Avice Benner Cho grew up in Embassytown, a backwater colonial outpost that survives on the fringes of the embassy to an alien culture.  Like most kids from fringe backwater outposts, Avice desperately wants out; unlike most kids, she gets out, becoming an immerser, one of the rare people who has the ability to guide spaceships through the weird interdimensional spaces that they use for transit.  As an adult, though, she returns to Embassytown, mostly to show off the quaint cultural heritage to her linguist spouse.  Her husband is as desperate to visit Embassytown as she was to leave, mostly because the aliens the embassy serves, the Ariekei, speak a wholly unique form of language–they can only speak truth, and they can only understand the speech of sentient entities.

The book hangs on the language question, and in kind of fascinating ways.  Avice herself has a special status among the Ariekei because she’s a simile.  The Ariekei can only speak truth, but they’ve developed ways of constructing more abstract comparisons.  If a person, such as Avice, does a thing that they want to use as a simile, then they can refer to her and thus refer to the abstraction of the simile.  The similes don’t always make sense to non-Ariekei; Avice’s simile is that she was the girl who was hurt in an abandoned building and then ate the food that was given to her.  Another simile is the boy who swims every month with fishes, and he does in fact go every month to a specially constructed fishpond and swim, in order to maintain the truth of his simile.  A small group of the Ariekei want to stretch the similes, to find shades of meaning and thus create multiple types of meaning in the same linguistic grouping; they’re connected to a group of Ariekei who want to learn to lie, and both groups find the effort physically exhausting and sometimes painful.  It’s a weird little concept that grows in importance as the book goes on, and turns into an interesting examination of the idea that lying is, to some extent, an act of control over language.

I’ve been feeling burnt out on reading actual science fiction lately, but this was a breath of fresh air–this is the kind of intellectual weirdness that made me fall in love with SF in the first place.  And the whole book hangs together a lot more than some of the other Mieville–I enjoyed the chaotic mess of Kraken, but this book wasn’t messy at all, and stronger for it.  There are turning points in the narrative, places where what you think you understood about Embassytown and the Ariekei turn out to have been tiny corners of the whole, places where you suddenly realize that the plot has moved out from underneath you and run away down an unexpected alley, places where the whole book sort of changes shape.  But all of those turning points feel very natural–surprising, but organic, if that makes sense.  (There’s a place where the whole narration is given over to a several-page discourse on the relationship between signifier and signified, and even that somehow feels organic rather than awkwardly infodumpy.)

I still don’t know how to not feel awkward while writing about books I’ve read (you reviewer people, how do you do this?) but, uh, loved this one.

The author of the story, Grady Hendrix recently posted on his blog about some issues he has with “The Bright and Shining Parasites of Guiyu”.  The post is titled “Regretting Guiyu” and it’s worth a read.  Grady’s concern is that he’s shortchanged the political aspects of his story–that he stopped short of showing how Americans, himself included, are deeply implicated in the horrible conditions that exist in places like Guiyu.  His scary dystopian science-fiction scenario isn’t the future, it’s the present, and it’s a present that all of us in the over-technologized West have a part in shaping.  I’m not sure that I agree with his critique of the story–I don’t at all think that it shies away from the ugly politics, although he’s right that it doesn’t specifically extend the supply chain out to American consumers.  But I’m really glad to see him asking this kind of question.

To quote Grady: “When science fiction writers tell stories about generation ships, and moon bases, and rockets I always want to know: who built them? Was it a union shop? Because we have always journeyed into the future on a highway made of slaves.”  I think we only strengthen ourselves, and our literature, if we stop hiding from that truth.

—–

As a side note:  Grady Hendrix is also the author of ”Messengers from the Stars Will Come to Help Us Overcome The Obstacles That Hold Us Back From Achieving Our True Potential,” which I think puts him squarely in contention for the “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” Prize for Awesome Long Titles.  (Other contenders include, of course, “A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, As Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, DPhil, MSc” by Helen Keeble.

You know, I can’t swear to it, but I think part of the recent delay in updating (which has put me more than a week behind on the reading log, again) is because I didn’t want to admit that I was re-reading the In Death series.

J.D. Robb is Nora Roberts, a romance author so prolific and so popular that she has practically transcended the romance industry and become her own genre category.  I enjoy most of her romances–not all of them, especially not when she’s off on some weird mystical kick, but for the most part they’re good solid contemporary romances.  The books she publishes under the J.D. Robb name aren’t category romance, they’re more like futuristic police procedurals, with a strong romance element, I guess.  I’ve been reading them, kind of half-heartedly, for years, and when I finished reading the most recent one in the series, I found myself wondering if I was imagining that the series had changed a lot over the years.  Specifically, I remembered the earlier books in the series being more obviously sci-fi tinged, but the more recent ones feel like they’re downplaying the futuristic-y stuff.  The BPL has a lot of them as ebooks, so I went back to the beginning and started working my way through.

This is a lot of writing, so far, for a book that I didn’t really want to admit I was reading.

Glory in Death is the second book in the series, and true to my memory, the sci-fi futuristic elements are a lot more prominent in this book than in the more recent ones.  They’re talking all the damn time about orbital platforms and off-planet settlements, for instance.  It’s a stupid fluffy candy of a book–like, if I consider reading most romance novels the literary equivalent of eating chocolate, this is more like eating Twizzlers, if that makes sense.  It’s fine while you’re doing it, and afterwards you realize that you basically just stuffed your face with cherry-flavored plastic.  Chocolate is at least a good solid guilty pleasure, this is just passing time.  Of course, I’m still going to read the next one once it comes in at the library, because I’m stupid that way.

A lot of the books I’m reading right now are coming from the Brooklyn Public Library, which is driving my reading list towards a kind of eclecticism I might not get otherwise.  Case in point: while browsing the new releases in the BPL digital collection, I saw that they’d just acquired a whole lot of stuff by Allegra Goodman.  I really liked Intuition, so I put myself on the list for some of her others, not really knowing anything about them.  It turns out that these two books (Total Immersion and Kaaterskill Falls) are very much like each other, and very much unlike Intuition.  (I don’t mean that I didn’t like them, though.  But maybe not as much as I liked Intuition.)  Kaaterskill Falls is a novel, set in an Orthodox community in the late 1970s; Total Immersion is a collection of loosely linked short stories, primarily about Orthodox Jews living in either Oxford or Hawai’i.  A few of the characters, mostly minor ones, from Kaaterskill Falls show up in Total Immersion,but at later points in their lives.

I didn’t really connect with Total Immersion.  When I was about halfway through it, I mentioned to Matt that I sometimes have trouble with literary short fiction, because I’ll finish a story and feel unsatisfied, kind of like, what was the point?  He suggested that I’m reading too fast and not paying enough attention to the writing, and he might be right.  It’s a different mode of reading.  You don’t read stories like this for plot, and when they’re about character, it’s more like a portrait than a movie, I think.  (The first story in the collection, “Onionskin”, is entirely in the form of a letter, a woman writing to her former religion professor about what led her to take his class, why it wasn’t what she was looking for, and how she’s trying to find what she’s looking for.  And I thought it was brilliantly done, a little window into a life, with a great voice.  That’s kind of what I mean by a portrait.)

The Hawai’i stories in Total Immersion were the most compelling to me–they felt like the ones where Goodman was at her best, language-wise.  Too many of the other stories, all of the Oxford stories, lean too much on academic politics.  (Although I did like the academic in one of the first stories who was fighting the same rivals at shul and in his tiny corner of literary analysis.)  And the last story in the collection, “The Closet”, the writing is just beautiful all the way through, and transcendent in places.

Kaaterskill Falls had different strengths–it’s about a particular Orthodox community, a separatist sect called the Kirshners that seems similar to the Satmar or Lubavitchers.  There are a lot of characters moving through this novel, but the one that I loved most was Elizabeth, the young mother of five who’s struggling to find a balance between the joy she finds in her community and the restlessness she feels under its restrictions.  She gives her daughters two names:

“To their friends they’re just the Shulman girls, five rattled off in a row: Chani, Malki, Ruchel, Sorah, and Brocha. But Elizabeth gave them other names, and she repeats them to herself: Annette and Margot, Rowena, Sabrina, and Bernice.  These are her daughters’ real names; the ones on their birth certificates; extraordinary and graceful–princesses and dancers. It’s true, of course, the nickname Malki by itself means “queen,” and Sorah means “princess.” But those are words the children drag around the house.  There must be twenty Sorahs at the Kirshner school.  Elizabeth wanted something remarkable and elegant–beyond the usual expectations. She didn’t name her daughters to be rattled off.  She named them to have imagination.”

At one point in the book, someone says to Elizabeth that she can do anything–this is America, after all, you can do whatever you damn well please.  But this one isn’t escapist reading, you know?  Elizabeth can’t do whatever she damn well pleases, and if she did, the cost would kill her.  And as the book goes on, the restrictions hurt a little more, and she starts to see that her daughters will have the same life as her–they’ll have the same love and support and community and tradition, and they’ll have the same restricted horizons and confined lives.  She sees that, and she lives through it, because that’s what you do.

There’s more to the book than Elizabeth, but she was the heart of it, for me.  (Although I do secretly hope for another book someday, about her daughter Chani, who develops a private passion for Israel even though the Kirshners are strictly anti-Zionist.  Here:

Chani has two real talents: memorizing Tanach and hiking. She has a prodigious memory for scripture, although the memorization does not come easily to her. She picks through the text doggedly, inching her way through hard passages. Like her father she learns slowly and meticulously.  And once she has learned a passage, though it might take weeks, she knows it unshakably. She’s won the elementary girls’ Bible contest three times. At home in the city she has three pairs of candlesticks on the bookcase in her room, her trophies. Chani is even better at hiking. Fast and surefooted. Cecil says she’s an intuitive hiker and a first-rate rockhound. She’s found samples of nearly every kind of quartz: rose quartz, smoky quartz, white, brown, pale lavender.  When she was nine, she made it to the top of Cole Mountain. Only she and Cecil and her father made it up that far.

Those are her favorite things–memorizing scripture and hiking on Cole Mountain. Each has its season: the Bible contest in January with the radiators hissing in the classroom, the hiking in the summer on leafy trails, ribbon trail markers tagging the trees. But it seems to Chani, when she thinks about Israel, that it is all scripture and hiking, with no separation between the two. She pedals her bike up to Kendall Falls and she pictures Israel, where all the trees are markers, and the geneaologies themselves are trails. Covenants are places; mountains stand as quotations from the prophets.

I loved Chani.  Allegra Goodman seems to have thoroughly moved on from her writing-about-Jewish-communities phase, so I’m unlikely to ever get my Chani novel, but I’d love it.)

January 2012, #3: Unclaimed, by Courtney Milan.

Kraken was intense, so I switched over to a romance novel for the next book.  I read a handful of Courtney Milan books last fall (Unveiled, Proof by Seduction and Trial by Desire) and really enjoyed them–Trial by Desire, in particular, is a cute and novel take on the “they sort of had to get married, now they’ll figure out how to fall in love” romance trope, and Unveiled played with the complications of marriages and inheritances in an interesting way.  (They’re all historicals, all set in that loosely-19th-century England that seems like the natural home of historical romances.)

The plot in Unveiled had to do with a young woman whose hateful father and awful brothers have managed to lose the family estate to a very distant relative.  She’s supposed to figure out how to trick the distant relative into giving it back, but along the way she falls in love with him, as happens in romance novels.  Before she falls in love with him, though, she’s utterly charmed by his utterly charming younger brother Mark, who wins her affection by agreeing with her that life is really unfair for women in their society and teaching her (and the female servants) some serious self-defense so that they can fend off untoward advances.

Mark, unsurprisingly, is the hero of Unclaimed, and he’s still utterly charming.  He’s written an academic work on the social value of male chastity that has become a big hit in the popular press, bringing him a lot of public attention.  Jessica, a career courtesan looking for a way to finance her retirement, is hired by one of Mark’s political enemies to seduce him and expose him as a fraud.  He’s fled to the small town where he and his brothers grew up, hoping to get away from the annoying glare of public attention, so she sets herself up in town, pretending to be a young widow.

What’s fun about this one isn’t so much the way the relationship comes together, but the way Jessica and Mark deal with being together.  By the time she’s in a place to ruin his public image, she can’t bring herself to do it, but if she doesn’t get her payment for ruining him, she’ll have to go back to being a courtesan, and she can’t bring herself to do that either.  Mark’s built his career on not blaming women for the horrible situations society pushes them into, but his first reaction on learning about Jessica’s situation is to hate her for it.  When they sort all of that out, Jessica is extremely hesitant to expose Mark (and his family) to the stigma of her past, even though they all keep insisting that they can fix most of it and live with the rest.

I read romance novels for a few reasons.  One reason: they’re good escapist fun.  And this one is fabulous escapist fun.  Jessica wears really beautiful dresses, and Mark is a (completely ahistorical) feminist dream who (for instance) repeatedly smacks down the villagers for their attempts to slut-shame Jessica over her really beautiful dresses.  Another reason: engaging characters and character relationships.  This book also hits pretty squarely on that front, and particularly on the family stuff.  If I didn’t already know Mark from Unveiled, he might have seemed a little stiff or priggish at the beginning of this book, but he warmed up very fast when he met Jessica, and I felt like the whole book found another gear once his brothers Ash and Smite showed up in the last act.

Courtney Milan seems to be writing historical romances that are gently tweaking the genre.  I like historicals a lot better than contemporaries, since there’s so much restraint built into the social systems in the historicals, but a lot of the authors I like best are the ones who are messing around a little bit with those restraints.  (Lisa Kleypas does this really well too, in my experience.)  Milan’s books mostly center on people who are a little bit outside the heart of Victorian high society–you still get all the trappings of ball gowns and marquesses and estate entailments and risking being compromised in the garden or whatever, but the marquess might have grown up as a factory owner’s son whose mother was an abusive religious zealot, and the garden tryst might be essentially a screwball comedy.  They’re not, like, “transcending the genre” or anything pretentious–these are straight-up category romances–but they’re a little askew, and a lot fun.  (And I’m totally looking forward to reading Unraveled, where Smite, the third and most difficult Turner brother, gets his love story.)

So, Kraken.  A preserved giant squid disappears from the Darwin Centre, and the mollusc specialist who first noticed the disappearance finds himself drawn into a vast magical underworld of squid cults, sorceror gangs, animal familiars, and competing visions of the end of the world.

It’s kind of awesome.

There’s a lot going on in here, and I won’t say that it all fits smoothly together, because it doesn’t, but there’s a kind of magic in the messiness.  Kraken has some of the appeal of Perdido Street Station, in that it’s a book that shows real and genuine affection for a city, for the way that cities are layers of history and clashing demographics and mismatched neighborhoods.  Given what I know about Mieville’s politics, I wasn’t particularly surprised by Wati’s backstory–a revolutionary-minded shabti who fights the system and becomes a labor organizer for the supernatural underworld.   (Oh, uh, stop reading now if you don’t want any surprises ruined.) On a more subtle note, I did like how the dramatic climax of the book (one of them at least) rested on some minor characters refusing to be sidelined.  (Marginalia! Literally!)  Paul’s power play against the Tattoo (and then Goss and Subby) was particularly amazing–Paul is a classic throwaway character who doesn’t seem to know he’s supposed to be a throwaway.

But yeah, mostly it’s all about the squid gods and possibly-insane cops and the mild-mannered mollusc expert discovering his inner magical badass.  It’s a good ride.

The guy at the entrance just shook his head.  ”There aren’t any trash cans inside,” he said.  ”Security.  No public bathrooms, either, just so you know.  Nowhere that people could hide things.”  We could take our coffee in with us, there just wouldn’t be anywhere to drop the cups when we were done.

The entrance is just some streetcorner downtown, a block and a half from Zuccotti Park.  It’s not a building, or even a tent, just a podium and a couple of signs.  We looked around for somewhere to toss the coffee cups before going in, but the guy shook his head again.  ”No trash cans out here, either.  Too close.”  He gestured at the curb next to his podium.  ”If you just leave them there, on the ground, I’ll make sure they get taken care of.”

They checked our tickets every hundred feet or so, it seemed like.  To get in, you’re basically walking through a construction site; it’s all alleyways and tarped-over chain-link fences, with one indoor waypoint, the security room.  It’s just like airplane security–coats and bags in pins, empty your pockets, take off your belts.  Follow the arrows on the floor, go through a scanner, don’t stand too long in one place.  Don’t ask too many questions.  The walls are covered with giant photo enlargements–one wall is all artist projections of what the memorial and the towers will look like when finished, the other wall is pictures of vigils and demonstrations of support from around the world.

The memorial itself is actually quite beautiful.  There were so many bad ideas being thrown around, in the early planning stages.  What they ended up with is beautiful.  It’s mostly a small park, and you can see already how peaceful it’s going to feel when the trees have grown up a little more.  The footprints of the two towers have been made into reflecting pools, recessed waterfalls ringed by the names of the people who died that day.

We spent a lot of time walking around and reading names.  This was a family trip, part of a family weekend that my in-laws do every year, and they had a list of names they were looking for.  You can look it up ahead of time, online, see where at the memorial the names are listed.  They were looking for neighbors, for the sons and brothers and nephews of friends.  I didn’t have anyone I’d looked up, I was just reading names.  Someone said that the families were contacted, asked for advice on grouping the names, so that in the end people aren’t listed alphabetically or at random, but they’re listed with their friends, the people they knew.

I hadn’t been down there before, and I don’t know that I really need to go back, but as memorials go, it’s very graceful, which gives it a lot of emotional power.

January 2012, #1: Grim Tides, T.A. Pratt

I really thoroughly enjoy the Marla Mason books.  I like Tim’s concept for the world that they’re set in: magic is real, every kind of magic you can think of.  All at the same time.  Every kind of magic you can think of, every belief system and every supernatural power, it’s all real, all at the same time.  The worldbuilding in these books is like an exercise in contained chaos, and at the center of it, you’ve got Marla.  Marla is the calm, mostly-amoral, slightly heartless heart of this crazy swirling storm of magical mess.  She’s holding together control of a series of magical alliances mostly by being a little more ruthless (and a little more reliable) than everyone else.  In some ways, she’s the anti-Chosen One.  Marla isn’t particularly gifted or special.  She isn’t better at stuff than other people, she’s just a little bit more willing to brute-force her way through the problem.  It’s refreshing.

And it’s fun.  When you’ve got this much tangled mess in the world, and a protagonist whose guiding philosophy seems to be “get shit done now, sort out the consequences later”, you end up with a series of books that are a crazy fun ride.  (I feel bad calling them “fun”, frankly, given Tim’s penchant for killing or maiming characters I really like, but dammit, they are fun.)  And Grim Tides is, fundamentally, a book about the laters in Marla’s “consequences later” coming due.  It’s also a book about what happens when you take a type-A urban-fantasy ass-kicker and drop her on a beach in Hawai’i with nothing to do but drink fruity cocktails and get a tan.

Anyway.  I really enjoyed it, and recommend the whole series.  If you haven’t read any Marla books, it’s probably best to start at the beginning, with Blood Engines.  And if you want to read Grim Tides, you can either buy the whole book, or read it for free as it’s serialized.

Story 500 is “MonitorBot and the King of Pop” by Jessica Barber.  ”It’s a symbolic gesture, she knows. She’s certain some low level government spook is keeping tabs on everything she does online, from porn to pie recipes, and she’s sure that every video he sends gets poked, prodded, analyzed, and traced.”  When the author first submitted it, she joked in her cover letter that we might have reached our quota on Michael Jackson stories (after Nisi Shawl’s “Pataki“), but it’s not really a Michael Jackson story at all.

Over on the SH Blog, Jed’s been encouraging people to post (either there or on their own sites) about their favorite Strange Horizons stories.  Eleven years and five hundred stories, people!  There’s a lot to choose from.  Also, I’ve always felt that it was kind of unseemly for an editor to talk about having favorites.  But as we start 2012, here are a few stories from 2011 that you really shouldn’t miss.  ”The Space Between the Stars” by Cassandra Clarke, “Widows in the World” by Gavin Grant, “Tomorrow is Waiting” by Holli Mintzer, “Ash and Dust” by Jennifer Mason-Black.  There’s more, a lot more, all good stuff, but those are all a little special to me.