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Monday reading

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Current
Collected Works, ed. Nick Wallace
Mind Over Ship, by David Marusek
Beyond This Horizon, by Robert A. Heinlein
In Other Lands, by Sarah Rees Brennan

Last books finished
Summer in Orcus, by T. Kingfisher
A Skinful of Shadows, by Frances Hardinge
Looking For JJ, by Anne Cassidy

Next books
Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch
Gemini, by Dorothy Dunnett

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The 2018 Hugo finalists for Best Novella

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I found it pretty easy to rank these this year, though I am also very well aware that my tastes are very different from those of voters (and indeed nominators). One point before I start: it's of course very gratifying for Tor.com to have got five of the six available slots, but is it such a good thing that one publisher has cornered the market in this category? (There was a time, of course, when Asimov's had this dominance too, getting five out of five slots for Best Novella in 1991 and 1996, and four out of five in 1987, 1988, 1990, 1992, and 2000; and likewise all but one slot for Best Novelette in 1988 and 1994, and all but one slot in Best Short Story in 1993 and 1995. We all survived.)

Anyway, my ranking, introduced in each case by the second paragraph of the third chapter, is:

6) All Systems Red, by Martha Wells

It wasn't until I was helping to carry equipment to the little hopper that I realized they were going to make me ride in the crew cabin.

I hate stories about anthroporphic robots coming to terms with their non-humanity, and I'm afraid this was another one of them.

5) Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor

When I finally stopped coughing and my eyes focused on the docked ships, my heart began to beat like a talking drum played by the strongest drummer. I rubbed some otjize with my index finger from my cheek and brought it to my nose and inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled its sweet aroma. My heart continued its hard beat, but at least it slowed some. Okwu was already at check-in and I quickly got behind him.

Unlike most people, I bounced firmly off the first of the Binti novellas, and the same happened here; I found the plot disjointed and the prose in places surprisingly clunky.

From here on we're into the stuff I liked. Sadly, we still have to rank them.

4) Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire

Age seven was first grade, where Jillian learned that she had cooties and smelled and no one wanted to play with her anyway, and Jacqueline learned that if she wanted people to like her, all she had to do was smile at them and say she liked their shoes.

To my immense surprise, since I've generally not found McGuire's writing to my taste, I hugely loved Every Heart a Doorway, last year's winner in this category. This year we have the back-story of two of the characters from Every Heart a Doorway, twin sisters Jack and Jill, and their adventure with a vampire in a hidden land. The characterisation of the sisters and their family was very convincing. But there were a number of gaps in the world-building that nagged me – not least that the sisters' home in our world wasn't quite right for either England or America.

3) River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey

They didn't read the second letter either.

I love this bonkers concept of an alternate steampunkish history where in the 1850s, hippopotami were introduced into the lower Mississippi, and immediately problems arise due to their tendency to take over the ecosystem. Our gender-diverse protagonists are sent on a mission to deal with the problem, and must deal with personal vendettas, betrayal and death. The hippos of this universe appear to be carnivorous, which suggests that evolution took a very strange turn at some point.

2) The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang

Winter had silenced the frogs that sang outside the windows on warmer days. In that quiet, Akeha cautiously cleared their mindeye and tapped into the Slack. The world of arch-energies lay calm around the sleeping bundle of their twin. Mokoya had nightmares sometimes, and on those nights the Slack seethed around them like a wild river. But not tonight. In Akeha’s mindeye, the Slack enfolded their twin like a gentle blanket, shimmering in the colors of the five natures.

I knew JY Yang back in Livejournal days in 2004, and indeed they made my Moldova userpic for me; I'm really glad to see their writing career flourishing now. I also really liked The Black Tides of Heaven, a story of high-born and magically gifted twins in an Asian-influenced fantasy world (which is however much more fluid in its acceptance of sexual diversity), dealing with the technology of mass destruction as well as their own relationship with each other and their lovers. Clear and direct, where a lot of stories like this disappear into their own jargon. Great stuff.

1) "And Then There Were (N-One)", by Sarah Pinsker

The hotel employee knelt by the Sarah to my left, who had my haircut and who was wearing the same T-shirt as me, only with a long sleeved shirt underneath it. She was the only one I’d seen with a prosthetic hand. It was a good prosthetic; I wouldn’t have noticed it if we hadn’t stood at a washroom sink next to each other before the meal. Other than the hand, she’d looked more like me than most; I desperately wanted to figure out where we’d diverged, but hadn’t worked up the nerve to ask her yet.

This was the first finalist that I read, and it was a good start. I may hate anthropomorphic robot stories, but I love doppelganger stories, and I have a residual affection for murder mysteries, and this scratches both of the latter two itches, with Pinsker called in to investigate her own murder at a convention attended exclusively by alternate timeline versions of herself. A briliant concept, carried off with just the right amount of humour and minimal solipsism. Gets my top vote.

Edited to add: Once again my tastes are out of whack with the trend, as All Systems Red won the Nebula!

2018 Hugos: Novel | Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Related Work | Graphic Story | Dramatic Long | Dramatic Short | Professional Artist & Fan Artist | Series | Young Adult | Campbell Award
1943 Retro Hugos: Novel | Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Dramatic Short | Fan Artist


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The God Instinct, by Jesse Bering

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Third paragraph of fourth chapter:

Of course, Nagin was only reinventing the well-treaded fire-and-brimstone wheel in suggesting that our God is a testy and vengeful one. Just a year before he made his political gaffe, other reflective people from all corners of the globe borrowed from the same barrel of explanation and offered commentary on the “real” reason for the Indonesian tsunami that killed nearly a quarter of a million people in Southeast Asia in 2004. (Never mind the sudden shifting of tectonic plates on the Indian Ocean floor.) All similarly saw that catastrophe, too, as a sort of enormous, Vegas-style, blinking marquee meant to convey an unambiguous message to us superficial, fallen, and famously flawed human beings. Here are a few anonymous samples from some online discussion forums just a few days after the tsunami disaster:

As God says, I send things down on you as a warning so that you may ponder and change your ways.

A lot of times, God allows things like this to happen to bring people to their knees before God. It takes something of this magnitude to help them understand there is something bigger that controls this world than themselves.

It might just be God’s way to remind us that He is in charge, that He is God and we need to repent.

The calamity—so distressing for those individually involved—was for humanity as a whole a profoundly moral occurrence, an act of God performed for our benefit.

I somehow came across Jesse Bering through our mutual connection with the Queen's University of Belfast – he was a lecturer there at the time that I was a visiting research fellow (not that I visited very often) – so when the buzz around this book started I acquired it, but then didn’t get around to reading it until now. It’s a short and breezy exploration of the psychology of belief – not as wearyingly hostile as Richard Dawkins, but equally taking it for granted that there is no “there” there. I was particularly drawn into the first few chapters’ exploration of theory of mind – our ability to attribute mental states to others and to adapt our behaviour to take others’ mental states into account. This is one of the things that makes us human – not just that we have a greater cognitive ability than other animals, but that we treat each other as fellow individuals. Bering makes a strong argument that belief in God, or in the supernatural, is a natural development from the fact that we have theory of mind, and therefore is to an extent an evolutionary adaptation to cope with our intelligence and social natures. He then ranges around the areas of philosophy, psychology and organised religion with a bit less impact, but he has set up the argument well enough (and the book is short enough) that I enjoyed following it though to the end. I must read more of his books, which include Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? and Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us. Docking points, though, for concealing interesting information in the endnotes – why do publishers still do this, when there is perfectly decent technology for footnotes? You can get it here.

This was the top unread book I acquired in 2011. Next on that list is Up Jim River, by Michael F. Flynn.

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The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Tonkee and Hoa lag behind with you. It’s almost like the old days, except that now Hoa appears as you walk, gets left behind as you keep walking, then appears again somewhere ahead of you. Most times he adopts a neutral posture, but occasionally he’s doing something ridiculous, like the time you find him in a running pose. Apparently stone eaters get bored, too. Hjarka stays with Tonkee, so that’s four of you. Well, five: Lerna lingers to walk with you, too, angry at what he perceives as the mistreatment of one of his patients. He didn’t think a recently comatose woman should be made to walk at all, let alone left to fall behind. You try to tell him not to stick with you, not to draw Castrima’s wrath upon himself, but he snorts and says that if Castrima really wants to antagonize the only person in the comm who’s formally trained to do surgery, they don’t deserve to keep him. Which is… well, it’s a very good point. You shut up.

Third of a trilogy whose first two volumes both won the Hugo, and on this year’s final ballot. I was among the very few who was not particularly grabbed by the previous two, and I’m afraid this one equally failed to grab me. I liked the mother-and-daughter theme, but I remain confused by the world-building and unengaged by the characters and indeed by the plot. Others will like it more than me, and they can get it here.

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Genius Loci, by Ben Aaronovitch

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The Professor’s database had a lot of material from the twentieth century. She called it the last Romantic age when the Earth was still diverse and exciting. She said it was a simpler age when the moral choices were clear. ‘When we met our first aliens,’ said the Professor, ‘we had to accept the reality of moral relativism. A Martian is biologically hardwired differently from a human, who is hardwired differently from a Draconian. You can’t find a basic moral common ground – only a constantly flexing point of equilibrium.’

Well, this was unexpected. I’ve been reading the Bernice Summerfield books in publication order, which generally means in order of internal chronology; but Genius Loci is an exception. It’s a novel about the early career of the first archaeologist companion, on her first offworld dig, and I can think of only two other novels in which a future companion appears before they meet the Doctor (Harry Sullivan in The Face of the Enemy and Erimem, like Benny a non-TV companion, in The Coming of the Queen).

And this is rather good. I’ve had my problems with some of Aaronovitch’s other work (though he certainly seems to have found his stride with Rivers of London, a finalist for last year’s Best Series Hugo); here a lot of things come together, a well-rounded main character, lots of detail of non-human cultures, lots of reflection on human politics, and plenty of humour and throwaway lines about 21st century culture. It’s one of the very few Bernice Sumemrfield books that you could try a non-Whovian fan on and have reasonable hope that they would appreciate it; the references to canon are light but tempting.

Sadly of course it is way out of print, and you can get it here at huge cost.

Next up: Collected Works, ed. Nick Wallace.

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Crash Override, by Zoe Quinn

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Even if you stick mainly to mainstream sites, you’ve probably seen glimpses of the internet’s underbelly in the notorious comments sections at the bottom of news articles. The article could be about a local man saving a box of kittens from a burning building, but no matter: the comments will accuse him of hating dogs, setting the building on fire in the first place, and secretly being Barack Obama’s Kenyan uncle.

This is a crucial book, a finalist for this year’s Hugo in the Best Related Work category; its author was the first victim of the appalling #Gamergate affair, in which the forces of the dark side of the Internet were unleashed upon her for supposedly securing a positive review of a game she had written by having sex with the journalist (who in fact did not write or publish any such review). Being white, male and cishet, I’ve faced very little of this myself. (There was one Brexiter who argued with me on Facebook and eventually resorted to sending me obscene messages from sockpuppet accounts and emailing cartooney threats of legal action when I gave him the silent treatment, but at least he involved only his imaginary friends rather than any real ones.) I’ve seen quite enough of it both online and offline, though; it’s very chilling indeed to read what it’s like to be at ground zero of one of the Internet’s most notorious and vicious attacks. (And I am not interested in hearing from any Gamergate supporters who do not start their contribution by admitting that Gamergate’s treatment of Zoe Quinn was inexcusably evil.)

Zoe Quinn also writes about what can be done to fix the problem. It’s clearly been a very wearing and learning political process for her and her allies. She has tried to take the issue to the US government, the UN, the titans of the private sector; she has set up her own organisation to help people mitigate similar situations when it happens to them. Good for her to take this dreadful experience and turn it into something positive.

The other point I took from it is that it doesn’t cost you to be nice. The waves of harassment diminished every time a celebrity spoke in public against Gamergate. Even on the micro-level, if we see an internet pile-on among our own social circles, it costs nothing to say “this isn’t cool” – particularly if the object of the pile-on is not white, male and cishet. Often the harassers are motivated by the low-hanging fruit of an easy target. Telling our friends to calm down can sometimes make the world a better place.

The book is only distantly related to sf literature, but games are definitely part of the genre (so far not much recognised by the Hugos) and as Gamergate fed into the Puppies, it became relevant to the wider discourse around the Hugos themselves. So I have no hesitation in finding this a suitable candidate for Best Related Work, and of the three finalists I’ve read so far, it’s getting my top vote. You can get it here.

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Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant by Gwyneth Jones

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

One afternoon Col Ben Phu and Drez Doyle — two private soldiers from Orange Company who’d befriended her in Cymru along with Sergeant Aswad — arrived. Bibi was glad to see them. The servants who’d been together on campaign had been dispersed. The only familiar face in Juniper was Ogul Merdov, proud possessor of a family name (although she had no actual family living), and she had no time for the ‘savage’. Col and Drez took Bibi off with them, ignoring the protests of Serenity, the Han woman who was warden of the girls’ dorm: through squares and gardens, over bridges, past many handsome buildings to a guardhouse in the perimeter wall. Sergeant Aswad looked the other way while they smuggled her up to the walkway.

I have somewhat bounced off Jones’ prose before – I really enjoyed the novalla “Bold As Love”, but then struggled with the book-length version and the first two Aleutian books. I am glad therefore to report that I got on rather well with Spirit, perhaps because it takes a few leads from The Count of Monte Cristo, familiar ground for me. Having said that, it’s not as slavish a copy as, say, Stephen Fry’s The Star’s Tennis Ballsget it here.

This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is Anno Mortis, by Rebecca Levene.

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Monday reading

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Current
Looking For JJ, by Anne Cassidy
Collected Works, ed. Nick Wallace
Mind Over Ship, by David Marusek
Summer in Orcus, by T. Kingfisher
A Skinful of Shadows, by Frances Hardinge

Last books finished
Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate, by Zoe Quinn
Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith
The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin
The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Liz Bourke

Next books
Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch
Gemini, by Dorothy Dunnett

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Akata Warrior, by Nnedi Okorafor

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Second para of third chapter:

“What is wrong with this silly girl?” he muttered as Sunny leaned against the Jeep with her arm on the warm door. She didn’t need to worry about dirt. As always, it was spotless. Sunny suspected he paid some of the younger boys in the neighborhood to wash it often. Chukwu had gotten the Jeep three weeks ago, and he would take it with him to the University of Port Harcourt in five days.

The second of the YA finalists for me, a rollicking tale of 13-year-old Sunny, who is an albino Nigerian and also part of the magical Leopard Society, and must confront human and inhuman enemies to save her society. I particularly loved the immersion in Nigerian contemporary detail, adapting a lot of Young Wizard tropes to a non-Western society with great efficiency. It’s still not really my sub-genre, and it loses a point or two for being second in a series where I haven’t read the first, but in general thumbs up. I bounced pretty thoroughly off both the Binti novellas, but really liked Lagoon which was also firmly set in Nigeria with a difference. You can get it here.

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Doctor Who: The Official Annual 2010

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Second paragraph of third article (“The Next Doctor”):

The real Doctor doesn’t have time to solve this mystery though, because they are confronted by a creature that seems to be part animal, part Cyberman – a CyberShade. The Doctors try to capture it, but it’s too strong.

This is awfully thin stuff. I’m sorry to say that, because most of the New Who spinoff literature has been of decent quality, and indeed a lot of good creative effort went into the Doctor Who Storybooks at this time of the show’s history. But this is basically a series of reviews of Tenth Doctor stories, reminders of regular characters, factual pieces and puzzles, and a couple of not very memorable comic strips – a bit of an end-of-RTD-era feel about it. OK for completists like me, but I would not have found it particularly good value for a young fan. If you want, you can get it here.

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Donovan’s Brain, by Curt Siodmak

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Second paragraph of third diary entry:

Schratt has lived in Konapah for more than thirty years. The heat has dried up his energies. He has become as superstitious as the Indians of his district. If his medical ethics permitted, he would prescribe snake charms and powdered toads for his patients.

This is another finalist for the Best Novel Retro Hugo for 1943, a short novel which was the basis of several memorable films. Our protagonist, a mildly corrupt doctor in a desert town in the Western USA, rescues the brain of evil millionaire Donovan, who is fatally injured in a plane crash, and finds a way of keeping it alive; but the brain is stronger than its human minders, and manipulates them to continue its original owner’s evil plans of various kinds (notably perverting the course of justice). It’s a basic horror plot of possession, but there’s a tremendously convincing air of despairing degeneracy about the entire story (the narrator is disgusted with himself) and nods to the latest technology as of 1942.

It’s striking that of the six finalists for the Best Novel category in this year’s Retro Hugos, three are from firmly outside genre publishing as it then was (Islandia, The Uninvited and Darkness and the Light). I think both Donovan’s Brain and The Uninvited would fit more comfortably into today’s horror shelves.

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Something Like Normal, by Trish Doller

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Second para of third chapter:

“Is there a good reason why you're outside my house at four thirty in the morning?” he asks, resting a travel mug of coffee on the hood of an ancient Land Rover. His keys jingle as he unlocks the driver’s-side door. He surveys my T-shirt, soaked through with sweat under the arms and in the middle of my chest. It’s a long run from my house to Fort Myers Beach — and there’s a bridge involved.

Trish Doller is one of my twins, born like me on 26 April 1967. (Also my former college flatmate who now runs London Zoo, the Estonian finance minister, and the Estonian finance minister's twin brother.) When I first got to know Trish online in 2002, she described herself as a "radio personality, wife, mother and all-around awesome babe" living in her native Ohio; now she is a full-time writer of YA fiction living in Florida. This was her first novel (of four so far), published in 2012.

It's a compassionate, even occasionally funny, account of a young Marine arriving home from military service in Afghanistan to find that his girlfriend has stolen his brother (at least, I read it that way round), his parents' marriage is disintegrating, and his own PTSD is ever more difficult to ignore. It's all in the present tense, which adds to the sense of the narrator trying to make sense of his life as it develops. There are no easy answers, but the journey to find them is interesting if tough. The happy ending is fairly well signalled in advance, but I actually found that rather satisfying. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2012. Next in that pile is Maigret Loses His Temper, by Georges Simenon.

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Luminescent Threads and The Road to Middlemarch

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Second paragraph of third article (a letter to Octavia Butler from Karen Lord) in Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, eds Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal:

I did not have the strength to read more, and so I know more about your books through synopses, reviews and commentaries than through the direct experience of reading. I can see similarities to my own work: the concerns about balance of power, the boundaries of self, the joys and demands of community, and the bliss and burden of empathy. However, it is not your work that inspires me so much as the fact of your success as an author, and the vision and determination that paved the way to that success.

Second paragraph of third chapter of The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot, by Rebecca Mead:

"Thornie came home. Dreadfully shocked to see him so worn," Lewes wrote in his diary the evening that Thornton arrived. "A dreadful day—Thornie rolling on the floor in agony," he wrote the following day. Thornton, usually a muscular young man of 180 pounds, had lost more than 50 pounds and was "piteously wasted," as George Eliot wrote to Blackwood. Dr. James Paget, the foremost surgeon of the day who included Queen Victoria among his patients, prescribed morphine. A prone couch was set up in the drawing room near the piano, and whenever the sedatives wore off Thornton listened to Eliot playing, and was able to speak a little about his life in Natal, where he had purchased a tract of land and had built a farm. "In the evening he got excited talking about his African experiences and singing Zulu songs," Lewes wrote in his diary on May 11. "Made anxious about him."

My reading schedules happened to throw both of these books at me simultaneously, in one of those happy coincidences that forces you to compare and contrast. Luminescent Threads, in a similar format to Letters to Tiptree and sharing an editor, brings together short pieces by almost fifty writers about the effect that Butler's writing had on them, including several who have attended the Clarion writers' workshop thanks to the scholarship established in Butler's name. Most of the pieces were written in the immediate aftermath of the Trump victory and inauguration, and many of the writers were still reeling in shock and invoking Butler, who foresaw the sort of regime that Trump would like to lead, as an inspiration in dark times.

I have to say that I was less satisfied with Luminescent Threads than I was with Letters to Tiptree. I felt that there was less internal organisation – it might have been more interesting to group the scholarly essays separately from the more personal letters. I also really missed Butler's own voice – Letters to Tiptree included a number of letters from Tiptree, whereas here we hear from Butler only in one short interview at the end. I salute the commitment of the editors and contributors, but the structure didn't quite work for me. Still, you may want to get it here. It’s up for the Hugo for Best Related Work.

The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot is similarly a long tribute to a favorite author, but with only one contributor, Rebecca Mead, now a staff writer with the New Yorker, who tracks her heroine's career across England and looks at the parallels of Eliot's life and works with her own life. Rebecca Mead is the same age as me, and we are both the same age as George Eliot was when Middlemarch was published (51). I don't go all the way with Mead in her enthusiasm; the only other Eliot novels I have read are Silas Marner, which I thought was OK, and The Mill on the Floss, which I hated.

But I do agree that Middlemarch is one of the greatest novels in the English language; it made a profound impression on me when I read it almost thirty years ago, and I still remember almost all of it. Mead teases out Eliot's portrayal of emotional complexity in the various relationships, obviously Dorothea in particular but also Lydgate/Rosamund and Fred/Mary, and explores where they were drawn from; I was fascinated to learn that Francis Pattison, later Lady Dilke, was the model for Dorothea. As I often say, it's not really my fandom, but I very much appreciated Mead's attention to historical and geographical detail, and shared her excitement in tracking down the very rooms in which Middlemarch was written, almost 150 years ago now. It's about time I read Middlemarch again. (But first, I'm going to try and revisit Proust in the second half of this year.) Meanwhile you can get Mead's book here.

The Road to Middlemarch made its way to the top of my pile of unread non-fiction books. Next on that list is The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England, by Ian Mortimer.

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Torchwood: Rift War

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Second page of part 3:

This pulls together the Rift War! comic story published originally in issues 4-13 of Torchwood Magazine in 2008, and adds at the end a single-episode story, Jetsam, published in issue 3 also in 2008.

I felt that the Rift War! epsiodes did not hang together very well – there was rather a feeling of three different writers (Simon Furman, Paul Grist and Ian Edgington) handing off the storyline between each other without much of a unifying concept. Also I was not attracted by Paul Grist’s depictions of the regular characters in six of the ten episodes that he illustrated, though I liked his writing for four of them a bit more. (The artist above is SL Gallant, who I found more to my taste.)

On the other hand, Jetsam was a real gem, written and drawn by Brian Williamson (who has done a lot of Doctor Who art, but this appears to be the only Whoniverse story he has actually written). It's a fairly standard Season 2 alien artefact story, but done with a real sense of warmth and engagement. I hope Williamson can be tempted to do a bt more. Worth getting the book for.

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Monday reading

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Current
Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith
Looking For JJ, by Anne Cassidy
The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin
Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate, by Zoe Quinn

Last books finished
River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey
Luminescent Threads, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal
The Road to Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead
Darkness and the Light, by Olaf Stapledon
The Day of the Doctor, by Steven Moffat
Donovan’s Brain, by Curt Siodmak
Akata Warrior, by Nnedi Okorafor
Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire
Twice Upon a Time, by Paul Cornell

Next books
Contes Fantastiques Complets, by Guy de Maupassant
Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch
Gemini, by Dorothy Dunnett

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