Thursday, October 29, 2015

2015 read #61: The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen.

The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen
435 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 21 to October 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Between October 11, when I finished China Dolls, and October 21, when I began this book, I don't think I read so much as a dozen pages. Part of the reason for that was my fruitless attempt to read Holly Black's Tithe -- for whatever reason, it just wasn't grabbing me, nixing my confident plan to breeze through Black's Faery Tale trilogy to beef up my book numbers for the month. But most of the blame can be laid with one word: Minecraft. Downloading and playing it for the very first time on October 7, I got hooked bad for a while there, playing literally every free hour of the day, and dreaming in cubes at night.

But I kept on accumulating books from the library, books I was eager to have read but couldn't quite get myself to read, if that makes sense. What I wanted was a book of old school high fantasy, a fun, pulpy adventure through what-the-fuck that would make me feel like I was inside a Roger Dean painting. But I wanted it packaged with adequate prose and some semblance of modern progressive ethics and values.

At first The Queen of the Tearling seemed to fit my order exactly, a straightforward fantasy of a young queen emerging from hiding and getting shit done, written in prose that didn't make me cringe or toss it across the room. But within a couple chapters, I saw signs that Queen was, if anything, too old school -- and in fact, it proved to be aggressively formulaic. There's the rightful heir, raised in seclusion, bookish and idealistic! There's the technomagical Macguffin, the power of which our queen learns to access exactly when she needs it! The technomagical Macguffin allows her to see visions and shoot bolts of electricity, but its use might cost her! There's the stoic and competent guard captain with a troubled past! There's a dashing and handsome and mysterious King of Thieves! There's the spidery secondary bad guy! There's the evil ruler of evil, her rooms curtained in crimson, who uses and disposes of sex slaves nightly! The evil ruler of evil even calls herself the Red Queen of Mortmense, for fuck's sake, and calls upon the power of a shadowy being who feeds on the blood of children. It's as if every high fantasy series of the '80s and early '90s regurgitated into a bowl, and watered the mixture down to yield this mess.

With the author mentioning her sense of social justice in the acknowledgements, and the central hero being a self-conscious and chubby 19 year old woman who kicks ass and holds onto her idealism, you'd think that Tearling would at least satisfy my desire for progressive ethics and values. One book into a trilogy, with much of the history and background of the setting intentionally left mysterious (for example, is it set on an alien planet, the tale of a founding space voyage corrupted into a myth of a sea voyage, or is it set on an Earth modified by magic, and the Tearling founded with an actual sea voyage across a magically expanded sea?), perhaps it's too early to tell which elements of Tearling society were chosen by the author to make a point, and which slipped in from unconscious bias. Whichever way the Tearling was founded, it was envisioned as a socialist utopia, breaking free from the corruption and near-feudal oligarchy of modern day or near-future America. So why is everyone white? When a brown or black character appears for a page or two, their existence is commented upon as a curiosity, which doesn't explain why they're so rare. Is this a deliberate choice on Johansen's part, to be explored in detail in following volumes? Was William Tear a racist piece of shit? Or did Johansen just neglect to imagine that a utopian colony drawn together by socialist idealism from modern Americans would be considerably darker and more diverse than she depicts here?

And why, oh why, would a girl raised in total isolation by a kindly old man and a strict, in-command woman be obsessed with her looks? Why would she emerge from a vision of horror and invasion and be able to think only of stroking the bare chest of her guard? A sex-positive heroine is still a novelty in fantasy literature, a chubby one still rarer, but honestly, at times Kelsea felt less like a progressive new figure and more like the blushing, looks-obsessed damsels of old school fantasy.

Sunday, October 11, 2015

2015 read #60: China Dolls by Lisa See.

China Dolls by Lisa See
384 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 7 to October 11
Rating: ★★ out of 5

I think I'll always need genre training wheels on my literature. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but at times I see it as a personal failing as a reader that I so rarely seek out, much less enjoy, what might be styled "conventional" literary fiction. I've talked before about my disdain for the "Napa Valley wedding" novel, the sort of dreadfully boring yet eternally popular upper-middle class verisimilitude in which rich people bruise each other's feelings and, like, ride horses or something. If a book is mired in dull realism, is set in the present day, and deals nigh-exclusively with class-privileged folks, I just can't bring myself to carry it so much as an inch closer to the library checkout counter. The only thing more boring to me would be some inane murder mystery for the protagonist to unravel -- and the two overlap far more often than I would have credited before I began combing my library's stacks for new things to read.

Almost every entry on my literary fiction tag falls into some additional category that spiced it up for my palate: YA, much of which features protagonists specially crafted to appeal to bookish, socially awkward types of any age; historical fiction, which, with its exotic and often educational settings, is essentially genre fiction in its own right; vague, softball psychological horror, which tends to be much less interesting than the publisher's plot description or the cover art; some surreal or fantastical element, as with the works of Murakami or Oyeyemi, which I won't hesitate to label fantasy (as an inverse of those "fantasy" novels of the mid-'80s and early '90s, such as The Doubleman and Briar Rose, which have nothing whatsoever fantastical about them). Far too infrequently, there is another category I've been known to enjoy: literary fiction set more or less in the present that deals with places or peoples I know nothing about, or lifestyles and situations I have no experience of. One of the few books I read in 2012, before beginning this blog, was The Geometry of God by Uzma Aslam Khan, which impressed me very much at the time; I'd love to read more works like that, excellent fiction that, however minutely, expands my cultural and social horizons.

China Dolls (recommended to me by my friend Francesca) is set primarily within the (so-called) "Oriental" nightclub scene in the years before and during World War II. It's a time and a social environment I know little about, so it appeals to me not only as a historical novel but also as a horizon-expanding exposure to a social context seldom discussed in our current mainstream (white, affluent) culture. Yet much of the actual plot follows the fortunes, friendships, secrets, and ongoing betrayals of its three central characters -- the sort of thing that would feel so dreadfully dull had it been set amongst the vineyards and inheritance lawyers of Napa Valley. The whole literary schtick about "secret traumas lead to horrible betrayals among friends or family members" can feel artificial, a fill-in-the-blank plot starter kit -- nowhere near as egregious as "parent/old friend/estranged sibling dies in mysterious circumstances, and architect/lawyer/novelist protagonist must open old wounds and confront family/town secrets to uncover the truth," but off-putting nonetheless. In China Dolls, those at-long-last-revealed secrets are devastating and pack an emotional heft, which renders the betrayals and melodrama of earlier chapters far more affecting in retrospect, but before that point, which came (of course) at the climax of the book, I found my attention wandering, despite the fascinating historical milieu. Hence me musing about my need for genre training wheels to get me through just about every book, no matter how good the book itself might be.

To be fair, my attention would have been wandering anyway, divided between YouTube videos of thru-hikes and a payday impulse-purchase of Minecraft. For two or three nights now I've been dreaming in cubes.

Sunday, October 4, 2015

2015 read #59: Imago by Octavia E. Butler.

Imago by Octavia E. Butler
264 pages
Published 1989
Read from October 3 to October 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Some general spoilers for the entire Xenogenesis Trilogy ahead.

One thing I particularly admire throughout this series is Butler's choice of viewpoint characters. Dawn followed a human woman awakening after nuclear apocalypse to find herself aboard a vast alien vessel, chosen to be the "Judas goat" aiding the aliens in their assimilation of humanity. Adulthood Rites was the maturation and coming-of-age of the first Oankali-human hybrid male, born as an experiment to see if such a configuration could be psychologically stable, used during his childhood as another scapegoat of sorts, his Oankali progenitors manipulating him into a choice they were biologically incapable of making for the remnant of "resister" humanity. Imago is the story of the first Oankali-human hybrid ooloi, a third biological sex with the capacity to absorb, manipulate, and recombine genetic information -- an experiment neither hybrids nor Oankali believe is safe. The progression from book to book is inevitable in retrospect, but Butler's handling of the different facets of her social/biological thought experiment is assured.

For much of its length I felt that Imago was a step above the two preceding volumes, Butler totally confident within her story universe and her narration. If I'm being honest, I found my interest flagging at times when I read both Dawn and Rites; Imago, by contrast, was zippy and riveting almost to the very end. The ending, alas, felt a bit rickety and incomplete, every plot obstacle and conflict resolved by, essentially, having the hybrid ooloi narrator smell really, really good. Perhaps it's an especially olfactory twist on the standard sci-fi messiah figure storyline, or perhaps Jodahs (again with the Judas imagery?) is merely the physical embodiment of "Life finds a way."

Having read all of Butler's novels (with the exception of Survivor, which I doubt I'll ever have the opportunity to read unless one day $90 means a lot less to me than it does now), it's interesting to be able to connect them thematically. For the most part, the Xenogensis Trilogy avoids Butler's seeming fixation on young women characters getting romantically involved with substantially older men (though there were hints of that in Dawn). But more seriously, Xenogenesis joins the Patternist series as well as (to a slightly lesser extent) the Parable books and even (arguably) Fledgling in exploring Butler's enduring interest in humanity evolving beyond and above its current sorry state. The amplification of social bonds (including but not limited to the expansion or redefinition of the family group) is her general means of accomplishing this evolution -- via alien biology and five-way sex in Xenogenesis, via underage sex and vampire saliva in Fledgling, via psychic powers and immortality genes in the Patternist books, via a new religion of cooperation and hard work in Parable. This focus on social factors makes the anthropologist in me nod in agreement, even if much of the time Butler seems to take a fatalist view that stronger social bonds and higher social understanding are impossible with humanity's biology. The Parable books, the one series that posits pure social evolution without recourse to fantastic biochemistry, happen to be some of the most depressing fiction I've ever read.

Kindred is the outlier, in the sense that broader questions of human evolution aren't considered, but even then, familial links once again dominate Butler's thinking.

One could comment as well upon other themes, such as survivorship and Butler's strongly anti-hierarchical bent, but at that point I'd just be quoting her Wikipedia page, so I won't strain my limited critical faculties further.

I still have one or two short story collections to read, but for now, a moment of silence for a marvelous mind and body of work ended much too soon. (I'm not good at this maudlin stuff.)

Saturday, October 3, 2015

2015 read #58: Jack the Giant-Killer by Charles de Lint.

Jack the Giant-Killer by Charles de Lint
210 pages
Published 1987
Read from October 2 to October 3
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I've been looking forward to the novels of Charles de Lint for almost an entire decade, ever since I saw the hardback debut of Widdershins on the shelves at Borders. During the years of this blog, I've read three of de Lint's short stories -- "The Conjure Man" (reviewed here), "Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair" (reviewed here), and "The Bone Woman" (reviewed here) -- all of which I've enjoyed but found pleasant and unsurprising rather than bold or indelible. But I had yet to get to any of his novels, largely because I had never bothered to look up which book opened his Newford series, and kept buying or checking out volumes from somewhere near the middle of the continuity, which of course just wouldn't do as starting places. (I've remedied my ignorance with Wikipedia, and The Dreaming Place is fairly high on my to-read list, but I doubt that I'll get to it before next year.)

A few weeks ago, I chanced upon Jane Yolen's Briar Rose on the shelves of my library, and from there, even though the book in hand wasn't even fantasy by my definition, I began tracking down the rest of the Terri Windling-helmed Fairy Tale Series of novels. My library also happened to have de Lint's entry, Jack the Giant-Killer (though no library in the county seems to have its follow-up volume, Drink Down the Moon). What better place to begin with de Lint than an almost-standalone novel from the crib years of modern Adult Fantasy? From the very first paragraph, alas, which introduces our heroine, gazing at her reflection in numb disbelief after she's hacked off her hair and gone on an Ottawa-style bender after her boyfriend of three months leaves her for being too boring, Jack gets mired in the bog of lazy urban fantasy cliches. De Lint's tendency to be warmly formulaic in his short stories metamorphoses at novel length into a losing struggle with mediocrity. There's a painfully generic Unseelie Court, halfway between an orc horde and the muppets from Labyrinth (but failing at either one), stealing power and territory from a waning Seelie Court on the streets and suburbs of Ottawa; there's a no-nonsense best friend who tries to wisecrack through every situation; there are some cardboard-cutout versions of "good" faeries; there are paragraphs of location details that would make sense only to locals and do nothing to advance the story. The very same year in which Emma Bull made similar (essentially identical) cliches seem fresh and full of pep in War for the Oaks, de Lint seems to be coloring by numbers in a subgenre still barely past the blueprint stage.

There's nothing bad or unpleasant about de Lint's tale here, and Jack is not without its charms, like when Jacky finds her pluck and drives a hard bargain with the fey fiddler Kerevan, but overall, this book is rather thorough in its unremarkableness.

Friday, October 2, 2015

2015 read #57: Adulthood Rites by Octavia E. Butler.

Adulthood Rites by Octavia E. Butler
277 pages
Published 1988
Read from September 29 to October 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of this middle entry in the Xenogenesis Trilogy is how alien yet natural the biology and the mental processes of the Oankali and their hybrid constructs feel. Butler makes the construction and depiction of an alien species seem effortless. As for the story itself, it was a neat little coming of age tale in the usual science fiction adventure style, and I find myself pleased with it for the most part, but have little to say about it that feels substantial.

Rites was written at a time when the cultural-scientific idea of nature vs. nurture had swung strongly back in the direction of nature, after the precocious peak of flower-child psychology in the '60s; much of the book is predicated upon the idea that humanity's doom, our primate heritage of "hierarchical behavior," is linked particularly and inextricably with biological maleness. Certainly male-dominated societies, historical as well as modern, don't have a positive record with this whole "treating human beings with dignity and respect" thing. But this "biology is destiny" approach to gender feels overly broad and clumsy now, through no fault of Butler's. It was just what people kind of accepted to be true at the time, I think, though it fit well with Butler's generally pessimistic view of human nature, her whole "We could achieve great things if we didn't kill each other over petty shit" message, best seen in Parable of the Sower.