Message from the Eocene by Margaret St. Clair
114 pages
Published 1964
Read April 29
Rating: ★½ out of 5
Last month I derived some minor enjoyment from an Ace Double -- a pair of quaint Martian adventures penned by Leigh Brackett (1, 2). They weren't high literature, or even all that good even by genre fiction standards, but they were pulpy and dumb and fun. Flush with tax return money around the same time, I went ahead and ordered more Ace Doubles, picking up a few flimsy novels by Margaret St. Clair, one of the few female sci-fi writers from midcentury (or at least one of the few I've heard of). I can't recall if I'd seen her name praised or merely mentioned as a woman who had existed and written sci-fi, but I had heard of her somewhere, and that was enough.
With my predilections, it was natural that I latched onto Message from the Eocene -- I love stories involving, no matter how tangentially, the geological past (enough so that I recently read a dismal horror novel because it had a trilobite on the cover). Could this be a lost classic of deep time fiction?
Alas, Message from the Eocene is a lot of things -- hot mess, primarily -- but it is neither a lost classic nor a novel of deep time. I mean, sure, ostensibly, it begins with an alien being named Tharg stumbling along the summits of what we would now term the Archean Earth (or possibly the Hadean), but that has no more connection to the Eocene than it does to Disneyland. The writing in this early section, especially, is so execrable and amateurish that only sheer obstinacy kept me turning pages. "I'm under attack by unknown forces! My thoughts turn to the myths of a lost race that marooned my people here on Earth, but such things are silly and the mere thought of such twaddle angers me! It only crossed my mind as heavy-handed exposition before it transpires that the ancient lost race has returned after all!" I could have written better exposition when I was 14.
Message briefly improves as it transmogrifies into a rural English ghost story (Tharg's disembodied consciousness producing poltergeist phenomena for a poor Quaker family, easily the best segment of the book), and has the distinction of novelty in the next section, which is the only bit of science fiction I've ever read set on New Caledonia. It's also somewhat progressive by the racist standards of the time (though still coming across as pretty racist by modern standards). The rest of the volume declines with some rather absurd logic and clumsy structuring, petering out abruptly with humanity poised to take the next step in its psychic-consciousness evolution.
All this talk of ancient disembodied consciousnesses and the psychic maturation of the human race, populated with a diverse cast, with a climactic moment of personal psychic evolution, sounds familiar. In fact, for at least half of Message I was bemused by how much it seemed to presage Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile (1, 2, 3, 4) and Galactic Milieu books (1, 2, 3). Unnecessarily convoluted and tortured by an inability to properly convey such heady concepts within the context of good storytelling, St. Clair's Message nonetheless seems suspiciously close to the spirit of May's later work. I'm not implying anything untoward, but I wouldn't be surprised if this muddled little novella helped inspired May's also muddled but more assured worldbuilding effort. It's an interesting link to speculate about, at the very least -- and perhaps the only reason I'm glad I read this inept mess of a tale.
Saturday, April 30, 2016
Friday, April 29, 2016
2016 read #35: The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf.
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf
342 pages
Published 2015
Read from April 26 to April 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I kept seeing this book on "best book of the year" lists, so I went into it with unrealistic expectations. Wulf explores a fascinating period of intellectual development, the cusp between the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, and Humboldt himself is a significant character well deserving of scrutiny and publicity. Wulf traces Humboldt's influence on the thinking and work of historical figures ranging from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Simón Bolívar to John Muir, and on movements ranging from conservation and environmentalism to Art Nouveau and nature writing. It is a perfectly serviceable scientific biography, providing far more scientific and contemporary context than Chrysalis, for example, but I've been spoiled lately by history books written with considerably more verve and personality. Invention is written in what I would call the default historical biography voice: informative, bland, interchangeable. It lacks the snarkiness of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, the authoritative skepticism of SPQR, the imaginative flourishes of The Witches. Wulf's prose flows well but tends to be as bland as noodles.
342 pages
Published 2015
Read from April 26 to April 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I kept seeing this book on "best book of the year" lists, so I went into it with unrealistic expectations. Wulf explores a fascinating period of intellectual development, the cusp between the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, and Humboldt himself is a significant character well deserving of scrutiny and publicity. Wulf traces Humboldt's influence on the thinking and work of historical figures ranging from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Simón Bolívar to John Muir, and on movements ranging from conservation and environmentalism to Art Nouveau and nature writing. It is a perfectly serviceable scientific biography, providing far more scientific and contemporary context than Chrysalis, for example, but I've been spoiled lately by history books written with considerably more verve and personality. Invention is written in what I would call the default historical biography voice: informative, bland, interchangeable. It lacks the snarkiness of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, the authoritative skepticism of SPQR, the imaginative flourishes of The Witches. Wulf's prose flows well but tends to be as bland as noodles.
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
2016 read #34: Threshold by Caitlín R. Kiernan.
Threshold: A Novel of Deep Time by Caitlín R. Kiernan
259 pages
Published 2001
Read from April 23 to April 26
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
In recent months, or years rather, I've discovered a fondness for a certain school of early urban fantasy, the sort of thing that dealt with a magical underworld beneath the lights and nightlife of a familiar everyday city, but hadn't yet been codified into vampire romances and werewolf detectives -- a young and still-malleable subgenre, already developing its inevitable superstructure of cliches and conventions but not entirely shackled to it. I'm thinking of Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons, Charles de Lint's Ottawa novels. None of them vital literature, and I mocked them just as often as I praised them, but they satisfied a receptor I hadn't even known was there. Junk food fiction, but a highly specific sort of junk food, that left me with a highly specific craving.
Threshold is, broadly speaking, a Lovecraftian horror tale, a rote reworking of impossible geometries and formless horrors from beyond time, but it can also be seen as a successor of sorts to the sort of mid-1980s urban fantasy I listed above. What Bull does with the Twin Cities, or Lindholm with Seattle, or de Lint with Ottawa of all places, Kiernan sort of does with Birmingham, Alabama -- mapping local landmarks and a pervasive, lived-in sense of place onto a fantasy of ancient forces beyond human knowledge. Of course, Kiernan presents her eldritch Birmingham within a world methodically stripped of any sense of joy or tenderness. The emotional palette is one Lego Batman would recognize: black, or sometimes really dark gray. Every character arrives fully steeped in misery: The geologist loses her family, one by one, to car crashes and suicide and meaningless biological inertia, all in the first chapter. The psychic who wandered in from a Stephen King novel medicates against the horrors he has seen with profound alcoholism. The magical backwoods albino is on the run from extradimensional horrors that destroyed her own family. The goth girl who gets mixed up in everyone else's troubles is the closest thing to a ray of sunshine in the entire book -- until (spoilers!) she summons the non-Euclidean intelligences with some black paint in the city park, and gets sucked into an eternal hell-void for her effort. The whole thing starts to seem like the Aristocrats, but with misery and death and broken coping skills as the special acts.
After a while, that single-note threnody grows mockable, and at last simply dreary. I read half of the book in what amounted to a single sitting the first night, but after that point, as it became clearer that it was going to stick in the gear of misery and not accelerate to any kind of cathartic buildup, I just wanted it to be done. There is no narrative momentum: everyone starts out miserable, and pretty much stays that way; whenever something like rising action threatens to develop, someone thinks better of it and avoids confronting any issues for another fifty pages.
That's not even getting to the prose issues. Present tense always annoys me, especially when sustained for so long. And Kiernan here has a tic of randomly, unnecessarily cramming adjectives into Germanic compound words, usually at least once a page, sometimes as often as three times a sentence. Awkward conglomerations like preciousthin, licoriceblack, cybergreen, ghostvoice, gulfdeep, suddensharp. My diagnosis: Earnest young novelist trying to force a distinctive style into being. Prognosis: Annoying.
And also there's, like, trilobites involved, which is the entire reason I picked this book up in the first place. (My previous exposure to Kiernan, a short story reviewed here, did not motivate me to seek out more of her material.) For a while I was worried that Kiernan was trying to make trilobites themselves into the ancient unthinkable horror, which is just silly -- there is no possible way to make trilobites scary. Instead they're just, like, a symbol of human thought of the deep past, which is what the timeless abominations want to prevent, or something? I'm not sure.
I give Threshold some points for the evident ambition behind it, even if it doesn't quite land, and also for the emotional earnestness behind its characters, even if that becomes more wearisome than compelling toward the back half. It was certainly a memorable reading experience, I'll give it that much.
259 pages
Published 2001
Read from April 23 to April 26
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
In recent months, or years rather, I've discovered a fondness for a certain school of early urban fantasy, the sort of thing that dealt with a magical underworld beneath the lights and nightlife of a familiar everyday city, but hadn't yet been codified into vampire romances and werewolf detectives -- a young and still-malleable subgenre, already developing its inevitable superstructure of cliches and conventions but not entirely shackled to it. I'm thinking of Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons, Charles de Lint's Ottawa novels. None of them vital literature, and I mocked them just as often as I praised them, but they satisfied a receptor I hadn't even known was there. Junk food fiction, but a highly specific sort of junk food, that left me with a highly specific craving.
Threshold is, broadly speaking, a Lovecraftian horror tale, a rote reworking of impossible geometries and formless horrors from beyond time, but it can also be seen as a successor of sorts to the sort of mid-1980s urban fantasy I listed above. What Bull does with the Twin Cities, or Lindholm with Seattle, or de Lint with Ottawa of all places, Kiernan sort of does with Birmingham, Alabama -- mapping local landmarks and a pervasive, lived-in sense of place onto a fantasy of ancient forces beyond human knowledge. Of course, Kiernan presents her eldritch Birmingham within a world methodically stripped of any sense of joy or tenderness. The emotional palette is one Lego Batman would recognize: black, or sometimes really dark gray. Every character arrives fully steeped in misery: The geologist loses her family, one by one, to car crashes and suicide and meaningless biological inertia, all in the first chapter. The psychic who wandered in from a Stephen King novel medicates against the horrors he has seen with profound alcoholism. The magical backwoods albino is on the run from extradimensional horrors that destroyed her own family. The goth girl who gets mixed up in everyone else's troubles is the closest thing to a ray of sunshine in the entire book -- until (spoilers!) she summons the non-Euclidean intelligences with some black paint in the city park, and gets sucked into an eternal hell-void for her effort. The whole thing starts to seem like the Aristocrats, but with misery and death and broken coping skills as the special acts.
After a while, that single-note threnody grows mockable, and at last simply dreary. I read half of the book in what amounted to a single sitting the first night, but after that point, as it became clearer that it was going to stick in the gear of misery and not accelerate to any kind of cathartic buildup, I just wanted it to be done. There is no narrative momentum: everyone starts out miserable, and pretty much stays that way; whenever something like rising action threatens to develop, someone thinks better of it and avoids confronting any issues for another fifty pages.
That's not even getting to the prose issues. Present tense always annoys me, especially when sustained for so long. And Kiernan here has a tic of randomly, unnecessarily cramming adjectives into Germanic compound words, usually at least once a page, sometimes as often as three times a sentence. Awkward conglomerations like preciousthin, licoriceblack, cybergreen, ghostvoice, gulfdeep, suddensharp. My diagnosis: Earnest young novelist trying to force a distinctive style into being. Prognosis: Annoying.
And also there's, like, trilobites involved, which is the entire reason I picked this book up in the first place. (My previous exposure to Kiernan, a short story reviewed here, did not motivate me to seek out more of her material.) For a while I was worried that Kiernan was trying to make trilobites themselves into the ancient unthinkable horror, which is just silly -- there is no possible way to make trilobites scary. Instead they're just, like, a symbol of human thought of the deep past, which is what the timeless abominations want to prevent, or something? I'm not sure.
I give Threshold some points for the evident ambition behind it, even if it doesn't quite land, and also for the emotional earnestness behind its characters, even if that becomes more wearisome than compelling toward the back half. It was certainly a memorable reading experience, I'll give it that much.
Saturday, April 23, 2016
2016 read #33: Inside Job by Connie Willis.
Inside Job by Connie Willis
99 pages
Published 2005
Read from April 22 to April 23
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Another filler book to boost my count, but it has an advantage over Willis' D.A. in that it at least has a mildly clever premise and a reason to exist as a published story. The characters and their motivations felt somewhat flimsy, but the conceit of an inveterate skeptic coming back from the spirit plane to discredit psychics and flimflam artists is winsome, and overall Inside Job seemed like more care and thought went into it than into D.A. -- it felt much more like an actual Connie Willis story than that hackjob ever did.
99 pages
Published 2005
Read from April 22 to April 23
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Another filler book to boost my count, but it has an advantage over Willis' D.A. in that it at least has a mildly clever premise and a reason to exist as a published story. The characters and their motivations felt somewhat flimsy, but the conceit of an inveterate skeptic coming back from the spirit plane to discredit psychics and flimflam artists is winsome, and overall Inside Job seemed like more care and thought went into it than into D.A. -- it felt much more like an actual Connie Willis story than that hackjob ever did.
Friday, April 22, 2016
2016 read #32: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
138 pages
Published 1962
Read from April 20 to April 22
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Never before, I think, has reading a grocery list seemed so creepy. A masterpiece of domestic menace and psychological horror, Castle's central strength is its narrative voice, which sustains the perfect balance of clarity and derangement. I don't believe the central ambiguity about who murdered the Blackwood parents was meant as a mystery; I certainly sussed it out in the early going, well before it gets spelled out. The book's most interesting character work, however, does not derive from any question of whether it was Constance or Mary Katherine who poisoned the sugar, but rather from the cramped, furtive ways the surviving Blackwoods adjust to the reality of the killer in their midst, their rituals of appeasement portrayed through the naive, matter-of-fact eyes of the narrator.
138 pages
Published 1962
Read from April 20 to April 22
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Never before, I think, has reading a grocery list seemed so creepy. A masterpiece of domestic menace and psychological horror, Castle's central strength is its narrative voice, which sustains the perfect balance of clarity and derangement. I don't believe the central ambiguity about who murdered the Blackwood parents was meant as a mystery; I certainly sussed it out in the early going, well before it gets spelled out. The book's most interesting character work, however, does not derive from any question of whether it was Constance or Mary Katherine who poisoned the sugar, but rather from the cramped, furtive ways the surviving Blackwoods adjust to the reality of the killer in their midst, their rituals of appeasement portrayed through the naive, matter-of-fact eyes of the narrator.
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
2016 read #31: D.A. by Connie Willis.
D.A. by Connie Willis
76 pages
Published 2007
Read April 20
Rating: ★½ out of 5
I'll be honest, I only read this novella to artificially inflate my book numbers for the month. Connie Willis tends to be reliably enjoyable -- I would read as many of her Oxford time travel novels as she'd care to produce -- so I figured that, in her hands, a quick romp about a shanghaied space cadet would be a fine way to kill an hour. The jacket flap makes comparisons to Heinlein's early adventure novels; how could it go wrong? Yet this slip of a book left me feeling like it had no reason to exist. There was no point to any of it. It would be too generous to say it reads like YA fiction -- the whole thing reads like a teenage sci-fi fan wrote it. It is both too short and too long, for what it is: too rushed to develop any sense of character or place, yet too frequently bogged down in confused phone calls and stammered "I shouldn't be here, get me out of this" exchanges to develop any momentum. The closest comparison I can make is to the setup chapters of one of my own early novels, hastily written with no concern for character development or prose quality; the denouement in particular seemed like something I would have considered amazing and groundbreaking when I was 14.
It's a mess, even for a book I read just for filler. And that's disappointing, given Willis' other works.
76 pages
Published 2007
Read April 20
Rating: ★½ out of 5
I'll be honest, I only read this novella to artificially inflate my book numbers for the month. Connie Willis tends to be reliably enjoyable -- I would read as many of her Oxford time travel novels as she'd care to produce -- so I figured that, in her hands, a quick romp about a shanghaied space cadet would be a fine way to kill an hour. The jacket flap makes comparisons to Heinlein's early adventure novels; how could it go wrong? Yet this slip of a book left me feeling like it had no reason to exist. There was no point to any of it. It would be too generous to say it reads like YA fiction -- the whole thing reads like a teenage sci-fi fan wrote it. It is both too short and too long, for what it is: too rushed to develop any sense of character or place, yet too frequently bogged down in confused phone calls and stammered "I shouldn't be here, get me out of this" exchanges to develop any momentum. The closest comparison I can make is to the setup chapters of one of my own early novels, hastily written with no concern for character development or prose quality; the denouement in particular seemed like something I would have considered amazing and groundbreaking when I was 14.
It's a mess, even for a book I read just for filler. And that's disappointing, given Willis' other works.
Monday, April 18, 2016
2016 read #30: The Kingdom of Gods by N. K. Jemisin.
The Kingdom of Gods by N. K. Jemisin
600 pages
Published 2011
Read from April 13 to April 18
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
After a surprisingly good first installment and a lesser but still enjoyable middle volume, the Inheritance Trilogy finishes with this uneven and overlong but ultimately worthwhile and effective number. Coming after two books centered on narrators from backwater provinces suddenly discovering vast powers, only now unlocked, Gods at least explores new territory. The narrator here is Sieh, the trickster-child god first encountered in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and he faces the loss of his god-powers while he uncovers a cosmic threat to the existence of the universe as he knows it. My main issue with this storyline is how abstracted the central threat feels. I've cared about Sieh as a character since early on in Hundred Thousand; he has been by far the most fleshed-out of the godling characters throughout the series. But when his primary antagonist is the cosmological laws of the fantasy universe he inhabits, investment in him as a character only gets the story so much mileage. I've read too many fantasy novels that pin their conflict to a ridiculous Big Bad (including, say, The Broken Kingdoms) to feel unappreciative of what Jemisin is trying to do -- at least she's trying to break the "fantasy villain" mold. But when the plot turns on minutiae of how fantastical cosmology operates, and the book reels on for 600 pages, it's hard to stifle the occasional yawn.
Fortunately, Jemisin delivers emotional catharsis where it counts, and overall, I'd rate this series a moderate success. I don't even care that much that I kind of saw the ending coming a long way off; it satisfied regardless.
This book came bundled with a bonus short story set in the same world, "Not the End," which serves as a cute, tidy coda to the story of Oree and Shiny from book two. It was hardly a necessary capper, but it wasn't unwelcome, either.
600 pages
Published 2011
Read from April 13 to April 18
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
After a surprisingly good first installment and a lesser but still enjoyable middle volume, the Inheritance Trilogy finishes with this uneven and overlong but ultimately worthwhile and effective number. Coming after two books centered on narrators from backwater provinces suddenly discovering vast powers, only now unlocked, Gods at least explores new territory. The narrator here is Sieh, the trickster-child god first encountered in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and he faces the loss of his god-powers while he uncovers a cosmic threat to the existence of the universe as he knows it. My main issue with this storyline is how abstracted the central threat feels. I've cared about Sieh as a character since early on in Hundred Thousand; he has been by far the most fleshed-out of the godling characters throughout the series. But when his primary antagonist is the cosmological laws of the fantasy universe he inhabits, investment in him as a character only gets the story so much mileage. I've read too many fantasy novels that pin their conflict to a ridiculous Big Bad (including, say, The Broken Kingdoms) to feel unappreciative of what Jemisin is trying to do -- at least she's trying to break the "fantasy villain" mold. But when the plot turns on minutiae of how fantastical cosmology operates, and the book reels on for 600 pages, it's hard to stifle the occasional yawn.
Fortunately, Jemisin delivers emotional catharsis where it counts, and overall, I'd rate this series a moderate success. I don't even care that much that I kind of saw the ending coming a long way off; it satisfied regardless.
This book came bundled with a bonus short story set in the same world, "Not the End," which serves as a cute, tidy coda to the story of Oree and Shiny from book two. It was hardly a necessary capper, but it wasn't unwelcome, either.
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
2016 read #29: SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard.
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
538 pages
Published 2015
Read from April 6 to April 12
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Now this is how to do a history tome. Beard has been recommended to me in the past, and I must say I am thoroughly impressed by her mix of hard-nosed skepticism, dry humor, and colorful character detail, as well as her resistance to the Big Person trap that certain other historians (cough, Susan Wise Bauer, cough) slide into. It's refreshing to see a historian simultaneously seeking out the almost-lost voices of common folk, delighting in barroom jokes painted in Pompeii and the modest gravestone brags of successful laundrymen, while minimizing the personal impact of any given emperor's foibles.
I particularly admired Beard's approach to handling the "truth" behind the myths (such as Romulus and Remus, or the ancient Roman kings, or various heroes of the early Republic). In perfect contrast to Bauer, who insisted on some nugget of fact inspiring even the most outlandish ancient myth, Beard is interested, sensibly, in what the telling of these myths might suggest about the concerns, worldview, and hidden anxieties of contemporary people. Throughout, Beard retains her healthy skepticism while demonstrating a thorough expertise in her subject matter -- all with a dexterous and appealing command of prose, a rare combination of historical expert and polished author. This may be her magnum opus, but I'm eager to look into her other books.
538 pages
Published 2015
Read from April 6 to April 12
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Now this is how to do a history tome. Beard has been recommended to me in the past, and I must say I am thoroughly impressed by her mix of hard-nosed skepticism, dry humor, and colorful character detail, as well as her resistance to the Big Person trap that certain other historians (cough, Susan Wise Bauer, cough) slide into. It's refreshing to see a historian simultaneously seeking out the almost-lost voices of common folk, delighting in barroom jokes painted in Pompeii and the modest gravestone brags of successful laundrymen, while minimizing the personal impact of any given emperor's foibles.
I particularly admired Beard's approach to handling the "truth" behind the myths (such as Romulus and Remus, or the ancient Roman kings, or various heroes of the early Republic). In perfect contrast to Bauer, who insisted on some nugget of fact inspiring even the most outlandish ancient myth, Beard is interested, sensibly, in what the telling of these myths might suggest about the concerns, worldview, and hidden anxieties of contemporary people. Throughout, Beard retains her healthy skepticism while demonstrating a thorough expertise in her subject matter -- all with a dexterous and appealing command of prose, a rare combination of historical expert and polished author. This may be her magnum opus, but I'm eager to look into her other books.
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
2016 read #28: All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders.
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
316 pages
Published 2016
Read from April 4 to April 6
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
This book is something of a genre gumbo, put together from scraps and shorthands and storytelling conventions (or, if you must misuse a perfectly good word permanently redefined by a certain website, genre tropes) from all corners of speculative fiction. There's childhood fairytale magic in the vein of Summer and Bird; there's a hint of airport thriller and a big dollop of technothriller; there's a brief interlude of magical school, more reminiscent of The Magicians than Harry Potter; there are bits of urban sorcery, in the tradition of Wizard of the Pigeons; there's strange physics, plus talk of wormholes and planetary colonization; there's a whole helping of climatepunk and near-future misery porn; the emergence of a sentient AI is a central plotline. The only things missing are dragons, political fantasy, and transhumanism, and even that last one is winked at in the closing pages.
The mix didn't strike me as quite so revelatory and astounding as the blurb-reviewers hyped -- people have been commingling science fiction and fantasy since before the two were coupled as linked genres, after all. Maybe I was less enthused than, say, Michael Chabon and Cory Doctorow were because I personally don't care that much for certain elements of modern science fiction, with its emphasis on small moments of personal joy amidst the all-encompassing nihilism and pessimism. The fatalism of climatepunk is a big part of the reason why the last three or four years of reading have turned me from a sci-fi buff into a fairies-and-witches nerd, and AI stories have never interested me much. A more straightforward fantasy continuing the atmosphere of the opening chapter probably would have suited my tastes better.
But that doesn't mar my appreciation for what is, on every other level, an outstanding and affecting novel, a tragic intertwining of personal losses and big picture stakes. The book felt longer to me than it was; to spill something a bit corny and hyperbolic, I almost feel like I've gone somewhere far away, and only now come back. The action climax landed with a bit of a thud, but the emotional core of the story, and the characters, remained true and moving throughout.
316 pages
Published 2016
Read from April 4 to April 6
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
This book is something of a genre gumbo, put together from scraps and shorthands and storytelling conventions (or, if you must misuse a perfectly good word permanently redefined by a certain website, genre tropes) from all corners of speculative fiction. There's childhood fairytale magic in the vein of Summer and Bird; there's a hint of airport thriller and a big dollop of technothriller; there's a brief interlude of magical school, more reminiscent of The Magicians than Harry Potter; there are bits of urban sorcery, in the tradition of Wizard of the Pigeons; there's strange physics, plus talk of wormholes and planetary colonization; there's a whole helping of climatepunk and near-future misery porn; the emergence of a sentient AI is a central plotline. The only things missing are dragons, political fantasy, and transhumanism, and even that last one is winked at in the closing pages.
The mix didn't strike me as quite so revelatory and astounding as the blurb-reviewers hyped -- people have been commingling science fiction and fantasy since before the two were coupled as linked genres, after all. Maybe I was less enthused than, say, Michael Chabon and Cory Doctorow were because I personally don't care that much for certain elements of modern science fiction, with its emphasis on small moments of personal joy amidst the all-encompassing nihilism and pessimism. The fatalism of climatepunk is a big part of the reason why the last three or four years of reading have turned me from a sci-fi buff into a fairies-and-witches nerd, and AI stories have never interested me much. A more straightforward fantasy continuing the atmosphere of the opening chapter probably would have suited my tastes better.
But that doesn't mar my appreciation for what is, on every other level, an outstanding and affecting novel, a tragic intertwining of personal losses and big picture stakes. The book felt longer to me than it was; to spill something a bit corny and hyperbolic, I almost feel like I've gone somewhere far away, and only now come back. The action climax landed with a bit of a thud, but the emotional core of the story, and the characters, remained true and moving throughout.
Friday, April 1, 2016
2016 read #27: The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home by Catherynne M. Valente.
The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home by Catherynne M. Valente
308 pages
Published 2016
Read from March 30 to April 1
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The Boy Who Lost Fairyland did not seem like the penultimate book of a series. I gave it a positive rating at the time, but I barely remember anything from it now, beyond the sense that it was directionless dilly-dallying, "a book-length narrative detour," as I called it in my review -- a long way to go, with an entirely new batch of characters, just to trigger a deus ex machina that could just as easily have been plopped down in ten pages tacked to the end of The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (which had felt like an incomplete novel anyway). So I was somewhat startled to find out that Valente's next Fairyland novel would also be the last. Perhaps the Harry Potter series had primed me to expect a seven novel series, but honestly, it just didn't seem to me that September's adventures in Fairyland had moved in the direction of resolution since, like, book two.
It took some time for All the Way Home to build its racing momentum, beginning as it does gummed down in the narrative tangle left by the Dodo's egg at the end of Boy. "Far too many people talk all at once," promises the description of the first chapter, and fully a third of the book went by before it hooked my interest. The marvelous creativity of the first two books had, by the time we got to Boy, diminished to "constant reminders of how edible everything looks" in Fairyland; that trend continues here, with the addition of rather annoying amounts of alliteration. But Valente's hand at allegory, while not allowed to frolic quite so much as I recall from the early novels, remains as expert as ever, twisting out chuckles as well as the aching sense of loss and confusion she wields so well. The end is moving and satisfying, albeit still rather sooner than I would have expected.
308 pages
Published 2016
Read from March 30 to April 1
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The Boy Who Lost Fairyland did not seem like the penultimate book of a series. I gave it a positive rating at the time, but I barely remember anything from it now, beyond the sense that it was directionless dilly-dallying, "a book-length narrative detour," as I called it in my review -- a long way to go, with an entirely new batch of characters, just to trigger a deus ex machina that could just as easily have been plopped down in ten pages tacked to the end of The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (which had felt like an incomplete novel anyway). So I was somewhat startled to find out that Valente's next Fairyland novel would also be the last. Perhaps the Harry Potter series had primed me to expect a seven novel series, but honestly, it just didn't seem to me that September's adventures in Fairyland had moved in the direction of resolution since, like, book two.
It took some time for All the Way Home to build its racing momentum, beginning as it does gummed down in the narrative tangle left by the Dodo's egg at the end of Boy. "Far too many people talk all at once," promises the description of the first chapter, and fully a third of the book went by before it hooked my interest. The marvelous creativity of the first two books had, by the time we got to Boy, diminished to "constant reminders of how edible everything looks" in Fairyland; that trend continues here, with the addition of rather annoying amounts of alliteration. But Valente's hand at allegory, while not allowed to frolic quite so much as I recall from the early novels, remains as expert as ever, twisting out chuckles as well as the aching sense of loss and confusion she wields so well. The end is moving and satisfying, albeit still rather sooner than I would have expected.
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