2016 read #46: The Wind Whales of Ishmael by Philip José Farmer.

The Wind Whales of Ishmael by Philip José Farmer
130 pages
Published 1971
Read from May 26 to May 27
Rating: ★½ out of 5

It takes a certain amount of hubris to write a "science fiction sequel" to Moby-Dick. This isn't the same thing as taking, say, The Tempest and reworking its elements into a fun but progressively less rewarding fantasy trilogy (1, 2, 3). That, at least, can be interpreted as a loving tribute to a classic of world literature, building somewhat organically from the storyline and characters established in the original. The only redeeming quality of The Wind Whales of Ishmael, by contrast, is its title. The title is, so far as I can tell, the only part of this book that draws anything akin to inspiration from Herman Melville's masterwork. Farmer's prose is lifeless and mechanical, nowhere approaching the off-kilter fluency and manic energy of Ishmael's narration. The character of Ishmael himself bears no likeness to Melville's narrator; he is a manly blank-slate figure straight out of any number of Burroughsian pulp adventures, bringing red-blooded American pluck and "survival instinct" to a fatalistic native tribe and teaching their virgin priestess to love -- all while coolly musing on the ecology of this strange new world, his thoughts referencing Darwinian evolution and plate tectonics despite being flung straight out of the year 1842. I mean, come on now.

Disregarding its tenuous-at-best lineage, Wind Whales is nothing more nor less than a generic Dying Earth fantasy, a subgenre popular in the late '60s and early '70s that served to give a science-fictiony sheen to hoary old heroic fantasy story conventions (the same genre-bending role Old Mars tales occupied in the decades before Mariner probes). The climax here cribs even more from heroic fantasy than most, dragging us through the world's most tedious dungeon raid, creature battles more goofy than exciting, and a running skirmish with temple priests. Farmer's clunking prose sucks out any element of pulpy adventure inherent to hunting sky-whales from airships, leaving the White Savior and "men should take the lead while women stay behind as precious breeding stock" narratives naked for all to see, without even the distraction of a fun story to blur them. And daring to link Whales directly to one of my favorite novels of all time invites no end of expectations and comparisons, all of which leave Farmer at a disadvantage.

It's possible this would have been a marginally more enjoyable book had it not been styled as a sequel to Moby-Dick -- there is certainly no thematic or character-driven necessity for this story to claim that status, nor is there even a remote equivalence in quality, so the connection serves only to make Whales look worse. The only reason to construe Whales as a "science fiction sequel," so far as I can tell, is to intrigue gullible readers into buying the damn thing. The trick sure worked on me.

2016 read #45: Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane.

Mountains of the Mind: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights Were Transformed into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit by Robert Macfarlane
282 pages
Published 2003
Read from May 22 to May 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

After several false starts and abandoned novels in the second half of this month (so much for that splendid pace I'd been setting!), I was more than eager to get started on this one. I've been trying to obtain Mountains of the Mind for well over a year now, probably ever since I finished The Old Ways and felt myself hankering for more from Macfarlane. I'm somewhat impressed by his works, primarily The Wild Places, and everything I knew about Mountains suggested it would be a worthwhile read. A sociological history on how people (well, Western Europeans, at any rate) conceptualize and respond to mountainous terrain intrigued both my anthropological side and my outdoorsy side; Macfarlane's byline promised the cachet of his often-fluent nature writing. That extra year or so while I waited for the library network to act upon my book request only added to my anticipation.

For all that buildup, Mountain proves to be... pretty much alright? The thesis statement of the bold opening chapter, promising nothing less than a history of landscape perception across several centuries, is the best part of the book -- an appropriate parallel to Macfarlane's theme of the romantic pull of the unknown, mystery and suggestion rendering to the imagination scenes to which reality is a disappointing substitute. He covers the West's progression of concepts and ideas regarding mountains well enough, chapter by chapter, but the book as a whole feels somewhat lacking, little serving to distinguish it from any number of history books. Macfarlane's later prose brilliance is only suggested here in the occasional bit of wordplay.

2016 read #44: The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny.

The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny
155 pages
Published 1966 (expanded version of a novella published 1964)
Read from May 17 to May 18
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I did not "get" this book. I can't tell if that should be blamed on the text or on my own muddled interpretive faculties. Goodness knows I've had trouble in the past interpreting events and meanings not explicitly spelled out by the author. But it's also possible that Zelazny, in his need to write an artsy-fartsy New Wave novel, packed with literary allusions and myths and poetry quoted out of context, built up a grand edifice to house something inane.

At first The Dream Master reads like a generic early New Wave book: Psychiatry is a hard science! The frontiers of the mind are explored, manipulated, and understood with an amazing technology -- a technology only a relative handful of special individuals are capable of wielding. There's a genetically modified talking dog for some reason! As it goes on, the book gets more tangled up and postmodern. Random scenes are interposed with the main storyline, nameless voices carrying on thematic monologues that only make sense -- if at all -- when it ties together at the very end. It could all be very interesting -- I do love me some postmodern genre fic, when it's done well -- but as far as I can make out, the point of it all is, shall we say, underwhelming. Underneath the literary tricks and nonlinear storytelling is what amounts to be the most basic and generic sci-fi motif of the mid-20th century: A technological existence has coddled and softened humanity. The neuroses of the modern human condition revolt against social welfare with the weapons of Jungian myth. It's an awful lot of buildup and artistic obfuscation to convey the same overall moral as Alpha Centauri—Or Die!

But hey, maybe there's a lot more to it that I just didn't apprehend.

2016 read #43: The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell.

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
255 pages
Published 2008
Read from May 13 to May 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

If I'm not mistaken, this was Vowell's first conventionally structured history book. Her books before this (which, admittedly, I haven't read -- I'm piecing this together from the internet) were collections of essays, or in the case of Assassination Vacation, something like a thematically unified travelogue. Shipmates tells the story of the Boston Puritans, rather than the more familiar pop-history figures north in Salem or south in Plymouth, largely through the eyes of John Winthrop, intermittent governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and author of the "city on a hill" sermon, so beloved and so wrongfully interpreted by Reagan. The intent is partly to trace the origins of one strain of American exceptionalism in popular ideology, but that thread gets lost somewhat in the flow of Puritan infighting and banishments and the ugliness of the Pequot War.

Overall, Shipmates doesn't quite hang together quite as well as Unfamiliar Fishes and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States. It's still an enjoyable read, but with the benefit of the hindsight of those two later books, it seems like Vowell had yet to finalize her voice in this period. It isn't quite so snarky, not quite so funny, not quite so zippy. It also doesn't feel as informative as those two volumes -- possibly because I've covered so much related material, both recently (in Stacy Schiff's The Witches) as well as many years ago, in college history courses.

2016 read #42: This Immortal by Roger Zelazny.

This Immortal by Roger Zelazny
184 pages
Published 1966 (expanded version of novella published 1965)
Read from May 12 to May 13
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Zelazny's first full novel, This Immortal is a creaky affair, lacking polish and the assured hand of his later work. The narrator here, Conrad, is a rough prototype of pretty much every Zelazny hero: superhumanly strong, superhumanly lucky, effectively immortal thanks to a chance mutation. Also, he's telepathic because why not, this is sci-fi in 1966, baby! Prefiguring the much more effectively realized myth-scape of Lord of Light, quirks of nuclear fallout and alien infestations fashion a convenient facsimile of Ancient Greek folklore. The episodic structure is also reminiscent of the superior Lord of Light, but whereas in the later novel this comes across as an intriguing experiment in structure and nonlinear storytelling, in Immortal the random creature fights and assassin duels feel closer to the clumsily serialized (or "fixed up") adventures of 1950s pulp sci-fi. Or, given the way things wrap up, perhaps it may even fall within the definition of a shaggy dog story. Immortal is most interesting in the context of the transition of the genre as a whole from the relative artlessness of pulp adventure to the more psychological, more experimental storytelling of the New Wave. It certainly has the feel of a transitional piece, which might derive as well from Zelazny expanding from short-format fiction to the demands of the long form.

2016 read #41: Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
173 pages
Published 2016
Read from May 10 to May 12
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Some books go on too long, bloviating along way past what the story, the characters, or my interest can support. Every Heart a Doorway is the opposite, a rarity: a book that would be much improved had it been twice the length. I love so much about this little tale. The central conceit, a boarding school for children unable to find their way back to magical story worlds, is a mishmash of several modern fantasy cliches, mingling a little bit of everything from The Magicians to Among Others to Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland books, as well as everything those novels had drawn from in turn, and while McGuire's Home for Wayward Children itself feels a bit rote, there's still enough charm and life to the cliches to sustain it. The characters here were a delight -- I wanted to learn everything about their worlds, their doorways, their stories. There is just enough space here to outline the experiences of the central characters, but never enough to satisfy. If McGuire wrote a trilogy about, say, the Addams sisters' adventures on the Moor, I would read the hell out of it. Alas, this book is just long enough to have gotten me wanting more. There is some emotional impact in how the characters' fates are resolved, but the book ends before I really felt attached to them. I need more.

The biggest weakness of Doorway, to my idiosyncratic tastes, was the central murder-mystery plotline. I find it difficult to give a shit about murder mysteries. If I pick up a new book with an intriguing cover, and I see from the jacket flap summary that a murder sets the story in motion, I put it right back on the shelf. Of all the cheap, lazy ways to generate a plot, a mysterious death is among the cheapest and laziest -- not to mention hokey, overdone, and dreadfully dull. If we're only going to spend less than two hundred pages with these characters, why waste pages that could be filled with thoughtful character moments and insights to develop some rote magical killer plotline? It cheapens the whole book for me. But I guess that's one of my personal peculiarities.

Had it been twice the length, and propelled by something more interesting than a murder mystery, Doorway could have been an amazing novel. As it is, I can only say it was pretty good.

2016 read #40: Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen.

Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen
342 pages
Published 2015
Read from May 7 to May 9
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

What I respect: An author making a conscious effort to create a diverse, representative cast of characters. I'm tired of straight white dudes dominating my fantasy adventures, tired of the standard Western European influences, interested in characters that face social prejudices and inequities more substantial than "secretly the son of the true king but raised by poor-yet-wise villagers." A mixed race agender pansexual person raised in slavery is a far more complicated and original protagonist than, say, just another Anglo feller.

What makes me go "Enh, I don't know": An author dedicating her book to a diversity-in-fiction hashtag, and underlining her "commit[ment] to respecting diversity" in a special author's note at the end. It has an aftertaste of "Look how enlightened and concerned I am!" Almost a whiff of White Savior in there, as well. Well, maybe I'm projecting. I certainly don't claim to understand hashtag culture; maybe this is merely what one does in online activist circles. But in general, I feel it's great to put in the due diligence to include respectfully portrayed diversity in one's books, more questionable to make a big deal about it so that everyone notices. Kind of like the social justice equivalent of praying in a closet vs. praying on the street corner.

What comes to mind, perhaps inevitably, is Francesca Lia Block's Love in a Time of Global Warming: Another much-praised YA fantasy that does excellent, admirable things with representation and inclusion amongst its cast, yet kind of sputters when it comes to actually telling a story with those characters. But whereas Warming was kind of a hot mess (heh) in its prose and plotting and characterization, Wake is at least averagely goodish. It's a generic urban fantasy monster-hunter adventure kitted out and sent to roam the West Texas plains. Adequate enough material, but more or less rote stuff in spite of the setting, with twists I saw coming from over the horizon. Despite her background, the protagonist didn't seem all that different from a generic modern YA fantasy protagonist, adjusting to a new social life after a shitty home life, confronting hormones and confusion and boys (and girls too, but mostly boys). You'd think that a person with such a background wouldn't be able to fit ever so conveniently into our modern ideas of the gender spectrum and sexuality, or adjust to her new awareness of herself with the help of a few well-timed self-actualizing Tumblr posts from her new friends, but hey -- fiction is meant to speak to its readers and their concerns, not necessarily replicate what a bronc-busting Black Indian in the borderlands would think and feel about herself and her surroundings.

2016 read #39: Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell.

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell
238 pages
Published 2011
Read from May 6 to May 7
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I think I found an apt comparison: Sarah Vowell is to social and political history what Mary Roach is to the history of science. Granted, I've only read two books by each of them, but they both seem to have perfected a pop history style, efficient and snarky and just a bit superficial in its coverage, skimming the broad outlines and illustrating with the occasional choice anecdote, mixing interviews and personal encounters with primary sources and a touch of modern social commentary into a breezy product predestined for bestseller lists and NPR segments.  Which is not necessarily meant in a disparaging way. I certainly enjoyed myself reading this; Vowell (like Roach) presents fascinating information in an engaging manner. But the effect is appetizer rather than entrée.

After reading Unfamiliar Fishes, I'm a little astounded (though not at all surprised) by how little I knew of the despicable profiteering and power-grabbing, the shady dealing and empire-building behind the American takeover of Hawaii. Even Grover Cleveland called the maneuvering of haole oligarchs, in cahoots with manifest destiny schemers in the McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt administrations, an "outrage" and a "miserable business." American empire-building, of course, has never been pretty, but the naked power-grab in Hawaii is all the more remarkable because I'd never even heard of it before -- and I had considered myself at least a little bit more aware of American imperialism than average.

The importance and interest factor of all this information is what makes me wish Vowell's analysis had gone into more depth.

2016 read #38: The Trees by Conrad Richter.

The Trees by Conrad Richter
304 pages
Published 1940
Read from May 3 to May 5
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

The initial contact period and early European settlement together comprise possibly the most fascinating segment of North American history (though I do wish those terms weren't so innately eurocentric). My interest in those centuries -- running from, say, the Norse voyages up until the aftermath of the Seven Years' War -- was sharpened by Scott Weidensaul's The First Frontier, a rather speculative but nonetheless excellent history of the contact period along the eastern seaboard. It was a time rife with unrealized possibilities, when assimilation and accommodation could have won out against exploitation and extermination, when cultures from opposite ends of the globe met, for a brief time, on nearly equal terms, before disease and enslavement depopulated the native peoples of America. And as a hiker in New York State, I'm prone to fantasizing about when the hills and the woods were less intensively managed, when (to once again put it in eurocentric terms) the Hudson Highlands were the frontier.

Aside from Weidensaul's volume, I've had a difficult time finding history books concerned with this period; the closest matches tend to explore the likes of Jamestown or the Lost Colony or Pilgrims hanging each other up by the Bay, very local and time-limited, nothing as expansive as Frontier. And in fiction, aside from the occasional Pocahontas tale or Salem dramatization, I can't seem to find anything at all. It's as if James Fenimore Cooper preemptively cornered the market on adventure books set on the early cultural frontier. Why are there no "westerns" set on the eastern seaboard?

I happened upon The Trees by accident just the other day, browsing the stacks at my library for anything that might be interesting (because my eighteen page to-read list is never enough). It is, perhaps, the closest approximation I could ask for of my "Appalachian Western" -- a pioneer tale set during European settlement of the Ohio country. It is also, unfortunately, a book from the early 20th century, with all that concomitant baggage. It began strong, with evocative descriptions of the vast old-growth wilderness of the depopulated Ohio hinterlands, and an engaging tale of a single "woodsy" family settling and making a living far from their Pennsylvania homeland. Right around the time that other white families began moving in nearby, however, the book settled into a less interesting string of episodes seemingly compiled from a checklist of Old Timey Frontier Concerns. The magic of the deep woods and its towering trees diminished with every axe blow. And being the product of a male writer from the 20th century, every female point of view is awkwardly framed in terms of growing bodies, budding breasts, appreciative gazes at naked reflections -- because how else would we know that our stalwart storyteller understands the female experience?

My itch for more modern, more progressively-minded adventures of cultural encounter and wilderness life remains unscratched. Surely there have to be latter-day Leatherstocking-esque tales out there?

2016 read #37: In the Labyrinth of Drakes by Marie Brennan.

In the Labyrinth of Drakes: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan
350 pages
Published 2016
Read from April 30 to May 2
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

When last we saw our intrepid Lady Trent, I had begun to grow bored of the "Pseudo-Victorian naturalist goes on a globetrotting adventures, gets mixed up in local politics, and saves the day with dragon-related heroism" formula. Voyage of the Basilisk was perfectly serviceable, aside from how vaguely sketched in all the new characters were, but by the third variation on the formula, the charm had started wearing thin. Labyrinth of Drakes revitalizes the franchise to an extent, first and foremost by ditching the last portion of the formula. There is no dragon-back derring-do, no climactic battle; the climax of the book is a careful archaeological excavation, and Labyrinth is all the better for it. Plus, given that the central draw of the series is presenting an alternate history of the natural sciences in a world where dragons make up much of the food chain, the draconic scholarship of Labyrinth might be the most interesting of the books to date.

Some of the concerns I had begun to feel during Basilisk persist here; with the exception of Suhail, the Akhian characters tend to be Arabian Muslim archetypes from Western fiction -- the citified sheik, the noble nomadic family, and so on. Relatively positive cliches for the most part, but only Suhail, returning now for his second appearance as a major character, exhibits any individuality. Worse, sinister agents of the totally-not-Ming-Dynasty-standins, the Yelang, remain furtive and faceless, notable only for their treachery. The storyline is building toward a seemingly inevitable world war between our pseudo-English Scirlanders (who, it must be noted, aren't portrayed so handsomely themselves) and the Yelangese, so perhaps it would feel contrived if our plucky heroine were to fall in with one of the enemy and put a face on him, but then again, this is a series in which the same scholar has uncovered three or more lost ruin complexes totally by accident while also discovering basically everything about dragons, so maybe humanizing the series' Yellow Peril is not too much to ask? Please?