2022 read #23: Otherlands by Thomas Halliday.

Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday

319 pages

Published 2022

Read from May 14 to May 15

Rating: 4 out of 5

We're in the midst of a small boom of pop paleontology. Major documentaries are coming out; more nonfiction books on prehistory have been coming out in recent years than I've seen since the 1990s. While, regrettably, this nonfiction wave has yet to be matched with a corresponding surge of dinosaur novels, I've been depleting my meager checking account in my delight at the new nonfiction offerings; perhaps it's better for my bills if there aren't novels to match.

I couldn't ask for a better premise than Otherlands'. Halliday spends each chapter depicting, as experientially as our current science allows, the living, breathing ecosystem preserved at certain iconic palentological sites, counting backward from the Pleistocene all the way back to the under-appreciated weirdness of the Ediacaran. It reminds me to a large extent of Steven Mithen's After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5,000 BC, which made a huge impression on me as an archaeology student in my undergrad years. Halliday sticks closer to the known facts than Mithen, who edges into outright historical fiction at times. It's a tricky balance to sustain. I simultaneously wished for more speculative "stories" in each chapter and more rigorous and detailed descriptions of the actual fossils and formations at their heart. Overall, though, I find myself more than satisfied.

Halliday's prose hews close to the modern greats of British nature writing. In particular, at times I caught a distinct flavor of Robert Macfarlane in the best of Halliday's turns of phrase. Almost every chapter has at least one indelibly brilliant bit of poetry: "Nature forswears nostalgia." "A count of winters endured." "Countrysides made of skeletons." 

2022 read #22: Stone and Steel by Eboni Dunbar.

Stone and Steel by Eboni Dunbar

92 pages

Published 2020

Read May 13

Rating: 4 out of 5

A gorgeous and assured sword-and-sorcery novella. Former street kid Aaliyah, now a renowned general, had helped her childhood companion and current lover Odessa, a mage who wields power over stone, overthrow the corrupt Iron King five years ago. Now, returning in glory from conquest, Aaliyah sees her city suffering under her lover's control, the promises she had made to better their people's lives unfulfilled. The tale is relatively straightforward, but the characters and setting hum with life and glitter with magic. I'm learning to appreciate the novella as a self-contained form with its own strengths and its own pace, but I really can't help but wish that this book were longer, that we could have gotten more time to let everything breathe.

2022 read #21: Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg.*

Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg*

186 pages

Published 1968

Read May 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread

I read a novella-length version of this book as a teen in an ancient best sci-fi of the year anthology. It's an early example of the time-prison concept, one later explored in Julian May's The Many-Colored Land and many other places. In the not-so-distant future of 2019, a totalitarian America sends political prisoners, dissidents, and failed revolutionaries on a one-way trip to the Cambrian, where they waste away and slowly lose their faculties on a barren rock shelf and fish the shallow seas for trilobites. Our hero Jim, whose physical size somehow endows him with natural leadership qualities, is the "king" of the titular station. When a mysterious newcomer materializes, Jim's not ready for where his revelations might lead.

Like many sci-fi books published between the 1940s and the 1970s, Hawksbill Station began as a short-form story originally published in a genre litmag (Galaxy, in this case). So far as I can tell, the novel contains the full text of the novella, but adds several chapters detailing Jim's career as a revolutionary. These chapters interrupt the flow of the Cambrian end of the narrative, and contribute little except for a broader canvas for Silverberg to employ grotesque mid-century bigotry, in particular a loathsome vein of misogyny. (The sole named woman character is a young revolutionary who Jim passive-aggressively manipulates until she loses weight and starts wearing a bra.)

As a story, Hawksbill Station is a vast improvement over Dinosaur Beach. It's amazing to me that Beach was published after Station; Station very much fits into the mold of New Wave sci-fi, built on character exploration rather than gee-whiz science, whereas Beach is pulpier, with a distinct Silver Age vibe. Both are very much products of their time, with manly-man protagonists bending women to their wills and being casually bigoted toward anyone who differs from them. Both are getting chucked into the donation bin after this.

2022 read #20: The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna.

The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna

418 pages

Published 2021

Read from May 5 to May 12

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I had high hopes for this book. I mean, its cover art is absolutely impeccable! It began promisingly, establishing a central premise that remains all too relevant as regressive misogyny continues to strip half of our society of their fundamental human rights and autonomy. Women, in this book's secondary world as much as in our own, are considered inferior and subservient beings, needing the control of men backed up by a religious hierarchy that just happens to align with the interest of a misogynist ruling class. Certain women are cursed with "demonic" golden blood that reveals itself in their teens; this heritage gives them superhuman strength and, to an extent, allows them to shrug off death. Therefore all teen girls are tested for this "impurity," and those with golden blood are killed repeatedly until their "final" death is found.  Certain girls get recruited to fight on behalf of the emperor, using their superior strength and knack for survival to fight off an encroaching horde of monstrous beings called "deathshrieks," their differences shunned unless they prove themselves useful to the power structure.

Sadly, this sort of metaphor is just as applicable today as it would have been in the 1970s or '80s.

The Gilded Ones begins to drag in its middle third, succumbing to YA stylistic tics that don't gel with my tastes. Every character interaction is punctuated with smirks, scoffs, snarls, shrugs. The action scenes are perfunctory, lacking any real tension or cohesion -- which would be fine, except they keep happening, especially once our main character Deka begins going on campaign against the deathshrieks. The final revelation of Deka's true nature and purpose was visible a long way off, which made this stretch feel particularly repetitive. Like, we all know where this is going, just get us there!

It's a shame that the flowering of diversity and fresh perspectives that has graced YA fantasy hasn't yet fully extended to adult fantasy. Most of what I didn't like about this book might have been fixed had it been pitched toward a different, older audience.

The setting has promise, and I'm interested to see where the series can go from here, since (slight spoilers) this book seems to end with Deka's main purpose in life already resolved. 

2022 read #19: Water into Wine by Joyce Chng.

Water into Wine by Joyce Chng

139 pages

Published 2017

Read from May 4 to May 5

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

For a long while, from childhood into my early twenties, space opera was my SFF subgenre of choice. I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The 1997 reissue of the Star Wars trilogy (my first time back in a movie theater since Short Circuit 2 disappointed me as a tiny child) led to an obsession. I filled up notebooks with plans for Star Wars novels before I turned to plotting more "serious" space opera set in a universe of my own design. Books like Hyperion and Dune were staples of my early adulthood. For that matter, the very first book I read and reviewed for this blog -- Memory by Linda Nagata -- could be considered space opera.

As I entered my thirties, our dimming prospects for an optimistic future -- and the grim realism that crept into sci-fi as a consequence -- helped turn me into a fantasy reader. The corporate vacuity of The Rise of Skywalker and The Book of Boba Fett chilled my lifelong love of Star Wars. I can't think of the last standalone space opera I read. Going through my reviews, it looks like the last short story was "Blue as Blood" by Leah Cypress (reviewed here in 2019), while the last novel was Jack Vance's The Star King (which I read in 2016).

It's, uh... it's been a while.

Water into Wine is a minimalist but moving tale of a gender-nonconforming person who inherits a vineyard on a distant planet and must figure out how to make a life there, while an interplanetary war sows chaos and death all around. A ground-level space opera of ordinary people trying to make do in the midst of armored patrolmen and dropships and space battles is something I never knew I needed in my life. I could read a dozen books with this basic setup before I tired of it -- not necessarily in this story's universe, which is barely sketched in, but certainly with this vibe of determination and loss.

2022 read #18: The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson.

The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson

Translated by David McDuff

59 pages

Published 1945 (English translation published 2012)

Read May 4

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

We're watching our rights as human beings crumble in real time, not just here in the United States but also in every other country (such as the United Kingdom) that is currently sliding into fascism.

Since the first of May I'd been trying to read a bad fantasy romance from the early 1980s. It was stuffed with gross clichés of the time, racial and sexual, and after the last couple days, I just couldn't stand to read it any longer.

So I dropped that losing bet and picked up the lightest and fluffiest bit of innocent escapism I had available: The Moomins and the Great Flood!

The first Moomin book, Great Flood presents Moomintroll, Moominmamma, and Moomin Valley in primordial form, a mostly blank canvas for an idle sketch of childhood adventure and a shaggy-dog narrative. There isn't much substance here, but then, I wasn't seeking any. Jansson's gorgeous illustrations are more compelling than the prose, which lacks the subtle ache of The Summer Book. In her 1991 preface, Jansson concludes, "Anyhow, here was my first happy ending!" That captures the vibe nicely. It was just what I needed today.