2023 read #80: Pimp My Airship by Maurice Broaddus.

Pimp My Airship by Maurice Broaddus

314 pages

Published 2019

Read from July 13 to July 30

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

This book was unlucky enough to fall into one of my occasional ADHD reading slumps. The prose is solid enough; the worldbuilding is fascinating; I enjoyed the characters; I loved the social commentary that underpins everything in the book. And of course I have to love a book so riddled with classic funk references. But I just couldn’t focus and read it for more than a couple pages at a time. That’s summer when you have a kid to look after, I suppose. (Let alone the summer when the global climate undergoes an obvious and perilous phase-shift and we face all the dread of an uncertain new era coupled with a redoubled rise of fascism.)

In a steam-powered Indianapolis still subject to the crown of Albion, Broaddus builds a grim and altogether too close-to-home satire of a right-wing corporate authoritarian state. Residents (especially Black folk) are brutalized by City Ordained Pinkertons while state-approved news media regurgitate fascist talking points praising privatization and the free market solving governmental inefficiencies. The entire system (little different than our own, in case you missed the allegory) functions to strip Black people of their status as people and ship them off as free labor for capitalists.

Poet Sleepy is in the wrong place at the wrong time and must go on the run with his new acquaintance (120 Degrees of) Knowledge Allah. Meanwhile, young heiress and disgraced scientist Sophine must navigate upper-crust politics, ubiquitous sexism, racism, and personal tragedy while unraveling a mystery with far-reaching ramifications. As is often the case with alternating perspectives, this structure gums up the pacing, shunting us off to a different storyline just when the other is accelerating. One chapter might end on a cliffhanger, and then the next will breeze through several weeks of perspective from the other character.

Pacing, I think, is the main thing that detracts from this book. I can’t tell if all the novellas and short fiction I’ve been reading have made me forget how longer books are paced, or if it’s something intrinsic to this particular novel. Either way, I greatly enjoyed reading it, overall!

2023 read #79: Birds Don’t Fly for Pleasure by Táíwo Hassan.

Birds Don’t Fly for Pleasure by Táíwo Hassan

25 pages

Published 2022

Read July 13

Rating: 4 out of 5

This slim but gorgeous chapbook is a concentrated document of grief woven after the death of Hassan’s twin brother:

to find yourself a grave            to house guilt & wonder

if this is the right soul for its weight

(from “The Nomenclature of Pain”)

Hassan refuses to flinch away from the helplessness of mourning, the stagnation of “moribund pools,” the weight in one’s mouth. “these days, i find myself fearing the rain,” is how he begins “some boys don’t wear colours of the wind,” then responds to his mother’s seeming acceptance with “perhaps, she hasn’t drowned enough.”

Water pervades Birds — drowning water, living water, the sweat and tears that constitute a body: “& in a split second, his / mouth isn’t an ocean anymore…” “i make a river and swim in it.” The unreality of loss, the dislocation of mourning, pulls back a curtain and reveals nothing to fill what was lost: “what if the laws of physics are nothing but dust, nothing but abstract projectiles and fading footprints?” Yet living itself is informed with the nearness of death, of fierce love clinging to whatever remains: “how long till butterflies seep out of this body?”

A running list of particular favorites:

“dear brother,”

“some boys don’t wear colours of the wind”

“Birds Don’t Fly for Pleasure”

“when i say i love you”

“Ẹdúnjobí: A Love Letter”

“The Nomenclature of Pain”

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at My Mother’s Radio”

“Salat”

2023 read #78: Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi.

Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi

47 pages

Published 2022

Read July 11

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

A jagged, devastating, gorgeous collection on queerness, trauma, identity, finding the sacred in oneself. I think this is best read after Emezi’s Freshwater; many of Everything’s themes build from that book’s examination of godhood and self-destruction.

Many of these poems explore birth, rebirth, and holiness, godhood and cool river water. Others dig deep into abuse, the violence of those we should have been able to trust, rejection, bigotry. Mortality, shrinking, inwardness all recur; bodies are scarred, broken up, oiled or awash in seawater or fucked in grave dirt. The soul is refashioned, built from scraps of hauntings and butchery and the clothing abandoned by those who hurt us. Heartbreak and sexual violence are no mortal thing, but a shattering of the godhead. “salvation” promises us “even nightmares / can be maps…”

A pervasive motif is what-if: what if we had been able to live our own sacred-in-themselves lives, what if we’d had support, what if we could have avoided the traumas of our pasts. What if love could heal instead of destroying. What if we could just exist, or not exist.

It’s impossible to pick any particular favorites — but here’s a running list of mine anyway:

“what if my mother met mary”

“disclosure”

“what if jesus was my big brother”

“july 28”

“confession”

“‘but why did you feel you had to kill yourself, baby love?’”

“self-portrait as a cannibal”

“what if magdalene seduced me”

“ashawo”

“when the hurricane comes the men protect their brothers”

“i was born in a great length of river”

“self-portrait as an angel”

“mourning”

“self-portrait as an abuser”

“content warning: everything”

2023 read #77: Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.*

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson*

279 pages

Published 1886

Read from July 4 to July 7

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

One of my favorite books as a kid was Treasure Island. This is no doubt a common outcome when your father is controlling and abusive and doesn’t let you read much, if anything, more current than the Edwardian era. So it happened that, when I was still young enough to eat up Readers Digest condensed classics (those stalwarts of impoverished American childhoods in the '80s and early '90s), I was thrilled to get my hands on their bowdlerized version of Kidnapped from the dollar store. Another seafaring adventure from Robert Louis Stevenson! Surely it would be exactly as good as Treasure Island!

Kidnapped is, of course, a very different book than Treasure Island. It was one of the very first times in my young life that I learned I could dislike a book. I don't remember why I didn't like it, though. I wouldn't be surprised if the Lowland Scots dialogue muddled my preteen brain; even at 40, I have no idea what the exclamation “Hoot-toot!” is meant to correspond to in actual Scots speech. Additionally, I wouldn't have been able to follow the intricacies of Jacobite vs Whig politics as a child. Or maybe I tired of interminable wandering over the heather. Whatever the reason, Kidnapped was one of the vanishingly few books I had as a kid that I didn't reread even once.

Maybe as a consequence of that, Kidnapped became a book I've wanted to revisit for much of my adult life. (Or at least since I got my library card and began this blog, all those years ago.) Weirdly, the Suffolk County library system had exactly one copy, and it was a ratty old tome, fraying apart along the spine, so I didn’t try to read it. I finally happened upon a cheap Scholastic edition at the used bookstore a few weeks ago. At long last we can answer: Was it truly so mediocre? Or was it simply above my reading level?

After all these years, I can report: It’s fine? I guess?

Stevenson’s primary storytelling skill here is characterization. Uncle Ebenezer is one of the great bastards of Victorian literature, a standout in a crowded field. Ebenezer is so perfectly realized on the page: a miser in a flannel nightgown, refusing to have lights in the house, happy to measure out half of his own beer into David's cup if he wants a drink at dinner. David himself, by contrast, is insufferably smug and classist, perennially thinking himself superior to everyone and the master of every situation. There's a place for unappealing narrators, and I’m sure his priggishness was thoroughly realistic, but David being a titled prick who I want to push into a bog does the story no favors.

The true star of the book is Alan Breck, whose characterization here — a swaggering braggart in love with his own legend, a Jacobite partisan who forms a fast friendship with a Whig lad simply because the lad witnessed Alan’s feats of swordsmanship — is one I want to recycle for a queer sword and sorcery story.

When it comes to plotting, or even adventure, however, Stevenson does an indifferent job. Our young hero David caroms from seeking his fortune at his uncle’s house, to the titular kidnapping, to fighting beside Alan, to shipwreck, to a half-hearted Robinson Crusoe sequence, to a traipse across a couple Scottish islands, to witnessing a murder, to fleeing across the heather with Alan, to lying sick in a croft for a month, to (finally) talking to a lawyer. It is, if nothing else, thoroughly Victorian — a sprawling mess with a little bit of everything thrown in, for the kids to enjoy in their weekly serial. No wonder it was all too much for a kid in the early 1990s who just wanted some more swashbuckling.

2023 read #76: The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” by William Hope Hodgson.

The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” by William Hope Hodgson

Introduction by Lin Carter

183 pages

Published 1907

Read from July 2 to July 3

Rating: 2 out of 5

The first novel from early weird-horror writer William Hope Hodgson, The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” is written as if it were an account from 1757 of events that happened even earlier. We begin in media res some time into this putative document, eliding over the wreck of the Glen Carrig, somewhere in the southern seas. We find the survivors in her two boats drifting toward lands and seas unknown — lands and seas where they are assailed by nocturnal cries, meet horrid monsters, and bumble onward to the next misadventure. It’s two parts Gulliver’s Travels, one part Fiend Folio.

Hodgson mimics the 1700s adventure novel formula — including, regrettably, its antique prose style — perhaps a bit too well. At one point some characters walk around a tree, a simple action which is adumbrated with the phrase “our circumnavigation of the great vegetable.” We are kept at arm’s-length from the characters, most of whom are never named; the action, which could have been a fun proto-D&D monster quest, is staid and prim.

There are nicely creepy images scattered here and there throughout the book: a tree trunk “soft as pulp under my fingers,” monstrous octopuses and prodigious crabs in a forest of giant mushrooms, thousands of tentacled humanoids swarming en masse up a cliff. These are few and far between, however. Most of the book is essentially mundane, covering the usual Robinson Crusoe terrain of obtaining fresh water, improvising weapons and shelter, plaiting rope, battening the boat down for a storm, etc. It isn’t bad by any means, but it isn’t quite the landmark in dreamlike creature-horror one might wish.

2023 read #75: I AM AI by Ai Jiang.

I AM AI by Ai Jiang

62 pages

Published 2023

Read July 2

Rating: 4 out of 5

A brief, heartbreaking novelette on capitalist power and worker burnout in the bleak tech-bro dystopia of an all-too-plausible future. An all-encompassing corporation innovates new ways to pile debt onto the working classes, debt which accumulates through the generations — getting passed on to acquaintances if someone dies without family. Elders eke out an existence offering their housekeeping services for cheaper than the “techies” would pay to machines. Our narrator Ai once aspired to write stories, but now merely produces content, ghostwriting under the guise of an AI. She replaces her human parts, bit by bit, with machine “upgrades,” hoping to work harder, more efficiently, to mute her emotions. But becoming a cyborg leaves Ai open to planned obsolescence and decreasing battery life, to being seen as a tool even by those in her community.

Honestly the only implausible note in this scenario is that it’s set a thousand years into the future, instead of thirty. After all, like all good science fiction, I AM AI is about today: a deeply personal story that blurs between autofiction and speculation.

2023 read #74: Dinosaur Planet by Anne McCaffrey.*

Dinosaur Planet by Anne McCaffrey*

202 pages

Published 1978

Read from June 30 to July 2

Rating: 1 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I must have read this in, like, uhhh, 2005 or something. I remember nothing about it beyond general dissatisfaction. The dinosaur purist in me sniffed that the dinosaurs were no good; the space opera enthusiast in me found nothing interesting in the planet. So what did that leave? It was enough to keep me from rereading it until now.

Having matured as a reader, I can now report that Dinosaur Planet’s characters, story, politics, and prose are garbage, as well. It reads like a juvenile spaceships-and-jetpacks pulper from before sci-fi’s New Wave, but sapped of any of the fun that might suggest. The writing level is barely above middle-grade, albeit encumbered with acronyms and technobabble. Throw in a lightsaber or some Klingons and you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a tie-in for some mass market IP.

An expedition is sent to survey and exploit an “unexplored” planet on behalf of a rapacious galactic federation, eager to strip-mine new worlds for heavy minerals. Our central heroes are the expedition’s co-leaders: Kai, a blank slate aside from his effortless masculine competence and natural leadership, and Varian, a xenobiologist whose main characteristics are liking animals and being Kai’s attractive young girlfriend. (Oh, and she also states, “Energy is a lot more important than wildlife,” in case you worried the animal-lover might object to the federation’s rapaciousness.) Our antagonists are the expedition’s muscle, big “heavy-worlders” who crave meat, love violence, and whose names, at least, are coded as subcontinental Indian. The stimulation of animal protein and the hunt drive them to fornicate and “revert” to “uncivilized” behaviors, and eventually to mutiny. One of them outright sneers to the co-leaders, “Where would we have fit in your plantation?” It’s distasteful, to put it mildly.

In addition to the dense racist subtext, I think tedium is this book’s final straw. Like, you wouldn’t think a book about galactic explorers finding a planet full of dinosaurs would focus predominantly on ore prospecting and a mutiny with racist undercurrents, yet here we are. We don’t have a proper ground-level dinosaur encounter in the entire book. Not one. No one figures out that these animals are from Earth’s prehistoric past until 75% of the way through. The whole while, Varian and Kai studiously ignore all the signs of the brewing heavy-worlder mutiny, which doesn’t build tension so much as it builds frustration with the narrative. And underpinning everything, of course, is the racism.

It’s a fucking mess. The whole book is a fucking mess. No wonder I never bothered to read the sequel, even though the story here gets chopped off halfway through.