Mark Gerrits
Turns out I have a yen for stories about crime families. This scratches the same itch as McDonald's Luna series for me. But instead of Ian McDonald's nightmare vision of a libertarian moon, Fonda Lee sets her story in a fantasy version of 70's Hong Kong, infused with kung fu and magical jade.
The story follows several members of one crime family as their personal goals clash with the demands of the clan and a looming clan war. It's impossible not to get caught up in the lives and (spectacularly written) fight scenes of these bigger than life yet still very relatable characters and that got me through some of the weaker parts of the book: Except for a few interesting religious ideas, the world building doesn't go much further than its initial premise. The moral difference between the clans is so clear-cut they might as well have been wearing black and white hats. And maybe worst of all for this kind of story, the plots and coups in the gang war feel rather simple and lacking in chutzpah.
But the characters are clearly the star of the story and I'm eager to find out what happens next, especially as it seems later books will expand the scope of the action.
Though most of the stories take place against a background of failing or failed relationships and often feature death or disease, this is a playful collection of linguistic fancies. Eley Williams either takes normal situations (two boys playing hide and seek or two lovers standing in front of a painting) and gives bravado performances of linguistic gymnastics or she takes weird setups (strangers meeting around a beached whale, an ortolan chef arguing with her boyfriend) and sees where they lead.
Through a playfulness with language, she finds the weird in the everyday and the everyday in the weird.
This Frankenstein is not the product of mad science, nor does he serve as a condemnation of the hubris of mankind or our fear of the other. Here, composed of the body parts of bombing victims, he is an avatar of pure vengeance. And as he changes from hunting down the killers of his composite body parts to indiscriminately killing innocents to keep himself from decomposing, the allegory is far from subtle but it works.
But the creature is only part of this book, which is also a mosaic novel about the inhabitants of a Baghdad neighborhood during American occupation. Their stories are tangled up in a disjointed patchwork, very much like the creature's body. The standout story strand is that of an elderly woman, refusing to accept the long ago death of her son. But many of the other characters get short shrift. And the story that get the most attention, of a journalist who falls under the thrall of his shady publisher, unfortunately lacks any real interest and continually drags the book down.
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.
-- Ursula Le Guin, in her 2014 National Book Awards speech
A great evocation of early adulthood when everybody but you seems to have figured life out and you are lacking any chill whatsoever. And all that made even worse by the university environment, a weird purgatory between school and “real life”. This definitely brought back memories.
The book's also about language and the narratives we form for ourselves. And it's a look back at a very particular moment in time, when the world wide web and email were just starting out (though this handled with a very light touch). But the main appeal of this novel is no doubt Selin, the narrator, and her deadpan wit. It was a real pleasure spending time with her (though maybe a bit too much time, the book was a tad too long for me).
I was expecting the book to be more about the death of democracies in general with a specific look at the United States at the end. But it's very much focused on the US from the start. Considering how bad the situation is (and if you don't think so, you will by the time you finish the book), I can't blame the authors.
The book makes clear that Trump is a great, immediate danger (certainly if a crisis should hit) but that things have been messed up for a while and quickly getting worse. They do propose a way out of the quagmire, but it would require a lot of citizens and politicians to start listening to the better angels of their natures.
A great story collection, both in the quality of the stories and how well they hung together while still touching several genres. Sometimes the speculative elements felt a bit too on the nose for me (mostly in “Real Women Have Bodies” and “Eight Bites”) but the emotional truth of the stories was always very strong.
An oil drilling company uncovers a network of big underwater caves with prehistoric fauna, most notably megalodons a.k.a huge ass sharks.
This bande dessinée started off very promising, with some cruel yet beautiful wordless scenes. But then it quickly devolved into pages and pages of boring exposition and when we do get back to the prehistoric sea life near the end, all sense of wonder or horror has evaporated.
There's some small hints of more overt speculative elements besides the surviving megalodons and judging by some of the other covers in the series, that aspect will become more and more important. But I think I'll stop here.
This book almost feels like it's written by a non-human intelligence. It's the story of a village as a whole, with nearly as much attention paid to the landscape and nature as to the people. It's as much concerned with patterns and continuity as it is with discrete events. And yet at the same time it's full of humanity: the good, the bad and the bland.
A wonderful love story and a nice evocation of 1940s San Fransisco, a place of real magic with its steep streets, delicious restaurants, the chaos of Chinatown, and just off the coast: Treasure Island, home of the ‘39 World Fair. A troubled place also, where the immigrant and queer communities are under constant threat and the only small way they can express themselves is under the voyeuristic gaze of uncouth tourists.
I wish the fantastical element was left maybe a bit more ambiguous but otherwise this was a great novella.
Some of the most interesting science fiction books these days are those that deal directly with the messed up interaction of our information age, late stage capitalism and democracy. And this book fits nicely in that niche; not only is it about the surveillance state, as the blurb suggests, but it deals a lot with democracy and its problems too. (As such it makes a very interesting companion book to Malka Older's Centenal Cycle and there are certainly parallels between The System and Information)
One of the book's motifs is the combination of steganography and obfuscation to bury useful information in a flood of data. The book somewhat does the same thing. At least two of the story layers don't really add a lot to the core plot. Not to say that they aren't interesting in their own right, but they do lead to a massive 700 page brick of a novel.
But it's a clever book and when everything clicks together at the end, it's very satisfying.
The story takes place in the early days of the internet, so different from what the world wide web has become that it reads almost like science fiction. But oh boy, the main character's MUD (the ascii forerunner of the MMORPG) experiences and addiction sure seemed mighty familiar. Everyone's who ever played a MUD should check this book out.