Review: In Memoriam: A Novel of the Terran Diaspora, by Fred Lerner

Review: In Memoriam: A Novel of the Terran Diaspora, by Fred Lerner

by Rich Horton

Fred Lerner is a long-time SF fan, and I've known him for several years, meeting him once or twice a year at conventions. I read and enjoyed his story "Rosetta Stone", which appeared in Ian Randal Strock's Artemis way back in 2000, and I was happy when he told me a few years ago that he was writing a novel set in that story's future (though not really directly related.) That novel appeared last year -- In Memoriam, from Fantastic Books.

It's narrated by David Bernstein. As the novel opens, he's finishing his final year of school before going to college. And he's attending a performance staged by the alien race that is native to the planet on which he lives. We learn quickly that these aliens, the Wyneri, rescued the survivors of the Cataclysm, which wiped out humanity on Earth, a couple of centuries prior to this story. The couple of thousand who were rescued have been fruitful enough that the human population is about 30,000 -- living in small chapters embedded among the Wyneri. The humans have been gifted one island, on which they have built a University, and to which they go once each year for the Ingathering. And this Remnant, as they style themselves, devote themselves to preserving as much knowledge of Terran history and culture as they can. 

Their relations with the Wyneri appear cordial enough, but both populations appear mostly to ignore each other. So David's interest in Wyneri art, and, soon after, his close friendship with a Wyneri girl named Harari, are considered decidedly unusual. The Wyneri are very humanoid (indeed, it's hinted that David and Harari are tempted to have a sexual relationship, but they decide not to go that far.) It turn out that many among the Wyneri are disgusted by David and Harari's friendship -- and so are many of the humans.

There are some shocking instances of violence, before and after David and Harari go to their separate universities. But the two of them have already discovered something very surprising about the Cataclysm and the Wyneri rescue operation. David, at his university, forms close relationships with many fellow students, and realizes that there are factions in the human Remnant who are pushing for Terran's to disassociate from the Wyneri, perhaps even to return to the Solar System. And there are increasingly active factions among the Wyneri that are hostile to Terrans. The situation becomes terribly threatening -- and David finds himself forced to a fairly prominent position, especially regarding the information he and Harari have found. The results will profound change both societies.

The novel is consistently interesting, and the society Lerner portrays in intelligently put together. David and his friends are characters we root for. Lerner's Jewish background contributes to much of this -- not just the fact that David and his family maintain Jewish traditions, but the obvious analogies with the "Terran Diaspora" of this novel, and the Jewish Diaspora, not to mention the Terrans situation as "strangers in a strange land" among the Wyneri. There are certain aspects I thought a bit underdeveloped, and I will say the dialogue doesn't always convince -- the characters speak as if reciting essays at times. But these are quibbles -- I enjoyed the novel, and cheered for its humanistic message.

Review: Nadja, by André Breton

Review: Nadja, by André Breton

a review by Rich Horton

Last year at Windy City Pulp and Paper convention, I got a copy of André Breton's Nadja, a surrealist novel first published in 1928. I hasten to add that Nadja is in no way a "pulp", not even by the debased criteria that labels paperback novels with salacious content "pulp". Instead it was a gift from a friend, another attendee of the convention. This copy is a recent Grove Press printing of a 1960 translation by the fine poet Richard Howard. (It turns out that, shortly after Howard's translation appeared, Breton produced a revised version of Nadja, that has not yet been translated into English.)

André Breton (1896-1966) was a French writer and the leader of the surrealistic movement in literature, author of the Surrealist Manifesto. He studied medicine, worked in a mental hospital, and, after the first World War, started a magazine, Littérature. He wrote prolifically for the rest of his life: poetry, novels, criticism (of literature and art), theory. He was a prolific art collector. He spent much of the Second World War in the US, as his politics and artistic attitudes were distasteful (to say the least) to the Vichy Regime.

Nadja remains, as far as I can tell, Breton's best known novel, though Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), with Philippe Soupalt; and L'Amour Fou (Mad Love) also have a reputation. Nadja is quite short, a bit less than 25,000 words in the English translation, though there are also 44 black and white photographs (including reproductions of drawings supposedly by the character Nadja). Surrealtistic writing supposedly includes "automatic writing", but I don't really see evidence of that here. And, at risk of forfeiting my avant garde membership card, the novel didn't really do a lot for me.

The book is narrated by a man named André, clearly the author himself. It opens with a long section discussing his life in Paris in the 1920s, the milieu, his friends, and his theories about surrealism and literature in general. Some strange movies are discussed, particularly one set at a grils' school, seeming to depictg the murder of one of the girls by the headmistrass and her friend. The actress, a friend of his, is mentioned. This is all a tad rambling though of some interest.

The long middle section is about Nadja, a mysterious and pretty young womman with whom the married narrator has a brief romance. Their affair consists of several rendezvous at restaurants and such, of discussions of their philosophies, and eventually of a revelations about Nadja -- that she is having mental problems, due to a death in the family, and that hshe is under pscychological care. After which the narrator abandons her, apparently because her oddly surrealistic philosophy of life is revealed to be a sympton of her mental illness. The final section concludes by discussing the narrator's continued devotion to his theories. 

If I had more sympathy with surrealism as a theory of life and art, rather than a sometimes interesting method of displaying reality at on odd angle, I might have enjoyed it more. It is well written, and the translation seems good. I also find surrealism more interesting in visual art, and in poetry, than in prose fiction. But that's just my taste I suppose. I'm glad I read the book, but in the end it's not quite my thing.

Old Bestseller Review: Belinda, by Rhoda Broughton

Old Bestseller Review: Belinda, by Rhoda Broughton

a review by Rich Horton

Rhoda Broughton (1840-1920) was a very popular writer in the last third of the 19th century, and continued publishing until her death. She was born in Wales, the grandaughter of a baronet, and her uncle was Sheridan LeFanu, the great writer of supernatural stories, including Carmilla, one of the earliest vampire stories. Her first two novels were serialized in Dublin University Magazine, edited by LeFanu. Her early novels were popular, but were denigrated as "sensation novels", with plots such as having a married man kill his mistress and himself in despair. Along with Mary Elizabeth Braddon, she was one of the "Queens of the circulating libraries". Belinda was part of her attempt to rehabilitate her reputation with less sensationalistic works. Happily, both Broughton and Braddon have experienced something of a revival in the last few decades.

Belinda's heroine is Belinda Churchill, a young woman (20 at the outset of the novel) who lives with her grandmother and with her younger sister Sarah. They seem to be in comfortable financial circumstances, though their parents must be dead. We meet them in Germany on an extended visit. Sarah, a vivacious and flirtatious girl, has become engaged, for about the seventh time, this time to an aging Professor named Forth. And Belinda meets a young man, David Rivers, whose father is wealthy but, unfortunately in the eyes of Belinda's family, in business. And soon David and Belinda are deeply in love, while Sarah is trying to extricate herself from her inappropriate engagement. The characters are quickly established -- Sarah is effervescent and friendly, Granny is profoundly lazy, Belinda is internally passionate but externally rather cold, hard to get close to. Professor Forth is a bore, and an hypochondriac. David Rivers, it must be said, is a very thin character. The other recurring character is an impossibly rude and pushing woman named Miss Watson, who will not take no for an answer, and in so doing thrusts herself into any social situation at the most unpropritious times. 

David and Belinda's relationship proceeds slowly, due to Belinda's shyness and coldness, and when Sarah finally pushes her to maneuver him to proposing, just as they are about to return home, David leaves suddenly, even as Belinda as arranged a rendezvous. Belinda and Sarah return home, and for some reason David never contacts them. Belinda is thrown into a deep depression, and after the vile Miss Watson reports having seen David Rivers in the company of a young woman, Belinda decides -- against Sarah's desperate opposition -- to agree to marry Professor Forth, with the understanding that it's a loveles (and presumably sexless) marriage, and that he shall teach her Greek and suchlike while she acts as a secretary to him. And so they do marry, and the Professor turns out to be an abusive taskmaster, while Belinda finds that she doesn't find a classical education inspiring (at least not the way the Professor does it) and begins to hate him. And, of course, we learn that David's absence was for a very good reason, and so he's back in the picture,but of course any relationship is entirely improper.

This summary mskes the novel sound downright dreary, but it isn't. Part of this is that though this situation is objectively terrible for Belinda, the novel remains oddly lighthearted, and often funny. Part of this is due to the character of Sarah, who really is a delight. Part is the comic relief -- the awful Miss Watson and the horrible Professor Forth are awful and horrible in quite comical ways. Belinda and David do eventually meet again and are tempted into a technically improper relationship, though of course they never cross boundaries. There is a portrait, clearly drawn from life, of the Professor's college, here called Oxbridge though it's openly based on Oxford, where Broughton was living by that time. There is a climactic trip to the Lake District, after the Professor's insistence on overworking Belinda drives her close to death. And the reader can see all along the only solution -- which comes as no real surprise.

It's not a great novel. The plotting is exiguous, and the key events are implausible. (For that matter, Sarah's initial engagement to Professor Forth makes no sense at all -- it's inconsistent with her character, and clearly just an initiating plot device.) But Broughton is a fine writer, with an eye for appropriate images, and she's effective in characterizing those people she wishes to depict. (Though as noted, when she isn't really interested in close observation, as with David Rivers, the character is essentially a placeholder.) So -- Sarah, Belinda, Miss Watson, the Professor ... all do come to life. The novel is written in present tense (apparently a habit of Broughton's) but that doesn't distract the reader. So -- if not a great novel, this is a pretty good novel, and quite enjoyable.

The reader will probably have noted a distinct echo, in the marriage of Professor Forth and Belinda, to that of Casaubon and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, which appeared a bit more than a decade earlier. The similarties can't be missed, but the two novels are quite different, and certainly Belinda and Dorothea are much different characters. Having said that, it is reliably asserted that Professor Forth is based a rather well known academic, a one time friend of Broughton's, Mark Pattison, the Rector of Oxford's Lincoln College. Pattison was notorious for having married a much younger woman, who refused sexual relations with him after a few years of marriage. And he was considered a bit of a fussy academic -- though, unlike Forth, he was apparently a well-respected teacher. Pattison's friendship with Broughton deteriorated after he began an affair with another much younger woman. Interestingly, one of Pattison's research interests was a man named Isaac Casaubon, about whom he wrote a biography. Casaubon from Middlemarch has also often been associated with Pattison, though this position is controversial. 

Resurrected Review: The Balmoral Nude, by Carolyn Coker

Here's a review I did for my old blog back in 2009, published unrevised. I understand that the author died not too long after that, in 2011. It's a minor work, but so be it!

Resurrected Review: The Balmoral Nude, by Carolyn Coker

by Rich Horton

Back in the early 90s I joined a paperback mystery book club on a trial basis but quickly cancelled my membership. One of the books I received and didn't then read was Carolyn Coker's The Balmoral Nude, a 1990 novel reprinted in paper in 1993. I picked it out of my bookshelves for hard to understand reasons this weekend and figured I'd read it. And it's not too bad, though nothing earthshaking. The heroine, sort of, is Andrea Perkins, an American art restorer who I believe appeared in other Coker novels. [She did -- some five books total.] In this book she is in London doing some work for the Victoria and Albert Museum. She bumps into an old boyfriend, Clayton Foley, who has married a rich Englishwoman, Deborah Fetherston. Deborah's ancestor, Cecil Fetherston, was a second-rate Victorian painter who was executed for murdering a prostitute. Fetherston started a gallery that remains in the family, and they have recently found some old drawings by Fetherston, which they believe can be sold for a tidy sum, particularly the one called "The Balmoral Nude". Clayton and Deborah hire Andrea to restore the drawings before the sale. It soon becomes clear that there are two major bidders: an American nouveau riche couple, and an English academic who wants to use the drawings in his new book about William Gladstone (who was a witness to Fetherston murdering the prostitute). 

It soon becomes clear that someone plans to acquire the drawings by foul means -- one is stolen from Andrea's lab, and another attempt is made which results in the accidental death of a woman who resembles Andrea. And behind the scenes, as it were, we learn that a shadowy woman is being urged by her lover to kill someone in order to get ahold of the drawings -- or perhaps for some other reason? There are three women who seem to be suspects -- the American couple's rackety daughter, who is fooling around with Deborah Fetherston's rackety son; a TV producer who seems to be trying to sleep her way to the top, and who gets embroiled in some controversy about the potential sale of the pictures; and the manager of the Fetherston gallery. Plus Clayton is a shady figure -- already putting moves on Andrea despite having long before rudely ended there previous relationship, and also caught in an embrace with the American daughter. 

It's one of those mystery novels where the main murder doesn't occur until perhaps 3/4 through the book (in fact, in a sense it doesn't occur until perhaps much later, as the victim ends up in a coma). And it's also one of those mystery novels -- all too many, for my taste -- where the murder isn't resolved until the criminal gives it away by committing another murder. I found it breezily readable, but not great. Andrea is far too passive ... she has little to do at all with solving the crime. (In fact, no one does, really -- as I said the murderer gives it away by committing another murder.) There is one nice touch -- a cute resolution to the mystery of the drawing itself, the "Balmoral Nude".

Review: Changing Places, by David Lodge

Review: Changing Places, by David Lodge 

a review by Rich Horton

David Lodge was born in 1935, and died, less than a month short of his 90th birthday, this past New Year's Day. His first novel was published in 1960, and he published a total of 15 novels, as well as plays and short fiction. He was also an academic, primarily at the University of Birmingham, with a couple of interludes in the US, including at Cal Berkeley. He wrote a lot of nonfiction as well, primarily criticism, and some memoirs late in life. I read a few of his novels a number of years ago, with considerable enjoyment, and also some of his critical works, particularly The Art of Fiction. Upon his death I realized I should continue and read his best known three novels, the so-called "Campus Trilogy". The first of these is Changing Places (1975). 

Changing Places opens with the two main characters on airplanes flying in the opposite direction. Philip Swallow, a lecturer at Rummidge University, a "redbrick" institution in the industrial town of Rummidge (obviously modeled on Birmingham) is heading to Euphoria State in Plotinus, near Esseph (even more obviously based on Berkeley and San Francisco) to spend an academic year as a visiting Professor. This is part of an annual exchange between the two universities, and Swallow's counterpart, Morris Zapp, is thus heading to Rummidge. We learn about their motives -- Philip had been feeling stuck -- hadn't published anything in years; while Morris, a much more successful Professor (modeled on Stanley Fish) is having marriage problems: his wife wants a divorce, and he thinks perhaps a year in Europe might give her time to reconsider.

Both of them are at first very much struggling to adapt to their new positions. Philip has no idea what to teach in his assigned classes -- one being on writing a novel (something he has never done.) Zapp is amused and to some extent horrified by the looseness of the teaching at Rummidge, and by the mostly somewhat grimy and underheated accomodations.

One prime mover of the plot is the late '60s student unrest, which has completely engulfed Euphoria State. Swallow never seems to do much teaching, partly because the students go on strike. But he gets involved in their protest movement, sort of by accident, and becomes a surprisingly popular figure. One of the leaders is an old student of his, Charles Boon, who had caused all kinds of trouble at Rummidge and is now heading a late night call in radio show. At the same time Morris gets heavily involved in campus politics at Rummidge, which is also mildly affected by student protests but also affected by such things as who will get the next promotion and who will run the English department after the retirement of the previous rather superannuated leader.

The other issues are more personal, and turn somewhat on their precarious housing arrangements. Philip's house is in a mudslide area, and is subdivided into two flats -- one for him, and the other for three young women, one of whom turns out to be Morris Zapp's daughter thought Philip doesn't know that. They introduce him to pot, and he sleeps with Zapp's daughter before she takes up with Charles Boon. Morris, on the other hand, has vowed to stay celibate while away from his wife (though he had never been faithful before) and he has to deal with the extremely eccentric Irish doctor who lets him the upstairs of his house. And won't say much more except to note that things progress to the point where each of Swallow and Zapp are offered jobs at the university they are visiting ...

The real interest of the novel isn't in the plot, to be sure, but in the comic elements. Lodge has great fun with the academic maneuvering at each college, and also of course with what might be called sex comedy elements. He plays some formal games, too -- each of the six sections is told in a different fashion, including one entirely in letters between the Swallow and Zapp and their respective wives; another uses found text -- newspaper excerpts and such, another is in screenplay form. This is the book in which Lodge introduced the game Humiliation, in which each participant (typically literature academics) cites a very well known text that they have not read, and gets points for how many of the other participants HAVE read it -- so that you do better the more you humiliate yourself by confessing to not have read something everybody else has. 

I liked the book, but found it a bit uneven. Some of the sections were outright hilarious, but some dragged a bit. The student unrest part, and the entire portrayal of what people in those days called the "hippie subculture" seems dated. The academic maneuverings, on the other hand, and the sexual politics, are both essentially timeless, and they work pretty well. Lodge is an enjoyable writer -- often very funny indeed -- and I'll be reading at least the two loose sequels to this novel (Small World and Nice Work) -- I'd already ready a good sampling of the rest of his work.

Review: Euphoria Days, by Pilar Fraile

Review: Euphoria Days, by Pilar Fraile

a review by Rich Horton

Pilar Fraile Amador, who writes as Pilar Fraile, is a Spanish poet and a writer of short stories and novels. Euphoria Days was published as Días de euforia in Spain in 2020, and the English edition, translated by Lizzie Davis, appeared in 2024 from Great Place Books. It is her first novel to be published in English, though there have been several short stories and at least one book of poems.

Euphoria Days is science fiction, taking a satirical look at corporate culture, and at sexual relationships, and at the entanglement of those two things, in a near future setting. There are five central characters: María, Angélica, Blasco, Diana, and Carlos, and the novel weaves its way through their interconnected lives. They are all youngish -- from their twenties to perhaps 40 as the novel begins, and working in the sort of typical jobs you might expect in the near future. María's job is the most overtly SFnal: her company is working on algorithmic ways to optimize "happiness", and one thing they do is assign sexual "matches" among their employees. As the book opens, María's match with Roger is disintegrating, and her projects to improve happiness seem to be foundering, as she is haunted by nightmares about worms. Angélica works in a fertility clinic, and she discovers a notebook from a previous worker that seems to show a continuing decrease in fertility. Blasco and Diana are married, and Diana is a high-powered boss. Blasco is obsessed with online videos of pretty women, and he and Diana's marriage is foundering. Carlos is rather a player, and sort of an outlier in the general group.

Over time these people interact, sometimes without quite knowing it. Relationships form and dissipate. Jobs change. Two of the women have children via IVF (with a fairly open secret about how this in a way tangles their relationships even further.) Over a decade passes, and we get a sense of the world changing -- perhaps disintegrating -- just a tiny step out of notice of the characters, even as their lives oddly mutate. The conclusion is purposely inconclusive -- these are somewhat self-deluded characters, living in a self-deluded milieu.

The novel is effectively satirical, and at the same time an effective portrayal of its characters. Though it's SF, it's not really too interested in its extrapolations. The future is a decaying future, and in the background we hear of severe economic trouble, radical political reorganization, fertility decline, corporate dysfunction, but in the foreground the characters are living lives not too different from today. I might have been interested in further discussion of the happiness optimization algorithm mentioned at the start, but that's not really the intention here. The story suggests that algorithms certainly won't lead us to happiness -- but that our own trendy approaches to life hacks (if you will) are likewise doomed. Euphoria Days is a fine novel, well-written (and well-translated), well-characterized -- recommended.

Review: The Fixed Period, by Anthony Trollope

Review: The Fixed Period, by Anthony Trollope 

a review by Rich Horton

This novel was serialized in 1881/1882, with a book version published the latter year. It is Anthony Trollope's only science fiction novel. I love Trollope's work, so I had to try it. I'll say up front -- it's a pretty minor piece. Only for SF fans and Trollope completists, I'd say, and possibly only for people in the intersection of those sets!

The Fixed Period is set in 1980 on the fictional island of Britannula. Britannula has been independent of England for a few decades, and has established a prosperous and comfortable society. Their laws have one peculiarity: a "fixed period" of life: anyone reaching the age of 67 will be "deposited" in comfort for one year, then humanely put down. The idea is to preserve people from the ills of old age, and  to remove the burden of unproductive people from the economy.

This law was passed when no one neared that age. The novel is narrated by the President of Britannula, Mr. Neverbend (a typical Trollope name with a meaning), who spearheaded the movement for the Fixed Period. But he tells us from the start that the law has been suspended, and that Britannula has lost its independence, and is again a colony of the British Empire. He is writing this account in order to promote his ideas, and to complain about England's actions.

The trouble starts when the oldest resident of Britannula is approaching the age of 67. This is Mr. Crasweller, who is a wealthy man, and who is also Mr. Neverbend's best friend. Mr. Crasweller was a supporter of the Fixed Period legislations, but as he approaches the age of "deposition" he is increasingly reluctant. After all, he is quite healthy, in both mind and body. And, indeed, several of the older residents are beginning to make it clear that they too have changed their minds. (Hardly surprising, I say, as I'm 65 myself!) But Mr. Neverbend, true to his name, insists that the law must be enforced, and expresses his disappointment with his friend's weakness. (He is about 10 years younger -- who knows what he'd think if he was the same age!)

Mr. Crasweller's beautiful daughter Eva is another factor. Naturally, she doesn't want her father to be killed. But whoever married her stands to gain control of the Crasweller estate. One of her suitors, then, is quickly revealed as a opportunistic troll who will be glad to see Eva's father die ... but another suitor is the President's son, Jack, who, for the sake of Eva, takes up against his father's beloved Fixed Period. Another complication is a cricket match between a team from England and the locals ... and one of the Englishmen falls for Eva as well.

It's ultimately rather weak, though Trollope is an engaing enough writer that I wasn't bored. The philosophy of the Fixed Period and its opposition are both weakly argued -- the novel would have been more interesting if it was more deeply discussed, though I suspect Trollope didn't have his heart in that. (I do think Trollope is satirizing the notion that a person's only worth is his productivity, his direct economic contributions to society.) The first person narration is an issue as well -- Trollope was an absolute master at the omniscient, author-centric, point of view, and here, with Mr. Neverbend narrating (and controlling the discourse about the Fixed Period) we lose something valuable. The romance plot is paper thin, to boot, and neith Jack nor Eva really draws our interest (except perhaps for Jack's cricket exploits.) Trollope does throw in some very modest extrapolations: a war in which England and France oppose the US and Russia, a super weapon, steam bicycles, a sort of (wired) telegraph, and, most amusingly, cricket played with mechanical bowlers. 

I wondered if this was the first fiction to posit a polity with mandatory euthanasia at a fixed age. The idea has been used since in SF, of course, with the most famous examples being Isaac Asimov's Pebble in the Sky, in which the far future Earth mandates euthanasia at 60, and William Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's Logan's Run, in which the age of euthanasia is 21 (though elevated to 30 for the movie version.) Offhand I can't think of any SF with that concept earlier than 1950, when Pebble in the Sky was published, but I wouldn't be surprised if a story or two from the pulp era had posited such an idea. That would still leave primacy with Trollope -- but it turns out he actually got the idea from a Jacobean-era play! This was The Old Law, by Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, and Philip Massinger, probably dating to the 1610s. In this play, men are to be killed when they reach the age of 80, and women at the age of 60! (As one character says, "There was no woman in this Senate, certes".) It turns out this law is a fake, designed to test the virtues of the citizenship -- those who do not resist the law are deemed to be bad people. Thus, the play doesn't QUITE portray a society with mandatory euthansia -- but it certainly portrays the idea.

One final irony: shortly after this novel was published, Trollope died -- at the age of 67.

My Reading and Writing Summary: 2024

My Reading and Writing Summary: 2024

by Rich Horton

Last year I read a total of 102 novels, 6 collections, 3 works of non-fiction. Fifty-one of the novels were by men, and fifty-one by women, as close to even as you can get, mostly by accident. Nine of the novels were from 2024. Six novels were translations -- two from the Japanese, two from Russian, one from Italian, one from French. 

The best novels I read last year were Anna Karenina, Harriet Hume, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and The Last Samurai. The most sheerly enjoyable were the four Anthony Trollope novels I read. Other really good novels included Peace, by Gene Wolfe; The Lonely Girl, by Edna O'Brien; Leaping Man Hill, by Carol Emshwiller; Doting, by Henry Green; and Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, by Rivka Galchen. The best SF novel was Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. The best SF/F novel from 2024 was The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley, with honorable mention to Aliya Whitely's Three Eight One, Kelly Link's The Book of Love, Paolo Bacigalupi's Navola, and Mark Rigney's Vinyl Wonderland. The best novellas from 2024 were A Mourning Coat, by Alex Jeffers; and The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar; with The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler also a contender. My favorite non-fiction and favorite recent collection were both by E. Lily Yu: Break, Blow, Burn & Make; and Jewel Box, respectively. 

I published reviews of almost all of those novels either here or at Black Gate, with a review of Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia in Bruce Gillespie's SF Commentary #118, and a look at Frederik Pohl's SF from a labor perspective in a special issue of Journey Planet edited by Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk, and a Curiosities piece for F&SF on Una Silberrad's 1911 novel The Affairs of John Bolsover. I also published a disheartening quantity of obituaries, all at Black Gate. And I did a few other posts, including lists of favorite SF novels, and of favorite short fiction, from roughly the last 30 years. Following are links to my favorite pieces:

General

"Iconic" SF novels of the 21st Century

SF Hall of Fame 1989-2018

Anthologies I Never Got to Publish

Hugo Novel Nominees, 2024: Review Summary

The Stories and Novels of T. L. Sherred

The Novels of Carol Emshwiller

Pseudonyms Quiz

The Second Inquisition

Obituaries

Barry N. Malzberg

Vernor Vinge

Brian Stableford

Christopher Priest

Terry Bisson/Howard Waldrop/Tom Purdom

Reviews

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Harriet Hume

The Game

Anna Karenina

Peace

The Ministry of Time

Edges

Doting

Love's Shadow

Hester

Framley Parsonage

Vinyl Wonderland

Jewel Box

Break, Blow, Burn & Make

Galactic Gambit

In the Hands of Glory

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

A Mourning Coat

Orbital

The Last Samurai

The Constant Nymph

Always Coming Home

An Infinite Summer

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Review: The Lake, by Yasunari Kawabata

Review: The Lake, by Yasunari Kawabata

a review by Rich Horton

Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) was the first Japanese winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I have previously read a few of his novels, including his most famous one, Snow Country, which I think is a remarkable novel indeed. (My review of Snow Country and Thousand Cranes is here.) I happened across a paperback edition of the English translation of The Lake, a 1954 novel translated in 1974 by Reiko Tsukimora. (This edition was published by Kodansha International, in a series called Japan's Modern Writers.) I had not heard of this novel, which I think is generally ranked as a lesser Kawabata work. It was made into a movie called Woman of the Lake by Yoshishige Yoshida in 1966, but the plot of the movie diverges in quite significant ways from that of the novel.

As with many of Kawabata's novels, the story revolves around the failure of a lonely man to establish a true relationship with any woman. Kawabata's male characters tend to be almost listless, drifters through life. And his women tend to be rather sad, perhaps unhappy with the men they encounter, perhaps themselves too listless, drifters in their own ways. The Lake is like that with a key difference -- the main character, Gimpei Momoi, is darker and creepier than other characters in the Kawabata novels I've read.

We meet Gimpei at a bathhouse in a rural town -- with him wondering if he is a wanted man. He is washed and massaged by the young and pretty attendant -- routine treatment in Japan at that time (a few years after the Second World War) -- but we get a sense right away of Gimpei's awkwardness. He's obsessed with his ugly feet, and he makes mildly inappropriate comments to the attendant, though nothing terrible happens. We also realize he has stolen 200,000 yen from a woman in Tokyo who threw her purse at him because he was following her.

Gimpei, apparently, was a high school teacher who had been fired for having a relationship with one of his students. Throughout the novel we learn somewhat more about that relationship, and also about Gimpei's youth, his father's accidental death (or murder?), and his attraction to his slightly older cousin. We also learn about the woman, Miyako, who lost the purse -- she is the mistress of a wealthy older man, and she is convinced that she is throwing her life away, but ... can't help herself. There are other threads, all eventually cohering and building up Gimpei's sad life story -- his treatment of a prostitute during the War, the late resolution of his affair with the high school girl, and his obsession with another young girl, perhaps 15, who is seeing a friend of Miyako's brother. The story drifts -- on purpose -- as Gimpei drifts, and it's clear that his life is going to remain what it is, unless he is driven to another criminal act. But he doesn't have, say, Humbert Humbert's murderous drive ... (The book was written at more or less the same time as Lolita.)

I enjoyed reading the novel -- Kawabata's writing is elegant and affecting, though I didn't think this translation as well done as the Edward Seidensticker translations of earlier books I read. (There are some odd bumps, and some odd word usages, such as (multiple times) using the word "scaring" where "scary" was wanted.) The state of postwar Japan is acutely portrayed (a common Kawabata theme, I think) and the lost characters are believable. It is a bit difficult to fully engage with a character as lumpen and creepy as Gimpei -- but surely that's entirely Kawabata's intention. 

Kawabata was a truly great writer, and I strong recommend his work. But I wouldn't start here.

Review: The English Understand Wool, by Helen DeWitt

Review: The English Understand Wool, by Helen DeWitt

a review by Rich Horton

Having read and loved Helen DeWitt's first novel, The Last Samurai, I immediately checked out her other work. This includes a 2011 novel called Lightning Rods, which seems very satirical SF of the sort that Galaxy used to publish in the 1950s, except that due to its subject matter it certainly couldn't have been published in Galaxy in the 1950s! Her other fiction comprises a forthcoming collaborative novel, Your Name Here (with Ilya Gridneff), and some shorter work, including the collection Some Trick, and also The English Understand Wool. I bought the collection, and this short book. That latter is published by Storybook ND, a project of New Directions, which has become DeWitt's primary publisher (after some difficulty with her previous publishers.) The Storybook ND editions are intended to be quick reads -- novella length or less (The English Understand Wool is perhaps 12,000 words) -- presented in attractive slim hardcover format.

The English Understand Wool, published in 2022, is a delightful tricksy work. It's narrated by an adolescent girl named perhaps Margeurite, or perhaps something else beginning with G. She lives with her mother, only seeing her father on rare occasions. Her mother is very wealthy, and they live primarily in Marrakech, but, not being Muslims, they take Ramadan off and travel. In luxury, of course. Her mother has very strict notions of behavior -- of avoiding "mauvais ton". Her daughter must learn to ride, must learn to play the piano, and to practice strictly. And, of course, must learn how to be truly fashionable -- as in understanding that only the English know how to make an outfit properly out of wool. (The French, though, understand linen.) 

All this comes to us in DeWitt's narrator's gloriously deadpan voice. And over time we realize that something else is going on. What are these letters addressed to "Marguerite" from someone named "Bethany" (surely that name by itself is mauvais ton!) We do quickly learn the reason for this -- "Marguerite" is writing a memoir, and her publisher's representative in unsatisfied so far with the amount of herself the author seems to want to reveal.

I myself won't reveal more -- the story is short enough you'll be glad to find out on your own. But it's slick and clever and twisty and very funny in a very dry way. It takes on the foibles of the very rich, of the publishing world (a DeWitt bête noire, it would seem), and of celebrity. It's really a delight, and though the book might be a bit pricy for its length, I was glad I got it.

Review: Navola, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Review: Navola, by Paolo Bacigalupi

a review by Rich Horton

Navola is Paolo Bacigalupi's eighth novel, and his first in seven years. His previous novels were relatively near future science fiction, with rather dystopian themes, focusing on environmental damage and corrupt corporations and politicians. Navola is something of a departure -- it is pure fantasy, set in a clear analogue of Renaissance Italy -- the title city perhaps most nearly resembles 15th Century Florence. (And the very language is clearly Italianate in flavor.) This strategy of building a fantasy setting by taking an historical location as a close model reminds me of many of Guy Gavriel Kay's novels. I will add that while Navola doesn't have an environmental focus, nor is it quite "dystopian" or post-apocalyptic, like much of Bacigalupi's previous work, but it is very dark in tone, and absolutely features corrupt politicians and scheming bankers, and a lot of brutality. And, not to bury the lede -- I loved it. It is an immensely entertaining novel. It is quite long, somewhat over 200,000 words. And it's the first of a series -- there will be at least one more book.

The story is told by Davico di Regulai da Navola. He is telling it to an unidentified person -- I have a guess as to who this person might be, someone we do not meet in this book, but I could be entirely wrong. Davico is the son of Devonaci di Regulai, who heads the Banca Regulai, an extremely influential merchant bank. The di Regulai are not technically aristocrats, and claim to be apolitical, but they are of the "Archinomi" -- a leading family of Navola, and their financial influence, bolstered by Devonaci's behind the scenes scheming, gives them immense power. Navola is nominally semi-democratic, with a 100 person council called the Callendra, and a sort of mayor, the Callarino. And there is a good deal of dissent, much from the "nomo anciens", or the old names of the city, who resent the loss of power to the likes of the di Regulai, and especially to the lower classes, the vianomae.

Davico grows up fairly happily. He learns his father's trade, though he despairs of ever equaling his father's skill, and especially his fathers ability to plot. He has friends among the other high families. His father's mistress, a slave named Ashia, serves as essentially his mother, who had died when he was very young. He is taught arithmetic and writing by his father's chief numenari, Merio; and the use of weapons by his father's guardsman, Aghan Khan. He remains rather an innocent, even after an attempt on his family is made by some other jealous families, and brutally beaten off. One of the guilty families is exiled, with a daughter just about Davico's age kept with the di Regulai as a hostage. This is Celia, who becomes in essence Davico's sister. Other key characters include Cavezza, Devonaci's stilettotore, a dangerous man who enforces punishments Devonaci commands, and who spies on the di Regulai enemies; Siena Furia, the only woman who leads an Archinomi family; and of course the ancient dragon eye that Devonaci keeps in his library, and which seems linked somehow with Davico.

The story proceeds from there, as Davico grows to adulthood. Davico remains rather innocent, even as intrigues wind around him -- another uprising, suppressed even more brutally than before; a plan revealed by his father to extend Navola's power, by both military means and by strategic marriages -- and Davico realizes that he does not wish to marry anyone but Celia, but of course this is impossible. Davico takes part in commercial and political negotiations, often to his father's disappointment. He learns that people he considers friends are ready to betray him. He realizes that his future is largely determined for him -- and he is increasingly frustrated; especially as he is forced to help arrange a key marriage for Celia, to a man he considers a fool. And then -- well, I will tell no more, except to say that his entire life and the lives of everyone close to him are utterly upended, and the novel takes a truly horrifying turn.

I found it all intensely involving. I can't say it is precisely new -- this sort of thing is a familiar fantasy trope, but very well executed here. The fantastical elements themselves are relatively slight, though important. The political maneuvering is believable and interesting. Davico is a likeable character, generally a good man but also often obtuse, blind to the needs and feelings of many about him, and unwilling to make a stand against injustice at times. The villains are terrible but in a very human way. The depictions of Davico's world -- of his city, the countryside, the buildings, the political divides -- are effective, sometimes lovely, sometimes dark. 

Navola is a very fine fantasy novel, and I am eagerly looking forward to its sequel.

Review: Three Eight One, by Aliya Whiteley

Review: Three Eight One, by Aliya Whiteley

by Rich Horton

Aliya Whiteley has been publishing interesting short fiction for a couple of decades, and novels for about half that time. I've reprinted one of her stories in my Year's Best series ("Fog and Pearls at King's Cross Junction" from 2020) but I  hadn't yet read a novel. But at a glance her most recent book, her sixth, from 2024, looked intriguing, so I have read it.

Three Eight One is quite strange, both in structure and content. It is framed as a personal project by Rowena Savalas, begun early in the 24th Century. Rowena tells us she's 17 years old physically, but 663 years old "streaming", and we gather that people live in digital form primarily, but may incarnate themselves into a physical body. Rowena's project is to research a digital document from the "Age of Riches" -- digital reaches, thus extending from late in the 20th century to early in the 22nd century, we are told. Rowena's era, the "Age of Curation", spends some effort trying to understand the quintillions of bytes of online date from our time. And Rowena is studying something called The Dance of the Horned Road, created July 23, 2024.

You probably have questions. I certainly did! The Dance of the Horned Road is the first person narrative of a young woman named Fairly, living in a walled village. She is about to go on a "quest", a common effort for young people of her village. This quest involves periodically pressing a button on a Chain Device, and attempting to follow the "Horned Road", as the Breathing Man follows. The sections of Fairly's narrative are each 381 words long. They are often glossed with footnotes by Rowena. 

This structure obviously somewhat resembles that of Geoff Ryman's 253, but really there is little resemblance between the two novels save the similarly sized sections. As far as this narrative goes, despited that fact that it was ostensibly created in 2024, neither Fairly's home nor anywhere she visits on her quest can plausibly be recognized as present day places, though the technology is vaguely current (or perhaps a few decades before now.) Rowena's footnotes acknowledge this, and often try to define aspects of Fairly's milieu, while also discussing her own responses, and something of her own life.

Fairly's journey takes her to a variety of places -- tending bar for a while at the nearby big town; a trek into the mountains where she is hosted by strange animals called cha (which is also what the three pieces of money she's been given for her quest are called); into a cave; across the sea; working on a pig farm -- or are they cha?; in a city of treehouses with a group of brothers who claim to have been royalty; joining a caravan that seems analogous to her quest; up in a balloon; and finally on a starship heading for a newly colonized planet; and finally drifting in a spaceship's lifeboat back to Earth and home. She makes friends, takes lovers, and encounters the cha in various forms, including repeatedly humans in cha costumes. Are the cha, as rumored, aliens who have taken over Earth and forced humanity into this odd sociality? Are they simply symbols? And what of the humans in cha costumes? To say nothing of the Breathing Man, who never stops following her, but in the end seems especially close to her. Things only get odder when she returns to her village.

Behind that there are the hints of Rowena's life. Her project is interrupted by a decades long period of "Lived Experience", which in some way seems similar to Fairly's quest. We learn that her people only live in bodies for 70 years, and then must die -- yet return to digital life. Her commentary on Fairly is -- interesting but perhaps not wholly trustworthy?

In the end I'm not sure what the novel means, but it's very interesting and very thought provoking. And it's astonishingly new -- original. I wonder -- how much of everything we read is simulations, or digital life, or simply story. That seems the only way to explain the strangeness of much of Fairly's quest. Or the way Fairly's curious life, allegedly in or before 2024, aligns with our own 21st century. And what are the cha, really? Is the space travel real? Is digital life a way to remove humans from Earth's ecosphere? A radical way of living lightly on the land? Is the village life Fairly grows up something to aspire to? Or a misstep? Is it all a metaphor for constructing a life? Or a story?

I don't have answers. But I'm glad to be able to ask the questions.

Review: The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt

Review: The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt

by Rich Horton

Helen DeWitt's first novel was published in 2000, and became something of a sensation, at least in the haut-literary world. I think it sold OK, but for publishing company reasons, it went out of print, and was only republished in 2016 by New Directions. I will confess I had not heard of this book, and I need to thank Naomi Kanakia for bringing it to my attention. It has been named the Best Novel of the 21st Century, which I admit annoys me, because it was published in the 20th Century, admittedly in its last year. 

And you know what? Maybe it is the best novel of the period 2000-2024! Or, at least it's in the conversation. (I'd offer Piranesi as another candidate.) The Last Samurai is a very funny novel built on a rather desperate, and at times tragic, substrate. It is profoundly clever without sacrificing depth. It's well written, unconventionally punctuated in an effective fashion, constantly readable and engaging, and when it wants to be, profoundly moving.

The novel is told by two characters. Sybilla Newman is an American who came to Oxford for college, got her degree and went on to postgraduate studies, and realized that her research subject was worthless. She needs a job to stay in England -- the thought of return to her family is insupportable -- her father is a motel magnate and her mother a permanently frustrated musician. She manages to get a job at a publishing company, and at a reception for one of their authors she ends up in bed with him, and has a child. And now she's telling us about her efforts to teach her precocious son, who is named Ludovic or Steven or David. Sybilla's experiences with education have convinced her that schools are all terrible, and she is teaching her son in between a job retyping old magazines, and more or less simultaneously watching Kurosawa's classic film Seven Samurai over and over again.

Essentially the book follows Ludo's learning process from the age of 3 or so to about 12. Sybilla's strategy is mostly to teach him languages and let him read anything he wants, and this more or less works except he is always asking questions, which makes it hard for her to do her job. But he is -- or seems to be -- utterly brilliant. By the time he reaches school age he is quite unsuited for conventional instruction and soon drops out ... and then decides he wants to know his father. But Sybilla refuses to tell him anything about the man -- who was a one night stand, after all, and who doesn't know that he has a son. And the rest of the book follows Ludo's search for his father, which morphs after a while to a search for any suitable father. 

But of course that doesn't really say much about the novel. The key is the telling, of course. The voice. Both Sibylla and Ludovic have recognizable and plausible voices. There are typographical tricks, but really not terribly exotic ones. There are many languages, none of which besides English and a tiny amount of French I know -- and that doesn't matter. The day by day events are eccentric to some extent -- constantly riding the Circle Line, sitting in museums to do homework, tracking down potential fathers and spying on them -- but they are also mundane in a sense, and confined to London. There are running jokes -- the chicken places named after a state that is never Kentucky, for example. The depictions of the potential fathers' lives are strange and intriguing -- they are travel writers and crusading journalists, diplomats and avant garde composers, Nobel Prize winners, fantasists and honest men. 

What is the novel about? Education, of course. Motherhood and fatherhood. Art. Music. Writing. Marriage. What it is to be a good man, or a bad man. Suicide. Language. Boredom. Seven Samurai. There is art criticism: Sybilla has severe tastes. (Lord Leighton (whose Flaming June graces the cover of one of my books) comes in for a lot of derision, as does the man who got her pregnant, and Seven Samurai imitations like The Magnificent Seven.) It all works -- it's laugh out loud funny at times, wry at times, wrenching at times. It's a novel of and about the 20th Century, that still feels ragingly original, and yet in a curious way, despite its experiments, despite its postmodernity, seems as ambitious and comprehensive as the great Victorian novels.

Review: Bird Isle, by Jack Vance

Review: Bird Isle (aka Isle of Peril, aka Bird Island), by Jack Vance

by Rich Horton

Bird Isle is one of the least known of all Jack Vance books. One reason is that it's not science fiction -- it's a crime novel, one of the first two he ever published (in 1957), both under different one-off pseudonyms. Bird Isle was published as Isle of Peril, by "Alan Wade", and the other 1957 crime novel was Take My Face, published  as by "Peter Held". Mystery House, at that time, was an imprint of Thomas Bouregy and Company, formerly Bouregy and Curl. As far as I can tell, Bouregy and Curl was a rather low end house, best known in SF for publishing the first book edition of Charles Harness's The Paradox Men (as Flight Into Yesterday.) (Samuel Curl got his start in publishing working with Alan Hillman, who published Vance's first book, The Dying Earth.) Mystery House had been an imprint of Arcadia House, Samuel Curl's earlier publishing venture, which Curl retained when he joined with Bouregy, and which Bouregy retained when Curl sold out to him in 1956. At any rate, I doubt Isle of Peril earned Vance much money, nor did it likely sell well. Copies of that edition are rare and go for quite high prices.

Bird Isle was reprinted under that name in an Underwood Miller edition in 1988, and then again, along with Take My Face and the 1985 crime novel Strange Notions in the Vance Integral Edition in 2002 -- this time retitled Bird Island. (Take My Face was retitled The Flesh Mask, and Strange Notions was called Strange People, Queer Notions. The VIE was prepared with Jack Vance's approval, and his preferred titles were used throughout. More recently, Spatterlight Press, run by Vance's son, has reprinted most or all of Vance's oeuvre, generally using the VIE titles (and texts) but for some reason reverting to Bird Isle in this case. (I do think Bird Isle is a better title than either of the other two.)

Well, that's a lot about the publication history. (I am generally intrigued by such details, and in this case I was very happy to discover the Spatterlight Press editions, which look nice and often have contemporary introductions (though the introductions don't seem to appear in the ebook editions.) But what about the novel? I have to say that Bird Isle is somewhat disappointing -- it's very definitely one of the weaker Vance novels. I will say that Vance's later crime novels, often published as by "John Holbrook Vance", are viewed as considerably better, and I personally am very fond of the two Sheriff Joe Bain mysteries, The Fox Valley Murders (1966) and The Pleasant Valley Murders (1967).

The novel is set on the title island, which is a short way off the coast near Monterey. There is a rather ramshackle hotel there, and a girls' finishing school, and nothing else. (The choice of the name "Bird Isle" seems partly a nod at the "birds" in the finishing school.) The owner of the hotel, realizing he needs more money to make his hotel more attractive to guests, decides to sell off the real estate he owns on the island, which is everything but the part where the school is. And quite quickly he manages to dispose of the several parcels he subdivides the island into. The buyers include Mortimer Archer, a retiree who dabbles in photography; the Ottenbrights, a lawyer and his wife; Ike McCarthy, a rough-edged Alaskan fisherman, with a plan to farm whales; and Milo Green, a young man who makes his living writing light poetry for newspapers; and Miss Pickett, headmistress of the finishing school, who buys a packet to keep the new neighbors away from her girls.

Things seem to go swimmingly for a bit, as the hotel's business picks up nicely, Milo starts building a house, and also meets Miss Pickett's very lovely niece. One of Miss Pickett's new students kicks up her traces a bit, and looking for for excitement, finds a way to make some money -- a way involving Mortimer Archer's photograpy skills, which not surprisingly are more aimed at women au naturel than at nature per se. There's an Eskimo love potion, too. And there's a rumor that the island was used by the Mob in Prohibition days, so there might be a hidden treasure ...

Much of this is potentially pretty fun. Alas, only some of it actually is. Things like the love potion are both implausible and bit distasteful. The humor is played rather too broadly, and much falls flat. The major crime aspect is a bit too obvious, and resolved a bit too easily. I think were Vance to have addressed this set of ideas a decade later, and with more time to develop the story, and more experience as well, it could have been nice enough. But as it is -- and presumably with Vance not at full motivation, given the pseudonymous nature of the book, and the presumably tiny payment -- the end result doesn't stand anywhere close to prime Jack Vance.

Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami

Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami

by Rich Horton

Haruki Murakami is one of the most celebrated contempory Japanese writers, and a large portion of his work is SF or Fantasy or just weird. As such I have been meaning to read him for a long time, but only now have I got around to it. I will note that The City and Its Uncertain Walls may not be the best place to start with him -- or, rather, my reaction to it may be different that that of readers who have read a lot of his work. One reason is that the book reworks some material first published as a novella with which Murakami was unsatisfied, and then revised to form one thread of his 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I am also told that the protagonist is a somewhat typical Murakami male lead -- lonely, a love a books and music, and somewhat obsessive in his love affairs. Indeed, one book club friend of mine immediately asked if the book features a nerdy solitary man (almost an incel, she suggested, though not really) who at one point falls into a deep hole. And, yes, this novel does!

Outlining the plot of this novel really tells one very little about how it works. So I'll be brief. A nameless narrator tells the story in three parts. The first is written in second person, addressing the girl he fell in love with as a teenage. When he was 17 and she 16, they spent a lot of time together, walking and talking, occasionally kissing, writing long letters to each other, but nothing more. Much of what they talked and wrote about was a strange walled city. The people in the city have no shadows. The girl seems to believe that she is actually the shadow of a girl who lives in the city. Over time it seems that the city is actually an invention of the two -- but an invention that is oddly real. The two are desperatly in love -- then the girl disappears -- or, at least, becomes completely unresponsive to the boy's letters. He goes to college, gets his degree, has brief relationsship with other women, but never forgets the girl. Then, in his mid-40s, he finds himself mysteriously transported to a city -- a walled city. He gains entry at the cost of his shadow, and gets a job as a dream reader at the library -- and the librarian is the girl he had loved as a teenager, still seeming only 16 or so. Over some time he learns to read dreams, and becomes friends with the girl (in a nonsexual way -- and she does not recognize him at all) -- but when he realizes his shadow -- forced to remain outside the city -- is dying, he faces a choice: reunite with his shadow so that it can survive, and then return to the "real" world, or stay in the city.

The next and longest part follows the narrator's life back in the real world. He remembers his time in the city, but not really how it ended. No time sseems to have passed in the "real" world while he was in the city. He has become dicontented with his rather mundane job, and he has enough money (having lived a somewhat spare single life since college) that he can take some time off, and, inspired by some strange dreams, he decides to look for a job in a library. He finds one in a mountain village some distance from Tokyo, and somewhat to his surprise, is hired as head librarian. The situation there is a bit strnage, especially the previous head librarian, who continues to give him advice. But the narrator adjusts, and eventrually forms a tentative relationship with a woman, and then gets involved with a teenaged boy who seems to be on the spectrum, and comes to the library to obsessively read, and eventually tells the narrator that he wants to escape to the walled city -- somehow he learned of the city despite the narrator telling no one but the mysterious former head librarian. Which leads to the events of the third part -- which I'll leave untold.

All this is indeed mysterious, but by itself perhaps thin gruel for a 500 page novel. (And in all honesty the middle part could probably have been cut a bit.) But for me it really worked. The novel casts a real spell. The narrator’s teenage love affair is affecting. The city itself is convincingly strange, with unicorns, clocks without hands, the everchanging walls, the gatekeeper, the old dreams the narrator reads. The mountain town he moves to seems in its isolation to somewhat mirror the otherworldly city. The narrator’s adult relationship with a woman who owns a coffee shop is affecting as well, and more mature than the narrator’s earlier affair. His friendship with his predecessor, Mr. Koyasu, is amusing and involving and at another level, rather sad. Most of all, there is everywhere an air of mystery. There is also a sense of emptiness, and a concomitant loneliness. There are really very few characters of any significance, and one senses that all the characters that matter to us – the narrator, his teenaged girlfriend, Mr. Koyasu, the perhaps autistic boy he meets late in the book, the woman in the coffee shop – are ultimately very lonely, very isolated, and so the importance of the connections we do see them form is enhanced.

As for the prose -- I am of two minds about it. Murakami has an exceptional may with striking and original images. And I was not ever bored, despite his habit of almost obsessive description of mundane things like clothes, and with his almost pedantic rendering of dialogue. All this, in the end, really works. But I did have trouble with some aspects of the writing, that just possibly lie more at the feet of the translator. Occasional phrases in English are outright clichés, and I don’t know if these are direct translations from the original or an example of the translator using an English cliché in place of a perhaps less trite Japanese expression. Some of the phrasing is stilted in a way that suggests possibly a too literal rendering of the structure of the sentences in the Japanese, when a slight reformulation would have read more smoothly. And there are curiously annoying bit such as rendering dimensions in English units in a slightly unnatural way -- something is described as "about 6 and a half feet tall" when the original probably read "two meters", for example, or a square room is described as about 13 feet by 13 when, again, the original likely said 4 meters on a side.

The above quibbles are minor, though. I was enchanted by the novel, at times transported. There are passages of unexpected beauty, of pathos, and of deep mystery. Perhaps  it is not a great novel, but it's a very good one.

Review: Alibi, by Sharon Shinn

Review: Alibi, by Sharon Shinn

by Rich Horton

Sharon Shinn's new novel, Alibi, features, as it says right on the cover, "Romance. Teleportation. Murder."  I confess I had thought of Shinn as mostly a fantasy writer. (I've read her novel General Winston's Daughter, which I quite enjoyed, and I have a couple of her Elemental Blessings novels on my TBR pile, and those are all fantasy.) But this book is nearish future science fiction, and quite effectively so. The words above suggests it's at once a romance novel, a murder mystery, and SF -- and that's fair enough, but I think the SF part dominates. (Well, and the character interactions -- not just the love story but an extensive network of family, friends, students, etc.) 

The novel was published in November 2024, by Fairwood Press. I bought my copy at World Fantasy this year, and was able to have Sharon Shinn sign it for me. (Sharon and I both live in St. Louis, and we have known each other for some time, and indeed we both did a writing workshop for philosophers at Saint Louis University a couple of years ago.)

The book is set some decades in the future. The main novum is teleportation -- the whole world seems connected by an enormous network of teleportation booths. Air travel is as far as I can tell nonexistent (perhaps there are cargo flight?) and the airports have become hubs for longer distance teleportation, but the cities are webbed with booths as well, and sufficiently wealthy people might even have booths in their homes. And, very skillfully presented in the background, there is a good deal of subtle speculation about just how this technology changes people's lives.

The first person narrator is Taylor Kendall, a thirty-something native of Chicago who now teaches at a private school in Houston. She lives in Houston and teaches in person there, but because of the teleportation, she can keep in constant touch with her best friend in Atlanta, and her family in Chicago. After a brief prologue establishing that there will be a murder, and that Taylor will be a suspect, we go back a few months, when Taylor is offered a job as a private tutor to the 19 year old son of Duncan Phillips, an extremely rich man who lives in Chicago. Taylor takes the job, and begins to teach Quentin Phillips, and quickly comes to like him. The kicker is that he suffers from a degenerative disease, and isn't expected to live much more than five more years. But he's an eager and engaging boy, and Taylor becomes very invested in his life.

Quentin's father is mostly absent, and so Taylor's interactions are with his staff -- Francis, the steward, Bram, the head of security, and Dennis, Quentin's physical therapist. It is quickly clear that all three men love Quentin and hate his father. Soon Taylor becomes part of sort of a circle of protectors of Quentin -- and when she meets Duncan Phillips, she realizes why the others hate him -- and also realizes that he is particularly dangerous, and creepy, to women. 

The novel then follows Taylor's tutoring of Quentin, her interactions with the three men on Duncan's staff (especially Bram, as sparks quickly fly between he and Taylor -- different people but both wary of relationships after unsuccessful marriages); her professional life as an English teacher (with some crises involving her students,) and her social life, centered on her friend Marika, her brother Jason, and his friend Domenic. All this is in a way mundane, but it's very enjoyable, and all along we get glimpses both of the teleportation-affected society, and of Quentin's prospects and how they are affected by his distant father. There are romances for a few of the characters, and hints of hope for Quentin's future.

And then, surprisingly late in the novel for a murder mystery, the murder happens. And from there things rush towards a conclusion. There is some nice misdirection about the killer, with of course teleportation involved in providing -- or removing -- alibis for the characters; and an exciting (if just slightly convenient) resolution, with a surprising (but not unfair) solution to the mystery.

I really enjoyed Alibi. It's fair to say that the opening is a bit of a slow burn -- but appropriately so -- and before long, even while in a curious way little happens but ordinary (future) life, the novel becomes quite absorbing. We root for the characters, we care about them, and we believe their interactions. And the conclusion is quite satisfying.

My picks for the most iconic SF/F novels of the 21st Century so far

My picks for the most iconic SF/F novels of the 21st Century so far

by Rich Horton

A few weeks ago Reactor published a list, or several lists, called "The Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century", based on a survey they did of their "favorite writers" and their staff. These were in numerous categories -- anthologies, collections, translated work, comics/manga, and then one list for books period. A bit later, Jo Walton (who I assume qualifies as both one of Reactor's favorite writers and part of their staff!) did an essay on her process in selecting her choices, "On Selecting the Top Ten Genre Books of the First Quarter of the Century", also dividing them into categories, in her case Fantasy, SF, Series, YA, and novellas. And I added a brief comment to her post, and she said, well, my don't I just make my own list. So I have.

I must note that I have missed a lot of novels in the past quarter century, partly because I was concentrating so heavily on short fiction. And I'd love to hear from people about novels they think belong there that I missed. I'll add another comment -- a couple of novels on the list are there more for their "iconic" status than their success as novels (though none are bad!) So -- The Ministry for the Future is in my opinion really important -- but it's not fully successful as a novel (though it is always interesting, and brimming with ideas.) Likewise, The Three-Body Problem is interesting and original, though it has diminished in my mind since first reading it, but its status as sort of introducing Chinese SF to the Western world seemed to merit its inclusion. Also, with one exception (Susanna Clarke's two novels, because they are both so very good and quite different from each other) I limited selections to one book per author.

I'm just going to list Sf novels, Fantasy novels, and a few additional outliers and "just missed" books. I already did a very roughly comparable list of short fiction, so I won't touch that. The adjective Reactor used was "Iconic", which I take to mean not exactly the same thing as "Best" -- to, in my interpretation lean a bit towards the most influential, memorable, or important books, however you define that. I'll lean a bit that way, but mostly my list will be the books I thought the best. I'm looking for ten of each, but I couldn't help myself and there are eleven. I'm putting them in chronological order.

Fantasy

2003: Kalpa Imperial, by Angelica Gorodischer

2004: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

2008: Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin

2009: The City and the City, by China Miéville

2013: A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar

2014: The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison

2015: The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin

2017: Spoonbenders, by Daryl Gregory

2017: Ka, by John Crowley

2020: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

2022: Babel, by R. F. Kuang

Science Fiction

2004: Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell

2005: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

2006: Blindsight, by Peter Watts

2006: The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu

2007: The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon

2014: Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

2016: Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee

2016: Everfair, by Nisi Shawl

2020: The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

2022: The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler

2023: Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

Others:

I left two of the best novels out because I couldn't quite argue that they were SF or Fantasy. These are Nicola Griffith's Hild, an utterly absorbing historical novel which is surely Fantasy-adjacent; and Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a searing contemporary novel which is profoundly SF-adjacent. . 

For sheer influence, you can argue for any of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire volumes -- perhaps the most recent, A Dance With Dragons (2011), would be a good exemplar. These have had the greatest penetration into the conciousness of the general public, which in itself makes them influential. On the SF side, Andy Weir's The Martian and James S. A. Covey's Expanse series have had similar exposure. In all three cases, of course, TV or Movie adaptations were very important, though the books in all cases had been very successful too. 

I will note that several of the novels I mention were published in the mainstream, whether by writers from within the genre to some extent (Clarke, Gregory, Crowley, Miéville, Fowler) or by writers who sometimes don't know they're doing SF (Harvey) or who do know that very well even though they made their bones writing contemporary fiction (Chabon, Mitchell.) And, really, the border is ever thinner, as evidenced by a writer like R. F. Kuang making a big splash this year with her contemporary novel Yellowface.

Here are some that just missed:

Among Others, by Jo Walton

Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer

The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie

Learning the World, by Ken MacLeod

Embassytown and Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville

Brasyl and The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald

Accelerando, by Charles Stross

The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell (the second of those is actually my favorite Mitchell novel, but it's just barely genre)

Bones of the Earth, by Michael Swanwick

The Peripheral, by William Gibson

The Unraveling, by Benjamin Rosenbaum

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer

Review: Strange Stars, by Jason Heller

Review: Strange Stars, by Jason Heller

by Rich Horton

Strange Stars is a history of science fiction themed rock music throughout the 1970s. It is Jason Heller's thesis that, with a few outliers in the previous couple of decades, popular music (in this case specifically rock music) with themes and imagery began in 1970. To be more specific, he ties it to the landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, and to the nearly simultaneous release of David Bowie's song "Space Oddity". To some extent this choice seems personal to Heller -- he admits to being a major fan of David Bowie's work -- but I think it holds up pretty well anyway. The book then goes year by year through the decade, highlighting major and obscure bands and records with songs based in some sense on science fiction. (Heller largely excludes fantasy from his remit.)

There are a few bands and artists that he follows in depth -- considering them prolific, influential, and effective in using science fiction-inspired tropes, characters, and musical styles in their music. David Bowie is one, of course -- and certainly he qualifies in spades, with such albums as Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Diamond Dogs. Paul Kantner specifically, and his bands Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship as well, are important contributors -- most notably with Kantner's Blows Against the Empire, which was for many years the only musical work to receive a Hugo nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation. Hawkwind, of course, is treated extensively -- their entire corpus is SF-influenced, from an early album like In Search of Space forward. Their association with Michael Moorcock is highlighted, and, later in the decade, Moorcock's association with Blue Öyster Cult is also treated at length. 

The great jazz musician Sun Ra is given a lot of play, even though most of his work was instrumental, and Heller also emphasizes his influence on Afrofuturism. George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, and their interlinked bands Parliament and Funkadelic are a huge part of Heller's narrative, and their music is certainly explicitly SFnal and very influential. Kraftwerk and the entire "Krautrock" scene are an important thread, including discussion of one of my wife's favorite records, Nektar's Remember the Future. Prog Rock, of course, is featured prominently. Obviously Yes gets a lot of discussion, as well as ELP and Pink Floyd. Alan Parsons Project is briefly mentioned for I Robot. Queen is discussed -- with a lot of emphasis on Brian May's Astrophysics Ph.D. Rush, and especially 2112, is part of the story. Devo is given a major place, slightly to my surprise, but Heller demonstrated that it makes a lot of sense. About the time Star Wars comes out, Heller discusses disco -- there was more SF in disco than I, at least, ever thought. His focus is Domenico Monardo, who, as Meco, made the album Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk. Towards the end of the decade there is a discussion of Joy Division -- a band I greatly admire -- though eventually their SFnal contribution seems minor to me, perhaps because of Ian Curtis' tragically early suicide.

There are also, of course, references to a lot of less obvious figures: Mark Bolan and T-Rex, X-Ray Spex, Magma, Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come, Alex Harvey, Amon Düül, Splendor. Major artists who did only a bit of SF-influenced work include Jimi Hendrix (a known SF fan mentioned in the prelude about the 1960s); Elton John; Blondie; Earth, Wind and Fire; Marvin Gaye; the MC5; the Jackson Five; Brian Eno; King Crimson; Steve Miller; Neil Young; and many more get a nod. 

Heller also interleaves the way science fiction was permeating pop culture in other ways, most obviously movies, with Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind getting the most attention, plus the Bowie vehicle The Man Who Fell to Earth. The science fictional imagery on album art is discussed, include the "guitar spaceships" on the covers of Boston albums, which otherwise didn't really have SF content. Heller also namedrops a great many authors who were influences on these musical artists -- often explicitly acknowledged by the artists, sometimes assumed so by Heller: George Orwell, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip José Farmer, Isaac Asimov, and more. (I had not realized that Delany's Fall of the Towers was part of the genesis of 2112!) The book includes a number of footnotes and a useful discography.

I would just have a few quibbles. Some are personal (I still have a hard time with the term Sci Fi), some are trivial (Philip José Farmer's Night of Light, a novel that Hendrix was reading around the time of composing "Purple Haze", is from 1966, not 1957, though one of the stories that became part of the novel, "The Night of Light", was published in that earlier year), some are matters of interpretation -- I think Heller occasionally reaches a bit in labeling songs science fictional. I admit I did wish that after crediting Paul Kantner for his giving credit to some of his inspirations, he'd have mentioned his failure to credit Mark Clifton after he swiped the "Hide Hide Witch" lyrics for his song "Mau Mau (Amerikon)". His knowledge of the music of the '70 is amazing and deep -- far deeper than mine -- and about the only plausible omission that comes to mind is Jackson Browne's "Before the Deluge". But none of these quibbles are at all fatal, and Strange Stars is a convincing portrayal of the growth of rock music featuring science fiction themes in the 1970s -- and I learned a lot about many artists I had no knowledge of.