Review: A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine

 A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine

a review by Rich Horton

Last year, on my last business trip before the pandemic shut everything down, I started reading Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. I was looking forward to it -- it had gotten great reviews, it seemed a possible Hugo nominee, and I had really enjoyed Martine's story "The Hydraulic Emperor". I got a few chapters in, and was quite enjoying it -- and then came the lockdown, and in between the psychical effects of that, and some deadlines, I put the book aside. It went on to not just receive a Hugo nomination, but to win the Hugo (and also the Compton Crook award.)

When her new novel, a sequel called A Desolation Called Peace, came out I thought to myself, OK, it's really time for me to read A Memory Called Empire! And I decided to use my recently obtained Audible subscription to listen to it. (As I did recently with Curious Toys, Piranesi, and The Stars are Legion -- using my commuting time to listen to audio books is proving a great way to tackle my TBR pile.)  

Not to bury the lede too far then -- this novel is immensely fun. It is true Space Opera, from one angle a case of a huge and ever-expanding interstellar empire being resisted by a tiny and plucky space station. But it's more complex than that. Because the "resistance" of the station, Lsel, is entirely diplomatic. Indeed, there are no space battles (though my guess is things might be different in the sequel.) And Teixcalaan, the empire, is portrayed as admirable in many ways (and kind of bad in the way of empires in other ways.) It's also the story of a succession crisis, and it's the story of someone finally encountering the culture she has long admired, and learning a little about it. And it's action-packed -- the novel takes place at a full sprint lasting little over a week. 

The main character is Mahit Dzmare, who arrives at Teixcalaan as the main action begins, ready to take up her duties as the new Ambassador from Lsel Station. She carries an "imago machine", which has the memories from 15 years ago of her predecessor, Yskandr Aghavn (and also his memories of his predecessor etc.) Almost as soon as she arrives she confronts two major issues -- Yskandr has died, almost certainly murdered, and her imago has malfunctioned, so she doesn't even have the help of Yskandr's experience (even 15 years out of date experience.) (And Lsel has provided her ridiculously little instruction or strategical guidance.)

Very quickly things get even more complicated. Mahit is present at a bombing, and her Teixcalaan-provided cultural liaison is injured. Mahit ends up hiding out (more or less) with one of the Emperor's closest advisors, or ezuazacats, Nineteen Adze. Mahit is nearly poisoned herself. She realizes that Yskandr had been a lover of both Nineteen Adze and the Emperor. She meets one of the Emperor's anointed co-Emperors (thus a potential successor), and she realizes that the Emperor, very old and in poor health, may die soon, and the issue of the succession is terribly fraught, with candidates including one of the Emperor's crechemates, and an influential and rich provincial man, and also the Emperor's 90% clone, who is only ten. Not to mention a would-be usurper, One Lightning, who hopes to build a military reputation, perhaps by invading Lsel Station. And the Emperor himself has a rather horrifying idea concerning his successor.

Lsel sends Mahit an urgent message, which she can only read with Yskandr's help -- which means she needs to acquire his more recent imago from his dead body, and to undergo absurdly risky surgery to integrate it with her brain. And it's clear that mysterious, hostile, and uncommunicative aliens are threatening the Empire through various jump gates, including ones in close proximity to Lsel. And her only allies, are Teixcalaan, none wholly trustworthy -- Nineteen Adze, who is clearly a political creature through and through; and then Three Seagrass and her friend Twelve Azalea, who are young and who probably have more loyalty to Teixcalaan than to Mahit. 

The action really never stops. There is danger, eventual tragedy, some sexual tension and intrigue, rebellions from different directions ... The resolution is pretty powerful, and satisfying. It makes emotional sense (for several characters) and it makes strategic sense. And it's a pretty clear slingshot to the next book -- because, you know, there are still those mysterious aliens! Indeed, this is an opening volume that comes to sensible closure on its own terms, but also promises another book that should have its own surprises and revelations.

I do have -- naturally -- some caveats. The biggest ones concern Lsel Station's laughably inadequate preparation of Mahit for her job. She doesn't even get a portfolio, as it were -- that is, a clear statement of Lsel's goals. I also found rather implausible the notion that Yskandr could successfully (to a degree) perform diplomacy by becoming the lover of two of the 5 or so most powerful people in the Teixcalaan Empire. (To say nothing of the Ambassadorial ethics implied.) And there were minor nits -- not really important -- such as an early exchange in which it becomes clear that Mahit, who had spent much of her life reading everything she possibly can about Teixcalaan, has no idea they bury their dead. (The Stationers of Lsel recycle their dead, naturally -- but by burning, which doesn't really seem the best way to recycle.)

In a way, those flaws are inherent to lots of Space Opera. Intrigue and rapid action are more interesting than, months of diplomatic communications and negotiations. And this novel does intrigue -- and color -- very well. I truly love the Teixcalaan naming conventions, for example. Gender roles are not emphasized at all, but this seems to be because both Teixcalaan and Lsel seem to be all but free of gender splits of any sort. (Partly because almost all pregnancies are carried in artificial wombs -- and even conception seems technologically controlled, as the several mentions of clones of a certain percentage indicate.) I think there's a lot of room for more and deeper exploration of the cultures of both Lsel and Teixcalaan in future books, though it may be that that's not what Martine is really interested in dealing with. Which is fine -- hinted background are cooler in many ways.

I'm glad I finally got around to reading A Memory Called Empire, and I won't let the wait before reading A Desolation Called Peace be nearly as long!

Review: Curious Toys, by Elizabeth Hand

 Curious Toys, by Elizabeth Hand

a review by Rich Horton

Elizabeth Hand is one of my favorite writers, but for reasons it's hard to parse, I had not read any of her novels. Well, in reality the reasons aren't so hard to parse -- I simply don't read as many novels as I should, in great part because I read so much short fiction. Also, Hand's recent novels have been crime novels -- and don't get me wrong, I like crime novels, and I have nothing against reading them, but I still concentrate on 1) science fiction; and 2) older novels. My wife, who reads a lot of mysteries, did read and enjoy two of Hand's recent books, both crime novels: Generation Loss and the book at hand, Curious Toys. As for me, the longest story I'd read by Hand was her utterly lovely long novella about the English folk revival (of which I'm a big fan anyway!) Wylding Hall. But her other short fiction is magnificent as well, stories like "Near Zennor", "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon", "Cleopatra Brimstone", "Chip Crockett's Christmas Carol", "Illyria", "The Least Trumps" ... and I could go on and on. I've known that I should read her novels for a long time -- her early Winterlong trilogy looks wonderful ...

So finally I pulled the trigger, with Curious Toys, from 2019. This novel is set in Chicago in 1915. The novel is primarily set at Riverview Park, an actual amusement park that operated from 1904 to 1967. (I grew up in the Chicago suburbs but I was just a bit too young -- the park formally closed two days before my eighth birthday -- to be aware of it.) There are many viewpoint characters but the book truly centers on Pin Maffucci, a 14 year old girl who dresses like a boy, partly because her mother wants to keep her safe, partly because that way she can more easily get odd jobs. But really because she likes it that way. Pin's main odd job is to run marijuana for one of the park's performers, a man who dresses as half woman/half man for his sideshow. One place she takes the drugs is to Essanay, a movie studio in Chicago, which suits her because she is infatuated with one of the young actresses there. 

Pin has a back story -- her sister was abducted and (presumably) murdered a couple of years earlier. Her mother is now a fortuneteller at the park, having changed their name and left their previous home partly because of the violence of the Black Hand gang that controls their old neighborhood. It turns out that a security guard at Riverview Park is a former policeman, Francis Bacon, who lost his job when he dared stand up to the Black Hand, which had plenty of police and judges under their control. This policeman is another POV character. Another key character is a very strange man who Pin notices hanging around the park -- we learn soon that this is Henry Darger, now one of the most famous outsider artists in history. Henry is obsessed with protecting young girls from violence -- this gives him a tie to Pin (and her lost sister) -- but it also makes Pin suspicious of him. 

The action is driven by the disappearance of a young girl in an underground water ride. Pin and Henry (separately) witness this girl enter the ride in the company of an adult man, and then the see the man leave alone. And Pin recognized the girl as another actress at the movie studio -- indeed, an actress Charlie Chaplin had taken a creepy interest in. At first no one believes Pin's story, but then the girl is found. And, depressingly, the first suspect is a black man who was working at the ride, even though there's no plausible reason to believe he committed the crime. Pin is pushed to do what she can to investigate ... and eventually she yields to Henry's insistence that he can help. Francis, as a security guard, is also investigating. Suspects eventually include Charlie Chaplin himself (who did seem to have an unhealthy attraction to just pubescent girls), as well as another of Pin's acquaintances, a scenarist at Essanay who wants to write dark and violent screenplays. And the questions arises -- is there a connection with the disappearance of Pin's sister? Or with the very young girl Henry is fascinated with? Or with other disappearances in different amusement parks?

The eventual solution to the murders is not really that interesting. We have been given glimpses of the murderer in action anyway -- and his identity is not that much of a surprise. What's really fascinating is the look at Chicago in 1915, and at Riverview Park. Also the characters -- Pin in particular, but Henry and Francis and Pin's mother and various minor characters are involving. Many of the characters, good and bad, are queer (each in their own way), and fully realized within a culture wholly different to today's. The look at silent movies in at this time is a tiny part of the book, but fascinating too, as are the peeks we get at other the other entertainments offered at the amusement park. There's a bit of an envoi, giving us a look at the futures for Henry (a matter of historical record, of course) and Pin, which serves as a striking bit of timebinding from the teens to the '70s, giving real perspective to the connections between, and differences between, 1915, 1970 (and, by implication, the present day, about as far from 1970 as that was from 1915.)

Birthday Review: Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks

Every year around this time I post one of my old blog reviews of Iain M. Banks on the occasion of his birthday ... here's another, of Look to Windward, which I think one of his best Culture novels. I wrote this about when the book appeared, and I repost it just as I had it back then. I think I was a bit longer-winded than usual in this review.

Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks

a review by Rich Horton

As the title hints, Iain M. Banks' latest Culture novel, Look to Windward, is connected to his first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas.  The connection is fairly tenuous: the events of the novel are largely set on Masaq' Orbital, the Hub Mind of which was formerly the Mind in charge of a combat ship in the Idiran War (which War was the subject of Consider Phlebas).  Light from a pair of novas caused by the combatants in a battle of that War, one in which the Hub Mind was intimately involved, is now reaching Masaq' Orbital, 800 years after the war.  In commemoration, the Mind has commissioned a musical piece by a composer names Mahrai Ziller. Ziller, as it happens, is an alien, a Chelgrian.  His people had an elaborate Caste system, and Ziller was a high-born who became a liberal and renounced the caste system, and who was involved in some significant political efforts which had temporary success.  But after everything blew up into a terrible civil war, Ziller left for the Culture.  The war was eventually ended in sort of a draw, after which it was revealed that the Culture had, by mistake, provoked the war.  (Contact and Special Circumstances were meddling, trying to help folks like Ziller who were trying to change the odious caste system from within, but they miscalculated how angry the Chelgrians would get, and how quickly a war might erupt.)  

All this is prelude.  The book runs on three (or four) tracks, with lots of flashbacks.  This sort of intricate structure is a Banks hallmark.  One track follows a Chelgrian of a high caste, Major Quilan, who lost his beloved wife during the war.  He has been recruited for a special mission to Masaq' Orbital, ostensibly to try to persuade Mahrai Ziller to return to Chel, but apparently he has a secret mission, secret even to himself (so that Culture Minds won't be able to read his mind).  Quilan has the personality of another Chelgrian, a crusty reactionary, General Huyler, implanted in his mind via some interesting technology.  This thread mostly runs in flashbacks, as we learn about Quilan's early life and his love for his wife, the war, and then his rehab and training after the war, leading eventually to a revelation about his real mission.

Another thread is mostly in real time, following Ziller and another alien, the Homomdan Ambassador Ischlaer (Homomdans were a species loosely on the side of the Idirans in the Idiran War), as they explore Masaq' Orbital, while Ziller tries to avoid meeting Major Quilan, whom he suspects of wanting to kill him.  These sections comprise one of the most extensive descriptions of ordinary life in the Culture that Banks has yet given us, as well as descriptions of the geography of an Orbital, and of various extreme sports the Culture folks indulge in.  All from the viewpoints of two non-Culture types, Ziller and Ischlaer.  These sections are really interesting, even if largely a travelogue.  

The third thread at first seems wholly disconnected from the rest.  It is set on a cool entity/construct/world called an "Airsphere", a huge enclosed ball of gas, apparently constructed millions or hundreds of millions of years previously.  Among the residents of the airsphere are extremely large intelligent beings called "behemothaurs".  These live for millions of years themselves.  Uguen Zlepe is a Culture citizen who is spending a number of years following a behemothaur (with its permission) to study its lifestyle. This thread does eventually get connected to the main plot, though I won't say how.

Eventually things come to a head, as we might predict, with the performance of Ziller's musical piece and the arrival of the light from the nova.  The actual plot resolution is just a bit anti-climactic, which is the only weakness of the story.  But it's otherwise outstanding.  There are very moving bits. There is lots of musing on the meaning of life, death, and guilt.  There is some interesting speculation about a curious fact about Chelgrian religion: they have learned to save their mind states, and after death the mind states can be uploaded into a literal "afterlife", and it is possible to communicate, to some extent, with those who have "gone to heaven".  Their traditional religion has been modified to fit with this new technology, with some unfortunate results.  In sum, a very good book, one of the best of the Culture novels.

Birthday Review: Capsules of four of Carrie Vaughn's Kitty Norville books

Today is Carrie Vaughn's birthday. I've previously done a birthday review focussing on her short fiction, so today I've assembled four very brief looks at some novels in the long series that began her book career: stories about Kitty Norville, a late night DJ who becomes a werewolf.

Kitty and the Midnight Hour

Carrie Vaughn is a fairly new writer whose short work I have quite enjoyed, so I was happy to see her first novel, which does not disappoint, though it's not quite a masterpiece.

Kitty and the Midnight Hour is expanded from a couple of stories that appeared in Weird Tales, about Kitty Norville, a werewolf who works as a late night radio DJ. One night she gets a call from someone who claims to be werewolf, and she runs with it. Before long, her secret is out, and so are some details about the supernatural creatures, mainly vampires and werewolves, who live among us. 

The story concerns Kitty's uneasy relationship with her pack -- she is supposed to be subservient to the leaders, and her new prominence threatens the pack's hierarchy. Also, there are threats from the vampires, who don't get along with the werewolves, and who fear exposure. And, finally, there is a "preacher" who promises to "turn" werewolves and vampires back into humans, but who seems to do more harm than good -- maybe. 

The novel is very good on depicting Kitty's difficulties with her pack relationship -- which has both good and bad sides; and on her ambivalence about her new nature and her original "human" nature. Would she want to change back? Maybe yes, maybe no. And so with many werewolves and vampires. Plotwise it's a bit slack and episodic. Some key issues are resolved, others are tabled for upcoming novels. It's a decent piece of work, not great, but I'll be looking for the sequel.

Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand

Carrie Vaughn's Kitty novels center on Kitty Norville, a Denver DJ who is also a werewolf. As related in the previous books, she has become a celebrity after she started a radio show dealing with the problems of supernatural beings -- werecreatures, vampires, and more -- and especially after she "outed" herself as a werewolf. By the time this book opens, she's the leader of Denver's "pack" of werewolves, having ousted the abusive previous pack leaders, and she's ready to get married to her former lawyer, Ben O'Farrell, who has been turned to a werewolf himself (not by Kitty). They decide to run off to Las Vegas to get married -- so as to avoid the hassle of putting together a big wedding -- and then Kitty's producer hits on the idea of a one-off TV version of her show, to be filmed in one of the Vegas hotel auditoriums. Plus Ben has realized his were-senses give him an edge at the poker table, and he has an itch to play in a big tournament.

Once in Vegas, besides getting ready for the wedding, and besides winning at Poker and putting on a TV show, Kitty and Ben investigate the local scene. This includes the surprising shallow vampire Master of Las Vegas, Dominic. Also there is a magician whose tricks appear possibly to be real magic, not just illusion. And there is a tiger/leopard show at one hotel in which, Kitty quickly figures out, the animals in the act are actually weres. Moreover, there don't seem to be any wereWOLVES at all in town. 

It's a short, fast-moving novel. Perhaps kind of a side-branch in the series as a whole. It's a good solid read, with an exciting and scary climax. And a slingshot to the next book ... which is as I said due in quick succession, in March.

Kitty and the Silver Bullet

I've also had lots of fun reading Carrie Vaughn's series about Kitty Norville, late night DJ and also werewolf. The books so far have introduced Kitty and her condition, and have also revealed that there are lots of magical beings out there -- werefolk of many types, vampires, skinwalkers, and more. Kitty has become a celebrity, and the world has become aware of the other humans among them.

In this latest volume Kitty is back in her hometown, Denver. As things open she has a miscarriage, and learns that a nasty side effect of being a werewolf is that you can't carry a child to term. Even more pressingly, her mother has been diagnosed with cancer -- and she isn't interested in Kitty's idea for a cure -- turning her mother into a werewolf. In the wider world, there is a serious threat to the stability of the paranormal folk in Denver -- the ruling vampire is under challenge, and Kitty's former pack leader, who she hates, has been embroiled in vampire politics. Kitty also is pressured to get involved, which is the last thing she wants ... but of course she can't stay out.

It's nice work -- a fairly typical entry in a template series, advancing the overall plot arc nicely while also setting up and resolving a single-book plot quite well. These remain good fun books.

Kitty Raises Hell

It's been a while since I read Kitty Raises Hell, and I don't have much to say about it. This came hard on the heels of the previous Kitty novel, in which she went to Vegas and got involved with some scary were-tigers and a really scary vampire. Now she's back in Denver, but the enemies she made in Vegas are still after her, and they seem to have sent a supernatural creature to harass her and her friends.

In the process of figuring out what's up with the curse, Kitty gets involved with the crew of a TV show that investigates supernatural stuff like haunted houses. The crew members are a mix of hardcore skeptics and people who think there's something to all this weird stuff, and over time Kitty wins them over somewhat. She also deals with a vampire from out of town who has a possibly interesting offer ... It's enjoyable as all these books have been, indeed I'd rate it one of the better entries in the series, though the basic review has to be: "If you are reading these books, of course keep reading them. If not, try the first one and see if they work for you." (Though probably any of the books can be read standalone with enjoyment.)

Three Recent Black Gate Posts: on Idris Seabright, Forrest Leo, and Samuel R. Delany

 I publish essays fairly often at Black Gate, on various subjects. Recently I've begun a series trying to take particularly close looks at good or interesting stories, with the intent of discussing how and why they work. I'm not sure I do a great job showing HOW they work, but I hope at least I do a decent job looking more closely at the stories than I can in my typical Locus reviews.

So I thought it would make sense to tell readers of my blog about these essays, and indeed link to them. Most recently I published a piece on three quite short stories by Margaret St. Clair, writing as "Idris Seabright". Because these stories are so short it's hard to go into as much detail on them, but I think St. Clair is a writer who deserves more attention, and I think many of her "Seabright" stories are especially delightful, and strange.

Alien Eggs, a Diligent Salesman, and a Robot Psychiatrist: Three Stories by Idris Seabright

My previous piece was on a great novella by one of the very greatest SF writers, Samuel R. Delany: "The Star Pit". 

An Evocation of the Science Fiction Dream of Exploration: “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany

And while I'm here, I may as well mention a more conventional review I recently did of a delightful 2016 novel, The Gentleman, by Forrest Leo, that wasn't much noticed by SF readers:

Recent Treasure: The Gentleman by Forrest Leo

Birthday Review: Stories of Allen Steele

 Birthday Review: Stories of Allen M. Steele

Today is Allen Steele's birthday. I've read a good many of Steele's novels and shorter work over the past few decades, generally with enjoyment though not rapture: Steele is a very traditional SF writer, reworking fairly familiar tropes. But he does so effectively, and if his stories seem a bit old hat that do entertain. (Allen lived not far from me, in the St. Louis area, for a while but I never met him them -- he's moved back east and I did meet him at a couple of Boskones.)

Here's a set of my reviews of his work from my Locus column:

Locus, February 2002

The cover story for Feburary's Asimov's is the latest of Allen M. Steele's "Coyote" tales, a series about the successful hijacking of a colonization starship to the planet called Coyote, and the subsequent struggles to establish a colony.  These stories are truly old-fashioned in some central assumptions: the habitability of Coyote is blithely accepted,  and there is little concern for disrupting an alien ecology. Somewhat old-fashioned, too, is the straightforward conflict resolution nature of the stories -- the conflicts often arising from the rather black and white division of the original colonists into heroic freedom-loving hijackers, and militaristic authoritarian loyalists.  So my reading of these pieces is colored by a certain lack of belief in the basic situation -- but getting past that, they have been a reliably entertaining several stories.  This latest is "Across the Eastern Divide": several teenagers, bored with life in the colony, illegally take a couple of canoes and some supplies and venture on a dangerous journey downriver, across the Eastern Divide, to the Equatorial River. The trip forces the illicitly pregnant narrator to confront her relationships with her baby's father, with another boy, and with her adoptive mother. The trip also forces all the participants into much greater danger than they had anticipated.  There is nothing much new or special here, but it is an enjoyable adventure story.

Locus, December 2002

Allen Steele continues his Coyote series with "Glorious Destiny". Steele is an effective adventure writer, fun to read, and this story doesn't disappoint. The struggling but apparently succeeding colony on the world Coyote now faces a new crisis – the arrival of another spaceship from Earth. The exact nature of the crisis, and Steele's solution, are a bit unexpected and nicely handled. This isn't a classic, but it is fast-moving and exciting. 

Locus, August 2003

Allen M. Steele's latest Coyote story is "Benjamin the Unbeliever" (Asimov's, August), about a religious cult centered around a surgically altered man. They come to Coyote, and the title character, looking for a job and attracted to a cute young woman in the cult, helps them out. He ends up guiding them on a dangerous journey into the unexplored wilderness, with tragic results. Steele tells a good story as always, though this isn't one of the best Coyote pieces.

Locus, April 2007

I’ll also mention the two novellas in the April-May Asimov's, both by familiar names, both pretty good. Allen Steele’s “The River Horses” is a Coyote story, in which Marie Montero and Lars Thompson, heroes of the revolution who have not adjusted well to peacetime life, are sent into exile to, in the Heinlein story model terms, “learn better”. The savant Manuel Castro accompanies them – for reasons of his own that we soon guess. The story has a familiar shape, and nowhere does it surprise, but it is well-executed and exciting.

Locus, September 2010

At the October Analog, I enjoyed Allen M. Steele’s “The Great Galactic Ghoul”. This fits a familiar Analog form: it’s a tale of asteroid mining, a disaster, and a rescue effort. What lifts it above the ordinary is its matter of fact, almost journalistic, telling, and its bleakly honest resolution to the mystery of the disaster (along with a sort of metastory of war and politics lingering in the background).

Locus, November 2014

Another enjoyable read that comes a bit short of full satisfaction is Allen M. Steele's “The Prodigal Son” (Asimov's, October-November), a sequel to his earlier “The Legion of Tomorrow”, about a group of SF professionals who set up a foundation to develop a starship. Here the disaffected great-great-grandson of the SF writer involved is sent to the island in the Caribbean where the starship parts are being built. The rather predictable plot has his cynicism overcome by a combination of satisfaction in his work for the first time in his life, along with of course the love of a good woman … so, it's a bit on the hackneyed side but it's well-executed and enjoyable reading anyway.

Locus, January 2015

Allen Steele continues his series of stories about an SF writer's legacy in “The Long Wait” (Asimov's, January), now revealed as the penultimate chapter of (as was already clear) an episodic novel. This is told by the daughter of the lead couple in the previous story. Her life is significantly devoted, not entirely by her will, to monitoring the progress of the starship launched in the previous story, while things fall apart at home, both locally (her mother never really recovers from the events of the previous story, and her father becomes an alcoholic) and globally (the Earth is threatened by an asteroid.) This is another story that treads quite familiar ground for SF readers, but it does so expertly: it never surprises, but it's a solid enjoyable read.

Locus, June 2015

“The Children of Gal” is the final installment of Allen Steele’s forthcoming Arkwright, which will be an expanded version of four Asimov’s stories which have followed the story of the building and then journey of Earth’s first starship. Here we see the state of the colonies established on Eos, in particular one isolated city which has established a somewhat repressive religion after a weather-related catastrophe. Sanjay is a young man whose mother has been banished for heresy, for claiming to see lights in the sky near Gal, their god. The arc of the story is easily enough guessed: Sanjay will eventually find a way to solve the mystery of the lights, and learn the true nature of Gal and his world. None of this surprises, but Steele handles the familiar material expertly, ringing a couple of nice changes on it, and the story is a good read throughout. 

Locus, December 2019

I find that in the last 2019 issue of Asimov’s I enjoyed several stories by, well, men of roughly my age, let’s just say. Allen Steele’s latest tale of the human settlement on the planet Tawcety, and their fraught relationship with the doglike rulers of the planet is “Escape from Sanctuary”. Crowe and his young friend Philip are in jail … but before long they’re freed, and soon after are in the hands of an outlaw gang, looking for a way to reunite Philip with his wife – which may end up taking them off Sanctuary, the only place humans are allowed. Fun and fast-moving adventure. 

Birthday Review: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu

 Charles Yu turns 45 today. His second novel, Interior Chinatown, just won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Much of his earlier work, including many short stories and his first novel, is SF, or SF-adjacent. (I reprinted one of those stories, "Standard Loneliness Package", in my 2011 Best of the Year volume.)

For his birthday, here's a review I did for SF Site of his first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

Charles Yu is a young writer whose first book, the story collection Third Class Superhero, gained a lot of praise in literary circles. But he's one also a guy who grew up reading Isaac Asimov. He has professed admiration for the likes of Richard Powers, who writes literary novels -- but also sometimes SF, and almost always scientifically-engaged work. So, what is How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe? Actually, that's an interesting question.

On the face of it, why doubt the SFnality of the book? The story concerns a 30ish guy named Charles Yu, who is a "certified network technician" working as an "approved independent affiliate for Time Warner Time". This means he fixes time machines. The story also concerns time loops and paradoxes and parallel universes. Pure SF, right? And indeed, so it is, at that level. But what is the novel really about? It's about a somewhat drifting young man, who misses the father who left years ago, and who occasionally visits his lonely mother, and who has never met the right woman to marry, and who is stuck in a dead-end job. Pure mainstream, right?

At bottom, such definitional questions don't matter very much. What Yu is doing, simply enough, is using some SFnal tropes in support of purely mainstream aims. That does affect the audience, of course. The novel isn't really interested in the mechanics of time travel, nor in a fully plausible future. Nor should it be. It's interested in the main character, and in his mother, and in his time machine's operating system (look, SFnal tropes again!) who has the personality of a sweet woman he's never really noticed while mooning over the girl he never married. And most of all, it's interested in Charles Yu's relationship with his father, an immigrant to the US, who struggled for years in his garage to invent a time machine and make something of himself. And who disappeared after his invention failed and someone else beat him to it.

But all that said, the novel isn't just another boring mainstream book about a guy trying to understand his father*. The SFnal furniture really does make things work. We know from the start that everything turns on a time loop engendered by Charles Yu killing his future self, and on the paradox that the book we are reading is a book he could only write by reading the book his dying future self gave him. Charles' mother is stuck in a time loop herself, reliving one of her few happy moments, or so Charles believes. And the entire "Minor Universe" in which the action takes place is a satirically altered version of our world -- or perhaps it is somehow our world? -- a minor universe slightly damaged in construction. The SFnal tropes, then, are not interesting as Science Fiction, per se. We don't care that this novel isn't in any serious way about the possibility of time travel. But the tropes work to help tell the story, and to make serious points about the central characters, and satirical points about the "real world." And that's as good a use as any.

I haven't said a whole lot about the plot of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and I don't think I have to. The book works not because of plot but because of voice, character, and a humorous but bittersweet attitude. It's not an earthshakingly brilliant book, but it's a very enjoyable first novel, from a writer with real chops.

(*Let's take it as read, shall we, that there are plenty of wonderful, not boring, mainstream books about a guy trying to understand his father.)