Words are inadequate

Megan Lindholm, Wizard of the Pigeons

I'd been hearing about this book ever since I picked up Lindholm's early-nineties collaboration with Steven Brust. For whatever reason I never sought it out, even when I was reading a lot of Robin Hobb (Lindholm's alter ego) for a few years. Then a fancy 35th Anniversary Edition turned up at the Subterranean Press offices and I was in a Mood and I said "sure, why not."

I can't come up with a pithy plot summary that doesn't overly trivialise the book. Magic and homelessness and mid-eighties Seattle that's archaeologically recognisable to me from glimpses twenty or thirty years on, depression and PTSD and loss and finding oneself.

This hits me like nothing so much as Bone Dance by Emma Bull. They're next to nothing alike except in being stories of damaged people healing and growing, but because of that they have a similar impact on me.

The titular Wizard is a Vietnam veteran, sent off too young to kill then brought back and expected to live. He's facing a demon that a literal-minded fantasy reader knows is real and an alert magical-realism reader recognises as an externalization of his inner torment. (Both are right, which is nice.) He's done awful things, and had awful things done to him, and knows he's capable of things still more awful. He sets strict limitations and impossible strictures on himself, so that when he fails or falls it's all his own fault. But he's loved, and cared for, and in the end that's... enough, even if it's still tragic.

I wish I'd found this at the Book Rack in Twinbrook Center when I was devouring used paperbacks in high school. I'd love to know what teenaged Tucker would have made of it in conjunction with The Things They Carried, and like with Bone Dance it'd be fascinating to reread with deeper comprehension and recognition.

But I get it now, and that's ... enough. And not even tragic, it'll be there for me to reread.

John M. Ford, Growing Up Weightless

Growing Up Weightless is a damnably opaque book, even for Ford. On the surface it's the story of Matt, a kid on a Lunar colony who wants to go to space; he and his role-playing friends sneak off for a week-long train trip, and at the end of it he unexpectedly, almost accidentally, achieves his desire. And behind and underneath that... I have read the book maybe a half dozen times now and I am not sure I could explain the "plot," which I think revolves around Luna's push for self-sufficiency and the Vaccuum Corporation of Earth's attempts to exert control. (I believe that at one point Mike said something like "No one in Weightless knows all of what's going on. At the end of the book Albin constructs a narrative of events, that's plausible from his perspective.")

And the last twenty pages still make me cry every damned time. I suspect that's as simple as seeing Matt get the freedom he so badly wants, and how that affects his (supportive but hurt) family and (wildly varied) friends. It's a Me Thing, is I guess what I'm saying.

I mentally file Weightless as a companion piece with The Last Hot Time, which is only right in that they're both about growing up (different angles on it, though). I think it's really that they both invoke Orwell at the end, almost in passing: "The object of power is power, and the object of torture is torture."

I don't love Growing Up Weightless. I like the well-thought-out worldbuilding (except for the overly compressed timescale), I like the depictions of role-playing and of one-sixth-gravity theatre. I'm happy to spend time with the characters, and to keep trying to tease out the "plot." But I reread Weightless for catharsis. It's a personal book for me, and I expect most people to say "huh" or "that was neat" and be done with it. I'm okay with that.

Elizabeth Bear, Dust (or Pinion)
Chill (or Sanction)
Grail (or Cleave)

I'm torn. The author's preferred titles have lovely opposing dual meanings, but the published titles are more evocative for me. Well, Dust is, anyway. And as a bonus, there are the lovely chapter headings with quotes from, among other sources, Conrad Aiken's lengthy modernist poem "The House of Dust." Oh well. Onward.

The Jacob's Ladder is a generation ship, launched around seven hundred years ago. Five hundred years ago, a series of disasters marooned the ship around an unstable star, and split the ship's governing intelligence into several separate parts. Now the star is threatening to go nova, and our heroes have to get the ship moving again, and find a place to make landfall before the ship completely falls apart.

Dust especially reads like a variant Amber Diceless campaign: the (essentially) royal family are, thanks to nanotech, long-lived, brilliant, just plain superior to normal humans ('Means', in another example of words with multiple relevant meanings), and rightfully distrustful of each other. Hence they spend a lot of time scheming and plotting and maneuvering around. This is not exactly a criticism: I love Amber Diceless, I especially love the later game Lords of Gossamer and Shadow, and I really enjoyed watching the various plots unfold, from the perspectives of characters who don't have quite all the information. It doesn't, however, make for a wholly satisfying read. "Oh, yes, I suppose character X was behind all this. We'll send people to arrest them." And, as in Amber, the gigantic cast of characters means that most of them end up feeling a bit shallow. I wanted to spend more time with most of them, to get to know them beyond just the image they put up.

Chill's big denouement felt a bit weak: not the event itself, the battle at and with the Leviathan that the long-dead crew imprisoned, but the reason behind it all. And Grail... the contact with the unexpected inhabitants of the planet they're heading for is handled so well on a character and dialogue level, and then the conflict is resolved by an almost literal deus ex machina.

Don't read these for the coherent plot, is I guess what I'm saying. Read them for the atmosphere and the characters and the journey. For Mallory the necromancer/gardener and the grove of fruit trees with dead people's memories, for the sentient carnivorous plants and Benedick's animate toolkit. For Perceval's wings, and Rien's bravery, and the Corwinesque Prince Tristen and solid practical Chief Engineer Caitlin.

Delightful, if unsatisfying. Recommended.

The Great Big Dragaera Reread, part 6

If I were really serious about this, I'd do an appendix that included the canonically non-canonical "A Dream of Passion" (see part 1), the hilariously terrible Jhereg graphic novel, the non-excerpt "Klava with Honey" (see part 5), and the not-by-Brust choose-your-own-adventure-book Dzurlord which is mostly interesting because Brust's introduction explicitly states Dragaera is modeled on Europe. However, my comic books and paperbacks are all in boxes, so you get what you get.

( Desecrator, Tiassa (long), Hawk )

The Great Big Dragaera Reread, part 4

I draw a mental line straight through Issola. You'd think that divide would be more reasonably put between Orca and Dragon, when the Vlad books got picked up by Tor, but no. In my head Dragon is the last of the Ace books and Dzur is the first of the Tor books, or something. I blame [SPOILER].

Also, I appreciate that Viscount is at least up-front about being composed of bound book-fragments. This does make writing about each individual volume both a) difficult and b) useless. However.

( Issola, Paths, Lord, Sethra )

The Great Big Dragaera Reread, part 2

Aha, the Ace collected editions do have the Cycle poem, just at the beginning before even the title page.

I miss the original covers. Next time I'm reading my mass-market paperbacks.

(I am aware that I am not really posting, and am in fact engaging in some serious escapism. I'm overcommitted and somewhat burnt out right now, but I don't think I'm depressed.)

( Palace, Taltos, Phoenix, Phoenix Guards )

Ken MacLeod, The Restoration Game

I've read two novels by Jon Courtenay Grimwood: Stamping Butterflies and, um, End Of The World Blues. I remember very little about Stamping Butterflies except that I enjoyed the writing and that at the end it pulled the "universe reset" / "erase the fact that the story occurred" trick, which (it turns out) really, really irritates me. End Of The World Blues didn't do that; instead, it set up an intriguing premise and then used that premise mostly to illuminate a single character's life and growth in the way that more literary novels often do.

Verdict: Grimwood writes well and succeeds admirably in what he sets out to do, and that goal does not line up at all with what I want out of a book. To quote James Nicoll, I don't mind hidden depths but I insist that there be a surface. Or, in this case, that the surface be integral to the story that's being told.

I mention Grimwood because The Restoration Game does something similar to those two books, but it works for me. I think.

This is not a spoiler: the opening scene of the novel involves space-cops discovering that some jerk has set up a computer running a simulation of a universe and all the life in it, including the sentient life. Said sentient life are scientifically advanced enough to start bumping up against the limits of the universe's physics engine. Creating such a simulation is a horrific crime against those sentients-- but the space cops may have an idea of how to fix things. And then much of the rest of the novel is a contemporaryish (set in 2008, written in 2010) spy thriller revolving around something strange that's going on near the border of Russia and Georgia.

I like spy thrillers, so I was predisposed to like this... but I also like weird worldhopping near-future cyberpunk, and End Of The World Blues left me cold. That said, Restoration Game wisely doesn't try to do anything clever with its frame story except use it as a) the Macguffin and b) closure. It's a spy thriller that peters out to a weirdly philosophical resolution. It's not even deus ex machina (dea in machina, rather, the goddess entering into the machine) because nothing gets solved by the arrival of God, they just talk for awhile. It's just ... what it is.

It helps, I think, that Restoration Game explicitly acknowledges its setup from the start. You know, unless you aren't paying any attention at all, that the world is "just" a simulation, though that doesn't make it any less real to anyone involved. It doesn't come as a surprise when the curtain gets tugged away and then pulled down altogether. It feels more like a natural conclusion. Everything drawn together.

I've been chewing on the question of whether I liked it for the past three days. I think that's a good sign.

Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death

I read Okorafor's Zahra the Windseeker a few months ago and thought it was a deeply original and imaginative YA / middle-grade novel, with a plot that didn't hold up at all. Who Fears Death is her first adult book. It maintains the originality and tones down the imagination a bit, and has a plot that hangs together pretty well too. It's that peculiar breed of fantasy that's set on what might be a future Earth, with magic and advanced tech coexisting more or less peacefully.

It's also about rape, and race, and rage, and growing up and learning who you are. I am really not sure what else to say about this: it's like nothing else I've read. Recommended. (It's also got a callback to Zahra the Windseeker, for good measure.)

---

Nancy Kress, Steal Across the Sky

Near-future SF. In the first half aliens arrive and tell us that ten thousand years ago they picked up some number of humans and dropped them on other planets as an experiment. Now they want to atone for experimenting on us, so they take a handful of human visitors to the other planets and drop them there to figure out what it is the aliens are atoning for. This is kind of a bombshell revelation, and the second half of the book is humanity dealing with that revelation.

Solid characters; fascinating alien cultures; questionable science; shaky post-revelation plot. Interesting, but more interesting than good.

---

Emma Bull, Falcon

Falcon reads like two short books that happen to have been published under the same cover.

The first book follows Dominic 'Niki' Glyndwyr-Jones, wastrel youngest son of the ruling dynasty on a colony founded by the Welsh, as his planet's economy collapses and turns into a police state. Niki develops a social conscience, starts sneaking out at night to help the resistance, uncovers a far-reaching plot to destabilise his planet's government, and barely escapes offworld with his life.

The second book picks up some years later. It's a sequel to the first so far as it has some of the same characters and explains a few of the mysteries left behind in the wake of Niki's flight. Niki Falcon is now an experimental pilot, the last of his program. He takes on a contract to a planet that's in some jeopardy, and political hijinks ensue. Ultimately he unravels the plot and does a bit of growing up.

The trouble with these books is that they're both so thin. There's just enough worldbuilding and secondary character development to carry the story, but not (quite) enough for the emotional payoff. I wanted more: more of Niki's relations with his family, more of what the resistance is doing, maybe more of the other gestalt pilots (though, maybe not). There are bits that I remember as being deeply affecting: Spin's ship, Laura's last hurrah. Most of that effect is from memory, and from how it resonates for the rest of the book. It deserves more impact in the moment.

Which is not to say that Falcon is a bad book: far from it. I think I read it because I didn't want to reread Growing Up Weightless yet again, and it served well enough. But I wanted it to be so much more.

Leah Bobet, Above

I didn't really know what to expect from Above going into it. That may be the best way to go in, honestly. So: Above is a contemporary YA urban fantasy that is, to quote the author, "about complicated, tangled, late-stage Growing Up. And people with crab claws. And living shadow-creatures. And a girl who turns into a honeybee, and a boy who grew up underground." And if that interests you at all then you should read it. Now.

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