Book Review: The Wall by John Lanchester

The Wall by John Lanchester
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first heard part of this book abridged on BBC R4 and only recently managed to sit down and start it in earnest. Dystopian fiction, a world after what is only known as The Change, after which sea levels have risen dramatically and Britain was built a defensive perimeter Wall round all its shoreline to keep out the Others. Lanchester creates well his bleak world where people man the wall as sentries for years at a time,where the Others try to scale it, those who succeed are chipped and put to work as Help, those that don't die, the sentries on duty when there is a breach are sentenced and put to sea. Kavanagh is our narrator as he begins his two year stint on the Wall.
This an addictive read, with good world building and a steadily building up storyline. The compelling book was longlisted for the 2019 Booker and deservedly so.

Book Review: This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I found this a challenging book to get into but by then end felt it might deserve a reread.
It is an unusual story, scifi, speculating a world of warring fractions each trying to control the time line to ensure their supremacy. But the book is no space opera, instead an intimate story of love told in epistolary form between two opposing agent provocateurs, as they navigate the time threads. 

I can see why it won awards, but for me it lacked something mais je ne sais quoi . 

Footnote: According to Wikepedia (2023_10_18)

It won BSFA Award for Best Shorter Fiction,
Nebula Award for Best Novella of 2019,
2020 Locus Award for Best Novella,
2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella,
2020 Prix Aurora Award for short fiction,
and was a finalist for the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award in the Novella category
a finalist for the inaugural Ray Bradbury Award for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction at the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes,
a finalist for the 2019 Kitschies in the Novel category,
and second place in the 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

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Book Review: Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author has created a world that is immediately recognizably set in history yet is has a fantastical thread running through it. It feels a bit like a modern day Harry Potter meets His Dark Materials with its Institute of Translators in Oxford, its magical multilingual runes written on silver to power a steampunk world, all overlaid with imperial colonialism, systemic racism and exploitation overtones of the East India Company's ruthless commerce. An author to watch and read more of.

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Book Review: Interior Chinatown by Charles Wu

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars 

 "All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages....."
                                from As You Like It by William Shakespeare

I think this completely sums up this book. Reading Charles Yu highly experimental fiction mean you step into a world where everyone is an actor and the world itself is the production set. Roles are based on race, age and gender. Everyone is limited Willis Wu dreams of eventually progressing from Generic Asian Guy to Kung Fu Guy. Written as a script, laid out as such on the page this is a novel novel. This is a satirical sociopolitical commentary on the effects of the various political Acts restricting Asians in America through the 1800 to recent times. Well worth a read, it won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction

Book Review: The Anomaly By Hervé Le Tellier

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was alerted to this book by a member of my online bookgroup who has similar reading tastes to myself. Not disappointed. 

It might be difficult to review this French book sensation without allowing any future reader to experience the organic reveals Tellier does so well. Victor writes a book entitled The Anomaly. Victor writes a book which bears witness to the anomaly. His editor says it is too complicated and he narrows his suite of characters down to eleven. Victor senses that even eleven is too many. The reader is reading a book called The Anomaly. It takes time to introduce so many characters and Tellier keeps the reader going as she begins to realise they all have one experience in common. How the outcome of this experience is managed, by them and others forms the second half of the book.
I loved the quips at Macron, and the unamed US President who would have stalled Twitter if the same experience happened on Air Force One! If on a Winter's Night....Circularity spirals.

A captivating read. Great ending. My advice is do not read book reviews of this book before you finish it.

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Book Review: Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang

Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have dipped into Ted Chiang's science fiction stories before and today I read the title story ( more a novella really) from his collection Stories of Your Life and Others. I loved it. It is the story from which the move Arrival is made https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/, directed by Denis Villeneuve who has just done the new Dune movie. Both movies impressed me and made me think about reading the originating works. The novella was a Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novella (http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-his...) and a Nebula Award for Best Novella Winner (https://nebulas.sfwa.org/award-year/1...) in 1999, and the collections won Locus Award for Best Collection in 2003 (https://www.sfadb.com/Locus_Awards_2003) .

Story of Your Life is about a linguist working to understand alien visitors, the Heptapods. Her coworker is a physicist and they eventually will have a child. The unravelling of the way the visitors think, their maths, their language is quite abstract in the movie from what I recall from seeing it when it came out, but in the story it is described in great detail, in great linguistic detail.

In the story Chiang creates a fantastic world view where, although remaining earthbound, the differences are explored by way of how language and writing is used to communicate. Whereas we see the world in sequential terms of cause and effect and our spoken and written languages are structured accordingly with variants on Subject Verb Object structure to reflect our sequential method of percieving the world and events. In contrast, the Heptapods parse their perceptions of things differently, working with a simultaneous mode of consciounessness, and their, to us highly complex, semasiographic writing system reflects this. They know the outcome before starting their sentence and language itself is a form of action where "saying equaled doing"

Interspersed with this linear recollection of the unravelling of their langauge, is the personal 'Story of Your Life' , namely the life of their child to which we are given insights. That story is told from, and finishes with, when he proposes that they make a baby, "the most important moment of our lives". Here time is distorted, with some of the child's life being told in the past, some in the future. That is a very clever way to illustrate what working with the Heptapods gives the linguist "ocassionally I have glimpses when Heptapod B truly reigns, and I experience past and future all at once; my consciousness becomes a half-century-long ember burning outside of time" At that moment of his proposal, she knows the destination, and she and we know that there will be ups and downs along the route, but she still says yes. Leaving us heart warmed and heart broken, wondering what we would do if we knew for certain the future?

In places it is not an easy story to read with all the linguists, but if the movie didn't make sense to you, try and persevere with the story, I think it really makes its case well.

Short Story Review: Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell

 

Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell

Audio online at LeVar Burton Reads Podcast
Text available at Diabolical Plots 

Read more about the author on his site  

This is a warm hearted short story about an empty house "just a family short of a home" and a young father and daughter in need of "somewhere to start fresh"

A couple of good lines struck me in the writing -
"He looks at the couple of ripples in the green floral wallpaper, with the expression of someone looking at his own armpit" and "The house cannot cry. There is just a little air in its pipes"

Short Story Review: The Walker by Izumi Suzuki, transl. by Daniel Joseph

The Walker by Izumi Suzuki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Test available online at https://granta.com/the-walker/

Izumi Suzuki was Japanese writer living between 1949 and 1986. The most informative account of her I found is from 2021 posting on Literary Hub (https://lithub.com/a-writer-from-the-...) from around the time her story collection Terminal Boredom: Stories appeared in English with stories translated by Polly Barton ( whose name I recognised from several other translation of modern Japanese writers), Sam Bett, David Boyd (who has written about translating her work https://hopscotchtranslation.com/2021... ), Aiko Masubuchi, Helen O’Horan and Daniel Joseph who is the translator of this story. That collection is all the has been translated thus far.

According to Granta, Daniel Joseph holds a Master's from Harvard in medieval Japanese Literature and who according to his Amazon's page he specializes in both modern and classical literature, science fiction, pop culture, music, and the avant-garde, and if this story is anything to go by that list may qualify for the addition of the term 'weird' ,

The Walker is a short 4 page story, set in some unknown time and place where a narrator seems to have been walking for ages and seems icompelled to continue to walk, except that she encounters a woman with food cart. ******SPOILER ALERT*** hungry and with no money she exchanges an item of jewellery for food. This seems a fantasy encounter, told quite realistically, but the final twist left so gobsmacked, my only though was 'How strangely weird!'

I've put Terminal Boredom: Stories on my To Be Read List 

 

Postscript: Daniel Joseph has also written about her on Art Review  in 2021 (https://artreview.com/how-izumi-suzuki-broke-science-fiction-boys-club )

Short Story Review: To Jump Is to Fall by Stephen Graham Jones, read by LeVar Burton

 

To Jump Is to Fall by Stephen Graham Jones

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another story from the marvellous LeVar Burton Reads Podcast. The story text is available online at https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fi...

For me this one had a slow start and took a bit of time to engage me. I was aware early on of the precarious position of the sky diving telepath upon his survival with the plan eing to get him to a hospital staffed by his employers people but the reason for the twist at the end I did not see coming as he considers his one jump for a golden payoff v his moral compass!

Short Story Review: The Uncurling of Samsara by Koji A. Dae

This short story is available to read and to listen to in the January 2022 Issue of Clarkesworld Magaine, https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/dae_01_22 

The author, new to me as so many of these CLarkesworld stories are,  has a website where many of her other short stories are listed there https://kojiadae.ink/published-elsewhere 

It is a story about grieving set on an generational ship making its way from to some brave new world.  The ship is called the Samsara,  the  Sanskrit word that means "world^", the concept of rebirth and "cyclicality of all life, matter, existence", a fundamental belief of most Indian religions, the cycle of death and rebirth  and rebirth, regeneration and recovery are themes in this story. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra )

Ever thought how food might be produced on such ships? One possibility lingers through this story. Gram and our narrator had been 'printing' food, trying to perfect recipes with the flavours, textures and tastes of old. But Gram has died and the narrator still in training for this role is left bereft and cannot bring herself to eat. We follow the  narrator through the month following Gram's funeral as she struggles to come to terms with her loss. On Day 10 facing the prospect of Potato stew in the canteen she considers that no one on the ship has ever eaten Earth potatoes so why do they have to copy them, to copy all their shortcomings - a bit like what I think about Vegan meat! 

Gram had been working on trying to perfect Cherry Pie, her famously good flaky pastry works but cherries are an altogether different problem, one she had yet to conquor. SPOILER ALERT  Our narrator's inability to eat eventually leads to her collapse and recovery and with it her novel solution to the cherry problem. Thus life goes on and it is all cherry pie! 

At the Creative Writing Group I attend we are always saying "forget the last line" as folk often overwrite it, but here the best  line of the story is undoubtedly its final one "Real cherries may not have had fat, but we're drifting curled un space, playing fugues on memories of Earth" Lovely.

Shoart Story Review: Different People by Timothy Mudie

Different People by Timothy Mudie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I listened to this on the LeVar Burton Reads Podcast https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Cl7..., and the originalstory is available online on LightSpeed Magazine https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fi...

 
This was the first piece I'd read by Timothy Mudie and was pleasantly surpised. It is a well constructed, well written storyline which flows along well. It is about the issues surrounding a relationship between a man and a woman who was his wife in another universe, becomes his wife in this one, and the person who is this wife in his universe. Actually it is a deft way of showing the questions never asked in relationships which might have made the difference to us understanding each other better, of considering how one's life could have been different and what it might be like to meet one's doppelgänger. 

Good story, worth a read/listen.

Short Story Review: 2043...A Merman I Should Turn to Be by Nisi Shawl

2043...A Merman I Should Turn to Be by Nisi Shawl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Book 3 of the Amazon Black Stars series of short speculative fiction stories. Not my favourite of the 4 that I have read so far. I liked the way it created an underwater city to which escaping landers were fleeing, paying for time limited, transit corridor opening licenses through hostile surrounding territory - a bit like a cross between the "40 acres and a mule"  reparations promise to freed slaves and the Underground Railroad. On the other hand I felt it rushed in some parts, the premis requiring a longer piece to do it justice.

Short Story Review: These Alien Skies by C.T. Rwizi

These Alien Skies by C.T. Rwizi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So many layers packed into a short story! These Alien Skies is Book 4 in the Amazon Series Black Stars.Msizi and Tariro are copiloting a starship through the first ever wormhole when it explodes leaving them with no way home. The injured Msizi is aided back to health by the inhabitants of an alien planet, migrants themselves and alien original residents. The story has themes of love and loss, survival, history, colonisation and diaspora, alien tech and communication issues. I liked the way the writer used the colonisation of Africa by Europeans in the protagonist and migrants own histories, his appropriate use of real African languages, Swahili and Dholuo in the story, although with today's onscreen translation it was a bit strange to have their words written in English. Neat ending bring all three groups together.

Short Story Review: Clap Back by Nalo Hopkinson

Clap Back by Nalo Hopkinson
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This is the second book I have read in the Black Stars series. Nalo Hopkinson is a new author to me, she has lots of short stories published in the likes of Uncanny and Strange Horizons ezines .
I was impressed by this speculative fiction story about nanites on wearables particularly the first half. Will be reading more of her work

Book and AudioBook Review: The Power by Naomi Alderman, narrated by Adjoa Andoh

The Power by Naomi Alderman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

First of all probably the best narration ever by my favourite female narrator, Adjoa Andoh, it permits her full vent to her extensive range of voices and accents, English, American, Nigerian, Indian, young, old, northern, southern, Cockney etc. Just brilliant! She brings real texture, changes in speed, pitch, emotion and vocalisation to this work. 5* narration.

The book inverts the world. Bookended by the correspondence surrounding the draft of a book by a male author. The story in his book being the core, interspersed with factual pieces from history. It depicts a world where, apparently suddenly, all girls have the power to release electricity from their fingertips, and soon all women, but only women and post puberty girls. As with all speculative fiction you have to go with the premis and here it will take you on an incredible journey alongwith its princple characters - Allie, an abused American foster child who reivents herself as a faith leader building a commmunity away from men, Roxy, streetwise teenage daughter of a London gangster, Tunde a young Nigerian journalist who reports on this pehnomenon witnessing how it shifts the society's balance worldwide, and middle aged Margot, an on the rise American politican.

And it does change the world. From overturning regimes in Saudi Arabia, to freeing women from trafficking, but mainly it inverts everything as regards gender, just as Malorie Blackman's Noughts & Crosses up-ended race in her thought provoking look at prejudice, so Alderman up ends gender in an equally thought provoking manner.

In essence what this book is about is Power, what it is and how it is wielded. And as such it is not for the faint hearted - think of all the situations where power exists today from the writing of history, waging war, abuse of individuals, groups and peoples, exploitation etc, the power to cover up, the power to spread false news, the power to manipulate etc.

The book I felt started well, took a little bit of time to give us all the characers and start to bring them and itself together, and then it got The Power and thundered all fully charged. Some of the scences are horrific, but at the same time nothing that does not happen. This book does what all great speculative fiction should do, pose pretty soul searching, fundamental socio=political questions about the way we live and why. Up there with the best. The 1984 for 21st century.

Short Story Review: Impatient Griselda by Margaret Atwood

Impatient Griselda by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Only from the pen of Atwood!! She is such a wicked lady :) disturbing the folkloric Griselda tale used in the original Decameron and playing to the current global pandemic's feelings of alienation. The narrator's octupus-like alien on a intergalactical-crises aid mission struggles to communicate with the native bi-ped population, has overtones of third world aid condescension, faces all the linguistic and cultural issues of understanding the stories of the Other and although they are trying their best can't wait to get home and back to a 'normal' life. Brilliant. 

Available online

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Short Story Review: You Have Arrived at Your Destination by Amor Towles

You Have Arrived at Your Destination by Amor Towles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This story is part of Amazon's Forward Collection which according to its curator was devise as a collection of stories about pivotal technological moments. In this story Amor Towles as chosen the subject of designer babies.

***SPOILER ALERT ***Sam is a successfull, moneyed, mortgage free 45 year old who is visiting Vitek a fertility clinic with a difference, not only can you pick boy/girl, blue/brown eyes etc but you can influence the intelligence and temperament of you future child. His wife Annie has done a lot of the legwork and when he gets to the clinic he is presented with her three options. These are presented as three short video montages of what each child's live would be like.

The first projection, Daniel One has " from the day he was born, Daniel had a smile on his face"; Daniel Two "marches to the beat of his own drum" and for Daniel Three "everything came easy". These are shown to Sam in a 15 seat movie theatre by MT Owens of Vitek, who sees these as mini movies and talks about each life as if it were a three act play. Seeing these potential lives acted out makes Sam reflect on his own life and his marriage. He takes exception to MTs talk about classic "second-act setbacks" during which people come face to face with their own limitations and there being "no point in pushing our personalities uphill". This is made all the more personal and cutting when MT remarks that Annie is still in her second-act, but Sam is already in his third and has been there for 15 years already. This prompts Sam to leave the building.

He ends up in a down at heels bar on a bypassed side road off the highway, where things get a little tense as Sam gets very drunk in conversation with Beezer and the barkeep Nick. More about Sam's upbringing is revealed and about the history of Vitek which Beezer reckons is an offshot of the previous occupants of that building the defense contractor Raytheon "because genetics is the fuure of defense". Sam goes back to Vitek to retrieve his DNA "sample" and returns to his new friends in the bar.

This story flows along really well, Towles paints three different characters as the potential children, and wonderfully interspaces their screening with Sam's own reflections, his concerns about his own life, about Annie's, about his father's impact on his childhood. The character of MT is perfectly OTT salesman, and the seed of a conspiracy theory which is dropp in towards the end by Beezer leaves a bitter taste not just with Sam but leaves the reader with a sense of dread.
It is very well structured, well ended and well written. It is just the type of short story which makes a great movie. I loved it and couldn't fault it, hence the 5*

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Short Story Review: This World is Full of Monsters by Jeff VanderMeer

This World is Full of Monsters by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reading Jeff VanderMeer is like experience a surreal rollercoaster ride through a hallucinatory world of strange fleetings images drenched in nature and the unreal, perhaps a bit like a Salvador Dali painting where everything is familiar and unfaniliar at the same time. I keep reading more of his writing in a hope of figuring it and him out, I'm still trying.

All I can say about this story is at times I thought I caught onto what he was actually writing about and meaning and then it would slip from my grasp only to be replaced by something else to tackle. The story sees a man, a writer taken over by "a story creature" and I could stretch to interpreting this as what happens when a writer is struggling wiht his writing, becomes so into his emerging story that it takes over his life. The story creature sprouts and the narrator feels "some thing growing through me.....I was awash in dreams of chlorophyll and photosynthesis" and doesn't wake for a hundred years.

The narrator also encounters a "school-creature" and is "set loose as a history lesson". Then he encounters a "single celled creature" which acts as a life-presever in the ocean, but which is battered by the narrator as he struggles to disentangle himself from it.

He is given a brother by the story creature an dsees his life though the brother's eyes but when this brother dies he leaves "a residue that was an anti-story....(which) would grow and accumulate...until it was too late to do anything but turn to the left and change and change again" On reading that part I was thinking about 'false-news' especially when he writes "...more peope spread the anti-story until eventually it was the story not the anti-story and there had never been an anti-story at all, or any other story to rule the Earth".

His next embodiment is the "dead-shell creature" when the narrator feels he "was his own fish" experiencing what it is like "to be other than human" Shedding this body his final encounter is with the "story-sea" which ultimately disgorges the narrator into the cosmos where he tells of being "flung into the stratoshpere" as if from a "mighty trampoline", acheiveing "escape velocity" and being expulsed "through light and dark into dark and weightlessness....tumbling end ove end though vaccuum" as he and his fellow travllers were "dispersed farther and farther...headed to other worlds...to become story-creatures" There's a circulatory sensation about this part, it is almost like a rebirthing much like a 'bigbang' as particales are flung out to 'populate' worlds and indeed one does feel as sense of having read an epic and is filled with a sense of optimism at the end of the piece.

JeffVanderMeer is for me a very strange, yet very compelling, read.

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Book Review: The Black God's Drums by P Djèlí Clarke narrated by Channie Waites

The Black God's Drums by P. Djèlí Clark
 4*
Continuing my reading of this author's works.

This is set in an alternative history where the 18/19 century Haitain slave rebellion's reach was much greater impacting the whole Caribbean, but the US civil war continued and a free and independent New Orleans was created.

It is here that street kid "Creeper" comes into possession of some important and sellable information about the whereabouts of a kidnapped Haitian scientist who invented a new and terrible weapon "The Black God's Drums" and who is now in the hands of a smuggler who is making a deal to hand him over with Confederates.

Whereas in A Dead Djinn in Cairo and The Haunting of Tram Car 015 PDC interwove Arabic culture and folklore here he uses Yoruba dieties from Nigeria to infuse spirit into his female lead characters who carry the goddess Oya and Oshun's within them as per his dedication on the book's opening page "To those who survived the crossing, and who carried their Black gods with them". It is this melding of cultures that appeals to me in his work.

I loved the character of teenager Creeper, strong with the spirit of Oya the goddess of wind, streetwise, knows what she wants - to see the world. The information she uncoveres about the scientist offers her a means of becoming crew on the famous airship Midnight Robber whose captain is also endowed with the spirit of Oshun the goddess of water. How these two women save scientist, stop the use of the weapon and save the day for New Orleans and the world is a classic story but the scene where the goddesses come into action is well done and highly visual.

The audible version is read by a naarator called Channie Waites who does a great job making PDC's often weird sentance structures transform into a vibrant dialect and thus his characters become real and leap of the page with life, particular Creeper.

Just like in his Cairo works PDC creates a novel landscape in which to play out his story. Not great literature but another great piece of rollicking good storytelling.

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Book Review: The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P Djèlí Clarke

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm gobbbling up PDC's writings at the moment like they are a sweet tray of chocolates with cream to dip them in.

This is a novella length story set in his incredible fantastical steampunk , djinn filled world of an alternative 1912 Cairo. I love the blend of East and West, of detective drama and spirit world fantasy, of folklore and myth, "boilerplate eunuchs"and alternative sociopolitical histories.

In this story we meet more agents of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, Hamad Nasr a man trying to be a modern man, and his youthful rookie sidekick Onsi as they deal with the haunting of the title.

I love the way PDC brings related everyday things into this world - budget problems within the department, Suffragettes, the rookie reciting the legislation to everyone's boredom yet in the end his skills shine through and the older inspector warms to his new buddy, and the bug of detectives everywhere, paperwork.

Along with his short story A Dead Djinn in Cairo this is a tour de force in world building which I am so pleased it looks like he is going to continue with in A Master of Djinn set for release in 2021. PDC definitely has an eye for the ridiculous, the comic, and for telling a great story, a master of balance. I hope this world continues to grow. A rollicking read.

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