The Enemy Stars by Poul Anderson

Goodness knows, I don't expect enlightened gender politics out of my old science fiction. I often mention how women are treated, because I think it bears mentioning, but I am also able to enjoy these old pulpy stories where women are absent, virgins, or sexpots. I don't need every book to reflect my ideas of gender - although if I go too long without a woman I can relate to, I get understandably twitchy.

So when I picked up this book by Poul Anderson, I thought I knew what to expect. I mean, this was written in the 1950s, and I wasn't expecting much. It wasn't a problem that it didn't offer much, except for one thing....

I read the back cover and got a little excited when the last paragraph of the blurb read: "Here is an absorbingly exciting tale of the far future and of the men and women who take part in one of mankind's most thrilling adventures."  Now look, I know authors probably didn't write the blurbs, but this got my hopes up, and then the book pretty much crushed them by being exactly what I would have expected it to be if the blurb writer hadn't added those two fateful words: "and women."

So I'd like to give a little fuck you to the blurb writer, for making it sound like women will get to take part in "one of mankind's most thrilling adventures" when the only goddamn thing the woman involved gets to do is get married, stay on earth while her new husband goes out to explore the stars, sit around under the thumb of her patriarchal father-in-law, have a baby, and get fed up and go live somewhere else, and then heterosexually pair up with someone else (it is strongly suggested.) Seriously, marriage, patriarchy, and childbirth are far from a new frontier in adventures for women.

Once I figured out the blurb writer was talking out their ass, I mostly enjoyed the rest of the book. It didn't rock my world, but it's a solid science fiction Man vs. Nature story. I am less baffled by why it was nominated for a Hugo at the time it was posted than I was by Danger Planet. 

This particular story is set in a world where matter transporters work, but are expensive, limiting quick travel between worlds. Of course, to get anywhere in space, someone has to get there the long way to set up the matter transporter. But they get around this by having transporters on ships as well as worlds, so men (and it is all men) go out for duty on a spaceship, then matter transport back.

And while it looks like immigration out is freely done, it is almost impossible to go back to Earth for colonials, causing unrest out there, while Earth itself is highly competitive, and under the thumb of the Protectorate, which, in addition to being more restrictive for women in almost every way, also oversees a hierarchical class system masquerading as a meritocracy.

That's all background, but I think fairly necessary background, because the story itself is fairly slight. A rich man on Earth discovers that one of those starships with a transporter is about to pass very near a super-dense star - not quite a black hole, I don't think, but close? He manages to get the ship diverted to do some scientific investigation, taking along a crew of three other men (all men! No women! I'm bitter, blurber!)

When they get there, their initial investigations nearly wreck the ship, and destroy the "web" needed for the matter transporter and any communication with the rest of the settled human worlds. It's now a race against time, dwindling supplies, and human psychology to get all or some of them out alive. They're entirely cut off, so this is not an Apollo 13 tale. It's a tale of survival against all odds, by men pitting their intellects and bodies against an uncaring and hostile universe.

It's also just a little bit about the stagnation of the human race if we curb the efforts to intelligent multi-tasking men - there's a team of four, but there's still that feel that it is rugged individualism that saves the day, now and always.

While the women get to stay at home, told to make the tea, and have babies. Bah.

(To be fair, the book doesn't show this as a good thing, but it's not much examined beyond that.)

Tigerman by Nick Harkaway

I enjoyed Nick Harkaway's first book, The Gone-Away World, and really, really loved his second book, Angelmaker. Now I am caught up on all the novels he has written, having picked up Tigerman a while ago, and finally gotten around to reading it. (When I die in a book avalanche, no one will really be surprised.)

Having read it, I'd have to say that it's weirdly closer in feel to The Gone-Away World, and that Angelmaker is still my favourite of his books, but I did enjoy Tigerman quite a lot. It's a weird mix of colonial/post-colonial lassitude mixed with comic books, fatherhood, and international dirty dealing. If Gone-Away World was, in part, about how corporate structures were set up to mean that no one had to take blame for ethically suspect decisions, Tigerman is about how nations might exploit weak spots in international law to do their own dirty deeds.

It all revolves around a question of fatherhood - the last British consul (Lester Ferris) on a doomed island (Mancreu) has made friends with a young teenager, and given that the island is about to be evacuated and nuked, wants to try to adopt the boy when they have to leave. Mancreu is doomed because years of biochemical experiments have been breeding under the island near lava vents, evolving into something that terrifies the world governments, occasionally being released in Capital-C Clouds of gases that do unusual things, although not quite as unusual as the things in The Gone-Away World. The lead scientist on the island warns that nuking will not help the problem and may even exacerbate it, but nuking is a simple-sounding solution for governments that want to make this problem disappear.

Or do they? Given the uncertain state of the island, it's become a convenient parking spot for what has been dubbed The Black Fleet - ships doing shady things in an area that belongs under no national or international law, while different groups debate the fate of the island and islanders. It's convenient, and being convenient, is used. For drugs. For extraordinary rendition. For just about every unsavoury thing you think a government might want convenient deniability around.

Lester is a good man, a former army sergeant, sent to Mancreu to do nothing at all except hold the fort ceremonially. Certainly not to get involved. But when one of his friends on the island is killed right in front of him, urged on by the boy he wants to think of as a son, he dons the mask (and body armour) of Tigerman, to instill fear into the hearts of evil-doers and avenge his friend.

Most of the book is about Lester's desire to be a father to this child he has befriended. It's a dream he holds so closely he hasn't even asked if the boy has parents, because that would feel like rejection and break his heart. His emotions are so submerged under British army discipline that he takes the long way around to every aspect of this question.

Why isn't sonhood a world? Because that's really where the heart of this novel is. We're very clear on Lester's desire to be a father, but what the boy wants, his sonhood, if you will, is a much greater question. Relationships like that are by definition two-sided, and you cannot simply decide to be someone's father and have that be the first and last step. Which Lester knows, but won't act on, less scared of uncertainty than the potential certainty of hearing that the boy already has parents.

This book is less full of whimsy than Harkaway's two previous books, a little less weird, which is not the same as saying not weird at all. It's an entertaining read, and I enjoyed it, but Angelmaker is still my favourite of his books so far.

Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

After having read almost all the Miles Vorkosigan books, I finally managed to find a copy of one of the two about his parents, hidden away not under the author's section in my favourite used book store, but shelved after it, with the miscellaneous "B" SF/F authors who didn't merit their own names on the shelf. I'd never thought to look there before, foolishly assuming that all Lois McMaster Bujold's books would be under "Lois McMaster Bujold." It seemed like a logical assumption at the time.

No matter how it came to light, though, I found it, and was delighted. I have loved Cordelia in particular, as a minor character in Miles' stories, and so I was eager to sit down and read these early entries, these glimpses into how she became who she is.

I think that's why reading this was a bit disconcerting. Not bad, just slightly off-kilter. Cordelia as I've come to known her might emerge from the character I encountered here in Shards of Honor, but she's definitely not the same. It's hard to know yet, still not having read Barrayar as the last book needed to connect this bridge for me, if it's that the character evolves because of the plot to become the Cordelia I know, or if Lois McMaster Bujold gains a greater writerly sense of who she is over time.

After all these books, I know a Cordelia who is devastatingly incisive - not unkind, but so perceptive it's a little terrifying. She wields that knowledge wisely, but it's there all the time, and the light she shines on dark corners is turned on herself as well. She knows who she is and what she can do, and one of the things she can do is analyze people without illusion.

That's not Cordelia as she appears here, and I like the Cordelia I meet here, but she's not as strongly drawn as she will be, and having encountered her in reverse order, so to speak, I felt a bit at sea. Nonetheless, I enjoyed very much the first meeting of Aral and Cordelia, and the slow progression by which they became entangled.

Cordelia Naismith is part of a planetary survey when her base camp is attacked and massacred by Barrayaran soldiers. One of their own is left behind for dead, the victim of a mutiny. This, of course, is Miles' eventual father, Aral Vorkosigan. Cordelia and Aral must find a way to survive on a planet with a small visiting population, most of whom would be more than happy to kill either one of them.

We also get to see the two in space in various parts of a war between the Barrayaran Empire and Escobar, with Escobar getting Betan support. I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty. On a thematic level, this is, as the title suggests, about honour, and war, and pressing needs that may go above and beyond official loyalties, and situations that test loyalty to one thing when another unexpected factor enters the question. How do you maintain loyalties when they conflict?

My one moment of particularly weird dislocation was at the first introduction of Illyan. I've known him for so long now as the head of ImpSec that it was genuinely shocking to see him as a rookie out on a spaceship. That's another case where where he'll end up makes the earlier version strange to encounter, but I felt less incongruity with Illyan. The two versions are vastly different, but the trip from this to what he'll become feels more right than Cordelia's ever quite did.

So, now I guess I really need to find Barrayar, to see how she changes then, before Miles is born.

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Eva

While I was reading this book, I was swept along, absolutely enchanted. I wasn't sure where it was going, and it was entirely unlike anything I'd read before, and I was loving it. Now I'm done, and I'm perhaps a little perplexed about where we ended up, or what it all meant, but the journey was so enjoyable I would have a hard time regretting the ride. And perhaps the feeling like the meaning is a wisp of fog just out of reach fits very well with the book as a whole.

In the way that life has of handing you little synchronicities, I have just started working on learning a new Tarot deck, one that came my way when a coworker said that she'd had it for a while and would never use it, would I like it? I gave it a good home, and am now finally settling down to familiarize myself, in a long process that will take me months to a year before I feel anywhere near comfortable enough with it to read for others using that deck. The synchronicity comes in because it's the Arthurian Tarot, so I was reading The Buried Giant while learning that the Knight of Pentacles in this deck is Sir Bors, and the Emperor is, predictably, Arthur. Or last night, when the card that came out of the deck for me to think about was Stone Five, a card of a standing stone in a barren field during a blizzard, with no shelter and nowhere to hide from the elements that batter it.

What I'm getting at, in addition to my excitement at embarking on learning a new Tarot deck, is Arthuriana, and trying to interact with it in a way that is open to interpretation and movement of meaning, which I feel this process has in common with Ishiguro's work. The Buried Giant is set in post-Arthur Britain, with Briton and Saxons settlements side by side, and a mist over the land that shrouds memories and dulls disagreements, paralyzing and soothing at the same time.

This is the story of an old Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, who are unhappy in the community in which they live, cold and no longer allowed to have candles in their small dwelling. They resolve to walk to their son's village, which is, they're sure, not that far away. Most of their past has faded in the mist that surrounds the land, but nevertheless, they set out.

On the way, they  meet a Saxon warrior, a boy who his village believed to have been bitten by an ogre, a monastery with some very odd practices, and, oh yes, Sir Gawain. The warrior is there to kill the dragon whose breath covers the land and causes the amnesia, but Gawain claims that quest as his own.

In between moments of forgetfulness, vague hints of the shared past of Axl and Beatrice emerge, worries that they would not be as dear to each other with full memories as without, and this is a microcosm of the larger theme of the impact of forgetfulness on the world. Would it solve divisions of tribe and history? Would it take away more than it gives? Would people still be whole people without substantial parts of their memories?

What we see may not be warfare, but it's far from free from petty suspicion and even mob justice. The boy bitten by the ogre is almost killed by villagers who suspect that he may turn into an ogre himself. They are suspicious of strangers, but know not why.

What could be bad enough to want a cloud of forgetfulness to settle over the land? Ishiguro carefully does not say, but knowledge of the Arthur myth and several hints in the book lead in a certain direction. Look for the worst thing King Arthur is ever reputed to have done, and you have a place to start.

The question I'm left with is...is there more? I liked this book a whole lot, and yet I wonder if I missed something. Were Axl and Beatrice supposed to be larger figures from the Arthurian myth than is completely obvious? There's a reference to adultery, which leads me down one path, and a bit at the end about recognizing the boatman who is going to ferry them across the water to and island. I just don't feel like I know, and I'm not sure if I should know.

But I'm okay if I don't. This is strangely about memory collective and personal, about old age and love, about life coming to a close and what comes after, all in elegant prose that was delightful to drift through.

Unexpected Stories by Octavia Butler

A large part of the reason I picked up a particular Humble Bundle was because it included several Octavia Butler books, including the two Parables, one of which I'd read, and one of which I hadn't. I wasn't sure what Unexpected Stories would be, but my general theory is that if it's Butler, I'm in.

I guess I hadn't really been aware that Butler had written short fiction as well as novels, but it doesn't really surprise me. It did surprise me that these were two as-yet unpublished short stories, and I wondered if they were ones that were unpublished for a reason. Having read them, the first one is good, but shows some rough edges, while the second is much shorter, and a gut punch of a story. It's really great.

If you've read a bunch of Butler and are hungry for more, you'll probably want to read these. I'm not sure I'd recommend them as a place to start, but it's definitely a worthy way-station on my way through her work. I can't wait to get to the novels of hers I haven't read, although I think they're dwindling in number.

The first story, "A Necessary Being" is about leadership and difference in a world that seems in some ways post-apocalyptic, although the people populating it are so different it's hard to know if they're descended from humans, or if we're on an entirely different world with entirely different aliens. It doesn't really matter, I suppose.

Wherever we are, the tribes that remain live precariously, vulnerable to drought or famine from year to year. The tribe we meet first has been suffering from a drought, which may or may not get better. Their Hao worries about what to do when the news comes that another Hao from another tribe has been sighted. Which needs some explanation.

In this society, the colour of your skin determines your caste status, which seem to be mostly warriors or judges, with another mass of people of no particular caste. The colours, though, are what take this into the alien. One is yellow, and I think the other green? The Hao are those who are blue, and the bluer they are, the stronger they are believed to be. The Hao are the leaders, and a tribe without one regards itself as doomed.

So when the new Hao comes into their territory, the river tribe decide they must capture him at any cost, as their present Hao has had no children. Their Hao hates the necessity, having watched her father go through a crippling ritual to bind him to the new tribe and prevent his escape back to his former people, but does believe that a Hao to pass on her authority to is necessary.

What follows is a dance of personal loyalty, tribe loyalty, and some sort of racial loyalty, although the Hao can come, it seems, from any couple, although children with each other have a higher chance of being the blue. (I didn't mention that these people can all change their colour, voluntarily and involuntary, which makes emotional states easier to discern.)

It's a good story, but it doesn't feel like Butler quite at her best. Certainly worth a read, but it's the second, much shorter, story that is the one I'd go back to. "Childminder" was apparently written for a legendary and unpublished Harlan Ellison anthology, and as such, feels like it was more ready for publication than "A Necessary Being."

This one is recognizably set in a version of our world, albeit one where psi powers have been discovered, and are in the process of being bureaucratized and controlled. The lead character is a childfinder, able to find nascent psi powers. But those who set up the organization she left were more interested in people whose powers had fully manifested, and, not coincidentally, were white and of a higher class. The main character decides that she wants to find those whose powers were almost never nurtured or allowed to blossom, moving to something like a housing project to work with the Black children there.

Then, one day, the organization shows up on her doorstep, having decided they were interested in those children after all.

And I'm really not going to say any more than that. Seek out this story, in particular. It's so amazingly good and complicated, particularly by the mini-epilogue. I'd love to talk to people about it.

The Victim by Saul Bellow

I had never read any Saul Bellow books before, but I picked this one up from a large 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list, which is one of the many sources from which I pick books. They tend to be quite different from my usual science fiction fare, and that's partly why I like them. It's good not to get too settled into one genre.

So with this one, I moved away from my genre fiction, and more recent works, back into mid-20th century literary fiction. I knew very little going in, only that Bellow was a Jewish author, and I feel like I might have heard that he wasn't particularly good at writing rounded female characters. Now, having read all of one of his works, I can say that in this particular book, women are so far to the side that it's not like they're being treated badly, but that they're barely present. Even when they are. The Victim is so firmly rooted in male experience it has little space for women.

It wasn't particularly offensive, but that when the women characters were around, there wasn't a whole lot to them, with the possible exception of the sister-in-law. She has more to do in the novel, but it's mostly to be irrational about the care of her sick son and accusatory after his death. She's there to be Emotion with a capital E.

The main character is Leventhal, a Jewish man in New York City, employed for several years now after a long stint of unemployment, still feeling uncertain of his place and status. The book was published in 1947, so also written with the uncertainty of WWII and the Holocaust. During his time unemployed, he became frustrated and even belligerent over the treatment he received from employers, which may or may not have been tinged with antisemitism. (This feels like a recurring theme - some things Leventhal experiences are undoubtedly antisemitic, but others are far more nebulous, and it feels like he spends a lot of time biting his own tail trying to figure out if a certain action belongs in one category or the other.)

At one point during this search, he became aggressive with the man who was interviewing him. Shortly afterwards, the man who'd gotten him the interview, Klein, was fired, probably because he wasn't any hot shit at his job anyways, but Klein fired holds Leventhal solely responsible for the wreck his life became after he lost his job, his wife left him, and then was killed in a car accident. He has taken to drinking, and comes to Leventhal with his accusations and an offer to let Leventhal make it right.

Leventhal rejects the assertion, but not entirely. He lets Klein bother him, and even stay with him while his wife is away visiting her mother, and wow, does the guy who holds him responsible lack every kind of boundaries, and there were plenty of red flags that should have had Leventhal changing the locks and possibly calling the police. Maybe levels at which your warning bells should be going off are different for men, but yikes!

In the meantime, Leventhal has to negotiate the sickness and death of his nephew, who dies before his brother can make it back to his son's side. That this pales in comparison to the issue with Klein is, I think, deliberate, and unsettling.

His social life is full of people who make random comments about you people and how everything is controlled by Jews that is blatant, but then there are moments where you doubt his reactions, because he's assuming he's the centre of other people's lives the same way he is the centre of his own. It's complicated and well done.

The question that came to my mind after the end was who the titular victim was. Leventhal, hard done by and doing hard by himself? The man who depicted himself as Leventhal's helpless victim? I kept coming back to Leventhal's brother, who makes no such claims, but is the one dealing with devastating events without crying out.

Reading the Bones by Sheila Finch

*Some Spoilers Below*

I had a very up and down relationship with this little novella. At the beginning, I was irritated with it, then I mellowed and decided it wasn't that bad, and by the end of the book, had gotten thoroughly aggravated again. In the end, it feels like something with a lot of potential, but with a trick ending that undermines most of what has gone before, and some troublesome colonialism to boot.

It's not great. It's not terrible either, and there are some good ideas here, even if they're not always executed well.

The novella is set on the planet that colonization forces have named Krishna, which is a good sign that Indians are the colonizing force here. This was the first thing that irritated me - it's very hard to lift what is essentially British colonialism, wholesale, transport it to another planet, but make the colonizers Indian and therefore...what? Less colonialist? Not really. It made me angry, that she just substituted Indian names into a setting with amahs, native markets, and rebellions that take place in prose that matches so closely fiction I've read set in British-ruled India, without real thought given to it. (Or at least, thought isn't evident.)

It doesn't suddenly make it okay, if you just replace the British with British-acting Indian colonial powers. It doesn't make it something you can not pay attention to - you want that in your story, you'd damn well better grapple with it honestly, not just state it and try to move on. It's enough to derail what you're doing, and it took me a long, long time to get over it. Add in the drunkard linguist looking at the 16-year-old daughter of the governor and remembering his dead wife, and I had a very hard time getting into this. And the casual description of watching a rape that shocks the viewers, but has no effect on the woman raped. I'm not sure the later explanations of biology make this any clearer. (And we all know how I feel about the overuse of evolutionary psychology.)

It got better, though, when the action jumped forward a few years, and we were with that daughter of the deceased governor as she attempts to become a linguist (lingster) as well, too old for most of the training, but taken under the wing of a lingster looking for universal sounds between alien languages that arose on different planets.

In this case, we got her story juxtaposed with that of her younger sister, who had grown much older because she had not travelled relativistically, left on the planet in a hurried evacuation. The younger sister had been adopted into the alien (Frehti) female priesthood, and sought to solve a problem of a racial split that had lost half the males and much of the possibility of procreation, through recovering and codifying a language the Frehti had brought with them from another planet.

Of course, both sisters end up on the planet at the same age, the older scarcely aged from when she left, the younger nearing her death from old age. The crisis of the Frehti nears, and the younger ancient sister is bound and determined to be the one who solves it, having struggled for her place in Frehti society.

But of course, when they come face to face with a new language from the fallen/altered Frehti, the one who can learn to speak it in barely moments is not the one who has spent her life with the unfallen Frehti, it's the one who has been off-planet for years, but has been educated. This didn't sit that well. Particularly when it all shakes out, and then the older offworld sister shrugs and says "well, it wasn't a problem of linguistics at all. Too bad she wasted her life."

Which...this whole book is about linguistics. Most of the characters are lingsters, or Frehti elders obsessed with language. I mean, I'm fine with not everything having a linguistics answer, but when all you get is a hammer, over and over, it doesn't feel like an unreasonable expectation that there will be a damned nail somewhere.

So, the middle was pretty good, but the beginning didn't show enough thought, and the end was all about giving a middle finger to the characters and the readers, who hadn't been given any hints of any other options all the way through. And this is a plot problem that could have been solved so easily. Have one scene, a couple scenes, where another one of the Frehti elders questioned whether it was about language, who came up with a different idea. Use it as a way to show how orthodoxy works or doesn't in Frehti culture, and then you've at least left the possibility that lifelong obsession might be wrong.

But as a "Psych!" moment right at the end, it's more frustrating than it is interesting or intriguing.