Dust Cover Dust-Up 2017: Round One, Part Seven

More Round One

The Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger vs. Sunshine by Robin McKinley

I didn't dislike The Mistress of Nothing, about gender politics and women in England and Egypt, but I liked Sunshine quite a lot more. It was a little cheesy, a slightly darker version of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse books. The human and vampire didn't quite get it on in the first book, but it was a lot of present-day fantasy fun.

Winner: Sunshine

Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant vs. Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Here we have one of the few books I really disliked this year, for a whole lot of reasons that I go into in the review. You can click the link if you're really interested. So it's definitely getting knocked out. Amy Poehler's Yes Please wasn't the best thing ever, but it was a hell of a lot more fun than inconsistent characters and tweeness.

Winner: Yes Please

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson vs. Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross

A nice pairing of science fiction - the futility of generation ships up against spreading Nazis in a world where light-speed is possible but highly regulated. Aurora characters bothered the heck out of me, handing an easy win to Charles Stross here.

Winner: Iron Sunrise

Bye: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

The First Lensman by E.E. "Doc" Smith vs. Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

Let's see...one book that ignores the valid concerns of a cabal of men taking over all government because they have magic devices that say they're virtuous, against a book that is far from my favourite of the Vorkosigan saga, but gives interesting insight into early Cordelia and Aral. Again, easy.

Winner: Shards of Honor

How To Be Both by Ali Smith vs. Winter Rose by Patricia McKillip

This is a complex choice. In the one corner, we have a story that can be told in one of two orders, about a lost mother and a female Renaissance painter, in the other, we have a retelling of a number of story tales that was less Tam Lin that I was hoping. I liked Winter Rose more than the rest of my book club did, but of the two, I think this has to go to the experiment that is How To Be Both.

Winner: How To Be Both

Earth by David Brin

*Some Spoilers Below*

I was trying to describe this book to people at my book club last night, and as I went through all the things it tried to incorporate, one person asked if this was a humourous book? It is not, but I can see how the hodge-podge I was listing might make it sound like a book where piling all these themes and technologies were be used to highlight absurdity.

This is...not that book. That book might have been more fun.

Which isn't to say this is a bad book, this is just a book that is trying to do so much and get through it as efficiently as possible that it's a perfectly serviceable, and, indeed, ambitious standard science fiction novel. But it's not heavily a novel of character (although the characters aren't terrible), or of prose styling. It's plot, and that's not uncommon, and it's a pretty good plot, but oh my, are we ever trying to mash a whole bunch of things in there:

Climate Change
Black holes in the centre of the Earth
Abolition of privacy by law
A.I.
Gaian Theory
A floating nation-state
A conspiracy of the rich
Aliens
Gazerbeams (gravity something something something)

It's a lot, even for a book that approaches 600 pages in mass market format. Does it all hang together? Kind of? Each of the stories is more or less hung on a different person, not to mention the young men who die along the way, and we go back and forth between them at what is sometimes whiplash speed. Chapters are often only 5-10 pages long, which at least is better than those books that have 2-3 page chapters. I hate 2-3 page chapters.

Let's see, can I make the plot make sense? The world has already suffered through drastic effects of climate change, leading to a lot of climate refugees, hence the floating state. Privacy has been abolished, and old people with cameras are everywhere, monitoring the young. One of the prime movers behind Gaian theory is an old woman, with radical ideas that are both lauded and decried by the political/religious movement she started inadvertently.

But none of that is the main story. The main story is about the Gaian scientist's grandson, who was a physicist, who accidentally created a small black hole that escaped and entered the centre of the Earth. When he goes looking for it to find out how screwed the planet is, he finds that it's benign and failing, but a much larger and malevolent (does cancerous work as an analogy here?) one was already there. How did it get there? Aliens, maybe? (This thread is not much followed up beyond the theory and then a later encounter with a character that another character thinks is probably a benevolent alien in disguise as a human.)

The grandson embarks on a conspiracy to slowly move the black hole out of the Earth into space, where it'll dissipate harmlessly. To do so, he invents gazers, a gravity-beam that could launch spacecraft without any worry about rockets or combustion. He needs to keep this secret because...reasons? Because people might try to stop him? To provide some tension for the plot?

See, it's just a lot. I mean, A LOT. While reading it, it all hangs together fairly well, although there were moments where if ONE MORE PERSON decided they needed to put their hand on the wheel I was going to scream. Not everyone needs to interfere. We don't need a list that approaches double-digits. It's okay to focus.

So, yeah. This is a perfectly serviceable science fiction story, but it's trying to do too much, and ends up feeling, not meandering, but more that it expects readers to follow along as yet another person decides to poke their nose in the same business. It's a well that is gone to several times too often. Readable but not stellar.

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad

This will be the 1000th post I've made on this blog. Happy blogiversary to me! There's a small part of me that is wistful that this doesn't line up with one of my favourite books of the year, that I don't get to gush over a book that you all totally need to read, guys. It's not a bad book, but I didn't love it, and for several days I've sat down to write this review and been absolutely stymied.

Time to break through that barrier, even if I have to drag myself through this review bodily.

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is my book club's selection for this month. I ran into another member of the club a few weeks ago, and he asked if I'd started the book yet, which I hadn't. He said it was a difficult book. Heavy. So when I sat down to read it, I was expecting this book to weigh on me, but I never really ended up feeling it in that way.

I mean, the character is buried under a large portion of self-loathing, but I didn't feel like I tapped into that myself, I didn't feel like there was that much fat phobia in the book that didn't come from the main character herself (and maybe her mother), I didn't feel like the issues with weight were transitive, if that makes sense. I'm far from a thin person myself, but I didn't take on any of the main character's issues as I read.  (However, one person in my book club who had struggled with disordered eating found that it was strongly resonant with her own experience.)

Writing the previous two paragraphs, I'm aware of how many of our words for difficult or traumatizing are connected to weight. Huh. I suppose that shouldn't shock me.

As the title suggests, this book is made up of thirteen short stories. Over half of them are from the point of view of the main character (I honestly can't remember her name, but I'm bad with character names), the others scattered ones from men she has slept with.

So, is it good? Does this book do what it's trying to do? What is it trying to do?

It's examining how this one woman moves through life, as an overweight teenager, and then as a woman who pushes her body into thinness through self-deprivation and excessive exercise. Who never believes that anyone could be attracted to her just as she is, even as her husband is wistful for a wife who knew how to let go and enjoy herself instead of being brittle all the time. For more than half the book, she is, it sounds like, quite skinny, but always sees herself as the fat girl from her childhood. Which, apparently, was so awful that she'd do anything to escape it.

It's heavily insinuated she inherited this from her mother, who was overweight, died too young, and measured everything by what size clothes her daughter could fit into. But although the young woman's early relationships are complicated, she doesn't seem to have nay trouble finding men who are attracted to her.

It's also about the female friendships she doesn't have, in addition to the relationship with the husband she pushes away, because anything soft smacks of weight? I guess? Awad doesn't really let us that far into the character, even though the stories are largely written in the first person. Maybe the character doesn't let herself see that far into what she does either. But all the women around her are competitors, either those who are effortlessly thin to spite her, working as hard as she is and thus rivals, or failures who haven't conquered their bodies.

There is little didactic in this book, for which I am grateful. It doesn't hit you over the head, but once you've seen how she reacts to all the other women around her, like everything in life is a zero-sum game centered around weight, it's not hard to pick up the theme. She hates herself, she hates all other women, she's not too fond of men. She is, quite frankly, miserable. But there's no self-awareness there. There's no glimmer of hope. Even at the end, when she starts eating more again (right at the very end), it's not out of an epiphany that all that misery isn't worth it. It's, yet again, as a failure.

So yeah, this is a bleak world. This character has issues on top of issues on top of issues, all dressed up in a fat suit. No progress is made towards addressing them, and the main character never seems to really see them as issues. It's not really fun to read, but I didn't find it particularly traumatizing either.

Dust Cover Dust-Up 2017: Round One, Part Six

We're halfway through Round One! Future rounds will be faster.

The January Dancer by Michael Flynn vs. More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm actually looking forward to the next round, when the choices aren't quite so clearcut. I think this is a better way to arrive at a top ten, but the vast majority of the choices are foregone in the first set. Like in this case, where I was not really fond of The January Dancer, (and in a couple of books, Michael Flynn has gotten wrong things I am familiar with), and I really quite enjoyed the experiment Sturgeon was trying in More Than Human.

Winner: More Than Human 

Bye #Something or Other: The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco vs. The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

This is actually a harder decision than most in this round. I didn't love The Golem and the Jinni, but so far it has stayed with me (keep in mind I only finished it a month or so ago). Still, if it's up against Foucault's Pendulum and Eco's meditations on history, conspiracy, and belief, I do know which wins. 

Winner: Foucault's Pendulum

Danger Planet by Brett Sterling vs. NW by Zadie Smith

Kangaroo puns. Kanga Roo puns. That alone would be enough to disqualify one of these books, even if otherwise it was perfectly serviceable swashbuckling space adventure. I can't quite forgive the central wordplay, and Zadie Smith's N-W was really great.

Winner: N-W

Farmer in the Sky by Robert Heinlein vs. Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson

Easy peasy choices continue. Heinlein is always at least readable, but Farmer in the Sky is pretty slight, and it's up against some very funny Jenny Lawson and her further adventures with being herself.

Winner: Furiously Happy

Transcendental by James Gunn vs. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Although I read the second quite a bit before my mother died (she's the one who gave it to me to read, at a time when neither of us knew how close death hovered), it, combined with the experiences of the last year, have given me a curious freedom from propitiatory anxiety. There isn't going to be any being ready for the moments that change everything, no matter how much you try to live it in advance. You come away with something like that, a science fiction book that sees transcendence as physical optimization and nothing else is not going to be the winner.

Winner: When Breath Becomes Air

Envy of Angels by Matt Wallace

*Some Spoilers Below*

If I hand you a book and tell you it's about the adventures and misadventures of a supernatural catering company, that pitch would probably give you certain expectations. Like, this probably isn't a super serious book. That it's a little light and enjoyable, probably with some good action set pieces and plenty of banter.

And that's precisely what you get out of Envy of Angels.This book is so thoroughly what it says on the box, and that was a lot of fun. I was in the mood for something light and frothy, and this novel was never too serious, even though a lot of it is about how they try to get away with not serving up angel at a demon's peace summit.

I got this free from Tor.com during one of their giveaways of an older book to whet the appetite for a newer addition to the series, and like most of the books I've picked up that way, I enjoyed it quite a lot. In this case, I don't know if I enjoyed it enough to now go out and pick up everything else in the series, but this is very firmly in "if one of the other books comes to my attention, I would be more than happy to read it."

It's more than "liked but didn't love," verging into "thoroughly enjoyed but am not emotionally attached to" territory. If you're looking for something that's a bit caper, a bit funny, and not really heavy and you like food and weird shit going on, then this is probably a series for you. You know who you are.

To venture into this world, we're given a couple of characters to whom this is all new as well - two chefs who recently quit the restaurant they both worked at because the head chef was such an asshole. They get an offer they can't refuse, like you do, from Bronko, the head of the catering agency that secretly does most of their work catering for supernatural beings (oh, you thought I meant serving supernatural beings? Well, there's that too. These are a carnivorous group of customers.)   They come in just as the crack catering ingredient retrieval team comes back from a mission getting some delicacies that are grown in the bodies of creatures we'd rather think exist only in our nightmares.

Just then, the government shows up with a trussed angel. They'd like the catering company to serve delicacies of angel for a summit between two warring demon clans. If they don't...well, there'll be at least three powerful enemies trying to kill them all. So they decide they'll serve a fake, and discover that angel tastes a lot like...well, this world's version of Chicken McNuggets.

This sends that crack team out to infiltrate the corporate headquarters of the fast food chain, and what they find is behind the secret recipe of "Nuggies" has stranger origins than anyone has ever suspected.

Can they fool the demons? Get out alive? Escape the horrors that lie behind the corporate facade of Big Fast Food? Again, you'll know if this is up your alley. If it sounds like it might be, this is exactly what the box promises. Unlike those Nuggies.

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

Just recently, when I was writing my review of Catherynne Valente's Radiance, I spoke of books where authors decide not to let readers entirely into their worlds, whether deliberately, to make the readers work for it, or accidentally, because things that are perfectly clear to the writer in their head don't quite make it to the page.

This book, uh...this book falls into the latter category. Not in terms of the characters or what's going on between them; I was able to figure out the general social structure of the universe as it exists in this book. It's the physics I don't freaking understand. That may not be essential, but I don't. I was halfway through the book when I was talking about it with a friend, and he was enthusiastic about this being a book where being in different parts of the galaxies meant that the speed of light was different.

I paused, because that wasn't how I understood what was going on at all. He may indeed be right! But I'd seen the inability to go the speed of light, or several times it, as what was changing, not the speed itself. And if it is different, what does that mean? I'm so lost.

Practically, what this means is that there are parts of the universe where technology is insanely advanced  and AIs are very, very smart and sometimes galaxy-spanning and dangerous, but then there are parts in the "Slowness" where they just...aren't. They can't. The ships can't. I don't get why. I'm sure it's in there somewhere, but it was oblique enough that I didn't fully understand why the basic rules of the universe differed based on physical location. I got that they did, but it never felt like Vinge let me in on the reasons.

So, in this universe I don't understand, there are a ton of races, most of them not even remotely humanoid. Civilizations rise and fall quickly out where technology works really really well, and the remnants of a past one are discovered by a human colony excavating old ruins. Old ruins are really fucking dangerous here. They unleash an old Power that has killed civilizations before, and starts to do it again, attacking information nexii in search of the humans who got out with something that could stop it.

People die, stations perish, and one ship makes its way into the Slowness in search of the weapon to use against the Power. The weapon, along with that refugee human ship, had crashlanded on a planet where the dominant species are packs of dogs. Not dogs, individually, and not, of course, quite dogs, but groups of "dogs" acting telepathically in concert. As singletons, they don't have enough brain power to sustain a thought, but as packs, they can think, and their identities can change as pack members die and new ones are added. This means that they're smart, but all their geniuses work in isolation, so progress has been slow.

Recently, a couple of powerful packs have been heavily engaging in eugenics as it would apply to such a society, often in extraordinarily cruel ways. The two children who survive the first attack of the packs on the ship end up with different sides, unaware of each other's continued existence.

Meanwhile, on the ship coming after them, we have a human, a sort-of human partially occupied by another Power, and two skrodes, which are plant-like ocean creatures on...skateboards? Kind of?  The skateboards are their external memories?

It's all intrigue and exploring pack dynamics, and it's all very interesting, but there's a little part of my brain that argues that it doesn't hang together as a story all that well. That there are pacing issues, and unexplained assumptions about the world that I didn't get.

It's...okay. It's interesting. There are really good bits. And yet.

Dust Cover Dust-Up 2017: Round One, Part Five

We're...not quite halfway through Round One. It's a long one, to give every book I've read this year a chance.

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller vs. Planetfall by Emma Newman

This is too easy. I didn't really like The Dog Stars. I really liked Planetfall, and I continue to think about the portrayal of trauma and grief that is portrayed there, as well as the effects of living in a society based on some fundamental lies that have become articles of faith.

Winner: Planetfall

What Belongs To You by Garth Greenwell vs. Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

I found Garth Greenwell's first novel okay, but far too full of semi-colons that kept intruding onto my thoughts; Nnedi Okorafor's book was haunting and difficult and if there was a semi-colon, I didn't notice it.

Winner: Who Fears Death

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins vs. Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

It's funny that my elaborate seeding scheme ended up putting two Okorafor books back to back in this competition, although not yet against each other. The randomness has been a little weird, but I think in a good way? This is all a digression, because again, this isn't a hard choice. The Girl on the Train was fine, Lagoon was really damned good, about aliens landing just off the coast of Lagos.

Winner: Lagoon

Bye # 6: Halting State by Charles Stross

Aimless Love by Billy Collins vs. Market Forces by Richard Morgan

Huh. This is actually a harder choice than it would appear. But as much as I've loved Billy Collins in the past, this year I'm less in the mood for melancholy exploration of theoretical mortality than I am for a deep painful dive into loss. Hypothetical doesn't cut it at the fucking moment. (They're still good poems.) Morgan's book is fun corporate state/Mad Max fun, but it's not deep. So, which do I pick? 

Winner: Aimless Love

Authority by Jeff VanderMeer vs. The Diviners by Libba Bray

I will admit that The Diviners snuck up on me. I liked it more than I should have, despite glaring flaws. It's not going to win, though, because it still doesn't measure up to the second Southern Reach book, with its dive into spy novel environmental SF.

Winner: Authority