All That We See or Seem, Ken Liu
I read this courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher. It’s out in October.
Julia had a difficult childhood, which included living on the streets and learning to be a hacker. Now, she’s making ends meet by doing pretty basic work; it’s not fulfilling but it brings in some money. Her life is thrown into turmoil when Piers turns up: he’s a stranger, looking for someone who can help him find his wife Elli. She’s a oneirofex – someone who leads others in vivid dreams – and she’s gone missing. It’s a case of pulling on a thread and the entire garment unravelling, as Piers and Julia discover unexpected things in Elli’s past that have very real consequences right now.
And then the story goes in a direction I really didn’t expect. The swerve made me quite disoriented, but eventually I could see what Liu was doing, and overall I think it works.
This is a near-future novel, and the key aspect is that it’s very clear Ken Liu has given enormous thought to the question of “AI”: what “artificial intelligence” actually means, how it might be used in future in large and and small ways, and particularly what the consequences might be. Liu is no “it’s all Skynet” doomsayer, but he’s also no “this is the answer to everything” evangelist. Julia, in particular, uses AIs in useful and creative ways. But at the same time, there is no doubt that the ubiquity of AI in this world has had some dreadful consequences: for artists, for privacy, for security, for what I would think of as ordinary life. This is a challenging novel in the best possible way: with an engaging narrative and characters that matter, Liu makes you think about things that are happening right now. It’s not didactic, but to me at least it’s pretty clear what Liu wants you to think at the end of the novel (but maybe I, as an anti-LLM person, am just reading in what I want to see).
Canterbury 2100
I really thought that I had reviewed this fifteen years ago when I first read it, but apparently not. How ridiculous! Anyway, I decided to reread it on a whim, and it’s still a delight.
It’s based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, of course – pilgrims telling stories as they travel to Canterbury. Here, after a series of apocalyptic events only vaguely referred to, a bunch of people (mostly pilgrims) are travelling to Canterbury on a nuclear and steam-powered train. They’re delayed by rain (and worse), and start telling stories. The same sort of stories, at heart, as those told in Chaucer’s story: individuals and communities, loss and love and hope and tragedy, believable and not; all revealing tantalising glimpses about the people and their world.
There’s a great range of styles, as there should be in an anthology like this, and maybe sometimes the stories don’t seem like they’re quite coming from the same world. But honestly, would someone from Kununurra tell the same sort of story about Australia as someone from Canberra? And did you really think all of these people were telling the unvarnished truth? … all of which is to say, the collected stories feel real in a very human way.
Published in 2008, one of the fun bits is to look at the authors and see who I still know. Third up is Angela Slatter, who is still going from strength to strength; likewise Trent Jamieson, Lisa L Hannett, Kaaron Warren. There’s Martin Livings and Laura E Goodin and Grant Watson and Thoraiya Dyer… and of course it’s edited (and with connecting text) by Dirk Flinthart. Truly it’s a who’s who.
If you can still find it, this is such a fun anthology.
A Letter to the Luminous Deep, by Sylvie Cathrall
I picked this up because someone mentioned the sequel, and I thought it sounded amazing. And because it turns out I’m a bit of a sucker for the epistolary novel.
There’s a tangle of letters here. Henerey Clel and E. were writing to each other for some months… and then they disappeared, presumed drowned. Their correspondence is pieced together by Henerey’s brother and E.’s sister, some months later again, through their own correspondence. And notes from other people are also included, to flesh out various issues along the way.
Why are Henerey and E. presumed drowned? Because the world they live on has almost no land above the ocean; because E.’s house is literally underwater – and there was some sort of disaster while they were outside, near that house. The world itself is one of the most wonderful and intriguing parts about the novel; exactly how it works is gradually – very gradually – teased out over the course of the entire book, and piecing together its history is almost as much fun as learning about E. (reclusive, highly intelligent and curious, anxious, probably has OCD) and Henerey (scholar, slightly awkward, frustrated by academia, highly intelligent and curious), and of course about Sophy and Vyerin.
The language won’t work for everyone: it’s a bit on the highly-stylised end. “O dearest E.!” and so on. But for me, I felt it was done with such love – Cathrall isn’t making fun of the language, but writing it with immense enjoyment – that I was prepared to go along with it, and even enjoy it most of the time.
I must admit that I put a hold on the second book… and then let it lapse. I read the blurb, and I’m not really convinced that it sounds as compelling as the first book. At least, not enough to read it immediately. Does this first book need a sequel? I think it probably does, but also I’m willing to let the mystery just sit, at least for now.
Fulvia: The Woman who Broke all the Rules in Ancient Rome
THIS BOOK.
Argh, this book. I have been waiting to get my hands on this book for… I dunno, a year or something? And now I have read it and it was wonderful.
I have enjoyed Jane Draycott’s work since reading Cleopatra’s Daughter: she has a wonderfully engaging style, she makes it clear when she’s making educated guesses but doesn’t shy away from them, and she’s determined to excavate interesting women out of either being completely ignored (Cleopatra Selene), or mostly ignored except when they’re excoriated (Fulvia).
Had I completely forgotten that Fulvia was married to Marc Antony? Uh, oops. I KNEW there was another reason that I was dead keen on learning more about her.
So little is known about Fulvia as a person that Draycott has to spend quite a lot of time going over what is known about OTHER Roman women in order to a) have a stab at discussing what most of Fulvia’s life was like, and b) putting her in context for both why some of the things she did were so unusual, and why some of the things she did were NOT unusual but still got maligned. While I already knew a lot of these things it was still great to see it all put together like this, and particularly in conversation with the life of one particular woman – for someone coming to the book with zero knowledge of Rome, I think it would be pretty accessible. The main thing that isn’t all that accessible, and which there is no getting away from, is the names. My goodness, Romans, could you not have had more imagination in your nomenclature? Gets me every single time.
Anyway. This book is a delight. It’s the best sort of revisionist history: not just accepting what ancient sources say, but examining their reasons for doing so; adding in the archeological evidence, as well as other source material; and bringing a trained feminist idea to persuasively make the case for how misogyny has worked over the centuries to write Fulvia’s story.
Look, it’s just really good. Highly recommended for anyone interested in late Republican Rome, and/or women’s history in general.
The Greatest Fight of Sunny Granada, and other stories
This is another of the book sent by a Filipino friend. You can buy it over here.
I’d not come across Kenneth Yu’s work before, but apparently this is his second collection of short stories. There’s a really interesting variety in the stories presented here.
The eponymous story is very clearly science fiction, and told non-linearly, about a man who starts off as a boxer/MMA etc on Earth and then leaves the planet to find more career options fighting aliens in the arena. Certainly on one level it’s about fighting as a sport and sport for money, but of course it’s also about family and inheritance and Place as home.
Then there’s “Spider Hunt,” which feels more like fantasy; “The Probe” is maybe SF, maybe fantasy, and works by muddying the lines. “Beats” is also genre-defying, intriguing and mysterious.
While I can see, and appreciate, what “Operation: Bleach” is doing, I’m as white as they come; I suspect it hits far harder for folks with browner skin than mine and who live in a society that upholds my sort of skin as somehow preferable. It’s another story told inventively – a series of newspaper articles and comments – and it’s probably my favourite story of the collection.
I found “Lost for Words” a bit confusing, to be honest – it’s very short, and I don’t think entirely works as a story. Then “All That We May See” tips into horror, “One Morning at the Bank” is a superhero story, and “Blending In” feels basically like realism.
And then “For Sale: Big Ass Sword” is told entirely as an ad on Talipapa, which I understand to be an online trading site for the Philippines; the story leans into folktales/fairy tales, and is a really solid conclusion.
It was never predictable what the next story would be like, and I really enjoyed that aspect, as well as the stories themselves.
Mapping New Stars: A Sourcebook on Philippine Speculative Fiction
Available to buy from The University of the Philippines Press.
This is another book sent to me by the wonderful Charles Tan, who knows that I have an abiding interest in non-fiction about science fiction and fantasy…
I love that this book exists. The Philippines as a modern nation has such a fascinating (note: not necessarily a positive term!) and tumultuous modern history – the various waves of colonisation and everything that goes with them – that to begin unpicking influence and purpose and consequence is a hard thing. What I hadn’t realised and should have is that, as with so many groups (thank you, Joanna Russ and How To Suppress Women’s Writing, for always making me think about this), modern Filipino authors may not necessarily know all of the history of speculative fiction in their country, for one reason or another.
So the historian and SFF fan in me is both fascinated and thankful for the editors and authors of this book: the first half, “Reading Philippine Speculative Fiction,” is literally tracing some of the histories and places where it has developed and thrived. Two chapters in this section are in Tagalog, so I can’t speak to what they’re about; but the others were really fascinating, especially that on Komiks and the way Filipino authors have used external and local influences to create stories.
I will admit that I only flicked through the second half of the book: I don’t write fiction, so “Writing Philippine Speculative Fiction” is not for me. I do love that Emil Francis M. Flores wrote on “First World Dreams, Third World Realities: Technology and Science Fiction in the Philippines,” since this conjunction is one that I think has enormous potential for authors to explore.
This is a great book. Props to the University of the Philippines for publishing it.
Black Convicts, Santilla Chingaipe
I came across this book because I heard Chingaipe at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. She was personally compelling, and the story she told of learning about the Black convicts who came to the east coast of Australia over the first few decades of “white” settlement was intriguing. So I picked it up, and have finally got around to reading it. To be honest I was putting it off because I knew it was going to have some harrowing bits – and I was right – although I also expected it to be gripping, and rewarding. On those counts it was more than I expected, because Chingaipe is an excellent author.
Chingaipe is doing two things here. On the one hand, she is writing about the Black people who were brought, or in a couple of instances came under their own steam, to the country we now call Australia (which wasn’t a country during this period and wasn’t always known as Australia). Often she’s talking about people whose names have never been mentioned in histories before, which is amazing in its own right. Some of these people were part of the standard “convict comes to Australia” story that tends to be discussed – do some minor crime in England, get sent to the colony for 7 or 14 years, live life here after. Many of the others, though, did their “crime” (a category explored extensively) in one of Britain’s other colonies – various sites in the Caribbean, or Mauritius, for instance – who then got shipped to England and then to these shores. Which I had no idea about.
On the other hand, she is also exploring the links between slavery, its systems and language and attitudes, and the convict system. What she points out are some things that I had previously considered, especially with the language, but a whole bunch of things that I was completely unaware of. She makes a compelling case for the convict system in Australia owing a great deal to the structures developed for and around slavery in North Americas and the Caribbean by the British. Which shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, when it’s laid out… but that’s often the way with a history like this.
One of the things that I really enjoyed about Chingaipe’s style is her presence within the book. I have noticed this happening more frequently in history books, especially with very deliberately and self-consciously political books: a refusal to pretend that the historian is objective, or even absent from the story they’re telling. So we get the story of Chingaipe visiting Hobart and Barbados, Zooming with historians around the world, her own emotional reaction to various stories. Far from detracting from the history, as would have been suggested decades ago (and probably still is by some today), this highlights the importance of the topic being discussed, and the fact that history is not/never is “past.”
I really think that anyone interested in Australian history, and probably also African diaspora history, would benefit from reading this.
Doomsday Dance Party, Nikki Alfar
A friend in the Phillipines sent me a copy of this, thinking I would like it. They were, of course, correct; you can get it from the publisher.
I’m not sure if I’ve come across Alfar’s work before – possibly in anthologies? – so it was intriguing to see the variety of short stories she presents here. Some are realist fiction; more are science fiction or fantastical. Most have clear Filipino connections – set in the ‘real’ Philippines or an alternative version – with a couple of exceptions, most notably “The Riddle of the Great Khan’s Great-Great-Granddaughter,” which I loved and is not connected to the Philippines at all. As well, many have elements of Filipino mythology, like the tikbalang and ‘fey folk’ (in English) at the wedding in “Destination: Wedding,” which was absolutely one of my favourite stories. Sometimes, as with that one, it’s because the story is specifically about an experience in the Philippines; other times the Philippines is the setting because it’s the setting, not because Alfar is making a specifically Filipino point (I hope that makes sense). Styles changes across the stories, from relatively straightforward to the more lyrical styling of stories like “El Legado de Lana (Lana’s Legacy)”.
It’s a compact collection, at 155 pages of story. I’m glad it exists and that I got to read it: the stories are a delight and I hope Alfar gets ever more notice, both at home and abroad.
The Bright Sword
You could say that I’m an Arthuriana tragic, but I would snootily say that I am a discerning Arthuriana tragic. I will not read/watch just every version of Camelot that comes along, these days; I got that out of my system a long time ago. These days what I’m after is something that does Arthuriana differently, cleverly, and/or insightfully. And preferably does it with a knowledge of the enormous weight of history that it carries. Which is why Lavie Tidhar’s By Force Alone knocked me over; Tidhar faces not only TH White and Malory but also the very earliest Celtic stuff, and includes some super deep cuts that made me intensely happy (why yes, I did do a semester-long subject about King Arthur as part of my undergrad).
Lev Grossman was a guest at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival this year. I actually had no idea this book existed until I saw it in the programme, so of course I went along to hear what he had to say. He and CS Pacat had a very engaging and lively conversation, which led to me buying the book right after. One of the most interesting things Grossman said is that he thinks the whole Arthur story can be re-imagined for each generation to basically reflect current issues and ideas. So from this perspective White, in the aftermath of WW2, is writing about the impact of violence on society. Grossman sees himself writing around the idea of what it means to be part of a people, a nation, and how that works. He also deliberately set out to write a gender and sexuality-inclusive narrative. (Which is great, but I sat there wondering whether he or Pacat had read the Tidhar…).
The most intriguing thing about The Bright Sword is when it’s set, which is in the weeks after Arthur has been struck down, as have most of the knights of the Round Table. A new, bright-eyed young knight arrives at Camelot to find in disarray and the remaining knights utterly disillusioned. The story goes from there: what happens next? Woven around that is the backstory of those knights who are left, as well as Nimue, and their reflections on Arthur and Guinevere and Merlin and “England” and everything that happened with Camelot.
This was not a saintly, perfect, Camelot – although not as rugged as Tidhar’s. It’s good to see the problem of Uther’s rape of Ygraine properly acknowledged, for example. It touches on the Christianity/old religion issue, and some of the other things that have come up in Arthur reworkings over the last several decades. And because of where the story starts – with Arthur already gone – the end of the story feels genuinely innovative and unexpected.
This is a worthy entry into the Arthuriana landscape. Centring Sir Palomides, the Saracen knight, and Sir Bedievere, let alone Sir Dagonet or Sir Dinadan or Sir Constantine – these make for a fascinating story, and one that points out that side characters can be real characters. I have to confess, though, that I still think Tidhar’s book is a more challenging and clever one.
The Tainted Cup & A Drop of Corruption
I have not read much Arthur Conan Doyle. I’m pretty sure I read Hound of the Baskervilles when I was a teen, and maybe A Study in Scarlet? But I’ve never been an aficionado.
Which makes it all the stranger that I have consumed a lot of Holmes adaptations. The Downey Jr films; the Cumberbatch show; Enola Holmes, The Irregulars, and even the not-very-good Holmes & Daughter. And then there’s the books. I have read many of the Laurie R King Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes books; I pine for the next in Malka Older’s Mossa & Pleiti series. Which brings me to Robert Jackson Bennett.
I had not heard of these books until the Hugo packet this year. And when I started The Tainted Cup I was a bit dubious, because I really haven’t been in the mood for gung-ho fantasy complete with made-up words for quite a while. But I persisted, because the characters were intriguing enough that I wanted to see what they were up to. And then the world grew on me – an empire shoring itself up against incursions from mindless oceanic leviathans (one assumes? I can’t tell whether that is going to get undercut later in the series), and one key way they do that is by changing some of its citizens: to have better reflexes, or more acute senses, or… other things.
And it didn’t take long for me to realise that Din and Ana are Watson and Holmes analogues. He is new to the justice job, struggling to find his place. She is weird, with bursts of manic energy and a delight in music and a desire of illegal drugs and an astonishing ability to put clues together. I mean, it’s not exactly subtle. And it’s an absolute delight. And you don’t need to know about Holmes and Watson to enjoy their interplay – it’s just an added amusement – because Bennett writes compelling characters and intriguing mysteries, and develops a world that stands by itself.
In fact I enjoyed The Tainted Cup enough that then I went and found A Drop of Corruption at the library, and I read it in a day and I have no regrets about that. Interestingly, the library has catalogued it as a mystery – I can only imagine what someone would think if they picked it up expecting something like Thursday Murder Club or a James Patterson. Anyway, it’s another gripping mystery in another part of the empire, and we learn more about how the empire works (and it’s not completely a “we love empire” story, either), and – happily – we finally learn a bit more about Ana, whose role and being are themselves mysterious. I assume Bennett has plans for more Din and Ana; certainly I will continue to read them.
Randomly Yours, Alex 