A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

After a weird apocalypse called The Storm that seems to have killed most people on Earth, 17-year-old Liz lives alone in the bookshop where she used to work, occasionally trading books for useful items. But when the more hardbitten Maeve shows up, the two girls fall in love. But is the world about to end all over again?

This book sounded so up my alley. Alas, it was not good. In fact it was kind of the bad lesbian version of Erik J. Brown's All That's Left in the World.

Given the title, you'd think the story would involve books and reading and how they matter even after the apocalypse - a kind of bookstore version of Station Eleven. It's not that at all. A lot of books are mentioned in passing, but "books are important" is not a theme, and reading isn't important to the characters. Liz is living in the bookshop out of trauma and inertia, not because it's her passion or a community center or it feels like home.

Liz is so incredibly helpless and useless, it's hard to believe she survived normal life let alone a post-apocalypse setting. When the tap water stops running, she's unsurprised but also has only one day's worth left stored up in bottles - and it's been running for months, with her expecting it would stop running any moment the whole time! She doesn't bother to lock the front door of the bookshop, even when she goes to sleep. There's all sorts of dangerous damage to the shop that she doesn't know how to or doesn't bother to try to repair, AND doesn't ever ask for help with even though a fair number of friendly people come to her shop. I get that she's supposed to be paralyzed by trauma but she also comes off as a passive nitwit.

Even apart from Liz herself, a lot of stuff in the story makes no sense. Liz literally hasn't left the bookstore in months, she only gets a customer every couple days if that, and the customers only give her small items like a couple batteries for a book. How is she getting enough food to stay alive?

When Maeve turns on a small generator and it doesn't come on immediately, Liz leaves it switched on and tries to manually start it by sticking her hand inside it and giving the fan a spin. (Amazingly, she does not precede this by saying, "Hold my beer.") It promptly turns on and starts sucking her entire body into it, like it's a jet engine.

This gives Liz an extremely severe injury - the skin is ripped off her hand, bones and tendons are visible, and she can't move her fingers at all - but she's basically fine two days later after some extremely vaguely described first aid.

Liz realizes Maeve might be dangerous because she has a prized and valuable knife whose blade is caked with blood. If it's that valuable, YOU'D CLEAN IT.

People mostly use knives as weapons instead of guns for no reason. When someone does have a gun, it's not loaded. I guess guns and bullets are super rare in America!

The apocalypse is a one-time rain of acid that melts everyone who was outside at the time. No one ever mentions that this is fucking bizarre, or speculates on why it happened. The set-up in the pre-apocalypse flashbacks is that a climate change catastrophe is ongoing, but that does not include LITERAL ACID RAIN.

Also, the world is way too depopulated for a one-time event that happened at night, when not many people would be outside, and spared everyone who was inside. There's barely anyone left in Liz's entire town, and we meet something like ten survivors max in the entire book.

It also makes no sense that an acid strong enough to completely dissolve a human in 20 minutes did so little apparent damage to anything else. All the structural damage that's described is what you'd expect from a tornado, not a 20 minute downpour of extremely strong acid.

Liz and Maeve's relationship was boring and barely there. Actually, the whole book was boring. I ended up skimming heavily.

There's some interstitial bits where people write one-page first-person accounts of their survival in a notebook Liz keeps. This sort of thing is almost always so much fun, people recall it as their favorite part of the book. All but one of these bits are boring! How do you even do that?! (The one that I liked was a woman whose dogs saved her from the acid rain by refusing to go on their regular night time walk.)

Spoilers for the end. ( Read more... )

Isn't that a gorgeous cover?

The book is an odd, dreamy work of epistolatory science fiction/fantasy, mostly in the form of unsent letters written by Lumi to her nonbinary spouse Sol. She's in the habit of writing a journal of letters to Sol, as they both often travel separately throughout the solar system for work, and giving them to Sol when they reunite. But this time, their reunion keeps getting delayed, and she keeps arriving at places just after Sol has left. Is Sol evading their own spouse, and if so, why?

The plot sounds like a mystery, but it's structured as a quest and feels like an unusually detailed dream. Beautiful images swim in and out, and moments feel fraught with a meaning just out of grasp. At one point Lumi visits Europa, whose cities are under the sea and where everyone speaks only in whispers, and even those only when absolutely necessary, because loud noises could crack the ice. In true dream fashion, that doesn't really make sense, but it's vivid and compelling.

Lumi follows in Sol's footsteps, occasionally gaining clues, while thinking back on their relationship and realizing that maybe she doesn't know Sol as well as she thought. She's from an Earth which has been radically restructured and is largely a playground for wealthy visitors, while the people actually live there are poor and often desperate to get difficult-to-obtain passports out; she apprentices with a woman who does magical soul healing with a spirit animal, gets her own spirit animal, and also a passport to Mars; many years later, she's still uneasily conscious of her status as an immigrant.

Lumi travels often within the solar system as a soul healer, always accompanied by her cat Ziggy; the difficulties of traveling with a cat are realistically detailed, and Ziggy is very present in the story without ever affecting the plot. We eventually learn that she had another cat who was euthanized when the space station she and Sol lived on was shut down due to a plague, and only humans were allowed off. Is that why Lumi is so determined to never leave Ziggy behind? She doesn't say. Is Lumi's soul healing real? Sol doesn't believe in it, but Lumi's spirit animal feels as present, when it appears, as Ziggy. (Ziggy survives. Lumi's spirit animal may or may not, it's complicated.)

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I'm not sure if some of the book's oddities - Lumi's extreme calm, Sol's unknowability, the emotionally distanced feeling in a story whose action is entirely driven by a marriage, the very open ending - are flaws or exactly what the author intended. I enjoyed reading it a lot, because it's so atmospheric and I will forgive a lot for atmosphere, and it feels so different from most books.

Itäranta is Finnish and wrote her first two books in Finnish and English simultaneously! Not sure if she did the same for this one.

Earth has been taken over, or more taken over, by right-wing religious extremists who maintain a prison camp on a very strange alien world called Kiln. They do lots of other things that are more practical, too; the alien prison camp is basically an expensive example of what could happen to you.

Professor Arton Daghdev, a professor and scientist, ends up on Kiln for fomenting revolution. About two-thirds of the book is an account of life in the prison camp, which is full of deliberate cruelties both large and petty. It's very plausible and very oppressive, both for the prisoners and for the reader - the latter feeling is added to because the prisoners also dislike and distrust Daghdev, as they suspect him of turning in the other revolutionaries. So for most of the book, everyone is mean to him, he has no friends, and nothing nice happens ever. There's tantalizing hints about the mystery of the alien world, but they're mostly in the background.

In the last third, we get to see more of the alien world FUCKING FINALLY. Also, Daghdev makes some... friends might be pushing it... but at least allies. And at the very end, we learn the secret of Kiln, which is extremely cool.

This is a good book that I did not enjoy. I wanted more weird biology. I got mostly prison politics. The cruelty and oppression are both pervasive and extremely believable, as it's all extrapolations or transpositions of bad stuff happening in reality right now. Again, well-done but not enjoyable.

I also didn't enjoy Daghdev's narration. It's very exposition-y. It makes sense for his character and is clearly a deliberate choice, but not one that I liked. What I don't think was deliberate was that the characters mostly blend together. At one point there's a dramatic revelation of who the mole is, and I could not for the life of me remember who that character was.

Unlike many writers, Tchaikovsky is 100% capable starting with the ending revelation about Kiln, and spending the whole book exploring that. I would have liked that 100% more.

What did I like? The thematic unity, which is extremely well-done. Kiln - the planet, not the prison camp. The revelation of the mysteries of Kiln, which is original, clever, and cool.

Mia Havero is a teenage girl living on a spaceship. After Earth was destroyed, humanity remains on several very large spaceships and about a hundred colonized planets. The spaceships have a high standard of living, strictly controlled population, and high technology. The planet colonies are nasty, brutish, and short... well, small, anyway. They have a low standard of living and low technology, as the spaceships don't share scientific knowledge, but only trade it in tiny snippets for goods. Spaceship people despise the colonists, calling them Mudeaters, and don't tend to leave their ships...

...except when they're fourteen. Then they get dumped on a random planet, where they have to survive for a month. If they survive - and about a quarter of them don't - they return as an adult. This is presented to them as a way to keep the population in check; it's only discussed as a meaningful rite of passage when they're actually training to do it.

Mia doesn't see any problem with this or with any other ship customs. Her adored father, a politician, always has wise explanations for everything, and Mia internalizes them. Of course the Mudeaters are so backward, they're not even people. Of course it's fine to do population control by dumping teenagers on a planet where a bunch of them will die. As she gets older and begins preparing for her Trial, she starts getting exposed to other opinions. They don't make much of a dent... until she actually does get dumped on a planet.

This book was written in 1968 and won the Nebula, but is now out of print. It's less dated and more interesting than quite a bit of SF from the same period that is still in print. In particular, while it seems to have been written as both a homage to and a critique of Heinlein's juveniles, it also has quite a bit in common with Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory, which did not win the Nebula but did win the Hugo this year.

Mia is an unusually flawed character for the protagonist of 1968 science fiction. She's smart and competent, but extremely socially anxious, arrogant, rigid, and bad at relating to people. People often don't like her, and it's not because they're jealous. Even more surprisingly, her perfect, wise, wonderful father turns out to not be quite the perfect, wise, always-right Heinlein mentor... or rather, he really is a Heinlein mentor, except he's written by Panshin rather than Heinlein, and Panshin doesn't think his ideas are good. The aspects of the Trail that seem particularly insane, like that the only way to get picked up is to set off a signal contained in a tiny box and too bad if the box gets lost, broken, or stolen, turn out to not be the author not thinking it through, but a depiction of how the ship society is deeply fucked up and broken.

Most of the book is a character study of Mia as she grows up in her society, focusing on her day-to-day life and how she matures (or doesn't.) It's very well-done and enjoyable, with some Growing up Weightless vibes. The Trial itself is only the last quarter of the book.

Spoilers!

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Spoilers are fine in comments.

The cold air was perfectly still, but full of old shoes--old shoes cracked and wrinkled, soles hanging off, floating around one another as if they'd been lifted up on a strong wind--as if shoes were an organism, one which, given the correct conditions, exhibit flocking behavior.

My favorite M. John Harrison novels are probably his most obscure, the dreamy fantasy The Course of the Heart and the low-key science fiction Signs of Life. I read Light, the novel that proceeds Nova Swing, years ago when it first came out, and did not love it anywhere near as much as most readers. I only picked up Nova Swing when I saw it on a list of books inspired by Roadside Picnic, one of the most influential books in one of my favorite subgenres.

That subgenre is concerned with exploring a strange and dangerous but often beautiful place where the rules are unknown and you may emerge with riches, emerge terribly or wonderfully changed, or never emerge at all. Other classics in the genre are Gateway by Frederic Pohl and Annihilation (both book and movie.) My description, of course, also applies to older ideas of Faerie.

Nova Swing is set in Saudade, a city beside the Event Site, which is where a piece of a zone of weirdness landed. The Event Site is extremely dangerous and no one is supposed to go in or out, but guides take tourists in for excursions, and living beings and artifacts do get out. At dawn and dusk, enormous numbers of black cats and white cats flood the streets, running in and out of the Event Site. A nearby bar is named Black Cat White Cat, and the action of the story largely centers around it.

This is not a plotty book. At all. That is, it does have a plot, but no one seems much concerned with it. In mood if not in style, it reminded me of some lost Hemingway novel where everyone moodily drinks all the time, speaks in enigmatic and mannered diction, and self-destructs in a slow and drifting manner. It's like a mainstream literary novel written in a science fiction world.

There's a cop theoretically investigating some serial murders (he never actually does) and protecting the Event Site (he's pretty useless at this); he's been genetically altered to look like Einstein. Vic Serotonin drinks a lot of rum and takes tourists into the site; this goes wrong when he takes in a woman who is clearly mentally off and liable to freak out. A woman takes care of her father who's dying from too much Event Site exploring. A female sex worker is in love with a guy who keeps getting transferred into new bodies to do gladiatorial matches; the fighters have tusks, rooster spurs, and giant, perpetually erect dicks. A gangster obtains a site artifact which turns out to be even worse news than is obvious from the get-go.

Everyone drinks a lot. There's also a lot of vomiting. Everyone wants things they can't have or which are bad for them. One of the plot strands might be the beginning of the end of the entire universe, but it's given no more or less weight than anything else. There's lots of male-gazey sex, all heterosexual. Motivations are often unclear, which is explicitly part of the point: we don't know why we do what we do.

Very little of the book actually takes place inside the Event Site - we only directly visit it in the second to last chapter. When we do get in, FINALLY, it's extremely weird and cool and inexplicable.

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In the last chapter, there's a completely unexpected turn into something like conventional plotting and character development. Several of the supporting characters make life-changing decisions involving their futures, their relationships, and their careers, and actually follow through on them. When one of them sells their business and goes in with two other characters on a new business, I was suddenly SO INTERESTED in them for the very first time. Except for the scenes actually in the Event Site, I was way more into their small business venture than I was interested in anything else in the entire book. And then the book ends. I felt certain that M. John Harrison was sitting back and thinking, "Yep, throw them a plot and conventional likability bone, and they pounce."

I didn't really like this book (or Light, which had much more of a plot) but I think it was doing exactly what Harrison wanted it to do. It's sometimes dryly funny, or at least I found bits dryly funny. ("Insect," she concluded, "is an anagram of incest." Even for a childhood on another planet it seemed extreme.) But overall, it was a specific type of literary experience that I don't much like.

Re-read of Megan Lindholm's (Robin Hobb's) sole science fiction novel. It has two connected plotlines that connect toward the end, and I remembered being way more into one than the other. (A common issue with that sort of plot.) On this re-read, the exact same thing happened. I also was able to identify a weird theme that on previous readings had only made me vaguely uncomfortable.

After humans destroyed the Earth's biosphere to the point that it and they were going to die together, some of the surviving humans were rescued by an alien species, the insectile Arthroplana, who traveled in beastships - enormous, semi-sentient, spacefaring animals, to which the Arthroplana attached some living compartments like barnacles on a whale. The Arthroplana deposited the humans on a spare planet which they were allowed to live on with the condition that they not damage its environment.

During the exodus from Earth, one man, Raef, was disqualified from leaving Earth as he had cancer. But he managed to smuggle himself aboard the beastship Evangeline, who was smarter than the Arthroplana realized. She concealed him within herself, extending his life with long periods of hibernation, during they both participate in a kind of dreamworld mostly based on Raef's memories of childhood and every work of fiction he's ever known. As he's always been very imaginative and given to spinning out pre-sleep fantasies for himself, it takes him a long time to realize that Evangeline is real and not a figment of his imagination - let alone who she really is. When he does figure it out, he also realizes that she's an intelligent being enslaved by the Arthropoda - and specifically by her ship's master, an Arthropoda nicknamed Tug.

This plotline is my favorite. It's got drama, it's got comedy, it's largely composed of dreamlike metafiction, and it has Evangeline first becoming more human and then, as she awakens into her true self, more alien. It's also a beautiful, strange love story culminating in a lovely final page. When I thought back on the book, this was about 90% of what I remembered about it.

There's another story too, which has more pagetime. In the hundreds of years that have passed since Raef boarded Evangeline, the Arthropoda have been genetically and culturally manipulating humans. This part is a weird dystopia based on environmentalism gone mad!

Ostensibly to ensure that humans don't trash the ecology of their new planet (but also so the Arthropoda can more easily enslave and exploit them), they are genetically engineered to delay puberty until well into adulthood, made smaller, fed a strictly vegan diet oh noes, and not allowed to alter the natural environment AT ALL. Every scrap of waste is recycled, every fruit plucked must be compensated for with fertilizer, etc. Also, fiction is banned.

John and Connie, a pair of traumatized-by-evil-environmentalism pre-pubescent adults, ship out aboard the Evangeline to check out the supposedly devastated Earth.

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So, is this worth reading? Well, yes and no. Half of it is pretty great. The other half is a dystopia on the theme of "too much environmentalism is bad actually," which I rolled my eyes as that's not REMOTELY an actual problem in the real world, so it lacks the resonance of "if this goes on..." I also can't help rolling my eyes at dystopias where fiction is banned even though that one really is a "if this goes on..." In general, I'm way more into sentient spaceships and humans falling in love via telepathic fanfic than I'm into fiction is banned and the government controls puberty.

Normally I would be all over a book in which a pandemic kills most teenagers, leaves the survivors with psychic powers which are neatly categorized by color, and then throws them in concentration camps from which the narrator must escape and join the rebellion!

Every bit of that is my id. But this book was just meh. It wasn't bad. It wasn't great. It was just okay. Though the worldbuilding around the concentration camps didn't make a lot of sense, it wasn't spectacularly batshit like say The Fourth Wing. The colors assigned to powers were mostly non-intuitive, like green for extra-smart and blue for telekinetic, so I didn't find that interesting. The characters were okay.

Basically this book just could not begin to compete with the much higher-octane, more batshit, more dramatic, more OTT version of itself, which is The X-Men and many, many other comic books and manga/anime.

A five-person spaceship crew hears a distress call from a long-lost luxury spaceship. They board it, hoping for salvage wealth, and discover that everyone onboard the ship died under violent and mysterious circumstances. It's basically a haunted house in space... and the only way to claim salvage rights is to get inside and pilot it back.

Despite the blatant similarities to Alien, Aliens, and Event Horizon, I love apocalypse logs and "stuck in a haunted house," so I was predisposed to like this. On the plus side, it has some haunting spooky images, like a mass of bodies floating in zero g above a ballroom floor, and enough creepiness and suspense that I actually finished it. On the minus side, everything else.

The writing is clunky. The science fiction setting doesn't feel likely or lived-in - it's full of references that are old-fashioned now. The most plausible part is the predatory corporations. The characters are barely characterized at all, and while we're told that the protagonist Claire's main trait is that she's emotionally closed off, what we mostly see is that she's miserable and insecure and bad at her job. The other four characters have about one trait each. There's an interminable framing device in which she's telling the story while being accused of murdering her crew. The explanation of what's going on is mildly clever yet somehow less interesting than "it's ghosts."

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A strange, ambitious, somewhat uneven but often excellent novel tracing a pandemic through an immense timeline via a series of linked short stories.

In the opening story, an archaeologist travels to the Arctic research base where his daughter Clara died falling through a sinkhole that revealed a 30,000 year-old-corpse. The ancient body, nicknamed Annie, is of a young girl with a bizarre genome, whose corpse carries a strange virus. As the anthropologist tries to understand Clara and what drove her to leave her own young daughter behind in her quest to save the world from climate change, the virus begins to spread...

Subsequent stories trace the pandemic and its effects on society through the lens of people grieving their own losses, working in new jobs that have arisen because of mass death and grief, trying to find a cure or escape the effects, or all of the above.

Despite the way that sounds, this doesn't feel at all like a typical science fiction pandemic book. It's a distinctly literary mainstream version of science fiction, with major surrealistic elements. You can tell the difference because a genre SF book would follow up on and explore elements like, say, Annie's genome:

Part Neanderthal and part something only superficially human, she possessed genetic traits similar to those of a starfish or an octopus.

I read that and thought, "Wow! Tell me more!" In fact, we get exactly one more sentence about it. This does eventually get followed up on, but not for ages and no one ever says, "WTF STARFISH OR OCTOPUS??!!"

In a later story, a scientist finds that a tiny singularity capable of powering a spaceship has opened up in his brain. This does get more detail as people are understandably concerned about what this might do to him and he wants to extract it from his brain to tap its spaceship-powering potential, but he only glancingly implies that it was the result of a lab "accident" born of depression after his daughter's death, and that's all we ever learn about the cause. We don't get anything more on the "accident," how the black hole was discovered, or anyone saying "WTF TINY BLACK HOLE IN YOUR BRAIN??!!"

In other stories, a man in a coma finds himself in what may or may not be an afterlife, with a strange task that slowly becomes clear; a man works as a costumed mascot at a theme park aimed at giving dying children a wonderful final day before they're euthanized on a roller coaster; a forensic pathologist befriends a dying man who's willed her his body; a man tries to repair robot dogs containing recordings of the voices of their dead owners; two women paint murals on the walls of a generation ship to commemorate the planets they visit and the people they've lost.

The stories are all told in first person, which makes them very immediate and gripping, but also has the unfortunate effect of making it very noticeable that the narrators all sound exactly the same. It doesn't help that the vast majority of them are straight, thirty-something Japanese-American men. (Everyone in the book is straight, not just the narrators, but a few narrators slightly break the mold by being Japanese or women or younger/older than average.)

However, a lot of the stories are very powerful. They're all about grief and many of them are about parent-child relationships. Most of the characters mean well, though some of them are fuckups, and most of the stories are about people searching for and often finding meaning and connection and love in the midst of devastation.

Though the stories are linked by connected characters a la six degrees of separation, and the book as a whole feels unexpectedly unified by the end, the stories vary widely in terms of how much I liked them. The first story is extremely strong and the rest range from excellent to okay. Of the okay ones, there's a set that are fine on their own but collectively feel repetitive. They're about the death and grief industry in a world where capitalism has taken over death and death has taken over capitalism and banks are deathbanks and money is deathcurrency and all the ads are death-related and the sheer muchness of both the death-and-capitalism ouroboros and the several stories focusing on that makes otherwise good stories feel one-note. Death note.

The final story is a banger that recontextualizes the entire book. I could have done without the cameos from real-life famous people but otherwise it's extremely well-done.

How High We Go in the Dark is a flawed and very weird book, and often hard to read due to both the subject matter and sheer intensity with which it's portrayed. But it's also very well-written, well-structured in a way that isn't immediately obvious, often extremely moving, and an unexpectedly quick read. It's an epic in just under 300 pages, which is impressive all by itself.

Sequoia Nagamatsu (what a great name) wrote the book before Covid, and had the distinctly surreal experience of trying to sell it in 2020.

Content Notes: Even apart from the entire book being death and grief central, the plague initially kills mostly children. So there's that. Also, one story is about animal experimentation and features an adorable and doomed intelligent pig.

A woman wakes up alone on a boat floating off the shore of Canada. She can't remember anything, not even her own name. She has ID for an identity she doesn't recognize. Her only clue is this note:

There are pills in the drawer for the headaches.

You want answers, but this has been done to keep you from them.

This is the only way out alive.

Start over.

Don't make yourself known.

Don't look back.

The woman, who ends up calling herself Ess, takes the warning seriously but can't resist trying to figure out who she is, what happened to her, and why.

It's 2037 and climate change has made things even worse than now, without any governments willing to do much about it. Climate refugees are turned away or put in camps, and there's a hunt on for lone amnesiacs found floating in boats, who are suspected of being climate refugees and jailed. So Ess has another reason to keep her amnesia hidden. But she can't resist trying to connect with other human beings; when she's alone, she feels her lack of identity even more acutely.

This is a low-key ambitious book which has the form of a thriller but the pacing and mood of literary fiction. It held my interest and pulls off some technically difficult elements, but I ultimately found it more admirable than enjoyable. For me it had a feeling of distance that prevented me from getting very emotionally engaged or thrilled. But that's very subjective. It got very good reviews.

Spoilers for what was up with the amnesia. ( Read more... )

Author's impressive bio: She holds degrees in aerospace engineering and urban design and currently works as a municipal sustainability specialist in Vancouver, BC focused on climate policy.