A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

A classic novel of anthropological science fiction originally published broken into two books even though it's not that long, an inexplicable decision compounded by giving the first book a cover depicting a fortune-teller falling out of her corset:



A first contact novel featuring a human spaceship split between various factions, several human anthropologists, and the aliens, who are furry humanoids whose women live in villages and whose men live alone. The main alien character, Nia, is an outcast because rather than doing the normal thing of mating with a man during the season for that and then leaving him, she lived with him in a monogamous relationship. This is an exploration of the underpinnings of sexual norms, not an argument for "monogamy is good."

The worldbuilding and culture clashes are well-done, but the book overall felt dry due to a lack of felt emotion. The main characters do get to be friends, but in a very low-key, non-intense manner. The humor, a mix of social satire and human comedy, was also extremely low-key and the satirical aspects fell flat for me. Overall I preferred Arnason's other book about furry aliens, Ring of Swords.

Leaning into premise score: It definitely delivers what it promises, it just didn't do so in a way that really worked for me.

A Woman of the Iron People

A book about intelligent spiders by Adrian Tchaikovsky… oh wait, all his books are about intelligent spiders. You have to admire a person who has a niche enthusiasm and really goes for it. I applaud his commitment to all things entomological and arachnid, and if he ever visits Mariposa he can sleep in the Spiderhouse.

If you do not want to read about spiders, skip this entire post.

This book is fantastic. I am arachnophobic and I loved it anyway, though admittedly my issue with spiders is how they look, not reading about them. (In fact, the parts of the book I found squicky and horrifying and phobic-triggering all involved ants, not spiders.) I can’t believe how attached I got to the valiant spiders and their civilization, and how much I was rooting for them to succeed.

[OH SHIT as I am typing I noticed my cats staring at something and there is a GIANT FUCKING BLACK SPIDER ON THE OUTSIDE SCREEN OF MY DOOR!!!! IT’S GOT A BIG FAT BODY AND THICK LEGS AND IT’S FUCKING HUGE!!!! I am not making this up. Um, so I guess this book did not cure my arachnophobia. Luckily someone came to the door and the spider scuttled away. Welp. Guess I won’t be using the back door any time soon.]

So, back to Children of Time. It’s old-school, big-picture, sweep of history, cool ideas, sense of wonder anthropological science fiction – something I haven’t enjoyed in ages. It reminded me of how much I used to like it.

The premise is that Earth has been largely trashed by wars and environmental damage, and there is currently a war between the humans who are trying to terraform other planets, and humans who are trying to stop this from happening. One woman is doing an experiment in which she plans to seed a terraformed planet with monkeys and

[AAAAAH I JUST NOW REALIZED THAT THE GIGANTIC SPIDER IS INSIDE THE DOOR, BETWEEN THE GLASS AND THE SCREEN AND THERE IS A BIG CHUNK OF GLASS MISSING ON THE INSIDE OF THE DOOR SO IT CAN GET TO ME. I just ran and grabbed tape and taped the inside of the door so it can’t get in. Hopefully there is a way out that it can use to get out the same way it got in. And thanks to decluttering, I knew instantly where my tape was. Marie Kondo just saved me from the spider.]

Um, so, this scientist, Dr. Kern, intends to seed a planet which has already been terraformed with Earth plants, bugs, and some small mammals like mice with a literal barrel of monkeys and a nanovirus which will enable them to evolve extremely fast, so what would normally take millennia will occur over a few thousand years. Her intent is to create a monkey civilization that will be intelligent but not as much as humans and can be used as servants. But things go drastically wrong, the entire Earth civilization blows up, and the monkeys never make it to the planet. But the nanovirus does. And it turns out to be quite compatible with spiders…

Meanwhile, a motley handful of human refugees flees the now-destroyed Earth in a generation ship. They have cryogenic sleep, so the story of the same few humans continues on their ship over a period of thousands of years, as they wake up for a few days or months or years at a time. At the same time, the spiders are evolving. We follow generation after generation of spiders as they fight wars and plagues, develop new technologies, and try to communicate with the mysterious thing in the sky—the AI that’s all that remains of Dr. Kern—that keeps sending them messages…

I don’t want to say too much about the spider civilization is because it’s so much fun to discover it on your own, but as a lure, I just want to mention that they figure out how to make colonies of nonsentient ants work as living computers. But seriously, the spider technology and culture is SO FUCKING COOL.

It took me longer to warm up to the human characters, and I was almost always more into the spiders’ story. But I did end up enjoying the humans’ story too. But the spiders? I LOVED the spiders. And not just as a civilization, but as individual, complex characters.

The nanovirus also uplifted some crustaceans, and in the midst of all the spider and human drama, every now and then we get an update about how the crustacean civilization is living out its own grand epic underwater and 99.9% off-page. It was delightful and slightly hilarious.

Spoilers: ( Read more... )

[Okay, my door spider is now out of the door and has been swept off the balcony. Pretty sure it’s fine and will live out its spidery life, hopefully very far away from me.]

More book spoilers. ( Read more... )

Only $2.99 on Kindle! Children of Time

The cover is both correct and not really representative of the experience of reading the book. However, an accurate cover would probably make at least a quarter of the intended audience flee screaming, so there's that.

First off: great title.

I’m going to excerpt a bit from a review that liked it more than I did because the premise is so high-concept:

I was captivated by this book. Set on a world which revolves so slowly that everyone has to move steadily West in order to escape Dusk and Night, which is a devastating ice world, and avoiding High Summer, so hot it kills everything in its path, West of January is highly original and superbly written. Not only is the world divided into Months and Days, each a particular climate steadily moving west, but the inhabitants are very segregated, each following the same patterns every cycle, never learning from the previous one (that often ends in disaster) because they do not pass their knowledge down.

Vernier is a lost colony on a planet whose rotation is almost the same speed as its revolution, so the habitable zones constantly but slowly move across the planet. So people can be born in the grasslands of Tuesday, north of September, and be three months old when they die of old age. I had a little trouble wrapping my head around this. However, Duncan obviously had it very clear in his head. There’s diagrams and everything. On that level, it’s pretty neat in an old-school, cool idea sf way.

The book starts out very strong, with the protagonist growing up in a weird, vividly depicted herdspeople society. Then he leaves home and it becomes a picaresque, with him visiting a whole bunch of societies which are wildly different from each other. I would have liked this, but there were a couple problems.

One was that the coolest part of the concept got a bit lost in the flurry of “and here’s the sea-people! And the jungle people! And the original settler people!” That’s fine, but there could have been any reason for that; I wanted more of the implications of the 200-year days.

The other was sex. So much sex. Knobil goes somewhere, and every woman in sight flings herself on him. I think Duncan was consciously imitating a classic picaresque form where this sort of thing happens, but it got so irritating. (The only reason I think this is conscious in any way rather than just “because a lot of guys write that” is that I’ve read other books by him and it’s the sort of thing he’d do. That being said, ditto, it’s probably also because a lot of guys write that.) Anyway, it got increasingly boring and ridiculous. A lot of the women were doing it because they wanted some genetic diversity rather than because he was hot, but still.

Finally, the whole book trailed out as it went along, ending in a fizzle. I was really grabbed by it when I started, but ended up putting it down for weeks at some point in the middle. Usually I read his books in one sitting (or two days, etc, depending on interruptions).

Dave Duncan writes sf and fantasy which is pulpy in tone but often driven by genuinely original concepts which are very carefully thought out and then explored in all their implications. For instance, the “A Man of his Word” series has one of the more unique magic systems I’ve encountered in fantasy – it’s word-based magic, but the specific type is one I’ve never seen before or since – and rather than just rest on those laurels, Duncan proceeds to spend a lot of the series taking the concept to unexpected places. His books have plain prose and somewhat basic characterization, which is probably why no one ever mentions him when they’re talking about writers of ideas, but he really is one. He does tend to pop up in discussions of underrated writers, so there is that.

Obviously, West of January is not one of his better books. It looks like an early work that was recently re-issued, so that might explain some things. I’m still pleased to have grabbed a bunch of his books for cheap and for Tool of Satan to have mailed me hard copies of others, and will report on them as I get to them. He’s a genuinely interesting writer and worth reading if you like his kind of thing, which at his best is quirky, surprisingly intelligent takes on pulp sf and fantasy tropes. I like that kind of thing. If you do too, I suggest The Cursed, which has a very odd/cool take on curse-or-blessing (90% curse) powers in a medieval setting; there are some mild "dude wrote this" gender issues but on the other hand the protagonist is a pretty awesome middle-aged female innkeeper. For an epic fantasy series, Magic Casement (A Man of His Word Book 1) is also interesting/quirky, as is the "King's Swords" series (more small-scale, more fighting and politicking, less magic) and-- hey, this is 99 cents today!-- The Reluctant Swordsman (The Seventh Sword Book 1). I have not read the latter but I've been recced it frequently. Interesting premise for sure.

West of January

This is a re-read. I’ve read this book multiple times. It’s one of Le Guin’s earliest works, novella-length and an expansion/continuation of a haunting short story, “Semley’s Necklace,” which is a science fiction version of a very ancient folkloric theme, the human visitor to Faerie who returns to find that during their brief sojourn, years have passed, their spouse is old or dead, and their children have grown. In Le Guin’s version, Faerie is another world and the time change is due to faster than light travel.

Rocannon is a scientist who gets stranded on a less technologically advanced world; there’s a loose plot involving him trying to communicate with his people on his own world and getting involved in a war on the world he’s on, but it’s mostly a picaresque about exploring a new world. The plot is not the point. (Nor is Rocannon himself, who is a blank slate and really exists as a body for the reader to inhabit.) The point is a series of beautiful or terrifying or strange encounters: the windsteeds, which are giant cats with wings; the city of angels and its shift from awe to horror as Rocannon realizes that beauty does not mean intelligence; the small furry creatures that rescue and guide him; his ordeal by fire, with echoes of the phoenix and Odin upon the tree. It doesn’t hang together particularly well as a smooth, continuous narrative, but then again, the picaresque is a perfectly legitimate form that just happens to not be much respected now.

Rocannon’s World is one of those books whose flaws are what make it wonderful. Le Guin has written about how it was written while she was still finding her voice and working out the rules of her universe; she points out that Rocannon’s impermasuit, which protects him from physical harm, was a clunky attempt to transfer magical armor into a science fiction setting, and ought to have suffocated him. No such thing exists in her later books. She’s correct that it is something of an awkward marriage between myth and science, and yet it creates the stunning scene in which he’s captured and burned alive, forced to stand unharmed but helpless within the flames, and finally emerges from the ashes, takes off the suit which, once off his body, appears to be nothing more than a handful of plastic and wires, and bathes naked in the river, trying to wash away the memory of flames licking at his eyes. How marvelous is that! We are lucky to have the book that Le Guin didn’t get quite right, that didn’t do what she wanted it to do. If it had been more perfect, it might well have ben less memorable.

This is the edition I have: Rocannon's World. I have to say, I really love that cover. What could possibly be better than a dude in a cape and armor, carrying a torch and riding a giant flying cat in a surprisingly practical-looking harness?