Interfacing

Hiromi Goto is a Japanese-Canadian writer who’s been publishing since 1994, and she just keeps winning awards. Her work ranges from realistic to fantastical in varying degrees, and she’s written for adults, children and now young adult. Most of her books have focused on Japanese immigrant experiences in Canada. But while the protagonist of her latest, Half World (winner of the 2009 Carl Brandon Parallax award), is clearly of Japanese descent, it’s more or less incidental to the story.

I’m gonna start this off by quoting from the Prologue, since I couldn’t put it better than Goto herself:

Long, long, long ago, before mortals began to inscribe mortal religions onto stone tablets and parchment, there was a time of the Three Realms: the Realm of Flesh, the Realm of Spirit, and Half World.

For eons it was a time of wholeness and balance; Life, After Life, and Half Life were as natural as awake, asleep, and dreaming. All living things died only to awaken in the dream land of Half World. Mortals awoke to the moment of the greatest trauma they had experienced during their time in the Realm of Flesh. In Half World they relived Half Lives, until they had worked through their burdens of mortal ills, through trial and tribulation. Wrongdoings, doubts, fears, terror, pain, hatred, suffering, all the ills of mortality had to be integrated and resolved before they could rise from mortal fetters into light and Spirit. Once in the Realm of Spirit, all physical cares disappeared. Spirits existed freely, unbounded by mortality and suffering, untroubled by Flesh, in a state pure and holy. Until eventually their light began to grow dim, and they were called back into Flesh once more. For without connections to Life, Spirit, too, shall pass away.

But something happened to the three Realms, long ago. The connections were severed, and all the mortals and spirits were trapped in a single Realm. Mortals were reborn again as mortal flesh, without any chance for rest or reconciliation with their suffering, and the suffering multiplied. The half-lives in Half World were trapped into an even uglier cycle, without birth or death, doomed to be pulled back into their most traumatic moments over and over again, never moving on. The people began to grow monstrous as result of their endless torment. Spirit faded and grew distant, without the renewal of Life.

And in the madness of Half World, an impossible thing happened: Fumiko Tamaki became pregnant. A prophecy states that a child born in Half-World would reunite the three Realms, restoring the balance of cycles. But a very powerful creature calling himself Mr. Glueskin doesn’t want that to happen, so he chases down Fumiko and her husband Shinobu, forcing Fumiko through the one gate left between the Realms in order to bear her child in the Realm of Flesh. And so, Melanie Tamaki grows up in familiar, fleshly Vancouver with her strange, sickly, half-aware mother. Until one day, when Melanie is 14 years old, and Mr. Glueskin calls Fumiko back to him, for punishment. Melanie must go into Half World herself, to rescue her mother and play her part in fulfilling the prophecy.

The book is a quick read, just 200 pages, with the occasional lovely illustration by Jillian Tamaki. I’m afraid Melanie was a bit underdeveloped, but she’s a good kid – a poor and lonely outcast with little to prepare her for her trial by fire, but she’s stronger and quicker than she gives herself credit for, and insists on the right choices in the end. Half World is a very strange place, grotesque and tragic. I had some unanswered questions about why Half World is the way it is, if it’s been cut off from the Realm of Flesh for so long, but…this just isn’t that sort of book. More than a few inexplicable things happen without regard for internal logic, and sometimes that’s just the kind of story a story is. The analytical pedant in me loves a well-executed world-building, but something less definable in me loves a good fairytale too, more symbolic than solid. Half World has the logic of nightmares.

Half World, like so many great young adult novels before it, is about a young person learning to deal with the world as an adult, without the protection of parents, overcoming fear and being responsible for their own choices. It’s also about balance, and renewal, and the need for healing and forgiveness.

I enjoyed the first Nalo Hopkinson book I read, and my library has a pretty good selection of her work, so I decided to try her next book, Midnight Robber. And now I’m sorry I waited so long.

Midnight Robber takes place in the indeterminate future, on the largely Caribbean-influenced colony world Toussaint. The characters all speak Anglo-Patois, and Trinidadian Carnival traditions play an important role in the first section of the book, including the titular Midnight Robber. The little girl Tan-Tan is the daughter of passionate but immature parents, and as the background of her life is revealed, we also learn that in this future, humanity has achieved its interstellar empire thanks to a massively intelligent and powerful AI, the Grand Anansi Web, or Granny Nancy. After Granny Nancy emerged, it appointed itself guardian of the species, and its systems are everywhere, monitoring everything but not interfering in human customs or justice unless lives are threatened. So when Tan-Tan’s father Antonio murders a man, he’s exiled to Toussaint’s alternate-dimension counterpart, New Half-Way Tree. But as part of an effort to evade the omniscient web, Antonio flees on his own before he can be sentenced, taking Tan-Tan with him.

New Half-Way Tree is a penal colony for the most violent and dangerous criminals, and has no Granny Nancy providing information, comfort or oversight. Tan-Tan’s life there is difficult, made worse by her father’s abuse and alcoholism (there are some tough scenes, but none of the descriptions are graphic). But she finds friendships with the sentient natives, reptilian-ish people called douen. And when, at 16, she commits her own unforgivable crime, she finds shelter with the douen, the first human allowed to live with them and learn their secrets. With the douen, Tan-Tan has to learn a great deal very quickly, including how to be her own self, away from her father’s toxic influence and in the shadow of her guilt.

Midnight Robber is a great second novel, showing a lot of growth in Hopkinson’s voice and world-building. The style has a deliberately mythic feeling, being partly narrated by a mysterious someone telling the legends that have sprung up around Tan-Tan’s life, and I do like a good Anansi story. The douen are wonderful, both surprising and familiar. And there are so many facets of the larger universe that are hinted at but lie outside the scope of the story. I don’t know if Hopkinson plans to write any more books set in this universe, but I’d love to read one. Until then, I’ll have to settle for rereading Midnight Robber. The story has a lot of layers and allegorical asides, and I think I’d get a lot out of it the second time around.

I was sick last week, which meant a lot of time in bed reading my favorite literary comfort food, young adult novels. Mostly I was revisiting old favorites, but at one point I did feel well enough to walk down to the library (best thing about my apartment is being 4 blocks from a library branch) and pick up some books I’d put on hold earlier, including, conveniently, a YA fantasy book – The Blood Stone.

The Blood Stone is definitely on the “younger” side of “young adult.” The protagonist is 12, and he reacts to the world in a way that 12-year-olds can relate to, without the messy adolescent confusion that tends to accompany things like coming to grips with one’s sexuality and being on the cusp of independent adulthood without being recognized as adult – things I like in my YA books, but are certainly not required for enjoyment. The story takes place early in the 17th century, first in Venice and then India during the height of the Mogul empire, and points between.

Filippo Veroneo’s jeweler father, Geronimo, left Venice before Filippo was born, to travel to the capital of the Mogul empire, famed for its riches and work with gems. He left the family in the care of a man named Bernardo Pagliarin, who married the eldest Veroneo daughter, and who is a jerk. A well-connected jerk who can block the eldest son’s claims to be the legitimate head of the household and continue to treat the family badly and demand their wealth when he goes broke. Which news comes at the same time as reports that Papa Veroneo is being held hostage by a warlord in Afganistan and must be ransomed if he is ever to return home. Filippo is 12 at the time, and in order to get the precious “Ocean of the Moon” diamond (the titular Blood Stone) to Geronimo without Pagliarin finding out and taking it for himself, or leaving the family without any possibility of challenging his dominance, he’s sent off with the stone and a mysterious man who claims to have been his father’s fellow prisoner, sworn to help him and his family.

But there is another man lurking about who is even more mysterious, who also has ties to Geronimo Veroneo. And someone along the way really doesn’t want Filippo to succeed in his mission.

The story is part historical travel adventure (with explicit parallels to The Odyssey), part mystery, and the supernatural elements of the story share more with magical realism than typical genre fantasy. While nothing about the writing was vague or overly-stylized, I came away from the book with an impression of a certain indistinct dreaminess. So, while Filippo faces quite a bit of danger in his journey, it wasn’t a sense of compelling action or excitement that kept me reading, but the mystery of the two strange men and what that damn flute music meant. Together with the way the fantasy elements are handled, the aesthetic reminds me more of Gabriel Garcia Marquez than J. R. R. Tolkien or Marion Zimmer Bradley. You’ll never hear me call that a bad thing, but it may not be what everyone expect from a YA fantasy.

Of course, Jamila Gavin is not Garcia Marquez (who else is?), and I didn’t love everything about The Blood Stone – part of that magical realism aesthetic is supported by abrupt tense shifts that were sometimes odd or distracting. And while the final reveal about Sadiqui Iqbal Khan was complicated and heartbreaking and wonderful, Rodriguez was a little anti-climactic. Maybe I was just looking for a more complex conspiracy plot? I think reading too many Vorkosigan books has left me paranoid. Regardless, The Blood Stone is a fun book with a lot of beautiful moments, and was just the sort of thing I like to curl up with when I’m not feeling well. And also read when I am not sick.

Friends, I am a woman of simple literary tastes. I read books because they are fun and they make me feel good. Well, sometimes I really like to read books that make me cry, but in a satisfying way, you know? I don’t know how to explain this, but the existence of an entire genre of movies known as “tear-jerkers” assures me that I am not alone. Basically, I am not good at reading Important books, especially ones that take Work to appreciate. I read some now and then, because some important writers are easier for me to engage with and can actually feel like entertainment, but mostly I don’t bother. I don’t need to torture myself with boring books in order to foster my sense of intellectual superiority; being smarter than most people does that for me just fine.

Trouble on Triton, though, is a difficult book. It was work for me to read. I probably would not have finished it if I weren’t determined to review it on the blog (and I’d meant to finish it last weekend so I’d have a blog post ready on Monday. You can see how that worked out). I picked it out of all the Delany books at the library, knowing nothing else about it, because the subtitle, “An Ambiguous Heterotopia,” seemed to be a reference to The Dispossessed, by my beloved Le Guin. Perhaps that should have been a warning. The Dispossessed is also a bit of a difficult book, and while I thought it was excellent and thought-provoking, I don’t intend to re-read it.

The main character of Trouble On Triton is a man named Brom Helstrom. Bron Helstrom was my biggest problem with the book. He is a jerk. As far as I can tell he has no redeeming qualities at all. He’s not even an entertaining jerk like, say, Holden Caulfield, or the characters in a good sitcom, he is just insufferable. The back copy of the book says it’s supposed to be funny, and the information I looked up on it after I finished it said it’s supposed to be satire, but I think I missed most of that. I mean, I guess I can see some of the satirical edge, but I just don’t think I have the cultural background to appreciate it. The setting, Neptune’s moon Triton, is the “heterotopia” in question. Delany gets the term from Foucault, because his day job is English professor, and I avoided things like English classes in college so I wouldn’t have to read stuff like Foucault, so I am not going to try and pretend I understand what Delany means by “heterotopia,” but I did learn from some very helpful Amazon reviews that the culture of the moon colonies (quite a few of the larger moons in the outer solar system are inhabited, in this future) is meant to evoke New York’s 60s counterculture. Fashion and theater are pretty wild, and whatever your sexual/relationship preferences, you can find a commune or a co-op to accommodate them. Or if you don’t like them, you can get a procedure or a surgery to change to them to whatever you would like them to be.

Unless, of course, you are Bron Helstrom, and your sexualization preference is for men to be Real Men and women to submit to their natural superiority, in which case you are SOL in a liberal sexual revolution paradise. Which is, as far as I can tell, the plot and the point of the book.

There is a bunch of other stuff about a war with Earth and Mars that I think was supposed to mean more than I understood, and many digressions into things like meta-logic and, philosophy of theater you might call it, and some genetics, and other long explanations of nerdy things that I tended to skim pretty quickly. Delany introduces and plays with quite a few ideas in this book, some more successfully than others, but the only one that gets consistent attention is how terrible Bron is, and a main character that is both unlikeable and boring is just the death of a book for me.

I didn’t want to turn this review into how much I don’t like this book, but I can’t seem to help it. It really is a good book in many ways. I mean, Delany’s writing is excellent, and I quite liked the parts where other characters get mad at Bron and try to explain to him why he sucks. Laurence, an old gay man who only tolerates Bron because he wants to sleep with him, is the best, and if the story had been told from his point of view I think I would have loved it.

But between a main character I didn’t care about at all, and the cultural stuff being mainly over my head – I did not live through the 60s, and in addition to having low tastes in literature, I have a very boring lifestyle and am pretty happy that way – I just didn’t get much out of this book. Here is a quote from the most helpful Amazon review: “This is a very, very intellectual book–not at all an easy read. But if you can enjoy a satire on white male piggishness written by a gay black genius, you’ll enjoy this book.”

Y’all, I have had more than my fill of white male piggishness. I already know that it sucks, I don’t need a whole book reminding me of all the worst of it, you know? But I think there are people out there who are better at laughing at assholes than I am, and you are welcome to Trouble on Triton.

I’m not giving up on Delany, but I think I’ll choose my next book by him more carefully.

I feel sort of silly writing about Octavia Butler, because for years she and Delany were basically The Two Black People who Write Science Fiction and surely everyone already knows about them. But then, I’ve known about Delany for years but didn’t actually read any of his books until a couple of months ago, so maybe there are people out there who have heard of Octavia Butler but have yet to pick up her work. So, I reread the Lilith’s Brood trilogy (originally published as Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, with the series name Xenogenesis) recently, and now I want to write about how good it is.

Butler writes a lot about several recurring ideas. In the most general terms, she explores tensions between biological roots of behavior, and conscious choice. Sometimes this can take the form of diseases or genetic conditions that alter an individual’s behavior, sometimes it involves people’s pheromonal influences on each other. In much of her writing, Butler sets up situations where her characters end up with desires they find out-of-character or even repugnant, due to explicitly biological triggers. Then she plays with possible responses to this conflict between belief and desire, and explores their consequences.

That’s not the only thing she writes about, and it’s not her only recurring theme, but I think it is one most distinctly characteristic of her work. And as I am a pretty die-hard pragmatic materialist, and if there is anything I learned from getting a psychology degree, it’s that my “conscious mind” is a lot less impressive than popularly conceived, I love Butler for talking about these sorts of ideas head-on.

And Lilith’s Brood is steeped in them. Sometime in the not-too-distant future, humanity has gone ahead with nuclear-based mutually-assured destruction (the books were written during the Cold War, after all) and made the Earth uninhabitable for most forms of life. But while we were busy destroying everything, a group of aliens known as the Oankali had been watching us. As part of their nature, they were irresistibly drawn to humans. And so they rescued as many people as they could, and began to clean up the planet.

It’s difficult to talk about the whole trilogy without explaining why the Oankali are so interested in humanity, but I can’t help feeling that that spoils an important part of the first book, so I’ll do what I can. The Oankali have plans for our species, and they’ve chosen one woman, Lilith Iyapo, to be the leader of the first human group who will be a part of the plan. Lilith, it turns out, does not like this plan in the least, but the Oankali leave her without much choice. They make Lilith desire to please them, even while she hates their goals.

I didn’t learn anything about the mythology of Lilith until long after I first read this series, but now that I do, I can appreciate Butler’s excellent choice for naming her protagonist. Lilith is strong and complicated, and my favorite character in the series. The first book, Dawn, deals with Lilith’s struggle to come to terms with her role in humanity’s future. Adulthood Rites and Imago are each told from the perspective of one of her children, who have their own unique and significant influence on that future.

Butler’s style is direct and powerful. The plots move quickly, with enough action to suit my adventure cravings, but what I like best is the internal conflicts of the characters. They are all caught, in one way or another, between Oankali and human nature.

My goal with these reviews has been to describe the books in a way that will help other people tell if they’d like them, so I try to be relatively neutral. But the thing is, if you haven’t read anything by Octavia Butler yet, you need to. As far as I’m concerned she’s one of the most talented people ever to write science fiction. Go read Lilith’s Brood. Do it now.

I confess that, even though I’ve known of Delany for years, this is the first book of his I’ve actually read, and it was just a few weeks ago. I felt the need to justify why this is the first book of his I picked up, so if you just want the summary, skip down a couple paragraphs.

Captives of the Flame was written in 1963, and sold in one of those 2-in-1 paperbacks that I guess were popular then. Now that I’m not browsing for books in the Library of My Dad’s Home Office, I tend not to bother reading SF that old beyond a few carefully screened classics. At best, the stories read fast but lightweight, at worst they are full of now-cliche ideas interspersed with unthinking perpetuation of unfortunate social norms. I’m just not interested in SF stories where the only thing that changes about the world is how big the toys are.

Now, 1963 was not technically “golden age,” but generally, grocery store paperback fare was not leading the New Wave revolution. Captives of the Flame is only Delany’s second novel, he was 20 years old, and nothing I could find about it suggested it was anything but another piece of mass market fluff. I just had my own knowledge that Delany went on to become such a groundbreaking figure in the genre. It’s not even in print anymore, except for The Fall of the Towers, which is a trilogy that begins with a rewritten version of Captives of The Flame. I, being out of bookshelf space until I move to a bigger apartment, wanted to buy a kindle edition of something by Delany, and my choices were this, his very first novel, or a recent one that isn’t SF. So my expectations weren’t high, but I had faith it wouldn’t be completely unreadable.

Anyway now that I’ve spent all this time talking about what I thought the book would be like, probably it’s time to describe what I actually read. In some ways, I got just what I expected. It was a short, fast-moving, plot-driven story and I finished it in about two hours. The basic premise isnothing unusual for 1960s SF: a massive nuclear exchange fragmented civilization on Earth, and 1500 years later, people are rebuilding, but they’re still cut off from other survivors by massive radiation zones. The group depicted in the novel are in the midst of a rapid technological development that is leaving a lot of people unemployed and threatening to destabilize the economy and social order. As a rallying point and distraction, the leadership is finding it very convenient to declare war on a mysterious enemy that seems to be highly powerful but no one knows anything about.

The one review I could find online wondered if maybe that aspect was meant as a critique of American involvement in Vietnam, but if it was, it seemed pretty oblique to me. My understanding is that American involvement in Vietnam wasn’t much of a mainstream concern in 1963, anyway. The economic problems and prison labor seemed to be more pointed commentary. You could read it as an indictment of militarism in general, but the truth is I don’t think the text supports a substantive analysis on any of these points. Mainly they are setup for an exciting story about a classic fight against evil, refreshingly free of the shenanigans that lead me to give up on “classic” SF books in disgust.

I did, however, see hints of something weightier in John Koshar’s struggle to free himself. He starts off the book breaking out of prison, but that wasn’t enough for him. There’s barely enough time to develop any of the characters, but what’s there is moving and convincing. Koshar wants something he can’t quite explain, but he knows it’s important. I could feel an idea there that didn’t have room to develop yet. I don’t know if it’s the sort of thing Delany expands on in the rewrite or the later books, but I’d love to find out.

Kind of anti-climactic for the first book I’ve read by someone whose name I’ve heard for years as being a pioneer writing about race and sexuality. I mean, if any of his famous SF works were available as ebooks I would have gotten one (go click a “request on Kindle” link for me, would you?), but I feel like I got my $4 worth here. I’m planning to read and review more Delany for sure, but in the meantime, if you come across The Fall of the Towers, I think it’s worth a look.

Nalo Hopkinson is one of the names I saw during the Racefail ugliness, and then forgot about until I went looking again this summer, when her name just kept coming up. Probably because she’s awesome. This was her first novel, and it won a bunch of first-novel and new-writer awards. It’s the only one of hers I’ve read so far, but I’ve just checked Midnight Robber out of the library.

Brown Girl in the Ring is set in a post-economic collapse Toronto, the kind of dystopian-ish near future that is fairly standard in post-Cold War science fiction. While this larger setting and the story about how Hopkinson’s Toronto came to be this way was not entirely convincing to me, it’s mostly beside the point. The immediate details of life in the Burn, the urban center that has been abandoned by the government and everyone with enough money to leave, felt right. I mean, not that I know anything about what it’s like to be poor in a place where you can’t rely on formal institutions of government or law – reading ethnographies of urban poor communities in sociology classes hardly counts – but the writing reads like real lives to me, not someone’s exaggerated fears and stereotypes of what such a life might be like.

In this story, the horrors come in the form of monsters and magic from Caribbean mythology. The main character, Ti-Jeanne, and her family, are part of the community of Jamaican-Canadians who make up an important part of the Burn. Ti-Jeanne must learn to use “obeah” to draw on the help of spirits in order to fight her crime lord grandfather’s greed for power and immortality. So far I’ve written about several books that were a bit slow to get into, but Brown Girl in the Ring is definitely an adventure story. I finished it in just a couple of sittings. Hopkinson’s style is vivid and easy to read, and the pacing is intense. Ti-Jeanne is an engaging heroine, passionate and brave, but still young, stubborn and inexperienced, and I was alternately cheering her on and yelling at her to stop making mistakes. When I am yelling at a character in my head, it is a good sign I have become emotionally invested in their story. The villain is pretty awful as villains go, there’s not much in the way of nuance or ambiguity to his characterization. He’s obsessed and willing to do a lot of bloody, gruesome things to get what he wants. I rather enjoy reading about creepy and gruesome rituals, but it’s not for everyone.

Many of the characters speak a sort of Creole dialect that was unfamiliar to me, but easy to get used to. I know a little bit about Louisiana voudoun, and a little less about Haitian voudoun, and not really anything at all about Jamaican or broader Caribbean folklore, which makes up an important part of the plot. Obviously, prior knowledge is not required to enjoy the book (naturally, at the beginning of the story Ti-Jeanne doesn’t know anything about obeah either, so the reader can learn along with her), but when unfamiliar references show up in a book I like to learn everything I can about the background, so I did a lot of googling. Sadly, Caribbean folklore is not very well-represented on the internet.

The story also seems to draw inspiration from the play Ti-Jean and His Brothers by Derek Walcott, which I pretty much cannot find any information about online, beyond the fact that the characters’ names are Gros-Jean, Mi-Jean, and Ti-Jean (in Brown Girl in the Ring, Ti-Jeanne’s mother is called Mi-Jeanne and her grandmother is Gros-Jeanne). Which is disappointing, because I kind of love intertextuality and would get a lot of pleasure from pondering what Hopkinson is drawing from the play.

Brown Girl in the Ring is on the opposite end of many spectra from the last book I reviewed, Acacia. It’s definitely directed at my “fast-paced adventure against evil” desires, and it satisfies them nicely. If you enjoy such adventures, urban fantasy, bloody rituals, and new mythology, I think you will like this book. Probably if you like those other things but are also intimately familiar with Caribbean culture you will still like it.