Tag: book-reviews

Two Powerful Contenders for the Arthur C. Clarke Award

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

Any of you following this blog know that from early May, my intention has been to read as many of the novels nominated for “best” category by the four biggest speculative fiction awards as I can. I started out with the first to hold its awards announcement, the 2024 Nebula Awards, and managed to read all the short-listed novels for “best novel.” You can read my reviews of each on this blog. The 2024 Locus Award short-list, coming so soon after the Nebulas (and, more to the point, so soon after I made my resolution), was a much, much bigger challenge. How does the saying go? Too many books, too little time? I couldn’t read all of them. But at least there was a bit of overlap with the Nebula list. I had to be content with that. Meanwhile, I am sprinting to read every one of the 2024 Arthur C. Clarke Award short-listed nominees before the July 24th announcement of the winner. I came to a belated realization that I needed to add this list to my other three (Nebula, Locus, Hugo) because I’m a reader in English, and even though the Arthur C. Clarke Award only goes to a writer published in the U.K, that still covers most of the English-speaking world. One of the first two writers I’m reviewing is a U.S. writer.

Awards, of course, aren’t the be-all and end-all. For whatever reason (maybe chiefly that indie writers aren’t usually included–a bit of a self-serving complaint, since I am indie-published myself), every novel that deserves a reward isn’t on these lists. That said, the short-lists for the major speculative fiction awards are an extremely helpful way to keep up with newly published novels (also other forms) in this cluster of genres.

Onward to my first two reviews of 2024 Arthur C. Clarke Award short-listed best novels. They are all SF, no fantasy, because SF is the only genre this award recognizes.

They are, in the order I’ve read them:

Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory (Macmillan–Tordotcom 2023)

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars (Penguin/Random House 2023)

Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory

Find it here.

I suppose this novel was short-listed for the Locus best new novel award–and not just for best novel– because Tesh’s World Fantasy Award-winning Silver in the Wood is actually a novella. Now, although Some Desperate Glory did not win in its Locus Awards category, it is short-listed for both the Arthur C. Clarke 2024 Awards and the Hugo 2024 Awards for best novel. Quite an achievement.

I was puzzled by this book at first. Not that I don’t enjoy a rousing space opera, but it seemed at first like an Ender’s Game sort of book, and given other nominated books this year, I didn’t think that would be enough for a major award. There are clues right away, though, that within the space opera wrapper and the space academy trope, this book offers a pretty deep experience. The first clue is the title. Do you recognize it? It’s from Wilfred Owen’s great poem about the horrors of World War I, “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Please read it if you haven’t, or if you haven’t in a while. It’s a terrific poem. But here’s the last stanza. If you could see the horrors I’ve seen, the narrator of the poem tells us,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Owen’s poem quotes another poem, a famous ode by the Roman poet Horace. “Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori” translates “how sweet and appropriate it is to die for one’s country.” This is a poem every schoolboy in England at the turn of the twentieth century would have known as the highest patriotic sentiment. And that schoolboy, statistically speaking, was soon to have an excellent chance of dying a horrible death in the trench warfare of World War I, a war which killed off an entire generation of young English, French, and German men, among others–including Wilfred Owen himself in the last weeks of the war.

So–a first clue about Emily Tesh’s intent. And the book goes on to ratify the clue–it’s a novel of child soldiers inculcated by their cynical elders with the patriotic ardor that will lead them to their needless deaths.

The novel is more complicated than that. The epigraph to the novel is our second clue, a quotation from the ancient Greek playwright Euripedes’s great Medea: “I would rather stand three times in the battle line than give birth to one child.” That line tells us how dangerous it was to be a woman in a society with scant medical help for women giving birth, and that’s the type of society Emily Tesh’s characters inhabit. The quotation (revisited several times in the novel) also makes us wonder, the moment we see a good number of the novel’s teenaged soldiers are female: what’s about to happen to these female soldiers? What will they be called upon to do as their patriotic duty to an all-consuming state?

More clues: chapter titles, character names, many taken from heroic Nordic or Graeco-Roman heroes and gods of old. These titles and names reinforce the idea of a militaristic society. For example, the novel’s villain is named for the Roman conqueror of the British Isles. The main (female) character’s name evokes the word valkyrie. The training exercises for the teenaged soldiers take place in a virtual reality facility called the agoge– a Spartan name for the rigorous training undergone in perhaps one of the most militaristic societies of the classical world. How many fantasy and SF novels have been set in a kind of Spartan- or Roman-inspired militaristic environment? Again, if we really think about this kind of clue, it leads us to deeper questions. Why are most of the character names drawn from Nordic or Graeco-Roman mythology? What does this tell us about diversity in the world of Tesh’s novel?

I found all of these hints pretty fascinating. However–around the two-thirds mark, I was ready to quit reading. The book takes a very sharp turn. No spoilers, but I hate a book that plays tricks on the reader. I hate a St. Elsewhere ending (old, old tv reference!), and it looked to me like that’s where we were headed. Luckily, I didn’t stop reading. I was so wrong. Some readers like that trick-the-reader stuff and might eagerly read on, but if you’re like me and hate it, just. . .trust the book and keep reading.

I think it’s safe to say that every time a lesser novel might have settled for easy answers, this novel rises above them. It’s not just about young eager military trainees at the space academy. It’s not just about the horrors of war, either. It’s a very interesting read, and I can see why it was nominated for so many awards.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

Find it HERE.

I finished this book around an hour ago, and I don’t even know how I’m writing. I should be falling on the floor moaning in despair. This is one powerful book. It’s near-future dystopia, but it is also SF, because (unlike a book like, say, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song) it includes plausible technology and institutions extrapolated from existing ones–but they don’t exist quite yet. Hence the nomination for the Arthur C. Clarke SF award.

The novel takes as its premise the idea that some near-future America might broadcast deadly gladiatorial-type games between convicted murderers as highly monetized reality tv. The novel takes its inspiration from a loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This loophole actually allows chattel servitude–slavery–in certain instances. That’s not science fiction. That’s fact. The exception in the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing U.S. slavery is for prisoners incarcerated for committing certain crimes. The U.S. has far and above the highest proportion of incarcerated people in the developed world, and the highest percentages of those people are drawn from minority populations. Not science fiction. Not exaggeration. Fact. It’s a national shame and blot, and it’s one of the foundational reasons for the national shame and blot that is the U.S. incarceration industry. Other writers of speculative fiction have tackled similar issues. I’m thinking of Margaret Atwood’s not very satisfying novel, The Heart Goes Last, for example. But I can’t think of any that are as powerful as this one.

A few things to know about this novel:

  1. if you are an easily distracted reader, try to get it in hard copy. The novel is peppered with footnotes, and if you are reading it in e-book form, you may find yourself repeatedly shuttling back and forth from the text of a chapter to the end of a chapter. I’m not sure about this, but I’m imagining a hard copy will be less distracting, because the footnotes will be right there at the bottom of each page. Whatever you do, don’t skip the footnotes thinking they will give you some kind of optional bonus content. They’re an integral part of the narrative fabric. And don’t be put off by the idea. Some of the footnotes are fictional, many are real, all are heart-stopping.
  2. This is a very American book about a very American problem. If you’re from another part of the world, you may not feel the horrible social consequences as much as a U.S. reader will. I’m not sure about that, being a U.S. reader myself and maybe lacking perspective. But British readers–maybe you’ve encountered Claire North’s dystopian novel 84K. Not exactly the same, but a similar kind of problem. Other parts of the world have their own horrifying social problems and will be able to empathize, I think.
  3. The premise might make you think you are in for a grittier, more adult Hunger Games. Think again.

This is such a powerful novel that right now, I can’t imagine anyone NOT giving it an award. The Locus Awards for first novel overlooked it. I can forgive that, since that award went to The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera, which is also a very powerful and important novel. Chain-Gang All-Stars, though-wow. Along with a slew of other nominations for genre awards, this novel has been nominated for the National Book Award. That’s one of the main U.S.-based awards for literary fiction. As a reader of literary fiction, I’d say I trust that award’s judges more than I trust the judges for the Pulitzer Prize, at least where fiction is concerned. Speculative fiction doesn’t usually win that kind of award. I say that, and then I’m thinking again (always thinking about it a lot–a very, very powerful novel) of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, the dystopian novel that won this year’s Booker Prize.

And a personal note, so you can skip this part: the author of this novel clearly has the standing to write it. I am another person very disturbed to learn about the exception in the 13th Amendment. Another person connecting the dots between that exception and the shameful state of incarceration in the U.S. I felt compelled to write a novel about it. Because I’m white, my protagonist was white. Yet the overwhelming proportion of this exception’s victims are Black and brown people. Look up information on the controversy surrounding #Own Voices if you don’t understand why a white writer might hesitate to take on such a topic–probably should hesitate. Yet I wrote my novel anyway. Why? This is a weird thing about writers–anyway, some writers. Anyway, me. My main character insisted I write it. He hounded me until I did write it. But as soon as I did, I decided to stick it away in a drawer. All that work. Oh, well. My character has stopped haunting me.

A final two Nebula Award finalists

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy1 Comment

In my quest to read all six of the novels short-listed for the 2024 Nebula Awards, I’ve made two posts so far about four of the novels. This post rounds out the six. When I began this series of posts, I have to say I scoffed. The Nebula Award winners will be unveiled on June 8th, and I only decided I’d do this thing a bit past mid-May. Was I crazy???? And now that I’ve actually done it (except for one–full disclosure, I read it earlier this year), have I ever read such an impressive collection of novels? If I have, I’ve never blitzed through them this fast. But they were so absorbing it was hard to stop. Okay, I’m a fast reader. But I’m not a fast reader of boring stuff. So there’s that.

I read these novels in no particular order, by the way–just grabbed one and dug in. It also didn’t hurt–in fact helped a lot–that I’m on a month’s DYI writing retreat in Portugal, where I am perched five stories above the beautiful Largo de São Domingos in Porto. Wafting through the windows along the balmy breezes are fantastic performances by the street musicians in the square below, especially the music of the superb soprano jazz saxophonist who bills himself as Andre Luis. Was there ever a more perfect writing/reading environment? I’ll go home to the U.S. soon and find out who won the Nebula this year for best novel, but I’ll leave a big part of my heart here in Porto.

Here are my final two reviews: The Terraformers, by Annalee Newitz, and The Water Bandits, by S. L. Huang.

Find out more HERE.

Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers (Tor, 2023)

How do I even begin? And what is this novel, anyway? Is it green lit/eco lit? Yes. Is it something called “noblebright“? Yes. Not dystopian. Not utopian, either. Is it structurally set up to fail as a novel? In my opinion, yes. Does it fail? No, no, a thousand times no. It is superb. Please read this book.

The novel covers a thousand years–enough, according to the author, to encompass a full terraforming cycle of the potentially Earth-like exoplanet Sask-E. That means, however, that you don’t get to follow one protagonist, or even several co-protagonists, over the course of the novel. So what happens when you switch main characters like this? In some cases, your novel functions like a series of novellas bound together into a single book. In some cases, you end up with a mess. Some writers succeed at doing this. In the SF realm, I’m thinking of Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, or Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves (which I found very unsatisfying–others obviously disagree). Another example might be David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which I found very annoying, especially because I think he’s a great writer (again, many, many others disagree). Against all odds–or anyway, against my own reading history and prejudices, Newitz’s novel brilliantly succeeds, perhaps because one of the main “characters” is Sask-E itself, or–maybe the whole Sask-E terraforming enterprise, based on the philosophy of a society of rangers whose job it is to protect the planet. The author’s interview for The Stranger explains their thinking.

The rangers’ communitarian and ecological principles run up against stiff opposition by commercial enterprises with a much different vision of Sask-E’s future. These interests have the financial and political clout to prevail. If I were to tell you my favorite kind of novel is one with a strong message overwhelming the characters, I’d be lying. I find that kind of novel trying. I’m thinking of the (very much lauded) novel The Tortilla Curtain, by T. C. Boyle (1996). At the end, I felt the characters were cardboard cutouts standing in for ideas, and I also felt resentful that I hadn’t spent the time instead reading a good nonfiction book about the problems of immigrants. A few chapters into Newitz’s book, I wondered if I were in for another experience like that. I wasn’t. This novel is thrilling–as a novel of ideas, but a real novel, not just a long, disguised essay.

The first chapter or two almost made me think we were about to embark on a fun adventure story, maybe of the cowboys-in-space variety, the good-guy farmers vs. the evil ranchers. After all, the novel begins with a ranger named Destry, riding their faithful moose Whistle. But pretty soon the reader is in the deep weeds of how a fair regulatory climate and carefully-maintained ecological balance are essential to justice and a decent life. If this description makes the novel seem drab, don’t be fooled. It’s anything but.

Far into the novel, I had to laugh at the minor character Cimell, a failed game designer who is very earnest but whose games are essentially unplayable. Cimell tries to explain to the main characters in this part of the book (a smart, savvy cat–is there any other kind?–and a sentient train) (Yes, train. A train is one of the main characters. A gamer-train.):

Maybe. . .battles are more exciting. They make for better superhero stories. . .But the revolution is actually happening in the boring details, like how you manage housing and water, or who is allowed to speak.

Please tell me the author hasn’t stuck Cimell into the novel to speak wryly for theirself. This novel is anything but boring. This game–this novel–is anything but unplayable. (Because what is a novel, anyway, but an elaborate game played with words?)

The Terraformers is an extremely important novel, and I am so glad it’s a Nebula finalist. The more of us who know about this book, the better. The more of us who read this book, the better. The planet needs us to. In addition, it’s a great reading experience. Did I mention sentient worms? And the much-maligned naked mole-rats finally get their due.

Find out more HERE.

S. L. Huang, The Water Outlaws (Tor, 2023)

What a fun, exciting novel this one is! I enjoyed it immensely. It’s a re-imagining of Ming-dynasty writer Shi Nai’an’s Water Margin, considered one of China’s “Four Great Classical Novels” and a precursor to later wuxia fiction: stories (movies, games, etc.) heavily involved with martial arts, magic, and underdog characters fighting for justice. This re-imagining is set in the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE), although it doesn’t adhere slavishly to historical facts. Huang’s acknowledgments page at the end of the novel gives a good overview of what parts are historical and what parts are made up.

I don’t know enough about wuxia, just that one of my favorite movies ever is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, directed by Ang Lee). For the hard-core wuxia fan, I’m sure Huang’s novel presents even more delights than it does for me. Even so, I found it thrilling. It’s a tale of women who are thrust to the margins of society. These outcasts band together in a sisterhood considered a pack of bandits by the authorities but freedom-fighters by themselves and the villagers they protect. A fascinating subplot concerns a woman forced to participate in a sort of proto-Manhattan Project to create a weapon of mass destruction–some of it based on wuxia tropes about magic and the magical arts, but a lot of it on actual Chinese experimentation with gunpowder. This part of the plot reminds me somewhat of Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself. The characters are compelling, and the moral dilemmas they face give them depth.

A serious message about the nature of justice and the dangers of messing with dark destructive forces undergirds this exciting tale. I had a blast ending my Nebula Finalists reading binge with this one.

COMING UP NEXT:

I have some thoughts about who I’d vote to win.

Two More Nebula Finalists

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy1 Comment

Continuing my previous post on the short-listed novels for the 2024 Nebula award, here are two more reviews of the finalists, Ann Leckie’s Translation State and Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors:

Find out more HERE.

Ann Leckie, Translation State (Orbit, 2023)

A compelling read from Leckie, who returns to a familiar setting, the interstellar empire of the Radch. Some time ago, I read the first of her Imperial Radch trilogy, Ancillary Justice, and reviewed it for this blog. At the time, I found the book hard to penetrate, but by the end of the novel, pretty fascinating. I was unsure whether I’d continue the series, and in fact didn’t. Now, with Translation State, I’ve returned to Leckie’s complex world of intrigue and danger and exotic species. The characters, the plot, the ingenious, very organic and natural-seeming use of pronouns to delineate a gender-fluid universe of peoples and cultures, are all outstanding. This novel is billed as a stand-alone novel in the Radch universe, but I agree with many reviewers who point out that the more a reader knows about that universe, the better the reading experience with this most recent novel.

Throughout Translation State, I was in awe of Leckie’s world-building. The Radch are not the main focus of this book, although their influence pervades the complicated politics that drive the plot. This novel focuses on the mysterious Presger and the intermediate forms some of them take to bridge from their alien consciousness to the humans with whom they exist in an uneasy alliance. A too-fragile treaty may be the only barrier standing between humanity and annihilation, so the stakes are high. I was reminded of Iain Banks’s great Culture novels.

To inhabit the mind of a species this removed from the human is quite a feat, and Leckie pulls it off. I’m thinking of other novels that accomplish something similar, such as William Golding’s The Inheritors, or Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves (which itself won the Nebula in 1972). I guess I could mention China Miéville’s great Embassytown, too, but that novel is in a class by itself.

Is it mean-spirited of me to say that in the end, I was a bit let down by Leckie’s tale of found family? On the other hand, while it may be fascinating to imagine the politics and treaties that stitch the universe together, in the end, at least for the novel (for readers? for human beings?), it all comes down to the personal. Only connect. Translation State is actually a very sweet-natured novel, and I enjoyed it immensely. And I think now I’ll return to the Ancillary books and start reading them in order.

Find out more HERE.

Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors (Tordotcom, 2023)

This novel, by Sri Lankan writer Chandrasekera, is simply astounding, a sweeping tale of power and the structures that drive power, loosely based on a legend about Siddhartha. The novel has received wide acclaim, nominated for the Locus award and short-listed for the Lambda award, among other accolades. Chandrasekera imagines a hybrid world of the fantastic (gods and anti-gods and spirits and demons and messiahs abound, as well as the mysterious “bright doors” of the title) and the realistic–shoddy apartment blocks in a steamy South Asian city, civil unrest, unfathomable and obscure caste distinctions, corrupt politics, and more–a heady mix. This is a characteristic Chandrasekera’s novel shares, at least a bit, with his fellow nominee Talabi’s Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon (reviewed in my preceding post), except that in Talabi’s novel, the spirit world and the regular world, while they may intersect, are clearly separate–that’s even a huge plot point in Talabi’s novel. In Chandrasekera’s novel, the spirit world’s and the ordinary world’s objects and personae and passions and concerns are all jammed and mashed together in a dizzying stew that defies any attempt (reader’s, chararacters’) to pry them apart.

This novel is infused with the historical and political concerns of Sri Lanka, matters pretty completely opaque to me. I refer readers of this blog to this great review and analysis published recently on the Strange Horizons magazine site. The reviewer, New Zealand writer Tehnuka, has a far greater understanding of these issues than I ever will. That said, even without the deep background of readers like her, I can tell you I found Chandrasekera’s novel as compelling a read as anything I’ve come across lately.

Its political concerns are not just local and regional, either. Many readers, from many parts of the world, will resonate with this aspect of the novel. Great quotation, too frighteningly true in too many parts of the world, not excepting my own:

the law might do anything, at any time, to anyone, and justify itself any way it likes–it is feral, like the invisible laws and powers of the world of which it is a pale imitation.

Quick message: I love to read. Love it. You do, too, I’m figuring, or you wouldn’t be here. So. . .LOVE YOUR PUBLIC LIBRARY. LOVE YOUR LIBRARIAN. For some of us, libraries and those brave souls, librarians, stand between us and the dark. So far, in my read through the Nebula finalists, any one of these books could be banned by ignorant ill-meaning people simply because all of these novels (so far, anyway), take an unflinching look at the human condition. (some, the not-so-human!)