even more science fiction and fantasy
12 and 13. Knife Edge and Checkmate by Malorie Blackman
I can't talk about these sequels to Noughts and Crosses without hugely spoilering that book, so don't read on if you want to be surprised.
I approached these books with some skepticism, since I find the second book in a trilogy often doesn't compare to the first, but these well exceeded my expectations. Knife Edge chronicles Sephy's struggles to make a life for herself and her new baby in the wake of Callum's death, and how it intersects with Jude's life in the Liberation Militia.
But while Knife Edge is a worthy successor to Noughts and Crosses, it is Checkmate which is I think the best as well as the darkest of the books. Callie Rose has grown to adolescence surrounded by secrets and silences - mostly those kept from her by the adults around her to protect her, but also those kept to protect themselves and each other. The relationships in this are raw and difficult and all too realistic, and the pair of interventions on the brink of violence are compelling in the real uncertainty they create as to which way the characters will jump. Highly recommended.
14. The First Century After Beatrice by Amin Maalouf
Scientists develop a way to make sure couples have a boy, but it's irreversible, and there's no girl drug available to counteract its cumulative effect on the world's population.
I am glad I read this book because I never previously considered South America and Africa together as an entity, and I think that is a good worldview shift for me. But I agree with vassilissa that for a book ostensibly about turmoil in the South, it is odd how all the action takes place in the North. Putting that remove together with the narrator's preferred detached observer stance and the result is oddly bloodless - there's a sort of appeal to the story of a small life going on elsewhere while great events take place, like in the Auden poem, but we don't really get enough of the guts of his life for that to work either, so I'm left wishing Maalouf had made Clarence the narrator and followed her into the action.
The South is not the only weird absence in the book. Beatrice of the title scarcely has even a walk on role. Where are the religions in this? Where is the Middle East? And or a book whose premise is all about gender, where are all the women? As vassilissa pointed out in her earlier post, only Clarence, who is the lover of the narrator, rates more than a mention (not to mention that she has a man's name and repudiates wanting or raising children. Certainly not all women do or should, but the combination makes her not a very good sole representative of women in a novel about reproduction).
It’s not only that the Network of Sages seems to be very male-dominated and that either author or translator has chosen gendered language for things like "men of goodwill". Even the superficial attempts to deal with gender are all about convincing fathers that daughters are just as good. Where are the women in the rioting? Where is the vicious debate between feminists who agree that girl infants should be adopted out of sexist home cultures and those who believe this is in itself harmful to women? Where are those who react in the most affected cultures by hoarding and sequestering women, or by killing them, or auctioning them, or blaming them? Where are the women who try to use their scarcity to gain power? Where are the people debating whether several men can share one woman as several women often share one man?
I understand why this book isn't marketed as science fiction even though it clearly is - it makes the least of its premise. And it’s such a meaty premise, I sort of wish Maalouf had picked some simpler route to provoking his simmering North/South resentment into open conflict, because I feel like that could be an interesting book, but it's overshadowed by the can of worms he opened and then didn't deal with.
15. The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Butler's been so extensively reviewed I feel like there's not much point to adding my two cents, but for what its worth, this is an extremely believable and compelling post-apocalyptic tale about a young woman Lauren, her family and then her chosen family, trying to make a good life in the ruin.
All the characters, main and walk-on alike, felt very real to me, and sympathetic - she never descends to stock. And the idea of hyperempathy syndrome seemed to me both believable as a development and fascinating as a force on individual character and society. I liked it very much.
That said, I believe this is the beginning of a series, and I am very skeptical about how far I will be able to stick with it, because I had a real disconnect with Earthseed, the religion she created (or, in her view, discovered) and set out to create a community around. I'm an atheist of half-Jewish extraction and she's a preacher's daughter, so clearly we're coming from very different places, but I just cannot take on board her belief that calling Change God is fundamentally different and better than calling Change Change. It seems to me the only difference is that it evokes a set of assumptions about God's anthropomorphism, omnipotence and benevolence that she is supposedly repudiating. And even though I totally agree with her about the importance of humankind going into space, the idea that it's our Destiny makes me twitch. I don't believe in Destiny, I don't know why someone who believes God is Change would believe in Destiny, and I think humans have done a lot of harm in the belief that they are destined to conquer new ground. None of this makes it a bad book or unbelievable that the character would believe it, it is just a question of how far I can go along for the ride.