some book reviews
Since fanfromfla said she'd like to see more discussion of books, here are some reviews I wrote up ages ago but never posted because I meant to add one more (for K. J. Parker's Devices and Desires, which I found both fascinating and frustrating but never did manage to write about).
These are brief reviews, with no plot spoilers beyond "back cover blurb" level.
Finch, by Jeff VanderMeer
Finch is the third of VanderMeer's books set in the strange, violent, fungally-challenged city of Ambergris. The story is set some years after the uprising of the so-called gray caps, who a thousand years earlier in Ambergris’s history had been massacred and driven literally underground by the city’s founders. Post-uprising, the gray caps control the city and have forced much of the human population into labor camps to build two huge, mysterious towers. To control the rest of the population, the gray caps have established a police force staffed by humans but firmly under gray cap control. John Finch is an unwilling police detective whose investigation of a double murder draws him into the secrets of Ambergris's history and the gray caps' intentions.
Fans of Ambergris may find it painful, as I did, to see the city brought low in this book, but I have to applaud VanderMeer for his boldness in showing the consequences of a long cycle of war and oppression.
The novel is a fascinating blend of noir (there's a clear debt to Chandler) and weird fantasy; last year China Miéville jokingly christened this new genre "Noird," and it's a form I hope to see more of. (It's interesting to read Finch alongside Miéville's The City and the City, which is less obviously fantastic in content but ultimately more subversive in structure.)
Finch doesn't quite have the punch of VanderMeer's first Ambergris book, City of Saints and Madman, in part because it explains mysteries rather than creating them. But it's a far more satisfying read than the frustrating Shriek: An Afterword, and a worthy end (?) to the Ambergris cycle.
Solitaire, by Kelley Eskridge
Ren Segura has been raised as a Hope--one of a small group of young people who, because of the time and date of their birth, are treated as living symbols of peace, prosperity, and progress. However, when Segura is accused of a terrible crime, the vast, paternalistic corporation she was raised in hangs her out to dry, and she's sentenced to an experimental virtual reality prison program that will inflict eight years experience of solitary confinement on her, although in the real world only months will have passed.
Solitaire is a book I have mixed feelings about. It does one thing I like a lot--Ren Segura is a queer character whose queerness is treated matter-of-factly. It's neither the point of her story nor "discreetly" glossed over and made half-invisible. This is something I'd love to see more of in sff. (I'm not saying that sff should never explore queer identities, issues of homophobia, etc.; of course it should. But there should also be queer characters at the center of all kinds of narratives that aren't focused on their queerness--you know, just like stories about straight people.) Solitaire is also written in a graceful style that I enjoyed reading.
However, the novel suffers from a rather shapeless plot, an overly abrupt ending, and a protagonist I often disliked, especially early in the book when Segura's deep and volatile streak of suppressed anger was completely unjustified by the privileged life she'd led. In fact, Solitaire consistently refuses to critique, or indeed to closely examine, the issues of economic privilege and corporate exploitation that are inherent in the novel's premise. That's not just a political failure, but a failure of worldbuilding (for example, I found myself wondering why all of the supposedly unemployable ex-prisoners we meet in the second half of the book live in such nice apartments). Solitaire is an interesting book, and worth reading, but ultimately somewhat unsatisfying.
Magneto: Testament, by Greg Pak, art by Carmine di Giandomenico
This series is apparently the first in-depth look in X-Men comicsverse at Magneto's past as a Holocaust survivor. There's a risk in this kind of story--unless the storytelling is managed very carefully, the result will be a grotesque appropriation of real suffering--but Pak engages scrupulously with history, and the result is deeply serious and utterly wrenching.
The story follows young Max Eisenhardt and his family from Germany in 1935, as Nazi persecution of Jews intensifies, to the Warsaw ghetto and then to Auschwitz. Horror piles on horror; Max survives Auschwitz by working as a Sonderkommando, a member of the "special unit" of prisoners who maintain the crematoria. The only glimmer of hope in Max's life is his love for Magda, a Romany girl. (I could have done without this suggested romance, which isn’t very plausible emotionally or plot-wise, but Marvel canon continuity requires it.)
Although it's Magneto's origin story, there are only the faintest suggestions of superpowers. Testament is about the formation of Magneto's worldview, not his mutation. Reading Testament makes it abundantly clear why Magneto refuses to "work within the system," and why he feels the only safety lies in striking first. But this is all handled primarily through implication; the latest historical moment we see is 1948, and there's no attempt to specifically foreshadow any Marvel comicsverse events.
In the book's extensive footnotes, Pak explains that he chose to show nothing happening that could not have happened in real-world history. And Pak seems to have researched everything, right down to the Sonderkommando uniforms and the tools they used. My second reading, when I used the footnotes, brought out new levels in the story and for me was more emotionally engaging (which is to say, more devastating) than the first read--in part because I'm not a very skilled visual reader, so I didn't always notice quite what was going on in panels until I read the notes.
I want to point out one delicate little touch that I especially appreciated, something that's uncommented-upon in their text and unmentioned in the footnotes. One of the prisoners, a Kapo who is also the leader of the internal resistance movement, and who is presented in a strongly positive light, wears a pink triangle. I half-wonder if Pak sneaked this through without Marvel's approval; in any case, it was good to see both a respectfully-depicted gay character and an acknowledgement of the gay victims of the Holocaust. (ETA after a bit of research: I see now that there was also a red triangle, used for political prisoners. Still, that's fairly obscure, and I think it's likely that the Kapo's triangle is supposed to be pink. I've returned the book to the library, so I can't double-check, but then it's hard to be sure about color in comics anyway.)
Testament is a harrowing story. Reading it will upset you, and I certainly wouldn't recommend giving it to kids much younger than 14 or so. But it's extremely well-handled. In one respect I actually prefer it to Art Spiegelman's classic Maus; I've always had a problem with the way Spiegelman's depiction of Germans as cats and Jews as mice naturalizes the Holocaust. Cats kill mice instinctively, but genocide is not an inevitable human instinct. In Testament, it's clear that the Holocaust was the result of political choices--indeed, of carefully-planned policy that used propaganda and disproportionate retaliation to suppress Jewish resistance--and that both its perpetrators and its victims were human beings.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.
These are brief reviews, with no plot spoilers beyond "back cover blurb" level.
Finch, by Jeff VanderMeer
Finch is the third of VanderMeer's books set in the strange, violent, fungally-challenged city of Ambergris. The story is set some years after the uprising of the so-called gray caps, who a thousand years earlier in Ambergris’s history had been massacred and driven literally underground by the city’s founders. Post-uprising, the gray caps control the city and have forced much of the human population into labor camps to build two huge, mysterious towers. To control the rest of the population, the gray caps have established a police force staffed by humans but firmly under gray cap control. John Finch is an unwilling police detective whose investigation of a double murder draws him into the secrets of Ambergris's history and the gray caps' intentions.
Fans of Ambergris may find it painful, as I did, to see the city brought low in this book, but I have to applaud VanderMeer for his boldness in showing the consequences of a long cycle of war and oppression.
The novel is a fascinating blend of noir (there's a clear debt to Chandler) and weird fantasy; last year China Miéville jokingly christened this new genre "Noird," and it's a form I hope to see more of. (It's interesting to read Finch alongside Miéville's The City and the City, which is less obviously fantastic in content but ultimately more subversive in structure.)
Finch doesn't quite have the punch of VanderMeer's first Ambergris book, City of Saints and Madman, in part because it explains mysteries rather than creating them. But it's a far more satisfying read than the frustrating Shriek: An Afterword, and a worthy end (?) to the Ambergris cycle.
Solitaire, by Kelley Eskridge
Ren Segura has been raised as a Hope--one of a small group of young people who, because of the time and date of their birth, are treated as living symbols of peace, prosperity, and progress. However, when Segura is accused of a terrible crime, the vast, paternalistic corporation she was raised in hangs her out to dry, and she's sentenced to an experimental virtual reality prison program that will inflict eight years experience of solitary confinement on her, although in the real world only months will have passed.
Solitaire is a book I have mixed feelings about. It does one thing I like a lot--Ren Segura is a queer character whose queerness is treated matter-of-factly. It's neither the point of her story nor "discreetly" glossed over and made half-invisible. This is something I'd love to see more of in sff. (I'm not saying that sff should never explore queer identities, issues of homophobia, etc.; of course it should. But there should also be queer characters at the center of all kinds of narratives that aren't focused on their queerness--you know, just like stories about straight people.) Solitaire is also written in a graceful style that I enjoyed reading.
However, the novel suffers from a rather shapeless plot, an overly abrupt ending, and a protagonist I often disliked, especially early in the book when Segura's deep and volatile streak of suppressed anger was completely unjustified by the privileged life she'd led. In fact, Solitaire consistently refuses to critique, or indeed to closely examine, the issues of economic privilege and corporate exploitation that are inherent in the novel's premise. That's not just a political failure, but a failure of worldbuilding (for example, I found myself wondering why all of the supposedly unemployable ex-prisoners we meet in the second half of the book live in such nice apartments). Solitaire is an interesting book, and worth reading, but ultimately somewhat unsatisfying.
Magneto: Testament, by Greg Pak, art by Carmine di Giandomenico
This series is apparently the first in-depth look in X-Men comicsverse at Magneto's past as a Holocaust survivor. There's a risk in this kind of story--unless the storytelling is managed very carefully, the result will be a grotesque appropriation of real suffering--but Pak engages scrupulously with history, and the result is deeply serious and utterly wrenching.
The story follows young Max Eisenhardt and his family from Germany in 1935, as Nazi persecution of Jews intensifies, to the Warsaw ghetto and then to Auschwitz. Horror piles on horror; Max survives Auschwitz by working as a Sonderkommando, a member of the "special unit" of prisoners who maintain the crematoria. The only glimmer of hope in Max's life is his love for Magda, a Romany girl. (I could have done without this suggested romance, which isn’t very plausible emotionally or plot-wise, but Marvel canon continuity requires it.)
Although it's Magneto's origin story, there are only the faintest suggestions of superpowers. Testament is about the formation of Magneto's worldview, not his mutation. Reading Testament makes it abundantly clear why Magneto refuses to "work within the system," and why he feels the only safety lies in striking first. But this is all handled primarily through implication; the latest historical moment we see is 1948, and there's no attempt to specifically foreshadow any Marvel comicsverse events.
In the book's extensive footnotes, Pak explains that he chose to show nothing happening that could not have happened in real-world history. And Pak seems to have researched everything, right down to the Sonderkommando uniforms and the tools they used. My second reading, when I used the footnotes, brought out new levels in the story and for me was more emotionally engaging (which is to say, more devastating) than the first read--in part because I'm not a very skilled visual reader, so I didn't always notice quite what was going on in panels until I read the notes.
I want to point out one delicate little touch that I especially appreciated, something that's uncommented-upon in their text and unmentioned in the footnotes. One of the prisoners, a Kapo who is also the leader of the internal resistance movement, and who is presented in a strongly positive light, wears a pink triangle. I half-wonder if Pak sneaked this through without Marvel's approval; in any case, it was good to see both a respectfully-depicted gay character and an acknowledgement of the gay victims of the Holocaust. (ETA after a bit of research: I see now that there was also a red triangle, used for political prisoners. Still, that's fairly obscure, and I think it's likely that the Kapo's triangle is supposed to be pink. I've returned the book to the library, so I can't double-check, but then it's hard to be sure about color in comics anyway.)
Testament is a harrowing story. Reading it will upset you, and I certainly wouldn't recommend giving it to kids much younger than 14 or so. But it's extremely well-handled. In one respect I actually prefer it to Art Spiegelman's classic Maus; I've always had a problem with the way Spiegelman's depiction of Germans as cats and Jews as mice naturalizes the Holocaust. Cats kill mice instinctively, but genocide is not an inevitable human instinct. In Testament, it's clear that the Holocaust was the result of political choices--indeed, of carefully-planned policy that used propaganda and disproportionate retaliation to suppress Jewish resistance--and that both its perpetrators and its victims were human beings.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.