Fiction
Grady Hendrix, Horrorstör: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Low-wage workers are trapped in an Ikea knockoff on the night it finally lets loose the ghosts of the sadistic warden and the suffering prisoners from the site’s former incarnation as a horrible prison. (Side note: the publishers are apparently so annoyingly worried about Ikea’s lawyers that Ikea itself shows up as a point of comparison several times to emphasize that Orsk is not Ikea, but rather a copy of the concept.) The book is framed as a catalog, with initial entries for furniture that seem standard Ikea fare, but swerve in the middle as the horror becomes overt to explicit torture devices, presented in Ikea catalog style. It’s a cute concept, but there was too much body horror for me. I didn’t get invested enough in the heroine to want to suffer through her suffering. However, if you can tolerate lots of gross and slimy impositions (no sexual assault) and enjoy trapped-in-a-haunted-house narratives, this might be an unusual variation.
Zombies vs. Unicorns, Justine Larbalestier & Holly Black eds.: The conceit is Team Unicorn and Team Zombie; the result is nearly all highly enjoyable stories of adventure and horror, not all of them correlated with the creature you might first think. Alaya Dawn Johnson’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, for example, is a zombie love story, while Kathleen Duey’s The Third Virgin is unicorn horror. Naomi Novik’s Purity Test is a charming unicorn-in-the-big-city story, and Scott Westerfeld’s Inoculata manages to meld YA rebellion with zombies: evolution as metaphor for growing up. Other authors include Garth Nix, Margo Lanagan, Maureen Johnson, Meg Cabot, Cassandra Clare, and Libba Bray, who ends the volume on an elegiac note.
Dave Eggers, The Circle: This is a book that, if written by someone who wasn’t Dave Eggers, would likely have been called dystopian sf. Mae joins the Circle, the giant internet company that runs everything and knows or intends to know everything. Eggers has a pitch-perfect ear for the instructions we’re constantly getting about how to configure ourselves better for the convenience of our technologies and the companies that profit from them. As Mae is enculturated into the Circle, she subjects herself to the constant discipline of visibility, trying both to participate socially and do her actual job of answering advertiser queries. In a world in which Zappo’s can force job applicants to spend dozens of hours becoming “friends” with their potential employers, this is hardly “if this goes on …” speculation: we’re already there. The more satirical parts involve things like the Circle counting every grain of sand in the Sahara, to prove it can be done. (Are self-driving cars much less out there?) When the Circle convinces numerous politicians to be recorded during all their interactions, the process is given the Scientology-esque name “going clear.” And frankly, given that transparency is currently for the governed rather than the governors, watching politicians wheel and deal might be an improvement, even though Eggers is clearly out to show the performativity/constructedness of even the most “open” encounters and the harms of pervasive self-inflicted surveillance. Plus, it’s clear that the Circle’s masters don’t offer to others the same information-sharing they demand of everyone else; what remains secret is all the more important as the Circle closes.
The question is whether you want to read 480+ well-written pages about a young woman who volunteers to destroy herself on the altar of transparency because she doesn’t know who she is. I don’t know whether this book will have the staying power of 1984 and Brave New World, but Eggers bitingly portrays surveillance culture and consumerism in a way that does at least merit comparison with those dystopias.
Richard K. Morgan, The Dark Defiles: Free review copy. I began this fantasy series very excited over the gay barbarian protagonist persisting despite his society’s homophobia and the half-alien lesbian protagonist whose involvements in palace intrigue are almost the least of her worries. Over time, the grimdark elements started hitting me harder (in the previous volume, protagonist #1 deliberately puts a woman in a position where she is raped to death in order to achieve his goals, and stands around as it happens), and I read Morgan’s blog (always a dangerous thing with authors) where he became increasingly defensive about the whole grimdark thing-he doesn’t like the label. Still, Morgan writes meaty plots-in this one, there are at least three separate threats to human existence, although one has been fairly soundly beaten back for the moment; the balance of power between human magic and alien/elvish technology/magic (very hard to tell) is constantly shifting, not to mention the relationships between the people involved. It’s a quest story where the characters don’t find the quest object; it ends at a point that feels like a real ending, but politics will obviously continue to create huge problems for the remaining protagonist. I was going to say that there was also a lot less rape in this book, at least onscreen/within one degree of our characters, but then the last hundred or so pages of the book made that wrong. I’m glad I know the ending, but I would not recommend this to anyone who doesn’t enjoy GRRM.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Zombies vs. Unicorns, Justine Larbalestier & Holly Black eds.: The conceit is Team Unicorn and Team Zombie; the result is nearly all highly enjoyable stories of adventure and horror, not all of them correlated with the creature you might first think. Alaya Dawn Johnson’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, for example, is a zombie love story, while Kathleen Duey’s The Third Virgin is unicorn horror. Naomi Novik’s Purity Test is a charming unicorn-in-the-big-city story, and Scott Westerfeld’s Inoculata manages to meld YA rebellion with zombies: evolution as metaphor for growing up. Other authors include Garth Nix, Margo Lanagan, Maureen Johnson, Meg Cabot, Cassandra Clare, and Libba Bray, who ends the volume on an elegiac note.
Dave Eggers, The Circle: This is a book that, if written by someone who wasn’t Dave Eggers, would likely have been called dystopian sf. Mae joins the Circle, the giant internet company that runs everything and knows or intends to know everything. Eggers has a pitch-perfect ear for the instructions we’re constantly getting about how to configure ourselves better for the convenience of our technologies and the companies that profit from them. As Mae is enculturated into the Circle, she subjects herself to the constant discipline of visibility, trying both to participate socially and do her actual job of answering advertiser queries. In a world in which Zappo’s can force job applicants to spend dozens of hours becoming “friends” with their potential employers, this is hardly “if this goes on …” speculation: we’re already there. The more satirical parts involve things like the Circle counting every grain of sand in the Sahara, to prove it can be done. (Are self-driving cars much less out there?) When the Circle convinces numerous politicians to be recorded during all their interactions, the process is given the Scientology-esque name “going clear.” And frankly, given that transparency is currently for the governed rather than the governors, watching politicians wheel and deal might be an improvement, even though Eggers is clearly out to show the performativity/constructedness of even the most “open” encounters and the harms of pervasive self-inflicted surveillance. Plus, it’s clear that the Circle’s masters don’t offer to others the same information-sharing they demand of everyone else; what remains secret is all the more important as the Circle closes.
The question is whether you want to read 480+ well-written pages about a young woman who volunteers to destroy herself on the altar of transparency because she doesn’t know who she is. I don’t know whether this book will have the staying power of 1984 and Brave New World, but Eggers bitingly portrays surveillance culture and consumerism in a way that does at least merit comparison with those dystopias.
Richard K. Morgan, The Dark Defiles: Free review copy. I began this fantasy series very excited over the gay barbarian protagonist persisting despite his society’s homophobia and the half-alien lesbian protagonist whose involvements in palace intrigue are almost the least of her worries. Over time, the grimdark elements started hitting me harder (in the previous volume, protagonist #1 deliberately puts a woman in a position where she is raped to death in order to achieve his goals, and stands around as it happens), and I read Morgan’s blog (always a dangerous thing with authors) where he became increasingly defensive about the whole grimdark thing-he doesn’t like the label. Still, Morgan writes meaty plots-in this one, there are at least three separate threats to human existence, although one has been fairly soundly beaten back for the moment; the balance of power between human magic and alien/elvish technology/magic (very hard to tell) is constantly shifting, not to mention the relationships between the people involved. It’s a quest story where the characters don’t find the quest object; it ends at a point that feels like a real ending, but politics will obviously continue to create huge problems for the remaining protagonist. I was going to say that there was also a lot less rape in this book, at least onscreen/within one degree of our characters, but then the last hundred or so pages of the book made that wrong. I’m glad I know the ending, but I would not recommend this to anyone who doesn’t enjoy GRRM.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.