Fiction
Mishell Baker, Impostor Syndrome: Millie is now planning a rebellion against the Arcadia Project, in order to overturn the system that’s enslaved spirits to do magic since the Project began. She’s also trying to deal with her reciprocated crush on her boss Caryl, whose emotional support dragon only sometimes deals with her emotions for her, and accept a new member of the team who also has BPD and thus works very badly with Millie. Various Seelie and Unseelie types complicate the situation further. It’s a good conclusion to this part of the arc (if there’s more to come).
Maggie Shen King, An Excess Male: 40 million excess young men in China, created by a combination of son preference and the one-child policy, pose a profound challenge, to which a repressive government responds by (1) formalizing and routinizing prostitution involving non-Chinese women imported for this specific purpose, (2) institutionalizing polyandry, first with two husbands and then three for the most patriotic families, (3) surveilling and dealing harshly with any deviance among the unmarried men. Also, and it seems illogically but not implausibly, the government treats male homosexuality as “Voluntary Sterility” and requires gay men to register as such, limiting them to particular professions; it also discriminates against Lost Boys, or those too far on the autism spectrum. Wei-guo is an unmarried man in his early forties who’s finally scraped up enough money for a dowry. He really likes May-ling and is willing to do almost anything to become her third husband. Because her first husband, Hann, is a closeted gay man; Hann’s brother XX, her second husband, is a closeted Lost Boy; and her son is showing signs of being a Lost Boy himself, “anything” might have to go pretty far, especially since the government wants him to identify some of his unmarried war-gaming buddies for deviance. This was a really well-done portrait of “what if” in a society that manages to control its unmarried men as part of a larger repressive strategy; there are no large victories here, and survival requires some unpretty compromises, but some kinds of integrity can, it seems, survive.
Compostela: Tesseracts Twenty, ed. Spider Robinson & James Alan Gardner: Collection of SF and speculative fiction/poetry with the general theme of technology. A lot of very short stories. Robert J. Sawyer is represented with a story about pioneers who show up at their destination planet to discover that tech, and thus colonization, has leapfrogged them. Nothing really stood out for me, though as Robinson writes in the afterword, if this is the zeitgeist, the zeitgeist is very very bleak.
Kim Stanley Robinson, 2140: Robinson’s optimism is increasingly more academically interesting to me than emotionally resonant, but he is good at worldbuilding, so to speak. A half-drowned NYC is still a center of global financial capital, and also of people who come to try to make better lives, although the city is trying to limit the entrance of refugees in order to concentrate on its own struggling residents. Various residents of an apartment building/co-op whose lower floors are now a boat dock make their way, some of them actively trying to take down capitalist exploitation and others just trying to survive it. Lots of quotes about New York, many of them witty. Channeling Whitman, Robinson writes, “Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,/So Life is going to dirve down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,/O you dark pools of money and law … /Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,/Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.” And I never saw it before, but Robinson clearly makes sense as an heir to Whitman in his faith in an unending, unpredictable human future.
Tracy Townsend, The Nine: In a steampunk world that’s unified science and religion, the convocation of Unification intelligentsia produces several murders and other nefarious deeds, into which are swept the mysterious Alchemist, his estranged daughter, her lover, and a street runner desperately trying to get money to keep her mother alive in debtors’ prison. Not every POV character survives, which may help justify the back cover comparisons to GRRM (minus the focus on rape, though there is a fair amount of prostitution), along with the politics/worldbuilding. There are also two intelligent nonhuman races with interests of their own, both of which have fraught-at-best relationships with humans (who until recently kept one of the races as slaves). I was caught up by the narrative and will seek out the sequel.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Maggie Shen King, An Excess Male: 40 million excess young men in China, created by a combination of son preference and the one-child policy, pose a profound challenge, to which a repressive government responds by (1) formalizing and routinizing prostitution involving non-Chinese women imported for this specific purpose, (2) institutionalizing polyandry, first with two husbands and then three for the most patriotic families, (3) surveilling and dealing harshly with any deviance among the unmarried men. Also, and it seems illogically but not implausibly, the government treats male homosexuality as “Voluntary Sterility” and requires gay men to register as such, limiting them to particular professions; it also discriminates against Lost Boys, or those too far on the autism spectrum. Wei-guo is an unmarried man in his early forties who’s finally scraped up enough money for a dowry. He really likes May-ling and is willing to do almost anything to become her third husband. Because her first husband, Hann, is a closeted gay man; Hann’s brother XX, her second husband, is a closeted Lost Boy; and her son is showing signs of being a Lost Boy himself, “anything” might have to go pretty far, especially since the government wants him to identify some of his unmarried war-gaming buddies for deviance. This was a really well-done portrait of “what if” in a society that manages to control its unmarried men as part of a larger repressive strategy; there are no large victories here, and survival requires some unpretty compromises, but some kinds of integrity can, it seems, survive.
Compostela: Tesseracts Twenty, ed. Spider Robinson & James Alan Gardner: Collection of SF and speculative fiction/poetry with the general theme of technology. A lot of very short stories. Robert J. Sawyer is represented with a story about pioneers who show up at their destination planet to discover that tech, and thus colonization, has leapfrogged them. Nothing really stood out for me, though as Robinson writes in the afterword, if this is the zeitgeist, the zeitgeist is very very bleak.
Kim Stanley Robinson, 2140: Robinson’s optimism is increasingly more academically interesting to me than emotionally resonant, but he is good at worldbuilding, so to speak. A half-drowned NYC is still a center of global financial capital, and also of people who come to try to make better lives, although the city is trying to limit the entrance of refugees in order to concentrate on its own struggling residents. Various residents of an apartment building/co-op whose lower floors are now a boat dock make their way, some of them actively trying to take down capitalist exploitation and others just trying to survive it. Lots of quotes about New York, many of them witty. Channeling Whitman, Robinson writes, “Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,/So Life is going to dirve down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,/O you dark pools of money and law … /Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,/Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.” And I never saw it before, but Robinson clearly makes sense as an heir to Whitman in his faith in an unending, unpredictable human future.
Tracy Townsend, The Nine: In a steampunk world that’s unified science and religion, the convocation of Unification intelligentsia produces several murders and other nefarious deeds, into which are swept the mysterious Alchemist, his estranged daughter, her lover, and a street runner desperately trying to get money to keep her mother alive in debtors’ prison. Not every POV character survives, which may help justify the back cover comparisons to GRRM (minus the focus on rape, though there is a fair amount of prostitution), along with the politics/worldbuilding. There are also two intelligent nonhuman races with interests of their own, both of which have fraught-at-best relationships with humans (who until recently kept one of the races as slaves). I was caught up by the narrative and will seek out the sequel.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.