2023/069: To Be Taught, If Fortunate — Becky Chambers

It’s understandable why humans stopped living in space in the 2020s. How can you think of the stars when the seas are spilling over? How can you spare thought for alien ecosystems when your cities are too hot to inhabit? How can you trade fuel and metal and ideas when the lines on every map are in flux? [loc. 234]

A science fiction novella set early in the next century, when citizen-funded space exploration has replaced the national space agencies of our own time. This is exploration for its own sake, without the desire to profit or colonise. The narrator is Ariadne O'Neill, one of four crew members on the Lawki 6. Their mission is to investigate a solar system containing four habitable worlds: to enable this, they make use of a technique called somaforming, which temporarily alters the human body, conferring 'that little bit extra we need to survive on different worlds'. Each world they visit has different requirements, and Ariadne compares the somaforming to metamorphosis: she maintains that it's the most ethical way to explore. Communication with Earth takes 14 years: the crew receive news packets, and send reports, but there's no real-time interaction. The worlds in this system, the icy moon Aecor and the planets Mirabilis, Opera and Votum, have complex and very different ecosystems: it's unsurprising that Ariadne, Jack, Chikondi amd Elena lose interest in the news packets, which seldom have anything of relevance in them. Except, one day, they realise that the packets haven't been arriving as regularly...

This was such a fascinating read: the little team and their (generally very comfortable and distinctly queer) interactions, the ethical dilemma of whether their explorations damage the living beings they encounter, the sheer wonder of each new world -- I found the story and the setting utterly engaging. The choices, good and bad, that the crew make have emotional resonance: and the final choice, the one they don't make, brought tears to my eyes.

The novella's title comes from the golden record carried on the Voyager space probe: 'We step out of our Solar System into the Universe, seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate.' That provenance adds poignancy to a short but profound story.

2023/068: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne — Katherine Rundell

To write about death in the way he did – to send a suction pump down into the gap between what we know and what we fear – was to risk chaos. Donne knew it and did it anyway. [loc. 2893]

A splendidly effervescent critical biography that emphasises both the transformations of John Donne ('the persecuted, the rake, the lawyer, the bereaved, the lover, the jailbird, the desperate, the striver, the pious, John Donne the almost dead and reporting from the front line of the grave' [loc. 4318]) and the constant thread of invention that ran through his life. All the basic material is here -- born a Catholic, youthful adventures, being imprisoned by his father-in-law, a dozen children and half a dozen infant mortalities, his wife's death, his entry to the priesthood and his immensely popular sermons as Dean of St Pauls -- but in Rundell's engaging, enthusiastic account there's something of the wit and imagery of Donne's poetry, and its 'violent joy'.

This is an immensely readable biography (rather more so, in my opinion, than the standard works) and Rundell's passion and compassion for her subject rings clear on every page. Rundell does bring up the question of whether Donne was a misogynist (one chapter is entitled 'The Paradoxical Quibbler, Taking Aim at Women') and argues that some of the more excessive poems, such as 'The Flea', were written for his male fans rather than for female lovers. Of which, she posits, he may not actually have had very many. That doesn't make him less of a misogynist, of course: 'It would be absurd to try Donne anachronistically as a misogynist; but alongside the poems which glorify and sing the female body and heart, there are those that very potently don’t.' [loc. 1895].

This book persuaded me to revisit Donne's poetry, including Metempsychosis, which I found impenetrable as an undergraduate but now find fascinating.

Fulfils the ‘Memoir / Biography / Autobiography’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2023/066: Starter Villain — John Scalzi

WE HAVE TOO MANY CATS IN TOO MANY HIGH PLACES.
"So you're not just spying on villains," I said.
IT DEPENDS ON WHETHER YOU CONSIDER THE RESIDENTS OF THE WHITE HOUSE AND 10 DOWNING STREET VILLAINS. [loc. 2976]

Charlie Finzer is down on his luck. His job as a newspaper reporter has evaporated; he's been working as a substitute teacher, which doesn't really bring enough money in to do more than survive; his father died recently, and he's living in the family home which his siblings would very much like to sell. Recently divorced, Charlie has little in the way of a social life: his most important relationship is with his cat Hera. But there's more to Hera than meets the eye, as quickly becomes apparent when Charlie's estranged Uncle Jake dies.

Apparently Uncle Jake was not only the reclusive billionaire owner of a large chain of parking structures, but also a successful supervillain with a plethora of ill-wishers. Cue the arrival of Mathilda Morrison, who asks Charlie to represent the family at Jake's memorial service, and who subsequently acts as his sidekick and bodyguard while Charlie, very much a fish out of water, travels to a supervillain HQ in a Caribbean volcano, and tries to hold his own amid the 'professional disruptors' who are expecting him to take over his uncle's business.

Starter Villain is a fast-moving and tightly-plotted tale of interspecies cooperation, international villainy, and the importance of unionisation. There's little in the way of description: instead, the story is driven by dialogue, punctuated by the occasional infodump. Many tropes are interrogated, many cliches mocked, and Charlie's business-reporting background enables him to make some incisive criticisms of the whole supervillain industry. It's an engaging and cheering novel, with some stealth thought-provocation amid the humour and the backstabbing. Worth noting, too, that the female characters (including Hera) are supremely competent, courageous and likeable. And best of all: talking cats! John Scalzi's afterword acknowledges the influence of Mary Robinette Kowal's Elsie), inspiring me to catch up with her recent activities.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review. UK publication date is 21 SEP 2023.

Update 22SEP23: Theme song by Dessa, commissioned by the author!

2023/067: The House in the Pines — Ana Reyes

Why would Maya need a key to a cabin she’s already inside? But as soon as she thinks it, the thought slips away, and what happens over the following few minutes will lie buried beneath the lowest cellar floor of her head for seven years. [p. 234]

Maya has problems sleeping: years later, she's still haunted by the memory of her best friend Aubrey dying whilst talking to Maya's then-boyfriend, Frank. Now, even though Maya's life is superficially delightful, she's addicted to sleeping pills and self-medicating with alcohol -- and it's unfortunate that the week she stops taking the pills is the week she sees a viral video of another young woman dying suddenly in Frank's company. Painfully aware of gaps in her memory, she returns to her mother's house to try to solve the mystery of what happened to the unknown woman, and to Aubrey ... and to Maya herself. Maybe she can even find the cabin deep in the pinewoods near Frank's own childhood home, the cabin that Frank built with his own hands, the cabin that Maya remembers with utmost clarity.

There were some interesting aspects to this novel, not least the way in which Frank has affected Maya, Aubrey and the woman in the video: though I think I understood this before Maya did, the description of her discovery was compelling. On the other hand, I never really felt a sense of dread or inevitability about Frank. More intriguing was the story of Maya's father, 'disappeared' by the regime in Guatemala before Maya's birth, and his unfinished magical realist novel, which seems to mirror some of the secrets and some of the doubts that Maya's experiencing.

Slightly annoyed by the 'present' scenes being told in the past tense and the 'past' scenes being told in present tense, though I suppose this does mirror the immediacy and powerful emotion of Maya's teenaged years.

2023/065: Speak of the Devil — Rose Wilding

... being part of a group of women who had decided to take action against one man, who had in some way harmed them all, felt like all women finally taking a stand. It felt like something big was coming, and coupled with the approach of the new millenium, she couldn't help but feel shook up, overwhelmed by anticipation and joy at what she thought was the beginning of a new era for women. [loc. 2183]

On the evening of 31st December 1999, seven women are summoned to 'the usual place'. There, they discover the decapitated head of a man they all knew; a man they all had reason to wish dead. Jamie has beguiled each of them in different ways: the pregnant teenager who thinks he's going to leave his wife for her, the aunt who raised him, the friend who's stood up for him when she wondered if she should, the woman who loved him despite her daughter's mistrust, the journalist he raped, the mother of his child, his wife ... One of them killed him: one of them delivered his head to this hotel room, with the snake sigil clumsily painted on the wallpaper.

An eighth woman, Nova, is a police detective, in a relationship with one of the suspects (but also with another woman who's less ... complicated). Her investigations, and Jamie's victims' memories and reactions, form the bulk of the novel. Set in and around Newcastle in the 1990s, Speak of the Devil evokes that time and place with a wealth of detail. The eight female protagonists (at least three of whom are queer) are distinctive characters, with idiosyncrasies of speech and behaviour. This was a very readable thriller, and I didn't guess the identity of the murderer until near the end. If there's a flaw, it's that we never get inside Jamie's (decapitated) head: we don't know what made him a narcissist, a psychopath, a monster. But though he's central to the action, it's not really about him at all.

Trigger warnings for violence, suicide, sexual abuse, rape.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 22nd June 2023.

2023/064: Scribe — Alyson Hagy

He had told her his transgressions, and she had recorded them to the best of her ability. But it wasn’t safe or simple to take on the burdens of another person’s history, all those sins and vacancies. [loc. 710]

The unnamed protagonist of Scribe is a woman living alone in the house she once shared with her sister, a healer who was reputed to have miraculous powers. The woman makes a living writing letters, which are more therapeutic or confessional than they are simple communications. She lives precariously, allowing the Uninvited -- travellers, or maybe migrants -- to camp on her land, but reliant on the goodwill of local despot Billy Kingery. When a man calling himself Hendricks comes to ask her to write a letter, and to read it aloud at a certain crossroads, her precarious life begins to topple.

This is a short, poetic, unsettling novel. The nameless protagonist is a hard woman: she's had a hard life, and she gives up her secrets slowly, and perhaps only to herself. Hendricks only gradually reveals his own history, though he seems a decent sort of fellow as he kills and skins a wildcat, and promises to chop wood for her. The setting is sketched in lightly: it's a rural area, some time after a war (or a series of wars) that set brother against brother: after the wars, the plagues came, and the people who survived hold to 'the hard, forged links of memory'. A post-apocalyptic future, then, with echoes of the American Civil War: a rough, lawless country, where trickery and greed trump good intentions.

The prose is glorious: "He repeated his invocation, slowly, sonorously—with all the bitter syllables mortised into place. What a great mansion it is, she thought. What a stout and foolish mansion is the human heart." [loc. 229] I don't think I enjoyed it -- there was too much darkness at its heart, echoing back through generations -- but scraps of it have lodged and will remain with me. And it is, in the end, about how a person's history becomes a story, how it forms an arc.

It was all a writer could do: lay out the consequences of a person’s choices. [loc. 1684]

2023/063: The Frame-Up — Meghan Scott Molin

Dating a non-geek means they might want to normal-fy me. I am terrified of someone constantly telling me my shows or comics are dumb, wishing I’d “tone down my hair a bit,” or asking me to give up my job ...[p. 91]

Michael-Grace is thirty years old, goes by MG, designs extravagant costumes for her drag-queen friend Lawrence, a.k.a. Latifah, and holds down a job as a comic-book writer at Genius Comics, working on a reboot of a thirty-year-old superhero comic called 'The Hooded Falcon'. She's the only female writer in a moderately toxic male environment, and she's sworn off romance after her last boyfriend made secret YouTube videos of her. MG refuses to live down to her mother's expectations: instead, she's excited to discover that the final unfinished run of 'The Hooded Falcon' may not have been unfinished after all. But someone else has also made this discovery -- maybe the same person who's running around the city, cosplaying as the Golden Arrow -- and MG could hold the key to the mystery. Enter LAPD detective Matteo Kildare, who proposes a fake relationship so he can get to know her colleagues and make use of MG's trade and fandom connections.

It's a familiar trope, but nicely handled here as MG slowly realises that Matteo knows nothing about geek culture (he hasn't even seen Star Wars!) and that maybe her mistake has been her insistence on dating geeks... This doesn't stop her keeping secrets from Matteo, as she tries to weigh up conflicting loyalties and ambitions, and work out what she really wants.

This was a fun read, a mystery revolving around comics and fandom with some very real peril and a good exploration of the culture that brought us Gamergate. MG is a likeable heroine, a little over-confident in her ability to succeed where LAPD's finest have failed, and determined to solve the mystery even if it means breaking promises. Her friends and colleagues are generally good people and well-characterised, and there's a strong theme of found family and of the freedom to be oneself. Fascinating take on comics history, too, and the rivalries and motivations of creators.

This is the first in a series: I'd be happy to read more, once the TBR pile has shrunk a bit.

Fulfils the ‘Set in a workplace’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.