2023/076: Ghostbird — Carol Lovekin

The undergrowth began to draw in the light, making the air feel heavy. The sense of being observed deepened: something or someone wanted to be noticed. Nothing felt familiar. [loc. 334]

Cadi lives in a Welsh village with her mother Violet and her aunt Lili. In the village, in August, it rains every day. In the village, nobody will tell Cadi about her dead father or her dead sister. ('Who knew whether or not Lilwen Hopkins, daughter of a witch woman, hadn’t bound their mouths with threads of silence?') But her sister's coming to haunt her, owls and flowers, and Cadi can't stay away from the lake at the end of the lane.

This is a claustrophobic and sometimes unnerving tale of the bonds, and the grievances, between the three women. Violet is still mourning her lost daughter Dora (who her husband Teilo insisted on naming Blodeuwedd) and won't talk to Cadi about any of it. Lili, Teilo's sister, has 'an eye for the girls' and tends to side with Cadi against Violet. And Cadi, who's fourteen, is caught in the middle of it all, feathers and leaves on her bedroom floor, the choking scent of meadowsweet, and a stranger named Owen Penry who's come to the village and set the gossips' tongues wagging.

This novel has something of the atmosphere of Garner's The Owl Service, though it's a much gentler book, and the protagonists are all female. Indeed, there are few male characters in Ghostbird: Violet the widow who doesn't remember her father; Lili the woman who will never marry but perhaps has a hope, by the end, of love; Cadi, who grew up fatherless and doesn't seem to have any male friends, though she is very close to her schoolmate Cerys. The village is shaped by women: the gossips, and the rainmaker, whose vengeance against 'naysayers' was to make it rain every day in August. And there is the ghost of a small girl, who 'has stopped wanting to eat chocolate and forgotten what pasta tastes like. Instead, she hunts mice until dawn.' I'd have liked more about the rainmaker, who was a shadowy presence at the edges of the novel, but that vague presence adds to the atmosphere: often eerie, sometimes magical, seldom explained. Ghostbird is dreamy and hypnotic, and I found myself falling easily into its rhythms and language: I'll look out for more of Lovekin's fiction.

Fulfils the ‘Title beginning with G’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

2023/075: Red Smoking Mirror — Nick Hunt

And what is there left to say about this walk through Tenochtitlan? Only that dogs are everywhere and that the sun is dark ... Only that the smoky sky is teeming with frightened birds, that the temple steps are wet, that body after body rolls down the angled, steep decline, their torsos blue ... [loc. 2013]

Eli Ben Abram is a Jewish merchant, born in the Caliphate of Andalus and now trading in the New Maghreb. He came across the Sea of Darkness to Mexica, in the first fleet of traders: now he lives in the great city of Tenochtitlan, in the shadow of the Smoking Mountain, with his Nahua wife Malinala. The traders from Andalus have prospered among the Mexica, but there are rumours of a great Moorish army bound for the city, there to root out the impurities of tubaq and xocolatl. And there is dissent among the elders of the Moorish quarter; and Malinala tells her husband tales of the Thirteen Heavens and the Nine Hells, the Five Suns, the Smoking Mirror, the Feathered Serpent...

This is a world in which, as Hunt says in his afterword, "the Reconquest never happened. The Islamic Golden Age .. continued into the Age of Exploration; and Spain, as we know it today, never came into existence. ... the first ships that crossed the Atlantic were crewed by seafaring Moors rather than by Spaniards." [loc. 2362] Hunt depicts a more peaceful (and less disease-ridden) meeting of the two cultures, though the seeds of bloody conquest have already been sown. There are some familiar historical figures (the emperor Moctezuma, La Malinche, and a Genoan named Christoforo) and, as the novel progresses, a sense of historical inevitability. Eli is an intriguing narrator, with his helpless love for his young wife, and the secret he's carried with him since he met a man from Genoa in a tavern in Cadiz. He sometimes seems wilfully blind to the undercurrents of what's happening around him, and he is sometimes less than kind to those he encounters: but his admiration for Mexica culture (evocatively described) runs through this novel.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 06 JUL 2023.

2023/074: The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both — Juno Dawson

Gender is a total paedo. Gender fucks kids. I was fucked by Gender as a kid. You were fucked by Gender, and this happened in childhood. [loc. 345]

As James Dawson, the author 'was given access to the ultimate prize: white male privilege', but was always aware that there was something out of alignment: traditionally-masculine pastimes were unpleasant, traditionally-feminine pastimes were much more appealing. As Juno Dawson, she writes 'My transition isn’t a rejection of masculinity, it’s embracing a state I feel far more attuned to.'

This is an interesting, and very personal, account of transition. There's a lot about Dawson's youth -- the ambition to be famous ('Fame is Diet Love. It tastes like love and looks like love, but there’s zero per cent real love in it'), the experiences in reality TV, the adventures on the gay scene in Brighton -- and how their perception of and relation to gender changed over the years. Where I found the book most interesting, though, was in its discussion of how gender affects us all from birth onwards, and how it perpetuates inequality. Dawson also argues that misogyny is a pillar of transphobia, which I can well believe regarding trans women but am less sure how it relates to trans men. (We see a plethora of TERF-style transphobia directed at trans women: is there an equivalent experienced by trans men? Or is there the reductionist absurdity of 'used to be a woman, so always inferior and scary'?)

Dawson's tone is colloquial and often very funny (commenting on Red Riding Hood and her hope of being rescued by the 'hunky woodcutter', Dawson remarks that 'a girl who can’t recognise a fucking wolf in a nightie probably isn’t the best role model'), and she isn't afraid to laugh at herself. Some apt similes, too, including gender as a Pullmanesque dæmon: 'for most it’s a fluffy sidekick they carry on their shoulders, hardly aware of it for much of their lives'. An engaging read, though I don't think I learnt anything new. I do, however, feel more inclined to read Dawson's historical fantasy novels, starting with Her Majesty's Royal Coven -- not least because, even as James, the author preferred to write female protagonists.

Fulfils the ‘Current Issues’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2023/073: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction and the Beginning of Our World — Riley Black

My goal is to offer an ecological, fleshed-out view of these organisms and their biology during a time of terrible stress, and I’ve done my best to envision these species as living organisms rather than permineralized, distorted fossils. That’s the goal of paleontology, after all—to start with the offerings of death and work back toward life. [p. 15]

Excellent and very readable science writing, focussing on the asteroid impact that marked the end of the Cretaceous period and 'the worst single day in the history of life on Earth': Black focusses on the area that is now Hell Creek, Montana (because the fossil record there is unsurpassed), and the activities of various species of animal -- birds, fish and protomammals as well as dinosaurs -- before, during and after the catastrophe. After a brief sketch of Cretaceous life (parasite-plagued T Rex, the corpse of a triceratops, a Quetzalcoatlus soaring over the ocean) the book deals with the after-effects of the impact, which was effectively instantaneous: the asteroid was travelling at about 20 km per second, so there wouldn't have been a slow fireball streaking across the sky. There are chapters on 'Impact', 'The First Hour', 'The First Day', and so on, up to 'One Million Years After Impact'. And from Black's account it's clear that very little life, anywhere on the planet, was unaffected. First the earth tremors, then the firestorms: the tsunamis, the infrared pulse that raised the air temperature to 500^o Fahrenheit, the acid rain, the three-year darkness of the impact winter. Those creatures that survived -- by burrowing, or beneath the water -- had to adjust rapidly to a world that had utterly changed, with a different ecology and a much lower temperature. Black is good at explaining the multiple factors affecting the survival of particular species, and at describing 'case studies'. She presents arguments for why beaked birds survived when toothed birds didn't; how the dinosaurs' demise led to the rise of the mammals; how other phenomena, such as volcanic eruptions in the Deccan traps, mitigated some of the impact aftereffects.

This is my favourite kind of science writing: lyrical and informal, not reliant on specialist knowledge or terminology (but with abundant references in the appendix, citing sources and indicating how much is speculation), and with a personal touch. ('My love was unconditional. You can’t be hurt by a friend who’s extinct.' [p. 195]). The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is at least as readable as a novel (more so than some!) and I found it utterly fascinating.

Fulfils the ‘Science’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2023/072: The Grief of Stones — Katherine Addison

It was probably the emperor who had saved my life, by giving me a purpose, a task, a question to answer. And then Ulis had spoken to me in a dream, and I had known that my calling had not been taken from me. After that there was no question of suicide, not if my god still needed my work. But I remembered what it had felt like. [loc. 808]

In which Thana Celehar acquires an apprentice (the widow Tomasaran, untrained and ignorant, whose first experience of communing with the recently-departed was over her husband's bier), faces a fearsome revenant, and investigates a case of child pornography. I didn't like this one quite as much as The Witness for the Dead, but that may simply be because I read it immediately after finishing Witness, and the edges got blurred. Or it may be that the story is darker, with its focus on female foundlings and the dearth of options for them. Or it may be that, at the end of this novel, Celehar is not the person he was at the beginning -- and while there is talk of 'an assignment that is uniquely suited to your abilities', no further detail is available at this time. (The author says she's hoping for a summer 2024 release for the concluding volume of the trilogy.)

There is a great deal to enjoy here, though. The underside of polite Amaro society, with louche photographers and a plethora of tea-houses; the fact that many of the characters live in some degree of poverty; the opera (the title of the novel comes from Pel-Thenhior's latest composition, 'based on a Barizheise novel about a lighthouse keeper and his family and the tragedies that befall them after the wreck of the Grief of Stones on their rocks'); the coexistence of elves and goblins, and their cultural idiosyncrasies (ear-position is a frequent indicator of mood or opinion); the cats that Celehar feeds but won't claim as his own ... The plot, with its several entwined mysteries, is interesting and well-paced, but the world-building and the characterisation is what kept me reading, and inclines me to preorder the next book as soon as it's available.

2023/071: The Witness for the Dead — Katherine Addison

...we were taught to listen, and that once you had learned to listen to the dead, the living posed no challenge. [p. 78]

Thara Celehar played a small but pivotal role in Addison's The Goblin Emperor. He is a prelate of the god Ulis and can communicate with the spirits of the recently deceased: in The Goblin Emperor he communed with Maia's murdered relatives, but in The Witness for the Dead he's the focal character (and the narrator), recounting his investigation in the murder of an opera singer in the city of Amalo. He lives alone, in poverty (he's been granted a 'small stipend') and mourns his long-dead lover, a married man. He buys tins of sardines to feed the feral neighbourhood cats, but does not give them names, or let them into his home. He has few friends, and is engaged in political manoeuvring with other religious factions. Though melancholy, he is a fascinating narrator and a thoroughly decent individual.

This was an immensely pleasurable read: the worldbuilding, though sometimes confusing (Addison does not stoop to explain terminology or culture) is splendidly detailed, and Celehar's exercise of his vocation is not sensationalised. I especially enjoyed the scenes at the opera house, where Celehar attempts to discover who might (or indeed who didn't) have a grudge against the dead soprano Arveneän Shelsin, whilst making the acquaintance of producer and composer Pel-Thenhior (who's just written an opera set in a factory, with a goblin mezzo-soprano in the principal role -- something that has never been done before). Celehar's investigations (there is also a plot thread about a dead woman whose husband cut her off from her family, and a plot thread about Celehar's probity being questioned and tested by ordeal) are well-constructed, and the slow subtle changes in his life are beautifully conveyed. I liked this book (bought a couple of years ago) so much that, on finishing, I immediately bought and began to read the sequel, The Grief of Stones. Review soon!

2023/070: The Last Astronaut — David Wellington

After NASA went bankrupt in the forties, they had to break up the second International Space Station and drop its pieces in the Pacific Ocean. After that, commercial spaceflight seemed like the only game in town. [loc. 301]

Sally Jansen is the eponymous last astronaut. In 2034, on a mission to Mars, she dealt with a critical failure but caused the death of a fellow astronaut. That was pretty much the end for NASA in terms of crewed missions: but now, years later, a mysterious object has entered the solar system and is slowing down. NASA needs an astronaut, and McAllister nominates Jensen, who's fifty-six and publicity-averse. NASA's misison isn't the only one heading for the object, which is known as 2I: there's also a mission run by a private company, KSpace. (Nothing at all like SpaceX, honest.) When Jansen, with her small crew -- military pilot Hawkins, zenobiologist Parminder Rao, and astrophysicist Sunny Stevens, late of KSpace, who first spotted 2I -- reaches the incomer, it's to find that the KSpace team have already entered the huge cylinder. (Echoes here of Rendezvous with Rama.) Hansen is determined to save them, but neither she nor any of her crew are prepared for what lies within 2I.

The premise is that 2I is an object of the same kind as 'Oumuamua, though rather larger. It's a massive cylinder with an interior that brings to mind films such as Alien: the second half of The Last Astronaut is very much horror-coded. They travel a long way, in the dark, in an utterly alien environment. Only the bright orange ropes, flags and memory sticks of the KSpace crew guide them. (The memory sticks are a handy way of telling a different side of the story, but they felt rather clunky, in plot terms.)

This was fast-paced and yet overlong. Wellington's prose is readable and flows well (he's also capable of great lyricism, as evidenced by one passage near the end of the novel) and he focusses on the two female crew members. There's some humour, too, in the juvenile antics of the KSpace mission. Despite that, I didn't really engage with any of the characters or their predicament. Good solid hard SF, with mention of Ann Leckie as well as Clarke and Asimov; an interesting premise; a woman in her fifties as protagonist; an unexpectedly upbeat ending: but maybe I am just not as much of a hard SF reader as once I was.

Still not sure why it was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2020 ...