Sunday, November 19, 2023

BOOK REVIEW: Babel, Or The Necessity of Violence by R.F. Kuang

Babel is the bestselling fantasy novel by R.F. Kuang, the author of The Poppy War trilogy. Babel won the 2023 Nebula award for Best Novel and was a #1 New York Times bestseller. It is set in alternate version of 1828 Great Britain where the country is the greatest Colonial power in the world (similar to our timeline) but the difference in Babel is the reason that Britain leads the world is the ability to manipulate silver using magic to produce technological wonders.

In the Babel timeline silver is the most important commodity in the world, and the knowledge of how to exploit silver to produce useful devices and effects is the most important technology in the world. This “technology” involves exploiting the differences in interpretation between meanings of words in two different languages. Kuang has crafted one of the most astonishing and creative magic systems ever deployed in epic fantasy, while also cleverly designing something that would appeal to book lovers and word enthusiasts everywhere. The Tower of Babel, located on the campus of Oxford, houses the Institute of Translation where academics with linguistic knowledge can try to find word pairs in different languages that produce magical, beneficial effects in the real world. Because Babel is in England, the United Kingdom is able to leverage their monopoly over this knowledge to dominate the globe economically, militarily, and culturally.

The story of Babel is told through and by following the fortunes of four teenage students who have been accepted to and attend Oxford’s Institute of Translation. In this way, the story becomes a familiar tale of students navigating their way through a complicated and unfamiliar/familiar academic system (e.g., the Harry Potter series, Ender’s Game, the author’s own The Poppy War, etc) and young people maturing and experiencing different aspects of life for the first time (many, many coming of age novels, like The Wise Man’s Fear).

In an interesting twist, the four protagonists of the novel are all members of groups that are marginalized in the time Babel is set in. They are Robin, an orphaned Chinese boy who is brought to England from Shanghai by an Oxford professor, Ramy, a Muslim boy from Calcutta; Victoire, a Creole-Haitian girl and Letty, a British girl who applies to Oxford after her older brother is killed in a freak horse and buggy accident in his second year at the University. Kuang expertly uses the identities of the four main characters to reveal, highlight, and dramatize the various ways oppression and power can interact with race, gender, class, and national origin. This is an extremely important and effective aspect of the book; it is thrilling to see these topics depicted (especially so well and in such a nuanced fashion) in an award-winning, best-selling novel of speculative fiction.

For example, the girls in the group, Victoire and Letty, are forced to live nearly two miles away from Oxford because there are no student residences that are “suitable” for unmarried women. Of course, it is considered completely impossible for female and male students to live in the same building, even if they each had their own quarters with locked doors. Even in the lodging that they were able to find the girls are subject to suspicion about their “propriety” and are expected to do some fraction of the cooking and cleaning, even though they are paying rent. Additionally, female students are so rare at Oxford that some of the professors refuse to interact with them, pretending not to hear them or see their raised hands in class. When in the Oxford library, the girls need to be accompanied by one of their male student colleagues at all times in order to use the study areas and access the reading materials found there.

However, while Robin and Ramy have male privilege that affords them the ability to be viewed as “proper” Oxford students in most academic settings that matter, their class, religious, and racial identities cause them to suffer a whole host of indignities on and off campus. Ramy, being a dark-skinned South Asian man, is regularly rejected admission to cafes and eateries when he attempts to enter on his own; he is only grudgingly allowed to socialize with his peers when accompanied by Robin or Letty who are ostensibly white. This is a curious situation, because Robin is Chinese, and really only appears white from a distance, so it is merely the unfocused blurry image of an all-white space that the proprietors are trying to maintain. In fact, Robin is the character the reader spends the most time with  and we get to see the many ways his foreignness and assumed inability to assimilate as an Asian man of Chinese descent leads to multiple awkward social interactions with Oxford students, faculty and townspeople.

The central dramatic tension in the novel is the question of how our quartet of outsiders will handle the contradictions of being members of marginalized groups who have been granted access to the most elite halls of power and sources of knowledge that the Oxford Institution of Translation represents. They are expected to use this power and knowledge to assist Britain in maintaining hegemonic control over their countries of origin, or at the very least, over other people who belong to the marginalized groups they belong to (Chinese nationals, Indian nationals, American nationals). It’s quite interesting the way that the important international conflicts are represented by the individual members of the central quartet of main characters.

Of course, the book is called Babel and the story's plot is centered around the act of translation between myriad languages, in a place that is literally an ivory tower. Kuang's riff on the story of the Tower of Babel is thrilling, but even though we know how the story must end, the path that Babel takes to get there is well worth the time invested.

 
Title: Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.
Author:
R.F. Kuang .
Format: Kindle.
Length: 560 pages.
Publisher: Harper Voyage.
Date Published: August 23, 2022.
Date Read: July 29, 2023.

GOODREADS RATING: 
★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

Monday, July 31, 2023

BOOK REVIEW: All The Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby


All The Sinners Bleed is the third Southern noir book by S.A. Cosby that I have read, after Blacktop Wasteland (2020) and Razorblade Tears (2021). I was very happy to be alerted by the Libby app that this book was available for a 1-week loan; it took me only four days to finish reading it—All The Sinners Bleed was almost impossible to put down once started.

Like the two previous books by Cosby that I have read, All The Sinners Bleed is set in the rural South. This time the protagonist is Titus Crown, who has recently surprised himself—and Charon County in rural Virginia where he was born and raised—to become the first Black man elected Sheriff.

The book begins with a bang (literally!) on the first anniversary of Titus’ election with a shooting (at Jefferson Davis HIgh School!) where a mentally troubled Black man named Lattrell Macdonald shoots and kills a well-regarded science teacher Mr. Spearman and is then himself shot by the (white) members of the sheriff’s department after brandishing a rifle while muttering incoherently about Mr. Spearman’s phone. When Titus investigates what reasons Latrell could possibly have to kill Mr. Spearman he discovers a horrifying secret which roils the entire small town of Charon.

It turns out that Mr. Spearman was a murderous pedophile, who preyed upon young Black children, assisted by Latrell to do so, while wearing masks and costumes. Even the casual description of Mr. Spearman’s acts are nauseating and Titus takes it upon himself to spare his deputies from seeing the worst stuff himself once they get a search warrant to search Spearman’s house. (The people who do watch the videotapes and view the pictures often find themselves vomiting afterwards and questioning their religious faith.) However, it soon becomes clear that there's a third man who is either white or a very light-skinned Black guy who was also involved in the heinous acts that were committed and this person, who Titus calls “The Last Wolf”  is still on the loose.

Cosby does an excellent job of depicting the internal dialogue and philosophical contradictions that Titus has as a black man serving in a public-facing law enforcement role. Many in the community want to see the incidents only in black and white: i.e., “crazy black guy killed beloved white teacher,” or “brave white cop killed armed black guy,” but Titus takes a more nuanced view because he has a job to do: catch this m****f*****. Cosby shows how the procedures and rules the sheriff's office needs to follow don’t allow him to be as forthcoming to the public in as timely a fashion as he (or they) would like. Titus is laser focused on solving the crime and capturing the remaining at-large sicko who has been raping and torturing Black kids to death. But both the black and white concerned citizens of Charon are not happy with the way Titus is doing his job in light of the revelation that Charon County has a resident serial killer on the loose.

An important characteristic of detective novels is not only how interesting the protagonist is but also how well-drawn the supporting characters are done. In the case of All The Sinners Bleed, Titus is a fully realized main character. He lives with his elderly father and has a complicated relationship with him due to his father’s (in)actions after the death of Titus’s mom decades before. These events also complicated Titus’s relationship with his brother, who dealt with his grief by using drugs. Additionally, the reasons that Titus moved back to Charon County in the first place after leaving the FBI are slowly revealed (in intermittent flashbacks) with more details that cast him in a less heroic and more realistic fashion.

Of course, since this is a genre novel, we end up with a lot more violence and dead bodies than the ones from the school shooting scene that began the book. It’s clear that the perpetrator of these atrocities is becoming more unhinged as Titus’s investigation gets closer and closer to revealing who The Last Wolf is. 

In the end, Titus (and the reader) discover who the serial killer is and stops his crime spree, but not until after a number of more horrific acts get perpetrated. Overall, I enjoyed spending time in the company of Titus, but events towards the end of the book and the fact that Cosby appears to not feel the need to build multiple mystery stories around the same character/detective, mean that it is unlikely that he’ll appear in another Cosby southern noir book. Even if that is the case, I definitely hope that we get more books from Cosby!

Title: All The Sinners Bleed.
Author: S.A. Cosby.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 352 pages.
Publisher: Scribner.
Date Published: November 1, 2022.
Date Read: June 27, 2023.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

Thursday, July 13, 2023

BOOK REVIEW: Exiles (Aaron Falk, #3) by Jane Harper


Exiles is the third (and final?) book in the police procedural series set in rural Australia featuring federal tax investigator Aaron Falk written by Jane Harper. The other books in the Falk series are The Dry (2016) and Force of Nature (2017). Harper is well-known for her suspenseful, lyrical mystery novels and Exiles (2023) is another example of this.

This time the main mystery is the disappearance of a 39-year-old new mother from a food and wine festival being held in a small rural (fictional) town named Marralee in the Australian wine country in Victoria. The missing woman is Kim Gillespie, the ex-wife of Charlie Raco, who is the brother of Aaron’s friend Greg Raco, another Australian cop who we were introduced to in Force of Nature. Aaron had been named godfather to Greg and Rita’s newborn kid Henry and was in town for the christening the very day Kim disappeared. He was at the Raco home when Kim called Zara, the 17-year-old daughter she had with Charlie to discuss how they would meet up at the Maralee festival.

All this information is provided in the prologue. When the story begins it's one year later and Aaron is driving to Marralee again to finally participate in the long-delayed christening of his godson, Henry Raco. We learn how the family members have been affected by Kim’s disappearance, and we get introduced to Kim’s husband, Rohan and his and Kim’s daughter. We also learn that Kim’s disappearance is not the only violent crime that the small town of Marralee has known. About five years ago there was a hit-and-run very near the site of the Festival, again during opening weekend (which is when Kim disappeared) that resulted in the death of Dean Tozer, the husband of Gemma Tozer and father of Joel. Joel and Kara are now teenage friends, bonded together through the loss of their parents.

One key aspect of Harper’s mysteries that makes them so compelling is that she uses her books to comment on and depict contemporary Australian life and the social problems that are lying below the surface. For example, in Exiles drinking alcohol by teenagers and the dangerous behaviors this can facilitate animates multiple important plot points. Ultimately, I would say that Exiles is about solitude, and the consequences of cutting oneself off (or being cut off by the actions of others) from the people around you that know you the best. (The book makes clear that in some cases this could be your family or your chosen family and doesn’t communicate any value judgments on the difference between them.)

Another key aspect of Harper’s mysteries, at least the ones that I have read that feature Aaron Falk, have been the internal dialogue of the protagonist. I wasn’t really that impressed with, or frankly very interested in, Falk’s inner life or personality in the first two books, The Dry and Forces of Nature, but in Exiles I really enjoyed getting to know him better. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but it could be that in addition to the career wanderlust that is a recurring theme in all three books, in Exiles he is also pursuing a romantic relationship. As a gay man reading about a straight male character (written by a presumably straight woman) falling in love, I was surprised at how much I was invested in the resolution of this storyline.

Overall, Exiles is (by far!) the best of the Aaron Falk books written by Jane Harper. It is billed as the last in a trilogy of books but I hope that is not the case, I would love to spend more time in rural Australia with Falk as he solves crimes. But even if Harper doesn’t write more books featuring Falk I am confident she will write more compelling mysteries set in rural Australia in the future.

Title: Exiles (Aaron Falk, #3).
Author: 
Jane Harper.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 353 pages.
Publisher: Orbit Books.
Date Published: May 26, 2022.
Date Read: May 22, 2023.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★½☆  (4.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

Thursday, July 06, 2023

BOOK REVIEW: Eversion by Alastair Reynolds


Eversion is the latest book by Alastair Reynolds, one of my all-time favorite authors. Reynolds is probably best known for his hard science fiction space opera series Revelation Space (Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, and Inhibitor Phase) and Poseidon’s Children (Blue Remembered Earth, On the Steel Breeze, Poseidon’s Wake). My favorite of his novels is Chasm City, but I have also read Century Rain, House of Suns as well as The Prefect (now called Aurora Rising) and its sequel Elysium Fire, which are very well done police procedurals set in science fiction settings. More recently, Reynolds’ work has shifted genres significantly. His Revenger trilogy (Revenger, Shadow Captain, Bone Silence) is basically young adult steampunk science fiction. This recent history had me approach Eversion cautiously, especially when I read the descriptive blurb:

From the master of the space opera comes a dark, mind-bending adventure spread across time and space, where Doctor Silas Coade is tasked with keeping his crew safe as they adventure across the galaxy in search of a mysterious artifact. In the 1800s, a sailing ship crashes off the coast of Norway. In the 1900s, a Zepellin explores an icy canyon in Antarctica. In the far future, a spaceship sets out for an alien artifact. Each excursion goes horribly wrong. And on every journey, Dr. Silas Coade is the physician, but only Silas seems to realize that these events keep repeating themselves. And it's up to him to figure out why and how. And how to stop it all from happening again.

Eversion certainly starts off like it's going to be another steampunk novel, with the main character Dr. Silas Coade serving as the doctor of an actual ship sailing to the frozen tundra of the Northern Atlantic in the 1800s. However, we the reader soon realize things are not what they seem because Dr. Coade suddenly dies but wakes up and he’s on a slightly different ship in slightly different circumstances, this time in the 1900s it's an airship with the same cast of characters. Clearly we are in some kind of time loop but Dr. Coade doesn't seem to know the cause of it or how and why it keeps happening. About two-thirds through the book we start to get a better sense of what’s going on, and it’s a delight. I don’t want to give any spoilers so I think it will suffice it to say that Eversion is definitely NOT just a steampunk fantasy novel. It also has space opera elements but I can't tell you what they are without spoiling some awesome story elements; if I had known that was the case I would have picked up Eversion to read earlier than I did. Don't make the same mistake I did--go read it now! If you're a fan of Reynolds' space opera works I am fairly confident you will also enjoy Eversion.

Title: Eversion.
Author: 
Alastair Reynolds.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 353 pages.
Publisher: Orbit Books.
Date Published: May 26, 2022.
Date Read: May 22, 2023.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★½☆  (4.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

Sunday, June 11, 2023

BOOK REVIEW: Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell

This is the second book set in the Universe of Winter's Orbit written by Everina Maxwell. Ocean’s Echo is not a direct sequel, but it has numerous similarities to Winter's Orbit. Both books are centered around a male-male romance. One would think that this feature would make Ocean’s Echo resonate with me, but unfortunately, it was not enough to win my favor in this case. 

I don’t have a lot of experience with the romance genre, but it is my understanding that it is dominated by female authors. This fact is apparently true of male-male romance as well. I’m not saying that women can’t write effective gay love stories (there are clear examples of amazing gay romances like Heartstopper and The Song of Achilles that have women authors) but there’s something about the romantic interactions between the two male protagonists in Ocean’s Echo that just seems “off” or inauthentic to me. I had an ill-defined feeling of unease while reading Winter's Orbit but I think that perhaps I was so impressed by the very existence of a viable space opera with a male-male romance at its core that I didn't want to quibble about its authenticity. However in Ocean’s Echo my misgivings about the verisimilitude of the gay romance swamps my generally positive impressions of the other parts of the narrative.

In Ocean’s Echothe two male protagonists are Tennalhin Halkana (Tennal) and Lieutenant Surit Yeni (Suri). They are very different people but they have several things in common; primary among these is that they both have very powerful mental powers. Their powers are complementary: Tennal is a “reader,” someone who is able to read the minds of others (i.e. a telepath) while Suri is an “architect,” someone who can “write” or force other people to do what they want by mental force. Oftentimes, an architect is mentally bonded (or “synced”) with a reader in such a way that the architect completely takes over the reader’s mind and uses their combined mental powers to write and read those around them.

Some people have described Winter's Orbit as romance with SF and Ocean’s Echo as SF with romance. In other words, in the first book, the romance storyline was subordinate to the political and space opera themes while in Ocean’s Echo the balance is reversed. I suppose I agree with this characterization of the books, but from my perspective it doesn’t tell the whole story because I liked (or at least didn’t recoil from) the romance elements in Winter's Orbit but the romance elements in Ocean’s Echo didn’t work for me at all.

I think the main source of my adverse reaction to the love story in Ocean’s Echo is simply the nature of the characters involved. In Winter's Orbit, the two guys were very different from each other, socially, politically, and even culturally. One is a mess and flamboyant and the other is reserved and careful. But they both seemed interesting (and even attractive) to some extent, so that I was hopeful and invested in the resolution of their relationship. In Ocean’s Echo, the two guys are also very different, with Tennal being something of a chaos monster (who has a powerful planet-wide politician as his aunt) and Surit being a dutiful member of the military (who happens to have an infamous traitor as his mother). I mostly identified with Surit, but Tennal has the bigger role and probably must be considered the primary character in the book. However, to me Tennal just is not very likable, so I never really saw what Surit would see in him and why I would/should root for these two guys to get together or fall in love. This is my primary problem with the book. I mean, how can you have a romance novel if the reader really doesn't like one of the protagonists in the couple?

To be clear, there are several aspects of Ocean’s Echo that I do like. For example, it includes multiple SF elements: spaceships, astronomical anomalies, alien artifacts, man-made habitats, and various advanced technologies. However, as I mentioned earlier, in this book the romance storyline is more prominent than the space opera elements and this was a decided downer for me.

I hope that in future books Maxwell continues to feature same-sex romances in space opera contexts; I think this is a great idea and I would love to read more books like this. I just hope that future books include characters that are more realistic and likable!

Title: Ocean’s Echo.
Author: 
Everina Maxwell.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 464 pages.
Publisher: Scribner's.
Date Published: November 1, 2022.
Date Read: February 20, 2023.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★☆☆  (3.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: B (3.0/4.0).

PLOT: B.
IMAGERY: B-.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: B.

Thursday, May 18, 2023

BOOK REVIEW: Planetfall (Planetfall, #1) by Emma Newman


Planetfall is the first book in the acclaimed  Planetfall series written by Emma Newman.  It is the fourth of her books that I have read; Newman has stated the Planetfall books are written to be read in any order. I read them in the order second (After Atlas), fourth ( Atlas Alone), third (Before Mars ), and first (Planetfall). It’s curious because all the books reference the main event of the series, which is the departure of the interstellar rocket Atlas with roughly 1000 colonists under the guidance of the Pathfinder Lee Suh-mi to a planet where Lee claims they will find God. So, one would think that the first book is about this seminal event in the series, but it’s not. Even the main events in Planetfall take place several decades after the seminal event (it turns out that all four books are set roughly in a time frame under a year or so from each other, just in very different locations).

In Planetfall, most of the events happen roughly two decades after the colonists arrive on the planet. They seem to be well acclimated to their extraterrestrial environs. They have deliberately engineered their living conditions to be such that it is sustainable and low-impact  or no-impact on the environmental resources of their new home world. However, at the point the reader enters the story this comfortable lifestyle is disrupted by the appearance of an outsider, someone who is the grandson of the Pathfinder herself, and bears a clear familial resemblance to her.

We are primarily told the story of events from the perspective of Ren (Renata Ghali) whom we discover was one of the chief engineers responsible for the successful Atlas mission to the planet and has served as one of the primary technological resources and fix-it mechanics for the colony since they landed.

Having read all of the four books in the series I realize now a common theme is that the protagonist/main character in each book  is an unreliable narrator; each one has either had mental health issues or a medical history is revealed that causes the reader to question the veracity and accuracy of what we are being told about events. Interestingly, in three of the four books this protagonist has been female. In Planetfall, it takes quite a while before the reader realizes the extent to which Ren has been hiding important information from the reader that reveals she has a serious mental condition. I don't want to reveal what it is but one of the most significant impacts of the book is when the reader is allowed to fully perceive reality from Ren's perspective as mediated by her mental condition; the effect is devastating.

However, Ren’s issues are really a side issue to the primary plot of Planetfall; the last 20 pages has multiple extremely significant revelations and stunning dénouements. Again I don't want to be too specific about details in order to spoil things but suffice it to say that we learn why the Pathfinder felt that she was bringing humanity to meet God, and we get information and see events that have potentially irreversible consequence for the long term survival of the colony (and thus humanity itself). In fact, it's the ending of Planetfall that makes this entry the most impactful of the books in the series in my opinion. I strongly hope that the author goes on to continue the story beyond where the events in Planetfall, After Mars or Atlas Alone conclude. Overall, that should tell you all you need to know about the Planetfall  books: they leave you wanting more!

Title: Planetfall.
Author: Emma Newman.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 328 pages.
Publisher: Scribner.
Date Published: September 6, 2015.
Date Read: May 1, 2023.


GOODREADS RATING: 
★★½☆ (4.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.83/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A-.

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