Review of The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

This science fiction novel is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Awards. It was published by Saga/Angry Robot on 19 March 2019 and runs 369 pages. The novel is an expansion of the author’s short story “The Light Brigade” published by Lightspeed in November 2015. This novel is not appropriate for children, and it gets a trigger warning for adults, too, as it includes graphic descriptions of death in a war. This review contains spoilers.

After São Paulo is depopulated by the Blink, Dietz wants to be a hero. She signs up for the Corporate Corps to fight against the Communist Martians that everybody knows are responsible. She goes through basic training and then is deployed on missions with a technology that breaks combat grunts down into particles of light and reassembled them somewhere else. However, for some soldiers this light-speed travel causes time glitches. Dietz experiences the war in a jumble of out-of-sync missions, but keeps her mouth shut about it because of rumors people who talk about things like that disappear. After a while, the jumble of missions starts to assemble into a picture that causes Dietz to question the very basis of the war. Is there anything she can do about it?

First the literary allusions: “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is a narrative poem written by by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1854 about the charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. Here’s a short sample: “Not though the soldier knew, someone had blundered. Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred.” Besides this, the transport technology strongly suggests Star Trek.

This novel is another in the recent trend to surrealist writing, and the accomplishment is fairly impressive. The main theme seems to be how easy it is to believe in lies and never think for yourself, and the story also functions as an anti-war screed. There is a definite plot, but it’s jumbled because of the time glitches and has to be assembled by the reader (you might want to take notes). Next, it seems Hurley has read Marx, who predicts that the end game of Capitalism is a small number of huge, wealthy and powerful corporations that ruthlessly fight to eliminate the competition. Hence the corporate wars in this novel. The Big Six are pitted against one another, and will commit any atrocity to win. While the rich corporates get richer, the poor are dying in the ruins. The Martian resistance is the Marxist revolution. We don’t get a clear picture of how these rebels carry on their business, but they are presented as living free lives and are labeled by the corporate leaders as dangerous Communists who threaten an important way of life.

On the less positive side, the author’s tool for creating impact includes constant graphic descriptions of violent death and dismemberment. Just be warned—I flinched at the first few incidents, but after a while I got desensitized and just plowed through the carnage. Next, the book makes an excellent case against the dangers of uncontrolled Capitalism, but suggesting that Communism is a simple, easy answer to the problems is another lie. Economists know that neither system is a panacea, and the best solution is a middle ground that stimulates enterprise while still providing opportunity for all. The important issue becomes how to provide that, especially for vulnerable members of the population. And one last annoyance: this is written in first person, and Dietz remains ungendered through the whole book until a friend calls her by her first name on page 351. Please, either let us know about gender early on or else let the protagonist remain ungendered. This device is clearly meant to be a gotcha, and it is not a twist ending.

Four stars.

Review of Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

This science fiction/fantasy novel is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Awards. It was published by Tor.com on 7 May 2019 and runs 492 pages. Interestingly, McGuire says she tried to sell this book on spec, but couldn’t explain it to anybody, so had to write it to make the whole thing clear. This review contains spoilers.

Roger and Dodger are twin geniuses adopted by parents who live on different coasts. Roger’s talent is language, and Dodger’s is math. The children are quantum entangled, so by an early age, they’ve found they can talk to each other inside their heads. It’s fun to have an imaginary friend that will talk back to you, but when Roger mentions Dodger, a scary woman comes to the house and threatens to take him away from his parents. This is Leigh Barrow, an evil assistant to evil alchemist James Reed, who is churning out genetically engineering pairs of children in an attempt to achieve the Doctrine of Ethos and the Impossible City through a guide laid out in the children’s book Over the Woodward Wall by his creator A. Deborah Baker. Terrified, Roger withdraws from his interactions with Dodger, but later he actually meets her at a chess tournament. They somehow both end up attending Berkeley, and soon start to realize they’re really brother and sister and a possibly dangerous combination. Meanwhile, Reed is getting impatient with their slow development and thinks he has achieved a more promising and tractable pair of children. In order for that pair to fully mature, he needs to get rid of Roger and Dodger. Can they defeat him and his evil minions? And then what?

First some background: Middlegame in chess is the part of the game in between the opening and the endgame. The Doctrine of Ethos, defined by Pythagoras, is about balance, especially between language and mathematics. At the time this book was published, Over the Woodward Wall did not exist, but it is now a novella scheduled for publication on October 6, 2020, by Seanan McGuire, writing as A. Deborah Baker. In Middlegame, McGuire describes Baker as “the greatest alchemist in North America, spreading her calm propaganda masked as fantasy.” It’s an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek glimpse of the author.

The best part of this story is the developing lifetime relationship between Roger, Dodger, their parents and friends. The characterizations, for the most part, are excellent, and we feel the children’s pain of separation and loneliness as bright children, especially Dodger, who is the math genius. The author lives in the San Francisco Bay area, so we get detailed descriptions of the setting where most of the story takes place. I’ve encountered the themes and devices used here elsewhere over the last couple of years, but this is definitely a creative synthesis of what’s out there.

On the less positive side, this could be considered a thriller, but there’s not that much to the plot, and at 492 pages, it moves very slowly. The first couple of hundred pages were gripping, but I was tired before we got to the end. The narrative jumps back and forth in time and the timeline changes a couple of times, so you have to accept that events are not immutable. Luckily, the pivotal events seem to be fairly enduring. The novel is a tour-de-force as far as symbolic construction goes, but eventually I think it got stuffed a little too full of themes and ideas, where the asides start to distract from the main storyline. Reed, Barrow and the association of alchemists are only sketched in, when they might have been used to provide a stronger power struggle underlying the story. The pathway supposedly outlined in the children’s story remains totally vague, and the absurdist references to this eventually detract from the seriousness of the story. There’s a lot here, from advice to bright children, to finding balance, to maintaining your own ethics, to fighting evil, to understanding what to do with power. Although it has a science fictional framework, the inclusion of undefined alchemy and the powers granted by achieving the Doctrine of Ethos give it a strong fantasy feel.

Four and a half stars.

Review of In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

This fantasy novella is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Awards. It is a stand-alone story from McGuire’s award-winning Wayward Children series, including Every Heart a Doorway, Down Among the Sticks and Bones and Beneath the Sugar Sky. This book was published by Tor.com on 8 January 2019, and runs 197 pages. This review contains major spoilers.

Katherine Lundy is the principal’s daughter and friendless. She always follows the rules and spends her time reading and studying, expecting that life will provide a husband and family sometime in the future. However, she takes a wrong turn on the way home from school and opens a door into the Goblin Market, a place that offers friends and adventure, but also enforces rules and accounts for debt. Everything has a cost or a consequence in the Goblin Market. Lundy moves back and forth between worlds, and forges ties to both. Her eighteenth birthday is coming up soon, when she will have to choose between the two worlds. Is there any way she can avoid the choice and continue to live in both worlds?

This features McGuire’s trademark style and fills out the backstory for one of the characters in her Wayward Children universe. As usual, it has the feel of middle grade to young adult. This is likely a standard narrative for children whose response to exclusion is burying their nose in a book, and so will likely strike familiar chords with dedicated readers. Because Lundy is such a devoted rule follower, her door opens into a world where the Market imposes strict rules about fair value in person-to-person interactions and imposes consequences for failing to follow the rules. I’m glad to see someone take on the issue of rules and consequences, as this seems to be something often missing in current media for children. Lundy’s attempt to get around the major restriction leaves her stuck in childhood, a warning for kids who think they can avoid choices and never grow up.

On the less positive side, this has huge gaps that skip over adventures related in other books from the series, without giving any indication of where to find the rest of the story. This affects the characterization and the continuity, and affects the readability. We skip through Lundy’s childhood, mostly learning about her relations with her family at home, including her father, her older brother and her younger sister, and about her relationship with the Archivist and her friend Moon in the Goblin Market. Maybe because of the short book length, these relationships still feel merely sketched in. I’m also concerned that rule-following has a faintly negative flavor in the book. It’s true that not all rules are good and that we should always question the need for them, but rules are also there for a reason, and good rule following is what holds our human society together. It allows us to set appropriate boundaries and demands that we respect the rights of others. Although fair value is a great concept, it’s also a little vague, and I’m not sure the rules given in the book will be clear or relatable for young readers.

Three stars.

Review of “Omphalos” by Ted Chiang

This alternate reality novelette is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Awards. It was released in the author’s collection Exhalation, published 7 May 2019 by Knopf. This review contains spoilers.

Dr. Dorothea Morrell is an archaeologist working on a dig in Arisona. She is scheduled to give a public lecture in the Chicagou area on how tree rings and other artifacts date the creation, which goes well, but afterward she finds evidence of the illegal sale of museum relics. With only a post office box address to go on, she lays a trap for the thief and catches Wilhelmina McCullough, daughter of Nathan McCullough, director of the University of Alta California’s Museum of Natural Philosophy in Oakland. Wilhelmina explains that she is not really a thief, but she feels the relics not being displayed should be in the hands of the faithful, especially considering the huge crisis of faith that will be coming soon. Her father is in possession of evidence that the Earth is not the center of the universe. Can Dorothea’s own faith withstand this knowledge?

In case you’re wondering, omthalos is Greek for “navel,” and this story is a play on Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, by Philip Henry Gosse, published in 1857, where the author tries to reconcile the events of the Biblical Genesis with the evidence of science. In Dorothea’s alternate world, tree rings and ridges on clam shells stop at a certain point, the Atacama mummies have no navels and someone is carving the Yosemiti Cathedral into a cliff face in California. The date of the creation is clear. Faith is clearly a huge part of everyone’s existence, and the narrative mostly comes from Dorothea’s conversations with God. The number of stars is limited, and the center of the universe turns out to be approximately at 58 Eridani. This is a catastrophe on par with Copernicus’ observation that the Earth actually revolves around the sun and not the other way around, meaning that humans aren’t really the navel of creation. In this case, it looks like the inhabitants of 58 Eridani are, instead.

This story is satire, a gentle but fairly direct questioning of Western religion, and as such, I can imagine it might be offensive to some readers. I’m personally disappointed that the story didn’t give us any real glimpse of God’s chosen people out there at 58 Eridani. Dorathea wonders where that leaves us. Just an accident, I guess.

Four stars.

Review of “Away with the Wolves” by Sarah Gailey

This fantasy novelette is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Awards. It was published by Uncanny Magazine September-October, 2019. This review contains spoilers.

Suss hurts when she lives in human form. She is much more comfortable as a wolf, but she worries that she causes problems for her friend Yana and the other village folk. When she wakes as a girl this time, Yana tells her she has destroyed three chickens, two gardens, the apothecary, and possibly the widow Nan Gideon’s goat. Suss and Yana make the rounds to apologize and offer amends for the damage, but the goat is a problem. It’s clearly been killed by a canine, but Suss doesn’t remember doing the deed. Is she spending so much time as a wolf that she’s losing touch with her human self? Or is something else going on?

Contrary to the traditional, horrific werewolf story, this narrative leaves a warm feel because of how Suss is accepted, loved and supported by her friends in the village. It’s written in first person, giving us a good feel for the characters through description and interaction, but not that much of an image for the village. Suss had Yana follow up on the mystery of the dead goat, providing practical advice to Nan for defraying the cost by selling the meat and cleaning up the pen. Because the goat shakes Suss’ confidence in herself, she considers giving up her life as a wolf, but Yana offers her an alternative that works out well, where she can live at the edge of the wilderness and become the village’s protector instead.

On the less positive side, there’s not much plot here, and the question of what actually killed the goat isn’t hard to figure out. The story is fairly straight forward and depends heavily on the emotional content for its impact. Suss’ pain is represented as physical in the story, but symbolically this suggests that she’s actually retreating from the problems of functioning as a human being. It’s good she finally finds her niche.

Three stars.

Review of “Do Not Look Back, My Lion” by Alix E. Harrow

This fantasy short story is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Awards. It was published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies on 21 January 2019. This review contains spoilers.

Eefa is a cripple and a healer and she has been a good husband, but now she wants to leave. She is married to the great warrior-woman Talaan the Lion and lives in the city of Xot, where the Emperor, Her Greatness the Mother of Vultures and Wolves, Ukhel’s Beloved, the Conqueror-King, has proclaimed the god Ukhel’s Era of Death. Talaan is pregnant with her fifth child, and now the Emperor wants her to fight in a war of conquest. Talaan has promised that this child will be unmarked by a promise scar and will not go off to war like her other children. Reluctantly, she agrees to the Emperor’s demands and rides to meet the foe. Her favorite son Tuvo, a sweet and sensitive page, is killed in the fighting. Talaan swears again her new daughter will not be scarred, but Eefa returns from praying at the temple to find the deed has been done. Talaan catches her packing to leave again. Will Eefa manage to escape the city this time?

On the positive side, this story features vivid imagery, strong characterization and impressive world-building. Although Eefa remains somewhat shadowy, Talaan comes across larger than life. This is a high fantasy tale where Talaan wrestles with her success as a warrior versus her love for her family. The Emperor, hooked on conquest, makes more and more demands of her hero, until the costs start to outweigh the benefits for The Lion and her First Husband. The fact that these women seem to be Amazons adds an interesting angle, and it’s impressive that Talaan agrees to go off to war while carrying a child. And then ready to take on the Emperor right after childbirth? Pretty tough.

On the less positive side, the usage of gender terms in this society is interesting, but the switch ends up being awkward. As the prime example, it’s not immediately obvious why Eefa is considered a husband and not a wife. Because she’s a cripple and engaged in a non-military profession? And Tuvo is a war-wife, while most husbands father children and, presumably, keep house? Okay, got it. But this did assemble fairly slowly throughout the narrative, meaning it set stumbling blocks that affected the flow of the story.

Four stars.

Review of “As the Last I May Know” by S.L. Huang

This fantasy/alternate reality short story is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Awards. It was published by Tor.com on 23 October 2019. This review contains spoilers.

Nyma is ten years old and the chosen child. Her country is at war and Otto Han has just been elected president. The military has the seres missiles that will most certainly stop the war, but will also cause terrible destruction to the cities of the enemy. Nyma has the access codes for the missiles buried next to her heart, and the president has a ceremonial dagger that can be used to retrieve them. Nyma’s tutor Tej tells her to establish a relationship with Han, so she reads him poetry, and after a book of her poems is published, she becomes recognized nationally as a poet. However, their country is losing the war and pressure is mounting to use the missiles. Will Han sacrifice her to get the codes?

This is a highly creative mashup of atom bombs and access codes with human sacrifice. The Order, creators of the system, have put a human face on the codes, a child that the president has to kill with his own hands and that the people in the country know and love. Han has to complete this step before he can bring the missiles to bear on the enemy, a task that might otherwise be easy, callous and unfeeling. Stress builds, while we wonder if Han has the stomach to do it. As I was reading, I had visions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where people had no warning of the firestorm coming down on them.

On the less positive side, this is a little too pat. The characters carry out their roles and we get the message, but there’s really very little conflict other than the inevitability of the decision Han will have to make. Everybody remains obedient to the system, even though I expect military interests could come up with several ways to get around the issue of killing a child. We get to know Nyma through her poetry, but she remains mostly a cipher. The world and the situation also remain vague, and I ended up with very little in the way of solid images or details. Shouldn’t Nyma have had a security detail?

Three stars.

Review of “Blood Is another Word for Hunger” by Rivers Solomon

This fantasy short story is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Awards. It was published by Tor.com on 24 July 2019, and is available online and also for sale as an ebook. This review contains spoilers.

The Civil War is raging and word comes that Missus’ husband Albert is dead. The Missus’ fifteen-year-old slave girl Sully immediately drugs her, her two daughters, her mother and her sister with valerian and skullcap and slits their throats. This leaves Sully in charge of the farmstead. She buries the bodies and cleans up the mess, but finds no joy in her newfound freedom. Because the etherworld has been disturbed by the murders, Sully soon gives birth to the revenant Ziza, who has a much more assertive outlook on the future. The two discuss the question of papers to show ownership of the land, and agree this will be a problem. Ziza’s solution is to birth more revenants and take over the town where the deeds are registered. Can they make this work?

This is a powerful story that captures a bit of the flavor of the Old South in the framework of the Civil War. The murders are a variation on the popular recent theme of killing people and taking over their power, and the violence takes place early in the story, which gives it a strong initial impact. The style tends toward the symbolic and surreal, which reduces the space for imagery, characterization and world building, but Sully does come alive in a couple of flashes. Aside from the fantastical elements, the framework also suggests an alternate history of the US South, although there’s not quite enough development to carry this interpretation. Eventually Sully does manage a rebirth of sorts.

On the less positive side, a flavor of the South is all we get. This makes a powerful point in the beginning, but somehow Sully never steps up to take over her own life, even after her symbolic rebirth. She ends up with the revenant Ziza telling her what to do, and starts to read like a side character in her own story, only spawning avenging ghosts and not any kind of new Sully who will step up and achieve joy in her newfound freedom and opportunity. This leads to questions about the theme of the story. Is Solomon suggesting African Americans are too haunted by the ghosts of slavery to achieve anything positive? On the alternate history side, I’m also wondering why Sully waits until word of Albert’s death comes to carry out her revolt. His death may be only a metaphor for the South losing the war, of course, but this still leaves a question of why the slave Sully feels it is the (absent) man who somehow prevents her from murdering the women. Why is she afraid of him and not the women? About 1/3 of the population of the US South was enslaved during the Civil War years. Is Solomon wondering why the slaves didn’t rise in revolt as soon as the men left for the front?

Regardless of these (and a few other) questions, Solomon gets a lot of credit for grappling with the issues.

Four stars.

Review of Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

This is a sort-of science fiction novel and a finalist for the 2019 Hugo Awards. It was published by Saga in April 2018 and runs about 304 pages. This review contains spoilers.

Has-been glam rocker Decibel Jones and Oort St. Ultraviolet, the only musician left of the Absolute Zeros, are approached to perform in the Metagalactic Grand Prix, a song contest that’s open to any alien race—with a little catch. Species that come in last at their first contest are pronounced non-sentient “meat” and eradicated from existence. Can Dess and Oort overcome self-doubt and competitor sabotage to rescue humankind from extermination?

This seems to be satirical absurdist humor. It rocks along at a reasonably fast pace with a lead in that gives us the history of the Sentience Wars, with the competition, like the Eurovision Contest, launched as a way to move forward in a more civilized fashion. The satirical part seems to be about racism. Or maybe the music business. Or maybe both? High points: Aliens decide against evaluating Earth’s house cats as a sentient species. Dess’ lost love Mira Wonderful Star asks him to marry her. The immigrant Oort works hard at being normal to escape police interest and eventually rescues humanity with a Christmas carol. Also on the positive side, Valente gets a lot of credit for keeping a narrative like this going for 300 plus pages.

On the not so positive side, this won’t be everyone’s piece of cake. It has minimal plot and most of it is complete nonsense about non-existent, not-especially-believable alien species doing weird things and making weird music. Because of the absurdist quality, I didn’t connect with the characters well. The ending was clearly foreshadowed, so didn’t surprise me.

Three and a half stars.

Review of Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor

This novella is a finalist for the 2019 Hugo Awards. It’s published by Tor.com and runs 202 pages. It follows the previous award-winning novellas Binti and Binti: Home and finishes out the Binti trilogy. This review contains spoilers.

This book takes up where Binti: Home leaves off. After finishing her first year at Oomza Uni, Binti has returned home to go on the traditional pilgrimage for young women in her tribe, and brought the Meduse Okwu as an ambassador of peace to her people. However, instead of completing the pilgrimage, she has a vision and travels into the desert with a boy named Mwinyi, where she is inoculated in the ways of her father’s people the Enyi Zinariya. On the way home, she experiences frightening visions of her home the Root burning. While she was gone into the desert, the Khoush people have used Okwu’s presence as an excuse to attack the Root. Once home, Binti finds her family is gone, along with many of the Khoush, but Okwu has survived. Now the Meduse are massing for an attack on the Khoush forces. Her people the Himba are angry with her for bringing this conflict on them. Can she harmonize the situation? Or will she lose her own life instead?

On the positive side, this continues the progressive themes from Binti: Home about trying to harmonize relations between different races and calling out racial prejudice. Binti takes on responsibility for bringing multiculturalism and different ways to her people, even though she is reviled and distrusted for it. At the end of the book, she is not only half Himba and half Enyi Zinariya, but she has also absorbed Meduse DNA and microbes from the living ship New Fish. Some of the juxtapositions here struck me as quite charming: for example, while Binti weeps in the smoldering ruins of the Root, Mwinyi’s camel Rakumi eats her brother’s vegetable garden.

On the not so positive side, the first part of this novella is messy and hard to follow, as it involves Binti’s nightmare visions of her family dying in the flames of the Root. Once we’re back home, the horrific nightmare continues as conflict plays out between the Khoush and the Meduse on the Himba lands. Questions about the tech carry over from earlier installments of the series. Binti’s use of treeing, or running math equations to generate a “current” remain unexplained, as is the question of whether the desert people’s communications system is some kind of nanotech. This also gets into Disneyesque territory, where instead of using her training, Binti loses it and screams at the elders of her village. It appears they understand that she’s right and will do what she wants, but in this case the council stands her up and leaves her to deal with the war on her own. Then Binti’s visions turn out to be false. She brings conflict to her tribe’s lands, fails to stop the war, barely escapes with her life, and finally retreats to the safety of Oomza Uni to be with her friends. This suggests that trying to bring multiculturalism to entrenched tribes isn’t that rewarding.

As usual, the author’s theme and symbolism are strongly developed, but the writing is a bit messy. This has a more negative feel than previous installments.

Three and a half stars.