Reviews and Comments

Well, they'd be used as weapons to fight in the Napoleonic Wars, their handlers a special Corps like the RAF, with their own rules and social mores. And the Chinese would have celestial dragons as companions to the Emperor and his family.

This is a fun series imagining an alternative history where dragons are real creatures, who can be born wild, but learn human languages the hear from inside their eggs and can be tamed if it's done as soon as they hatch.

These stories are told from the perspective of a very stuffy (and not necessarily too bright) English Naval Captain during the Napoleonic wars, who very reluctantly becomes the handler of a Chinese dragon who hatches from an egg carried by a French ship he seizes. Nobody in his world approves, but he rapidly comes to love his draconic companion Temeraire, who turns out to be very intelligent and earnest, with a few surprises in store.

I would have absolutely lapped up these novels when I was a teenager.

These days my threshold for seriousness in fantasy fiction is dialled to 'Terry Pratchett', so I was a little dubious about picking up a wizardy quest book with no jokes. I gave it a shot only because of its impeccable lineage of recommendations - Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr), Randall Munroe, and Gretchen McCulloch (@gretchenmcc@xoxo.zone) - and now I'm hooked on this surprisingly satisfying series.

Steerswomen are a guild of learned travelers, cartographers, gatherers and disseminators of knowledge. Ask a question, and a Steerswoman will always answer, and will never lie. But if she questions you, you in turn must always answer, and never lie. Or suffer the Steerwomen's Ban, which no one wants. Everyone shows them deference and respect. Except the wizards who disdain their knowledge and jealously guard their own secrets.

Rowan is a Steerswoman on a quest to understand the mysterious blue jewels that have been scattered across the known world. As she travels, gathering clues and companions - a barbarian amazon and a blacksmith's son with an unusual talent - she begins to realise that she is being hunted. Why is there a price on her head? How can she protect herself and her fellow Steerswomen? Are the very principles they live by in peril?

Rosemary Kirstein unveils her fantasy realm unhurriedly, scattering isolated clues, like strangely familiar puzzle pieces, throughout the story. Clues for Rowan, and different clues for the reader, who is allowed the exquisite satisfaction of shadowy suspicions being gradually rounded out, without ever becoming expository.

Maybe @pluralistic@mamot.fr lost a bet? Why else write a novel about an 'ageing accountant'? If so, Cory Doctorow got the last laugh, because Red Team Blues is a gripping page-turner!

Our hero, Marty, is only technically an accountant (forensic accountant “when I wanted to talk about the job”), this is really a detective novel, complete with organised crime in the shadows, grisly murders, covert government agents, thugs with clubs lying in wait in lobbies, and “old fashioned shoe-leather work”.

These crime-novel boxes are ticked, as only Doctorow can, with the most germane near-future-but-could-be-today technological and social elements possible. Cryptocurrency is central to the plot (and Marty's strong opinions about crypto groaned out in the very first chapter), as are ‘secure enclaves’, a ubiquitous computing technology that's as obscure as it is crucial.

Doctorow brings this obscurity into the light with trademark clarity, but the tech, the drilling through processors, the tor network connections, etc. aren't really the point. This is a story about a man navigating a maelstrom of vast powers, using his smarts and experience, and not a little help from his friends (and a few friendly strangers), to keep his head above the waves. It's also about the perils of moving from titular the read team - the attackers who only need to find a single chink in the defenders armour - to the blue team, who need to find and plug every one of those chinks.

Along the way we get a fascinating tour of a variety of anthropological micro-climates, from the Silicon Valley elite set, through their lawyers and accountants, down to the tented homeless, imperilled by dangers as mortal and merciless as, but much less seemingly glamorous than, those that threaten Marty himself. And also lots of enjoyably wry opinions about certain social media billionaires, Starbucks, and many near mythical narratives of rises and falls in the tech world.

This is firmly a novel in the Cory Doctorow canon, but also a departure in a couple of ways. Apart from being a new genre (previous novels have been more purely directly SF and YA ‘activism-fic’), unlike in previous stories, this protagonist is old. There are lots of gripes about aches and pains and the frequency of nocturnal urination, and also many many references that will tickle the atrophied synapses of older computer nerds like myself, from UUCP/Usenet through Lotus 1-2-3, to gripes about remembering “when crypto meant cryptography”.

I enjoyed this so much that, having recently finished the audio-book version narrated by the peerless Wil Wheaton, I've just started an immediate re-read in e-book format. Both, of course, are DRM-free!

The Ministry for the Future follows the history of the eponymous ministry created by the UN in 2025 to represent the interests of future people when addressing #ClimateChange; given that the solutions to climate change will take effect over hundreds of years, so don't immediately benefit the current generations, the ministry would speak for future generations in order to ensure long-term thinking is applied.

The novel has three main characters: Frank, who we meet in the first traumatising chapter, is an American relief worker, and the only survivor of an Indian town struck by a devastating heatwave that wipes out millions. Frank suffers the rest of his ruined life with acute PTSD, which drives him ever more desperately find ways to avoid such a catastrophe from repeating. Early in the novel, it spurs him to actions that introducing us to the second main character:

Mary, an Irish lifetime diplomat, is the Minister for the Future, a role that make her a target for activists from both sides of the climate struggle, and requires her to assemble and coordinate a team to establish legal standing for future generations, and promote solutions that protect them.

The novel interleaves short chapters between Frank and Mary and the third main character: The Situation Itself. This unusual character's chapters are either extremely short whom-am-I riddles that impart a set of disparate but germane concepts, or they are vignettes told from the perspective of unnamed witnesses to some aspect of climate change's effects or solutions.

Appreciating that the story is global, vast, and epic helps to understand that this apparently scattershot narration style is a cleverly devised mechanism (and maybe the only way) to ensure that the novel includes everything needed to grasp the problem and its solutions. Indeed, in parts it's so saturated that it reads like a draft of a #CliFi novel, with long lists and shorthand notes, that was rushed to print before some of the chapters were fleshed out, and maybe before some of the events played out in reality!

The novel is somehow both harrowingly realistic and implausibly optimistic, in that some of the manifold solutions involve changes that just seem impossible to achieve. But Robinson already understands my pessimism and dread:

"... the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately…"

On reflection, although it may be naive, it's also possible the exact formula we need in order to confront inexorable, nonfictional climate change that is definitely already arriving.

@johngreen@mastodon.social's The Fault in our Stars is the story of a 16 year old girl, Hazel, riddled with terminal cancer. The novel opens with her multiple awful treatments, dependency on an oxygen tank she must take everywhere and use even while sleeping, her depression, sarcasm, loneliness.

She meets a boy at a support group, Augustus, who's lost a leg to cancer but is now cancer free. Amid shared irony, and angst, they fall slowly, then suddenly, in love, and depart on an adventure to track down the mysterious author of her favourite novel.

Any book about terminally ill children is sure to be unbearably sad, but Green's writing is so compelling that this novel will surely wring a tear from even the hardest hearted eye. (Green explicitly wants to reject the tropes of the cancer-kid genre. I'm not widely read enough to judge whether he succeeds.)

Fault in Our Stars is cleverly a kind of reverse Romeo and Juliet, but Green has crafted a story that projects way beyond a mere teen love tragedy. Teen angst extrapolates into authentic existential angst when the teen is terminally ill, bringing into sharp focus the real problem with existence and mortality. "What's the meaning of life?" isn't a well-formulated question, but "what do I do with this life I've found myself in?" is, or better: "how do I make this life meaningful?" What does meaningful even mean? Does fame for important achievements entail meaning? Does meaning have to be public? Is being remembered by loved ones enough? What about when they die?

These questions are explicit in Hazel and Gus's banterings, but the people and places they encounter on their adventures raise related ones. If I achieve something great, and then waste the rest of my life, is it still meaningful? Can my life have meaning if I don't know it before I die? Is having a meaningful death the same as having a meaningful life?

Alas, there are many questions. Are there any definitive answers? Of course not, but there are some pretty good proposals which, in lieu of other more fantastical ones given by religion or other metaphysics, could help some of us face the yawning chasm of the void mortality confronts us with.

Green is as erudite as Borges, but with pomposity swapped out for emotional warmth. I liked this a lot, even if I'm not sure I can bear to read more of his work; I'm still recovering from the acute melancholy I underwent from "Anthropocene Reviewed" and haven't managed to steel myself yet for "Turtles all the way down".

PostScript: There's a movie adaptation of this novel. As always, movie-then-book would be the way to go.

In The Golden Compass, book 1 of this series, we met Lyra, the half-wild charge of a scholar of an Oxford University in a parallel universe, and follow her adventures with warrior polar bears to the gates of a new world. This is book 2 of the series, in which Lyra meets Will, who had fled 'our' world into a parallel world to escape shadowy men who are pursuing him to obtain the papers of Will's long-lost explorer father. As Lyra and Will explore the third parallel universe, we learn of the titular knife, which can cut any substance, including the membranes that separate parallel universes. We also learn of the epic battle playing out across the universes, which involves god and angels, and both of their fathers, and of which they're unwittingly key players. This is a fantastical, imaginative adventure spanning many climes and crossing the boundaries of the universes.

I was pre-reading for a pre-teen, with an eagle eye out for too-adult themes. Although I didn't find any, there is a very intense last-stand of a beloved character, which might be too much for sensitive readers.

This is a vivid, stifling tail of first love and heartbreak, written in the Spanglish of Francisca, a not-so-sweet sixteen fresh of the plane in Miami, dragged with her sister to the promised land of Yanquilandia from Colombia by her controlling, born-again-christian mother, where they live in a small apartment with with her drunkard abuela.

Sucked into the world of the local evanglical church against her will, she falls for the pastors' adopted daughter, Carmen. She 'accepts Jesus into her heart' in order to be with her crush, and finally there's a source of joy in her existence, where she's otherwise an outsider at all turns.

Along the way we learn of past quinceañera vidas of the matriarchs of Francesca's family; her abuela, the most eligible costeña bachorette who wanted to have nothing to do with any of her suitors, much to her father's consternation, and her mother, the capitalist-schoolgirl taking advantage of the artesanas indíginas to make a profit from her private-school classmates, and running away from home, and falling into a life of drugs and sex.

The writing is so compelling you can taste the sweat, feel the weight of the heat and the oppression of her family life.

Three societies at three moments in time: a Mayan kingdom in decline in 1012CE, modern day capitalist society at the rollover of the Mayan calendar's 'long count' cycle in 2012, and 'Laviaja', a post-climate-change wanderer society of 3012CE.

If you liked Cloud Atlas's cast of characters popping up in different ages, you'll like the braided structure of this novel. In each strand, a small cast of characters face abandonment, alienation, and the yearning to escape.

If Ursula Le Guin's 'Birthday of the World' left you yearning for more, you'll love Byrne's 1012CE strand, as teenage twin monarchs rise to power in a declining kingdom bathed in animal gods, bloody rituals, and sacred places.

If you ponder #PostColonialism, #CulturalAppropriation, or you've ever been a privileged white tourist on a guided tour to an ancient place, there's something in the 2012CE strand for you. It follows the sordid misadventures of a misfit teenager on a quest to find spirituality and her place in the world.

If you wish Le Guin had leaned into the possibilities of anarchy more in The Dispossessed, or you shared the yearning for another world you found in #OctaviaButler's Earthseed, you'll love this novel's 3012CE strand. Like @pluralistic@mamot.fr's Walkaway, this novel projects utopia risen from dystopia. Global warming has come out in the wash. All our current problems are solved. Everyone just wanders the earth, going where they want, doing what they want. But new religion gives rise to new heretics.

If you were irresistibly drawn to the excruciating claustrophobic dread of The Tombs of Atuan (or even the arachnophobic nightmare of the Peruvian temple in Indiana Jones' iconic debut), you'll cower exquisitely before one of the novel's eternal protagonists: the sacred cave of Actun Tunichil Muknal.

But the millennia spanned also affords a long perspective for exploring the arc of humanity; family and social norms, the distinctions that generate prejudice, and even an interesting take on privacy and surveillance. I liked this a lot, and think it will stand a second reading.

This was Monica Byrne's debut novel and wow! She doesn't screw around!

This is the gripping tale of a climate-tipping-point future where India has much more economic clout in the world, and is expanding its power and influence (with China) into Africa. Among many interesting technologies that have been developed, a huge wave-energy power generator has been constructed from India to Africa, consisting of a long chain of floating inverted pyramids, each about a metre square, which form a road between continents; the 'Trail'. Although it's illegal to walk on, travellers do it anyway.

Meena is one such traveller, who is fleeing something in India, although we don't know the details, only that she's got snake bites on her chest, she's fled her home, and is totally paranoid about being followed.

We learn that she's an orphan raised by the parents of her doctor father, who was brutally murdered, along with his pregnant wife, in a hospital in Ethiopia. Meena was the only survivor, and now that she's fleeing, she decides to head back to Ethiopia via the Trail, in order to find her parents' murderer.

Meanwhile, Mariama is an escaped slave girl heading to Ethiopia from Western Africa. She attaches herself to a convoy of trucks heading East, as does a motherly woman she becomes obsessed with and begins to worship like some kind of divine avatar. We learn much of this future Africa, and the world, through Miriama's wide eyed ignorance.

So we have two 'girls' ostensibly heading to the same destination, who seem to have some kind of mystical connection. They both clearly traumatised and suffer mental illness. I think this and Byrne's The Actual Star are the only two Sci Fi novels I've read that has protagonists who are truly, certifiably, fucked up in such a realistic, tragic way. The violence and trauma become progressively less implied and metaphorical, and more literal and graphic.

There is so much beauty in this book, and so much trauma and madness that it's overwhelming. Despite the slavery, sexual violence, and prejudice mentioned throughout the story, the final terrible twists are still jarring. But in a good way; not a soft story, but a compelling one.

Like #TedChiang's ‘Seventy Two Letters’, Babel is set in a fantastical alternative history of England during the Industrial Revolution. In Kuang's universe, the revolutionary tech is yínfúlù, silver talismans engraved with a word in one language and it's translation in another. When a bilingual utters the words, the subtle differences between their meanings are released by the silver, working magic on the physical world. “The power of the bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language the words are incapable of expressing - the stuff that gets lost when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what's lost and manifests it into being.” Like in #UrsulaLeGuin's Earthsea, words have magical power, but also like Earthsea, the magic is taught to adepts in cloistered academies, in Kuang's case the Royal Institute of Translation. Translators are not only key to great leaps in productivity for British Industry, but also at the nexus of Britain's project for empire and colonisation. The empire's next target is China, and the novel opens with a boy, the only survivor of Asiatic Cholera in his Canton household, is rescued and cured with silver-work by a mysterious Englishman, Professor Lovell. The professor spirits the boy off to London, forcing him to choose an English name (Robin) and abandon his native Cantonese in favour of the more ‘useful’ Mandarin tongue. Like #PhilipPullman's The Golden Compass, the hero is a youth of ambiguous parentage, growing up in an Oxford college, mentored by a distant, dismissive father figure. He's brought up studying Latin and Greek, and afforded a ‘opportunity’ to enter the Royal Institute of Translation, with a small cohort of foreign-born multilinguals. Like the Le Guin's academy, the he finally finds recognition and love amongst his peers, and a long lost sense of belonging, a salve for his lifelong alienation. Robin loves student life, but glossing over the underlying racism of Britain in general and Oxford in particular, and ignoring the growing realisation that silver-work is a tool for oppression in the colonies and a weapon of imperial expansion, become increasingly unsustainable. He realises the ‘opportunity’ is slavery wrapped in a false promise. The novel's civilised beginnings are misleading. The tension, violence, and stakes rise inexorably amongst revelations about his origins, shadowy resistance groups, betrayal, excruciating torture, and sudden death. Ostensibly about English colonial hegemony in centuries past, the novel has a lot to say about Silicon Valley's global imperial projects of similar magnitude, digital and linguistic sovereignty violated by today's magic: machine learning in general, and natural language processing in particular. Kuang's 'Babel' is action packed, and also bristling with etymological curiosities and translation theory. I loved it not only because of its germane themes and because I'm a nerd linguist, but also because it was a great, heartrending adventure, with a great deal of resonance not only presumably for colonised people and immigrants everywhere, but anyone who's spent time bathed in alienation or crises of identity.

Walkaway by @pluralistic@mamot.fr has been described as a utopian novel in a sea of dystopian alternatives, although I'd say it's actually both utopian and dystopian. It takes place in the 'middle distance' of the future; cars are still a thing, and they have wheels that roll on the ground, space travel isn't really a thing yet - humankind is essentially still bound to the Earth. But number of current-day issues have reached their logical culmination; from mundane technology (drones everywhere, 'interface surfaces' stuck to things instead of touch-screen smartphones, 3D printer 'fabs' are ubiquitous, capable of printing machines, clothing, and food) to the Big Issues of our time: Social inequality is extreme, with the overwhelming majority of the populous trapped in a struggling middle-class of insecure wage slaves, ruled by a tiny over-class of 'zottas', the hyper-rich owners of everything, from real estate, through business and roboticized industry, to intellectual property - Thomas Picketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" taken at its word. In addition, climate change has raised sea levels, flooding major cities, and pollution has rendered others unlivably toxic - great swathes of civilisation lie abandoned and in ruins.

At this intersection of technological advancement an eco-social catastrophe, three initial protagonists, Hubert, Seth, and Natalie decide to become "walkaways", joining a 'post scarcity' movement that rejects the premises of the materialistic, hierarchical, and clearly unsustainable "default" civilisation they find themselve in, and, rather than resisting or trying to change it, they simply 'walk away', leaving behind possessions, the very idea of ownership, money, work, and social status. The walkaways have no formal structure or organisation, are simply a collection of people living ideologically and literally outside civilisation. They occupy abandoned land and using 'fabbers', FAQs, and software, construct machines, buildings, and everything else they need, using 'feedstock' scavenged from the surroundings. Designs and systems are open-sourced and constantly improved on by whoever wants to work on them. Similarly work that needs doing on their pop-up settlements, from construction to food preparation, is picked up by whoever wants to do it, helped and highlighted by ubiquitous smart technology, all powered by wind and sun.

The trio wander and learn the walkaway terrain, make friends and lovers, with imminent disaster always looming - from internal philosophical conflicts and power struggles to increasingly lethal incursions from the "default" world, which sees the walkaways as more and more of an existential threat. They discover a community of scientists working on the ultimate act of walking away - the abandonment of biological dependency; developing the means to 'scan' the important parts of a person from their neurological structure, and 'sim' them on a digital substrate - i.e. upload minds into computers, making not only material but also temporal scarcity irrelevant. The walkaways want to eliminate death, and they want to open-source it so that everyone, not just the zotta overlords, can enjoy the benefits of disembodied immortality.

As so much good science fiction is, the novel is essentially a vehicle for Doctorow to explore philosophical ideas and take them to logical conclusions. Much of the dialogue is essentially 'Socratic'; two or more characters ostensibly 'arguing' about something, as a means for the author to explore a particular set of opposing philosophical positions. The topics are wide-ranging. 'Open-source' development and organisation feature large in the walkaway world; putative meritocracies are examined through a couple of different lenses: the zotta's, personified by Natalie's father, believe themselves to have floated to the top of society by their own genius, rather than their privilege, but also the walkaways themselves debate about their own social organisation, and whether work gets done more efficiently when 'merit' is rewarded by formal kudos or by the privilege of having exclusive right to particular work. In a nice twist, those with merit are labelled 'snowflakes', an epithet currently reserved for 'bleeding-heart liberals' by the 'right' in the real world, but used in Doctorow's world to apply to decidedly right-wing capitalists and others who feel their talents grant them divine rights not shared with commoners.

The 'mind-brain' problem (complete with oriental room), of course, is given an airing, along with some discussion of the possible socio-political consequences of widespread immortality. Interestingly, although mass abandonment of biology, and social control via fear becoming impossible, are projected as the outcome of mind-uploading, these scenarios don't actually play out in the novel, and the reasons aren't directly explicated.

However, rather than have the characters duke out all the issues raised, some of them are simply 'givens' in the walkaway universe; economic inequality, the militarised police state, anthropogenic environmental catastrophe. The injustices of these have terrible consequences in the story, but they're not 'solved' by it, and this is the dystopian facet of the work. Its utopia, on the other hand, is represented by ascent of the walkways, from an underground, marginal movement, through increasing persecution as their numbers and relevance swell, to finally (and possibly too sweetly) they become the 'default' themselves, by sheer force of numbers (and of course the efficiency, justice, and 'rightness' of their way of life).

Along the way, there are lots of opportunities to explore both neat and terrible technology, including realistic extrapolations from the state of the art, and actually real (if currently less ubiquitous) things, some interesting uses, and drawbacks to, #cryptography, changes of social norms around drugs, sexuality, gender, and race. And Doctorow gets to air many of his memes - individuals failing to recycle their way out of global warming; only those who tread water against all odds surviving shipwrecks, economists being to the 1% as court astrologers were to kings...

For me it was just the right mix of the familiar with some new ideas; allowing this reader to both feel like he knows some things, but also have some new thoughts too. I imagine it would be a vindicating romp for faraday-cage-wallet-toting, gait-altering, #cyanogenmod-installing, #cypherpunk githubbers everywhere.

The only thing wrong with it is that you can't put it down. Not even if it's 3am. This is why I can't read novels - they're the original Netflix binge-watching recipe for sleep deprivation.