Lightspeed Magazine - January 2017
Page 24
I initially reviewed W.C. Bauer’s military science fiction debut novel, Unbreakable, two years ago, with my January 2015 column (bit.ly/2i8H6V9). Unbreakable was an entertaining military SF novel: it introduced us to a compelling protagonist, Promise Paen, as well as an equally compelling world in which the Republic of Aligned Worlds is engaged in a sort of cold war against the Lustianian Empire. The two governments go head to head on Paen’s homeworld of Montana, and there’s plenty of action and fighting that keeps the book humming along.
For military SF, it’s always great to see an author pull back from the fighting and take a look at the bigger political picture that’s forming the main story: it gives the action context and gives one perspective. Unfortunately, Bauers pulls out too far. Much of this follow-up book is about politics, and while there’s some engaging action at the front of the book, much of the promised plot doesn’t begin to take place until you’re past the 200-page point. Bauers spends much time going over the internal politics of the RAW, which makes this book a much slower and far less entertaining read.
It’s a shame, because Unbreakable showed off much potential; Indomitable just bored me for most of the story. I see what Bauers was trying to do, but it feels like this book is a bit of an overcorrection, and it misses the mark by a bit. It’s good to see that the world is being fleshed out quite a bit more, but hopefully, a future installment will find its balance between action and context.
Remnants of Trust
Elizabeth Bonesteel
eBook / Paperback
ISBN: 978-0062413673
Harper Voyager, November 2016
528 pages
My next read is Elizabeth Bonesteel’s Remnants of Trust, the continuation of her Central Corps series, which kicked of with a bang in The Cold Between (previous review at bit.ly/1QxGCEm). I really enjoyed this debut novel, because Bonesteel plunks you down in the depths of a mystery set against the politics of an interstellar organization. She doesn’t throw you much of a lifeline with this novel, and I’ll definitely need another read or two to fully get all the nuances.
Fortunately, with Remnants of Trust, it feels as though Bonesteel has a better handle on the world and conveying it to the reader. Like the first novel, it deals with a complicated mystery that’s wrapped in some prior action undertaken by the Central Corps—in the prologue, an away team visits a colony world and finds that it’s been devastated, with its inhabitants turned savage and cannibalistic. Fast forward several years, and Commander Elena Shaw and Captain Greg Foster find themselves in more trouble after the events of the first book: they’ve been redeployed to patrol Third Sector, when they find that their sister ship Exeter has been sabotaged, as well as a nearby PSI ship. These incidents are connected, and as Shaw and others begin to investigate, it’s clear that someone is going to great lengths to cover everything up.
Remnants of Trust is as well written as its predecessor, but I enjoyed this novel more. The mystery and intrigue feel more compelling, its characters are a bit more interesting, and it’s got its share of action. To me, it feels as though it’s what Star Trek could have been if it was conceived in 2016: dark and incredibly compelling. It would make a hell of a fantastic television series.
A Closed and Common Orbit
Becky Chambers
eBook Paperback Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0062569400
Harper Voyager, October 2016
464 pages
There are some novels in a series that just throw out the rulebook altogether. That’s the case with Becky Chambers and her second novel, A Closed and Common Orbit (see review at bit.ly/2hBnEDt). It’s set in the same world as her stunning debut, The Long Way to a Small and Angry Planet, which I had a blast reading. Chambers introduces us to an incredible cast of characters onboard a starship, and for her follow-up act, she could have plopped the crew into a new adventure and had just as much fun.
That doesn’t happen with this novel, and it’s an incredibly brave jump. This novel takes place shortly after the first, picking up Lovelace’s story. When we left her, she had been downloaded into a realistic human body, but had been essentially reformatted: she’s a new person, so to speak, which allows Chambers to inject some depth that was largely lacking in the first book. This is a fantastic jump, and we follow Lovelace (renamed Sidra) as she explores what it means to be a person.
Interspersed through this narrative is a second storyline following Jane, a young girl who escapes from a factory into a junkyard, where she’s raised for the next decade by the AI of a broken-down starship. This is an equally compelling storyline, and we watch as she grows up alone, trying to survive. These two storylines come together by the end of the novel. They don’t mesh up quite perfectly: they largely feel like two separate stories that just happen to come together with an ending that feels almost too convenient.
That said, like its predecessor, this is an incredible book. Chambers tells an incredibly sharp story, one that explores the limits of disability and acceptance as two characters make their way in a difficult world. It’s a wonderful feat, and it’s the epitome of subverting expectations. I already can’t wait to see what surprises are in store for her next novel.
Each of these three novels show how Bauers, Bonesteel, and Chambers have gone on to follow up with their novels. Each one has experimented in some ways. Chambers and Bonesteel have each taken two very different approaches: Bonesteel has essentially continued the story of her crew, but with a new conspiracy for them to unravel, while Chambers has jumped away from her first to a new set of characters and themes completely. While Bauer’s novel is the weaker of the three, he likewise does some really interesting things with his story, taking it in a direction that I didn’t expect and showing off some new parts of his world. While it doesn’t quite pay off for me, this sort of experimentation is what authors should be doing, rather than just laying down the same story installment after installment. While there’s something to be said for playing with a long, ongoing series like The Dresden Files or The Lost Fleet novels, they get tedious after a while, something that each of these novels really manage to avoid.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Liptak is the Weekend Editor for The Verge. He is the co-editor of War Stories: New Military Science Fiction, (Apex Publications, 2014). His writing has also appeared in io9, Gizmodo, Kirkus Reviews, Tor.com, BN Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Clarkesworld and others. He lives in Vermont.
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Interview: Kij Johnson
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 11014 words
Kij Johnson is the author of the novels The Fox Woman and Fudoki, as well as the short story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees. She’s worked at Tor Books, Wizards of the Coast, Dark Horse Comics, and Microsoft, and is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Kansas. We spoke with her about her novella The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, a feminist take on H. P. Lovecraft.
This interview first appeared in August 2016 on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the interview or other episodes.
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Your new book is called The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe. What’s that about?
That’s complicated, because there’s the metafictional answer, which is that it’s a sort of commentary on and response to H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which is one of his better known works. The other answer is that it’s the story of a woman of a certain age who goes out on a quest, which makes her a very unusual character, in the middle of a strange and very bizarre world.
For people who aren’t that familiar with Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle stories, do you want to say a little bit about the background of those?
Sure. H.P. Lovecraft was writing a lot in the early twentieth century. I don’t remember the exact dates, and he wrote a series of stories called “The Dreamlands” storie
s. The idea is that there is a dreamland that certain master dreamers, all male, can get to. It’s a world ruled by these whimsical, cosmological horrors and petty, immensely powered gods. The stories are usually very vividly imagined. There are certain characters who turn up again and again. Randolph Carter is one of his basic characters, who he frames the entire Dream-Quest cycle around. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is Randolph Carter’s primary story, in which he sees a mystical city when he is dreaming. He lives in Boston, and he wants to get there, but when he goes to the Dreamlands, and he’s a master there, he finds the gods will not permit him to see it, and so he quests across the Dreamlands to get somebody who will let him go to this mystical city that he’s seen.
My understanding is that Randolph Carter is sort of a self-insert for Lovecraft himself, who suffered from very vivid nightmares throughout his life.
That’s my understanding as well. Randolph Carter turns up a number of times, and also turns up in stories that are not exactly Dreamlands stories. There’s one story where—I think it’s the first time we meet him—he’s just essentially telling the cops about something horrible that’s happened. But, yeah, he seems like a very central character to Lovecraft.
There’s about twenty or so of these Dream-Cycle stories. How many of them did you reference or use in your book?
I read all of them many times. First off because I’d read The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath when I was a little girl, and it was the only one of the Lovecraft stories that didn’t scare the absolute daylights out of me. So, I kept reading it again and again, and it always disturbed me a little. It bothered me, and I couldn’t identify at that point why, but I read the other Dream-Quest stories just in that childhood obsessive way that we track down everything that we think we might possibly like. When I went back to start writing this, I re-read all of the Dream stories again and again. There was one poem that I was not able to track down, so there’s one piece that I didn’t actually get to read.
What is it about these Dream stories you think appeals to you?
The Protean nature of the world. The way things shift. They were full of great wonders.
I grew up a little girl in Iowa, and we didn’t have great wonders, really. We had a lot of pigs and soybeans, which are kind of great, but not wonders, and something about this magical place that he went to, and it was all very encompassable by a little girl. You didn’t have to be sophisticated to understand Lovecraft. You just had to have a good vocabulary. I was able to read them and internalize them in a way that even books like Tolkien—I read The Lord of the Rings at about the same stage, and I couldn’t always follow the bigger emotional movements, whereas there are no big emotional movements, generally, in Lovecraft.
In the acknowledgements for this book, you say that you read The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath at ten, and you said that you were “thrilled and terrified and uncomfortable with the racism, but not yet aware that the total absence of women was also problematic.”
This is something that I didn’t notice. I think most of us didn’t at that age. All of the stories that I read when I was younger, there were so few insertion points for girls. We’re stuck having to take our choice between the four girls in Little Women or having to take our choice between Eowyn and Galadriel, which is improbable when you’re growing up in Iowa, or Arwen. It’s interesting how they all have vowel names.
There really were never that many choices, and when I was a little girl reading science fiction and fantasy, I didn’t have anything much. I would read all of them, even stories like Andre Norton’s, and it was always guys, guys, guys. I was as tomboyish as I could be, because it that was the only way I could see being part of these worlds.
I didn’t notice until rereading it as an adult that the Dream-Quest mentions one human woman, and only one, and it’s a farmer’s wife. That’s all they say. “The farmer’s wife was scared.” The end. I started noticing that the only time Lovecraft ever uses women, they tend to be very negative, very stereotypical. They’re evil old grannies or they’re the scared farmer’s wife, but even those are so minor. It’s as though he existed in a world without women at all, and that’s one of the things I was doing in Vellitt Boe, because this Dreamland is empty of women, almost. There’s so few of them, and so the women kind of have to band together, understand each other, and support each other, but there just aren’t that many.
What was the specific impetus to write this? Did you just happen to go back and reread the Dream Cycle stories and then you got the idea? Or did you get the idea and then you went back and read the stories? What prompted it?
The proximate cause was that Jonathan Strahan asked me if I wanted to write something, and I had been chewing over an idea before this that wasn’t Lovecraft. There’s a book by John Myers Myers called Silverlock, which was written in the ’40s, and the conceit is that the Commonwealth of Letters is an actual country, and so in all of those great classics, those characters all live on the same terrain, and they all interact. It was sort of a big, exciting adventure novel about a guy who ends up in a place where he’s fighting Brian Boru, and he ends up meeting Beowulf, and he meets Manon Lescaut, and people like that. But, when I read it, I realized that the only females in that were either women of unsteady virtue and innocent girls for whom either good or bad things happened. There just weren’t any other types in that story. Of course, that’s because in the literature there really aren’t that many types.
So, I had started thinking before Vellitt Boe about what would be in my Commonwealth. If I were adventuring in a land full of literatures, what would my adventures be? I had started thinking, well, where do you insert yourself as a woman? Especially now that I’m an adult, where do I insert myself as an adult woman who’s not preoccupied with the things of a twenty-year-old. I found that there really weren’t that many people I wanted to be, in literature. Most of the women were boring, or I just didn’t see the point. They didn’t aspire for big things. There was a real preoccupation with things that just don’t interest me that much: family and home. There were not enough women going out and doing things. I started thinking, “Why? Why are these classics so dominated by this?” Not because of the histories and conventions of their times or their authors, but more what happens when you insert a mature woman into a science fiction or fantasy world? What do you get?
I’d just done this exploration with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows where I had just written a sequel, which will be out from Small Beer next year, where I inserted two female animals to say, “What happens to the world if we put females in?” Does it break the world? Does it break the relationships of the male characters? In what ways does it affect the world? Then, after that, when Jonathan Strahan asked me if I wanted to write something, I’d been kind of chewing over what’s wrong with Lovecraft, and that’s what I decided was going to be my next project. I didn’t realize just how absorbing it would become or how much time it would take me, because I ended up really researching it heavily. I ended up doing tons of research into completely unrelated topics like lateen-rigged boats and things like that.
I know you do a lot of research for your stories, and I was curious, you said you read all these Lovecraft stories many times. Did you make some sort of atlas or compendium of names? What sort of background worldbuilding stuff did you create?
Usually my memory is not good enough to just remember it, but because I had read these as a child, that helped a lot, and this time I did have a gazetteer, and I did have a list of characters, but mostly I just read them so much that I’d say, “Oh, oh, wait, Pickering, where’s Pickering? He’s the ghoul, right? He’s three-quarters of the way through. Let me find him.” And then I would go find that section of the book and reread, and I would just use that. Actually, there are places in this book that are direct chimes with Lovecraft’s language, although I didn’t try to simulate it, but I’m directly pointing to certain things that he did.
I saw in an interview that you said, when you went
back to these stories, that he was maddeningly vague, and that you had to do a lot of your own invention.
Right. He describes towns, and he will tend to describe them all using the exact same language so that every town feels like it’s a sort of mix of medieval towers made out of some strange stone combined with quaint little New England gabled things. And that’s really all the descriptions he gives. He’ll use a lot of Latinate, multi-syllabic adjectives. They tend to be charged with emotion, not with detail, so he’ll talk about ichorous, the gooey stuff, right? But he doesn’t really tell you what the ichor looks like or what it smells like or is it sticky to the fingers or is it slippery to the fingers? And that’s just one tiny detail. When he talks about geography, people go across pasturelands, but there’s a lot of pasturelands in the world, and they all look different. He’s somewhat restricted by his geography. He’s seeing his pastures, but I decided I might as well see other pastures. So within everything he said, I made a lot of tweaks, and when he didn’t describe something … Like, he mentions a number of stars in the night sky, but he doesn’t mention how many stars. His assumption, I assume, is that the night sky looks exactly like our night sky, but that’s not written down, so I was able to play around with the sky and make it do different things than his sky does.
In your book, the sky has exactly ninety-seven stars. I was curious, does that number have any significance? Where did that idea come from?
It would be really funny to say yes, because then years after I’m gone, perhaps people would be trying to figure it out. Maybe she had ninety-seven books about Lovecraft or something? But no, in fact, I picked it because I wanted it to be under a hundred. He actually cites about twenty space objects, including planets, and so these people, to my mind, they’re thinking Mars and Venus are also stars, and perhaps Saturn as well, so they’re not necessarily making a distinction between Algol and Venus. But, I just wanted it to be few enough that the sky would be very, very dark, and to make the contrast with our sky so much different.