Book Review: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
“Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.” Beginning the book with an apocalypse as a cold open is just the first audacious and bold maneuver that writer N.K. Jemisin pulls off in The Fifth Season, the first of the Broken Earth series. The Fifth Season continues Jemisin’s technique of crafting interesting, diverse and unique fantasy worlds to explore ideas, concepts and characters in her burgeoning signature style. I listened to this in audiobook form, an excellent narration by Robin Miles. After that cold open, and a very brief immersion into the world, less than a page, the novel launches us into the stories of the characters. The novel focuses on three characters, and given that apocalypse, one quickly realizes that two of the characters’ stories predate that critical cold open event, and one, the character we meet first, is a survivor of the aftermath. The characters are all women, all in different stages of life.
Mining the Genre Asteroid: The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
Eight, sir; seven, sir; Six, sir; five, sir; Four, sir; three, sir; Two, sir; one! Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, And dissension have begun In the days of Sad and Rabid Puppies and food fights over the Hugos and the legacy of science fiction, it’s valuable to go back to the award’s beginning. In 1953, the first ever Hugo award for Best Novel was awarded. The winner was The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester. The Demolished Man stands with Bester’s The Stars My Destination as one of the two masterpieces of SF author Alfred Bester.
Book Review: To Shape the Dark edited by Athena Andreadis
Athena Andraedis’ anthology The Other Half of the Sky was an explicit attempt at highlighting and fighting a severe tendency for female characters in science fiction to be secondary characters, love interests or even just wallpaper by gathering an excellent group of writers to bring forth a set of stories with female protagonists in science fictional settings. The fact that they were women informed their choices, outlooks, and actions, and the stories help correct the mistaken idea some have, ‘Chekov’s Lesbian’, that such diversity has to be of primary plot importance to be justified. To Shape the Dark, the newest anthology from Andraedis, continues the tradition of female protagonists in science fiction settings by focusing on female protagonists in science fiction stories who, specifically, are doing science. Science Fiction as midwife for future scientists and in general appreciation for and inculcating science literacy in its readership is a long and important tradition in the field. This anthology helps that tradition along by showing readers, of any gender, that women can and do have an equal role to play as scientists in science fiction stories, and in our society.
Book Review: When the Heavens Fall and The Dragon Hunters by Marc Turner
In the Empire of Fantasy, there are many duchies, kingdoms, republics, city states, freeports and shires. Even the field of epic fantasy, a large chunk of that aforementioned Empire, has a number of subdivisions one can make, based on the particular style of the epic fantasy. Readers who go deep into epic fantasy can tease out the essential differences between Robin Hobb’s style of fantasy to Kate Elliott, or George R R Martin, or Robert Jordan. As these authors have produced novels and created fans, they have in effect helped guide schools of thought within Epic Fantasy. Marc Turner’s Chronicle of the Exile series, starting with When the Heavens Fall and continuing through The Dragon Hunters, falls within a school of fantasy that I attribute and associate most with the works of Steven Erikson in his Malazan universe.
Angels, Demons and 1930s Spain: The Los Nefilim Trilogy by T. Frohock
The 1930s of Spain was a time and place marked by terrible oppression, a vicious civil war immortalized in works of the time such as Picasso’s Guernica and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. It’s a setting relatively near at hand in time and space, but one which has only modestly been depicted and inspirational to the world of genre fiction. The film Pan’s Labyrinth, notably, captured the brutality of the period in the story of Ofelia and her connection to faerie, even as the unredeemable wickedness of her stepfather shines through the narrative of the film like a witchlight. Ian Tregillis’ novel Bitter Seeds takes the popular tack that the Spanish Civil War was a rehearsal for the Second World War in having his German supermen field test their developing powers during the conflict. T. Frohock’s trio of novellas, set in her dark fantastic Los Nefilim universe takes place in the years just before the full breakout of hostilities.
Book Review: The Race by Nina Allan
Ecological collapse, genetically modified dogs that bond with their human trainers and owners, the darker side of decaying worlds and the people trapped within them, and metatextual games. The Race by Nina Allan is a SF novel that is much more on the literary end of science fiction, much more Rachel Swirsky than Linda Nagata. The Race is composed of several interlinked and interlaced stories, and finding and discovering the connections, even below the immediately obvious, is part of the joy of the novel. In part one, Jenna’s story is of a hardscrabble existence in a town devoted to genetically uplifted dogs, and the desperate life people on the margins sometimes live. It encapsulates the domino problem and the fragility of people on the edge: just one domino falling can bring down an entire chain of lives. In terms of more straightforward science fictional elements and their use, this was by far the strongest section of the novels.
