Guest Post: Religions on Mars, according to Me, by Mary Turzillo
I truly don’t know if human beings need religions or ideologies, but history seems to indicate that we do. Every time a culture attempts to base its social values on entirely non-spiritual things, that very agnostic value-system becomes a new religion. People from England, France, Germany, etc. migrated to North and South America and to Australia in order to practice religions that were banned or looked down upon in Europe. Once they got to the New World, some of them started religions that did not harmonize with the social mores of their neighbors. Animal sacrifice, child marriage, and polygamy were three of the customs sanctioned by various religions that caused them to be ostracized. So the devotees moved further west, into less populated territory. I think this will happen when humans begin to migrate to the moon and Mars. I don’t discuss this much in Mars Girls, although I’m building another novel (Isidis Rising) where dissidents sequester themselves in a Martian enclave.
Book Review: The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley
I came to Kameron Hurley’s work early, getting a copy of God’s War back at the beginning of her career, and following her work and worlds since. Sometimes I’ve had questions or issues with her work, but throughout, the “blood, bugs, and brutal women” that have been a hallmark of all of her worlds and characters have sustained my reading interest and been a welcome expenditure of my reading time. It was thus with great anticipation that I picked up The Stars Are Legion, the new Space Opera from Hurley. I started this review and continue to engage with the author on a metatextual as well as a textual level because her work responds to that sort of analysis. No writer is separate from her creation, but some writers are very intimately connected to what they write, how they write, and why they write as they do. Hurley falls into this camp. So, I went into the novel with expectations that there would be strong female characters, violence, perhaps worldbuilding that might frustrate me a tiny bit, and a harsh and high contrast verse that engages my senses. In photography terms, instead of a placid and straightforward landscape or portrait, Hurley’s work pushes pixels in both directions, sometimes discordantly, to deliberate and eye-arresting effect.
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.
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: Cities and Thrones by Carrie Patel
Revolt and revolution are only the beginning of the troubles facing Malone, Jane and the other characters in CITIES AND THRONES, the follow-up to THE BURIED LIFE by Carrie Patel. Taking place on the heels of the prior book, while the first novel is a New Weird murder mystery with a large side of political revolution and unrest, Cities and Thrones explores the consequences, causes and calamities when political revolution happens. Malone has prospered, in a way, in the wake of the political changes occurring in the prior volume, having risen to a position of power and authority over the Inspectors that she didn’t quite want, but is the only person trusted for the job, anyway. Jane Lin and her companion Anders, on the other hand, having gone on the run, give the reader a view into a completely different city — Medina. While Medina is another underground city in the same vein as Recoletta, its culture and setup are very different. Lin’s talents for espionage and getting wrapped up in the councils of power do not fail her in Medina, and Lin soon finds herself caught in them in her new city in short order.
Book Review: Dirty Magic by Jaye Wells
Alchemy-based magic gives a relatively mild supernatural flavor to what is otherwise a novel focused strongly on police procedural lines in Dirty Magic, a novel by Jaye Wells. Dirty Magic, the first in the “Prospero War” series, follows the story of Kate Prospero, police officer. The novel brings us to her story just as the scourge of dirty magic in her rust belt hometown takes a dangerous, and even deadly, turn. Genre mashups, or crossovers, are always a matter of balancing acts. Unless an author is truly ambitious, there usually is a dominant genre, and a secondary genre. Often for fantasy and science fiction readers, SFF is the dominant genre, with mystery, romance, or thriller elements as the secondary genre that is layered in. A relatively popular secondary genre as of late for layering into fantasy, especially urban fantasy, has the bones of the procedural. There are a lot of advantages for a writer to use elements of the procedural, especially in terms of structure and story beats, It provides authors a narrative framework to decorate with the genre elements, and everything else in the novel as well. Dirty Magic by Jaye Wells, then, runs with that last, as the secondary genre to her urban fantasy structure is most definitely police procedural.
