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brigdh · 6 years

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Reading Wednesday

The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh. A space opera more concerned with ethics and friendships than battles and politics. The Pride of Chanur is a merchant ship crewed by the Hani, a lion-like species in which the females are in charge of trade and diplomacy while the males stay back home and fight one another for control of powerful households. Captain Pyanfar is on a typical trip, docked at a trading station, when a strange, naked alien that looks like nothing she's ever seen (though readers will quickly recognize it as a human) runs onto her ship. Another species, the Kif, soon demand its return, but Pyanfar refuses, as much because she dislikes the Kif and is happy to annoy them than for any deep reason. That choice lands her and her crew in escalating danger, as the Kif are determined to get the alien back and will declare war to do it and other species are drawn into the conflict. A great deal of the book is about the difficulty of translation; even with long-contacted species like the Kif, the Hani are forced to communicate in short, broken sentences and deal with deep cultural differences. With the humans, they're starting from the ground up, and matters like gestures, clothing, and food are as prone to misunderstandings as language itself. How do you even tell the difference between an sentient alien and an animal, if you have nothing in common? I loved this sociological part of the book. Unfortunately, I didn't like much of the rest of The Pride of Chanur. I didn't connect emotionally with any of the characters, I found the descriptions of space travel deeply confusing, and I have no idea at all how Hani society is supposed to function. For example, it seems like the male fights over households are supposed to be one-on-one, but then we're given a description of a whole crew invading and pillaging an enemy house. Is that illegal? Are there laws regulating these fights? What does a new male leader mean to the daughters and sisters of the former ruler – are they cast out too, or do they just have to obey a new boss? All of this is pretty important to the climax, but I just couldn't figure it out. The Pride of Chanur has its positives, but I don't think I'll be reading the sequels unless someone talks me into it. Cibola Burn by James S.A. Corey. The fourth book in The Expanse series, and so inevitably this review will contain spoilers for previous books. After the events of Abaddon's Gate , humanity suddenly has access to thousands of solar systems, most with inhabitable, Earth-like planets. And yet in a very believable, petty example of human nature, we're fighting a war over just one. The Cibola in the title is metaphorical; it's one of the mythical 'cities of gold' the Spanish conquistadors searched and killed for in their early days in the New World. The idea of being beyond the law, of pillaging fortunes from a new land, is a major theme in this book, and Cortez and his methods get name-dropped at least twice. A group of refugees, homeless after Ganymede was torn apart by war, riots, and alien monsters, settle on a planet they name Ilus. At the same time, the UN grants the Royal Charter Energy corporation the exploration and exploitation rights to the same planet, which they've named New Terra. This immediately sets up several consequential questions that no one has the answer to: since the refugees beat RCE to Ilus/New Terra by a year, do they have rights of priority? Does the UN even have the authority to give out contracts over these new planets? Where do Mars and the Outer Planet Alliance stand? Who owns the lithium ore the refugees have already mined and transported into space? And since the rest of humanity is months or even years away from Ilus/New Terra, can anyone stop RCE and the refugees from killing each other before politicians settle the matter? James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante are sent in to act as mediators, since a) Holden is, by this point, a popular celebrity, and b) as an Earth native and former OPA operative, he can be seen as neutral. Unfortunately matters quickly grow beyond his ability to control them, particularly when the defense system set up by long-dead aliens wakes up and adds a third front to the killing-everyone campaign. As always in The Expanse series, we have a set of new POVs. Unfortunately this time I didn't like any of them as much as usual. Holden repeats again, and our others are Basia Merton, Elvi Okoye, and Dimitri Havelock. Basia was formerly a minor character in Caliban's War, the father of one of the other kidnapped children. His son died, and in reaction to that Basia has become fiercely, perhaps stupidly, protective of his surviving family. They are some of the refugees, and Basia's grief leads him to make several dangerous choices when confronted by the RCE. He's a sympathetic character, but I just didn't find him as captivating as Avasarala, Bobbie, or Pastor Anna. Havelock was also a minor character before; he was Detective Miller's partner in Leviathan Wakes. Now he's second-in-command of security for the RCE. It's just too bad that his boss is Murtry, a straight-up sociopath who doesn't care how many people he has to kill to give RCE an advantage. Havelock explicitly says that he's overly influenced by the people around him, and so goes along with Murtry's plan for far too long. As a character arc, this did not work for me at all. There is some suspense in waiting to see if Havelock will grow a spine and do the right thing, but it's not nearly as intriguing than if he was genuinely convinced of Murtry's ideas and had to change his mind, or was in some sort of physical danger that prevented him from helping the heroes. Finally, we have Elvi, an exo-zoologist working as part of RCE's science exploration team. More than anyone else, she understands Ilus/New Terra and how very different it is from Earth, despite superficial similarities. She makes several important discoveries that save lives, but she's dangerously naive regarding politics and human relationships. She also falls desperately in love with Holden and begins to act like a besotted teenager; this is believable as a reaction to the stress and life-threatening circumstances she finds herself in – and the narration does make it clear that's what's happening – but it was still somewhat annoying to read. It was hard to take her seriously as a respected professor when she was blushing and stammering over her crush. Overall, I didn't like this book as much as the previous ones in the series. It just wasn't as exciting and the characters weren't as likeable. On the other hand, I did really enjoy the found-family vibes between Holden and his crew: Naomi, Amos, and Alex. (Which reminds me: I forgot to mention the AMAZING scene in Caliban's War where Holden literally proposes marriage to the whole crew. He's half-joking, suggesting it more as a way for them to easily become co-owners of their spaceship than to actually enter into a poly romance, but I still loved it.) We have Amos nearly murdering people when Naomi is taken hostage, Naomi issuing vicious threats when Alex's safety is endangered, and Holden going to new extremes to protect Amos. It's just a whole circle of love and family-of-choice and it is my very favorite trope. I'm totally giving this book an extra star just for that. In general, Cibola Burn is a step down in quality from previous books, but I'll still be reading the sequel. How Not to Kill Your Houseplant: Survival Tips for the Horticulturally Challenged by Veronica Peerless. A really excellent how-to guide for houseplants, possibly the best book on the topic I've ever seen. It's split into two halves, with "The Basics" offering general tips and "The Houseplants" giving specific guidance on 119 common species. How Not to Kill Your Houseplant is aimed towards newbies, but it also included tricks that were new to me, such as how to save an overwatered plant by wrapping its soil in newspaper. I particularly liked the troubleshooting offered in "The Houseplants"; it explains, for instance, that yellow leaves on one plant might mean it needs more water, while yellow leaves on another species might indicate that it's getting too much sunlight. It's easy to look up your specific plants and get tips on how to best care for them. How Not to Kill Your Houseplant is available as both an ebook and a physical book, but I'd highly recommend the physical book. It's beautifully laid out, with a collage-like style that mixes photographs and abstract cutouts. A great book for anyone who raises houseplants, 'horticulturally challenged' or not! I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. One Way by S.J. Morden. A sci-fi thriller set in the near future: 2048, to be exact. Mars has been visited, and it's time for humanity to build a permanent base there for the ease of future astronauts. But how to do it? Robots are expensive and prone to breaking down, whereas human labor is even more expensive and when they break down there's likely to be lawsuits from family members. Xenosystems Operations, the company who has contracted with NASA to build the base, hits on the perfect solution: convict labor. After all, it's not like they can escape; they'll be on fucking Mars, and there's not a lot of spare oxygen or rocket ships for them to steal. XO runs a private prison in California (named Panopticon; subtle, Morden), so all they have to do is select a team of seven people with life-sentences who are willing to serve the rest of their time on Mars, give them a few months of training, and send them on a one-way journey – even once the base is built, they'll be a need for maintenance and janitorial services, since astronauts have more important things to do than unclog drains or charge batteries. In exchange, the prisoners get work they can be proud of and a bit more freedom in their daily lives. Frank is our narrator and main character. Sentenced to life for murdering his son's drug dealer, Frank is a former construction worker, an obviously useful background. He and his team of six other prisoners, each with their own specialities (transportation, plumbing, electricity, computers, hydroponics, and a doctor), plus an XO employee to be their guard/boss, quickly find out that XO has cut every possible corner to save money. They have no redundant supplies in case of wear or mishap; broken or missing necessary parts; barely enough food to get them through; problems with producing their own oxygen, water, and power; and not enough training for emergencies. Unsurprisingly, this quickly starts to take its toll, and people die in easily preventable accidents. Except by the third death, Frank suspects that they're not just accidents – someone on the team is deliberately murdering the others. He has no one he trusts, help from Earth is months away, and in the harsh environment of Mars the smallest mistake can kill, so Frank is left to figure out the murderer by himself before he's the next victim. Morden is an excellent writer of tension; there's several wonderfully dramatic scenes involving characters in spacesuits running out of time on their oxygen supplies that were heart-pounding and thrilling. Unfortunately he's not a great author of mysteries. The murderer is SUPER obvious, so much so that it makes Frank look dumb for taking so long to figure it out. At the point where Frank discovers a bunch of empty oxycontin packets around the murderer's bed and still doesn't think it might be him, I had to groan out loud. (Of course, being a drug addict doesn't make one a murderer, except that this is totally the kind of book where it does.) I also had problems with Morden's science writing; I think he expects his average reader to know more about space than I, at least, do. There was a lot of techno-jargon I didn't know, and I never could manage to picture what the base Frank and the others built was supposed to look like. On the other hand, I am highly predisposed to like a book that's this critical of the use of convict labor for corporate profit, and the excerpts scattered throughout of XO's private communications really make it clear how far down the path of evil a bit of greed and pure capitalism can get you. Hooray for a nice dose of contemporary politics in my escapist reading! I do want to note – because I didn't know before reading it – One Way is not a stand-alone. A sequel is due out soon. Nonetheless, One Way ends at a good point, with almost all of the plot threads wrapped up. You won't feel like you've gotten only half of the story if you read this book alone. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

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#books #book reviews #james s.a. corey #cj cherryh #S. J. Morden #gardening #the expanse

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brigdh · 6 years

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A lot of reading reviews

I was unexpectedly busy for most of April, so this is several weeks' worth of reading – though weeks where I didn't have much time for reading for fun, alas. Enjoy an overabundance of reviews? What did you just finish? A Short History of Drunkenness: How, Why, Where, and When Humankind Has Gotten Merry from the Stone Age to the Present by Mark Forsyth. A shallow but funny history of humanity's relationship with booze. Brief chapters cover pretty much every historical era you'd expect: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, Ancient China, Vikings, the Medieval Middle East, Medieval England, the Aztecs, colonial Australia, the Wild West, Russia, American Prohibition, and London's Gin Craze of the 1700s. That's quite the list for a book of less than three hundred pages, and indeed Forsyth is clearly focused on being amusing and easy to read more than he is on deep historical investigations – which isn't really a critique, as long as "silly and quick" is what you're looking for. (I am a bit skeptical of some of his claims, but he has footnotes to back him up; I suspect it's a case of Forsyth taking the most extreme possible side in genuine historical debates.) It's a nice collection of "hey, did-you-know" trivia, but I doubt anyone will come away with more insight on the history of alcohol than they started with. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. Caliban's War by James S.A. Corey. The sequel to Leviathan Wakes, which I had mixed feelings about. Well, goddamn! Corey has levelled up their writing beyond my highest expectations, particularly in regards to characterization. This time around we have four PoVs. There's Holden again, who remains somewhat action-hero-y but has become far more sympathetic (possibly because he actually has idiosyncratic attributes now; I'm particularly fond of his deep attachment to a fancy coffee-maker). We're introduced to Bobbie Draper, a highly-trained marine from the Martian military and the only surviving witness of the opening salvo of the Martian-Earth war, which might actually have been an accident caused by an alien attack; she prefers battle to politics, and struggles with the question of who she should be loyal to when no one believes her or cares about the whole alien thing. Next is Chrisjen Avasarala, a tiny gray-haired grandmother with a meaningless-sounding title ("assistant to the undersecretary of executive administration") who is actually the power behind the throne of the UN, now Earth's ruling body; she smiles and snacks on pistachios in public and curses like a sailor in private, fiercely determined to ride over any opposition she encounters. And finally there's Prax – Praxidike Meng – a botanist and single father of a four-year-old daughter, more comfortable with plants or scientific reports than being social or having emotions, and completely over-his-head incompetent with the politics and violence he soon finds himself thrown into. The plot sets off when that four-year-old disappears in the conflict of war. A great many people have disappeared or died, and more than that are starving, displaced, rioting, or soon to be all of the above, so Prax is unable to get the authorities to care about one lost little girl. That is until he accidentally encounters Holden et al, and finds the team he needs to solve what increasingly becomes a deep, wide-spread mystery. Meanwhile, Avasarala and Bobbie are trying to convince the militaries of Earth and Mars to back down and focus on the real problem: possible aliens from who-knows-where, capable of doing who-knows-what. Unsurprisingly, these plots eventually intersect for a dramatic climax. I really appreciate how Corey doesn't focus on the action to the detriment of meaning. Yes, there's lots of space battles and killer aliens, but there's thoughtful insight on war and human nature too: “So you’re in an entrenched position with a huge threat coming down onto you, right?” Avasarala said, sitting down on the edge of Soren’s desk. “Say you’re on a moon and some third party has thrown a comet at you. Massive threat, you understand?” Bobbie looked at her, confused for a moment, and then, with a shrug, played along. “All right,” the marine said. “So why do you choose that moment to pick a fight with your neighbors? Are you just frightened and lashing out? Are you thinking that the other bastards are responsible for the rock? Are you just that stupid?” “We’re talking about Venus and the fighting in the Jovian system,” Bobbie said. “It’s a pretty fucking thin metaphor, yes,” Avasarala said. “So why are you doing it?” Bobbie leaned back in her chair, plastic creaking under her. The big woman’s eyes narrowed. She opened her mouth once, closed it, frowned, and began again. “I’m consolidating power,” Bobbie said. “If I use my resources stopping the comet, then as soon as that threat’s gone, I lose. The other guy catches me with my pants down. Bang. If I kick his ass first, then when it’s over, I win.” “But if you cooperate—” “Then you have to trust the other guy,” Bobbie said, shaking her head. “There’s a million tons of ice coming that’s going to kill you both. Why the hell wouldn’t you trust the other guy?” “Depends. Is he an Earther?” Bobbie said. “We’ve got two major military forces in the system, plus whatever the Belters can gin up. That’s three sides with a lot of history. When whatever’s going to happen on Venus actually happens, someone wants to already have all the cards.” “And if both sides—Earth and Mars—are making that same calculation, we’re going to spend all our energy getting ready for the war after next.” “Yep,” Bobbie said. “And yes, that’s how we all lose together.” Caliban's War is a incredible page-turner of a book, with wonderfully engaging characters, detailed worldbuilding, and enough substance to give the action weight. Plus, how can you not like a book where the bad guy turns out to be the military-industrial complex? Also there is a hell of a cliffhanger ending to this book. I'm really glad I didn't have to wait a year for the sequel to be published. Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey. The sequel to Caliban's War, part 3 of The Expanse series. The plot is becoming hard to talk about without spoiling the previous books, so if you don't want to know what happened, stop reading here. The inexplicable alien presence (is it a virus? An AI? something else?) first encountered in the first book of the series has constructed a giant ring far out on the edges of the solar system. Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planet Alliance (OPA, a loose conglomerate of the various colonies on other planets, moons, and asteroids) have each sent ships to study it, but the only thing anyone can tell is that it seems to be a gate to somewhere else. Until, of course, plot events send several ships accidentally through it and into a truly alien, nicely creepy other-place, where even the laws of physics are mutable and prone to abruptly changing. Meanwhile, Holden is visited by Miller, who died in the first book and whose appearance/personality/knowledge the alien presence seems to have co-opted as a face for itself. Unfortunately trying to communicate across the barriers of species and millions of lightyears is just as difficult as it sounds, and what Miller manages to say comes across as garbled nonsense, often intelligible only after whatever he was warning about has already happened. The climax of the book goes small-scale, with two sides battling for control of a single spaceship, crawling through tunnels and fighting hand-to-hand. It's a striking change from the previous books that ended in giant confrontations with hundreds of ships while being just as exciting. Once again we have a new set of PoVs (except for Holden, who continues on), and though I desperately missed Avasarala, Bobbie, and Prax, I have to admit these new guys were pretty fun too. First off is Clarissa Mao, the sister of Julie Mao (now dead from the alien zombie virus) and daughter of Jules-Pierre Mao (now imprisoned for life for war crimes, due to turning the alien virus into a bioweapon and trying to sell it to the highest bidder). Her once-powerful and crazy-wealthy family is disgraced and scattered, and Clarissa blames James Holden personally. She's determined to get revenge – not just to kill him, but to ruin him and his reputation, and make all the galaxy doubt his previous actions – and she doesn't care how many other people have to die to make that happen. To get to Holden, she disguises herself as a nobody, an electrochemical technician on a minor spaceship, and finds herself spending every day dealing with people and problems that were once far beneath her notice. There's also Bull – Carlos Baca – head of security for the main spaceship of the OPA navy. Although Bull is far more experienced and sensible than either the captain or XO, he finds himself relegated to third in command because he grew up on Earth rather than in the Asteroid Belt, and Earthers are visibly distinct from Belters; it's a bit like getting demoted because you're the 'wrong' race, and it would look politically bad for you to be in charge. After an accident halfway through the book, Bull becomes paraplegic. I thought the handling of his disability was mostly well-done, and seeing a big, physically-imposing guy deal with being unable to use strength to enforce his will was an interesting twist. Finally we have my favorite character of this book: Annushka Volovodov, or Pastor Anna. She's a tiny, non-drinking, politically-unconnected, small-town Methodist preacher, determinedly pacifistic and married to a woman. She ends up heading to the Ring when Earth decides to send a team of artists, poets, philosophers, and religious leaders along with the scientists and military, mainly to show off that it can afford to do so, though theoretically to interpret the meaning of an alien presence. I can't imagine a character less likely to end up as the star of a space-opera thriller than a lesbian pastor who just wants everybody to stop fighting, you guys, seriously, why don't we talk about forgiveness and maybe organize a Sunday service with grape juice and a sermon about coming together?, and yet it works incredibly, unexpectedly well. I love Anna so much, and continue to be deeply impressed at the diversity of personalities Corey has written after a first book that was fairly disappointing in that regard. They even seem to be particularly good at writing women who are very different from one another but are all well-rounded, believable, and fascinating, and I would never have seen that coming. The world-building continues to be really well-done. I particularly enjoyed the many scenes set on the Behemoth, an enormous spaceship originally built to be a colony ship for Mormons but retrofitted due to necessity into a warship. The murals of Jesus and angels providing a backdrop for war counsels and weapons storage are maybe a too-obvious irony, but one that never failed to make me laugh. I didn't love Abaddon's Gate quite as much Caliban's War, mostly because the characters here were very good but just not as spectacularly wonderful as before. But that's a relatively minor criticism, and overall I admire Corey's focus on petty, recognizable human squabbling even in the face of worldchanging developments. I'm looking forward to the next book already. Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg. What is this? Well, a damn hard book to review, to start. On one level we have what is presented as the 'recently discovered autobiography' of Jack Sheppard, real-life petty thief and escapee from jail in early 1700s London. Sheppard lived fast and died young, then proceeded to become an enormously famous figure in English folklore, probably most recognizable today as the inspiration for "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" in The Threepenny Opera. But Confessions of the Fox is in fact a novel, and though it otherwise mostly stays close to the facts and dates (as we know them) of Jack's life, here Jack is a transman, his girlfriend Bess is the daughter of a South Asian man who was press-ganged by the East India Company before escaping into an independant communal society hidden away in the fens of East Anglia, and his best friend Aurie is a black gay man. Just to be clear, I am all for this presentation of a multiracial queer history. A second level of story is presented through footnotes, much like House of Leaves (though infinitely less confusing than that book, since we only have two levels of story here rather than the four or five in House of Leaves). This narrator is Dr R. Voth, a professor of English literature who is editing Jack's "autobiography" for publication and who is a transman himself. Voth alternates between telling mundane stories of his life – his ex, his job troubles, his attempts to ask out a neighbor – and citing genuine academic sources to provide context for Jack's story. Voth is fictional but his sources are not, which makes for an unsettling mixture of truth and imagination; I think I would have assumed the academic footnotes were also fictional if I hadn't happened to recognize several early ones. I've read Gretchen Gerzina's Black London: Life Before Emancipation and Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, among others, and seeing them mentioned by a fictional character was like water to the face, confusing my assumption of what was real and what wasn't. As the story goes on, "P-Quad Publishers and Pharmaceuticals" in association with "Militia.edu" attempts to take control of Jack's autobiography and Voth's work on it, leading both levels of Confessions of the Fox to become critiques of the commodification of the body and its experiences, capitalism in general, the history of the discovery and modern patenting of synthetic testosterone, and how historical biographies enter (or, more often, don't enter) the archive. Which leaves us in an odd place. If you didn't instantly recognize what I meant by The Archive in that previous line, if you're one of the vast majority of humans on Earth who haven't read Appadurai's "Commodities and the Politics of Value", then I'm not sure this book is interested in talking to you. Certainly if Rosenberg ever bothered to explain any of these concepts in an introductory way I missed it. On the other hand, if you, like me, are an overeducated liberal who can nod pretentiously at sentences like "A commodity is an entity without qualities", then I'm not sure Confessions of the Fox has anything new to say to you. It restates various queer, postcolonial, and Marxist theories without adding anything to them or combining them in interesting ways. Like, sure, we all agree with Foucault that prisons form the model for surveillance and discipline by the wider society, but so what? Dosomething with that idea, expand upon it, challenge it, or else there's no reason to read Rosenberg's book if you've already read Foucault's. So then who is Confessions of the Fox for? I have genuinely no idea. The love story between Jack and Bess or the adventure of Jack's exploits should have been enough to carry their half of the story. I love me a good historical thriller of criminals and the whores they adore. But we didn't really get that here; we see Jack and Bess's first meeting and first night spent together, but then we jump ahead to them as an already established relationship without seeing how they grow together and build trust and affection. Similarly, we never see Jack learn to pick pockets or burglar houses; he's just an innocent apprentice and then suddenly a famously skilled thief. He meets Aurie once and then we're told they're brothers-in-arms without ever seeing their friendship. Etc. In addition to all this, it's hard to love characters who are more living examples of theories than they are three-dimensional people, particularly when they keep bursting into dialogue like this example: Bess stood, speaking to the entire room. “Plague’s an excuse they’re using to police us further!” She looked out. Most continued to quaff and quarrel amongst themselves. “All of you! They’re panicking the people delib’rately. It’s a securitizational furor they’re raising to put more centinels on the streets. Can’t you see that?” It's not even that I disagree with the concept of "security theater", but it's not good fiction to have your characters straight-up define it, and then POINTING OUT IN A FOOTNOTE THAT THE 1720-ISH DATE WOULD MAKE HER THE FIRST TO DO SO IS EVEN WORSE, OH MY GOD, DON'T PRAISE YOUR OWN FICTIONAL CHARACTERS FOR THE MODERN LANGUAGE YOU GAVE THEM. Ahhh, I don't know. I agree with all of Confessions of the Fox's politics, I want to support histories (fictional or not) with more accurate, multiracial, and queer portrayals of the past, and I've certainly read far, far worse books, but in the end I just didn't much enjoy this. The worst I can say is that it's unengaging; I found my attention constantly drifting whenever I tried to read, and even put it down for a few weeks before finally coming back to finish it. But no matter what its good intentions, that doesn't make for a book I'd recommend. In the end Confessions of the Fox has a fantastic concept, but unfortunately doesn't pull off the execution. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. What are you currently reading? The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh. sholio is going to be hosting a tumblr book club, if anyone else wants to read along!

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#books #book reviews #james s.a. corey #jordy rosenberg #mark forsyth #long post

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