Red Moon

Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson, 2018

Fred Fredericks is an American engineer who travels to the moon in the year 2047 and soon finds himself entangled in the assassination of a Chinese official up there. His life becomes even more complicated when he runs into Chan Qi, the daughter of one of China’s top leaders who appears to be on the run from the government, for some reason that he does not yet understand.

The plot then consists of Fred and Qi going back to Earth, on the run, hiding, almost captured, on the run again, hiding, almost captured, returning to the Moon, on the run, hiding, almost captured… look, the plot’s not what we’re meant to focus on. The plot is just Kim Stanley Robinson’s vehicle to show off the setting (his depiction of the future) and an exploration of society and politics. Just as in all of his novels.

I’ve realized that I am really bad at writing up my impressions of Kim Stanley Robinson novels. But I feel compelled to write up my immediate reactions to this one, which is so heavily about the near future of China. I live in Taiwan, a land that fits snugly in the liminal space between the Chinese border on one side and the Nine-Dash Line on the other. So safe and cozy.

So what do I think of the setting of Red Moon?

For someone who has included plenty of Chinese people and settings in his fiction before and so has had many chances of getting all the China cliches out of his system, Robinson sure includes a lot of China cliches in Red Moon. To be fair, most of them come via the thoughts of supporting character Ta Shu, an elderly poet and celebrity whose musings reference topics ranging from Feng Shui to 5,000 years of history, and perhaps Robinson simply didn't have space to include the many younger Chinese who roll their eyes and mutter “Okay, Grandpa” at his cliches.

It’s extremely difficult to glean what Robinson thinks of the real-life PRC regime in Beijing. I should make it clear that I certainly don’t see him as one of those Westerners who feels the need to make excuses for the PRC government’s misdeeds. After all, his future-China suffers from serious problems which directly stem from 2019 China. What's more, he breaks realism and invents unlikely surnames to tell us that China is currently led by President Shanzhai (President Knockoff?) who seeks to be succeeded by an official named Huyou (Flickering? Swindle?).

I’m curious about what Taiwan is like in this universe, but Robinson doesn’t make it easy to extract that information from the text. At one point the China-ingenue Fred Fredericks gets up to speed about Taiwan from characters who are not from there: it seems the status quo of 2047 is basically the status quo of 2019, and Beijing is playing super-nice to Taiwan to entice it into closer ties. But then just a few chapters later, Ta Shu hears some official Beijing propaganda calling on the people to resist the poisonous lies of the Tibetans, the Uyghurs, the Taiwanese. So it’s very hard to tell what’s “really” going on with the Taiwan of this world, and I suspect Robinson never worked it out because Taiwan’s not what he’s actually interested in.

Regarding his Hong Kong of 2047, we hear there are protests surrounding the end of the fifty years as an SAR, but there are no details. Robinson published Red Moon in 2018 -- in other words, this future Hong Kong was written after 2014 but before 2019. I frankly find it a bit curious that Robinson went to the trouble of setting Red Moon in China in the portentous year 2047 but left his depiction of Hong Kong so vague.

Finally, there’s Xi Jinping, who is remembered by several characters as a positive force, a strong leader who tried to improve China before he had to eventually step down and was replaced by a succession of weak leaders culminating in the current President Knockoff. On the one hand, this is clearly meant to be some characters’ subjective opinion and not objective fact; on the other hand, it’s all we ever hear of the Xi Jinping of this universe. Does it reflect Robinson's own opinion? No idea.

But to be fair, Robinson thinks globally, and in the final chapters of Red Moon we see a worldwide revolt against the moneyed ruling classes. This is a global movement, far too big to be defined by one country, even China.

What I kept comparing Red Moon to was another China-centric futuristic novel written by a Westerner, Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang. That book, written in 1992 and set in a 22nd Century where China is the global hyperpower and the USA is a backwater, will linger in my mind longer than Red Moon, it’s got a more varied plot and, frankly, is lighter on the China cliches.

Machineries of Empire

Machineries of Empire

Ninefox Gambit (2016), Raven Strategem (2017), Revenant Gun (2018)

Yoon Ha Lee

After I read Ninefox Gambit, the first in Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy, I wrote a blog post where I kicked off by immediately saying “I know it looks like a space opera, but maybe you should think of it as high fantasy.” Frankly, now I re-read that and I’m embarrassed. I think I sound like Comic Book Guy.

But all the same, the amorphous and possibly irrelevant line separating science fiction and fantasy is something that I’ve been thinking about lately. Every work of speculative fiction presents the audience with a universe and asks them to accept it on its own terms. In Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire, that universe runs on strange indistinguishable-from-magic technology that doesn’t quite work like anything that the reader has seen before. There’s a lot for us wrap our brains around in Ninefox Gambit.

The remainder of the trilogy, Raven Strategem and Revenant Gun, do spectacular things with the foundation the first book lays. Trusting that the reader is now up to speed on how this universe works, Lee delivers a tightly focused story and fewer viewpoint characters than the first book to describe an insurrection that could mean the end of the brutal interstellar empire known as the Hexarchate.

The Hexarchate is named for its government split into six factions, each ruled by a Hexarch. Each division has a well-defined function within the empire; for instance, the Kel supply the troops and are known for their mental conditioning that renders them obedient, while the Shuos are the spies and schemers. (The author has this spoiler-free cheat sheet on the six factions on his website which I unfortunately didn’t know about until I had finished the series.)

The Hexarchate’s weird technology relies on everyone following and organizing their thoughts around an incredibly intricate calendar, which happens to require people’s death by slow torture on specified holidays for the full effect. Rival calendars constitute an existential threat to this system, so the Hexarchate stamps out these heresies with overwhelming force.

And that was what spurs the plot of the first book, Ninefox Gambit, in which the Hexarchate was forced to bring out a reserve weapon to deal with the latest heretical rebellion: infamous general Shuos Jedao. Hundreds of years ago, Jedao was executed following a battle that he won after he unnecessarily caused over a million collateral deaths and murdered his command crew. But it would be a shame to let such a tactical mastermind just simply die, so one of the Hexarchs kept his soul around through technological means of his own devising. (This particular Hexarch is a 900-year-old mad scientist who the reader should keep an eye on because he is important.)

The technology requires a body to tether Jedao’s spirit to, which brings us to the first book’s main protagonist: Kel Cheris, a military officer with a good head for the bizarre math this universe’s technology runs on. The plan was for Cheris to cautiously use Jedao’s experience and guidance as she led the Hexarchate forces against the heretics.

The events of Ninefox Gambit did not go according to plan.

At the start of book two, Raven Strategem, Jedao appears to have fully taken over Kel Cheris’ body, and he has taken advantage of the Kel’s obedience conditioning to gain possession of a formidable Kel military force for his rebellion against the Hexarchate. Cheris/Jedao cease to be a viewpoint character for Book 2 (keeping it uncertain who is actually in control of Cheris’s body), as new protagonists come to the forefront, including both military officers and a Hexarch with a decadent and incestuous personal life whose schemes are a main driver of the military and political strife that continue through the end of the final book, Revenant Gun.

The first book was heavy going with all the weird worldbuilding to wrap my head around, but now that the setting is established the second and third books are real page-turners. The setting is strange, the technology is unusual and often upsetting (some of the calendar-based weapons are pretty nasty), and the stakes are high, as the Hexarchate is a violent, brutal entity. Machineries of Empire, at its core, is a work of military SF, though one that’s set in a universe where physics follows very strange rules.

And there are numerous other angles I could discuss here but others might be better qualified, such as the exploration of queer sexuality. On the whole, this world is unlike any I have read about before, and I will remember it.

The Empty Throne: Those Above & Those Below

Those Above & Those Below

by Daniel Polansky, 2016

Imagine a series with all of the low-fantasy political intrigue of A Song of Ice and Fire, and it’s two books long and then it’s done because the author finished the story. Sound good?

In the Empty Throne duology, Daniel Polansky introduces us to a continent of medieval feuding states. Aeleria is a militaristic expanding power, reminiscent of ancient Rome. The steppes of the Marches are inhabited by fierce nomadic peoples, whereas the cities of Salucia are run by traders who prefer to hire mercenaries to fight their wars.

And yet none of these petty human states will ever amount to anything compared to the Others, also known as Those Above, or Eternals, or as demons, depending on one’s point of view. Majestic, strong, agile, long-lived beings, Those Above have claimed suzerainty over the continent for thousands of years, allowing the human nations to bicker and argue while they live lives of leisure in their vast city, the Roost. Why should they meddle in the affairs of puny humans, whom they think of as insects? After all, if a human nation gets out of hand, they can swoop down from their mountaintop abode to effortlessly crush them.

The Others are the sole bit of magic intruding upon this universe. We never really find out what they are, or where they came from, but it doesn’t really matter. They’re not tyrants, and they don’t rule with anything close to an authoritarian iron fist. In fact, they are utterly unconcerned with human welfare. Their beautiful mountaintop city is surrounded by a teeming human slum, a place of squalor and misery ruled by organized crime. They don’t care. Most of them don’t even notice.

The story of the Empty Throne duology -- Those Above and Those Below -- is the story of the human rebellion that aims to topple these complacent, sublimely perfect creatures from their position.

The story is told through the eyes of four main protagonists, two Aelerian and two at the Roost. Bas is a grizzled veteran of Aeleria’s army, famed as the only human to have killed an Eternal in combat. It’s through Bas’s eyes that we see most of the story’s battle scenes, which uncompromisingly depict war as a brutal, unglamorous endeavor. Eudokia is a brilliant, ruthless, amoral woman who has risen through her own efforts to become the most powerful figure in Aeleria’s male-dominated government. 

In the Roost, Calla is a privileged human who lives among Those Above on the mountaintop. She is essentially a pampered slave, not that she would see herself that way. It is Calla who eventually emerges as the most sympathetic of the four main protagonists. And Thistle is a young thug who grew up in the vast slums on the edge of the city. Thistle’s eventual character arc is not difficult to predict, but it is difficult for him to break out of the patterns of behavior that he grew up with.

Those Above and Those Below are best thought of as a single long novel arbitrarily split in two. The pacing might not be everybody’s cup of tea, as the first ¾ of the story slowly, methodically builds toward a conclusion that, when it comes, feels thoroughly inevitable. But the slow buildup is important; it gives meaning to the tragedy that finally unfolds.

The final chapters of this story are unremittingly grim and sad. There is a sense that this was the only way the story could possibly play out, with human nature being what it is, and with the Eternals seemingly unwilling or unable to compromise. The violent end might have come at a later date, if things had gone differently, but it would still have come eventually. It’s not pretty when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.

It may be tempting to find parallels between this story and the state of the world in 2019. If there is a lesson here, it is a warning of the horrific consequences if those at the pinnacle of power cannot change course or compromise with those they deem weaker.

Haven't updated since May, ugh

I haven’t updated this in several months! It’s a bad habit to let this blog lie fallow. I should read more and write more.

Well, I’m going to try to update more regularly, now that I’m back from a 2 ½ week trip to Europe. What can I say? It was good to see family. Ate a lot of Western European sweets that put Taiwan to shame. We spent several days in Paris and nobody was rude to us -- it seems we missed out on a classic cultural experience. For the record, Marseille is a delightful, underrated city. And if you’re going to see immensely popular European tourist attractions, buy your tickets ahead of time whenever humanly possible.

Flying long-haul airlines is a good time to see movies. On the way to France I saw:

Toy Story 4: I like Pixar. I’ve never disliked a Pixar movie (bear in mind I’ve never seen any of the Cars movies). Oddly enough, I’ve never seen the very first Toy Story, a weird omission that I’ll have to rectify at some point. I’ve never really had an emotional connection to the Toy Story series, so I feel unqualified to say if it’s a good thing that they keep making movies after Toy Story 3 seemed to provide a definitive and satisfying end. But I can say that Toy Story 4 is quality entertainment and is as inventive as I would expect from any Pixar film.

Rocketman: An enjoyable look at Elton John’s music, though to be honest if you strip away the music and costumes there’s not much here. Actually, that’s a silly thing to say. The music and the costumes are the whole reason to watch.

Vice: I was curious about the oddball casting, especially Steve Carrell as Donald Rumsfeld, which kinda works if you accept he’s creating a new character rather than impersonating a real person. Overall though, although Vice has a few genuinely clever bits, it also has a lot of sarcastic snark that thinks it’s more clever than it actually is. A sober look at the Late Ante-Trump Era of the Republican Party could make for an interesting movie; whatever Vice is, it is not sober.

And on the way back I watched:

Amélie: I saw this one on the way home from Paris, feeling that I may as well watch it as it’s a well-known film, it hadn’t crossed my path before, and I’d just been in Paris. My verdict? I see what they were aiming at, but it wasn’t really to my taste. But allow me this one flight of fancy. Upon arriving in Paris I had managed to immediately lose my wallet (long story short, I’m an idiot). No one ever found it; it might as well have vanished into thin air. Watching Amélie, it suddenly occurred to me: Amélie is a real person, she found my wallet, and she was taking her time trying to think of the most whimsical, quirky way she could return it to me! Well, screw you, Amélie, I just wanted my wallet back.

Stan & Ollie: Having seen a bunch of Laurel and Hardy’s films as a kid, I was suitably primed for this film about L&H’s attempts to revive their career in the 1950s. As with all films of this type, great liberties have been taken with the real-life chronology, but the main thing most viewers will remember will be the acting by Steve Coogan and John C. Reily. The two actors, especially Reilly, do a superb job channeling L&H -- it’s an astonishing oversight that neither one received an Academy Award nomination. This is a low-key, understated film produced by people with an affection for a bygone era of show business.

As I said, now that I am back in Taiwan I shall try to post things more semi-regularly...

A People's Future of the United States

x

A People's Future of the United States

2019

There’s some great writing in this SF anthology, covering a range of sub-genres ranging from fantastical allegories to realistic extrapolations from the world of today.

And as the title implies, this anthology is heavy on the politically charged stories. The degree of explicit relevance to today’s politics varies depending on the story, but it’s safe to say none of the authors mean to inspire anyone to run out and work for the reelection of the current President of the United States.

A large proportion depict a United States that has taken a hard turn towards right-wing authoritarianism. I’ll get to those in a moment.

My favorite story in the collection is probably the first one, “The Bookstore at the End of America” by Charlie Jane Anders. This is a tale of a quirky bookstore straddling the border between an independent California and a reactionary United States of America, and its owner Molly, a memorable character doing her best the keep the peace between the two groups of customers. The worldbuilding is not black-and-white (the USA may be Gilead-lite, but some of the glimpses we get of techno-utopian California are highly unnerving in their own way) and the political barbs the bookstore’s customers exchange ring true. As an aside, I really ought to read some of Anders's novel-length output.

Other memorable stories include (among others):

“Chapter 5: Disruption & Continuity [Excerpted]” by Malka Older, an academic account of the societies that replace the disintegrating United States of the 2030s and 2040s, written with subtle but mind-bending temporal quirks.

“By His Bootstraps” by Ashok K. Banker, in which the President of the United States (clearly meant to be the office’s current 2019 inhabitant) watches with incomprehension and dismay as government research into time travel backfires, creating a USA that has retroactively been inclusive and tolerant from the beginning of its history.

“No Algorithms in the World” by Hugh Howey, a portrait of an older conservative man who believes strongly in values of hard work and having to earn one’s living, who cannot cope with the transition to a post-scarcity economy.

“ROME” by G. Willow Wilson, in which high school students take a high-stakes exam that absolutely cannot be rescheduled despite the massive fire ravaging their city and coming awfully close to the exam center.

As mentioned above, there are also many stories set in near-future USAs that have turned towards right-wing authoritarianism. I’m uncomfortably aware that in many of these settings, as a white cis hetero guy, I’d be allowed to live a relatively privileged life, especially if I kept certain opinions to myself.

Of these reactionary futures, I think the one that left the biggest impression on me was A. Merc Rustad’s “Our Aim Is Not to Die”, about Sua, a young, non-gender-binary teenager on the autism spectrum in a future USA where such perceived non-conformity is prohibited. Sua has a state-mandated medical checkup looming in a few days and the inevitable results will cause them to lose everything they have in their modest life. Sua is such an inoffensive character, utterly terrified. The ending gives Sua a reprieve from their fate, and leaves open the possibility that Sua might rise to a traditional notion of heroism -- or might not, and let the heroism to others, and that’s okay too.

These stories about dystopian American futures range from extrapolations based on contemporary politics, to far-out weirdness. “The Referendum” by Lesley Nneka Arimah looks at how a small group of people reacts to the government’s stripping away of rights for African-Americans, presented as a scarily plausible scenario; in “Calendar Girls” by Justina Ireland, a young purveyor of banned birth control products gets sucked into political intrigue surrounding a powerful politician who helped ban them. Meanwhile, in “Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death” by N. K. Jemisin, oppressed communities turn the tables on their oppressors by taming the dragons that have been bred to intimidate them.

These future authoritarianisms hit me, personally, uncomfortably. Although I am an American citizen, I’ve lived abroad for most of my adult life. For the last 12 years I’ve lived in a country that could (arguably) be called the least authoritarian in Asia.

It’s not perfect. For one thing, the free press -- possibly the freest in Asia -- tends to focus on bloody sensationalism and partisan politics; for another thing, the lax libel laws are often misused by those with money to spare to harass people they don’t like. And that’s not even getting into the scary intersection of local politics and organized crime, or the blatant racism towards certain groups of outsiders (and I don’t mean Westerners). I’m not looking at this country with rose-colored glasses.

But for every problem mentioned above, there are local people working to make it better, and they have the freedom to do so without a tyrannical government harassing them and making their lives miserable.

And yet, it terrifies me that every knowledgeable person agrees that there is a real chance this country’s democracy could collapse within a few years. Not just degrade, but utterly collapse.

I don’t deny that, if that happens, as a non-citizen with a foreign passport I’ll have the opportunity to pick up and leave. And that does give me a degree of privilege. That doesn’t make me any less concerned about the place I have lived with my wife for twelve years, with our neighborhood, our friends, our jobs, our two cats.

And this has forced me to become more politically aware than I might have been otherwise. There is a lot to worry about, in many countries, not least the United States. The stories, characters and ideas in this collection can inspire us to go out there and work to improve things.

Ninefox Gambit

Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee, 2016

The line between science fiction and fantasy is a hazy one. This is why we have the useful catch-all term “speculative fiction,” filled with sub-genres that fade and bleed into each other.

That said, if I see anyone in a bookstore looking at Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, I'd have to fight the urge to say: “I know it looks like a space opera, but maybe you should think of it as high fantasy. I’m not saying it’s not space opera. Those categories don’t have to be mutually exclusive.”

Then, a moment later: “No, not like Star Wars.”

I feel like saying this in order to to set expectations. It’s not just that the technology used in Ninefox Gambit is well within the “indistinguishable from magic” realm; it’s also that it is exceptionally weird and strange, and the reader faces a steep learning curve to figure out just how things in this universe work. Judging from comments I’ve seen online, more than one reader has found this universe difficult to get into and has left Ninefox Gambit unfinished.

So my suggestion is to approach Ninefox Gambit as a military novel in a very non-Tolkein high fantasy setting, with a magic system that may take a bit of mind-stretching to get one’s head around but is worth it in the end. That way, you’ll find it easier to enter the world of the Hexarchate, whose magic, er, I mean technology depends on the reality-defining effects of their calendar system. Calendar system? Yes indeed. In this world, if we all believe in the consensus calendar, it can be exploited using arcane mathematics to create reality-bending effects.

The Hexarchate, as its name implies, is divided into six primary parts, each led by its own ruthless genius called the Hexarch. (It used to be the Heptarchate, but one division was stamped out centuries ago.) One of them, the Kel, provide the bulk of the Hexarchate’s troops, and one of their specialties that we see in the novel is arranging themselves in various formations that bring about reality-bending effects within the Hexarchate’s calendar system. Our protagonist, Kel Cheris, has better-than-average skills for a Kel grunt at the exotic math one needs to master this, and so she is recruited to help fight an existential threat to the Hexarchate.

A heretical calendar is being propagated by a group that wants to restore the Heptarchate, and they’ve occupied the vast and heavily defended Fortress of Scattered Needles. At this point, I’m going to turn it over to Aidan Moher, who in his Tor.com review explained what’s going on much better than I can: “the heretics (the so-called “badguys”) are twisting this “reality engine” by breaking away from the hive-mind agreement that gives the government, the aforementioned heptarchate (which is the hexarchate by the time Ninefox Gambit begins), authority over the people and high-level technology.”

The Hexarchate’s secret weapon is Shuos Jedao, legendary tactical genius who was executed centuries ago after unnecessarily killing over a million people in the course of winning a battle. Jedao is too useful to rot in the grave, so the Hexarchate keeps his spirit around for when there’s an emergency that requires his skill set. Cheris is to be his vessel.

So now our hero Cheris has an insane undead general who has taken up residence in her shadow (and she is given alarming instructions on what to do if he starts misbehaving), and she is given command of a military force that heads for the Fortress of Scattered Needles. This is a violent and grim novel, and the exotic flavor of the weaponry does not make it any less so. It’s very bloody and a lot of characters die.

It’s also weirdly brilliant, and as it is the first novel in Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy, the remainder of the story is now on my reading list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke, 2004

I don’t have much to say that is new about this novel. It’s deservedly quite popular, and the fact that it’s been adapted for TV by the BBC (I have yet to watch) means that it has a cultural reach extending beyond those of us who read 900-page novels. It’s enjoyable, and very English (in a good way), and Susanna Clarke is the kind of writer who can make me feel unironically happy when I turn the page and see a wonderfully long explanatory footnote awaiting me.

But there’s a question that I really have to ask: What about the rest of the world?

Jonathan Strange travels to Portugal and Spain, Belgium and eventually Venice, but the only magicians we ever hear about are English ones (with the exception of a Scottish magician who is briefly discussed late in the book). The specific phrase “English magic” is used dozens of times, but we never hear “French magic” or “Venetian magic”. Magic is something English magicians and English magical beings use on each other. And no one ever remarks on the fact that all the magic in the world seems to center on Great Britain.

This kind of worldbuilding blindspot grates on me, because there’s no good reason for it and it makes the world less interesting than it could otherwise have been. I realize that the novel is specifically focused on England and English magic, but some indications that magic and magicians also exist elsewhere could’ve made the world seem more vibrant and teeming with possibility, and the story could still be focused on England.

Did Napoleon make any efforts to find Continental magicians of suitable talent to counter Strange and Norrell? Do Lisbon and Venice have their own eccentric histories of magic? Are there rumors of magic being done in remote lands such as India and China? Hints in these directions wouldn’t have distracted from Clarke’s story of England, but the world would have seemed richer.

And if all magic in the world does revolve around England (and Scotland), shouldn’t this be seen as noteworthy? Shouldn’t somebody mention that Great Britain is the most magical land in the world? But no, no one ever explicitly says this.

This just seems like bad worldbuilding. It doesn’t spoil the novel for me, but it gives me something to be mildly annoyed about.