I’ve fallen out of the habit of writing about fiction I’ve recently read. I don’t know why -- there is no coronavirus-related reason. But I’ve decided that it would be good for me to keep it up. I don’t write for an external audience, not really -- this blog doesn’t get enough pageviews for that to make sense. I write this because it forces me to take my half-formed impressions of what I’ve read, and process them into a form that (I hope!) is comprehensible to other people. That, I think, is valuable for me.
I write for myself, but it’s crucial that I know other people can see what I’ve read.
Butler is a new author for me, though I’ve heard her name spoken with respect and reverence by the SF community for years. Parable of the Sower takes place in a 2020s California that has slid, through accumulating entropy, into a dystopia that would have struck me as unlikely and overblown if I’d read the book in the 1990s when it was newly published, but reading this story in the real 2020 has made me fidget uncomfortably.
Parable of the Talents picks up where the first book left off, and main character Olamina passes through darkness that is even more painful and horrifying than what she went through in the first book. The story ends on an upbeat note in some ways, less so in others. Butler did an excellent job crafting both the setting and the characters (which cannot be said for every book I’ve read recently) and at the end of the story the reader will be left with very mixed, contradictory emotions.
It’s ironic that I feel as if I should have more to say about these two books. They will probably stick with me longer than anything else I’ve read recently.
It’s 22nd-century Thailand and brutal necessity has shifted the world’s economy away from dependence on fossil fuels. Various forms of bioengineering rule the day, ranging from algae to full-blown humans. Our title character Emiko the “windup girl” is bred to serve the wealthy and powerful. Reduced to living in a brothel in Bangkok, she is seen as less than human, by the law as well as the average bigot in the street. Other point-of-view characters highlight different sides of the main plot-based conflict, an internal struggle within the future Thai government that involves the giant Western agricultural conglomerates that wield tremendous power.
Some parts of this book rubbed me the wrong way. I could have done without the hoary East Asian tropes, such as the internal narrative of Chinese businessman Hock Seng whose attitudes towards laowai could have come straight out of the 1900s. This strikes me as unimaginative in this setting where so much has changed since our day.
That being said, overall this is a novel where the characters exist to serve the setting, rather than the other way around, and this look at a hypothetical post-fossil fuel world through the lens of the political situation in a non-Western country is an interesting one. More than anything, this book is a portrait of future Bangkok, a vast city below the rising sea level, which is being kept dry by the heroic engineering efforts of the Thai government.
Stephenson delivers nearly a thousand pages of Stephenson prose here in a hefty novel that delivers everything Stephenson fans could want and also could have really benefited from a very merciless editor. Despite the feeling that the book is at least 20% longer than its optimal length, there’s a lot of stuff here that I will remember. A mid-21st century setting (where QAnon-type theories have won the information wars) eventually gives way to an almost exclusive focus on a vast electronic afterlife: the Land.
I actually could have done with more time spent in the novel’s middle section set in the 2030s. The breakdown of consensus reality is disturbingly ludicrous, in the same sense that “President Trump” would have been considered a ludicrous future ten years ago. This is a world where the Utah legislature believes the town of Moab has been obliterated by a terrorist nuke and everyone living there now is a paid crisis actor, and so refuse to issue license plates to Moabites (who roll their eyes, shrug, and make their own).
The latter half of the book increasingly takes place in the Land. The most interesting parts of the narrative are the questions which are unanswered. What happens if the residents of the Land start interacting meaningfully with the physical world? (I’m picturing a future of Greg Egan-style crewed interstellar ships where the crews lack physical bodies, which makes the logistics of space travel far easier.) And what if that never happens and the bulk of the Solar System’s resources eventually go towards supporting an entirely inward-focused society? (Could it evolve into something resembling the religion of the Chel in Iain Banks’ Look to Windward?)
What a thing it is, to pick up an SF novel written in this day and age that’s only about 200 pages long, like a genre novel of fifty years ago! But this is no fast read; El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s rich use of language is something to be read slowly and savored. Two agents working for opposite sides of a conflict of epic proportions start leaving taunting notes for each other, but this progresses to the mutual realization that they have fallen in love.
The details of this time war are labyrinthine and Escheresque, but the war itself is only a backdrop to the relationship between the two characters, which also eventually unfolds in very non-linear ways. This is the sort of book I want to go back and re-read, to pick up myriad details that eluded me the first time.
A week after I read it, This Is How You Lose the Time War won a Hugo for Best Novella; I haven’t read the competition but El-Mohtar and Gladstone definitely deserve the recognition.
Banks is one of my favorite authors of page-turners, and I’ve read enough of his work that I know what his favored tropes are. Strategy games. Dark family secrets. Incest. (Face it, more than a few Banks novels feature incest, whether overt, implied, or symbolic.) The young protagonist of The Steep Approach to Garbadale is from a Scottish family full of secrets whose family wealth comes from a popular strategy game, and he has also been pursuing an on-again, off-again romance with his first cousin.
This is familiar Banks ground. It kept me turning pages to get to the inevitable dark final revelations, but the plot is on the whole rather prosaic and never reaches the heights of weirdness of some Iain Banks novels (even if you only count the stuff he wrote with no middle initial).
