Paolo Bacigalupi – Eugene Fischer

November 14, 2015

Reading 2015: October

Light month, but apparently the number of books I read is inversely proportional to how long it takes me to get this post up. As I’ve already read more books in November than I did in October (and this despite both my birthday and Fallout 4), I should be more timely for the next one.

Bitch Planet, vol. 1: Extraordinary Machine by Kelly-Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro – Here it is, the one I’ve been waiting for: the book of Kelly-Sue’s that fires for me on all cylinders. (And all it took was stripping out the superheroes.) This is pulpy science fiction, using the setpieces and grit of exploitation cinema to power its social commentary. It’s not satire, though; this is too deeply invested in its own characters and narrative for that word to fit. Chewy story, and art that’s evocative and garish in all the best ways. I expect I’ll be picking up all of this series.
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi – There are certain authors whose prose, I find, goes down easy like water, and others whose prose bites like bourbon. That’s not a comment on the quality or artistry, nor of how much I respect the writers in question. I think the world of Ursula Le Guin, but parsing her prose isn’t effortless for me, and neither is that of Hilary Mantel or Kevin Brockmeier–all authors I adore. On the other hand, parsing Octavia Butler or Walter Tevis is like breathing, I barely notice myself doing it. Paolo Bacigalupi is in this second category for me. The structure of his sentences meshes perfectly with the cadence of my own thought, and so I blaze through his books without even noticing the time passing. There is a definite pleasure in that, which is somewhat distinct from my appreciation of the book itself. Which is all to say, I enjoyed reading this book more than I enjoyed the story. As with The Windup Girl, I liked the short fiction of which this is an expansion more than I liked the novel. In particular, this story is powered by a macguffin–some water rights documentation on old sheafs of paper–that I found unconvincing.

June 2, 2014

The Next Twenty Books of 2014

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When I did my roundup of the first 20 books I read this year, I noticed that only three of them were written by women. I wanted to even up that ratio a bit, so made a point of bumping books by women to the top of the stack for this group.

Technopriests: Supreme Collection by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Zoran Janjetov, and Fred Beltran. This was the last major branch of the Jodoverse that I hadn’t read. Jodorowsky remains one of my favorite writers, for his sheer bonkers extravagance, and having recently re-read the Jodoverse books added an extra layer of delight when I recently saw Jodorowsky’s Dune.
Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck. For such a slim volume, I loved the tonal breadth of this collection. These were stories originally published in Swedish and translated by the author, and they are weird and wonderful. A brief, delightful read.
Crash by J. G. Ballard. I found this difficult to finish. For about the first 80 pages I was engaged, but it became punishingly repetitive by the end. The fetishistic novelty wore off long before the book ended, and there was little else to recommend it. Many people whose opinions I respect are fans of Ballard, but I’m still trying to cultivate an appreciation for much of his work.
Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine. I read this on an airplane and hardly noticed the time passing. It’s kaleidoscopic steampunk with gorgeous images on every page, fragmented into short chapters that build momentum like an avalanche. Genevieve’s second book is coming out tomorrow, and I can’t wait to read it.
The Einstein Intersection by Samuel Delany. This book is… odd. Good, thought provoking. But very strange. It’s surprising to me–in a positive way, mind!–that it’s considered a classic of science fiction. I doubt though that I’m going to be revisiting this book as often as I will Nova.
Saga, vol. 3 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. It’s been a long time since I’ve been as excited about an ongoing comic series as I am about Saga. Each new trade is an insta-buy.
The Adventures of Alyx by Joanna Russ. I’m glad I read this, though on the whole I enjoyed it less than I thought I would. A couple of the pieces here I found compelling, but the majority was coldly intellectual with an efficiency of prose that I found tiring even as I thought it admirable. I liked We Who Are About To better, but will still be reading more Russ.
The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne. Monica is a Clarion classmate of mine and a dear friend, and so it is a delight to report that her first novel is an explosive debut. Ambitious and engrossing. I consumed it in two days and then spent the next week of my life thinking about it, wandering store aisles and taking unconscious inventory of the provisions I would need if I woke up in the future Monica created. It’s not so far away. We all might wake up there yet.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. I’d been meaning to read Shirley Jackson’s novels for years, and decided to start here. Ho-lee shit. It’s as brilliant as everyone said it was.
A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip by Kevin Brockmeier. Kevin’s a teacher of mine and a friend, so it was a pleasurable but unusual experience to read his first foray into memoir. He has evoked the seventh grade so keenly that I felt my own bubble up as I read, which, as I later told him across a lunch table, put me in the weird position of feeling possessive of someone else’s childhood.
Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch. I think, were it not for Flowers For Algernon exploring some of the same ground first and more accessibly, this would be considered a classic. I thought it an excellent book, though one for which I had to look up many words. I also felt unsure about the ending. It was convincingly rendered, but somehow didn’t fully satisfy. Still, I recommend the book. I think this is the most fully-imagined 1st person voice of increasing intelligence I’ve read.
Unexpected Stories by Octavia Butler. I’d been waiting years to read these stories, and finally getting to do so was both thrilling and bittersweet. This was, so far as I know, my last unread Butler fiction. I wrote about it more here.
Blame by Michelle Huneven. Though she was never one of my teachers, Michelle was on faculty at Iowa when I applied, and is I think one of the people responsible for me getting accepted there. This is the first of her books I’ve read, and I greatly enjoyed it. It’s a novel that sprawls decades and resists tidiness, catching something that feels very true in its tangles. On the strength of this book I’ll be picking up her new one soon.
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. My first time reading Wyndham. He was clearly brilliant, and the book is good, but I’m not sure I approached it from the right frame of mind. As is sometimes the case with classic apocalyptica, Triffids belabors ideas that have, since it was published, become cliche. The combination of that and the antiquated, one-note masculinity of the main character kept me from enjoying the novel as much as I otherwise might have. There’s a lot to appreciate here, but I wish I’d gone in with a more historical literary curiosity.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. It’s a great book that I had problems with. I wrote about them at some length.
Liar by Justine Larbalestier. After The Sparrow I was in the mood for some YA. This hit the spot. It’s like a young person’s introduction to the unreliable narrator. Great fun.
The Alchemist by Paolo Bacigalupi. I got an ARC of this novella at the Tiptree auction a couple of years ago. When I read it, it was immediately obvious how I would want to use it pedagogically if I ever teach my Fantasy Writing class again.
Osborn: Evil Incarcerated by Kelly-Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios. I enjoyed this, but suspect I would have liked it more had I been previously familiar with the characters. With the talent at Marvel these days, having been a DC kid is feeling more and more like having backed the wrong horse.
The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman. More YA, and more wonderful reading. This book is like Octavia Bulter’s Kindred, but for young readers.
Self-Help by Lorrie Moore. I had read stories from this, but never the whole thing. As I recently wrote some fiction in the second person, I wanted to finally fix that. A deservingly famous collection.

January 28, 2011

Recent Reading (Jan 2011)

I finished four novels this month, all of them highly engaging.

• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi — I finally got around to reading the most celebrated SF novel of last year. I was already a fan of Paolo’s short stories, and this novel shares a future with two of his best, “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man.” Indeed, stories a Calorie Man and a Yellow Card Man comprise about half of the plot of the novel. What I found most notable about this book was that it draws a world too complicated for even the most competent and well-connected characters to be able to meaningfully plan for. Subtle and considered machinations are again and again rendered irrelevant by circumstance and randomness. In the end, the character who seems to escape the novel with the most personal agency is a fully amoral and decrepit geneticist who takes hedonistic delight in being a conduit for change, just because he can. It’s a rich, compelling, and pessimistic book. Easily recommended, though I think I agree with Abigail Nussbaum when she says that the whole feels less completely successful than the short stories that inspired it. (Link to her far more comprehensive review.)

• Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks — The latest of Banks’s Culture novels, which I generally love. The novel follows the stories of various individuals in some way connected to a “confliction,” that is, a virtual war, over the propriety of societies creating simulated versions of their mythological hells to house the consciousnesses of the dead. The Culture, naturally, is opposed to the practice of consigning conscious entities to eternal simulated torture, but there are equivalently powerful societies in favor of the practice, and so a virtual war is waged with the various actors contractually obligated to abide by its conclusion. But as the confliction draws to a close, there is increasing likelihood of the war spilling over into the Real. This was an exciting novel, though not one that will ever enter the eternal conversation over which Culture novel is the best jumping-on point for new readers. There are too many references to things that have gone before for a newcomer to the universe to get as much out of it as a reader already familiar with this milieu. I have some minor quibbles with the believability of two elements of the climax, but there’s no way to discuss them without being more spoiler-y than I care to in a capsule review.

• Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi — I found that I enjoyed Paolo’s YA novel even more than I enjoyed The Windup Girl. I really have nothing negative to say about this book; the characters are deep and believable, and the world is as rich as any he’s written. It follows Nailer, a child laborer who works stripping beached tankers and lives in a coastal slum. (The coast in question is the Gulf Coast of a depleted and flooded future USA) He has no prospects for any kind of upward social mobility until a storm causes a ship of a very different kind to wreck near his beach. The book has several nuanced explorations of class, family, and violence. It was a deserving winner of the Printz award.

• China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh — My favorite of the four novels I read this month. This book was published in 1992, but it feels perfectly in touch with the zeitgeist of today. It is set in a 22nd century where China is the primary world power and the US has had a socialist revolution in the wake of an early 21st centure collapse of the US bond market. The main character is a mixed-race Hispanic and Chinese gay man who has undergone gene splicing to hide his mixed heritage. There are no world changing events in this novel, no great heroics or eyeball kicks. This is a quiet, first person novel that dips in and out of the lives of several characters as it charts the different ways people fail and succeed and love in a very believable future.