A Time of Changes

Robert Silverberg
Completed 1/12/2021, Reviewed 1/12/2021
3 stars

I’ve read two book by Robert Silverberg, Gilgamesh the King and Son of Man.  This book was like the latter: strange and somewhat difficult to understand.  I really liked the writing of all three though.  I think Silverberg is probably one of the more literary science fiction writers, with excellent prose.  Sometimes though that can be a downfall, and it sort of was here.  This book is almost all prose with little plot.  It tells the life story of a man on a planet long ago colonized by Earth who discovers a drug that lets him break through the culturally embedded philosophy of the destruction of self and discovers that to truly love, he must truly be in touch with himself.  It goes on and on about his life and doesn’t get to plot until well after halfway through the book.  Nonetheless, it won him the Nebula in 1971 and was one of his many Hugo nominations. 

Kinnal Darival is the second son of the Septarch of a province on the planet Borthan.  When his brother ascends the throne, Kinnal takes a self-imposed exile to avoid being his rival.  He settles in another province where he marries, has children, and becomes a powerful noble.  One day, he meets Schweiz, a merchant from Earth.  Schweiz engages him in a debate about religion and the Covenant, the law set down by the original colonists which requires people never use the pronouns I, me, my, or mine.  Basically, it implies the destruction of self.  Schweiz argues that it is actually a very selfish law, where people are completely self-absorbed because they are not allowed to fully engage with others and look outside of themselves.  He offers Kinnal a drug from the southern continent, where the original dissenters of the Covenant fled.  When taken with another person, it allows both people to fully experience each other’s existence.  Kinnal’s experience is transformative.  He wants to share this with his people even though it is illegal and an abomination.  This begins his downfall.

Ironically, the book is written in first person perspective of Kinnal.  He documents his journey of self-discovery to share with the world to incite a social revolution and bring down the old Covenant.  The build-up of the plot is very slow, but we get excellent world-building and characterization of Kinnal.  As Schweiz so clearly sees, Kinnal, like everyone on the continent, is very self-absorbed.  But Kinnal doesn’t see it.  As part of the world-building, we hear the story of how the gods and the Covenant came to be.   Kinnal is agnotic, but of course being brought up in the culture, he adheres to the Covenant and the mythology.  With his discovery of Schweiz’s drug, he becomes a savior of sorts, trying to convert everyone to the new experience, and potentially, a new Covenant.

One interesting construct on this world is that of bondbrothers and bondsisters.  Everyone has one of each, chosen at birth to be very close friends with.  It creates a sense of connectedness in a world without connection.  A person is generally most honest with their bondsiblings, as well as with their drainer, a priest who is a person’s confessor.  Kinnal’s bondbrother is Noim and his bondsister is Halum.  When Kinnal goes into exile, he forgoes his relationship with them.  In one way, this is good because he is deeply in love with Halum, and having a physical relationship with a bondsibling is taboo.  Noim and Halum, with Schweiz, are the only other characters who get any development.

I give this book three stars out of five.  The prose and the world-building are excellent, but the pace is tedious and the plot thin.  The book is only 220 pages, but it took me five days to read.  This is really slow for me.  I wonder if the Nebula Silverberg won for the book was more of a lifetime achievement award rather than for its merits.  He wrote over a hundred science fiction and fantasy novels as well as nonfiction and erotica.  He’s definitely one of the most prolific genre writers of any generation.  I just don’t think this one was award-worthy.

 

The Speed of Dark

Elizabeth Moon
Completed 1/8/2021, Reviewed 1/8/2021
5 stars

This is only my second book by Elizabeth Moon, and once again, I found it to be incredible.  This book is very different from Remnant Population.  It concerns an autistic man in the near future where the disability has been eradicated in utero and in very young children.  He is of the last generation of adults with autism.  The author has a child with autism and did lots of research on it to get the perspective right.  This book is mostly told in first person by the man with only the occasional third person omniscient narration for continuity’s sake.  This book made me feel the struggles the man faces in the story, about as much as Temple Grandin did in her book.  This book has been compared to “Flowers for Algernon” which I read in high school and again in college, but it is vastly different.  I thought it was equally as powerful, and much more complex.  It won the Nebula Award in 2003 and was nominated for several others.

Lou works at a giant corporation doing complex computer programming and/or analysis.  (I wasn’t quite clear on that point).  It involves his strength, identifying and manipulating patterns.  He works in a department with quite a few other equally brilliant autistic people in a department called Section 2A.  He is an avid fencer and has feelings for a fellow fencer named Marjorie.  The department gets a new boss who threatens Section 2A with their jobs if they don’t “volunteer” for an experimental treatment that promises to cure their autism.

Much of the book is about Lou dealing with the conflict of being forced into this treatment.  It also gives us a lot of detail about the daily life of Lou, including time at the resource center for persons with disabilities, as well as the sport of fencing and the friends he has there.  Lou’s perspective is remarkably detailed.  The writing is brilliant.  It is not simplistic as you might expect from someone with verbal communication issues.  In fact, it’s incredibly rich, giving insight into what goes on in the mind of Lou as he navigates through daily life as well as the conflicts with which he is confronted.  Because of this, the characterization is tremendous.  I felt like I was in Lou’s head the whole time.

The other characters are well done as well, including his “normal” friends from fencing, his autistic friends from work, his immediate supervisor, and the bad boss who is doing the threatening.  Tom is the fencing coach who is perhaps Lou’s best friend.  He’s a great guy with endless empathy for Lou.  Danny is a cop who lives in the same apartment complex with Lou.  He is also great as he helps Lou when his tires are slashed.  There are quite a few other good characters, in fact too many to name.  But they are all three dimensional, even the bad boss.

There is another plotline where someone is vandalizing his car.  The vandalization progresses and the mystery is who is doing it.  While it’s not the central plot, this subplot along with the main plot gives interesting and terrible insight into the minds of people who are threatened by people who are different. 

I give this book five stars out of five because one, it is excellent and two, because it moved me to near tears through the last forty pages or so.  My eyes actually watered as the story wrapped up.  Elizabeth Moon is batting a thousand for me so far.  She is one of the authors who got her start with Andre Norton, much like Mercedes Lackey, another author I really like.  I definitely have to read more of Moon.  Perhaps reading her Paksennarion series will be my challenge for next year. 

 

Exhalation

Ted Chiang
Completed 1/6/2021, Reviewed 1/6/2021
4 stars

Like his first collection of short stories, Stories of Your Life and Others, this collection was well written.  The prose is phenomenal.  His concepts are well researched and fairly easy to comprehend.  I liked all the stories, some more than others.  As a collection, they seemed a little uneven.  I believe this was because these stories were written over quite a large period of years, some coming from early in his career, others more recent.  But overall, as a writer, I think Chiang is tremendous.

My favorite story was first one, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”.  It’s a time travel novel set in the Middle East.  An alchemist creates gates that send you 20 years into the future or the past, depending on which way you enter.  A merchant goes through to right a wrong, finds he can’t change the past no matter what he does, but finds reconciliation. 

The title story was another favorite.  It’s about a robot or automaton performing brain surgery on itself to find the secret to memory, but instead finding the answer to the beginning and end of existence.  It takes place in an enclosed world of automatons that have their own mythology.  It’s an interesting spin on AI and self-awareness.

“The Great Silence” was a very cool, very short story about a parrot explaining how they are intelligent and on the brink of extinction.  It questions why humans don’t study parrots in their search for intelligent life as it ponders the role of the great Aricebo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.  It was interesting and sad reading this story just a few weeks after the telescope collapsed on itself.  The Chiang wrote this as part of a multimedia piece in conjunction with performance artists that involved the endangered parrots and the radio telescope.

The last story I’ll mention is “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”.  It was a morality tale in a world where there are devices that let you see parallel universes where you can communicate with your parallel self.  A young woman works at a store that buys, sells, and rents these devices, called prisms.  She and her boss run scams to make extra money, preying on people who use the prisms to feel better about the decisions they are making in life. It’s one of Chiang’s more complex stories, explaining the quantum physics that creates the parallel timelines and the laws that govern interaction with them. 

I really enjoyed this book, though not quite as much as the first collection.  I still give it four stars out of five because the writing is terrific, even while explaining the hard science and in one case, the hard philosophy.  I think his stories are very original, even when he gets ideas from other fiction sources, as noted in the afterword where he describes how he came up with the ideas for each story.  I’ll definitely continue reading his output.

 

The Quantum Rose

Catherine Asaro
Completed 1/1/2021, Reviewed 1/3/2021
4 stars

This book was another surprise for me.  Nebula Winner for 2001, it looked more like a heavy romance than science fiction.  Also, it’s the sixth book in a long series and although the reviews said it was standalone, I couldn’t wrap my head around jumping into the middle.  The first 40 or 50 pages felt like it was just another romance with court drama, but it quickly became a different beast.  There was lots of well-explained science and surprising revelations.  And the book stood on its own.  I ended up really enjoying it.

Kamoj is the young governor of her province on a distant planet.  She’s betrothed to Jax, the abusive governor of the neighboring province, solely for the consolidation of power and to rescue her people from economic disaster.  She meets a mysterious stranger who puts up a massive dowry for her, and by law, winning the right to marry her.  It turns out the stranger is a prince named Havyrl, or Vyrl, from another planet.  The marriage actually works as Vyrl reveals himself to be a gentle, loving husband.  His big flaw is that he is an alcoholic, though he doesn’t abuse Kamoj during his drunken episodes, unlike Jax.  Jax, however, will not let Kamoj go, kidnaps her, and sues Vyrl for marriage under coercion. 

Well, I guess the plot does sound like a heavy romance, but there’s so much more to it.  First, it’s actually an analog for quantum scattering theory.  You really don’t know it until you read the afterword where the author describes the theory and how it relates to the plot.  Second, it’s a small piece of a much larger space opera.  You figure out that you would have understood more background if you had read the five earlier books.  But as I said, it’s not really necessary to appreciate this one.  Third, the science that is described within is interesting and surprising.  To go into much detail would be a spoiler, but the basic gist is genetic manipulation.  Lastly, the book felt like a Beauty and the Beast homage, although it wasn’t quite a Stockholm Syndrome plot.  The genetic manipulation has a part in this aspect of the book.

I liked Kamoj.  I liked her more as the book progressed and we find out not only more about her past, but about the role of genetic manipulation in her life.  Vyrl is a good guy and I really rooted for him as he fought with his alcoholism.  I think it’s the first time I’ve encountered alcoholism in a science fiction story.  I thought it was done particularly well.  The reason why he began self-medicating is intense, though it’s another spoiler, so I won’t give it away.  Jax is a dastardly manipulator and plays upon all of Kamoj’s gentle qualities to keep her in the spiral of the abuse. 

As I write this, I realize much of the book can’t be described because so much of it is done as big revelations and discussing it would be a big spoiler.  I also realize that maybe I’m a little more of a sucker for a good romance than I let myself believe.  So I give this book four stars out of five.  I was enrapt through most of the book, although I felt the end dragged a bit and was somewhat predictable.  But the ride to the end was very exciting.  The writing was really good, with decent prose and believable dialogue.  I don’t know if I’ll read any more of the series.  I read this because my next big personal challenge is to read the seventeen Nebula winners I have not read yet.  And while I really liked this book, I just don’t find myself reading the other seventeen books in the series. 

The Moon and the Sun

Vonda N McIntyre
Completed 12/29/2020, Reviewed 12/31/2020
4 stars

I was prepared to hate this book.  It is an alt-history of a period I don’t particularly like, the French court of Louis XIV filled with excruciating detail about clothes and social station.  The heroine is a poor lady-in-waiting who was abused by nuns when she was raised in the convent in the French colony of Martinique.  And an inordinate amount of time is spent on court drama and relationships, licit and illicit.  But after about a quarter of the way through, I found myself caught up in all this drama as it supported the main plot of this story, the bringing of a human-like sea monster to Louis’ menagerie of animals. 

Marie-Joseph de la Croix is the lady-in-waiting to the sister-in-law and niece of Louis XIV.  Her brother Yves is a Jesuit scientist-priest who has captured two sea monsters, killing one and bringing the other back to France.  Louis is convinced the sea monster has an immortality organ and commissions Yves to find it.  Marie-Joseph, who assisted Yves scientific experiments as a youth, once again assists him by caring for living female and drawing pictures of the dead male as he performs an autopsy on it.  Marie-Joseph finds she can communicate with the living one and figures out she is human, or at least human-like, having almost the exact anatomy of a human.  She fights for the right of the sea monster while Louis is bent on eating it to acquire its property of immortality. 

This is another book about a strong woman who doesn’t remain in her station, trying to buck the system with her intelligence despite her lack of power in society.  Not only does she try to convince the King, but also the Pope who is visiting and happens to be the King’s cousin.  Of course the Pope is convinced the sea creature is just an animal and soulless.  Yves struggles with his scientific background and his allegiance to the King and the Pope.  The only person who believes Marie-Joseph is Lucien, close friend and confidant of the King, who also happens to be an atheist and a dwarf. 

In addition to the main plot, there are subplots involving Marie-Joseph’s slave, a Turkish woman who becomes a popular servant at the Louis XIV court, and the making of a match for Marie-Joseph with the man who is the lover of Louis’ brother.  These with the main plot made for a very well-thought-out story that rivaled the lush alt-history style of Guy Gavriel Kay in The Lions of Al-Rassan.

The characters, like the details of the story, are very detailed and developed.  Marie-Joseph is a very likeable character.  Rooting for her is easy.  It is also very easy to empathize with Yves, her brother, as he struggles with his duties as subject of France and Rome versus his training as a scientist.  Lucien is also very likeable with details about his struggles in life as a little person in the 17^th century.  The other characters vary between likeable, relatable, and deplorable, but they are all extremely well drawn.  Even the King and the cad are complex.  There are simply no one-dimensional major characters. 

McIntyre captures the opulence and decadence of the French nobility, with jewels, entitlement, and promiscuity everywhere.  The story mostly takes place at Versailles but there are few times when the King must go through town and someone from the crowd pleads with him about taxes or poverty.  But this was the Sun King who basically saw himself as God.  There are statues and paintings of Roman gods everywhere.  Specifically, there’s a statue of Apollo who should be facing the direction of the sun, but instead faces the direction of the Sun King.  Eventually, I felt slimy from reading about diamond encrusted shoe buckles, with peacock feathers, gold, and other jewels in everyone’s clothes.

I give this book four stars out of five.  It won the Nebula for 1997.  It is beautifully written and extremely well researched.  Most of the characters are historical, except for Marie-Joseph and Yves.  Yet McIntyre breathes life into all of them and really captures the essence of the 17^th century privilege.  It’s very different from her Hugo and Nebula winner Dreamsnake, being a period piece, but definitely worthy of an award itself.  

Soulless

Gail Carriger
Completed 12/26/2020, Reviewed 12/28/2020
3 stars

This was fun fluff.  It’s a Victorian comedy of manners with a powerful heroine, vampires, and werewolves.  I’ve had this on my bookshelf for quite a while and finally pulled it down.  I was pleased that I enjoyed it and will eventually get around to reading some others in the series.  The prose is quite nice.  It is very easy reading.  This is just what the doctor ordered after reading the terse Tolkien History of Middle Earth Series.

Alexia Tarabotti is a spinster (age 24!).  She’s not considered marriageable because she is a little dark skinned from being half Italian and has a prominent nose.  Her mother and stepsisters are more concerned with fashion and marriage than anything more substantial.  So Alexia never tells them that she has no soul, that is, she’s a preternatural.  When she touches a supernatural being, they are made powerless.  When she touches a vampire, its teeth retract.  When she touches a werewolf, it reverts back to human.

The story begins where Alexia is at a ball and meets a rove vampire, one that is not associated with a hive.  Unlike all the registered vampires, this one does not seem to know she is a preternatural and attacks her.  She fights it off and kills it with her trusty parasol and a wooden hairpin.  This raises concerns with the local hive and the Queen’s department of the paranormal.  The investigation is led by Lord Maccon (loud, messy, gorgeous, and a werewolf).  Maccon and Alexia constantly trade barbs as their attraction to each other grows.  But amidst this romance, Alexia is pursued by the local vampires and a mysterious wax-faced creature that appears superhuman and is not affected by her touch.  Maccon and Alexia try to get to the bottom of the mystery of the appearance of rove, unregistered vampires and the strange creature.

The characters are well crafted.  Alexia is a strong-willed young woman in the 19^th century world of repressed women and mores.  She’s instantly likeable.  Maccon is great at the Scottish alpha werewolf investigator.  He falls in love with Alexia despite their constant bickering.  Alexia falls for Maccon as well, but she constantly, comically misreads his advances.  Lord Akeldama is a great supporting character.  He is an ancient vampire who is no longer associated with hive.  He’s a flamboyant, gay fop who seems to know a little about everything that’s going on in the supernatural world.  He’s Alexia’s best friend and confidant.  There are several other supporting werewolves and vampires that round out this universe, as well as annoying humans including Alexia’s mother and stepsisters. 

On the positive side, it’s always great to read a genre book with a strong female lead, especially in a Victorian setting.  It’s also a delightfully different take on alternative history, where the supernatural have “come out” and have integrated into gentle society after centuries of living in the shadows.  My one problem with the book is that it took too long for Alexia to comprehend Maccon’s intentions.  This is a problem I have with most comedies of manners.  People in these types of stories misread each other and I get aggravated with how thick they can be.  But I guess that’s what makes for the comedy. 

I give this book three stars out of five.  It’s very fun and a good fluff read.  I probably would have given it four stars if I hadn’t gotten so aggravated over the slow pace of Alexia’s coming around with the romance.  I still look forward to reading more of this series as it is a great read after heavy novels. 

Record of a Spaceborn Few

Becky Chambers
Completed 12/22/2020, Reviewed 12/22/2020
4 stars

This is the third standalone book in the Wayfarers series. Like the first two books, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit, it is a character study. Unlike the first two books, it doesn’t have much of a plot. This is basically a slice of life of five people living on a colony ship. There are some intriguing points that cause all the characters to reflect on their lives and relationships. But the main point of the book is that humanity has learned to live in space and have become basically nice, peaceful, cooperating people and this is the story of a few of them.

The story begins on one of 32 colony ships carrying the remnants of Earth’s population, known as the Exodans. One of its sister ships has blown up. They pick up the bodies. Then life continues on for the characters, all of whom are affected by the disaster. Later, one of the characters is killed accidently, and the body is found days later. This affects all the characters, inspiring more reflection on their situations and choices in life. So you see, not much of a plot. The real story is in the characters.

My favorite characters are probably the more complex. The first one, Eyas, named after a young hawk, is basically a funeral director. She preps the bodies of the dead, holds a ritual ceremony for them with the grieving family, and composts them. This is one of the most important jobs on the ship, as it recycles the deceased to support the living. But after dealing with the influx of bodies from the sister ship, she seeks solace in a brothel, which is a legal business on the ships. She develops a special intimacy with Sunny, the male prostitute with the heart of gold.

My next favorite character was Isobel. She is one of the ship’s archivists. She maintains the records of Earth, the history of the ship, and the present happenings. She is one of the grand dames of the ship and lives with her long-time wife. She maintains an interesting perspective on life and events aboard the ship. In addition, she hosts an alien from the Galactic Council who comes to make observations of the Exodans.

The other characters are good, but less complex. There’s Tessa, a working mom of two who also takes care of her ailing father. Her husband works in space and is not home often. There’s Kip, an angsty teen with a questionable friend who wants to leave the ship and go planet-side. Lastly, there’s Sawyer who grew up on a planet and comes to the ship looking to reinvent himself.

The story is told disjointedly, with each chapter being from the perspective of one of the characters. This threw me at first, feeling like there were too many characters. But about halfway through the book, I realized I really cared about what was going on in each of their lives, even the moody teen Kip.

I give the book four stars out of five. My only complaint with the book is that I felt it took too long to get the hang of the changing perspectives from the different chapters. That with the lack of plot makes for a slow burn. But instead of getting bored, I found myself really loving the characters. I got tied up in their personal lives and how the events of the ship changed their perspectives. It ended up being one of those books that warmed my heart and made me wish it wouldn’t end.