Walking on the Moon

I’m a big fan of Gail Simone in general and of her Red Sonja comics run in particular, so of course I wanted to check this out.

Lots of what I love about Simone’s writing is in here. Strong characters from across the spectrum. Horror twined into adventure. Fun plot twists. Great stuff.

But, honestly, it took a while to get moving. The first half or so of the book is more disconnected than I was expecting. There’s a lot happening, but not all of the stakes are connecting for me. A couple times characters are saying “I know this is a mistake, but I…” I know people do that, but it felt a little more like a flag that we were doing this for strict plot reasons.

Eventually, the gears all mesh and the plot becomes propulsive with character-driven beats that make sense and have impact. By the end I was cheering for the good guys and hissing the villains enthusiastically.

Recommended. If it feels slow, stick with it.

This is the first Sherlock Holmes novella. I’d never read it and decided to fill that hole. It was not entirely what I expected.

I’ve read a bunch of the Holmes short stories and maybe The Hound of the Baskervilles, but by them the formula of a Holmes mystery had gelled into an efficient puzzle and Holmes delivery system. Scarlet is still feeling things out in ways that surprised me.

First, there is the introduction of Watson and Holmes, which was quite fun. I know a bunch of the details but it was fun to see how Conan Doyle established all these. And then we get sucked into a Holmes mystery and watch Holmes do Holmes things. It’s great. Easy to see how this character hooked people and why there’s a whole canon around him.

And then we take a turn to an entirely different setting to kind of show the reader the circumstances that Holmes has deduced. I was quite surprised. More than that, I can see why this style of mystery execution wasn’t for Holmes. Conan Doyle writes it well enough, but I spent the whole section – about half the novella – wanting to get back to Holmes.

It makes for an interesting artifact more than a thrilling read. Still worth a look, probably.

Recommended.

I came to this through the 99 Percent Invisible podcast. The podcast read it and discussed it with a variety of guests. I heard one episode and decided I should read the book before I listened to more of them. This was a good idea.

The Power Broker is the story of Robert Moses, the person behind basically all of the urban improvements in New York City and environs from the 30’s to the early 70’s. To tell that story, Robert Caro starts with a traditional biography. But to make that make sense he has to take lengthy side trips into the larger than life characters in New York City and New York State politics. And the ways that skilled politicians can manipulate the law to create and consolidate power. And how they gather the human and media capital to enact those laws. And how that process changes someone. And how the results of those actions can change the largest city in the world, not always for the best.

It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. The thing is, it is never dull. Whether Caro is explaining how Moses manipulates public authorities to generate self-perpetuating funding for his projects immune from conventional governmental authority or painting a picture of an out-to-pasture ex-Governor of New York wandering the New York Zoo at night, he has your attention. Caro’s ability to make the mundane dramatic is remarkable.

The Power Broker is also a lot in terms of sheer word count. It’s a tome, 1500 pages or so (I read an e-book). I won’t say it flew by, but it’s a trip worth taking.

I came away much richer for having read this. I learned things about New York’s specific history, a lot about bare-knuckle politics in general, and about the effects of those politics on people.

A must.

I think is one of the best novellas I’ve read, but I also think it’s got a long fuse. I enjoyed reading it and I’ve continued to marvel at how revolutionary and well written it is. If one doesn’t think deeply about it, I can imagine this being a neat, quick SF read. Kind of like what I thought of The Plot – and I liked The Plot. I definitely think it’s worth the time to chew on this book. Becky Chambers doesn’t need my kudos, what with the Hugo and all, but I was quite blown away as the fuse went off.

If you want the joy of discovering the book yourself, stop reading here. I don’t have any plot spoilers in here, but I am going to talk about other aspects of the work that I think might be more fun to discover unprompted.

As I say, when I first read this it felt enjoyable and low stakes. The setting and characters were charming, there was a quest to go on, a sudden unexpected first contact between civilizations separated for an age (the sentient robots humans built and the humans). The sort of SF tropes you’d expect from a post-apocalyptic SF novella. But, like I say, low stakes: personal rather than galactic. Engaging. Fun.

But the cover mentioned a Hugo. And I had this nagging feeling that something was going on that I was missing. So I ruminated. And then the penny dropped.

This is a post-apocalyptic SF novella in which the concept of violence between sentients is completely absent. It’s not just that there is no fighting. The concept of violence never occurs to the protagonist nor is there any indication it occurs to the robot they encounter. No threats. Not even a violent metaphor or joshing punch on the arm. If these societies know that sentients can be violent with one another, I’m guessing it would be the kind of taboo that would excite fundamental revulsion. And at this point I have to guess.

Once I realized that, I thought about how fundamental violence or the threat thereof is to SF and other genre fiction. I cannot think of another SF story in which the idea of violence is completely absent. Just to make that point more strongly, it took me quite some time to characterize the revulsion in the previous paragraph in some way that captured its scope without using a violent word, and I’m not writing genre fiction.

SF invites writers and readers to consider a world fundamentally different than our own and see what that says about ours. This is a big swing at world building.

Before I read this, I would have assumed that you couldn’t write an engaging work without reference to violence committed by sentients. But, I read this and didn’t notice the absence until I ruminated. It is a huge challenge to set for yourself as a writer. That Chambers succeeded gobsmacks me.

The more I’ve thought about it – and I can’t stop thinking about it – the more fundamental ideas are woven in here. Those ideas are all slipped in quietly. But once I see a fuse, I know they light firecracker strings as well as single bombs.

There is more to come in this series (OK, it’s out but I’m slow) and I’m all in. But just chewing on this is well worth it.

A must.

I quite liked Jeff Guinn’s The War on the Border, which is a lively, readable, well researched history of a series of US incursions into Mexico in the 1910’s and the general mayhem that precipitated them. It’s stuff like this that I missed in history class and that explains so much.

There’s a lot of nasty feeling in the Southwest on both sides of the border that was hard for me to internalize until I read this and learned that people on both sides of the US/Mexico border have been committing mayhem on a scale I hadn’t realized. Some of it at the behest of governments and some freelance. Pancho Villa did his best to wipe out a New Mexico town in 1916 and there was a document called la Plan de San Diego that claimed to lay out a terrorist strategy predicated on destroying US towns. On the other side Texas Rangers acted as judge and jury and retaliated with little regard for guilt.

It’s easy to forget that US history is full of border wars with these sort of violent confrontations between families wronged by folks on the other side of the border, who in turn commit mayhem, gangs form that turn into armies and generations of hate bore into the land. Guinn doesn’t go into all of that, but it’s hard not to see it all from these events.

Beyond the lawless land grabbery and revenge battles, there is international intrigue in the forms of Mexican revolutions, counter revolutions, and local warlords that are exacerbated by actual German interference to keep the pot bubbling to keep the US distracted and out of World War I.

Guinn does a great job bringing all those levels into focus as well as highlighting some genuinely dramatic figures – Pancho Villa, “Black Jack” Pershing, Patton. Quite a good read.

Strongly Recommended.

OK, not really, but I have had someone inquire about using grap and a notice that it has been included in the Free Software Foundation’s Free Software Directory.

Fans of archaic typesetting software, rejoice!

If you’re looking for another harbinger of the End Times, consider this grap release. The changes are minor, but the code is now available from github.

Enjoy!

Carmen Maria Machado has brought a remarkably powerful work into the world with In The Dream House. Any short summary would belie the honesty, power, and craft she employed. That said, it’s a memoir of her years as a victim in an abusive relationship.

Abuse is complicated, layered and yet invites simple judgement from us. Everyone has preconceptions about what it is and perhaps insight from being involved. Whether the reader believes that one brings it on oneself or that the abusers are possessed by overriding malice or many many other explanations, each person and relationship differs.

Machado tells her story in tiny, bite-sized chapters that slowly cohere into the narrative. They also cohere into an introduction to her remarkable mind. She has dissected her experience deeply from many angles. Each chapter is a facet of those thoughts, captured at different moments in time and reflecting aspects of the situation. That creates bounds around her experience that neither define or encapsulate it. Other people’s experience is never our own, and Machado doesn’t let us believe so. The corral she draws around the thing clarifies it remarkably.

She attacks the thing from so many perspectives. She is a scholar of the literature and the statistics. She is a queer woman living with her understanding of others’ assumptions and judgements. She has dug deeply into how those preconceptions have shaped her own ideas of her identity. She is a hurt child. She is a Star Trek fan. She is a literary scholar. She is a young, sociable college student. She is a writer. And so, so, much more. She is a human, and one I find remarkable.

I have to stress hat last facet – being a writer – because she is a remarkable one. Each of these facets is a gem in itself. The memories are evocative and poetic. The musings are clear while capturing the thoughts that led her to them. The scholarship is professional. And the whole thing intertwines in ways that make it all more of what each is.

A must.

So often when I review short story collections I start by saying that they’re a mixed bag, which is me basically saying that the quality is uneven. Black Future Month is mixed, but all the stories work for me.

That surprised me a little because the stories really cover a lot of ground. If N K Jemisin has a lane, she clearly doesn’t need to stay in it. OK, very broadly speaking you could call all of these SF, but one could easily defend several as outside that domain.

More importantly than which Dewey Decimal number I assign the collection, I found all of them entertaining and most thought-provoking. Some play with storytelling, some subvert genre conventions, and all are just good stories.

With a title like this one, it’s easy to imagine that the point of the writing is to provoke reactions, especially given the state of the SF community. Jemisin walks a difficult line with boldness and panache. She is intentionally challenging many assumptions that underlie SF, but that’s never the whole point of a story. These are SF stories, and ideas and themes have center stage. By illuminating those themes from unfamiliar angles, these stories sparked new ideas for me.

Big picture issues aside, everyone in these stories is believable. All SF authors manipulate their characters to highlight the speculation inherent in the fiction. Jemisin’s people always ring true. I never thought that someone playing by her rules in the worlds she puts them in were acting like characters. They were people. (That reinforces the inclusion and representation goals, of course.)

Overall an interesting and exciting set of stories.

Strongly Recommended.

I was horrified to see that a motorist had hit and killed a cyclist along my daily commuting route on Thursday morning. I was further surprised when I realized that I had passed the scene soon enough after the collision that the police were still on the scene and had the street shut down.

I didn’t see the accident, so all I can do is give my sympathies and a few impressions of that area. I’m just going to post those here to contribute what I can to understanding and sympathy.

The intersection in question is somewhat challenging, but far from the worst I see on a regular basis. The intersection is treacherous because of the fork and joining of Olive and Manchester. There’s no good way for northbound bike traffic to continue up Manchester without northbound Olive traffic posing a risk. I wasn’t there, so I have no idea if that contributed.

Most of the people I see on bikes in that area are riding simple cruiser kinds of bikes. They look like folks who are making short trips from a bus stop to work or between some of the dispersed work locations – lots of car lots/parking lots there. That also means there are come car carriers and other commercial vehicles in the area regularly that can make it hard to see what’s happening.

Again, my sympathies to the families and friends. Thanks to the indispensable Biking In LA blog for keeping us all aware.