Walking on the Moon

I really liked this book. It took an interesting hook – Orc in a high fantasy/D&D/WoW world wants to retire from adventuring and open a coffee shop – and delivers the goods.

I realize how much craft it takes to make that happen. Travis Baldree has to put enough of the world on the table to make the idea make sense without distracting the reader from the story of this character doing it. And he knows that a reader picking up this book is going to be able to swallow “gnomish espresso machine” long enough to let the world form up around them and make it all make sense.

And then as that world forms he brings in a set of likeable characters along with some not very likeable ones. None too deep, none too shallow. And in parallel with that Baldree lays out his perfect coffee shop. I mean, I assume he does. Why create a coffee shop in a fantasy setting if it’s not your fantasy coffee shop? (He’s a little too heavy on pastry love and a little light on actual coffee.)

There’s a plot, of course. Bad folks want to advance their agendas and our characters have growing to do. It’s all just enough to give a point to hanging out in this emerging coffee shop and these characters. And I had fun doing that.

Recommended.

Fourteen Days is a collaborative novel set in New York City in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s a fair amount of room in the “collaborative novel” category. This one is more Canterbury Tales than “write your buddy into a corner,” but it’s not strictly a framing sequence and a bunch of short stories either.

It is in the genre of a bunch of strangers thrown together who start telling tales to pass the time. But Atwood and Preston do a good job of building a sound structure around it. They don’t hide that the novel is composed of short stories and connective tissue. The structure emerges in how one story seems to set another off or how the characters notice and react to the themes of the stories.

The ambience starts as something like telling stories around a campfire but builds to being more confessional. All the characters are reflected in their stories, but not all are defined by them. Everyone is more fleshed out. Most of the characters who do narrate a foundational event in their lives already seem like the kind of person shaped by the event before they tell the story.

It is a novel. There’s a narrative, the characters grow, and the plot is diverting. But I did feel like it was less focused than a work by a single author or small writing team. I am amazed that it is the coherent work that it is. More than 30 authors collaborated on this. If you told me that you could make a book this good composed of significant passages by Erica Jong and R. L. Stine plus 30 others whose works are equally unlike one another, I would have been very skeptical. A feat by all involved.

Recommended.

Death’s End brings the history that runs through The Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest to a close. I’ve read enough SF to say “to a close” is tentative at best, but Cixin does project some finality here. That said, the book does begin by retconning a character into the timeline established in The Dark Forest, so I wouldn’t go etching anything into stone, effective as that might be.

The retcon crack was probably unnecessarily snarky. Cixin definitely wrote these books to explore larger themes and I think his universe building only enhances that. And like his other books, I think he’s playing with more than one theme here.

Death’s End spends time talking about fairy tales and the messages we convey to one another. There are nice ideas here about how much the context of the teller matters and how timeless the values are that are passed along. He also raises some interesting questions about when children’s values are appropriate for adults.

Even without the title, the book doesn’t hide that it wants to talk about death and how people face it. Earlier books were more focused on how a culture faces possible extinction, but Death’s End turns more to the personal. The characters always are making decisions with implications far beyond themselves, but Cixin’s clear that those choices are always made by individuals with individual values.

I can see a reading where The Dark Forest and Death’s End are set up as masculine and feminine world views. I think there’s definitely text to support that, but I don’t agree with binding the viewpoints to genders. I’m sure people will take other sides of that argument.

All of this is wrapped up in a Space Opera that is written well and paced to keep the pages turning.

Overall I find the trilogy worth reading and interesting. I’m still thinking about it and arguing with myself about it.

Strongly Recommended.

This might have more spoilers than usual.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about The Dark Forest since I read it. It follows The Three Body Problem directly. The set up is that the Solar System has to prepare for an invasion by a superior force that will show up in a couple centuries. Forest focuses on a facet of the defense plan that basically empowers 4 selected humans to do anything to defend humanity. Humanity can send people forward in time by hibernating, so these humans can see their plans to fruition. The attackers have access to all Earth actions, but limited understanding of the concept of duplicity.

It’s a set up for a cat-and-mouse thriller and Cixin delivers. There are a lot of twists in the characters’ personal plans and experiences and they held my attention. We get to see how the cultures develop under the threat of future extinction. There are personal struggles and space battles. It’s Cixin doing doing the classic SF thing of turning prosaic big issues into fictional threats to show them to us with fresh eyes. And to show how people react with fresh eyes.

But it gets dark. This is probably one of the three most misanthropic books I’ve ever read.

The rules of the game mean that none of the main characters are going to be paladins, but Cixin is a cold realist. He shows us what people do when they believe they are fighting for the ultimate end. I don’t trust all his physics, but I do believe his depiction of people who believe they are messiahs. And I believe there are many self-appointed messiahs today without an interstellar armada bearing down.

I’m vexed that Cixin seems to stack misogyny on top of misanthropy. None of his potential saviors are women. There are few secondary female characters and all of them are strictly in service of the plot. It seems like one of the four potential saviors might be female, especially given how many women played major roles in the first contact in The Three Body Problem, but nope. I suppose he may be arguing that women would behave better, but I disagree. People are people.

When I discuss misogyny, I’m ignoring the character who exists as an embodiment of one of the potential savior’s imaginary perfect woman. That’s very literal and turns into sexual coercion is a way that disturbed me – and I hope most readers – profoundly. But I don’t think this is blind spot misogyny. I think Cixin is intentionally depicting abuse. I also think he’s being deliberately vague about whether this savior is succumbing to his weaknesses or carrying out a necessary subterfuge to hide his plan from an omniscient opponent. And worse than that, no matter which motivation is real or how they’re mixed, the character still deliberately and methodically harms this woman.

All these saviors’ plans are based on ruthless exploitation of people. Several are charged with Crimes against Humanity when their plans are revealed. But those abstract “acceptable losses” crimes didn’t hit me like the deliberate exploitation of one woman. That’s the point of it.

The themes are dark, but the form is an SF thriller and it’s well done. I think lots of Chandler is dark, too, but they’re great mysteries. And there aren’t many books with an Osama bin-Laden cameo that are blurbed by President Obama.

Strongly recommended.

I’m interested in how writers bringing culture of the day into stories to create verisimilitude can wind up distancing readers from the work as time goes by. When I recently read The Turn of the Screw there were several times that the characters left things unsaid that remained unknown to me because I’m not reading in late 18th Century England. I still got something out of Screw, but I wasn’t creeped out the way I was when I read The Church of Dead Girls. It’s been years since I read that and I still get chills.

I bring that up because Hank Green is very much setting An Absolutely Remarkable Thing in the world of late 2010’s internet fame. I can imagine it being steeped enough in that time to become opaque to readers in time. I hope not. For all immersion in the era, I think Green has a lot to say about fame and communities that form around arcane interests that is independent of mechanism.

He also creates a set of characters that I believe. While it’s tempting to try to make characters here stereotypes or symbols, these all feel unique. He does one of my favorite tricks a good writer can pull off: he writes a character who I think is wrong or crazy, but who I like, who I believe, and who I’m rooting for. Even knowing that it’s probably not going to end well.

I like his writing, and he brings the rhythms of the language of the time to life very well. In the same way I like to imagine that people in the 30’s and 40’s spoke like Raymond Chandler characters, I hope people believe we talked this way in the future.

Strongly Recommended.

I picked this up just poking around the library’s virtual shelves. I recognized the title and figured I’d catch up with a classic.

It’s a gothic ghost story and I’ve heard enough ghost stories to see the foundations here. And I know that James is often read more in subtext than in text. But for all the discursive text here I missed a lot of the context.

I do think it’s very hard to be eerie on the page. Especially so when you’re talking to someone across a century and ten levels of class. And even with all that gap, I did feel the slow ratchet of tension rising. But overall it felt like homework.

Yeah, I finally read The Martian.

I realized a few pages into it that I was going to enjoy it, but I wasn’t sure if it was just one of those books that was written especially for me or if it was really good. The early chapters had the tone of the things I do at work absent the threat of death if I get it wrong. A book about stressful problem solving seems to have a limited audience.

Weir is a writer with more range than stranding me in space, though. He does a really good job dropping the reader into a relatable character’s head in the middle of a terrifying situation and then expanding out to the larger worlds around him. No one’s found themselves struggling to stay alive on Mars, but many people have found themselves in a tough spot and gone into problem solving mode. I think it sucks people into the story. Once you’re in, when the main character gets a chance to breathe, bits of the worlds creep in, and the reader is oriented. And the rest of the worlds are believable and engaging, so you look up and find you’re caring about more characters than the stranded fellow.

Weir puts individual scenes into that structure that keep the reader in the story. Some of that is just writing exciting set-pieces. Some of that is dribbling out bits of context that form a universe. Some is pacing the whole story. He’s good all around.

It’s an adventure story, and super pro-space exploration. I like adventure and space exploration, so I’m an easy sell. But I recognize the bias. If any bit of adventure or space attracts you, this is top quality stuff.

Strongly recommended.

This is a dandy piece of genre fiction. Moreno-Garcia takes the basic set-up of Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and writes a better book. She sets it in late 19th century Mexico and puts real characters into the story. Once she’s put better elements into the scenario, she orchestrates a consistent, interesting, tense story with a satisfying outcome.

Moreno-Garcia builds a consistent real world full of characters with enough depth and ambiguity to make them interesting. She fits them into an adventure tale that consistently raises the stakes and grips the reader. Exciting read with plenty of interesting sidelights and ideas that drive the story without hijacking it.

Strongly recommended.

I picked this up on a lark. I was between holds at my library and this was on on one of the digital shelves of new well-regarded books. Something in the summary caught my eye, so I grabbed it. It was more than I expected.

Birnam stuck the landing in a way that few books I’ve read have. I thought I’d read one kind of book, and in the last few pages realized I’d read quite another. I admired the second one much more.

For obvious reasons, I don’t want to say more. Have a look at the blurbs and if it sounds remotely interesting to you, check it out.

You may reach the end and feel like it was a straight line. I think it’s probably a good read even if that’s the case. You may be surprised by and be put off. I just don’t know. But I know I think it’s quite a book.

Highly recommended.

Overall I liked The Three Body Problem. I think it’s a well executed SF novel with a lot of twists and turns. There’s enough hard science thrown around that part of the fun is deciding if this is just a near future thriller, or just where and how far things are going to come off the rails. There’s a nice tension to it that keeps you reading.

Liu sets the book primarily in China, primarily in the early 2000’s with big chunks in later 20th Century flashbacks. As an American reader, I found it interesting to see the differences and parallels between the same periods in the US and China. There’s a nice use of footnotes by the author and translator to both flesh out the world and keep the reader off-balance. Some are just “here’s a relevant fact from Chinese history or slang that you might not know” while others reference the history of the fictional world Liu is creating.

There are lots of interesting ideas to chew on about idealism and practicality, about how understanding the broad picture may not determine individual cases, and other lofty stuff that doesn’t get in the way of a fast moving plot in a shifting world.

If there’s anything I didn’t like, it might be that the characters didn’t suck me in as people. Some of that may be thematic. Liu may be treating them less as people to meet than as complex interacting systems. It’s nowhere as stark as that sentence makes it out to be. These folks are drawn with more depth than stereotypes. They have individual motivations and histories that help explain who they are and I recognize them as unique. But I also see how they’re the initial conditions of a complex system that expresses itself as this novel.

And I don’t think that’s just because I’m a nerd.

Highly recommended.