Walking on the Moon

I used to be more diligent about checking in with these sorts of collections of short writing in genre, but I got away from it. I hopped on this collection edited by Nnedi Okorafor and quite enjoyed it.

Short story collections are by nature a mixed bag, and that’s what I signed up for when I borrowed this. For me there were no bad stories in here – which isn’t always true. There were two or three standouts. And the writers are playing with genre tropes and representation as well as telling very straight-ahead genre fiction well. Worth a look for a quick way to survey current SF. I’ll probably grab another one of these.

Recommended.

This is the what the Los Angeles Public Library tells me is the second book in the series started with A Fire upon the Deep, but it’s a prequel with little obvious connection to Fire. Vernor Vinge wrote both.

There are ties to Fire‘s setting. This takes place in the same basic human history established that book, and there are places and characters referenced in that book that appear here. But if you show up fresh, it will all be good.

It is a very well done space opera, if anything, to a fault. I think Fire has more to think about and play with in it. Where Fire introduced a new cosmology and a threat that was intimately tied to that, Deepness puts us back in conventional physics with more direct extrapolations of technology. Any fan of Ringworld will be right at home here.

It is absolutely a space opera. The good guys are the tenors and the bad guys are the basses. There is enough nuance to make the characters worth rooting for, but this is an adventure story. I could get all English-teacher-y on this and dredge up some complaints about it, but that’s not the book Vinge obviously wrote. It’s a lot of fun.

I also can’t resist pointing out that according to this, it’s strongly implied that thousands of years from today human software still reckons time from the Unix epoch.

Strongly recommended.

The Los Angeles public library has led me to a bunch of interesting and different Japanese fiction over the past couple years and Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow is the latest. It’s a difficult book to drop into a genre. There is plenty of crime and it takes place at the edges of Japan’s criminal underground. There’s a coming of age story in there, of sorts. There’s basis for some kind of activist fiction like The Jungle, but it’s not explicit. And may not be present.

What is there is a completely gripping narrative told from the point of view of an unreliable but completely believable narrator. This is the story of a girl growing into adulthood on the fringes of society. She’s less a mobster’s daughter and more Richard Pryor. She grows up alongside generally shady goings on, but she’s never actively harming anyone. In her mind.

And her mind is absolutely the core of the story. There’s a framing sequence that asks a question that seems to have a clear answer. But not to her, which drives her remembrance which takes up much of the novel. She’s an obviously unreliable narrator, but even looking in from the outside, there is a lot that is not black and white.

I think this is a book where some readers will look at the question that the framing sequence asks and have strong opinions of the answer. Since that question is pretty close to “was this person held hostage and forced into a criminal enterprise by a woman twenty years her elder?” it seems like there should be an answer. But I can build arguments both ways. I suspect the litmus test of it is part of the point.

And there’s much more in there than a puzzle. Have a look for yourself.

A must.