Reading Well: Children of Time, Children of Ruin, & Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky‘s hefty trilogy, totaling well over 1,500 pages, begins with Children of Time (2015), continues in Children of Ruin (2019), and concludes in Children of Memory (2023).

It’s brilliant.

And it ain’t for everyone.

There is a tradition in science fiction of work that is carried by the sheer overwhelming ingenuity of a core idea or set of concepts more than traditional writerly components. If you are looking for compelling and memorable characters, if you are looking for skillfully plotted arcs that leave you gasping at each twist and turn, if you are looking for a thickly rendered world that fully immerses you in deep cultural settings … these aren’t the books for you.

But it is a masterful, imaginative, and–for me–absolutely fascinating execution of a spiral of ideas around a core thread: how would evolution manifest with different species?

Children of Time starts with one of those what-could-possibly-go-wrong plans: the Earth is becoming uninhabitable, and one solution being pursued by your typical global congregation of corporations and scientists is to drop a virus that replicates human evolution at hyperspeed on a planet that already has some proto-mammalian life. Let that run for a while, then the original humans can show up in their hastily constructed deep space transport vessels, and bingo, we haz new Earth. Like I said, what could possibly go wrong?

It’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s not as planned: the virus, instead of making it to the proto-apes, finds its way into the arachnids. So what develops on this planet is highly evolved, critical thinking, socially aware, fully civilized … spiders. And what Tchaikovsky does spectacularly is work through what that might look like, how an arachnid race might evolve, what the implications might be of eight incredibly sensitive legs and countless eyes and a very flexible sense of verticality and a hypersensitivity to smell and vibration and and and …

And all of that just works. It’s imaginative, detailed, fascinating, and based on just enough biology to be convincing as a potential path of possibilities. Most critically, the arachnids develop into themselves, they don’t become spider-humans, they become evolved spiders, adapted to their unique environments and physiology.

The plot does just enough to keep the reader moving to the next revelation about the spiders, and wanting more, even after its somewhat too-pat conclusion.

Which takes us to the second book.

Set well after the opening novel, Children of Ruin focuses on the same process, but with octopi (a very different plot thread, focusing on terraforming a planet for human habitation, but it’s all a vehicle for the accelerated evolution). Again, throughout the novel, the plot machinations are a bit rough around the edges, and the characters tend to be less distinguishable than perhaps a reader would like. But the cephalods! The imaginative power behind the invention of their emotional lives, their curiosity, the way their brain and limbs interact, their ability to problem solve … it’s stunning.

You’ll never see an octopus in an aquarium reaching outwards with an arm again without thinking of Tchaikovsky’s conception of what could be going on beneath their color-changing skin.

Children of Memory is set even further in the future, and is a little different in that the plot is more clearly and compellingly articulated, revolving around the politics of an emerging world. And, the evolutionary biology is less detailed, although the conception of highly evolved paired corvids is brilliant, wrestling with the core question of whether solving a puzzle represents intelligence or the fruits of highly focused repetition and whether the difference between those two carries any real value.

There is an interesting question for writers buried in there as well: as Tchaikovsky improves on the traditional dimensions of what makes a “good author,” does he lose the space to display his truly unique imaginative gifts?

I think at this point it should be pretty clear if the trilogy will appeal to you. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the creativity continues to live in my mind.

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Reading Well: Three Memoirs (Cicely Tyson, Stuart Braithwaite, and Dessa)

Cicely Tyson, Just As I Am, with Michelle Burford, 2021; Spaceships over Glasgow: Mogwai, Mayhem and Misspent Youth, 2022;

This was not what I expected.

I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, as you may have noticed. When I do read memoirs, I do so almost exclusively for two reasons: first, when there are specific biographical moments or characters that interest me; and second, for insight into artists’ creative processes. There is little more fascinating than learning about how artists see the creation of their art, and how they understand both the process and what the meaning or impact of their art is once it is loose in the wild.

Cicely Tyson‘s 2021 memoir, Just As I Am (written with Michelle Burford), came very highly recommended, and my expectations were very high for the first reason above: not only was there likely to be insights into her long, tempestuous relationship with Miles Davis, but I was sure there would be dozens of other figures passing through Tyson’s world I was somewhere on the scale of curious about to fascinated by. And along those dimensions, it’s a fantastic read.

This next bit is hard, right: the only proper response to Cicely Tyson is awe.

As a memoir, for me, Just As I Am falls short, largely because the usual insight into her process, her art, and how she was able to be the irresistible, magnificent force she was is that she was blessed by God.

Nothing against that, of course. But it’s not very compelling at the end of the day. There is, despite the constant stream of encounters with massive figures of the late 20th century, despite the recognition of how important Roots was as a cultural moment, and even despite the details of her long and tortured relationship with Miles, an absence of revelation, of a point of entry into her artistic self.

So, worthwhile as history; worthwhile as a tribute to Ms. Cicely, not so worthwhile as insight into her spectacular talent.

If you know me, you know I loves me some Mogwai.

(For those wondering what a Mogwai might be, they are a Scottish postrock band that has been around for over 30 years at this point. Postrock, one of my favorite genres, is essentially instrumental music performed by classic rock band configurations, with a high focus on sometimes extreme variation in harmonics, melody, and pure volume. Mogwai–along with Sigur Rós, Explosions in the Sky, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor–are generally considered the founding fathers of the genre, although such discussions can always be somewhat controversial.)

So when I saw their founder, Stuart Braithwaite, was releasing Spaceships over Glasgow: Mogwai, Mayhem and Misspent Youth in 2022, I think I was among the first in line to reserve a copy. If I listened to music via Spotify, Mogwai would be top 10 on my Spotify Wrapped every year, I would imagine.

So my disappointment in the book is very personal. Spaceships Over Glasgow reads like a long prelude that should culminate in a substance abuse intervention followed by reflections on the music and the process that went into making it over several decades.

But we never get there. Instead, it’s a detailed chronology of a misspent youth, and a long list of drunken performances and borderline behavior, most of which is excused with a nod, a wink, and an appeal to certain brand of Scotsness.

The early chapters are more interesting, mostly as a chronicle of the UK post-punk scene of the mid 1980s, and, more specifically, as they contain some brief insight into how and why he was drawn specifically to extraordinarily loud music, to sonic experiences that could be literally felt as well as heard. But it really stops traveling that road very early.

The second half–which should be the most interesting, as the band slowly and somewhat shockingly begins to succeed, and as they explore and ultimately destroy a decently long series of artistic collaborations. Instead, it’s somewhat numbing: there are only so many times you can read, So we got pissing drunk and somehow pulled off a great show. We really were horrible.

And, finally, we have Dessa.

Dessa is a hip hop artist/singer/songwriter and founding member of the Doomtree Collective, a Minneapolis based artist community/record label/performance troupe. Dessa’s popular peak was probably a single on one of the re-imagining Hamilton albums, singing Congratulations on The Hamilton Mixtape, and her first solo album, A Badly Broken Code, is absolutely fantastic.

In 2018, she released My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love.

And, for me, it is by far the best of these memoirs and really the only one I can wholeheartedly recommend.

She is very smart, very wry, and very insightful as she reflects on what it takes to found and maintain artistic community, on the travails of touring, and perhaps most of all, on what it means to love and be loved, and what happens when that love isn’t entirely healthy, yet you still crave it.

Doing this led her to pursue research in neurobiology, working with a leading scientist in the field to map her emotions to the physical/electrical workings of her brain; it led her to leave and then rejoin the touring company of Doomtree; it led her to doubt and the rebuild her sense of herself as an artist. And through it all, she is unflinching, recognizing the impacts of her family of origin on her later emotional states as well as the issues that are uniquely a product of her own experience.

Of the three, Dessa is probably the least influential artist, the one most likely to be lost to history (she and Mogwai clearly are dwarfed by the immense shadow of Ms. Cicely; that said, Mogwai is an important figure in the founding and continued progression of a minorly significant genre); yet she is the best writer, and the most willing to engage with questions at the core of an artist and their creative process and output.

Throw in a painfully honest examination of the role of love and passion in those movements, and My Own Devices is a compelling read, end to end.

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Reading Well: The Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett

Robert Jackson Bennett‘s Founders Trilogy begins with Foundryside (2018), continues with Shorefall (2020), and concludes with Locklands (2022).

This is rollicking ride of a trilogy, animated chiefly by well drawn characters and a very intelligent twist on the question of how does magic work, anyway? In this world, the answer revolves around a practice of scrivening, which inscribes functional runes–not dissimilar to lines of computer code–onto objects that change their relationship to the laws of the physical world. Meaning, if I inscribe two objects with runes that believe they are next to each other, and activate one of them when the objects are far apart, that object will rush with all speed towards the other, with predictable effects.

Different manipulations of reality take different levels of complexity of scrivening: changing the amount of light an object reflects is relatively simple; getting a falling object to ignore gravity is incredibly complex.

But the trilogy really centers around its somewhat ragged band of heroes, and while some of the relationships are, like so much contemporary fiction, overly determined, there is a lot of nuance for many others. And beneath the page-turning nature of the series are explorations of all sorts of relationships: generational, parental, a wide variety of personal and sexual attraction, and, perhaps overall, wrestling with the myriad answers to the question of just how do I navigate my choices about who I want to be in the world. At the end of the day, I believe, that is the real-world implication of “the hero’s journey.”

Most entertaining of all for a reader, there is a deliciously creepy antagonist for much of the series, a true wow, I hope they film that scene type of bad guy.

The plot spans multiple genres: heist, political intrigue, classic fantasy adventuring, love triangles (and other shapes as well).

It’s a very smart series, very recommended as change of pace, hovering quite comfortably somewhere between steampunk and fantasy.

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Reading Well: The Dreamblood Duology by N.K. Jemisin

The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun (both 2012) form a bridge between Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy and the magnificent Broken Earth series.

I mean that not in terms of its content or setting or characters, but more in how it displays a writer coming into her powers. I have a sense that these two books are a little underappreciated. I enjoyed them immensely, finding them imaginative, visually striking, and emotionally powerful.

The duology is set in a magical society inspired strongly by a reimagination of Egyptian life and cosmology. This is a source of inspiration that is so often disappointing, but in Jemisin’s hands it absolutely glows, especially in her use of dreams as an accessible realm parallel to mundane reality. Note that this is a reimagination, not a recreation: there is no Osiris myth at play, no actual pyramids of Giza, but some wrestling with ancient Egypt clearly lives at the inspirational core of the work.

The hero is flawed, and the ethical challenges strewn throughout the novel are complicated and multifaceted, all it’s all wrapped around a murder mystery draped in the intrigue of a high court and a nation on the brink of both civil and external war. It’s a lot, and while parts of the plot run briefly out of control, overall the novels deliver in a striking, memorable way.

Recommended.

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An Update on the Reading Well

I miss having a semi-current log of what I’ve read and what I’m reading. So I’m going to try to get back on the horse with Reading Well.

It may take a while to catch back up.

I know this is a bit of an anachronism, a throwback to the days when blogs were things and you could actually find information on the internet independent of its infinite marketplaces. But I also have no illusions: this is an autobiographical record, terribly unlikely to be of interest to anyone else. These are certainly not reviews, per se–they lack the length and the specificity, and I try to write them without spoilers (or even, you know, character names) as much as possible.

So that makes them, I would guess, less useful for friends and family (and anyone else) that may stumble across them.

I’m OK with that and, in fact, one of the clear outcomes of wanting to start it back up again (and catch up with the backlog) is putting even less of high bar on them, less of a need to revise and polish.

So, we’ll see. But I would expect something to land every couple of weeks, and that would mean catching up to what I’m currently reading perhaps by year’s end.

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Reading Well: The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman

Christopher Buehlman‘s The Blacktongue Thief (2021) is, simply, the best swashbuckling fantasy novel I’ve read in years.

In some ways, that’s it: perhaps Reading Well should move to being one sentence reviews.

The protagonist lives right in the middle of the genre: a smart-talking, street smart, vagabond thief on the run, complete with Daddy issues and a love interest. The story is set in a world recovering from a long and bloody war that has decimated the populations of several cultures. The “bad guys” are a race of goblins, and while, yeah, they tend to eat the humans, they are also drawn with some depth and sensitivity.

Lovely swashbuckling epic. Great protagonist, deep world building. Best pure fantasy read in quite a while, and one where I truly hope the author decides to extend the story. Currently, there is a prequel set for release in 2024, but no word on a continuation of the characters from The Blacktongue Thief itself.

Highly recommended.

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Reading Well: Illuminations by Alan Moore

I was so excited for a new collection of short stories by Alan Moore

Some background may be useful: Moore was a relatively significant figure in my academic work for a few reasons. First, the formal structure of graphic narrative–comics–is an interesting one to me and Moore is a dominant figure in the field in the late 20th century. Second, his occult practices are of interest as well. Moore essentially decided that he wanted to make a run at experiencing this religion thing, and somewhat arbitrarily chose an early Greco-Roman snake goddess, and had (and presumably is still having) a fascinating relationship with 20th century neo paganism. Whatever one takes away from his experiential claim, the notion that the act of devotion matters more than the object of devotion is a good question to ponder.

All that to the side, when Moore nails something, he’s also a truly gifted writer. Illuminations (2022) has some examples of that: Hypothetical Lizard (which also exists in a graphic novel form), Cold Reading, and Location, Location, Location are great: smart, spooky, taut, and evocative.

And then comes What We Can Know About Thunderman. 240 pages of inside joke fiction set in the the comic book industry of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I would assume it was cathartic for Moore to write, and that, if that kind of long-form parody is your thing (or if you know the people being caricatured), is probably amusing. But it is also awfully self-indulgent, and, along with a few of the other pieces, makes the whole collection feel very lightweight.

So, ultimately, disappointing. Some jewels for the completist in you, but otherwise, skippable in the Moore canon.

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Reading Well: A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

You would think a fantasy/ steampunk detective story with multiple strong female leads set in an alternate history where Cairo is the most powerful city in the world in the early 20th century would be right up my alley.

Somehow, though, P. Djélì Clark‘s A Master of Djinn (2021), falls short for me. It’s a great premise: in the late 20th century, an opening between our world and that of various magical forces (most notably, Djinn) was created, propelling Egypt into prominence as the most technologically advanced nation in the world, with the British empire fading, and both the European powers and the United States scrambling to find ways to compete.

The protagonists work for an arm of the Egyptian government tasked with investigating and managing magical phenomena, and the plot centers around the sudden appearance of someone who seems able to control and manipulate the Djinn to their own ends.

Clark’s Cairo is well described, especially in how they navigate the overlap of the daily practice of Islam and Middle Eastern mythology made real. But it also falls short, for me, of ever truly evoking the country or the city. In some ways, while N.K Jemisin‘s The Killing Moon (which I just realized I have not written up yet, whoops, adding it to the list) is far more fantastical and bears far less direct resemblance to 20th century Egypt, it also feels more deeply Egyptian. Part of this may reflect on Clark’s use of near-caricatures for the non-Egyptian characters. On the one hand, sure, turnabout is fair play and all that; on the other, it feels like we’ve moved beyond that to a place that demands that, if one group is presented with a certain realistic richness, all should meet that same level.

Clearly, this is a very subjective reaction. The whodunnit side of A Master of Djinn works well, and the various plot twists are handled well, without telegraphing the final turns too overtly. There are at least one more book in the series.

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Reading Well: An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

2017’s An Unkindness of Ghosts is my first foray into Rivers Solomon‘s work. It is a story of resistance against oppression, explicitly seen through the dual lenses of class and race, all set on a ship hurtling through space on what is often termed a “generation ship” in the genre. The name derives from understanding that, if space travel is performed at speeds below the speed of light, the journeys will take centuries, spanning generations and creating an environment where various cultural practices may take form in surprising ways.

The voyage of the Matilda is not a happy one: very stark divisions along both class and racial lines are enforced on the ship, with a nearly omnipotent leader figure at the top. Life on the lower decks is brutal, and the available strategies of resistance are often limited. Solomon’s use of different linguistic styles among the various decks/class levels is very smart and very well done, a constant reminder of the way language and privilege are related.

The protagonist is queer and neurodivergent, and Solomon’s decision to foreground their modes of perception may be key to your enjoyment of the novel. I found them incredibly compelling, and found Solomon’s ability to present their challenges responding to indirect communication, their struggles with interpersonal relationships in general, and their complicated relationship with their duties and abilities as a healer all quite impressive, making the narrative constantly engaging and, perhaps more importantly, serving as an active disruption of a lot of classic science fiction tropes.

My guess is those three paragraphs have you squarely intrigued or you’ve already moved on. If you’re still here, you’ll be interested, and probably enjoy, An Unkindness of Ghosts.

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Reading Well: Black Water Sister by Zen Cho

Zen Cho‘s Black Water Sister (2021) does three things exceptionally well.

First, it captures a contemporary young, female protagonist with care, detail, and empathy. Born in Malaysia, but raised in the United States, she has now returned to Malaysia with her parents, and is a bit lost, both in ways somewhat generic to people in their early 20’s facing the overwhelming challenge of answering the question what will I do with my life? and in ways related to returning to a culture that is familiar and foreign at the same time.

Second, there is Malaysia itself. This is not a novel where you’ll learn about the country’s history or the complicated weave of its current politics. But it is full of small details–language, landscapes, lingo, and the like–that thoroughly ground the narrative in a thickly realized setting.

Finally, it does all this in the context of a good old-fashioned possession/ ghost story spanning multiple generations of a family. The first two points impact this as well–the protagonist is skeptical in a nicely modern way, and the “ghost” is decidedly Malaysian.

The 21st century is a particularly challenging setting for novels: incorporating the ubiquitous nature of technology while maintaining narrative momentum and interest is difficult, and Cho does an excellent job at navigating this: there is a long-distance relationship mediated over Facetime, the constant use of Google to answer questions about what is really happening, etc., all done without allowing the writing to slip into a series of text exchanges or search results.

Overall, the novel is engaging and entertaining. Recommended, especially if you are interested in a small dose of insight into what contemporary Malaysia might be like.

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