Reading Well: In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster

Posted on February 21, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Dystopian novels are relatively common; literary dystopian novels, not so much. In the Country of Last Things (1987) by Paul Auster certainly qualifies. A single, long letter, In the Country of Last Things tells the story a woman who flees the safe confines of her homeland in search of her brother, who has gone on a journalistic assignment into a destroyed hellscape of a city.

The cause of the urban woes is never quite clear, but the devastation is familiar to the genre: there is no food, no work, no infrastructure, and the struggle to live overwhelms all else. Our protagonist struggles to adjust, falls in love two–maybe, three–times, and manages to survive, all the while adding layer on top of layer of our understanding of the difficulties of life in the city.

I have not read other books by Auster, so I don’t know if he has a consistently unique voice, or if it one he adopted for this novel: in either case, you will quickly know if it is, as they say, your cup of tea. The sentences and the ideas they convey are complex, yet direct, and the literary skill is enjoyable.

There is nothing new here in terms of the genre, but it’s a quick read, and some of the images will stay with you long after you read it.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Be this literate without drifting into pretentiousness. I’m not very comfortable with me “literary voice,” and I think that is a challenge I need to figure out.

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Reading Well: Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

Posted on February 12, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Billed as a “space opera,” Iain M. Banks‘ Consider Phlebas (1987) is quite a bit more than that. It certainly checks the requisite boxes–an intergalactic war involving almost incomprehensibly powerful technology (and explanations for the same that sure sound scientific), alien races that range from humanoid to highly mysterious, high-octane action scenes with spaceships in hot pursuit, interludes that would be comedic if they didn’t place the protagonist in such extreme peril. But there is also an intelligence and a depth of character and an ending that remains satisfying, despite it’s subtle movements against genre.

Two specifics that raise the book above the norm: first, the general conflict is intelligently articulated. On one side is a race ordained by their Gods to rule all they encounter, a good old-fashioned imperial hegemony; on the other is a massive and loose affiliation of worlds known as The Culture, whose primary mark is a trust in technology as a means to free sentient beings to pursue pleasure and the arts. It’s deftly done, and even the side of the protagonist is a bit of a surprise, but well thought out and consistently presented.

Second, towards the end of the book, the characters overwhelm the plot; that is, you end up caring less about what happens, and more about who it happens to, and as more fringe characters move towards the center of the resolution, the book ends with a deeper emotional resonance than could be expected.

It’s not a short book, but it’s an enjoyable and fast read, and is recommended to the point where I will probably look into other works by Banks in the not so distant future.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

There is a fantastic confidence in Banks’ writing, a sense of authority that helps immediately to build trust between reader and author. In stories that stretch credulity–as all good science fiction/fantasy should–that is a key element in the reader holding their judgement in abeyance long enough for the story to seduce them.

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Reading Well: The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The Steel Remains (2010) by Richard K. Morgan is very much a 21st century book, but for all the commentary about how it turns the genre on its head, it is actually a very traditional fantasy novel–especially as an initial foray into a world designed to hold sequels. Yes, the characters curse a lot and, yes, the protagonist is unabashedly and explicitly gay. But aside from that, what is best about the book is the competence and creativity with which familiar genre terrain is navigated.

Our hero is past his peak: several years ago he won the day at a famous battle, turning the tide of the most recent great war, but he now lives off his reputation, and has grown a little thicker around the middle, a little slower with the blade. When his mother summons him to find a relative of the family who has been sold into slavery, he answers, and the game is on!

There are two other story lines that merge with his, both centering on people he knew before, one a warlord from the northern wastes, the other the only (perhaps) remaining member of her race on this planet. The latter opens up some interesting dynamics: the world is set to hold both magic and science, and contains people at very different points of understanding and interpretation, from an institutionalized church that is turning towards hard-line orthodoxy to a race that is able to move in and out of spacetime at will (they cannot go backwards in time, but they can enter a place where it moves so slowly as to be as good as standing still).

It’s sword and sorcery with a little science, and if it feels at times like a novelization of a Fall From Heaven game gone out of control, that is, actually, a good thing (FFH is a great dark fantasy game based on the Civilization series). The three main characters are all deftly sketched and differentiated, and are all sympathetic enough that different readers will have different favorites, with good reasons for each.

The book quickly settles into a nice rhythm, alternating among the storylines until the very end, and I kept caring whether characters thrived or not, and kept turning the pages to find out. It’s a better book than that, even: of all the first novels in a series I’ve written about over the past year or so, it is the only one where I immediately ordered volume two.

#WhatIWishedICouldDo

Morgan does a very good job at dropping us into a thickly considered world. There is a history here, mostly political and/or warfare related, and that poses a challenge: how do you realize that history without lecturing? How do you have characters reference a massive conflict without diving deeply into it? Morgan does this very well, enriching the current story and whetting the readers appetite for both what is to come in this world as well as what precedes these events.

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Reading Well: Uproot by Jace Clayton

Posted on January 25, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Jace Clayton, better known to some as DJ Rupture, used to host a radio show called Mudd Up! on WFMU in New York. Clayton makes my musical taste look downright provincial, and Mudd Up! introduced me to pockets of world music and microgenres and fusions of sounds from all corners of the globe that I can’t imagine having discovered otherwise. Not all of it was good, but almost all of it was interesting, some of it was challenging, and it always contained unexpected moments of pleasure.

Since shuttering that show, Clayton has done some performing, some composing, and, in 2016, released his first book, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture. If the topics interest you, this is a must-read, a fascinating set of reflections on the rise of digital music by someone whose entire professional life has been spent at the center of its borders.

That turn of phrase is intentional: Clayton’s musical passion focuses on music from isolated villages in Saharan Africa, from bustling urban enclaves in Cairo, from youth-organized daytime raves in Mexico City. What makes the book special, though, is that the breadth of musical insight is matched with intelligent and insightful reflections on the impact of digital distribution and production of music in a global context. So, the focus of the explorations into Berber music center around the gendered use of autotune within traditional musical forms; his analysis of the dominant tools in use by DJ’s not only recognize how software–the open source utopian savior of the arts to many–actually limits and determines your artistic choices.

Clayton’s music (both his own and that which he loves) moves around the globe through quasi-legal filesharing sites, through cell phone transfers, through bluetooth swaps in taxicabs. And he’s very aware of the complexity of the situation, from the simultaneous democratization of the tools of production and the increasing control of the flow of profit away from the artists to the ways in which advanced technology can hide a lack of talent as easily as it can be a tool used elegantly in talent’s service.

Enough. If any of this interests you, this book is absolutely, enthusiastically recommended. I’m off to chase down a copy of the software he created as part of his explorations, Sufi Plug-Ins.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Write for a popular audience. My academic training is in a niche area, my fiction is aimed at entertainment, not education. I think it must be cool to write something that you think is smart and that you know others will read, and learn about the world in doing so.

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Reading Well: The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor

Posted on January 17, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Nnedi Okorafor is an important figure in science fiction. She is working to create not just science fiction by an African writer, but an African science fiction. That’s a huge, complex, messy, inaccurate, and unfair statement, and has far more to it than I can unpack in a Reading Well post, but it’s very much part of Okorafor’s context. (For what it’s worth, I don’t know how she sees or positions herself.)

The Book of Phoenix (2015) tells the story of Phoenix and her struggles against the forces that created her. She is a SpeciMan, created to be a weapon through various forms of genetic engineering by a military-industrial complex that controls North America. With the help of some allies, Phoenix escapes her confinement: the rest of the book details her flight and her escalating resistance against her creators.

There is a framing device, set even further in the future, so we are really doubly -displaced: first, to that very far-flung and desolate future and then to the Phoenix’s time. It’s an entertaining and creative read, and the relationships between the main characters–two of whom are love interests for Phoenix, one of whom is not–ring true and deep.

Throughout, Okorafor muses on the contrast between what she presents as a pan-African perspective and an American one, and while some of those details may be heavy-handed, most are intelligent and creative, and Phoenix herself is a compelling figure, full of fury and passion and insight.

The Book of Phoenix is not a classic, but it is part of an important project; if that interests you, the book will as well.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The Book of Phoenix is a short book, and I think Okorafor is very smart about how deeply she dives into world-building throughout it. There is enough for the world to feel real, but little is explained that is not immediately relevant to the plot or the characters. That brevity and focus is a model I could do well to emulate.

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Reading Well: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

Posted on January 8, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Scott Lynch‘s The Lies of Locke Lamora (2013) surprised me. The mixture of world-building, long con game, and more traditional inverted-hero plot takes a while to get going, but once it does, the book is a very fast, very engaging read.

The inverted-hero trope is met through Locke Lamora himself, a preternaturally gifted thief and con man operating in the underground of the city of Camorr. The novel moves around in time quite a bit, from Locke’s youth as an apprentice-thief to (some of) the initial adventures of five young thieves known as The Gentleman Bastards to the dominant plot, which involves a brutal attempt to gain control of Camorr’s underground by a mysterious figure known as The Grey King.

Camorr and the surrounding lands are clearly intended to hold more stories, and are filled with both backstory and mystery, and if some of the touches are a bit over the top (ritual shark fighting from floating logs, anyone?), it’s all energetically and richly done.

The story just increases in momentum and interest as you move through it: if you are moderately intrigued by the first 100 pages, you will be fully hooked for the last 100 (and the 500 in between–it is a quick read, but not a short book).

I don’t know that I will return to Camorr, but the time spent there was worthwhile, and a TV or movie or video game franchise is certainly possible.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Just go for it. It feels like Lynch has a deep affection for things, and then just finds a way to fold them into his fiction–from sharks to long cons to the way cities in early Dungeons & Dragons type games were a connected series of distinctly flavored neighborhoods, each with its own challenges and themes. There is something energetic and enjoyable in reading about things someone else loves.

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Reading Well: The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

Posted on December 30, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Until I began reading The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), I didn’t realize how familiar I was with the author. Here listed as M. R. Carey, it’s the same Mike Carey who wrote one of the greatest comic book arcs in recent memory, Lucifer, as well as a 40 issue run on Hellblazer.

If that turns you off, stop and pretend you don’t know it: The Girl with All the Gifts is an engrossing thriller, a page-turner to the very end, and a book that takes some familiar tropes–teens coming of age, vampires, post-apocalyptic settings–and turns them on their heads.

Most importantly, the characters are compelling: from the young protagonist to her adult adversaries and protectors, they are well sketched and their motivations are far richer than often occurs in the genre. Additionally, the science is intriguing, and the plot is propulsive. This isn’t great literature, but it’s highly enjoyable, and his take on vampires (vampires with a slight zombie component, even) is inventive.

One minor quibble: writing for comics trains one to climax and denouement very, very quickly (often in the space of a few panels, let alone pages). For me, The Girl with All the Gifts ends far too rapidly, but the mechanics of the end remain quite satisfying nonetheless.

And, one intriguing note: Carey worked on the novel at the same time as he worked on the screenplay (the film came out to generally positive reviews earlier this year, I have not seen it), and they diverged as part of that creative process. I find that fascinating.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Mix the action/adventure with the character study while not losing the strength of each. The pacing is quick and the page-turning quotient is very high, but the characters remain real, and even the ones that are “bad guys” (or indeterminate gals) have clearly coherent motivations.

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Reading Well: Lilith’s Brood by Octavia Butler

Posted on December 20, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Octavia Butler‘s Lilith’s Brood is the best “hard” science fiction I’ve read since The Sparrow.

It’s actually a trilogy of short novels (maybe even novellas)–Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)–that were collected under the title Xenogenesis (1989) and then republished as Lilith’s Brood in 2000.

The novel/s revolve/s around the encounters between humanity and an alien race, the Oankali. Earth has been ravaged by an incredibly destructive war, and the survivors are either isolated in very remote places or are with the Oankali as something between prisoners and guests. The aliens, a tri-gendered race who survive by searching out new races and exchanging genetic material with them, vary drastically in appearance and create an intense revulsion in humans, at least initially.

Humanity holds a special attraction for them due to the presence of cancer, a seductively intriguing condition for a race that is able to modify genetic structures at will. Humans that live and mate with Oankali are made genetically perfect: disease-free, strong, etc., but many elect instead to resist the presence of the aliens, sometimes violently. Most of those that live outside the presence of the Oankali are sterilized, which contributes both to the resistance and to the draw of integrating with Oankali family groups.

The books trace out conflicts around sexual rights, freedom, and the line where true understanding across the species barrier remains impossible. The first book is the story of Lilith Iyapo, a human tasked by the Oankali with starting the resettlement of Earth; the second follows one of her children, an Oankli-human mix known as a construct; and the third, a next-generation construct who is the first to possess the full range of Oankali genetic skills.

I called this “hard” science fiction, but don’t be put off: the books are character-driven and almost lyrical. This is Butler writing near the height of her considerable powers, and the intelligence and scope of consideration she gives to the various points of view and challenges embedded in the setting is fantastic. Oankali culture is shown with clarity and sympathy, which is truly the mark of mastery in books about aliens.

Brilliantly, she also sums up the essential conflict of humanity as being the poor luck to be a species that is both highly intelligent and highly hierarchical, a combination the Oankali rarely see. That’s an insight worth reflecting on.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Butler’s restraint in showing Oankali perspectives and culture is fantastic: by focusing on a small handful of issues, she is able to make the aliens understandable and sympathetic. I think the temptation is to delve into all, or nearly all, of the corners of an alien culture, and doing so may often make it harder for the reader to really gain the level of desired insight.

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@TheMovies with PopPop: Theeb

Posted on December 10, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Theeb (Arabic for wolf) is a 2014 Jordanian movie directed by Naji Abu Nomar that won various awards and was a 2015 Oscar nominee for best foreign film.

It’s set in the Mideastern theatre of WWI, with the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire (Lawrence, anyone?) as the background.

A Bedouin boy, Theeb, is the youngest of three sons of a nomadic desert family, who in the past, earned their livelihoods as “pilgrim guides,” folks who would guide people on the Haj across their stretch of desert to Medina, knowing where the various wells and oases were. The war and the new railroad have almost eliminated their livelihood. The father has recently died, and the oldest brother is now head of the family, with Hussein, the middle son perhaps in his early 20’s, and Theeb a pre-adolescent – all deeply rooted to their way of life, knowledgeable about the geography of their area, and bound by codes of hospitality and service to fellow clans.

One evening an Arab and a young blond Englishman (Lawrence, anyone?) appear at their camp and request to be guided across their stretch of desert to the next set of wells. Though somewhat reluctantly, given the war, the Ottomans, and the Arab revolt against them, they agree. Hussein is to be the guide. When they set off, Theeb trails behind – and eventually, as the Englishman insists they don’t have time to go back with him, accompanies them.

Things get complicated – the well to which they were guiding them is now poisoned by the blood of some of the men they were to meet, and as they reach the next well, they are attacked by a group of former “pilgrim guides” who are now allied with the Ottomans. The Englishman, his Arab companion and Hussein are all killed. Theeb survives and shows skill and cunning beyond his years to survive, eventually meeting the badly wounded former “pilgrim guide” who had been part of the group who had attacked them and killed Hussein and the others.

Theeb and the wounded man stay together and get to the railroad station where the man sells the goods he took from the Englishman to the Ottoman lieutenant. And the story reaches its conclusion…

In some ways a coming-of-age tale; in others a revenge story, and in a sense a desert western — a couple of absorbing hours, with Arab hospitality, lots of camel riding, cleverness, and transport to one of those wonderfully different worlds. Well worth seeing.

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Reading Well: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling

Posted on December 5, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The latest (final?) installment of the Harry Potter saga is a play, rather than a novel: J.K. Rowling‘s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016) is in production in London and will  be, well, potentially forever I suppose. Probably a decent last-longer bet between it and Hamilton in there somewhere.

The play involves both our familiar cast of characters and their offspring, most notably the sons of Draco Malfoy (Scorpius) and Harry Potter himself (Albus).

The stagecraft required to put on this play is stunning: scenes switch very quickly, and with full magical intent. At a minimum, that should be interesting to watch, assuming there is an inevitable broadcast of the production at some point. Dramatically, it’s fine: the lines between good and evil are, as in the books, simultaneously crystal clear and a little bit muddied for at least a key character or two, and the central tropes of the misery and challenges and intense triumphs of adolescence are all on show, with the stakes predictably higher than those at your local high school.

It really falls into one of two buckets for most folks: either, no matter what, you will read it and, if the opportunity presents itself, go see it in person; or, you will remain bewildered over what, exactly, all the fuss is about.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Um … write a series of books that are arguably the most influential contemporary literature in at least a century? Become rich enough to write plays that contain insanely difficult stage directions with no fear of being edited? Yeah, of course. All of that.

Also, just write a play. I think playwriting is the most difficult literary form–even more so than poetry for me. So I would have to have a thriving artistic career to even try it “for real.”

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