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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@TheMovies with PopPop: Mustang

Posted on November 29, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Mustang is a 2015 Turkish (Turkish-French production) movie directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven. It’s a movie that combines an almost fairy tale like story with the very serious issues of young women coming of age and the struggles with modernization in traditional societies.

The film, in Turkish with English subtitles and nominated for several film awards and the winner of a few, is set in more or less current time in a remote town in northern Turkey. Five young women, ages perhaps 10-16, sisters and cousins, are being raised by their grandmother in the house of one of their uncles/fathers. While unclear – to me – how many are his daughters, whether the others are the children of one or more of his brothers, whether one or more brothers have died, or what happened to the mothers, what is clear is that the 5 of them have formed a close knit tight pack, loving, teasing, sharing with each other; clearly differentiated in various ways, but a quite happy pack of young women.

The fairy tale aspect is that some of the young women have now reached, and others are reaching, the age of serious interest in young men, and the grandmother and uncle have increasingly become concerned about protecting their honor – only virgins are marriageable, certified by a doctor as necessary. So a struggle ensues where the house is slowly transformed into a fortress and the girls find ever more clever ways of getting out. After a few quite wonderful and comedic scenes, including a mass escape to attend a soccer match to which as a result of previous violence at a match, men have been barred and therefore all the local women can go, a new strategy is put into place by the grandmother and uncle of marrying them off. Things escalate, get complicated, some quite serious notes are introduced, and things end varyingly, from happily to tragically, from enthusiastic to dismal marriages, and with the two youngest attempting a final escape.

Of the five young women, only one had prior acting experience. They form a delightful ensemble. The scenes and strategies of the old women of the town are also quite special. The uncle of course is an ambiguous character.

The film transcends the narrowness of its setting and is universally recognizable, with situations and settings applicable everywhere from the least to the most traditional settings.

It’s not a great movie, but a very good one, that will make you laugh, make you angry, and mainly engage you.

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Reading Well: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Posted on November 23, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Not only am I pretty late to the Elena Ferrante party, works like My Brilliant Friend (2012)–that is, what is considered “serious” contemporary literature, stuff that is positively reviewed in major newspapers and the like–rarely finds its way onto my reading pile. I don’t have much to add to the wealth of material on this book, the first of Ferrante’s four volume Neapolitan series.

The most successful element of the book is the central friendship between Elena and Raffaella (or, as they are more usually referred to, Lenù and Lila), which is traced in My Brilliant Friend from when they were very young girls well into their teenage years (which, in Naples in the middle of the 20th century includes marriage for one of them). The two are well matched, but follow separate trajectories–one using their academic success as a vehicle to escape the small neighborhood that rings their lives, the other embarking on a more traditional arc of marriage, albeit to what amounts, within that context, to a transgressive choice of partner.

Transgression is a central theme of the book: Lenù spectacularly exceeds the academic expectations of young women of her time and place, allowing her to literally exit from the neighborhood to pursue higher education; Lila who, if anything, was even more intellectually gifted, picks and chooses her moments to move beyond the expectations of those around her. These scenes, which range from trips into dark cellars to the production of a self-designed line of footwear to the constant negotiation of the changing political landscape of their few blocks on the outskirts of Naples, are portrayed with a direct touch that manages to never overstate their objective importance while retaining their primacy for the characters involved.

The key question is whether the friendship is sufficient: for many, the honesty and clarity with which the intense, somewhat obsessive nature of youthful friendships (and, perhaps, specifically young, female friendship) will carry the book through its entirety.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Other than be spectacularly successful and generate a global buzz in the pursuit of uncovering my true identity? There is an honesty to Ferrante’s writing that is to be emulated: this is, I believe, what allows the book to simultaneously present the events from the perspectives of children and young adults and to never feel juvenile, to never lose a sense of sophistication in its world-building.

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Reading Well: Supernova: The Knight, The Princess, and the Falling Star by Dewi Lestari

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

Supernova (2001) by Dewi Lestari came to my attention via an article I cannot find now that talked about the global diversity of contemporary science fiction–Lestari is Indonesian, and the book is firmly set there. The subtitle was added for later editions to differentiate it from other related novels and, somewhere along the line, the author began to be referred to as Dee, not Dewi.

There are several intertwined stories in the book, most notably the interplay of the characters of the main story and two fictional authors who are collaborating in writing that story. One of the authors (they are a male couple) is a psuedo-philosopher, and the book is clearly an attempt to play with loose concepts drawn from quantum physics and postmodern philosophy.

It’s a bit scattered, and unfortunately Lestari discards the character I was most invested in following about halfway through for others who are more clearly symbolic representations of ideals instead of flesh and blood creatures of fiction.

I may suffer from too much familiarity (many of these notions were relatively central to my thesis), and people new to notions of quantum entanglement) or post-Foucauldian analyses of the way relationships intertwine may find this a reasonable introduction to those concepts. Lestari has a nice touch with humor, and the lighter moments of the book are the most successful.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I am pretty enamored, and quite familiar, with of a lot of the ideas that the fictional authors discuss in Supernova. It would be neat to weave those into my own writing, for sure.

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Reading Well: Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman

Posted on October 28, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I don’t understand how I’ve never encountered Ellen Ullman‘s writing before: she writes elegantly and intelligently about the role of technology–and specifically software and software development–in our world. Close to the Machine (1997) talks about her career as a (female, no less) programmer in Silicon Valley during the very early days of the information revolution.

The first half of the book should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand what it means to create software or trying to think through what the implications of that particularly peculiar industry are for the rest of the world. It’s that good, and Ullman is unflinching as she wrestles with her own political disconnects and with what the implications are of creating tools that all too often and all too easily lose sight of their users.

She loses some steam in her second half, when the book becomes more of a personal memoir, but the writing remains confident and skillful. She has written two novels, and I will be reading one of them (The Bug, which looks to explore some of the same concerns) at some point in the next months. But it is her technical commentary and insight that had me as excited as I read it as anything I’ve picked up over the past few years.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I don’t see my life as being memoir-worthy. And yet what is remarkable about this book is her insight and her observations, not the particular accomplishments. Sometimes, I wish I could frame my own insights in ways that felt like they could explicitly stand alone, instead of reflecting into the world through fiction. But usually, I just wish I could write more fiction.

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@TheMovies with PopPop: East Side Sushi

Posted on October 22, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

East Side Sushi, a 2014 film directed by Anthony Lucero, is a delightful cross-cultural fairy tale. Set in LA, Mexican-American single Mom Juana and her young daughter Lydia, share a household with her father. Working hard at various low paying jobs – the father mainly in a dry goods store, and she in various restaurants, as a sports club janitor, etc., they barely make ends meet, while focused on Lydia, a sweet, bright pre-teen, having a “better” life, starting with her attending a private school.

Each day, mixed in with all these jobs and a pre-dawn to after dark schedule, they also sell fresh fruit from a hand cart. The father is getting older and weaker, and after a robbery of the cart’s proceeds at the end of a busy day and Juana getting knocked unconscious, she decides she needs a different path. Over the years, she has developed remarkable knife skills (to accompany the dish washing and cleaning skills!), and so when she passes a mid-scale sushi restaurant with a help wanted sign in the window, she applies for the assistant to the chefs (dishwasher, clean-up person and whatever other tasks she’s asked to do), and despite the Japanese owners’ concerns about hiring a non-Japanese who’s never tasted, let alone worked in a sushi restaurant (can’t even use chopsticks), gets the job.

Over time, she’s asked to do more and more, from checking the fish for freshness to preparing them for the sushi chefs, to even making rolls (of course, invisibly in the back when they’re shorthanded), gets better and better at it, develops a friendship with the head sushi chef and, of course, remains unacceptable to the very traditional Japanese owner. And in a fit of pique at not being allowed to work up front at the sushi bar – after all she’s not only non-Japanese, but a woman — she quits.

In the meantime, she has entered the TV reality competition for Sushi Champions – requiring along with execution of traditional sushi items and rolls, a unique chef’s creation, which of course integrates Mexican ingredients with the traditional roll shapes and tastes – and is invited as one of four finalists to the live competition.

From there the rest is predictable, albeit with a couple of cute twists.

The film is delightful in a straight forward feel good way, is well done, and both sad and funny where it should be. Mainly in English with some subtitled dialogue between Juana and her father, an occasionally a few sentences of Japanese among the restaurant staff.

See it – you’ll enjoy it, perhaps choke up a bit, and mainly smile.

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Reading Well: Children of God by Mary Doria Russell

Posted on October 17, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Children of God (1998) is Mary Doria Russell‘s sequel to The Sparrow, which I adored and wrote about here. The structure remains similar: chapters alternate back and forth in time, with the novel as a whole closing in on an endpoint from both sides. This carries the same challenges it did the first time around, as plot elements are necessarily revealed before their dramatic moments have fully played out.

But, again, she makes it work. Emilio Sandoz’ story remains compelling, and his return to Rakhat rounds out his story in moving, surprising, and emotionally resonant ways. The book remains strongest for me when centered on Sandoz himself: he’s a great character, whose suffering and determination and intelligence shine brilliantly. As a reader, I care about him as a character, and his all-too-brief moments of happiness remain memorable long after those scenes pass.

Perhaps most impressively, most of the activity from The Sparrow is more fully explained here, and the characters lose none of their depth through that process. That’s remarkable: misunderstandings and errors in communication are central in building tension in most fiction, to unwind those and still retain a dramatic narrative is an act of great skill.

I do think The Sparrow is the better novel; but if you enjoyed that, you will certainly enjoy this.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I forgot to do this section when I reviewed The Sparrow, so this covers both of them. Doria Russell is clearly working through big issues: faith, free will, what God’s presence in a life may actually mean, things like that. But she never comes off as preachy or academic or theoretical: those questions are lived and explored through the activities, motivations, and interactions of her characters.

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Reading Well: Storm Front by Jim Butcher

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Published in 2000, Storm Front is the first installment of The Dresden Files, a series Jim Butcher has extended over a dozen books. The protagonist is Harry Dresden, a traditional hard-edged private investigator in contemporary (or, near contemporary) Chicago. It’s all very noir: gangsters and damsels in distress and beautiful women in all roles.

The twist? Dresden is a wizard, indeed one of the only remaining powerful magicians in the world. He works as a consultant to the Chicago police department, called in whenever crimes spill over into the supernatural. The plot sits at the intersections of many worlds: the supernatural and the mundane, the legal and the illicit; and there are double-crosses and a nicely climactic showdown with the Big Bad.

That about wraps it up: it’s a nicely plotted, well-paced mystery. But, with magic!

Dresden is a solid character, but there is almost nothing surprising about him and, more problematically, little complexity to any of the various women (all attractive, some hard-edged, others manipulative, a few pure of heart).

Butcher’s grasp of magic is nicely done: it’s consistent, and it reflects a nice understanding of traditional western elemental systems.

Still, especially as a break between more demanding reads, this was an enjoyable and engrossing read.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Plot and genre, naturally. The plot of Storm Front works: it is intricate without ever feeling forced. And, as I’ve written elsewhere, being able to so totally embrace a genre is really a freeing move for a writer, providing rails within which one can bounce around.

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