The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Narrated by George Guidall

This is the 1969 novel that won both the Hugo and the Nebula and made Ursula K. Le Guin’s reputation as a science fiction author. It asks a simple question--What if people were neither male nor female?--and a number of corollary questions, including What sort of society might that lead to?, and How would such individuals view us?

The setting is the planet Gethen, which was originally settled by humans who, for reasons long lost in the mists of time, decided to run a genetic experiment and create human beings who were neither male nor female. Gethenians are neuter most of the time, but every 26 days they briefly go into a state called kemmer, when they experience sexual desire and become either male or female, depending on who else is nearby in kemmer and how their kemmer is manifesting. At that point they are fertile and can either fertilize an egg or produce one and become pregnant.

The protagonist who sees all of this is Genly Ai, a lone emissary from a loose confederation of worlds called the Ekumen. Genly’s task is to convince the Gethenians to join the Ekumen--but he must do so without any show of military or technological might (because that would be coercive), and indeed without any companionship of his own kind at all, or any really convincing proof that the Ekumen actually exists. He’s completely on his own.

On Gethen he’s also considered a deviant, a perverted sort of freak, because he is always, by their lights, in kemmer. And he has a great deal of difficulty understanding Gethenians and their culture, because, as he says to the one friend he makes on that planet, he grew up in a society where one’s sex is, in many ways, the most important thing about a person, defining or strongly influencing what sort of person one is, one’s capabilities, one’s point of view, and even one’s ethics. On a planet where there is no gender and sex is fluid, persisting in thinking of neuter individuals as either male or female seriously handicaps Genly’s ability to get any real grasp on the culture, on whom to trust, on how people are actually reacting to him and how to influence that.

So, plenty of strikes against poor Genly, and of course things go south. Badly. Fortunately he has, in spite of himself, made one friend, though it takes him a very long time to realize it. The question is whether that will be enough--to save his life, and, more importantly, to accomplish his mission.

Le Guin does a lot of exploring in this book that may seem old hat to us now--and more that we still haven’t done much of yet in our culture. As with any science fiction book, it’s as fascinating a picture of the society the writer lived in at the time as of the society it depicts. With Le Guin’s keen and curious intellect behind it, it’s no wonder that this What If tale caught so many people’s imagination. It first caught mine when I was in my teens, and thirty-odd years later, it still doesn’t disappoint.

It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living by Dan Savage and Terry Miller: #tbt reviews

In response to a series of teen suicides in 2010, famed sex and relationship advice columnist Dan Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, put together this collection of open letters to LGBTQ+ teens to let them know that life really does get better after high school and to inspire them and give them courage to stick around, even in the face of bullying, and discover that for themselves.

After years of bullying, 15-year-old Justin Aalberg hanged himself in his bedroom in the summer of 2010. His suicide was followed by that of Billy Lucas, and others followed them. Dan Savage, a longtime advocate for queer rights, was painfully aware of these deaths and wished he could speak directly to young people being bullied everywhere, to let them know that it gets better if they can just manage to stick around long enough. 

Then it occurred to him that in the age of the Internet, he could speak directly to teens. He and his husband, Terry Miller, put together a video talking about that and posted it on YouTube, hoping to inspire perhaps 100 other queer adults to do the same. 

Their video went way beyond viral.

As of December 2011, over 10,000 people had made videos for the project: teens and adults in towns and cities across the world; celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres; and even President Obama. The book is a compilation of hundreds of these open letters: some transcriptions of the videos, some essays that have grown out of the videos, and some original material. The book also includes resources for queer youth and their parents, educators, and anybody who cares about them.

These are amazing stories, as individual as the people who wrote them. Each one is a celebration of life and a heartfelt plea to kids who are being bullied today to stick around long enough to learn for themselves that it does, in fact, get better.

Exception: some of the pieces, such as the one by President Obama, though they may be sincere, come across as overly polished and somewhat self-serving. The letters written by actual members of the LGBTQ+ community ring much more true and will mean more to LGBTQ+ kids. Nonetheless, it’s important for kids who are being bullied for their sexuality to read the other letters too. Because if the President of the United States thinks what these kids are going through is important enough for him to be talking about, well… maybe it does get better.

[Note from the present: Um, yeah. Let's just put a pin in that one. -MN, July 2018]

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft

Narrated by Jim Roberts

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is easily Lovecraft’s most ripping yarn, and a work of high fantasy, not horror. Well, there is an element of horror; eldritch beings do gibber and bubble and meep in inimitably Lovecraftian fashion throughout the story. But at its heart it’s definitely a fantasy story, if one with madness at its core.

The hero, Randolph Carter, dreams of a heartbreakingly beautiful city three times and never again. This dream affects him so deeply that he goes on a quest to beseech the gods’ help in finding it again—never mind that those self-same gods are probably the ones who decided they didn’t want him dreaming about it anymore. Along the way he encounters both help and hindrance in many forms, is captured and escapes, forms alliances, and generally exhibits the manly, chiseled-jawline sort of equanimity, resourcefulness, and determination we expect in a fantasy hero from the first half of the 20th century. Think of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter, or Flash Gordon.

The central conceit of this book, and of all the stories of Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle, is that we actually go somewhere, to a shared reality, an objective plane of existence, when we’re dreaming. (Well, not entirely objective; it looks a little different to each of us.) There’s a geography to it; there are denizens who are actual people, not just figments of our dreaming imaginations; and there are physics and natural laws, though different ones from those we’re subject to in the waking world. Our old and much-altered friend Richard Pickman is there, and ships that sail to the moon. Mountains walk (not in a good way), and cats talk.

Experienced dreamers—skilled dreamers—“old dreamers,” as Lovecraft calls them—are able to affect the reality around them, to a greater or lesser extent, in the Dreamlands. One truly old dreamer in the story was able to create an entire city, and retire there to rule over it after he died on the mortal plane. Ghouls—those rubbery, doglike creatures who inhabit Earthly cemeteries for reasons best not dwelt upon--also nibble at the edges of the Dreamlands.

Expect Lovecraftian language. Things are verdant and wholesome and fair, or else chthonic and cryptical and cyclopean. Bad guys are squat and swarthy and slant-eyed, and black men (always men, we never see any women) exist purely to be enslaved or worse. (Apparently their life in the dreamlands isn’t any better than their reality—hell of a raw deal, that.)

In between the racism and the gibbering horrors, though, it’s a beautiful place, and Lovecraft describes it to within an inch of its life, never failing to modify a noun or verb if he can possibly help it and never using just one adjective when two will fit. Here’s a fair sample:

“Down through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight float up from the river to the marvelous golden spires of Thran. And just at the hour of dusk he came to the southern gate, and was stopped by a red-robed sentry till he had told three dreams beyond belief, and proved himself a dreamer worthy to walk up Thran's steep mysterious streets and linger in the bazaars where the wares of the ornate galleons were sold. Then into that incredible city he walked; through a wall so thick that the gate was a tunnel, and thereafter amidst curved and undulant ways winding deep and narrow between the heavenward towers. Lights shone through grated and balconied windows, and the sound of lutes and pipes stole timid from inner courts where marble fountains bubbled. Carter knew his way, and edged down through darker streets to the river, where at an old sea tavern he found the captains and seamen he had known in myriad other dreams. There he bought his passage to Celephais on a great green galleon, and there he stopped for the night after speaking gravely to the venerable cat of that inn, who blinked dozing before an enormous hearth and dreamed of old wars and forgotten gods.”

Intrigued? You should be. If you haven’t read Lovecraft, this is a great place to start. If you have, but haven’t read anything from his Dream Cycle, all I can tell you is you’re missing out.

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

Narrated by Michael C. Hall

For Valentine’s Day this year, my partner took me to a special screening-with-dinner of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It was just about the perfect date. I’d seen the movie maybe half a dozen times, all told, but never on the big screen, and he’d never seen it at all. I fell in love with it all over again, warts and all—and the warts, I admit, are a pretty disfiguring blemish on what is otherwise a crown jewel of a movie.

To start with, you have Audrey Hepburn playing the quirky, unapologetic gold-digger, Holly Golightly. The point of view character, Paul Varjak, is also something of a whore (though in the service of his art), and is played by a very debonair young George Peppard. The two are a perfect match, because they can each love other for who they actually are; there’s no need for pretense between them. But of course it can never work, because they both depend on their lovers for money and neither of them has a dime of their own, and nobody ever heard of open relationships or polyamory in those days.

In case you’ve never seen the movie, I won’t spoil the ending for you. Go see it! Seriously. Be prepared to cry at the end, but also, be prepared to have to stomach some breathtakingly casual racism—not just part of the scenery because 1961, but mined, over and over again, for laughs, because ha ha, we’re all white folks together here and aren’t those people funny. But if you can and are willing to handle that, see it. It’s a masterpiece and I cry every time.

I had never, in spite of my love for this film, read the book it was based on. Hadn’t realized it was based on a book at all. But it turns out that it is: it’s based on a novella by Truman Capote, and the novella is just as flawed and just as much of a jewel as the movie.

(Ah, a dying art form, the novella. And yet it shouldn’t be. I get that books are expensive and people want a lot of bang for their book-buying buck, and so publishers favor enormous tomes these days. And I do love me a really good, meaty, enormous tome. But haven’t we all read at least one bloated, flabby enormous tome too many that should, and in the hands of a good editor would, have been a really excellent novella?)

The basic setup is the same as the movie. Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak are neighbors in an apartment building in New York City; he’s an aspiring professional writer, and she’s an aspiring wife of somebody rich. Ideally, somebody rich who isn’t a complete rat, though really, any man who refrains from trying to take advantage of her situation pretty much qualifies as a non-rat; she has a generous heart. She has a lot in common with her cat: they share a fiercely independent but deeply affectionate nature. She’s also a runaway from her own past as a child bride from Texas.

She has to hide all of this from the wealthy men she seeks, with a great deal of success, to intoxicate, and whom she hopes to lure into marriage so she can be financially secure at last. But she doesn’t hide a thing from her neighbor, Paul, who after all isn’t anywhere near the demographic she’s seeking. Which means he gets to know the real Holly—the Holly she has invented for herself, who contains but is far more worldly, self-assured, and fun-loving than the Lulamae Barnes she used to be.

Paul, meanwhile, struggles to get published, and struggles with an extremely low sense of self-worth: as a man, he should be able to be a self-sufficient success. He starts out nonplussed by his flighty neighbor; he appreciates her beauty and the vulnerability she radiates and the unexpected things that happen when she is part of his world, but is taken aback by her chosen path in life and her pursuit of it with a predator’s cold, clear, unswerving sense of purpose. Eventually, of course, he falls in love, and things—not hijinks, exactly, though some of them closely resemble hijinks—ensue.

Many of the scenes in the book are written exactly as they ended up being portrayed on the screen. Capote’s gift for description—of people’s appearance and surroundings, directly, and of their character through their words and the way they speak—is tremendous; anybody having read the book first would be delighted at the faithfulness of the film adaptation.

However, there are numerous differences, large and small. Paul Varjak isn’t a sugar baby in the book; his empathy for Ms. Golightly is harder-won than that, and slower to develop. There’s a major character in the book who is written out of the movie script. And the racism, just as breathtakingly casual in the book as in the movie, is mostly aimed at a different target and isn’t mined for laughs; instead, it rears its head as a method of describing-without-describing just how flawed a person Holly Golightly is, as well as being generally in the background because 1958.

Still, the story is intriguing. It’s written with such skill that not a single necessary or desirable detail is left out, and yet not a single unneccessary word is left in. As one would expect, the characters are more complex and fully-fleshed-out than in the movie.

Oh, and the ending is different. I won’t spoil it. Read the book!

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow: #tbt review

Marcus, a highly individualistic and very tech-savvy teen, lives in the interface between his “real” life of school and parents and real-world friends and his extensive virtual life. Then terrorists attack his city—and he, along with three of his friends, are in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are detained and interrogated (read: tortured) by the DHS; one of his friends is "disappeared" and the other two are too afraid to act after they’re released.

Marcus is afraid, too; he's not stupid. Nevertheless he vows to bring down the DHS and, once he learns his friend is still alive, to rescue his friend, whatever it takes. Aided by the powers of friendship, Bayesian probability, and a community of like-minded hacker types, Marcus puts his freedom, his love, and his life on the line to restore civil liberties to his fellow San Franciscans and to bring his friend safely home to his family.

Every young person, and everybody who values their freedom in this society, should read this book. It’s about how technology can be used against us *and* against those who would use it against us; it’s about growing up immersed in this kind of technology; and it’s about not lying back and just accepting what we’re told about what’s really going on and what we can or can’t do about it. 

It’s also an extremely compelling story about a city, a group of friends, and one boy in particular who grows up very suddenly but manages to retain his youthful fire and idealism. And who pays a terrible price for that idealism… but buys, for that coin, something incredibly precious. 

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this book—part love letter, part polemic—for his 14-year-old son, Samori. He wrote in an outpouring of protectiveness and anguish, trying to explain to him a world—well, a country, a society—that is a constant danger to them both, in a way that his son might understand.

So that his son might, maybe, be a little safer? I don’t think Mr. Coates believes that there’s much his son, or any African American, can do to keep himself safe in this society, steeped as it is in institutional racism. So that his son can at least avoid the trap of self-hatred or internalized racism, maybe. So that his son can see the world around him more clearly than Ta-Nehisi did at his age, certainly.

And so that his son knows, now and forever, how precious and loved he is. And that there is, if not hope, at least beauty and meaning in this world—not only outside of America, though traveling to France was life-changing for Mr. Coates and his family, but also, and most importantly, within his own culture. This book is, among other things, a love letter: not just to his son, but also to his fellow black Americans, survivors all.

I am not the intended audience of this book. Nonetheless I felt it was important to read it, if only in order to bear witness to Mr. Coates’ reality. And one brings oneself to one's reading, just as I bring my point of view to this review; one can't help it. I read it as someone who hasn’t had to deal with racism on top of all the other -isms I face, but I also read it as the parent of a 14-year-old who will face -isms I never foresaw when I first became a parent. And my point of view has expanded: my eyes are clearer. I'm grateful for that.

It may be an odd comparison, but in a way, this book reminds me of Allen Ginsburg’s famous poem, Howl: it’s an intellectual torrent, beautiful and hideous and brave, simultaneously difficult to read and impossible to put down. Unlike Ginsburg's poetry, though, Mr. Coates’ prose is diamond-hard, relentless, and pitiless—as it must be. It’s also insightful and lush and lyrical and heartbreakingly full of love.

Don't let the difficulty of the subject matter put you off reading this book. It requires much of the reader, but it gives back in kind. It’s required reading for our generation.

Superman: Earth One, Volume One, by Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis: #tbt review

(Finished April 13, 2015)

Loved bringing Superman into the modern age. Plot holes (old and new) neatly filled; Clark has an appealing complexity and isn't always immune to temptation (though this isn't massively, oppressively grimdark like the most recent movies). But his life will show him the way—he seems to have faith in that, and as the reader, I'm happy to concur—and he will learn that there are no simple choices.

Oh, and the artwork. So gorgeous. A thousand times I have picked up a graphic novel based on the gorgeousness of the cover art and been disappointed by clunky, unimaginative, and even amateurish drawing throughout the body of the story. Not so here. Of course the cover is still the most fully-realized image in the book, but thought and care and skill have been applied throughout.

Not a DC person? Maybe this series will change your mind. Don't know what that means? This is a great entry-point into that universe. Four stars, and high hopes that the whole series will amount to five.

Guest post: I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

"I Love Dick" is a cult "novel"--for a very good reason. This is a difficult train-wreck of a book, not for everyone. But there will always be people who absolutely need to hear what it has to say.

The publisher calls it a novel, perhaps to create plausible deniability, but the author, Chris Kraus, has said that everything in it is true, and, indeed, she uses the real names of real people throughout the book. The story begins when Chris and her husband Sylvère meet the eponymous, appropriately named "Dick"--a British academic living in California--for dinner. Chris fall instantly in love in him. But rather than hiding this love from her husband, she tells Sylvère all about it--and much of the first part of the book consists of love letters they take turns writing to Dick. The letters are insightful, sexy, honest, and hilarious. 

While "I Love Dick" is often discussed as an exploration of female desire, much of it is about how couples communicate and manage desire for a "third," someone outside of the marriage. At first, love for Dick seems to re-ignite their moribund marriage, emotionally, intellectually, and sexually. As the story goes on, however, Chris begins to outgrow both her husband and Dick. 

"Through love I am teaching myself how to think," Chris writes. "Love and sex both cause mutation." 

-Jeremy Adam Smith

Locke & Key Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

A spooky mansion with magical doors and hidden keys—a Bay Area family with a secret history taking refuge there after a horrific tragedy—an echo in a well that is also a deeply malevolent creature—an unapologetically murderous teenager on the road trip from hell—a quiet New England town called Lovecraft—who could ask for more?

Go ahead and ask, because this graphic novel is also replete with glorious artwork and nuggets of sly, laugh-out-loud humor. Not for the weak of stomach or the faint of heart! But super rewarding for the stout-hearted reader.

Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

Imagine waking up in a cave, alone and horribly injured and with no memory of anything that happened before you woke up. First you just have to survive from one minute to the next, then from one hour to the next, and eventually, from day to day. But you don’t have the luxury to just focus on healing; if you’re going to survive, you need to learn who wanted you dead, and why.

This is how Fledgling opens. Our protagonist is a remarkable, intelligent, strikingly self-possessed and resourceful young woman who also happens not to be human. A creature of some kind wanders into the cave where she lies injured and alone. She kills it with her bare hands, eats it, and begins to heal immediately—and that's how we learn that she’s not only a vulnerable girl who is in terrible danger, but is also capable of being very, very dangerous herself.

This is Octavia Butler’s last novel and, in my opinion, her masterpiece. It’s a work of literary fiction that starts out as a mystery, then becomes a vampire novel, then a work of science fiction—and finally it wraps up as a courtroom drama. Butler doesn't so much transcend genre as bend it to her formidable storytelling talents. And the story is hugely entertaining and tightly-woven.

This was my second time through this book, and I’d forgotten just how good it is. Butler was such a master. Here she explores her usual themes of what it means to be female and black, the nature of humanity, what it does to people to be “othered,” and what it does to people to do the “othering.” She does this absolutely seamlessly, in the context of a gripping story set in a very recognizable California among very real people.

So much literature is tough to chew on and hard to digest. Butler’s work reminds one that there is literature—meaningful, multilayered, deeply intellectually satisfying writing that leaves room for as much thought as the reader wants to bring to it—that is also a pure pleasure to read. The concepts are laid out in a gorgeous, stimulating feast that also happens to be perfectly nourishing. 

Read this book! It'll never, ever make it to the screen, for reasons that will be obvious to any reader but which I won't spoil for you here. So if you want the story—and you do—you'll have to read it. If you'd rather be read to, the audiobook version, narrated by Tracey Leigh, leaves absolutely nothing to be desired.

If you still want more convincing, read this review—it’s fantastic.

The Martian by Andy Weir: #tbt review

(Finished January 30, 2015—before the movie came out!)

I was worried that this book would be too intense—too Apollo 13—and indeed there is a strong element of that, of course, and of course those events are referenced here. Don't get me wrong: this book is definitely intense. But it's not *gratuiutously* intense. I didn't feel I was being played as I read it. And the protagonist's optimism and sense of humor kept things light enough that I never felt weighed down by the intensity. Not more weighed down than I could stand, anyhow.

For anyone who isn't aware of the plot yet, our protagonist and his colleagues are all early explorers on Mars. After a horrific accident, he is left for dead—only he isn't dead; he's the only human being on an entire planet that's extremely hostile to life. You'd be tempted to think that he may as well be dead, but you'd be wrong; he's too determined to live, no matter what the odds are.

What follows is several harrowing months of an extremely intelligent and resourceful man doing everything it takes to survive on an alien world—literally everything, right down to creating a biome in which food can grow, because of course the soil is completely sterile—includeing, not least, the herculean task of keeping despair at bay. Meanwhile, his fellow astronauts do everything they can to figure out how to rescue him.

This would be a fantastic book, not only for lovers of old-school hard SF, but also for anybody who likes a good, bare-knuckled but very realistic adventure. This is science fiction purely because it hasn't happened yet, not because it couldn't happen or takes place in some fantastical far future. This could take place... well, with NASA's current funding, not next year, but certainly in the next decade.

Verdict: I loved this and I highly recommend it to nearly anybody.