Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

I have a confession to make: I did not love Norse mythology growing up. In fact I was only dimly aware of its existence. 

I loved Greek mythology, which I read in turn to my kid. And I picked up various fictional-world mythologies via osmosis, by reading things like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and playing role-playing games, like RuneQuest, that were set in richly-detailed worlds. (Thank you, Greg Stafford, and may you rest in peace.) But for whatever reason, Norse mythology never really did much for me.

This was true even after reading American Gods, my second-least-favorite Neil Gaiman book (though I’m enjoying the hell out of the TV series), even though I pretty much love everything he writes. It was true even after watching some of the Marvel movies that include Thor and Loki because, well, of course those characters are only loosely based on their mythological prototypes. I wasn’t even inspired to learn much about it when I learned that the days of our week are named after Norse deities, or after getting a crow tattooed on my left shoulder--that was a crow, not a raven, and especially not Hugin or Munin.

But I do love most of Neil Gaiman’s work. Particularly when he goes off in a new direction--which he does often. (Though what you can really call a “new direction” for a writer who is a genre unto himself could be an interesting discussion.) Rewriting the Norse myths, bringing them alive for the modern age, struck me as the perfect job for a man of his background and peculiar talents. And I was right.

Gaiman’s gods have voices of their own. Voices, and faces, and gestures, and tastes in food and in women (and in some cases, in men and even in stallions), and, so help me, after reading this version of the Norse myths I feel like I could tell them apart by their body odor. These are manly myths about manly gods--Gaiman wasn’t making any effort to modernize these stories. The gods misbehave in all the expected ways: they drink too much, covet each other’s property too much, become violently peevish when things don’t go their way or they’re just bored. They aren’t role models.

What they are is vividly real, in this retelling, outsized technicolor warts and all. I don’t approve of them, and nor am I meant to. They’re gods, after all, and beyond a mere mortal’s approval or disapproval. They’re also fascinating to read about. Highly recommend.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

Read by Cherise Boothe

Those of us who love science fiction are probably well acquainted with the idea of the generation ship story. Starting with Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky and Herbert’s Destination: Void, and on through the years (well, many of us started with those; technically the genre began with Don Wilcox's short story, “The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years,” published in Amazing in October 1940), and on through the Pixar movie, Wall-E, it’s become a well-established trope. For good reasons, which I will go into shortly.

But first, for anybody not familiar with the concept of the generation ship, here’s the general idea:

Traveling from our solar system to another star, at any currently likely level of technology, will take many, many years. Our nearest neighbor is Proxima Centauri, at 4.243 light years away—which means it takes light, the fastest thing in the universe, 4.243 years to get from here to there. Since we aren’t yet (and aren’t likely to be anytime soon) capable of traveling anywhere near the speed of light, getting there would take a very long time. In fact, at our current capability, it would take over 81,000 years (yes, that’s the right number of zeroes) to get there—and most stars are much further.

Even if we manage to improve our technology quite a bit, it’s likely that it will take centuries, at least, to travel to the nearest star system with potentially-habitable planets in it. But the human lifespan is only several decades, or a bit over a single century at best. So how to solve the problem of visiting or even colonizing another planet beyond our little solar system?

One solution is the generation ship. That's an enormous space vessel which contains everything needed to play host to several generations of humans, each one learning what's needed to keep the ship running from the generation before it. The people who board the ship on Earth become the ancestors of the people who, a varying number of generations later, arrive at the new star system.

Of course, something always goes wrong. (It wouldn’t be much of a story if everything the author had to say could be summarized by the sentence, “Once upon a time, Captain Doe and her crew boarded a great starship; 10 generations later, their descendants all arrived safely.”) There is some kind of disaster—the AI that runs the ship goes crazy or just breaks down in spite of all the fail-safes, often due to human error or fecklessness; those feckless humans decide to play politics with the life of the entire crew and stage a coup, or else they fall prey to illness; basically, something goes so disastrously wrong that the ship’s passengers no longer have the wherewithal to direct or properly maintain the ship, often descending, over the course of many generations, into totalitarianism and/or barbarism and even forgetting that there is a universe outside the ship.

The main good reason, in my opinion, that this trope is much beloved in science fiction is that the ship becomes a claustrophobic little petri dish teeming with humanity’s best and worst traits, duking it out for the highest of stakes. It’s like the classic writer’s workshop exercise where you take two characters who hate each other, put them in an elevator together, then have the elevator break down between floors—but times 10,000: often the ship’s passengers are the only humans alive anywhere, after some apocalyptic disaster on Earth, so the entire fate of our species is in their hands. It’s a grand way of putting human nature under a very uncomfortable microscope, and of giving characters and situations enormous scope within their universe, while keeping the universe down to a manageable size.

This is very much the case in An Unkindness of Ghosts. Ms. Solomon’s generation ship, the HSS Matilda, became the entire universe to its inhabitants so long ago that its passengers scoff at the idea that they *are* passengers, or that there ever was or could be anyplace else besides the ship. Now it’s run a lot like a plantation society; the upper decks are the domain of a light-skinned and very privileged ruling class, while darker-skinned manual laborers with no rights live below. Males dominate, and there is no law other than harsh moral restrictions which are applied however the current dictator and his goons care to apply it.

We enter this society through the person of Aster. She’s a healer—in whatever free time she has when her shifts working the farming levels are over. She’s tremendously intelligent, resilient, and resourceful. She’s also, it becomes clear pretty quickly, not neurotypical—it’s never spelled out as such, but she seems to be somewhere on the Autism spectrum. She’s also not typical when it comes to gender or sexuality, even within her own very rich and diverse lower-deck society, in some parts of which it’s standard to refer to all children as “they/them” rather than “he” or “she” until they’re old enough to declare their gender.

The culture of the lower decks—or I should say the cultures, plural, because, as I just mentioned, there is quite a bit of diversity among the numerous decks—is what makes this book fascinating. Yes, Aster has to discover the clues her long-disappeared mother left her and figure out how to lead the ship to its destination. Yes, she does this while facing incredible deprivation, being preyed upon by guards for whom inflicting gratuitous cruelty is just a perk of the job, and dealing with her best friend’s frequent and violent psychotic episodes. Yes, there’s a romantic subplot (though not a traditional one), and a dictator you’ll desperately wish to be overthrown.

But all of this happens in the context of her society, which is deeply informed by the collective trauma of its enslavement, but which has also very unapologetically shaped itself in whatever ways it sees fit. In order to survive, yes, but also in whatever ways it finds beautiful or important or simply desirable. It’s not monolithic—as in any society, some folks are true believers in the morality of the upper classes and some are scoffers, some are genuinely good and some are selfish and cruel, and some have internalized the deeply scarring belief in their own sub-humanity of their so-called superiors more than others. But it’s a culture with its own language (and its own accents and dialects within that language), its own food, its own legends, and its own mores. And it’s fascinating.

If you have never read a generation ship story before, this is a great place to start. And if you feel like the trope has gotten stale, this book will change your mind. I highly recommend it for adults and mature teens. And I particularly recommend the audiobook version, if you like that sort of thing; Cherise Boothe does a truly magical job of bringing all the voices and accents to life.

  

First Year Out: A Transition Story by Sabrina Symington

First Year Out is a thinly-veiled primer on what it’s like to be a trans person. It’s about a trans woman, Lily, and her struggles and triumphs during her first year “out” as her true gender. She spends a lot of time explaining things to her mother, who has all the struggles with Lily’s gender one would expect a loving but pretty clueless parent to have; she experiences dysphoria as she has to deal with getting rid of facial hair; she goes on dates and talks to friends.

Throughout, the dialog is a bit clunky and the pacing is clearly about ticking off all the items on a list of Issues Trans Folks Face. It’s not great literature, and it’s not beautifully drawn. But it’s a fine example of what it is, an educational book candy-coated to make it palatable.

A good book to hand to your loving but somewhat clueless relatives and loved ones who need to learn the basics of what being trans means; it's well-calibrated for folks who aren't very in the know, aren't invested enough to want to read a bunch of scientific literature, and/or have fairly basic questions that they don't quite know how to ask.

Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis: #tbt review

A catastrophic water shortage has divided the world into two groups: those who have reliable access to safe drinking water, and those who would do anything to get it. 

Lynn’s life is simple: she and her mom trust nobody, depend on nobody but each other, and spend their nights in their basement and their days doing whatever it takes to feed themselves and to protect their pond. Then strangers appear, Lynn’s world turns upside down, and she has to reevaluate everything she’s ever been taught.

This book starts out grim and gets grimmer; it’s not going to make a convert of anybody who isn’t already a fan of intensely dark dystopian fiction. The protagonist is a remorseless killer and the threat (and sometimes the reality) of rape, slavery, and lesser forms of violence are never entirely absent. But for readers who like this sort of thing and can hang on through several chapters during which there seems to be little point in caring about characters whose lives are so precarious, there is a big payoff. 

Lynn’s claustrophobic world grows whether she likes it or not, and she’s got to find a way to grow with it or die. Fortunately, there’s a core of resilience and a desire for connection buried deep within the many layers of rigid self-sufficiency and misanthropy that her mother has armored her with, and she’s able to grope her way toward an extremely hard-won redemption. 

It’s an ambiguous redemption at best, though, tainted by irreparable losses: the implacable and deeply disturbing forces at play in this horrific and all-too-plausible future aren’t going anywhere. Thoughtfully and realistically written; well above average for books of this genre; but definitely not for the faint of heart or for younger teens. Highly recommended for readers who loved The Hunger Games or Divergent.

Just One Damned Thing After Another (The Chronicles of St. Mary’s, Book 1) by Jodi Taylor

narrated by Zara Ramm 

Fans of Connie Willis and Dr. Who, take note: here’s a madcap time-travel adventure series with just enough grit to keep the stakes high. In this universe, time travel has been invented and is kept top-secret, used only by highly-trained historians to verify historical accounts and fill in gaps in the record. At least that’s the theory. The problem is, there’s another lot out there, they’re ruthless, and they’re in it purely for the profit. And they want to wipe St. Mary’s out.

Our heroine, Max, is an historian in the same sense that Indiana Jones is an archaeologist. She’s also tough, snarky, and sadly accident-prone—in fact, the rate at which disasters ensue whenever *any* of the historians travel to the past seems really alarming, even considering the delicacy and complexity inherent in that activity.

Eventually the reason becomes clear: there’s a band of rival time-travelers who are interested in nothing about time travel except the potential for profit… and for settling an old score.

This is exactly the sort of thing I would binge-watch if it were a TV series (and I wouldn’t be surprised if it became one). Thoroughly enjoyable.