Semiosis by Sue Burke

read by Caitlin Davies and Daniel Thomas Hay

In the wake of ecological catastrophe, starvation, and universal war on Earth, 50 pacifists (and a lot of frozen embryos) are chosen for a privately-funded mission to colonize a distant planet. Traumatized by decades of war, starvation, and despair, they land on a different planet than the one originally planned on. Now they have to find a way to survive: as individuals, as a species, and as a society, with their ideals intact. It’s those ideals that are going to prevent the new planet from going the way of Earth.

It’s going to be harder than anyone imagined, though. The new planet, Pax, is lush and full of unpredictable dangers. It’s also home to two sentient alien species, one native and one not. And the native life-form is such an alien intelligence that the Pacifists come perilously close to failing to recognize it as an intelligence at all. 

As each generation follows the one before it and adapts to life on Pax, new conflicts and opportunities arise. The Pacifists are clinging to viability as a colony, plagued by a lack of understanding of the local plant life, diseases they could have easily cured with their grandparents’ technology, and a crash in male fertility. Paternalistic first- and second-generation colonists hide crucially important things from their adult “children” for their own good, setting the scene for real violence, not to mention revolution.

To what degree do they need to adapt, and when does adaptation become dangerous backsliding into barbarism? What became of the other alien species that also colonized this planet at some point in the past, and left a ruined city behind? And can the rainbow colors of the bamboo grove near the ruins actually be a form of communication?

Burke does a fantastic job of world-building, depicting a human civilization that clearly owes a lot to LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and an alien intelligence that is truly alien, and the struggles and motivations of each to communicate. The structure of this book, divided into sections based on the current generation of the colonists and with a new unreliable narrator/protagonist for each section, doesn’t lend itself to a lot of character development for the human protagonists. But their society does develop, as does the alien intelligence, along fascinating lines.

A ripping yarn that also gives a lot of food for thought. Highly recommend.

The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver: A Middle Falls Time Travel Story (Middle Falls Time Travel Series Book 1) by Shawn Inmon

read by Johnny Heller

Anybody who knows my taste in literature knows I’m a complete sucker for a time travel tale. Whether it’s a romp or a horror story, whether the fate of reality itself is at stake or just the fate of the protagonist and a few close friends, whether the story is beautifully thought out or the writer came up with a concept and just went for it, I’ll read it. Of course I appreciate something literary to sink my teeth into, and am delighted by a plot twist that actually surprises me (and that happens all too rarely anymore). But really, if a book is about someone traveling along the 4th dimension, I’ll read it and I’ll probably like it.

So I’m not setting a high bar. But I will say that The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver was above-average delightful.

It starts with our eponymous protagonist, Thomas, as a middle-aged man who has wasted his entire life. After a stupid mistake in his youth led to a tragedy, he sank deeper and deeper into depression over the decades, doing absolutely nothing of worth to himself or anyone else and not especially enjoying himself in the process. One day the final straw lands, and he decides to do himself in. He closes his eyes for the final time in 2016…

...and opens them in 1976, in his bedroom, in his 15-year-old body, with all his memories intact. After some disorientation, he figures out that it’s a few months before the tragedy. He’s got a second chance--maybe he can do things right this time. And while he’s at it, maybe he can stop a serial killer.

And then—well, and then he learns he’s not the only one to have traveled through time in exactly that fashion.

The tone of this book is by turns creepily suspenseful and thoughtfully hopeful. The author does a great job of putting you right back in 1976—if you’re old enough to remember it, you’ll instantly feel the verisimilitude of his depiction. It’ll feel almost claustrophobically like going back there. If you’re not old enough to remember it—well, here’s your chance to get a glimpse.

Our protagonist feels very believable. He vacillates between a burning desire to fix the wrong things and despair that they can’t be fixed. Also between an adult sense of agency and responsibility and the weird in-between passivity and acceptance of life of the young teenager. (As someone who moved back in with her parents to finish grad school, I can tell you that this is a thing.)

Thomas is a bit of a dufus, though, I will say. A well-intentioned dufus, but a dufus all the same. He just doesn’t seem to think things through. And we can’t blame it on him not being a science fiction geek and therefore never having thought about the potential consequences of his actions. He mentions, near the beginning of the story, having read some books and watched some movies about time travel, and being familiar with the “butterfly effect.” 

Maybe some of his dufosity can be explained by the fact that, although he has all of his memories from his adult life through 2016, he’s now back in the body of a teenage boy, all hormones and undeveloped prefrontal cortex? Our narrator is definitely unreliable, so it’s probably that, rather than lazy plotting. In any case, you’ll want to slap him sometimes.

Fortunately the story doesn’t revolve around his tendency to make mysteriously stupid mistakes. Instead it revolves around free will and the nature of causality, like any self-respecting time travel tale. Also around the interactions between Thomas and the other time-traveler, and the ripples (both emotional and in the time-space continuum) those interactions create. And the book leaves some mysteries unsolved--maybe because it follows Thomas’ point of view so closely and he doesn’t learn everything there is to be learned, or maybe because it’s the first of a series and the author wants to leave the reader curious.

Speaking of that, once the denouement becomes apparent on the horizon the book does seem to draw itself to its conclusion very quickly. In spite of which, the ending isn’t at all unsatisfying—if anything, it’s more satisfying than I expected.

In conclusion, if you’re not a fan of time travel novels, this one probably won’t convert you. But if you are, you’ll find it intriguing and mysterious and creepy and sweet, and you’ll enjoy meeting all the characters and getting lost in the setting. And maybe being surprised by some of the twists.

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

read by the author

The first time I read Tales of the City, I had not yet fallen out of love with San Francisco. It was sometime around 1992 and I fell deeply in love with Mouse all the other Barbary Lane denizens. I proceeded directly to the library to get my mitts on every other book in the series so I could devour them all.

I was far too young, when my family moved to San Francisco in the mid ‘70s, to be really aware of what San Francisco meant to the adults, what it was like to live there—especially coming from somewhere else. Nonetheless, as I came of age during that decade and the next, I absorbed the local customs and predilections without realizing it was happening, as one does. And picking up a book, in my early 20s, that spoke lovingly of the sorts of people I’d grown up around, when they were roughly the age I was when I finally got to reading it… it was a rediscovery of what still felt like my home town, and a discovery of some of the influences that had shaped me.

I continued to read these books as they came out, up to The Days of Anna Madrigal. I never stopped enjoying them; it was always good to catch up on the latest gossip about old friends. But it had been a few years, and I had said goodbye to them all in my heart, when the new Netflix series came out.

This isn’t a review of that series. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a reboot that happens instead of what happened in The Days of Anna Madrigal (I think!), in an exaggerated but clearly recognizable San Francisco of today. I liked it a lot. I liked it so much, I decided it was time to go back and re-read the book that started it all, to see how it had aged.

It has aged beautifully—mainly, I think, because it was so deliberately and perfectly a work of its time that it’s a perfect little time capsule. San Francisco in a music box. It makes no attempt to be universal or timeless; it’s a unique product of a unique place and time.

To begin with, there’s Barbary Lane itself, a sprawling wooden apartment building on a tiny side street that’s also a staircase in the Castro district. This sort of place still exists, of course, but nobody in the socioeconomic neighborhood of the folks in the book could afford to live there now. Except the landlady, of course. But it’s a type of building and street and hillside very familiar to anyone who has spent much time in San Francisco.

Then there are the characters—stock characters of their time. Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, the adorable, wistful twink who just wants to find love. Mary Ann Singleton, a blonde Midwestern career gal naively navigating Oz. Mona Ramsey, both earthy and spacey, both questioning and believing everything. Anna Madrigal, the wise, quirky landlady who grows her own pot and dispenses it, along with sometimes-cryptic advice. It goes on and on.

The one thing that I think would stand out as an off note to a modern reader who wasn’t around in the late 20th century is the telegraphic-yet-pulpy style of writing. The book was originally published in serial form in the San Francisco Chronicle, so each chapter is a little segment written to be read on its own and to compel the reader to comb through the sections of next week’s Sunday paper to find the next installment. If that whole concept seems strange to you, the pacing and semi-shorthand will feel a bit odd to begin with. But I think you’ll acclimate.

Verdict: if you were there at the time, you’ll definitely want to read this. If you weren’t, but are fond of (or curious about) San Francisco in the 70s, absolutely give it a read. If you’re curious about the roots of modern LGBTQ+ culture, this is a must-read. And if you just like a good soap opera, give it a try!