The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison

read by Angela Dawe

Earth Abides meets Children of Men with a little Parable of the Sower thrown in for good measure in this post-apocalyptic tale about a midwife wandering a world in which almost everybody has died of a plague, very few of the survivors are women, and childbirth has become universally deadly.

The conceit here is that a professional midwife from San Francisco falls sick with an illness that has been killing a lot of her patients and wakes up in the hospital an indeterminate number of days later to find that everybody is dead. (Walking Dead, anyone?) But not quite everyone, it turns out; there are a few survivors roaming around. The vast majority of this handful of survivors are men, and this is not good news for the small number of women and even tinier number of children who are left.

Our midwife, who never gives out her real name, keeps a journal of her travels. The beauty of this book is the way the journal is written. Not that it’s beautifully written; on the contrary, it’s full of irrelevant asides and repetitive typographical quirks. It’s also very convincing—you feel, as you read, that someone you know might have written it. The world she comes from is ours, and the world she lives in is recognizably what our world would probably become in the wake of that particular disaster.

As the story progresses, this sense that the protagonist is a very real person just gets stronger. She’s strong, but not superheroically strong. She’s tough in some ways but fragile in others, like we all are. She’s smart enough to avoid making stupid horror-trope mistakes, but not so smart that we can’t identify with her perfection. We believe in her, which makes the trauma she goes through every single day matter. And what she does about it matters, too.

The most moving post-apocalyptic story I’ve read in a long time. Highly recommend.

Earth Abides by George Stewart

read by Jonathan Davis (introduction written & read by Connie Willis)

Earth Abides was my first post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. Way back in the 8th grade, my English teacher, Mr. Felker, assigned it to the class. (We also read Flowers for Algernon that year, and the room was decorated with black-and-white photos of Marilyn Monroe. Go figure.) The book made such an impression that that post-apocalyptic became one of my handful of favorite sub-genres of science fiction, which I'd already developed a taste for, and I’ve never stopped reading it. To this day, if I leave my house at some ungodly hour and the streets are deserted, I think to myself, “It’s like Earth Abides out here.”

First published in 1949 (and the winner of the first International Fantasy Award in 1951), this novel is very much a product of its time. There’s all the breathtakingly casual racism, sexism, and jingoism that you’d expect (though to give him credit, I think Stewart, a UC Berkeley professor, really was trying quite earnestly to be open-minded and open-hearted). What’s wonderful about it to me, though, is that it’s also very much a product of its place. And its place is the San Francisco Bay Area—specifically, Berkeley. More specifically, the Berkeley hills.

This, more than anything, helped me put myself in the shoes of the protagonist, Ish. When he comes home from a solitary camping trip (where he’d been working on his graduate thesis in geography), he’s coming home to his parents’ house on a fictional street within walking distance of Indian Rock Park. He uses both the university library on the UC Berkeley campus and the main public library downtown. As time passes, he makes his way through numerous familiar landscapes and neighborhoods, going so far as to describe billboards that were still recognizable to a local reader more than 30 years after the book was written. 

Ish goes on to mark the passage of days and years by watching where, along the horizon dominated by San Francisco to the south and Mount Tamalpais to the north, the sun sets—much as I used to do when I lived in a house with a western view in the Berkeley hills. (Though, unlike Ish, I had the help of up-to-date calendars and society generally.) He chisels the number of each passing year onto the face of one of the enormous rocks at Indian Rock Park, describing recognizable things there like the bowl-shaped depressions where the area's original inhabitants used to grind acorns and a cave-like area formed by two rocks leaning together. 

Ish—short for Isherwood Williams, though also, without doubt, meant to call to mind Ishi, the last of the Yahi people who himself walked down out of the hills into what we think of as modern civilization and lived out his in Berkeley, where he worked as a janitor when he wasn’t being studied by anthropologists—Ish is a familiar type in a university town. Like many academics, he lives very much inside his own head. He thinks of himself more as an observer of than a participant in life. He credits this tendency of his as the major factor that helps him, having survived a pandemic that has killed off all but a handful of humans on Earth, to keep himself together.

He does go into a sort of shock, of course, after his civilization dies. It’s not possible to survive something that has killed off 99% or more of your species without enduring major emotional trauma. But he doesn’t descend into drink or any of the other excesses now freely available to him; he doesn’t commit suicide, either quickly or slowly; and he doesn’t build a false life for himself, pretending nothing has changed. He observes; he accepts; and slowly, over decades, he becomes the nucleus of a group of more or less stable folks who start a new society in the rubble of the old.

Of course he’s not perfect. Far from it, even in his own terms. For one thing—and I couldn’t get over this as I was reading—he’s strangely passive about certain things. For example, he’s very aware, as an educated person, of the importance of literacy—and yet he doesn’t read stories to his own children or encourage his neighbors to do it when the time comes; he just grouses about the fact that none of the kids are learning to read. He does eventually start a school of sorts, but by the time the community’s children arrive there they are big kids with no background or interest in literacy. Those who aren’t already too old for school and don’t already have kids of their own, that is. 

And instead of thinking this through and encouraging parents and grandparents to start reading to the littlest ones at home, he throws his hands up and decides the new society he’s creating is just going to have to be too illiterate to use the treasure troves of knowledge that are available to them.

There are other examples—that’s just the main one that stands out in my librarian's mind. And yet. As Stewart points out himself, via Ish’s internal maunderings, those who are left after the great disaster and its secondary kill aren’t necessarily going to be the brightest or best of humanity. They’re a random sampling, in the universe of this book, of those whose immune systems were able to fight off the virus, and whose mental habits were conducive to getting on with life afterward. They were all hardy in their various ways, yes, but really had no other traits in common, good or bad. They were just regular people, doing their best in a world gone horribly wrong.

And that is another great thing about this book. It’s not about scientists, or tough guys, or utopians. It’s about a cross-section of folks, and about the world they live in. It’s about the ants and the rats and the housecats and the dogs. It’s about the pavement and the grocery stores and the electric and water grids. It’s about our world, as it might have been if things had gone wrong in just that way. And it’s fascinating, even now.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

read by Martin Jarvis

With the new series set to premier this month, I had to read Good Omens. I’d avoided it for all these years because, honestly, I’m not a huge fan of Terry Pratchett’s. (Yes, go ahead and pelt me with raw carrots or something.) I just didn’t love Neil Gaiman enough to read this collaboration—and I love Neil Gaiman a lot. But the on-screen version of American Gods was so good, I decided I had to have the necessary background to properly appreciate this adaptation.

And it turns out to have been an excellent idea. Good Omens is terrifically funny, in a style reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ best work: somehow ludicrous and dry at the same time. Basically two angels, one fallen (Crowley) and one not so fallen (Aziraphale), are friends who have “gone native” here on Earth and are living happily among us. But then it turns out that the End Times are about to happen—and neither of them wants that.

Also in the mix: the Antichrist, age 11; Anathema Device, a witch and a descendant of the eponymous Agnes Nutter; the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; and a couple of misguided but very devoted witch hunters. Hijinks ensue.

There are tons of scenes that stick in my head in a very visual way—but if I told you about them, I'd be like that preview of that really hilarious movie that shows all the funniest pratfalls and sight gags and one-liners to get you all excited, and then when you go to see the actual movie, you realize you've already seen all the best bits. So I'm not gonna do that.

I will tell you that it's about free will, more or less. Free will, and the absurdity of the human condition, and yes, it's also a buddy comedy, sort of. It's got elements of the Hitchhiker's Guide and of American Gods, which you would expect. But it's also got elements of The Screwtape Letters (but less preachy), Lucifer (the TV show) (but smarter), The Good Place, and The Preacher.

Verdict: definitely read it. Especially if you plan to watch the show. If you like this sort of thing, this is definitely a great example of it. If you have no idea what sort of thing this is, this is a good place to start. If you don't like this sort of thing... I still think you should give it a try, because this might very well change your mind. If it doesn't, I'll still shake your hand and wish you well.

The Host by Stephenie Meyer: #tbt review

The human era has ended. An alien species who call themselves the Souls have taken over the Earth and no humans who are still human remain, aside from a few ragged, very hunted bands. Wanderer, a member of this alien species, survives parasitically by taking over other the bodies of individuals of other species—destroying their minds in the process.

But there’s something wrong with Wanderer’s host, Mel. Her feelings are too strong and her mind refuses to go away. Now Wanderer isn’t just a Soul anymore: she's an abomination to her own species, a combination of minds in one body. 

The other Souls mustn’t know that Mel’s mind still exists; they'd destroy Mel's body and Wanderer with it. At the same time, Wanderer's very existence is inimical to all humanity—so there's no hope to be found there. She must find a way to work with Mel if she is to survive on a planet where she doesn’t belong anywhere and everybody wants her dead.

This is a fascinating piece of speculative fiction that gets into the mind and the motivations of a member of a species that any rational human would consider intrinsically evil. This species exists by invading the bodies and destroying the minds of other species—and doesn’t consider itself evil, any more than any predator does. The speculation extends to the nature of memory (how much of it exists in the physical brain? Do we have souls?), the mind/body dichotomy, and the power of love and forgiveness.

Don't let this author's other books scare you away from this one; there are no vampires, sparkly or otherwise, to be found. This is good, meaty sci fi. Highly recommend.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson: #tbt review

(Finished September 24, 2015)

If you love good, hard science fiction, this book is for you. If you love The Expanse or Battlestar: Galactica, this book is for you. If you love a good apocalypse, like I do, this book is for you. If you loved Snow Crash and The Diamond Age but felt meh about Stephenson's alternate-history stuff, this book is for you.

It doesn't hark back to those earlier, less messy, shorter (all things being relative) tales—but the plot, while sprawling, is clean, with no gratuitous elements, and the characters are compelling again. Thank goodness; I used to love Neal Stephenson's work, and it's wonderful to be able to love it again.

There's damn little else I can say about this book without spoilers. It's incredibly plot-driven, and yet it manages to have real—really lovable as well as really despicable and really complex—characters throughout. Not to mention one major appearance by a thinly-veiled actual person, who happens to be one of my favorite living celebrities. My mind was blown on numerous occasions while reading. I was more deeply sucked-in to this book than I have been in a long, long time. 

It gripped me in much the way that Battlestar: Galactica (the modern series) gripped me: I cared too much about the people in this book, and their plight was too desperate, for me to be able to stop reading before I knew what became of them all. There were a number of nights that I stayed up far too late reading this because I HAD TO KNOW how a situation would resolve itself before I could compose myself for sleep.

The ending... well. It fizzles just a bit. I can't say anything about it without wrecking the book for you, but I will say that the last few hundred pages, though clearly Stevenson did a lot of thinking about how things would pan out, just weren't as vividly painted as the rest of the book. And the characters didn't shine through in the same way. And—well. I can't say more. It was a perfectly fine ending, satisfying, but not up to the standard of the rest of the book.

But that's because the rest of the book set an incredibly high standard. Read this. Truly. That is all.

When the English Fall by David Williams

read by Eric Michael Summerer

So, the narrator is an Amish man living not far from Philadelphia when a massive solar storm causes civilization to fail and the “English”--that’s us--to literally fall, as in, airplanes falling from the sky. Chaos ensues, and we get to see it from the Plain People’s point of view, which is really fascinating, as really, it’s only a matter of degree. To them, our entire civilization is horrifically chaotic anyhow.

This is a satisfying and oddly surprising apocalypse tale (I do love me a good apocalypse). If you liked Life As We Knew It, say, or the opening chapters of Earth Abides, you’ll enjoy the hell out of this. Why, yes, I am trying to tell you you should read this. If you love a good apocalypse. But too short! I didn’t want it to end when it did.

My one complaint: I’m not entirely happy with the way the daughter’s epilepsy, or “epilepsy,” was used as a plot device. Again, I can’t say more without spoilers, but… hrm. A little too convenient. But, yeah. Read this book.

The Power by Naomi Alderman

read by Adjoa Andoh

You've almost certainly heard one version or another of the famous Margaret Atwood quote: "At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them." What if women weren't afraid of men's violence anymore? How would that change things? Naomi Alderman, who became Margaret Atwood's protege in 2012, set out to answer that exact question in The Power.

I started reading The Power last December—but I deliberately stretched out reading it, and ended up not finishing it until several days into the new year, so I’m counting it as my first book of 2018. I was enthralled with it and kept wishing I was reading it with someone so I’d have someone to talk about it with. The whole idea of how the world would change if women were more physically powerful than men—if they didn’t fear men—how women’s attitudes would change, how they would speak differently, act differently—what that would mean on an individual level, to them, to families and religions and countries and regions and cultures and the whole future—I couldn't stop thinking about it.

One may wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to be another gender. But *this* is about how it might be if people remained whatever gender they were, but the whole power structure got changed—and that change started within each individual woman, one woman at a time, until it became a tsunami.

I can't say much more than that without spoiling the plot of this very plot-driven book for you. It's not just plot-driven; the characters, unreliable narrators all, were real and vivid and I couldn't stop worrying about what was going to happen to each of them next (and what was going to happen to the world when it did). But the plot, with all of its twists and turns and peaks and troughs and frustrations and epiphanies, is definitely the focus.

In short: everybody needs to read this book. Five stars.