A Psalm for the Wild-Built

by Becky Chambers

On a moon called Panga at some point in the distant future, there is peace and plenty. The people have set aside half of the world to remain in a state of wilderness, nobody is in charge, and everybody gets to do the work they find most fulfilling. Or not, if that’s their choice. And at some point centuries ago, all the robots decided they didn't care for servitude and they left. Nobody has seen one since.

Sibling Dex has decided that the work that will fulfil them is becoming a Tea Monk, so that’s what they set out to do. As Dex gets better and better at their new vocation, they find it less and less fulfilling, and they find themself more and more drawn to the wilderness. And one day, out at the very edges of human habitation, a robot appears. It approaches Sibling Dex with a simple question that’s going to be awfully hard to answer. The question is, “What do people need?”

In an odd way, Psalm for the Wild-Built reminds me of the Murderbot books. This universe is kind of the exact opposite of the Murderbot universe (which is a very good thing for its inhabitants). But both are about what personhood means and what it means to be viewed as a not-a-person. Both are short and sweet. And both will soften your jaded old heart just a little.

This is probably the gentlest, most hopeful story I’ve ever read. It’s deceptively simple, like a raku-ware teacup. It’s just a story about people from two societies that have diverged from each other but aren’t at odds about it, learning about each other.

If you know me well enough to be on my Christmas list, now you know what you’ll be getting this year. If not, what are you waiting for? It’s a super quick read and you won’t be sorry. Five stars.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

read by Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller 

What if Michael Moorcock had decided one day to rewrite the Spy vs. Spy comics as an epistolary novel set in his Dancers at the End of Time universe, but aimed it at poets and at fans of The Hunger Games or maybe early Anne Rice? (Not that those are necessarily mutually contradictory.)

This book, like Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, gives the impression of being a triumph of style over substance—but only if you don’t know better. Style *is* substance, sometimes. And when it’s not, well, what’s wrong with having your substance conveyed by an absolute torrent of luscious prose, profusely elegant and full of biting wit? 

Nothing, I say. And there’s nothing wrong with a slim epistolary novel, surreal and crystalline-dense like a crazy fractal oil-spill diamond built up of fragrant slabs of impassioned ugly/beautiful imagery like slam poetry, whose setting is hard to grasp and flicks past like a universe-sized slideshow and whose characters know full well they are stereotypes.

So: our protagonists, Red and Blue. Each is a… well, not a soldier. More of an MI6 agent in a time of war. A time war. Each is fighting for the future they were born in—and, not coincidentally, for their own individual existence. Since of course if things had gone differently, neither of them would have been born in the first place. If things *do* go differently (and causing things retroactively to have gone differently in the other faction’s timeline is what Red and Blue are each hired to do), at least one of them will never have existed. Neither can live while the other survives.

Which is a problem. Because in the course of a playfully vicious cat-and-mouse exchange of letters between realities, engaged in at first purely because it made the game more fun, Red and Blue fall in love.

Yes yes yes. It all sounds very predictable except maybe where it’s just incomprehensible, and I won’t deny that it starts out that way. I enjoyed it from go, but saw it as frivolous, a guilty pleasure. But as time went on and more of the story rushed past me, with me just paddling along as best I could to keep up while all this improbable scenery whizzed by, I began to fall in love with it. Much, I think, as Red and Blue fall in love with each other: unwittingly, unexpectedly, ineluctably.

Here’s the exact passage where I fell in love with the book. Red, from the machine universe, had written to Blue, from the biotech universe, about how she enjoys eating, which is optional for people in her time. This taste sets her apart from her contemporaries, who find the whole idea of food not just unusual but actually revolting and even shocking. Blue replies:

“Absent from your mention of food—so sweet, so savory—was any mention of hunger. You spoke of the lack of need, yes. No lion in pursuit, no animalistic procreative desperation. And these lead to enjoyment, certainly.

“But hunger is a many-splendored thing. It needn’t be conceived only in limbic terms, in biology. Hunger, Red—to sate a hunger or to stoke it—to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth—is this a thing you (singly) know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it? Sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out?”

Right??? To desire a thing without needing it, with no skin in the game, is surely pleasant. It gives one a sense of safety in the enjoyment. But to actually hunger, to need, to want so deeply that it’s physical—that’s a knife’s edge, dangerous. And it’s on the threshold of that danger that you are truly alive, that new things can be born.

And, I mean. Such precision of language, unafraid of using the perfect word, the exact phrase to convey the meaning, even if it might be seen as trivial or highfalutin’ or a little odd or antiquated or (heaven help us) trite. Even if the reader might have to look up one or two of those words. Words are to prose what brushwork is to painting, and the fashion in prose at least since Hemingway has been to make that brushwork as invisible as possible so that the scenes and characters and plot shine through with as little distortion as possible. 

That’s begun to change, in spots at least, in the here and now. I mean, there have always been oddballs, cranks, and geniuses who wrote whatever they wanted however they wanted, gods bless them. What’s changing is that stylized and individualistic writing styles are more an accepted part of the everyday literary landscape than a couple of decades ago. This isn’t *always* a good thing in individual cases (*coughMichaelChaboncough*) (sorry-not-sorry if you’re a fan of Telegraph Avenue, which I desperately wanted to be), but it is definitely a good thing overall as it encourages creativity and diversifies what’s out there for us all to choose from.

El-Mohtar and Gladstone aren’t constantly that brilliant. I mean, who could be? To understand and convey so brilliantly the nature of desire, to depict in strobe-light flashes a conversation about desire and hunger between denizens of different realities who haven’t yet admitted to each other that their subject matter concerns them so deeply—to do all of that *constantly,* for 200 pages, is almost certainly impossible and would probably leave the reader bleeding and raw by the end, not in a good way.

No, the authors do it just often enough, and in intervals that decrease just enough as the narrative goes on, to make the reader remember that sometimes bleeding is a good thing. And to make you willing to bleed just a little more so that you can have just another chapter. Just one more.

Hungry yet?

Read this book.

Not convinced yet?

Here's another review.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

read by Cassandra Campbell

Beggars in Spain is Methuselah’s Children for the new millennium. 

If you don’t know what I mean by that, I forgive you. But also, I will have to ask you to bear with me while I try to explain myself. It’s a very specific reference, but also huge and dense with information that you kind of had to be there for (“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” anyone?). I’ll do my best, though. Here goes:

Methuselah’s Children is a Heinlein novel, one of his most sweeping and important. It is, of course, a massively ripping yarn. But moreover, it establishes two of the three major themes that characterize his body of work throughout his career and it sets the stage for his Future History stories. It tells us how the Howard Families got their start, and what effect that start, and the very existence of the Howards, had on the course of human history.

The short version: a wealthy man named Ira Howard has a genetic disorder that causes him to die of old age in his forties. Before he dies he decides, as his legacy, to increase human longevity. So he sets up a foundation that financially encourages folks with long-lived grandparents to have kids with each other. 

Within just a few generations, this scheme succeeds so wildly that the Howard Families, as they become known, live much longer than the folks around them. They start having to go on the lam, witness-protection-plan-style, because they don’t age like other folks and they don’t want to arouse envy or suspicion. They worry about the possibility of discrimination and even violence if ordinary people become aware of their advantages.

Eventually they do get outed, of course. And of course it turns out they were right to worry. Folks at large want to know what the “secret” to their longevity is and refuse to believe that there isn’t one, beyond good genes. The Howards race against time (and overreaching government) and manage a seat-of-their pants escape from Earth in a spaceship, and proceed to Have Adventures and Learn Lessons. 

A few years later they return to Earth—but due to Einsteinian time dilation, it’s been much longer than that back home. And the folks here, having been “cheated” of the “secret” to longevity, have had no recourse but to find it on their own—which they do, in the form of numerous therapies. 

Throw in a bunch of thinly-veiled (and sometimes buck nekkid) lectures on the benefits of eugenics and libertarianism, and you’ve got Methuselah’s Children in a nutshell.

Why is all of that so important? Well, to begin with, Heinlein wasn’t called “the dean of science fiction writers” for nothing. His writing career spanned five decades, during which he published 32 novels and 59 short stories in 16 collections (as well as numerous essays and a screenplay). His work has been adapted into numerous movies, TV series, and at least one board game, and his influence on other writers and on popular culture at large can’t be overstated. He invented the waldo, foresaw the Internet, coined the word “grok,” and gave comfort and encouragement to generations of free-love hippies and other sexual deviants.

And then there’s the Future History timeline. It’s just one of a sheaf of timelines in Heinlen’s World As Myth multiverse, but it’s the one nearly all of his early adult work is set in and, in my opinion, the vast majority of his most-important later work takes place there as well. (Sorry-not-sorry to any Heinlein scholars who disagree either about the timeline or the importance—and yes, there’s plenty of heartfelt and very vocal disagreement out there. That’s how important this guy’s work is.) 

Even outside of this timeline, Heinlein’s major themes of the excellence and longevity of humans being determined by eugenics and of the sacred importance of individual responsibility and the dignity of labor (slightly strange bedfellows when you think about it) are set up and thoroughly established here. The only major Heinleinian theme missing from this book is his rejection of contemporary sexual mores.

So then. We have a major work by a major author that lays out his major themes. How does it relate to Beggars in Spain, the book I’m actually reviewing here? Well:

Beggars begins in 2019 (which must have felt comfortably far in the future back in 1993 when it was written—or maybe 1991 or 1996, depending on how you count it) with a wealthy man strong-arming a geneticist into using a new and unproven genetic manipulation technique to give his as-yet-unconceived child the advantage of never having to sleep. He reasons that if his offspring doesn’t have to essentially waste 30% of its life being unconscious and therefore unproductive, that child will be able to accomplish 30% more than its peers. 

Why wouldn’t you buy that for your kid if you could, right? Lots of folks end up buying it for their kids. Thus begins the story of the Sleepless, a group of people who, in addition to the intended effect of never needing to sleep, also enjoy the side effects of an innately sunny disposition and—you guessed it—longevity. Plus whatever else their parents have paid to have them genetically predisposed toward, typically stuff like high intelligence and physical beauty. 

As these kids grow up, they become a group that is at once envied and reviled—discriminated against very openly, much like Jewish people in Europe in previous centuries, because they’re simultaneously seen as possessing unearned advantages and being not-quite-human. At the same time, the American economy is in a period of sunny prosperity, fueled by the invention of cold fusion technology called Y-energy by a man named Kenzo Yagai.  

Yagai is a fascinating figure, though we never spend any time with him in the book. His influence on the world isn’t limited to nearly-endless nearly-free energy and all that that implies. He’s also the founder and popularizer of a philosophy called Yagaiism, which emphasizes individual excellence and has its roots firmly in—you guessed it—libertarianism.

And so we have the two themes again, eugenics and (quasi-) libertarianism. But Kress doesn’t lecture us about them. Instead she explores them, in depth and with nuance. 

Through her characters’ eyes, we see the human effects of genetic manipulation combined with a philosophy that holds that the weak have no claim on the labor of the strong. We explore the meaning of community and the definition of humanity. We see all of this from the point of view of multiple sides and multiple generations. As a result, we ask ourselves interesting questions about them. Kress doesn’t shove the answers to these questions down our throats. But she gives us enough information to form some nuanced ideas, and start to ask questions of our own. Questions which apply to us here and now, in our current cultural, scientific, and political landscape.

Like the best literature, this is a book that can be read as lightly or deeply as you like. It can be enjoyed as an amusing walk through a plausible and interesting possible future, or an examination of what it does to a person to be “other than” or to be the one doing the “othering,” or the playing-out on a grand scale of a philosophical exercise. Whether you want to read for fun or to exercise your empathy or to sink your intellectual teeth into an intriguing idea, do read it.

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.

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.

Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton

read by Michael Crouch, Karissa Vacker, Brittany Pressley, Christopher Gebauer, Ari Fliakos, and Rebecca Lowman

This is a gorgeous, gorgeous book. (And I’m not talking about the inhumanly lovely face on the cover.) Westworld, HUM∀NS, Black Mirror—if you’re a fan of any of those, this universe will feel familiar to you. Then again, it will feel familiar to you if you live in the western world (and probably most other places) at all right now.

So then, what’s it about? Well, let’s try a little philosophical exercise. 

I don’t think that most people would argue too much with the proposition that if you lose, say, a foot, and it’s replaced with a prosthetic foot, you’re still you, and still human. Still true if you lose both feet, or both feet and both legs. And the recipient of a donor heart or liver is obviously still human and still themselves. Got a tattoo? Still you. Skin completely covered in tattoos, 27 piercings, and no appendix or tonsils? Possibly an unusual specimen, but definitely still human.

All right, but where does the line begin to blur? 

Let’s say a pair of twins were both born with numerous potentially fatal birth defects, and at a certain point in their lives, when they’re in their teens, one of them begins to suffer from cascading organ failure. There’s no question that this twin is going to die; only massively invasive medical technology is keeping her body even minimally functioning. Meanwhile, her twin continues to suffer from numerous major disabilities and it’s medically certain that he won’t live past his twenties. At best.

Unless. Unless his twin’s organs are harvested—the ones that are still functioning—and used to replace or repair his. This has to be done while they’re still in some kind of condition to do him some good, of course. And it has to be done using new technology that allows her organs to be grafted to his—stem cells, 3D-printed artificial tissue, CRISPR gene editing, what have you. And this is truly major surgery. A really significant percentage of this teenager’s body, going forward, will have once been part of his twin.

So… is he still himself? Unless his brain were being replaced, most people would still say yes. Likewise to his still being human… though some people might call him a monster. But they would probably mean that metaphorically. Mostly.

All right, then. What if, a couple of decades later, a teenager is in a terrible car accident, and half her body is completely destroyed, and she doesn’t have a dying twin to provide her with donor parts… but she has really top-notch health insurance and access to the world’s best medical technology. Which can replace literally everything that’s been damaged or destroyed with synthetic and/or mechanical parts. Is she still human? Is she a cyborg? What does that even mean? And how will that affect her social life when she goes back to high school?

It goes on from there. What happens when we start deliberately modifying ourselves with parts of other people, or even animals? What is it that makes us human, what makes us other, and where does morality lie in all of this? Where does it end? Centuries, millennia from now, where will we be? Will we even be "we" anymore?

If any of this is even a little interesting to you, you should read this book. It’s written with such clarity and curiosity and understanding of what makes people tick that you will find yourself empathizing with points of view that are deeply inimical to yours.

The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov

read by Scott Brick

This book interested me because I heard that it featured a triad—a stable romantic partnership involving three individuals. It was one of a handful of examples of polyamorous relationships in science fiction that a group of friends on Facebook were able to come up with. Since I also enjoy dipping into the odd New Wave hard sci fi novel, and Asimov is of course one of the greats, I decided to give this one a go. 

It doesn’t start in a promising way. Basically a cadre of in-fighting, nerdishly vicious, and highly competitive white-guy scientists discover a source of infinite free energy, and they fight and fight and fight about it. Who really discovered it, who gets how much credit, whether it’s dangerous in any way and how shall we discredit and ruin the career of anyone who dares to ask that question, and so on. This, and the discovery that the energy source is actually a parallel universe with slightly different laws of physics than our own and that this may cause the sun to blow up, take up the first third of the book.

In the next third of the novel, we get to visit the alternate universe. This is where, for me, the book gets interesting. The species that has initiated the energy transfer (which goes two ways and thus benefits the civilization utilizing it in each universe) consists, in its immature form, of three genders: Rational, Emotional, and Parental. Every relationship consists of a triad including one individual of each gender, and they blend their essences to produce exactly three children, one of each gender. After that, they go on to the next phase of their existence.

All of this is interesting enough in theory. But what hooked me was Asimov’s gritty, unsentimental but not unsympathetic depiction of the everyday reality of these beings. He paints a vivid picture of the way their society is shaped by being comprised of three genders with very distinct roles and personality types, how that affects relationships and thought patterns, what this kind of relationship feels to someone who is in it and how that differs by gender. 

The day-to-day happinesses and compromises and failures to communicate and generosities of any romantic partnership, as transformed by the triune nature of relationships in this society, don’t have to be imagined by the reader. Asimov shows us both the differences and the similarities between that form of relationship and the two-person sort that most of us are more accustomed to and he does it with a very… I can’t say human touch here, can I? With a portrait painter’s eye for the homely, telling detail.

In the third part of the book we get on with the business of saving the universe, and for me it becomes somewhat less interesting. I mean, of course I’m all for the universe being saved, especially when saving it means flipping a highly humiliating bird at the forces of greed and egotism that got us in that mess in the first place. The pacing, once you figure out who’s who and what their agendas are, is good. The characters are interesting, the lunar society depicted is interesting, and there’s even a well-written central female character. It’s a good story and a fine final third. But for my taste, Part 2 is what this book is all about.

Verdict: read it! Just be prepared to do some eye rolling for the first hundred pages or so. Your patience will be rewarded.

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

read by Cassandra Campbell

The power of this story is the compelling writing—and it’s a very powerful story. Despite the stupid cover, which makes it look like a YA fantasy romance (it’s not!!!), and despite the title, which someone ought to be fired for because it manages to be both deceptive and non-descriptive. This story is so much better than it needs to be, and so much better than I expected when I picked it up. I just wanted a good time-travel romp; what I got was much deeper, deeply satisfying, both emotionally and intellectually.

The story starts when Kate and Ben meet at a party at a rich girl’s uncle’s apartment in New York, attended by idealistic young political activists at the turn of the millennium. They hit it off right away, almost in spite of themselves. Ben isn’t quite looking to fall for someone, and Kate is super quirky, to the point of not quite seeming to live in the same reality as everyone else. But chemistry is chemistry.

What Ben is slow to realize is the degree to which Kate’s reality differs from his. She has dreams of another life—a life in which she’s the mistress of an Elizabethan nobleman. And she takes these dreams very seriously. How could she not, when sometimes, when she wakes up from them, reality has changed? It might be a small change, like suddenly there are blinds instead of curtains on her bedroom windows. But nobody else ever remembers things the way she does, or seems to realize that anything was ever different. 

Gradually the changes get bigger and bigger, and always, Kate is the only one who remembers how things were before. She comes to the realization that she actually is traveling to the past in her dreams, and that small things she does there are changing the future.

As the changes become bigger and bigger, and the world keeps changing—always for the worse—it becomes harder and harder for Kate to keep her grip on the current state of things. And when she can’t remember who the president is, or why people allow so many billboards and cars all over the place, Ben and her friends and family increasingly see her as mentally ill and out of touch with reality.

And maybe that’s actually the case…? Is this actually a time travel story, or just a story about someone with a remarkably detailed structure of delusions? Could 2001 have been entirely different if Kate hadn’t decided to advise an acquaintance to leave London during a plague year, and then put a good word for him in her lover’s ear? Or is that as ridiculous as it would sound to you or me in the real world?

All of this would be fascinating in any case. It’s just such a good story premise. But what makes it truly compelling for me is the way Sandra Newman writes. 

She’s just so good at depicting what happens between couples when they argue, what goes on in their heads and how they try to express it and what happens when that goes wrong. She paints such a clear and realistic picture of how people who think they are very sensible and attuned to what matters can actually completely miss seeing the elephant trampling all over the room. She’s a master of the telling emotional detail, and writes it in brilliant, insightful, and unsentimental strokes.

I walked away from it in a daze. Verdict: read this book. 

Everything You Ever Wanted by Luiza Sauma

read by Stephanie Racine

I’m not sure how to categorize this book. It's not a psychological thriller, though we do spend a lot of time on the edge of our seats wondering, claustrophobically, what's really going on. It's not contemporary realistic fiction, because people travel to and live on another planet. It’s not exactly science fiction, either—though a lot of it takes place on that other planet, in a near-future that’s scarily like ours.

That planet, Nyx, is a lot of things—on a surface level it’s what the narrator describes it as, a barren planet sufficiently Earth-like as to make colonization and eventual terraforming a possibility. Scratch just a little below that surface, though, and Nyx is a sort of anti-Earth, a symbolic and literal refuge for social media refuseniks who romanticise grandiose and permanent acts of rebellion, or for those who just can’t cope with life under the modern social panopticon. Its presence in the book, at the beginning at least, is clearly more about our current social ills than about actual and literal heavenly bodies.

So: in addition to being straight-up entertaining and a quick, fun read, this book is definitely literary, working on several levels and raising more questions than it answers. In fact, if I were teaching a freshman lit class in college, I'd want to assign this book, for those very reasons.

And so we come to the fourth paragraph on this review and I’m not sure I’ve even begun to tell you what you want or need to know. I may, in fact, have already scared you off from reading this novel. But in case you're still considering reading it (and I do recommend that you do), you’ll want some basic information. So:

It’s set in the near future, as I’ve said. A near future that’s maybe halfway between Life As We Know It here and now, and that Black Mirror episode where people constantly rate each other and their ratings affect what jobs they can have, what housing they can live in, and so on. What’s really different about this near future is that a wormhole has opened up on Earth. A one-way wormhole that leads to the planet Nyx, which humans are colonizing.

Nyx is beautiful and pink and Instagram-perfect, populated by like-minded folks who have no interest in being connected to the World Wide Web—which is a good thing, seeing as how the wormhole is one-way only. Once they go to Nyx, they can’t send home so much as an email. (And yet, strangely, social media posts complete with luscious images are sent to Earth on a daily basis, and they arrive just fine.)

Our protagonist, who does social media for a living, isn’t exactly a wiz at critical thinking. What she is is exhausted with her life and with having to pretend that it’s better and prettier than it is. She’s also suicidal—not that she wants anyone to know. After spending her entire (young) adult life putting a good and socially acceptable face on everything, she’s ready to pitch it all and head to where things are real, even if there’s no return from there. Especially since there’s no return from there.

And naturally, once she’s there and it’s too late, things aren’t quite what they seemed from Earth. A slow, intensely creepy unraveling of the minds and lives of the Nyxians ensues. And that's where I need to stop in order to avoid spoilers.

Read this book. Just don’t expect to know quite what to make of it, even after you’re done with it.

Note: Sharlene Teo summarizes this book brilliantly as "both ultra contemporary and timeless in its examination of mental health and existential and social purpose, it's the most hilarious and razor-sharp depiction of office politics I've ever read. The protagonist, Iris, hates earht so much she volunteers to participate in a reality show set on another planet."

See the entire article here.

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.

An Alien Heat by Michael Moorcock

This is the first book in the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy, though I read it (and read and re-read it numerous times as a teen and young adult) as a stand-alone book.

As the story begins, the universe is millions of years older than it is now and humanity has at last ceased to take itself seriously. It has also shrunk to a relative handful of individuals—but they are near-immortals with enormous amounts of power over their environment, their bodies, and, up to a point, matter itself. (Think of Q from Star Trek.) They use this tremendous power to sculpt fanciful landscapes and city-sized follies in which to throw parties and/or have sex, often at the same time. The point to all this being pleasure, and bonding, and to fight the one enemy left to them: boredom.

Into this ultimately decadent world arrives an alien, Yusharisp, from the far edge of the galaxy. He brings with him a dire warning: the universe is coming to an end. His own planet, in fact, has already been swallowed by the coming universal apocalypse, and he is traveling ahead of the wave of doom to warn as many planets as he can. 

What he has failed to predict (and could not have imagined) was that humanity was a species too fatally jaded to really believe his warning or to truly care if it is true—or perhaps too infantilized by millennia of any lack of real consequences for any action or event to truly understand the concept of finality. Also, humanity is, in this century, prone to keeping collections of captive aliens and time travelers. Yusharisp is snapped up by a colllector, preventing him (much to his baffled despair) from continuing his mission.

At about the same time, an inadvertent time traveler named Mrs. Ameila Underwood, from Victorian England, becomes part of someone else’s menagerie. Her captor brings her to a party to be shown off; there she’s spotted by our protagonist, Jherek Carnelian. His current obsession happens to be the 19th century, and he immediately becomes determined to fall in love with her.

Hijinks ensue, the plot thickens, and a Machiavellian individual’s machinations are slowly sensed by the reader—but not by poor Jherek, who ends up traveling to Victorian England, where he’s helpless as a newborn (though delighted by how friendly everyone is). Saying more would spoil the plot for you, so this is where I stop.

I don’t think anybody but Moorcock could have pulled this off. The wit, the vivid descriptions, the world-building--think Oscar Wilde meets Douglas Adams in the Q Continuum as painted by Salvador Dali. Like Q, these end-times humans have no concept of morality—how can they, when there are never any real consequences to anything, and what would be the point?  

With all their literally earth-shattering power, these people have created a surprisingly small world for themselves. Their only concerns are their own pleasure and the oddly conformist society they’ve created; they’ve lost their curiosity and turned inward to a remarkable degree, for a people with a historically unparalleled ability to satisfy their curiosity. And for all their access to knowledge, they’re shockingly ignorant about anything that doesn’t affect them directly (and much that does).

Jherek, meantime, is such an intriguing character--maybe the only truly interesting one on his planet. He’s the only person alive to have been actually born, in the old-fashioned sense, and maybe for that reason he’s a bit of a throwback. At the same time, he’s very much a creature of his time, an amoral, self-centered hedonist with no concept that there’s any other way to be. But Mrs. Underwood seems set to change that…

Well worth a read, especially as it’s both very much a period piece and oddly relevant to our times. It’s still my third-favorite Moorcock book (after Gloriana and The Warhound and the World’s Pain), and that still says a lot, even after all this time.

The Space Between: An Outlander Novella by Diana Gabaldon

 read by Davina Porter

I’ve spent a lot of my life in the Outlander universe. I started reading the novels when they first came out, but tapered off during the long wait between Drums of Autumn and The Fiery Cross. When that was finally published, my curiosity got the best of me and I had to dive back in and find out what happened to Jamie and Claire—but I had to start again from the beginning because I’d just forgotten too much. 

(Side note: rereading something you really enjoyed and discovering that it’s still just as delicious on a second read, when you already know what’s going to happen, is an incredible treat. Ms. Gabaldon really is a very good writer.)

Finally the TV series happened, but I was super skeptical about it. I saw the stills on social media, and the actors who played Jamie and Claire looked nothing like the Jamie and Claire in my head. I didn’t want my headcanon messed with, so I avoided it. Nevertheless it did have one effect on me: it reminded me that, after another very long wait, Ms. Gabaldon had completed another segment of the story arc. More reading to be done! And I’d never listened to the audiobooks. I had no idea what a treat I was in for: they were read by Davina Porter, whom I wasn’t yet familiar with.

That woman could read her grocery list out loud, and I’d listen. For hours. 

Then I finished listening to Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, and I needed more Outlander, so I finally gave in and gave the show a try. And found, to my surprise, that the actors who play Jaimie and Claire are actually very appealing once they start moving and talking; the stills, in which they struck me as looking like enormous waxworks, had been deceptive. (I think they were *too* beautiful in a way; it made them seem inhuman. With the human attributes of speech and motion, though, they are simply very very very beautiful. IMHO.)

And then the recent season ended, and I needed more.

I’d tried one of the Lord John novellas some years back, but in spite of being set in this universe and centering a character I quite like, I couldn’t get into it. I can’t even remember now which one it was. I’m just not a mystery-novel person. 

But when I heard about The Space Between, I was intrigued. It’s about Jaimie’s stepdaughter, Joan, who is headed to France to become a nun, because she hears voices and knows when people are about to die and she thinks a religious community is the only place she has any real chance of finding answers about this, or at least relative safety from being tried as a witch. It’s also about Michael Murray, Jaimie’s nephew, who is returning to France after the death of his wife. It’s also about… no, I can’t tell you who else it’s about, because actually that would be a huge spoiler. Let’s just say that mysteriousness abounds in this novella.

And it turned out to be a lot of fun. It’s more like a story arc on the TV series in its pacing than like the novels, but that’s not a bad thing. And it delves deeper into the occult and stays there longer than most of her novels, but in a shorter piece like this, that works well. And the characters are charming and the setting is vivid and there are all the other hallmarks of Ms. Gabaldon’s writing in this series.

In other words, this is a very worthwhile use of your time while you wait for the next full-length Jaimie-and-Claire novel. What, you didn’t know about that? It’s going to be called Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, and it’s due out later this year, most likely. You can read all about it, including some excerpts, here.

Home (Binti #2) by Nnedi Okorafor

read by Robin Miles

A worthy successor to Binti, this is a short, intriguing novel that ends on a seriously wrenching cliff-hanger. It takes us to personal and sociological depths left unexplored in the first book, filling out the characters and the world-building in a super satisfying way.

We follow Binti back to Earth for her first visit home since starting at Oomza University. Out there, she’s a hero for ending the war between humanity and the Meduse (well, technically between the Khoush, but who’s counting?). But back where she came from, she’s unwomanly and disloyal for having left home at all, and gets no sympathy, much less admiration.

The fact that she’s coping with PTSD after all she’s been through is purely her fault for having left in the first place. The fact that she has tentacles like the Meduse now (technically okuoko, but again, who’s counting) is seen as somehow her fault, too; nobody cares that she never asked for them and nearly died in the process of receiving them. And nobody seems interested in being welcoming or even showing basic politeness toward her Meduse friend, Okwu—never mind that the war has been over for some time now.

Just as it’s really hitting Binti that you can’t go home again, the unbelievable occurs, and… nope, I won’t say more and spoil it for you. 

If you liked Binti, even (or especially) if you liked it but found it a little shallow, read this book! It’s great. But keep the third one in the series (The Night Masquerade) handy ahead of time, or you may want to toss this one across the room when you hit that super abrupt cliffhanger ending.

The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

read by Paul Boehmer

So humanity has found a way to time travel, and to edit history (and therefore the future) for the good of humanity. But it’s run by a cadre of chest-thumping nerd boys who live together with next to no female companionship (and no female colleagues at all) outside of time, in a no-place called Eternity. 

Eternity is meant to be a safe bubble of idealism and intellectual stimulation, free from distractions and the sorts of personal prejudices that would lead to bad decisions… but which, in reality, is a seething cauldron of bitter competition, thwarted desire, unexamined privilege, and unchecked neurosis. 

Basically, if you put a bunch of Silicon Valley bros in charge of all of time, it would look something like this.

I spent a lot of time gnashing my teeth at the obvious error of putting a bunch of putatively meritocratous hormone-soaked monks in charge of humanity’s destiny, and trying to tell myself that Asimov grew up when and where he grew up and so had some serious but understandable blind spots when writing this. And then, when the main character (duh) becomes willing to mess up all of history and therefore the entire future of everyone purely because he wants to get laid, I gnashed my teeth even harder.

But I kept reading… because it was a classic that I’d never gotten around to, and it’s not that long, and I figured what the heck.

And then it turns out that Asimov was taking all of this into account… but if I tell you how, I’ll spoil the book for you.

Verdict: read it. But only if you can stand to grit your teeth for the first 90% of the book. In my opinion, it was worth it.

A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle

read by Jennifer Ehle

Here’s another book review that has to start with a confession: I was never especially fond of A Wrinkle In Time. It was a good book, in my opinion, just scary enough and with some interesting science-fictiony concepts and scenes in it. I get why people love it so much. But it never really did it for me. I only ever read it once, until I had a kid of my own and read it to them. And I only read it even that one time, as a kid, because it was by the same author as A Wind in the Door.

I *loved* A Wind in the Door. I lived it, over and over and over again. I absorbed it. It became part of me in a way that books just don’t do anymore once you’re past your formative years. Reading it again, now, for the first time in decades, I was struck by how certain scenes and even certain phrases, though I didn’t consciously remember them, struck such a chord of familiarity and happiness that it was almost like reuniting with a long-lost and much beloved grandparent. The characters felt like long-lost family. Rereading this book was an intensely emotional experience—surprisingly so.

Meg Murry is our protagonist; she’s a bright, argumentative, and complaint-prone high-schooler who lacks confidence in her looks and is intensely loyal to friends and family (though she constantly questions everything they say). She’s the oldest Murry child; the middle kids are a pair of socially well-adapted twins, Sandy and Dennys, who play fairly minor roles in this book, and her baby brother, Charles Wallace, around whom the plot revolves.

Charles Wallace is a genius, the brightest of a very bright family. At age 6, he has a better vocabulary than most adults. He gets beaten up regularly at school because he’s so different—and it turns out he’s also seriously ill, with a disease that, coincidentally, his microbiologist mother happens to be studying.

Proginoskes is a singular cherubim, a creature not of this plane who materializes, when he does, as a great ball of hundreds of wings with winking eyes set amongst them, emitting the occasional spurt of flame or puff of smoke. He's haughty and pedantic—but so would you be, probably, if it were  your job to know the name of every star in the universe. His unbelievable appearance on the Murry property (they seem to live on a tremendous plot of rural land, though in other parts of the country their acreage is probably pretty standard) is what sets events in motion.

Meg, Charles Wallace, Proginoskes, and Meg’s personable and protective friend, Calvin O’Keefe, are soon united as students of a Teacher, an enormous and all-knowing humanoid being named Blajeny. For me, the biggest surprise of this reading was that I’d completely forgotten about Blajeny, as he directs the kids and sets them their tests and basically moves them all like somewhat-willful chess pieces. He’s hugely important to the plot—and yet he’d gone completely out of my mind.

My theory is that this is because he isn’t really a character—he’s more of a god-like force. He doesn’t seem to have much personality, other than an idealized-but-dim fatherliness. He matters tremendously, but he doesn't really feel real.

In any case, our intrepid protagonists discover the nature of Charles Wallace’s illness, and that it threatens not only him but, somehow, the entire universe. So of course they set out to save the world. Hijinks ensue.

I’ll stop here so as not to spoil the plot for you. I will say that this is metaphysical fiction on par, for its intended audience of tweens, with the Narnia books and with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The nature of free will, the meaning and importance of love, the unimportance of time and distance—all that is discussed, at length, in terms any 5th-grader could understand. There’s a lot more religious content here than I realized when I was the target audience, but it’s thoughtful and life-affirming.

If you’ve never read this book, you should. Either to your kids, if you have them, or to yourself. It’s definitely aimed at a young audience, but it’s magical and scientific and universe-spanning enough to enchant almost anyone. 

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Narrated by Lloyd James

Oh boy. This was my first re-read of this book in at least a couple of decades. And—spoiler alert!—it is flawed.

I should start by saying a bit about my history with Heinlein. My first Heinlein book was Friday; I read that when I was about 15 or so, and I was instantly hooked. The plot grabbed me by the collar and roared along like a freight train, and I loved every moment of it. I also loved the self-assured competence of the plucky-yet-vulnerable protagonist, and I was super intrigued with the future and with the alternative relationship models the author presented.

So I began reading every Heinlein book I could get my hands on. When I began to have a hard time finding new ones, I re-read the old ones. (To this day, there are a handful of his “juveniles” that I’ve never gotten my mitts on.) A few—Friday, The Number of the Beast, The Door into Summer, I Will Fear No Evil, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, To Sail Beyond the Sunset—I read over and over and over again. They were deeply satisfying worlds to crawl into; they were my happy place.

Much as I loved these stories and uncritical as I was at that age, even then I knew they weren’t perfect. I got that his ideas about gun-toting and personal liberty—I didn’t know the word “libertarian” yet—worked out so well in his universe only because he was in charge of everything in it, and could conveniently ignore all the real-world reasons why we don’t actually want that kind of society. And his ideas about sex—some were great, even enlightened, but many were clearly misguided and a few were flat-out harmful if taken as advice for how to conduct one’s life.

And o lord did that man love a soap box. Politics, economics, gender roles—if he had an opinion on a subject (and o lord did he have a lot of opinions), he didn’t hesitate to climb up and hold forth, at great length. Don’t even get me started about his long lessons on engineering and ballistics.

Still. When you’re reading an otherwise excellent book, by an author for whom you have great affection, it’s easy to quickly scan through the boring or squicky bits and get back to the good stuff. And there’s so much good stuff there. The “dean of science fiction writers,” as he was often called, could write a ripping yarn like nobody else. He was spilling over with story ideas—a universe full of them—multiple universes, actually—and he knew a thing or two about how to make them compelling.

Fast forward to 2018. I was nosing through the science fiction audiobooks on Hoopla, trying to decide what to read next, when The Moon is a Harsh Mistress popped up.

This was never one of my favorites. I had found the narrator’s pseudo-Russian patois a little annoying, as well as his pretense of having no political opinions. On the other hand, the book covers an interesting period in Luna’s history (in that particular timeline). As such, it gives important background for some of my favorite plot lines in other books. (Cameo by a very young Hazel Stone, anyone?) Also, I’ve always loved his stories featuring artificial intelligences.

So I decided to go ahead and download it. I listened to the first chapter or so on my own, and found the accent of the narrator even more annoying when read out loud than when printed on the page. It wasn’t so annoying that I couldn’t fall under the spell of the story, though. The next day I had a long car ride with my 14-year-old, and I asked if they would mind if we listened. They did not mind.

Almost immediately I had to stop the story to explain stuff to my kid. First, of course, was the basic setup—where the story takes place, and at what point in its history, and who Mike was (Mycroft Holmes, the first self-aware computer and the centralized administrator of way too many civic functions). Then mention was made of the main character’s line marriage, which my kid wondered about, so I paused the story to briefly explain the various sorts of marriage described in the book.

Then came a heaping pile of condescension toward Wyoming Knott, a female character who was putatively admirable, and I had to stop again.

Women’s place in Heinlein’s Luna… ugh, what a can of worms. I think he means to be generous and respectful toward women, in his way. But...

So, basically, Luna is a penal colony (much like Australia back in the day), and the male-to-female ratio is heavily skewed in favor of males. And there are no laws, as such; only the Authority’s rules. The way this plays out is that women’s sexual agency is considered sacred, and all decisions about marriage and divorce are theirs to make. Men universally band together to defend women's right to make these decisions, though it's so ingrained in the culture that it only needs to be defended against outsiders and "new chums."

Good as far as it goes (though why they should have to be underrepresented in the population in order for this to be the case is a fair question). However, the way men show “respect” to women is to howl, snap, and wolf whistle instead of, say, shaking hands. Whether this “respect” is paid to women past a certain age, or who present as butch, or are otherwise sexually unappealing or unavailable to a given man, isn’t mentioned—but it seems clear from context that women’s status is firmly based on their sexual availability and desirability in a situation of scarcity. And it’s unambiguously clear that women who choose to sell their sexual favors are considered to have the right to do so—but are also looked down upon as flighty, at best.

Wyoming Knott—Wyoh—is presented as intelligent, a beauty, and a political leader. She is simultaneously presented as a charming little fluff-head whose misapprehensions about politics are to be gently but firmly corrected. Oh, and whenever she does anything unusually admirable, she’s praised for being almost like a man. It’s not just that she’s imperfect; it’s that her imperfections are cute little specifically-female qualities that add up to there being no need to take her seriously. (That Mannie and the Prof take her as seriously as they do is clearly meant to be taken as admirable gallantry on their part.) Women are supposedly treated extra well in Luna because they are scarce—but they are treated like a scarce commodity, not fully human.

So I told my kid, awkwardly, that Heinlein had a lot of strange ideas about women, and that he was, in lots of ways, ahead of his time, but in other ways he was very much a man of his time. And, my kid being 14 years old, I left it at that. They are, after all, able to ask their own questions if they have any. We listened. We didn't get as far as any of his numerous instances of casual racism thinly disguised as admiration, so we didn't have to have that conversation. Not that that isn't a good and important conversation to have with your kids, and not that I haven't had it before and won't have it again—but just then I wanted to hear a story, not give a series of lessons.

And it’s an engaging story. It is. It's about a lonely computer, a revolution, and an engineer pulled into it for friendship’s sake. One character, Professor Bernardo de la Paz, is clearly a stand-in for the author, and he’s a charming old coot in his way. This book is definitely worthwhile—it won a Hugo award in its day—though I probably wouldn’t recommend it as an introduction to Heinlein.

Verdict: read it, but with a very large grain of salt.

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.