Against the Fall of Night (or The City and the Stars) by Arthur C. Clarke: #tbt review

This is the book that turned me into a science fiction reader when I was 10 or 11 years old. I was at my godparents' house when I noticed this book cover on the stack of books kept in the half-bathroom off the kitchen. Of course I was completely intrigued and started reading it—and ended up taking it home with me. The rest is, well, history. So many scenes from this book are utterly vivid to me even now. I lived this book.

Against the Fall of Night (also called, in a different and longer edition that I don't actually recommend, The City and the Stars) is the far-future story of a teenager named Alvin. It's humanity's twilight; Alvin is the only child of his generation. He lives in Diaspar, a beautiful, fully self-contained city on an Earth that has become a vast, inhospitable desert. He has everything he could possibly need or want—at least, that's the idea.

But Alvin is a throwback, blessed (or cursed) with a trait that has been nearly bred out of what remains of humanity: curiosity. His curiosity leads him to discover that there’s a lot more out there than he’s been taught, and he becomes caught between forces that have been holding his world in a rigid balance as a defense against a power that threaten’s humanity’s very existence.

This story takes place in a very far future where humanity is long past its bloom and has hunkered down in one city on one planet to slowly, slowly die. What’s left of our species lives in parasitic luxury off the past, while denying itself or its children any knowledge of that past or why things are the way they are now. Basically we are a moribund species and have retreated so far back into our shell that we don't remember anything else when Alvin is born.

Or so it would seem.

Alvin represents both the past and the future of humanity: he’s a type that hasn’t existed in Diaspar for so many millennia that nobody quite knows what to do with him. He’s also the key to any possible future humanity might have. This is an allegory about old age and adolescence, and also a story of an existential threat to our species that’s very much born of the cold war. It's also an adventure. It's quite wonderful.

Do check out the link to The City and the Stars if you're at all interested. It will take you to a nice, long Tor Books review of both books that discusses the differences and interplay between the two versions. But maybe check it out after you've read Against the Fall of Night—because spoilers!

The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson: #tbt review

Can a book change, and maybe save, a girl’s life? What does the life of one little girl matter in a world of abundance and extreme social stratification?

Four-year-old Nell, a member of a dispossessed underclass in a world where abundance should be everybody’s birthright and education has become the scarce commodity that sets the classes apart, is dangerously ignorant. She's growing up with all the dangers and disadvantages of poverty in a world where there’s no reason for poverty to exist.  

Then she comes into possession of a wondrous stolen item. It's a technological marvel: a book that talks to her, changes itself to teach and entertain her, shapes her view of the world, and even cares about her, until she can not only survive her harsh reality, but, as she becomes a young woman, break out of it.

You've heard of smart phones? This is a smart book, and it’s meant to teach critical thinking to educated young ladies of the upper classes. But there's a person behind it; humans are hired as voice actors, and to fill in the gaps where an AI can't figure out how to respond to something. Miranda has a gig being the human voice behind these primers, and she's worried about Nell. Pretty soon her humanity starts to color the responses of Nell's primer, and that changes everything.

There’s a strong ideological statement here; the story aims to show the extent to which poverty, ignorance, and misery create the inability to rise above one’s parents’ station, rather than the other way around.

This book was my first exposure to steampunk, and my second Neal Stephenson, and I was in awe. There are so many ideas zooming around, and the world-building is so impeccable and complex, and yet Stephenson never loses sight of the human beings who make all of it matter.

Protector of the Small: First Test by Tamora Pierce: #tbt review

This is another book that my kid fell in love with when I would have thought they were too young for it, because I was listening to it in the car. With hindsight, I can see that they loved the heroine's strong sense of justice and her refusal to fit into prescribed gender roles.

Plus Tamora Pierce has done a great job of world-building here. If you're a fan of fantasy but you haven't read any of her books yet, you should—and this one would be a great place to start. It comes after the Song of the Lioness series and makes numerous references to storylines and characters from it, but someone who hasn't read that first (as I hadn't!) won't be at all lost.

As this novel begins, because of the pioneering work of the great Lady Knight, Alanna the Lioness, girls have won the right to go into service as pages and become knights. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Keladry of Mindelan is the first one to attempt it, and she learns very quickly just how stacked against her the deck is.

Not only is the system itself unfair, but on top of that, she immediately ends up on probation because of the actions of a bully. She has to work so much harder and overcome so many more obstacles than any boy… it would be so easy to give up. 

But she’s always wanted this, and it seems at least one person in the world believes she can really do it: a mysterious benefactor keeps sending her expensive gifts that are exactly what a page needs. Plus, Kel has never been able to abide a bully. Something has to be done about this one, or he’ll be able to get away with hurting her friends, too.

This is basically the story of the first girl going to a West Point-type military academy, only in a fantasy setting. Keladry lives out the maxim that a woman has to be twice as good as a man to be considered half as good. It’s a good introduction for middle-grade kids and younger teens to this sort of story, and Kel is a compelling character—she makes mistakes and has bad days but her determination and her unwavering protectiveness of those who are taken advantage of by others who are stronger keep her going.

The author, Tamora Pierce, originally studied psychology with an eye toward doing social work with teenagers. But she became a full-time writer instead in 1992, and I'm glad—I'm sure she has reached a lot more teens with her writing than she could have as a social worker.

The Free Lunch by Spider Robinson: #tbt review

If the Master, Robert A. Heinlein, had been born a Boomer instead of a member of the Greatest Generation, he would have been Spider Robinson. If you have any fondness for Heinlein or for the Happiest Place on Earth or for ripping yarns where a young hero has to save the world, this book is for you.

Our protagonist, brilliant twelve-year-old Mike, has such a terrible secret that he needs to find a way to fall completely off the face of the Earth. He accomplishes this by disappearing into the “off-stage” areas of the world’s most perfect theme park, Dreamland. Nobody will find him there—except someone does. It turns out a woman named Annie pulled the exact same disappearing act thirteen years ago, and she’s still there. 

The two of them team up, watching each other’s backs and becoming friends. Then they discover that not only are they not as safe as they’d hoped, but the fate of the world is in their hands.

“Dreamland” is a futuristic Disneyland: a totally immersive theme park where the illusion is complete and the off-stage areas are extremely well-concealed. The book is worth reading for the descriptions of the magical theme park and its mysterious underpinnings alone; the close bond that Mike develops with Annie and the ripping yarn that ensues when they realize they have to save the world make it a must-read.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman: #tbt review

Full disclosure: I love this series so much that I'm planning to get an alethiometer tattoo when I'm feeling a little more flush. (After the scarlet A and the Deathly Hallows symbol, that is.) My second time through the series (I've read it three times now) was on audio CDs in my car when my kid was 5 years old, and even though it was far too advanced for them at the time, they fell in love with it too. I wrote this review after my second reading but before the third, and long before the prequel was published.

So:

In this alternate universe where people’s souls have a physical reality and manifest themselves outside people’s bodies as animal-shaped “daemons,” and the Magisterium (think of the Catholic Church during the days of the Inquisition) rules politics, morality, and, as far as possible, people's minds, Lyra is an orphan who lives at Jordan College, Oxford. She is being raised haphazardly amid the benign neglect of the professors there and has a good, if chaotic, life.

Then a mysterious relative appears and Lyra saves his life; she ends up with a unique artifact called an alethiometer (the eponymous Golden Compass), in her possession; her friend Roger is disappeared by the much-feared Gobblers; and she is taken to live with the beautiful, self-willed Mrs. Coulter, whom the Jordan scholars obviously fear. Now Lyra needs to learn the nature of the relationship between all of these events, and what they have to do with Dust, a substance whose very existence is inimical to the Magisterium, and which nobody is supposed to know about--least of all a half-wild young girl.

This is an incredibly beautiful metaphysical work (I can't just call it a work of fantasy, though it is that) about the nature of truth and the soul, along the lines of the best C. S. Lewis books--but written by someone with a deep distrust of organized religion and of anybody who withholds important truths in order to control people.

The protagonist, Lyra, is a liar, a teller of tales, and the product of a society based on lies, brought up not knowing the most basic facts of her existence. But she is also intelligent, resourceful, intensely curious, and deeply loyal to her friends. This gets her into trouble, of course, but it may also be, along with her boundless ability to love and her fierce determination to find her disappeared friend, what ultimately saves her and her world.

Five out of five stars. At least.

Have Spacesuit—Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein: #tbt review

Kip’s dream of going to the moon turns into a nightmare when evil aliens kidnap him and a little girl and take them there. How will he escape—and moreover, how will he justify humanity’s existence when it’s put on trial?

One of the golden-age Master of Science Fiction’s many “juveniles,” Have Space Suit—Will Travel has stood the test of time better than most. Kip is a high school senior who dreams of traveling to the Moon. He makes it there, but by a surprising route: he’s kidnapped, along with a little girl named Peewee and an alien he calls the Mother Thing, by a malignantly aggressive species Kip calls Wormfaces. Eventually the three work together and escape, but that’s not the end of the story: now the fate of all humanity is on Kip and Peewee’s shoulders as their species is put on trial before an interplanetary court.

As with the protagonists in Heinlein's other juveniles, the teens in this story will seem oddly young in some ways to modern readers, and their characters too good to be true. This is partly a function of the era in which the book was written—things really were different then—and of what was considered appropriate material for young adults to read at the time. But that also makes this book a fascinating glimpse into the culture of the 1950s.

A ripping yarn. Read!

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.

Teen Angst? Naaah...: A Quasi-Autobiography: #tbt review

Smart-alec urban nerd Ned Vizzini (author of It's Kind of a Funny Story) wrote a lot of anecdotes about junior high and high school and got them published while he was under 18. This collection of marvelously self-deprecating pieces will feel familiar to anybody who has ever been a teenager.

Vizzini was a nerdy Magic-playing teenager in New York City in the 1990s, and wrote about it. A lot of those anecdotes got published, and they’re all here, from the day he first played Nintendo in middle school to getting into the best public school in NYC to coming home drunk for the very first time to falling in love. The sum total of his anecdotes is a thoughtful and eloquent memoir of an adolescence, told from the point of view of someone who was still there at the time.

These are engaging little vignettes that show the author’s progress from late childhood to late adolescence, somewhere between awkwardness and grace. This is a young man who is privileged to be white and smart and financially secure in a city where many teens are anything but; he’s well aware of this. At the same time, he has faced social and emotional handicaps that form the basis of his self-deprecating sense of humor. This is a very real account of life in the big city for a teenager who may not be exactly typical but who faces many of the same problems that other teens face.

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

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

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

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

Their video went way beyond viral.

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

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

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

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

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow: #tbt review

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

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

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

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

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

(Finished April 13, 2015)

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

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

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

The Martian by Andy Weir: #tbt review

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playground by 50 Cent: #tbt review

(Finished April 25, 2015)

Butterball is a 13-year-old playground bully who has just landed another kid in the hospital. And he's absolutely not interested in telling his therapist, an out-of-touch white lady, what happened and why. His mom has made him move to Long Island with her when all he wants to do is live in the City with his dad, nobody will leave him alone about his weight, and he pretty much has nothing to say to anybody. 

I started reading this book with almost literally no idea what to expect. I was being a good librarian and deliberately reading outside of my wheelhouse. When I walked over to the Young Adult section, this book happened to be displayed with its very eye-catching cover facing out. So I picked it up, read the teaser on the back, and decided to go for it.

It turned out to be completely engaging—at first because the narrator manages to be such a complete idiot and yet display this intriguingly sharp, dry sense of humor, and then because I wanted to know what had happened on that playground, and then because I needed to know why and what would become of him. Little drawings throughout gave me a sense of what Butterball's world looks like to him. This, and the richness, realness, and effortless-seeming naive charm of Butterball's narrative of his own life, kept me right there with him—when being a mom of a teenager, and a white lady of a certain age, might have tempted me to empathize more with his mom or with his therapist.

This is a quick read that reminds you what trauma can do to kids, what their resilience looks like from within, and that there is such a thing as redemption. 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.

This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki: #tbt review

(Finished April 22, 2015)

I don't often sit down and take in a whole book, even a short one, in one sitting anymore, but this was so absorbing I did just that. The characters and situations are very imperfect and very real. There's so much tension between things everlastingly staying always the same whether you want them to or not, and things inexorably changing whether you want them to or not—and the girls are right at that cusp of becoming teenagers, and developing (internally, externally) unevenly, as kids do—and it's just a chapter in their lives, just this one summer—

We see coming-of-age books about boys all the time. And sexy ones about girls. This book is just real. In some ways it's more of a window than a mirror--I didn't have the kind of childhood where staying at a summer cottage was a thing--but I saw myself, too, in the push and pull between wanting to stay a child and being impatient with the whole thing and wanting to just grow up already. 

And there's the whole thing where your parents become suddenly human and the way their human imperfections impact your life becomes—not exactly a thing you question, but at least you begin to see it. It's still the water you swim in every day, but you're getting close to the point in your life where you will be breaching the surface tension. 

And there's the other thing where your childhood friendships, based on nothing more than proximity and age and yet seeming as permanent as the landscape around you, become something that may or may not last through the next argument or your family's next living situation. Just because someone's proximity has made them almost part of who you are doesn't mean that the person they're growing up to be won't be a stranger to you. And that feels so, so strange when you realize it.

I guess what I mean is, read this.

Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite: #tbt review

When I first read this book in 2002, it was still too soon after the 90s for me to realize just what a product of the 90s it really was (all the mansplaining about the magic you can do with a laptop and a modem becomes a little heavy-handed after a while, for example), and I was still too young to realize the degree to which Brite is maybe just a touch too close to her characters in all their just-post-teen rebellion. 

Rereading it in 2013, I concluded that in spite of my minor quibbles with it, this is a gorgeous, highly readable book. The settings are flawlessly painted, the characters have depths that they themselves aren't aware of, and, like all the best haunted-house stories, the plot hooks you remorselessly and draws you along until your knuckles are white and you are tempted to close the book--but you can't, because you have to know what happens next. Very, very worth reading.

Not convinced yet? Read this review by Paul Jr. on Goodreads.