The Dark Between by Sonia Gensler: #tbt review

Plucky, street-wise Kate is an orphan who has just lost her last hope of making an even vaguely respectable living. Frail, dreamy Elsie suffers from fits and can’t admit to anybody what she sees while she has them. Handsome, brooding Asher is just trying to get away from an American father he hates. 

The members of this ragtag group of Victorian teens find their various ways to London’s Summerfield College, where all is not as it seems. There have been mysterious deaths, and the three very different young people are going to have to start trusting each other before they can learn the disturbing truth--and how to deal with their own dark secrets.

This is an entertaining paranormal mystery in the gothic vein with fairly judicious touches of steampunk. It does suffer from a very common fault, that of putting characters with distinctly modern attitudes into a setting that is supposed to be more or less historical. Also, the vast majority of the story's tension revolves around the fact that these characters repeatedly fail to just come out and tell each other what they obviously need to know. 

Nonetheless, the story carries the reader along an amusing roller-coaster of a plot with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing. Refreshingly, the obvious pair-off fails to materialize, and the way the lines between the spirit world and the world of hard-nosed scientific discovery are blurred is interesting in itself. A fun, light read for younger and middle teens.

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!

Circe by Madeline Miller

Narrated by Perdita Weeks

When I was about 14 years old, I read Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis and it changed my life. It was the story of Cupid and Psyche, told from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister. I’d always loved Greek mythology, but under Lewis’ skillful hand, this story and the world it’s set in came vividly to life. Suddenly these were real people with real flaws dealing with, yes, problems on a more-than-human scale, but in a very human way. It was like that moment in The Giver when Jonas begins to learn to see in color. If the people in this story were really human, maybe the people in other myths were, too—maybe they were all human stories, about people not so different from me. All a question of perspective, and mine had shifted, permanently.

Then I reread it as an adult with adult critical faculties—and was deeply disappointed by it. The misogyny that runs through it is so deeply ingrained in the plot and the characters that there was no ignoring it, no compartmentalizing it or separating it from an otherwise beautifully-written book. The whole premise of the thing was that Psyche’s older sister was ugly, and the fact that her younger sister was beautiful and got all sorts of goodies for it—adventure, romance, the attention of the gods—twisted her insides up so badly that she became as ugly on the inside as on the outside. And this was just natural: of course any ugly woman would be so twisted with envy and hatred for any attractive woman that her life would be one big bitter pill. Even if it was her baby sister.

I may go back to it a third time. Maybe I’ve mellowed enough with age to appreciate its virtues as well as its faults. Maybe.

But I don’t have to. Madeline Miller has written Circe, and I so, so wish I could go back in time and hand it to 14-year-old me. It would have blown her mind in exactly the same way as Till We Have Faces, but without the nasty misogynistic-garbage aftertaste.

There’s not much to say about the plot of this book if you’re at all familiar with Greek mythology. Circe is the witch who turns Odysseus’ crew into swine (and well they deserved it); she’s the one who turned the nymph Scylla into the hideous sea-monster to whom we unwittingly refer when we say “between a rock and a hard place” (the original rock being the one Scylla lived in, and Charybdis, another sea monster or maybe a whirlpool nearby, being the hard place—it was apparently not an easy thing to navigate safely between the two); she’s the goddess of magic, or maybe her daughter; she’s a nymph; she’s a misfit; she’s a mother of heroes; she’s the daughter of the mighty titan, Helios.

What’s wonderful about this book is the way it takes all of these disparate identities and scraps of legend and weaves them into one complex but utterly believable being. I mean, aren’t we all a little complicated, and, once we’ve lived enough of life, wouldn’t the people who knew us best at one point in our lives hardly recognize us based on descriptions of us from people we knew in other eras?

Circe is no angel, and this novel isn’t an attempt to reform her. Thank the gods. Nor, however, does it romanticize her dark deeds, and neither does it wallow in them. What it does is create a portrait of an immortal life drawn from many, many strands, setting that life in an ancient Greece where magic is very real and the gods are all too manifest, and this portrait is clear and believable enough to seem like a window we could almost walk right through.

We see the court of Helios with its bickering nymphs, pitch-black and frozen by day while its lord is away and brilliant but brittle when he is in residence, through the eyes of his most neglected daughter. We see her exile to Aeaea, beset by wild beasts and worse sailors, as something she loves and hates in turn, and which in the end facilitates her coming into her own power and protecting her son. We see a person and a life in all of their facets. And maybe, if we’re women of a certain age, we see a little of ourselves.

But you don’t have to be any particular age or gender to be thoroughly ravished by this book. Five out of five stars.

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.

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

Read by Mark Meadows

I am a sucker for time travel stories and vampire stories.

What I often love best about vampire novels and movies is the rich, specific melancholy of the very long-lived—the friends and lovers lost in the depths of centuries; the layered memories of cities as they change through their life cycle while you go on, unchanging; the sense of displacement when the culture that formed you no longer exists. What I love about time travel books is being vicariously plopped, with all of my modern sensibilities, into another time.

How to Stop Time isn’t a vampire book or a time-travel book. It’s about a bloke named Tom Hazard. He’s not a blood-sucking monster and doesn’t have access to any technology that lets him mess with the fabric of space-time. He’s actually a pretty average guy, apart from one thing—due to a rare genetic condition, he doesn’t age at the same rate as the rest of us. He’s been alive for centuries, but doesn’t look a day over 41.

As we read we learn about his childhood, and how he became aware of his condition, and what a danger it was to those around him. Tom’s mother was killed as a witch when people started to notice that he had been 13 years old for an awfully long time, for example. And of course he himself is in danger of being torn apart by mobs or vivisected for science or, at best, thrown in a loony bin, depending on the era and area he’s in. He gradually learns to lie low and never, ever fall in love.

Except he did fall in love, once, when he was a young man. His beloved is long dead as the novel opens, but the daughter they had together, who inherited his longevity, has disappeared. Tom has been searching for her for centuries, with the help of the Albatross Society, a shadowy group of people who share Tom’s condition. They’re a helpful bunch, helping their members acquire new lives and new identities every eight years so that they can live unmolested. All the Albatross Society asks in exchange is the occasional favor.

Tom isn’t actually crazy about performing these favors, but whenever he thinks about backing out of the society, he thinks about his beloved daughter and how they are helping him locate her, and he sticks around. Fingering his many memories like beads on a rosary, avoiding falling in love, and meanwhile rubbing elbows with the likes of William Shakespeare and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

This is a book that held a lot of charms for me. Tom isn’t some superguy; he’s just this bloke who happens to have this genetic condition which has been, yes, a blessing to him, but also, at times, a curse. There’s an extent to which all that elbow-rubbing with famous people starts to feel a little Forrest-Gumpish, but really, if you were writing a time travel book--okay, a book in which your protagonist travels through a lot of time—would you really be able to resist putting them in intriguing historical situations or having them meet intriguing historical personages? And the author doesn’t overdo it.

My main beef with this book is that Tom seems a trifle naive for somebody with plural centuries under his belt. But I love the way his personality develops, over time, into a modern one, and the flashbacks to previous eras are so skillfully written that I felt I’d been whisked right there.

A fun piece of speculative fiction; file under Ripping Yarns for Melancholy Temperaments.

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.

Dune by Frank Herbert

This was not my first time at this rodeo. I first read Dune somewhere around age 15, and I re-read it (and its sequel, Dune Messiah, and sometimes the third book, Children of Dune, and always the then-last book in the series, Chapterhouse: Dune) many times. In fact it was something of a yearly ritual of mine, to pick up Dune and whichever sequels I chose during the holidays every year for a very satisfying re-read. I estimate that I’ve read books 1, 2, and 6 at least a dozen times each, and book 3 perhaps half a dozen times. (I only bothered with books 4 and 5 once each; they didn’t do it for me.)

However, life is short and there are so many great books out there that I will never have time to read, and over the years I became a busier person. When you only finish about a book a week, you become much more selective about what you spend your precious reading time on, and you think hard before going back to something you are already thoroughly familiar with. So, I gradually lost my annual Dune habit. In fact, when my stepson became interested in Dune earlier this year, I realized that it had been at least 15 years since I’d read it—maybe more; I think the last time was around the time the TV miniseries came out in 2000.

It was time to revisit Arrakis.

For anyone who has not read Dune (and also, I hope, not seen any of the screen adaptations—all of them so far are hugely problematic in my opinion and I would be sad to think that they were your first experience of this universe, though if you’re already a fan they’re worth watching)—for anyone not already familiar with this work, the incredible thing, the thing that impressed the hell out of everyone back in 1965 when it was originally published and still impresses new readers today, is the world-building. Nobody had attempted anything like it before, and damn few have succeeded since.

In Herbert’s universe, humanity has spread to the stars and their interstellar civilization is still recovering from a cataclysmic war, the Butlerian Jihad, which resulted in a universal ban on “thinking machines” (basically any computer at all). Humanity, partly as a result of the jihad, has attained amount and degree of diversity that is unimaginable by today’s standards. Some people, even some entire peoples, have been genetically modified and/or deeply, intensively trained to take the place of the thinking machines that previously made an interplanetary civilization possible.

All of these people are knit together in a neo-feudal empire ruled by a theoretically absolute ruler, Emperor Shaddam IV. He holds the Landsraad (a political entity composed of all the noble houses under Shaddam’s rule) and CHOAM (the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles, an organization that controls all above-board trade in the known universe) in his imperial pockets. However, his power is balanced by that of the Spacing Guild, who hold an absolute monopoly on all interstellar travel, and a shadowy sisterhood called the Bene Gesserit, whose motivations are hard to discern and whose members are everywhere.

All of these organizations are completely dependent on a highly addictive substance called melange, or more often, simply “spice.” Spice confers health and longevity in small doses and a variety of utterly necessary mental powers (no computers, remember? But interstellar civilization) in large doses.

And this spice, it turns out, can’t be synthesized. It can only be mined, and only on one planet: Arrakis, nicknamed “Dune” because the entire planet is a deep-desert ecosystem, aside from small habitable areas near the poles. Mining spice is incredibly dangerous; special mobile factories must be flown into the deep desert, where they face constant danger from the planet’s “wild” inhabitants, the Fremen; immense, unpredictable, and astonishingly destructive coriolis storms; and, most of all, the planet’s signature lifeform, the sandworms.

Sandworms vary in size from merely half a dozen meters to large enough to swallow an entire spice factory in one gulp. And swallow them they do, given the opportunity; the sandworms protect the spice sands. Always, without exception, a sandworm will appear at any excavation site. The question is when, and whether a given worm is sighted early enough for the mining machinery and personnel to be safely evacuated.

Arrakis, then, is existentially important to the Empire, and also extremely difficult to govern. As the story begins, Duke Leto Atreides has just won Dune as a fiefdom from his enemy, the morally and physically disgusting Baron Harkonnen. Leto, his Bene Gesserit concubine, Jessica, and their 15-year-old son, Paul, all must leave their beautiful homeworld to take possession of this incredibly tough nut. Of course it’s a trap; Leto and his family are slated for betrayal and assassination. The noble duke nevertheless does his best to successfully govern Arrakis in spite of his powerful enemy’s plots.

He fails, of course. (It would only be a mildly interesting story if he succeeded.) But his son and concubine survive, spirited away to the deep desert, which turns out to be more inhabited than anyone but the inhabitants realized—and it turns out they have plans of their own for their planet. The destiny of the entire human universe will hinge on one fifteen-year-old boy and the fallout from an evil baron’s petty machinations.

This is a book that contains a vast civilization, a carefully-thought-out planetary ecosystem, and a fascinating array of characters. For me, though, it’s a book of moments. I can thumb through these moments in my mind as easily, and almost as meaningfully, as my own memories. There’s the moment when Jessica is overseeing the unpacking in their new home and trying to decide whether she can get away with not displaying the portrait of her duke’s father and the taxidermed head of the bull that killed him in the dining room. The moment when Paul uses a compass, a few precious drops of water, and some real Boy Scout ingenuity to save his and his mother’s life when they are buried in sand. The moment when Paul and Chani meet and he recognizes her from his dreams.

There are a thousand such moments in this book. Reading it is like dipping my hand into a chest full of pearls and coming up holding a strand where one perfect orb follows another, and another, and another, each one deeply lustrous, and each following the next because how could it be otherwise? I honestly can’t tell to what degree the vividness, clarity, and (once you’ve read them) inevitability-in-retrospect of all the moments is a function of how well-written the book is, and to what degree I feel that way because I read it repeatedly at an impressionable age. I do know that inevitability is a large part of what the book is about, and that Herbert won both the Hugo and the Nebula for it in large part because he had created such a believable universe. It’s considered a classic for a reason.

If you’ve never read this book, read it. If you haven’t read it in a while, revisit it. It stands up to the test of time.

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.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Narrated by Mark Bramhall

This book was strongly recommended to me by someone who knows my taste in literature pretty well and called it “Harry Potter for grownups.”

The comparison is obvious, and fairly apt. Our hero, a kid who is about to graduate from high school in modern-day Brooklyn, discovers and is accepted at Brakebills, a highly exclusive school for magicians—real-magic magicians, that is, not stage magic. It’s a college in upstate New York, not an English boarding school for middle- and high-schoolers, though. And since the students are all college-aged, they do all the stuff you expect college students to do. In addition to learning to manipulate the fabric of reality, that is.

The novel spends a *lot* of time on Quentin’s college years—all five of them—before getting to what I feel is the meat of the story. Don’t get me wrong, Grossman’s take on how magic works is interesting, and his descriptions of various events in Quentin’s school years—especially the episode of the wild geese—can be enthralling. And it certainly gets the reader invested in the central characters, who are definitely three-dimensional. But I kept waiting for the other thing that was described on the book jacket to happen: his discovery that a land from his favorite fantasy series actually exists, and his travels there.

Grossman drops a hint about the magical land of Fillory (a very thinly-veiled analog of Narnia, with a smidgen of Middle Earth thrown in) in the first chapter—then drops the subject completely until well into the second half of the book. Eventually, however, and well after graduation, Quentin and his former classmates do learn that it really exists and that they can really travel there. Travel they do—and, naturally enough, disaster ensues, which, naturally, brings out both the best and the worst in them. Though, again, it takes much longer than I would have expected for things to go truly wrong.

The characters are interesting—even Quentin, who starts out very callow and manages to remain more or less incapable of seeing other people’s point of view throughout the book, gains depth and becomes a protagonist one can root for. The universe the Brakebills students live in is one that I could wish to live in. This a good book and I recommend it. Be prepared, though, for the pacing to be rather… odd. I understand there’s a TV series based on the series of books now; I plan to check it out.