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 Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

read by Kyle McCarley

Maia is the exiled, motherless, abused, and neglected youngest son of the emperor of the Elflands. He’s also a half-goblin in a society where stone-cold racism is the norm. When his father and all of his older brothers are killed in an airship crash, suddenly *he’s* the emperor—a job he has no training or desire for. 

But he does have the desire to make a good job of it. And he gradually learns he’s got the disposition for it; his childhood, miserable and deliberately neglectful as it was, prepared him for the imperial throne in some unexpected ways. Still, learning whom to trust and how best to navigate the bewildering and seemingly constant intrigues of a hostile court is far from easy. 

And then it turns out that the disaster that killed his father was no accident—and whoever is responsible for it is still out there somewhere. Or maybe somewhere in his own palace. Maia knows in his head, and soon learns in his gut, that an emperor can’t truly have friends; and his relations are either distant, dead, or have so many agendas, secret or otherwise, that it would take someone as idiotic as his former guardian always told him he was to trust them.

He can’t act alone, though. There’s only one of him, and he doesn’t know enough to be effective. And the potential consequences of failure to unearth the perpetrators of this plot won’t just affect him; thousands of his subjects could suffer if he makes a wrong move. He needs reliable advice and confederates, not honeyed words from sycophants. He’ll have to trust someone. But who?

This is a truly charming coming-of-age tale/political thriller/murder mystery set in a delightfully detailed and creditably believable world somewhere between elfpunk and steampunk (elfsteam? Punkpunk?). The cultures, political system, and details like court fashions are all three-dimensional and fascinating. We follow Maia's point of view closely throughout, to a degree that’s almost old school by today’s standards. 

Mostly this works beautifully, because Maia is such a good sort and a sympathetic character on multiple levels. His ignorance of court life is nearly as deep as our own ignorance of the world it’s set in, which makes him a good stand-in for the reader, and his awkwardness and occasional spitefulness are believable and save him from seeming too good to be true (or too good to be palatable, anyhow). 

The only drawback to this following-super-closely-over-Maia’s-shoulder business, and it’s the only real flaw I see in the writing, is that the scope of the story is much broader than our narrow view of it. Lots of things that one might like and expect to see happening, one only hears about afterward, which can feel a little anticlimactic at times.

But that’s a quibble. This is a really engrossing story that I couldn’t make myself stay away from for any length of time. Highly recommend.

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.

Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art by Gene Wilder

read by the author

My first reaction to listening to the audiobook version of this autobiography, which Gene Wilder narrated himself, was, “Ah, that voice—that’s the gentlest voice in the world. I love that voice.”

My second reaction was, “Man, Gene Wilder was really screwed up.”

It’s a truism that a lot of comedians and comedic actors are pretty screwed up. The line between a desire to please others and make them laugh, and an enjoyment of fame and attention—and a *need* for all of that, as a stand-in for love or a way of staving off deep, crippling anxiety—can be a fine one. In Gene Wilder’s case I think he spent most of his adult life on the sane side of that line. But he achieved that only after a lot of therapy.

We get to hear about the events of his childhood and young adulthood that shaped him as a person and contributed to his artistic and comedic sensibilities. Mr. Wilder was very open about who he was and how he responded to things, so we really get a sense of his life journey. For example, he was, if not scarred for life, at least greatly set back and discouraged, by an early encounter with the opposite sex, and while he definitely seems rather bitter about the other person involved, he doesn’t hold back about his own reaction, either.

We get to hear about his training as an actor, his friendships and romantic relationships, and his films--though the one thing I found a little disappointing about this book was that he doesn’t go into as much detail as I’d like about the making of most of his films. The only one he spends much time on is Young Frankenstein; I’d have loved to have heard much more about the personalities and the general experience involved with, say, The Frisco Kid and Blazing Saddles. Still, what he did include was more than I already knew. I loved, for example, hearing his impression of the young Harrison Ford.

And we get to hear, of course, about Gilda Radner. They had a deep love and a tumultuous relationship and he doesn’t spare himself or her in his descriptions. And we get to learn about the woman he married and was with until he died, Karen Webb.

This autobiography is full of beautiful little nuggets about the life of a very gifted man who had a lot of issues. Highly recommended to anyone who is a fan of his work.

The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family by Dan Savage

read by Paul Michael Garcia

Published in 2005, The Commitment is a snapshot of a time in our country’s life as well as famed sex-and-relationship-advice columnist Dan Savage’s life. A decade before June 26, 2015, when the United States Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage and legalized it everywhere, there was still a lot of very contentious debate on the topic—not least among those most directly affected by it.

For example, there was Dan Savage, his boyfriend Terry Miller, and their son, DJ, aged 6 at the time. None of them wanted Dan and Terry to get married. At least, Terry doesn’t want to get married; not because he isn’t committed to Dan and their son, but because he doesn’t want to “act straight.” He’d rather they get matching “property of” tattoos. 

And DJ is against it because, in his six-year-old worldview, boys don’t marry each other. (Never mind quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.) Plus he doesn’t want to be there when his dads say mushy things to each other and kiss in front of everyone. But he wants cake. If there’s going to be a wedding, he’s definitely going to want some cake.

But Dan isn’t sure. Marriage does seem pointless when there’s no legally-binding aspect of it and you’re an atheist. On the other hand, his Catholic mom would be beyond thrilled. Plus he’s already planning a ten-year anniversary party—the anniversary of his and Terry’s first date—and he wants everyone in the family to travel to Seattle for it, and to take it as seriously as they take other major family events. And it’s not like he’s going to be leaving Terry.

So he sets out, in his somewhat contrarian way, to explore the issue. He takes his little family to a summer camp for kids with queer families, so DJ can see that other kids *do* have parents with matching genders. The following summer, he brings his whole family along—mom, siblings-and-partners, everyone. He has conversations with them about why they have or have not chosen to marry and/or have kids, he has debates with Terry about the drawbacks and virtues of marriage and tattoos and how best to plan for their anniversary party.

The most interesting conversations he has, to me, are the ones he has with his older brother, Bill. I realized while listening to Dan recounting them just how much his philosophies on life, sex, and relationships are informed by Bill’s. In fact, many of Dan’s most regularly-repeated nuggets of wisdom come directly from the conversations about marriage that he had with Bill that summer.

In case you’re not already a Dan Savage fan and don’t already know how the story ends, I won’t spoil it for you. Whether you’re already one of his readers or listeners or not, though, I do  highly recommend this book. It’s an interesting and very personal and journey through what the politics of DOMA and the religious right put families through, and it’s told with clarity, frankness, and (sometimes self-deprecating) humor. It’s no longer ripped-from-the-headlines current, but it’s an important piece of (recent) LGBTQ+ history and a moving story.

A Fugitive Green by Diana Gabaldon

read by Jeff Woodman

This is a novella from the Seven Stones to Stand collection—these are stories set in the Outlander universe, about characters other than Jamie, Claire, and their immediate family. It recounts the story of how Minnie met Lord John Grey’s brother Hal during a distinctly low period in his life, and it’s charming as all hell.

Minnie is a 17-year-old whose father runs a rare book business—and also trades in gossip, secrets, and documents whose originators and/or proper owners would prefer remain private. Minnie, like most people in that day and age, has been brought up in the family business. And she may have just a little too much knack for the illicit information trade for her own good.

As the story begins, Minnie’s father is sending her off to London, putatively to both deliver and receive some books and at the same time to be introduced to polite society with the idea of catching a wealthy English husband. In reality, he has a handful of less legal commissions for her—and she has some personal business of her own.

Accompanied at various times by two stalwart Irish bodyguards and by the redoubtable matchmaker, Lady Buford, Minnie sets out to accomplish her father’s errands, evade her new suitors, and find and meet her biological mother. Along the way she meets Hal.

Hal’s wife has just died a month ago, giving birth to a probable bastard. In addition to dealing with that, he’s trying to restart the regiment that was disbanded when his father became a convicted traitor, and to do that, he’s got to secure royal patronage. In order to secure royal patronage, he’s got to get rid of the stain on his reputation that was caused when he dueled with and killed his dead wife’s poet lover. And he’s got plenty of evidence—a cache of letters between his late wife and her paramour. But he refuses to let the deeply painful letters be made public, or seen by anyone at all.

Into this muddle sails Minnie, at a critical point. She has the tools to cut this Gordian knot—but will she find a way to do it without unacceptable consequences? How will this mess get set to rights, and who will pay for it?

Ms. Gabaldon’s crystal-clear pose and deft, balanced hand with character, setting, *and* plot will hook you and keep you hooked. (Not to mention a cameo from a certain Jamie Fraser, whose masculine charms get him out of hot water without him even knowing about it.) A must-read for fans of the Outlander books.

You Know Me Well by Nina LaCour and David Levithan

read by Matthew Brown and Emma Galvin

You Know Me Well is a madcap buddy/coming-of-age/caper story for teens, set in San Francisco and an unnamed East Bay suburb (I’m thinking San Ramon?) during Pride Week. Co-written by David Levithan and Nina LaCour, it’s told in alternating points of view of the two main characters, who have sat next to each other in class for close to a year but never spoken. They meet unexpectedly on a painfully eventful night in San Francisco and instantly become each other’s manic pixie dream wingperson.

Mark is a boy who has been in love with his best friend, Ryan, for years (think Michael Novotny and Brian Kinney). They’ve fooled around, but for Ryan, that’s all he wants and all it ever was ever meant to be. Kate, meanwhile, has been long-distance in love with her best friend’s cousin, Violet—or at least the idea of Violet, since they’ve never actually met.

On the eventful night in question, Kate is actually going to get to meet Violet in person for the first time, and Mark and Ryan are encouraging each other to be brave at a party at a gay bar they’ve used fake IDs to get into. It’s set to be a magical evening… but falls completely apart. When Kate runs into Mark, they both need a friend very badly, and Kate decides, in a very straightforward way, to ask for that.

It ends up being both of their salvation, and their friendship is at the core of the book, though there’s romance and coming-of-age stuff going on, too. David Levithan’s unrealistically happy coincidences abound, but you can’t mind them; you want the characters, who have more than enough on their plates, to be helped along by fate and by wealthy Instagram fairy godfathers as much as possible.

The scenes in LGBTQ+ settings really shine—the jockey shorts dance contest and the LGBTQ+ poetry slam (for which a few actual not-bad and quite plausible poems were written) in particular. Less shiny is the character of Kate’s mean-girl best friend, whose actions and motivations are contradictory. Kate’s reasons for remaining friends with her are opaque to murky though most of the book, but they do become clearer toward the end. It’s a forgivable rough patch in a thoroughly enjoyable book.

Verdict: read it. It won’t change your life, but you’ll be glad you got to meet these kids and spend some time rooting for them.

Calypso by David Sedaris

read by the author

If you’ve never heard David Sedaris read, go google Santaland Diaries right now. You want an excerpt of him on NPR. Go ahead. I’ll wait. 

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All right, now that you’ve listened, you’re starting to get the picture. Sedaris is a memoirist and a performer of his memoirs, which are written in short… anecdotes? They’re more structured than that. Stage performances? You do definitely want to hear him read his work, but it also works very well in print. Stories? They are definitely that, but also highly personal and, to say the least, quirky as hell. Also deeply, sometimes shockingly, funny. You’re never sure how much of them to actually believe.

The term I see bandied about is “semi-autobiographical essays.” Which seems accurate enough, if a little pedantic. He collects these semi-autobiographical essays into books every so often, and Calypso is one of those collections.

It’s a bit of a departure from a lot of his previous work, because he was writing these stories/memories/anecdotes at a time in his life when he was dealing with the death of two family members. It’s still funny, because he’s a man who can see the humor in literally anything, and make you see it, too--and be a little shocked at yourself for laughing.

What you’ll be laughing about in this collection is a series of family vacations at a beach house on the Carolina coast, haunted by bickering, badgering, the arrival of middle age, and both the specter and the reality of mortality. There are snapping turtles and book signings, transatlantic travel and family dinners. Sedaris writes in lovingly, gleefully unsparing detail about everyone’s quirks and faults, his own most of all.

If that idea makes you squeamish, or really, if you’re squeamish at all, you should probably skip this one. But if you can handle a little tumor humor and a lot of blatant (but never gratiutous) oversharing, dive in. If he can laugh at his life, and make us laugh at it too, maybe you can start seeing the ridiculousness in yours.

Oh. And if possible, listen to the audiobook version, which he reads himself.

The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

I devoured this book in one sitting. Yes, it is a quick read—but it’s also a compulsively engrossing one.

Each page is a dictionary entry, a definition of a single word, in alphabetical order. But the definitions are idiosyncratic memories and emotions, definitions-by-example. And these examples are snippets from the life of a relationship--beautiful little snippets, as clear and specific as snapshots.

The snippets are set up in alphabetical order, not chronological order, so the narrative emerges like the image in a pointillist painting as the artist adds first ultramarine, then phthalo blue, then cadmium red, and so on—one image suddenly swimming into focus as others become temporarily more obscure, but what it’s being obscured by is detail that’s building up another section of the image, or linking one figure in the painting to another.

Which makes this sound very high-brow and maybe difficult to comprehend, but it’s not. The little “snapshots” are each so engaging, so clear, so poignant in small and large ways, that you just want to read the next one and the next one. And it’s no harder to understand than your own life, or a rambling story told by a friend who is rambling as they try to figure out where they went wrong in the most important relationship in their life.

If I told you absolutely anything about the narrative, I’d be robbing you of the joy of discovering it for yourself. I won’t do that. This book is compulsively readable and you can do it in an evening. Go do it. You won’t be sorry.

Semiosis by Sue Burke

read by Caitlin Davies and Daniel Thomas Hay

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

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

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

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

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

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