Author Archives: Rebecca

Noor by Nnedi Okorafor

by Rebecca

Noor
by Nnedi Okorafor
2021

This is really good and I highly recommend it. It’s Afrofuturistism with the plot beats of a YA novel but a complexity to the characters that makes it feel more adult. It’s set in a relatively near future that grew from our current world. It’s scifi with technology that has continued to advance from what we have, but with a thread of mystical realism that makes me look at the current world and wonder if that is how a religious true believer sees the world. (I’m in this with the main character, AO, who is solidly atheist and yet is beginning to wonder…) It’s set in Nigeria, which is a culture that I’m not particularly familiar with and thus can’t always tell what is based on reality and what has been fictionalized. But the characters and the world are so beautiful and so difficult.

The plot is that our two main characters have each been through separate traumatic attacks in which they defended themselves with lethal force. But they both know that society does not recognize them as having the right to self-defense at the cost of their attackers’ lives. Our primary main character, AO, was born with severe birth defects and now uses extensive and experimental prosthetics, that make many of the people around her question if she is truly human or not. On the run from both her own actions and societies judgement of her, she learns more about other people on the outskirts of society and the exact nature of the experiments that have been done with her and her prosthetics.

The plot also just feels very timely as it comments on how easily the terms “attack” and “defense” can be swapped back and forth when someone’s mere existence is considered a threat to a dominant power in society. And how useful having such a threat can be in maintaining that power, right up until it turns out to actually be a threat rather than carefully massaged propoganda.

Anyway, I really enjoyed and highly recommend this.

We Drank Tea & Stars by Crow & Oubi

by Rebecca

We Drank Tea & Stars
by Judah Crow & Nadine Oubi

This is a fascinating little independent publication that I can’t find listed anywhere online, but ran across on my uncle’s bookcase, after he had apparently found it in a little free library. Poems by Crow and illustrations by Oubi, the really fascinating part is that they’re all collages, both the visual and the text.

I’m familiar with collage art and immediately recognized it when I saw it, and these were fascinating and fun examples of that. But I hadn’t even heard of collage poetry before, the closest I’ve come is erasure poetry: using found text and erasing everything except the words the new artist wants to highlight for their poem. Instead of that, this collage poetry samples lines from other written works and combines them in new ways. Crow also points out that there’s an extra level of collaboration that came from the way most of the samples were from translated works: so there’s the original author, the translator, and then Crow, each providing a different context.

Poetry isn’t really my reading genre of choice, but I do love seeing people do new and interesting things with text. And while I could admire the poetry without any particular understanding or critical thinking, I really enjoyed the afterward talking about the process, and also the Sources list, which ranged between works I’ve never read to works I’ve never even heard of.

Five Gods (Bujold) Fanfic

by Rebecca

I just read Penric & the Bandit, the 13th and most recent addition to the Penric & Desdemona series by Lois McMaster Bujold, and it was a lot of fun, although not necessarily a stand-alone story. I highly recommend the whole series, and the books set in the same universe, and pretty much everything by this author. However, reading this latest story reminded me of how there was some really excellent fanfic set in Bujold’s Five Gods universe that I highly recommend.

One of the real benefits of fanfic, as a genre separate from the canonical source material, is that it can explore ideas that are mutual exclusive to one another, and explore endings without actually concluding the story. Several of these stories deal with what happens to Desdemona when Penric eventually dies.

End of the Road by Gwynne
Summary: Desdemona has moved from one rider to another a dozen times. This is just one more.
My review: This is short, only 975 words, and brings tears to my eyes every time I read it, but it’s not sad: it’s glorious. Penric dies a peaceful death that he and Desdemona had prepared for, but this death is different from any of her previous riders and Desdemona is different too and the god recognizes and rewards that.

After the End by allonym
Summary: Given the choice of jumping to her, or being dissolved in the unfathomable energies of the Bastard’s Hell, Penric kin Jurald’s demon had chosen its destruction. Somewhere, the Bastard is laughing at Eleni.
My review: This is a fabulous continuation of Gwynne’s End of the Road, showing events and consequences for people who did not have the perspective to see the meeting between demon and god. And also includes Penric’s funeral, as a beloved saint of the Bastard, and those funerals are always hilariously chaotic.

Penric’s Last Ride by Zarz
Summary: Pen and Des have had a long and happy partnership together as demon and rider, but Des is well aware that humans don’t live forever, and one last mission to deal with an invading army proves to be Pen’s last. Now Des is stuck as an unwilling ascended demon with an unresponsive rider. Des may be struggling after outliving yet another rider, but being eaten by a saint and dissolved back into chaos isn’t her preferred outcome either. But maybe, just maybe, the Lord Bastard has more grace for His demons than any of them ever realized.
My review: This is a different take on how Penric dies and what happens with Desdemona, that really leans into the idea that the gods are parsimonious, and use the deaths of their saints to further their goals just as they used their lives, but it works out because their goals are to their people’s benefits as well.

Inheritance by silverbirch
Summary: Generations after the events of Paladin of Souls, an old man finds an heir, and a young man finds a new vocation.
My review: Once more, this is a story about the death of a sorcerer and the response of the demon, but instead of Penric, it’s Foix dy Gura, a character from the books The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls, with Penric mentioned as the author of a book written centuries before. This reads very much like a reprisal of the first Penric & Desdemona story, Penric’s Demon, while also being a short look into the future of those characters we met in the first two novels, and I love both of those things.

The Saint, the Scholar, and the Whale by Neotoma
Summary: Ista in Jokona meets an unusual divine on an unusual mission.
My review: In contrast to the other stories in this list, this is not about death, but a pure adventure that shows Desdemona continuing on being her immortal self with a new host and a new set of friends and family around her, centuries after Penric, who is still loved and remembered as an imprint, but there are other things to think about and new people to save and demons and befriend and saints to interact with. Life goes on and it’s an adventure!

I do love the way fanfic is a modern version of storytelling around the campfire, where anyone and everyone gets a chance to offer ideas and insights into what could or couldn’t happen in all sorts of scenarios real or imaginary.

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

by Rebecca

The Mezzanine
by Nicholson Baker
1986, 1988

This is a very odd book. I did enjoy but also, just, huh. It’s a first-person demonstration of overthinking everything, while also just letting it all flow past.

The plot, such as it is, is that the narrator rides an escalator from the lobby to the mezzanine, returning to work after his lunch break. The style however is a detailed and rambling documentation of his thoughts as they veer from the immediacy of his current sensations to memories both recent and long past to considerations for the future and back again. His thoughts would be tripping over themselves with how many and how rapid they are, overlapping and given depth from history, except that Baker has given them space to be fully articulated in a 135-page novel with a multitude of long footnotes such that he describes both a three-minute experience and the entirety of a character.

This book also reminded me of how journals kept by the most obsessively boring of individuals can be the most valuable to historians as they’ll document details that other diarists don’t bother to mention. Most books skim past a character going from point A to point B, with a single line or phrase. This book makes it clear that such a phrase can be treated like a fractal: the closer you look, the more details appear. There are a thousand questions: how did he come to be at point A? why is he going to point B? What is the process of going to point B? Why that process? What sense memories are attached to the process? What history? What is he bringing with him? Why those items? How did he come by those items? etcetera ad infinitum.

I have previously denigrated the literary genre, but this is actually really good despite being very much within that genre. I think the difference is that in so many literary books there is a scene in which the narrator looks at other people in a crowd and think to themselves: those people don’t have interior lives like I do. This book has as it’s very premise that each and every person has a rich interior life. The narrator in this book is no different on the surface level from any of the others, and yet, he is uniquely strangely himself, and so too would be every other person if one looked as deeply.

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

by Rebecca

Fourth Wing
by Rebecca Yarros
2023

I enjoyed this book, and I do recommend it, but it was good enough that its flaws stood out. I was frustrated that it wasn’t better. It felt like an amalgamation of Iron Widow, The Hunger Games, A Deadly Education, and Dragon Riders of Pern, rather than entirely it’s own unique thing. The plot arc was also similar enough like The Poppy War that I was nervous that it was going to get overwhelmingly gruesome at some point. It didn’t, which was a relief. By about page 100 I had a basic concept of how the plot and characters would develop and what kind of twist there would be at the end. It’s not a subtle book. I still blasted through all 500 pages in two days.

Our heroine Violet is forced to enter the training for dragon riders, which has something like a 25% survival rate, and where the students are not quite encouraged to kill each other but certainly not discouraged from doing so. It makes me wonder how much the current real world trend of extreme bullying in schools is coming out in fiction. In theory every student is a volunteer, since dragon riders are highly honored, but Violet’s mother is the general in charge and demands Violet enter despite her having a congenital condition weakening her bones and joints. The children of the executed traitors of an earlier rebellion are also required to enter. Notably the children of traitors who were executed by Violet’s mother.

The students are all in their early twenties and training for peak physical fitness and constantly in mortal danger and are completely horny with it all. There are two students in a classic love triangle with Violet — one is her best friend from childhood and the other is the son of the executed rebellion leader. This is not a subtle love triangle and had me rolling my eyes at the introductions (they’re both so strong and sexy!), but I was really impressed with how the relationships develop and how the situation concludes. Also, a special call out to how well done the sex scenes were, at being character and plot significant and also both sexy and hilarious. Special kudos on those!

The part of the world building that I particularly love is that the dragons are large vicious beings who are not just sentient but actually the ones in charge of the dragon/rider relationship. The dragons pick their riders and they kill the ones that annoy them and no one gainsays what a dragon decides. The humans are essentially familiars to the dragons who can use them to access magic in a way that they can’t without a rider. It’s a fabulous premise that I adore and wish had been fully developed and integrated into the rest of the societal world-building, but it’s just not. The demonstrated command structure is still very much human-oriented, although maybe that will change in the sequel.

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

by Rebecca

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures
by Merlin Sheldrake
read by Merlin Sheldrake
2020

I adore this book! It is fabulous! It made various lists in 2020 and I’ve been sort of vaguely meaning to read it since then, but only just recently got to it when I was looking for an audiobook for a road trip. But it is so good!

Sheldrake is so deeply delightfully peculiar, surrounded by similarly peculiar researchers, that the most shocking point, beyond even his loving description of zombie ants as fungi who have temporarily become ants, or his musings on the heat produced by decomposition as he stewed himself at a fermentation spa, is when he refers to someone else as “eccentric”. I’m just like: “Sir!, you are not in a position to call someone else eccentric!”

He has a wide range of stories from his studies, his life, the studies and lives of his friends and peers, and from world history about how people think of and related to fungi, and they are all fascinating in ways I hadn’t previously imagined.

Sheldrake reads his book with a soft melodic voice that soothes the reader into an understand of the world from his perspective, from the fungal perspective, and makes a convincing argument for how important that perspective is.

He reminds us that there’s still a lot of unknowns in the world, and scientific theories are only as good as the phenomenon they explain. For any given law of nature that we think we know, there seem to be a variety of exceptions and ambiguities, and this book is focused on a huge category of beings that are pressure testing much of our current understanding of the world, and have been for as long as we’ve been aware of fungi as something to study. For example: the very word “symbiosis” was only created in 1876 to describe lichen, and “symbiotic” is even more recent as it became evident that the relationship was more common than just in fungal scenarios.

This book is fascinating and funny while giving an accessible overview of the current state of fungal studies. (Just take a moment to consider that sentence: fascinating! funny! fungal studies?) It also introduced me at least to the existence of a community of professional and amateur fungal enthusiasts I had not previously been aware of. They sound delightfully bonkers while still having some very real ideas and possible solutions to saving the environment and showing that both humans and fungi have a role in a sustainable ecosystem.

The entire audiobook is available for free online at the Internet Archive. I highly recommend it.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

by Rebecca

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
by Claire North
2014

This is a fascinating premise and it’s well-written, but I had more than a few issues with it. I still read it to the end and was impressed overall.

The book is written in the first-person, by Harry August, a man who is born in 1919 and generally dies in the 1990s, and when he dies, he wakes up again, born in 1919. He’s not the only person living and re-living such recursive lives. They call themselves kalachakra. Their first lives are normal, their second lives tend to be short and filled with madness as they freak out about what is happening, and then they settle into the pattern of just reliving their lives, with both more comfort and more tedium each time through. Their society really highlights the apathy that comes from not thinking that we can do anything to effect the terrible things that are happening in the world.

At the beginning of this book, a child shows up at Harry’s 11th deathbed to explain that she’s one link in a chain of messages being sent from the future into the past, from the very young to the very old, to tell them that the end of the world is speeding up, and they don’t know what’s causing it, but it has to be something happening in the past. Then Harry dies in 1996 and is born in 1919 and he goes to find the oldest kalachakra currently living within reach of a small child, to pass along the message.

Fascinating!

Then he discovers what is causing the problem and it’s during his lifetime. So then he has to figure out what to do about it. The main plot takes place over the course of lives 12 thru 15 (which are told in order) but with frequent intermittent descriptions of lives 1 thru 11.

A brilliant idea and well implemented. In some ways, it reminded me of This Is How You Lose the Time War, a book I enjoyed a great deal. But any recommendation for this book comes with a lot of caveats.

First caveat: Much of the action takes place in the 1950s and 1960s, with all that entails, specifically: cold war era and a sense of science having all the answers. Everyone is very certain of themselves, which leads to them doing really terrible things because they don’t pause to consider that they might not know best, and simply shrug off all the harm as unavoidable consequences of progress. I don’t find any of the characters particularly likeable.

Second caveat: There’s a lot of torture. At least four extremely specific torture scenes and more than that depending on what counts, and a general sense that this is just how the world is. Characters, setting, and plot are written such that the torture makes perfect sense, and it’s an unpleasant world view that’s a bit too convincing.

Third caveat: The worldview is not completely convincing, especially as the reveal happens of what’s causing the end of the world. It’s written as an obvious and logical sequences that I don’t actually think works as a logical sequence. Or if it does, it’s a commentary on how time works that I don’t think the author fully intends. If it was intentional, then it would have been interesting but this book is too well written for that commentary to be so poorly implemented.*

Fourth caveat: There’s a lot of convincing by the antagonist to the protagonist. It reminded me a bit of Oscar Wilde’s the Portrait of Dorian Grey, except without Wilde’s humor and with a lot of scientific zealotry.**

The concept of the kalachakra is so cool, and the writing is really well done, but I just wish it had been explored in a less grim and gritty way.***

* In Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog (a book I whole-heartedly recommend), there’s a deep dive into discussion about how time is effected by time travel and what changes a time traveler can and cannot make, and what happens when a person tries. This book would have made a lot more sense if Claire North had made the argument that the timeline is relatively stable but can be slowed down or sped up, rather than simply saying that changes to the timeline are merely taboo due to messing things up for future kalachakra. Then there could have been a deep dive into the ramifications about that. But instead there are a few half-hearted discussions of alternate timelines and branching time theory, and protecting the future world for the kalachakra that live in those futures, but no real discussion of the stability or malleability of the timeline.

** There was not any less homosexual subtext though. I spent a lot of pages waiting for at least some seduction between the antagonist and protagonist, but it’s all very 1950s lets just sleep with women while thinking about each other but no-homo type of thing. It’s just obsession, not attraction, your honor!

*** Especially since there are at least several dozen rather delightful fanfic stories that I’ve read about people re-living their lives to better or worse effect.

Toronto Comic Arts Festival 2024

by Rebecca

I’ve been going to the Small Press Expo (SPX) for years, but last weekend was the first time I’ve managed to go to the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) and it was so much fun! We came in to Toronto on Friday and left on Monday so that we could attend the entirety of the event on Saturday and Sunday. I attended five presentations, browsed hundreds of vendor stalls, and bought 14 graphic novels. (And was tempted by a whole lot more!) I haven’t read all my new acquisitions yet, but most of the ones I have are also online so I can link out to them as well as brag about them:

Godslave
by Meaghan Carter
A nineteen-year-old college drop-out accidentally wakes up an ancient Egyptian god who looks a bit like a fennec fox (so cute!) and then gets drawn into the deadly family drama of the Egyptian pantheon. Who the good guys are is deeply in question. I bought the first two volumes, which comprise the first five chapters, but the online version has started the sixth chapter!

The Big Mystery Case: A Crime Comedy
by Luke Bruger-Howard
This is a hilarious pastiche of crime thrillers that reminds me of the equally hilarious video How To Make Blockbuster Movie Trailer. It’s a quick read (less than an hour) and a loving mockery of the detective genre.

Baggage
by Violet Kitchen
This is an absolutely beautiful poem of a graphic novel, about packing for a trip, unpacking in a hotel room, and then repacking to depart again. It’s gorgeous in the way it uses both artwork and words to evoke emotions and communicate a sense memory. The imagery is very clean and crisp while the concept is very ethereal and dreamlike, and it works together perfectly.

The Closest Thing to Living
by Ky K
They only had the prologue of this story in hardcopy, but it drew me in and included a link to the online version for me to continue following and see what happened to the woman who wakes up from her murder, discovers she’s a vampire, and decides that this is the freedom she needed to be more true to herself. She’s very nihilistic and isn’t much interested in her own past, but it looks like despite being dead, she won’t be able to actually walk away.

Autumn Wing and the Crown of Fire, Volume 1: The Sword of Red Leaves
by Brandon Hankins
Gorgeous inkbrush artwork with a limited color palate that I really love. This first chapter is about a young nephilim, who’s trying to earn the right to go on a quest to forge a crown of fire, aka a halo, and come into his full power. It did a really good job of addressing what it means to be strong, especially when other people are yelling at you for both not giving in to them and for not being strong. I just bought the first volume, but five chapters are online!

Tales from the Sixth Sun
by Dennis Moran
Absolutely gorgeous artwork and a magical world that reminds me a bit of Wakanda, with mysticism and technology integrated, set in a fantasy world heavily influenced by Afrofuturism and Inca-futurism. The first half of the book is nearly word-less, and the art carries the storytelling so beautifully but also very tightly focused. The later part has more dialogue and introduces a much more complex society and history and plot. This book contains the first three chapters of the story, but the first six chapters are online!

I am extremely picky about the graphic novels I buy: I they need to have both beautiful artwork and interesting storylines, and all of these were wonderful finds. I’m really looking forward to making this festival an annual event.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

by Rebecca

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
2013
read by Robin Wall Kimmerer
2016

This is a gorgeous and fascinating book, and I’m glad that I was able to listen to a version read by the author. The book is a wide ranging series of stories and musings about her life, family history, biology, ecology, and reclaiming that which is too nearly lost. It starts with a very personal focus, about her life and self-reflection and moves onto some really fascinating discussions of plants and of Native American culture and history, and then continues onto a discussion of both the dangers of ecological destruction and the importance of not giving up on repairing such casualties.

Kimmerer was raised with a Native American’s perspective on nature which gave her a love of plants and a desire to study them, and then went on to get a PhD and then a professorship in biology with a very scientific perspective on nature. It was later that she realized how important it was to combine the two approaches to nature rather than to give up one for the other. The scientific perspective is one of studying plants as objects, with scientists as unbiased outsiders, while the Native American perspective is one of being part of the nature with humanity as the younger sibling needing to learn from the plants and animals who came before them.

One of the themes that really got to me was her description of how nature is a gift economy: plants give fruits and berries to the birds, and birds give transportation of seeds to the plants. And also how humans are part of this gift economy, not separate from it. Our role in nature is supposed to be taking what is given with gratitude and giving back with reciprocity. The dangers comes with refusing what is given, taking what is not given, not having gratitude, and not giving back.

Another metaphor that she used to great effect was delving into the story of the windigo — a Native American monster that is constantly hungry and can never be satiated — and how capitalist society is trying to turn everyone into this very monster: hungry for more and never satisfied.

The audiobook is approximately 17 hours long, so I’ve been listening to this on my work commute for more than a month, and Anna has been inundated with “In Braiding Sweetgrass…” statements, because every day there is some new and fascinating story or perspective. I’ve also had to deal with becoming a bit teary-eyed while driving a few times.

This is truly an amazing book, and I highly recommend it to basically anyone and everyone.

Little Mushroom by Shisi

by Rebecca

Little Mushroom
by Shisi
translated by Xiao
2022

This is adorable and hilarious and horrifying. This is set in a post-apocalyptic world (with all the scientific explanation of Star Trek, ie, absolutely ludicrous but boy does the author and a series of scientist characters try) where the final bastions of humanity are in a handful of highly guarded cities under military rule, while plants and animals outside are all aggressively mutating and mutagenic. Get stung by an insect and within a couple of hours you’ll become a giant insect monster going on a killing rampage. The nature aspect reminds me of Scavengers Reign, and the writing is clearly intended to evoke specific visual images that sometimes comes across oddly in a written medium, but this would make a stunning animation.

The society is an extreme form of fascism that’s written as a necessary evil with the protestors dying horrible deaths for not understanding the necessity of the military department with little to no oversight that executes anyone suspected of being tainted with a mutation. The slogan of “Humankind’s interests take precedence over all else” very much includes the rights of any individual. There’s the military, the scientists, the breeding program, and everyone else. It’s a grim society, on the cusp of destruction: an extreme dystopia.

However, the book’s perspective is not from the point of view of a human. While humans are struggling for survival in an increasingly hostile world due to the mutating animals and plants, one such mutation is a mushroom who has gained sentience, mobility, and the ability to shape change into the form of a human. That mushroom, named An Zhe, ventures forth into the human city to reacquire part of itself that had been collected by a human research team. Human massacres just aren’t as traumatic to a mushroom as they are to a human and An Zhe’s calm curiosity permeates the book. What does he know about humans and morals and society? He’s just a little mushroom! Adorable!

Lu Feng, the human in charge of executing any human mutations, takes one look at An Zhe and essentially goes: huh. An Zhe is definitely odd but not in the way of a mutated human. Deeply suspicious, but to all appearances just an oddly sweet and naive human.

And thus the plot develops: the human race losing the century-long war against the increasing number of devastating disasters while desperately trying to figure out what’s causing the mutations, An Zhe trying to figure out how to fit into human society while searching for his lost “spore”, and Lu Feng developing unwanted feelings for the one person who isn’t scared of him.

It is utterly ridiculous and adorable — despite the gore, body horror, and overarching destruction — and somehow ends happily.

While this is printed in two volumes, it was originally written as a webnovel with three books and then a series of epilogues and side stories. I’d originally just bought the first volume which is books one and two (despite the cover which says “book one” on it). It does come to a good conclusion and is a natural break in the story… except that there are some really distracting loose ends (a mannequin that’s a perfect replica of Lu Feng was created, confiscated, and then never shows up again? I think not!) so I immediately ordered the second volume and then had to wait a week for it to show up.

There’s definitely some cultural commentary and common Chinese tropes that I don’t have the context for, but I still really enjoyed these books. I can’t give a blanket recommendation since the society is seriously grim dark with the aforementioned body horror and gory deaths, so readers will need to judge their own preferences, but it really is amazing how chill and even hilarious the narration can be regarding the horrors when the POV character is a self-aware mushroom.