Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Binti is the second of Tor's new novella project that I have read. After the superb Witches of Lychford, my expectations were high. I'd previously read Zarah the Windseeker and Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, but I was hoping Binti might convert me from a vaguely curious reader to a fan.

Sadly, it didn't.

Binti starts out with our heroine sneaking away from home to start a journey away from her heritage, towards education and space. She is at the bottom of the social pecking order, standing out as different and ultra-traditional in a modern world, with strangers feeling entitled to treat her like a curious animal or a freak.

She takes her place on a starship to travel to the universe's most respected academy - and then the real meat of the story begins. It involves aliens and conflict, heritage and stolen cultural artefacts.

The problem with Binti is that the most interesting story takes place before the narrative begins. Binti's determination to start a new life is a huge thing - but it's a decision already made when the story starts. Being treated as second or third class citizen because of her primitive / traditional heritage (or rather, because of her tribe) is vaguely interesting, but an aspect of the story that is quickly overshadowed.

Once the main plot develops, Binti does not achieve any of her successes through merit. She's immune to an attack because of an artefact she has found on her home planet and smuggled aboard as a talisman. The mixture she applies to her skin turns out to make her useful to the aliens. Communication becomes possible, essentially, because of magic.

Binti might be a gifted prodigy, but none of her achievements in the story are earned because of her skill and intellect. Luck and Deus Ex Machina save the day, again and again and again.

There were a lot of interesting aspects early in the story - Binti as an outsider who is patronised benevolently (one man tells her that she's the pride of her people because she has earned a place in the academy - i.e. in his, the higher culture. He's ignorant of the fact that she has in fact permanently shamed and exiled herself by accepting the place) or dismissively and malevolently (some women touch the film of mixture on her skin and discuss its ingredients and smells in her presence, clearly considering her a primitive).

As soon as we see people as 'other' we treat them differently. In most cases, we assign them an inferior rank in our heads. Whether we distrust, resent, dismiss or look down upon them, or whether we cutesify, protect, try to save them - either way, we don't see them as equal. We expect less of them, whether intellectually, morally, socially or physically. Binti travels into a world where everyone others her, where everyone is above her in standing, and to do so, she gives up her place in a world where she was an equal to others. As such, it is terribly disappointing that she surprises the people she meets, and earns their respect, not through merit, but through luck.

Rating: 3/5

Cardiff Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club: THE MARTIAN!!!

I've been distributing new flyers around Cardiff this weekend to encourage new people to join our Science Fiction & Fantasy / Speculative Fiction Book Club.

If you're visiting my blog because you found a flyer, hello!

Book Club Background

Our book club is fairly small. Meeting sizes over the past year have ranged from two to nine people - the last two meetings had three attendees, so we decided to renew our efforts to recruit our pool of book clubbers and inject some fresh blood. Hence the flyers.

We're a relaxed book club: not everyone reads every book.

The more regular attendees include myself (Robert), Nikki, Thomas, Sarah and Kelly. Several others have come along from time to time.

You can also find our book club on Facebook and on Goodreads.

October: The Martian

The book we're reading for the next meeting is Andy Weir's 'The Martian'.

We're also planning to see the movie in a cinema. UPDATE: We'll see the film this Saturday, 10th October, at 11:20am in Cineworld Cardiff. This should be early enough for some of us to watch the rugby afterwards.  :-)

November: Halloween Read?

For all existing members and those showing up at our next meeting: Should we read something scary for Halloween / our November meeting?

If so, any recommendations?

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Aurora is a convincing novel about interstellar travel. Forget faster-than-light and other magic: we meet our spacefarers about twenty years before they will reach their destination, and over 150 years after their great great grandparents set off. They are twenty light years away from Earth: communication is two strands of one-way streams passing each other in the dark. There is no possibility of dialogue. Their spaceship is made up of a central spine and two cylinders of connected 'biomes' - each of which is the home to one replica of a climate region from Earth. Their mission is to populate an Earth like planet, twenty light years away.

After 160 or so years, the society on board the ship is rigidly managed by a committee. The biggest threat is human population growth, so procreation is strictly regulated (while attitudes to recreational sex are generally relaxed). Their ship has its own history, with mysteries and past upheavals casting shadows into their present and into the future.

The ship and its habitats are showing signs of wear and tear, and despite the engineers' best efforts, it looks like the ship could not go on forever. The differential evolutionary development speeds of all the different life forms aboard are having odd effects - their ship is an island in space, but even that analogy is not completely useful.

Devi is, effectively, the chief engineer, even if she insists that everyone is equal. She's extremely competent, respected throughout all parts of the ship, serious and constantly, quietly fretting over the myriad little problems that beset their ship and its habitats. Her husband Badim is a counterpoint: calm, warm, and a solid source of support to her and their daughter, Freya.

Freya is the hero of the story. We meet her as a child, taller than most adults already (she will grow into the tallest human aboard), curious and adventurous, a bit naive, and, in her mother's eyes, mentally slow. At night she sometimes sneaks out of her room to eavesdrop on her parents' conversations, and she feels the acute agony of her mother's judgement and generally distant demeanour.

Freya goes through a coming of age rite - to walk the ship, explore all the biomes of both rings and meet all the communities aboard - while the ship slows down to be able to stop when it gets to their destination. Devi keeps trying to fix the systems so everything stays in equilibrium, battling material decay, system imbalances, and the progression of time.

Meanwhile, Devi asks the ship to tell her a story: the story of their journey. The ship, run by a quantum computer, struggles with this assignment: a human narrative requires a near-human mind. Devi has been programming and instructing the ship to self-programme her entire life. She has turned a quantum computer running static software routines into a dynamic self-improving system, and now, asking it to make its own programming ever more flexible, she has started shaping the ship's software into something that it becoming a mind, a personality, a self.

Aurora is a thought through, convincing novel. Freya is the heart and soul of the story, and it is gut-wrenching to see her suffer on several occasions. The ship is the counterpoint character, a very introspective mind that constantly questions language and logic. At times, the story moves quickly and the narrative becomes a summary of developments. At others, the narrative zooms in. It's not always clear who is telling the story - at some point, it seems as if the novel has been written by the ship, while this later turns out not to be the case.

As a hard science fiction novel, it's perhaps unsurprising that it takes its ideas and its thoughts very seriously, while the characters are a little bit secondary. The population is made up of regular people, with very few being outstanding or particularly unique. Devi, yes, but everyone else is a little more flat. Freya is a person the reader gets attached to more because we see her grow up from childhood to adulthood and beyond, rather than because she is uniquely heroic.

Devi probably has a more complex internal life than she ever lets anyone see - even the reader can only infer her thoughts and emotions; she keeps her own counsel. If you are looking for a novel that is fun and light, full of adventures and iconic characters, this is not the book for you. If, on the other hand, you want to read a book that mulls interstellar travel as seriously as it can, and which comes up with a very realistic scenario, then Aurora is well worth your time. It's never boring, but, conversely, it rarely gets very exciting, either.

It's hard SF, based sufficiently on science for it to seem possible. I found it interesting and compelling: a solid accomplishment.

Rating: 3.5/5

Dream Paris by Tony Ballantyne

Dream Paris is the second in a series of books, following on from Dream London. The book ditches most of the characters from Dream London, with only two (that I noticed) reappearing.

Dream Paris is the story of Anna, a teenage girl living in the slowly redeveloping ruins of London, which has only just re-established its reality after a takeover attempt by the Dream World.

Her parents are absent, having marched into the parks at the end of Dream London, while Anna only  narrowly escaped from the march. She's coming to terms with life on her own, looking after lost and vulnerable neighbours from time to time, and vaguely looking forward to passing her A-levels and moving on to university.

Dream London has not passed without leaving some aftereffects behind. People take an undue interest in the social lives and virtue of women. Social mores have reverted by a generation or two (in Dream London, women were either housewives, whores, or, much more rarely, femme fatales), so Anna is not entirely surprised when a social worker shows up at her door, tasked with taking her into care.

The meeting with the social worker does not go as expected: another person shows up, a representative of the government with a clear history with the Dreamworld, and he has plans for Anna. She is given a fortune, a relic from Dream London. Fortunes are absolutely deterministic: what is foretold must happen. Unfortunately, the fortunes are in short snippets and impressions: an argument with her mother, a night of passion, a death...

Anna's fortune foretells that she will meet her mother in Dream Paris. The British government has an interest in revisiting the Dream World, as the incursion into London has left Britain reeling. They send Anna on her quest, accompanied by a soldier / bodyguard.

Dream London, if you haven't read it, is a mesmerising, evocative novel. Surrealism and dream logic intermingle effortlessly with an adventure story. It's a novel that reminds the reader of Dark City, of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. It's very archetypal, with patriarchical gender roles and a strong sense of location / London.

Dream Paris, by comparison, is different. This time, too, there is surreal dream logic at work. The plot successfully balances the unpredictable nature of crazy dreams with the predictable shape of a regular story. Having a good structure with plenty of thrills makes it satisfying to read.

Once again, there is also a strong sense of location. Paris is a different city, with different archetypes. Dream Paris is caught up in perpetual revolution. Eiffel Towers spring up everywhere and need to be repressed, while La Terreur and Madame Guillotine lurk just around the corner.

Dream Paris stands up to reading on its own. It is a slightly superior novel to its precursor: Dream London made the reader feel like being sucked further and further into a dream. It was a sinkhole of surrealism, a huge credit to writerly craftsmanship, but, towards the end, it was so surreal that the reading experience stopped being pleasurable and started feeling more than a little nightmarish. Dream Paris, on the other hand, is set in an established Dream City. It is not trying to take over real Paris. There is less of a sense of spiralling, exponentially growing surrealism, as this city is more or less set in its ways. People are still shaped by the Dreamworld, but citizens here have lived their entire lives in Dreamworld: they are not brutalised by a shifting reality. Dream London turned women into whores, ethnic minorities into primitives. It did this, fairly rappidly, to people who were modern Londoners to begin with. Dream Paris may be full of iconic characters, but they have grown into their roles over their lifetimes. They have more agency, are less the victims of a traumatic invasion of their psyches.

Dream Paris is full of interesting, quirky ideas. Scary clowns, porcelain dolls, sinister banks, edible duels, integer bombs, non-continuous mathematics, sexism and morality... it's a novel that positively fizzes with originality.

If you enjoyed Dream London, I think you'll love Dream Paris. If you found Dream London interesting, but not quite to your liking, you will probably enjoy Dream Paris more, And if you haven't read Dream London, I would recommend it, and recommend Dream Paris more.

Rating: 4.5/5 

Witches of Lychford by Paul Cornell

Witches of Lychford is a novella. It's one of the first in Tor's new effort to re-popularize a near-forgotten format, now that e-readers make it less expensive to take risks.

It is, however, much more than that: it's a real gem.

Despite a cover that looks unappealing (and very, very literary), this is a story which has more richness and flavour than you'd expect from its sepia cover.

Judith, a cranky old woman with a viciously belligerent, bed-ridden husband, is Lychford's last remaining witch. On a rare excursion out of her home, a sinister force attacks her. She fends it off, but wonders whether thinking about the controversy about a proposed supermarket has triggered the attack - and what exactly those plans might entail.

Lizzie is a pastor, going through the motions after having lost her faith when a playful act resulted in the death of her boyfriend a year ago. She's returned to Lychford in the hope of reconnecting with her faith surrounded by the community she grew up in. She does not care either way about the supermarket. Her main concern is that the controversy is tearing her community apart. When the executive sent out by the company puts a giant wad of cash in her collection plate, she has an irrational and overwhelmingly powerful aversion to touching the money. Soon, she finds herself drawn into the battle.

Autumn grew up with Lizzie, but their friendship fell apart when Lizzie was at university studying theology. A rationalist and atheist, Autumn wasn't keen on her best friend's choice. But there was something else, something that happened to her, which has turned her into the woman running a herbal magic shop while resisting the beliefs she is making her living on.

Three complex women, drawn in detail, end up in an adventure together, in a small English town that's struggling with modern times. Some of the blurbs made the novella sound like a funny romp, but actually, it is a more complex beast. There are moments of humour, but they are biting, more often than not. The evil our heroes are up against manages to be simultaneoulsy epic and utterly mundane in a way that you usually see in only the very best urban fantasy novels, except this is not an urban setting at all. Lychford is a village a bit like Wall in Stardust, except the places it borders are much more dangerous to the unprepared.

Every detail in this novella is interesting and authentic. If Hollywood producers (or the BBC) have any sense, they'll buy the rights immediately: there is enough depth and richness here for a superb movie, with just enough plot to fill a perfect movie length without the risk of losing anything. The novella is a beautiful gem that has more depth than many a novel, while being entertaining, fun and well-paced. It's not a word too long, not a word too short: it's practically perfect in every way.

Rating: 5/5

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

The Rest of Us Just Live Here is a post-modern suburban-fantasy teen novel. Set in a world where, every generation or so, some big supernatural events occur which happen to be solved by teenagers, the book focuses on the regular teens instead.

The 'indie kids' are the ones who have the grand, world-saving adventures with zombies or vampires or Gods or aliens or multidimensional whatsits. Everyone knows who they are - the ones who keep themselves apart and whose names are pretentious and hipster-y. The ones who go through life-or-death stuff a lot, while forming their little Scooby Gangs, staying off the internet and Twitter and not really telling anyone else what's going on.

Meanwhile, Mikey, Mel, Henna, Jared, Meredith and Nathan are having their own problems. The final year of high school, the change in their lives that's imminent with most of them moving to different colleges, and the heartbreak, sexualities, attractions, anxieties and confusing matter of being teenagers. Not to mention their parents, who are bizarre and flawed and in some cases quite dysfunctional. Oh, and there's also OCD and anorexia in the mix...

The Rest of Us Just Live Here is a much more serious teen novel than it sounds like from the blurbs. Each chapter starts with a one-paragraph summary of the 'indie kid' story that happens simultaneous to whatever Mikey's experiences are, but it's Mikey's everyday problems that the novel is built on. Occasionally, Mikey's path intersects with indie kid events, and his friends speculate about what this year's big hoo-hah might involve, but mostly, they try to avoid being caught up in those things. After all, who wants to be collateral damage?

Really, it's a novel about the transition that takes place at the end of school. These teens are about to have one of the biggest changes of their lives - from living at home with their parents and being surrounded by kids they grew up with to being thrown into a mix with strangers and living on their own - and they are half-excited, two-thirds-terrified. Some of them are damaged (Mikey has OCD episodes, his sister Mel once had a heart attack due to anorexia and malnourishment), and the relationships they have with each other don't fit the fairy tale stereotypes. There've been sexual experiments, there's been flirtations with polyamory, there is jealousy and awkwardness.

It's also a novel about anxiety and self-loathing and trying to deal with those. Mikey's jealous, often passive-aggressive or outright hostile, and self-consciously needy. He feels like he is always at the edges of his group of friends, the least necessary one, the one all the others could do without.

I found this book a hard read. The prose is easy, and the characterisation is spot on, but that's what makes it hard. It resonates. I remember that time all-too vividly. Mikey's view of himself resonates all the more, even now.

Meanwhile, the indie kid events are told with a certain amount of spite. This does not feel like the affectionate satire that stories like Redshirts and Galaxy Quest have mastered. This parody seems to resent the Buffys and Harry Potters and Twilights and Veronica Marses of the universe. Whenever they sit around to ponder events they do so with mocking extra corny adverbs in the description. They have the life-and-death adventures, they do their teenage moping and they keep themselves apart. They're walking talking parodies. No one minds much that so many of them die: it's expected.

Patrick Ness is a hugely talented author, and this book does exhibit truckloads of writerly craftsmanship, with spot-on characterisation, authentic dialogue, and a terribly smart understanding of teenagers. All of which makes this a literary achievement - but my desire to have fun and be entertained was disappointed by the novel. It's too serious for its premise.

Rating: 3.5/5

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho

You can read an excerpt of Sorcerer to the Crown online.

Zacharias Whyte has just inherited the position of Sorcerer Royal from his mentor and adoptive father. Already, there are many who would like to see him fail, some who conspire against him. Mysteries surround the death of his mentor: how did he die, and where did his familiar, a small dragon, disappear to? What secrets is Zacharias keeping?

Prunella Gentleman is a young woman living in a school of magically gifted girls from high society. There, they are being taught means to keep their magic in check and repress their unnatural natures. But what if conventional wisdom is wrong - what if women are not too frail to be competent at sorcery?

Sorcerer to the Crown is one of the most eagerly anticipated fantasy debut novels this year. Only Aliette de Bodard's House of Shattered Wings is getting (slightly) more word of mouth in booky e-circles. So I've been keen to get my mitts on a copy for a while now.

Inevitably, the first comparison that springs to mind once you start reading is Susanna Clarke's classic Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Readers could be forgiven for thinking Sorcerer to the Crown is a sort of Strange & Norrell light. The setting is all-too similar: during the time of the Napoleonic Wars, English magic has been floundering and is in need of revival. Magic is governed by a society of stuffy noble men, as a sort of alternative to politics and priesthood for surplus younger sons. In comes a burst of magical talent from an unexpected direction, and the society of magicians gets flustered and alienated by the changes foisted upon it. Meanwhile, politicians want magic to solve foreign policy problems and assist in war and empire building efforts, while sorcerers need magic to remain aloof and respected, distanced from the grime of politics.

There are some key differences between Sorcerer and Strange & Norrell. Sorcerer to the Crown is a lot more light hearted in its narrative, and most of its characters are actually pleasant individuals. The writing voice isn't quite as infused with dry wit, but the story moves along at a brisker pace and with a lighter touch.

The other key difference is the very conscious decision to make this not yet another book about white men. Jonathan Strange had the outstanding semi-tragic black hero of Stephen Black as one of the minor characters. Sorcerer to the Crown puts a black male sorcerer (Zacharias Whyte) and a half-Indian female magical person (Prunella Gentleman) in the protagonists' chairs, and of the side characters, it's a South Asian witch who steals the show. Zacharias and Prunella are both outstandingly gifted, both adopted and mentored by well-meaning but quite patronising white noble people, and both used to repressing themselves in order to please their adoptive parental figures. Until things change, through death or betrayal of trust.

Of the two, it is Prunella who is more strong willed, single minded and proud. Zacharias is a scholar, with a tendency to isolate himself and keep aloof. Prunella is a social butterfly, outgoing and a force of nature.

If the novel were told through Zacharias' eyes, Prunella would be a manic pixie dream girl. But the book gives them equal space, which means we get a lot more Prunella (and insight into her) than Zacharias does. This de-pixies her and serves the novel well.

While it's light-hearted and fun, I did not love the novel entirely. Zacharias does not take the danger to his person seriously, so neither could I, which softens the drama. When the grand finale happens, the big confrontation is handled with a lightness that reminds me more of mid-season Doctor Who battles: it's a very tongue in cheek finale, and very very safe. It feels more like a story for children than young adults or adults at that point.

This lightness does not really work for me, in the context of a novel about disadvantaged people flourishing and succeeding against all odds. The novel does not have to get all po-faced and worthy, but when there are conspiracies to murder and do blood sacrifice, the intended victim should probably not shrug those things off. When there is a real risk of people being burnt alive, the people in question should probably not laugh at their persecutors.

Sorcerer to the Crown is a novel about girl power, attitude and inherited superpowers overcoming persecution, oppression and conspiracies. It makes the book fun and light, but it sells short the challenges involved, and it's lazy. It's very much like Doctor Who in that regard - The Doctor often beats his opponents with attitude and gobbledigook and a huge (sense of) superiority. This is why I dislike many episodes of Doctor Who. I like it no better when the character beating their opponents with attitude and surprises and a huge (sense of) superiority are ethnic minority sorcerers in Regency Britain. They never act like people who perceive themselves to be in genuine peril, and so their successes end up looking too easy, not earned.

Despite those criticisms, I enjoyed Sorcerer to the Crown. I will want to read the sequels when they come out: it's a promising start to a series, even if it errs a little on the sight of lightness.

Rating: 4/5