Speaking as a kid who did the same robotics contests at more or less the same time (FIRST 2002-2004, MATE 2005), Spare Parts is the real deal.

They were four kids born in Mexico and living in the bad part of Phoenix, undocumented immigrants with one shot at glory. Oscar was ROTC, a born leader. Lorenzo torn between flashy style and even flashier outbursts of anger. Cristian was a natural scientist and inventor. Luis a gentle giant. Together with two talented and dedicated teachers, they made an underwater robot that took first place in the 2004 MATE contest, defeating a score of well-funded teams, including MIT.

It's a true underdog story, and on that is every bit as inspiring as you'd expect (god, even reading the prior paragraph of this review makes me want to throw up a little from the schmaltz). This book is light on the technical details, but manages to capture all the excitement of making something and having it work--or explode spectacularly.

But the technical cannot be distangled from the political. Our four protagonists excelled, and then hit a brick wall as their undocumented status barred them from engineering programs and the Army. They became political footballs in nativist Arizona politics and the debacle of the DREAM act. I'm angry that people who are smarter and harder working than I am can't live up to their potential in America because of a choice their parents made when they were children. I'm ashamed at how easy I've had it by comparison. Davis doesn't hammer the politics, but even the most even-handed account of the actual lives of these people reveals shocking injustice. So yeah, come for the robots and the underdog story, stay to find out how America betrays those who best embody its ideals.

The City and the City is a great page-turning mystery, but ultimately lacking.

Mieville's greatest talent, aside from his monstrous imagination, is his impeccable understanding of motive, of "why". The world of Bas Lag is so shocking, not because of how unusual it is, but because in the midst of magic and splendors and hideous beasts, characters still grapple with mundane concerns like wealth and power and class and knowledge and love.

The mystery at the heart of The City and the City, the nature of the breach between Besźel and Ul Qoma, is not satisfactorily explained or resolved. As an allegory on divided cities in our world, or the way that we do not see the poor and powerless, it is surprisingly subtle and effective. As the central driver of a murder mystery, it comes up short.
--Nov 26, 2016


****

China Miéville made his name on weird fantasy with a communist and anarchist bent. His world of Bas Lag is full of wonderful and terrible monsters, with humans+capitalism as the king predator of them all, even more so than insane gods, mind-eating months, and trans-dimensions leviathans. The City and The City takes us from Bas Lag to our world, and the twinned and divided cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, located somewhere Eastern Europe. Inspector Borlu, Extreme Crime Squad, is investigating a murdered girl. This should be an open and shut case of a murdered prostitute, another grimy little tragedy of the night, but the details don't make sense. The victim is an American archaeologist, working on a dig in Ul Qoma, and full of heretical theories about the history of the two cities.

As Borlu investigates, it becomes apparent that the real mystery is the nature of the barrier between Besźel and Ul Qoma, and the force of Breach that maintains it. This isn't Berlin or Jerusalem, cities divided by walls and borders. Both cities exist on top of each other, grosstopologically speaking, and the inhabitants careful learn to un-see and un-hear their neighbors. Miéville teases at the idea that Breach has arcane powers, access to ancient technology, is identical to or is at war with a secret third city, Orciny.

He teases at these things, but when Borlu shoots a suspect across the border and is taken by Breach, the actuality of the world fails to meet expectations. Breach are just men and women, a social convention of sudden violence and intimidation used to enforce a unique set of laws. The case that got the suspect killed is a tangle of corporate espionage and political corruption, not something particularly supernatural.

Miéville obviously has great talents as a writer, and in this case he puts them entirely behind a political position: that we are all complicit in unseeing certain aspects of our own cities: the homeless, the poor, refugees; while being carefully attentive of the fictions of geopolitics and business. He has a keen eye for coolness of liminal spaces and temporary autonomous zones, and the interlinkages of ideology, pragmatic politics, and academic theory. The thing is, I'm fairly sure this isn't a science fiction novel, or even a speculative novel of any stripe (aside from the fictionalized but carefully realized setting). Parts of me likes this better than the alternative. It'd be a disappointment if Breach really was Alien Space Bats, or something similarly sensible. But part of me also wants a novel that engages with the Weird, that grips and sticks, and that doesn't slide so neatly into the gap between cities.

Expendable is a clever twist on the Star Trek Away Team/Red Shirt. Being the first person on an unexplored planet is very dangerous. Deaths impact crew morale. Except if the dead person is different, disfigured, or otherwise odd, then people are happy to see them go. The human Technocracy uses people with unsightly but non-crippling birth defects as Explorers, Expendable Crew Members. It's all for the greater good.

Festina is one such Expendable. She and her partner are assigned to take a senile admiral to Melaquin, a sure one way ticket to out of contact. The story unveils the hidden crimes of the Fleet Admirals, the brutal logic of "that's what Expendable means", and the strange rules of the interstellar League of People, which enforces strict non-violence on humanity. What she finds on Melaquin is an exile community of Explorers, trying to get back into space, and a strange and dying primitive race of transparent humans, created in the distant past by super-powerful aliens.

I loved the style of the short chapters, and Gardner's keen eye for frailties of human nature, from Festina's unrequited romantic problems, to calling the alien super tech drive system the Sperm (sailors. sailors never change), to the simple brutality of the "Oh Shit!", an Explorer term for dying on mission. Explorers all listen to audio-recordings of other away teams, but the Technocracy doesn't bother to inform the Explorers if they're about to listen to a friend's violent death.

Commitment Hour is a removal from the galactic exploration and politics of Expendable, towards an investigation of a very unusual small town. Tober Cove is a unique town, where children switch genders each year until they age of 20, where they must commit to one gender for the rest of their life. Fullin is a talented young musician, trying to avoid his soon-to-be jilted lover, when on the night before commitment he's visited by a powerful Spark Lord and a hated Neuter exile from his village, come to investigate the nature of Tober Cove.

The investigation of gender roles is in scifi in inextricably linked the Ursula K LeGuin, and Gardner builds on that tradition with a surprisingly egalitarian examination of the differences between men and women, and the benefits that experiencing both sides of the gender duality might bring*. Tabor Cove slots cleverly into the larger League of People's universe as an unethical science experiment set up on Old Earth and abandoned. I really enjoyed the details of the 400 years of history since first contact, and the authenticity of the small town culture.

That said, while the protagonist of this book felt believable as a person, Fullin was also a miserable brat. Fullin was so much obviously better as the female self, and his partner Cappie likewise as a male, that it was almost painful watching them walk towards locking themselves into the wrong gender. The actual timeline of the book was only a day, perhaps the worst day in anyone's life, and I'm surprised Fullin kept it together as well as he did. The book ends with a titanic shift in the nature of the Tabor's Cove, which is left unresolved.

This book is stylish, but I'm not sure how much I enjoyed reading it, or what exactly it had to say.

*Note: some people with really strong opinions about the Right Way that genders are may be offended, particularly trans activists and/or opponents, or gay people, of whom there are none in the novel. Fullin lives under the rule of particularly shitty patriarchal religion, but I'm not sure that Watsonian explanation holds up.

Exactly what it says on the tin: a collection of underappreciated biographical chapters from history, with a bias towards Brits, Nazis, and the people around Stalin. The quality is popular, but without egregious errors. Think a more serious version of a Cracked.com listicle (I actually have a pretty good opinion of Cracked, aside from the house style). Since I listened to this on audiobook, Mr. Milton is an enthusiastic and pleasant narrator, who really brings these stories to life. On the other hand, there's no theme or research beyond sensationalism.

Rat Queens mixes the tropes of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure (fighter, wizard, cleric, thief, adventurer's guild, quests, etc) through a kind of post-modern party girl aesthetic. The Rat Queens are four adventurers, who in between drunken riots in town, kill orcs and trolls, face down assassins, and deal with the distant disappointment of their respective families.

This volume is style over substance, jump cuts and actions scenes held together with a dash of character tape, but it is damn stylish, and a good representation of the "best of" table talk of a good D&D session.

For a long time I've been fascinated by Scientology, as a totally novel religion founded by a mediocre sci-fi author, that despite clearly being total nonsense, seems to be quite enduring. Mixing business and religion as L Ron Hubbard did was possibly brilliant, possibly crazy, definitely evil. But who wouldn't want to go out like L Ron, on a giant yatch surrounded by nubile young members of your "Sea Org" Counterfeit Dreams is one man's effort to explain his experience in Scientology, and to bring its practices to public awareness.

Jeff stays away from the theological side of the cult, instead focusing on its management practices, which are to but it bluntly, Stalinistic. Scientologists work 14 hours days, with a day off every other week. Management is done by fiat, screaming, and if all else fails, assignment to re-education centers where failures can ponder their errors while working in a sweatshop.

Scientology is a classic cult, using a private language of acronyms, abbreviations, and neologisms, and abusive group criticism to separate people from "wog reality". But what I want to know is why is Scientology evil?

Is Scientology evil because it is a system of language and nonsense designed to separate people from reality and prevent them from critically examining their lives?
Is Scientology evil because it an authoritarian system run by madmen?
Is Scientology evil because at its ideological core is broken and twisted, even beyond the style and leadership of the cult?

It's hard to say, and harder to answer definitively.

The Incal is a glorious romp through Jodorowsky's supremely screwy cosmology, as lowly class R detectivie John Difool stumbles into a plot of galactic invasion, treason to the perfect hermaphrodite Emperoress of Humanity, the foul machinations of the Technopope, and a spiritual battle against ultimate darkness.

The illustrations of immense scifi vistas by Moebius are of course a delight, but the story lacks the oepidal resonances of The Metabarons. Pretty good, all told, if you know what kind of weirdness you're getting into.

The Chosen is a beautiful book about Jewishness, fathers and sons, and adapting to modernity. In 1944, Reuven is a 15 year old orthodox Jew growing up in Brooklyn, playing baseball, following World War 2, studying the Talmud with his father. A baseball game with the Hasidic team leaves Reuven wounded by David Saunders, son of a powerful Hasidic rabbi, and a polymathic genius. A wound turns to an unlikely friendship between two brilliant intellectual youths, as Reuven studies mathematical logic, David studies Freud, and they both continue to study the Talmud. The tension of the novel is in David’s destiny. He is expected to continue his family’s rabbinical dynasty, but wants to become a psychologist. To make matters worse, David is being “raised in silence”, his father the Rabbi will only discuss theological matters with him, and nothing so mundane as what his son wants to be when he grows up.

The plot arcs and curls, with the Zionist question interrupting Reuven and David’s friendship as they go to college, and Rueven caring for his own brilliant father’s failing health, before the Rabbi makes it clear that his son can find his own path.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Torah, and the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Isaac and Jacob, Jacob and Joseph, the generational chains of sacrifice and blessing and brother against brother. Being “raised in silence” seems a special cruelty, but is also an apt metaphor for the (Reform) Jewish experience. God, after all, does not talk directly to us. Over all, a deep and moving little book about adulthood and the necessity and limits of faith.

The Windup Girl is the first true scifi masterpiece of the 21st century. Bacigalupi images a world ravaged by genetic plagues unleashed by big agrotech companies that are now the only source of clean calories for the desperate survivors. Nations have fallen under the hammer blows of climate change, the end of oil and globalization, the horsemen of famine, disease, and war, but somehow the Kingdom of Thailand and the city of Bangkok hang on, defended by the fanatics of the Environmental Ministry and sustained by a secret seed bank. But the city seethes with unresolved tension between the corrupt and overbearing white-shirts of the Environmental Ministry, and the outside looking Trade Ministry.

Into this powder keg walks Anderson, an undercover agent for AgriGen, looking to ferret out how the Thais have resurrected plant species dead for centuries, and to seize the incalculable genetic riches of their seedbank. Anderson employs Hock Seng, a Malaysian Chinese refugee who was once a shipping tycoon, but who lost everything in a terrifying fundamentalist revolt. Jaidee and Kanya are officers in the Environmental Ministry, trying to balance honor along a knife-edge of survival. And Emiko is a New Person, a post-human genetic construct illegally abandoned in Thailand, and now reduced to the status of a most debased whore. The ambitions, desires, and plans of these people swirl around each other, as Thailand lurches towards disaster.

Bacigalupi uses a truly diverse cast of viewpoint characters to explore a byzantine plot, while describing a lived-in world comparable only to Neuromancer in its depth and realism. The diseases, the hunger, the crude work arounds for an absence of fossil fuels and cheap electricity, all carry the bronze ring of truth. I can practically smell the fruit rotting from blister rust, and the megadonts (genetically engineered elephants) winding the spindles of industry. One of the most clever bits of setting building are the cheshires, chameleon shifting cats who have completely replaced domestic Felis catus, and who have devastated a bird population that can't dodge predators with active camo.

This book speaks directly to current anxieties: over food security, over climate change, over globalism and national sovereignty. Bacigalpupi does not flinch away from the implications of what he writing. Our current civilization of high energy fossil fuels, what his characters refer to as the Expansion, is doomed. The plagues and sterile seeds of the Calorie Companies are a collective suicide from people who prefer genocide to loosening their grip on power. Nature is helpless before the artificial evolution of genetic engineering, which can only make ever more perfect parasites. The characters have accepted their death, even as they struggle against it.

There's a kind of ambiguous hope in the end, that a new ecosystem of genetically modified organism may stabilize, but for us, nothing.

*****

The blurb on the front of my copy compares this book to Neuromancer. I can only second that comparison, and say that this is a very good book about the classic elements of human tragedy: power, ambition, lust, and fear, set in a stunningly well-realized setting that seems both incredibly exotic and all too familiar. Read this. Now.

(From July 23, 2011. Updated for the Hugo Reread project)