How do you even review a 760-page book comprising 52 short stories that is meant to offer a comprehensive look at the genre for the purposes of teaching? I don’t know.

The Ben of seven years ago would have rated each story out of 5 stars and taken the average, but ain’t nobody got time for that these days. It took me over a year to read this anthology—because if I had torn straight through it, I might have torn out my hair. I’m not built for anthologies; I need the slow, simmering build-up of novels and sweet, sweet payoff of character development. That being said, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the short story form is where one can find some of the best and brightest science fiction. The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction certainly proves this.

I could try to highlight my very favourite stories, but that would still probably be excessive. At 52, there is a lot to choose from. There are only 14 women authors in the selection, but I think it’s admirable the editors tried to include several earlier women who were at the forefront of early SF publishing. Moreover, as we get into the 1960s onwards, quite a few more women authors put in an appearance. While I think the editors might have done a little better, this anthology is far from being an all-male panel, and I appreciate that.

Before I get into talking about some of the individual stories, however, I also want to mention that this book comes with two tables of contents. The first is a chronological listing, which is how the stories are organized in the actual text. The second table of contents is a thematic listing, along the lines of “Alien Encounters”, “Apocalypse and Post-apocalypse”, etc. This is a sweet idea, especially because this is obviously a teaching anthology. (The inclusion of a link to a teaching guide helps with that last part, too.) I read the stories chronologically, which has its own benefits, but I could easily see someone choosing to read, say, all the stories about “Time Travel and Alternate History” to get a brief overview of some of those ideas.

The introduction provided before each story is great too. It gives me just enough information about each author, including highlights of their works, without overstaying its welcome. I also like how it introduces the specific piece without spoiling too much. The actual introduction to the overall book is your typical university course textbook introduction: if you are a student of a course, it’s probably something you want to read so you can quote from it in your midterm paper. Otherwise, you are probably wise to skip it. Unless you can’t sleep?

OK, but since you really want to know some favourites….

I liked a lot of the early ones just because I have not read as much early SF, so it was nice to expose myself to these stories and their styles. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is fascinating just because of its age. I am familiar, of course, with the tracing of the provenance of SF back towards Frankenstein, but it was nice to learn about an almost-as-old story I hadn’t heard of. I also enjoyed “Thunder and Roses”, by Theodore Sturgeon, so obviously inspired by the military life during the Second World War.

The collection includes some classics, like Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Rat and Dragon” (which, to be honest, I’m not much of a fan of) and one of my favourite time travel stories, the amazing “‘All You Zombies—’”, by Robert Heinlein, which also features some very interesting titular punctuation. And who can forget “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”, by Philip K. Dick?

Maybe one of the more useful aspects of this anthology for someone who is not a student is the exposure to authors I mean to read but haven’t yet. For example, Carol Emshwiller, Pat Cadigan, and Kate Wilhelm are all on my list. Wilhelm’s “Forever Yours, Anna” is a neat time-travel story, and while “‘All You Zombies—’” is an elegant depiction of paradox, there is just something so beautiful about Wilhelm’s time travel mystery/romance. I recall enjoying this story and not wanting it to end, far more so than a lot of the entries in this collection.

I don’t think there are any bad stories in this collection. There are some I didn’t personally like much, but even then I can see their merit as stories and works of literature; it’s just that neither their characters nor their plots held my interest. Perhaps half the fun of this book is arguing with the other people who have read it which stories are the best (the other half being bludgeoning your opponent with the sheer weight of this tome—definitely the definition of a doorstopper).

As a teacher, I love collections like this. It’s well-rounded, clearly carefully curated. I don’t get much of a chance to teach science fiction short stories in my English classes, though I tend to sneak some in there when I can (I love opening a unit on short stories with Vanessa Torline’s “#TrainFightTuesday” just because it is so deliciously atypical in its form). Still, this is a great resource, both in how it augments my understanding of the genre as a whole, and in its ability to offer up story ideas no matter what theme or era I’m interested in covering at the moment.

Definitely recommend for teachers, SF fans who want to dive deeper, and people with doors that keep closing on them.

My relationship with Dan Simmons has been ambivalent. We've had bad times and even worse times. We've also had some good times, namely with Hyperion. So I went into The Fall of Hyperion feeling pretty good, and if anything my opinion of this series has only improved. Any ill will I bore Simmons for the books I didn't like has dissipated thanks to his masterful presentation of this epic science-fiction series. The Hyperion Cantos hits an impressive number of tropes that appeal to me in my science fiction. Introspective, existentially-minded main character? Check. Ineffable, almost omnipotent artificial intelligences? Got it. Wormhole-connected human civilization? Oh yes. Crazy mind-bending temporal logic? Sadly, oh so much. The Fall of Hyperion preserves the flavour of its predecessor, and to its credit, it is also much more complete than Hyperion.

One thing I need to mention: I really like the cover art for both this book and Hyperion, with the exception of the depiction of the Shrike. In reading the first book, I missed the fact that the Shrike has four arms. (I don't pay a lot of attention to physical descriptions, because I don't visualize characters.) I clued into it in this book, however, so seeing the all-too-humanoid Shrike on the covers is irking me. I don't know what the artist was thinking—the cover version does look menacing and cool, but the discrepancy bothers my inner consistency monitor.

But I digress.

I liked Hyperion (after re-reading my review, more than I recalled, apparently). One of the things I enjoyed about the book were the overt allusions to John Keats' poem of the same name. By way I've disclaimer, I haven't actually read Keats' Hyperion, nor am I anywhere close to familiar with most of his work. Still, Simmons establishes a literary mood that I, as a reader, enjoy. The tone of the work is erudite without becoming overbearing about its literary qualities; at its heart, it is still science fiction. But it's high quality science fiction, the kind you buy from a shady dealer in the dive off the darkest alleyway, looking furtively in either direction as he reaches beneath his trenchcoat for his last copy even as you rock back in forth, muttering under your breath about how you need your next hit. Yeah, Hyperion and its sequel are definitely my type of drug.

The literary quality to the book also helps liken it to the myths that Simmons references. In another author's hands, the comparisons might be heavy-handed, but he pulls it off deftly. In my review of Hyperion, I discuss what we learn about the AIs, the TechnoCore, and "how irrelevant they consider humanity to the grand scheme of the cosmos". I could not have been more wrong! Without going into spoiler territory, let's just say that humanity is essential to the TechnoCore's plan, at least in the short term, for a variety of reasons. And the TechnoCore's role as antagonist becomes much more apparent in this book. To accompany this plot, Simmons talks about the war between the Titans and the Olympian gods of Greek mythology (the subject of Keats' poem), putting the human Hegemony in the role of the former and the usurper AIs as the Olympians. By including this literary dimension, Simmons elevates his conflict beyond the typical AI rebellion plot. The struggle is more than mere survival, more than epic, even more than myth: it's the fulfilment of a grand, cosmic theme. It's poetic.

Simmons sort of uses a frame story here, but it's nowhere near as explicit or as strong as the Canterbury Tales-like setup in Hyperion. Rather, one of the main characters, another Keats cybrid under the name of John Severn, "dreams" what's happening to the pilgrims on Hyperion. Simmons plays a little fast-and-loose with what Severn can dream; after finishing the book and becoming privy to all the facts (such as they are thus far), I think it's possible to explain it all. But I'm just as happy handwaving it as artistic license. Although some of the characters—Brawne, later on the Consul, and maybe Sol—play important roles in the overall plot and have interesting subplots in their own right, some of the other characters are less interesting (though probably still important). If The Fall of Hyperion has a single major flaw, it's the way the main cast of the first book gets sidelined. Most of Hyperion comprises the tale of each pilgrim, so we get close to each character and his or her reasons for braving the Time Tombs and seeking the terrible Shrike. In this book, although their roles are still important, Simmons focuses a lot more on the larger scale political consequences of the Hyperion conflict. Unfortunately, the pilgrims get lost in the shuffle.

Severn is involved, mostly as an observer, in the larger plot concerning the Hegemony's defence of Hyperion against the invading Ousters. We also meet Meina Gladstone, the "CEO" of the Hegemony and a formidable woman in her own right. Gladstone is herself complicit in the eponymous fall, for she is playing her own long game in the style of Paul and Leto Atreides. Unfortunately, like the rest of humanity, she fails to perceive the true scope of the TechnoCore's betrayal and how this relates to the Time Tombs and the Shrike. So the climax and conclusion of the book become a race against time to change course mid-plan and attempt to save the scuttling of the Hegemony. That's right: we aren't trying to save the human empire in this book; we just want to make sure it breaks the way we want it to break. Which is fine. The Hegemony might have cool wormhole travel, but it's an imperialist, destructive entity that brooks no competition. What little we see of its most serious challengers, the Ousters, makes them look appealing: their society certainly seems more egalitarian (but maybe we don't get the whole story). By contrast, Simmons goes out of his way to illustrate how the Hegemony is ruled by the select powerful and rich few—hmm, sounds familiar. We see that the ruling class is decadent and self-absorbed. We aren't supposed to mourn the Hegemony; we mourn the chaos into which its billions of innocent citizens will plunge after it collapses. According to Gladstone, it will all work out for the best. But we can never be sure, can we?

(Well, we can. Because Simmons wrote more sequels. Isn't reading great?)

The Fall of Hyperion makes heavy use of the role of religion in society. Father Paul Duré is back, in a big way, and with it comes the small cult of Catholicism and Duré's own musings about the eventual fate of humanity. We can also call the TechnoCore's motives "religious". All their roads lead to the Ultimate Intelligence, an AI that would essentially be God. Yet even as they manipulate humanity, they are divided, both on whether they want to realize a UI and what to do with humanity. Severn/Keats, an AI reconstruction of a centuries-dead poet, also has to reclaim his identity and decide what role he wishes to play in this conflict (as he discovers, he has been groomed to perform a certain task). Finally, the pilgrims each have their own conflicts of faith and must decide to embrace faith or reject it, in very personal ways. Simmons involves conflicts of faith at a variety of levels, which overall adds to the complexity and rich texture of this book.

Given the antagonist and the emphasis on faith, the casual reader might detect an anti-technology theme to The Fall of Hyperion. I know that, at first, I was wondering why Simmons was down on the bit-mongers. But it's much deeper than that. Simmons is criticizing the Hegemony's dependence on the sentient TechnoCore for its technology and the maintenance of that technology. The story goes: humanity invented the Hawking drive, but the TechnoCore gave us the farcasters. Guess which one became the primary mode of transportation? That's right, the one that moves people instantaneously from planet to planet. Since the establishment of the Hegemony, the Core has been there, suppressing any radical developments in technology that might upset the balance. In a way, the TechnoCore is a depiction of what the Minds of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels could be, if they were of a more domineering bent. (There are other factors, of course, not the least of which is the fact that the Hegemony descends directly from humanity and Earth cultures, whereas the Culture is a "pan-species" civilization old when humans are still learning to sail.) Technology itself is awesome, and becoming dependent on a technology is OK, but surrendering one's freedom and self-determination because someone else is doling out technological goodies leads down a bad road.

Having compared this series to the Culture novels, I'd also like to refer to Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star and its sequel and related works. There are some superficial similarities: Hamilton has an Intersolar Commonwealth, wormholes, and the SI; Simmons has the Hegemony of Man, farcasters, and the TechnoCore. Yet the differences between the two universes allow their stories to be wonderfully unique. In Hamilton's works, wormhole travel comes from the minds of two human geniuses before the SI is a glimmer in the eyes of programmers. The Commonwealth's government treats the SI with more suspicion than it might warrant, since it seems a lot friendlier and more benign than Simmons' TechnoCore. By contrast, although the Commonwealth isn't all it's cracked up to be, it is much nicer than the Hegemony on a sliding scale. Both deliver the type of mega-scale space opera that I find so enticing, so addictive.

The Fall of Hyperion isn't perfect, but overall it seems designed to appeal directly to me and to my interests. I can easily see why it was nominated for a Hugo and why Hyperion won the award. It's a space opera with a complex plot that draws upon literature and mythology to create an immensely satisfying experience. This is the good stuff, the direct line to the pleasure centre of your science-fiction nervous system.

My reviews of the Hyperion Cantos:
← Hyperion | Endymion →

Centuries after the events of The Fall of Hyperion, and three and a half years after I read that book, Endymion takes place and I read it. I had actually forgotten that there was a book between this one and Hyperion; I described this as the second book in a series when friends asked me what I was reading. Oops! And it has been so long since I read the first two that my memories of the series were distant and vague.

That proved not as much of a barrier as I worried it would be. I’m still trying to figure out why I am so ambivalent towards Dan Simmons’ other work but loving the Hyperion Cantos. It isn’t the classical allusions—as much as I love the classics, that doesn’t work so much for me. But the books in this series are just so well constructed, characterized, and compelling in their depth and scope, that I’m happy to claim that this series represents some of the finest far-future space opera of the nineties.

It took me a little while to get a feel for Endymion. I wasn’t enjoying the introduction to Raul, his meeting with Martin Silenus, etc. Once Simmons introduces Father Captain de Soya and the hunt for Aenea, however, things pick up considerably. The way in which he cuts between the two perspectives of hunter and hunted works quite well. Ideally when an author does this, they manage to make you constantly yearn for both perspectives: just as it switches from Raul to de Soya we’re supposed to wonder how the fugitives will get out of their latest cliffhanger. I admit to some preference for de Soya’s story—but that’s mostly because I was so intrigued by the internal affairs of the Pax.

When we last saw the Pax, it was a growing political movement on Pacem—but now it has taken the place of the Hegemony in the former Web worlds. Thanks to the collapse of the fatline and data spheres, the Pax has an information monopoly that allows them to manipulate public perception (e.g., of things like the Ousters). Yet Simmons hints that, despite the piety implicit in Pax life, there are more sinister elements in the upper echelons of the Church. In Father Captain de Soya he creates a great antihero: sincere in his belief and devotion to God and the Church, de Soya nevertheless has enough independent thought to begin questioning when the facts stop adding up. He is an antagonist in the sense that he is working against our protagonists’ ends—but he is not a bad man or a villain by any means.

I didn’t really warm up to Raul. He’s not a bad character, in that he isn’t too whiny. He’s just not the type of main character I want to identify with too much … I never got any grasp on his personality beyond a sense of competence and occasional references to his grandmother. I found that I best enjoyed the chapters with him, Bettik, and Aenea touring the River Tethys if I ignored the overall plot and just focused on the dangers they faced on each planet.

These subplots turn Endymion from what could be a weak-but-sprawling space opera into a fluid-but-lengthy adventure story. The three fugitives face a new challenge on every world, always escaping by the skin of their teeth. Simmons finds the right balance between no exposition and too much as he reveals just enough to keep us guessing about the identities of those who are helping Aenea and their relationship to the Pax, which is so concerned with apprehending her. There are plenty of allusions to the events of the past two books—and I’d recommend reading them before reading this one—but by and large, Endymion is much more about Aenea’s personal development than wider galactic affairs.

She keeps referring to being guided towards an architect who can teach her. Simmons hints that Aenea will be a messiah, someone special with “powers.” Fortunately, he avoids the temptation of turning her into a creepy child who manifests those powers early. Aside from a psychic episode here or there, she has to rely on her own determination and resolve—plus the help from Raul and Bettik—to survive. I loved the moment where she pointed out that, from the moment she stepped from the Time Tombs, it has all been one “very long day” for her.

Endymion is long. But I actually like that about it. My weariness was sympathetic with the weariness the fugitives felt after their long journey, and with the weariness of de Soya and his minions for their constant deaths and resurrections. Simmons underscores how gallivanting through the galaxy is not a game for the merely human: space travel of any kind places demands on us that exceed what our bodies and minds evolved to handle. Though the TechnoCore’s role in this book is greatly reduced, Simmons reminds us that the existence of AI is a thorny existential issue for humanity.

In some ways, this book feels like filler between the conflicts begun in The Fall of Hyperion and what will hopefully be the resolution in The Rise of Endymion. I still enjoyed it, though, and heartily recommend it to those who read the first two books.

My reviews of the Hyperion Cantos:
← The Fall of Hyperion | The Rise of Endymion →

She doesn’t want to get married.

She wants her darker skin to be celebrated, not medicated.

She wants to escape the memories of abuse at the hands of her uncle and break the cycle for her own daughter.

She wants a job and doesn’t understand why it’s so hard for the men who might hire her to look her in the eye instead of her breasts.

None of these stories are my stories. My story is one of comfort and privilege, ensconced in my male, white, Canadian body. These are the stories of 14 ordinary women from India, women who had the courage to show up at a comic-drawing workshop put on by an Indian artist, Priya Kuriyan, and two German artists, Ludmilla Bartscht and Larissa Bertonasco. Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back! is the product of this creative awakening. As these three explain in their afterword, no one knew quite what to expect. Bartscht and Bertonasco went to India with all these pre-conceptions about what the women would and would not be comfortable drawing and telling. Kuriyan had no idea if she would get along with two foreign artists. No one knew if the women, most of whom had never drawn in their life, would open up enough to share themselves.

Well, spoiler alert: it turned out fantastically.

I backed Ad Astra’s Kickstarter for this North American edition. I don’t really know why; I think someone shared it on Twitter, and it seemed like a nice idea, and I could back at a level appropriate for my budget and get a copy of the book—win-win. This is not the type of book I usually read.

And that is exactly why it’s so important that I read it.

I think a lot about the idea of “reading widely”, both what it means and why it is important.

Even when we try not to judge others for what they read, we are often judgmental through how we profess our own reading tastes. “Oh, science fiction? I don’t touch the stuff” is not really much better than just coming out and telling me you think my sci-fi habit is juvenile or silly. And I’m just as guilty of looking down my nose at romance-readers, Western enthusiasts, or hardcore thriller tasters. We’re a judgy species; we like to label and categorize ourselves and others.

I don’t often read graphic novels. Visual storytelling does not fill the space in my soul the same way a page packed with words does.

And I don’t often read the types of stories contained in Drawing the Line—though this, I feel, is more because I have not sought out such stories, nor are they as ubiquitous, rather than a preference on my part.

So it’s important for me, every once in a while, to stretch myself. To read outside of that comfort zone. Sometimes that means trying on a romance or a thriller for size. Sometimes that means picking up an anthology of comics created by women who want to share their voices with the world.

I didn’t understand every nuance of these stories, of course, but in general they are eye-opening glimpses at incidents and ideas I wouldn’t otherwise consider. The whole thing about skin-lightening, for instance. Several women link the lightness of their skin to marriage prospects and family attitudes. Also, I really enjoyed “An Ideal Girl” by Soumya Menon, both in its artistic execution and in the story it tells. Menon’s positive depiction of how the eponymous girl breaks out of the mould of expectations set for her to take agency is quite compelling.

The variety of art styles might be distracting to some, but I kind of like it. I like the idea that in the future I can take this down from the shelf, open it to a story at random, and get something a little different every time.

I don’t know if I would recommend Drawing the Line specifically to everyone, though I’d encourage you to check it out if you get an opportunity. But this is the type of book I’d recommend to everyone, in so far as I think everyone should read more, and read widely.

Over seven years and four books later, I have finished the Hyperion Cantos. What a journey. I’d be lying if I said I remembered much about the first three books at this point (that’s why I write reviews). I kept putting off reading The Rise of Endymion; it has been sitting in my to-read pile since I bought the last three books from the used book store. But Dan Simmons’ science fiction is just so damn dense I knew it was going to take days to get through it, and I was not looking forward to making that commitment. Nevertheless, I decided last week that enough was enough.

The Rise of Endymion gets something right from the start: the cover depicts the Shrike with four arms!

Anyway, it picks up pretty much where Endymion leaves off, give or take a little bit of time passing. Aenea sends Raul on a quest to retrieve the Consul’s ship, although it is also kind of a spiritual journey that separates him from her long enough (thanks to relativity time shenanigans) for her to get closer to him in age, so the sexual relationship stuff isn’t so squicky, and for some other shenanigans that I won’t spoil. Reunited with Aenea just in time for the Pax to catch up to them, Raul’s role in the story is split between confused narrator and occasional action hero. I spent large parts of the story trying to ignore how obtuse Raul is and how boring it makes things.

Fortunately, I had other plots to keep me occupied. The Pax and its unholy alliance with the TechnoCore gets fleshed out (pun intended) in more depth here. I don’t think anyone who makes it into book four is going to be surprised by the seemingly-boundlessness of Simmons’ imagination. I’m reminded of Pandora’s Star, which has a similar space operatic setting including AIs and wormhole travel. Simmons blends elements of posthumanism, transhumanism, and time travel. The result can only be described, for better or for worse, as epic. Even if you don’t like the series, it is hard to dispute the scope and style of it.

I, myself, have rather mixed feelings now that I’m done. The narrative in this one is quite clunky, with endless pages of exposition that Simmons barely deigns to dress up as dialogue—and sometimes he doesn’t even do that. The nerd in me, who likes learning about the ideas, just drinks it up, of course. But it does stop the story dead in its tracks. Simmons is very good at creating complexity but not necessarily at displaying it, and sometimes he sacrifices pacing for the sake of completeness. As a result, The Rise of Endymion has a pedantic feeling in parts, losing something of its edge.

Similarly, the foreordained nature of Aenea’s victory of the Pax doesn’t appeal to me. Although I am loath to agree with Raul about anything (because he’s such a tool), I agree with him that prophecies and predestination suck. Since Aenea is so sure of how things will work out, I never feel much in the way of danger or suspense. She can talk “probability waves” all she wants, but the fact remains that she is not really a “human” protagonist in the classical sense of someone with flaws. She is Other, progeny of a cybrid, touched by the Lions and Tigers and Bears. I never get the sense that she is really tempted to stray from the path laid out for her, and that makes her boring. In the same way, her romance with Raul and the inevitability of it, up to and including the predictability of the conclusion, just makes me yawn.

For a book about interstellar warfare where the stakes are the future of the human species’ development, there is remarkably little conflict at times.

The TechnoCore’s master plan turns out to be ho-hum, pretty standard run-of-the-mill evil AI stuff. And that is a bit disappointing. Simmons gives us some good villains, but he never really gets to turn them loose on anyone we care about. Rhadamanth Nemes gets to slice the heads off redshirts and monks and other minor characters, but no one in the main party even loses an arm here. Were they all rolling natural 20s?

Like the series as a whole, The Rise of Endymion’s strength lies mostly in the scope of its ideas and the ways in which Simmons explores them through his characters, rather than the characters themselves. Raul, Aenea, et al might be forgettable as individuals. But it’s hard to forget how Simmons weaves them into a science fictional tapestry drawing on messianic echoes of Christianity, older stories and tropes of the genre, and of course, classic and Romantic literature.

This is a lovely, nerdy text in the way it is embedded with rich meaning and connections to other texts and other ideas. Every planet visited gives Simmons a chance to show off a new society, a new what-if evolution of a culture here on Earth. He indeed takes us on such a whistle-stop tour towards the end of the book, visiting some worlds familiar to Cantos readers and others new. Practically every page of this book is just saturated with allusions to or extensions of diverse cultural practices, religions, myths, etc.

That being said, this cornucopia of cultural extrapolation means that the series, like many other sprawling sagas, suffers from its sensational scope. Simmons might blow one’s mind with the sheer diversity of human thoughts, expressions, and even body plans—but we spend so little time with each one, we barely get to scratch the surface. In this sense, a shorter, more intimate novel will always win out against the epic.

Fortunately, I have time enough and desire enough to read both such story types. I don’t know if I would recommend the Hyperion Cantos to readers like I would, say, the Hitchhiker’s series or the Culture novels. But if you want science fiction with an extra helping of literary allusions, this series might be right for you.

My reviews of The Hyperion Cantos:
← Endymion

OK, been a while since I’ve dropped one of these into the rotation. The Mutation is the first Jake-narrated book since #31: The Conspiracy. Whereas the previous book focused heavily on the tough decisions Jake must make as a leader, The Mutation instead explores more broadly the toughness required of all the Animorphs. This book is like a bizarre mash-up of James Bond and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

The Animorphs discover that Visser Three has a shiny new toy to use to find the sunken Pemalite ship. So they decide to take the toy away from him the hard way. The first half of the book is fairly intense, because the Animorphs have to use a succession of morphs to locate, dive towards, and then fight the so-called Sea Blade vessel. Remember the good old days when the Animorphs used maybe two morphs in the entire book? This far along in the series, Applegate is signalling the way their lives have changed dramatically. Jake just casually mentions the Chee covering from them while they go on this trip. Similarly, although he acknowledges that all these quick morphs are draining, it definitely feels more routine than it once did.

Yes, the Animorphs are transforming from a motley group of unlikely heroes into actual heroes. If only they would start, you know, planning beforehand. But that’s probably too much to ask.

The second half of The Mutation is a whackadoodle narrative of epic proportions, however. Sea people, seriously?? I mean, I guess I could have gone with it—goodness knows I’ve gone with so many other weird turns in this series—but the execution is just terrible. They’re clearly a one-off, with little actual thought given to how they mutated from humans (radiation did it!, not that it works that way), and their bellicose attitudes towards the surface dwellers handwaved away by … you guessed it, radiation and inbreeding.

Applegate has gone to a lot of trouble to establish her youthful protagonists as forces to be reckoned with and moral forces equivalent to adults. Hence, it is always disappointing when this series pits these protagonists against cheesy, childish foes. This isn’t Power Rangers or another Saturday-morning Japanese import where teenagers are fighting goofy alien enemies. Yes, the enemies are alien—but they are serious business. And every time the Animorphs go up against dumb sea people, or have to temporarily make a truce with Visser Three, the series creeps closer to that Saturday-morning territory.

Small moments offer tantalizing glimpses of what makes Animorphs so good. Jake reflects on Cassie’s un-Cassielike bloodthirsty zeal for revenge against the Yeerks. He also has to weigh the destruction of the Sea Blade (to prevent the sea people from using it on the surface) against the Animorphs using it to escape and return to the surface. These kinds of decisions are always an interesting part of his role as leader.

Unfortunately, these small moments can’t carry an otherwise loopy plot. This one has some great underwater action scenes and lots of morphing, but in terms of substance, it’s disappointing.

I realize now I forgot to read Visser in between this book and the last one (I put them on my ereader a few books at a time, and these ones made it on but Visser didn’t). So, hopefully soon, we get to learn more about Visser Three!

My reviews of Animorphs:
← #36: The Proposal | Visser →

I still haven’t read Bad Feminist. But when I saw Roxane Gay’s new collection of short stories up for request on NetGalley, I leapt at the chance to read them. So thanks, NetGalley and Grove Press, for this opportunity.

Trigger warning in this review and book for discussions of rape and assault.

In many ways, Difficult Women seems like a kind of spiritual successor to Bad Feminist. Again, I haven’t read the essay collection, so I can’t draw direct comparisons. However, in general it seems like Gay’s short stories here are echoing what her essays say about the fraught and flawed nature of existing as a woman, or indeed, as a human, in our society. These are stories full of characters who are bad feminists! Some of the protagonists are likeable, some aren’t, but at every turn they are complex and conflicted and full of nuance. These are short stories beautiful both in their writing and in what they have to say about how we live our lives.

If I had to choose one word to describe this collection, it would be charged, or maybe raw. All of these stories concern, to one degree or another, the act of sex. Women having sex with their boyfriends, husbands, lovers, or even against their will. Gay’s writing surfaces problematic tropes. Many of her protagonists sleep with bad boys or men who are otherwise unhealthy for them. Moreover, quite often Gay has them describe their enjoyment of rough sex, of being made to feel “sore”, of being used for the man’s pleasure. This is far from the second-wave feminist ideal of sex as a liberating act in which the woman takes back control over her body and seeks pleasure on her terms rather than a man’s—this is bad feminist stuff! Yet these descriptions are co-located with an intense focus of the reader’s gaze on the embodiment of the characters and how they are acutely aware of their bodies at all times.

From “Florida”:

Marcy enjoyed the pleasant soreness as she drove the five blocks home after each class. She liked how for an hour, there was a precise set of instructions she was meant to follow, a clear sense of direction.

I don’t know if it’s intentional, but this phrase reverberates through later stories, sometimes in an association with sexual activity, as in “Baby Arm” below:

A couple of months later, he comes over to my apartment in the middle of the night because we’ve long abandoned any pretense of a mutual interest in anything but dirty sex….

…he never knows how to make a move, still doesn’t understand he only needs to push me on my back and tell me to spread my legs.…

…I open my eyes and look up at him. A thin line of sweat beads along his hairline. I smile. I tell him to hate me more. He does, and a pleasant soreness begins spreading from between my thighs and my head is slamming against the headboard. Now I’m with him.

Later, I am still awake because I’m not very good at sleeping and I’m achy so I’m feeling tender toward him.

and “Bone Density”:

Bennett is not romantic and we don'>t delude ourselves about the state of our affair. He is, however, intense and always leaves me sore in uncomfortable places.

and “The Sacrifice of Darkness”:

She gave in to the weight of him. He held her face between his hands like he might crush her skull. The pressure of his hands made her head throb, almost pleasantly. When Hiram kiss Mara that morning, her lips swelled and bruised, threatened to split open and spill. Her lips felt pulpy against his, beautifully misshapen. The whole of her body felt that way by the time he was done, as if every muscle, every part of her skin, had been worked through his hands and his mouth and his eyes until was broken all the way down.

When Mara climbed out of bed, sore, heavy, drained, Hiram said, “Don’t wash,” so she didn’t.

Sometimes the phrasing refers to non-sexual activity, as in “Florida” above or here, in “Requiem for a Glass Heart”:

After her afternoons in the park, the stone thrower’s wife finds herself sweaty and pleasantly sore. She walks home slowly, breathing deeply. She revels. Then she takes a cold shower, emerges, wraps herself in a soft cotton robe.

This focus on embodiment appears in other ways as well. Some of the stories involve twins: in one, a woman loves her husband’s twin more than him, pretends not to notice how they switch places constantly; in another, a woman has delayed leaving an abusive situation because she does not want to leave her twin. Others, such as “Requiem for a Glass Heart”, take a more magical realist turn, wherein the paradox of fragility and resilience manifests literally in the form of a glass woman.

In every story, the protagonists are hyperaware of their bodies, how they move, how they are perceived by others. This transcends class or race. In “La Negra Blanca”, which might be my favourite story of the collection, Gay shows both the woman’s hyperawareness of the male gaze and the man’s gaze itself. Sarah/Sierra, a biracial stripper stereotypically putting herself through school, uses her body to make money and has conflicted feelings about it. As William becomes obsessed with Sierra, with all that she represents in body and soul, we see him entertain—and then act on—increasingly depraved fantasies. We see the reality disappoint in contrast to the fantasy, and the cost this has for Sarah. William can walk away, dismiss his role in the rape as a mistake, an action in the past that he can forget. Sarah cannot let that go. (Gay explores this idea, that abuse is so traumatic in part because it exists outside of time for the victim, that it is not merely the abuse-in-the-moment that is harmful but the fact that the victim is forever anchored to that moment in time, in some of the other stories, including “I Will Follow You”. It is quite powerful, and I think people who have not experienced such abuse will find these stories very helpful in understanding why it is so harmful and its effects so long-lasting.)

“North Country” plays off this motif of hyperawareness in a different way. In Kate, female readers will recognize the tightrope between professional life and personal life that women are asked to walk by the patriarchy:

I teach a section of Design of Concrete Structures and a section of Structural Dynamics. I have no female students in either class. The boys stare at me after class, they linger in the hallway just outside the classroom. They try to flirt. I remind them I will assess their final grades. They made inappropriate comments about extra credit.

For men like myself, Gay’s exquisite prose and descriptions help us understand this experience from “the other side”, if you will. Most men don’t have to constantly wonder whether the attention they receive is the result of their looks or their activities. Most men don’t have to fend off the continual, almost automatic advances of colleagues simply because they are young, unattached, and attractive. And while I know this, intellectually, from my reading and my conversations with female friends, there is something very emotionally intense about Gay’s writing. I like to read because I like putting myself in other characters’ shoes, to build empathy for experiences I cannot (or am lucky enough not) to have myself.

Difficult Women does this for me. Beyond considerations of race, class, and gender, Gay’s emphasis on embodiment fascinates me on a personal level because I don’t feel very in touch with my body. I don’t pay much attention to it, and I even find it fairly awkward at times. So there is something very intriguing about the different facets of embodiment that Gay explores throughout this anthology, from sexual intercourse to combat to the gaze of others.

What Gay depicts in these stories is life at its messiest, life in the liminal spaces. The women of this collection are difficult because, like any woman, they do not fit neatly in the boxes and labels that anyone—on any part of the political or social spectra—ascribes to them. They are not always entirely happy with this or with themselves—but that is part of the theme here. And Gay brings this out through a diverse set of stories, each one unique and intriguing in tone and style. It’s not too hard to write stories that are enjoyable to read; it’s not too hard to write stories that are meaningful and thought-provoking. Gay has managed to combine these two feats—no small order—and I’m always delighted when that happens.

Full disclosure: I received this book for free because I won a Twitter contest run by Courtney Summers. But wait! If you want to send me free books, you don’t have to get me to retweet anything at all. You can just do it! Contact me for more details.

Fuller disclosure: Michelle Krys is from Thunder Bay, my hometown and place of residence, so that does give her bonus points.

Fullest disclosure: (I actually have nothing else to add, but I felt like going all the way to the superlative.)

Anyway, I suppose I should, as they say on Monty Python, GET ON WITH IT….

I’m not sure what I was expecting with Dead Girls Society. Outside of where they intersect with science fiction and fantasy, YA thrillers have not been something I’ve reach much of lately. So while I’m used to YA books that deal with some dark and deep issues, the level of unhinged shit that goes down, especially during the climax, is a pleasant surprise here.

Hope Callahan suffers from cystic fibrosis, and it is bad enough that she has been out of school for a few months now. She receives a mysterious, anonymous invitation from the eponymous society. The goal: participate in—and win—a series of dangerous challenges to win $100 000. Though Krys is Canadian, the book takes place in the States (Louisiana, it seems), so that much money would seriously help Hope’s family pay for her medical treatment. But Hope can’t tell anyone else about this game, and it is dangerous enough that it might very well take her life.

Meanwhile, as if she doesn’t have enough problems, she’s developing feelings for Ethan, her best friend, and trying to navigate a return to school. One of the richest, most popular guys is putting the moves on her, and she kind of likes it—but Hope can’t trust anyone, because she soon learns that the Dead Girls Society has representatives and minions everywhere.

I found the main plot very exciting and tightly paced. Krys is frustratingly good at ending her chapters on cliffhangers, and I kept having to put the book down to do boring real life stuff just when I wanted to find out whether Hope was going to live or die! While I can’t speak to the verisimilitude of her portrayal of a teen with CF, I will say that I think Krys does a good job balancing the risks of Hope’s condition with portraying her as a vital, vibrant person. Hope is not an invalid, neither is she an athlete. Her illness does not define her, but it informs her relationships with other people—particularly her family.

Hope’s mother could easily have been a caricature of an over-protective parent, so concerned for her child that she forces her to live in a bubble. Indeed, there are shades of this at the very beginning—but Krys is quick to dispel these. In particular, I love how Hope reasons with her mother on multiple occasions, swaying her mom through the application of logical arguments. It’s kind of refreshing to see teen drama that isn’t so over-the-top. (And if you’re looking for that, don’t worry, it shows up later.)

Krys consistently increases the stakes with each “challenge” and the occasional reprisals that follow. What starts as an intriguing mystery transforms gradually into a literal life-or-death confrontation. Hope is torn between playing the game—whether out of a desire for the money or simply fear of reprisal if she stops—and trying to outsmart/undermine the Society. I loved watching her try to befriend and enlist the other girls involved. At first the other girls seem to fall into stock character types, or, as Krys lampshades it: “the Bad Girl, the Smart Girl, the Rich Girl, the Sporty Girl, and the Sick Girl”. Yet she quickly belies these labels, fleshing out each of the other characters in turn. I don’t want to spoil the story by going into details, but it’s nice to see each of them become more three-dimensional. In particular, I loved Hope’s interactions with Farrah and the way they help her slowly slot back into high school society. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to try to get back into “regular life” and socializing after being confined to one’s house for so long.

Now, there are subplots here that do very little for me, as an ace and no-longer-so-young adult. The “falling for my best friend” plot is pretty old, and Krys doesn’t do much new with that. Likewise, morally ambiguous rich guy falling for main character is another oldie-and-not-always-goodie. I appreciate that Krys exploits that moral ambiguity of Tucker’s for maximum effect, doubling down on the doubt by first undermining Ethan’s revelation of the criminal record and then pulling the rug out from beneath Hope when she least expects it.

Similarly, some of these subplots are also very rushed, or at least underdeveloped. Again, when it comes to the Hope/Tucker relationship, he makes his move the very same day she is back at school and things accelerate … quickly. There is little chance to build tension or for Hope to process what’s happening. (Then again, hormones? I guess?) Ethan’s conflicting relationship with another girl lives mostly in the background, the girlfriend coming to the fore only once or twice before being put on a bus. Fortunately, the main plot comes with enough tension to carry the rest of the story forward like an out-of-control train on greased-up tracks.

There’s more to Dead Girls Society than just thriller material too—there is commentary, both subtle and more obvious, about class and sexuality and gender. Krys contrasts Hope’s working-class family and its struggles to get by with the effortless glamour of Farrah, Tucker, and Nikki’s families—and the political consternation that hangs in the balance when these teenagers fuck up. Some stories, in their eagerness to critique the rich/poor divide, portray one side or the other in one dimension; this is where I find many dystopian YA stories let me down. Krys humanizes everyone, allowing us to understand—if not actually sympathize, because Tucker is a huge dick—why they act the way they do. I appreciate how Krys works these issues into the novel even though they aren’t a central feature.

Going to have to temper my enthusiasm slightly because of that ending, which almost has enough sugar mixed into it to dull the bitter taste of the rest of the book. This is a matter of personal taste, I guess. If you like “happy endings” where the protagonist gets all that she wants and maybe more, I guess you’ll enjoy this one. I prefer endings that are more ambiguous, endings that reflect the true uncertainty of life, endings that offer up the suggestion of hope (pun intended) but never the promise. While Krys does try to introduce an element of mystery right at the end (is there going to be a sequel? I’d read a sequel!), overall I feel like she wraps the story up in too much of a big bow before handing it to the reader.

I was decidedly lukewarm about Krys’ debut, Hexed, and consequently didn’t check out its sequel (even though I said I would, but hey, terrible person and all that). With Dead Girls Society I wanted to give her another try (and not just because she’s local—though that doesn’t hurt), and I don’t regret it. For all that it’s a smart and tightly-plotted thriller, it also doesn’t skimp on character development, and that is a balance I can get behind. Also, just realized I kind of bookended my year with Michelle Krys books. I should try doing that with more authors!

I want to start with the author bio at the end of this book: “Chibundu Onuzo was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1991.” When I read this, I did a doubletake, because that makes Onuzo only 25 years old and 2 years younger than me. I had just assumed she was much older, because her voice sounds so much older, so much richer in terms of experience and worldliness. I am in awe, and in no small part envious, of this 25-year-old’s talent.

I first encountered Onuzo and her writing quite recently, when I read an article of hers in The Guardian and used it for a summarizing exercise in one of my classes. I had no idea she was also a novelist, but then I stumbled across Welcome to Lagos on NetGalley! I appreciate Faber and Faber making it available for me to read.

Last year National Geographic published a feature on Lagos (NB: National Geographic is fantastic and remains so despite its purchase by Rupert Murdoch; my grandparents continue to give me a subscription every year and I love it). Robert Draper describes the same Lagos seen here in Onuzo’s novel. On the one hand, it’s a city rife with corruption. Everyone is on the take, hustling, from the lowliest person selling and buying on the street to the highest government officials. The level of corruption is so staggering it’s stupefying how the country functions at all. Yet it does, and on the other hand, Lagos is a vibrant city, economically and culturally. People start businesses here, become huge successes. The various tribes celebrate their traditions both different and common—both Draper and Onuzo mention the colour themes at Nigerian wedding and the expectation that guests all dress in the chosen colour.

Onuzo’s meditations on Lagos and the entire country’s political situation are unequivocal. She lays the blame for the country’s situation on the doorstep of colonialism and ongoing imperialism: “the whole of Nigeria’s fortunes rose and fell on what foreigners would pay for her sweet crude”. Later, in the book, someone jokes about how Western leaders want to “impose democracy” on the country—except it’s not really a joke. I love postcolonial fiction, but I don’t read enough of it about Africa. As a native of Lagos, Onuzo is in the best position to explain and portray her hometown’s history and situation. I loved learning about it from her, seeing it through her characters’ eyes.

Lagos is a complicated, paradoxical city, and Welcome to Lagos captures that. Its characters, for the most part, are outsiders to the city. They come in from the hinterland: Chike, a soldier who has deserted an army unit after becoming disillusioned by the brutality of his commanding officer; Fineboy, a militant more interested in radio and deals than in violence; Isoken, a woman who has lost her family and came too close to losing her autonomy; Oma, a wife fleeing an abusive husband but still tethered, spiritually, to the idea of her marriage; Yemi, Chike’s right-hand man, an illiterate and less educated soldier who nevertheless displays a deep and abiding interest in his country’s history and welfare. As these outsiders meet for the first time and begin navigating Lagos together, Onuzo introduces us to the city’s complicated character. None of them are 100 per cent adapted to navigating it. Fineboy is very adaptable but needs guidance, a goal, something bigger than himself and his own dreams. Chike is also searching for purpose, though he is more practically minded and will settle for a job first.

It’s kind of your standard motley crew of nobodies coming into their own. In this case, Onuzo drops a disgraced Minister of Education on them. With the money they confiscate from Chief Sandayọ, they start renovating and resupplying one school at a time in Lagos, ironically putting the money to its originally intended use. Sandayọ himself has mixed feelings about this, and I love this portrayal: he is upset, naturally, that his plans to flee have been stymied by this group of squatters in his abandoned Lagosian home; yet he is also intrigued by how swiftly Chike et al put that money to good use where, after a year as Education Minister, he met only frustration. Onuzo indicts the paralysis gripping the corrupt government of Nigeria, something underscored more terribly when, after Sandayọ reveals the names of the schools they helped, the police swoop in and arrest the principals involved.

Part of the brilliance of Welcome to Lagos is how softly it speaks. There is not a great deal of action in this book. Aside from the opening, and then later on towards the end, any confrontations or threats of violence tend to happen off the page and are recounted, theatre-style, by a character to the others. In this way Onuzo takes up the spaces between violence, focusing on the ever-present possibility of a situation becoming violent if the people with the guns, or the money, or the oil, or whatever leverage is potent at the moment, aren’t satisfied.

Like any good writer, Onuzo also investigates the role of the written word in revolution. Ahmed Bakare is an intriguing revolutionary editor: so dedicated to justice, to hard reporting, yet also strangely impotent. I love the observation of the futility of his continuing to print newspaper:

He would not bring down the government with the Nigerian Journal. Those days were gone, when newspapermen were feared and hounded and despised and worshipped for their recklessness.

Mmm, oh, it just feels so relevant to journalism everywhere in this, 2016, the year of the Trump. Ugh. Because the line between Nigeria and a country like Canada is a thin one: we have freedom of the press, but is it really free? Nigeria just does away with the pretext, makes it very clear that if people in power don’t like what you’re saying they will burn your building to the ground and make your secretary disappear! Ahmed flees the country into the welcoming embrace of mother England only to find that the news cycle there is different from how he operates, and of course, corruption in Nigeria only has so much currency as a story.

This tension between what is newsworthy and what should be reported to the public as a matter of human interest and empathy is a minor but important theme in Welcome to Lagos. Onuzo rather uses Lagos as a microcosm for the decisions that happen around the world to shape what we see, what gets reported. The report the BBC World Service runs is different from the story that Sandayọ tells David West which is different from what actually happened; along each link in this causal chain the distortions build like constructive interference. The BBC is interested in a different narrative from the one Ahmed champions or Chike encounters on a day-to-day basis. While these differing narratives share similar issues and facts at their cores, their distinct perspectives influence the opinions that form around them.

I’m hearing a lot about how we’ve suddenly entered a “post-truth” or “post-fact” era. And I can’t help but think the Western world is overreacting, at least in the sense that what’s happening now is somehow new or unimaginable and has never happened before in the history of the world. Onuzu aptly demonstrates here in her novel that Nigeria is plenty familiar with a post-truth society—everyone knows one truth but is careful to state another, and this is a feature common to dictatorships, failed communist states, and basically anywhere that corruption or bureaucracy has outlived a sense of duty and integrity.

And so while Welcome to Lagos does comment on how the colonialism of the past got Nigeria to where it is today, it also holds up a mirror to the continuing colonialism now impelled by international coalitions of oil companies and news services instead of the British empire. This form of colonialism might be subtler, at least to the outsider’s perspective, than what previously went on, but it is no less insidious as a result.

But by the end of the book, Onuzo tightens the focus again to examine the effects these national events have had on our heroes. Are they scarred? Battle-worn? Wiser? She offers us no easy or simple answers; this is not a Hollywood film “based on a true story” where the main character conveniently dies an honourable death and everyone else pairs off and keeps their memory alive. Nope. Relationships continue to inch ever forward, one day at a time, and whether they flourish or wither is not for us to know. Each one of the protagonists has to make decisions about who they want to be, how they want to slot into life in Lagos.

This is a book that captivates, that grabs your attention. It is, as I observed earlier, soft-spoken—but that does not mean it waters down its words. On the contrary, aside from the intensely interesting light it sheds on Nigerian politics, this novel is just beautiful prose from start to finish:

As always, there was too much food. The table was heaped for guests that would never arrive: his dead sister, her imaginary husband and their six obese children.

Onuzo wastes no words and deploys them with unerring accuracy, weapons of mass description that always find their target in the reader. Her imagery is impressive—and I say this as someone who generally ignores such things, since I don’t visualize when I read. Nevertheless, I found myself almost able to imagine the heat of the day, the sweat, the dust and grime, the absence of power and the noises of chaotic traffic. She plucks you from the familiar world, the world where your assumptions hold true, and transports you to Lagos, where everything is both the same and different. Welcome to Lagos will hopefully challenge your complacency in your knowledge of the world even as it entertains and moves you with the characters who come alive on its pages.

This isn't a review so much as a disjointed collection of thoughts about Saga, Volume 5. I mean, the problem with these reviews is that it always boils down to more of the same. Buy Saga. Read it, in order. Do it!

Whenever I read graphic novels, I try to talk about the art and artist, since these are obviously important parts of the medium. And it’s with great respect when I say that I don’t give the art of a graphic novel as much attention as I should; I prefer words, which is why I prefer regular novels. But Volume 5 has some very explicit scenes, so it provides a good opportunity to discuss Fiona Staples’ artwork.

Saga is fairly conventional when it comes to its panel layout, so that helps. The panels are different on each page, and occasionally they’re skewed rather than perpendicular—but they are always generally quadrilateral and well-defined. Despite sticking to this conservative schema, Staples employs a great variety of panel dimensions and layouts to help tell the story. She can effortlessly convey a sense of motion, or give us a big hero shot to emphasize a particular moment.

This has always been an adult comic, and its artwork reflects that. This volume is no different, and perhaps even a little more. I mean, that two-page spread with the dragon is just … uh … wow.

Also, can we pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that Ghüs is amazing and possibly the best character in the entire series and I don’t want him to die please oh please don’t kill him?

Let’s pause and do that.

There is lots of dying in here. No spoilers, of course, just a reminder that Vaughan and Staples are GRRMing the shit out of this series: anyone and everyone can and will die, no guarantees, no warning. It’s a good thing, because like Game of Thrones they have a tremendous cast of characters, and no, and I can’t remember everyone’s name. That’s what wikis are for.

This volume might be the most insane yet in turns of plot twists. Saga continues to ramp up, with the stories going in directions both predictable and unforeseen, providing a nice mixture of reward for invested readers and twists that will keep us invested.

And Ghüs is the best!

My reviews of Saga:
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