Laline Paull's THE BEES

To compare Laline Paull's entomological fantasy, The Bees,to Watership Down is an almost irresistible temptation, and probably made a pretty good elevator pitch for the book, but to do so, to simply say "bees instead of rabbits" is to sell both novels short. Yes, they're both magnificent novels that are much, much more than human stories acted out by animals, but that's pretty much where the similarities end.

The Bees concerns the life-span of one individual worker bee, Flora-717 (Flora is her "kin"; there are hundreds of Floras and she is but one. But...) within the larger life of a domesticated hive kept by a human beekeeper to pollinate his orchard (his sole "Visitation" to collect some honey is a terrifying scene I'd pit right up against the harrowing extermination scene from the animated film version of Watership Down, but it's somehow more horrifying because the reader knows the beekeeper believes he's a kindly husband to his hive, its benevolent father-god just collecting his tithe).

From her emergence from the cell in which she metamorphosed from a larva to an adult worker bee forward, Flora-717 (or just Flora; other members of her kin group are referred to as floras with a lower case "f" for clarity) is marked out as different. A member of the lowly sanitation caste, she is already considered ugly and brutish, but she's also huge for a worker bee, so huge that the "fertility police" almost kill her as deformed. Only the experimental kindness of a high-caste "Sage" (of royal kin) saves her, and sets her on her unique path.

Flora gets to be a nurse in the royal nurseries for a while, then goes back to janitoring, then gets the opportunity to join the elite corps of "foragers" -- the bees who fly out in search of new sources of nectar and pollen and come back to the hive to dance out not only directions but also detailed stories about how they found the food and what terrors they encountered -- crows, wasps, spiders, cell phone towers* -- on the way there.

All of this is presented with great attention to our current actual scientific understanding of bees and beehives, which lends a lot of plausibility (and earns a lot of willing suspension of disbelief) to Flora's story. At times, though, Paulli can't help herself. These bees "talk" in perfect English sentences and, furthermore, have a powerful form of telepathy that is kind of top-down in that higher caste bees seem to have greater ability than lower but also allows our heroine to download a whole load of knowledge from a dying forager bee at one point. One may snort at this, but let it go.

The prose is lovely, and so is the emotional journey of our Flora as she experiences both a sexless and sexual life of a kind, motherhood of a kind (only the Queen is supposed to breed, but as we've established, Flora is special -- and her origins, if not how she learns of them, plausibly explain her specialness) and life as a tiny part of a greater whole. I'm not at this stage 100% sure that I'm going to read this one over and over again as I have the rabbit book, but since I do happen to love insects rather a lot more than I do rabbits, well...

Anyway, as the best entomological fiction to hit the book world since Clark Thomas Carlton's Prophets of the Ghost Ants, this one is not to be missed!

*A whole thread that entertains all of the suggested and accepted factors that contributed to colony collapse disorder is present here. Paulli wisely favors none of the theories specifically, nor does she get didactic about it all; it's merely texture, background detail on what the life of bees must actually be like. Well, what it would actually be like if they "spoke" and all.

Seth Harwood's EVERYONE PAYS

First off, why isn't every motherfolklore among you reading Seth Harwood? Seriously, he is one of the best we've got, and the crime genre he so loves to write in is lucky to have him. Any genre would be.

Harwood has proven this time and time again, in a sound and unflashy way, and then later in a spectacular way (seriously, if you are one of those types still crying that The Wire is all done and dusted, you owe it to yourself to go have a look at Young Junius, in which Harwood had the balls to go where the admittedly spectacular writing staff of that show never went, right up into the project towers).

And the guy keeps improving.

With Everyone Pays, Harwood returns to his beloved San Francisco to bring us what looks on the surface like a straight-up cops'n'killers story: a homicide detective and her partner find themselves on the trail of a serial killer. I yawn just typing that description. I cocked an eyebrow when I realized that's what my boy had written. But of course this is my boy Harwood, so lots more is going on.

For one thing, the serial killer in question is killing low-lifes who abuse prostitutes, so, Dexter-ish, he could almost become a sort of hero-villain. But that twist is not what makes Everyone Pays so special.

It's special for two reasons.

First, the way it's structured. Now, alternating points of view between hero and villain is not a new trick, and Harwood knows this, but he's gone that structure one better in a way that feels strange at first but subtly gives the experience of reading this novel more depth than I would have ever expected. As our hero, Sgt. Clara Donner, begins investigating the case, she and her partner come across crime scene after crime scene as they start piecing together who this guy is and what he's all about. Emphasis is placed more on Donner's interaction with her team members than on the gruesome details -- except, usually, for one unusual one (that's not necessarily gruesome, but is unusual enough to be the one thing you might expect these people to feel worth mentioning later on when they tell their tales at the bar or in the locker room. Aagain, not to unusual.

But then, after each crime scene, we get the crime from the killer's point of view. The strange detail gets put into context, the killer's story and motivations deepen and become (kind of sickeningly) more comprehensible, and while the first few times this happens it feels like a weird choice for Harwood to have made, it gives the novel a rhythm all its own that makes it stand out.*

So, that's pretty cool, but what really is going to make this a memorable read for me for a long time to come is how masterfully Harwood constructed a narrative about a female homicide investigator and made it work. Sgt. Donner is blue-blooded but her homicide investigator father insisted forever that homicide is no place for a woman. She became a homicide investigator anyway, but doesn't carry a chip on her shoulder about it. She gets stuff done, lives her life, seems to enjoy it, passes the Bechdel test fairly well, encounters some sexism but doesn't get distracted by it, is kind of constricted within a sexist world within her narrative but fights it with weary excellence. She's got to be twice as good and she knows it, but she doesn't resent this, just accepts it as part of her world and displays considerable skill in getting things done anyway. She's a great character and I kind of love her.

Then her quarry becomes aware of her. Her quarry who thinks God has commanded him to punish sinners and protect women from them. Her quarry whose understanding of women traps them, pacing like animals in an old-fashioned zoo, in the smallest possible space, and tries to force Sgt. Donner into a role he has imagined for her. The tension between who Donner is and who this most patriarchal of killers tries to make her be is powerful, and drives a lot of the second half of the novel.

So Harwood, in other words, is a white male novelist who has worked very, very, very hard to Get It. He's dared and succeeded to write inner city black characters with sympathy and plausibility and skill in other books; now he's turned that same sensitivity to a female character, and his work rings just as true.

And it's a hell of a good crime story. Good enough, once again, to make me wonder if maybe I shouldn't be reading more crime fiction. I run through this set of thoughts every time I finish one of Harwood's books, with the answer being "I probably should" but honestly? I have such a monstrous pile of TBR in my lifelong favorite genres (science fiction, science fantasy, weird fiction, etc), to say nothing of all of my other projects, that I just don't know how I'd ever fit in another whole genre with its own set of classics (and I've read the serious classics of the genre already. Dashiell Hammett forever, yo) and must-reads and newcomers and all that. Perhaps if I live beyond my century mark I'll pull it off, but man, do you know how much stuff I still haven't read in my chosen genres? To say nothing of the books yet to come? Motherfolklore.

But always, always, I will make time for Seth Harwood.

*At least for me, but I don't read a lot of crime fiction. It's just not my thing. I grew up in a law enforcement family, worked in the field myself for a decade, and so I just can't stand cop shows or novels. So I can't be considered an authority on them. But still, for me, this technique made the book special. Your mileage may vary.

Laline Paull's THE BEES

To compare Laline Paull's entomological fantasy, The Bees,to Watership Down is an almost irresistible temptation, and probably made a pretty good elevator pitch for the book, but to do so, to simply say "bees instead of rabbits" is to sell both novels short. Yes, they're both magnificent novels that are much, much more than human stories acted out by animals, but that's pretty much where the similarities end.

The Bees concerns the life-span of one individual worker bee, Flora-717 (Flora is her "kin"; there are hundreds of Floras and she is but one. But...) within the larger life of a domesticated hive kept by a human beekeeper to pollinate his orchard (his sole "Visitation" to collect some honey is a terrifying scene I'd pit right up against the harrowing extermination scene from the animated film version of Watership Down, but it's somehow more horrifying because the reader knows the beekeeper believes he's a kindly husband to his hive, its benevolent father-god just collecting his tithe).

From her emergence from the cell in which she metamorphosed from a larva to an adult worker bee forward, Flora-717 (or just Flora; other members of her kin group are referred to as floras with a lower case "f" for clarity) is marked out as different. A member of the lowly sanitation caste, she is already considered ugly and brutish, but she's also huge for a worker bee, so huge that the "fertility police" almost kill her as deformed. Only the experimental kindness of a high-caste "Sage" (of royal kin) saves her, and sets her on her unique path.

Flora gets to be a nurse in the royal nurseries for a while, then goes back to janitoring, then gets the opportunity to join the elite corps of "foragers" -- the bees who fly out in search of new sources of nectar and pollen and come back to the hive to dance out not only directions but also detailed stories about how they found the food and what terrors they encountered -- crows, wasps, spiders, cell phone towers* -- on the way there.

All of this is presented with great attention to our current actual scientific understanding of bees and beehives, which lends a lot of plausibility (and earns a lot of willing suspension of disbelief) to Flora's story. At times, though, Paulli can't help herself. These bees "talk" in perfect English sentences and, furthermore, have a powerful form of telepathy that is kind of top-down in that higher caste bees seem to have greater ability than lower but also allows our heroine to download a whole load of knowledge from a dying forager bee at one point. One may snort at this, but let it go.

The prose is lovely, and so is the emotional journey of our Flora as she experiences both a sexless and sexual life of a kind, motherhood of a kind (only the Queen is supposed to breed, but as we've established, Flora is special -- and her origins, if not how she learns of them, plausibly explain her specialness) and life as a tiny part of a greater whole. I'm not at this stage 100% sure that I'm going to read this one over and over again as I have the rabbit book, but since I do happen to love insects rather a lot more than I do rabbits, well...

Anyway, as the best entomological fiction to hit the book world since Clark Thomas Carlton's Prophets of the Ghost Ants, this one is not to be missed!

*A whole thread that entertains all of the suggested and accepted factors that contributed to colony collapse disorder is present here. Paulli wisely favors none of the theories specifically, nor does she get didactic about it all; it's merely texture, background detail on what the life of bees must actually be like. Well, what it would actually be like if they "spoke" and all.

Matt Wallace's ENVY OF ANGELS

So, if you've always wanted to know more about the pink slurry that is formed by varied and largely unknown means into chicken "nuggets" or if you think there's not enough speculative fiction about the highly competitive world of professional catering, OR if your favorite H.P. Lovecraft story just happens to be "The Festival", well, you're slightly nuts but Matt Wallace has you covered anyway, though not so much that maybe you deserve it but rather that you absolutely deserve it and the extant sequels already come and coming down the pike and ready to violate your little eye-holes.

S'all right? S'all right.

But also.caveat clowns. Possibly worse than Pennywise clowns. OMG clowns, etc

But so, Envy of Angels is the first entry in Wallace's Sin du Jour novella series, which focuses on the eldritch adventures of the owner and staff of a catering company with a very unusual (even diabolical) clientele whose tastes require extraordinary effort to satisfy. So, for instance, the crew involved in procuring ingredients are all half Indiana Jones, half Harry Dresden and half Repairman Jack. And yes, that's three halves and what part of "eldritch" weren't you understanding?

This first entry introduces us to a pair of new hires who are immediately sucked into a near impossible effort: finding a way to prepare a meal that tastes exactly like the expertly prepared flesh and blood of an angel but doesn't actually.contain any angel because who wants to kill and cook an angel?

And yes, this leads to adventure and horror and hijinks, because how could it not, you guys? How could it not?

Bonus points for some gawdawdful humor at the end, too. Holy shih!

SUNS SUNS SUNS Program Note, Or Whatever You'd Call It

Just letting y'all know, since I've had more questions about this posting series than about anything else I've ever done on this blog -- I have not abandoned this, oh no! In fact, I'm going on pseudo-vacation pretty soon (I say "pseudo" because as a person with increasing chronic pain issues, it really just means I'm going to be severely limited in my daily activities in a different location) and I'm planning on resuming this right where I left off, er, quite some time ago. So keep your eye on this space, Wolfe-ites! More junk analysis of Book of the New Sun (and, someday, Book of the Long Sun and Book of the Short Sun) is coming soon!

For those of you who want to brush up on this (as I had to do, to find my place), here is a link to the entire series to date. As always, because this is Blogspot, start at the bottom and work your way up.

Grab your sunglasses!

Doctor Doctor: Christopher Bulis' PALACE OF THE RED SUN

Blogger's Note: This review may need revision later on because there might be a bit of a rubber band effect going on here. That's because this is my second attempt at a Sixth Doctor novel for this series after spending almost two months bogged down in another one that I'm not even going to name here but you can follow this link to see what it was if you really want to know. I finally got so annoyed with it that I filed it under Did Not Finish and that's all I'm going to say about that.

On to this delightful little romp, which I thoroughly enjoyed even though it's a Sixth Doctor and Peri story. And yes, that means it may have even rehabilitated that character a bit for me. It helps not to have poor Nicola Bryant's actual voice actually straining after that bad American accent, I think. And also, they're not bickering quite so much. But mostly, Peri actually gets stuff done, displaying resourceful adaptability and really not whining much at all. Very refreshing!

But so, she and Sixie land on a planet or planetoid that appears at first to be just one giant immaculate English garden, zealously maintained by a staff of robots for some unknown masters. Our duo is soon separated (though perhaps not soon enough. This not, for once, a complaint about bickering, though; things just get off to a very slow start generally) and the fun begins. Peri meets some locals and looks to share their plight as despised and oppressed scavengers (who are enslaved and worked to death by the robots if caught), while the Doctor meets up with a robot gardener who has managed to develop sentience -- and to realize that there are sinister secrets at the heart of this pleasure planet.

The exposure of these secrets and their larger relevance to a framing plot that involves a galactic dictator hunting the escaped leaders of his latest conquered planet and the sleazy journalist who documents his career proceed apace, revealing some satisfying timey-wimeyness in the process. The result is a pleasant, clever read with the bonus of maybe rehabilitating a hated companion a bit.

I shall look forward to more of Mr. Bulis' Doctor Who fiction in future, and update my Arbitrary and Capricious rankings when I'm not on vacation.

Until then, see you in Time. As such.