Hildur Knútsdóttir's THE NIGHT GUEST (Tr Mary Robinette Kowall)

...when you stop sleeping, there are suddenly so terribly many hours of the day.

The early chapters of Hildur Knútsdóttir's The Night Guest were some of the hardest reading I've done and have still left me more than a little bitter, you guys. Not for their quality, not for the prose, not for any literary reason at all, really, but for their specific content and how it resonated with my own past and continuing experience -- until it didn't. 

For The Night Guest starts off with a young woman in quest of a diagnosis, an activity that ate up over a decade of my own life, so I related very hard, at first.

But our heroine, Iðunn, is in Iceland rather than America, so while she encounters some of the same bullshytt that I did from family and friends as she seeks an answer for how she wakes up every morning from sound and adequate sleep with incredible fatigue and soreness and mysterious wounds and injuries, she does not encounter the kind of hostility, disbelief, blaming and accusations of drug-seeking that so many Americans do in her situation.

So I spent a while envying her for that. But then it got worse.

Because there is an answer to her problem that isn't medical, which is partially spoiled by the very jacket copy of this book (thus robbing these early chapters of a lot of tension that might have made them more relatable and interesting even for people like me), so then I was envious of her for two reasons. 

That's a lot to cope with when trying to assess a book critically, which I of course promised Netgalley I would do. Wanting to yell at and/or slap pretty much everyone in the opening chapters of a book is never a good sign that you're going to find what follows is in anyway worth one's precious reading time. But here we go.

Before you can say "have you tried yoga" (which of course she has, and she's a vegetarian, too) Iðunn has other problems, some of which stem from her deep past; her parents willfully misunderstand everything (a typical phone exchange when her mother is shopping for a family dinner goes something like Mom: Do you eat chicken now, I forget? Iðunn: Nope nope nope ty nope. Mom: Oh, well, chicken breasts were on sale but I'll make lots of rice) and are not dealing at all with a family tragedy we don't even realize took place until almost half of the book is over.

Meanwhile, Iðunn has started to notice some odd phenomena in her surroundings, is being stalked by a married ex-lover/co-worker who is starting to get obnoxious, is trying to start something with an attractive new guy whose motives for courting her will seem a little suspect to the reader but whom she accepts at face value, and her sleep issues just keep getting worse and worse.

One thing Knútsdóttir does incredibly well is capture how long-term sleep deprivation (something with which I am also incredibly, uncomfortably familiar) affects cognition and communication -- and one's ability to implement their good and sensible coping strategies, to follow actually helpful and professional advice. This is chiefly communicated via chapter length and brevity of sentences; as Iðunn deteriorates, she tells us less and less until some chapters are only four or five words long. I wonder if this is a quality of the original or is something that translator Mary Robinette Kowall introduced or enhanced. Anyway, it's a brilliant example of the classic writing advice of "show, don't tell" that I truly admire.

Ultimately, though, that brevity feels like truncation, the ending telescoped and rushed, though admirably without sacrificing the tantalizing ambiguity, even at the very end. If you value tidy endings with all narrative questions answered, though, look elsewhere. The Night Guest is probably not for you.

But if you like a story that remains mysterious throughout (and you can overcome any misplaced feelings engendered by its opening act) and just want a short and tense read, get this.

M. John Harrison's WISH I WAS HERE: AN ANTI-MEMOIR

My first and still favorite M. John Harrison read was The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, in which the speculative fiction elements take place so far in the background of the story that they're barely noticeable. The focus instead is on a pair of mostly dysfunctional characters, barely competent at living their own lives, utterly incapable of even paying a little attention to the bizarre changes taking place to the landscape and society around them, which feels faintly like a prequel to J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World might -- if we're interpreting the subtle and widely scattered clues, clues like a sudden and seemingly culture-wide obsession with Charles Kingsley's Victorian era children's book The Water Babies -- at all correctly.

Author and editor and all around badass M. John Harrison's new book, Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir, works on much the same principle. The details of Harrison's life and career are present mostly in the negative (with the exceptions of some anecdotes about an aging cat and about his obsession with rock climbing); the positive space is filled with the figures and ideas and opinions and bits of imagery that have occupied his mind while all of that was going on. It's a fascinating and original way to approach the arts of biography and memoir that I, only the most casual reader of these genres, have never encountered before, and I love it! 

Thus instead of "I" and "me" and banal narratives of mere events in Harrison's life, we get accounts of a sort of dream-self he calls "Map Boy" (everybody writing about this book is going to remind you that "the map is not the territory, blah blah blah, how anti- do I have to get, here?), exploring remembered landscapes and word games and dreams, and of "Beatrice," Harrison's "writer friend" to whom he attributes various mini-manifestos about genre and character and why world-building is pretty bad, actually, and other matters of writing and inspiration and work. Were we to create an image in which these two constructions face one another in profile, the space in between them might in some way be a portrait of Harrison -- but it would be a pretty weird and distorted one. Just the way he wants it, I suspect.*

I can't say for sure that I like Wish I Was Here; I found it beautiful on a purely aesthetic level, full of striking ideas and images, and the very concept of it fascinates me. I do plan to read it again a few times as I become more acquainted with the rest of his work, though. I think it will resonate much more strongly for me when I recognize more of the material in it from his fiction, as it did on this first read when I kept recognizing notions and locations from The Sunken Land, like this: 

We find that, pinkish and surrounded by brand new wire netting, the surface of the tennis court is already sinking into the mud, so that the drainage channels around it, which are still to be filled in, look more like the remains of a half-hearted rescue attempt. Someone has scratched the mileage off the nearby road signs, as if to hide the town or perhaps deny its existence.

I mean, I didn't really feel like I got The Vorrh on the first reading but now it's very likely my favorite of all trilogies.

I have a very strong feeling that Wish I Was Here will grow on me like that. But I don't mean to use it as a sort of key to all his mysteries, which I'm pretty sure was not remotely what he set out to, or indeed did, write. As he pointed out several times in this text, he deliberately cultivates ambiguity and sets out to leave much to his readers' imaginations. Guys like that don't write Dummy's guides.

What they do write, apparently, is the kind of "huh, look at that" narrative that I most associate with (again) Ballardian protagonists, though Harrison has shown a lot more agency than those passive and detached observers of their lives. Ballard protagonists don't cultivate habits like base jumping in middle age, for instance! I mean, if Harrison ever wants to write a whole big non-fiction book about what that's like, I'll sure as hell read it. For I have at least concluded this: I'm down to read whatever he cares to write, and I'm very excited to read his back catalog, much of which has occupied space in my to-be-read piles, sometimes for decades. Sometimes it just takes something special to make me yank them out of the heap and let the stuff that was on top of them fall as it may. Wish I Was Here was more than adequate to that job, if nothing else.

*But can't say I know, because I'm still very much an M. John Harrison newb, for all that much of his career has had significant impact on much of what I've enjoyed the most in my reading life. But, I mean, I haven't even read all of the Virconium tales yet!

Jason Pargin's I'M STARTING TO WORRY ABOUT THIS BLACK BOX OF DOOM

I worry a bit, in the middle of the dumbest year in living memory (so far), that the people who most need to read Jason Pargin's I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, as well as those who are most going to appreciate it, are not going to bother finishing it because of its singular flaw, one that has been creeping very slowly into Pargin's work from the beginning: it's a bit didactic at times. As in there are some scenes that all but descend into Socratic dialogues.*

And there are no elements of hilarious supernatural horror (like in Pargin's John and Dave and Amy books), nor of over-the-top plutocratic science fiction (like in Pargin's Zoey Ashe books) in his latest novel. Pargin would seen to have concluded, like, say, William Gibson did before him (at least for the Bigend/Blue Ant trilogy) that the real, mundane world that we actually live in is plenty weird a setting for his brand of horrifying comedy and searing pathos, thank you very much. 

Which makes the fact that I was reading an ARC of I'm Starting to Worry... at the very instant the news first broke of the shooter at the Trump Rally in Butler, PA on July 13th of this stupid year of 2024 so freaking weird and perfect and unsettling that it made me feel like I was suddenly a bystander in either a John and Dave and Amy novel or a Zoey Ashe novel, for reasons I'll talk about here in a bit.

The plot of I'm Starting to Worry... chiefly concerns a disaffected young man, Abbott Coburn, who accepts a Lyft request from a mysterious woman who needs help transporting the titular Black Box, a roadie crate covered in band stickers, at least one of which stickers looks quite a lot like a radiation hazard sticker as depicted in the cover art, from California to Washington D.C. In Abbott's dad's tricked-out practically brand new Lincoln Navigator, of which Abbot believes his dad is more proud and protective of than he is of Abbot himself. 

We are treated, here and there, to  just enough foreshadowing about the eventual fate of box and car l, and about the subsequent fame of Abbot and the young woman, who gives the improbable but cool name of Ether when Abbott demands to know what to call her, to know that this trip they're planning is not going to go smoothly or end well. Which, of course it isn't; this is a Jason Pargin novel. His first book gave away an unhappy ending in its title! 

The duo's eventual fate is sealed by two unhappy circumstances they don't even know about until miles and days later, when one of them finally breaks the rules of the trip (don't look in the box, don't bring any devices that can track us, etc) and realizes that the Internet has lost its collective mind over their journey and conspiracy theories about it abound; the true point of I'm Starting to Worry... is thus revealed to be that said Internet has given us all a chronic case of what Malka Older named "Narrative Disorder" in her Centenal Cycle: our brains, already inclined to pattern seeking and narrative creation where neither pattern nor narrative actually exist, also can't really tell the difference between the stories it has fabricated and objective reality. Or at least not without more effort than most of us are used to expending to overcome the inherent efficiency/laziness of our brains, the better not to hog all the glucose so our muscles and organs can have some, too.

Anyway, not only did that sticker on the box capture the imagination of some of the worst sufferers ever of Narrative Disorder (aka Reddit users, which, get ready for them: big chunks of the novel take the form of conflicting theories, insults and wild speculation in Reddit threads, even unto the creation by rebels from one subreddit about the escapade of a whole 'nother one, denouncing the users and moderator of the original), but also, the vehicle Ether had originally tried to use to take the box cross country by herself... did in fact set off a radiation detector when investigators found it broken down and abandoned not far from where Abbott picked her up.

 

Oops.

So people think the pair are maybe some kind of terrorists transporting a dirty bomb to set off on the Mall in Washington D.C. No, wait, actually, Abbott is just a dupe in this plot, seduced into driving by Ether, who is a trained Russian sex-spy. No, the radiation is actually from an alien (or alien corpse) that the pair are transporting from a seekrit location to D.C. for a dramatic reveal to finally force Disclosure; Abbott and Ether are heroes! No, wait...

See why it was freaking weird to be reading this on the day a poor marksman took a potshot at the Republican nominee for POTUS?

Anyway, the mystery ropes in two unlikely "detectives" who have assigned themselves to the case: a recently retired FBI agent named Joan Key, and Abbott's father, Hunter, who, it turns out, actually does care quite a bit about his son, thank you (he's just really bad at, you know, emotions and stuff), and would really rather not see his boy go down in a hail of bullets on national TV.

But as Key and Hunter try to track Abbott and Ether -- Key to stop what she is sure is a terrible domestic terror threat that none of her former colleagues will take seriously, Abbott to save his son from certain death or even worse fates and also maybe congratulate him for finally doing something interesting with his life -- they can't help but join a howling pack of weirdos who are all doing the same thing for different reasons, spurred to action by the insanity on Reddit and Facebook, mostly, but also...

We find out early on that Abbott isn't just a Lyft driver who still lives with Daddy, but is also a YouTube streamer of middling popularity; this all really got touched off by a quick post to his channel advising that he was going to be offline for a while having a real life adventure. So some of his fans, hip to what's been going on on Reddit, etc long before Abbott himself is, are out to save him from the Evil Woman who tempted or kidnapped him into being her unwitting stooge.

And there's a big scary and heavily armed guy the duo refers to as the Tattoo Monster on their trail, too. The Tattoo Monster seems to know what's actually in the box and to believe that it's rightfully his, and is surprisingly resourceful for a dude who looks like he hasn't paid attention to anything since Hunter S. Thompson wrote Hell's Angels. In which Tattoo Monster (he has a real name but Tattoo Monster is more fun) could easily have been a character.

It all builds up to a satisfying climax in typical Pargin fashion, both way over the top and just believable enough, both coming at you out of nowhere and telegraphed almost from the first paragraph. 

In the middle, though, we get lots and lots and lots of pseudo-philosophical exchanges between Abbott and Ether, mostly about how much the world sucks and it's going to hell and it's especially bad for unattractive young white men (Abbott, who "spent half his life sensing he was in someone's way and the other half actually being in someone's way but failing to sense it") vs It's only bad from a very narrow, specific and privileged viewpoint and everyone really has a bad case of Internet poisoning and toxic levels of loneliness (Ether).

I have this theory that everything that happens on our screens is designed to do exactly what's happening here, to repel us from one another, to create a war of all against all. It's like a filter that only shows you others' bad behavior, blocking the pure and letting through the poison, to make you scared of everyone who isn't exactly identical to you. I think that, long-term, it traps your brain in a prison, that it's designed to keep you inside, alone, with only those screens for comfort.

- Ether, explaining why she refers to social media tech as the Black Box of Doom 

So yeah, if you're a fan of Pargin's old work at Crackd, his many podcast appearances on shows like Behind the Bastards, or his TikTok channel, these passages won't be too much of a bother, covering similar mythbuster-y ground to those, but they do slow down the action some and often feel quite preachy if you're already on Pargin's wavelength re: what modern technology and living standards and capitalism have done to our brains and how important it is to unplug and get some perspective -- I can only imagine but that is even worse for those who are not. So I'm sure lots of people are going to be online soon complaining that Pargin has Gone Woke or whatever new slang for pointing out that things could stand some improvement in the equity and kindness departments will be by the time the book is published later this year. 

For this was a Netgalley pick for me, and, weird July 13 experience it was for me, I'm mighty glad to have gotten it.

Pargin doesn't need fancy magic or sci-fi trappings to tell a great, and frequently funny, story. He made my auto-buy list a long time ago, but I maybe need to bump him up to must buy in hardcover.

*I'm aware that this is a strange context in which to use the word "descend" but this is supposed to be genre fiction, and Pargin's audience is not, I suspect, going to like the lecturing and arguing that characterizes a lot of the interactions between our protagonist and his primary companion. I'd love to be wrong!

Leo Vardiashvili's HARD BY A GREAT FOREST (Narr by Luke Thompson)

Combining elements of a classic fairy tale and a desperate defense strategy the author assures us has been an unfortunate necessity for his people for as long as their land has been settled, Leo Vardiashvili's first novel, Hard By a Great Forest is a devastating read, but one that is more than worth the emotional pain it induces.

The great forest of the title is both metaphorical -- the forest in which a witch awaits Hansel and Gretel and also in which Baba Yaga dwells in her famous chicken-legged hut -- and the all too real region of Ossetia. If you're like me, you'd only ever heard of Ossetia in 2008, when Russia and Georgia went to war over it, resulting in the creation of a partially recognized (by only five countries as of this writing) nation-state in an area that most everybody else still considers to be part of the nation of Georgia.

That war and an earlier civil war fought in Georgia not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 form the very intensely still-felt background informing everything the novel's characters do and feel in every moment, even before our protagonist arrives in Tblisi in search of missing family members. 

Saba Sulidze-Donauri (and really, I urge you to listen to this novel in audio book form if you can; the proper nouns are amazing. Luke Thompson is English but he must have had help from the author or someone) is the last member of his little family to return to Georgia, from which he, his father Irakli (see?) and his older brother Sando fled during the civil war in the 1990s. The mother of the family, Eka, was supposed to come with them, even though she had divorced Irakli some time ago, but was forced to stay behind. Saba and Sandro were just old enough to know something had gone wrong but not what, and spent the rest of their childhoods in their eventual new home of London asking Irakli (they almost never call him "Dad" or "Father"; Eka, too is only ever Eka) where Eka was and when would she be joining them.

Irakli, meanwhile, worked ridiculously long and hard hours at jobs in their new city, leaving his sons to all but raise themselves, trying to earn the money to get Eka out of Georgia but his plans for achieving this never succeed, usually through trusting the wrong people to help him make it happen; Eka has died without ever seeing any of them again long before the events of the novel begin.

As things get started, we learn that Irakli has, after a lifetime of trying and failing to make the trip, finally traveled to Georgia  -- and has disappeared. As, it seems, has Sandro, who followed Irakli sometime later, trying to pick up the trail, only to himself fall out of contact with Saba, who feels he has no choice but to follow his family into his homeland, confronting the mysteries of his family members' fates and a lot of painful memories. 

The Tblisi to which Saba returns is the evolving tourist destination of 2015, experiencing some unique growing pains in the aftermath of a famous flood that, among other things, destroyed the city's zoo and let loose a host of exotic animals, mostly to grim fates, but occasionally also to amusing and heartwarming scenes, like when a hippopotamus named Begi, whose dilemma is depicted in the novel, caused a traffic jam and was helped to safety by a group of caring citizens. A Bengal tiger named Artyom has another cameo in a tense and retroactively kind of funny scene in the old botanical gardens when Saba finds himself pursuing a clue there.

The humor in that scary scene is communicated to us by a taxi driver of sorts named Noldar, who spotted Saba looking bewildered in Tblisi's airport, chivvied him into hiring his cab (an old Volga that becomes itself almost a character) and then, for good measure, talks Saba into staying in his very informally rented out spare bedroom. Noldar and his wife, Keti, adopt Saba almost immediately, but it's not all smiles; they are refugees from Ossetia, who were separated from their little daughter when their home came under attack. Noldar holds out hope that the girl is still alive; Keti maintains otherwise, and has forced Noldar to buy a cemetery plot and erect a gravestone so they have something to visit on the anniversaries of their loss. The broken state of their family is still palpable as they team up to help Saba try to repair what's left of his.

Noldar is a gruff old bear of a man, loud, hard drinking and -- vitally necessary in a novel this tragic -- funny. His version of Saba's encounter with Artyom delights many, including the reader, who witnessed it happening a bit differently than how Noldar loves to tell it.

Saba gets answers, visits old haunts, is haunted by a host of ghosts from his past, is hunted by a sinister detective who seems weirdly fixated on Saba's "case" and is possibly even more interested in finding Irakli than Saba is, encounters other vaguely menacing figures hostile to his mission, and has some touching -- and gut-wrenching -- reunions. It's all told with skill, immediacy and emotional honesty; in other words, keep some tissues handy if books ever make you cry.

You may also find that you really want to visit Tblisi, which sounds like a fascinating city. Just, if you go, know that tragedy is everywhere and memories close to the surface, so be kind. 

Of course that's true everywhere, though, isn't it?

Adrian Tchaikovsky's ALIEN CLAY

"Everything that our biological sciences say can't be here on Kiln, his archaeology says is here. Or was."

I'm passing familiar with gulag narratives, having read my share of Solzhenitzin, Dostoevsky et al; enough, at any rate, to be pretty sure nobody really needed to tell the Czars to hold my beer: they were plenty bad as already recorded, thanks.

But nobody told that to Adrian Tchaikovsky, apparently.

The basic idea of Tchaikovsky's latest, Alien Clay, is, what if gulags but we also demanded that the inmates perform original almost-scientific research on a bizarre alien biome full of life forms that are not only hostile to humans but also just incomprehensibly strange, ridiculous kluges of forms so complexly interdependent/mutually exploitative/indistinguishable that they call the very Idea of speciation and taxonomy into question. 

Also that "almost-scientific" is important; the Mandate, aka the human space empire from which our prisoner/researchers have been dispatched, is a totalitarian state run by powers who have a skewed, religiously-tinged idea of what science is even for, which is finding and promulgating only that evidence which supports the Mandate's pre-ordained conclusions about how the universe works and about humanity's place as the pinnacle and point of all creation.

Oh, and there's xeno-archaelogical evidence, in the form of strange gigantic structures that reminded the first visitors to this nightmare planet of kilns, hence the name bestowed, unofficially of course, on the planet: Kiln. This Must Be Investigated by (pseudo) Science, or at least appear to have been investigated even though the conclusions about what these ruins are, what kind of beings built them, what they mean for humanity, are pre-determined.

So our exiled convict-scientists' primary job is to present the Mandate with evidence supporting the conclusion that somehow Kiln once supported some kind of humanoid life that built the weird structures. They have to demonstrate how these humanoids evolved and how they're basically humans because nobody else could make structures like these kilns. And woe betide anybody who even sort of suggests otherwise -- never mind that there's no sign of anything remotely human-like ever having lived on Kiln -- let alone discloses that life on Kiln operates on principles that are pretty far from the good old descent-with-modification we know from terrestrial evolution.

So I guess the elevator pitch for this book must be something like: Jeff Vandermeer meets Alastair Reynolds meets China Mieville. With maybe a little bit of Greg "Blood Music" Bear thrown in toward the end.

That China Mieville bit is not a third wheel, by the way: most of the convicts laboring on Kiln have been banished for revolutionary activity, actively organizing against the Mandate, not just occasionally publishing slightly subversive ideas. And they've brought a wealth of that kind of political experience with them to Kiln; much of Alien Clay's first third or so concerns covert activity on the part of our narrator and his fellow political prisoners against the evil and manipulative Commandant of the teeming hellhole where they're expected to spend the rest of their lives. Entertainingly, we are never privy to any of their actual planning or preparation; we see them doing seemingly inexplicable, covert actions and only understand why when actual revolution breaks out. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

A revolution story on a weird prison world would be plenty interesting on its own, but what really makes Alien Clay so special, such an exceptional read, is the speculative biology of Kiln, which our narrator describes visually as "a forest of body horror just quietly going about its business." Everything our convicts encounter on this planet is a macro version of the true nature of our own bodies that we try so hard not to think about; truly, we are weird teeming assemblages of diverse other creatures, right down to our cells. The mitochondria that power those cells were originally independent single-cell organisms, just captured and harnessed ages ago by slightly bigger single-cell organisms. Our guts are host to vast colonies of microbes that help us digest our food; our skin is home to a myriad of mites that eat our dead cells, etc. 

On Kiln, in Kiln, that is all scaled way up. As our narrator observes on the dissecting table even before actually getting to explore any of the planet's lushly weird surface, what his masters keep trying to describe as species are anything but:

Not "species" -- the specific combination of symbionts that make up this particular visual signature, which all exist independently elsewhere with other partners, as though the entire biosphere is one big polyamorous love-in. If it'd been them coming to us they'd have been appalled at how repressed, one-note and boring all us Earth types are.

And of course it all turns out to be way weirder than that.

Tchaikovsky keeps all of these plots and revelations in exquisite balance while also providing the kind of intense character drama that a good gulag story requires. Many of the inmates were colleagues of various kinds back in the Mandate proper, who were expertly manipulated by the regime into distrusting each other long before they got shipped out in one-way deathtraps to work themselves into early -- I would normally say graves but since Earth and Kiln biology are wildly incompatible, human corpses would not decompose properly if buried on Kiln, so I'll say an early recycling, with all the nastiness that implies. There are some staff here -- supervising scientists who are not convicts but, being willing to serve out large chunks of their careers on this hellworld, they're not the best and brightest the Academy has to offer; security guards to keep the convicts in line, usually violently; and, of course, a Commandant who rules over all with all the brutal and manipulative flair that the Mandate has made into its one true science, but who also fancies himself an actual scientist, just like his slaves. And there are some in-between figures to keep everybody, including the reader, guessing.

I've read a lot of really great books this year, despite not having written posts about very many of them, but of them all I think Alien Clay is a candidate for my favorite, both among those published this year and among those older ones I have read this year. I snoozed on Tchaikovsky for a long time, but I shall do so no longer!

Addendum one day later: D'oh, I just realized that Alien Clay is pretty much a prequel to the Southern Reach trilogy!