Bao Ninh's THE SORROW OF WAR (Tr Frank Palmos & Phan Thanh Hao, Narr James Langton)

Kien himself would have been dead long ago if it had not been for the sacrifice of others; he might even have killed himself to escape the psychological burden of killing others. He had not done that, choosing instead to live the life of an antlike soldier, carrying the burden of every underling.

I've known more than a few United States veterans of the Vietnam War, listened to them talk about survivors' guilt and how that can color absolutely every aspect of their post-war lives, and that's hard enough for me to imagine -- but what if you were also living out that life in the same territory where you took your wounds, watched your buddies and rivals die? Which was also where you grew up, first fell in love, buried your grandparents or parents? Comparing these experiences is, of course, pointless. So I won't say one is worse than another, but, well, the most emotionally harrowing parts of the only novel I've read about this war from the perspective of the Vietnamese, Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War, take place on former battlefields long after the Yanks went home.

Our point of view character, Kien, has, like Bao Ninh himself, finally concluded, after years of failing to re-integrate into daily life in his home city, the much-revived and gentrified Hanoi, that the only real reason he has been forced,  by circumstance and conscience, to carry on, is to record his experiences for posterity. And so he has done, and is doing, for The Sorrow of War isn't just about his experiences of preparation, combat and aftermath, but also of remembering and writing what will essentially become this very novel. The one can be as harrowing as the other, as anyone with PTSD* can tell you. And as difficult to convey in words!

The Sorrow of War, like Slaughterhouse Five, pulls its narrator character unstuck from time, though without any of the (possibly imaginary) relief of S5's science fictional frame narrative. We see Kien on an MIA detail, retrieving bodies after hostilities have ended, in various medical camps recovering from injuries, taking damage from explosions of buildings, trains, planes overhead, with his childhood sweetheart as a teenager, misunderstanding his father as an even younger teen, rescuing one woman from assault and likely rape, failing to rescue another one, encountering still another woman he last saw as a worshipful little girl watching him bravely march off to war with her adored big brother only to find her forced into prostitution as an adult... and Bao Ninh via Kien is there to make sure we feel every second of Kien's pain, guilt, concern, helplessness, rage, love, fear, disappointment and, yes, immaturity and emotional stuntedness. War forces one to grow up too fast in some ways, and stops him from growing up at all in others. We do not see Kien's attitude about women evolve much beyond what it was when he was rolling around in the grass with his gorgeous first love at the age of 17. But he learns every other lesson imaginable, and doesn't shy from showing us that even from his perspective as a lonely middle aged man, he still has some growing to do.

All of this is conveyed with considerable introspection and tenderness by narrator James Langton, whose voice I associate more with the colder and more empirical narratives of science fiction writers like Adam Roberts than with the emotional scenes this book demanded. I mean to say, here, that Langton would not have been my choice for The Sorrow of War but that I would have been wrong. He hits the right note every scene, and even when he sounds like he's at his most detached, still also manages to sneak in subtle hints that it's all an act. I still think I would have rather read this one in print, but I'm poor and my beloved public library only has the audio edition, so that's what I got -- but I did not suffer for it. At least, not in terms of quality.

I suffered in lots of other ways, of course. All of them the ways that fiction intends. And I also got to visit, in my minds eye and through the beautiful words of Bao Ninh, Frank Palmos and Phan Thanh Hao, a beautiful country that I'll never see with the eyes of my body -- at both its best and its worst. Wow.

*And to this I can relate, in my different but still pretty fucking intense way. 

Jerrod Edson's THE BOULEVARD

Not since Robert A. Heinlen*'s Job: A Comedy of Justice gave us the jovial, folksy Devil in the person of Jerry Farnsworth has Old Nick himself aroused my positive emotions as he does in The Boulevard, Canadian novelist Jerrod Edson's not-really Allegherian literary train ride through the Underworld. Though in this case, Jerry Farnsworth is kind of split into two people, the Devil and Ernest Hemingway.

And yes, the third figure on the book cover is Vincent Van Gogh. All aboard!

The premise, or at least the inciting incident, of The Boulevard is pretty simple. A nearly-ignored email, checked almost too late, informs the staff of Hell that, for the first time ever, God Himself is planning on coming down for a visit to see what they've made of the gloomy void he condemned Lucifer and all of his rebels to, eons ago. He's heard such magnificent things...

Only the Rebels have actually just settled it like any of us would in playing a simulation game, starting with mud huts for shelter in the stygian gloom and crafting their way up to something like civilization (occasionally stealing a few resources from the world of humans now and then. Like light. But not enough of it), though they've had to make do with some poor substitutes like painted metal representations of the flowers that won't grow Down Below and were, in a charming early anecdote that would have done the Heinlein of Job proud, the original source of their trouble. They've made a decent go of it, these Infernals have, even unto bringing into being one real miracle of beauty and light that is the great joy of every demon and condemned soul, The Boulevard.

But if God sees that Hell is not, in fact, a lake of fire filled with torment and agony and eternal ugliness, sees that his employees are maybe enjoying their work and afterlives, well, just imagine Elon showing up at a Tesla factory one day and seeing that George Clinton was supplying the house band and all the assembly line workers were enjoying themselves while building cars that not only didn't lock passengers inside at the first sign of an engine fire but also don't treat pedestrians as targets! That's no way to run a torture chamber factory! There'd be Hell to pay. 

OK, I'll stop with the puns and the Heinlein comparisons. Just, Job was baby's first blasphemy book.**

The aforementioned train ride is one that Satan is making across Hell, to meet with his estranged friend and tenant, Van Gogh, without whose work the Boulevard would still just be a dark and depressing street in Hell's Capital City, and break the bad news that his greatest work, his shining triumph, his immortal glory, his 60-block-long celebration of art, has got to go in order to save them all from the literal wrath of God.. Um.

Hemingway just happens to have been on the same train, traveling with a Jean Rhys whose brief appearance is one of The Boulevard's few lowlights. She's drunk, she's disgraceful, she has no reason to be there except as unpleasant comic relief, and for someone Hemingway can bitch about misogynistically. Boo. Anyway, the Devil, Ernie thinks, will be better company, especially since he's in a confessing mood. He seems to carry a lot of guilt over his relationship with Van Gogh. Uh oh.

Much of the meat of the book, thus, consists of Satan narrating the life of Van Gogh as observed by a secret manipulator, now disguised as a magpie and captured in a famous early painting, now scrubbing the floors of his famous room at Arles, now appearing as a chance met companion for an easel-side chat in a wheat field, but always subtly guiding the artist towards the desired end, or ends. This exposition dump -- for that is what it is as far as the frame narrative of the journey is concerned -- could have been just a dull, short retelling of famous scenes from Van Gogh's well-documented life, but the Devil's perspective on them gives them immediacy and freshness, helped along by frequent pauses for Hemingway's usually sardonic commentary. If you're looking for a charming, brief and bittersweet biographical sketch of one of the greatest painters ever to do it, you could do a lot worse than pick up a copy of The Boulevard; it's worth the cover price for this alone, with its entertaining and occasionally profound frame narrative an added bonus that will make you pause and think more than a few times.

Alas, I came away from this a little bit disappointed, because it feels unbalanced. There are a few jumps back to the titular Boulevard where Satan's minions are busy getting ready to undo all of the hard work that has gone into making the Capital City and all of Hell's other cities into the thriving metropolises that they are, but we get only the briefest of glimpses of these. The fact that they're enacted by the likes of Al Capone especially makes these bits feel inadequate for their brevity and their one-note treatment of what is going on; it's all logistics and very little emotion, and Capone and the other doers of Satan's bidding really beg to be fleshed out as characters in the ways that the riders on the train are -- especially Ms. Victoria, the book's other female character, frequently admired for her va-va-voomery but never allowed to become a person even though we learn she's been right there with Satan and the Boys since they were all angels and he went by Lucifer. I wanted this side of the story to have something closer to equal weight with the Satan and Ernie show.

But that show is glorious, and the imbalance isn't enough of a problem to stop me recommending that you pay The Boulevard a visit at your earliest opportunity. After all, unlike Hemingway and Van Gogh and Al Capone, you don't have to die to check it out. You just have to get your hands on a good book.

It's just a bit of a shame that it's not a truly great one.

*I know.

**My disappointment that none of RAH's other books were remotely like this still makes me sigh. 

Ursula Whitcher's NORTH CONTINENT RIBBON

Sometimes there's a better way to show me the society, the world an author is imagining than via a single piece of narrative fiction. If you've created a truly richly developed culture that really differs from ours, it can be more effective, by which I mean both more efficiently communicative and more interesting for me as a reader, to show me facets, via vignettes or mini-biographies or, most gracefully, short stories about different characters occupying different roles in that society. And the stories need not necessarily overlap or interact, nor do they have to depict earth-shattering crises or huge personality conflicts or major civilizational turning points, either. An older example of this is Lucius Sheperd's story cycle surrounding the vast corpse of The Dragon Griaule; but I've found an even better one here.

Ursula Whitcher's phenomenal story suite, North Continent Ribbon, where, as the cover explains to us, "every contract is a ribbon, and every ribbon is a secret," depicts one of those imagined worlds that would feel like a fantasy setting if the tales within were read out of order; several of them involve no science fictional wizardry or even much-beyond-medieval era technology. Were it not for its opening matter, which declares that it comes from a larger work named Cross-Planetary Investment: A Practical Vraselian's Galactic Opportunity Handbook and informs us that the planet on which most of these stories take place is an important source for "faster-than-light vehicular components sourced from a high-orbit E-type singularity," the society on the North Continent of Nakharat would be all but indistinguishable from one of the weaving planets in Andreas Eschbach's The Carpet Makers, for instance.

But amidst its tales of ribbon-crossed lovers and sundered families and somewhat shady business dealings, we get hints that there's a lot more going on than just trade and agriculture and the many different ways love can come and go in human lives. There's the question, for instance, of how those aforementioned vehicular components, once assembled into faster-than-light vehicles that navigate through what this culture refers to as the deep*, are sourced. And what they even are. Which, it might seem as one pages through this slim little volume, are questions that might not get answered? At least not explicitly?

At least, not if you're not well versed in the kinds of science fiction and fantasy that I love best, where what's going on between the characters is not the whole of what's going on in the book, might even be a distraction from that, actually. See also Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison and Frank Herbert and Alastair Reynolds.**

But even if you're not willing to plumb the weird and somewhat distressing secrets of this world, Whitcher still has plenty of rewards for your attention in store; these stories feature deftly drawn characters facing dilemmas that are delicately fantastic yet still mundane enough to be believable, from clandestine business machinations by rival corporations vying for profit, to local political scandals, to estrangement between children and parents, to inappropriate workplace love affairs, to secret labor union conspiracies, to the threat of imminent invasion by military forces that might just be coming to restore peace and safety, but might also come to impose new tyrannies over old -- all amidst some stunningly good line-for-line science fiction writing, like this in an earlier story, "The Fifteenth Saint":

The new text began with a litany: an electron's internal spin, the electron dancing around a nucleus, the shiver of atoms within a rock, all the way up to the slow rotation of the galaxy's arms and the slide of entire galaxies. Twisted behind and within and around all of these things was the deep, that other space where starships cut between stars. At every shift in scale, the book said, we experience a loss. But at every shift in scale there is the deep, thus at every shift in scale we find eternity; at every shift in scale there is the beloved, who has always been the beloved.

The text under discussion in the above, by the way, is a sort of samizdat that is buried in a book that has found its way into the hands of one of a district's hard-working political officials, who is starting to suspect that some of his co-equals in power and responsibility not only aren't holding up their ends -- he has just had to spend a whole day solving what should be a trivial problem for somebody else's constituent, only to be stymied repeatedly by layers of bureaucracy that he didn't even know had been imposed because things have been so compartmentalized -- but might actually be corrupt! But the culture of Nakharat is far too subtle for a samizdat to just come out and say things like that; far better to do so indirectly, poetically and above all memorably.

But also, and this is what makes Nakharat feel truly fantastic to a 21st century reader in most of the English-speaking world, the situation that official just had to deal with is really more of an exception than the rule, because Nakharat has a fundamentally different conception of how a civilized society runs. Among other things, the military forces on this world do not exist primarily to fight wars or extend or exercise the domination of a particular polity. No. As two characters in a later story, "Ten Percent for Luck," discuss as one explains to another why she's chosen the career path she has:

"But why the military?" Because it sounded like Inkar hadn't just taken a Contract with Otter Company. Her parents might have had actual shares. People with that sort of income didn't join up, not usually, not even with a paid commission.

"Because I wanted to build something."...

"Don't Companies build things?"

"For themselves. So they can take tolls. The army, we protect everyone. It doesn't matter who you are."

And I haven't even gotten into the lovely grace-notes present throughout these stories, like the whole ribbon thing. Almost everyone on the planet wears their hair in braids decorated with colorful ribbons that show their various personal and professional affiliations. Look at a person's hair and you can see where they went to school, to what professional societies they belong, if they are married and/or have children, if they're a high official in a Company or a public servant or a member of the military or a sex worker -- but only if you are on close enough terms with them to see them without their turban. Every contract is a ribbon, and every ribbon is a secret. And yes, there are some people who have no braids, no ribbons at all, and who flaunt this with loose, flowing hair not wrapped up in a turban. Those are very special people indeed, and yes, we meet one, kind of. But that person is maybe not as unencumbered as his hair suggests, hmm?

All in just 154 pages. My goodness!

Lots of people have had a good chuckle at the fact that North Continent Ribbon was short-listed for the 2025 Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction, and that the author is also named Ursula, as though the fix is in. But her own prose above and Your Humble Blogger are here to assure you that Whitcher deserved the honor, actually. And she's just revving up; this is her first book. And whether she chooses to continue writing, publishing and collecting Nakharat stories, or tries her hand at something else entirely, I'm here for it. Though I reckon I'll have to be patient, as she is a working mathematician, too.

I'm gonna choose to believe that she's taking her poet's ribbon at least as seriously as her math one, though. Because I definitely want to see more of her stuff. I'll put one in my hair, too, if need be. I've been growing it out again. And hey, it's grey now, so whatever color she chooses, it won't clash! Lemme know, Ms. Whitcher!

*Which I think is basically what most science fiction calls hyperspace or wormhole space or folded space. Use your favorite hand-waving term for how we cross the stupefying vastness of space without wasting human lifetimes in generation ships here. "The deep" seems just fine. I like, too, that it's treated as nothing special, so that it doesn't even get capitalized.

**What? You didn't know that the secret of the Revelation Space universe's Conjoiner Drives is explicitly revealed within that series? Tell me you haven't read Reynolds' short stories without telling me you haven't read his short stories. My goodness!

Ann LeBlanc's THE TRANSITIVE PROPERTIES OF CHEESE

Whomst among us hasn't been here: you're the very best cheesemaker (curd nerd in the parlance) outside of Earth's gravity well, famous for your unique, creamy and full-flavored products on every space station, asteroid and shuttle plying the solar system (and possibly beyond? You really don't pay much attention to matters of trade; you've built yourself a body perfect for stirring, curd cutting, measuring and tasting, and hacked your brain decades ago so you can tune out absolutely everything else in the universe and just concentrate on making that beautiful RedOrion), you've got an entire asteroid hollowed out, moved into a stable orbit, kept at the perfect temperature, humidity and gravity and inoculated long ago with the perfect population of beneficial microorganisms to assist in the fermentation and aging of your famous handiwork... and then suddenly one day you happen to hear a snippet on the news about how a big shot businessman has announced that an asteroid he owns and manages for his silent and reclusive genius of a business associate is going to be let go and allowed to crash into the Sun. It will burn up with all its contents in about two weeks. Wow, sucks to be that sucker. But hey wait, which asteroid was that again?

Such is the plight of Millions Wayland, cheesemaker of, in, among and to the stars, or at least the bodies orbiting this one, whose life's work is currently careening sunward on a collision course for financial reasons beyond her comprehension, in Ann LeBlanc's stunning little novella, The Transitive Properties of Cheese. And of course there's no time to handle this the way most artisans of her caliber would; she's going to have to cross a rather large volume of outer space to even begin to lodge a complaint, and meanwhile there's these batches of cheese she just got going here in her workshop (not in the hollow asteroid-cum-cheese cave, not aboard the space station where that irresponsible jerk of a managing partner is, either, but another third place where crewed spaceships don't even go, just automatic cargo shuttles that periodically bring in supplies and bring out fresh wheels of space cheese to transport them to be aged in the cheese cave with the suddenly curtailed life span).

So, Wayland does what any of us would do: she makes a perfect cognitive duplicate of herself, memories, personality, connectome and all, and shoots it in a tight-beam to the space station in near-Earth orbit where the restaurateur, who didn't even bother to warn her about her cheese cave's imminent demise before she heard it on the news, lives and works and maintains contact with the financial, military, civic and religious authorities of Earth. She -- or rather, this newborn version of herself -- is going to give that chucklehead a piece of her/their mind, even if she has to confront, head-on, the scene of the greatest trauma of her past, and of his -- and of all the other versions of themselves that are out here in space.

Versions? 

Yep. This is a trans-human soap opera, kids, and all of the characters except a few heavily armed thugs recently come up from Earth are cyberpunk interations of one of the first people ever to decide to upload himself to the Net and start making custom bodies for himself -- work bodies with extra arms, business bodies that look good in suits and are focused on the bottom line, party bodies for various recreational pursuits (mostly food and sex) and oh, by the way, before most of the copies of this character came into being, the original made a male-to-female transition, which is why I've mostly used female pronouns in this post but switched to male ones for this paragraph. There is trans-humanism and then there is trans-humanism. Which I should maybe call trans-trans-humanism? Except that would be silly? I mean, some of the bodies containing versions of the Millions character are more like giant robot millipedes than anything else, and are capable of directly metabolizing starlight and thrive in conditions of hard vacuum, because at some point in Millions' life they decided the best way to explore beyond the solar system would be just to become the spaceship!

Which is to say that, title aside, this book is only superficially about cheese, though in addressing the question of whether or not future batches that Wayland Millions may make in the future, without her cheese cave, could be regarded in any way as the same cheeses she was making with it, The Transitive Properties of Cheese takes on lots of bigger questions about how far the society in which she lives -- and the one she left behind when she left Earth -- are going to be willing to stretch the idea of "humanity," and how much that is even going to matter.

All in just over 100 pages. Because LeBlanc is a goddamn storyteller, who makes every sentence count for "world building," character development, plot advancement and the conveyance of exquisite sensory detail. In an age of 800-page doorstops, half of which seem to be devoted to that first (and least interesting) element of a piece of fiction, LeBlanc's talent for the tight and pithy novella is cause for considerable celebration. And The Transitive Properties of Cheese deserves to sell many, many, many more copies than any of those doorstops. What are you even doing? Go! And while you're at it, have a look around the publisher's site. They have a lot of good stuff there.

Helen Oyeyemi's GINGERBREAD (Narr by the author)

Once I thought I had a hard and fast rule that no novel narrated for its audio edition by its author could be as good as one narrated by a professional narrator.* But that was before I heard the soft, sweet, not quite-childlike but nearly child-pitched tones of Afro-Surrealist (and possibly Post-Exotic) queen Helen Oyeyemi. I've immensely enjoyed settling down each night to let her tell me the weird and wonderful bedtime story** that is Gingerbread.

Caveat auditor/caveat lector, though: you're likely to wake up the next morning with a fierce craving for the titular treat. Myself, I prefer sliced from nice loaf, with a good glop or two of lemon curd, over the biscuit/cookie variey, but you do you. 

Anyway, this magical, disturbing and bizarre little novel, what?

We first encounter our triple protagonists***, Margot Lee, her daughter Harriet and her granddaughter Perdita, in plain old 21st century Yorkshire. The younger two share a flat on the top floor of a seven-storey house far too old and ill-regarded to have an elevator. Margot lives elsewhere; we don't find out for a while where,  but it's just as banal a setting as the flat. So far, so dull. 

How we meet them, though, is through Harriet's famous-or-infamous gingerbread, her primary means of communication with her fellow humans. If she is courting you,  or worried that you're angry with her, or suspects you and she are in any way at odds, she will present you with a tin of what a "gingerbread addict" once described to her as tasting like Revenge:

It’s noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they’d get away with it,’ the gingerbread addict said. ‘That heart, ground to ash and shot through with dars of heat, salt, spice, and sulfurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze, and trickled through the dough along with the liquefied spoon.

"You are phenomenal. You have ruined my life forever, " the addict had continued."Thank you."

Now, I make a pretty great loaf of gingerbread (and am pretty good at fruit curds, too) but nobody has compared it to a feeling that satisfying. So, first of all, goals. And second of all...

It's this really just a book about baked goods? And if so, wouldn't that be a bit, I dunno, cozy for a book covered here at Kate of Mind?

Oh, ye of little faith!

For the Lee family, at least two generations of them as we know to start, are not native to Yorkshire. Or to England. They might be said to be natives to Europe, but only if your idea of Europe can stretch to accommodate possibly imaginary, or at least notional countries that at one point were officially recognized by just four other nations in the world, but now maintain any kind of relations at all only with the Czech Republic. Such is Druhástrana, a land where one may be sentenced to public execution for unspecified crimes but where few actually die this way, because a stay is granted if one of the spectators at the event of imminent death agrees to take full legal and moral responsibility for the criminal in future by marrying them. For instance. 

This is how the Lee family got its start, when Margot impulsively volunteered to wed a very handsome crook -- despite the fact that she had observed him to be weirdly in cahoots with another female spectator. Before we know it, the not very happy pair, Margot, the daughter of a fabulously rich family of dubious scruples, and her formerly condemned bridegroom, are reduced to eking out a living on some rather poor farmland and living in a rather poor house, but welcoming a beautiful daughter, Harriet. And then, before we know it -- but that would be telling. You see, there are many mysteries behind Harriet's talent for gingerbread and her recipe, and of how Perdita came to exist at all. And these are the mysteries we are here to explore alongside Perdita as she embarks on a mission of discovery via... baking up a batch of her mother's famous gingerbread with an extra, unknown but possibly psychoactive ingredient, eating it all up and... slipping into a coma? Surrounded by the apparently sentient but laconic combinations of dolls and houseplants that have grown up alongside her while guarding the corners of her four-poster bed?

Well, yes. What part of "Afro-surrealist" would possibly lead you to expect a standard and cozy book about baking? That would be boring. And Oyeyemi, while she sounds gentle and soothing and only slightly amused as she narrates her tale, is not here to bore anybody, least of all herself.

Also, that whiff of fairy tales that a title like Gingerbread gives off for most of us? That's no accident, and one in particular is evoked by the name of Harriet's sly and not entirely well- meaning best friend, whose faintly flour-dusted fingerprints turn out to be all over the middle Lee generation's life, and thus those of her mother and daughter as well. 

Along the way through this story of mother's and daughters and gingerbread, Oyeyemi has left odd little ambushes of insight that wait to attack us like packs of wolves, or wolf pups at least. An "authenticity theme park" full of ersatz gingerbread girls here, a professor with wise bons mot about the writing of Emile Zola there, a lesson or two about what we will and will not accept in exchange for doing what we do better than anyone else around another corner... and, strangest and most confrontational of all, the idea of a near-utopia in which every kind of equality between people prevails except for economic equality. People may get bored with lives in which sexes, races, religions, sexualities, degrees or attractiveness or physical ability or intelligence are all on a level playing field, the land of Druhástrana seems to have concluded, as long as the chance of "unexpected abundance" (often in the form of some kind of lottery winnings) is present. Would that be so? Oyeyemi doesn't give us the answer to that; we must decide for ourselves. 

All this and at least one seriously adorably funny sex scene!

I have but one complaint about Gingerbread, and that's about the ending, which throws in several intriguing but unexplored new plot elements and characters at us by way of teasing a still-to-come reunion between Harriet and her old Druhástranian friend and on the whole feel like they've come from some other book entirely. It's a book I'd very much like to read someday, but I don't feel like it was a great way to end this one. 

Nonetheless, I've added the rest of Oyeyemi's output to date to my endless TBR, and will look forward to new work from her with anticipation and pleasure, like a freshly baked loaf of something dark and complex and delicious straight out of the oven. 

*Though one must always make allowances for the likes of Podiobooks and any similar efforts by aspiring authors who are trying everything they can to get attention for their beloved book babies, especially nowadays. Too many authors who have truly enriched my life got their starts that way, and some, like Scott Sigler, have never abandoned this practice. 

**If you're OK with tripping balls in your dreams that night. 

***Played in my imagination by 1980s-era Joan Plowright as Margot Lee, Juliette Stephenson as Harriet Lee, and Joely Richardson as Perdita Lee, because I spent many years with only a handful of movies on VHS to my name and my very favorite, watched until it wore out, was Peter Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers, a film I still haven't tired of, by the way! And yes, the text makes clear early on that the Lee women have "pearl gray hair and bark-brown skin" but I couldn't help it. Once the idea leaked into my head, it couldn't be budged.

Ernest Hogan's CORTEZ ON JUPITER

I don't know about you guys, but if we have to have a Palmer Eldritch figure in our damnable future, I would much rather it be a Latinx visual artist than Elon Musk. Can we live in Ernest Hogan's World instead of Philip K. Dick's? Just as a treat?

Think before you answer. 

Allow me to elaborate. 

It's going to be very hard not to drift into the incredible bilingual slangy brilliance that is every word out of the mouth, pen or spray can of Pablo Cortez, the hero of Ernest Hogan's early cyberpunk should-be classic, Cortez on Jupiter, because I've been trying to improve my Spanish lately by reading the Oz books translated into that language, and the weirdness of that experience easily bleeds over into the demented delight of this tale of a graffiti artist in space!

Pablo is more than "just" a graffiti artist though; once he gets into space by a circuitous route involving the overworked criminal justice system and the jaded art world of a near-future greater Los Angeles, our man only goes and invents an entirely new art form! One that takes his already highly developed color sense and love of movement for its own sake and adds the novelty of zero gravity to what he does and to what the paint does -- and how it makes his "canvas" a truly three-dimensional sphere of influence, as it were, muchachitos.

"Working in freefall," he tells a news camera invading his studio at the center of a space station, "Has added a new dimension to my work."

If you can't tell, I kind of like this book. 

 

I had to feel -- and create -- ways of flinging paint and moving in freefall. It was like magic, flying and dancing with colorful matching creatures: the protomorphic beastery of a new mythology. This was a second ritual for outer space. I was a shaman for the new frontier. (Italics mine)

While Pablo makes his zero-gravity splatter paintings* in defiance of the arts foundation board who paid his way up the gravity well (they liked his sketched ideas for what amounted to ascemic writing, the beginnings of an imaginary alien alphabet that i can't help but imagining the Beltalowdas of the Expanse series using for secret communications sprayed in plain sight someday -- but aren't too keen on what he's chosen to do instead), another artist works on a "viral graffiti robot bomb" and other less probable contraptions, the kind of work that might someday inspire a new generation of industrial designers working on machines our species hasn't imagined a need for yet; another of the artists is a floating bombshell of a woman who occasionally remembers to sculpt something between press interviews and photo shoots and three-day drug binges because artists gotta artist.

The sculptor tries having a fling with Pablo to keep the paparazzi excited -- if they get bored, her career could sink her back down to the Mudball after all -- but Pablo is in the Zone, work-wise and anyway, doesn't do drugs. When he was a little boy in East L.A., his parents got a little too deeply absorbed in a neo-Aztec subculture** and got addicted to a new-old drug called ATL and overdosed, leaving little Pablito to discover their bodies. All part of the legend, but he stays true to it and doesn't even really drink alcohol. 

All of this by itself would make for a unique and intriguing novel (as far as my reading has gone, we won't really see much attention paid to the idea of art in zero-gravity until the very early 21st century, when Alastair Reynolds will consider the possibilities of vast and intricate glassblown confections that would only be possible in space stations), and there's more than enough character drama with these artists and patrons to have kept me happy,  but Hogan had more on his mind.  This isn't "just" about what if we sent a graffiti artist into low earth orbit to make art on a space station. For one thing, this is a future in which humanity has started spreading through the solar system -- and encountered another life form right in our backyard. The planet Jupiter, a vast gas giant that could contain 1300 Earths in its volume, and that doesn't have what we could regard as a solid surface except deep in its core where it's subjected to pressures that make the floors of Earth's oceans feel both easy and peasy, has something weird living in its famous Great Red Spot! But so far, we have utterly failed to make contact with it. Or have we.

Before you can say "volatile and mercurial artist beefs with his patrons," Pablo has manipulated (or been manipulated into; opinions differ, and this story is told from many divergent points of view) his way onto the weird team of volunteers who have agreed to be lowered via special modules into that giant atmospheric storm to try to talk to the beings known to us as the Sirens. Pablo won't be the first; several others have failed and come back as mind-wiped vegetables. He isn't the most qualified; the OG "Sirenaut" was a seasoned spacer with a system-wide reputation, after all. Until he came back with zero control over his bodily functions and whatnot...

No, what Pablo is, is the strangest, the most stubborn and the most egotistical of the candidates. So when he shows up in Jupiter's orbit, the scientific reasearch/entertainment conglomerate*** in charge is ready to launch him on the mission immediately! But first he has to meet the love of his life, telepath and fellow Sirenaut Willa Aboid, whose fate is weirdly bound up with his even though they're not very successful as a typical couple and their romance does not satisfy the audience back home. Once again, Hogan has much more interesting things in mind for this pairing, things that are impossible to discuss without spoiling the fun of discovering what all the weird little hints and foreshadowings sprinkled through the novel actually mean. And while Cortez on Jupiter largely does exist as a self-spoiling text, there's no point in robbing you of the fun of what discovery there still is. Though if I haven't convinced you to check this one out as yet, maybe you deserve it.

Hmm.

Anyway, I'm delighted to see that Hogan, who is a practicing visual artist as well as a Gonzo science fiction writer, is still at it after all of these years, even to having just recently published a short story collection that I'm going to rush to get just as soon as my current embargo (I'm trying to read down a huge accumulation of the evidence that when it comes to buying new books, I have no self-control at all, even if I'm down to my last head of lettuce in the fridge. You may not see my tsundoku room. The fact that I have a tsundoku room is bad enough) conditions are met, aka I have read at least 100 of the print, ebook and audio books that I already own. But then, yeah, Guerilla Mural of a Siren's Song will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine.

*And yes, of course I'm thinking of that OK Go video. 

**Anticipating Hogan's next novel, the psychedelic cyberpunk splendor that is High Aztech.

***Why yes, Ernest Hogan anticipated reality TV just like D.G. Compton did. 

Michael Weingrad's EUGENE NADELMAN: A TALE OF THE 1980s IN VERSE

There ought to be so many books like this, 

As writ in verse, in meter and in rhyme, 

Yet telling modern tales, or modern-ish --

This one's nostalgic for a place and time, 

For Philly in the early Reagan years. 

Which years are now as far behind us as

Was World War II and all its hopes and fears

From its young hero's life and times. Such has

Been 'mongst my thoughts while reading this, a tale

Of 1981 and thereabouts.

Our Wonder Years are come at last. Avail

Yourself of Eugene Nadelman -- no doubts! --

As soon as e'er you can, for to enjoy

This charming story of this charming boy.

To Pushkin and to Petrarch Weingrad pays

His tribute here, while I obey the form

Of Shakespeare. I am well set in my ways

As readers of this blog well know -- with warm

Regard do I invite you, please to click

The link that's to the right, if you have yet

To buy my own experiment in slick

And sonnetized narrations. He has set

The tale of Onegin in junior high,

At summer camp, bars mitzvah, and, the most

Important, in a basement dungeon I

Could only envy, where, with his host

Eugene fights monsters, swings his weapon and

Loots wizards' towers scattered through the land. 

For yes, some action only here unfolds

Before the teenaged eyes of teenaged minds

In D&D! But lo!  This here game holds

Unguessed-at dangers, as our hero finds

When Abigail, his lady-love, comes down

To watch a bit, and has a girl's effect

On boyish hearts, which ever seek renown

Before a girl's attention. What will wreck?

A budding love affair? A friendly game?

Companionship from childhood? You must read

The book to learn the nature of the shame

And of the glories waiting for Eugene

In this short work. The little time you'll spend

In doing so rewards well in the end. 

Kylie Lee Baker's BAT EATER AND OTHER NAMES FOR CORA ZENG (Narr by Natalie Naudus)

There's something peaceful about your worst fear coming true.

Kylie Lee Baker would have been fun to have as a lab partner in high school biology, I decided about halfway through her creepy horror/crime hybrid Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng. She relishes the particular and intimate, yes, the gory, details of the insides of organisms, revels in the sensory details of textures felt and observed, how smells penetrate not only the nostrils and sinuses but also the back of the throat, if the substance giving them off is thick enough; the contrast of vividly colored internal organs and tissues to dulled and more uniform integuments and surroundings. 

So of course her heroine here is a specialty cleaner -- of murder crime scenes. And as we already know from comics and TV, that makes for an interesting enough character and milieu right there, but Baker has bigger and better ideas than the low hanging ones. 

Because, for starters, Bat Eater takes place in Manhattan at the height of the very first wave of COVID-19, when everybody who had the luxury was sheltering in place and hoarding toilet paper and being, perhaps selfishly?, grateful not to be among the corpses stacking up in hospital morgues, then meat lockers, then refrigerated trucks parked wherever they'd fit on the island -- and our heroine, Cora Zeng, is Asian. Specifically American-Born Chinese.

Oh, and just for extra fun, all of this kicks off just in time for the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, when the gates of hell open up and let the spirits of the dead roam the earth again, demanding attention and sustenance from their loved ones. Ignore them at your peril; they might take a bite out of your coffee table. Or out of you. Best to give them what they actually want, maybe?

I mean, if you believe that stuff.

And if you accept your Chinese aunt's insistence that you acquire symbolic objects made of joss paper and burn them as appeasement offerings to your dead, rather than your white and Catholic aunt's snobbish attitude that Hungry Ghosts and joss papers are just icky Asian superstitions and you should really just pray and confess and enact ritual cannibalism instead. 

Cora, you see, is half-white. But her older sister, Delilah, is fully Chinese. And, as Delilah observes of their situation in a poignant flashback to when they suddenly came into each other's lives after some familial drama finally brought them together, how they might feel about it won't charge the fact that they're family. So they might as well be more grown-up about it than their parents seem to have been, and stick together. 

Until suddenly, Delilah announces right before shocking tragedy strikes, that this whole pandemic thing has Delilah thinking about breaking up the team and heading back to China without her mei-mei, who isn't fluent in Mandarin or the local dialect their father's family speaks, and anyway Cora has nice white relatives she can maybe rely on like she does their father to send her a check from China each month to help cover NYC living expenses that are beyond his girls and their useless liberal arts degrees...

I still have a mostly negative attitude about Pandemic Literature. Too many people, I knew at the time and still maintain, decided that lockdown was the perfect time for them to finally sit down and write that novel they always knew they had in them, which, that's fine; we've been dealing with tidal waves of NaNoWriMo projects for years now and some of them have even been good, so this alone is no reason to dismiss a book, but too many of them have been about COVID-19 and the writer's personal experience of lockdown and toilet paper shortages and fear and germiphobia and putting their groceries under a UV light before putting them away (if privileged enough to have the money to spend on such a gadget) and all the rest of the, yes, mostly pretty common experience that most of the planet seems to have shared unless they were deemed Essential Workers and had to keep going to work at risk of their lives either as healthcare or grocery stockers or ambulance drivers... and didn't get to stay home and write that novel they've always known they had in them. I mean, there's only so many of those stories that I, personally, have patience for, and that number is pretty close to zero. Unless...

Unless someone has a different experience of this to share with me. Which the protagonist/narrator of Bat Eater most certainly does, for not only is she facing a new excuse for racism evoked by the title; as the Leader of the Free World and all of his minions declared while pushing the infamous "lab leak" hypothesis even as they also blamed it all on a wet market in Wuhan, China, lots of people at least claimed to believe that COVID-19 was all China's fault, and by extension the fault of every person they might encounter who even looks vaguely Chinese, even if they're third or fourth generation Americans with dim origins in completely different Asian countries than the one where Wuhan is, even if they don't speak any language but English, even if they're actually Native American but just kind of vaguely look Asian. Against whom it is now perfectly okay to discriminate and even enact hate crimes to punish the "bat eaters" for the disease and its impact on everybody's sudden inability to get a haircut.

I mean sure, racism is racism, but it has to have been extra bizarre and extra scary to suddenly get called "Bat Eater" before being spit on (which, get ready for all the bodily fluids in this story; it's not confined to the blood that Cora and her colleagues have to clean up in the crime scene du jour) or shoved or assaulted or -- here we go! -- murdered.

...maybe she wants this monster to have teeth, wants it to be some intangible, hungry darkness that can swallow all her rage like a black hole. She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish. The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness. Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not. And she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora.

It would seem that there's a serial killer at work in Chinatown, targeting young, single Asian women who live alone. The killer bursts into their homes at night, brutally and spectacularly murders them in a variety of different ways, and then shoves a bat down their throats or otherwise inside their bodies, to make sure everybody Gets the Message. But so far, only Cora and her two colleagues, happy go lucky and kind of doofy Harvey (nephew of the Chinatown dry cleaning mogul who pivoted his business to crime scene clean-up when the pandemic meant nobody needed their work clothes professionally cleaned anymore) and sharply observant, intelligent and no nonsense Yi-Fei* (who is every bit as at-risk as Cora herself, being an actual immigrant from China who still has a bit of an accent), the found family Cora comes to rely on when her actual family seems to have let her down, seem to understand what's really going on. At least until they get the call to come clean the crime scene where a Chinese-American member of New York's finest has gotten the bat treatment. He would seem to have noticed as well. And to have paid dearly for noticing.

Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it is a pool of anguish under her feet. There is not enough oxygen inside Cora to keep anger burning. No matter how hard she tries, she can only wield her sharpest thoughts against her own flesh. She knows, on some level, that most of the problems in her life are her own fault in one way or another. Anger is just one of those thoughts that can never quite sink its teeth into her—she is not solid enough, and its jaws close around nothing at all.

Anyway, the relationship that develops between Cora and her co-workers -- a relationship she is in sore need of, as the above suggests -- is the best part of the story, for me. Both Harvey and Yi-Fei get to be fully developed characters who have important things to contribute to Cora's efforts to get anyone in authority to give a damn that young Asian women are being, not just verbally or physically attacked but murdered, to maybe track down the bad guy who ruined Cora's own personal life, and to deal with the Hungry Ghost that seems to be stalking her, and not just out of hunger. Because yes, the ghost stuff is far from incidental to the setting of this story. We get lots and lots of ghost action, some of it hilariously gory, some of it genuinely creepy, much of it heartbreaking. Good thing Cora has friends.

One thing I really like about horror novels like Bat Eater is how well they maintain a sense of ambiguity for as long as possible. Is this a fully supernatural tale, in which all of the adversaries, even the disease, are eldritch horrors from beyond the veil? Is the disease "natural" but the serial killer and the ghosts supernatural? Is the disease real and the serial killer just some asshole, but the ghosts are real? Or is all of this going to turn out to be aspects of Cora's psychological trauma? Baker kept me wondering and speculating about this until almost the last hour.

And all of this, to further muddy the issues, is delivered to us with a purring, cooing tenderness by narrator Natalie Naudus, who sounds like a mother telling us a weirdly contemporary bedtime story and doesn't want us to get too scared, but still relishes the disgusting details, described with immaculate syllabic precision so we can't elide or ignore them. I smelled, heard, and felt every drop of various fluids, every garbage pile, every whiff of bad breath. I'm pretty sure I showered a few more times than I needed to. I defy you not to.

Don't snooze on this one if you're in the mood for a good scare.

*I might have misspelled her name because audio book.

Amanda Michalopoulou's WHY I KILLED MY BEST FRIEND (Tr Karen Emmerich)

We all have to show courage and faith in our ideals. We have to literally embody our emotions if we're going to act politically. New technologies have marginalized the body. There's nothing more dangerous than that. We here are going to fight with our bodies, because it's the only thing we have left.

No, that's not a quote from Renee Good, dead only a week as I type this, but it sure could be, couldn't it? It's from a Greek novel, originally written in 2003, translated and published in English (by good old Open Letter) in 2014. History doesn't only rhyme with itself. Sometimes it rhymes with literature, too.

As the title of Amanda Michalopoulou's tense and affecting novel of odiasamato (we'll get to that), Why I Killed My Best Friend, the course of true love, or at least friendship, never did run very smooth, and while this story concerns two very cosmopolitan Greek women who effortlessly shuttle from Nigeria to Greece to France and around again, it's a book that I, a shut-in living in the landlocked and isolated heart of North America, found a lot within that spoke to me, and not just because I'm basically the same age as protagonist Maria and her titular bestie, Anna.

I, too, grew up with a best friend (though I called another that at the time) for whom I had feelings as strongly hostile as admiring. More than one, actually; my original frienemy, whose mother looked after both my sister and I after school during our elementary years ,moved away just before middle school, leaving me to drift into an almost identically toxic relationship before sixth grade was even halfway over. There's a reason I gnash my teeth at Margaret Atwood's doormat protagonists, who never quite manage to rebel against their more charismatic and domineering friends, only escaping at best, usually only to be re-ensnared later in life when the toxicity has only increased. I'm in this image and I don't like it. 

Such a fate looms ever larger for Maria, whose entanglement with the exquisite Anna begins soon after she is taken away from her childhood home in Nigeria (where her exiled Greek expat parents lived comfortably expat lives doing something bourgeois for a living) back to her family's native Athens. At first Maria feels unwelcome and singled out for misery: her classmates hate her. But then a newer new girl joins the class, also the child of returned exiles, but their return is from glamorous, sophisticated Paris, rather than primitive and mysterious Africa. Still, the girls' shared status as outcasts gives them a reason to bond, at least after they clear up a slight misunderstanding about whether or not Maria's parents were nasty, racist,  colonial oppressors. They weren't (or, at least, not exactly); friendship saved. 

Though this is far from the only misunderstanding that will threaten this pairing over the decades. 

For these two girls' families were not expats on a whim, like their American counterparts would be; their parents are leftists who fled into exile in the 70s rather than suffer, or even be killed, under the rule of the Greek Junta aka the Regime of the Colonels.* Anna's father is a famous philosopher, and her mother a ballet dancer, for instance. Maria's parents' leftist bona fides are a little less apparent -- her dad works for an oil company and her mom is kind of a socialite -- but at least they were very kind to their black live-in help, especially Maria's nanny, Gwendolyn, whom in true colonial fashion Maria thought was her actual mother for a while there.

I bring up all this political background because it's actually to the fore in this novel; indeed, it could be debated whether WIKMBF is a coming-of-age story with political characteristics, or a political story with coming-of-age characteristics. Anna has absolutely been raised on leftist politics and doesn't know how not to bring them up in every conversation, even as an angelic looking little nine-year-old new girl who is absolutely ready to judge her desk-mate as just another superficial right wing pigeon from outer space (IYKYK), while Maria is decidedly less so but willing to be influenced, falling under the spell of glamorous Antigone, Anna's mother, and very disappointed when her own mother won't join the consciousness-raising group Antigone is trying to put together before she and her daughter have even finished moving into their pretty house.

So of course the girls are soon competing with each other over who's the most doctrinaire leftist, who has the best ideas for incorporating good politics into their childish art projects at school, who's going to do greater and more important things when they grow up, and whose mother loves whom more. And yes, eventually the girls' fathers become part of the story, but never a very big part; just enough for us to see that Anna's future husband will be a carbon copy of dear old dad, and for us to see just how much Maria's mother has diminished herself to keep Maria's father happy, giving Maria a negative model of femininity to measure herself against as she goes on to live the life of a bohemian art student and political activist, i.e. neither a wife nor a mother.

And of course they spend some time in young adulthood accusing each other of insincerity, of doubting each other's commitment and effectiveness, while still joyfully reuniting and professing eternal love and best friendship... and Maria watching the prettier and more confident Anna steal pretty much every man Maria has ever had a crush on (and one or two of the women). Friendships as close as this only lack these aspects when there is neither a political nor sexual dimension to the friends' lives, like pretty much no friendship ever.

Someday, if I manage to figure out the why and the how, I'll write a novel. I'll tell the whole story, all that we lived through, from my point of view. I'll let Anna have the title, though: Why I Killed My Best Friend.  If you don't feel like reading it, the cover will be enough, you can skip the story: one friend kills another, big deal, human beings are killing one another every day all over the world. Sometimes, to give a logical structure to these conflicts, they fight body to body, hand to hand with the police. Or they fall down the stairs in a metro station without ever having been pushed. They'll even fight themselves, if there's no other worthy opponent around.

"Odiosamato" is the word Maria uses to name her relationship with Anna. I'm no scholar of Greek, ancient or modern, but I think our modern English slang "frienemy" works well enough for it, though I'm pretty sure the Greek, combining "love" and "hate" rather than the somewhat more tepid "friend" and "enemy",  deserves to remain in the translated text as it does. As we learn in a translator's note at the end, Karen Emmerich was able to work fairly closely with Michalopoulou on the translation, and Michalopoulou took this opportunity to revise the original a bit. As Emmerich observes, "Careful readers familiar with the Greek may notice some larger-scale changes than translator's usually allow themselves; these were all made with Amanda's consent and involvement." I'm not one of those readers familiar with the Greek, but their keeping of "odiosamato" signals very strongly to me how carefully this work was prepared. As a certain gigantic publisher odiously prepares to end its relationship with translators in favor of letting large language models do it instead, I want here to take a stand against it and in gratitude to the work that only human beings can do with the care and skill and sensitivity required. 

But so, the question you're probably asking in your head as I blather about this book is, does Maria actually kill her best friend? But you know me by now; I'm going to tell you to read the damned book. It's an international hit for a reason (and not just for its hints of good praxis, my favorite of which is bringing rainsticks to protests, "which in a pinch can serve as batons to fight the police"), and it's not just for the unflinching honesty with which it portrays female friendship at its most troublesome. 

I'm pinching myself for letting this book languish in my ebook library for as long as it did; had I gotten it in a physical edition its various lurid and eye-catching covers would have made it stand out on my shelf, I think. But better late than never, and sometimes, best of all is right now.

*A situation I only just learned of through reading this book. I swear I didn't choose to read this in January 2026 because its background dictatorship reminds me of anything chilly going on right now. Regardless of what the conspirituality types keep insisting, there is such a thing as coincidence. I just wanted to read more contemporary Greek literature, and did my usual trick of going bananas when Open Letter had one of its sales. Which, if you're reading this right when I've posted it, they've got one going on right now. Go bananas! Or baklavas, if you prefer. 

Karen Tidbeck's AMATKA (Tr Karen Tidbeck)

Do you like the art style known as Socialist Realism, but wish that maybe it was a little less realistic? Alternatively, do you like fantasy, but wish it could sometimes be a little more socialist?

Do you believe in the magic of language?

Boy have I got a book for you!

Karen Tidbeck's Amatka might be a portal fantasy of sorts, but it's hard to say, just as it's hard to say a lot of things about the world in which the title town sits, to which its inhabitants came generations ago as colonists of a sort, from what sounds like it might have been our ordinary everyday world, but could also have been the dystopian hellscape our best writers still feel coming despite how smugly we once regarded books like The Sheep Look Up as "self-denying prophecies.*" But I don't think they came in a spaceship, or in any kind of craft at all. 

I ginned up as many theories about what was really going on in Tidbeck's strange world as there are pages in this short novel, and I trashed nearly all of them, resurrected some of them, trashed them again, chanted nonsense words over them to see what they would do (but only if no one was about to hear me blaspheming/threatening the very stability of reality by so speaking), babbled to my book bestie (the mad book snob formerly but sometimes still known as Popqueenie), who originally turned me on to this book, that I had suspicions that there was some weird kind of "slavery with extra steps" kind of nightmare scenario at work here... cheered that the rather hapless heroine was finally taking on some agency and acting on her suspicions, only to grind my teeth to see her chicken out or dampen it down for the sake of her budding relationship with her love interest... you know. All the things great fiction makes us do in our heads while in reality we're sitting in a comfy chair with a cup of tea and one or more mammals using us as furniture and a book or some other kind of reading device spread open before us...

Anyway, let's talk about that heroine, whose name is Vanja and who isn't super thrilled with her job, but it could be worse -- and suddenly it's giving her the opportunity to travel and see more of her strange world. We meet her busily reminding all of her possessions of what they are by softly naming them off, one by one, working overtime to make sure that none of her words become rote; she learned long ago when assigned to do this with her childhood classroom's supply of pencils that saying "pencil" over and over again gets, first really dull, then kind of meditative, and then maybe nonsensical until you might as well, instead of saying "pencil pencil pencil" start saying "pencilpencilpencil" until you're kind of half-consciously saying "cilpen cilpen cil--" and oops, suddenly all of those pencils start losing their form and essential nature and then collapse into... something else... and everybody around you starts losing their minds with worry and panic and yelling at you for your carelessness and calling in the Cleaners to stop a chain reaction of form-losing from happening and taking everything in the colony, or at least in the classroom, with it.

You know. How everybody rides a slow, somewhat ill-maintained train from one town to another on an ordinary day.

Some reviewers of this book have complained quite a lot about Vanja, whose advent on the cold, chilly and mysteriously depopulated Amatka settlement touches off a whole series of calamities, being a badly written or unbelievable character. It would not surprise me at all that none of those reviewers have grown up in a truly small town, a really rural and underpopulated one by most of the 21st century's standards, and don't know just how different life is in such places from even the cities most consider to be small towns in this day and age. In a truly small town (as long-time readers of this blog know, I grew up in southern Wyoming, in a town with fewer than 1600 people, over 20 empty miles (as in no rest stops, no convenience stores, no gas stations, just big sprawling cattle ranches populated by cattle and haystacks and maybe one guy on a 4-wheeler or, yes, horse) from the nearest town, which boasted a population of maybe 300. We didn't have professional firefighters; we had volunteers, people from the community who had other full-time jobs and families and responsibilities who nonetheless also took on the role of responding to structure fires, wild land fires and many other dangerous accidents that professional firefighters in larger cities probably would never dream of being expected to deal with (a large proportion of these volunteers were also our emergency medical responders, paid a token amount and subject to brutal on-call schedules 24/7/365). Newcomers to our area were always kind of shocked and disbelieving about this at first, charmed by it for a while, and then sooner or later often pretty resentful when they realized that there weren't a lot of resources to go around and it's really better for everybody if they learn to manage some small issues themselves and take prevention very, very seriously.

And some of them never get it. Sigh.

Anyway, I bring this up because, for whatever mysterious reason that it's great fun to theorize about (myself I came up with a truly horrifying interpretation that still haunts me as a possible - Tidbeck has given us a truly awesome -- in the old-fashioned sense of that word -- thought experiment of an allegory of a horror scenario in the pages of this novel) because in Amatka and the larger world in which it's situated, reality itself is what everybody is responsible for maintaining, very deliberately, very consciously, every day. Because with the exception of the original stuffs -- paper, fabric, metal, wood, food organisms (I think?) -- that the original settlers brought with them to this weird and alien world, all matter is profoundly protean and malleable and uniquely responsive to human language to a rather shocking degree. Imagine if you'd forgotten to remind your clothing that it is clothing for a few days and it suddenly just dissolved into weird and possibly hazardous goo while you were wearing it at work! What if you hadn't declared that your bed was a bed for a few days, clearly and distinctly and unambiguously (and, importantly, without using metaphors -- no calling it "my sleepy sack" or "slumberland'; you have to address it, as it were, in the second person, and call it a bed), and forgetfully went to sleep in it one night, only to have it turn to slop in the night?

So, okay, life is hard, and a lot of your conscious thought (which is not an inexhaustible supply; ask any chronically ill person you know about what happens when they've spent too much of their energy in a day "playing through the pain" and then suddenly have to do some real cognitive labor like reading a page in a foreign language or updating a home budget spreadsheet or remembering to call the appliance repairman because the stove is more broken than you and YouTube can figure out how to fix which is maybe how you spent too much of that energy in the first place. You get me?) has to go into just maintaining the physical integrity of your clothes and tools and furniture and transportation and even, say, the documents that your company-or-co-operative keeps its records on. But that's true everywhere in this world, right?

Ah, but the more people there are on the ground to maintain stuff, the easier the work of maintenance is, right? For this reason, for example, nobody in Amatka lives alone. One tired person could never maintain the furniture, the kitchen equipment, the household chattels like curtains and blankets and bath towels and the walls and floor and ceiling and plumbing and heating ducts. By the time you'd got all that done you'd be overdue to start all over again.

And there's a whole town to maintain here. With factories and offices and city administration and water and sewer plants and greenhouses to grow the food in and... get me?

But so, Vanja is from a much bigger settlement, where there are lots more people to pay attention and name things and keep everything going at the basic level, and thus there can also be people who specialize in weird and kind of pointless Golgafrincham B Ark things like marketing, which is what Vanja does for a company who is maybe going to expand its service area if she can find a way to persuade residents of other settlements, such as Amatka, to buy their products instead of relying on their own homegrown soap and detergent and medicines and band-aids. She's grown up with only a little bit being asked of her by her community, and now she's come to an area that is unaccustomed to visitors overall but still expects them to do their part while they're there and...

And, oh, by the way; the ruling powers of this society have deemed it not that important to educate much of the populace about the actual nature of reality. So lots of people like Vanja have grown up with the habit of naming things -- it's drilled into them from earliest days and everybody probably has an incident like hers with the schoolroom pencils haunting their memories -- but seem to think it's a weird cultural thing and maybe out of date and really kind of fascist if you think about it because there's so much control over your behavior and how you use language and what about things like poetry, man?

So no, Vanja is not a poorly written or unbelievable character. She is a totally convincing and terrifyingly plausible product of her admittedly weird and kind of allegorical but compelling and mysterious environment. I know I've gone off about this at tedious length, but it's really important that you understand this going into the book because -- look, I wouldn't go to all of this effort, to any effort at all, really,** if I didn't think Amatka was something special. And if the reviewers bitching about it having top tier ideas but being a shitty novel didn't really piss me off. Heh.

Anyway, Vanja has come to Amatka to do her market research and of course is immediately put off by the impossibility of her task. And the shoddiness of her accommodations for her stay: she is assigned to an ordinary workers' house, which she will share with several strangers, including an old lady who needs extra care and help with maintaining her stuff because she's old and deteriorating but Amatka society still at least theoretically values her enough to keep her alive even though she can't work anymore; a greenhouse worker, Ivan, and Vanja's hostess and eventual love interest, Nina. And, on the odd weekend, Ivan and Nina's two daughters, who visit now and then to maintain basic ties with their parents but since their parents' work (everybody's work) is too important to also have to spend the mental and physical energy raising their kids and maintaining their stuff, kids in Amatka live and are educated communally, by teachers who live communally with them and thus aren't expecting to maintain individual households and chattels and whatnot. 

Make no mistake: if nothing else, Tidbeck has created perhaps the perfect scenario in which socialism is the only way for humans to exist. Feel about that however you like; you can't deny that this is interesting.

So, anyway, here comes Vanja, ready to convince the good people of Amatka that the hygiene products they've been using are inferior to what can be gotten from elsewhere (and never mind that in order to get them from Vanja's city to Amatka, someone would probably have to ride on the train with the shipment to keep telling everything what it is so it doesn't collapse into goo on the way, and of course someone has to maintain the train itself for the shipment, and goodness me, what would happen if something went wrong en route and suddenly there were no hygiene products to be had in Amatka because market forces had driven the local stuff out of production in favor of the fancier stuff from abroad? This is just my personal speculation; these arguments don't exactly come up in the novel, but it's part of the array of forces lined up against Vanja's mission before she even arrives, and she's primed to resent it before she even meets anybody), and not really prepared to pull her weight within the town while she's there; some of her own personal belongings denature themselves on her very first night, throwing the whole neighborhood into panic and forcing other town citizens out of their beds to come and contain the problem she created through her carelessness. You can see where this has the potential to go. Several wheres, several ways.

And then, Vanja falls in love with Nina, who seems to kind of return her feelings. And Vanja, from a big impersonal city that is full of people who, while not as individuals quite so slavishly bound to the round of mentally and verbally maintaining everything around them as Amatkans, still have to devote a fair amount of mental energy to keeping everything together and so don't have as much to spare for emotional attachments as we do in our ordinary world where the kitchen table remains a kitchen table forever unless it's smashed or burned, so, again, I argue that it's entirely plausible that "kind of" returning Vanja's feelings is enough to make Vanja, whose life back home was pretty dull even for a functionary like her, to decide she'll chuck it all and stay in Amatka with Nina. Who, for her part, seems glad to have another set of hands and brain cells to keep it all going, even if she's not, like, writing love songs and greeting Vanja with flowers at the end of the day.

But Vanja is still the city girl, and while she knows intellectually that she's got to step up and change her ways, still has that core of skepticism and resentment that won't go away no matter how much daily evidence she has that telling her file folders that they are file folders matters and has some outdated but very human ideas about freedom and expression and literally counter-productive things like that, and is nosy enough, as she starts imperfectly adjusting to her new life, to start connecting with other locals who might have some of the same notions, and to notice that some things like books of poetry in the town library that the authorities keep redacting and then suppressing, point to the possibility of another way of living if only, if only...!

So, look, this is an incredible book. Incredible science fiction, incredible social fiction, incredible weird fiction, just incredible. It's one of the best novels I read last year (look, it takes a while to generate these screeds of mine) and one I think that everybody should have a look at, and not just for its ideas.

Anybody who tells you it's a great novel trapped in a shitty one is just plain wrong. And if I don't tell you that, market forces might stop us from seeing what else Tidbeck has under their sleeve. And I very much want to find out what that is.

Karen Tidbeck. Author. Novel. Weird Fiction. Book. Treasure.

*But apparently at least 1/3 of the active voters in the United States in 2024 were regarding as a statement of goals, if not an instruction manual.

**If you haven't noticed, I don't review books that I don't at least like. I read a lot more books than I write about on here, and I am a ruthless did-not-finisher these days; my lifespan is in its second "half" (if you can say that about its uncertain length especially in this horrible century) and there are still so many books I want to read yet, so if I'm not feeling it on one, I move on. So if you see a book on this blog, it's because I think it's good enough or interesting enough or important enough to hurt myself to tell you about. Amatka is all of the above.

Sheldon Costa's THE GREAT WORK

He wandered over to a stump and sat down to watch the river flow over the side of the cliff. It fell a good thirty or forty feet, carving a glossy chute down the stone face and into the overgrown valley below, where it erupted into a cloud of white mist that settled slowly over the surrounding vegetation, dappling the ferns with a thousand glinting gemstones. Somehow, the moisture reached Gentle’s face, and no matter how fervently he wiped the droplets from his cheeks, they kept on falling.

Terrific nature writing, first rate depictions of both platonic and another kind of close male friendships, powerful ecological messaging, female characters with agency, and redneck alchemists, y'all! I started 2026 with a hell of a read. 

Sheldon Costa's debut novel, The Great Work, is purt'near everything I've ever wanted out of a Weird Western. It's got all the elements I mentioned above and more, and it tells a tight and coherent story to boot. It's even got some excellent, over-the-top villains.* And, I mean, just look at this cover art! Maryann Held is the mad genius behind this magnificence, and Quirk Books should keep her on a hell of a retainer based on this image. 

OK, I'll settle down a bit. 

Our heroes are a precocious pre-teen boy, Kitt, and his lost soul of an uncle, Gentle, who's only kept life and soul together in the pre-statehood foothills of what will become Washington State through the help and friendship of a frontier alchemist, Liam, hard at work to create the phliosophick stone, the titular Great Work, out in the as-yet unspoiled wilderness of the western United States ca. 1890 or so.  Only as our story starts the settlement of which they're kind of a part is suddenly all ahoo over reports of a cryptid, the giant, ghost-white salamander Maryann Held depicted on the book cover, which haunts their daily visits to the river and their nightly dreams -- and Liam has gotten himself killed trying to hint down the monster, in the belief that the Prima Materia he still lacks for his formula will be found in the salamander's blood.

Gentle, a drunken ne'er-do-well on the run from his powerful family back in Ohio when Liam saved his life years ago, now has to tough it out without his friend, face his grief and find a way to go on living - but some men would rather try to raise their bestie from the dead than go to therapy, yannow.

Enter Kitt, who, it turns out, is on the run from the same family as Gentle, being Gentle's young nephew, who was no more inclined to put up with Gentle's older brother's abuse than Gentle himself was a generation ago, and has high-tailed it out to try his luck with his black sheep of an uncle. Before we know it, the pair have set out from the late, lamented Liam's laboratory, with Liam's embalmed corpse strapped to the back of a scene-stealing old mule named Abe (it should surprise no one that Abe is the best character. I would die for Abe) and gone off in quest of the salamander once and for all. 

Alas, this weird party is only a step or two ahead of the mighty and implacable forces of civilization, in the person of The Reverend Judge Crane and a few lesser mortals, already hard at work logging and mining and damming and settling everything they can see, and to hell with the already mostly exterminated indigenous peoples, and the odd settler types with a less extractive outlook on the landscape, who stand in its way. 

Further complicating matters are a secret village of frontier anarchist free-love types AND a roving band of Civil War veterans and other freebooter types who have formed a weird cult around the salamander and its prophet that's straight out of "The Call of Cthulhu," minus the swamp.

With this much plot it's hard to believe there's good character work in here, too, but there is. It's not entirely evenly distributed; the various adversarial figures are a bit cartoonish, but most of the bystanders and secondary heroes are given a chance to manifest as real a set of people as Kitt and Gentle and Abe** do.

But what really makes The Great Work, uhh, work, is the inherent tension supplied by the questions that pulls the reader through it: just how much disbelief are we supposed to suspend, here? Does alchemy actually work in this alternate Cascadia? Or is Christianity "right?" Is the salamander an actual living creature or just an egregore, a shared delusion employed to explain the many things these settlers still don't understand about the land they think they've conquered? Whose promises and prophecies, if any, will be fulfilled? Are these beliefs all just competing delusions, or are some of them "real?" Or all of them?

I'm not going to tell you whether or not any of these questions get explicitly answered, anymore than I'm going to tell you if Abe makes it out alive. There's a website for that. Though this book is still pretty new, especially for something Your Humble Blogger has read. But what I will tell you is that I feel like Costa is going to be an author to watch, that has me curious about what he's going to do next, and that I'm grateful indeed to the Discord friend of mine who casually mentioned this book in our year-end ravings about what we thought the best books of 2025 were. It pays to have friends with taste!

*Here's our first sight of one of them. Tell me this guy, who is also seven feet tall with a thorough-going gentleman's education, wouldn't stop you in your tracks, if not make you want to run the other way. Or compliment his fashion sense?:

The hunter turned to look at them more closely. Gentle had a clearer view of the rest of his strange outfit, now. His coat and chaps, stitched together out of tanned hides, hung over his body in rigid plates, like the carapace of a giant beetle. On his feet he wore a pair of high-ankle cattleman boots made of alligator skin. The hunter had kept the alligators’ snouts and fangs intact, so that each foot ended in a snarling reptilian sneer.

**Don't you even try to tell me a mule can't be people. He's the Bill the Pony of the Weird Western genre. IYKYK.

The space was not large enough for the mule to fit inside, and after some cajoling Gentle was able to maneuver around the animal and squeeze into the crack. He turned back, grabbed Abe’s head in his hands, and pressed their foreheads together. “Go,” he whispered. “Please go. I’ll find Kitt. I promise.” The mule, as if embarrassed by this display, yanked his head away and snorted a wet blast of air into Gentle’s face. “Fine,” Gentle said. “Wait for us here, you stubborn bastard.”