William T. Vollmann's YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS

Oh, ants, my sisters, good old honeydew-seekers! From close up you are sticky and shiny and gristly; and your nymphs have parasitic red mites stuck to them. You are too intent upon your chewing and gathering to listen to me, but I tell you that despite my warm feelings I really do not like you, and I cannot feel sorry for you in any way because there are too many of you and you are not cute at all. You eat too much of my forests; you are a rebellious tribe, and I will destroy you; I will poison your nests with sweet-smelling traps.

Man, I've known of the existence of this book for decades. I had a vague idea of what it's about and that it was probably going to be something I would love, but I never came across it in a bookstore, back when it was new and a physical store selling physical books, or a public library, was the only way to get them, so I never picked it up for my personal collection or checked it out. Later on, online booksellers became a thing and I went bananas, just like everybody else did, but by then a lot of newer books were on my radar, and then e-books happened and then...

But really? I couldn't tell you why it took me so long to get around to You Bright and Risen Angels, apart from its still never turning up in any bookstores I've managed to hit when I've a bit to spend. And there not being an ebook or audio edition. And there being millions and millions of other books vying for my attention. 

Sigh.

But so, better late than never. And also, thank goodness for my having a few dozen high brodernist friends, many of whom are obsessed with Billy TV and his oeuvre, who selected his Europe Central as a book club read (which I loved and consider one of the best books I read this year, but I'm not ready to write about it yet and think I'm gonna read it again before I do)* and I was jolted into remembering that back in the 90s when I was temping my way around the Greater Boston area (so many bookstores! But I never saw this in any of them. And anyway, Infinite Jest happened, etc.) I was kind of always on the lookout for this big chunk of literary speculative fiction about insects and revolution and hey, online booksellers still exist, and not all of them are avatars of pure evil...

So, anyway, You Bright and Risen Angels is finally in my life. And, as I often but don't always say, it feels like it was written just for me. Well, except for all the gun stuff. There's a fair amount of gun stuff. Which isn't really for me, but I'll put up with it if an author makes it worth my doing so. 

Billy TV sure did! Though he also kind of tricked me in some pretty inventive ways, like providing a rather untrustworthy, though vividly descriptive, table of contents. As such.

This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality’s brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles.

I'm coming to dislike the phrase "late-stage capitalism" almost as much as I do all the Underpants Gnome-ish fantasizing about the neo-Nuremberg Trials that are surely just around the corner for the current crop of bigoted,  authoritarian oppressors who have come to power in so much of the world. Both memes presuppose that these regimes so obviously carry the seeds of their own destruction that it's just a waiting game for the rest of us; we don't really have to do anything. We certainly don't have to get nasty or violent. We just have to keep the popcorn ready for when the imaginary good guys who are going to swoop in and save us show up and clean house, like they did in World War II. Except somehow, we all seem to think that we're gonna get to skip the war part this time? Or at least that somebody else is going to do the arduous stuff? But on what basis do we think that?

Anyway, YBARA is an elaborate, baroque and challenging allegory of what it's most likely really going to feel like when everybody's finally had enough of the manipulations and empty promises of our current socio-economic systems that keep everyone too scared or hopeless or indoctrinated to be be willing to even imagine a slightly better world anymore. Couched as a giant revenge plot of bugs against bug zappers. 

But that sounds a bit dry and no-fun, doesn't it? But see, those are two things this book ain't, especially if you like weird shit like giant, freakishly long-lived anthropomorphic insects who have teamed up with their more conventionally sized and life-spanned brethren to fight back against human domination and destruction; like sentient agglomerations of electricity that, for their part, seek to preserve the status quo except with themselves in charge instead of stupid humans; like a handful of sinister, immortal oligarchs who both embody the status quo and believe the aforementioned agglomerations of sentient electricity are actually their willing servants and weapons; like a tiny cadre of passionate revolutionaries who were already ready to take matters into their own hands and fight, despite their paltry numbers, and then accept surprise offers of tactical, strategic and actual support from the very gnats that ordinarily would be tormenting them in swarms in their secret lair above the Arctic Circle!

Oh and there's also another oligarch, shadowy, sinister and remote, manipulating affairs from his base of operations on Mars? And a secret race of plant-people who can dramatically alter their own biochemistry to incorporate some industrial products and by-products to give themselves really weird superpowers like remote viewing via developing photographic film at a touch? I mean, you can't say Billy TV is unimaginative. 

All of this is related to us, by the way, by an unreliable narrator who seems to at least *believe* he is the last human survivor of the resulting conflict, who in his loneliness has programmed an elaborate computer simulation** depicting "resurrected" versions of all of the important actors in the scenario (helpfully listed for us with notes on their interrelationships and alignments in a Dramatis Personae at the beginning of the book right before its wild and rather fanciful table of contents). As he boots up his system for the latest iteration of the game, he addresses the personality constructs inhabiting it as his "Bright and Risen Angels" with a melancholy air. But is he really a lone survivor wistfully reliving the actual past of the narrative, or just a frustrated Infocom employee? Heh.

And it is because of this that YBARA often gets categorized as proto-cyberpunk. As this is really barely just a frame narrative, though, I think so promoting it is a mistake. You're not going to see any console cowboys, expensive razorgirls, or Rastafarian satellite-dwellers here,  but nor are you going to get the funky, vaguely creepy pseudo-biopunk of, say, Bruce Sterling's more interesting offerings, or the intensely insect-focused action of "antasy" works like Clark Thomas Carlton's output to date,  which I must confess to having vaguely hoped for back in the early days of my knowing this book exists.

I am by no means disappointed by what I got, for all that it does not even contain what the second half of the table of contents suggests that it will. Because what it's actually in these pages is fascinating in its own right, with its alternate history of the industrialization of the United States, its vision of cryptoterrestrials (again, rather before even most fringe communities were even really talking about certain phenomena in those terms) and its depiction of how rebels are made, not born. This is that rarity of rarities, a genuinely unique book, and one I'm profoundly glad to have finally gotten to read.

Interestingly enough, I seem to have stumbled into what feels awfully like a spiritual sequel to YBARA. Stay tuned right here to find out what it is. 

By the way, I think there's going to be a lot more Billy TV content on this blog in the new year, but don't worry: I'm pretty sure this one is still going to prove to be unique, because this guy's restless intelligence and creativity have legendarily led him never to write the same, or even the similar, book twice. Dayum!

*Yes, I'm in a book club now, at long last, halfway through my sixth decade on this warming, dessicating planet. 

**Recall that this book was first published in 1987, when most high schools in the U.S. boasted, at most, a few Apple IIes awkwardly situated in the library for a handful of nerds to play typing games on. Oregon Trail was still in the unimaginable future for most of us who weren't in the industry or attending a handful of schools adjacent to it. But guess who was working in the industry as a programmer back then? Billy TV!

Clark Thomas Carlton's THE GHOST ANTS OF GRYLLADESH

It's been a while since I had a new "Antasy" to enjoy -- though it's rather bittersweet to be doing so right after we lost the great E.O. Wilson -- but at long last Clark Thomas Carlton has come through with the third in his bizarre and delightful series that began with Prophets of the Ghost Ants and continued in The Prophet of the Termite God. When I first encountered these books, I described them as "Dune with ant-riders" but as we move into this third novel it has so much more in common with George R.R. Martin's big unfinished fantasy series that this could almost be called "A Feast for Ant-Crows" or some such. Except, you know, not horrifyingly repetitive.

It is, however, as grim as AFfC for much of it. We'll leave aside for the moment some questionable tactics in this continuation of our boy Anand's quest to save the people he persuaded into a new way of life way back in the first novel (I guess there's neither a Security Council nor any Geneva Conventions in his world) because they are employed defensively (but make for rough reading if you're at all sensitive to things like biological or chemical warfare because trigger warning if you are); those aside this is still the darkest view of this world, in which humans have evolved into near-microscopic creatures who ride ants like horses (see cover art) and have entered into more-or-less symbiotic relationships with many other insects despite most of those insects being much larger than humans are, that we've yet seen.

We get a somewhat bewildering array of new and returning POV characters who, I guarentee, will send you scurrying back to the helpful dramatis personae at book's beginning just to keep straight*.  They all have very intense adventures once again as the world of the Antasy reels from the wars fought in prior novels, only to find itself embroiled in new conflicts as forces held down or blocked by the evil Hulkrite Empire are now free to seek revenge, conquer lost territory, and wreak general havoc on Anand and his forces -- and on the civilians who have been caught in the middle of it all.

Like in GRRM's opus, we get the perspectives of people on all sides of the conflict(s), including a refugee princess (Trelanna) who finally, after three novels, garners reader sympathy (she suffered plenty in the prior novels, but elicited schadenfreude rather than pity or sorrow, at least from this reader), not by enacting a redemption arc so much as just really becoming abject and pitiful as she gets swept up in an invading army's progress to attack her homeland and has a forced marriage to its leader to look forward to once her unborn children (by Anand!) are got rid of, one way or the other. Did I mention that The Ghost Ants of Grylladesh is grim? The Ghost Ants of Grylladesh is grim.

Of course, Trellana's mother Polexima, who joined with Anand in establishing a new nation based on freedom, tolerance, and an abandonment of her native land's absurdly rigid hierarchy, in previous novels, had it even worse and bore up much better, never wavering in her commitment to the new way even when hamstrung and hobbled and repeatedly raped by the terrifying army Anand defeated in the second book, so feeling for Trellana only goes so far.

Then there's Anand's cousin-I-think Terraclon, elevated last novel to what amounts to the pope of the religion devoted to Goddess Ant Queen and the series' sole LGBTQA+ representation (unless we count [REDACTED] the non-POV character who becomes his lover by this novel's end), who has pretty much held Anand's forces together while Anand has hared off on weird mission after weird mission on the back of a high-flying locust. Pleckoo, the main villain of the last two novels, gets a quick cameo but is basically fridged, while a new royal lady, Fewlenray has quite an arc of her own while, in one of the things I like best about Clark Thomas Carlton's work (besides the arthopods, of course), several villains get point of view chapters that win, if not our sympathy, at least our empathy as their plans clash with Anand's, assuring that no matter how this ends, somebody we've come to love, like a little, or at least respect, is going to be brought low and we'll cry along with them at least a little bit -- recalling that arch-villain Pleckoo started out his Antastic life as Anand's best friend and cousin, after all...

But the novel is still very much about Anand, whose character deepens and becomes yet more complicated as circumstances and his own shortcomings tempt him into atrocities of his own. He is still that poor nobody from the midden at heart, and while his time among the freedom-loving Dranverites taught him a lot and gave him the courage to share what he learned with his former society, he still reacts at times like that scared and bullied young man, even as he also copes with the fact that both of his very pregnant wives are captives of the very hostile nations who threaten his co-creation of Bee-jor. He becomes a little less lovable but a whole lot more believable in this book, does Anand. Would you have made different choices? Could you have thought of better solutions to his problems?

The novel ends on even more cliffhangers than did The Prophet of the Termite God, so I sure do hope CTC doesn't take our least favorite page out of GRRM's book. Write fast and stay healthy, Clark!

*Indeed, I dithered as I read over whether or not I should backtrack and read The Prophet of the Termite God again because for a lot of these characters, I was uncertain about whether they were completely new for the third novel, or just newly prominent and having emerged from the background of the previous two. I think I should have backtracked.

Kij Johnson's AT THE MOUTH OF THE RIVER OF BEES

"Where does it begin?" she says at last. "Where does it end?"

He is slow answering and she knows he is as trapped in its weird beauty as she. "No one knows," he says: "Or no one says. My dad used to tell me tales, but I don't know that he knew, either. Maybe there's a spring of bees somewhere, and it sinks underground somewhere else. Maybe the bees gather, do this thing, and then go home. There's no ocean of bees anyway." 

No guesses as to what attracted me to Kij Johnson's fantastic short story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees. My proclivities are well known to you all by now. But I mean, come on, just look at this cover. And yes, I think this bee's mouthparts look kind of weevil-y, but bees come in lots and lots of varieties and mutations and variations and I mean, she's just cute, right?

Johnson first won my devotion with her extraordinary Lovecraftian novella The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe, which took inspiration from Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, a piece HPL neither revised from its early draft nor got published in his lifetime, but which might just be my favorite thing he ever wrote and yes of course at least part of it is because Chad Fifer sold me on the space-faring kitty cats. For her take on this crazypants universe, Johnson gave me a childless spinster just like me as a tour guide, and I'm forever grateful for the resulting adventure.

So my expectations for this story collection were quite high going in, and I'm delighted to say they were more than met! For one thing, Johnson shows mastery in pretty much every sub-genre of speculative fiction here, meaning there is guaranteed something for every reader here. For another, she is that kind of writer best for short stories, a master at quickly sketched world-building that still feels complete even in just a few lines, the better to get on with the storytelling. Not everbody can do that, but Kij Johnson sure can.

I'm not going to discuss every story in the collection, though every one of them has something astonishing or thought-provoking or just plan cool to offer and only one of them is one I'd skip if there's a next time I read this collection because yuck (but yuck, too, can be a testimony to a writer's powers!).

But let's talk about themes for a moment. One is loss; many of these stories are explicitly about losing something, someone, or a whole lifestyle, and how to cope with it (not always gracefully) or, in one notable case, postpone it for a while. Another is animals, anthropomorphized or not. Another is Asia; several of these stories have explicitly Japanese or generally Asian-inspired settings and bear that extra burden of "writing the other" but bear it very well indeed.

Best among the animal stories (though not quite of the Asian) is the delightful "The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles" and no, no evocation of that song is necessary, thank you. Our little heroine, Small Cat, does not fall down at anybody's door, for a start. Raised in an abandoned city house and garden in Japan by a large family of feral cats who've developed their own take on fudoki, to which she hopes to add someday, Small Cat sees the downfall of this feline paradise and decides to live out a story from her ancestral fudoki about The Cat From the North, in reverse; instead of coming from the north, she will go north, eventually going as far north as a cat can go without crossing an ocean. Her adventures along the way are by turns exciting, heartbreaking, charming and adorable.

Of the Asian themed ones, "The Empress Jingu Fishes" is a standout. The titular empress is a shaman, blessed/cursed by the gods with complete and perfect foresight. She knows when she gets married that her husband would not live long, so she loved him as well and as fiercely as she could. She knows that he will die while their kingdom is at war with a neighboring one (though not the one the gods had commanded them, through her, to attack) and before their son could even be born. She knows that their son will be a great emperor in his time and will eventually be elevated to godhood. She knows all of this while she sits by a spring and fashions a line, hook and some bait to try to catch a trout that she doesn't need purely to feel at least a tiny illusion of having a bit of free will; she is powerless against the forces that took her husband and will take her son and wants to kill something, but this is her sole opportunity to do so. It's an exquisite tale.

Other stories are closer to our own experience, or seem that way at first. For instance, "Names for Water" seems like a mundane slow burn about a student looking for excuses to skip or even drop her math class and change her major, but turns out to have galaxy-spanning impact and implications by the time its few pages are off the paper and in the reader's head. For all we know, little things like this are happening every time our cell phones ring. But probably not. Kij Johnson is much better at writing realities than the hacks in charge of the one I live in are.

She's also good at 17th century naturalist pastische, as it turns out. "MyWife Reincarnated as a Solitaire - Exposition on the Flaws in My Wife's Character - The Nature of the Bird - The Possible Causes - Her Final Disposition." is just that, both a biting satire on the pompous and patriarchal style of narration fashionable at the time and a delightful poke in the eye of the kind of patriarch who wrote that way, as it tells the story of how his much disliked wife apparently reincarnated as an extinct flightless bird, as the title gives away, but has gotten a last laugh on him right under his nose the whole time. Henry Fielding would applaud. And possibly bite his thumb at Kij Johnson, sir. As such.

Then there's the title story, "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" in which a young woman and her ailing German shepherd find themselves on a road trip like no other, compelled to follow the course of an annual migrating bee swarm so large and long that it blocks major highways for days on its northward course. What she finds at the end of the journey is terribly bittersweet and doesn't have a whole lot to do with bees, but like in my favorite Paul Valery poem, the bee isn't really the point; it's a "tiny gold alarm" there to sting us into taking necessary action. For some reason, I pictured this as a major motion picture starring Dakota Johnson. Your milage may vary.

A final favorite I'll mention, and the story that occupies the biggest chunk of the volume, is the extensively imagined and constructed "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" which takes us either to a fantasy world or a science fiction one -- it doesn't really matter which -- in which a society at roughly the medieval level of technological development must contend with a unique geographical feature if its to extend the benefits of civilization to its outskirts and other side. Not only is there a vast river of water dividing the Empire, but over top of it is another, more dangerous and weirder, river of "mist", but it's not like any mist we've ever encountered. It flows along the course of the water but it's denser than water, dense enough to row boats across but corrosive AF and prone to strange disturbances and, oh yes, home to monsters the locals call Fish but are unlike any fish you or I are thinking about. For a start, the Big Ones could destroy whole towns if disturbed enough to surface. Our fish out of water coming to this mist-river is an architect there to build a vast suspension bridge across it, the first of its kind. The majority of the story concerns this effort of his and of those he hires to help him, including two members of a family whose hereditary duty has been to ferry people and cargo across this river, who won't be needed if this giant construction project is successful. This story I'd especially recommend to people who like reading about logistics and mundane projects like building. I promise you it's not boring for those who aren't into that sort of thing; just that those who are, will especially like this one.

There are also stories about marauding tribes in another fantasy-or-sci-fi setting (and how I love that Johnson is comfortable letting these settings of hers be either, just fine with the ambiguity), a bureaucrat who is being groomed for minor godhood but doesn't want to leave his mistress, a family of foxes who beguile a young husband into madness in order to survive, and an exceptionally brutal Galactic empire and how its tactics for keeping everybody unified actually affect populations at its edges. Like I said, there's not a bad story in the bunch, though if graphic and weird sex isn't your cup of tea, maybe skip "Spar", the slightest of these stories in any case.

All in all, this was the perfect collection with which to wind down my reading year, cementing Kij Johnson as a writer to watch and filling a lot of little moments in between tasks in exactly the way I most want a collection of short fiction to do. The buzz was warranted.

Polenth Blake's WERECOCKROACH

"Once this is over, I'm sure people'll want goot things to read. Distraction is good."

Personally, I'd be hitting the cute animal videos. It wasn't that I didn't like books, but you never know if a book will be good all the way through. A fun mystery has a weird rant about why women are all liars or that cute gay couple ends up being thrown in a meat grinder. That's not as comforting as watching cats sit in boxes.

 Rest assured, none of those terrible things happen in this novella, which is even more comforting and as fun as watching cats sit in boxes, especially if you understand that cockroaches are so much like cats that they spend a lot of time sort of comfortingly stroking each other with their antennae in their down time and, if something grody happens like being picked up by a disgusting yucky human being, they immediately freak out and need to clean themselves thoroughly to get rid of our cooties.*

Being as I am the kind of person who writes sonnet cycles about brand inspectors trying to manage small herds of cow-weres**, having at one stage of life kept a small family of Blaberus craniifer as pets in a college dorm room, and being also the kind of person who enjoys various portrayals of insects in literature, Polenth Blake's Werecockroach feels like a Christmas present from a complete stranger intended specifically for me. So of course right off the bat, I have to share my only complaint, and that is that Werecockroach isn't about 700 pages long. Good thing my beloved Clark Thomas Carleton wrote me another volume of his Antasy series, coming soon to a blog near you.

Werecockroach, at just 79 pages, is a light little whisp of a thing compared to the lit-chonks I tend to review on here, but its subject matter and wonderful cover of course made it a must whatever its length. And a lot gets packed into those 79 little pages; it is light in form rather than content.

We have but three characters to manage, but what characters they are. Rin is a agendered asexual aromantic person*** whose last residence burned to the ground before our story even gets going, who has managed to locate a new living situation in London, with two young men who strike Rin right away as rather unusual people in their own rights, though at first they merely come off as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist and a roommate who is way more tolerant of the theorist's eccentricities than is quite usual in modern day London. And the flat they're willing to share with Rin is very small and tight, with narrow corridors and rooms into which a bare minimum of furniture just barely fits, but that's fine with Rin, who has few belongings to stash, now, anyway.

Before long Things Happen that would ordinarily be the entire focus of a big fat novel, but here just serve as a reason to drive our three new friends out of their overly cozy living quarters and out into the big weird world which quickly exposes, well, the title gives that bit away (which is why I'm keeping the Things That Happen secret). How Rin reacts to the discovery that makes this title make sense is not what you're expecting; nor is how a whole group new group of maybe-friends talk, which is 100% hilarious and was just what I needed this week as the last of this wretched year 2020 And Some Months dwindles and seems to be fixin' to drag the wretched year of 2020 And Some More Months in on a gust of apocalyptic winds here in Casper, WY, USA.

Suffice it to say that I feel like Polenth Blake is maybe my new best friend, or at least someone whose work I'm always going to be on the lookout for. Hiss!

*Yes, these are actual observations made once upon a time by Your Humble Blogger.

**That being, of course, a being that transforms from a bovine to a human at the full moon.

***Whom I imagined sounding exactly like Abigail from Unwell.

Olga Tokarczuk's DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD (tr Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

"Nobody takes notice of old women who wander around with their shopping bags."

With a title lifted right out of William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" and a cranky old Polish woman spinning us a yarn that keeps wanting to devolve into just another cozy mystery except she just won't let it, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead feels like it was written just for me. I know I say that about a lot of books, but I contain multitudes you know?

Yes, I know, that's not from William Blake.

The cranky old Polish woman in question, and our narrator of questionable reliability, is an astrologer-cum-schoolteacher-cum translator-cum property manager named Janina, and she lives in a sparsely populated region of Poland so near the border with the Czech Republic that most of the time, if residents try to call emergency services, their call gets bounced to a cell tower in that other country and gets a recording in the Czech language. This makes said residents both frustrated as hell and very self-reliant, none more so than our Janina. Who hates that name but never really gives us one she'd prefer to be called, so I will christen her Crank.

Hey, it's very in keeping for how she addresses and talks about her neighbors. Very keen on thinking deeply about language, she hates the idea of personal names being meaningless sounds bestowed on a person by their parents before anything is known about us besides how many fingers and toes we have and if we've got a winkle. So her nearest neighbor is called Bigfoot, and her next nearest is Oddball, and her best friend and partner in translating William Blake into Polish is called Dizzy.

Lest I convey the very wrong idea that this is a charming and quirky story, though, well, it isn't. Crank is embittered as hell, embittered as only a passionate defender of animal rights can be when she lives surrounded by poachers, riders of noisy and polluting all terrain vehicles and bands of hunters who stride in formation through her beloved woods shooting in unison at pheasants and ignoring her pleas to stop and listen to her for just a moment.

Then one day, Bigfoot turns up dead, choked on a bone from a deer he'd poached*. And some other deaths occur. All with at least two things in common; proximity to Crank, and the apparent or explicit involvement of animals. Most want to chalk these deaths up as accidental; Crank thinks she's witnessing a string of animal revenge attacks that makes them murders! Who is right?

That's basically the plot of the novel. Interesting enough, but what makes it stand out is, of course, the prose, brought to very vivid but agonizingly slow life in the audio edition by Beata Poźniak**. "Winter mornings are made of steel. They have a metallic taste and sharp edges," Crank observes one morning, for example. There are tons of gorgeous little prose bombs waiting to explode in your head and realize that Tokarczuk and Lloyd-Jones are a hell of a team and Tokarczuk is definitely a Nobel laureate.

For me and my kind there are added bonuses, including a character (and possibly a love interest for Crank; it's nicely ambiguous) who is an entomologist deeply engaged in study of and efforts to conserve a bark beetle (which, yeah, people who know me know that I have a grudge against bark beetles for destroying so much of my beloved Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest, but it's really not their fault so much as human management policy's fault that they've run rampant there for decades, unchecked by the natural fire cycle and whatnot), and not just another character who is a mushroom picker but a whole society of mushroom pickers, so involved with one another and so organized that they throw a costume ball every summer right before the season for serious 'shrooming begins.

Finally, I want so much to gloat over how much I admire the last 20% or so of this book but it's really almost impossible to do without spoilers, which just kills me, but there you go. Drive that plow right over me, I dead.

And yes, I'm going to need to listen to this one again real soon, because it's that kind of book, one of my favorite kinds, that promises to be a very different read the second time around. Hooray!

*Having eaten my share of deer over the years, I cannot figure out what bone in a deer's carcass would be small enough for a man to choke on, but maybe it's a fragment? Either that or Tokarczuk and/or Lloyd-Jones think that deer bones are just like fish bones?

**Seriously. This is the first time I've resorted to bumping up the narration speed as I've listened. I found 1.30x to be adequate, but 1.0 was just too much as Poźniak draaaaaaaaws oooouuuuut allllllmost eeeeeeeveeeeeryyyyyy syyyyyyyyyyllable in her authentically Polish accent.

Laline Paull's THE BEES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laline Paull's THE BEES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clark Thomas Carlton's PROPHETS OF THE GHOST ANTS

Oh man. Ever hear about a book that sounded so exactly like it was written just for you that you were almost afraid to read it because there was no possible way it was as brain-explodingly awesome as you desperately wanted it to be and so you let a whole year go by between OMG MUST BUY NOW purchase and actually starting to read it?

I mean, come on, tiny, tiny humans who ride ants and locusts around like horses! Who share mounds and pheromone signatures with various species of ants! As if Edmund O. Wilson started writing science fiction! Or at least epic fantasy! I mean, who's been peeking at my Christmas list?

So yeah, my expectations for this were unreasonably high going in, and I had to sort of grit my teeth and risk them being unmet to even start reading this book. The question thus becomes: were they met?

More like confounded. Prophets of the Ghost Ants is one of the most unusual novels I've ever read, and may genuinely qualify as unique. Though I suppose there might be some who want to describe it as Dune with insects, that still doesn't quite capture it. For one thing, the fanatical monotheistic desert tribe are the bad guys. Though there is something very Muad'Dib-ish about our hero.

Anand*, starts out life as the lowest of the low, a bottom-of-the-heap half-caste** among a vast tribe of humans-and-leafcutter ants (the humans are essentially parasitizing the ants, but no one but Anand ever wants to face up to that fact) but soon learns a bit more about his true heritage and special destiny, like so many fantasy heroes do. In this case, it's because his mother came from a tribe of roach-herders, and while this bit of interbreeding makes Anand even more revolting to the leafcutter people, the roach-herders think he's destined to improve their lot, by improving the way they get treated. He gets betrothed to a very pretty girl and just has to wait until he's sixteen to take up his exalted role in his mother's tribe.

But until then, he's stuck being an ant guy. And when the human queen of the leafcutter tribe gives birth to a daughter, by tradition and necessity, the mound must fission (after the fashion of anthills), with a certain percentage of the mound's ant and human populations striking off to found a new colony elsewhere. Guess who has to go with them.

Even worse: there are other populations of insects-and-people out there, also expanding their territories. And some of them don't like what leafcutters do to the landscape, no, not at all. And while some of them are secular, somewhat happy-go-lucky quasi-anarchist/demarchist types who ridicule the idea that people should be as socially stratified as ants, some others are religious fantatics, who live with and ride the titular ghost ants (though for the purposes of this book, ghost ants are all the way transparent, and don't just have see-through abdomens. Oh, and they're also huge [for ants] and aggressive as hell, so, um, yeah) and won't rest until all the humans in their world worship the termite god who originally gave them succor in the desert to which their founders were banished long ago -- a desert caused by the defoliating, despoiling ways of the leafcutter tribes. D'oh!

So in the midst of its speculations about what life might be like for a humanity that is the only vertebrate land animal to survive a series of stellar disasters, and could  only do so by evolving into something as small as the arthopods that are the planet's only other survivors, Prophets of the Ghost Ants is at bottom a clash of civilizations. The leafcutter tribe is top-down, its rigid social structure not dictated so very much by its coexistence with/parasitism on its ants as by a set of inherited religious beliefs enforced by a fat and lazy priestly caste; the anarchic freedom-lovers are willing to live and let live as long as no one tries to coerce anybody; the ghost ant riders are a dire threat to both. And moving among them all as a sort of triple (if not quadruple) agent is Anand, emissary to the leafcutters from the democracy, spy on the ghost ant fanatics, but really only looking to reconnect with his beloved roach tribe and his destined bride. Would I have enjoyed this without the insect angle? Probably not nearly as much, since stripped of its entomological content it would just be another bog standard fantasy plot, albeit with a welcome attention to the idea that feudalism isn't the only way to go, with a little bit of Moses of the Mandricanthites thrown in for good measure.

What saved it for me was the little things, like for instance, the way that water behaves in this world, which Carlton got very, very right. At the scale of an ant, surface tension becomes much more of a force than we experience at this scale; an ant can pick up a drop of water, hold it above its head, and collapse it into its mouth.**** And this is very much in evidence in Prophets of the Ghost Ants, as when Anand, in a highly symbolic gesture, "made a show of dunking his hands in the bulging dome of water in the basin." This coupled with details about scents and pheromones, and the relish with which Anand plays on the fact that even in this world, most people have an unreasoning fear/disgust reaction to roaches, kept it fun for me.

Oh, and the battle scenes. I think Carlton had the most fun cooking those up and imagining all the different military applications for, e.g., rhinocerous beetles and night wasps and locusts, oh my. Wonder if he's read Jeff Lockwood.

Of course it turns out this is merely book one of a planned "Antasy" trilogy. Aren't they all. Except, well, he had me at Antasy.

*This is the second time in as many books I've run into an important character seemingly named after an important disciple of the Buddha; a professor in Nexus was explicitly so named, as befits a Thai monk and teacher. Here, though, we only get sly references to the possible, er, additive qualities of such a name. Amusing coincidence, anyway.

**It's one of the conceits* of Prophet of the Ghost Ants that the teeny tiny humans adopt the rigid social structures of the species with which they co-habitate, from a queen who gives birth to multiple (as in five or six) sons almost every time (daughters are rare, and have consequences) and who actually rules the mound through, in the case of Anand's leafcutter ant people, 127 castes of worker.

*And this novel has many conceits, starting with the idea that humans that tiny would still be as intelligent and neurologically plastic as you and I are, though I'm not sure a brain reduced to that scale could possibly be complex enough? Anyway, this strikes me as almost as funny as the stereotypical giant human-sized insect scenario which I know for a fact is physically impossible because the muscle-to-exoskeleton ratio of creatures that big would not allow them to move at all. So what; we've rolled with Them! all this time, so I can roll with ant-sized people with human-sized intellects. And yes, this is my first footnote of a footnote. I'm turning into David Foster Wallce.

***He has written some literary fiction, Anthill, but I've yet to read it.

****I first learned of this from Richard P. Feynman. Yes, that Feynman. Of the diagrams and figuring out what went wrong with Challenger. He was a curious character.

Ned Beauman's BOXER, BEETLE #OneBookAtATime

Nazis! Nazi memorabilia collectors! Boxers! Boxing promoters! Insects! Entomologists! Sufferers of trimethylaminuria! People who have to work with and smell them!The ecosystem of Ned Beauman's Boxer, Beetle is complicated and repulsive, but wound up not being quite as compelling as other reviewers have made it sound.

The novel intertwines two narratives and two timelines in the now-classic format of a historical narrative being chased down by a modern explorer. In the 21st century, we have a young man named Fishy (so named for his unfortunate, genetically-determined body chemistry and the odors it produces), who conducts internet auctions of historical artifacts at his day job, and has a special sideline in the Nazi memorabilia trade for a hobby, and whose latest mysterious pursuit (alongside a nasty gun-toting freelancer who is killing his way to a new find) leads him to start exploring the story of a British entomologist, fascist and eugenics enthusiast and the diminutive Jewish boxer whom the entomologist manipulates into becoming the subject of some, err, special research in 1936.

Trimethylaminuria is neither played up for laughs (something I was kind of expecting-with-a-cringe from the novel's earliest pages) nor presented as a subject for our compassion or pity (though in real life lots of sufferers wind up committing suicide as a result of the social isolation it tends to impose, the Gordon Crisps of the world aside) as it stands in, in the modern timeline, for all of the things about humanity eugenicists want to eliminate (in 1936, of course, they're much more blatant and reprehensible about it). For Fishy it's just a fact in his life, albeit one that has dealt him out of the reproductive sweepstakes far more effectively than anything the eugenicists of yesteryear would have dared to dream of. He's got bigger concerns as the novel unfolds, like surviving and escaping from his weird captor. Or so it would seem as the novel gets going, but then Fishy and the gunman disappear except for quick and pointless interludes. Fishy's disorder winds up being kind of a punchline for the novel, but otherwise, there really isn't much point to his being in it. Which is a shame.

Meanwhile, Philip Erskine's story (1936) is a study in multiform ickiness, not because he specializes in  carrion-eating/carnivorous insects,  but because of his and his family's matter-of-fact fascism and anti-semetism and, while we're at it, classism. For Erskine is a character straight out of Michel Houellebecq, that French novelist I so love to hate and hate to love. Amid all of his other passions and pretenses are little observations like this one, made while he tries to address the difficult problem of how to masturbate when sharing a cabin and a bed with a professional colleague: "Why couldn't one just go to the doctor every month to have one's semen, this irrational fluid, syringed off like the pus from a boil."

This long before he is shown regarding a semen sample demanded from his boxer specimen as "ootheca", a term usually reserved for the egg case of members of that insect family that contains mantises and cockroaches, thus demonstrating just how human he thinks Seth Roach isn't (and lest one think Roach is by any stretch of the imagination a sympathetic figure or victim, he's just biding his time until he can go out again and get rip-roaring drunk and beat the crap out of whatever "toff" is foolish enough to take him home. There's rough sex, and there's what Roach does. Yikes.).

So, like Arslan before it in my reading this year, this is a fairly repellent and ugly book, but this time unredeemed by beautiful prose. Beauman takes great, gleeful pleasure in giving us a close look at some of the greatest ugliness humanity has ever produced, and at the people who allowed it to flourish largely because they were happy to admire it from a distance. Erskine, for instance, is, in addition to all the other icky things he is, such a fan of Adolf Hitler's that he goes so far as to breed a stronger, nastier, more belligerent strain of an eyeless beetle he originally discovered in a cave in the Poland the Fuhrer is soon to invade, all so that there might be an insect worthy of being named after his hero.

And then there's the boxer, all four foot eleven of him, nine-toed Seth Roach, descended from immigrants chased away by pogroms from the environs of the cave where Erskine found his breeding stock, the kind of gay man who embraces the idea that his preferences are considered perversions and who not only lets himself get roped into being Erskine's study subject, but into coming along to a fateful conference that is supposed to be about artificial languages (think Esperanto, only weirder and more fiddly) but winds up being something rather more vile.

But hey, sometimes, at least, Boxer, Beetle is funny, as when we come, midway through the book, to a description of Erskine's ancestral home, which his father had determined to modernize so thoroughly that it would still be modern in a hundred years. Rube Goldberg isn't in it. I could have maybe used more of this kind of thing for my tour through the slime -- especially in a novel that is promoted as "hilarious." Had I been looking for belly laughs instead of bugs, I might have been annoyed at the paucity of the former (as it was, I could have used more of the latter, but that's what Daniel Evan Weiss' debut was for. And Tyler Knox's for that matter). As it stands, well, this is the first novel of a young man of undoubted talent but who maybe bit off a bit much for his first project. His second, The Teleportation Accident, was long-listed for the Man Booker this year, and sounds interesting enough for me to give it another chance, but on the strength of the subject matter more than of his writing as I've seen it so far.

Anyway, it doesn't sound like it's quite as filthy.