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!

Rick Moody's THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH

What happens when a writer with exceedingly literary pretentions wrangles a contract to novelize a B-movie of the kind most of us nowadays can only imagine watching with the silhouettes of a nebbishy guy and two iconic robots bopping around in the lower right corner of the screen?

Has anyone ever asked this question before?

Well, Rick Moody did. And the results are bananas.

The Four Fingers of Death, for much of its considerable length, directly answers this question by serving us a smorgasbord of pulpy goodness ranging from a crewed mission to Mars (conceived as the last grasp at relevance for a NASA and a United States on the brink of destitution, third world-caliber exploitation by actual world powers, and a concomitant brain drain that has brought us into the world of Mike Judge's Idiocracy but without that film's unfortunate eugenics arguments) to a suddenly self-aware chimpanzee whose pages-long speeches display a surfeit of internet-gleaned erudition*, to an amputated human arm infected with alien bacteria that's mindlessly crawling around Arizona committing murder and a few sex crimes while spreading its disease. Helpful servant Thing, of Addams Family fame, this ain't. 

Oddly, the narrative doesn't really play this for laughs, though it acknowledges on nearly every page that its every premise is ridiculous. I mentioned that the fictional writer of this madness, whose own career forms a frame narrative for his novelization of The Four Fingers of Death (a 1960s Technicolor remake, we learn, of an older black and white schlock-classic, The Crawling Hand), has serious literary pretensions; our man Montese Crandall, previously only known for flash fiction so brief that he only ever actually published single sentences, explores in depth and with sensitivity the inner lives of the astronauts on their journey to and through their tragic, pathetic and farcical experiences as the first humans on Mars, the dawning sentience of the experimental chimpanzee, Morton (alas, unable to perform a Caesar and uplift other apes with whom to be strong together), and the plights of the many earthbound humans, at many strata of society, whose lives are affected by the titular hand and its disease. 

While also treating us to some over-the-top gross and bawdy sex scenes, very much the funniest I've ever read.

Meanwhile, Moody pulls a kind of The Corrida at San Feliu of a trick, considering and expressing considerable emotion upon different aspects of a common problem -- most prominently, how gifted but emotionally stunted men deal with the loss, to death or desertion, of their wives -- through different narrative layers. In the frame narrative, Crandall is watching his wife slowly waste away and die of chronic disease; in the astronaut layer, Major Jed Richards is kind of in denial of the fact that his long separation from his wife started long before he blasted off for Mars and he's probably not getting her back if he makes it back to earth; and in the chaotic Crawling Hand account, a scientist whose wife died some time ago is keeping her body in cryonic suspension while he experiments on lab animals using cells from her body as he works on a cure for what killed her -- and hasn't leveled with his teenaged son about any of it. The son, meanwhile, often looks poised to repeat his father's emotional mistakes, except he has a girlfriend who is way more healthy and dedicated to making their relationship work than any of the wives in the novel. Seriously, if you don't come out of this with a deep love for Vienna Roberts, I am starting to doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.

That this book doesn't collapse under the weight of all of these premises is a source of wonder to me, even weeks after having compulsively read its over 700 pages almost without stopping (after a false start with the audio book, which is so poorly done in so many ways that I didn't even make it halfway through before my spleen erupted and sprayed bile all over a bunch of my Discord buddies, who I think were ready to beg me to switch to any other format when I did just that). Even if I hadn't been deeply emotionally invested in all of these characters and strapped in for all of their plots and subplots, I would have hung in just to see how the hell Moody was going to bring all of this madness to a close, even before I realized he was going to do so in the middle of a howling mad latter day Burning Man analog. But damn me if he didn't stick the landing. And earn a perfect 11 from all of the judges except for that one who actually is just really afraid of apes.

Utterly batshit. And brilliant. 

*Obviously this book was written back in the days when web searches were still useful and AI slop not even imagined by the likes of your Corys Doctorow or your Williams Gibson. Ever the peril of science fiction is this race against actual culture towards dystopiae.

Adrian Tchaikovsky's ALIEN CLAY

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

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

But nobody told that to Adrian Tchaikovsky, apparently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward Ashton's ANTIMATTER BLUES (Narr John Pirhalla & Katharine Chin)

Somehow I didn't know that a sequel to Mickey7 was in the works, let alone already published. Thank goodness for Mastodon, where I landed early in the Twitter diaspora and where frank curiosity about what everybody else is reading is possibly the most common conversation I have there, or I still wouldn't know that Edward Ashton'sp Antimatter Blues existed!

I hadn't planned to read the audio edition, though. But for some reason, that's the version my public library bought despite owning only the ebook version of Mickey7, so, since beggars can't be choosers and I'm a beggar since retirement, audio it was this time. 

Except now I have a new audio narration pet peeve: when a (first person) narrator aims for callow and casual but the only note he really achieves is every sentence that isn't another character's dialog ends in what I can only describe as a verbal shrug. Like when a parent tries to warn a kid not to come crying to them if they ignore the warning and suffer mild to moderate consequences? Except it's every single sentence, and usually nobody could have predicted the consequences of a thing so nobody could have warned about a thing and the consequences are usually way beyond mild to moderate -- often they are severe to near-fatal, i.e. the kind after which it is never appropriate to say anything remotely like "I told you so" especially since usually no, in fact, you didn't. It makes the narrator character, Mickey, who is already not the most sympathetic or reliable of these, sound like he is constantly abdicating responsibility for every single thing that happens. This could be excused as an audio narrating choice when it's a thing for which responsibility might be assigned, like having lied to your partner or lost an important resource or, you know, actually did tell you so, but this tone is even used when describing perfectly mundane things like crossing a room or biting into a protein bar. Over eight or so hours of a really great story, this goes from being annoying and occasionally misleading to my finally wanting to send narrator John Pirhalla* back to high school speech class. And flunk him on principle the first time so he has to take it twice. 

As for Pirhalla's co-narrator, who's really more of a guest voice but that's not really officially a thing, Katherine Chin, she is fine. I can't say more than that, though, because of a weird choice the producers made to have Pirhalla voice everybody's dialogue, including the female characters', including Mickey's beloved, Nasha, who is actually so important she's basically a co-protagonist... in the bog-standard "raise your pitch above your normal speaking level, add lots more vaguely "feminine" breathiness and give most of your lines a flirty tone" style that way too many male narrators use for female or enby characters. Why do they have Chin at all, then? Only to play Nasha when her dialogue comes over the radio. Um, whut.

Anyway, the book is good enough to make up for all of that. I'm a big fan of the book. I recommend it to everybody who likes science fiction. But I'll urge anybody who decides to read to to do so in digital format or in good old fashioned print.*

Well, except for one kind of neat thing about the audio versus other formats: in the book, we come to know a non-human character called Speaker, who not only learned human language wholly from years of eavesdropping on radio conversations between Mickey and his best friend, Berto, but has also exactly duplicated Berto's voice and speech patterns; if they heard but couldn't see the one speaking, nobody could ever tell Speaker and Berto apart until it became a matter of each character's unique perspective or experiences being communicated, i.e., the voice said something that only Speaker or Berto could or would say. Berto is a daredevil pilot who talks like Buzz Lightyear. Speaker is a constructed representative of a vast hive mind and its body, like all of its kind, is a vaguely insectoid/trilobite-ish form. So imagine a Buzz Lightyear and a giant pill bug who also talks like Buzz Lightyear on a desperate mission together. It's amusing in audio book format in a way print could never match. If that sounds like fun to you and you think I'm being overly sensitive (I mean, I've coached high school speech teams to state championships a few times so I've made a lot of kids pay attention to details like this, so yes, I am more sensitive than most when it comes to vocal narrative) to the Verbal Shrug issue, hey, sample it and see. 

Anyway...

Our story picks up two years after Mickey Barnes, seventh of his name, resigned his job as the "Expendable" for humanity's beachhead colony on an icy frost clod of a planet called Nefilheim. A mission's Expendable is a person with no particular skill set of the kind that would ordinarily merit a spot on a mission but is simply willing to do all the dangerous/fatal tasks that need doing on that mission. If an Expendable dies in the line of duty, a new clone of that person is quickly grown in a vat and imprinted with the previous clone's memories and personality from up to the moment the prior clone last submitted to Upload. The memories might thus include the prior's experience of dying from, say, being the first to try eating vegetation or meat from a new planet, or being attacked by a new creature, or exposure to radiation while making emergency repairs to the kind of thing that emits radiation.

Mickey 7 explored the consequences of an Expendable actually surviving a supposed death but only making it back home after he, presumed dead by the rest of the crew, had already been replaced by his clone. In the process, Mickey discovered that an alien monster (that happens to be what everyone thinks killed him) is actually sentient. And in his dealings with the monster species that I don't want to get too specific about, one important thing that I can't help spoiling happens: he left a very powerful antimatter bomb in their possession. Or at least told his commanding officer that he did.

As Antimatter Blues gets going, Mickey's colony finds itself sorely in need of getting that bomb back, not to use as a weapon or to blow anything up, but to drain of its antimatter for fuel to keep the colony going through a projected planetary winter that could very well render the whole colony extinct. And we find out /are reminded what Mickey really did with the bomb, which becomes a McGuffin in a vastly entertaining plot that involves renewing relations with the alien Creepers, whose vast underground labyrinth of a habitat is very near the humans' dome, meeting another population of Creepers who are even weirder and scarier than humanity's neighbors, and getting inextricably and irrevocably involved in inter-population politics as they race to recover humanity's only hope for survival. In the process we get to know Berto and Nasha a lot better than we did last novel. Nasha especially gets a chance to become a more important character in her own right, starting with a pretty grim and close look at what it has been like for her to watch her boyfriend die of various hazards seven times. Amusingly, she gets referred to as "The Nasha" by the Creepers, whose perspective on her, remember, has been formed by supposedly private conversations between her boyfriend Mickey and her fellow pilot, Berto, both of whom affect an exaggerated fear of/respect for Nasha at all times. In other words, the Creepers think that Nasha is pretty much the biggest badass ever, and she comes pretty close to proving them right.

Mickey, also, gets to show a bit more general heroism as he is all but shoved into command of the mission, since it's his fault the antimatter is out of human control. He makes a hell of an ambassador to an alien race, but his unique experiences as a former Expendable give him an equally unique perspective on what it means to be an individual, a concept he has great difficulty explaining to the two flavors of hive mind with which he has to negotiate.

But of course it's the Creeper called Speaker who steals the show this time around, weirdly charismatic, stern, occasionally baffled by us weirdo humans and very, very committed to his Nest's survival. It's the Speaker's presence in this second book that really makes it an even better read than its predecessor and makes me hope for a few more Mickey7 novels to come. Mickey and the Creepers. I mean, come on!

*Who sounds enough like Casey Kasem that I was constantly waiting to hear this. And so I hereby renew my plea for blooper reels at the end of audio books. They would be the most fun. And if there are still more than a handful of home-producers out there, I absolutely want to hear the takes spoiled/enhanced by your pets (*cough* especially Paul E. Cooley *cough*). Come on. You know it would enhance the whole audio book experience and thus allow your special friends to contribute a tiny bit more to your (hahahahaha) livelihood (hohohohoho).

**I have a terrible, terrible time with paperbacks, especially trade paperbacks, because I can't physically handle or manipulate these for more than about 15 minutes per day without searing physical pain and inability to get pretty much anything else done that day. I have a category on most social reading sites I call "On Dead Tree Despite The Pain" into which I put books that I found worth that annoyance and discomfort to read and finish. Guys, I would have read Antimatter Blues in a mass market paperback if I had to. In fact, I seriously considered DNFing the audio book (no sunk cost except a tiny bit of my tax dollars) and waiting for a cheap used paperback to wash up at Alibris or my local used bookstore. But I really got into the story so I forged on through.