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. 

Olga Ravn's THE EMPLOYEES (Tr Martin Aiken)

I know you say I'm not a prisoner here, but the objects have told me otherwise. - Statement 021

I really, really wonder if Olga Ravn is a fan of some of the same weirdass international cinema that I am, because this novel made me think of some of the strangest films I've seen. It's even, kind of, structured like they are, its narrative decidedly non-linear and divided into little vignettes we're left to ponder, rearrange, connect for ourselves into something that feels meaningful enough to be a story.

In the case of The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 23rd Century, what we are given is a collection of statements from workers on a spaceship called the Six Thousand (six thousand of what, we are left to ponder) that has taken on a collection of not-entirely-inanimate objects found on a planet on the ship's route to an unspecified destination. The statements chiefly concern the emotional effects the various objects have on the members of the crew, and appear to maybe be a sort of threat assessment, or at least to be trying to tease out what idiosyncrasies each employee, of which there are some who were born, some who were created, some who will die, and some who will never die,  has that make them more or less susceptible to these effects. 

From the very start The Employees had me thinking of visuals from some of the weirdest bits of fantasy filmmaking I've yet encountered; the first "statement," for instance,  has an employee talking about a large machine they regard as female. The employee is responsible for cleaning it and mentions that "One day she laid an egg." Immediately I was reminded of one of the more perverse scenes in Alejandro Jodorowsky's feature-length freak-out, The Holy Mountain and of course I'm talking about "The Love Machine." 

Simultaneously I also thought of the weird alien bio-contraptions in Katsuhito Ishii's Funky Forest: The First Contact -- especially once I encountered this passage:

Despite your numbering system, which I personally find reasonable indeed, I can inform you that the crew employs countless unofficial names for the objects, some more improper than others. Examples include: the Reverse Strap-On, the Gift, the Dog, the Half-Naked Bean... My own impression is that this idiosyncratic naming process is an indication that crew members feel a need to appropriate these objects in their own way, reducing the distance between crew member and object, and establishing a form of intimacy, so to speak. It's my assumption that naming in this way renders the object harmless, scaling down its strangeness and assimilating it into a reality the individual crew member can both relate to and accept, thereby facilitating coexistence with the found objects.

For illustrative purposes, here are some stills from Funky Forest, a film I still feel that not enough of you have given the chance it deserves. This first image, could it not indeed be the Reverse Strap-On? Or perhaps a parent producing a whole new generation of Reverse Strap-Ons?

This second still doesn't really fit any of the names described in the passage above, but in its Cronenbergian intimacy between a strange machine and a person, it uniquely depicts visually the kind of relationship some of the Employees have to the objects on board the generation ship.

If you someday find out that a certain cute house on a certain cute street in Casper, WY was mysteriously stricken by bolts of pure fury and burnt to a cinder, you might later learn that Olga Ravn is not, in fact, a fan of either of these films and is deeply offended by my comparisons. But then again, you might not.

One might also consider the sub-genre that shows up more in TV and video games of "mundane objects imbued somehow with weird/supernatural powers or properies" like The Lost Room, Warehouse 13, or Remedy's magnificent video game, Control. Since the objects under discussion seem, most of them, to be at least partly alive, though, I go for the Funky Forest imagery.

Another work of art The Employees brought strongly to mind as I read it is something Ravn might find a more flattering one to be compared to: the epic poem by Nobel Laureate Harry Nilsson and the 2018 film adapted from it, Aniara, which features a technology that swamps the entire sensoria of passengers on an accidental generation ship with detailed recordings of natural scenes of Earth that was. It's only when this artificial nostalgia machine finally burns out that the passengers finally face the reality of their fate and go mad from existential dread. This doesn't quite happen aboard the ship in The Employees, but it always feels like a possibility as many workers express longings for scenes and experiences in the natural world of Earth that are no longer available to them, and reveal that they have sort of incorporated some of the more evocative objects into their fantasies of walking through a forest or sitting by a babbling brook.

Those of us from Earth, we can hardly talk to each other. We're weighed down with memories of where we came from and what we left behind. Seeing the others on the ship, speaking to them, all it does is make me unhappy.

While most of the statements give us little glimpses of life with the objects, some invite us to ponder other matters, as when an employee who is evidently of the "created" category wonders just how meaningful that status really is:

I know I'm only humanoid and that it's not the same. But I look like a human, and feel the way humans do. I consist of the same parts. Perhaps all that's needed is for you to change my status in your documents? Is it a question of name? Could I be human if you called me one?

In an age where some of us seem to be agitating for up to (or maybe even more than; it all depends on how bigoted one is) half of us to lose our status as fully human, this bit hits pretty damned hard, as I'm sure it was meant to. 

It hits even harder in a statement or so later, when another -- or possibly the same* -- employee tells us "You can't cry, you're not programmed to cry" in response to the employee's reaction to the news that they will be allocated less time with their human co-workers : and that you want me to stay with my kind." One now wonders -- are these four categories of worker inherent in the individuals' beings, or assigned/imposed by Authority? Is the difference between those who will die and those who will never die that some are functionally immortal, or that they've been artificially designated for their fates?

As is probably inevitable with a storytelling structure like this one, we finish The Employees with possibly more questions than we started with. What happened to the Earth? What does the Employer want with the objects? Is the distinction between humans and humanoids even real (one of the few questions that kind of get answered, but only kind of)? Is this actually a meaningful mission, or just an experiment to see how much people will put up with? What are the objects? What's the deal with Cadet 04? What the hell happened in the canteen? Who was Dr. Lund and where is he now? Is he the speaker in Statement 160?

When does Tadanobu Asano show up?

Olga Ravn, you've got my attention. 

*The statements themselves are given unique individual numbers, presented in sequence but not in their original entirety (some numbers are missing) but the employees aren't. 

Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's ASSASSIN OF REALITY (Tr Julia Metov Hersey, Narr Jessica Bell)

There is a kind of deeply pessimistic magical thinking that occurs to some people when they find themselves on the verge of falling in love (or, really, already having so fallen but not ready to admit it). We say to ourselves something like, oh no now God or the universe or fate or my enemies have another hostage for my good behavior. They know they can't actually hurt me directly because I'm hopeless already, but they can hurt this person that I might love, and hurt me that way. 

Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's Vita Nostra books are all about exploring what this means when it's literally true. Last novel, the hostages were heroine Sasha Samokhina's mother and Mum's new husband and baby. If Sasha didn't study hard at the weird school she'd been coerced into attending, terrible things would happen to her family. Examples were made when she tried to test this, even as she (was told that she) gave up her humanity in order to become something entirely else; her studies were preparing her to wield incredible power, and so there had to be incredible consequences if she showed signs of misusing it.

At the first novel's end, when she took the all important third year Placement Exam at the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies, Sasha, already acknowledged as the school's finest current student and poised to become a uniquely powerful Imperative Verb in the Great Speech, manifested as something even more alarming and unexpected than that. An Imperative Verb could profoundly influence other Parts of Speech (as she learned when she understood that her then-boyfriend, a Subjunctive Verb, would never really have freedom or free will while they were together), but the Password she turned out actually to be is more powerful yet. Too powerful. There must be consequences.

This second novel, Assassin of Reality, starts off with an imposition of some of those consequences, conducted in such a way as to free her original hostages for her good behavior from their roles, and introduce a new one: an attractive airline pilot, Jaroslav, who grew up in the town of Torpa and flies a regular route in and out of its municipal airport. They are immediately and ferociously attracted to one another, but it all feels rather forced and Sasha senses the hand of her terrifying advisor, Farit Kozhennikov in it all. 

It is, of course, only one of her problems. 

As she begins her fourth year at the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies, Sasha is, oddly, warmly welcomed back by her classmates, even those who previously resented her, but regarded with outright hostility by their most important teacher: their frighteningly altered former gym teacher. This teacher, Dima, whom everyone had been led to regard as a gentle himbo, is in fact every bit as scary as Farit -- maybe even more so, as he shifts between his himbo and his steely-eyed bastard personas moment to moment and without warning. And he teaches the most difficult and dangerous class yet, in which students must examine and manipulate diagrams that can manipulate them back, for the worse. 

It is Dima who declares Sasha an "Assassin of Reality" but won't explain why, and flatly refuses to teach her. Another instructor at the school with whom she has a better relationship tries to help her make up for this severe handicap, but with limited results -- and strangely joins her advisor Farit in encouraging her to let a love affair with Jaroslav happen! She needs, they tell her, a way to recharge herself, get away from it all, and, most importantly, a source of fear to balance out the spells of omnipotence that have led Sasha to believe, in her grander moments, that she can fix everything that's wrong with the world, even the fact that people have to die.

Speaking of dying, Farit has shown up with a new way of using Jaroslav to compel Sasha's good behavior, a way that doesn't harm a hair on Jaroslav's head, and is even crueler than casually reminding her that any airplane can crash. And it's as subtle as when the Tenth Doctor asks Harriet Jones' aide-de-camp if Harriet maybe looks "a bit tired." And as devastating.

Some readers have complained that Assassin of Reality isn't as interesting as Vita Nostra, which was, after all, intended as a stand-alone, but I think it's every bit as interesting, just differently so. Vita Nostra was first and foremost a coming-of-age, structured by Sasha's progress through her first three years at Torpa; Assassin of Reality, while still taking place almost entirely at the school, has far murkier territory to explore: adulthood, with its new responsibilities, burdens, freedoms and fears. Sasha hasn't graduated yet but the Placement Exam she didn't really pass so much as obviate at the end of Vita Nostra was still very much a rite of passage (which not everybody survived), and her life after it is very, very different.

Part of this is because we finally find out what happens to Torpa students after they pass the Placement Exam; first- and second-year students are simply told that third years move on to study "elsewhere" after Placement, but it turns out it's really "elsewhen" -- they are transported as a group 15 years into the future, effectively cutting them off completely from their families and former lives in general (with the exception of poor Kostya, Sasha's first friend at the school, who has the dubious honor of being the son of their terrifying advisor, Farit)! That this kind of means that maybe Jaroslav was just a kid when Sasha endured her first three years at Torpa is never really explored but it's hard not to think about anyway.

Moreover, this book masterfully draws out a thread of ambiguity, if possibility that has been there in this story all along. Except for Sasha's winged flights over Torpa and her deeply weird experiences of profoundly altered perspective, we haven't seen much that is overtly magical or supernatural. Even the supposed time travel could really just have been accomplished by updating the decor of the Institute and adding some newer technology.* 

There is always the possibility that Farit has simply manipulated Sasha and her classmates, threatened them, confused them, spirited them away from their loved ones, shut them in with a bunch of equally vulnerable young people and made them work to exhaustion and beyond at stuff that makes no sense. They get little sleep, are forbidden most outlets for normal youthful energy, and become convinced that their teachers and Farit have godlike power over them. What does that all sound like?

It sounds kind of like a cult, to me. Sasha wouldn't be the first young woman to become convinced, through a series of events and circumstances and, yes, abuse,  engineered to be as bizarre as possible, that she's had a few supernatural experiences. Possibly with the help of psychedelics in the tea everybody is always sipping?

"It's too much to just give up, isn't it?" Sasha was dizzy, as if Farit's voice was alcohol of the highest proof, or a warm poison flooding her ears. 

And just when Jaroslav seems poised to become a source of actual strength for Sasha, when he and his father seem about to become a new family to which she might gladly belong (she even starts to consider having a child), Farit, with just the barest suggestion, turns her against her new love. And it never occurs to her that Farit might have simply lied to her. By the time he poisons her love with a few words, she is convinced of only two possibilities: that Jaroslav and his father have been lying all along, or that while they might have been real and honest and sincere before, Farit has such power over time and reality that he has reached back in the history of their lives to make his whispered slanders into the truth. But the simplest and most likely possibility is not the correct one in this mixed up world of Sasha's. 

This is, of course, the least interesting way to understand what's been going on in these books and I don't necessarily espouse it. I do, however, admire the skill and care that went into constructing the world of these novels, such that the mundane interpretation is even possible. I plan to go back and read these first two books again before I tackle the third, Migrant which, I'm told, has already been translated by Ms. Hersey, but does not yet seem to have a publication date in English. I have, however, been working very hard on my Russian vocabulary, and an ebook of the original Russian edition was very inexpensive so maybe... maybe I'll jump the gun. 

Of course, I said that about the third of Rodrigo Fresán's Tres Partes, which was published in English before I was even halfway through the Spanish edition, so pfft. I will note, though, that my Russian is way better than my Spanish. 

Either way, I'm excited for Volume Three, even though this second book had a very satisfactory ending on its own. 

*Just because they were using physical books, pencils, paper and blackboards in Vita nostra didn't necessarily mean that plasma touchscreens, smart phones and computers didn't exist, after all, just that the school didn't provide them. This could be for reasons of budget, aesthetics or the behind-the-times requirements of pedagogy.

Jack Womack's AMBIENT

My next read in Jack Womack's Dryco universe, Ambient leads off with a slightly alarming precis of how this world came to be, a series of events that we witnessed peripherally in other novels but is nicely encapsulated here. You'll see right away what made my eyebrows shoot into the stratosphere:

After the Long Island accident and the birth of Ambients; after the revelation of the Q documents in the loss of spirit thereof; after the economic emergency, the resulting currency devaluation, and what was called, by some, the unavoidable regrouping of structures, came the twelve months known by Ambients, and now by most, as the Goblin Year.

Our narrator, Seamus "Shameless" O'Malley, whom we met in Elvissey as the CEO of Dryco, then immediately shares that his mother died in a pro-life riot.

Ambient first saw print in 1987.

I have long maintained that evaluating science fiction on its prescience is the least interesting way to talk about it, and to that notion I still hold, but I couldn't let this bit just float by. What the hell kind of Q documents was Womack thinking about back in 1987?*

Anyway, Ambient. What is specifically meant by the term "Ambient" in this novel is another one of those slippery matters we're left to figure out through context for quite a while, like Elvissey's "regooding" or the still-mysterious-to-me "jabbernowling," but as for the novel bearing Ambient as its title, it is a prequel to Elvissey and but seems again like a sequel to Random Acts of Senseless Violence; an early scene likely even features a counterpart to the father of RAoSV's Lola**, here working a terrible, demaning job as a bookstore clerk in a world that has so devalued literacy that many (including O'Malley as he begins this novel) seem to regard it as an all but unattainable skill. 

In this scene, O'Malley, is a sort of body man to the current CEO of Dryco, Mister Dryden, a casually cruel man who takes pleasure in mistreatment of lesser beings for its own sake. In their encounter with the clerk who reminded me of Lola's father, Dryden throws the books he selects at the poor clerk, who is expected to catch them even as they come to number in the double digits while the clerk scrambles to follow him around the bookstore. When, inevitably, the poor clerk drops one, Dryden complains that it is now slightly scratched and demands that the store manager (whom Lola hates so for his own mistreatment of her father in RAoSV) get him a new and undamaged one, even though the damage is Dryden's fault if it's anyone's. To drive his point home, he smashes the scratched book over the manager's head until its binding splits, so it's truly unsalable. The store manager merely accepts the abuse as his due. We are spared what vengeance he takes on the poor clerk later on. 

O'Malley, like Dryden's sort-of mistress, sort-of hired gladiator, Avalon (who is written as a conventionally attractive, exaggeratedly cis bombshell but I kept imagining as a cute trans girl played by Charlie Jane Anders in the movie adaptation), merely watches as the scene unfolds. Just another shopping trip with the boss...

We know from the jacket copy of Ambient that this is more or less the story of how O'Malley comes to replace Dryden as the head honcho at Dryco, so I reckon it's important that we see that Dryden is a monster and O'Malley a decent guy... except the mature and empowered O'Malley we met in Elvissey wasn't too nice either, so it's hard, going into Ambient, to regard O'Malley as a sympathetic character whose point of view we will gladly share. I wonder how different this experience is for people who read Ambient before Elvissey.

We learn early in the book that there are more three fairly rigid castes in American society in the Dryco universe: owners and their servants (not slave owners as such, but rather what we would now consider oligarchs. What they own are the companies that own everything else), "boozhies" (the old bourgeois) and the Superfluous (what used to be both the working poor and the indigent, now lumped together in one big group "felt to deserve no shielding from the visscitudes of life). 

Womack, by the way, even anticipated the work from home trend, but Dryco at least has not only quashed it but found a way to make required office hours even more hellish than they are now:

A red light flashed over one of the cubicles. One of the office maintenants rolled over and unlocked the stocks that held the young woman's feet. It guided her across the room, toward the lav; her white cane helped her in tapping out the way. The system had flaws; some employees went insane -- they were fired -- and some grew blind -- the ones whose fingers slipped were given Braille keyboards, at cost.

Employees are literally chained to their desks and disabled employees are made to pay for their own accommodations. That last bit didn't surprise me all that much though; at my last job I had to buy my own vertical computer mice and split keyboard. To paraphrase Womack's buddy William Gibson, the dystopia is already here; it's just not evenly distributed yet. It's pretty funny, though, having O'Malley call attention to this detail, knowing as we do what kind of garbage he's going to allow/cause on his own watch in Elvissey. 

The Statue of Liberty's arm was blown off; there was a photo of the amputee, rather resembling an Ambient in her newmade loss.

Which brings us to Ambients, finally revealed as a subculture straight out of Gandahar/Light Years except they don't have blue skin. Originally the label -- which they are very proud to explain as referring to the fact that as disabled human beings in an urban environment, they are both everywhere and seemingly invisible (it just takes lots of effort not to see them, if you know what I mean) -- only referred to a small population of children who were born on Long Island after The Incident -- possibly a nuclear detonation -- there, but over time Ambient society has come to encompass not only anybody born with birth defects or disfigurements but also anybody who, like O'Malley's sister Enid***, have come so to identify with them that they have voluntarily had body parts amputated. The Ambients have developed a society partially encompassing the Ambient music genre (but not as in Brian Eno's airport music; as described it sounds a lot more like some kind of very energetic punk/thrash that just happens to be played by, e.g. one-armed bassists) and partly a characteristic increased agility forced by the need to function in a world that does not accommodate their lacks of arms or other disabilities. It's as hard not to think of Philip K. Dick's Hoppy Harrington as it is not to think of the Prester John-inspired blue mutants of Gandahar, though this novel's group lack those people's psionic abilities. You still don't want to mess with them, though. 

Interestingly, carrying on with a theme I first started really noticing in Elvissey, the Ambients are basically Manichaeans, or at least something close to Gnostics -- alt-universe Elvis from Elvissey was actually a pretty doctrinaire Valentinian Gnostic, which mean that upon learning that Dryco expected him to act as a god, Elvis got very, very upset and really didn't want to. In Valentinian Gnosticism and related doctrines, the creator god/Demiurge is actually evil, having captured countless souls and imprisoned them in the material universe to torture them and keep them ignorant of the real, radiant and beautiful nature of the actual universe beyond their capacities. We don't really get an idea of how widespread this faith might have been in the alt-universe, but it might explain the streak of nihilism that characterizes that nasty place.

I found Ambient interesting in its details but the least interesting in terms of plot an execution of the Dryco books so far. As far as its plotting, Ambient is basically a mob novel with noir flavoring as O'Malley gets drawn into his employer's long-fantasized plan to finally get rid of The Old Man - Dryden's ancient father, who founded Dryco on a drug-smuggling fortune with the help of a Latin American cartel or two, then seized on various opportunities posed by the disintegration of civil society as outlined in the precis with which I started this post. The kind of guy who can do all that (with the help of an equally ruthless and sociopathic wife who is long dead when Ambient gets going) is never a very good father, so nobody is surprised when Dryden drafts O'Malley for his final vengeance and dangles Avalon as bait/reward. There are double-crosses and plenty more random acts of violence and we do get to see more of what's become of New York but I'm running out of steam on these novels. I'm still going to read the rest of them, but I need a break from all of the explosions and gunfire and inhumanity. Woof.

*Actually, I know what kind of Q we're dealing with here, because like our Kipple King, Philip Kindred Dick, before him, Jack Womack seems to enjoy getting lost in the weeds of biblical apocrypha; in this case Q stands for Qumran. And Kipple we shall be if the other Q people latch on to this Q.

**I assumed this was indeed Lola's father while reading that passage, but what can only be Lola herself shows up in an insane scene later in the book, at an age and in a state that puts this story well past the time of her father's demise.

***Who is revealed to have attended the same tony private girls' school, Brearley, as RAoSV's Lola Hart and was likely one of her schoolmates. 

Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's VITA NOSTRA (Tr Julia Meitov Hersey, Narr Jessica Ball)

Book review sites, jacket copy and other official and unofficial arms of what passes for book promotion these days all seem to regard the remarkable Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's Vita Nostra as "dark academia" but the inestimable Popqueenie (to whom I owe a million more thanks for recommending this book to me) and I agree that where this book and its sequels really belong is in a category we've created, Beyond Yacht Rock-style, as The Magic of Language. To wit, it has more in common with books like Pontypool Changes Everything, The Flame Alphabet and Embassytown than it does with such wizarding school classics as the TERFing Classist Lady's books and Lev Grossman's The Magicians. Most of all, it is of a kind with R.F. Kuang's Babel, which overlaps these two made-up sub-genres in much the same way.

The school in Vita Nostra, the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies -- is a lot more rigorous than most literary magic schools, and I don't just say this because they use actual Latin on matriculation day. The curriculum is much more conceptual, bizzare, nearly incomprehensible, because in the Dyachenkos' magical system, the students first must undergo a lot of weird training designed to fundamentally alter, first their neurological makeups and, later, their very nature as physical beings on this earth, before they can ever even dream of exercising any abilities that defy or alter the laws of physics and other norms we consider as constituting realilty. Indeed; Vita Nostra feels to be fundamentally concerned with what the effect of supernatural-ish abilities would be on a human's nervous system than with depicting any jolly accidents with turning each other into critters or misfiring with a magic wand.

Our point of view character is a young woman, Sasha Samokhina, who catches the notice of a Torpa recruiter while on vacation with her mother. As Sasha's long-divorced Mum meets a wonderful new man and cautiously begins a relationship at a seaside resort, Sasha is stalked by an unsettling man in dark glasses and dark clothing that might at first seem like a Man in Black type but turns out to be much stranger and scarier; without ever spelling anything out or giving any overt demonstration of his power or how it works, he asserts a sudden and uncontestable power over Sasha. Within moments of his finally addressing her, she just knows that if she doesn't obey him, he has the power to destroy everything she loves or could love. Her Mum and Mum's new boyfriend, Valentin, are suddenly hostages to Sasha's good behavior.

Through a series of bizarre commands and requirements that begin with her being trapped in a time loop reliving the same single day of her vacation endlessly until she finally agrees to a bizarre sort of exercise program, and follow Sasha through her final year of high school, this man, Farit Kozhennikov, steers her right clear of her intended future -- a philology degree from her local university, which she will attend while continuing to live at home with her Mum, and someday a job as a professor -- and into enrollment at the mysterious Torpa Institute, where the professors are strange and the curriculum even stranger; their first year at school is largely spent poring over paragraph after paragraph of complete gibberish, which they must memorize and recite without ever being told what it's all for.

Of course what it is for is to begin transforming them from mere humans into, and here's where the Magic of Language stuff comes in -- parts of what is known as The Great Speech. And while most of the transformations are internal and not readily visible, some wild talents like Sasha's manifest early and unpredictably in the form of unstable metamorphoses that in some cases -- Sasha's and one of her stranger professors -- include the development of wings. Wings that actually let them fly about above the rooftops of Torpa late at night. 

Indeed, were it not for the fact that Vita Nostra -- the title coming from the Gaudeamus sung on the students' first day at the school -- contains no references to religion or spirituality beyond this title at all, I'd almost suspect that the school exists actually to turn humans into something very like angels, and yes of course once again I thought of my patron saint Jacopo Belbo (actually Umberto Eco, of course)'s quip that "God created the world by speaking; he didn't send a telegram" as Sasha's teachers carefully allow her only little drabs here and there of useful information about why she's at this school and being put through these courses of gibberish reading and, later, strenuous application of a peculiar form of mental geometry exercises.

Meanwhile, this is still at least in part a coming of age/school days novel, which means that yes, there is a soupçon of teen romance. The first fellow student Sasha meets upon arriving in the out-of-the-way town of Torpa, Kostya, becomes a bit more than her first friend, and she has another short but fairly intense relationship with a younger student in her second year at the school. These never overwhelm the overall plot or flavor of the story, though; they are all but inevitable experiences in a young person's life but they are very much not the point, which might frustrate readers who come into this expecting more dark academia but suited me just fine.

What I've found most remarkable about this book is how little anything gets spelled out for us but how perfectly we feel we understand what's at stake and what the consequences might be for Sasha if she fails, making the closing scenes of Vita Nostra a marvel of tension and anguish for all that what is actually going on is just the handing out of exam papers for the third year Placement Exam toward which they've all been working, the midway point of a Torpa education beyond which an impenetrable wall of mystery stands between first, second and third-year students and the final two years before graduate school.

Vita Nostra doesn't quite end on a cliffhanger as such, but does end on a note of possibility and ambiguity as Sasha experiences an even weirder Placement Exam than we've been led to expect. Having been given a general idea of the kind of part of the Great Speech she is going to manifest as and then Reverberate, she and we think maybe we know what's coming next, but boy do we not. So it was a good thing that a sequel, Assassin of Reality, has already been a) translated and b) released on audio; Jessica Ball's crisply British delivery was both enjoyable enough and unobtrusive enough for me to wish to continue this series on audio -- and I had a credit waiting to use to get that one, which I'm already devouring. And, well, there is a third book out in the world and it's already been translated, per Julia Meitov Hersey, but I don't know when it's going to be available and I'm getting pretty good at reading Russian and the Russian language ebook edition was just three bucks and so...

Jack Womack's ELVISSEY

I, too had been cut loose, bereft of work, of friendship, of love, allowed only to devote life and time to readying one in whom I didn't believe for one I couldn't believe to lull those who, against reason, did believe.

I'm going to noodle a lot about language and weird little questions this book inspired, but please don't think that because I do so means this book is not an exciting or eventful read. It is that and more. So much more!

I was last December years old when I realized that Jack Womack's amazing Random Acts of Senseless Violence was part of a series. Or at least a grouping of novels set in a shared Dryco Cinematic Universe. And that there are more than a handful of these Dryco books. Yippee!

The first-for-me* of these other books, Elvissey, is more or less a direct sequel to RAoSV, which I re-read at the beginning of this year. And, if possible, it packs some even bigger emotional wallops than its predecessor. As in buckle up. But also...

The characters in the Dryco universe speak an argot that is easy to understand if you don't try to do so, but gets more difficult to grasp the more you think about it. It's beyond how Lola Harte, the heroine of RAoSV, wrote in her diary that formed that novel, but not in the way I had figured it would be; the overlapping characters, Iz and Judy, are all grown up now but instead of speaking something more like the modern American English that we know, betokening the greater sophistication of adulthood in contrast to 12-year-old Lola's schoolgirl prose, Iz, Judy and all their colleagues sound like they come from Pohl and Kornbluth's Space Merchants world by way of Darmok's planet, with a lot of corporate jargon and buzzwords thrown in. Nouns are verbed, verbs are nouned, aphorisms are condensed (my favorite phrase: "You're mountaining this molehill" with "an exaltation of interpreters" a close second - in which "interpreters" is used in the sense of those who embody and act rather than render speech from one language into another, as a close second. The "exaltation" is one of Elvis impersonators!), all manner of portmanteaus and inherited malapropisms appear, and some terminology is so opaque as to constitute a mystery at least as compelling as any mechanisms of plot or character. "Regooding," for instance. How creepy and Orwellian is this neologism, really? It's baffling as the story starts, and we're left to soak up its meaning via context.**

This would be maddening and even a reason to DNF a novel if a lesser writer than Jack Womack were the author.

But so, what's Elvis got to do, got to do with it? I'll get to that, but first let's enjoy all the different things this title could mean. Perhaps it is an epic journey undertaken, not by Odysseus but by Elvis? Or maybe "Elvissey" denotes a thing or things associated with Elvis, as we might call, say, Graceland or a Las Vegas wedding chapel an Elvissey (like an abbey)? Though I at least would probably wind up sticking an "R" in there to make the stand-alone noun, as in an "Elvisry." Then again, maybe it's an adjective. Hey, that was Elvissey. How Elvissey? A little Elvissey? A lot Elvissey? The Elvisseyest thing ever? We eventually learn that it is none of these things but a completely legit other, proving that Womack thought about this even more than I did. 

See what you've done to my brain this time, Mr. Womack? I hope you happy. Happify?

"All Elvii bewail their lot... Digging oases of pain in deserts of comfort... Such jabbernowling frets and hinders," a character observes early in the story. This little speech is a perfect example of how this argot is both breezily simple and fiendishly complex. Leaving aside what the "Elvii" are for a moment, he's basically rephrasing our contemporary aphorism "some people'd bitch if their water's too wet" (or a yet more contemporary "now and then it's important to stop and bitch about the roses"), and we nod along because ain't that the truth, these Elvii have it great and they're still complaining but then what the hell is "jabbernowling" and is it something that frets, as in performs the act of fretting, or has the argot of Elvissey transformed the simple verb "fret," meaning something like "to fuss or worry about something" into a transitive verb, requiring an object, meaning something like "to cause someone to fuss or worry about something?"

I still haven't parsed what "jabbernowling" is, though I'm pretty sure it has something to do with pointless verbalizing, as in "jabber."

With all this extra musing on language waiting to pounce from every page, Elvissey is a very demanding book for its length and its pulpy plot. 

Because oh yeah, the plot. For there is indeed a plot taking place amid all the Fun With Language.

It's even easy to summarize: Iz, Lola's closest girlfriend from the harrowing second half of RAoSV, survived their teenage years as New York City fell apart and has married a wonderful but troubled man and the two of them have been "Regooded" by Dryco (the only corporate overlord you'll ever need, who have taken over most, if not all, of the functions of government, including the enormous project of rehabilitating New York City with an eye toward making it a utopian City of the Future... for a million inhabitants and no more) as a field team the company sends on vitally important but seemingly impossible missions, though ordinarily she is the administrative assistant to DryCo's second-in-command that being Judy) and her husband is a high-level security guard. 

In this case, Iz and husband John are to travel back in time/ visit a parallel universe and abduct one Elvis Aaron Presley from when he was at the height of his youth and beauty, and thus his value to Dryco... and bring him back to their post-collapse New New York to be the messiah for a cult that already exists (these are the Elvii mentioned above, so no, there are not multiple Elvises Presley running around. Or are there?).

This poses another interesting question, of course. This novel was originally published in 1993, when Elvis had only been dead for 16 years or so. I remember occasionally encountering people back then who staunchly believed that Elvis was still alive, had faked his death so he could be just another guy in the world who just had to deal with being made by his devotees every once in a while, but who had the whole publicity-industrial complex on his side to keep his secret. His fans who "knew better" were just harmless and amusing kooks, back then, decades before Q-Anon had people camping out at Dealy Plaza awaiting the second coming of JFK and JFK Jr. We didn't know how good we had it. 

But anyway, now in our own 2023, 30 years since the publication of Elvissey and some 45 years since Elvis died, with Elvis so long gone that even his only daughter has passed on, if Q-Anon had never happened, would there still be people running around who disbelieve in Elvis' death? Given that he would be 88 years old now and wasn't really looking too good at age 42, would his cult have persisted in our world? I would expect it to be much diminished at the very least, in a world without Q-Anon and all of its weird cultural baggage, but, would there be, or are there, many people in 2023 who are still fanatically devoted to the erstwhile King of Rock'n'Roll?

In Iz's contemporary universe of 2033, the answer to that question is enough to cause problems for John's and her employer, Dryco. Meaning its CEO, Mr. O'Malley is a god-king of a kind we found amusingly improbable back in 1993 but now, well, *gestures at universe*. I mean, people like to argue about whether we live in Huxley's dystopia or Orwell's, etc but a case sure could be made for it really being Womack's.

Anyway, O'Malley's fee-fees are hurt because so many Elvii worship the wrong god-king and thank Elvis for all the good (?) that O'Malley has done for them.

So obviously the solution is to kidnap alt-universe Elvis and let him deal with the Elvii -- but only after he agrees to promote O'Malley's aims and goals and ego. And tell them O'Malley has massive, manly hands, really. 

But then Iz and John cross over -- in a simply amazing car you're going to have to read the book to get to appreciate -- and find just how alternate this other universe is; the culture shock isn't merely that it's 1954. In this universe there was never a U.S. Civil War and slaves weren't freed until 1905, and while we think car culture is bad in our world, the interstate highway system in alt world has massive elevated 20-lane behemoths all over the place; even bigger swaths of the neighborhoods that were sacrificed to the Eisenhower system in our world were obliterated to the point of many of them just not existing anymore. And as for the culture off those highways, it's a gross QOP wet-dream of segregation, sexual harassment, revisionist historical interpretations even of stuff that it shares with Iz's universe, etc.

And so, its Elvis is nothing like what Iz and her people have expected to find. This Elvis is downtrodden and not at all famous (nobody in white supremacy Disneyland wants to listen to a kid who wants to sing blues instead of oom pa pa), more than a bit violent and entitled and wholly unready for what they're going to ask of him. He winds up complicating every aspect of the plot, from Dryco corporate dynamics to Iz's marriage to John, and sends it all spiraling off in unexpected but wholly satisfying directions. 

In other words, holy shit, this book is good!

*There doesn't seem to be a definitive order in which these books are to be read; they're cataloged like a series but without ordinal numbers. I thought of going in publication order but then I saw that this book tells of the adulthood of some characters from RAoSV so I chose this as my first deliberate read in the Dryco universe. 

**"Regooding" as a concept gets increasingly problematic as the Dryco world unfolds. At first it simply seems to mean something like "rescued from bad circumstances" or "rehabilitated" as a neighborhood might be gentrified or a person lifted out of poverty/ignorance/illness, but then a truly icky aspect kicks in: the existence of a drug called Melaway. The "mel" being the same prefix for darkness/blackness as appears in "melanin." As in this drug turns dark skin light, black hair blonde. Add in some blue contact lenses and Iz, a dark-skinned black girl from the meanest pre-Dryco streets, can pass as a white woman on her mission,  to the alternate universe which is, she is repeatedly told, way more racist than her own. But then, on the eve of her journey, she "concludes her bleach" and admires her naked self in the mirror: "Venus atremble at seaside, another regooded resident to best suit our eternal city." While some later language tries to imply that it is not a purely White ideal that is sought but rather a golden-toned racelessness but one is not sure whether that is the sincere aim and context of "regooding" or just lip-service to a less racist goal, you know?

Jack Womack is a brave writer. 

Andrus Kivirähk's THE MAN WHO SPOKE SNAKISH (Tr Christopher Moseley, Narr Aaron Landon)

I first learned about Andrus Kivirähk via the film adaptation of his novel November, which introduced the world to perhaps the greatest folk horror monster ever, the kratt, a wholly unique monster that starts out life as a pile of junk before animating it via a few drops of blood dedicated to, of course, the devil. Once animated, a kratt will help you with your farm chores and whatnot, but you have to keep it busy or else it will turn on you. In the movie, and so I presume, the novel, one kidnaps a calf and flies it through the air forming with it cinema's very first cowlicopter! Plus, there are werewolves! 

Alas, as of this writing, that novel of his does not appear to have been translated into English yet. But the film is occasionally streaming and was popular enough here that your local public library might have it on DVD, as mine did. So until the book is rendered in English (or you learn Estonian) this will have to do. But wait!

Another of Kivirähk's novels, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is so beloved in the author's home country of Estonia that it has been adapted into a board game there, and has been translated into many languages including English! And it's even available as an audio book, decently performed by new-to-me narrator Aaron Landon, who has a voice in the higher range that isn't the most delightful to hear in straight up narration but Landon did a wonderful job on the many characters' voices, many of whom aren't even human so I'm still pleased with and gladly recommend the audio edition.

Set in medieval Estonia right around the time that land is becoming Christian and adapting its culture along the lines of the rest of Europe, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is chiefly a novel of culture clashes. Our title character and narrator, Leemet, has been raised among a handful of hunter-gatherer forest people, where he fed on a diet of  roast venison, wolf's milk and owl's eggs and listened to stories of his mother and the bear that was her lover (prefiguring Leemet's sister Salma's own relationship with and eventual marriage to another bear) until accidentally killing Leemet's father the day daddy caught them in flagrante. The bear, Leemet learns, was a gentle soul and so regretted killing Leemet's father that it castrated itself and vowed never to see Leemet's mother again. 

And we're off!

We quickly learn that Leemet's people are unusual for much more interesting reasons than their diet or habit of, err, bear-loving; some are still staunchly clinging to a very strict and proscribing paganism centered around "sprites," which beings demand a lot of sacrifices at all times and have very short tempers; others have focused on maintaining a fascinating and useful tradition: the language called "Snakish." A reasonably fluent speaker of the language can, of course, befriend snakes, as Leemet quickly does, acquiring a charismatic and practically-minded adder named Ints for a best friend, but what most of Leemet's people seem to use it for nowadays is to command animals. They summon deer to lie down and allow themselves to be mercifully and humanely killed for meat and hides; they keep herds of wolves in barns like cows and tell them when to sleep and when to meekly allow themselves to be milked and when to allow humans to ride them like horses for their sylvan wars, though those wars are nearly as much a thing of the past as is the Frog of the North, a giant flying amphibian who protects the forest people but who can only be summoned by a large number of fluent Snakish speakers calling it down in unison. Nearly, but not completely; we do get a bit of wolf-riding in The Man Who Spoke Snakish, but it's only one swift element in one of the novel's most exciting and action-packed and anguished scenes.

Meanwhile, "progress" has happened to most of the rest of Estonia. Most of the region's people live in villages, have converted to Christianity (though maybe not as sincerely as the colonizing knights and monks might wish; most of them treat it more like a matter of fashion than of faith), and speak German. And they are very, very keen on proselytizing to the forest people and trying to shame them into moving out of the forest and into the villages, giving up their weird diets and freewheeling ways for lives sowing, tending and harvesting grain, making it into bread, and eating that instead of owl's eggs and wolves' milk. And of course, obeying the foreign monks and soldiers ("Iron Men" as the locals call them) who have subjugated everybody else.

While Leemet is still a boy learning his first Snakish words, he meets a village girl named Magdelena and through her comes into contact with her father, Johannes, the village elder, who barely lets the Lemeet and the boy he was exploring with get a word in edgewise before he's commanding them to go tell their parents that they must move into the village and be christened with new, biblical names and give up their culture altogether, really. Cowed, Leemet kind of agrees but doesn't wind up actually obeying; he'd much rather hang out with his uncle, the greatest still-living speaker of Snakish, who sees in Leemet perhaps the last person who will carry his people's traditions into the future -- even though, because Leemet's father once fell under the sway of village life and wanted to eat bread, Leemet was actually born in the village, and is thus shunned as a village person by about half of the dwindling population of the forest.

He soon comes to have more unusual companions, befriending a pair of local "primates" -- possibly some last remnants of the Neanderthals or Homo Erectus? -- who treasure other animals, especially lice, which they have carefully bred until they have one as big as a child. It loves to go for walks and to go swimming in a nearby lake, becoming a new source of friction among the forest people. 

The giant louse also loves Leemet's childhood tagalong, Hia, a plain and meek little girl whose parents are the most ardent remaining devotees of the sprite cult and force her to behave at all times as a paragon of forest virtue, toiling to exhaustion every day to butcher all the meat needed to feed the hundreds of wolves her family keeps in a gigantic barn, and being force-fed wolf milk even though she can't digest it. The scenes between this giant louse and Hia are some of the most charming in a book that is long on charm -- but also on violence. 

The violence in this book is mostly at least indirectly Leemet's fault; his fascination with the villagers brings his world into more direct conflict with theirs as he discovers to his horror that all the former forest people now living there have not only forgotten Snakish but regard snakes as servants of Satan and mostly refuse to believe that Leemet himself is not a werewolf preying on their pitiful flock of sheep. 

Leemet spends most of the story trapped between orthodoxies and struggling to be left in non-observant peace. The villagers (save one) harangue him to give up his wicked "pagan" ways while the hard core forest people maintain he'll never be good enough for them, either, no, not even when he emerges as the last living human who can speak Snakish. And just when he thinks he's found a way to settle down in happiness with a sweet wife and his snake friends, both orthodoxies attack, demonstrating that his choices will never be respected. 

How Leemet reacts to being doubly hemmed in and to gradually losing everything he cares about may shock some readers, who find themselves rooting for a pair (a long-lost ancestor shows up late in the book and quickly starts stealing every scene he's in!) of violent anti-zealots bent on avenging their losses on the whole rest of the world. It's a strange feeling to be cheering on a gory rampage with a high body count, but Kivirähk has fashioned his tale and portrayed his hero well; by the time the rampage begins we understand completely the feelings behind every blow struck, quixotic though they all are. 

If nothing else, we come away with one important lesson: don't fuck around with Estonians. You never know who might have a pair of venomous fangs concealed in their smile, ready to bite anyone who corners them. Have some respect.