Jim Grimsley

This book kept harkening back to the feelings I had when I first read A Wrinkle in Time; it’s the oddest mix of elements held together by a magical set of characters. The story begins with a transgender girl fleeing her home with her violin, which is a pretty strong hook; the violin acts as a promise that what you’re reading is not what you might expect. This is quickly followed by the revelation that you are in the world of a superstar violin teacher who has sold her soul to the devil; and she quickly becomes involved not only with Katrina, the young girl, but also with a family of aliens who run a local doughnut shop. If this doesn’t pique your interest then I don’t know what to think. The book is lighthearted and full of whimsy but veers into dark moments and dangerous paths, especially when Katrina endures sexual violence, and when she films herself for paying customers on the internet in order to get money to keep herself alive. So this is not a simple book to categorize. Not every moment in the book quite works for me but the missteps are slight and stem mostly from the daring of the fantasy and the pace of the story. The writing is very strong. Katrina is depicted in a way that feels more like the book is aimed at young adults, with a simplicity of soul that is quite appealing, though this portrait is not easy to reconcile with the book’s harder moments. Nevertheless the book is strong and readable and rather glorious in its invention. Just when the soul-selling part of the plot comes to the head, the other storyline comes to the rescue, and the ending is lovely and unexpected. And there are doughnuts. Every part of the book breathes and moves. A special experience.

Many years ago I read the first two installments in this series, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Both of those are excellent and even enthralling reading experiences, especially if you love 90s space opera. Vinge is a masterful writer. So I remembered the books and looked up the third installment of the series, which takes place on Tine’s World ten years after the defeat of the Blight. This will be gobbledygook to anyone who hasn’t read the books but that’s how it goes in SF. This book finishes the tale of the godbuilding screwups from Straumli Realm who flee something they made that goes wrong, crash-landing on a world of intelligent dog-packs. The dogs are self-aware only when there are enough of them, from four to eight, and they bond into a self. There are mechanics to this process that make it fascinating and fluid. What this idea did for the earlier book was to delineate one of the most fascinating schemes for an alien species ever devised. What this idea does for the current book is to stand still and be exactly the same. This is not entirely true but it’s true enough that the book feels the flaw all the way through. It’s a book set on one world where two species are building some kind of synergetic civilization, and details a lot of politics among the rivals spurred by actions in the earlier book. Absent is the element of the Zones of Thought except as as threat to be explained over and over. The earlier book had a cosmological sweep. This book is narrow and relies too heavily on the novelty of the Tines. It’s not that they can’t carry a story, but it’s the case that I expect something else of Vinge. The book is weighed down by a back story that is barely relevant. This is not enough of an evolution for a sequel and not enough of a departure for a good novel. It was a slog to read though after about a third of it had passed I became more absorbed by it.

This lovely book makes its mark through gentle comedy, pristine writing, and the rich oddity of its people, especially Monkey and Samir, the central figures of the journey along the Silk Road. The comic touches within the writing are many, as the author is enamored of word play and of puns, which, while not my favorite practice, is handled here so deftly that it brings a good deal of amusement to the flow of the writing. The remarkable first sentence of the novel introduces a scene that is nearly the high point of the book, the stoning of the twelve-year-old orphan whom we come to know as Monkey and his rescue by the wizened caravan trader Samir, who is a seller of dreams, which is a nice term for a bullshit artist. Samir’s dream-telling operates at a very high level, however, and becomes as entertaining to the reader as it is to his audience. The story that follows is quick, heartfelt, and rich. Many people have been swindled by Samir and have hired killers to enact their revenge. The attempts on Samir’s life are the spine of the plot, and the trick of the writing is that each of these murder attempts takes on a different spin from our expectations. All the while Monkey is coming to understand what love and family really mean, an important lesson for him, since he is an orphan who has experienced almost no affection in his short life. The book reminds me of Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey, especially in its reliance on the voice of the writer, though Nayeri’s book is slighter in some ways, or perhaps more clearly aimed at including younger readers in its audience. It’s a very fine performance.

I read this book because of the connection to China; I’ve never read a book by a gay man from China and was interested in the premise. I missed the fact that this is a self-published novel, but that likely would not have stopped me from reading the book, though it might have helped me understand the quality of the writing, which is quite poor. The grammar is uncertain in the finer points and usage is all over the place. Words are swapped or used in awkward contexts. The writing is that of someone who has learned English well but not with the intimacy required of a fiction writer. The story itself has some compelling moments, especially in the sections written about Hanmei’s childhood, growing up as the son of a gay father who nevertheless accepts a traditional Chinese marriage. Hanmei views his father as a monster due to his treatment of Rulan, Hanmei’s mother. These sections alerted me to the fact that the writer has something important to say but probably not all the tools needed to say it. So I relaxed and read the book for its information rather than its beauty. When Hanmei moves to Los Angeles and embraces his sexuality the book feels less important, though the story is still, at times, engaging. He becomes a gay clone in West Hollywood, haunting clubs, taking off his shirt with all the other hot dudes, living the life. This is my editorial comment on him, not what he says about himself. The book is genuinely interesting but full of assumptions about men and manliness. Sex is a contest of strength and aggression. Hanmei’s desperation is to fit in and belong, meanwhile trying to negotiate his place in a Chinese family that still expected certain behaviors from him, like obedience to his mother and father and his eventual marriage. The relationship with Jay, a young black man, was tender but also with some queasy references, as when the writer describes him as thuggish. On the whole this felt like a book from a world that its author saw only partly and incompletely.

A comet is about to strike Earth and a family chosen to board a colonization starship hurries to their ark of survival. This is a similar plot to any number of science fiction novels, with some variations, but in Higuera’s book we are centered on Petra, a girl who comes from the indigenous Mexican culture and who was trained to be a storyteller, a cuentista, by her grandmother. This reinvents the current story into something new and rather wonderful while doing full service to the science fiction elements of the book. The colonists are betrayed by a Collective of humans who want to eradicate their own humanity and who take over the ship and destroy most of the colonists either immediately or over time. Petra wakens out of her stasis-sleep to find her family gone, her future betrayed, and the few surviving original, unaltered children in the position of guinea pigs and expendable explorers in service of the Collective. The summary of the story does not do justice to the book, which is reminiscent of A Wrinkle in Time both in mood and power and in some story elements as well. The rescue of the other children from the monotone culture of the Collective hinges on Petra’s stories, which have the power (as stories do) of reaching through propaganda and ideology to the core of human memory. Like L’Engle’s book, this is young adult writing that anyone can love, and I certainly loved the experience of reading this novel.