Rob Wolf's Blog, page 9
November 4, 2018
A Crow Flies Through Human History with Wit and Wisdom in John Crowley’s Ka
https://files.newbooksnetwork.com/scifi/074scificrowley.mp3
In Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (Saga Press, 2017), John Crowley provides an account of human history through the eyes of a crow.
The story takes flight in the Iron Age, when the eponymous main character, Dar Oakley, is the first of his kind to encounter humans. He finds these upright beings (who hail from a realm that Dar Oakley calls “Ymr” in crow-speak) both fascinating and baffling.[image error]
Witnessing a battle for the first time, Dar Oakley can’t make sense of it. In his experience, animals kill for food, but absurdly people don’t eat their opponents. Rather, they defile and plunder their enemies’ bodies while tenderly attending to the corpses of their compatriots. (Any unburied remains are, of course, a windfall to hungry crows, who happily peck the bones clean).
I was feeling intimidated before I got Crowley on the line. His reputation as a “writer’s writer” had me worried that my questions would fall flat or that I’d missed the point of the book. It didn’t help that the esteemed critic Harold Bloom has cited Crowley’d 1981 novel Little, Big as one of the best books of all time, calling it “an imaginative masterpiece, in which the sense of wonder never subsides.”
It turned out Crowley was as sweet as could be and a delight to talk to. And who wouldn’t be charmed by someone who professes a life-long fascination with crows? “I think they are amazing beings,” he says, “and they become more interesting the more you learn about them.”
Even though Dark Oakley is a crow, I found him highly relatable. Maybe this is because I’ve always been (or at least felt like) an outsider, and Dar Oakley is nothing if not an outsider, observing humans from the distance of the air or the centuries, even as he makes a few human friends along the way.
Crowley calls the novel “a long meditation on death,” which makes the story sound more morose than it is. Dar Oakley is actually a charming companion, his wonder over human ideas about the soul and afterlife leavened by his kindness and humor. He makes several trips to the underworld (which changes over time to reflect evolving human beliefs) and even assists a clairvoyant after the American Civil War.
Dar Oakley’s long-life makes him a consummate storyteller, and towards the end of the book, his exploits—like his introducing the concept of names to crow culture in the pre-Christian era—are re-told as myth among modern crows. Thus Ka is also a novel about the power of words.
“If you’ve written 13 or 14 novels like I have, you cannot forget almost in every sentence that you are in a story,” Crowley says. And a good writer plays with that idea, leaving the reader poised between a belief that, on the one hand, what they’re reading “is just a story” and, on the other, that it’s reality.
Crowley, 75, has earned both the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
“If you want to write a realistic novel it ought to contain a little bit of the fantastical and the spiritual and the impossible because life does,” Crowley says. “I don’t particularly care for books that don’t have something of that in it.”
Personally, I couldn’t agree with him more.
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October 18, 2018
Twelve Tomorrows: New Short Story Collection Grounds Visions of Tomorrow in the Tech of Today
https://files.newbooksnetwork.com/scifi/073scifiroush.mp3
Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future.
Twelve Tomorrows uses short stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into a single book. Edited by journalist Wade Roush, the collection features stories by Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, and Alastair Reynolds.
[image error]The book is the latest in a series of identically titled books launched in 2011 by MIT Technology Review. The series explores the future implications of emerging technologies through the lens of fiction.
Roush, who hosts the podcast Soonish and specializes in writing about science and technology, is the first journalist (rather than a science fiction writer) to edit the collection. “The mission of Twelve Tomorrows is to highlight stories that are totally plausible from an engineering point of view,” Roush says in our conversation on New Books in Science Fiction.
In “The Heart of the Matter,” Nnedi Okorafur explores how suspicion of new technology can have real life consequences. In this case, plotters against the reformist president of Nigeria try to muster support for a coup by manipulating fears about the president’s new artificial heart, claiming that the organ—which was grown in a Chinese laboratory from plant cells—is powered by witchcraft.
In “The Woman Who Destroyed Us,” SL Huang describes the plight of a mother who wants to exact revenge on a doctor who used deep brain stimulation to treat her son’s behavioral and mental health issues. The changes in her son are so dramatic that the mother feels she’s lost her child, and yet the son is happy with the result, feeling that the treatment has revealed his true self.
If there’s one message Roush hopes readers take from the collection, it’s that people are in the driver’s seat when it comes to building and using new technologies. He hopes the book reminds people “that we do have the power to adopt or shun technology, that we can decide how to bring it into our lives, to what extent we want to use it or not use it. We can even influence the way innovation happens. We can tell scientists and engineers, ‘You know what? This isn’t good enough’ or ‘We’re worried about this. We want you to build in more safeguards.’… We have that power.”
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October 7, 2018
Is the Unexpected Sight of a Monarch Butterfly a Reason for Hope or Worry?
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It’s rare to see butterflies in Manhattan, and rarer still to have one land on you as this one did on my cousin as we were walking down a block in the 90s. It was a delightful moment and yet the delight passed quickly as I immediately thought of all the awful things that [image error]could explain the butterfly’s seemingly aberrant behavior. Was it sick? Had it been weakened from some environmental disaster? Was it a sign of the of the decline in the population of monarchs and the problems with their winter migration?
It’s hard to know what’s going on, at least from a cursory Google search. A column in the Portland Tribune announces ominously that “researchers warn that if present trends continue, Western Monarchs face a 72 percent likelihood of going extinct within 20 years” while an article in the Burlington Free-Press says the monarch migration this year is expected to be “enormous.” Of course, both could be true: despite a rise in this year’s migration, the lovely monarch might still be headed for extinction.
October 5, 2018
Watch What You Say: Language Shapes Reality in Karin Tidbeck’s Amatka
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https://files.newbooksnetwork.com/scifi/072scifitidbeck.mp3
In Karin Tidbeck‘s Amatka (Vintage, 2017), words weave—and have the potential to shred—the fabric of reality.
[image error]Karin Tidbeck
Amatka was shortlisted for the Compton Crook and Locus Awards. A reviewer on NPR called it “a warped and chilling portrait of post-truth reality” while a Chicago Tribune reviewer called it “disturbing and provocative.”
The book’s title takes its name from a colony settled at an unspecified point in the past by pioneers. Life there is hard; not only is it always maddeningly cold, but a paucity of resources requires the colonists to recycle everything, including dead bodies, and they depend on mushrooms for all their nourishment.
But the most unusual feature of life in Amatka is that all objects must be labeled. According to the rules set forth by a secretive ruling committee, a pencil must be labeled “pencil.” A toothbrush must be labeled “toothbrush.” If a label wears off, or if something is mislabeled, the consequences are disastrous: the object degenerates into a primordial substance known as gloop.
Tidbeck says in our conversation on New Books in Science Fiction that the novel began as a thought experiment. Essentially, she wondered, “What if we lived in a world where reality is controlled by language?” The idea was inspired, in part, by the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which holds that the structure of a language affects the speakers’ worldview. Thus, in Amatka, “Language has enormous power. You have to be extremely careful about what you say, what you do… because upsetting the order of things can literally mean the end of the world.”
To avoid the risk of things transforming into gloop, the colony Amatka (and therefore the book Amatka) doesn’t use homonyms, synonyms or metaphors—a principle adhered to not only in the original Swedish but in the English translation.
Amatka itself actually started as a poetry collection, but when Tidbeck couldn’t find a publisher, she turned the book into a narrative, a process that took six years. But Tidbeck hasn’t abandoned poetry entirely. As the plot unfolds, the main character, Vanja, is inspired by a book of poetry to rebel. Thus words serve as both the backbone of this cold authoritarian society and also offer—through poetry—a route to freedom.
September 21, 2018
Gods and Monsters on the Rez: Rebecca Roanhorse Puts Navajo Culture Front and Center in Trail of Lightning
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https://files.newbooksnetwork.com/scifi/071scifiroanhorse.mp3
In Trail of Lightning, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Rebecca Roanhorse draws on Navajo culture and history to tell a gripping future-fable about gods and monsters.
The book launches The Sixth World, a planned four-part series set in the near future. The series title refers to the Navajo origin story, which says that our current world—the fifth—emerged after floods destroyed the previous ones.
In Trail of Lightning, the six world is wrought from similar devastation, a combination of earthquakes and rising seas. The Navajo Nation survives thanks to a protective wall and a shot of magic, which transforms the barrier into four culturally resonant materials: turquoise, abalone, jet and white shell.
The wall seals the nation off from not only the apocalypse but from white Euro-centric colonialism. Roanhorse considers her work a form of indigenous futurism that tells “a sovereign story, a story that exists on its own, on native land in native thought with native characters’ stories and processes that don’t have to acknowledge the larger, white western world. This is not a story that even has any white folks in it. This is a Navajo-centric story, and that’s on purpose.”
In creating a magic system, Roanhorse decided not to draw on Navajo spirituality. “There’s already a mess in New Age thinking about Native American spirituality as magic and yet somehow other spiritualities are not,” she says. Still, she wanted to make the magic “distinctly Navajo” so she turned to the concept of clans, which imbue her characters with unique powers.
For instance, the clan powers of the book’s protagonist, Maggie Hoskie, make her ideally suited to be a monster hunter. She is Honágháahnii, which means Walks-Around, giving her lightning speed. And she is K’aahanáanii, which means Living Arrow, making her, as Maggie herself puts it, “really good at killing people.”
Maggie’s powers emerge spontaneously in response to a devastating incident from her childhood.
“The clan powers answer your need,” Roanhorse says. “In Maggie’s case, her jumping off traumatic event was the murder of her grandmother, so what she needed then were those two powers … But often the coping skills that we learn in dealing with trauma—especially childhood trauma—may serve us in the moment but don’t necessarily serve us as we grow. And overcoming those and the baggage that comes with it is part of Maggie’s journey.”
The novel is a gripping action-adventure that all readers can appreciate but that holds particular resonance for Native Americans. Some readers have told Roanhorse that “they’ve never seen some of the things I talk about on the rez in a book… I had one reader say she cried the whole way through because she’s never gotten to see that.”
A Yale graduate and lawyer specializing in federal Indian law, Roanhorse didn’t get serious about writing until 2013. But she’s quickly made a name for herself. A couple days before we recorded her interview in August, she was honored at the 76th WorldCon with the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a Hugo Award for Best Short Story for “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience
.” (The story also earned the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in May and is read by Lavar Burton on his podcast.)
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August 30, 2018
Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts: A Powerful Story of Racism and Resilience
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https://files.newbooksnetwork.com/scifi/070scifisolomon.mp3
Humans might one day escape Earth, but escaping our biases may prove much harder.
That’s one of the lessons from Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (Akashic Books, 2017) set on the HSS Matilda, a massive generation starship where the nightmare of slavery persists hundreds of years after humans have fled their dying planet.
[image error]Rivers Solomon
At the center of Solomon’s masterful debut is Aster, a young woman trying to figure out why her mother apparently killed herself shortly after giving birth to her 25 years ago. An Unkindness of Ghosts is a powerful story about oppression, racism, gender non-conformity, and the role of trauma in society and peoples’ lives.
The book earned a spot on many best-of-the-year lists, including the Guardian‘s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2017. It also made the shortlist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, 2018 Locus Award for First Novel, and the Lambda Literary Award for best science fiction, fantasy or horror novel.
The Matilda is as complex as a planet with social castes and languages that have evolved so much over time that people who live on different floors don’t always understand each other. “Matilda first came to me when I was reading about the last slave ship to come to the Americas,” Solomon tells me on New Books in Science Fiction.
The Matilda’s black and brown citizens live in cramped squalor and endure constant violence at the hands of armed soldiers and the white, wealthy upper-deckers. But Aster refuses to be defined by threats and social controls. A brilliant scientist, she’s learned how to make medicines from plants that she grows herself. Despite having trouble reading social queues, she’s a fearless defender of her dignity and doing what’s right.
“How do you have hope when it’s not just you and your individual life, but it’s all your friends and family and it’s your parents and your grandparents and their parents and back and so forth and it really does seem like you’re trapped?” Solomon asks.
“I was the kind of child who every night, I watched the news and used to cry. I was very, very sensitive. Even as young as 10, I didn’t understand how people just went on in it. And so I think it’s no surprise that … that’s kind of an essential question of the novel.”
Her next book project—which she was embargoed from mentioning during the interview but which she subsequently tweeted about —is inspired by Clipping’s song The Deep “about descendants of enslaved Africans living in the ocean’s deep.”
August 20, 2018
K.R. Richardson Explores the Pros and Cons of Cyborg Surgery in Her Extraterrestrial Noir Blood Orbit
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https://files.newbooksnetwork.com/scifi/069scifirichardson.mp3
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For Inspector J.P. Dillal, the main protagonist in K. R. Richardson’s Blood Orbit (Pyr, 2018), the expression “I’ve got a lot on my mind” takes on new meaning when he allows his bosses to replace a good chunk of his brain with a mobile crime lab.
What he gets in exchange for submitting to the risky surgery is a promotion that allows him to catapult to the top ranks of the Gattis Corporation’s police force. The life circumstances that lead Dillal to surrender part of his body is as much a part of the story as the brutal mass murder that he must solve with his new cybernetic implants.
While cyborgs are often depicted as superior to ordinary humans, Richardson doesn’t hesitate to describe the dark side of a surgery that reconfigures a significant part of a person’s body. Not only are many people repulsed when they see Dillal, but the surgery is still fresh, and he grapples with fatigue, infection, leaks, and other menacing complications.
His condition “is considerably less than optimal because that’s an aspect of a highly intrusive body change,” Richardson tells me during her appearance on New Books in Science Fiction. She herself had undergone major surgery while working on the book. “People who’ve never been through a major surgery are unaware of how long you continue to be less than normal.”
Richardson was inspired by a real-life crime, the Wah Mee massacre, which occurred in Seattle in 1983, transferring real-life ethnic tensions and police corruption to a new planet with its own culture and ethnic strife.
Blood Orbit represents a change of genre for Richardson, who previously authored the Greywalker paranormal detective novels as Kat Richardson. She switched from “Kat” to the gender-neutral “K.R.” to escape the misperception that “women writing urban fantasy actually write paranormal romance.”
“It was a perception I’ve been fighting since the very first book because the Greywalker novels are not particularly romantic. They’re detective noir in urban fantasy clothes. I’ve always been a detective writer, and fighting that fight every book for nine books was really disheartening.
August 2, 2018
Martha Wells Discusses the Making of Murderbot, Everyone’s Favorite Soap-Opera Loving, Snark-Spewing Killing Machine
https://files.newbooksnetwork.com/scifi/068scifiwells.mp3
The “artificial” in artificial intelligence is easy to understand. But the meaning of “intelligence” is harder to define. How smart can an A.I. get? Can it teach itself, change its programming, become independent? Can it outfox its human inventors, be guided by self-interest, have feelings?
[image error]Martha Wells
While companies like Google and Facebook are competing to develop A.I. technology, science fiction writers are light years ahead of them, finding answers to these questions in their imaginations.
One of the most engaging A.I.s in recent years is Martha Wells’ Murderbot, a people-averse, soap-opera loving, snark-spewing and highly efficient killing machine. The first book in Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, All Systems Red, earned numerous honors this year, including Nebula and Locus awards. It also made the short list for the Philip K. Dick and Hugo awards. The second and third books—Artificial Condition, which came out in May, and Rogue Protocol, out next week on Aug. 7—are equally engaging, taking Murderbot on a journey of self discovery that one hopes will eventually allow it a chance to retire from the business of saving human lives and spend its days watching its beloved “entertainment media” in peace.
“Does it have a place in this world?” is the question at the back of its mind, Wells says in her New Books in Science Fiction inerview. “It can’t go back to its corporate owner, which would destroy or erase it for going rogue; and it’s not sure it wants to go to a human who is offering it a home because it would still essentially be property.”
Despite its name, Murderbot is only murderous when work requires it. As it says on the first page of All Systems Red, “As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.” Thus, even though it could seek revenge against its human taskmasters, try to amass power or wreak havoc (since it has “borked” the programs that restrain its behavior), it voluntarily elects to continue performing the function for which it was designed—providing security to “small soft” humans. Why it so often says “yes” to a dangerous assignment when it really wants to hide in a closet is as much a mystery to it as our motivations are to us. Perhaps all forms of “intelligence,” artificial or otherwise, could benefit from a few sessions on an analyst’s couch.
Wells has incorporated aspects of herself in Murderbot, a fact that resonates with readers. “I have some problems with anxiety and OCD and I’ve put those into the character… and one of the interesting things that’s happened is that people who also have bad anxiety and have other issues say that they saw themselves in this character and that was heartwarming to me.”
The final book in the series of novellas, Exit Strategy, will be published in October.
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While @Google and @facebook race to build #artificialintelligence, science fiction writers like @marthawells1 are light years ahead. I chat with the author of the Murderbot Diaries about #AI and more on the latest @newbooksscifi podcast: https://t.co/2nKJgVhtW9 pic.twitter.com/DySUKRGvJx
— Rob Wolf (@RobWolfBooks) August 3, 2018
Interview: Martha Wells Discusses the Making of Murderbot, Everyone’s Favorite Soap-Opera Loving, Snark-Spewing Killing Machine
https://files.newbooksnetwork.com/scifi/068scifiwells.mp3
The “artificial” in artificial intelligence is easy to understand. But the meaning of “intelligence” is harder to define. How smart can an A.I. get? Can it teach itself, change its programming, become independent? Can it outfox its human inventors, be guided by self-interest, have feelings?
[image error]Martha Wells
While companies like Google and Facebook are competing to develop A.I. technology, science fiction writers are light years ahead of them, finding answers to these questions in their imaginations.
One of the most engaging A.I.s in recent years is Martha Wells’ Murderbot, a people-averse, soap-opera loving, snark-spewing and highly efficient killing machine. The first book in Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, All Systems Red, earned numerous honors this year, including Nebula and Locus awards. It also made the short list for the Philip K. Dick and Hugo awards. The second and third books—Artificial Condition, which came out in May, and Rogue Protocol, out next week on Aug. 7—are equally engaging, taking Murderbot on a journey of self discovery that one hopes will eventually allow it a chance to retire from the business of saving human lives and spend its days watching its beloved “entertainment media” in peace.
“Does it have a place in this world?” is the question at the back of its mind, Wells says in her New Books in Science Fiction inerview. “It can’t go back to its corporate owner, which would destroy or erase it for going rogue; and it’s not sure it wants to go to a human who is offering it a home because it would still essentially be property.”
Despite its name, Murderbot is only murderous when work requires it. As it says on the first page of All Systems Red, “As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.” Thus, even though it could seek revenge against its human taskmasters, try to amass power or wreak havoc (since it has “borked” the programs that restrain its behavior), it voluntarily elects to continue performing the function for which it was designed—providing security to “small soft” humans. Why it so often says “yes” to a dangerous assignment when it really wants to hide in a closet is as much a mystery to it as our motivations are to us. Perhaps all forms of “intelligence,” artificial or otherwise, could benefit from a few sessions on an analyst’s couch.
Wells has incorporated aspects of herself in Murderbot, a fact that resonates with readers. “I have some problems with anxiety and OCD and I’ve put those into the character… and one of the interesting things that’s happened is that people who also have bad anxiety and have other issues say that they saw themselves in this character and that was heartwarming to me.”
The final book in the series of novellas, Exit Strategy, will be published in October.
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July 19, 2018
Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City Offers a Tale of Family and Revenge on Arctic Waters
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https://files.newbooksnetwork.com/scifi/067scifimiller.mp3
Sam J. Miller loves cities. He lives in one, has a day job dedicated to making urban life more humane and fair, and has set his new novel, Blackfish City, in a teeming metropolis full of people who are grateful to be there.
[image error]Sam J. Miller (Photo: Sam J. Miller)
The fictional metropolis is Qaanaak, which floats in arctic waters like a massive 8-armed asterisk and serves as a refuge for those fleeing climate change, resource scarcity and war.
Like Miller’s hometown of New York City, the book is packed with diverse characters, including Fill, a privileged gay man suffering from a new horrifying disease; Kaev, a fighter who’s paid to lose fights; Ankit, chief of staff to a hack politician; and Soq, a gender-fluid messenger with ambitions of becoming a crime boss like the one he works for. They are strangers to each other until a mysterious woman, on a mission of rescue and revenge, rides into town on the back of a killer whale. This woman–an “orcamancer”–brings them close, revealing secret ties that had bound them together all along.
Miller uses his fiction to imagine solutions to problems he grapples with in his job as a community organizer and advocate for the homeless. “I wanted to imagine a city where many of the sort of problematic things that have been the prime directives of urban policy over the last 30 years in cities like New York were no longer true. Maybe you don’t need a racist police force in order to have a functional city; maybe you don’t need to make homeless people’s lives miserable as your prime mandate for how architecture and public space happen.”
Miller calls Blackfish City “a hopeful dystopia.”
“Yes, many of the things we love will be destroyed; yes, maybe there will be unspeakable horror in our future as a result of climate change or social injustice, but that doesn’t mean humanity is going to cease…. I wanted to imagine a dramatically transformed world that is still recognizably human and where things like love, and family and community and noodles can save us.”
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