Deborah J. Ross's Blog, page 18

Book Reviews: Re-Created Extinct Hominids

 TheIce Ghost, by KathleenO'Neal Gear (DAW)

The Ice Orphan, by Kathleen O'Neal Gear (DAW)

I previously reviewed the first of the “Rewilding Reports”novels (The Ice Lion) and I liked it (The Ice Lion, by Kathleen O'Neal Gear, DAW). The set-up is appealing: Inthe far future, an attempt to halt the Earth’s runaway warming resulted in anew, apocalyptic Ice Age with glaciers three miles high and a poisonous slime,“zyme” covering the oceans. As the planet descended into this frigid nightmare,the last scientists recreated species that had survived earlier Ice Ages: direwolves, helmeted musk oxen, cave lions, and extinct, archaic human species likethe Denisovans, Neanderthals, and Homo erectus. Remnants of theprevious civilization persist in myths (about the godlike Jemen = G-men), anenigmatic scientist with an artificially extended lifespan, and a quantumcomputer spiraling into loss of function.

Someof the things I liked best about the first volume are here in the subsequent books.Foremost is the humanity, culture, and sensitivity, and poetic imagery of thepre-human characters. We moderns tend to regard our ancestors as dim-witted andlacking in social graces, although recent discoveries reveal such markers ofcooperative culture as care for the injured and burial of the dead long before H.sapiens came along. Gear’s characters, although having much smaller brains,are nonetheless resourceful, compassionate, and thoughtful. The Dog Soldiers (H.erectus) may have had small, sloping skulls, but their understanding ofethical issues, not to mention their literacy and reverence for books, marksthem as anything but “primitive.” In fact, the most advanced of the threespecies, the Rust People Neanderthals, are the most violent.

TheIce Ghost andThe Ice Orphan continue the adventures of Sealion People(Denisovan) Lynx and Quiller, and members of Quiller’s family, as they struggleagainst an increasingly hostile terrain and new enemies. Legends mix uneasilywith prophecies and dreams, as none of the pre-human species draws precisedifferences between poorly understood history, inspiration, and the visionsborn of mental illness or hallucinogens. The disintegrating quantum computer,called “Quancee,” is undoubtedly real, as is the reanimated Jemen general benton destroying the computer’s autonomy and changing it into a weapon, and thebrutal Rust People (Neandertal) shaman whose visions drive him to invade theJemen stronghold and reawaken the ancient ruler. Who, of course, has an agendaof her own.

These next two volumes have many of the strengths of thefirst, including smooth prose, sympathetic characters, innovativeworld-building, and wonderful physical descriptions. The characters areportrayed through their experiences so that only occasionally are theirphysical appearances important. What matters is the quality of theircharacters, their courage, compassion, leadership, and honesty.

Each of the three books centers on a different but relatedquest, and therein lies not only the charm of the series and the independenceof each installment, but a flaw in the latter two. The first volume of a serieshas a lot of work to do, establishing not only viewpoint characters, theirgoals and conflicts, but the world itself. In this case, the world’s history iscritical to the story. To her credit, Gear does not bash us over the head withpages of exposition and backstory. History is gleaned from hints here andthere, and the understanding of the characters. In this, Gear does a great job,even when historical facts have become distorted or even erased with time andthe demands of survival in an increasingly perilous
environment.

The problem I experienced was that, compared with the firstvolume (The Ice Lion), what comes next felt lightweight. They seemedmore like novellas in the scope of the plot, stories fleshed out with too manyrepetitive descriptions and inconsequential or trivial events.

My second problem arose from the conflation of imaginary andreal events. In books of this type, there’s an expectation that mysteriouselements will be revealed (as opposed to fantasy, where magic need not have anyrelationship to the laws of physics), that the reader will be able to puttogether the pieces and figure out what the age-warped technology, historicalevents, and so forth really are. And how much were real technology, events, andso forth, versus how much the imaginative, often superstitious interpretation.Gear’s characters treat superstition as just as real as tangible physicalarticles, but we the readers lack the clues to distinguish them. Perhaps thoseclues will be revealed in a future volume. Alas, I for one found two novels toolong to be befuddled. This was made worse by hand-waving technology, such asnear-immortality antiaging tech, a way for the genetically modified prehumansto receive telepathic communications from a computer, and the dream quest ofQuiller’s adolescent son, which left me wondering if he was spiritually“transformed” or actually dead.

I continue to recommend the first volume of this series forall the reasons cited above. As for the rest, other readers may find the samedelight in them. The series looks to be continuing. As they say, “YMMV.”

Short Book Reviews: Speaking With Ghosts Can Get You Killed

 Daughter of Redwinter, by Ed McDonald (Tor)

What a great read! From the first page, this book grabbed meand carried me along. Superb action, wonderful characters, ever-escalatingstakes, and mystery. The story opens with Raine, our heroine, creeping out theback way from a monastery under military siege, looking for an escape route,only to encounter a mysterious wounded woman who is desperate to get back in.On the woman’s heels are a group of warrior-magicians, bent on stopping hereven if it means tearing down the walls. The military besiegers are willing toaid the magicians, but what they’re after is inside — people with “grave-sight”that allows them to see, and sometimes speak with, the dead. Raine is one ofthose with the talent that means execution, should it be discovered. All herlife she has hidden, lied, and run away to save her skin, and she’s made somespectacularly bad choices along the way.

The book was full of drama and poignant emotion, hard-bittenaction and sweet romance. The balance between slowly unfolding mystery,lightning reversals and betrayals, and coming of age of a most remarkableheroine was exceptionally well handled. Most of all, from the very firstparagraphs, I found myself relaxing into the hands of a master storyteller,confident that wherever the tale took me, it would be a wild and infinitelysatisfying ride. I was never disappointed.

 

Short Book Reviews: Encountering Warped Probabilities

Rosebud, by Paul Cornell (Tordotcom)

“The crew of the Rosebud are, currently, and by forceof law, a balloon, a goth with a swagger stick, some sort of science aristocratpossibly, a ball of hands, and a swarm of insects.” Although they’re not human,at least not in their current form, they’re most definitely people. And they’refanatically devoted to The Company, which for 300 years has placed them out inthe back acres of space. When they come upon a mysterious black sphere, theyarrive at a plan, after much squabbling: to capture the object for the Company,thereby earning lots of praise.

But the object is not what anyone might expect; it has theability manipulate probability and time-lines, thereby controlling the crew ofthe Rosebud by selecting the futures with the most benign outcomes. Asthe crew attempts to understand what’s happening to them, their own pasts arerevealed, as well as the less-than-benign nature of the Company.

I loved how the crew figures out that their memories areunreliable and what the object doing. In the end, however, I found the “universe-changing”revelations opaque. I wanted to like and understand the story, but ended upjust not getting it, which is never a good feeling to leave a reader with.

Tyrannosaurus Lips and Other Wonders of Science

 Once my science classes progressed beyond "the parts of the cell," I loved them. So much so that my college degree is in Biology, which entailed many classes in Physics and General and Organic Chemistry. Fast forward many decades, I had the joy to attend Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, about which I have previously blogged. But I've never given up my love of Things Prehistoric. Here are some wonderful new stories:

T. rex had thin lips and a gummy smile, controversial study suggests

Theropod dinosaurs — a group of bipedal, mostly meat-eating dinosaurs that included T. rex, Velociraptor and Spinosaurus — may instead have concealed their deadly chompers behind thin lips that kept their teeth hydrated and tough enough to crush bones. 

Paleontologists had already suggested that T. rex may have had lips, and there has been debate whether carnivorous dinosaurs looked more like present-day crocodiles, which don’t have lips and have protruding teeth, or if they more likely resembled monitor lizards, whose large teeth are covered by scaly lips.

Rhino-like 'thunder beasts' grew massive in the evolutionary blink of an eye after dinos died off

In the aftermath of the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact, a second explosion rocked the animal kingdom. 

This time, it was the mammals that blew up. Rhino-like horse relatives that had lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs became gigantic "thunder beasts" as suddenly as an evolutionary lightning strike,  new research, published Thursday (May 11) in the journal Science(opens in new tab), shows.

"Even though other mammalian groups attained large sizes before [they did], brontotheres were the first animals to consistently reach large sizes," study first author Oscar Sanisidro(opens in new tab), a researcher with the Global Change Ecology and Evolution Research Group at the University of Alcalá in Spain. "Not only that, they reached maximum weights of 4-5 tons [3.6 to 4.5 metric tons] in just 16 million years, a short period of time from a geological perspective."

462 million-year-old fossilized eyes and brains uncovered in 'secret' Welsh fossil site

Last year, weird "bramble snout" fossils were documented at the site called "Castle Bank," but new research published May 1 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution(opens in new tab) describes the whole fossil deposit.

Hosting a myriad of soft-bodied marine creatures and their organs, which are scarcely preserved in the fossil record, the site resembles the world-renowned Cambrian deposits of Burgess Shale in Canada and Qingjiang biota in China. The rocks of Castle Bank, however, are 50 million years younger and give researchers a unique window into how soft-bodied life diversified in the Ordovician Period (485.4 million to 443.8 million years ago), according to a statement released by Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales.

Researchers believe they've recovered more than 170 species from the site, most of which are new to science. These include what appear to be late examples of Cambrian groups, including the weirdest wonders of evolution, the nozzle-nosed opabiniids, and early examples of animals that evolved later, including barnacles, shrimp and an unidentified six-legged insect-like creature. The rocks are also home to the fossilized digestive systems of trilobites and the eyes and brain of an unidentified arthropod, as well as preserved worms and sponges.

'Frightful' never-before-seen tyrannosaur might be the 'missing link' in T. rex evolution


Paleontologists have uncovered the remains of a never-before-seen tyrannosaur that was possibly a direct ancestor of the dinosaur king Tyrannosaurus rex. The newfound species could help settle a big debate about T. rex's evolutionary lineage.
The newfound species, Daspletosaurus wilsoni, has a unique arrangement of spiked hornlets around its eyes. 
Until now, the Tyrannosauridae lineage has been difficult to unravel, making it hard to determine the exact  evolutionary  relationships between individual species.
"Many researchers disagree as to whether tyrannosaurids represent a single lineage evolving in place, or several closely related species that do not descend from one another," study co-authors and palaeontologists Elías Warshaw and Denver Fowler wrote in a  statement (opens in new tab). This has not been helped by a lack of high-quality specimens to examine, they added.
But the discovery of D. wilsoni suggests that the three daspletosaurs came one after the other, like "consecutive ladder-like steps in a single evolutionary lineage," rather than branching off from one another like "evolutionary cousins," the researchers wrote. 

Short Book Reviews: Great Concepts, Disappointing Execution

Dark Earth, by Rebecca Stott (Random House)

I requested this book from Netgalley based on thedescription. I loved the idea of an underworld of rebel women living secretly amid the ruins.Alas, the opening was so sedate and the characters so bland and unrelatable, Igave up in the middle of the second chapter. There simply wasn’t enough to keepme reading. By contrast, the next book I picked up grabbed me right away, so I sawno reason to take another look.

The Hundred Loves of Juliet, by Evelyn Skye (DelRey)

What a great premise — Romeo and Juliet, reincarnated manytimes over the centuries, always drawn together and always linked in tragedy. Inan added twist, Romeo is immortal and remembers all his previous loves. Heknows, for example, that whoever Juliet is in any given lifetime, she will diewithin two years. Juliet, on the other hand, has no idea of their historytogether. Now in the 21st Century, writer “Juliette” and sea captain“Romeo” find themselves thrown together by fate and consuming attraction. Canthey break the cycle?

Well, maybe, if he would just sit down with her and have acandid conversation. Clearly, he’s failed to do that before, only to watch hisbeloved-of-this-century die, usually horribly. You would think he’d learn fromhis disasters. Of all the failings of a typical romance novel, the stupidity ofkeeping secrets ranks top of my list. Even if “Juliet” thinks he’s delusionaland doesn’t believe him, at least he would have given her a rationale for himwalking away from her. Which he tries to do, but because she has no idea why,it doesn’t work.

I had other quibbles, including the passages supposedlydiaries and so forth from past centuries but laden with contemporarysensibilities, that the heroine tries way too hard to be likeable, that thehero is an example of “female-gaze” and not a real person. Although the proseis for the most part pretty good, it slips into tone deafness all too often.

I suspect that this is a romance with fantastic elements,rather than a reincarnation/time-travel fantasy with a love story, and thatscience fiction/fantasy readers like myself will have a much harder time withit than romance readers. Regardless, I gave up around the 24% mark. I simplydidn’t care what happened next as long as the characters were being sodishonest with each other and themselves.

 

Memories of Baycon friends

I came across this image from Baycon 2006, me with Jeff Carlson and his wife, Diana, and Kevin O'Donnell, Jr. I felt a pang of sadness for the loss of both Jeff and Kevin, Jeff in 2017 and Kevin in 2012, and I've lost touch with Diana. Still, a poignant memory of good friends and good times. And I still have the green dragon T-shirt.

[Archives]: Mary Rosenblum on How To Handle Bad Reviews

In light of the recent story about an author who was dropped by her publisher after she engaged in a heated discussion with a reviewer, here are some thoughts from writer and teacher Mary Rosenblum (1952-2018), first published here in 2014 and still relevant.

How To Handle Bad Reviewsby Mary Rosenblum

Paul KleeWhat do you do when you get a really nasty review?

You know, we don't teach writers about reviews and reviewers and we should. Everybody thinks of 'good' and 'bad' writing as a standard. If it's 'good' editors and readers will love it! If it's 'bad' nobody will publish the story and readers will hate it. Alas, that mean that many authors who had a really good story felt like failures when they couldn't sell it to a publisher, when it was a matter of simply not suiting the publisher's target audience. The quality of the book was excellent, the publisher felt it wouldn't get the huge numbers of sales they needed in order to show a profit.

Self-publishing has let authors take their stories directly to readers and they vote with their mouse-clicks. You either sell or you don't, but we all know that it's a bit of a slow process at first, that self-publishing is all about the long tail. Meaning your sales are probably not stellar at first, with only one or two books out. So, the feeling of 'success' or 'failure' gets put on hold. Gotta wait to see how many people like it…

Enter the reviewers.

We love Authority. Authorities Know A Lot. Authorities Pass Judgment and They Are Gods. Reviewers Are Authorities And Therefore, They Are Gods.

Really?

You know what? That has never ever ever been the case. Reviewers are people who are willing to read lots and lots of books quite quickly and write down a judgment about the quality of that book to meet a regular deadline. You know what skills are involved? You must be able to read and you must be able to write a relatively coherent commentary and -- most importantly -- do that on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, reliably.

See anything missing? How about a 'standard of excellence' or some other measuring tool so that you can effectively winnow 'good' from 'bad'? Don't see one, do you? You can become a reviewer. You should become a reviewer. It's a great way to meet new potential fans. One of my clients, from prison, has become a regular reviewer for a large circulation magazine.

Reviewers express their opinions. Their opinions. Remember that lacking 'standard of excellence'? Keep it in mind here. Some reviewers only review books they like, others review books they don't like. And the reasons they don't like them may have nothing to do with lots of other people liking your book. Mr. Reviewer may hate cats and is disposed to pick holes in any story that features a cute cat as a player. So your cozy mystery with the Miss Marple type sleuth who owns a cat gets picked to pieces. Will Mr. Reviewer come out and say 'I hate stories with cats'? No, of course not. How unprofessional! But he got even with you for putting that silly feline in there, didn't he? He called your cozy mystery weak, with an obvious ending.

And it really isn't weak and most readers are surprised by your clever ending.

Should you slit your wrists?

Messy and really, a waste of perfectly good future books, in my opinion. Relatively few readers read any one review. Really. Yes, it seems as if you have just been put up on the six o'clock news stark naked, but that's just your perception. If every reviewer comments on your weak plot, I would sure pay attention! But that one snarky or nasty review isn't going to hurt you. Really it will not.

The nastiest review I got, one where the reviewer strongly implied that I was an exploitive white writer using native culture frivolously, won the top award in its genre later on. Take that, snarky, nasty reviewer who clearly didn't bother to even read the end of the story! Bleah!!!!

Did that sting at the time? Oh, you BET it stung! And that accusation of racial non-political-correctness was not a good thing to have kicking around, career-wise, either. I was furious, hurt, ready to kill the jerk…

What did I do?

Nothing.

YOU CANNOT DO ANYTHING.

Read that again. Repeat it to yourself. Look at all the libelous 'news' in those tabloids you see at the end of the supermarket checkout counter, accusing celebrities of everything from incest to consorting intimately with aliens. Do those celebrities ever sue? No, of course not. To even acknowledge that silliness is to give it weight.

If you comment on a reviewer's post, you will hurt yourself professionally. YOU WILL HURT YOURSELF PROFESSIONALLY.

YOU WILL HURT YOURSELF PROFESSIONALLY

The review itself, painful as it seems at the time, will vanish into the murky waters of the online world and eventually it won't even surface when someone googles your specific title. Sorry, folks. Enjoy the glowing reviews, shrug off the lukewarm ones, and be prepared to live with the snarky and nasty ones that you WILL get from time to time. Readers are not stupid. If you have ten really positive reviews on various sites and one 'flyer' who wails that this is totally unreadable, whom do you think readers will take more seriously? Yeah, maybe those are all your friends and you paid them to write those glowing reviews, but probably not all are paid friends. They outweigh the wail.

Live with it.

You have to.

Ahem…I have found that there is a certain…er…comfort in venting some of that hurt and fury in a less personally damaging way than responding in the heat of the moment, online. Breaking something that you need to recycle anyway is one good method. Personally, I like a very sharp axe and some rounds of wood that need to be split for firewood. There is something so pleasantly violent in a well sharpened axe.

I will leave my imaginings to your own imaginations.

But the wood burns nicely in my woodstove and warms the house!

Welcome to the real world of writing and reviews. Hey…it means you ARE a writer, you know!

----------------

An award-winning author of New York published ScienceFiction and mystery novels as well as dozens of short stories, Mary Rosenblumbegan teaching writing fifteen years ago, mentoring student authors through thewriting and publishing process. 

Short Book Reviews: A Steamy Vampire Werewolf Mystery

 Blood of the Pack (Dark Ink Tattoo Book One), by CassieAlexander (Caskara Press)

My introduction to the works of Cassie Alexander was the “Nightshifted”series (in which a nurse discovers a new career path in a secret hospital ward forsupernatural patients). I loved how she handled nonhuman characters, greatdramatic tension, and smooth prose. So I picked up this first book in a newseries without knowing much about it beyond the lots-of-queer sex content warnings.I found many of the elements I’d previously enjoyed, including characterizationand great action sequences. The sex scenes were better done than usual for “highheat” stories. There was a nice balance in tension between a satisfying landinglevel for the first novel in a series on the one hand, and enough of acliff-hanger so the reader will be left hungry for the next. My personalquibble, and other readers may feel quite differently, was that the sex scenes tookup a disproportionate amount of space for what they contributed to the plot. Ithink this has to do with what different readers look for. If it’s a (in thiscase) action-mystery with sex scenes that enhance that plot, or if it’s veryjuicy sex scenes that make sense in terms of character and motivation. As Isaid, the scenes are very well done, great examples of how to write literate,well-paced intimate encounters. I especially liked the depiction of consent,the mutuality of pleasure, and the care of the partners for one another.

And of course, if that sex comes with vampire and werewolves,oh my, so much the better.

Reprint: Preventing Another Pandemic

 From the NY Times Opinion newsletter:

The Covid-19 pandemic exploited a narrow gap in humanity’s outbreak prevention barriers. As the world now knows, SARS-CoV-2 spreads through the air via respiratory transmission. Spread can occur even before people develop symptoms. Our modern, mostly indoor lifestyles constructed the optimal environment for a fast-moving respiratory pandemic. Clean water, clean hands, clean food and clean surfaces did not stop the virus from hitching a ride on airplanes or spreading at packed concerts, bars and restaurants.

As in the past, we need to develop technologies that will fundamentally change our environment. In the United States, all modern buildings are built with fire prevention in mind, despite the last city-burning fire occurring over a generation ago. We provide piped water and sewer systems, electricity to boil water and refrigerate food, and window screens to stop pests. The goal today should be to take respiratory pandemics entirely off the table.

This starts with cleaning the air. The most ambitious version of clean indoor air technology would be capable of rapidly suppressing transmission for even the most contagious pathogens, like measles, at a cost affordable enough to install in all the places people gather and cross paths. Accomplishing this will require innovation beyond better ventilation and ways to filter air. ‌This could include light bulbs that also emit germ-killing wavelengths that are still safe for humans. With this type of innovation, society can reduce transmission and maybe even make the common cold a relic. The Biden administration has declared improving ventilation a priority, but simply upgrading out-of-date filtration systems to the current standard probably won’t be enough to prevent pandemics.

Researchers have made ‌progress toward‌‌ other advanced pandemic-fighting capabilities. It is now possible to take any type of sample from a possibly infected person and sequence the genome of every microorganism in that sample ‌‌ — bacteria, viruses, fungi and all. All pathogens have genomic material, and sequencing allows us to read that material. This method, metagenomic sequencing, functions as a universal pathogen detector. It is beginning to be used to monitor patients for known pathogens, as well as bugs we have never seen before.

Vaccines are, of course, a mainstay of prevention, and even these have seen incredible improvements with the advent of mRNA vaccines. Work is ongoing to deliver pandemic vaccines within 100 days. Efforts toward‌‌ making vaccines effective against entire groups of viruses, such as all coronaviruses, are underway. But for modern vaccines to truly prevent rapid respiratory pandemics, they must be deployed widely and quickly and, when possible, in advance.

The U.S. government‌‌ is investing in microneedle vaccine patches and nasal spray vaccines that can be self-administered. These could be quickly mailed to every household, eliminating the need for clinic- and pharmacy-based administration by trained health care workers. Scientists think that skin patches and nasal vaccines may be able to elicit mucosal immunity, something current injectable vaccines don’t do very well. Mucosal immunity prevents viruses that land on our mucus membranes — in the nose, mouth and lungs — from causing an infection entirely.

Short Book Reviews: An Early Novel by a Master of Fantasy

 SignalTo Noise, by SilviaMoreno-Garcia (Solaris)

I spent most of this book, a reprint of an early novel bySilvia Morena-Garcia, loathing the central character. The story bounces backand forth between “the past” (1988) and “the present” (2009), and theadventures of Meche (short for Mercedes, which she loathes) and her two bestfriends, Sebastián and Diana. The three were misfits in high school, each withtheir own family dramas and challenges. Mecha’s definitely the leader of thegroup, and she’s endlessly sarcastic, demanding, and miserly in her friendship.Her alcoholic father is a radio DJ and aspiring music historian, obsessed withvinyl records. Almost by accident, Meche discovers that by wishing hard enoughwhile playing a specific record, she can make things happen. Soon she’s ropedher friends into a magical circle, searching for especially potent songs and practicingincreasingly dark acts of magic. In the present, she’s returned home for herfather’s funeral, reliving the past as she packs up his papers and recordcollection.

I really wish Meche had been a more sympathetic character orthat the turning point in her descent into magical violence had been moreclear. I cared more about awkward, earnest Sebastián with his long-time,unspoken crush on Meche, and loyal Diana with her fussy dresses, Easy-Bakeoven, and lupus diagnosis. Sebastián and Diana each had a moral compass but notenough courage to stand up to Meche. Even so, the story caught me up and keptme turning pages. This is an early work, and the author has matured greatly. Ilike her later characters a lot better, particularly those in Mexican Gothic,The Beautiful Ones, and Gods of Jade and Shadow.