Archive for February 2018
So, I finished We Can Build You, by Philip K Dick.
There are spoilers ahead. #SorryNotSorry.
This book started out so interesting!! Lots of cool ideas, simulacrum robots who can pass for human (oh, hai cylons!), there was so much potential for conversations about what makes us alive and how would you know you were a simulacrum, and if you were a simulacrum how would it change you life and maybe it wouldn’t change your life at all. Could you convince yourself you were a robot? Could a robot convince themselves they were a human? My brain was overflowing with hope for interesting ideas. There is an Edward Stanton simulacrum, and then they make an Abraham Lincoln. Even more possibility for cool things to happen!
And then Louis had to decide he was in love with Pris.
Louis’s business partner is Maury, and Pris is Maury’s brilliantly creative but mentally unstable 18 year old daughter. She’s cold towards Louis (because why would an 18 year old be interested in her dad’s buddy? oh, that’s right, she isn’t), and the colder she is towards him, the more he becomes obsessed with her.
All those cool ideas? All those cool possibilities? The idea of Abraham Lincoln having to navigate the modern world? All out the window because Louis chases Pris all over the place, even though she is in a relationship with someone else, even though Maury forbids Louis from being in a relationship with his daughter. Really, the second half of this book was so fucking boring. I’d read like 5 pages and then fall asleep.
I guess if I read between the lines as far as possible, I could pull something out of this near-future society’s obsession with right thinking and skewed mental health, that we are being programmed to think and act a certain way, the way a robot is programmed, and when we aren’t acting correctly, when something is wrong with our mental health, we have to be institutionalized to be “reprogrammed”. Maybe that is what this novel is about? I had to get through what felt like 500 pages of Louis chasing and threatening people for Pris’s attentions, to get to that?
I was really hoping that at the end there would be some big reveal that Louis was a simulacrum, or maybe that Pris was. Spoiler! that doesn’t happen.
I got a few more Philip K Dick books floating around, I hope they are better.
The Tea Master and The Detective, by Aliette de Bodard
available March 31, 2018
where I got it: received ARC from the publisher (thanks Sub Press!)
Aliette deBodard’s newest novella, The Tea Master and the Detective (available March 31 from Subterranean Press) wears the disguise of a space opera Sherlock Holmes type story, complete with an insensitive detective who is a master of deduction and the annoyed lackey who follows behind until finally seeing the light. I say wears that disguise because while this is a highly enjoyable and tightly focused mystery, it functions better as a showcase for deBodard’s characterization and worldbuilding prowess. If you’ve not yet experienced the beauty of one of deBodard’s Xuya stories, The Tea Master and The Detective is an excellent entry point. (click here for an in depth chronology and list of Xuya stories, many of which are available to read online) If you enjoy character driven narratives, beautiful prose, and multi-sensory worldbuilding, this is the story for you.
Us reviewers, we’re always talking about worldbuilding – which among other things is literally how an author builds a world and how successfully they transport us, the reader, to that world. How big is the city? How wide is the river? How many ships are in the harbor? How small is the escape pod? What color are the androids? How dark is the forest? What color is her dress?
Did you notice something about all those worldbuilding questions?
They are all visual.
Don’t get me wrong, visual worldbuilding is important! I want to know that the city is so large you can’t walk across it in a day, that the river is narrow here but wider further south closer to home but I walk a ways to cross here because I refuse to pay the bridge toll, that there aren’t many ships in the harbor because of those idiotic tariffs, that this damn escape pod is so claustrophobically small that i can barely turn around and i’m about to lose my damn mind, that the android is a dull gun-metal grey, that the forest is as dark as midnight, and that her dress was blood red.
But there is more to the world than seeing. Smell, taste, texture, memory, if presented right, those sensory experiences will tell you more about how a character has moved through a world than anything else. deBodard does that kind of worldbuilding exactly right.
There is this gorgeous short scene (the best always are) where two shipminds are having tea together. They have tea and snacks, and they just chat. There is tea, of course, but also a medley of sumptuous dishes. Both shipminds know that none of this is real. There is no food on the table, the two of them are physically incapable of actually eating or drinking anything. But the concept of the food reminds them of their families. The pork is the same dish from childhood festivals, the scent of the tea is the same of family discussions and decisions generations old. All of that and more, in a few short paragraphs about a meal that neither of the participants are actually eating. A meal that doesn’t actually exist, but symbolizes everything of import, connects these two people to family members and conversations that have been dead for decades. More worldbuilding and characterization in that small handful of paragraphs than I sometimes find in an entire novel. I’ve read this short scene like three times now. It gets better every time, like shining light through a prism and having it come out a rainbow of the rest of the story on the other side.
A few months ago, the ads started popping up on Amazon for their original series Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. The ads actually were not very compelling, so I didn’t even notice when the series loaded up. Some friends mentioned their enjoyment of it on twitter, so a few weeks ago I gave it a try.
I’ve only seen three episodes so far, and they were excellent. They aren’t teleplays of PKD stories, but they play with many of the ideas he presented in his fiction. The show is completely episodic, it is like an anthology, with each episode a self contained story. Maybe later in the series they connect?
So, I watch these 3 episodes over the course of a few days, I pick up We Can Build You and The Game Players of Titan at the used bookstore, and then a couple of days after that I have my first ever ocular migraine. The good thing about ocular migraines is that they are relatively painless and mine was harmless. The bad thing is that you can have pixelated visual distortions, which are basically a blind spot in your peripheral vision. It was weird AF but harmless.
Yeah, so pixelated visual distortions after watching a few of episodes of Electric Dreams was seriously the most fucked up thing I have ever experienced.
To add to the weirdness, I started reading We Can Build You a few days ago. It is so readable and accessible, are we sure Philip K Dick wrote this? Like, I don’t have to work at all to figure out what is going on and what the characters relationships to each other are! Granted, I am only 5 or 6 chapters in, so who knows what will happen later.
If you don’t want to know anything about We Can Build You, stop reading now. This might turn into a series of posts like the ones I wrote on Book of the New Sun that had a lot of spoilers.
Enjoying an unreliable narrator is entirely personal preference. Some people love unreliable narrators, some people hate them, others pass judgement on a case by case basis.
The thing with an unreliable narrator is you never know if they are telling you the truth.
The thing with an unreliable narrator is that they are most likely hardly ever telling you the truth.
Maybe they are conning you into something. Maybe they want to appear bigger and badder than they really are. Maybe they want to see what they can get away with. Maybe they only want you to see their good side before you find out all the horrible things they did.
Maybe they are trying to figure out if they can trust you or not.
I don’t remember what book I was reading, but it was written in first person, and the narrator came right out and told the reader that they weren’t going to talk about certain things yet, because a) it still hurt to much and b) they weren’t sure they could trust the reader. That’s been in the back of my mind ever since, that there are occasions where I have to earn a character’s trust, that there may be times where no matter what I do, they won’t trust me.
So next time you run into an unreliable narrator, do what you can to earn their trust. After all, it’s just a story, what’s the worst that could happen?
Epic Post on New Books
Posted on: February 10, 2018
This post is mostly book photos. Some of these I’ve read, some of them I plan to get to shortly, some of them were happy surprises from publishers, or random acquisitions. What looks good?
Starting off with books I’ve read: The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette De Bodard is forthcoming from Subterranean Press, what a gem of a novella! More to come in a longer post, but if you like shipminds who are pretty sure they are people (because they *are* people), this book is for you. Immortal Clay by Michael Lucas was a compelling post-apocalyptic novel based on the premise that at the end of John Carpenter’s The Thing, humanity lost. Again, more to come in a longer post, but I most noticed and most appreciated the slower pace of this story. After all, when you’re already dead, what’s the hurry?
In the category of Want To Read Very Soon is Binti:The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor (what? you haven’t read the Binti novellas? holy shit, DO IT!) and The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi, which is the February book for my local book club.
Hello February! You are officially the month wherein I start complaining that winter has gone on too long.
January though, was fantastic! Vintage Science Fiction month was a rousing success as always, the quieter conversations were balanced out by a very fun watch-along of the 1984 movie of Dune, seen for the first time by many. Every January I also attend ConFusion, a fan run science fiction convention in the Detroit suburbs.
The promise I made to myself in the days before ConFusion were “you don’t have to do it all. Do whatever you want, and not a bit more”. I tend to exhaust myself at these events, going to too many panels in a row without eating, trying to meet all the people, suffering from fear of missing out if i don’t make an appearance at every event, feeling socially awkward because I really don’t know that many people and yadda yadda. So this year I hung out with my friends, worked some shifts at the Apex table in the vendor room, attended very few panels, ditched the hotel entirely on Friday night to visit my favorite sushi restaurant and have a drink at my friend’s bar, didn’t push myself to do to much, and had a fantastic time.
Here’s the thing tho – I have a bunch of neat memories and they are all smushed together. I don’t know what conversations happened with who, or what exactly was said in which panel, or what came together in my brain when to come up with what ideas. It’s become a congealed memory blob.
In one of these panels – Disaster Response in Science Fiction, Philosophy in Science Fiction, and Game Boards in Scifi and Fantasy, there was a tiny aside about the 3 types of conflict:
Person vs another person
Person vs nature
Person vs themself
In that same panel, or perhaps a different one, I though about or maybe made mention that First Contact with aliens will challenge everything we think we know.
Thanks to the congealed memory blob in my brain, all of that combined to:
Won’t first contact be the ultimate of “Person vs themselves”? Anyone involved with first contact would have to be able to separate themselves from everything they think they know, all of their assumptions, all their preconceived notions, all those easy “well, what *should* happen is. . . “ thoughts. You’ve got to get past all those barriers within yourself before you can understand someone else. You’ve got to be willing to bare yourself, or communication will never happen. Wanna talk with aliens? You gotta defeat yourself first.
By the end of January, it was still just barely light out when I got home from work. In those dark days, we sure got a lot of Vintage Science Fiction read!
a huge thank you to my fantastic co-host, Red Star Reviews, who runs the @VintageSciFi_ twitter feed. He also organized a number of discussions groups in Instagram and Twitter, organized the Dune read-along, and organized a watch-along of the 1984 film version of Dune. Red Star Reviews, you are my organizational hero! Although I mostly lurked in the read-along conversations, the Watch-Along was buckets of fun. We went over to Every Day Should Be Tuesday’s house, and enjoyed the movie and I got to snuggle with his very bouncy doggie.
If you’ve not visited these fine blogs, please take a minute to do so. Discover what they enjoyed for Vintage Science Fiction Month, who knows what will catch your eye!
Vintage month is always a fun way to start off the year! Thank you to everyone who wrote a review, commented on a blog post, mentioned something they liked or posted a photo on twitter or instagram, and thank you to everyone on twitter who put up with me live tweeting Dune. The older I get, the more I appreciate that scene with Sting. 😉
the Little Red Reviewer 
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