Yes, it's (past) that time again. And again, we're just going to skip over the stuff I don't have anything positive to say about. Being catty and trashing other people's work may be fun, but it's not nice. Life is short. We're all trying our best.
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Tokyo Ueno Station (Miri Yu)
Beautiful and oddly lively, for all that it's a profoundly sad novel about a dead homeless guy and the crushing weight of class and caste in Japanese society. I find it really interesting how much contemporary(-ish) Japanese art, like the films of Juzo Itami and Satoshi Kon, prominently features, or even (as in this novel and Kon's Tokyo Godfathers) focuses directly on the homeless, a population that, by official measures, scarcely exists in the country.
HHhH (Laurent Binet)
A fascinating blend of gripping true story and dizzying metafiction account of trying to write a gripping true story. Not as confident as Binet's Civilizations, which I read first, and less enjoyable overall, but the lack of confidence is part of the point, and how much are you supposed to enjoy learning about the rise of the Nazis and how they strangled the life out of Europe, even if a few of them do get theirs in the end?
Severance (Ling Ma)
For all that this was prescient about what a disastrous pandemic originating from China would look like (Ma predicted the ubiquity of KN95 masks and remote work, among other things, well before COVID arrived), I think it's been unfairly pigeonholed as “a pandemic novel,” when it's really much more about The Way We Life Now. The real pandemic was capitalism! (But seriously, a beautiful, provocative, hilariously funny novel, one of the best I've read in recent years.)
Short Letter, Long Farewell (Peter Handke)
A weird, endlessly digressive little novel that I didn't tremendously enjoy as I was reading it, but that has stuck with me more than I expected it to. Handke had a way of conjuring up powerfully vivid little scenes and communicating the disjointed, discursive thinking of his oddball narrator (which is to say, probably, himself) such that you can really get into the head of a guy you have very little reason to relate to.
Plague Ship, Ordeal in Otherwhere, and Garan the Eternal (Andre Norton)
Found these last summer in the same used-books section where I snapped up Moorcock's Runestaff books—same yellow and yellowing little old 1970s paperbacks (somebody in Hot Springs, Montana, was plugged into exactly the same influences as Gygax and company). I'd never read any Norton, one of the most prolific SFF authors of the 20th century and, right alongside Moorcock, one of the chief influences on D&D (and thus on pretty much all genre media of the past 50 years). I grabbed one from the '50s, one from the '60s, and one that was started in the '40s and finished in the '70s, and they're all delightfully representative of their time periods, going from the hypermasculine star-trader heroics of Plague Ship (which is basically just a short Traveller campaign) to the psychedelic quasi-feminist zaniness of Ordeal in Otherwhere and then Garan lurching from baroque Sky Captain silliness in his postwar debut to apocalyptic drear (and also trippy past-lives Eternal Champion stuff) in the Nixon-era conclusion. Definitely going to be on the lookout for more Norton in my used-books beachcombing.
Creative Surgery (Clelia Farris)
I was put onto Farris by Lavie Tidhar, who included her story “The Substance of Ideas” in Best of World SF: Volume 2. For better and worse, I think he chose well — that story, which is included in this collection, remains my favorite. They're mostly great, though (I also liked “Gabola” and “Secret Enemy” quite a bit), and every single one has something arrestingly memorable going on.
Fire to Fire (Mark Doty)
Another book, albeit an almost entirely different one, where my point of entry (in this case, “Messiah: Christmas Portions”) remains my favorite of the author's work, but I'm not the least bit disappointed. Many beautiful poems here; Doty is an observer of the minutiae of life, particularly urban life, with few equals. Love “Chanteuse,” and not just because it's about, and so vividly evokes, Boston.
Broken Stars (ed. Ken Liu)
Another one that I found my way to via Tidhar's Best of World SF series, and as much as anything I've tracked down following the spoor of one of those stories, this reinforces my belief that all the best, most interesting stuff happening in SFF is happening outside the United States, if not outside the Anglosphere entirely (although, in fairness, a couple of these were originally written in English). “Moonlight,” “The Snow of Jinyang,” and “The First Emperor's Games” are all fun little confections, playing with genre tropes or mashing up short fiction with other media (“Moonlight” is by Cixin Liu; I was not a fan of The Three-Body Problem, but I think his style is very well suited to this sort of wry short fiction). The best of the book, and one of the most affecting, thought-provoking stories I've read in a long time, is “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appeal,” which like many (most?) of the works in this collection concerns travel through time and our perception thereof.
Delicious in Dungeon, Vols. 1–4 (Ryoko Kui)
Super fun stuff, can't wait to read more. Incredibly good about taking a lot of what's weird and irrational about D&D and digging into it, spinning out rationales for it and deriving all kinds of fun little plots from it. The whole dungeon ecosystem is a great idea, but all the individual parts of it are particularly wonderful fuel for game writing.
The Living Mountain (Nan Shepherd)
Strange and beautiful. Some of the best work I've ever read not so much about nature but about being in nature, being embodied in the natural environment—the sensory experience, and not just the sights and sounds (although she has keen and unusual observations about how the mountain atmosphere plays tricks on the eyes) but the touch and taste of it too, the sensations of walking barefoot, napping under the sky, drinking spring water straight from the creek. Also a good reminder that you might write something truly great and not be able to find a publisher for it, not be able to find an audience for it, and that doesn't diminish its greatness. Shepherd had the pleasure of seeing it published (and become beloved and influential) late in life, after it'd sat in a desk drawer for 30 years. Not all artists are so lucky!
The Vanished Birds (Simon Jimenez)
Didn't love the story or setting, but still found a lot to like. Strong, well drawn characters, some arresting imagery, good writing throughout. The first shift of perspective is extremely powerful, a wonderfully lived-in illustration of the effects of time dilation, of what it's like to live, travel, and love in an interstellar society. The second shift in perspective, and the subsequent elaboration of one character's backstory, is much weaker, and the novel never finds it way back to the heights of the first two chapters.
Radical Warrior: August Willich's Journey from German Revolutionary to Union General (David Dixon)
It's not perfect (like almost everything published these days, it could've really used more and better editing) but I am not going to look a gift horse in the mouth when the universe hands me a full-length biography of my favorite, and heretofore criminally obscure, Civil War general. The full story of Willich's life is even more delightful than what I knew from Wikipedia and anecdotal scraps from other histories. A truly modern man, two centuries ahead of his life, and deeply flawed in ways that only make him more relatable to me. It is crazy what posters dudes like Willich, Marx, and Engels were. People joke about like, “Oh, imagine if they'd had Twitter!” but no, I don't think that would've actually changed much. They were tweeting at each other in the broadsheets and in handbills, and exactly the same dumbass ways leftist bros snipe at each other online today, right down to accusing each other of being both gay and cucked. It's magnificent. And also, for all that he was a temperamental egotist with a death wish, for as much as he enjoyed the sound of his own voice and was a political naïf, Willich was truly heroic. Not just a brilliant, and appallingly physically courageous, military officer, but a courageous thinker, a courageous ally to oppressed and marginalized people (particularly Black Americans), and somebody who sought—for all that he enjoyed fame, acclaim, and the perks of leadership—not to command but to empower others, to give them the tools to defend and perfect a people's republic.
