THE WAGES OF SIN, deeply disappointing alt-hist

THE WAGES OF SIN
HARRY TURTLEDOVE
CAEZIK SF & Fantasy (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: A terrifying tale about HIV spreading in the early sixteenth century by an author, Publisher Weekly calls “The Master of Alternate History.”

What if HIV started spreading in the early 1500s rather than the late 1900s? Without modern medicine, anybody who catches HIV is going to die. A patriarchal society reacts to this devastating disease in the only way it knows it sequesters women as much as possible, limiting contacts between the sexes except for married couples. While imperfect, such drastic actions do limit the spread of the disease.

The ‘Wasting’ (HIV) has caused devasting destruction throughout the known world and severely limited the development of technology as well, creating a mid-nineteenth century England and London almost unrecognizable to us. This is the world Viola is born into. Extremely intelligent and growing up in a house full of medical books which she reads, she dreams of travelling to far-off places, something she can only do via books since her actions and movements are severely restricted by both law and custom.

Meticulously researched and exquisitely detailed in a way only a master like Harry Turtledove can do, this book is a tour-de-force from one of the best historical and alternate history writers ever to write in the genre.

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My Review: Big ideas chopped to bits, tossed around some, then left to collapse where they collided. Are we in the 1509 Congolese-disease plot? The 1850s jerkoff's plot? (That is more literal than figurative here.) What made me read the book was Turtledove. Why I finished it was Turtledove. I disliked its underdeveloped alt-hist; I deeply disliked the crude and demeaning language, though both period and setting appropriate; I never felt as though, unlike a certain character, the story ever got near a climax as Viola and Peter, the straight people whose story I expected (not unreasonably) this to be, spend the entire story apart. Then, after a betrayal, a confession, and a shocking comeuppance(!), all conducted by letters between them, there's a wedding and...

...off you and I go. Contracts all fulfilled, we have a story thay does the absolute bare-bones minimum.This can't be all, thought I, but indeed it was. Please note there is absolutely not more than one tiny whiff of gayness, of sodomy as an act, of the merest hint of the existence of queers at all. In three hundred pages about AIDS.

Now it's the poor straight women get all the fallout of the AIDS epidemic because, I guess, there weren't gay people in 1509 Congo (great, let's put the source of the STD plague in Africa...at least it's a change from South America's factual syphilis plague...then switch to straight people in whiter-than-white England! Ignoring Africa thereafter! It's the twenty-fucking-first ventury, colonialism is on the cross so let's drop it, k?)

So I think I'm being pretty magnanimous with two stars.

ALAN SMALE'S PAGE: The Apollo Rising series, HOT MOON & RADIANT SKY

HOT MOON (Apollo Rising #1)
ALAN SMALE
CAEZIK SF & Fantasy (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Imagine for a second what would have happened if the Soviets had gotten a cosmonaut to the moon first, if Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 had been in a humiliating second place. Everything would have unfolded differently.

America would never have let the Soviets win the space race. That would have been unthinkable during the Cold War, political suicide for any president. We'd have gritted our teeth and doubled down, poured billions into the Apollo program.

HOT MOON is set in 1979 in this alternate world. The US and the Soviets both have permanent moon bases, orbiting space stations, and manned spy satellites supported by frequent rocket launches. Reagan is President and the Cold War is hotter than ever.

The crew of Apollo 32, commanded by Vivian Carter, career astronaut, docks at NASA's Columbia space station on their way to their main mission: exploring the volcanic Marius Hills region of the Moon. Vivian is caught in the crossfire as four Soviet Soyuz craft appear without warning to assault the orbiting station.

The fight for the Moon has begun!

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My Review: Imagine The Martian set in the storyverse of For All Mankind.

So. You got it. You need more?

The author's a praciticing astronomer. A real, actual scientist writing SF is always a positive, from my PoV, because the details are clearly based in a scientist's understanding of what matters to an expedition to the moon. It's also refreshing when someone takes the constraints of the actual extant tech of a given time seriously. Author Smale does both.

Mixed in with the cool sciency bits are a selection of genre-friendly bits of alternate history, in this case the survival of a Russian scientist whose death caused the end of the Soviet Moon program; a fun twist of gender-equality advancement; and a murder mystery. None of these violated the basic need of the SF reader for a clear path to believable results. It's as accurate to 1960s and 70s science as is possible.

Geopolitics as the source of alt-hist plots are, as you can imagine, the biggest vein in the story-mine ever worked. This one being especially interesting to me, of course I fell for it immediately (despite my absolute conviction that Nixon would never, ever, ever have pulled out of Vietnam...too many defense contractors would've been hurt). I'm one of those who saw "Earthrise" when there was one digit in my age:

...and was never the same again. So a story centered around a time when I was alive but positing a different outcome was meat and drink!

That doesn't stop me from seeing the execution's flaws. I don't see anything in Vivian's sketched-in background that makes her gender relevant, so it feels a bit like tokenism. Mentioning her inclusion for some overarching reason, or integrating some responses that point up the reason, might have helped.

The story's pace is not swift, which I mention for those wanting a real thrill ride. I found it more than swift enough to keep the pages turning. The pace is not representative of the perils. This is space after all, the merest slip of a tool can be lethal...and Vivian seems to be a disaster magnet. She's certainly hair-breadth escape expert par excellence. Permaybehaps a bit too much so.

So I'm not yodeling buy-now-or-else from atop the roof, I *am* saying it's a very enjoyable read for your Kindle as you do your best not to hear little Pookums extorting that second cousin's kid out of the latest game. It'll keep you immersed.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


RADIANT SKY (Apollo Rising #2)
ALAN SMALE
CAEZIK SF & Fantasy (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Vivan Carter, the electrifying hero from Hot Moon, returns to lead a lunar geological survey team comprised of both Americans and Soviets. Their journey takes them across the harsh and barren lunar surface as they chart the moon and collect samples for this grueling mission. It is dangerous enough, but the stakes become much higher when an ambush threatens the entire mission.

The crew must navigate a treacherous path where survival requires ingenuity, courage, and an uneasy alliance with their Soviet counterparts. As the stakes grow higher, the mission becomes a test of skill, endurance, and trust in an era defined by suspicion and rivalry.

Dive into an electrifying alternate history where space rivalry takes center stage. Radiant Sky is a thrilling continuation of the highly acclaimed hard science fiction novel that will captivate fans of NASA fiction books, near-future adventures, and hard science fiction series. Set in a meticulously crafted world where the Cold War extends far beyond Earth's atmosphere, humanity's reach into space creates a new frontier of tension and exploration.

With breathtaking accuracy from a retired NASA director and an immersive look at the untold stories of space rivalry, Radiant Sky brings hard science fiction alive, capturing the imagination and the thrill of space exploration. Prepare for a pulse-pounding experience that redefines what it means to venture into the unknown.

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My Review: Sequels to alternate-history books are hoeing a hard row indeed. The setting's the star, and the star's done the lifting in the first one. Now, four years later, we know what happened to Vivian, a chunk of why, and how it made her act.

What's left to do? Make her world do a flip: Cooperate with the Soviets who tried multiple ways to kill you only a few years ago. The Moon makes strange bedfellows, after all. And there's weirdness enough that we need all hands on deck to survive.

So the stakes ratcheted up from personal, the character's still a deeply resouceful person, the setting's still the very hostile one of the Moon, and we're treated to more tense moments. This does seem to me to be Author Smale's favorite way of moving the plot: Add a threat and resolve it with averting death. I'm not totally down with that because those stakes really don't change much, just make the status quo continue. So the dopamine hit of fixing the problem wanes a bit every time it happens again.

That said, I don't for a second want you to think this is a sequel where we just do it all again. The worldbuilding is more sophisticated than that. Geopolitics are present in any alternate history. In this iteration, the geopolitics are dependent on events from the last book, so they're less directly mappable still from the 1983 of your and my memories. That is clear from the fact we're on the Moon, of course...but the story is much more than that.

If you're a fan of "what happens when I pull this?" stories, this series will do it for you. Author Smale understands the puzzle-solver's mind, feeds it puzzles to follow as they're solved, and makes points about conflict, its roots, and some of the ways it does, and doesn't, get resolved.

This book came out last month and I snarfed it down in two days. Possibly displacing Farthing as my favorite alternate-history crime book....

2024 NEBULA FINALISTS: SLEEPING WORLDS HAVE NO MEMORY, thought-provoking story with a hopeful twist

SLEEPING WORLDS HAVE NO MEMORY
YAROSLAV BARSUKOV
CAEZIK SF & Fantasy (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.75* of five

FINALIST for the 2024 Nebula Award! Winner announced at the 2025 Nebula Conference, 5 through 8 June 2025.

The Publisher Says: When lies become truths and two kingdoms head to a bloody war, a man is exiled for his conscience

Refusing the queen’s order to gas a crowd of protesters, Minister Shea Ashcroft is banished to the border to oversee construction of the biggest defensive tower in history. However, the use of advanced technology taken from refugees makes the tower volatile and dangerous, becoming a threat to local interests. Shea has no choice but to fight the local hierarchy to ensure the construction succeeds—and to reclaim his own life.

Surviving an assassination attempt, Shea confronts his inner demons, encounters an ancient legend, and discovers a portal to a dead world—all the while struggling to stay true to his own principles and maintain his sanity. Fighting memories and hallucinations, he starts to question everything...

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory is a thought-provoking meditation on the fragility of the human condition, our beliefs, the manipulation of propaganda for political gains, and our ability to distinguish the real from the unreal and willingness to accept convenient “truths.” The novel is a compelling exploration of memory, its fragile nature, and its profound impact on our perception of identity, relationships, and facts themselves.

A unique blend of science fiction, fantasy and noir, with zeitgeist and prophetic qualities (the original novella anticipated the Russo-Ukrainian War), this is a must for fans of China Miéville’s Bas-Lag series, Ted Chiang’s Tower of Babylon, and Robert Silverberg’s Tower of Glass.

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My Review: We can use some entertainment. We can use a bit of moral instruction, it seems. Author Barsukov said these things to himself, at least in my reconstruction of the thought process that led to this book, and decided that he'd make a world and a man to resist its slide into darkness.

I found this book very inspiring. I'm inspired to bring it to y'all's attention because of this piece from The Guardian, "'It will renew your faith in humanity': books to bring comfort in dark times":

A surprising number of readers believe a happy ending should mean automatic disqualification from any serious literary award. Good luck to them: I wish them joy in their wallowing. In my turn, I’ve come to believe the opposite. To reach only for novels that reaffirm our darkest fears is merely to make an escape of a different sort, not the escapism of brooding heroes and wedding finales, but the security blanket of an equally foregone conclusion: the safety of imagining the worst. I would argue that to live only in that place is simply cowardice in better camouflage. The truth is that it’s far riskier to remain in uncertainty. Far braver, far more radical to keep hoping.

The truth of this is in Shea's dogged determination to do what's Right; it's in his determination's effect on engineer Brielle, whose expertise is central in what their shared need to do what's Right creates.

There's a lot of the epic fantasy ethos in this urban-fantasy story, sans the usual military glorification; but there is a very welcome leavening of SF in the story that prevents me from the usual somnolent, glazed-eyed scanning to get to the ending. I was alert and involved as Brielle's skills were deployed to create the tower that Shea's tasked with defending, to little avail:

The tower took the length of the world—only it was an alien world, replicating itself over and over as it climbed to a distant, ghostly gap into the clouds. Or did he stare down a well? Shea's head spun again as up and down flip-flopped like axes on a gyroscope.

Does this dimensionally daft structure need defending? Does this technology need help, or resistance to its implications? Can anyone, still less a proven-murderous tyrant, be trusted with a tool/weapon of this magnitude? Are the Others, the aliens, to be trusted, or are they there to treat Shea and his people as the Others...with the usual result?

Ethical questions, existential ones, that resonate clearly with our post-November 6th world. They aren't easy, or easily solved ones; Author Barsukov doesn't pretend his ending is a solution to them all. There aren't any escape routes from the consequences of greed and lust for power provided. There are stern meditations on what we try to use, though:

What makes guilt so grotesque is the fact that it adorns itself with whatever remains of our righteousness.

And so the sadness of life as a moral actor, as a being with agency and puissance outreaching the lessons of their past, is revealed and refined. The story, an expansion of his 2021 novella Tower of Mud and Straw, reminded me more and more of THE DEEP SEA DIVER'S SYNDROME (qv) which French translation also delves into the intersection between dreamlike states and meatspace with equal care. Does anyone really know what the Tower is/can do? Do their...reveries, memories, dreamlike experiences...come without cost yet replete with warning signs?

An ending that addresses these queries of reality yet doesn't wrap them in a tight, constricting little bow gave me both inspiration and information to examine this moment in which I am deeply unhappy, afraid, and emotionally bereft, with a dose of hope. There is a reason Author Barsukov chose this particular stream-of-consciousness style, and this superposed urban-fantasy/SF genre mashup, to tell you this story. Intrinsic to the story, the way everything meshes...and the things that don't...are all made to present a frame for a very intensely resonant meditation.

There is not a lot more valuable for a story to give as its gift than that.