VAGABONDS, first English-language novel from Hugo-winner Hao Jingfang

VAGABONDS
HAO JINGFANG (tr. Ken Liu)
Saga Press
$28.99 hardcover, available now

JUMPNAUTS (book 2) reviewed here

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A century after the Martian war of independence, a group of kids are sent to Earth as delegates from Mars, but when they return home, they are caught between the two worlds, unable to reconcile the beauty and culture of Mars with their experiences on Earth in this spellbinding novel from Hugo Award–winning author Hao Jingfang.

In 2096, the war of independence erupts when a colony of people living on Mars rebel against Earth’s rule. The war results in two different and mutually incompatible worlds. In 2196, one hundred years later, Earth and Mars attempt to initiate a dialogue, hoping a reconciliation is on the horizon. Representing Mars, a group of young delegates are sent to Earth to study the history and culture of the rival planet, all while teaching others about life on Mars.

Narrated from two perspectives: Luo Ying, an eighteen-year-old girl from Mars who has spent the past five years on Earth, and Ignacio, a filmmaker in his late twenties from Earth on a job to document the delegates from Mars. Both Luo and Ignacio are trapped between worlds, with critics all around, and always under suspicion, searching for where they truly belong.

THE PUBLISHER APPROVED A DRC OF THE BOOK FOR ME VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It will come as no surprise to any regular reader, or in fact anyone I've interacted with in the past decade-plus, that end-stage capitalism such as has gifted us with the badly botched, lethally disorganized COVID-19 plague response is not high on my list of Good Things in the old-fashioned Martha Stewart sense. Quite a lot of people (over fifteen) in the assisted-living facility where I live are dead thanks to this money-grubbing ethos. So yes, I began this read fully expecting to approve of the Utopian Martian colony and its collectivist politics.

Well, it's comforting (I suppose) that I consistently never learn....

Hugo-winner Hao (Best Novelette, 2016) builds two competing Utopias. Neither sees the beam in its own eye but focuses on the mote in its symbiotic sibling's; so much easier to sell the distortion and misperception necessary to see any human-made system as anything other than dystopian. Earth's hypercapitalism has continued to devour the planet; its existence is always precarious, always threatening to collapse. Mars's collectivism is dependent on inputs from the fragile, worn-out Earth; its people are not natural innovators, never striving to Do More because, well, why? You don't get more, and there is limited support for striving.

A side note to shout out my dead father, whose aperçu about economics I quote frequently: No system will thrive that either ignores or exalts greed.

This book assumes that Earth remains viable in 2196, and is willing as well as able to continue to support its former Martian colony. I question this decision...but then I remind myself of Ursula K. Le Guin's magisterial The Dispossessed which treats similar themes in a similar setting. The use of a less sophisticated narrator in this book makes it possible for Author Hao to run the lessons past us without the dreaded "As you know, Bob..." locutions. Of course there's information to be dumped, these are STUDENTS! It worked well for me. Quite a lot of the cultural interchange between the rival systems seems, well, far-fetched is as close as I dare come. Eko, an Earth character, has come to Mars to make a documentary; he wants, in his heart of hearts, to grow closer to his dead mentor the Marsophile. Luyuang, our principal Martian character, has returned from her exchange period on Earth where she studied...wait for it...dance in the three-times-greater gravity of Earth! Mm hmm.

I don't want to get into the story's twists and turns for two reasons: Spoilers are impossible to avoid, and your experience of the storytelling voice is the best barometer of your eventual pleasure in the read that you can find. I enjoyed reading Translator Liu's gilded words and finely wrought arabesques. You might not. But download a sample, and if that unique voice isn't your jam, don't go any further. This book clocks in at over 600 pages. Writing that isn't simply thrilling to you will rapidly devolve into a waterboarding session at that length.

While I'm discussing length...the last 100pp of the book are delightfully swift and deeply exciting. The middle 200pp should be severely chopped into, ballpark figure, 75pp. Book-bloat is as common in China as it is in the USA, more's the pity. But, for the reader who vibrates like a freshly-struck bell to this writing and this political tale, the experience is a top quality one.

I can't be clearer than: Try it; you'll know right away if it is for you, as it was for me.

ANCILLARY JUSTICE, Hugo, BSFA, Arthur C. Clarke Award winner...it's okay

ANCILLARY JUSTICE (Imperial Radch #1)
ANN LECKIE
Orbit Books
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.
Once, she was the Justice of Toren - a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.
Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER AS PART OF THE LIBRARY THING EARLY REVIEWERS PROGRAM.

My Review: Pleasant enough. I'm not convinced that Leckie has moved the goalposts for female empowerment by preferentially using she in place of he, which so far as I can see is what's new and different about this book.

Congratulations to Ms. Leckie for winning her many awards, and to Orbit for seeing the potential in the book. I have missed everything the awards committees have seen, and am almost certainly the poorer for it. I feel no more Enlightened in my gender-role attitudes than I was before, and am not going to remember this book in about a day. The xenophobic imperialists the Radch were mildly interesting. The pragmatic handling of religion on the Radch's part was refreshing and appealing.

But Hugo Award, BSFA Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award? Really? I'm obviously missing something major. I don't see it.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

THE MAN WHO BRIDGED THE MIST, Hugo & Nebula Best Novella Winner

THE MAN WHO BRIDGED THE MIST
KIJ JOHNSON
Author's Website
Free Download!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The river of Mist, an almost living organism, divides the Empire in two. A few Ferries make dangerous and treacherous journeys across the Mist when they can, trusting in good fortune and the uncanny skills of those plying the trade. *** A bridge across the Mist will greatly ease the suffering of those who risk crossing the river. The last bridge builder sent by the Empire died while building it. *** Kit now comes to the town of Nearside to complete the task left unfinished by the dead bridge builder. Will he be the man who will finally bridge the Mist?

This novella won both the Nebula and the Hugo Awards for Best Novella of 2011.

My Review: My Goodreads friend Nataliya recommended this novella to me today. The title, as beautiful and evocative as this author's debut collection of short fiction's was (At the Mouth of the River of Bees), hooked me; the Doc's warble of rapture sealed the deal.

There was for everything a possibility, an invisible pattern that could be made manifest given work and the right materials.

Bless you, dear Doc, bless you and those whose hurts and harms you heal with that magiqckal ability to see and fix a pattern. This story was a piece of my own pattern that was missing, and you gave it to me.

This tale of a man in a world not entirely like our own, a man whose purpose is to function and whose function is to build, that needs a way to communicate and connect its parts. Technology isn't advanced, and there's not even a HINT of majgicqk to sully the handsome, spare caternary curve of the story. It is a story of a world beset by troubles we know bone-deep, connection and confusion and longing and fear. And every character, no matter how fleeting their time or how small their space on the page, carries the weight of their piece of the pattern fairly and squarely. This is how I know I'm in the presence of top-quality writing. I see the pattern, I sense the supporting structure, and I am still *in* the story. Many writers write lovely sentences and many others imagine some strong characters, relatable and investible, and many many more create stories that bind and grip and sweep and carry me away. A very few do two of these things, and a vanishingly small number do them all. In this work, Johnson has done them all.

In a fortyish-page novella, five years of toil and change and death and learning fold into a structure as deceptively simple as an origami crane. The slow and unhurried pace at which the folds present themselves belies the time it took to craft them as well as the conciseness of their delivery. It is never easy to be brief. It is much more demanding to satisfy the jaded, spoiled-for-choice reader in a compact package.

“The soul often hangs in a balance of some sort. Tonight do I lie down in the high fields with Dirk Tanner or not? At the fair, do I buy ribbons or wine? For the new ferry’s headboard, do I use camphor or pearwood? Small things. A kiss, a ribbon, a grain that coaxes the knife this way or that. They are not, Kit Meinem of Atyar. Our souls wait for our answer because any answer changes us. This is why I wait to decide what I feel about your bridge. I’m waiting until I know how I will be changed.”
“You never know how things will change you,” Kit said.
“If you don’t, you have not waited to find out.”

Simple, direct, truthful, and (for me anyway) resonant with truth.

Perhaps the defining moment of the story, the bridging of the Mist River, came for me when Kit and Rasali experience a deeply, intensely frightening encounter with the Mist. Reflecting on it, and on the death that comes for us all at some time we can't know for sure, Kij Johnson rang my eyes like gongs:

“If {Death} comes for you?” he said. “Would you be so sanguine then?”
She laughed and the pensiveness was gone. “No indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.”

Won't it, though?


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

SIX MONTHS, THREE DAYS by Charlie Jane Anders

I've reviewed a Hugo-winning novelette, SIX MONTHS, THREE DAYS, by Charlie Jane Anders.

What an interesting question it poses. Do we in fact have free will? Does the ability to foresee more than one future outcome to the present mean change is possible, or merely that some choices are okay to make?

I love the answer. Read it, it's free.


SIX MONTHS, THREE DAYS
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
Tor.com
Free, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: NBC is putting Charlie Jane Anders’ Six Months, Three Days into production and we could not be more excited! Tor.com published the Hugo award-winning novelette in 2011.

From Deadline Hollywood, NBC is adapting the story into...

...a light procedural about a mismatched pair of San Francisco private investigators — an upbeat, free-spirited idealist and a swoon-worthy, brooding fatalist –- both of whom can see the future. Forced to team up, the pair knows their relationship is destined to grow from antagonistic rivalry into fairy-tale true love… but only if they can stop him from being killed in six months and three days. The adaptation will being written by film and TV writer Eric Garcia, author of the novel Matchstick Men, on which the feature film was based. Ritter, Garcia, Janollari and Silent Machine’s Lindsey Liberatore are executive producing.

Charlie Jane had this to say over on io9...

I was really blown away by how many people connected with this story, both with the characters and with the ideas. After a decade and a half of toiling in obscurity as a fiction writer, it's beyond intense when something you wrote takes on a life of its own like that. Knowing that something that came out of your head is living in other people's heads, is enough to make your head explode. I felt way beyond lucky.

So then hearing from other creative people that they want to turn my story into something brand new and different is kind of that same feeling of astonishment and luck — only maybe even more so, because of the realization that smart people are putting time and energy into the idea of adapting your story. Whatever happens with this deal, I will never stop being thrilled about that.

A huge congratulations to Charlie Jane Anders! And a thank-you to editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden for acquiring the story for us. This remains one of my favorite stories we have had the honor to publish. If you haven’t read it yet, you can do so here. And then get the popcorn ready for TV night!

My Review: "O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!" --Robert Burns

That quote has always chilled me. I don't want to see myself as others see me, thanks. Burns's point is that we should not wish for that, ever, because the burden of knowing what another person thinks, sees, feels is quite impossibly heavy and unbearable. Think of how many times in this good life you've wanted not to know what you yourownself thought, felt, saw.

Charlie Jane Anders, a smallish fixture in the SFnal world with a good reputation as a storyteller and a nice lady, imagines for two people the horrid, heavy burden of seeing the future...exacerbated or ameliorated by their discovery of each other and their subsequent, doomed relationship. After all, seeing the future means knowing how it ends, right?

“I don’t think you’re any more or less powerful than me. Our powers are just different,” Doug says. “But I think you’re a selfish person. I think you’re used to the idea that you can cheat on everything, and it’s made your soul a little bit rotten. I think you’re going to hate me for the next few weeks until you figure out how to cast me out. I think I love you more than my own arms and legs and I would shorten my already short life by a decade to have you stick around one more year. I think you’re brave as hell for keeping your head up on our journey together into the mouth of hell. I think you’re the most beautiful human being I’ve ever met, and you have a good heart despite how much you’re going to tear me to shreds.”

Or does it, wonders Judy, mean that she can make changes in small things and thereby change the future? Is it in her power to alter the inevitable? Doug doesn't think so. Doug is a committed and convinced determinist. He sees only one future, and he's sure he's correct about its inevitability.

Judy sees, on the other hand, a multiplicity of possible futures, and must weigh in a matter of a blink which one she will choose. Pause a moment and consider that. Doesn't that degree of personal accountability for one's life's course sound appallingly dreary?

And now imagine for a moment the sheer relief of finding and spending time with the one other person on the planet that fully, as fully as humans can anyway, Gets You...while knowing that your love is doomed. (See the title for a clue.)

Do you lie down and weep for what can't be changed? Do you rail against the cold, merciless gawd who lumbered you with this "gift?" Or do you break the rules, test the limits, fight for yourself and your happiness, by doing something, anything, to take your future into your own hands?

Well?