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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

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.

GALILEO AND THE SCIENCE DENIERS, a great read and a good gift

GALILEO AND THE SCIENCE DENIERS
MARIO LIVIO
Simon & Schuster
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An “intriguing and accessible” (Publishers Weekly) interpretation of the life of Galileo Galilei, one of history’s greatest and most fascinating scientists, that sheds new light on his discoveries and how he was challenged by science deniers. “We really need this story now, because we’re living through the next chapter of science denial” (Bill McKibben).

Galileo’s story may be more relevant today than ever before. At present, we face enormous crises—such as minimizing the dangers of climate change—because the science behind these threats is erroneously questioned or ignored. Galileo encountered this problem 400 years ago. His discoveries, based on careful observations and ingenious experiments, contradicted conventional wisdom and the teachings of the church at the time. Consequently, in a blatant assault on freedom of thought, his books were forbidden by church authorities.

Astrophysicist and bestselling author Mario Livio draws on his own scientific expertise and uses his “gifts as a great storyteller” (The Washington Post) to provide a “refreshing perspective” (Booklist) into how Galileo reached his bold new conclusions about the cosmos and the laws of nature. A freethinker who followed the evidence wherever it led him, Galileo was one of the most significant figures behind the scientific revolution. He believed that every educated person should know science as well as literature, and insisted on reaching the widest audience possible, publishing his books in Italian rather than Latin.

Galileo was put on trial with his life in the balance for refusing to renounce his scientific convictions. He remains a hero and inspiration to scientists and all of those who respect science—which, as Livio reminds us in this “admirably clear and concise” (The Times, London) book, remains threatened everyday.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A concise, well-thought-through biography of Galileo. The point of another biography of him is the present climate od science denial, of skepticism in our social and political realms, about the way science is done–and why it is done that way.

There is much to be taken from an erudite scientist and polymath's recounting of the events of Galileo's life in the specific context of looking at what led him to become a prisoner of conscience, what the men who opposed his dissemination of his discoveries were fighting for and against, and what this battle cost all of society. Author Livio is tendentious, unapologetically so, and presents a perfectly astonishing notes, footnotes, and sources collection for a popular not academic book.

The organization of the book is more thematic than linear. Following the author's arguments is, as expected from a scientist, not hard...being organized is kinda the job description of scientist, after all...but do not expect the chronology of Galileo's life to make an appearance, and go with the logical flow.

Science, being dedicated to the pursuit of facts, often presents its conclusions as Truth...then changes its mind as new evidence comes in. This is a feature, not a bug, in how science works. It conflicts with many people's intense need for Immutable Truth...science is pretty much antithetical to Immutability. This has the sad consquence of people like the church hierarchy is made up of, running head-on into people like Galileo and his fellow scientists as they follow the evidence and the facts in reaching very new conclusions...facts are not Truth. The conclusions based on the facts, new and old, are not Truth. Science is a worldview based on probabilities.

Many people feel this is shifty...dishonest...trying to put one over on them.

This is the conflict that Author Livio is arguing against. He does not use head-on confrontation to do so. Galileo's life, and his conflict with the hierarchy, does most of his heavy lifting. The beauty of his book is that this argument, presented in any other way, leads to deeper entrenchment of anti-science attitudes. By using the life of a well-known and respected scientist from the past, the attitudes that led him into conflict, and how that conflict is now understood, Author Livio uses the back door to find the chinks in the faulty logic used by science deniers.

Great book for your loud old uncle, or your argumentative teen boy, who has Opinions about science with no information to rest them on. Also good for you to read because you will learn more ways to build your counterarguments to the denials of facts to serve that evil illusion, Truth.