ObeliskGate

Grimdark fantasy SF that makes the works of Abercrombie and Morgan seem like happy optimistic children’s fiction.

This is the second book in The Broken Earth series and it picks up right after the first book, The Fifth Season, ends. The Earth is still broken. Everyone is still going to die. And things continue to get worse.

The two main characters, Essun and Nassun, mother and daughter, both gifted with powers that make them an outcasts and slaves. They’ve been separated by circumstances and their struggles form the core of the book.

Everyone is so damaged. It’s heartbreaking. Nassun, a young girl, is warped and broken by seeing her father standing over the corpse of her younger brother. He was killed by their father when the father realized that his son had the powers to shape rocks. Nassun, in an effort to survive, travels with her father, manipulating him, developing her powers. Trying to stay alive. Expecting to die. Even when she finds sanctuary among others like herself, even when she becomes powerful in her abilities to shape forces both geological and genetic, she still knows that she will die soon. She knows that at any moment she will be killed. And all around her, the world ends.

Essun, her mother, is similarly damaged by her various pasts. She’s found refuge, temporary refuge, in an underground town. It seems nice and unbelievably, it’s run by a woman who is a member of the same slave caste as she it. But Essun knows that she can’t trust any one there, she knows that she can’t trust the situation to remain safe and peaceful. She knows that the pogrom against her and her kind is inevitable. Her past has taught her that any refuge is temporary and to be prepared for the worst. Happiness is a lie both malign and blind for Essun.

She similarly distrusts those who come to her and tell her that she can save the world. All she has to do is trust them and develop her powers. All she has to do is believe them. And she has no trust left.

Saving the world. It brings up a question I have. Why do the writers of SF fantasy hate the Moon? Richard Morgan in his Dark series turns the Moon into an orbital ring. In this series, Jemisin has the moon flung away and forgotten. What’s up with the lunar hate, guys? Sheesh.

Saving the world also brings up one minor problem I have with the book. In the course of the story, it’s revealed that Essun might have the power to save the world, to stop, even reverse the end of the world. Reading this, it struck me as cliche. It’s just a variant on the hidden scullery boy who can defeat the Evil Dark Lord. In any other fantasy series, I would have just accepted this and moved on. But Jemisin is such a good author that this plot element was especially jarring. It’s the only fly in the ointment. And I trust her that she’ll come up with some interesting twist on the concept.

I grew up in the 80s, so I grew up knowing, in my bones, that the world was going to end in a nuclear war. Which means I read a metric fuck-ton of post-apocalypse fiction. The stuff was everywhere in those days: Horseclans, the Survivalist, Deathlands, that Dean Ing series, Damnation Alley, Swan’s Song, and there are lots more that I’m forgetting. The Obelisk Gate puts them all in the shade, shows them up for the happy clappy optimistic lies that they were. In The Obelisk Gate, for example, cannibalism is inevitable and rationally discussed.

This is a sad book, filled with people just trying to survive the end of the world, just trying to survive for just a little longer. No heroes (and in those other post-apocalypse books, there were always heroes – usually white guys, of course), just people trying to survive amid unremitting horror as the planet dies and other people try to kill them.

Anyway. This is a fantastic book. Very well written. Incredibly grim. I am looking forward to the rest of the books in the series.

jablokov

Carve The Sky is a 1991 science fiction novel by Alexander Jablokov starring Anton Lindgren (Seneschal to George Harvey Westerkamp, Lord Monboddo, Interrogator of Boston, Colonel Division of External Security {Westerkamp wears a lot of hats}) and Vanessa Karageorge (Ordinary Fellow of the Academia Sapientae). Hat tip to Movies With Mikey.

The plot of the novel revolves around the search for a famous and skilled sculptor who’s supposed to have been dead for a couple of years. A new piece by him has appeared and it contains a very special extra-terrestrial mineral. A mineral that might contain the secret to space travel. The Union of Nations wants the mineral. The Technic Alliance of the outer planets and satellites wants it. And nobody knows what the Academia Sapientae wants, but they’re involved. The threat of the Second Solar War looms. It’s a Macguffin hunt. It’s a tour novel.

But what makes this novel special is that it’s so wonderfully decadent, filled with delightful touches. Because of weapons satellites left over from the Orthodox Empire, there’s no high speed travel on Earth. No jets or anything like that. All long distance travel is done by zeppelin and train. A slow decadent pace for a book that goes from Boston to the Pamir Mountains via an art gallery in Paris and a monastery in Istanbul and then to the Asteroid Belt via a stop on the moon for more art and a boar hunt.

It’s on the Moon, in the city of Rutherford which rests in the Crater Clavius, where Jablokov sets the scene that truly informs the reader that this isn’t a usual SF novel. The scene is a wild animal hunt. On the Moon. A regular event where the Justice of Clavius, a member of the nobility, releases a flood of wild animals in the streets and forests that stretch below the surface of the Moon. Boar, deer, gazelles, pronghorn antelopes. All of them being hunted with spears and bows by the citizens. On the Moon.

Jablokov does something that I greatly admire on the level of technique. Many of the chapters start with extracts from books, reports, catalogues, tourist guides. The extracts give a little background to the chapter: lunar culture, Anatolian politics, cult history, best place to get noodles in the Asteroid Belt. This is a very artful way to avoid info-dumps. So artful, that I’m going to steal it for my next book.

Jablokov has written several other very good SF novels. River of Dust takes place in the same universe as Carve The Sky, some of the same characters but younger. Same flavor. Nimbus is a near future SF novel informed by the chaos of the post-Soviet 90s. There’s a very cute bit in Nimbus of jazz playing LARPers who pretend to be living in a world where rock and roll never happened. It’s a typically Jablokovian grace note. He’s a very good writer who, as far as I can tell, fell victim to the collapse of the mid-list. And we readers are the poorer for it.

I highly recommend Carve The Sky. A very good SF novel written with imagination and verve.

Next week… Well, next week, I give in and review a Warhammer 40K novel. That’s right, next week is all shooty-shooty stabby-stabby all the time.

Kadath by John Coulthart
Kadath by John Coulthart

Dreams are dangerous.

Dreams are especially dangerous when they are shared, when you walk through the dreamer’s internal visions that are unspooling behind their eyelids. Michael Cisco has shared one of his dreams with us. A fever dream of The Divinity Student and what happens to him the city of San Veneficio. What he does in San Veneficio.

The Divinity Student is taking a break from his studies at The Seminary. He’s taking a walk in the rain and he climbs a hill. Where he’s struck by lightning. Killed. Fried. This happens on the first page.

They cut him open. They toss out his cooked innards. They stuff him with pages. With text. With words. Words become his core. Words bring him back to life.

And words become his mission.

He is sent to the city, to San Veneficio. The city in the desert. The city where giant monitor lizards surround it at night, their eyes reflecting the lights of city. The city where the heat presses down on the streets and plazas and where demons live in the trees.

In San Veneficio, he is trained to retrieve memories from the dead. He starts with dead animals, works his way up to humans. He’s taught this skill because of the Catalog of Unknown Words.

The Catalog lists the words used in the Eclogue, the dialogues between the shepherds of men. These dialogues are the substance of Creation, according to the Seminary Priest who gives the Student his mission.

The Divinity becomes a Mad Scientist, creating machinery to extract the memories from the dead brains of the scholars who created the Catalogue in the first place. To extract the words. He becomes lost in memories, dreams, hallucinations. He lives on formaldehyde.

Every Mad Scientist needs an Igor. The Divinity Student has Teo Desden, the butcher who dreams of the day when he’s the one getting chopped apart on his counters. Desden with his sharpened knives and cleavers. Desden who makes the bodies disappear.

But the Seminary doesn’t know what it has resurrected. The Student goes rogue, flooded with the power and dreams taken from the brains of dead men.

Phantasmagoria. Visions. Dreams. Cisco evokes the Student’s shifting internal landscape with immaculate skill. The read feels how the membrane of reality trembles around the Student as he walks along the street of San Veneficio, as the buildings stare down in dumb regard. And outside the walls, the monitor lizards look on with reflective eyes. Knowing more than they let on.

The outbreaks of superpowers that contort the Student’s body, fling him dancing and leaping over the roofs of the city.

Come on. Share this dream. Read just a page. Just one. It won’t hurt.

Next up: Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte.

haints

Brooke and Sugar, two brothers, more than brothers, a little different than brothers, are killers for hire.

Casual violence and the intimations of a ghost story when the young nameless boy with the blank palms appears. And then things get horrific.

Brooke and Sugar are captured, separated. Tragedy results. Death. Mindless violence. The two brothers never see each other again. The death of one of them happens at a distance, at the hands of someone who is trying to do good and completely misunderstands the situation.

The violence is sudden. The cannibal is awful. And Sugar’s pregnancy and delivery is surreal. And there is, of course, the high comedy of the high tension scenes of violence.

It’s a western so the temptation is to compare it to Blood Meridian. Amoral monsters wandering around dispensing offhand brutal violence, the urge to invoke St. Cormac is understandable. But the two, while possessing certain genetics in common, are dissimilar enough that Haints Stay can be enjoyed on its own merits. Winnette’s a good writer. And he’s got his own way of telling a story.

Short, sharp sentences, rather than the rolling, ornate utterances of Blood Meridian.

Very stylized dialogue. The two children, orphaned by violence and massacre, don’t really talk as real children would. It seems like that’s a requirement for Westerns, very stylized dialogue. Even Deadwood was that way. More of the influence of St. Cormac on the entire genre, I suppose.

An abrupt ending that echos with the tragedies to come.

Every bit of happiness in the book contains sadness or evil. The only certainty is that there will be violence to come.

A short book and a very good one. Very highly recommended.
Next up: Savage Messiah by Laura Oldfield Ford

ninefox

Imaginative.

Yoon Ha Lee has made a name for himself with such short stories as Snakes  and Falcon-And-Sparrows and The Knight of Chains, The Deuce of Swords. Ninefox Gambit is his first novel.

It’s military SF, which (stating my biases upfront) was a bit disappointing, since the genre is inherently conservative one within the infinite possibilities of science fiction.

The Hexarchate (which used to be the Heptarchate before the Liozh were declared heretics and destroyed) is a standard authoritarian interstellar government that keeps its power through the enforcement of calendrical and religious protocols. All conquered peoples are forced to follow the same date and time systems. Control at the level of basic societal assumptions.

The Hex in the Hexarchate refers to the castes in the system: Kel, Shuos, Nihrai, Rahal, Andan, and the last one that starts with a V (Vordai? Sorry, bad note taking while reading). The lead character in the book is Captain Kel Cheris. She’s a genius at math and has been very successful in the ranks of the Kel, the Hexarchate’s military caste. Her success has brought her to the attention of the leaders of the Hexarchate who are dealing with an outbreak of heresy that has taken over the Fortress of Scattered Needles. When asked what weapon she will need to destroy the heretics and take the Fortress, she answers that she needs the insane traitor General Shuos Jedao. Jedao has been on ice for the last 400 years, too traitorous and insane to keep alive, too useful to kill. He never lost a battle, you see. The Hexarchate responds with a long ooooookayyyyy… and gives Cheris what she wants.

Cheris goes into battle with Jedao welded to her shadow, offering her advice and strategy in her mind. Which is a problem for Cheris when she realizes that Jedao is playing a very long game. A game of vengeance. An extremely long gambit.  

Lee uses his imagination best in this novel when it comes to weapon design. Amputation guns. Threshold winnowers. Carrion bombs which leave behind nothing but shards of personality traits and memories that can be ingested. Cannons both erasure and dire. Infantry formations that bring on hive mind states and also act as mathematical armor for the entire formation. Military SF, yes, but not your standard shooty-shooty (yes, Warhammer 40K, I’m looking at you).

There’s a lot of talking in this novel. But Lee is a skilled writer and is able to keep the scenes tension filled and moving along. It’s never a boring novel.

One of the weakness of the book is that there isn’t a great sense of place. A variety of command centers and hallways, it seemed.

Reminded me a lot of Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch series, down to gloves as civilizational signifier and AIs that are secretly helpful to those who they like.

It’s almost like a fantasy novel (cue: any sufficiently advanced tech = magic). Sword and sorcery overlay of the science fiction elements. This came to mind when I read the place names: Fortress of the Scattered Needles, the Entangled March, the Citadel of Eyes.

I’m not saying Ninefox Gambit is a bad novel. It’s imaginative. Read it if you can get it from a library or torrent. I’m going to read the next one in the series. I was just hoping for the pure quill weirdness that Lee showed in his short stories.
Next Review: Haints Stay by Colin Winnette