A Rip Through Time (2022) - Kelley Armstrong

 

Back when I was eleven years old, the 1960 movie version of The Time Machine was my first real exposure to time travel stories. I knew I wanted more, but time travel movies don’t come along every day, so I reluctantly turned to the movie’s source material, the 1895 novel of the same name by H.G. Wells. That’s how a whole new fiction subgenre was introduced to me, and I’ve been a sucker for time travel novels ever since. Over the years, I’ve read some great ones, some mediocre ones, and some pretty bad ones.

Kelley Armstrong’s A Rip Through Time is one of the good ones.

For me, time travel novels come in two general types: thoughtful stories that explore the ethics and dangers of being able to change the future by changing the past vs. the, usually simpler but thrilling, adventures time travelers experience by going backward or forward in time.  Even though Armstrong's time traveler, Mallory Atkinson, is aware that her meddling in the past might change the future to some degree, A Rip Through Time falls more squarely in the second  category.

Mallory, a homicide detective with the Vancouver police department, is in Scotland to visit her dying grandmother for the last time when she crosses paths with a serial killer who tries to strangle her. The last thing she remembers, before waking up in a strangely antiquated room, is fighting for her life. Now she has to figure out why she’s trapped inside the body of a teenage housemaid in 1869 Edinburgh -  and why everyone seems to dislike her so much. And all the while, Mallory is desperately looking for a way back to her own world and time.

A Rip Through Time is a solid murder mystery in which Mallory and the local police work together to identify and stop whoever is strangling young women (Mallory believes that finding the killer is the key to her being able to return to her own time), but the real fun comes from watching her try to adapt to the period in which she’s trapped. Mallory’s police detective experience gives her crime scene insights and skills that 1869 policemen can only dream about, but she has to keep reminding herself that to them she is only a teenage housemaid - and a supposedly reformed thief, at that. On a lighter note, Mallory struggles not to use contemporary words and phrases that have completely different meanings in 1869 Scotland than they have in twenty-first century Canada - even though some in the household appreciate them enough to begin using the new words and phrases themselves.

A Rip Through Time has two sequels, The Poisoner’s Ring and The Music of Time that I hope to explore later. I’ve already read the first chapter of The Poisoner’s Ring and see that it takes up exactly where A Rip Through Time ends, so I decided to take a break from that world before reading on into the series. If you like more lighthearted (despite the numerous murders in this one) time travel fiction, I think you will enjoy A Rip Through Time.

Godfall (2023) - Van Jensen

 

“No one knew where the thing came from. What it was. How it remained unseen for so long. Only that it was three miles long, head to toe. If it didn’t change course, in six days and twenty-two hours it would make landfall in the United States. Models were forecasting western Nebraska. At the speed it was going, it would strike the earth like a bullet. An extinction-level event…"

But that’s not really what happens.

Instead, as it approaches rural Nebraska, what turns out to be an alien corpse falls slower and slower before rather gently landing just outside Little Springs, Nebraska. No one dies. No one is even injured. But almost immediately, a swarm of military personnel, FBI agents, scientists, cultists, foreign spies, and conspiracy theorists hits Little Springs - and Sheriff David Blunt’s problems are just about to begin. In the end, the Sheriff will be lucky to survive the invasion of his little town, because almost immediately people start to die - and it looks like the string of murders is directly connected to the massive, supposedly dead, alien.

Godfall is not as much of a science fiction novel as its title and basic plot might lead readers to believe it to be. It is much more a solidly crafted police procedural in which the Sheriff, with a mixed bag of help and opposition from the FBI and the military, tries to catch a serial killer who is relentlessly picking off his victims one by one. That so many of the killer’s victims are townspeople personally closest to Sheriff Blunt makes it all the more urgent that the killer be stopped quickly. The job would be a lot easier, though, if Blunt could tell the difference between those he can trust and those who are lying to him.

This is a well done mashup of the science fiction and murder mystery genres that will probably please fans of the mystery genre a bit more than it will please science fiction fans. In truth, the scifi here is really rather limited in comparison to the space given to catching the town’s serial killer. It helps that the novel’s characters are distinctive enough to keep them all straight, with Sheriff Blunt and his journalist cousin being particularly well developed ones.

If you are a fan of both science fiction and of mysteries, Godfall is definitely one you should take a look at, but even non-scifi fans will enjoy this one.

Mars Life (2008) by Ben Bova

I cut my reading teeth on ‘50s and ‘60s scifi authors like Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Theodore Sturgeon, and a few others. Probably because so much of his output was aimed directly at the YA market, Heinlein is the one whose work I remember most vividly today, but all of my favorites had one thing in common: a relatively strong emphasis on the “science” part of the term “science fiction.” And that’s the kind of science fiction I’m most likely to enjoy and remember today even though I do like a well written space opera or alien invasion novel now and then. (My favorite scifi novel of the last few years is Andy Weir’s The Martian, a novel in which the science is almost a main character of its own.) 

Although it’s a little too light on the scientific details to suit me, Ben Bova’s Mars Life does place an emphasis on science over wild fantasy to tell its tale of a Mars exploration mission having to be shut down due to budgetary limitations. It’s come down to a choice of spending money on space exploration or on resettling the millions of people around the world who have been displaced by the rising tides of global warming. Not so hard a choice, really.

But it couldn’t have happened at a worse time for the team on Mars.

A team of anthropologists digging beneath previously discovered  60-million-year-old Martian cliff dwellings has just discovered an actual fossil in what they believe to be a small city located below the cliff dwellings. But that fossil, even with the discovery of an adjacent Martian cemetery filled with the bones of ancient Martians, will not be enough to save the project because the Mars project has more than just money problems - it has very powerful enemies actively working to shut it down for good. As in forever.

The New Morality, a dominant group of religious fundamentalists is so politically powerful that no politician running for office dares run without its endorsement. New Morality believes the type of archeological work proposed for Mars is a threat to its core religious beliefs. If God, or perhaps even another God, created a Martian population and then destroyed it what does that say about their own relationship to God? Is everything they believe about to be proven wrong? New Morality already has ensured that all remaining government funding has been pulled from the project, and now they are intimidating private donors to follow suit.

Mars Life is as much about politics and personal relationships as it is science fiction. It is a cynical look at what motivates peoples and governments and just how fortunate we often are to have a handful of good people turn up in exactly the right spot at the right time when we need them there most. Mars Life is unlikely ever to be considered a scifi classic, but it is an interesting look at what it might be like to be trapped on another planet with only a limited number of people around for support.   

(Mars Life, following Mars and Return to Mars, is the third book in Ben Bova’s Mars series.)

Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro

Despite all the international acclaim garnered by Kazuo Ishiguro in recent years, Klara and the Sun is my first experience with one of his novels. The immediate buzz about this one was so great that I knew I had to read it, but ended up waiting for five months for my name finally to reach the top of my library’s “hold list.” Thankfully, Klara and the Sun was worth the wait, and now I can look forward to reading more from Ishiguro, including his backlist. 

Klara and the Sun takes place at some time in the relatively near future in an unnamed country in which people seem to have splintered into communities that share certain characteristics and status levels. Those wanting to move to a new city or state first have to  find a community willing to invite them there. This is definitely a country of haves and have-nots, and the impression is that rapidly advancing technology, especially the use of artificial intelligence, has a lot to do with the economic split. 

The novel’s narrator, in fact, is a lifelike robot called Klara, who introduces herself this way to the reader in the novel’s first few sentences:

When we were new, Rosa and I were mid-store, on the magazine table side, and could see through more than half of the window. So we were able to watch the outside — the office workers hurrying by, the taxis, the runners, the tourists, Beggar Man and his dog, the lower part of the RPO Building. Once we were more settled, Manager allowed us to walk up to the front until we were right behind the window display, and then we could see how tall the RPO Building was. 

Klara and Rosa, two robotic Artificial Friends (known to the world as AFs) themselves become friends while they spend all those hours waiting to be taken home by the one teenager who will choose them off the showroom floor. They are friends, but they are not really much alike. Klara, in fact, is everything that Rosa is not: curious, thoughtful, empathetic, and observant. And she will turn out to be the perfect match for the teen girl who finally returns to purchase Klara just when the AF is beginning to think it will never happen for her.

Klara’s new human friend, Josie, is not having an easy time of it at home, but she could not have made a better choice for an AF than Klara because Klara is completely dedicated to her new role as Josie’s protector and advocate. Klara, though, must work within the limitations of her role and she sometimes, especially in the early days, allows herself to be manipulated by others who may not have Josie’s best interests in mind. Klara, though, never stops believing that better days are ahead for Josie and her family — and she never stops working to make that happen.

Bottom Line: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara is one of the most unforgettable characters I’ve encountered in a while. Some may argue that Klara’s selflessness and dedication to her friend Josie is only to be expected; Klara is, after all, only a well designed machine; that she has no choice but to do the things for Josie and her parents that she does. But even Manager, the woman Klara refers to in the novel’s opening paragraph, believes that Klara is special, that she is, in effect, almost human. One of the more intriguing aspects of Klara and the Sun is watching Klara figure out things for herself as she experiences more and more of the world. This is one novel I will not be forgetting…especially that ending.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse - Various Authors

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, published in 2019, is the third book in a series of similar collections, having been preceded by Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse in 2008 and Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse in 2015. 

As I began this 524-page compilation of 34 apocalyptic short stories by various authors, I doubted that I was up to reading the entire collection, figuring that the similar nature of the stories would ultimately lead to my loss of interest in reading so many of them at once. After all, how many ways are there for the world to end? Well, here are some of the ones that these guys came up with:

• Economic Crash caused by running out of oil
• Global Warming leading to a nuclear winter
• Virus leading to a zombie apocalypse
• Nuclear War
• An uncontrollable fungus
• An unstoppable flu 
• A quickly mutating virus
• A takeover by computers and robots
• Alien Invaders
• Meteor Impact
• A mutated rabies virus
• Destruction of the ozone layer
• Flooding of all land masses

You will notice that there are only thirteen end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios listed, and that even some of these are similar, so most of them are used more than once. That, however, is where the real creativity of the selected writers becomes obvious. Some authors focus on the cause of the apocalypse, some on the aftermath, some on how survivors are coping and adapting, and a couple (my least favorites) are just generic sci-fi thrillers focusing on the fighting between survivors. There are even a couple of surrealistic stories that, honestly, made almost no sense at all to me as I struggled through them. 

I use a numbering system to help me judge the overall quality of short story collection by assigning each story from one to five points immediately after finishing them. Short story complications, by their nature, are almost always uneven, but with eight 5-star stories, thirteen 4-star stories, eight 3-star stories, and five 2-star stories, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse comes in with a solid 3.7 stars overall based on the average rating of the individual stories.

Among my favorites are: “Snow” by Dale Bailey, “So Sharp, So Bright, So Final” by Seanan McGuire, “The Elephants’ Crematorium” by Timothy Mudie, “The Eyes of the Flood” by Susan Jane Bidelow, and “The Last Garden” by Jack Skillingstead. 

Bottom Line: Wastelands: The New Apocalypse is an entertaining, and often thought-provoking, collection of short stories with a common theme. There is something here for every kind of science fiction fan in addition to the kind of character-driven storytelling that will appeal to readers who do not necessarily share an enthusiasm for short stories of this type. This collection is so much fun, in fact, that I’m tempted now to find the first two volumes in the series.

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir

If you like a lot of science and math in your science fiction novels, Andy Weir is just the SF author for you. And that means that you will almost certainly love Weir’s latest novel, Project Hail Mary, because there are equally heavy doses of both science and math in this one. Heck, Project Hail Mary even includes a full-page illustration of the components of the spaceship in “thrust configuration,” along with another full-page illustration explaining how the ship transforms into centrifuge mode and what happens after it does that. But as much as I enjoy science and math in science fiction novels (if maybe not quite as much as Weir includes here), what I really enjoy in them is human contact with a space alien culture. And, I’m happy to tell you that if reading about alien-contact is as high on your list of favorite reading experiences as it is on mine, you are in for a treat. 

The story opens when Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher, wakes up to a robotic voice asking him “What’s two plus two?” over and over again. Grace has no idea who he is, where he is, or why the irritating robot-voice won’t just shut up and let him go back to sleep. Maybe, though, his confusion will temporarily be a good thing because it turns out that Grace (as he eventually figures out) is the lone survivor of a three-person crew launched from Earth toward a distant star years earlier to gather the information that hopefully can be used to save humanity from its impending doom. That’s bad enough, but adding to the larger problem is the fact that Grace is the least qualified of the three scientists sent on the mission — and that even the better qualified scientists who died would have found the job near impossible on their own. 

The good news is that maybe he won’t have to do it all alone, after all, because he’s not the only one in the area trying to figure out why his home planet is dying. "Rocky" is there, too. 

Bottom Line: Project Hail Mary is a book about what makes us human, with all of our strengths and weaknesses on display, but it is also a heartwarming story about one of the deepest, if least likely, friendships imaginable. Main character Ryland Grace is a flawed individual who surprises even himself by what he is willing to do for others even though he didn't exactly volunteered for the mission he wakes up to. The book is perhaps a bit overlong, and it can sometimes get a little bogged down by the math and science at its heart, but it is one that readers are going to remember. Next, I would love to read a novel about what was happening back on Earth during the 26 years it took to get answers back to scientists there.

Andy Weir

Good Morning, Midnight - Lily Brooks-Dalton

At only 253 numbered-pages, Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight is a deceptively complex novel with a whole lot going on, so pay attention. If you do, I think that you are pretty likely to appreciate the ride as much as I did. 

Good Morning, Midnight begins as a relatively straightforward tale about the forced evacuation and ultimate abandonment of an isolated Arctic observatory. One man, Augustine Lofthouse, who is in his late seventies refuses to be carried out with the rest of his colleagues despite being warned that there will be “no return trip,” No return trip means no second chance to go home - ever. Not long after everyone leaves, Augustine discovers that he has company: a little girl who tells him her name is Iris. He knows that no one is coming back for her either. 

While all this is going on at the observatory, a sophisticated space ship manned by a crew of international astronauts is drawing closer and closer to Earth after having spent two years on a scientific mission to Jupiter and that planet’s moons. Those aboard the ship lost communication with everyone on Earth months earlier, including NASA’s mission control specialists. The closer they get to their home planet, the more obvious it becomes that something has gone catastrophically wrong for everyone they hoped to return to someday. 

In alternating chapters, Brooks-Dalton explores the struggles of both groups to make sense of what has happened to them. They have questions, but there is no one around to give them any answers, so the six astronauts and the two people abandoned at the observatory are left to deal with the situation on their own. Tough decisions are going to have to be made, and soon.

Different as they are, each of the scenarios is very atmospherically presented, and as a reader, I never found myself prematurely wishing that one segment would end so that I could revisit the other. The isolation faced by Augustine and Iris is very different from the lack of privacy felt by the astronauts in their confined living space, but all of the adults are faced with making sense of the lives they have lived, and the concept that they may now be among the last handful of humans still alive. The little girl, on the other hand, is content to take life one day at a time, and to enjoy the great adventure she and Augustine are experiencing. 

Bottom Line: The ending of Good Morning, Midnight is almost certain to surprise its readers. It will also confuse them to the point that they have to reevaluate everything they’ve just read. However, Brooks-Dalton, I believe, does play fair with the reader by providing hints along the way that will lead them to some relatively solid retrospective conclusions about the story. This is a solid debut novel about love, regrets, guilt, optimism, and bravery, and I would love to hear what others think of it.

Lily Brooks-Dalton

A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux #23)

James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux books have always seemed darker and more violent to me than most of the other popular detective series of the day. Considering what Dave Robicheaux and his blood brother Clete Purcel have endured over the first twenty-two books of the series, they are lucky to still be standing, much less breathing. I have been reading the Robicheaux books as each of them is published all the way back to the third book in the series, Black Cherry Blues, so I thought I knew pretty much what to expect from A Private Cathedral when it comes to violence, mysticism, visions, and the like. Boy, was I wrong, because A Private Cathedral reaches a whole new level of darkness and evil brutality.

As the novel opens, Dave Robicheaux is a lonely man living with several cats and Tripod, his pet raccoon. The twice-married Robicheaux has by now been twice-widowed, and he is still grieving the loss of both women. Alafair, his daughter, is in school a long way from New Iberia, Louisiana, and Robicheaux misses her terribly, too. He’s lost his badge, and is waiting on investigators to decide if deserves to get it back (not that that much slows a man like Dave Robicheaux down). And now, things are going to get much, much worse for the “Bobbsey Twins,” Dave Robicheaux and Cletus Purcel. 

There are two major crime families in the New Iberia area, the Shondells and the Balangies, and they hate each other’s guts. However, in order to avoid a bloodbath, it’s important that the two families figure out a way to keep the balance of power from being tipped too heavily in favor of one or the other of them. When Isolde Balangie, the teen-aged step-daughter of the Balangie kingpin, tells Dave one day that she is being delivered to Mark Shondell, head of the Shondell family, he understands that some kind of deal has been struck between the two families. But it all smells too much like human-trafficking for Dave to ignore what he’s been told and what he already knows about Mark Shondell.

In a Romeo and Juliet kind of twist, Isolde Balangie soon disappears along with Mark Shondell’s nephew Johnny. Dave knows that can’t be part of the families’ masterplan, so he wants to find them before anyone else does. Not only won’t that be easy, it will result in Dave and Clete having to run and hide from what appears to be a time-traveling hitman from the bowels of hell, a “man” who travels on a ghost ship, can induce traumatizing hallucinations, and strike directly at the weak spots of his prey. Oh…and he doesn’t have a nose, does have beady little eyes, and from the color of his skin may just be more reptile than human. 

So, yes, A Private Cathedral requires a huge leap of suspended disbelief by the reader if it is to be taken seriously. But I don’t read Dave Robicheaux novels just for the plot; I read them to get inside Dave’s head - and sometimes inside Clete’s - in order to understand better what makes him tick. They are both “White Knights” despite their personal habits and their willingness to bend the law however much it takes to make sure that the good guys win in the end. They are both alcoholics, but only Dave seems to ever be on the wagon. They are both scarred by their mutual experiences in Vietnam. They are both Cajuns who believe in spirits, ghosts, and visions in a way that others will never understand. And, somehow, they are now two old men covered in battle scars from the past who have survived way longer than either ever expected to survive.

They are both rather brilliant, introspective men, although Clete hides it better than Dave. Dave describes Clete as “a closet bibliophile” who has “stored hundreds of paperback books he bought in secondhand stores and yard sales, most of them about American history and the War Between the States.” He reads and re-reads them. Dave, on the other hand, often speaks like a man with both a classical education and an education in the classics. He can’t hide his true character the way that Clete hides his own.

What worries me a little about A Private Cathedral is what seems to be a personal message from Dave to his admiring audience of readers. On the novel’s last page, Dave says:

“I didn’t want to hear any more of the story. I had already put aside the unhappiness of the past and no longer wanted to probe the shadows of the heart or the evil that men do. It was time to lay down my sword and shield and study war no more.”

It remains to be seen whether or not Dave is talking only about the Balangies and the Shondells or not. After all, James Lee Burke is 83 years old now, and one day we will have read the final chapter in the story of the Bobbsey Twins. And, honestly, Dave and Clete haven’t been acting their ages for a long time - Vietnam veterans must all be at least 70 years old now, and our heroes have hardly lost a step - but then again, neither has Burke. They are all still indestructible in the long run.

James Lee Burke

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter - Theodora Goss

The first thing you need to know about The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter is how much fun reading it is – especially if you grew up on books like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells. Frankenstein was published in 1818, so Shelley may have been a little ahead of her time, but there is no doubt that Victorian society was fascinated by books like hers and the other two mentioned (published in 1886 and 1896, respectively). 

Two hundred years after the first appearance of Frankenstein’s monster, Theodora Goss has written a mashup novel that includes these three mad scientists and others like them. The men have formed a secret society, and they continue to experiment on living creatures (and dead ones) to see just what new kind of being they can create. Now, it seems that no one can stop them but their own daughters, most of whom themselves have been drastically altered by their own fathers into something no human was ever intended to be – oh, and Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Let’s not forget those two. 

Theodora Goss

Other than Holmes and Watson, the main characters of the novel are Mary Jekyll, her sister Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherin Moreau, and Justine Frankenstein. One of them has a breath so poisonous that it kills anything that comes too close, one is a cross between a panther and a human, one has been reanimated and physically enhanced after having been hanged to death, one is a rebellious teen, and the other matches wits with Mr. Holmes with relative ease. At first, it is sheer necessity that forces the women team up in order to fight those who want so badly to return them to their fathers’ laboratories. But soon enough, something funny begins to happen: the women become a family of sisters more than capable of taking care of themselves. So that’s what they do. 

Kate Reading

The audiobook version of The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter is read by Kate Reading (is that the perfect name for an audiobook narrator, or what?). Reading is a veteran of numerous audiobooks in the fantasy genre, such as Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, so she is probably already familiar to many fantasy fans. Her skill of using multiple accents and voice-variations to individualize so many main characters is exceptional, and adds to the fun. 

Bottom Line: Readers looking to escape the horrors of 2020 for a few hours will not go wrong by choosing Theodora Goss’s The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter as a temporary diversion.

Rogue Protocol (Murderbot #3) - Martha Wells

I can’t help but feel a little confused by the third book of Martha Wells’s “Murderbot Diaries.” It’s not the plot or the characters that confuse me, though. It’s more a question of why the whole book - all 158 pages of it - was not simply tacked onto the ending of the previous book – also of about 150 pages – and published as the novel it was meant to be. As it is, Rogue Protocol breaks almost no new ground either plot-wise or character-wise, and I doubt that I would have stayed with it all the way through if I had picked it up as a standalone novella. It was tough enough, at times, to do that anyway because I started to feel as if I were reading a story I had already read, and that only the names of most of the characters had changed.  

Murderbot is still trying to gather evidence against GrayCris Corporation, the cut-throat company that is so willing to murder its competitors in the name of increased profits. Murderbot is still officially a rogue SecUnit on the run, and as such, he’s forced to live in the shadows. Still, most often by teaming up with other artificial-intelligence creations, he manages to make his way from planet to planet without being captured. 

That doesn’t mean that it’s been easy, or that it’s going to be, because Murderbot’s big weakness keeps getting him in trouble. He still has a soft spot in his “heart” for humans, and he keeps stumbling into situations where several rather naïve human scientists have to be protected from the evil GrayCris Corporation. And, since Murderbot is heading in the same direction, he finds it impossible to keep himself from taking the humans under his wing – whether they always realize it or not. 

But all of that is part of the problem I had with Rogue Protocol. Wells assumes that all of her readers are already going to have Murderbot’s backstory, so she doesn’t spend much time developing the book’s newest characters (granted, they are only passing through, anyway) or the backstory. Consequently, Murderbot does not come across as nearly the compassionate and ironically funny character he is in the first two books in the series. And then there’s yet another claustrophobic jaunt down long hallways dotted with dangerous intersections, as Murderbot frantically tries to get his humans to safety while fighting one combat bot after another. 

The best part of Rogue Protocol is Miki, the little bot that just wants a friend like himself. Even as Miki is recklessly throwing his body into every battle alongside Murderbot (despite being hopelessly overmatched), he’s more concerned with hurting Murderbot’s feelings than with the danger to himself. He loves his humans, and they love him, but Miki truly treasures his first friendship with someone “like him.” 

Bottom Line: It seems that the publisher of the Murderbot Diaries made more of a business decision than a literary one with the way the company handled Rogue Protocol. This one could, and probably should, have been the second half of its predecessor, Artificial Condition, even though it would have probably seemed a little repetitive that way. As it was, two Murderbot Diary novellas and one Murderbot Diary novel were published in 2018, rather than what could easily have been two novels.

Martha Wells

To Your Scattered Bodies Go - Philip Jose Farmer

All of us, I think, can recall a handful of books that to this day seem to mark a particular period in our lives. Often, as the decades go by, we find ourselves taking those books with us as we move from place to place. For instance, I still have the paperback copy of Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle that I paid sixty cents for in a Nashville bus station during my Army basic training in nearby Ft. Campbell, KY, in early 1968. Its pages are brown and a little brittle now, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. 

Philip Jose Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go is another of those books for me. I did not discover this 1971 novel (and Philip Jose Farmer) until 1983 when I paid $2.95 for a twenty-third printing of the paperback version of the novel. As you can see, the price of a relatively thin paperback had gone up considerably in the fifteen years separating publication of these two books. I’ve read each of them at least three times now, so I’ve definitely gotten my money’s worth out of them. 

The main character in To Your Scattered Bodies Go is the nineteenth century explorer Richard Burton, a man who one morning wakes up naked on the banks of a river he has never before seen. Burton, though, is not the only confused person waking up in that same condition:

“Everywhere on the plain were unclothed bald-headed human beings, spaced about six feet apart. Most were still on their backs and gazing into the sky. Others were beginning to stir, to look around, or even sitting up.” 

 That quote, from page 13 of the novel, hooked me, and it was off to the races when I learned that To Your Scattered Bodies Go was just the first book in Farmer’s “Riverworld novels.” Perhaps the best thing about coming to a series as late as I came to this one is not having to wait at least a year between new books, and I took full advantage of my tardiness. 

This first book in the series sees Burton aligning himself with men and women he feels he can trust to travel with him up and down the river while he tries to figure out why every human being who has ever lived has been resurrected at the same time somewhere along the banks of this ten-million-mile-long nameless river. One of the first to join Burton’s new “family” is Alice Hargreaves, who in her first life was the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Among others taken in by Burton are a primitive cave man and an alien who died on Earth while in the processing of killing off the entire human race. 

After Burton discovers a group of “Ethicals” who seem to be responsible for this unexpected afterlife, he wants answers. If they are not gods, how did they manage to resurrect everyone? Is the human race being given a second chance to find heaven? Or is this all just an experiment run by the Ethicals to record the history and customs of the entire human race? Are the Ethicals amused at how humans are reacting to their resurrection? Whatever they are up to, Burton wants some answers – and he is determined to get them no matter how many times he has to kill his new arch-enemy Herman Goring. 

Bottom Line: To Your Scattered Bodies Go beautifully sets up the rest of the Riverworld books. As the book ends, Burton understands just enough about his situation to get himself into even more trouble by trying to find the river’s source – where he believes he will find the home-base of the Ethicals themselves and all the answers he so desperately wants. And, in book two, The Fabulous Riverboat, Burton teams up with just the man to get him further up the river: the resurrected young Mark Twain. Let the fun begin.

Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009)

Artificial Condition (Murderbot #2) - Martha Wells

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells is the second novella in the author’s “Murderbot Diaries” series. That leaves two novellas, a novel, and a short story yet for me to enjoy – and even better, something knew to look forward to because the series continues in 2021 with the addition of a fifth novella.

 

Artificial Condition picks up exactly where All Systems Red leaves off. As readers learned in that first book, our Murderbot has a heart, and despite his shyness in dealing with humans, he is fast developing a code of ethics and morality that would put many humans to shame. Strangely enough, he’s developed his moral code by watching thousands of hours of what he calls “series,” something akin to the “soaps” that are so common in our own world. He has learned all about the human condition, and he knows which side he is on, so now that he is a “free agent,” a bot not owned and controlled by a corporation or any other owner, Murderbot is on a mission to clear his reputation of a stain that really bugs him. Did he really go berserk a couple of contract-jobs ago and slaughter all the people it was his job to protect?

 

Murderbot really hopes not, but there’s only one way to find out: return to the scene of the crime to do his own investigation of what happened there. Now, all he needs to do is figure out how to get there without being arrested, or more likely, destroyed by his enemies in the process. Along the way, Murderbot manages to pick up three new clients who need a bodyguard to protect them from a former employer, and to meet ART the robotic brains behind a large research transport vehicle transporting miners and scientists from planet to planet. Let’s just say that ART and Murderbot end up making one heck of a team for the good guys.

 

Bottom Line: Martha Wells packs a lot into 158 pages, including a whole lot of fighting between the good guys and the bad guys, but the main attraction here is Murderbot. What the bot learns about himself and his past in Artificial Condition will change him forever, further advancing the way Wells is developing him over the life of the series. Murderbot is already one of my favorite fictional characters of the year, and I can’t wait to see where he goes next.

Review of All Systems Red (8-23-20)

All Systems Red - Martha Wells

I don’t read all that much pure science fiction these days, so I doubt that I would have become aware of Martha Wells’s Murderbot Series if I had not read a blogger’s review of All Systems Red, the first book in the series. As it turns out, there are currently four novellas of approximately 150 pages each, one 350-page novel, and one short story in the series - with a fifth novella scheduled for publication in 2021. All Systems Red was published in 2017, followed quickly in 2018 by the next three books. However, it was not until May 2020 that the Murderbot Diaries novel was published, so longtime fans of the series must have been thrilled to see it resumed.

The central character of All Systems Red, and of the whole series, is a “droid” supplied to planetary explorers and scientists somewhere in the distant future for security purposes when they are on the job far from any possible support or backup originating on Earth. The bots can be programmed and reprogrammed to perform various tasks, including becoming combat soldiers, as necessary. The particular group of scientists we encounter in All Systems Red has had the good (or bad, depending on how you look at it) fortune of having rented a bot smart enough to have hacked its own “governor module,” meaning that it is now capable of making its own decisions instead of always doing exactly what its humans tell it to do. Our bot, unknown to his humans, has dubbed himself “Murderbot.”

 

So what are Murderbot’s plans now? As you can tell from the book’s opening paragraph, not all that much, really:

 

            “I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.”

 

Murderbot is perfectly content to turn into a couch potato while performing the minimum required to keep his humans safe until they can be transported home by the company. But then something funny starts to happen: Murderbot starts to develop a personal relationship with the humans around him. And he hates that thought because he does not want to feel anything even remotely resembling a human emotion. He can’t wait to get back to watching his space operas, not realizing that he is learning all about what it is to be human from those same serials.

Bottom Line: All Systems Red does turn into quite a space thriller with good humans and bad humans using their bots to maim and kill each other over the potential profits the unknown planet might generate. But that’s not the kind of thing that will necessarily make readers anxious to get hold of the next book in the series. What hooks readers here, I think, is the idea that Murderbot is in the process of figuring out all for himself the meaning of his life. By the end of the novel, he is his own man. And I, for one, can’t wait to find out what’s next for this killer with a heart.

Little Eyes - Samanta Schweblin

No one would ever call Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin, who at one point in her career was estimated by Granta to be “one of the 22 best writers in Spanish under the age of 35,” a particularly prolific author. Between 2002 and the present, the author has published just three short story collections and two novels in addition to having stories published in magazines such as Harper’s and The New Yorker. Two of her books have been considered for the prestigious Man Booker International Prize: her first novel, Fever Dream, as a finalist, and her second short story collection, A Mouthful of Birds, as a longlisted candidate. Little Eyes, published in Spanish in 2018 under the title Kintukis, has only now been translated into English by Megan McDowell. 

So what are Kintukis? Well, as it turns out, they are little toy-like animals on wheels that at first glance appear to have been created to amuse small children. But these little guys are a whole lot more than toys. The little rabbits, moles, dragons, crows, etc., all come equipped with cameras and microphones that allow their human controllers to observe, and sometimes manipulate, everything their owners do. In an age when most of us are wondering just how closely we are being watched by our own smart devices – think Amazon Alexa and smart TVs, among other devices – this is a terrifying proposition.

 

Samanta Schweblin 

Schweblin tells her story in a manner that allows readers to observe for themselves several rotating relationships between Kintuki “dwellers” (those who purchase a tablet that controls one particular Kintuki from afar) and Kintuki “keepers” (those who choose to allow a Kintuki into their home) as the relationships evolve over time. The pairings are randomly assigned, meaning that a dweller cannot choose the location of the Kintuki they control, and that a keeper knows nothing at all about the real person following them around. The pairings, too, are largely international ones, giving dwellers (whose tablets all have built-in translators) a distinct advantage over their keepers.  

In short, alternating sections, readers watch budding relationships between people from all over the world (Beijing – Lyon; Lima - Erfurt; Zagreb – Cartagena; Antigua – Honningsvåg, for example) evolve into troubling manipulations, dependencies, extortions, and the like, that negatively impact the real worlds of both the dwellers and the keepers. It may sound farfetched, but is it really? We already live in a world dominated by social media through which “dwellers” burrow their way inside the heads of “keepers” so desperate for approval they allow themselves to be negatively impacted by perfect strangers, sometimes even to the point of suicide.

 

Who can say that something like this is not the next logical step in social media evolution?

 

Bottom Line: Little Eyes is a terrifying glimpse into a future just one or two steps evolved past what the world accepts as perfectly normal today. And that is a terrifying thought.

The End of October - Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright’s pandemic novel The End of October was published on April 28, 2020, meaning that it was probably pretty much written, edited, and in the hands of his publisher by the time our own real-world COVID-19 pandemic was really hitting its stride. If that assumption is true, the first half of Wright’s novel rather uncannily tracks what we’ve gone through with COVID-19, including even our silly arguments about the effectiveness, or non-effectiveness, of face masks. But that should not really be as surprising as it may at first glance seem to be because Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker who, beginning with 1979’s City Children, Country Summer, has produced a string of ten carefully researched nonfiction books. In the process, Wright won a Pulitzer for 2007’s The Looming Tower and a National Book Critics Circle Award for 2013’s Going Clear. Wright used those same research skills in preparation of The End of October, and it shows.

 

            “Disease was more powerful than armies. Disease was more arbitrary than terrorism. Disease was crueler than the human imagination.”  (Page 22)

 

Dr. Henry Parsons first hears of the Kongoli virus at a “parliament of health officials” in Geneva, Switzerland. The next-to-last presentation of the last day of the conference focuses on an unusual cluster of forty-seven bloody deaths in a West Java refugee camp (although it turns out that the camp is actually a prison for Muslim homosexuals). Parsons does not believe the official Indonesian government explanation of the deaths, so he agrees to collect samples from the camp for further study before heading home to Atlanta. But as it turns out, he will not see Atlanta, his wife, or his two children again for a long, long time.

 

Within hours of his arrival in the squalid camp, Parsons is convinced that an unidentified virus is responsible for the horrendous deaths – and that he has made a terrible, perhaps fatal, mistake by not quarantining his driver before the man could drive away on his own. By the time the driver could be tracked down, he was on the hajj to Mecca along with millions of other devout Muslims. And now everything that can possibly go wrong, is about to. A highly contagious flu virus with a death rate of close to 50% is about to be unleashed on the world.

 

Lawrence Wright

The second half of The End of October (which is a reference to the expected timing of the second wave of the virus) is more dystopian than the first half of the book. Just about the time that the virus seems to have passed its peak (the old flattening of the curve theory we are all so familiar with by now), “the lights go out” in the United States because the dictators in Russia, Iran, and North Korea (and perhaps others) decide that this is the perfect time to launch an all-out cyber-war against America. But as catastrophic as this second scenario is, it all feels a little rushed and somehow fails to pack the punch provided by the earlier part of Wright’s story.

 

Bottom Line: The End of October is one of those thrillers (cliché warning) pulled from today’s headlines and, as such, it can be nerve-rackingly scary to read this one at times. Wright’s story also includes concise accounts of the major pandemics that have plagued the world in the past and how those were either dealt with or played themselves out. It’s impossible to put a happy face on this one.

Kindred - Octavia E. Butler

As an on-again-off-again fan of science fiction writing, I’ve known of Octavia E. Butler by reputation for years. She was, after all, inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010, so it would probably be more surprising at this point in Butler’s long career for someone not to recognize her name than it would be for them to recognize it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that I had ever actually read her work. Then a week or so ago, Butler’s name and books were mentioned several times in segments of a video course on science fiction writing I was working my way through. Because of my fondness of time travel novels, the novel that particularly caught my attention was 1979’s Kindred.

 

I expected Kindred to be somewhat of a thriller during which a modern California black woman, a writer by trade, finds herself trying to stay alive – and free – in the Deep South during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. As it turns out, Kindred is that and much, much more.

 

Dana and her white husband are in the process of moving into their new 1976-Los Angeles home the first time that a bout of time-travel-inducing dizziness strikes her. Within seconds, Dana finds herself on the muddy banks of a river staring at what seems to be the lifeless body of a little white boy. Springing into action, she manages to resuscitate the boy just in time to save his life. But as she looks up to catch her breath, Dana finds herself staring into the barrel of a gun being held by a very angry man. Even terrified as she is, Dana does not have time to react before she suddenly finds herself, wet and muddy, back inside her new California home.

 

Dana, although she is unable to predict when it will happen, learns that she is being called back into time over and over again to save the life of one of her ancestors, the son of the same man who seemed ready to kill her when she appeared out of nowhere to save the boy’s life for the first time. Unfortunately for Dana, Rufus, a very reckless child, grows into a self-destructive drunkard as a young man – and she is the only thing keeping him alive until he can father the child with one of his father’s slaves that will keep Dana’s family line intact.

 

Octavia E. Butler

This is the science fiction/time travel premise of Kindred, but that’s about as much “science” as Butler ever offers the reader. She does not try to explain how it is possible for Dana – and anything in contact with her, including her husband, Kevin – to leap back and forth from 1819 to 1976. Nor does she ever address the usual time travel paradoxes with which fans of the genre are so familiar. Instead, this is a novel about a woman who “knows” that her ancestors had been slaves not all that long ago. Slavery, in fact, had only been dead for 111 years upon publication of Kindred, so Dana’s own great-great grandmother had been a slave. But there is a fundamental difference in knowing that your ancestors were enslaved for generations and actually  standing alongside your great-great grandparents knowing that one of them is a slave owned by the other.

 

Dana arrives in 1819 Maryland a modern woman, one completely overconfident that her education and modern sensibilities will protect her from the harsh reality of the times she finds herself entrapped in. By the time she learns just how naïve she is, she is lucky to be alive – or not working the steaming cane fields of southern Louisiana. So, will her luck continue long enough for Rufus to father the child that links directly to her portion of the family tree or not?

 

Bottom Line: Kindred explores an aspect of American slavery that is seldom tackled so well in historical fiction: the different emotional effects that generations of slavery had on a people who knew no other way of life. Butler considers the ones readers most often read about, those who never lose their desire for freedom, but she gives equal time to those who manage to justify slavery to themselves even to the point of feeling almost at ease with it, what becomes for them a choice of “security” over the greater, scarier unknown out there. The author also explores the insidious culture that spawned generations of whites capable of such cruelty for over 200 years by showing how Dana’s white husband himself is unconsciously affected by his own five years of living in early nineteenth century America. Perhaps most surprising to Dana (and to readers), is how quickly she adjusts to life’s new rules and some of the things she is willing to do to make her life as bearable as possible. Octavia Butler herself did not consider Kindred to be a science fiction novel – and it’s easy to see why.