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Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

“What was I, a black girl, made of?”

Behind the Book by Agnes Gomillion

In Agnes Gomillion’s The Record Keeper, an authoritarian global government has been established in the wake of World War III. Young Arika Cobane has been studying for years to become one of the elite, but when a new and rebellious student arrives, she begins to question the morality of the government and her place within it. In this essay, Gomillion explores her own political awakening and how it led to the conception of her excellent new novel.

At 7, I understood that each of us are patchwork, composites of our past. My best friend Liana, for example, had her mother’s thick hair and her father’s moon face. And once, when we visited her grandmother, I saw parts of my friend in the faces of old family photos. An ear here, an eye there. A dozen pieces that, all patched together, made Liana. At the time, it wasn’t odd to me that I called Liana’s grandmother, who was old and white, my grandmother—my Yaya. At the time, I had no idea I was Black.

Ten years later, at 17, I became aware. The question of affirmative action arose in my senior history class, and my hand shot up. I was staunchly in favor. My parents, after all, had benefitted from affirmative action. Without it, my whole upper middle-class life might not have materialized.

A blond girl, Marianne, disagreed with me. “Lazy people who aren’t as smart as me shouldn’t be given my place in college just because they’re black.” When several students agreed with her, I was shocked, and the debate commenced. Opposition mounted. I stopped raising my hand and stood to combat the entire class, including the teacher, who tore apart my ideas. I knew nothing of systemic racism or white privilege—my high school didn’t teach that. I couldn’t unpack misleading statistics that, on their face, indicated Black people were—in fact—lazy and unintelligent.

I had nothing but the gut belief that my mother was not inferior to theirs. And my cousins were not stupid. My father deserved his medical degree and I, myself, deserved my life. If there was something broken in America, I knew it wasn’t us—only my education hadn’t prepared me to prove it.

When the bell rang, everyone left for second period as I sat, eyes wide open. My peers, I saw, with their myriad of differences, were the same in the only way that mattered. They were white, I realized. And, finally, I understood that I was Black.

After that, everything bisected, and I was suddenly excluded, the opposite of everything I admired. My textbooks were mostly white. My church—including Jesus—was white. My teachers, celebrities I idolized, Disney princesses, the heroes I read about—all white. The best parts of my world belonged to the white race, and according to known history, it had always been that way.

Around this time, I began to wonder about my people’s patchwork. What was I, a black girl, made of? I thought of the pictures at my actual Yaya’s house, and considered history—surveying what I knew. Before and after Martin Luther King, I concluded, there was little to be proud of.

It was a lie that took 15 years to dispel. I was jogging and listening to The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin when the truth finally hit me.

“Take no one’s word for anything,” Baldwin said. “The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember . . . [y]ou come from sturdy peasant stock, men who . . . in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.”

The words struck with such force, I stopped in the street to cry. I’d been lied to. Duped by my biased education. To heal, I had to seek, for myself, from whence I came. From that moment, I questioned everything—especially what I’d been taught about American history. It was the beginning of a very long journey.

Arika’s journey through The Record Keeper parallels my own path to freedom. When she realizes her view of herself and her people are largely influenced by her education, she starts to question her education and the structures of government that dictate it. Soon, she awakens to the biases that underpin her thinking, and armed with the truth, she begins to resist.

In my view, every American must take this same trek if we’re to realize racial reconciliation. Just like each of us, our country is also composed of its past. In order to realize the ideal—a more perfect union—the government itself must journey, excavate, illuminate and atone for its misdeeds. I wrote The Record Keeper, in large part, to encourage readers to take up this quest.

In Agnes Gomillion’s The Record Keeper, an authoritarian global government has been established in the wake of World War III. In this essay, Gomillion explores her own political awakening and how it led to the conception of her excellent new novel.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Off the edge of the map

Behind the Book by Max Gladstone

In Empress of Forever, Max Gladstone’s riotous new science-fiction adventure, tech genius Vivian Liao is thrust into a battle for the universe’s independence after being unexpectedly transported to the farthest reaches of time and space. Gladstone’s novel has the structure of a portal fantasy (a subgenre best typified by The Chronicles of Narnia and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), except that the portal opens into a distant stretch of the galaxy rather than a magical world. Gladstone argues that the unexplored frontier of outer space provides an opportunity for modern authors to be part of a time-honored literary tradition.

Where can we go a-Questing?

In the fourteenth century, a Florentine poet, scholar and politician could find himself midway along his life’s journey, lost and in a wood, and discover in that darkness the gates of hell and the long winding path to the Celestial Rose. The cave that led to Dante’s hell might not be found on any map, but a wanderer reading his poem could suppose that maybe over this hill, through this copse of gnarled trees, might stand the yawning portal. At any turn in a sufficiently unknown place, they might slip into a story-space, one of those strange realms where the rigid daily progress of events gives way to the heightened, analogically realm of magic and revelation.

In Spain a hundred years later, the world felt too mapped for giants and chivalry. Cervantes writes of a madman Don Quixote in a late medieval social world so known, so observed, so mapped, that it could not possibly contain chivalric quests and wicked magicians. Don Quixote’s quest-land—where he quests after wizards and grails, slays monsters and jousts with wicked knights—that quest-land must not exist for it to exist at all. He takes part in stories that could never have happened and yet centuries later, they remain instantly relatable and comprehensible to any reader of fantasy romance

Cervantes mocks this invisible world, rendering golden helmets as shaving basins and ladies of legendary beauty as tavern wenches—but he also recognizes that Don Quixote’s realm offers meaning, clarity, revelatory power, even though it is absurd. Even after Don Quixote’s “cure,” he cannot long survive without constructing for himself another fantasy—this time using the forms of the pastoral.

No organism, as Shirley Jackson would write centuries later, can long exist under conditions of absolute reality. Even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

The great inner moments of life—revelation and transformation, confrontation with our darkest fears, attainment of the divine, the rapture and pain of true love or the dissolution of the self—are as real as rabbits. We know they exist. We encounter them and are destroyed and changed. Even when we are not in their grip we see them at the edge of the shadows. But when we try to approach them head on, to speak or write about them, they hop back from our clumsy advance, scamper to a safe distance, and resume their quivering vigil, watching us watch them. One woman’s quest for inner grace—for relief from the chains she has forged around himself—can only indirectly be captured by the sharp realism that refuses to dive into the quivering mess of myth and memory that underlies our shared experience of this bewildering thing we like to call reality, so named because it makes us feel better. But we do have tools to tell stories about that search. All we need to do is go off the edge of the map, where we can find knights, and a wood, and a Grail, and a wounded King.

In the Tang dynasty, a monk called Xuanzang set out from the Imperial Capitol in the city now called Xi’an. He traveled west to India through places now called Xinjiang and Tibet. He left behind a glittering and literate Imperial court, the height of global civilization of the age, a place where he enjoyed patronage and support, to travel a Silk Road ruled by no empire, awash with bandits and hostile strangers. As a Buddhist monk, he brought few comforts with him.

Why make such a long and brutal voyage? Why leave friends and Emperor? He sought scriptures. He sought the salvation of the world and the liberation of all sentient beings. A new form of Buddhism had filtered into Tang Dynasty China across the Himalayas—building a more political and communal vision of Buddhist practice in the person of the bodhisattva, a character who, having achieved liberation from the world, remains within it to help set others free. This new tradition fascinated, but the Emperor wanted to study its sources firsthand—so he commissioned Xuanzang to go West, study, and bring back an authentic copy of the scriptures of this “Great Vehicle” (which was what its originators called it, being savvy marketers in addition to holy men).

So Xuanzang made his voyage through what Tang writers at the time thought were barbarian lands, reached India, studied with masters, learned Sanskrit, copied sutras by hand and translated them into Chinese, and, after many years, returned—his mission a success—to a grateful Emperor.

This is history on a mythic scale. But as the history turned into story, the stark exterior image of a monk traveling with minimal escort over barren vistas, studying languages in foreign lands, unfurled into the multicolored petals of myth.

Xuanzang’s quest was a grand one—so in Wu Cheng’en’s retelling Journey to the West, its internal aspects gained magical incident and mythic resonance. The monsters of danger and temptation that plague anyone of deep commitment became demon kings and seductive immortals, evil Taoists, escaped alchemical experiments. The man’s own profound internal drives emerge from his person, and take on form: animal demigod disciples, rich in mystic power, each corresponding to a different feature of the psyche, their deep personal conflicts standing in between Xuanzang and his westbound Quest.

Once Xuanzang steps beyond the bounds of known, stable Tang China, anything can happen—well, not quite. A different set of things can happen, a different set of rules apply. To understand Xuanzang’s pilgrimage on foot, to understand its scale and consequence and the range of difficulties he faced within his heart, Wu teases out around the walking man a world of Monkey Kings and voracious pig gods and spider immortals, ribald and rich and vast as any soul.

But where, in our extensively Google Mapped world, are we to go that could be peopled with magic, monstrosity and transformation, as was Xuanzang’s Journey West? In what dark wood might we lose ourselves to find those gates with the famous words above them, and Virgil ready to lead us down? We live in Cervantes’ world more than Dante’s or Wu Cheng-en’s. There’s no beyond-the-edge-of-the-map left.

Tolkien, among others, answered this challenge by creating a whole other realm in which his dramas could play out, in which men walking together through an age-ending war could be the pivot of history. But the subcreated fantasy world is, by definition, a place where we cannot go. No one, midway along their life’s journey, finds themselves lost and in Middle Earth. (At least, outside of fan fiction.)

Also, the subcreated fantasy is caught in a finger trap. The tale-teller must create working systems and societies for our heroes to pass through, lest the illusion shatter. Who grows the grain here? Who might these traders trade with? Why might one build a castle there? The systems and maps and justifications that orient readers all cut against the drive to create a great unknown, a realm of transformation. The kind of tales I’m talking about here start with characters we know and drive them off the map. Epic fantasies, as a rule, start with maps.

How can we turn off the edge of the map? Where can our spirits unfold to their full mythic scope? Each genre offers its own answer. Through the gate, the door, the fairy ring, to Oz or Narnia or Roland’s world, says portal fantasy. To the great silent spaces behind the upstairs neighbors’ apartment doors, says urban fantasy. And to the shadows—in the closet, the woods, the long-shuttered house, our dead parents’ attic, the tunnels beneath our nation—says horror. (This, by the way, is why My Neighbor Totoro remains firmly locked in my heart as Miyazaki’s great horror flick.)

But each of these options has a built-in limit. As we grow up, we realize that the wardrobes of our youth did not, in fact, lead to Narnia. Only as a child can we truly believe that the back of our uncle’s wardrobe might lead anywhere interesting. And while that silent neighbor might be a vampire, soon the strictures of logic and urban space constrain the space available for the adventure. (How does she feed? No city has that many murders. Could there be a society of vampires? If so, how do they operate?)

But space—SPACE! It’s up there, known through the pinholes of astrophysics and high-powered telescopes. But the pinholes are small, and space is huge. Our science, we know, is not complete—and there’s the edge of the map, beyond which “here be dragons.” What little we know of what is up there—black holes of a million solar masses, quasars and pulsars, sprawling nebulae, neutron stars and gas giants, supernovas smelting gold and galaxies smashing one another to oblivion, the endless stellar bestiary of weird and awesome phenomena (Dark Matter! Darker Energy!) offers a vast unrolling space where character can unfold and reveal itself in the grammar of the Quest and Adventure.

The SPACE of the Quest, rich with alien life and faster than light travel and planet-smashing super weapons—may be as deeply unlikely as Herodotus’ giant ants. But that’s just what’s so great about SPACE! We don’t know any of these things to be false yet. So, as long as the texture of reality is preserved, SPACE remains always a place we could encounter wonders, a dark and unknown wood we could wander if only we turned in a new direction—straight up, into the stars.

I’ve written many books set in an alternate fantasy world, which works for me like a funhouse mirror—curved and distorted, magnifying aspects of our own reality that are often invisible or overlooked. (Though less so now than they were when I started writing Three Parts Dead in 2009.) But a reflection, even a dark one, is a closed space. Reach out to touch it, and you touch cool glass. Strike it, and you shred yourself.

I wanted my new book, Empress of Forever, to be a door, like Journey to the West or the grail stories. Vivian Liao, our near future protagonist, would scoff at being called an “everywoman” (and she’d be right to), but any of us could find ourselves on her path, blinking and afraid, in a brilliant new world—and set out to get things done. Vivian Liao moves beyond the map’s edge into Oz, the West, space, the antipodes of the soul. She will find new friends and bitter enemies; she will save worlds and break them and learn more about herself than she thought there was to know. Starships burst in a singularity sky. Pirate queens steal suns, monks sift the ruins of countless worlds for shreds of enlightenment, and she will face them all.

It’s a marvelous world out there. Come on. Let’s go off the edge of the map.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Empress of Forever.

Empress of Forever author Max Gladstone argues that the unexplored frontier of outer space provides an opportunity for modern authors to be part of a time-honored literary tradition.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Survival of the fittest

Behind the Book by Robert Repino

Robert Repino’s War With No Name science fiction series began with an immediately compelling premise: What if animals gained sentience and rose up against humans? But the heart of the series lies in an interspecies friendship between Mort(e), a former housecat, and Sheba, the dog who was his best friend before the world changed forever.

With the release of Malefactor, the final novel, Repino looks back on the surprising, heartwarming origins of the War With No Name series.

In the fall of 2009, I awoke from a strange dream and immediately began scribbling everything I could recall in my notebook. Groggy and working by the light of a Manhattan streetlight, I remembered an image of my old neighborhood in the Philadelphia suburb of Drexel Hill. An enormous spaceship hovered directly above my parents’ backyard, with a metal gangplank extending from the hull to the grass. A strange energy pulsed from inside the ship. And all the pets and stray animals in the neighborhood suddenly, as if on cue, rose onto their hind legs in a comical but hideous impersonation of humans. At that moment, all hell broke loose. The animals attacked, dragging the humans from their homes, cornering them against cyclone fences and manicured shrubs. It was grotesque and liberating at the same time because, in my mind, I was among the animals, yearning for some kind of revenge, unable to ignore my instincts to kill and to protect my territory. By the time I was done, I asked myself what an uplifted animal would choose as a name. And without thinking, I wrote what felt like a nonsense word: Mort(e). I fell back asleep.

The dream could not have come at a better time. I was between my second and third failed novels. Book number three—a somewhat autobiographical work set in the Caribbean—was about to go out to agents, a miserable process that had already left me in despair the previous two times I tried it. I had come from the MFA world and had produced mainly literary work up until then, with a few short stories published here and there. And now, with this dream still rattling in my head, I had to ask: Could I change course and write a completely bonkers novel about a war between humans and sentient animals?

All my sad little eggs were in one basket with this goofy mess of a science fiction novel, part epic, part Saturday morning cartoon.

So, while novel number three began its journey through the meat grinder, novel number four—Mort(e)—came to life a few months later. By then, I had replaced the aliens with a hyperintelligent ant colony. Insects that are treated like pests would have a more coherent motivation to wage war with humanity, and would hark back to some of the weird B-movie entertainment that helped to raise me like Them! and Phase IV. That first draft opened with the aftermath of my dream, with the humans tied up and carted away by their new animal overlords. And from there, I let it rip, creating a war story with characters who find themselves permanently damaged by their pyrrhic victory over their sworn enemy.

But believe it or not, all of this was meant to be a love story. When I asked myself who the protagonists would be, the answer was simple. Before I was born, my parents adopted an orange and white cat named Sebastian when they moved into their first apartment. In the unit below lived another married couple, who owned a big dog named Sheba. My parents became such good friends with the couple below that they named them as my godparents when I came along a few years later. Sebastian and Sheba, meanwhile, had an adorable friendship, often falling asleep together on the landing of the steps that connected the two apartments. That experience may have convinced Sebastian that he was a dog. There is a scene in the novel in which the cat protagonist fiercely “protects” the house from a babysitter, which is word-for-word reenactment of an incident from my youth. My mom still loves to tell that story. And so, Sebastian and Sheba were the perfect couple to place at the center of the chaos of war.

While Mort(e) continued to grow, my previous novel crashed and burned. Though I found someone to represent it, the book languished for over a year on submission. Eventually, I had no choice but to part ways with the agent I had spent nearly a decade trying to find. Over five years had passed since completing my MFA, and everything felt like it was going backward. By then, all my sad little eggs were in one basket with this goofy mess of a science fiction novel, part epic, part Saturday morning cartoon.

As I tried to focus on the positive, I found the book changing as well. In later drafts, I deemphasized the spectacle of the premise in favor of the simple, platonic, interspecies love story. That’s been the backbone of the entire series, which I think made it attractive to a new agent and, eventually, to a publisher. The series now includes three novels and a spinoff novella. Somehow, as I moved on from a demoralizing period in my career, I was able to conclude the War With No Name on a relatively positive note with Malefactor, focusing more on redemption rather than revenge, and forgiveness rather than judgment. Frustration and despair may have given birth to the project, and even sustained it for a while, but what’s the use in that if it doesn’t lead to something better?

 

Author photo by Nicholas Repino

Robert Repino looks back on the surprising, heartwarming origins of his War with No Name series, which follows an interspecies war between animals and humans.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Detective fiction meets sci fi in Wolfe’s latest

Review by Michael Burgin

Home Fires, the new book by Gene Wolfe, starts with a simple premise. A man awaits the imminent   return of his true love from a stint in the military. Will she still love him? But of course, it’s more complicated than that. The beloved in question, Mastergunner Chelle Sea Blue, has been deployed in a far-off star system battling against an alien race called the Os. Thanks to the math of faster-than-light travel, a little more than two years will have passed for Chelle when she returns. For protagonist Skip Grison, the man awaiting her return, it’s been more than 20. Despite the decades, Skip’s love is undiminished, but will Chelle still be interested in a late-40s model of Skip? And what exactly is the perfect gift for a returning war hero? A cruise is a good start. Perhaps a reanimated version of her deceased mom?

Though the presence of interstellar travel, alien foes and reincarnation-capable brain scanning technology—among other things—clearly mark Home Fires as science fiction, Wolfe’s latest novel is more akin to classic detective fiction in pace and presentation. After the initial setup and the return of Chelle, Skip Grison finds himself trying to answer an expanding cascade of questions regarding Chelle, her “mother” and a multiplying cast of characters, all the while also trying to survive hostile hijackers, double agents and a woman scorned. Add whole swatches of back-and-forth dialogue largely uninterrupted by narrative exposition, and the feel of Home Fires is more Hammet than Bova.

Though by no means unprecedented, combining the two genres brings with it additional challenges. On one hand, in speculative fiction, the author must anticipate the reader’s need to get his or her bearings. How are things different? The same? What are the rules? Answer these questions too quickly or too completely, and you risk leaving the reader bored. Too slowly, and you may leave the reader disoriented or impatient. In either case, the book risks going unread. Add to this balancing act the demands placed on the reader from within the story by the mystery genre—like Skip Grison, the reader must try to figure out exactly what’s going on—and that fine line one must walk in speculative fiction is made finer, still.

But this is Gene Wolfe, an acclaimed master of speculative fiction. It’s nothing he hasn’t done before—and done well. As a result, pages turn, chapters fly by, and though the ending of Home Fires leaves plenty of unanswered questions—itself a hallmark of Wolfe’s fiction—most readers will only put this book down after it’s been finished. Or reread.

Home Fires, the new book by Gene Wolfe, starts with a simple premise. A man awaits the imminent   return of his true love from a stint in the military. Will she still love him? But of course, it’s more complicated than that. The beloved in question, Mastergunner Chelle Sea Blue, has been deployed in a […]
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Space opera stories

Review by Michael Burgin

The past two decades have been a prolific period for fantasy and science fiction author David Weber. From 1991 and 2010, between his own works and collaborations with authors such as Erik Flint, John Ringo and Linda Evans, Weber has published more than 35 books. Weber admits that everything he writes tends to “spawn sequels”—there are few single works in Weber’s bibliography. But Weber’s most successful series by far—beginning with 1992’s On Basilisk Station and continuing through 2010’s Mission of Honor—has yielded 12 books as it follows the exploits of female space navy officer, Honor Harrington.

Harrington battles enemy fleets, inimical political machinations and the schemes of genetic slavers in a space operatic milieu that loosely transposes the naval conflicts and political tensions between Great Britain and France during the Napoleonic Wars to the far future. (Think a female Horatio Hornblower in space.)

The series has certainly resonated with readers, as several of its entries, including 2000’s Ashes of Victory and 2002’s War of Honor, have reached as high as #12 and #8 on the New York Times bestseller list, respectively.

It turns out that even Weber’s shared-world anthologies spawn sequels—February’s In Fire Forged: Worlds of Honor #5 features three new stories based in the “Honorverse.” In addition to Jane Lindskold’s “Ruthless” and Timothy Zahn’s “An Act of War,” Weber himself has contributed “Let’s Dance!” a new Honor Harrington tale.

Though Lindskold, Zahn and Weber’s stories are self-contained enough to keep the interest of a reader unfamiliar with the Honorverse, In Fire Forged is ultimately aimed at an existing fan base. (A fourth and final entry in the anthology, Andy Presby’s “An Introduction to Modern Starship Armor Design,” which is less a story than a faux scientific treatise, will appeal only to the most dedicated Honorverse technophiles.)

In Fire Forged should help tide over fans of Honor Harrington until the next novel, A Rising Thunder, arrives sometime in 2012.

The past two decades have been a prolific period for fantasy and science fiction author David Weber. From 1991 and 2010, between his own works and collaborations with authors such as Erik Flint, John Ringo and Linda Evans, Weber has published more than 35 books. Weber admits that everything he writes tends to “spawn sequels”—there […]
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Light From Uncommon Stars

Review by Thane Tierney

What is it with the devil and violinists? Seems like his thirst for their souls is never slaked. In the 1700s, he made a deal with Paganini; in the 1970s, he went down to Georgia; and now the unlikely California city of El Monte offers up the latest additions to his infernal collection.

In Ryka Aoki’s Light From Uncommon Stars, violin teacher Shizuka Satomi finds herself on the horns of a dilemma: As the clock ticks down, she needs to deliver one more soul to the Bad Guy Down Below or else prepare to take the hot seat for all eternity. She’s already turned over six violin students, each of whom traded their immortal essence for earthly success beyond their wildest ambitions. 

Number seven, though, is a problem. Katrina Nguyen, a transgender teen runaway with a broken instrument and a broken psyche, isn’t motivated by the typical incentives (recording contract, concert tour, international renown) that made Shizuka’s previous students such easy marks.

Katrina isn’t the only refugee with a troubled past on Shizuka’s date card. Local donut shop owner—and starship captain—Lan Tran is on the intergalactic lam from a civilization-destroying phenomenon known as Endplague. After a meet cute, Shizuka and Lan embark on a friendship in which confidences are shared and mutual assistance is provided.

In a sense, virtually all of the book’s protagonists are literary examples of the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which damaged pottery is repaired with gold, becoming stronger because of its imperfections. In addition to the novel’s all-the-feels poignancy, Light From Uncommon Stars is also very, very funny. When Lan’s son is harassed by a hot-rodding local, the interstellar traveler derides the Earthling as “another primitive . . . who thought going 0 to 0.00000089469 times the speed of light in 6.6 seconds was something to brag about.” In another scene, when Lan marvels at a seemingly unending parade of breadsticks at an Olive Garden, Shizuka rejoins, somewhat incredulously, “But you traveled across the galaxy. The galaxy.”

Without straining the metaphor too much, Aoki gets every element of mise-en-scène note-perfect, and her prose is as exacting and precise as the techniques Shizuka is trying to impart to her young charge. Readers can feel the steam emanating from the kitchens of Aoki’s San Gabriel Valley noodle joints, hear the scrape of a freshly rosined bow across recalcitrant strings and experience the acute anguish of having one foot anchored in one world while the other is desperately trying to move forward. 

It almost makes you wonder if Aoki made a deal with—naaaah. She knows better.

In addition to the novel’s all-the-feels poignancy, Light From Uncommon Stars is also very, very funny.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Light Chaser

Review by Ralph Harris

Short, sweet and chock-full of both existential joy and dread, Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell’s novella Light Chaser is a hard science thriller set in a utopian future.

A lonely quasi-immortal, Amahle is a light chaser, a spaceship captain who travels the stars and takes advantage of enhanced genetics and lightspeed time-dilation to cross through millenia. Her mission is the dispersion and eventual retrieval of memory collars, fancy futuristic necklaces that record the memories of entire lifetimes: Imagine the 94-part Instagram stories of your most social media addicted-friends, but stretching across a century with fewer grainy, impossible-to-hear concerts. Between planets, Amahle uses these memory collars to experience the lives of those she met on her visits, with only the ship’s AI as her companion. That is, until she realizes that someone is trying to reach out to her through the memory collars, someone capable of communicating across centuries and galaxies.

Despite its short length, Light Chaser plunges into both soul-bound, possibly fated love and universe-spanning conspiracies. Readers who love unique science fiction settings will enjoy how Hamilton and Powell reveal new worlds with each new chapter. Both world building and suspense increase in tandem, complexity and depth building throughout the story while each new reveal amps up the tension.

An ideal read for a flight or a cozy afternoon at home, Light Chaser will make an afternoon seem like minutes.

Short, sweet and chock-full of both existential joy and dread, Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell’s novella Light Chaser is a hard science thriller set in a utopian future.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

The Exiled Fleet

Review by Chris Pickens

So you’ve successfully saved a fleet of soldiers from an intergalactic peril while simultaneously becoming the reluctant commander of a budding resistance movement. Now what? That's the dilemma facing Adequin Rake, captain of the spacecraft Argus. Unluckily for her—but luckily for readers—the excitement doesn’t ebb for even a moment in The Exiled Fleet.

As J.S. Dewe’s rousing follow-up to The Last Watch opens, Rake and her patchwork crew have survived the expanding calamity known as the Divide only to enter a new predicament. Without a warp core to travel to a safe part of the solar system, they’re dead in the water, and food and patience among the corps is growing scarce. Rake must rely on her team of trusted crewmembers to figure out how to retrofit the Argus and jump to safety. Along the way, they’ll encounter ancient civilizations, criminal enterprises and more than a few mechanical difficulties, all while trying to evade the evil Mercer Empire. Strap in—it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

But the bumpy ride is why we’re all here, right? One of the best parts about The Last Watch was how a cobbled-together, rag-tag assemblage of characters and technology still eked out a victory. I’m happy to report that the same white-knuckle, skin-of-their-teeth excitement is here from the very first page. So, too, are many of the characters that made the first installment great, as well as some welcome new arrivals.

Since The Exiled Fleet wastes very little time getting back into the action, it’s definitely recommended that readers tackle the first book before turning to this one. It’ll be completely worth it, because Fleet does a superlative job of expanding on everything that was interesting in Dewes’ debut—and this book is even more engaging and often, more personal. As Rake and her crew search for solutions, Dewes explores more of her complex universe and reveals more about the characters’ pasts. One character in particular has to come face-to-face with some ugly truths about his own family in a tense, painful, scary and oh-so-satisfying scene. Dewes has an aptitude both for excellent naval-inspired action sequences as well as for quieter interludes between characters. The amount of time she gives her characters to simply speak to one another makes the bonds they forge that much more believable.

In my review of The Last Watch, I mentioned that everyone should get ready to go back to the Divide in the next installment. But in The Exiled Fleet, Dewes goes far beyond the Divide to points of space as of yet unseen. Here’s hoping the next book in this excellent series keeps propelling us even further into the stars.

So you’ve successfully saved a fleet of soldiers from an intergalactic peril while simultaneously becoming the reluctant commander of a budding resistance movement. Now what?

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Review by Noah Fram

Dex is a monk of Allalae, the god of small comforts, living in the only city on the planet of Panga. Their city and its satellite villages are the only parts of their world where humans have lived since the Factory Age, which ended when human-built robots suddenly achieved consciousness and asked to be given the freedom to choose their own path through existence. The robots vanished into the wilderness, and the humans have lived in their cities alone ever since.

After Sibling Dex begins ruminating on a recording of evening crickets—a sound that they have never heard in reality, as generations ago, crickets were rendered extinct in areas inhabited by humans—they start to see all the other ways they feel unfulfilled. They decide to become a tea monk, a vocation devoted to helping people in the satellite villages through a combination of good listening and good tea. But after years tending to the villages, Dex’s cricketsong wanderlust remains unfulfilled, and they leave the trails between human habitations behind, striking off into the foreign forests.

Typically, we assume that stories require conflict, and this is particularly true in genre fiction, in which there are worlds to be saved, aliens and elves to be romanced and new technologies and ancient incantations to be discovered. So it is striking that Becky Chambers’ novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built is narratively compelling without anything approximating a typical science fiction conflict. Rather, it is a story of discovery, fueled by the tension of exploring a small slice of an unknown world, like a more tightly constructed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

In keeping with the rest of Chambers’ work, Psalm is a remarkably personal story set within a much larger saga; in this instance, she sets Sibling Dex’s journey across Panga against a canvas of rapid, large-scale sociocultural evolution. And although Psalm is separate from Chambers’ Wayfarers series, it follows many of the same themes: the strength of platonic bonds, thoughtful engagement with one’s environment and personal growth. It also retains the fundamental hopefulness and aspirational nature of her longer works.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built is the perfect length. If it were shorter, it would be unsatisfying. But if it were longer, its meditative tenor might have become unsustainable, even with Chambers’ sense of whimsy shining through as frequently and naturally as it does. Introspection and humor are perfectly balanced, to the point that these two tones literally bracket the novella: The first line is a shot of humor that admirably sets the mood and grabs the reader’s attention, while the last line is a draught of peaceful gratification reminiscent of one of Dex’s prized brews. This duality is characteristic of Chambers’ work, and A Psalm for the Wild-Built admirably demonstrates how it can translate beautifully into shorter formats.

Psalm also highlights Chambers’ talent for world-building without excessive description. The ubiquity of ox-bikes, which are bicycles aided by electric motors to handle towing loads and climbing hills, speaks more clearly to Panga’s wholesale commitment to sustainable technology than pages of exposition. Similarly, the nature of this world’s six gods—including their separation into Parent Gods representing natural forces (Bosh, the god of the life cycle; Grylom, the god of the inanimate; and Trikilli of the framework of natural laws) and Child Gods representing human creation or action (Allalae of small comforts; Chal, the god of constructs; and Samafar, the god of mysteries)—paints a remarkably detailed picture of the cultural ethos of Panga society. And the tea monks, journeying through satellite villages, providing solace with a kind ear and a warm mug of tea, highlight this culture’s deeply collectivist bent.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a worthy addition to Becky Chambers’ already burgeoning oeuvre. It distills her established interest in moving the grand conflicts of genre fiction to the background, in favor of more inspiring personal stories infused with beauty and optimism.

Dex is a monk of Allalae, the god of small comforts, who abruptly decides to leave the familiarity of the only city on the planet of Panga to become a tea monk.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Hold Fast Through the Fire

Review by Laura Hubbard

Looking for a quick bit of adrenaline, a spot of intrigue and the drama of an international sports event? Look no further than the second entry in K.B. Wagers’ NeoG series, Hold Fast Through the Fire.

This second book in the author’s military science fiction series picks up roughly a year after the events of A Pale Light in the Black. The crew of Zuma’s Ghost have achieved a repeat victory at the intermilitary Boarding Games, which was quite an achievement given that the Near-Earth Orbital Guard (NeoG) are looked down upon by other branches of the armed forces. Zuma’s Ghost is facing a change of staff, and everyone is uneasy about what that means for the future of the ship. The prelims for the next year’s Games are fast approaching, and the Ghost has been put on a new task force to investigate potential smuggling issues from off-world settlements.

Nika, still off balance from the loss of his hand, is apprehensive about his new command on Zuma’s Ghost, despite the fact that it was the ship where he cut his teeth as a budding lieutenant. His budding romance with Maxine Carmichael is on the rocks, and to make things worse, he has accepted a secret assignment that will put both Max’s and the crew’s trust to the test. Chae, Zuma’s Ghost’s new pilot, has issues of their own. Forced into the NeoG as part of a plea bargain, they are torn between their growing loyalty to their new crew and the need to keep their fathers safe from intergalactic intrigue. Meanwhile, Max is certain something is desperately wrong with Nika, Chae and their new assignment, but no one will back her up. With Nika effectively gaslighting her to throw her off the scent of his new top-secret mission, Max will have to hew closely to her own instincts if she is going to get the team through the prelims in one piece—let alone their official assignment.

Unlike A Pale Light in the Black, Hold Fast Through the Fire’s central mystery begins unrolling nearly at page one, giving the book a more sinister feel than its predecessor and pulling readers into a labyrinthine plot that surprises and delights. This does take away slightly from the Games aspect of the series, but readers who enjoyed A Pale Light in the Black’s focus on the competition won’t be disappointed. When training for the Games does make its appearance, it still packs the same adrenaline-filled punch of A Pale Light in the Black. Despite the increase in intrigue, Wagers devotes ample attention to the relationships among the crew of Zuma’s Ghost. From the exploration of Jenks’ and Max’s close friendship to Chae’s struggles to fit in with the group to Nika’s battle to accept himself after his accident, Hold Fast Through the Fire is as much about found family and interpersonal relationships as it is about mysteries or the Boarding Games.

This brilliant and entertaining installment in the NeoG universe is a great choice for readers looking for military drama, evocative writing and espionage.

Looking for a quick bit of adrenaline, a spot of intrigue and the drama of an international sports event? Look no further than the latest entry in K.B. Wagers’ NeoG series, Hold Fast Through the Fire.

Science Fiction & FantasyShort StoriesScience Fiction

I’m Waiting for You

Review by Chris Pickens

A character awakens after dying in “That One Life,” one of the four stories in South Korean author Kim Bo-Young’s expansive, captivating collection, I’m Waiting for You. In the afterlife, he’s greeted by a god who tells him, “Every life changes the whole universe. Whether or not that life is yours.” Where does humanity end and the universe begin? What are the limits of love and hope? What is the difference between creation and destruction? These are big questions, but Bo-Young’s attempt to bring shape to them in these stories is stunning, humbling and utterly beautiful.

I’m Waiting for You’s four stories form two pairs with interwoven thematic elements. In the titular story and in “On My Way,” an engaged couple, one on Earth and one on Alpha Centauri, exchange letters about their plans to meet to get married. (Each story contains one person’s letters.) Due to the problems posed by the theory of relativity and by light-speed travel, they must carefully coordinate their departures so they can arrive together at their destination at the same time, yet each lover encounters increasingly difficult complications to their original plan. Weeks, then months, then years are added to the journey’s overall time. Can the lovers hold out hope of finally being in the same place, at the same time?

In “The Prophet of Corruption” and “That One Life,” godlike beings, the progenitors of human existence, contemplate their impact on Earth and everything in it. From the smallest rock to the largest ocean, all of creation is an extension of them. When a young god created by Naban questions whether controlling the human world is right, Naban wonders if he and his fellow divine beings have had it backward all along. What if they exist because humanity exists, rather than the other way around?

The collection’s translators, Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu, should be commended on shepherding these stories so gracefully into English. They introduce complex and ambitious ideas about space travel, philosophical and metaphysical riddles playing out in worlds inhabited by gods . . . you get the idea. But even when it’s challenging, Bo-Young’s prose is always oh-so-gorgeous.

This is some of the most beautiful science fiction writing that I’ve read recently. Not every element between the pairs of stories is analogous, but sometimes, just there, right under the surface, Bo-Young has hidden common threads. The bookended stories of lovers traveling through space in time and the feelings of longing and trust in the face of astronomically impossible circumstances are particularly lovely. Even in the huge expanse of space, the second-person voices in their letters are intimate and genuine, and the emotional power of each story’s closing moments is hefty. Grab your tissues, because you may be thoroughly moved.

I’m Waiting for You isn’t just a statement of action. It’s a promise: I’m waiting on your behalf, to be with you, to experience the universe’s purpose for me through you. If only we can live up to such a promise.

A character awakens after dying in “That One Life,” one of the four stories in South Korean author Kim Bo-Young’s expansive, captivating collection, I’m Waiting for You
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Dead Space

Review by Laura Hubbard

If you’re an employee of Parthenope Enterprises, there is no such thing as privacy. Your movements around whatever desolate space station you occupy are tracked constantly, and the only place you aren’t under video surveillance is in the comfort of your own quarters. Or so security officer Hester Marley believes. But when an old friend dies under mysterious circumstances after sending her an untraceable message, Hester is forced to reexamine her certainty about the Parthenope panopticon. In order to solve his murder—and indeed, in order to survive her investigation—Hester will need to reconsider not just her views of life within the company, but also what she knows of her own tragic past.

Kali Wallace's Dead Space is tense and kinetic. Wallace masterfully dances back and forth between two speeds, using them to guide us towards a destination that feels both surprising and inevitable. In some scenes, Wallace lingers over interrogations as Hester and her investigative crew dissect every word and facial expression of the dead man’s fellow crew members at the asteroid mine where he worked and died. In others, the narration careens from one impact to another, sometimes literally, as the body count on the mining station continues to mount.

Because it’s written in first person, the book centers almost claustrophobically on Hester. At first glance, Dead Space’s protagonist is not exactly dynamic. Hester is competent but miserable, having been forced into indentured servitude by medical debt from injuries she sustained in a terrorist attack. In the moment of the attack, her dream—to explore the moon of Titan as part of a team looking for extraterrestrial life—was ripped away from her, replaced by a sobering reality of imperfect prosthetics and a security job ill-befitting an artificial intelligence expert. At least, that’s the view of her we see initially.

Yet as bad goes to worse in the investigation, we witness Hester bloom into someone who is passionate, curious and fiercely intelligent. Dead Space is as much about processing grief as it is about solving a murder. The events on the mining station force Hester to fully reckon with her loss even as they push her to her limits, giving an intensely human throughline to a story that might otherwise lose focus during its many twists and turns.

The book opens with a bloody description of a body modification surgery gone horribly wrong, and descriptions of gore only escalate from there. But Dead Space gives readers who can stomach such things an amazing gift: a character-driven thriller full of secrets, mayhem and plenty of explosions that will leave them guessing from beginning to end.

If you’re an employee of Parthenope Enterprises, there is no such thing as privacy. Your movements around whatever desolate space station you occupy are tracked constantly, and the only place you aren’t under video surveillance is in the comfort of your own quarters.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

A Desolation Called Peace

Review by Noah Fram

It has been two months since Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass foiled an attempted military coup on Teixcalaan—though they may have started a war to do it. Dzmare is back on her native Lsel Station, among her people but unsure if she still belongs there. Seagrass has a desk job; a prestigious one, to be sure, but a bore all the same, so when she lucks into a not-quite-legal chance for an adventure, and one that will bring her and Dzmare together again, she leaps at the chance. As diplomatic envoys to an uncommunicative alien armada, they must contend with a host of horrors, from a fleet of screaming, ship-eating aliens and deadly fleet politics to an infestation of cats and a lack of non-clichéd poetic imagery. And if they survive their privations, both military and literary, it is not at all clear whether either of them can truly go home again.

In her award-winning debut novel, A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine tackled the problem of communicating between cultures in a shared lingua franca, detailed an empire at war with itself and told of an intrigue involving Lsel Station’s memory-preserving imago-machines and one man’s quest for immortality. In A Desolation Called Peace, all of those themes have evolved in complexity, diving deeper into an intrigue about the very nature of life and death. The central cast is as appealing as ever, and the cats, described as “very friendly, if—sharp, on the ends” and “puddles of space without stars” are a delightful addition. 

Martine’s debut showcased her consummate skill and perfect blend of narrative, humor and world-building; her second effort highlights her thematic ambition, and her abilities as a writer are more than equal to the task. Desolation is the kind of book that crouches in your mind, waiting for a quiet moment. It is hard to read slowly, but demands to be savored, lest you miss some of the cleverest and most elegant foreshadowing in modern science fiction. Redolent with echoes of Frank Herbert’s Whipping Star, Iain M. Banks’s Excession and screen epics such as Arrival and Ronald D. Moore’s “Battlestar Galactica,” it nevertheless carries its own distinctive melody.

Arkady Martine’s first book was a deserving Hugo winner. Her second might eclipse it.

It has been two months since Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass foiled an attempted military coup on Teixcalaan—and they may have started a war to do it.

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