It's the week between Christmas and New Year's, that blank time filled with cheese, sugar, and not knowing what day of the week it is. I've been having fun reading, but I have been somewhat remiss when it comes to writing reviews. Lest I disappoint the small handful of humans and bots who will read this, here are my reviews of some of what I've been reading lately: Transcendent by Stephen Baxter, The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee, and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. I also recently finished A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers, but I need more time to process how much I loved everything about it. I'm also returning to an old favorite, The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, which I'm loving just as much if not more than I did when I first read it ten years ago. Anyway, on to this Review of Reviews: December 2023!
Transcendent by Stephen Baxter
Stephen Baxter is never boring, at least if mind-bending physics, philosophy, and science fictional speculation are your thing. Like Arthur C. Clarke, Baxter does both Big Ideas SF and Engineering SF, and you get plenty of both here. Transcendent is a "sequel" to Coalescent and Exultant, but it's not so much a continuation of the same story. There are some direct ties, especially to Coalescent, but I think you could easily read this as a standalone.
Michael Poole is a depressed engineer in 2047 in a world seeing the serious effects of climate change. He is haunted (literally, it seems, oddly enough!) by his dead wife. Eventually he works with his estranged son as well as his uncle and aunt (who were characters in Coalescent) on a potential geoengineering fix for a catastrophic climate issue. Meanwhile (in a vastly temporally extended sense of "meanwhile"!), 500,000 years in the future, a woman named Alia is "Witnessing" Michael from her generation ship. She is also contacted by the Transcendence, a group of post-humans intent on achieving a kind of god-like existence that involves some kind of time-meddling redemption of all past human suffering. She embarks on a trek across the galaxy to figure out if she will join the Transcendence, becoming a bit suspicious of them in the process. I enjoyed that each chapter alternated between Michael's and Alia's timelines. Some readers might find this disjointed, but I think it helped keep things moving.
I never quite entirely understand everything in a Stephen Baxter novel (that's part of the mind-bending fun, I guess), but in this case I'm not sure I really understood what the Transcendence wanted to do or what their motivations were, or in any case that felt underdeveloped to me, especially for a group of such allegedly advanced post-humans (it kinda felt like a loosely sketched out "space Christianity" or something). But I guess when you're juggling so many science fictional balls as Baxter, it's hard to avoid dropping one now and then. But overall, I really enjoyed this one. And I appreciated all the shoutouts to philosophers (Leibniz, Russell, Kant, and more!). I've never failed to be entertained by a Baxter novel, and Transcendent is no different on that count.
See my Goodreads review.
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
I've been meaning to check out John Wyndham for a while, and I'm glad I finally did. Published in the 1950's, this may be one of the first in the now-ubiquitous genre of dystopian science fiction. We never learn exactly when this novel takes place, but it seems there was a climate-altering nuclear was at some point, leaving humans in small, isolated communities. Our protagonist lives in a community in Labrador, where they have a religion that teaches them to abhor any sort of impurity, especially in the form of genetic mutations. Our protagonist meets a girl with six toes on one foot, and later he discovers that he, too, is different.
It's a deep, yet readable, meditation on the problems of insisting on purity and attempting to erase difference and change, of trying to build borders between yourself and the rest of reality (these days I'm thinking a lot about nondualism in a Buddhist sense, and this novel keeps me thinking in that theme). The Chrysalids is also quite short (about 200 pages in my edition), and while short novels were the norm in mid-20th century science fiction, it's still amazing how much Wyndham does in such a short book. I look forward to reading more of his work.
Check out this great review by Jo Walton. And my Goodreads review.
The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee
The Sum of Us is a fascinating and engagingly-written examination of the folly of zero-sum thinking about race, the kind of thinking that seems to be at the root of so many white Americans' thinking these days (although few would so blatantly admit it). While McGhee admits that of course racism most adversely affects people of the color in the US, she makes a great case that it affects white people, too. Her guiding metaphor is the closure of public pools in many US cities that decided to close public pools rather than desegregating them. Likewise, zero-sum thinking about race hurts all of us when it comes to healthcare, economics, education, housing, political representation, and so on. I've always suspected that we're all in this together (thinking a lot about Buddhist nondualism lately has deepened this for me), but McGhee's book gives an accessible, social science-based argument to this effect. As a white American myself, I wish more people would make the switch in thinking that this book represents in what McGhee calls a Solidarity Dividend. We'd all be better off for it!
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
I loved the 2018 Annihilation movie, and I've been meaning to read the book ever since. I finally did! There are some differences, but like the movie, the book is creepy and atmospheric. If anything, it feels a bit more dream-like and disturbing in a, dare I say it, Lovecraftian sense (but without Lovecraft's verbiage and racism). And little things (like the fact that we never learn the characters' names and that a tunnel is referred to as Tower) makes it feel delightfully uncanny. I enjoyed how VanderMeer doles out bits of information about our main character as we go on.
I admire the filmmakers for visualizing this book, but in some ways I think maybe I like the book more for evoking amorphous dread, uncanny creatures, and existential absurdity beyond our human ken. Cosmic horror usually works better on the page than the screen: what you can't quite visualize is always scarier than anything on the screen. Annihilation is I think one of the most unique and engaging examples of cosmic horror in recent years. And I love how compact it is: so much in so few pages! Although the sequels look longer, I'll get around to reading them someday, too.
See also my Goodreads review.
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