Review – The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

First there’s an exposition-y beginning involving a teacher from a Harry-Potter-with-the-serial-numbers filed off kind of world, and a promising student who accidentally killed her whole family with a “demonic incursion” and some law and order adults who want to get to the bottom of it. Yep, it’s another mystery. But I’m determined to hold off on judgment, a little, so I kept going for a while. Ultimately it lost me over the scoldy teacher voice of the narrator, but if you like mysteries, and have a hankering for some Potter-ish fanfic from Professor McGonagall’s perspective, this is the book for you.

Review - Among Ghosts by Rachel Hartman

This one started out promisingly enough, when a bully and his two ruffian sidekicks try  to sneak into a mysterious place. I was intrigued by the notion of a naughty protagonist rather than a goody two shoes.

But it was just a bait and switch. The bully undergoes a Lovecraftian-type experience and the perspective switches to a goody two shoes who has some positive, loving interactions with the warm, nurturing adults in the village, and then we get a glimpse of the warring kingdoms backstory, and I was starting to fall asleep.

And THEN I made the mistake of trying to open a second e-pub, which caused my e-pub reader to eject this one. I spent a couple of minutes wondering whether I cared what happened to either the goody goody or the warring kingdoms. The answer was no. But I can say the book was well-written, and part of it was engaging so that holds potential for further engagement later on. 

Review - A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

Lots of blurbiage comparing the detectives herein to Holmes and Watson gave me a feeling of foreboding. I’m not usually drawn to the genre in which some neurodivergent and likely autistic type making clever observations while everyone goes “how marvelous, I would never have thought of that” (see Sherlock Holmes, House, etc.).

An excerpt was provided, with a link for those who want the whole thing, and I checked it out before deciding Not For Me – an autopsy is conducted, by people who are dressed for a fantasy story and talk like they’re in a cop movie. I got a very strong vibe of "story that's trying to simultaneously checkbox all the genres" and couldn't engage at all.

So I’m going to thank Robert Jackson Bennett for adding more books to the world while declining this one. 

Ten Science Fiction Tropes I Heartily Dislike

As an extreme casual with regard to science fiction, some tropes work for me and others fall flat. I won’t necessarily stop reading a book when I encounter one of these, but I’ll deduct points.

1. Psionics 

Back in the ‘70s, people thought science would eventually give us a way to do telepathy and telekinesis and empathy and other kinds of sidhi magic like the yogis wrote about. Didn’t pan out, although it inspired some of Stephen King’s first books. 

Psionics are pretty firmly entrenched in speculative fiction though. Especially the superhero genre, but they also turn up in classic works like Dune. Sometimes this leads to my number one speculative fiction red flag: “character grunts and strains as if they are pooping while trying real hard to do a psionic thing.” 

Or my number two -- some psi bully forces their way into a character’s internal narrative because they have a great big strong muscular psi, while their victim’s feeble psi is too weak to resist them despite lots of histrionics, and requests for the bully to “get out of my head!” 

Or number three – there really are voices in my head who are responsible for all those crimes I did!

If I rejected everything with psionics I wouldn’t have much to read. Even Carl relies on them occasionally, and it makes perfect sense for people to use a communication platform that doesn’t exist, like telepathy, while talking to a being that doesn’t exist, like a demigod. 

I have rejected books over psionics though. I tend to view it as a metaphor for schizophrenia, because sometimes people with that are a bit “leaky” with respect to attributing the source of their thoughts. Which helps them with things like creativity but sometimes gets in their way when they’re trying to focus. So it depends if the psionic metaphor has to do with decent folks dealing with scrambled signals … or if it’s got a few judgmental layers mixed in, like demonic possession, evil mind controlling entities, or elements that seem to equate hearing voices with misconduct. 

2. The Preciousing

Writer reached out to tentatively touch the Writing Surface. It was like a million toothless mosquito bites. Writer opened its mouth in awe. Gaping wide. Stupefied. The Writing Surface undulated in its bare blankness. Petulantly. The Writer drifted in its mindless gape, compostulating about how “whoa” this all was. The empty blank Writing Surface writhed in silent scorn.

This “stoned on weed for the first time” type prose where some not-quite-lucid thinker assigns Capitalized Nouns to various things and people while their internal monologue suddenly becomes festooned with decorative verbiage is not a style exclusive to science fiction, but science fiction tends to intensify the cringe. Older readers might recall the novelization of the film E.T., which adds a plot arc about the extraterrestrial giving these precious little infodumps about crushing on Elliot’s mom, whom he calls Willow Creature. That was the point where I personally decided I’d had enough of The Preciousing, which hasn’t kept me from running into it over and over again. Although I’m getting better at tapping out the instant I see it. 

3. Clone Arrangers

Crappy writer: “So my character lost a leg and then he went to the clone vats and got a new one, from a clone.”

Me: “So your futuristic society has two classes of humans, and one class is enslaved or something and can be suddenly deprived of their legs. Shouldn’t the story be about that? How do they keep the second class humans down? Does everyone get a second class human of their own automatically, when they’re born? What about twins and other multiple births? Or do they just assign the first one born as the original and all the other siblings get sentenced to grow up in the ‘no civil rights’ class? Speaking of classes, do they get their own segregated schools? 

Crappy writer: “Ummm … so he goes to a clone vat and says ‘one leg please’ and they go ‘yes sir that will be thirty credits’ and then they put the leg on…”

Jodi Picoult wrote a domestic drama called My Sister’s Keeper about a kid conceived to be a donor for her older sibling that goes deeper into this issue than many crappy writers. People used to feel similarly about “test tube babies” – how they are automatically somehow less human, with less rights, and there’s something sinister and manufactured about them, and that they’d somehow be a second, special, less natural kind of being. These days, people born via assisted reproduction are all over the place and nobody gives it a second thought. 

4. Bodies Are Turntables And Minds Are Vinyl

Body swapping is a science fiction staple, and it’s also popular with actors who enjoy pretending to be possessed by some other actor. A very literal twist on Cartesian dualism, these stories feature people effortlessly repositioning their consciousness in someone else’s flesh, and they never ever run into bodily complications like neurodiversity, or food allergies, or even the dreaded lack of internal monologue (a concept which upsets lots of people who post on Reddit). Or constantly thinking about food, which is something people report losing when they start taking GLP-1 drugs. Or even attraction, which is a largely physical thing involving subtle hormone scents and various innate predispositions. You hardly ever read about body swappers suddenly falling in love though, or zapping themselves into a body with different desires, or even one that constantly nags you for sweets. Let alone one with a brain that is fantastic at math and terrible at small talk. 

There are reasons for this, which come in many flavors such as good, bad, and well-intended. Lots of people think that being able to detect qualities based on physical criteria would lead to selective abortions and other eugenics-related measures, and it's preferable to have a fundamentalist body/mind separation worldview, in which flesh is merely a vehicle, and variation is all attributable to conditioning and trauma, and people can swap bodies effortlessly, without even dealing with headaches, or bellies that’ll keep you up all night if you feed them the wrong dinner. In this vision, bodies are just like cars that all have the same instrument panel – interchangeable, with zero concerns about adjusting to a manual transmission or a right-side driver’s seat or a fussy engine that needs to warm up for a couple minutes. 

This trope is such a staple that it’s difficult to avoid, and occasionally these days I’m spotting maverick writers who deal with it in creative ways, considering the possibility one’s new body might be quirkier than the last one they were wearing, and that brains might actually physically store memories as well as personality details. I’ll give that sort of speculation a chance. Not if it’s yet another lazy story about someone choosing between their authentic self and their DNA though. Gedoudaheah widatshit. 

5. Simplistic Backstory as Exposition

This is another one not exclusive to science fiction, it happens in all the genres. Character X is obsessed with dogs, because they were bitten by one as a child. Or character X is terrified by spiders, also due to a single instance of juvenile exposure. Or maybe they were dominated by their mean dentist dad, which inspired them to grow up and buy a chocolate factory. Sometimes the main character must investigate the simplistic backstory, which ends up being the big reveal which then frees Character X from their mysterious compulsion. Yet another one I’m not buying. 

6. Bougie Soldiers

I have zero firsthand military experience but I’ve known a lot of current and former soldiers, worked with them in lawsuits, played videogames with them and the like, and I’ve found them to be a lot like medical people, or responder people – they sometimes have a rather dark sense of humor that helps them deal with the disgusting stuff they deal with at work. Lots of them are working class, and some of the ones who aren’t tend to affect working class slang and mannerisms to fit in. One of the things that strikes me as accurate about DC Carl is the idea he used to be in the Coast Guard and is familiar with enlisted men. 

Then there are fictional troops who act more like middle-class office workers. Polite and cooperative. Customer service mode. They don’t get emo over sports. They don’t posture and play-fight over status. Often they don’t even talk in slang, or lose their temper, or quarrel. They would never, ever think of drawing a penis on the face of a passed-out colleague because that would be just wrong. 

The Alien movies tend to get it right, with bickering wage slaves trading barbs in space. Even Chrisp Ratt’s character in Guardian of the Galaxies feels authentically soldier-like, with his ability to balance wildly disparate personalities, dumb tension-defusing jokes, and love for dopey rock and roll. 

Other times storytellers expect me to accept a pack of clean-living well-behaved humor-free citizens as working folks whose job involves gross, dangerous, and highly unpleasant things. But I’m not buying it. 

7. One Personality Planet

I’m not down with this type of OPP, where all the Vulcans are INTJs, and all the Venusians are great dancers while the Martians are obsessed with conquest. It’s even kind of weird in fantasy where all the dwarves are stubborn, and all the orcs are violent – we invented D&D specifically to get past those types of stereotypes. It reminds me of Victorians pontificating about whether the Spaniards’ average head shape influences their national character to be different from that of the Portuguese. But I’ll buy it in the context of lots of neighboring kingdoms in close proximity where the people are genetically distinct and probably do a lot of cheerleading about what makes a person truly part of their society. A whole planet of jocks/nerds/people who never lie in contrast with the people from a neighboring planet who always tell the truth? Great big nope. 

8. Genre Dysphoria

Science fiction stories are about ideas. Romance stories are about two people experiencing attraction. Mysteries are about trying to find out who did something, and the answer is revealed at the end for those who couldn’t figure out all the clues. Westerns are about cowboys and horror is about scary things. Genre stories can incorporate thousands of other elements as long as they at least give a nod to their genre, otherwise they’re just generic stories that will probably get lost out there in the big bad world without a support group. 

So don’t go telling me “this is a western” and then proceed to discuss your last relationship and several of your favorite recipes while including a sentence like “my uncle was a cowboy” somewhere on the last page. Too much of a fraudulence vibe. 

9. Excessive Grooviness

Stranger In A Strange Land is probably the biggest example, checking off bingo card categories like “hippie cult,” “polycule,” and “hero who gets lots of sex” and “surrealism that might be influenced by drugs.” If Austin Powers would dig the book in question, or if Philip K. Dick wrote it, or if it throws in hipster references to people like Jack Parsons, it is way too groovy for me and I’ll have to pass, with Roger Zelazny and Michael Moorcock standing guard at the border. 

10. Excessive Fascism

I don’t like the other polarity very much either. I’m not going to sympathize with some racist sexist asshole of a character, unless it’s Harry Flashman, and the author is a genius with regard to the fictional portrayal of assholes who occasionally experience a flash of moral clarity in between lots of stumbling around in their customary assholian fog. I don’t object to the presence of characters like that as long as I can snicker when they get their painful comeuppance, but I’m sure not going to fangirl over them. 

Probably Voting For Nnedi Okorafor for Best Novel

 I had a "and one more thing!" kind of experience regarding Death Of The Author -- there's a scene where Zelu is accused of being "verbally violent" after she castigates a student she feels is writing in a self-indulgent way, and he is too fragile to deal with it. Later, Zelu is socializing with her own people and everyone tends to be direct like that. It gave me lots of insights as to how personalities can either fit or clash with different crowds. 

Later, I heard a speaker give a talk about diversity and her attempts to figure out whether a place was "for her" or "not for people like her" depending on things like whether her mobility device could enter, or whether the other people might consider her food to be unusual. And it made me think about the challenges of balancing tolerance that we can fix, like adding ramps, with tolerances that might not be as readily remedied, as in "I come from a culture of direct people while your people are customarily fragile." 

And on that basis I'm currently leaning toward voting for it for Best Novel even though I felt uncomfortable myself while trying to soak into this world of complex interactions, where I just wanted Zelu to ignore everyone and go do her own thing, which is how I respond to complex interactions. And in the end, she kinda does. Which places it in the category of "books that make me think" and I want to acknowledge that. 

Review – Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

I’m bouncing off of this book even as I recognize it as a great book. It’s about Zelu, who is disabled due to paralysis, as well as Nigerian-American, as well as the author of the greatest science fiction book ever, which makes her instantly rich and famous. She also has a very close family, and a major part of the novel has to do with diplomacy between formidable people. Those last two are the elements that made it difficult for me to engage – overnight success and being part of a family unit full of people with strong opinions. 

The novel-within-a-novel, Rusted Robots, is written in a poetic style lots of modern writers seem to enjoy, which reminds me of people like Richard Brautigan, except to me it’s one of those red flags, like psionics, and it feels kind of like … the Reviewer contemplated the Reviewed as it sat there spinning in digital space in its nascent, pre-reviewed state. The Reviewer contemplated the Reviewed with the same diffidence she had displayed eating the Breakfast. It had been Breakfast, the same she ate every day. She consumed it following her daily escape from the Bed. A duality forever at odds, the Breakfast and the Bed, existing in a room where the Reviewed did not. 

So I had a hard time believing Rusted Robots was that big a bestselling fluke, especially when I’ve been having an extended affair with legit bestselling fluke DC Carl. 

I also had a hard time with the community-centric way the African people interacted. It was an interesting glimpse into a different world, and I kept wanting to tell Zelu to tell all those people off and run away with her robots and money to lead a more Zelu-centric life, and failing to understand why she kept going back for more. 

That’s the point of the story, though – Zelu’s uncomfortable transition into becoming a cyborg. The themes about accommodating and changing with new technology seemed far more mature and nuanced than a lot of voices in this discussion, possibly including mine. 

Both this book and Tchaikovsky’s address Big Themes with regard to technology, and inclusion, so it’s easy to see why they are nominated. The fact I bounced off of both of them halfway through, and then wandered over to the Wiki for enough summary to write a coherent review, isn’t detracting from their importance or quality. These are great books from an intellectual standpoint, and I’m more of a sensation-chasing barbarian when it comes to literature, or music, or food, or most things. 

Which kind of leaves me torn. Should I vote for the Important Book by the British guy who needs more acclaim? Or should I vote for the Important Book by the Nigerian-American woman who is getting plenty of deserved acclaim plus I got to be on a panel with her once, at Hawaiicon, and I’m still a little bit starstruck because she was glimmering with impending success vibes at the time. 

Or should I take a chance with the other three books to see if any of them have the qualities I seek? Or (and this is my current direction), should I just bounce off the Best Novel category and go read YA entries, because I definitely enjoyed the first chapter of Among Ghosts enough to feel an almost recreational vibe, where most Hugo nominees feel more like summarizing evidence. 

This one is good. It’s nuanced. It made me think. It revealed a world of classy smart Nigerian-Americans behind the handful of individuals I’ve personally met. Parts of it I found deeply engaging. I just couldn’t mesh with the story-in-a-story, or Zelu’s many frustrating encounters where she’s being misunderstood again. 

Rewards I Will Give Myself For Getting Through This Reading Assignment

 Best Novel: Nnedi's has some interesting characters but there's a "you're nothing without family" theme running through it, and the whole family has to weigh in as to whether a disabled member can use an assistive device, so I'm seeing it as an interesting look into an alien culture, with some interesting nuance compared to a lot of these other anti-tech stories that people wrote on computers. Like "well what if it helps a disabled person have a better life?" These are interesting people from a parallel world and Nnedi makes them come alive but I'm not sure if I'll make it to the end. 

If I finish the others I might check out some of the other novels, but as of now, I'm tempted to leave Nnedi's novel unfinished yet still vote for it on that basis, although if I finish the rest of it in time I'll check out all the cozy mysteries or whatever else is on the slate and see if any voices grab me. I think that warrants a self-reward of at least one concert ticket. 

Best Lodestone/YA novel: upon completion of this category I intend to gift myself one of those new Labubus wearing a sailor hat. 

Best Novella: I used to use food as a reward, just like my parents used to do whenever they wanted to distract me, but these days I am trying to substitute healthier rewards, such as things that give me incentive to get off my ass and go outside. Therefore, if I slog my way through this category, I am allowing myself one trip to Stonestown for some fried shrimp (which is way healthier than fried ice cream) and a bath bomb from either Lush or Sephora. 

The whole shebang: a copy of one of Matt Dinniman's books that I haven't read yet. That should incentivize me to turn some pages and grind some levels in reading books. Plus if I pull off all this reading before I go to Las Vegas to see BTS again, I am allowing myself some bonus lilikoi Hi-Chews from the ABC Store in addition to other treats not determined as of yet.