May. 26th, 2015

bibliogramma: (Default)

Murder World: Kaiju Dawn by Jason Cordova and Eric S. Brown, submitted as part of the Hugo Voters' Packet, is one of several books that Campbell nominee Cordova has co-written with Eric Brown. Of course, it's difficult to know how much of the book is due to Cordova's input, but at least it's something to go on.

It's kind of a fun concept - mercenaries are hired to retrieve something from a military ship that crashed on a presumably uninhabited planet, only to crash themselves and discover the planet is full of kaiju - monsters from Japanese sf films. It's chock full of wisecracking fighters - I particularly liked the lethally kickass woman, as you would expect) and full-tilt action scenes and almost everyone dies before the last survivors make it off the planet (with some unexpected help). The characters and situations are walking cliches, the plot is rather formulaic, the craft is adequate to tell a story of this type, but that's about it. It's what I call a guilty pleasure read - there's nothing particularly remarkable about it, but it hits a few of my favourite plot buttons and it's a quick and easy read when you're in the mood for something that does not challenge in the slightest.

Cordova also submitted a shorter and solo piece called "Hill 142." Set in war-torn Europe (there's reference to The Great War) it features another "high concept" - Germans on giant spiders, referred to in the story as the "dreaded German Höllenspinne Division." Fortunately, the allies have giant attack lions on their side. Unfortunately, there are more spiders than lions, but everyone on the right side is courageous and dies nobly after completing their mission.Also unfortunately, the thing that struck me the most was how on earth the human protagonist was able to dismount from his lion twice without an intervening remount. Must have been the heat of battle.

Basing my assessment on these two submissions, Cordova has a future as an SF writer to be sure, and I enjoyed them both, but to me, his work does not rise to the level of previous Campbell winners such as Spider Robinson, C. J. Cherryh, Ted Chiang, Nalo Hopkinson, Cory Doctorow, Elizabeth Bear, Jo Walton, and others.
bibliogramma: (Default)

In addition to her Hugo-nominated short story "Totaled," English submitted two short works for the Hugo Voters Packet in support of her Campbell nomination.

"Departure Gate 34B" is a short, bittersweet story about love, memory and letting go. In a story told through dialogue, a married couple meet in an airport lounge and slowly reveal the truth about a catastrophic event that prevented their planned vacation. There's some skill here, and some surprise, and for a very short story it packs an emotional punch.

"Totaled," the story which received a Hugo Nomination, is a somewhat sentimental but reasonably interesting story about a research scientist who ends up as the subject of her own research. As we all know, in the future, either the costs of healthcare or the shortage of organs or some other reason will result in people's bodies being harvested for all sorts of things. English's variation on this has protagonist Maggie's brain shipped off to a research lab when she dies in a car accident. When her brain is hooked up to the plumbing designed to keep her brain functional for various tests, she finds herself conscious - and in her very own lab. She finds a way to convince her former associate that it's really her in that lump of grey goo. In a scene that feels both awkward and cliched, we learn that their boss arranged for her brain to be collected for the express purpose of completing their research before her brain decays. And what a trouper she is, working as hard as she can to finish the job before she dissolves into grey soup. Some genuinely touching moments, such as when her associate, having wired her for sight and sound, takes her jar out to see her children getting awards at a school assembly. Job done, she asks for an end as her consciousness begins to blur in her disintegrating brain - a process that was nicely portrayed in the text. But after the coup de grace, she wakes up again, presumably having had her consciousness transferred into the bionet McGuffin she has been developing. The end.

"Flight of the Kikayon," the third of English's submissions, is like the other two in that it features as a protagonist a woman (of unmarked race) whose identity is strongly (though not exclusively in one case) based on being a wife and mother. One might have wished to see more variety.

This is the most complex of the stories in terms of plot and number of significant characters. In this story, the protagonist (Lydia) is married to an abusive husband (Donnie) and has one child, a daughter who is primarily cared for by one of the genetically engineered humanoid servants developed by the husband's company (Cara, who looks exactly like Lydia and was developed from her DNA). The protagonist sees her chance to escape when her husband insists that the family take a "universe cruise" and leave the nanny behind. Lydia smuggles Cara aboard the starliner and makes plans for them to swap identities, at which point Lydia plans to vanish. But Donnie's insistence on a daytrip to a proscribed planet changes everything. Some unexpected plot twists and an open-ended conclusion helped to make this an interesting piece.

English has some definite writing chops, but I felt that there wasn't a lot of variety in the pieces offered, which weakens my overall assessment of her as a Campbell nominee. I have already noted the similarities in protagonist choice. There are also structural similarities in the pieces, and I was irked in that I wanted to use the word "bittersweet" in describing all three stories. I think English has definite potential and I hope she continues to develop her craft.

bibliogramma: (Default)

Wesley Chu's Tao trilogy has been receiving a fair amount of critical attention recently, but I had not gotten around to reading the first volume - but when the Hugo voters packet arrived, the submission for Campbell nominee Chu was the second volume in the series. So naturally I had to read the first volume before jumping into the second.

Chu's The Lives of Tao - a combination secret history/spythriller/aliens among us conspiracy tale - is quite an impressive first novel. I was hooked on it from the first chapter - the fast-paced action combined with an intriguing situation and some very good multi-purposed dialogue pulled me into the story, got me interested in the characters and how they came to be where they were, and gave me enough information concerning the series's long and complex backstory so that I didn't feel lost. The material was handled with such confidence that I trusted the author enough to jump in and see where the story was going.

And it is quite a story too. The backstory (much of which we learn in the form of reminiscences and dialogue between characters) starts millions of years ago, with a damaged space ship carrying hundreds of thousands of alien beings - Quasings, whose natural form at Earth-like air pressure is an organic fog - exploded in Earth's atmosphere while trying to make an emergency landing. Many died. Those who survived were scattered around the globe, wherever the fragments of the ship came to ground. Unable to survive in the open, their only option was to merge their bodies with those of the native life forms, using their hosts' nervous systems to maintain their own lives. For millions of years these essentially immortal beings migrated from host to host, only able to change hosts when the current host died. Scattered around the globe, living in bodies without enough brain development to allow them to make plans, they stagnated as a species - until finally some of them migrated into the bodies of some rapidly evolving simians and began a quest to find other survivors of the crash, and then to encourage the smartest of the simians to create a technological civilization capable of building a ship to take them home.

In this universe, the Quasings have shaped human society since its very beginnings. Many of the famous - and pivotal if less well-known - leaders, politicians, warriors, artists and thinkers of human history have been hosts for Quasings. The basic relationship is not one of possession and dominance - Quasings have very limited abilities to directly influence their hosts' thoughts or actions, although they can "take over" when their hosts are asleep. Rather, Quasings propose, advise, negotiate, or use psychological manipulation to influence their hosts. Over time, Quasings have experimented with human societies, trying to find the best way to promote technological progress by persuading their hosts to take various actions. Slowly two broad camps formed - one (the more numerous faction) believing that humans progress the most in conflict situations, and the other holding that humans progress best in co-operative situations (I found myself thinking for a few moments of Babylon 5's Shadows and Vorlons). About 500 years in the past, the disagreements between these two camps became violent, and since then, the two camps, Genjix and Prophus, have been in a state of conflict, each trying to gain control over human society through various means while struggling to destroy the influence of the other group and neutralise its members. One other significant difference between the two groups is that the Genjix see humans as inferior vessels to be used as required, and they control their human hosts and supporters through a rigid cult-like organisational structure. The Prophus see their hosts and associates as partners.

The first novel opens with a mission. Edward Blair and his Prophus symbiote Tao are part of a team infiltrating a Genjix facility to obtain computer files relating to a secret project of the Genjix. The mission is an operational success, but Edward and Tao are trapped behind enemy lines and rather than risk the destruction of both, Edward chooses to suicide so that Tao has a chance to find another host and survive.

With only a few moments to locate a host before Earth's conditions destroy it (Quasings are genderless and do not appear to reproduce, at least not away from their home planet), Tao is forced to select an unwilling, unprepared, and highly unsuitable host, Roen Tan. Thus an immortal being who carries the memories of thousands of the best and brightest of humans, and whose special expertise within the Prophus organisation lies in infiltration and sabotagr, finds himself joined until death with an insecure, overweight, nerdly slacker who has a dead-end IT job in a cube farm. The Lives of Tao tells the story of how Tao and Roen become an effective working unit and Roen.

Chu's writing is strong and confident, the story is intriguing and keeps the reader invested. There are lots of references to science fiction classics and tropes, and to historical people and events, both of which delighted me. The main characters are well-developed and distinctive. Unfortunately, a few of the supporting characters are somewhat derivative (notably the ancient martial arts teacher). My initial impression of the book's gender politics was not wholly favourable. While the few female characters are intelligent and competent women, Roen's romantic interest Jill seemed to have no other independent function within the story, and we see both Jill and the kickass fighter Sonya (host of Tao's old friend Baji) who trains Roen on hand-to-hand combat and weapons, through a pervasive male gaze. At the time, I wondered if this was deliberate, a function of seeing them through Roen's perceptions, because he is the kind of nerdboy who would have that kind of gaze. Reading of the second novel confirmed my thoughts on that score. Overall, The Lives of Tao is an ambitious first novel, well executed.

The second book in the trilogy, The Deaths of Tao, totally avoids the dreaded sophomore slump. In fact, it may be better than the first book. The tone is very different, the story much more complex, and the stakes are higher as we move from a relatively straightforward story about a geek who learns to be a spy to a tale of international intrigue and political machinations on multiple levels, seasoned with intelligence missions, assassinations and eventually, set battle pieces.

In The Deaths of Tao, the story is told from multiple perspectives. Roen and Tao share the focus with a high-ranking Genjix pairing, and with Jill, who is now a Quasing host and plays a pivotal role in the events of the book.

The time is about five years after the end of the first book, and there have been significant changes, both in the lives of Roen and Tao, and in the conflict between Genjix and Prophus. In the hiatus between novels, Roen and Jill have married, had a child, and are now separated. Jill has devoted herself to the Prophus cause, using her (previously referred to but unseen) intellect, negotiating skills and legal prowess in the political branch of Prophus' operations. Roen and Tao have gone rogue, frustrated by what Tao sees as misguided tactics on the part of the Prophus. The third narrative voice is that of Enzo, the product of a breeding and training program designed to create superhuman hosts for the Genji, and the new host of a highly ranked Genjix named Zoras.

The Genjix are winning the battle for control of humanity, and because we the readers have the benefit of a Genjix POV, we know what the Prophus do not - that the Genjix are no longer focused on going home, but rather on Quasiforming Earth, thus creating conditions under which they can live outside hosts and reproduce. The Prophus have been attempting to block Genjix research through manipulation of international trade - we watch as Jill, now an aide to a powerful US Senator, negotiates backroom deals on trade legislation - but their efforts are hampered by lack of intel on what the Genjix really want and how they are routing supplies through world trade channels. Roen and Tao, acting on their own, have come closer to an understanding of what the Genjix are planning, but isolated and lacking the ability to do anything about it.

Then a Prophus mission gone sour pulls Roen and Tao back into the Prophus fold, and into a dangerous mission that could prove what Roen and Tao have suspected for some time about Genjix objectives.

The darker tone and broader scope of this novel provides room to form a more critical opinion of both sides of the Quasing conflict. The tone of the first book, the fact that the viewpoint characters are a naive young man and a member of the Prophus, and the conventions of the apprentice spy novel (i.e. +, that there are good guys and bad guys, and the hero always ends up with the good guys), tended to mask the ambiguity of the Prophus and accentuate the differences between the two camps. Now, even though one camp is clearly intending to take the earth away from humans, leaving them nothing, and the other camp still hopes to go home and leave humans to their own destiny, the similarities between them and the weight of a long history of manipulation by all Quasings are clearer. After all, the division is a relatively recent one, and regardless of differences in how the Quasings view and treat their hosts and humans in general, the naked truth is that for millennia, the Quasings have been manipulating humans and depriving them of their chance to develop "naturally." At one point, in one of Tao's accounts of earlier hosts and their achievements, Chu weaves into that account the final phrase from the iconic death speech of Roy Batty in the film Blade Runner. Which caused me to think about parallels between replicants in the film - shaped, limited, used and then set aside by their human creators -and humans in this series - also in many ways shaped, limited, used and set aside by the Quasings a trend that continues even among the Prophus. What are we to think of the fact that in The Deaths of Tao, the two key protagonists on the Prophus side - Roen and Jill - had no choice in becoming hosts, and that both became hosts because humans were sacrificed to save the Quasing inhabiting them, whereas the obnoxious and arrogant Enzo, host to the Genjix Quasing Zoras, chose to be a host, and went willingly to the joining (granted, he had been conditioned from childhood to want it, but he was nonetheless a willing participant). Such skillfully developed undertones prepare us for the unexpected and game-changing climax of the novel.

I was delighted to see that my suspicions about the source of male gaze in the first novel appear to have been correct. The women in this novel - even the minor characters - are all integral to the plot and have their own character arcs. And the novel passes the Bechdel test with flying colours. In fact, at certain points Chu demonstrates a sophistication in the portrayal of gender in this novel that is reminiscent of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch novels and Andrea Hairston's Mindscape, highlighting the fact that as readers we tend to make assumptions of gender based on cultural defaults.

I'm looking forward to devouring the final book of the trilogy; and I thank the gods and goddesses that it's already in print so I don't have to wait.

Obviously, I am very much impressed by these two novels. Chu easily passes my standard as a worthy candidate for the Campbell.

Profile

bibliogramma: (Default)
bibliogramma

May 2019

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930 31 

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 6th, 2025 12:29 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios