Finishing with 2007

[bibliogramma]

I have really wanted to write detailed responses to the last two books still un-reviewed from 2007, but life hasn't been accommodating in that respect. So gentle reader will have to settle for summaries, along with my hearty, if somewhat qualified, recommendations for both of these books.

Maul, Tricia Sullivan

This is a very thought-provoking, but also somewhat challenging book. Sullivan gives us two very different story lines: one set in a future where disease has almost wiped out the male population, and a medical researcher is trying to develop a diagnostic game that is intended to help bolster the immune system - and possibly make men more viable; and one dealing with a gang of more-or-less modern teenage girls caught up in a turf for pride and honour in the perfume aisle of a mall department store which turns violent and deadly. The two plotlines are linked thematically, and perhaps even literally - is what happens to the young women fighting to survive against a rival girl gang and the mall security and police simply a parallel set of events to what happens in the body of the researcher's male lab specimen, or is it the record of an RPG-style medical program?

As one might expect, the near-extinction of males in the future world plotline gives the author a great deal of scope for an examination of gender issues, and what Sullivan does with the by-now classic situation of how to organise a society of many women and a few sperm-producers necessary to continue the species is original, satirical and not to be missed.

You will find a more in-depth review at Infinity Plus, where the reviewer appears to have enjoyed this fast-paced and rewarding book as much as I did.


The Rebirth of Pan, Jo Walton

This book is available online here. Jo Walton posted it online last year in honour of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. It is an early, unpublished work, and it is evident that Walton wrote it before she developed the impressive technical chops she demonstrates today.

But you know, that really doesn't matter. Yes, it defies a great many conventions - there is no main protagonist, a large cast of characters, multiple plotlines, far too many POVs and perspectives, and because it's not a polished and finished work, one has to pay attention so as not to get lost. A lot is left to the imagination.

But what it says about the eternal, ever-renewing condition of the human soul - or spirit, or any other similar word you might prefer - is timeless, and more than enough to carry this reader through the technical flaws. The rebirth of Pan is the rebirth of the spirit, of life itself, breaking out of confinements and boundaries and starting things fresh and new again.

Reading it made me feel hopeful, optimistic, made me believe that there is something in the human experience that can transcend all the pettiness and divisiveness and greed and scrabbling for power over each other and all that we do that makes us less than we can be. And that's a good way to feel.