My life in books

In Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, James Daschuk sets out to tell the history of the European colonisation of the the Canadian Great Plains as it affected, and continues to affect, the health of Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. As he states in his introduction: “Racism among policy makers and members of mainstream society was the key factor in creating the gap in health outcomes as well as maintaining a double standard for acceptable living conditions for the majority of the population and the indigenous minority.” This book shows how that double standard was created and maintained.

“Canada consistently places among the top nations in the world according to the UN Human Development Index. In its report for 2007–08, only Iceland, Norway, and Australia ranked higher than Canada in the criteria considered by the United Nations. Yet also a regular story is the dismal condition of Canada’s indigenous people in comparison with its mainstream population. The gap between these populations is so wide that official communications of the Assembly of First Nations, the largest aboriginal organization in the country, state that Canada’s indigenous population would rank sixty-third on the same index, the equivalent of Panama, Malaysia, or Belarus. On average, indigenous Canadians can expect to die between five and eight years earlier than other Canadians. Canadians have come to expect the highest-quality medical care as their national right, but indigenous people routinely suffer from poverty, violence, sickness, and premature death. Substandard health conditions are so entrenched that a recent text on the social determinants of health listed aboriginal status as a key predictive variable in the analysis of the country’s overall health outcomes. The chasm between the health conditions of First Nations people and mainstream Canadians has existed for as long as anyone can remember; it too has become part of who we are as a nation. The primary goal of this study is to identify the roots of the current health disparity between the indigenous and mainstream populations in western Canada. Health as a measure of human experience cannot be considered in isolation from the social and economic forces that shape it. In Canada, the marginalization of First Nations people has been the primary factor impeding improved health outcomes for all of its citizens.”

I don’t think I could present a better summary of Daschuk’s work than the one published in the Literary Review of Canada, written by Anishnaabe scholar Niigaan Sinclair, department head of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba, from which I quote below:

“In the book, Daschuk presents an intricate examination of how Canada cleared the plains coldly and opportunistically, taking advantage of a famine caused by the loss of bison populations, due to the flooding of Nakota, Dakota, Nehiyawak, Niitsitapi and Anishinaabe territories by settlers. Methodically, using draconian legislation regarding Indians and starvation, Canadian leaders coerced indigenous leaders into signing treaties and acquiescing to federal control—all in an attempt to exterminate indigenous peoples from the national consciousness. In other words, Indians were forcibly and willfully manipulated, removed, and murdered for the sake of “progress.” None of this is an overstatement: it’s all there in the evidence Daschuk unearths in deft research and prose.

The most remarkable aspect of Clearing the Plains is the narrative arc of the book. He draws a direct line connecting 19th century Canadian Indian policy, Sir John A. Macdonald’s railroad, western settlement, Canada’s economic foundation and territorial theft of indigenous communities, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The conclusion of this story is that indigenous peoples now experience, a century and a half later, dire circumstances due to these events: the lowest life expectancy, the greatest amount of poverty and ostracization, and the highest amount of racism and violence. Simply put, the situation indigenous communities face today is the result of an elaborate and extensive plan in which every Canadian is culpable. Throughout the 19th century, Canada pursued a “state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities,” Daschuk states, that continues to “haunt us as a nation still.”

In 340 pages Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains does more to tell the true story of Canada’s history than the entirety of Eurocentric pioneer narratives, “award-winning” textbooks, and self-congratulatory encyclopedias that flood bookstores, libraries and classrooms across this country. Daschuk announces the secret that indigenous peoples have been telling all along but Canadians weren’t ready to hear (frankly, until one of their own said it): Canada’s settlement, growth and economy was not a simple, earned and positivistic set of events but a cold, methodical and exploitative plan built on sacrifices by and theft from indigenous peoples.”
(http://reviewcanada.ca/the-lrc-25/clearing-the-plains/)

This is the story of a genocide, in which all settler Canadians are complicit. Daschuk begins with a picture of life before the influence of English and French fur traders began to affect the Indigenous Great Plains peoples, a semi-nomadic life that hunted bison in a sustainable manner, and prohibited hunting of beaver to ensure the water supply, dependent on the dam-building behaviours of beavers, remained stable. The coming of white settlers and traders was felt on the Plains long before whites actually reached the area. The growth of European colonies in the east pushed the Indigenous peoples of Central Canada westward, destabilising conditions across the continent. Trade in horses along the north-south trade routes with Mesoamerica brought changes to long-established hunting methods. And with both these movements came smallpox, which would irrevocably affect both the demographics and the population levels of the Plains peoples. Other diseases - tularaemia, tuberculosis, whooping cough, venereal disease, measles - followed as contacts with Europeans increased and the fur trade encroached on the Plains economy and ecology. The fur trade, with its insatiable demand for beaver pelts, its introduction of highly distilled alcohol products, and its creation of competition for hunting grounds among the peoples who took part, further impacted the Indigenous Plains nations’ stability and way of life. Food shortages became a serious threat to the Plains peoples. Violence between Indigenous peoples, between whites and the Indigenous hunters they exploited, and between rival trade companies Hudson’s Bay Co. and North West Co. was endemic. “By 1821, the Canadian northwest was in social, demographic, and environmental crisis. Harsh climatic conditions compounded by the eruption of Mount Tambora, along with catastrophic disease episodes, created severe conditions for the physical environment and people of the northwest.”

Throughout the 19th century, as the fur trade, followed by the beginning of white agricultural settlement, followed by successive gold rushes, and an increased military presence, brought more and more movement of white people into and through the plains in both Canadian and American territories, waves of infections swept through indigenous communities, decimating populations already weakened by malnutrition due to the hunting out of fur-bearing species and the buffalo and bison. With the end of the traditional bison economy and the more recent fur-trade economy, the only option for many Indigenous communities was to negotiate treaties and convert their economies yet again, this time to an agricultural economy under the reserve system. Many treaties included, at the insistence of the Indigenous parties, the provision by the government of a “medicine chest” to combat the frequent epidemics, and rations during times of famine - provisions rarely honored by the government once its goal of isolating Indigenous peoples on reserves was achieved.

The deadly conditions continued, exacerbated by Government policies and lack of concern at the highest levels for the suffering of Indigenous peoples, bereft of their traditional ways of life, hemmed in by restrictive laws, weakened by famine and disease, subjected to multiple forms of abuse by Department of Indian Affairs employees and agents.

Daschuk’s account concludes with the following comments:

“This study has shown that the decline of First Nations health was the direct result of economic and cultural suppression. The effects of the state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities that began in the 1880s haunt us as a nation still. The Cree negotiators at Treaty 6 recognized the need for their people to adapt to the new economic paradigm taking shape in the west. They acknowledged that the conversion would be difficult. What they failed to plan for was the active intervention of the Canadian government in preventing them from doing so. Tuberculosis and pathologies that have emerged in aboriginal communities in recent decades are the physical manifestations of their poverty and marginalization from mainstream Canadian life.

The gap between the health, living conditions, and other social determinants of health of First Nations people and mainstream Canadians continues as it has since the end of the nineteenth century. While Canadians see themselves as world leaders in social welfare, health care, and economic development, most reserves in Canada are economic backwaters with little prospect of material advancement and more in common with the third world than the rest of Canada. Even basics such as clean drinking water remain elusive for some communities. Identification of the forces that have held indigenous communities back might provide insights into what is required to bridge the gap between First Nations communities and the rest of Canada today.”

Canada’s genocidal war on Indigenous peoples continues.

The second Murderbot Diaries novella, Artificial Condition, is just as delightful as the first. In this new adventure, our protagonist, the still unnamed “free” security unit/cyborg construct, has left its human “governor” Dr. Mensah, and is trying to find out what happened on a previous contract, before it became autonomous.

It has been informed that while serving as security for a mining concern, it went rogue and destroyed nine other security units and the human personnel. It wants to find out why, and whether this is the reason that it was able to hack its governing module and become capable of independent action.

The murderbot has been hitching rides on automated transports, exchanging its collection of entertainment media for passage with the bots controlling the ships. On the last leg of its trip, it hitches a ride with a scientific vessel that normally carries a crew, but is travelling empty. The bot that runs the ship is a highly complex AI called ART with more computing power and almost as much autonomy as Murderbot itself. They establish what might be construed as a friendship, and the AI decides to help Muderbot become more able to pass as human, and to use its experience dealing with its human crew to help Murderbot successfully investigate its past.

In order to have a reason to go down to the planet, ART advises Murderbot to take a job as a security consultant to a group of researchers, which turns out to be a serious matter in itself, as someone is definitely out to kill Murderbot’s new clients, though all ends well, thanks to assistance from ART.

What’s fascinating about this installment of Murderbot’s story is watching its process of moving from a being accustomed to following orders to a truly independent being. It makes mistakes in handling its clients’ affairs, because it hasn’t quire grasped that it doesn’t have to settle for doing the best it can within the parameters set by its clients, it is allowed to insist on the parameters the clients must follow. Reading these diaries is like watching an intelligence begin to understand itself and the nature of freedom and responsibility, and it’s a very interesting process.

Philip Pullman’s YA novel La Belle Sauvage is the first volume in a new trilogy set in the same universe as his earlier His Dark Materials novels. This volume is a prequel to The Golden Compass, and Lyra appears as a six-month-old infant.

The protagonist is 11 year-old Malcolm Polstead who, along with his daemon Asta, lives with his parents in Gostow, a village not far upriver from Oxford. Malcolm has a busy life - he attends school, works as in his parent’s inn, The Trout, does odd jobs at the Priory of St. Rosamund just across the river, and spends his free time on the river in his canoe, La Belle Sauvage. And he’s a spy, although that’s a rather new thing, and something that he rather fell into by accident through being a bright, observant and compassionate young lad.

Malcolm lives in a time when conservative, religious forces are taking power. Scholars are finding their researches examined fir the taint of heresy. The Church has a thought police division who can make questioners disappear. Children are being encouraged to watch their families and report any suspicions of disbelief. And Malcolm, after witnessing such a disappearance, and accidentally intercepting a secret message intended for scholar Hannah Relf, has been drawn into the fight for intellectual freedom.

Malcolm quickly learns that there is a great deal of mystery surrounding an infant being cared for at the Priory, a baby who is apparently the consequence of a rather scandalous relationship between the influential and wealthy Mrs. Coulter, and the adventurer Lord Asriel. This baby is, of course, Lyra. In the course of helping out around the Priory, Malcolm becomes both charmed by and devoted to Lyra, and is soon swept up in a desperate struggle to save the infant from threats, both human and natural. When a catastrophic flood damages the Priory just as a threatening and dangerous individual, Gerald Bonneville, makes his move to seize the infant from the care of the nuns, Malcolm and a local girl, Alice, must flee with Lyra in La Belle Sauvage, seeking sanctuary for the little girl.

The novel portrays the well-chronicled descent into fascist social control through the eyes of a bright child who instinctively feels that ruling through fear and throttling free thought are distinctly wrong. Malcolm’s instinctive commitment both to freedom from oppression, and to saving the infant Lyra, make him a very sympathetic character. His intelligence, loyalty and resourcefulness are on display from the beginning of the novel, but the most interesting character development lies with Alice, who begins the story as a sullen and rather unpleasant teenager, but is transformed through her choice to help Malcolm save Lyra.

While I wouldn’t call it a favourite work, I enjoyed Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and I found myself feeling much the same way toward La Belle Sauvage - it’s an interesting and enjoyable novel, and certainly worth reading.

The 1942 novel - another Retro Hugo finalist - Donovan’s Brain, by Curt Siodmak, is a complex exploration of obsession and consequence. The protagonist, Dr. Patrick Cory, is a brilliant medical researcher, deeply fascinated with the idea of understanding brain function. In the tradition of the obsessed “mad” scientist, he works virtually alone out of his basement lab in a remote rural area, with his wife Janice, a nurse, as lab assistant when necessary and the local county doctor and coroner, the aging and alcoholic Dr. Schratt, as a sounding board.

Cory has allowed his research to take over the whole of his life. He barely has any relationship remaining with his wife, whise support - domestic and financial - he takes for granted. He sees Schratt only in terms of his usefulness to his own goals, he has no other human relationships - in fact he seems emotionally dead, interested only in his research.

When Cory is called to the scene of a plane crash - Schratt is incapacitated and the locals know him to be a doctor, albeit a non-practicing one - he finds one of the two survivors is severely injured and near death. Emergency surgery on location does little to improve the man’s condition, and it becomes obvious that the man - whom Cory has identified as millionaire Warren Horace Donovan - will not survive the journey to the nearest hospital. Instead, Cory has Donovan taken to his lab, where, as he is dying, Cory harvests his brain and, using the equipment he has developed through animal experimentation, preserves the brain, alive.

Cory’s obsession to understand what the brain is capable of leads him to discover a means of augmenting the brain’s power to the point where Donovan can communicate with him telepathically, at first through automatic writing, later directly. In fact, Donovan’s vastly increased will eventually overpowers Cory’s autonomy, forcing him to carry out Donovan’s own obsession, allowing nothing to stand in his way.

In their different ways, both men are obsessed with their goals and will stop at nothing, even murder, to achieve them. Siodmak explores the impact of obsession on relationships, first through the empty shell of Cory’s marriage, then through observation of the effects Donovan in life had on his family and close associates.

As the novel is presented as a series of entries in Cory’s journal, there is an element of the unreliable narrator here, but this is offset by that narrator’s devotion to a scientific worldview - he records his events, thoughts, actions, emotions, with a certain level of detachment and self-honesty. And it is through the changes in his entries that we see him slowly regaining his humanity as he experiences what it is to be sacrificed to another’s obsession. It’s a stripped-down narrative, creating a fast-paced story that generates both mystery and suspense - why is Donovan forcing Cory to do these things, and whose will will prevail in the end.

At its core, Donovan’s Brain is a case study of the damage done by closing out one’s humanity to focus on a single goal, be it scientific truth, or the accumulation of wealth, or any of the other obsessions humans are prone to pursuing.

You have to admit, John Scalzi writes a damn good story. Certainly, The Collapsing Empire, the first volume in his new space opera series, The Interdependency, starts off with an adrenaline-drenched bang. A mutiny about a merchant ship suddenly derailed by a near-catastrophic failure of the Flow - an interdimensional current that subs in for FTL in this fictional universe.

The Interdependency is a galaxy-spanning trade empire comprising planets and space stations located near exit and entry points to the Flow. Without access to the Flow, these locations are isolated, light years away from each other. Humans are cut off from Earth, which is no longer accessible by Flow, and most of the other habitats of humanity depend on trade to survive, they are not fully self-sustaining ecologies.

The Interdependency has survived for centuries, during which time the Flow has been relatively stable. Sometimes it shifts, and a planet falls out of the web, or a new one is brought into reach and colonised, but the changes have always been small enough not to affect the Interdependancy as a whole. But now that is changing, and all of humanity’s planets are at risk of isolation and eventual collapse.

There are some great good guys - Cardenia, styled Emperox Grayland II, the newly crowned head of the Interdependency, the unexpected heir following her older half-brother’s accidental death in a racing accident, and Mance Clermont, son of the late emperox’s old friend and, like his father, a theoretical physicist, and the somewhat morally ambiguous, profane, and pragmatic Kiva Lagos, daughter of a major noble house which, like all the great trading houses, depends on trade for its wealth and power. And some fantastic bad guys - the ambitious, scheming, and greedy scions of house Nohamapetan, Ghreni, Amit, and Nadashe.

This is a nicely political space opera, with internal struggles between ruling houses and intrigues and all those nice twisty things that make for interesting reading. And it is worth noting that many of the key characters, good guys or bad, are intelligent, competent, and very interesting women. Scalzi is good at being simultaneously entertaining and thoughtful, which makes this novel a superior read.

Indigenous Nationhood is a collection of writings by Indigenous writer and activist Pamela Palmater of the Mi’kmaw Nation, which she describes as: “... a collection of my own personal thoughts, opinions, ideas, and critiques about a wide range of issues...” Most of the writings are taken from her blog, and address many issues, political, economic and cultural, of relevance to Indigenous peoples, particularly those living within what is now called Canada, and their struggles for justice in a white settler country. Many of the blogs were written during the tenure of Stephen Harper as Prime Minister and refer to specific issues involving his government, but really, not much has changed under Trudeau, and the basic truths remain, no matter how the details change.

In my comments on the non-fiction books I read, I often try to summarise some of the important points the author makes; this time, I’m just going to let Palmater’s words speak for themselves, and urge you to buy the book, or go read her blog, to learn more. Because her words are important.

“This is an old battle, one that we have been fighting since contact. While many Canadians would like to believe that old colonial ideologies about Indigenous peoples have long since waned, the opposite is true. Just take a peek at some of the vile comments posted on online media stories about Indigenous peoples and you’ll see what I mean. Not only do Indigenous peoples face this battle on multiple fronts and on a daily basis, but they must also face the battle within themselves. Every day we face the battle to prove we are worthy as human beings. Too often this battle is lost, and we lose our young people to suicide, violent deaths, and early deaths from diseases, malnutrition, and lack of housing or clean water caused by extreme poverty.”

“It is time Canada accepted the fact that we will not be assimilated. Whether you call it “aggressively contrary,” “insurgency,” or “criminal” — we will continue to protect our cultures and identities for future generations. If only Canadians could leave their minds open long enough to see the incredible strength of our diverse peoples, the beauty of our rich cultures and traditions, the unique ties we have to our territories, and the incredible pride we have in our identities — then they would see why we refuse to give it up.”

“My own identity has been shaped by the histories, stories, lessons, and practices passed on to me by my large extended family. This has shaped my worldview, values, and aspirations — it is essentially what some might refer to as my cultural identity. My experience of identity on the other hand, has been shaped entirely by others — by schoolmates, teachers, employers, friends, neighbours, historians, judges, politicians, and governments. While my own Indigenous identity is strong and has survived the test of time, it is scarred and bruised by my lived experience of identity and the ongoing attack on my identity through government law and policy designed to assimilate Indigenous peoples into the body politic.”

“From smallpox blankets and scalping bounties to imprisonment and neglect — Canada is killing our people, and Canadians will be next if nothing is done to change the value (or lack thereof) that we collectively put on human life — all human life. This dictatorial, police state is not what newcomers had in mind when they came to Canada. A territory shared with Indigenous Nations based on formal agreements (treaties) and informal agreements (alliances) was founded on three principles: mutual respect, mutual prosperity, and mutual protection. Indigenous peoples, their families, communities, and Nations protected and cared for newcomers. Our people fought in Canada’s world wars to protect our shared territory and people. Now it’s time for Canadians to stand up for Indigenous peoples.”

“There is a children-in-care crisis, with 40% of children in care in Canada (30,000–40,000) being Indigenous children. In Manitoba, approximately 90% of the children in care are Indigenous. The crisis of over-incarceration of Indigenous people shows that 25–30% of the prison population in Canada are Indigenous and numbers are increasing. The water crisis reveals that 116+ First Nations do not have clean water and 75% of their water systems are at medium to high risk. The housing crisis is particularly staggering when you consider that 40% of First Nations homes are in need of major repair and there is an 85,000 home backlog. There is a growing crisis of violence against Indigenous women, with over 1200 murdered and missing Indigenous women and little girls in Canada. The health crisis results in a life expectancy of 8–20 years less for Indigenous people due to extreme poverty. This does not include the cultural crisis, where 94% of Indigenous languages in Canada (47 of 50 languages) are at high risk of extinction. These are all exacerbated for communities which suffer from massive flooding due to hydroelectric operations.”

“We are in the fight of our lives and we need to turn the tide of this war around. We have to stop blaming ourselves and believing the lies that we were told. We are not inferior, we are not genetically predisposed to dysfunction, our men are not better than our women, and we certainly did not ever consent to genocide against our people. All the dysfunction, addictions, ill health, suicides, male domination, and violence are the result of what Canada did to us. We are not each other’s enemies. We have to forgive ourselves for being colonized — none of that is who we really are as Indigenous peoples.”

“Today, however, the bright spirits of our peoples have been dimmed by the dark cloud under which our generations have lived for a very long time. Multiple generations of our peoples have been living under colonial rule and suffering the losses of our lands, identities, traditions, values, and worldviews, as well as our sense of responsibility to ourselves and each other. This has been compounded by the historical and current physical and emotional harms imposed by our colonizers. These actions are well known and include assimilation laws, policies, and state actions like residential schools, day schools, the Indian Act, discriminatory laws, the sixties scoop, overrepresentation of Indigenous children in foster care and our men in prisons, deaths in police custody, starlight tours, racial profiling, and many other current state actions.”

“Just like all the “non-status,” “non-band member” and “off reserve” Indian women who have been excluded at every turn, we now have a new negative descriptor — murdered or missing Indigenous women and girls. Our women can be murdered or go missing in frighteningly high numbers without society caring enough to even wonder why. How much more inequality must Indigenous women endure before society at large will stand up and say enough?”

“The whole world is changing and it is Indigenous peoples who are leading that change to restore balance to the earth, its life-giving resources, and the peoples who share this planet. We have the power to bring our people back home. All those suffering in child and family services, those that are missing, and those trapped in prisons or state custody — we are going to bring them back home. Canadians are standing beside us as we do this because they have come to realize that without farmable land, drinkable water, and breathable air — none of us will survive. This means that Indigenous Nations are Canadians’ last best hope at protecting the lands, waters, plants and animals for all our future generations.”

The finalists for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer are Rivers Solomon, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Vina Jie-Min Prasad - whose work I’ve read, and who were on my nominations list - and Katherine Arden, Sarah Kuhn, and Jeannette Ng, whose work I have not read. So, I’ve gone looking for work by the latter three.

Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightengale

I have a confession to make. I have to work a bit to engage with novels that are strongly flavoured with a Russian or Eastern European influence. I’m not sure why, but it’s a thing I have. So Arden’s debut fantasy, set in feudal Russia, took a little time to grow on me. It is a story about bloodlines and magic. The central character, Vasilisa Petrovna, called Vasya, is the youngest child of wealthy boyar Pyotr Vladimirovitch and his now-dead wife Marina, the daughter of a mysterious and beautiful woman who appeared out of the forest, enchanted Moscow, and claimed the heart of Ivan I, .grand Prince of Muscovy. Like her grandmother, Vasilisa has a kind of magic - she sees spirits and other strange creatures of the field and forest.

It was the sense of family and a simple, daily life with its trials and joys that Arden conveys in the early part of the book that won me over, that and the fierce and joyful wildness that is Vasya. Pyotr Vlaidimirovitch loved his wife, loves his children, and hopes, within the bounds of the society he lives in, to see them happy. His children have their flaws - one is perhaps a bit too proud, another a touch too pious, but they care for one another. Sadly, this happy family starts to unravel when Pyotr is pressured into agreeing to two dynastic marriages - his own, to Anna, the daughter of his dead wife’s half-brother, the new Grand Prince of Muscovy, and his daughter Olga’s, to the Grand Prince’s nephew. Anna is deeply unhappy at the bargain, and longs only for the comfort of a convent life, for she, like Vasilisa, sees spirits, but to her, they are devils to be feared.

Meanwhile, the threads of destiny are beginning to weave a web around Vasya. She becomes lost in the forest and encounters a strange man who seems vaguely threatening. And while Pyotr is in Moscow, he has an unpleasant experience with a man who gives him a gift for Vasya, forcing him to swear that he will tell no living soul about this exchange, on penalty of losing his oldest son.

Fairy tales are of course filled with these things, by definition - is it, after all, in fairy tales that they began. That’s why retelling such tales is tricky - to be successful, the writer must keep enough of the tale for it to be recognisable, but make it new enough not to be overladen with too-familiar tropes. The weakness in this book is that it does perhaps rely too much on well-used staples of fairy tale lore.

But what kept me reading was Vasya herself, vibrant, bold, adventurous, different. Her love of wild things, her compassion, her resilience, her stubbornness, and her utterly solid moral compass. This was the first book in a trilogy, and I do think I shall read on, just for the joy of Vasya.


Sarah Kuhn, Heroine Complex

Ok, there is something to be said about a novel that begins with a livestreamed fight between demons in the form of pastries and a narcissistic superhero. So... I’ll start by saying this is a fun book, an interesting blend of satire, chick lit and superhero fiction.The superhero in question is Aveda Jupiter, otherwise known as Annie Chang, who has serious kickass fight moves (her own personal icon is Michelle Yeoh) and a slight tekekinetic ability gained during the first, massive incursion of demons in San Francisco, some years earlier. Fir some unknown reason, the appearance of demons triggered superpowers, mist of them relatively minor and not particularly useful, in a small percentage of the population! Although subsequent demon appearances have not repeated the effect. The narrator, Evie Tanaka, is Aveda’s childhood friend and personal assistant, the person who keeps the whole superhero business functioning, a combination of Batman’s Alfred and Superman’s Jimmy Olsen. Until Annie suffers an injury fighting demons and insists that Evie take her place so that no one discovers that superheroes are vulnerable. The problem is that Evie also has a superpower, one of very few powerful and dangerous ones, and it’s triggered by strong feelings. She works very hard to control her emotions so that she doesn’t hurt anyone, having once allowed anger at a cheating boyfriend to get out of hand, resulting in the destruction of an entire building. But when she appears as Aveda (thanks to a minor glamour cast by a friend who developed magical abilities as a result of the demon appearance), things get out of hand and she manifests her power, which is of course attributed to Aveda.

Being at the centre of the stage instead of behind the scenes, and having to learn new ways of dealing with her power, results in many changes for Evie, her sense of herself and her goals, and her relationships with Annie and the other members of the Aveda Jupiter Inc demon-fighting team.

I like the way that Kuhn uses the superhero genre to create a delicious satire on celebrity divaism. Between the portrayal of Aveda herself, the inclusion of gossip columns from a local celebrity news reporter, and Evie’s observations on the various benefits and social engagements that she has to attend while pretending to be Aveda, we get some very fine puncturing of pretentiousness that I think rings true for any form of social celebrity. Kuhn also takes on internet fannishness, showing how anyone, but particularly women, in the media spotlight can be showered with adulation one moment snd with disgust the next as some fake news story, or almost imperceptible physical imperfection (such as a zit) causes fans to suddenly turn on a firmer hero. The shallowness of public assessments of celebrities in both traditional and social media is a major point in Kuhn’s satire. Add to this some serious examination of the strengths and stresses of relationships between women (there are only two significant male characters, both playing supporting/sidekick roles), and the absurd nature of many of the demonic interactions, and you have an entertaining story with rewarding depths.


Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun

Under the Pendulum Sun, Jeanette Ng’s debut novel, is a fascinating and multilayered exploration of faith and the nature of reality. Written in the style of a Gothic romance (which has little to do with romantic goings-on as we use the term today), it is much concerned with the nature of the soul, the limits of faith, the relation of sin and redemption, and the ransom theology of the sacrifice of Christ.

Set in an alternate Victorian era, it follows the journey of Cathering Helstone to the land of Arcadia - the otherworldly home of the fae, a place of magic, mystery, shadows and dangers. Her brother Laon, a Christian missionary to Arcadia, has seemed both troubled and remote in his letters, and Catherine has gained permission from the missionary society to join him - and to carry out a quest for them, to unravel what went wrong with Laon’s predecessor, the Reverend Roche. She is conveyed to Laon’s residence, a true gothic mansion called .Gethsemane, by Miss Davenport, a changeling who grew up in human lands and describes herself as Laon’s companion. Laon himself is away on business, and Miss Davenport warns Catherine that she must remain within the walls surrounding Gethsemane until Laon returns, for her own safety. Waiting for Laon’s return, she debates points of thelogy with the only fae to have been converted, the gardener Mr. Benjamin, and pores through Reverend Riche’s papers and journals.

At first the novel moves slowly, but with an exquisite blend of suspense and strangeness. These are the fickle, treacherous, sometimes benevolent, sometimes dangerous fae of legend, and their land, like them, is full of both strange beauty and ominous shadow. Ng excels at worldbuilding, and her examination of theology and philosophy, wrapt around with a rich set of subtle literary references from Bronte to Milton, and a host of Biblical allusions, is rather delicious - if you enjoy such things, which I do.

Both pace and tone however, change once Laon returns, with Queen Mab and her court following on his arrival. Catherine is disturbed by the changes she sees in Laon, and unnerved by Mab and the inhuman creatures of her court. The visit of Mab forces to the surface the darkest secrets in both Catherine and Laon. Mab and the other high fae delight in cruelty, and in wielding both truth and deceptions as weapons of chais and destruction. The effects of her toying with Catherine and Laon leads to some difficult revelations, and some may find their actions cross lines that are uncomfortable to contemplate. But while Catherine and Laon can be broken, as were the missionaries who came before them, they find a way through the pain to become more than they were. Even when the truth is a weapon, facing it can set one free.

Ng develops an entire theological cosmogony to make room in the Christian concept of the universe for the fae, one that draws on biblical and other legends, and it’s one that I find intriguing. It’s Catherine who searches it out - echoes of the tree of knowledge and other aspects of the story of Eden reverberate throughout the novel even as Ng rewrites the story as we know it. An ambitious and, in my opinion, successful, debut.

Kim Stanley Robinson is kind of a hit-or-miss author for me. Some of the books that I’ve read, I’ve quite enjoyed; others, I bounce off hard. New York 2140, which is a finalist for this year’s Hugo awards, is unfortunately one of those that I bounce off. Nonetheless, because it is a finalist, I’ve done my best to set aside the fact that it doesn’t really interest me, and forge through.

If you asked me why I had trouble engaging with the book, I’m not sure I could tell you why. Some of it is that, because I’m not American, New York is not an icon for me. This is a book that depends on the city’s mythology and mystique, to some extent. The careful work that Robinson has done in envisioning this particular city, adapted to a 50 foot rise in sea level, is probably a solid hook for anyone with a strong sense of the place, whether real or imagined. Me, I can’t tell Brooklyn from the Bronx, so the changes in either that such a submergence might bring don’t mean a lot to me. Then, too, there’s a lot of high finance and day trading and such, and the games of capitalism bore and annoy me. Robinson isn’t all that fond of capitalism either, but just because we agree on that point doesn’t mean I want to read about his characters making imaginary money on imaginary mortgage bundles.

There are some characters who are more interesting, such as the two coders who try to hack the global system and end up disappearing, and the woman who sets out to discover what happened to them, and some folks who are just trying to survive in a half-drowned and very broken world, but it’s not quite enough. Somehow, Robinson seems to have put more effort into the characters I don’t much give a damn about, leaving the others, the ones that might have gotten me hooked, not fully fleshed.

And there are a lot of viewpoint characters and plotlines in this novel, linked by the fact that they all live in (or in some cases squat in, which is a distinction worth noting) the same building, the Met Life tower, with one exception. There’s Mutt and Jeff, two temporarily homeless coders; Franklin the day trader, who soecialises in trading submerged real estate futures; Inspector Gen, a police official conducting a casual investigation into the disappearance of Mutt and Jeff; Amelia, an activist on behalf of endangered species and media star; Charlotte, an advocate for the poor and undocumented immigrants; Stefan and Roberto, two very young homeless entrepreneurs who live in the boat they moor at the Met; Vlade, the superintendant of the Met Life building; and an unnamed ‘citizen’ who speaks directly to the reader, acting as a kind of chorus and providing history, context, and general, somewhat sardonically toned infodumps. While each character or set of characters, with the exception of the citizen chorus, have their own story line, the disappearance if Mutt and Jeff is a major throughline, as is a mysterious offer to purchase the building from the residents co-op that currently owns it. As the novel progresses, various linkages arise between the multiple protagonists, from accidental encounters to developing relationships, and the individual plotlines begin to intertwine and converge. And when they do, just as a massive natural disaster strikes the city, the bubbling sense of discontent that Robinson has been slowly nurturing in his characters and the people around them erupts into a revolt of the commons that is really quite satisfying. Although it may or may not last, and may or may not bring about real change, for as the cynical citizen chorus reminds us:

“So no, no, no, no! Don’t be naïve! There are no happy endings! Because there are no endings! And possibly there is no happiness either! Except perhaps in some odd chance moment, dawn in the clean washed street, midnight out on the river, or more likely in the regarding of some past time, some moment encased in a cyst of nostalgia, glimpsed in the rearview mirror as you fly away from it. Could be happiness is always retrospective and probably therefore made up and even factually wrong. Who knows. Who the fuck knows. Meanwhile get over your childlike Rocky Mountain desire for a happy ending, because it doesn’t exist. Because down there in Antarctica—or in other realms of being far more dangerous—the next buttress of the buttress could go at any time.”

It’s an ambitious novel, a complex novel, a well-crafted novel - indeed, in lesser hands the multiple plotlines might have been confusing, but Robinson keeps everything clear and comprehensible - a novel with important things to say. It’s just not quite my kind of novel.

I’ve always intended to read something by John Crowley, but somehow until now I’d never got around to it. But when PM Press decided to include him in their Outspoken Authors series, it finally seemed the right time to make a start. Said volume, titled Totalitopia, is a collection of short fiction and essays by Crowley, augmented with an interview and bibliography.

The first story in the collection, This Is Our Town, was in itself enough to make me happy I’d decided to read it. It is a fascinating and multilayered exploration of childhood, faith and memory, set in a small American mining town that has seen disasters and, possibly, miracles. The narrator is a young girl from a relatively poor Catholic family, who converses with her guardian angel and believes that prayer, free will, and God’s omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience can be reconciled in such a way that, somehow, good will prevail - and who, in looking back as an adult, longs for that childhood certainty of faith.

What if, when the aliens come, they offer to do your chores? Why might they do such a thing? What would be their ulterior motive - for as everyone knows, aliens always have an ulterior motive. The short story Gone suggests one possibility.

And Go Like This is a story inspired by a quote from Buckminster Fuller: “There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world’s population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.” Crowley writes this as if it happened, all the people in the world painstaking transported to NYC, assigned spaces, and then, when all are accounted fir, the music starts on a hundred thousand records players and the world twists. But the twist is also a psychological one, for what would it mean, that for a brief point in time, the whole of the world were neighbours?

The title piece, Totalitopia, is an essay - serious in intent for all its lightness of tone - on the predictive tendencies of science fiction. Crowley advances various approaches to predictive SF, notes that many futuristic utopias and dystopias are actually commentaries n present conditions rather than serious attempt to forecast the future, and discusses a few of the classic texts, even advancing his own ‘prediction’ - which bears certain resemblances to my own ideas of utopia, something which disposes me to think I may enjoy more of this author’s works - before concluding:

“It will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature. Of course holding the mirror up to nature is what Hamlet insisted all playing, or pretending, must do; but—as Lewis Carroll knew—the image in a mirror, however scary or amusing or enlightening, is always reversed.”

In the essay “Everything that Rises,” Crowley gently critiques the transhumanist movement - which he links to a strain of primarily Russian scientifically-inspired mysticism known as cosmism. Immortality, the transference of mind to mechanical rather than biological substrates, the transmission of the human data stream at the speed of light, the development of the superintelligent AI - all these speculations on the future of mind are part of this movement, and come under Crowley’s eye.

The concluding essay is a review of the works of another author I’ve never read, Paul Parks. Here Crowley does the work of a reviewer well, for in Paul Park’ Hidden Worlds he makes me think quite seriously about looking into some of the books he discusses.

The volume ends, as all of the books in this series do, with an interview conducted by Terry Bisson. Between the sentiments expressed in the interview, and my feeling of profound delight with both fiction and essays collected in this volume, I have the distinct sense that I have missed out on something I would have enjoyed very much in not reading Crowley earlier, and despite the clamourings of thousands of other books demanding to be read, I really must find space for more of his work in the never-ending queue.

Black Panther: Avengers of the New World, Book One is the beginning of a new narrative arc in the Black Panther comic written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The rebellion is ended in Wakanda. A new constitution, a new, more representational form of government is being forged. But T’Challa and his people face a new crisis - the disappearance of the Orishas, the gods of Wakanda, who have until the recent rebellion been an active force in Wakandan life. But now prayers and entreaties go unheard, and not even the Black Panther can commune with his patron orisha, Bast, as he has in the past.

But there are other threats. Strange, violent reptilian beings have begun appearing, entering Wakanda through portals that Wakandan science cannot control, and Wakanda’s shamans cannot close without facing their own deaths. All that is known is that these Simbi are ancient enemies from Wakanda’s far-distant past. And the Simbi are not alone. Other creatures appear, giant ape-like creatures called Vanyan, the spider-men known as the Anansi, and other dooms from the past.

Guided by the spirits of former Black Panthers, T’Challa seeks out a potential ally, the ancient sorcerer Zawavari, who appears to know something about what is going on. He manages to close a gate, killing a troop of invading Vanyan, but falls into a coma - first uttering the chilling words that the gods are dead, and predicting that the Originators will return. With Zawavari unable - temporarily, they hope - to help, Shuri persuades T’Challa to seek the help of his former wife Oromo, the warrior goddess known as Storm.

As the crisis worsens, news is brought to T’Challa of a new religious cult - in the name of the “twice-risen” god Sefako - sweeping the land, filling in the gap left by the disappearance of the orishas.

And there are other enemies circling Wakanda as well - Zeke Stane, Doctor Faustus, Fenris, and the rebel Zenzi are planning to take advantage of Wakanada’s unrest. The first dign of their involvement comes when T’Challa learns that Fenris has kidnapped T’Challa’s old friend Asira and given her to Wakanda’s enemies, the Azanians. Aneka and Ayo of the Dora Milaje are sent to rescue her, but are taken prisoner by Doctor Faustus and Klaw.

It’s an action-filled, tense beginning to the next Black Panther adventure. I find the missing orisha plotline more engaging at the moment, but that’s probably because I lack context for all these villains and their history with the Black Panther. I’m certainly enjoying the fact that in Black Panther, we have a hero surrounded by women without whom he would be quite lost. And I find the idea of Wakanda, an uncolonised African nation, ever resisting, very powerful.