My life in books

Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars takes place in an world that was much like our own, until a massive catastrophe - the fall to earth off the coast of the US of a meteorite last enough to precipitate an extinction level event (ELE) - changes everything. In this iteration of our world, the calculations that show the inevitable changes in climate that will make the planet uninhabitable within decades are accepted as scientific fact by the world’s political leaders, who decide upon a two-pronged approach - to try to ameliorate the effects of the catastrophe to save life in earth, and to colonise the solar system so that if necessary, humanity will have another home.

It’s lucky, in a way, that this catastrophe falls during the early post-war period, when science was respected and economies were still capable of being mobilised to meet goals. If Kowal had chosen to set such a novel today, I suspect no such response to a global catastrophe would have seemed realistic - but this was still the era of potential.

The narrative is focused on Elma Wexler, a former WASP - one of the Women Airforce Service Pilots who, as civilian pilots attached to the military, ferried airplanes wherever needed, including to the front, during the Second World War. Elma, now retired, and her husband, Nathaniel York, a scientist with the Manhattan Project during the war, and later with the fledgling American space program, survived the concussive wave that destroyed most of the east coast, and Nathaniel’s colleagues at Langley, by accident - they were on vacation in the Poconos, having flown out in Elma’s little Cessna - and were able to fly west out of the circle of destruction to reach an air force base that would temporarily become the centre of the immediate response to the meteorite fall.

It is Elma, who is not only a pilot but a calculator - one of the women whose mathematical skills enabled the pre-computer space program to determine how to get an object into orbit and bring it home, whose calculations prove that humanity is facing an ELE. Both Nathaniel and Elma become part of the international effort to reach space, but Elma has a secret goal - to be one of the astronauts that goes into space.

If you’ve read the original novelette that sparked the series, Lady Astronaut of Mars, you know what happens, in the broadest of strokes, in both the race to colonise the system and Elma’s personal quest to become an astronaut. But that doesn’t change the reader’s absorption in the details of the process here, told over the years as it happens.

But while Kowal tells us the story of a successful space program, and the frustrations of a fully qualified woman locked out of her dream of going into space, Kowal also gives us a look at the society of 1950s America that does not flinch from uncomfortable truths. Elma and her husband Nathaniel are Jewish; there are hints of anti-semitism, and echoes, in the deaths surrounding the fall of the meteor, of the devastating losses of the Holocaust. There is ample evidence of the high degree of segregation and the entrenched racism of the time, in everything from the choices made during the post-cataclysmic evacuation not to look for survivors in black neighbourhoods, to the bitterness of black women pilots, who can’t even hope, as Elma does, that they could get anywhere near the astronaut training program. Kowal does not forget the dynamics of the society she’s chosen to place her break in history within.

The novel also deals sensitively with disability. Elma has an anxiety disorder, brought on by the highly pressured and misogynistic atmosphere she faced as an early entrant - and a female ine at that - into a prestigious math and physics program at university. The disorder surfaces when she must take on public relations tasks as a part of her quest to open the astronaut corps to women, and she begins taking sedatives to deal with it - a choice that will jeopardise her position when women are ultimately allowed into astronaut training and she is one of the successful candidates.

The second of Kowal’s “Lady Astronaut” novels, The Fated Sky, takes up a few years after the first novel ends. Having made it to the Moon, and established the beginnings of a colony there, the next goal in the space program is Mars. The extreme climate changes triggered by the Meteor fall are beginning to have demonstrable effects - the temperature is rising, the cloud cover remains thick, adding to the greenhouse effect, and while it is possible that not all the earth will become uninhabitable, still, the need to provide a ew home for humanity is very real, and the Moon is not an ideal location for a self-sustaining colony. But not everyone is convinced that the space program is necessary, and protest is growing, especially among marginalised populations - specifically, in America, black people, who know that if the earth is left behind, they will be too.

Elma has been spending half her time piloting shuttle rockets between colonies on the moon, and half her time on Earth. On one of Elma’s return trips, the rocket is highjacked on landing by a group of black activists protesting the money spent on space that could be better spent on improving conditions on earth. Elma, using her celebrity status as the “lady astronaut” - even though there are a number of female astronauts by now - persuades the activists to release all the other hostages, who are suffering from gravity sickness, which she manages to pass off to the activists as potentially infectious ‘space germs.’ Once again, the lady astronaut makes the news.

To counteract adverse publicity and shore up faltering financial support, Elma is asked to join the the first Mars mission. She accepts, not realising that another astronaut who has been training for the mission with the other crew fir months is being pulled to make room for her. The atmosphere of the mission is compromised from the minute she arrives, and it dies not get any better when the government, suspecting a conspiracy behind the recent highjacking, places pressure on the two black member of the Mars crew, one of whom had been, like Elma, on the rocket when it was taken.

As the novel progresses, we begin to see more and more clearly that Elma, who we are primed by literary traditions to see as the hero, is actually a very flawed character, naive and thoughtless, the perfect example of the white liberal who wants to do the right things, but never actually thinks from any point of view save her own, and ends up making matters worse until she learns to sit back and let those most directly affected by the injustices that anger her take the lead in strategising. She has no idea of how she appears to others, being wrapped up in her own view of herself as both victim and saviour. But the stresses of the journey to Mars become a journey to maturity for her, and by the end of the novel, when she and a handful of other colonists stand on Mars, we feel that she has become something even more important than a hero - a woman who has fulfilled her dreams, and come to know herself in the process.

These are fascinating books, both for their examination of a path to the stars that we might once have followed, and for their uncompromising look at the deep flaws in our society which really have not changed much since the days in which the book is set. We’ve lost the stars, but at the same time, we’ve done little to fix what we have here on earth. It’s this that makes these books a poignant illustration of what might have been.

But at the same time, these are inspiring novels about women in science, and women in space, and my God, I needed to read something like this just now.

In Rogue Protocol, the third of Martha Wells’ wonderful Murderbot Diaries novellas, Murderbot - having resolved some serious questions about its own past in the second volume - undertakes a mission to unravel the secrets of GreyCris, the corporate entity behind the disastrous events that led to the deaths of most of its clients in the opening installment of the series and led to its becoming a free, if not precisely legal, agent. This time, Murderbot is investigating an abandoned GreyCris terraforming project, having theorised that the ailed project was actually a cover for secret excavations of ancient alien artefacts.

When Murderbot discovers that a small salvage company has purchased the rights to the abandoned project, and is on its way to the terraforming complex to begin surveying the scene, it makes contact with the company’s human-form robot Miki, a simple and innocent being who has never been violated by humans as Murderbot has, and who considers the salvage company personnel to be its friends. Murderbot convinces Miki that it is backup security for the company, secretly shadowing the team of two human security agents hired by Miki’s friends - but as it turns out, GreyCris has left some unpleasant surprises at the abandoned facility to protect its secrets, and it will take all of Murderbot’s considerable abilities to get the vulnerable humans out of the trap and back to safety.

What’s important to Murderbot’s growing sense of itself and its relationships in the world of humans is its observation of the close, caring relationship between the robot Miki, and Miki’s owner/employer, Don Abene. For the first time in its existence, Murderbot sees a model of mutual respect between artificial and human life forms, and the experience is a significant influence on Murderbot’s developing understanding of empathy, responsibility, and connection between intelligent beings. For lack of a better word, the events of this mission show Murderbot a new dimension of its own capacity for humanity.

This is in so many ways a story about becoming a truly empathetic, compassionate, and righteous being, and watching Murderbot, cranky and anti-social as it is, develop into such a being is a delightful experience.

More Murderbot, please.

Some of Heinlein’s early published novels - Revolt in 2100, Methuselah’s Children - are, I think, among his best. At least, they are some of my favourites. They’re tightly written, with lots of action and not a lot of editorialising or rambling - although both Revolt in 2100 and Beyond This Horizon have a number of passages where the characters, or the authorial voice, present large chunks of background on topics ranging from semantics to Mendelian genetics.

At the same time, two of Heinlein’s novels that I think are among his worst, Sixth Column and Orphans of the Sky, were also published in the first few years of his writing career, though Sixth Column we can perhaps excuse, as he wrote it to John Campbell’s specifications.

His first published novel, “—If This Goes On” - which is packaged, along with two linked shorter works, “Coventry” and “Misfit,” as Revolt in 2100, is the first of his Future History novels.

Methuselah’s Children, the novel that follows “—If This Goes On” introduces two key elements of Heinlein’s universe, to which he would return again and again at various points in hus writing career - the Howard Families, and the iconic figure of Lazarus Long, the irascible, irreverent, Senior of the Howard Families, the oldest human being thanks to a genetic quirk at the early stages of the Howard Family longevity breeding experiment. There’s a line in Methuselah’s Children that places Lazarus in the background of Heinlein’s first published short story, “Life-Line,” and Lazarus will play a key role in the last novel Heinlein wrote, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. In a way, Lazarus is Heinlein’s Everyman, not as he is but as he should be, the personification of everything Heinlein sees as quintessentially human, from his eternal restlessness to his refusal to be broken in spirit, no matter what befalls him.

Methuselah’s Children opens in the year 2125, a quarter-century after the end of the American theocracy described in Revolt in 2100. America is now part of a global world government, and is back in the space era - we can assume from various comments in both books that the exploration and development of colonies in the solar system continued under the management of other countries while the US was isolated. The establishment of a planetary civilisation the has as its main values peace and tolerance, in which we assume economic inequality has been overcome through technology and global resource management, has led the secretive Howard Families to believe that they can finally come out of hiding and live among short-lived humans without the need for changing identities and moving on every few decades to conceal their longevity.

Of course, it’s a mistake. Shorter lived humans refuse to believe that it’s just a matter of genetics, and set aside the Covenant that guarantees the rights of every human bring so that the Howard Families can be arrested and the ‘secret’ of long life forced from them. Fortunately, Federation Adnimistrator Slayton Ford, recognises from the early reports of interrogated Howards that there is no secret, and decides to try and resolve the situation without more violence - he, Howard Foundation Chief Executive Zaccur Barstow, and Lazarus, develop a daring plan - to highjack the generation star ship New Horizons, which is about to be launched on the Second Proxima Centauri Expedition, and use it to evacuate all the Howards to another solar system, so the two branches of humanity can continue in isolation.

The plan works, and Ford, deposed and labelled as a traitor, joins the fleeing Howard Families as they seek a new home world. While a trip that would ordinarily take generations would be less daunting to the long-lived Howards, the timeline is further shortened by the invention, by Andrew Jackson Libby - last seen in Misfit - which brings them to a possible planet in a much shorter period of time, relatively speaking (a minor character, Hubert Johnson, who is an infant at the time of the evacuation, has grown into a nasty spoiled brat when they reach their destination). But the planet they land on is inhabited, and as it turns out, is no place for humans - the most numerous species, the Jockaira, may be intelligent and human-like, but they are all the willing servants and worshippers the dominant species of the planet, whom the perceive as gods. When it becomes apparent that the humans cannot, and will not, enter into the same relationship with the true rulers if the planet, the ‘gods’ of the Jockaira use their advanced abilities - whether science or psionic, is never clearly determined - to send them to another system, also inhabited. At first it seems like a paradise, but eventually the deep differences between the two species - the Little People are in fact a society of communal minds, with each ‘individual’ living in many different bodies - make it clear that this is no home for humans either. Frustrated and homesick, they return to Earth, prepared to fight for their rights as members of the human race - only to find that in their absence, determination and allocation of vast resources have achieved what the Howard Families’ more limited resources were unable to - a real technology of rejuvenation that is affordable for all, and which puts Howards and non-Howards back on an equal footing. And their exploration adventures - and Libby’s star drive - are enough to wipe clean the criminality of their escape. Humanity is reunited, the stage is set for real space exploration, and all is well.

The inability of humans to become, like the Jockaira, servants, or perhaps pets, of a dominant race, and their general reluctance to merge into communal groupings of Little People, are, like Lazarus himself, keys to Heinlein’s beliefs about the essential nature of human beings. Throughout his novels runs the theme of the ‘free man’ - an individual who can be captured, even killed, but cannot be conquered. There’s an interesting tension here - on the one hand, Heinlein sees this as the defining quality of humanity, and yet so often, it’s only his heroes and their associates who display this trait, and they are surrounded by weaker men who give up and give in.

Hidden in the story of the highjacking of the New Horizons is the seed of Heinlein’s next novel, Orphans of the Sky - which comprises two distinct sections, Universe and Common Sense. The New Horizons was built for the Second Proxima Centauri Expedition. Heinlein’s next novel would backtrack slightly and tell the story of the first Proxima Centauri Expedition.

The first part of Orphans of the Sky, Universe, begins with the notation “The Proximo Centauri Expedition, sponsored by the Jordan Foundation in 2119, was the first recorded attempt to reach the nearer stars of this galaxy. Whatever its unhappy fate we can only conjecture . . .” The novel is the story of what happened to the lost expedition. The protagonist is a young man named Hugh Hoyland, who is apprenticed to become a scientist - which, we quickly learn, has nothing to do with science, and is rather his culture’s term for priest. It is through his eyes that we discover what’s happening on the lost ship, generations after its launch. For Hugh, there is only Ship. It is his universe, and he has no concept of an outside, a space through which the ship moves. Few people can read or write, outside of the ranks of the scientists, and what oral history there is has become entangled with a theology in which Jordan, the supreme god, created the ship and its people, who when they die will go to Centaurus to live forever in paradise. There’s a memory of a mutiny, in which most of the original ship’s crew was killed, which is probably the point at which survival needs took over and much of the basic knowledge about the nature of the true universe was lost. What books remain have been interpreted by the scientists as religious allegories.

The plot begins to develop when Hugh, on an expedition with some other young scientists to the sectors where Muties - mutants born as a result of higher radiation levels in the ship, though it’s generally attributed to the resurgence of the original sin of mutiny - live, is injured and left for dead. He’s taken as a servant by conjoined twins, Jim and Joe, who share one body and who are also possibly of Howard stock, being several generations old. Jim and Joe are highly intelligent, and have gained a position of some leadership within the Mutie community. They have also read extensively, explored the low-gee areas of the ship, found the main control room, and looked out at the stars. They have deduced much of the true nature of the ship and its voyage - though their sense of scale is sadly lacking - and they introduce Hugh to the truth as well.

The second part of the novel, Common Sense, is largely about Hugh’s attempts, with the backing of Jim and Joe, to take control of the Ship and carry out ‘Jordan’s Plan’ - colonisation of a new planet. Of course, the attempt to convince the other ship’s officers of the truth eventually fails, and Hugh, Jim, Joe, and a small handful of supporters find themselves hunted, with no way out - except the single shuttle remaining after the catastrophe that was the mutiny. The novel ends as Hugh and the others - minus Jim and Joe, who died in the fight to get to the shuttle, land through the greatest of luck on an unknown planet that can sustain human life. We would not learn if Hugh and his followers survived until ears later, when Heinlein revealed their fate in a casual discussion in the novel Time Enough for Love.

Orphans of the Sky has never been one of my favourite Heinlein novels. It’s an interesting concept, with a reasonable amount of action, but the characters are thinly realised and even Hugh Hoyland doesn’t have much depth to draw one into the story. Conjoined twins Jim and Joe are perhaps the most memorable characters, but it’s rather annoying the way that Heinlein can’t quite figure out whether to treat them as one person, because they share a body, or two people, because each head clearly belongs to a distinct individual with a definite sense of personal identity. Plus, there are virtually no women in the story, other than a mutant woman knifesmith who has one short appearance, and the wives of Hugh and his handful of human supporters. Women on the Ship are slaves, used for domestic and sexual service, treated with physical violence even by the supposed hero, and don’t even have names of their own, only what their men choose to call them - at least among the ‘normal humans.’ Hugh hasn’t even bothered to give one of his wives a name. It is clear, hiwever, that the female Mutie, Mother of Knives, has not only a name but a degree of respect within her community.

It’s an early novel, but where his other early novels, Revolt in 2100 and Methuselah’s Children, and even, to some degree, Sixth Column, are already clearly ‘Heinlein’ novels - well-written, strong characters of both genders, solid plots - Orphans of the Sky does not pass muster.

The last of Heinlein’s early novels for adults is Beyond This Horizon, written in 1942. The world as portrayed in Beyond This Horizon owed much background to his unpublished novel, For Us, the Living. It’s not hard to see where he built the flesh and muscle of this book, on the skeleton of the socialist-influenced, socially progressive society he invented in that very early work. Gender equity in many respects (though in an armed duello society, women generally go unarmed and have immunity from challenge), a multi-national government (in Heinlein’s future, Asia and Africa were virtually destroyed by imperialistic wars their people are considered to be at the developmental level of barbarians), guaranteed annual income, respect for privacy and personal choice - there’s a lot here that’s admirable. What’s highly questionable is his whole-hearted embrace of eugenics - the deliberate breeding of human beings for so-called desirable traits - which underlies both the entire notion of the Howard families in the Future History novels, and the way that, in Beyond This Horizon, ‘genetically compatible’ humans are urged to create children together, with or without any existing or on-going relationship between them. He goes to some lengths to differentiate ‘bad’ eugenics, which produced humans bred for specific functions and purposes and the horrors of two world wars, and the ‘scientific’ eugenics of his near-utopian civilisation that sought to conserve positive traits and eliminate inherited weaknesses, from bad teeth to depression.

The protagonist of Beyond This Horizon is Hamilton Felix, a product of multiple generations of genetic selection designed to conserve several favourable traits, who presents a serious problem to the genetics planners - he sees no particular reason why the human race should continue, genetically improved or not. Felix is intelligent, rational, highly adaptable, a survivor on many levels, the kind of person the natural selection would favour if civilisation wasn’t making that aspect of evolution obsolete. He himself enjoys life, but he does not see much real happiness around him, nor a clear argument for continuing humanity, or at least, an argument fir him contributing to its continuation.

It’s clear, though, that he’s not as disaffected as he seems. When he comes into contact with a revolutionary group planning to overthrow the current world government and replace it with a fascist regime that sounds far too close to the ideas behind the empire that was responsible for the Second Eugenics War, he willingly volunteers to infiltrate the organisation and report on its plans. In the meantime, his life becomes complicated when Longcourt Phyllis, the woman who’s been selected as the best match to conserve and strengthen the genetic lines that make him of some importance to the genetic planners decides to look him up, he discovers that she’s exactly the sort of woman he’d like to be involved with - except for the fact that she, like every perfect Heinlein woman, wants a passel of kids.

Everything comes to a head when, during the attempted coup, Felix, Phyllis, and Mordan Claude, the genetic planner responsible for the breeding lines they represent, are all pinned down in Claude’s office, fighting off the rebels trying to seize control of the valuable stores of germ plasm Claude is responsible for. Facing death, Felix realises what it is that would make him sufficiently interested in the future of humanity to participate in its continuation - answers to, or at least, a serious investigation of, the great philosophical and metaphysical questions that have haunted humankind. The nature of consciousness. The fate of the self after death. The limits of human knowledge. The beginning and the end of time.

The revolution is, of course, unsuccessful. Felix, Phyllis and Claude survive. And Claude presents Felix’s questions to the world ruling council, who realise that Felix has in fact identified a key lack in their modern, rational world. After some discussion, they establish a massive foundation (a society where technology ensures high productivity and values tend not to encourage obscene concentration of wealth and power being a society with cash to spare) to explore exactly the kinds of questions Felix wants answers too. He and Phyllis marry and proceed to have children who are even more exceptional than they are. The end.

What’s interesting about Beyond This Horizon is Heinlein’s argument, presented through Felix, that freedom, love, and material well being, as important as they are, are not enough to satisfy the human soul. That there are needs beyond the physical and emotional, questions that reach beyond the realm of the rational and phenomenological world, that are of importance to human societies. That the driving question that underlies all others is simply “is this all there is?”

The publication of Beyond This Horizon marked a sharp change in Heinlein’s writing career, likely brought about at least in part by the entry of the US into WWII and Heinlein’s war work. After this novel, he would spend the next ten years writing mainly short stories and juveniles, until 1952 when he would write the thinly disguised Cold War, Communist-under-the-bed novel The Puppet Masters.

An Ancient Peace is the first book in a new series by Tanya Huff, featuring Confederation Marines Gunnery Sergeant - now ex-Marine Gunnery Sergeant - Torin Kerr. Torin is a true hero, with many hard missions under her belt, but the thing she’s most known for is that no matter what the situation, she always brings her people home. Not always all of them, but she survives, and those with her survive, far more often than you’d expect of someone with a gift for getting into the worst situations in the galaxy.

No longer a Marine, Torin and her lover, former salvage operator Craig Ryder, have put together a small team of specialists, most if them ex-Marine, all of them with special skills, and take on unusual jobs - Torin can’t stop thinking of them as deployments - for various Confederacy departments.

This time, it’s the Justice Department. They have evidence suggesting that someone has located the ancient grace planet of the Elder Race of H’san, and is trying to break into the tomb that holds the weapons they buried millenia ago when they gave up the idea of war. The mission is a secret one - Humans, like the other Younger Races, are in the Conferation on sufferage, with many of the Elder Races thinking they are still too primitive and warlike to be trusted in galactic civilisation. So Torin’s people have been ordered to go in quietly, track the grave robbers to the secret planet of the ancient dead, and solve the problem by whatever means necessary.

I’ve loved the Torin Kerr stories from the beginning. They started out as some of the best milsf in the genre, and have slowly developed into something that’s still full of action and adventure, but represents a mindset that’s developing beyond warfare. A more evolved set of ethics that defends, but doesn’t conquer.

In An Ancient Peace, Torin and her people finally set the military mindset behind them. Oh, they’re still kickass in the very best ways, but Torin’s allegiances are shifting. Once she was all about her duty to the Marines, and to her people. Then ‘her people’ grew into a larger set, to humanity and the other younger races who’s been used and manipulated by external forces. And now, she’s thinking about peace, and the whole of Confederation, as her people. And she always brings her people home.

John Scalzi’s Head On is a stand alone sequel to Lock In, his powerful novel about people rendered completely immobile by the disease known as Haden’s Syndrome, and the society that develops around them once technology finds a way for Hadens, as they are known, to transfer their consciousness into mechanical robots called threeps.

Chris Shane is a Haden, a former celebrity - famous as a child victim of the Syndrome and child of a rich American sports star - and now an FBI agent with responsibility for investigating crimes involving Hadens, along with partner Leslie Vann.

In Head On, Shane and Vann are investigating the suspicious deaths of Duane Chapman, a Haden and a professional athlete, a utility player for a team engaged in the game of Hilketa - a violent sport, played professionally only by Hadens, in which the object of the game is to score points by decapitating the threep being worn by the designated ‘goat’ of the opposite team.

Chaoman’s death during a game, in which he served as goat three times and was decapitated three times, leads Shane and Vann into a convoluted web of corruption in sport and in the arras of high finance that surround it, dealing with issues including manipulation of wins and point spreads for gambling, money laundering, performance doping, corruption in sponsorship deals, and just about everything else you can think of, including multiple murders.

I did not enjoy this as much as I did Lock In, possibly because sport isn’t a big interest of mine, but it’s a good, solid mystery, and the continued exploration of a society that is no longer tied to the body, thanks to advances that make it possible for all humans to make use of the same technology that Hadens use to function in the physical world, is fascinating.

Not only does Scalzi use these novels to examine disability issues and the nature of consciousness, he also looks at the ways that funding for accessibility for the disabled, or the lack of it, makes people vulnerable and desperate. As a disabled person, It makes me happy to see a major genre author dealing with disability issues in a significant way.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is perhaps best known for her remarkable series of historical supernatural novels featuring the vampire Count Saint Germain, but she’s also written a wide range of other novels in a variety of genres. Taji’s Syndrome is a solid near-future medical thriller about a freak accident in a militarily funded genetic research lab that has cascading consequences that only appear years afterwards.

The reader has all the important clues up front - Yarbro begins with the incident, and the series of co-incidental events that lead to the fetuses carried by six pregnant woman at a particular point in the pregnancies being affected. But from that point, the reader, like the medical researchers across the country some 15 years later, is caught up in the history of a bewildering epidemic. At first, it’s only a few cases in clusters, and for the isolated doctors and researchers, looks like a classic case of toxic contamination. But the epidemic spreads out from those loci like an infectious disease, and by the time the Centers for Disease Control are called in, thousands are dying from a disease no one understands.

I happen to quite enjoy this kind of medical thriller, and so for me this was a great read - suspenseful, conveying both the urgency and the frustration of medical detectives struggling to put the pieces together while people are dying all around them and each day without a solution to the puzzle and a step towards a viable cure is a day where their whole raison d’etre as doctors is chalkenged.

Bitch Planet Volume 2: President Bitch (containing issues 6 through 10 of the comic series written by Kelly Sue DeConnick) continues to tell a brilliantly dystopic and uncomfortably violent story. As with the first volume, I can’t quite say I like or enjoy reading it, it’s too raw and too close to reality, in spirit if not in fact. It’s hard to read about women in prison for being insufficiently docile, and not hear the chants of ‘Lock her up’ heard at Trump rallies, or think of women of colour from Joanne Little to Sandra Bland and on and on, imprisoned, abused, raped, killed, in jails and prisons, or thousands of migrant women detained for the ‘crime’ of seeking refuge in the richest country in the world. Feminist dystopias are hard things to read if you happen to be a woman in this time.

But, on with the story. Volume One established the scene and set up a situation where former athlete Kamau agrees to lead a team of women inmates in the Metaton tournament that is a huge part of the authoritarian, patriarchal culture in which a place like Bitch Planet can exist. Volume 2 begins with a flashback telling the story of Bitch Planet inmate Meiko Maki, who was murdered during a Metaton practice session at the conclusion of Volume 1. In the present, multiple plot threads are advancing. Meiko’s father, Makoto Maki, an engineer, has been assigned the task of building a Metaton stadium on the Bitch Planet. He agrees, hoping to see his daughter - not knowing she is dead. Kamau has convinced a guard to get a map of the prison for her, and convinced that her sister is being held in a special cell. We, however, have seen that her sister Morowa, a trans woman, is being held in the general population in a special section with other trans women. Whitney, the official who offered Kamau the leadership of the Metaton tram, has been stripped of her position and imprisoned fir Meiko’s murder - and is now Kamau’s cellmate.

When Makoto is allowed a ‘virtual interview’ with Meiko, he realises something is very wrong, and uses his authority to get access to the prison controls, shut down the power and open all the cell doors. Kamau takes the opportunity to look for her sister, but instead, discovers that the mysterious unnamed prisoner in the special cell is an older black woman named Eleanor Doane, whom Kamau addresses as Madame President. The volume ends as revolution, both in the prison and on Earth begins.

There is a very raw, very real feeling to this narrative. It’s powerful, it is saying things that need to be said. It’s profoundly intersectional, and one of the things about it that is so very right is the way that it shows us that while sexism causes damage and injury to all women, it’s the multiply marginalised, black women, trans women, women who cannot conform to male-created standards of beauty, who suffer most. It acknowledges the reality that women of colour have always been more likely to be seen as transgressive and non-compliant, and be punished for it by the justice system, which has always operated for the benefit of the multiply privileged - those who are white, wealthy, heterosexual, cisgender and predominantly men.

I can hardly bear to read it, but I’m going to keep on doing so anyway. If you are interested, I urge you to read the individual comics, not the trade compilations, because of the excellent articles by feminist, anti-racist and trans activists and scholars. Bitch Planet is more than just a powerful feminist narrative, it’s an experience.

Nnedi Okorafor has described the arc of her Binti trilogy as: “African girl leaves home. African girl returns home. African girl becomes home." Which is to say, that this is not a narrative in which the important things are what Binti does, but rather, who Binti is, and who she becomes.

By the time we as readers embark on the final volume of the trilogy, Binti: The Night Masquerade, Binti has already become much more than she was in the beginning. She starts out her journey as an African girl, of the Himba people, a marginalised group within the area she grows up in, which is dominated by the more numerous and far more aggressive Khoush. She is a harmonizer, someone who can sense and use the currents of energy in its very broadest sense - emotional, physical, cultural - to bring things into harmony with eachother, a peacemaker. But she longs to be more.

She travels to an ancient, galactic university, surviving a massacre of her shipmates by the non-human enemies of the Khoush and entering into an exchange of genetic material with her attackers in order to bring about a measure of truce. She becomes friends, perhaps even more than friends, with Okwe, one of the Meduse who attacked her ship, and in the second volume, when she returns to Earth and Himbaland, Okwe accompanies her. At home, she discovers that she has grown beyond the limitations placed on her by the traditions of her people, and learns that through her father, she has a heritage communion made many generations ago between sone of her people, not treated as outcastes, and an alien race, the Zinariya. And yet again, Binti becomes more, as she chooses to join the outcaste community, having her alien DNA activated. Bonding with Okwe gave her the ability to communicate at a distance with the Meduse; becoming Enyi Zinariya opens her to a gene-based technology that permits long-distance communication with all others of her kind, and access to a racial history.

But at the opening of the third novella, Binti is in dire circumstances. Still struggling to adapt to the changes in her ways of thinking, perceiving and communicating brought about by the activation of her Zinariya self, she learns that the Khoush have attacked her parent’s home, seeking to kill both her and Okwe. Having failed to find either, they have set fire to her family’s house, and all her relatives, who sought safety in the deep roots of the ancestral structure formed from a massive tree, are believed dead. And Meduse ships, summoned by Okwe, are en route to avenge the attack and open up a new chapter of the long Meduse-Khoush war, on a battleground of the lands of the Himba people.

Despite her deep personal loss, despite being rejected by the other Himba for what and who she has become, Binti tries to use her skills as a master harmonizer to bring about peace between Meduse and Khoush.

And here is where it is vital to remember that this is a story about who Binti is becoming, not a story about what Binti does. Because despite her efforts, she is betrayed, and the peace fails. And everything that follows after is about what Binti will become, and not what happens to the Himba, the Khoush or the Meduse.

And part of Binti’s becoming is learning to be her own judge and arbiter, not to accept without question the beliefs if others, which her own experiences have shown her are so often limited and blind. In becoming her own home, Binti becomes mistress of herself, unbound by the restrictions others have always placed on her, freed by the web of connections she has forged with others to be fully herself among them.

Reading a few short pieces of Eleanor Arnason’s pieces fiction that have come my way. Arnason is one of my favourite authors, both for the originality and gentle thought-provoking nature of her work and the skill of her craft. She challenges the accepted, leads her reader toward questions that require some contemplation, and highlights such important things as ethical decisions and respect for others. I like her work.

A Dog’s Story features Merlin and a young and not particularly noble knight named Ewan who Merlin has changed into a dog as punishment for attempting to rape a young woman after killing her brother. Ewan is actually happier as a dog, because he doesn’t have to think about right and wrong, and female dogs are usually quite willing at least when they’re in heat. Merlin trues from tine to time to restore him to his human shape, but he never really seems comfortable with it, and keeps asking to be a dog again. The story carries through to the end of Merlin’s story, his entanglement with Nimue, and Ewan’s restoration to human form, with finally some idea of what it is he wants to do as a man.

Stellar Harvest is the first of the Lydia DuLuth stories. Lydia works for an interstellar entertainment production company called Stellar Harvest, and she is on assignment on a new planet, location scouting, recording sights and sounds to be used in the next blockbuster entertainment starring icon Ali Khan. After spending some time in the town of Dzul, she heads into the wilderness for more local colour. Things become complicated when she shoots a local male who trues to steal her chool, an animal used for transportation. On this planet, most makes if the dominant species are altered - castrated - in the belief that unaltered men are only capable of passion-driven actions. Unaltered men are kept prisoners in their family homes, and traded for stud service. The male she encounters - Thoo - is an unaltered male who has escaped his family compound, longing to be free. Lydia agrees to taje him into the mountains where perhaps he can survive away from his kind, but his altered brother Casoon hunts them down and tries to capture Thoo. Unwilling to give Thoo up to captivity, or to allow Tho to kill Casoon to keep his freedom, Lydia comes up with an unexpected plan that gives both brothers a new chance at life.

The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons recounts a day in the life of a science fiction author, sometime in the not-too-distant future, as she goes about her everyday life, thinks about the world she lives in, and writes - a most exciting story, too, about a heroic red-haired adventurer and her mysterious, dark and brooding associate and lover, as they battle across the ice fields of Titan in a desperate attempt to foil the dastardly plans of the evil warlord of Saturn’s moons. The contrasts between hero and author, the thought processes of the author as she plots, more or less on the fly, and her thoughts about the polluted and violent world around her, make for an interesting and subtle commentary on the escapist and cautionary functions of science fiction. Plus, it’s both a damn fine character study and an exciting story-within-a-story.

John Scalzi’s Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome is an odd but interesting piece of fiction. It’s a companion of sorts to his novels Lock In and Head On, in that it is, quite literally, what it says on the label. It’s written as a selection of personal accounts by medical researchers, doctors, journalists, scientists, business people, and people with Haden’s Syndrome, illuminating various aspects of the fictional disease that creates the world in which thise two novels are set.

It reads as if it were real, which is a testament to Scalzi’s gifts for characterization. The narrators have their own voices, perspectives, insights, into the ways American society develops after the world-wide catastrophe that is Haden’s Syndrome begins. My only regret is that Scalzi didn’t take the opportunity to give us more than a few casual remarks on what happened in the rest of the world while all this was unfolding in the US.