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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.
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In his latest novel Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson takes on a beloved science fiction theme - the multigenerational spaceship - and turns it into a relentless exploration of the limits of small-scale ecologies and long-term planning, an illumination of the dynamics of human communities under pressure, a profound meditation on the evolution of consciousness, and a celebration of the human will to survive.

As the novel begins, the ship - as everyone, even the AI that controls the ship refers to it - is nearing the end of its long journey to Tau Ceti, where the plan is for the roughly two thousand inhabitants to attempt to start a colony on Tau Ceti E's moon, which they have already named Aurora. The first section of the book focuses on the family of Devi - the closest the ship has to a Chief Engineer - her husband Badim and child Freya. Through Devi's eyes we see how narrow the survival margin has been, as imperceptible imbalances in the original ecological design of the ship have magnified over time, testing her ingenuity to its fullest as she struggles to diagnose and repair one malfunction after another. Further, in the ship's closed system, microbial life has mutated faster than the larger lifeforms, and the consequences of this have not all been beneficial. The initiation of deceleration has made subtle changes in the forces acting on the mechanical parts of the ship. Over time, the accumulation of minor shifts have taken the ship and its lifeforms closer to the brink.

Indeed, Devi and others have noticed slow changes in the ship's inhabitants even across the seven generations of the voyage - with people on average being smaller, slower to develop, a little less capable of grasping complex intellectual concepts - as if humans too, affected by the growing entropy of such a small-scale world, have been falling out of balance.

As arrival at Aurora grows nearer, Devi sets the ship's AI an unusual task - to write a narrative of the journey, not as a reportage of facts and figures, as a computer might, but as a story, as humans might tell it. The central portion of the novel represents the ship's - or more accurately, Ship's - attempt to do just that, and in the process we see the transition of Ship from AI to full, conscious personhood - or something so much like it that no Turing or Voight-Kampff Empathy test could ever tell the difference.

As the narrative progresses, Ship selects Devi's daughter Freya as the focus of the story, and indeed Freya becomes in some ways a crucial character in the events that follow upon the ship's arrival in the Tau Ceti system.

The novel is in its own way both deeply pessimistic and triumphantly optimistic as it presents the essential, indomitable stubbornness of humanity in the face of a vast and indifferent universe, and its own limitations and mistakes.

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Some interesting anthologies and collections of short stories came my way last year. The anthologies included two nicely edited theme anthologies by John Joseph Adams (dystopias and homages to Barsoom), a vamipre themed antholgy edited by Nancy Kilpatrick, a survey of urban fantasy edited by Peter Beagle and a dragon-themed anthology edited by Jack Dann.

Of particular interest were two volumes edited or co-edited by Connie Wilkins: the second volume in a new annual series of anthologies featuring short stories with lesbian protagonists; and an uneven but engaging selection of alternate history short stories with a focus on queer protagonists as nexi of change.

I was also delighted to be able to obtain a copy of an anthology edited by Nisi Shawl of short stories written by authors of colour who attended Clarion as Octavia E. Butler Scholars. The anthology was offered by the Carl Brandon Society for a limited time as a fund-raising project and is no longer available.

Peter Beagle (ed.), The Urban Fantasy Anthology
John Joseph Adams (ed.), Under the Moons of Mars
John Joseph Adams (ed.), Brave New Worlds
Nancy Kilpatrick (ed.), Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead
Jack Dann (ed.), The Dragon Book: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy
Nisi Shawl (ed.), Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars
Connie Wilkins & Steve Berman (eds.), Heiresses of Russ 2012
Connie Wilkins (ed.), Time Well-Bent: Queer Alternative Histories


I also read several collections this year, including two more volunes from PM Press's Outspoken Authors series, featuring work by and interviews with Nalo Hopkinson and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Other collections of works by SFF writers included: a set of novellas from Mercedes Lackey featuring two familiar characters, Jennifer Talldeer and Diana Tregarde, and a new heroine, techno-shaman Ellen McBride; a collection of short stories by Elizabeth Bear featuring forensic sorcerer Abigail Irene Garrett; short stories by Maureen McHugh; and forays ibto the fantasy realm of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander.

In honour of Alice Munro, this year's recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, I read a collection of her more recent short stories (and plan on reading several more in the coming months - I've always loved her work and am delighted that she has been so deservedly recognised). Also worthy of note was Drew Hayden Taylor's collection of stories set among the residents of the fictional Otter Lake First Nations reserve, and Margaret Laurence's short stories set in Ghana. In the realm of historical fiction, There were stories by Margaret Frazer featuring medieval nun and master sleuth Dame Frevisse; I discovered and devoured Frazer's novels last year, and will speak of them in a later post.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Lucky Strike 
Nalo Hopkinson, Report from Planet Midnight
Mercedes Lackey, Trio of Sorcery
Elizabeth Bear, Garrett Investigates
Maureen McHugh, After the Apocalypse
Lloyd Alexander, The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain

Margaret Laurence, The Tomorrow-Tamer
Margaret Frazer, Sins of the Blood
Drew Hayden Taylor, Fearless Warriors
Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

All in all, I found a wide range of short fiction to enjoy this year.

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It does not seem as though I am actually going to be able to catch up on the books I've read over the past couple of years.

So here's the new plan. I'm going to post lists of the books I read in 2009, 2010 and, once we hit December 31st, 2011, and my summaries of the best books of those years. Then I start afresh in January and try to keep up with comments on each book I read in the new year.

So, here are the remaining books I read in 2009.

Dystopic fiction

The Carhullan Army, Sarah Hall
Make Room, Make Room, Harry Harrison
Generation 14, Priya Sarukkai Chabria


Science fiction

Solitaire, Kelley Eskridge
The Mount, Carol Emshwiller
Starship & Haiku, Somtow Sucharitkul
Jovah’s Angel, Sharon Shinn
Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
The Gameplayers of Zan, M. A. Foster
The Warriors of Dawn, M. A. Foster
The Day of the Klesh, M. A. Foster


Fantasy

The Silver Lake, Fiona Patton
The Shadowed Isle, Katherine Kerr
The Last Paladin, Kathleen Bryan
Children of the Blood, Michelle Sagara West
The Hidden City, Michelle West
Borne in the Blood, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Victory of Eagles, Naomi Novik

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