My life in books

Early this year, Morgan told me she was trying to finish a lot of books she had started but not finished. But there were still several half-read books on her ipad, and I found seven partially completed reviews, which I am cleaning up and posting here. I suspect most of the reviews were started before she decided she needed to focus more on reading than on doing write ups of what she had read.

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Ambiguity Machines is the extremely apt title of a collection of shorter fiction by physicist and science fiction writer Vandana Singh. Singh’s writing is rarely linear, with a single interpretation; her work asks the reader to consider the complexities and multiplicities in life and art, to welcome the ambiguities.

Most if the stories collected here are reprints, but I certainly had not read all of them before, so there was much that was fresh and exciting to me.

The last piece in the collection, and the only new piece, is the novelette Requiem. Varsha, originally from New Delhi, now a grad student in Boston, has come to Alaska, to a scientific installation near Utqiagvik, an Inupiaq village, to collect the personal belongings of her deceased aunt Rima. This is a post climate change Alaska, where the weather is cold but uncertain, and automated oil mining factories roam the land and the ocean floor, seeking the last scraps of fossil fuel for a world that, with the vision of space travel before it, no longer cares about the destruction of the planet. As Varsha collects her aunt’s things, she learns about the polar region and how the ‘big melt’ affected the people who lived by the sacred, vanishing bowhead whale. And how the actions of greedy corporations affected the whales and other species of the north, living in such a delicately balanced ecology.

Requiem is a story about passing through grief to truth, and about surviving, and fighting back in ways that, ultimately heal rather than harm. It’s about communication, between people, between species, between humans and the environment they live in. For those of us who worry about the coming climate shifts, it’s a story of a secret, underground hope that not all will be lost.

The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, Vandana Singh

This is a collection of short stories by the most remarkable Vandana Singh, whose work I am growing more and more in love with the more of it I read.

In these stories, Singh writes about apparently quite ordinary people – specifically, people who are often women and often Indian – who find themselves in strikingly unordinary situations and circumstances, or who suddenly feel distanced, alienated as it were, from what once seemed normal and familiar. Her gift for delineating character with subtlety, precision and sometimes gentle humour is in peak form here, enabling us to understand and identify with the rich humanity of her characters, and thus experience a universe much larger and richer than we normally encounter – learning greatly thereby.

As Singh notes in the essay that concludes the collection:

Speculative fiction is our chance to… find ourselves part of a larger whole; to step out of the claustrophobia of the exclusively human and discover joy, terror, wonder, and meaning, in the greater universe.

Singh sees another function for speculative fiction (beyond the simple fun of it all, which she also celebrates), one that is also at the heart of many of the stories in this collection:

Science fiction and fantasy posit other paths, alternative futures, different social arrangements as well as technologies, other ways that we could be. Before we do, we must dream.

I’d be hard pressed to pick a few favourites from this collection to talk about – they are all very, very good.

There’s an interesting review of The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet here.

Aqueduct Press is a small publisher specializing in feminist science fiction, and if one can be said to have a “favourite” publishing house, Aqueduct Press is mine. Founded by L. Timmel Duchamp, whose innovative feminist dystopic series “The Marq’ssan Cycle” I have been praising loudly for some time now, Aqueduct has made an effort to publish a broad range of works with a feminist perspective, and I must admit that so far, I want to own every volume that Aqueduct has published so far. Every once in a while, I treat myself and send in an order for a few more books from their catalogue, and the most recent of these treats (a Christmas present to myself) included two novellas and two collections of short stories.

Novellas

Of Love and Other Monsters, Vandana Singh

Singh begins with one of the classic situations for a journey of self-discovery; her protagonist, Arun, a young man has no memory of life before being rescued from a terrible fire, is also aware that he is different from other people in that he can he can in some way “feel” the minds of others, experience and appreciate them, as other people sense physical bodies: “I sensed the convoluted topography of each mind, its hills, valleys, areas of light and darkness, the whole animal mass trembling and shifting with emotional fluxes.” Arun’s journey touches on a number of themes: the quest for self-knowledge, a history, a past; the desire for relationship with someone for can see/perceive the world as you do, who can see you the same way you see them; the experience of being other, immigrant, alien in a world where some cannot abide the other; the nature of love when it is in fact the “meeting of two minds” that is most deeply desired, and how this affects questions of gender; and the process of discovering and coming to terms with limits and the existential isolation that is part of the human condition. Singh is too good a writer to give us a traditional happy ending, but she does give us a story of coming to terms with past, present and future, and with self.

The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding), L. Timmel Duchamp

Duchamp has already demonstrated in the very difficult second volume of her Marq’ssan Cycle, Renegade, her ability to unflinchingly hold up before our eyes the most naked of power dynamics, the processes of torture and brainwashing, and show us how this horrifying spectacle is in many ways a condensation of so many other kinds of relationships based on power and submission, enforcement of conformity, creation and maintenance of systems of oppression that are masked as “they way things are.” In this novella, Duchamp again forces us to look at the way in which a society that is in its essence based on conformity and unquestioned acceptance of hardened institutional structures of power reveals its moral bankruptcy in its treatment of the non-conformist, the questioner, the rebel. Set in a futuristic prison where those society rejects “pay for their crimes” by being experimental subjects and organ donors (and indeed, let’s be honest here, just how “futuristic” is this, really?), The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding) is a powerful examination of the methods used by a conformist society to reform, punish, and ultimately destroy those who would question its authority.


Short Story Collections

Love’s Body, Dancing in Time, L. Timmel Duchamp

The five stories in this volume can certainly all be said to be about love, among other things. Love and sacrifice, love and secrecy, love and forbidden knowledge, love and devotion to the voice of the divine, love and regret, love and passion, love and remorse, love and risk, love and loss, love and vision, love between being and love of art, god, tradition… love in a great many contexts, places and times. In different ways, I loved all five stories: “Dancing at the Edge,” “The Gift,” “The Apprenticeship of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi,” “Lord Enoch’s Revels,” and “The Heloise Archive.”

The Travelling Tide, Rosaleen Love

The seven stories in this collection by Australian writer Rosaleen Love are all, in different ways, influenced by Love’s background as a teacher of the history and philosophy of ideas, and a science writer with a particular interest in the geology of Australia and the indigenous lifeforms of the seas surrounding it. From a tale told in email of “cousin Bridie’s” search for the roots of Southern American music, to a very feminist look at Alexander the Great and his little-known wife Roxanne, to stories of giants transformed, to an appreciation of the songs of a coral reef, to losses and resurgences of friends and geological eras in water, earth and stone, and more, Love brings together the sense of the long stretch of time in which ideas and landscapes change, billow and recede like the tides, and the vastness of seas and continents and structures of thought and tradition.

Strange Horizons has an excellent review of this collection by Lesley Hall here.