My life in books

Like the lives of most people without wealth, status or high-tech credentials in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novella Prime Meridian, Amelia’s life is shit. After dropping out of university to cate for a dying mother, she lost her scholarship, and with that, her chance at a life she’s dreamed of forever, a life on Mars. Instead, she lives in her dead mother’s house with her sister and her nieces, and the best job she’s been able to find in months is working as a pretend companion for Friendrr.

In Moreno-Garcia’s future world, there really are colonies on Mars, but a girl like her is never going to get there. Still, the idea of Mars - fresh starts, getting away, escape - pervades her world. One if her clients is a retired actress who constantly reminisces about her one successful film, Conquerer Women of Mars. Another of her clients, a former boyfriend who ghosted her in college, had planned to emigrate with her before his rich father knocked some sense into him. The text is intercut with scenes from a movie that perhaps exists only in Amelia’s mind, a movie about a stalwart adventurer on Mars.

This is the future of today, if we are honest. All the toys of the futures that have been written about, but only for the favoured few. The rest of us will only see the future in small things, in the kinds of apps our cheap smartwatches can offer, while we struggle to find work and security in an Uber-style world. Our dreams will always be that, just dreams, until we lose them altogether. Or unless we are one of the very, very fortunate few who get a second chance, and setting everything else aside, take it.

This story will break your heart for all but the last few pages, and then it will make it soar. May we all find our way to Mars after all.

Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun is a strange dystopia, presenting a Finland in which government control over all facets of life has brought about both the monstrous - a rigid eugenics program that aims to produce virile, masterful men and bubble-headed submissive women - and the bizarre - a ban on anything consumable that offers a strong sensory experience, from tobacco and alcohol to chili peppers.

The narrator, Vanna, is an aberrant woman - she looks like, and can pass as, an eloi, one of the pretty, incurious, domestically and sexually focused women who are preferred as wives, consorts, and sex workers. But her mind is that of a morlock - she is intelligent, curious, restless. The novel is partly epistolatory, in that much of Vanna’s account of events is told in the form of letters to her missing sister Manna, a true eloi. The letters talk to Manna about Vanna’s present, but also about their shared past, giving the reader insight into how Finnish society was transformed into the world in which
Vanna lives.

As Vanna remembers their upbringing, how both sisters were taught the rigid sex roles demanded of the eloi, we learn how Vanna has managed to reach adulthood undetected. The sisters were homeschooled by their grandmother, who lived in a rural area, free from the degree of observation they would have faced in a city, or even a town. Aulikki, who came of age before the adoption of the eugenics program, realised that Vanna was too intelligent to be an eloi, but physically able to pass as one. She carefully taught Vanna to hide her differences, to seem to be like Manna.

Vanna and Manna’s relationship, once close, is eventually damaged by Manna’s eloi conditioning and responses. Their grandmother had hired Jare, a young man from the city as a hired hand to help out on the farm. Jare accidentally discovered Vanna’s secret, but was willing to keep quiet; this shared secret, and the isolation in which they lived, resulted in something unthinkable to an eloi - a friendship. Manna became jealous, competitive for Jare’s affections as elois are conditioned to do, and resented what she saw as the love affair between Jare and Vanna. When the two girls come of age and move to the city, to enter the marriage market - quite literally - Vanna and Jare become partners in an illegal enterprise, dealing in chiles, the pretense of a relationship an ideal cover for their partnership. Manna, still wounded, quickly becomes engaged.

As the narrative progresses, alternating betwen Vanna’s letters to her sister, Jare’s recollections and thoughts, and excerpts from documents detailing this alternative history of Finland, and the nature of the social expectations of men and women - mascos and minuses, eloi and morlocks - we learn the story behind Manns’s disappearance, and follow Vanna’s desperate search for the truth.

The novel is not just a picture of secret resistance to an oppressive, rigidly gendered and controlled society, however. It is also an examination of loss, addiction and mental illness. Vanna is a capsaicin addict. She craves the heat of chilis, seeking anything with a high scoville rating, the higher the better. Her addiction helps her to control what she calls the Cellar, a space within her mind, a metaphor for anxiety, depression, panic. A place where she can feel as though she’s trapped, with water rising all around her. A depression caused by Vanna’s sense that it is her fault that Manna is missing, presumed dead - though Vanna cannot bring herself to think it.

In the second half of the book, Jare and Vanna become involved with the Gaians, a religious cult that seeks to breed the purest, most potent possible chili, believing capsaicin in its natural form to be a spiritual awakening agent, that the effects of capsaicin on the brain can induce trance experiences - it’s their quest for this plant, which they call the Core of the Sun, that gives the novel its title. Jare and Vanna move back to the country, to the farm where Vanna grew up, inviting the Gaians to come with them and, under the cover of growing hyper-organic vegetables, complete their breeding program to produce the Core of the .sun. Meanwhile, they produce lesser breeds of chili, which Vanna and Jare sell, using the funds to support the group, and to save money for Jare’s goal, which is to defect from Finland and make a life for himself in the outside world. The parallels between the breeding of the plants, and the eugenics-based breeding program that has produced eloi and morlocks, in which only the offspring with the desired characteristics are allowed to breed, raise serious ethical questions - which in some ways, Sinisalo leaves hanging - about when and where selective breeding, attempts to improve a species, are legitimate. If breeding chilis to a point unknown in nature is a spiritual quest, but breeding humans to create a subrace of infantilised women a horror, where does the dividing line lie? In some ways, the fire of the chilis is also a metaphor fir the fire of resistance - the Gaians reject the social order in Finland, and at one point, Vanna, in a capsaicin-induced trace, sees the power of her visions as powers that can also bring down the repressive system. I must admit, as a devote of the chili myself, I was rather taken with the idea of chili peppers as the path to enlightenment and social justice. If only it were so.

The way the novel is structured gives Sinisalo the freedom to make many trenchant comments on the social construction of gender and other stereotypes. At one point, talking about television programming for elois, Vanna says:

“I sat with you and watched one television show after another that ended in marriage. “Elois” flouncing around in beautiful gowns, heavily made up, wigs on their heads, padded in the right places. They couldn’t use real elois—that would have been a real job, would have required memorizing lines, concentration, perseverance. The mascos dressed as elois on the TV shows tittered and giggled and fluttered and swung their hips and stuck out their lips and used an exaggerated caricature to show how an eloi should look and sound. I had read in one of Aulikki’s books that in old American movies, white people painted their skin black to portray Negroes. I wonder if some dark-skinned people who watched those movies thought that they were supposed to speak in simple sentences and roll their eyes and be childish and superstitious.”

I couldn’t help thinking, as I read the passages about the establishment of this rigidly gendered society, of other feminist works that have imagined a ‘return’ to an imagined natural or God-prescribed order where all men are powerful and all women submissive. And of what’s happening now in the US, and other parts of the world, as hard won freedoms for women and other marginalised people are being swept away by people with an ideology of repression and control. Once I thought it would be difficult for such things to happen, once a momentum was established. Now I’m terrified by hiw easy it seems.

Books like this have become vital warnings, to resist before it’s too late.

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.

Annalee Newitz’s novel Autonomous gives us a terrifying picture of a future where patent laws protecting drugs, and the reward of exorbitant pharmaceutical profits, have created a two-tiered society where only the wealthy can afford medical care, and the benefits of performance enhancing drugs, because the cost of those drugs, from vaccines to longevity treatments, is far beyond anything the typical person can afford.

In this world, there are people, like Jack Chen, who reverse engineer essential medicines and distribute them illegally at a fraction of the price charged by the pharmas. They subsidise their work by also distributing other drugs, mood and performance enhancers. They are called pirates, drug-runners, even terrorists by the authorities for whom the pharma companies are major drivers of the economy and supporters of the governments that enforce the abusive patent laws via an international organisation, the International Property Coalition, or IPC.

This is also a world where intelligent robots and cyborgs can become legally autonomous, and where humans can spend their entire life as indentured servants.

Jack has been distributing a generic copy of a drug that’s nit even officially on the market yet - Zacuity. It’s supposed to give the user an enhanced feeling of reward for work accomplished, a kind of performance enhancer. But people using it are developing addictive obsessions and working themselves to death. At first, Jack is afraid that she screwed up when she reverse engineered the drug. But then she realises that the drug itself is deadly, and Xaxy, the company that made, it has hidden the proof. One way or another, Jack knows she’s responsible for the deaths, and she wants to develop a therapy to treat the problem - and make sure everyone knows that the company was prepared to market a potentially additive, deadly drug. Along the way, she teams up with Threezed, a young man who was an indentured servant - until she had to kill his owner - and Med (short for Medea), an autonomous humanoid bot who is a biochemical engineer.

But she’s working against time. Agents of the IPC are after her - a human intelligence officer named Eliasz, and an indentured military bot designated Paladin. They’re authorised to kill drug-runners, and Jack knows she has to work fast to get the cure, and the truth, out before they find and kill her.

In addition to exploring the nightmare of drug patent laws gone wild, Newitz examines issues of identity and autonomy through the robots Paladin and Med, one indentured, one autonomous, and through Threezed, who moves from slavery to freedom thanks to Jack and Med.

This is a strong science fiction debut, well-written, with memorable characters and a fast-moving plot. It drew me in almost from the beginning and held my interest through to the end.

Karin Tidbeck’s debut novel Amatka is a complex and challenging fiction of social criticism - calling it satire, or dystopia, is far too inadequate, though it certainly performs the functions of both genres.

We are in a nominally future world, on a colony planet, but at the same time, Amatka is, like Erewhon, set nowhere in time or space. Amatka is one of several cities on this planet, settled in a cold and harsh region. Like the other cities, it is somewhat of a socialist/syndicalist managed economy. People live communally in small groups, children are raised in a separate children’s house, personal property is limited to one’s own necessary effects.

But there are some very odd things happening. Everything in this world is labelled, and people say the names of things over and over again. At first, there’s no obvious explanation for this behaviour, and the reader wonders why everyone is repeating the names of things, writing them on everything. I was speculating that some plague had damaged humans’ cognitive abilities, weakening object permanence. But the reason, when it’s revealed, is stranger still. Reality is fragile, and the existence of material objects must be frequently supported by bring named, or they dissolve into a kind of featureless paste.

As one reads, one becomes aware that there are two general classes of things. One, identified by the adjective “good” consists of things made from materials that the colonists brought with them. These things, it seems, are far less prone to dissolving, they hold their shape and firm without constant naming and labelling, they are resistant to other subtle dangers suggested but never spoken of or defined. Things not identified as good, things made from materials on the planet, are things without permanence. And the material from which these impermanent things are made is, of course, the same stuff they dissolve into when they are not named often enough.

And there’s a mystery, about a lost colony no one talks about. Once, when humans first settled this place, there were five colony cities founded. Then one was no longer there.

The protagonist, Vanja, lives in one of the four remaining colony cities, Essre. She has been asked by the company/collective she works in to travel to Amatka on a kind of market research jaunt. Her collective makes personal hygiene products, and it is her assignment to find out what the people in Amatka need, use, and want, for things like soap and tooth powder.

It doesn’t take long for her to learn that the people of Amatka are not all that interested in the idea of new things, things that might come from other colonies. At the same time, she discovers that the people of Amatka suffer from frequent skin problems, rashes, eczema, cracked skin.

As Vanja goes about her research, while living in a communal household and getting to know her housemates, she learns about other strange things that have been happening in Amatka. Things that are not talked about. Some years ago, there was an incident, and a hundred people died. This may, or may not, be the reason that the city seems too empty, too quiet. And the nearby lake has started freezing over, every night, and thawing in the morning, even though the temperature does not change that much. There’s a serious shortage of “good paper” such that even important things like medical records are being written on paper that will decay, and the books in the library are being seized and recycled for the use of the city’s central committee.

Vanja has never really been content with life as it is lived. As one of her new housemates notes, she forgets to name and mark things too often, it suggests that she wants to know more. And she does. Much of the novel is about her slow and frustrating search for answers - not so much to the question of why things are the way they are, but to what if anything could be better.

In Amatka, Tidbeck has written is a complex and powerful parable about hw we sustain the nature of our world, our reality, our interpretation of our selves, and of the necessity of change to create a way of living that is more free, and more in harmony.

Last year, on International Women's Day, Tor.com published a series of short stories on a theme drawn from the silencing of American Senator Elizabeth Warren during the confirmation hearings for Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Commenting on the silencing, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said:

"She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted."

The phrase has quickly become a feminist slogan, a cry of resistance against the worst injustices of the new American administration.

I read most of these last year, but wanted to bundle all the comments on them together in one post, so here, very late indeed, is that post. Links to all the stories can be found here: https://www.tor.com/series/nevertheless-she-persisted/


Kameron Hurley, "Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Full of Light"

The title is, of course, a direct reference to a short story by James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon) writing as Racoona Sheldon - a woman who certainly persisted, writing about a woman driven mad by warnings and explanations, who resisted to the end. And the story is a grim, but somehow glorious fable of women’s persistence across the years, the centuries.


Alyssa Wong, “God Product”

This is not a happy story. It’s a story about a woman led to believe she is nothing, that she must destroy the thing she values in order to gain the respect she craves.


Carrie Vaughn, “Alchemy”

A paean to every woman who has ever labored, thankless, hindered, belittled, mocked, in a field designated as being “for men” and who has succeeded against all odds.


Seanan McGuire, “Persephone”

A bitter tale that touches powerfully on many painful things - poverty, desperation, the futility of hope in a capitalist dystopia, the delegitimising of non-standard relationships, the traffic in human flesh and blood, the dehumanising of the underclass by the powerful, and the anger that grows from all these and more.


Charlie Jane Anders, “Margot and Rosalind”

A slightly comic, slightly snarky, quite delightful story about a female “mad scientist” who’s building a brain in her basement, despite the efforts of everyone trying to stop her.


Maria Dahvana Headley, “Astronaut”

Reimagining the story of the first primate to survive a flight in space. It’s an all-too-familiar story with a sweetly triumohant ending.


Nisi Shawl, “More than Nothing”

Cora knows what’s expected of her, the sister if a pastor’s wife, a member of a black community, but Cora feels the call of other ways, and even more dangerously, she dares to hope.


Brooke Bolander, “The Last of the Minotaur Wives”

This story speaks of an inheritance of hope, generations of quiet resistance that build to the culmination, the moment when all is ready for the last in the chain to stand, to run, to leave the prison behind.


Jo Walton, “The Jump Rope Rhyme”

Important lessons are often encoded in children’s games and rhymes. Walton, an accomplished poet as well as writer of fiction, has built a skipping rhyme for future generations on the theme of persistence. A poem of hope.

“Persisting, in bad times, with only hope,
For you, in space, for the dream we share
Of a better future everywhere.”


Amal El Mohtar, “Anabasis”

Fir those who do not recognise the reference, Anabasis, which means, in the Greek, journey/expedition up from below, is the title of a book written by Xenophon describing the experiences of an army of Greek mercenaries fighting for the Persian would-be emperor Cyrus the Younger. After Cyrus was killed in battle, the Greeks faced a long and dangerous journey home, and it is this journey out of civil war that occupies most of the account.

El Mohtar writes in this powerful short story about a woman struggling to bring her child to safety, to a new home, and about her own identity as an Arab, a Muslim, a Canadian immigrant, a writer, a voice crying for justice. It’s a story about being a refugee, about borders and documents and human lives. It calls up the specific memories of Muslims trying to cross out of a suddenly far less welcoming US and into Canada during the winter of 2017 and Donald Trump.

Ironically, several months after this story was published, El Mohtar, a Canadian citizen traveling on a Canadian passport, was detained by American Customs agents while on her way to a writers’ retreat in the US. As a result of the interrogation, she missed her flight and was traumatised. (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-author-calls-out-canadian-government-border-questioning-1.4430916)


Catherynne M. Valente, “The Ordinary Woman and the Unquiet Emperor”

In a world where everything that is not required is forbidden, an ordinary woman has the chance to change everything. She is warned. She is given an explanation. She persisted, and the world changed.

I am embarking on a reading project, it seems. I am rereading Heinlein books. Probably not all of them, though it is possible. I started this project because my partner and I were talking about the Japanese anime version of Starship Troopers, and its portrayal of certain characters in terms of race. Heinlein is not always obvious about the race of his characters, he tosses clues in and leaves you to make your own assumptions. Anyway, we were discussing Sergeant Zim, who is portrayed as black in the anime. We both agreed that this was unlikely, as one of the few clues to his race is a reference to him being 'shaved blue' which I and my partner took to mean very closely shaved, in line with other references to his precision in terms of proper presentation. I'd had the vague sense that he might be Asian, based on his comment about not speaking Standard and having been taught martial arts by cadet Shikumi's father. But nothing else confirms that, and Sergeant Zim's race remains ambiguous. But that was why I started rereading.

I'm continuing with the reread because Farah Mendlesohn's long awaited (by me, at least) critical study of Heinlein is getting ready for publication and I want to reacquaint myself with a fair chunk of Heinlein's work before I read Mendlesohn's study.

(By the way, due to some contractual issues with the press that had originally accepted Mendlesohn's proposal for the book, she is publishing it through a crowdsourcing publisher. If you want a copy - and you are going to want one if you are in any way a science fiction fan - you can pre-order at the link below. It's already fully funded, so there's no risk, you will get what you order.

https://unbound.com/books/robert-heinlein

I repeat, if you are an sf fan, you will want this book. Go order it now.)

Right, back to Heinlein.

So, I reread Starship Troopers, because you can't just check out something in a Heinlein book, you get sucked into the story and you have to read it all. At least I do.

It's still a damned good story. I've never agreed with the philosophy behind his 'volunteer for the army and you prove you are deserving of the vote' but it is not necessary that you agree with him to enjoy a story based on some theory he's cooked up. And there is a small something in his argument that, if broadened, does make some sense. It's a seductive argument that one should have to demonstrate some sense of civic responsibility in order to participate in the democratic process. Maybe if we had to perform a term of service - not necessarily military (in fact, I'd say definitely not military) - but something, like giving your time and skills to a public service organisation for a few years. Meals on Wheels. A free health clinic. After school programs for kids. Something that puts you in contact with people who aren't like you, and asks you to serve, to make things better, to think about others rather than yourself. Maybe if we had something like that, we wouldn't run the risk of democracies that go soft in the head and elect leaders like Trump. I don't know. It has become an article of faith that we do not question the prime importance of universal franchise, largely because it is so easily taken away for the wrong reasons - sex, race, not owning land or having enough money or attending the right church.

Anyway, that's what's so good about the best of Heinlein. He entertains immensely, and seemingly effortlessly - but he also invites you to think. I am always amused by the more extreme among his fans, who don't think about what he wrote, and construct arguments about it, and critique it, but who just worship it. He would have hated those fans, I think. My image of Heinlein is of someone who'd rather have everyone disagree with him after thinking, than everyone agree with him without thinking.

The next book I decided to reread was Podkayne of Mars. I like Podkayne as a character - more so right at the beginning of the book than further on, as she becomes more 'sophisticated' and starts compromising her dreams. Heinlein does better at writing three-dimensional, complex and competent women than most other male sf writers of his time, but he was undeniably sexist by any standards. For instance, there's the scene where she re-evaluates her dream if being a spaceship pilot/captain: "I've been doing some hard thinking about piloting - and have concluded that there are more ways of skinning a cat than buttering it with parsnips. Do I really want to be a "famous explorer captain"? Or would I be just as happy to be some member of his crew?"

And there's the stuff about how being a woman means instinctive and overriding maternal instincts. Podkayne's mother is one of the top engineers in the solar system - she holds a "systemwide license as a Master Engineer, Heavy Construction, Surface or Free Fall" - and yet the unexpected decanting of three frozen embryos turns her into a mindless milk machine who can't even tell whether an infant's diaper is clean or dirty. And it's a stint of caring for infants during a solar flare emergency on a spaceliner that makes Podkayne think it might be better to run a crêche on a spaceship than be a pilot. It's these things that 'mystify' both femininity and motherhood in so many of Heinlein's novels that kick me out of my enjoyment of the story itself whenever they crop up.

The edition I have of the book has both endings - Heinlein's unpublished original ending in which Podkayne dies, and the ending demanded by the publisher, in which she is wounded but survives. I'm still not sure which one I prefer.

And then I moved on to Revolt in 2100. Considering the current political situation in the US, this was an inevitable early pick from among Heinlein's oeuvre. It's far too easy to see the US sliding into a theocratic dictatorship these days, what with fascists in the White House and the Republican party doubling down on 'sin and immorality.' Given the way Trump is stacking the courts, it's not hard to imagine the reversal of key SCOTUS and lower court decisions on abortion, sexual assault, gay and trans rights, maybe even, given the overt racism of the times, Loving vs. Virginia.

Heinlein knew his people. He knew there was a massive streak of religious fanaticism in American culture, to say nothing of virulent nationalism, just waiting to be fanned by the 'right' person. But the core novella in the collection that's come to be known as Revolt in 2100, -If This Goes On, isn't just about the dangers of a religious dictator, it's also about how the organs of the establishment - media, the church, the schools - shape public knowledge and manipulate public opinion. There's practically an entire primer on the uses of propaganda in supporting - or destabilising - a government buried in the narrative, to say nothing of some ideas about how to organise an underground revolution.

Not surprisingly, -If This Goes On has a lot to say about religion and spiritual practice. Rereading it, I wonder how much my own ideas were shaped by some of the observations placed in the mouth of the protagonists friend, Zebediah Jones. For instance, "I believe very strongly in freedom of religion—but I think that that freedom is best expressed as freedom to keep quiet. From my point of view, a great deal of openly expressed piety is insufferable conceit" - that's pretty much the central tenet of my belief about spiritual performance. I have some very strong spiritual beliefs - and I almost never talk about them. For what it's worth, Zebediah is one of the few Heinlein avatars (there's one in most of his novels for adults) that I had a crush on as a youngish person.

The story is tightly plotted and fast-paced despite the multiple ruminations on religion, dictatorships, the process of decolonising the mind, and other themes. It's a very quick read in spite of its depth. And there are somr things that just sit perfectly with me. I've always felt a strange sense of rightness in the last sentences of the novella. For all his annoyingly sexist assumptions about women, he got one thing dead right - the deep level of anger that exists in women who have been sexually abused should never be underestimated.

As for the two shorter pieces that are bundled with -If This Goes on in the Revolt in 2100 volume, "Coventry" and "Misfit" - they're both in their own way variations on a theme, that of the young man who needs to find his way to be part of society.

"Coventry" is not quite as successful as some of Heinlein's other stories, in my opinion. Heinlein's characters all do a lot of talking about ideas, but not so much about themselves, and Heinlein doesn't usually talk to the reader about them, he lets the reader see for herself who they are. But in "Coventry" the omniscient third person narrator pointedly backs up what we have already seen in David McKinnon's behaviour - that he is the classic entitled, self-pitying and angry young man who thinks he deserves everything despite giving nothing back. This makes McKinnon at first seem overdone, more like a caricature than a real person - though to be honest, some of the real young men of his ilk that I've met seem like caricatures of themselves. It also makes his sudden transformation into a responsible human being, willing to sacrifice for the common weal, less believable. Why does this whiny prat suddenly decide to risk his life for the society he turned his back on merely a few weeks earlier? Because he's shamed by the courage of a young girl? Because he's been mistreated in Coventry? Because he feels gratitude to the Fader? Because he sees how power without responsibility destroys lives? How has he "cured himself"? It's a little too pat for my tastes. If we accept the suggested etiology of his entitlement and rage, years of emotional abuse primed him to be a selfish and angry man, and the effects of that kind of abuse don't go away that quickly.

I'm also curious about the Covenant itself. Dismissing the concept of justice as undefinable, it takes as the cornerstone of appropriate behaviour, doing no damage. Yet it does not recognise the damage of emotional abuse. McKinnon's crime is responding with physical force to verbal abuse. Given his history, it may well have been a matter of PTSD. He's not ready to be a responsible citizen, but he's been damaged and no one has given him any redress. (Yes, it's possible, perhaps even common, to be an abuse survivor and an entitled prat simultaneously.) I must remember, when rereading the other novels set during the tine of the Covenant, to read them with this story in mind.

"Misfit" is, on the other hand, a story about a marginalised outsider finding his gift, the thing that makes him special and gives him a sense of worth. The young Andy Libby doesn't have a problem with entitlement or with a lack of responsibility to his fellow human beings, he just doesn't realise what he has to offer. The situation is another of Heinlein's patented 'hard work and discipline will make you a man' scenarios - a whole generation of misfits being sent out into dangerous conditions in space to do construction work, an uneasy cross between the Peace Corps and a chain gang. In the context of the society of the Covenant, it's likely an alternative to the 'psychological readjustment or Coventry' choice offered to adults. These are barely more than boys, who don't fit into society, but theoretically aren't so set in their ways that they can't be salvaged without psychological manipulation.

It's also our introduction to one of my favourite characters in Heinlein's Future History series, Andrew Jackson Libby, mathematical wild talent and one of 'traditional' science fiction's first trans characters.

And now I shall have to consider what to reread next. Another of my favourites, I think. Double Star.

Brushwork, by Aliya Whiteley, is a novella set in a dystopic, climate-changed future where real food, grown in biodomes and greenhouses, is a luxury for the rich and a target for agro-terrorism.

Mel - so called because her production area is the melon section - is one of the workers at a BlossomFarms facility. Like many of the workers, she has lived in the domes for years, sleeping in dormitories, eating synthetic food, never tasting the fruits she grows for the conglomerate's wealthy customers. When agro-terrorists break into the biodome, taking the facilities hostage in the name of the people who have never tasted fruit, everything changes - except the fact that workers remain workers, and no matter who is in charge, the hierarchy never changes until the workers themselves decide what is important to them.

One thing in particular that I enjoyed about this was the age of the protagonist and her co-workers, and the acknowledgement of generational issues we see around us in the world today - older people who did everything they were supposed to do, and feel betrayed without knowing who to blame. And the youth, knowing they will not have what they think was the birthright of their parents and grandparents. Both betrayed by the wealthy and powerful, but somehow blaming each other instead.


Note: Brushwork can be found online at Giganotosaurus:
http://giganotosaurus.org/2016/05/01/brushwork/

In Laurie Penny's novella Everything Belongs to the Future, science - corporate controlled science - has developed a drug that, taken daily, can extend the lifespan for years, perhaps centuries. It is, of course, extremely expensive, available only to the rich and to favoured scientists, entertainers, and others who make themselves of particular value to those in control.

The narrative focuses on a small group of anarchist activists. Joined by Daisy, the scientist who did the original research on the "blue pill' - now a woman in her eighties who looks like a teenager - their attempts to develop a generic life extension drug give way to something profoundly different when Daisy's research leads in an unexpected and potentially explosive direction. Although we know from the beginning that something goes wrong with their plans - part of the narrative consists of letters written from prison by one of the activists - much of the story's tension is driven by the fact that the reader learns early on that there is a covert agent of the establishment among them.

Penny writes about power and corruption, oppression and resistance, loyalty and betrayal, but her focus is so narrow that the reader is left with little understanding of how the existence of life extension drugs has changed society. We learn that, faced with long life, the world's elites have finally taken measures to curb climate change, but little else that's concrete about this future society.

We get a sense that, at least among those to whom the protagonists initially try to distribute stolen life extension pills, life seems grim and faintly desperate, but we are left unsure as to the reasons for this. Is it just the longing that everyone has for the virtually unattainable fountain of youth, or has the creation of an immortal elite altered social conditions in ways that have made a life of normal span less tolerable?

Penny also uses the dichotomous categories of eternal youth and premature aging to explore the ways that apparent age influences the perceived value and status of women.

The novella moves quickly, and Penny's prose is at times both deeply evocative and chillingly powerful. As an allegory of favoured elites, disfavoured masses, and discontented resistance, it offers considerable good for thought, but I found I wanted more.

"The Great Silence," Ted Chiang, May 2015, e-flux journal
http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/

A meditation on sentience, inter-species communication, language, and the consequences of co-existence with other intelligences. From the perspective of a parrot.


"Forestspirit, Forestspirit," Bogi Takács, June 2015,
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/takacs_06_15/

An AI-driven battle machine, survivor of the last war, becomes the guardian of the forest at the instigation of a young boy.


"Folding Beijing," Hao Jingfang (trans. Ken Liu), January/February 2015
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/folding-beijing-2/

This elegant novelette from Hao Jingfang proposes a future China where overpopulation is so severe that the city of Beijing is redesigned and rebuilt so as to fold up and flip over twice in every 48 hour cycle. In the first 24 hours, the part of the city revealed is First Space - the world of the upper class, five million out of a total of 80 million. When First Space folds up and its inhabitants are tucked safely away in a drugged sleep, the city flips over and the next 12 hours belong to Second Space, the middle class, 25 million. After 12 hours, Second Space folds up and Third Space - the home of the working class and the poor - unfolds for another 12 hours. And the cycle repeats.

The protagonist of the story is Lao Dao, a worker in a refuse sorting plant in Third Space, who wants only one thing - to find enough money to educate his adopted daughter so that she can live in a better space. To do so on his own salary would be impossible, so he takes on an illegal commission to carry messages between people in other Spaces.

Through Lao's experiences, Hao delivers a profound critique of class, capital and the exploitation of the workers, while reminding us that the best parts of life are those that stand outside of the economic sphere - love, generosity, joy, simple pleasures, human interaction.


"Liminal Grid," Jaymee Goh, November 2015, Strange Horizons
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2015/20151109/gohliminalgrid-f.shtml

In a dystopic future Malaysia where government surveillance and control are close to absolute, the rebels of a new generation struggle to escape the confines of a society they hate and fear, and go
"off-grid."


"Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers," Alyssa Wong, October 2015, Nightmare Magazine
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/hungry-daughters-of-starving-mothers/

A compelling, visceral dark fantasy. Themes of vengeance on misogynist bile-mongers, intergenerational legacies and wounds, and the consequences of not being fully open with those one truly loves. I have to mention the effectiveness of the startlingly perfect use of imagery in this piece.


"Scarecrow," Alyssa Wong, originally published in Black Static, 2014, reprinted January 2015, Tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2015/01/27/scarecrow/

A powerful and moving dark fantasy story about love, self-deception, internalised homophobia, guilt and grief. A young man too afraid, or ashamed, to acknowledge his love for another joins his friends in tormenting his lover, with deadly consequences.


"The Fisher Queen," Alyssa Wong, 2014
http://fu-gen.org/crash/fisherqueen-wong.htm

The daughter of a fisherman discovers hidden truths about, not just her own family, but also about the trade she seeks to follow on her first fishing voyage. A dark story about family secrets and sexual violence.


"By Degrees and Dilatory Time," S. L. Huang, May 2015, Strange Horizons
http://strangehorizons.com/2015/20150518/dilatory-f.shtml

A story about bodily integrity, loss and healing. A young man who has already lost a promising career as a competitive figure skater to a sports injury and knee replacement surgery develops a rare cancer in both eyes and must accept replacement surgery - artificial eyes - in order to survive.