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And so much for 2024.
Read 23 books this year, which is enough to complete my Goodreads Reading Challenge, and you know, I’ll take it. Plus I went out on a relative high note, which is nice.
And so:
The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde by Norman Spinrad
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve been reading and (mostly) enjoying Norman Spinrad’s novels, but the only short fiction of his I’ve read is “Carcinoma Angels”, his excellent contribution to Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology. That story also appears in this volume, which is also Spinrad’s first collection of short stories, and of course I had to pick it up.
One striking thing about this collection is that even within the SF wheelhouse, it’s strikingly diverse. Spinrad covers a lot of ground – space opera, space madness, corporate caveman satire, alien honeypots, alien wars, alien invasions, dystopian utopias, immortality, avant garde psychotherapy, time-travel tourism and (of course) experimental drugs.
Another striking thing about this collection is how accessible most of it is. The title track is one of the few stories here that points toward the experimental, Kerouacian lyrical writing style Spinrad would embrace for some of his more famous novels. But most of these are relatively more conventional, style-wise, which is not a bad thing. Anyway, a few stories don’t quite work for me, but overall this is a solid collection.
Babel by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is my first time reading R.F. Kuang, and I confess my interest was piqued at least in part by the kerfluffle over the World Science Fiction Society declaring it ineligible for the 2023 Hugo Awards, despite having enough nominations, because that year’s awards were being held in China, and the jury head apparently wanted to avoid any authors that Beijing might not like. Which is odd, since this book – an alt-history set in the 1830s just before the Opium War between Britain and China – clearly portrays the British Empire as the villain of the story.
In Kuang’s alt-history, the British Empire is thriving thanks to its use of silver bars with magical properties that leverage “match pairs” of translated words – the idea being that all translations are imperfect, and what gets lost in translation between words with similar but not identical meanings can be harnessed by the bars to, say, increase crop yields or make warships move faster. Britain is also using its economic and military power to corner the silver market by exploiting poorer nations. The story follows Robin Swift, a poor boy in Canton who is adopted by Professor Lovell and brought to England to raise him as a translator to study at the Royal Institute of Translation in Oxford (a.k.a. Babel), where silver-bar technology is being developed and refined.
Robin eventually enters Oxford with a first-year cohort that includes Indian Muslim Ramy, Haitian Victoire, and Letty, the white daughter of an admiral who sent her to Babel as a grudging replacement for her recently deceased brother. Despite the overt racism of Oxford society, Robin is happy at Babel until he is contacted by half-brother Griffin, who wants to recruit him into the Hermes Society, a global underground organisation that wants to undermine Britain’s silver supremacy. Once Robin realises Babel is exploiting non-white foreigners like Robin, Ramy and Victoire on the grounds that translations using their native languages have more power than European ones – and will enable Britain to plunder their home countries – he waffles over which side to take until his hand is forced.
There’s a lot to chew on here, from Kuang’s deep-dive explanations of how translation works (which I found fascinating) to her fairly blatant critique of the white supremacist mindset of British colonialism told from the POV of the colonised. And then of course there’s the debate over whether violence is necessary to change systemic injustice, and if so, how far should it be taken. While Kuang covers the arguments on both sides fairly thoroughly, it’s tricky to evaluate them in a modern context vs the context of the 1830s, when attitudes towards justified violence were somewhat different than they are today. That said, Kuang seems more interested in provoking discussion rather than answering questions (apart from her clear assertion that colonialism is evil), but it’s arguably a discussion worth having. What’s really remarkable is that she makes all of this quite readable – which is a good thing for a doorstop book like this.
View all my reviews
Babel on,
This is dF
Read 23 books this year, which is enough to complete my Goodreads Reading Challenge, and you know, I’ll take it. Plus I went out on a relative high note, which is nice.
And so:
The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde by Norman SpinradMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve been reading and (mostly) enjoying Norman Spinrad’s novels, but the only short fiction of his I’ve read is “Carcinoma Angels”, his excellent contribution to Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology. That story also appears in this volume, which is also Spinrad’s first collection of short stories, and of course I had to pick it up.
One striking thing about this collection is that even within the SF wheelhouse, it’s strikingly diverse. Spinrad covers a lot of ground – space opera, space madness, corporate caveman satire, alien honeypots, alien wars, alien invasions, dystopian utopias, immortality, avant garde psychotherapy, time-travel tourism and (of course) experimental drugs.
Another striking thing about this collection is how accessible most of it is. The title track is one of the few stories here that points toward the experimental, Kerouacian lyrical writing style Spinrad would embrace for some of his more famous novels. But most of these are relatively more conventional, style-wise, which is not a bad thing. Anyway, a few stories don’t quite work for me, but overall this is a solid collection.
Babel by R.F. KuangMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is my first time reading R.F. Kuang, and I confess my interest was piqued at least in part by the kerfluffle over the World Science Fiction Society declaring it ineligible for the 2023 Hugo Awards, despite having enough nominations, because that year’s awards were being held in China, and the jury head apparently wanted to avoid any authors that Beijing might not like. Which is odd, since this book – an alt-history set in the 1830s just before the Opium War between Britain and China – clearly portrays the British Empire as the villain of the story.
In Kuang’s alt-history, the British Empire is thriving thanks to its use of silver bars with magical properties that leverage “match pairs” of translated words – the idea being that all translations are imperfect, and what gets lost in translation between words with similar but not identical meanings can be harnessed by the bars to, say, increase crop yields or make warships move faster. Britain is also using its economic and military power to corner the silver market by exploiting poorer nations. The story follows Robin Swift, a poor boy in Canton who is adopted by Professor Lovell and brought to England to raise him as a translator to study at the Royal Institute of Translation in Oxford (a.k.a. Babel), where silver-bar technology is being developed and refined.
Robin eventually enters Oxford with a first-year cohort that includes Indian Muslim Ramy, Haitian Victoire, and Letty, the white daughter of an admiral who sent her to Babel as a grudging replacement for her recently deceased brother. Despite the overt racism of Oxford society, Robin is happy at Babel until he is contacted by half-brother Griffin, who wants to recruit him into the Hermes Society, a global underground organisation that wants to undermine Britain’s silver supremacy. Once Robin realises Babel is exploiting non-white foreigners like Robin, Ramy and Victoire on the grounds that translations using their native languages have more power than European ones – and will enable Britain to plunder their home countries – he waffles over which side to take until his hand is forced.
There’s a lot to chew on here, from Kuang’s deep-dive explanations of how translation works (which I found fascinating) to her fairly blatant critique of the white supremacist mindset of British colonialism told from the POV of the colonised. And then of course there’s the debate over whether violence is necessary to change systemic injustice, and if so, how far should it be taken. While Kuang covers the arguments on both sides fairly thoroughly, it’s tricky to evaluate them in a modern context vs the context of the 1830s, when attitudes towards justified violence were somewhat different than they are today. That said, Kuang seems more interested in provoking discussion rather than answering questions (apart from her clear assertion that colonialism is evil), but it’s arguably a discussion worth having. What’s really remarkable is that she makes all of this quite readable – which is a good thing for a doorstop book like this.
View all my reviews
Babel on,
This is dF
