MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

I really am.

Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first of a new Africanfuturism trilogy from Nnedi Okorafor set in the same universe as her books Who Fears Death and The Book of Phoenix. Set in near-future Ghana, the story follows Fatima, a 7-year-old girl who encounters an alien seed that falls to Earth and develops the power to kill any living thing when she glows green. She soon becomes known and feared as Sankofa, The Adopted Daughter Of Death.

Shortly before Sankofa discovers she has this power, the alien seed is stolen, and so she spends much of the book trying to track it down (on foot, as her power also kills whatever technology she touches, including cars, which also means she can’t just Google what she needs to know), accompanied by a mysterious red fox that seems to be immune to her power. Which is a fairly straightforward plot device for what is basically a coming-of-age narrative where Sankofa tries to make sense of who and what she is, and where she fits in a culture that worships her out of fear.

Pretty much everything here is familiar territory for Okorafor – strong women, alienation, death, mythology – but here she also blurs the lines between folk tales and the reality behind them, with Sankofa’s origin a mystery even to her, and one that becomes more ambiguous as the story goes on. It’s also a somewhat harrowing character study on what would happen if the power of death was bestowed on a 7-year-old Ghanian kid, with horrifying results. It’s not exactly fun, but with these kinds of topics, it’s how you tell it, and (as usual) Okorafor tells it well.


No Place on Earth by Louis Charbonneau

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve never read Louis Charbonneau before – in fact, I’d never even heard of him before I came across this in a second-hand bookstore. And the back cover blurb convinced me to try it, as I’m often a sucker for totalitarian dystopias (that, and it was only 95 cents). The blurb is an obvious riff on 1984 – the Great Leader, the Population Control Corps (PCC), ubiquitous surveillance, relentless propaganda, total control, etc and so on. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the actual story is not quite that.

The story is mostly told in flashback, opening with the protagonist Petr Clayborne, accused of being a member of an underground resistance, already captured and about to be subject to torturous interrogation by the cruel Captain Hartog. Only Petr remembers nothing, having dosed himself with a memory obliterator drug. Hence the electroshock therapy that can unlock those memories. As the interrogation progresses, Petr reveals more about how he went from propaganda writer to underground recruit, and how he ended up marrying Alda, the daughter of an underground leader – who may also have been a spy for the PCC (and whom Petr may have killed).

Well, Charbonneau is no Orwell, but then nobody is. The story itself is alright, building partly on the suspense of who the spy is, and the increasing revelation that Hartog is not a neutral party when it comes to Petr and Alda. That said, the novel focuses more on the action elements than the context – which is also its main weakness. Charbonneau’s 2240 Earth under the dictatorship under Malthus lacks imagination, particularly in terms of surveillance technology. On the other hand, Charbonneau has a good grasp of how people behave in such societies and tactics that authoritarian governments use to control them. So it’s an okay novel – it just could have been a much better one.

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Everything is under control,

This is dF

Pushing on …

Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A number of books about Hong Kong have popped up in the aftermath of the 2019 protests and the subsequent National Security Law imposed by Beijing on the city to put a stop to protests and dissent in general. Each have their own particular angle – this one by journalist Louisa Lim is a blend of history and personal memoir to explore the question of Hong Kong identity – what does it mean to be a Hongkonger? And more importantly, who gets to decide?

It's a pertinent question – partly because this was one of the driving forces behind the protests, but also because Hong Kong’s official history has always been written by the colonial masters in control of the city, be it the UK or China. Lim’s research shows that both competing narratives obscure the truth that HK has always had its own distinct culture that has become increasingly multi-layered over the years. Interestingly, Lim finds this complex identity embodied in Tsang Tsou-choi, a.k.a. “the King of Kowloon”, a local legend who spent decades covering public spaces with graffiti claiming the British stole his ancestral homeland.

Lim interweaves the history of HK and the story of the King with her own experience as a Eurasian who grew up in HK. All of this feeds into her experience covering the 2019 protests and her struggle to maintain journalistic neutrality as an out-of-control police force unleashed endless tear gas and vicious beatings on protesters, journalists and anyone else in their way. While Lim doesn’t excuse the violence from the protester side, she frames it within the proper context of both an asymmetrical power balance and the inevitable response of people who were understandably angry that their own govt was responding to their concerns about HK’s future with tear gas, beatings and jailing of opposition leaders. More than that, they were angry that they had been robbed of a future they had been promised by Beijing, who in their view had turned out to be just another colonial master who saw HK as an entitled land grab with an inconveniently different culture to be assimilated.

It’s a well-written, powerful book and a welcome correction of the official historical narratives of Hong Kong – especially now that HK’s history textbooks are being rewritten again under recent “patriotic” education reforms to suit the official Beijing narrative and foster a new “national” identity as dictated by the CCP. Lim’s previous book, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, described how Beijing had successfully managed to transform June 4, 1989 into a day in which (at least in China) nothing memorable happened. Lim warns that it could do the same with the 2019 protests (which have already been officially labelled by the HK govt as a violent separatist uprising funded by foreign govts intending to overthrow the CCP) – but she is hopeful the city’s “Lion Rock” spirit as embodied by the King of Kowloon remains, and its people will not forget their history or relinquish their identity so easily.


Seeking God: The Way of St Benedict by Esther de Waal

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was the book for this year’s Lent study, so I can’t say it’s something I would have picked up on my own. But it’s regarded as something of a classic, so there’s that. The book is essentially a reflection on the "Rules of St Benedict" by Esther de Waal, a layperson who was inspired by the ancient Benedictine church buildings in England where she grew up to read the Rules, and found them so meaningful that she wrote this book to explain how they can also apply to modern Christian living without having to actually join a Benedictine monastery.

This is key because Benedict (who was also a layperson) wrote them mainly as a rulebook for the order, which means many of them are specific to monastery life and operations. But the rules themselves can be broken down to cover various pillars of monastic life, from worship, work and study to devotion, authority and wealth. In other words, it’s not the specific rules that matter so much as the practical and spiritual intentions behind them. De Waal focuses on these, and then explains how they’re still relevant to us today.

I confess I didn’t get much out of it in terms of practical application, although I did learn a lot about Benedict and the Benedictine order. I won’t say reading the Rules of St Benedict is a prerequisite, but it might help, since de Waal writes as though you have at least skimmed over them. She also writes in a reflective and somewhat meandering manner, so it’s probably as well we spent five weeks on it in the study group, because it takes a while for everything to gel – at least for me. But that could well be my problem. In fact, it probably is.


The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Second novel from Annalee Newitz (also the second of theirs that I’ve read) that could be summed up as a “alt-history queer feminist riot-grrrl time wars” novel, which is a heck of a subgenre. The basic premise is that time travel has been a thing for hundreds of thousands of years, as the time machines in this case are five geological formations that can be activated to open wormholes along the timeline. You can go back and forth from your present time, but never into the future.

The storyline follows two basic narratives. In 2022, Tess is part of a group of geologists called the Daughters of Harriet in 2022 trying to covertly “edit” the timeline as a group of incels inspired by Anthony Comstock plots to create a future where women are breeder slaves, then destroy the machines to prevent further edits. In 1992, Beth is a riot grrl whose helps her best friend Lizzy cover up her murder of a boy who tried to rape their friend, only to find that Lizzy won’t stop at just one. These become interconnected as it is revealed that Tess is trying to edit more than just the Comstocker plot.

Like any decent time travel story, it’s somewhat convoluted. But I like that Newitz challenges the old simplistic trope of using time travel to change history (e.g. killing baby Hitler prevents the Holocaust) and explores whether collective action would be a more effective tool, as well as the ethics and consequences of editing timelines. It’s also very angry and political, so obviously your experience will depend in part on how you feel about LGBTQ+ rights/representation, racism and sexism, or at least your ability to tolerate other viewpoints on these issues.

Overall, despite a few minor flaws, I found this a better and more believable novel than their debut novel Autonomous, a lot of which comes down to having more likeable characters. While I think Newitz still tends to reduce their villains to amplified stereotypes, there’s less of it here. And in fairness, their portrayals of the Comstockers were lifted directly from incel message boards (and quotes from Comstock himself). Also, their timing is uncanny, in that they imagine a 2022 in which abortion was never legalized in the US – which might have seemed a far-fetched plot point when this came out in 2019, but since Roe v Wade was overturned (in 2022!), it seems almost prophetic.

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Living in the past,

This is dF

Indeed I am.

Strange Doings by R.A. Lafferty

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve seen R.A. Lafferty’s name on the spines of books in plenty of used bookstores for years, but it never occurred to me to actually pick up any of them – mainly because I kept confusing him with R.A. Salvatore, whom I associate mainly with the Forgotten Realms franchise, which doesn’t really interest me. Anyway, like probably a lot of people in recent years, I decided to check Lafferty out after Neil Gaiman kept namedropping him as one of the greatest writers ever. Then of course I couldn’t find anything by him for ages until I finally found this short-story collection in a used bookstore in the US a couple of years ago.

By the second story, I could see what all the hoo-ha was about. Lafferty is generally classified as an SF/F writer, but these 16 stories aren’t really straight SF or fantasy but a blend of playful oddball surrealism, where the wordplay matters more than the story itself. There are a lot of tropes here – mad geniuses, explorers visiting strange planets, aliens invading Earth, sailors seduced by the sea, people whose imaginations become reality – but Lafferty takes none of them seriously and uses them all to make weird things happen, and his characters either roll with it or refuse to accept it.

In that sense, these aren’t short stories in the traditional sense – they’re more like good-natured surreal thought experiments. No wonder Gaiman is a fan. The downside for me is that I ended up not remembering too much of what actually happened in many of these stories, but I had a great time while I was there. Lafferty’s dialogue alone is a whimsical delight and well worth the price of admission. I’ll definitely be seeking out more of his work.


The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve only read James Baldwin once before, but Go Tell It on the Mountain made me want to read more, and this novella-length essay presented my first opportunity to do so. Ostensibly it’s about the Atlanta Murders, in which 28 black children, adolescents and adults were murdered between 1979 and 1981. Wayne Williams (also black) was convicted for murders (both adults), and the rest have been attributed to him, although no proof ever emerged to confirm this. Baldwin was asked by Playboy editor Walter Lowe to cover the trial, and so he did.

Which is why the first thing to mention is that it helps if you already know the basic details of the case, because Baldwin – perhaps unsurprisingly – approached this as a literary social critique, not a straight journalism piece. Consequently, his interest lies not so much in the case itself but the overall context in which it was happening – not only America’s racist history in general, but the context of Atlanta itself, a self-styled cosmopolitan city of the “New South” trying to show it was separate from the rest of Georgia in terms of racial progress – yet “the city too busy to hate”, even with a black mayor, a black police commissioner and black judges, still found itself beholden to the same systemic racism that plagues all of America.

That alone makes it worth reading in these days of #BlackLivesMatter and the resurgence of white supremacy, where a common tactic is to claim black-on-black crime is the bigger problem and that the police can’t be racist when there are black officers on the force. The reality is more complex, and here’s Baldwin explaining why all the way back in 1985 (and he wasn’t the first). Less tangentially, Baldwin reflects the feelings of many that the case against Williams wasn’t a slam-dunk, and that Williams was unfairly credited for the other murders – in a sense, just another victim of injustice (though Baldwin never flat-out proclaims Williams’ innocence).

People expecting a straight true-crime book may be frustrated with Baldwin’s ponderous, fragmented and meandering prose (and I’ll admit even I found it a bit frustrating at times). Nonetheless, it was a provocative read in 1985, and is no less provocative now. So it’ll probably be banned from Florida libraries soon (if it hasn’t been already), is what I'm saying.

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Same as it ever was,

This is dF

And that wraps up my reading activities for 2022.

If you want to see my whole year in books summed up in a Goodreads infographic (kinda like Spotify Wrapped, only more accurate and not as annoying), it’s right here.

Also, I hereby enclose proof that I (barely) completed my Goodreads Reading Challenge for 2022. Hooray for me.

Otherwise, here’s the last of the book reviews for the year.

101 President Jokes by Melvin A. Berger

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Well, look, sometimes you need a fast read to meet your Goodreads Reading Challenge quota. And who doesn’t love a good President joke? That said, this book contains almost none of them. It’s mainly a collection of anecdotes of US presidents allegedly saying humorous things, or allegedly having humorous encounters. There’s also a clever dodge where the joke is not about a president at all but allegedly one of his favorite jokes. I’m reasonably sure most of these are just made up, although the ones with Calvin Coolidge are probably real (they’re also the funniest jokes here).

It's a kids book from Scholastic, so I can’t be too hard on it. On the other hand, kids deserve better political humor. Also, it’s a shame that out of 101 jokes, they couldn’t gin up at least one joke for every president – the book covers Washington up to Bill Clinton (the current POTUS at the time of publication), but some (Lincoln, JFK, Reagan, Coolidge) get multiple jokes while a number of presidents are left out completely. I mean sure, maybe Zachary Taylor wasn’t a funny guy, but most of these aren’t true anyway, so why not make something up? Many are also non-specific to the POTUS in question – you could literally plug in any president’s name without damaging the joke.

Still, I suppose one interesting thing about it is that the book shows that making fun of presidents is a time-honored tradition and a comedy staple that people used to take for granted before some people decided that comedians making jokes about their president were biased, unfair and unpatriotic. You know, this review is a lot longer than I thought it would be. It probably took me longer to write this than to read the book. Which just goes to show. Anyway, it got me one book closer to completing my Goodreads Challenge – that’s the important thing.


Stranger at Home by Leigh Brackett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Continuing my exploration of the works of Leigh Brackett, this is my first time reading something by her that isn’t SF – she also wrote crime and westerns. This is the former, and it’s a bit of an odd duck in that it was ghostwritten in 1946 for George Sanders, a popular British actor at the time who starred in The Falcon movies as the titular gentleman detective (he also played The Saint, for what it’s worth). For some reason, Sanders collaborated with Craig Rice to write a detective novel (Crime On My Hands), which featured Sanders as basically himself, only solving an actual murder case. I guess it was a success, because Brackett was hired to write the second one, which has since been republished under her name, so of course I had to try it.

The set-up is classic noir – Michael Vickers, presumed dead four years ago whilst in Mexico with three friends, turns up at his house unannounced during a big party. The next morning, one of the guests – Harry Bryce, who was one of the three friends with Vickers in Mexico – turns up dead. But Vickers isn’t the only one with a motive, and everyone has their own secrets, including Vickers’ wife Angie. While police detective Joe Trehearne tries to figure out who killed Bryce, Vickers tries to figure out who tried to kill him in Mexico – not least because they seems keen to finish the job now that he’s back.

The novel starts out a bit surreal, with disjointed dialogue and strange character reactions as Vickers makes his presence known to them – as if Vickers feels out of place returning home after so long (having suffered from amnesia for most of those four years). It’s only in the second half of the book that everything starts to gel, yet the first half turns out to be key to the climax. Anyway, it’s by no means a classic of the genre, but it’s pretty good for what it is, and it’s nice that Brackett is now getting recognition for it. Bonus points for Brackett declining to stick to the established formula – where the first Sanders novel was a standard first-person whodunit, Brackett delivered a gritty surreal noir thriller. Ace!


Noir by Christopher Moore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In which comic novelist Christopher Moore takes on the pulp noir genre as only he can – which is to say, not seriously, and with some inevitable weirdness. Set in 1947 San Francisco, the story follows Sammy “Two Toes” Tiffin, a bartender at Sal’s Saloon who grifts in his spare time, and whose world is turned upside down by a dame named Stilton, a.k.a. The Cheese. She is of course in distress, and when Sammy falls for her, trouble inevitably follows.

This being Moore, the story kind of meanders about for the first half of the book before finally coalescing into a discernible plot. However, this being Moore, there’s a lot to enjoy and laugh at while you’re waiting for the story to kick in – from Sammy’s pursuit of Stilton to his schemes with pal Eddie Moo Shoes, including one involving a black mamba snake that naturally goes wildly wrong. There’s also female drag queens, a secret meeting of the Bohemian Club, a General based in Roswell, NM, and (of course) men in black. And you get kind of a scenic tour of 1947 Frisco while you’re at it.

It's all good fun, with Moore not so much satirizing the noir genre as using it as a framework for the characters, setting and story – Moore describes it as “perky noir”, which is about right. He captures some of the elements of noir (especially the dialogue) without lapsing into pastiche, and he serves up a reasonably entertaining cast of characters to deliver the comedy. Not everything works, but most of it does.


The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This 1960 novella is, among other things, a masterclass in classic SF book marketing. The cover blurb describes it as a “novel of tomorrow” set on a future Earth “when one vast and stratified society threatens all who fail to conform”. That kind of thing is guaranteed to make non-conformists like me pick it up. And while the cover blurb isn’t wrong, it’s misleading in the sense that most of the novella doesn’t take place on Earth, but Omega, a planet that is basically a penal colony run by the prisoners. Everyone is sentenced for life – once you’re on Omega, there is no escape.

The story starts with a man who wakes up in a room with his memory wiped – he doesn’t know who or where he is or why he’s there. He’s soon told that he’s Will Barrent, he was convicted of murder and he’s on his way to Omega to serve his sentence in the city of Tetrahyde. On Omega, there is rule of law, but as this is a society run by criminals, the law enables ritualized murder. Your chances of survival depend on your status. As Barrent rises in status, the authorities seem more determined to try and kill him. When he starts to doubt whether he really killed anyone in the first place, his only hope lies in getting back to Earth to find out the truth.

At face value it sounds like a typical prison-planet trope, complete with combat trials, breakouts, manhunts, etc. But Sheckley uses those tropes for satirical purposes by imagining how a city run by criminals might operate (i.e. residents are required to worship Evil and can be arrested for not being a drug addict, etc), and how far societies will go to rid themselves of radicals and non-conformists in the name of peace and stability. I can’t say much more without spoiling it, but it’s a well-paced SF adventure with a wry sense of humor and an unexpected climax.

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We gotta get out of this place,

This is dF

One of these is seasonal. The other is not. But the seasonal one is coincidence, so like it matters.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been meaning to try Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series, but haven’t had a chance to get copy of the first book, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Meanwhile, I came across this novella and thought maybe this was as good a place to start with Chambers as any. It’s also my first time reading solarpunk, an emerging subgenre which involves futures that are generally optimistic, if not utopian. In this case, the action takes place on Panga, an Earth-like moon where humans have achieved an equilibrium with nature after an Industrial Age that went wrong. Part of that history involved factory robots that achieved sentience and went on strike. The humans offered them citizenship – instead they politely chose exile and vanished into the wilderness.

A few centuries later, Sibling Dex is following their calling as a Tea Monk, which involves traveling from village to village, and serving tea to people as they tell Dex their problems. Dex enjoys the work, but something is missing, though they don’t know what. Dex decides to travel to an abandoned hermitage in the middle of the wild. In the process, they become the first human in hundreds of years to encounter a robot: Mosscap, an emissary tasked by the robot community to re-establish contact with humans, find out what they need, and how the robots might help. From there, the story is basically a road trip during which Dex and Mosscap discuss the basic question "What do humans need?" – which is of course tricky since even Dex has no idea what they personally need.

So the story mostly involves two beings exploring the similarities and differences between them, and why so many humans struggle to be satisfied even in a society that is more or less harmonious. There’s no antagonist (apart from Dex’s own mind and the wilderness) – just a quest for meaning. Which may put off readers who expect SF to have at least some action in it. And yet there’s something charming and cozy about it, thanks in part to Dex and Mosscap being two strikingly relatable characters. And in this increasingly insane and polarized world, charming and cozy is kind of refreshing. To sum up, if the philosophical parts of the Matrix films bored you senseless (and/or the use of nonbinary pronouns sends you into an anti-woke conniption fit), this possibly will too. If (like me) you thought those were the most interesting parts of the films, you may get something out of this.


Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this in high school, mainly because of the 1983 Disney film. It was my first time reading Bradbury, and it may not have been the best introduction. Bradbury’s ultra-lyrical prose threw me, and I found it hard to follow. I’ve read and enjoyed a lot of Bradbury since then, and as I’ve been re-reading some of his stuff, I decided I might as well give this one another go to see if I’ve matured enough to appreciate it.

In small-town Illinois, a week before Halloween, a mysterious carnival called Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show arrives in the middle of the night. Two 7th graders – Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade – witness its strange arrival. The next day, they visit the carnival and notice its effect on the older people in town, including Will’s father Charles. When Will and Jim discover the carnival’s sinister secret, they are pursued by the proprietor Mr Dark, who makes them an offer that Jim is more than tempted to accept.

This time around, I still found Bradbury’s lyrical storytelling a bit offputting at first, especially in terms of the dialogue. But as I went on, I started reading it more as a nightmare dreamscape rather than a straight horror story, and it works a lot better that way – especially the ending, which is otherwise too corny, if not contrived. I also appreciate that Bradbury is working on several levels here – small-town Americana nostalgia, the dark allure of carnival freaks, the price of impossible wishes granted, and our obsession with age, whether it’s old people wanting to reclaim youth or young people in a hurry to grow up. So it’s a lot better than I remember it.

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Nightmare alley,

This is dF

Indeed I am. Really.

Alpha Centauri or Die! by Leigh Brackett

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Continuing my exploration of the works of Leigh Brackett, this 1963 novel combines two short stories Brackett wrote for Planet Stories in the mid-1950s. The premise: in the far future, interstellar travel is possible, but the solar government has forbidden humans from flying their own ships anywhere in space – only robot-controlled ships are allowed. This gets up the nose of former space pilot Kirby, who joins an underground plot on Mars to refit an old freighter into a space ark, fly it to an uninhabited Earth-like planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, escape the regime and start a new colony – only the planet isn’t as uninhabited as they think.

Whether intentional or not, Brackett is channelling Heinlein here – not just in terms of interstellar space adventure, but also the template of the hard-headed libertarian protagonist defying unreasonable govt authority to do whatever the hell he wants to do, if only because the govt is telling him not to do it. The twist is Kirby’s obsession with flying to the stars has a cost that other people have to pay, from the families onboard to his telepathic Martian wife Shari. Far from being a frontier hero, Kirby comes across as a stubborn jackass who can’t admit when he’s wrong, even if he knows full well that he is.

All of which is interesting. However, the prose feels rushed, the dialog clunky and the characters underdeveloped – particularly Shari, who plays an important role in the story but is essentially written as supportive wife – her Martian heritage simplified down to “she’s a telepath”, with no real explanation. Maybe that’s the product of 50s magazine editing, or the fact that this is essentially two unrelated short stories jammed together. There’s a decent story here, but it may require more time and space to tell it than Brackett perhaps had at the time. Anyway, it’s not terrible, and I prefer this to her planetary romance stuff, but Brackett has done far better work.


The Mechanical Messiah and Other Marvels of the Modern Age: A Novel by Robert Rankin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is Rankin’s second instalment in his revisionist steampunk series, in which the Martian invasion in The War Of The Worlds actually happened, after which Charles Babbage and Nikola Tesla reverse-engineered Martian technology, the British Empire expanded to Mars, and Victorian London has become a technologically advanced steampunk city with ray guns, spaceships, wireless electricity and things of that nature generally. There’s also a talking monkey named Darwin, who is the only character from the first book (The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions) to appear here.

In this one, Colonel Katterfelto – a veteran of the Martian war – is down on his luck due to a failed attempt to build a Mechanical Messiah, which he believes will bring about a Utopian society on Earth. He is keen to make a second attempt, but success hinges on taking a party of Jovian tourists on a game-hunting safari on Venus, where people are prohibited from landing. Meanwhile, private detective Cameron Bell – the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, despite bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mr Pickwick – is attempting to find out who is disintegrating top-billed acts at the Electric Alhambra Music Hall onstage – and why his acquaintance Aleister Crowley desperately wants to acquire the Ring of Moses. Bell must also protect Alice Lovell, a music hall artist who conducts a team of acrobatic kiwi birds – and has been through the looking glass, if you see what I’m saying.

If that sounds like a lot, well, it is. It’s a very busy novel even by Rankin standards, and it takes awhile for everything to more or less cohere. But then Rankin specializes in keeping the reader (hopefully) entertained with running gags, lyrical description and general weirdness while the story percolates in the background somewhere. So it’s entertaining, if you like that sort of thing – which I generally do. That said, I did feel Rankin overdoes it a little here, jamming in as many ideas and Victorian pop culture references as he can, so it feels a bit bloated and unfocused at times. On the other hand, he does seem to enjoy himself.

(FUN FACT: Someone actually did try to build a Mechanical Messiah in the 1850s in hopes of creating a Utopian paradise – you can read about it here. Be advised that Rankin’s version bears little resemblance beyond the name.)


Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today by Anna Feigenbaum

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was sort of an impulse buy at a local indie bookstore (Bleak House Books, which closed last year), but it was relevant to my interests, as police use of tear gas was a hot topic during the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, during which police fired roughly 16,000 rounds of tear gas in a six-month period. There was quite a bit of debate about it at the time – both in terms of improper and indiscriminate usage (frequently violating the police’s own operational guidelines) and the possible health consequences of firing that much gas, as well as the fact that tear gas is literally banned by the Geneva Convention in warfare, so why do the police get to throw it around?

This book tracks the origins of tear gas during World War 1; how it was commercialized as a “less lethal” tool for dealing with protests (“Look, it’s either this or shoot them, right? Which would you prefer?”); how proponents sold the narrative that tear gas was generally harmless (despite being banned in war as too inhumane); how it became a huge business; how its use by police forces worldwide has become normalized; and how increasing police militarization has led to tear gas being frequently misused as a way to punish peaceful protesters and escalate violence rather than simply getting crowds to disperse.

Anna Feigenbaum isn’t a neutral observer here – the book has a political and moral POV, and what you make of this will likely depend on where your own sympathies lie. But it’s not wrong either – it’s a concise and well-researched history of how we got here, and offers some suggestions on what we might do about it. But then I’m not exactly neutral either (and not just because I've experienced CS gas first-hand and can assure you it's a form of torture). This book was published before the 2019 HK protests, but tear-gas / police brutality anecdotes from 2019 would fit in seamlessly here. Which goes to show that what happened in HK is actually normal in other parts of the world. When the HK govt justified its actions by saying the police conformed to international policing standards, turns out they were right – just not in a good way.

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I can’t breathe,

This is dF

Steady as she goes, now.

Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Continuing my quest to sample science fiction from outside the English-speaking world, I came across this in a local indie bookstore. I’d never heard of Argentinian author Angélica Gorodischer before – she’s had a long and successful career, but this 1979 book is only the second of her novels to be translated into English. The blurb sounded interesting enough – Trafalgar Medrano is a space-faring businessman who tells friends over coffee (lots of it) about his travels to other planets and the adventures and mishaps he gets into.

The twist is that it’s not set in the future or in some space bar somewhere in the galaxy. Trafalgar lives in the contemporary world where interstellar space travel is not a thing. Yet he talks about flying his “clunker” to one world after another as if this is a perfectly ordinary thing to be doing. He tells tall tales about the planets and societies he encounters – on one planet, the dead don’t stay dead; on another, timelines shift back and forth daily. Another planet resemble Earth circa 1492, complete with Queen Isabella and Christopher Columbus. Etc. So less sci-fi and more thought-experiment space fantasy.

What really stands out is that the people he tells his stories to don’t question whether the stories are true – they don’t necessarily believe them either, but they seem happy to play along and indulge him, if only to see whatever new wild story he comes up with the next time they meet. And that might be what makes this more or less work. Trafalgar is a well-drawn character who grew on me as I kept reading, so I could see how his friends could roll with it rather than calling him out. Some stories are better than others, but overall it’s an interesting variation on the space bar / intergalactic tourism trope.


Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large by Walter Mosley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve never read Walter Mosley before, although I’ve been meaning to – it’s just that he’s one of those authors who is prolific and successful enough that I don’t feel any sense of urgency because at least some of his stuff is always in print. Also, with that many books to choose from, it’s hard to know where to start. So when Warren Ellis recommended this novella in his newsletter, I figured it was as good a starting point as any. It’s also something of an outlier in his portfolio – Archibald Lawless was a minor character in Mosley’s Trouble Is What I Do, but one Mosley apparently found interesting enough to devote a standalone story to.

That said, the central narrator is Felix Orlean, a New York journalism student in need of a job to cover his rent. He answers an ad in the paper for a “scribe” and meets Archibald Lawless, who is indeed an Anarchist At Large, a radical detective who “walks the line between chaos and the man”. Which more or less means he seeks justice in America’s corrupt capitalist system that exploits the weak to enrich the corrupt and powerful. Felix’s initial duties involve reading the newspapers, organizing Lawless’ archive and tracking down four people to make sure they are where they’re supposed to be. One ends up killed and Felix is the suspect.

It sounds a fairly straightforward set-up, but it’s actually a lot weirder than that. Apart from being a riff on the Holmes/Watson template, the story has a surreal quality to it. Lawless is arguably insane, but he’s well connected, there’s always a car or boat waiting for him to take him where he needs to go, and as the story goes on it becomes more clear that at as mad as he is, he’s not living in a delusional fantasy world either. It’s an odd, complex little book with a mysteriously compelling title character, and apart from a couple of tangents that seem gratuitous, I enjoyed reading it. Mosley is definitely going to find his way on my “to read” list again.

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At large,

This is dF

Indeed I am.

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve read and enjoyed Nnedi Okorafor’s Africanfuturist novels before, but this is my first time reading one her Africanjuju novels, as well as one of her YA novels. (Note for the uninitiated: Africanfuturism and Africanjuju are the Africa-centric equivalent of SF and fantasy.) This is the first instalment of her Nsibidi Scripts trilogy, which tells the tale of Sunny Nwazue, a 12-year-old girl in Nigeria who is an outsider in every respect – American-born and a black albino (hint: the term “akata” is not a nice one). She’s also had a vision about the end of the world. She is befriended by classmate Orlu and his friend Chichi, who are “Leopard People” (a.k.a. people with magical abilities), and who show Sunny that she also has magical powers.

Because Sunny is a “free agent” (i.e. a Leopard Person who doesn’t come from at least one pure Leopard spiritline), she must be taught how to understand and use her powers. Orlu and Chichi bring her to their teacher Anatov in the secret neighborhood of Leopard Knocks. They are eventually joined by another American-born teenager named Sasha. The story mainly focuses on Sunny learning about the magic world of the Leopard People and her place in it, while in the background a serial killer known as Black Hat Otokoto is targeting children.

Akata Witch gets a lot of comparisons to Harry Potter, although mainly by people who don’t know that there were other books written about young people finding out they’re wizards and going to magic school long before JK Rowling showed up. Like other Okorafor stories, it’s well told, well-paced, and rich in fascinating West African folklore. On the downside, it employs a couple of fantasy tropes I’ve never cared for: (1) the hotheaded protagonist who has to learn things the hard way, and (2) adults giving young people magic lessons and tasks that are potentially lethal, which I’ve never found convincing as a plot device. But then I’m resistant to the fantasy genre in general, and storywise, I found this less compelling than Okorafor’s Africanfuturism tales, so I probably won’t continue this series anytime soon. Still, there’s a lot to like here, so if you dig fantasy, I’d definitely recommend this.


Extinction by Kazuaki Takano

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Also published as Genocide of One (and why Mulholland changed the title I can only guess), this is Kazuaki Takano’s first novel to be translated into English, and I picked it up mainly because the bride read the Chinese translation and said it was pretty good. And the book-jacket synopsis is a pretty good hook: The US government discovers the emergence of an extinction-level threat in the heart of the Congo. Mercenary Jonathan Yeager is hired to lead a team into the DRC to take out the threat – only to discover that the extinction-level threat is a three-year-old child named Akili, an evolved human who possesses superhuman intelligence, and whose race could potentially do to Homo Sapiens what we did to the Neanderthals.

Meanwhile, Japanese grad student Kento Koga gets a message from his recently deceased father that leads him to a secret lab where his father wants him to synthesize a drug that can cure a deadly and incurable form of lung sclerosis – which Yeager’s young son just happens to be dying from. Koga gets to work and finds himself chased by the police and a mysterious woman. Back in DC, Arthur Rubens, an analyst at the Schneider Institute (which produced a report in the 70s that predicted a major leap in human evolution could emerge as a threat to non-evolved humanity) who is advising the operation to assassinate Akili, is trying to sabotage the mission from the inside.

In some ways this is classic potboiler stuff, with lots of tech-science info dumps, plot twists, suspense and occasionally implausible technology. And while the US reaction to Akili’s existence seems a little extreme, Takano’s ace in the hole is that US President Burns is a very thinly disguised Bush 43 who also invaded Iraq on false pretences and renditions brown people to secret facilities to torture them – Takano reckons such an admin would have no moral qualms in murdering a three-year-old to preserve American power. He also has strong feelings about child soldiers in African countries (including the DRC), and the horrors of warfare in general. Consequently, some of the violence is way too graphic for my taste. Some animals don’t fare well either, which is also off-putting for me. That aside, it’s a page-turning adventure as good as anything Michael Crichton ever did.

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The evolution will not be televised,

This is dF

Well that’s quite a dent in the “to-read” pile, isn’t it?

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having been pleasantly surprised by the first instalment of the Murderbot Diaries (All Systems Red), I was keen to move on to the next novella in the series, which is this one right here. Artificial Condition more or less takes up where the first left off – the SecUnit cyborg known as Murderbot is now under contract to the leader of his last expedition, who intends to bring it to her home base where it can legally live autonomously. Which is a problem because Murderbot is not very comfortable with humans – or with its past history, in which it hacked the governor module that controls it and murdered 57 humans on the mining facility of RaviHyral where it was contracted prior to the story in the first book.

The thing is, it doesn't remember why it did this, and decides to abscond to RaviHyral, hoping that returning to the scene of the crime will provide some answers. As SecUnits aren’t allowed to just wander around, it disguises itself as an augmented human and stows away on a transport ship run by an AI bot named ART, which whom it forms a reluctant alliance, not least because ART knows what it is. Getting into RaviHyral requires it to pose as a security consultant and get someone to hire it for a job – which in this case turns out to be a trio of very naïve scientists who whose work has been stolen by their now-former employer.

Like the previous novel, the storyline follows the high-stakes corporate espionage template, but again, the secret is in how you tell it, and the characters you deploy to that end. Murderbot continues to be drawn reluctantly out of its shell as it adjusts to being a sentient cyborg with free will, and having to deal with humans on emotional levels it’s clearly uncomfortable with. Also, this instalment expands nicely on the world-building and Murderbot’s past, and offers some new characters that are also fleshed out nicely. And while it’s becoming apparent that Wells is taking an episodic approach to what appears to be one long story arc, she does it so well that makes me want to read the next one. So, you know, mischief managed.

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The Hounds of Skaith by Leigh Brackett

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is the second of Leigh Brackett’s Skaith trilogy in which she brought back her legendary planetary-romance action hero, Eric John Stark, who is essentially a hybrid of John Carter and Tarzan. Skaith is a backwater planet where the Galactic Union has opened a starport for trade purposes. But this has also upset the balance of power for the local rulers, the Lords Protector – the tribe of Irnan wants to emigrate to the stars, partly to escape the oppressive rule of the Wandsmen (who enforce the rule of the Lords Protector), and partly because Skaith’s sun is dying.

In the first book, Stark travels to Skaith to rescue his foster father Simon Ashton, who was kidnapped by the Wandsmen whilst on a diplomatic mission there. This one takes up right where the first book left off as Stark – who is now in command of the Northhounds (the giant telepathic dogs who guard the Citadel of the Lords Protector) – now has two more tasks: rescue his love interest (the seer Gerrith) who was captured by the Wandsmen in the previous episode, and get himself and Ashton back to the starport in Skeg before the Wandsmen shut it down forever. For some reason, accomplishing both requires him to organize every desert tribe and mutant race in his path into an army to liberate Irnan and overthrow the Wandsmen once and for all – and by “organize” I mean “conquer them and take command”.

Consequently, much of the book is comprised of major battle scenes – great if you like that sort of thing, tedious if you don’t. I’m in the latter camp. Also, the battles seem gratuitous, as surely Stark could have found a way to get to the starport without literally starting a war everywhere he goes. So I didn't get as much out of this as I did the first one – and as I said before, this brand of sci-fi (basically Conan in space) was never quite my thing to begin with. And yet, Brackett writes this stuff better than most, and the bits where there isn’t a major battle going on are often entertaining – especially the parts where Brackett makes clear that while Stark is the hero of the tale, most of the people he uses to accomplish his goal don’t see him that way.


Africanfuturism: An Anthology by Wole Talabi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a free ebook anthology from literary magazine Brittle Paper showcasing the emerging sci-fi subgenre of “Africanfuturism”, a term coined by author Nnedi Okorafor mainly to describe her own work as distinct from “Afrofuturism”, but also to describe similar works by other authors (put simply, the latter focuses on the Black diaspora outside of Africa, whereas Africanfuturism is specifically rooted in African cultures, comes from a specifically African POV, and specifically takes place in the future – you can read her explanation of Africanfuturism here, but it’s also included in this book). Edited by Nigerian writer and editor Wole Talabi, this collection features original short stories from eight authors that illustrate the Africanfuturism concept.

T.L. Huchu’s “Egoli” and Okorafor’s “Sunrise” focus on the sometimes clashing impact of advanced technologies on local culture, while Dilman Dila’s “Yat Madit” looks at how technology could prevent political corruption (and how determined politicians would try to find workarounds). Rafeeat Aliyu’s “Fruit of the Calabash” deals with the hazards of running a private ectogenesis lab of artificial wombs to counter a plague of infertility. Tlotlo Tsamaase’s “Behind Our Irises” is corporate-driven body horror. Derek Lubangakene’s “Fort Kwame” involves a failed offworld rebellion. Mazi Nwonwu’s “Rainmaker” takes place on a planet plagued by dust storms. And Mame Bougouma Diene’s “Lekki Lekki” features “soul engines” installed in giant trees.

Like with any anthology, there are hits and misses, but even the few misses here are pretty good and worth reading. What’s particularly noteworthy is the rich variety of stories here. Sure, plenty of anthologies do that, but it’s particularly significant here because while Africanfuturism might be a narrowly defined subgenre, there’s a lot of room to play within those parameters. That’s because Africa itself is not one country with a monolithic culture, but rather a collection of countries with a wide spectrum of cultures and traditions, each of which inevitably approach SF in its own way. And that’s a very good thing. Highly recommended (and did I mention it’s free?).


Forever and a Death by Donald E. Westlake

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This posthumous novel is a novelty item in that its genesis involved Westlake being hired in 1995 to write a draft screenplay for the next James Bond film due in 1997 to follow up Goldeneye. He wrote two treatments, both revolving around the idea of a supervillain plotting to steal gold from Hong Kong and destroy the city to cover his tracks. Westlake reportedly liked the idea of a Bond movie set amidst the Hong Kong handover from the UK to China coming out the same year the event happened in real life. The problem was that, at the time, some people were predicting the handover would involve PLA tanks rolling through the streets killing whatever resistance might manifest. Consequently, the Bond producers didn't want to release an expensive blockbuster franchise film set during a real, contemporary event that might turn bloody and horrifying. (They also didn’t want to make another Bond film that China would ban, which happened with Goldeneye.) Westlake ran with the idea and reworked it into this novel, although it should be stated up front this is not a Bond novel, or even a spy-action-hero novel.

The central plot involves Richard Curtis, an American property developer who made a fortune in Hong Kong until he was kicked out by mainland authorities after the handover, and is now planning his revenge (see above). So far so Bond, but Westlake elected to replace the Bond figure with a group of normal non-action people: Jerry Dietrich, an environmental activist with a personal vendetta against Curtis; Kim Baldur, another environmental activist who Curtis wants killed in a way that pins it on Dietrich; and George Manville, his lead engineer who unwittingly designed the technology central to Curtis’ revenge plan and discovers the plot to kill Baldur. Things escalate from there as Manville, Baldur and Dietrich try to figure out what Curtis is up to and stop him.

It mostly works, although the lack of a central protagonist puts Curtis at the center of the novel. That said, this also results in (1) an overlong narrative that rambles at times, and (2) a whole lot of character exposition bunched up at the start rather than spread more evenly as Westlake typically does, so it takes a while for the story to kick into gear. Also, the HK parts haven't aged well in terms of historical accuracy. And as someone who has lived in HK for 25 years (and has made dozens of trips to Singapore during that time), it’s pretty obvious to me that Westlake had never been to either Hong Kong or Singapore, though he did do quite a bit of research. All of which may be why Westlake never had it published – perhaps he wasn’t happy with the results or thought it needed more work. Anyway, it’s a decent story, but at the end of the day I found it more of a curiosity than an essential read.

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Neither shaken nor stirred,

This is dF

Another year, another book-reading marathon. Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I tried Robert Sheckley once way back in the mid-90s with Options, and I remember being somewhat entertained but not particularly inspired to try more of his work. But recently he’s been namedropped by the kind of people whose opinions I respect, and when one of them noted that this book (now back in print) was an accidental precursor to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, well, I had to try it out, didn’t I?

The premise: present-day earthman Thomas Carmody is notified that he has won the Intergalactic Sweepstakes (despite being unaware that there was such a thing), and is whisked away from Earth to Galactic Centre via a space-time portal to claim his prize. The problem is that Galactic Centre can only return him to Earth if he can tell them its exact coordinates in space as well as time (and which timeline) – which of course he can’t. As Carmody travels from one world to another trying to find someone who can help him get home, he encounters incompetent bureaucrats, disenchanted demi-gods, talking dinosaurs, annoying sentient cities and a mysterious predator out to kill him, among other things.

I kind of get the H2G2 comparisons (and for the record, Douglas Adams once said he wasn’t aware of the novel until he’d already written the first H2G2 book, but agreed there were some uncanny parallels), but for me the resemblance is superficial – Dimension of Miracles is more free-wheeling and absurdist, for one thing. It’s also not quite as good in terms of characterization – there’s not much to Carmody, who serves as an existential straight man for everyone else. That said, it’s delightfully weird, fun and entertaining.


Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now by Walter Brueggemann

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I enjoyed Walter Brueggemann’s Out of Babylon, and when I came across this, the title alone was a great hook – the idea of the Sabbath as a form of resistance to the never-ending demands of late-stage capitalism. Brueggemann’s basic thesis is that the Fourth Commandment is not only more significant than it looks, it’s also arguably the centerpiece of the list – a bridge between Commandments 1 to 3 and 5 to 10. The book offers a concise exploration into just why God felt it necessary to stick that particular commandment in the list in the first place.

Without giving too much away, it’s not simply to celebrate the event of God “resting” on Day 7 of creation – it’s largely to do with the context of the Exodus from Egypt where the Hebrews were enslaved for 400 years, but it’s also a command to resist any economic system that demands endless non-stop work and requires immediate and ever increasing consumption. Brueggemann argues that the Sabbath offers an alternate system that in turn creates a society better enabled to fulfil God’s other commands – especially Jesus’ “first and greatest” commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.

It’s a short and interesting take, and one I am of course rather sympathetic to. Brueggemann covers a lot of bases, and makes a good case. That said, this is more of a Bible study exercise than a manifesto, and doesn't offer any concrete steps to implement this on a personal or policy level. Then again, there’s really only one step: take one day off a week and relax. You can tell your boss it’s for religious reasons.


Fiasco by Stanisław Lem

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is Stanislaw Lem’s final novel, though he continued to write non-fiction long after this was published in 1986. It’s also the last of his pessimistic “first contact” novels, though this isn’t obvious at first, as the first part of the story involves Parvis, an astronaut who is frozen on Titan after an accident during a mission to find the missing astronaut Pirx. Either he or Pirx (no one knows) is revived over a hundred years later by a passing expedition – which, it later transpires, is on its way to establish contact with an alien race on the distant planet Quinta. Just one problem: the Quintans don’t seem to want contact.

Much the novel’s content is dedicated to pages and pages of philosophical and ethical musings, as well as dense hard SF explaining how they use black holes to enable faster-than-light travel, and the various other technologies at their disposal. Buried under all of that somewhere is the actual storyline, in which attempts to force the Quintans to talk to them escalate into increasingly insane and cataclysmic violence. Hence Lem’s pessimistic tone, as his take is basically that if humans went to all that effort to travel to a distant planet to offer our hand in friendship, and they ignored us, we probably wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Which is kind of an extreme take, but then satire sometimes is. And I can't say he's totally wrong. What’s also interesting to me is Lem’s reversal of the first-contact trope in which humans are the hostile aliens arriving unannounced and how the locals might react to us. It also covers (for Lem) familiar ground in terms of the problems of communicating with a civilization we know nothing about, and our tendency to assume that alien races think and behave like we do. All of which is great. The main problem with Fiasco (and it's a big one) is that Lem drowns the interesting parts of the story in way too much science – unless that’s what you’re here for, in which case this may work better for you than it did for me.

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Talk to me,

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