SUMMER SCI-FI READING ROUNDUP 2019

The following mini-reviews cover the most memorable reads for me over the last summer (2019):

Allan's previous effort, The Rift, has made me a permanent fan of this author, who I've come to worship as a writer. Persistent attention to emotion and relationships amidst the unusual, the abnormal, and the strange put Allan in a category of her own. There's an odd little science fiction story embedded into this narrative close to the end, and we have a novel-within-a-novel structure that I liked more than I thought I would. This summer I went to Cornwall, all the way to Land's End, so the latter parts of this story, where the Dollmaker makes his way to see his developing love interest, resonated particularly well for me, especially the description of the otherworldly landscapes of the mining areas.

I've been prone to do what many Canadians do quite often, namely, diss Atwood for no particularly good reason. We are especially harsh on Atwood probably because she makes such an easy target, always popping up everywhere seeming to claim some kind of hegemonic status in the business of representing Canada's voice on the world literary stage.  But her voice is very much her own and that is nowhere more apparent than here. It might be easy, as Atwood herself so ironically demonstrates herself with a cameo in the TV series The Handmaid's Tale, to confuse this author with one of her austere martinet Aunts whose jokes are so very dry, and whose descriptions of life in Gilead could have been lifted from the recent reports of the Commissions into Residential Schooling in Canada.  Apparently the ever-perceptive and wily Atwood is aware of this too: the book ends with an academic conference being led by some very present-day sounding First Nations academics leading a 'Gilead Studies' conference discussion. This is one of Atwood's best works but then I've only really engaged with a few of them myself.  Judge for yourself by reading this (I would argue necessary) work.

I'm a bit behind here as this book came out a couple of years ago, and I was not expecting to find the Dick resonances in this work to be so strong. But there it is: you have a biomedical novum about reproductive politics embedded in a parsimoniously strong narrative line with characters you can really care about and grow to love / hate. The prolific father figure is especially compelling and unlikeable, as we are projected into an intergenerational utopia/nightmare of reproductive choice in which individuals can choose any number of parental options: from families of two with only one true parent of offspring; to those with three or more genetic parental progenitors and more, this is a book to make you both think and feel deeply.

2019 is my #YearOfReadingLeGuin and this has been my favourite volume so far, partly because I was quite familiar with a lot of the Library of America's vol. 1 in the set.  This, volume 2, had some new ones for me, the most thrilling of which has to be The Word For World is Forest, the novella upon which Avatar is allegedly based (in fact this is stated in the notes to this book). Le Guin herself comments upon this fact noting how her story was turned around in exactly a way she feared it might. And I can see why she was upset: the indigenous hegemony over their planet/homeland/forest (Athshe) is particularly strongly asserted here, while Davidson is a pathological/psychotic figure in a much stronger way than the movie was willing to assert. This is a much more political work than its cinematic counterpart, and it imparts an urgency into the reader about our own plights on Earth.  Five Ways to Forgiveness is absolutely brutal.

I liked this book a lot, and found it very well written, engaging, and easy to read. It presents a speculative trajectory without overcomplicating or overestimating the power of present technologies into the future. Its one potentially grievous prediction revolves around the idea that the internet might at some future date 'go down' or fail in a spectacular, catastrophic, complete, and irreversible way well before advance modern society has begun to decay or disappear. What this book really is is, first and foremost, a kick-ass cyberpunk narrative about augmented reality in which the rediscovery of this technology post-catastrophe is asserted as a kind of magic (I found this believable actually). What it also is, is a hipster handbook about cool music and mesh networks, and most of all it is about these hipsters in BRISTOL, and in particular a few blocks in that city. The latter fact was a bit annoying, as I don't consider myself to be part of this in-group, nor to be particular au courant with that music/scene. However, I can forgive these things due to the quality of the writing/novum.

An absolute page turner, I had somewhere in my mind secretly given up hope that such books still exist and/or might still be being written.  1000 pages of blisteringly addictive story are rivalled for me only by my childhood experience of reading The Stand so long ago.  T'rain (short for Terrain) forms the backdrop/cyberspace platform upon which so much of this narrative is driven, due to the ability of players to mine economic benefit (gold pieces re-salable in the non-cyberspace world). I guzzled the kick-ass Kool-Aid this story offered. It is in a long tradition of cyberpunk that operates along a two-tier structure positing a more-than-real cyberspace/augmented reality aspect going back to Gibson's Neuromancer. Names/character spiral and map through the multiple spatialities presented, even as the action plays out in very particular (but specifically altered) real-world locales along the Canada/US border (Washington State/British Columbia). Now I can finally move onto the sequel, Fall, or Dodge in Hell.

I love this book because it is a psychogeographical counter-map against the idea of technological progress. Its enlightened protagonist is an inveterate drinker to the point of pathos, but he clearly has luck on his side. While unimaginably fucking up his life, some powerful interests decide to channel the drunk's momentum towards their own ends, and somehow end up getting this guy a promotion despite his self-destructive determination. The novum is a literal (but not literally existing) map that is a real-time track of everyone with points and lines indicating both positions and trajectories. The existence of the map is a secret that needs to be kept that way, lest others benefit as much economically as certain interests already are. So we are led to a critique of capitalism by the most likeable drunk since Barfly, or the guy in Last Exit to Brooklyn, or hey, Kerouac himself.  Clearly a gifted writer, we can only await, and then consume greedily, anything Wiles will write in the future.

I'm not quite sure yet whether I like Harrison as a writer. I'm re-reading Light currently but I actually started with this one, which was the second book I checked out of the Bracknell Public Library (the first was Slan) after moving to Bracknell in April. Postmodern new wave science fiction's lifeblood and Kool-Aid, I drank this book in on train platforms, sunny plazas, and rainy afternoon rooms, crying and laughing along with the often brutally uglifying words. There's a lot of beautiful and bright trash/detritus blowing around Harrison's narratives and just when you're about to give up, the whole thing seems to take some kind of terrifying shape. I'm pretty sure these books started to take the place of my dreams after a while, and several parts are a bit disturbing.  But this nails the poetics of science fiction to the core: it is both poetry and technological novum at one blast: its hot molten core drives us onward into unknown spaces and places across barely thinkable universes.  OK, I'll keep reading.