All The Birds In The Sky — Book Club Review

All The Birds In The Sky comes with a gold-star pedigree. Universally, our book club looked forward to reading it because of our longstanding respect for Charlie Jane Anders’ work as a science fiction

Image via Amazon.ca

journalist.

While this book — Anders’ first novel — shows promise, it ultimately did not live up to our expectations.

As with many journalists who turn their quills to novel writing, Anders’ fist attempt at long-form writing seems to be an aggregation of vignettes. The prose is more than competent in places, but the structure is uneven, the pace is off-putting and the dialogue left us wondering about the intended audience.

Written with knowledge of the genre

That being said, Anders’ long-time involvement in fandom and knowledge of the genre shine through. Members of our book club praised the magic system she created and the odd applications of scientific technology — particularly the university-based A.I. that is trying to help people find romantic partners.

Many of these ideas may be worthy of development into standalone short stories — a format that Anders has shown skill with in the past (We would particularly highlight her first-rate story The Fermi Paradox Is My Business Model).

Charlie Jane Anders
(Image via Wikipedia)

As noted in a previous blog post, our group has a preference for books that have a beginning, middle and end and are self-contained. This book’s large-scale structure — childhood, divergence, conflict, apocalypse — works, and it’s good to see at least one nominated book that fulfills a single large narrative arc.

Uneven pacing

But the pacing of this arc is choppy and characters disappear and reappear suddenly and without explanation. The assassin — one of the more interesting characters in the book — disappears for long stretches without cause and, when he is written in, seems to act without clear motives.

The book’s exploration of societal dichotomy between nature-based neo-pagan beliefs and technophilia spurred some lively debate in our group.

Given our appreciation for much of Anders’ previous work as a journalist and short stories, many of us are looking forward to her subsequent works. However, this book was not at the top of any of our Hugo ballots.

Ninefox Gambit — Book Club Review

Image via Amazon.ca

The horrors of war, sacrifice and a theocratic-fascist society are at the forefront of Yoon Ha Lee’s debut novel, that also happens to be a less-than-typical military science fiction novel.

The novel primarily follows two characters: Cheris, a living soldier with a gift for math, and Jedao, a brilliant, undead general and feared mass murderer. To up the tension between the two, Lee places both characters in Cheris’ body. Together, the two must face a “heretical” enemy that is altering the fabric of reality with “calendrical rot.”

The universe of Cheris and Jedao isn’t well-explained by Lee, who instead throws readers out of the boat to teach them to swim. There isn’t much description of the technology, the different cultures and castes, the boundaries between science and what some of us saw as ritualistic magic (ie. blood sacrifices at holidays), or how seemingly basic things work. Most of our group wasn’t bothered by this approach, and it lead to many comparisons to Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. In fact, we enjoyed discussing how we came to understand the mechanics of the story’s setting. For example, some of us interpreted the frequent references to “calendar” as a type of math (ie. instead of calculus, it’s calendar), while others saw calendars as a means of creating a uniform collective unconscious or psychic energy able to affect certain technologies.

While maybe a paragraph explaining the meaning of “calendar” in this context would have been welcome, we respected that Lee probably cut down the page count by half with the approach he took. Lee’s efficient prose reflects the militaristic society and the war genre. Lee never shies away from the gruesomeness of war and the remarkable tyranny of the theocratic-fascist society he creates, which elevates Ninefox Gambit beyond the average military science fiction story. In Lee’s universe, war is not to be celebrated or enjoyed; it is awful, brutal and at least two characters recognize that it needs to be stopped. 

Beyond Ancillary Justice, this book opened up a lot of comparisons to some of this year’s other Hugo-nominated books: the absence of variety in species/culture in contrast to A Closed and Common Orbit, the lack of defined gender roles unlike Death’s End, community service as a punishment in the criminal justice system in Too Like the Lightning and the boundaries of magic between science, as seen in Obelisk Gate and our final book club read, All the Birds in the Sky.

While we all doubted that it would win the Hugo, at least one of us thought it was the best novel on the shortlist and we are ready to see where the rest of the series goes.

Hugos 2017 — Short Stories

This year’s shortlist of short stories is varied, offering a plethora of interesting and diverse work. Almost all of these stories are worthy of winning a Hugo — this was a difficult category in which to pick a favourite nominee.

The most perplexing nominee — A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers by Alyssa

We found Wong's work
more perplexing than
entertaining.
Image via Tor.com. 

Wong — is a frenetic time-hopping story about a girl and her sister who have magical (electrical?) powers. The story may be about suicide, or it may be about the end of the world. There’s very little overall narrative thread to hold onto.

In portions of the text, it feels like Wong is stringing words together into paragraphs without the traditional intermediary step of sentences. We can appreciate the artfulness of this style of writing, but it is not to our tastes.

Brooke Bolander’s Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies is a short story about an incorporeal being that takes human form, is murdered, and then returns for revenge. There was some debate amongst members of the book club about whether the protagonist is an alien energy being, a spirit, or an angel. Although the language is entertaining, the story is extremely thin. There just isn’t enough substance to the story to vote for it.

An Unimaginable Light is probably the best John C. Wright story that we’ve read — in no small part because it’s based around a couple of interesting notions about the ability of robots to interpret Asimov’s Three Laws in ways that their creators never intended. Although the ‘twist’ ending seems to come out of nowhere, that ending is at least built around an interesting idea concerning what it means to be human.

Perennial Hugo nominee
John C. Wright's story is
built around an interesting
idea, but his prose is too
didactic for our tastes. 

That being said, Wright’s slightly didactic prose and aggressive thesaurus use isn’t to our taste, nor is the way he seems to delight in the sexual degradation of one of the characters. This won’t be at the top of our ballot, but we can understand why some fans chose to nominate it.

For us, there were three very different works vying for the top of our Hugo ballots: Seasons of Glass and Iron, That Game We Played During the War and The City Born Great.

The City Born Great by N.K. Jemisin is an interesting urban fantasy that is partway between Jane Jacobs and Jim Butcher. The theme of potential and the metaphor of birth speak to a hopefulness that was uplifting.

But for some of our book club members, The City Born Great wasn’t didactic enough. N.K. Jemisin’s story of a youth becoming the magical avatar of a city seemed to be working toward a grand statement about the death and life of great American cities (or something similar), but never really committed itself to an idea about urbanism. There’s no indication in the story about the forces that the youth is struggling against and the ending left some of us wanting a bit more meaning to the work.

In Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar weaves together two Norwegian folk tales into a story of empowerment and problem solving. An Ottawa-based poet, El-Mohtar’s dexterously uses

El-Mohtar deconstructs
Norwegian Folk Tales
in interesting ways.
Image via Blue Fairy Book
illustrated by H.J.Ford
& G.P.Jacomb Hood, 1889

language to draw readers into a rustic mythology and to interrogate the assumptions of the folk tales she’s playing with. Her two protagonists are given motivations and personalities, and instead of needing some prince to save them, the two women save each other from their curses.

This is a very likable short story with some depth, offers a satisfying conclusion, and might bear re-reading.

Out of all of the nominees, That Game We Played During The War by Carrie Vaughn is the one that we found the most enjoyable to read. It’s a clear, straightforward story about former prisoners of war from two very different factions finding common ground after a long-running conflict. Vaughn’s tale feels like something out of the golden age of SF — concise, spare, and precise in its language. The relationship between the two central characters is touching and thoughtful.

She leavens the story with observations about cultural understandings and misunderstandings, as well as some interesting notions about how telepathy might influence a society.

The medium of the short story is a particularly difficult one to master; balancing brevity with profundity and balancing artfulness with clarity are not easy tasks. Three nominees this year achieved a level of excellence that is worth celebrating.

The Obelisk Gate – Book Club 2017 – First book discussed

The Obelisk Gate is a worthy nominee for the Hugo Award, but most of us didn’t feel that it was as good as Fifth Season.

True to form, N.K. Jemisin’s writing is strong, her characters are well crafted, and the world building is interesting. And yet the book falls somewhere short of what we had hoped for. 

Although it sounds a bit strange, many of us tried to figure out what had actually happened in the book. As it turns out, not all that much. While interesting context is provided for the events of the preceding book and information is offered about the challenges to come, the characters didn’t actually do very much or move the plot along in any significant ways.

Second-Book Syndrome

Perhaps the book suffers from being the second in a trilogy. As such, it can’t have the originality and vigor of a first book and also can’t have as epic a conclusion as a third book.

Jemisin’s strength as a writer and deft social commentary make this a worthwhile read. Questions of race, class and gender are explored thoughtfully and with nuance. The characters speak with their own voices, and grow.

Alabaster’s slow decline as he tries to pass along knowledge to Essun, and Essun’s growing control of her magic could have been nothing more than a Hero’s Journey ™ like that of Obi-Wan and Luke. But Jemisin’s more nuanced character building elevates this relationship to something more touching and poignant.  Again, she raises the readers’ expectations as they progress through the book.

N.K. Jemisin
Photo from SFWA

The book’s final 50 pages are where the second-book syndrome really comes to the forefront, because nothing is resolved other than knowing that there are significant actions to come. Needing to read the next book to have a dénouement is not a satisfying ending. 

Back-To-Back Hugos?

The Hugo Awards have often honoured multiple books in a well-loved series, but usually not in back-to-back years, and usually only when the author has taken the series in new directions. The Obelisk Gate is unlikely to buck this trend.

None of us would be upset if Obelisk Gate won — and some of us are likely to vote for it. At the same time, we're all hoping that one of the other nominees astonishes us.