Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, 255 p.

"Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe."--Goodreads blurb

This short book packed a big punch. St. John Mandel is a very compelling writer and writes very interesting characters. The last book I read had time jumping, as far as viewpoints from different eras, but this was a legitimate time-travel book. The storyline was an interesting premise, though slow in places. The twist at the end was great and I will be reading this author again for sure!

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie --- 416 pages, including Cast of Characters and Acknowledgements.

Ann Leckie, the award-winning science fiction author of The Imperial Radch Trilogy --- Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy --- has just published her first fantasy novel, and once again proved herself to be one of the most original and intriguing authors of sf/fantasy since the late, great Ursula K. LeGuin.

The Raven Tower features a traditional swords and sorcery-style fantasy world, with some significant twists. The narrator is an ancient god, who alternately observes and comments upon a usurped throne in Iraden that mirrors Shakespeare's Hamlet. But the god speaks not to Mowat (Hamlet) but to Eolo (Horatio). In an alternating second plot line, the god describes his own slow awakening to consciousness over the millennia; his understanding of how gods exercise power, and the limits thereof; the complex relation between gods and humans, and whether the god will intervene in the catastrophe engulfing Iraden.

Ann Leckie lives in St. Louis, and loves to hang out in local libraries.

Click HERE to read an interview with Ann Leckie on syfy.com

Click HERE to read the review from ars technica.com

Click HERE to read the review on tor.com.

Click HERE to read the review from NPR (National public Radio).

Click HERE to read a pair of reviews from Locus Magazine.

Provenance by Ann Leckie

Provenance by Ann Leckie --- 438 pages

Provenance is St. Louisan Ann Leckie's first novel since the triumph of her debut Imperial Radch Trilogy: Ancillary Justice; Ancillary Sword; and Ancillary Mercy.

Ingray Aughskold, the foster daughter of Netano Aughskold, an important politician on the planet Hwae, is engaged in a desperate rivalry with eir foster brother Danach; the two of em competing to be chosen as Netano's heir. To gain eir mother's approval, Ingray concocts a scheme to break a notorious thief out of Compassionate Removal and persuade em to reveal the whereabouts of precious historical "vestiges" that e stole, so that Ingray's mother can restore the vestiges to the Lareum that houses all eir planet's most sacred artifacts. 

Provenance is set in one small corner of the Radchaai universe. It is an entirely different approach, combining elements of the classic cozy mystery and the comedy of manners, with a plot that features sibling rivalry writ large, art fraud, unpredictable alien species and the threat of interplanetary war.  Then Leckie delivers a happily-ever-after conclusion that contradicts all our assumptions.  I look forward to following Leckie on many more forays into her intriguing universe!

Click HERE to read an interview with the author from Wired Magazine.

Click HERE to read a review from National Public Radio.

Click HERE to read a review from the New York Times.

Click HERE to read a review from The Guardian newspaper.

 

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon --- 349 pages

With her brilliant debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon stakes their claim to the dystopian legacy of Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin and Ann Leckie.

The lost star ship Matilda fled a dying Earth generations ago in search of a new world. But as the long years of its journey proceeded, a brutal  theocracy took control of the ship,  segregating the population into pale skinned elites and dark skinned workers. Workers, such as Aster,  are confined to the lower decks, starved, overworked and brutalized by guards.  The pale skinned elites inhabit the  upper decks, hoarding their comforts and their privileges as god-given prerogatives. Aster fights back any way she can, and uses her skills as a healer to help the suffering. But doing so makes her a target for retribution as a rebel against the Sovereignty that rules Matilda.

A fearsome, fearless book.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from National Public Radio.

Click HERE to read the review from Foreword.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland

Neal Stephenson and Nicole Gallard

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Gallard --- 752 pages including Cast of Characters and Glossary

Magic used to be real. Possibly, it could be again. And so the top secret Department of Diachronic Operations is created to build an Ontic Decoherence Cavity and recruit KCWs to perform DEDEs that will send DOers on DTAPs.

This book could serve as a doorstop for an ODEC. It's the perfect summer read, pages upon pages of quasi-historical, quasi-scientific Quixotic Quest with a capital Q. But make sure you have a pillow on your lap to prop the book on or it will sprain your wrists as surely as the contents will sprain your brain.

When a best selling master of speculative fiction and an inventive writer of historical fiction decide to collaborate, what ensues is a romp through time that combines swords, sorcery, quantum physics, a hero obsessed with the job, a heroine (obsessed with the hero) trapped in 1851 London, government bureaucracy on steroids, and mercenary warriors from Fourth Century Constantinople running amok in near future Massachusetts, and the dreadful fate of the Elizabethan poet, Christopher Marlowe.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from Starburst Magazine.

Click HERE to listen to a June 16, 2017 interview with both authors from Youtube.

Click HERE to read a review from The Guardian (UK).

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

Walkaway: A Novel by Cory Doctorow --- 379 pages

In an article in Wired cited below, Cory Doctorow talks about why his new novel is utopian not dystopian.

"The difference between utopia and dystopia isn't how well everything runs. It's about what happens when everything fails."

Walkaway is the story of the first days of a better nation, and the journey to get there.

You either love Doctorow or you shake your head in bafflement. I love his stuff, and the reviewer in steemit made two key connections that helped me understand why: he connects Walkaway with Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, one of the very first science fiction books I read in my early teens. Granted, Heinlein was a bona fide sexist pig: he's also one of the Holy Trinity of postwar American science fiction writers, along with Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. He also makes the connection between Doctorow's "walkaway" and another one of my all time favorites, Ursula K. LeGuin's short story, "The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas." If Heinlein is part of the Holy Trinity, LeGuin is the Mother Goddess of 20th century American speculative fiction. Maybe that makes Doctorow some kind of 21st century John the Baptist, preparing the way?

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus.

Click HERE to read the review from NPR.

Click HERE to read Doctorow's essay, "Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopias" in Wired.

Click HERE to read the review on steemit.com.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven: A Novel by Emily St. John Mandel --- 333 pages

In her book Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel reimagines the dystopian novel as a narrative of the slow rebirth of civilzation on a world scoured clean of past glories and past mistakes.

The novel begins with a once celebrated actor now on the slow downslide of his career, playing the title role in Shakespeare's King Lear in a small theater in Toronto, Canada in the cold of winter. In the middle of the play, Arthur Leander suffers a massive heart attack and dies on stage before a stunned audience, cast and crew.

But what might have rated a last flurry of headlines in news reports and comments on social media passes unnoticed a few hours later when a virulent new strain of influenza --- the Georgia Flu --- erupts around the globe, killing billions in days and triggering a complete collapse of the modern, technological world. In short order, all that remains are a few isolated pockets of survivors struggling to rebuild with what they can scavenge from the wreckage.

Mandel follows the paths of several characters whose initial connection is that each one was involved with Arthur Leander at some point in their lives.  Station Eleven is that rare bird, a literary novel of speculative fiction set in a post-Apocalypse world. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award for 2015.

Click HERE for an interview with Emily St. John Mandel on National Public Radio.

Click HERE for a review of Station Eleven in the Huffington Post.

Click HERE for a review on sfgate.com

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

The Book of Strange New Things: A Novel  by Michel Faber --- 500 pages

The Book of Strange New Things is an exemplar of speculative fiction as serious literature.  It takes all the standard ingredients of "space opera" and recombines them to create an exegesis of faith, love, suffering and commitment.

The story is narrated by Peter, an evangelical Christian minister who is contracted by USIC, a mysterious multinational corporation, to serve as a missionary to the native inhabitants of the planet Oasis, where the corporation has established an unspecified mining operation.   He is excited and energized by the challenge; his only regret in leaving his life on Earth behind is that his wife and co-evangelist, Bea, cannot go with him on this great adventure.

But Oasis, once Peter arrives, continually deflects his assumptions and expectations. Even the comfort he finds in ministering to his alien flock is tainted by his failure to connect with other humans working for USIC. Even worse is the alienation he feels growing between him and Bea, left alone to cope with an accelerating social collapse into chaos on Earth.

Faber holds up the mirror of this strange new world to show us ourselves from an unfamiliar and revealing new angle.  

Click HERE for a review from the UK Telegraph.

Click HERE for a review from the Washington Post.

Click HERE for a review from the New York Times.

Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta

Memory of Water: A Novel by Emmi Itäranta --- 263 pages

In the present-world, Noria Kaitio is the tea master in a small village in the far northern reaches of the Scandinavian Union, under the control of the repressive military regime of New Qian. 

In a world ravaged by global warming and massive pollution, fresh water is an increasingly endangered resource. To maintain their power the military must control the dwindling sources of fresh water. 

Noria, like her father before her, is suspected of concealing a fresh water source somewhere in the vicinity of her village. When the drought grows worse, and the people of the village are dying from lack of water, Noria faces a terrible choice: does she keep her secret and watch her neighbors die, or does she share the water, knowing that sooner or later something or someone will betray her to the military?  Knowledge, she slowly comes to understand, is also a kind of power.

The author, from Finland, now lives in Canterbury, England. She wrote Memory of Water in both Finnish and English; it was first published in Finland in 2012 under the title Teemestarin kirja (The Teamaster's Book), and won several prizes. It was published in English in 2014, and is currently shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Memory of Water has garnered praise as a different kind of dystopian novel. Her style has drawn comparisons to Ursula K. LeGuin. Itäranta is currently working on her second novel. 

Click HERE to read a review of Memory of Water on Tor.com.

Click HERE and HERE to read other revews.

Click HERE to watch a short video interview of the author.

Click HERE to read the biographical entry on Emmi Itäranta from Wikipedia.

My Real Children by Jo Walton

My Real Children by Jo Walton --- 317 pages

This is a hauntingly beautiful novel by an author I just stumbled across when I found her collection of essays, What Makes This Book So Great, on the new books shelf at my local library.

Ursula K. LeGuin invented the term "speculative fiction," and this is exactly the kind of story she meant by it. Walton begins with an old woman in a nursing home. Patricia is suffering from dementia; the notes on her chart often say she is "very confused." But she does remember people and places and events from the past --- only it seems as though she is remembering two different sets of people and places and events. At some point in time she made a choice --- either/or --- and her life and the world around her diverged down separate paths, but she remembers both: living, breathing, real.

Even if you don't read science fiction or fantasy, read this book. It will break your heart and fill you with wonder and pride in the sheer resilience of the human spirit.

Click HERE for a brief biographical entry on Jo Walton.

Click HERE to acess Jo Walton's web site.

Click HERE to access Jo Walton's blog on the Tor Book's web site.  

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

 Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, 288 pages

In this book, Kathy recounts memories, both fond and painful, of her time at Hailsham, a private school.  The story is fairly typical, with young romances and graduation nerves, but the ending reveals that it is more complicated than it seems. I thought it was alright- but I was more interested in the story that wasn't told (sorry, no spoilers here).  

Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson

Shaman: A Novel of the Ice Age by Kim Stanley Robinson --- 456 pages

The critically acclaimed and best selling author of science fiction speculating on the future of the human species has now published an equally distinguished and imaginative meditation on humanity's past. Shaman is a story of how our early human ancestors in the Aurignacian Period circa 30,000 BCE might have experienced life. Robinson has carefully crafted his story within the boundaries of scientific knowledge based on archeological and other evidence. Yet his characters speak to us, recognizably and fully human, sharing the same instincts and emotions that still continue to drive human existence across the millenia. 

Robinson says he has long wanted to write about prehistoric humans, but needed a way in to the story he wanted to tell. He found the way when he began to read about the Paleolithic cave paintings of southern France and Spain, some of the earliest known human art. He also drew on his own experiences hiking and climbing in rugged and inhospitable terrain to understand the challenges of survival faced by Loon, Thorn, Heather, Elga and their clan. Listen to Kim Stanley Robinson talking about Shaman. Or check out his web site at www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/

The book references the amazing paintings of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, discovered in the Ardèche, France on December 18,1994. You can learn more about this site at the Wikipedia article on the Chauvet Cave. The distinguished German filmmaker Werner Herzog made a documentary in 2010 about the Chauvet Cave paintings that is available through Amazon and Google Play. Watch a trailer for the film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross

The Rapture of the Nerds: A Tale of the Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Social Situations by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross --- 349 pages

Doctorow and Stross have created the 21st century successor to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe. Millions of posthumans have migrated off-planet to upload their consciousness into the Cloud, abandoning their meatbodies and playing mind games with their meatheaded cousins who stayed behind by spamming Earth's networks with disruptive technologies just for the fun of watching us squirm.

A highminded species would ignore these provocations but whoever said we as a species are all that highminded? No, there's a chump born every minute as they say, and this particular chump, a technophobic Welsh person named Huw, has been assigned the unenviable task of defending all humanity's continued right to exist before the Galactic Federation.

The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam #2), by Margaret Atwood

The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam #2), by Margaret Atwood, 448 pages

This story takes place in a near future, where corporations run the world, most animals we know are extinct, and science has achieved god-like power.  The story centers around a small cult-like group, called the Gardeners, who shun the system and believe that a waterless flood will soon come and wash away the evil and give the world a new start.  It is told from the point of view of Ren and Toby, two women who take different life paths but find themselves in a similar predicament, and the preachings of their one-time leader.

I listened to this on CD, so I didn't realize that it was the second book in a trilogy.  Surprisingly, though, I didn't feel like I was missing anything until the very end.  And even at that, I was okay with it.  The audio narration was very well-done, and I'm glad they went with 3 narrators since there were alternating voices.