Book Review: “Hit List” by Laurell K. Hamilton

This review contains minor-to-moderate spoilers for the previous 19 Anita Blake novels.

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Toward the end of Smallville‘s eighth season, I told myself, “this is it, it’s getting silly, and I can’t deal with it anymore.” Then General Zod showed up. And I absolutely had to watch. And when it was announced that season 10 would be the last one, I figured, “okay, I might as well stick it out.”

I wasn’t terribly thrilled with the way it all ended, but I was invested in the characters and the story.

And that’s exactly how I feel about the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. When I first started reading it, back in 1996, I thought it was great; it had action, fantasy and horror elements, good characters that I could care about, cool villains, and a fast-paced storytelling style. But sometime around the tenth book, Anita started gaining “power-of-the-week” abilities and having sex with lots… and lots… and lots… of people.

And then the books stopped being about the story and started being about tiny details, nit-picky arguments, and Anita somehow having the perfect power to stop any bad guy. I thought when the Mother of All Darkness was introduced, we’d finally have someone we could respect, who could actually defeat Anita.

I should’ve known better.

So, Hit List by Laurell K. Hamilton. The reader is thrown into this book running, with Anita and Edward (Anita’s sociopath best friend) in their roles as Federal Marshals, trying to figure out who’s killing weretigers across the country. After some infodump disguised as a police procedural — with some cool stuff about the preternatural branch of the Marshals Service — Anita goes back to the hotel. There the Harlequin show up and severely injure another Marshal, and now we get more info about exactly who is hunting the weretigers and why. (For those who don’t know, the Harlequin are basically the Vampire Council’s Secret Service. Anita defeated them a couple of books ago.)

But the problem is that Edward and Anita need more than just the two of them, plus a few unproven Marshals that neither one really trusts in a fight. So they bring in crowd favorite Bernardo and serial killer Olaf (and a bunch of were-creatures from St. Louis, Anita’s hometown) to back them up. Before the help arrives, though, Anita tries to confront the local weretigers, to get information, and there she discovers the man who may be the key to stopping the Mother of All Darkness once and for all.

Here’s my major problem with Hit List: it feels like Hamilton wanted to write another book where Anita and Edward take on a lot of really tough bad guys, but she had to advance the overarching story. So there’s a lot of background shoehorned into this novel — which, by the way, is only 320 pages (according to my Kindle). Despite the infodumps and the rather-predictable “let’s stop the pace of the book to have a three-page discussion over some point of conversational/personal protocol”, it moves at a very quick pace. The writing has been tightened a bit after — I’m guessing — reviews of past books have discussed how wordy Hamilton can be. Her action sequences are (except for the discussions) well-written and well-paced, but the rest of the book is a lot of talking, driving around, and going to the hospital. If you’ve read the previous Anita novels, you can compare this one to Obsidian Butterfly.

Which is funny, because that gets referenced too.

Anyway, regardless of my somewhat-backhanded praise above, I had several problems with this book, and while there have been improvements on my general issues with Anita Blake novels (including the last one, Bullet, which I reviewed on my old blog), the problems still exist. Let’s start with the talking. And oh, how there is talking. Everyone talks. A lot. About everything. Even when Anita is about to have sex, she’s still talking. It’s really tough to pace a novel when you have so much talking. At least, I think so.

There was only one sex scene in this book — a record, I think, if you include only the past ten books — and Anita only had one partner in it. Of course he’s never been seen before this book, and of course he’s good-looking, and of course Hamilton spends many sentences describing him, and of course he is exceptionally well-endowed*, and of course they have amazing sex, because I don’t think Anita is capable of having bad sex. I mean, come on — if you’ve had sex, you know that even with someone you love, or even someone you’re really attracted to, it can be bad on occasion. I’m just saying.

Because we were in another city, there weren’t a ton of new preternaturals in this book — and, now that I think on it, very few vampires — but we did get several new humans, including Marshals, doctors, nurses and cops. There’s a few scenes with the Marshals that are creaky and painful, one where a character was (in my opinion) written in specifically to allow Hamilton to write herself out of a corner, and the word Marshal started to look weird after a while anyway. But we definitely knew every character’s eye and hair color, height, build, and what part of him Anita liked the best. Pretty standard fare for the series at this point.

Strangely, there was extremely little contact with our friends back in St. Louis, and that’s what I missed the most. With the exception of exposition and a quick scene near the end, there was no Jean-Claude, no Micah, no Nathaniel, no Jason, and no Asher. I missed them. They’re the reason I read the books — although recently Jean-Claude has been very whiny, and I’m pretty much over him. Also, Anita did slip in a couple of anti-Richard barbs.

Without the Missouri contingent, though, the ending of the book really falls down. I’ve read the same basic story before — in The Laughing Corpse, Hamilton’s second novel, the climax is relatively similar, except that now Anita is more willing to kick ass than to run away (a welcome change). But when the Final Boss shows up, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that the hero of the book is going to win that fight, and I also don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that she does it using what she describes as the “worst” power she holds. Which, of course, works perfectly. Makes me wonder why, if there’s a Vampire Council, they let the vampire who gave Anita that power live for as long as she did (and, of course, it was Anita who killed her to gain said power). There are references in the Boss Fight, though, that directly point to characters that haven’t even been glimpsed in this novel.

Which is one of my problems with it. Hit List is not a novel that a casual reader can just pick up and hope to understand. You really have to have read at least the last three novels to know what’s going on — by then you’ll have at least enough exposition to know why Anita is so powerful.

And believe me, after this (rather disappointing) Boss Fight, not only will she still be powerful but you’ll be wondering what the point is of writing any more Anita books (Hamilton, on Twitter, said she is already working on the next one).

To summarize: I don’t think Hit List is a really good book, especially when held up to others in the Anita Blake series such as Blue Moon, Lunatic Cafe, or my personal favorite, The Killing Dance. While the writing is definitely better and tighter than the past couple of Anita Blake novels, this one doesn’t really stand on its own as a piece of fiction in its own right — it feels more to me like a bridge book, like the author has a story she wants to tell but had to tell this one first to get to that point (the pacing of the Boss Fight is a big clue). I maintain that, in order to bring the series back to what it was during its good days, Hamilton will have to kill off a lot of her characters**. Unfortunately, she’s built the world in such a way that killing one of them would kill (or at least seriously damage) Anita, and we can’t have that.

One thing I will say is that Hamilton loves her characters — even the evil ones — and in Hit List, I see a lot of that, especially with Edward. However, every writer will tell you that one of the first thing s/he learns in seminars and from editors is that you have to cut, and cut, and cut, and when you think there’s nothing to cut, you cut again. And, hey, I love her characters too — they’re the reason I read the books, to keep up with the characters I care about. But the cast list is getting enormous; it’s time to pare it down.

I’m waiting for your next book, Ms Hamilton. Let’s see some cutting.

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* I wonder what Hamilton’s husband thinks about all of Anita’s lovers — and Anita is definitely a Mary Sue in many regards — being so well-endowed. Of course, since we write what we know…

** Maybe she should call in David Mack. He’s really good at killing off huge swaths of characters in a way that works well in the story and gives them honorable deaths when deserved.

“Deathless” by Catherynne M. Valente

Deathless cover
Deathless cover

“This is Russia and it is 1952. What else would you call hell?”

The retold fairytale is an old and well-worn road in the fantasy genre. Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente, still manages to arrive with something new. Valente hasn’t just taken “The Death of Koschei the Deathless” into modern Russia. She has also made a fairytale — a dark, and brutal, and frightening tale — out of the Russian revolution and the siege of Leningrad.

Marya Morevna is not the hero of “The Death of Koschei the Deathless.” Deathless is her story. She begins as a young girl in Saint Petersburg, watching as birds arrive, one by one, transform into men, and marry her sisters. By the time Koschei comes for her, she is a young woman in Leningrad.

Koschei is a perennial villain from Russian mythology. In Deathless he is cast as the Tsar of Life, fighting an endless war with the Tsar of Death that is always going badly. Marya steps into this mess and, right from the beginning, refuses to be what the fairytale demands that she be. She refuses to betray Koschei, her husband. She refuses to be helpless. And she swears that she will not go with Ivan when he arrives.

Because the hero of the story is Ivan — the hero of the story must always be an Ivan, who rescues the beautiful bride from Koschei’s withered hands. One of the central themes of Deathless is that everyone in the book knows how the story is supposed to end. They can choose to fight it, if they want. Marya does.

That sort of self-awareness will probably put some people off of Deathless. Like a lot of her writing, this book is aware that it is a book. Valente is not afraid to let her narrator turn and address the audience directly. I think this works in the context of a story whose roots lie in an oral tradition.

The fairytale style also helped give me some much-needed emotional distance from the worst of the brutality in Leningrad. Valente juxtaposes terrifying myths, such as the witch Baba Yaga who grinds the bones of disobedient girls in her flying mortar, with real tragedies — like people putting the bodies of their loved ones on sleds to take to the graveyard, only to die on the way, nameless and alone in the Russian winter.

The writing in Deathless is beautiful. I adore Valente’s writing style, and this book did not let me down. Readers who enjoyed her short story collection, Ventriloquism, will certainly find something to love in Deathless. They may recognize a character who first appeared in one of Valente’s short stories, and who has a minor role to play here.

Deathless is a subtle book. I was charmed by Naganya the rifle imp, and I’m sure there are many similar puns to be found elsewhere. The more the reader knows about Russia, its language, history, and mythology, the more they will get out of this book. Fans of Valente should definitely pick this one up, as should anyone who enjoys a dark fairytale well told.

Genres:

Escape Pod 298: The Things

Originally appearing in Clarkesworld

Rated appropriate for older teens and up for language and disturbing imagery.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:11 — 38.7MB)

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Show Notes

Nominated for the Hugo Award for Short Story, 2011

Thanks to Kate Baker and Clarkesworld for the audio!

The Things

By Peter Watts

I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair.  MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.

The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.

There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke ; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase.  I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.

I will go into the storm, and never come back.

(Continue Reading…)

Science Future: Maintaining Memory

Science fiction inspires the world around us. It inspires our future. To discover these influences, we look to the future of science, to Science Future. The Science Future series presents the bleeding edge of scientific discovery and links it back to science fiction in order to discuss these influences and speculate on the future of science fiction.

Maintaining Memory

One could say that in reading and listening to science fiction we are, in a way, remembering the future. The future we remember from these stories is often wrong and full of holes, just like our memory of the past. Memory is a fickle thing, as anybody who has lost their keys or forgotten their homework, can attest to. In science fiction, memory is often even more unreliable. Take some of our recent stories here at Escape Pod. In EP284: On a Clear Day You Can See All the Way to Conspiracy by Desmond Warzel and EP292: In The Water by Katherine Mankiller memory is something that is easily modified and manipulated.

Thankfully that isn’t the case, right? Yes and no.

Recent studies into computer aided training have yielded mixed results when it comes to expanding the mental capabilities. The study focused on a popular theory that taxing a person’s working memory can lead to an increase in mental capacity. Basically if you’re forced to hold more numbers or words in your head while performing calculations with them, you’ll find it easier to hold that many, if not more, thoughts later. The results were mixed. Some of the participants showed marked increase working memory and some showed little to none at all. What was found was that there was a significant correlation between how much the participants enjoyed the training, with the people who enjoyed it the most showing the most improvement.

This is great news, except that we can’t always trust what we remember. A study, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, shows that visual advertisements, such as happy scenes involving prominent product placement, actually trick our brains into forming memories. We believe we’ve actually experienced what we see. A study managed to convince a group of students that they had eaten a particular brand of popcorn and remember enjoying it when they were asked about it later.

A group of pyramidal cell axons in the brain.

Thankfully this stuff isn’t really mind control it is just creating new, if false, memories. Like hacking the brain except the individual has ultimate control over how the memory forms. We haven’t figured out how to really control this process but scientists are making strides in understanding how the brain makes a memory. For example nueroscientists in University of California, Berkeley, have figured out how heightened emotion, like fear, helps us to remember events. It seems that in fearful states, the amygdala, the part of our brains that controls emotion, talks the hippocampus, a relay hub for memory, into generating new neurons. These new neurons are fresh and ready for imprinting with your most recent experiences which how you remember that last near collision with a fellow driver but can never remember what year Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia. Next time try studying while listening to Psuedopod!

Understanding how we create memory will help us lead to actual memory creation, not unlike what happens in EP288: Future Perfect by LaShawn M. Wanak or keep our memories after everything around us changes, like in EP287: A Taste of Time by Abby Goldsmith. Movies like Inception and Total Recall will be that much closer to reality. With it I expect we’ll see more tales that touch upon the implications behind memory altering technologies and Stories speculating on what it means to have your memory altered, willingly, or unwillingly.

“Memory is the mother of all wisdom.” – Aeschylus

Science Future: Searching Space

Science fiction inspires the world around us. It inspires our future. To discover these influences, we look to the future of science, to Science Future. The Science Future series presents the bleeding edge of scientific discovery and links it back to science fiction in order to discuss these influences and speculate on the future of science fiction.

Searching Space

NASA (CC BY 2.0)Space. The future will grant us access to what is beyond that big blue sky we see surrounding that bright thing that hounds us out of bed every morning. Space and science fiction have become so intertwined that even the mention of it will sometimes push a fantasy novel into the science fiction genre. Science fiction even has sub-genres specifically devoted to space based stories: Space Opera and Space Westerns.

We, as a race, are still taking our first steps into space; sending people out into space and peering out into the sky. We know there is a universe out there full of stars, planets, nebulae, and maybe even something called dark mater or dark energy but really, those are all just names. Our actual knowledge about those celestial objects is still very small and the only way we’re going to really find out is to send something out there to get a really good look at it.

The bad news is, it may be getting harder to go out there to see them. The common theory, up until two years ago, was that the universe was expanding but that the expansion was slowing. That there was a big bang and everything was moving away from that bang but, eventually, the universe would slow, stop, and then begin to collapse in on itself, perhaps leading to another big bang. That has all been thrown into confusion thanks to two independent teams of researchers who measured the distances of nearby galaxies using the light from Cepheids and supernoevae. They determined that the universe is currently expanding at about the rate of the width of the United States of America per minute, which compared to our last accurate calculation is actually faster. The expansion of the universe isn’t slowing, it is speeding up.

NASA (CC BY-NC 2.0)That means if we, as a species, are going to go out there, we’re going to need to hit some pretty fast-moving targets but before we do that, we need to figure out where those targets are. That’s where the Kepler Spacecraft comes into play. The Kepler Spacecraft, named after the famous 17th Century astrologer Johannes Kepler, was shot into space two years ago with a simple mission, start surveying worlds and figure out how many possible habitable planets might be out there. Kepler has been sending back data and, based upon the first four months of Kepler’s searching, there appears to be about 2 billion “Earth Analog” planets out there. Earth Analogs are planted that are roughly similar to earth in size and position within their own part of the universe, giving them some of the best chances of holding life similar to our own. Sadly this is considerably less than what researchers were predicting but those same researchers are still hopeful because Kepler hasn’t completed its survey yet, which means more data to devour!

Hot White Dwarf Shines in Young Star Cluster NGC 1818 (Public Domain via Hubble)And there is plenty of data out there to find. A professor at University of Washington has proposed using ground and space based telescopes to search near white dwarf stars for habitable planets. White dwarf stars are small, dense, cool stars, in the final stage of their life and these aspects might make it easier to spot planets near them. Their relatively low brightness might allow ground telescopes to identify a planet moving between the dwarf star and our telescopes with more ease when compared to brighter stars like our Sol. Another theory put forth is that these cool stars will provide exactly the right heat to a close orbiting planet to allow the planet to have liquid water, which scientists feel provide a huge indication of the possibility of extraterrestrial life. There are about 20,000 “nearby” white dwarf stars that could be observed from ground telescopes quickly and efficiently. So plenty out there for us to look at.

Our first steps into space are slow and shaky but with each day, each probe, and each theory, we are learning more and more about the universe waiting for us. It may not be full of Klingons, Vorlons, or Sith, but with 2 billion possibly habitable planets  out there, stories about what new and interesting beings we will find among the stars will never be in short supply.

Escape Pod 297: Amaryllis

Originally appearing in Lightspeed

Rated appropriate for all young teens and up for reproductive concerns.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:21 — 32.6MB)

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Show Notes

Nominated for the Hugo Award for Short Story, 2011

Amaryllis

By Carrie Vaughn

I never knew my mother, and I never understood why she did what she did. I ought to be grateful that she was crazy enough to cut out her implant so she could get pregnant. But it also meant she was crazy enough to hide the pregnancy until termination wasn’t an option, knowing the whole time that she’d never get to keep the baby. That she’d lose everything. That her household would lose everything because of her.

I never understood how she couldn’t care. I wondered what her family thought when they learned what she’d done, when their committee split up the household, scattered them—broke them, because of her.

Did she think I was worth it? (Continue Reading…)

Book Review: “Embassytown” by China Mieville

I was once working in a building that was under construction, and the noise was so loud and annoying that I said it was like someone playing a trombone — badly — inside a swimming pool filled with gravel. I made a simile, because the English language is capable of comparing things to other things that might not exist.

Imagine you couldn’t do that. Imagine that, to make said comparison, I would have to have a bad trombone player buried in a huge pile of gravel on the floor of a swimming pool, playing his instrument all the while.

The main character of China Mieville’s newest novel, Embassytown, is that trombone player.

Embassytown takes place in the far future, on a planet called Arieka. The natives — colloquially called Hosts — can breathe human-compatible atmosphere (although the reverse is not true), so they created an area on the planet for humans to settle in, so we could trade with them.

The world of Embassytown is exactly as phantasmagoric as you would expect from Mieville. Hyperspace travel goes through a weird realm called the immer where people see… things. The Hosts are a cross between spiders, flies, and two-mouthed hydras. Humanity has created Ambassadors to speak with the Hosts — twin humans, connected by mental implants — who act as one person (despite being two discrete beings) and can speak Language, the Hosts’ form of speech, which is delivered via two separate streams of words at the same time. And, of course, since the Hosts can’t compare things that never existed, in order to create similes they have to use humans.

Enter Avice, the main character, who — in Language — is “the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her”. To create that simile, Avice actually had to undergo the events of it. So did dozens of other humans, such as “the man who swims every week” and others like him.

Embassytown follows Avice, who grew up in Embassytown and left home to become an immerser — someone who can pilot starships through the immer — but has returned to Arieka a minor hero, not just because of her facility with immersion but also because she is one of the most popular similes among the Ariekei. Spurred on by her (non-exclusive) husband’s desire to learn Language, Avice inveigles herself in high society, eventually forming a relationship with Ambassador CalVin and appearing with them at parties and functions. But one day, when a ship from Bremen (home planet of the confederation of worlds that includes Arieka) delivers a new Ambassador, EzRa, the strange world of Embassytown and the Ariekei who frequent it is changed forever.

Like all of Mieville’s books, Embassytown is full of rich imagery, unique patois, characters you both love and hate, and strange and wonderful creatures. In this book, the mind that gave us New Crobuzon’s Remade presents the Ariekei’s technology — all bioengineered, all alive, from aeoli (breathing masks that convert Arieka’s air into something humans can breathe) to guns that spit their ammunition in the direction they’re pointed. Even buildings are alive, to a point.

But Embassytown‘s Big Idea is language: what is it, how is it spoken, and how does it differ when you can’t even create a metaphor because your brain would literally force you to go insane? The Ariekei can’t lie because Language is a completely referential language. They don’t even have the word “that”, because when you say “that chair”, you not only refer to the chair at which you’re pointing but also implicity every other chair in existence as being “not the one I want you to focus upon”.

Despite its broad scope — language, politics, aliens, bioengineering — the novel echoes a common theme in Mieville’s other books: the love of one’s home and the desire to protect it. From Uther Doul and the Lovers in The Scar to Inspector Borlu in The City and the City, Mieville often focuses on a character who cares so much about his or her home city that s/he is willing to do anything to save it — go against the government, oppress the people, break the law, betray loved ones, and even commit murder. And, really, that sentiment is very deeply felt by many who have moved away from the place they consider “home” — for example, I still refer to Fort Lauderdale as “home”, even though I live in Atlanta now, and my memories of “home” are pretty much uniformly good, even though stuff happened to me while I lived there that I certainly wouldn’t want to experience again. Similarly, while Avice didn’t have a charmed childhood, and while she does harbor some animosity toward Embassytown, she clearly loves the place and doesn’t want to see anything bad happen to it.

And, since she’s a little bitchy through the first quarter of the book, that sort of thing really does help.

Unlike Kraken, Embassytown doesn’t force the reader to perform mental gymnastics to keep up with Mieville’s use of language. However, the book did take me quite a while to get through. There’s a lot to absorb, and a lot of pages to do it in, and, quite honestly, for the first half or so I really wondered what the dramatic tension was going to be. If the book has a failing, that’s it — that I had absolutely no idea where the road would take me, but damn if the scenery wasn’t worth staring at, slack-jawed and awed.

Embassytown is a great book. You should read it. It’s another home run by an author who seems to hit nothing but. But, you know, if you’d rather become part of a simile and be referred to as “the person who chose not to read the novel called Embassytown“… that’s up to you.

Note to Parents: This book contains violence (including self-mutilation), adult language, adult situations, and occasional sexual situations (many not of the male/female two-person variety). It should be safe for older teens who have read similar material in the past. However, the reading level of the material may preclude even mature younger teens from fully appreciating the novel. Of course, you should use your own best judgment where your children are concerned.

Science Future: Portable Power

Science fiction inspires the world around us. It inspires our future. To discover these influences, we look to the future of science, to Science Future. The Science Future series presents the bleeding edge of scientific discovery and links it back to science fiction in order to discuss these influences and speculate on the future of science fiction.

Portable Power

Mobile and ubiquitous computing is one of the hot spots of commercial research and it has been slowly invading our science fiction for years. Almost every one can refer to at least one person, if not themselves, who carries the internet around in their pocket and nearly every space faring race seems to have easy access to huge databases of information just by saying or thinking the word “Computer”.  Today, most lunch-break trivia arguments can be settled, if not very quickly, before the bill has arrived. That is until the battery runs out. Even to the most casual user of digital devices, occasionally having to disconnect ourselves from our external memory and constant updates, to let our little glowing boxes recharge, causes anguish.

Batteries by Tomblois (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)What would help alleviate this pain and suffering? Maybe if it didn’t take so long to recharge a battery. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found a way to use nanomaterials to recreate battery cathodes at a nano-scale that can charge up to 100 times faster than current commercial batteries but still power your netbook just fine. It helps explain why we never really see our protagonists pulling out their hyperspace coms and cursing that they forgot to leave it on the charger over night.

You still need to get power from somewhere, however, and some scientists at MIT have delved into biotechnology and developed an artificial leaf that will absorb a gallon of water and bright sunlight and produce enough electricity to power a house in a developing country for an entire day. The leaf works by simulating a form of photosynthesis, where in it breaks down water into hydrogen and oxygen and then uses those two elements to produce electricity. Imagine spaceships sailing through the solar system covered in artificial leaves that not only power our ships but also camouflage them in case they fly through a space forest.

If you’re not big into the flora fashion, Doctors at GeorgeTech have created one of the first commercially viable nanogenerators. That is to say they’ve created a flexible chip about the a quarter of the size of a stamp that generates electricity through simple movement. It does this by taking advantage of a nanowire property known as piezoelectric, or the ability to generate electrical fields when mechanically strained. Research suggests that five of these chips can output the same amount of power as a AA battery. Combined with the batteries above, this means that joggers and outdoor enthusiasts never have to worry about being disconnected from the internet ever again! Not a lot science fiction authors saw that one coming.
Bzzt

So does this mean that the lack of plugs, chargers, and batteries in our science fiction has been author oversight or author foresight? Science fiction likes it technological gadgets from laser rifles to portable shield generators to omni-tools but rarely do we see a person of the future angry over forgetting to charge their light sword. Ubiquitous energy seems to be the theme of the future and it’s fiction. But the issue of power has many reprocussions. Science is bringing us a future of full of miniaturized safe energy to help power our increasingly mobile lifestyles in a decreasingly large world. This might lead to stories that focus on the dehumanization, re-humanization, or even digitalization of human society. Either way power will always be an important part of science fiction even if most of science fiction chooses to ignore it.

Book Review: “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms” by N.K. Jemisin

Every now and then, you hear about a book by an author you’ve heard of. The book has a great title, gets good reviews, and is generally well-received. You see it on Amazon, but the price is a little higher than you’re willing to pay. So you decide to wait until it goes on sale.

Then it goes on sale. You buy it. You start reading it. And you wish you’d just kept on waiting.

That was my experience with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin.

Kingdoms takes place on an alternate Earth, where… well… 100,000 kingdoms are led by the Arameri family, who lives within a Space-Needle-like palace called Sky. The current leader of the Arameri, Dekarta, is getting on in years and wants to pass the mantle of leadership to one of his full-blooded Arameri heirs, Scimina and Relad.

But there’s a third Arameri heir, Yeine, warrior-princess of the far-off land of Darr — and the main character of Kingdoms. Brought to Sky by Dekarta, her grandfather, she finds herself embroiled in a power struggle for the leadership of the Arameri — and the entire world — as she becomes increasingly aware of exactly why she was ordered to Sky in the first place: the Arameri want her to die.

I think my main problems with Kingdoms stemmed from the tropes used and the storytelling style. The tropes included:

  • Young woman comes to town and is suddenly the most important person there.
  • Supernatural creatures try to recruit young woman to their side.
  • Young woman turns out to have some sort of connection to the supernatural creatures.

In this case, the creatures in question are the gods of the planet — Itempas, Nahadoth, and Enefa, roughly corresponding to God, Satan, and Eve/Lilith. Nahadoth lives among the Arameri; Itempas appears when the Arameri passes leadership on to the next heir. Unlike the real world, these gods actually provably exist, and can do godlike things. There are others, including the childlike Sieh, but it’s really all about Nahadoth.

Once Yeine gets situated in Sky, the story turns into a fantastical soap opera, with plots and counterplots, and in the middle of it all a single character who things just seem to happen to. Yeine does act upon her environment, but usually not until the environment has acted upon her.

To go back to my comment on storytelling style — the best way to explain it is that I felt like I was reading Anita Blake: God Hunter. The same problems I have with Laurell K. Hamilton’s storytelling, I had with Kingdoms (although this book was well-edited, whereas some of Hamilton’s novels unfortunately contain grammatical errors and spelling inconsistencies). I also didn’t really care for the digressions into Yeine’s dreams about what the gods were doing, or had done. They didn’t hold my interest.

There is an unexpected twist at the end — I’ll give it that — but unfortunately I felt as though the amount of talking and exposition that came right after, to support the twist, lessened its effect.

Despite my problems with the tropes and the style, I did find the main characters to be well-rounded and interesting. Even though I didn’t really like Yeine, I was on her side throughout the whole story. In the afterword of the digital copy of the novel that I read, an interview with the author indicated that Yeine was a version of herself taken “to the extreme”. I’ve never met or spoken to the author, but I’ve written enough stories with “a version of myself” as the main character that I saw the hallmarks of it, and they drew me out of the story a little. But despite that, I still wanted her, maybe if not to win, then to at least not lose. Some of the villains felt a little flat — and one of the characters who betrays our heroes, I don’t think I really had enough clues to appreciate the level of betrayal — but I was pleased with the sheer level of detail and attention paid to the main players. Especially Nahadoth and T’vril. I found T’vril to be the most relatable character in the story, and Nahadoth the most interesting. In fact, Nahadoth is really the character I think most people will be rooting for — bound by the Arameri, he nonetheless finds ways to rebel. I watched Watchmen last night, and I found myself drawing parallels to Dr. Manhattan’s immense power and his battle to control it for the people he cared about.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the first book in the “Inheritance” trilogy, according to the cover. I’m not sure I’m going to read the second book anytime soon, but I think the first one was well-received enough that the sequels will be enjoyed by those who liked Kingdoms. Unfortunately, I didn’t really care for the book that much. Despite the author’s clear talent and ability for worldbuilding and characterization, the story didn’t hold my interest — possibly because, at least in my mind, it didn’t bring anything new to an oft-told tale of a young warrior-trained woman upon whom rests the fate of the entire world.

Maybe next time.

Note to Parents: This novel contains violence and a couple of sexual situations, one explicit. Mature teens will be able to handle it; younger ones may become distracted by the imagery. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.

Book Review: “Scouts” by Nobilis Reed

Warp drive. Hyperspeed. Folding space. Immersion. The Infinite Improbability Drive. Read five different pieces of science fiction and you’re guaranteed to find five different propulsion methods with five different names. But one thing I can guarantee* is that you’ve never seen a starship being powered the way Nobilis Reed does it in Scouts.

WARNING: Scouts is a novel for adults, and as a result the review contains discussions of explicit sex. Reader discretion is advised.

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