Sleep Donation by Karen Russell (3 stars)

An excellent premise: a contagious and fatal insomnia epidemic is sweeping the world. Sleep donors are sought desperately to save lives, and the most valuable sleep of all comes from newborn baby donors who are sedated to have their grade A dreamless sleep extracted.

But is there a risk to donating? What effects will it have on the most prolific and famous donor "Baby A"? Is the donated sleep contaminated? Is there a black market for sleep?

There's such a wealth of ideas here, it would be easy to hang a whole series of novels off them, but this is a novella so we need to settle for less. Sadly, while the writing is strong none of the tension in these ideas is really brought to climax. The novel ends with basically none of those interesting questions answered, and left me with a feeling that it could have been so much more.

I get the impression that this was a literary author "slumming it" in sci-fi for a bit with an interesting idea, but not one she wanted to spend a whole lot of time on. I'd love to read a China Meiville or Robin McKinley rewrite of this novel.

3 stars.

Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente (3 stars)

It's the adult version of Alice in Wonderland crossed with Miyazaki's Spirited Away. i.e. it's very weird in a dark and dreamlike way. I was not really a fan.

It's interesting to contrast with Mieville, who is no stranger to weird and dark. The differentiator is that Mieville has a stronger sense of plot and more defined characters. Valente forgoes these in favour of a LSD dreamscape populated by characters so shallow you need to be constantly reminded of their badges to remember whose POV this is: bee girl, blue hair train girl, crazy locksmith etc.

To enter this dreamscape you first need to catch the STD map from someone else who has it, then have sex with another map holder to enter the world of Palimpsest. At first I thought this was a very cheap plot device to soak up some more adventurous romance readers, but it quickly became clear that this was not a refuge for romance novel readers. The sex is often loveless, depressing, frequently homosexual, and void of any romance. For most of the Palimpsest travelers it is a necessary ordeal, just a ticket purchase price.

I was never really satisfied with the motivations for the characters to put themselves through this ordeal to visit Palimpsest. And I was completely unconvinced by any desire to immigrate and live there permanently, which is the premise and tensions of the whole novel.

Some reviewers say the world building was amazing. I was less impressed. There's plenty of fantastic ideas and imagery, but each visit is like a short film of a completely different world: there's very little consistent (apart from animal body parts grafted onto humans), so I never felt immersed in a world, more like thrust into a new crazy dreamscape each time.

3 stars.