Best of 2018 as read by G

The best (5 stars):

• Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
• The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
• Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor
• Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
• Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. Le Guin (3 stars)

The Dispossessed is very philosophical sci-fi. Effectively the aliens are just there to explore a large thought experiment about an anarchist utopia, just as left hand of darkness is an expose by contrast of the effect of gender differences we have created in our society.

There's a study guide at the back of the book, which I wish I'd read with each chapter, it would have given me a deeper understanding. One thing it points out is the historical context: following the dystopias popular in the mid 1900s, this novel was one of a few new utopias written in the mid 70s that attempted to be more realistic - not implausibly perfect and unattainable.

So in this novel Le Guin presents Anarres, where an anarchist society has succeeded in a very harsh environment, but is far from perfect. Rather than a government, policy, and military controlling the populace, the job of enforcing social norms and enacting any punishment for deviance from those norms is essentially left to your neighbours and colleagues. The stick they wield is removal of social approval and casting out of those who don't conform.

As well as exploring how an anarchist society could work, Le Guin continues a strong sexual equality discourse that was familiar from left hand. Shevek is shocked at the reactions he gets from people on Urras when discussing how men and women were effectively equal on Anarres:

“Is there really no distinction between men’s work and women’s work?” “Well, no, it seems a very mechanical basis for the division of labor, doesn’t it? A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength—what has the sex to do with that?” “Men are physically stronger,” the doctor asserted with professional finality. “Yes, often, and larger, but what does that matter when we have machines?

Kimoe stared at him, shocked out of politeness. “But the loss of—of everything feminine—of delicacy—and the loss of masculine self-respect— You can’t pretend, surely, in your work, that women are your equals? In physics, in mathematics, in the intellect? You can’t pretend to lower yourself constantly to their level?” 

And there's a fairly profound portrayal of how messed up our way of speaking about sex is:

The language Shevek spoke, the only one he knew, lacked any proprietary idioms for the sexual act. In Pravic it made no sense for a man to say that he had “had” a woman. The word which came closest in meaning to “fuck,” and had a similar secondary usage as a curse, was specific: it meant rape. The usual verb, taking only a plural subject, can be translated only by a neutral word like copulate. It meant something two people did, not something one person did, or had. 

Shevek can't comprehend why the women of Urras put up with this situation:

“It seems that everything your society does is done by men. The industry, arts, management, government, decisions. And all your life you bear your father’s name and the husband’s name. The men go to school and you don’t go to school; they are all the teachers, and judges, and police, and government, aren’t they? Why do you let them control everything? Why don’t you do what you like?” 

It's all very thoughtful, the subject is important, and the premise is well constructed. I can see why it won tons of awards. But honestly I just didn't enjoy reading it so I can't give it a high rating. Too much sitting around philosophizing and reflecting on events, and not enough first-person experiencing of events. There's plenty of passages that feel like reading a philosophy textbook that I just found boring:

Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.” “What motivated Odo but an exceptional sensitivity to suffering—her own and others’?” Bedap retorted. “But the whole principle of mutual aid is designed to prevent suffering!”

3 stars.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (5 stars)

I loved this one, originally published in 1972 it has held up well, sans some uncomfortable sexism. It won all the awards (Hugo, Nebula, and others). It's a fascinating exploration of an unknown alien object.

There's absolutely no character development. It could almost be a scientific journal article, but it's actually a really interesting discovery and exploration story. One of my favourite parts was the attention to detail about travel through the artifact, including mind games played on the explorers by low gravity in an enormous indoor space:

Too much thinking along these lines evoked yet a third image of Rama, which he was anxious to avoid at all costs. This was the viewpoint that regarded it once again as a vertical cylinder, or well—but now he was at the top, not the bottom, like a fly crawling upside down on a domed ceiling, with a fifty-kilometer drop immediately below. Every time he found this image creeping up on him, he needed all his will power not to cling to the ladder in mindless panic.

It's well written, but fairly cold and impersonal, with some rare more poetic moments like this:

Rama is a cosmic egg, being warmed by the fires of the Sun. It may hatch at any moment.” The Chairman of the committee looked at the Ambassador from Mercury in frank astonishment.

Quibbles:

• It seems really unlikely to me that aliens would have similar body geometry to humans, but the explorers don't seem to find this remarkable at all. I was waiting to find out that it's actually a human artifact created by time-travelling humans...
• Space travel is more advanced than present day, but I found the amount of extra equipment lying around unused on a spaceship that wasn't built as an exploration vessel stupidly implausible. There's crates and crates of equipment brought into Rama, spare 20kW electric motors, and even a recreational plane-bike???

And on the sexism, it was sad to see how many times "men" was written in sentences like these, but also not surprising for the 70's:

...at least for men who were trained to face the realities of space. Perhaps no one who had never left Earth, and had never seen the stars all around him, could endure these vistas. But if any men could accept them, Norton told himself with grim determination, it would be the captain and crew of the Endeavour. He looked at his chronometer.

The reviews of the sequels are terrible, so I'll probably stop at this one.

5 stars.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (5 stars)

Great read, I breezed through it over a couple of days. Time travel is one of my favourite subjects, and I liked the premise of being trapped constantly re-living the same life in the same body, but with memories carrying over after your death. Like Groundhog day, but for your whole life instead of one day.

What would you do if you had essentially infinite lives? What would matter to you? How would you value the lives of others who aren't like you (referred to as linear)?

North gives Harry plenty of opportunity to explore those questions. He discovers the "Cronus Club": an organization of kalachakras like himself that assists those who have been reborn as children with escaping the tedium of going through yet another childhood, and establishing some income and housing stability. A common view of those in the Chronus Club is that "complexity should be your excuse for inaction": the reasoning being that if you were to kill Hitler for example, how do you know that an even more effective leader with the same views wouldn't take his place, and possibly win World War Two? Through trying to influence the world in many ways the consensus of the Chronus Club is that the large historical events are largely fixed and mostly immune to change.

Given that WWII will always happen no matter what you do, how would you choose to live your life? Some escape to calmer countries during the war, some fully participate and revel in the unpredictability of war because it delivers new experiences each time.

Ironically, to give purpose to the lives of the Chronus Club members, some sort of mutual objective is desirable, and one materializes in the form of Vincent, our antagonist. Vincent's only real crime is chasing a macguffin, in this case a quantum mirror which will help him understand time and matter on a much deeper level. He pursues it with ruthless efficiency, killing those who get in his way, and with no care for how much he may be changing the course of history in the process. He perfects methods to create advanced technology faster than it was ever supposed to happen - delivering gift-wrapped inventions to the best scientists of the time. I've often wondered about this subject myself: given modern education, and the ability to time travel, how effective could a single person be at accelerating technological advancement? Vincent is certainly helped by having a photographic memory.

I loved the idea of handing messages forward and backwards through time by passing them young to old, old to young through the Chronus club. The implication received through these messages from the future is that technological advancement precipitates environmental collapse, and bringing forward the pace of that change, also brings forward the end of the world.

There's some logic holes that aren't really explained in the story: say Harry and Vincent are separated by 10 years at birth, but Harry dies at 20 and Vincent lives for another 50 years. If Harry is reborn and then Vincent is reborn 10 years later with all of his extra 50 years of memories, was Harry waiting in limbo for 50 years? Multiply that problem by thousands of kalachakras.

Spoilers.

The ending seems a little too easy. Vincent just gives up his point of origin for no good reason. I didn't buy Harry's strategy of talking to him about his own childhood in an effort to get Vincent to divulge his, Vincent guarded that secret as his most prized possession for hundreds of years. Also I didn't buy that Harry wouldn't slip up over several decades of working closely with Vincent. It would have happened somehow, some bit of knowledge would have peeked through. Harry's very long-game strategy just wouldn't have worked. I especially don't think he could have maintained composure through the Jenny incident.

Overall though, spectacular read.

5 stars.

Who fears death by Nnedi Okorafor (3 stars)

Coming off the Binti series underwhelmed I wasn't sure I should dive into another Okorafor book, but I was intrigued because HBO had bought the options on it as a series with George RR Martin as the executive producer. Minor spoilers ahead

Okorafor sets out to tackle some heavy subjects: rape, female circumcision, colourism, racism, sexism, and ethnic cleansing. She succeeds in showing us what it would be like to be pressured by society and tradition into circumcision, what it would be like to be the child of rape where your very skin colour screams to everyone that you were a child of rape. Just your skin colour makes you an outcast, constantly reviled and hated. Sadly, this is based on true events in Sudan:

The Nuru men, and their women, had done what they did for more than torture and shame. They wanted to create Ewu children. Such children are not children of the forbidden love between a Nuru and an Okeke, nor are they Noahs, Okekes born without color. The Ewu are children of violence.

The female circumcision where they mutilate young healthy girls is also barbaric:

“The scalpel that they use is treated by Aro. There’s juju on it that makes it so that a woman feels pain whenever she is too aroused . . . until she’s married.”

Onyesonwu obviously has magical talents, but sexism prevents her from receiving any proper tuition despite her life being under threat in the magical world "the wilderness" from her biological father, rapist, and powerful sorcerer.

This is all heavy, heavy stuff, but it is dealt with in well crafted storytelling...for a while. But soon I found the story stalling. I expected to get a sorcery training montage, but didn't. All of Onyesonwu's 'training' was mostly just starving her, throwing her into a deadly situation and seeing if she could figure out what to do instinctively. Somehow this makes her incredibly powerful, by her own account. That's unconventional, but OK.

I also expected to get more deep character development, but didn't. Even Mwita, the second most important character, is basically just a skin colour (also Ewu) who is in love with Onyesonwu. The girls who go through the circumcision with Onyesonwu become her friends, but are almost entirely defined by wanting the circumcisions undone so they can have sex. We know very little else about them except Luyu is probably the prettiest.

Sex is had and talked about constantly as the group of friends start their voyage, but there aren't actual sex scenes, just lots of talk about hearing people have sex in other tents. Its repetitive and boring.

After reading a number of Okorafor books, I think the lack of character development outside the main character is a pattern. There's no secondary point of view, and everyone else is a cutout. The villain nemesis in this story is crudely drawn as a pure evil rapist sorcerer:

“Some people are just born evil,”

Real villains are much more complex. What was his motivation for these terrible acts? We don't know.

The ending was essentially what I expected, although with a decent twist, i.e. Onyesonwu doesn't know what to do, acts instinctively using her enormous powers, and saves the day.

It may be possible to make a decent TV series out of this, although it will definitely be hard to watch due to all the violence. It is largely experienced second-hand in the book, but I assume you'll get that first hand on the screen.

The strength of the novel is the real-world hardships and Onyesonwu coming of age in a world where she is beset by multiple -isms. The fantasy/magic side of it is very weak.

3 stars.

Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor (2 stars)

The first in this series showed a lot of promise, but the rest failed to hold my interest, and this was the weakest of the trilogy. Despite this being a short novel I found myself struggling to finish it. Spoilers ahead.

In a really obvious plot quirk, Binti doesn't investigate the fire in the root where supposedly her entire family perished. Wouldn't you want to know? What if they were still alive? Spoiler: they are still alive, she finds out later. This was very awkward plot construction.

It takes a long time to walk anywhere. I don't understand this world where the technology exists for spaceships, but people don't even have bikes? Pedicabs? Scooters? Motorbikes? Cars?

Just like in the first novel, Binti just has to ask and interplanetary wars stop. These two races have a long and bloody history, and just started a new war, but Binti says:

The war between Khoush and Meduse ends

shoots out some lightning, and everyone agrees to stop fighting. Right.

When she dies it's super obvious she is going to be resurrected by some deus ex machina bullshit at Saturn. My only surprise was that it wasn't the favourite deus ex otjize (I was so sick of hearing about otjize) which has no end of magical properties. Instead it turned out to be even more lame, it's the "microbes", duuuude:

"When your body was placed in my chamber, my microbes went to work. You are probably more microbes than human now."
I frowned. "What does that mean? I look and feel like myself. I remember who I am. I was dead, right?"

It's super lazy. The author might as well have said "bacteria", "space dust" or "icing sugar" for all the sense that makes.

And then we find out that this whole thing with the edan was just the most complicated way possible to solicit a Yelp review for a university.

"So you've known I would eventually be...what I now am, so you sent for me?"
"Yes. We are many things. What is your opinion of the university?"

Meanwhile, turns out the war is back on, but now Binti is safely ensconced at the University and the president tells her:

But until then, don’t worry too much. This fight is old and if the Enyi Zinariya are going to help the Himba, then at least your families will be safe. With you gone, the Khoush will not bother with the Himba, I don’t think.”

So, essentially: "don't worry that you triggered a war, this has been going on for ages. I mean wars are pretty sensible and innocent people don't tend to get hurt, so I'm sure your family still on the planet will be fine."

and then we find out Binti has essentially enslaved New Fish:

“About five miles on land and she can fly about seven miles up,” she said. “That’s not so bad, is it?” I smiled and said, “No. Thank the Seven.” “But unless she follows, no more taking university and solar shuttles, okay? New Fish can take you.”

So, because she saved your life, New Fish now needs to follow around wherever Binti wants to go, never moving away more than a few miles. And the president has no problem committing New Fish to shuttling Binti around whenever she want for the rest of Binti's life. And it doesn't even seem to occur to Binti that she just made New Fish her slave. WTF?

In this series Okorafor explored some powerful topics of racism and coming of age for a young woman. But it ultimately fell flat for me on weak characters other than Binti and unbelievable hairpin plot turns.

2 stars.

Binti: Home (2.5 stars)

Less interesting than the first, with no interesting characters except for Binti. I think the novella format is very constraining. Okorafor is doing a large amount of world building, but doesn't have time to bring in any other realistic characters.

Binti is going through a coming-of-age, after her trip off-planet has changed her physically and spiritually. She finds the world she left is no longer the one she knew, and confronts prejudice in the form of traditional role beliefs held by her family and friends that don't allow for wild off-planet alien adventures.

She also confronts her own latent racism about the Desert People, and there's a moment of afrofuturism similar to Black Panther when their technology prowess is revealed.

I felt a sting of shame as I realized why I hadn’t understood something so obvious. My own prejudice.

Fairly disappointing follow-up to the first novel.

2.5 stars