Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, May 2016

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire

Collectively, "the Ibis trilogy", three historical novels centered around the First Opium War. They're beautifully written and the viewpoint characters (of which there are many, weaving in and out of the three books) are all very well-drawn. Beyond that, the setting and the protagonists give Ghosh a chance to depict — "comment on" suggests something more heavy-handed — imperialism, cultural diversity and exchange, free trade, multiple identities, enough varieties of love that cannot be acknowledged that I'd have to think to list them all, desires ditto, gardening, memory, the perils of getting what you want, and much, much else. It's really impressive, even if I was not very happy with the ending, and I will be revisiting it at a more leisurely pace.

Elizabeth Bear, Karen Memory

Mind candy. I am normally a big fan of Bear's writing, but just got through this one. The central feature of the book is the voice of the first-person narrator, Karen Memery (sic), and while this was clearly a labor of love on the part of the author, my reaction to that voice ranged from indifference to irritation. (The character wasn't irritating, her style was.) As for the steampunk setting --- as my friend Henry Farrell once put it, "the goggles do nothing", i.e., it seemed like it would have been very easy to tell a very similar, and no worse, story without those props. Clearly, though, lots of people like it very much, so I will just look forward to Bear's future books.

Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss

Mind candy: a mystery or literary thriller (or both?). The writing is excellent and the protagonist, a failed New York photographer very much out of her element in Maine, is a very well-realized character (and a complete jerk, with impulses which are much, much worse). There are apparently sequels, which I look forward to tracking down. ROT-13'd, for being both a spoiler and catty: Gubhtu V qb ubcr Pnff trgf orggre nobhg fbyivat zlfgrevrf guna whfg orvat yhpxl jura fur qrpvqrf fbzrbar fbhaqf qhovbhf.

(Picked up on the recommendation of Aunt Agatha's in Ann Arbor.)

Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

This is a deeply impressive effort to take seriously the line that "history is the trade secret of science fiction". That is, Palmer has tried to craft a 25th century which is as strange, as familiar, and as both-at-once-because-that's-not-what-we-meant, as our own time would have seemed to someone from the 17th century. This applies not just to the world-building but also to the story-telling (e.g., the way her narrator is simultaneously speaking to his own future and trying to channel [what he thinks of as] an 18th-century voice). This is, to my mind, exactly the sort of thing good science fiction should do. I hope the example of the effort catches on, though I worry that it will merely be specific inventions which get imitated.

Having enthused about setting and narration, I have to admit to being more ambivalent about the plot. Or maybe plots; there are at least two, one revolving around the high politics of the world, and the other around a young boy who seems to have miraculous powers. Both are hard to summarize, or even describe, and both are left very much unresolved at the end of this book. I find it hard to say whether I like the story, though I was certainly eager enough to keep reading, and am frustrated enough by not knowing what happened next that I pre-ordered the sequel.

ObLinkage: Palmer's round-up of her self-presentations and reviews by others.

Robert Jackson Bennett, American Elsewhere

Mind-candy contemporary fantasy, but of truly exceptional quality. This is in many ways a meditation Lovecraftian themes, transposed t