What I Read in February, 2017

February was a bit busy. I attempted to finish reading the collection my story, "Killing the First Gods," appeared in "A Book of Blasphemous Words." At nearly thirty stories, I'm afraid I didn't quite finish the book in time but what I read gave me quite a few more names to follow.

A Sack Race to the River by Chris Kuriata. (The Book of Blasphemous Words) This one left a mark. The story of a father who is attempting to save his sons from some awful apocalyptic fate by stuffing them in a burlap sack reminded me of that Bill Paxton movie, "Fraility," but the payoff here is a bit more epic and weird.
Youth Will be Served by Andrew Fox. (Nightmare) In Florida, a leviathan offers youth in exchange for the lives of a few sacrificial elderly. Wrapped up in this is the desire to help those in pain and the inevitability of decline and death. What really came through in this story is the sense of unspoken menace, the constant peril of altruism.
If We Survive The Night by Carlie St. George (The Dark). What if all of the victims of slasher flicks got sent down to purgatory to live out their failings in a quest for redemption. After the initial set up this story sets a deliberate ferocious tone. There are echoes here of Brooke Bolander's "Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies" and of course "Cabin in the Woods." However, by examining the harsh calculations that drive modern horror films it reaches towards a fuller depiction of human forgiveness. Fun read.
Assassins by Jack Skillingstead and Burt Courtier. (Clarkesworld) Intriguing look at augmented reality entertainment where popular virtual friends can be assassinated by any random heart-broken troll. One of a few stories I've read in recent years attempting to grapple with a world where fantasy, fandom, and human fragility collide in virtual reality.

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Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation. Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...

A Reaction to Peter Watts' "Echopraxia"

Peter Watts’ Echopraxia is a side-sequel to his previous hard sf horror novel Blindsight . Daniel Bruks, a biologist in the Eastern Oregonian desert, gets stuck in the middle of a war between a fugitive vampire and a cult of rewired post-humans called Bicamerals, ultimately kidnapped by them as they head towards the sun. The goal of post-human and vampire alike is to investigate a possible alien intelligence gaining strength there, to determine if it poses a threat, or offers a weapon for the two sides as they struggle for advantage. Bruks' goal is simple survival. Reading Watts is a simultaneously bracing and discouraging experience. Bracing because his depiction of the future and the oddities who inhabit it continue to get better and better, his plots more complicated and more involving, his characters less like sock-puppets for his ideas and more like actual human beings (or whatevers). Discouraging because Watts uses his considerable gifts, artistic and academic, ...

The Dorsia Brevia Solution

While "Green Mars," didn't include nearly as much mind-blowing speculative awesomeness as the first book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, it did include one set-piece that I enjoyed very much: The Dorsa Brevia Declaration. As mentioned in my review earlier this week, the plot of Green Mars focuses on the approach of a second Martian revolution. The first revolution, as described in Red Mars, was a spasm of senseless violence, mayhem, and targeted assassination, accomplishing little besides the deaths of many, many important characters in the story. As would-be revolutionaries gather in an enormous lava tube named Dorsa Brevia, the central question is how would any future revolution escape the fate of the first. The process, which I'll describe below, was very familiar to me. During the course of my path to teaching history in Middle School, I worked at an afterschool program named Citizen Schools based in Boston. Citizen Schools had its ups and down...

Ancient Logic

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