What I Read in May 2017

May brought a deluge of amazing stories. In particular I think these works captured my mood throughout this month of revelations, disgust, and hope.

Look, this is meant to be a post about art - short literature specifically. However, I don't think you can understand art in isolation from politics, society, or whatever else is going on at a particular moment. A writer cannot help but weave elements of what circulates through their brains during the writing process (or at least I can't). Editors and publishers cannot help but respond to things that speak to a moment in time. Do I know for 100% that these stories reflect the situation in this country? No, I do not. I do think each has something to say about this moment.

"Machine of the Devil" by Maria Haskins. I've praised Haskins work before in these monthly round-ups for her well-crafted, tightly wound short fiction. This flash piece highlights her talent for embodying large themes in very small packages. In a story about sacrifice and other messy epiphanies, the remarkable thing is how much of a panoramic horizon unfolds from a single snap-shot.
"Why I Don't Trust Batman" by Sarah Gailey. This piece made me genuinely angry. I'm not quite sure why it was published as nonfiction in last month's Uncanny Magazine but whatever you want to call it, this careful, step-by-step take-down of the Batman is genius. Somehow I think Gailey took the famous pronouncement you 'can't kill an idea,' as a challenge. Ken Liu had a work last year that reminds me of this one, but I felt this was infinitely less philosophical and more genuinely pissed-off, an observation I mean as no slight to Liu but only as praise for the Gailey.
"James, In the Golden Sunlight" of the Hereafter by Adam-Troy Castro. A man, killed in an accident, enjoys the endless delights of heaven, only gradually realizing that no one else he knows appears there with him. His quest to track down what happened to his family concludes in a powerful statement on invisible privilege and what is owed to others. The tone and style of this story reminded me of Neil Gaiman at his most urgent and unrestrained.
"The Sound Of" by Charles Payseur. Damn fine story. Motors by with a verve and terrified passion, keeping the monster at the heart of its story held just out of view. One of the first stories I've read that seems post-Trump. The dread in this story stems from the way the unimaginable becomes normalized.

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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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