Why I Read It: Thanks to the Mount TBR project, it’s given me a chance to delve into series that I’ve collected but neglected, and Asaro was at the top of my pile. I started with The Radiant Seas, and next in line in the series (by publication chronology) was Ascendant Sun, so no matter how much I hated the cover (I’ll get to that later), I picked it up and gave it a whirl.

Please Note: the premise spoils the events of Catherine Asaro’s The Last Hawk.

The premise: ganked from BN.com: Ascendant Sun is the direct sequel to The Last Hawk, in which Kelric, heir to the Skolian Empire, crash-landed his fighter on the Restricted planet of Coba. He was imprisoned by the powerful mistresses of the great estates — women who, over time, fell in love with him. After 18 years of living in their gilded cage, Kelric finally made his escape.

In Ascendant Sun, Kelric returns to Skolian space, only to find the Empire in control of the Allied forces of Earth. With little more than the clothes on his back, Kelric is forced to take work on a merchant vessel. But when that vessel enters Euban space, Kelric finds his worst nightmare realized: he becomes a slave to the cruel Aristos — humans who use torture and sex as the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay. For those who want to remain surprised and unspoiled, please skip to “My Rating.” Everyone else, onward!

Discussion: It’s been a long time since I read The Last Hawk. I remember actively not liking it as the book continued, because if the roles were reversed, and Kelric a female, the story would have feminists up in arms. I remember rolling my eyes at how quickly the book established and stuck to a pattern, sucking tension out of the story. I remember the book had some good things to offer in terms of world-building, but the negative stuck with me longer.

I don’t remember the analogy to The Illiad. It’s an analogy that’s referenced here in Ascendant Sun, and now that I think of it, it makes sense in a rather clever way. Helen of Troy was the face who launched a thousand ships, and in The Last Hawk, an entire planet went to war over Kelric. Whether I saw the parallel and didn’t care, or didn’t catch the parallel and should’ve is beyond the point, I get it now.

Why I bring this up for my review of Ascendant Sun, I don’t know. We lose some of the formula, though I can safely say that with nearly every encounter with a new female, a sexual advance is sure to follow, and if not a sexual advance, then at least arousal. I’m starting to think, thanks to the book, this can be blamed on Kelric himself, because he’s got such an off-the-charts empathy rating that he can’t help but pick up on those feelings in others, and because he’s been so damaged by his years on Coba, he can’t help but broadcasting his feelings. So if he finds someone attractive, he broadcasts it, which can stimulate those feelings in others, which he senses, and you get stuck in a feedback loop of arousal.

Don’t get me wrong, it gets a little ridiculous. And sometimes, female characters see Kelric’s body and immediately want to hump him. That gets even more ridiculous.

But the overall story of Kelric coming home from exile to learn of the Radiance War, learning how many of his family is either dead or captive, and trying to figure out how to take his rightful place as Imperator is interesting. Also interesting is his time with the Aristos, which I was convinced I would hate, but I didn’t. We meet characters that we met at the very end of The Radiant Seas and it’s confirmed that as an Aristo ages, the need to transcend isn’t as overpowering, and indeed one character had that part of her brain removed so she could transcend no longer. I really liked her, and what Kelric learns during his time there was fascinating, even if the sex scenes had me rolling my eyes. By time we get to the end of the book, after Kelric has met Jaibriol III (aka Jay Rockworth, aka Soz & Jaibriol’s son), I’m more interested in ever in learning how these two powers come to peace, in learning if it’s even possible. With Kelric and Jaibriol in the driver seats, it seems very possible, and the optimistic side of me hopes that both can get their prospective empires in line and meet in peace. If anyone can figure out how to do it on the Skolian side, it’s Kelric, whose observations of the Aristos using the Quis was fascinating.

I’m not too optimistic though. What seems logical to me usually ends up being the last thing characters can do in this world the Asaro has created. My logic there would get all the characters killed, so maybe I just need to sit down for the rest of the ride. I have six books left in the series, as well as a few books I don’t own yet. I doubt the numerous short stories that Asaro has written would provide any real closure to how all of this resolves, but hey, I could be wrong. The point is that I’ve got a long way to go, and despite enjoying this book, I’ll be taking a break so I can move on to another series and start completing some trilogies.

The writing still leaves a lot to be desired, especially when Asaro is writing from the aroused male point of view. These scenes strike me as silly and adolescent, and I’m not sure who the target audience is here. I mean, seriously, who is this line supposed to excite (page 131):

He rubbed his thumb against his fingers, itching to close his hands around those well-sized marvels of structural suspension.

Then there’s the threesome (foursomes?) during the auction (which The Radiant Seas prepared us for but ick) and during the Diamond Banquet (this one especially making me roll my eyes). I bring this up because I’m really not sure if I’m meant to laugh at the ridiculousness of it or if I’m actually expected to be aroused. Regarding the latter, I’ve read often that writers of romance SHOULD expect to arouse their readers during sex scenes, that if the reader isn’t around, the writer’s not doing their job properly. Here, I’m not sure what exactly the end result is, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think some of those threesome/foursome scenes came directly out of a teen boy’s imagination. So yeah, those did nothing for me.

My Rating: 5 – It’s a Gamble

I actually enjoyed this more than I was expecting, and I wasn’t expecting much, thanks to the cover and some of the negative reviews I’d read of this book before reading. But thankfully, while the ick moments are certainly ick, and while the reader must roll his or her eyes every time Kelric meets a straight female, because inevitably sexual attraction becomes part of the narrative, the story read very quickly and I was engaged in learning how Kelric would (if he even could) find a way to claim his role of Imperator. Also seeing him interact with Jay Rockworth, whose true identity is revealed in The Radiant Seas, is quite the hoot, and interesting besides. I’m slowly growing more invested in seeing how the Skolian and Aristo societies rebuild after the Radiance War, and Kelric’s personal philosophy and observations touch on some things I wondered myself: why can’t there be peace? And depending on how’s in charge, peace is very well possible. So I enjoyed this, despite all indicators saying I wouldn’t. Asaro’s writing still leaves me a little meh, and I’m starting to think it’s because the author oscillates between super technical and super erotic without striking the right tone that makes those extreme oscillations okay, if that makes sense.

Still, despite enjoying this, I’ll be moving on to another series, simply because I don’t want to spend half the year catching up on my Skolian Empire novels. I do plan to come back to the series, don’t worry, but I want to knock out some trilogies, so the next series I’ll be focusing on is Elizabeth Bear’s Jacob’s Ladder.

Cover Commentary: I hate it. So much. I’ll give credit where credit is due: this scene is in the book, as it’s when Kelric is being auctioned off as a slave, but not only does the artist make Kelric look UTTERLY unattractive (and trust me, he’s supposed to be attractive), but having the Aristo leering at him from the sofa (or whatever) had me hating this book before I ever read a word. Bad cover, bad!

Why I Read It: The opening of this book snagged me faster than anything’s snagged me in a very long while. Then when The Book Smugglers gave it an 8 out of 10, I knew this was a new release I had to get my hands on, so I did.

The premise: ganked from BN.com: “The body you are wearing used to be mine.” So begins the letter Myfanwy Thomas is holding when she awakes in a London park surrounded by bodies all wearing latex gloves. With no recollection of who she is, Myfanwy must follow the instructions her former self left behind to discover her identity and track down the agents who want to destroy her.

She soon learns that she is a Rook, a high-ranking member of a secret organization called the Chequy that battles the many supernatural forces at work in Britain. She also discovers that she possesses a rare, potentially deadly supernatural ability of her own.

In her quest to uncover which member of the Chequy betrayed her and why, Myfanwy encounters a person with four bodies, an aristocratic woman who can enter her dreams, a secret training facility where children are transformed into deadly fighters, and a conspiracy more vast than she ever could have imagined.

Filled with characters both fascinating and fantastical, THE ROOK is a richly inventive, suspenseful, and often wry thriller that marks an ambitious debut from a promising young writer.

Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay. Given the particular pros and cons of the book that I had, I’ll end up venturing into spoiler territory, so if you’re wanting to remain surprised, just skip to “My Rating” and you’ll be good to go! Everyone else, onward.

Discussion: So let me say: the opening is the best, most exciting part of the book. The opening had me thinking the book was a body-switching story, where paranormal investigators could utilize different bodies. Thinking of that kind of plot, you can see where I was chomping at the bit for that kind of story when I read that opening.

Now, because the book was NOT what I expected (a clever way to reveal an amnesiac’s story) doesn’t mean that I’m judging the book harshly for not being what I wanted it to be. The Rook has a lot to offer. It passes the Bechdel test in spades, and there’s no love story, no love interest. The only hint of any sort of romantic anything is Myfanwy commentary on how cute various co-workers are, you know? That’s it. And for a book that’s essentially an urban fantasy? That’s freaking fantastic. You’ve got girl power, but girl power that utilizes intellect instead of physical violence. You’ve got women working together, being heroes rather than love interests. And, as I mentioned before, there’s no love interest. If you’re looking for an urban fantasy that breaks the Buffy-lit mold, this is it, and I applaud the book for doing so.

And while I was disappointed that this wasn’t a body-switching plot, I found O’Malley’s handling of amnesia to be quite clever. Because amnesia is one of my least favorite plot devices. Amnesiacs in fiction always do STUPID THINGS, like trust people they should OBVIOUSLY not trust, and the plot is always about getting the memories back, and frankly, it can get a little boring, because while the memories might be unique, the person who’s wiped free of them always tends to be bland and boring.

What worked here was a few things: 1) Myfanwy knew that she would, at some point in the future, lose her memory. And because she’s crazily detail oriented, she PREPARED for this like nobody’s business, knowing that one day, she’d open her eyes with no memory of anything at all, and she’d need a helping hand. Who better to help an amnesiac than her pre-memory loss self?

The other reason this worked is 2) the Myfanwy we meet at the start has a clear personality, one we learn is really different from her predecessor, and it’s cool to see Myfanwy stand up for herself and learn that her previous incarnation would’ve never done such a thing.

So in many ways, I kept wondering if maybe I did get a body-snatching story, but by the end, when we learn how Myfanwy lost her memory in the first place, it makes sense that it was so complete that I kept reading “different person” instead of “amnesiac waiting to get memories back.” Because with rare exception, Myfanwy doesn’t get flashes of memory, and the book isn’t about her recovery her memory or even recovering her identity. She assumes it, armed with the knowledge she left herself, and basically wings it. It works rather well, and I give the author many kudos for pulling it off.

Mostly. All that being said, the beginning was still the most exciting part of the book for me.

One of the things I found myself struggling with was tone. There were times I thought this was going to be a nail-biting thriller. There were times I wondered if perhaps the author was reaching for a more humorous tone, a modern version of Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate voice. Other times, the tone just read a little too generically for me, sometimes slipping its POV grasp and sliding into someone else’s head during a single scene, and then there were a few POV cameos of other characters that I found completely unnecessary. That, and while I loved how cleverly the author used the letters to self to provide Myfanwy and the reader information, the conceit lost its sheen when the letters ended up dictating exact dialogue pre-amnesia Myfanwy experienced. And because it wasn’t made known that Myfanwy had an eidetic memory, then I can’t buy word-for-word dialogue revealed in letters.

That, more than anything, strained my suspension of disbelief. I was never sure what kind of book I was reading, and maybe that just means shame on me for trying to fit it into a pre-defined genre or subgenre, but I found this fluid vagueness to define itself a bit irritating, because I felt like I had to reset my expectations every time I learned something new about O’Malley’s world.

For example, the majority of the book is close third person POV, focusing all on Myfanwy’s observations. But on page 305, we’re pulled back into almost an omniscient narrator voice for the sake of humor:

“Uh, yeah. It’s Friday. That’s why I called. I was wondering if you wanted to come out tonight. A few of us are going clubbing and I thought that if you weren’t busy, you might want to come.”

“Clubbing? Clubbing what?” asked Myfanwy.

“What?”

“Do you mean self-defense?”

“What are you talking about?” asked the girl whose world did not consist primarily of supernatural security.

“What are you talking about?” asked the girl whose social life consisted primarily of occasionally going out to lunch and visiting sites filled with paranormal malevolence.

I get that’s supposed to be funny, especially in context, but considering it’s not the overall tone of the book, it throws me a bit. It’s the drawback on “the girl who” instead of keeping us tight on Myfanwy’s POV, you know?

And while I feel like, as a whole, O’Malley handled the whole amnesia thing rather well, there is the question of how the original operation dealt with something like muscle memory. Myfanwy freaks out when she has to sign something, worried the signatures wouldn’t match, but why wouldn’t they? Even if knowledge has been erased, muscle memory would still work, right? She obviously still knows how to write, so the erasure couldn’t have been THAT deep, right?

The humor sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t. I got the giggles over the dragon-birthing flashback scene, where we learn that Bittner had already empathically bonded with the dragon and they’d continue to bond after hatching. They bonded all right: the dragon took Bittner’s head off!

The plot felt a little predictable, though I didn’t have any idea how, exactly, Myfanwy lost her memory. But what was given in the letters, I felt, should surely relate to what was happening now, so it stood to reason that all of these things would come together by the end. True, the dragon-hatching and the vampire bit really didn’t play a role in this book, but unless I miss my guess, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the start of a series (especially because of the vampire; after all, Myfanwy did have scars on her neck, and the vampire pops up at strange places in the narrative). At any rate, some times I wasn’t sure if I was meant to be shocked or what when certain plots played out (like the five Gestalt instead of four), though I did like how my predictions left room for surprise. I didn’t suspect, for example, that the fifth Gestalt was a baby.

The ending is a bit anti-climatic. On one hand, the action portion of it was a little fuzzy and hard to really visualize in terms of what happened and why. A lot of what’s accomplished is Myfanwy learning how to use her powers in new and unexpected ways, so while it’s not quite a deus ex machina, it does sometimes feel a little too inconvenient. And while I like that the very, very end, the threat of the Grafters, is actually handled through diplomacy rather than butt-kicking action, there’s a little bit of a “That’s it?” feeling when it’s over.

My Rating: 6 – Worth Reading, with Reservations

I’ll say it again: the beginning was, for me, the best part of the book. That doesn’t mean the rest of the book doesn’t have anything to offer. It does. It passes the Bechdel test in spades, features a heroine who saves the day with intellect and diplomacy versus physical ass-kicking, and even better, doesn’t have a hint of romance in it. For readers looking for a fun urban fantasy that isn’t Buffy-lit, this is your book. Also, O’Malley’s got quite a clever take on amnesia, though it requires a certain suspension of disbelief that not all readers will be able to accomplish (though considering the fact I hate amnesia stories and this worked as a whole? I feel qualified in saying it works well). That being said, the while the book does have plenty of good to offer, I felt a wee bit let down, partially due to my own expectations and partially due to the tone not quite ever figuring out what it wants to be. That’s okay: this is a debut after all, but I found myself wishing I’d gotten the Kindle version instead, because the book itself is rather large, and I would’ve had more fun reading it on the Kindle.

Also, while this book certainly stands on its own two feet, I suspect this is the first of a series. I can’t find anything on the author’s website to confirm or deny this (though I didn’t look very hard), but I wouldn’t be surprised if we meet Myfanwy again in the future. While the story isn’t really about recapturing her memory, it is about finding out WHY she lost it to begin with, and because this book answers that question, perhaps the next question is seeing what’s next, and if she’ll ever recover the memories she lost. However, I’m not sure the “letters to self” device would work for more than one book. Even in this book alone, there were places I had trouble buying into the concept, as clever as it was (and really, it worked on the whole).

Cover Commentary: It’s a little plain. Also, and you can’t tell this from the image, but in person it’s the shiny kind of gloss cover, and I wish it had more of a thicker, matte finish. It’d certainly look awesome in that finish for a trade.

Why I Read It: while Robson’s stuff can be hit or miss with me, her stuff’s usually a hit more than a miss, and Silver Screen has been sitting on my shelf for a while. I always enjoy reading Robson’s fiction, because she’s a fabulous stylist with great technique, empathetic characters, and vivid descriptions. I kind of see her as the Catherynne M. Valente of SF, in a way. At any rate, thanks to the Mount TBR challenge, I was happy to dig this out of the TBR pile and give it a go.

The premise: ganked from publisher’s website: Silver Screen presents an enjoyably different, subversive slant on the science fiction themes of AI and cyberspace. Insecure and overweight heroine Anjuli O’Connell is one of a group of friends who have been hot-housed from an early age to perform in genius-level jobs. But Anjuli worries that her eidetic memory and her friendship with genuine smart boy Roy Croft has been her ticket to success, rather than any real intelligence of her own.

She’s put to the test when Roy kills himself in an experiment to upload his mind into cyberspace, seeking that SF dream of bodiless immortality, which doesn’t work as expected. At the same time her boyfriend’s research has led to him harnessing himself to dubious biomechanoid technologies, which pull the user into mental symbiosis, creating hybrid consciousness – a new “I”, continuous with the old, but different. “Where does life end and the machine begin?”

Meanwhile Anjuli’s grasping multinational employer, OptiNet, the owner of global communications AI, 901, is locked into an increasingly bitter war with the Machine-Greens, who preach AI liberation. As the case for 901’s humanity, or otherwise, comes up before the Strasbourg Court, expert witness Anjuli is targeted by assassins and entangled in the hunt for an algorithm which is the key to machine consciousness, and which may even be the master-code of life itself.

This story explores many interfaces between humans and their technologies, between the promises of science and the explanations of faith. It is written in a first-person style that mingles elements of detective story and confessional. Alongside its SF content, the book delves into the complexities of friendship, loyalty, love, and betrayal from an intimate human perspective.

This is “grrrl-style” SF: as well as all the favorite “Airfix” features, the protagonists deconstruct personal relationships amidst macrocosmic and deeply philosophical goings-on. The writing is punchy, but with a literary sheen. It delivers complex concepts and a twisting plot with a deceptively light touch.

Spoilers, yay or nay?: Nay. It took me a while to get to reviewing this, and the book isn’t as fresh on my mind as it would have been otherwise. Still, there are some details I’d like to discuss that — while not spoilerific — might make some people jumpy, so if you’re one of those people (or if you’re in a hurry), skip to “My Rating” and you’ll be just fine. Everyone else, onward!

Discussion: It always amazes me that more often than not, when I start reading a Robson book, I feel pretty comfortable, pretty quickly (exceptions being Natural History and Living Next Door to the God of Love, which really, really push the reader to the extreme in terms of strangeness budget), and that’s saying something, because it’s obvious, while reading, that Robson is a fan of SF. Whether or not she’s using technology “accurately” (it’s called science fiction for a reason) or whether or not she’s doing something new, splashy and original isn’t the point for me. The point is that I’m able to connect quickly with her characters and empathize with them, which makes the science fictional elements of the story so much more tolerable, because Robson does like to push her strangeness budget and being connected to her characters really helps.

I hadn’t though of it while reading Silver Screen, but this book is most certainly cyberpunk, and those who are fans of cyberpunk will probably have various things to say about how good or bad this book is in relation to the Holy Grail of that genre (Gibson’s Neuromancer). Me, I read Neuromancer a few years back, and it was one of those cases where I knew it was a classic and respected it for what it did at the time, but I wasn’t impressed. Worse, I thought Gibson’s more recent publication (at the time) of Pattern Recognition was a better book. Cyberpunk nerds might say this is sacrelidge, and maybe it is to them, that’s fine. But for my buck, I’d rather have more cyberpunk books by Robson than read Neuromancer, or try to force myself through Snow Crash again.

Remember, for me, it’s all about character. And I connected to Anjuli really, really quickly. And there’s something to be said about style too. I just like Robson’s style. Numerous times I grabbed a sticky tab just to mark a passage or sentence that stood out to me for being particularly vivid, and that goes a long way.

Here are some examples:

Page 22 (note that the heroine is overweight herself, and this has already been established):

She put her last piece of chocolate into her mouth. I seemed to be paying a high price for her so-called help. I should have given her something cheaper, with more cocoa butter in it. Or not. She could lose a few pounds herself: she was built like a big Welsh pony.

That’s just funny. Maybe it shouldn’t be, due to the subject at hand (how overweight someone is), but it’s true to life, especially women judging other women by their weight. And being overweight oneself doesn’t exclude that person from judging OTHER peoples’ weight. Plus, the Welsh pony line is a fantastic description.

Page 43:

Maria sat on the end of the bed and patted my foot through the covers. “You should get some rest.” Obviously she’d been reading too many hospital romances on her day off. I could just see her imagining herself as the beautiful matron in a perfect white coat, floating around the wards and dispensing care and nurturing to the terminally ill, feeding like a vampire off the gratitude in their rheumy eyes.

Page 92:

It’s strange how sometimes you can long to see a person and then, when the moment has come, you realize that you don’t want to because it isn’t going to be the perfect reunion you were expecting, just you and them as usual, doing the things you usually do, saying what you usually say, with the great revelation unspoken and no finality to it. You’ll part again and meeting again in ordinary ways.

Page 113:

Stupid and insecure — that’s what being a woman seems to mean to me, I was sorry to repeatedly discover.

Page 169 (sorry for no context here, but the murdering sentence in particular strikes me as rather profound in today’s society):

“It’s a pointless, going-nowhere, marking-time nothingness. It increases entropy and decreases organization. It contributes to the heat death of the universe. It’s the triumph of extinction, of the self-important crazy shits like my father. It’s murdering the children of reason on the altar of smug, self-satisfied, short-sighted stupidity. That’s what’s wrong with it.”

Page 234:

But I couldn’t tell her that he loved me. That, of all, was the unkindest deception I had laid for him: my stubborn refusal to admit anything which might disrupt my idle beliefs — fortified by sugar, alcohol, and fear; insulated by fat. And I learned to eat right about the time I gave up on truth and settled for the fatal lure of comfort.

There are a lot of things this novel has to offer. For starters, a solid heroine who’s got the memory of a computer (she’s not LITERALLY a computer, mind you, but she can remember EVERYTHING) and because of this, she feels like she’s missing out on a vital part of the human experience: the ability to take various bits of knowledge and actually understand what it really means. In many ways, she’s analogous to the A.I. in the story, the 901, and the question of who’s more human becomes very interesting when you examine their interactions with each other as well as their friendship.

And speaking of friendship, Anjuli has female friends! More than one! Who talk about more than just men! Yay!!!!!

I also found Robson’s treatment of body-sharing experiences really interesting. She does a great job of really making the reader get a sense of what it would be to literally be inside someone else’s skin, and those passages were fascinating to read (for various reasons due to personal interest in themes of telepathy and multi-user bodies). And the computerized suit that made this possible sometimes reminded me of what Iron Man’s suit might be like if it had a mind of its own. That’s a fun nod, if intentional. If not, it’s still a fun nod.

My Rating: 7 – Good Read

I really enjoyed reading this book. It may not be for self-professed cyberpunk snobs, but I think if you enjoy character-centric SF, if you enjoy the focus on people and their problems against the backdrop of an SF-nal setting (and this setting is very SF-nal, you can tell Robson loves the genre), and if you have a relatively solid dose of SF in your reading/viewing background, you should be fine with this book. It boasts of a fascinating heroine who’s rather likable (overweight but with the memory of a machine), who’s trying desperately to solve both a murder as well as stop the death of another, who also has best friends who pass the Bechdel test, you may want to stick this book in your TBR pile. The AI character is fascinating as well, because not only will it appear as classic film stars from the silver screen (hence the title, but there’s more to it than that), but also, you get to learn the AI’s creation myth as the AI sees it, which is really cool.

Of Robson’s work, Mappa Mundi is still my favorite (and it is a FAVORITE), but this isn’t a bad place to start, not at all. That said, if you’re more of a fantasy reader than SF reader, you may want to start with Keeping It Real instead, which is her cyberpunk, urban elf fantasy, and is a lot of fun. All that said, Robson’s an author whose work I almost always enjoy, and if you find the right book from her for you, I think you will too.

Cover Commentary: I love this cover. It’s so pretty and colorful, and while it really doesn’t tell you what’s inside the pages, it definitely grabs my eye. Also, and I may be crazy, but I can’t help but look at the girl on the cover and think of Jennifer Garner, as seen in the early seasons of Alias. That being said, I’m pretty sure the heroine is half-Pakistani, so does the model really do the character justice? Not sure. I doubt it. But it’s still a pretty, eye-catching cover.

Why I Read It: This book has been on my radar ever since I got my hands on Who Fears Death and I wondered if Okorafor was coming out with anything new. To my surprise, this came out less than a year later, so I happily plunked it on my wishlist and waited for the right time to get it. Turns out, the right time to get it is at Christmas, as a friend of mine picked it up for me, and when this came to the top of my queue, I was more than happy to read it.

The premise: ganked from publisher’s website: Twelve-year-old Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born American. Her features are African, but she’s albino. She’s a terrific athlete, but can’t go out into the sun to play soccer. There seems to be no place where she fits. And then she discovers something amazing – she is a “free agent,” with latent magical power. Soon she’s part of a quartet of magic students, studying the visible and invisible, learning to change reality. But will it be enough to help them when they are asked to catch a career criminal who knows magic too?

Spoilers, yay or nay?: Nay. The book is a short one, and I don’t want to ruin any big surprises. However, I kind of make a comparison to Harry Potter in terms of story elements, and that in and of itself could be a kind of spoiler, so if you’re paranoid, jump ahead to “My Rating,” and everyone else, onward!

Discussion: It’s interesting: the prologue really pulled me in with its use of the first person POV as well as the situation. So much so that when we got to chapter one and I learned the rest of the book would be in third person instead, I was a wee bit disappointed. However, it should be noted that I’m rather partial to the first person POV (past or present tense) but have no problem with third. I point that out because some readers don’t like first at all, and I want to quell any protests due to the book opening in first person. It doesn’t stay that way. You’ll be fine. (Though I will note that I think perhaps this book was originally written in the first person, because there are slips here and there to “I” when there shouldn’t be).

At any rate, we learn that Sunny is an albino. Her description of herself is actually quite humorous (page 3):

I’m Nigerian by blood, American by birth, and Nigerian again because I live here. I have West African features, like my mother, but while the rest of my family is dark brown, I’ve got light yellow hair, skin the color of “sour milk” (or so stupid people like to tell me), and hazel eyes that look like God ran out of the right color. I’m albino.

Another description follows on the next page:

I knew I looked like a ghost. All pale-skinned. And I was good at being ghost-quiet. When I was younger, if my father was in the main room drinking his beer and reading his paper, I’d sneak in. I could move like a mosquito when I wanted. Not the American ones that buzz in your ear — the Nigerian ones that are silent like the dead.

While I haven’t read everything in Okorafor’s repertoire, one thing I find I love about her writing is her use of description and how it paints a vivid picture in my mind. And sometimes, not a visual picture, but that of a personality. Phrases like “like God ran out of the right color” or “Nigerian ones that are silent like the dead,” these descriptions work for me on so many levels: visual, personality, and world-building. The mosquitoes are great, because having never been to Africa, let alone Nigeria, I have no idea of the difference of mosquitoes, but by painting the difference, Okorafor has given me a glimpse into a world that’s alien to me, and slightly frightening because of it (I hate mosquitoes. My one consolation is that I can hear them. If I were in Nigeria and found one munching on my arm, I’d freak. Thank you, Okorafor!).

The culture itself is utterly unfamiliar to me. I’ll go ahead and say it now: if Okorafor’s mis-represented anything or messed something up, I wouldn’t know about it even if you hit me with a two-by-four, and even then, I’m likely not to believe it until shown hard evidence. So if you’re looking for accuracy, I’m not the reviewer to rely on. However, I’d imagine Okorafor knows her stuff, since her bio indicates she was born to two Nigerian parents.

Breathing in Okorafor’s fictional Nigeria certainly had me enchanted. Even the heroine and her troubles had me engaged. And as she made friends and learned more about the Leopard People (of which she was one), I had a funny thought: structure-wise, this is kind of like a Harry Potter set in Nigeria. Mind you, this is NOT a Harry Potter knock-off or any such nonsense. But seeing familiar story-telling elements in an unfamiliar world meant this book really packed a punch. The comparisons that made me smile: Leopard Knocks, which is a part of the world only Leopard People can access (for some reason, I was reminded of Diagon Alley); the juju knives being analogous to wands. And of course, the athletics: Sunny’s soccer to Harry’s Quidditch. Okay, so soccer itself may not be magical, but the way Sunny plays sure reads that way.

And again, intentional or not, I liked having familiar elements in a story where the world was pretty strange to me. That’s one of the great things about storytelling, taking what’s familiar and making it different, and Okorafor did a wonderfully fabulous job with that here.

Speaking of world-building: there’s so much to love about the culture and magic of the Leopard People. The bright spots, where wealth is an indicator of actual knowledge, and the dark spots, as the monsters that populate this world are rather vivid and frightening. I also found myself wondering, off and on, whether or not this world in Akata Witch might be a prequel world of sorts for Who Fears Death. It may just be that Okorafor is using some of the same mythology/folklore for both works, but using it in different ways, and because I’m not familiar with the mythology/folklore, I can’t pick up on that. But the idea that this book could possibly, maybe be a prequel for Who Fears Death is a charming one, even though I’m quite likely very, very wrong in that regard.

Akata Witch has its moments of humor as well: see page 216, when Sunny and her friends visit the Junk Man to select Sunny’s juju knife:

Don’t be shy. Look, then you buy. But don’t touch the things you don’t think you should. Especially those parrot feathers. For some reason, people don’t know better. Then they get home and wonder why all they want to do is chatter about nonsense.

And as humorous as that is, it’s also a neat window into the world Okorafor is creating. Another favorite humorous/unique element was the wasp artist. Page 295:

“I’d smash the thing,” Sasha said. “My sister had one when she was small, and when she forgot to give it praise once, it got pissed and stung her. Its sting paralyzes you for ten minutes so you can do nothing but watch it build its ‘final masterpiece’ and then keep watching as it dramatically dies. The damn things are psychotic.”

Fortunately, Sunny always lavishes praise on her wasp artist, and I have to say, I think I want one!

One thing to note about this book is that while the ending doesn’t feel wholly rushed, it does feel like some things were skipped over and left out. I’m still scratching my head, trying to figure out how Sunny knew to do the right thing at the right time, as it wasn’t anything she’d been taught. And there were also things that come up early on in the book that had me seriously thinking that Akata Witch could be the start of a series, despite this book resolving its own story. I don’t know if those holes are symptomatic of this being a book slightly on the younger side of YA or not, but if this is a series, I’ll be happy to keep reading.

My Rating: 7 – Good Read

This book was fast and fun, while also delightful in its world-building and its ability to tip-toe into darker material without making it too adult. For those readers who were put off by the darker elements in Who Fears Death (and let’s face it, there were quite a few) should find themselves enjoying the hell out of Akata Witch. The world-building is fun and delightful, and Sunny’s a great heroine supported by a great cast. The ending does sneak up on the reader in that you can’t help but wonder how it all will resolve before the book ends, but it does resolve. That said, I’m really hoping this is a start of a series, but even if it isn’t, I still have Okorafor’s backlist to grab, and after reading two of her books, reading more is by no means a hardship. For readers looking for something unique and different in YA fantasy, look no further.

Cover Commentary: The moment I saw this cover, I was hooked. I love the simplicity of it, the way the color rainbows out from the juju knife. It’s all just very eye-catching to me, and I’d definitely take a second or third look at this book if I saw it in stores. I can’t pinpoint why, but the style of art is a style I’ve always been drawn to. It’s a gorgeous little cover.

Why I Read It: I first discovered Catherine Asaro when I was a graduate student working on my own SF thesis, and at the time, I didn’t know that such a thing as Science Fiction Romance (or commonly known as SFR) existed. Once I read Asaro’s debut Primary Inversion, I was hooked. I ended up with the whole series to date and read the next two novels (I should note I’m not referring to series order, but rather publication order) within the year, and then just stopped. Thanks to the Mount TBR challenge, I knew it was time to pick this series up again, if only to get just a few more books under my belt. The Radiant Seas is fourth in the publication order, which is how I’ve decided to read the series, rather than rely on any internal chronology, because Asaro’s chronology is rather all-the-place.

Please note: the premise includes spoilers for Primary Inversion, the very first book in the series.

The premise: ganked from BN.com: Living in exile on a deserted planet, Sauscony and Jaibriol, each the heir to an interstellar empire, become entangled in the machinations of the Skolian Empire. Interstellar war erupts and Jaibriol is snatched away to be the unwilling ruler of the Highton Aristos. Sauscony must lead an invading space fleet to rescue him from his own Empire-without revealing that they are married. With much of interstellar civilization poised on the brink of destruction, it is the devotion of these two lovers, their sacrifices, and their heroism, that might just forge a new order.

Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay. You’ll get some spoilers for Primary Inversion too, so please, if this is a series you’re interested in, just skip to “My Rating” and you’ll be good to go. Everyone else, onward!

Discussion: This was an odd reading experience, especially at first. Since I originally read Primary Inversion, I’ve developed quite the pedestal for Asaro in my mind in terms of what I expect out of SFR. When people talk about the genre, I immediately go to Primary Inversion. It was my go-to book for SFR, but as I was reading The Radiant Seas, I remembered something.

The second book I read, The Last Hawk, which was the third book published in the series, I grew very tired with, very quickly. I won’t say I hated it, but if it’d been the first Asaro book I’d tried, I would’ve never continued with the series.

The third book I read, Catch the Lightning, which was the second book published in the series, was more on par with Primary Inversion, and I enjoyed it far more than Catch the Lightning. That said, it didn’t quite capture the magic of the debut, and I suspect that my reading experience of the sequels is why I’ve put the rest of the series off so long.

And now that I’m reading the fourth book published in the series, The Radiant Seas, which is a direct sequel to Primary Inversion, I’m starting to wonder what it was I loved so much about the debut.

Make no mistake: Asaro does some cool things: her ability to mix hard science (whether it’s accurate or not is beside the point; the point is that there’s a lot of tech talk) with space opera and romance is an interesting thing to study, and it showed me that yes, you could have a hard SF book that still loved its characters and focused on what the characters wanted out of life, rather than gee-whiz ideas. That is all excellent, even if my original review commented that I found the author’s writing style a little lacking at times. But I always worry about how re-reads of favorite books might dampen my original love for said books, and I have a feeling that Primary Inversion would suffer on re-read. I could be wrong, mind you, but after reading The Radiant Seas, I worry.

Truth is, I seriously considered slapping a DNF label on this around page 75 or so, and also seriously considered just putting the rest of the series in the “for sale” pile and being done with it all. What made me continue?

For starters, I did consider Primary Inversion a favorite. And as far as the rest of the series goes, Asaro really doesn’t structure things linearly. The second published book in the series? Is one of the latest books in the timeline, with no relation to the first book except the world-building. So I knew that even if The Radiant Seas ended up being a miss for me, the other books might just work, as they would feature different characters and situations, albeit in the same world. Also, The Quantum Rose won a Nebula, and honestly, I can’t wait to see how that title compares to the other books in the series.

So I soldiered on. And finally got interested after Kurj’s epic death and plot-lines started picking up in earnest.

What didn’t work:

I don’t remember Souscony and Jaibriol being so immature. Soz is a lot older and wiser, and one would think she wouldn’t be quite so reckless or inconsiderate of Jaibriol’s feelings. That being said, age does not equate wisdom. Soz might have been equally immature and inconsiderate in the first book and I don’t remember, but I had a tough time accepting these two as a couple (especially given Jaibriol’s youth and sheltered life. But at least his reactions were a little more realistic. Annoying, but realistic). Once we got out of that first part, though, when they were newly exiled, they didn’t bother me as badly because they were in happily wedded bliss. Popping out babies left and right and generally being a perfect little happy family. Which annoyed me for completely different reasons. I don’t have a problem with it, technically speaking, but I found it rather boring to read about. Maybe it’s because of the kids, and I don’t relate well to kids. Also, the talk of breast-feeding weirded me out (baby Jai wanting to eat and then commenting on how Daddy got to “eat the night before” squicked me out), but perhaps those readers with children can relate to those scenes. Yet the birthing scene bugged me. I’ve not had children, and yet the stuff Soz was clueless about and/or stuff that would (in my mind) come naturally (like breathing hard) was stuff even I knew, yet I’m the one who’s not had kids. Surely Soz knew something about childbirth and how it worked, or would’ve made some attempt to research it given that she’s exiled on a planet with no advanced technology. That they were both clueless didn’t make the scene charming for me, not in the slightest. Also, for some reason, I was under the impression that if a woman is breast-feeding one child but gets pregnant with a second, that the breast milk dries up? Maybe I’m wrong about that factoid and Asaro’s right that Soz can keep breast-feeding while being pregnant. After all, I’ve never had kids, so what the hell do I know? I just know that these domestic scenes annoyed the crap out of me, rightly or wrongly.

Also, this business about Soz naming her node? First she scoffs at it, and then years later, we finally learn she decided to name it, and then when we see her interacting with it later, it’s not using an original name that I could tell. She only named it when she got other nodes, and it wasn’t even a creative name at that.

There were many things I was annoyed with. So let’s move on to more: Kurj.

I barely remember this character from Primary Inversion, but I do remember what he looked like, since his description is pretty unique. That being said, his POV sections had me bored to tears. We got a lot of techno-babble during his sections, and he lacked any kind of personality. His whole obsession with his mother also threw me for a loop, and I wonder: this may have been the fourth book published, but perhaps Asaro had already written that backstory (which I think we get in the, what, 9th book published? I bring this up for one reason: I saw Asaro speak at Seton Hill, and she’d stated that the book I disliked so much, The Last Hawk, was actually the first book she ever wrote. The second was the second, and the third book she wrote was Primary Inversion was actually the book that was published first. And my point is that while one can assume many writers are writing and publishing linearly, that assumption holds no water with Asaro, which makes me wonder if she took her own backstory for granted and that was why I had such a hard time connecting with Kurj. He didn’t get interesting until the subtext about his mother became text and he faced his inner demon and resisted temptation (whatever the hell that means), and then he fought a grand battle and died. I was rooting for him more by then, but I definitely didn’t miss him when he was gone. He wasn’t a bad guy, as far as I could tell, but I never could connect with him, and I often felt that most (not all) of his scenes were written in response to critics who didn’t want romance in their SF.

Description often was too excessive, be it describing someone’s grand beauty and allure or simply landscapes, both of which I got bored with.

The POV sections of the various Highton Aristos also grated on me, simply because so often, they were two-dimensional villains who acted exactly as you expected them to. There was one line where Vitrex was thinking about his wife on page 201:

Besides, he really liked Sharla, who played the ice princess in public and the whore of his dreams in private.

I don’t know who Asaro’s targeting with these POVs, or if it doesn’t matter because they’re villains and I’m supposed to hate them, but crap like this, even from a two-dimensional villain, just makes me want to put the book down. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does.

Also? I got tired of characters seeing a beautiful woman and either touching her breasts or untying her robes. This was done by both villains AND the good guys! What the HELL?!?!?!?

Moving on to the actual plot, one of my issues was why it was SO NECESSARY for Soz and Jaibriol’s marriage to be secret. In my mind, bringing it into the open and showing that these two empires are now linked would be a great way to stop the madness: Soz takes her role, Jaibriol takes his role, and the two empires work together, right? Asaro actually addresses that in a multitude of ways, some directly (by saying that it is essentially treason on both sides and would result in the death of all parties, including the children), and then shows us what happens when Jaibriol is found and forced on the throne. He has no power, and is merely a puppet. He couldn’t change things even if he wanted. And I do believe that if the Aristos knew the truth about his marriage and children, they would be used against him. So that was a case of my being annoyed but getting over it.

I’m really ripping this book apart, aren’t I? There were things I liked. When Soz gets back into leader/action mode, I was all eyes and ears. She’s a stronger character at that point, and that raises some disturbing questions about how I (and perhaps readers in general) see women in fiction. That women in fiction can’t be strong if they’re mothers, but they can be strong if they’re kicking butt (literally or figuratively). But I’m going to go ahead and call bullshit on that theory, at least for my own tastes. Soz was stronger when she had a clear goal, and those goals started right after Jaibriol was taken away. Her first goal was protecting and saving her children, which she did, and her second goal was getting her husband back, which she did, and that reunion was FREAKING AWESOME. But it boils down to the fact that happy normal married life does not for good fiction make, no matter how much I like the characters. Ironic, because when I was growing up watching soap operas, once a couple FINALLY got together, I didn’t want anything to break them apart, despite the fact that conflict and melodrama is a soap opera’s bread and butter. But there’s something to be said that fictional characters of all sexes are more interesting when they have something they want, when there’s a conflict, and they have to work to get it, when there’s a chance of failure. Let’s face it: stories without ANY KIND of conflict aren’t stories, and who wants to read those? I don’t, and I don’t care if the characters are male or female. So there. Soz was more awesome when she had plenty to lose, versus when she was complacent with domestic life. It’s not to say that former threat wasn’t always there in the latter, but it certainly wasn’t stressed, and I really wasn’t worried for her, despite the natural dangers Asaro tried to throw her way.

Another woman who became rather fascinating was Empress Viquara. She wasn’t Jaibriol’s birth mother, but that was a secret, and when that secret was threatened, she was in danger. It was fascinating to read her scenes or scenes about her, showing what she wanted and what she was and what she was willing to become, all for a son that wasn’t really hers. The end of her arc was quite satisfying. She was a mother above all, despite having never given birth.

So don’t walk away from this review thinking that I think mothers are boring. They aren’t, especially by the end of this book.

And how sad is it that it took me four books and not until the end of this fourth book that I finally equated the Skolian Web with the actual internet? Thinking about it that way, it was kind of funny that it crashed. Probably not what Asaro intended, but it was kind of funny.

Lastly, I liked seeing the nod to Kelric at the very end. I know for a fact the next book in publication order is the direct sequel to The Last Hawk, and while it honestly DOES worry me, because poor Kelric was a damsel in distress pretty much all of The Last Hawk, I hope the next book manages to redeem that story and character for me.

My Rating: 5 – It’s a Gamble

So, this is not the best book to start with if you haven’t yet read any of Asaro’s space opera/SFR. No, the best book to start with is Primary Inversion, and even that’s been the best book of the series to date (and by date, I mean by how far I’ve read). Asaro’s at her best when her characters have something to lose and she can focus on the action of bringing a story to a close. But in The Radiant Seas, there were a lot of world-building sections that had me utterly disengaged, and really, there were too many POV characters (I’m remembering at least eight) and that always dilutes a story for me. I was so tempted to put this book down and declare myself done with the series, but I pushed onward, because I want to see what else the series has to offer, and it didn’t seem right to make this book a DNF and still read more of the series. And the ending does redeem my enjoyment of the book, though sadly, it takes a long, long time to get to that point. I still plan on continuing the series with the next book in the publication order, which is Ascendant Sun, but after that, I’ll probably be taking a break.

Cover Commentary: For a while, I rather liked this cover, until I started fixating on the position of Sauscony’s body while dashing through this rather deadly obstacle course. Since she’s got a lot of machinery in her body, it makes sense she could contort herself in a manner that would make a cat raise its eyebrows, but it’s still rather painful to look at. Her hair’s pretty though!

Why I Read It: Ever since this book came out, I’ve had a hankering to read it. The title was simply too captivating for me to ignore, and when I first received my Kindle, this was one of the first samples I downloaded. I didn’t get it right away because I knew I could wait to read it, but the voice of the narrator had me hooked right away. It was an easy choice to put this book in the Genre in the Mainstream poll, but when you all selected it, I feared it would actually be too science fictional to fit the theme. I should have never feared. Welcome to 2012′s Book Club, Theme Park. How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe is our very first selection, so let’s talk!

The premise: ganked from BN.com: From a 5 Under 35 winner, comes a razor-sharp, hilarious, and touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space-time.

Every day in Minor Universe 31 people get into time machines and try to change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician, steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. The key to locating his father may be found in a book. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and somewhere inside it is information that will help him. It may even save his life.

Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay. Book club reviews will always have spoilers, so if you read the book, you’re good to go. If you haven’t read the book, this is oddly a difficult book to spoil, but use your own judgement. If you’re worried about said spoilers, just skip to “My Rating” and you’ll be just fine.

Discussion: What inspired this “Genre in the Mainstream” was Ryan Britt’s feature on Tor.com called — you guessed it — “Genre in the Mainstream.” By chance, Britt posted an article in January entitled “What is Genre in the Mainstream? Why Should You Care?” It’s a great article, and a timely one, and I’ll let you read it in full here.

But there’s a particular quote from this article I want to pull for the sake of this review:

Literary fiction (or “the mainstream”) is often voice-driven. The notion of an author/character voice sometimes is the story, particularly with short fiction. Etgar Keret’s story “Fatso” is a good example here. In the story (which is maybe two pages long) a man discovers his girlfriend transforms into an ugly fat man when the sun goes down every night. He describes their adventures briefly, and then the story ends, quickly. If Keret’s story were written by Harlan Ellison, or even Asimov, the shape shifting gender-crossing woman/fatso would likely be fleshed out a little more, if you can forgive the intended pun. A science fiction version of this story would linger more and explore through plot mechanics how everything is going down. Is this to say Asimov’s or Tor.com or any other market for short science fiction and fantasy wouldn’t have published “Fatso” if Keret had sent it there initially, instead of a mainstream literary journal? No! In fact, I’m saying just the opposite; that it’s not quite clear anymore because while literary fiction has developed an appetite for more high concept writing, SFF has developed a taste for more voice-driven or “literary” work.

To me, this sums up exactly what I was hoping for when selecting books for this theme. What we read is still science fiction or fantasy, but the focus isn’t on the traditional narrative structure. Rather, it’s the focus on voice and how voice is the story.

Now, some of you might read that and cry bullshit. Fine, that’s your prerogative. But when I think of past books I’ve read that fit in “Genre in the Mainstream,” I think of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. I think of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Books that have been published on the “literary” side of things that happen to have genre elements. And those genre elements may or may not be the most original things in the world, but what makes them slightly different than those books marketed and published as science fiction and fantasy is one major distinction: voice.

Britt’s article goes on to talk about the day when no such distinctions will be made, nor will they need to be made. After all, it’s all fiction, right? But looking at it in terms of voice, making voice the primary focus on the tale, can give a reader a new way into a story that they previous thought was just another piece of science fiction or fantasy.

Hence, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

I think it was the dog that did it. I mentioned that I’d read a sample long before I downloaded the whole kit and caboodle, and really, what hooked me good wasn’t the fun title, but it was the discovery of the dog that made me realize this would so be my kind of book. And because I’m quoting for a Kindle, you get no page numbers.

At least I have a dog, sort of. He was retconned out of some space western. It was the usual deal: hero, on his way up, has a trusty canine sidekick, then hero gets famous and important and all that and by the time season two rolls around, hero doesn’t feel like sharing the spotlight anymore, not with a scruffy-looking mutt. So they put the little guy in a trash pod and send him off.

I found him just as he was about to drift into a black hole. He had a face like soft clay, with haunches that were bald in spots where he’d been chewing off his own fur. I don’t think anyone has ever been as happy to see anything as this dog was to see me. He licked my face and that was that. I asked him what he wanted his name to be. He didn’t say anything so I named him Ed.

The smell of Ed is pretty powerful in here, but I’m okay with that. He’s a good dog, sleeps a lot, sometimes licks his paw to comfort himself. Doesn’t need food or water. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even know that he doesn’t exist. Ed is just this weird ontological entity that produces unconditional slobbery loyal affection. Superfluous. Gratuitous. He must violate some kind of conservation law. Something from nothing: all of this saliva. And, I guess, love. Love from the abandoned heart of a nonexistent dog.

There are so many reasons this book worked for me. That’s the first and foremost, but it’s the voice, the writing, that grabbed me and had me highlighting passages every few (Kindle) pages. I won’t quote all of them here, but let’s quote a few more before getting to the meat of the review, because these quotes show why I loved this book more than anything I can explain will. That said, if the quotes don’t do it for you, it’s a matter of not clicking with the book, and that’s okay.

Or, as Mom used to say: it’s a box. You get into it. You push some buttons. It takes you to other places, different times. Hit this switch for the past, pull up that lever for the future. You get out and hope the world has changed. Or at least maybe you have.

I think this book resonates with me on such a deep level is one of the recurring themes through the whole book: change. The idea that even if you can’t go to the past and change things to make your life better (despite the use of time machines), the humanity’s desire to do so will never cease, and let’s face it, who hasn’t wanted to change at least something, to take a different route through life and see what happens (this is one reason why parallel world stories engage me so).

One of the first things I picked up on was how the book was a metaphor for writing a book (and then later, became the literal writing of a book, as the narrator was writing the very book his future self game him, the very book we’re reading). At first, I thought this whole time machine stuff was metaphor, that perhaps the father referenced so early in the book was a writer, and that the universe itself was an abandoned fictional universe created by either the narrator or the father of the narrator. Consider:

At the moment work was halted, physics was only 93% percent installed, and thus you may find that it can be a bit unpredictable in places. For the most part, however, while here travlers should be fine relying on any off-the-shelf causal processor based on quantum general relativity.

The technology left behind by the MU31 engineering team, despite being only partially developed, is first-rate, although the same can’t be said of its human inhabitants, who seem to have been left with a lingering sense of incompleteness.

For those of you who, like me, are writers: does that not sound like a scientific way of describing a writer abandoning a novel before completion?

Then there’s this:

Out my window I can see the edges of stories as we pass by. Some of them, the space operas, are grand circuses of light. Others are smaller systems, lonesome clusters, dim and muted and private little stories. I had no idea Universe 31 was so big. Bigger than I’d imagined.

Really, though, while the pop culture term “meta” sometimes alludes me as to its actual meaning, I realized while reading that if this book wasn’t meta, I’d never figure it out. Because it’s a fictional book about fictional universes, but it’s also a fictional book that’s probably rather close to a memoir of the author (given the narrator’s name is Charles Yu, and there’s pictures of where Charles Yu grew up, how can you help but make that assumption?), and there’s just so many layers upon layers here that it’s easy to get lost in them and not be certain what you’re reading or why.

But if I had to take a gander, I’d say that it’s possible (though I could totally be wrong, it’s dangerous to make these kinds of assumptions) that this book is a memoir for Charles Yu’s life, but it’s set in a fictional universe where time machines exist, but I suspect that if there is a true parallel to the real world (meaning our real world), I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the father was some kind of writer. But again, I could be off-base. But at least there’s humor to be found:

My cousin is in accounts receivable on the Death Star, and whenever we talk he always says how nice it’d be if I joined him. He says they have a good cafeteria. So that’s an option. And there’s an opening for a caseworker at the social services bureau for noninteresting aliens. Government pension.

And speaking of funny: if you read this as a book, you probably got the illustrative graphics as you turned the pages, but I had to click a link at it took me to a “job ad” for a position on the Death Star, and it was hysterical!

Here’s more funny:

This isn’t the TM-31. I’m in some other kind of vehicle. Larger. More room and air and light. The interior is clean, all white and black ceramic. Like Apple designed a spaceship.

Or this:

“Holy Heinlein.”

Or this:

Holy Mother of Ursula K. Le Guin

Clearly, the author is a fan of science fiction and geeky things. I love how this shows in the humor of this book.

Let’s do some more quotes:

Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.

And there’s this:

My father sometimes said that his life was two-thirds disappointment. This was when he was in a good mood.

At one point, I was convinced this book was going to zag by the end, that in order to find his father, the narrator would have to realize he’s actually living inside his head (not a time machine) and get out to discover that his father is lost, but not findable, because his father has passed away. Reading the book with that theory in mind makes interpretation of things very interesting. I’m not saying it’s right either: I’m saying it’s very interesting.

Here’s this tidbit:

Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.

And a big kahuna:

Everyone has a time machine. Everyone is a time machine. It’s just that most people’s machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines. We are all perfectly engineered time machines, technologically equipped to allow the inside user, the traveler riding inside each of us, to experience time travel, and loss, and understanding. We are universal time machines manufactured to the most exacting specifications possible. Every single one of us.

This book is such a mind-bender because the quote above it both metaphorical and literal. To get the literal, you’ve got to read the book. But metaphorically, think about the one rule: you can’t go back and change your past. Sure, Yu uses all kinds of physics talk to explain why it can’t happen, how creating alternate universes with you in them will get you in trouble and so forth, but think of it literally: the memory as a time machine. You can try and change the past, perhaps by reconstructing your memory of it. But it won’t work. The past cannot be changed.

At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever.

Is it any wonder I had death on the brain while reading this?

Is this a perfect book? No. I had some trouble trying to keep the loop straight in my head, trying to figure out how his future self came back if his future self never time-traveled, so my brain’s a little mushy in that regard. That being said, it’s the kind of book that so engages me, so resonates with me, that I can see myself reading this again and again, and coming back with a different meaning each time.

My Rating: 8 – Excellent

This book is not for everyone. I’ll say that first and foremost. And because most of my review is quoting, really, all you have to do is sample the book, look at the quotes, to see if they resonate with you at all. The book is so many different things at once: a fictional memoir of what I bet is a somewhat factual story; a time-travel loop brain-melter; a humorous piece; a story about memory and regret and family; a love letter to science fictional geekery everywhere. This book is META, and it’s a fascinating and fast read, but I will say it’s best read in big chunks. Not only does that allow the voice to hook you and stick with you, but it helps when the narrator goes on the tangents comparing time travel to memory and all that wonderful fun stuff. This is the kind of book that resonates with me deeply on an emotional level, because it touches on so many things I can relate to, and yet the science and geekery makes the book fun to read. This is a book I can see myself coming back to again and again, because there’s so much to get out of it. So glad this ended up being our book club pick for January!

Cover Commentary: I prefer the cover to the trade paperback, featured at the top of the review. I can’t resist Ed in a space suit! Though the narrator doesn’t look anything like I pictured him. But the red really catches my eye! The hardcover art is okay, showing lots of ray guns, which works when you consider the title alone, but not so well when you pair it with the book.

I will say this: I wish I’d gotten a physical copy. There are illustrations in the book that Kindle gives you links for, and then the way the book is constructed, sometimes I wondered if I was reading something out of sequence, because let’s face it, I wasn’t looking at physical pages. I suspect I may be buying another copy of this book one day, but I’m cool with that.

Why I Read It: A friend of mine was cleaning out his apartment back in 2005-2006, saw this book, and thought of me. Given the premise of it, and remembering what he’d read of my own writing, he thought I’d be interested. Of course, back then, any free book was a book I was interested in, so I was happy to take the book off of his hands. Of course, it languished in the TBR pile until now, when the Mount TBR challenge gave me a reason to unearth it.

The premise: ganked from BN.com: In 1912, history was changed by the Miracle, when the old world of Europe was replaced by Darwinia, a strange land of nightmarish jungle and antedeluvian monsters. To some, the Miracle is an act of divine retribution; to others, it is an opportunity to carve out a new empire.

Leaving American now ruled by religious fundamentalism, young Guilford Law travels to Darwinia on a mission of discovery that will take him further than he can possibly imagine…to a shattering revelation about mankind’s destiny in the universe.

Darwinia is a 1999 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel.

Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay. Part of the reason is so I can try and work out my understanding of the novel. If you’re spoiler-phobic, feel free to jump down to “My Rating” and you’ll be safe and sound. If you’re not, or if you’ve read the book, onward!

Discussion: If there’s one thing Robert Charles Wilson does well (and mind you, this is only the third book of his I’ve read, despite it being the first of his I’ve owned), it’s opening with a sense of wonder. The beginning of Darwinia reminded me very much of the beginning of Spin, which was my first and still my favorite novel by Wilson. Of course, in some ways, it’s rather easy to evoke that sense of wonder: gather a group of people together, describe something magical/frightening/unusual in the night sky, and voila! Though I should be fair: I’m sure many a writer has written a similar scene and it lacks the power of wonder. Wilson deserves credit where credit is due: he knows how to pull people in, and wonder isn’t an easy thing to achieve, even if the ingredients are rather obvious to me.

Unfortunately, after that beginning sense of wonder, it faded for me. Mostly in part because really, I didn’t have any expectations for the book, so while reading, I found myself thinking, “Okay, this is going to be some kind of explorer of the new land novel, only it’s an alien landscape on Earth.” Which, honestly, did not sound like any fun. For the longest time, and this was the time I was questioning whether or not I really wanted to continue reading, I felt I might as well have picked up some kind of historical piece about Cortez or someone exploring South America, because I kept seeing Darwinia as a tropical continent, and my mind filled in the blanks, despite any alien descriptions provided.

And then things got weird.

For starters, there was Vale. For the longest time, Vale’s was the only POV that kept me interested, and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what the big deal was about the Finch expedition or any of that, and because Vale had an outsider’s view, and because his god was so interested, I had rather hoped to get some answers, because all we get at first are omninous predictions that no one will make it out alive, but unlike, say, the film Jurassic Park, where the viewers know what’s in store for the upcoming heroes thanks to the opening scene (which is a weird comparison, but hey, it’s tropical!), we don’t see Darwinia as anything dangerous, but rather something strange and unexplained. That should imply danger, of course, and of course, there IS danger. But this sense that the expedition is off to certain death? Not so much, so I was never very anxious for the characters.

Until they started getting killed.

Now, I’m done with the book now and I have a faint understanding of what went down and why. But yet in some ways, it’s still utterly confusing for me. Wait, confusing is the wrong word: vague, hard to explain would be a better way of describing my feelings about what went down and why.

Anyway, when we reached part two, I was invested. Part of what really helped was reading Guilford’s journals in the first person POV, and I really rather wish all of Guilford’s sections were written from the first person POV, because those were more immediate and more vivid for me as a reader. Learning that people WANTED the group to fail was fascinating and frightening, and really heightened the danger, because it’s wasn’t just the expedition versus nature, but it was the expedition versus man, which we actually learn is something far different, and worse.

And then there was this little explanation on page 198 that just sent my brain utterly spinning:

“But the two worlds aren’t strictly separate anymore.That’s what the Conversion of Europe was all about, not to mention that so-called city you wintered in. The two worlds are tangled up because there’s something wants to destroy ‘em both. Maybe not destroy, more like eat — well, it’s complicated.”

And then we get this crazy, insane bombshell (and mind you, this is MY understanding of what went down. I may be WRONG, but this is what I came away with): when the conversion happened, it was an event that caused a parallel universe. In the one universe, the conversion didn’t happen, life carried on as normal, and we had all the wars our history has taught us. In the second universe, where the conversion did happen, Europe was swallowed whole by this Darwinia, its people vanished, and life just didn’t follow the same outline as the primary universe did.

And because of this, we’ve got two Guilfords. The one who never experienced conversion and fought and died in World War I, and the one who did experience conversion and is exploring Darwinia at the expense of his sanity.

I say that because that quote from above? Comes from the “ghost” of his primary WWI dead self. Or something.

Oh, what a mind-bender of a book. And there’s more!

From pages 213 and 214:

He suggested — in broad daylight and in the plainest language — that the world around me, the world you and I inhabit, is nothing more than a sustained illusion inside a machine at the end of time.

And this, from page 214:

It gets more complicated. When we were a “history book,” Caroline, every event, every action, was predetermined, a rote repetition of what had gone on before — though of course there was no way we could have known that.

But psilife has injected “chaos” (his word) into the system — which is the equivalent of what the theologians call “free will”!

Which means, the picket said, that you and I and all the other sentient beings who had been “modeled” in the Archive have become independent, unpredictable moral entities — real lives, that is; new lives, which Sentience is sworn to protect!

Mind blown? Yeah, mine is too, and I read the whole book.

It’s a lot of food for thought, and this novel is a great many things: alternate history, science fiction, suspense thriller, all with ghosts, philosophy, aliens and war filling out these pages. War’s an interesting topic here, because the book is divided into parts, and every part is dated.

The Conversion happens in 1912. The expedition (parts one and two) happens in 1920 or so. Real life parallel: World War I happened from 1914-1918.

Part three happens in 1945, when Guilford has tried so hard to make a normal life for himself, but he’s learning that his parallel ghostly counterpart is right, and there’s more to this world than he wanted to accept, and people want him dead because of it. Real life parallel: World War II, 1939-1945.

Part four happens in 1965, and it’s the final battle between the ghostly parallel counterparts (turns out, everyone in the expedition had them, and of course, there were more besides) against the people like Vale, whose gods take over their bodies in a bid to consume the Earth (I guess?). Real life parallel: Vietnam War, 1955-1975.

The point: every part of this book, every time period, there is strife and conflict. Sometimes its on a wider scale, sometimes it’s on more of a personal scale, but there is conflict, and there is plenty of violence and death to go around. And I point that out because even though this is easily an alternate history, this parallel world isn’t without its conflict, and interestingly enough, those conflicts parallel what happened in the primary, original world in terms of dates.

In other words, no matter what happens, there will always be conflict. It’s inevitable, and sometimes I think Wilson was trying to say that it absolutely has to happen, and it has to happen at a certain time in history, that there’s no avoiding it, despite free will and all that jazz.

Of course, I could be reading it wrong. But eerily enough, and this was published in 1998, and while I was obviously alive and old enough to know what was going on, I was a self-absorbed high school/college student that year (and the years before, just high school), so I can’t tell you what conflicts were going on in the mid to late nineties. What I can say, and what’s eerie, is that 1999 isn’t far from 2001, when September 11 happened, and it makes me wonder: the end of this book, there’s mention that Guilford may not be done fighting and protecting yet, and wouldn’t it be interesting to know what’s going on in this parallel world Wilson’s created during that time period when the primary world (aka the real world, aka OUR world) was going through the tragedy of 9-11?

One thing I did notice that for either side, it was always men who were possessed by gods (the bad guys) or whose doubles they’d merged with (the good guys). I suppose the good guys make sense, since at least in Guilford’s case and his expedition, they were all in the same company in the first World War. But that’s where it gets confusing. Was it only soldiers who were used? Or just anyone who died in the primary world but was still alive in the parallel/secondary world? In other words, why weren’t there any women?

I have no answers for that. I’m not ashamed to say I didn’t understand the book quite well enough to even remotely come up with answers for that. I’m just throwing it out there in case anyone reading this does have answers.

Once it got out of the expedition, the book did have some interesting moments and poignant parts. One particular line stood out to me on page 300:

What did dying mean, when the world was made of numbers?

Isn’t that just chilling? It chills me, because this isn’t the Matrix we’re talking about here. It’s a real world, yet being rewritten. Hmm… The Matrix came out in the summer of 1999, a year after this book was released. I wonder if there are any comparisons and contrasts between the two. They’re utterly different, but that line alone connects them.

My Rating: 6 – Worth Reading, with Reservations

Even though this was the first Robert Charles Wilson book to ever come in my possession, I’m really glad it’s not the first one I ever read. Not to say that this one was bad, but I’m not sure it would’ve left enough of a strong impression on me back then to read more of the author’s work, whereas Spin was one of my favorite novels that I read in 2011. Be that as it may, this book does have a dizzying amount of things to offer: alternate history/parallel worlds, philosophy, suspense and thrillers, evolution and aliens, intergalactic conflict. It’s certainly fascinating, and almost something that deserves two readers so that readers can really sink their teeth into what’s going on, why it’s going on, and therefore really appreciate the story. It’s not a book that you can read with the television on, or while under the influence of cold medicine. It’s a book that requires your absolute attention, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s just a thing to be aware of. The opening is great, but the rest of the book had its ups and downs for me. Definitely worth reading, but be focused when you do.

Cover Commentary: It’s rather appealing, though I will say that if I didn’t know the premise of the novel, I wouldn’t think the book was a strange alternate history or anything, so in that sense, I think the cover could do a better job showing the alien-ness of the land, just to grab the reader’s attention a little better.