Review by New York Times Review
IN "ANNIHILATION," the first book of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, readers were introduced to Area X, a stretch of coastal wetland whose conspiracy-theory name is the icing atop a mille-feuille of layered, slow-building, deliciously creepy horror. Twelve teams of researchers, stripped of names to somehow protect them from the identity-warping effects of the danger zone, have traveled into Area X; "Annihilation" followed "the biologist" as she seemingly became the only survivor to actually understand what was happening. The second book, AUTHORITY (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $15), pulls the action back to the edge of Area X, where the government agency that oversees the phenomenon - the Southern Reach - is going through some changes in the wake of the 12th expedition. A new director has come aboard, and his decision to shed his name in favor of the nickname Control is the first hint that all is not as it seems in the halls of this outdated and underfunded government complex. Area X is an idea as well as a place, gradually colonizing everyone who has contact with it, and it's no accident that Control's gradual discovery of the agency's secrets parallels the journey of the biologist in the first book. The narrative is mundane in a way that lulls the reader into a false sense of complacency, as Control spends an inordinate amount of time attending meetings and worrying about personnel matters. Yet VanderMeer carefully inserts oddities at well-timed intervals to remind the reader of just what it is the Southern Reach is dealing with. While cleaning out the previous director's office, for example, Control finds an apparently unkillable plant in a desk drawer that has been closed and locked for months. Mysterious graffiti, familiar to readers of "Annihilation," appears on the office walls. The incidents pile up, building in tension and terror until it becomes very, very clear that Area X is in no way safely contained within its borders. As in the first book, VanderMeer also performs a careful character study of one of the few people strange enough to contend (debatably) with Area X. This elevates the whole exercise into something more than just a horror novel; there's something Poe-like in this tightening, increasingly paranoid focus. But where Poe kept his most vicious blows relatively oblique, VanderMeer drives them deep - albeit in a corkscrewing way that is no less cruel and exquisite. There's a slower buildup of tension in this book than the first, possibly because it's almost twice as long. The payoff is absolutely worth the patience. It's easy to get lost in the scenery Chris Beckett introduces in his third novel, DARK EDEN (Broadway, paper, $15), which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in England last year. Eden, the sunless rogue planet on which a pair of stranded spacefarers played Adam and Eve (other biblical allusions are less obvious, thankfully), is the poetic if improbable setting. Here life has evolved to channel energy from the planet's interior to its surface in endless variety and sufficient quantity to make up for the lack of a sun. Beckett describes in exhaustive detail glowing forests of lantern trees and light-reflecting predators that sing to their prey. He renders the terror of the darkness beyond the forests with a riveting deftness that evokes all primordial fears of the unknown. So entrancing and fresh is Eden's beauty, in fact, that it might take a while for the reader to notice the tired devices playing out against its backdrop. The Family, as the 532 primitive descendants of the spacefarers call themselves, has dwelled for generations in one forest on Eden, never daring to venture into the lightless, frozen lands beyond. This is a problem because their growing population has taxed the forest to capacity, and something will have to give soon. Enter young John Redlantern, the stalwart visionary who dares to question the nonsensical traditions passed down from their Earthborn forebears. It takes a while for this part of the story to get going, but you can see it coming from nearly the first chapter: John, his devoted but forgettable cousin and his equally clichéd love interest eventually challenge enough of the Family's status quo to be kicked out of it, forcing them into the dark. The journey is exciting, and Beckett cleverly offers his characters additional threats to face as the dark becomes less of one, but it's all a bit predictable. What really dims Eden's glow, however, is the 1950s ethos underpinning the whole thing. The Family has developed into a relatively peaceful communal society that venerates its elders and has necessarily relaxed sexual norms; the society John seeks to create instead is monogamous, individualistic, rife with subtle bigotries and rooted in murder. Survival and progress, the story seems to suggest, require these things. John himself is that most threadbare of science fiction types: the impossibly handsome, impossibly forward-thinking young man who gets the prettiest girl with no particular effort, and saves the day through sheer bloody-mindedness. Beckett tells the story from the alternating viewpoints of John and his companions, but it's unclear why he bothers with the others; everything's about John anyway. Still, for the sort of readers who like their heroes retro and their world-building literally colorful, there's plenty here to intrigue and entrance. It quickly becomes clear over the course of Jo Walton's MY REAL CHILDREN (Tor, $25.99) that there's no overtly science fictional or fantastic element in this story of an English girl who comes of age in postwar Europe. As an old woman, Patricia tells her story through the haze of deepening dementia - perhaps. Her memories are oddly bifurcated: In one recollection, her younger self makes the fateful decision to enter a loveless marriage with her college sweetheart; in the other she turns down his proposal and gallivants off to an exciting life as a travel writer, eventually entering a long-term same-sex relationship. The result is two period dramas for the price of one, told through the science fictional conceit of alternate realities. But it does a disservice to this powerful novel to focus overmuch on its structure or categorization. Both versions of Patricia - the much-put-upon, traditional Trida and the avant-garde free spirit Pat - endure the trials of women of the time with admirable grace. Some of these are alien enough to jar a modern reader; it's excruciating to see Tricia suffer marital rape and reproductive coercion, though she hardly has the language or self-actualization to view this treatment as abusive. It's correspondingly exhilarating to see Pat experience a degree of freedom that few modern women can claim, as she breaks boundaries as an expatriate single woman and forges a nontraditional family. Between these highs and lows, both Patricias travel the usual middle ground of life: rebellious children, unexpected career opportunities, the decline of a partner's or parent's health. Both Patricias are the same woman, and in many ways they're living the same lives. The difference ultimately lies in feminism: at which point in her two lives Patricia embraces it, and to what degree. Pat lives the intersectionality of the third wave from the moment she leaves her parents' house, while Trida comes late to "The Feminine Mystique" and a second-waver's rejection of traditional marriage's inequalities. All of this is rendered with Walton's usual power and beauty, establishing firmly that both Patricias are valid, fully realized women with stories worth knowing. The alternate-history elements grow stronger as the stories progress, yet it's this haunting character complexity that ultimately holds the reader captive to the tale. Within the sphere of steampunk there seems to be a rapidly growing subsphere of gadgetless "neo-Victorian" novels, most of which attempt to recapture the romance of the era without all the sociopolitical ugliness. In the same vein as Kay Kenyon's "A Thousand Perfect Things" and Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series, here comes Marie Brennan's the tropic of serpents (Tor, $25.99), Book 2 of the fictional memoirs of Lady Isabella Trent, a well-born alterna-Englishwoman who braves war, nature and propriety in pursuit of her passion for naturalism. Though Lady Trent is prevented from joining the pre-eminent scientific societies of her era because of her gender, she's well on her way to achieving fame anyway, as the book's frame narration implies. (The older Trent describing these events notes that her memoirs are quite popular.) This is probably because she's chosen to focus her formidable intellect on cataloging and understanding the world's dragons. That alone wouldn't be enough to sustain a fantasy series, though, so in this second Lady Trent outing (after "A Natural History of Dragons"), we follow her to Eriga, Brennan's stand-in for the African continent. There she and her companions, including a young runaway heiress who also wants to devote her life to science, become embroiled in local politics. This portion of the story is a little slow, in part because the heroine is forced to isolate herself when she menstruates per local rules. This means that after a promising opening in which mysterious antagonists steal the formula for preserving dragon bones, there's a long lull in which Lady Trent meets with this or that important personage to gain support for her cause. Eventually, however, the action resumes as Lady Trent and her party are sent into dangerous territory on a quest for dragon eggs. A set of lovely illustrations, maybe meant to evoke Darwin's texts, accompanies this quest. Even when the action resumes, however, it's all surprisingly unengaging. This may be a flaw of the medium and not the work itself. The problem lies in the need to keep the era recognizably Victorian, when really, it shouldn't be. Actual Victorian mores and politics were a reaction to a specific series of historical events, technological and scientific developments, and ethical trends in which the commodification of people was de rigueur. In "The Tropic of Serpents" (as in similar neo-Victorian works), these ugly bits of real history are elided. There's little mention here of an international slave trade, no British Raj. There's some space allotted to a push by Western powers to get access to the iron of other lands, but this is relevant only in how it threatens the protagonist's goals : Properly treated, dragon bone is stronger than iron. She fears a speculative run that could wipe out the beasts. In a way, this illustrates the niggling problem with neo-Victorian fiction. That Isabella frets so obsessively about conservationism while the nation around her ratchets toward war is actually spot on as an example of a colonizer's patronizing attitude - but not enough actual colonialism exists in this world to support that attitude. And meanwhile the story's focus on the liberation of only wealthy, white and otherwise highly privileged women ignores the grassroots-driven, labor-movement-inflected struggle that actually took place in our own world's England. All of this actually serves to emphasize what's been left out of these idealized Victorian worlds, and trivialize the struggles and complexities that made the era fascinating in real life. Which is fine, for readers who aren't especially interested in engaging with those complexities. In that case, the story is exactly what it says on the tin: a rollicking adventure in which women wearing unnerving amounts of underwear tromp through jungles on dragon-hunting safaris. Really, that should be more than enough for just about everyone. The most praiseworthy thing that can be said about Daniel Price's novel the flight of the silvers (Blue Rider, $27.95) is that it borrows from the best. There's something admirably audacious in the way Price attempts to blend superhero comics, portal quest fantasies, science fictional "other Earths," thrillers and Hollywood summer tent-pole films. All of these things can be entertaining on their own, but any attempt to put them together stands a solid chance of turning into a jumbled mess even in the most skilled hands. Price's book could have been worse, but not by much. The problem starts from the prologue, in which Price lavishes detail on the parents of two children, Amanda and Hannah Given, in a movie-trailer opening that sees the family saved from a highway disaster by three inhumanly beautiful beings. These beings use awesome might-as-well-be-magical powers to stop time, then announce that the two little girls are special and theatrically vanish. None of this is necessary. The parents are dead by Chapter 1. The girls are young enough that they barely remember the incident, and the omniscient narrative informs us it has no real impact on their lives. The story reintroduces Hannah and Amanda in their 20s, by which point both have grown into tiresome clichés. Amanda is a successful, no-nonsense career woman, while Hannah has become a flighty mediocre actress whose most significant work is being attractive to men. (Her breasts are mentioned several times.) The reader then learns almost nothing more about these sisters for roughly 300 pages. Oh, there are lots of scenes of both women reacting to another mysterious disaster (this one literally world-ending), but they develop only minimally beyond the stereotypes they represent. Even after the sisters are transported to an alternate universe in which flying cars and time travel are the norm, it takes 150 pages to figure out what makes them so special - namely, that they and a few others have their own might-as-well-be-magical time powers. They were all given silver bracelets, and thus are referred to as "the Silvers" for the duration. You know, like "the Avengers." The whole book - a whopping 600 pages - is structured like this: a portentous action scene depicted via a clunky, head-hopping narrative informing the reader something special has just occurred, followed by a grueling wait before the specialness is only partially explained. Since the book is the first of a proposed series, full explanations will be a long time coming. There are some mitigating elements amid the morass. The novel's alternate America, diverging from our world thanks to a disaster that rewrites the history of science, is genuinely fascinating; descriptions of the transformed New York City are some of the most eloquent in the book. As the Silvers come together, learn to wield their uncanny powers and promptly go on the run from people mysteriously trying to kill them, the story does get more interesting. Price devotes a lot of time to fleshing out his ensemble of young, attractive, white people through character quirks like alcoholism and Whedonesque witty banter. You can practically smell the Hollywood bait. In fact, Hollywood is likely to compress the cast and plot into a more manageable package. Maybe wait for the film version on this one. N.K. JEMISIN is the author of the Inheritance trilogy and, most recently, "The Shadowed Sun." Her new novel, "The Fifth Season," will be published next year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 1, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Jo Walton's My Real Children is a bit like a novel written from the point of view of Schrodinger's cat, except that instead of a cat we have a smart, sympathetic Englishwoman named Patricia, and she's not alive and dead, she's alive twice-she lives two parallel lives, in two distinct worlds, both of which are apparently equally real. While the premise of My Real Children is science fictional, its tone is that of literary realism. Patricia is born in 1926, but when we first meet her she's almost 90 and in a nursing home, where her confused memories of two different pasts are taken as a symptom of senile dementia. Patricia isn't so sure. "It was just that things were different, things that shouldn't have been different," she thinks. "She remembered Kennedy being assassinated and she remembered him declining to run after the Cuban missile exchange. They couldn't both have happened, yet she remembered them both happening." In 1949, shortly after she graduates from Oxford, Patricia receives a marriage proposal from a pushy suitor named Mark, a devout Christian. In the life where she says yes, Mark and Trish (as she's called) wind up in a terrible, loveless union; she's a stoic, philosophical soul and a devoted mother who eventually gets involved in local politics. In the other life, where Patricia goes by Pat, she turns Mark down and later has a loving partnership with a woman named Bee and a joyful career writing travel guides. Walton tells both stories in the same even, unfussy tone: no matter how well or badly things go for Pat or Trish, the narration remains observant but calmly, coolly distant. The fortunes of the wider world flop the opposite way. Pat lives in a world of nuclear exchanges and rabid intolerance. Trish's world chooses peace and international cooperation in space. (Each world is recognizably related, but not identical, to our own.) Comparing the two, Patricia is forced to wonder: did her choice split not just her own life, but the history of the entire species? Do we all possess that power, and the responsibility that comes with it? My Real Children has as much in common with an Alice Munro story as it does with, say, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. It explores issues of choice and chance and destiny and responsibility with the narrative tools that only science fiction affords, but it's also a deeply poignant, richly imagined book about women's lives in 20th- and 21st-century England, and, in a broader sense, about the lives of all those who are pushed to the margins of history: the disabled, the disenfranchised, the queer, the lower middle class. My Real Children is a quiet triumph, not least because whatever life Patricia happens to be living at any given moment, she remains deeply and recognizably herself. Good novels show us a character's destiny as an expression of who they fundamentally are. What most novels do only once, My Real Children does twice. Lev Grossman is the book critic at Time magazine and author of the forthcoming novel The Magician's Land. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Dementia obscures some memories and reveals others for octogenarian Patricia Cowan. Two lives, two families diverge from a single choice. Which life should she have lived, and which did she really experience? VERDICT Readers of character-driven speculative fiction will appreciate the importance Walton places on personal moments of consequence as well as on those that change the wider world. (LJ 4/15/15) © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
