Pale Blue Dot: 2013 Book #27

4 of 5 stars

After reading this book, it made me wish for trillions of dollars in wealth so I could sink it into a space program.

The strength of this book is how Sagan takes the cold, unforgiving world of space, a place that for all the money we could likely sink into it, will probably not yield (at least in our lifetimes), proof of other life, other habitable worlds, etc. But that’s not the point of the book – the point of the book is possibilities. Of making science fiction real. Because when he talks about how billions of years from now, after our civilization has ended, the Voyager spacecrafts will still be floating out in the Milky Way with a golden record of human life, or when he talks about the chills he gets when he thinks how the SETI program has yielded strong anomolous radio signals, all originating from the direction of stars in the Milky Way, you can’t help but want to get caught up in his passion for the universe and fire up the rockets.

He spends a considerable amount of time talking about our own solar system and exploring the ins and outs of the planets that traverse the night sky but still seem so far out of reach. He also spends considerable time talking about near Earth asteroids, something I wasn’t completely aware of existing before this book. He posits them as potential halfway points between our the Moon (which is old hat by now) and a mission to Mars. Less time is spent on the worlds and stars beyond, but that’s O.K., at the time this book was written less was likely known.

I gave this book 4 stars because some of the information did feel repetitive. While he talks about the planets from all sorts of different angles, at points it feels like he’s rehashing the same data or discovery, albeit in a different and novel way. The other thing I didn’t like is his obvious bias towards the disparity in military vs. science spending. While I completely agree with him, and would love to take even 5% of the defense budget to put towards space exploration, he mentions it at least a half dozen times. It left a small, almost imperceptible bad taste in the bad of my mouth, if only because it feels so out of character for this wonderful book.

Midwestern Gothic Issue 10

Who would have thought we’d hit ten issues of Midwestern Gothic?

Issue 10 (Summer 2013) of Midwestern Gothic might be an arbitrary milestone, but I can’t help but feel a little extra pride in lasting long enough to throw double digits on the cover. It’s getting harder and harder for lit journals to last nowadays – even some of the established beachheads of the industry are flailing a little bit. To be around for this long is a testament to our contributors who fill the magazine – I’ve said it many, many times, but without them, we’re nothing. There’s some phenomenal, gritty stuff in this issue, including one of the major players in grit-lit today, Frank Bill. To land a writer with that much national cred is pretty cool – especially to see him placed among folks who are being published for the first time in our magazine.

My favorite story in this issue was “The Disappearance of Herman Grimes” by Michael Shou-Yung Shum, a fiction about a struggling franchise restaurant owner who is preparing for a visit from headquarters. Things haven’t been going well, but the situation is correctable – provided Herman is up to the task. In true Midwestern tradition, our authors continue to favor main characters they love to hate. Herman draws in on himself, hides, and only makes the situation worse by putting his incompetent assistant manager in charge of saving this business. It’s tragic and comedic to watch at the same time. Here’s one of my favorite sections:

In the entire town of Ardsmore, Oklahoma, there were only two restaurants that could be considered adequate, and neither was Herman Grimes’s. Herman’s was a franchise called Crystal’s, located off the first highway exit leaving town, next to a twenty-four hour gas station. The food served in his restaurant was U.S. fast food, deep fried, mostly parts of chickens. The fact was that in Ardsmore, the options for dining out were bleak and could only be tolerated by a citizenry who’d grown habituated to the basest diet.

Herman’s franchise featured a radiant jewel on its sign, a glass front, and once-shining chrome fixtures now dulled from repetitive use. Always, a thin layer of grease pervaded the air, ruining the complexions of his teenaged employees. Herman himself stood up front only when he was manning a register during the lunch and dinner hours or taking a complaint. He usually sat in the back, in his office next to the employee bathroom with the lock that did not lock, watching what was happening on the video surveillance monitor with dismay rising in his eyes. Herman had never been particularly interested in food, but when he and his wife had started out in business, they’d mutually agreed that a restaurant franchise was the safest bet. Now, for the last three years, the restaurant had hardly been making any money. The recession had driven most of Ardsmore to the pre-packaged frozen food aisles of the local supermarket, where the parts of chickens could be had for a dozen at the same price Herman offered for four.

The atmosphere in the restaurant had been especially brutal for six weeks, since Herman’s wife had passed away. He’d been away an entire month, on bereavement leave. And then, barely recovered and somewhat bewildered by why he was doing it, Herman Grimes had returned to work. That first week back had been awful, filled with so many gruesome gestures of commiseration from his regulars that they drove Herman entirely into his office. His teenaged employees treated him as if his misfortune were contagious, even using the customer bathroom to avoid crossing paths. The worst was Joe Cloud, his general manager, who had seemingly taken it upon himself to rehabilitate Herman’s psyche through sheer force of aphorism.

But it was primarily Herman Grimes that caused Herman to isolate himself in his office. He couldn’t say that he particularly liked his restaurant, but it was all he had left, now that Greta had passed. Oh God. Greta. The second day back, in the midst of counting inventory with Joe, trying to regain a feel for hard numbers, the thought had struck him like a bolt from the blue. She’s gone. His clipboard fell to the floor, and he was biting his right knuckle hard, so hard it drew blood, cringing like an animal in the corner of a cage. When his fit had subsided, Joe was looking at him with more than mild concern. Joe said he could finish the inventory himself.

Buy a copy of Issue 10 and hear from some of the Midwest’s best writers and poets.

In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods: 2013 Book #25

5 of 5 stars
I went into this book with high expectations, given how much I liked Bell’s prior collection, Cataclysm Baby, stories set in a universe familiar to In the House Upon the Dirt in Between the Lake and the Woods.

It met all of my expectations. Bell seems to have settled into the style he explored in Wolf Parts and polished in Cataclysm Baby. Sentences packed densely with symbolism and meaning, each word carefully hand-picked to suit. Paragraphs that echo each other, each one subtle and quiet on their own, but that rise to form, as one advance reviewer noted, the beat of “…a powerful heart you can hear thumping miles away.” Reading a story by this author is like boarding a locomotive and not knowing the destination. For a time, you quietly rumble along, wondering where it’ll take you. By the time you recognize the trunks of the murky, enchanted forest he’s drawn you to, the ride is irreversible and you have no choice but delve deep into the dark heart of the woods.

The prose is beautiful, as I said before, each word seems carefully hand-chosen to project the exact atmosphere and pathos of this unflinching alternate reality where there is nothing but the narrator and the elements he knows. For anyone who has had children or has struggled to have children, this novel is a fantastic metaphor for the experience of marriage and parentage. The loss of a child and the labyrinth it leads both mother and father down is pitch-perfect.

There’s little to not like about this book. You should know going in that this is dense literature. But, it toes the line expertly between accessible and the stuff studied and analyzed thoroughly in academia. It is a book to be read slowly, savored. One where if the territory feels strange, unfamiliar and unclear, it is to be enjoyed.

Artifice Magazine – Issue 3: 2013 Book #24

This edition was on the weaker side for me, in terms of lit. journals / anthologies – probably because experimental fiction/poetry isn’t my preference. There were some nice surprises in here – specifically Matt Bell’s story, which rather than being a traditional short, ran along the bottom of every page like a news ticker, and was amalgamated from lines within the book and other sources of information. I really enjoyed just simply re-reading the book in a new way, and he included a lot of lines that resonated with me when I’d read through the collection the first time through.

Some of the other standouts included Addam Jest’s The Beautiful Necessity and Brian Oilu’s set of three short fictions. Most of the rest just didn’t speak to me because the breaking of structure and form got in the way of me feeling or in some cases even comprehending what the author was trying to communicate. That said, if you’re a fan of experimental fiction, you’ll probably want to check this out.

Theory of Remainders: 2013 Book #23

Theory of Remainders is a phenomenal tale about the consuming nature of loss. It explores the tried and true story of a child being murdered and the parent or emotionally invested detective uncovering the truth in a new way, by setting the actual crime fourteen years in the past and examining the effects place and time have on the protagonist, Phillip Adler. The novel does a great job using subtle cues to show how inescapable something as traumatic as losing a child is. At one point, Adler attempts to leave the Normandy region multiple times, each time being drawn back inexplicably because he’s daughter’s body has yet to be found. In fact, the entire trip to France is prompted by an inability to resolve the past, and the desire to have everything in its right place.

It’s a very human story, in that Adler’s relationships with his ex-wife, her husband, their daughter who bears a heartbreaking resemblence to his own daughter, their extended family and the inhabitants of the town he used to live in. But the story of discovering his daughter’s body, even though the killer has been found and committed in a mental institution is executed well and provides plenty of twists and turns without feeling contrived.

Carpenter’s use of language and knowledge of the tension between American and French culture is also a strength of the book, truly transporting you to a region infamous for it’s involvement with World War II. It’s easy to forget that a people and their communities inhabit this place.

Cryptonomicon: 2013 Book #22

Some books take a little more effort to chew through, and I felt like Cryptonomicon was definitely one of them. Aside from keeping up with all the threads from three separate narratives taking place over the course of World War 2 era battlefronts and the South Pacific in the late 20th century, you’ve also got the super-dense business of cryptology to understand. Stephenson was hit or miss with me in explaining some of the complex math behind cryptosystems. Sometimes, he took pages to delve into the particulars and illustrate the concepts using metaphors, and it worked extremely well. I was not only interested, but felt smarter and understood the stakes in the books better. In other scenes, it was too dense or obtuse and bogged down the narrative.

That aside, I enjoyed reading the book, if only for Stephenson’s fantastic descriptions of action. There are quite a few laugh out loud moments in the book, in which he describes something in a way that instantly flashes a perfect picture of what he was trying to communicate, and done in a way that not many authors have a gift for. Equally as humorous is the way all of his solitary, often socially inept characters collide and maneuver around each other – all math nerds and computer geeks thrust into a critical role in war, a space typically reserved for the brave and physically strong.

The biggest thing that didn’t work for me in this book was the pacing – there were many sections of the book that felt extremely slow and drawn out, Stephenson probably could have achieved a story that resonated just as well, if not more so, with a book easily a third less in length. I found myself not caring what happened in the book or what happened to the characters for long stretches of time before I’d hit another section that felt engrossing.

C2E2 Comics Hoard: 2013 Books #18,19, 20 and 21

A couple weeks ago, I went to C2E2, a comic book convention in Chicago. It’s a relatively new con – just four years young. It’s definitely a step up from the longer-running Wizard World, just in terms of publishers, artists and guests they get. Which, unfortunately for my wallet, makes it that much easier to splurge on books.

I ended up coming away with four trade paperbacks, which is a solid afternoon or evening of reading material. Rather than do full-blown reviews of each, I’ll do a sentence or two review that lets you know exactly what you need to know.

The Walking Dead Vol. 16: A Larger World – Even though I love this series, it’s failed to explore new territory in the past few trades. While it took a whole trade to get there, I think 16 is going to push the series back into interesting territory. Rick finds a new group of people to distrust, but in finding them, he may have discovered a way to create a world that’s truly safe. This was still slow, but I was satisfied with the ending.
3 of 5 stars

 

 

 

The Walking Dead Vol. 17: Something to Fear – If they’re setting up another arc on par with the Governor with Negan’s character, I’m in. This issue was brutal, reveals just how difficult Rick’s vision is going to be to achieve, and reminds us of how hard the choices in this world are. This trade felt a lot closer to the stories that made me fall in love with the series, so hopefully they continue to play with these themes.
4 of 5 stars

 

 

 

 

Lucid Vol. 1 – This story felt extremely disjointed to me, nothing more than a series of wise-cracking characters with shallow motivations and dark sides. When I flipped through the book at Achaia’s booth, the art and concept seemed interesting, but this is just one of those books that falls apart upon closer inspection. I don’t know if they’re planning on serializing this with more stories, but I probably won’t be back to check it out.
1 of 5 stars

 

 

 

 

Syndrome: The polished art in this book is really well done – it’s not genre-bending or boundary-pushing, but just plain solid, traditional execution. I found quite a few of the characters intriguing, especially the art director and the actress, but at the end of the book I was left wanting more from them. The concept behind the book is that a researcher and Branson-esque billionaire are trying to cure the evil side of human nature, and their methodology is ripe for lots of great storytelling, but at the end of this book, I felt like the ending was abrupt and trivialized the plot, in a way. Again, not sure if this book will continue with more arcs, but I’ll definitely check it out if they do.
4 of 5 stars

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven: 2013 Book #17

4 of 5 stars

You’d think the year’s best collection would fare a little better than most anthologies, simply because all these stories are supposedly “good.” At the end of the day – it’s still an anthology, all centered around the theme of what the editor thinks is “best.” Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of great writing here, and even the ones that didn’t resonate with me still had beautiful prose. And I did enjoy a lot of the stories here, and the editor, Jonathan Strahan, really packs them in.

Overall, I felt like there was too much urban fantasy, magical realism and dystopian sci-fi. Strahan even comments on this in the prologue, acknowledging that sci-fi is in a state of flux – in the past, sci-fi has always been about what we could achieve, humanity bringing out the best in itself via science.

The future we imagined is here, and there are no jet packs.

What’s to say the next twenty years will be different? The tone of this book is decidedly bleak, and the vast majority of the stories are either dystopian sci-fi or post apocaliptic sci-fi. Thinking back, there are very, very few of these stories that would fall into what I’d call Fantasy, and even those are in the urban fantasy / magical realism sub-genre. All this is very “hot” right now, and the editor may have seen his job as capturing a snapshot of what happened in 2012. If so, he probably did a bang up job. However, I’ve got to believe there’s more sword and sorcery fantasy out there. Stuff that feels more medieval, dream-like and epic in scope. I’d even settle for just plain high or low fantasy, but those sub-genres are largely missing from this book.

My favorite story by far was “Two Houses” by Kelly Link. It had an eerie, bordering on horror-ish vibe to it. This sci-fi fiction about a team of deep space explorers reminded me a ton of Prometheus (which I liked, incidentally.) and a few other horror stories with twist endings that I won’t include here so as not to ruin the ending for you. The story does a phenomenal job capturing the feeling of isolation and grief with the imagery surrounding the characters as they move through the spaceship and deal with the loss of their sister ship is haunting. I also enjoyed how Link explored how even though these two ships have been disconnected by a vacuum for years, when the other ship disappears, it has profound effects on the crew. Even though there was a lack of a physical connection, the implied emotional connection was just as powerful.

Collections like these are a must for any fan of the genres. Just because I wasn’t feeling this year’s as a whole, doesn’t mean there weren’t some phenomenal works of fiction.

Buy The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

Leah Petersen Interview and Cascade Effect: 2013 Book #13

5 Questions with Leah Petersen, Author of Cascade Effect

JP: The Fighting Gravity and Cascade Effect universe are set in a future where homosexuality has reached complete acceptance. Currently, there’s a bit of turmoil around the issue, to say the least. Can you talk about the culture of your novel in context with the events of today?

LP: I didn’t write this universe to make any particular point, in fact I was well into writing it before I realized it was even going to have a homosexual character. But looking back, I can see how the issues of the day probably influenced me unconsciously. It was around 2008. I’d moved out of California a few years earlier, but I remembered feeling just stunned when California of all places banned homosexual marriage. I felt…betrayed somehow. And I’m straight.

I think that’s what made it so satisfying to write a world that didn’t just accept homosexuality, they didn’t even notice it as something to accept or not accept. Jake makes a lot of enemies, and has a lot of people who hate him for who he is, things he was born with and can’t change, but none of them ever notice or care about the gender of his sexual partners. The human race still had plenty of prejudices and issues, but that one was so far in the past no one even remembered to mind about it.

JP: Jake is endlessly frustrating as a character – unable to get out of his own way, yet remaining endearing at the same time. What kind of relationship do you have with your main character?

LP: I’ll forever have a weak spot for characters like Jake who you just want to strangle for being so damn sure they’re right and so damn stubborn, that they end up with twice the problems because they cause half of them all by themselves. This is another one that, looking back, I see a lot of the unconscious influence of my own life in his development. I was finally responding the the treatment that worked to control the bipolar disorder that had taken over the last few years of my life. I was intimately familiar with making stupid choices because you felt you HAD to, or that you couldn’t stop yourself, that made no sense to anyone else, or even you, later.

JP: Describe your relationship with writing.

LP: It started out as a way to dump emotion somewhere more productive and has developed into a passion. I always loved writing but felt I didn’t have time for it, or didn’t have good reason to spend my time that way. Once I realized that other people could enjoy my writing too, it became something I wanted to do and be, for myself and not anyone else.

JP: Tell me one thing nobody knows about you. (or, at least, something most people would never guess about you.)

LP: A lot of people who know my secret identity (real-life-Leah) know this one, but it’s not something that comes up in my author persona:

I breastfed both of my children until they were at least three years old. Yep, I’m one of THOSE moms. 😉

JP: What’s next for you?

LP: As far as writing goes, I’m working really hard on finishing up a second draft of a YA fantasy I’ve gotten obsessed with. After that, I’m writing the third in this trilogy, the conclusion of Jake’s story. I’ve got a good bit of that outlined, or written out in my head, and a little of that on paper. I have to give a story a lot of head time before I write. Once I start, it all pours out pretty fast. I’m hoping to see that one out next April.

Find out more about Leah Petersen at her website

4 out of 5 stars

Was super excited to get my hands on an early eBook of Leah’s sci-fi sequel, Cascade Effect – I’d read a version of it long, long ago before it got picked up by Dragon Moon Press, so I was curious to see what it’d turned into.

Petersen seems to be following a similar structure to cinematic comic book trilogies. The first tale (Fighting Gravity) is a pure origin story. Where our hero, Jake, came from, and the process of stepping into a role larger than anything he could have imagined. The second installment explores the consequences of his choice to marry the emperor of the universe.

In case you haven’t read my review of Fighting Gravity, both characters are men. And gay.

Odd that I’d be reading this as the Supreme Court hears cases on marriage equality – but Jake’s world and our world are years apart, both literally and figuratively. In Cascade Effect, the question of whether or not two men can be married isn’t even an issue. Instead, the conflict comes from Jake’s birth and upbringing in the lowest of the slums in Mexico, and the emperor’s high birth.

The strongest part of this book is Jake’s character. After the events of Fighting Gravity, he’s left with demons and secrets he can’t tell even his husband. And everything about his new life wants to reject him. It’s obvious throughout the entire book that Jake is out over his skis, with no idea how to maneuver the political whitewater around the emperor. Couple that with the fact that Jake is maddeningly dense in that he can’t get out of his own way. He’s trying to do the right thing, but he truly is his own worst enemy. In many books, this might lead to an unlikable, annoying character, but Petersen handles it masterfully. You want Jake to turn the corner and be happy, and you root for him, despite his flaws, the entire way.

The are moments of genuine tenderness in the book. Despite the interplanetary sci-fi themes, the political intrigue and the story being set far in the future – at its heard, Cascade Effect is the story of a relationship between Jake and Pete. It’s messy, it doesn’t always work, but it feels real. It’s huge and epic, yet intimate at the same time. Their journey in finding a way to have a child of their own is heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time, something that could have easily been lost in the less capable hands of other authors.

One thing I’m not sure I liked about the book was how much Jake seemed to lose who he was. I suppose that was part of what he was dealing with – in Fighting Gravity he was a brilliant scientific mind, one of the youngest in the universe. In Cascade Effect, he’s little more than the Emperor’s arm candy to many of those around him. I felt it as a reader, but it didn’t seem to come through in Jake’s internal battles. There were a few times when he tried to lose himself in research, but I didn’t feel like losing that aspect of his life was truly an issue for him. Even when one of his scientific endeavors goes horribly wrong, Jake doesn’t question his choices.

Any sci-fi fan would be well served to pick up Fighting Gravity and Cascade Effect. Personally, I can’t wait for the next installment.

Shop for Cascade Effect on Amazon

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius: 2013 Book #16

2 of 5 stars

Pretty typical of an anthology of short stories based around a theme – you get some good, some meh, and some downright boring.

Let’s start with the good. Of all the stories, I tended to like the ones with a more humorous bend to them. Specifically, “The Angel of Death has a Business Plan,” by Heather Lindsley and “Captain Justice Saves the Day,” by Genevieve Valentine. Probably not a coincidence that these both juxtaposed a realistic take on a character with the comic-book-like cartoon sketch of the mad scientist. That dichotomy worked best in these stories, particularly in the email exchanges between the technologically inept Dr. Mason and Brenda in the latter story.

There was a lot of “meh” in this collection for me, and consequently, I found myself growing tired of the same tropes after awhile. In fact, the longest story of the collection, “The Space Between,” I gave up on. There was a lot in this collection that was just plain uninteresting. Nearly every author painted the mad scientist as a caricature, the evil villain with some grand, dastardly plot and pitted against a typical superhero. I much preferred the few stories that explored the idea of a mad scientist in a unique way, like in “The Last Dignity of Man,” by Marjorie M. Liu. In it, a man who’s been given the name Alexander Luthor spends his whole life obsessed with living up to his namesake, in a world where there is no Superman. He is in a position to change the world, and has the power to. He wants to give the world a Superman, but he thinks the only way to do so is make himself the villain.

There are plenty of big name, award winning authors in this collection. Nearly everyone has at least one Hugo award under their belt. Many will probably enjoy it, but I would have preferred a more diverse representation of the subject.