Time traveling agents comb through battlefields in the aftermath of devastating wars, and gather intelligence to make adjustments in time and events so that their own side will win. But at one battlefield, there is a note. A taunting, gloating note. An invitation to the finder from a skilled strategic rival to… do what, exactly?
Whether it is a dare or a trap, communicating with the enemy is highly dangerous. And yet, elaborately coded exchanges between these professional rivals begin, woven and shaped through time, so that only a specific arch enemy will spot and interpret it.
And those communications are… thrilling.
Are communications with enemy rivals supposed to be thrilling? Are finding their cleverly devised codes supposed to make your not-necessarily-human heart race?
This is a well-acted, FUN, page-turner-if-this-had-pages story of rivalry, risk, intrigue, and mutual admiration that delighted me. I recommend it highly.
How High We Go In the Dark is a book about a plague that reshapes humanity for centuries. (Note, this is not about the plague we are in at the moment. Also: it is intense to read about a world reshaped by plague, while in a world pretending not to have an ongoing plague at all…)
Melting permafrost reveals the remains of ancient people, who thaw and release the Arctic Plague upon the world, a pandemic of terrifying symptoms and profound lethality. The scale and scope of the suffering it causes remakes the world in surprising ways.
If you have wondered how serious a plague would need to be for society to adjust its values around voluntarily ending life to limit suffering; to refocus the economy around the business as its core; or how the risk of humanity’s end could drive new goals for space exploration, Sequoia Nagamatsu has wondered about this more – elaborately, delicately, thoughtfully. Through a series of interconnected chapters / short stories / vignettes, we learn about the Arctic Plague through the eyes of people who discover it, die from it, spare their loved ones from dying of it, mourn their losses, try to cure it, survive it, and travel between worlds to create a future without it.
Nagamatsu’s world building is remarkable – so plausible, so human, yet so far from the particular choices we are making during our current plague. The characters have motivations that are varied, but make sense. The settings are notable in the way the characters describe how they feel when they experience them, yet are never so detailed that you require footnotes. The emotional journey of coping with global grief and hope is handled so well. The story reveals humanity adapting to this challenge in surprising ways under the worst circumstances.
I listened to the audiobook version of this from Libro.fm, which is brilliantly acted by a cast of about fifteen voice actors (!), whose characters are compelling. (For those of us who live in the SF Bay Area, some of the voices sound pleasantly local in our port-city, collecting-people-from-afar-and-influencing-each-other way.)
This has been my favorite book of 2023. I think of it often, and have recommended it internationally! Go read or listen to this excellent book.
This is a sci-fi story about parallel universes, and a person who makes contact with a parallel version of themselves to see how their life could have been different. It’s concise! It’s great! Go read it.
Noor by Nnedi Okorafor published by Penguin Random House audiobook read by Délé Ogundiran audiobook published by Tantor Media, Inc. 2021
This amazing African Futurist novel engrossed me completely this weekend!
AO has a many cybernetic enhancements, having been born with life-threatening birth defects, and having further been maimed in an unexplained autonomous vehicle accident. She’s followed her fiancé to a new city, made a life for herself, improved her body, and found a meaningful profession. After a rough day coping with the abrupt end of her engagement, she just wants to have a nice dinner. At her local market, however, locals who have been radicalized by a passing imam against the evils of cybernetics have other plans for her…
In a time of environmental devastation, oppressive corporate monopolies, and wireless energy transmission, AO finds herself on the run with a nomadic herdsman, a bloody nose, and an increasing awareness of the surveillance technologies that have infused every element of Nigerian society.
The tech is great; the inserted documentary about how some of the tech was invented is engaging and wonderful; the the environments, both urban and desert, are well described; the cosmopolitan people, the languages, the different traditions, the meals – all are vividly and richly laid out in world building of great depth for such a brief and satisfying novel.
I recommend Noor highly to everyone who likes a great, earth-bound, science-fiction story in a vivid near-future that never lets up the pace.
Oh! So, I mentioned how excited I was about this 4th Matrix film back in September, and I’m happy to report that I adored it for unexpected reasons.
Yes, it’s funny, and self-aware, and makes jokes about being forced to make a 4th film in a franchise by Warner Bros – yes, all that.
Yes, I saw it in theaters, and it looked great. (And then I watched it again online, and it STILL looked great.) It is action packed! The effects are pretty! The story lines about re-evaluating life’s meaning and struggling with middle age are relevant!
The pleasant surprise, something I hadn’t realized during filming here in San Francisco, was how wild it is to see the setting of your real life used in a film. Sure, I often enjoy seeing scenes from San Francisco in films, but this was different. This was very specific. SO specific. A building where I worked for 10 years is a settling for key scenes in the film. The coffee shop meetings and fights were set there. The top of the building serves as a backdrop in other scenes. And nearly all of the chase scenes and outdoor night scenes were filmed on the surrounding blocks, where I have walked (and shopped, and dined, and caffeinated) countless times.
Even some of the later scenes, where the protagonists flee into other buildings, felt eerily familiar, because I have been in those buildings, too! My second viewing required sending time stamps and photos of filming locales that I’d walked past just days before to a friend, so he could see what the doors in the lobby scene looked like from the other side… Plus time stamps of when our current mayor has her cameo.
I know it wasn’t as big a blockbuster as the first one, but the film is still a treat for hardcore fans(yes, I own the prior 3 films; yes, I’ve seen the first film more times than is reasonable) who were interested in how people managed to recover after events in this world after the ending of the prior trilogy, and anyone who has worked in the area north of Montgomery Street BART!
Kafka Hibino has a dirty job: cleaning up the mess after giant monsters (kaiju) that attack his home city are violently “neutralized” by the nation’s Defense Force.
Kafka didn’t PLAN to be cutting up monster guts: he planned to fight against the kaiju directly at the side of childhood best friend, Mina Ashiro. But his plans went sideways, and decades later, he handles sanitation, while Mina leads the Defense Force’s third division as a national hero(ine), using weapons made from previously killed, powerful kaiju.
But… one day, things go very wrong, and Kafka becomes a part-time kaiju himself. Which is… SO AWKWARD. How will he ever get into the Defense Force and work with Mina if he is the enemy?
This is a charming adventure with dangerous monsters, dangerous humans, loyalty, teamwork, men gossiping in bathhouses, monster intestines, secret identities, partial kaiju transformations, very sharp blades, unexpected alliances, and fun illustrations between chapters.
I subscribe to Viz’s Shonen Jump, so I have access to all available chapters (1 through 54 as of mid-January 2022), and have been delighted by the story so far! Chapters 1-7 are available in book form, and I imagine the rest of the story will be bundled and released in the future.
I’m looking forward to future issues!
VIZ | Read Kaiju No. 8 Manga – Official Shonen Jump From Japan
The world’s most popular manga! Read free or become a member. Start your free trial today! | Kaiju No. 8 – Kafka wants to clean up kaiju, but not literally! Will a sudden metamorphosis stand in the way of his dream?
FTL, Y’all! Tales from the Age of the $200 Warp Drive edited by C. Spike Trotman and Amanda LaFrenais published by Iron Circus Comics 2018
I love sci-fi, and so this anthology of what people would do if faster-than-light travel was possible, cheap, and open to anyone who could assemble some off-the-shelf parts was irresistible.
I think I actually said, “OH NO” out loud in the shop, because my first thought was, yes, some people would make their parents’ old Camaro into a FTL travel device, and go into space with NO PREPARATION AT ALL. I would like to thank the editors for assuring me that I’m not the only one who would fear this…
This anthology has it all: people who are competent with interstellar travel! People who are not! People who prepare! Cool ships! Quiet disasters! People on the run from the authorities! Other forms of life! The absence of other forms of life! Social media! Pop culture references to famous sci-fi movies! A wide range of illustration styles in a wide range of stories… I really enjoyed this hefty, speculative collection of adventures from a collection of talented artists.
I have watched this. Many times. Possibly too many times.
It’s fun to be excited about this.
Also, I just love to see San Francisco in films. (This was really filmed here, in part: there were many excited sightings of filming downtown, and some pretty funny warnings from the public health service letting us know what the helicopters downtown were for. 🙂 )
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson published by Tor 2018
One of the funnier recommendations I’d read for this book observed that it was hilarious that, even in the future, scientists will devote entirely too much of their time writing grant proposals. Yes, this book EMPHASIZES that in a way that feels a bit too real!
Without revealing any spoilers, this is a science fiction story of first contact (my definition of it), environmental devastation, underfunded environmental restoration, practical business applications of time travel, and the risks of the combining those things!
Robson tells the story in a non-linear way, which is fair and even appropriate for time travel stories. Her approach develops an excellent tension while reading: you know from the first page that something will go wrong, but HOW it will go wrong and how the wrongness will be resolved is the mystery.
Robson’s world-building is done well – you learn about the different ways humans have survived the devastation they wrought without being bogged down with too many details. The way the world works is experienced as characters accomplish other things, which is efficient and makes the characters’ efforts feel appropriate. It is great to have some grown-up characters in the book: people whose experience, scientific knowledge, and past successes made them valuable. (I live in a youth-worshipping culture, so this stood out.)
I had my doubts about the book during the proposal writing sections (because, as someone with a procurement certificate and experience writing grants: TOO REAL), but was rewarded for my persistence with a book I couldn’t put down once the time travel started.
I write legal and technical materials professionally, AND I recreationally write a range of other things. Blogs like this, web pages, a surprising number of letters and postcards, diaries, notes for stories, and fiction. Writing is something I have always enjoyed, and I am always writing something, at least for my own satisfaction.
As with so many other fiction writers, the current pandemic has been a wake up call that the popular fictional narratives we have around plagues are not accurate. Yes, in nearly every popular movie, there is a warning from scientists that goes unheeded, and there is needless suffering. Yes, there are rumors and superstitions and panics, and we see those in films and playing out similarly in real life.
Yet, the level of denial visible in real life in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic is shocking. People are devoting significant time to announcing that the pandemic is: a hoax, a domestic conspiracy (despite its global nature), a foreign plot (it is somehow not real but also a foreign bioweapon), a domestic power grab (preventing illness is oppression?), a disease carried by outsiders (again, somehow it is not real but also something strangers bring? WHAT?), something that isn’t real so they flout precautions, something that isn’t real so they sabotage the medicines (but if it isn’t real, why bother sabotaging medicines?), a situation where the vaccine is free but a counterfeit card that falsely claims you were vaccinated costs $400 (so it would be cheaper to go along with the treatment than pretend you did), a private sector plot to embed microchips into people (for generally unexplained purposes, though when they are explained, it always involves something like the location your smartphone already records, which means an additional device would not be necessary)… In this bizarre current reality, the pandemic is somehow BOTH a situation where precautions against catching the illness are banned by a governor AND a situation where that governor’s state requires federal emergency supplies of hospital ventilators and monoclonal antibody treatments for the seriously ill, which the governor suggests people somehow self-medicate with for this illness he says isn’t serious?
If I had written ANY of these things into a fiction story, my writing would have been rejected as implausible. The publishers would have told me that people are not that stupid, and that I should feel bad about making my fellow Americans look so ridiculous.
-I mean, really.
I want people in my fiction writing to be both realistic and smart, but it feels like I can only have one of those two.
I am inspired to post this after reading the tweet above, about news that a sci-fi movie has been interpreted as reality by the anti-vaccine-far-right (who failed to even grasp basic details about the movie they are basing their nonsensical conspiracies on). Their nonsense has gotten so much press that the screenwriter for this remade sci-fi movie had to make public statements emphasizing that it is fiction:
I Am Legend screenwriter dismisses anti-vax claims based on film’s plot
A sci-fi writer hits back at unfounded rumours that Covid jabs turn people into zombies.
(It is still strange to read something on Twitter and later find the tweets I read subsequently inspired news articles…)
The past several years have inspired many discussions about the death of parody in the face of an absurd reality, but the current absurd reality also is killing off the premise that the vast majority of people could consistently act intelligently. Maybe we could get to half, or nearly half, but not an overwhelming majority.
I want a future where people ARE actually intelligent. I want to WRITE futures in which people are intelligent!
I suppose my defense for stories with predominantly intelligent populations will be: yes, but I told you this is fiction.
