Archive for the Novel Category


A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys

September 11th, 2022

Today’s review was brought to you by the many people who suggested I read this book, beginning with Ada Palmer who suggested in it during our Yuri Studio chat about Tezuka, Revolutionary Girl Utena and her own amazing Terra Ignota Series, (of which I reviewed the first book, Too Like The Lightning and last book, Perhaps the Stars, here) to our own YNN Correspondent David M, some folks who worked on the book and many others.

Today we’re talking about A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys.

As a long-time science fiction fan, I have read and watched my share of first-contact stories, but rarely have I encountered one so fully thought through. It’s a joke among scifi fans that so many of the cultures we encounter are humanoidish, but from a visual media perspective, until computers caught up with human imagination, it was just…easier… to represent. In good media, issues of language and  and culture are addressed. In many media, sex and mating are addressed, good, bad and indifferent. In A Half-Built Garden, Emrys takes a look at not only the cultural differences and similarities between human and alien, but between humans and other humans, among individuals who represent different environmental and economic priorities, religions, gender and sexuality constructs, clothing, language, and desires for the future.

Like Rose of Versailles, in which Riyoko Ikeda-sensei attempts to make sense of the vast scope of the French Revolution, by having us experience it through one person’s perspective, Emrys too, takes on a First Contact situation from the perspective of one woman. Set in an immediate future where humanity has turned the tide of climate change by bonding in “watershed” polities, with limited central government and corporate influence significantly curtailed, to the point of physical exile, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to find an alien ship polluting her local watershed. With her wife and infant daughter, she heads out to make contact with the aliens.

What follows is an extraordinary story of negotiation, adventure, personal relationships and making new friends across all the possible gaps that can exist between cultures.

What drew to this story was that it was positioned by many people as aspirational science fiction. I know there are plenty of folks who prefer their scifi gritty, but personally, what draws me to science fiction has always been the ability to create new solutions for old problems then new solutions to the new problems that come from them. Because I am also a realist, I am a believer in change – and that unintended consequences are a reality of that change. Therefore reform needs to be updated over time. Emrys’ book is wholly grounded in this idea – that every change, every moment of progress needs to be constantly monitored and adjusted…and problems that develop are an inevitability and, possibly, an opportunity.

As readers of queer media we highlight here on Okazu, folks may also find this story interesting for what it does in terms of addressing gender and sexuality…and in certain cases, gender role. Where the watershed folks, known as the Dandelion Networks, have roughly the same level of nuance about gender and sexuality as you and I, the corporate folks have a far, far more elaborate and political series of genders, indicated by clothing, pronouns, roles and behavior. Because gender is presumed to be fluid, they have a gender for someone you haven’t seen in at least a few hours, and therefore may not know which gender they currently are. I found this fascinating…and felt the entire segment of corporate life was left open-ended for a book of it’s own.

Parenting is a major chunk of the cultural exchange here with the Ringers, the name the aliens give themselves in English. When they meet the head Ringer Glycosine, a  Mother (a kind of ship captain) with two children, Judy and Carol are co-parenting two children with another couple, both of whom are trans as we understand that concept. Judy herself is Jewish and keeps kosher, while other characters are vegan, pagan and ex-fundamentalist Christian. The Ringers’ ideas of religion, food, ritual, storytelling, sex, gender and sexuality are all expressed within the story in ways that feel utterly organic. At one of the first meetings between humans and Ringers, Judy’s family puts out gender ID pins and several of the Ringers choose pins for themselves…one, at odds with the gender the rest of the Ringers associate with them. It was a fantastic, small shake-up, one that portends many much larger questions that both humans and aliens had to ask of themselves.

Of the Ringers, it is almost impossible to dislike Rhamnetin, whose job it is to ask – and answer – awkward questions. Other Ringers are richly written, with fully fleshed-out personalities. One spent the book hoping that everyone could make this work. And whether they do is left to our imaginations, which is exactly where it should be.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

If you are looking for aspirational science fiction or what Ada Palmer terms Hopepunk, I can highly recommend this book to you. A Half-Built Garden leaves plenty of space for our own imagination to grow.





Plain Bad Heroines written by Emily M. Danforth, illustrated by Sara Lautman

July 17th, 2022

In 1902, at a boarding school for young women in Rhode Island., a book is making an indelible impact upon both the student body and the school headmistress, leading to a series of tragedies. In 2022, the same book – is having an equivalently huge impact on the stars of a movie about those tragedies. In Plain Bad Heroines, Emily M. Danforth creates a meta-novel about a meta-novel, full of gothic horror, women in love and the memeification of fear and desire.

Brookhants (pronounced, Brookhaunts, we are assured early on) is a school on the property of a man who was deeply, obsessively, interested in the occult. The grounds, the buildings, the flora and fauna of Brookhants are saturated with the occult. But  the occult is just the gold lame draped over this story. Under the turban and giant earrings, is a psychological thriller about social media in 1902 and 2022. The girls at Brookhants share their obsessions through songs and rhyme and images, and promises, the young women of the 21st century share Instagram photos and memes, images and promises. What ties these two threads together is a book that was a huge hit in 1901, The Story of Mary Maclane, one girls’ diary of desire for other girls and desire to be released from a boring life. Both this book – which is a real book – and the “author” of the novel are ever present in the narrative. They will be there with us, every step.

This story begins with a tragic sapphic love; two young women who die a horrible death together instead of living horrible lives apart. These deaths bring about more deaths, and the separation of an adult lesbian couple who had, until this tragedy, managed to find joy together….they hoped.  A hundred years later, a movie about these stories is being filmed as a kind of true-horror story, with real, imagined and staged mysteries that keep the two leads – a famous up–and-coming young star and the daughter of a B-movie has been – and the woman who is credited with writing the book about the book, in a state of high anxiety, until they find each other and redeem both the film, themselves and each other. The several levels of meta-novel lean heavily on one another. If you were, for instance, to pretend that memes don’t have power, this book probably would have no power over you. But…you’d have to pretend, because we know for a fact that memes do have power. ^_^

What this book does right is the slow-burn of the obsessive thoughts and behaviors that creep in and out of the pages until, unbidden, they come to your own mind in a similar situation….the perfect meme, even if that meme is a bit destructive, like invoking Bloody Mary on Halloween.  Even though the book is not entirely happy, if you’re fond of gothic romance – the penny dreadfuls of the turn of last century – you’ll probably enjoy this. Certainly, Sara Lautman’s illustrations remind us exactly how we should be reading this story – late at night, with a candle or lamp for atmospheric lighting, maybe on a stormy, cold, dank day.  Whether from the cold or the fear, or the quiet longings of our own history, doesn’t matter – we should be shivering.

Despite the many tragedies of the story, it does have what I consider to be a happy ending. The happy ending is tied up in the existence of a three-person relationship that exists in a space that isn’t one thing or another, yet.  Where the girls and women of 1902 were not given the space to determine what they might be to one another, the happy ending is that the three of 2022 will have time and freedom to figure it out for themselves…

Ratings:

Art – Atmospheric
Story – A LOT of story
Characters – Fascinating and deeply flawed, like people
Service – Yes, actually. But I can’t tell you what it is or I’d ruin it
Lesbian – Several different kinds of sapphic relationships, spanning a century.

Overall – Complex, overwrought, a very good read that will stick with me for a long while

Listening to the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast over the past several months I find I do not actually enjoy that much historical fiction. As I mentioned when LHMP interviewed me last month, I do tend to prefer contemporary fiction that becomes historical over time. The historical part being just one layer of this novel gave it depth, rather than being a lesson on “the time period I researched” as so much historical fiction feels to me. And the contemporary side of the story is cemented in it’s time and place with any number of cultural touchpoints that will disappear and become historical footnotes, for a doubly historical piece any day now. ^_^





Secret Identity, by Alex Segura

May 22nd, 2022

Carmen Valdez eats and breathes comic books; ink flows through her veins. She’s moved away from her beloved Miami and her family to the rough streets of 1975 New York City in an attempt to create a space for herself in comics. And, she has, but not the space she wanted.

As the secretary to a cheap, not-quite-incompetent boss at a small third-rate comic book company, Carmen knows she can do so much more, if only she got the opportunity. Then something like the opportunity arrives – even knowing it’s the longest of long shots, she takes it.

When Carmen finds her writing partner’s body with a bullet hole in his head and only his name on their comic, everything comes crashing down around her. But, the Lethal Lynx is her character, too, and she’s not going to back down from trying to save the comic book, and herself.

Secret Identity by Alex Segura is a great read. With an all-around solid story that comics fans and insiders will love, it reads very much like a comics-industry version of Umberto Eco’s Focault’s Pendulum. There’s an incredible depth of knowledge and experience that Alex brings to the book.  Those of who remember NYC of the 70s will nod to the tense beat of life there, the smells and sounds of the streets, and the faces of the real names with which Segura sugars the story. Carmen feels like a character right out of an episode of Wonder Woman on TV, or any drama about women “making it in the big city,” with NYC as a backdrop.

What came as a pleasant surprise to me was the narrative about Carmen’s past and present. Her relationships (romantic and non) with other women are as critical to the narrative as the interactions she has with the men in the book, but they do not overwrite of obfuscate one another. Carmen is a lesbian and she’s got the effed up ex to prove it, but that is not at all the sum of who Carmen is as a human. In fact, Carmen’s friendship with her roommate was among my favorite developments. The ending of this book is spot on. I could not have asked for better.

One of the loveliest aspects of the book are the comic pages of the Lethal Lynx. They tell a subtle story of their own. The art is excellent – especially when it is bad. The badness was incredible, just such a skilled example of bad comics art in the 1975 (although I think it could have used more sleaze) that I have to give it props. The excellent pages create quite the punch. BUT, this leads me to the one criticism I have of this otherwise perfect book. Personally, I would have loved if Segura had chosen women as his artist and letterer as a hearty “Fuck you comics in 1975.” Alas, he did not. While he credits many woman with the making of his book, both artist and letterer were men. A petty complaint, but it rankled. Not enough to lessen how much I enjoyed this book. ^_^

It’s summer. It’s a perfect time to go read a great rollicking superhero comics-flavored mystery (and caperish and queer) novel written by someone who does right by all of those things. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 9 Nailed it. Every time.
Story – 9
Characters – 9
Service – 2 Rather, some good sexual tension where it needed.
Lesbian – 9

Overall – 9

Great book, fast-paced and fun, with an ending that nails the landing.





Perhaps the Stars, by Ada Palmer

February 6th, 2022

“…no one should be made to choose between advancing the future we love and doing so kindly.”

 

Today I am wrapping up a review that took 4 years from beginning to end. It began in 2018, when Peter K suggested I read Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer. I did and I was blown away by it. You can read my review here on Okazu, where I gave it a 9/10. This was a book for people who loved to read. It stretched my ability to follow a complex story, with roots in history, anime, 18th century literature, science fiction, political science, and /flailing hands/ everything.

Over the next few years I read the next books in the series, Seven Surrenders and The Will to Battle. I did not review them here, but they were as outstanding. The world Ada Palmer built was fully fleshed out. While we saw epic events from individual perspectives (and not all of those reliable), it was gripping drama.

And then, at last I read the series finale. Perhaps the Stars may well be one of the very best books I have ever read – in part because it scratches all of my literary itches. ^_^ As I read, I kept jotting down quotes, so I hope you don’t mind if share them as I write here.

 

“Then I wrote an essay, ‘On Fanatacism’ (based on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique portatif) in which I argued that war’s atrocities hatch, not from any inhuman machine of war, but from human hearts when we let conviction turn into fanatacism. We are all in danger of dying in this war, but we are all also in danger of becoming the authors of atrocities. The first danger we cannot avoid, but the second is entirely in our power, since each, of us alone can choose whether we let fanatacism fester in us, or keep our hearts havens of Reason, Reasonableness and Humanity.”

 

There is a constant dialogue between Past and Present in Terra Ignota, and, in Perhaps the Stars, it turns out that Future has been there are along, waiting to be noticed. References to both classical literature and pop culture stop being references, and shove their way through to the surface, where they stand gleaming in the light as the homages they are. I cannot stress how fantastic these scenes are. One of my long-lasting sells on literature is any mythology creeping in…but this is not a creep. In Terra Ignota, Homeric mythology is front of stage along with Gundam and Rose of Versailles and Utena. And little green army men. And Voltaire. It’s all real and all there.

Where previous volumes dealt with the remaking of the world after it had failed, Perhaps the Stars deals deeply with the unmaking of that brave new world; how simply refusing to acknowledge gender and sexuality, nationalism or the raw desire for power can never be a truly healthy society.  (Queership has a terrific article abut Gender in Terra Ignota, which I recommend.) And how the world we leave for our children is a brand new set of diseases that need to be cured.

 

“…you who had power and used it to burn the world. You burned it a lot. You didn’t just burn trees and cities and each other. You burned our admiration for the governments we grew up respecting. You burned our sense of safety in our care. You burned our patience, our ability to believe in the great things in this world you promised to protect will still be there for us and future generations. You burned our trust as you misused the data and surveillance we let you collect…for the war, its propaganda and lies. You burned our self-trust, too since we know we are infused with your values, values we thought made both you and us people who would never do such what you just did. We have to be afraid of ourselves, vigilant against what you’ve taught us to be, since now we know that we are something to be afraid of and ashamed of. And even if you didn’t personally kill in the war, if you carried arms, if you participated, you helped burn what nothing can bring back. No sentence can repair any of that. So, we want you to repair what you can.”

 

Above all, Perhaps the Stars is paean to everything I hope for the world. That communities of intent and desire, are as powerful as the arbitrary allegiances we have because of geography.  In fact, that was what spurred me to Interview Ada Palmer for Yuri Studio.I wanted her thoughts on what we do, here, every day. And boy did I get some great commentary! If you haven’t listened to Ada talking about the power of historical LARPing, Revolutionary Girl Utena and how fandom can save the world, you definitely should. This book and the conversation with Ada, convinced me even more that those of us in this Yuri community, are best served when we stand with each other and with other marginalized communities.

“Friends help friends ignore the voices that tell us we are not human, outside voices and in.”

 

At the end of everything, Perhaps the Stars is deeply aspirational. Ada spoke of Hopepunk, which is now my new favorite genre of everything in the world. I believe that one of science fiction’s jobs is to provide aspiration so the next generation does better, whether it be in connecting with other races, or with our own. We need to find the cures for the diseases we create and homes for our hearts.  There’s a good reason why healing anime is super popular right now. Communities of intent become “ibasho, that special community that lets one be one’s self, the human half of home.”

Perhaps the Stars and the whole Terra Ignota series is a magnificent love letter to literature, philosophy, history and humanity.

I sincerely hope you’ll all read it. It’s worth every second. Now I think I’m going to get it all as voice recording and start all over again. ^_^

Ratings:

Overall – 10





Three Books For Fans of Revolutionary Girl Utena

December 15th, 2021

Today’s review is a video!

Revolutionary Girl Utena was a major gateway anime for a generation of Yuri fans. 20 years later, it is inspiring literature. Check out these three titles for their Utena references and roots!

 

Books mentioned:

Silk & Steel: A Queer Speculative Adventure Anthology on Kindle
Featuring stories by:
Ellen Kushner * Aliette de Bodard * Yoon Ha Lee * Neon Yang * Jennifer Mace * Django Wexler * Freya Marske * Claire Bartlett * K.A. Doore * Alison Tam * Ann LeBlanc * Cara Patterson * Chris Wolfgang * Elaine McIonyn * Elizabeth Davis * S.K. Terentiev * Kaitlyn Zivanovich

A/CINet Case Files: An Inside Job by Erica Friedman on Kindle

The Terra Ignota Series, by Ada Palmer

Too Like the Lightning
Seven Surrender
The Will to Battle
Perhaps the Stars

(links to Amazon, but these are available at any bookstore or site)

Today’s t-shirt: Hana & Hina Afterschool, by Milk Morinaga, from the 2018 Yuriten event:

Hana & Hina Afterschool is available in English form Seven Seas.