The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Tor Books, 2014)
★★★☆☆
This is a hard one to rate. On the minus side, the characters were pretty wooden; there wasn’t a single person to “hold onto.” The reveals were clunky—sometimes a throwaway line, sometimes an exposition dump. There are significant shifts in pace and tone across the work. But if I consider that those criticisms originate from a Western storytelling perspective, and evaluate what I did like: I felt totally engaged while reading this, from the moment Wang first begins to question his sanity, to the nefarious weirdness of the Three Body game, to the sinister first contact scenario that forms the novel’s climax. And I enjoyed the way multiple characters threaded through the plot, driving it forward with their reminiscences, actions, and artifacts, even if they did display little interiority. Ultimately, the first 75% of the book feels like a prelude to the hard sci-fi thought experiment at the end, and I found that nosedive a compelling and satisfactory payoff.
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A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (Tor Books, 2019)
★★★☆☆
Twenty pages in: "I'm pretty sure I'm gonna love this book." Friend: "You are." Flash forward 400 pages, and... why do I feel so empty inside?
There was so much here that should have been up my alley. The neural circuitry of imago-lines; lush Aztec-inflected Teixcalaan and Teixcalaanli; Ministries of everything; algorithm-driven automata-guards; the seduction of empire and its players (Nineteen Adze Edgeshine-of-a-Knife gets her own call-out here); epithets, my god, epithets; I am a spear in the hands of the sun.
But I never felt invested in these characters. Yskandr, maybe, but he disappears early. From then on, Mahit fumbles, and fumbles hard. Her rare moments of agency feel unearned.
The best moments were the ones where Mahit's Stationer life informed her perceptions of Teixcalaan. She notices dust motes because the planet doesn't come with air filters. She is horrified by projectile weapons (these are also illegal planetside, for reasons of cultural osmosis, yet inexplicably people still have them) and the wanton destructiveness of rioters. But so little else gets that commentary. I really wanted to see more of Mahit processing: the hegemonic culture through the lens of the outsider. She gets othered a lot, true—in relationships, poetry, smiles (too often; a crutch), even food—but we only rarely see the materials producing that friction. I wanted to see where her upbringing told her to go one way and where her training ushered her the other. I didn't, so I didn't believe Mahit as a competent Ambassador, especially after Yskandr's departure. Accordingly, the few encounters that would have proven otherwise, like her barbarian-act with Ten Pearl, seemed haphazard. Spurious.
Call it wishful thinking, okay. The flip side of the coin is worse. Despite being asked to believe this is a far-future space opera: there are students and they make zines? There are creepy Gestapo and they're fooled by hide-and-seek? There were a couple other concepts that seemed more "21st-century America" than "Jewel of the (Multi-Galactic) World Teixcalaan." Even if I could believe they had reason to exist on the planet, Stationer Mahit had zero reaction to them. Oversight at worst; immersion-breaking at best.
Perhaps because of my lack of trust/investment in Mahit as a character, I also couldn't emotionally connect to Three Seagrass or Twelve Azalea. There never seemed to be any substantial reason for them to trust each other; the "truth pact" mechanic was cheap, and no one fought it. Martine further opts to have Mahit tell us those two are friends, rather than letting the characters breathe on the page. And, despite having misgivings about Three Seagrass's allegiances, Mahit never once pursues them. All that feeds back into my mistrust of Mahit... and on and on, in a vicious cycle.
Ring composition, indeed. I wish I could have given this more stars, but three is the best I can do.
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Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction by Sunyoung Park (Editor) and Sang Joon Park (Editor) (Kaya Press, 2018)
★★☆☆☆
Despite how excited I was to be gifted this anthology, getting through it was a slog. I can't tell if I should blame poor writing, poor translation, or my own lack of experience reading science fiction, Korean stories, and anthologies.
I enjoyed a couple stories significantly more than others. "Cosmic Go" by Jeong Soyeon is about the difficult and tragic turns in a young woman's life that later align to make her an astronaut. "Roadkill" by Pak Min-gyu reveals the lives of a dispossessed family trying to cross the border into utopian, megacorporate Asia at the same time as a border cleaning robot struggles to honor their devastated bodies. Other stories (some of which are excerpts from longer works) contained neat ideas, interesting scientific foundations, or astute sociopolitical commentary, but failed to develop those nuggets into compelling plot, characters, or dialogue.
Incidentally, the cover is one of the most gorgeous I've recently beheld on a book, and the inside is beautifully typeset, but the editors made the irksome choice to hanging-indent all the stories. Just why?
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The Edge Chronicles: Beyond the Deepwoods by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell (David Fickling Books, 1998)
★★★☆☆
One of my mentees claimed this series is woefully underknown, so I gave it a try. Beyond the Deepwoods, the first entry, is about Twig, a boy who was abandoned at birth in the Deepwoods, a dark, thick forest inhabited by fantastic, perilous creatures. Bullied all his life for not looking or acting like his fellow woodtrolls, Twig is eventually disowned by his mother (seemingly because she is coerced by, or to save him from, his contemptuous father). In the process, he accidentally commits the one woodtroll sin: he strays from the path. From there, he encounters everything the Deepwoods has in store: carnivorous flora, hidden societies, and motley enterprising individuals—most, if not all, inventively named and creatively illustrated.
Twig's run-ins rarely last longer than a chapter; like The Hobbit, this is a children's story, to be read an episode at a time. But its turns are dark, frantic, even gruesome—more reminiscent of Dahl than Tolkien. A surprising amount of thought is given to trade economics, predator-prey relationships, and even symbiotic agriculture (of a sort). Despite how weird everything is, the world feels internally consistent, if a little misogynistic—in one chapter, a young "termagant trog" keeps Twig as a pet until her coming-of-age, wherein she drinks blood and becomes a fearsome hellbent destroyer. 🤔
In the end, the message is about learning to embrace one's individuality. The Gloamglozer, as the antithesis of this, makes a fearsome antagonist even for an adult. I liked the way that conflict was threaded throughout and resolved, happily as one might expect, but not too cleanly.