Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki

Light from Uncommon Stars (2021) was recommended to me by one of you, Lou or Melanie probably – sorry I don’t remember – I bought it on Audible, listened, liked it and promptly forgot it (and forgot to list it in ‘Recent Audiobooks’). So this last trip I listened to it again and loved it.

The author, Ryka Aoki, is Japanese American, a trans woman, an author, a composer, a poet and a lecturer in English and Gender Studies. She appears to use the pronouns she/her – and her trans protagonist definitely does. This is her second novel. She has also published two ‘collections’.

The novel begins with Katrina Nguyen, a young trans woman and potential violin prodigy catching a bus out of town to get away from an abusive father and unsupportive mother. She’s making for Los Angeles where there’s a gay guy she thinks is supportive of her being trans, and who might give her a room.

He gives her a couch and he and his friends steal from her while she makes a little money from prostitution. Eventually he pawns her violin and she has no option but to leave. In the meantime she has met, on a park bench, and played for, Shizuka Satomi, an old woman and fabled (former) violin teacher.

Shizuka decides she wants Katrina to be her final pupil, waiting daily on the park bench until Katrina reappears. They recover Katrina’s violin; give it to Lucy Matía, the last in a family of male-only luthiers, to be restored; and Shizuka takes Katrina to her semi-rural home in the San Gabriel Valley, where she will be cared for by Shizuka’s housekeeper and friend (unnamed in any review or summary. I skip listen. Astrid).

This is a novel of strong women, set if not entirely in the Asian-American community, then still well to one side of mainstream America. Shizuka meets Lan Tran, a refugee woman running a donut shop, Starrgate Donuts, with her children, Shirley, Markus and the twins. Shizuka and Lan are attracted, but take a very long time to do anything about it. Shirley and Katrina, who are similarly aged, become friends, go shopping together as Katrina begins to accept she is secure, not outcast, not hunted.

Shizuka struggles with teaching Katrina, who till now, has been largely self taught and has developed a presence on the internet with videos of her playing the themes from games, rather than any of the classical repertoire. And so the story develops through to the inevitable climax where Katrina performs on stage to tumultuous acclaim.

Aoki’s rendering of Katrina’s story as a trans woman; of Shizuka’s as an ageing teacher with one last student; of Lucy’s, overcoming generations of opposition to her doing men’s work; of daily life in the Asian-American community are all brilliantly done. But wait, there’s more.

This is a Fantasy novel and a Science Fiction novel. Ursula Le Guin wrote, in her criticism of Margaret Atwood in 2009, that realistic fiction has complex characters and genre fiction has ‘types’. Le Guin’s own SF writing gives the lie to that, and in fact, I think it is a feature of women’s SF that by and large the characters are complex rather than types. Certainly, that is true here. The great bulk of this novel is ‘realistic’, yet the underlying themes are fantasy – Shizuka has sold her soul to the Devil; and SF – the Starrgate Donut shop is a buried spaceship; ‘Captain’ Lan Tran and her family are refugees from a distant, failing galactic civilization; and Shirley, her daughter and deputy, is a computer simulation and hologram projection.

Shizuka is known within the violin community as the Queen of Hell. For complicated reasons she has agreed with the Devil’s representative, Tremon, that she will deliver up to him the souls of seven superlative violinists. She has delivered six, and decides that she can train Katrina up to be the seventh. Katrina however, doesn’t have that fierce ambition that would lead her to give up her soul for worldly success, but when she becomes aware of the pact, she determines that she will accept Tremon’s offer anyway and save Shizuka.

Meanwhile, Lan Tran has a problem with Markus, her older son, and decides to return him to his father, one of the commanders in the war which is dooming her former home. She needs a pilot for the shuttle and orders Shirley to duplicate herself and to install a self-destruct routine. Shirley has grown from the brain of Lan Tran’s first child who died in infancy, but when push comes to shove Lan Tran treats her as a machine. She runs away from home and hides in the hologram projector at Katrina’s.

There’s a lot to resolve and Aoki does it very, very well.

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Ryka Aoki, Light from Uncommon Stars, Tor Books, New York, 2021. Audible edition read by Cindy Kay. 13 hours

SF of some use after all

Journal: 111

AI-generated ‘Many Armadillos’

I have no idea of this picture’s relevance but it was attached to the latest issue (24 Nov., 2023) of ScienceWriteNow which includes a link to an article I’d like to discuss (and commend).

ScienceWriteNow is a free online magazine edited by our friend Jess White with Amanda Niehaus and Taylor Mitchell (Who we are). The article, “Science Fiction for Hire? Notes towards an emerging practice of creative futurism” by Helen Marshall, Kathleen Jennings, Joanne Anderton of UQ asks, What does science fiction have to offer the world, besides spaceships?

The authors define ‘creative futurism’ as “work which is futures oriented, uses elements of the traditional creative writing skillset, but is constrained by an additional set of parameters”. Basically, creative writers are finding outlets for their talents (and hopefully, income!), generating SF stories around a set of parameters selected by their clients.

One example is Peter Singer and August Cole’s Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War (2015) which has all its major extrapolations documented in footnotes citing existing research. For this the authors coined the term FICINT/fictional intelligence – fiction which allows readers to “experience” the results of actual on-going research. The Australian War College (there’s a terrifying concept) has apparently taken up this idea, with students now encouraged to write speculative fiction.

Much of this (without the clients) is work Science Fiction already does. Alvin Toffler calls SF “a sociology of the future”; other theorists frame SF as a “tool to explore and challenge, rather than to predict.”

While some forms of science fiction are explicitly interested in the future of humanity, most are concerned with using visions of alternative worlds to understand, interrogate and reflect contemporary society.

p 5/26

When the authors say ‘traditional creative writing skillset’ they are talking of setting, characterisation, plot etc, intended to produce ‘commercial’ science fiction. But the intention – to highlight a particular scientific development, say – detracts from the ‘passion’ of fiction produced for its own sake.

For writers, the upside of ‘creative futurism’ is guaranteed income. The downside of course is that employers will almost certainly demand some control over the finished product. In this context the paper discuss ‘military futurology’, though I’m not sure how this might be distinguished from existing wargaming, unless the finished work is published without its origins, and the motivations of its paymasters, being disclosed.

From this overview, the authors diverge to each offer their own experience and views.

Anderton offers as a case study her work with ‘a Defence cooperative research centre with a focus on robotic and autonomous technology’, where she was asked to write three 2,000 word narratives for an audience of Defence and Defence Industry personnel, testing the ethical risks in using AI in military contexts.

I think she may have found it more difficult than she expected to be creative under such tight constraints. In the end she devised a template
One or two main characters
Their mission
Setting (had to be generalised, not identifiable)
Technology
Ethical issues to be explored
The set-up
The inciting incident
The Turn (reaction to the ‘incident’)
Resolution
which she was able to use to generate her three narratives.

One problem she found was that by breathing life into her narratives, making them ‘stories’, her consumers would discuss the characters, their reactions, instead of focussing on the technology.

Jennings analyzes some creative futurism published as short stories. She finds that they all exhibit a creative tension between the author’s attempts to imbue them with life and their overt ‘realist-rationalist’ tone. She finds it is difficult to become immersed in a story when the technology is constantly being brought to the fore.

The authors conclude “the constraints of creative futurism appear to resist too strong a play of imagination and personal style, an intriguing consideration, when authors are presumably recruited because of that imagination and style, or at least for the credibility it has earned them.”

From the ‘References’ here is one story that may be read online (it’s funny and not military, which is a bonus)
https://translunartravelerslounge.com/2022/02/15/oil-bugs-by-gwen-c-katz/

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Helen Marshall, Kathleen Jennings, Joanne Anderton, “Science Fiction for Hire? Notes towards an emerging practice of creative futurism”, ScienceWriteNow, 24 Nov 2023 (here)

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If today is Weds (29/11) then this must be Marble Bar (Australia’s hottest town and one of its most remote). Yesterday I was due to deliver some conveyor belts to Jimblebar, an iron ore mine near Newman, and today I should really be through Port Hedland and on my way out to Telfer, a major gold mine in the Great Sandy Desert, to pick up a couple of machines to take home. Hopefully, I will have listened to all of Catch 22 by now – at least my third rereading – and be full bottle for a writing up in the very near future.

Recent audiobooks 

Joseph Heller (M, USA), Catch 22 (1961)
Sarah Winman (F, Eng), When God was a Rabbit (2011)
Stephany Tromby (F, USA), Trouble is a Friend of Mine (2015) YA
Anne Tyler (F, USA), French Braid (2022)

Currently Reading 

Yevgeny Zamyatin (M, USSR), We (1924) SF
Margaret Atwood (F, Can), The Edible Woman (1969)
Olive Schreiner (F, S.Af), Story of an African Farm (1883)
Olive Schreiner (F, S.Af), Woman and Labour (1911)

AWWC Nov 2023

Date	Contributor	Title
Wed 1	Elizabeth Lhuede	Jessie Urquhart, the jail governor’s daughter
Fri 3	Stories FTA	Jessie Urquhart, Hodden Grey (short story)
Wed 8	Meg Brayshaw	‘Countless Flaming Eyes’: The Genius of Christina Stead
Fri 10	Stories FTA
Wed 15	Debbie Robson	Jean Curlewis
Fri 17	Stories FTA	Jean Curlewis, The lonely lady (short story)
Wed 22	Bill Holloway	Christina Stead, A Writer’s Friends
Fri 24	Stories FTA
Wed 29	Whispering Gums	Annie and Ida Rentoul, the early years

We, Yevgeny Zamyatin

MARM 2023

Although an anarchist, I am by and large, a fan of Communism and of Revolutions, though it is a sad fact that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” almost always becomes just plain old “dictatorship” under the unrelenting pressure from oligarchs everywhere and the USA in particular who cannot afford to allow a Revolution to appear to succeed.

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a Russian naval engineer, a writer and a Bolshevik who participated in the abortive 1905 Revolution, after which he was imprisoned and exiled, and then the Russian Revolutions of 1917 which led first to parliamentary government and then to Communism.

The anarchists who had supported the Bolsheviks through 1905 and 1917 were soon disillusioned, and in 1921 Lenin and Trotsky were forced to put down serious anarchist rebellions demanding:

“reduction in Bolshevik power; newly elected soviets (councils) to include socialist and anarchist groups; economic freedom for peasants and workers; dissolution of the bureaucratic governmental organs created during the civil war; and the restoration of civil rights for the working class.” (wiki).

While I won’t claim Zamyatin as an anarchist it seems clear that he too was quickly disillusioned with Leninism. We, a satire on regimented society, was probably written in 1920-21. Wikipedia currently says that in 1921 it was “the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board” (here), though George Orwell, writing in 1946, says that “WE was written about 1923, and […] was refused publication on the ground that it was ideologically undesirable” before being smuggled out of the country.

A Czech translation was soon circulating in Soviet Russia, leading to Zamyatin coming under pressure from the authorities, including at one stage imprisonment. In 1930 Zamyatin resigned from the Union of Soviet Writers, and in 1931 he petitioned Stalin, who had replaced Lenin on the latter’s death in 1924, for permission to emigrate. He died in Paris in 1937.

Orwell’s review of We (Tribune, 4 January 1946) is best known for stating, “the fact – never pointed out, I believe-that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must be partly derived from it. Both books deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanised, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place about six hundred years hence”, going on, “Huxley’s book shows less political awareness and is more influenced by recent biological and psychological theories.” He admired We – for which at the time he could only find a French version, under the title Nous Autres – and it had some influence on 1984, which came out in 1949.

Marcie got me to read We for MARM because the latest translation has an Introduction by Margaret Atwwood which begins:

“I didn’t read Zamyatin’s remarkable novel, WE, until the 1990s, many years after I’d written The Handmaid’s Tale. How could I have missed one of the most important dystopias of the twentieth century, and one that was a direct influence on George Orwell’s 1984 – which was a direct influence on me?”

I must say I prefer Ursula K Le Guin’s description in ‘The Stalin in the Soul’, in the Supplementary Materials in the same edition: “a science fiction novel, a negative Utopia”. Her essay is mostly about censorship and puts Zamyatin in the company of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, writers promoted by the CIA for their anti-Soviet value.

Atwood, and apparently Le Guin, believe We is a satire on Stalinism, written some years before Stalin took power but foreshadowed by Lenin’s own authoritarianism. Orwell, is not so sure. Even given that pure revolutionists were soon disillusioned by the direction the Revolution was taking, 1921 or even 1923, is very early for such a mature satire. And he points back to Zamyatin’s experience of modern government on a working visit to Britain in 1916 (supervising the construction of icebreakers for the Russian Navy) which is interesting as much as for what it says about Orwell as it does about Zamyatin.

The basis of the story is that some centuries into the future, society, protected from the outside world by the Wall, has settled on a form of government in which all individuality is subsumed for the good of the state – the United State, ruled over by the Well-Doer. The most arresting image is of every citizen walking in lock step during exercise periods.

[the ancients] preferred to believe that they saw heaven, even though it was a toy made of clay, rather than confess to themselves that it was only a blue nothing. We on the other hand (Glory to the Well-Doer!), we are adults and we have no need of toys. Now if we put a drop of acid on the idea of “right”…. Even the ancients (the most mature of them) knew that the source of right was—might! Right is a function of might. Here we have our scale: on the one side an ounce, on the other a ton. On one side “I,” on the other “we,” the United State. Is it not clear? To assume that I may have any “right” as far as the State is concerned, is like assuming that an ounce may equilibrate a ton in a scale! Hence the natural distribution: tons—rights, grams—duties. And the natural road from nothingness to greatness, is to forget that one is a gram and to feel that one is one-millionth of a ton!

Record 20

The narrator, D-503 (everyone has numbers, not names) is the engineer in charge of building a giant spaceship to explore Mars. We is his journal, broken into 40 ‘records’. D503 has been assigned a lover, O-90. “Dear O—! She always seems to me to look like her name, O—. She is approximately ten centimeters shorter than the required Maternal Norm. Therefore she appears all round; the rose-colored O of her lips is open to meet every word of mine. She has a round soft dimple on her wrist. Children have such dimples.”

Slowly, D-503 becomes attracted to another woman, I-330, who meets him in strange places and encourages him to break rules and then not report himself to the Guardians. The reader becomes aware, more quickly than does D-503, that I-330 is a member of an underground movement and is more interested in the spaceship than its builder.

The regular vote for the Well-Doer comes around and not every citizen raises their hand. The next Revolution has begun.

Atwood writes: “Zamyatin holds out the possibility of escape: beyond the Wall is a natural world where there are free ‘barbarian’ human beings, covered with – could it be fur?”

She sees We being written at a time when the Russian Revolution’s promise of utopia was fading into dystopia, though in fact the years since October 1917 had been filled with civil war, which the Bolsheviks had only just won. Still, Zamyatin was alarmed enough by the authoritarianism inherent in Bolshevism, or perhaps just by the authoritarianism inherent in most systems of government, to write this protest, so perhaps the anarchists should claim him after all.

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Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, first pub. in English, EP Dutton, New York, 1924. Translated by Gregory Zilboorg. First pub. in the original Russian, 1952. Latest edition published by Ecco (Harper Collins), New York, 2021. Translated by Bela Shayevich. Introduction by Margaret Atwood, Essay (on censorship) by Ursula K Le Guin. 304pp

Note: Quotes are from the Zilborg translation available from Project Gutenberg

Le Guin Prize 2023 Winner

Following on from an earlier post which looked at the Ursula K Le Guin Prize 2023 shortlist, Marcie (BIP) and I read a few of those that looked most promising –
Rebecca Campbell, Arboreality
Zain Khalid, Brother Alive
Yuri Herrera (translated by Lisa Dillman), Ten Planets
Marcie read at least one other, Nicola Griffith’s, Spear, a feminist retelling of Arthurian legends, which didn’t appeal to me. Did she like it? You’ll have to ask her.

And the winner, announced yesterday, is … Arboreality.

The announcement, which I heartily endorse, is on Tor.com – a science fiction newsletter – but not on the UKLG Prize website. I suppose it will go up there sooner rather than later. In fact it went up as I was typing – here.

Tor reports that the judges said, “Arboreality is a eulogy for the world as we know it. Rebecca Campbell’s extraordinary, deeply felt book explores the difficulties of the long hard project of survival. There are no heroes or villains here—only people making brave, difficult choices, out of hope and love for their community, for art, knowledge, and beauty. Arboreality imagines things that we haven’t yet considered about what can and will go wrong with our gardens, libraries, and archives if we don’t act now (maybe even if we do). In her masterful and profoundly ethical stories, Campbell asks us what might be saved, what must be saved, and what it will take to do so.”

For those of you who don’t often read SF, Arboreality is a novel of linked short stories, set increasingly into the near future, which explores people’s reactions to the coming ecological disasters, there’s no futuristic science (or ‘science’). It is, in a word, Dystopian. I’m sure many of you would enjoy reading it, as you have recent Australian dystopian fiction since, say Charlotte Woods’ The Natural Way of Things.

The (inaugral) UKLG Prize 2022 winner, if you are interested in looking for it, was The House of Rust by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber. “In Bajaber’s debut novel, published by Graywolf Press, young Aisha sets out in the company of a talking cat and a boat made of bones to rescue her fisherman father.”

On a short, personal note, I’m home. The second load I was expecting, a bulldozer to Port Hedland, was cancelled, and so a third load following on from it, from Fitzroy Crossing back to Perth, had to be handed off to someone else. Naked Lunch may get written up after all.

Ten Planets, Yuri Herrera

Ten Planets (2023) by Mexican author Yuri Herrera (translated by Lisa Dillman) is my latest readalong-with-Marcie from the Ursula K Le Guin Prize shortlist. The collection is not so much of SF short stories, as of SF fragments. And despite Herrera writing in Spanish, the feel is entirely 1960s, 1970s US pulp SF. Think for example Philip K Dick, Solar Lottery, or Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. People, objects on this and other planets, behaving weirdly.

Did I enjoy reading Ten Planets? Definitely. Did I understand what Herrera was attempting? Not even a little bit. Once I realised the stories were nearly all only one or two pages, I would read one before starting on something else, or at the end, over the course of a couple of weeks. All the while writing backwards and forwards with Marcie as we attempted to understand both the form the collection was taking, and what bound the stories together. In those endeavours we made very little progress.

I was reading on my kindle, to which I am not used, having used it in the past only for old stories off Project Gutenberg, for the ease of carrying them with me. I missed the feel of a book in my hands, the knowledge of where I was up to, the ability to easily flick back to an earlier page. Since finishing, I have checked, the book is 120pp and there are 20 stories (according to the table of contents I must have skipped over at the beginning); there is a 21st, not story, but essay, by the translator, Lisa Dillman, who has translated all of Herrera’s work, and which discusses some of the choices she had to make when there was only an imperfect match between Spanish and English (also, her conversion to SF-dom).

Despite growing up a voracious reader I was never a sci-fi fan…. I had stereotyped science fiction as a genre for the Dungeons & Dragons crowd. Sadly, it had not dawned on me, ever the literalist, that positing alternate worlds […] was in itself a commentary on our world…

Lisa Dillman, Translator’s note

She goes on to discuss Herrera’s use of ápice which may variously be translated as shred, speck, ounce etc and also as tip or extremity, and why she chose to use throughout iota. It sometimes sounds odd, or unexpected but Herrera’s use of ápice was also, she said, idiosyncratic.

I have determined that the only way I can proceed from here is to start reading again at the beginning, taking notes this time, as I go.

The Science of Extinction: A man is losing names and concepts; recalling (for me) Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, about whole classes of things disappearing. Whole Entero: a bacterium comes into contact with LSD and achieves consciousness. “She, the vespertine coliform, was one light of awareness among billions, the vastest population on an earth she had never managed to conceive.” The Obituarist: A city where everyone was invisible, except just when they need to be seen. The obituarist writes up their lives from what the dead have left behind. But is this dead man dead?

The Cosmonaut: is the first story with some meat to it, more than a fragment then. Marcie, who was a little behind me, wrote when she got to it, “I was almost as puzzled by The Cosmonaut as the Obituarist. (Now I’m thinking, maybe we need a map, like noses. Maybe we aren’t meant to understand The Obituarist until we read the Cosmonaut, or maybe these two relate with other stories to reveal different understandings?)”. This idea that later stories reflected on earlier stories is one we came back to.

A man spends some pages establishing that he can read noses. “Each nose is the code to a secret … because with every inhalation, tiny particles of the landscape are introduced into the body.” One day two men come to his door, one in a blue suit, the other in a blue suit – an FBI reference? – and take him to where a cosmonaut (I would like to ask Dillman why ‘cosmonaut’ and not ‘astronaut’) is being held. He had been sent out to intercept a comet, had spacewalked, had opened his faceplate. He will not say what he learned. But his nose tells a story.

Of course, as with many short stories, the whole point is in the twist at the end, which even I will not discuss.

House Taken Over: is one of those stories with a 70s vibe of thinking about what is futurisitic. In this case a house that learns and begins to act autonomously. Consolidation of Spirits: and then immediately to a fanciful story/fragment of a bureaucrat dealing with the invasion of the world by spirits.

I’ve skipped a few and got to Obverse: explorers go to the ends of the world. And find it does indeed have ends –

They traversed iotas and iotas. deserts of iotas and dales of iotas and mountains of iotas. Millions of iotas. Until, finally, once again, they reached a place where there were no more iotas to traverse but another cliff, an earth cliff … Vast number of explorers were lost in a descent that took decades, which are vast accumulations of iotas of time: iotas and iotas of beats.

This idea of a flat earth with ends comes up a few times after this, and was one of the ideas which led us to look for a unifying theme. But really, I don’t think there is one. And no, I don’t believe we were taken over the twenty stories to ten different planets.

What we got, what I think we got, was a sometimes playful writer, developing SF themes for as long or as little as it took to tease them out. I know I get cranky about short stories. What I found worked with these, and yes, despite being quite often bemused, I did enjoy reading them, was to read them individually, with gaps in between. Though, as I was planning all along to write them up, I really should have taken notes.

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Yuri Herrera, Ten Planets, And Other Stories, Sheffield (UK), 2023. Translated by Lisa Dillman. 120pp

see also:
Ursula K Le Guin Prize 2023 shortlist (here)
Rebecca Campbell, Arboreality (review)
Zain Khalid, Brother Alive (review)
Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (Whispering Gums’ review)
Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (Reading Matters’ review)

Brother Alive, Zain Khalid

Brother Alive (2022) is the second book Marcie McCauley (Buried in Print) and I have read from the shortlist for the second annual Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

I could say we both struggled with it, which would be true, and that we both found it in the end to be worth reading, also true, maybe. It’s not that the writing is difficult, and it’s certainly not bad, but that it takes a long time to work out where the author is taking us.

Three brothers, Dayo, Iseul and Youssef live in the upper storey of a building used as a mosque, on Staten Island NY, with their Iman father. They live Muslim lives, as you would expect, and the language throughout presupposes a knowledge of Muslim practice and custom which challenges the usual Euro/Christian preconceptions of American literature.

During the course of the novel Iseul marries and has two children. The first and third parts of the novel are each a ‘letter’ from Youssef to Iseul’s daughter, Ruhi; and the middle part is a letter from the Iman, Salim, to his sons. To his foster sons, as it turns out, though, as they are of respectively Nigerian, Korean and Middle Eastern descent, that was always understood.

Ya Ruhi, I say to begin with any birth is maliciously unoriginal. I also say time will destroy all that we do, whatever it is. And so, once more for the gallery. Dayo, Iseul, and I were born in that order in 1990. That is true. What came next is not so much true as it is what we were told. Your grandfather knows memory is often a lie sealed with the hot wax of repitition. It helps that he wielded his lies with the aplomb of God’s own press secretary.

The first letter is largely a relatively ordinary coming of age story for three unusual boys in what seems to be a working class New York backwater. Iman Salim is remote, will not display affection, and seems to actively dislike Youssef.

Youssef, writing the account, seems to have an imaginary friend ‘Brother’, whom the others cannot see and whose sustenance is Youssef’s memories. Mostly Youssef memorizes passages from the Qur’an and passes those on, though sometimes Brother will take a memory Youssef is upset about losing.

Brother, it turns out, is not imaginary, and as the story progresses, takes on an increasingly important role. It is only on rereading that I understand the opening sentence of Chapter 1: “When you ask, what should I tell you? Should I tell you that you inherited your leech, your louse, your pest from your grandfather?” that he is referring to Ruhi’s ‘Brother’; and that the Science Fiction aspect of the novel is an explanation of how ‘Brothers’ came about.

Salim rarely sleeps, writes long letters to correspondents in the Middle East. Youssef in his teens follows Salim one night and observes him with a gay lover, which is important in the context of Youssef ‘coming of age’ but of little relevance to the main story. Dayo is academic. Iseul gets a wife and begins a career as a pro basketballer. All three boys move away. Youssef gets a job in advertising and loses it. Salim returns home to Saudi Arabia.

Part 2, Salim’s letter to the boys, sets us on a new path. It begins slowly, with an account of Salim’s own young manhood, but eventually gets to the boys’ parents; his awareness of a disastrous programme to induce belief through drugs; the boys’ births; the parents’ deaths.

The central character in Salim’s Saudia Arabia is Ibrahim, a member of the ruling class and apparently a ‘moderate’. My opinion is that he is standing in for Mohammed bin Salman, the murderous MBS, Crown Prince and dictator (and generous donor to Trump and the Kushners).

Part 3. The boys’ response to reading Salim’s letter is to immediately fly to Saudi Arabia, to seek out evidence of the parents they had not known they had. They find that they are employed by Ibrahim in a new megacity, probably referencing Neom, MBS’s proposed “two mirror-encased skyscrapers stretching more than 100 miles across a swathe of desert and mountain terrain” (Guardian, 28 July 2022).

Of course, I can’t say much more. The boys work out who are their friends and who are their enemies. There are adventures and gunfights, as in most straight SF.

Khalid’s website says nothing about his background – describes him simply as a New York writer – but, maybe his family are from there, or just because he thinks it is important, he wishes to say something about Saudi Arabia and its outward capitalist normalcy. This fable tells us that beneath the surface, religion is used to mask gross inequality and unrestrained violence. As it always has. Everywhere.

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Zain Khalid, Brother Alive, first pub. 2022. My version, ebook from Amazon/Kindle. 352pp.

New York Times review, Pete Tosiello, 12 July 2022 (here)

Secondhand Daylight, E Bacon & A Hook

When I was a student, a long time ago, there was a circuit of hotels around Melb Uni that featured WWII era UK singers and dancing on Saturday nights – the Astor, Clare Castle, Sarah Sands. Mostly, if I could get my friend Di to go with me, we’d go to the Astor, in Lygon St, have a few drinks and a few dances – I grew up in the country ok, I didn’t know any other way to dance.

A generation later my son and his friends lived/still live a bit further north, in Brunswick and Northcote, and the Sarah Sands has been through many iterations as a venue for drinking, dancing and eating (the poor old Astor devolved into a meeting place for Carlton Football Club in-groupers).

Which is by way of introducing you to two things in Secondhand Daylight: that the narrator, a young man, dances at a nightclub in the Sarah Sands on Thursday nights; and he listens to the Dead Kennedys, specifically California Uber Alles, which my son’s best friend introduced me to, along with Lard, when he used to make me mix tapes in the 1990s, the starting period for this book.

In passing, Secondhand Daylight is also the name of an albumn by “UK post-punk band Magazine”. I listened to it for a while, while I was looking up other stuff, but obviously, though having made it over the years from rock to punk, I’m not going to make it ‘post’.

Chapter 1

1990

I came to on the tarmac outside the Sarah Sands Hotel. I felt my feet, wriggled a toe inside my boot. I stood with caution, scratched my head.
The fog just happened?

X, I think he gets a name later, has just experienced his first time loss, while dancing with a girl not called Em he has just met.

He starts to lose time more frequently, minutes, hours, days, his one friend, his job, his mostly absent father (his mother long gone); before 6 months lost makes him realise he’s jumping forward in time. During one long absence Moonee Ponds City Council seizes his house; he banks the proceeds; as he skips forward increasingly longer periods, ageing only incrementally as he does, compound interest makes him rich.

In maybe the 2020s, getting a clothes fitting in Spring St, not Em passes the door, but by the time he’s outside she’s gone.

In the 2050s he discovers he owns a social media and research company, managed by himself cloned as an AI; that they have discovered a way to travel back in time; that an employee, a young woman, Zada, has gone back looking for him.

And then we have Zada’s story.

X’s story (I have his surname at least, Green) keeps aiming for a Grunge vibe and not always hitting. In an encounter with a briefly met 9 year old half brother, X tries for juvenile football slang, but then, no doubt for foreign readers, says ‘Melbourne Cricket Ground’ when there isn’t a person in Melbourne who says other than ‘MCG’, except, when talking to 9 year olds maybe, they might say ‘the G’

I’m pretty sure the Green guy’s story has been written by Hook, a Brit, and Zada’s by Bacon, who is African/Australian. They fit together, one after the other, ok, but they flow differently. Though they both have a good feel for Melbourne, and an innocent, early-SF vibe of over-eager talking about sex, Heinlen-ish, without the misogyny.

[I’m writing as I read, and Zada, written if I’m right by Melbourne resident Bacon, on meeting Green’s one (ex-)friend as she jumps backwards, does say ‘the G’. Which she then spoils with some unnecessary explaining about footy teams].

Zada jumps back and back, trying to match where she is to where he should be; never quite meeting up; gathering information from his friends, family; matching herself to each new/old version of Melbourne; till she’s at the Sarah Sands, at the bar of the nightclub, on a Thursday night, in 1990.

Zada looks around. This is it, that’s how it feels like. The last stop. She has no way back or forward in time. The Tesseract should close history here, in Green’s furthermost place, the beginning place where his time jumps began.

The ending isn’t predictable, it isn’t even an explanation. I’m still thinking about it.

It’s at least a year since I last let anyone send me a new release for review, and now I’ve had two in a week, both time travel – though otherwise completely different – and both fun reads.

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Eugen Bacon & Andrew Hook, Secondhand Daylight, Cosmic Egg Books, 2023

The Hermitage, Debbie Robson

Debbie Robson is an author, based in NSW, with a couple of novels to her name, plus this one just out. I think it would be fair to say she mostly sets her fiction in the period between the two World Wars. You may know her also as a regular contributor to the Australian Women Writers Challenge, most recently on Australian women doctors and nurses with Scottish Women’s Hospitals during WWI.

The Hermitage, a novella set in Sydney in 1937, has a twist which I really enjoyed. Sadly, it’s spelt out on the back cover, or the beginning of it anyway, so it doesn’t come as a complete surprise. And that is that the Hermitage and its grounds, on the north shore of Sydney Harbour (map) is a closed system, accessible, by the Taronga Zoo ferry, from other times.

A woman, Vere, and two men, Roger and John, board the ferry at the Zoo. They are the only passengers and the captain remains invisible, shouting at them to disembark when the ferry arrives at the Hermitage. All three have very little idea of how they came to be there, except some memory of being invited to stay with Celeste and Dereck Williams, whom none of them know.

Celeste proves to be a young woman, thirtyish, with or caring for a baby, Blythe. There is no Dereck, but an older man, Bernard, and a cook, Mrs Jenkins. I’m not sure Vere and Roger are given ages, but let’s say late thirties. John is younger, early twenties, and dressed in an old fashioned suit.

The three are met by Bernard and when Celeste subsequently appears Vere can see that her dress is not quite right, too modern. It is Vere who catches on the quickest, and when she subsequently goes through Celeste’s things she finds she is reading The Pursuit of Love, which we know from my last post was published in 1945.

It is soon apparent, to Vere and to the reader, that Celeste and Bernard are from some years ahead and John is from 1917 or 18. I won’t say more than that about the time travel aspect, except that Robson deals with it quite nicely, and the explanation, when it comes, works beautifully.

Vere coaxes John into being her lover, while Roger, who is meant to be in the middle of an important business deal, rants and storms about the place, going off on long walks which invariable return him to his starting point. The Hermitage is not a place guests can leave without an escort.

The author implies, or perhaps Vere just wrongly believes, they are in a “locked room” mystery. Which is to say someone dies and there is no way in or out. But no one dies, well not here anyway, and they all eventually satisfy the conditions for leaving.

What struck me was the writing. Consistently throughout it’s like reading a play script. Each chapter begins with the scene being set and then proceeds mostly by dialogue. Not that I minded, it works quite well.

Pre-Dinner Drinks

The grandfather clock in the hall strikes the hour of six as Bernard and Roger sit drinking whiskies in the sitting room. Daphne [the dog] is asleep at Bernard’s feet.

“Where are the girls?” Roger asks.

“Unfortunately, Celeste is not feeling well, so she won’t be coming in to dinner. I’m not sure where Vere is. Sketching I think.” Bernard takes a puff of his cigar. “I saw her walk off into the bush below the tennis court with her sketch pad a couple of hours ago.”

I enjoyed the story, read it straight through in one sitting. It is far gentler than most SF – and yes it is SF. I wonder if Debbie enjoyed herself genre-hopping from Hist.Fic. romance like this. I imagine she did. She handles very well the progress each of the characters makes with understanding their situation, and also their interactions. In just 138 (double spaced) pages we get to know all the characters, and to like them, Vere and Celeste in particular.

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Book Launch: Tuesday 19th September, Hippy Java Cafe, Lake Macquarie NSW

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Debbie Robson, The Hermitage, Alien Buddha Press, 2023. 138pp [available from Amazon Aust or US]

Arboreality, Rebecca Campbell

Arboreality (2022) is a Science Fiction novella set on Canada’s Vancouver Island, opening with the early years of climate apocalypse when a great deal of Canada is burning – as indeed it is today; rising sea levels are rendering the coastal cities uninhabitable; and initially at least, people remember the old days and half expect them to return.

The novel consists of linked short stories, set increasingly into the future over the space of about 100 years. You might remember I came to Arboreality when it was shortlisted for this year’s Ursula K Le Guin Award, whose goal is to encourage “realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.”

Rebecca Campbell’s first novel was The Paradise Engine (2013). Arboreality appears to be her third or fourth. It has been published by small independent press, Stelliform, which publishes stories addressing “climate change, ecological destruction, and the effect of these issues on how we relate to each other.” Where the press has its offices it doesn’t say [Hamilton, Can.].

One of the strengths of Campbell’s writing is that she tells you almost nothing directly, background info just comes out as we go along. So, the location for example, Campbell doesn’t say ‘here we are on Vancouver Island’; but as someone crosses the Salish Sea to Vancouver, or comes back from a trip to Seattle; as the stories centre on the Cowichan Valley, with the lake of that name – First Nations name Kaatza – at its heart; then we are there, as a local would be, referring unselfconsciously to local place names.

Before I go on, let me share some of my Vancouver Island research. It was “discovered” by Capt Cook in March 1778. It is about a third the area of Tasmania, with one and a half times the population (880,000). The highest peak is just 30m lower than Mt Kosciuszko. The Indigenous inhabitants are the Kwakwakaʼwakw to the north, the Nuu-chah-nulth on the west (Pacific Ocean) coast, and the Coast Salish in the south.

I was surprised that as society collapses and then slowly recovers, First Nations people play no part, even in the background. I discussed this of course with Marcie (I forgot to say, but Canadian writer Marcie McCauley and I are making our way through the UKLG shortlist together – we may get to 3 books by October) and apparently this is reflective of the much stronger approach Canadian writers take to not telling First Nations’ stories.

Special Collections, the first story, is set in the early days of the apocalypse. Universities have been teaching remotely for some time. Sea levels are rising and university buildings are collapsing from storm damage. Jude is rescuing and rehousing as many books as he can

we should think farther ahead than next semester, or next year. Even if the satellites work, connectivity will only get spottier – think about what happened after the last landslide in the interior. We’re going to need books again, for a while at least. Maybe forever.

Each story is told in sections, not always continuous, and sometimes off at a tangent. As the temp rises daily through the forties and into the fifties (C) “In Victoria, a poor girl renting a crooked room dreams of rain. The grid flickers and fails.” Elsewhere, people are moving east or north to the huge mining towns, where they “could gather at cafes in the blackfly summers and watch the smoke rise above the wildfires.”

Attempting to deliver maps to the home of his old geography teacher Jude sees for the first time a hybrid, golden, arbutus, and it is these trees, rather than people, which prove to be the heart of the novel (see Art by Di, which might have been made for Arboreality).

Controlled Burn. Some years later, Bernard, his wife dead, his daughter moved away, slowly re-wilds first his own block, then as they move away, his neighbours’.

He walks into town, finds the library now relocated to a bank building, an old man the custodian, having hand-written the indexes; finds a book saved from the old university library, on living architecture, structures grown from trees.

At the top of his former suburban cul-de-sac there’s a young golden arbutus. He begins the long job of training it into a park bench.

An Important Failure will make you cry, it made me cry. Mason, who lives with market gardeners Jacob and Sophie, finds his path apprenticing himself to, working for a maker of, repairer of violins. His special project, which will take him a lifetime of accumulating and ageing the right woods, making a violin for a child prodigy, Masami Lucretia Delgado, who, as the possibility of world travel disappears, becomes a teacher of music therapy for children, a mother, the wife of a miner. So that when Mason finally presents her with the instrument all she can do is play it for herself, as it ages and develops its tone.

But what will really make you cry is the crimes, the last ebony purchased on the black market, the 500 year old spruce felled for just a handfull of wood.

Scions and Root Stocks. Benno “grew up reading everything that had the UVic stamp in the flyleaf .. at 17 he’d crossed the Salish .. to Seattle to see what they’d done with the old tech headquarters, abandoned when the big corporations relocated to Cincinnati and Detroit.” He’s in charge of salvage. Kit and Trish, in Benno’s crew, in what had been “a rich white dude’s neighborhood”, at the end of a cul de sac find not scrub and the remains of houses, but 50 years of forest regrowth and a golden arbutus, no not one, six, grown together, “a bench. Someone grew a bench.”

Pub Food. All along you get the feeling that while the island has become a backwater, mostly growing its own food and drugs, losing regular contact with ‘civilization’, there’s still ‘Canada’ and the US out there somewhere, well inland of the flooded coasts; mining, farming on the melting permafrost. Sophie and Jacob are old now, but Sophie continues into the last story …

The Cathedral Arboreal. ‘Canada’ has sent a ship (I want to know if came by the North West Passage Cook was searching for all those years ago). Sophie is the aged matriarch, Kit born in 2055, is the father of a teenager. Campbell doesn’t carry off this last ‘story’ so well, so brilliantly, as she has the earlier ones, there is too much telling, too much concentration on people, but the idea of the cathedral arboreal is stunning.

Each of these is a proper story, interesting in itself. I see I have done not much more than pick out the linking elements, which does the novel as a whole a disservice. If you have enjoyed the current generation of writers’ dystopian fiction then this is for you. Cambell is a genuine successor to Le Guin and Arboreality to The Word for World is Forest.

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Rebecca Campbell, Arboreality, Stelliform, 2022. 117pp (read on Kindle)

Next from the UKLG Prize shortlist: Zain Khalid, Brother Alive

The Salt Roads, Nalo Hopkinson

I was introduced to Nalo Hopkinson, a Canadian-Jamaican writer of Science Fiction Fantasy, during my North America Project last year, when I read, and loved, her second novel, Midnight Robber (2001). Hopkinson is notable for using African-Jamaican culture in SF and post-apocalyptic settings, though this time, The Salt Roads (2003), which is more Fantasy than SF and more MR than Fantasy, has historical settings.

I am not sure what to do about MR and non-European writing. In most things we are happy to let the original owners tell us what the names should be, but there doesn’t yet appear to be a consensus on how to talk about/what name to give to the widespread use of spirit figures in contemporary fiction. In white fiction it’s easier. It’s Fantasy, made up, and only very loosely derived from old legends.

We have been using the name Magic Realism, since at least Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but African and Indigenous writers say they resent their representations of the spirit world being called ‘magic’. I have no time for Roman Catholicism (and I actively despise its male hierarchy), nor for Pentecostals, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists and Scientologists, but I think that we should give similar weight to African and Indigenous depictions of another world as we do to them – saints and stone gods and intercessory spirits and all that stuff.

And, in fact in The Salt Roads, the two become mixed.

Let’s just say that confirmed sceptic as I am, I am happy for these insights into another worldview. And, as it happens, for the comparison with Alexis Wright, as I make my way through Praiseworthy, which seems, interestingly, less ‘spirity’ than Carpentaria or The Swan Book.

The novel begins with a young slave woman, Georgine – who has been sold to be the ‘wife’ of a poor white man – giving birth in a hut on a plantation in Saint Domingue, in the years immediately before slavery ended and the island became independent, as Haiti, in 1804. Georgine’s midwife is the slave Mer, the narrator (at this point) assisted by her friend and lover Tipingee. The baby is stillborn, but on being buried by the river, it is reborn as the water goddess, or maybe as one iteration of the water goddess, Lasirén, who roams across space and time.

The other main characters of this aspect of the novel are Makandai, a man, a shape shifter, who has had one arm chopped off, who flits in and out of the people, the Ginen, preaching revolution against the “backra” (white slave owners); and Tipingee’s husband, Patrice, who returns from living with rebels in the bush, to accept his punishment and to be available to assist Makandai.

Lasirén charges Mer with clearing “the salt roads”, the paths between the Ginen and their ancient gods.

The second aspect of the novel is Paris, half a century later, where the Haitian dancer Jeanne (Jeanne Duval) becomes the mistress of Charles Baudelaire. Lasirén, who when she is present is the narrator, is variously frustrated to find herself shut in the head of Jeanne, and shut out.

And the third aspect begins in Egypt in maybe the third century AD, where a young Nubian slave girl, Mary or Meritet, kept as a prostitute in Alexandria, is told by one of her favourite clients of the new temple in Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem) and as an escapade rather than a serious attempt at escape, hitches a lift by sea to Jaffa, with a young male fellow prostitute, paying their way in the usual manner, and thence by land, the 70 odd km to the temple, where she is ill and then miscarries. And so the legend of St Mary the Black Egyptian saint is born.

Each of the three stories is well told, and the surroundings well-described, in not particularly heavy Jamaican dialect, and we become invested in the protagonists, and in the lesser characters, as they live out these parts of their lives, with Lasirén weaving in and out of the stories as she attempts to stay in contact with her people.

Hopkinson shows us African women, in three different contexts, living their lives and striving for independence. They live interesting lives, each of which we follow for quite some time. We argue here – well, I argue with you – about Historical Fiction, but the reason I appear inconsistent is because I believe white writers should stop mining history for stories, stop filling Settler Colonization and World War I and World War II with twenty first century characters and ideas; while at the same time believing that people whose histories we have been telling should have the opportunity to tell them for themselves. And if that involves spirits and magic, maybe as metaphor, maybe not, well it’s not my place to say otherwise.

Did I make myself clear. Nalo Hopkinson is a very fine writer, and I think she had a lot of fun keeping all these stories in the air at once. Yes it was hard to keep track of them, as we switched back and forth, especially with an audiobook and not being readily able to backtrack; but still, I enjoyed The Salt Roads nearly as much as I did Midnight Robber, which is saying something.

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Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads, first pub. 2003. Tantor Audio, 2018, read by Bahni Turpin. 13 hours