I’ve been a fan of Alexander Wales for ages since his fanfiction days. He dropped off my radar for a bit but since I finished the grimdark epic Worth the Candle I’ve been catching up on his other works. From what I understand he set out to write this less serious piece to decompress. There are adventurers and dungeon delving in it but as he puts it, this is mostly meant to be slice-of-life. It’s set in a pleasant, near utopia of a world and one of the main themes is that some characters feel that their world is so safe and so well understood that there are no mysteries and places to discover left. Anyway, Wales delivers exactly what he promised here. It’s not really about the worldbuilding or grand plots but about getting to know and fall in love with the cast of characters. It’s great comfort food and I really enjoyed it.
Continuing on my tour of the greatest science-fiction novels ever written, here is Norstrilia, the only novel published by Cordwainer Smith. Smith is genuinely one of the greats of science-fiction and is mainly known for his short stories. His real life is arguably as fascinating as his fiction, being an East Asian scholar who called Sun Yat-Sen his godfather and an expert in psychological warfare who worked for the CIA. I found this book to be an impressive example of building a complete fictional future history setting and a incisive dissection of what it means to be human. Due to its characters and moral sensibility, I can’t say that I enjoyed it very much. It’s yet another book that really is a product of its time.
As I’ve always said, short stories are where the newest science-fiction ideas first appear and it’s been too long since I last read a decent collection of them. qntm is the pen name of Sam Hughes who seems to be a self-published author and makes many of his stories free to read on his personal website. I haven’t read those stories before but I do know that he is a contributor to the SCP Foundation website and I have read many of the stories there. This is a very short book and the individual stories are not so much stories as scenarios. That’s fine by me as I’m here for the ideas, not the dramatic arcs.
Unsongis a web novel by Scott Alexander who is best known for the popular Slate Star Codex blog. I’m not really a regular reader but I do pay attention to it. The saga of the blog and the person behind it makes for a fascinating story in its own right but I won’t go into that here. This novel is set in an alternative history in which the Apollo 8 mission breaks the firmament around Earth as described in Biblical scripture and causes disruptions in the nature of reality. It turns out that everything described in the Talmud is literally true. Angels exist, the laws of physics are broken and the United States is broken up into fiefs led by local powers. People who learn to speak the Names of God can invoke magical effects and a worldwide organization called Unsong is formed to regulate their use.
Greg Egan is still my favorite science-fiction writer and I’m glad to see that he is still producing work. Even so his more recent work has been disappointing and this one with a length somewhere between a novella and a novel, is so underwhelming that I find it impossible to recommend to anyone. It’s still a quintessentially Egan story in that longtime fans will immediately recognize what it is in here that interests him but it’s such a narrow conceit that it’s hard to imagine many people would be similarly enthusiastic and Egan fails to develop an interesting story around it.
Finally, I’m back to working through the list of the great science-fiction novels of all time and this must be one of the weirdest entries on the list. It was originally published in 1956 under the title of Tiger! Tiger!, named after William Blake’s poem. The newer title makes it feel more like science-fiction certainly but the original title really captures its spirit better: an unapologetic paean to the individual superman. As a tour de force of pure imagination the book is marvelous and no wonder it’s considered a classic of the genre. Still I must admit that the deliberately wild ride that is its plot and and the odiousness of its protagonist makes it a difficult novel for me to enjoy.
R.F. Kuang’s name has been making the rounds lately due to her new novel Babel which critics have been talking up. She’s a Chinese-American writer whose work is new to me and browsing through her published work I was more intrigued by her debut novel. It’s set in a fantasy version of China that is weakened by internal disunity and widespread addiction to opium. It follows the story of a female young orphan who enrolls into the country’s top military and in that sense feels similar to many of the webfiction series around today. Unfortunately while I liked the worldbuilding and the early parts of the novel, to me, it goes off the rails as the action picks up and turned me off completely. I will not be reading the sequels of this trilogy.
