Grabbed the second issue of Lightspeed Magazine last night. I’ve been reading Miéville’s Kraken but I’m finding it to be not something I’m enjoying. Surprising, in fact. So I figured some short fiction would be a good palate cleanser.

Overall I thought this issue was a little meatier than the first issue. I liked it, but the first issue definitely felt light, particularly with the non-fiction. This issue upgrades that portion. The non-fiction is still much less substantial than I’d like, but it’s an improvement.

All these items will be up at Lightspeed’s web site by the end of the month. I paid for my issue, so I get to read them a bit early.

No Time Like the Present by Carol Emshwiller

Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount is one of my favorite novels of all time. I’ve also seen her talk a few times at WisCon, and she impressed me every time. This is one of her more normal science fiction stories. It’s a time travel story told from a little bit of an unusual viewpoint; the people in the time being visited. Shows very much how odd people from the future would be.

Top Five Time Travel Nightmares by Carol Pinchefsky

A very unsatisfying review of five time travel issues that repeatedly come up. Stuff anyone who’s thought about time travel at all will have thought of.

Manumission by Tobias S. Buckell

Kind of an origin story for Pepper, a character who appeared in Buckell’s Xenowealth series (Crystal Rain, etc.). He’s a bionic man doing what bionic men do, fight for their masters. Here he has only one memory of himself, that of someone using racial epithets against him. The rest has been wiped by ShinnCo, which has booby-trapped Pepper’s equipment so that he’ll die if he doesn’t follow their orders. Can he win his freedom by killing for them? Nothing particularly deep here, but a well written plot and I don’t think I could ever get enough of Pepper. He’s super human but not so much that I thought he’d necessarily win.

You Are the Person You Are Now by The Evil Monkey (of Neurotopia

Non-fiction piece about what can be done with memory and what we know about it. I’d say about Wikipedia level of detail.

The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball by Genevieve Valentine

Kind of a nice take on zeppelins. Along with like a billion other things in steampunk, they’ve been somewhat fetishized. Here Valentine looks at the people who make them go. The conductors of the story work inside the helium balloons, which (like astronauts) makes them taller and weaker. As noted in the author profile that follows, a lot of the industrial age society that steampunk centers itself on was built on the backs of workers who didn’t get to see the benefits of its wonders.

A Very Brief History of Airships by Gregory K. H. Bryant

Another Wikipedia level overview of the history of dirigibles. Interesting, but only because I know very little about the machines.

…For a Single Yesterday by George R. R. Martin

A third story where memories play a part. Emshwiller’s story also uses memory, but in a more minor way. This is post-nuclear-war survivors making their way. Although this is not a David Brin Postman or Cormac McCarthy Road style man trying to hold onto humanity or civilization in the face of relentless barbarity. The conflict here is really about moving on when your life has been upended. One of the members of a small hippie like commune has lost the love of his life in the blast, and now he has to find a way to go on.

Music Is Science Fiction: An Interview With The Lisps by Desirina Boskovich

So the Lisps have made a steampunk musical or some such thing. I don’t know much about the musical and this didn’t really tell me. So it’s really really hard to get interested in the behind-the-music interview with the band that created it. But if you’ve seen one of the 5 showings (or maybe series of showings, I’m not sure), maybe this’ll be your thing. I wish the writer had established more of a baseline of this musical.

One minor improvement. This time around the cover art inside wasn’t fuzzy when displayed on my Nook. Maybe they have a better resolution for the cover, or maybe Nook improved image display with the 1.4 release. Either way, it was nice.

Title: Lightspeed Magazine
Issue: July 2010 (#2)
Editors: John Joseph Adams (fiction) / Andrea Kail (non-fiction)

Back in January, I wrote about my views on the graphic novel: a worthwhile art form, but not literature as I define it because the primary mode of storytelling in it is visual. I might occasionally put up a review of a graphic novel on this blog because the blog covers books in all their forms. Cookbooks and atlases are rarely literary, and yet I include them. I’m a pragmatist.

In contrast, I consider audiobooks to be literature. While the medium for storytelling is verbal, the transaction between the book and reader is conveyed by the words. The narrator’s skill can add or take away in presentation, but to me the words are equivalent to the written form. The words are what are important to me.

But I’ve never listened to an audiobook before. That’s partially because audiobooks are freakin’ expensive. But it’s also because I have a much harder time focusing on the story. Audiobooks are often played in the background while a busy person does something else. When I read, my full attention is on the pages in front of me. To listen to an audiobook that way, my tasks would need to be so mindless that I my full attention could be devoted to the book.

In listening to METAtropolis, I also determined that not being able to look back a few words, sentences, or paragraph’s detracted from my comprehension. On a page, if I don’t quite get something I could scan back briefly and get that understanding. And my comprehension looking at a word was much better in the first place. I seem to mis-hear things when spoken more frequently than I mis-read as well.

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. When my mom lost the use of her hands this summer, I signed her up for Audible.com so we could get some audiobooks for her to listen to. She could operate a laptop with her feet, so Audible was a much better choice than buying CDs. Cheaper too. She left a few unused credits when she died in October, so I selected a few books to use them up. Figured it was a good opportunity to try audiobooks.

First up is METAtropolis. Right now it’s only available through Audible, so this was a perfect opportunity. It’s a shared universe anthology. Two of the five authors (Schroeder and Buckell) are among my recent discoveries. The other three have been on my list to check out for a few months.

In the Forests of the Night by Jay Lake (read by Michael Hogan)

I didn’t really like Michael Hogan’s breathy reading. It seemed overly dramatic to me. Tyger is a mercenary newcomer to Cascadeopolis, an anarchist green commune in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade mountains. Capitalists have targeted the semi-secret community for their intellectual property, which they normally give away freely using open source licenses. Tyger and another operative are under contract to the capitalist, but Tyger has gone rogue. I did not understand the ending to this at all.

Stochasti-city by Tobias Buckell (read by Scott Brick)

In Detroit, a green movement needs help fighting against the Edgewater Company’s private security forces (the police are more or less non-existent) who are trying to prevent them from forcibly make Detroit car-free. Often jobs are done through turking which I believe is a take-off of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, though where they got it I do not know. In this method, anonymous employers split up jobs to anonymous employees who only get to see a little bit of the big picture. Think of hiring 50 movers each to carry one box for you. That sort of thing. The green movement hires Reginald, a former military colonel now working as a bouncer to do part of the work. BUt then he gets sucked in to the plot just a but more. Good story. The legal setup for parts is a bit unbelievable, but I do like the economic landscape described.

The Red in the Sky is Our Blood by Elizabeth Bear (read by Kandyse McClure)

Okay, now I see a formula behind this anthology. Third story in a row of a band of outsiders/reformers trying to live in the margins of a decaying or decayed United States. Outsiders are environmentally conscience kibbutzim type places. Not necessarily a bad premise, but all three stories seem to follow the same general lines. As in, introduce a non-member to the place and use that person as a foil to explain how the kibbutz works. Throw in the newcomer mistrust, and a little conflict where the newcomer can play a key role, and there you have your story. So far, I prefer the Buckell version of the formula.

Utere Nihil… by John Scalzi (read by Alessandro Juliani)

Slacker kid needs to take a placement exam to go out and get a job. Starts off with slacker kid Benji playing the friend role to a girl he really likes, and telling her that her current boyfriend doesn’t really respect her. Job he gets is dealing with pig shit, cause that’s about all there is for someone who screwed around as much as he did. In this story, the insular enclave is not the insurgent group, but instead established St. Louis. And the city is set upon by the have-nots outside the city boundaries. A little different from the other stories but still has a lot of the same feel as them, particularly with Jay Lake’s contribution.

To Hie from Far Cilenia by Karl Schroeder (read by Stefan Rudnicki)

Meh. Schroeder’s contribution is, surprise, a reworking of a lot of the ideas that appeared in Lady of Mazes. Virtual reality. The theme behind METAtropolis overall is that disparate locations, generally cities, are linked together in a much stronger bond than nation-states. Cascadia is a combination of Portland, Seattle, and Portland, across a still extant U.S. and Canada. Citizenship in St. Louis provides privileges to visit cities in Asia and Europe. Schroeder takes it one step further. Every place falls not only within several jurisdictions in real life but also within virtual worlds. Put on glasses and enter overlayed worlds of virtual reality, such as Oversatch. Frankly, there’s a lot of magic happens here to make it work. The basic story is that plutonium has been stolen in the real world by someone who lived in one of these virtual worlds. Gennady is an I.A.E.A. inspector who is hired to help find it, and he must travel through these virtual worlds. I thought the story was pretty underwhelming. Even more so than the other stories, I wasn’t fond of the immense amount of explanation the technology in the story required. It took away from the actual story.

I think the concept behind the anthology is strong, but in execution it lacks a lot. The stories feel very much alike, particularly the first three. All of them rely too much on explication rather than story. In other words, I want my stories to tell the concepts needed, rather than breaks in the story where the narrator steps in to explain the concepts.

In addition, I wasn’t too fond of the actors hired for narration. The hook was that three of them appear on the new Battlestar Galactica series. Way to hook in the geek crowd, but they aren’t great readers. Michael Hogan read extremely breathily, for instance. Stefan Rudnicki (not a B.S.G. actor) was quite excellent though.

Some other blogged reviews:

• Indentured Mind
• Dichroic
• AzureScape

Title: METAtropolis
Editor: John Scalzi
Imprint / publisher: Audible Frontiers
Format: Audiobook
Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
Publication date: 21 October 2008

The Benevolent Satrapy (for want of a better name) trilogy continues in this second installment, breaking out from a steampunk inspired war between humans on a lost colony into an all out interstellar conflagration. There’s a lot to keep track of in this book and things get complicated enough that I think I prefer Crystal Rain to Ragamuffin. But it’s a good book despite the flaws and I will pick up the final part, Sly Mongoose when it appears in mass market paperback format.

Spoilers for Crystal Rain ahead, so stop reading now if that sort of thing bothers you.

When we last left our characters, John deBrun and Pepper had helped Nanagada defeat an invasion from an Aztec inspired culture. In the process Pepper reveals that he and deBrun (who suffered amnesia) were augmented humans who helped settle the planet, and that his goal was to return to interstellar civilization after re-opening the wormhole or traveling for decades through interstellar space. But they don’t appear until halfway through Ragamuffin.

Instead the book starts with Nashara, a similarly augmented human from another proscribed world called Chimson. She’s escaping from a reservation for humans. Her mission is to rejoin the Ragamuffin who inhabit the space around the dead wormhole to New Anegada (a.k.a. Nanagada), where deBrun and Pepper are on the other side. The Ragamuffin are opposed to the alien Satrapy that rules, but they do little more than smuggle and harry.

That all sounds simple enough, but there are really about a gazillion factions. Let me make a list:

I might be missing a few more factions.

Essentially there are two stories here. Nashara escaping the reservation and fighting the Satraps, and deBrun and Pepper dealing with the return of the Teotl on Nanagada. These are fun adventures tinged with space opera. The characters are fun, though I wish Nashara and Pepper were a little less bad-ass. That’s mostly though that I think the super bad-ass archetype is overused generally. Buckell doesn’t do it badly, I’ve just read a lot of it.

Where things turned more sour for me was when the story lines started meeting up. If I could have focused on the action, it would have been like a movie with good explosions. But I had a hard time following the interplay between the factions. The chess moves confused me. A couple of factions turned, several times even. It felt very over-engineered, in the software development sense where over-engineering often results in complicated and fragile systems. What little I could figure out seemed to be built on a house of cards. It probably all fits together quite well. Buckell must have a huge diagram on his wall to keep track of it all when he was writing. I don’t have the diagram though.

In terms of adventure, characters, and universe building I enjoyed it. And I’ll note that it passes the Bechdel test.

Title: Ragamuffin
Author: Tobias S. Buckell
Cover creator: Todd Lockwood (artist)
Series: Benevolent Satrapy; 2
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Macmillan
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 325 p.
Publication date: June 2008
ISBN-10: 0-7653-5410-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-5410-5
Subject: Life on other planets — Fiction
Subject: Human-alien encounters — Fiction
LC classification: PS3602.U2635 R34 2007

At the start of Tobias Buckell’s Crystal Rain I wasn’t sure if I had picked up a science fiction novel or a fantasy novel. Azteca are coming over the mountains, invading Nanagada for fresh sacrifices for their gods, who have physical form. John deBrun lives in Brungstun, the first town from the mountains, where he gets separated from his wife and son. He must go on a quest for the mythical Ma Wi Jung, which will save Nanagada from the Azteca and their Teotl gods. Sounds very fantasy like. Slowly Buckell introduces more technology, steam age level stuff. Some dirigibles. Trains. Still could be fantasy, much like China Miéville has industrial revolution level technology in his books.

It is science fiction though. The Nanagada are a polyglot collection of colonists and refugees from Earth. Or rather, the descendants of those people. The largest group of people are Caribbean-descended, which gives this series it’s dominant speech patterns and culture. They vaguely remember they came from the stars, and groups of Preservationists spend a lot of time digging up old technology and looking to put it to use.

The gods are the Teotl and the Loa. All are forms of an alien species. Teotl have set themselves up as gods of the Azteca, and model the society on the bloodthirsty Aztecs. The Loa have priestesses, but aren’t worshiped in the same manner by the Nanagada. While not requiring sacrifices, they do try to prevent people from recovering more old-father technology, a policy that leaves Nanagada vulnerable to the Azteca.

While I don’t think this will be considered a classic S.F. novel along the lines of an Ender’s Game or Neuromancer, it’s a pretty damn good read. The pacing for action is pretty fast, but kept slow for characterization. I thought the slow reveal of John deBrun’s background along with the history of the world was fairly expertly accomplished. The world and it’s culture were really interesting. Too often I think when S.F. includes a different culture as a basis, it’s a very white-ified version. Nanagada’s people are black (mostly), they are intelligent, and they are mostly non-stereotypical. They don’t act like white people with bad accents. I liked the slow turn for Oaxyctl, the Aztec spy. He humanizes them, and I liked that he didn’t dehumanize his opponents. He’s pretty much the only insight into the bad guys in the novel. For the most part they remain a faceless overwhelming menace.

On the negative side, the transition from star-faring humanity to industrial level technology left some gaping holes that didn’t make logical sense to me. Perhaps Buckell answers some of these questions logically in book two, Ragamuffin, or on his blog. Why would one group of humans voluntarily (more or less) take up Aztec sacrificial ways? It’s sort of explained, but I don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense. How did the history of the downfall get lost when at least one group of people has lived for the entire four centuries since it happened? If the councilors didn’t lose all their memory, it would seem like far more of the history would be available (though not the technology).

I’m pretty happy with the book though. I’ll definitely be picking up the sequel (when it comes out in mass market form that is, I’m spending too much on my trade paperbacks and hardcovers).

Title: Crystal rain
Author: Tobias S. Buckell
Cover creators: Todd Lockwood (artist)
Series: Benevolent satrapy; 1
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Tom Doherty / Macmillan
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 358 p.
Publication date: June 2007 (originally February 2006)
ISBN-10: 0-7653-5090-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-5090-9
LC classification: PS3602.U2635 C79 2006