2019 Hugo possibilities

Hugo Nominee Review: “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington”, by P. Djèli Clark (Best Short Story)

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And with a title that striking, do you actually need a story?… Well, there is one, or at least there is a series of vignettes, following the origins of each of Washington’s dentures.  Moving, magical, and slightly spooky, it’s a powerful and all too necessary reminder that people all have lives and stories of their own to tell – no matter how marginalized someone is (and you can’t get much more marginalized than being reduced to a single tooth stuck into George Washington’s head), they’re still a person with hopes, dreams, stories and memories, and just a touch of magic attached.

I suppose it’s not a conventionally structured short story… I don’t see that matters very much, frankly.  Clark writes with eloquence and grace, and makes his point neatly and effectively – it packs a hefty punch in its small compass, like all the best short stories.  Well worth thinking about, both for a Hugo award and, y’know, just generally.

Nominations Go Live!

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Yes, folks, the 2019 Worldcon in Dublin has opened up nominations for the 2019 Hugo Awards and the 1944 Retro Hugos.

Much cogitation, and a fair amount of additional reading and rereading, will have to take place before I fill up the form… but a couple of things immediately leapt to mind, and I might as well say what they are.

For “Novel”, Sue Burke’s Semiosis and Yoon Ha Lee’s Revenant Gun are definitely worthy of your discerning consideration.  There are others, too, that I’m thinking about… mostly in the context of “Series”, since a series as a whole can be worth a nomination even if the qualifying bit for this year isn’t up to the peak of quality, if you see what I mean.  Which is why I’m not necessarily entering the qualifying volumes for Sylvain Neuvel’s “Themis Files” or Dave Hutchinson’s “Fractured Europe”.  (Not that I think either Only Human or Europe at Dawn is a bad book… I just want to save some space on my novels ballot for stand-alone works.)

Unusually, I had a space reserved in the “Novelette” category, for Brooke Bolander’s grim tale of luminous yellow radioactive elephants, “The Only Harmless Great Thing”.  Bolander has been one to watch for some time, now.  In “Novella”, Peter Watts’s “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” sprang to mind.

Nothing immediately floated to the scummy surface of my consciousness in the “Short Story” category, but of course I have read some short stories, mostly in the mags I get regularly, which are Interzone and Uncanny Magazine, so that’s a couple of slots filled in the “Semiprozine” area, at least.

Jonathan Strahan’s “Infinity” anthologies came to an end last year, and Strahan has been editing other anthologies and stuff too, so (believe it or not) I had one name ready for “Best Editor (Short Form)”.  And Minna Sundberg is continuing to write and draw Stand Still, Stay Silent, and it is continuing to be damn good stuff (and, in fact, last year saw the release of a second print volume of this ongoing webcomic), so onto the list she goes.

A slot got taken immediately, too, in “Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)”… no, not by a Doctor Who episode, though I will give Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor some thought, at least.  But the “Autofac” episode of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams struck me at the time as a perfectly judged adaptation – many of the stories in this anthology series were plagued by televisual padding (the slow and bloated feeling you get when a story you can read in fifteen minutes is stretched out into an hour-long timeslot), but “Autofac” resisted this; it was tense, stylish, and effective throughout, and I liked it a lot.  Enough to make a mental note, “Nomination worthy”, when I was watching it… and, around about a year later, I don’t see any reason to change that opinion.  So there.

So.  There is still a vast amount of blank space to fill… but, it turns out, I do have some opinions, and they’re enough to make a start.

Music of the Night

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Dreadful Company, by Vivian Shaw, is a sequel to Strange Practice, which I discussed here a while back, and is… well, pretty similar, in many respects.  Which you would sort of expect from a sequel, really.

Dr. Greta Helsing, professional physician to the supernatural and undead, is off in Paris presenting a paper on diseases of barrow-wights.  To liven things up – if that’s the right word – she’s in the company of her good friend Lord Ruthven, who (as we remember from the previous book) is that Lord Ruthven.  However, a trip to the opera with the handsome vampire causes problems for Greta – an old vampiric rival of Ruthven’s is out for revenge, and a first step in this is kidnapping Greta and holding her hostage.  And the evil vampire’s hangers-on include a would-be sorceress whose hobby of summoning creatures out of M.R. James is distorting the local magical landscape, to the point where the whole world could go drastically out of order….

Well.  It’s an agreeable piece of urban-fantasy fluff; Greta Helsing continues to be a normal person in a world of monsters, armed with nothing except a conscience and an urge to do good – she’s an appealing and a sympathetic character, and Shaw tells her stories very well.  It’s not great literature by any means, but it is fun and exciting and generally a pleasure to read.

Apart, that is, from my basic problem with the whole thing, which is that I am a horror fan, and this is urban fantasy, and light-touch urban fantasy at that, so Shaw seems absolutely determined to draw every last drop of terror and threat and mystery out of the supernatural and make everything sunny and cuddly.  Ruthven and Varney the Vampire are well-meaning toffs, the head werewolf in Paris is writing a guide book, the Descending Hierarchy of Hell itself is a sort of bungling civil service, and in the course of the book Greta adopts no fewer than three different M.R. James creatures, turning them from lurking terrors at the fringes of our perception into adorable cuddly little snugglebunnykins.  Hmph, say I, hmph.  The thing in the well in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” should not be adorable.  So says the die-hard horror fan, confronted with the quite different world of urban fantasy.  Shaw is taking all the fun out of being too scared to go to sleep even with the light on, damn her.

And, of course, it’s continuing to re-use and recycle previous creatures and characters – the vampires, the James monsters, the werewolf, even the Phantom of the Opera gets a name-check in this one.  Which is fine, of course; if Vivian Shaw wants to write this sort of mash-up, nobody’s stopping her… but it makes me a little restive, because it is quite clear that Shaw has the chops to come up with something stronger and more original if she cared to do it.  More originality, I urge it.  (Also, more sunlight.  Greta Helsing spent half the first novel crawling through the London Underground, she spends most of this one in tunnels, cells and catacombs under Paris – never mind the vampires, her biggest enemy at this rate is going to be vitamin D deficiency.)

But anyway.  Dreadful Company is a fun book; if you are a fan of urban fantasy and don’t share my peculiar prejudices, you might like it a lot.  Heck, I do have my peculiar prejudices (obviously) and I still liked it.  Vivian Shaw is a good writer, and Greta Helsing – compassionate, moral, kind and determined – is the sort of protagonist we could do with seeing more of, these days.

O’er Land that is Lost Now

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“The Flowers of Vashnoi”, by Lois McMaster Bujold, is a stand-alone novella within the long-running and (deservedly) popular “Vorkosigan” series.

The genetically-engineered insects created by Dr. Enrique Borgos have proved to have many other uses beyond comically disrupting dinner parties.  One batch of insects is now being tested, to see if the bugs can help clear the radioactive contamination in Miles Vorkosigan’s (nominal) landholding of Vorkosigan Vashnoi.  But, when Miles’s wife Ekaterin helps check on the experiment’s progress, she finds a number of the insects inexplicably missing.  Could this have anything to do with the shadowy figure, glimpsed by her husband, which he feels sure couldn’t have been a wood-elf?  Further investigation brings Ekaterin face to face with the tragic consequences of one of the bleaker chapters in the planet Barrayar’s long, bleak history.

I think this is one for the fans, really.  Bujold is very good about making the novels stand alone (I started reading the series with Memory, which is definitely the wrong place to begin, but it hooked me in anyway), but the shorter format of a novella means some of the background info-dumping can’t be squeezed in.  Moreover, it’s comparatively late in the internal chronology of the series, which means it assumes a certain level of familiarity with the characters, as well as the setting.  Long-time readers of the series will be right at home; neophytes may well be puzzled by some of the details (like one character referring to Miles as “the mutie Lord”, for instance).

If you are already a fan, there’s a lot to enjoy here.  It’s told from Ekaterin’s point of view, and the plot is therefore driven by her talent for investigation and reasonableness, rather than Miles’s talent for manic improvisation.  I’ve nothing against Miles as a character, far from it, but a different viewpoint in the series does make for something of a refreshing change.  However, the result is a more sedately-paced, low-key, entry in the series – it’s smoothly and enjoyably written, Bujold is her normal highly professional self, but it does lack the dash and zing of some of the more manic episodes.

It also invites an inevitable comparison, with the other novella that deals with the primitive Barrayaran backwoods and the grim social legacy left by the planet’s atomic bombardment.  And, by comparison with “The Mountains of Mourning”… well, “The Flowers of Vashnoi” doesn’t have the same tense plotting, and doesn’t pack anything like the same emotional punch.  It’s probably an unfair comparison – “The Mountains of Mourning” would be high up my own list of “best entries in the series”, and would rate an honourable mention (at least) if I were making a list of “best novellas of the twentieth century”, it is genuinely that damn good.  “The Flowers of Vashnoi” isn’t, therefore, Bujold at her absolute best.  It’s certainly Bujold good enough to be consistently entertaining, compassionate, thoughtful and humane – it’s not a low water mark in the series, not by any means.

I Hear the Crash of Thunder and the Tracy Symphony

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Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente, is an exuberant and oddly endearing piece of glitzy nonsense, much like the (ahem) event which inspires it.

Earth is contacted by intelligent aliens, with a view to admitting humanity to the wider galactic society; however, before this can happen, humanity must pass a test to prove that it’s a properly sentient species.  It’s not an overly onerous test – our species must prove it has heart and soul, by participating in the Metagalactic Grand Prix music contest.  We don’t even have to place highly – just avoid coming last.  Because last, in this case, means dead last: score “nul points”, and human civilization gets archived, while the human species is eradicated with as little collateral damage as possible to the rest of Earth’s biosphere.  No pressure, then.

The aliens have provided a helpful list of the sort of act that tends to go down well at the Grand Prix… most of the acts they list, though, are dead or otherwise unavailable.  But washed-up ex-star Danesh Jalo finds his own name on the list… and, shortly thereafter, the surviving two-thirds of Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes are on their way into interstellar space, hoping they can get back enough of their glam-rock-punk groove thing to save the human race.

It sounds a bit silly, doesn’t it?  I remember when they did something very similar in Gerry Anderson’s Terrahawks*, and it was silly then.  But Catherynne Valente happens to be a writer who can do “silly” very, very well.

It’s safe to say, I think, that Valente is a bit of a Marmite writer – her ebullient adjectives and hyperactive run-on sentences grate on some people’s sensibilities, her gleeful inventiveness can be dismissed as simple froth.  Personally, I love it – I just wish I had enough nerve to write like that myself, sometimes.  For those of us who do enjoy Valente’s brand of prose Marmite, there’s a lot to appreciate here, as “Decibel Jones” and his long-suffering bandmate are pitched into a situation they really can’t cope with, confronting their own personal baggage while dealing with a bewildering range of bizarre aliens.  My own introduction to Valente’s writing came with her novel Radiance: Space Opera isn’t as deep or as complex as Radiance (which managed to hide a taut and intelligent SF mystery underneath its stylistic pyrotechnics), but it manages to be silly and often hilariously funny, while also being genuinely tense, and genuinely touching.

Daft, glitzy, over-the-top and weirdly enjoyable, Space Opera is very much like the Eurovision Song Contest which inspires it.  I know that, like Eurovision, it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.  But some of us like some glamorous trashy nonsense to brighten up our otherwise drab lives, and Space Opera provides that.  Oh yes indeed.

*Discerning readers will recognize the line heading this review as a lyric from Kate Kestrel, Terrahawks‘s resident international singing sensation and high-tech interceptor pilot.

I Talk to de Trees, dat’s why dey Put me Away….

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Semiosis, by Sue Burke, is a multi-generational saga of an Earth colony adapting to a new planet, and turns out to be very much my kind of SF, with strong characters and plenty of ideas to chew over, mingled with enough action and excitement to keep even a casual reader’s interest engaged from start to finish.

Escaping from an Earth which they believed to be in terminal ecological and moral decline, a group of high-minded, well-intentioned individuals set out to found a new and better society on the planet they name Pax.  Harsh reality starts intruding on their idealism almost immediately, not least because Pax already has intelligent life, and not where the colonists first thought of looking.  The planet’s plants are intelligent, and they have ways and means of keeping dangerous animals in check.  The colonists have to reach a modus vivendi with the native life – in which they are, sort of, helped, by the discovery of a city, a set of ancient buildings abandoned by a previous, non-human, colonization effort; the sentient bamboo that lives in the city has come to appreciate the virtues of intelligent animals, but it has its own agenda – and the city’s original builders are still out there, somewhere.

Overall, this is an intelligent, smoothly written, highly persuasive piece of, in some ways, very traditional SF – Pax is the sort of exoplanet that is comfortable enough for humans to live on, while also throwing a plentiful supply of weird critters at them.  I have a suspicion that it wouldn’t stand up to serious analysis – in particular, if the biochemistry of Earth life is so similar to that of Pax that Earth lifeforms can eat Pax ones (and vice versa), then surely the biosphere must be rife with bacteria that could live inside humans, and to which humans would have no immunities?  (You could, I suppose, cover that with a line, as they say in the theatre – say, by explaining that the first generation’s Earth-made medical technology could support people through the inevitable sicknesses, and by the time that technology wore out, the Pax-born children would have the necessary antibodies.  And then people like me would complain about this obvious piece of handwaving, because people like me are never satisfied.  Never mind.)

Quibbles over biology aside, there’s a lot to enjoy as the colony progresses through seven generations over the course of more than a century, snapshotted through the viewpoints of a series of first-person protagonists, each one of whom comes across as a well-realized and believable character.  High ideals are all very well, but sordid reality keeps on intruding, sometimes with uncomfortable brutality.  As the years pass, the colony gains a history – indeed, two histories, with some very nasty details passed down privately, while the official records paint a much more sanitized picture.  And, as generation succeeds generation, the colony develops its own distinctive customs and taboos, and words begin to shift in meaning.  The colonists don’t repudiate their ancestors, and by and large they stick to those ideals – sometimes even when it gets them into serious trouble.  And, while they have plenty of external threats and dangers to contend with, their biggest single worry remains their best friend – the intelligent plant that lives with them, helps them in their efforts, but remains strongly self-centred and convinced that it knows what’s best for everyone.

In some ways, it reminded me of Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – the setting is very different, but the structure of the two books is similar (multi-generational sagas of societies evolving under a peculiar initial constraint) and Burke’s restrained and straightforwardly elegant prose bears comparison with Wilhelm’s.  Semiosis, is, perhaps, a little heavier on the action-adventure side of things than WLtSBS, though – which is fine by me, I like a dash of adrenaline as much as the next reader, and Burke handles her dramatic action sequences pretty neatly.

In short, Semiosis is an effective and intelligent piece of writing, in as traditional an SF vein as you could hope to find in a month of Sundays.  An all-around polished, competent, highly professional and very readable piece of work, in fact.

One for the Money, Two for the Show

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Agent Ptolema makes contact with defectors from a super-secret black agency, who have disturbing news.  Something very awful is happening off the coast of Maine, and the only way to keep it contained is by using the incestuous twins, Bête and Ivoire.  But what is the twins’ secret?  While Ptolema delves into the past and the future, the Signalman is waiting to see if it’s time to announce the end of the world.  Chaos theory and wave-particle duality are at work, and it turns out Bête and Ivoire are closer even than twins and lovers.

Hmm.  I’m not a hundred per cent sure this revised and expanded version of Caitlin R. Kiernan’s novella Black Helicopters is properly Hugo-eligible – the revisions from the 2013 chapbook are certainly substantial, roughly doubling the length just for a start, but then there’s the question of word count…. I’m glad I don’t have to decide these things.  Anyway.  This is abstruse Lovecraftian espionage-horror-SF, a companion piece to the same author’s Agents of Dreamland, and it’s, well… interesting.

The central gimmicks hinge on physics and mathematics sufficiently abstruse as to look like magic – which is moving into Lovecraft territory right there, as any aficionado of Charles Stross’s “Laundry” series will tell you.  The conditions which give rise to an incursion by the eldritch outer horrors are susceptible to manipulation, and very sensitive to initial conditions – if you make small changes to the initial conditions, say by folding a sufficient number of origami cranes, you can totally contain an invasion by shoggoths.  It’s all in the detail – of course, it depends on you being a sufficiently insane and alienated mathematical genius to appreciate the detail.  And, this being Kiernan’s world of shadowy counter-espionage counter-Lovecraftian agencies, there’s an awful lot of sinister meetings in dark alleys and assassinations going on.

It’s quite relentlessly erudite, demanding a great deal from the reader – you have to follow the physics and maths stuff, and the complex non-linear storyline, and the barrage of literary allusions, drawing heavily on James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and (for some reason) Watership Down.  Unlike other, lesser, works, this one contains two Chapter 9s – I thought, at first, there was some arcane cosmic significance to this, but it turns out the second Chapter 9 is just an appendix, containing a translation of the substantial amounts of French dialogue in the actual Chapter 9.  Kind of Kiernan to take pity on the non-Francophones, I guess.

I dunno.  It’s all very clever and erudite, and it’s got lots of good set pieces, and it’s very atmospheric… I can’t shake the suspicion, though, that it’s all a bit, well, meretricious.  I liked Agents of Dreamland quite a lot, but I can’t help but feel that one had a more definite plot.  Black Helicopters, well, there’s a story there… but not a very substantial one.  I can’t help but feel that if you tried to summarize it – “woman is duplicated by magical quantum physics so that both halves of her can fight off a shoggoth invasion” – it’d sound a bit silly.  Impressive and erudite as all hell, yes, but I have this nagging suspicion that, when you get down to it, Black Helicopters is something a bit less than the sum of its parts.

You’ll Find a God in Every Golden Cloister

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So, in my efforts to keep a finger on the pulse of current SFF, I picked up Cameron Johnston’s novel The Traitor God, a 2018 book from a new writer (no previous novels, but ISFDB shows some shorter stuff, going back a few years.)  It’s a finalist for the Dragon Awards, but I’ll try not to hold that against it.

Edrin Walker is a mage on the run, pursued everywhere by daemons and monstrous spectral cats.  Ten years ago, he did something which may have involved killing one of the five gods (actually just heavily over-powered wizards, but they get to call themselves gods) of the mage-ruled city of Setharis – his memory of the incident has been deliberately erased.  As part of whatever deal he struck, he faked his own death and has been on the run ever since.  But whoever he struck a deal with, they promised to protect his friends – so, when (through a magical link) he feels his best friend die horribly, Walker figures the deal is off, and he heads back to Setharis with vengeance in mind. He arrives in the middle of a wave of magical killings, with a very nasty conspiracy brewing somewhere in the background, while a horde of barbarian invaders is about to hove into view….

It’s not a bad performance, for a first novel, actually.  It’s fast-paced, high-energy grimdark fantasy – unlike that Anne Charnock novel, plenty of stuff happens; Walker no sooner settles down for a drink in a pub, in chapter one, when the place is fire-bombed and he finds himself outside, wrestling with a tattooed berserker who’s trying to bite his cock off.  You can’t fault it for lack of incident.

You can fault it on some other grounds, I’m afraid.  It’s rather self-consciously grimdark fantasy, with the grimness and the darkness put on with a trowel – I found myself muttering “a free poxed whore with every chapter” at one point, and I have quite a high tolerance level for grime and grit and gore.  Oddly, I find that grimdark works best in the hands of a writer with a light touch – people like Daniel Polansky and Joe Abercrombie have, if you look closely, quite a nice line in understated humour.  Johnston hasn’t really developed that – the writing is clear but rather uninspiring, a bit flat, a touch predictable.  Then there’s our first-person protagonist, Walker, who sets out on a mission of vengeance but doesn’t really have any sort of a plan – he spends most of his time trying to dodge trouble, while blundering into other people who throw useful bits of the plot at him.  Between the generous chunks of exposition handed out, and the overall constraints of the sub-genre (it’s grimdark fantasy, expect the hero to be betrayed), I was able to figure out several important revelations long before they were officially revealed, and I don’t think I’m especially clever in this regard.

Still, it moves along reasonably well, the (rather cartoonishly bad) bad guys get a properly explosive come-uppance in the end… and the final chapters contain a number of plot hooks, suitable for hanging a sequel on.  I don’t know that I’d actually be in a hurry to seek the sequel out, but I wouldn’t actively avoid it.  The Traitor God is pretty decent lightweight entertainment, at least.  If you can cope with all the grimdark, anyway.  2018 book, so eligible for next year’s Hugos, though I’d be surprised if it made my nominations ballot.  Which puts Cameron Johnston way up there with Anne Charnock in the literary stakes, come to think of it.

Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)

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So, I guess it’s time to talk about Revenant Gun, the concluding novel in Yoon Ha Lee’s “Machineries of Empire” trilogy, then.

Nine years have passed since Raven Stratagem, when Ajewen Cheris (sometimes Kel Cheris) used the hijacked remnants of Shuos Jedao’s personality and memories to take over his command, stage a largely successful revolution, and create a seismic shift in the oppressive Hexarchate’s society.  Cheris’s success was to make the various exotic abilities conferred by the Hexarchate’s high calendar optional for their recipients – which, when you consider the Kel caste’s ability of “mindless conformity with superior authority” or the Vidona caste’s ability to fold dissenters into origami sculptures, actually sounds like a pretty good idea.  Under Cheris’s system, the Hexarchate can move away from being an oppressive totalitarian dystopia founded on mass human sacrifice.

Unfortunately, not everyone thinks this is a good idea – particularly Nirai Kujen, one of the surviving Hexarchs and the architect of much of the Hexarchate’s original system.  Kujen’s own method of personal immortality depends on the unaltered high calendar, and he is keen to see it preserved.  Kujen is a nine-hundred-year-old inventive genius, and a dangerous adversary.  He has, for example, a warship with a devastating weapons system.  More importantly, he has a general with the ability to use that weapon inventively.  Cheris may have stolen most of Shuos Jedao’s memories and abilities, but Jedao was a major asset for Kujen, and you don’t get to be a nine-hundred-year-old inventive genius without realizing the importance of making backups….

It’s a solid conclusion to Yoon Ha Lee’s exotic space opera, centred on Shuos Jedao – or, at least, the current version of him – wrestling with the problem of being fundamentally an OK kind of guy, while also being a mass murderer on a level that makes him reviled even in the Hexarchate, where mass murder is basically a spectator sport.  Along the way, we get to see a bit more of Cheris – I can cope with that, Cheris is basically the only person in the series who isn’t horrendously morally compromised – and the parallel society of the Hexarchate’s robotic “Servitors”, and the various factions vying for control within the successor states to the Hexarchate, and a lot else besides.  (We get to find out more about this setting’s “voidmoth” spacecraft, too, in a development which, in retrospect, should have been obvious – all the other castes’ symbols are living creatures, after all, why should the Nirai’s be any different?)  Lee is good with personalities and motivations and interpersonal dynamics; there are no overt villains, despite all the torture and genocide flying around – even Kujen’s origins make him a vaguely sympathetic character, though one who has to be stopped at all costs.  And, despite all the space-operatic starships and exotic weaponry and stuff, it’s the interpersonal dynamics – the webwork of loves and loyalties and betrayals – that provide the drama and the tension here.

It’s a good book.  It’s also the conclusion to a darn good trilogy (with a couple of random additions thrown in; a scene in Revenant Gun openly calls back to the events of “Extracurricular Activities”, for example.)  The construction of the trilogy, overall, is… interesting.  Lee rather throws the reader in at the deep end in Ninefox Gambit, with a lot of the exotic background left unexplained – which, I think, makes it more rewarding to read the second and third books; having navigated the deep waters at the start, so to speak, it’s a relief and a pleasure to be on firmer footing with the later stuff.  Ninefox Gambit, among other things, presents the Hexarchate’s setting as a given, leaving it to the reader to decide that “hang on, this society is absolutely horrible, isn’t it?”   And then the sequel comes along, confirming that yes, indeed, this society is absolutely horrible, and encouraging us to cheer along as Cheris sets out to change it.  It’s canny writing, that.  I think I could stand to see a lot more from Yoon Ha Lee, in the future.

Revenant Gun is, of course, published in 2018, so eligible for a Hugo in 2019 – and, equally of course, the whole “Machineries of Empire” is eligible for the “Best Series” Hugo.  I’m inclined to go that way, myself, nominating the whole trilogy rather than one of its component parts.  It makes sense to me, although Revenant Gun, by itself, is up there with many individual Hugo winners, quality wise.  Still.  Worth thinking about, come next year’s nominations, that’s for certain.

But If You Don’t Play, You Can’t Win

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So, I suppose the time has come to think about next year’s Hugo possibles, and I suppose Roger Levy’s novel The Rig is one of them.  It’s published in 2018, it’s got an approving cover quote by Lavie Tidhar, it’s worth a look.

Razer is an itinerant tale-teller in the System; she’s guided from planet to planet by her AI Cynth, who points her in the direction of people whose lives would make good stories.  On the aptly-named planet Bleak, she’s pointed at tough cop Bale and loner Tallen; when Tallen is attacked by a serial killer whom Bale takes down, it looks like a suitably dramatic incident for a story… except Bale is convinced there is more going on than meets the eye.  Meanwhile, Tallen is faced with massive medical bills and is forced to take a job running one of the rigs that mine Bleak’s core.  Neurally interfaced with the rig, Tallen becomes its guiding intelligence.  It’s an important job, because mining isn’t all the rigs do – the seas of Bleak are also used to store thousands of “sarcs”, suspended-animation capsules, holding people at the verge of death, who might get a second chance at life through the offices of the all-pervading AfterLife corporation.  Tallen’s rig is looking after a couple of very special sarcs – and both Tallen and Razer have been manipulated into the positions they’re in, as part of a decades-long plan….

Interleaved with this is the life story of Alef, an autistic maths genius following in the footsteps of his father – who was also a maths genius, and was recruited by one of the System’s biggest criminals, who could use a maths genius.  Alef falls in with the crime-lord’s son and heir, the psychotic Pellonhorc, whose ruthlessness will exterminate both his rivals and his father – and, finally, threaten to exterminate everyone, as Pellonhorc imagines himself in a personal duel with God, and will destroy all human life in the System, just to score a point.  Surviving Pellonhorc’s madness, and preserving humanity from it, will take extensive planning on Alef’s part – a decades-long plan, in fact….

OK.  It’s all smoothly enough written, and the final tie-up between the two plot threads is neatly enough executed.  I have to confess, though, I didn’t entirely warm to this one.  The setting – Earth is dead, humanity has relocated to a system with multiple terraformable planets and moons, including one at the edge of the system which is sealed off and nobody talks about it – struck a certain note of familiarity, though it’s grungier and has more incurable diseases than Firefly.  Then, too, I didn’t wholly buy the premise by which AfterLife – which offers a fifty-fifty chance of revival to its subscribers, if a) a cure is found for whatever’s killing them and b) their life stories get enough up-votes on social media – becomes an all-pervading, culturally dominating influence that effectively replaces religion (a suggested tagline for the book, apparently, was “Who needs God, when you have social media?”)  I suppose it’s possible.  Anything’s possible; SF is the literature of possibilities, innit?  I just didn’t buy it.

This might be part and parcel of my bigger problems with the book, one of which is structural.  I couldn’t figure why AfterLife wouldn’t have competition… until fairly late in the book, where it is made clear that the whole set-up has been created by Alef with the resources of the super-Mafia crime syndicate (so any potential competitors would have been discouraged, perhaps by horses’ heads in their beds.)  The thing is, the insertion of Alef’s entire life story, from early childhood onward, stretches the other half of the narrative all out of shape – it’s unevenly paced, padded out with superfluous extreme-sports sequences, even with superfluous characters (like the unfortunate Bale, who, unlike most redshirts, gets to die in the second act to prove the situation is serious.)

My other major problem is with the characters – I didn’t much like either Razer or Alef, and I think the problem here is that they are too passive.  Razer is being manipulated throughout the story, guided into position by her tricky AI.  As for Alef, he, too, is basically responsive rather than proactive, reacting to the demands made on him by Pellonhorc and his father.  Even at the end of the story, when his plan is finally coming to fruition, Alef still turns out to have been played, in a very important way.  Personally, I prefer my protagonists to have a bit more in the way of agency.

If you don’t share my prejudices, the book’s got stuff going for it – the action sequences are nicely spectacular (even if I think some of them are superfluous), the dystopian setting is filled with interesting detail, and the writing is just fine – Levy can convey the excitement of a chase or a catastrophe, can build up the atmosphere of his grim and grimy setting, can handle the rather frequent explosions of violence; it’s all good stuff (unless you have a low tolerance for spurting gore, of course.) The things that bothered me won’t bother everyone – and it’s not like I’m actually hurling it against the wall and demanding my time and money back.  Ultimately, I think The Rig is, well, fairly OK.  It’s just that, for the reasons given, I’m not wildly enthusiastic about it.