Good Stuff: L.I.F.E. in the 23rd Century by Jason R. Richter

I realized recently that you can measure the state of the union with Saturday Night Live as a barometer. It’s dark days for America when SNL is entertaining, troubled times when they have material to work with.

Following that notion, it’s no shocker to find a lot of comedy in new dystopian stories, and Jason R. Richter’s L.I.F.E. falls right in that vein. His vision of the future takes some of our brightest* qualities and cranks them to eleven: mindless consumerism, war-mongery, xenophobia, Christano-centrism (is that the word?), dependence on quick-fix psychopharmacology, hyper-sensitivity, reactionism, sheepism, use of the word “freedom” as a distracing bludgeoun while destroying the reality of the concept, our inability to deal with anything, and generally being collectively f$@#-witted.

(*: I said brightest qualities. Most visible, not best.)

I think this needed to be a comedy. Without the buffering jokes, the disheartening reality of the world in this book would hit way too close to the life we live in. It would feel like a tale of tomorrow, not of 200 years in the future. And that’s the point. Comedy functions to package awful concepts in palatable forms. You laugh and say “That’s so true!” But you keep on thinking about the idea, the concept, the warning. And you stop laughing. That is where this book fits; it its credit, and our detriment, L.I.F.E. is more of a mirror than it initially seems to be.

Good Stuff: Abomination

Have you ever had to give a book two attempts?

This was one of those for me.

Gary Whitta’s writing goes deep into both the history of the story and the hearts of the characters, delivering a full, rich immersion into a very real and immediate-feeling Dark-Ages England.

The first time I tried to read Abomination I think I was restless. I usually prefer books that read like a Luc Besson movie; Pow! pow! Blam! …sexy bit… gogoGO BIG FINISH and explode.

Yeah, like that.

Maybe that makes me seem shallow. I dunno. I just get very impatient sometimes. I needed a book that moved fast like a river. Gary Whitta’s writing is more like an ocean current – deep, wide, but don’t think it’s not moving! I promise you, this book takes the werewolf/monster genre to thrilling, brutal, emotionally vibrant new places. (Fun fact: it’s not a wolf.)

The magic, the richness of the characters, the grotesquerie of the fiends in the fully-realized and very immediate historical setting stayed in my mind, and pulled me back when I was ready for a book to really sink into. The light is failing. Autumn’s closing in. Nights are growing longer. Time for a book about grappling with the darkness that lurks within all or us, eh?

Good Stuff: It’s All Fun and Games

This is a fun, quick read kinda hanging out on the edge of YA fantasy. If you’ve seen the movie Knights of Badassdom, it’s a bit like that, but without Peter Dinklage trippin’ balls. (Maybe something to be worked into the sequel?)

To further differentiate this book from that film,  rather than fantasy elements invading a LARPing weekend, Dave Barrett’s LARPers are sucked into a fantasy realm – so this is a “portal fantasy,” though, thankfully, there’s no big flashy portal. I liked that. One moment they’re kids stompin’ through the woods, next moment “Oh, snap! Those arrows are real, yo!”

I also liked that, unlike many portal fantasies, there’s no over-dramatized freakout session (which, let’s be honest, would be accurate for many of our high-strung spazz-nick nerd friends, who tend to hyperbolize everything.) No, these characters are obviously true nerds. They’ve been dreaming of living in a fantasy realm all their lives. They’ve probably read all the portal fantasy YA novels they could get their hands on. So, when it happens to them, when they’re off Earth and realize their character stats are now real traits that they possess, their reaction is along the lines of “This is dope. Imma go throw fireballs at something.” I dig that; it lets you hurl right into the fun stuff of the story without the usual drawn-out freak-out.

(Side note; the kids in this story don’t talk like the lines I put in quotes above. That’s all me. But if the author wishes to drop some kids representative of more hip-hop/urban culture into the fantasy world in future books, that’d be dope. My only suggestion is that any Yo-Boys and anyone who says “Brah”  should be eaten by fungus monsters.)

If you’re looking for a light, fun read, a different angle on portal fantasy, or maybe a gift for that young geek in your life, you’ll find It’s All Fun and Games to be an exciting start to a new series.

Good Stuff: Asteroid Made of Dragons

Not kidding. That’s what the book is called. If you’re looking at a title as jam-packed with ridiculousness as that, you know the content is either going to be awful, or awesome. Let me assure you: here there be awesomeness.

You’ve got a story here about a mathematical genius struggling to control phenomenal cosmic powers in her head, a guilt-wracked innocent murderer, a monster, and a penniless archaeologist with a flying motorcycle and her finger on the pulse of a shattering secret. And of course, over it all, is an asteroid.

The asteroid.

The one made of dragons.

What makes it all work is G. Derek Adams’ mastery of storytelling. His writing is engrossing, beautiful, exciting. There are moments of linguistic virtuosity in this story, of written jazz, that lit fireworks in my head. I’m not talking about big words. I’m talking about the right ones. I’m talking about knowing the rules, using them well, and having the relaxed courage to break them and the intuitive wisdom to know when to break them. There are no wasted words here. You’re dropped into a strange world, right in the middle of these peoples’ lives, and it all is made real with such natural storytelling that the pace never drops. No chunky exposition, just drips and drops and “figure the rest out yourself because we’re busy saving the bloody world! Can’t tell you my story, you can get to know me by the way I cope with all the things trying to kill me!”

So there’s the rub; perfect character development, wordsmithing juicy enough to make you get up and dance, and and unabashedly bold story that will shake down your preconceptions of what a fantasy can be.

I’ll be watching this guy.

Good Stuff: The Life Engineered

When the protagonist achieves Nirvana within the first few pages, you know you’re entering a story that’s goin’ places. When the first words a hero  hears after rebirth into physical life are “Brace yourself” you know the ride is going to be exciting.

J.F. Dubeau has created a post-human universe of gods, engineered life-forms tasked with repairing a damaged, uninhabitable galaxy while we hibernate in safety. Dagir is born into a lush universe, a vivid and thrilling trans-human society – and into instant calamity. She is quite literally made-to-order and unleashed barely in time to respond to a civil war that is staggering in its bredth and suddenness, though the causes for it are rooted in human programming written hundreds or thousands of years before.

If you’re looking for a fast pace and a grand scale (and that’s my bag, baby), you won’t be disappointed with The Life Engineered.

Good Stuff: Monkey Business

This book breaks narrative rules. I mean, the narrator staggers drunkenly from one side of the fourth wall to the other. Sometimes he plops down on the couch next to you and starts eating your cheetoes. And he/she/it/disembodied-narrator-voice isn’t even part of the story. Chats all over the place in a familiar storytelling manner as if he was someone involved, someone there, but he’s (I’ll settle on the masculine pronoun) not. He’s just a voice. It comes off like some dude, maybe your bartender, telling you this really long yarn about a couple of nut-jobs living out a trippy mashup of Gilligan’s Isle and Castaway…

And it works beautifully!

Monkey Business is pure, cut-loose fun. Any lessons about life, love and how to be are purely coincidental. (But present all the same.)

The story is a buddy adventure about two guys trying to escape a tropical island. It’s also about angry monkeys, indigenous dudebros, the fragile, shifting borders of reality and exploding fish. It kicks off in the aftermath of a failed attempt at escape. The most recent of several. No appendages were lost in this failure, and the protagonists’ frustration has an accepting, fatalistic edge. The protagonists are longtime friends, caught on this island for some time, but the author deftly skips all the backstory and jumps us right into that special kind of humor born from watching other peoples’ pain and ineptitude. Exposition creeps in naturally… along with the monkeys. This is a big plus for me, as massive expository blobs make me want to fling massive excretory? blobs.

What really stuck with me with this story was its frenetic edge-of-reality scenes. If you’ve ever seen the psychadelic trip-scenes from Simpsons and Futurama – yeah, Monkey Business has parts like that, just as vivid, scenes that burst like a vomiting kaleidoscope inside my brain. The characters blur across the ragged edge of sanity as the world gets weirder and weirder around them, as if some ancient disgruntled god (probably that asshole narrator) is absently messing with them. The slippage of reality works beautifully to pull you in and keep you reading as the story gains more of a fantastical flavor. By the end of it Monkey Business has the feel of an American tall tale, with mundane reality shoved off into the wings to make room for a good story – Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Big Fish, Monkey Business.

Happy reading.

Or, As Pratchett might have written:

Oook.

.

.

.

I know, I know! The Librarian was a great ape, not a monkey. Cut me some slack!

Good Stuff: Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

I’ve never read a story like this before, and it really wowed me. Fantasy? Sure. But Fantasy so well researched it could be historical fiction.

Through poetry and intrigue this story brought me on a grand adventure across a land heavily inspired by Tang Dynasty China, a culture that always seemed mysterious and thrilling to me in its complexity and sophistication, especially when compared to what was going on in Europe around the same time.

So  the scope is big, and well-planned, but the world is wrought effectively by keeping close to the protagonist, Shen Tai, who balances martial and poetic mindsets as he struggles with the trials that fall onto him.

And there are trials. For the performance of a selfless act, a deed which he undertook for purely personal reasons, Tai is given a gift that is anything but, a present that turns him into a political firebomb. Think of it this way; if someone gave you a fusion-powered personal hovercar with unlimited range, a completely unique vehicle, you’d think it’s cool, right? But then think about what lengths every government and corporate manufacturer would go to to take it from you?

Not such a good gift, eh?

That happens to Tai. Kind of. But it’s horses. Really good horses, and a lot of them. That’s where the story begins. The rest of this gripping tale follows Tai’s flight and fight to stay alive as every political faction in the empire moves against each-other and against him in the upheaval his staggering gift causes.

It’s a long tale, but the author’s mastery of beautiful language – simple on the face of it, layered with complexities between the lines, and always within a breath of poetry – pulls you fully into this world, makes it as real as your own. When you read this story, you’re not visiting a strange world. You’re living there, immersed in Tai’s existence, and you understand him and the people around him as well as yourself.

Good Stuff: ‘Shadow of the Winter King’ by Erik Scott de Bie

One thing to know ahead of time is that this book is set in “The World of Ruin.” Before you even get into the story, you know that this place has been falling apart for so long that the people living here generally acknowledge it as a fact of life. It is unclear in this book if Ruin is a direct dark force, some sort of intentional malevolent happening, or just an example of the pattern we’ve seen in our own history; a civilization rises, becomes too bloated, collapses and falls, and on come the ravening barbarians, from within and without. But that does not matter for this story. What matters is that the author has created a world where the bones of a glorious, beautiful, powerful civilization are showing, while the flesh is falling off in rot. So don’t be prepared for valiant, radiant protagonists. People like that don’t live here. The whole place is falling apart, and even the most heroic knights, with the greatest love for the honor and dignity of days gone by, even they are soiled down deep and choking on ruin.

This may not sound like a good thing, and some people may indeed not enjoy this book. But I did. The protagonists Ovelia and Regel are weighed down with layers of old secrets, years of dirty deeds and hard choices, and blood they can’t wash off. Their secrets have secrets, and every choice and interaction resonates through their respective wells of deep, old, dark pain. It can get heavy and frustrating for readers sometimes – the emotional layering of the story is less of like a familiar epic fantasy and more like a spy thriller, Shakespearian tragedy or a really heavy family drama. You know, the kind where you want to shake a character and scream “Tell him! Tell her! Use your words!” But for all that, probably even because of it, the story kept a hold on me.

The old bones of this world ring sadly of past glory, but that echo and the glints of light, love and valor that shine off these two tarnished souls kept me hooked, grasping to see what good they might forge out of this world where everyone – even them – seems to have wheels tuning within wheels all driving toward an inevitable, staggering collapse. If I have made this tale sound heavy with gloom and doom, think of it this way: Imagine Lord of the Rings, but there is no Gondor, no Rivendell, no Shire. All the bastions of hope have fallen to Sauron. That jerk. You just have two old hobbits with a ring and a memory of what the sun looked like. And maybe you have Aragorn too, but he’s hooked on smack and has Arwen’s blood on his hands. Imagine that story, those people fighting against the dark to bring something good into the world. The darkness is deeper, but if hope can come through, then it’s all the more precious for that.

As brutal and emotionally wracking as “Shadow of the Winter King” is, it’s all to set the stage for a story to remind us that, no matter how dire things get, hope lives as long as there is still one of us left to strive for it. It isn’t until the last few pages, maybe even the last few words, but this story gives birth – from the hearts of some deeply troubled and wounded people – to a burst of light and human spirit that just might in the coming books push back against the tide of Ruin.

Good Stuff: Shifting Borders by Jessie Kwak

A ghost-possession story where the possessing entity is the victim? What’s not to love?

Shifting Borders takes you into a reality tweaked just slightly out of tun with ours – it’s set in a Seattle with just as much drizzle, traffic, diversity and tribulation as the real deal, but with demonstrably real ghosts. The story starts with grief – not shattering, melodramatic grief, but the later, numb, hollow feeling as new loss becomes part of the new normal. Moved by sympathy (and the road to hell is paved in what, my friends?) to give her younger sister Val a chance to say goodbye to her departed boyfriend, Patricia agrees to help Val raise Marco’s ghost. The intervention of drug-running thugs throws a wrench in the works, and Patricia ends up with Marco’s ghost stuck inside of her.

As a Latina single mother in an expensive American city, Patricia’s life keeping her family on the straight and narrow had been a struggle before. Now, with her sister’s boyfriend’s ghost shacking up inside her manifesting all sorts of poltergeisty urges, and her pincushion hot mess of a sister bringing violent drug smugglers and black magic into her life, Patricia loses her grip on what normalcy and security she had managed to hold onto.

The hits in this supernatural murder-mystery keep piling up on Patricia as the consequences of her sister’s illicit dealings spill over into her life, drawing her and her family into ever-increasing peril, and it is her strength as a mother and protector that – shakily at first, but with growing confidence as the situation becomes more desperate – pulls her through a multi-layered confrontation with evil.

Expository world-building is one of my touchstones, and mad props go to Jessie Kwak for keeping this story rooted in direct, realistic experience, and allowing the fantastic elements to unfold naturally, without dragging the pace down with exposition. The story comes to us fresh, unencumbered, and immediately realistic. Indeed, despite the fantastic elements, this is in no way a fairy tale. It even side-steps many of the common temptations of fantasy – magic is alive and powerful in this story, but it provides no release from grief or pain. The dead can speak, but coping with loss and fighting back to a life of joy and healing still happens only with time and the gentle application – and willing acceptance – of the more simple human magic we all know.

Good Stuff: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Stunning.

Was this her first novel? I think so. I dunno, but I should find out. But here’s an author who took every trope of common fantasy, tossed them out, and made something purely new.

“There’s nothing new under the sun!”

Phah! Get stuffed. This story was new, at least new to me. A tale of political palace intrigue… but so much more! Yeine enters the theater of global leadership unprepared, bewildered, a lamb in a den of wolves (her relatives) and chained – but still mighty and terrifying – gods. The fast pace and vivid, immersive voice pulled me in and lit my imagination. I didn’t want to reach the end, but I didn’t want to stop reading. The grand reveal floored me, set this entire wracking epic as a mere starting point. But I’m forced to wonder – with where this tale ends, what crazy heights of imagination, what strange journey does Jemisin have in store for us? And are we equipped for the ride??