thoughts on Octavia E. Butler: LILITH’S BROOD, FLEDGLING, etc

I feel it would be superfluous to quote summaries of these books, Octavia Butler’s works being what they are–well-known, celebrated, and deservedly so. So I’ll just say that I think these covers are so very pretty. Butler is one of those writers who underpin the genre, and black presence in the genre, to the point that no publisher today will ever dare to whitewash covers of her books, because they know that if they do all hell will break loose and no amount of PR bullshit will save them. This is a Good Thing and makes me tingle.

 

in the grim darkness of the future, one author is a better feminist ally than Joss Whedon

Dan Abnett: Ravenor

In the war–torn future of the 41st millennium, the Inquisition fights a secret war against the darkest enemies of mankind – the alien, the heretic and the daemon. The three stories in this omnibus tell the tale of Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor and his lethal band of operatives, whose investigations take them from the heart of the Scarus Sector to the wildest regions of space beyond, and even through time itself. Wherever they go, and whatever dangers they face, they will never give up until their mission succeeds.

Imagine Firefly in book form. Except Mal is all brain instead of brawn. Simon Tam is a veteran ex-military medic. Inara isn’t a courtesan but a highly trained telekinetic who’s too busy slaughtering people to pine after anybody, let alone break down in tears when the object of her affection goes and has sex with another woman. River is a haunted teenage boy. His protector is a Jayne who reads a lot of cheap erotica (that he doesn’t actually enjoy) and chain-smokes. Attrition rate? Much worse than in Serenity, because the modus operandi here is pyrrhic victory or total annihilation, fuckers, nothing in the between. You now what’s best, though? Joss Whedon’s horrible gender issues: ENTIRELY ABSENT.

That’s Ravenor.

To set a proper tone: Gideon Ravenor, inquisitor and our protagonist, used to be a brilliant young man with a promising career with the Imperial Inquisition ahead of him. Thanks to a devastating attack, he’s lost all his limbs, his face, much of his body. Little more than a sack of featureless flesh, he’s now confined to a force-chair and kept alive only through its life support systems. All he’s got left is his mind and a singular determination to destroy those who threaten the Imperium of Mankind. Cheery, no? Don’t worry, it doesn’t get better.

 

Ian McDonald’s RIVER OF SUCK AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

So wtf was I missing in Ian McDonald’s River of Gods? I don’t think I’ve seen anything approaching a negative opinion of this novel, going by a quick look on google, except a few reviews on Amazon. Nearly everyone seems to agree that it’s literary or almost literary. Nearly everyone seems to think it paints an authentic portrait of India.

I don’t know about authentic portrait, never having been to India, but I thought the entire time that this is a novel written by a very British, very white, very male author. As for its literary value, I’ll let the scarf-up-the-ass sex scene speak for itself.

Marianna Fusco is professional and roused enough not to coo at the size of Vishram’s penthouse as they stumble through the door, quaking with lust. He just about remembers to undress the proper way, the gentleman’s way, from the bottom up; then she whips off her silk sarong and comes for him across the room, twisting the translucent fabric into a rope and tying it into a chain of large knots, like a thugee… He tries to push into her vagina, she rolls away saying no no no, I’m not letting that thing in there. She let him get three fingers in both orifices and blasphemes and thrashes on the mat by the foot of the bed. Then she helps him fold the silk scarf knot by careful knot up inside her and she straddles him… handing him until he comes and after he’s come she rolls onto her back and makes him wank her clitoris with the ball of his big toe and when she is swearing and beating her fists off the carpet she rolls into the yoga plough position and he wraps the free end of the scarf around his hand and slowly pulls it out, each knot accompanied by a blaspheme and a full-body thrash.

The novel’s crammed with hilariously written sex: everyone is an enthusiastic contortionist (“yoga plough” position while thrashing and having a scarf “lovingly pulled” out of your colon, hanging from your lover’s waist upside down and all) and everyone practices Tantric sex (including or even particularly the western characters. One character’s French boyfriend ties a string or a rubber band around his cock and shoves it up her vagina while chanting–apparently this keeps the thing erect for an entire hour or something). I mean, hell, some of them could have been interesting, but instead you have a nute–a non-gendered–who acts like a weepy uke: lower lip trembling at the slightest social embarrassment, physically fragile and effeminate. What the hell is up with that? Apparently, all the nutes in McDonald’s futuristic India are girly, work in the fashion/media industry, are walking fashion plates and are every single one unironically faaaabulous.

 

THE STORIES OF IBLS is weeaboo bait but not totally awful

Hiroshi Yamamoto: The Stories of Ibis In a world where humans are a minority and androids have created their own civilization, a wandering storyteller meets the beautiful android Ibis. She tells him seven stories of human/android interaction in order to reveal the secret behind humanity’s fall. The stories that Ibis speaks of are the “seven novels” about the events surrounding the announcements of the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 20th and 21st centuries. At a glance, these stories do not appear to have any sort of connection, but what is the true meaning behind them? What are Ibis’s real intentions?

 

Nalo Hopkinson’s MIDNIGHT ROBBER is unadulterated beauty

On the Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint, Carnival is a Lollapalooza of music and dance, a Mardi Gras, a masquerade; and the Robin Hood of Toussaint legend, the Robber Queen, is just another costume, Tan-Tan’s favorite. Then Tan-Tan’s corrupt politician father commits a crime that sends them into exile on the extradimensional planet New Half-Way Tree, Toussaint’s untamed quantum twin. As she struggles to survive the violent criminals, mysterious aliens, and merciless jungles of New Half-Way Tree, Tan-Tan finds herself taking on–or being taken over by–the mythic persona and powers of the Robber Queen.

You know how I fell in love with this book? By reading the first page. It goes like this:

Oho. Like it starting, oui? Don’t be frightened, sweetness; is for the best. I go be with you the whole time. Trust me and let me distract you little bit with one anansi story:

It had a woman, you see, a strong, hard-back woman with skin like cocoa-tea. She two foot-them tough from hiking through the diable bush, the devil bush on the prison planet of New Half-Way Tree. When she walk, she foot strike the hard earth bup! like breadfruit dropping to the ground. She two arms hard with muscle from all the years of hacking paths through the diable bush on New Half-Way Tree. Even she hair itself rough and wiry; long black knotty locks springing from she scalp and corkscrewing all the way down she back. She name Tan-Tan, and New Half-Way Tree was she planet.

 

AVATAR: Oh James Cameron NO

If you’re like me–cynic, snob, or otherwise an individual of discerning taste–you will already know that James Cameron’s Avatar was going to be shit just based on its summary alone.

I’m here to vindicate you. I came out of the theater doubled over laughing, because really, it’s either laugh or rage.

By rage, I mean “I’ll hunt James Cameron down and burn his house and choke his pet dogs/cats/goldfish to death and then burn them too.” That kind of rage. And you can bitch about me having ~*liberal hang-upgs*~ and agendas or “reading too much into this, it’s just FANTASY and ESCAPIST ENTERTAINMENT” if you like, but keep in mind that I’ll call you names and you will deserve every single one.

 

Keith Brooke’s THE ACCORD

The key to understanding Keith Brooke’s The Accord is this: fuck.

Wait, let’s try that again: FUCK!!!

This isn’t me swearing a lot in yet another review; this is Keith Brooke’s prose in his pathetic soap opera masquerading as cyberpunk. I don’t know if it’s just Brooke or an unspoken agreement between certain sci-fi writers (Charles Stross, to a lesser extent M. John Harrison and Richard Morgan) that characters in a futuristic world must never, ever speak naturally. The symptoms vary: most of the time it’s meaningless technobabble describing technology that isn’t probable and backed up by a form of science known to no man except maybe the gnome mages in Dungeons & Dragons, sometimes it’s people talking in a manner writers think super-geniuses would but which resembles nothing in reality. In Brooke’s case, it’s a mix of both plus a liberal use of “fuck” as the be-all, end-all outlet for emotion. Happy? FUCK. Sad? FUCKING FUCK. Angry? FUCKITY FUCK FUCK.