An appropriately-timed March wrap-up, part 2: Girl Gone International Hanoi and enjoyable (gasp!) hard SF

In the beginning of March, I fell in love with a Cat Sebastian’s romance, discovered Caitlin Starling’s universe, and changed by mind about T. Kingfisher! Take a look at the first part of my wrap-up if that tickles your fancy!

This month was marked by my first attempt to socialise in Hanoi. Indeed, I finally crawled out of my lair and joined a book club! My partner may have a big-girl-job, I sure don’t. I got no money so I spend a lot of time at home. I work on my thesis, on scientific papers, or I read, and that’s about it. A good reason to go out and mingle was needed. An online search didn’t garner much results, there weren’t any sewing/crochet/knitting clubs. There weren’t any writing circles. But there was an English-speaking book club! I registered, wrote down the date, read the book, got the meeting time wrong and arrived six hours early, went back home, went back to the meeting place, and met a lovely bunch of women! The book was not a hit for most of us, but I had a great time and I am looking forward for our next meeting. where we will be discussing Project Hail Mary and The Invisible Library!

The Only One Left (2023)

Whelp.

That was a bit underwhelming.

I had never heard of this author or of that book, which isn’t a huge surprise considering that I have only just started to pay attention contemporary literature and that I am not United-Statian, but it was Girl Gone International Book Club Hanoi’s book of the month (that’s a mouthful, let’s call it the CCIBCH. That’s better) and I was in the mood for a thriller, so I got it. However, I was immediately unconvinced.

Lenora who, after a series of strokes, has been unable to speak and to move, except for one of her hands. With it, she communicates through knocks and, secretly, through the typewriter on her desk. Why secretly? That’s part of the mystery, baby, a mystery that she proposes to reveal to Kip, key by key, secret by secret, as strange occurences manifest at night. The whole gang is here: unexplained creaks, blood stains that cannot be cleaned, silhouettes in the windows of rooms that should empty, and more.

The story seemed interesting enough. No problem on that front, a bit far-fetched, sure, but then what thriller isn’t? Most of them are as fantastical as fantasy they are set in a land where due process, the chain of evidence, and subject-matter jurisdiction are foreign concepts. What do you mean you entered that house with no probable cause and without any back-up? and you have been staking out this man’s house for weeks without authorisation? and you have slapped the suspect and harassed the victim to convince them to testify? and I’m supposed to be rooting for you?? Pure fantasy, no thank you.

No, as it is often the case, my issue lied with the style. I have realised lately that subpar writing is my biggest literary pet peeve and the only reason I DNF books. A lot of people online or around me who do not mind, as long as the story interests them or they enjoy the characters, but I really can’t put myself through hundreds of pages where I feel like editing each paragraph! I value my sanity too much, thank you very much. In the case of this novel, it was mostly serviceable. A lot of books are like that, they don’t blow your mind with their style, the words are merely a medium for the story, and that’s ok. I don’t hold it against them However, this novel did something that gets old real quick for me, which is that each time it wanted to be impactful (so about every other page), it would harp on the one detail currently being revealed and describe it about ten times in various phrasing. Let me demonstrate:

« Oh right. The poison.
The poison for Kuzco.
The poison chosen especially for…
Kuzco.
Kuzco’s poison.
That poison? »

dun, dun, DUN

Of course, as always, I am slightly exagerrating, but once I had noticed that the author was doing that, I couln’t unsee it and each occurence got a bit more on my nerves. This is probably a question of taste, but it did not make scenes more compelling to me, just annoying to read. On top of that, In a nutshell: this book tried to do too much in my opinion. It probably could have been vastly improved by removing even just ONE thread of the plot (there is one that is revealed at the very, very end which could have been scrapped altogether without changing the story at all). I can’t stand works of fiction that stack plot twists upon plot twists upon plot twists (How to get away with murder and Pretty Little Liars, I’m looking at you) and think they are soooo unpredictable. You’re not unpredictable, dude, you’re random. The first twist is fun, the second is alright, but after twenty-nine, I just don’t care anymore. I won’t believe anything you say. Stop gaslighting me.

It was one of these cases where EVERYTHING is connected. Nothing is a coincidence, apart from Kit going to work Lenora. Save for that detail, everything and everyone was connected to everything, and I just don’t enjoy stories like this, precisely because they feel like stories instead of actual events that we following unfold organically. It makes the world seem claustrophobic.

The story did have its pros still! Don’t believe I’m a Negative Nancy, I do have a heart and the ability to find joy. I swear. This novel did manage to give me some chills. I hadn’t even realised until it was the middle of the night and I prefered to hold my bladder rather than walk ten meters to the restroom, so that’s something! I would not discourage anyone from reading it, just not actively recommend it unless you are looking for a very average thriller with many underwhelming reveals (but at least one that made me gasp).

The Bear and the Nightingale (2017)

This review will probably be much shorter, as is often the case when a book is good, ‘good’ being a horrible understatement here. I picked up this novel by chance, because it was immediately available at my library. I had never heard of it, I didn’t even know it was the first part of a series, I knew nothiiiing at all, but I liked the summary and I don’t need much more. Even my reason for reading it at the time I did was random as hell: my hold was almost up. I went into it with zero expectations, and I came out with my breath taken away.

Soon orphaned of her mother, Vasya is everything she would have hoped for: a strange child that seems to see things no else can and speak to them. The villagers soon take notice, as does her god-fearing step-mother and the village’s new priest, raising suspicions on her devilish nature. However, this is not the only threat Vasya must face. Winters are getting longer and leaner as the years go by, and a man with one eye seems to haunt the forest that surround them.

It felt like reading a 19th century classic (I’ve never read one from Russia but still), complete with the sexualisation of a teenage girl. Except in this case, it was done by a male antagonist, not the hero or the author, and it was a dramatic plot point, not a banalised observation. Thank you, Katherine. I love the Count of Monte Cristo, but SPOILER why did Haydée, his ward, end up as his lover and redemption??? Can he not have a happy-ish ending without sleeping with a teenage girl he raised?? Why was that necessary, Dumas??

Anyhoo.

I loved the lyrical prose used by Arden, as well as her choice of what to describe and what to ignore. This is a tightrope act that I feel like a lot of writers do not achieve, sometimes saying too little, often saying way too much, which in turn drowns the story in unimportant details. Here, everything was both interesting, poetic, and important. I always enjoy stories that touch on religion and spirituality, especially on folk religions, so I loved seeing the symbiotic relationship between the people and the myriad of deities that surround them: gods that both embody and control ovens, stables and horses, baths, rivers, trees, courtyards, etc; how the formers’ worship impacted the latters, which impacted the life of the formers and so on. Magic systems or mythologies that depend on equivalence, or cause and effect, are fascinating to me. There is something comforting about them, about believing that to offer bread to an invisible deity will protect your family and your home from hunger.

Katherine Arden lived there for one year and she has a degree in Russian, so I felt quite safe trusting her on that aspect, but I want more! I will definitely be bingeing all of the Wikipedia pages I can find on the subject, and maybe buy a book or three.

My only caveat would probably be that, though I had a good time while reading, I had trouble picking it up again once it was closed. I think it lacked maybe a sense of urgency, or thrill to make me go back to it. As it was, obstination was my main motivation, and I don’t know if I will be reading the rest of the series. The novel ended in a way that satisfied me, I do not feel the need to know what happens next. In my opinion, it holds up as a stand-alone novel. I still might, if I’m in want of a beautifully-crafted folk fantasy novel, but I think I might sooner read Arden’s new work, The Unicorn Hunters, which seems right up my alley!

Red Mars (1992)

I decided that 2026 would be year I finish my thesis, and for that to happen I need to read all of my corpus. It is made up of ten SF texts that deal in some way with the international law of spaces (yes, I did mean to write it with an s), and out of the ten I have read six and disliked five. Yup. I’ve come to a point where I wonder if I even enjoy SF as a genre. Like fantasy, it is choke full of duds that, for some reason, are hailed as classics, and time and time again I get bamboozled by a cool premise that turns out to have a piss-poor execution.

Thankfully, there are novels like Red Mars that remind me that yes, SF can be good. It can be well-written and well thought-out! I know, insane. I really hope the four remaining texts will be more akin Red Mars than Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson), Permutation City, Diaspora (both by Greg Egan), Infomocracy (Malka Older), and Too Like the Lightning (Ada Palmer). Not that all of these novels are piss-poor! I won’t put them all in the same bag, I’m not cruel enough to pretend that Too Like the Lightning and Diaspora are anything alike. Too Like the Lightning actually has a plot.

Anyway, just when I was losing hope that I would like ANY of the texts in my corpus, I read Red Mars. I had tried before, years before starting my PhD, and I hadn’t managed to get past the first few pages. In that way, it was similar to my first experience with The Lord of the Rings: a monument of its genre that I really wanted to discover but that was just too dense for me to get through at that age. I waited a few years and tried again, and suddenly LOTR didn’t seem so obscure anymore. It actually was enjoyable! The exact same happened when I opened Red Mars again last March. Not to say that it was all of a sudden an easy read. It remains hard SF and 800 pages long, and therefore demands some endurance, but what a great marathon it was!

From year to year, we see their interactions, the relationships they form, the structures they build, the ideals that they strive for, and how the greed of Terran States and corporations killed the utopia it could have been (and was meant to be per the fictitious Mars Treaty and the very real Outer Space Treaty). Conflicts between the scientists/colonists start pretty soon after their arrival on Mars, some lobbying to terraformthe planet to make it easier to inhabit and to exploit the Greens), some defending the need to protect Mars’ integrity to study it, sure, but also because it should not fall onto humans to decide to disfigure a celestial body for their own convenience )the Reds). One conversation in particular struck me.

Ann Clayborne, a geologist who is considered as the leader, or the most vocal, of the Reds, is being surrounded by the other colonists because she went over their heads, straight to the U.N., to protest againt the plans to terraform Mars:

“It’s clear what you all think about this, we’ve gone over it many times before, and nothing I’ve said makes any difference to you. Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as well as the whole history of a planet, scarcely changed in the last billion years. And you’re going to wreck it all. And without ever honestly admitting what you’re doing, either. Because we could live here and study the planet without changing it— we could do that with very little harm or even inconvenience to ourselves. All this talk of radiation is bullshit and you know it. There’s simply not a high enough level of it to justify this mass alteration of the environment. You want to do that because you think you can. You want to try it out and see— as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to build castles in. A big Mars jar! You find your justifications where you can, but it’s bad faith, and it’s not science.”

Sax Russel, main driving force of the Greens (for what seems to be his own ego, as he appears to only want to terraform Mars because he is fascinated with the idea of being able to do it) showboasts a bit for the benefit of their audience:

“The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.” […] « “Now that we are here,” he went on, “it isn’t enough to just hide under ten meters of soil and study the rock. That’s science, yes, and needed science too. But science is more than that. Science is part of a larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us. Science is creation. The lack of life here, and the lack of any finding in fifty years of the SETI program, indicates that life is rare, and intelligent life even rarer. And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It’s too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out. And so now we’re on two, three if you count the moon. And we can change this one to make it safer to live on. Changing it won’t destroy it. Reading its past might get harder, but the beauty of it won’t go away. If there are lakes, or forests, or glaciers, how does that diminish Mars’s beauty? I don’t think it does. I think it only enhances it. It adds life, the most beautiful system of all. But nothing life can do will bring Tharsis down, or fill Marineris. Mars will always remain Mars, different from Earth, colder and wilder. But it can be Mars and ours at the same time. And it will be. There is this about the human mind: if it can be done, it will be done. We can transform Mars and build it like you would build a cathedral, as a monument to humanity and the universe both. We can do it, so we will do it. So—” he held up a palm, as if satisfied that the analysis had been supported by the data in the graph— as if he had examined the periodic table, and found that it still held true—”we might as well start.”

(what a load of undiluted ethno-centrist bullshit) To that, knowing full well she won’t prevail, Ann responds:

“I think you value consciousness too high, and rock too little. We are not lords of the universe. We’re one small part of it. We may be its consciousness, but being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror image of us. It means rather fitting into it as it is, and worshiping it with our attention.” She met Sax’s mild gaze, and one final flare of her anger jetted out: “You’ve never even seen Mars.”

My (stoic, bright, ecologist) queen <3

All of the characters are extraordinarily complex and realist, but what impressedmost in Robinson’s writing was how, depending through whose POV we were seeing an interaction, our perception of characters changed. The first POV is Maya’s, the leader of the Russian contingent among the First Hundred, and she has quite a poor opinion of Ann, that she sees as cold and unfeeling, whereas when we are in Nadia’s head, we see that Ann is a no-nonsense person that is wholly devoted to her work and to science, showing a more flattering side of her. At the end of the novel, we have a more nuanced idea of who each person is.

Maya’s depiction by the other characters was particularly interesting. As I said, she is our first POV and we discover her as a leader, a diplomat, an administrator, but also as a friend and a lover. A well-round person. However, afterward and throughout the whole novel, the other POVs have quite a negative image of her. Needy, sometimes pathetic, inconstant in her affections, jumping from man to man, she is shown as the type of woman who defines herself through her relationships with men. Michel judges her, Frank resents her, John loves her but sees her as volatile. It is only at the very end, when shit hits the fan and she pulls her own weight, leading the others to salvation, that I realised that those POV were biased against her and that they had led me to be biased as well. Maya is a woman who falls in love, yes, and so what? Should she apologise for having been attracted and having attracted two men, two friends? From day 1, she was a leader, a hard worker, an active participant in the colonies and in the diplomatic relationship with Earth. I thought that was masterful of K. S. Robinson.

There is so much more I’d like to say about this novel but this article is already long enough. Prepare yourelves for an in-depth analysis of Red Mars and its depiction of space colonisation in the coming weeks! In the meantime, I cannot recommand this novel enough. It is a mastodon of a novel, and spends a lot of time on sciencey concepts, but it is also poetic, deep in its treatment of human nature, and even funny at times!

Until next time!