Dream with Our Eyes Open

In 2005, artist Rhea Ewing had a lot of questions about their own gender identity. Some of those questions were so big and so formless that they didn't even know how to ask them.

They started a kind of study, gathering people who were willing to talk to Ewing about their gender identities. Because Ewing thought in visuals, they turned it into a comic. It was originally meant to be maybe 30 pages, a little project for their final university project. Ewing soon realized that this work was too complex and multifaceted to be that simple booklet, and in fact, they didn't finish the comic until the early 2020s.

The book is arranged by topics, starting with Femininity and Masculinity and then working through more of the interviewees' experiences within themselves and then out in the world of other people, through Hormones, Healthcare, Queer Community, and much more. Under each topic are relevant snippets of the actual interviews, drawn as lively, expressive comics, and the words of the interviewees are thought-provoking and sometimes heart-rending.

Some reviewers I've read are miffed with Ewing, because the artist doesn't come up with a specific plan or specific answers to the issue of gender in today's society (and yes, there is acknowledgement and discussion of variations in culture within that society). But in fact, there are conclusions, expressed on the last couple of pages before the acknowledgments. What there isn't is a step-by-step recipe for "solving" the question of gender. And if you really read that far, you should appreciate why.

A being called Kai wakes up to find himself in a glass box, feeling terrible. His mental powers confirm that a dear friend is somewhere near, but she's feeling equally out of it. Then a gang of unsavory characters show up, dragging with them a dead body and a struggling prisoner. With an ease that shows he's done this many times before, Kai transfers himself into the dead body.

Wait, what?

In less than five minutes, the little band of evildoers discover that they are facing not the helpless ensorcelled person that they had expected, but a fully functioning and extremely pissed off major demon:

"Now," Kai said, grinning, as he shoved the veil aside. "Which one of you wants to go first?"

This is not the Wells of Murderbot, with relatively straightforward plots and a narrator with a limited interest in the worldbuilding around it, but instead the Wells of the Fall of Ile-Rien and Books of the Raksura, with rich, multi-layered histories and landscapes. Some readers may be disappointed; I was enthralled.

After a series of brief action-filled set pieces in which Kai, his friend Ziede, and the former prisoner (who turns out to be a street urchin named Sanja) escape the islet tomb/tower in which the two adults were imprisoned, the book starts to alternate the current timeline plot, in which Kai and Ziede start to unravel the mystery of who imprisoned them and why, with sections set in Kai's past, where we find out more about what he is and what he cares about.

I really liked this book, but then, I trust Wells to tell a story that I will enjoy, and she seems to be as addicted to the Family of Choice trope as I am.

Witch King has drawn an extremely mixed bag of reviews. Part of it is likely due to the fact that readers are thrown into the deep end and expected to figure out this swimming thing themselves. Not everyone likes this approach. What info dumps we do get are brief, basic, and simply told because they are most often directed in-story at young Sanja, who seems to be nine or ten years old.

Another complaint is that except for Kai, we don't get inside anyone's head. This is actually a common Wells characteristic: the sole narrator of Books of the Raksura is Moon, and the sole narrator of the Murderbot Diaries is, of course, Murderbot/SecUnit. (The Fall of Ile-Rien is a little different: we definitely get sections from both Tremaine and Ilias' viewpoints, and I think we get some from Florian in the second and third books.) Again, this isn't something that bothers me.

On the positive side, people have noted with pleasure the fact that much of the story is agendered. Kai's only concerns about the bodies he has inhabited are how useful they are: some bodies require more rest, some need more food to function well, and so on. Gender isn't an issue. Ziede and her wife Tahren are both women, and various members of the supporting cast use they pronouns.

The ending is fairly open: some of the mysteries are solved, but there is plenty of "Yes, but what about …?" to feed into a sequel or sequels. And when I went to move the ebook from my actual Kindle device to the app on my iPad for another re-read (this will be re-read number 3) , I noticed that the current title info says Witch King (The Rising World Book 1). 😃

Usually novels in the form of legends or histories leave me a little cold because the narration style usually draws back from the characters' interior lives. It's not always an insurmountable problem, though. Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea is a book that I learned to love despite the withdrawn, almost cool narrative voice, and it seems that The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo might be another.

When Cleric Chih (along with their intelligent bird companion, Almost Brilliant) comes to inventory the goods of the Imperial residence at Lake Scarlet, they also gradually learns the story of the exiled barbarian empress who most famously lived there. Her teacher is an old woman called Rabbit, who as a low-class girl from the provinces became the servant of the empress In-yo.

This is a strange and strangely beautiful novel, but it didn't really grab me.

So, yeah, slow off the dime on this. Nominations are due March 19. Eeek!

I've read only a few eligible books during the past year, mostly by authors I knew I liked already (Martha Wells, Yoon Ha Lee). I made myself of list of possibles on Big South America River, on the basis of the Locus Recommended Reading List and a few "Best of 2020" review lists, and it's clearly too much to finish by then, even if I skip books that are volumes 2 or 3 of series I haven't been following.

Any recommendations? I just finished Piranesi (Susanna Clarke) and Pacific Storm (Linda Nagata) (... talk about style and mood whiplash!).

A feckless young man has but one wish the day he's released from a prison term for minor charges: to take in some Rakugo, a Japanese art form consisting of storytelling by a single performer who does the narration, all the character voices, and some simple sound effects. He tracks his favorite performer, the master Yakumo Yurakutei VIII, home after a performance and insists on becoming his apprentice. Yakumo never takes apprentices, but somehow the persistence of this awkward and uneducated fellow wears the master down.

At first Yakumo treats the young man, to whom he gives the apprentice name Yotaro, as a combination of man-of-all-work, pet, and comic relief. In addition to Yakumo himself, the household includes Matsuda, his elderly valet/driver/housekeeper, and a moody young woman named Konatsu, who was Yakumo's ward when she was a child. The tension between Konatsu and her guardian is like an open wound: he ignores her most of the time, but when he does notice her, it's usually to remark on how much she looks like her father, and she reacts with angry words and tears. At this point in (recent) history, classical Rakugo was closed to women performers, and Yakumo is adamant that Konatsu will never become a storyteller while in his household.

Yakumo gradually starts treating Yotaro as an actual apprentice, but the young man's real teacher is actually Konatsu. Whatever her history, she has an encyclopedic knowledge of Rakugo stories, and although the master remarks disparagingly about her tutoring of Yotaro, he never outright forbids them to continue. Yotaro's cheerful antics, willingness to work at menial tasks, and enthusiasm make him popular in the yose (Rakugo performance hall), and it looks like he might actually succeed in his ambition.

One day, it all comes crashing down. Yotaro, exhausted from a late night, falls asleep during the evening's storytelling at the yose and snores so loudly that he interrupts his master's performance. Yakumo throws him out. Yotaro comes crawling back, but Yakumo rejects his pleas — and then suddenly has somewhat of a change of heart. He starts to tell Yotaro and Konatsu of his own history, back when he was known as Kikuhiko, and that of his fellow apprentice, the man who became the Rakugo artist Sukeroku: Konatsu's father.

I had never heard of Rakugo before. The theatrical arts always interest me (I used to be in stage crew in high school and college), and the human intrigue of this story adds another dimension, although the story starts out rather slowly. The artwork is pretty great: mangaka Haruko Kumota's drawings remind me a bit of Fumi Yoshinaga's work in its more relaxed versions (What Did You Eat Yesterday?, for example), although it's a little looser and sloppier (example here, showing Yotaro and a more senior apprentice watching Yakumo perform in vol. 1, from Sequential Ink), especially when drawing Yotaro.

You can find Rakugo in English online! Here is a brief comic tale told by woman performer (things have changed).

This josei series is compete in 10 volumes. The five I have read take the story from the beginning to the next section of the modern-day story, after the extended flashback about Sukeroku and Kikuhiko. I certainly intend to finish the series.

ETA:. This is an even better intro to Rakugo, with another woman performer.

This is part of my Hugo Award Reading. I read Anders' first novel, All the Birds in the Sky, back in 2016 and was meh for me. This book is better but still ends up wandering off into nowhere.

The book starts with a small info dump in the guise of translation notes, such as the fact that the people who colonized this planet, January, named the native creatures after animals from their homeworld. You have been warned.

We then join our first protagonist, Sophie. She's from a lower-class family that might, in other settings, be called peasants. Faced with a future as a producer of more peasant agriculturists, she studies with desperate diligence and wins entrance to the university in the city, where she develops a deep crush on her roommate, Bianca. Bianca is beautiful, bright, and at her core, not a great person. She dabbles with the concept of being a revolutionary from a position of extreme privilege, and when things go south, it's not Bianca who falls.

As this story unfolds, we learn about the city and to some extent, the world. In Xiosphant, the activities of the city are controlled to the hour, at a minimum. Timed signals throughout the day tell the citizens when to wake, to eat, to go to work or school. No one breaks curfew, or they are punished. Maniacal little rules occupy any spare thought cycles people might have: food can only be bought with special food currency, for instance, and there are a variety of other currencies for other purchases. Bianca's daring revolutionary actions are trivial: if they were anything else, she'd be dead.

From Sophie's memories, it seems that this draconian governance is somehow a response to the planetary situation. January does not rotate. One side is baked to a fiery hell by its sun; the other side is deathly cold. A narrow temperate zone exists between the two, home to two cities: Xiosphant and Argelo, which we learn about later.

When Sophie takes the blame for Bianca's stupid act of defiance, she is cast out of the city into the edge of the cold zone to die but is unexpectedly saved by a creature considered a hideous and violent monster. When she comes back, she is unable to take up her old life and instead goes to work in a fascinating coffee shop where people can come be different for a short period of time.

At this point, I figured the book was heading into its final arc. I was intrigued and excited. I thought, this time Anders has really nailed it! Somehow Sophie and the underpeople represented at the coffee shop will make things go right! The only thing that didn't seem to work was this strange parallel arc about a traveling merchant called Mouth, part of a desperate crew who bring in contraband goods from Argelo, a strange and dangerous journey. Mouth discovers that the sacred text of her people, whom she lost at a young age, is in the museum in Xiosphant, and plans a burglary under cover of the nascent revolution under the partial leadership of -- you knew this, right? -- Bianca.

And as you've probably also guessed, the book was, in fact, only about half over at that point.

The revolution and Mouth's caper both go badly, and pretty soon, everyone is fleeing back across the horrible leagues between the two cities. After many misadventures, most of the group arrive in Argelo. Mouth and her partner try to fit into non-traveling life, and we get some rather nice "stranger in a strange land" as Sophie and Bianca learn about Argelo. Sadly, Sophie also finally begins to learn about Bianca, who very quickly makes herself at home with the most powerful of the free-wheeling criminal organizations that run the place. Bianca has plans, and Sophie is going to be part of them.

In the final 15% or so of the book, there are battle and horror and catastrophe, and then things just kind of stop.

Anders has a wonderful imagination, and she sometimes has a way with words. But the pieces simply aren't hanging together yet, at least not for me.

I also want to note that the book strikes me as, in some way, a homage to the works of Ursula Le Guin. An obvious inspiration is Le Guin's The Dispossessed, with the two cities and their very different approaches to life on the hostile planet standing in for the worlds of Urras and Anarres. We also have the world January, its very name echoing that of Winter, the outsiders' name for the planet Gethen, setting of Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which also considered the challenges of maintaining a complex civilization in a very hostile environment.

Amal El-Mohtar (a talented author in her own right) reviews SF&F for the New York Times, and her most recent multi-book writeup included very good words indeed about the latest Murderbot:

'While the chief pleasure of the Murderbot Diaries is the protagonist’s unique and delightful voice, “Network Effect” introduces new characters and subtly different perspectives in a way that only amplifies its shocking joy.'

"Shocking joy": I quite like that. It's so nice to see Wells getting the acclaim that she's richly deserved for lo these many years.

However, one of the other books reviewed got me thinking about the issue of re-using a distinctive part of someone else's past work. A book called Docile by K. M. Szpara includes the plot point that (to quote the review) "[debt slaves] are offered Dociline, a drug that makes them willing, contented drones for the duration of their contracts and dims their memories of what they endured as so-called Dociles."

Hello? Anyone besides me remember The Sardonyx Net by Elizabeth Lynn (1981)? Where criminals are sentenced to slave labor on the hell planet Chabad, their suffering relieved by a drug called dorazine, which keep them, well, docile? (James Nicoll has a pretty much no-holds-barred review of it here.)

I have no idea whether Szpara has ever read Lynn's book, but the remarkalble similarity made me feel very indignant, even though The Sardonyx Net is pretty sucky on the ethical axis.

The NYT review also says nice things about Robert Jackson Bennett's Shorefall, reminding me that I need to write that up as well.

This was part of my Hugo reading; also, people were raving about it.

The Ninth House, charged with guarding an infamous tomb, inhabits a gloomy world barely capable of growing food to support its human inhabitants -- and that's saying something, because there aren't that many mortal beings around the place. The residents are necromancer priests and nuns, and most of the servants are animated skeletons. And then there's Gideon.

Gideon is a smart-mouthed, tough young woman with something of a talent for swordwork and a head full of lusty fantasies about pretty girls. In between martial arts training with the Ninth House's aging swords-master and reluctant bouts of menial work, Gideon reads naughty comic books, lobs dirty and sacrilegious quips at her betters, and plots to escape off-world to become a soldier. The main reason she doesn't get worse punishments for her sins is (at a guess) that she is the only young person left in the Ninth House except for the high priestess in waiting, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, and someone will have to serve Harrow in the years to come, besides the skeletons. Gideon and Harrow have a mutual enmity fest going that dates back to infancy.

As the story opens, Gideon's latest escape attempt is foiled, and a message arrives from the Emperor God. The necromancer heirs of all nine Houses are commanded to come to the first House and prove themselves worthy of becoming his Lyctor. And because the challenges will be of both mind and body, each competitor must also bring their cavalier. And who will be Harrow's cavalier? Take a wild guess!

Once the candidates come together at the First House, the story becomes a crazed ride of a locked-room mystery combined with a haunted house Gothic. In fact, this is the first time since Marta Randall's The Sword of Winter (anyone else remember this?), with its murderer run amok on a storm-isolated island castle, that I have come across anything that scratches this particular itch for me. Gideon is encountering other people (and green vegetables) for the first time in her life, even as the body count mounts, and it's in many ways a wonderful experience for her. But she and Harrow come to realize that surviving will mean depending on each other, and the ultimate result of this growing trust is, as one critic pointed out, deeply dysfunctional (but also beautiful, in a sick sort of way).

Gideon has a wonderful narrative voice, rather as though Sha Gojyo (Saiyuki) had been reincarnated as a buff young gay woman: the story is told pretty much entirely from her tight third-person viewpoint.The world-building is sheer crack, with all the good and the bad that implies: are the Houses on separate planets? In separate dimensions? Who cares! But if you do care about this kind of information, you may find this book both slight and frustrating.

I enjoyed this an awful lot, maybe more than it deserves. The sequel, Harrow the Ninth, is due out this August.

Three years ago, the Saint of Steel had died. The god left behind his paladins, men and women sworn to the righteous fight, terrifying in battle against evil when they would run berserk. Empty of their god's spirit and bereft of purpose, the paladins have died, one by one, leaving hardly more than a handful.

Stephen is one, attempting to bury himself in purpose by serving the White Rat, god of the downtrodden, alongside the healers, lawyers, and diplomats who strove to make life better in their kingdom. Every day he gets up and does whatever he's ordered: mostly serving as a bodyguard to healers working the poor and desperate parts of the city. In his spare time, he knits socks and tries not to wish he were dead.

And then one day, while he's on duty in the slums, a woman fleeing from the grim priests of the Hanged Motherhood throws herself into his arms and whispers "Hide me!"

The woman is Grace, a skilled perfumer with an unhappy past, and she and Stephen each find themselves unable to forget the other after their brief (and hilariously dirty) encounter in the alley. Meanwhile, a maniac is leaving headless corpses around the poorer quarters of the city and foreign envoys seem to be weaving political schemes.

What's up with the corpses? Why does the foreign prince want to see Grace in person? Why is Grace being arrested? Will Stephen and Grace ever stop tripping over themselves in each other's presence, despite their non-youthful years? And will Grace ever figure out why Stephen smells like gingerbread?

Readers of "The Clocktaur War" will recognize the setting, and those who have read Swordheart will also recognize the Rat God and its servant, the lawyer Zale. The romance seems almost recycled from Swordheart as well, but Kingfisher says in her notes (in the Acknowledgments at the end) that although she meant to write a sequel to Swordheart, she got sidetracked by a podcast on perfumery: "I thought, 'Man, that could be a great profession for a heroine ... '." And indeed, a great deal of this book is a couple of mysteries that Grace helps solve with her highly trained sense of smell.

I wasn't super-impressed with the book, but I enjoyed it. It's not on par with Swordheart, in my opinion (it's missing the dramatic tension of Sarkis' history), but it's fun. And those who found Halla, the heroine of Swordheart, too passive (I didn't, but I heard there are those who did) may find Grace more to their taste. I found Stephen more fun than Sarkis too, knitting and all.