Review of The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

The Stone Sky is the third novel in the Hugo award winning Broken Earth trilogy. While perhaps slightly less engrossing than the other two novels, it is still a grand finale to the series. The trilogy features incredible original world building. Its various elements interlock with a thorough consistency. The characters control the world, live the world, breathe the world.
                

The series is set in a world dominated by seismic events. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions regularly send the world into a fifth season, which is an extended winter where the sky is full of dust and the sun is blocked for years on end. This causes widespread famines. Tsunamis from the earthquakes also regularly inundate coastal areas.

There are a special class of people called Orogenes who can sense these seismic events about to happen and, depending on the orogene’s power and the severity of the event, can limit their destructiveness. The orogene can also cause these seismic events, either deliberately or as a result of out-of-control emotions. Consequently, they are feared by the general population, and any child found with these traits is murdered unless they are taken by the Guardians.

The Guardians teach the orogenes to control their power and use it to limit seismic events. The Guardians have powers that can control the orogenes and can hurt the orogenes to discipline them. They subject them to a servitude that verges on slave labour.

The trilogy’s main character is an orogene who goes through various names. She comes to the attention of a Guardian who then trains her. She is then sent out into the world to use her abilities to stop seismic events or use them to do things like clear harbour entrances. But she goes rogue. In the third novel she is searching for her daughter, Nassun, who was taken by her husband. Nassun is also an orogene. Mother and daughter are unaware they have two competing goals, one wants to stop fifth seasons from occurring forever, while the other wants to destroy the world.

The prose for this novel is some of the best I have read in genre fiction. N.K. Jemisin really knows how to construct descriptive narratives. I was often marvelling at a sentence she had written. The characters, for the most part, have a real emotional impact on the reader. The reader develops a strong empathy for their situation and their planned actions, even though they could involve the deaths of millions.

The Stone Sky finally brings in the backstory that shows how the world became so susceptible to seismic events. It does this by introducing the story of a group of exploited orogenes from the distance past. The mother and daughter then have their confrontation that brings the series to a compelling conclusion.

This is one of the best fantasy trilogies I have read. I find fantasy full of wizards and trolls and, dare I say, hobbits, so boring these days. This series thrashes most fantasy because of its sheer originality and the author’s writing prowess. It is not a novel for the faint-hearted as it contains physical child abuse. Good and evil are not as clear cut as it is in most fantasy. All three of the trilogy’s novels won Hugo awards, which is a feat unmatched by any other series.
                 

Review of Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Kindred is a harrowing time-travel novel that is rightly acknowledged as a science-fiction classic. It is the story of a black American writer, Dana, living in 1976 with her white writer husband Kevin. They are moving into a new house when she collapses and is transported back to the America of 1815. There she meets one of her ancestors, Rufus, the white child of a slave owner. A boy who she will encounter many times over his life. She saves Rufus’ life but is still treated like a slave by the boy’s father. A special slave with medical knowledge that is useful to them, but she is still beaten and whipped when they deem that she has misbehaved.

The novel very much explores what it was like to be a slave, a possession that can be used as the owner likes. It could be worked until it collapsed, beaten when it disobeyed, raped, bred and its children sold. It was not human, just a farm animal. The slaves don’t behave like farm animals as they create their own community. They look after each other for the most part. They accept Dana and try to help her adjust to her circumstances.

There are four classes of slaves. The lowest being those who work in the fields. Then there are the house slaves: the cooks, the cleaners etc. Above them, for the most part, are slaves who were sired by the slave owner, and then there is Dana. But no matter their rank, they all risk being beaten, whipped, raped, or sold off, even if they are married to a slave who is not sold off.

There are two pivotal plot factors that affect the direction of this time-travel story. The first is that Dana can return from the world of the early 1800s to 1976 when certain events occur. The second is that she must ensure that the somewhat reckless Rufus survives for herself to be eventually born.  The relationship between Dana and Rufus is complex, but in the end, it boils down to him being a white slave owner and her being a slave.

Dana’s reactions to the situation she finds herself in are believable. She quickly decides to keep her origins secret as the people of 1815 would not believe her and think her mad. This changes as she gains the trust of others. She does not freak out. She decides to keep a low profile and not draw attention to herself. An unrealistic book would have her go on a crusade to free the slaves. Mentally she is a strong woman.

The book creates a real empathy for the plight of Dana and the slaves on the estate. I desperately wanted characters like Alice, Carrie, Luke, and Dana, of course, to survive, gain their freedom, live as equals, and prosper. I hoped the civil war was around the corner and would put an end to slavery, but that war was decades away. If these slaves were going to gain freedom, they were going to have to do it themselves.

Those readers who treat the novel as a thriller may be disappointed with the ending as we never learn why Dana is being transported back to the past. But that is not the point of the novel, it is an exploration of slavery and the inhumanity of whites towards blacks. It is a challenging read, especially for a white guy like me.

I want to say that it is a book everyone should read, but that is such a cliché. But everyone should read this book. America has much to be ashamed of in its past. So does Australia, where Indigenous Australians were exploited as unpaid labour and pacific islander slaves were used in its sugar cane fields. This book really exposes our past and continuing inhumanity to each other and our pathetic disregard for human rights. How greed will have us rationalising the exploitation of others. I would like to say that it shows those under adversity banding together to help each other, and it does, but they are forced to band together to survive, it is not something they have chosen to do.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted. It is not a book for those who think justice will occur in the end. In a world full of greed and divided into tribes who can’t understand each other, justice is still elusive. American, like Australia, is still a hotbed of racism. Kindred is a book that will make you angry. If it doesn’t you are probably a racist.   

Review of Never-Ending Day by Graham Storrs

Never-Ending Day is an enjoyable read. Its title comes from the fact that most of the action takes place in a Dyson wheel which is a structure built around and enclosing a star, so those inside always have the star’s light shining on them.

The story is set hundreds of years into the future where a police officer, Tara Fraser, is chasing a terrorist, Yuna, across space. Tara comes across the previously unknown Dyson wheel, and his ship is captured and dragged in. He assumes the same thing happened to Yuna with her ship, so he goes looking for her, thinking that when he captures her he will worry about escaping the Dyson wheel. He is a really committed cop.

He discovers the wheel is inhabited and stops to ask the natives if they had seen Yuna, using his computer implant to translate. Instead of helping, they capture him. He now has another problem, dealing with a treacherous native population.

The story is written in a light-hearted tone, along the lines of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A tone I found refreshing after reading a lot of hard science-fiction and literature. This tone is reflected in the banter between Fraser and Yuna. Fraser is a stick in the mud, doing everything by the book even though he knows his employers are not the nicest people. While Yuna loves to break laws and rules and is prone to impulsive actions. Some of which are successful, others which are not.

I have read a couple of other of Graham Storr’s novels in the Timesplash series, which I plan to return to with his third novel in that series. They are time-travel thriller novels, while Never Ending Day is more of an adventure novel with plenty of humour.

I did find the dialogue slightly disconcerting to begin with, as Yuna and Fraser conversed like they were living in the late 20^th Century. But who knows how people will talk in the future. I recently listened to a radio program on trends which said that everything old is coming back in again, so maybe in hundreds of years times it will be trendy to talk like people in the 20^th Century. The dialogue was very funny at times.

 After reading a lot of hard science-fiction, I enjoyed reading something fun. I very much cared for the protagonists and really hoped they could come to some mutual arrangement to escape the wheel and its somewhat suspect inhabitants.

A review of Julia by Sandra Newman

I can’t remember reading a more harrowing novel than Sandra Newman’s Julia. The novel really had me fearing for the two main characters and where our society might be heading. Julia is the story of Winston Smith’s lover from the novel 1984. I read 1984 decades ago, so I am not sure how much the story in Julia diverges from Orwell’s novel, but Julia seems to be set in a lot more desolate world than what I remember of Orwell’s 1984.

Julia is much more than the story of her relationship with Winston Smith. We meet Julia as a child of well-off parents, but then the parents get on the wrong side of Big Brother, and they are banished to a special area zone. A zone full of proles and labour camps. But with the help of her mother, Julia manages to get a job in the Ministry of Truth. She is a mechanic whose main task is to keep the machines running in the Fiction Department. A department that, among other things, rewrites novels and poems to make them suit the Big Brother ethos. It is there that she meets Winston Smith.

Julia lives in a rundown dorm with other unmarried women. It is very basic, just a bunk bed with a cupboard and surrounded by telescreens to keep an eye on the women. The dorm has no showers, and the toilets keep getting clogged. It is in a state of decay like the rest of London, except for the Party areas. Apart from the failure to fix and clean the infrastructure due to resources being spent on the ongoing war, many areas of London have been bombed and continue to be bombed.

Julia is a product of her environment. She keeps to herself, hardly trusting anyone. She hides her occasional sexual activity, as unmarried sex is illegal. Like many, she pays lip service to the plethora of Big Brother rules. She is definitely guilty of Wrong Think as she pretends to display hate during the daily hate broadcasts. She puts on a total front to the world. She is a strong woman whose sole aim is survival, but she is also a victim of the society she lives in. She has no intention of rebelling against Big Brother.

On the other hand, Winston Smith is full of secret bravo about taking on Big Brother. He seeks the truth and is looking for a way to fight to achieve it. When they first meet, Julia thinks he is somewhat naïve. She eventually sees him as someone totally deluded by thoughts of a successful rebellion.

The ending of the novel looked like it was going to surprise, to leave the reader with hope for Julia, but that hope is squashed under yet another boot.

As I read the novel, I found myself becoming paranoid about who might be watching me and how much of a performance everyone is giving to me. That is the sort of effect this novel can have. It is an excellent read, and really rams home the warning that we should be wary of ceding our freedom to bright and shiny false hopes like Trump and Putin.

I think Julia will be considered a classic in the not-too-distant future. Either that, or it might be rewritten to suit the authoritarian government of the day. I also would not be surprised if a Big Brother of the future recommends school children read Julia so they will fear the consequences of Wrong Think.

The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer

 

The Terminal Experiment is a terrific science fiction thriller set in what was the author’s near future. It was written in 1995 and set in 2011. The novel has a prologue, so the reader knows that a murder is going to happen, and a police officer is also going to be poisoned.

The plot starts with a scientist, Dr Peter Hobson, accidently discovering the electrical signature of a soul leaving a body. This discovery has all sorts of implications for society. Some people suicide so their soul can go to a better place, some go on health kicks as they fear where their soul might end up. But this is only the beginning of Hobson’s experiments with the human mind.

Hobson then teams up with another scientist to conduct an experiment where copies of his mind are uploaded onto a computer. He alters two of the copies in different ways and a third is a control copy. The experiments don’t go as expected, with Hobson’s marital problems having an effect on them.

As mentioned, the novel was written in 1995, so it is interesting to see what technology Sawyer has people using in 2011. Obviously, no one uploaded human minds that functioned as such in 2011. And no one had tracked the human soul in 2011. But, for the most part, the technology is what it actually was like in 2011. Sawyer had a really good grasp of what the internet might be like. The one major missing technology is mobile phones, with characters often having to find a phone to use. Many of the phones did have video screens though.

The novel has some wonderful speculations on what uploaded minds might get up to. It also has some very interesting insights into how police can manipulate the people they investigate. Sawyer seems to have a keen interest in police procedures due to the nature of his novels, like Flash Forward.

I have not read many “crime” novels set in the future, so reading The Terminal Experiment was an enjoyable different read for me. It may be the type of novel that introduces readers of crime fiction to science fiction. It is very much a page-turner.

The Glad Shout by Alice Robinson

The Glad Shout is a novel that will shake many readers expectations of their future prospects. It portrays a potential future for many of us, especially those who live near the coast. The novel is set in 2045 after a massive storm has flooded Melbourne, destroying much of the housing and infrastructure, including power.

The story is about one family: Isobel, her three-year-old daughter Margaret, and Shane her husband. It is told almost exclusively from Isobel’s point of view. The family have just made their way out of the floodwaters to higher ground in a sports stadium. It could be the MCG but that is never made clear. It is supposed to be an evacuation centre but has limited supplies, limited staff and virtually no communication with the outside world.

The family sets up a tent in the muddy stadium field. They then wait to find out the extent of the damage to Melbourne and where they might eventually be relocated to. There is a lot of tension in the camp. As the novel is set in Australia, it fortunately lacks the American gun and gang culture. No one tries to take control with guns as would happen in many similar American novels. For the most part, the survivors still behave like they are part of a continuing society that has order to it.

In between the story of Isobel and her family’s attempts to survive, the novel explores her backstory. Isobel and her older brother, Josh, were brought up by their mother, Luna, a real estate agent. To Isobel, Luna seemed more concerned about having a house that looked like it belonged in a magazine photoshoot than being a caring mother. Isobel frequently escaped to stay with her bohemian grandmother who also lived in Melbourne. Her and Josh also frequently holidayed at their grandfather’s small farm.

Through the backstory we learn that Isobel has had an emotionally unfulfilling childhood. She longed for a mother who took more interest in her and her brother. We also see the creeping effect of climate change, and how it changed the character’s lives over the years.

The plight of internal climate change refugees is one of the themes of the novel. As climate change destroys the environment and the economy, more and more people are displaced. 

The novel is much more than a disaster story. It is about how a woman needs to take control for her family to survive while exploring her fears, desires, concerns for her child, and sense of abandonment, as well as her questioning whether she could have done more to prepare for the disaster and climate change.   

The story is written in first person and present tense, giving it a real urgency. It is very well-written as it immerses the reader in the main character’s life.

This is a fantastic novel that should scare climate change complacency out of many of its readers. It should have them asking if it is even possible to prepare for coming climate change disasters. It asks these questions while exploring a woman’s life and the effects of her family on it.

Review of Saha by Cho Nam-Joo

Saha is a dystopian novel set on a fictious Korean island called Town. The island is completely corporatised. Everything is run by a company, from education to health to the government. To survive in Town you have to be a good corporate citizen. It is the sort of utopia someone like Elon Musk or Gina Rinehart would idolise.  

The story is set around what was an abandoned housing tower complex, Saha, which is now inhabited by dispossessed squatters. They have set up their own power source, have a well for water, and a vegetable garden. They are tolerated by the authorities as they can be used for menial labour. But they have no access to any services, like medical, social security or educational services. Charities don’t exist. The squatters are classified as non-citizens who are left to fend for themselves.

The novel tells the story, in an episodic fashion, of the inhabitants of Saha. It begins with Do-Kyung waking and vomiting, and then finding Su dead in a car. We are not told what has happened as he flees. But the novel is not a mystery. It is an examination of the lives of people who have been abandoned by a totally corporatised society. A society, from what I have read, that South Korea is not far from in reality.

Some of the characters have deformities, like the one-eyed Sara. Some of the characters are fleeing persecution. One of the characters is used for medical experimentation. Many of them have secrets. All of them hope for a better life. All of them hope to one day become citizens of Town.

Saha is a novel that questions how the less fortunate are treated in society and where neo-liberalism is taking us. This could be the western world of the near future. It is probably close to the China of the present. It is a brutal novel that could devastate a reader who is yet to realise how harmful and uncaring capitalism is.

I found the writing good, but a bit stilted to begin with. I think the style of writing emphasises the uncaring nature of the society and how the novel’s characters are not able to participate in it.

I really enjoyed the novel and will be looking up more of Cho Nam-Joo's writing. I really cared about the characters and what happened to them. I recommend this book to any readers who have a social conscience. 

[Spoiler alert] The ending is ambiguous. I took it to mean that the characters find no one to attack or blame for their plight, just a faceless corporation.