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Author: Soyka

Everyone Knows This is Nowhere: The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville

Everyone Knows This is Nowhere: The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville

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The Book of Elsewhere (Del Rey, July 23, 2024). Jacket design by Drusilla Adeline

Can someone who has been alive for 80,000 years find wonder and meaning in every day life? Would such an immortal still be capable of surprise, still uncertain about his own motivations, still unable to come to grips with the meaning of it all? After experiencing centuries upon centuries of the death of others, and frequently inflicting those deaths, do you become oblivious to the fate of mortal souls as just so many anthill denizens?

Is there anyone else out there like you? And why are you the way you are? Would the wish for mortality indicate a Freudian death wish, or instead a yearning to experience the existential perils and the perplexities of being that paradoxically imbue significance?

These are the intertwined questions posed by The Book of Elsewhere, a tie-in novel by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville based on BRZRKR, a 12-issue comic book (graphic novel?) co-written by Reeves. The title refers to when the protagonist suffers episodes of uncontrollable violence and goes “berserk” (get it?), although “suffer” is perhaps better applied to those in the line of fire of his rage.

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Not Fade Away: The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

Not Fade Away: The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

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The Cemetery of Untold Stories (Algonquin Books, April 2, 2024). Cover artist unknown

We live our life telling a story

Of what we’ve said and done

But lately you caused me to worry

That you’re spinning fiction

— Amanda Fish, “The Hard Way,” Kingdom

What perhaps separates humans from our fellow creatures is the capacity, indeed the compulsion, of storytelling. Hardly an original observation on my part (cf., The Stortelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall), though for all we know the white whale biting off the mad captain’s leg is vocalized in Cetacea pods.

Stories, and discussions of stories, are why you are all reading here. Of course it’s not limited to the literate classes, as the rich oral tradition of ancient cultures demonstrates, not to mention the popularity among screen-addicts of  so-called “reality shows” of otherwise untalented people whose only achievement is being on a reality show. Though even that low level of celebrityhood is further diluted in an era where just about everyone has their own Instagram following.

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The Great Escapes: James, Kindred, The Reformatory by Percival Everett, Octavia Butler, and Tananarive Due

The Great Escapes: James, Kindred, The Reformatory by Percival Everett, Octavia Butler, and Tananarive Due

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James (Doubleday, March 19, 2024), Kindred (Doubleday,
July 1979), and The Reformatory (S&S/Saga Press, October 31, 2023

Percival Everett’s James is receiving a lot of well-deserved critical praise. As the title indicates (and the choice of the formal name a key trope), this reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn elevates the escaped slave Jim from supporting stereotypical character to leading man status. Fearing he is about to be sold by his owner and separated from his family, James becomes a runaway not just for his own sake, but to find a way to free his wife and daughter. Along the way, he meets Huck who has just faked his death to escape an abusive father. So far we’re close to Twain’s original, and while Everett retains some events, the perspective shifts to focus on James’s journey towards safety and dignity.

As with many of Everett’s novels, James is a satire of white perceptions of Blacks, reinventing James as highly literate and articulate. In an ironic reversal of enslaver laws that prohibit educating slaves, all Blacks are well-spoken amongst themselves and only resort to uneducated and subservient slang when in presence of their white oppressors. James calls it a “slave filter”: “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them. The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us.”

Highly recommended, as is just about anything in the Everett catalog.

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We Are All Time Traveling Together: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

We Are All Time Traveling Together: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

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The Ministry of Time (Avid Reader Press, May 7, 2024)

Perhaps second only to space travel, science fiction is obsessed with time travel and in particular the paradox that if we go back to the past, how do we affect the future; can we inadvertently or purposely alter our “present”? Sometimes the answer is that your somehow being in the past is essential to determining your present (e.g., Kindred by Octavia Butler where the protagonist travels back to antebellum South to ensure an ancestor stays alive). Other times the innocent butterfly effect (e.g., Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder) has disastrous consequences; even attempting something seemingly good, such as thwarting a presidential assassination, proves catastrophic (e.g., Stephen King’s 1/22/63 ). Then there’s the question of how visitors from the future to our present seek to change future events (e.g., the Terminator movie franchise).

H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine is a canonical SF work because it offers a technology, rather than magical intervention, that enables time travel (hence the title). In addition to its social criticism, The Time Machine is a quintessential adventure tale. The hero enters a strange land populated by equally strange different beings nonetheless still sort of like us, whose use of advanced technology causes disaster. The hero manages escape, but then mysteriously disappears, perhaps in search of something better than what awaits back home.

Which brings us to Kaliane Bradley’s Ministry of Time, in which she reverse-engineers a number of these time travel and adventure tropes.

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H. Bruce Franklin, February 28, 1934 — May 19, 2024

H. Bruce Franklin, February 28, 1934 — May 19, 2024

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H. Bruce Franklin

I was sad to learn that H(oward) Bruce Franklin, emeritus John Cotton Dana endowed Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark and author of numerous books, essays, and exhibitions related to science fiction, died at the age of 90 on May 19.  On a personal note, in grad school I took his seminar in science fiction studies, which reignited my interest in science fiction and prompted me to start writing about it. So, for better or worse, I probably wouldn’t be posting here were it not for Dr. Franklin.

During the 1960s, Dr. Franklin was fired from Stanford despite being tenured supposedly for inciting student anti-Vietnam war protests. A former Air Force navigator and intelligence office in the Strategic Air Command, he also resigned his commission in protest of that war.

While his range of published work ranged from Melville studies to prison literature to fish ecology, he frequently used science fiction as a lens to comment upon American history, particularly as it relates to Vietnam and the forever wars that extended to Iraq and Afghanistan.  He was awarded a number of honors, including the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) Pilgrim Award and Pioneer Award, as well as an Eaton Award. He was a Distinguished Scholar for the International Association for Fantastic in the Arts, and was a Guest Curator for the Star Trek and the Sixties exhibit at the Smithsonian and Hayden Planetarium. From its inception up until 2002, Dr. Franklin was a consulting editor of Science Fiction Studies.

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Besties: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by R.F. Kuang

Besties: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by R.F. Kuang

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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023
(Mariner Books, October 17, 2023)

Perhaps the most overused title for short story anthologies beings with “Best of.” In genre fiction, the heavyweight (in terms of both size and breadth of coverage) was the Gardner Dozois-edited The Year’s Best Science Fiction Stories that ran for 35 years until his death in 2018. And there are a whole slew of similar “Best of’s” for horror, dark fantasy, speculative fiction, you name a subgenre and there’s a “Best of” collection.

If “Best of” is overused for survey anthologies of a year and/or genre, and recognizing that someone’s “best” is someone else’s “meh,” it is probably because a more accurate title of This is Kinda What the Editor Liked More than Others For Whatever Subjective Reasons doesn’t go over well with publisher marketing teams.

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Frankly Frankenstein

Frankly Frankenstein

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My guess is that even people who’ve never read the novel or seen the Boris Karloff version likely recognize that “Frankenstein” signifies a human-made scientific creation that bites back. (Though they probably do confuse which is the creator and which is the actual monster.)

Here in the 21st century, what Mary Shelley depicted way back at the start of the 19th is embedded in our cultural collective consciousness, even for those people who don’t pay attention to the culture unless it involves Taylor Swift, because of how often it actually occurs throughout history. Take your pick of technological disasters, the latest perhaps being AI.

Of course the reason why Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus  is a canonical work even before SF gained some legitimacy in academia is that this isn’t just a gothic horror story (though it is of course that).

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My Three Problems with the Three-Body Problem

My Three Problems with the Three-Body Problem

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The Three-Body Problem (Tor Books, November 11, 2014). Cover by Stephan Martiniere

In the middle of trying to explain quantum mechanics to me, my physicist friend stopped in frustration and said, “This would all make a lot more sense if you understood math.”

Alas, I am one of those recovering English majors who never could wrap their heads around anything more basic than simple arithmetic (and not so good at even that). Intellectually, I can intuit how mathematical prowess unleashes secrets of the universe, while also presenting further paradoxes. (I kinda, sorta get Schrödinger’s cat, but not really.) But my eyes glaze over at the actual work of adding it all up. Which explains my barely passable grades back in college for courses such as Science for non-Science Majors.  

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The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit: The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit: The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

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The Strange (Saga Press, March 21, 2023). Cover uncredited

I wish I could take credit for the headline of The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit for Nathan Ballingrud’s terrific novel, but according to the author, Karen Jay Fowler came up with it. I hope she won’t mine me stealing it because it is as spot on as any description I could come up with.

The more prosaic version is that The Strange is a Western riff on Ray Bradbury’s vision of Mars, but without the canals. A Mars in an alternate 1930s timeline when interplanetary space travel first began during the Civil War, an oblique reference (among a slew of oblique references to classic SF tropes and personages) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter, an ex-Confederate Barsoom warlord. Just as Bradbury had no interest in explaining how humans could actually exist on Mars sans space suits in a sort of off-world version of 1950s Illinois, or Burroughs how you can get astrally projected from an Arizona cave to Mars, Ballingrud just wants you to suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride.

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A Kick-ass Female Perspective on Comics That’s Disturbingly Close to Real-Life: The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

A Kick-ass Female Perspective on Comics That’s Disturbingly Close to Real-Life: The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

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the-refrigerator-monologues-smallThe Wonder Woman movie has received considerable buzz for depicting an interesting lead female character who actually has a personality, is not dependent on some guy to come to her rescue and truly is the star attraction; it even has a female director. It’s enough to make you forgive the silly and at this point yawn inducing CGI pyrotechnics between good and evil ending that is apparently sacrosanct in these sort of flicks. Look, I enjoyed the movie, but for all its merits it’s still a sad commentary of our times that Wonder Woman is considered somehow ground breaking. Problem is, compared to the latest crop of superhero movies (maybe even movies in general) the bar isn’t set very high.

You want some real kick-ass female perspective on the comic book world that’s disturbingly close to real-life? Check out The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente. This is a series of short stories set in shared alternate comic book universe (with characters such as Grimdark and Kid Mercury and Doctor Nocturne evoking various Marvel and DC Comics personages) linked by a sort of AA session in which deceased women (with one exception who for her own reasons hangs out among the unliving) take turns explaining how they ended up in Deadtown, i.e., thanks to some male superhero or supervillian exploit.

The title of the collection is a take-off of The Vagina Monologues — the Eve Ensler play about sex and body image told from the perspectives of a variety of women representing different ethnic, sexual and class identities — and comic book writer Gail Simone’s observation that comic book women are typically hypersexualized for a male audience and often end up “refrigerated” — killed, disabled, or otherwise rendered marginalized or powerless in order to advance a male character’s storyline. Indeed, in “Happy Birthday, Samantha Dane” the title character literally ends up in a refrigerator. (And, by the way, is just one of many great comic book kind of names that Valente invents for her cast of characters. Also by the way, it’s worth noting that in Wonder Woman a male character dies to advance our heroine’s story — perhaps an intentional inversion of the refrigerator motif?)

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