Erika Swyler’s Light from Other Stars

On February 5, 2019February 18, 2019 By upstateasbIn Fiction, Literary Fiction, Sci-Fi / DypstopianLeave a comment

Entropy. Accelerating/decelerating half-life. De-organizing systems. I understand nothing. Science, technology, Earth is mid-Apocalypse, and a failing space ship carries four pioneers to an unnamed planet. My mind goes “Yadda, yadda, yadda.” And yet. And yet…. You must begin in a tiny Florida town, Easter, on the day Challenger explodes. In a small college lab, an experimental machine named Crucible activates; and time begins to move forward, backward, to slow. Water freezes, ponds boil and frogs scream, viscous liquid drips from power lines. Then, in Easter, time stops.

But, you see, this book, this story, does not focus on science and technology, or on an imaginary world. Rather, it is built around its characters, human beings speaking and thinking as we might, and what treasures they are. At its core there is Nedda, a prodigiously gifted eleven year old, her mother, a brilliant chemist who bakes experimental cakes and her father, the prof who created Crucible. No matter that I don’t understand entropy. What matters is that I will never forget this story and these people. One of my two best reads so far this year. Shines as brightly as the light from any star in any galaxy real or imagined. Hitting bookstores on May 7 (Bloomsbury USA).

Full Disclosure: A review copy of this book was provided to me by Bloomsbury USA / Bloomsbury Publishing via NetGalley. I would like to thank the publisher and the author for providing me this opportunity. All opinions expressed herein are my own.

Be Careful Who You Follow Into Space!

On July 13, 2016July 13, 2016 By upstateasbIn Sci-Fi / DypstopianLeave a comment

Planetfall

Emma Newman’s Planetfall appears, at first blush, to be a straight-up, sci-fi colonization tale. A group of human space pioneers follows their leader, Suh, to an unnamed planet far, far from Earth. Once the colonists arrive on said unknown planet, Suh vanishes into a huge, odd plantlike structure found growing, or possibly built, there and dubbed “God’s city” by the settlers. Suh never reemerges from God’s city and becomes an oracle of sorts, believed to be still alive somewhere inside and called the Pathfinder by her disciples. She even becomes the subject of an odd pilgrimage a chosen colonist makes into God’s city as a yearly rite.

Twenty years later, when the events of Planetfall take place, the colonists are thriving, having quite successfully built a life for themselves on this anonymous rock spinning through space. You’ve got Mack, your strong, male colony leader with a secret. Helping to keep that secret, and hiding secrets of her own, is your female protagonist, Ren, the colony’s master printer (practically everything the colony needs to exist, including food, is created by 3-D printers, a concept I have yet to entirely get my head around). And you’ve got a wild card in Sung-Soo, a newcomer, offspring of two, long-thought dead, original colonists, and apparent grandson of Suh.

All’s good and usual in sci-fi land so far, right? So while you, the unsuspecting reader, are trucking along, engrossed in this, your latest spacey discovery, you begin to realize that Ren, the first-person narrator of Planetfall, is just a weeeeee bit different from your average planetary colonist. She’s fiercely private, she suffers from social anxiety and is a card-carrying introvert. Shoot, I could even relate a little . . . to a point . . . until it became clear that there was something very, very off with Ren. Hint: There’s a reality show showcasing people like Ren.

And this is where Planetfall becomes a different kind of colonization tale. I think it’s safe to say Emma Newman gets points for originality by incorporating a character with Ren’s particular disorder into her sci-fi work. I can’t say I particularly liked Ren, even though I could empathize with her at first. But her refusal to come to grips with her disease leaves me frustrated as she becomes increasingly more destructive to herself and the entire colony.

Newman has a new book coming out this fall, set in the same world as Planetfall. I’m curious to see where she heads for the next installment.

Full Disclosure: A review copy of this book was provided to me by PENGUIN GROUP Berkley, NAL / Roc via Netgalley. I would like to thank the publisher for providing me this opportunity. All opinions expressed herein are my own.

A Baker’s Dozen (Plus One) of My All-Time Favorite Books: Part III

On November 29, 2015 By upstateasbIn Fantasy, Literary Fiction, Southern LiteratureLeave a comment

As I write this, I’m still riding the wave of elation and rapture that is the beautiful beat-down my Carolina Panthers gave to the Dallas Cowgirls on Thanksgiving. Luuuuuuuuke!!!!! Cam and the Dab! 11-0 baby! And to think the Vegas odds makers initially had a 3-7 Dallas team as the favorite over my undefeated boys. What in the fuck were they thinking? I guess the Panthers still are, as they always have been, the Rodney Dangerfields of the NFL. But that was one collarbone and a 33-14 game ago. How ‘bout some respect now, suckas?!

But forgive me my gloating. Let’s get back to business. Part III of the Baker’s Dozen (Plus One) is fresh out of the oven.

Fair and Tender Ladies – Lee Smith

I read across all genres, fiction and nonfiction, so long as it’s well written. But Southern literature in all its variations is where my heart is, being a daughter of the South and all. From Eudora Welty to George Singleton, from sweet, honeysuckle-scented stories to edgy Grit Lit, I love it all.

There are a multitude of contemporary authors you could start off with if your Southern lit education is lacking: Reynolds Price, Kaye Gibbons, Jill McCorkle, Allan Gurganus, Ron Rash, Wiley Cash, Tim Gautreaux. Or you can go old school: the aforementioned Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter. The list is endless and stacked with literary behemoths. I’d even go so far as to say that, in my opinion, no other region of the country is so steeped with written tradition and essence.

Fair and Tender Ladies

While there are any number of biscuit-and-gravy flavored books I could trot out here (it’d be easy to produce innumerable blogs posts about my Southern favorites alone), Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies has held a revered place in my heart for a long, long time. One of my dirty little secrets is that I’m a sucker for epistolary novels, stemming from my reading at a very young age of Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs, and Fair and Tender Ladies is composed entirely of the correspondence of Ivy Rowe, a young girl growing up in the mists of Appalachia. The epistolary tale is a rare bird these days, as is letter writing itself, an art lost to the millennial generation born of the instant gratification of texting. If I shoved this book into the arms of an under-thirty-something, most of them would look at me as if I’d sprouted two heads. So all you millennials out there: download this one onto your Kindle or your iPad or your smartphone and find out what real correspondence looks like.

Ivy’s first letters bear the misspellings and colloquialisms of her age and her environment, but this book wouldn’t have worked nearly so well if Lee Smith had prettied up the grammar. It’s Ivy’s unaffected, down-home voice that, as politely as possible, still smacks you upside the head and knocks you flat on your ass squarely in the middle of a holler in the Virginia mountains. As Ivy grows up and becomes a mother, then a grandmother, her words gain maturity and polish but her voice never loses its direction.

I had the opportunity to meet Ms. Smith a year or so ago at a book signing for her then-new release Guests on Earth, but it was Fair and Tender Ladies that I wanted her to sign.

A Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin

Call me a sellout for placing A Game of Thrones on my all-time favorites list, since by now everybody and his brother has either read the books or seen the HBO series, but hear me out.

A Game of Thrones

I had never been much of a fantasy or sci-fi reader (other than Tolkien) and, like what I imagine are quite a lot of folks, I might have even considered myself above genre fiction of that sort. I lumped it in with romance and took a literary snob’s view that most of its writers were hacks. I have to admit I still feel that way about romance novels – I have yet to find a romance author who I think has any serious literary chops (yes, I hear the boos and hisses from the romance crowd – just don’t throw any tomatoes!). Keep in mind it’s just my opinion so if I’ve now managed to alienate you romance aficionados out there, try to change my mind and let me know who you think is worthy. I can be open-minded . . . I think.

So around early spring 2011, I hit a wall in my reading. I was coming off a rough two or three years with my dad’s illness and then passing, and all of a sudden I found that I just didn’t want to read about real people with real problems (i.e., pretty much all fiction AND nonfiction). I had had enough problems of my own to deal with for a while. “Bon”, the attorney I work with who I’ve mentioned in a previous post, and a serious fantasy buff, suggested several of his sword and dragon favorites as potential escapes and alternatives. I was skeptical but I figured, what the hey . . . so I picked up A Game of Thrones . . . and LIFE WAS NEVER THE SAME!

I landed smack dab in the middle of Westeros somewhere near The Wall and suddenly I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and no amount of heel-clicking was going to bring me back home any time soon. That was fine with me; I didn’t want to be at home anyway. I had developed some pretty asinine assumptions over the years about fantasy novels and their authors in general, but George Martin and his Starks and Lannisters put paid to that in short order. These weren’t your cookie cutter wizards, fairies, knights saving damsels in distress. These guys (and the girls too) were snarky, conniving, deadly, and charming as hell all at the same time. Plus there were badass dragons. Dragons are like horses, if horses could fly and barbecue your ass to cinders. I fell in with Ned, Jon, Arya, Sansa (well, maybe not Sansa; she’s a little too sniveling for my taste), Tyrion, Jamie, Cersei, Daenerys, the Hound, et al. like I’d known them my whole life, then proceeded to be absolutely astounded at the rate in which George Martin slashed and burned his main characters. Oh, and did I mention the man can write?

In all fairness, I should probably have just listed the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series as my entry here. I read all five of the existing books in the series straight through, something I NEVER EVER do with series fiction. Placing them here on a list of what is supposed to be my great literature recommendations may still seem like a cop-out to some of you higher-minded readers. But what makes these books so special to me is that they accomplished two important things: they provided me a welcome and ready safe haven when real life was taking a toll, and they offered a jumping-off point into a genre at which I’d previously sneered and of which I’m now a giant fan. I’ve since read Nalo Hopkinson, Kevin Hearne, John Scalzi, Patrick Rothfuss, Robin Hobb, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, Neil Gaiman, Lois McMaster Bujold, Glen Cook, China Mieville, Anne McCaffrey, Jack Vance and Arthur C. Clarke, and the list goes on.

Do yourself a favor and try reading something outside of your comfort zone. It doesn’t have to be fantasy or sci-fi. For you it might be horror or biography, mystery or history. You might surprise yourself (like I did) and open up whole new worlds of exploration, enjoyment and knowledge. And isn’t that what reading’s all about?