science fiction/fantasy

What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan

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In McEwan’s latest novel it’s 2119 and the world has achieved a tenuous stability after the long-predicted climate catastrophe. Combined with a nuclear accident, climate change led to what’s known as “The Inundation,” a tsunami which devasted continents, leaving the UK an archipelago of former mountaintops, Nigeria the wealthiest nation and storehouse of knowledge, and the U.S. in fragments run by heavily armed warlords.  

The digital world has been preserved, though, and scholars of the 22nd century have access to everything previously stored in the cloud including our emails, DMs, and social media posts. Nostalgic for the lost pre-Inundation world, Thomas Metcalfe, a scholar of literature from 1990 to 2030, is fascinated by a poem called “A Corona for Vivien,” written in 2014.

Thomas has the facts: Francis Blundy, a famous poet, composed it for his wife Vivien and read it aloud at her birthday dinner in October 2014. It has since been lost. Francis is determined to find it and thus make his name in the world of academia. He’s read everything he can find on Francis, Vivien and their friends and, as a result, believes he understands their feelings and motives, so much so that he feels entitled to fill in gaps with what he imagines they must have felt and thought.

However, as we learn, Thomas doesn’t understand at all. He visits the Bodleian Library, now on a peak in Snowdonia. Then he and his sometime-girlfriend Rose, another academic who mocks Thomas’s obsessions, take off on a quest to find the poem itself, leading to an entirely different second half of the book.

The novel is an interesting intellectual exercise about the limits of our knowledge of the past and, indeed, of ourselves and the people around us. However, as I’ve mentioned before, his characters seem cold and impersonal to me. I often have difficulty believing in them as anything more than  convenient pawns to move the plot forward. I couldn’t accept Thomas’s complete cluelessness, Rose’s patience with her man-child,  Vivian’s mix of passivity and sexual hunger, or Francis’s nacissism.

I’ve reviewed many of McEwan’s books, mostly because my book club likes to include them in our schedule. This time we encountered a curious split. Some people liked the first, dystopian part and thought the second part contrived, while others thought the second part realistic and the first part boring.

We all agreed, though, about the quality of McEwan’s prose. Sentence by sentence, there is much to be learned by studying his work. We also agreed that his description of the heartbreaking difficulty of caring for someone with dementia truly captured that reality.

As often with his novels, the adjacent discussions were the most interesting. We talked about history and the way details are selected and presented by historians, who (like all of us) have their own ideas and preconceptions. We also talked about the inevitably performative aspect of our interaction with others. The manner we adopt when we stand up to teach a class is different from the one we use when sitting around a table with wine and cheese to discuss a book with friends. There’s nothing dishonest in this. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman famously declared of himself.

So McEwan’s novel, for all its flaws (to my mind, anyway), is a potent reminder of our limits. We fumble about with our partial knowledge of ourselves, others, and the world, forming opinions and making decisions that have consequences. We do the best we can with what we know.

However, when I think of Thomas filling in the gaps in the records, I’m reminded of an issue that I often confront as writer of memoir and other forms of creative nonfiction: How do I respectfully write about the real people who are present in my piece? I can change names or obscure details. I can try to write the emotional truth of a scene even if I don’t remember exact words or details. I can depict them as the complex people they are instead of one-sided caricatures.

Yet I still feel I’m in danger of invading their privacy. This book warns me against the arrogance of believing I know anyone sufficiently to believe I can depict them in their fullness. And it reminds me of the hurt caused by appropriating someone else’s story. At the same time, I believe in the power of stories and hope they will continue to be told many years into the future.

What do you think our world will be like in a hundred years?

The Box of Delights, by John Masefield

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Changing trains on his way home for Christmas from his first term at school, Kay Harker meets an old man who asks Kay to help him lift his large case onto his back. “ ‘Only I do date from pagan times and age makes joints to creak.’ ” Once on the train Kay, who seems to be around eleven or twelve, is approached by two suspicious men dressed as clergymen who entice him into playing cards for money.

When Kay disembarks in Condicote, he finds that his wallet and watch are missing. He meets the old man again, now revealed as a Punch-and-Judy man, who asks him to pass on a warning that “the wolves are running” to a woman outside Bob’s bakery. Carolina Louise, Kay’s guardian while his parents are absent, agrees to the stop and also tells him that the four Jones children will be staying with them at Seekings over Christmas: Peter who is near his age, Jemima, Susan, and young Maria with her revolvers. “ ‘I shall shoot and I shall shock, as long as my name’s Maria,’ ” the girl says later. She might be my favorite character.

The old man, Cole Hawlings, comes to Seekings to give a Punch and Judy show for the children, which he follows with a magical adventure where one thing turns into another, such as when “[i]t seemed to the children that the ceiling above them opened into a forest in a tropical night: they could see giant trees, with the stars in their boughs and fireflies gleaming out.”

Later he entrusts Kay with the magical box of the title with a knob on the outside which enables him to “go small” or “go swift.” Also, each time Kay opens the box, he’s transported into the past where he might meet up with Herne the Hunter, the Lady of the Oak, fairies, or a Roman legion. However, the wolves—human and animal—are after the box and the action accelerates with the robbers “scrobbling” people left, right and center and chasing after the children.

A beloved Christmas favorite in England since 1935, The Box of Delights is now available in the U.S. from the New York Review of Books in a revised edition that restores sections cut from previous versions and has been corrected from the manuscript. John Masefield was a well-known poet (author of “Sea Fever,” my mother’s favorite poem) and poet laureate for England from 1930-1967.

After finishing this book, I learned that it’s the sequel to The Midnight Folk, which I haven’t read. This could be why I was so confused at the beginning. I couldn’t figure out who Carolina Louise was—another child?—or where all the parents were? Yet my discombobulation turned out to be good preparation for the wild proceedings to come; the book does come at you fast and furious, with kidnappings, chases, robberies, and terrifying escapes. We’re told as writers to teach our readers how to read our book. Mission accomplished, Mr. Masefield!

It seems clear that Masefield’s book influenced many later children’s stories: T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone (1938), Elizabeth Goudge’s The Well of the Star (1941), C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1948), Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising (1973), and probably even J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. 

Today’s children might have trouble untangling the period slang, historical references, and folklore. Also, unlike the books mentioned above, the plot, if it exists at all, seems almost beside the point until we get towards the end. Instead, we fall from a fairly ordinary train journey into a series of increasingly odd adventures which are indeed delightful but can leave the reader feeling unmoored. Still, I hope children will try it; adults, too.

This is a book I will return to during the holiday season, as so many others do. I’ll probably skip around to favorite bits rather than read it straight through, but we’ll see.

Is there a book you like to reread in December?

Lost in the Never Woods, by Aiden Thomas

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In this retelling of Peter Pan, Wendy Darling lives in Astoria, Oregon, a small town where children have begun disappearing. People turn to her because she and her brothers also went missing five years earlier. She has no answers because when she did turn up in the woods, she remembered nothing of what happened. Michael and John have never returned.

When Wendy, on her eighteenth birthday, almost runs over a boy lying in the middle of a forest road, she discovers that the Peter Pan of the childhood stories her mother told them is real. He’s left Neverland to recruit Wendy’s help in finding the missing children.

It’s clear that Thomas put a lot of thought and imagination into how to adapt the magic of the J.M. Barrie original to the modern world. I especially like how he characterises the antagonist. Also, he’s done a good job of understanding issues such as grief, guilt, and PTSD. The damage to the Darling family, in particular, struck me as genuine.

Unfortunately, I came near to setting it aside unfinished, despite so much I liked about it and my own fascination with Peter Pan. Only the fact that I was listening to it as an audiobook while doing chores and commuting enabled me to stay with it. So what lessons can I as a writer draw from this Young Adult novel and NYT bestseller?

Go for broke with the cover. The book’s cover is fabulous! It draws you in to the tangled woods with their tempting flowery path and threatening blue and mauve trees. And the mysterious faces in silhouette. Who wouldn’t want to pick up a book with a cover like this?

Take time to describe your main characters with surprising sensory details. The early descriptions of Peter charmed me, with so many wonderful details such as twigs in his hair, the woodsy scents that accompany him, the oddball clothes that he’s picked up in Wendy’s world. I loved this aspect of the story.

Make sure your characters feel like real people. Sadly, after the wonderful description of Peter, he and Wendy, not to mention her family and best friend, come across as one-note characters. This is especially problematic with Wendy, since she is our point-of-view character.

Vary your pacing. The whole story is at fight-or-flight level. Wendy starts the story freaking out and, aside from one or two brief moments of connection, she spends the entire story at the same panicked level. Many Goodreads reviewers complained about slow pacing. I attribute this reaction to the pedal-to-the-metal emotional level, the absence of character development, and the scarcity of actual actions Wendy and Peter take to solve the problem.

These problems could be attributed to a rush to publish a second novel in 2021 after the big success of Thomas’s debut novel Cemetery Boys in 2020. Most writers labor for years on their first novel trying to make it perfect in this difficult marketplace. Then the follow-up doesn’t have a chance to get as much attention.

I’m impressed by Thomas’s productivity. I’m also taking a lesson from the way he interacts with his fans online, from his fun bio to the way he addresses them directly.  Given the very positive reviews for Cemetery Boys, I will give that one a try. I’m also looking forward to seeing how this promising writer develops over his next few books.

What Young Adult book laced with a bit of magic have you enjoyed?

Reprise: The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper

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During the solstice season, I’m rereading this favorite series.  Here’s my earlier post about it:

This time of year, when the sun begins to return even though winter is just beginning (in the northern hemisphere), has been celebrated with rituals throughout the centuries. Prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge, the building of which is believed to have begun around 3100 BCE, identify the precise moment of the winter and summer solstices. They probably had other uses as well; certainly Stonehenge was also a burial site and may be been used for religious ceremonies, a healing site, and/or as an astronomical observatory.

My favorite books about the solstice are The Dark Is Rising sequence, five fantasy novels by Susan Cooper for young adults. The author draws on Arthurian legends, Celtic and Norse mythology, and English folklore to tell the story of the struggle between good and evil.

In keeping with the season, these are identified as the Light and the Dark, which raised no cultural sensitivity concerns when the books were published in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever we might think today of the persistent identification of dark colors with evil, these are still the best terms to describe the turmoil at the time of the winter solstice, when the sun tries to return and the darkness resists.

In these stories Will Stanton discovers that he is one of an ancient mystical people called “Old Ones” who are gifted with magical powers. He is the seventh son of a seventh son, and his eleventh birthday is the moment when he comes into his powers, including the ability to move through time. He is tasked to find the four Things of Power which the Old Ones need in order to vanquish the Dark.

Cooper’s five books are truly wonderful, especially for someone like me who grew up with these myths and legends. I can still picture that corner of my neighborhood library, just to one side of the front door, that held the books that captured my imagination as a child and put me on the path to become a writer.

The return of the sun inspires us with hope. Whether you are celebrating the winter solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Diwali, Hanukkah, St. Lucia’s Day, the Lunar New Year, Las Posados, or another festival, I wish you joy, health, love and peace, now and in the coming year.

What are your favorite books of the season, however you celebrate it?

The Secret Library, by Kekla Magoon

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I like to read a mix of books, so this week’s review is of a middle-grade book. As the story opens, eleven-year-old Delilah “Dally” Peteharrington has lost her beloved grandfather, whose son—her father—died some years earlier. As a result, her mother is left to manage the family’s extremely wealthy businesses. Already uptight and business-oriented, she rises to the challenge, but is determined that Dally will be trained to take over. That means tutoring in business after school, and no time for other, more interesting activities.

Dally, however, takes after her father and grandfather: two adventurers who wanted to get out and explore what life has to offer. The mysterious letter that comes to her from her grandfather leads her to the Secret Library, which is not in itself secret but rather a repository of secrets. She eludes her mother’s control to delve into her family’s past and learn the secrets hidden there.

As is Octavia Butler’s Kindred, she is actually transported into the past, resulting in wonderful adventures but also creating some problems for the author. Dally is biracial—her father Black and her mother White—so she encounters the explicit racism that up to now she’s only heard about.

Pirate ships, the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow, slavery: there’s a lot here, brought to life through her adventures. The author goes further, having her encounter same-sex relationships, trans persons, Black persons passing as White, etc. While I enjoyed the story, and in most cases felt like it was a good introduction for 8-12 year-olds to some of this history, it began to seem like a lot.

Worse, as the story went on, my credulity was strained to the breaking point. For example, I had trouble believing Dally’s mother could be so entirely cold and controlling: the worst sort of businessperson stereotype. At times, the characters perform physically impossible feats. And, unlike in Kindred, there are no consequences when Dally acts like a modern person of color around White people in pre-Civil Rights eras. There are many more examples, but I don’t want to include too many spoilers.

I love the idea of a magical library. I enjoy stories about uncovering family secrets. I even like young people wanting adventures and experiences, though I’m not fond of the anti-education slant here. I respect and admire the challenge this author has set themselves: creating a coming-of-age story mixed with fantasy and historical fiction that is based on themes of identity, racism, LGBTQ+, friendship, inheritance, and family.

I found the story engrossing, and even stayed up late to finish it. It would be fine for a twelve-year-old, but any younger than that I think I’d want to read it with the child and be ready to do a lot of explaining.

Have you read a story about a magical library?

The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper

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This time of year, when the sun begins to return even though winter is just beginning (in the northern hemisphere), has been celebrated with rituals throughout the centuries. Prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge, the building of which is believed to have begun around 3100 BCE, identify the precise moment of the winter and summer solstices. They probably had other uses as well; certainly Stonehenge was also a burial site and may be been used for religious ceremonies, a healing site, and/or as an astronomical observatory.

My favorite books about the solstice are The Dark Is Rising sequence, five fantasy novels by Susan Cooper for young adults. The author draws on Arthurian legends, Celtic and Norse mythology, and English folklore to tell the story of the struggle between good and evil.

In keeping with the season, these are identified as the Light and the Dark, which raised no cultural sensitivity concerns when the books were published in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever we might think today of the persistent identification of dark colors with evil, these are still the best terms to describe the turmoil at the time of the winter solstice, when the sun tries to return and the darkness resists.

In these stories Will Stanton discovers that he is one of an ancient mystical people called “Old Ones” who are gifted with magical powers. He is the seventh son of a seventh son, and his eleventh birthday is the moment when he comes into his powers, including the ability to move through time. He is tasked to find the four Things of Power which the Old Ones need in order to vanquish the Dark.

Cooper’s five books are truly wonderful, especially for someone like me who grew up with these myths and legends. I can still picture that corner of my neighborhood library, just to one side of the front door, that held the books that captured my imagination as a child and put me on the path to become a writer.

The return of the sun inspires us with hope. Whether you are celebrating the winter solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Diwali, Hanukkah, St. Lucia’s Day, the Lunar New Year, Las Posados, or another festival, I wish you joy, health, love and peace, now and in the coming year.

What are your favorite books of the season, however you celebrate it?

Prelude to Foundation, Isaac Asimov

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This is the first book in Asimov’s classic Foundation series, though he wrote it after five of the six novels in the series. It is meant to be a guide as well as a prequel. Asimov says he hadn’t planned for his first Foundation short story, published in 1942, to grow into a multi-volume series, so had decided a better introduction was needed.

Hari Seldon, a young mathematician, delivers a paper at a conference held in Trantor, capital of the empire, and thus comes to the attention of young Cleon I, whom we are told is the last Galactic Emperor of his dynasty. Cleon is mostly a figurehead, somewhat like the British royal family, relying completely on Eto Demerzel, his brilliant and somewhat mysterious advisor.

Cleon is intrigued because it sounds as though Seldon has worked out how to predict the future. When they meet, Cleon is disappointed that Seldon’s work is all theoretical and unlikely to yield practical results. However, whether Seldon’s so-called psychohistory actually works is less important to the Emperor than the possibility of using the process to issue rosy predictions about Cleon’s successes, thus calming the restive planets in the far reaches of the empire.

The next day, as he’s preparing to return to his home planet, Seldon meets a journalist in the park. Chetter Hummin alerts Seldon that Demerzel will try to detain him and offers to use his connections to take the mathematician to a safe place. Thus begins what’s known in the Foundation books as The Flight.

I read some of the Foundation novels in my teens, at a time when I was reading a lot of science fiction. I certainly thought they were interesting enough to keep reading the ones that were available then, but now I remember nothing about them, unlike some of the other SF books I consumed back then. A writer friend suggested I read this Prelude.

The story certainly flows well and has plenty of suspense and potentially interesting characters. However, it shows its age. Don’t get me wrong: Asimov was amazing. What an imagination! However, in the following decades—the first Foundation story was published 80 years ago—SF has changed.

An obvious area that’s improved is world-building. Asimov uses two methods of conveying information about the people, culture and settings of the story. One is to preface each chapter with an excerpt from the fictional Encyclopedia Galactica, directly providing information to the reader. The other is that Hari, being new to every world he travels to in the course of The Flight, must have everything explained to him. We have no access to his thoughts, but he obviously doesn’t pick up things on his own; someone must tell him.

As a result, the story is more talk than action, and it’s awkward, stilted talk at that. In today’s SF novels, world-building is much more subtle. It’s incorporated into the story. A particularly effective example is the beginning of The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, which starts with action and the thoughts of the protagonist Katniss. We’re never lectured on the way that world works; instead it becomes clear through what’s going on.

Another area that’s improved in today’s stories is the characters. Hari and the other characters are flat. We don’t learn much about them as people; they are just there to serve the plot. None has the character arc we’ve come to expect in modern novels of every genre, where the person actually changes during the story, as a result of what they experience. Today’s authors get to know their characters as fully rounded people and then set them free to act and react naturally as the story progresses.

This is not a criticism of the Prelude. Plot dominated in most early SF stories. It was a rare author whose characters came alive; Ursula Le Guin comes to mind, though she was writing somewhat later than Asimov.

I’m grateful to be reminded of the enormous strides in quality that SF has made, specifically here with world-building, dialogue, and characterisation, but also thrilled to see again the strong plotting that made these early stories so interesting.

Have you gone back to read a novel from the early days of science fiction?

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler

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This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world.

She and her father, stepmother and young siblings live in a gated community ten miles outside Los Angeles. It is not just gated but fortified against the collapsing society outside, where dire poverty is rampant, services have mostly collapsed, and police and firefighters cannot be trusted. Gangs run amok, many high on a drug that makes them delight in setting fires and killing people.

Lauren comes to the conclusion that society will fail even further and their frail walls will not be able to keep out the mobs who want even the small affluence they have: vegetable gardens, acorns they’ve collected for flour, a sewing machine. She begins to train herself in how to survive, everything from recognising edible wild plants to firing a gun. But her “sharing” means that it is easy to incapacitate her, simply by hurting someone in front of her.

She creates her own belief system, which she calls Earthseed, based on the idea that the only reliable truth is that “God is Change.” Given that, then humanity can shape God. All of her preparations are needed when their fortifications are breached three years later, and she sets out to find a place to regroup and recreate a community.

At first I found this book almost impossible to read. Not because of anything wrong with the book, but because of my own despair. Such a future seems only too likely, maybe not in the next two years, but not that far off. Too many groups today are threatening civil war, and boasting that they are the ones with guns.

Then I remembered the early 1970s. Society seemed to be falling apart in the wake of assassinations, corruption, the Vietnam debacle. My partner pointed out the fragility of supply chains—something the pandemic has brought home to all of us fifty years later. Like many of those who jumped on the back-to-the-land movement at the time, he was motivated less by a desire to be closer to nature and more by wanting to be self-sufficient if—when—the social order imploded.

It didn’t. The country pulled through, damaged and deeply flawed, but holding.

This book felt so real to me, as though it were all happening right now. Just as I despaired in the beginning, I began to hope as Lauren built her community, one person at a time, one kindness at a time.

Have you read this book? What did you think of it?

The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan

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Most synopses of this book ignore the prologue, which started as a short story and was added here at the beginning of this first book in Jordan’s Wheel of Time fantasy series. Yet this was the part that grabbed my attention, centering as it does on a young woman in a world that seems similar to England in the late Middle Ages, though with some differences.

It’s Egwene’s first day being allowed to work as a water carrier during the annual sheep shearing in Emond’s Field, a town in the Two Rivers district. However, her ambition to be the best water carrier ever is derailed by her desire to see what the three young men—Rand, Mat and Perrin—are up to. The town has a mayor, who also owns the pub, but it is the Wisdom, an elderly woman, who holds the power. There are subtle signs that something is threatening this world.

As we move into the story proper, two strangers come to Emond’s Field: the mysterious Moiraine and her warder Lan. Gleeman Thom Merrilyn also turns up to entertain the town during the Winternight celebration with songs, stories, and juggling. When the town is attacked by Trollocs—creatures believed to only exist in legends—Moiraine leads the four young people and Thom on a quest to find out why their town was attacked and prevent future invasions.

While I love that women have the power in this world, what makes the story work is how each character is brought to life as their lives change and they are invited to become more than they ever thought they could be. Their individuality and the realistic character development kept me reading to find out what would happen to them.

A friend recommended the series, surprised that I’d never heard of it. There are fourteen books in the series, the last three of which were completed by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death. Since each book is over 800 pages long, the series is a huge commitment.

The amount of detail Jordan has infused into this world is stunning. The world began when the Creator set a wheel in motion, such that the pattern of its seven ages repeat, but the intervals are so long, that people forget what’s happened before.

In addition to the theme of time being cyclical is the theme of how best to use power. The One Power which turns the wheel is divided into male and female halves, saidin and saidar. Unfortunately, history has shown that men who try to channel the One Power go mad and destroy everything, so now only women wield that power.

During creation the Creator imprisoned “Shai’tan,” the Dark One, but at various times his influence has escaped, so that his followers—Trollocs, Myrddraals and others—now fight to free him to take over the world.

Among many things I admire in this book is the language, particularly in dialogue. Jordan has found a way to suggest an older time without belaboring the reader with archaic diction. I need to study more carefully how he’s accomplished this, but one way is by occasionally using an obsolete word, such as scullion, while retaining the flow of our current speech patterns.

Another thing I admire is Jordan’s inventiveness, both with the detailed legends and with the dangers our protagonists encounter. Even more, I love the possibilities that open before them. And for once, the ending is perfect. I won’t give it away, but it is a model for how to handle the climax of a quest effectively, one way at least. And there are maps!

Will I read more? I don’t know if I have the stomach for fourteen books, but I may read a few more. There’s this one character I’d like to know more about.

Have you read The Wheel of Time series? What is your favorite fantasy novel?