Review: Calypso by Oliver K. Langmead

This awe-inspiring and utterly beautiful novel told in verse will make you think, feel, and wonder why there aren't more contemporary authors writing sci-fi that is both full of ideas and jaw-droppingly well written. 

Remember that scene in Contact (1997) when Ellie Arroway, confronted with the vast immensity and beauty of our far-reaching universe, can only utter "...they should have sent a poet"? 

She was right. 

Oliver K. Langmead in Calypso tells a story spanning centuries and light years — entirely in verse — about humanity in space, and all of the triumphs, travails, and emotions generated in the process. 

Having spent the past five years working my way through all of the Hugo Award-winning novels, the most common refrain I and my podcast co-hosts have is "fantastic idea and world-building but absolutely lackluster writing." Calypso is the first work of science fiction in years to make me feel something for all the characters while simultaneously providing a fleshed-out world and mythology full of interesting science fiction ideas.

The story

The Calypso is a generation ship headed across the galaxy to build and colonize a distant planet, and Rochelle, an engineer, agrees to leave her family behind forever to travel through the centuries in cryosleep so she can assist in the momentous task of building a new society. She wakes up and nothing is at it should be, as it appears there's been a revolt at some point during the long time interval between the botanists and engineers.

We learn slowly about the revolt and what caused it — namely the absolutely understandable human impulse to not want to live and procreate entirely within a cramped and lifeless starship while generations down the line get to benefit from the beauty and sustenance of an actual planet.  This is an idea I've thought about every single time I've read a book — or even played a video game like Fallout — that requires multiple generations to put in the work of keeping humanity going while knowing they'll never get to experience the end result. I'm not sure it would ever work, honestly.

We also slowly unravel the true nature of the voyage. Sigmund, the project's brilliant director, wants to give humans a chance at building a society on a new planet completely devoid of human history. In this universe, people have populated other planets in our own neighborhood, and he bemoans that Venus is just another Earth, "the worst of humanity / Slowly being spread across the solar system." He describes in an emotional gut punch the homeless population that lives on Mars, and it's then that you're forced to think, "Damn, maybe we shouldn't be sending humans off Earth after all. But instead, he imagines that:

It would be a truly epic 

experiment

To engineer a new world

and colonise it

With blank humans un-

aware of the heritage.

The words

Despite my time in poetry creative writing classes in college 20 years ago, I've not kept up much with published verse. But this novel is enjoyable regardless of whether one has a background in poetry. It's not stilted or filled with overly cutesy rhymes, despite it's impressively consistent pentameter (10 syllables for each phrase).

These words tell the story succinctly and with incredible turns of imagistic phrasing. Rochelle, when describing a walk in the woods, states "And I crunch across a kingdom / Nothing like my childhood's imaginings." It is a place where "our knuckles and knees were the knots of trees." Despite the fact that the book spends much of its time in a cold and sterile spaceship, there are highly vivid  concentrations of life both within it (in the form of on-board gardens) and on the new planet as it's slowly terraformed into a place suitable for life. 

There's even a section entirely describing the transformation from barren rock all the way to multi-celled life, the imaginative verse roiling and building much like the world does over eons. The verdant descriptions are teeming with life in an almost unsettling way, much like the prose of Jeff VanderMeer in the Southern Reach trilogy. 

Reading Calypso, one also sees the influence of Anne Carson, a famed poet known for her prose novels like Autobiography of Red. Both reveal startlingly human depictions of feelings and relationships set amidst unusual backdrops, whether outer space or a retelling of an ancient myth. 

The effect

Immediately after finishing Calypso, I wanted to restart it. I enjoyed the story and the words throughout the first read, but now having learned the narrative (which honestly I sort of rushed through because of how compulsively readable it is), my desire was to go back and savor the words. I feel the same way about Moby Dick, I just want to get lost in the language time and time again. Highly recommended.

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The Math

Baseline Score: 9/10

Bonuses: Incredible language, imaginative storytelling, and a very human voice that's rarely polished and focused in sci-fi

Penalties: The format will undoubtedly scare off some potential readers, and the more experimental sections (like when words are arranged in visual depictions across the page) can be hard to follow for even a poetry aficionado.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Microreview [poetry]: Marginalia to Stone Bird by Rose Lemberg

Stone wings can indeed fly in this book of speculative poetry

The Meat:

I like to think of poetry as one of the great (largely) unsung forms of SFF. Popular culture (movies, video games, etc.) tend to take top billing when it comes to Big Things in SFF, with novels behind that and comic books next and short stories a little further back still. Poetry suffers a bit from how most people come into contact with it: in school. And while many works that are literary canon are indeed fine pieces, few capture the possibilities of speculative poetry. Like it's something that people outgrow after they fall in love with it through the works of Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein and similar works. When poetry is strictly the arena for dry essays and agonizing class discussions about what a poem "means," it's small wonder perhaps that people take a look at poetry of an sort and turn away. But it is a shame.

Indeed, Marginalia to Stone Bird is a testament to how speculative poetry can succeed in capturing voice and plot and movement and feeling while still tackling big ideas and personal truths. The collection crafts a sort of map of forms and intents, a tour of what speculative poetry can be. From magic realism to high fantasy to far off-world science fiction, the poems range far and wide while maintaining a circling consistency, an interest in language and oppression and voice and freedom. And there's a lot to like here for fans of poetry in general or SFF in general, as it combines the best of both worlds. I've actually already featured "Long Shadow," which comes nearly at the end of this collection, in my Monthly Round (one of only two poetic works that has ever made a list I normally reserve for fiction). The poem, like many others here, shows a keen eye for storytelling and a great flare for making complex moral and emotional points.

The collection is divided into three parts, prefaced by a great introductory poem "Burns at Both Ends," which sets the tone well, the idea of throwing off the safe and protected in favor of being free. This sentiment echoes throughout, growing more and more complex as it passes through the three sections. In Finding Voice, the first section, the poems linger on language and translation, on immigration and movement. Here the poems stay a bit more grounded, showing journeys mostly through the real world but tinged with the magic of place and family and history. The poems remain a bit shorter, a bit punchier, and focus on the ideas of self-discovery, of being trapped and persecuted.

The second section, Changing Shape, brings in more of the fantasy elements, focuses on gender and defiance. The poems grow longer and the characters a bit more defined, reaching back toward fable and myth. The collection as a whole is nicely balanced, the first and the second providing distinct and strong contrasts that are to some degree harmonized in the third section, Making Journeys. It is in that third section that the poems finally let loose with world-building and connected narratives, where I found the collection to be its most formally daring and thematically impacting. Poems like "Earth Map" and "Write of fireflies" both express the freedom that had been frustrated in the first section and loosened in the second. These are not stories of transition so much as recognition that what we are does not have to be set in stone. Maps can be drawn freely, and conventions can be broken or adhered to as they fit, as they work. The danger is not gone, but there is here a familiarity with it, a recognition of it that...perhaps doesn't diminish the danger, but echoes that first poem, the defiance tempered now into a more precise weapon.

The third section also sees the most elaborate and robust poems, including the aforementioned "Long Shadow" and a number of pieces from the same setting. Rarely have I seen such world-building attempted in poetic form but it works here just as well as in prose, the characters alive, the feeling of the world palpable. For those who love poetry in their SFF, this collection is a perfect comfort and joy. And for those who try their hardest to avoid poetry, this collection might just be the thing to change your mind. Whatever the case, Marginalia to Stone Bird is affirming and strong, dense and magical and very worth checking out.

The Math:

Baseline Assessment: 7/10 

Bonuses: +1 managing complex world-building in poetic form, +1 keeping a collection of 45 pieces focused and connected

Negatives: nope, I got nothing here

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 "Who cares about tepid? Better the sizzling / feathers of nightmares" [Burns at Both Ends] see our full rating system here.

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POSTED BY: Charles, avid reader, reviewer, and sometimes writer of speculative fiction. Contributor to Nerds of a Feather since 2014.

REFERENCE: Lemberg, Rose. Marginalia to Stone Bird [Aqueduct Press, 2016]