Nanoreviews: The Rosewater Redemption, Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor, Call of Cthulhu

Thompson, Tade. The Rosewater Redemption [Orbit, 2019]

Spoiler warning for the previous two Rosewater novels.

It had to come to this, right? After the fight between Nigeria and the city-state of Rosewater, we now have aliens living in human bodies (corpses, really). They live among the people of Rosewater, and they’re more or less undetectable. But the aliens need bodies, and the troublemakers don’t die when the host corpse dies; they just get downloaded back into a new body. When some aliens start to take up mass murder to get the bodies they need, a human resistance forms. It’s comprised of strange bedfellows, but they’ve got one mission: to stop the extinction of the human race.

Redemption is a fitting conclusion to the trilogy. As with the previous novels, Thompson writes fully formed characters, and then sticks them in this dirty, strange world to see what happens. Some questions lingering in your brain from the previous two novels will get addressed, but Redemption does take some odd detours that haven’t really added up in hindsight. Regardless, so many authors don’t know how to end something, and Thompson, thankfully, does. There’s a minimal amount of deus ex machina, but it works. If you’ve made it this far, and you should because these books are good, see the conclusion.

Score: 8/10

Watts, Peter. Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays [Tachyon Publications, 2019]

You’ve seen this before, right? The novelist maintains a blog, someone has the brilliant idea to turn that blog into an essay collection, so the author and an editor spend an afternoon collating, winnowing, and editing to produce a new book from old material. If you like Peter Watts, here’s a chance to see his blog posts in paper form. But this isn’t really the kind of thing you want to read in one go, right? It’s kind of a pick-up, put-down. You’re getting a firehose of Peter Watts’ brain in machine gun fashion, so you can take the rapid fire blasts right in the face, but I chose to get a taste and shelve it. You wouldn’t read a blog from beginning to end, so doing the same here is a bad idea. Watts is an easy read (in this form, at least), and the essays are generally entertaining. If you want to know what Watts thinks about enough to put hands to keyboard for a blog post, but you want it to be slightly more edited and selected for quality, here it is. Just don’t read it in one go.

Score: 6/10

Cyanide Studio. Call of Cthulhu [Focus Home Interactive, 2018]

Call of Cthulhu is a first person role-playing video game set in the world of the pen-and-paper role-playing game, Call of Cthulhu, deeply inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. You play a detective sent to the isle of Darkwater to investigate the strange circumstances surrounding the death of a local family. Along the way you find cultists, a mad scientist, elder signs, and deep old ones. Call of Cthulhu starts off very strong as you arrive in Darkwater and start to piece together what the situation is, but it soon deteriorates into a series of linear game levels that demand very little and give very little back in return. It’s like you’re at a theme park and you get to spend the beginning milling about the park, but eventually you get to the roller coaster and then you’re just strapped in for the ride. It’s far from bad, but it does boil out a lot of the flavor and freedom of the pen-and-paper game. Your player stats don’t seem to mean much beyond those first couple hours. It’s also ugly, and not stylistically ugly. It just looks like it was made 5 years ago, put on a shelf, and dusted off to release last year. I played through it all over a weekend, which is about the perfect use for it. A good weekend game, but no need to ever play it again or give it much more thought.

Score: 5/10 

***
POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014  

Microreview [book]: The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts

Pictures of Home

It starts with a gremlin. The Eriophora is a space ship built inside an asteroid packed with 30,000 crew members and one mission: to build gates that will allow humanity to quickly travel among the stars. But they’re taking the long route and it takes millennia of travel time between builds, and they’ve built far too many gates. Eriophora is built for this, but a “gremlin” grazing the ship after a gate build spooks the crew and some of them want to overthrow the Chimp, the AI driving the mission. There’s just one problem; how do you overthrow an AI if you’re only awake for days in the span of millennia?

Off the bat, let me bring up that this is the latest in a series of short stories, though this one is novella+ size. I have not read the Sunflowers series of which this belongs beforehand, and I was not lost in the plot or setting. Discussion around the novel seemed to indicate that having read the previous stories may make some of the plot elements more obvious or pre-determined, but I didn’t have that experience.

What I love about this novel is the same thing I love about all of Watts’ novels. It’s an excellent blend of “feels like it could be real” science and then driving it all the way out to “this asteroid flying through space is millions of years past our timeline”. Their reasonable explanation for how this ship has survived so long is the perfect combination of magic and reality. It touches philosophical topics around artificial life and what it means to possibly be the last humans. I really don’t have a lot of fault it on. I clamor for more, but I can have more by reading the short stories. There’s even a short story hidden in this novel! The end, as usual for Watts, left me agape. I will be re-reading this.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 end-to-end hard SF that doesn’t bore for a single second

Penalties: None

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 (very high quality/standout in its category)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Microreview [book]: Summerlong, by Peter S. Beagle

 A remarkably moving, indeed captivating retelling of the Persephone myth—set near Seattle.  Or, “move over, Stephenie Meyer: there’s a new paranormal group in town!”

Beagle, Peter S. Summerlong. Tachyon, (Sept) 2016.

Buy it here starting next month.

By almost any measure, this book sounds boring. It stars Abe, a scholar retiree—the sort of person for whom ‘puttering’ is the verb of choice, in other words—and his longtime girlfriend, flight attendant Joanna “Del” Delvecchio (along with her desperate-to-love-somebody daughter Lily), and is set near Seattle in the present day. For the first 20% or so, there’s basically nothing out of the ordinary at all; it’s just two older people quietly ‘puttering’ their way through life. If you are thinking “ugh, reading about a 66-year old man and his attempts at banter? Pass”, then join the club, because so different, so unlikely were Abe and Del as heroes that I almost put the book down after the first few dozen pages; it just seemed like the story, while certainly well written and effective at building empathy in the reader for Abe and Del’s various incredibly minor predicaments, didn’t seem to be ‘going anywhere.’

           

Boy, am I glad I kept reading! Lioness (I feel no compunction in revealing that she is in fact Persephone, as this is patently obvious almost immediately after her first appearance) bursts onto the scene, and their ordinary lives, like the rising sun burning through a cloudy Seattle morning. Everyone loves her—how could one fail to love the personification of spring? As it turns out, even Hades loves her, and he soon comes calling, a bit like the husband from Sleeping with the Enemy (but way less awful, luckily!).

They should dig this guy up to play Hades if this book ever hits the silver screen!

Still, a story that is technically quite skillfully written doesn’t necessarily have much emotional valence, and just setting the Hades-Persephone myth in modern Seattle probably wouldn't by itself contribute much to the tale’s emotional impact…so now, after finishing the book, I’m still at a loss to explain why the story affected me so powerfully.

No fewer than five times, I found myself actually weeping (not sniffling or a little misty-eyed, mind you), and reached for the Kleenex. To clarify (without spoiling the story), nothing earth-shattering or particularly melodramatic happens; the Olympian additions to the cast notwithstanding, the main drama remains squarely focused on the relationship between Abe and Del, and Del and Lily too, and the effect the gods’ presence has on each. What in this sounds likely to require Kleenex? I just can’t explain it any other way than to say that Beagle lived up to his reputation as one of the doyens of fantasy literature, endowing this quiet, even uneventful tale with such lyrical beauty that I have tears in my eyes just recalling it now, as I write this.

Beagle’s prose is undeniably brilliant, but in an unassuming, unpretentious way. His dialogue is good, but almost archaic (or simply outdated) at times, perhaps as a result of hanging the story around two such unusually aged protagonists. So it’s not as though I was blinking back tears at the poignancy of any specific description or line of dialogue. I am left grasping at straws, and must resort to saying, simply, Beagle’s “storytelling ability” allowed him to convert what to rights should be a boring tale into an emotionally riveting one. In any case, bravo, Mr. Beagle: you’ve won over a new fan!

 
The Math:

Objective assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for bringing that certain ineffable “je ne sais quoi” (yes, I actually said that)

Penalties: -1 for altogether too much ‘puttering’ around in the first few dozen pages, before Lioness makes her transformative appearance

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 “Well worth your time and attention”

[At NOAF, an 8/10 is something to be very proud of; see details of our scoring system here.]

Reviewed by Zhaoyun, regular contributor at Nerds of a Feather since 2013 and connoisseur of magic realism, indeed any fantasy or science fiction tale that can move readers to tears.