Review: Our Shadows Have Claws

A journey through the hidden corners of a continent's imagination

Edited by Yamile Saied Méndez and Amparo Ortiz, Our Shadows Have Claws is a bone-chilling anthology that gathers folk monsters from all corners of Latin America. Now, before I proceed to reviewing this book, I feel I have to insert an important note. At Nerds of a Feather, I've previously covered other collections of speculative short fiction from the Latin diaspora, which I'm always excited to do; I see it as my small contribution toward increasing the visibility of Latin authors. Like many contemporary writings by bilingual migrants, those stories contained bilingual dialogues; by now it's become increasingly accepted that people who publish in English and come from cultures where English is a foreign presence shouldn't have to treat their own mother tongue as the weird Other. As an aspiring writer myself, with English as my second language, I can appreciate the empowering effect of demanding English to accommodate our words instead of the other way around.

However, in Our Shadows Have Claws I find a substantially higher proportion of untranslated Spanish compared to previous collections I've reviewed, which will doubtlessly make the stories hard to follow for the monolingual reader. On discussing this point I must be mindful of my own position. I'm not a member of the diaspora, so I'm not qualified to evaluate the verisimilitude of Spanglish and successive code-switching in the context of the geographic settings where those dialogues occur. Speaking only for my experience as a reader, I had no difficulty with the book because I grew up with Spanish; your particular mileage may vary. The authors' (and editors') choice to include this much untranslated Spanish places the book in the middle of a conversation about intended audience, a conversation that was already intense back when Junot Díaz miraculously convinced The New Yorker to print his Spanglish untouched by the editorial hand.

All this is to say that Our Shadows Have Claws is unapologetically not meant for the incurious gringo. In a way, it's fitting for a collection of spooky fiction to make itself a bit elusive, partially out of the reach of unprepared eyes. So let's get to the stories.

The Nightingale and the Lark by Chantel Acevedo, about the doomed love between the respective descendants of a lineage of cryptid rescuers and a lineage of cryptid hunters, leans on Latin America's thorny baggage of civil wars to comment on the regrettable ease with which inherited grudges can continue to poison social ties.

I tracked my father the way I'd been taught to
track monsters—silently, on alert, like a woodland
creature. I could smell his aftershave, hear the faint
crackling sound his left ankle made every few steps,
spot the places on the earth where he'd knelt down.

¿Dónde Está el Duende? by Jenny Torres Sanchez, about a girl haunted by the sound of nighttime scratching during a visit to her profoundly disturbed cousin, takes advantage of the stylistic arsenal of first-person narration to draw the reader into the perspective of a second-generation immigrant gradually losing her memory and identity.

I don't know how much time has passed when I suddenly sense
something else in the room. A heavy, threatening presence that
thickens the air and makes my mind feel muggy. Some part of me
tries to scream, but my mouth won't open. My voice won't work.

El Viejo de la Bolsa by Alexandra Villasante, about an unofficial foster home that welcomes the children of missing political dissidents, makes Cold War dictatorships pass through the lens of allegory to portray with an understated expressiveness how the loss of basic civil rights can feel as dreadful as an urban legend told to make children behave.

Making people disappear is like balancing
an equation; one half is the taking of a person,
the other half is pretending not to see.

Beware the Empty Subway Car by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite, about a teenage mutant cannibal shapeshifter on the loose in Manhattan, deftly weaves together the desire for prey and the desire for human connection, thus subverting the power dynamic that occurs when comfortable New Yorkers choose not to see those in need among them.

As he shifts back in his seat to eat a slice, his scent
meets your nostrils. He smells sweet but not sickly so.
Your mouth waters. You take a bite of pizza and try
not to wonder what it would be like to do the same to him.

Dismembered by Ann Dávila Cardinal, about a grieving granddaughter who returns to a childhood home where things start to go bump in the night, suggests an original, gentler tweak on the trope of ghosts with unfinished business.

I was heading to my room, trying not to think about the fact
that I was alone in the house, when I heard a dragging sound
outside the front windows. Like someone was hauling a full
garbage bag across the gravel with long, scritching noises.

Blood Kin by Ari Tison, about a family physically and spiritually wounded by territorial encroachment on their Native reservation, balances the tragic tone of its ending with a resounding plea for drawing strength from the struggles of those who resisted colonization before us.

His eyes are horrified, and he begins to pull himself
away, half mauled. But I have no doubt what to do.
No doubt to finish. To let my ever-present fire pour on
him. I tear him apart. Limb by limb until he is no more.

La Boca del Lobo by M. García Peña, about a girl dangerously fascinated with a particular spot in the woods near her parents' former home, invites the reader to walk through her dreams and daydreams as she reconnects with her half-forgotten wild side.

A stabbing pain juts into my back reaching out
through my hands, my feet, my mouth. My body arches
forward, raising me up to my tiptoes, I feel the crack
of each individual finger breaking, shaping, growing.

Blood-Stained Hands Like Yours by Gabriela Martins, about a homeless orphan desperate to prevent her family curse from hurting the girl she loves, builds slowly toward a triumphant affirmation of our ability to redefine ourselves beyond the evil we've inherited.

She wakes up choking in sobs, overwhelmed by a heavy
smell she couldn't identify at first. She touches her face, and
it's slick, but… not with tears. Her fingers come away red.

The Boy from Hell by Amparo Ortiz, about a young slayer pursuing the clues to a vampire who's been stalking her classmates, proposes an interesting parallel between the abstruse politics of vampire clan rivalries and the equally arbitrary dynamics of Latin-on-Latin racism.

The deeper I get, the thicker the bushes are; there's
barely any space for solid footing. Cows moo at me a few
feet away. None have obvious bite marks, so I'm safe from
being attacked by four-legged bloodsucking mammals.

La Patasola by Racquel Marie, about an avenging spirit who seeks unfaithful men to brutally punish them, is curiously set far from the Colombian mountains where this folk monster is said to roam, which, for all the gore in its plot, suggests the comforting notion that the power of our stories can still sustain and protect us wherever we go.

She emerges from the shadows slowly, crawling across
the ground on her hands and foot. As grotesque as her
flesh is, her body moves fluidly. Like she learned to prowl
from the very pumas whose teeth tore her to shreds.

The Other Side of the Mountain by Claribel A. Ortega, about a young man who goes on a quest to rescue his sister from the witch who kidnapped her, plays with the standard hero's journey and puts it on its head, warning that in the jungle there are forces you can't defeat.

Her skin was not skin, but feathers. Her hair
stringy and thin against a visible scalp, with
large bulging eyes and lips sharp like a beak.
Her fingernails long and twisted like claws.

La Madrina by Yamile Saied Méndez, about a house built on the road between life and death, where a personified cosmic force gives succor to those uncertain of their journey, descends upon the reader like a soothing balm before sending us back on our quest.

I stumbled toward the witch light. Somewhere in
the brambles, I lost one of my shoes. Thorns tore
through my soles. Blood seeped through my nylons.
The earth drank it thirstily, like a payment for a grace.

Sugary Deaths by Lilliam Rivera, about an unrepenting womanizer who one day makes the poor choice of messing with the wrong girl, is a straightforward but impactful revenge fantasy set in the streets of a 1980s Nuyorican neighborhood.

Across the street, the stone gargoyles on her building stand
as they always have, but instead of their usual poses,
one holds a handkerchief as if crying, another appears
to be shouting, while another holds a spiked club.

Leave No Tracks by Julia Alvarez, about a secret community of river spirits with a natural defense against the exterior world, has in its biracial protagonist an example of how you can fight for your homeland and your heritage even if you already have a life settled far away from it.

When he saw me, he didn't chase after me.
Instead he sang me a song he made up on the spot.
Day after day he returned and sang it. That's
when I realized not all humans are inhuman.

The Hour of the Wolf by Courtney Alameda, about a high school mean girl haunted by a savage presence she unwittingly summoned, closes the book with a terrifying game of cat and mouse that honors the wave of supernatural flicks that swept the 1960s.

The Tukákame is a god of death and cruelty. At night, he
comes forth from the deep places of the earth to hunt, taking
the form of a wolf. But his true form is that of a skeleton,
and he garbs himself in the skins and bones of his victims.

A common thread in many of these stories is a warning to the gringos to not mess with what they don't understand. One by one, colonizers, exploiters, harassers, bigots and plain vanilla jerks meet their demise at the hands (or claws) of the beasts that roam our mountains and jungles. This is not only a collection that showcases our folk monsters, but one that explores the specific unequal relationship between the United States and Latin America. I'm usually not very moved by revenge fantasies, but there are some days when white Latinophobia gets so irritating I would just like to roar it into shreds. Perhaps you've heard of the classic Mexican Llorona. Now meet her extended family. Read, and tremble.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Méndez, Yamile Saied and Ortiz, Amparo [editors]. Our Shadows Have Claws [Algonquin Young Readers, 2022].

Review: The Peacekeeper by B. L. Blanchard

This glimpse of another possible world proposes a completely different notion of justice

Introducing a speculative setting through a cop's perspective is a time-honored tradition. It's a practical choice for an author because describing police work involves describing the nuts and bolts that make a society function. In B. L. Blanchard's alternate history novel The Peacekeeper, we follow Chibenashi, a sort of police officer that is instead called peacekeeper in this world where European colonization never occurred and therefore the Native American peoples followed their own course of development until the time that we call the 21st century. Chibenashi's society, however, does not deal with crime the way we're used to seeing in conventional detective thrillers. The author uses the setting of a Native American-ruled society to illustrate what justice would be like if people didn't treat each other as adversaries. Rather than punishing, the purpose of justice in this world is restoration. Just as cops are called peacekeepers, judges are called mediators, and sentences are called resolutions. This is a society where the aggrieved do not seek victory, but harmony.

Little is explained about the background of this alternate world. We're just shown what it looks like now, without any infodumps about exactly why history took another course. That's fine. That's not really the point of the story. The setting (and the murder mystery) is simply an opportunity to expose how this legal system does its job. At times, the narration is so focused on the investigative work that it's easy to forget this is not happening in our world. However, the choice of setting is key to the core theme, because reparation is one of the hottest topics in the discussion about the situation of Native Americans in our real world.

The Peacekeeper makes a complex point about the purpose of reparations. The plot follows cases of individual victims, but the arguments can be extrapolated to the entire Native American community. After someone's whole world has been destroyed, the next stage is reconstruction, but things can never fully go back to the way they were. Restorative justice aims to preserve the human dignity of both the perpetrator and the victim, but it never loses sight of the impossibility of perfect reconstruction. Victims need to be brought as close as humanly possible to their initial condition. But the past must be acknowledged, must be honored. The pain that has been caused cannot be removed, nor should it. This view of justice is not concerned with settling scores, but with allowing everyone to move forward.

The manners of restorative justice are admirably detailed, even though the murder mystery itself isn't a very compelling one. The choice to end with a lengthy villain monologue and an inelegant last-minute rescue diminishes the merits that the novel otherwise deserves regarding worldbuilding and characterization.

There's already a sequel planned for next year, which will show us how Europe fares in a timeline where it never ruled over other lands. As a first look at a world without colonization, The Peacekeeper is more interesting in the big picture than in the personal lives of its characters. Fans of alternate history have much to appreciate in this innovative concept, but fans of detective novels may have a hard time adjusting to an unfamiliar set of assumptions about what law enforcement is meant to exist for.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Blanchard, B. L. The Peacekeeper [47North, 2022].

Review: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

A monumental classic of science fiction gets renewed for 21st-century readers

Is this novel a retelling, a remake, a reimagining, a reboot, a requel? I'd call it a reclaiming.

The original book that inspired it, The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells, bears several hallmarks typical of Victorian adventure fiction: a properly educated Englishman ventures into the scary jungle and is quickly forced to dodge the infighting of the locals before he makes an eager return to modern civilization. In a new version of the story, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, author Silvia Moreno-Garcia takes that premise and turns it on its head: no, when the white man sets foot in the tropic, the dangerous thing about that interaction is not the tropic; no, the locals are not aggressive by nature, but they won't take kindly to attempts at enslavement; and no, home sweet home is not only to be found in the drawing rooms of Europe.

The first chapter deliberately declares this shift in the place of enunciation, when one of Moreau's hybrids asks, "what does an Englishman know about managing anything here? There are no jungles in England."

It's now the locals who get to tell the story. Instead of using an outsider perspective that follows the white man as he enters the jungle and then runs for his life, this novel is told from the jungle, without the othering that so often occurs in adventure fiction written from Europe. Contra Wells, nature is not described with the tools of narrative estrangement, as an anomalous place, full of forbidden mysteries; here nature is simply home. The anomalous, menacing thing to fear is not the tropical heat of the wilderness, but the extremes of coldness that the civilized mind is capable of.

This decentering of the white gaze is a sorely needed change to the classic story. The Island of Doctor Moreau is one of the foundational works of science fiction, but it's also appallingly racist. In some passages, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau reads like an effort to correct what was wrong with the original by adding background information that Wells didn't include, but which stands out as essential when one compares both books. Where Island merely portrays the character of Montgomery as a bitter alcoholic, Daughter does the work of exploring why he's a bitter alcoholic and how his life story influences his atttitude and his actions. Where Island presents us a Doctor Moreau comfortably settled in the remote jungle where he has built a fully furnished laboratory by himself, Daughter questions how much he could have achieved without live-in servants and a rich sponsor. Where Island believes that the purpose of creating the animal/human hybrids can be pure scientific advancement, Daughter understands the potential for oppression and explicitly states that the hybrids are intended to serve as cheap subhuman workers. Where Island uses the hybrids as token monsters for the hero to flee from, Daughter demands empathy for the hybrids and makes them the protagonists of a moral tragedy.

Lastly, the most important alteration is the titular daughter. The original book is a boys' club; the only noteworthy female character is a panther hybrid who is only there to be feared and then killed. The film adaptations of the novel have expanded this character into a love interest for the hero. Moreno-Garcia rejects that cliché and populates the novel with women and girls who are central to the plot. The young lady Carlota Moreau is a spectacularly constructed character, pulsating with a fearless love of life and an innate sweetness that accentuates the horror of the events around her. By casting Doctor Moreau as the physician of his own daughter, the author turns him into a representation of male control over female bodies; by including the topic of her upcoming marriageability, the author also brings into the story the convolutedness of 19th-century Latin American classism.

Reclaiming the Western canon by giving it a feminist and/or anticolonial twist has become an established practice for roughly half a century. Christa Wolf and Pat Barker gave a voice to the women of the Iliad, as did Margaret Atwood and Madeline Miller for the Odyssey; Jean Rhys added an entire Caribbean backstory to Jane Eyre; David Henry Hwang brought queer poetic justice to Madame Butterfly; Valerie Martin put Doctor Jekyll under a working-class lens; Bharati Mukherjee made The Scarlet Letter unapologetically her own; Alice Randall cheerfully eviscerated Gone with the Wind; Juan Gabriel Vásquez corrected Nostromo's erasure of Colombia; Kamel Daoud humanized the victim of the remorseless murderer Mersault; and Nancy Springer gave Sherlock Holmes a sister.

Even Doctor Moreau has received this treatment in recent years: both Megan Shepherd and Theodora Goss have written novels that invent a daughter for him.

What Moreno-Garcia contributes to this tradition is the specificities of her Mexican heritage. The timeline she has chosen for her plot coincides with a real historical conflict between native populations and white settlers, a context she helpfully provides in an appendix. By narrating the experiments of Doctor Moreau in parallel with an uprising of indigenous communities against the encroachment perpetrated by Hispanic landowners (a conflict where the English became involved seeking commercial advantage), she places onto the story the weight of the entire historical baggage of the colonial system of racial hierarchy, which assigned legal rights based on ancestry, considered the natives as less than human, and aspired to "improve" indigenous blood by hybridizing it with European blood.

The other identifiable Mexican ingredient in this novel is the romance plot. Yes, this is a story of medical horror and wars of conquest and patriarchal abuse and modern slavery, but it's also a tragic romance story. Carlota falls in love, gets entangled in a love triangle, and suffers inevitable heartbreak with the impetuosity and the fierceness of the best Mexican telenovelas. This is another way Moreno-Garcia has transformed the original story into something wholly new and wholly hers.

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau does more than update a classic. It takes the themes and tropes of canonical English literature, from the period that perfected the novel form, and brings them down to earth in a setting outside the control of English characters and English norms. Instead of the superior attitude of those who proclaimed of anything that didn't fit their categories, "Here be dragons," we jump right into the places where the systems of domination clash against the human spirit. At last, we listen to the dragons.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Moreno-Garcia, Silvia. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau [Del Rey, 2022].

Review: The Last Human by P. S. Hoffman

A far-future adventure where the legacy of humankind falls into the unlikeliest hands

Untold millennia after human extinction, new intelligent species populate the universe. Civilizations have risen and fallen and risen again, and developed their own forms of industry, but the relics of the final stages of human technology are still regarded as the ultimate standard of quality. In most worlds, human artifacts are even preserved with sacred reverence. And although humanity is long gone, the memory of our glorious deeds has persisted and morphed and grown to such legendary heights that we are worshiped as gods.

On the planet Gaiam, the native birdlike population is divided in castes, in the same way their capital city, called the Cauldron because of its concave shape, is segregated in horizontal layers of ascending prestige. The nobility lives in the Highcity, the regular folk have the Midcity, and those who have been abandoned by society do their best to get by in the Lowtown. For nineteen years now, Gaiam has been under the cruel occupation of the Cyran Empire, a civilization of reptilians that have conquered dozens more worlds. A short-lived rebellion ended disastrously, and its survivors have joined the unfortunate inhabitants of the Lowtown.

But one day, corvid-shaped Eolh, a jaded spy-for-hire with no personal attachments and no hopes for the future, stumbles upon the greatest discovery in the universe: a gang boss has gotten his hands on a cryonic tank that contains an actual, intact, living human. And there's no telling what the imperial regime will do to seize possession of him. From that point on, Eolh's life becomes a whirlwind of back alley chases, deadly knife fights, underground tunnel forays, clandestine medicine, and personally difficult choices as he crosses paths with a devout robot who has been patiently working to bring about the return of the gods, an imperial magistrate who will happily burn down the city to advance his career ambitions, and a disgraced queen who willingly surrendered the planet to the invaders.

Each of these characters is a complete story in itself, with generous space dedicated to exploring the web of their desires and their hidden depths, but Poire, the rescued human, is on a whole other level of fascinating: his survivor guilt drives a hard journey towards maturity as he slowly gains the strength to resolve the incongruousness between his rather inconsequential position in the vanished human society and the cosmic-scale role that the new society wants to drop onto his shoulders.

One can perceive a similar tension at the core of Eolh's character: each of his choices is a heart-rending balancing act between his post-traumatic urge for self-preservation and his newfound and not entirely welcome sense of responsibility. This is one of the high achievements of this novel: the level of effort that the author invested in portraying the inner struggle behind choices that the reader might not approve of, but will definitely empathize with. These characters are carefully built of emotions that feel authentic, an artistic feat all the more remarkable by the fact that all but one of them behave by alien rules of psychology that in this kind of story often risk coming off as incomprehensible. Here, the alien traditions and assumptions about proper conduct and social norms are organically integrated into the plot so that they don't fall as an infodump, and the reader can easily follow the reasons why this society works the way it does. Poire the human is utterly lost in this world, but the reader never is.

The world itself, lovingly put together, is worthy of more extensive praise. Although the action is mostly limited to one city, the author has taken obvious delight in the creation of each setting, from the shiny towers of the occupation government to the grimy passages between neglected and barely lit neighborhoods. The quarrel between factions to see who will gain control of the last human takes the reader through all the levels of the Cauldron, giving the author a nice excuse to display a vigorous worldbuilding arsenal. It's hard enough to design an entire collective habitat for a species of flight-capable aliens; it's even harder to refine the precise sense of setting that allows the author to carry the action naturally through the places where it needs to happen while ensuring that the physical components of each space reinforce the mood of each scene. This novel invites the reader to feel the vertigo of polished stone balconies and the dread of foul-smelling sewers and the eeriness of sentient climbing vines and the disorientation of abandoned high-tech ruins. Each space is strange and unexpected, but not simply for the sake of wowing the reader (though it more than does). I'm repeating myself, but it's important to highlight the synergy this novel reaches, by which the space supports the action and the action colors the space.

There are unmistakable parallels between the emergence of a long-awaited god in Cyran-occupied Gaiam and the emergence of Christianity in Roman-occupied Judea, but this novel does something far more interesting than a straight retelling of the Gospels. Poire is well aware that he's no savior, he's no divine superman, and he's the least-equipped hero to face the full might of an empire. But it's intensely satisfying to witness his growth from an unskilled, mediocre youth into a reliable, confident man who may not like the circumstances he's been thrown into, but serenely accepts the duty those circumstances put in his hands.

For a debut novel, and a self-published one at that, The Last Human is a consistent work of writing excellence that deserves a place next to any professionally produced book. You can immediately tell how much fun the author had in coming up with the complexities of these characters and in assembling every weird detail of the difficult world they inhabit. Fortunately, it's only the first entry in a planned series, which means we'll get to savor the mysteries of Gaiam for several years to come.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10.

Bonuses: +2 for the construction of richly detailed spaces throughout the city, +2 for gut-punching feats of psychological depth.

Penalties: −2 for the way the sequel hook makes the ending feel truncated, −2 because the language used to describe the ethnic varieties of avians comes too close to validating monarchism and bioessentialism—there's no justification for saying there's anything inherently "regal" about birds of prey that would make them worthier rulers than crows, for instance.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Hoffman, P. S. The Last Human [self-published, 2022].

Microreview [Book]: Babel by R. F. Kuang

 It's definitely dark, it's definitely set in academia, but this is far more powerful and far less aesthetic than that label implies. 

Cover art by Nico Delort

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution, to give it its full title, is not a gentle book. It is not a book inclined to mince words about its topics. It is about a lot of things - colonialism, both physical and cultural, racism and classism, white fragility, love, linguistics and the power of belonging, and of not belonging. To quote the author, it is a "love letter and break up letter to Oxford". It is a story of how a small group of people try to find a way to fight against the seemingly insurmountable force of the British Empire in the early 19th century, in a world where we imagine magic powered by silver and language exacerbates the technology and various societal effects of the industrial revolution. It is unflinchingly critical and honest about history, academic culture, and the untrammeled self-interest of those in charge.

In the world of Babel, languages can make magic - by inscribing words that translate, but with some meaning lost in the process, onto a bar of silver, the linguistic dissonance can cause some thematically similar effects in the real world, when the match pair of words is spoken by someone fluent in the languages. Collecting more words, more translations, more languages, allows the translators of Oxford to find more effects, which in turn are sold for exorbitant profit, or used to fuel the expansion of the British Empire. This in turn brings in more silver to inscribe, more languages to plunder and more speakers of those languages to exploit - because native speakers of the more "foreign" languages, ones who have had less cross-pollination with English, are particularly prized by the Translation Institute, and what better way to get those speakers than when they are young and can be moulded to fit an English lifestyle?

Our protagonist Robin is one such, taken from his home in Canton after the rest of his family died of cholera, himself on the brink of succumbing, healed by the English Professor Lovell, then raised in his house on a diet of languages until he was ready to take a place in Oxford.

By getting Robin's perspective, raised to think of Lovell with gratitude for saving him, to focus on nothing but language, starved of affection and people his own age, Kuang is in a position to give us the authentic feeling of coming up to Oxford as an undergraduate but on overdrive. And at this, she is devastatingly effective. The passages of the first years having their first tutes, discovering their intellectual curiosity, the sparkling feelings of joy talking to other people their age about the things they've all been raised to hold most dear, they feel so palpable, so painfully real. The bond between Robin and his three cohort-mates is immediate and vivid and so earnest, and all of their bond together with Oxford as a place and a feeling is so instantly, intensely passionate, a sense of sudden belonging after a childhood of various hardships.

Which makes the rest of the book all the more bittersweet. Because the thesis of the book is about how that belonging is false, an impossible dream none of them could ever realise. The carrot dangled before them to lure them along, alongside the stick of what would happen, what their lives would be, if they didn't give in to the temptation. And watching them realise this in slow motion, as events unfold that force them to see what was there all along, force them to realise they can't shut their eyes to it all, is devastating. It is a story of the shattering of pleasant illusions by bitter realities, and it is impossible not to grieve with the characters for the lost dreams, even as we and they know those dreams were never going to actually happen. The whole thing builds slowly through the course of the book, but by the end it is entirely gutwrenching.

As an emotional journey, the story is pretty flawless. Robin's slow progression from childhood ignorance to youthful academic zeal to disillusionment is beautifully, poignantly told, as are his relationships to both England and Canton, and China more broadly, and his own sense of nationality and identity. We move from mood to mood in smooth progression, and it is incredibly easy to latch onto his changing feelings, and slip from one to another as events dictate.

On the flip side, some of the early parts are a little repetitive in their world building and exposition. The beginning of the book has a lot of telling us about slavery, oppression and exploitation in the world of the early 1800s. All of what it tells us is true, clear, unambiguous and necessary, but is occasionally undercut by some of the footnotes - where the text will give us a pretty well-drawn picture of the world, the footnote spells it out so basically that it feels almost as if it doesn't trust the reader to have understood what it was telling them, which is occasionally a little grating. However, this mostly clears up once Robin reaches university, so it's possibly some of the tone is meant to be through the lens of his understanding of the world (or lack thereof), and if so, some of that heavy underscoring makes a little more sense. There are also so many delightful bits of historical accuracy, in the details. For instance, Robin once asks the Professor "what do I need Latin and Greek for?" and is met with "to understand English", which is such a 19th century view, and there are enough nuggets like this hidden among the childhood parts that it becomes relatively easy to forgive some of the overemphasis where it crops up.

Once we reach his time at university, there is a definite shift in the way the narrative moves - we speed up, steadily at first, matching the pace of his own growing understanding of the world and his place in it, and this match of prose and tone to content is both subtly and skillfully done. By the time the book reaches full flow, it feels impossible to put down, and utterly immersive in its worldbuilding.

We also go from his limited character interactions as a child - seeing really only Professor Lovell, his tutors and the cook - to a more richly peopled world. The sparseness of the childhood parts again mirror in the reader Robin's experience of his narrow world, and emphasise again the sheer emotional intensity of his coming up to Oxford, and the friends he meets and makes in his cohort.

And what a cohort they are. The four characters, who comprise most of the books main social and emotional interactions (alongside the Professor and one other), have a beautiful web of love and hate and co-dependency, understanding and ignorance, between them. There is the tension between the two boys and the two girls (who have their own struggles in an Oxford that barely accepts women might be capable of study), between white Letty and the other three, and then between Victoire and Ramy, and the sometimes-white-passing Robin. It is a book, encapsulated in these four, that really wants us to see the many, many different ways the world chose to oppress people, and how difficult it could sometimes be for people to see outside of their own struggle to those of others, even those nearest and dearest to us. The progression of the four way relationship in the Babel cohort is one of best written parts of the book (which is saying something), and it is just so, so good. It's "emphatic hand gestures while failing to find the right words to tell people how good it is" good.

It is also to some extent the tension of the main plotline writ small - because when we come to the events of the latter half of the book, Kuang manages to encompass so much of what was going on in the world of the 1830s, and so well, and it is brilliant. She draws in threads of the social and economic harms of industrialisation, the struggle of the working class, sexism, racism, the self-serving nature of apparent philanthropism, the intersections of religion with both liberation and oppression, the sheer hubris of empire, the self-sabotaging nature of colonialism, the blindness of people to the harms around them, and so, so much more, and connects and contextualises them with each other. And she manages to do this without flooding us with extraneous information that the reader might juggle to hold in their head all together. We don't need to know every single piece and part of every struggle that forms a part of the whole - she gives us what we need for the narrative to work, and for it to feel immersive, coherent and natural as a world, and this is absolutely critical for both allowing the story to move along at the speed it does, and for it to balance so well with the arc of the character relationships. This is, of course, to some extent helped by the fact we view the world through the lens of sheltered academics, and so can be presented information as somewhat new that many outside of the Oxford bubble would have been well aware of, but even so, it is extremely well-handled.

As is the magic system, and the necessary smattering of linguistics that gets thrown in as part of it. Because the silverwork relies on translation, and understanding words and how they come to be as they are, it is necessary to explain some various bits and bobs of philology to move the story along. And obviously, these are all factually good and sound, but more critically, what is included, the real and fake scholars' works that are quoted, work together to build such a perfect vibe of linguistics as a discipline in the early 1800s (with some tweaks for the story, of course). The ubiquity of Latin and Ancient Greek, as well as the abundance of German scholarship, the insistence on biblical underpinnings, the inter-country feuding and prides at stake, all builds together to create a great pastiche of the linguistics discipline as it did, or could have, looked.

And then, of course, the brutal honesty of the end thesis - on the necessity of violence. The crux of the novel. It is an inexorable, powerful, sophisticated and sharp conclusion to an argument we've been led along through the book. It is devastating and it is brilliant, and that is all I can really say about it.

As I was reading, several other books came to mind as drawing on similar themes in different ways, but the one I would most pick up is how the portrayal of the poisoned-fruit lure of Oxford in Babel is extremely resonant with Mahit's infatuation with the Teixcalaanli culture in A Memory Called Empire. Both manage to capture exactly the feel, the siren song of that beautiful, cursed and toxic coloniser culture, through the eyes of someone immersed but othered, whose highest possible aspiration in the eyes of that culture will be "one of the good foreigners", as though that were the best compliment that could be paid. And both manage to capture the impossible position it puts those who live between the worlds in, and how, whatever they pick, whatever path they walk, whatever life they lead, they will never win.

 --

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 I very nearly cried at the end. God, the ending.

+1 Almost painfully accurate in the portrayal of the allure and awfulness of academic culture

Penalties: -1 some of the early parts feel a little repetitive

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: R. F. Kuang, Babel [Harper Voyager, 2022]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Review: Speculative Fiction for Dreamers, a Latinx Anthology

A new collection of fiction and poetry about home, identity, and the need for connection

A sequel to the Latinx Rising anthology, Speculative Fiction for Dreamers contains 38 pieces of writing by authors from the Latin diaspora. The inherently hybrid nature of Latin life and Latin identity in the United States is addressed in the editors' introduction, which states, "Being Latinx, in its immense, beautiful, fractured entirety, is a kind of speculative fiction in itself."

These stories come at a pivotal moment for Latin artists of all speculative genres in the United States, which Frederick Luis Aldama's preface describes as "how the creative, mindful use of our counterfactual capacity today can imagine better ways for us to think, act, and feel tomorrow."

Part I: Dreaming of New Homes

The pieces selected for this first section deal with the characters' search for a place in the world and with their need to persist in that search when the world seems determined to exclude them.

How Juan Bobo Got to los Nueba Yores by Karlo Yeager Rodríguez, about an immigrant mother struggling to keep her son safe in a hostile city, is a dreamlike sequence of close encounters with the urgent need to belong, both as a matter of personal identity and as a matter of survival.

If he looked out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw mountains, hazy
with distance. Every time he repeated his story to himself, they grew sharper,
greener, until one day the skyscrapers would become the mountains back home.

Those Rumors of Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice Have Been Greatly Exaggerated by Ernest Hogan, about a road trip through the reclaimed lands of Mexican America, is an incoherent, rambling rant that mistakes having an anthropologist character for the need to overexplain itself in anthropological parlance. Even worse, it's a historical revenge fantasy, which to me is one of the least interesting forms of speculative fiction.

"It's a chocolate-flavored delivery system for a scientifically
blended combination of caffeine and cannabis!"
"Keeps you awake and energetic. And feeling good! It's the working
person's best friend! And it doesn't make you pee all the time!"

Saint Simon of 9th and Oblivion by Sabrina Vourvoulias, about a single young woman trying to figure out what she wants from life while everyone around her wants to impose their own aspirations on her, is a beautifully written exploration of the meaning of self-confidence, the elusive gift of living on one's talent, and the blurry lines between need and desire.

"My success comes from how wildly I imagine and how
meticulously I execute. Not magic, not fortune, just me."
"You've always had an exceedingly high opinion of yourself."

Ancestral Lines and other Tall Tales by Samy Figaredo, a theater play about a mixed-race young enby learning to draw strength from their origins, is a bit too flat and direct, without space for layers or subtext, but sometimes a heavy truth calls for a blunt delivery.

"You may choose to show certain sides to people to survive, but
the features you conceal are still with you. The moon does not
dissolve to form a crescent: it only chooses to show us less of itself."

Quetzal Feathers by Tammy Melody Gomez is a short but touching poem where an unnamed narrator transforms into the sacred bird of Mayan culture and flies toward a land more alive than reality.

a mountain place of winged fish and fluorescent frogs,
where I have forced my dreams to take me, again and again.

Tía Abuela's Face, Ten Ways by Lisa M. Bradley, about a young woman who undergoes plastic surgery to adopt her dead great-aunt's face, does a great work of condensing into the short story form the complexities of extended family drama, the effects of technology on identity, the biopolitics of bereavement, and the oddities of human culture when seen from the outside.

Everything is swimmy. Which I guess is appropriate, since the serum
in my irises is modeled after the chromatophores in octopus skin.

Part II: Dreams Interrupted

In this section, characters are placed in situations where they have to deal with loss, be it personal, generational, or ancestral.

Jean by Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos, about a girl whose way of coping with the death of a mother addicted to consuming heroin is to retreat into the story of the death of a heroine addicted to consuming stars, draws a thought-provoking parallel between spacetime wormholes and the unsettling power of emotional triggers.

Shake up the world of the dead and there's no way of knowing how far back into
the past you've reached to understand a story. Where a wormhole's taken you.

Like Flowers through Concrete by Louangie Bou-Montes, about a park ranger searching for a proper way to honor his dead brother's memory while unexpectedly falling in love with a guerrilla gardener, is a sweet portrayal of the compassion and care with which lasting sadness can gradually learn to coexist with newfound joy.

Wyatt just preferred the outskirts of town: the trees bursting up through
the roofs of the long-forgotten rectangular buildings, the mounds of
moss and grass growing over hunks of rusted metal, the forest smashing
its way past the concrete and asphalt that had once tried to contain it.

A Flock for the Sandhill Crane by Roman Sanchez, about the spirit of Our Lady of Guadalupe watching over the Mexican nation for centuries, is a waste of an interesting idea with its poorly edited sentences, its jarring structural disjointedness, and its cartoonish oversimplification of the historical roots of inequality as if they were reducible to conspiracy theory.

They had never intended to give the world
the opportunity to begin life in the stars.
While DeLamonte kept the UN and its
citizens distracted, the capitalist class began
boarding his rockets and preparing to flee.

Fancy by Diana Burbano, a theater play about organized struggle under a patriarchal theocracy, proceeds like a philosophical debate between waves of feminism and, by extension, between their associated generations, with the topic in question being the choice of tactic of resistance.

"Fighting like you do gets people killed. Or
thrown in jail— We got other ways to rebel."

Time Traveler Intro by Eliana Buenrostro is a flash piece about the dislocating strain of having to survive as several identities in several places.

I am everywhere and split into so many directions.
Split into multitudes. I am here and not at all.

The Music Box by Sara Daniele Rivera, about a grotesquely commodified soprano singer, is the curious type of science fiction that picks a metaphor and plays with taking it literally, in this case the metaphor of being robbed of your voice.

If she could, she would sing in Spanish.
If her mouth could still shape the words.

Part III: My Life in Dreams

The unifying theme in this section is the effect that the wondrous element (either technological or magical) has on human beings when it is integrated into the ordinary actions of daily life.

My First Word by William Alexander, about a community of garbage collectors in a world where speech produces trash, is an intriguing example of how language can be a tool of social exclusion, but also of survival.

The boy uttered a refrigerator. He didn't seem to have any trouble
producing an entire fridge from inside his distended jaw. It was
dark beige. It thunked against the rooftop, several times his size.

Do as I Do by Pedro Iniguez, about a trek across the Mexican countryside during a robot apocalypse, should have had more retouches in the editing stage, but is still effective at conveying the strength to keep love alive when all seems lost.

"He had to come out of hiding because food was running short. That's when
I met him. I was scavenging an old pet store for food. It had been looted
long ago, but there he was, frightened and joyous all at once. Like me."

The Clarification Oral History Project by Pedro Cabiya is written in the style of a promotional brochure by a nonprofit organization entrusted with documenting first-hand testimonies about a mysterious event that transformed all Haitians into white people.

After the Clarification nothing has been the same anywhere in
the world. Perhaps one of the most enduring and far-reaching
results of the Clarification is the final disintegration of Western
moral paradigms and the bankruptcy of its cultural leadership.

Curanderas in the Ceiling by Alex Temblador, about a woman undergoing spiritual healing at the same time as gynecological surgery, is one of those cases where an ending open to ambiguous interpretations hurts the story instead of helping it.

I want to say something, but in that moment, I can feel
the blood rushing from my head, my vision blurs and
begins to fade. I can hear the nurse speaking in tongues,
Mamá crying, and the doctor yelling at someone.

Dream Rider by Daniel Parada, a comic one-shot about an agricultural festival in a Mesoamerican-themed future, has an interesting visual design, but it doesn't really have a plot, and feels more like a prologue for something longer.

It is only once a year, but on this day, the dimensions
of the living and the dead are weakened. This creates a
liminal space accessed by lucid dreaming via a special
liquid compound. On this day the dry and wet worlds party.

Spooky Action at a Distance by Laura Villareal is a poem where the narrator meditates on the threads that tie us to each other.

people gushed about Pluto's heart
until they knew it was broken.

BlindVision by Grisel Y. Acosta, about an extreme form of augmented reality that takes over users' muscles to guide their daily movements for them, starts as a very interesting thought experiment and then derails into something resembling a spy drama that promises answers and gives none.

They look like glasses to block the sun, the kind
you get at the doctor, except for the flicker of
light at the center of each lens, like a blue, green,
or red signal, slowly dying, somehow lingering.

Part IV: When Dreams Awaken

This section explores that liminal moment when the realm of fiction brushes against the realm of reality, and the inhabitants of our stories somehow cross over into our side.

The Chupacabra Next Door by Roxanne Ocasio, an urban fantasy/shifter romance about a schoolgirl who accidentaly gets involved in a secret war against evil, is a great example of the power of legends to rewrite collective memory: chupacabras are actually a very modern phenomenon, arisen in the late 20th century, but this story succeeds at believably recasting them as mythical creatures from precolonial times.

Wings and tail drooped as if empty of bone and muscle.
His strange blue eyes lost all of their color, becoming
a sickly gray. How could this be the same person
who had eaten dinner at her house twice this week?

An Adventure of Xuxa, La Ultima by Reyes Ramirez, about a wandering warrior who visits town after town to warn them of an oncoming zombie horde, is a fast-paced adventure with serious questions about humanity's right to survive.

"The gods, in all their genius, ended our reality
with the dead returning to feast on the living, our
collective history catching up to confront us."

Night Flowers by Stephanie Adams-Santos, about a family of survivors that flee from a fire and walk through a dangerous jungle full of hungry terrors, abounds in pitch-perfect metaphors that don't let the tension subside for one moment.

in the vicinity of sleep one begins to
doubt the shape and size of what is true.

Alma y Corazón by Julia Rios, about a former demon slayer now institutionalized as a mental patient, takes the tropes of superheroism and carefully molds them into a more intimate form. There is an admirable depth of compassion in how this story suggests a different way of saving a life.

She needed to be strong for her sister. And
strength didn't always mean roaring ferociously.
Sometimes it meant being quietly assertive.

Ella by Frederick Luis Aldama, Fernando de Peña and Rodrigo Vargas, a comic one-shot about biomechanical surveillance in a totalitarian maquila, has a worthy premise, but is visually unpolished and structurally confusing.

I wake. I roll over. I'm connected. I'm tentacled.

Two-Bullet Cowgirl Blues by Steve Castro, a poem about a tough girl in a tough town, is brief and direct, but with a whole world of revelations at the ending.

She arose early enough to wring the rooster's neck while it slept.

A Mirage by Steve Castro, about a domestic discussion on what to have for dinner in space, is written in flash form, and that hurts the story. The sheer amount of background exposition that the characters have to insert in each line of dialogue demands too much credulity of the reader, and the abruptness of the ending makes the whole piece feel directionless.

"Didn't you tell me that dodo burritos were your favorite,
and that your mistress loved goat-cheese empanadas."

The One by Steve Castro is another flash piece, this time about a world-ending cataclysm, and it fares better in its use of the form to paint a general image in the appropriately broad strokes it needs.

The fire was so massive and intense, its flames reached
up to the heavens and incinerated the earth's moon.

Grave Talk by J. M. Guzman, a surreal exploration of a literally living city, is by far the most difficult piece in the book. I have no idea what it means, but it's beautiful.

There were violet hearts encased in the calcified
ceiling, oozing black oil, pulsating irregularly.
Engineering the city with their tenuous hold.

Part V: Dreams Never Imagined

The anthology reserved the most creative pieces for its last section, which contains some truly innovative concepts that push forward the frontiers of speculative literature.

A Dangerous Wand by Nicholas Belardes, about a glassblower who becomes fascinated by a newcome stranger with mysterious intentions, is a tragic take on the allure of danger.

She said in our native tongue that Mr. Tiré was a
brujo, that he was here to melt the trees and consume
both sand and animals and pull the water from
below us and evaporate what was left into the sky.

Madrina by Sara Daniele Rivera, about stranded astronauts who resort to telepathic time travel to try to chart their way back home, not only has a thought-provoking premise related to the ethics of anthropological research and historical memory, but also leaves the reader with a bittersweet new sensation: the nostalgia for a place not yet seen.

"It's like I was born in a gap. Like my whole life is a
transition between people who will have true lives."

Bad Sun by Scott Russell Duncan, a flash piece about a boy sneaking out to play under forbidden sunshine, has almost an air of ancient myth in how it wields imagery and primal fears.

Knocking came from the door. A man in a hat
that had candles circling it talked to Mom.

Beacon by Scott Russell Duncan, a flash piece about a sinister bishop obsessed with people's inner light, is a curious reversal of the colonial gaze on Indigenous religions.

Their fathers and mothers lit candles to their spirits,
then more candles so they could see to light even
more candles, but it was never enough, darkness
came every night, inside, outside, everywhere.

Her Number by Scott Russell Duncan, a flash piece about an accountant who finds mystical meaning in financial datasets, is a weird but entertaining portrait of gradually creeping obsession.

Wendy did her numbers. The patterns came slowly.
Numbers formed pictures at times. At first like looking
up in the clouds and seeing people. Or a paw. Or a tail.

Old Folks by Scott Russell Duncan, a flash piece about a retirement home running an organ harvesting program, is quite effective at beginning in a warm, friendly tone and ending with a wham.

"Don't be so greedy, Pearl. Wait your turn. He's here for everyone."

Soledad by Ezzy G. Languzzi, about a desperate housewife who asks for a wish from an enchanted bottle of mezcal, is a hilarious vignette of revenge.

"The plant warmed, wrapped its plump, velvet-like
leaves around her, and protected her from the cold. It
cradled her and lulled her into a deep, deep sleep."

Contraband by Patrick Lugo, a comic one-shot about a reluctant smuggler doing a favor for her brother in a cyberpunk dystopia, makes excellent use of silent panels to tell its plot and of dialogues to land the punch of its reveal.

"Oh, what's that? Is that what everyone calls 'papers'?"

The ENCRoach Program by Grisel Y. Acosta, a poem about coerced espionage via insect wetware, tells a lot more than it shows, and ends up sounding more like a dry manifesto than like an artistic work.

my enslavement, the anvil on my back,
forcing me to steal words from the same population I steal food from

Homebound by Tabitha Sin, about the slow, bureaucratic genocide of immigrants in a future flooded Manhattan, leaves a chilling impression of how easy it can be to normalize the unacceptable. It offers a sobering reflection on whether immigration is really worth all the hatred and the broken ties. As the last story in the collection, it closes resoundingly.

I didn't know if I was heading home or leaving it, but
at least I had someone who felt like home by my side.

As regards wordcraft quality, this anthology is rather mixed. But in thematic breadth, historic relevance, and opportunity for recognition of both established and up-and-coming creators, this is a milestone. There's material here for every taste: you may love the parts I didn't, and that's one of the strengths that make this book very recommended.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Hernandez, Alex; Goodwin, Matthew David; and García, Sarah Rafael [editors]. Speculative Fiction for Dreamers, a Latinx Anthology [Mad Creek Books, 2021].

Microreview [book]: The Actual Star by Monica Byrne

A cyclical epic about the connections and divisions between us

The Actual Star is a demanding book. It tells three interdependent stories, each a novel in its own right, separated by centuries but connected by reincarnation and by the eternal recurrence of myths. It opens with three maps of the same location, each set in a different era, oriented in a different direction, and containing different landmarks that reflect the passage of colonial devastation and sea level rise. It has a massive glossary at the end, which I recommend you read first, because it explains much of the backstory that the text of the novel proper is content to leave implied. It has entire pages of untranslated dialogues in Spanish, futuristic neo-Spanish, and Belizean Kriol. And at every step it asks you to reevaluate your assumptions about how societies work, how cultures survive, and how people seek their own way of transcendence.

In the year 1012, Ixul and Ajul are the twin heirs of the Tzoyna throne in one of the many Mesoamerican kingdoms that comprise what we call the Maya civilization. Their younger sister Ket starts having prophetic visions that they hope will guide their people to renewed prosperity, but their ascent to the throne coincides with a period of climate change that destabilizes the necessary trust between farmers and rulers.

In the year 2012, American teenager Leah Oliveri flies from her boring frozen town in Minnesota to Belize, the home of her biological father, following an irresistible yet indescribable pull toward a deeper meaning. Right at the time the Maya calendar is turning over a leaf, she becomes the lover of two tourist guides and develops a dangerous fascination with a sacred cave which she believes guards the answers she's looking for.

In the year 3012, after modern civilization has collapsed and humanity has narrowly survived extinction, the dominant social structure is the religion of Laviaja (futuristic neo-Spanish for "The Journey"), a syncretic blend of anarcho-nomadism, Maya myth, and radical sex positivity that reveres Leah Oliveri as a saint and her two one-night-stands as her first apostles. This belief system has kept peace on Earth for centuries, but now is at risk of fossilizing into yet another oppressive institution.

These three plots are braided together in a polyphony full of thematic resonance, where events in one time period are mirrored in the next, a character's prayer in the future is fulfilled in the past, and particular sensory experiences reverberate across the eras at key moments of decision. Even quiet, contemplative scenes bear the tension of multiple threads leading to other characters having the same thought, other conversations wrestling with the same question, other versions of humanity dealing with the same basic yearning.

Yearning is a core theme of this novel. The reader is made aware of it since the very first page, where a quote by C.S. Lewis says, "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world." That is absolutely not how probabilities work, or how explanations work, or how desires work, or how worlds work, but it's the frame of mind from which the whole story is conceived: the ancient doctrine that this material world is made of imperfect reflections of a more "real" world, and that the purpose of life is to heal the divide between us and that other world. The title of the book refers to the difference between seeing a reflection of a star with our flawed human senses and perceiving the real thing via more direct means. Across the novel, this is expressed through the frequent motif of characters pausing to notice Venus in the sky. Every time it is mentioned, Venus is used as a symbol of the things that are desired but appear unreachable.

Much is made of the condition of Venus and Earth as twin planets, because twins are another motif in the book. Twins appear in Maya creation myths as the heroic founders of humanity, and twins reappear in each era of The Actual Star as symbols of the fundamental tragedy of human life: that we are so much like each other, yet are irrevocably unique and separate, that we desire togetherness, but the universe tends toward increasing separation. Every variation of this is explored, from the trope of quarreling twins separated at birth, to the mythic cosmology of a spherical universe cleft in halves, to the enmity directed inward in the act of self-cutting. A cut can be understood as an abyss separating two parts, but also as a passage connecting them. The sacred cave that connects the three narratives is clearly a wound in the earth, a wound turned into its own world. The most dramatic extrapolation of this motif is the notion of afterlife in Laviaja, whose devotees hope to be snatched into the other world through a cut in the fabric of reality.

Now one may wonder why they would want to leave this world, if Laviaja has supposedly turned it into a utopia. But no utopia can satisfy every wish. In the pacifistic anarchy of 3012, nation states no longer exist. In their stead, each individual builds their own identity from three key components, the terms for which are an imagined evolution from real Spanish words. "Genéra" corresponds to gender identity, except that the options available are named after cardinal points. "Manéra" is aesthetic presentation, more or less like the way you can tell apart an emo from a hipster from a furry from a ganguro, but expanded to include every possible aesthetic, even ancient Romans, mermaids, or Swan Lake Odettes. Finally, "preféra" is this world's version of the top/bottom axis, which is a choice open to all because humans in this future are genetically engineered for fully functional hermaphroditism (another instance of the ancestral yearning for the reunion of split halves).

Where it gets dystopic is in the extreme way Laviaja handles social relations. As the book itself declares, "peace needs enforcement," and later, "peace requires sacrifice," which is a nicer way of saying that any sufficiently coordinated anarchy is indistinguishable from a state. I wouldn't want to live under a regime where anyone who sees my face can instantly know every conversation I've ever had and every place I've ever been and exactly what I like to do in bed; where a world-spanning computing network dictates what job I'll do that day and whom I can gift my possessions; where the entire world can cast me out for speaking in favor of lasting human connection. A world where privacy is frowned upon as a form of hoarding, where the justice system is literally panoptic, is not a very desirable world. Laviaja was founded originally as a movement of climate refugees, who became the majority of the human population after unchecked exploitation of resources reached the point of unsustainability. The problem is that emergency measures devised to deal with an extreme situation became codified as the norm of everyday living. That is the conundrum the protagonists face in 3012: must they continue a lifestyle adapted to near-extinction conditions, now that human survival has been ensured? Just because it is the nature of the universe to break apart and break away, must they hold on to nothing?

The sections set in 1012 present a horrifying alternative: instead of escaping this world, you could submit to the captivity in which we are all born. The scenes in the royal palace describe the sacred ball game of the Maya people as a ritualized ratification of the social contract whereby some are always fated to win and some are always fated to be sacrificed.

The sections set in 3012 suggest a different way: we cannot pretend that change won't happen. What we can do is to consciously steer it. Otherwise, we no longer belong to the order of things. We may as well not be in the world.

Rejection of this world by comparison to a perfect afterlife is nothing new. In her recent video interview with John Scalzi, Byrne described the religio-political structure of Laviaja in these terms: "it's as if the entire planet is one nomadic monastery." That choice of wording points to the danger at the core of this system: for all its emphasis on individual freedom, it lends itself too easily to dogmatism. In each era of the story, we see the harmful effect of rigid social rules, which the reader can infer by the degree of access allowed to the sacred cave, a stand-in for access to ultimate fulfillment: in 1012, only the royal family can reach it; in 2012, only those with disposable income and lucky passports can; in 3012, it is supposedly open to everyone, but no one is allowed to stay. Time and again, the yearning for union clashes against the reality of separation, but it is separation which makes desire possible.

As a story about the way all things break apart and break away, it is remarkable that The Actual Star holds together until the end. Byrne displays here an expert mastery of the techniques of the craft, using repeated themes as a vehicle for unique characters to come alive, letting their choices speak the points and counterpoints of a long discussion spanning centuries of history. The plot transmutes the cruelty of empire into the joy of perpetual diaspora, the rudeness of the tourist gaze into a celebration of impermanence, the disjointedness of an incomplete historical record into a tool of narrative creativity. Just like Leah was said to have disappeared in the cave, but actually found transcendence, just like the Maya people are said to have disappeared in history, but actually survive in new ways in the real world, you may feel at times that you lose yourself in this book. What you find at the end of the passage is unique to you. It depends on the god of the place where you are while you experience it.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +2 for the skillful interweaving and rhyming between the three timelines, +2 for numerous poetic descriptions that serve as an effective complement to the narration.

Penalties: −1 because Leah, the central character of the book, the foundation for a major religion of mutual help and acceptance, the pivot around which the entire history of the planet turns, too often comes off as an insufferably fastidious brat, −1 because too many dialogues and choices in the 2012 sections are evidently inserted because the plot demands that they happen, −3 because, for a novel that relies so heavily on Spanish, it commits numerous orthographic and semantic errors in representing the Spanish of the present day. (The ones that are most impactful to the plot are the false friend actual, which means "current" or "up-to-date," not "real;" and the noun jugador, which does derive from the verb jugar, but does not share its dual meaning. Jugador only means "player" of a sport or a game, not "player" of a theatrical role. Less crucially, but more irritatingly, "vámanos" is not even a word that exists in Spanish. The correct spelling is "vámonos.")

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Byrne, Monica. The Actual Star [Harper Voyager, 2021].

Review: The Dominion Anthology

Ours is a time of ever-increasing visibility for African SFF—now it has its first anthology

Our editor Adri mentioned this book already last August, but it bears revisiting at greater length. This is, according to the publisher, "the first anthology of speculative fiction and poetry by Africans and the African Diaspora," so it deserves every chance of visibility it can get. Edited by Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and with a foreword by Tananarive Due, the Dominion anthology collects twelve stories and one poem about imagined futures and reimagined pasts told with deep sincerity and robustness of worldbuilding. This is certainly an exciting time for diversity in speculative fiction.

Trickin' by Nicole Givens Kurtz, from the United States, is an odd choice to open the book with, as it is not a very strong story, with little impact on the reader. In the ruins of a city devastated by biological warfare, a mysterious wanderer wakes up on Halloween and starts terrorizing the survivors, demanding a blood tribute. There are the vaguest indications that the protagonist might be some sort of superhuman, most likely a vampire, but the story itself is scarce in information. One has to flip back to the book's introductory pages to learn from the editorial synopsis that this character is supposed to be a god. Not the most impressive of starts, but don't worry: the rest of the anthology more than makes up.

Red_Bati by Dilman Dila, from Uganda, is the deeply moving rebellion story of a former pet robot now working for an asteroid mining company that finds it cheaper to repurpose discarded pets than to buy actual miner robots. Unbeknownst to its new owners, Red_Bati had a software upgrade with human-like intelligence so it could better serve as a companion to humans, so when it suffers an accident and is put in storage as damaged junk, he devises a risky escape plan.

The most effective artistic choice in this story is its gradual dosing of information: we start in the middle of a conversation with minimal context, then we are pulled back so we can see some of the scenery (we are on a spaceship), and later we learn the protagonist's immediate predicament, and only when it becomes relevant to the plot are we given the rest of the backstory. This technique of withholding crucial facts until they are needed is very hard to do successfully, but this time it's managed with a flawless expertise that never loses hold of the reader's attention. The interaction between the robotic protagonist and its internal simulation of its dead owner is as funny as it is heartbreaking, and it subtly grows in weirdness until the ending comes and devastates the reader.

There are, however, a few missteps, which would not matter in any other kind of story, but are too noticeable in one that presents itself as science fiction grounded in physics. One aside comment mentions a sentient robotic crew on another spaceship that panics and refuses to keep working upon estimating only a 99.9% chance of a safe landing (which is not how any superintelligent being would respond to probabilities), while another part refers to a system of thermal insulation so good it can resist −400 °C (a temperature that is physically impossible in this universe). These details are brief and do not affect in the least the emotional punch of the story, but they do distract enough to prevent full suspension of disbelief.

A Maji Maji Chronicle by Eugen Bacon, from Australia, is a time travel story that revisits the Maji Maji Rebellion, an uprising that erupted against forced labor in the German East Africa colony (today's Tanzania). A wizard and his apprentice jump from the future to 1905 Earth and explore the ramifications of an alternate outcome to the rebellion. In our timeline, villagers used folk charms that were believed to stop bullets, and were brutally suppressed by the German colonial officers. In this version of events, we watch with dread the insidious darkness that could have taken over the human heart if the rebels had had access to real magic.

This tale appears to have a simple structure at first sight, but it contains material for extended discussions on the allure of power, the difficulty of maintaining control, and the didactic usefulness of history. The reader will marvel at how the author managed to speak of a horribly painful episode while having the two viewpoint protagonists banter with Quixotic irony.

The Unclean by Nuzo Onoh, from Nigeria, is a haunting story about the horror of loss worsened by the horror of patriarchy. In the years leading to Nigeria's independence, a young Igbo woman separated from her home by arranged marriage endures first the cruel pressure to conceive and then the despair of her child's death. When she starts receiving nightly visitations from the child's ghost, she tries desperately to help him be born into his next life. We experience in parallel narratives the journey that brought her to her present misfortune and the trial by ordeal she's going through for practicing forbidden sorcery.

This story abounds in cultural specifics that construct a solid image of the setting in the reader's mind. We're presented with an array of malevolent spirits, magical rituals and secret Nsibidi symbols that anchor the story firmly in its corner of the world.

But beyond the care for authenticity, it is amazing that a terrifying tale of horrific events can be so filled, from start to end, with beautiful sentences that jump out at the reader, demanding to be reread for the pure enjoyment of their rhythm, their choice of words, their evocative poetry. A select few are "As I walked through the low metal gate of our compound, my feet grew sudden wings as I raced the last few yards to our front door" and "My reddened eyes remained puffed with unfinished tears, ready to shed my agony at the slightest excuse" and "The unnatural stillness in my room was heavy with a waiting quality that made the darkness a solid malignant mass" and "Gathered in a silent, waiting crowd, hollowed eyes dripping blood as black as tar, each posed in the manner of their demise, they impaled me to the ground by their appalling visage" and "God is thundering, roaring, helpless as He's always been in the face of mankind's tragedy."

This is a powerful piece of horror and one of the highlights of the entire collection.

A Mastery of German by Marian Denise Moore, from the United States, is a short but effective exploration of the anxieties brought by the current genetic ancestry testing fad. In a not very tightly regulated pharmaceutical company, a project to turn generational memory into a product is discussed in the context of larger questions about privacy, identity, heredity, and erased history. If a company can make money from your memories, but you are your memories, is the company selling you? This question would be piercing enough in any story, but in one told from the perspective of African American history, and coinciding with the still-ongoing discussion about who gets to own and tell a people's experience, it carries an extra edge.

The anthology also features Emily, Moore's heartfelt poem about the many characters lost to history and the things we wish we could have told them.

Convergence in Chorus Architecture by Dare Segun Falowo, from Nigeria, is a survival story with the symbolic scope and weight of an epic. In a richly detailed Yoruba setting, sustained by powerful descriptions like "Lightning flashed and for a moment, everything seemed made from white stone," a community of war escapees who founded a secret village have to decipher a vision from the heavens. For a long stretch, the plot is less about material events and more about the effort to decipher the omens. This is a nice way to tell a story about stories: to make it hinge on an act of interpretation. Characters spend whole days in mystical trance and their perception of the waking world is effortlessly blended with the signs of the dream.

The narration relies heavily on the divinatory practices of the Ifa religion, and large portions are devoted to painting intricate dreamscapes that hold the secrets to the story. These sections employ surreal imagery that both detaches the reader from the conventional meanings of words and creates a very concrete, very unique world with its own system of meaning. This is what makes it possible for the author to put so much force into wonderful sentences like "A scream was cut short by a blaze of violet fire, as the screaming body exploded into the air, burning a trail thin as thread from the distant plain into the gut of the boneship" and "Up in the sky where he looked, he saw as in the shared dream, a blackness staining the night, the emergence of a void in the flesh of reality" and "Her motions set off melodies which the air sings to itself."

The author's mastery of description holds together two parallel plots that explore both the depths of the earth and the void of outer space. Thieves from another star system have come to the village, in a stylized metaphor for the arrival of the slave trade, while a man navigates the underworld to seek the divine power that may save his people. Both below the earth and up among the stars, the events have to be read with multiple meanings, with the lasting resonance of myth. This story, my favorite in the book, is absolutely breathtaking, crafted in a tactile language that makes the stuff of dreams feel real.

To Say Nothing of Lost Figurines by Rafeeat Aliyu, from Nigeria, is a fun portal fantasy where a bored half-alien bureaucrat assigned to a boring uneventful town is suddenly ordered to watch over a human wizard searching for a staff he needs to participate in a magical competition. The frustrations of cultural misunderstandings and the absurdities of transdimensional legislation carry the tale in a breeze, but it's worth noting briefly the series of clever allegories inserted here: barriers to immigration, theft of cultural treasures, the discrimination suffered by people of mixed ethnicity, and the power of heritage to literally make a territory.

Sleep Papa, Sleep by Suyi Davies Okungbowa, from Nigeria, is a gritty undead story where an organ trafficker is haunted by his father's corpse after inadvertently selling parts of him. We follow the protagonist in a deadly quest through the criminal underbelly of Lagos to unburden himself from his guilt.

Clanfall: Death of Kings by Odida Nyabundi, from Kenya, is a complex political drama with plenty of throat slashing and gut ripping. In a far future Earth without humans, a territory known only as the Cracked Realm is ruled by feuding cyborg dynasties. The clan of the Fisi has just overthrown the clan of the Simba for control of the country, but a spy drone sent by the reclusive clan of the Chui has discovered a secret that could strengthen their position under the new regime. The plot is slow to reveal itself, and folds back into the past several times to revisit events from another perspective. The multiple alternating viewpoints tax the reader's working memory, and the abrupt ending comes frustratingly soon after the author has spent so much effort on building a fascinating world that cries out to be explored more. It reads as the first chapter of a much longer epic, and one can only hope it is.

The Satellite Charmer by Mame Bougouma Diene, from the United States, zooms the controversy on Chinese acquisition of African raw materials to cosmic proportions: in a future empire spanning the territories between Chad and Senegal, Chinese corporations have acquired a license to shoot gigantic beams of red light from orbit to pull minerals from the ground. A young man with prophetic powers has spent his life captivated by the strange seductive power of the red beam, obsessed with becoming one with it, while his country tries to survive amid massive environmental devastation.

The prose is written efficiently, but has time for strong description when it matters. The reader is regaled with sentences like "He could taste the dampness in the air, his eyes watering with the wind" and "Entire swathes of the continent seared and bleeding with lava, like open arteries on a suicidal forearm" and "The Mandrill's eyes opened onto the universe, folded it into the shape of Ibou's heart and took a bite." Likewise, the protagonist holds on to scarce moments of beauty as an escape from the bleakness of the world. Through slices of his life, we watch him adapt to the pressures of extractive economy until it takes everything from him and more.

This story gradually rises from a mundane plot to metaphysical musings without letting go of its threads of logical continuity. It's one thing for you to repeat the mantra that everything is connected, and another thing to be yourself the pathway through which it happens.

Thresher of Men by Michael Boatman, from the United States, is a quick succesion of shocking episodes about an avenging goddess who has lived for centuries watching over the African people and their descendants, and now has returned to the world in the era of police brutality.

Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, from Nigeria, concludes this anthology with mixed results. In a future Ife, a refuge for the dwindling survivors of a nuclear war, the tribal leader makes unauthorized contact with the outside world, offering his people's supernatural talents in exchange for a dubious promise of rescue, and sets in motion an explosive confrontation and a social revolution in his suffocatingly patriarchal community.

The dialogues are excessive, explaining too much in a theatrical voice that makes the characters sound separated from their own feelings. In the manner of didactic tales, which themselves feature as central elements of the story, the author chooses to tell rather than show, to a degree that strains the reader's investment. The characters come off more as archetypes than as concrete persons. Every time a fact about this society needs to be told to the reader, characters say it to each other, in classic "As you know" manner. Strangely, in a pivotal early scene where two prophets pronounce world-shattering revelations, the dialogue is simple, almost business-like, incongruous with the events it is describing.

The action scenes, in contrast, are written with better skill. This is not entirely to be celebrated, as this is not a story of war, but a story of cultural change told with the trappings of war. When it returns to its central topics, however, it adopts a preachy tone that does its message no favors. Only its mythical ending saves this story, which by that point has grown rather ponderous.

This last part may sound like an indictment of the book, but it's far from that. There is material here for every taste, and you may notice that in Adri's review last August, she enjoyed stories I didn't. This anthology is worth your immediate attention, and the most exciting bit is that it is labeled as "Volume One," so we remain eager for the rest of the series.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +2 for beautiful prose.

Penalties: −2 for numerous typesetting errors that are even more numerous in the Kindle version. It is unfair that an anthology capable of such literary heights should be stained by clumsy paragraph indentation and careless kerning.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Knight, Zelda and Ekpeki, Oghenechovwe Donald [editors]. Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora (Volume One) [Aurelia Leo, 2020].

Summer Reading List 2020: Adri

This is set to be an interesting summer for reading: on the one hand, there are going to be no holiday breaks or long plane journeys to really pack in the pages , but on the other, there's plenty of reasons to want to escape and not going halfway round the world has the added advantage of being within touching distance of my entire TBR at all times. I've got several conflicting reading tasks on my mind right now, including finishing off awards shortlists, recommitting to non fiction reading, catching up on my never-ending short fiction backlist, and trying to get the physical TBR back under control - all while still getting to the new stuff I'm most excited about in 2020. And all of this at a time when I've also rediscovered the many and varied joys of fanfiction (specifically of the Fire Emblem: Three Houses variety, no I shall not be letting this game out of my heart any time soon) - in short, things are feeling pretty busy, and I'm hoping to be as targeted as possible about what I'm picking up at the moment.

Looking back on my list from last year, I'm pleased to say that I've read all six of the books I intended to, although this did not by any stretch all happen in the summer of 2019. I'm hoping I can replicate that success with this set of bangers:

1. Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee

New Yoon Ha Lee fantasy! I heard a reading of this while at Worldcon last year, and when the cover was revealed to be something out of the coolest video game ever, it became pretty clear this was going to be a Big Deal for my reading calendar. With a non-binary protagonist caught up in political intrigue when all they want to do is make art, in an empire whose military force includes giant mecha powered by mystical sigils. Have I mentioned I'm excited? I could literally not be more excited. Why am I not reading this right now instead of writing an article?

2. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I've been a Moreno-Garcia fangirl for a while now, and one of my favourite things about following her writing is how it takes me into a different genre with every book. Plus, gothic literature is an old teenage fixation of mine, so when it comes to this feminist reimagining, I need very little persuasion in the first place. This story, about a woman who receives a letter asking for help from her cousin following her marriage and move to a mysterious gothic mansion, looks like it's going to be claustrophobic


3. Ancient, Ancient by Kinii Ibura Salaam.


What would a summer reading list be without a collection of poetic science fiction short stories from a feminist press? I've had my eye on this volume for a while and I finally got my hands on it a couple of months ago, it went right up near the top of my reading list. I don't believe I've read a story by Salaam before so, with the exception of a few very promising reviews, I'm going into this with little expectation beyond being very intrigued by what it has in store.


4. Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent by Priyamvada Gopal.

I once spent an otherwise normal train journey sat opposite two other commuting strangers, one of whom was reading Saul Alinsky and the other who was reading this intriguingly titled history book. (I was reading Palestine +100, and I like to think we all got some book recommendations off each other that day). I made a mental note to remember the book title, but on getting off the train it went out of my head again... until a couple of months later when I rediscovered it at Housman's bookshop in London. Of course I then had to have it, and this summer seems like an excellent time to read it.


5. Exhalation by Ted Chiang


Standing in for all the remaining award-nominated fiction I need to get to in the next month and a bit, Exhalation is on my list for the two original stories on the Hugo finalist list, but also because its Ted Chiang and of course I'm going to read the whole thing from start to finish and hopefully love every moment of it. Like the Salaam, I think I've avoided previously reading any of these stories, and I have no expectations about their content except "very good".

6. Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire by Rhodes Must Fall, Oxford

A few years before Edward Colston took a dip in the Avon, the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa successfully campaigned for the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town; the movement sparked similar calls around the world, including in Oxford, where a statue of Rhodes (at the time of writing) still stands outside Oriel College, on the High Street. This volume combines the history and analysis of that movement, and reflections from sister movements in the UK, with pieces about the broader need to decolonise the curriculum and teaching at British universities. I've had the book on my shelves for a year and I'm excited to finally read it, especially since it might soon need a new afterword...

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.