Microreview [book]: Crossroads of Canopy, by Thoraiya Dyer

If you haven’t read this yet, why on earth not? And if you have yet somehow didn’t like it, seriously: why on earth not?

Dyer, Thoraiya. Crossroads of Canopy. Macmillan, 2017.

You can buy it here, and by the time you’re done reading this review, you’ll want to!

Despite being the target of polarizing reviews (some of which, I am convinced, are consciously or unconsciously motivated by dislike for precisely what makes it unique, namely the unconventional heroine), this story is awesome. Its awesomeness stems partly from its world-building (the unique forest world, consisting of the mysterious Floor, the savage Understory, and the elitist Canopy, with the people and creatures from each a strange and fascinating mix of familiar and alien traits) and partly, perhaps mostly, from its main character. Here’s why heroine Unar is the best female protagonist—and indeed, one of the best protagonists of any biological sex or gender—in years.

Her masculine-without-being-stereotypically-tomboyish femininity:

Unlike the squeaky clean, often virginal heroines of recent popular fantasy and sci fi literature (I’m looking at you, Bella Swan!), Unar has desires…and acts on them. In fact, her coming of age reminded me quite strongly of Tenar’s awakening in Ursula Le Guin’s immortal The Tombs of Atuan. I wonder if Unar’s name might have been inspired by that rather similar story of social and sexual repression, out of which, like two glorious butterflies, these two heroines irrepressibly burst? Unar is not a model of demure femininity; instead, she’s an interesting mix of feminine and (what we might identify as) prototypically masculine traits, especially her tremendous ambition and her hunger for power, qualities that stay-in-the-kitchen traditionalists would doubtless call ‘unfeminine’. Given men’s dismal track record of monopolizing power, controlling female sexuality and indulging their ambitions throughout history (both in the world of Canopy and our own), ‘unfeminine’ girl power doesn’t sound so bad to me.

Thanks for taking a giant dump on the Earthsea cycle, creators of this crappy 2004 miniseries!

Her moral ambiguity:

Generally, heroines are presented as always doing the right thing, so even when, e.g., Katniss Everdeen shoots a certain character in the Hunger Games trilogy, the reader certainly is not meant to question Katniss’s essential goodness. That is, female anti-heroes, true anti-hero(ine) protagonists (not just pure-hearted women forced by cruel circumstances to do bad things, or black-hearted ‘fallen woman’ villains) are very rare, as though even most authors can scarcely conceive of a woman anywhere in the ethical spectrum between the polar extremes of pure goodness and total evil. Unar, however, is decidedly a mixed bag, ethically, and as the reader continues to cheer her on, we too become complicit in some of her darker deeds. I’m not talking about when she’s being mind-controlled, her magic used against her will to harm others; that’s just standard victim stuff. I’m talking about when she does have control: often she acts bravely, and sometimes altruistically, but also occasionally acts out of pure selfishness. Gosh, this mass of contradictions almost sounds like a real person—a lot more than most fairytale heroines, to be sure!

Her overall awesomeness:

Unar is betrayed many times, in many forms, by family, friends and allies, but she is like a juggernaut—nothing can keep her down. She’s also almost unique, given her privileged position, in being quick to recognize the worth of people in a lower social class than her; she both uses their talents for her own ends and, sometimes, uses her own vast powers to help them. She is essentially the only person in her highly and literally stratified world that is able to travel between these distinct layers, combining the best parts of both Canopy and Understory. I can hardly wait until we get a sequel and she begins exploring the still dark and mysterious world of Floor!

The fact that there’s no ‘happily ever after’ in sight:

Usually, books about girls (or boys, for that matter) bring everything to a cathartic and suitably romantic conclusion; the heroine finds and wins the man of her dreams, etc., etc. But Unar has no such too-pat ending waiting for her. Even if no sequel is ever written (though that would be a terrible shame!), Unar’s story is complete in its incompleteness. The worth of a young woman, the sum total of her life, cannot be expressed in hetero(or homo)sexual union—nor is her value necessarily tied to her youth. This story emphasizes that, by focusing more on the life-cycle of the oppressed women of this fictional world, introducing not only Maidens, but also Mothers and Crones, and insisting we the readers take notice of their valuable contributions. Fittingly, at the end Unar finds herself decisively deprived—by her own actions—of the chance to settle down and enjoy a quiet, happy life, and given her morally questionable deeds, her inability to resume her old life, while in a sense a cruel fate, is not a surprising one. It’s only surprising if we the readers have been fed a diet of happily ever afters. I for one am looking forward to future stories about Unar’s fascinating exploits, as something tells me her story is far from over.

 The Math:

Objective Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for making such a morally complex, endlessly fascinating heroine as Unar

                +1 for quite creative bout of world-building

Penalties: None!

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 “Totally sweet!”
  

See more about our scoring system (under which 8/10 is quite rare!) here.

This message brought to you by Zhaoyun, aficionado of fictional worlds and devotee of earth-shattering heroines like Unar, and reviewer for Nerds of a Feather since ancient times (2013).

Microreview [book]: Mistborn - The Final Empire

The heroic fantasy of this generation.

This generation of fantasy can be characterized in one word: grit. We can argue over the definition of that word and ones like it, but to me it involves less than beautiful worlds, unconventional heroes that walk the moral line, and humanized villains – when heroes and villains are even distinguishable. Some books distinctive to this generation of fantasy include Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and Stephen Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. But what we don’t have in this list is a good old fashioned hero’s tale. Enter Mistborn.

Mistborn is the story of a young street urchin named Vin, one of the lowborn Skaa oppressed by the Lord Ruler. She is recruited by an elite band of ‘thieves’ for her unique but undeveloped powers. Led by the legendary Survivor of Hathsin, this group of mistings (wielders of magical power) are planning more than a typical heist… they’re planning a revolution. Vin learns to hone her powers under the tutelage of Kelsier (the aforementioned Survivor of Hathsin) and also finds herself in the process. This is very much a coming of age story. Tor is currently re-branding it as YA, which it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not appealing to an older audience as well - as evidenced by its success marketed to such thus far.

So why is Mistborn the heroic fantasy of the generation? Well, we have all the classic necessary tropes for a hero’s tale: young, lowborn protagonist with undeveloped powers; mentor; love interest; bad guy to fight. What makes it different, or rather, indicative of the current grit movement? The world is dark and literally covered in ash. Our heroes are a band of thieves, scheming and killing remorselessly to get ahead (Vin included). Kelsier, Vin’s mentor and leader of the revolution, is tortured and has his own agenda. Vin hides in the shadows. Our villain is made human and relatable through the discovery of a log book (or diary) believed to have belonged to him. 

But at its heart, Mistborn is a heroic fantasy and the characters are not morally ambiguous. It is obvious who the good guys are, even if their means to the end are not always reputable. And Vin is far from an anti-hero; she is kind, courageous, and good-hearted. She starts out this story as a troubled little girl and grows into a brave and powerful young woman. And most importantly (albeit somewhat unrealistically), Vin has the support of those around her. No one is jealous of her powers or plots against her. Surprisingly, when she falls in love, no one tries to make her out to be weak or a fool for it.

I take notes as I read a book that I am going to review, recording my thoughts and impressions in the moment. For Mistborn, I wrote: maps are hard to read. That's it. I said before that you know a good book when you can just read it and enjoy it, without feeling the need to break it down critically. This was my Mistborn reading experience. I just sat and read it, ceaselessly, and thoroughly enjoyed every second.

I do have one complaint though. (A legitimate one, not about the maps.) There is a scene at the end where Vin is sitting on a roof looking down through a skylight. She has to make the choice to jump down into the room or walk away. I wish she would have chose differently.

The Math:

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for giving us a good female hero, +1 for not having the guys make Vin feel foolish for falling in love

Negatives: -1 for Vin's choice at the end

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

----
POSTED BY: Tia   Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2014


REFERENCE: Sanderson, Brandon. Mistborn [Tor, 2006]

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson

Dossier – Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age, Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam, 1995).

Filetype – book (or "primer", perhaps?)

File under – postcyberpunk

Summary – A girl gets a remarkable(/ly) immersive book that lifts her out of one trajectory and into greatness, while a nanotech-engineer, having invented said book, finds himself in Hot Water and almost destroys the foundations of society.

High-tech – While not so temporally distant from the present, we're further away than in Snow Crash, with the invention of matter compilers (nanotech that, nonetheless, already exists in primitive form today: 3D printing!) a truly revolutionary development since now anyone can just ask the magic box for, like, some tasteless food, or a mattress, or a knife with a monofilament blade and presto! The implications for matter compiling are almost endless, and threaten to render the world Stephenson crafted almost unrecognizably different from our own, however. There are cyberpunk-esque skull guns, "hoplite" armor and bullet-proof dusters, as well as nanosites (really really small artificial parasites) that can invade the human body and do a) nothing much, b) good stuff, or c) make you explode.

The most alien (and, I might add, least plausible, especially the idea of a resurgence of Victorian ethics/fashion!) technologies are actually the social ones, the idea that the world will soon descend into the managed chaos of "phyles" and say adieu to nation-states. Writing in the early 1990s, Stephenson can be forgiven for having gotten caught up in the wave of optimism about the end of history and prophecies of a paradigm shift in the reorganization of society away from nation-states. The Primer is probably the most realistic fusion of existing with speculative yet believable future technologies, as already we have movies and games (and perhaps one day soon books) blending together in new and interesting ways, and the media available for use in education radically expanding...

 

Low-life – Stephenson was wise to note that the radical implications of the matter compiler do not affect the fundamental inequalities of human society, which for brevity's sake I will call the 80/20 idea. The powerful might live in a New Atlantan or Nipponese enclave, but it's an elite club (determined by birth, mainly) that only the most exceptional outsiders are invited to join; there are plenty of hoi polloi left behind by the changes, who remain trapped in a life, with few prospects, that is nasty, brutish and short. Nell is one such, who is rescued from a doubtless grim fate via the power of Education, in the form of the Primer. Several hundred thousand girls are likewise saved from oblivion by lesser versions of the same powerful book (though Stephenson utterly fails to render the consequences of this individually tailored educational regimen, since the 330k girls end up functioning without a trace of individuality, as a hive mind in fact; perhaps for him, the fact of them having been rescued from abortion/infanticide, and given magic books, is Good Deed enough?)

Dark times – Run afoul of the law, like Nell's idiot father? Enjoy your last minutes of life, as cookie-cutter nanosites invade your body and prepare to detonate from within...ouch. This is a world that is based upon hierarchy and order, and you had better hope to be born into a good tribe/phyle because if not, you're in deep doo-doo. It's also a world threatened by a massive awakening of xenophobic sentiment in what was once the nation-state of China. The 'Fists' (as in 'Fists of Righteous Harmony', i.e. the Boxers) have risen again, and are determined to win back their country and drive out/murder all foreigners. Scary (but also patently ridiculous, as is the mysterious Seed technology with which they intend to remake the world).

Legacy – Not as well received as Snow Crash, this intricate and generally well-crafted book nonetheless reached millions, and certain aspects of the book continue to resonate today, especially the Book itself, the Primer and its promise of emancipation through education.

In retrospect – Because the future it depicts is even more outlandish than that we see in Snow Crash, and because The Diamond Age combines in one package the same key stylistic/pacing weakness (a shocking lack of falling action after the climax, which in this case occurs literally on the last page!) that mars Snow Crash with the astonishingly excessive detail in world-building and exposition plaguing his post Diamond Age work (Baroque Cycle in particular), this book sits at a weird transitional point in Stephenson's career. The mid-90s were a giddy-with-hope-but-also-terrified kind of time, with the collapse of the USSR and so forth, but the more apocalyptic aspects of Stephenson's speculations on our (societies') future seem fairly outlandish to us today. The rapid progress in 3D printing notwithstanding, in the twenty years since the book was first published, the nation-state has yet to shuffle off its mortal coil, and shows no signs at all of doing so; even if some of the nanotechnological breakthroughs as must have occurred in Nell's world happened right away, one doubts whether much would actually change in the nature of society formation.

Stephenson's vision of the future rests on several underlying premises/ethical positions, some plausible enough, some pretty goofy. In the former category there is the transformative power of education; in the latter, the idea that not only fashion but ethics are cyclical; sorry Neal, a return to Victorian morals is not in the cards, and would carry none of the benefits you whimsically ascribe to such morals anyway. And as the scattered nature of this review/re-visitation should make clear, the book is so complicated (I would argue, needlessly so) that it is very difficult to sum up with any pith, or retain in one's mind for any length of time.

The only thing I remember from my first reading, all those years ago, was that there was a long section on Turing machines that was impossible for me to visualize and boring, but mostly it was about a girl who stumbled on an awesome, super-expensive book that sounded fun—a lot more fun than The Diamond Age, in fact, with its interminable discussions of Turing machines and occasionally clumsy exposition (the worst is between Miranda and Carl, who have several conversations (pp. 270-271, 284, etc.) that explain the fundamental workings of some of the key technologies in the book but might as well have a "Forced Exposition!" banner slapped on them, so ill-fitting are they in terms of narrative flow).

On the other hand, Stephenson did an absolutely masterful job of crafting morally complex characters, with no clear antagonist (even the shadowy Mr. X is obviously not a "bad guy" inasmuch as it was he, almost single-handedly, who saved the 330k girls from their fates) and plenty of hard choices for the protagonists as well.

But if even back in the 90s I was nonplussed with the ending, judging it to have ended not with a bang but a whimper, my disappointment was even stronger upon this re-reading. If only Stephenson had been able to come up with a more emotionally (and narratologically) satisfying ending! (For one thing, why the crap is the Alchemist still working on the Seed at the end, after saying, in so many words, that he didn't want to do so and would actively try to prevent its development?!?!) Just think how great this book could have been...

Analytics

For its time: 4/5.
Viewed today: 3/5.
Cybercoefficient: 7/10.

Zhaoyun, while a devoted fan of Neal Stephenson in general, is not afraid to say to Stephenson, "Hey, man, think of a less anticlimactic/abrupt way of ending your books, will you? You're killing me, here!". and has been issuing this and other gauntlet-in-your-face challenges at Nerds of a Feather since 2013.

Microreview [book]: The Girl with All the Gifts, by M. R. Carey

 

Carey, M. R. The Girl with All the Gifts. Orbit, June 2014.
Buy it here starting June 10th!

The Meat (of the Mushrooms

Or, Fungocalypse Now! 

Books about bad guys are awesome. Best of all are those where either the readers or the bad guys themselves (or both) don't even know they're bad guys! Since 'the reveal' about the eponymous girl, Melanie (but her true name, thematically at least, is Pandora!), happens right at the beginning, I'm giving little away when I say that Melanie is just such a doesn't-know-she's-bad character. There are wonderful, slightly displaced echoes of Matheson's I Am Legend here, and a glorious twist at the end worthy of an M. Night Shyamalan movie (one of his good early efforts, not the trite drivel he poops out these days). Choosing to introduce us to the post-(but not fully)apocalyptic human world partly through the eyes of one of its near-destroyers, Melanie, ensures the reader's sympathy for her rather unique plight, caught between the human and 'hungry' worlds.

 ++

                                Ophiocordyceps unilateralis!

                                                                                  =

(Crichton-esque 'meddling with nature' is the implied cause of the fungocalypse)

One of the book's greatest strengths, however, is that despite this tacit endorsement of Melanie's perspective, Carey (the author) doesn't let us slide into the seductively easy trap of identifying entirely with the protagonist (Melanie, the anti-hero) at the expense of those characters to whom she takes a dislike (Sergeant Parks, seen initially from her perspective as a loathsome, hateful Napoleon of a man, turns out to have quite a human dimension as well).

The key in melodrama, broadly defined, is generating an intense burst of antipathy in readers for certain characters because of the injustice or essential unfairness of their actions (i.e., creating someone to hate as the foil for the hero, who we are meant to love), then providing a cathartic (and often violent) resolution in the form of the hero, justice personified, triumphing over the unreasonable foe. So this decision by Carey to take the high road (avoiding the easy payday of a totally despicable character) and keep things balanced between multiple competing, and (perhaps) equally valid perspectives brings deliciously sustained tension to the story as it unfolds. I can't recall the last time I read something possessing such fine equilibrium (and I have no doubt that when this is, inevitably, made into a Hollywood movie, this rare anti-melodramatic quality will vanish, replaced by a much more straightforward morality play, the kind where bad guys are irredeemably bad and good guys as unimpeachable as friggin' Albus Dumbledore). Warm Bodies (book and/or movie) was close, but the future father in law was just such a jerktard!

Was every single aspect of The Girl with All the Gifts full of the same brilliance as the highlights mentioned above? No, there were naturally weaker aspects of the story, in particular behavior by certain characters (here's looking at you, Private G.!) that was frankly so mind-bogglingly dumb as to be, in essence, out of character, as well as a certain coldly rational scientist who indeed began to approach the 'totally bad' type of villain, almost a caricature of "(evil) scientist", so impersonal and inhuman were her actions. But if we leave aside these just slightly jarring notes, we can enjoy what remains: a delightfully entertaining symphony of the fungocalypse!

The Math

Baseline assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for villain's-eye-view, +1 for humanizing (almost) all the characters and preventing any one viewpoint from achieving melodramatic dominance

Penalties: -1 for including a few less developed characters, indeed mere caricatures of archetypes

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

[As you can read here, 8/10 from us is like an 11/10 from the guys in Spinal Tap!]