The Murderbot series, by Martha Wells

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I’ve been reading through this series off and on for the past year and just now finished System Collapse, the latest book. This series is much more “hard sci-fi” and tech-centric than what I usually read when I wander in to the sci-fi genre, but it has such great writing and such an appealing main character that I’m able to get past the fact that there are whole swathes of chapters where I’m not sure what exactly is happening in the plot because I’m not able to keep up with all the techie details.

The main character is the titular Murderbot — a nickname it’s given itself — a human-like robot with a mix of machine and organic parts, designed to operate as a Security Unit — much tougher than a human security guard, and programmed only to obey the instructions of whoever has paid for its use. However, Murderbot figured out how to disable its governor module so that it’s able to think independently and make choices. It no longer has to do whatever it’s told.

So then, of course, it has to figure out what to do.

Murderbot lives in a futuristic world with lots of space ships and space stations and planets and while it’s not exactly dystopian, it’s not great either. Humans don’t appear to live on earth anymore in this version of the future, and most of the human-colonized planets and the space stations they live on are kind of a capitalist hellscape, where corporations rule everything, employ slave labour, and can pretty much do whatever they want. There are a few human societies that live outside the “Corporation Rim” and defy those values, and it’s a group of those humans that Murderbot is contracted to provide security for on a mission when the first book opens.

I’ve long felt that there are basically two story paths for bot/droid/etc characters in science fiction: there are characters like Data in Star Trek: Next Generation, who admire humanity and want to become more human, and then there are bots and droids who look down on humans and don’t want to be like them in any way (the best example I can think of in this category is not really a good example: it’s Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager, who of course actually is human by birth, but becomes assimilated into the Borg and then rescued back into a human society that, for much of her story arc, she really doesn’t want to reenter).

Murderbot is more like the second category, in that it doesn’t exactly despite humans, but it finds them strange and difficult to deal with. Even more difficult to deal with is the fact that now that it has free will, Murderbot has to, in some ways, learn to think the way a human does — to decide what to do with its choices. This is really the story arc of this whole series — the wonderfully cynical, snarky, detached Murderbot coming to terms with having choices, having emotions, even having relationships (both with humans and with non-human intelligences — but by “relationships” please don’t think I mean sexual relations, because, ugh, nothing would gross Murderbot out more!).

All the best speculative fiction, for me, really centres around the question “What does it mean to be human?” This series, about a character who is quite determinedly not human, is one of the best explorations of that question I’ve ever seen.

There’s also a TV series coming, and yes, I’ll watch it, although I’m skeptical television can capture the wonderful inner voice of Murderbot, which is the thing that makes the books such a pleasure. I guess we’ll see!

Last House, by Jessica Shattuck

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Last House turned out not to be the kind of book I expected it to be, but I think it was better than the book I expected.

The blurb I read gave me the impression this was a multi-generational family story centred around a New England house — something like Bonnie Burnard’s A Good House or Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, or, in a rather different way, Daniel Mason’s North Woods.

This is sort of what Last House is, but not really. It begins a few years after the Second World War, when Nick and Bet Taylor and their two young children buy Last House, an idyllic and isolated retreat in the Vermont mountains, as a respite from their suburban lives. Nick, still coping with trauma from his wartime experiences, is a lawyer for oil companies and finds himself deeply involved with the efforts by big oil companies and the CIA to prop up the Shah’s regime in Iran to allow unfettered access to Iranian oil. Bet, who worked as a codebreaker in Washington during the war, feels frustrated and constrained in her new role as housewife, though she adores her children Katherine and Harry. So far, it feels like a typical mid-century marriage-and-family saga, but Nick’s work in Iran is a tip-off that this novel is going to explore issues of politics, capitalism, war, human rights, and environmental devastation that flow, like oil, beneath the surface of what we can see.

It’s really only a two-generation story, and barely that — we get a glimpse of future generations at the very end, in a kind of epilogue chapter, but most of the story takes place in two acts: the first in the 1950s, the second in the 1970s. When the second act rolls around, Nick’s and Bet’s lives are much the same, but Katherine and Harry are in their late teens/early 20s now, and as young people of their era they get swept up in the counterculture in New York City, with their political involvement leading not only to inevitable conflict with their father who still works for Big Oil, but eventually to a shattering tragedy.

To me, this reads not so much “multigenerational family saga centred around a family house” — though that is part of it — but rather an indepth and thoughtful novel about how mid-20th-century American and international political issues play out against the backdrop of a single family, how young people are both shaped by and push back against the values of their parents. Every character in this family interested me, none of them were simple and none of their actions or reactions were as predictable as I’d originally thought they would be. There’s real complexity here (which does not surprise me in a Jessica Shattuck novel). The Iranian segments of the story were just as interesting to me as the Vermont and New York scenes, if not moreso, because they gave me an interesting perspective, from the point of view of a peripherally-involved American, on the events that led up to the Iranian Revolution, and the murky moral mess that precipitated it.

I enjoyed reading this a lot.

Long Island, by Colm Toibin

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Over fifteen years ago when I read Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn, I was quite distracted by the fact that my own novel about immigrants coming to Brooklyn was being released that same year. I did manage to get past that enough to read Toibin’s novel and appreciate what a beautifully written, evocative book it was; my main critique of it (which was not really a critique, because it was absolutely intentional on Toibin’s part, just annoyed me) was the passivity of the main character, Eilis Lacey, the young woman who moves from a small town in Ireland to Brooklyn, New York in the 1950s.

This novel picks up twenty years later. Eilis is married to her Italian-American husband and they no longer live in New York; consistent with the fortunes of upwardly mobile (not to say “white flight”-ing) Brooklynites by the 1970s, the whole extended family has now moved to Long Island, where they live in four houses next to each other on a cul-de-sac and experience a little more family togetherness than Eilis, who has never really felt part of the clan, is comfortable with.

Eilis’s children are in their late teens, almost ready to launch into independence, and with her home, her marriage, and her job as bookkeeper for a neighbour’s small business, she seems to be in a manageable if not thrilling routine. Then she learns something that shakes her marriage, and by extension her whole Long Island life, to its foundations.

I appreciated seeing that on receiving this news, Eilis shows she is a much less passive woman than she was in Brooklyn (or in Brooklyn, I guess). Her response to the crisis is very firm and very decisive, and never wavers. On the heels of this upheaval, she packs up and returns on an extended visit to her aging mother in Ireland, inviting her teenage children (but definitely not her husband) to join her later in the summer for their grandmother’s eightieth birthday party.

The novel is told from three points of view: Eilis herself; Jim Farrell, the man she was seeing back in Ireland before she got married; and Nancy Sheridan, who was Eilis’s best friend back home with whom she’s lost touch. As events both in Ireland and back in Brooklyn move towards inevitable conflict, my sympathies shifted among the characters and my perception of them as people changed quite a bit. The story ends very abruptly — whether because there is going to be a third Eilis Lacey book, or because we are left to draw our own conclusions about how things get resolved … well, that remains to be seen, I guess.

The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang

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This book, the first of a trilogy, started so well that I was sure I was going to want to race through the whole trilogy as quickly as possible. Yet by the time I finished it, I had absolutely no desire to pick up the sequel. It’s not badly written at all, it’s just very definitively Not For Me. This is OK, I’ve realized. Not all books are for all readers.

The Poppy War, as the title might suggest, is a fantasy novel set in a world inspired by China — the events of the novel corresponding quite closely to late 19th-early 20th century China, though the setting in the book is pre-industrial and the weaponry medieval, as is typical for fantasy novels. A young orphaned girl, Rin, takes a desperate long shot at escaping her miserable life by taking the famously difficult entrance exam that will grant her admission to higher learning, even though she has no formal education. It’ll be no surprise to anyone who’s ever read a fantasy novel that Rin passes the exam, gains admission to an elite military academy, and finds herself a fish out of water among her wealthy, privileged classmates as she tries to harness her natural talents to become a warrior.

So far, so familiar — but not in a bad way. These are the tropes of much fantasy, and if well executed, the story of the kid from nowhere who turns out to have special gifts and carves out their place in the world can be an enjoyable journey. “Enjoyable” isn’t quite the word here, as one hardship after another befalls Rin in her education to the point that the novel began to remind me of Elizabeth Moon’s The Deed of Paksennarion, an epic fantasy novel I read in the years before I blogged about everything I read, in which the heroine joins a mercenary company and goes through so many trials and tribulations I got exhausted reading about them and never had the urge to re-read the novel (which is unusual for me).

However, the Chinese-inspired setting of The Poppy War was interesting and well-drawn, and Rin was an engaging character who I wanted to succeed, so I hung in there.

Then it got worse.

Then it got much, much worse.

Not only the amount of suffering our heroine has to endure, nor even the staggering amount of much-too-vividly described suffering she sees around her (it is set during a brutal war, after all), but the suffering she becomes willing to inflict, the evil she herself is willing to commit — all I can say is, it just got too dark for me. To the point where it felt unrelenting and gratuitous, and I had no hope that Rin would continue to be a character whose adventures I wanted to follow through two more books.

I’ve seen this book described as “grimdark” which is just the kind of cheeky BookTok-trope-inspired descriptor that I usually don’t use, but it is both very, very grim and very, very dark. And that is fine if that’s the kind of thing you like to read. I personally like my fantasy with lots of realistic darkness and drama, but also with an overarching sense that there is good in the world worth fighting for (thank you, Professor Tolkein, for pre-setting my expectations that way) and also that the story’s main character, while they may be deeply flawed and do bad things, is ultimately on the side of that good and will help to bring it about. Call me old-fashioned but those are the kind of fantasy novels I like.

Fortunately, there are lots of those kinds of books. And for people who prefer grimness, darkness, an overarching lack of hope, and an antihero you may not be able to cheer for … there is The Poppy War. And its two sequels, presumably … though I’ll never know for sure.

Extraordinary Passages, by Margot I. Duley

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Extraordinary Passages is the first complete study of the life and work of Newfoundland’s first significant novelist, Margaret Iris Duley (1894-1968), written by her niece, historian Dr. Margot Duley. This book is an important contribution to the literary and academic culture of Newfoundland and Labrador; many of us know that Margaret Duley was the first Newfoundlander to have her critically acclaimed novels published in Canada, the US, and the UK, but may not know a great deal about her life or even about the contents of those novels.

This book is my favourite kind of non-fiction: a book written by a scholar, with an academic’s thoughtful care for accuracy, detail, and sources, with copious footnotes and a useful index — but written in lively and accessible language that can be appreciated by a non-academic reader. The fact that the writer is the author’s niece adds another level of depth to this study. While Margot Duley writes with detachment and, where necessary, with a critical eye about Margaret Duley, there are places in the book — especially in dealing with Margaret’s family relationships in later years, when Margot was growing up — where an element of memoir is woven into the biography. Margot Duley does not hold back from sharing her warm personal memories of her aunt, and for me this enriched the book.

Margaret Duley’s life spanned much of Newfoundland’s turbulent twentieth century: two world wars, the Depression, the women’s suffrage movement, the Commission of Government years, Confederation and the changes that came in its wake, all impacted her, and this book not only shows us Duley as a person and a writer, but situates her in her historical, social, and political context. This book is both important and tremendously enjoyable, and it makes me want to read more of Margaret Duley’s novels.

The Crane, by Monica Kidd

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Tolstoy allegedly said (or perhaps didn’t say; it’s unclear) that there are only two stories: a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Of course, those are actually the same story. If a man (or a woman, which apparently didn’t occur to Tolstoy) goes on a journey, then wherever he goes, he arrives as the stranger in town. So maybe there’s only one story.

All of which is to say that Monica Kidd’s beautiful new novel starts with a stranger arriving in town. It’s 1969, and a young American man named James is arriving by train in St. John’s, Newfoundland, a city where he knows nobody and nothing awaits him. Also, he’s broken his glasses, meaning that he arrives in town with a level of vulnerability that I found immediately relatable.

If you’re at all versed in North American 20th century history, you might already (even without the back cover blurb) have a good guess as to why a young American might be arriving alone in a Canadian city in 1969. And yes, James is what was called then a “draft dodger” — escaping the US to avoid being drafted into the military and sent to Vietnam. There’s a backstory behind why he chooses such a remote corner of Canada to retreat to, and as that story unfolds in flashback scenes we learn more about why this particular man is on this particular journey.

James is a quietly engaging character, with a very low-key, self-deprecating sense of humour and a lot of regrets about how things have already unfolded in his short life. He’s carrying a tremendous amount of grief, and the quest that brings him to Newfoundland is a way of trying to bring some closure to the biggest loss of his life. When he goes on yet another journey — travelling from St. John’s to a small outport — he discovers that closure is not as straightforward as it seems.

I said James is a “quietly engaging” character, and “quiet” is the adjective that comes to mind most often as I think back on this book. I mean that in a good way. Sometimes people say a book is “quiet” in a way that implies it’s not vivid or interesting, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Both the author and the main character have a kind of control in this story that keeps the reader’s focus on this single story unfolding against the background of much bigger events. James’s home country is torn apart by the Vietnam War and the anti-war protests, both on a national level and on the very personal level of James’s family. In the place he chooses to escape to, Newfoundland, the war seems very far away — but twenty years after Confederation, Newfoundland is going through its own changes, the old way of life falling away in ways that are not always easy or welcome.

Yet against these huge societal tides, we travel along with James on this small and specific journey: into the heart of loss and the task of finding a path through it. James’s travels bring him from one community dealing with loss to another, on the other side of the continent. If James finds the catharsis and healing in Newfoundland that he couldn’t find at home, that’s not to say that Newfoundland is a better or more mentally healthy place than Wyoming, but rather that sometimes, a person just has to go on a journey.

I loved reading this book. I’ve also rarely read a book where I’ve wished more at the end that there was a time-jump forward epilogue — I had clear ideas about where I wanted to see James and some of the other characters end up in a few years — but on reflection I was OK with the author leaving that denouement to my imagination.

This is a beautiful, quiet, thoughtful story about loss, leaving, and finding yourself somewhere far from home.

The Phoenix Crown, by Kate Quinn and Janie Chang

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This is the second novel I’ve read set against the backdrop of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 (the first was The Nature of Fragile Things, by Susan Meissner). This one, however, has a lot more going on in addition to (and after!) the earthquake.

It follows four women: opera singer Gemma, seamstress Suling, artist Nellie, and botanist Alice Eastwood (the one real woman in this quartet) whose lives intersect in various ways in the days leading up to the earthquake. Their paths cross around their interactions with one man, wealthy patron of the arts Henry Thornton, who decides to make Gemma as famous as he believes she deserves to be. Along the way we get a lot of opera, botany, life in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and a few real-life characters like Enrico Caruso and a cameo appearance by actor John Barrymore. While the drama of the story felt a little contrived at times, the glimpse into all these different worlds at this point in time was very interesting.

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, by Emma Knight

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First of all: this book is not about octopuses. There is zero octopus content in this novel; you are not going to meet a sentient, wise octopus character like in Remarkably Bright Creatures. The octopus is a metaphor, and one that is mentioned fairly late in the novel, though it’s very apt for at least one of the novel’s major themes. Given the sudden surge in octopus popularity in fiction and popular culture at the moment, it’s tempting to suspect that someone at the publishing house leapt upon that metaphor as a great and very saleable title idea, but this novel is strong enough that it doesn’t need to reach out a tentacle to lure in octo-curious readers only to disappoint them: it should stand on its own merits as a very human coming-of-age story that explores themes of family and identity.

The man character, Pen, is a Canadian girl who, along with her best friend Alice, leaves Toronto to attend the University of Edinburgh (as the author herself did) in 2006. Both girls are inspired to leave the country for university by a desire for adventure away from home, but Pen has another motive: there’s a famous Scottish author (who is also a lord, and lives in a vast manor house) who was her father’s best friend when he, too, lived in Britain in his youth. Her father has been cagey about this friend and why they’re more or less estranged now, and Pen, raised amid the wreckage of her parents’ unhappy marriage and eventual divorce, believes that if she can meet this old friend of her father’s, she can perhaps uncover some secret that might help her understand her family better.

Well, she does uncover secrets — while at the same time meeting new people, falling in love, testing the strength of friendships, making dumb mistakes, re-inventing herself, and examining her family in a new light — in other words, doing all the things you’re supposed to do in the first year of university, especially if you’ve moved far from home to go there. I thoroughly enjoyed these characters and this journey through Pen’s first year in Edinburgh, with all the discoveries, both external and internal, that she makes. I also really enjoyed the time-setting of 2006 — that era of non-smart phones, character-limited texting, and instant-messaging chats on a desktop computer: when instant communication was possible but so much less immediate and pervasive than it is today; perhaps the very last moment when it was possible for people to be truly unplugged. It was nice revisiting that moment, as well as that time in life (much earlier than 2006 for me, and in a very different setting, but with many of the same emotions) when you’re 18, far from home, making new friends and trying to figure out who you were. I loved everything about this book.

The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore

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This is slightly further along the spectrum towards thriller/suspense than I usually read, but Liz Moore is a writer whose work I’ve enjoyed before and who I feel I can trust to make any novel a rich study of character rather than just an exercise in building suspense. This was certainly the case with The God of the Woods, which I absolutely loved and devoured in a day or two.

The novel is set in the 1970s, at a summer camp in upstate New York. A young camper, the daughter of the wealthy family who owns the camp property, goes missing in the night. To compound the mystery, this same family’s only other child, a small boy, went missing in the woods near the family home several years earlier and was never found. A second disappearance from the same family on the same property feels too sinister to be coincidence.

Moore has a large cast of characters in this novel — the counsellor from whose cabin the girl disappeared, another camper who is a close friend of the missing girl, a young female police officer investigating the disappearance, and, isolated in her huge house on the hill, the girl’s mother, who has never recovered from the loss of her son and is now confronted with this second loss.

Every one of the viewpoint characters felt compelling, rich, and fully developed to me, as did the tensions of class and gender that are woven all throughout this story. The resolution of the mystery (both mysteries, actually) was not something I could have predicted, but it felt appropriate and satisfying. I would definitely recommend this novel.

Legends and Lattes, by Travis Baldree

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I’ve seen this book mentioned often online, and right after having DM’d my first D&D campaign seemed like a good time to pick it up. It’s advertised as “high fantasy with low stakes,” which is just lovely for when you want to read something set in a fantasy world where not everything has to be “IF WE DON’T DEFEAT THE GREAT EVIL ONE HE WILL ACTIVATE THE STONE OF BAD STUFF AND DESTROY THE ENTIRE WORLD OMG OMG!!!” Sometimes, you just want to read a book about an orc who opens a coffee shop and has to deal with small problems, like the local organized crime ring wanting a bribe, and opening a coffee shop in a town where no-one’s ever heard of coffee, and stuff like that. This is the book for when you want that. It’s very fun, it’s very D&D-coded, and this was an entirely light and non-challenging read that was still enjoyable.