Book Report: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

I hadn't read any Octavia Butler before, and this became my what-I-read-while-volunteering-at-Boneshaker the last month or so. I thought the plot of Parable of the Sower was very engaging, but the narrator's attempt to shoehorn her own religion (Earthseed - primary belief: God is Change), was ham-fisted and detracted from the book's quality.

Parable of the Sower is set in the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area in the mid 2020s. American society/economy hasn't dramatically collapsed, but things have proceeded further down our current downward trajectory. Global warming has made water scarce in most places, very few jobs are available that actually pay money rather than just rent or company scrip, and most neighborhoods have walled themselves off from the outside world in order to prevent attack. Some sort of drug known as pyro results in a sex-like euphoria from setting fires, leading to many arsons. Slavery has returned.

The narrator is a teenage girl who has a physical empathetic response to others around her who are in physical pain, and wants to start a religion called Earthseed and eventually colonize Mars. Aside from items described in that sentence, most of the plot resides in a recognizable world. It ends up being a road trip book, and it's an entertaining read.

Book Report: Authority by Jeff Vandermeer

Maybe I should just accept that the experience of reading Annihilation, the book, was like catching lightning in a bottle, not reasonable to expect it to be repeated. Because Authority, the second book in the Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, and the movie adaptation of Annihilation, were both so much less enjoyable than Annihilation, the book, that I don't have high expectations for the third book in trilogy, Acceptance.

Did you ever read a mind-bending quest book featuring almost an entirely female cast, and then hope that the author would follow it up with a miserable slog detailing office politics with male characters tangentially related to those on the quest? If so, hoo boy are you in for a treat. The only reason I stuck with this book is that my wife was reading it ahead of me and assured me that the third book is better. I hope she's right.

Book Report: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

Future Home of the Living God covers a lot of the same thematic ground as The Handmaid's Tale, and I enjoyed it despite that. Not to say that Handmaid's Tale isn't an excellent book in its own right, but its unrelenting bleakness and too-close-to-home imagining of a theocracy colonizing functional wombs makes for brutal reading/viewing. For Erdrich, it seems like it's worth covering some of the same ground in light of recent events...

I've tried to read several Louise Erdrich books on several occasions, and haven't disliked any of them, but I've never gotten pulled into one enough to finish it. Recently I had to spend some time in airports over multiple consecutive days, and that was exactly the motivation I needed to finish this book. Living God follows a young half-Ojibwe woman who was "adopted" as an infant by Minneapolis liberals, and in young adulthood, becomes pregnant in a time of theocratic takeover when evolution appears to be reverting. So, women are having extreme difficulty getting pregnant and delivering healthy babies, and society appears to be collapsing. Oh, and there are occasional megafauna and dinosaur-like-creature sightings. It's complicated.

I didn't like any of the characters initially, which probably would have led me to put this book down under different circumstances, but since I was a bit of a captive audience, I stuck with it. Whether they were written more sympathetically as the book went along or I just got used to them, I grew to like most of them by the end. Which turned out to be unfortunate, because a lot of really horrible shit happens. Dammit.

Book Report: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

I've been reading a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction lately, and it may not be great for my outlook about the world, but there's a lot of excellent writing on the subject, including Station Eleven. In the near future, an incredibly deadly and contagious flu variant wipes out the vast majority of the world's population, precipitating a societal collapse.

The book flip-flops back and forth in time, following several different characters' lives up to and after the outbreak. It's geographically tethered to Toronto in the Before, and in a fictionalized version of western Michigan in the After. The through-line of those two plots is a woman named Kirsten, who was a young actress in a performance of King Lear beforehand, and is part of a traveling Shakespearean troupe wandering the upper midwest after.

While performing as King Lear, a famous actor and aging accidental(?) lothario named Arthur Leander has a heart attack and dies, and soon most of the people of the world die of the flu. Mandel does an excellent job of weaving many storylines together, and there are several characters worth rooting for.

Book Report: Cat Pictures, Please by Naomi Kritzer

Naomi Kritzer lives in St. Paul and writes really engaging speculative fiction, as well as being a really engaging political blogger. I found about about the first part by reading her work as the second part before last fall's election, and then I requested Cat Pictures, Please from the library. This collection of stories is always inventive, but by turns sad, exhilarating, and suspenseful.

The highlights, for me, were the titular story, in which a search engine has achieved singularity, and it's happy to use its powers for good, so long as you keep feeding it the cat pictures it desires. Kritzer does an excellent job of weaving familiar folk tales into unique stories. For example, "Comrade Grandmother" incorporated Baba Yaga into the siege of St. Petersburg, and "The Golem" sees, well, a golem attempt to save a young pair of women from the Holocaust.

Kritzer is fantastic, and I'm hoping to read more of her stuff. These stories veer from straight sci-fi to magical realism, and I enjoyed them all.