Senlin Ascends

 
 

Senlin Ascends

by Josiah Bancroft

Orbit

2019

 

 

Senlin Ascends is the first book in a quartet that I first became interested in reading after seeing a positive review several years ago, but was prevented from checking out from any library by my own misspelling of the main character's name.

 
Thomas Senlin is a naive and fastidious schoolmaster from a rural fishing village, who's just gotten married, and takes his new wife to the Tower of Babel for their honeymoon. The Tower resembles a vertical London. The couple is almost immediately separated in the crowd, and we follow Senlin as he climbs the levels of the Tower (called 'ringdoms') in search of his wife.

 
Senlin passes through the raucous working-class Basement, the stage-play-imitating-manor-life Parlours, and hopes to run into Marya in the tourist spas of the Baths. Eventually, he realizes that he won't accomplish anything by acting like a tourist or following the rules. 

 
The people who make the rules (and their employees) are the primary source of danger, and tourists are their easiest targets. There is no government to appeal to for help, the 'governors' are essentially mobsters who style themselves as aristocrats - they're the people you'd want protection from.

 
So the first half of the book shows Senlin slowly reaching this realization as he loses hope and hits bottom. In the second half he rallies and begins a much more proactive plan to find his wife and rescue her, and the pace and excitement of the story dramatically increases.

 
I really enjoyed this one, and I'll be reading the rest of the series over time.

Soviet Asia

 
 

Soviet Asia
Soviet Modernist Architecture in Central Asia

edited by Robert Conte and Stefano Perago

Fuel

2019

 

 

Soviet Asia is a photo book showing images of the government buildings the Soviets erected in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan in the 1960s-1980s, along with an introductory essay and a concluding one.

 
I spotted this book in the library and it caught my eye. I've had it checked out for a little while, but it was probably recent events that inspired me to read it right now.

 
Conte and Perego talk about how the Soviet government in Moscow tried to impose a unified culture on all the Soviet states, and how this was especially disruptive in Central Asia, where many people still led nomadic lifestyles until those were forbidden by the state, and where multi-story apartment blocks didn't accommodate the preferences of people used to dwelling in multi-generational homes alongside parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, etc.

 
The actual buildings remind me of other big concrete structures that went up in the US around the same time. There are apartment buildings in my hometown and Columbus that look similar to the ones in the book, and plenty of campus buildings at the schools where I went to college, and grad school, and where I work now look like they're part of the same architectural movement.

Radio Iris

 

Radio Iris

by Anne-Marie Kinney
Two Dollar Radio

2012

 

 

Radio Iris came out like 10 years ago, published by Columbus, Ohio's own Two Dollar Radio press. I wanted to read it then, and I know I even checked it out from my grad school library, but never started it, because, you know, grad school. And then recently saw it  while I was trawling an old wishlist and decided to check it out again. I wish I could say it was worth the wait!

 
The novel tells what appears to be a suspense story about an isolated young woman (Iris) working in a Kafka-esque office where nothing makes sense, although Kinney herself can't seem to decide if she's writing a suspense novel or a realistic novel about a character who perceives her own life as mysterious and suspenseful.

 
We alternate between scenes of Iris being alone in the office, Iris fielding bizarre requests from her secretive boss, Iris trying to spy on the man living in the office next door, Iris being alone in public places, Iris failing to connect with her brother by phone, Iris remembering a tragic incident from her and her brother's childhoods, Iris having dreams that appear to be about her childhood, and for some reason, we get a few chapters where Iris's brother is the viewpoint character as he travels and makes corporate presentations.

 
Each chapter covers only a single scene, and most are 1-3 pages long. Almost nothing happens except for Iris being passive, wondering about things but not seeking answers, avoiding other people, and failing to understand the nature of her boss's business. I was prepared for a mundane explanation, that she doesn't work for a real company, just one man who's either incompetent or involved in crime or both.

 
And then in the last 5-10 pages, her paycheck bounces, she goes to work and all the office furniture is gone, she goes to finally talk to the man next door but he and all his stuff are gone, she finds a hole in the floor and climbs down into the structure of the building, then underground, where she finds herself outside on an alien world with a different sun, the mystery man is there and tells her she can't stay, she hears her phone ringing upstairs, climbs back up, it's her brother who pocket dialed her and doesn't want to talk, then there's an earthquake, and Iris runs outside and away from the building, the end.

 
I'm all for wild endings, but I prefer them to have some basis in anything that's happened earlier in the story.

Monster, She Wrote

 
 

Monster, She Wrote

The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

by Lisa Kroger and Melanie Anderson

Quirk Books

2019

 

 

Monster She Wrote is a history of the most famous and influential women to write Gothic fiction, whether their works would be classified as horror, scifi, fantasy, or just 'literature.' Each author gets 3-5 pages of a vignette biography and discussion of her major works.

 
Most of the book is divided into chronological sections, covering the authors who originated 'the Gothic' like Mary Shelley and Anne Radcliffe, pulp authors from the early 20th Century, the writers of lurid paperbacks from the 80s and 90s, and a few sections in between. The last chapter is organized thematically, and it's overstuffed with names and recommendations.

 
I thought the earlier sections were stronger, but I appreciate Kroger and Anderson's willingness to try to wrestle the plethora of more recent works into a kind of canon to accompany the more-established earlier ones. They certainly offer a lot of help if you want to craft your own Gothic reading list.

Star Wars Infinities

 
 

Star Wars Infinities

Epic Collection

Marvel Comics

2015

Star Wars Infinities is a collection of three What If? style stories based on the first three Star Wars movies - what if the Rebellion hadn't destroyed the first Death Star in A New Hope?, what if Luke Skywalker froze to death when he was lost on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back?, and what if Han Solo's friends failed to rescue him from Jaba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi?
 

The stories are okay, but not as good as the originals. Each one imagines Leia becoming a major Force user, two of them imagine Yoda as an improbable martial badass, and all three have the good guys winning despite setbacks that really seem like they should let the Empire prevail.

 
Also included is a bonus miniseries based on George Lucas's original Star Wars script. It's kind of interesting because almost all the names are there, but assigned different roles - Luke Skywalker is an aging general (drawn to look like Lucas himself) and Annakin Starkiller is his young protege, for example.

 
It's fortunate that this story got revised, or the movies never would have been as good. For one thing, this plot is too long and too complex, while the movies are notable for their clarity. The story combines what became A New Hope and Return of the Jedi, although with Wookies, rather than Ewoks, as the forest-dwelling allies ... which maybe explains why both films were about destroying the Death Star? Darth Vader is much more frightening in the movies than he is here, and R2-D2 is significantly better with his beeps than with actual dialogue like in the comic.

 

The Best American Comics 2009

 
 

The Best American Comics 2009

edited by Charles Burns

Houghton Mifflin

2009

 

 

I started reading the Best American Comics series last year. It started in 2006, so I'm only a few years in at this point. I might try getting into the scifi or 'non-required reading' series at some point, we'll see.

 
I don't necessarily like everything in these anthologies, but it's interesting to see what's going on in American comics outside the superhero stories.

 
My favorite this time was Dan Zettwoch's 'Spirit Duplicator,' where he's reflecting on the comics he drew for his local church bulletin from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. He shows an example from each decade, annotated by his own little talking head, discussing the five different printing technologies he used, and some memories of what the church and his life were like at the time.

 
R Crumb isn't my least favorite, but he's been in every one of these so far, and it feels more like he's being included more for his name than for the quality of his contemporary work.

Sensation

 
 

Sensation

by Nick Mamatas

PM Press

2011

 

 

Sensation is narrated in the first person plural - 'we' - by a global collective of sentient spiders, who work as a conservative and stabilizing force on human history. 

 

'We' observe Julia, who gets stung by mutant parasitic wasps, the kind that change the behavior of the spiders they sting, and who turn Julia into a very charismatic agent of chaos. Allegedly, the wasps are responsible for a number of such individuals throughout history - human culture is defined by the war between the spiders and wasps.

 

'We' also follow Julia's husband as he haplessly attempts to catch up with her and keep track of what she's doing. What Julia is doing is inspiring an unnamed social movement that resembles a cross between Dada and Occupy Wall Street.

 
The spiders briefly catch Julia and put her in 'the Simulation' - a Potemkin village imitation of human society that hides in various marginal social spaces - but between the movement, the fumbling chase given by her husband, and Julia's own supernatural wasp-fueled charisma, she keeps giving them the slip.

 
Mamatas has a cool idea here, a kind of Matrix story that takes place entirely in the real world, although the plot kind of gets away from him in the final third of the book. After the movement shuts down the internet for a month, he no long seems to know what should happen next, and even the proofreading and copy-editing get noticeably worse.

Pandora's Planet

 

Pandora's Planet

by Christopher Anvil

Doubleday

1972

 

 

Pandora's Planet was published in 1972, expanded from a short story written in 1956. 'Humans' conquer a planet of 'humanoids' and then discover they've bitten off a lot more than they can chew. It's clear by the end of the first chapter that the Centrans are aliens and the humanoids they've conquered are, well, us, but we get several more increasingly obvious clues over the next several chapters, until Anvil all but grabs you by the lapels and shouts "it's Earth, stupid!" for anyone who hasn't realized it yet.

 
In Anvil's portrayal, humans are bursting with ideas and are natural leaders, we're also fractious and constantly fighting each other. The Centrans are mostly born followers, who previously just followed their own traditions. As Earthlings disperse throughout the Centran empire, we more or less take over the place, then nearly destroy it and ourselves, but the good guys (that is, the aliens, who are more or less typical 1950s scifi science heroes) save the day in the end.

 
Early on, conflicts are avoided by sending different philosophies to different planets, but we rapidly end up consolidating into a capitalist-racist-fascist alliance on one side and some sort of communist union on the other. The Centrans eventually retake control of their planets through a combination of letting their opponents tire themselves out and some classic mid-century scifi deus ex machina.

 
Anvil chooses to write each chapter as almost a stage play between two Centran generals learning about what's happened next from reports and talking about what to do it about it. He presents some humorous critique of our various major governing philosophies. I wouldn't actually recommend this to anyone, but it was good enough to finish. (I picked it up knowing nothing, based solely on the title. Pandora's Planet is the Centran nickname for Earth based on the chaos we unleash when they "open us up" by allowing human immigration into their empire.)