What If, Pig?

 
What If, Pig?
A Pig, A Mouse and a Whole Wobble of Worries
by Linzie Hunter
Harper Collins
2021

 

 

I don't think he's on the show anymore, but growing up, one of my favorite Sesame Street monsters was Telly, because he was very anxious, but the others were still friends with him, and things generally looked out okay. As an anxious kid myself, it was nice to see a character who had the same kinds of feelings I did, and who didn't (as I feared I would) end up totally alone and friendless because of his negative emotions.

 
Pig from What If, Pig? is a bit like Telly. We see Pig from the perspective of his friend Mouse. Pig is a good friend, but he also worries a lot, and his worries take the form of 'what if?' questions.

 
So when Pig plans to throw a party and invite lots of others, he gets anxious. What if no one comes? What if everyone comes but has a terrible time? Pig gets so worried, he wants to cancel the party. Mouse appears to agree, and encourages Pig to take a nap and then go for a walk together. And then we see that Mouse and everyone else have turned Pig's party into a surprise party for Pig. We also see thst everyone has their own worries, but they still feel better spending time with their friends.

 
Linzie Hunter's art is simple and has a hand-drawn quality. I've heard that some kid's book illustrators try to make characters thst kids will be able to re-draw pretty easily if they want to, and these certainly fit that criteria. And like Telly, Pig is allowed to feel and voice his worries, but he still has friends, and things work out pretty okay.

The Girl from the Other Side 10

 
The Girl from the Other Side 10
Siuil, a Run
by Nagabe
Seven Seas
2021
 

 

The 10th volume of The Girl from the Other Side opens with a flashback to Teacher's life when he wad still human, before he became a cursed Outsider. The soldier who thought he knew him was right - in fact he's the one who gave Teacher the locket he's held onto all this time.

 
We also see when the curse spread in their village. Teacher was shot with arrows helping his wife and infant child escape from being killed by soldiers. As he lay dying, another Outsider found him, and he became Cursed.

 
We return to the present, where Teacher has his memories back, all his memories, after Shiva gave him her soul. He finds Shiva, who has fully transformed into an Outsider now as well. She looks a bit tree-like, but she can still move, and retains her human memories.

 
Teacher tells Shiva about the time he spent alone before he met her, and reminisces about how they first met.

 
And we learn the truth about Shiva's relationship to Teacher - who they both were before they met in the forest, wrongly believing they were total strangers.

 
Because this volume is almost all flashback, it feels like a kind of calm before the storm that I'm sure is coming in the next, final collection. We know the truth now, or most of it, and all that remains is the confrontation between the king and his soldiers and Teacher and Shiva. 

 
One choice I thought was interesting, we never see Teacher's human face. It's always concealed by shadow, or up out of frame. His monstrous Outsider face is the only face of his we ever see.

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow

 
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow
by Tom King

art by Bilquis Evely
DC Comics

2022

 

 

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is an 8 issue standalone miniseries set in a far distant corner of the DC universe. Like Far Sector, which I read last year, it uses its remote location to tell a story that isn't particularly connected to or concerned with the rest of DC's continuity. While Far Sector drew on the scifi conventions of space opera, Woman of Tomorrow draws far more on the tropes and imagery of sword & planet fiction.

 
The tale is narrated in retrospect by Ruthye, a simple farm girl, who wants revenge on Kern of the Yellow Hills, who murdered her father. Ruthye tries to hire a bounty hunter to use Kern's own sword to kill him, when she runs into Supergirl, who's visiting this planet beneath a red sun so that she can get drunk for her 21st birthday. We learn on the second page that Supergirl will kill Kern, and only at the end do we see exactly how long after the fact the story is being recounted from.

 
This is a young Supergirl. She swears, says 'like' a lot, and is only a few subjective years removed from the destruction of Krypton, which she witnessed firsthand as a teenager. She initially counsels Ruthye to forgo revenge, but then Kern shoots her with several arrows, poisons and nearly kills her dog Krypto, and steals her spaceship. So Supergirl and Ruthye set off together to find Kern and get the antidote for the poison.

 
The pair take the spaceship equivalent of a Greyhound bus to reach the planet the stolen ship went to. They find evidence of a recent ethnic cleansing, and learn that space brigands visited the world, and that Kern has joined them. They follow a trail of planets that experienced recent genocides at the hands of Kern and the brigands. What they see upsets them, greatly.

 
The first time they catch up with the brigands, Kern uses magic to teleport the women to a planet full of dinosaurs and an articial Kryptonite sun. They confront Kern again with the help of Supergirl's horse Comet, and capture him. The brigands come to rescue Kern, and at great cost, Supergirl defeats them. Then, while Ruthye learns that her travels have caused her to want justice instead of revenge, Supergirl decides to end things by killing Kern.

 
In an epilogue, an older Supergirl returns to visit Ruthye after she published her account of their adventures together. We also learn that one key incident recounted earlier was a lie.

 
I liked Woman of Tomorrow a lot. Ruthye is proud, speaks formally, and often complements an action scene with thoughtful commentary on Supergirl's nature. I like her as a narrator. 

 

We also see Supergirl herself greatly tested. She suffers pain, watches the injury and death of her pets, and sees over and over the results of genocidal violence that she was too late to stop. She is almost infinitely patient, shows almost infinite restraint. She tries to help who she can, and to do the right thing. But against foes like the brigands and Kern, we also see her pushed to her limits, and placed in a position where executing her prisoner rather than showing him mercy might, arguably, be the more just decision (and certainly a tempting decision, even if you think it is wrong.)

 
Bilquis Evely's art is beautiful and baroque, and Matheus Lopes's colors are a perfect complement, all pastels and jewel tones and rich shades. I would happily read almost anything Evely illustrated and Lopes colored. Together the communicate the strangeness and alienness of the setting, giving it a fantastical, storybook feeling that's a good match for the tone of the text.

The Memory of Babel

 
 
The Memory of Babel

by Christelle Dabos
translated by Hildegarde Serle
Europa Editions
2020

 

 

I'm developing, I think, a theory of how book quartets work. The first volume does a lot of worldbuilding, is capable of standing alone, but is also somewhat open-ended, without dictating what should follow. The second volume establishes the direction for the rest of the series, and the third fully commits, setting up the situation for the last volume to resolve.

 
The Memory of Babel is the third book in its quartet, and I have to tell you, when I read the first book, I wouldn't have guessed where this series was going. I thought it was going to be primarily a romance, with Ophelia either eventually growing to love her cold, distant arranged-fiance Thorn, or else finding romance with the lovable scamp Archibald, who we're told all the women in the court of the Pole cheat on their husbands with.

 
But instead what we get is a mystery. Why is the world broken into twenty Arks floating in space? Who is the mysterious 'God' who created the Family Spirits who birthed the magical royal families that rule each Ark? In the second book, someone loyal to God committed a string of murders in the Pole, and kidnapped Archibald, planning to kill him, all to prevent Thorn from learning the Family Spirits' secret - that God had torn a page from each the living Book that somehow creates the Spirits, robbing each of them of their memories. Ophelia saved Archibald, finally married Thorn, and then was separated from him, sent back home to Anima while Thorn vanished to go hunt for God while God hunted him back.

 
Three years pass in this waiting period, until Archibald rescues Ophelia from her family, and she sets off to find and maybe rescue Thorn. She travels to the ark of Babel, with its MC Escher architecture and its giant library, and she enrolls in an elite school, hoping to be the top student in her class so that she can access the secret central room of the library, where supposedly ultimate knowledge is kept. Oh, and she's in disguise again! Not a magic illusion this time, just a fake name and passport to keep God's informers from reporting her to him.

 
In library school, Ophelia deals with a mind-reading mean girl blackmailer, makes friends with a genius older student and a jinxed library staff member, crosses paths with the revolutionary trying to tear down Babel's system of censorship, and, oh yeah, tries to solve another murder mystery, which this time seems to be killing anyone who gets too close to God's secrets. 

 
Ophelia eventually does manage to find Thorn again, and she increasingly discovers that she has subconscious access to some of God's memories. She and Thorn, after a year-long engagement where they rarely saw each other, and another three years apart, are now falling in love for real, and are finally physically intimate. Oh, and also the world is maybe starting to end faster?

 
Ophelia was a teenager and a bit of a late bloomer in the first two books, but here we see her becoming an adult woman. She still has doubts and fears, but more courage to face them, and a bit more skill and cunning in social situations. She's not the naive kid she was at first. She basically becomes a spy on her own initiative, to find Thorn and figure out how to stop this God person who's threatening both of them, and she mostly succeeds, rising to the occasion far more than she stumbles.

 
I think Ophelia's part of the next book will take place in Babel again, but I also thought this one would be set on Anima, so who knows. Also Archibald has successfully traveled to the secret hidden Ark where people who can magically manipulate space live. His infant niece, Victoria, has accidentally spirit-walked her soul there with him (while her body remains in the Pole,) and it's possible that God, who can disguise himself as anyone, has followed him too. So probably that will be important next time also!

 
The bizarre architecture and general 'you're late to take a test you didn't study for' vibe of this book continue the dreamlike feeling of the series, as do the invisible killer who scares his victims to death, Victoria's out-of-body travels, and the threat of an enemy who can look like anybody and has loyal informers everywhere. I'm genuinely wondering how this will end!

The Subplot

 
The Subplot
What China is Reading and Why It Matters
by Megan Walsh

Columbia Global Reports
2022
 

 

The Subplot is a very recent review of fiction written by mainland Chinese authors and read primarily by Chinese audiences. This is a short work, a little over 100 pages, and each chapter covers a different popular genre. Regardless of genre, authors who publish in China are required to treat certain topics as off-limits, and cannot openly disagree with the government's official position on others. Part of the creativity of Chinese literature is trying to write around what's not allowed to be said.

 
Walsh explains her project by noting that Western audiences are usually most interested in books that have been banned outright by the CCP, often by authors living in exile. Meanwhile, in China, fiction accounts for a much smaller proportion of book sales than in the West, and fiction writers have come under renewed scrutiny and censorship after a period of relative openness in the 2000s and 2010s, in the time of Covid and President Xi's increasing authoritarianism.

 
Books by authors who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and have experienced the rapid change of capitalism, tend to be the most overtly political, and the best known to Western audiences. Authors like Mo Yan and Lan Yianke write historical fiction that incorporates as much criticism of past governments as the censors will allow.

 
Authors who grew up in the first generation to be raised under capitalism (people my age) write about urban life and its amenities, and the pursuit of love and sex, unimaginable under Mao. These writers are often criticized for being vapid, or not sufficiently critical or political. Rural migrants in this age group, who moved to the cities for work, but lack the rights of people born in the city, have a thriving poetry scene that describes the harsh conditions of their lives.

 
Online fiction, roughly equivalent to American fanfic, is extremely popular. The two most common plots are about young men who repeatedly 'level up' in business, defeating foe after foe, until they attain super powers, and eventually godhood, and about young women competing to become the love interest of someone like that. These stories tend to be very, VERY long, some the equivalent of millions of printed pages. Online writers on platforms like Chinese Literature hope to gain enough readers to quit their low-paying day jobs, and dream of maybe scoring an anime adaptation. This genre has been the subject of a recent crackdown, directed by Xi, that's left many writers locked out of their own stories.

 
China also has a print-only underground comics scene that remains offline to try to avoid censorship. Books by non-Han ethnic minorities are subject to much more intense government scrutiny, because authors identifying themselves with their own ethnic group is treated as akin to protest or terrorism. Women are the most common readers of the 'boy's love' genre, whose homosexuality is often among the least transgressive elements, written by self-proclaimed 'rotten girls,' some of whom have been jailed for their writing. Ironically, despite the government's displeasure with these stories, they're a popular source for tv and movie adaptations, as long as the two central men can be officially recast as just friends or just coworkers.

 
Crime fiction was banned under Mao, and Western-style mysteries involving criminals who outsmart the police are still not really allowed. (In both cases because they're seen as implicitly criticizing the government.) Crime writing usually takes the form of police procedurals. During Xi's anti-corruption campaign in the 2000s, crime writers were allowed to depict corrupt officials as the criminals being caught.

 
There's a rich tradition of Chinese science fiction, which can sometimes use imaginary future societies as a basis for political critique. Cixin Liu and Chen Qiufan are currently the best known scifi authors. Pastoral 'cottagecore' style rural utopias have also recently become a popular topic, possibly as a reaction against Covid lockdowns.

Helcome to St Hell

 
Welcome to St Hell
My Trans Teen Misadventure
by Lewis Hancox

Graphix
2022

 

 

Welcome to St Hell is a graphic memoir by a British trans guy, covering his teen years, as he shifted from thinking of himself as a tomboy, then a lesbian, and finally as a man. Hancox is from a working-class community in northern England (St Helens, aka St Hell,) and both his narration and the dialogue is written in the local vernacular.

 
Present-day Hancox inserts himself in the narrative, to point out times he wishes he'd been kinder to himself, and to interview the present-day versions of his family and friends about what they now think of some of the events depicted. His choice to tell the story in this way feels unique among the memoirs I've seen.

 
Hancox is only a couple years younger than me, and seems to have been grappling with his feelings about his gender around the same time I was, both in terms of stage-of-life and in terms of the calendar year.
Hancox's friends and family were basically supportive from the start (though they felt some initial confusion and reticence too) - most of his struggles are with his own feelings, and with not really knowing that what he feels has a name and is a viable path through life. Living in the same early-internet era, I also had to figure out how my teenage sense that 'I wish I could be a girl' could be translated into a fulfilling life as an adult woman.

 
In telling his own story, I think Hancox gets at some relatively universal feelings of being trapped in a small town where you don't know how to live the sort of life you want, of trying to figure out who you want to be as a person, of worrying about whether the people who knew you when you were young will still accept you as you change into an adult.

Demon Days

 
Demon Days
by Peach Momoko

Marvel Comics

2023

 

 

Demon Days is a five issue comic miniseries that reimagines several Marvel characters (mostly women, mostly from the X-Men) in a Japanese fantasy story. I would say that the biggest attraction here is probably Momoko's art. She draws in a fluid, expressive manga style, and apparently got famous doing collectible variant covers for Marvel before being given the opportunity to write her own comic.

 
We start with a folktale about Psylocke and her wolfhound Logan coming to a village where the humans and oni are in conflict. She, village elder Jubilee, and oni Red Hulk help rid the village of giant evil snake spirit Venom, creating a truce in the previous conflict. At the end, this is revealed to be a story being read in the present day by Mariko, who we'll follow for the rest of the series.

 
Mariko has strange dreams, and wonders what they mean. Her grandmother tells her maybe it's finally time to learn the truth - that she is descended from oni. Mariko's maid, Black Widow, tells her that she was under orders to kidnap her if she ever remembered the truth, but she's grown too fond of her to do it. Then Nightcrawler teleports in and kidnaps Black Widow.

 
So Mariko sets off to rescue her maid and confront the sinister yokai who wants to capture her. (I think this evil lady is supposed to resemble Emma Frost, but I'm not positive.) She meets Silk (or some other Spider Girl?) who helps her fight off Sabretooth and Mystique.

 
Silk leaves, and immortal wolfhound Logan joins Mariko. She's confronted by Thor and Storm, who owe the evil lady a favor. They reveal the full truth to Mariko, that she and the evil lady are sisters.
Mariko arrives to confront the evil lady, who sics oni Green Hulk on her and Logan. Then Mariko channels the spirit of her mother, who tells the girls that she loves them both and doesn't want them to fight anymore.

 
Again, the very pretty art is probably the main reason to look at this one. Momoko's reimaginings of the characters might also mean more to someone a bit more conversant in Marvel lore than I am. The plot felt weirdly anti-climactic to me, and I feel like I disagree with the premise that Mariko should forgive the sadistic mass-murderer who spent the whole series trying to kill her (and who, we're told, is responsible for countless other deaths) just because, it turns out, they're sisters.

Geometric Regional Novel

 
 
Geometric Regional Novel
by Gert Jonke
translated by Johannes Vazulik
Dalkey Archive

1969, reprinted 2000

 

 

I found Geometric Regional Novel while doing some library work in the German literature section. Its strange title caught my eye, and when I looked inside, I immediately saw Jonkers' use of unconventional typography and other experimental techniques. 

 
This is a book that was published in German in the late 1960s and translated into English in the 90s - but it plays with a style of novel that was popular with conservatives in the 30s and 40s, which romanticized the preindustrial countryside. There's a kind timeless (or maybe unstuck-in-time) quality to it.

 
This is a short book, divided into 21 unnumbered sections, usually only a few pages in length. Every other section is titled 'The Village Square,' and is narrated by two people who observe the square from a hiding spot, trying to decide whether the square is empty enough to walk across it together without being seen. They disagree and contradict each other. They only finally go out at the end. Over these chapters, we see trees grow, get cut down, the stumps removed, the stumps replaced with benches. But those are like 4 chapters out of 10 or 11.

 
The alternating chapters describe other events around the village. In one, we're told what would happen if a hiker killed a bull and brought it to the village to roast ... and then the whole chapter is un-told in reverse as we learn what wouldn't happen if the bull killed the hiker instead. In another, an acrobat comes to town to perform a hackneyed routine that ends badly. We then see the scene again through the town art critic's write-up in the village newspaper, where he lavishly praises the acrobat, especially the daring of his 'decision' to die of a broken back when his tightrope came untied. 

 
In the longest chapter, a new law goes into effect requiring people to fill out a long, intrusive form to travel, because of the threat of bandits, but the chapter also implies that the bandit threat is a pretext for surveillance and limiting travel. In the most lyrical chapter, the villagers defend their town from birds that peck out the mortar between bricks by spraying the flock with water.

 
Jonkers' writing is deliberately strange and experimental. He describes physical objects using precise measurements and comparisons to geometric shapes. He describes human actions in such precise detail that they sound strange, like reading the technical specifications for the performance of a machine. He emphasizes words by giving them extra spacing  l i k e   t h i s . He almost never uses a pronoun (including 'this' and 'that') when he can repeat the whole name or a complete phrase again and again, as in a chapter where 'the old blacksmith, and his wife, and his son, the new blacksmith' are listed every time they do anything. He uses lots of synonyms back-to-back, usually 6-12 at a time. 

 
And he fills the book with drawings, diagrams, a song, seemingly any literary technique he could think of to make the familiar strange, to criticize the overbearing nature of authority, and to contradict his own telling, then contradict the contradiction. The cumulative effect, over the 120 pages, is to show village life to be both deeply conservative, but also undergoing changes that the villagers are unaware of or disagree about. And despite the very simple subject matter, the way it's told is interesting.

Cycle of Fire

 
 
Cycle of Fire
by Hal Clement
Ballantine
1957, reprinted 1981

 

 

Cycle of Fire is the second Hal Clement novel I've read, and like the first, Mission of Gravity, it involves a long overland journey across the landscape of an alien planet, which leads to the discovery of secrets about how this strange world actually works.

 
Teenage space cadet Kreuger ends up assumed dead by his human crewmates, and tags along with alien Dar, who is transporting a load of books to the polar ice cap for safety. Dar is also on foot and alone after his glider crashed, and so the two learn to work together.

 
In a reversal of the way I feel like these things usually go, Kreuger doesn't end up as the 'leader' of the expedition. He follows Dar's lead, treats him as a mentor, and learns much more of the alien language than Dar learns of English. He's decidedly non-colonial for a mid-century scifi protagonist!

 
Dar and Kreuger travel over lava fields and through jungle. They get taken prisoner by a strange village of Dar's species who confiscate their books, which prevents the duo from leaving. Dar is used to his people being ruled by Teachers, but this village is weird. The Teacher is never seen in person, and the villagers don't write and aren't delivering any books to the ice cap.

 
While they're sort of captives, Dar and Kreuger are also allowed to explore the area, so long as they return at regular intervals for questioning. They find an abandoned city that appears to belong to another species that Dar's never seen before. They also find a high tech underground headquarters hidden beneath a mountain.

 
Eventually Dar and Kreuger signal another glider, and catch a ride to the ice cap, where Kreuger gets to meet the Teachers. He also learns that a 'dying time' is coming soon, when most of Dar's species will die off, and some length of time will pass until they're all reborn, with only the Teachers and the books to preserve the species' language and culture between cycles.

 
Then something Kreuger never expected happens - another human crew comes to the planet to learn more about it, and are willing to rescue him too, now that they know he's alive.

 
With the humans, we learn a bit more of the truth. The planet's two suns work to create decades-long super-seasons. Although tropical by human standards, Dar's people live during the 'cold time,' while another sentient species lives during the 'hot time.' The other species is much more technologically advanced. The abandoned city is theirs, and the mysterious Teacher belongs to this species, communicating by radio. The two species exist in a strange symbiotic relationship, with one being born from the dead bodies of the other at the start of their 'season.'

 
There are debates among the humans about how much scientific knowledge to allow the aliens to acquire, and what might happen if they colonized the stars. Kreuger, to his credit, is more loyal to Dar and Dar's people than to his military superiors or the interests of humans as a species. (The human officers are chauvinistic in a way that feels typical of the time.) In the end, Dar is the one to decide his own fate, which again, I appreciated.

 
Cycle of Fire belongs to a mini-tradition of scifi novels about planets with binary stars and super-seasons, which includes Poul Anderson's Fire Time, Brian Aldiss's Helliconia trilogy, Joan Vinge's Snow Queen and Summer Queen, and, via a very different mechanic, Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. The 'hot time' aliens also made it into Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials.
 

Anderson, at least, credits Clement as inspiration, and Fire Time might be an even better novel, with more viewpoints and political depth, and maybe more plausible biology. But Cycle of Fire is also a good scifi mystery - it's interesting to see the clues accumulate and try to understand what they all mean for the nature of the planet. And Kreuger's empathy, humility, and willingness to defer to the wisdom of the alien makes him an unexpectedly appealing human protagonist.

 

Cycle of Fire illustration by Wayne Douglas Barlowe

 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

 
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
by Gabrielle Zevin
Knopf
2022

 

 

I was recommended Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by a couple friends, as well as seeing it appear on a number of last year's 'best of' lists, and I'm glad that I was able to get ahold of a copy. This was a very well-written book.

 
We primarily follow Sadie and Sam, two childhood friends who used to play video games together in the 80s, who meet up again in college in the mid-90s, and begin a long creative partnership as video game designers. We learn in the first sentence that they will be successful, and eventually famous, and at a number of points, Zevin narrates an event from a future perspective, such as showing how Sam or Sadie will describe it in an interview years laters.

 
Sadie and Sam have an intense relationship. It's non-sexual, based on their shared love of playing and making video games, and the idea that they bring out each other's best creativity. Their friendship is also difficult. In between being friends as kids and in college, they have a 6-year falling out, and we learn early on from glimpses into the future that they will have another 6ish-year separation as adults.

 
Sam's college roommate Marx is the third main character, and Sadie's instructor-turned-boyfriend Dov is also important, especially during the early years. Marx is a wonderful human; Dov is awful, and his bad, power-imbalanced relationship with Sadie is realistic and frustrating. Almost everything that happens is realistic. Sam's foot, never fully healed from a childhood injury, keeps getting worse in ways that are accurate to that sort of wound. 

 
And their careers develop in ways that seem grounded in reality, rather than wish fulfillment. We see each character respond in authentic-feeling way to the situations they encounter, and the choices they're forced to make. They are successful, but it's a climb, not an escalator, and at various points it's much easier for one of them or the other. I think we see a bit more of Sadie's perspective than Sam's, but he's a pretty close second.

 
One of my favorite things about Zevin's writing is that the structure of each section mirrors whatever game they're designing at the time. This is most obvious for 'Both Sides,' which takes places in two alternating worlds, when each chapter is literally split into a Sam section and a Sadie section; and in the 'Pioneers' section, which is narrated from inside the 'Oregon Trail meets Animal Crossing' online game, with headings like posts on the Western town's message board instead of numbered chapters. But it's also true of the section where they design their first game, 'Ichigo,' about a child journeys out and returns home, and the section about Sadie's multiple viewpoint Shakespearean murder mystery. And arguably the book, taken as a whole, mirrors the structure of the 'Ichigo,' in addition to the first section.

 
Once we reach the event that causes the pair's second falling-out, the book is pretty sad from thst point on, although we do see them reconnect before the end. 

 
I think I tend to introspect a lot when I read literary fiction, and this one got me looking inward more than most. I usually prefer to look at myself like viewing an eclipse through dark glasses, protected by the multiple layers of distancing and metaphor that scifi provides, rather than staring directly into the sun via lit fic. But I'm glad I read this one; I give it my strong recommendation.