The Fall of Babel

 
The Fall of Babel

by Josiah Bancroft

Orbit Books

2021
 

 

The Fall of Babel concludes the quartet of books that begins with Senlin Ascends, and it's a big one. The other books in the series all fell in the 300-400 page range; this one is almost 650. Bancroft uses this space to tell a story in three parts.

 
Part one tells Adam's story, picking up when he left the others in the Sphinx's Lair in Arm of the Sphinx. He wanted to seek his own fortune and find his own adventures, rather than always chasing his sister, trying to keep her from getting hurt. He arrives at the golden city on the roof of the Tower, finds it well-defended but sparsely populated by the descendants of the original builders, living in what is basically a scifi utopia. Usually no one is allowed in - and everyone who tries is vaporized by lightning guns. But for reasons he doesn't initially understand, Adam is famous here.

 
Adam makes friends with a local, and eventually learns how it's possible that the people here know his life. More importantly, he learns that something is happening in the Black Trail that winds all through the Tower walls, behind the scenes, and is used exclusively by the debt-enslaved Hods. And whatever that something is, it's imperiling all the Hods' lives. Taking a risk to trust his new friend, Adam helps thousands of orphaned refugees and their caretakers immigrate into the golden city without getting vaporized. The final scene of this section is the locals voting on whether to let the orphans stay, or to kill all the refugee children, and Adam along with them. This part of the story runs alongside the latter half of Arm of the Sphinx, the three parallel storylines of The Hod King, and the events of part 2 of this book, merging back into the main action at the start of part 3.

 
Part 2 alternates viewpoints between Senlin onboard The Hod King, the giant robotic centipede / doomsday device built by aspiring usurper and wannabe tyrant Marat and his army of escaped Hods, and Edith and the rest of the crew on the Sphinx's airship, The State of the Art, which is held aloft by what seems to be antigrav technology in a world where every other flying craft uses a hydrogen balloon. (I would call the specific blend of scifi and fantasy here steampunk. It is probably more like a scifi story dressed in the trappings of fantasy, as opposed to science fantasy, which I think of as being the reverse.)
 

So Senlin, who was enslaved last book, has reached Marat, convinced him that he is a sincere convert to the cause, and joined the crew of The Hod King, along with a couple familiar faces from the first book. Marat trusts Senlin so much that he welcomes him into his inner circle, which includes four other cybernetic Wakemen (former servants of the Sphinx, like Edith,) and reveals that he doesn't believe his own antislavery rhetoric. He just wants a loyal army, to overthrow the Sphinx, and to rule the Tower as a monarch. Edith's arm is functional, even powerful, but still mostly human looking. The other Wakemen we've seen are mostly so horrific that it's unfortunate, but perhaps not surprising, that they were all rejected by the people they're supposed to serve.

 
The Hod King is literally digging through the walls of the Tower, causing the local equivalent of earthquakes, and occasionally erupting to the surface to climb straight up the walls, sowing terror among the Ringdoms in its wake. (This is the something that's forcing the orphans to the top of the Black Trail.) Senlin and his friends want to sabotage the vessel, a task made harder by their separation. Bancroft managed to get me to guess the solution just before he explicitly revealed it, which I thought was a neat trick.

 
On The State of the Art, the crew is trying to find some remaining paintings that act as a key to a door in the Sphinx's Lair. But Marat and his spies got to almost all them first. They're also trying to track The Hod King, and shoot it off the side of the Tower whenever it emerges.This game of cat and mouse is what structures the alternations between the two viewpoints.

 
The main interpersonal drama here is Edith and recently-rescued Marya, damsel no longer, trying to figure out how to live on the same ship when they both want to be the one to end up with Senlin. Personally, I think Edith actually likes him better, and she's been by his side for most of the past year, which has been transformative for all of them. Marya seems decidedly ambivalent about Senlin, even as she seems determined to be reunited with him. I won't say how Bancroft resolves this particular love triangle, except to say that Senlin ultimately gets to decide, and the one he leaves behind reluctantly agrees with his decision. But that won't happen until part 3.

 
There's also some individual drama with Voleta. After getting shot and revived by the Sphinx's alchemical liquid, her personality is significantly changed. She's also gone from being daring and acrobatic, to essentially lacking fear or pain (among other emotions) and being able to accomplish superhuman gymnastics. She's also probably taking too much of the chemical, and shortening her reborn life in the process. There was a time when I thought Voleta would be the replacement Sphinx, but Bancroft has a much stranger fate planned for her.

 
In part 3, all the plots converge. After their last gunbattle, Marat abandoned The Hod King in a smaller lifeboat digging robot, and has reached the Sphinx's Lair, where he forces Senlin to help him find his way around. Edith and the others reached the golden city, reunited with Adam, and descended from the roof to the Lair. Senlin escapes Marat and rejoins his friends, but any happiness is short-lived, because Marat and the Wakemen are right behind him. What follows is an absolutely brutal fight that not everyone survives.
 

Eventually Marat is defeated, and the Brick Layer's extremely long-term plan finally comes to fruition. If you paid enough attention to the description of the golden city you might guess its true purpose (in the book, not here, where I haven't said enough to reveal it.)

 

Senlin is reunited with one of the women he loves. The Sphinx gets a successor who takes over the role of figurehead and arbiter of disputes between Ringdoms. And some of the characters get to be intimately involved in the Tower's secret purpose. You get the sense that in the near future, the Ringdoms will be forced to become somewhat less exploitative, and the Hods will be emancipated from their debt-slavery, all of which will lead to a juster society, but also probably a great deal of unrest for the new Sphinx to manage.

 
The first book in this series could probably stand alone, and after just it, the series probably could have gone off in different directions. But starting in the second book and continuing through this one, Bancroft selects a plot and puts his foot on the accelerator. One consequence of this is that while the first book is largely character-driven and more literary, they become increasingly plot-driven and action-focused as they go. The proliferation of cyborgs, giant robot vehicles, and alchemical superheroes also ratchets up the genre-ness of the later books. Though Bancroft does still take time to give each character an inner life, and to find insightful metaphors to describe the action. He also continued to surprise me up to the end.

 
It was interesting to see Senlin get increasingly sidelined in what had started out as his story, but the result is a much larger and richer cast, and also perhaps, some added realism, in that he is not infinitely able to rise to every occasion. Sometimes someone else can do whatever it is better than him, including leadership in Edith's case. This is, I think, also the series' feminism in action. Bancroft and his characters are aware of the sexism and other forms of iniquity in the Tower. Part of fixing it means that the heroes don't just rely on a lone man to make all the decisions for them.

 
One final thing I want to call out for their quality are the epigraphs, the fake quotes at the start of each chapter. Across the series, these quotes come from probably over a dozen fake books, mostly about the Tower, and each has a unique voice, including the famed poet Jumet. The epigraphs are a great bit of worldbuilding, because they both tell us about the Tower and show how it's seen from different perspectives. I think they're always taken from a book one of the main characters is carrying or reading, they often provide a kind of ironic commentary of the events of the coming chapter, and in a couple occasions, they're a source of metafictional delight, when you realize that the character is interacting with the quote to a greater extent than you previously knew. There's a moment like that in the first book, and another one here. The epigraphs probably aren't vital to the series's success, but they do enliven and enrich the text to an extent you don't usually see.

The Best American Comics 2014

 
The Best American Comics 2014

edited by Scott McCloud

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

2014

 

 

The 2014 volume of the Best American Comics series is absolutely crammed, and honestly, I think, a bit to its detriment. Certain comics got enough space to include a complete chapter or story (notably, Love & Rockets gets 23 pages right out of the gate.) Others are excerpted in ways that feel a little too brief to fully appreciate. And others just get a single 2-page spread, only enough room for the smallest taste of their work.

 
McCloud was able to include a lot of familiar authors and artists. In addition to L&R, the Hernandez family got another project included, plus the supposedly last ever comic from Robert and Aline Crumb, Charles Burns, and Chris Ware, whose Building Stories is McCloud's favorite of the year.

 
Others who are by now becoming familiar to me are Michael DeForge, Ben Katchor, and Brandon Graham. Graham caught my eye in 2013's volume also, so I want to seek out some more of his work.
 

New to BAC, but famous outside its pages already, we get the webcomic Hyperbole and a Half, the monthly comic book Saga, (McCloud said he also wanted to include Homestuck and Hawkeye, but you can't print GIFs on paper, and Houghton Mifflin couldn't come to a reprint agreement with Marvel, respectively,) plus Rene Telgemeier's bestselling Drama, John Lewis's March, and Ed Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree. McCloud also included BAC's first newspaper comic strip (I think,) with the final week of Cul de Sac, which I'd never heard of, but does look good.

 
McCloud chose to arrange the book into about 10 sections. Each comic doesn't get its own introduction (as in a couple of the most recent volumes,) but each section gets its own table of contents and intro. It's a gimmick that, to me, feels like it wastes a lot of space, especially when an intro spills onto a second page for just a sentence or so. 

 
Which was frustrating, because it felt like a slightly more economical use of space somewhere would've let him give more than 2 pages to so many of the experimental comics near the end. Or else, honestly, I think he shouldn't have included some of them, because the amount we get to see isn't enough to form a real impression of the piece or appreciate it, or even know that you want to see more.

Gigantic Worlds

 
Gigantic Worlds

edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto

Gigantic Magazine

2015

 

 

Gigantic Worlds is an anthology of science fiction short stories, specifically short shorts or 'flash fictions.' It was intended to be the first book put out by Gigantic Magazine, but it ended up being the only one, because the publisher folded not long afterward. Which seems like kind of a shame. I learned of its existence years afterwards thanks to a review at Tor.com.

 
The 51 stories include a couple ringers - reprints of stories by Philip K Dick and JG Ballard. The rest were by contemporary authors, some I recognized, most I didn't. The most famous names include Ted Chiang (whose story about predestination I'd actually read before,) Alissa Nutting, Laird Barron, Johnathan Lethem (whose piece isn't really scifi, just an account of a man unaware he has a bleeding head wound on a video call,) Charles Yu, Brian Evanson. Maybe ⅓ of the stories are by women.

 
The book is divided into five thematic sections, named for the classical elements, plus Cosmos. The stories in Hydro mostly do involve rain or ocean or some other kind of water, and the ones in Ignis are often more violent, but I would mostly say the themes were quite loose.

 
My favorite stories were one told from the perspective of a software program, one about an office microwave that accidentally opens a hole in space-time, a parable about sexual morality set among bird people, a time-traveler trying to prevent the creation of a specific painting (without killing the artist,) and several written like fictional encyclopedia entries.

 
Beyond my favorites, plenty of the others were pretty good. For the ones I didn't like some seemed, in their brevity, to forget to have a point, some tried to allude to ... something? ... but were too vague and distant for me to get what they were trying to signify, and a few played such complex games with language that I couldn't get past the surface to even see if there was anything inside. One annoyed me by claiming to be a found story from 1928 and being utterly unconvincing.

A is for Bee

 
A is for Bee

An Alphabet Book in Translation
by Ellen Heck

Levine Querido

2022

 

 

A is for Bee is a children's picture book where each page shows a single animal associated with a letter of the English alphabet, and a list of names for that animal in other languages where its name starts with that letter.

So 'A is for bee' because it is 'anu in Igbo, ari in Turkish, aamoo in Ojibwe, abelha in Portuguese.'

Each animal is depicted as a print from a woodcut or linocut. Heck also provides an author's note explaining how she ensured that her translations and transliterations were correct, and an index that lists all the languages included in the book, and which letters each is paired with.

Because I know you're wondering, Q is for frog, X is for bear, and Z is for elephant. Our old friend the zebra still makes it in, appearing at letter V.

Press Enter to Continue

 
 
Press Enter to Continue

by Ana Galvan

translated by Jamie Richards
Fantagraphics

2019

 

 

Press Enter to Continue is a collection of five short comics by Spanish artist Ana Galvan. Each comic is sort of dreamlike, or really, nightmarish. Galvan's art combines relatively simple line-drawing with complex digital color.
 
In the first, silent story shows a woman walking down the street. She keeps splitting duplicates off from herself. Then a tiger starts to chase her. The tiger spawns duplicates too. Some of the tigers kill and eat some of the women.
 
A new trapeze artist joins a circus. He is fascinated by the living doll. The other performers warn him away from her. She was once popular, now ignored. She might have something to do with the disappearance of the old trapeze artist.
 
A woman in a job interview keeps hearing a humming sound. The interviewer tells her to ignore it. She can't. She accuses the interviewer of using a button to trigger the sound. Congratulations! She has passed the test, and can return tomorrow for the next phase of the interview. She leaves on hands and knees through a dog door.
 
Children in a futuristic reeducation camp seem to be both being taught and technologically altered to make them identical, to bring them up to some ideal. They make a plan to stay friends and meet again outside the camp, but they don't know if it'll work.
 
In the longest story, a woman keeps hallucinating a little boy saying his name. She discovers a secret society who thinks this and related images are being projected into the minds of vulnerable people via some sort of transmitter. They give her a code to type into her home computer that should somehow protect her. She sees the vision again, starts to enter the code, but then wonders, what if the boy is a real memory that was suppressed? Is the real deception the image of the boy, or the claim that he is a deceit?
 
Galvan's colors are rainbow hued, and tend to be soft except for pops of neon. Each page is entirely colored, often in an ombre, with additional colors picking out details in the art, or just adding geometric shapes and splotches of contrast that seem to serve only a decorative role. Her drawings are maybe halfway between Tom Gauld and someone like Michael DeForge or Jesse Jacobs. Her coloring is like no one else.

Impossible Views of the World

 
Impossible Views of the World

by Lucy Ives

Penguin

2017

 

 

Impossible Views of the World is a literary novel that unfolds over the course of a single week, narrated in the first person by museum curator Stella, whom Lucy Ives imbues with a unique and engaging authorial voice. Stella is having a difficult week personally and a very busy one professionally.

 
On the personal front, Stella is dealing with two complicated relationships, and perhaps more importantly, her feelings about them. First, her soon-to-be-ex husband Whit, who won't sign his divorce papers, and also won't stop showing up at the museum, which both annoys and embarrasses her. Second, her coworker Frederick, who is doing better than her, and will likely soon outrank her. 

 
Fred and Stella grew infatuated, then slept together, and then have awkwardly wondered whether to try to be together. Fred likes having easy, committmentless relationships with a number of women. He likes this lifestyle too much to actually date Stella, but likes her too much to call it off, so he sort of torturously strings her along. Stella meanwhile feels guilty about cheating on Whit, unable to resist Fred, and until this week, unable to see him in the unflattering light of truth enough to get over her infatuation.

 
Meanwhile, don't feel too bad for Whit, because starting a couple years before Fred and Stella even began flirting, he started hooking back up with his ex-girlfriend from highschool, for daily sex and sexting. This week also, Stella will admit that Whit's affair hurt her, and that although she wasn't aware of it, his emotional unavailability probably created the conditions that led to her own workplace crush and fling.

 
At work, in the museum, Fred has just unveiled a new exhibit to much public acclaim. His curation was financed by a Dutch company at the forefront of privatizing the world's water supply. He also scores an additional professional coup - the corporation wants to build a dozen private, exclusive company towns around the world, and thanks to Fred, wants to build a new branch of the museum in each of them.

 
Also, Stella's coworker Paul has gone missing, and while using his office to finish some work, Stella finds an interesting map of a previously-unknown utopian community called Elysia. Trying to distract herself from her disastrous lovelife and the fact that she's being professionally eclipsed, Stella also spends the week investigating the mysterious provenance of the map. 

 
This is the true heart of the novel. Stella pours herself into her research. Ives gives us excerpts and summaries as Stella finds an obscure book of utopian feminist scifi that mentions Elysia, a historic scrapbook with the original of the map, a biography of the scrapbooker's descendant, a bohemian socialite who named her art salon Elysia, etc. Also some of missing Paul's poetry, and Paul's ex-wife's recent novel. Stella's investigation even unearths secrets about the rich family who founded the water company, although nothing she learns will stand in the way of capitalism. Ives really impressed me with the winding nature of the search, and the many voices she adopts to create all the fictional documents.

 
As I said earlier, Ives gives Stella herself a fascinating voice as the book's narrator. She is precise, maybe even overly so. Her sentences constantly interrupt themselves with clarifying clauses. She says what things are not, as well as what they are. And then sometimes she realizes she's overelaborated, says 'I mean,' and repeats herself more plainly. 

 
I like Stella as a narrator. She's maybe my favorite since Finley from Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles. I like that she over-intellectualizes, but also can't prevent her emotions from leaking through, as when she can't stop herself from getting judgey about her husband's secret girlfriend. I like that Fred's amoral careerism kind of disgusts her. And I like the thrilling curiosity that drives her search, her desire to simply know the truth about something, even if it can't lead to an exhibit, even if it's irrelevant to the corporate sponsors.

Ex Libris

 
 
Ex Libris
by Matt Madden

Uncivilized Books

2021

 

 

Matt Madden is like a one-man graphic novel Ouilipo movement, and Ex Libris is like his version of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, although I think Madden is actually more ambitious here. 

 
In If on a Winter's Night, Calvino writes a dozen short stories in the style of other authors, each one allegedly the first chapter of a complete book, and links them with a framing story about a reader who's trying to finish at least one of these books, but keeps being thwarted by misprinted editions that never have the right second chapter, only the new first chapter of the next book in the chase.

 
In Ex Libris, Madden does give us excerpts of a couple dozen fake comics, each in a different style, but he uses them differently. The overarching story here is about a reader in a rented bedroom, recovering from a bad breakup, and feeling trapped. The rented room has a full bookshelf - but all of the books on it are comics. What's more, the reader sometimes feels like the comics are speaking directly to them (they are!) and that they sometimes contain eerie parallels to the events leading to the breakup (they do!) The reader gradually realizes that they're not just metaphorically trapped in a bad situation, they're literally trapped in a comic. And then they realize a way to escape.

 
It's hard for a review to do this one justice, because what Madden is doing is easy to understand as you read it, but hard to describe or give examples of. There's a recurring visual spiral motif that seems to represent the sense of being drawn into something. The comics-within-the-comic are full of characters who also feel trapped and are also trying to escape. The scenes where the comic panels the narrator is looking at 'talk back' to the narrator's internal monologue are probably my favorite.