Invisible Planets

 
  
Invisible Planets

An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation

edited by Ken Liu

translated by Ken Liu

Tor
2016 
 
 
Invisible Planets is a collection of scifi short stories originally written in Chinese. The stories were selected and translated by Ken Liu, who's a science fiction writer in his own right, and a prolific translator of Chinese fiction. The authors included in this anthology have all won awards, and most of the stories are award-winners or nominees as well. As a result, the book functions as a kind of "best of" collection of recent Chinese science fiction.
 
According to Liu in his introduction, one of his other goals for the book is to show off the versatility of Chinese scifi by including the widest possible range of topics and writing styles. Because of this, it's difficult to identify any recurring themes. We get military scifi, a couple of cyberpunk stories, robots inheriting the planet after the humans are gone, a couple of dystopias, an homage to Italo Calvino, and from Liu Cixin, a pair of stories that have the same pro space exploration message and feeling as the so-called "golden age of American scifi." He'd be right at home on the pages of Amazing Stories, I think.
 
The one theme I think I notice is social commentary, which is common in the science fiction of any country. In his introduction, Liu discourages us from interpreting any of the stories as being 'about' Chinese social problems. On the one hand, this feels disingenuous, like including a story about a mass shooting in an anthology of American fiction and then telling the readers not to think of it as a commentary on gun violence in America.
 
On the other hand, I think part of what Liu means is that we shouldn't read these stories as being only about China. We get stories about young people having trouble finding employment, pollution, overcrowding in cities, economic inequality, the difficulty of caring for elderly people who can't support themselves. These are problems of capitalism, we have the same problems everywhere that people don't have the right to life's necessities, but only the right to buy those necessities if they can afford them. The one story that reminds me of the Chinese government's efforts to control the internet is also an intentional homage to 1984, and reading it makes me think about the way America and Britain starting to use age verification as an excuse to restrict online anonymity, or the way some websites censor certain words, so that people have to write 'unalive', because if they wrote 'dead' or 'killed' then no one else would be able to see their post.
 
The censorship story, "The City of Silence" by Ma Boyong is one of the best in the collection. It's one I think I heard of when it was first published in English, but never read until now. It's set in a city where everyone has a government issued internet username, there are only a handful of accessible websites, and people can only write using words from an approved list. Everyone also have to wear a listening device that beeps whenever they say an unapproved word, and that automatically calls the police if they say too many. So mostly people say nothing at all. Our protagonist is a man who notices a word puzzle hidden in plain sight online. When he solves it, it leads him to a small in-person gathering where the listening devices don't work, so people can talk about whatever they want (and enjoy casual sex). Joining the club revitalizes his love of language, and he starts to notice other ways that people try to use approved words to express forbidden thoughts.
 
"Folding Beijing" by Hao Jingfang (who also wrote the title story) is about a future where the capital city folds and rearranges itself like a Transformer robot, turning it into three different cities that share the same footprint. One is spacious and luxurious for the rich, another is kind of like a modern city, and the third is an overcrowded dystopia for the poor. Everyone uses a hibernation device to sleep through the other two cities' time on the surface. We follow a poor man who's trying to make some money by crossing between the different Beijings as a courier. "Invisible Planets" is written in the style of Invisible Cities, and it reminds me of Liu's own story, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species".
 
Two of Xia Jia's stories, "A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight" and "Night Journey of the Horse-Dragon" depict abandoned robots attaining consciousness and sentience after all the humans have disappeared from the Earth. They feel like ghost stories, or fairy tales. Cheng Jingbo's "Grave of the Fireflies" reminds me of Staislaw Lem's robot fables, except sadder and perhaps a bit more lyrical. There's a princess, a magician, a castle in the shape of a giant robot knight, and also last surviving humans migrating to an orbital city around the last star as the rest of the galaxy goes dark.

There's a Tiger on the Train

 
 
There's a Tiger on the Train

by Mariesa Dulak

art by Rebecca Cobb

Faber & Faber
2024 

 

 

There's a Tiger on the Train is a cute children's picture book about a little boy entertaining himself with his imagination while he and his dad ride the train to the beach. Dad is on his phone, and won't do more than glance up from it until the train arrives, which means our young protagonist will have to amuse himself.
 
Which he does! He imagines a tiger in a top hat, crocodiles just back from a swim, playful piglets, tea-drinking hippos, pugs in glamorous dresses... In the end, the train reaches the beach, and he gets what he wants most off, a chance to play with his dad, who gives him his full attention now that they're there.
 
I imagine a lot of kids can relate to a parent who's not really paying attention because they're on their phone, and everyone has had times when they're bored and have to entertain themselves. Long trips where you're a passenger are a perfect time to daydream. And dad comes through in the end! Which doesn't always happen in real life, so I was kind of relieved that things worked out here. I guess I shouldn't really be surprised a kids' book had a happy ending, but I'm still glad it did.
 
The text of the book is written in 4-line stanzas with A-B-C-B rhyming structure. There's some neat typography where changes in the font or text size herald the arrival of a new set of animals or give voice to the train's rattles and clanks. The art reminds me of a kid's color pencil drawings, which I'm sure is a deliberate effect, because it encourages young readers to try out the same style. I also think it's worth mentioning that the boy in the book is Black and his dad is White. The Snowy Day is great, but it's only one book; There's a Tiger on the Train gives children of color another opportunity to see themselves portrayed in a very relatable, universal kind of story.

Bad Dream

 
 
Bad Dream
A Dreamer Story

by Nicole Maines

art by Rye Hickman

DC Comics

2024

 

 

Bad Dream is an origin story for the transgender superhero Dreamer, written by the actress who played her in the Supergirl tv series. It's part of DC Comics' series of YA graphic novels, which seems to include more origin stories than ongoing adventures. The version of Dreamer we meet here is very similar to the one on Supergirl, although here she's presented as a high school student rather than a young adult like on the show.
 
Nia Nal and her older sister Maeve are both half human, half alien, and they live in a secret small town where aliens can live on Earth without attracting attention from the broader public. Their father is human, and their mom used to be one of the Seers from the planet Naltor, a kind of psychic matriarchy who use their visions of the future to both protect the planet militarily and police it internally. Their mom had a vision long ago that her daughter would inherit her powers, so Maeve's spent her whole life training to receive dream visions ... but they haven't started yet. Nia is trans, idolizes her big sister, and wishes the other alien teens would stop bullying her.
 
Nia has also started having dreams with strange, prophetic imagery. She's afraid that she's stealing Maeve's powers from her, so she runs away to Metropolis to ... well, she doesn't actually seem to have a plan. She turns off her cellphone and then just wanders around the city drinking coffee and energy drinks to keep from falling asleep.
 
Eventually, she happens to run into Galaxy, an alien teen we met in Galaxy: The Prettiest Star from this same series of YA comics. Galaxy is metaphorically like a trans girl because she was forced to disguise herself as a human boy for most of her life. Galaxy has a Black girlfriend and a Black trans best friend. They're all older teens and recognize that Nia is a kid in trouble, so they bring her to a queer community center that includes a shelter. The trans friend wears a cool space-themed outfit in a ballroom walk-off and wins the night. Nia learns a bit about Black trans and queer culture in the big city and embarrasses herself a bit with her small town ignorance, but eventually befriends Galaxy and her friends enough that she agrees to let the older girls drive her back home.
 
One of the other Seers of Naltor was also in Metropolis. She follows Nia and Galaxy back to the secret town, reveals that (quelle surprise) the psychic leaders of a planetary surveillance state are not actually nice people, and executes Nia's mom for desertion. Nia inherits her mother's full powers in that moment, and uses them to defeat the other Seer. Afterward, we're shown that Nia and Maeve's relationship is now quite strained, and that Nia has become a sometimes superhero.
 
I have a sense that DC intends the graphic novels in this series to serve as entry points for new readers, and maybe acts as self-funding market research to find out which characters spark those readers' imagination. I'm glad that effort seems to include trying out multiple trans and trans-adjacent characters, and I've seen that Galaxy and Dreamer have gotten to appear in some of DC's regular monthly comics too, Galaxy in a Hawkgirl run and Dreamer teaming up with Superboy.

The Claw of the Conciliator

 
 
The Claw of the Conciliator
by Gene Wolfe

Orb

1981, reprinted 1994 

 

 

The Claw of the Conciliator is the second book in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun quartet. Our narrator is Severian, an orphan with near-perfect memory who will someday become the new autarch. For all the strangeness of Wolfe's far future Urth, the first book used a couple of familiar narrative arcs to ground us. We watched as Severian grew from a boy to a young man as a member of the Torturers' Guild, and saw him exiled from his home for a forbidden act of mercy. Then, as he traveled, we saw him get challenged to a duel, which he prepared for and then fought, and he met some traveling companions.
 
In Claw we leave those narrative arcs behind, so I had much less sense of where the story might take me. At the end of the previous book, Severian was separated from the others by a disturbance in the crowd as they left the city of Nessus. At the start of this one, he's hoping to reconnect with them on the road. A town hires him to execute a criminal, and he tells us this will happen many more times in his travels, but that he won't mention it again.
 
Severian is recruited by the rebel leader Vodalus, and sent to deliver a message to a spy in the House Absolute, home of the Autarch. Before he leaves, he takes part in a ritual in which an alien carrion animal consumes a corpse, then the participants drink some of the animal's brain fluid, and experience visions of the person who died. The corpse belongs to Thelca, the prisoner Sevarian loved, and who he mercy killed to spare from further torture. Perhaps because of his perfect memory, Severian permanently receives a small piece of Thelca's mind as a second personality inside him. Later in the book, we'll see him remember things because she knew them, and in one instance, she'll possess his body.
 
Severian arrives at the autarch's House and is immediately imprisoned in a communal holding cell. Originally it was meant to hold people while they wait for trial, but most of the current prisoners were born there; their ancestors were accused of crimes generations ago, and never released or even tried.
 
Severian escapes and meets Vodalus's contact. He receives instructions to return the Claw of the Conciliator to the holy order it was stolen from, and to kill the Autarch as he goes to war. The Claw is a glowing gemstone that appears to have the power to heal injuries. Severian realizes the Autarch knows about Vodalus's communications network. This seems less like counterintelligence, and more like the Autarch wants Vodalus to succeed at overthrowing the autarchy. It seems possible that the Autarch somehow orchestrated Vodalus becoming a rebel, and maybe that he's chosen Severian as his successor, although if so, his methods and even his reasons are unknown to us.
 
Severian is reunited with his companions, who are there to perform a play a a festival - the impresario Dr Talos, the giant Baldanders, and Severian's girlfriend Dorcas, who was resurrected by the Claw decades after she died. They perform and then part ways, with Talos and Baldanders returning home, and Severian and Dorcas on the way to complete his two missions.
 

alien carrion eater illustration by Wayne Douglas Barlowe

 
   
Seemingly very little happens, aside from events being set in motion. We see examples of the government's cruelty - the execution and the hereditary prisoners. We see the power of the Claw. Severian is changed by the ceremony with Thecla's corpse. We learn that there's something strange about the relationship between the Autarch and the rebellion. And Sevarian is given goals to accomplish that will presumably lead to him becoming the new autarch. One chapter is transcript of a story Severian reads that sounds like a parable for killing the alien giant Abaia who lives in the ocean. Another chapter is the text of Dr Talos's play, about an autarch acquiring a new sun to replace the dying old one. I have to think that both of these are foreshadowing events that will happen in the next two books.
 
Wolfe has kind of a bleak vision of the future. We know that in the past, humans traveled by spaceship to other stars. Aliens have come to Urth to live and brought some animals with them to integrate into our ecology, and the aliens themselves intermarried with humans. The moon is green and forested, and at their peak, humans lived on Venus and Mars, and in domed cities underwater. But in Severian's time, society has become tradition-bound and quasi-medieval, and technology is perceived like magic. Severian's country is ruled by the autarchy, and it's engaged in a long war with its northern neighbors. Plus, you know, the sun is dying.
 
The giants intrigue me. We're told that Abaia is big like a mountain, and that he'll continue to grow until he can break the continents. Baldanders is an alien from the same species, just young and small enough that he can still live on land. Baldanders seems extremely hostile to a different species of alien who are part of the Autarch's court. If I've understood correctly, the hereditary ruling class, the exultants, are all descended from humans who had children with the alien courtiers. And Severian might be the child of an exultant.
 
Some things Vodalus says make me wonder if the rebels are somehow aligned with the giants against the Autarch. It's hard for me to see what advantage humans could hope to gain from allying with an alien who will eventually destroy the planet, but if there is a connection, I imagine it will become clearer later. It's almost as though a war between two alien societies is being fought on Urth, with humans on both sides of the conflict.
 
I see a kind of parallelism between Abaia who grows like a cancer on the earth, and the black hole growing at the heart of the old sun that's the cause of its decline. In Severian's time, the sun is large and red and no longer as warm as today, not because it's millions of years in the future (though it is thousands), but because of a cancer inside the star, eating it from within. If so, then story logic would seem to require that, to save the sun, Severian will also have to defeat the giant Abaia. How that will intersect with the rebellion and the war, I'm not sure. 

The Hard Switch

 
 
The Hard Switch

by Owen Pomery

Avery Hill

2024 

 

 

The Hard Switch is a graphic novel set at the end of an age of interstellar civilization. We're told that there's a mineral needed to make hyperspace jumps, that it's nearly all used up, and that everywhere in space, people are scrambling to get someplace they want to stay before the mineral runs out for good and each star system becomes isolated from its neighbors. It sounds pretty bleak! But the characters we follow, while not satisfied with where they're currently at, also don't seem to feel any special urgency. The art style and narrative tone both remind me of On a Sunbeam, a comparison that unfortunately doesn't do Hard Switch any favors. This is much slimmer and more slight; it's not fair to hold it to the same standard.
 
We follow two women and a sentient octopus. They have enough of the mineral for a few more jumps, and they're trying to salvage old shipwrecks to find more. Because our viewpoint is such a closeup, and because this trio seems so self-reliant, the mood is less like the apocalyptic closing of all borders and Balkanization of space, and more like some roommates trying to squeeze in a few errands before a storm snows them in for the weekend. I liked what was on the page well enough, but there's a real mismatch between what we're told the stakes are and what they actually seem to be.
 
Pomery favors plot over characterization or worldbuilding, and he keeps the scale of the action quite small. We open with our trio locating a shipwreck and going in to grab the hyperspace mineral. They encounter some peaceful alien salvagers and then a team of violent human mercenaries. They escape unharmed with an object with ancient writing on it. They become convinced it's proof that before the special mineral was discovered, there was some other way to travel faster than lightspeed. Unfortunately, some rich guy recently hauled a huge cache of ancient art offworld.
 
They to track down the art collector and arrange to meet him. Along the way, they stop to help a ship in distress. It's a transport of refugees, but almost everyone has already died. The lone survivor is an alien child. The unscrupulous ship owner took everyone's money, skimped on the oxygen supply, and and left the ship and its passengers adrift halfway to the destination. This is the one place where we get a glimpse of how the coming crisis is making some people desperate and others ruthless. Our viewpoint characters don't seem especially privileged, but they must be. They own a ship, even if it's small, and have enough of the rare mineral to do seemingly everything they want to get done.
 
After that detour, the three go to the mansion of the art collector, and he lets them in to see walls and walls of ancient text, supposedly because he wants to see their fragment to to consider buying it. But it turns out he's also the human trafficker, he knows they've witnessed his crime, and he wants to eliminate them. By all rights, he ought to succeed, but our three protagonists manage to defeat his private security death squad and get away despite being surprised and outnumbered.
 
As they escape into space again, we learn that they got photos of the ancient language, so if there is a secret to FTL travel in there, they may be able to translate it, or send the images to someone who can. For now they jump someplace safe to hide out for awhile, still with enough of the mineral to jump to where they really want to be later, whether or not the translation works out.

Pomery's art style is quite simplified, which works well for the story he's chosen to tell. I thought about what it might take to communicate the scale of the upcoming disaster, and I think it would just take more - a longer book, a broader scope, more characters, more plot threads. I also thought about what the story would be like with no ancient secrets or magic remedies, and I think it would be like a parable for downward mobility. Young adults who grew up thinking they'd be able to go where they want, when they want, realizing they're going to be stuck in one place, and having to accept that because there's no way to avoid it. 

Kissing on the Mouth (2005)

  

Kissing on the Mouth 

directed by Joe Swanberg
written by Kevin Pittman, Kris Rey, and Joe Swanberg
Film1

2005


Kissing on the Mouth is an early mumblecore movie, although it has far more in common with 9 Songs than it does with something like Funny Ha Ha.

 

The plot here is minimal. What's distinctive about the film is its frank portrayal of nudity and 'non-simulated sex acts' and the use of audio recordings of everyday young adults talking about relationships to provide a voiceover soundtrack that runs over most of the movie. The mixture of these non-fictional elements with a naturalistic but fictional narrative and improvised rather than scripted acting is kind of fascinating.

 

Within the film, the recordings are some kind of secret art project of Patrick's, so sometimes the audience hears them because a character in the film is listening to them, sometimes we just hear them as a kind of commentary track. The recordings are about dating, sex, breaking up. They don't directly correspond to anything happening on the screen, although they are generally thematically related to the fictional plot.

 

Ellen and Patrick (played by the director, Joe Swanberg) are roommates, who, as far as I can tell, have never had a sexual relationship. Despite this, Ellen finds herself sneaking around, and Patrick seems weirdly controlling of her relationships. The other two characters are Ellen's ex-boyfriend Chris, who she's recently started hooking up with again, and her friend Laura (played by Swanberg's future wife), who acts as an unreliable confidante, and also seduces Patrick while Ellen is away.

  

We watch Ellen and Chris make out, strip, then fuck, several times. That really is the appropriate verb here. We get two different scenes of Ellen grooming her pubic hair, once on the toilet, once in the shower. Patrick (that is, Swanberg) masturbates to completion in the shower. Laura and Patrick make out in the shower, then fuck.

 

Ellen wants to know about the secret project Patrick is working on. He refuses to tell her. She burns a copy of the recordings to a CD to listen to without his permission. Ellen and Laura talk about sex and desire; Laura gossips about Ellen to Patrick to convince him to have sex with her. Patrick keeps asking Ellen if she's seeing Chris again; she keeps lying and saying no. Eventually he searches her room and finds nude photos Chris took of her.

 

The climax of the film, such as it is, is a fight between Ellen and Patrick where they confront each other over the secrets they've been keeping. Patrick is obviously very jealous. I feel like this scene only makes sense if you think he wants to date Ellen, or maybe that he's been lying to himself and imagining they were a couple, and not just roommates, this entire time. By the end of the film, Ellen has re-established her autonomy. Nothing else is resolved.

  

The graphic content is realistic rather than glamorous. It feels more like we're peeping at people than like they're performing for us, although obviously that's a conceit - everything we see is a performance. The film's editing is interesting, often intercutting two scenes to create an emotional contrast. Most of the action happens without dialogue, leaving space for the voiceovers to fill. The recorded interviews are the most interesting aspect of the movie, and combined with the somewhat experimental visuals, make this probably a bit better than 9 Songs, which uses similarly explicit depictions of sex to track the course of a brief relationship.
 
 

Originally watched February 2023. 

This One Summer

 
This One Summer

by Mariko Tamaki

art by Jillian Tamaki

First Second

2014

 

 

This One Summer is a young adult graphic novel about a memorable vacation at a lake, written and illustrated by cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. It's fiction, but feels very much like a memoir. It's the sort of time an adult author might look back on, the dialogue is naturalistic, and the plotting and characterization both feel very true to life. This is how people talk, this is how they act. The least realistic thing is that life never has this much thematic unity.
 
We follow Rose, a girl on the cusp of puberty, whose family spends two weeks in a cabin by the lake each summer. Each year, Rose hangs out with her best friend Windy, who's a year or two younger. This year that gap translates into an awkward imbalance: Windy is still a kid, but Rose is becoming a teen. They spend the days swimming and hiking in the woods. They talk about what it will be like to grow breasts and get their periods. And they decide to rent grown-up horror movies from the local convenience store. They notice the slashers treat girls different than boys. Probably neither of them is quite ready for what they're watching, but they're both curious, and they both want to be ready.
 
Rose's parents are fighting. She knows they were trying to have another kid, but didn't. Rose doesn't really know what that might mean, or how it might relate to the fact that her mother seems depressed and unwilling to participate in many of the usual fun vacation activities. She probably doesn't understand how her dad being fun and laid back creates an obligation for her mom to be more serious and responsible.
 
The third plot thread is lives of some of the older teens who live in town all year round. Rose and Windy pick up on what's going on only vicariously, as conversations happen around them, or in a few cases thanks to deliberate eavesdropping. 
 
Windy teases Rose that she has a crush on the guy who works at the convenience store, and at first I thought it was just a joke, but it becomes clear that she does feel something for him, and when there's trouble later, she instinctively takes his side, even though she doesn't really know him. There's a running theme of characters saying 'I'm kidding' to try to smooth over the awkwardness after they've said or done something that didn't land. It's one of the things Rose and Windy talk about.
 
The trouble I mentioned is that the guy who works at the convenience store, the guy Rose likes, has a girlfriend who just found out she's pregnant. She understandably anxious to talk to him, and he keeps refusing to answer her calls. Eventually, this leads to a much bigger confrontation that brings all three plot threads together, and shows us (and Rose) a different, more sympathetic side of her mom.
 
Throughout the book, we see Rose learning about and grappling with adult femininity and heterosexuality. What will it be like to have boobs, and how big will they be? Are those older girls really 'sluts'? Is it wrong to call them that? Why are Rose's parents fighting so much? Why doesn't her mom seem to want to have fun? And why isn't it okay for her to vacation at her own pace, in her own way? Why are the convenience store guy and his girlfriend fighting? What does he owe to her? What does Rose actually feel for him? 

  

It's a coming of age story, focused on Rose's growing awareness of sexism, and of her own ability to be wrong. Because Windy is just a little younger, she functions almost like Rose's younger self. She still thinks the way Rose did last year, so when they disagree, it's a measure of how Rose is changing as she grows up.
 
I've praised the writing, but the art is worth mentioning too. Jillian Tamaki's drawings are realistic and expressive. The scenery is especially detailed. The book is printed in purple ink instead of black, with lavender instead of grey. It adds to the feeling of nostalgia. 
 
Reading this reminded me of the vacations my parents took us on with our extended family when I was younger, of the odd, timeless, self-contained quality of a week spent in a place you don't really live around people you only see while traveling. This one is really something special. 

The Shamshine Blind

 
 
The Shamshine Blind

by Paz Pardo

Atria

2023 

 

 

I think alt-historical mystery novels are having a moment. Paz Pardo's The Shamshine Blind is one several recent books that fit that description. I think the first one I read was The Yiddish Policeman's Union, right when it first came out. I doubt it was the first book to fit the description, and it's difficult for me to believe that what's going on right now is connected to Chabon in any straightforward way. Seeing so many examples appearing around the sane time makes it seem like the two genres have a natural affinity, like alternate history worldbuilding and mystery-solving detective stories pair well in a way that allows each to reinforce the other.
 
Pardo also writes The Shamshine Blind with a kind of gonzo approach to the science part of her science fiction that reminds me of Nick Harkaway or Jasper Fforde. Because while the point where her alt history departs real history is relatively straight forward - what if Argentina won the Faulklands War? - but the cause of the departure is like something out of a comic book or cartoon - what if the way they won was by deploying colors that cause emotions as chemical weapons? By the present day of Shamshine, Argentina is the world's superpower, America is a bombed out ruin with an economy decimated by hyperinflation, and 'psychopigments', colors that control how you feel, are both our primary pharmaceuticals and our life-ruining illegal drugs.
 
The mystery is narrated by Curdita, a field in Pigment Enforcement agent nearing the mandatory retirement age of 40, working in the suburbs of an abandoned San Francisco, still dreaming of a promotion to the big time in Iowa City or Boise. Curdita is a Depressive, as are all the other Pigment agents: depression weakens the effect of psychopigments. Neurotypical people are too vulnerable, and can be permanently brain-damaged by a level of exposure that Depressives can (mostly) recover from in a few weeks. 
 
At the start of the book, Curdita is tracking down a shipment of Shamshine, a counterfeit version of Sunshine Yellow, the psychopigment for happiness, which is taken daily in pill form by patients across the country. We hear about at least a dozen other pigments, but a couple of the most important are Deepest Blue, the first psychopigment, which causes memory loss and amnesia, and was Argentina's main weapon in the war, and Slate Gray, which causes ennui and a lack of motivation. 
 
Soon enough, the Shamshine case leads Curdita to a much bigger mystery. Someone is creating a whole new pigment with unknown effects, except that all the human test subjects are getting totally burned out by the strength of it. Once they get it right, whatever it is, they appear to have plans to manipulate the public mood on a national scale, and in the meantime, they're killing or using Deepest Blue to erase the minds of anyone who might be a loose end. Curdita goes all trying to solve this and stop it, spending the back half of the book operating out of a hospital room rather than the police station, and 
 
Pardo interweaves the present day mystery with Curdita's memories of her childhood and her time in the police academy, and a tour of a fallen America, transformed by years of psychopigment warfare and the periphery's love-hate relationship with the new Argentinian core. Americans listen to soap operas on the radio and eat imported hot sauce at every meal; and militant White nationalists dream of reclaiming lost glory. When Curdita gets exposed to Slate or Blue or Magenta Obsession in the course of her pursuit, her emotions are no longer her own, and the past, both hers and the country's, spills out in free association. 
 
Pardo takes her slightly silly premise and treats it seriously. San Francisco getting emptied out by a Magenta attack that disables fifty-thousand people that turns their fandom into true fanaticism is zany, but Pardo keeps an eye on the human cost. Her America is all hinterland, every major city made uninhabitable by Deepest Blue bombings that make them permanent superfund sites. I think that's part of what reminds me of Harkaway's The Gone-Away World or Fforde's Shades of Grey - an absurd apocalypse is still the end of the old world, and however strange the new world might be, people still have to find a way to live there.

Tower Dungeon 2

 
 
Tower Dungeon 2

by Tsutomu Nihei

Kodansha

2025 

 

 

In the first volume of Tower Dungeon, super-strong farmboy Yuva got conscripted into the royal army to rescue the princess, who's been kidnapped by a necromancer and taken to the mountainous Dragon Tower. Yuva helped defeat a slime monster and recovered a gem that the necromancer says he's willing to trade for the princess. Then many of the royal guards were recalled to the capital, leaving Yuva with a straitlaced master archer and a bratty woman who knows fire magic.
 
Now in volume 2, the trio continues to explore for a safe (-ish) route up to level 100 where they can trade for the princess. Enriquo the archer leads them very cautiously. With their familiar staircase now guarded by giant suits of armor, he insists they map a new route. We learn that the dungeon is circular and 3 kilometers in diameter, which must make it like 15 or 18 km tall, given its proportions. Each level has numbered support pillars and is exactly 10 meters tall, though it seems that the very regularized main structure also holds more irregular and less well-built secondary features, perhaps later additions by less-skilled builders than the originals.
 
The trio gets lost in some repetitive, identical looking sections, then comes close to dying of thirst. Their equipment is stolen while they're sleeping, but when they give chase, they learn that the primordial human dungeon dwellers only wanted their salt (a precaution against another slime monster) for cooking. Yuva and his friends get back the rest of their stuff, plus some treasure, and the location of a water source and a secret staircase.
 
Back outside the fort, a boom town has sprung up to supply the soldiers going in. Besides Yuva's group, we meet a team of badass women adventurers who look like a roller derby team and all carry hammers, and a cat woman who wears a suit of armor. Fire mage Lilicen is eager to go back in the dungeon to beat out the new competitors. Yuva's sister has arrived from the village to work at the inn. She gets attacked by a 10 foot tall nobleman who can turn into a dragon, but the cat-lady knight protects her. Apparently everyone in the royal family is like 10 feet tall and a 'dracomorph', presumably including the princess.
 
Nihei seems to be drawing on tropes from both Dungeons & Dragons and dungeon crawling computer games like Rogue. The appearance of the stair guardians feels like a classic dungeon restocking procedure, and confusing architecture that trips you up as you make your own map is a staple of megadungeons as a genre. The sheer size of the place, and the identical superstructure of each level, is more like a video game though. Lilicen also shows Yuva you can break clay jars to find minor treasures, which is straight out of the Zelda games.
 
Yuva is our viewpoint character. He's from a small village and knows little of the outside world, so he needs Enriquo and Lilicen to explain how dungeons work to him. Along with us, he goggles at the noble cat woman and at the news that the kingdom's royalty are all giant shapeshifters. Yuva is kindhearted, which is why he talked to the salt thieves instead of fighting them. So far, his incredible strength has only been used for carrying heavy packs and breaking through a weakened wall into a secret passageway, but presumably he'll eventually use it for fighting, too. Yuva treats Enriquo like a boss and Lilicen like a sister, much to her annoyance.
 
The world Nihei is building here seems rough, crude, and brutal in a way that matches the style of his linework. The monsters are dangerous and strange in a way that borders on horror. The royal family is monstrous and inhuman, and at least one member is a Bluebeard-type who wants to cannibalize Yuva's actual little sister to prolong his life. Enriquo got a bladder infection when they ran out of water. The details add up to a world that's harsh and uncaring, where only people of incredible skill can survive.

Invisible Things

 
 
Invisible Things

by Andy Pizza and Sophie Miller

Chronicle Books

2023 

 

 

Invisible Things is a children's picture book that illustrates things that can't be seen - experiences from our other senses and our emotions. 

 

The book is a kind of guided meditation for kids, first walking through things we might hear, smell, taste, or feel, and then asking the reader to close their eyes and take some time to identify the invisible sensations around themselves. And then this is repeated for emotions, with a bit of extra attention given to reassuring kids that sadness and fear are normal, but also not permanent. 

 

The illustrations use cute little personifications to depict each invible thing. The song stuck in your head is a guitar with feet and googly eyes; the heebie jeebies is a hollow tree stump with little eyes peeking out of it. I think the idea is that making each sensation or emotion into a tiny monster makes them easier to think about and imagine.

The Bathysphere Book

 
The Bathysphere Book
Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths
by Brad Fox
Astra

2023 
 
 
I think there's some value in allowing your friends' interests to influence you. At one time, my sister was very interested in oceanography, so I still like to read about it from time to time. The Bathysphere Book is a history of the first really successful deep-sea diving vehicle, the bathysphere, and a biography of the explorer who rode in it, William Beebe.
 
The bathysphere was built by Otis Barton. When the door was screwed on, it was a hermetically sealed metal sphere, with only three quartz windows to see out. It was raised and lowed by a metal cable, and this was paired with a phone line so Beebe could report what he saw up to his research partner (and girlfriend) Gloria Hollister for transcription. The bathysphere carried its own compressed oxygen, had internal air conditioning, and used a chemical reactant to neutralize the carbon dioxide its occupants exhaled. It was only used a few times, mainly in 1933 and 1934, and Hollister never got to go on a real dive. Bebee and seasick Barton dove together each time, with Barton not even looking out, just monitoring the machines.
 
The purpose of the dives was to find out what the ocean was actually like, below the depths you could reach in diving helmet. As you descend, more and more light is absorbed by the water above you, first reds and oranges, then yellows and greens. Before it becomes black, the ocean glows blue-violet. Many of the deep sea creatures are also partially bioluminescent. There is more life down there than scientists had believed possible before Beebe's dives.
 
The other famous collaborator on this project was artist Else Bostelmann. She also never dove in the bathysphere, and based all her paintings on Hollister's transcripts and direct conversation with Beebe. I actually got this book because I'd seen some of Bostelmann's fantastically dark, haunting watercolors before. My favorite anecdote is that on a few occasions, she donned a diving helmet, dropped a canvas and a metal music stand, and was actually able to oil paint fish and coral, from life, at a depth of 20 or 30 feet.
 

Previously Unknown Dragonfish Circling the Bathysphere 
- Else Bostlemann, 1934

 
There are some things from the past that I guess I assumed were more widespread than they actually were. When I watched the film The Automat, I was genuinely surprised to learn there were really only ever in New York and Philadelphia. The bathysphere was unique, not the name for a general type of craft, and outside of Beebe's handful of deep dives in the early 30s, was really only used for test dives and exhibitions.
 
Fox writes in very short chapters that each relay a single thought or incident. His narratives of Beebe's life and the story of the bathysphere dives are interwoven with Bostelmann's sketches and paintings, photos of the expeditions, excerpts from Beebe's and Hollister's diaries, excerpts from the transcripts of the dives and descriptions of the undersea sightings, accounts of what else was going on historically at the same time, and then lots and lots of short biographical sketches of other people tangentially (often very tenuously) connected to Beebe and the dives. So we learn about the famous racist Beebe dedicated one of his books to, but also about Beebe's neighbor's doctor. Who indeed sounds like a fascinating fellow! The proliferation of chapters about people with only the thinnest of connections to the dives is probably meant to help provide context, but also kind of made it feel like Fox didn't really have enough material to fill a book and was padding it out.

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013)

 
 

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears

directed by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani

written by Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet

Strand Releasing

2013

 

 

Although it's only a decade old, The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears looks more like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, with its unsettling blend of blood and sexuality, the uncanny repetitions and re-dos of Celine and Julie Go Boating, or Jan Svankmajer's Alice, with its creepy stop-motion skeletons, than like anything from the last 30 years.

 

The plot, such as it is, is relatively simple, but the story isn't told in a straightforward way, and by the end, I doubt that we're supposed to think that there's anything as solid as a 'real' story amidst the parade of images.

 

A man comes home to his absurdly Art Nouveau apartment to find his wife missing. He questions the neighbors, calls a private investigator, searches the building, and finds a series of secret passages. He also keeps encountering the same enigmatic woman in a number of different guises.

 

As the film continues, the already tenuous distinction between 'reality,' flashback, dream, fantasy, hallucination, and story told by another person recounting one of the above, dissolves completely. We see the same events several times, sometimes identically, sometimes with variations. People, especially the husband, are repeatedly cut with razor blades and knives, only to see their wounds vanish moments later. People die, and then are still alive. The sex is all sadistic. The mysterious woman, Laura, is powerful in a way that all the others are helpless within this surreal world.

 

The most notable thing about the look of this movie is the editing. I don't think there's a single shot that's held for more than a couple seconds. The editing deliberately creates dis-continuity rather than the usual illusion of seamless movement. Actions start and restart, repeat partway through. Scenes are interlaced with each other and with brief flashes of imagery. Parts of the movie are shown in low-frame-rate stop-motion, like we're flipping through a stack of photographs.

 

It's a unique visual experience. It don't think I'd describe how I felt about this one as 'liking it,' but I am glad I watched it. I'm always interested to see movies that experiment, that try something new, show me something I haven't seen before.

 

 

Originally watched January 2023.

My Dear Pierrot

 
 
My Dear Pierrot

by Jim Bishop

translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger
Magnetic Press

2024
 

 

As near as I can tell, Jim Bishop's career as a comic artist is making dark variations on themes from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. My Dear Pierrot is absolutely a more adult, more erotic, more sinister take on Howl's Moving Castle, and the character of Pierrot is very recognizably a riff on the wizard Howl.
 
Clea is the daughter of a wealthy family. She loves to dance, but in her social class, that can only be a hobby, not a career, not something she can perform for others. She has an arranged engagement to Berthier, the son of the local baron. She'll become his wife, and then a mother. The city follows the Church, artists and dancers are suspected of being pagans, and the nearby forest is off-limits and supposedly full of witches.
 
Clea meets Pierrot, a magician who can do real magic, and flies away with him to his house inside a giant oak tree in the forest. Pierrot begins teaching Clea magic, and she quickly falls in love with him. Everything seems perfect and they sleep together ... and then he vanishes for three days.
 
When Pierrot gets back, the mood has changed somehow. Every time Clea tries to talk about her feelings, he scolds her for feeling them wrong. A lot of what he says is sound relationship advice, except that it's self-serving coming from him, and in context, he's only saying it to dismiss her valid complaints. He's gaslighting her.
 
Clea continues learning magic and practicing dance and starts to get to know some of the other witches in the forest. She realizes Pierrot's had a lot of girlfriends, and she might not even be his only one right now. One forgetful witch keeps calling her by someone else's name, and there's a mysterious ghost of a young woman haunting nearby the treehouse...
 
If any of this is starting to make you nervous, you have good instincts. Pierrot has a secret (very similar to Howl's), and a plan for Clea that relies on her falling into suicidal despair. But despite Pierrot's attempts to undermine her self-confidence, Clea has good instincts too, and while she's nowhere near as strong a magician as Pierrot, she's strong enough to get away.
 
While all this was happening, Berthier was humiliated that his fiancee left him for another man (a pagan, no less!) and went into the forest, ostensibly to rescue Clea, but mostly to restore his own honor. A witch plucks out one of Berthier's eyes to punish him for not being able to understand his own motives, and he spends the rest of his time in the woods feeling sorry for himself, until he runs into her as she's running away from Pierrot, and they get married after all. 
 
Clea gives up magic and dance to become a wife and mother, and it seems her fire has gone out. In the end though, she rekindles it, and abandons her family to go live as a witch in the forest.
 

Clea and Pierrot hide from the ghost in the forest.

  
 
I like Bishop's art. Pierrot is otherwordly and good-looking enough to make his role in the story believable. When we see magic, it really comes alive. It reminds me a bit of Ghibli, but it's definitely his own style, not a pastiche. It's very clear and colorful, and Bishop really has an eye for movement and composition. The layout of the panels matches the pacing of the scene. Characters sometimes extend beyond the boundaries of their panel when they're being especially active or expressive. Important moments are drawn oversized and practically leap off the page.
 
I liked Pierrot more than Bishop's Lost Letters, which I read over the summer. In general, I think this one is even darker, and both comics show a young woman's life falling apart to the point she becomes suicidal. But Clea is at the center of My Dear Pierrot, and it's clear Bishop knows that Pierrot is mistreating her. The fact of his intent, and not just the mistreatment itself, is central to the plot. 
 
In Lost Letters, Iode completely wrecks Sista's life, but he does it sort of by accident, and it's actually not clear when reading if Bishop himself assigns cause and effect to that chain of events. That book is also fully Iode's story; Sista's problems are a side plot. Even her death is portrayed solely in terms of how it affects him. I'm willing to see men mistreat women in fiction, but I also want to see evidence that the author appreciates the significance of what they're showing me. 

I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

 
 
I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

by Kodama Naoko

translated by Amber Tamasaitis
Seven Seas

2019 

 

 

I kind of love the trend of Japanese fiction with long, descriptive titles. I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up is a standalone manga about two young women who are friends who make a marriage of convenience, and I know you're not going to believe this because such a story has never been told before, but after awhile of living together as roommates, they slowly, awkwardly start to develop romantic feelings for each other. The closest thing to a twist here is that one of them is already an out lesbian and has some feelings from the start.
 
Machi has a job in a corporate office. She works hard, has no interest in dating, and imagines herself living alone in the future. Her biggest problem is that her parents keep pressuring her to get married and have kids. She's lied to them and said she has a boyfriend, but that hasn't helped, and she doesn't want a real one. She wishes she could have a sham marriage just to stop them talking about it!
 
As luck would have it, Machi tells all these thoughts to Hana, her friend since high school. Hana is a couple years younger and wants to be an artist, and she's about to be evicted because her apartment building wants to upgrade. Hana suggests they help each other out. Machi will convince her parents to leave her alone, and Hana will have a chance to save up money and work on her freelancing by moving in. And same-sex civil partnerships are legal in their prefecture...
 
In general, I think Hana gets the better end of this bargain. She really is able to build up her artistic career, and she is very fond of her 'senpai' who she used to have a crush on back in high school. What Machi gets is an excuse for a blowout fight that lets her completely cut off contact with her parents, and to feel secretly smug when her male coworkers talk about wanting to marry their girlfriends.
 
But neither of them seems to expect how it'll affect them emotionally. Machi's spent her whole life being pressured to achieve certain visible markers of success by her parents, and meanwhile her boss assumes she'll quit when she becomes a wife or mother, so why bother promoting her? Seeing Hana do something she likes and cares about inspires Machi to try to get ahead at the office by taking on more ambitious projecs. And while Hana likes living with her friend, the marriage of convenience rekindles some rather inconvenient older feelings. It's hard being close to someone you're romantically interested in who doesn't like you back, and every time Hana expresses that interest, Machi rebuffs her and seems disgusted, which, you know, hurts. Hana doesn't like that she feels like a creep whenever she flirts, and decides that it'll be healthier for herself to try moving on.
 
Machi is our viewpoint character, and we follow her more closely. We see her warm up to Hana, and come to rely on her as a housemate. It's Hana finally saving enough money to get an apartment on her own again that forces Machi to admit what she's started to feel, and even when she does, Hana is worried that it's going to be hard to have a relationship with someone who doesn't really want to kiss or touch her. But she agrees to give it a try.
 
This is a pretty short one, told in three chapters. I'm not sure if Machi is asexual - she doesn't think of herself that way, but she also doesn't seem to be attracted to men, and her feelings for Hana are more platonic than physical. I think if I want to see a similar style of relationship, I could try reading the series How Do We Relationship? 
 
I think the thing author Kodama Naoko does best here is to use little flashbacks to show us Machi thinking about earlier incidents and gaining new perspective on them. I haven't read many fake dating romances, but the decision to have Hana know she's a lesbian, to have her attraction be part of her identity and not solely a consequence of her situation is an important part of the plot, and I think it might be a bit different from the typical. 

A Storm of Wings

 
 
A Storm of Wings

by John Harrison

Bantam Spectra

1980, reprinted 2005
 
 
A Storm of Wings is the second of John Harrison's science fantasy books centered on the far-future city of Viriconium. The first book, The Pastel City, is set on earth in the Evening, a kind of quasi-medieval period that follows after the fall of the ultra high-tech civilizations of the Afternoon. That first book reads almost like a sequel, because Harrison introduces us to a King-Arthur-like figure who ruled Viriconium and united the surrounding lands, but then the whole book is set after his death. The dead king's daughter, the young queen, calls her father's old allies out of retirement for help as Viriconium is invaded by her half-sister, leading an army of human raiders and scifi monsters left over from the Afternoon.
 
A Storm of Wings is set another 80 years later. The young queen is now a woman in middle age (human lifespans are longer in this era, it seems). Her father's equivalent of the Knights of the Round Table are all dead, except for Tomb the dwarf and the ancient, possibly immortal wizard-figure Cellur. Society is Viriconium has become less medieval and more futuristic thanks to the Reborn Men, an army of soldiers from the Afternoon who were specially trained to fight the scifi monsters, who Tomb woke up out of suspended animation for help in the war. It's not initially clear how, but the other important detail from the first book is that Tomb mentioned several times that his mentor was the first person in the Evening to travel to the moon, and that journey is the source of this book's problems. Unbeknownst to anyone, he's returned to the earth, and he's brought something with him...
  
So, A Storm of Wings leans more into the scifi half of science fantasy. It's also probably more literary, because while the first book had dense, almost poetic passages of description, and featured slightly unconventional heroes in a strange setting, its plot still followed the structure of an adventure story. 
 
This second book is more ambitious, though in my opinion not quite as good. The main protagonist of Pastel City was a reluctant hero because he was old and retired, weary and mournful, and he wanted to be a poet. In Storm, Harrison goes fully anti-heroic. We get someone who repeatedly rejects the attempts to recruit him, who was an apprentice airship pilot in the war (which destroyed all the airships), who's spent the last 80 years angry and embittered and working as an assassin. Tomb and Cellur are little more than elderly advisors at this point. Cellur's tower has collapsed and his flock of mechanical birds is all but gone. We get a witness to the alien trouble, a Reborn woman who has only a tenuous grasp to reality, and one of the queen's advisors, another Reborn Man who is in the middle of losing his grasp as well. And to guide them, the ghostly psychic projection of Tomb's mentor, a babbling, farting, levitating sphere of ectoplasm, who sometimes warns of danger or leads the way, but is otherwise incapable of coherent thought.
 
What especially makes Storm different though, is that while nominally the monsters this group has set off to find and defeat are alien insects, originally from deep space, more recently from the moon, the actual problem they have to solve is a kind of epistemic crisis, a fundamental disagreement about the nature of reality itself. 
 
I mentioned that both the Reborn protagonists experience something like delusions; Harrison tells us this problem is ubiquitous among the Reborn Men. Some part of their minds still wants to live in the Afternoon. This is presented like a kind of degenerative schizophrenia. They suffer hallucinations and fugue states and lose the ability to care for themselves or to live among anyone but their own kind.
 
The citizens of Viriconium increasingly join the Sign of the Locust, a cult that preaches that the world is an illusion, it isn't real. By the start of the book they've become violent. By the end they are all partially turning into insects, growing new limbs and other bodyparts as though they're cancerous tumors.
 
When our protagonists, a mix of reluctant and incapable, finally learn the truth, the problem isn't just that alien insects have landed on the earth. It's almost metaphysical. Harrison claims the earth looks the way it does not just because of its physical matter, because of how we, collectively, because of how our minds interpret that arrangement of matter. But the insects have alien minds, different needs, a new psychology, and the world responds by becoming what they need it to be. 
 
The insects are like the angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion or the hronir from Tlon from Borges's story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". Their presence is an incursion of a competing idea that strives to overwrite the world as we know it, a dream trying to become real. The changing landscape, the toxic yellow mist, the mutating cultists, the city of Viriconium overlaid with another version of itself made of spiderwebs and wasps' nests, the insects themselves growing human limbs and organs in a process that mirrors the cultists - the apocalypse is here, and it is the physical manifestation of a disagreement about meaning. You can't fault Harrison for trying something daring.
 
That said, I think I prefer The Pastel City. Harrison leans so hard into making his characters unlikable that I didn't especially enjoy reading them, even as they opposed an end of the world scenario that's more like a nightmare or horror film than like a disaster movie. I liked his prose better before too. In Storm he repeatedly describes scenes as though we are watching them on a screen, including people walking onto, then across, the out of our unmoving field of vision. It felt like reading a description of a comic or movie, it's not an effect I enjoy in literature. If other critics are to be believed, both these two are just warm-ups, and it's the next couple books where Harrison will really impress me. It's an open question though, whether what is mostly widely praised about his writing will be something I enjoy more than a clear story, told well. 

Mute (2018)

 

  
Mute
directed by Duncan Jones

written by Michael Robert Johnson and Duncan Jones

Netflix

2018
 

 
Mute is a neon-drench noir investigation set in a cyberpunk near future. It starts well, but as a 'missing girl' story, suffers from the early loss of its most engaging character, and goes wildly off the rails by the end. It's disappointing, because you could easily imagine a better script resulting in a top-notch experience.

 

Leo is an Amish man living in Berlin. He can't speak because of a childhood injury and his mother's opposition to medical technology. He swims underwater, draws, and works as a bartender at a mob-owned speakeasy. He's clearly a man out of place, and seemingly out of time. His girlfriend Naadirah is a waitress at the same place, and has a secret she wants to tell Leo soon. Then mysteriously - after Leo gets fired for beating up a sexually-harrassing patron - she vanishes.

 

The first act, the one good act, sets all this up. The second act is Leo's search, which is mostly good, but involves an implausible, manual reverse phone number search through paper phone books Leo checks out from the Berlin public library in order to find Naadirah's mother and the final clue. (The scene of a stolen luxury ground car tailing a flying-car taxi was pretty good.) The third act is garbage as all the clues are resolved and Leo seeks two-fisted justice in a city where apparently no one has a gun, so no one can do the easy thing and just shoot him already.

 

Also wandering around Berlin are Paul Rudd in a giant mustache and Justin Theroux playing an even creepier doctor than he did in Maniac. Rudd is AWOL from the US Army, and the pair work for the mobster who owns the bar while Rudd waits for forged papers that will let him get himself and his daughter out of the country before the MPs catch him. One of the dawning realizations of the film is that despite his demeanor, Rudd is not playing one of his usual nice-guy characters, but it's interesting how long he can keep you on his side before you start to hate him. This plotline initially seems almost entirely disconnected from Leo and his search, but they merge disastrously in the final act.

 

I will applaud Mute for being willing to show us what the bleakest possible ending might look like before allowing Leo to very slightly save the day. I don't mind that we don't get a fully nihilistic ending, but I do mind the implausible and heavy-handed machinations needed to bring us to this point.

 

Rudd and Theroux salvage what ought to be embarrassingly bad dialogue with the strength of their commitment to their roles, and as Leo, Alexander Skarsgard is incredibly expressive despite never making a sound. The quality of the acting saves the film from total ruin, but I still wouldn't recommend it unless you're a noir completist.

 

  

Originally watched in January 2023.

Sabine's Notebook

 
 
Sabine's Notebook

In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Continues
by Nick Bantock

Chronicle Books

1992

 

 

Sabine's Notebook is the second book in Nick Bantock's trilogy of novels about a pair of artists who are separated across the globe, but share a kind of psychic connection, and communicate in letters and postcards. Bantock's work blends the epistolary novel with the art book, as each postcard and envelope are illustrated, each letter has an actual envelope it can be removed from, and everything is written in the specific handwriting of the artists, Griffin and Sabine.
 
In the first book, Sabine reached out to Griffin because she'd finally learned who he was and how to reach him, after a lifetime of being able to (sometimes?) see through his eyes. Griffin is an illustrator living in London; Sabine lives on a small island in the South Pacific and designs the island's stamps. For Sabine, the chance to talk to Griffin is the fulfillment of a dream. Griffin is intrigued by Sabine but also fears her, and fears that he's imagining her or going insane. The first book ended with Sabine announcing she was coming to visit Griffin, but then arriving to find his apartment empty.
 
Now in Sabine's Notebook, we learn that Griffin has essentially fled in terror, afraid to actually meet the dream girl who, he's afraid, might really be just a dream. Sabine seems awfully understanding as he writes to her (at his own home address) from Italy, Greece, Japan, Australia. She's enjoying the city and its museums, though she'll eventually have to go back home. 
 
Griffin is clearly going through some sort of spiritual or psychological crisis, though I found myself thinking that world travel wouldn't really solve anything, and that he ought to see a therapist, and especially that he ought to face his fears and just go meet Sabine already. I can understand building something up in your mind so that you fear disappointment if you actually do it, but he's not even really choosing the idea of Sabine over actually meeting her. He must understand that if he keeps avoiding her, he could lose her as a pen pal too.
  
The pair repeatedly affirm that they are in love with one another, and Sabine in particular has the patience of a saint. When Griffin finally returns home, near Sabine's deadline for leaving, he finds her already gone ... but then the last postcard in the book is from her, from his address, asking why he never made it back like he said he would!
 
I'm curious to see how this situation will be resolved. I wonder if we'll learn that the pair are somehow separated in time as well as space. I don't really know, but that's my guess. Poor Sabine! Regardless of whatever supernatural is going on, she's in love with a man who prefers to keep her at a distance and to communicate in the slowest, most attenuated way possible. Bantock's artwork is again evocative - suggestive and dream-like - which fits the mood of the book and the personality of the two artists well. 

Paper Girls 2

 
 
Paper Girls 2

by Brian Vaughan

art by Cliff Chiang

Image Comics

2016 

 

 

In the first volume of Paper Girls, four girls on their paper routes the morning after Halloween joined together, initially for self-defense against older teen boys out looking for trouble, and then to try to figure out and stay away from a whole host of weird things happening in their neighborhood.
 
For reasons unknown, the 'Old Timers' came to that morning in the late 1980s and imposed an electronic and communications blackout, kidnapping almost everyone except our four young heroines. Some far future teen boys with a stolen time machine arrived at the same time to steal useful tech. It's not clear if the Old Timers are there to catch the teens, or if the teens are there to take advantage of the blackout.
 
But when Chinese American new girl Erin got injured, it was one of the mystery teens who got her medical care. Shortly afterward, their time machine exploded! Erin, Mac, and Tiffany were sent to 2016 where they ran into Erin's adult self. KJ went somewhere else.
 
Now in volume 2, adult Erin brings her younger self and two friends home. We learn she has the scar from the injury, but no memory of how she got it. It seems the Old Timers eventually put everything back and erase everyone's memories after doing ... whatever it is they're up to. Separately, another future teen who speaks an alien language arrives in 2016. This one is also Erin? It turns out she's a clone, grown from Erin's blood after she got medical care, and she's the niece of the teen boys from the first volume.
 
Young Erin and Old Erin go to the abandoned shopping mall to look for KJ. They find her field hockey stick with a message carved in it - a warning not to trust 'the other Erin', and directions for where to go next. But which one is 'other'? Mac and Tiffany go looking for their own older selves, and Mac learns she died of leukemia in the early 90s. Meanwhile, Clone Erin is also on her way to the mall, and manages to run into Mac and Tiffany on the way. 

Clone Erin's trip somehow brought a pair of hundred foot tall tardigrades with her, and they immediately start wrecking downtown Cleveland, which attracts the attention of the Old Timers again. They arrive in a combination zeppelin-cathedral and unleash another squadron of knights riding pteradons. 
 
From Clone Erin and the leader of the Old Timers, we learn that there is only one timeline, no branching or parallel worlds, and there are at least two factions with access to time travel, although their goals, and what rules they might follow, remain unknown. Both factions seem to want the paper girls, although we don't understand why yet. The leader of the Old Timers mentions that his mother was born in 2016, and worries that he and his airship are 'breaking curfew' in order to address the tardigrades, so there might be another faction we haven't met yet that will show up soon.
 
Eventually Clone Erin tries to kidnap the girls to her far future home, but they manage to send her back alone. With Old Erin's help, they dodge the Old Timers, and follow the directions from the hockey stick, arriving at a different future where their friend KJ is waiting for them.
 
Some time travel ideas are easier to understand than others. You have to be pretty far in the weeds, for example, to understand how the most shocking scene in the film Looper is supposed to work. The idea of a single timeline, and a group somehow outside it who repeatedly writes over parts of it to preserve their preferred version of human history benefits a bit from familiarity. Isaac Asimov introduced this version of time travel, along with a bureacratic agency that monitors changes in The End of Eternity. John Crowley and Charles Stross have both told their own versions, in Great Work of Time and Palimpsest, and anyone who's watched the Loki tv show has seen Marvel's version of time travel law enforcement. Visually, the Old Timers in Paper Girls look nothing like the 'man in a gray suit' bureaucrats that usually show up in these stories, but I think the idea about time travel is the same.
 
Volume 1 introduced the girls and the mysteries and set things in motion. Now in volume 2, we learn a lot more about Erin, and a fair bit about what's going on, and the action definitely ramps up. I'm excited to see what's next!

The Nude

 

The Nude

by Michelle Lindley

Atria Books

2024 

 

  

The Nude is a literary novel about an American curator going to Greece to acquire a newly discovered statue of a nude woman for her museum. I perhaps should've given more thought to what it meant that I saw it on a list of the best book covers for the month it was released, but not on any of the lists of the best reviewed books for that month.

 

Most of The Nude is intended to be slow-burning tension and mounting internal turmoil as Dr Elizabeth Clark becomes more and more anxious from the heat, the jet lag, her migraine headaches, her pill addictions, her increasingly erotic fascination with her translator Niko and his artist wife Theo, haunting childhood memories of her dead sister; with the Greek museum's slow-walking the acquisition, protests against the expatriation of ancient art, vandals attempting to sabotage the statue to send a message; her failing marriage back home, pressure and doubt about her abilities from her museum director back home, competition from her rival over who will take over as director after this buy... It all accumulates and Elizabeth's behavior becomes more erratic until the vandals succeed in damaging the statue and Elizabeth reaches a breaking point of her own.

 

There are two problems though, and I think they're kind of related. There's not enough tension, and not enough payoff. Although things keep happening, and it seems clear that eventually Elizabeth will become overwhelmed and act out in some way, author Michelle Lindley blends the anxious with the ordinary in a way that probably makes the book more realistic, but also seems to rob it of some of its potential power. Elizabeth belongs in a thriller, the plot structure wants to be a thriller, but it's not, you know, thrilling enough.

 

In Elizabeth, Lindley has created a protagonist who belongs in transgressive fiction. She's someone who feels fundamentally unable to fit into society, who constantly strives to appear perfect and succeed at work, but who's so tortured by her own psyche that she seems always on the brink of disaster. Elizabeth is ultra-controlled, always anxious, always unhappy. She hates her body, starves herself and recoils from casual touch, but also loves her painkillers and tranquilizers, loves to binge eat as a treat, and sleeps with men in a mercenary way to advance her career. Her migraines are debilitating and make her see hallucinatory auras; she's gone hysterically blind twice in her life and fears it'll happen again, maybe even on this trip, especially since she's taking her pills too quickly and they might not last.

 

There's all the ingredients for steadily ratcheting tension, perhaps with minor outbursts building toward a major eruption. But Lindley continually undercuts the anxiety with normality. There are too many possible sources of stress, but none of them get enough attention. Nothing can really build up, because it all keeps alternating. Every unsettling thought or moment is counteracted with something prosaic. Even the suspicion that Elizabeth slept with a major donor to the Greek museum, or perhaps was assaulted by him, while she was awake and ambulatory, but not conscious or forming memories, just goes nowhere and ultimately comes to nothing, dropped and forgotten.

  

None of the stress keeps Elizabeth from keeping up appearances and going through the motions; and all the other characters seem perpetually relaxed, unbothered, unhurried. It should create more frisson! Elizabeth is not fun or normal! But she's desperate to be liked, desperate for others to think she's fun and chill, and determined that no one should suspect her of being uncool enough to care what they think of her. 

 

She acts out some, but not in ways that are truly satisfying or cathartic. The migraine imagery is too brief before the pills kick in; we never get a full phantasmagoria. She's obsessed with sexy free-spirited Theo, her first time being attracted to a woman, possibly her first time actually desiring a person and not just the social advantage she can gain from them, and Theo is interested back, so when Elizabeth eventually stops trying to please everyone else and gives in to her own desires and urges, you might expect the two women to do more than kiss a couple times. But no.

 

It's incredibly anticlimactic. And I think kind of emblematic of the way that Lindley's efforts to make her book literary and realistic prevent it from delivering the pleasure that we'd get from watching real chaos. At one point near the end, Elizabeth tells us she feels feral, feels unhinged. That is what I'd spent the whole book up to that point waiting for! But even though she says it, she doesn't really do it. Instead of fireworks, everything mostly fizzles.