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.