On Books
by Kelly Jennings
S.J. Klapecki, Station Six
Nancy McCabe, Vaulting Through Time
Walter Mosley, Touched
Alix E. Harrow, Starling House
Naomi Kritzer, Liberty’s Daughter
Soul Jar, Ed. Annie Carl
Rosalind’s Sibling, Ed. Bogi Takács
Out There Screaming, Ed. Jordan Peele
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith,
A City on Mars
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S.J. Klapecki’s short novel, Station Six (AK Press, 2023), is part of a series, Black Dawn, put out by AK Press. The stated goal of this series is to follow in the traditions of Octavia Butler, and I am onboard already. Specifically, the series seeks to “center queerness, Blackness, antifascism” and to explore themes that “do not reinforce dependency on oppressive forces.” Told from the point of view of Max, a nonbinary trans person, the novel details a few days in a labor uprising on a space station, the titular Station Six. Max is recruited by the union’s Protective Forces division (the PF division) because they (Max uses they/them pronouns) are a “black hat”—a hacker who can infiltrate security systems.
The company, LMC, which owns Station Six is planning to automate all its labor, leaving the labor force jobless, with two bad options: be shipped back to Earth, where they will still be jobless; or take (much worse) jobs further out in the solar system, on Titan and elsewhere. Jobs with LMC tend to pay a minimum wage, far less than anyone can survive on. LMC happily allows its workers to take on more and more debt for their daily needs—like medical care and food. This debt then traps its labor force into working for LMC. It’s the old Company Store dodge, updated for space.
As all that makes clear, this is very much a novel about labor politics. It is also about Max’s growth from an anxious dock worker, heavily invested in keeping their head down and not drawing attention, to someone who is willing to risk their future and their life to help the union stand up to LMC. The novel looks not so much at the strike itself, as at the strike from the point of view of the PF division, which engages in extralegal actions to fight the company. For example, the workers need public attention if their strike is to succeed. So when LMC shuts down the internet to keep the workers from broadcasting events on the station, PF takes Max up through the station to the servers, where they can infiltrate the system and get the internet back online. The novel also details the progress of a strike on a space station, or at least the parts of it witnessed by Max. That progress is by no means smooth.
Station Six is an engaging novel, dealing with an area not usually considered in science fiction, and I very much look forward to reading more by S.J. Klapecki and from AK Press.
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Early in Starling House (Tor, 2023), which is set in Muhlenberg County, Alix Harrow alludes to the John Prine song “Paradise.” In that song, a father explains to his son that they cannot return home to Muhlenberg County, as the coal company has destroyed their town. Opal, this novel’s protagonist, lives in a town, Eden, that is similarly ravished by coal barons.
Similar to Max in Station Six, Opal has a job that doesn’t pay enough to survive on; and she is trying not only to survive, but also to support and educate her younger brother. Opal and her brother are members of America’s precarity, unable to afford decent food, sufficient clothing, transportation, or health care. This novel seems at first to be about the monsters living in Starling House that intermittently emerge to devour the people of Eden, but it is in fact about the monsters of capitalism, the coal barons, who now live elsewhere and return, intermittently, to suck yet more wealth from the county they have destroyed.
That’s the thematic matter of the novel; the beauty of the novel (and it is a beautiful novel) lies in Harrow’s use of language, structure, and character. The language is clean and spare, with every now and then a line that makes the reader pause in admiration. For example, Opal remembers how when she was a child, the coal company owner, Don Gravely, would show up at their school once a year to give a speech about hard work and American values. Afterward, he would shake the hand of every child in the school. His palm, Opal remembers, felt like “fresh-peeled boiled egg.”
She also remembers him flinching at the sight of her, which she puts down to his horror at her appalling poverty. The reader accepts this explanation, since by then Opal has made it clear just how impoverished she and her brother are—they live in a hotel room, rent-free due to some arrangement (Opal believes) between her dead mother and the hotel’s owner; they dine on generic pop-tarts, stolen hot chocolate, and ramen; and a visit to a clinic for a tetanus shot is as far beyond them as a flight to the moon. But, as the structure of the novel unfolds, we soon understand it is not her poverty Don Gravely flinched at. As we progress through the story, learning the truth as Opal learns it, via stories told by the hotel owner, the town librarian, a woman long dead, and several others, we begin to understand what Don Gravely and the coal company truly fear.
The truth of Opal’s history and of Eden’s history is deeply buried. The business of the plot is Opal digging for that history, as her ancestors dug for coal. Relentless and stubborn, Opal, she says, has one goal—to get her brother Jasper out of Eden. Nothing else matters but that, Opal claims. As the novel progresses, however, we learn the truth is otherwise: many things matter to Opal, and she is willing to work, bleed, and fight for all of them.
Opal is the main character, and so our favorite; but all of Harrow’s characters, even those who are now ghosts, are intriguing; all get their moment in the spotlight. The revelation dropped near the end of the book by the hotel owner, Bev, is both shocking and perfect; the emergence of the House itself as a character is similarly satisfying. And when Jasper, whom Opal thinks of as helpless, takes the reins, we, along with Opal, burn with grief and pride. The exceptions to this splendid development are the coal company owners and employees, who never get their moment of revelation. Instead, these villains of the story serve as mere caricatures, with no explanation given for their determination to do harm. Though I understand the temptation, if the novel had let them speak as well, it might have strengthened Harrow’s narrative.
Still, this is a beautifully written and thematically rich novel, about a part of America that, despite John Prine, Steve Earle, and the TV series Justified, is not yet well known. It is also a very literary novel—allusions run through it like the river Opal keeps returning to, a river fouled not just by the coal companies, but also by the people of Eden. The allusions include that river itself, which echoes the river in the Prine song; the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast”; and Wuthering Heights, which Jasper is reading for his English class. When Opal adds Arthur Starling, the current resident/defender of Starling House, to her phone contact list, she enters him as Heathcliff. Further, the central focus of Brontë’s novel (who belongs; who is an intruder; who is family and who is not; and whether family can be escaped) is also at the center of Harrow’s novel. The structure, with its footnotes and the interspersed oral histories, is both literary and effective. Highly recommended.
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In Vaulting Through Time (CamCat Books, 2023), Nancy McCabe combines the world of Olympic-level gymnasts with time travel. The central character in the novel, Elizabeth Arlington, is sixteen years old, and has been working toward the Olympics since she was tiny. As the novel opens, Elizabeth is beginning to have doubts—about gymnastics, about the gymnastics community, and about her family. Worse, she has fought with the person whom she would normally talk to about all this, Zach, the boy next door who has been her best friend since they were toddlers. When she learns that her mother has been lying to her about her (Elizabeth’s) birth, Elizabeth goes into a tailspin.
Zach pulls her out of it by offering her a watch that allows her to travel through time. She can go back to the night she was born, he explains, and see what really happened. He found this watch in the deserted “yellow house,” which is on the other side of Elizabeth’s house, where he and Elizabeth used to play as children. The watch, as we learn, is one of three built by a gifted physicist in the 1970s, who, because her daughter was interested in gymnastics, set the watches to visit Olympic years and often the sites of Olympic events.
Though the watches let people travel through time, the one Elizabeth has is damaged, and doesn’t always take her where she wants to go, or at least not where she thinks she wants to go. Through the novel, she moves up and down the timeline from 1924 to 2018, sometimes going to Olympic events, and sometimes to the yellow house, which turns out to be owned by and inhabited by her maternal ancestors. Elizabeth, who all her life has thought her only family was her mother, meets and comes to know this vast kinship network.
Partly this book is about that: family, women in the family especially, and what women will do for their families, as well as the expectations and limits put on those women. It is also, however, an inside look at the world of gymnasts—training regimes, the demands put on young girls, the expense and risks involved, as well as what happens to gymnasts who don’t make it to the Olympics: the expectations and limits put on young female gymnasts, in other words. This is an engaging if complicated novel—I was glad when Elizabeth, at one point, drew us a family tree. If you like time travel novels, you’ll like this one.
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Walter Mosley is probably best known as a writer of mystery novels, including the Easy Rawlins series, but he has also written SF. His 2023 novel, Touched (Atlantic Monthly Press), probably falls into the science fiction category.
I say probably because some aspects of this slim novel almost seem like philosophy. (Fittingly, the main character, Martin Just, has a PhD in Philosophy, though he works selling software.) The setup is science fictional, however: Martin wakes up one morning infected, or maybe transformed, by an interstellar being he names Temple. Temple is just one of 107 beings sent by a galactic council to deal with the virus that is transforming Earth. That virus, as it develops, is humanity; in a few millennia, Temple explains, humanity will have the ability to destroy the universe. The 107 have been sent to stop the virus now.
Before Temple can do anything toward this end, though, he is arrested by the LAPD—Martin Just is a black man, and Temple realizes his race must have something to do with the way Martin/Temple is being treated, but he can’t quite grasp what. As the novel progresses, Temple and Martin have control of the body at different times, during different events (Martin wonders at one point if he’s schizophrenic). Temple infects Martin’s wife, his grown children, and three white nationalists who come to kill them all. Using this team, all with their own strengths, Martin/Temple must devise a plan for dealing with the others of the 107, who are working to destroy humanity.
The notion of humans being taken over by interstellar beings determined to conquer humanity is not new—Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters is an obvious example, and there are dozens of others. Usually these novels function as social commentary, as Heinlein’s novel spoke to his fear of communists brainwashing the population. Mosley’s take differs in that the interstellar beings, rather than being mere symbols of evil that must be destroyed, turn out to be individuals, capable of learning and capable of partnering with their hosts. In this novel, Martin/Temple use their combined knowledge to reach decisions, or take action. Since Martin Just is a philosopher at heart, he and Temple use Martin’s extensive readings in philosophy as one tool; and since Temple has supernatural strength and reaction speed, they use that strength as another tool. The idea of the Other as a potential ally is a refreshing one.
This is an extremely spare novel, just over 150 pages long. I would have liked a little more development. There’s a lovely and very funny scene where Martin/Temple consider their next action while Just’s wife, Tessa, serves hot chocolate to the (former) white nationalists whom Just/Temple have recruited. The novel could have used more of that, to leaven the weight of the philosophy and the grim treatment that Martin/Temple experience from the police and the district attorney; but the novel seems set up for a sequel, and perhaps we’ll get more leavening in the next book.
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For years, I hunted used bookshops and the internet for Naomi Kritzer’s Seastead stories—tales about a teenager, Rebecca “Beck” Garrison, growing up in a dystopian anarchy built on platforms and cargo ships anchored at sea. These stories, published between 2012 and 2015 and only occasionally reprinted, were hard to find. So, I’d been hoping these stories would be issued as a collection for a long time. Liberty’s Daughter (Fairwood Press, 2023) is not quite that. Instead, it is a novel built out of the events in (some) of these stories, with an over-arching plot and added material.
In the earliest story, “Liberty’s Daughter” (2012), we met Beck Garrison, who is working as a finder for a small store on a Seastead platform. Seastead has been deliberately located in international waters, a couple of hundred miles off the shore of California, in order to be outside the purview of any country’s laws. But this distance can make it difficult or expensive to locate a specific item someone wants or needs—as, in this case, a size 8 pair of sparkly sandals. Beck has a knack for finding things, but as the narrative progresses, we soon learn that her true gift lies in making things happen. Having grown up on Seastead (brought there at age four by her father), she knows everything about it, and very nearly everyone on the platforms; further, she knows how to convince, persuade, or blackmail people into doing what she needs done.
That’s the setup as the novel opens. As it progresses, we grow more and more uneasy about Beck’s father, and about unelected powers that control the Seastead. In an interesting plot move early in the book, Kritzer has a reality TV show come to the platforms and hire—or actually, buy—twenty or thirty bonded workers to build a new platform (and thus a new society, since every platform and ship has its own customs and laws, or, in one case, an utter lack of laws). This allows Kritzer to have Beck explain things about Seastead to the show’s producer, and incidentally to us, the readers. Similarly, Beck acquires a friend/boyfriend early on—Thor—whose family had just bought a stake on a platform, so Beck can explain the occult details of Seastead society to him as well. It’s a nice tactic.
The overarching plot has to do with the bonded workers—which is to say, slaves—on Seastead, often doing work that is not legal in places with actual governments. The secondary plot has to do with Beck’s own history. Her father has told her that her mother was killed in a car accident, driving while drunk; but early in the book, Beck learns that her father has taken her to Seastead, out of the reach of US custody laws, in order to keep her from her mother, who is still alive and has legal custody of her. Beck does not want to leave Seastead, the only home she has ever known, and though she is afraid of her father, he is also the only parent she has ever known. This leaves her in a dilemma, not helped when her mother arrives on Seastead and, like her father, treats her as a child, someone without agency or the ability to handle herself in her world.
The best part of this novel is the Seastead-world Kritzer creates for us, the semi-anarchy, semi-crimelord ruled society; and Kritzer’s focus, which is not on the crimelords (who often turn out to be pure capitalists), but on the bond-workers, private security officers, free workers, and children of that society. The happy ending for the bond-workers was, I have to admit, satisfying, if somewhat improbable; as was the happy ending for Beck. I’ve been waiting for this novel for over a decade, and it was well worth the wait.
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This anthology, Soul Jar (Forest Avenue Press, 2023), edited by Annie Carl and with a foreward by Nicola Griffith, features stories by and about people with disabilities. Too often, stories with disabled characters end up being about the disability, rather than the character; or, worse, stories about how the disability needs to be cured. See Pollyanna, for instance, a 1913 novel about a child who is disabled in an accident but remains cheery and as a reward for this cheerfulness is cured of her disability. You will not find such stories in this collection, and you will not find people whose disability makes them passive victims, grateful to be saved.
Instead, in Soul Jar, we have stories about characters who happen to have disabilities. The disability may function in the story line; but the story is about the character. For example, one early story, “There Are No Hearing Aid Batteries after the Apocalypse,” by Carol Scheina, concerns people banding together to survive after civilization collapses following a series of ecological disasters. Kesslyn, the main character, loses the batteries for her hearing aids early on. Her loss of batteries, and her initial inability to function without those batteries, becomes a metaphor that runs through the story: “All around her, she saw people waiting to hear someone say, ‘It’s okay, we’re here to help.’ They heard only silence.” Eventually, people begin to help one another. Kesslyn, who has been communicating via one of the last notebooks in existence, begins to give scraps from the notebook to other people, so that they can try to send messages (via a community network, notes passed hand to hand) to their missing friends and family. Other people build shelters, organize scavenging groups, haul water. It’s a story about how people band together in disaster, and how a community works for the benefit and survival of everyone.
Similarly, in Nicola Griffith’s contribution to the anthology, “Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese,” the main character, Molly, has MS (as Griffith herself does). When a plague hits the world, afflicting everyone with something like chronic fatigue syndrome, almost 95 percent of the population dies over a period of weeks. Molly is one of the few surviving immunologists with the skills to work on the problem, but since her beloved partner, Helen, was one of the first to die from the syndrome, Molly has little interest in research. The human race is doomed; why should she get involved? She lives in isolation, miles from one of the remaining human enclaves in Atlanta. That community persists in keeping Molly alive, in the hope that she can be persuaded to come work on finding a treatment; Molly believes she would rather die out here, by her pond, alone. Her MS and the CFS of all the other characters inform the plot, but this is not a story about finding a cure; rather, it is a story about human perseverance, even in the face of what looks like inescapable doom.
There are also a few stories about dealing with ableism—for example, Evergreen Lee contributes a story, “The Definition of Professional Attire,” about aliens trying to work in human-run corporations and agencies, which is a clear metaphor for disabled persons working in an ableist world. And mental disabilities are also included, as in Kit Harding’s “Cranberry Nightmare,” where an autistic young adult fights to convince her town that the monsters she perceives are real; and Ellis Bray’s “Suffer the Silence,” in which a character without health insurance whose psych meds have become unaffordable struggles to deal with a ghost that has lost her baby. (The horrors of the American health care system factor in several of these stories.) This is a solid collection, with some outstanding work. If you think you aren’t interested in DEI issues, this collection may change your mind.
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I don’t like horror for the most part, but I do like Jordan Peele, so I was exited for the anthology he edited, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror (Random House, 2023). John Joseph Adams being the co-editor also piqued my interest, as did the table of contents—there are stories by N.K. Jemisin, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Maurice Broaddus, among others. The stories are all pretty much horror stories, but many of them have science fictional elements. For example, in Justin C. Key’s “The Aesthete,” the main characters are bespoke clones, created for the wealthy, while the horror involves why the clones are created and what happens to them once their Creators (which is to say owners) tire of them, or die. And in “Invasion of the Baby Snatchers,” by Lesley Nneka Arimah, we have aliens who are taking over human wombs (still in the humans) and human minds to create alien/hybrids. One of my favorite stories, “Your Happy Place,” by Terence Taylor, places a Matrix-like simulation in prisons, with prison labor being kept passive by the simulation.
Other stories, though pure horror, feature the social commentary Peele’s work is famous for. In N.K. Jemisin’s “Reckless Eyeballing,” for example, we have a look at a police officer, Carl, who is infamous in his department for his violent treatment of those pulled over on traffic stops. Carl begins seeing what he thinks is a new fad in headlights—they look like eyes. The reader realizes sooner than Carl does that something more horrifying than this is in play. And another of my favorite stories, “Origin Story,” by Tochi Onyebuchi, mixes Lord of the Flies with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for an incisive and occasionally hilarious look at the recipients of social privilege. I also liked the weird and wonderful “The Most Strongest Obeah Woman of the World,” by Nalo Hopkinson, even though it is also straight horror. These are the strongest stories, I think, but to be honest, all of the stories in this collection are good ones. Even if, like me, you don’t really like horror fiction, this anthology is worth a look.
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The anthology Rosalind’s Sibling (Atthis Arts, 2023), edited by Bogi Takács, takes its title from Rosalind Franklin, who worked to develop a model of the structure of DNA in the 1950s, but whose contribution to the understanding of the structure was for years essentially ignored. This anthology features stories and poems about scientists similarly “marginalized due to their gender or sex.” The authors—and some of their lead characters—also tend to be from various marginalized groups—trans authors, authors of color, neurodivergent, and LGBQT+ authors.
The anthology contains several excellent works. Those of special note include the initial story/poem, “Collecting Ynés,” by Lisa M. Bradley, a beautiful and “slightly mythologized” work about the life of Ynés Mexica, and “LDR,” by Cameron Van Sant, about a trans astronaut in a long-distance relationship with another trans man, who is catfished in an unexpected way. I also very much enjoyed “Blood and Iron,” by Jennifer Lee Rossman, in which an autistic forensic pathologist deals with a sudden spate of (dead) mythological creatures. In “To Keep the Way,” Phoebe Barton’s scientist, Director Agatha Valentine, must deal with an incursion by a group intent on colonizing the planet under her care—a planet that has the only surviving non-terrestrial life and ecosystem still in existence. Premee Mohamed, in “If Strange Things Happen,” looks at a scientist dealing with a future war, one who has to decide what is truly important in war-time; and in Polenth Blake’s “Rewilding Nova,” a scientist is marginalized not so much because of their disability or gender as because the work they are doing reaches conclusions contrary to that of mainstream science on their colonized planet. (This one also features good explanations of how science works.)
What’s most interesting in these stories is not the “otherness” of the scientists—though in some cases, the very thing that marginalizes the scientists also makes them valuable or so skilled at their jobs, as in Rossman’s story, where the autistic scientist’s ability to think differently allows her to solve the mystery; or as in “Morning Star Blues” by Tessa Fisher, in which the two astronauts are chosen because the International Space Consortium believes that asexual trans women astronauts will cause less trouble on a long mission. Even these stories, however, don’t focus on the features that marginalize the scientists, but rather on how prejudices against the marginalized group lead to conflict or misunderstandings. And in most of the stories, the aspect of the scientist that has caused them to be marginalized is presented simply as one feature of the character—one that may cause the scientist to be othered, but which is not the most important thing about the character, or even in the story.
I enjoyed this anthology a lot, not in the least because it introduced me to several new writers. Recommended!
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This time I also read a nonfiction science book, ancillary to science fiction: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (Penguin Press, 2023). You may be familiar with Zach Weinersmith through his webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal; Kelly Weinersmith is a scientist, currently working at Rice University. In this book, illustrated by Zach, the Weinersmiths detail the problems involved with any sort of space settlement anywhere—trying to put a city on Mars, yes, but also the problems with having a town on the Moon, or out among the asteroids, or on a space station, or trying to send a generation ship to the nearest exoplanets. They also examine the possible benefits of each of these, noting that as science nerds themselves they very much want space settlements to exist.
Among other problems, they examine both pregnancy and raising children in space, areas in which almost no research has been done (some experiments with mice, so far, and a proposed experiment with monkeys). As the authors argue, without the ability to successfully conceive and raise children, no real settlement is possible. As a side issue, they discuss one current school of thought in this area, which is to “let evolution sort it out.” That’s the method Robert Heinlein also proposed in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where “monster” babies were killed as a matter of course. Almost certainly that’s not a method most parents would find acceptable, though the Weinersmiths note that ethics in space settlements might be different from ours here on Earth. There’s also a section on labor politics in these proposed settlements, which I particularly enjoyed.
In another chapter, the Weinersmiths look at the Biosphere experiments that have been done here on Earth, in which small groups of people are sealed into a contained environment for a period of time—two years, with the Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona—and detail the problems that developed. The Weinersmiths argue that more of these experiments need to be run, since any extraterrestrial settlement will, perforce, at least begin in a biosphere.
Another good point made in the book is that no matter how terrible things become here on Earth, due to global climate change or some other natural disaster, creating livable environments/settlements here on Earth will be not only more possible, but much less expensive than trying to create similar settlements on Mars, or a space station, or even the moon.
This is a popular science book, but it is clear Kelly and Zach Weinersmith have done their research (there is an impressive bibliography at the end of the book). I learned a lot from the book, and it should be required reading for every space nerd, as well as every aspiring science fiction writer.
Copyright © 2024 Kelly Jennings