flying_monkey's reviews
499 reviews

Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos, Robin Myers

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adventurous challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Be warned, the thematically-linked stories in this fresh, experimental collection by this young Chilean author, Mónica Ramón Ríos, are frequently difficult. Sometimes what's going on is completely unclear, sometimes the protagonist is vague and only half there, almost all the time, everrything is haunted by absent parents, unfulfilled desires, and the everpresence of systems of oppression and violence, whether it's dictatorship or capitalism, universties or psychiatry. People are shiftless, bitter, stupid. They try to resist, or to turn the bad into something beautiful, but nothing happens, they don't go anywhere, cars catch fire. Some people seem to hate this book. And sure, not all the stories work as well as the best ones like The Student and the eponymous Cars on Fire. But in this case, the polarized reactions only go to show Riós has done something right. 

A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker

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challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

This Nebula Award-winning novel from 2019 is set in a world that, in the time of COVID, seems much closer to home than when Sarah Pinsker wrote it. A combination of terrorism and a new plague has devastated the world, leading not only to countless deaths but to government measures that prohibit public and private gatherings and shutting down social life IRL almost entirely. Instead everything has migrated into a VR version of the Internet: people interface with the net through technologically-enhanced hooded tops, which has led to it being refered to as 'hoodspace.'

There are two main protagonists, whose intersecting stories are told in parallel chapters. The first is a rebellious rock singer-songwriter, Luce Cannon (geddit? but don't worry, it's her stage name...). Before the plague she as just getting there, one of her songs had become a hit, and she is actually on stage when everything is shut down. Rosemary Laws was a kid when all this happened. She has grown up in the new normal, so protected by her paranoid back-to-the-land parents that her entire educational and social life has been in hoodspace. She ends up working in customer service for the ubiqutous Amazon-alike everything store, Superwally (Super Wallmart? Perhaps...) until she unexpectedly gets offered another job worked for StageHoloLive, the company that has effectively replace both live and recorded music with VR-based music experiences. What's unexpected is that she isn't hired in the same kind of role she had for Superwally but as a talent scout. But how do you scout for musical talent in a world with no public gigs or concert.

Rosemary and Luce's lives collide as the naive (and possibly even autistic) new scout discovers the networks of illegal live music venues all over the USA, populated by outsiders and passionate fans, who come to listen to the likes of Luce and her musical rebels, most of whom don't trust Rosemary and want nothing to do with SHL's fakery. But together, can they perhaps do something that will bring the whole thing crashing down and help a new day to dawn? Of course, nothing is ever so simple or so easy.

This is a novel that creeps up on you. Halfway through I was still convinced that it was a mediocre and rather dull lesbian novel, and that I wasn't going to like it. However before I knew it I was riveted. Partly this was because of the musical element. It's really hard to do music in fiction, and music in science fiction is usually terrible and suffers from the need to show how 'futuristic' future art will be, thereby condemning it to be dated before it starts. Instead, Pinsker, who has released 4 albums and toured herself, keeps it close to the present: the bands and artists are a mixture of old-fashioned rock, arty stuff and more experiemental electronica. And she also hints at the fact that this is only one 'scene' - there are jazz and other things mentioned. But you feel the performances and the urgency and exhilihiration of being a live performer. The dirt, the blood, the vomit, the sweat, the terrible venues, the broken-down vans - it's all there. And this is music you really might believe could carry the hopes of a nation...

Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker

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adventurous emotional reflective sad slow-paced
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

This is a superior collection of literary science fiction stories by a Nebula-award winning writer. They focus on relationships, and the suble and personal effects of technological and social change. The quality of the writing is breathtaking at its best, and some of the stories pack of powerful emotional punch while retaining subtlety. There are one or two that aren't quite so strong, but that's to be expected. I'm reading her novel next, and unfortunately it's connected to the story I probably liked least in this collection (about a singer-songwriter in a post-pandemic apocalyptic society). Pinsker is also a folk singer-songwriter, so I checked some of her music out and... well, let's just say I'm glad she took up writing fiction!
The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal

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adventurous emotional hopeful tense medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I enjoyed the first two volumes of what is now becoming the 'Lady Astronaut' series. The set-up is basically that a meteorite hits earth in the 1950s, not far from Washington DC, destroying the US capital and a lot of the military command and infrastructure too, and worse, the Earth is facing utter climatic destruction in the longer term. Governments are forced to accelerate space programs to develop long-term plans to get people to the Moon and Mars. This means that they need all the best pilots they can get and while the world remains highly conservation, female pilots (who let's not forget, did much of the testing and delivery of planes during WW2) end up as astronauts alongside the men (who are not always happy about this). However, despite the death and destruction caused by the initital impact and the obvious changes to the weather, a lot of people remain unconvinced about the prospects and oppose the space program, and some have formed a violent Christian-inspired terrorist organisation, Earth First. 

With Elma, the original Lady Astronaut, now en route to Mars, this novel focuses on the Nicole Wargin, another astronaut, who was a minor character in the first novels, who is also the wife of a senior politician, a possibility for next president. She was a spy in the war, but her other secrets are her her anorexia and anxiety, both of which she barely keeps under control. She's an important pilot and leader for the Moon colonization program, and this novel focuses on the threat to the colony posed by Earth First infiltrators who become increasingly dangerous in their attempts to make it fail. 

The novels are written with a deliberately 1950s feeling. They are melodramatic, almost Douglas Sirk-like in their sometimes over-the-top emotional tone. Despite the protagonist claiming to not believe in god, there is a strong Christian feel, which I guess in characteristic of the USA, and particularly the USA of the time, and the heterosexual married love and sex are ethusiastic and frankly annoying. By this novel, which is twice as long as either of the previous ones, this is all becoming a bit tiresome, and it really drags at this length. At least a third, perhaps half, of the novel is really just establishing the situation, which we really don't need. It does pick up in speed and plot in the last third but I don't think this salvages a relatively flabby book. And finally, for all its research, which the author is really keen to tell you about, compared with other recent Moon-set novels, in particular Ian McDonald's Luna sequence, this book really suffers in its portrayal of the Moon as an environment and moonbase life. Sure, McDonald's is a much more advanced society, but the dangers of the Moon seem far more real, the dust more everpresent, the contrasts starker. A disappointment.

Red Pill by Hari Kunzru

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challenging dark mysterious reflective tense medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Hari Kuzru is one of my favourite contemporary writers and his last novel, White Tears, was the Get Out of literary fiction. Red Pill deals with similarly contemporary issues, but it's set very specifically in 2016 in the run-up to the election of Donald Trump, although this doesn't become signficant until near the end of the book. 

The protagonist is a poor Kunzru substitute, Gary Bridgeman, an aimless British-Indian writer (not of the same level as Kunzru) transplanted to New York, with a lovely and brilliant Japanese wife, Rei, and 3-year old daughter, Nina. Due to some limited success with a popular book on aesthetics, he is offered a 3-month residency by an eccentric German oganisation, the Deuter Foundation, located in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, just across the lake from the house where the Nazis developed the Final Solution. Like me, Gary is already obsessed with surveillance and privacy and somewhat paranoid, and it turns out that the foundation has completely the opposite views and expects its fellows to work completely transparently and engage with the other resident fellows. Needless to say, Gary reacts badly and retreats into his room and then tries to escape into the local area and the centre of Berlin. He encounters Syrian refugees and ex-Stasi informers, but most fatefully of all, Anton, a mephistophelean white supremacist who happens to be the showrunner of a TV show Gary is obsessed with, a truly horrific police drama called Blue Lives (and yes, you can't help adding the 'Matter' at the end). From here things go very badly wrong for Gary.

Red Pill is another beautifully written and genuinely disturbing novel from Kunzru, but I can't help feeling, coming out as it does as Trump is on his way out, that it feels much more temporally specific and maybe even dated, than White Tears. There is a lot going on and some of it feels forced, and certainly the story of the Stasi informer reads so much like an outtake from or a riff off Anna Funder's brilliant book, Stasiland, I was surprised not to see her name in the acknowledgements. It's still head and shoulders above most other things I've read this year. 

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The Blade Between by Sam J. Miller

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Hudson is a small town that was once made rich through the whaling industry. Hundreds of magnificent animals ended their long lives here, flensed and gutted, their fat rendered for lamp oil, their bones destined for corsetry and their flesh - well unlike in Japan, Americans didn't even eat it, so it was burried in massive pits all around the town. The end of the whaling industry saw a precipitous decline into poverty and irrelevence until recently, New York City property prices started to drive New Yorkers to Hudson, leading to new investment and highly controversial gentrification. 

This much is fact, however Sam Miller, author of excellent cli-fi / neo-cyberpunk novel, Black Fish City, uses these facts as the basis for a much wilder take on what's really going on in this town. It's a novel in which Hudson is haunted by the spirits of being that may or may not be the long-dead whales, where seawater seems to be seeping into basements and people's lungs, and where the arguments over gentrification get vicious and violent. The novel starts with the return to the town of Ronan Szepessy, a hip gay NYC photographer who fled homophobic Hudson years before, leaving behind his butcher father and the friend he loved in high school. Now he's back and he's not entirely sure why. Maybe it's to see his father, maybe it's to see his old friend Dom and his wife Attalah and disrupt their marriage, maybe it's to hook up with a guy named Katch, although the only problem with that is he seems to be dead. 

Ronan's arrival seems to precipitate something. A simmering anti-gentrification movement, supporting the evicted and the marginal long-term and particularly black residents of  Hudson, suddenly gets jet-fueled, the drugs get better, and fake Grindr and Tindr handles created by Ronan to troll pro-gentrification inhabitants suddenly seem to have lives and appetites and politics of their own. Soon there are gangs of whale-masked vigilantes with harpoons roaming the streets, people are making plans and making bombs, and the (also gay) head honcho of the multi-million dollar arts company, Penelope's Quilt, which no-one quite understands, is framed for a disgusting crime.

Quite a few reviews have praised this work, and its fusion of literary novel with elements of SF and horror, but I found that not only were the politics of the novel unclear and sometimes pretty nasty, even when it comes to queer issues (and I believe Miller is gay himself), but that the novel seemed constantly on the verge of spiraling out of control. There is just too much that Miller tries to cram into the work; it's like the book has ADHD.   
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Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki, Polly Barton

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emotional mysterious reflective sad medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

This is my favourite (so far) in a great series of Japanese novellas. This one concerns a couple who become obsessed with a sky-blue house that borders their crumbling apartment block, which was once owned by an obscure artist, who documented the interior in a brief and mysterious photography book. A fascinating piece or urban fiction that really captures the feeling of living the constantly changing yet somehow always familiar neighbourhoods of Tokyo with their own very particular and often personal athways, stories, mythologies.
Slow Boat by Hideo Furukawa

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mysterious reflective sad medium-paced
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

Another in a great series of Japanese novellas. Slow Boat is itself inspired by another story by Haruki Murakami. It is a strange, lethargic story of a man who really wants to leave Tokyo, the scene of his three failed love affairs, but can't quite seem to manage to get past the city limits. Is there some force preventing him, or is he the problem?  Not the best one of this series, but the writing is still interesting.
Record of a Night Too Brief by Lucy North, Hiromi Kawakami

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challenging dark funny mysterious medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

Another in a great series of Japanese novellas. If you've read any of Kawakami's more celebrated work, you are in for a shock, for these three stories are nothing like them at all, and much more related to the 'grotesque' tradition of Japanese writing, with a nod to yokai monster and ghost stories. The title story is a surreal picaresque across a shifting and bizarre nighttime landscape. where nothing is what you expect. Missing features a family, some of whose members may or may not be invisible. Finally, A Snake Stepped On is about a snake which can become human and get along quite nicely with people if you treat it right. They all have their strengths and it really depends on how much of a foundation in realism you like which one you will like best. The only disappointing thing with all of them is that none really end satisfyingly. A bit like this review. 
The End of the Moment We Had by Toshiki Okada

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emotional reflective sad
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

This is one in a great series of Japanese novellas. This book is actually two novellas, the first of which is about a brief sexual affair between two people after an art event, and the second is basically a reflection about a woman's depression within marriage told while she lies in bed deliberately doing nothing. The latter story is more challenging and doesn't quite work, whereas the first is easier to like and actually more successful.