Tag: science fiction

Book review: Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

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Interstellar Megachef book coverI try to buy ebooks direct from publishers when I can. There are a few small publishers that are really good for this, such as Rebellion.When I go to their site for a particular book I almost always wind up buying a couple of random other books that just sound fun. Such as Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan – I mean, that’s quite the title, right?

A queer SF tale about an intergalactic cooking show, this sounded like it would be completely silly fluff. Which I was very much in the mood for when I bought it and when I decided to read it. But this is actually much better and less fluffy than I expected. Though it does have its sillier moments, and comedic ones too, this is largely a story about prejudice, migration, xenophobia and bullying.

Saras has run away from Earth, arriving on Primus with nothing but a small bag of belongings, her little robot Kili and a dream of winning the galaxy’s most watched, most prestigious cooking show, Interstellar MegaChef. As one of Earth’s most celebrated chefs she thinks she stands a good chance, but she is in for a rude awakening to reality.

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Book review: The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

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The galaxy and the ground within book coverI think the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers is my favourite science fiction of this past decade. So I’m a little sad that I’ve read them all now. But the fourth and final part, The Galaxy and the Ground Within, is pleasingly excellent.

In this novel, three strangers are passing through a small habitat dome on a planet called Gora while they await their turn entering a wormhole to continue their journeys. A disaster leaves them temporarily trapped with just each other, their host and her young child. The visitors are all different species, living very different lives. They have expectations and prejudices to deal with, as well as concerns about their delayed journeys.

Pei is captain of a cargo ship, an Aeluon who was introduced in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Aeluons largely communicate by changing the colour and patterns of their fur. They don’t have vocal cords but most have an implant that enables them to approximate speech sounds.

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Book review: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler

Parable of the Sower book cover

Thank you again to the organisers of the Banned Book Club on BlueSky for prompting me to read this modern classic of dystopian fiction, Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler. I listened to the audio book read by Lynne Thigpen, which meant I couldn’t highlight quotes but it did really bring it alive.

In diary entries starting from 2024, teenager Lauren details what it takes to survive in an alternate California. The US is increasingly unstable between severe climate change; escalating privatisation of resources and services; and a scary drug that gives users a high from watching fire burn. Lauren lives in a gated community with her Black preacher father, Hispanic stepmother and gaggle of stepbrothers.

A gated community sounds fancy, but this is just an ordinary neighbourhood on the outskirts of LA of people who are at best lower middle class. They have had to put up walls, rigged alarms, set up 24-hour watches. They seem at first to be managing well. Several families grow some food in their gardens; one family breeds rabbits for food; most families have one person with a paying job. They trade between themselves, the teenagers date each other, the parents take turns teaching essential life skills to the children.

But they are under constant threat of robbery, violence, fire. When they leave the neighbourhood for weekly shooting practice they must keep constant watch for attacks from humans and feral dogs.

Added to this, Lauren has hyper empathy, literally feeling the pain and ecstasy of any people near her. Which is not helpful when surrounded by violence. She knows that worse times are coming and tries to encourage friends to prepare but they reject her warnings. All she can do is prepare herself.

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Two book reviews: Rosewater and Rosewater

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Two paper back books called Rosewater

A couple of months ago I spotted that I had two books on my TBR with the same title. Rosewater by Liv Little and Rosewater by Tade Thompson are very different novels but I thought it might be interesting to read them back to back.

In one book Rosewater is a poem, in the other it’s the name of a town, but both refer obliquely to the scented product. The poem is an ode to a person who wears that particular scent. The town is in its early days especially smelly, so the name is ironic.

Little’s book follows Elsie, a 28-year-old poet in London struggling with debt in the gig economy. In short succession she loses her home and almost loses her job thanks to a racist customer. To keep a roof over her head she must go crawling to her best friend Juliet, but there is beef in their recent past they haven’t dealt with.

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Book review: Austral by Paul McAuley

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Austral book coverPaul McAuley is Tim’s favourite author and I completely understand why. I am surprised McAuley isn’t more widely known, as he is in my experience consistently excellent, creating thoughtful, hard science fiction with great characters and exciting stories.

His 2017 novel Austral imagines a world where the climate catastrophe has happened, the worst-case scenarios came to pass, and the surviving humans have learned little to nothing from it, continuing to put the needs of rich people and corporations before other concerns. It’s depressing in its believability.

A century after the climate catastrophe, Antarctica is now a country with elected politicians and cities to house all the people who work in the plethora of mines the continent is now home to. The first wave of people to move to Antarctica, decades before our story begins, were the Eco Poets, a collective who planted forests, gardens and small farms. But they were targeted as political “undesirables” and now their legacy is the scattered remains of their plantations, and the children they created through gene editing to be better adapted to the Antarctic climate, known as “huskies”.

Our heroine, Austral, is a husky. She’s large, strong and fat so that she doesn’t feel the cold. Discriminated against wherever she goes, she has limited employment options and few friends. Austral works as a prison guard at a penal colony, a rare job that she is well suited for. She dreams of living in an apartment in Auckland, an ordinary life somewhere safe – a dream that is simple and impossible.

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Book review: The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe

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I remember the first time I heard “Make Me Feel” by Janelle Monáe I was astonished. I initially thought it was a Prince track I’d somehow never heard before, but it’s not just his influence on Monae that makes it a great song. It’s a joyous sex-positive song with smart lyrics that question the status quo. I bought the single, then a few months later her album Dirty Computer, and marvelled again.

This wasn’t just an album, it was a rock opera (albeit spanning multiple genres beyond rock) telling a sci-fi story about androids and humans facing oppression. It was even accompanied by a short film, in which abbreviated versions of the album’s songs are strung together in a sci-fi narrative about heavily restricted sexual and romantic freedom. Monáe herself stars as a woman (or android? it isn’t clear) captured by authorities whose memories are being deleted so that she can be made “clean”.

This dystopian vision has now been expanded on in The Memory Librarian – a collection of short stories by Monáe, working with a different experienced sci-fi writer for each story. I have been excited for this book since Monáe announced it last year but I was going to wait until it turned up in bookshops to buy a copy in person. So imagine my surprise (and delight) when I received a signed (!) copy in the post the day before release, thanks to my wonderful partner Tim having pre-ordered it for me.

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Book review: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin

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Left handHof Darkness book coverWhen my book club put out its call a few months ago for book suggestions on the theme of gender, I felt that science fiction could be a good angle from which to explore this topic but I feared that might put off some of the group. I needn’t have feared. Not only was my suggestion of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin the vote winner for our March meeting, it was also a really well attended (virtual) meet-up and a very fruitful, lively discussion. I should never have doubted them.

This novel certainly provides a lot of fodder for discussion. It’s difficult to boil down the plot succinctly (which is perhaps why looking in different places you’ll see very different synopses that sound like entirely different books) but here is my attempt. Genly Ai is an envoy from the human interplanetary collaboration the Ekumen. He has been sent alone to the planet Gethen to see whether he can persuade the inhabitants to join the Ekumen. Between the planet’s perpetual wintry conditions and the Gethenians’ androgynous nature, Genly is struggling with his ambassadorial role. His primary contact is Estraven, who seems to want to help, but can they ever truly understand and trust one another?

For me – and most of the book group – this was a slow burner. There is a LOT of background to set up about Gethen’s people, politics and languages. On reflection there is also a lot of plot and character development from the start as well, but for me that got a bit buried under my trying to get to grips with the world building. And then around the halfway point I realised I was really enjoying the book and by the end I loved it.

As with every aspect of the novel, Le Guin goes into a lot of detail of the Gethenians’ androgyny. She has invented something called “kemmer”, a period of fertility akin to mammals in heat. During kemmer, Gethenians experience sexual urges that are overwhelming to the point that no-one is expected to work during that period. Though some Gethenians do have an equivalent of marriage, most are promiscuous and go to communal “kemmer houses” to have their sexual needs met. Genly finds this all a little strange, but what I really liked is that Le Guin has the Gethenians find Genly revolting because to them, he’s sexually aroused (or capable of it) all the time.

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March 2022 reading round-up

Sick day company

Well, Tim and I have both now had COVID and survived, which makes the world feel a bit less scary. Obviously we know we can be re-infected, and it wouldn’t necessarily be the same a second time round, but for now we’re enjoying the higher level of immune protection and the psychological relief of our worst fears not being realised.

I read four books this month, which is a big drop from Jan and Feb, but three of them were science fiction and two of those I found pretty challenging. Plus I had COVID and then the weather got glorious and I mostly wanted to be outside.

My favourite book this month was The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders (see below for a brief summary), which I liked so much that even when I felt absolutely awful on my first day of having COVID, I avidly read for the majority of the day. Usually when I’m sick I struggle to read and turn to TV instead. Not sure if it’s because COVID is a different kind of sick to my usual, or if I’m turning to the wrong kinds of books at those times.

I did also watch a lot of TV as per usual, don’t get me wrong. This month I discovered Man Like Mobeen, This Way Up and The Woman Across the Street From the Girl in the Window – which are all ideal if you need to laugh. And as for films, even just the really good ones make for a long list. I can recommend Mixtape, A Quiet Place, Columbus, Encanto, Colombiana and Tick Tick Boom.

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I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes

The Memory PoliceThe Memory Police
by Yoko Ogawa
translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder

This was chosen by my work book club and I would have loved to join that discussion, but sadly I was in a reading slump and didn’t finish the book in time. It’s a high-concept dystopia but it’s still very readable.

On the island, things disappear. En masse. And their disappearance is policed. Residents wake up knowing that something has to go that day – hats or bells or stamps, for instance. They destroy the items under the watchful eye of the Memory Police and their memory of the thing quickly fades, so that if the word is spoken it no longer has any meaning.

So far so strange, eerie even, but the scary part is that some people remember – and the Memory Police are hunting them down, taking them away.

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K-drama review: Memories of the Alhambra

Memories of the Alhambra poster

For a while Memories of the Alhambra (a 2019 joint production of tvN and Netflix) was being heavily trailed on Netflix (at least, it was being advertised at me, but I guess I’m the target audience). It got lots of online hype (and apparently a petition for a second season), which I’m a bit bemused by. Honestly, this was beautifully filmed, well acted, had an original sci-fi thriller concept and unexpected plot twists, but I wound up disappointed overall.

It starts out well. Park Shin-hye (Doctors, Pinocchio, Heirs) plays Jung Hee-joo, a woman running a hostel for Koreans in Granada with her grandmother. She supports her younger sister Min-joo (who is still at school) and her brother Se-joo (a freelance game developer) by working two other jobs in addition to the hostel management. She has a Korean best friend who’s in love with her and a secret talent for playing classical guitar. It’s all very cosy and lovely.

Then along comes Yoo Jin-woo (played by Hyun Bin of Secret Garden) – the CEO of a tech company called J-One. He receives a mysterious phone call begging him to go to a certain hostel in Granada to discuss a business deal. When he gets there, he finds no sign of the man he was supposed to meet (who turns out to be Se-joo), but he does have an e-mail with a game attached to it – a game designed to work with J-One’s augmented-reality contact lenses. A game that could be worth billions.

The bulk of the first two episodes is establishing the game – in which users walk around real Granada collecting virtual weapons and fighting virtual warriors (think Pokémon Go but with almost realistic graphics). It’s pretty impressive, makes good use of the Granada setting and provides a source of some comedy as the camera view switches between Jin-woo’s point-of-view and what the rest of the world sees (i.e. some tourist flailing his arms around mysteriously and pulling strange faces).

There’s also some mystery about Se-joo, namely why both he and his business partner Marco have disappeared. There’s a fight over buying the rights to the game from Se-joo’s family between Jin-woo and his biggest rival (and former best friend) Cha Hyeong-seok. There are ex-wives and hapless assistants (including the adorable Seo Jung-hoon, played by Min Jin-woong). While there’s lots of ominous music and hints of something dark and terrible, for the most part it feels like a typical set-up of love triangles and business rivalry.

Then after just a couple of episodes, everything changes. A death in the game becomes a death in real life. The tone suddenly makes sense. This show is genuinely exciting, thrilling and even at times quite scary, with some good fighting scenes and special effects.

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