It’s a speculative fiction blitz this month with only four book read. I’m a little surpri My nonfiction reading has been tied up with a couple projects including finishing my presentation for the Mormon History Association conference in June. I’m going to be talking about Mormon colonialism in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive, which has been fun but exhausting to research. I also started my reading for the graduate class in speculative fiction I’m taking on a post-baccalaureate basis. This is one of my goals for 2022; I’m hoping it will help me decide whether I really want to go back for an MA or MFA in the next few years.
I’ve also squeezed a little fiction writing in, submitting to a couple flash fiction contests. I didn’t make the cut for the Mormon Lit Blitz, but I’m excited by the titles of this year’s semifinalists. Tune in on May 30 to start reading with me!
Speculative Fiction
Extreme Makeover by Dan Wells – If you go in knowing what to expect, this book is a great take-down of the cosmetics industry in particular and corporate America in general. A lot of the early meetings and justifications for the product match exactly with the stories I have heard on the Beauty Brains podcast (claims ingredients that do nothing, figuring out how to claim your product does something amazing without claiming it does anything at all for legal reasons, etc). I believe that Dan Wells previously had a day job at a beauty company, and it shows.
The rest of the book is an exercise in hard science fiction: Wells shows off dozens of possible uses for the main SF concept, each more creative than the last. However, there’s a bit of a lack of plot or likeable characters. The book runs on a ticking timebomb principle, each chapter beginning with how many days are remaining until the end of the world. It’s effective as far as it goes, but it kind of undercuts any desire to root for the main characters, since we know from the beginning how it’s going to end.
But overall, this is a solid hard SF concept book, but with evil cosmetics companies rather than spaceships.
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine – Read as part of my 2022 5×5 Reading Challenge to read some of the recent Hugo winners. I think I had picked up this book once before but gotten confused by the imago machines in the first few chapters. But this time I pushed through, and I loved it.
This book is a great example of world-building the interaction between a dominant culture and a minority culture. The protagonist Mahit is both drawn to Texicalaanli culture and driven to protect her home from it, which leads to so much of the conflict in the novel. As a writer, you also have to love how the author pulled off a culture built around using poetry to hide messages and meanings. Writing poetry is hard and not all fiction writers can do it. The characters are well realized and unique with their own motivations. This book deserves its acclaim, in my opinion. I’m excited to pick up the sequel!
Duskfall by Christopher Husberg – I picked up this book because the author was a graduate of Brandon Sanderson’s SFF writing class. And I can see some of the Brandon influence in here in the huge amount of worldbuilding behind the scenes of this novel. There are definitely also some Mormon connections: one plotline is a gender-swapped version of the translation of the Book of Mormon.
Unfortunately, I found this part of the story more intriguing than the main part of the story, and it’s only a small fraction of the book. I found the main characters to be a little unmotivated, more stumbling into the plot than actively participating in it. The male lead, Knot, has amnesia, so all of his portions of the story are motivated by vague memories. The female lead, Winter, is at first chasing Knot, then motivated by a drug addiction she develops while following him. Neither really pulled me in. I’m not sure whether I’ll be picking up the sequel, but it’s definitely an interesting example of Mormon SFF.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler – I had heard a lot about this book as a seminal work of speculative fiction and also as a very difficult read. I can definitely confirm both of those parts. Huge trigger warning for this book, as there is frank discussion of rape, murder, cannibalism, death of children, etc. This is no gentle dystopia. We are straight into a post-apocalyptic wasteland caused by climate change and political division (as far as I can tell).
As a reader who is very interested in religion in SF, it was fascinating to read a book written from the perspective of someone who is founding, or “discovering” as the character puts it, a new religion. Imagine that we had a daily diary from Joseph Smith of his thoughts and musings as he worked through the doctrines he was receiving, and that’s what it felt like reading Lauren’s journal entries in this book. (Of course, Earthseed is more humanism or philosophy rather than religion; there isn’t a supernatural element here.)
I loved that the author noted when they were on the road that Lauren’s journal entries were expanded from notes she took during the week. What a realistic detail which is too often ignored in this kind of writing in favor of narrative.
Lots to think about in this novel, but it will take me a while to process it all and decide what I have to say about it. I definitely want to pick up the next volume and see how Lauren’s Earthseed experiment goes.
