Apocalypses?
Review: Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace
Growing up, I was very much “Not like other girls.” Buffy spoke to me, although that speaking is colored by what I now know about Joss Whedon.
Archivist Wasp is like somebody took Buffy, made it post-apocalyptic, had the girls fight to the death become or stay the Slayer and made the Watcher…an even more evil bastard. Or maybe just less subtly evil.
Wasp is the Archivist, the ghost hunter with a blade that can harvest ghosts. The goal is to retrieve memories of the world before, but the ghosts don’t seem to be very good at holding onto them. (For a while I wondered if they actually were ghosts…)
Wasp travels to the Underworld with a ghost who never gives a name, in search of its (the ghosts are always called it) equally dead partner. Which leads her to the truth about where the upstarts (Archivist candidates) come from.
This is a book about how traditions become twisted and darkened, about what men will do to maintain power, and also about…I don’t know. A kind of love, I suppose.
We never find out what caused the apocalypse. There was a “civil war” but that’s all we know, it’s kept as mysterious as the ghosts’ memories.
This book is very dark…but also beautifully written. I generally like strange post-apocalyptic stories, but I’m less fond of kids fighting to the death…it always feels to be as if Hunger Games did everything with that that needed to be done.
At the same time…there’s definitely something to this book.
I received a copy of this book for review purposes.
Review: The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed
First of all, Weed is a decent writer. His characters are good (and his female characters are as good as his men). I’m rather done with depressing we’re-all-going-to-die climate fiction, but Weed manages to write his story in a peculiarly and ambiguously hopeful way.
Where he falls down is the science.
He understands the climate apocalypse, and makes it worse, then has desperate people pop off some volcanoes to try and cool things down.
That’s when it falls apart, because somehow the volcanoes release a bacterium/microbe (explicitly not a virus) that:
· Kills about a third of humanity
· Leaves the rest sterile except for this One Guy, both men and women
· Spreads “airborne through the troposphere” so even isolated tribes are affected
· Has no effect on any other species
I’m sorry. I know what Weed is doing…designing something to fit his plot, but it just doesn’t work. Bacteria don’t affect only one species, for one thing, typically. I think I might have bought this more if it was a virus.
Maybe I’m missing something, but this doesn’t feel right.
(Also, while Weed doesn’t say horses are extinct, they either are…or he forgot they exist).
I did find some parts of this book enjoyable. But that science. And more to the point, when our time traveler travels 10,000 years into the future…seems that as soon as we remove humans, a dying ecosystem fully recovers.
It doesn’t work like that. It just doesn’t work like that and I don’t like it when fiction puts that forward.
But again, this is well written. I just found some bits of it nailed my suspension of disbelief to the wall…or perhaps a tree.
I received a free copy of this book for review purposes.
Review: Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson
I saw a discussion recently about what kind of English is okay to write in. Hopkinson writes in Caribbean English…and it’s perfectly readable.
Blackheart Man is set in a secondary world Caribbean, with Afro-Caribbean magic, colonialism, and representation of something I have never seen before. Unfortunately, saying what is a major spoiler.
Chynchin is almost, but not quite, Haiti…an island inhabited by former slaves who’s wealth comes from spices and “piche” – tar.
Tar plays multiple roles in the story, as wealth, as magic, even as food flavoring. Veycosi’s culture is different and beautiful…I don’t know all the elements that went into it, I suspect there’s a good slice of indigenous in there too, but I don’t have the personal knowledge to know for sure. Polyamory of a certain form is normal, and magic centers around the cullybree, birds who can never land (as was once believed of the European swift, which lands only once a year…to brood its eggs…and lives on the wing the rest of the time).
Scholars memorize books so that if the original is destroyed, the text can be preserved. Then the white people come back…
Because of course they do, we always do, after all. This is ultimately a book about fighting against colonialism. It’s also about parenthood, and what it can mean, and about an imperfect, flawed protagonist who honestly deserves all the bad things that happen to him…and the good.
Hopkinson is a Grand Master for a reason. Don’t let the language put you off; she knows exactly how to balance things so people not fluent in that form of English will still understand it…and appreciate its beauty.
I really enjoyed this book. Recommended.