Ukrainian SF and...Roma Eterna?
Two very different books this week.
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Review: The Factory by Ihor Mystak
I don’t often review books by deceased authors. I prefer to support the living who can maybe get a sale or two out of it. Mystak is a special case…he was a Ukrainian author who was killed in the war and I hope that plenty of royalties go to his widow.
This book was published in 2022, but not translated into English until 2024. The translation has some minor issues, most of which only add flavor, but I was a little bothered by the guy telling people to stop being formal when they weren’t. That didn’t translate across properly somehow.
The science fictional element here is very light…a device that supposedly causes people to go by their impulses, but there’s no proof it works and at least some of the characters think it’s a placebo. And even then, it’s not important to the story, which is a quiet tale about the relationships between the various people working in the eponymous factory.
I liked it, but there’s a caveat here…this is a very quiet story, one might almost call it cozy, with very little action. (I’m also not sure what’s with the weird dream sequence right at the end. Maybe it’s a Ukrainian folklore reference I’m not getting?)
It’s an interesting little book and I haven’t read much Ukrainian fiction…I have a feeling there’s stuff going on here I’m not grasping because of lack of familiarity with the culture. Worth checking out.
Review: Sargassa by Sophie Burnham
Sometimes a book is hard to review without spoilers. Sometimes that book is also one that you just can’t spoil.
So I have to talk about Sargassa as what it first presents itself as; a story of the Roman Empire in the New World, or perhaps an alternate world which almost resembles that. It’s a complex political thriller that needs all of its 400 pages to do its work.
The characters, most of them queer, have to navigate Roma Sargassa’s complicated citizenship and clientship system, a system that echoes Rome but drifts away from it in places (no automatic citizenship from military service being an obvious example). The author plays fast and loose with Rome in a way that only somebody who knows Rome can.
It’s not what it seems to be, but Burnham creates a world that you feel as you have to inhabit, even though you likely don’t want to. Slave and free is a binary; this world has gradations of both. It took me an inordinate amount of time to work out what was going on.
When you do, you will realize this book is brilliant.
Recommended.