Dear co-conspirator and friend Amal El-Mohtar is off on a whirlwind—and I do mean whirlwind, just looking at the schedule makes my head spin—tour of the States to promote her new book, The River Has Roots.

It’s a powerful volume, saturated with Amal’s suggestive, lyrical magic, and exploring so many of her core concerns, of language, sisterhood, complexity and transformation. It’s wonderful to watch an artist so surefooted stretch their powers—to see how the new heights attained rhyme with and grows beyond what they’ve done before. Plus Ultra! And if you’re an audiobook sort of person, Amal and her sister have enriched the recording with their own voices and music. See her on tour if she’s anywhere near you.

I’m also reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture trilogy—most of the way through Eyes of the Void at the moment—and it’s a trip, in a good way, watching Tchaikovsky riff on classical space operatics and the static and distortion thrown into the project by his evident fascination with the difficulty and even impossibility of encounter. Space opera can be so many things but it often has the quality of a tour—deriving from its roots maybe in the “horse opera” Westerns.1

By encounter I mean, in space opera we tend to travel around meeting new people, discovering new truths, and seeing new Big Space Objects. But while there’s a lot of Tchaikovsky2 I haven’t read, what I have read orbits the question of whether encounter is possible at all, whether two people (or aliens) can ever truly meet or understand one another. The Elder Race, spoiling it as little as possible, features a beautiful maybe-it-is / maybe-it’s-not moment when one character attempts to explain the “truth” of their complex sci-fi situation to another, who’s grown up in a Thundarr the Barbarian sort of post-SF fantasy setting—only for the second character to interpret everything said entirely in line with their own “fantasy” worldview and context. Thereby missing the point altogether? Or understanding precisely? Or something in between?

Tchaikovsky works to inhabit this tension, rather than bowing toward unknowability (a more standard literary SF move-set, Solaris, Southern Reach, etc.) or assuming some fundamental tangency or universal common-ground (as in more popular media-SF). Reality is big and weird and scary and unknowable. Not just in space! How much do we know ourselves? Our children? How much do we know the people we lie down to sleep beside each night? And yet knowing, loving, trusting, is possible, we know that, because we see ourselves fail at it so often… It’s the fundamental challenge of the text (“am I reading this right?”)—maybe the fundamental challenge of the human animal. Do I actually know what’s going on here? Can I? Do we understand one another? Can we?

And lest that sound too, like, heavy, man, a few planets get blown up, and there’s a running gunfight between a clone valkyrie and a bunch of black-ops thugs through a Precursor city while it’s being deconstructed by a sorta-Lovecraftian sorta-Reaper-ish moon monster (which is itself being attacked by a bunch of deep space Ark-dwelling nomad cyber-Lapras). I’m having a good time, anyway, and looking forward to seeing where all this lands.

Other recent reading: I got a lot out of Robin Sloan’s essay “Is it Okay,” on LLMs, which reaches toward a sort of missing middle of deep-thought conversation on the future of the technology. I have some thoughts of my own, some ominous, which will have to be the foundation of a future essay, since this is already too long.

I’ll be in Philadelphia next Friday! Come join me at the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society meeting, 8-10 at St Mary’s at Penn. See you there!