Martin's Booklog

The Zero Stone — Andre Norton

Published on October 2, 20142 Comments

Cover of The Zero Stone

The Zero Stone
Andre Norton
221 pages
published in 1968

You can’t accuse Andre Norton from starting her stories slowly. When The Zero Stone opens, its protagonist, Murdoc Jern is fleeing through a primitive town on an alien planet, barely one step ahead of a mob of religious fanatics wanting to kill him. They already killed his boss when the priests of a local cult indicated the both of them for their next ritual victims, but Murdoc managed to escape. He finally manages to reach the dubious safety of a free trader ship, where his only friend is the ship’s cat, but when it falls pregnant after ingesting a strange stone on the traders’ first stopover and he himself falls ill of a strange plague once the cat gives birth, he learns not only that the trader’s crew plan to abandon him on an airless moon, but also that they had been hired to kidnap him. Luckily for him, the cat’s mutant offspring turns out to be a mysterious and powerful alien intelligence who calls himself Eet and who sets out to save Murdoc from his predicament.

The reason for Murdoc’s continuing bad luck turns out to be the old memento that was the only thing he’d taken from his adopted father’s home, who had been not just a gem trader but also a retired crime Guild boss. This memento is a ring too large to be worn and containing a dull, lifeless stone; it was found on a corpse drifting in space but Murdoc’s father could never find out anything more about it, which is why he called it the zero stone. As you’d expect in a story like this, his son has more success in finding out at least some of the story behind the stone, if only by being dragged behind it in a series of increasingly desparate escapes from danger, aided and abetted by his alien companion.

Escaping from the free trader ship doesn’t get Murdoc out of trouble. First he manages to get to a derelict alien ship, dead for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, which confirms his suspicions that the ring is a Forerunner artifact, something an ancient civilisation left behind long before mankind entered the scene. Then he gets stuck on a forest planet where he finds out he’s just a tool in the struggle between the crime Guild and the Patrol, the first wanting to use the stone to get them to a source of incredible power, the latter wanting to destroy it or at least make sure this doesn’t end up in the wrong hands. The telepathic, highly intelligent and annoyingly mysterious Eet meanwhile, whom the cover actually depicts remarkably well as a sort cross of cat, seal and monkey, says he has the best interests of both himself and Murdoc at heart, but that doesn’t stop him from using Murdoc too.

That relationship between Murdoc and Eet is the heart of the book and it’s a relief to have a telepathic space cat who isn’t incredibly cute and sweet but downright obnoxious and irritated at times. It’s somewhat of a Archie Goodwin/Nero Wolfe relationship, with Eet providing the brain for Murdoc’s brawn. They start out allies but end up sort of reluctant friends, being the only ones each of them can rely upon on.

What’s struck me about Murdoc and indeed about many of Norton’s boy heroes, is how often they are in over their heads, largely ignorant of what’s really going on and basically trying to survive rather than having the fate of the universe in their hands. It makes me wonder how much of influence she had on C. J. Cherryh, who after all specialises in this sort of protagonist and takes great delight in keeping them off balance and on the verge of exhaustion. Like Cherryh, Norton’s heroes are just trying to survive in a vast, ancient and hostile universe, only she’s nicer about it.

The Zero Stone is pure space opera with little hard science in it. It therefore aged remarkably well, some nonsense about navigation tapes notwithstanding. Instead, where it is dated is in its gender assumptions. This is literally a novel without any women in it, or females of any kind other than the ship cat. Not even the aliens are female. This is something that even in 1968, with second wave feminism starting to make noises, must’ve seen natural. No room for women in science fiction; that only distracts. So obvious a fact of life that this absence doesn’t even need to be noted, let alone explained. Half a century on though it stands out like a sore thumb.

From the various novels of her I’ve read it seems that Norton never had much time to include romance in her stories, perhas judging that her young, largely boyish audience would not put up with it. Yet she’s had female protagonists before, e.g. in Ordeal in Otherwhere. It’s therefore not so much malice than that leaves The Zero Stone womanless, rather it was just “natural” for a science fiction adventure story to be a sausagefest.

To sum up The Zero Stone was an enjoyable romp even if the lack of women looks really odd. I liked the universe Norton build and the fact Murdoc was never a superhero, just an ordinary guy caught up in forces beyond his control.

All the Shah’s Men — Stephen Kinzer

Published on September 24, 2014Leave a comment

All the Shah's Men

All the Shah’s Men
Stephen Kinzer
258 pages including index
published in 2003

If you read the name Roosevelt, you probably think of the American president during World War II, or perhaps his predecesor Theodore Roosevelt, who gave his name to the teddy bear. But there’s another Roosevelt who has been of some influence in world history, a grandson of Theodore, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., the man behind the coup against the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953. That was the coup that overthrew a government nominally an ally of the United States, on the behest of a British oil company to install a dictator whose father had had nazi sympathies, who himself would be overthrown a quarter century later in the Islamic revolution of 1979, when Americans were baffled to realise most of Iran hated them, a ahtred that had its roots in 1953.

That 1953 coup is one of those monumental changes in history that are far less well known than they should be. Though not exactly a secret, the American involvement and leadership of the coup is even less known, or at least that was the case when this book was published, in the year the US would invade another former client state, Iraq. These days the sad and sordid story of American meddling in the Middle East is well known, at least to those who paid attention to what happened after 9/11. I’m not sure how much Stephen Kinzer’s book contributed to this though.

On the face of it, All the Shah’s Men is a perfectly servicable history of the coup and the context in which it arose, with some attention to its consequences. Kinzer writes well and keeps your attention, adept at setting the scene. What bothered me however, especially in the later sections, is his ambivalent attitude towards the coup and its American ringleaders. To be sure, he doesn’t portray Kermit as a hero, but he doesn’t really condemn him either. In the last chapter, when he looks back at the inevitability of the coup, he comes close to victim blaming in arguing what the Iranian prime minister, Mossadegh, could and should’ve done to prevent the coup.

Kinzer starts well, in media res, with Kermit Roosevelt’s first, failed coup attempt, before tracing back the history of western interference in Iran. As per usual, it was the British who were to blame, ruling the country indirectly through a series of weak rulers, never permitting an effective state to arise on the borders of their Indian Empire. After World War I, with the discovery of huge oil fields in Iran, British influence in the country grew worse, with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company making millions sellings its oil without Iran profiting much of it.

He moves on to talking about the political careers of the shah, the ruler of Iran who had been put on his throne by the allies in WWII when his father proved to be slightly too enamoured of fascism. From there Kinzer also follows Mossadegh’s career, showing his integrity and idealism. While the former was ultimately a weak ruler, Mossadegh was an excellent politician and statesman, always operating with the best interests of Iran at heart.

Those interests very much included getting more out of Iran’s oilfields, attempting through negotiation to get a better share of Anglo-Iranian’s profits. British pigheadedness and racism however, both in the company as at governmental level made this futile however and in the end Mossadegh nationalised the company, which was hugely popular in Iran but not so much with the British. These immediately threw a hissy fit, withdrew all their employees (few Iranians working in other than menial positions there) and set out to economically sabotage the country through oil boycotts, as preparation for a possible invasion or other method of regime change.

For this they needed the Americans and as long as the Democrat Harry Truman was in the White House, they had no luck getting their support. All changed with the election of Eisenhower, who brought along the Dulles brothers, one who became the secretary of foreign affairs, the other head of the CIA. These were receptive to the idea of overthrowing Mossadegh and set out to work towards this. Ultimately, through Kermit Roosevelt’s hard work, they succeeded by a mixture of bribery and buying off of high ranking soldiers and police officers, CIA supported newspapers pumping out propaganda and downright hiring mobs to destabilise the country.

Now what struck me was the way Kinzer condemned Mossadegh in his epilogue. He argued that because of his refusal to come to a compromise with the British and their own fears for possible communist interference in the country, the Americans were forced to mount the coup, completely disregarding America’s own moral culpability. Worse, he argues Mossadegh had “helped bring Iran to the dead end it reached in mid-1953” after spending the entire book showing how this dead end had been brought about by British intransigence and CIA meddling! He also faults him for not actually being a dictator and coming down too weak on the coupists after their first, failed attempt.

What also struck me was the blithe disregard for Iranian suffering Kinzer displayed when he attempted to asses the consequences of the coup, in arguing that it “bought the United States and the west a reliable Iran for twenty-five years”. That’s a repulsive but sadly too common way to think about a quarter century of tyranny, torture and murder. Offhandedly musing that perhaps Iran wasn’t ready for democracy in 1953 doesn’t help either, as it shows a breathtaking arrogance considering how Iranian democracy was betrayed by the agents of the same country he belongs to.

In short then, if you know little about how this coup took place and the context in which it happened, this is a reasonable book but it displays all the shortcomings and tunnel vision you’d expect from a “veteran New York Times correspondent”. Somebody in his position, regardless of all the evidence, just cannot get themselves to see the evil that America has done.

Essential books for a school library

Published on September 17, 2014Leave a comment

In a comment on the Otherbound review, Robert asked:

Suppose you could recommend 100 books for a high school library (ages 14-18). What books would you want the librarian to buy, and why? (Fiction, non-fiction… whatever you think it important for teenagers to read.)

I’m not sure I could answer this on my own, so let’s throw it out to everybody. What would you recommend as books that should be in any (American) school library? And why? What YA fiction would you want everybody to read, or which history or science books should a clever fourteen year old encounter? Anything slightly subversive that’s essential to becoming a well rounded adult?

Otherbound — Corinne Duyvis

Published on September 15, 20143 Comments

Cover of Otherbound

Otherbound
Corinne Duyvis
387 pages
published in 2014

It was thanks to The SKiffy and Fanty Show that I got to know about Dutch author Corinne Duyvis and her début novel Otherbound, when they had an interview with her about her book. This interview intrigued me enough to buy the ebook and start reading it immediately, because Duyvis was saying smart things about diversity and disability; it also helped that in the Dutch SF round table was raving about this book. And they were right to. This is a smart, well written fantasy novel with a clever, original idea at the heart of it that deserves to be a huge success.

Nolan would be just a normal high school kid, where it not for his crippling epileptic seizures. Amara is a servant girl, her only job to keep the fugitive princess Cilla safe, functioning as the lightning rod for the princess’ curse. Any drop of her blood spilled will attract the world’s vengeance on her, so instead Amara has to draw the curse to her, because she has a healing power that will allow the curse to do its worst and still leave her alive. As a side effect of her “gift”, Nolan was dragged into her world, her mind, seeing and experiencing Amara’s life every time he closes his eyes, every time he blinks. So when Cilla’s protector and Amara’s overseer, Jorn, punishes Amara for her neglicence by thrusting her arms into a fire, Nolan feels the pain alongside her. It’s this what’s really behind his epilepsy, this loss of control as he’s sucked into Amara’s world and can’t pay attention to his own.

It’s a great idea and not one I’ve come across before. The closest might actually be Katherine Blake/Dorothy J. Heydt’s The Interior Life, in which an American housewife imagines/relives a life in a fantasyland whose crisises and thriumphs mirror her own. The same intertwining of a “mundane” life with one in what seems to be a fantasy world, one in which magic is real and terrifying, but here Nolan and Amara are distinct people and Nolan isn’t just a passive onlooker to Amara’s life, but attempts to actively interfere, as well as to find some way to break their connection. Because for him, life mainly consists on trying to survive around experiencing hers, leaving little to no room for school, family or anything.

As Amara and princess Cilla flee the wrath of the ministers who took control of the country in the coup that killed the rest of the royal family, Amara has to deal not just with the brutality of Jorn and her relationship with Maart, another servant, but especially with her feelings for Cilla. As a servant she’s indoctrinated, raised from when she was first made a servant, had her tongue cut out, to obey and follow. Her ordeals battling the curse, the pains she suffers in Cilla’s stead — Duyvis doesn’t flinch in describing some of them — do test that enforced loyalty to the breaking point though and yet she finds it hard to hate Cilla. Cilla herself certainly is less than comfortable with Amara’s suffering, attempting to befriend but not quite realising how impossible that is considering their respective positions. Amara knows that she both cannot reject her overtures nor accept them, as that beyond her status as a bound servant. She can’t consent to them.

Meanwhile the relationship between Nolan and Amara, in which at first seems to be the innocent bystander drawn into Amara’s mind and life unbeknownst to her, starts changing too. As Nolan increasingly is able to enter her body and mind completely, taking over and controlling it, which Amara at first experiences as blackouts, put doubt to the idea that it was her that drew him to her. Perhaps it was the other way around and was it Nolan who, for some reason, had cast his mind into hers and now, through a quirk in his anti epilepsy medication, was able to control it better and control her.

Both these plot lines of course revolve around consent, the ways in which Amara cannot give consent in her relationship with Cilla and the ways in which she can, as their relationship shifts and changes, the ways in which Nolan has to deal with his discovery that he’s now in control and what that means. For Amara, each of his intrusions is obviously a violation, an invasion of her innermost being, something that Nolan is certainly aware of and not happy with. He doesn’t want to do this any more than she wants it done to her and now that he can control it and she’s aware of his presence, he wants nothing better than to stop doing so, but unfortunately the dangers in which Amara and Cilla are caught means he and Amara do need to come to some accommodation to save all of them.

Otherbound takes consent seriously, it’s at the heart of the novel and its villains are those who violate consent in the worst way possible, while it’s heroes, Amara, Nolan and to a lesser extent Cilla are those who learn to respect or have always attempted to respect consent and other people’s boundaries, while learning to set their own. The relationship that blossoms between Cilla and Amara is all about consent, about Cilla learning to ask in such a way that Amara can genuinely give it, while Amara learns to find those ways in which she can meaningfully consent, learns to go against conditioning and free herself. The villains of the story on the other hand cheerfully abuse consent, want ultimately to force Nolan to force Amara to give in to them so they can keep on ruling unchallenged.

As important perhaps as this theme, is the disability all three protagonists suffer from: Amara’s healing gifts, Cilla’s curse and Nolan’s epilepsy, all disabilities they each have to find and have found ways to try and live with, all in some ways limiting them. These felt real to me, not just gimmicks, not some D&D like stat to give the protagonist a bit of a handicap, but something that shapes their lives and will continue to do so even if no longer present. That’s … rarer than I’d like in fantasy or science fiction.

It makes Otherbound an important book as well as an entertaining one, a young adult novel that gets across the right sort of messages about consent and disability without being preachy or issue driven, but having them arise naturally from the story itself. It’s also good on family and the relationship between sisters and brothers, as with Nolan and his sister Pat.

Otherbound is not perfect. Both Nolan’s South-Western America and Amala’s Dunelands feel a bit flat at times, more sketched than portrayed. That said, I liked the little Dutch details Duyvis has put in their fantasy land, from the Dunelands themselves to having an island called Teschel (next to one calld T’ershell’ng?) to having “sugared batter poffs”. The pacing of the story is also slightly off, with the first half of the novel taking a bit too long to get going and the second half perhaps going too fast. But these are meer quibbles. This is a great, well written YA novel and I can’t wait for Duyvis’ next one.

The Mirror Empire — Kameron Hurley

Published on September 11, 20141 Comment

Cover of The Mirror Empire

The Mirror Empire
Kameron Hurley
540 pages
published in 2014

Kameron Hurley’s debut novel Gods War had an impact many other writers would envy her for, only equalled by the buzz generated by Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice last year. It wasn’t just an accomplished debut novel, it also helped revitalise science fiction at a time when it started to grow a bit stale again. Expectations are therefore high for Hurley’s new novel, The Mirror Empire, the first in a new series and the first fantasy novel she has published. Would it be as good and inventive as her previous series, would she be as good at writing fantasy as science fiction?

Halfway through Mirror Empire I finally realised what it reminded me off: Steven Erikson’s Malazan series. Not so much in setting or plot, but rather in complexity and willingness of both authors to throw all sorts of interesting ideas into their novels, ideas you may not expect in what at first glance seems to be a standard epic fantasy series. Where they differ is that Hurley is much better at inclueing the reader about who all these people are and how everything fits together, where Erikson had a magnificent disdain for the reading, leaving them to sink or swim on their own. Hurley is … more forgiving but still requires you to pay attention. This is not a novel to read with your brain in standby.

Luckily Hurley has provided a cheat sheet, in the form of her promotional blog tour she undertook for The Mirror Empire. As you may know, her first publisher went into a spot of trouble that almost sunk her writing career until she got taken on by Angry Robot. Though I do have the feeling she severily underestimated how well know and popular she actually is, I can’t fault her for deciding that she needed to pull out all the stops to promote what might be her last chance at kickstarting her writing career. Hence the blog tour in which she talks about The Mirror Empire, why she wrote it as she did and the choices she made. If you haven’t read the novel you may therefore want be careful with reading those posts, because they do reveal a lot about the story, but it’s a boon to refresh your memory afterwards.

I started The Mirror Empire last Sunday when I read a large chunk sitting in my garden, then basically read it in fifteen-tweny minutes chunks on my commute, finishing it today, on Thursday. It read incredibly fast, pages flew by, chapters were read in minutes. Normally that’s the sign of a shallow book, something you don’t need to pay too much attention to read, but that’s not true here. Because I also found that I needed the time between commutes to think about the story, while going about my day, letting it bubble in my subconscious. As Hurley’s blog tour shows, there was a lot of thought put into this novel and I needed the time to process that.

The worldbuilding I especially was impressed with. The Mirror Empire takes amongst three different societies: the Dhai, Dorinah and the Saiduan, on one continent of one world. The latter two seem variations of well known pseudo feudal, medievaloid fantasy societies, but the Dhai are something else: vegetarian pacifist cannibals living in the middle of a wilderness filled with ambulatory predatory trees and other dangers. Their towns and temples are protected by various barriers as well as the talents of their priests or jistas, those who can draw on the powers of the various satellites that circle the world. As these, in their complicated years and decades long orbits draw closer or further, their powers become greater or lesser. The most elusive of the satellites is Oma, not seen for 2,000 years but whose rise always is accompanied by great and violent change. No points for guessing which satellite is starting to rise at the start of the novel.

But we don’t know that at the start of the novel, which begins with the main protagonist, Lila, losing her mother in a raid by a warband of Dhai. She escapes only because her mother, a bloodwitch able to work magic through the use of, well, blood, throws her through a gate to another world, where Lila is raised as a temple drudge for the Temple of Oma. Meanwhile in Saiduan the country is under attack from a relentless horde of invaders, invaders who seem to step out of tears in the sky, while in Dorinah the empress there entrusts her captain general with an important task: to ethnically cleanse all the Dhai slaves in the empire. All pieces of the same puzzle and to the reader it becomes relatively quick clear that’s what’s happening is no less than an invasion of a dying parallel world, where the Dhai are not cuddly pacifist cannibals, but aggressive conquerors who’ve taken over most of their world and now want to do the same to this world.

None of the characters in The Mirror Empire fit the traditional heroic mold. Lila is disabled with bad leg and asthma, while e.g. the Dorinah captain general, Zezili Hasaria, is more than happy to follow her empress’ orders for genocide, until driven by necessity to go against them. The closest the book comes to a true heroically good character is Ahkio, the kai or leader of the Dhai who tries to keep to the traditional virtues of his people even in the face of this existential crisis.

Which brings me back to the Dhai society, which not only distinguishes some five different genders (as well as people who don’t fit any of them) but which is also egalitarian and based on a radical form of consent, where even a simple touch on the arm needs to be consented to. This is something that’s genuinely new to me; I don’t think I’ve seen this before in either fantasy or science fiction.

In general, as the blog tour shows, Hurley has put an incredible amount of thought in gender and gender relations and how to create societies that aren’t the tired old medievaloid creatures of lesser novels. There are the five genders, female passive, female assertive, male passive, male assertive, and ungendered which do not map entirely on our own notions of gender, as they’re built around specific roles these genders play in Dhai society as well as temperament and are fluid as people change over time and change their identity. Ahkio for example identifies as male passive, more conservative, more traditional and reserved, whereas if he’d identified as male assertive he’d been more individualistic and liberal.

The Saiduan too have a flexible gender system, acknowledging a third gender, the ataisa, inbetween male and female, but whereas with the Dhai gender is self identified, in Saiduan it’s enforced much more by society. That’s one of the ways in which Hurley is great at worldbuilding, by creating those subtle but fitting distinctions between societies while still seeing the similarities. What’s also interesting is that describing these gender systems and societies Hurley has created puts them much more in the foreground than they are when reading the novel. Most of the time you accept them like you’d accept the details of any fantasy world, as you accept that the people here ride dogs or bears, rather than horses.

There is one place though where these gender concerns are foregrounded, mainly in the subplot surrounding Anavha, husband to Zezili, the Dorinah captain general. Dorinah society is a matriarchal one where men fill the same role as women historically in our world, appandages of their wives, with nothing more to do than to look pretty for them and be there to fullfill their sexual needs and give them children. His chapters are in your face and uncomfortable and hard to read: it’s not that often you have this role reversal in a fantasy novel and have it shown up so starkly. His story is what’s going to stick in some people’s craws, if anything is.

For me personally though, I’ve only scratched the surface of what makes The Mirror Empire great and I can’t wait for the sequel. Already this is a worthy candidate for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and certainly a much better novel than Gods War.