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Noah Fram

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

A Memory Called Empire

Review by Noah Fram

Mahit Dzmare, ambassador from the small mining station Lsel to the behemoth Teixcalaan Empire, carries the memories of her late predecessor, Yskandr Aghavn, in her mind. Until those memories are forcefully and inexplicably removed, leaving her abandoned on a world whose people speak in poetic allusions; name themselves after flowers, abstract concepts and sometimes vehicles or appliances; are dealing with a looming war of succession; and want her dead more frequently than is, strictly speaking, healthy. Mahit must navigate this lethal maze and maintain her independence while choosing the right allies to keep her home from being devoured by the ever-hungry Teixcalaanli fleet. And all while searching for a way to regain her connection to Yskandr’s knowledge and guidance without of course, telling anyone she’d ever had such access.

A Memory Called Empire is a political thriller inspired by the Byzantine Empire and featuring plot points reminiscent of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”’s Trill symbionts and the linguistic games of Frank Herbert’s Whipping Star. It is science fiction, and is certainly operatic in scope, but calling it a space opera seems like cheating somehow, as if there’s something being left out. Arkady Martine’s prose is an incisive, self-aware blend of tense action and delightful humor. Scenes extolling the virtues of alcohol when forced to praise bad poetry and mocking an otherwise irrelevant character that named themselves after a snowmobile are sprinkled liberally amongst the murder attempts and diplomatic machinations. A Memory Called Empire is dense, packed full of ulterior motives and subplots and beautifully realized characters, but its variety makes it eminently readable.

But the most memorable aspect of Martine’s debut may be the society she has crafted. Teixcalaan is utterly fascinating, its libertine self-image and obsession with art and style mixed with an almost superstitious fear of the human mind. Its veneer of gentility, elegance and enlightenment is profoundly fragile, and all the more precious for it. Smiling with one’s mouth is gauche, but it is also deeply personal. Mastery of allusion and subtext are such clear markers of social and political power that only the highest and the lowest in Teixcalaanli society dare speak plainly. The empire is the center of civilization, surrounded by barbarians who live on space stations and burn and recycle their dead, and yet in times of civil war, its inhabitants commit ritual suicide to earn the favor of gods they don’t quite believe in. They fear the depths of the human psyche, yet live in a city and under the protection of a police force that are both controlled by an artificial intelligence.

Imperial Teixcalaan is a brilliantly realized world of contradictions, and A Memory Called Empire is filled with poets, politicians, spies, soldiers and a thousand degrees of moral ambiguity. Oh, and some of the best names in all of science fiction.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Arkady Martine about A Memory Called Empire.

Mahit Dzmare, ambassador from the small mining station Lsel to the behemoth Teixcalaan Empire, carries the memories of her late predecessor, Yskandr Aghavn, in her mind. Until those memories are forcefully and inexplicably removed.

Science Fiction & FantasyShort Stories

A People’s Future of the United States

Review by Noah Fram

A People’s History of the United States, the seminal work by the late Howard Zinn, strove to tell American history not from the perspective of the victors, but from those who experienced it and, in many cases, suffered because of it. In response, Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams set out to compile a collection of speculative fiction to continue those stories, to imagine what the future will be for those history has forgotten. The result, A People’s Future of the United States, ably addresses that prompt. But in the process, it also asks another question, one with as many implications for contemporary life as any: what does hope look like in an increasingly dystopian reality?

The answers are predictably varied, from A. Merc Rustad and N.K. Jemisin’s resistance fighters to Ashok Banker’s accidental utopia, Jamie Ford’s illusory perfection to Seanan McGuire’s small, triumphant realization of harmony. There is a running theme of open conflict and formal division between California and the rest of the United States. Some, like Charles Yu’s “Good News Bad News” and Catherynne M. Valente’s “The Sun in Exile,” revel in comedy so bleak the humour feels spiteful. Others, like Omar El Akkad’s “Riverbed” and Lizz Huerta’s “The Wall,” are weighty and resonant. There are stories of grand causes (Mari Dahvana Headley’s “Read After Burning”) and personal triumphs (G. Willow Wilson’s “ROME”). But they all share three characteristics: the focus on history’s forgotten, omitted or erased multitudes LaValle and Adams envisioned; a willingness to wield the lens of speculative fiction to address the crises of the human condition; and an awareness, conscious or otherwise, of the difficulty in building the future on a rapidly-crumbling foundation.

Three stories in particular are worth detailed discussion: the opener, Charlie Jane Anders’s “The Bookstore at the End of America”; Gabby Rivera’s “O.1”; and Tananarive Due’s “Attachment Disorder.” All three are depictions of imperfect worlds, of places whose denizens must seek their own futures in a world where the very existence of any future at all is, was or soon will be in question.

Anders’s story is almost more about its setting than its story. A bookstore straddling a contested border, serving as the sole link between communities who once interacted freely and now each believe the other is condemned, is a marvellous conceit, and the conceptualization of books in general and fiction in particular as a refuge is among the most compelling narratives in this collection. What really separates “The Bookstore at the End of America” from its peers, however, is its almost startling lack of pretension. There is a massive, literally earth-shattering conflict unfolding around the titular bookstore, and yet Anders avoids it. Instead, she crafts a love letter to the kind of fantasy that appears nowhere else in A People’s Future, the kind that exists in a universe wholly separate from the real world. Its juxtaposition of the persistent joy of acknowledged fiction against the fatalistic horror of a rapidly decaying reality not only sets the tone for the rest of the volume, but also establishes a high benchmark for the quality of the stories to come.

In “O.1,” the end of the world is hardly an apocalypse. Rather, it is an adjustment, a recalibration of sorts. It is, in many ways, the most hopeful story of the collection. Its lack of a true antagonist makes the urgency of Rivera’s conflict an even more impressive demonstration of her considerable skill, and her vision of a world without greed is almost utopian. But more than any other story in A People’s Future, “O.1” highlights the tension inherent in such a project. When the fractures in reality are so clear, any attempt to heal them necessitates a cataclysm, and Rivera’s IMBALANCE is a kind of deus ex bacteria, a benevolent hybrid of Vernor Vinge’s artificial intelligences and N.K Jemisin’s vengeful Stillness. It is a vision of an ideal future, yes, but of one that is imposed, not achieved, and shot through with an acknowledged fragility that lends an undeniably hopeful story an air of melancholy. It relies on the belief that, left to our own devices, we will never truly heal our wounds.

“Attachment Disorder” could be interpreted as the inverse of “O.1.” It depicts a world ravaged by plague, where those with the antibodies at once prized and feared, and where a delicate peace brokered by human powers relies on surveillance and control. Like “O.1,” its fundamental struggle is one of navigating the balance between freedom and safety. But unlike Rivera’s piece, Tananarive Due’s story is not one of beginning anew. Rather, it is one of continuing, of the quiet resistance of going on as before, of not subscribing to a new world order. Rivera’s heroes give birth to a world—Due’s refuse to let one die. And instead of a melancholy utopia, Due has somehow crafted a hopeful dystopia out of resilience, necessity and the basic human instinct to care.

A People’s Future of the United States concludes with Alice Sola Kim’s “Now Wait for This Week,” a stark reimagining of Groundhog Day, told from the perspective of an unwitting repeater. It compellingly depicts the inevitability of repeating a forgotten history and the deep-seated frustration of those who remember. There may be no better way to conclude such a collection of well-crafted, frequently terrifying and sometimes beautiful visions of America’s future.

A People’s History of the United States, the seminal work by the late Howard Zinn, strove to tell American history not from the perspective of the victors, but from those who experienced it and, in many cases, suffered because of it. In response, Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams set out to compile a collection of speculative fiction to continue those stories, to imagine what the future will be for those history has forgotten.

FictionThriller

Receptor

Review by Noah Fram

MDT-48 is an experimental drug designed by the CIA during its infamous Project MK-Ultra, which was developed to unlock the full potential of the human mind. Ned Sweeney is an unassuming, milquetoast account manager at an advertising firm. When the man and the drug are combined in a clandestine experiment, Sweeney becomes something else, a madcap machine of computation and prediction, dazzling random strangers in bars, accompanying Dylan Thomas on a bender and spending a few hours holed up with Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. But the subsequent crash leaves him despondent, confused and with a debilitating craving for more. Half a century later, Sweeney’s grandson Ray has been told his grandfather committed suicide. But an offhand remark from a retired government official upends that story. Ray begins leveraging his contacts as a political operative to dig into his grandfather’s past, embarking on a search that will change his life forever.

Project MK-Ultra is not fiction, and author Alan Glynn ably contends with the ever-changing boundary between human enhancement and treatment that both that project and modern pharmaceutical developments imply. Furthermore, Glynn’s writing is as sharp as ever, conjuring tension and drama fit for an action film out of what is essentially a political thriller. His characters, especially the cantankerous Clay Proctor, are compelling and memorable, and they are well deployed. Receptor’s sole failing is that its plot can move a touch too quickly, rushing through relationships and romances in ways that limit their credibility. But Glynn’s dramatic instinct is maintained throughout. The potential of MDT-48 is demonstrated with flashbacks to Ned Sweeney’s story, and the circumstances of his death are revealed as they happened, not in a retrospective or historical narrative. Glynn unfailing obeys the rule of showing rather than telling, and does so with memorable elegance. Perhaps his chief accomplishment in Receptor is his ability to shift the language of his dialogue. Ned Sweeney is almost aggressively bland for the most part, but speaks in kaleidoscopic swirls of persuasive fervour when on MDT-48.

All told, for anybody who enjoyed The Dark Fields (now titled Limitless) and wants a fast-paced thriller that still has time to question the morality of medical enhancement, Receptor would make an excellent choice.

MDT-48 is an experimental drug designed by the CIA during its infamous Project MK-Ultra, which was developed to unlock the full potential of the human mind. Ned Sweeney is an unassuming, milquetoast account manager at an advertising firm. When the man and the drug are combined in a clandestine experiment, Sweeney becomes something else, a madcap machine of computation and prediction, dazzling random strangers in bars, accompanying Dylan Thomas on a bender and spending a few hours holed up with Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe.

Science Fiction & FantasyHistorical FantasyFantasy

The Mortal Word

Review by Noah Fram

Irene is a Librarian, sworn to maintain the balance between order and chaos by carefully observing and, when necessary, stealing works of literature and history. Her Library stands apart from a vast array of alternate universes, and Irene travels between them to find and protect game-changing works of literature. She is (mostly) content with her typical daily duties of infiltrating the private libraries of brutal feudal lords and reading books so extraordinary, most mortals would never know they’d ever existed.

So when she is called to investigate a murder that could threaten that balance, Irene must apply her ingenuity and adaptability to preserve the most delicate of peaces and protect her Library while uncovering the truth. And if she and her friends and fellow investigators happen to stumble across a conspiracy or two along the way, they can only hope that any of the lawful and regimented dragons, chaotic Fae raconteurs, or suspicious and secretive senior Librarians will believe them.

Genevieve Cogman’s prose in The Mortal Word is characteristically light and witty, and filled with the kind of unexpected literary references one would expect from a book about magical librarians. Even more impressive, however, is Cogman’s ability to craft compelling standalone novels, while still using the developing relationships among her characters to tie the entire Invisible Library series together. Her series is reminiscent of the better, longest-running television serials, and the murder mystery aspect of The Mortal Word lends it the air of an unusually comedic episode of “Law and Order.”

The Library itself, and its relationship to humanity, is itself a fascinating take on an established literary tradition. Borges wrote of a Library of Babel, in which all possible writing was catalogued in an infinite and barely-navigable maze, but Cogman’s Librarians have more in common with Connie Willis’ time-traveling historians. They are not merely collectors, but have an explicit purpose in their behavior, and must be cautious when their activities in some world or historical era have unintended consequences. Cogman’s version of reality stands apart from its peers as one of the few versions of reality where, if the narrative lines up just right, anybody can be a knight in shining armor, a poem can bring down a dragon and a kiss really can bring back the dead.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Genevieve Cogman about The Mortal Word.

Irene is a Librarian, sworn to maintain the balance between order and chaos by carefully observing and, when necessary, stealing works of literature and history. Her Library stands apart from a vast array of alternate universes, and Irene travels between them to find and protect game-changing works of literature. She is (mostly) content with her typical daily duties of infiltrating the private libraries of brutal feudal lords and reading books so extraordinary, most mortals would never know they’d ever existed.

Science Fiction & FantasyHistorical FantasyFantasy

An Easy Death

Review by Noah Fram

Lizbeth Rose is a “gunnie,” a crack shot with her bolt-action Winchester rifle and her pair of Colt handguns, who makes a living guarding people on their helter-skelter treks between towns in the Texoma desert. With the United States government in tatters after the assassination of Franklin Roosevelt and the continent subsequently swallowed up by Canada, Mexico, England and Imperial Russia, there is no such thing as an easy life. So when her crew is killed on a run, Lizbeth is forced to take whatever job comes along, even if it means following a dour pair of Russian wizards on their hunt for the last descendants of Rasputin. As their search takes them south, Lizbeth is drawn ever closer to a part of her past she would rather forget. At least she won’t be unarmed when she finds it.

In An Easy Death, Charlaine Harris’s fictionalized mid-century North America is enticingly familiar. Although she will win no prizes for eloquence, her blunt prose serves the first-person narration, as it matches Lizbeth’s personality and language. Seen through the gunnie’s eyes, what used to be the American Southwest is brutal and remorseless, but draped in a kind of honesty the reader is forced to respect. Lizbeth’s descriptions of the wizards, or “grigoris” as she derisively calls them, are studiously, sometimes hilariously devoid of flowery language. She is content to describe their methods of combat as “creative,” leaving it up to the reader’s own creativity to fill in the gaps.

The plot is predictable, sure, but it’s honestly refreshing to read an alternate history that doesn’t try to score any philosophical points and focuses on telling a complete story. Similarly, Lizbeth’s quest is to maintain the status quo, both in aiding her charges on their journey and in returning to the life she left to take this job. For her, it would be a triumph if nothing much changed. In a genre dominated by rags-to-riches stories of world dominance and great evils vanquished and old magics mastered, there’s more than enough room for a good story of normal people, just trying to stay alive.

Lizbeth Rose is a “gunnie,” a crack shot with her bolt-action Winchester rifle and her pair of Colt handguns, who makes a living guarding people on their helter-skelter treks between towns in the Texoma desert. With the United States government in tatters after the assassination of Franklin Roosevelt and the continent subsequently swallowed up by Canada, Mexico, England and Imperial Russia, there is no such thing as an easy life. So when her crew is killed on a run, Lizbeth is forced to take whatever job comes along, even if it means following a dour pair of Russian wizards on their hunt for the last descendants of Rasputin. As their search takes them south, Lizbeth is drawn ever closer to a part of her past she would rather forget. At least she won’t be unarmed when she finds it.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

All things bright and terrible

Review by Noah Fram

Cixin Liu’s Ball Lightning opens with a young Chen witnessing his parents being incinerated by an unexplained sphere of energy, and then follows Chen as he delves ever deeper into the mysteries surrounding this inscrutable atmospheric phenomenon. His obsession leads him into top-secret laboratories and culminates in the accidental realization of a new form of military deterrence. Along the way, he is forced to question his own internal strife and intractable ethical quandaries by working alongside the beautiful and weapon-obsessed Major Lin Yun and the heedlessly single-minded physicist Ding Yi.

Ball lightning is, in fact, a genuine mystery in contemporary physics and atmospheric science. However, none of the myriad theories proposed to explain it go quite as far as Liu’s speculation, which breaks the tenets of particle physics. Following on the heels of his landmark Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, Ball Lightning establishes Liu as a dominant force in so-called “hard” science fiction, although his more recent novel unfolds over a much more limited spatial and temporal domain. There are no extraterrestrial powers or looming extinction events here, although humanity is once again portrayed as stumbling around a dark and incomprehensible universe it will never truly master.

Rather, Liu focuses on the human and geopolitical side of scientific progress. For all the quantum-mechanical jargon, the real centerpieces of the novel are Chen’s struggle to balance his traumatic past with the need to build a life for himself, and the relationship between scientific progress and military power. Each character’s perspective is inhibited or restricted in some way, from Lin Yun’s monomaniacal ruthlessness to Ding Yi’s intellectual amorality, and each inhibition is grounded in part of that person’s history. Liu populates Ball Lightning with logical, well-crafted individuals and manages to conjure a compelling conflict out of a cast of characters who are all trying to do the right thing. The resulting story is curiously optimistic for a speculative parable about the human propensity for self-destruction. At its core, Ball Lightning is an emotionally compelling and well-written story hiding within a shell of detailed and thoroughly researched quantum mechanics, and it serves as ample evidence for Liu’s pedigree as a storyteller working within the constraints of rigorous speculative fiction.

Cixin Liu’s Ball Lightning opens with a young Chen witnessing his parents being incinerated by an unexplained sphere of energy, and then follows Chen as he delves ever deeper into the mysteries surrounding this inscrutable atmospheric phenomenon.

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Besieged on all sides

Review by Noah Fram

Jovan and Kalina, noble siblings of art-loving Sjona, are heirs to a difficult responsibility: detecting poisons and preventing them from reaching the city’s Chancellor. When their father is felled along with the reigning monarch by a poison none of them can identify or detect, they are thrust into duty protecting their friend Tain—the newest ruler of Sjona. And then, with their military fighting a campaign far from home, they find an army of fanatics at their city’s gates, hell-bent on destroying Sjona and its people. Somehow, Jovan and Kalina must decide whom to trust in a city they barely recognize, while fighting a war neither of them fully understands.

City of Lies is only the beginning of the Poison War trilogy, but it functions as a standalone story as well. Sam Hawke’s tale of intrigue and betrayal comes to a seemingly pat ending, but knowing that the story is far from over casts a welcome patina of uncertainty over the state of affairs. This complexity is aided by Hawke’s skilful use of a first-person limited perspective to construct multifaceted and imperfect characters, although they sometimes fall into established fantasy archetypes. Sjona is a fascinating environment as well. Hawke’s politically fraught society is built on subterfuge in a fashion reminiscent of Robin Hobb’s Buckkeep Castle, and her magic system is an interesting take on the type of magic used by writers like Guy Gavriel Kay and Daniel Abraham.

Much of City of Lies’ appeal lies in Hawke’s writing style, and the depth and narrative potential of its world and characters. But the most interesting aspect is its approach to conflict. Unlike most typical fantasy works, Hawke presents both sides of a religious war as sympathetic. This is a plot that seems to be full of antagonists, but is actually populated with basically decent people who cannot communicate with each other, either because they do not understand each other’s concerns or because their complaints are too deeply held to be negotiable. Even the real masterminds are merely selfish rather than evil. As a result, City of Lies is a story that resonates beyond its pages without overtly moralizing, which is a rare achievement in any genre.

All told, Sam Hawke’s debut is an engaging, tense and deeply relevant story within an intriguing world that lends itself well to further exploration.

Jovan and Kalina, noble siblings of art-loving Sjona, are heirs to a difficult responsibility: detecting poisons and preventing them from reaching the city’s Chancellor. When their father is felled along with the reigning monarch by a poison none of them can identify or detect, they are thrust into duty protecting their friend Tain—the newest ruler of Sjona. And then, with their military fighting a campaign far from home, they find an army of fanatics at their city’s gates, hell-bent on destroying Sjona and its people. Somehow, Jovan and Kalina must decide whom to trust in a city they barely recognize, while fighting a war neither of them fully understands.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Reaching out towards the stars

Review by Noah Fram

In the first two books of the Themis Files, Dr. Rose Franklin discovered and rebuilt an alien war machine, nearly doomed the human race to extinction at the hands of an aggressively benevolent alien power, wrenched survival from the jaws of an untimely demise and was accidentally whisked off into space along with a linguist named Vincent, his daughter Eva and General Eugene Govender of the Earth Defense Corps. Now, nine years later, she must save her species again, this time from itself. With her friendships fractured and thrown into a cauldron of eugenics and Cold War imperialism, she must rely on her intelligence, instincts and stubborn unwillingness to accept the world as it is.

Sylvain Neuvel is an engaging and atypical writer. Like the rest of the series, Only Human is told entirely in transcripts of conversations, interviews and news reports, and Neuvel handles this challenging storytelling medium extremely well. The story he tells is interesting and compelling, in large part due to the complexity of the supporting cast. Although the most enigmatic character from the first two novels—his name is never revealed, even when he details his own history—is absent, Vincent’s struggle with the responsibilities of fatherhood, and the blurred moralities of geneticist Alyssa Papantoniou and GRU officer Katherine Lebedev admirably fill that void. Even if the ending has a touch of deus ex machina, this is a story driven by its people more than its plot.

The familiarity of that plot at times makes Only Human the literary equivalent of a cover band of a cover band composed of better musicians than the groups they mimic. It is most reminiscent of Carl Sagan’s Contact or the recent film Arrival, both of which also featured an alien species contacting humanity at some technological milestone, a group of scientists attempting to decode that civilization’s language to construct and use a giant machine, and a realization of the flaws in human nature. But Neuvel’s narrative technique sets the Themis Files apart from its predecessors and demonstrates that even the most well-worn stories can always be told better than before.

Only Human is a fitting conclusion to a well-crafted sci-fi fable of human fallacy. Its plot may cover previously trodden ground, but its narrative technique and character depth make it worth the reader’s time. Just be sure to read the rest of the trilogy first.

In the first two books of the Themis Files, Dr. Rose Franklin discovered and rebuilt an alien war machine, nearly doomed the human race to extinction at the hands of an aggressively benevolent alien power, wrenched survival from the jaws of an untimely demise and was accidentally whisked off into space along with a linguist named Vincent, his daughter Eva and General Eugene Govender of the Earth Defense Corps. Now, nine years later, she must save her species again, this time from itself. With her friendships fractured and thrown into a cauldron of eugenics and Cold War imperialism, she must rely on her intelligence, instincts and stubborn unwillingness to accept the world as it is.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Space Opera

Review by Noah Fram

Decibel Jones, one-time rock god and full-time personification of glam and glitter, wakes up from a hangover to confront an alien invasion. More precisely, he wakes up to find himself being abducted. The aliens want to know more about humanity, and they have chosen Jones and his old band, the Absolute Zeros, as the best living specimens.

That is the extent of the similarities between Space Opera and any other book about humankind’s first interaction with extraterrestrial life. Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros are not bound for an examination room and a catalog; rather, they are headed for a stage. These aliens’ research method of choice is, of all things, a song competition, and they hope to determine whether or not humanity has enough soul to be allowed to survive.

Although Catherynne M. Valente’s delightful sense of humor is the most constant aspect of her prose, it is not the most memorable. Although her comedic talents are reminiscent of Douglas Adams at his best, Valente’s palette is far larger. Her prose is always quick and engrossing, but the content ranges from a glitzy, sometimes profane satirization of the music industry and its larger-than-life characters, to dead-serious flashbacks and a genuinely moving finale.

That ability to fluidly tie real-world tragedy together with psychedelic hilarity is perhaps Space Opera’s most impressive attribute. Valente’s writing here is as strong as anything taught as “good prose,” although the rock and whimsy will keep it from finding its way into the traditional literary canon anytime soon. And that’s a shame. It takes confidence, skill and talent to craft a tragic disco ball metaphor, and Valente has all three in spades.

At the end of the day, Valente’s fiction of a high-stakes, sequined Intergalactic Idol ably addresses what it means to be human and what it means to love someone, while being ever-entertaining and, crucially, being the kind of book that makes you want to dance. It’s got soul, after all.

Decibel Jones, one-time rock god and full-time personification of glam and glitter, wakes up from a hangover to confront an alien invasion. More precisely, he wakes up to find himself being abducted. The aliens want to know more about humanity, and they have chosen Jones and his old band, the Absolute Zeros, as the best living specimens.

FictionThriller

Prey becomes predator

Review by Noah Fram

Can you be redeemed for crimes you did not commit? Charlotte Rowe has spent her adult life trying to find out. A husband-and-wife serial killer team kidnapped the infant Charlotte after they murdered her mother. They groomed her to follow in her footsteps, teaching her to operate a furnace that burned the bodies of their victims, and were about to initiate her into their killings when the FBI raided their hideout. Charlotte has spent her entire life under the spectre of their crimes, and the suspicion of some that she was complicit in the murders.

So when a powerful corporation and its shadowy allies trick her into piloting an experimental technology that gives her superhuman powers, Charlotte must decide whether she will seek freedom from their manipulations, or use their questionable but effective means to ensure no one else will have a childhood like hers.

It is instantly clear that there are no perfect heroes in Christopher Rice’s Bone Music, and that everybody has skeletons in their closets. The thrill, and for many readers, the challenge, is figuring out what those skeletons are, how they’re related and which of the many flawed people that populate Rice’s fictional American Southwest are really the good guys.

Bone Music is reminiscent of Michael Crichton at his best, but without his occasional myopias. Rice is refreshingly frank when constructing his characters, drawing clear distinctions among them without resorting to rhetorical kitsch or overwrought stereotyping. And he is really, truly funny. Although present-tense narration can be gimmicky, Rice’s storytelling voice carries enough bite that his real-time engagement with the story is consistently enjoyable, and his frequent sly interjections are welcome breaks in what could, in a different writer’s hands, so easily be a mawkishly macabre tale.

There are moments when Rice teeters on the brink of sensationalism, a rhetorical dance that supplies its own kind of thrill. Bone Music has not been sanitised, much to its credit. Few thrillers worth their salt are. Its population of survivors do not lend themselves to anodyne platitudes or flowery syntax, and Rice supplies neither. His characters are blunt, forthright, and frequently caustic, and his writing suits them well.

Bone Music is a funny, engaging story filled with interwoven backstories and intrigue that rarely, if ever, slows down. It’s a high-energy sci-fi thriller with few pretensions, a consistently entertaining and engagingly crafted story that careens around dusty Arizona roads, glittering corporate boardrooms and anonymous corners of the internet as each of its characters search for answers, seeking absolution for transgressions both real and imagined. And it’s a hell of a lot of fun to read.

Can you be redeemed for crimes you did not commit? Charlotte Rowe has spent her adult life trying to find out. A husband-and-wife serial killer team kidnapped the infant Charlotte after they murdered her mother. They groomed her to follow in her footsteps, teaching her to operate a furnace that burned the bodies of their victims, and were about to initiate her into their killings when the FBI raided their hideout. Charlotte has spent her entire life under the spectre of their crimes, and the suspicion of some that she was complicit in the murders.

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Sam Hawke

Interview by Noah Fram

“I was seven years old the first time my uncle poisoned me.” The first sentence of Sam Hawke’s City of Lies lets the reader know exactly what they’re in for. A deliciously tense, well-crafted start to a new fantasy series, City of Lies follows Jovan and Kalina, two young nobles who have been raised to detect poisons and prevent them from harming the ruling family of Sjona. When their father and the monarch are assassinated, Jovan and Kalina have to protect the new ruler—their close friend Tain—from threats both within the city and outside its walls. We talked to Hawke about devising fictional poisons, creating a magic system based on emotion and the real-world parallels in her fantastic new world.

A lot can happen in the process of crafting a novel, especially when it’s part of a series. How different is the final product of City of Lies from what you originally intended when you set out to write it?
In some ways very similar, and in others quite different. I think it has stayed true to its core—that is, the main characters, who they are, how they relate to each other and the broad plot. What changed fairly dramatically over the course of editing was its structure (it was originally geared more heavily toward Jovan’s storyline, and undersold Kalina’s), some of the history of the world and the motivation for the rebellion and the active role of magic in the story.

I think the six guilds (Warrior, Craft, Artist, Stone, Theatre and Scribe) are fascinating, both because of their roles in the plot and the picture they paint of Sjonan society. How did you choose them? Was it more about plot, world building or something else entirely?
Definitely world building. The Guilds are a handy shorthand for what the society values and elevates—arts, science, learning, cultural pursuits—and what it doesn’t. There were a few extra Guilds that got cut for the purposes of tightening the cast early on, though!

Many religions use clothing as a mark of faith or status, and discrimination against members of those religions based on their dress is both a huge contemporary issue and something that turns up in City of Lies with characters like Hadrea. Did you intend to deal with or comment on those real-world parallels?
I definitely was influenced by real-world events in looking at how a dominant culture can steamroll smaller ones, whether through deliberate design or unthinking ignorance. In this case, the cultural difference is partially religious, but it’s also based on the class and geographical divide between the cities, and the land and people that keep the city fed and supplied. Where there are no racial or other physical cues to identify differences, dress custom, jewelry and other body markings can be a visual identifier of those differences and therefore the target of mockery and discrimination (or subtler aggressions such as taking the trappings of the religion and using them in a manner stripped of meaning).

Your choice to focus on proofers and poisoners reminded me of Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice series. Were those books something you thought about when writing City of Lies?
I love a good assassin story but I wanted to write the kind of inverse to that: the tale of the spoiled and pampered officials being targeted, rather than the tale of the assassins themselves. What I particularly love about Robin’s books, and what makes them stand out from other assassin romps, is that the poisonings and manipulations performed are never presented in a glorified or glamorous way. Fitz takes no joy in his position. He’s not a wry, unruffled or revenge-fuelled assassin. He’s not a cool loner. If anything, I was inspired by the way those books deal with the emotional cost of every decision and the consequences of a lifestyle of that nature. While my story is focused on defense rather than attack, the way that my characters think about poisonings and violence is never offhanded.

Your blog is a mix of thoughts on writing, life stories and humor (I had never considered how well I actually know the back of my hand until reading your bio), and your novel reads in a similar way, so I was curious—how much do you think you have a “writer voice” that’s different from your normal voice? You can take that to be about word selection, pacing or basically anything else you’d like.
I’m a lot sillier in real life than in fiction (at least I hope), and more conversational in my style, but I suspect the ole Samishness bleeds through into everything I do. I admire other writers who are far more elegant in their writing than I am, but I always sound like me to me. Just, with fewer rants about cheese hangovers.

You clearly put a lot of thought into the specific poisons and their effects in City of Lies. How much is all of that based on actual research into historical and current poisons, and how much of it was invented for your world specifically?
Oh, lots of both. Because the world I had created was pretty low magic, I still wanted it to feel like a different reality, and one way to do that, besides pretty significant cultural differences, was to have a lot less reliance on our world’s standard trappings in terms of flora and fauna. So while there are some recognizable “earth” type plants and animals, most are invented. I also didn’t want to be writing a manual on how to poison somebody for real, and I didn’t want to be bound by particular expectations about what certain plants do and don’t do. But having said that, a lot of my fictional poisons are based loosely on real ones to help me along! I left a few clues in the names so keen-eyed readers can probably spot some similarities.

I love that your magic is based on a kind of emotional communion rather than incantations or spells, and I’m always curious where fantasy writers get those structures from, especially when they’re as central to the conflict as yours. Can you talk a bit about building the magical and cultural mechanics of Sjona, and what kinds of inspiration you drew on for that process?
My POV characters know literally nothing about the magic in their world. I wanted it to retain a certain air of confusion and mystery and surrealism because that’s how it comes across to them. (Readers who are only into very detailed, rule-based magic systems, beware, this may not be for you.) Since the Darfri culture was the original way of life for Sjona, and is something retained in the more remote areas of the country but largely forgotten in the cities, it seemed natural to fit with an indigenous tradition of great respect for and desire to work harmoniously with the land. It made sense to have a kind of elemental magic that linked people and the land itself. Without giving spoilers, the concept of spirits bound to particular landmarks was obviously important to the plot, and I wanted there to be a symbiotic relationship between people and spirits, and for the use of magic to be tied to that relationship. As part of my personal tastes, I like reading about magical systems that are entwined with emotions rather than intellectualism (because that’s messier, and gives you loads of scope for good character moments), and that felt like a natural tie into what humans could offer to the equation.

City of Lies functions really well as a standalone story, but knowing it is the first installment of a trilogy changes the interpretation of several main storylines. How confident should we be in the way things seem to have wrapped up at this point?
Hmm, I’m not sure how to answer this without spoilers. You can definitely read City of Lies as a standalone—no big cliffhangers and the main plot threads are resolved (for the immediate term anyway). But the second book, Hollow Empire, deals with the very messy aftermath of the events in the first book and brings in new but related threats. The story will also pan out to see more of the continent outside Sjona. I don’t think I can say much more!

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of City of Lies.

Author photo (c) Kris Arnold Photography.

“I was seven years old the first time my uncle poisoned me.” The first sentence of Sam Hawke’s City of Lies lets the reader know exactly what they’re in for. A deliciously tense, well-crafted start to a new fantasy series, City of Lies follows Jovan and Kalina, two young nobles who have been raised to detect poisons and prevent them from harming the ruling family of Sjona. When their father and the monarch are assassinated, Jovan and Kalina have to protect the new ruler—their close friend Tain—from threats both within the city and outside its walls. We talked to Hawke about devising fictional poisons, creating a magic system based on emotion and the real-world parallels in her fantastic new world.

Science Fiction & FantasyHistorical FantasyFantasy

Genevieve Cogman

Interview by Noah Fram

Libraries are (obviously) always important. But in Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library series, a library is what keeps all of existence in balance. Tasked with keeping the peace between the noble, orderly dragons and the chaotic, untrustworthy Fae, the Librarians reside outside of time itself and maintain the balance between all possible worlds. Sometimes, this even involves stealing extraordinarily powerful books whose effect will too drastically alter the status of their world. In the fifth installment of the series, heroic Librarian Irene is summoned to solve a murder in an alternate-reality Paris before it derails a historic peace conference. We talked to Cogman about the future of her series, and which alternate-reality book she’d love to steal.

I love the concept for this series—two supernatural species, kept in balance by Librarians who can alter little pockets of reality and go about stealing disruptive books to keep them safe in their Invisible Library. Where on earth did it come from?
It came from a whole mix of things, really—law and chaos at opposing ends of the universe, and mysterious interdimensional libraries [of] Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman and other sources. Like a lot of authors, I pulled out the bits I liked and put them together in a new way.

The plot of The Mortal Word relies in some ways on its setting in Paris. Did the setting or the story come first, or were they in balance, as it were?
I picked Paris because I particularly wanted to use a specific location in Paris. (I’m not saying which location it is because I don’t want to spoil the story, but anyone who’s finished the book can probably guess.) So I suppose the setting and the story were mostly in balance. But Paris fit in other ways—it was convenient for the peace conference and luxurious enough to keep the participants in a good mood. I suppose the peace conference could have been held in Antarctica in an abandoned science station, where nobody would have known about it, but imagine how certain people would have reacted on being asked to accept local inconveniences.

Have you read any books that you’re surprised a Librarian hasn’t stolen? And are there any alternate reality books you’d be tempted to steal?
Well, I have a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, which I would think anyone would want to steal, but that’s not actually fiction. If we were to consider unique books which never got written in this world but might have been written in other worlds, I’d love to read a version of The Tale of Genji which actually went into how Genji died—in our world, that chapter is left blank, but who knows how the story goes in other worlds?

Each Fae has an archetype or a character that they follow, and their actions are prescribed by the nature of that character. Since they’re at war with the dragons, what do you think would happen if a Fae adopted a draconic archetype?
Unfortunately (for them), a Fae can’t actually turn into a dragon. (I’m sure it’s been tried!) It is quite possible for a Fae to adopt a noble, virtuous archetype, and in that case, they would behave in a noble and virtuous way. I’m not sure any dragon would trust them, though . . .

I got the impression that when the Fae’s stories get too many reboots, they’d turn out a bit like the Countess, with their personalities shattered and shot through with contradictions. Has that ever been done deliberately or tactically in the Invisible Library’s world?
It’s more the opposite—some Fae deliberately restrict their archetype in order to stay more focused, human and sane. Others prefer to go for the heights, and often go out in a blaze of glory. And there are always other Fae coming along after them, willing to take over the identity or imitate it on a smaller scale. There are probably half a dozen other would-be-Countesses out there, less powerful than the “acknowledged” one, lurking in their castles and dreaming of power.

I was struck while reading by the connections between the dragons’ characters and their elements, but also the connections between elements of related dragons. (For instance, Ao Ji’s affinity for ice and Kai’s affinity for water.) Are dragons’ elemental affinities tied to their personalities, or are they more hereditary or familial?
That is an interesting question to which the dragons don’t have a definite answer. It is considered fortunate for a dragon to have the same elemental affinity as one of their parents (Kai’s father also has an affinity to water), but it’s far from always the case. However, a dragon who has a strong affinity for a particular element will usually organize their life and surroundings to be conveniently close to that element—both for preference and for strategic reasons.

The Mortal Word feels a bit like an episode of a long-running serial, and the series could theoretically go on for as long as you want it to. How much more of the Invisible Library world do you think you’ll end up exploring?
I’m not sure at the moment. I do intend that the series will have an ending, and I have a rough plotline up to the end of book eight. Beyond that, I can’t be certain. (Or there is the possibility of exploring other parts of that universe—Irene isn’t the only Librarian who gets into trouble.)

There’s a reference to a Library cataloging system, in which worlds are given numbers, and one number, in particular, is very prominently mentioned. What world is Beta-001? Or is that something you can’t tell us right now?
It’s the first world that the Library has cataloged in the Beta series—the worlds that the Library considers to be magic-dominant. That may or may not be something important in the long run . . .

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Mortal Word.

Author photo © Deborah Drake.

Libraries are (obviously) always important. But in Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library series, a library is what keeps all of existence in balance. We talked to Cogman about the future of her series, and which alternate-reality book she’d love to steal.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Arkady Martine

Interview by Noah Fram

One of the most dazzling new settings in science fiction, Arkady Martine’s the City, capital of the Teixcalaan Empire, is a giddily complex combination of the Byzantine empire and Mesoamerican civilizations spread out over the vast expanse of an entire planet. Martine’s debut novel, A Memory Called Empire, strands novice diplomat Mahit Dzmare at the center of the City without the benefit of an imago-line—the memories and experiences of her predecessor, accessed via a brain implant. Now totally lacking the mysteriously deceased Yskandr Aghavn’s guidance, Mahit must investigate his death and advocate for her small mining station home’s independence.

We talked to Martine about faster-than-light travel, the joys of creating a complicated naming-system and which historical figure’s memories she’d like implanted in her brain.

Your background as both a historian and an apprentice city planner really shines through in A Memory Called Empire, especially in your beautifully complex depiction of the City. What were your inspirations for it?
The City—the Jewel of the World, the heart of Teixcalaan—is an oecumenopolis, a world-city: essentially a planet that has been fully urbanized aside from its oceans and its natural reserves. City-planets are quintessentially space opera for me—Star Wars’ Coruscant, for example, but also any number of others. I love the visual of the idea. All that architecture, a planet that would glow like a jewel, lit up with glass and metal and lights. But cities aren’t just visuals. They’re real, complex, messy places, and a planet-size city would be complex to the point of near-ungovernability . . .

Which of course is where the algorithm-driven subway system and other city-ruling algorithms and artificial intelligences that I created for the Jewel of the World come in. And because I study history, and because I work in city planning, I knew when I began thinking about those algorithms that they were going to be biased, be about panopticon control, be about making citizens of Teixcalaan visible to policing and governing forces . . . and making noncitizens either invisible or singled out for persecution. Because that’s what algorithms tend to do, because algorithms are written by human beings.

The other deep inspiration for the City comes from the fact that I’m a New Yorker, in that deeply obnoxious sense of being a New Yorker who thinks there aren’t any other real places in the world, if you’re asking me honestly. (Yes, yes, I know.) But also I love my city very passionately. And I have also studied Byzantium’s capital, Constantinople, and been very aware of how similar the concept of city-as-center-of-the-universe was for Constantinopolitans as it is for New Yorkers, so I wanted to play with that as an element of how my characters related to their setting.

How did you come up with the Teixcalaanli naming system?
The number-noun naming system of Teixcalaan is a direct reference to the naming practices of the Mixtec people of Oaxaca, who, like many Mesoamerican peoples, were named for the day in the 260-day cycle of the year on which they were born: a cycle of 13 numbers and 20 signs (animals, plants and natural phenomena). For the Teixcalaanli names, I have a very extensive document of “how to do a Teixcalaanli name correctly,” but the simplest version is as follows.

Each Teixcalaanli personal name has a number part and a noun part. Both parts have symbolic meanings. The number part of the name is a whole integer (i.e. no negative numbers, no decimals or fractions, and irrational numbers like pi or e are only for jokes). The range of numbers is almost always between one and 100, with lower numbers being more common. (Numbers over 100 are a little like naming your kid “Moon Unit” or “Apple.” Except that “Apple” is a perfectly normal Teixcalaanli name, and “Moon Unit” is only a little weird. . .)

The noun part of a Teixcalaanli name is always a plant, an inanimate object or a concept (in order of likelihood). No animals and no self-propelled inanimate things—i.e. “boat” is an acceptable noun, but “self-driving car” is not. (Honestly, though, both “Boat” and “Self-Driving Car” are names that Teixcalaanlitzlim would laugh at.) A lot of plant names are flowers and trees, including some unusual ones, like “Cyclamen”; object names tend to be related to the natural world (“Agate”), astronomical objects or phenomena (“Solar-Flare”) or common objects, often ones that can be held and manipulated. Tools are highly represented, like “Adze” or “Lathe.” Occasionally object names refer to architecture—“Five Portico” is only a little bit odd as a name. (Something like “Two Paving-Stone” would be odd, but no odder than a kid named “Winston.”)

This is probably more information than you wanted to know. I went deep on the world building on this bit because it was so damn fun.

Where did the jumpgates come from?
So, wormholes (or “hyperspace”) as a solution to faster-than-light (FTL) travel are a classic sci-fi trick, and the jumpgates are functionally wormholes. If you imagine a wide-bore needle that pokes through a piece of fabric and then picks up a different part of the fabric on the other side, and holds them together, that’s what a jumpgate does. You can go in either direction, but you can only get from point A to point B or vice versa at each individual jumpgate, and point A and point B have no actual contiguous bits except the jumpgate. This produces a kind of patchwork of interstellar travel, where System X and System Y might be hundreds of light-years away but very well connected through jumpgates, and thus part of the same political and even cultural unit, but System X and System Z could be only three or four light-years away but not connected through jumpgates, and thus very divergent in politics and culture.

In the Teixcalaanli universe, there isn’t any FTL that doesn’t involve jumpgates. They can go pretty fast! But not faster than light. And the physics of it all is pretty normal—they experience relativistic effects when traveling near light speed, so really they want to take jumpgates as much as possible.

But none of that answers why. The why is: I wanted to mimic the communication and travel difficulties of a medieval empire, while having my empire be In Space. And the jumpgates essentially function as mountain passes: narrow places that only a little bit of an army can go through at a time. It creates real constraints on how, where and why an empire can expand . . . and that’s what I wanted to be able to play with.

So basically, I made up some very complex physics so I could reproduce the situation of a Byzantine army trying to get into the Armenian highlands in 1054 CE. ☺

The threat of an alien species is a major part if A Memory Called Empire’s plot, but you don’t describe any other encounters with actual nonhumans directly. How do you think any contact between humankind and alien species would go? Would any of them be amicable, or would they all be like the ones with the three-ring ships?
I think it depends very much on the aliens. I can imagine there are aliens we can talk to, and aliens we can’t; aliens who we think we can talk to, and we aren’t really communicating with at all; and aliens who we simply don’t have anything to say to, don’t share any resource concerns or desires with.

I hope the first set we meet are kind and smart and savvy, and also mammals who breathe oxygen and have hierarchical structure, because otherwise we’re going to not be able to figure out how to say anything useful and understandable, and if they’re not kind, they may decide they’re better off without us.

Humans have some growing up to do before I’d trust us with interstellar negotiation, basically.

If you were part of a historical figure’s imago-line, who would it be and why?
This is genuinely the hardest question anyone has asked me recently, because it’s so hugely self-revelatory. Um. I’d be honoured to be the recipient of James Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon’s imago, and I think we’d be a surprisingly good match on aptitudes, but also I’d be scared as hell to take on a personality that is as strong and unique as hers. I love her work though, and it’s an enormous influence on mine.

For a more historical figure, I’ll be grandiose in my ambitions here and go for Börte Ujin, the Grand Empress of the Mongols, first wife of Temujin a.k.a. Genghis Khan, who ran the court in the center of the Mongol homeland. She was one of her husband’s closest advisors and a powerful ruler in her own right, a civilization builder and a politician. I’d like to be in the imago-line of her successors: a whole sequence of people who know how to create and manage a culture at a time of profound change, and did it through relationships and connections.

There’s one question that is explicitly raised in the book but never answered, so I thought I’d ask: How are the Sunlit made? Or is that a trade secret?
I am sorry to tell you that that is absolutely a trade secret, and you must stay tuned to find out. But you wouldn’t be wrong if you started thinking about those subway algorithms, and other ways of being a shared mind . . .

What’s next? Will there be more stories about Teixcalaan, or in Teixcalaan’s universe? Or something completely different?
There is a direct sequel to A Memory Called Empire, titled A Desolation Called Peace, coming out in 2020, which is a book about unwinnable wars, incomprehensible aliens and apocalyptic violenc—and also space kittens, unwise kissing and interstellar mail fraud. It’s the second part of Mahit’s story, and I’m very excited to be telling it. I absolutely don’t rule out writing more Teixcalaan books, either—the universe is enormous, and I love it quite desperately and have lots of ideas for books I could write. We’ll see how these two books are received and what my publisher is interested in!

But I’m also working on two other non-Teixcalaanli, novel-length projects. One is a “science fantasy” co-written with my wife Vivian Shaw, which contains, in no particular order, a post-nuclear war desertscape, mass-concentration-inducing minerals, a dead city that talks, a political romance, a pre-fab imperial colony town, a steppe kingdom with a city on a mountainside, a possibly alien or possibly magic local king and a geologist/mining engineer who ends up becoming a cartographer (among other things).

The other is the novel I’m currently calling “the one about drought politics, the Santa Ana winds and arson investigation,” because I’m terrible at titles. That one is my cities-and-climate-change novel, and to my fascination and despair, it seems to be about Los Angeles. As a New Yorker, I find this a bit distressing. But that’s what I get for really thinking about how Raymond Chandler books work, and whether they could fruitfully be combined with Peake’s Gormenghast and Tana French’s The Trespasser.

I’ve also got some plans in the works for a nonfiction book wthathich is about narrative-making, Byzantium, politics and possible futures—stay tuned, that’s a 2021 sort of thing.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of A Memory Called Empire.

Author photo by Karen Osborne.

We talked to A Memory Called Empire author Arkady Martine about faster-than-light travel, the joys of creating a complicated naming-system and which historical figure’s memories she’d like implanted in her brain.

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