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RYO Review: Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
Packed into his landing module and jettisoned from an interstellar spacecraft, Kris Kelvin heads towards Solaris. Solaris is a watery planet that has been under Earth’s observation for over a century. The consensus opinion holds that the ocean covering its surface is a single intelligent life form, but any detail of its nature or of the possibility of human communication with it has remained open to question. Over the past decade or so, interest in the planet has cooled among all but the most dedicated or obsessed Solarisists. The observation post on the planet was designed to house dozens of scientists. Kelvin will add a fourth to the three that are currently on board.
Kelvin lands on a strangely desolate facility. Even the robots are inactive. His one friend among the scientists on board has committed suicide. The others he believes are possibly insane. And they are not alone. A caricature of an African tribal woman stalks the hallways and the living scientists appear to hide living beings in their quarters. I associate Stanislaw Lem with the brainy comedy of his short fiction, but the opening chapters of Solaris are as unnerving as any horror novel I have ever read.
RYO Review: Halfway Human by Caroline Ives Gilman
Intended Audience: Adult
Sexual content: Explicit
Ace/Genderqueer characters: yes
Rating: R for heavy sexual violence, suicidal characters and disturbing imagery
Writing style: 5/5
Likable characters: 4/5
Plot/Concepts: 4/5
Valerie has never met a Gammadian bland before, but when Tedla is found half-dead in an alley, Val is called in to make sense of this sexless being. Tedla’s life has not been easy, not least of all because blands are treated as a nonhuman slave class by the males and females of Gammadis.
I had misgivings about this book when I first heard the synopsis. Would this be another story in which a sexless asexual “non-human” would become human through discovering sexuality and gender? Given that so many becoming-human stories have such a discovery or relationship as an important milestone, I was worried this would be the same, and thus invalidate Tedla’s identity. I also balked at the name “bland”, since this seemed like just another instance of thinking that nonsexual means boring. And yes, this is another story in which the sexless characters are referred to as “it”. This serves the double purpose of not sexing the blands but also illustrating their nonhuman status in the eyes of the other Gammadians.
RYO Review: Blameless by Gail Carriger
Gail Carriger‘s The Parasol Protectorate novels are like delicious, ridiculously decorated little petit fours of books. I read Blameless in under twenty-four hours, mostly in two sittings. I went through two cups of lavender Earl Grey tea, one glass of wine, two espressos, and one cup of vanilla black tea while reading it. The espresso is not very Parasol Protectorate-ish, but Alexia was in Italy for that portion of the book.
I was a little afraid going into this book, because the end of the last book was very heavy, and also Conall was absolutely terrible, so I was afraid that in order to provide conflict throughout this book, he would continue to be a jerkface and then I wouldn’t be able to be happy about him and Alexia getting back together (which was basically the inevitable ending). Luckily, things weren’t as bad as I feared on that front, since (a) the book only takes place over a few weeks, and (b) apparently Conall deals with his feelings by getting sloshed off formaldehyde and then the mess he created continues because he can’t sober up for weeks, not because he is continuing to actually have dumber-than-a-brick opinions about the whole mess.
RYO Review: The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Telling (2000) is Ursula K. Le Guin‘s eighth (and currently last) novel in the Hainish series. It won the 2001 Locus SF Award. I recently read a 2013 interview with Le Guin in which she says “Maybe, as I’ve gone on, what I’ve learned as a writer is that you do as little as possible. And part of it is leaving a lot of it up to the reader. And a lot of it is realizing you don’t have to do that much if you do the right thing. That’s enough. So my writing has tended to be shorter and more allusive than it used to be.”
Le Guin follows her own advice in The Telling. In this age of enormous page counts and authors who are now “too famous” to be edited, the hardback edition of her book is 264 pages (with a nice, big font and very comfortable margins). In many ways this book reads like an Eastern koan: Le Guin never explains; she never tells the reader what to think. She presents contrasting ideas in beautiful language and lets the reader decide what it all means.
