You can read my book reviews below:
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Becky Chambers
Tor.com
Hardcover July 2021, $20.99
ISBN: 978-1250236210
In Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built, the robots of the verdant moon Panga gained consciousness, left the factories in which they labored, and entered the wilderness, where they remained unseen for centuries, until the story begins. The mysterious departure and return of these robots serves as the foundation of this book, but the heart of this novel is devoted to the grander themes of what it means to be alive, either for robots or humans.
The opening of the tale deftly sketches out this world from the conflicting perspectives of six religious orders, each with their own views as to which divinity holds sway over robotic consciousness—say, the god of machines, or of the wilderness. In this way, Chambers sets up the groundwork for the main character of her novel, the monk Sibling Dex.
Dex seeks to vanish into the wilderness much as the robots have. There is no hardship driving this mission. The city in which Dex lives is described as an architectural marvel perfumed with spices and nectar. The order to which Dex belongs is less of an ascetic sect than it is a fellowship devoted to scholarship and to service, a found family of Brothers, Sisters and Siblings, the latter term denoting monks that prefer they and them as pronouns as Dex does. But for no reason Dex initially understands, they want to hear the sound of crickets, an obsession that ultimately becomes a quest.
Although Dex faces a number of detours on their way to the wild, they ultimately end up where they wish—alone in a firefly-lit campsite in the forest with a medley of veggies simmering in butter and folk music playing on their pocket computer, And just as they step out naked and dripping wet from a shower, a seven-foot-tall robot unexpectedly strides out of the woods announcing the return of the machines.
The robot, Mosscap, explains the machines now want to discover what humans want, and sees Dex as potentially a perfect way to accomplish this mission. In exchange, Mosscap suggests it can help get Dex safely to their destination in the wilderness.
The resulting talks between the monk and robot are intriguing, delving into the nature of robot society and machine viewpoints on life, death, ecology and the nature of intelligence. At the same time, Chambers’ gift for dialogue means these chats are far from pedantically philosophical, and she milks a great deal of humor from the way the robot seeks companionship while the monk just wants to be left alone.
On the surface, the story is about recontact between robots and humanity. However, fundamentally, it’s about one person’s challenging journey into the wild to understand why they should be alive. The monk comes to question everything about the expedition and themselves, and the answers they reach yield insights on how to find purpose in life, potentially shedding light on why the robots may have done what they did.
The focus of the novel is not on action or thrills, but on charm and insight. The world is detailed so lovingly, it’s little wonder that Dex wants to explore it:
Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted by the traffic of worms, hopeful spiders’ hunting cabins, crash pads for nomadic beetles, trees shyly locking toes with one another.
And Chambers adorns her tale with little unexpected treasures every now and then, such as villages suspended from trees that “looked akin to shells, cut open to reveal soft geometry. Everything there curved—the rain-shielding roofs, the light-giving windows, the bridges running between like jewelry.”
Between Dex’s pursuit of and entry into the wild, they become a tea monk—they listen to a person’s woes and serve them a cup of tea. It’s a profession depicted so delightfully that one might wish it existed in real life. The book acts much like a tea monk itself—readers listen to problems one might easily imagine themselves, and left with a soothing experience and potentially a fresh perspective on their lives.
***
Déjà Doomed
Ed Lerner
Caezik Science Fiction & Fantasy
Trade Paperback May 2021, $14.99
ISBN: 978-1647100278
In the starkly beautiful airless landscape of the far side of the moon, a prospector telerobotically guides a rover to hunt for the iridium ore that he hopes will make him rich. He finds more than he bargains for—the mummy of an alien. It’s a discovery in Ed Lerner’s Déjà Doomed that will spur covert operations, global intrigue and, ultimately, a race to save humanity.
The story begins with multiple lunar bases seeking to exploit the moon’s unique resources. The United States is constructing a radio observatory on the lunar far side, an array of telescopes protected from the din of radio signals from Earth to better analyze the universe, one built mostly from moon rock instead of components hauled at prohibitive cost from Earth. Russia has a base on the far side as well, strip-mining lunar dust for helium-3 to help drive fusion reactors.
The novel does a fine job establishing the general workaday nature of life on the moon, one usually focused on budgets, timetables and other mundanities, one where taking part on pioneering missions is likely of less significance to most people there than personal matters such as parenting and pregnant spouses. By showing what it might really be like to strive to live an ordinary life on the moon, the book underscores the extraordinary nature of the events that end up driving the story.
The alien discovery leads the CIA to draft the engineer managing the far-side observatory project to covertly investigate the find. He assembles a small ragtag team for the clandestine mission, with the United States seeking to keep any extraterrestrial treasures they find to themselves.
Secrets don’t remain secret for long in the story due to smart, determined opposition. Most of the novel is devoted to the struggle between the U.S. and Russian teams over the alien finding. The book does a good job depicting the Russians as thoughtful antagonists, making clever deductions as to what the Americans want and will likely do based off the scant intelligence the Russians can glean.
The moon’s far side, which permanently faces away from Earth, is an intriguing setting for a story. Whereas the moon’s near side boasts huge smooth plains, the far side, long unfamiliar to human eyes, is deeply scarred with craters upon craters upon craters, making its exploration challenging.
Déjà Doomed shines when depicting the difficulties of working on the moon. For instance, the monotonous lunar landscape can make it easy to lose one’s bearings, and hide perils such as crevasses. Anyone who has had to deal with similar fissures on Earth while crossing glaciers knows that while deep cracks in the surface might not sound very dangerous, these hidden chasms can easily prove fatal.
The novel depicts the Americans investigating the alien discovery as believably flawed, usually confident and correct within their areas of expertise but overconfident and wrong outside matters they know best. For instance, the CIA agent managing the mission from Earth has no ground experience on the moon, and so blithely and idiotically assumes the 1,800-mile drive there will be an easy road trip just a few days long like a spring break vacation. Instead, the pockmarked nature of the lunar far side easily doubles the distance for the voyage in order to drive around the many obstacles there. At the same time, the spy is rightfully paranoid that others are watching, whereas the head of the U.S. team is a bit naive in this regard.
The book also showcases the challenges of carrying out the tradecraft expected of spies, especially if one is a drafted amateur instead of a trained intelligence agent. Operations security measures designed to foil surveillance, such as radio silence and performing the charades of cover missions for anyone who might be watching, can prove aggravating if one is uncertain they are actually necessary or working, but one slip can lead to ruin.
Much of the drama of Déjà Doomed focuses on the shenanigans between the Russians and American teams, neither side trusting the other, only working together at times because they cannot simply dislodge the other from the site without major incident. The paranoia and cloak-and-dagger read heavily like a drama from the Cold War.
The most interesting part of Déjà Doomed” for many readers will likely be the aliens, whose drama is suitably cosmic in scope. Mysteries abound when it comes to the extraterrestrials, such as why they are found on the far side of the moon as opposed to on Earth. The answers, when they come, ultimately pose an existential threat to humanity.
As befitting a book written by an engineer, a great deal of loving detail is spent describing both futuristic human technology as well as alien devices. A number of life-and-death struggles are also satisfyingly bested with the judicious application of improvised feats of engineering ingenuity.
All in all, Déjà Doomed is a straightforward tale whose clear descriptions are helpful at making readers feel as if they are really there.
***
Elder Race
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tor.com
Trade Paperback Nov 2021, $13.59
ISBN: 978-1250768728
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race begins with the youngest princess of a faraway realm scaling a mountain to venture to the Tower of the Elder Sorcerer. A demon stalks the land, and she goes to invoke the royal pact between her family and the last of the ancients in the hopes of using magic to fight magic.
But nothing is as it seems. The sorcerer in question is a starfaring scientist, alive for centuries through the judicious use of suspended animation. The lowly anthropologist second-class is forbidden to interfere on the distant planet, but he has broken these rules before for the princess’s ancestor and is drawn to do so again for this latest quest.
Arthur C. Clarke noted that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Elder Race follows in the acclaimed tradition of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in blending science fiction with epic fantasy. It’s a kind of tale told many times before, but Elder Race nevertheless succeeds in crafting a worthy new entry in this style of story, one seasoned with humor and humanity.
Tchaikovsky specifically pays homage to Gene Wolfe’s “Trip, Trap,” a short story made up of two interweaving narratives often telling the same events from two different points of view, a war chieftain and a field xenoarchaeologist. Elder Race alternates between the perspectives of the princess and the anthropologist, although in one notable chapter, both viewpoints are displayed side by side to highlight just how poorly they understand one another. What the princess views as a legendary battle with a monster, the anthropologist sees as dealing with a malfunctioning appliance.
The charm of the novel stems mainly from defective translations and the wide cultural gulf between the princess and the anthropologist. For example, the princess wanted to know why the anthropologist looked sad, and when he tried to explain he was suffering from clinical depression, that isn’t what she ends up hearing:
“There is a beast that has hounded me down the centuries,” Nyrgoth told her. His hand lifted, and she shivered and leant back in case he should touch her again. His words filled her with a sense of creeping dread.
“It is always at my back,” he continued, “and sometimes it grows bold and its teeth are at my throat. It drags me down, and if I did not carry a shield against it, I could not get up from beneath its weight. But perhaps it is the same with you, or some of your people, though maybe they have never told you. Such beasts hunt in secrecy; even their prey are loath to speak of them for fear of showing weakness.”
“My uncle was killed by a cerkitt, a wild one,” she said uncertainly, but she knew it wasn’t the same thing. A beast that hunted sorcerers would doubtless savage a thousand men like her uncle and barely pause. She shuddered and returned to the fire and slept very poorly.
Although Tchaikovsky knows how to mine humor from his premise, the story is not simply a comedy and his characters are not clowns. The princess and the anthropologist are sympathetically drawn as overcoming their own personal doubts and limitations to do their best to do good in the world.
The princess is drawn as appealingly headstrong and vulnerable. As a child, she escaped her retainers to see the Elder Tower and, despite getting embarrassed in front of the court of her mother the queen as a punishment, deciding that being the first person to lay eyes on it for a very long time made it all worthwhile. This same bravery drives her as an adult to confront demons, but her willfulness takes a toll on her as well, robbing her of respect from her family she hopes to buy with heroic deeds.
The princess sees the anthropologist as a seven-foot-tall horned figure from legend capable of commanding mechanical demons. The anthropologist mostly sees himself as an embarrassing failure due to his many lapses of professional judgment when it comes to interfering with the natural cultural development of a lost colony.
An intriguing piece of neurotechnology that play a central role in the anthropologist’s life is a brain implant that allows him to compartmentalize his feelings for maximum scientific objectivity and mission effectiveness. However, it cannot suppress his emotions indefinitely, and when he has to turn it off every now and again, his despair at living alone for centuries in a potentially meaningless way catches up to him. It cuts him off from fear and doubt, but also much-needed sadness and happiness—an intriguing exploration of the costs and benefits of the device.
The ending of the novel unexpectedly veers into Lovecraftian horror, which readers might have mixed feelings about. Still, the story ultimately ends in a satisfying way true to its spirit and to its characters.