The Book of Phoenix - Nnedi Okorafor

The internet-o-sphere has been abuzz lately about diversity in fantasy and science fiction. It's a valid concern for sure: for over a century both genres have been dominated by white men, and the worlds they create reflect not only their time but their culture. How many fantasy stories are based on medieval Europe and all that goes along with that, including subjugation of women, feudal/monarchy systems of government and absence/tokenism of minorities? It stands to reason that if we approach these genres from outside of that perspective, we'll get new, fresh, incredibly interesting worlds that may resonate with readers who have never been able to see themselves in these traditional narratives.

Nnedi Okorafor is an outspoken proponent of fantasy diversity, and her books work to fill that void as well. Previously I was introduced to her post-apocalyptic African-based book Who Fears Death via a college course, but I realized I had a copy of her short story collection Kabu Kabu on my shelf already. And once I got into them? I was hooked. This is a fantasy I hadn't seen before.

Great art, too.

The Book of Phoenix, released this May, is a prequel to Who Fears Death. We listen to the story of Phoenix Okore, a genetically engineered woman who burns like a sun and rises from her ashes. She escapes from the tower where she's been contained for the first few years of her life (she ages dramatically fast, and is only three for the majority of the book, though she appears around 40) and, over the course of the book, discovers more about what the people who kept her captive have done to her, her birth mother, her genetic siblings, and her friends and lover, all of whom are of African descent. It's a kind of 'let my people go' quest, only Phoenix holds nothing back. She's willing to destroy everything to achieve justice.

Okorafor's worldbuilding is always a pleasure. I really enjoyed how she tied this story, not only to Who Fears Death but also to one of her short stories, Spider the Artist (which, incidentally, can be read online at Lightspeed Magazine). The anansi droids, spider-like robots, guard the Nigerian oil lines, but become too dangerous to be around people. In The Book of Phoenix, they're spotted by Phoenix swimming through the ocean, having left Nigeria. We don't know their exact intentions, but it's certainly ominous. Are they looking for more humans to kill? Are these machines programmed to hate the human race? It's a small commentary on how AI has the potential to get away from us. You can also see how these droids, and the atrocities committed by the Big Eye towers, could contribute to a mythology in Who Fears Death where humans were punished for their technological sins.

In fact, that's really the basis of the story. The Book of Phoenix is constructing the mythology of the Great Book in Who Fears Death. It's all very interconnected, and fascinating for that.

It's something to note, too, exactly how important race is to this story. I think a lot of fantasy and science fiction, when attempting to be diverse, makes race incidental to the character. And in some settings, that could make perfect sense. A fantasy world without out our particular societal baggage, I could see skin color being incidental to a character's personality. But in many others, it seems like either a mistake or a missed opportunity. Our race--though a construct created entirely by our perceptions--does have an effect on who we are. We can see that effect in the Book of Phoenix, in every African character, that their heritage is an integral part of the character and shapes how they move and talk and react and even how they see each other and how others see them. This is what I mean when I say making race incidental is a missed opportunity: there's an extra dimension to these characters because of how they interact with the world, influenced by their race.

I think this can be something hard for white authors to understand. Is this what leads authors to make entirely white casts? Or, sometimes, token characters with racial signifiers, that maybe have no bearing on the character's development? White authors certainly CAN write characters of color effectively, but I think it takes a level of commitment to writing authentically and trying to understand the experiences of someone not like yourself. But ultimately, I think it's going to be most important to continue to push for diversity in publishing, in race and sexual identity and ability. Those are the authors that are going to be giving us the deepest truths about these experiences. I say this as a white author who, still, will try to find my own place in the industry and do my best to contribute to the solutions, not the problems.

As always, your mileage may vary. All I can say is I like the focus that #weneeddiversebooks is getting, and I hope that it continues.

"Phoenix," she said. Hearing my name come from her lips made me feel stronger. "I birthed you all on my lonesome. They cleared out soon as I was in labor. They left me in that building, talked to me by portable. They were sure you'd blow up...or something. But you came out alive, eyes all open. Glowing like a little sun--orange under ebony brown. Brownest newborn I ever saw. I held you." She shut her eyes and she held my hand. She opened her eyes and looked intensely into mine. "I held you. They come back when they knew it was safe. Took you from me! They'd promised me I could raise you! That you'd be mine." She breathed heavily, wheezing and coughing.
"Easy," I whispered, patting her on the back.
"They classified you as a 'dangerous non-human person'. That's how they justified taking you from me like that. But then, what's that make me?" She coughed again, weaker. "Phoenix, give 'em hell. You hear me girl? Give 'em hell."

Overall: 5 stars

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The Giver - Lois Lowry

I've been digging into books from my childhood again lately, to mixed success. Some failed miserably to live up to my memories (Redwall, Pern, among others), but others, the ones that I think are truly remarkable, hold up well. The Giver is a great example of that. Though maybe better known to today's audiences as a exceedingly subpar movie adaptation, Lowry's original book was published in 1993 and was awarded multiple honors, including the 1994 Newberry Medal.

Hollywood always gotta insert romance into a story that doesn't have one and doesn't NEED one.

The Giver was perhaps dystopian fiction before dystopian fiction became a thing. It takes place in an implied future, where every aspect of life as we know it today has been changed: hills don't exist, because they interfered with shipping and travel. Weather doesn't exist, because it interferes with the efficiencies of life. Sunlight doesn't exist. Color doesn't exist. Everyone is herded through early life in groups according to their birthyear, and they explore the same milestones together, learning about interdependence and the importance of community cohesiveness. Careers are assigned to them based on their aptitudes, spouses are assigned based on compatibility. Sex doesn't exist, children are born by birthmothers and assigned to family units. Rules are paramount. Rules are what keeps the community existing.

Enter Jonas, who approaches his twelfth year ceremony with apprehension, the year everyone gets their career assignments. The community is shocked when he is assigned to be the Receiver of Memory. Jonas learns about how the previous Receiver, now the Giver, holds the memories of the time before, meant to remember all the hardships that all these extraneous things brought them, and advise the community when questions arise that would bring the state of their community into jeopardy.

 I wouldn't say it's an overly complicated plot or anything, and yes, we see this idea of sameness=bad, freedom to make our choices=good, etc. in other works, but I think it's important to consider first, the time that this was published, and second, the audience. This book came out before our latest glut of science fiction and dystopian young adult works, so really, a lot of the work we're seeing now is really sampling from what Lowry wrote. For example, Divergent uses the same trope of "This categorizing isn't LIVING! Freeeeeedooooom!" -- only executed a lot poorer. But also, this is children's fiction, possibly middle grade by today's publishing standards. You don't want a middle grade book to be TOO far above the audience's heads, which this book is not. The writing is easy to understand and digest.What makes Lowry's writing so much higher quality is the fact that while easy to understand, it's still challenging for that age group, and really gives them something to think about in terms of what they might want society to look like in the future

There's not a whole lot I can take away from this from a technical standpoint, because I don't think that middle grade will be my genre of choice, but I like having the example of what's appropriate for that age group. If that was something I wanted to explore at some point, The Giver would certainly be a decent example to emulate, as far as word choice and sentence structure.

One thing I found interesting is how Lowry emphasized the characters that have distinctively light-colored eyes: Jonas, the Giver, and the previous Receiver all do; as well as Gabe, the newchild that Jonas's family is caring for. There's also a female Six that Jonas mentions has the same eyes. They mention that the Birthmothers only bear three children in three years and then retire, so it's not possible that all there could have the same birthmother, but I do wonder if they're related somehow. It makes it seem like the ability to give and receive these memories (which Gabe can also do) is somehow related to their genetics. Perhaps the community has a store of sperm? I wonder how they would replenish that supply, given that every male in the community takes the pills that remove all sexual desire?

Additionally, it's never really explained how the memories 'escape' and return to the community. When Rosemary was released/died, her memories just flew out and everyone had a piece of them. It's heavily implied that Jonas and Gabe die, but they make it seem as if they believe just leaving the community will release those memories back. How does that work? They pass some special line on the ground and lose those memories? It's not like there aren't other communities in the world, they specifically mention groups of visiting children from Elsewhere. I guess I just wonder at some of the logistics of this world that Lowry didn't explore, because from an adult perspective it doesn't necessarily make sense. Which isn't the point of the book at all, so it's okay to not explore that--I'm just that kind of annoying reader, I guess.

Incidentally, I have only now learned, twenty years later, that there's a Giver series and now I must read the others. Maybe my questions will be answered!

"But now that I can see colors, at least sometimes, I was just thinking: What if we could hold up things that were bright red, or bright yellow, and he could choose? Instead of the Sameness."
"He might make wrong choices."
"Oh." Jonas was silent for a minute. "Oh, I see what you mean. It wouldn't matter for a newchild's toy. But later it does matter, doesn't it? We don't dare to let people make choices of their own."
"Not safe?" The Giver suggested.
"Definitely not safe," Jonas said with certainty. "What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And chose wrong?"Or what if," he went on, almost laughing at the absurdity, "they chose their own jobs?"
"Frightening, isn't it?" The Giver said.
Jonas chuckled. "Very frightening. I can't even imagine it. We really have to protect people from wrong choices."
"It's safer."
"Yes," Jonas agreed. "Much safer."
But when the conversation turned to other things, Jonas was left, still, with a feeling of frustration that he didn't understand.

 Overall: 5 stars

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The Dead Lands - Benjamin Percy

To start this post I'd like to point you, first, to a clip of 'devil-voiced' (no, that never gets old) Benjamin Percy singing "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Writers" over at Poets and Writers magazine. If you ever have an opportunity to go to one of his readings, do it. It's worth it to hear his voice alone, and you know, the books are pretty decent too.

Benjamin Percy kind of exemplifies to me the 'small world' flavor the literary world has sometimes. On the jacket of this book he has blurbs from Edan Lepucki, who was on a panel with him at AWP 15 that I saw, and also Jess Walter, who I saw at Writers in Paradise in Florida in January '15. The deeper I get into this world, the more I'm starting to recognize these names. Everyone is connected...!

The Dead Lands was Percy's April release, and part of my new effort to try to read at least one new release each month. Previously I'd read his werewolf novel Red Moon, which I liked as a kind of newer take on the whole werewolf mythology. It also earned a glowing review from my mom, so there's that. The Dead Lands departs from this concept but stays firmly rooted in the speculative (though, like many writers, it's hard to genre-define Percy). Best described as a post-apocalyptical reimagining of the Lewis and Clark journey, we follow Lewis Meriwether and Mina Clark on their journey as they leave the walled city of the ruins of St Louis and strike out into the midwestern desert, following their guide Gawea to the promised land of water and plenty. Naturally, not everything is as it appears. And also human-size albino bats.

I love that there is someone out there that is both literary-fiction-acceptable, and in their own fashion, genre, considering how much anti-genre bias there is in the literary world. It kind of gives me hope for bridging that gap. And yes, the book really is well-written: although I find a lot of the sentence structures to be short, almost overly dramatic, it's really part of Percy's voice and style and works for him in his own way.

My nitpick, though? Science. The flu is named H3L1 - or Hell, but while kitschy, this has no bearing on what flu varieties would actually be named. Varities of flu are named according to the type of H (hemagglutinin) and N (neuramidase) antigens they possess, hence, H1N1, or H3N1, etc. These are very specific proteins that produce specific effects: hemagglutinin causes red cells to aggregate, and neuramidase cleaves bonds in neuraminic acid. The minute differing signatures of these proteins are what differentiate H1 from H3, etc. etc. But there is no L antigen. It's a little bit of a stretch to say that the flu could have developed another kind of antigen- it's possible, sure, but not necessarily probable. I get the narrative convenience but I do love me some accuracy in biology.

I don't know, I'll admit, the accuracy behind what Percy describes as the changes to the various parts of the US, but they ring true to me. I love the description of North Dakota, where the pressures from the abandoned oil rigs have built up to the point of explosions, and caught fire into blazing infernos that have nobody to put them out. So they foul up the sky and cause a kind of nuclear winter. St. Louis and the rest of the midwest is a desert wasteland where water is precious, the pacific northwest is lush and green, and Washington DC is a swamp. I can easily imagine the images that he's creating here, and it seems really plausible for these changes to have taken place. So kudos there, for sure: the setting is really enjoyable.

The book is written in present tense which really emphasizes to me the difficulty in making present tense work. Percy has obviously had lots of practice, because the difficulties are few, but there are parts where we're slipping into describing past action where it gets a little awkward jumping from tense to tense. Example, including my notes:

Even the horses seem angry. (present) One dropped dead from exhaustion. (past) The others droop their heads and hood their eyes. (present) Yesterday, when Lewis spurred his horse, it swung back its head and bit his calf. (past)

I think in a way that past tense is almost easier to write in, because you don't have to try and keep this straight as you go. Which is not to say don't write in the present tense, because by all means, do: just be aware of the unique challenges that present tense forces you to confront. I'm certainly more comfortable in past, but if a story calls for it, I would try my damndest to make present work.

Overall I'd say another good book from Percy. Because of the theme there's the occasional kitsch that not really my cup of tea (Aran Burr (Aaron Burr), Gawea (Sacagawea), President Jefferson, etc.) but it's eminently overlookable for the whole. And also human size albino bats.

He will go there are night, when only a few guards haunt the halls and he can whisper in and out without any trouble. He will fold the letter into Danica's panties, they decide. Not her pillow. There it might be discovered by a servant or her husband. And not a gown hanging in the closet. There it might wait undiscovered for a month or more. "No," Ella says, "only her panties will do. A good everyday pair. Faded, worn, maybe even holey."

"Woman like that would never wear a pair of holey panties."

"Every woman has a pair of holey panties. They're her favorite panties."

(she did not, for the record, have any holey panties)

Overall: 4 stars

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The Fire Sermon - Francesca Haig

The trilogy sure is big right now. It seems like every new YA book coming out is automatically planned to be part of a trilogy right off the bat: and I get it, really. I get it from a marketing perspective. Publishers want to ride the YA popularity wave (especially dystopian YA) by selling three books instead of one to a hungry market and hopefully in the process option the rights off for future movies as well. And if those can be expanded into multiple movies, well, all the better. So yeah, I get it. But that doesn't mean it's good.

Artistically, it creates some problems. Some stories just don't work that well as trilogies, suffering from pacing issues, tangents, or artificial-feeling subplots. The Fire Sermon is one of these that I feel would have been better told in a much tighter manner, as a more efficient long single novel than three scanty short ones.

Haig's starting with a great concept here: after some kind of worldwide disaster in which the world was swallowed in fire (I'm guessing nuclear, but obviously the narrator doesn't know exactly what happened and neither do we), every person is born into a pair of twins. The Alpha twin, physically perfect, and the Omega twin, with some sort of deformity. The Omega twins are removed from the Alpha population, sometimes early when the difference is obvious, and sometimes late when it is subtle. The main character, Cass, is the Omega twin, but she has no deformity. She is a Seer. She dreams things that will happen, or sometimes sees things far away, or sometimes knows where things are--it's all very vague and mystical. She's Special, though, with a capital S. She's Different from all the others.

But it's important to separate concept from plot: a great concept is wonderful. But it only gets you 25% of the way there. You still have to use that concept to tell a good story. To illustrate the specific issue with this book, I direct you to The Hero's Journey:

This basic pattern, also called the monomyth, was created by Joseph Campbell, best known as a mythologist. He argues that many myths (and subsequently, many stories) share the same basic structure, though they differ in the finer details. Many of our most famous stories can be lined up with this structure, including Star Wars and the Matrix.

Now the applicability of the Hero's Journey to literature can be contentious. I think some would argue that it doesn't have to apply to a piece for it to be considered a good story, and I agree. However, I think it is a useful tool for understanding when something doesn't work quite as well as it could, and how to improve it.

In specifics: The narrator of The Fire Sermon spends about 75% of the book refusing the call.

Literally: line after line of characters asking her to use her abilities to help the Omegas, and line after line of her absolutely refusing. Yes, it's a little more nuanced than that. She doesn't see their situation as an us-vs-them like most people do (remember, she's Different!). She sees the twins as two parts of a whole, and not something she wants to fight against. Yet again, I get it. But narratively, spending three quarters of a book stuck at the same stage is not good for a story. As a reader, I got bored. I got annoyed. I started to roll my eyes at the narrator. I wanted the story to progress, and instead, Cass just keeps running. Early in the story she's placed in a kind of prison: she escapes, and she runs. They get to an island Omega sanctuary: but it gets attacked, and she runs. She's just so very passive that it gets a little grating.

A lot of that may be my personal opinion, obviously. I prefer characters that are active, that make decisions, that push the narrative forward by their choices, not just by what happens to them. Other people may like this kind of narrator. To each their own, really, I won't deny that. It just doesn't do anything for me.

Partly this probably has to do with the fact that I'm not really the target audience for this book, either. YA is really aiming at teenagers, and so it's very probable that they want different things out of a story than I do. One part of the book that I was ambivalent about may play right into something that's popular for the YA audience: it's all very internal. Things do happen externally, but a huge amount of time we spend in Cass's head, with her thoughts and her memories and her feelings, to the point where some of the things that happen externally seem almost incidental. It's been a while since I've been a teen, but from what I remember, in general we were all pretty internal in that way: what was going on inside of us was just so incredibly important, because hey, it was a big confusing time we were trying to make sense of. So while I was unsure about the effect, I have the impression that in particular would work well for a YA audience.

One thing I did find really interesting was the age of the narrator. Typical YA books have the protagonist around the same age as their audience: sixteen, maybe seventeen, something like that. But Cass is nineteen when she goes into prison, and in her early twenties when she escapes. Even if we're sticking with a lot of YA tropes in other parts of the books, I think it's refreshing to see something different now and then.

Lastly, I'm a little tired of amnesia as a plot device. It rarely works in real life the way it works in books and movies: where a person can function perfectly normal, but simply doesn't remember personal information like their name or their family or memories of their childhood. It's just overused at this point, and I'd like to see some new directions taken, personally.

Overall there's nothing particularly abhorrent about this book. It's fine, the writing is well done, the plot does move, albeit sluggishly, and it feels artificially stretched out to fill three books. It'll probably do pretty decently in the YA market, though I'm just not interested enough to pick up the second book.

What does my opinion matter, though? Haig has already optioned the rights to the film, so she's taking it to the bank. Some of us writers should be so lucky!

Overall: 3 stars

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AWESOME cover.