Tag Archives: Science Fiction

Review | Among Others, Jo Walton

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Oh my gosh, wow. Just wow. Dan Wagstaff from Raincoast Books told me Jo Walton’s Among Others is “totally a novel for book nerds,” and wow, is it ever! If a book has ever changed your life, if you’ve ever felt at home in a new town because of the local library, if your favourite book has ever made a troubling experience easier to bear — read this book.

Among Others is a story about magic; it’s about boarding schools and dealing with grief; above all, it’s a love letter to books and libraries, and to the community created by book lovers finding each other. I haven’t underlined a book this much in a long time — now my copy is filled with passages underlined in green ink, and I can imagine it soon becoming dog-eared and tattered from much re-reading. It’s that good. Dear Dan Wagstaff: thank you!

Mori Phelps was raised in Wales by an insane mother who dabbled in magic. Mori finds refuge in science fiction novels and the fairies who live in nearby industrial ruins. When a magical battle against her mother kills Mori’s twin sister and leaves Mori crippled, she runs away to join her father in England. Her father sends her to boarding school, where she attempts some magic of her own to find friends, and eventually has to face her mother again.

To be honest, the book description made me wary — I expected a fantasy world with characters casting spells and attacking each other with magical lightning bolts. While I love Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, I haven’t read much of that genre in years, and I couldn’t see how a book about magical beings could be “totally a novel for book nerds.”

Here’s the thing — the magic in Among Others is completely different from what I expected, and I love, absolutely love, this concept of magic. Mori wants magic “to work in a magical way… like it did in the books,” yet

You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That’s because it doesn’t happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That’s what it is. It’s like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it was because someone on an aeroplane had dropped a rose at just the right time for it to land in your hand. There was a real person and a real aeroplane and a real rose, but that doesn’t mean the reason you have the rose in your hand isn’t because you did the magic.

I love that. I love the ambiguity about the idea of magic. I love how you can never be sure if something magical really was going on, or if it was Mori’s science fiction-fuelled imagination casting events in a magical light. Even the magical battle against her mother is never fully explained, and the sister’s death could very well have been the result of an accident. Yet, as with the rose and the aeroplane, just because there was a real accident didn’t mean it wasn’t magic. I love this ambiguity because Among Others refuses to be about actual, fantasy world magic or about finding magic in the ordinary. Rather, Among Others remains firmly within the possibility of magic, and, as any reader can attest, potential can be so much more potent than the actual. Take for example a scene when Mori is asked whether her fairies could be ghosts and she replies she doesn’t know.

“Don’t you want to find out?” he asked, his eyes gleaming. That’s the spirit of science fiction.

“Yes,” I said, but I didn’t really mean it. They are what they are, that’s all.

Like Mori, I too didn’t want her magic to be tied down to a single explanation. As such, I found it really jarring when Mori says, “Does this mean that it doesn’t matter if it’s magic or not, anything you do has power and consequences and affects other people?” No, I wanted to shout. No shift into self-awareness and definitely no tying down into moral lessons. Fortunately, Mori concludes that “magic is different,” and I try to forget that that all too preachy line was ever written.

I want to say that at its heart, Among Others is really just about a lonely young girl grieving over her sister’s death and trying to belong to a new school. There’s a particularly beautiful passage where Mori realizes she’s fifteen and her twin “is still and always fourteen.” Yet the book defies such reductionism. The book is eloquent in its simplicity, yet it also feels expansive in scope. “Sometimes I’m not sure whether I’m entirely human,” Mori confesses.

I mean, I know I am… What I mean is, when I look at other people, other girls in school, and see what they like and what they’re happy with and what they want, I don’t feel as if I’m part of their species.

Something about the way Mori speaks takes the very personal emotion of loneliness and makes it seem like an intergalactic issue. I love her narrative voice, possibly because I’m a major nerd, and such metaphors resonate with me.

At one point, Mori considers joining her sister — again, described in such a way that it’s not about suicide, but about following her sister and some fairies into a portal, much like the one elves go to in Lord of the Rings when they die. Mori decides against it because she still hasn’t finished Babel 17. “I’m sure that isn’t normal,” she admits. Still, “there may be stranger reasons for being alive.” I love Mori’s detached, almost clinical tone about such an emotionally charged scene; you can just feel her disengaging from the pain and trying to find refuge through words.

The ambiguity over magic has its own consequences for Mori. She casts a spell to find herself a karass, and it works. If, like me, you haven’t read Cat’s Cradle by Vonnegut, Mori describes a karass as “a group of people who are generally connected together.” Essentially, she uses magic to find herself a group of friends, and the next day, she hears about a science fiction book club at the local library. Coincidence or magic? The difference matters to Mori — do her  new friends like her for herself, or is it the magic that made them like her? Her confusion and fear that perhaps without her spell, her newfound friends wouldn’t have liked her are very real. That’s another thing I love about Among Others. Even when phrased in magical terms, or described in a fantastical way, Mori’s emotions feel very real and keep the story firmly grounded.

I’ve mentioned that Among Others is a love letter to libraries and a novel for book nerds. Mori feels she can handle her new life with her father because of his library: “I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.” She also finds refuge in the local library: “Libraries really are wonderful… I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.” Isn’t that a lovely thought?

Mori also references a lot of books. At times, I felt like the school librarian who took Mori to a book club meeting on Le Guin and, having read only Wizard of Earthsea, felt intimidated by the pile of books on the table. Mori uses terms like karass without bothering to explain them and mentions characters from science fiction novels without bothering to explain their stories, because to her, these words and names are familiar. Context usually made it fairly easy to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words, and I admit feeling a thrill of recognition at the ones I did recognize. When Mori compares Marx’s Communist Manifesto to Anarres, I love the way it made me suddenly think of communism in a new way. When a Wikipedia search showed me that the name for Mori’s fairy friend Glorfindel actually comes from Lord of the Rings, I thought that was just geeky cool.

The best part is that all the references to science fiction in Among Others gave me a full list of books I now want to check out. Mori’s love for these books is irresistibly infectious. “The thing about Tolkien,” Mori says, “about The Lord of the Rings, is that it’s perfect.” Yes! Oh my god, yes! She talks a lot about Samuel Delany’s Triton, and at one point compares it to one of my favourite novels, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Literally, while I was still reading Among Others, I checked to see if Triton is available at my local library. It isn’t, but I did find it at a nearby indie used bookstore. I just bought it this weekend, and can’t wait to begin it. Seriously, Among Others is just that kind of book. You finish it and want to keep reading more. You want to read all the books Mori mentions and understand exactly who Glorfindel is. You want to cast your own spell and find a club at your local library that loves reading as much as you do. Mori’s passion for books and desire to find fellow book lovers with whom to share that passion invites us to join in her karass.

Trust me: read this book. If you do, I’d love to know what you think! I discovered Among Others myself from a Twitter conversation where the tweeters were so enamoured of the book that I just had to read it to see what the fuss was all about. I’m so happy I did. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read my brand new (used) copy of Triton.

Review | Perfect People, Peter James

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What if you had the chance to free your unborn child from all genetic imperfections? Sure, you may say all you really want is for your child to be healthy, and it doesn’t matter if he’s the smartest or most good-looking boy in the world. But what if all those options were also available to you, at no additional cost? Would you be able to turn down this chance, and risk having your child grow up unpopular, or unable to realize his dream of becoming a doctor, and know you had your chance to change that? Even if you do decide to keep him as healthy and normal as possible, where do you stop — with the rare genetic disease your first child died of, or remove even the genes for diabetes and cancer and, hey why not, asthma?

There are no easy answers, and Peter James’ Perfect People bombards us with all these difficult questions. This book just blew me away. Wow. I was reading this book at a mall, and I kept gasping or shaking my head every few pages. I started tweeting my reactions, then had to stop myself because I realized that if I kept going, I’d flood my Twitter feed with comments like, “OMG. This chapter made me gasp out loud.” “Oh no! This chapter made me gasp even louder!” “Now what?” “Hmmm… No idea what I’d do…” Exciting reading experience for me, monotonous for my followers.

James takes us right into the lives of John and Naomi Klaesson, who do get that opportunity to design their baby. Their four year old son had died of a rare genetic disorder, so they pool their life savings and go to geneticist Dr Leo Dettore, who can design their next baby’s genetic makeup. I love how James depicts the difficulty of John and Naomi’s dilemma. Naomi insists she just wants as normal a child as possible — if their son is genetically enhanced to have vastly superior intelligence or athletic prowess, will other kids still want to play with him, or will they shun him as a freak? John, a scientist, is afraid that if they turn down genetic enhancements and if designer babies become the norm, then their future son will lose a valuable competitive advantage. I love the combination of parental ambition and desire to nurture. The scenes at the clinic could’ve been very science fiction, but James’ focus on Naomi and John’s fears kept the story feeling very real and immediate.

Naomi and John go home, excited about the soon-to-be-born son they’d requested. Then they go to get an ultrasound and realize Dr Dettore may have made one, very basic mistake with their child. If he got such a simple detail wrong, what else could he have gotten wrong? Worse, even if they do find out other details had been messed up, what will they do about it? Again, James offers no easy answers. The pro-life/pro-choice debate gets even more complicated when this is a baby you’d planned to the very last detail, and now you don’t even know what exactly is growing inside you. A normal, healthy baby, a super child, or an evil baby Frankenstein’s monster? I like that James didn’t have either John or Naomi firmly on one side of the debate. They’re both confused and scared, and end up making mistakes. They’re all too flawed and relatable, and I was completely immersed in their story because even I couldn’t see an easy way out.

Minor spoiler (this is one that James’ own website provides, but if like me, you want zero spoilers, skip to the next paragraph): Naomi ends up giving birth to twins. Super intelligent twins, who at three prefer to surf the Internet than watch a clown, and who might in fact already be more intelligent than their parents. I remember watching I Am Sam, and feeling bad for Dakota Fanning’s character, who seemed more like the parent than the child, and for Sean Penn’s character, who tried as hard as he could but just could not keep up with his daughter. I felt the same way for the Klaesson family in Perfect People, but worse, because while Dakota Fanning and Sean Penn’s characters could look to other adults for guidance, the Klaesson family really had no one to turn to. As parents, how could Naomi and John best provide for such children? Again, never any easy answers, and the story kept me completely engrossed.

To complicate matters even further, Naomi and John are pursued by the Disciples of the Third Millenium, a fanatical religious group that believes designer babies are spawns of the devil. In true Peter James fashion, the author even takes us into the mind of one of the Disciples, who needs to kill the Klaesson family before he can marry the woman he loves. To be honest, this subplot just felt flat to me. Despite the background information on the Disciple’s life and his romantic subplot, a lot of his thoughts and actions read like standard thriller fare, a generic religious fanatic. To be fair, it may have been an accurate portrayal, with the Disciple’s single-mindedness about his group’s mission. Also, it’s certainly realistic that fanatical religious groups would want to destroy designer baby families. Still, with John and Naomi’s story already so mind-blowing, and already raising so many fascinating dilemmas, I almost wish the Disciples of the Third Millenium hadn’t been included at all. Or at the very least, wish they’d been included only as backdrop bad guys, providing external conflict without getting chapters of their own.

Perfect People is such an amazing book. The psychological thrills are almost non-stop, the emotional ups and downs unrelenting, and the ending almost made me cry. I received this ARC from Harper Collins at the fish and chips party to celebrate Peter James’ ITV3 People’s Bestseller Dagger Award (thanks HCC!), so I don’t know if this is available in the final book, but I wish there was an author note with a glimpse of James’ research into real world designer babies. Fascinating topic, definitely, and in Perfect People, James gives this scientific innovation very human faces.

Delirium, Lauren Oliver #50BookPledge

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In Lauren Oliver’s Delirium, love has been diagnosed as a disease, and everyone is required to undergo the cure when they turn eighteen. When I first heard the premise, my cynical brain immediately thought it was brilliant. No more Eponine-style romances for me! Thing is, the procedure doesn’t just kill off romantic love. My sister, who also read this book, called it practically a lobotomy, and that’s what it is: the doctors surgically remove every last bit of passion. You will never been heartbroken, but you will also view your friends and children with cold logic (you’ll give your baby milk because he’s hungry and needs food to live, not because you can’t stand to see him cry). You will no longer feel depressed, but you will also never enjoy your hobbies with as much fervour as before. Hana, the best friend of protagonist Lena, tells her early on, “You know you can’t be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes, right?” And it’s true. Cliches aside, if you remove all violent emotion, you’ll have to remove the good with the bad.

Unlike Hana, however, Lena can’t wait for the procedure. When she was very young, her mother committed suicide because she was too infected by amor deliria nervosa to be cured. All Lena can remember is her mother laughing and dancing with her (then immediately checking to see if anyone had noticed; too much laughter after all is a symptom of delirium) and her mother fiercely telling her, “I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.” Lena is heartbroken by her mother’s death, and looks forward to being cured and freed from all that pain. I love that the heroine begins the novel looking forward to the procedure, and horrified whenever Hana makes negative comments about it. My natural reaction, once I found out the procedure destroyed all passion and not just romantic love, was to wonder how anyone could think that was a good idea. Lena’s desire to forget a completely different kind of pain made sense to me, and showed me how this procedure could be seen as a good thing, even by intelligent, non-brainwashed-drone individuals like Lena.

But Lena falls in love. Only three months before her procedure, she meets a boy named Alex, who has the scars of the cured, but whom Lena saw laughing when something messes up an evaluation interview. I love how she falls in love with him not just because of his good looks (though he is hot), but because of the tremor of laughter in his voice, and the constant look of amusement in his eyes. In a world where serenity is prized and passion is feared, happiness is enticing. Alex too, it turns out, first develops a crush on Lena when he sees her acting silly during a run — as Lena discovers during class picture day, even her ordinary looks are transformed into great beauty when she’s really happy. It’s wonderful seeing this tale from Lena’s perspective — I worry with her when Hana sneaks off to attend an underground party (with real music! Not the government regulated chipper tunes!), I feel for her whenever she remembers her mom, and I get just as giddy as she does whenever she meets up with Alex. She still worries about ending up like her mother, and I love what Alex tells her about the downside of the cure: “That’s when you really lose people, you know. When the pain passes.” I think of when my grandfather died, how my biggest fear is forgetting how he looks, or how he sounds. Pain sucks, but Alex is right; pain also keeps the past alive.

As you can probably tell, I love this book. It’s an emotional ride, which reminds me of how repressing emotions actually ends up making them burst out even more violently. I love how it goes beyond just a romance, and deals with the value of passion in so many things — friendship, family, music, hobbies, and yes, love.

I remember how violently I felt about things when I was younger, and how much more practical I am today. I remember how, when I was young, an older cousin told me never to fall in love, because it hurt too much, and I remember how I, fuelled by Disney movies mostly, vowed never ever to turn away from love, because I’d rather be hurt than block myself from feeling. I remember changing my mind later on, and chalking it up to maturity. Delirium is about a surgical procedure that removes strong emotions, but I wonder, though not as extreme, do we all subject ourselves to a similar procedure in the name of growing up?

This book will make you believe in love again. At the very least, it will make you realize why numbing yourself against pain, while tempting, can never work in the long term. Delirium ends with a bang, which actually reminded me of a Le Carre novel (I can’t say which, as that would totally be a spoiler). It’s a wonderful, exciting book that I hope will touch you like it has touched me.

By the way, if you plan on getting this book (as you should!), just to let you know, I found out on the Harper Collins Canada website that Delirium: The Special Edition will be published July 20, 2011. It’ll have new cover art, a Q&A with author Lauren Oliver and an exclusive excerpt from her next book! Pretty cool, eh? (Thanks to Harper Collins Canada’s Savvy Reader for letting me know details about Delirium: The Special Edition!)