“If Blue were a scholar . . . she would catalogue, across all strands, a comprehensive study of the worlds in which Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, and in which a comedy. It delights her, whenever visiting a new strand, to take in a performance not knowing how it will end.”
—This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
I don’t have a complete reading log to offer this year. I finally, after too long, upgraded to a new computer last summer, leaving behind the document I had started at the beginning of the year. That coincided with a severe reading drought over the summer and I didn’t keep up the log when I finally got back to reading in the fall. So it wasn’t the best year for reading books to begin with, but I do have some highlights worthy of mention.
Science Fiction
Two short science fiction novels made an impression on me. This Is How You Lose the Time War alternates chapters between the perspectives of its two leads, Red and Blue, champions of time- and space-spanning rival powers. The Agency, for whom Red works, represents a post-singularity technological future; the Garden, Blue’s home, is a biologically-engineered paradise. Neither force considers itself safe while the other exists, and the two empires battle across myriad parallel timelines, steering historical events toward their chosen future and cutting off the others’. In this context, Red and Blue are sworn enemies, but they respect each other at a distance like opponents across a chess board. Curious but unable to confront each other face to face, they leave cryptic messages for one another, and their similarities outnumber their differences. (It becomes clear that neither the Agency nor the Garden is the utopia it’s cracked up to be, and one of the prices of the war for Red and Blue is disillusionment.) This is an inventive and lyrical novel, full of poetic flights and extravagant with its language as the clandestine messages back and forth become overt love letters.
Landscape with Invisible Hand by M. T. Anderson is another short but evocative book. Each chapter illuminates a drawing or painting by the narrator, Adam, an aspiring teenage artist. But instead of the infinite worlds of Time War, Landscape focuses on characters with few choices and nowhere to go. In the years since an alien race called the vuvv arrived on Earth and offered membership in their “Interspecies Co-Prosperity Alliance” (red flag!), the gap between the haves and have-nots has grown even larger, and those left behind live in the shadows of the vuvv’s pollution-generating machinery, fighting over jobs in soup kitchens. Adam and his girlfriend Chloe livestream idyllic 1950s-style dates to an audience of fascinated vuvv subscribers, even after they begin to hate each other, an illustration of the way in which the vuvv presence distorts their human “partners,” turning them into caricatures of themselves to satisfy the economic demands of their colonizers. If many science fiction dystopias ask the question “What if white, middle-class people were treated the way minorities and the poor are routinely treated now?”, Landscape with Invisible Hand asks “What if modern, Western society went through the kind of economic and cultural colonization that indigenous people around the world have experienced?”
Another book on a similar theme is The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex (the basis for the animated movie Home), which centers on an invading race called the Boov magnanimously herding all of America’s citizens into a single state reserved just for them (first Florida, but then, after the Boov decide they like Florida, Arizona). Rex is a versatile cartoonist and illustrator as well as a writer, so several sequences are rendered in comics format, purportedly drawn by the Boov main character to explain his world’s history and character. This one is written for a younger audience so it’s fairly whimsical and light, but it’s witty and entertaining and full of asides on human society as seen from an outsider’s perspective in the best science fiction tradition.
Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis is a much more grounded novel intended for adults, but it shares with The True Meaning of Smekday a focus on the difficulties of communication with different forms of intelligence and the impossibility of truly knowing another’s mind. Ellis has written that the idea for this novel (the first volume of a trilogy, still underway) sprang from her interest in the Transformers cartoon series, a kernel still present in the friendship between a human woman and an alien being who represents one side in a galactic war. Intriguingly, at least for me, the cohort of aliens who secretly made contact with the U.S. government in the 1970s are identified with Esperanto code names, a relic of the idealism and nerdiness of the group charged with handling them. Linguistic analysis and the ways in which language can channel thought are front and center, but within an action-packed thriller that doesn’t shy away from the gee-whiz tropes popularly associated with science fiction.
Romance
Romance as a genre is, in my opinion, at least partly a form of pulp. Now, before anyone gets defensive, and especially if this is your first time visiting Medleyana and you’re not familiar with my previous writings on pulp, that’s not meant as an insult or a comment on the genre’s readers. But the fact remains that, like the murder mystery, romance is one of the few genres that’s defined by its plot mechanics rather than theme or setting (do not bring a tragic love story without a “happily ever after” to a romance reader and call it a romance). There are established formulas and story beats (especially in the current obsession with tropes and hooks), and, however beautifully written, an emphasis on keeping the story rolling. Many of the romance novelists I explored in the last year were continuing in the tradition of Jane Austen (especially Georgette Heyer, the true parent of “Regency romance” as a publishing genre, and whose work I continued to explore), but there are as many subgenres of romance as there are genres outside it. Paranormal romance in particular overlaps with the fantasy, science fiction and horror that I was already reading.
I particularly enjoyed The Emperor’s New Clothes by Victoria Alexander, set in a small Wyoming town on the cusp of the twentieth century. An itinerant actress, gambler and con woman is mistaken for a visiting English Countess, and with the Countess’ trunks of clothing at her disposal, decides to make the best of it. The only thing confounding her plan to sell her bogus title for cash and move on is the Oxford-educated Mayor, the adopted son of the wealthy rancher who effectively runs things. Will the sparks of attraction between them convince her to go straight, and can he love her for who she is, not who she pretends to be? Well, see my comments on plotting in the paragraph above.
Comics
Although I continued to collect and read comics in the past year, I fell behind and didn’t match the amount I read in 2022. The most notable book I read in this format was Destroyer Duck: Graphite Edition, a trade collection of a series from the early 1980s. Destroyer Duck was an unusual collaboration between writer Steve Gerber, then fighting with Marvel over ownership of his creation Howard the Duck, and artist Jack Kirby, who had his own reasons to feel mistreated by Marvel. As such, the adventures of Duke “Destroyer” Duck, a macho, capable John Rambo among talking waterfowl, are marked by relentless action that would have been out of character for Howard’s acerbic social commentary and self-examination (read: navel-gazing). Of course, this is Gerber, so there are still plenty of axes to grind as Destroyer avenges his unnamed friend, “the little guy,” who was taken in, exploited, and abandoned by the sprawling Godcorp, an obvious stand-in for Marvel with characters based on editors or fellow artists whom Gerber felt mistreated him or picked the wrong side. (If that’s what Gerber thought of Marvel then, I can only imagine what he would make of its current Disney-owned incarnation and the dominance of the MCU.) The first issue of Destroyer Duck was published by independent Eclipse Comics as a fund-raiser for Gerber’s legal bills and continued as an ongoing series; the Graphite Edition collects the first five issues, the sum of Gerber’s and Kirby’s collaboration. (In the vein of currently popular “artist’s editions,” this book is a reproduction of Kirby’s original pencil art rather than a full reprint of the finished color comics, but knowing that readers like me might be encountering this material for the first time, they’ve kindly included word balloons with dialogue, which were usually added during the inking process.) A wealth of commentary and supplementary material rounds out the volume.
I read other stuff during the year as well, but I’ve run long enough and it’s already the second week of January. I have more year-end articles to get to, not to mention Ninjanuary and Vintage Science Fiction Month! Perhaps I’ll get to those before July. In the meantime, thanks for reading!
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