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The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin’s debut is a fascinating speculative fiction, set in a world in which gods exist, war, fall out of power, and can become enslaved by mortals.

The main character, Yeine, is the nineteen year old leader of her small tribe, a matriarchal culture in which men’s aptitude for glory and bravery is dismissed much like women’s is in contemporary American culture. Daughter of a royal who abdicated her position to marry into the tribe, she is drawn into a deadly competition for a throne and her life changes quickly when she is drawn into the political intrigues of the capital city.

The world Jemisin builds is rich with mythology. The sibling gods of night and day and the goddess of twilight warred against each other, with one dying, another becoming enslaved, and the last used by the royalty to rule the world. The exploration of the fate of the gods as it entwines with Yeine’s is engrossing. This is the first of a trilogy, I am looking forward to the next installations.

The Stranger by Max Frei

The Stranger is a slow-moving, epic dream-work. First published in Russia in 1996, it was finally released in English translation in 2009. The author and narrator, Max Frei, is an underachiever night-owl who dreams of another world.  Near the beginning of the book, he is rewarded for his persistent dreaming and is given a job in the dream world, and instructions on how to get there. Skeptical, he tries – and succeeds in entering Echo, the city he’s been dreaming about. He is given a job working the night shift for “The Department of Absolute Order,” something like a city police investigative bureau. He acquires new friends and responsibilities with his new position, and eventually comes into some very strange powers.

It reminds me in some ways of China Miéville’s books about strange cities. And in some ways it reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork city guard, although the humor is not as broad. But mostly, it’s unique and not easy to describe.  The language is strangely formal,  perhaps an artifact of translation. It has a surreal feel, as appropriate for a novel set in a dream. The ‘authorities’ are strangely unmoved by the murders and mysteries they encounter.

I did not discover two additional delightful features of The Stranger until several weeks after I had finished it. First, the author, Max Frei has written many more books set in this dream world called Echo, and second, Max Frei is actually a pen name of Svetlana Martynchik. The bad news is that only this first volume has been translated into English.

It’s hard to say that I ‘liked’ or ‘disliked’ this book. The author is a writer, who works in publishing and pornography. The book’s main character and narrator is a writer, who works in publishing and pornography.  The plot turns on the repellent idea of a writer who is persuaded to create fictional pornography featuring real women and a serial killer, in return for exclusive interviews with the killer. The hard-up writer also pens a vampire-romance series under his dead mother’s name (funny) and has an ongoing sexually tense relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl that he ghost-writes papers for (creepy).

At one point Gordon’s narrator says something about reading that I have never seen articulated this quite this way before. This kind of insight made it impossible to dislike the book entirely, despite the sleaziness.

“Why do we read? In the beginning, as children, why do we love the books we love? For most, I think, it’s travel, a flight into adventure, into a dream that feels like our own. But for a few it is also escape, flight from boredom, unhappiness, loneliness, from where or who we can no longer bear to be. When I read, the words on the page replace the voice in my head and I cease, for a little while, to be me, or at least to be so painfully aware of being me. These are the real readers, the maniacs, the ones who dose themselves with fiction the way junkies get high, the way lovers adore the beloved: beyond reason.”

Reading is lot like that, for me at least.

The narrator goes on to say that “This kind of reading, ironically, precedes all judgment.” Ironically,  because it is just these manic, omnivorous devourers of genre fiction that go on to become book snob academics – or book reviewers.

Behold Apple’s new wireless mouse. The “magic” mouse. The exceedingly expensive at $69 mouse. Looks cool, sleek. Neat features – the scroll wheel/ball is replaced by a completely smooth, touch sensitive surface – you pet it to scroll up and down. It can use “gestures” like the iPod touch. When I saw one at a Mac expo, I played with it for a few seconds and decided I had to have one.

And? After the first day of using it, I hated it. It’s yet another one-button mouse. Why, Apple? Why sell a lovely yet useless product? (Also see, “Why sell me a beautiful laptop with one big honkin’ mouse button under the track pad?”) It’s impossible to play games. Even after changing the default settings so that you can “right click”, you still can’t hold down two mouse buttons at once, so you can’t run, pan up and down, etcetera.

I figured at least I could use it at work, but after a couple of days I have reluctantly concluded that it’s not even good for basic tasks like web design or word processing. “Accidental” input on the touch sensitive surface makes for random crazy scrolling up and down, sudden inexplicable selection of big chunks of text, the view zooming in and out. It’s driving me crazy. What a disappointment. Now I have this fancy Mac and plugged into it is a $10 PC mouse with 2 buttons and a scroll wheel. I get to feel like a sucker, and the devil-mouse gets to sit in its fancy little pouch, in a drawer.

Chuck Palahniuk. Love him? Hate him? Wish you could escape the Horror genre tag and claim your space on the General Popular Fiction shelves  as  seemingly effortlessly?

His latest book, Pygmy, escalates an output already far out on the edge. After the excesses of Rant, I’ve been curious – what comes next? I appreciated Rant as a response to the popular obsession with Fight Club. How do you respond to hearing that men are punching each other in Mexico City, inspired by a movie based on your book? You give your loving public a character who gains his charisma from rabid rodents. A charmer who demonstrates his love by infecting his lovers with rabies. “Emulate this, suckers!”

So, Pygmy. It’s in dialect. A entire-book-sustained first person, English-second-language, sometimes punny, always awkward, voice. Our narrator, an exchange student from an unnamed Communist country, probably China, takes advantage of the bleeding-heart American academic exchange program to infiltrate a typical American family, with a mandate to impregnate as many girls as possible before instigating mass destruction.

I confess, after the male-on-male rape scene in the first 30 pages, I had to take a break. I read two Jim Thompson novels and then came back and finished Pygmy. It was disturbing. Some of it was funny. None of it seemed like a movie Brad Pitt could be in.

The rape scene was particularly disturbing. It wasn’t  completely gratuitous like the traditional male-on-female rape scene. It impacted the rest of the story. It was described with great detail. It could be instructional for that all-too-common young man that describes his losses at Halo as being “raped,” although the chances of such a fellow reading this book are probably slim.

I can’t say I like this book. The metaphors never fall in to focus, the narrator is yet another murderous pervert. There is a strong female character, and there might be some redemption to be found in the end. Is it worth the journey? You’ll have to decide for yourself.

The WBC are failed lawyers and consummate con artists that have been perfecting their game for almost 20 years. Their con is worthy of a Chuck Palahniuk novel – they go from town to town, antagonizing the residents as best they can, with hateful, homosexuality-obsessed posters that insult beloved community members that have been murdered or died in war.

Their con is viciously clever – they use the “right to free speech” to force their way in to a community, and their victims have to pay the police that have to protect the con artists.  Then they pray for someone to punch them in the noses so they can sue them and continue to fund their crazed lifestyle. It doesn’t matter if they believe what they say or not – their real goal is to find another sucker to sue. If they leave a town without a new lawsuit, that town wins – they didn’t fall for the con.

Their shtick would be a lot funnier if they didn’t bring their single-digit-aged children along and make them hold up signs, too.

Some people seem upset that there was a big turnout in Blacksburg last week to protest against them, since the WBC was quoted in the local media as liking having all the attention. But, they will always spin events to make it seem like a victory for them. If lots of people show up, they claim to be thrilled. If nobody shows up, they claim to be vindicated in their beliefs because nobody cares enough to protest them.

I think it’s great that when they came to Blacksburg, many people showed up and were colorful and silly and happy and peaceful. That’s the best antidote for hate. And the haters had to leave empty-handed, with “LET’S GO HOKIES” echoing in their ears.