mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

In this steampunk alt-history novel, a group of Fabian Socialists and African-American missionaries become founders of a new nation in central Africa in the late 19th century. With a boost from talented inventors and new technologies (some plausible but a bit early, like airships, and some fanciful, like clockwork cyborg limbs) they're able to challenge oppressive Belgian rule in the region. This alters the course of history in a sprawling, decades-long narrative of international intrigue, featuring a huge cast of characters in a complex web of love and hate.

So, you know when a TV show gets canceled but they still have a few episodes left, or maybe they get a movie, and the writers do a speed-run of all the remaining unresolved plot threads, basically hitting the highlights, and you have to mentally fill in all the other stuff that would have happened if they'd been able to take their time? That's what reading this book is like. Shawl had enough ideas here to fill a series of six or seven books if they'd taken it at a leisurely pace, but instead it's all packed into 400 pages.

I'm not sure I'm exactly complaining, though? I don't think I'm quite the right audience for the material as presented (way too much romance and breakup drama, not enough speculative tech, disappointingly little followup on one character's intriguing steam engine kink) so if there were six or seven books, I doubt I would have read them all. A relatively quick overview of how it all plays out was enough to satisfy me. But on the other hand, if I'd been deeply invested and wanted to sink my teeth into every detail of the plot and the interpersonal stuff, I probably would have been disappointed, so I guess I'm not sure who the ideal reader for this is.

I have read a few of Shawl's short stories, and I'm starting to get the impression that they are not a writer who likes to go into intricate detail about things. I do think they have it all in their head, but it reads to me like they're more invested in writing the exciting, intense highlights than the in-between explainy parts. Which, honestly, I can relate to—I can find that stuff a slog to write, too! But even if it is in your head, it's not in the reader's head until you put it there.

There actually is a sequel, which at a peek sounds like it steers away from steampunk and leans more fantasy, which isn't necessarily what I would have expected (thought there are some magical elements here too). Either way, my interest level is probably closer to "read a detailed synopsis" than "actually read the book."

In 17th century West Africa, an immortal woman named Anyanwu encounters another immortal for the first time, a man named Doro. But while Anyanwu is a healer who uses her powers to help others, Doro is a brutal manipulator who has been gathering people with paranormal powers and attempting to breed a race of superhumans under his iron fist. Anyanwu is the only other immortal he has ever found, and he intends to use her as "breeding stock" to make more. The novel follows centuries of their power struggle after Doro takes Anyanwu to the New World, as she strives to protect those under Doro's control and he strives to bend her to his will.

This is the chronologically earliest novel in Butler's Patternist series, though it was the fourth to be published. I was assured by leading experts (i.e. book club friends) that this is a perfectly good entry point to the series, so I started here and do not actually know yet what happens next!

It's the kind of book where it's hard to sit down and think of what to write about it, because it has so many layers that are worth thinking about and talking about, and they're all woven together so tightly and effectively that I'm not sure where to start pulling threads to unravel everything the book does. Butler had a gift for writing stories that resonate deeply with real situations without being simplistic, didactic one-to-one mappings. The speculative narrative and the real world historical setting illuminate each other in complex ways, and all the while Butler never loses sight of the characters as people with their own specific hurts, flaws, and needs. She makes it look so easy.

spoilery thoughts

The obvious comparison is to her stand-alone novel Kindred, published just the previous year, which had a contemporary Black American woman time-traveling to the era of slavery. Anyanwu also travels from a life of freedom to the New World under slavery. Against this backdrop, Doro acts as a master over "his people" in the eugenics program—and he definitely uses the phrase to indicate ownership, not kinship. His program isn't legal slavery, but it is inextricably entwined with it; sometimes Doro buys enslaved people who have the powers he's looking for, and if they wanted to leave, how could they? Even if Doro didn't catch them, they'd only be fleeing into a land where they'd be assumed to be runaway slaves. Anyanwu's powers are a match for Doro's, so saving herself is an option, but he controls the lives of everyone she knows and cares about. What this book shares most strongly with Kindred is a devastating portrayal of how people can be trapped into compliance with systems of oppression.

The book's religious themes are also complex. Anyanwu does not pray to gods, as she feels she has all the power she needs within herself, but she does not see herself as superior to other people either. Meanwhile, Doro shamelessly plays the part of a god over his people because it serves his purposes and he can get away with it. But not a loving god. Rather he reminds me of the way people will sometimes talk about the so-called "Old Testament God": bloodthirsty and hypercontrolling, demanding absolute obedience and destroying anyone who gets in his way. In which case his favorite son Isaac plays the corresponding supposed role of Jesus: the "good cop" son who draws Anyanwu into trying to appease his father. If this is a distorted image of Christian theology, well, distortion and misuse of Christian faith are certainly a deliberate theme in the book, as Anyanwu overtly calls out Christian enslavers for their hypocrisy.

On a deeper and unspoken level, the book comments on the thought processes underlying patriarchal power structures. Doro has the power to kill and he uses it to control others without a second thought; might makes right. Anyanwu could also use her powers to kill if she chose to, but it doesn't even occur to her. Instead she heals—but everything she has goes to other people, all her nurturing and self-sacrifice. She has total control over her own body's inner workings (while Doro doesn't even have his original body anymore!), and she uses herself as a scientific test subject to learn to heal wounds and diseases, suffering pain and injury so others can recover. She always puts others first, and the rightness of this is so ingrained in the assumptions of the characters that nobody ever questions it. Even when she escapes Doro temporarily, she keeps coming back to him, in part because she can't bring herself to leave others unprotected.

The fact that Doro and Anyanwu both have male and female bodies at different points in the story made me think about how patriarchy isn't defined by anatomy, but by power dynamics. I would not describe either of them as trans characters, but there is a trans resonance with the way Anyanwu remains confident in her womanhood regardless of her physical form, and in the many ways she remains vulnerable to misogyny even when people who don't know her read her as a man.

The bond between Anyanwu and Doro is both twisted and deeply understandable. They're the only two immortals; everyone else they know grows old and dies. They're lonely. Doro wants someone like him, but he can't get that by force, much as he has been trying. Anyanwu's well of empathy seems boundless, but somehow excludes herself. Her threat of suicide makes sense as it's the only way she can escape the cycle of returning to him again and again—she can't trust herself not to keep going back as long as she is like him. And the only way she can be unlike him, as she sees it, is to sacrifice her immortality and die.

The book's protagonist is a healer, and I think one of the book's core questions is who deserves healing, and who is too far gone to ever be healed. Doro tries to punish Anyanwu by forcing her to bear a child by Thomas, an uncontrolled psychic who is so deep in addiction and depression that he has become physically repellent. To Doro's surprise, Anyanwu responds with empathy (her greatest superpower, I think) and begins to heal Thomas's physical and mental wounds. Doro's reaction—to murder Thomas and possess his body—is the moment when he tells on himself the most. He intends to show power and cruelty, and he does, but he also reveals himself as a desperately isolated person who yearns to be healed, to be transformed from something repulsive into someone loveable. The book has the courage to leave it less than settled how possible that really is for him.

So, I guess I'll be continuing this series! I have been warned that not all of the books in it are this good. I'm sure I will cope somehow.

This is part three of my book club notes on A Thousand Beginnings and Endings. [Part one, part two.]

Something I learned in this meeting that I did not previously realize is that a number of the authors in the collection are best known for YA. This does explain why it was shelved under YA in the library, which I have to admit I did not see as significant given that I also had to visit the YA section to find Dracula (because their copy is part of a series of "classic canon" repubs marketed to teens). I had noticed that some of the entries certainly are YA, which I don't consider a bad thing in itself, but in this batch of stories we did experience a disconnect between the marketed-to audience and ourselves.


"Nothing Into All" by Renée Ahdieh

( An embittered brother and a doormat sister run across goblins that can turn anything into gold. )


"Spear Carrier" by Naomi Kanakia

[Note: This book was published before Kanakia came out as trans, so it lists this story under her former name Rahul Kanakia.]

( A look at the Mahabharata from the POV of one of the five million soldiers in the climactic battle. )


"Code of Honor" by Melissa de la Cruz

( A Filipina vampire seeks belonging in New York City. )


"Bullet, Butterfly" by Elsie Chapman

( In a war-torn country, a boy disguises himself as a girl to infiltrate a munitions factory. )

Note: Emezi is nonbinary and started using they/them pronouns after this book was published, so earlier reviews may misgender them, as does the jacket bio.

This autobiographical novel follows Ada, a young Nigerian who is inhabited by multiple spirits. In Igbo the word for this is ọgbanje, which seems to sometimes refer to the spirits and sometimes the host (or maybe trying to distinguish the two is a failure of cultural literacy on my part). From birth, Ada knows she's different, and sometimes living with the spirits is a struggle. At other times they're a source of comfort and protection as she deals with unsettled family relationships, a move to an entirely new culture in the US, and intimate partner abuse. A lot of the time it's both.

Like Stone Butch Blues, this book is so memoir-shaped and episodic that it's hard to parse it as a novel, but it does have novelistic prose which is quite strong and evocative, and there's a satisfying arc. The use of alternating POVs among the different spirits is effective at establishing them as their own voices with their own motivations and interiority. Ada isn't really the main character—we get the spirits' perspectives on entering her body, being born from her trauma, and making decisions about how to deal with her, long before we ever get Ada's own POV. So it's more of an ensemble piece. Conversations between Ada and the spirits take place in an internal mind palace where each entity has a physical form, which helps it feel more vividly concrete rather than an abstract dialogue among inner voices.

The book takes an eclectic perspective on spirituality and mental health. Western psych concepts of dissociative identity are fluidly interwoven with Igbo religious traditions, as well as with Christian spirituality. (Jesus is an occasional visitor to the mind palace.) This feels very honest and unafraid to hold diverse truths, which is refreshing as well as thematically resonant.

Though the character Ada goes by she/her, she does have gender stuff going on, which is presented in the context of one of the inhabiting spirits being male. It was a little startling to me to have this portrayed so frankly, because it's one of those things we talk about in the trans community but not necessarily outside it, and it made me feel a strange mix of comfortable familiarity and high anxiety. Like, yes, there are trans/nb/genderfluid people who experience their gender(s) in whole or in part as plural identity, but you're not supposed to say that in public. But when I take a breath and look past that initial reaction, of course I realize that we can't get where we need to go by sanding the rough edges off our reality in the name of not scaring the straights.

I plan to check out some of Emezi's other books. Since this one is obviously a lightly fictionalized recounting of things that really happened, I'll be interested to see what they come up with when they write outside of their specific personal experiences.

Content notes for the book include: Rape, self-injury, disordered eating, and attempted suicide.

This sequel to A Wizard of Earthsea follows a girl named Tenar who is believed to be the reincarnation of a high-ranking priestess. She's taken from her family at a young age and raised by a strict religious order, cloistered away from the rest of the world and taught to navigate the dark underground labyrinth where a powerful magic artifact lies hidden. When a strange wizard comes looking for the artifact and gets trapped in the maze, Tenar has to start thinking for herself for the first time in her life.

I always enjoy this book when I re-read it, but I don't have such strong feelings about it as I do about A Wizard of Earthsea. I think as a kid what I found most compelling was the labyrinth and the worldbuilding around it, this idea of a place where light is forbidden and if you miss one memorized turn you might be lost forever. But I also think some of my memories of it are mixed up with another book I read around the same time that also has someone trying to navigate a completely dark labyrinth and almost dying, which I believe was Walter Farley's The Island Stallion but I'm not completely sure. I just know there are some moments and bits of description that I always think are in Tombs but aren't. [eta: It was!]

Similarly, re-reads always remind me that a lot of what I love about Tenar is not in this book, but in Tehanu (book four). She has character growth here, but by the end she's still really young and hasn't had a lot of crucial experiences yet. This was Le Guin's first crack at writing a novel centering a female protagonist, and while it was obviously an important step in her creative development, I think in retrospect it sometimes does have a little bit of the feeling of her gripping the pencil in an awkward fist trying to Write Female Characters rather than just writing.

Reading as an adult, I especially notice that although Tenar grows up in an all-female religious order, the book still seems suspicious of women's power. Tenar is taught to wield authority with cruelty and violence. The order's eventual leader is a cynical hypocrite, and while other priestesses are sincere believers, their beliefs are revealed to be completely wrongheaded and the beings they worship are actually evil. The book doesn't explicitly state "this is what happens when you put women in charge" but it's sort of implied. We're very much not out of the "wicked as women's magic" era of Earthsea.

The scenes between Tenar and Ged are wonderful, though. He's a little older and wiser than we last saw him, but not so far away from adolescence that he can't understand Tenar's position and the burden of responsibility she bears. It's painfully apparent that Tenar has never had a friend because she's never had a peer—she doesn't know how to interact with people outside of horribly warped power dynamics. Reading as an adult, it's more clear to me that the heart of the book is in the forest after their escape, where they exist as individuals in a liminal space without authority figures or power structures. No wonder Tenar's first instinct is that she wants to stay there; it's her first time breathing freely after a life of near-suffocation. She doesn't want to go back to that, even if it's within a different power structure than the one she's known, and she's able to articulate that and take another path. As a child I don't think I was able to grasp the massive significance of that.

This is part two of my book club notes on Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Science Fiction. [Part 1.]


"Goslin Day" by Avram Davidson (1970)

( A man goes to a Kabbalist because he fears evil spirits. )


"The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV" by Robert Silverberg (1974)

( On a planet where Jewish colonists live side by side with indigenous aliens, a dybbuk possesses a native. )


"Trouble with Water" by Horace L. Gold (1939)

( A concession stand operator offends a water gnome and is cursed to become completely water-repellent. )


"Gather Blue Roses" by Pamela Sargent (1971)

( The daughter of a Holocaust survivor has empathic powers. )


"The Jewbird" by Bernard Malamud (1963)

( A father feuds with a talking bird. )

This is the first part of my book club notes on Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Science Fiction. The group has grown a bit, with some new and returning members. Ten people this week, the most I've seen. There's a mix of Jews and non-Jews, with various denominations and levels of observance represented on the Jewish side. (I guess I sit near the line; my dad is Jewish, and I don't consider myself to be, but growing up my Jewish family was my only family, as my culturally Christian mom was estranged from her family of origin. Anyway!)

Right off, this is a different experience from our reading of the Dark Matter books, where no one belonged to the identity group whose works we were looking at. Here there's a lot more opportunity to discuss lived experience, a lot less uncertainty about unspoken context. And more potential for off-base interpretations to personally hurt, so I'm trying to stay conscious of that.


"On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi!" by William Tenn (1974)

( Hundreds of years in the future, a Venusian TV repairman tells a long tale that comes to center on nonhumanoid Jewish aliens. )


"The Golem" by Avram Davidson (1955)

( A short, comedic piece where a golem confronts and attempts to threaten an old retired couple, who could not be less intimidated by him. )


"Unto the Fourth Generation" by Isaac Asimov (1959)

( A young businessman is haunted by a family name. )


"Look, You Think You've Got Troubles" by Carol Carr (1969)

( A father is distraught because his daughter married a Martian. )

This is part four of my book club notes on Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. (Part 1, part 2, part 3.)


"Old Flesh Song" by Ibi Aanu Zoboi (2004)

( A confrontation between two soucouyants. [cn: infanticide] )


"Whispers in the Dark" by Walter Mosley (2001)

( A gifted child's caregiver fights to protect him from exploitation. )


"Aftermoon" by Tananarive Due (2004)

( A werewolf grapples with her identity. )


"Voodoo Vincent and the Astrostoriograms" by Tyehimba Jess (2004)

( A homeless artist makes a Faustian bargain. )

In this sequel to Parable of the Sower, things get a lot worse before they get better.

I liked this book much less than the first one, and I don't just mean it wasn't really what I wanted to read right now but I felt obligated since I'd been on the library hold list for so long (though that was also admittedly an issue). I found that many things about it were not believable and raised (I think) unintended questions about the plot and the general messaging of the series.

rambling spoilers (cn: fascism, rape)

- The US takes a hard turn into Christianist fascism, which leads to everyone in Lauren's growing "heathen" community being arrested and sent to reeducation camps to be tortured, brainwashed, raped, etc. I understand, narratively, why something like this had to happen; now that Lauren's mission is well-developed and she's had some success with it, it has to be severely tested. She loses everything—her community, her husband, her daughter, her freedom—but she still doesn't give up. But the violence was too extreme for me to read, so I only got the gist of what was going on in the middle section of the book, therefore my opinions on the book as a whole may be taken with a grain of salt.

- It seemed implausible to me that Lauren would be able to keep writing in a journal during this period and that it would survive for her daughter to find later, thus allowing the novel's framing story to conveniently continue uninterrupted. But maybe that was explained in a part that I skimmed or skipped.

- I was surprised that Lauren's "hyperempathy" is now characterized as a delusional disorder. In the first book I assumed she actually had psychic powers. It's sf, so why not? The explicit rejection of that interpretation here makes me wonder if Butler realized from reader responses that it wasn't clear in the first book, and felt she really had to hammer home that that wasn't what she meant.

- I had problems with the arc with Lauren's brother. We thought he died in the first book, but he actually survived and was sold into sex slavery. Lauren rescues him but he rejects her religious teachings and joins the fundamentalists instead. The issue I had with this is the revelation that he is gay. For me this put a very weird spin on everything about his storyline—the fact that he's the only important male character who's sexually abused, the constant reiterations of how pretty he is, the religious conflicts between him and Lauren, and how he tries to prevent Lauren from finding her daughter. The presentation of this character felt stereotyped and exploitative to me.

- I also didn't really buy into a lot of things about the eventual global triumph of Earthseed. It's pretty hand-wavey and actually seems too easy after all that's happened. Like, the solution to religious fascism is to just kind of wait until people realize it isn't solving their problems and get tired of it, so they'll be more receptive to your diametrically opposed religious philosophy instead? I am skeptical, and the lack of detail and decades-long time skip seem designed to dodge hard questions about how this would really work. (Come on, give us something we can use!)

- Although the book roundly condemns religious fanaticism, Lauren's fantasy of every child being raised to believe in Earthseed actually strikes an alarming chord of religious intolerance. In her scriptures she writes "embrace diversity or be destroyed" but it does not sound like pluralism is what she really wants. She wants everyone to think like she does, which makes the "destroyed" part come off more like a threat than a statement of moral principle. You can't just be like, it's bad for those other religions to demand conformity, but it's okay for me because my religion happens to be The Truth. All zealots think that! This is partly why religious reforms tend to face the problem that after they topple existing power structures, instead of creating an antiauthoritarian utopia they just calcify into new power structures. This book didn't do enough to convince me that Earthseed would be any different. (It's a little convenient, don't you think, that Lauren's husband gets killed off pretty early in the book, since he's the one who begins to voice some of these concerns?)

- But maybe I'm not giving Butler enough credit. She intended to write more books in this series and never finished them, so we don't know what her plans were. I will say that these two books don't feel incomplete as a duology since they at least follow Lauren's personal story to the end. We just don't know how her reforms will hold up and what happens to the incipient space colonies.

- In the end, I was not sure what the book wants us to think about Lauren and her choices. She achieved her dream, but her daughter argues that she sacrificed her relationship with her family for it, so it's a hollow victory in that way. But I suppose Lauren herself couldn't rightfully complain about the way the book presents her; after all, she's the one who insisted that Earthseed sermons should end with a debate!

Some members of the book club had a busy October, so we took a break and are just now returning to our new book. (Here was part 1.)


"Desire" by Kiini Ibura Salaam (2004)

( In an African-inspired fantasy setting, gods and mortals contend over the power of lust. )


"Recovery from a Fall" by David Findlay (2004)

( A reverse Garden of Eden story, undoing the Fall. )


"Anansi Meets Peter Parker at the Taco Bell on Lexington" by Douglas Kearney (2000)

( What it says on the tin. )


"The Magical Negro" by Nnedi Okorafor (2004)

( An old trope is turned on its head. )


"Her Pen Could Fly: Remembering Virginia Hamilton" by Nnedi Okorafor (2004) [essay]

( Okorafor discusses how Virginia Hamilton's work spoke to her as a child and influenced her as a writer. )