Dying Earth, part III

Dying Earths: Sixteen Stories from the Ends of Times
by Sue Burke and others…

Finished on New Year‘s Day! And I actually backdated the finishing date to the 31st of December, so I can start the new year with a clean cut. It might throw off my statistics a little — I already wrote my yearly wrap-up, it will go online on Friday or thereabouts. But I am not fussed enough to update that post. Or rather, I am working on letting go of my OCD. It makes me a little twitchy, but I‘ll cope… 😆

Ok, back to the last few stories of this anthology:

TELLTALE by Matthew Hughes ★★★☆☆ Fantasy
“Raffalon’s world had become monochrome: the thief stood on a shingle beach of gray stones, lapped by a gray sea beneath a gray sky.“
The author likes to use plenty of adjectives. Add to that a stilted prose, presumably to give a „fantasy“ feel. Ugh. The writing became more fluent after the first paragraphs. The story had the feel of a fairytale and had absolutely nothing to do with a dyeing Earth. It was ok.

THE MEAT PLAINS by Jeremy Megargee ★★½☆☆ SF
“Humans are a mass now, a great hideous stretch of fleshy plains spanning from one end of the globe to the other.“
Ugh, this was absurd and really disgusting. 

THE MIDWIVES by Jude Reid ★★★½☆ SF
Earth dies, some chose ones leave. This is the story of the descendants of those left behind.

THE SNOWS OF ADALON by Scott J. Couturier ★★★☆☆ Fantasy/SF
“Clouded over by perpetual white-gray miasma, wroth with terminal frost and cold, the planet is muffled in a cloak of blizzards.“
A blend of Fantasy and SF, with a sorcerer and his daughter stuck on a planet that was plunged into eternal winter. Salvation might be an escape capsule and the planet‘s moon.

ALONE IN IMALONE by Christopher Stanley ★★★★☆ Apocalyptic
Amusing little story about a guy trying to get onto one of the shuttles leaving Earth, before it blows up. 

CONVERTIR Andrew by Leon Hudson ★★★★★ Fantasy?
“When even something so evident as the changing of the climate becomes a matter of faith, to be accepted or rejected at the whim of the individual… in what sense is there a settled material reality at all?”
We start at the compound of a religious cult, but end up debating the perception of reality, fake news and the willful ignorance of facts that seems to be so abundant right now. Pretty wacky, but good.

This last story led me to an online SF magazine: https://mythaxis.co.uk

What I liked about this anthology:
It reminded me that I like Sue Burke. She is probably the main reason why I got this a while back. I met some new authors.

What I did not like about this anthology:
Considering the name of this anthology, I expected stories of the apocalypse. Dyeing Earth. Right? In quite a few of these stories the presence of Earth was incidental and we could have been anywhere. And even the apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic setting seemed to be more of an afterthought or something in the sidelines. It was not a focal point. The title also incorporated „Ends of Time“, but it still feels a little like the book topic was missed. Still, mostly enjoyable.

Link to the review of the first set of stories.

Link to the second set of story reviews.

Dying Earth…

Dying Earths: Sixteen Stories from the Ends of Times
by Sue Burke and others…

Ongoing. I will update as I go along…

THE TYRANNY OF BEAUTY by P.J. Richards ★★★☆☆ Fantasy
“When the Ways first appeared they felt like our salvation, an escape from the desolation we had created. They were the dream that had tempted humans for generations.“
The Ways to Fairyland or the Otherworld open and release the Host. The view into the Ways might be paradisal, but is a really scary place. Not what I expected in an anthology of a dying Earth, but interesting.

Interview with the author about another short story with a similar theme: https://mtmisery.com/2019/01/04/neon-…

THE CULT OF MOTHER-SUN by James Maxstadt ★★★☆☆ SF
A movie director from the future travels back to Earth to make a documentary about the birthplace of humanity. A little light and silly.

IN THE WEEDS by Sue Burke ★★★★☆ Climate fic / SF
Climate change has destroyed Earth as we know it. Weeds grow well, plants adapt. Great extrapolation of potential evolutionary steps of our plantlife. I wish this one had been longer.

Recommended reading by Sue Burke: Semiosis (my review)
Interview with the author about Semiosis: https://www.blackgate.com/2018/02/21/…

GOOD MOTHER by Lena Ng ★★½☆☆ Allegory
Gaia, the Mother of Earth, gives and gives and we take and take and in our entitlement give nothing back. The author wacks us over the head with what we are doing to Earth. A bit pointless.

TWILIGHT AT THE BASEBALL GROUND by George Alan Bradley ★★★★½  Alternate history
The US after a nuclear attack. Set after Star Wars (1977) and before the collapse of the Soviet Union. One boy and his parents in a bunker. Depressing, but well written. Not quite sure what to make of the ending.

Dyeing Earth, next part of reviews is here.

Battling kudzu…

The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Six 

I will update this anthology as I go along…

RHIZOME, BY STARLIGHT by Fran Wilde
Our MC lives on her own in an apocalyptic world, on a mountaintop surrounded by water and made of glas (a skyscraper?) where a presumably genetically enhanced and malicious kudzu is encroaching on her greenhouse. She is fighting for her life. Stay or leave? For more you have to read the story. ★★★★½

Interview with the author about her story:

„I was drawn to the idea of not just surviving but thriving post-event and how that might look for someone who had an inherited disability. My main character is part of a group that has been left behind because of their disabilities and asked to guard a seed warehouse. She’s descended from the original people who were left behind.“

This story was published as part of another anthology as well:

Rebuilding Tomorrow
by Tsana Dolichva (Editor), Fran Wilde (Contributor) and other authors

What if the apocalypse isn’t the end of the world? An anthology of apocalypse fiction featuring disabled and chronically ill protagonists, proving it’s not always the “fittest” who survive, it’s the most tenacious, stubborn, enduring and innovative characters who have the best chance of adapting when everything is lost. In this follow-up to Defying Doomsday, disabled and chronically ill protagonists build new worlds from the remains of the old…new perspectives on life after the apocalypse. (Book description)

Tentacle wars

Black Tide
by K.C. Jones, John Pirhalla (Narrator), Sophie Amoss (Narrator)

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Beth is a mess, a self-proclaimed „car wreck“. She is a professional house-sitter, sampling other people‘s lives. This time around she also dog-sits Jake, a golden lab, and makes friends with her neighbour Mike. Well, she starts by stalking him with her camera and then…Hello to an alcohol-induced one-night stand! And then the world ends and they end up stuck in a car on a beach, surrounded by something scary…

My recent track record with horror is not great. Psychological horror is lost on me, I usually get bored. And slasher stuff turns me off. Creature features are the most fun. This isn‘t exactly that, but a little. Plus there is plenty of action right from the start. Creepy, scary, sci-fi horror fun. Alien invasion with a twist.

I quite liked the reason for this particular end of the world and wish that it had been explored more.

Unfortunately I did not like Beth. Whiny, sorry for herself and a general failure at life. Bent on making the stupidest choices possible. Mike is self-destructive in another way. Together they make a couple that is potentially quite inept at survival under apocalyptic circumstances. 

Don‘t expect deep character development.

The audiobook is told by two narrators, one female and one male, alternating between telling the story from the POVs of Beth or Mike. They do a good job although there is one voice towards the end that doesn‘t really work well for me.

Bottomline, I liked the claustrophobic plot, but disliked Beth quite a bit. Good action, fast plot. Let‘s say 4 of 5 ominous bowling balls for now, I might raise that once I‘ve pondered it a bit longer.

Millennial banality with zombies

Severance
by Ling Ma (Author), Nancy Wu (Narrator)

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

“The end begins before you are ever aware of it.“

Odd book. The beginning feels like Covid-19 reimagined, bacterial instead of viral. Or rather it’s prophetic, as it was written in 2018. Apocalyptic/dystopian on the surface, it reads more like literary fiction. Commentary on capitalism, consumerism, the life of millennials, hopes and aspirations and the reality of making ends meet, the occasional boredom and banality of everyday life and work.

A long look back at the depressing/monotonous life of the MC. Average millenial with average job, living an average-sounding life of the relatively well-off. Illness strikes, an outbreak at first and then a pandemic. People seem to wind up as harmless zombies, wandering about and repeating tasks of their living past. Society as we know it ends. Our MC eventually leaves New York and joins up with a group of other survivors.

The backstories of the MC and her parents, Chinese immigrants to the US, take centre stage for most of the book. Which made me question if the apocalyptic setting was just a gimmick, to draw more readers. There is an odd amount of narrative about the MCs book production job. This had me wondering even more, what the whole point of this book was supposed to be. The dystopian elements only play a small part.

One of my GR friends described this as a „a slightly disguised New Adult Contemporary coming of age“. It’s a bit deeper than that, but nails it pretty well.

The audiobook narrator sounded pretty bored and laconic for most of the book. Or depressed? Pretty similar to how the MC felt about her life before the apocalypse.

The last few chapters made up for the indifference I mostly felt towards this story. The ending is pretty open, which I usually hate, but it gave a nice sense of purpose and possibility here.

Anemone?

Maelstrom by Peter Watts
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The sequel to the first Rifters novel, Starfish. Difficult. Lenie Clarke comes to shore and with her the apocalypse, of a sort (two sorts, actually).

The first half of the book was confusing. Multiple viewpoints with different agendas, some of them of the artificial kind. I was pretty lost. Cyberpunk meets the apocalypse meets a revenge story and…. it was a mess. I skimmed some of the more indecipherable parts. I contemplated to DNF, but my curiosity kept me going. It was a case of „what the hell did I just read“, but it had its moments.

A plot finally coalesced about two-thirds into the book and it was pretty slim. This book is more about the noise than about the red thread. The ending was satisfying enough. I might even pick up the third book at some point.

★★¾☆☆

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Try, try again…

Ark by Veronica Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The audio did not work for me at all. I was bored from the beginning. It just rambled along, I looked in vain for a red thread or something to grab my interest. I listened to it a second time with half an ear this morning and then proceeded to skim the written word.

I think that did the trick. I still don‘t love this story, but I think reading this brings out the subtleties of the story much better than listening to it. I only caught the final twist when I read the words, crazily enough. I might have fallen asleep last night, listening to this.

Audio narration by Evan Rachel Wood, who appeared on my radar in the role of Queen Sophie-Anne on True Blood. She did ok. Relatively bland. She made no attempt to bring any of the characters alive by giving them different voices.

Random thoughts, whilst reading this:

Svalbard makes me think of dark elves. Not sure, who is to blame.

In case you are wondering:
From spectacular orchids to towering trees – 2018’s top new plant discoveries
https://www.theguardian.com/environme…

None of my orchids have soil. Most orchids grow on trees (epiphytic orchids), although some are terrestrial. Or do you call the substrate that is used for potted orchids soil as well in English?

Look up a photo of a mirror orchid, it is so cool!

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And an overly hot apocalypse…

Perihelion Summer by Greg Egan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“People have had a couple of years to stockpile whatever they wanted, even if they thought the chance of anything happening was minuscule. The only ones who haven’t done that are temperamentally incapable of entertaining the possibility of disaster, and nothing they’ve heard in the last few days is going to change their minds.”

A third into this short novel (slightly overlong novella?) things haven’t changed so dramatically yet. And the old maps still work perfectly. Or rather, the frog is boiling so slowly that it hasn‘t noticed yet. I had expected something a lot more dramatic.

By the middle of the book things have started to heat up. Literally.

The world building is ok, the characters are mostly exchangeable. The most confusing thing for me as a European were the upside down seasons—the story is set south of the equator.

It was ok. It probably would have profited from having a few more pages.

And the ending was not satisfying. I actually flipped back a page, to see if I had missed something.

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Pretty chilled apocalypse

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Decided to get the audio. The narrator is an Aboriginal Canadian, same as the author. The first few chapters were odd, as he has an unusual way to emphasize his sentences.

The story starts slowly… No power in the reservation, the male MCs talking about hunting, slow build-up… I really wanted to try some moose meat one hour into the audio!

The plot is pretty straight forward and not terribly suspenseful. It’s about the community and how it deals with the lack of power and the issues following that. It does not really explore the situation deeply. The dream sequences had me hoping for something more exciting. Besides the slightly unusual setting, there is nothing here that hasn‘t been covered before by similar stories. Predictable. Clichéed.

Fairly flat and stereotypical characters. Towards the end I still struggled to tell some of them apart.

It was ok. I liked it. I am not rushing to get more by this author. The audio narration grew on me.

Why Waubgeshig Rice wrote a dystopian novel about the collapse of society from an Indigenous perspective
https://www.cbc.ca/books/why-waubgesh…

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More Naomi Kritzer

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 126 by Neil Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“Waiting Out the End of the World in Patty’s Place Cafe” by Naomi Kritzer

“I ran out of gas in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, just two hundred miles short of Pierre, my goal. Pierre, South Dakota, I mean, I wasn’t trying to get to someone named Pierre. I was trying to get to my parents, and Pierre was where they lived. I thought maybe, given that the world was probably ending in the next twenty-four hours, they’d want to talk to me.“

End of the World. Nothing else needed to make me read this. Nice. Relationships, family, should you fulfill the usual expectations, just because it‘s the done thing?

Can be found for free here: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritz…

About the Arecibo Oberservatory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areci…

Internal soundtrack, while listening to the podcast: GoldenEye by Tina Turner (because of the Arecibo Observatory—watch the movie, if you haven‘t yet, it‘s great).

Quirky podcast. At one point she took a break to drink something. That was a first!



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