Book review: The Cruel Prince by Holly Black versus Jack Four by Neal Ascher

Good books have no gender, but I read two books one after the other, and they a direct embodiment of “female” and “male” literature:

* The Cruel Prince by Holly Black – action in the Fay kingdom. Magic as a source of energy – she waved her hand, muttered incantations and made a horse out of wands. A lot of different relationships – siblings, fathers and children, romantic love, intrigues, betrayals. I started out sceptical and got carried away.

* Jack Four by Neal Ascher – no relationships, except “the enemy turned out to be a friend”, with almost no dialogue. Science as a source of energy – he waved his hand, muttered a code word for AI, and the printer began to print a gun. It starts with a rape, then a lot of blood, something like a robinsonade or a computer quest with a detailed description of the items the hero collects.

Closer to the end, the hero has sex with a woman but concludes that “it was a monkey business” and devotes the rest of the book to trying to kill her. In the spirit of feminism, she runs an orbital station specializing in the slave trade and decides to make a sex slave out of the hero – as you do.

I didn’t read multi-page descriptions of how someone soaked blow-by-blow missed.

An alien who produces children alone is called a “father”. Typical male fiction that tries to be less sexist but comes out as usual.

Book nano-review: “The Witch Who Came in from the Cold” by Lindsay Smith et al.

John le Carre meets “A Discovery of Witches” in the 70-s Prague.

Uneven – what’s all that about the golem? – but good.

Book mini-review: “Shadows of the Apt series by Adrian Chajkovski

The first book of the series

There are two problems with compelling books: at first, it’s impossible to tear yourself away from them, and after the end, there is a difficult void to fill.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is my favourite contemporary SF writer. He won Arthur Clarke’s award in 2016; I have read everything he wrote since then. Like my other favourite writer, K. S. Robinson, Tchaikovsky was drawn to fantasy after “hard science fiction”.

Gritting my teeth, I started the first book in the “Shadows of the Apt” series, an original world where human types are like insects, and got sucked into all 10 books. While reading, I abandoned non-fiction, justifying myself with the fact that (electronic) books are library books, I can’t keep other readers in the queue. And the fact that the book is very timely: in it, the democratic, academic city of Collegium opposes the absolutist Wasp Empire.

Another interesting idea is the difference between “apt” and “inapt” – scientific and magical thinking. Somewhere in Medieval times, people started measuring, drawing and recording, leading to the Industrial Revolution. The Medieval maps don’t show distances and are more symbolic than factual; the modern maps are precise. “Shadows of the Apt” describes the switch that led to a social revolution.

An idea came to mind while reading that during the film adaptation, people who became rabid because of Tolkien’s non-white characters in the recent TV adaptations will not have reason to be indignant: the peoples described in “Shadows of the Apt” are emphatically ethnically diverse. The main characters from the “beetle” family are repeatedly described as “brown-skinned people”. “Ants” from different cities vary from “white with a blue tint” to “blue-black”.

I hope it will take less than 70 years to display the reality of the modern world on the screen. Tolkien was writing from the POW of his world during the decline of the British Empire, in which the whites of your country were absolutely good, so the “evil whites” were disguised as non-whites. With the adaptation of Tchaikovsky, everyone will be in their places and closer to the truth – there are enough villains and heroes among people of any colour.

Book review: The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird

It’s an excellent book in the fashionable subgenre of modern Western SF (also Not Forgetting the Whale). Continuing the tradition of “Herland” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” James Tiptree Jr.: what happens if men are removed from civilization?

And the answer is – surprisingly to most men but not women – nothing like unlimited sex choices for the surviving men like in the 80s Polish satiric film Sexmission. Although I must admit the emerging society does look a bit socialist.

Unusually, the epidemic starts in Britain and logically spreads around the world. As usual, no one listens to the person who first understands what is happening (like Lee Venliang, who noticed COVID).

But the biological part in the book is ourrageously wrong (spoilers). There is a virus transmitted by airborne droplets and through surfaces, which kills 90% of men two days after infection. And it does not touch asymptomatic carriers – women at all.

1) “The virus multiplies 1.8 times faster than HIV.” HIV1 replication takes 24 hours. Reducing the replication time by half will not give a rapid course of the disease. AIDS takes years to develop.

2) The mechanism of the disease is the massive multiplication of leukocytes. What prevents the use of chemotherapy drugs against leukemia?

3) The creators of the vaccine achieve 100% survival of the chimpanzee. In the meantime, only 96% survive, the vaccine is not ready. We all already know that this is not how it works. However, the book was written in 2019.

4) Finally, 10% of men are immune due to some sequence on the X chromosome. A typical X-linked inheritance is shown: two identical twins, whose father is sensitive to the disease, are immune. And with a raznoyaytsevye and sensitive father, one survived, the other did not.

And that 10% of immunity in all populations, from Inuit to Bantu (unlikely, there is already evidence that sensitivity to COVID depends on ethnicity). Women have two X chromosomes, so they are stable. But wait. If there are 10% of X chromosomes in the population R, this means that only 20% of women will have at least one R chromosome. Plus 1% two. But nothing is said about the death of women. This means that there must be an additional dependence on the level of hormones.

So if you need a biologist as a beta-reader, you know where to find me

Book micro-review: “The Cold Storage” by David Koepp ***

The author is no less than a Jurassic Park screen writer. It’s another riff on the topic of a cosmic rays irradiated, highly contagious slime mould taking hold of the human nervous system through the unlikely feats of metabolic Lamarckism. 

The characters and plot are relatively plausible in the Maire of Easttown kind of way, unlike the happy end.

(spoiler alert)

The Australian Outback is only isolated if you are a human. If you propagate using spores, the winds will blow you around the world, ending in the “The girl with all the gifts” scenario.

“The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug”

By Steffanie Strathdee, Thomas Patterson

The memoir describes the first successful US case of bacteriophage therapy written by the patient’s wife (a scientist) and the patient himself. “The Perfect Predator” is not one book but at least four – is this a bug or a feature?

It starts as a boring travelogue about Valley of the Kings in Egypt. I would’ve dropped the book there if I was not reading it for the Bad Bugs book club. After the husband falls ill, the book pivots into a misery memoir detailing long-term care in Egypt, Germany, and the US. When antibiotics fail, it becomes a “hail Mary” search for an alternative but scientific therapy that segues into the history of bacterial viruses (phages).

Every block is intercepted by the patient’s account of his hallucinations that reads as psychedelic prose. As a result, whoever you are, you will find something interesting in the book. If you are a spiritual person who distrusts science and prefers alternative treatments, you will find a guru-embracing attitude refreshing. You will be able to skip the boring history and details of modern ICU treatment parts.

If you are scientifically minded, you will be able to reverse the order. I don’t know who needs to read about an erotic dance in ICU, but maybe it’s just my puritan upbringing showing. The book was nominated for numerous awards and launched a global “treatment by phages” movement.

The perfect predator? A. baumannii aka Iraquibactor visualized using Scanning electron microscopy. (By Vader1941 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

I’ve had privilege of talking to the authors via Zoom – the wonders of Twitter and our famous club. They come across as very charming people. They answered to our niggling questions about notoriously US expensive health service. They were lucky to have the insurance from the University where Thomas Patterson worked. And – more importantly – experimental treatments are free to encourage the development of new techniques. I support and admire Dr. Strathdee mission to make it available to more people.

But maybe if the authors find a publisher that doesn’t push for maximum popular appeal at the expense of the stylistic coherence, the next book will win an award.

Bad Bugs Book Club 2020

The aim of the Bad Bugs Book Club is to get people interested in science, specifically microbiology, by reading books (novels) in which infectious disease forms some part of the story.

* Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson  (YA)  – yellow fever in the 18th century US.

 * Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koonz -floated to the surface recently because it features a virus produced in a secret Wuhan laboratory.  One of the worst books I’ve read.  A mishmash of Stephen King, a spy thriller and romance.  The relevant part is 5% at the end of the novel.

* The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh  – a bewildering mix of real science and a conspiracy theory

* Not forgetting the Whale by John Ironmonger – “British whimsical” segueing into Wolf of the Wall street segueing into a postapocalyptic novel that ends well.

* The Constant Gardener,  John le Carre – a global pharma conspiracy. I remember Ralph Fiennes mopping about in the film; the book is better despite the bleak end.

* The waiting room, Eve Smith – after a global crysis, antibiotics are not administered to people over 70; a government conspiracy. Le Carre meets Vongozero.

*  The Bone garden by Tess Gerritsen – an excellent description of “childbed fever”, ridiculous plot with Mills & Boon moments. The second worst book of the year, after Eyes of darkness.

Book nano-review: Marge Piercy “Woman on the edge of time”

A genuinely great book written from the rare view of a dispossesed – an immigrant Latino woman incarcerated in a mental institution.

Books2020: Speculative (SF + fantasy)

While taking the Coursera course on speculative fiction, I was forced to admit that SF is a sub-genre of fantasy. This usually offends SF fans, as spaceships are much more realistic than dragons.

* The underground railroad, Whitehead, Colson

There is an actual underground railroad that delivers slaves to freedom. Very good.

* Neptune’s brood, Stross, Charle

A rare SF about accountants brilliantly inventing the whole new financial system adapted to travel in the absence of FTL. There is only one sex scene of a life-like undignified tumbling kind.

* Consider Flebas, Inversions, – Ian M. Banks  – rereading 20 years later. Unputdownable again.

* Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1) by Ernest Cline. Now a movie by Stevel Spielberg. The brave new world of extreme povertry and digital escapism. Great to read, but I am uneasy that the savior is rescued by a billionaire.

* Vongozero (Вонгозеро #1), Live peopple (Вонгозеро #2) – Yana Vagner/Яна Вагнер. I rarely read Russian SF, but this is word-of-mouse self published book about a pandemic. Very good, although the whining heroine got on my nerves. The atrocious Russian TV series, To the lake, is on Netflix.

• The boy on the bridge, Carey, M. R.  – the prequel to the excellent   “The girl with all the gifts”, almost just as good and provides a satisfactory closure.
• The wheel of ice,   Baxter, Stephen –  a  Doctor Who novel, YA
• The Supernova Era by Cixin Liu – all people above 13 die after a close supernova
• Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu – ball lighting is weaponised.
• The long way to a small angry planet by Becky Chambers
• Diving into the Wreck, City of ruins by Kristine Rusch – deep space archeology. Feels very real. Bought the second book to reward the author.
• Firefall  (an omnibus of Blindside and Echopraxia) by Blind by Peter Watts – a compelling vision of the future with vampires resurreced and zombies created but his descriptions don’t create a picture for me. I felt like one of his cognitively impaired protagonists

Micro-review: Normal people by Sally Rooney

On the first attempt I quickly got bored by yet one more story about  Juliet and Romeo from the wrong side of the tracks. Then started watching the BBC adaptation that followed word-by-word the book. Gave up the adaptation as the catch-up didn’t have subtitles and the protagonists speak with a Northern Irish accent. Finished the book. A convincing  “rich and Millennials also cry”, but just the latest BBC “War and Peace” adaptation I don’t see what is the fuss about.