lightreads

How Long 'til Black Future Month: Stories

4/5. Short fiction collection ranging from hard SF to dark fairy tales and back again. Jemisin's introduction is about how she taught herself to write short fiction; it made me think about how I might need to teach myself more about reading it, since I'm not very good at that. And since my ability to finish things remains spotty (siiigh), now seems as good a time as any. A few notes (links go to online versions):

"The Evaluators": A deeply creepy epistolary hard SF story about predation and loneliness and population control. Reminded me of Tiptree in the way it uses blank space to fill in the horror. Lingered in my mind.

"The Effluent Engine": This is not the most cutting or most weird or most inventive story in the collection, but it's the most fun for my money. I knew Jemisin was working on a new novel based off a short story in this collection but didn't know which one; I was sad to discover it wasn't this. Steampunk lesbian Haiti freedom fighters in historical New Orleans! Come on!

"The City Born Great": This one is apparently the basis of the new book. I went from 'okay, I'll read it obviously,' to 'ugh, really?' when I found out it has roots in Lovecraft because really? More? Must we? But reporting on where she plans to go does sound enjoyable. Anyway, this is one of several stories in the collection that deal with cities being or coming to life; I can see how rich this soil might be for a novel or a trilogy about New York.

There are many other stories here, most of them barbed or clever or thought-provoking, most about brown people of various sorts, most about power and who has it and who doesn't. It's all great stuff, unsurprisingly.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read this book using synthetic speech -- Nuance’s Samantha voice (.wav sample file). Not my favorite aural modality – Neospeech’s synthetic* line of voices such as Kate (another .wav) are examples of much better synthetic speech output. There’s also human-voiced audio, of course, and I actually see now that the U.S. National Library Service is considering recording this book (your tax dollars at work, Americans!). But the NLS runs about eighteen months behind on everything, there’s no commercial audio for this book at the moment, and frankly, human-voiced audio is a great experience exactly as much as I can speed it up but keep pitch down.

But here in the ghetto of print inaccessibility, there are lots of device specific constraints, and like I said access can lag months or years behind,** so there I was with good old Samantha. Mind you, I read almost everything with synthetic speech – let’s see, what have I read so far today? corporate balance sheets, Supreme Court cases, the New York Times, a dozen blogs, Gmail, my Eleventh Amendment abrogation notes, etc. And this review, naturally, all with the positively ancient Eloquence engine (wav file), only, uh, a lot faster than that. I know, I know! But I’ve been hearing this for over fifteen years – I think I’ve dreamed in this voice – so I don’t even notice how awful it is anymore. (ETA: Incidentally, that sample file cracks me right up because it's all, "I am an American. I speak English . . . I am British. Do you speak English?")

Anyway, so about reading this book! Which is the start of an epic fantasy trilogy. This one is about a young woman who is called to the power center of the throne that her mother abdicated, and she gets tangled up with the gods enslaved to her family. And this book is told in the oral tradition. Well, it’s told out loud, anyway, for reasons that become clear late in the book. And on the macro level, it works great – there are these wonderful moments where our narrator doubles back to remember the tiny thing she forgot to insert before the big thing she just remembered, and doing it this way makes the “and then . . . and then . . .” quality of first person work for its keep.

On the micro level . . . eh, not so much. The thing about synthetic voices is that they operate entirely on a rigid set of rules about punctuation and intonation, length of phrase and weight of pause. I know these rules so far down in my preconscious by now, I really can’t articulate them. But reading like this for most of my life – and being a writer in my own right – has made me think very hard about how sentences come together out loud. And these sentences were no different than the average, with perhaps a slightly rarer failure to come to a goddamn period already. They were not sentences said out loud: they were a bit too evenly cadenced, a bit too tidily constructed. I wanted the writing to be as fitted to faltering memory and a tired voice as the structure was, and aside from some spoilery elements, it wasn’t. These sentences followed the rules way too much.

Ah well. This book is getting a lot of attention right now. It was recced to me first as the book to read when you’re sick to your back teeth of racefail, and yep, that seems about right to me. In a few ways, particularly how it’s an epic fantasy that doesn’t sublimate race into a creepy multi-species conflict. My comments are otherwise similar to some others I’ve seen: it was an interesting book, but the protagonist didn’t do anything for me, emotionally, and I had that uncomfortable feeling that the enslaved god of chaos was supposed to be far more viscerally fascinating to me than he actually was. Still, it was a book about the geopolitics of gods that I found more interesting than Daniel Abrahams A Shadow in Summer, and there was also gay divine incest with bonus divine incest threesome.

All in all a good time that I’m not shouting about. I admit some trepidation for the sequel, which is apparently about – check this – a blind painter who can see the gods. *clutches head*. A blind painter, you guys. With bonus specialness!

*Well, technically the difference between Samantha and the Neospeech voices like Kate is that Samantha is entirely computer-generated, and Kate is a very fast digital assemblage of actual pre-recorded human phonemes. But that still qualifies as synthetic to my ear.

**I should take this moment, actually, to applaud Jemisin’s publisher, Orbit, for supplying this book in appropriate format to Bookshare on the day it was published. This is such a revolutionary idea – having access at the same time as everyone else! Good job, Orbit!

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