Review: Cloud Permutations by Lavie Tidhar

I stumbled into a #hashchat on Twitter, where World SF blog creator, GUD contributor, and prolific writer @LavieTidhar was answering questions from the audience. If the Library of Congress was on the ball with their Twitter archive, or I had a better memory, I could amaze you with the brilliance of my question. As it is, I will try to impress you with the brilliance of the book that I won with that lost-to-posterity question.

'Cloud Permutations' is part myth, part science fiction adventure. Its roots are both broad and deep; they nurture a story that is personal, well-defined, and brilliantly textured and contextualized, yet still archetypal.

Tidhar draws from his experience in the remote islands of Melanesia to paint for us one possible permutation of the clouds. Heven is a world populated, centuries ago, by Melanesian settlers from distant Earth. They have been cut off, due to unknown circumstances (a trope Tidhar has pulled off beautifully before), and their day-to-day life has grown to fill those circumstances as /kastom/. There is one rule above all others, core to keeping the peace: you will not fly.

Kalbaben and his best friend, Vira, go against the /kastom/ of Heven and pay a heavy price, Kal's first step towards a prophecy he ill understands. He is banished to the merchant-island Tanna, given to remote relatives. There, he is befriended by an ostentatious and crafty albino, Bani, who takes him under his wing.

The adventure they embark on is not easy, nor just, nor kind, nor innocent, but it is told with a rich brush, in language, in interaction, and in scope. The world of Heven has many histories, touched on lightly in parts, and heavily in others. Tidhar borrows from many standard sfnal tropes, and makes something unique of them: in blend, tone, and setting.

The story that is told most directly, the life of Kalbaben, is sweet or bitter-sweet depending on how you choose to read it. It ends perhaps a touch too simply, except 'Cloud Permutations' has many more stories besides, and Tidhar weaves them in a tapestry worth reading for its many ragged layers.

A Field Guide to Surreal Botany edited by Janet Chui and Jason Erik Lundberg, reviewed by kaolin

A Field Guide to Surreal Botany by Janet Chui

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

These days you have to crinkle the map a bit to find any edges, but that makes the edges no less real. And still at the edges of the map lie not only dragons and other fauna, but quite curious flora as well, though in some instances the distinction is difficult.

"A Field Guide to Surreal Botany" begins with an elegant introduction to the world of surreal botany, and its move to the underground of science since the eighteenth century. But:

The publishers of this book believe that the time for remaining ignorant of surreal botany has come to an end. Personal safety alone would justify the information on some of these specimens coming to light, and readers will surely appreciate learning of the plants whose threats are lesser, or that are disappearing as the plants themselves become more rare. This book may be read and appreciated by gardening enthusiasts, paranormal investigators, and conspiracy theorists alike.

To that last list, I would add: the whimsically creative, the writer dry of ideas, precocious children, geneticists, and perhaps those very surreal plants themselves as are capable of assimilating information from this printed form. The guide delights with forty-eight detailed and researched (and in the case of the Big Yellow Flower of Unnecessarily Obvious Information, perhaps overly detailed and researched) plants (or plant-like beings, or vaguely plant-like things) that exist across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and in some cases "beyond".

That is not to say the book is without flaw--with so many contributors, the tone at times falls from the requisite scientific to more mundane turns of phrase; and some of Janet Chui's wonderful illustrations, for me, fall short of perfection. And while I'm wishing, I really could have gone for a more thorough set of indexes--it's frustrating to remember a plant and have to go scan the table of contents, where they're alphabetized per region.

Really, though, it is a beautiful book, and the humor and erudition is more than consistent enough to carry the bemused reader away--they do warn you about some of those plants! While the Forget-me-bastard merely causes itching, stinging, and rash, the Time Cactus can trick the unwary researcher or amateur botanist into a quite deadly trance (sending nutrients back along a wormhole to previous times of scarcity). I would recommend a copy of this book to be nestled in among any collection of its more prosaic ilk.

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Delusionism by Anthony Marais, reviewed by kaolin

Delusionism by Anthony Marais

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars


In "Delusionism", Anthony Marais presents roughly sixty-nine micro-essays, whose two sections (Culture vs. Nature and Art vs. Life) are divided by a hundred aphorisms. This is a forked-tongue-in-cheek exploration and oration, marketed as philosophy/self help--somewhat in the vein of Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary", but intending more to drive thought through humor than humor through thought.

The book is filled with thoughts--and thoughts about thoughts--and I was tempted to refer to its points heavily in this review. I was, in retrospect, surprised to not find an essay on Conversation or Discussion, though it's likely there was a fitting aphorism I'm not recalling. Regarding Genius, Marais says:

Has the reader ever noticed that thinking is easy? For most of us it's more difficult not to think than the contrary. It seems that with every turn of the head our brain showers us with thoughts, flashing across our mind's sky like fireworks. Indeed, the rush of ideas is a delightful feeling. Sometimes it seems to palpably flow through our body in a euphoric, almost tickling sensation. Interestingly, it's often ideas we perceive as untruths that tickles us most: absurd, ridiculous thoughts that produce outrageous images. People who, with a haphazard turn of the head, stumble upon these thoughts sometimes find themselves giggling aloud in public, or walking with a silly, conspicuous skip. This is genius: the ability to produce freely and easily new thoughts. And the sensation is pleasurable.

It is genius, this genius, that Marais seems to strive for with this book; and from how often I laughed along, I think he often hit his mark. With a wink and a nudge, he delivers essays on topics ranging from Originality and The Quest For Happiness to Pet Rocks and Books vs. Movies. Some play straight, some verso--and others strive for double duty, contradicting not only convention, but, subtly perhaps, themselves as well.

Of course, some insights are more clever than others--some are obvious, some simply plain, and some a bit muddled. But the overall attempt, I think, makes a very worthwhile platter of intellectual finger food that could well be grown into a banquet given the right crowd. I found myself half wanting to keep notes as I read, to argue back with the author and see where more thoughts led--so perhaps this is a book better read with a friend. But I suspect the author would be pleased even with my reaction to those essays I was not moved by, or felt were less than a hundred percent presented: I thought.

If this sounds interesting, you might also consider our review of The Cure, a novel by Anthony Marais.

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The Lone Star Stories Reader, edited by Eric T. Marin, reviewed by kaolin

The Lone Star Stories Reader by Eric T. Marin

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars

// WARNING: gushing follows.

If you've read any issue of the long-established webzine Lone Star Stories, you've seen it's not tied to Texas in any particular way (the introduction to this collection helps explain how that came about). If you've not yet read an issue of LSS, you're missing out.

Having been familiar with LSS for a few years, now, and being an especial fan of the /printed/ word, I was thrilled to hear editor, slush-reader and fastest rejecter in the business Eric Marin was bringing out a collection. "The Lone Star Stories Reader" contains fifteen stories ranging considerably in length, for a grand total of two hundred sixty pages. These are all stories that originally appeared online at LSS between 2004 and 2008, all of which can still be read online at http://literary.erictmarin.com.... But for those of you who prefer your fiction in a tactile form, I heartily recommend this handsomely-presented book.

With most collections, you expect a few clunkers--pieces that don't resonate with you as much as they might with someone else. I felt this anthology had been prepared with me in mind. The stories are inventive; some toy with you, some slap you around, some curl up next to you and purr sweet demands. My only complaint might be that the occasional denouement was more ethereal than I would have liked.

Since they are all exquisitely written, here's some picks to give you a taste for the variety.

"The Frozen One" by Tim Pratt might just blow your mind: a visitor from "someplace else. Sort of a kingdom next door" steps into our reality to tell a parable. "It's like, if you teach a kid to play chess, he doesn't just learn how to play chess, he learns how to think a certain way." They're training us--"there's some bad stuff happening there, way more complicated [...:], but there might be some ... refugees." The parable's an engaging moral tale as well--I loved it, and I have a thing against moral tales.

"The Disembowler" by Ekaterina Sedia is a beautifully inventive piece about a being running around disemboweling cars and appliances. I was skeptical a few paragraphs in, but everything was explained far better than I could have asked for, and the logic was consistent as well as surprising.

"A Night in Electric Squidland" by Sarah Monette is a strange dystopian paranormal detective story set in the bowels of a BDSM nightclub, an otherworld that feels here-and-now except for the magic suffusing it.

"Seasonal Work" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman is an exceptionally brief piece of mystic realism (or perhaps there's no genre involved--that's almost up to the reader) set at a gift-wrapping station.

"Angels of a Desert Heaven" by Marguerite Reed sets up the question of the place of gods and culture in a land with cultures both melted together and oddly segregated; it's a poignant tale that spreads itself across several, including those of rock music stardom and fortune telling.

There is so much beauty here, densely packed yet woven like gossamer thread. Buy a copy for yourself and one for a friend who needs a touch more beauty in their lives.

Disclaimer: I've been shooting to get my own works in Eric Marin's table of contents for some time now.

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The Silk Palace by Colin Harvey, reviewed by kaolin

The Silk Palace by Colin Harvey

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ancient gods, cultish murders, royal intrigue, and sapphic love--The Silk Palace has it all. The two younger daughters of the king of Whiterock are to be married to neighboring kingdoms: one to Prince Casimiripian (Cas) of the Karnaki Empire, and one to an Emir of the Western Alliance. Cas has under his care the linguist Bluestocking, who has been invited to Whiterock to study and translate some ancient scrolls whose meanings have been lost through both intentional and temporal obfusaction.

Bluestocking has a dirty secret that's slipped to us early on, which adds a measure of fear to her day to day existence and gives others a few extra hooks to dig into her as she finds herself more and more wrapped in conflicting threads. We're shown, towards the beginning, what would happen to Bluestocking if she were caught out--public maiming and dismemberment; followed by a slow, lingering death. And by the end, the truth _is_ made known.

Sadly, I found The Silk Palace very hard to get into--it was as if a great expository chunk had been chopped from the beginning and flung back into the flow of things without proper adjustment for what a fresh reader would understand. The characters' familiarities with each other (and lack thereof) were difficult to understand from how they acted until we were given relevant flashbacks/memories.

The writing was competent, for the most part, though I felt it over-told some things, re-told some things too often, and fell into cliche occasionally. For all the wandering about, I never really felt an understanding of the city or the people in it--or the context of it all, including armies laying siege. And while it's traditional for everything to fall on the shoulders of one character, I found there to be too many threads that disappeared as soon as they weren't being looked at--for the scope of the piece, I felt the world was under-represented.

And while the "ancient evil" storyline is given a reasonably complex context, it still felt somewhat generic in execution; the characters tell us a fair bit about themselves, but emote no real depth. Any differentiation from stereotypes was largely due to plot, rather than the plot feeling driven by character.

Still, if "ancient gods, cultish murders, royal intrigue, and sapphic love" pull you in, you'll probably appreciate the book.


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The Suicide Shop by Jean Teulé, reviewed by kaolin

The Suicide Shop by Jean Teule

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Tuvaches, a sort of working class Addams Family, operate The Suicide Shop--a shop where anyone can purchase the equipment and/or training required to off themselves (though children can only purchase sweets that have a 50% chance of killing them).

The story is set some time after North America has been laid to waste by the Big One--but for the most part it could pass as contemporary, with the odd bit of future tech: holographic greeting cards; a solution that turn one's kiss poisonous to others; 3d semi-immersive full-sensory television.

Mishima and Lucrèce Tuvache have three children--two depressed and/or ailing, and the youngest, bright and cherubic. This latter child, Alan, is the force that changes everything.

The chapters are brief, often terse, and the story progresses swiftly--at times a little too swiftly, in that I felt the characters bounced a bit too much in mood and disposition. At the same time, the quick pace kept me turning pages.

I was somewhat disappointed by the direction of the narrative--it's described as a quirky black comedy, but I found it more comedy, verging on slapstick, and less black (until, perhaps, the end). Alan's cheer and undauntable optimism quickly infects the rest of the family (except for Mishima, the father); even suicide commandos are shown to not be able to withstand his barrage of cheerfulness (a favorite quote: "I'll only be demonstrating this to you once!").

Still, it has a definite charm, and if you are perhaps less jaded you might get a real kick out of it throughout. I could easily see it being a cult favorite in the right circles.

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The Fireborn Chronicles by Mary Andrews, reviewed by kaolin

The Fireborn Chronicles by Mary Andrews

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Fireborn Chronicles is a psionic/space-faring epic. The focus of the chronicles is Rael--an adoptee/refugee from The Hive with implants that allow him to access any data terminal with a thought. He's groomed by his foster-mother for Dark Ops government work, given his own ship and told to assemble a team of his choosing.

The first several sections of the book are essentially short stories jumping from place to place as we're introduced to the team that he assembles. The plot picks up when the team is together-at-last and has to track down what happened to a high-ranking ambassador. In the end, the fate of the known universe hangs in the balance.

Mary Andrews sets a grand stage with many inventive ideas--but as a whole this novel does not tell the story it sets out to as well as I would have liked. It was an easy read, slipping into cliche only now and then, though each section repeated details as if I'd not been privy to them before, jerking me out of the narrative repeatedly. And while a very complex universe is hinted at, its rendering was sparse and, I felt, the hinting overreached its presentation:

PSI of a certain sort are universally recognized, but are only allowed to live in one section of one planet; aliens of all sorts exist somewhere (accomodations have been made for them on a pleasure planet; and we meet one non-humanoid in the form of a station master), but for brief mention they have nothing to do with this story that "will change the universe".

I know the story is not meant to be taken too seriously, but still I wanted things to hang together a bit more. We jump from character introduction to character introduction as a team is gathered (losing one along the way, not to be mentioned again until half-way through the book, and then only off-handedly explained), with large gaps in character development.

And while the plot kept me increasingly curious, what wrapped it up was, for me, ultimately unsatisfying--a deus ex machina that is relatively unexplained and unexplored. The book largely read as a few snippets plus a larger novella whose main purpose was jumping off into another, as of yet untold, story.

All that said, I'm sure there's many a reader that will enjoy this book. It's a "psionic sci fi" romp with tinges of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat and tinges of Babylon 5, where everything works out in the end.


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