Tag: alternate history

#REVIEW: The Radiant Dark, by Alexandra Oliva

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I have reached a point where I am getting a truly absurd number of books every month through book box services of one stripe or another, and every time I think I’m going to get my shit together and cull one or two of them, I discover a book like The Radiant Dark, which was not on my radar in any way before it showed up and caught my interest via, in this case, my Aardvark box. Alexandra Oliva has written a couple of other books before this, but she’s new to me, and anything that can consistently feed me new authors that I like is going to continue to get my attention and my money.

The Radiant Dark is part alternate history, part science fiction, and part family saga; it starts in 1980, and at first I thought I had managed to pick up what feels like the third or fourth book in the last month or so featuring a struggling young mother with a baby and a useless husband. And, well, it is that, for a little while, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. Very early in, President Carter announces that a signal emanating from a specific region of outer space has been conclusively proven to have intelligent alien origins, from an unknown exoplanet approximately eleven light-years away. And because of the distances involved, any message that gets sent back is going to take eleven years for the aliens to receive, and 22 years minimum for Earth to receive any sort of response. The book isn’t solely concerned with the communications, of course, but there have to be time skips to keep it from being a thousand pages long. Oliva also has a defter hand with her characters than you might think at the beginning of the book, and the relationship between Carol, her son Michael, and her daughter Rosanna (called Ro for most of the book) is the emotional center of the book. Carol’s husband quickly becomes her ex-husband, but he’s a complex character in his own right, and while it seems clear who the hero and who the goat is early on, it gets muddled up nicely in the fashion of most dysfunctional families pretty quickly. Ro in particular has a very strained relationship with her mother, and she will eventually become a mother on her own. I genuinely feel like even if they hadn’t had the first contact/science fiction side of this book, it would be well worth reading just because of the way it explores the family dynamics.

Ro turns out to be a world-class astronomer, and is one of the first people to decipher the second message the aliens send us, 22 years after the original beacon. She is snatched out of her Ph.D program by a world-renowned scientist who wants to use the knowledge the aliens have sent us to start looking for other potentially habitable planets and, possibly, other intelligent life– although the aliens make it clear that all they have been able to find so far is us. She presents it as a generational effort, something that she doesn’t plan to survive to see the fruits of. By the time the book ends in the 2030s, humanity has colonized the Moon and sent people to Mars, so obviously there’s some divergence from our own history, as you well might expect.

I was not expecting to enjoy this nearly as much as I did, and this is the rare book that I will recommend because I find the characters so compelling. I like good character work, of course, but it’s rarely at the forefront of my reasons for liking a book, especially one so suited to my interests as a first-contact science fiction novel. But I think it’s best to read this as a family saga with a side dish of sci-fi rather than the other way around; if you go into this solely as a sci-fi person, I think you’ll come out disappointed. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the aliens do show up eventually, but don’t read the book waiting for that reveal. That’s not the book Oliva wanted to write. Go in with your expectations calibrated appropriately, though, and you’ll end up with a read that I think stands a pretty good chance of showing up on my end of the year list. Check it out.

#REVIEW: The Peacekeeper, by B.L. Blanchard

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I kinda feel bad about this one, I’ll admit it.

The last time I did a review of a book I’d been sent for review purposes was Scorpica, which turned out pretty well. In fact, rereading my review just now, it seems like that book has grown in my estimation since I read it. After that review got posted the publicist emailed me and sent me a list of the other books she was currently representing, and, well, the description for The Peacekeeper really grabbed me:

Against the backdrop of a never-colonized North America, a broken Ojibwe detective embarks on an emotional and twisting journey toward solving two murders, rediscovering family, and finding himself.

North America was never colonized. The United States and Canada don’t exist. The Great Lakes are surrounded by an independent Ojibwe nation. And in the village of Baawitigong, a Peacekeeper confronts his devastating past.

Twenty years ago to the day, Chibenashi’s mother was murdered and his father confessed. Ever since, caring for his still-traumatized younger sister has been Chibenashi’s privilege and penance. Now, on the same night of the Manoomin harvest, another woman is slain. His mother’s best friend. This leads to a seemingly impossible connection that takes Chibenashi far from the only world he’s ever known.

The major city of Shikaakwa is home to the victim’s cruelly estranged family―and to two people Chibenashi never wanted to see again: his imprisoned father and the lover who broke his heart. As the questions mount, the answers will change his and his sister’s lives forever. Because Chibenashi is about to discover that everything about their lives has been a lie.

Like, y’all know me by now. That’s my shit right there, and I jumped at this book. I’d have jumped at it even if it hadn’t been offered to me for free. A murder mystery set in an uncolonized North America? I’m in. Gimme.

I’ll cut to the chase, because I don’t like writing bad reviews unless I can make them entertaining: I needed more from this book than I got, and ended up disappointed. “North America was never colonized” is kind of a big deal, and it’s just sort of taken as a given, to the point where this book might as well have been set on another planet. It’s “now,” roughly, but there’s reference to a few big wars in the last couple of decades, and we’re on Mars, and the Ojibwe nation is more or less a utopia, in a way that ends up feeling kind of patronizing to the actual Ojibwe.(*) The murder mystery itself is kind of boring, the main character is a bit of a wanker, and the killer is clear from roughly a third of the way into the book, and I am generally very bad at predicting the killer in mysteries.

If any one of these elements were where I wanted them to be– either a little bit of explanatory history, or at least a map, or if the central mystery was more compelling, or the main character less one-note and whiny, I’d have been able to ignore the other flaws. But unfortunately the only thing that kept me from putting this down was the idea that I’d agreed to review it. I didn’t hate it– if I had, this would have been more fun to write– but I just don’t have anything good to say about it. As it stands, unfortunately, it’s just kind of blandly mediocre, and a book with this interesting of a premise being mediocre is a serious letdown.

(*) I kind of want to spend a lot of time talking about this and I kind of don’t; the notion that Ojibwe culture is the best in the world is so consistent throughout the book to the point where it feels weirdly jingoistic and propagandistic, and that’s a damned weird thing to say about a fictional country. Like, one character is an economist and a university lecture, and his alibi for the murder is that he was giving a lecture about how the Ojibwe economic system was the best in the world at a prestigious conference. That is … not how economists talk, and generally not how “prestigious conferences” go, either.