Diverse Energies
Nov. 26th, 2012 17:34![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyDiverse Energies. Ed. Tobias S. Buckell and Joe Monti. New York: Tu Books, 2012.
Review copy provided by the publisher. Thanks!
I'd heard good things about this anthology, and though the premise isn't something that I am 100% always a fan of--"YA dystopia" is a marketing category that needs to be exploded as far as I am concerned, and asrachelmanija notes, the books in it "are generally about naïve privileged white girls slowly coming to realize that their “the government controls everything” society actually sucks, while navigating a love triangle"--I genuinely enjoyed almost all of the stories in this anthology, and there were even a few genuine laugh-out-loud moments. When I finally write that magical urban revolution story, I am putting a coelacanth in it as the symbol of rebellion, let me just say. Another thing I genuinely enjoyed is that almost all of the protagonists in these stories are not white, and many of the authors are people of color. These are both things that I can get behind.
Although almost all of these stories were awesome, here's a bit more about some of the ones I really liked:
# "Uncertainty Principle" by K. Tempest Bradford. The protagonist is a girl who can see and remember the effects of people messing with time around her. The awesome part comes when she decides to start messing back.
# "Pattern Recognition" by Ken Liu - Apparently Neal Stephenson isn't the only writer with human computing on the brain.
# "Good Girl" by Malinda Lo - Interracial marriage is outlawed and the government controls jobs. In Lo's telling, apocalyptic dictatorship Manhattan comes to life and a potentially hackneyed story is luminously real and tinged with possibility.
# "Blue Skies" by Cindy Pon - My only real complaint is that this story, about a have not-boy kidnapping a have-girl in postapocalyptic Taiwan, could have gone on for twice as long and I would have been equally happy. Pon excels at rendering emotion and setting, and I really liked the ending.
# "Solitude" by Ursula K. Le Guin - A Hainish story that's reprinted from The Birthday of the World, is told by the daughter of an Ekumen anthropologist who adapts to the culture her mother studies and comes to consider a dystopia. Like all of LeGuin's stories, this one made me think, and it was a really interesting place to end the anthology.
There were two stories I didn't like, and I actually want to say a bit about why.
# "The Last Day" by Ellen Oh - This is the first story in the collection, and it's a humdinger of a story to start out on. Maybe the theory was that because this one was the most depressing, it should go first? Regardless, though the story takes place in some incoherently alternate Dai Nihon Teikoku, all you really need to know is this: if you've read Barefoot Gen, you've read this story, except much better. If you haven't read Barefoot Gen, what are you waiting for? Go read Barefoot Gen. And, if, as the premise of this story has it, the Empire of Japan has been engaged in a life-and-death war with the West for nearly two decades, why do the characters give their names in Western, rather than Japanese, order?
# "A Pocket Full of Dharma" by Paolo Bacigalupi - I'm not surprised to see Bacigalupi in this collection, for all the obvious reasons, but I actually can't stand Bacigalupi; this is the first of his works of any length that I've been able to finish. I continue to believe that he is essentially an Orientalist in sheep's clothing, and though I can put my finger on very few specific things about this story that rubbed me the wrong way, the entire story rubbed me the wrong way. The feeling was cemented at about the halfway mark when--in an example of the elementary Mandarin that is inexplicably thrown in haphazardly, presumably for that essential exotic Asian flavor, despite the fact that the protagonist is a homeless boy from rural Chengdu--"qipao" is misspelled "chipao." Dear Paolo Bacigalupi, if you don't know Pinyin, there's an app for that. The point being, to me this story seemed to be an overwritten exercise in the sort of techno-Orientalism in which 1980s William Gibson repeatedly indulged, and we don't need more of it as far as I'm concerned. See also the Silver Goggles review of The Windup Girl.
Overall, I didn't find this collection as depressing as some people have--I suspect this has as much to do with temperament as with anything else, but there are at least two components to my reaction that I can identify. The first is the uncomfortable knowledge that some of these futures, or near carbon copies of them, almost certainly already exist in our present for those who are less privileged than I am and we are. The second is the fact that very few of the stories end in a truly hopeless place, for the world as a whole if not the protagonists, as far as I can tell. Again, it may be temperament that inspires this interpretation in me, but it may also be the fact that creation can and does come out of destruction, as the writers in this anthology prove.
Review copy provided by the publisher. Thanks!
I'd heard good things about this anthology, and though the premise isn't something that I am 100% always a fan of--"YA dystopia" is a marketing category that needs to be exploded as far as I am concerned, and as
rachelmanija notes, the books in it "are generally about naïve privileged white girls slowly coming to realize that their “the government controls everything” society actually sucks, while navigating a love triangle"--I genuinely enjoyed almost all of the stories in this anthology, and there were even a few genuine laugh-out-loud moments. When I finally write that magical urban revolution story, I am putting a coelacanth in it as the symbol of rebellion, let me just say. Another thing I genuinely enjoyed is that almost all of the protagonists in these stories are not white, and many of the authors are people of color. These are both things that I can get behind. Although almost all of these stories were awesome, here's a bit more about some of the ones I really liked:
# "Uncertainty Principle" by K. Tempest Bradford. The protagonist is a girl who can see and remember the effects of people messing with time around her. The awesome part comes when she decides to start messing back.
# "Pattern Recognition" by Ken Liu - Apparently Neal Stephenson isn't the only writer with human computing on the brain.
# "Good Girl" by Malinda Lo - Interracial marriage is outlawed and the government controls jobs. In Lo's telling, apocalyptic dictatorship Manhattan comes to life and a potentially hackneyed story is luminously real and tinged with possibility.
# "Blue Skies" by Cindy Pon - My only real complaint is that this story, about a have not-boy kidnapping a have-girl in postapocalyptic Taiwan, could have gone on for twice as long and I would have been equally happy. Pon excels at rendering emotion and setting, and I really liked the ending.
# "Solitude" by Ursula K. Le Guin - A Hainish story that's reprinted from The Birthday of the World, is told by the daughter of an Ekumen anthropologist who adapts to the culture her mother studies and comes to consider a dystopia. Like all of LeGuin's stories, this one made me think, and it was a really interesting place to end the anthology.
There were two stories I didn't like, and I actually want to say a bit about why.
# "The Last Day" by Ellen Oh - This is the first story in the collection, and it's a humdinger of a story to start out on. Maybe the theory was that because this one was the most depressing, it should go first? Regardless, though the story takes place in some incoherently alternate Dai Nihon Teikoku, all you really need to know is this: if you've read Barefoot Gen, you've read this story, except much better. If you haven't read Barefoot Gen, what are you waiting for? Go read Barefoot Gen. And, if, as the premise of this story has it, the Empire of Japan has been engaged in a life-and-death war with the West for nearly two decades, why do the characters give their names in Western, rather than Japanese, order?
# "A Pocket Full of Dharma" by Paolo Bacigalupi - I'm not surprised to see Bacigalupi in this collection, for all the obvious reasons, but I actually can't stand Bacigalupi; this is the first of his works of any length that I've been able to finish. I continue to believe that he is essentially an Orientalist in sheep's clothing, and though I can put my finger on very few specific things about this story that rubbed me the wrong way, the entire story rubbed me the wrong way. The feeling was cemented at about the halfway mark when--in an example of the elementary Mandarin that is inexplicably thrown in haphazardly, presumably for that essential exotic Asian flavor, despite the fact that the protagonist is a homeless boy from rural Chengdu--"qipao" is misspelled "chipao." Dear Paolo Bacigalupi, if you don't know Pinyin, there's an app for that. The point being, to me this story seemed to be an overwritten exercise in the sort of techno-Orientalism in which 1980s William Gibson repeatedly indulged, and we don't need more of it as far as I'm concerned. See also the Silver Goggles review of The Windup Girl.
Overall, I didn't find this collection as depressing as some people have--I suspect this has as much to do with temperament as with anything else, but there are at least two components to my reaction that I can identify. The first is the uncomfortable knowledge that some of these futures, or near carbon copies of them, almost certainly already exist in our present for those who are less privileged than I am and we are. The second is the fact that very few of the stories end in a truly hopeless place, for the world as a whole if not the protagonists, as far as I can tell. Again, it may be temperament that inspires this interpretation in me, but it may also be the fact that creation can and does come out of destruction, as the writers in this anthology prove.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-14 03:30 (UTC)That actually made me find it even more depressing! ;)
The second is the fact that very few of the stories end in a truly hopeless place, for the world as a whole if not the protagonists, as far as I can tell.
Hmm. I thought the world seemed clearly doomed in Cindy Pon's story, Ellen Oh's story, and Greg von Eekhout's story. Additionally, the protagonists of the child slavery story and the squatters story seemed likely to die immediately after the story ended - wasn't it stated in the first and strongly implied in the second that they had already been poisoned and would die of it?
Though in a related point, the fact that the thing the government banned in Lo's story was interracial marriage - something which has been banned in real life - definitely helped sell the "the government has banned X" premise.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-14 04:13 (UTC)I actually borrowed my copy of the book to someone else after I finished it, so I can only say that I didn't get those impressions from the von Eekhout, child slavery, or squatters stories. Is the child slavery one you're mentioning the one about human computing? I really didn't get that impression at all. And I also didn't have that impression of Pon's world, either. Things were fucked up in all of these, I thought, but not irrevocably.
Re: your first point, my reaction at that point tends to discomfort and anger, rather than feeling depressed per se.