L’Esprit De L’Escalier, by Catherynne M. Valente

It’s hard for me to rate overt retellings of classics really high, but the tradition is a venerable one and L'Esprit De L'Escalier is very good. Since it references Virgil’s telling you might want to read that or a summary first. The setting is very clever, making the minor tweak that Orpheus never looks back at Eurydice and actually gets her out of Hades, sort of. She’s not in good shape. The modernizing of the Pantheon (the Greek gods) is fun too. What a year for Valente.

My Goodreads Review 

Comfort Me With Apples, by Catherynne Valente

This is a jaw-dropper of a book. I have tended to think of Valente as a kind of lightweight, but not any more. The style of the book is horror, but there's a whole lot more going on here than jumpscares. It is deeply allegorical, and the reveal of the allegory is gradual. I should have read it more than once. I didn't pick up on a lot of the references until I read other reviews with spoilers in them.

Between this and "The Past Is Red" it looks like Valente is ready to move into a powerful writing phase. It's always been fun to read her stuff--lots of action and adventure, and she's not afraid to be feminine in her writing. This was better than fun.

My Goodreads Review

The Past Is Red, by Cathrynne M. Valente

This has to be one of my favorites from Cat Valente. She is reaching for some new literary ground here, and while the voice of the protagonist (the most hated in Garbagetown, essentially for telling the truth, and some know it) gets a bit grating in places it's a really powerfully told apocalyptic story. What is left of humanity is mostly living on a floating land mass made from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch collected and sorted. Everything else is under water. Not geologically accurate (there was a fair amount of dry land on Earth even when there was no ice) but it drives the story really well. Valente captures the insanity of living in that place really well, and in the afterword (important to read) says she is trying to offer a positive message as well. Life will go on even in the absolute worst case scenarios, unless it doesn't, and it is possible to enjoy it. Well worth the read.

My Goodreads Review

Color, Heat and the Wreck of the Argo, by Catherynne M. Valente

I've read a fair amount of Catherynne M. Valente over the years, and a lot of it is kind of goofy.  Not really in a bad way.  But in this story she's digging deep.  The protagonist is a kind of hard-luck woman with an interest in videography, and knowledge about Betamax recorders.  She finds one at a yard sale, gets it working, and starts seeing visions of other parts of the subjects' lives.

It's a fully mature story in that the relationships described are powerful and central to the story.  The protagonist is mourning her ex's departure, and they have to come back together to hand over the remains of the dog they had together.  You really feel for everyone involved, and the Betamax technology is certainly obscure enough to carry fantasy.  Color, Heat and the Wreck of the Argo is definitely worth reading.

Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This book reads like you took an armload of glam rock albums, put them in a blender, covered them with chocolate sauce and set them on fire. It has all the nuance of a trash compactor, all the character development of an overripe mango, and all the wonder of a six year old..cat. Reading this, I felt like I had run several miles in a three piece suit, sat in a hot tub, gone break dancing, and then sat in the sun for several hours.

Just about no effort to turn out the above, and that's the whole book. I have no doubt that the author crafted these sentences herself, but it reads like it could have been written by a neural network from the 90's. There's a wafer-thin plot, and a touch of character development, in a sea of overdone metaphors and similes pretending to be clever. Not sure how this gets all the award nominations, since there's just not that much there. I saw it through to the end, but was glad it got there. Exhausting to read, and not much in the way of payoff.



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Fade to White, by Cathrynne M. Valente

A pretty common theme in disaster stories, true and fictional, is that people in those situations try to hang on to some form of normalcy.  It's very deliberate where children are involved, and is done for their comfort--presumably that is true for adults also.

So speculative fiction can take that to its logical conclusion.  In the worst forms of disaster, people may cling to the most staid of their traditions, represented by extreme conservatism.  One example that comes to mind is A Boy and His Dog, a series of stories by Harlan Ellison adapted into a movie.  I only saw the movie, and apparently it doesn't do the series justice.  We have another in Valente's Fade to White.  

The story centers on Marvin, hoping to grow up to be a Husband--few men are now fertile, and the ones that are must have several wives, so they travel from family to family.  Sylvie could be one of these wives, but she is not looking forward to it--she is tuned in to the desolation of the situation, large swaths of landscape glassed over and lifeless.  President McCarthy endorses beer and leads the few people left after a nuclear war.  The story is illustrated with drafts of ad campaigns for enhanced food and toiletries--marketing is part of that normalcy.  And it's really pretty good, in a very overt Sheri S. Tepper sort of way.  I liked it, even if it doesn't really extend the trope much.  A nice dystopian read before bed.  3 stars.

Silently and Very Fast, by Catherynne M. Valente

Silently and Very Fast is a very interesting and challenging read.  It doesn't read like a hard SF story, but in some way it may be a very accurate way of describing what's coming for us.  This is the second AI-buddy story in the Novella category for the Nebulas this year, and it couldn't be more different from Kiss Me Twice, which I reviewed just a few days ago.  Silently and Very Fast was harder for me to read, as it gets more magical and loopy than I normally prefer.  But Kiss Me Twice was a more straight technological projection, and as a result put what I think were artificial limits on the artificial intelligences.  Valente places no such limits on her AIs, or at least the limits are not apparent at first.  The ending puts it in context very well.  Valente made me work and it put me off a little, but in the end I really enjoyed it, and give it 3 strong stars.

So now I've read all the Nebula nominees that are available online for free.  Adam-Troy Castro's "With Unclean Hands" and Carolyn Ives Gilman's "The Ice Owl" are in Analog and F & SF respectively, and those publications do sometimes put award nominees up as samples for awhile, so we'll see if I get to see those under the aegis of this blog.  Who do I think will win?  Ken Liu's The Man Who Ended History.  Most fun to read?  Kiss me Twice.  It was a strong field this year, all the stories were pretty good.  We'll see how the novelettes are.