Because there are many SFF novellas at the library.
Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
Par for the course for me, I pulled down a random Murderbot book from the library shelf and started reading the series there. My goal was to prepare myself for the upcoming AppleTV+ series. You might ask “Why not read the first book in the series then?” and to that I must answer :P.
In this entry, Murderbot’s investigation into its missing memories is interrupted by a contract to protect a group of naive and bumbling scientists. Murderbot grumpily saves them with the help of a rather sassy research ship.
I declare Artificial Condition solid. I needed a bit of a push to get through the first few chapters because I was not quite following the plot. Say, maybe one should start a series at the beginning? No, it’s the kids who are wrong. As the plot picked up and Murderbot’s motivations became clearer, the novella drew me in and I came around. In a concise less-than-200 pages, Murderbot saved a group of scientists and advanced its investigation into its background.
It was fun. It was fine. It was Not That Deep. I don’t think Murderbot is the Second Coming (First Coming?) of neurodivergent representation in literature. Murderbot is no more or less like a neurodivergent person than Count Pierre Bezhukov or Dorothea Brooke. If you feel like Murderbot, then I’m glad Murderbot is there for you. I don’t really feel like Murderbot, even though there’s something deeply abnormal about my cognition. I thank Martha Wells for producing another entertaining entry in the canon of “Weird Robot Adventures”. If in the future I want to be comfortably entertained for an afternoon, I’ll consider Murderbot among my first-tier opportunities.
The Truth of the Aleke by Moses Ose Utomi
I also started the Forever Desert novella series with the second entry. Teehee. I am evil.
This story was a successful standalone, though it contained many references to the prior novella, which in my defense is a book that I had never heard of. (We need to go back to having numbers on the spines of books that are parts of series.) I learned of The Truth of the Aleke through the widespread disappointment that it wasn’t nominated for the Hugos this year, and having finished it I’m also surprised. While the prose style of the story is simple and direct, it engages with complex and troubling themes that benefit from being couched in a such humble package.
In The Truth of the Aleke, an idealistic and naive young man named Osi discovers that the cause to which he’s devoted his life is mere cover for oppression and extractive violence. Then, and this is critical, he discovers even more than that. In a time where we (including myself) are enamored of surface-level societal critique that warms the liberal-left cockles of our disappointed hearts, I commend Utomi for drilling not just down into the substrate of violence, but out the other side, to confront the nasty and intractable truth that the victim-victimizer dichotomy is less of a profound moral order and more of a vise in which many people are squeezed until they die.
Utomi unfurls the story of Osi like a fable, short chapters summarizing the milestones of his journey. Over and over, Utomi reaches what appears to be a natural stopping point, a final familiar lesson for Osi to learn: “We’re not so different after all”, “Don’t believe everything your rulers tell you”, “Give peace a chance”. And always Utomi collapses that assumption with another twist, until Osi and the reader are left with the awful truth: people with power are always playing you, and if somebody who doesn’t have power wants it, then they’re looking for ways to play you too.
I was not surprised when Utomi opened his Acknowledgements with a short discussion of the influence of 9/11 on the creation of the book. The deluge of grievances and opinions unleashed by that event carried us off a cliff and we’re still tumbling, abyss-bound, to this day. It drove Utomi to write one of the most subtly and starkly cynical books I’ve ever read. The Truth of the Aleke should be required reading for all of us feeling inappropriately Rebel Alliance-pilled in these times. We know everything bad that happens in Andor will be worth it, because we already know what unassailably well-meaning Skywalkers will take over after. Osi finds out that veeeeeeeery few people are Skywalker-blameless.
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
I don’t actually think I’ve read any H.P. Lovecraft stories. Or if I have, I’ve forgotten them. But I have read Victor LaValle’s The Changeling, and that book is so brilliantly terrifying that I’d pick up anything else he did (Admittedly, this approach has backfired once already because A People’s Future of the United States was mediocre).
But it didn’t backfire in the case of The Ballad of Black Tom, a powerful rewrite of one of Lovecraft’s most racist stories (a disturbing distinction in the oeuvre of a man who was notably racist by the standards of a super racist world). LaValle skillfully inverts Lovecraft’s sweaty-handed terror of urban interracial encounters into a disturbing account of how relentless racialized violence is scarier than any googly-eyed squid kid from under the sea.
Why not end the world, when the world hates you? LaValle’s Black Tom asks this question, and white people give him no good counter-arguments and lots of strong evidence for killing everyone, as is our wont. Many have commented on the core of Lovecraft’s horror being a white man’s mortal fear of irrelevance, that the scariest thing H.P. can think of is somebody important literally not giving a shit about him. Meanwhile, one day of indifference from the powerful would be a relief for Black Tom.
This world, the real world, strains at the seams with the amount of horror packed inside. The addition of dead gods who lie dreaming is a sort of respite from that horror, not a greater terror. This is what LaValle reveals to us with The Ballad of Black Tom, writing back to his fallen hero, Lovecraft, to let H.P. know how trite and risible his eldritch fears were in comparison to the villainy that slumbers in human hearts. It makes for an interesting counterpoint to Ring Shout, which I read just about a month ago. P. Djèlí Clark fuses the Klan and the Cthulhu to make a point about the dehumanizing nature of hate, whereas LaValle divides them to suggest that hate is what makes human beings the most dangerous creatures on Earth. It’s up to you which story you believe in; luckily, both rip.
So that’s SFF novellas, lately in my reading, though not entirely lately in publication history. You might ask “Are you ever gonna read books that have come out recently? Are you going to provide reviews in a timely fashion to inform the potential reader? What is the purpose of this exercise?”
To which I must answer :P.