Book O' the Fortnight: Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

This fortnight's book is one of the most intriguing and exquisitely written I have read in a long time. In a very small nutshell, the novel follows a weekend in the life plus flashbacks of "Mark Spitz," a survivor of the zombie-apocalypse who is currently involved in an operation to re-take and clear out a chunk of Manhattan Island and New York City. The Marines have done the heavy lifting, dropping in barricades around the Zone and eradicating 98+% of the normal seek-and-eat zombies, but afterwards small, para-military sweeper teams like Mark Spitz's are sent in to take care of "stragglers," zombies which, for whatever reason, never quite adjusted to being zombies. Instead of mindlessly attacking and eating any living human they come across, they spend their un-lives stuck in a repetitive loop: operating a long-dead copy machine, answering unringing phones, even lowering and raising fry-baskets into empty deep-fryers in the back of a Micky Dee's.

Now, before you get excited at the prospect of another Zombieland-style zombie-apocalypse novel Readers Mine, be warned: this is not your average zombie-apocalypse novel. In fact, what Colson Whitehead has written isn't a zombie-apocalypse novel at all. Instead he has written something both far more original and far more traditional and universal: he's written a novel about the human heart in conflict with itself set in a post(?)-zombie-apocalypse world. This novel is really quite brilliant, but unfortunately the fact that it isn't really a zombie novel has cost Whitehead considerably in terms of high-star reviews on places like Amazon. In the end it is rarely genre-novels that give fields like horror, SF, fantasy,mystery, etc a bad name. It is the fans, and zombie-apocalypse fans have proven true to the type with Zone One. In other words, since it turns out not to really be a zombie-apocalypse novel, those who picked it up expecting a comfortable romp through familiar generic territory are left confused and angry, so they blame Whitehead for betraying their expectations. In the process they miss out on an incredible work of fiction.

To my mind, Zone One is about trauma, and how the human mind and spirit tries to deal with it, and adjust to a world that is irrevocably changed from the one they are familiar with. Mark Spitz spends a lot of time wandering through his past via often sudden, quasi stream-of-consciousness vignettes. These trips give the reader a look into both the pre-apocalypse world, and Spitz's months of survival and constant movement after Last Night, to the eventual beginnings of a kind of national recovery and Reconstruction. The problem is that Spitz grew up in a world very similar and only a few more years advanced technologically than our own, a world with which we are intimately familiar and which is now gone forever, destroyed by the "plague." (Whitehead's use of "Reconstruction" to describe the efforts of the rebuilt American government is a nicely ironic twist on classic "Redemptionist" novels of the early 20th century, which celebrated the antebellum American South and reviled the historical post-war Reconstruction efforts of the North.)

However, Spitz adjusted to the post-First Night world, and actually became extremely good at surviving, at staying alive and uninfected/eaten in a country where the revenant dead vastly outnumbered the living. His problem is that he cannot seem to adjust to this third era, where, supposedly, the survivors are to take back what was theirs and rebuild the lost world. Yet everyone knows that a true resurrection of the past is impossible. Too many have died, too much has been endured by the survivors. (Indeed, Whitehead gives the reader a wonderfully dark strain of comic relief with the universal effects of PASD, Post-Apocalyptic-Stress-Disorder, where modern psychology meets the end of the world.) Spitz is separated from the two worlds where he knows the rules and now is being asked to adapt to a third, where no one knows the rules.

Spitz's trauma(s) run deep and true, and Whitehead's style gives the reader a continuous sense of weightlessness, of being adrift, and trying to find an anchor or sure footing on a fun-house floor. Anyone who has ever experienced the death of a parent or loved one, especially at a young age, will recognize this uncomfortable micro-gravity. How can the world continue to go on after X? Why does it? It has been irredeemably changed, yet doesn't seem to recognize the fact! Trauma challenges our necessary assumption of personal importance, and in the case of Zone One, our assumption of human importance. Individually, in predictable environments, we usually manage to adapt. But what if, as Whitehead asks, the environment is fundamentally unpredictable? How much change do we have in us? How malleable is the human mind, how adaptable the human spirit?

And given a choice in worlds to live in, would we really make the apparently obvious and sane choice?

This is a great book, and deserves to become a classic, cult or otherwise. It's available for Kindle as well, so   go and grab it. You'll dig it.

Book O' the Fortnight: Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors

Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors
 by Jennifer K. Stuller

Regular readers will recognize the author of the current Book O' the Fortnight from previous mentions here in connection with Slayage and Geek Girl Con, and it is well known that she's one of my favorite people. I met Jennifer K. Stuller at Slayage 4 in St. Augustine, where she gave an incredible presentation on pop culture influences on Joss Whedon's works. At the same conference, we bought her book Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology, which she was kind enough to inscribe for Dale and me. I'm kind of ashamed to say that it took me until late last year to sit down and read it cover-to-cover. Don't get me wrong, her book wasn't sitting idle. I dipped into it regularly, reading a chapter here, skimming a section there, diving from index to mid-chapter to see what she had to say about a particular interest here and there, but I just hadn't settled in for the entire journey.

I'm glad I finally did!

Stuller self-identifies as a pop culture historian, and Ink-Stained Amazons  shows the truth of that claim. Her research and methodology are impeccable, and she presents her findings in a narrative that is both fascinating and fun, using a wide ranging, multi-disciplinary approach that sets her work firmly within the changing historical context of the past century or so. More, her writing is immediately accessible, and thoroughly enjoyable. She begins by briefly outlining her focus, being female characters in popular culture which meet at least two of four criteria: 1.) a narrative that "borrows from, or resonates with, classical themes and/or elements of world mythology," 2.) has "an element of the fantastic," 3.) "a uniquely identifiable skill or power," 4.) and "a mission or purpose that benefits the greater good." These criteria set, she then gives the reader an excellent historical overview of female superheroes from William M. Marston's Wonder Woman to Dark Angel's Max Guevara, covering kick-ass female heroes in comic books, comic strips, books, movies, and TV along the way. Importantly, Stuller places the development of these figures within the larger socio-cultural context of (particularly) American culture and the emergence, growth, and change of the feminist movement.

Stuller is also unflinching in her analysis of the successes and failures of both the larger culture and the feminist movement's various "waves." She maintains an admirably clear and unbiased historical lens throughout (which trust me, Readers Mine, is an incredibly difficult thing to do when writing about a subject  that one is passionate about!). From classic historical narrative, Stuller moves in the second section of her book to the mythological and cultural underpinnings and story-structures of female superheroes, combining history, feminist criticism, Jungian archetypes, Campbellian comparative mythology, and fan-love into a powerful in-depth analysis of the successes an failings of specific characters and narratives, from The Avengers to Modesty Blaise, to Xena the Warrior Princess, Charlie's Angels, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,  Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and Dark Angel to name just a few. She examines the strange lack of female to female mentoring, positive maternal figures, and realistic female relationships in popular culture, as well as pointing out where such stories have appeared.

With some of the problems and potentialities of fdemale superhero narratives outlines, Stuller concludes with a look at the women who are creating the modern crop of female superheroes. From actors like Nichelle Nichols, Whoopi Goldberg, Lucy Lawless, Lynda Carter, Sarah Michelle Gellar, among others, all of who take their positions as potential role models very seriously, to writer/blogger/activists like Mary Borsellino, Gail Simone, Trina Robbins, and Angela Robinson, who are on the front lines of creating today's female superheros and working against old tropes and entrenched male-centric storytelling, Stuller gives the reader an inside look on the still growing, still evolving history of the female superhero who today is more and more often being brought to life by women.

Stuller's final chapter asks the question "Where do we go from here?" Which she answers with an unflinching "foreward!" In spite of failures, in spite of resistance, in spite of steps forward being accompanied by steps back, the next step is to continue, that each of us, whatever sex, whatever gender, may find in these modern myths the stories that inspire us, and that, in Jennifer K. Stuller's own words, enable us to  find "heroes to relate to, and ways to live heroically."

It is a remarkable, fun, moving and inspiring book, one that I'm glad is on my shelf, and who's author I am so very proud to call a friend. Go buy it.

Infidel by Kameron Hurley is the Book O' the Fortnight

You may have noticed some changes here at Solomon Mao’s recently, Readers Mine. I decided it was time to refresh the look of things a little and add some new bells and whistles, among which is the Book O’ the Week, which you see to the upper left. The theory is that every week I’ll choose a book I’ve read and really enjoyed, write a quick review post, and then leave a linked cover shot up until the next week. Of course, in reality, I’ve had Vernor Vinge’s Children of the Sky up for a good two and a half weeks now, so maybe I should call the piece the “Book O’ the Fortnight,” which doesn’t sound all that bad actually.

God's War by Kameron Hurley

Anyway, I’m pleased to put up Kameron Hurley’s Infidel as the new Book O’! Hurley’s a recent discovery on my part, as I picked up her first novel, God’s War, this summer and pretty much was instantly hooked on the worlds she has made and the words she uses to make them. God’s War and Infidel are the first two books in a series set on the planet Umayma (an Arabic name meaning “high mother” or “little mother”), a world originally fundamentally hostile to human life which was roughly terraformed many centuries ago and thus at the time of the novels is merely inhospitable. Not that you can really blame the planet. See, the terraforming was carried out by semi-mythical “magicians” using bugs, bioengineered insects which presumably breathed in whatever mix of atmospheric gases was originally present and belched out a good ol’ nitrogen-oxygen-argon-etc mix, and broke down and fertilized the soil, made the water drinkable, etc, etc, until the planet’s putative population, until this time eaking out an existence on the several moons around Umayma, could come on down, though they may have done so before things were quite ready. Of course, like all human technologies the bugs had – well – bugs, and sometimes the terraforming… got interesting.

Anyway, the settlers were largely of a faith derived from Islam, with a few non-Muslim groups thrown in. At first Umayma had a planetary government and a kind of all powerful, all female planetary special forces/religious police force, the bel dames. As in “sans merci.” Soon enough, people being people, this set up went to hell, several separate nations states emerged from the chaos, and two hundred odd years ago, two of those, Nasheen and Chenja, started a war that’s been going strong ever since, fueled by religious intolerance, nationalism, and chemical and biological weapons that make a genegineered ebola-smallpox hybrid look like dessert topping.

Out of this world and this war steps Nyxnissa so Dasheem, “Nyx” – ex soldier, ex-bel dame, and one of the hardest boiled anti-heroes to come down the pike in a long while. Nyx isn’t just hard, she’s brutal. Not driven, but ruthless. Just to give you some idea, here’s the very first line of God’s War:

“Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert.”

Yeah. Like that. Hurley’s prose is tight and hard, sometimes coming so fast and clipped that it reads like the sound of a master chef chopping celery. Nyx is a product of her world, and Hurley somehow makes you want to love and hate her at the same time. Her foil is Rhys, a tall drink of water, half-assed magician, and observant Muslim who is soft where Nyx is hard, and hard where she is, unexpectedly, soft.

I’m not going to go into the story of Infidel here, because it’s the second book in the series, and because the tale it tells is inextricably bound up in the world Hurley has created. This truly is one of the most magnificent examples of world-building I’ve seen in decades, and the characters are a part and parcel of that building. Be advised, this ain’t your granny’s SF/F. Hurley pulls no punches, gives no easy answers, and she shies away from nothing. Race, religion, gender roles, sex, drugs, violence, war, politics, business… all of that is here in all of its rotting glory, but there are also people desperately looking for something to believe in, something to live by and for, even if they have to invent it for themselves. I’ve seen Hurley’s work called “feminist science fiction,” “bug noir,” even “bug punk.” Whatever. I call it fast-paced, well written, meticulously detailed, character-driven, bad-ass writing, and I think you will too.

Buy her stuff. You’ll like it.