Book Reviews

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, this year's Nebula Award winner, and I think justifiably so. Existential horror in the Lovecraft mode, beautifully and imaginatively told. Of course it has the same fundamental flaw as all Lovecraftian horror does for me: it tries to in some way suggest that the limits in the search for knowledge ought to warn us off from the search, and that there are things about how the world works that we are better off not knowing. That will always be a hard sell for me. But Vandermeer's ending manages to complicate this with its ambiguity in the Biologist's ultimate motive. In including herself as a survivor of the eleventh expedition as well as the twelfth, the Biologist suggests that ultimately her failure to bring the twelfth expedition to a successful conclusion does not mean that she has been a failure altogether. It suggests that in fact she still believes that there are answers out there to the questions she cares about and she will keep pursuing them, come madness.



Whose Body by Dorothy Sayers, a re-read, probably for the third or fourth time. The list of murder mysteries I will re-read is very, very short for obvious reasons, but this book will always be on the list. I wonder if other people have lists of murder mysteries they'll reread. For me, it's about half of Sayers, a handful of arc-important Poirots, and any Nero Wolfe mysteries whose ending I have forgotten (and if I realize halfway through a Nero Wolfe that I've already read it, I will put it down, but I find that I quite often make it to the ending before realizing it's a re-read). And that's about it.

I'd be happier with Whose Body if it had a few less anti-semitic jokes, but ultimately it's less problematic on these grounds than some of the other Wimsey books, and I like a lot of the Wimsey/Parker dynamic quite a lot, how Wimsey falters when it comes to groundwork and accusing people he likes and all of the hard work of policing... I think Sayers strays a bit from this idea as the books go on, or perhaps she intentionally suggests Wimsey gets better about being less of an ass in this regard... I know Wimsey does a lot more legwork a lot more uncomplainingly in Strong Poison, my most recent Wimsey reread.



Full Fathom Five by Max Gladstone, the third in his Craft series of metropolitan fantasies about a world where magic is a transactional economic activity and Gods are major engines of financial power. This one is set on a pseudo-Pacific island with a large expat population and a healthy business as a tax shelter, and is asking odd and interesting questions about modern-day colonialism that I haven't fully wrapped my head around. I think the thing Gladstone's metaphor gets at is that because economics is transactional, the influence of colonialism goes both ways. He spends an awful lot of time wondering about the costs, both fiscal and otherwise, that colonial powers are forced to pay by their colonies when they impose their will on them. When Kavekana'ai's status as a tax haven is threatened, the reader is led to believe that it is the scary 'western' corporate power that has an interest in keeping that status intact, but they just want their money back- it is the entrenched powers of Kavekana'ai's government that have been abusing the unique position of Kavekana'ai to steal from those foreigners making use of the shelters, and they are the ones most invested in preserving the status quo.

I'll have to think more about this. There's probably more nuance to it than that- there are certainly echoes of these themes in the secondary characters that cast more light on these questions.