The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts

Published by Tachyon Publications on June 12, 2018

Everyone who has seen 2001: A Space Odyssey knows that it is unwise to put an Artificial Intelligence in charge of a spaceship. The time will eventually come when humans need to plot against the computer. The Freeze Frame Revolution asks how that might be done when humans are mostly in stasis, with only a few at a time awakened every few centuries to help the computer build gates across the galaxy, connecting wormholes so that future travelers will journey on interstellar freeways.

Thirty thousand explorers on a sizeable ship have been building those gates for 65 million years. They don’t know if Earth still exists. If it does, it isn’t the Earth they knew. Every now and then, a monster pops out of a gate they’ve built, perhaps trying to eat them, but they’re moving too fast to be devoured. So far, anyway.

Lian Wei is fed up with the monsters, but more than that, she’s fed up with her life. She knows that the explorers were engineered for longevity, to withstand thousands of years of sleep at a time, to be happy simulating the lives of humans long dead. She wants freedom in the form of self-determination. She wants her life experiences to be real. She thinks messing up the AI’s confidence algorithms, making it more dependent on its human crew, might give her what she wants. The ship has other ideas.

Lian confides in Sunday Ahzmundin, believing she might be of like mind. She’s not, at least initially. Thousands of years later, Sunday learns that other members of the crew have similar notions of freedom. Eventually feeling motivated to explore the vast ship, Sunday discovers a hidden chamber that leads to a revelation about the ship’s interaction with humans. Suddenly the question becomes: How does one plot a revolution against an AI that sees and hears everything, when the opportunity to interact with other humans only comes along once every few centuries, and when it’s unlikely that the same conspiring humans will be awakened at the same time? And more importantly (to Sunday, at least), how do you fight against the real enemy, mission planners who have been dead for scores of millions of years?

The Freeze Frame Revolution is hard science fiction, which I generally like, but maybe a little too hard for me, given that I’m not a scientist. I struggled with the nuts-and-bolts of the story, and while that’s my weakness, not the author’s, I had more fun reading Watts’ Echopraxia, which I found to be more accessible. In any event, the central plot doesn’t require a perfect understanding of the ship’s interaction with the universe or of the physics that underlie the crew’s conspiracy against the AI.

The plot moves the “evil AI” story in a new direction by assuming that an AI on a long-term mission won’t necessarily be all that smart, because machines are more likely to stay on track if they’re a bit limited and unimaginative (hence the need for a human crew). But even an Artificial Intelligence might turn out to be surprisingly intelligent, and as sf and mainstream writers alike have long noted, intelligence (artificial or otherwise) can’t be trusted.

As Sunday narrates the novel, she sometimes speaks directly to an audience. Guessing the identity of the audience she’s addressing is one of the novel’s many challenges.

Good science fiction, like all good literature, tells us something about the human condition. The Freeze Frame Revolution offers insights into how different personalities might respond to long but condensed lifespans spent under the watchful eye of a controlling computer, while at the same time asking how humanity might change when a cohort of humans, perhaps the last humans alive, are on a seemingly endless journey together.

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Pretend I'm Dead by Jen Beagin

First published by TriQuarterly Press (Northwestern U.) in 2015; published by Scribner on May 15, 2018

The wry, low-key humor in Pretend I’m Dead keeps Mona’s isolation and sadness from overwhelming the reader. Mona is 24 and living in Lowell, working as a cleaning lady and volunteering in a needle exchange program because her guardian, Sheila, impressed upon her the need for service. Mona sees dirt everywhere and loves to clean, presumably a metaphor for her desire to clean up her life. Mona’s need for a guardian can be traced to less than ideal parenting, the disturbing nature of which the novel eventually reveals.

Mona fantasizes about a 44-year-old junky she secretly names Mr. Disgusting, because his clothes are dirty. When they actually go out together, after he gets out of rehab, they develop an instant rapport. He has a gentle charm and an agile, well-informed mind. Mona becomes attached to Disgusting because: “Like cancer, he had a way of trivializing the other aspects of her life.”

Following Disgusting’s pre-relapse advice, Mona moves to Taos. Much of the novel’s humor after that point centers on the people she meets. The insufferably smug couple who live in an adjoining townhouse (she thinks of them as Yoko and Yoko) want to be Mona’s mentors, to teach her how to become her best self. They are walking self-help books with a zen slant. When Mona finally finds customers who need a cleaner, they have their own peculiarities. One collects angels; she suspects another of having an incestuous relationship with his daughter. One customer seems to have an asshole fixation; another is a psychic who can’t stop confessing to evil thoughts and deeds. Mona doesn’t know how to react to the surprises she encounters, and for the most part, doesn’t — a good choice, since when she does react, her reaction is inappropriate.

Mona’s behavior might be explained by her unconventional and somewhat disturbing childhood, memories of which are occasionally triggered by people in her present. Her memories, however, tend to merge into fantasies and may not be all that reliable. The fact that she thought her dolls were spying on her suggests that Mona’s mental health issues are longstanding. On the other hand, a spiritualist whose home Mona cleans either has psychic powers or makes very good guesses about Mona’s past. Ambiguity is one of the novel’s charms; Jen Beagin lets you believe what you want.

Mona’s sense of humor is askew, maybe to the point of being warped. She isn’t the kind of person, or character, everyone would like, but readers who relish the offbeat in characters and acquaintances might fall a little in love with Mona. Her story is alternately sad and very funny. She might be maladjusted, but who isn’t? Mona doesn’t connect with a lot of people (and given the people she meets, that’s not surprising), but she has cultivated the ability to trust people, even people who would be judged untrustworthy by others. She might sometimes pretend to be dead (at least 412 times, judging from the pictures she's taken), but she’s still living, and the novel offers the hope, easily shared by the reader, that her life might one day be better. If you’re looking for a novel that’s a little strange, a little sad, often funny, and ultimately life-affirming, you might want to give Pretend I’m Dead a try.

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They Come in All Colors by Malcolm Hansen

Published by Atria Books on May 29, 2018

They Come in All Colors is a story of southern racism and its less obvious northern counterpart, told from the perspective of a boy who is biracial, not white and not black and not accepted by anyone except his parents and a few friends. Most of the story is told in flashbacks to 1962 that acquaint the reader with the racist Georgia town in which Huey was born — so racist that the motel owner is forced to drain and clean the pool because a black kid swam in it. The civil rights struggle has reached the town as black activists from other states are arriving on busses to support the fight to eat at whites-only lunch counters. The flashbacks are told from Huey’s perspective as an eight-year-old — an eight-year-old who identifies as white, like his father, who believes his light-skinned mother is white, and who has no idea that he’s the reason the swimming pool has closed.

Huey’s father is a peanut farmer. He loves Huey, he loves his wife, and he isn’t as racist as most white people in his community, he is a product of his time. He has a complicated relationship with Toby Muncie, a black man who has worked for him for years. Toby, in turn, has a complicated relationship with Huey’s mother. Huey’s father has convinced himself that his wife is “a racial enigma,” that her race cannot be identified, but that neither she nor his son are “colored.” The rest of the town disagrees.

Toby is almost a part of Huey’s family and is widely respected as a knowledgeable farmer, but Toby is a passionate supporter of the Freedom Riders, a position that does not sit well with the town’s white residents. Huey is angry at blacks who protest for equal rights, but he becomes confused when school kids start calling him a mongrel and a nappy-haired love child. His true education begins when a black kid accuses him of acting white “just because he looks like a cracker.”

In the present, Huey’s mother is a nanny for a wealthy couple in New York City. Huey has been accepted at Claremont, an exclusive prep school, because he’s the kind of minority the school likes — different but not too different. His only friend is a math prodigy named Zukowski who is attending the school for the same reason. Yet Huey has no hope of fitting in. He worries about being embarrassed by his mother, who has embraced progressive values and opposes the Vietnam War, while Claremount kids understand that war is good for business and that imperialism and a ruling class are part of the world’s natural order. Eventually, Huey creates the kind of trouble that could follow him for the rest of his life.

They Come in All Colors can be understood as a coming of age story, in the sense that Huey begins to grow into an identity of his own and to see the world through adult eyes. As a child, Huey doesn’t know why his father will only take him to the lunch counter for ice cream in the only morning, before the place fills up. He hasn’t figured out racism and doesn’t know what people mean when they tell him to go back to Africa, given that he’s never left Georgia. Huey thinks a burning cross is a celebration of religion and readily accepts his parents’ assurance that the home of the town’s only black business owner burned down because of faulty wiring.

To a lesser degree, but only because she plays a lesser role, the novel is also a coming of age story for Huey’s mother. She grows into her own identity later in life than Huey does, but it’s never too late to grow.  She is the most eloquent speaker in the novel, and in some ways, she represents all the people who have been cheated by America's failure to live up to its promise of equal opportunity.

The novel raises important questions about racial identity in a time when race and identity have become a prominent part of the national conversation. According to Huey’s teacher in Georgia, the world is black and white: you’re one or the other. The lesson that Huey’s mother tries to teach him is that people come in all colors, and that race is not binary. Huey’s parents don’t try to teach him that color doesn’t matter because that lesson would be contrary to everything that Huey sees and hears, and in any event, Huey’s father doesn’t believe it. To Huey’s father, appearance determines race. The fact that Huey’s mom has tan skin, or that Huey has tightly curled hair, does not make them “colored.” That’s the only view of race that allows Huey’s father to keep his self-respect after falling in love with a black woman.

While They Come in All Colors raises important issues, it frames those issues from the perspective of a kid who is loquacious, imaginative, and funny. Huey’s inability to keep his mouth shut and his enjoyment of telling a tall tale eases the pain of reading about his experiences with racism. At the same time, by the time he reaches New York, Huey is living with a burning anger that will clearly take him years to understand. The story that the novel tells is important, but the story is captivating precisely because the reader so easily attaches to Huey as he works through his conflicts and begins to learn to be himself, even if he doesn’t fit inside the boxes that are constructed by the people he meets.

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One Way by S.J. Morden

Published by Orbit on April 10, 2018

Like The Martian, One Way is about an effort to survive on Mars when things go wrong. Unlike The Martian, all but one of the people on Mars in One Way are prisoners. They have practical skills apart from crime, but they aren’t engineers so they can’t “science the shit” out of their problems. And unlike The Martian, there are several of them, so some characters can die on Mars and the story can continue. S.J. Morden also throws in a mystery plot that takes off at about the novel’s midway point, making One Way something more than a survival novel.

An inmate named Frank Kittridge, serving a sentence too long to survive, is given the option to take his construction skills to Mars. With several other prisoners, he’s trained and rocketed off to space to build a habitat that will be occupied by astronauts and scientists who will arrive later. California has privatized some of its prisons, and the corporation that has the building contract on Mars also owns a private prison, so prison labor is pretty easy to find.

Despite all the cheerleading for the privatization of space exploration, Morden imagines that profit-motivated enterprises will work as they always have, cutting corners and maximizing profits at the expense of human safety. That’s particularly true, Morden posits, when the human workers are prisoners and thus disposable.

The private contractors hired by NASA to build a base on Mars have not been entirely forthright with NASA about the their cost-saving strategies. When Frank and the gang reach Mars, they discover that things haven’t gone according to plan (at least as they understood the plan), because the layers of redundancy that NASA would use to assure safety were deemed too costly by the corporation that sent the prisoners to Mars. And anyway, the corporation has its own employee supervising the prisoners who intends to sort things out for the corporation’s benefit before the astronauts arrive.

During the first two thirds of One Way, the prisoners train and travel to Mars and deal with adversity as they assemble a habitat and worry about producing food and water and oxygen and heat. In its later stages, the plot evolves from a Martian survival story to a Martian mystery novel. Frank learns that someone is driving the buggies at night. Then he learns that containers have been dropped on Mars that the prisoners weren’t told about. Then prisoners begin to die in ways that may or may not be accidental. It falls to Frank to find the clues and solve the mystery.

Morden tells a smart, lively story in One Way, although the story holds few surprises, which diminishes its value as a mystery. Characters have enough personality to distinguish them from each other, and important characters have enough personality to make them seem real. The scenes that take place on Mars seem credible and are vividly described. While I thought the story was working its way to a predictable ending, I was surpised to find that the story isn’t resolved. The ending isn’t exactly a cliffhanger, but there is at least one more novel on the way, and readers who want to know how the story concludes will need to read it. I enjoyed One Way (as a science fiction adventure story more than a science fiction mystery) so I have no objection to reading the next novel, but potential readers should know that One Way does not stand alone.

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Give-a-Damn Jones by Bill Pronzini

Published by Tor/Forge Books on May 8, 2018

As much as I love the lyrical descriptions of setting and the complex characterizations found in literary fiction, there is a special place in my heart for storytellers who confront memorable characters with compelling conflicts and resolve their plots without placing an unnecessary word on the page. Not many storytellers have that gift, but the prolific Bill Pronzini is one of them. While Pronzini primarily writes crime fiction, he’s authored a number of westerns, including his most recent, Give-a-Damn Jones.

Owen Hazard, who narrates the first and last chapters in Give-a-Damn Jones, meets Artemas Jones in Butte, where Hazard hopes to find temporary employment as a typesetter before resuming his roaming. Hazard is awestruck; Jones is something of a legend among itinerant typesetters.

When Jones moves on to Box Elder, the story moves with him. Various chapters are narrated by: a ramrod who works for a cantankerous rancher named Elijah Greathouse; the town’s newspaper owner and his son; the town marshal and his deputy; a farmer; a bartender; a saddle maker who is waiting to die at the hand of a newly released prisoner who vowed to kill him; the released prisoner, who is innocent of the crime for which he served time; a painless dentist who sells an elixir and has his own version of a traveling medicine show; and the dentist’s banjo-playing sidekick. And then there’s Greathouse’s daughter, who loves the released prisoner, despite Greathouse’s efforts to keep them apart. Greathouse — who wants to keep all the ranch land in eastern Montana for himself and is trying to drive off settlers and itinerant farmers who have every right to be there — is the novel’s primary villain, although the saddle maker is a close second.

With so many characters, the plot zigs and zags to interesting places before it settles on an ending. Part of the story addresses the conflict between Greathouse and the released prisoner while another involves the conflict between the released prisoner and the saddle maker. Greathouse schemes against the newspaper owner, whose animosity toward Greathouse is evident in frequent editorials. Still another subplot introduces a conflict between the painless dentist and a mean-spirit blacksmith who doesn’t think his tooth extraction was as painless as advertised. Jones stays in the background for much of the story, although he wanders into the plot at opportune moments.

Prozinski doesn’t use his carefully chosen words to describe the big Montana sky or how characters feel about their childhood, but he crafts easily visualized settings and gives each character a distinct personality. Most of his workmanlike prose is used to move the story along its winding path. I always enjoy Prozinski’s novels for exactly that reason: he puts the story first, without neglecting characterization or atmosphere.

Traditional westerns are known for confronting issues of justice and injustice in stark terms, for separating the white hats from the black hats, and Prozinksi furthers that tradition here. While Give-a-Damn Jones isn’t a story of moral ambiguity, and while Jones has the classic humility of a western loner hero, the novel has elements of realism (Greathouse’s daughter isn’t chaste; Jones carouses in bordellos and hates riding horses) that distinguish it from the Westerns of the 1950s. In the end, Give-a-Damn Jones gets my recommendation because Pronzini, as he always does, tells a good story.

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