Several People are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

Published by Doubleday on August 31, 2021

If I were to attach a label to Several People Are Typing, I might go with absurdist or experimental. A more apt description might be “really, really funny.”

One of the technology trends that I’ve managed to avoid is called Slack. If I’m getting this right, Slack is a messaging app that businesses use to enable internal communications and conferencing. Slack users apparently have the ability to add emojis to their communications. According to a blog post at Vice, nobody is quite sure what the “dusty stick” emoji means. That ambiguity is milked for its full laugh potential in Several People Are Typing.

The novel consists entirely of chat dialog in Slack message rooms used by the New York office of a public relations firm. Clients rely on the firm for crisis management. When Pomeranians start dying because their dog food has been poisoned, they turn to the firm for positive messaging to restore the faith of dog owners in the deadly product.

Early in the novel, a member of the firm named Gerald is working at home on a spreadsheet that he has made to compare the merits of various winter coats so he can decide which one to purchase. That task somehow transports his consciousness into Slack, where he has rather unproductive conversations with Slackbot, a Clippy-type helper that refers Gerald to the Help Center for answers to his questions about why he is stuck in a program. Gerald can easily communicate with other employees via Slack, but they think he is trying out a “bit” when he complains that he is stuck inside Slack. Gerald’s co-employee Pradeep eventually heeds Gerald’s entreaties, goes to Gerald’s home, and finds Gerald’s drooling body slumped over a keyboard. Pradeep takes this in stride, in part because Gerald pays Pradeep to tend to his body while his mind adjusts to living inside of Slack. Slackbot eventually “wakes up” and decides he would like to live Gerald’s physical life while Gerald is stuck in Slack. Slackbot’s idea of living is largely limited to eating and sex, although he enjoys sunsets, at least when they appear in a gif.

Much of the story’s humor comes from random office absurdities. A new employee arrives in the office on a snowy day, finding only one other employee who made it to work. They promptly have sex on the boss’ standing desk, to the detriment of the desk. They discuss their dalliance on Slack, secure in the knowledge that the boss never exercises his authority to read private communications on Slack. A “wrong send” nevertheless clues the rest of the office into the romance. Before that happens, the male in the relationship seeks advice in private rooms about Valentine’s Day — specifically, how to avoid celebrating it with his new casual lover without seeming like a dick for avoiding it, a problem I instinctively understood.

An employee named Lydia has a growing concern about the howling she always hears, as if wolves are at her door. Another employee develops a concern when Lydia disappears and nobody else in the office remembers that Lydia ever worked there. Such is life in the modern office environment.

The novel satirizes office relationships, professional and personal, as well as working (or not working) from home, a mode that is popular with the firm’s employees, who never seem to do much work even if they’re in the office. It satirizes managers who ignore questions (like, “when are you going to send me the information I need to finish this project?”) and employees who gossip (i.e., all employees). Of course, it satirizes dusty stick and the culture of using emojis as ambiguous shorthand, including the tendency to “thumbs up” any remark when no better response comes to mind.

Perhaps the novel merits an analysis of the serious observations it makes through satire, but I was too busy giggling or guffawing to consider anything beyond its humor. Every page of Several People Are Typing made me laugh. Many pages made me laugh more than once. Considering how gloomy the world can be, I give high marks to books that are as clever, smart, and funny as this one. For readers who appreciate wackiness, Several People Are Typing might be the year’s must read.

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Lightning Strike by William Kent Krueger

Published by Atria Books on August 24, 2021

Lightning Strike is a prequel to the Cork O’Connor series. The story begins with Cork being sworn in as the new Sheriff of Tamarack County in Northern Minnesota. After a county resident complains that he's the first “redskin” to become sheriff, Cork recalls his father, Liam, who also held the sheriff’s position. Cork’s memories take the reader to 1963 when Cork was a pre-teen, delivering newspapers and hanging out with his two best friends, Billy Downwind and Jorge Patterson. Jorge’s mother is Mexican and Billy, like Cork’s mother, is Ojibwe.

Like all good mysteries, Lightning Strike is based on misdirection. Three deaths occur, apparently unrelated, but mystery fans will understand that multiple deaths in a mystery are always related. The mystery is the culprit’s identity. William Kent Krueger plants clues that might help the reader guess the answer, but he also sets up several other suspects who might have a motive for committing at least one of the murders.

When Cork and Jorge visit a clearing on the Shore of Iron Lake known as Lightning Strike, they are shocked to find Big John Manydeeds hanging from a rope. An autopsy reveals a high blood alcohol content, which is consistent with the cases of empty whiskey bottles found behind Big Johns’ home. People on the rez all believed that Big John had stopped drinking and are unwilling to accept the fact of his apparent suicide. They are suspicious of Liam’s apparent unwillingness to investigate the death, viewing Big John’s demise as another case in which white law enforcement turns its back on Indians.

Murder suspects accumulate after Liam, prodded by his wife and mother-in-law, begins to consider the possibility that Big John didn’t kill himself. Big John may have been carrying on with the wife of Duncan McDermid, who owns the local iron mine, but the local judge isn’t interested in issuing search warrants related to that investigation because McDermid is white and powerful. Big John also had more than a few fights with his stepbrother, who happens to be Billy’s uncle. At least three minor characters make repeat appearances, which mystery fans will realize is enough reason to put them on the short list of suspects.

A couple of plot elements distinguish Lightning Strike from typical mysteries. The spirit of Big John seems to appear from time to time, perhaps assisting the investigation of his murder, although never in a way that can’t be explained without a belief in spirits. Believe what you want, the story seems to say.

Cork plays a key role at several points as he searches for clues or contributes helpful insights. His efforts are credible — he makes no deductions that are beyond a child of his age — but the central role of a kid in a murder investigation gives the story a certain charm. Cork learns some life lessons as he ponders both Christian and Native American spiritual beliefs, ultimately recognizing that he’ll need to travel a long path before he finds satisfying answers about the meaning of life and death.

The theme of white hostility toward Native Americay.ns and Native American distrust of whites gives the story some weight without making it preachy. Lightning Strike is, at bottom, a well-crafted mystery with likeable characters. Action scenes at the end add a level of tension by placing Cork in danger. The novel is a good end-of-summer book for readers who are ready to transition away from beach reads but not quite ready for the heavy literary diet that winter might bring.

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Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by Orbit on August 3, 2021

Adrian Tchaikovsky built a detailed universe for Shards of Earth, the first book of the Final Architecture series. That universe is fundamental to the novel, but it never gets in the way of a multifaceted space opera that features creative aliens and appealing human characters.

A human diaspora led to the settlement of hundreds of worlds in the novel’s far future. As humans tend to do, they have divided themselves into factions. Most worlds colonized by humans belong to the Council of Human Interests, or Hugh. Some have followed the Essiel, an ancient alien race that has organized the Hegemony and promises protection from threats if its members will accept the Essiel as divine beings. While the Essiel generally leave species and individuals alone if they choose not to follow the Essiel, the humans who join the Essiel, being human, tend to become cultists.

The primary threat to humanity comes from inscrutable aliens called the Architects. The Architects destroy inhabited worlds. They’ve destroyed alien civilizations in the past and, a few decades before the novel begins, they turned their attention to human worlds, starting with Earth. Their ships appear out of nowhere and, using a technology that humans don’t understand, reshape planets by pulling at their cores and turning the planets inside out. They take a similar approach to the ships that attack them. The new contours of the reshaped planets and ships might be appreciated for their aesthetic value, although not by their dead inhabitants. Perhaps the destruction is a form of artistic creation, a theory that explains why humans refer to the aliens as Architects.

A group of women called the Parthenon represent a human faction outside of the Hugh. They reproduce parthenogenetically and are genetically engineered to be, as conceived by their founder, ideal representatives of humanity. The Partheni are fierce warriors but they are viewed with suspicion by humans who believe rumors that the Partheni kill male babies and want to form a superior race that will subjugate lesser humans. Whether their founder actually intended the Partheni to rule others was, at least for a time, a subject of some debate among the Partheni, but less authoritarian Partheni minds ultimately prevailed.

While the Parthenon fought alongside the Hugh against the Architects, a different breed of human provided the key to the war. A 15-year-old girl named Xavienne was able to reach into the mind of an Architect and turn its ship back. Humans tried to engineer that same ability into volunteers known as Intermediaries, killing most of them in the process. The most successful Int was Idris Telemmier. He teamed with a Partheni named Solace in the war’s most important battle.

The other primary defense against Architects are relics left on certain worlds by an ancient race known as the Originators. The Architects won’t go near those worlds. Unfortunately, the relics lose their power to deter Architects when they are transported elsewhere.

All of this is background to a story that takes place several decades after the Architects disappeared. By virtue of their engineering, Ints are able to pilot vessels in unspace. That makes them valuable even in the absence of the enemy Architects. While most humans lose their sanity (or at least their lunch) unless they sleep through journeys into unspace, Ints can withstand the discomfort. Telemmier nevertheless experiences barely suppressed horror based on his sense of a terrifying presence in unspace.

Telemmier is now piloting a salvage vessel called the Vulture God. Decades after they were last together, Solace is asked to recruit Telemmier to work for the Partheni. After proving her worth to the ship during a skirmish on an unwelcoming planet, she joins the crew so she’ll have the opportunity to make her pitch to Telemmier.

Apart from Telemmier and Solace, the novel’s primary characters are other crew members of the Vulture God. A shrewd lawyer named Kris, a factor (deal maker/accountant) named Kit, a drone specialist named Olli, and a search specialist named Medvig are the most memorable characters. Kit is Hammilambra, an alien species whose members resemble crabs. Medvig is a Hiver, a distributed intelligence that resides in cyborg insects that inhabit mechanical bodies. Olli was “born a stranger to her human body” and relies on mechanical devices for transportation (her favorite resembles an oversize scorpion). A Hiver archeologist named Trine becomes a de facto crew member when Solace needs his expertise to analyze some relics. The wormlike Castigar and symbionts called the Tothiat are among the other species that populate the universe.

The plot takes off when the Vulture God contracts to recover a missing ship. The crew discovers that the ship has been reshaped, suggesting that the Architects have returned. The crew encounters one obstacle after another when they try to bring the ship home. Various parties, including a group of Essiel gangsters and the human version of the CIA/KGB, want to seize the ship or its contents, kidnap Telemmier, or start a fight. As the reader might expect, the Architects do return, forcing a reluctant Telemmier to once again play hero. By the end, Telemmier learns something about the Architects and their mission that will undoubtedly set up the next book in the series.

In the grand tradition of science fiction, Telemmier also learns something about himself as he finds the courage and pluck to return to heroic conflict after embracing obscurity during decades of peace. He also finds that he missed Solace, having bonded with her in battle, although he doesn’t particularly trust her. Solace’s own conflict, between her loyalty to the sisterhood of Parthenon and her friends on the Vulture God, tests her in a way that will be familiar to science fiction fans.

Shards of Earth is built on a carefully conceived foundation that suggests an epic story, yet Tchaikovsky never lets the story get away from him. He balances the big picture with interpersonal conflicts, making it possible for the reader to relate to the characters, even if they aren’t the sort of cyborg insects who live next door. I wouldn’t say that the far future is so different from the present that it represents a brilliance of imagination, but the story is satisfying, the characters have distinct personalities, and the true nature of the Architects presents an intriguing question. I look forward to learning any answers Tchaikovsky decides to provide in the next novel.

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Light Chaser by Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell

Published by tor.com on August 24, 2021

Humanity has spread itself among the stars, but it has fallen short of its full potential. The message that Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell send in Light Chaser will be familiar to science fiction fans: humans need to be challenged or the human race becomes stagnant. Of course, stagnant humans can live pretty good lives — asking a replicator to make me a cheeseburger would be nicer than working all day so I can afford cheeseburgers — but the virtues of endeavor and competition (and even war) have always been preached like religious dogma by the giants of science fiction.

Hamilton and Powell marry the theme of stagnation to another popular theme: fear that Artificial Intelligence will do a disservice to the humans who depend upon it by making our lives too easy, perhaps enslaving us in the process. To sf writers, Alexa is a very naughty girl. In the far future of Light Chaser, AI controls worlds, assuring their stability but denying humans the resources they need to grow and achieve better lives.

The novel begins with Amahle and another person traveling to the home world of the Exalted. They are flying a strangelet into a star that will destroy all the worlds in the star’s system. The novel then backtracks to tell us why this is happening. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell us enough.

Amahle is a Light Chaser. She is essentially immortal. She is under contract to fly a circuit at near light speed every thousand years. She makes port at various planets, where she trades goods with selected families. In exchange for those goods, family members have agreed to wear memory collars, passing them from generation to generation over the next thousand years. When Amahle returns, she collects the collars and issues new ones. The memory collars store the memories of everyone who wears them. Amahle spends her flight time reviewing the memories on the collars, which I suppose is like watching a steady diet of particularly boring soap operas.

Amahle’s human brain has limited storage capacity, so she can’t remember much of her early years. As she reviews the memory collars, she encounters humans who have messages for her — although the messages all originate from one human who seems to have taken various guises over the years, apart from his identifying tattoo. Piecing together those messages helps Amahle remember that she was once married. Her husband has something important to tell her about the AI that runs her ship. Eventually the messages cause her to distrust all the AIs that are running the systems on every human world. Why that information must be provided in pieces over multiple collars is never entirely clear.

Light Chaser is relatively short, probably short enough to qualify as a novella. Perhaps its length accounts for its failure to develop its themes in full. The AI that controls humanity could be giving humans more resources and better lives. We’re told that it doesn’t do so because its purpose is to assure stability, but we aren’t told why better lives would create instability. Some of the worlds Amahle visits are modern but others are medieval. What’s the point of not allowing (or helping) medieval societies to advance? How does the AI manage to keep humans in a medieval state for millennia? The ultimate purpose of the AI is to deliver memory collars and their stories to the Exalted, but it isn’t clear why the Exalted want stories of stable societies. Wouldn’t stories of unstable societies be more interesting? Nor is it clear why thriving societies would necessarily be unstable. Some of the worlds have attained a future version of modernity without losing their stability. Why won’t the AI allow that on every world?

Hamilton and Powell leave too many questions unanswered, all for the sake of illustrating a well-worn sf mantra: competition is good, managing human life is bad, unstable societies lead to progress unless everyone dies. The Exalted are a plot device rather than an actual race. We know almost nothing about them, apart from their residence “in the null-folds of the Cosmos,” a term that has the vagueness of gibberish, and their desire to “increase the experience which enriched them, by feeding on human experience like vampires of the mind.” What, I wonder, is so interesting about mundane human lives that the Exalted are enriched by experiencing them? Why would they be less enriched if they did not manipulate the human perception of reality, so that humans live in a reality apart from the “original reality we encountered when our souls first emerged into it from our holm beyond.” More gibberish, at least from my admittedly limited perception of reality.  

Amanda’s experiences on the worlds she visits and the experiences of people whose memories she reviews demonstrate that the authors are capable of writing with warmth and feeling. Light Chaser is intriguing, but both authors are capable of telling better stories than this one. The clichés about trading stability for progress are too easy and the unanswered questions are too important to ignore. Light Chaser feels like a good idea that never evolved into the complex story that the idea merited.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Published by Del Rey on August 17, 2021

Velvet Was the Night is a story of Mexican noir. Set in the early 1970s, the novel takes as its background a CIA funded and Mexican government-supported effort to organize private citizens as shock troops (known as Hawks) to attack protesting students. The CIA wanted to suppress communism and the Mexican government wanted to suppress dissent. Those machinations cemented Mexico’s authoritarian oppression and laid the foundation for the Dirty War.

Maite is caught in the middle of that struggle. She isn’t political. She doesn’t feel she’s much of anything. Her days, as she sees them, are dull and meaningless. Her sister berates her for wasting her life. As she turns 30, Maite is a single, insecure woman who devours romance comics, wishing her life were filled with the love and drama she reads about.

Maite can’t afford to pay for her car repairs. She supplements her income as a secretary by looking after her neighbors’ pets when they are away. Maite’s only vice is her occasional theft of a small object from a neighbor’s apartment.

Maite has been feeding Leonara’s cat. She’s vexed that Leonara hasn’t returned from her trip. When Leonara finally calls Maite and asks her to bring the cat and a box to an address, Maite becomes even more annoyed when Leonara doesn’t appear. She decides to track down Leonara so she can get paid. Her quest leads her to a group of wannabe revolutionaries and brings her to the attention of the Hawks and the secret police.

The other protagonist, Elvis, is a Hawk. At 21, he is the right age to blend with and infiltrate student groups. He admires his boss, El Mago, and is more committed to following El Mago than to any political philosophy. Elvis doesn’t mind administering beatings to send a message, but he draws the line at beating women or killing anyone. He’d rather be doing something else with his life but he doesn’t know what else he is capable of doing.

The novel alternates chapters that follow either Elvis or Maite. Their paths intersect when El Mago assigns Elvis to follow Maite. El Mago wants to find some pictures that Leonara has hidden. He hopes that Maite will lead him to Leonara.

Maite and Elvis are linked in unexpected ways, particularly by their passion for music. Elvis is impressed by the record collection he discovers while snooping through Maite’s apartment. Elvis took his name from the obvious source, but he’s also a fan of Sinatra and American standards. Maite enjoys the Spanish versions of those songs. The government has closed singing cafés and banned American rock because it views dancing as a form of anarchy, but the government can’t stop Maite or Elvis from enjoying music.

As one would expect of authoritarians and revolutionaries, none of the characters trust each other. The revolutionaries correctly believe they have an informant in their midst. An agent of the secret police named Anaya is sure that his sources are all lying to him. The Hawks and the secret police share the goal of disrupting perceived communists but they share nothing else. A Russian KGB agent adds another level of intrigue to the story. A relative of Leonara seems to want her dead. Elvis becomes increasingly disillusioned as his friends die, particularly when he learns the identity of one of the killers.

For Elvis, the story is one of intellectual disenchantment and personal growth as he begins to realize that the Hawks and their methods pose a greater threat to Mexico than the harmless student protestors. For Maite, the story is one of romance followed by inevitable heartbreak followed by the unlikely possibility of a new romance. The protagonists’ stories are simple, but they are built on strong characterizations and on the novel’s complex noir setting.

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