Snow Angels by Jeff Lemire

Published digitally by Amazon Original Stories on February 16, 2021

“Snow Angels” is an entry in Amazon’s series of original short stories. The protagonist is Milliken, a girl who is almost thirteen. She longs to be sixteen so she can embark on a rite of passage. As sixteen, she will be allowed to skate beyond the Bend and into the Forbidden Territory, where she will see the First Gift left by the Colden Ones. This sounds like a YA plot and Amazon has labeled it accordingly.

Matt Lemire recounts a mythology with which Milliken was raised. Long ago, the Colden Ones walked the ice. They used their giant tools to dig a trench for safety and then created the Trenchfolk from themselves. Milliken and the other Trenchfolk now dwell in the trench.

Having learned to hunt, Milliken sets out to see the First Gift because she’s a precocious tween and screw waiting. She discovers truths that will make her rethink the mythology with which she was raised. The meaning of what she learns isn’t entirely clear, due in part to the story’s limited focus. This is more the concept of a story than a fleshed-out product.

From browsing Amazon, I note that Lemire is creating a ten-issue comic book series based on the same concept. I imagine the story is a teaser for that series. I also imagine the series will be better than the story.

I found myself rethinking the story after I read it. Most of my thoughts began with the question why. Why do families wait until children are sixteen to reveal the truth of their existence? What is the point of the mythology? The fact that the story made me think at all (granted, I was driving somewhere and didn’t have much else to think about) is probably a reason to recommend the story to a YA audience. The fact that I couldn’t arrive at satisfactory answers creates reservations about that recommendation. Comic book fans might want to wait for the graphic version.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Future Is Yours by Dan Frey

Published by Del Rey on February 9, 2021

The Future is Yours is an epistolary novel. Text messages, emails, Twitter threads, blog posts, magazine articles, and congressional hearing transcripts are among the documents telling the story of a technology company startup conceived by two lifelong friends: Adhi Chaudry and Ben Boyce. The technology makes use of quantum physics to allow a computer to connect to itself one year in the future. Adhi conceived the idea in a doctoral dissertation and stumbled upon a way to make it work while employed by Google.

The two friends plan to market a device that will allow everyone to see one year into the future, on the theory that if everyone can do it, nobody can use the news of the future to exploit people who lack the same access. They call their company The Future.

Theoretically, the same technology could allow the computer to connect to itself at a more distant time, but Adhi can’t make the tech see even two years ahead. Perhaps humanity will be wiped out in two years. Perhaps there its just a technical bug. Ben doesn’t much care because a year is sufficient to cash in on the technology.

The Future Is Ours raises questions that are common to time travel novels. Can the future be changed or is our fate written? Is there a benefit to knowing the future if it can’t be changed? Is there any reason to attend an NBA playoff game if you can watch it online before it’s played? Does knowing the future actually shape that future? For example, if everyone knows that a stock value will rise, does that knowledge cause investors to buy the stock which causes the price to soar? Do investors engage in insider trading if they invest based on knowledge of future stock prices? Probably not if everyone has the same information, which is what The Future hopes to achieve.

A science fiction blog entry argues that A Christmas Carol was the first time travel story. Scrooge saw the future and earned a chance at redemption, but what of Marley? His ghost will drag chains forever, perhaps because he was denied the same vision of the future that benefitted Scrooge. So is knowledge of the future a good thing or a bad thing? Personally, I don’t want to know when or how I’m going to die, at least if the future is immutable (unless I’m going to die in an extraordinarily pleasant way, which would give me something to look forward to). But I digress.

As financial thrillers should, The Future is Yours investigates the ethical implications of growing or working for a billion dollar business. Most tech startups fail, in part because tech giants like Google and Facebook and Microsoft do their best to acquire or crush potential competitors. Ben and Adhi manage to raise investor capital by saying “we’ve seen the future and you’ll be rich,” but they eventually develop different visions of their company. Adhi and Ben’s wife (the company’s corporate counsel) are concerned when the news coming back from the future suggests that the company’s technology will cause widespread harm. Ben is focused on becoming a billionaire and pushes aside less immediate concerns on the theory that glitches can always be fixed later. But can the future be repaired?

The relationship between Adhi and Ben deteriorates for other reasons as well, including jealousy and infidelity. Ben sees Adhi as the tech genius who has no head for business while Adhi sees Ben as the marketing genius who has no sense of ethics. Their partnership seems very real, as do the inevitable forces that pull the friends in different directions. It doesn’t help that Google sues Adhi for stealing ideas that he partially conceived while working for Google, illustrating the extreme but common view of tech companies that they own the thoughts of their employees. A conflict between Ben’s wife (representing The Future) and her lawyer father (representing Google) adds additional spice to the story.

The novel also raises intriguing questions about the extent to which technology that has the potential to help or harm us all should be controlled by either a handful of wealthy business owners or the government (not that there’s much difference between those two groups). Some of the novel’s characters echo the call for limits on information technology while others call for making critical technology the property of the people. The military and the NSA/CIA, for the usual reasons, want complete control of the tech. The concluding chapter suggests that the novel is a cautionary tale of how technology can change the world in ways its inventors may not foresee and that reasonable people cannot control.

As a novel of ideas, The Future Is Yours should interest most readers who care about the issues it raises. As a financial novel, The Future Is Yours tells an entertaining story. As a novel of relationships, the novel reminds us of how easily money can get in the way of love and friendship. As a blend of genre fiction, the novel will probably appeal more to sf fans than to thriller fans (it is more a novel of ideas than action, although Frey does introduce an apparent murder mystery into the plot), but it should have significant appeal to most readers.

RECOMMENDED

The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott

Published in Australia in 2020; published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG Originals) on February 9, 2021

A central character in The Rain Heron believes she brought a myth to life and comes to regret her actions. Robbie Arnott creates a myth and brings a novel to life as he tells the story of two women whose lives the myth changes.

The Rain Heron opens with a fable about a heron that brings prosperity to an unlucky farmer until a jealous neighbor kills it and brings misfortune to everyone. The heron is nearly transparent, a bird made of water. Later in the story, we learn that the rain heron (or perhaps a different one) actually exists and that it is capable of changing the climate in its immediate vicinity by breathing steam or frost.

The main story takes place in an unnamed country in troubled times. The country has experienced a coup. The weather is extreme and unpredictable. Jobs have disappeared. Schools are closed and crime is rampant.

When the main story starts, we know only that a woman named Ren is living on her own on a mountain, using a cave for shelter, trapping animals and foraging for mushrooms. She meets weekly with a man named Barlow, who trades goods from the village for her animal skins. Barlow warns her that soldiers have come to the village but we don’t know why. Ren shows no interest in news of the soldiers until she meets one, a female lieutenant named Zoe Harker who wants her help searching for the mythical heron. Her methods to gain Ren’s assistance are cruel but effective. Harker pays a price for disturbing the heron, just as Ren pays a price for resisting Harker.

The novel’s second part tells Harker’s backstory, although most of that story concerns Harker’s mother, who uses her blood to coax squid into releasing their ink, and the foreigner who tries to learn her secret. The squid, like the rain heron, have mythological qualities that become apparent during the ink-releasing ritual.

The third part returns to the present, focusing largely on a medic named Daniel as Harker’s soldiers turn to the next phase of their mission. When Daniel asks Harker why the generals want the rain heron, she responds, “Men want things. They hear about something and pretty soon they’re convinced it belongs to them.” Harker's jaded view of men may change before the novel ends.

Harker’s story, in fact, is one of a constantly changing life, a life of apparent self-discovery followed by her discovery that she cannot abide the person she has become. Daniel’s story is a struggle to retain the sense of hope and empathy that has sustained his young life in the face of the horrors he has seen.

In the novel’s concluding part, a worker at a wildlife sanctuary tells Harker that he believed in rain herons as a child, because children believe everything that they are told, but later stopped believing in impossible things. After the coup, when things stopped making sense, he found it possible to believe in the impossible again. The worker, Alec, was a terrible soldier who was finally assigned to the sanctuary as a research assistant. Now he’s alone and forgotten, a condition that suits him. It seems a good place for Harker to join him in a brooding reflection on the lessons we might learn from myths. At least until the past catches up with the present, leading to a final dramatic moment that will change Harker’s life again.

Arnott balances a harsh story with soothing prose that carries the plot in the grip of its steady currents. His characters are decent people who live in indecent times, people who might behave indecently without losing their humanity. The novel’s ending combines the myth of the rain heron with the myth of the squid to make something new and wondrous.

If myths teach lessons, one lesson taught by The Rain Heron is that reality does its best to crush mythology, yet we can learn from both. We can learn from our mistakes. We can crawl up from the depths of our despair. And if we can’t change the past, we can at least make amends.

Myths are meant to tell us something about where we came from and who we are. They help us see ourselves with sharper clarity. By blending the motifs of mythology with the dangers that confront inhabitants of the modern world (unstable government, global warming), The Rain Heron reminds us that we can be better than we have been, that we possess the power to transform ourselves and our world, to make the impossible possible.

RECOMMENDED

The Delivery by Peter Mendelsund

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 9, 2021

Over the course of The Delivery, we learn that the character known only as the delivery boy came from another country, a nation ruled by a leader he calls “the Stongman.” The delivery boy was smuggled to the United States and must eventually repay the cost of his passage and bicycle repairs and rent for the bunk on which he sleeps. He knows his debt will never be paid but he dutifully makes bicycle deliveries while he learns English and the ways of American consumers, one delivery after another, each described to varying degrees, some routine, others an adventure.

This delivery boy, like all the others, is known only as the delivery boy, just as Supervisor is known only as Supervisor and the manager is known only as Uncle. It seems that people who are smuggled into the country are not entitled to an invidual identity, but are part of an amorphous mass. The delivery boy lives in fear of the Supervisor, who controls his fate. If customers make too many complaints, the delivery boy might be fired and lose his only means of survival as an undocumented alien. He also has a not-so-secret crush on N., the dispatcher from his native country who also controls his fate by giving him easier or more difficult assignments. For the most part, N. acts if the delivery does not exist apart from his job, although he assigns deep meaning to her occasional acts of kindness.

The delivery boy seems to have accepted his life and does not feel much sorrow when, for example, he loses his lighter, because it is just another hardship, “another lost article in a long list of lost articles.” He accepts rude drivers and rule doormen and rude customers as if they are his due, but he feels a sense of wonder when he receives a good tip or a kind word, the same wonder he feels when he pauses during the day to look around, to appreciate beauty and to marvel at the way other people live.

The Delivery is a charming novel. The simplicity of the story hides its depth. Many background details are omitted — in what city does the delivery boy make his deliveries? what is his country of origin? — because they don’t really matter. The delivery boy is an every-delivery-boy, an undocumented worker who is readily exploited, performing unrewarding labor that leaves him unnoticed, unable to image a better life for himself (beyond imagining that N. might one day like him) because his life, unsatisfying though it might be, is better than the lives his parents face under the rule of the Strongman.

The delivery boy’s hopes and aspirations, small though they might be, are touching. Like all immigrants, his ultimate yearning is to be free — free from the Strongman, free from the Supervisor, free from those who would exploit or control the vulnerable. The novel’shopeful ending suggests the possibility that by taking a chance — another chance, apart from being smuggled into a free country — the delivery boy might ultimately attain his dream.

RECOMMENDED

All Fall Down by James Brabazon

First published in the UK in 2020; published by Berkley on February 2, 2021

It is the nature of espionage that things are not always as they appear. That is also the basis for many espionage novels, including All Fall Down.

Frank Knight gives Max McLean what seems to be an easy assignment. Travel to a cottage in “the wild country of Donegal” and kill “an Old IRA man” named Chappie Connor. After two days of surveillance, Max enters the cottage and pulls the trigger, only to make three discoveries: first, his victim is already dead; second, the dead man is holding a hundred-dollar bill bearing the word Archangel written in Cyrillic; and third, whoever killed Connor is now trying to kill Max. One shootout and explosion later, Max is swimming for his life.

Max doesn’t know what’s up, but he pretends to have lost the C-note while swimming. That swim and the preceding shootout is the first of many action scenes in All Fall Down. I often think that action scenes work better in movies than novels, but James Brabazon writes them with such cinematic detail that the shootouts, explosions, and chases — culminating with a shootout during a chase while riding a racehorse in the midst of explosions — are just as exciting as they would be on a big screen.

Max decides to check in with his oldest friend, Doc Levy. What he finds haunts him for the rest of the novel. When Knight calls Max in Levy’s house and tells him to run, Max barely has time to wonder how Knight knew his whereabouts before he’s engaged in the novel’s second high-action scene.

Max quickly determines that the British, the Russians, the Americans, and the Israelis all want to get their hands on the hundred-dollar bill. They’re willing to shoot up a bar and kill everyone in it (and each other) to get a chance to go through Max’s pockets.

There’s nothing for it but to investigate the provenance of the bill and the Russian word Archangel. That investigation brings him to a forger, to an information broker, and to a young math genius named Bhavneet (“Baaz”) Singh. Max has a momentary moral dilemma after he saves Baaz from the novel’s fourth or fifth shootout (this one in the Catacombs beneath Paris), only to come close to killing him before deciding that Baaz’s math skills might be useful.

Max isn’t necessarily a deep thinker, but he at least reflects (when time permits) before he kills, which elevates him above the average thriller protagonist. He spends most of the novel wondering why so many people are trying to kill him over a hundred-dollar bill, only to learn that some of the players are not who he believed them to be. In the meantime, he learns something about quantum computers and algorithms and a lot of jargon that sounded good to me, as someone who vaguely grasps the concept of anything that begins with the word “quantum” but soon gets lost in the details.

If you can believe that Max can survive an endless series of shootouts and explosions — and you need to believe that to enjoy most action novels — then All Fall Down tells a reasonably credible story. The plot twists are surprising, as befits a spy novel. The world hopping (Ireland, Paris, Israel, Russia) is interesting and the characters are developed with all the personality they need. As spy novels of the action variety go, All Fall Down offers more thrills than most.

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