Q3 2021 Roundup

With the fall equinox, summer is now over.

This blog has passed 2800 daily posts in a row, though reported hits are way down from last year.  Posts will continue until readership improves.  : – )

This summer saw many posts on favorite topics, including dinosaurs, robots, solar energy, and cryptocurrencies.  And robot helicopters on Mars.   And the melting cryosphere.

If we hear about a solar powered robot dinosaur that eats cryptocurrency you know it will appear in this blog!  Especially if it emerges from a melting icecap and goes to Mars to transform into a helicopter.

Book Reviews

As always, weekly reviews of 14 fiction and 6 non fiction books.

Notable book:  The Amazons by Adrienne Mayor

Fiction

Antkind by Charlie Kaufman
The World Gives Way by Marissa Levien
The Very Nice Box by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman
Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Captain Moxley and the Embers of Empire by Dan Hanks
The Paris Labyrinth by Gilles Legardinier
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
Questland by Carrie Vaughn
The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
Elysium Fire by Alistair Reynolds
The Invention of Sound by Chuck Palahniuk
Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Non-fiction

The Amazons by Adrienne Mayor
Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen
Venus and Aphrodite by Bettany Hughes
Forget the Alamo by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford
We Had A Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff
Pastels and Pedophiles by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko

Great Names For a Band

Terms found in real technical papers, not made up at all.

“Spin Orbit Torques”
“Cadmium Telluride”

Book Review: “Trouble the Saints” by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Trouble with Saints is a 40’s noir with some magic thrown in.  Johnson makes things topical with some gritty realism about the casual racism of Jim Crow America.  Life in the depression and war was tough, but it was also infused with intense anxiety and conflict over skin color. 

This book is hard to read in places.  It’s enough to make you want to become an anti-racist.

The story itself is even darker than the background. 

Certain people haves magical gifts, which are linked in some way to racial and colonial conflict, as if some power is trying to even up the tilted playing field. And these gifts seem to come with an obligation to try to “make things right”.

So…racially political magic abilities?

In New York in 1940, Phyllis, known as Pea, has been gifted with magical hands that give her uncanny ability to kill with knives.  She has made her way in the world working as a killer for a mobster.  Some of her friends have other gifts, including fortune telling.

Naturally, Pea falls deeply in love, and struggles to retire from killing.  That’s not easy in any case, but her magic killer hands want to keep killing.  Pea and her loved ones struggle to win free of distrust, deceit, violence, and guilt.

It’s an intense and, I have to say, deeply sad story. 

Johnson has been writing “urban fantasy” for a while, though I haven’t read any of her earlier works. It is clear that she has become a confident and imaginative storyteller.

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1. Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints, New York, TOR, 2020.