‘Between life and death there is a library ,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’
In a book that channels Friedrich Nietzsche, Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life, and even Doctor Who and his amazing Tardis, we get a schmaltzy feel-good life-affirming fable. Nietzsche expressed it as a question of what your response would be if a demon crept up to you and said you would live this same life innumerable times including every joy and pain, would you leap in joy or curse him to the end of eternity. Frank Capra’s beloved Christmas movie starring Jimmy Stewart has us thinking about what life would be like without you and the things you accomplished or the differences you made without even realizing it.
Matt Haig approaches the meaning of life more like Doctor Who trapped in a Tardis with no controls where you never know where you might end up. For Nora Seed, the library between life and death is such a vehicle that allows her to travel into parallel universes where life turned out differently because she made different choices along the way. Kind of like time travel, but not cause she stays in the same time zone just in different lives. There’s a life where she becomes a rockstar, one where she is a scientist, one an Olympic athlete, etc, etc. just pick a different book and see where you end up.
Only — Haig’s library of books is like a genie’s three wishes. Well, you are not limited to three. There’s an infinite number of books. But, your wishes just may not turn out how you think. Every path traveled leads somewhere, but maybe the grass isn’t always greener and maybe things didn’t turn out how you think they would.
This is not a fantasy book for those seeking knights in armor, fell dragons, or magic sorcerers. There simply may not be enough action or enough excitement for some readers. It’s a fable that uses the construct of an endless library to explore ideas. It’s cleverly done and quite an easy read. And there’s a sense of humor at work here cause each time Nora drops into an alternate life, she’s got to try and figure out her new past and how her new life works without anyone being the wiser, not even a best friend or a new husband. It’s quite a feat pretending to be one’s self when one is not altogether familiar with one’s new life.
Vanished Birds
Vanished Birds is a mysterious science fiction tale bathed in beautiful prose that offers glimpses of a future of seasons changing, stars within reach, technological marvels, corporate greed, and metaphysical depth.
Starting with a distant world, a colony frozen in time except for brief decades-apart visits from offworlders. You get a strong juxtaposition of the few backward souls living simple lives and the grand civilization out there. A young boy exploding from the stars ✨ changes everything. And, his future appears special. He’s mute. He doesn’t belong anywhere. But he may just be the one everyone in the cosmos has been waiting for. Or not.
Meanwhile, a thousand years earlier, a designer baby changes everything and puts in motion things unimagined. The question is always what matters most, personal affections or human progress. Is it the job or the relationship that’s important? Is loyalty to your friends, shipmates, companions paramount or setting aside a nest egg? Ultimately are we all disposable, interchangeable, useful? And what are the limits of corporate greed? Will it take us places we never thought we’d go?
This is a metaphysical story, not a bang bang shoot em up. It’s filled with a sense of wonder and magic. Although I enjoyed it, I’m not certain everyone will.
What I think makes this novel work so well is that you never really know where the story is going. At first, you think one is the main character, but then there’s a shift and the story focuses on someone else in another part of he universe becomes the focus. A lot of the story takes place on an aging ship with a motley crew, but it’s a few giant steps till you get there. First, you have to flee the dying earth and it’s not necessarily fair who gets to go. First, you have to have the oddest extramarital affair imaginable. First, someone has to predict what may come to be.
In any case, the writing is captivating, mystical. And takes the reader on a
One strange trip through time and space.
The Space Between Worlds
Johnson’s “The Space Between Worlds” is a beautifully-crafted science fiction novel that breaks all the rules. The golden rule of time travel has always been avoiding meeting yourself at all costs. Such a time travel paradox can cause all hell to break loose and often does. The Space Between Worlds is not a time travel story. Indeed, all time flows at the same rate. Instead, it posits an interdimensional transfer between dimensions, between worlds, between realities, and going from Earth 0 to Earth 2 leaves open the possibility of meeting one’s self. But, there are not just two Earths, but infinite worlds, “worlds upon worlds into infinity,” and approximately 382 alternate Earths have been discovered. That’s 382 versions of one’s self to encounter and cause all kinds of paradoxes.
No two of the same can exist in the same space. There just isn’t room. Eldrige Corporation has solved that problem. The traversers who go into the spaces between reality and enter alternate worlds simply can’t be ordinary folks living ordinary lives. They have to be people who have been living such dangerous high-wire-act lives that they have died in most alternate realities. Since they do not exist in almost any of the 382 possibilities, there is little chance of their exploding into nothingness. They live with enough risk to have died over and over again. Their very survival in even one world and ability to travel to others is a miracle.
Cara is such a high-wire act person. In this Earth, Earth 0, she lives out in the desert wastelands where they have to scavenge for a living outside the mighty walls of the cities, out there where a psychotic warlord rules all, a psychotic warlord (Nik Nik) who thinks she is his plaything and pretends to drown her in the mud over and over. She is a desperate one who takes chances no ordinary person would take. And for that reason, she is the most amazing traverser ever. But what happens when she comes across her doppelgänger, her twin, her duplicate lying in the riverbed.
Not only does Cara break the golden rules of never meeting one’s self, but she interferes in the affairs of alternate earths. It is wonderful how Johnson has taken many of the problems and paradoxes of time travel stories and twisted them into this alternate reality story. There is also great world building here from the desert wasteland dwellers (Ashland) where runners race across the sands in giant vehicles to the religions flourishing in the wastelands.
The beginning can be a bit confusing because the reader is not let into the secrets of the interdimensional travel and the rules until later. Indeed, it is not clear what the purpose of the corporation poking into the interdimensional jet stream is. Nevertheless, it will all become clear later on. Cara finds almost religious satisfaction in traveling between worlds, explaining how gratifying it is about going places where she is dead and touching things she was never meant to see. She also gets to meet people who died long ago in some realities.
The writing in this novel is excellent. The pace is tremendous and it is hard to put it down. Few have done such a great job of combining hard science fiction ideas with interpersonal relations and allowing both to flourish within the story confines. The relationship between Cara and Dell is cleverly drawn, beginning with the description of it being a section of the sky utterly dead and empty and that it is two parallel universes too close to touching and that there is a cold dark between them “that three suns couldn’t light.”
The space between worlds describes the darkness Cara travels through and hopes to survive. It’s worth it though because she knows what waits on the other side. She is an amazing character who says that asking for things is like drinking glass shards.
Many thanks to the publisher for providing me a copy of this amazing novel. Can’t wait to see what else this author has up her sleeve.
Project Hail Mary
“Project Hail Mary” is an incredible unputdownable science fiction novel. But it’s a far from what most might expect from a space opera. This is a science geek’s version of astronaut life. It breaks all the rules of what makes a science fiction novel a great read and offers us scientific theory after scientific theory as Grace tries to solve one mystery after another. You never stop cheering Grace on as he figures out one answer after another only to be befuddled by reality. McGyver would be quite proud.
It’s also a completely different twist on First Contact, one that channels a bit of Close Encounters with regard to communication. This is probably not how you ever pictured first contact or how you imagined an alien species would be. Indeed, so unlike human life so as to hardly be able to exist alongside each other except …. apparently space aliens get sarcasm!!
Climate change may be the new mantra, but Weir takes it to a new level as a planetary level extinction event is at hand. The stakes could not be higher.
From the opening scene where a befuddled astronaut awakens without knowing who he is, where he is, or what he’s doing there, this novel is filled with discovery after discovery. But what makes it so incredible is that it’s fascinating without deathstars and fighter pilots and princesses.
Daughters of Yalta
The Daughters of Yalta is a brilliant book, bringing to life the minutiae of a historic conference through the eyes of three unlikely participants. These three were Sarah Churchill, Prime Minister Winston’s daughter, who accompanied him, Anna Roosevelt, FDR’s daughter, who watched over her ailing father who survived little more than two months after the conference, and finally Kathleen Harriman, daughter of the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman, one of the richest men in the world, heir to one of the great railroad fortunes.
It was an amazing journey to take with the world still at war and for Roosevelt a very difficult journey to make and not be at full strength when dealing with the wily Stalin. The site of the conference was an old Imperial Russian palace in great disrepair among the ruins that the Germans had made of Crimea. The lush banquets the Soviets offered as a show of pride sharply contrasted with the desolation all around and the fear the populace had of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. Indeed, the palace was so bare that bathrooms were in short supply.
The whole background of the conference participants is fascinating. Their history and their connections are written about in such a manner that their stories come to life as those of individuals, not merely historical figures.
Nevertheless, the shortcomings of the conference are spelled out. With the Soviet army already holding Poland and the other East European countries, there was little hope of dislodging them short of all out war. Roosevelt believed as many as two million American troops would perish in an invasion of the Japanese homelands without the Soviet army’s help. No one knew at the time if the Manhattan Project would prove successful. And, there was no mention of the Holocaust at all despite the evidence now being undeniable. The conference that set up the postwar world paved the way for decades of the Cold War.
All in all, a fantastic story about history that is unforgettable in its breadth and scope.
LATER by Stephen King
Who You Gonna Call?
“Later” is a short but fun ride that unites Stephen King and Hard Case Crime fans. It’s not your imagination running away with you when you think it’s a cousin to Haley Joel Osmont in The Sixth Sense. King boldly acknowledges in this book the connection.
Here, too, you get a young kid (age 9 in the beginning to age 15 later on) who somehow some way sees dead people. But, these dead folks also talk to young Jamie and apparently one of the magical rules is that they always answer his questions truthfully. These ghosts ( and without the white sheets, they are less like Casper and more haunting) run the gamut from a sweet old lady to a serial killer.
It also reminds us of King’s earlier HCC work, Joyland. It evokes a similar spirit of youthful wonder.
The key to this snappy little novel that reads so quickly is the narrative voice of Jamie. It has that coming-of-age innocence laced with a bit of streetwise sarcasm that just works so well. Despite an ultimate battle between good and evil, this one you find to be horror-lite. It doesn’t get to the point of being terrifying, but coasts around that border a little.
Nöthin’ But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the ’80s Hard Rock Explosion
BY Tom Beaujour, Richard Bienstock
“Nothin But A Good Time” traces the journey that heavy metal rock took from the explosion of Van Halen in the late Seventies until the days of Nirvana and the grunge monsters bands heralded the dawning of a new generation of rock. Told not in expository fashion, but through interviews with artists, managers, and industry people, what this book does is give the reader a hands-on view of life in the metal trenches in the Eighties. For those not too familiar with the numerous hair metal bands of the Eighties like Motley Crew, Vixen, or Guns and Roses, this format might leave you a bit lost at times. For those who lived through the era and remember what the Sunset Strip was like in those days, it might just be a trip down memory lane. There are no secrets here. Every excess of drugs, sex, fame, or straight-out idiocy is laid out in these pages as remembered by those who were there.
Cutter & Bone
Cutter and Bone is Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing meets murder mystery. It’s a long strange trip involving two cynical men with no jobs, no real connections, and both half mad. One is an unrepentant gigolo living off any woman he can hypnotize or crashing in his buddy’s pad. He once walked away from a middle management job, a wife, and kids. The other survived Vietnam with one less eye and one bloody stump of an arm.
Witnessing the dumping of a teenage girl’s body is what changes their worlds. They set out to blackmail the culprit together with the victim’s sister. Then, after drowning in the sea and more booze than twenty bathtubs would contain, it’s a trip to the Ozarks with a college co-ed and not much of a plan.
Not your ordinary crime fiction, but a powerful study of despair, rootlessness, and losing one’s mind. No one writes this stuff like Thornburg. No one
Rabbits
“Rabbits” is a book for those who couldn’t get enough of the tv series Lost, the tv series Stranger Things, or Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe Of Heaven. Forget it’s a debut novel cause it’s spectacular. It takes the world of computer gaming combines it with drifting between multiverses and throws in cults, conspiracies, blackouts, deadly fog, and coincidences that may just be more than coincidences. Is it just a game or is it about saving the world before it’s too late?
One of the great things here is that like the lead character K. (And yeah it’s just K.) you, the reader, are never sure where this cosmic chess match is going to take you next. On one hand, you get a handful of retro hipsters who hang around arcades and like to play on the dark web via their tor browsers. But, there’s this mysterious game, which like Fight Club you are never supposed to talk about, and it’s a game of following patterns and finding coincidences, following the clues. But, you’ve been warned that something’s wrong with the game and players are disappearing, even well-known multi-billionaires. At what point is it real and at what point merely a game with reality as you know it being the stakes?
It’s not possible to say enough good things about this ultra-absorbing novel. Maybe you just need to wait till the next iteration of the game begins. That is, if it’s not too late.
Those Crazy Books 