Review: When We Have Wings by Claire Corbett

This review is part of my Science Fiction Australian Women Writers Challenge. You can check my progress here and about the challenge in general here. Since starting the challenge, I have started a review-only blog and this review is cross-posted there.

When We Have Wings by Claire Corbett is set in a vaguely near future Sydney where the rich can fly thanks to having wings implanted on their backs.

Before I get into talking about the story, I want to point out that, from a physics point of view, Corbett has described a very plausible situation. The wings people get are quite large (the impression I got was comparable to the height of the person) and they also get treatments to change the physiology to make their bones lighter (carbon fibre was involved) and their muscles stronger. And, of course, to grow the new muscles needed to control their wings. (For the record, the fictional wings were larger and more interestingly-coloured than on the cover, although it’s a nice cover despite that.)

I have little idea of how plausible the biology was, but assuming those biological modifications were possible, the physics seemed to check out (y’know, without actually writing out equations or anything). The descriptions of flight and weather patterns were also quite rigorous and I commend Corbett on her dedicated research. Those details made the book all the more realistic and helped with the suspension of disbelief so we could focus on the social issues surrounding flight.

The story follows two characters: Zeke, a PI investigating a nanny kidnapping the child of a flyer couple, and Peri, the nanny on the run. The mystery of why and where the nanny took the baby is not the real mystery, however — especially since about half the story is told from her point of view. The real mysteries become apparent when Zeke digs a little deeper and when events get away from everyone.

The setting isn’t a dystopia. Similar to what I said about Spare Parts, just because there is a widening gap between haves and have nots, doesn’t make it a dystopia. Especially when, other than the size of the gap, there aren’t many social or political differences to our world. It’s a commentary on where our world could go, given enough scientific progress. And it doesn’t make the assumption that the medical developments are inherently a bad thing, either. Partly, this is explored through Zeke having to make a choice as to whether to give his toddler son wings from an early age (it’s easier when they’re children) or whether to deprive him of flight and bar entrance into the elite flyer society.

In many ways, flight is a metaphor in When We Have Wings. However, it’s not just a metaphor, as evidenced by the rigorous world building and the real exploration of social issues surrounding flight. What makes us human? How much of a disadvantage is not being able to afford wings? Is being an ordinary human (in their world), without modification, edging towards being a disability since they can’t fly? There was a lot of background political discussion about equality and quotas (of non-modified humans) and equal access. In a world where everyone is expected to choose the most favourable characteristics for their unborn children and concerns like baldness are trivial to “fix” where do you draw the line? If you want an unadulterated genome, where does that leave you (other than as a member of the conservative anti-modification cult)?

Progress marches on.

When We Have Wings was an excellent read. I highly recommend it to fans of science fiction, fantasy and anything in between. I suspect it’s being at least partially marketed as main stream, so hey, all readers of fiction, go out and buy it!

4.5 / 5 stars

Review: The Rhesus Factor by Sonny Whitelaw

The Rhesus Factor by Sonny Whitelaw has been sitting on my harddrive for a few years, waiting for me to finally get around to reading it. The Australian Women Writers Challenge gave me the push I needed to pick it up. The Rhesus Factor can be downloaded as a free pdf from Whitelaw's website (you have to click on the link in the left menu).

In essence, The Rhesus Factor is an eco-thriller. Set in the near future when the Gulf Stream has stopped, climate change is decidedly noticeable and drug-resistant epidemics are sweeping the Earth. Since it was written about ten years ago, some of the technology of our very near future isn't quite here (no space planes to hop across the pacific in a matter of hours, not even for the US Airforce) but some of her predictions are eerily true. There was a throwaway paragraph that included severe bushfires in southern Australia and Brisbane flooding, for example. Granted, those aren't exactly outlandish predictions, and the Gulf Stream is still with us, but still, some of the crazy weather Whitelaw describes doesn't feel like it's as outlandish as it would have been ten years ago.

There was also this great line about the US congress which predicts a situation that has become slightly old news now:

"So you voted in a Democratic President—but hedged your bets with a Republican Congress that will not entertain any motion to install a fair and equitable health care system."

Sound familiar?

Anyway, back to the story. The Rhesus Factor follows a handful of characters through dramatic* climate change, the discovery of a virus which is on track to sterilising 99% of humanity, terrorist attacks, and assorted other emergencies. Some of the characters are clearly there to demonstrate consequences to ordinary folk, but most of them play some sort of governmental role (including scientific research) in mitigating the damage. A nice touch, I thought, was that almost all of the characters were quite competent and none of the disasters were because of any one person stuffing up. They were all just sort of inevitable.

My favourite character, and the one I felt was the most developed, was Kristin: an Australian marine engineer, initially based in Vanuatu, who has the unfortunate luck to be present for almost all the on-page explosions. (There are a lot of explosions.) Her back story, complete with an ex-boyfriend who has the emotional intelligence of a wet rag, is well drawn and she's not one of the people who knows everything up front, so it was nice to discover some of what was going on as she did. She also had a strong "Australian, no-nonsense" pragmatism which helped keep up the pace of the book (not that it was ever in any danger of dragging).

Another enjoyable character to read was the Australian Prime Minister. I suspect half the reason I liked him is because the world would be a better place if we had more political leaders that cut through bullshit and did what needed to be done. The other half is that his scenes — particularly some of the comments he makes when not in front of the press — were some of the most amusing and did a good job of diffusing some of the inherent doom of the novel. The most unbelievable aspect of both his character and the US President is that, before becoming politicians, both were scientists with ecology-related (I forget the specifics) PhDs. I just don't really buy that they got elected, especially the President, but it's a good thing for their world that they did.

I also enjoyed Australia being so central to many of the events taking place. Other prominent settings were Vanuatu and the US, but while the US was obligatory (greatest impact of Gulf Stream failure, powerful government), the Australian scenes were more lovingly carved. From the outback, down to Kristin complaining about Canberran weather.

The Rhesus Factor is a fast-paced, thriller crammed with one disaster after another. Set in the near future in a world a little bit more disease-ridden, with a slightly more altered climate than ours, it will keep you flipping/tapping the pages to find out what happens next. I should warn you though, Whitelaw set out to present a realistic picture of the near future. The only fabricated factor is, as the title will tell you, the Rhesus factor which acts as a catalyst for some disasters and an also-ran for others. There is no quick-fix offered in the novel and the ending isn't exactly a happy one — though it is somewhat hopeful. Nevertheless, it's an entertaining and, if you're into getting science out of your fiction, an educational^# one.

4.5 / 5 stars


* I say dramatic because the Gulf Stream failed. It's not quite Hollywood dramatic, if you're wondering.
^# Actually, The Rhesus Factor is available as a free pdf because at one point it was cited by an Australian MP in Queensland parliament for its realistic and alarming predictions.

Review: Nightsiders by Sue Isle

Nightsiders by Sue Isle is a collection of four short stories set in the same world. It is part of Twelfth Planet Press's Twelve Planets series, twelve collections which are showcasing the work of twelve Australian female authors. I believe it's the only one so far to be entirely science fictional (that said, the only other I've read is Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts -- an excellent blend of Roman mythology, the past and the future -- and I'm not sure what's planned for the rest of the series).

Nightsiders is set in Western Australia, in and around Perth. I want to say it's post-apocalyptic, but that's not quite true. It seems part local apocalypse, part generalised catastrophic climate change. The Australian climate has changed so that the west coast is no longer particularly habitable, with hints at the start that things are better in the east. The former city of Perth is now generally referred to as Nightside, because the people living there have turned nocturnal, seeking shelter during the heat of the day and going about their business in the marginally cooler nights.

A few words on each of the stories:


The Painted Girl

13 year old girl has been with walking with an older woman (who isn't her mother) as long as she remembers. One day, her life abruptly changes and she learns there's more to it than she'd realised.

The Nation of the Night

Ash, 17 year old a trans boy, goes east for an operation. The story is mostly about the stark differences between the parched west and the drowning east. He quickly learns that life is far from perfect in Melbourne, even if they still have hospitals and infrastructure. In Nightside (aka Perth), everyone helps their neighbours, in Melbourne, the infrastructure is overcrowded and they're trying to keep out as many surplus people as they can manage.

Paper Dragons

Some of the kids in Nightside put on a play based on some old TV scripts they found in an abandoned home. Turns out it's a soap about the trivialities of teenage life as in our time. Nightside's entire population of old folk (who remember life before the bombings and the evacuation) turn out to watch.

The Schoolteacher's Tale

This was my favourite story. Mostly, I think, because it filled in some of the gaps left by the other stories with teenage protagonists who didn't know life before Nightside. The titular schoolteacher is a 70 year old woman who had been mentioned as a key figure in the lives of the characters in the previous two stories. We are exposed to some of her reminiscences of how much the world has changed and, through the story, we learn a bit of where Nightside is headed in the future.

~

It sort of feels strange that I can summarise each of the stories in a few sentences but barely even touch on what the stories are really about. Partly this is avoiding spoilers, and partly because there are some themes and ideas that run through all four stories which are hard to pin down to just one of them.

An idea that runs through all the stories (though features the most in the first one) is that of the Drainers. They are a group of people with a genetic mutation that gives them a tolerance for the harsh sun and helps them go a bit longer between sips of water. They come out during the day when everyone else is sleeping, and hide in caves and drains (hence the name, I suppose) at night. There are stories of them eating people or draining their blood and, because they move about when everyone else is sleeping, they're regarded almost as reverse vampires, a notion which appealed to me.

All the children protagonists have adapted better to life in Nightside than the adults. They have good night vision (and poor day vision) and, of course, they are used to the only life they have ever known. One theme that ran heavily through the first three stories is that of abandonment. In the two middle stories, the children were abandoned by parents who went east during the evacuation. There's a heavy implication that this happened to almost all of the children of Nightside, with some of the remaining adults acting as foster parents to many of them. It sort of felt a bit much. Of course, the children that weren't abandoned when their parents went east wouldn't have still been around. But really, children are pretty much top of the list of things parents take with them when leaving a war zone. Where are the parents that stayed behind with children? Where are the children whose parents were killed rather than left? I appreciate that the theme of abandonment fits in with the greater theme of Nightside being abandoned by its former inhabitants and the rest of the country, but it felt a little bit lopsided by the time I got to the end.

On a happier note, this was a collection full of strong and well drawn female characters. With the exception of Ash (trans) in the second story, all the protagonists were female. There was also a good balance of male and female secondary/background characters, which is always nice to see.

To a small degree, the setting put me in mind of Daughters of Moab by Kim Westwood, but the writing style was very different and thematically the setting and the idea of adaptation to a hostile environment were the only things the two have in common.

Overall, I found Nightsiders an interesting read.

Rating 4 / 5 stars

Review: Spare Parts by Sally Rogers-Davidson

You may recall me posting about the Australian Women Writers Challenge at the end of last year. Well I just finished reading my first science fiction book for the challenge, which I will review in this post. Actually, I'm undertaking two challenges, the other not being restricted to only science fiction books (although it is mostly fantasy). One of the books I've read that I've decided to count as not science fiction was a bit borderline. That's Hoodwink by Rhonda Roberts, which is about a time-travelling PI. The time-travelling part is obviously the science fiction element, but since the book doesn't spend much time talking about the mechanics or physics of time travel (it's mentioned briefly and I suspect may become more important in other books), I've counted it towards the other challenge. If you're interested, you can read my 4.5 / 5 star review here.

Spare Parts by Sally Rogers-Davidson


This was actually a fairly difficult book to track down. When I first made my list of possible science fiction books by Australian women, many were out of print. This was one of them. Or so I thought at first, since it was published in 1999 and not readily available in the usual places. I actually found it on Audible in audiobook form (if you become a member, even briefly, it's much cheaper to buy audiobooks from them, FYI). It was read by Suzi Dougherty, who has apparently also read many/most of John Marsden's audiobooks. The Australian accent was appreciated since most audiofiction I come across, with a few British exceptions, is American.

But enough about the format.

Spare Parts is about Kelty, a 19 year old "C-grader" (in a caste system which goes down to D), whose prospects were reduced when she narrowly missed out on a place at university (because C-graders can only get in with scholarships). The book is set about a hundred years in the future in the sprawling suburbia of Melbourne, albeit a Melbourne more filled with high-rises and with even dodgier trains than at present.

When Kelty's best friend is grievously injured in an industrial accident, Kelty decides to sell her body and join the space corps to save her friend. This is a world where the rich discard their old, decrepit (or sometimes merely slightly wrinkled) bodies and have their brains transplanted into the young bodies of people of the lower classes, for a nice fee. The people who've sold their bodies then get to have their brains transplanted into cyborg bodies. The catch? Cyborgs (or cybermorphs as is the politically correct term) aren't allowed to live permanently on Earth.

When I first started reading, I thought this was a dystopian novel and was convinced that Kelty was going to discover that the evil A and B graders were killing the poor for their bodies and organs. It's possible that I've read too many YA dystopias of late. To alleviate any confusion such as what I suffered, I want to make it clear that this is not really a dystopian novel. Sure, it's not all rainbows and sunshine for the poor, criminals wear tracker bracelets which electrocute them if they feel angry (so they don't attack bystanders) but it's not terribly different to our world. The class boundaries are just a little more emphasised so that the rich live in high-rises and ride cable cars around the city and the poor live in dodgy areas and ride the subway. The main thing which distinguishes Spare Parts from books like The Hunger Games and Divergent or even 1984 is that there is no government conspiracy keeping everyone oppressed. The poor are just poor and have to either sell their bodies and join the space corps or be smart enough for a scholarship to university to improve their situation.

Of course, I'm not saying that the characters, rich or otherwise, are necessarily all on the up and up, but if I hadn't automatically assumed dystopia, I think I would have enjoyed the start more, instead of spending it being deeply suspicious of the society. That's more an issue with my expectations than with the book itself, however.

I thought the way the cyborg bodies were explained and treated was well done. The space corps is composed entirely of cyborgs because ordinary human bodies aren't resilient enough to withstand the accelerations and radiation and other dangers of space. Human brains can't just be plonked in a cyborg body and be expected to know how to manipulate it (especially given the extra senses they have, like infrared and UV vision, for example). Rogers-Davidson deals with this by giving each cyborg an AI assistant which interfaces with their systems and helps them acclimate to the world. They can even mitigate or postpone the effects of alcohol. Kelty's snarky AI was one of the really fun parts of the novel. (She's so "state-of-the-art" she can even be sarcastic.)

I also enjoyed the human aspect of the novel. It was nice to see a wide range of female characters and their relationships were equally varied and well drawn particularly between the main character and others (since this was written in first person, that's to be expected). In fact, I think there was only one prominent male character, and he was only really around in the first half of the book, which is rare to see. Another key difference between Spare Parts and many more recent YA books is the lack of a romantic plot line. Which I found endearing. Given all the changes she's going through -- changing bodies, changing socioeconomic circumstances -- Kelty really has much more important things to worry about than boys. It really is nice to read about a teenager who doesn't think important life choices have to include boys.

Rating: 5 / 5 stars

Australian Women Writers Challenge

Next year, I am going to take on the Australian Women Writers Challenge. To make it particularly challenging and to tie in better with the contents of my blog, I am going to try to read only science fictional books by female Australians.

The specifics of my challenge:

Genre challenge: Purist: one genre only

Challenge level: Miles (read 6 and review at least 3*)

* Should include at least one substantial length review


I'm excited! But also kind of glad that there are still a few weeks left in 2011 to finish the Vorkorsigan Saga which I'm in the grips of. (Only, um, 4-5 books to go...)

Book list

And here is my preliminary list of books/authors that I plan to read. The order I've listed them is more or less the order they occurred to me / were suggested to me on Twitter / I saw them on past Aurealis Awards short lists. Also, I think some of these will be difficult to acquire, so that will definitely affect my ability to get through them all.

• Marianne de Pierres (definitely Angel Arias which is sitting on my bookshelf, quite possibly others)
• Patty Jansen (Watchers Web / The Far Horison)
• Kim Westwood (Courier's New Bicycle)
• Maria Quinn (Gene Thieves)
• 
Sara Creasy (Song of Scarabaeus)
• Sonny Whitelaw (Rhesus Factor)
• Claire Corbett (When We Have Wings)
• Sue Isle (Nightsiders)
• Maxine McArthur (Less Than Human / Time Future)
• Michelle Marquardt (Blue Silence -- seems very hard to find though)
• Tess Williams (Sea as Mirror)
• Sally Rogers-Davidson (Spare Parts)

 I've put a link along the top bar thingy under the banner to a page where I'll be collating reviews and keeping track of the books I've read.