So…March, 2021. One year into the pandemic (for most of us – it started in December, really, but we only realized it was a pandemic in March 2020). The Covid Tracking Project stopped collecting/posting data yesterday, on their one-year anniversary, so this is as good a day as any to count as “one year”.
The good news is – there’s light at the end of the tunnel. For real. The decline in case counts I mentioned a month ago is ongoing in California (appears to have leveled out in most of the U.S., but still at summer-low levels again), and vaccines are here – importantly, availability of those vaccines is becoming more widespread, too. I myself will get my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Friday, as an educator, and President Biden intends to have all American adults (who want it) vaccinated by the end of May.
So, because it’s important: take any vaccine they’ll give you. Really. The faster, the better – and the more likely we’ll be able to contain those variants that are a bit more resilient to the vaccines we currently have.
Okay, so – what did I read last month?
I finished three books, though the last one was actually finished yesterday. But, per my own rules, if I finish it before I write the post, it counts. So…
February Reads
First off, Maddaddam, the final installment of Margaret Atwood’s waterless flood trilogy, which begins with Oryx and Crake. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that most people haven’t read the entire trilogy – that many might not even know it IS a trilogy. I didn’t, before I began reading. At any rate, this novel picks up exactly where the previous one, The Year of the Flood, ends. The Flood, in this case, is a humanity-ending (nearly) plague, which it turns out was engineered and spread by Crake. Crake, a genetic and bioengineer, decided that the current state of the world (climate change, deteriorating society, cruelty, etc.) is all due to the nature of its current dominant species, and so he engineered a solution – he created a new breed of humans, with all of the traits he considered undesirable engineered out, and new ones that he hoped will facilitate cooperation and peaceful coexistence with nature engineered IN. These people, here called “Crakers” are to replace humanity. Enter the second part of the plan – Crake’s bioengineered superbug, which causes what reads like a very rapid and very contagious type of hemorrhagic fever – think Ebola on steroids. Crake had this plague incorporated into sex-enhancement drugs, and triggered it when he was pretty sure the drugs had penetrated all of society, everywhere.
Maddaddam picks up many months after the death of most of humanity, and follows the lives of a few people who escaped initial infection and managed to wait out the plague until it subsided (everyone else had died, so no more hosts – so the world appears to be safe to move about in again, except for the dangers of “nature”, which now includes a lot of escaped bioengineered animals and not a small number of humans who escaped the plague but aren’t great to be around. The usual post-apocalyptic scenario, with added genetic engineering.
We also get lots of backstory on the remaining characters, which is a feature of all of these stories – they contain the current story, plus lots of biographical flashbacks. Those are intermittently successful, but sometimes a bit boring.
Speaking of boring, the Crakers…Crake apparently thought that all “negative” emotions should be bred out of people, and this includes jealousy, anger, and most fear. But without these things, the Crakers appear to also lack imagination. They have curiosity, but no real ability to extrapolate on what they’re told. As a result, they’re kind of dull. Though they do get more interesting in this book, as some of their added-in features are revealed.
I liked the book, and the series as a whole, but it’s hard to read. Atwood is always grim, but this is grimmer than most of her work, and it’s hard to read even if you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic science fiction. Nevertheless, recommended if you enjoy that sort of thing.
Last month, I also read Headliners, my first Lucy Parker romance. Lucy Parker came highly recommended by a few book podcasts, and so I decided to give her latest a try. Headliners is the story of two competing evening news show anchors in London, who legitimately hate one another at the start of the story. Or, at least, Sabrina hates Nick, and she’s got a good reason or two. At the start of the story, they’ve both managed to blow up their careers as evening headliners, and their bosses decide to give them the failing morning show to co-host, with the ultimatum that either its ratings improve by the end of December, or they are both fired and someone else will be given the show. Neither has the option of the evening shows on their current network at this point.
So you can probably see where this is going, and, yeah, it goes there, but it’s enjoyable. And the characters are more relatable to me than the small-town religious types that have been populating the other romance series I’ve been reading. It’s marginally more diverse, and the characters don’t moralize at me about things I don’t have any connection to. I really enjoyed it, and will read more of her work.
Finally, I just finished the final book in John Scalzi’s Collapsing Empire series, and, damn, but he DID put it right there in the title. The Last Emperox is the story of the beginning of the end of a collapsing galactic empire, which is collapsing because of…physics. The Flow, a system of (something like) subspace tunnels that the Empire uses to get from one of their worlds to another is beginning to collapse, meaning that the various systems of the Empire are about to become completely separated from one another. Worse than that, there is only ONE world in the entire Empire that can sustain human life on its surface; the others are all either human-made habitats or hollowed-out lifeless worlds, and every system makes SOME of what it needs to survive and imports the rest. Which means, yeah…billions of people are looking at long, slow deaths.
So, what to do? That’s the story of the trilogy, along with the story of the accidental Emperox, Rachela the Second, who wasn’t ever supposed to become Emperox, and now has the fate of the known universe in her hands. This novel is the story of how she deals with the ongoing coup against her, as well as how she and her fiancé, a Flow physicist, are trying to figure out how to save most-to-all of humanity, rather than just the few million they might be able to get to End (the single human-sustaining world they have).
So…I liked these books a lot, but also they made me sad. Cardenia (the “real” name of the current Emperox) is facing a nearly-impossible task, and in the end (spoilers), there’s no saving the Empire, though it’s still possible by the end of the books that most of humanity will go on to survive. But we don’t KNOW. And poor Cardenia. The solution to her problem is, well, SERIOUS SPOILERS, to let one of the assassination attempts succeed. Sort of. I won’t explain the “sort of”, but let’s just say that the end of her story is sadder than I wanted, but less sad than it could have been.
Just read it. I don’t want to give too much away.
What’s Next?
Right now, I’m reading another Susan Mallery (not a romance, but one of her chick lit stories, which I like). Sisters By Choice is another of her Blackberry Island novels, and all I know right now is that I wonder what kind of mother Susan Mallery had, because she really does have every type of “bad” mother in these novels. In addition, I’ve just started the second book in Nancy’s Kress’ Yesterday’s Kin trilogy. More on that next month…
Chili on the Bunsen Burner 