You Have To Wonder

Thanks to a coincidental bit of alphabetizing, the next book on this list also works as an illustration of Ball’s theme:  

The Album of Dr. Moreau, by Daryl Gregory — What if the creations of Dr. Moreau were to form a boy band?  (How do people think of these things?)  Five human/ animal hybrids who fled a secret experiment become a tight singing group and the heartthrobs of teenage girls everywhere.  When their manager is murdered, Detective Luce Delgado is called in to investigate.

Each of the WyldBoyZ has his own character and perspective, partly based on their genetics but mostly unique to themselves.  Bobby the ocelot (“the cute one”) is focused on the traditional rock-star triad, sex and drugs and rock and roll, but also has a sweet charm and innocence.  Tusk the elephant is cerebral and, yes, has an excellent memory, but no understanding of humor.  Matt the Bat, on the other hand, is very funny.  Devin, three-quarters bonobo, has a new-age perspective and thinks everyone in the world is sexy.  And poor Tim the pangolin is afraid of everything, especially after a fan on a Chinese tour tried to steal one of his scales.

Like most things by Gregory, there’s some pretty funny parts: “Delgado, an intriguing name, he was pretty sure it meant ‘the cat,’” Devin thinks.  (Well, maybe this is only funny if you’ve made as many mistakes in Spanish as I have.) Or:

“I don’t see color,” Matt said.

“Bullshit,” Devin said.

“Literally, I don’t see color.”

As it turns out, each of them has a motive to kill the manager, who had taken advantage of them after they escaped and is still blackmailing them.  There’s also a touching moment with Delgado’s daughter, who is a huge fan of the group.

Dolphin Junction, by Mick Herron — Sharp mystery stories by an author who’s written some of the best spy and mystery novels around.  I’m mentioning it here because of a story that could be fantasy if you look at it from the right direction, “The Usual Santas.”  Eight mall Santas, still in costume, get together after the stores close on Christmas Eve to compare notes and complain about this year’s kids.  Then someone notices that there are nine Santas instead of eight.  This story should have appeared in every Year’s Best Fantasy collection, though I haven’t seen enough of them to know if it did.

The Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse — The Black Sun is based on Mesoamerican mythology, something that’s pretty rare in fantasy.  Roanhorse creates an intriguing world out of these myths, a world of gods that came from the sky and left magic in the earth when they went back, of powerful Sky Made clans and the Dry Earth folk who serve them, of priests fighting and scheming in the holy city of Tova.

By using myths from Mesoamerica, Roanhorse avoids the over-harvested stories from Europe, the tropes that have become cliches.  There’s a Chosen One here, Serapio, but his fate is something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, not glorious but terrifying.  He’s been fashioned from birth to be a god, a process that involved blinding him and other cruelties.  His purpose is to destroy the Watchers, who generations ago slaughtered most of his clan, Carrion Crow.  To do this he has to get to Tova before the Convergence, a rare combination of the winter solstice and a solar eclipse.  But by the time he is released into the world he has become more of a weapon than a human being.

The ship that takes him to Tova is captained by Xiala.  She is a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking woman, exiled from her native Teek for reasons we don’t know, a complete opposite and antidote to the focused, grim-dark Serapio.  A lot of the fun of this book is watching them survive their voyage, going from wary distrust to something like love.

Of course this is the first book of a trilogy, and ends on a cliff-hanger.  Well, Amazon says the next one will be out in April, so at least it exists.  I hope, anyway.

Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit — Solnit uses the fact that Orwell planted roses as a starting point for meditations on all kinds of people and things: Orwell and the symbolism of roses, of course, but also coal mining, Stalin and Soviet Communism, intra-species cooperation, the British in Burma, gardens, and the life of a fascinating but ultimately tragic photographer named Tina Modotti.  It’s a book that champions, as Emma Goldman said (the quote is included in the book), “everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”