Review: Alif the Unseen

By G. Willow Wilson
Available now from Grove Press (Grove/Atlantic)
Review copy

G. Willow Wilson wanted to talk to the literati, comic book geeks, and Muslims at once.  She wanted to write a book that was a dialogue between them.  In the process, she borrowed a bit from almost every genre and wrote a funny, affecting novel about the internet, revolution, and the many ways we can see the world.

Alif is a hacker specializing in providing security for other hackers, bloggers, anyone who wants to cover their tracks from the State.  He has a girlfriend, who he met over the internet, who leaves him for a rich fiance.  Her last request is to never see him again.  He complies, writing a program that can track any person by their typing patterns and blocking her from accessing his presence on the net.  Then her fiance, the Hand of God and the State's premier computer surveillance guy, hacks Alif's machine and gets the program.  But what he really wants in the copy of the Alf Yeom (The Book of a Thousand Days) given to Alif by Intisar.

By the time the book is though, Alif's allies will include jinn, an American convert, a holy man, a prince, and a pious neighbor.  He will  be repaid for saving someone's life unknowingly, survive a car wreck in the desert, and grow up a little.  Although no age is given for Alif, it's heavily implied that he's a teenager.  He certainly has a teenager's captious passions and lack of long-term planning.

I loved ALIF THE UNSEEN.  I loved how it revels in the powers of literature, belief, and the internet.  I like how handles are used, as legitimate identities, although there are some characters like Dina who need nothing but their real name and that's okay too.  I liked that there is a world of magic right beside out own, but few can see it because they're too busy being superstitious to actually believe in something.  I liked the strong sense of time and place.  I liked that Wilson clearly had something to say but didn't sacrifice story for didacticism. 

I know lots of literary types who having been raving over ALIF THE UNSEEN, exactly as Wilson wanted.  I think there's room for a large young adult and new adult audience as well.  ALIF THE UNSEEN, among the many other things it accomplishes, captures what it is like to be young.  It's a tale of being in over your head, of deciding when to be reverent, of being both crushed and new in love, and being awesome at computers but not knowing as much as older people about a bunch of important things.  All in all ALIF THE UNSEEN is a terrific, thrilling novel.  And you can be assured I'm going to look into reading Wilson's graphic novels.

Review: Losers in Space

By John Barnes
Available now from Viking (Penguin)
Review copy
Read my review of TALES OF THE MADMAN UNDERGROUND

I started the 48 Hour Book Challenge with AMPED, the book I was in the middle of reading when the challenge started.  I chose two books that I had begun but never finished to read next.  The first of those two books was LOSERS IN SPACE by John Barnes.

TALES OF THE MADMAN UNDERGROUND remains one of my favorite books I've ever reviewed for In Bed With Books.  It was a surprising treat.  But I started LOSERS IN SPACE with astronomical expectations.  The first page of the book met those expectations.  Notes for the Interested #0 explains that LOSERS IN SPACE will be hard science fiction, but all the science stuff will be regulated to Notes for the Interested instead of infodumps.  I love hard sci-fi, so that didn't deter me, and I thought the notes were a clever way to appeal to two audiences.

Then the characters where introduced.  Narrator Susan once wanted to be a scientist, until she realized that fame is the most important thing.  Now that's true in the LOSERS IN SPACE world, where a YouTube-like version of reality TV is the easiest avenue of work in a world where most work is valued at nothing.  If you want any power over your life, you need to have a salable story.  But, true though it might be, I don't want to read about a smart girl who dumbs herself down to be a celebutante.  And all her friends seemed to deserve their title as losers.

John Barnes, I apologize for doubting you.  I absolutely love this book and regret that I wasted time that I could have used reading it.  Please know that I only ever doubted you because I love your work.

Novels like LOSERS IN SPACE don't come around that often.  It exemplifies the great possibilities that lie within the young adult genre.  At it's heart, LOSERS IN SPACE is driven by the characters.  The losers decide to stowaway aboard a ship to Mars in order to gain fame.  When things go catastrophically wrong, they must somehow survive alone in space for months.  Some of the losers rise to the occasion.  Some rise and fall.  The losers turn out to be much more than they ever thought they could.

Except for Derlock, who is a sociopath.  Did I mention that they're trapped in space with a murderous sociopath?  How could I leave that part out?

But on top of being a character-driven survival story with thriller elements, there's a nice heaping slice of social satire and classic SF.  It's TUNNEL IN THE SKY meets Libba Bray.  And let me tell you: TUNNEL IN THE SKY is one of my favorite books ever.  I doubt I could give a book a better compliment.

Please, please, please read LOSERS IN SPACE.  John Barnes should be one of the big YA names along with John Green and Scott Westerfeld.  I would wax poetic longer, but I need to get back to reading.