Two books for the price of one! Well not really. Two mostly unrelated books that ended up being posted together because I can't meet writing deadlines.
Discussed herein: Digits and Dastards by Fredrick Pohl, and Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer
I enjoyed these short stories by Fredrick Pohl a lot, but didn't have much to say about them, so I didnt give this book its own entry when I finished. I just like this era of pulpy spacefaring sci-fi short stories. I just like these stories about weird little aliens and spaceships. It is kind of dated, in that Star Trek: ToS way, but if you're willing to roll with that, these are fun and I have some weird unexamined nostalgia for this era of science fiction.
It did make for an interesting contrast sliding into Hummingbird Salamander.
Hummingbird Salamander was much harder for me to get into. It's kind of a thriller adventure where the narrator follows a trail of clues left by an eco-terrorist, Silvina, about endangered species poaching.
[I usually have a hard time getting in to thrillers and mysteries, but I think its good for me to keep trying one or two every year. ]
I have to be honest, this book just made me feel like Jeff VanderMeer has a profoundly different relationship to nature and conservation than I do.
I consider myself a conservationist, but for me, even from childhood, it's always been about ecosystems, not about species. To save the manatees you need to save the whole watershed. Perhaps that
seems like making a specific problem bigger and more complicated, but to
me it makes everything simpler and more manageable: reduce runoff,
protect the banks of the river with a riparian barrier, increase our
wastewater processing and stormwater capacity. Saving the river saves
the seagrasses and saves the manatees. Most conservation marketing, however, uses a pretty or adorable "ambassador species" to get humans to care. The manatees are how you get people to care about the seagrass. I think this was supposed to be the approach in Hummingbird Salamander.
"Jane Smith" is left a taxidermied hummingbird by a mysterious woman named Silvina. Jane becomes obsessed with trying to understand Silvina, and slowly uncovers some facts about her life: Silvina was a wealthy heiress. A disability forced her out of human society and she connected with nature. She became more and more radicalized until ahe started bombing people and selling exotic furs on the black market to fund her terrorism. She was probably killed by her father when she became an embarrassment to the family.
I kind of can't shake the feeling that maybe Silvina was the POV in early drafts, because this is, for most of the book, her story. Perhaps the author felt she would be more relatable through the lens of a white middle class protagonist. However, Jane is a brick wall. Jane is so closed off the only thing she seems to care about is this hummingbird. I didnt feel she drew me in, and only finished it because I am trying to catch up with a page goal for this year.
My gut feels like there is some sort of smart-person culture critic connection to draw between these two works: the pulpiest of pulp sci-fi and the current hero of literary speculative fiction. Something about thrillers and drunken neo-noir private eyes on houseboats while the world burns, something about billionaires who bankrupt themselves and forfeit their humanity to further the cause of space exploration? Dreams turning to nightmares? Idealism vs conservatism? I can't quite articulate it.
Digits and Dastards has a lot of stories about weird aliens and humans having their bodies and consciousness morphed into other forms. Sterile environments, being cut off from the rest of humanity. I would definitely recommend it, if that wasn't clear from the comparison to Star Trek.
I think by comparison, Hummingbird Salamander felt somehow solipsistic, all about one random middle class woman's personal obsession with this random eco-terrorist. And truly, I didn't care. For
a story that tries so hard to have a climate angle, it spends all its
time on human bullshit. Who cares. Who cares about Vilcapampa Enterprises or Jack or any of this bullshit? How is any of it helping
anything?
Last
year I read a book called "Is A River Alive" by Robert MacFarlane, and
while it was more emotional than I prefer I liked that it focused on the
ecosystem - the river- as a living thing, and not just the newts or
mushrooms. Pohl's heros hurled themselves against the stars for the sake of a collective dream. Jane Smith hurls herself against the uncaring world to feel like she matters. That's my read on her character at least. She doesn't try to improve the world, she's entirely focused on making herself feel satisfied. I wish I hadn't finished this book. The way it ends makes me kind of hate her, actually.
