Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor's name is one that I have been seeing a lot lately.  My reading of her has been pretty limited so far, but she is an author whose books I keep wanting to pick up.  Last week at the library I found her newly released Broken Places & Outer Spaces.  This is not a work of fiction but is a book about the author's own life and development as a writer.  While I am in the process of trying to reinvent myself as a writer, I thought that it might be informative to gain some perspective on someone who makes a living this way.
Okorafor's book parallels her emergence as a writer with her recovery from a spinal surgery that left her temporarily paralyzed from the waist down.
What stands out about this book is that it isn't just a story of development and it isn't just a personal recovery story, both of which this is.  I don't think that the book is meant to be blindly inspirational in the sense that any hardship or difficulty will lead to personal growth.  Rather, this is a a focused book about her own personal experiences.  I have read many other personal narratives that give the reader the impression that either one must experience hardship in order to be creative or that hardship will necessarily lead to personal growth.  Okorafor does not attribute her creative development to the difficulties that she faced.  She almost offhandedly mentions that a friend suggested that she take a creative writing course.
Okorafor's descriptions of her struggling to relearn how to walk, coupled with her memories of her young athletic life show how much she has lived in her own experience.  She has spent a lot of time thinking about these times in her life.  This is really what sticks for me.  Her story is personal and hopeful without being didactic.
While this is not normally the type of book that I would read, she brings a lot to the form.

Dune Messiah

A while back I felt ambitious about reading a bunch of classic sci-fi series.  I bought Rendezvous with Rama and Rama II, I bought all of the Foundation series, and I bought 3 sequels to Dune.  I have slowly been making my way through these because I find that I have to separate them out from my normal reading sequence. While I have really enjoyed the first books in each of these series, I have not been enamored enough of any of the sequels to delve further into their worlds. 
When I picked up Dune Messiah, I figured that I would see the continuation of Maud'Dib's rule and hoped that I would get a bit more backstory to the mythology that Frank Herbert exposes his reader to in Dune.  One thing that I liked about Dune, and something that I also found frustrating, is that he offers up a rich world with a built-in mythology that he only barely explains.  He lets the reader pick up bits and pieces of the various cultures and religions the figure heavily throughout the novel.  On one hand, I like an author who trusts his audience enough to be able to put together enough to get through a novel without laying everything out for them.  I am also a patient enough reader that I am happy to piece things together and to let things go until/unless the author comes back to them.  I don't need every single novel to be overly plotted and planned and have everything tied up neatly.  A shaggy dog here or there never killed anyone.
But Dune Messiah isn't interested in delving anymore into these aspects of Dune that I found fascinating.  Herbert also doesn't seem all that interested in continuing the action of Dune.  To some extent, this is okay because Paul Atreides has won his Jihad and reigns.  This novel is about intrigue and the difficulties of maintaining power won.  But there is a lot of talk, and a lot of it is very repetitious. 
I don't want to get too much into plot here because it is both a simple plot and convoluted.  It is simple in the sense that the parties are introduced quickly or are already known from the previous novel and the conflict is rather straightforward.  But it is convoluted in the approach.  Herbert must find a way for his characters to deceive and trick a character with the power of prescience, or the ability to see multiple potential future timelines.  The way that Herbert pulls this off is rather clever and exposes Paul's fatal flaw.  It is the more clever because of the way that it places Paul in a company of mythic figures whose hubris leads to an eventual downfall.  This all fits well into the archetypal hero's journey.
The read is quick and it is satisfying in its return to known quantities but I didn't get as much out of it as the original novel.

The Expanse, pt. 1: Leviathan Wakes

James S.A. Corey's Leviathan Wakes is a big book that is a part of a big series.  The scope of the novel is equally big.  There is a lot about this author (a pseudonym for two authors working together) and the series (that is currently being adapted into the series The Expanse by Amazon) that merit attention, but I am just interested in this novel so far.
It must have been a few years ago when I started dedicating a lot more time to reading and writing about sci-fi that I started seeing these books.  Initially, I thought that this was an old series because there were so many of them.  Each of the book covers features similar cover art and the same lettering style.  It looks a lot like a reissue of a recovered series.
But this novel, the first in the series was just published in 2011 and the books have been coming out nearly every year with the total up to 8 and a new novella just announced.  So, I had missed the boat a bit until now.
The book opens with a prologue that narrates a terrifying scene of a woman trapped in a storage locker aboard the spaceship Scopuli after it had been forcibly boarded by a hostile raiding party.  Julie, the woman trapped in the locker, will become the center of a shaggy-dog detective narrative around which the sci-fi narrative is wrapped.
The novel's two main characters, Holden and Miller (a disgraced naval officer and disgraced police detective, respectively), carry two separate narrative strands that eventually merge as the case of the missing girl evolves from a wandering daughter case to massive, interplanetary political upheaval.
The exact details of the plot dissolve into the background as the story unfolds.  There is an ancient alien virus, tribal conflict between humans of different colonial origins, and futuristic hardware.  The world built in the novel is one that is familiar to fans of contemporary sci-fi.  That is, a world that is similar to our own in its lived-in qualities.  This is not the glossy world of Star Trek where everything is military-grade and state of the art.  The ships and gear range from the bleeding edge of technology to patched-together, aging industrial haulers.
There is a lot going on in this novel, too much to cover here, but I will say that this was an enjoyable read.  Corey's matter-of-fact description of inter-faction conflict is reminiscent of Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  In the world of this novel, colonialism travels into space along with humanity as people living in space stations in the and outside of the asteroid belt, on Mars, the Moon, and back on Earth compete for resources and jockey for political power.  The descriptions of the bodies of human that are born and live in different gravities echoes the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, who so frequently muses on the effects that deep space will have on human evolution.
When my recently pared-down sci-fi book group decided to read this novel, I went and bought a box set of the first three novels.  I look forward to continuing this series and seeing what the authors can do with the world they have created.  I am a little torn about whether I want to begin watching the series just yet.  I may hold out until I get further into the books.

This Boy's Life

In the final pages of Tobias Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life, he writes:  "When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to at in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters.  We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever."
This memoir is filled with entertaining stories and some insight.  This post is just to recommend the book to anyone interested.