★★★★☆ A cozy catastrophe

Uncanny Magazine Issue 55: November/December 2023

Naomi Kritzker

I am reviewing only the story "The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer.

It has come to my attention that "cozy" is having a moment in speculative fiction. I picked up Uncanny Magazine Issue 55: November/December 2023 because the story “The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer is a finalist for the 2024 Best Novelette Hugo Award. It's not my favorite of the finalists in this category (that would be Nghi Vo's On the Fox Roads), but I still enjoyed it.

And it certainly had a cozy feel to me.

A disaster has occurred that caused the ejection of large amounts of dust into the atmosphere. It is never explained what caused this, but there are many possibilities -- a big volcanic eruption, for instance. All that dust blocks sunlight -- not completely, but enough to be a problem for solar power and for growing crops. The loss of sunlight coincides with (or causes) a general breakdown of society. Grocery stores run out of food, there is no gasoline, electricity is unreliable, the supply of medicines is unreliable or nonexistent. Some people makes raids on other neighborhoods to steal the things they need.

OK, you're saying -- how the Heck is that cozy? Aha! I'm not going to answer that, because that's the story. It was fun.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★☆☆ Historically important

The Blue Fairy Book Andrew Lang I read Andrew Lang 's Blue Fairy Book when in High School. My famous Aunt Althea, who lived in New York and always knew the best new books, had given us a new translation of The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales , and I read it. It was a strange experience. I read a fairy tale every night. To a teenage kid accustomed to modern literature, they seemed kind of underpowered. Yet, I found myself every evening looking forward to the next one. Somehow the experience of reading the stories was better than the stories themselves. Yes, I know that makes no sense, but that was how it felt to me. Therefore, after I finished with Grimm , I looked for other collections of fairy tales. Naturally I found my way to Lang 's famous Colored Fairy Books . I read most of them -- this single review will be a review of the entire collection. Even though the Colored Fairy Books are collections of stories from other sources, the books were indeed written by Lang

★★★★☆ That was fun!

The Monks of Appalling Dreadfulness John Connolly John Connolly 's The Monks of Appalling Dreadfulness begins with the words In Which We Are Reunited Some Time After the Appearance of the Last Volume. You Look Lovely, By the Way. What Have You Done to Your Hair? This is the Chapter 1 heading. From this I surmise that it might be related to some other work Connolly has written. What that would be, I don't really know -- it is the first thing by Connolly I have ever read. It probably won't be the last. The truth is, I couldn't tell you that happens in tMoAD . Perhaps if I could it would rate five stars. It is just one joke after another, held together by a thin tissue of plot, incomprehensible to the uninitiated reader (or at least to THIS uninitiated reader). But it made me laugh and want to read more. I assert that any book that accomplishes those two things is a Good Book! Amazon review Goodreads review

★★★★☆ Civilized savagery

The Cinnamon Peeler: Select Poems Michael Ondaatje I have recently read a lot of poetry by classic poets such as Sappho , Li Po , Tu Fu , John Keats , and Robert Browning . To read poets like these, you can get your hands on carefully annotated versions by editors who explain all the obscure references in the poems. Reading Michael Ondaatje 's The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems made me realize that I've been underappreciating that luxury. There's a good deal in tCP:SP that remains mysterious to me. For instance the second poem, "Early Morning, Kingston to Ganaoque", ends with these two lines Somewhere in those fields, they are shaping new kinds of women My reaction to that was "Huh? What does that have to do with the previous 15 lines?" I still don't know. They come out of nowhere. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka (although at the time of his birth it may have been known as Ceylon). His first eleven years he grew up in Sri Lanka. His family

★★☆☆☆ Chinese Hugo finalists

Adventures in Space Patrick Parrinder, Yao Haijun, Leah Cypess, Ronald Ferguson, Russell James, Alex Shvartsman, Amdi Silvestri, Allen Stroud, Eleanor Wood, Bao Shu, Zhao Haihong I bought Adventures in Space because it includes English translations of three Chinese finalists for 2024 Hugo awards: the novellas Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet , by 何夕 = He Xi , and Seeds of Mercury , by 康著王 = Wang Jinkang and the short story "Answerless Journey", by Han Song. I am very sorry to report that they all stink. Also, I suspect the translations are poor. I don't read Chinese, so my basis for that final statement is just that the English translation reads awkwardly. "Answerless Journey" is the worst of the three. "Answerless Journey" is not an inaccurate title, but "Confusing, Painful, and Pointless Journey" would be more precise. It felt like a new version of Waiting for Godot , except that I once saw a video performance of Waiting for Godot ,

★★★★☆ Repays effort

Selected Poems Robert Browning, Daniel Karlin (editor) There are treasures to be found in Robert Browning 's poetry but don't expect them to be laid out for you like the candies at the grocery store cash register. Browning is famously obscure. In his introduction to Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) by Browning Robert Daniel Karlin tells this story Tennyson said that there were only two lines in [Browning's Sordello] that he understood, the first – ‘Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told’ – and the last – ‘Who would, has heard Sordello’s story told’ – and that both were lies, which is unkind, but still pretty funny. This Penguin Classics edition is a well-put-together book, as Penguin Classics always are in my experience. After a brief (3 pages) introduction, we dive right into the poems, in publication order, with the exception of the final poem, which serves as a kind of epitaph. There are notes after the poems themselves, which are a big help in understanding

★★★★☆ The Great Malevolence has a personnel problem

The Gates John Connolly Around the time of the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago, evil came into existence along with everything else. John Connolly 's The Gates begins with an account of the Big Bang. In fact, chapter I, entitled "In Which the Universe Forms, Which Seems Like a Very Good Place to Start", is a brief description of the Big Bang. It is evident that Connolly has taken pains to be scientifically accurate here and at other relevant points. In fact, in his acknowledgements he writes Dr. Colm Stephens, administrator of the School of Physics at Trinity College, Dublin, very generously agreed to read this manuscript, and offered advice and clarification. In the interests of fiction I was forced to ignore some of it, and for that I apologize deeply. In fact, I have read purported nonfiction books by card-carrying physicists that were less scientifically accurate. That said, let's admit that the creation of Evil in the Big Bang is not something physicists say,

★★★☆☆ Inscrutably transparent

Full Speed to a Crash Landing Beth Revis When we first meet Ada Lamarr she is alone on her ship Glory with less than an hour of oxygen left. Ada makes her living by salvaging abandoned spaceships. She is ostensibly here to salvage valuable metal from a ship that crashed on a nearby planet. But as a result of an explosion, Glory now has a three-meter hole in her hull, and almost all systems are down. That includes life support, but not communications. Ada knows that there is another ship in the vicinity and has sent out a distress call. Ada is straight as a corkscrew and trustworthy as a seven-dollar bill. I have no hesitation in mentioning Ada's dodginess, because it is (1) Extremely obvious from page 1, and (2) Intentionally obvious. That is, in my judgment Beth Revis fully intends to make it obvious that Ada is up to something. In fact, this is the thing I don't get about Full Speed to a Crash Landing . It is transparently obvious what Ada is about, and you will work o

★☆☆☆☆ Simon, incredibly, becomes even more tedious

Like a Dream Seanan McGuire Like a Dream is Seanan McGuire 's Patreon reward for November 2022. She introduces it in this way: And now it's time for November, wherein Simon gets to learn more about the mortal concepts being therapy and medical treatment. He's having a week. This is a story in the October Daye universe. It continues the (now quite long) series of Patreon stories about Simon Torquill trying to adjust himself to domestic life with his wife and husband Dianda and Patrick (yes, it's a mariage à trois) and daughter August. Simon has a history of having been abused and coerced into doing awful things that's he's trying to put behind him. Now that he's no longer loathsome he's full of self-loathing. A nicer person than me might have tender feelings towards Simon and wish him well. But I am an awful person and I cannot help feeling that, like Marvin the Paranoid Android , Simon's company is unbearable. This one is more tedious than ever be

★★★★☆ Calculus with pictures and jokes

Change Is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World Ben Orlin I recently wrote a review of Understanding Analysis , which provoked me to lament the failure of most of Earth's population to appreciate the beauty of analysis. This led me to Change Is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World , which is, more or less, a book intended to extenuate that deficit. I had previously read Ben Orlin 's Math with Bad Drawings , a book that is simultaneously very funny and deeply profound. Thus I bought Change Is the Only Constant and read it in the kindle app on by iPad, for the sake of the color illustrations. I was delighted to discover that the book begins with an epigraph from Octavia Butler , whose Kindred I just finished. So clearly this was MEANT TO BE! Here is how Change Is the Only Constant begins. “What is,” said the philosopher Parmenides, not quite a million days ago, “is uncreated and indestructible, alone, complete, immovable and

★★★★★ Excellent biography of an intelligent man

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer Kai Bird Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific leader of the Manhattan Project -- the project that developed the first atomic bombs, including the two that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The scientists who developed the Bomb had at first few or no moral qualms about it. (The best history of this effort is The Making of the Atomic Bomb , by Richard Rhodes , an extraordinarily good book.) They knew that Germany was working on a bomb, and they were morally certain that if Germany made a Bomb, Hitler would use it. Developing the Bomb just looked like a matter of survival. In the event, the German bomb project came to nothing, and the Manhattan Project continued after the military defeat and occupation of Germany. Oppenheimer was one of the first to question the wisdom of developing the Bomb. After the war he agitated for limitations on atomic weapons. (Surely he would be a candidate for the all-time "Too

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