A Muhammed Ali of a book. Hard-hitting and beautifully done. I feel physically better for having read such writing. I don’t remember ever rooting for a character like I did for Cora, knowing that the truth-witnessing of the author was never going to pull any punches.
 
The one gripe I had was when Cora’s story jumps forward to Indiana. Colson Whitehead has a penchant for introducing a new scene and sketching in the backstory to it later, which is fine, only this time it comes unstuck. I was quite lost, looking around at the new farm and new characters and not knowing where I was, or who they were. I even flipped back several pages to see if I might have accidentally skipped a brief intervening chapter, but nope.
 
That’s by and by. The Underground Railroad is one hell of a story. I guess it’s just me, something I had pending, but for some reason, it feels appropriate to be reading about slavery in America right now.

Is sci fi having some kind of steampunk cyborg moment, or is it simply coincidence that I read Karin Tidbeck just after Ted Chiang?
 
If Chiang’s “Exhalation” playing with the idea of a piston-driven non-organic life form left me cold, Tidbeck’s penchant for amalgamating the organic with the mechanical left me queasy. Human-machine love and engine cables clung to by blubbery flesh tend to creep me out. If you like weird tales, you’ll probably like these, but I found there was too much freakishness for its own sake. All the fat and flab seemed gratuitously excessive to me.
 
Human relationships in these stories with abnormal creatures of unnatural birth would work better if they were more relatable, or exciting. But that is not the Swedish way, I think, and you certainly get a strong feel of Nordic otherness and Sehnsucht.
 
But then there’s “Rebecka”, which knocks the spots off any story I’ve read this year. I occasionally do preliminary judging for a short story contest: I would award this one first prize. It packs something massive into its eight pages.
 
It starts off with a cracking guess-how-things-ended-up-this-way scene and thus we meet Sara, reluctant confidante to the troubled Rebecka, after whose suicide attempts she is always cleaning up: “the worst kind of friendship, held together by pity.”
 
Added to the obvious tension of the scenario are Sara’s impatient, sardonic humour and the sharp minds of both women, but that’s not all.
 
Sara recalls a phone conversation—before her friend’s first attempt to kill herself—in which Rebecka asserts having met the living Lord in a church.
 
The truly wonderful thing that happens in this conversation is a shift that thrusts a huge ambiguity into the reader’s mind. At first, Sara appears to be humouring Rebecka, but then she starts talking as if Christ’s second coming were an established and fairly recent fact.
 
When we learn what torture Rebecka suffered at the hands of her husband, we take her more seriously and her suicidal nature seems more than comprehensible. So that when the strangely level-headed Rebecka tells Sara that “the Lord is fucking with me” and won’t let her die, we don’t know where this could possibly lead.
 
That it does lead somewhere conclusive and unexpected is superbly accomplished by Tidbeck.

I had just given up on time travel.
 
I’d been reading Ted Chiang’s “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” and his irrefutable exposition of how nudging just a single atom can impact nearby air molecules, producing a knock-on reaction that extends far and wide, going on to affect the weather and ultimately, with that, people’s decisions and actions. Any retroactive micro-change would thus alter the course of the world, creating another, divergent timeline.
 
So adiós, I thought, to any lingering fictional flirtation of mine with that idea.
 
But then Octavia Butler comes along and does it effortlessly. The trick—if you can call it that—is to have your time-travelled character far too caught up in the danger and drama of what they land in to begin to worry about the physics. And it actually helps that Dana, her protagonist, doesn’t seek to explain it herself. It’s a damnable thing she’d rather be rid of.
 
The real interest is how Dana, a black woman from 1976 Los Angeles, can deal with and survive a 19th century Maryland slave plantation.
 
There are some people whose company you simply enjoy and it doesn’t matter what the hell you talk about. I feel that way reading certain writers, albeit only a very few, and Octavia Butler is becoming one of them. I admire and like the natural storyteller in her that makes the outlandish perfectly believable.
 
What gives the story depth is that Dana is not a one-dimensional black-female-victim cipher, but a complex character whose outrage is susceptible to being tempered by contradictory feelings and understanding — and the fact that she has a vested interest.
 
I imagined while reading—I don’t know—that Butler’s depiction of life on the American plantation has reliable verisimilitude, and seeing that world through the eyes of her time-shifted heroine was that much clearer for not being didactic.
 
Reviving that period in fiction certainly makes for a cautionary tale. Don’t jump back there in time and space if you can avoid it.