Reading roundup, with Gideon and Murderbot
26. Simon Jimenez, The Vanished Birds -- another Astounding nominee. I had not heard of either author or book at all before I saw his name on the Astounding ballot, but then it was mentioned like 3 times by one guy on a Balticon panel, which intrigued, so I went and got the book out of the library without waiting for the Hugo packet. Maybe the Balticon guy and the author are friends or something, because I did not think this was all that great along any of the axes he talked it up on. I liked the first chapter, advancing through a man's entire life, but once I got to chapter 2, which has a different POV character and setting, the book completely broke for me. I found the prose painfully clunky, the characters flat, zero chemistry between them despite the attempt to signal it by people grinning and chuckling at each other. I got to 50 pages, which is my "earnest effort" self-imposed metric for sampling Hugo homework, and was about ready to quit, but I was close to the start of a new chapter, so I looked ahead to see if the same POV continued, and it did not. The opening of chapter 3 felt more interesting, too, so I decided to stick out out and see if that worked for me any better -- and it did. And then chapter 4 was not as bad as chapter 2, even though it came back to the same characters, and then I was like 100 pages in, which felt like a significant sunk cost, so I just kept going. But whenever I was reading the book, with maybe the exception of a handful of pages here and there, it was because I wanted to get to be done with the book, not because I wanted to know what happned next or was enjoying the experience.
This is just... overwritten, not in a purple prose way, but there's just a lot thrown in here, and I didn't feel like the payoff justified any of the unusual narrative choices. Like, I'm not at all surprised that this is a debut book (unlike Unspoken Name and The Space Between Worlds, e.g., which felt like more mature books), because it really feels like a mishmash of all the things a new SFF writer has been meaning to write, couldn't pick a single story, so he put them all in. SPOILERS from here There is the distinct story of Kaeda, the first chapter I liked: a man on a primitive-technology hunter/agrarian planet, with nicely done hints that the planet is controlled by a corporation, and we get the whole story of his life, from birth to venerable old age, punctuated by visits from a ship traveling in a way where 15 years pass for the planet where only a couple of months pass for the ship. (Pocket travel taking up considerable time, while even more time passes outside, was an interesting take on FTL travel that I haven't seen before -- like generally you either have slow travel and generation ships (which is alluded to here, with remnants of those splinter cultures like the Quiet Ship), or hyperspace and then it's just like taking a plane, but there's a range of technologies here, which was interesting.) I was not surprised to learn that this chapter had been written to be able to read as a standalone, because it does, but it didn't feel sufficiently connected to anything else, even when the boy returned to the planet, even when, at the very end, we learn that he's originally from there, and Kaeda's story didn't have enough of a payoff on its own. There's also the story of Fumiko, the inventor of the space stations, who's spent the last 1000 years on and off in cryosleep, and while I liked her first chapter, I thought that story fizzled too -- I didn't feel like her ending was satisfying, though it did feel inevitable -- it just seemed like a way to wrap up the loose ends and tie the two stories together, but in an artificial and arbitrary way. (Also, spoilers for Terra Ignota book 3 person losing their mind and hallucinating someone they lost and interacting with them, which you get to see through their POV, was just done so much more interestingly in Terra Ignota. /Terra Ignota spoilers) There are epistolary bits, Dana's letters and Sartoris's diary entries, and the format felt gratuitous even when I enjoyed the content (I did like Sartoris's style and injection of humour, intentional and not). There was one chapter where we were getting Sartoris's diary *and* omniscient or Ahro's POV of the same scene, interspersed, and I really wasn't getting anything extra out of that. There are the one-off POVs of people Ahro meets -- Elby (Kaeda's daughter, now an old woman), the guy with the concert music and the mastiff on a derelict planet, Vaila and the doctor, random busser family, etc. -- but while some authors can sketch an engaging character and arc in a couple of pages, that's not what was happening for me here. Oh, also, the haiku... (which weren't even good haiku) It was just too much disparate stuff, for not enough reason. Or maybe just not pulled off well enough to feel justified. (Presumably one's mileage on this can vary; I've seen praise for this book, and somehow this author was nominated for Astounding. But I personally wasn't feeling any of it.)
I'm also not sure what this book was supposed to make me feel, but it mostly didn't. I did not get found family vibes, definitely not from the Debby's original crew, but not even from the ultimate bunch, despite Sartoris's best efforts to humanize them in the diaries. (I did end up liking Sartoris himself, and maybe even caring a little bit about what happened to him, but not long after I reached that point, he ended up in a coma.) I did not end up feeling anything for Ahro, tragic backstory notwithstanding; I think maybe we didn't get enough interiority with him? I did not end up feeling anything for Nia, or even liking her much. It was the chapter introducing Fumiko that brought me back from the brink of DNFing, and I found her a little interesting, in a cliche "character in a sci-fi movie" sort of way when she was first introduced, but that also petered out by the time we got to her one thousand year old version with memory gaps. Also, with a couple of splashes of exception, the way she was doing Science and the way Science (or engineering) worked in this book did not ring true to me, like, timeframes, and Fumiko's personal role vs what teams might've been doing -- it felt like movie science, shallow. And the sci-fi suspension of disbelief fell apart for me completely once we got to the hyperspace jumps Powered by a Forsaken Child part. Not only did it feel thematically over-the-top, the leap to "he is unconsciously controlling thousands of ships via droplets of blood embedded in them" lost me. I think I could've been sold on this premise if some effort had been applied to tying it in with how this universe presumably worked, but it was just there, with no one even trying to exlain it or understand it. And, like, something on the boundary of the scientific and the numinous CAN actually work for me -- The Space Between Worlds from fellow Astounding nominee did this really well, actually, I thought -- but here it goes from a "we are going to study him to see how we can reproduce this power" (a reasonably sci-fi concept) to full-on sympathetic magic, without a pause to reframe, and that left me behind.
The writing mostly did not work for me, although there were some lovely passages that did. But there were also several spots that tripped me up because the sentences just seemed to be constructed incorrectly (not in a typo/missing word way, but maybe something that slipped through an editing pass), and while the use of epithets doesn't bug me as much as I know it does some people, it was frequent enough here that it was very noticeable. There was also a thing with the passage of time in the book which I'm not sure if it was a writing choice or a thematic choice or both, but whichever it was, it did not work for me. I kept finding myself reading one of the frequent passages where time is passing and described in a sort of zoomed out way -- in a movie these would be montages, I guess -- Ahro getting to know the crew, Ahro mastering the Jaunt, scientists working on whatever, Nia working for the salvagers while Sartoris convalesces, Jaunt-based ship technology proliferating while Nia searches for Ahro and "lighting the fires" -- and I would have very little sense of how much time was actually passing -- weeks? months? years? decades? Which, if it had worked smoothly, would've been a really neat trick -- I think that's what Jimenez was going for. But then some grounding, quantifiable detail of time would be mentioned, and instead of feeling some thematic jolt, I'd find myself confused by the practicalities: the random busser made 30 jump journeys in 12 hours? that's 24 minutes per journey, that doesn't seem practical for boarding, disembarking, serving snacks, presumably cleaning up and taking bathroom breaks occasionally; one thousand fires lit = one thousands jaunts by Nia's ship, in the space of 15 years, meaning a jump every 5-6 days, but weren't they trying to space these out so as not to attract notice? I basically think that the writing choices meant to underline the theme of time slipping away ended up also highlighting bits of worldbuilding/plot that felt shaky to me, for a net negative. But there were some things that worked, the occasional neat turn of phrase ("the boy as her shadow, he stitching himself slowly each day to the soles of her feet", though I think that "he" doesn't need to be there; "a young girl selling some fried unknown at the end of a stick"), descriptions and names of food, which sketch in a sense of variety across worlds and serve as a nicely grounding detail.
I feel like the book was aiming for "profound", but as far as I'm concerned, it just landed on "busy" and also "kinda boring". Or maybe it's more on the literary side? Anyway, it's going on the bottom of my list for now, or rather Jimenez is. I do see potential here, so not tempted to No Award, but not all that impressed either.
Hugo roundup: Astounding -- 5/6. Micaiah Johnson, K.A.Larkwood, Emily Tesh, Lindsay Ellis, Simon Jimenez. I did debate some about which order Lindsay Ellis and Simon Jimenez should go, because I found both books occasionally a slog, but I feel like the thing Axiom's End is *trying* to do is more interesting to me than the thing The Vanished Birds is trying to do, and I am more interested in seeing where Ellis's series goes from here than I am in reading something else by Jimenez, so this was the order I settled on based on that.
27. Darcie Little Badger, Elatsoe -- even reading in ebook format on my phone, I can tell this is a pretty book, with a glittery title, very cool cover, and neat b&w mini illustrations inside. It made for reasonably enjoyable reading, too. I quite liked the first chapter, but the book went slightly downhill for me from there, just in the level of writing. It's nothing egregious, but the dialogue sounds unnatural (and people telling each other things I would expect them to know about each other by now, banter that just isn't very fun, making a swerve so people can make a Very Important Point in dialogue), dream and magical sequence stretches that didn't hold my attention, action scenes that felt weirdly paced, protagonist taking too long to notice some important things/come to some obvious conclusions while leaping to others -- you know, regular sort of flaws for a new author, new mystery, author of a YA book (though, weirdly, I had to keep reminding myself this was YA and not kidlit; the protagonist is 17, but she's asexual/aromantic, and I think the understandable lack of romance in combination with family themes and mystery plot made it feel more kid-lit-y. And the presence and type of illustrations too, I guess.) None of it was bad to the point of ruining the reading experience, or even close, but it didn't feel award-level either.
The book has some interesting representation stuff going on. On the asexual front, there aren't so many books with ace protagonists, and while I didn't think this was a virtuoso take (I preferred the first 3-4 mentions that Ellie wasn't interested in dating or getting married to the "You can bring a guest to the wedding, but nobody too weird. I get that you're asexual, so, like, it can be a friend or zucchini or..." -- really, there had to be smoother ways to get the word "asexual" to be explicitly mentioned in the book, if that's what this was for, and I can't imagine what else it could be for), I did prefer it to, say, Every Heart a Doorway in that regard. Even more unusually, and more centrally to the book, Ellie is Lipan Apache, and there's a neat mix of Native American mythology and European urban fantasy tropes (vampires, fairies) mixing up in the plot here, in interesting (if occasionally somewhat didactic) ways -- like the scene where Ellie's mother banishes an attacking vampire by revoking permission for him to be on Apache ancestral lands (and then the equally cool scene when Ellie tries that trick again on a different vampire and it doesn't work, because the vampire she is facing was Lipan himself, before he was turned -- that was a genuine surprise). It was also interesting to learn a little bit about Lipan Apache death and burial traditions, and the way different cultural approaches to death and grieving could cause conflict/concern even within a family that loves each other, like with Cousin Trevor's widow, who is Latina and does not share the same traditions. There are some more overtly Educational bits that worked less well for me: Ellie's digressions about why even beloved early presidents like Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt may not be seen the same way by Native Americans, and how history is taught in general, stuff about how mall security and cashiers are always suspicious of her and she needs to take that into account, or dialogue being twisted so that Vivian has a reason to correct Al's thoughtless use of "on the warpath". Like, I do think these are all points worth making, but they felt studded into the narrative with didactic intent rather than organic to it, and that made them feel like a flaw instead of an important point. Oh, and on a completely different note, I guess Ellie and Jay are both vegetarians, and Jay is a cheerleader, which is not along the same levels, of course, but also stood out to me as an interesting bit of representation you don't see terribly often.
Ellie herself I liked best when we were getting a look inside her mind (in the real world), when she was hanging out with Kirby or making paleontologist/PI plans. Her relationship with Kirby, the ghost of her canine best friend, was super cute, as were the flashbacks to sixth grade when the two of them got in trouble. SPOILERS from here I wasn't sure if it would turn out, at the end, that Kirby was gone for a long while or would return by the end of the book, and was happy that he did return, and immediately made friends with the new, living dog. I like the idea of what the author was going for with Ellie's parents -- a pair of nerds with a tendency to make corny science jokes (her veterenarian dad) and relate anecdotes from history (her mom the teacher), but they didn't feel like 3D characters to me. Ellie's relationship with Jay I found to be a weakness of the book; they spend more time interacting together than Ellie and any other human, but all the interactions felt artificial and weird, from the first encounter at the bridge to the texting to playing PIs. Partly I guess it's because Jay's role as the non-evil Anglo person in the book is to be the general audience stand-in to whom things can be explained, but it leads to weird stilted conversations like Jay not knowing what Ellie's actual full name is (really, they've been friends literally their whole lives, having "met when their mothers attended the same Lamaze program" and it's never come up? I could understand it if it was something meant to be kept private, or something that Ellie was ambivalent about, but that doesn't at all seem to be the case), or Ellie not knowing he could do magic, or this bit: "So, you don't like peas?" "Their flavor is... not good." "Fair enough. I hate tomatoes." "Aren't tomatoes from the Americas?" "[...] Doesn't mean I have to like them. Pizza sauce is fine." -- I mean, what IS that? That's two people who met last week getting to know each other, not two kids who grew up together for 17 years. Maybe he was a new friend in an earlier draft? It's kind of weird with Jay, he is very enmeshed in the story, so it's not like he could've been added later, but it almost feels like that -- I don't get the sense that the author is interested in him as a person, or that his relationship with Ellie is important -- he's just there to be useful, both narratively and plot-wise. Which, now that I've written it out, I guess that's what would happen a lot with minority characters in the olden days, including, of course, Native Americans. I assume Darcie Little Badger did not intentionally set out to write Jay as a flatter character, but that's kind of an interesting reversal regardless. I do think it makes the book weaker, though. Similarly, introducing Ronnie in person and her posse so late in the book felt pretty random and I'm not sure served any actual purpose. And while I enjoyed the chapter from Ellie's mother's POV, it also felt like a flaw to have a single chapter from a different character's POV, when I think the story could've been told some time when Ellie was there without too much distortion of the plot.
I haven't talked about the worldbuilding yet, but I found it actually pretty neat. It's an Unmasked World, where there are (fairy) Ring Transport Centers used for commuting and field trips and vampire regulations and precedent about using ghost evidence in court, and people are worried about the environmental impact of magic use (though the bit about magic use adding helium and argon to the atmosphere -- really, there were better elements to pick than some noble gases, I feel like). Unusual in my experience for an Unmasked World story, there doesn't seem to be any specific point in history at which the mask came off, so either it's always been like that and our world and this one just developed identically despite the presence of magic or the author just didn't feel like figuring out a point of divergence, but either way it didn't bother me.
Finally, the plot. The resolution ended up being more to my liking than I'd thought it would, so by the end of the book I liked it more than I had until then, but the bulk of it is fairly standard. Ellie's cousin -- elementary school teacher and new father -- dies in a car accident with a bunch o things not adding up (why was he on that stretch of road? why was he not wearing a seatbelt when he always insisted on everyone buckling up?), and his spirit asks Ellie to protect his family from his murderer, whom he names. Sooo, not so much a whodunit, but still a mystery trying to understand what Dr Allerton is, and why he killed Trevor, and uncover something that would be actionable with the police. The snooping around is fairly standard, with the exception that Ellie and Jay video everything and stream it live to Jay's sister when they're in dangerous circumstances -- that's not something I've seen in a book before, but I wonder if it'll become more of a thing, the way everyone having cell phones changed how mysteries/thrillers had to be plotted for the modern world. I was convinced that Dr Allerton was going to turn out to BE the historical Nathaniel Grace, given that Ellie thought they looked like twins, but apparently not and he actually was a descendant? Anyway, his actual racket worked well thematically and with the mystery plot -- he has magic that allows him to transfer the injuries from one body (including his own) to another, and have the "less important" person die while his patient is healed and he gets the reputation of a miracle worker and the goodwill of all the important people he's saved. And it's neat that not only does he do this for mortals, he has a parallel srvice going for vampires where he transfer the effect of the old vampires' (progressively degenerative, in this worldbuilding) curse to young vampires to extend the old vampires' abilities to go out in the sun and stuff -- I hadn't seen that part coming. I did guess that the town had to be moving around via a sort of built-in fairy ring almost as soon as the mushrooms all over Allerton's lawn were mentioned.
Anyway, so, the town of rich people hiding behind a facade of respectability and charity but actually leeching the lives off those who would not be easily missed is not exactly novel (afterwards the comprison to Get Out occurred to me, only Get Out was way better set up), I did like the way the story resolved itself. Dr Allerton and his cronies are a threat, but actually the biggest, most immediate threat is the "emissary of vengeance", Trevor's angry ghost -- who is emphatically NOT Trevor himself, but only a dark, angry spirit, while all of Trevor's compassion, decency, etc. is far away. This angry spirit is really creepy! -- I especially liked the effectof it talking through the dispatches security guards' walkie-talkies with Trevor's voice -- it kills people without hesitation, threatens one of Trevor's former students (an elementary schooler), and feels like a real danger to Ellie and her friends (but because it's talking with Trevor's voice, and because she recognizes the special effects it is using, like zombie tropes from movies they've watched together, she still feels torn about whose side she is on in the conflict between the vengeful ghost and the magical leeches). I also thought it was really interesting that the angry ghost was woken up by a combination of menace from Trevor's murderers and the grief of his loved ones who did not have the cultural backing (or maturity) to leave the dead alone -- the bereaved widow visits the grave and disturbs it by digging, Allerton's people follow her and exhume the body (to hide an incriminating tattoo), and Tevor's baby Gregory does the final bit of helping the ghost cross over because he doesn't understand the difference between his living father and the spirit. And the ending, where Ellie defeats Dr Allerton by bringing him to the Below with her, and leaving him to the vengeful spirits of his victims, felt very fitting and apt (and actually reminded me a tiny bit of the end of Small Gods, where she tells Dr Allerton to just start walking), and this exchange was I think the best piece of dialogue in the book: "Be merciful. Help me." "This is me showing mercy to the people who will live now that you're gone." So while the setup with the evil doctor and the evil town was cliche, everything to do with the actual spirits was not something I would have expected -- I assume it's rooted in Lipan Apache beiefs, and THIS is the really cool thing about reading diverse voices SFF as a non in-group reader.
Final random note: Ellie puts sunscreen on before going out in Texas weather, and I think this might be the only time I've seen a character do that in an urban fantasy book.
Quotes:
"Evil scarecrows were becoming a pest. Probably spreading with fields of monoculture corn and soy crops."
From a letter Ellie gets after the Willowbee story ends up in newspapers: "Please tell your fead tribe that I'm sorry for living over their graves. I can't afford a better location right now. My girlfriend won't stay the night until I do something. We've been together three years."
Note to self: Rovina Cai did the illustrations, and I need to remember that come Pro Artist voting time.
Hugo roundup: Lodestar -- 3/6 (though really it's 3.5). A Deadly Education, Cemetery Boys, Elatsoe, with the half of Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking that I've read so far hovering somewhere around Cemetery Boys.
28. Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth -- what an odd book, and what an odd trajectory I had with it. First, I never would've picked it up on my own -- just, nothing about the "necromancers in space" premise sounds interesting to me. I also would not have picked it up based on Tumblr hype, which seemed to lean heavy on lesbian necromancers in space, which, yes, are a feature of the book, but not in a way that is a focus, and definitely not in the way I thought based on the Tumblr hype. I started getting a little curious as people on my flist whose tastes are often a good predictor for mine picked it up and some of them loved it -- but then many of them also bounced off it hard, for the kinds of reasons that usually break a reading experience for me, like a POV voice that is jarring for the character and/or setting. So at that point I wrote the book off as Not For Me, and was planning to ignore it henceforth. But then
cafemassolit/ikel89 read it, from the same "not sure if want" standpoint, and was intrigued enough to continue on to book 2 -- which I'd already seen be hugely polarizing in the fandom -- and book 2 blew her mind enough that at least one Zoom Best Chat was dedicated to explaining it to us. So that made me interested in giving 'Gideon' a shot again, and I obtained a copy of the book and started reading it, but it was glacial progress -- I was sitting at something like 5-12% and wandering off every chance to read something new, because it just wasn't doing anything for me. Then 'Harrow' ended up on the Hugo novel ballot and renewed my determination to actually read the thing, but I think this part of the journey took me to like 22-28%. Then, I have no idea what switch flipped -- I don't think it was the Astounding things I'd finished reading, and I don't see how acquiring the Murderbot novella I'd been waiting to get my hands on for months would make me want to go read 'Gideon' instead, but that's what happened: I went back to the book and started actually making significant progress. It was still a slog until about the 40% point, when it stopped being Gideon wandering around mouldering halls and having surface interactions with too many people, when the book actually "caught" for me. I actually enjoyed it and read it whenever I had time from 40% onward, and wrapped up the last 70% in less than a week, compared to the ~3 months it took me to get through the first 30% -- I think this is an issue with the book, btw, rather than simply personal preference; the pacing could use some work. And at about the 75-80% mark, around the pool conversation, I finally came around to acknowledging that maybe this was a book that deserved to be on awards ballots, which I'd continued to find baffling up to that point, even when I was having a good time with it. And once I finished it, I immediately launched into 'Harrow', so the build-up of momentum continued through the very end.
Like, I still don't think this is any sort of sensible way to structure a book (even if book 2 ends up explaining some inconsistencies of POV or whatever, which I've seen some people argue that it does; obviously, not having read it yet, I don't have an opinion of my own). Left to my own devices, I never would've made it to the 40% mark where it actually started interesting me on its own merits. Which is not to say that books can't be slowburn or have a moment of leveling up late in the structure -- Too Like the Lightning is a great example of a book that did that successfully for me. This was also a book I 100% would've bailed on if K hadn't given me the wise advice to keep referencing this incredibly handy character chart. I think this is also a flaw of the book, because I don't often have trouble keeping track of large casts, and here I don't think I would've been able to name the Second representatives pretty mch until SPOILERS their death(?) scene in the last 15% of the book, and even then I couldn't keep the two of them straight. And I still don't remember half the people's names, even though I remember who they are.
Even from the retrospect of having liked the book on the whole, it is still very much a Not For Me kind of book. The aesthetic is so completely and utterly not my thing -- the decaying space installations, bones and skeletons and gore, face paint and whatever -- it's just not my aesthetic, and the loving descriptions of it do nothing for me except make me go "...ew" occasionally. I found the action scenes like that, too -- the focus is on showy moves and horrible constructs of bone and grossness and, like, bone fragments raining down -- it's a particular horror movie vibe that is not anything I would choose to watch/read about on my own, and so the action setpieces which were not cavalier vs cavalier duels made me want to skim. I did like the mystery and puzzle aspects of the plot -- the spot where the book picked up for me was Abigail and Magnus's deaths, because then there was finally a PLOT.
Characters were a mixed bag for me. It will surprise no-one, I think, that Palamedes was hands down my favorite, and I loved his relationship with Camilla. (I would also have loved to see more interaction between Palamedes and Harrow. I'm kind of with Gideon's "Too bad ou didn't marry him. You're both into old dead chicks" there, but this is not, apparently, a relationship -- in the & sense -- that fandom is interested in?). Dulciniea was interesting, though became less so to me in the reveal; but still, I got such strong Tyrell vibes from her throughout, which is a plus in my book. Magnus, and Abigail, very briefly, were adorable, but also definitely the right people to kill off first to destabilize the group. The horrible teenagers were really amusing up to the point when they were suddenly tragic, so that was also well done. And the Eighth duo really surprised me in a positive way towards the end of the book, and contributed to my finding it more worthy at that point. And, OK, Protesilaus has a reason for not being a scintillating character. So I guess it's really the Second and the Third house group that were a miss for me. The Second are kind of nonentities -- they seem to be just there to drive conflict in plot -- but with the Third, hm. I enjoyed Gideon drooling over Corona's athletic tanned limbs and glorious hair, and it's a neat excuse to make her even less observant of tricksy goings on in that house, and I liked the reveal that Ianthe, the boring twin, is actually the powerhouse, but also until that point, I actually did not have any sense of either Third princess as a character, so I don't think the twist landed as strongly as it could have. Let alone the impact of a necromancer killing their cavalier to become Lyctor -- Naberius had felt like a total nonentity, and an annoying one at that, so having him be the illustratory sacrifice sapped emotional impact from that reveal for me. (Sixth, Fourth, Fifth, even the creepy Eighth and the otherwise featureless Second had a visibly stronger necro/cavalier bond which really felt like the core of the duo; I actually don't understand why Naberius was there at all and it wasn't Ianthe and Corona as the necro/cav pairing for Third... I mean, I suppose it makes sense that the person who would make the move required to become Lyctor would be one with a weaker bond to their cavalier, but it still feels weirdly asymmentric, like, thematically? symbolically? IDK...)
Which, OK, let's talk about the necromancer/cavalier bond, and Harrow and Gideon specifically. My thoughts on this are, hm. The idea of the necromancer and cavalier bond ("one flesh, one end"), the way the tests of the House were all geared at refining it, was neat! I liked the range of bonds we get to see, from married couple Magnus and Abigail, to the creepy but ultimately loyal Eighth uncle + nephew duo, to codependent horrible teenagers who believably feel like kids who grew up together, almost like siblings, to the sketched in sisters-in-arms bond of the Second pair, to of course darling nerds Palamedes and Camilla, who have exactly the kind of seamless trust and loyalty I love to see, and it's neat that it's in an apparently purely platonic couple. Gideon and Harrow follow an enemies-to-friends trajectory which is ALSO a thing I love, and which I don't think I've seen done much or centrally with female characters. But it didn't fully work for me; the years of fighting and resentment as children forging into loyalty, admiration, and trust didn't quite work for me as a transformation -- I think it would've been easier for me to get on board if they were coming together as distrustful strangers, rather than all the baggage between them? I think that part is done well, but it made harder for me to feel invested in their relationship. And, honestly, while I completely buy both Gideon's sacrifice and Harrow's reaction to it, I buy it purely as things these characters would do because of who they are individually, and I don't so much buy it as an outcome of a bond between the two of them, if that makes any sense. Like, I liked some of Gideon's parting words and presence in Harrow's mind in the last chapter, but the more high-flown ones felt artificial.
I was also not particularly interested in Gideon herself. I have in recent years discovered a love of female Big Guy characters (e.g. Tazendra in Dragaera, or more recently Scorpia in the new She-Ra), and she's a nice example of that trope, but Gideon and I just didn't really click. Maybe it's to do with the writing, which didn't really feel like it was coming from Gideon's POV? (more on this below) I did find Harrow much more interesting, with her fainting smugly after titanic accomplishments and intellectual rivalries that draw her out of a faint, and the awareness (which we learn about, along with Gideon, after the pool conversation) that she is "a war crime" and "exactly two hundred sons and daughters of my House" and "tired of being two hundred corpses". So, yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing her again in Harrow the Ninth, having been spoiled for all the things. And I get why people ship Gideon and Harrow, but personally I did not feel anything romantic there. Or, to be honest, even anything particularly interesting. I think maybe, while they're foils for each other, they're foils in ways which aren't aspect that are interesting to me?
I'm actually surprised that I got this far without talking about the writing, because it was definitely one of the first things I noticed, and not in a positive way. Not in a bad way either, necessarily. But one of the things that made several people I know bounce off this book was Gideon's POV refrencing mints on pillows (in a world with no hotels that she would've been exposed to) and other weirdly anachronistic things. People also talk about the memes, but I guess I'm insulated enough from Tumblr that I simply missed most of those, and wouldn't have recognized the ones I did spot as memes if I weren't looking. Anyway, I was expecting that to bother me A LOT, because POVs that use vocabulary that don't fit the POV character (even when they're not first person but close third) throw me out of the story, but to my surprise I found that this didn't bother me here -- maybe because I knew to expect it? I still found the writing, hmm -- intrusive is probably the best word: words or phrases that drew attention to themselves by being very unusual, or not quite in combinations you'd expect, or full of weird juxtapositions between high language and low language. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I expect that sort of thing to mean something about character or worldbuilding, but here it felt mostly like Tamsyn Muir wanted to write in that particular style, so she did, for her own amusement, rather than in the service of some worldbuilding goal. (This reminded me of Maggie Stiefvater, actually; it also took me a while to get used to her prose, and go from "ugh but why" to kind of liking her approach.) There were some neat turns of phrase I appreciated, e.g. Ianthe's "eyes like violets on dialysis", "a tin with nothing in it but the vague waft of peppermints", "when she breathed, it sounded like custard sloshing around an air conditioner", but I have no idea what many of them are doing in Gideon's POV...
Oh, and I should talk about the worldbuilding, too, I guess, but I really don't have anything to say because... I don't care about the different kinds of necromany. It didn't even occur to me, until I was skimming the article linked above, that there was a sorting system buried in the worldbuilding, because pretty much all of the necromancy types are interchangeably boring to me, though I do find some creepier than others (Eighth). And I'm willing to believe that the magic system of thanergy/thalergy is well thought out, but I never felt compelled to pause long enough to figure it out for myself.
Quotes:
Harrow, at the 12% mark: "All you need to know is that you'll do what I say, or I'll mix bone meal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut."
Harrow: "You have one black eye already, courtesy of the Seventh House, and you seem to yearn for symmetry."
"Captain, you are no use to anyone dead."
Judith: "It is my privilege to no longer be of use."
"Gideon's skin had already been crawling, but now it was trying to sprint."
Gideon re: Harrow: "They had never fought together before, but they had always fought, and they could work in and around each other without a secon'ds thought."
"I mean it about not wanting an afterlife subsciption to Palamedes Sextus's Top Nerd Facts."
30. Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth -- I rolled into this one as soon as I finished 'Gideon' (then took an afternoon's detour for the Murderbot novella when I was about 40% in, because reading it straight through was starting to feel too claustrophobic), and finished it in 4 days. In fact, I would not go to sleep on the last day until I was done, which hasn't happened to me in a while / happens much less often to me nowadays than when I was younger. And it's not even that I was engrossed, per se, but in the last 10-15% the revelations were coming so fast on top of each other, I wanted to get through their storm. And I still can't say that I enjoyed this book (or this series to date, even more so), but I'm intrigued, and impressed, and overall glad of the experience, I guess would be the way to put it.
I went into 'Harrow' spoiled for most things, intentionally -- it was the spoilers that made me want to read the series at all, after pretty much writing it off as Not For Me. The aesthetic is still completely Not For Me; I am so tired of bones. I had liked Harrow in book 1, and it was hard to see her in this reduced/"mad" state in this book, though of course she's still impressive in a sort of negative-space way, especially once you figure out (or, in my case, know via spoilers) SPOILERS from here, let's say what she has done to herself as part of "the work". I did find her POV -- I mean, the second person POV strand -- kind of oppressive to read through. I am also doubtful about the second person schtick, to be honest, because it did not sound like Gideon to me, like, at all, in either tone or attitude. The first-person Gideon POV that shows up later sure did, but, like, those are not the same voice. I suppose you can hand-wave it with the explanation that Gideon, submerged, was observing everything at a remove, through a blindfold, through mud, but it's, well, honestly I think it's another thing that underlines the fact that Tamsyn Muir and I have very different ideas about how POV in narration works. But getting to Gideon's first person POV was fun -- I wouldn't have thought I'd miss it, because I did not love Gideon's voice in book 1, but after 80% of a long book in Harrow's disoriented POV, it was a nice reprieve.
There is so much going on in this book, all of it confusing. I was also spoiled for Harrow's skewed memories of book 1, with Ortus and things unfolding differently. ikel89 recommended reading 'Harrow' right after finishing 'Gideon', while the real events of book 1 were fresh in my mind, and that was a great call. K described it as being gaslit by a book, and yes, that is exactly what it is, and it's such an interesting and, like, writer/reader compact breaking thing to attempt! I liked those sections a lot, and I liked the broken skulls as the chapter wingbats, denoting that things were taking place in that fractured reality. I was NOT spoiled for what this alternate Canaan House was (a bubble in the River) or what the people Harrow interacts with there really were (ghosts), and those reveals worked for me very nicely. It was a neat way to get to see more of Abigail and Magnus, who were gone from the first book so quickly, and Dulcie and Pro, whom it turned out we had never met at all. I kind of feel like we still got to know the fake Dulcinea better in 'Gideon' than the ghost of the real one here, but I appreciated meeting her at all, and it was cool to learn she intentionally fed BS to Cytherea to help tip Palamedes off. The Second cavalier continued to remain largely a cypher, and I wonder if that's just how it's going to be, or if Muir is saving something interesting for book 3 (ditto Coronabeth and the other Second rep). Anyway, so that was a cool trick, and the "Is this how it happens?" penetrating the ghost tableaus worked really effectively for me. And then there were the mini-AUs, including a coffee shop AU, which is just showing off, but sure, why not, have your fun XD
Very unexpectedly, I ended up liking Ortus, the "find and replace" cavalier, quite a lot, the poor sad-sack and his tedious poetry. But, like, the navigated the line between comic and tragic and heroic really nicely, and I loved that in the broken-skull timeline, their victory, in a very real way, is made possible by his passion (and Abigail's skill, and everyone's determination, but he's the unexpected factor). (On a very random note, his tedious long poem made me think of Apollo Mojave's Pacific Rim Iliad in Terra Ignota, which thought I had to share with K, of course, and she posited that we should now think of Apollo in TI as looking like Ortus ("Didn't they love him for his beautiful soul? Now put your money where your mouth is"); so, you're welcome, the three people who can appreciate this crossover that nobody asked for.
The other new character in this book I liked was John/God/Necrolord Prime, which as K says is not a surprise, he's my type of character. He is such a dork, it's kind of delightful, and I especially enjoyed the way everyone hates his attempts at analogies. I thought his relationship with Harrow was sweet, trying to ply her with tea and cookies but learning slowly to just offer her crackers and water, and trying to give her the birds and the bees talk viz Ianthe. His relationship with his Lyctors, too, although I never did warm up to the Lyctors themselves. Mercy was just annoying, though I was amused by the running gag of her lowering Harrow's age every time she spoke about her. Augustine was the most interesting of the three to me, but ultimately not THAT interesting; there was just so much history and baggage and whatever going on between the three Lyctors and their dead cavaliers, and various other dead people -- I kept having to flick back to the Dramatis Personae a lot, until almost the very end -- but I don't feel like trying to pay attention to that had any significant payoff to the final confrontation (at least so far; maybe there will be something more interesting in book 3).
My least favorite thing about God in this book was the Dad joke the meeting between him and Gideon ends on, because, whatever the Tumblr memes are supposed to contribute to this narrative, they are not doing it for me. Like, best case I just don't notice them. When I do notice them but don't get the reference -- "jail for Mother", e.g. -- and go to look them up, there is absolutely nothing positive I get out of that, it just disrupts the flow. And the memes I did recognize without having to look up anything, like the Dad joke, like "none Houses with left grief", still, like, why? Does anyone get something more out of the memes than "I recognize that thing"? Can you explain to me what it is you get out of them?
I've talked about the new characters, but not yet the ones who came back. I do now understand why Abigail and Magnus seem to be as popular as they are in fandom (well, I got it about Magnus based on book 1, but I do feel like this is where we really get to know Abigail, which is kind of cool). Not getting enough of a feel for Ianthe was one of my complaints with book 1; book 2 does remedy that, but I don't have any strong feelings about Ianthe anyway. I was hoping the broken skull/gaslight AU would mean getting to spend more time with the characters from book 1 who were dead in reality, including Palamedes, but then the Sixth duo was killed off right away (and I did figure out that it was the people who were actually still alive who were murdered in the gaslight AU), and I figured that was the end of it. But of course that proved, gloriously, not to be the case, and there was Harrow and Palamedes meeting in his prepared bubble (with the sole shitty romance book he is writing a sequel to on the wallpaper, which was probably my favorite detail of the entire book/series to date), and Palamedes's reaction to the confirmation that Camilla was alive, and Camilla's reaction to the confirmation that the bubble had worked. Just, I love these two, and I love that Harrow and Palamedes got to interact some more, and all of Harrow's thoughts about him. This was the thing I wanted after 'Gideon', and was convinced I wasn't going to get it in canon, so, yay.
There is a whole bunch more magical worldbuilding we get in this one, tied up with some of the big reveals, the Reventant Beasts and Heralds, the River, the revelation that there is a way (or maybe several ways) for both necromancer and cavalier to survive the Lyctorhood transformation (at current count, Harrow and Gideon have managed it at least temporarily, but also God and Alecto, Pyrrha and Gideon Prime (though without him realizing it), and Camilla and Palamedes seem to have worked out at least something similar, based on the epilogue. Oh, and, Blood of Eden (with Corona and Camilla now working with them, apparently), and Commander Wake (haunting Cytherea's corpse), and Gideon the secret baby of God conceived in order to be able to open the Locked Tomb -- which I guess explains why Harrow was able to get in there, with Gideon sneaking along as the key? It's all a lot, and some of it was genuinely cool, startling reveals, like the bit where it turns out Gideon's golden eyes are actually part of John's genetic makeup, and the differently weird eyes which are his most striking feature are not his own -- that was such a cool twist, and I totally fell for it. Some of it felt like, wait, we're meant to be surprised by this? -- e.g. the revelation (?) that A.L. was God's cavalier -- A.L. is listed in exactly the same way as the cavaliers of the Lyctors in the Dramatis Personae, so that was a "reveal" I'd been expecting from literally page 1; and like I get why the Lyctors would be shocked by the realization, I guess -- because they'd spent ten thousand years telling themselves there had been no other way but to kill their cavaliers, and here is the proof that this was not so -- but as a reader I found that very anticlimactic. And some of it is just sheer soap opera, secret babies, Gideon Prime thinking Commander Wake was pregnant with his child, her having an affair with both him and his cavalier (???); I mean, I'm sure the soap opera-ness is intentional, and, like, not any more ridiculous than what you get in Seven Surrenders (you may have noticed, this book keeps making me think of Terra Ignota -- 'Harrow' specifically, 'Gideon' was only emphatically a contrast; I think a large part of that is the POV of someone experiencing a warped reality/someone haunted, in their perception if not, as with Harrow, in reality). And it's certainly no weirder than the coffee shop AU or the Tumblr memes, I'm just equally unsure about what it's ultimately for.
I enjoyed the section, towards the end of the book, where we get Gideon's first person POV narration of her inhabiting and fighting from within Harrow's body, the way she has to learn to compensate for Harrow's shorter reach/stature, getting a different vantage point because Harrow is much shorter than her. Particularly fun was Gideon's attempt to recall Harrow by saying "the worst shit I can think of," to wit: "Oooh, Palamedes, I am measurably less intelligent than you. Put your tongue in my mouth, and Ill flop my tongue against it." and "I think bones are mediocre" XD
So, OK, I totally understand why this is such a polarizing book, why so many people who loved 'Gideon' bounced off this one or struggled through it. I'm more in the camp that appreciates this book more than the first one, though it's still with a kind of -- not even grudging, really, but more like bemused, respect.
Taking stock of some things from this vantage point to see if they've changed for me: I still don't see Harrow/Gideon as a ship, and I'm not even sure if I'm meant to? (Gideon seems resigned to Harrow/Locked Tomb lady). Even non-shippily... I said at the end of book 1 that I could see the characters' individual reactions but that Gideon's sacrifice and Harrow's reaction felt like things that made sense for them, but not necessarily because of each other. I'm still kind of on the fence about that, to be honest, from Harrow's side. Gideon does seem to be all about laying down her life for Harrow specifically (although I get the sense she would've accepted a different purpose, too, if she'd been put in the position of having one). Harrow obviously goes to ENORMOUS lengths to preserve Gideon's soul/identity, annnnnd, I don't know. On the one hand, I feel like Harrow, two hundred dead sons and daughters of the Ninth House, just would not accept any additional sacrifice for her, period, because she's already laboring under such a debt of sacrifice, from before she was even born -- sacrifice she never got any choice about but obviously still guilty for, so one can imagine how much more difficult it would be for her to accept a sacrifice where she actually does have some choice, however limited. On the other hand, the specific lengths Harrow goes to in order to preserve Gideon's soul -- making herself less than, making herself vulnerable, making herself dependent on Ianthe -- those are such difficult things for her, I'm sure, that I don't know if I can see her accepting them, engineering them out of a matter of principle alone. I almost can, because I absolutely accept that Harrow will go very far on a matter of principle, but I do think now it's more likely that she's acting out of something like love as well. Still not shippy love, and not even a healthy love necessarily -- I don't see Gideon and Harrow as a love for the ages, more as their bond being another manifestation of "neglected children" put in an impossible situation and relying on each other to survive. I mean, "I died knowing you'd hate me for dying; but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I'd had your full attention" -- that is certainly a kind of bond and compulsion, but not, you know, one I would root for as a healthy bond, shippy of platonic. But let's see what I think by the end of book 3.
Random other things: I had not twigged on my own that the Nine Houses are planets of the solar system, with Earth being the First House (destroyed by "rising sea levels and a massive nuclear fission chain reaction", as the Emperor explains), Ninth House presumably Pluto, Sixth House Mercury (being closest to the sun), and Fifth as Jupiter, Second as Mars, and I suppose Seventh as Venus also make sense.
Quotes:
"And when the Body turned so that you could see her face you were amazed, as ever, by that beauty unblemished by breath."
"You wanted to be relieved, but no longer recalled how that worked, glandularly speaking."
"Harrowhark fell in love. || 'Falling' was not the right term, precisely. It was a long process. She more correctly climbed down into love, picked its locks, opened its gates, and breached its inner chamber."
"Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die."
"Harrow was furious that she was doing something so -- so pedestrian as to pubesce."
"transparent enough to let you see quite clearly, albeit through a stippled violence of rainbow light."
"Your job is simple in the way most very tough things are."
"She hated it wehn people dressed constructs; it smacked of shimsy, like making one's hammer wear a hat."
"Harrow regretted not making [Ortus] take a solemn pledge of silence [...] but only a very obedient idiot of a cavalier would have stuck to that."
"a couple of teeth tumbled loose in your mouth like ragged little dice"
"The air was hot and wet, like the inside of a mouth."
Harrow talking to Ortus: "she knew that she was irritated because each time she tried to blunt the razor edge of her tongue, he somehow grasped the blades of her anyway."
"Harrowhark was learning that a scion of the Fifth House might busy themselves politely during a murder, or an orgy."
'"Never mind. I'm sure I've done worse with more," said Abigail bracingly.'
Also Abigail: "It takes a great deal of ego to be a psychopomp. Thank you for letting me be yours."
Gideon re: Ianthe: "There would be a goddamn reckoning, Nonagesimus, I was going to reck her."
"Abigail [...] reached forward to brush a stray lock of hair behind Harrowhark's ear, which was an instinct Harrow could not find it within herself to feel humiliated by."
The Emperor: "There is no such thing as forgiveness, Mercy. There's only bloody truth, and blessed ignorance."
(As you can tell from the much higher number of quotes, I enjoyed the writing here more than in book 1.)
Hugo roundup: novel -- 3/6. Still Network Effect at the top, because I loved that book. Piranesi and Harrow are actually similarly "not really my thing but I admire the ambition and the execution", but I do think Piranesi is a better book -- Harrow is very messy and all over the place, full of weird indulgences, while Piranesi is a precision strike. So, Network Effect, Piranesi, Harrow the Ninth.
29. Martha Wells, Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot 6) -- OK, so it wasn't an ART & Murderbot adventure, which is always going to be inherently superior to any other type of Murderbot story, but it was a lot of fun! Murderbot solving a murder mystery among Preservation security officials was a good time, and makes me realize that a thing I'd really love to see is ART and Murderbot s a mystery-solving duo, with Murderbot doing all the legwork and ART throwing in its processing power and deviousness and, of course, the resulting mutual snark (I was thinking Father Brown and Flambeau, but possibly Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin would be an even better analogy, except that I haven't read those and only know about them by fannish osmosis). Anyway, back to the actual story I did read. SPOILERS including the whodunit
Dr Mensah's and Murderbot's relationship is always lovely to see, and I liked the little bits of it we got here, especially the part where Murderbot thinks about appealing to Mensah's authority to help it deal with the Security folks and flashes back to "the time Mensah's youngest child had got hold of the comm and demanded that Mensah tell an older sibling to stop taking all the squash dumplings". The mystery fit the overall worldbuilding well, I thought, refugees born into slavery and more hapless, not-too-bright humans who are not bad even when they're being violent and when Murderbot has to neutralize them -- both the Lalow crew and the refugees who distrust or in one case attack Murderbot. (I also thought it was very neat that, given that Murderbot thinks of the humans from the transport ship as Target One, Two, etc., it was a while before I realized how many of them, including the one in charge, were women, because why would the gender of the targets be relevant to Murderbot's POV? Ditto for the human who seems to be the de facto leader of the refugee bunch.) I also thought it was neat and fitting that it's not that Station Security/Port Authority are bad at their jobs; there's a little scene where they figure out something about the transport side of it fast, which Murderbot notices -- because cargo safety/smuggling is the job they are used to doing, it's just that they're not used to doing with murder. But at the same time, the infrequency of murder on Preservation sttion means the reaction to the body being discovered is different than the bounty hunters expected, and that leads to their downfall anyway. On the whodunit side, I realized there had to be "a local actor" involved a little ahead of the book mentioning it, and I figured Balin could be implicated (though not the specific sleeper CombatBot way) before Murderbot figured it out. I also kind of liked that the final standoff was resolved by a bunch of cargo bots (who have a sense of humour, sort of! and private jokes XD) because that was something new.
No particularly interesting new characters in this installment, I thought, and since it takes place before Network Effect, not much in the way of arc advancement or character growth, either. Oh, except I guess we now know how Murderbot thinks of its gender, canonically: "not applicable". I actually find it a little odd that Martha Wells would go back to pre-Network Effect at this point, unless this was something she already had in the works and it's just that the publication order worked out this way. So, nothing earthshaking, and I'd rank this installment in the lower half of Murderbot books to date (currently I think they go Network Effect, Artificial Condition, All Systems Red, Exit Strategy, Fugitive Telemetry, and Rogue Protocol -- but ES and FT are pretty close), but a couple of hours spent in Murderbot's company was certainly very enjoyable anyway, and there are always fun quotes:
"Being the top Preservation expert in dealing with contract law in the Corporation Rim apparently made Pin-Lee like the CombatUnit version of a lawyer."
"Aylen and the other officers were explaining to their individual Targets what rights they had as detainees in Preservation Alliance territory. (It was a lot of rights. I was pretty sure it was more rights than a human who hadn't been detained by Station Security had in the Corporation rim.)"
Also, the transport crew's slightly-off translator was a source of some amusement, because I'm easily amused by slightly off translations.
*
Right, also, L and I watched Raya and the Last Dragon. It was mostly enjoyable, but also really forgettable, and also I fell asleep briefly at some point during the dragon pearl shard collection fetch quest. Both of us did get AtLA vibes from the setup, but they kind of faded after a while. Vague spoilers? maybe? Sisu in human form was a lot of fun; Raya/Namaari vibes were strong and I actually have a hard time seeing that relationship as platonic (I mean, plausible deniability, sure, but not ACTUALLY platonic), and my actual favorite thing about the movie was Tuk-Tuk the roly-poly armadillo thing (of course it was voiced by Alan Tudyk; what is Alan Tudyk even doing these days other than voicing Disney critters XD) If there was a deeper message or theme to the movie (I guess about working together and extending trust being ultimately repaid), I did not think anything landed particularly strongly. Oh, and L remarked that there was no romantic subplot here at all (if you don't count Raya/Namaari, that is); it's not unprecedented -- Moana was also like that -- but I guess that's the new trend.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1152762.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
This is just... overwritten, not in a purple prose way, but there's just a lot thrown in here, and I didn't feel like the payoff justified any of the unusual narrative choices. Like, I'm not at all surprised that this is a debut book (unlike Unspoken Name and The Space Between Worlds, e.g., which felt like more mature books), because it really feels like a mishmash of all the things a new SFF writer has been meaning to write, couldn't pick a single story, so he put them all in. SPOILERS from here There is the distinct story of Kaeda, the first chapter I liked: a man on a primitive-technology hunter/agrarian planet, with nicely done hints that the planet is controlled by a corporation, and we get the whole story of his life, from birth to venerable old age, punctuated by visits from a ship traveling in a way where 15 years pass for the planet where only a couple of months pass for the ship. (Pocket travel taking up considerable time, while even more time passes outside, was an interesting take on FTL travel that I haven't seen before -- like generally you either have slow travel and generation ships (which is alluded to here, with remnants of those splinter cultures like the Quiet Ship), or hyperspace and then it's just like taking a plane, but there's a range of technologies here, which was interesting.) I was not surprised to learn that this chapter had been written to be able to read as a standalone, because it does, but it didn't feel sufficiently connected to anything else, even when the boy returned to the planet, even when, at the very end, we learn that he's originally from there, and Kaeda's story didn't have enough of a payoff on its own. There's also the story of Fumiko, the inventor of the space stations, who's spent the last 1000 years on and off in cryosleep, and while I liked her first chapter, I thought that story fizzled too -- I didn't feel like her ending was satisfying, though it did feel inevitable -- it just seemed like a way to wrap up the loose ends and tie the two stories together, but in an artificial and arbitrary way. (Also, spoilers for Terra Ignota book 3 person losing their mind and hallucinating someone they lost and interacting with them, which you get to see through their POV, was just done so much more interestingly in Terra Ignota. /Terra Ignota spoilers) There are epistolary bits, Dana's letters and Sartoris's diary entries, and the format felt gratuitous even when I enjoyed the content (I did like Sartoris's style and injection of humour, intentional and not). There was one chapter where we were getting Sartoris's diary *and* omniscient or Ahro's POV of the same scene, interspersed, and I really wasn't getting anything extra out of that. There are the one-off POVs of people Ahro meets -- Elby (Kaeda's daughter, now an old woman), the guy with the concert music and the mastiff on a derelict planet, Vaila and the doctor, random busser family, etc. -- but while some authors can sketch an engaging character and arc in a couple of pages, that's not what was happening for me here. Oh, also, the haiku... (which weren't even good haiku) It was just too much disparate stuff, for not enough reason. Or maybe just not pulled off well enough to feel justified. (Presumably one's mileage on this can vary; I've seen praise for this book, and somehow this author was nominated for Astounding. But I personally wasn't feeling any of it.)
I'm also not sure what this book was supposed to make me feel, but it mostly didn't. I did not get found family vibes, definitely not from the Debby's original crew, but not even from the ultimate bunch, despite Sartoris's best efforts to humanize them in the diaries. (I did end up liking Sartoris himself, and maybe even caring a little bit about what happened to him, but not long after I reached that point, he ended up in a coma.) I did not end up feeling anything for Ahro, tragic backstory notwithstanding; I think maybe we didn't get enough interiority with him? I did not end up feeling anything for Nia, or even liking her much. It was the chapter introducing Fumiko that brought me back from the brink of DNFing, and I found her a little interesting, in a cliche "character in a sci-fi movie" sort of way when she was first introduced, but that also petered out by the time we got to her one thousand year old version with memory gaps. Also, with a couple of splashes of exception, the way she was doing Science and the way Science (or engineering) worked in this book did not ring true to me, like, timeframes, and Fumiko's personal role vs what teams might've been doing -- it felt like movie science, shallow. And the sci-fi suspension of disbelief fell apart for me completely once we got to the hyperspace jumps Powered by a Forsaken Child part. Not only did it feel thematically over-the-top, the leap to "he is unconsciously controlling thousands of ships via droplets of blood embedded in them" lost me. I think I could've been sold on this premise if some effort had been applied to tying it in with how this universe presumably worked, but it was just there, with no one even trying to exlain it or understand it. And, like, something on the boundary of the scientific and the numinous CAN actually work for me -- The Space Between Worlds from fellow Astounding nominee did this really well, actually, I thought -- but here it goes from a "we are going to study him to see how we can reproduce this power" (a reasonably sci-fi concept) to full-on sympathetic magic, without a pause to reframe, and that left me behind.
The writing mostly did not work for me, although there were some lovely passages that did. But there were also several spots that tripped me up because the sentences just seemed to be constructed incorrectly (not in a typo/missing word way, but maybe something that slipped through an editing pass), and while the use of epithets doesn't bug me as much as I know it does some people, it was frequent enough here that it was very noticeable. There was also a thing with the passage of time in the book which I'm not sure if it was a writing choice or a thematic choice or both, but whichever it was, it did not work for me. I kept finding myself reading one of the frequent passages where time is passing and described in a sort of zoomed out way -- in a movie these would be montages, I guess -- Ahro getting to know the crew, Ahro mastering the Jaunt, scientists working on whatever, Nia working for the salvagers while Sartoris convalesces, Jaunt-based ship technology proliferating while Nia searches for Ahro and "lighting the fires" -- and I would have very little sense of how much time was actually passing -- weeks? months? years? decades? Which, if it had worked smoothly, would've been a really neat trick -- I think that's what Jimenez was going for. But then some grounding, quantifiable detail of time would be mentioned, and instead of feeling some thematic jolt, I'd find myself confused by the practicalities: the random busser made 30 jump journeys in 12 hours? that's 24 minutes per journey, that doesn't seem practical for boarding, disembarking, serving snacks, presumably cleaning up and taking bathroom breaks occasionally; one thousand fires lit = one thousands jaunts by Nia's ship, in the space of 15 years, meaning a jump every 5-6 days, but weren't they trying to space these out so as not to attract notice? I basically think that the writing choices meant to underline the theme of time slipping away ended up also highlighting bits of worldbuilding/plot that felt shaky to me, for a net negative. But there were some things that worked, the occasional neat turn of phrase ("the boy as her shadow, he stitching himself slowly each day to the soles of her feet", though I think that "he" doesn't need to be there; "a young girl selling some fried unknown at the end of a stick"), descriptions and names of food, which sketch in a sense of variety across worlds and serve as a nicely grounding detail.
I feel like the book was aiming for "profound", but as far as I'm concerned, it just landed on "busy" and also "kinda boring". Or maybe it's more on the literary side? Anyway, it's going on the bottom of my list for now, or rather Jimenez is. I do see potential here, so not tempted to No Award, but not all that impressed either.
Hugo roundup: Astounding -- 5/6. Micaiah Johnson, K.A.Larkwood, Emily Tesh, Lindsay Ellis, Simon Jimenez. I did debate some about which order Lindsay Ellis and Simon Jimenez should go, because I found both books occasionally a slog, but I feel like the thing Axiom's End is *trying* to do is more interesting to me than the thing The Vanished Birds is trying to do, and I am more interested in seeing where Ellis's series goes from here than I am in reading something else by Jimenez, so this was the order I settled on based on that.
27. Darcie Little Badger, Elatsoe -- even reading in ebook format on my phone, I can tell this is a pretty book, with a glittery title, very cool cover, and neat b&w mini illustrations inside. It made for reasonably enjoyable reading, too. I quite liked the first chapter, but the book went slightly downhill for me from there, just in the level of writing. It's nothing egregious, but the dialogue sounds unnatural (and people telling each other things I would expect them to know about each other by now, banter that just isn't very fun, making a swerve so people can make a Very Important Point in dialogue), dream and magical sequence stretches that didn't hold my attention, action scenes that felt weirdly paced, protagonist taking too long to notice some important things/come to some obvious conclusions while leaping to others -- you know, regular sort of flaws for a new author, new mystery, author of a YA book (though, weirdly, I had to keep reminding myself this was YA and not kidlit; the protagonist is 17, but she's asexual/aromantic, and I think the understandable lack of romance in combination with family themes and mystery plot made it feel more kid-lit-y. And the presence and type of illustrations too, I guess.) None of it was bad to the point of ruining the reading experience, or even close, but it didn't feel award-level either.
The book has some interesting representation stuff going on. On the asexual front, there aren't so many books with ace protagonists, and while I didn't think this was a virtuoso take (I preferred the first 3-4 mentions that Ellie wasn't interested in dating or getting married to the "You can bring a guest to the wedding, but nobody too weird. I get that you're asexual, so, like, it can be a friend or zucchini or..." -- really, there had to be smoother ways to get the word "asexual" to be explicitly mentioned in the book, if that's what this was for, and I can't imagine what else it could be for), I did prefer it to, say, Every Heart a Doorway in that regard. Even more unusually, and more centrally to the book, Ellie is Lipan Apache, and there's a neat mix of Native American mythology and European urban fantasy tropes (vampires, fairies) mixing up in the plot here, in interesting (if occasionally somewhat didactic) ways -- like the scene where Ellie's mother banishes an attacking vampire by revoking permission for him to be on Apache ancestral lands (and then the equally cool scene when Ellie tries that trick again on a different vampire and it doesn't work, because the vampire she is facing was Lipan himself, before he was turned -- that was a genuine surprise). It was also interesting to learn a little bit about Lipan Apache death and burial traditions, and the way different cultural approaches to death and grieving could cause conflict/concern even within a family that loves each other, like with Cousin Trevor's widow, who is Latina and does not share the same traditions. There are some more overtly Educational bits that worked less well for me: Ellie's digressions about why even beloved early presidents like Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt may not be seen the same way by Native Americans, and how history is taught in general, stuff about how mall security and cashiers are always suspicious of her and she needs to take that into account, or dialogue being twisted so that Vivian has a reason to correct Al's thoughtless use of "on the warpath". Like, I do think these are all points worth making, but they felt studded into the narrative with didactic intent rather than organic to it, and that made them feel like a flaw instead of an important point. Oh, and on a completely different note, I guess Ellie and Jay are both vegetarians, and Jay is a cheerleader, which is not along the same levels, of course, but also stood out to me as an interesting bit of representation you don't see terribly often.
Ellie herself I liked best when we were getting a look inside her mind (in the real world), when she was hanging out with Kirby or making paleontologist/PI plans. Her relationship with Kirby, the ghost of her canine best friend, was super cute, as were the flashbacks to sixth grade when the two of them got in trouble. SPOILERS from here I wasn't sure if it would turn out, at the end, that Kirby was gone for a long while or would return by the end of the book, and was happy that he did return, and immediately made friends with the new, living dog. I like the idea of what the author was going for with Ellie's parents -- a pair of nerds with a tendency to make corny science jokes (her veterenarian dad) and relate anecdotes from history (her mom the teacher), but they didn't feel like 3D characters to me. Ellie's relationship with Jay I found to be a weakness of the book; they spend more time interacting together than Ellie and any other human, but all the interactions felt artificial and weird, from the first encounter at the bridge to the texting to playing PIs. Partly I guess it's because Jay's role as the non-evil Anglo person in the book is to be the general audience stand-in to whom things can be explained, but it leads to weird stilted conversations like Jay not knowing what Ellie's actual full name is (really, they've been friends literally their whole lives, having "met when their mothers attended the same Lamaze program" and it's never come up? I could understand it if it was something meant to be kept private, or something that Ellie was ambivalent about, but that doesn't at all seem to be the case), or Ellie not knowing he could do magic, or this bit: "So, you don't like peas?" "Their flavor is... not good." "Fair enough. I hate tomatoes." "Aren't tomatoes from the Americas?" "[...] Doesn't mean I have to like them. Pizza sauce is fine." -- I mean, what IS that? That's two people who met last week getting to know each other, not two kids who grew up together for 17 years. Maybe he was a new friend in an earlier draft? It's kind of weird with Jay, he is very enmeshed in the story, so it's not like he could've been added later, but it almost feels like that -- I don't get the sense that the author is interested in him as a person, or that his relationship with Ellie is important -- he's just there to be useful, both narratively and plot-wise. Which, now that I've written it out, I guess that's what would happen a lot with minority characters in the olden days, including, of course, Native Americans. I assume Darcie Little Badger did not intentionally set out to write Jay as a flatter character, but that's kind of an interesting reversal regardless. I do think it makes the book weaker, though. Similarly, introducing Ronnie in person and her posse so late in the book felt pretty random and I'm not sure served any actual purpose. And while I enjoyed the chapter from Ellie's mother's POV, it also felt like a flaw to have a single chapter from a different character's POV, when I think the story could've been told some time when Ellie was there without too much distortion of the plot.
I haven't talked about the worldbuilding yet, but I found it actually pretty neat. It's an Unmasked World, where there are (fairy) Ring Transport Centers used for commuting and field trips and vampire regulations and precedent about using ghost evidence in court, and people are worried about the environmental impact of magic use (though the bit about magic use adding helium and argon to the atmosphere -- really, there were better elements to pick than some noble gases, I feel like). Unusual in my experience for an Unmasked World story, there doesn't seem to be any specific point in history at which the mask came off, so either it's always been like that and our world and this one just developed identically despite the presence of magic or the author just didn't feel like figuring out a point of divergence, but either way it didn't bother me.
Finally, the plot. The resolution ended up being more to my liking than I'd thought it would, so by the end of the book I liked it more than I had until then, but the bulk of it is fairly standard. Ellie's cousin -- elementary school teacher and new father -- dies in a car accident with a bunch o things not adding up (why was he on that stretch of road? why was he not wearing a seatbelt when he always insisted on everyone buckling up?), and his spirit asks Ellie to protect his family from his murderer, whom he names. Sooo, not so much a whodunit, but still a mystery trying to understand what Dr Allerton is, and why he killed Trevor, and uncover something that would be actionable with the police. The snooping around is fairly standard, with the exception that Ellie and Jay video everything and stream it live to Jay's sister when they're in dangerous circumstances -- that's not something I've seen in a book before, but I wonder if it'll become more of a thing, the way everyone having cell phones changed how mysteries/thrillers had to be plotted for the modern world. I was convinced that Dr Allerton was going to turn out to BE the historical Nathaniel Grace, given that Ellie thought they looked like twins, but apparently not and he actually was a descendant? Anyway, his actual racket worked well thematically and with the mystery plot -- he has magic that allows him to transfer the injuries from one body (including his own) to another, and have the "less important" person die while his patient is healed and he gets the reputation of a miracle worker and the goodwill of all the important people he's saved. And it's neat that not only does he do this for mortals, he has a parallel srvice going for vampires where he transfer the effect of the old vampires' (progressively degenerative, in this worldbuilding) curse to young vampires to extend the old vampires' abilities to go out in the sun and stuff -- I hadn't seen that part coming. I did guess that the town had to be moving around via a sort of built-in fairy ring almost as soon as the mushrooms all over Allerton's lawn were mentioned.
Anyway, so, the town of rich people hiding behind a facade of respectability and charity but actually leeching the lives off those who would not be easily missed is not exactly novel (afterwards the comprison to Get Out occurred to me, only Get Out was way better set up), I did like the way the story resolved itself. Dr Allerton and his cronies are a threat, but actually the biggest, most immediate threat is the "emissary of vengeance", Trevor's angry ghost -- who is emphatically NOT Trevor himself, but only a dark, angry spirit, while all of Trevor's compassion, decency, etc. is far away. This angry spirit is really creepy! -- I especially liked the effectof it talking through the dispatches security guards' walkie-talkies with Trevor's voice -- it kills people without hesitation, threatens one of Trevor's former students (an elementary schooler), and feels like a real danger to Ellie and her friends (but because it's talking with Trevor's voice, and because she recognizes the special effects it is using, like zombie tropes from movies they've watched together, she still feels torn about whose side she is on in the conflict between the vengeful ghost and the magical leeches). I also thought it was really interesting that the angry ghost was woken up by a combination of menace from Trevor's murderers and the grief of his loved ones who did not have the cultural backing (or maturity) to leave the dead alone -- the bereaved widow visits the grave and disturbs it by digging, Allerton's people follow her and exhume the body (to hide an incriminating tattoo), and Tevor's baby Gregory does the final bit of helping the ghost cross over because he doesn't understand the difference between his living father and the spirit. And the ending, where Ellie defeats Dr Allerton by bringing him to the Below with her, and leaving him to the vengeful spirits of his victims, felt very fitting and apt (and actually reminded me a tiny bit of the end of Small Gods, where she tells Dr Allerton to just start walking), and this exchange was I think the best piece of dialogue in the book: "Be merciful. Help me." "This is me showing mercy to the people who will live now that you're gone." So while the setup with the evil doctor and the evil town was cliche, everything to do with the actual spirits was not something I would have expected -- I assume it's rooted in Lipan Apache beiefs, and THIS is the really cool thing about reading diverse voices SFF as a non in-group reader.
Final random note: Ellie puts sunscreen on before going out in Texas weather, and I think this might be the only time I've seen a character do that in an urban fantasy book.
Quotes:
"Evil scarecrows were becoming a pest. Probably spreading with fields of monoculture corn and soy crops."
From a letter Ellie gets after the Willowbee story ends up in newspapers: "Please tell your fead tribe that I'm sorry for living over their graves. I can't afford a better location right now. My girlfriend won't stay the night until I do something. We've been together three years."
Note to self: Rovina Cai did the illustrations, and I need to remember that come Pro Artist voting time.
Hugo roundup: Lodestar -- 3/6 (though really it's 3.5). A Deadly Education, Cemetery Boys, Elatsoe, with the half of Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking that I've read so far hovering somewhere around Cemetery Boys.
28. Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth -- what an odd book, and what an odd trajectory I had with it. First, I never would've picked it up on my own -- just, nothing about the "necromancers in space" premise sounds interesting to me. I also would not have picked it up based on Tumblr hype, which seemed to lean heavy on lesbian necromancers in space, which, yes, are a feature of the book, but not in a way that is a focus, and definitely not in the way I thought based on the Tumblr hype. I started getting a little curious as people on my flist whose tastes are often a good predictor for mine picked it up and some of them loved it -- but then many of them also bounced off it hard, for the kinds of reasons that usually break a reading experience for me, like a POV voice that is jarring for the character and/or setting. So at that point I wrote the book off as Not For Me, and was planning to ignore it henceforth. But then
cafemassolit/ikel89 read it, from the same "not sure if want" standpoint, and was intrigued enough to continue on to book 2 -- which I'd already seen be hugely polarizing in the fandom -- and book 2 blew her mind enough that at least one Zoom Best Chat was dedicated to explaining it to us. So that made me interested in giving 'Gideon' a shot again, and I obtained a copy of the book and started reading it, but it was glacial progress -- I was sitting at something like 5-12% and wandering off every chance to read something new, because it just wasn't doing anything for me. Then 'Harrow' ended up on the Hugo novel ballot and renewed my determination to actually read the thing, but I think this part of the journey took me to like 22-28%. Then, I have no idea what switch flipped -- I don't think it was the Astounding things I'd finished reading, and I don't see how acquiring the Murderbot novella I'd been waiting to get my hands on for months would make me want to go read 'Gideon' instead, but that's what happened: I went back to the book and started actually making significant progress. It was still a slog until about the 40% point, when it stopped being Gideon wandering around mouldering halls and having surface interactions with too many people, when the book actually "caught" for me. I actually enjoyed it and read it whenever I had time from 40% onward, and wrapped up the last 70% in less than a week, compared to the ~3 months it took me to get through the first 30% -- I think this is an issue with the book, btw, rather than simply personal preference; the pacing could use some work. And at about the 75-80% mark, around the pool conversation, I finally came around to acknowledging that maybe this was a book that deserved to be on awards ballots, which I'd continued to find baffling up to that point, even when I was having a good time with it. And once I finished it, I immediately launched into 'Harrow', so the build-up of momentum continued through the very end.
Like, I still don't think this is any sort of sensible way to structure a book (even if book 2 ends up explaining some inconsistencies of POV or whatever, which I've seen some people argue that it does; obviously, not having read it yet, I don't have an opinion of my own). Left to my own devices, I never would've made it to the 40% mark where it actually started interesting me on its own merits. Which is not to say that books can't be slowburn or have a moment of leveling up late in the structure -- Too Like the Lightning is a great example of a book that did that successfully for me. This was also a book I 100% would've bailed on if K hadn't given me the wise advice to keep referencing this incredibly handy character chart. I think this is also a flaw of the book, because I don't often have trouble keeping track of large casts, and here I don't think I would've been able to name the Second representatives pretty mch until SPOILERS their death(?) scene in the last 15% of the book, and even then I couldn't keep the two of them straight. And I still don't remember half the people's names, even though I remember who they are.
Even from the retrospect of having liked the book on the whole, it is still very much a Not For Me kind of book. The aesthetic is so completely and utterly not my thing -- the decaying space installations, bones and skeletons and gore, face paint and whatever -- it's just not my aesthetic, and the loving descriptions of it do nothing for me except make me go "...ew" occasionally. I found the action scenes like that, too -- the focus is on showy moves and horrible constructs of bone and grossness and, like, bone fragments raining down -- it's a particular horror movie vibe that is not anything I would choose to watch/read about on my own, and so the action setpieces which were not cavalier vs cavalier duels made me want to skim. I did like the mystery and puzzle aspects of the plot -- the spot where the book picked up for me was Abigail and Magnus's deaths, because then there was finally a PLOT.
Characters were a mixed bag for me. It will surprise no-one, I think, that Palamedes was hands down my favorite, and I loved his relationship with Camilla. (I would also have loved to see more interaction between Palamedes and Harrow. I'm kind of with Gideon's "Too bad ou didn't marry him. You're both into old dead chicks" there, but this is not, apparently, a relationship -- in the & sense -- that fandom is interested in?). Dulciniea was interesting, though became less so to me in the reveal; but still, I got such strong Tyrell vibes from her throughout, which is a plus in my book. Magnus, and Abigail, very briefly, were adorable, but also definitely the right people to kill off first to destabilize the group. The horrible teenagers were really amusing up to the point when they were suddenly tragic, so that was also well done. And the Eighth duo really surprised me in a positive way towards the end of the book, and contributed to my finding it more worthy at that point. And, OK, Protesilaus has a reason for not being a scintillating character. So I guess it's really the Second and the Third house group that were a miss for me. The Second are kind of nonentities -- they seem to be just there to drive conflict in plot -- but with the Third, hm. I enjoyed Gideon drooling over Corona's athletic tanned limbs and glorious hair, and it's a neat excuse to make her even less observant of tricksy goings on in that house, and I liked the reveal that Ianthe, the boring twin, is actually the powerhouse, but also until that point, I actually did not have any sense of either Third princess as a character, so I don't think the twist landed as strongly as it could have. Let alone the impact of a necromancer killing their cavalier to become Lyctor -- Naberius had felt like a total nonentity, and an annoying one at that, so having him be the illustratory sacrifice sapped emotional impact from that reveal for me. (Sixth, Fourth, Fifth, even the creepy Eighth and the otherwise featureless Second had a visibly stronger necro/cavalier bond which really felt like the core of the duo; I actually don't understand why Naberius was there at all and it wasn't Ianthe and Corona as the necro/cav pairing for Third... I mean, I suppose it makes sense that the person who would make the move required to become Lyctor would be one with a weaker bond to their cavalier, but it still feels weirdly asymmentric, like, thematically? symbolically? IDK...)
Which, OK, let's talk about the necromancer/cavalier bond, and Harrow and Gideon specifically. My thoughts on this are, hm. The idea of the necromancer and cavalier bond ("one flesh, one end"), the way the tests of the House were all geared at refining it, was neat! I liked the range of bonds we get to see, from married couple Magnus and Abigail, to the creepy but ultimately loyal Eighth uncle + nephew duo, to codependent horrible teenagers who believably feel like kids who grew up together, almost like siblings, to the sketched in sisters-in-arms bond of the Second pair, to of course darling nerds Palamedes and Camilla, who have exactly the kind of seamless trust and loyalty I love to see, and it's neat that it's in an apparently purely platonic couple. Gideon and Harrow follow an enemies-to-friends trajectory which is ALSO a thing I love, and which I don't think I've seen done much or centrally with female characters. But it didn't fully work for me; the years of fighting and resentment as children forging into loyalty, admiration, and trust didn't quite work for me as a transformation -- I think it would've been easier for me to get on board if they were coming together as distrustful strangers, rather than all the baggage between them? I think that part is done well, but it made harder for me to feel invested in their relationship. And, honestly, while I completely buy both Gideon's sacrifice and Harrow's reaction to it, I buy it purely as things these characters would do because of who they are individually, and I don't so much buy it as an outcome of a bond between the two of them, if that makes any sense. Like, I liked some of Gideon's parting words and presence in Harrow's mind in the last chapter, but the more high-flown ones felt artificial.
I was also not particularly interested in Gideon herself. I have in recent years discovered a love of female Big Guy characters (e.g. Tazendra in Dragaera, or more recently Scorpia in the new She-Ra), and she's a nice example of that trope, but Gideon and I just didn't really click. Maybe it's to do with the writing, which didn't really feel like it was coming from Gideon's POV? (more on this below) I did find Harrow much more interesting, with her fainting smugly after titanic accomplishments and intellectual rivalries that draw her out of a faint, and the awareness (which we learn about, along with Gideon, after the pool conversation) that she is "a war crime" and "exactly two hundred sons and daughters of my House" and "tired of being two hundred corpses". So, yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing her again in Harrow the Ninth, having been spoiled for all the things. And I get why people ship Gideon and Harrow, but personally I did not feel anything romantic there. Or, to be honest, even anything particularly interesting. I think maybe, while they're foils for each other, they're foils in ways which aren't aspect that are interesting to me?
I'm actually surprised that I got this far without talking about the writing, because it was definitely one of the first things I noticed, and not in a positive way. Not in a bad way either, necessarily. But one of the things that made several people I know bounce off this book was Gideon's POV refrencing mints on pillows (in a world with no hotels that she would've been exposed to) and other weirdly anachronistic things. People also talk about the memes, but I guess I'm insulated enough from Tumblr that I simply missed most of those, and wouldn't have recognized the ones I did spot as memes if I weren't looking. Anyway, I was expecting that to bother me A LOT, because POVs that use vocabulary that don't fit the POV character (even when they're not first person but close third) throw me out of the story, but to my surprise I found that this didn't bother me here -- maybe because I knew to expect it? I still found the writing, hmm -- intrusive is probably the best word: words or phrases that drew attention to themselves by being very unusual, or not quite in combinations you'd expect, or full of weird juxtapositions between high language and low language. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I expect that sort of thing to mean something about character or worldbuilding, but here it felt mostly like Tamsyn Muir wanted to write in that particular style, so she did, for her own amusement, rather than in the service of some worldbuilding goal. (This reminded me of Maggie Stiefvater, actually; it also took me a while to get used to her prose, and go from "ugh but why" to kind of liking her approach.) There were some neat turns of phrase I appreciated, e.g. Ianthe's "eyes like violets on dialysis", "a tin with nothing in it but the vague waft of peppermints", "when she breathed, it sounded like custard sloshing around an air conditioner", but I have no idea what many of them are doing in Gideon's POV...
Oh, and I should talk about the worldbuilding, too, I guess, but I really don't have anything to say because... I don't care about the different kinds of necromany. It didn't even occur to me, until I was skimming the article linked above, that there was a sorting system buried in the worldbuilding, because pretty much all of the necromancy types are interchangeably boring to me, though I do find some creepier than others (Eighth). And I'm willing to believe that the magic system of thanergy/thalergy is well thought out, but I never felt compelled to pause long enough to figure it out for myself.
Quotes:
Harrow, at the 12% mark: "All you need to know is that you'll do what I say, or I'll mix bone meal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut."
Harrow: "You have one black eye already, courtesy of the Seventh House, and you seem to yearn for symmetry."
"Captain, you are no use to anyone dead."
Judith: "It is my privilege to no longer be of use."
"Gideon's skin had already been crawling, but now it was trying to sprint."
Gideon re: Harrow: "They had never fought together before, but they had always fought, and they could work in and around each other without a secon'ds thought."
"I mean it about not wanting an afterlife subsciption to Palamedes Sextus's Top Nerd Facts."
30. Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth -- I rolled into this one as soon as I finished 'Gideon' (then took an afternoon's detour for the Murderbot novella when I was about 40% in, because reading it straight through was starting to feel too claustrophobic), and finished it in 4 days. In fact, I would not go to sleep on the last day until I was done, which hasn't happened to me in a while / happens much less often to me nowadays than when I was younger. And it's not even that I was engrossed, per se, but in the last 10-15% the revelations were coming so fast on top of each other, I wanted to get through their storm. And I still can't say that I enjoyed this book (or this series to date, even more so), but I'm intrigued, and impressed, and overall glad of the experience, I guess would be the way to put it.
I went into 'Harrow' spoiled for most things, intentionally -- it was the spoilers that made me want to read the series at all, after pretty much writing it off as Not For Me. The aesthetic is still completely Not For Me; I am so tired of bones. I had liked Harrow in book 1, and it was hard to see her in this reduced/"mad" state in this book, though of course she's still impressive in a sort of negative-space way, especially once you figure out (or, in my case, know via spoilers) SPOILERS from here, let's say what she has done to herself as part of "the work". I did find her POV -- I mean, the second person POV strand -- kind of oppressive to read through. I am also doubtful about the second person schtick, to be honest, because it did not sound like Gideon to me, like, at all, in either tone or attitude. The first-person Gideon POV that shows up later sure did, but, like, those are not the same voice. I suppose you can hand-wave it with the explanation that Gideon, submerged, was observing everything at a remove, through a blindfold, through mud, but it's, well, honestly I think it's another thing that underlines the fact that Tamsyn Muir and I have very different ideas about how POV in narration works. But getting to Gideon's first person POV was fun -- I wouldn't have thought I'd miss it, because I did not love Gideon's voice in book 1, but after 80% of a long book in Harrow's disoriented POV, it was a nice reprieve.
There is so much going on in this book, all of it confusing. I was also spoiled for Harrow's skewed memories of book 1, with Ortus and things unfolding differently. ikel89 recommended reading 'Harrow' right after finishing 'Gideon', while the real events of book 1 were fresh in my mind, and that was a great call. K described it as being gaslit by a book, and yes, that is exactly what it is, and it's such an interesting and, like, writer/reader compact breaking thing to attempt! I liked those sections a lot, and I liked the broken skulls as the chapter wingbats, denoting that things were taking place in that fractured reality. I was NOT spoiled for what this alternate Canaan House was (a bubble in the River) or what the people Harrow interacts with there really were (ghosts), and those reveals worked for me very nicely. It was a neat way to get to see more of Abigail and Magnus, who were gone from the first book so quickly, and Dulcie and Pro, whom it turned out we had never met at all. I kind of feel like we still got to know the fake Dulcinea better in 'Gideon' than the ghost of the real one here, but I appreciated meeting her at all, and it was cool to learn she intentionally fed BS to Cytherea to help tip Palamedes off. The Second cavalier continued to remain largely a cypher, and I wonder if that's just how it's going to be, or if Muir is saving something interesting for book 3 (ditto Coronabeth and the other Second rep). Anyway, so that was a cool trick, and the "Is this how it happens?" penetrating the ghost tableaus worked really effectively for me. And then there were the mini-AUs, including a coffee shop AU, which is just showing off, but sure, why not, have your fun XD
Very unexpectedly, I ended up liking Ortus, the "find and replace" cavalier, quite a lot, the poor sad-sack and his tedious poetry. But, like, the navigated the line between comic and tragic and heroic really nicely, and I loved that in the broken-skull timeline, their victory, in a very real way, is made possible by his passion (and Abigail's skill, and everyone's determination, but he's the unexpected factor). (On a very random note, his tedious long poem made me think of Apollo Mojave's Pacific Rim Iliad in Terra Ignota, which thought I had to share with K, of course, and she posited that we should now think of Apollo in TI as looking like Ortus ("Didn't they love him for his beautiful soul? Now put your money where your mouth is"); so, you're welcome, the three people who can appreciate this crossover that nobody asked for.
The other new character in this book I liked was John/God/Necrolord Prime, which as K says is not a surprise, he's my type of character. He is such a dork, it's kind of delightful, and I especially enjoyed the way everyone hates his attempts at analogies. I thought his relationship with Harrow was sweet, trying to ply her with tea and cookies but learning slowly to just offer her crackers and water, and trying to give her the birds and the bees talk viz Ianthe. His relationship with his Lyctors, too, although I never did warm up to the Lyctors themselves. Mercy was just annoying, though I was amused by the running gag of her lowering Harrow's age every time she spoke about her. Augustine was the most interesting of the three to me, but ultimately not THAT interesting; there was just so much history and baggage and whatever going on between the three Lyctors and their dead cavaliers, and various other dead people -- I kept having to flick back to the Dramatis Personae a lot, until almost the very end -- but I don't feel like trying to pay attention to that had any significant payoff to the final confrontation (at least so far; maybe there will be something more interesting in book 3).
My least favorite thing about God in this book was the Dad joke the meeting between him and Gideon ends on, because, whatever the Tumblr memes are supposed to contribute to this narrative, they are not doing it for me. Like, best case I just don't notice them. When I do notice them but don't get the reference -- "jail for Mother", e.g. -- and go to look them up, there is absolutely nothing positive I get out of that, it just disrupts the flow. And the memes I did recognize without having to look up anything, like the Dad joke, like "none Houses with left grief", still, like, why? Does anyone get something more out of the memes than "I recognize that thing"? Can you explain to me what it is you get out of them?
I've talked about the new characters, but not yet the ones who came back. I do now understand why Abigail and Magnus seem to be as popular as they are in fandom (well, I got it about Magnus based on book 1, but I do feel like this is where we really get to know Abigail, which is kind of cool). Not getting enough of a feel for Ianthe was one of my complaints with book 1; book 2 does remedy that, but I don't have any strong feelings about Ianthe anyway. I was hoping the broken skull/gaslight AU would mean getting to spend more time with the characters from book 1 who were dead in reality, including Palamedes, but then the Sixth duo was killed off right away (and I did figure out that it was the people who were actually still alive who were murdered in the gaslight AU), and I figured that was the end of it. But of course that proved, gloriously, not to be the case, and there was Harrow and Palamedes meeting in his prepared bubble (with the sole shitty romance book he is writing a sequel to on the wallpaper, which was probably my favorite detail of the entire book/series to date), and Palamedes's reaction to the confirmation that Camilla was alive, and Camilla's reaction to the confirmation that the bubble had worked. Just, I love these two, and I love that Harrow and Palamedes got to interact some more, and all of Harrow's thoughts about him. This was the thing I wanted after 'Gideon', and was convinced I wasn't going to get it in canon, so, yay.
There is a whole bunch more magical worldbuilding we get in this one, tied up with some of the big reveals, the Reventant Beasts and Heralds, the River, the revelation that there is a way (or maybe several ways) for both necromancer and cavalier to survive the Lyctorhood transformation (at current count, Harrow and Gideon have managed it at least temporarily, but also God and Alecto, Pyrrha and Gideon Prime (though without him realizing it), and Camilla and Palamedes seem to have worked out at least something similar, based on the epilogue. Oh, and, Blood of Eden (with Corona and Camilla now working with them, apparently), and Commander Wake (haunting Cytherea's corpse), and Gideon the secret baby of God conceived in order to be able to open the Locked Tomb -- which I guess explains why Harrow was able to get in there, with Gideon sneaking along as the key? It's all a lot, and some of it was genuinely cool, startling reveals, like the bit where it turns out Gideon's golden eyes are actually part of John's genetic makeup, and the differently weird eyes which are his most striking feature are not his own -- that was such a cool twist, and I totally fell for it. Some of it felt like, wait, we're meant to be surprised by this? -- e.g. the revelation (?) that A.L. was God's cavalier -- A.L. is listed in exactly the same way as the cavaliers of the Lyctors in the Dramatis Personae, so that was a "reveal" I'd been expecting from literally page 1; and like I get why the Lyctors would be shocked by the realization, I guess -- because they'd spent ten thousand years telling themselves there had been no other way but to kill their cavaliers, and here is the proof that this was not so -- but as a reader I found that very anticlimactic. And some of it is just sheer soap opera, secret babies, Gideon Prime thinking Commander Wake was pregnant with his child, her having an affair with both him and his cavalier (???); I mean, I'm sure the soap opera-ness is intentional, and, like, not any more ridiculous than what you get in Seven Surrenders (you may have noticed, this book keeps making me think of Terra Ignota -- 'Harrow' specifically, 'Gideon' was only emphatically a contrast; I think a large part of that is the POV of someone experiencing a warped reality/someone haunted, in their perception if not, as with Harrow, in reality). And it's certainly no weirder than the coffee shop AU or the Tumblr memes, I'm just equally unsure about what it's ultimately for.
I enjoyed the section, towards the end of the book, where we get Gideon's first person POV narration of her inhabiting and fighting from within Harrow's body, the way she has to learn to compensate for Harrow's shorter reach/stature, getting a different vantage point because Harrow is much shorter than her. Particularly fun was Gideon's attempt to recall Harrow by saying "the worst shit I can think of," to wit: "Oooh, Palamedes, I am measurably less intelligent than you. Put your tongue in my mouth, and Ill flop my tongue against it." and "I think bones are mediocre" XD
So, OK, I totally understand why this is such a polarizing book, why so many people who loved 'Gideon' bounced off this one or struggled through it. I'm more in the camp that appreciates this book more than the first one, though it's still with a kind of -- not even grudging, really, but more like bemused, respect.
Taking stock of some things from this vantage point to see if they've changed for me: I still don't see Harrow/Gideon as a ship, and I'm not even sure if I'm meant to? (Gideon seems resigned to Harrow/Locked Tomb lady). Even non-shippily... I said at the end of book 1 that I could see the characters' individual reactions but that Gideon's sacrifice and Harrow's reaction felt like things that made sense for them, but not necessarily because of each other. I'm still kind of on the fence about that, to be honest, from Harrow's side. Gideon does seem to be all about laying down her life for Harrow specifically (although I get the sense she would've accepted a different purpose, too, if she'd been put in the position of having one). Harrow obviously goes to ENORMOUS lengths to preserve Gideon's soul/identity, annnnnd, I don't know. On the one hand, I feel like Harrow, two hundred dead sons and daughters of the Ninth House, just would not accept any additional sacrifice for her, period, because she's already laboring under such a debt of sacrifice, from before she was even born -- sacrifice she never got any choice about but obviously still guilty for, so one can imagine how much more difficult it would be for her to accept a sacrifice where she actually does have some choice, however limited. On the other hand, the specific lengths Harrow goes to in order to preserve Gideon's soul -- making herself less than, making herself vulnerable, making herself dependent on Ianthe -- those are such difficult things for her, I'm sure, that I don't know if I can see her accepting them, engineering them out of a matter of principle alone. I almost can, because I absolutely accept that Harrow will go very far on a matter of principle, but I do think now it's more likely that she's acting out of something like love as well. Still not shippy love, and not even a healthy love necessarily -- I don't see Gideon and Harrow as a love for the ages, more as their bond being another manifestation of "neglected children" put in an impossible situation and relying on each other to survive. I mean, "I died knowing you'd hate me for dying; but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I'd had your full attention" -- that is certainly a kind of bond and compulsion, but not, you know, one I would root for as a healthy bond, shippy of platonic. But let's see what I think by the end of book 3.
Random other things: I had not twigged on my own that the Nine Houses are planets of the solar system, with Earth being the First House (destroyed by "rising sea levels and a massive nuclear fission chain reaction", as the Emperor explains), Ninth House presumably Pluto, Sixth House Mercury (being closest to the sun), and Fifth as Jupiter, Second as Mars, and I suppose Seventh as Venus also make sense.
Quotes:
"And when the Body turned so that you could see her face you were amazed, as ever, by that beauty unblemished by breath."
"You wanted to be relieved, but no longer recalled how that worked, glandularly speaking."
"Harrowhark fell in love. || 'Falling' was not the right term, precisely. It was a long process. She more correctly climbed down into love, picked its locks, opened its gates, and breached its inner chamber."
"Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die."
"Harrow was furious that she was doing something so -- so pedestrian as to pubesce."
"transparent enough to let you see quite clearly, albeit through a stippled violence of rainbow light."
"Your job is simple in the way most very tough things are."
"She hated it wehn people dressed constructs; it smacked of shimsy, like making one's hammer wear a hat."
"Harrow regretted not making [Ortus] take a solemn pledge of silence [...] but only a very obedient idiot of a cavalier would have stuck to that."
"a couple of teeth tumbled loose in your mouth like ragged little dice"
"The air was hot and wet, like the inside of a mouth."
Harrow talking to Ortus: "she knew that she was irritated because each time she tried to blunt the razor edge of her tongue, he somehow grasped the blades of her anyway."
"Harrowhark was learning that a scion of the Fifth House might busy themselves politely during a murder, or an orgy."
'"Never mind. I'm sure I've done worse with more," said Abigail bracingly.'
Also Abigail: "It takes a great deal of ego to be a psychopomp. Thank you for letting me be yours."
Gideon re: Ianthe: "There would be a goddamn reckoning, Nonagesimus, I was going to reck her."
"Abigail [...] reached forward to brush a stray lock of hair behind Harrowhark's ear, which was an instinct Harrow could not find it within herself to feel humiliated by."
The Emperor: "There is no such thing as forgiveness, Mercy. There's only bloody truth, and blessed ignorance."
(As you can tell from the much higher number of quotes, I enjoyed the writing here more than in book 1.)
Hugo roundup: novel -- 3/6. Still Network Effect at the top, because I loved that book. Piranesi and Harrow are actually similarly "not really my thing but I admire the ambition and the execution", but I do think Piranesi is a better book -- Harrow is very messy and all over the place, full of weird indulgences, while Piranesi is a precision strike. So, Network Effect, Piranesi, Harrow the Ninth.
29. Martha Wells, Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot 6) -- OK, so it wasn't an ART & Murderbot adventure, which is always going to be inherently superior to any other type of Murderbot story, but it was a lot of fun! Murderbot solving a murder mystery among Preservation security officials was a good time, and makes me realize that a thing I'd really love to see is ART and Murderbot s a mystery-solving duo, with Murderbot doing all the legwork and ART throwing in its processing power and deviousness and, of course, the resulting mutual snark (I was thinking Father Brown and Flambeau, but possibly Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin would be an even better analogy, except that I haven't read those and only know about them by fannish osmosis). Anyway, back to the actual story I did read. SPOILERS including the whodunit
Dr Mensah's and Murderbot's relationship is always lovely to see, and I liked the little bits of it we got here, especially the part where Murderbot thinks about appealing to Mensah's authority to help it deal with the Security folks and flashes back to "the time Mensah's youngest child had got hold of the comm and demanded that Mensah tell an older sibling to stop taking all the squash dumplings". The mystery fit the overall worldbuilding well, I thought, refugees born into slavery and more hapless, not-too-bright humans who are not bad even when they're being violent and when Murderbot has to neutralize them -- both the Lalow crew and the refugees who distrust or in one case attack Murderbot. (I also thought it was very neat that, given that Murderbot thinks of the humans from the transport ship as Target One, Two, etc., it was a while before I realized how many of them, including the one in charge, were women, because why would the gender of the targets be relevant to Murderbot's POV? Ditto for the human who seems to be the de facto leader of the refugee bunch.) I also thought it was neat and fitting that it's not that Station Security/Port Authority are bad at their jobs; there's a little scene where they figure out something about the transport side of it fast, which Murderbot notices -- because cargo safety/smuggling is the job they are used to doing, it's just that they're not used to doing with murder. But at the same time, the infrequency of murder on Preservation sttion means the reaction to the body being discovered is different than the bounty hunters expected, and that leads to their downfall anyway. On the whodunit side, I realized there had to be "a local actor" involved a little ahead of the book mentioning it, and I figured Balin could be implicated (though not the specific sleeper CombatBot way) before Murderbot figured it out. I also kind of liked that the final standoff was resolved by a bunch of cargo bots (who have a sense of humour, sort of! and private jokes XD) because that was something new.
No particularly interesting new characters in this installment, I thought, and since it takes place before Network Effect, not much in the way of arc advancement or character growth, either. Oh, except I guess we now know how Murderbot thinks of its gender, canonically: "not applicable". I actually find it a little odd that Martha Wells would go back to pre-Network Effect at this point, unless this was something she already had in the works and it's just that the publication order worked out this way. So, nothing earthshaking, and I'd rank this installment in the lower half of Murderbot books to date (currently I think they go Network Effect, Artificial Condition, All Systems Red, Exit Strategy, Fugitive Telemetry, and Rogue Protocol -- but ES and FT are pretty close), but a couple of hours spent in Murderbot's company was certainly very enjoyable anyway, and there are always fun quotes:
"Being the top Preservation expert in dealing with contract law in the Corporation Rim apparently made Pin-Lee like the CombatUnit version of a lawyer."
"Aylen and the other officers were explaining to their individual Targets what rights they had as detainees in Preservation Alliance territory. (It was a lot of rights. I was pretty sure it was more rights than a human who hadn't been detained by Station Security had in the Corporation rim.)"
Also, the transport crew's slightly-off translator was a source of some amusement, because I'm easily amused by slightly off translations.
*
Right, also, L and I watched Raya and the Last Dragon. It was mostly enjoyable, but also really forgettable, and also I fell asleep briefly at some point during the dragon pearl shard collection fetch quest. Both of us did get AtLA vibes from the setup, but they kind of faded after a while. Vague spoilers? maybe? Sisu in human form was a lot of fun; Raya/Namaari vibes were strong and I actually have a hard time seeing that relationship as platonic (I mean, plausible deniability, sure, but not ACTUALLY platonic), and my actual favorite thing about the movie was Tuk-Tuk the roly-poly armadillo thing (of course it was voiced by Alan Tudyk; what is Alan Tudyk even doing these days other than voicing Disney critters XD) If there was a deeper message or theme to the movie (I guess about working together and extending trust being ultimately repaid), I did not think anything landed particularly strongly. Oh, and L remarked that there was no romantic subplot here at all (if you don't count Raya/Namaari, that is); it's not unprecedented -- Moana was also like that -- but I guess that's the new trend.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1152762.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).