Reading roundup: Lady Astronauts and NPR list catch-up
I'm back (RL post to follow at some point, when RL stops being so full of things, but foot's fine, leak/house is fine, our first week back is being eaten up by college move-in things), and I got some solid reading done while on holiday. Part of it ended up being informed by the NPR list in my last reading post and things I'd not read that I saw other flisters had read and liked.
38. Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven -- this was a book I've been aware of and low-key planning to read for years, but I had only a vague idea of what it was about: I knew there was something about a Shakespeare company in a post-apocalyptic setting, but from the title I'd assumed it was IN SPACE (rather than that the titular station was fictional). I also did not realize the apocalyptic event was a pandemic until
bearshorty mentioned it in my comments, and I'm glad I was forewarned about it going in. It worked for me to be reading about a pandemic in a pandemic year, similar to how Song for a New Day had worked for me in 2020, but I wouldn't have wanted to be ambushed by it.
I really enjoyed the book, although it's a different sort of book than the kind of SFF I usually enjoy. Like, I'm not even entirely sure it's SFF? (I'm not the only one to wonder, I see.) There's no additional technology, and it's not so far-future that the people are all that different, except, of course, for their experience of societal and technological collapse. (Maybe it would've felt more science-fictional if I'd read it before 2020, but we've had a global pandemic by now, though, thank god, much less deadly than the one in the book. But when Kirsten and August were talking about parallel universes and Earths where the Georgia flu didn't happen, or happened but wasn't as bad, it really felt like they were talking about Covid.) But it doesn't matter, because it's a lovely book, elegaic and hopeful and sort of... luminous. I'm definitely glad I read it, even if it's not at all what I had been expecting from my vaguely osmosed preconceptions about it.
It took a while after I finished the book before it occurred to me that this book was succeeding at what I think The Vanished Birds (which I had not liked) was trying to do -- a sort of mosaic narrative that, zoomed out, shows the ripples and intersections over a fairly scattered cast of characters and a longish period of time, all around a central theme. Where I think this works for me with Station Eleven is that the linkages are subtle but clear, and the beginning is really well chosen for the ripples to spread from that one central event and person, the performance of King Lear during which Arthur dies. Spoilers from here Arthur, Jeevan, and Kirsten are present, and Clark and Miranda involved soon after, and then you get to see the pandemic progress real time through Jeevan's and Miranda's and later Clark's POVs, and you get the post-apocalyptic POV from Kirsten, and the flashbacks from Arthur and Miranda, and it's all woven together in an elegant and well-constructed way that never felt disparate or arbitrary. Oh, and the same objects showing up in the different threads and different times, without it being clear at first how they made their way from one thread to another -- the stormy snowglobe, as a physical object, and Station Eleven (the comic books as a physical object and as a thing/fictional object in people's consciousness) -- work to pull the whole tapestry together. In retrospect it occurred to me that probably Jimenez was going for something similar with the flute and I guess the pelican in The Vanished Birds (down to naming the book after one of the things which becomes a sort of metaphorical title), but there isn't this slight mystery of how the blute gets around, and the birds are off isolated in the their own storyline, so it didn't add to up a cool tapestry with common threads running through effect for me. This way of putting a book together is a really unusual structure (at least for SFF), and I googled around after to see if other people thought The Vanished Birds was going for something similar, and at least a couple seemed to. But it actually worked for me here.
Another kind of odd thing about the book is that I tend to be a Character-first reader (followed by Setthing, and I don't like post-apocalyptic setting, so that certainly wasn't part of the draw), and I'm not that into the individual characters in Station Eleven, but somehow it worked for me anyway. I think, of the POV characters, I only really like Clark (who doesn't get many chapters), and feel sort of sympathetic towards Miranda. Kirsten is fine, but even with the interview she feels kind of like a cypher because some critical parts of her own past are locked away from her -- I didn't feel like I knew her very deeply. I didn't like Jeevan much, but for my purposes Jeevan and Kirsten were there to observe the worldbuilding -- the unfolding pandemic with Jeevan, the 20-years-after world through Kirsten. And Arthur was interesting, because he is not very likable (or at least not very likable to me), and also his storyline is the least science-fictional of the book, taking place entirely before the pandemic -- but both through his own eyes and hte eyes of people like Clark and Miranda, he felt human and wistful enough that I did actually enjoy his sections, and the counterpoint of normalcy, the Before world, which can be both petty and beautiful, works nicely to round out the tapestry, I guess. The old world, the world in the process of falling apart, which we get to see through Jeevan and Clark, the new world, Shakespeare's 400-years-ago world, the overtly science-fictional world of "Station Eleven" -- the echoes of themes, human connection and lack thereof, the importance of art / something beyond survival -- it all just worked for me on a poetic level almost. Not the prose, which was occasionally lovely but not in a poetic way, but sort of in a way a poem works by putting things next to each other, weaving threads of imagery, and having them come together in a way that doesn't have to make purely logical sense -- in assonances and reflections, except done through a prose structure rather than via rhyme and alliteration and stuff. It's really neat that this kind of thing can work.
And speaking of characters, it occurred to me at the end that the "character" I was reacting to most strongly / the most attached to was the Traveling Symphony itself. Not its individual members -- like, I'm definitely glad Kirsten survived and Sayid is OK and that they reunited with Charlie and the sixth guitar, but Dieter's death did not affect me much, and I think if any other individuals had died, it also wouldn't affect me greatly -- but I was worried about Kirsten and Charlie and the clarinet making their way back to the Company, or the Company getting separated/destroyed, or people choosing to go their separate ways at the end. Because the Company felt the most character-like to me, with those great descriptions of who is mad at whom for what minor things from five years ago, and the habit of counting departed guitars in their number, and the way the Shakespeare people get names but the orchestra members are referred to by their functions, and their long-standing arguments about what plays and costumes are relevant to their present audience. And once I'd realized that, I realized that I also felt similarly, but on a smaller scale, since we get a lot less time with them, about the folks in the airport terminal. Between Clark's POV (given that he was my favorite individual character) and getting to see this new enclave come together, from people randomly trapped in a small airport in Michigan, the section where we get to see the Museum of Civilization and its keepers come together was probably my favorite. (It might have also helped that I was reading this shortly after being in an airport for the first time in 2+ years and having pre-apocalyptic airport nostalgia feels of my own, admittedly... :P) Also, the quarantined plane and Tyler/the future prophet preaching to the dead inside was really chilling, and probably the thing from this book that will stay with me most vividly...
As with Song for a New Day last year, the progress of the pandemic and the post-pandemic world were interesting to see from the standpoint of being in the process of living in a (much milder) global pandemic. It did strain my disbelief how quickly things fell apart, and in what order. I wonder how much of those choices was research vs poetic choice, because it didn't feel intrinsically true to me, but I also don't know much about failure modes on that scale. I do know that when we did BCP audits at work, a pandemic is a really difficult one to recover from, because it's not localized in time or space and can crater every segment of your supply chain at once, so it does make sense that for something as virulent and with as high a death rate as the Georgian flu, the effects would be pretty catastrophic. But I feel like a lot of critical infrastructure things are automated now to the point that they would hold out longer even if nobody was coming to work (though, OK, this book was written before 2014, and probably a fair number of those lights-out automation type things are the work of recent years (we definitely stepped up our BCP stuff after the 2011 Japan quake, and I know other industries did as well). But still, it felt like "the internet" disappeared too quickly, and I would've expected pockets of greater technological stability / people like Ron-the-Dwarf kluging together technology out of surviving bits (which, admittedly, might exist, just outside of what the people in the novel can see. After all, we don't know what the pilot who flew to LA found on the West Coast, and the characters have a conversation about how maybe other parts of the world are in a different state, they just don't know it).
One thing I found neat/unusual about the book is the lacuna of the worst years. You get the old world via Arthur and his cohort, you get the first days of the pandemic via Jeevan and Clark and Miranda, but Clark's little community is naturally sheltered, and the other two threads end pretty soon -- and then you see the "present day" world of 20 years later, and you hear about how much safer things are now than they used to be. Our main post-pandemic POV, Kirsten, literally doesn't remember the worst of it, so we can never see it, but we get little references throughout, like Kirsten marveling that August made it to year 20 of the pandemic without ever having to kill anyone before. And what we do see is still pretty bad, with the town run by the Prophet, Kirsten's experiences with the two men she'd had to kill, the protocols the Company has, etc. The negative space approach to dealing with the worst of it really worked for me and was something I appreciated, because I really don't want to read about the worst of humanity.
I was getting very close to the end of the book and wondering how the whole thing was going to be wrapped up, since there wasn't much space left and also how does one wrap up a tapestry? But the ending worked for me: there is no sense of triumph in the Prophet's death -- it's necessary but pretty sad, knowing that Tyler was a little boy who went through some horrible things in those early years most likely, because everyone did, and the tragedy of the boy who shot him turning the gun on himself -- but there's survival, and the hope of something beyond survival in the mysterious electrical lights they can see from the tower, and community, and reunion, and that was a fitting ending.
So, yeah, I liked the book a lot, even if not in an "SF novel" sort of way, and I'm glad both that I finally read it and that I read it after 2020, because I think I appreciated it more in a post-Covid reality.
Quotes:
Jeevan: "He felt extravagantly, guiltily alive. The unfairness of it, his heart pumping faultlessly while somewhere Arthur lay cold and still."
"'I should call his lawyer,' the producer said.
This solution was inarguable, but so depressing that the group drank for several minutes in silence before anyone could bring themselves to speak."
Arthur in LA: "the same girl at two parties in this infinite city" and "the sun rsing on scenes of tedious debauchery"
Miranda: "In art school they talked about day jobs in tones of horror. She never would have imagined that her day job would be the calmest and least cluttered part of her life."
"Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor."
"The tattoo argument has lost all of its sting over the years and had become something like a familiar room where they met."
"None of the older Symphony members knew much about the science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended."
"There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth."
"The man playing the part of the aging actor sipped his tea, and in that moment, acting or not, it seemed to her that he was deeply unhappy."
Viola "whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her"
Clark: "This had been happening more and more lately, this nodding off unexpectedly, and it left him with an unsettled intimation of rehearsal. You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever."
Kirsten: "If she could only speak to August. We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid."
Arthur, thinking back on being seventeen: "during what seemed at the time like adulthood and seemed in retrospect like a dream."
Arthur: "He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like months to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one."
"If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonis and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain?"
P.S. Looks like an HBO miniseries is in the works, and I'm kind of impressed they're going forward with it despite Covid...
39. Victor Lavalle, The Changeling -- another one off the NPR list, and hmm. This was a lot more horror than the NPR blurb made it sound ("a modern urban fairy tale with one toe over the line into horror" -- uh, no, I beg to differ about the "one toe" thing -- large, climactic parts of it were full-on horror if you ask me), and so it suffers for me from the same thing horror always suffers from: I get to the end and am left going, "and what did I get out of reading this?", because whatever it is people who like horror get out of reading horror, I don't get that. I don't regret reading it, because there were some parts I liked, and one aspect I liked a lot (new parenting observations, before the horror comes along), and the horror, well, I guess it was masterfully done, probably? But I would say 75% of this book was Not My Thing, and in a way where it doesn't even help me figure out whether I should try to read more things by Victor Lavalle or not...
The part I really liked: everything about Apollo and Emma as new parents, because there was some very well done observational comedy there
The parts I liked: Apollo and Patrice's friendship, their banter and support. To a lesser extent, Apollo's courtship of Emma, and the dinner at the overpriced restaurant with her friend. Spoilers from here Apollo with Gayl, the little girl on the island, who was a very believable toddler. And the creepiness of a changeling setup in a world permeated by technology -- the texts and photos that seem to be coming from nowhere -- who is taking those photos? -- and disappearing off the phone, and analagy of inviting bad things over your threshold with all those Facebook photos of the baby was really nicely done.
Beyond that, I can appreciate the interwoven theme of fatherhood -- Apollo's abandonment issues from his father's disappearance and the truth behind that, the way that's rooted in Brian West's own childhood trauma, the way it translates to his parenting of Baby Brian, and the other parent-child links in the book -- Emma's parents and Emma and Kim, Jorgen and William/Kinder Garden, William and Agnes, the historical Nils and the sacrificed daughter -- but, mmm, I don't know that it said anything particularly novel to me, and/or maybe it's not a theme I'm particularly interested in exploring in such depth.
The chapters that set up the very, very disturbing scene where cw: child harm Emma tries to destroy the changeling, which comes across to Apollo as her killing their child in a very gruesome way, and nearly killing him to stop him from interfering, and the aftermath of that scene... I mean, that was well done, in the sense that it was difficult to read, but I don't think I got anything out of reading it (as a person who doesn't read horror), so, well, that was a very well done scene full of extreme unpleasantness that I got nothing out of, except that I guess I know which book is going on the "outside of your comfort zone" book meme question at the end of the year. Also, I'm actually still not entirely clear on why "killing" the changeling was necessary... In the changeling stories I'm familiar with, it forces the abducting faeries to come back and swap the babies back, but that pretty clearly didn't work in this case, since Emma had to go off and keep an eye on the real Baby Brian in the troll's cave anyway. Was she expecting it to work based on what Cal had told her? (why, since it doesn't seem to have ever worked before?) Is it something that confers some kind of protection on the real baby? (That also doesn't appear to be the case based on past experience, since it doesn't seem like any of the previous babies had survived.) Is Emma's willingness to go through with that for her real baby the thing that confers the magical powers on her that allows her to keep Brian alive and speak to Jorgen telepathically/make him do stuff? (??? And probably also not, because in looking over my notes, I see that Kim's story about how their parents really died shows that Emma had these telepathic/mind control abilities even as a small child, in an extreme enough situation.) Probably I should not be examining this from a logical perspective; probably the book is operating on some kind of horror narrative logic that I'm not famiiar with, but if I stopped to think about it, the horrible but powerful scene stopped making any sort of sense, leaving me with even more annoyance about why I'd had to read that. Also, on that subject, when Apollo and Emma reunite for the climax of the book, Apollo is extremely apologetic about not believing her that the "Brian" he was trying to protect was not a real baby, and she throws his (admittedly very shitty) words to here -- "Youre what's wrong with our family. You. Are. The. Problem. Go take another pill." -- back at him, but nowhere in this reunion is there any discussion/acknowledgement of the fact that she nearly killed him with a claw hammer to the face after chaining him up, which, uh, seems like something that's maybe also appropriate to work through. And speaking of logic, this didn't occur to me when I was reading, but after looking up
ambyr's write-up of the book, I have to concur that it's unclear to me what kind of happily-ever-after Apollo and Emma are riding towards, with a baby that everyone believes to be dead, her notoriously wanted to for the murder of a child, him having violated parole, and two dead bodies left behind (with video evidence for one of them?). Probably this is also meant to operate on some kind of horror logic, where as long as you survive the nightmare experience, everything will be OK, but given the otherwise grounded setting this takes place in... how? The story does sort of lampshade that with the "happily ever after" / "happily for today" conversation at the end, as well as Jorgen's diatribe against "happily ever after" earlier, but there's a large difference between what might happen years down the road from the ending of a fairy tale and an active murder investigation...
But let's back up a bit. After the very traumatic scene at the 28% mark, the book kind of devolved for me into mostly a bunch of things I either didn't care about or didn't enjoy. Kinder Garten and the reveal that there's both a literal troll and an internet troll involved -- meh, a bit too on the nose, and the snuff livestream setup just felt over the top. The island of women like Emma, hidden in the middle of the river/in an alternate dimension -- that whole segment felt like treading water, actually, though as I mentioned above I liked getting to see Apollo with a young child again. Jorgen and the reveal of the history of what's actually going on -- felt kind of like a letdown, although the revelation of what William had done, and why, was a neat element that brought things together. And the battle with the troll -- the red herring with the Daylight app got me, which was neat, but nothing else about it was particularly interesting to me, just a lot of gore and horror things that I don't care for.
So, ultimately, eh. Would I have read it if I'd known how much of it would end up working for me? No, probably not, or I would've stopped at the 25% mark and read a plot summary of the rest. Do I regret reading it? No, I don't, because it was an interesting experience in confirming yet again that horror doesn't work for me, and it was a book from an interesting voice that was new to me, which has value in itself.
Quotes:
"Brian had a habit of mispronouncing Lillian Kagwa's last name, and Lillian kept mistaking Brian for other white men. Hardly kismet."
"'I promise you,' he said. 'With me, all three of your wishes will come true.'
In this moment Emma Valentine faced a choice. She could see this moment as proof that Apollo Kagwa was an arrogant dick, or she could decide he was bold and worthy."
The fancy restaurant: "The median age of these customers was billionnaire. Even the busboys in this place were white."
"Apollo went through the baby bag, cross-checking like a pilot about to take flight. Bottle, three diapers, wipes, burp cloth, set of plastic keys for rattling, and finally, a small fluffy blanket."
"'Tummy time!' Apollo shouted, as if Brian had just successfully piloted an airplane."
"The other dads crowded closer and asked after Brian's development like coaches eyeballing a rival player."
"Maybe having a child was like being drunk. You couldn't gauge when you went from being charming to being an asshole." (My favorite quote from the book.)
"Soon it seemed strange to call this group the Survivors. They were here, but none of them had survived."
"Oh, you poor thing. You were begging to be devoured. [...] You leave a trail of breadcrumbs any wolf could follow, then act shocked when the wolf is outside your door."
40. Mary Robinette Kowal, The Fated Sky (Lady Astronaut 2) -- book 3 is nominated for Best Novel at the Hugos this year, and Lady Astronaut is up for the series award, so I wanted to catch up, which meant reading both books 2 and 3. It actually took me a while to get into book 2 -- I checked it out of the library, read part of the first chapter, then moved on to other books, and it disappeared off my Kindle unread. Then I checked it out again, after finishing Wayfarers 4, when I was thinking I'd be in the mood for more space things, and got distracted again by the books above. And even once I went back to Fated Sky, knowing I wanted to finish it before my library time ran out again, the first part was kind of a slog to get through: everything with the Cygnus Six and the FBI investigation and Elma taking over Helen's spot on the Mars Expedition and the friction it causes. But once the Mars Expedition launched and it was just the crew if the Nina rubbing along, I started enjoying the book once again, and ended up liking it on the whole, though not as much as book 1.
I mean, many of the things I'd liked about book 1 were still here, but they were either not new and not evolving in any drastic way (the post-Meteor world and diverging history, Elma's Jewishness, her relationship with Nathan) or not as prominent (Elma's mathematical gifts, dealing with her anxiety -- which, I'm glad she needs less help in that regard, so that's not a complaint, but it was something I found interesting and novel about book 1, which wasn't much of a thing here). Some of the things I appreciated about book 1, I didn't think were done as well in book 2: the "Elma the Nice White Lady" aspects of book 1 worked for me better than they did here. Leonard's "don't explain my own experience to me" speech felt, I dunno, anachronistic, or maybe too didactic? Maybe just more heavy-handed? performative? Or maybe it's got nothing to do with the book itself at all, and book 1 had all the same features/flaws, and they're more noticeable to me in *this* book because this year's Hugo crop has a whole bunch of books by Black authors, several of them specifically engaging with racism, and it's a question of contrast? But I did feel like the Black characters in this book, Florence and Leonard, felt less like full-fledged characters than the Lindholms in book 1 (or book 3) did, which made me feel like they were just there for the Race Commentary. Spoilers from here
Speaking of things that did not work well for me, I'm not sure I would've realized that Kam was meant to be trans if I hadn't gone into the book with a vague recollection from dinner with
ambyr,
factitious, and Kelly where whoever had read the book at that time mentioned that it had done something related to trans representation very badly, and as soon as we got the "Yet another reason to wish I'd been born a man" line, I figured this was probably the character involved. The afterword talks about MRK's choice to have Elma's POV keep referring to Kam with the "she/her" pronouns because Elma does not understand that Kam is trans, and MRK didn't see Kam having that conversation with Elma (Elsa switching to using Kam instead of "Kamilah" as soon as Kam asks her to suggests to me that she would've switched to the right pronouns, too, if Kam had asked her/explained). I'm actually not sure what the benefit is of including a trans character but misgendering him throughout the novel; I can respect the "historical plausibility" argument, but Elma gets explained a lot of things she's initially blind to over the course of this and the previous book, so why not also this one? And if MRK thought it was a bridge too far, then it seems like maybe Kam would've been a better fit for a novel with a different POV.
I've also seen complaints about Bury Your Gays in this book, and, well, factually that's definitely true -- one of the characters in the m/m relationship dies -- but actually everything about Terrazas was one of my favorite things about this book, from his radio play and general clowning around, to the banter with Rafael, to the way the space walk and subsequent accident play out, to the funeral and Rafael's grief, to the Mars lander being named in his honor. So it didn't bother me while I was reading, but seeing the complaints... well, I can't really think of other non-het characters in the series (the three novels I've read, anyway; I know there are also some short stories), which does make it rather unfortunate that the one non-het relationship (that I can recall) is broken up by death, even if I otherwise like the character, the relationship, and the death a lot.
But I did say I ultimately liked the book, so I should talk about the things I liked about it, actually. A lot of it was just the Space Adventure! stuff -- I'm apparently still a sucker for Space Adventure! (although MRK seems to enjoy writing about the poop side of Space Adventure! more than I enjoy reading about it; I did not need quite so much zero-g diarrhea and malfuncitoning toilets in my SF) That's one of the reasons I appreciated the space walk that leads to Terrazas's death as much as I did -- the problem (which may or may not be a simple problem), the combination of bad luck, deadliness of space, and human mistakes that leads to tragedy, the way the other astronauts react, both in the moment and after. The scene with Ruby's body and "the bag" also worked for me really well, the juxtaposition of the holiness of the kaddish and the mechanical, profane actions of the bag, "funcitoning as designed" -- I thought that was a powerful and well-written scene, and that was actually when my appreciation for the book started to grow. The way the astronauts use humour and nonsense like the rhyming game Elma and Kam play to deal with serious, deadly situations was neat, even if the coping mechanisms themselves didn't always work for me -- the rhyming left me cold, but the Flash Gordon callbacks continued to work for me very well. The space-farers dealing with the blackout of communications from earth and not knowing what was going on also worked for me. Most of everything to do with the crew of the Pinta, less so; I knew it was bound to happen that the two crews would have to coexist in the same space, so the thing with DeBeer the South African racist asshole and the non-white crew members of the Nina could play out, but the way it did play out was predictable and boring and kind of pro forma. DeBeer was such a flat character, with nothing redeemable or interesting about him, that he was just boring. And one of the reasons I resent that is that I kind of feel like he was introduced in part to make Parker look less bad, which -- Stetson Parker is actually probably the most interesting thing to me about these books, and the Elma-Parker stuff was my favorite thing about The Fated Sky, but I don't want Parker to be redeemed by means of putting him next to a cartoonish villain and making him look better by comparison. (Also, one thing I don't really get is, if Nina is the "separate but equal" crew, why is Parker, the First Man in Space, part of it? I mean, sure, *a* white man would be the one in charge of the ship, but why put the biggest name in the space program on the ship of 'misfits'? Did they want him specifically to keep an eye on said misfits? Did he volunteer for brownie points for Miriam's sake? I mean, Doylistically, obviously it's so that Parker and Elma end up on the same ship, which also needs to be the Ship of Representation, but I kept wondering about the in-universe explanation...)
But let's talk about Parker. I was intrigued by Parker from book 1, where he was this really interesting (to me) combination of highly competent pilot/astronaut, a good commander and teacher, and a vindictive, misogynist asshole, with serious bad history between him and the protagonist. It was also clear to me (even if not Elma) in book 1 that there was something interesting going on with his wife, that he was genuinely devoted to her while also carrying on an affair (and possibly continuing to hit on women in his vicinity whether they welcomed his advances or not). I really liked everything we got with Parker, the information on Parker's family, and Parker and Elma's changing relationship in this book. I like all the ways in which we get to see Parker as competent and clever and astute -- and using that astuteness both for good reasons (e.g. when dealing with grief-stricken Rafeal and the rest of the traumatized crew) and petty ones (to needle Elma). I liked everything that we got to see about how he chooses to obey or question or ignore Mission Control directions, and sometimes he gets it wrong but has to move on. The language thing I found to be kind of over the top, but it was still cute to see Parker getting to be nerdy about something. I was thinking about it after reading a couple of other reviews, and I don't think Parker is meant to be redeemed by this book -- more that Elma has now spent enough time with him and is sufficiently independent of him that she can see beyond the fear and hatred that permeated their relationship in book 1. The reason I don't think he's meant to be redeemed is that not only does nothing happen to address the issue of him bothering the WASPs "who hadn't felt like she could turn him down", over which he and Elma originally came into conflict (Elma reporting him to her general father), but that history is mentioned a couple of times in this book, once when Elma finds the condom in the zero-g toilet and is worried Parker is pressuring the other women for sex, and then again kind of by Parker himself during Terrazas's funeral, where he mentions propositioning his sister and getting punched by Terrazas as part of the eulogy. That last part especially makes me feel like Parker doesn't see anything wrong in his past behavior.
I like Parker and Elma's gradual and jagged sort of reconciliation, where she is touched by moments of kindness and respect from him, and hates that she reacts that way -- that felt very plausible/kind of relatable; that he kind of almost apologizes, or at least shows he's capable of learning, but he's still an asshole, and it's not monotonic, and he is definitely not perfect even after showing some growth. And the whole compliment conversation was oddly adorable: "Because you don't take my shit. Because I've seen you in a crisis, and you are disciplined as hell. Because you are a damn good pilot." "Were those compliments?" "No. Those were critical assessments. This is a compliment: damn good biscuit." The "I function better with a copilot" thing after Terrazas' death worked for me really well (the point where Elma realizes Parker is mourning a friend as well as trying to keep the crew together), and Elma being there to support him after they reestablish communication with earth and he knows his wife is dead, holding him and walking him through the mourner's Kaddish, also really worked for me. And by "worked for me" I mean, I've kind of wanted to read Elma/Parker since I read book 1 (I like Elma/Nathaniel as a couple, I really do, they're adorable, but Elma and Parker have so much foeyay!, but it wouldn't have been plausible at all in a book 1 setting, but cocooned together in a tin can in space for 3 years? grieving a mutual friend, and/or Parker grieving his wife, I'd read the hell out of that, tbh... But there are only a handful of stories on AO3, and they're all Elma/Nathaniel or Nicole/Kenneth. Alas, earwax.)
Random notes:
The book included a bunch of non-translated Afrikaans, which made sense, since Elma doesn't speak it, but it was handy to be reading while B was around, so I could make him translate it for me. There was some guesswork involved on a couple of the words, but between me having the context and him being able to understand most of the words courtesy of Dutch and listening to a bunch of songs and radio news in Afrikaans over the years, we made it work. :)
Conversely, I have no idea why MRK felt like she needed to include both the cyphered bits and the translation for Elma and Nathaniel's letters. Honestly, given how short this book is (shorter than either book 1 or book 3), it kindof feels like padding...
It was probably already the case in the first book but if so, I didn't notice, but I liked it here: the use of "meteoric" to mean essentially "catastrophic" was a neat touch.
Oh, and Florence being a "real" figure who inspired Uhura in Star Trek was cute! I was thinking that her role in communications felt kind of Uhura-like, and then that turned out to be intentional: nice!
Quote:
"Maybe I could get him [the reporter] to take Parker's photo with a single punch card." (Elma's enduring indignation at the stupid photo where Nathan is 'explaining' a single punch card to her was one of my favorite things.)
41. Mary Robinette Kowal, The Relentless Moon (Lady Astronaut 3) -- this one was less to my taste. I had not realized when I started that it had a different POV character, and I also did not realize that it was a different genre -- not space adventure but like a spy thriller thing, IN SPACE. I also did not realize, until I started, that the book was taking place during a portion of the same timeframe that The Fated Sky had already covered, which means that on the one hand, I knew how some things were going to turn out going in, but there were also enough things I did not know that there was a reasonable amount of suspense anyway, and it also managed to cast some things from book 2 in new light. But I missed the Space Adventure which I guess are one of the things that most attracts me to this series, and while she was an interesting character, I didn't like Nicole as much as I like Elma, so it wasn't as fun to spend time with her. The book was OK, and interesting additional facet to the universe, but not one I liked as much on its own.
I guess a lot of the charm of the prior two books is Elma as narrator and her excitement about space. Nicole is interestingly complex, and I appreciated the way her mind works, always evaluating angles and appearances and thinking through the possibilities of a nefarious mind (Elma can be very naive; Nicole is anything but), but I just... didn't want to spend a whole bunch of hours with her (and this is a much longer book than the Elma ones, so it was quite a few hours). I was amused at Nicole's exasperation with Elma and Nathan's cutesy rocket innuendo, and Elma's general shelteredness when it comes to sex, and also using "woman talking about sex" powers to discomfit men, like with the cat-o'-nine-tails bit. I was less interested in Spoilers from here her Swiss school/spy shenanigans background, but it I suppose it was handy for explaining her clearance and making her the protagonist of this particular story. I was also amused to see how quickly Nicole figured out that Elma and Nathan were sending secret messages to each other; OK, Nathan was not at his best when asking her for the book and the teletype garbage, but still, that took all of a single conversation XD The thing that bugged me, I guess, besides just not really clicking with Nicole as a person, is that for the first part of the book she kept doing things/trying to do things that were ill-advised and did not work out well, and then doing the same sort of thing again -- not the same ill-advised things, but pushing herself beyond what she was capable of sustaining in different circumstances. Which, Elma definitely makes mistakes as well, but hers tend to be ones of well-meaning cluelessness, and she does learn from them. With Nicole, I felt like her ambition, and the pilot's pretense of invulnerability, kept driving her to attempt things that ended badly, and I find that a lot less sympathetic as a flaw. And I assume the anorexia thing was well done, and is no less important to have representation for than something like Elma's anxiety, but unlike Elma's anxiety, which, I dunno, felt more plot-relevant I guess, I found the "what did you have for lunch" stuff just kind of tedious. It felt kind of like "what mental health awareness issue shall we give Nicole instead of Elma's anxiety", which might not be fair, but eh, I figure if I had enjoyed this aspect more, that thought wouldn't have occurred to me / would have been overtaken by appreciation of what MRK was doing there, and it was not.
The spy story -- OK, this was interesting, because I knew from Fated Sky that Curtis Frye was (one of) the bad guys, and I was pretty sure that if Frisch had been really implicated that would've come up, but we do also know that the Mars Expedition crew was getting censored news, so other people being also involved was still a possibility. And I liked the way the stuff with Curt was handled: even knowing he WAS the bad guy, he was pretty likable and convincing a lot of the time, and one could admire his calm and try to figure out the details of where he was bluffing and where he wasn't -- the tension of the story was still preserved, which is pretty cool considering book 2 spoiled the "big bad". Some of it got to be a bit ridiculous though and went beyond my suspension of disbelief, like all the people with F-names being involved or not-involved in various tangential ways (Birgit Furst and the affair, Frisch acting hazy under the poison, Faustino with his mostly-unrelated death due to trying to ski on the moon), all the stuff with handwriting and codes and who checked out the book when and for whom. In general that middle section where they're chasing the suspected saboteurs around the moon felt like it went on too long; the individual bits were fine, but did there have to be that many of them?
It was interesting to see, though, the things that did NOT get through the filters to Elma in Fated Sky -- Nathaniel being POISONED rather than just suffering from an ulcer came as a total shock, though it explains some of the things in Fated Sky better. And it was cool to see just how much the Mars Expedition crews weren't told about what was going on on Earth and on the Moon while they were in transit. And the suggestion that the faulty gauge that led to Terrazas's death, and maybe the E.Coli poisoning too, might have been the result of sabotage on Earth, rather than a tragic accident, was also pretty chilling.
One thing that did work for me was Nicole the consummate politician's wife refining her reactions into three phrases she can repeat without thinking, and the phrases then showing up again and again as part of other scenes; the setup where it first happens, and then, especially effectively, with Kenneth's death, and even two years later, at the reception for the return of the Mars expedition, retreating into those phrases when talking to Parker: "Thank you, that's very kind." "Yes, he was the love of my life." "And how are you holding up?"
Conversely, a thing that did not work for me was the epilogue in which we learn that Nicole is now the President of the United States. I liked her line that she "rode the coattails of a martyred husband. It sold well.", but I don't believe this to be plausible. Given how hard the women still have to fight for anything, real work on the Mars expedition, a chance to fly the big rockets, just being taken seriously -- having a female president in 1964, really? I don't buy it for a second, especially a woman without a prior political career, however much press she might have as an "astronette". And a woman touched by scandal, with the coded messages? Even with the US presumably reeling from the Earth First attacks, I don't see it at all.
I was, however, happy to see the Lindholms again and to see how they were doing. Eugene as the first lunar mayor is lovely (and I do find it easier to believe in a very carefully selected small society like the Moon colony). And of the new characters, I liked Ana Teresa, the docotr of the "angry terrier" bedside manner.
There was another thing that didn't work for me about this book, though, and it was feeling like, for all the international make-up of the IAC, the issues MRK seems to be interested in tackling have converged to a very Black vs white race relations perspective, which feels very US parochial to me. It feels like every conflict/interaction comes down to "white person vs Black person", even if some other variables are different, and the white person is not necessarily American. And I can kind of handwave it in perception because we're getting this story through yet another American POV (for all the Swiss school education), but it didn't feel like just Nicole's POV. Conflicts between people from different nations on the moon would be more complicated than that, but it all seems to come down to the same thing, which is disappointing and makes the world of the book feel smaller.
Random note: I don't know if it's more prominently done in this book, or if I just happened to be familiar with the names in question, but I spotted a couple of characters/referenced people named after real people (not historical figures like Aldrin and Armstrong, but MRK's friends and such). My favorite of those was definitely the reference to Ariela Housman's calligraphic series of astronaut portraits.
Quotes:
"There are two scenarios. The first is that she's happily married and you've insulted their relationship. The other is that her husband is abusive and she will not thank you for endangering her by drawing attention to it. In the range of possibilities in between, there's not a single one in which a joke about being a battered woman is funny."
Nicole about her house of worship: "The incense is the heady aroma of petroleum products in the form of fuel and tarmac. We have our catechism of call signs and the high holy language of acronyms. In the temple that is the hangar, we store our artifacts, relics, and holy vessels."
A reporter, with Nicole on the Moon giving an interview by phone: "Mrs Wargin told me that she was wearing a simple bue pantsuit, with a brooch given to her by her mother."
"I was retreating into that safe, calm vacuum where I could move without friction. Reentry was going to be hell later."
Hugo roundup: novel -- 5/6. Network Effect, Piranesi, Harrow the Ninth, The City We Became, Relentless Moon (though the last two are close and might end up swapping, we'll see). Relentless Moon is not nearly as original as Piranesi; it doesn't upend and deepen the series in the crazy way Harrow does (though it's doing something a bit similar, actually), and while I didn't like TCWB that much overall either, there were elements of that book I did like which I found more original and fun than I found Relentless Moon. So I think that's how it stacks up for me in novel space. Now I just need to go back and finish Black Sun, which has been languishing at 13% for like two months...
Hugo roundup: series -- 6/6 sampled, 2/6 "done". I wasn't sure how to track this one, since I was familiar with all of the nominated series to begin with, but there are series I'm 100% caught up on, and series I've read partially but plan to read more, and series I've read all I intend to read of them. I'm calling the first and the last "done", but my rankings for the others may well change as/if I read more entires. So: 100% caught up = Murderbot; read all I care to read = The Poppy War (first book and like 40% of book 2); partial reads which may evolve between now and close of voting: Daevabad (1 book and a bit of the sequel of the trilogy), the Interdependency (two books of three), Lady Astronaut (3 novels, but there are also the short works), October Daye (uhhh, 8 books out of 14? something like that -- and a smattering of stories, but not all the stories). Anyway, at the current level of progress, I think my rankings are as follows: Murderbot (it is by no means my favorite or an incredible series like Vorkosigan, but even its weakest entries were ones I enjoyed, and I love the strongest entries; I think it is too episodic and ~same-y to be an AMAZING series, but it's a solid one that I like a lot), Lady Astronaut (I like and respect book 1 and what the series is doing, but it's kind of a diminishing returns series for me), October Daye (very, very mixed for me, but some of the aspects, like the Luidaeg, do work for me very well, and something has kept me reading for 8 books), Daevabad? (on the strength of the one book I read, and the placement I'm least sure about, but if I had to put it somewhere, I guess it would be here for now, but I hope that it will move up as I read more), Interdependency (fun popcorn but also kind of diminishing returns, based on the two books I've read), The Poppy War (OK, I feel bad listing it last, because I thought the first book was VERY strong, but book 2 went so sharply downhill for me that, as a series, it doesn't work for me at all; what I like is The Poppy War, the novel; the series aspect of it just kind of squandered those aspects I liked in book 1 and replaced them with stuff I don't care for). Or, for ease of future manipulation, with no commentary: Murderbot, Lady Astronaut, Toby Daye, Daevabad, Interdependency, Poppy War.
I'm now also 70% into Leviathan Wakes and 40% into Nicky Drayden's The Prey of Gods, which are both books(/authors) I've meant to try for a while, so the vacation was good for my "to try" reading goals. I hope to have them in the next write-up, but I'm feeling kind of mixed on The Expanse book, and The Prey of Gods was working fine for me until I hit a particular scene which, while very effective, has made me reluctant to go back to it...
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1155681.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
38. Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven -- this was a book I've been aware of and low-key planning to read for years, but I had only a vague idea of what it was about: I knew there was something about a Shakespeare company in a post-apocalyptic setting, but from the title I'd assumed it was IN SPACE (rather than that the titular station was fictional). I also did not realize the apocalyptic event was a pandemic until
bearshorty mentioned it in my comments, and I'm glad I was forewarned about it going in. It worked for me to be reading about a pandemic in a pandemic year, similar to how Song for a New Day had worked for me in 2020, but I wouldn't have wanted to be ambushed by it.
I really enjoyed the book, although it's a different sort of book than the kind of SFF I usually enjoy. Like, I'm not even entirely sure it's SFF? (I'm not the only one to wonder, I see.) There's no additional technology, and it's not so far-future that the people are all that different, except, of course, for their experience of societal and technological collapse. (Maybe it would've felt more science-fictional if I'd read it before 2020, but we've had a global pandemic by now, though, thank god, much less deadly than the one in the book. But when Kirsten and August were talking about parallel universes and Earths where the Georgia flu didn't happen, or happened but wasn't as bad, it really felt like they were talking about Covid.) But it doesn't matter, because it's a lovely book, elegaic and hopeful and sort of... luminous. I'm definitely glad I read it, even if it's not at all what I had been expecting from my vaguely osmosed preconceptions about it.
It took a while after I finished the book before it occurred to me that this book was succeeding at what I think The Vanished Birds (which I had not liked) was trying to do -- a sort of mosaic narrative that, zoomed out, shows the ripples and intersections over a fairly scattered cast of characters and a longish period of time, all around a central theme. Where I think this works for me with Station Eleven is that the linkages are subtle but clear, and the beginning is really well chosen for the ripples to spread from that one central event and person, the performance of King Lear during which Arthur dies. Spoilers from here Arthur, Jeevan, and Kirsten are present, and Clark and Miranda involved soon after, and then you get to see the pandemic progress real time through Jeevan's and Miranda's and later Clark's POVs, and you get the post-apocalyptic POV from Kirsten, and the flashbacks from Arthur and Miranda, and it's all woven together in an elegant and well-constructed way that never felt disparate or arbitrary. Oh, and the same objects showing up in the different threads and different times, without it being clear at first how they made their way from one thread to another -- the stormy snowglobe, as a physical object, and Station Eleven (the comic books as a physical object and as a thing/fictional object in people's consciousness) -- work to pull the whole tapestry together. In retrospect it occurred to me that probably Jimenez was going for something similar with the flute and I guess the pelican in The Vanished Birds (down to naming the book after one of the things which becomes a sort of metaphorical title), but there isn't this slight mystery of how the blute gets around, and the birds are off isolated in the their own storyline, so it didn't add to up a cool tapestry with common threads running through effect for me. This way of putting a book together is a really unusual structure (at least for SFF), and I googled around after to see if other people thought The Vanished Birds was going for something similar, and at least a couple seemed to. But it actually worked for me here.
Another kind of odd thing about the book is that I tend to be a Character-first reader (followed by Setthing, and I don't like post-apocalyptic setting, so that certainly wasn't part of the draw), and I'm not that into the individual characters in Station Eleven, but somehow it worked for me anyway. I think, of the POV characters, I only really like Clark (who doesn't get many chapters), and feel sort of sympathetic towards Miranda. Kirsten is fine, but even with the interview she feels kind of like a cypher because some critical parts of her own past are locked away from her -- I didn't feel like I knew her very deeply. I didn't like Jeevan much, but for my purposes Jeevan and Kirsten were there to observe the worldbuilding -- the unfolding pandemic with Jeevan, the 20-years-after world through Kirsten. And Arthur was interesting, because he is not very likable (or at least not very likable to me), and also his storyline is the least science-fictional of the book, taking place entirely before the pandemic -- but both through his own eyes and hte eyes of people like Clark and Miranda, he felt human and wistful enough that I did actually enjoy his sections, and the counterpoint of normalcy, the Before world, which can be both petty and beautiful, works nicely to round out the tapestry, I guess. The old world, the world in the process of falling apart, which we get to see through Jeevan and Clark, the new world, Shakespeare's 400-years-ago world, the overtly science-fictional world of "Station Eleven" -- the echoes of themes, human connection and lack thereof, the importance of art / something beyond survival -- it all just worked for me on a poetic level almost. Not the prose, which was occasionally lovely but not in a poetic way, but sort of in a way a poem works by putting things next to each other, weaving threads of imagery, and having them come together in a way that doesn't have to make purely logical sense -- in assonances and reflections, except done through a prose structure rather than via rhyme and alliteration and stuff. It's really neat that this kind of thing can work.
And speaking of characters, it occurred to me at the end that the "character" I was reacting to most strongly / the most attached to was the Traveling Symphony itself. Not its individual members -- like, I'm definitely glad Kirsten survived and Sayid is OK and that they reunited with Charlie and the sixth guitar, but Dieter's death did not affect me much, and I think if any other individuals had died, it also wouldn't affect me greatly -- but I was worried about Kirsten and Charlie and the clarinet making their way back to the Company, or the Company getting separated/destroyed, or people choosing to go their separate ways at the end. Because the Company felt the most character-like to me, with those great descriptions of who is mad at whom for what minor things from five years ago, and the habit of counting departed guitars in their number, and the way the Shakespeare people get names but the orchestra members are referred to by their functions, and their long-standing arguments about what plays and costumes are relevant to their present audience. And once I'd realized that, I realized that I also felt similarly, but on a smaller scale, since we get a lot less time with them, about the folks in the airport terminal. Between Clark's POV (given that he was my favorite individual character) and getting to see this new enclave come together, from people randomly trapped in a small airport in Michigan, the section where we get to see the Museum of Civilization and its keepers come together was probably my favorite. (It might have also helped that I was reading this shortly after being in an airport for the first time in 2+ years and having pre-apocalyptic airport nostalgia feels of my own, admittedly... :P) Also, the quarantined plane and Tyler/the future prophet preaching to the dead inside was really chilling, and probably the thing from this book that will stay with me most vividly...
As with Song for a New Day last year, the progress of the pandemic and the post-pandemic world were interesting to see from the standpoint of being in the process of living in a (much milder) global pandemic. It did strain my disbelief how quickly things fell apart, and in what order. I wonder how much of those choices was research vs poetic choice, because it didn't feel intrinsically true to me, but I also don't know much about failure modes on that scale. I do know that when we did BCP audits at work, a pandemic is a really difficult one to recover from, because it's not localized in time or space and can crater every segment of your supply chain at once, so it does make sense that for something as virulent and with as high a death rate as the Georgian flu, the effects would be pretty catastrophic. But I feel like a lot of critical infrastructure things are automated now to the point that they would hold out longer even if nobody was coming to work (though, OK, this book was written before 2014, and probably a fair number of those lights-out automation type things are the work of recent years (we definitely stepped up our BCP stuff after the 2011 Japan quake, and I know other industries did as well). But still, it felt like "the internet" disappeared too quickly, and I would've expected pockets of greater technological stability / people like Ron-the-Dwarf kluging together technology out of surviving bits (which, admittedly, might exist, just outside of what the people in the novel can see. After all, we don't know what the pilot who flew to LA found on the West Coast, and the characters have a conversation about how maybe other parts of the world are in a different state, they just don't know it).
One thing I found neat/unusual about the book is the lacuna of the worst years. You get the old world via Arthur and his cohort, you get the first days of the pandemic via Jeevan and Clark and Miranda, but Clark's little community is naturally sheltered, and the other two threads end pretty soon -- and then you see the "present day" world of 20 years later, and you hear about how much safer things are now than they used to be. Our main post-pandemic POV, Kirsten, literally doesn't remember the worst of it, so we can never see it, but we get little references throughout, like Kirsten marveling that August made it to year 20 of the pandemic without ever having to kill anyone before. And what we do see is still pretty bad, with the town run by the Prophet, Kirsten's experiences with the two men she'd had to kill, the protocols the Company has, etc. The negative space approach to dealing with the worst of it really worked for me and was something I appreciated, because I really don't want to read about the worst of humanity.
I was getting very close to the end of the book and wondering how the whole thing was going to be wrapped up, since there wasn't much space left and also how does one wrap up a tapestry? But the ending worked for me: there is no sense of triumph in the Prophet's death -- it's necessary but pretty sad, knowing that Tyler was a little boy who went through some horrible things in those early years most likely, because everyone did, and the tragedy of the boy who shot him turning the gun on himself -- but there's survival, and the hope of something beyond survival in the mysterious electrical lights they can see from the tower, and community, and reunion, and that was a fitting ending.
So, yeah, I liked the book a lot, even if not in an "SF novel" sort of way, and I'm glad both that I finally read it and that I read it after 2020, because I think I appreciated it more in a post-Covid reality.
Quotes:
Jeevan: "He felt extravagantly, guiltily alive. The unfairness of it, his heart pumping faultlessly while somewhere Arthur lay cold and still."
"'I should call his lawyer,' the producer said.
This solution was inarguable, but so depressing that the group drank for several minutes in silence before anyone could bring themselves to speak."
Arthur in LA: "the same girl at two parties in this infinite city" and "the sun rsing on scenes of tedious debauchery"
Miranda: "In art school they talked about day jobs in tones of horror. She never would have imagined that her day job would be the calmest and least cluttered part of her life."
"Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor."
"The tattoo argument has lost all of its sting over the years and had become something like a familiar room where they met."
"None of the older Symphony members knew much about the science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended."
"There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth."
"The man playing the part of the aging actor sipped his tea, and in that moment, acting or not, it seemed to her that he was deeply unhappy."
Viola "whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her"
Clark: "This had been happening more and more lately, this nodding off unexpectedly, and it left him with an unsettled intimation of rehearsal. You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever."
Kirsten: "If she could only speak to August. We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid."
Arthur, thinking back on being seventeen: "during what seemed at the time like adulthood and seemed in retrospect like a dream."
Arthur: "He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like months to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one."
"If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonis and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain?"
P.S. Looks like an HBO miniseries is in the works, and I'm kind of impressed they're going forward with it despite Covid...
39. Victor Lavalle, The Changeling -- another one off the NPR list, and hmm. This was a lot more horror than the NPR blurb made it sound ("a modern urban fairy tale with one toe over the line into horror" -- uh, no, I beg to differ about the "one toe" thing -- large, climactic parts of it were full-on horror if you ask me), and so it suffers for me from the same thing horror always suffers from: I get to the end and am left going, "and what did I get out of reading this?", because whatever it is people who like horror get out of reading horror, I don't get that. I don't regret reading it, because there were some parts I liked, and one aspect I liked a lot (new parenting observations, before the horror comes along), and the horror, well, I guess it was masterfully done, probably? But I would say 75% of this book was Not My Thing, and in a way where it doesn't even help me figure out whether I should try to read more things by Victor Lavalle or not...
The part I really liked: everything about Apollo and Emma as new parents, because there was some very well done observational comedy there
The parts I liked: Apollo and Patrice's friendship, their banter and support. To a lesser extent, Apollo's courtship of Emma, and the dinner at the overpriced restaurant with her friend. Spoilers from here Apollo with Gayl, the little girl on the island, who was a very believable toddler. And the creepiness of a changeling setup in a world permeated by technology -- the texts and photos that seem to be coming from nowhere -- who is taking those photos? -- and disappearing off the phone, and analagy of inviting bad things over your threshold with all those Facebook photos of the baby was really nicely done.
Beyond that, I can appreciate the interwoven theme of fatherhood -- Apollo's abandonment issues from his father's disappearance and the truth behind that, the way that's rooted in Brian West's own childhood trauma, the way it translates to his parenting of Baby Brian, and the other parent-child links in the book -- Emma's parents and Emma and Kim, Jorgen and William/Kinder Garden, William and Agnes, the historical Nils and the sacrificed daughter -- but, mmm, I don't know that it said anything particularly novel to me, and/or maybe it's not a theme I'm particularly interested in exploring in such depth.
The chapters that set up the very, very disturbing scene where cw: child harm Emma tries to destroy the changeling, which comes across to Apollo as her killing their child in a very gruesome way, and nearly killing him to stop him from interfering, and the aftermath of that scene... I mean, that was well done, in the sense that it was difficult to read, but I don't think I got anything out of reading it (as a person who doesn't read horror), so, well, that was a very well done scene full of extreme unpleasantness that I got nothing out of, except that I guess I know which book is going on the "outside of your comfort zone" book meme question at the end of the year. Also, I'm actually still not entirely clear on why "killing" the changeling was necessary... In the changeling stories I'm familiar with, it forces the abducting faeries to come back and swap the babies back, but that pretty clearly didn't work in this case, since Emma had to go off and keep an eye on the real Baby Brian in the troll's cave anyway. Was she expecting it to work based on what Cal had told her? (why, since it doesn't seem to have ever worked before?) Is it something that confers some kind of protection on the real baby? (That also doesn't appear to be the case based on past experience, since it doesn't seem like any of the previous babies had survived.) Is Emma's willingness to go through with that for her real baby the thing that confers the magical powers on her that allows her to keep Brian alive and speak to Jorgen telepathically/make him do stuff? (??? And probably also not, because in looking over my notes, I see that Kim's story about how their parents really died shows that Emma had these telepathic/mind control abilities even as a small child, in an extreme enough situation.) Probably I should not be examining this from a logical perspective; probably the book is operating on some kind of horror narrative logic that I'm not famiiar with, but if I stopped to think about it, the horrible but powerful scene stopped making any sort of sense, leaving me with even more annoyance about why I'd had to read that. Also, on that subject, when Apollo and Emma reunite for the climax of the book, Apollo is extremely apologetic about not believing her that the "Brian" he was trying to protect was not a real baby, and she throws his (admittedly very shitty) words to here -- "Youre what's wrong with our family. You. Are. The. Problem. Go take another pill." -- back at him, but nowhere in this reunion is there any discussion/acknowledgement of the fact that she nearly killed him with a claw hammer to the face after chaining him up, which, uh, seems like something that's maybe also appropriate to work through. And speaking of logic, this didn't occur to me when I was reading, but after looking up
ambyr's write-up of the book, I have to concur that it's unclear to me what kind of happily-ever-after Apollo and Emma are riding towards, with a baby that everyone believes to be dead, her notoriously wanted to for the murder of a child, him having violated parole, and two dead bodies left behind (with video evidence for one of them?). Probably this is also meant to operate on some kind of horror logic, where as long as you survive the nightmare experience, everything will be OK, but given the otherwise grounded setting this takes place in... how? The story does sort of lampshade that with the "happily ever after" / "happily for today" conversation at the end, as well as Jorgen's diatribe against "happily ever after" earlier, but there's a large difference between what might happen years down the road from the ending of a fairy tale and an active murder investigation...
But let's back up a bit. After the very traumatic scene at the 28% mark, the book kind of devolved for me into mostly a bunch of things I either didn't care about or didn't enjoy. Kinder Garten and the reveal that there's both a literal troll and an internet troll involved -- meh, a bit too on the nose, and the snuff livestream setup just felt over the top. The island of women like Emma, hidden in the middle of the river/in an alternate dimension -- that whole segment felt like treading water, actually, though as I mentioned above I liked getting to see Apollo with a young child again. Jorgen and the reveal of the history of what's actually going on -- felt kind of like a letdown, although the revelation of what William had done, and why, was a neat element that brought things together. And the battle with the troll -- the red herring with the Daylight app got me, which was neat, but nothing else about it was particularly interesting to me, just a lot of gore and horror things that I don't care for.
So, ultimately, eh. Would I have read it if I'd known how much of it would end up working for me? No, probably not, or I would've stopped at the 25% mark and read a plot summary of the rest. Do I regret reading it? No, I don't, because it was an interesting experience in confirming yet again that horror doesn't work for me, and it was a book from an interesting voice that was new to me, which has value in itself.
Quotes:
"Brian had a habit of mispronouncing Lillian Kagwa's last name, and Lillian kept mistaking Brian for other white men. Hardly kismet."
"'I promise you,' he said. 'With me, all three of your wishes will come true.'
In this moment Emma Valentine faced a choice. She could see this moment as proof that Apollo Kagwa was an arrogant dick, or she could decide he was bold and worthy."
The fancy restaurant: "The median age of these customers was billionnaire. Even the busboys in this place were white."
"Apollo went through the baby bag, cross-checking like a pilot about to take flight. Bottle, three diapers, wipes, burp cloth, set of plastic keys for rattling, and finally, a small fluffy blanket."
"'Tummy time!' Apollo shouted, as if Brian had just successfully piloted an airplane."
"The other dads crowded closer and asked after Brian's development like coaches eyeballing a rival player."
"Maybe having a child was like being drunk. You couldn't gauge when you went from being charming to being an asshole." (My favorite quote from the book.)
"Soon it seemed strange to call this group the Survivors. They were here, but none of them had survived."
"Oh, you poor thing. You were begging to be devoured. [...] You leave a trail of breadcrumbs any wolf could follow, then act shocked when the wolf is outside your door."
40. Mary Robinette Kowal, The Fated Sky (Lady Astronaut 2) -- book 3 is nominated for Best Novel at the Hugos this year, and Lady Astronaut is up for the series award, so I wanted to catch up, which meant reading both books 2 and 3. It actually took me a while to get into book 2 -- I checked it out of the library, read part of the first chapter, then moved on to other books, and it disappeared off my Kindle unread. Then I checked it out again, after finishing Wayfarers 4, when I was thinking I'd be in the mood for more space things, and got distracted again by the books above. And even once I went back to Fated Sky, knowing I wanted to finish it before my library time ran out again, the first part was kind of a slog to get through: everything with the Cygnus Six and the FBI investigation and Elma taking over Helen's spot on the Mars Expedition and the friction it causes. But once the Mars Expedition launched and it was just the crew if the Nina rubbing along, I started enjoying the book once again, and ended up liking it on the whole, though not as much as book 1.
I mean, many of the things I'd liked about book 1 were still here, but they were either not new and not evolving in any drastic way (the post-Meteor world and diverging history, Elma's Jewishness, her relationship with Nathan) or not as prominent (Elma's mathematical gifts, dealing with her anxiety -- which, I'm glad she needs less help in that regard, so that's not a complaint, but it was something I found interesting and novel about book 1, which wasn't much of a thing here). Some of the things I appreciated about book 1, I didn't think were done as well in book 2: the "Elma the Nice White Lady" aspects of book 1 worked for me better than they did here. Leonard's "don't explain my own experience to me" speech felt, I dunno, anachronistic, or maybe too didactic? Maybe just more heavy-handed? performative? Or maybe it's got nothing to do with the book itself at all, and book 1 had all the same features/flaws, and they're more noticeable to me in *this* book because this year's Hugo crop has a whole bunch of books by Black authors, several of them specifically engaging with racism, and it's a question of contrast? But I did feel like the Black characters in this book, Florence and Leonard, felt less like full-fledged characters than the Lindholms in book 1 (or book 3) did, which made me feel like they were just there for the Race Commentary. Spoilers from here
Speaking of things that did not work well for me, I'm not sure I would've realized that Kam was meant to be trans if I hadn't gone into the book with a vague recollection from dinner with
ambyr,
factitious, and Kelly where whoever had read the book at that time mentioned that it had done something related to trans representation very badly, and as soon as we got the "Yet another reason to wish I'd been born a man" line, I figured this was probably the character involved. The afterword talks about MRK's choice to have Elma's POV keep referring to Kam with the "she/her" pronouns because Elma does not understand that Kam is trans, and MRK didn't see Kam having that conversation with Elma (Elsa switching to using Kam instead of "Kamilah" as soon as Kam asks her to suggests to me that she would've switched to the right pronouns, too, if Kam had asked her/explained). I'm actually not sure what the benefit is of including a trans character but misgendering him throughout the novel; I can respect the "historical plausibility" argument, but Elma gets explained a lot of things she's initially blind to over the course of this and the previous book, so why not also this one? And if MRK thought it was a bridge too far, then it seems like maybe Kam would've been a better fit for a novel with a different POV.
I've also seen complaints about Bury Your Gays in this book, and, well, factually that's definitely true -- one of the characters in the m/m relationship dies -- but actually everything about Terrazas was one of my favorite things about this book, from his radio play and general clowning around, to the banter with Rafael, to the way the space walk and subsequent accident play out, to the funeral and Rafael's grief, to the Mars lander being named in his honor. So it didn't bother me while I was reading, but seeing the complaints... well, I can't really think of other non-het characters in the series (the three novels I've read, anyway; I know there are also some short stories), which does make it rather unfortunate that the one non-het relationship (that I can recall) is broken up by death, even if I otherwise like the character, the relationship, and the death a lot.
But I did say I ultimately liked the book, so I should talk about the things I liked about it, actually. A lot of it was just the Space Adventure! stuff -- I'm apparently still a sucker for Space Adventure! (although MRK seems to enjoy writing about the poop side of Space Adventure! more than I enjoy reading about it; I did not need quite so much zero-g diarrhea and malfuncitoning toilets in my SF) That's one of the reasons I appreciated the space walk that leads to Terrazas's death as much as I did -- the problem (which may or may not be a simple problem), the combination of bad luck, deadliness of space, and human mistakes that leads to tragedy, the way the other astronauts react, both in the moment and after. The scene with Ruby's body and "the bag" also worked for me really well, the juxtaposition of the holiness of the kaddish and the mechanical, profane actions of the bag, "funcitoning as designed" -- I thought that was a powerful and well-written scene, and that was actually when my appreciation for the book started to grow. The way the astronauts use humour and nonsense like the rhyming game Elma and Kam play to deal with serious, deadly situations was neat, even if the coping mechanisms themselves didn't always work for me -- the rhyming left me cold, but the Flash Gordon callbacks continued to work for me very well. The space-farers dealing with the blackout of communications from earth and not knowing what was going on also worked for me. Most of everything to do with the crew of the Pinta, less so; I knew it was bound to happen that the two crews would have to coexist in the same space, so the thing with DeBeer the South African racist asshole and the non-white crew members of the Nina could play out, but the way it did play out was predictable and boring and kind of pro forma. DeBeer was such a flat character, with nothing redeemable or interesting about him, that he was just boring. And one of the reasons I resent that is that I kind of feel like he was introduced in part to make Parker look less bad, which -- Stetson Parker is actually probably the most interesting thing to me about these books, and the Elma-Parker stuff was my favorite thing about The Fated Sky, but I don't want Parker to be redeemed by means of putting him next to a cartoonish villain and making him look better by comparison. (Also, one thing I don't really get is, if Nina is the "separate but equal" crew, why is Parker, the First Man in Space, part of it? I mean, sure, *a* white man would be the one in charge of the ship, but why put the biggest name in the space program on the ship of 'misfits'? Did they want him specifically to keep an eye on said misfits? Did he volunteer for brownie points for Miriam's sake? I mean, Doylistically, obviously it's so that Parker and Elma end up on the same ship, which also needs to be the Ship of Representation, but I kept wondering about the in-universe explanation...)
But let's talk about Parker. I was intrigued by Parker from book 1, where he was this really interesting (to me) combination of highly competent pilot/astronaut, a good commander and teacher, and a vindictive, misogynist asshole, with serious bad history between him and the protagonist. It was also clear to me (even if not Elma) in book 1 that there was something interesting going on with his wife, that he was genuinely devoted to her while also carrying on an affair (and possibly continuing to hit on women in his vicinity whether they welcomed his advances or not). I really liked everything we got with Parker, the information on Parker's family, and Parker and Elma's changing relationship in this book. I like all the ways in which we get to see Parker as competent and clever and astute -- and using that astuteness both for good reasons (e.g. when dealing with grief-stricken Rafeal and the rest of the traumatized crew) and petty ones (to needle Elma). I liked everything that we got to see about how he chooses to obey or question or ignore Mission Control directions, and sometimes he gets it wrong but has to move on. The language thing I found to be kind of over the top, but it was still cute to see Parker getting to be nerdy about something. I was thinking about it after reading a couple of other reviews, and I don't think Parker is meant to be redeemed by this book -- more that Elma has now spent enough time with him and is sufficiently independent of him that she can see beyond the fear and hatred that permeated their relationship in book 1. The reason I don't think he's meant to be redeemed is that not only does nothing happen to address the issue of him bothering the WASPs "who hadn't felt like she could turn him down", over which he and Elma originally came into conflict (Elma reporting him to her general father), but that history is mentioned a couple of times in this book, once when Elma finds the condom in the zero-g toilet and is worried Parker is pressuring the other women for sex, and then again kind of by Parker himself during Terrazas's funeral, where he mentions propositioning his sister and getting punched by Terrazas as part of the eulogy. That last part especially makes me feel like Parker doesn't see anything wrong in his past behavior.
I like Parker and Elma's gradual and jagged sort of reconciliation, where she is touched by moments of kindness and respect from him, and hates that she reacts that way -- that felt very plausible/kind of relatable; that he kind of almost apologizes, or at least shows he's capable of learning, but he's still an asshole, and it's not monotonic, and he is definitely not perfect even after showing some growth. And the whole compliment conversation was oddly adorable: "Because you don't take my shit. Because I've seen you in a crisis, and you are disciplined as hell. Because you are a damn good pilot." "Were those compliments?" "No. Those were critical assessments. This is a compliment: damn good biscuit." The "I function better with a copilot" thing after Terrazas' death worked for me really well (the point where Elma realizes Parker is mourning a friend as well as trying to keep the crew together), and Elma being there to support him after they reestablish communication with earth and he knows his wife is dead, holding him and walking him through the mourner's Kaddish, also really worked for me. And by "worked for me" I mean, I've kind of wanted to read Elma/Parker since I read book 1 (I like Elma/Nathaniel as a couple, I really do, they're adorable, but Elma and Parker have so much foeyay!, but it wouldn't have been plausible at all in a book 1 setting, but cocooned together in a tin can in space for 3 years? grieving a mutual friend, and/or Parker grieving his wife, I'd read the hell out of that, tbh... But there are only a handful of stories on AO3, and they're all Elma/Nathaniel or Nicole/Kenneth. Alas, earwax.)
Random notes:
The book included a bunch of non-translated Afrikaans, which made sense, since Elma doesn't speak it, but it was handy to be reading while B was around, so I could make him translate it for me. There was some guesswork involved on a couple of the words, but between me having the context and him being able to understand most of the words courtesy of Dutch and listening to a bunch of songs and radio news in Afrikaans over the years, we made it work. :)
Conversely, I have no idea why MRK felt like she needed to include both the cyphered bits and the translation for Elma and Nathaniel's letters. Honestly, given how short this book is (shorter than either book 1 or book 3), it kindof feels like padding...
It was probably already the case in the first book but if so, I didn't notice, but I liked it here: the use of "meteoric" to mean essentially "catastrophic" was a neat touch.
Oh, and Florence being a "real" figure who inspired Uhura in Star Trek was cute! I was thinking that her role in communications felt kind of Uhura-like, and then that turned out to be intentional: nice!
Quote:
"Maybe I could get him [the reporter] to take Parker's photo with a single punch card." (Elma's enduring indignation at the stupid photo where Nathan is 'explaining' a single punch card to her was one of my favorite things.)
41. Mary Robinette Kowal, The Relentless Moon (Lady Astronaut 3) -- this one was less to my taste. I had not realized when I started that it had a different POV character, and I also did not realize that it was a different genre -- not space adventure but like a spy thriller thing, IN SPACE. I also did not realize, until I started, that the book was taking place during a portion of the same timeframe that The Fated Sky had already covered, which means that on the one hand, I knew how some things were going to turn out going in, but there were also enough things I did not know that there was a reasonable amount of suspense anyway, and it also managed to cast some things from book 2 in new light. But I missed the Space Adventure which I guess are one of the things that most attracts me to this series, and while she was an interesting character, I didn't like Nicole as much as I like Elma, so it wasn't as fun to spend time with her. The book was OK, and interesting additional facet to the universe, but not one I liked as much on its own.
I guess a lot of the charm of the prior two books is Elma as narrator and her excitement about space. Nicole is interestingly complex, and I appreciated the way her mind works, always evaluating angles and appearances and thinking through the possibilities of a nefarious mind (Elma can be very naive; Nicole is anything but), but I just... didn't want to spend a whole bunch of hours with her (and this is a much longer book than the Elma ones, so it was quite a few hours). I was amused at Nicole's exasperation with Elma and Nathan's cutesy rocket innuendo, and Elma's general shelteredness when it comes to sex, and also using "woman talking about sex" powers to discomfit men, like with the cat-o'-nine-tails bit. I was less interested in Spoilers from here her Swiss school/spy shenanigans background, but it I suppose it was handy for explaining her clearance and making her the protagonist of this particular story. I was also amused to see how quickly Nicole figured out that Elma and Nathan were sending secret messages to each other; OK, Nathan was not at his best when asking her for the book and the teletype garbage, but still, that took all of a single conversation XD The thing that bugged me, I guess, besides just not really clicking with Nicole as a person, is that for the first part of the book she kept doing things/trying to do things that were ill-advised and did not work out well, and then doing the same sort of thing again -- not the same ill-advised things, but pushing herself beyond what she was capable of sustaining in different circumstances. Which, Elma definitely makes mistakes as well, but hers tend to be ones of well-meaning cluelessness, and she does learn from them. With Nicole, I felt like her ambition, and the pilot's pretense of invulnerability, kept driving her to attempt things that ended badly, and I find that a lot less sympathetic as a flaw. And I assume the anorexia thing was well done, and is no less important to have representation for than something like Elma's anxiety, but unlike Elma's anxiety, which, I dunno, felt more plot-relevant I guess, I found the "what did you have for lunch" stuff just kind of tedious. It felt kind of like "what mental health awareness issue shall we give Nicole instead of Elma's anxiety", which might not be fair, but eh, I figure if I had enjoyed this aspect more, that thought wouldn't have occurred to me / would have been overtaken by appreciation of what MRK was doing there, and it was not.
The spy story -- OK, this was interesting, because I knew from Fated Sky that Curtis Frye was (one of) the bad guys, and I was pretty sure that if Frisch had been really implicated that would've come up, but we do also know that the Mars Expedition crew was getting censored news, so other people being also involved was still a possibility. And I liked the way the stuff with Curt was handled: even knowing he WAS the bad guy, he was pretty likable and convincing a lot of the time, and one could admire his calm and try to figure out the details of where he was bluffing and where he wasn't -- the tension of the story was still preserved, which is pretty cool considering book 2 spoiled the "big bad". Some of it got to be a bit ridiculous though and went beyond my suspension of disbelief, like all the people with F-names being involved or not-involved in various tangential ways (Birgit Furst and the affair, Frisch acting hazy under the poison, Faustino with his mostly-unrelated death due to trying to ski on the moon), all the stuff with handwriting and codes and who checked out the book when and for whom. In general that middle section where they're chasing the suspected saboteurs around the moon felt like it went on too long; the individual bits were fine, but did there have to be that many of them?
It was interesting to see, though, the things that did NOT get through the filters to Elma in Fated Sky -- Nathaniel being POISONED rather than just suffering from an ulcer came as a total shock, though it explains some of the things in Fated Sky better. And it was cool to see just how much the Mars Expedition crews weren't told about what was going on on Earth and on the Moon while they were in transit. And the suggestion that the faulty gauge that led to Terrazas's death, and maybe the E.Coli poisoning too, might have been the result of sabotage on Earth, rather than a tragic accident, was also pretty chilling.
One thing that did work for me was Nicole the consummate politician's wife refining her reactions into three phrases she can repeat without thinking, and the phrases then showing up again and again as part of other scenes; the setup where it first happens, and then, especially effectively, with Kenneth's death, and even two years later, at the reception for the return of the Mars expedition, retreating into those phrases when talking to Parker: "Thank you, that's very kind." "Yes, he was the love of my life." "And how are you holding up?"
Conversely, a thing that did not work for me was the epilogue in which we learn that Nicole is now the President of the United States. I liked her line that she "rode the coattails of a martyred husband. It sold well.", but I don't believe this to be plausible. Given how hard the women still have to fight for anything, real work on the Mars expedition, a chance to fly the big rockets, just being taken seriously -- having a female president in 1964, really? I don't buy it for a second, especially a woman without a prior political career, however much press she might have as an "astronette". And a woman touched by scandal, with the coded messages? Even with the US presumably reeling from the Earth First attacks, I don't see it at all.
I was, however, happy to see the Lindholms again and to see how they were doing. Eugene as the first lunar mayor is lovely (and I do find it easier to believe in a very carefully selected small society like the Moon colony). And of the new characters, I liked Ana Teresa, the docotr of the "angry terrier" bedside manner.
There was another thing that didn't work for me about this book, though, and it was feeling like, for all the international make-up of the IAC, the issues MRK seems to be interested in tackling have converged to a very Black vs white race relations perspective, which feels very US parochial to me. It feels like every conflict/interaction comes down to "white person vs Black person", even if some other variables are different, and the white person is not necessarily American. And I can kind of handwave it in perception because we're getting this story through yet another American POV (for all the Swiss school education), but it didn't feel like just Nicole's POV. Conflicts between people from different nations on the moon would be more complicated than that, but it all seems to come down to the same thing, which is disappointing and makes the world of the book feel smaller.
Random note: I don't know if it's more prominently done in this book, or if I just happened to be familiar with the names in question, but I spotted a couple of characters/referenced people named after real people (not historical figures like Aldrin and Armstrong, but MRK's friends and such). My favorite of those was definitely the reference to Ariela Housman's calligraphic series of astronaut portraits.
Quotes:
"There are two scenarios. The first is that she's happily married and you've insulted their relationship. The other is that her husband is abusive and she will not thank you for endangering her by drawing attention to it. In the range of possibilities in between, there's not a single one in which a joke about being a battered woman is funny."
Nicole about her house of worship: "The incense is the heady aroma of petroleum products in the form of fuel and tarmac. We have our catechism of call signs and the high holy language of acronyms. In the temple that is the hangar, we store our artifacts, relics, and holy vessels."
A reporter, with Nicole on the Moon giving an interview by phone: "Mrs Wargin told me that she was wearing a simple bue pantsuit, with a brooch given to her by her mother."
"I was retreating into that safe, calm vacuum where I could move without friction. Reentry was going to be hell later."
Hugo roundup: novel -- 5/6. Network Effect, Piranesi, Harrow the Ninth, The City We Became, Relentless Moon (though the last two are close and might end up swapping, we'll see). Relentless Moon is not nearly as original as Piranesi; it doesn't upend and deepen the series in the crazy way Harrow does (though it's doing something a bit similar, actually), and while I didn't like TCWB that much overall either, there were elements of that book I did like which I found more original and fun than I found Relentless Moon. So I think that's how it stacks up for me in novel space. Now I just need to go back and finish Black Sun, which has been languishing at 13% for like two months...
Hugo roundup: series -- 6/6 sampled, 2/6 "done". I wasn't sure how to track this one, since I was familiar with all of the nominated series to begin with, but there are series I'm 100% caught up on, and series I've read partially but plan to read more, and series I've read all I intend to read of them. I'm calling the first and the last "done", but my rankings for the others may well change as/if I read more entires. So: 100% caught up = Murderbot; read all I care to read = The Poppy War (first book and like 40% of book 2); partial reads which may evolve between now and close of voting: Daevabad (1 book and a bit of the sequel of the trilogy), the Interdependency (two books of three), Lady Astronaut (3 novels, but there are also the short works), October Daye (uhhh, 8 books out of 14? something like that -- and a smattering of stories, but not all the stories). Anyway, at the current level of progress, I think my rankings are as follows: Murderbot (it is by no means my favorite or an incredible series like Vorkosigan, but even its weakest entries were ones I enjoyed, and I love the strongest entries; I think it is too episodic and ~same-y to be an AMAZING series, but it's a solid one that I like a lot), Lady Astronaut (I like and respect book 1 and what the series is doing, but it's kind of a diminishing returns series for me), October Daye (very, very mixed for me, but some of the aspects, like the Luidaeg, do work for me very well, and something has kept me reading for 8 books), Daevabad? (on the strength of the one book I read, and the placement I'm least sure about, but if I had to put it somewhere, I guess it would be here for now, but I hope that it will move up as I read more), Interdependency (fun popcorn but also kind of diminishing returns, based on the two books I've read), The Poppy War (OK, I feel bad listing it last, because I thought the first book was VERY strong, but book 2 went so sharply downhill for me that, as a series, it doesn't work for me at all; what I like is The Poppy War, the novel; the series aspect of it just kind of squandered those aspects I liked in book 1 and replaced them with stuff I don't care for). Or, for ease of future manipulation, with no commentary: Murderbot, Lady Astronaut, Toby Daye, Daevabad, Interdependency, Poppy War.
I'm now also 70% into Leviathan Wakes and 40% into Nicky Drayden's The Prey of Gods, which are both books(/authors) I've meant to try for a while, so the vacation was good for my "to try" reading goals. I hope to have them in the next write-up, but I'm feeling kind of mixed on The Expanse book, and The Prey of Gods was working fine for me until I hit a particular scene which, while very effective, has made me reluctant to go back to it...
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1155681.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).