Fiction: lots
Zoe Chant, Leader Lion: Shifter romance: bodyguard lion shifter meets curvy stage manager as a result of shenanigans at the show she’s trying to run, recognizes her as his true mate. Unfortunately she’s human and doesn’t know about shifters, so her attraction while reciprocal isn’t as certain, and more unfortunately he ends up misleading her about his relationship to the leading lady. More theater shenanigans ensue, with people mostly acting in good faith rather than prologing misunderstandings for the sake of drama.
Erin Bow, The Scorpion Rules: Greta is a princess, and a hostage: the AI ruling the post-global warming, water-scarce world has declared that any leader of a country must have a child-hostage under the AI’s control. The leader can choose to fight a war, whether offensively or defensively, but will have their hostage killed as a result. After a revolution, Greta, who represents the entity that occupies what’s now Canada, gets a new counterpart from what used to be a big chunk of the US; they’re very likely to go to war over water access soon, and the new hostage isn’t at all reconciled to the way things are, as Greta is. Bow explores the various ways that a person can be tortured, in terrifying detail both physical and psychological, and the ways in which people survive, and deform, under such circumstances. It’s a thought-provoking and entertaining read, if you can deal with the torture (which is never presented as anything but horrifying).
Erin Bow, The Swan Riders: Sequel to The Scorpion Rules. Greta, now transformed, struggles to deal with her new situation and to convince the AI who controls the world by threatening to destroy cities of nations that defy him that peace achieved through terror can never be true peace. There are some hiccups in her process. Not quite as good as the first book, though I did like her exploration of what it means to be loyal to an institution while also wanting it to change.
Kat Howard, An Unkindness of Magicians: Magic is Unseen, hidden from mundanes by the laws of the magical community, which is currently undergoing a Turning, where leadership of the community may change from one House to another. Various upstarts are plotting, as are the already powerful. Into this uncertainty comes a woman who’s escaped from the House of Shadows, where sacrifices go for their magic to be painfully drained and used by others. Also, there’s a serial killer of women on the loose (why does it always have to be women? I know, but…). It’s hard not to think of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, given that most people in the magic community know where their easy power comes from; this novel is pretty clear that even if you get rid of the atrocity, the people who survived it are not okay, and the people who allowed it are still around.
Amie Kaufman, Illuminae: SF epistolary/documentary novel with some portions told through images created by words. Snarky computer genius breaks up with her boyfriend, then her colony is attacked by a competing company and they end up on a ragtag refugee fleet. Things get worse as the ex is conscripted to become a fighter pilot and their only battleship’s AI goes dangerously haywire. If you like people who get more mouthy as their situations get worse and/or experiments with the visual placement of text, you may well enjoy this.
Catherine Asaro, Schism: This turns out not to be the beginning of the Ruby Dynasty books about the empaths who rule one empire while trying to fight off the empath-torturing antiempaths who rule another, but it still explained enough to be an okay starting point. Humanity has spread out and changed into a number of variants through deliberate manipulation and genetic drift; only the Rhon psions can run the Network that enables the Ruby Empire to maintain FTL travel, its only advantage over the Traders (who enslave everyone they can, and love the suffering of empaths they keep as “providers”). This book focuses on the family drama of one branch of the Rhon psions, with two children going into military training and their poet-king father fighting it-until he falls into the hands of a Trader on a secret mission. I’m not sure I’m sold yet, but I’m willing to keep going.
Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever: Grace is a huge fan of a boy bad, Fever Dream, and in particular she ships two of the boys and is convinced they’re secretly together, as she insists on her Tumblr. Then one night she meets the lead singer, and gets caught by a photographer meeting him, and things escalate from there. Turns out, they all have secrets, and crossing the streams might not be good for anyone. It’s a good portrayal of fandom, the way it can help and hurt, distort and clarify.
Victor LaValle, The Changeling: Apollo is a New York native, son of an African immigrant and a police officer, whose rosy life as a bookseller and new father is shattered by a horrific crime. As he stumbles through the aftermath-not helped by the way the police and the judicial system treat young black men-he starts to learn that the horror he experienced might not be over yet. Mixing modern internet crimes with fairytales, New York realism with evocations of The Great Gatsby, I found it a compelling but ultimately unpleasant read. The whole thing is very ominious, using omniscient POV at times to great advantage but mostly keeping us just as in the dark as Apollo, but I felt it suffered from the “I’m not going to explain things to you because that would short-cut the narrative” phenomenon. Given the horror/fantasy elements, it’s plausible to say “you wouldn’t believe me if I told you” a few times, and it’s psychologically plausible that an estranged and exhausted wife wouldn’t try to convince her husband that their baby was a changeling, but it happened enough that I got mad at the characters who weren’t even trying. Perhaps that’s my defect and not theirs. There’s also a running theme about the particular, often imperialist/racilly inflected, evil of using another’s child as a sacrifice-including a reminder that a man who sacrifices his own child is also sacrificing another person’s child. Lots of child harm (suggested but not gorily described).
James S.A. Corey, Persepolis Rising: The narrative jumps ahead several decades; many of the key characters are still around, but new people are taking over-and Bobbie is going to be the new captain when James Holden and Naomi Nagata retire, as they are preparing to do when the novel opens. Then, of course, it all goes to shit when an invasion changes the shape of the human race. The main villain, Winston Duarte, is a great example of an understandable but deeply evil person-not in the least dumb, but convinced of his right to rule others, to live forever, and to sacrifice anyone to the protomolecule if it helps him.
Fran Wilde, Updraft: Kirit is hoping to earn her glider wings and become a trader between Towers, like her mother. The Towers are living bone, part of the City above the clouds. Below is only death and destruction, and invisible skymouths stalk the skies; only Singers can protect the City from them and coax the Towers into growing larger to support a growing population. But when Kirit breaks the law and discovers that she has Singer talents, she stumbles into a deadly conspiracy and is forced to harm all she holds dear. I see why others found the worldbuilding interesting, but it wasn’t for me.
Naomi Alderman, The Power: Girls, and then women, worldwide start developing the power to administer electric shocks; many of them can make the shocks fatal. My thoughts about this are conflicted. The book feels like a move in a second-wave feminist argument: power is sexy; if most women could easily kill other people and men usually couldn’t, women would act like men and men would act like women; all power corrupts, and all power has branching effects that are fractal/not entirely predictable from the center (like lightning, see?).
The frame narrative in which a man amusingly (to his indulgent female betters) reconstructs a forgotten world in which men had power over women doesn’t make sense, because the core story includes realistic details that the frame narrative insists are lost to history. And the ways in which women quickly reverse all our current stereotypes and atrocities to inflict them on men didn’t work for me. The twentieth century is replete with evidence that discrimination, and even genocide, can arise quickly, so I can’t say it wasn’t plausible in some sense, but this version didn’t feel inventive enough to be worth the effort. Women immediately switching to rape as part of warfare, sexually harassing men in the workforce, deciding that they were more intelligent than men, denying men the right to drive, requiring all men to have female guardians (because they’re so dangerous on their own), even ultimately engaging in male genital mutilation so that only electric stimulation could get them hard and orgasm was often painful; men starting to simper and pretend to be dumb to curry favor with women-all this seemed to lack imagination.
More broadly, I have deep reservations about the implicit argument that, if women could easily kill men, the current social category “men” would turn into the current (or even more retrograde) social category “women.” First, there’s the question of ideology: so far, patriarchy has been relatively successful at revaluing male as good and female as bad no matter what-see, e.g., the treatment of doctors (a heavily female profession in Russia, heavily male traditionally in the US). The counterargument can’t lightly be set aside: the book shows a political candidate who loses her temper and nearly shocks her male opponent when he says something nasty to her, and it’s that very display of nearly unchecked power, and willingness to use it, that wins her the election even though people say they disapprove. After 2016 I can’t say for sure that voters would react otherwise, but I also think there’s an existing narrative of female unreliability/emotionality that would work against such a switch. After all, it’s not like Trump actually was stronger than Clinton-he’s an unhealthy coward. I have trouble believing that women would become the class to whom that kind of power was attributed and for whom that kind of willingness to harm was valued in a few years. But even after that, the implicit argument of the book is that systematic oppression grows out of the physical power disparity of men and women, to which I respond: chattel slavery was imposed on people who were often physically more powerful than their enslavers. There were indeed revolts, some of them successful, but slavery also persisted where enslavers were able to keep enslaved people divided, to threaten them with massive retaliation if they exercised their physical power against enslavers, and to hold hostages for good behavior. With a preexisting ideology supporting patriarchy and preexisting divisions among women (not least race-based), I am dubious that the switch the book describes would happen. I presume the thought is, well, that’s why the Cataclysm occurred-there was enough of a backlash to create global war sufficiently destructive to leave almost no intact artifacts or even information behind. But even if that’s the worldbuilding answer, by only featuring characters who accept that the polarities of gender have been reversed, Alderman creates the impression of unity in reaction (even if a lot of the men are mad about the change, they all accept that it has happened).
The characters are also mostly-well, I can also no longer say that cartoon villainy is implausible; 2017’s storyline is proof of that. But that doesn’t mean that it’s fun to read about, or what I go to f/sf to get. Still, I have to admit that even though I’ve tried to unlearn a lot of gendered codes I was discomfited by the supplicating tone in which the man in the frame story wrote his female mentor-and I likely wouldn’t have been as sensitized to the same note written by a young woman to her male mentor.
Sarah Maas, Tower of Dawn: Wisely, Maas detours from the main characters to spend some time with Chaol Westfall, a paraplegic from the injuries he suffered when Aelin destroyed a city, and his sometime lover. They travel to a new country to seek healing, and both of them find both intrigue and new love. The interpersonal conflicts have good reasons, grounded in character and the palace politics surrounding them as they try to get aid against the demon invasion, and it is all in all a good entry in the series.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Erin Bow, The Scorpion Rules: Greta is a princess, and a hostage: the AI ruling the post-global warming, water-scarce world has declared that any leader of a country must have a child-hostage under the AI’s control. The leader can choose to fight a war, whether offensively or defensively, but will have their hostage killed as a result. After a revolution, Greta, who represents the entity that occupies what’s now Canada, gets a new counterpart from what used to be a big chunk of the US; they’re very likely to go to war over water access soon, and the new hostage isn’t at all reconciled to the way things are, as Greta is. Bow explores the various ways that a person can be tortured, in terrifying detail both physical and psychological, and the ways in which people survive, and deform, under such circumstances. It’s a thought-provoking and entertaining read, if you can deal with the torture (which is never presented as anything but horrifying).
Erin Bow, The Swan Riders: Sequel to The Scorpion Rules. Greta, now transformed, struggles to deal with her new situation and to convince the AI who controls the world by threatening to destroy cities of nations that defy him that peace achieved through terror can never be true peace. There are some hiccups in her process. Not quite as good as the first book, though I did like her exploration of what it means to be loyal to an institution while also wanting it to change.
Kat Howard, An Unkindness of Magicians: Magic is Unseen, hidden from mundanes by the laws of the magical community, which is currently undergoing a Turning, where leadership of the community may change from one House to another. Various upstarts are plotting, as are the already powerful. Into this uncertainty comes a woman who’s escaped from the House of Shadows, where sacrifices go for their magic to be painfully drained and used by others. Also, there’s a serial killer of women on the loose (why does it always have to be women? I know, but…). It’s hard not to think of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, given that most people in the magic community know where their easy power comes from; this novel is pretty clear that even if you get rid of the atrocity, the people who survived it are not okay, and the people who allowed it are still around.
Amie Kaufman, Illuminae: SF epistolary/documentary novel with some portions told through images created by words. Snarky computer genius breaks up with her boyfriend, then her colony is attacked by a competing company and they end up on a ragtag refugee fleet. Things get worse as the ex is conscripted to become a fighter pilot and their only battleship’s AI goes dangerously haywire. If you like people who get more mouthy as their situations get worse and/or experiments with the visual placement of text, you may well enjoy this.
Catherine Asaro, Schism: This turns out not to be the beginning of the Ruby Dynasty books about the empaths who rule one empire while trying to fight off the empath-torturing antiempaths who rule another, but it still explained enough to be an okay starting point. Humanity has spread out and changed into a number of variants through deliberate manipulation and genetic drift; only the Rhon psions can run the Network that enables the Ruby Empire to maintain FTL travel, its only advantage over the Traders (who enslave everyone they can, and love the suffering of empaths they keep as “providers”). This book focuses on the family drama of one branch of the Rhon psions, with two children going into military training and their poet-king father fighting it-until he falls into the hands of a Trader on a secret mission. I’m not sure I’m sold yet, but I’m willing to keep going.
Zan Romanoff, Grace and the Fever: Grace is a huge fan of a boy bad, Fever Dream, and in particular she ships two of the boys and is convinced they’re secretly together, as she insists on her Tumblr. Then one night she meets the lead singer, and gets caught by a photographer meeting him, and things escalate from there. Turns out, they all have secrets, and crossing the streams might not be good for anyone. It’s a good portrayal of fandom, the way it can help and hurt, distort and clarify.
Victor LaValle, The Changeling: Apollo is a New York native, son of an African immigrant and a police officer, whose rosy life as a bookseller and new father is shattered by a horrific crime. As he stumbles through the aftermath-not helped by the way the police and the judicial system treat young black men-he starts to learn that the horror he experienced might not be over yet. Mixing modern internet crimes with fairytales, New York realism with evocations of The Great Gatsby, I found it a compelling but ultimately unpleasant read. The whole thing is very ominious, using omniscient POV at times to great advantage but mostly keeping us just as in the dark as Apollo, but I felt it suffered from the “I’m not going to explain things to you because that would short-cut the narrative” phenomenon. Given the horror/fantasy elements, it’s plausible to say “you wouldn’t believe me if I told you” a few times, and it’s psychologically plausible that an estranged and exhausted wife wouldn’t try to convince her husband that their baby was a changeling, but it happened enough that I got mad at the characters who weren’t even trying. Perhaps that’s my defect and not theirs. There’s also a running theme about the particular, often imperialist/racilly inflected, evil of using another’s child as a sacrifice-including a reminder that a man who sacrifices his own child is also sacrificing another person’s child. Lots of child harm (suggested but not gorily described).
James S.A. Corey, Persepolis Rising: The narrative jumps ahead several decades; many of the key characters are still around, but new people are taking over-and Bobbie is going to be the new captain when James Holden and Naomi Nagata retire, as they are preparing to do when the novel opens. Then, of course, it all goes to shit when an invasion changes the shape of the human race. The main villain, Winston Duarte, is a great example of an understandable but deeply evil person-not in the least dumb, but convinced of his right to rule others, to live forever, and to sacrifice anyone to the protomolecule if it helps him.
Fran Wilde, Updraft: Kirit is hoping to earn her glider wings and become a trader between Towers, like her mother. The Towers are living bone, part of the City above the clouds. Below is only death and destruction, and invisible skymouths stalk the skies; only Singers can protect the City from them and coax the Towers into growing larger to support a growing population. But when Kirit breaks the law and discovers that she has Singer talents, she stumbles into a deadly conspiracy and is forced to harm all she holds dear. I see why others found the worldbuilding interesting, but it wasn’t for me.
Naomi Alderman, The Power: Girls, and then women, worldwide start developing the power to administer electric shocks; many of them can make the shocks fatal. My thoughts about this are conflicted. The book feels like a move in a second-wave feminist argument: power is sexy; if most women could easily kill other people and men usually couldn’t, women would act like men and men would act like women; all power corrupts, and all power has branching effects that are fractal/not entirely predictable from the center (like lightning, see?).
The frame narrative in which a man amusingly (to his indulgent female betters) reconstructs a forgotten world in which men had power over women doesn’t make sense, because the core story includes realistic details that the frame narrative insists are lost to history. And the ways in which women quickly reverse all our current stereotypes and atrocities to inflict them on men didn’t work for me. The twentieth century is replete with evidence that discrimination, and even genocide, can arise quickly, so I can’t say it wasn’t plausible in some sense, but this version didn’t feel inventive enough to be worth the effort. Women immediately switching to rape as part of warfare, sexually harassing men in the workforce, deciding that they were more intelligent than men, denying men the right to drive, requiring all men to have female guardians (because they’re so dangerous on their own), even ultimately engaging in male genital mutilation so that only electric stimulation could get them hard and orgasm was often painful; men starting to simper and pretend to be dumb to curry favor with women-all this seemed to lack imagination.
More broadly, I have deep reservations about the implicit argument that, if women could easily kill men, the current social category “men” would turn into the current (or even more retrograde) social category “women.” First, there’s the question of ideology: so far, patriarchy has been relatively successful at revaluing male as good and female as bad no matter what-see, e.g., the treatment of doctors (a heavily female profession in Russia, heavily male traditionally in the US). The counterargument can’t lightly be set aside: the book shows a political candidate who loses her temper and nearly shocks her male opponent when he says something nasty to her, and it’s that very display of nearly unchecked power, and willingness to use it, that wins her the election even though people say they disapprove. After 2016 I can’t say for sure that voters would react otherwise, but I also think there’s an existing narrative of female unreliability/emotionality that would work against such a switch. After all, it’s not like Trump actually was stronger than Clinton-he’s an unhealthy coward. I have trouble believing that women would become the class to whom that kind of power was attributed and for whom that kind of willingness to harm was valued in a few years. But even after that, the implicit argument of the book is that systematic oppression grows out of the physical power disparity of men and women, to which I respond: chattel slavery was imposed on people who were often physically more powerful than their enslavers. There were indeed revolts, some of them successful, but slavery also persisted where enslavers were able to keep enslaved people divided, to threaten them with massive retaliation if they exercised their physical power against enslavers, and to hold hostages for good behavior. With a preexisting ideology supporting patriarchy and preexisting divisions among women (not least race-based), I am dubious that the switch the book describes would happen. I presume the thought is, well, that’s why the Cataclysm occurred-there was enough of a backlash to create global war sufficiently destructive to leave almost no intact artifacts or even information behind. But even if that’s the worldbuilding answer, by only featuring characters who accept that the polarities of gender have been reversed, Alderman creates the impression of unity in reaction (even if a lot of the men are mad about the change, they all accept that it has happened).
The characters are also mostly-well, I can also no longer say that cartoon villainy is implausible; 2017’s storyline is proof of that. But that doesn’t mean that it’s fun to read about, or what I go to f/sf to get. Still, I have to admit that even though I’ve tried to unlearn a lot of gendered codes I was discomfited by the supplicating tone in which the man in the frame story wrote his female mentor-and I likely wouldn’t have been as sensitized to the same note written by a young woman to her male mentor.
Sarah Maas, Tower of Dawn: Wisely, Maas detours from the main characters to spend some time with Chaol Westfall, a paraplegic from the injuries he suffered when Aelin destroyed a city, and his sometime lover. They travel to a new country to seek healing, and both of them find both intrigue and new love. The interpersonal conflicts have good reasons, grounded in character and the palace politics surrounding them as they try to get aid against the demon invasion, and it is all in all a good entry in the series.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.