Fiction
Aimee Kaufman, Gemina: Yep, this is pretty much a rewrite of the first book in the series, Illuminae: Spunky, well-trained teenage girl and kind-of-fucked-up-but-ultimately-noble teenage boy survive a space massacre and then try to survive the aftermath as perpetrators of said massacre try to kill them too. The text is mostly epistolary/after-action reports and features unreliable narrators, including sometimes the insane AI that survived the earlier book, along with text that sometimes curls in spirals or other forms. Also, there are brain-eating monster slugs, which contribute to the chaos but then are gotten rid of in something of an anticlimax, as the author perhaps realized she’d created too powerful an adversary. The slugs did give rise to what to me was the funniest of all the black humor moments, when the boy protagonist and his equally criminal cousin remember what they forgot to deal with due to massacre/invasion, which is to say the hatching of the slugs. (The slugs produce drugs, which is why someone thought it was a fine idea to bring a bunch of brain-eating slugs aboard a space station full of brains.)
Yoon Ha Lee, Revenant Gun: It’s always hard to conclude a trilogy that broke new ground. Lee here brings us two Jedaos in order to do so-Cheris, and a newly resurrected entity with the rest of Jedao’s memories, tasked with restoring the high calendar (which will include torture-“sacrifices”) on behalf of one of the remaining hexarchs. The storytelling was as twisty as I could have hoped for, but did introduce a whole new category of atrocities being committed with only a partial resolution-which perhaps is part of Lee’s point; there will never be an end to history, or to pain, only a series of choices for better and worse.
Elizabeth Moon, Into the Fire: I’ve enjoyed other books by Moon, but this one didn’t work for me. It’s part of a series; a once-disgraced, now-successful military leader returns home, where palace intrigue threatens her and her loved ones/her crew. The logistics, repeated conversations bringing new players up to date, and endless meetings are realistic, but not in the way that makes for fun reading.
Rachel Caine & Ann Aguirre, Honor Among Thieves: The Leviathans saved humanity when it was about to destroy itself, and asked only that 100 Honors join them for travels in space each year; some Honors choose to continue on with the Leviathans in their journey. No one knows how the Honors are chosen, but when a young criminal makes the list, she starts to ask questions that no one can answer-not even the young Leviathan with whom she’s paired. It didn’t click with me, but I recognize it as a well done YA of its type, similar to what Claudia Grey’s been writing.
David Walton, The Genius Plague: Following the M.R. Carey/Mira Grant path, Walton posits a fungal infection that gives humans greater intelligence and perception, but also seems to turn them towards appalling violence. In thriller form, the hero just happens to work for the NSA and have a mycologist brother who’s at the center of the happenings. It’s a page-turner, but I’d honestly forgotten what it was like to read such a dude-centric book. The protagonist isn’t sexist as such, but the women are there to relate to him as help, mom (real or surrogate), or potential girlfriend, even when they also have jobs of their own.
Annalee Newitz, Autonomous: In a world where bots are born sentient but indentured, and repay the investment in creating them through service, humans can also be indentured (though they’re nominally born free). Jack, a patent pirate, unwittingly copies an addictive drug that starts killing people, and she tries to ameliorate the harm she caused. In the process, she unwillingly acquires a slave boy with whom she has sex; the question of his ability to choose is one of the issues we’re supposed to grapple with. This is paralleled, or at least contrasted, to the situation of the bot and human pair sent by the corporation that made the original drug to kill Jack and suppress any evidence of corporate involvement. The bot is programmed for loyalty; can s/he [the pronoun changes during the book] actually choose to enter into a sexual relationship with her human partner? I was less invested in this question than I might have been because I thought they were all pretty awful people, and even accepting that the bot had been programmed to be a remorseless killer and that “choice” wasn’t a particularly useful construct for judging her behavior (or was it?), reading her POV was no fun.
Seanan McGuire, Beneath the Sugar Sky: OK, I guess I’m never satisfied, because this book lacks McGuire’s writing tics (repetition, too many rhymes/quotes spelling out the themes) but also didn’t have quite as much magic as some of her earlier books about the home for children who’ve returned from other worlds, usually resentful about it. In this one, the daughter of a murdered teen comes looking for her mother because the daughter is starting to unravel, having now never been born (she’s from a Nonsense world). Some of the other kids go on a journey through multiple worlds to put her mother back together. It’s a quest, and there’s beauty and kindness, and that’s about it.
Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes: I ordered this because it was the only Hugo nominee I hadn’t read. Um. Six clones (bearing most of the memories of their originals) wake up on a spaceship where their previous iterations have all been violently killed, except for the one in a coma. Their recent memories are lost. They and the ship’s AI, who’s also lost a lot, have to figure out what’s going on. Semi-spoiler: the cause is a plan that is not sheer elegance in its simplicity. I was pretty bored and uninterested in the characters, mostly an unappealing lot though some of them for good reasons.
Peter Watts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution: Sunday is an evolutionary specialist on a ship that travels through the galaxies at relativistic speeds, planting wormhole gates so that humanity-or its successors-can have access to FTL travel. Most of her time is spent in stasis, so 60 million years or so have gone by and the things that come out of the gates, when they do come out, don’t seem to have much in common with humans, but the mission continues regardless. Which is why some of the other humans decide to revolt. Sunday is closer with the ship’s AI than others, but she also has reservations of her own. There’s a lot of otherness in the book, from the AI to the post-human/galactic landscapes to the “humans” whose lives are lived in tiny chunks across millions of years, after they were programmed for the mission. I found it well-crafted but, as with other works of his, emotionally rather limited.
Charmed & Dangerous, various. Ten short stories of gay paranormal romance. I thought Ginn Hale’s was the standout-the aftermath of a magical revolution in which the dour predictions of Animal Farm have once again come to pass, and one of the initial revolutionaries tries to fix some ongoing sins. The magical system was fresh and the conflicts felt real. KJ Charles, Jordan Castillo Price, and Jordan Hawk are among the other authors.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Yoon Ha Lee, Revenant Gun: It’s always hard to conclude a trilogy that broke new ground. Lee here brings us two Jedaos in order to do so-Cheris, and a newly resurrected entity with the rest of Jedao’s memories, tasked with restoring the high calendar (which will include torture-“sacrifices”) on behalf of one of the remaining hexarchs. The storytelling was as twisty as I could have hoped for, but did introduce a whole new category of atrocities being committed with only a partial resolution-which perhaps is part of Lee’s point; there will never be an end to history, or to pain, only a series of choices for better and worse.
Elizabeth Moon, Into the Fire: I’ve enjoyed other books by Moon, but this one didn’t work for me. It’s part of a series; a once-disgraced, now-successful military leader returns home, where palace intrigue threatens her and her loved ones/her crew. The logistics, repeated conversations bringing new players up to date, and endless meetings are realistic, but not in the way that makes for fun reading.
Rachel Caine & Ann Aguirre, Honor Among Thieves: The Leviathans saved humanity when it was about to destroy itself, and asked only that 100 Honors join them for travels in space each year; some Honors choose to continue on with the Leviathans in their journey. No one knows how the Honors are chosen, but when a young criminal makes the list, she starts to ask questions that no one can answer-not even the young Leviathan with whom she’s paired. It didn’t click with me, but I recognize it as a well done YA of its type, similar to what Claudia Grey’s been writing.
David Walton, The Genius Plague: Following the M.R. Carey/Mira Grant path, Walton posits a fungal infection that gives humans greater intelligence and perception, but also seems to turn them towards appalling violence. In thriller form, the hero just happens to work for the NSA and have a mycologist brother who’s at the center of the happenings. It’s a page-turner, but I’d honestly forgotten what it was like to read such a dude-centric book. The protagonist isn’t sexist as such, but the women are there to relate to him as help, mom (real or surrogate), or potential girlfriend, even when they also have jobs of their own.
Annalee Newitz, Autonomous: In a world where bots are born sentient but indentured, and repay the investment in creating them through service, humans can also be indentured (though they’re nominally born free). Jack, a patent pirate, unwittingly copies an addictive drug that starts killing people, and she tries to ameliorate the harm she caused. In the process, she unwillingly acquires a slave boy with whom she has sex; the question of his ability to choose is one of the issues we’re supposed to grapple with. This is paralleled, or at least contrasted, to the situation of the bot and human pair sent by the corporation that made the original drug to kill Jack and suppress any evidence of corporate involvement. The bot is programmed for loyalty; can s/he [the pronoun changes during the book] actually choose to enter into a sexual relationship with her human partner? I was less invested in this question than I might have been because I thought they were all pretty awful people, and even accepting that the bot had been programmed to be a remorseless killer and that “choice” wasn’t a particularly useful construct for judging her behavior (or was it?), reading her POV was no fun.
Seanan McGuire, Beneath the Sugar Sky: OK, I guess I’m never satisfied, because this book lacks McGuire’s writing tics (repetition, too many rhymes/quotes spelling out the themes) but also didn’t have quite as much magic as some of her earlier books about the home for children who’ve returned from other worlds, usually resentful about it. In this one, the daughter of a murdered teen comes looking for her mother because the daughter is starting to unravel, having now never been born (she’s from a Nonsense world). Some of the other kids go on a journey through multiple worlds to put her mother back together. It’s a quest, and there’s beauty and kindness, and that’s about it.
Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes: I ordered this because it was the only Hugo nominee I hadn’t read. Um. Six clones (bearing most of the memories of their originals) wake up on a spaceship where their previous iterations have all been violently killed, except for the one in a coma. Their recent memories are lost. They and the ship’s AI, who’s also lost a lot, have to figure out what’s going on. Semi-spoiler: the cause is a plan that is not sheer elegance in its simplicity. I was pretty bored and uninterested in the characters, mostly an unappealing lot though some of them for good reasons.
Peter Watts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution: Sunday is an evolutionary specialist on a ship that travels through the galaxies at relativistic speeds, planting wormhole gates so that humanity-or its successors-can have access to FTL travel. Most of her time is spent in stasis, so 60 million years or so have gone by and the things that come out of the gates, when they do come out, don’t seem to have much in common with humans, but the mission continues regardless. Which is why some of the other humans decide to revolt. Sunday is closer with the ship’s AI than others, but she also has reservations of her own. There’s a lot of otherness in the book, from the AI to the post-human/galactic landscapes to the “humans” whose lives are lived in tiny chunks across millions of years, after they were programmed for the mission. I found it well-crafted but, as with other works of his, emotionally rather limited.
Charmed & Dangerous, various. Ten short stories of gay paranormal romance. I thought Ginn Hale’s was the standout-the aftermath of a magical revolution in which the dour predictions of Animal Farm have once again come to pass, and one of the initial revolutionaries tries to fix some ongoing sins. The magical system was fresh and the conflicts felt real. KJ Charles, Jordan Castillo Price, and Jordan Hawk are among the other authors.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.