Fiction
KJ Charles, The Henchmen of Zenda: Retelling of The Prisoner of Zenda from the POV of one of the bad guys, who’s actually not so bad but helping the usurper half-brother in order to repay a debt of honor to said usurper’s (at this point unwilling) mistress. He falls in lust, then in love, with another of the henchmen, and they plot to save themselves and the lady; it’s elaborate enough to match the original source. I enjoyed it.
Craig DiLouie, One of Us: In an alternate 1980s America, a sexually transmitted teratogenic plague has created a generation of children with various inhuman characteristics, from treelike limbs to reversed faces to animal hybrid appearances. America decided the best thing to do was put all such “monsters” into Homes (and to make abortion a sacrament for infected people). The Homes are pretty much as bad as you’d expect they’d be, while many “normal” people resent the free food and education the residents are supposedly getting. In a small southern town, the budding morality and sexuality of a group of non-plague (or are they?) kids intersects with the increasing maturity and powers of a few plague kids, with results made tragic by the misbehavior of adults. On the one hand, the book moved at a good clip and had a complex view of how individually bad choices, or even good choices, created terrible structures and how hard it was to fight that with individual good choices. On the other, even though a number of POV characters were female (just not the real heroes: only the commentators and helpmeets, not to mention a girl with what is practically a vagina dentata), I realized how tired I am of books like this by dudes. Setting the book in 1984 made it easier to rationalize just how deferential the girls were to the boys and how much they defined themselves by male reaction to them (see also: a ton of overt racism, expressed mostly by unsympathetic characters), but it’s not what I want to be reading and not even what I expect most girls’ interior lives were like then. I was a weird kid, but I know mine definitely wasn’t, and I’d have been within a couple of years of these characters.
Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol: Yay Murderbot! Another novella in which Murderbot gets unwillingly caught up in human shenanigans and has to deal with its complex feelings towards bots who have different, more trusting relations with humans. Here, Murderbot investigates an abandoned mining station for more evidence of the larger conspiracy that made it a murderbot, accidentally taking on the protection of a group of investigators who are under threat from the same corporation.
Emma Newman,Before Mars: This is set in the same universe as a previous book which I have not read but will now. The protagonist, an artist/geologist, arrives on Mars with a mission to paint landscapes on behalf of her corporate employer, but things start out very strange from the beginning: one of the current mission members is inexplicably hostile, another inexplicably intimate; she might be experiencing psychosis from too much virtual reality; her wedding ring is wrong-oh, and there’s a note waiting for her, in her own hand, telling her not to trust the mission psychologist. As the mystery unfolds, she also engages with her past trauma (her father was abusive and her mother keeps wanting her to forgive) and her possible rejection of her marriage and her infant child. The characters were complex and the situation was engaging, though there is a lot of tragedy.
Emma Newman, After Atlas: Carlos is essentially a slave of the justice branch of the UK gov-corp (the replacement for democracy worldwide), and he’s sent to investigate the murder of an important political figure-who was also personally important to him: the founder of the Circle, a cult-like American group that rejects the technology that monitors and controls everyone else’s lives. Carlos left the Circle as a teenager and then worse things happened to him; he ended up “contracted” to the justice branch for decades, hoping to be free someday. The murder investigation forces him to confront old events and emotions, and sends him to even more dangerous places. Compelling and painful, with a killer ending.
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Craig DiLouie, One of Us: In an alternate 1980s America, a sexually transmitted teratogenic plague has created a generation of children with various inhuman characteristics, from treelike limbs to reversed faces to animal hybrid appearances. America decided the best thing to do was put all such “monsters” into Homes (and to make abortion a sacrament for infected people). The Homes are pretty much as bad as you’d expect they’d be, while many “normal” people resent the free food and education the residents are supposedly getting. In a small southern town, the budding morality and sexuality of a group of non-plague (or are they?) kids intersects with the increasing maturity and powers of a few plague kids, with results made tragic by the misbehavior of adults. On the one hand, the book moved at a good clip and had a complex view of how individually bad choices, or even good choices, created terrible structures and how hard it was to fight that with individual good choices. On the other, even though a number of POV characters were female (just not the real heroes: only the commentators and helpmeets, not to mention a girl with what is practically a vagina dentata), I realized how tired I am of books like this by dudes. Setting the book in 1984 made it easier to rationalize just how deferential the girls were to the boys and how much they defined themselves by male reaction to them (see also: a ton of overt racism, expressed mostly by unsympathetic characters), but it’s not what I want to be reading and not even what I expect most girls’ interior lives were like then. I was a weird kid, but I know mine definitely wasn’t, and I’d have been within a couple of years of these characters.
Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol: Yay Murderbot! Another novella in which Murderbot gets unwillingly caught up in human shenanigans and has to deal with its complex feelings towards bots who have different, more trusting relations with humans. Here, Murderbot investigates an abandoned mining station for more evidence of the larger conspiracy that made it a murderbot, accidentally taking on the protection of a group of investigators who are under threat from the same corporation.
Emma Newman,Before Mars: This is set in the same universe as a previous book which I have not read but will now. The protagonist, an artist/geologist, arrives on Mars with a mission to paint landscapes on behalf of her corporate employer, but things start out very strange from the beginning: one of the current mission members is inexplicably hostile, another inexplicably intimate; she might be experiencing psychosis from too much virtual reality; her wedding ring is wrong-oh, and there’s a note waiting for her, in her own hand, telling her not to trust the mission psychologist. As the mystery unfolds, she also engages with her past trauma (her father was abusive and her mother keeps wanting her to forgive) and her possible rejection of her marriage and her infant child. The characters were complex and the situation was engaging, though there is a lot of tragedy.
Emma Newman, After Atlas: Carlos is essentially a slave of the justice branch of the UK gov-corp (the replacement for democracy worldwide), and he’s sent to investigate the murder of an important political figure-who was also personally important to him: the founder of the Circle, a cult-like American group that rejects the technology that monitors and controls everyone else’s lives. Carlos left the Circle as a teenager and then worse things happened to him; he ended up “contracted” to the justice branch for decades, hoping to be free someday. The murder investigation forces him to confront old events and emotions, and sends him to even more dangerous places. Compelling and painful, with a killer ending.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.