Fiction
Nancy Kress, Sea Change: In a world that turned against GMOs after one went very wrong and killed a lot of kids, a woman who lost her own young son to a different biological disaster-one that was enhanced by global warming-works for a secret organization that tries to do GMOs better, without capitalist distortions and designed to feed a warming and desertifying world. There are mobile houses and retinal scans and pervasive government surveillance. And the only thing that really didn’t work for me was the relatively hopeful ending relying on “the truth getting out.” Kress tried to deal with the phenomenon of pervasive online misinformation, but ultimately ended up handwaving too much for my currently very pessimistic take on our likely future. Also non-explicit discussions of sexual assault, including of a child.
S.A. Chakraborty, The City of Brass: Nahri is a young woman on her own in Cairo while Turks and Franks war over the city, surviving on her wits and her strange abilities to understand any language she encounters and to determine what’s going on in a human body, sometimes even to heal it. Then she accidentally summons a djinn and things get much more complicated. Ali is a prince in Daevabad, a powerful djinn city, with dangerous sympathies for the impoverished mixed-blood people who aren’t allowed to leave and seek their fortunes in the human world any more than they are allowed to resist the djinn. There’s a lot of the crushing weight of the past along with palace politics where retribution for old wrongs and the fear of new ones makes everyone act badly. One thing the book did well, I thought, was to show some of the attractions of strict faith. Ali is a young hothead who looks down on djinn who drink and have extramarital sex, and that threatens to lead him seamlessly into bigotry against those with other traditions, but his convictions are coherent to him in a way this kind of fantasy rarely emphasizes.
Lilith Saintcrow, Night Shift: Jill Kismet is a hunter of Hellbreed, demons that make deals and do other bad things; she has her own deal with one Hellbreed for power in return for services that make her feel disgusted with herself. When a rogue Were shows up slaughtering ordinary humans, she has to deal with Hellbreed politics as well as a Were who seems to want more from her than she thinks she can afford to give. Urban fantasy; didn’t move me.
Neil Gaiman & Colleen Doran, Snow, Glass, Apples: Graphic novelization of original Gaiman short story, with all the creepy eroticism of the story and then some. Doran emulated Harry Clarke’s style for this, but it’s very much also Doran’s beautiful curling hair and other luxuries of style.
Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August: Harry August is reborn as soon as he dies, living the same life again (except for the changes that he or other ouroborans make in that particular lifetime). Only changing things so that an ouroboran is never born can eliminate them. But Harry receives a message, passed down from overlapping ouroborans from the future: the world is ending, and it’s happening sooner and sooner. His struggle to stop it turns into an intensely personal obsession with the probable culprit. An odd book, with some moderately described torture.
Rainbow Rowell, Wayward Son: Ok, first of all, genius title-moving the Britishness of Carry On into classic Americana/fannishly evocative territory, which is perfect because our heroes (vampire mage Baz, newly non-mage but part-dragon Simon, and most intense witch of her generation Penelope) come to America and take a road trip from Chicago to the West. They’re all spiraling in various ways now that the big battle is over, and Penelope decides that visiting Agatha-who’s tried to leave magic behind-is the perfect way to fix things. Spoiler: it’s not. Also, they don’t know any of the magickal rules in America, which puts them in mortal danger a bunch. It’s a very enjoyable afterwards story, though it ends on a new cliffhanger.
Paul Cornell, Witches of Lychford: When a big box retailer threatens to come to town, three very different women-a crotchety old woman stuck with her cranky homebound husband, a minister, and a rationalist who’s running a magic store-have to fight it, because it’s going to destroy the boundaries between the worlds. Short and nicely done (though I liked his London magic police books better).
Max Barry, Providence: The human crew of an AI warship are maybe there to sustain human support for the interstellar war. But being isolated from the rest of humanity brings out some weirdness, not to mention fighting an enemy that seemingly can make brilliant leaps and is also incapable of what we consider ordinary logic. I like Barry’s work, and this one is a fascinating blend of unreliable narration, the effects of monitoring (via social media and otherwise) on the construction of the self, and speculation about the different kinds of intelligences that could exist, some of which we may build ourselves.
Devil Take Me: Anthology of romances built around deals with the devil, primarily m/m but with Jordan L. Hawk’s entry (also the lightest of heart) involving a genderqueer demon slayer who hooks up with a crossroads demon. Ginn Hale’s Counterfeit Viscount was my favorite; uses Hale’s existing world of Prodigals and ordinary humans to good effect-the protagonist made a deal with a Prodigal to impersonate his titled cousin and ruin his uncle, and gets caught up in a larger scheme that may be killing Prodigals or saving them. C.S. Poe, TA Moore, Jordan Castillo Price, and Rhys Ford (a dark Wonderland story) are also represented.
Tade Thompson, The Murders of Molly Southbourne: Whenever Molly bleeds, a new molly is created and tries to kill her. Also, she is mentally ill; her parents home-school her and teach her how to fight to protect herself. Disturbing novella that plays with identity and belief.
Tade Thompson, The Survival of Molly Southbourne: Molly tries to deal with the mysterious organization that has helped keep her secret through her lifetime, and finally encounters another like her. More conventional and less successful than the previous novella, but still thought-provoking.
Tade Thompson, Rosewater: It’s the second half of the twenty-first century, and a city has grown up around the alien entity in Nigeria that occasionally heals people (or resurrects their dead bodies as mindless zombies). The alien incursion has given some people psychic powers; one of them works for a secret government agency that tortures people to preserve the regime’s power. But someone or something is killing psychics, and he has to go deeper into politics and into the alien to survive. It’s a fascinating combination of noir and speculative sf, including the question of what makes a person human when alien cells are incorporated into them. Recommended.
Tade Thompson, The Rosewater Insurrection: New characters, a few years down the line: with almost no psychics remaining, when Rosewater declares independence and the alien comes under attack by a different alien, the future of humanity is very much at stake. Thompson keeps complicating the situation in interesting ways; even the horrific characters are recognizably people (even the construct).
Tade ThompsonThe Rosewater Redemption: Rosewater’s independence turns even deadlier as Nigeria attempts to crush the city, the aliens accelerate their attempts to take over human bodies, and humans launch a desperate attempt to fight back. As Abigail Nussbaum says, an anti-invasion narrative is very different when it focuses on Africans who are intimately aware of human colonialist histories. Would you commit genocide-even genocide against a bunch of storied identities on a computer-to save your own people’s future? Does it matter whether there are sympathetic aliens, or not? Thought-provoking, at the very least; I’m looking forward to what comes next for Thompson.
Alexis Hall, Shadows & Dreams: Kate Kane is a paranormal investigator who’s dating a vampire prince (female) and carrying the power of the Deepwild, which wants to take her over. When an ancient vampire wakes up and tries to take over London, Kate is dragged into the resulting problems, which involve at least four of her exes: a tech billionaire, a werewolf, an arcane thief, and the vampire she dated when she was a kid who didn’t know she was a lesbian. The last one is a fairly hilarious sendup of the Twilight/Angel-style vampire who angsts over his attraction to young girls but doesn’t actually stay away from them. I enjoyed it but am not pining for more.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
S.A. Chakraborty, The City of Brass: Nahri is a young woman on her own in Cairo while Turks and Franks war over the city, surviving on her wits and her strange abilities to understand any language she encounters and to determine what’s going on in a human body, sometimes even to heal it. Then she accidentally summons a djinn and things get much more complicated. Ali is a prince in Daevabad, a powerful djinn city, with dangerous sympathies for the impoverished mixed-blood people who aren’t allowed to leave and seek their fortunes in the human world any more than they are allowed to resist the djinn. There’s a lot of the crushing weight of the past along with palace politics where retribution for old wrongs and the fear of new ones makes everyone act badly. One thing the book did well, I thought, was to show some of the attractions of strict faith. Ali is a young hothead who looks down on djinn who drink and have extramarital sex, and that threatens to lead him seamlessly into bigotry against those with other traditions, but his convictions are coherent to him in a way this kind of fantasy rarely emphasizes.
Lilith Saintcrow, Night Shift: Jill Kismet is a hunter of Hellbreed, demons that make deals and do other bad things; she has her own deal with one Hellbreed for power in return for services that make her feel disgusted with herself. When a rogue Were shows up slaughtering ordinary humans, she has to deal with Hellbreed politics as well as a Were who seems to want more from her than she thinks she can afford to give. Urban fantasy; didn’t move me.
Neil Gaiman & Colleen Doran, Snow, Glass, Apples: Graphic novelization of original Gaiman short story, with all the creepy eroticism of the story and then some. Doran emulated Harry Clarke’s style for this, but it’s very much also Doran’s beautiful curling hair and other luxuries of style.
Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August: Harry August is reborn as soon as he dies, living the same life again (except for the changes that he or other ouroborans make in that particular lifetime). Only changing things so that an ouroboran is never born can eliminate them. But Harry receives a message, passed down from overlapping ouroborans from the future: the world is ending, and it’s happening sooner and sooner. His struggle to stop it turns into an intensely personal obsession with the probable culprit. An odd book, with some moderately described torture.
Rainbow Rowell, Wayward Son: Ok, first of all, genius title-moving the Britishness of Carry On into classic Americana/fannishly evocative territory, which is perfect because our heroes (vampire mage Baz, newly non-mage but part-dragon Simon, and most intense witch of her generation Penelope) come to America and take a road trip from Chicago to the West. They’re all spiraling in various ways now that the big battle is over, and Penelope decides that visiting Agatha-who’s tried to leave magic behind-is the perfect way to fix things. Spoiler: it’s not. Also, they don’t know any of the magickal rules in America, which puts them in mortal danger a bunch. It’s a very enjoyable afterwards story, though it ends on a new cliffhanger.
Paul Cornell, Witches of Lychford: When a big box retailer threatens to come to town, three very different women-a crotchety old woman stuck with her cranky homebound husband, a minister, and a rationalist who’s running a magic store-have to fight it, because it’s going to destroy the boundaries between the worlds. Short and nicely done (though I liked his London magic police books better).
Max Barry, Providence: The human crew of an AI warship are maybe there to sustain human support for the interstellar war. But being isolated from the rest of humanity brings out some weirdness, not to mention fighting an enemy that seemingly can make brilliant leaps and is also incapable of what we consider ordinary logic. I like Barry’s work, and this one is a fascinating blend of unreliable narration, the effects of monitoring (via social media and otherwise) on the construction of the self, and speculation about the different kinds of intelligences that could exist, some of which we may build ourselves.
Devil Take Me: Anthology of romances built around deals with the devil, primarily m/m but with Jordan L. Hawk’s entry (also the lightest of heart) involving a genderqueer demon slayer who hooks up with a crossroads demon. Ginn Hale’s Counterfeit Viscount was my favorite; uses Hale’s existing world of Prodigals and ordinary humans to good effect-the protagonist made a deal with a Prodigal to impersonate his titled cousin and ruin his uncle, and gets caught up in a larger scheme that may be killing Prodigals or saving them. C.S. Poe, TA Moore, Jordan Castillo Price, and Rhys Ford (a dark Wonderland story) are also represented.
Tade Thompson, The Murders of Molly Southbourne: Whenever Molly bleeds, a new molly is created and tries to kill her. Also, she is mentally ill; her parents home-school her and teach her how to fight to protect herself. Disturbing novella that plays with identity and belief.
Tade Thompson, The Survival of Molly Southbourne: Molly tries to deal with the mysterious organization that has helped keep her secret through her lifetime, and finally encounters another like her. More conventional and less successful than the previous novella, but still thought-provoking.
Tade Thompson, Rosewater: It’s the second half of the twenty-first century, and a city has grown up around the alien entity in Nigeria that occasionally heals people (or resurrects their dead bodies as mindless zombies). The alien incursion has given some people psychic powers; one of them works for a secret government agency that tortures people to preserve the regime’s power. But someone or something is killing psychics, and he has to go deeper into politics and into the alien to survive. It’s a fascinating combination of noir and speculative sf, including the question of what makes a person human when alien cells are incorporated into them. Recommended.
Tade Thompson, The Rosewater Insurrection: New characters, a few years down the line: with almost no psychics remaining, when Rosewater declares independence and the alien comes under attack by a different alien, the future of humanity is very much at stake. Thompson keeps complicating the situation in interesting ways; even the horrific characters are recognizably people (even the construct).
Tade ThompsonThe Rosewater Redemption: Rosewater’s independence turns even deadlier as Nigeria attempts to crush the city, the aliens accelerate their attempts to take over human bodies, and humans launch a desperate attempt to fight back. As Abigail Nussbaum says, an anti-invasion narrative is very different when it focuses on Africans who are intimately aware of human colonialist histories. Would you commit genocide-even genocide against a bunch of storied identities on a computer-to save your own people’s future? Does it matter whether there are sympathetic aliens, or not? Thought-provoking, at the very least; I’m looking forward to what comes next for Thompson.
Alexis Hall, Shadows & Dreams: Kate Kane is a paranormal investigator who’s dating a vampire prince (female) and carrying the power of the Deepwild, which wants to take her over. When an ancient vampire wakes up and tries to take over London, Kate is dragged into the resulting problems, which involve at least four of her exes: a tech billionaire, a werewolf, an arcane thief, and the vampire she dated when she was a kid who didn’t know she was a lesbian. The last one is a fairly hilarious sendup of the Twilight/Angel-style vampire who angsts over his attraction to young girls but doesn’t actually stay away from them. I enjoyed it but am not pining for more.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.