Fiction
Hi, I am not okay, but as someone on Twitter said, I'm doing things I ordinarily enjoy because I don't know what else to do. (Other than volunteer for GOTV activities, which has been surprisingly heartening, though then again I am in a bright blue area.) I hope you all are as well as possible!
Charles Stross, Dead Lies Dreaming: Changing one of the basic premises of a series is risky; when Stross had the stars come right, the Laundry Files faced some major narrative challenges, and he’s chosen to start with a bunch of new characters, mostly criminals-but-not-so-bad, along with an ex-police officer turned private investigator/enforcer-type now that the New Management has eliminated most public functions. It’s hard not to see the narrative shift being affected by Brexit and the pandemic, too; the general idea is that most people keep on doing their ordinary things even as the extended public executions begin and there’s no longer any pretense of the law binding the rich and powerful too. But that’s background to the more specific caper: there’s a scary book, a codex to the Necronomicon, and a number of nasty types are competing to get it, along with our protagonists, who mostly work for one or another of the nasty types (or are said types themselves, in one instance). I’ll go with it because I’m invested but I really wish I knew what was happening to Mo and the old crew.
Emily Tesh, Drowned Country: In this sequel to the first novella, Silver and Tobias have split up; Tobias is with Silver’s mother, until she comes to get him to investigate what they think is a vampire who’s taken a young woman. It turns out to be a bit more complicated, and they have to deal with the attractions of Fairyland while figuring out how to navigate Silver’s new immortality and Tobias’s new mortality. It’s nicely done.
Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material: He’s the kid of C-level celebrities whose bad reputation is threatening his job and also our narrator. He’s an upright and uptight barrister whose family wants him to bring home a boyfriend. They agree to fake date to solve their problems, but you can probably guess what happens next. The narrator’s self-loathing/ “who could ever want me” schtick got pretty old for me pretty fast, but there’s witty banter and developing feels so if this is the kind of thing you like, you’ll like it.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Expert System’s Brother: Short novel featuring humanity’s inheritors on a planet they have transformed themselves to adapt to; when someone breaks too many community norms they can be un-transformed and exiled and the planet itself will kill them. The narrator accidentally gets burned by the un-transforming potion; his sister then gets stung by the wasps that carry the “ghost” technology that lets programs talk through people and gets (partially) taken over by the doctor ghost, who wants to finish the exiling job. Of course there are wasps and arachnids! When the narrator finds a group of exiles led by a fanatic who wants to un-transform everyone, he will have to choose what he values-old family or found family; the prospect of change through violence versus the risk of stagnation.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Firewalkers: Short novel about Mao and his crew: Firewalkers who go out into the desert that humans have made of the equator, maintaining the solar panels that bring power (and preserve water) to the port that takes the wealthy off-planet so they can escape the dying. The precariat around them hangs on for scraps. But with the solar panels failing at a much greater rate than normal, the Firewalkers are sent to find and fix the problem-and discover much more than they expected. If your deus ex machina wants to kill all the wealthy to stop their hoarding, should you go along?
Alina Boyden, Stealing Thunder: Razia was assigned male at birth-actually she was assigned princehood at birth-but escaped to become a hijra, with many associated risks including the contempt of many powerful men. (In this fantasy realm, the alchemists supplement surgery with hormone therapy-like potions.) If her emperor-father ever finds out, he is likely to send his assassins to erase the shame he feels. She felt she had no choice because of her woman’s soul, though the one thing she really missed was riding her dragon, a valuable creature reserved to the most important princes. When she meets a handsome prince whose nation is a bitter enemy of her birth empire’s and foolishly lets her secret slip, she gets involved in dangerous politics. Also she’s a thief on behalf of her dera, which creates its own set of problems, but also gives her important skills. I got frustrated that she couldn't seem to keep her mouth shut about her identity, but it wasn't ridiculous characterization for a reckless teen. If you can’t stand her having to be deferential to men who casually insult and threaten her-including one who previously assaulted her-then be warned that there’s a lot of that here given the power and gender relations. Razia does negotiate greater power for herself, but it’s from a position of being the “special” woman who gets to break the rules and help a couple of others.
James R. Gapinski, Fruit Rot: Chapbook/short story about a tree that appears in the front yard of a struggling artist couple; its tree produces fruit that heals any ills-but only the first bite. After that first bite, it rots and turns to bugs-and there’s another side effect of eating a rotten bite. And there’s a limited supply of fruit. There is more to the story, but to me the basic question posed was: Does wealth make you a villain, or is there a way to be a hero when you’re sitting on resources that can’t be fully shared but can be hoarded?
Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade: The protagonist is a young woman who enlists in the military after the Martians (human colonists) destroy her home city and kill her remaining family; earning citizenship, and thus access to health care and education, from the reigning corporation would be a nice side benefit. But the transmission technology they use has side effects, and as she starts coming unstuck in time she begins to suspect that the stories of the war they’ve told her are false. Obvious comparisons to The Forever War, with only humans and corporations as enemies; I liked it more than the other Hurley book I read.
A.K. Larkwood, The Unspoken Name: Very engaging fantasy with a lot going on. Csorwe was raised to be the mouthpiece and then sacrifice for/to a goddess; when a strange sorceror convinces her to run away instead, she learns to be his enforcer. Uncertainties, betrayals, and conflicts across multiple worlds-some of them dying or already dead-follow. Csorwe does not necessarily do the right thing, but she does care for something more than her own survival, even as her loyalties change (she falls for a sorceress who is destined for a personality-destroying merger with others due to her restrictive religion). I liked it!
Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January: In early 20th century America, mixed-race January is raised in the house of a wealthy collector while her father searches for more rarities for him. But when her father disappears she discovers there’s much more to it than that-the collector is interested in Doors to other worlds, and it turns out that January can open those doors. As a secret society hunts her down, January has to learn how to survive and love in a world that favors the white and wealthy. I found the writing repetitive at the sentence level and not particularly compelling, but it would definitely be possible to enjoy January as a welcome addition to the plucky girl heroine genre-especially since she’s not always plucky; sometimes people with power over hurt her and she gives in for a while before figuring out what to do next.
Jim Butcher, Peace Talks: A relatively short Harry Dresden book (because it ends with them heading to a bigger confrontation). Harry is in a loving relationship with Murphy now but still notices how hot the women around him are, which is excused by the lusts raised by carrying the Winter Knight’s mantle. Sure. Also he still notices Marcone in almost exactly the same terms other than the explicit acknowledgement of his lusts, so there’s that. Plotwise: everyone’s in town for peace talks, yay, but then Harry’s brother attacks an ally and Harry has to work with the White Court to rescue him, which means the Wardens think he’s gone evil. So, par for the course, really.
Lauren Beukes, Afterland: A white South African woman is stuck in the US after a pandemic that killed off 99% of the men; her immune twelve-year-old son is considered a national asset. Her sister, a petty criminal and excellent scammer, talks her way into the facility where they’re being held and offers to get them out, the only price being her son’s sperm. This doesn’t go well, and soon mother and son are on the run, with the mother convinced she’s killed her sister (the reader knows almost immediately this isn’t true because of the alternating POVs) and the son disguised as a daughter and, soon enough, starting to believe in the cult of apology/misogyny that they hook up with as a means to travel the semi-apocalyptic landscape to try to get out of the country, back to where things are less mean. Beukes writes about human cruelties exquisitely; I don’t really like her take on average weakness and pettiness, especially in the US, but I can’t say she’s wrong. I did think the idea of a global ban on pregnancies from stored or immune men’s sperm-in order to give the world time to work on a vaccine/to allow the virus to burn itself out-was both scientifically dubious and politically implausible, especially in the US. Even with men absent as a political force, American women would have been getting themselves inseminated and killing any politicians who tried to stop them.
K.B. Wagers, Beyond the Empire: Final volume in the trilogy introducing Hail Bristol, gunrunner-turned-Empress. Putting down the male-led rebellion against her matriarchal empire (don’t worry, though, she’s a reformer/egalitarian though still totally committed to the whole “empress” thing), Hail fights enemies foreign and domestic, building to the final confrontation with Wilson, the man who killed most of her relatives. Wilson ended up a bit too cartoony for my tastes, but there’s a lot to like if you like palace intrigue in space.
Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth: This sequel is more batshit than the original, which is really saying something. Structural problem: the character we came to know and kind of like from the first book is absent for most of the second. Also, I have only the faintest idea what was going on in most of the book, which goes back and forth between (1) maybe-replays/fake memories of what happened in the first book up to and including a meet-cute at a coffeeshop-analogue (these occur without much narrative resolution-they lack coherence even though their existence is ultimately explained) and (2) Harrow’s not-actually-training to fight on behalf of the Emperor against the forces trying to destroy them. And while it was easier to ignore the genocidal foundations of necromantic power in the first book because the protagonist wasn’t a necromancer and Gideon/Harrow didn’t actually kill a lot of people, that’s not the case here. To mangle a movie quote, to make me like her Harrow would have to be one motherfucking charming genocidaire, and she doesn’t quite make it, largely because she is fairly passive throughout. While she solved major puzzles in book one, here she seems to have no idea what’s going on with the older lectors, who amidst their present-day power struggles make jokes intelligible to people with late 20th/early 21st-century pop culture knowledge but not to her. It made sense that she was a necromantic genius but didn’t understand anything about people, but it wasn’t that much fun to read about when she didn’t do very much or observe enough to really put together the backstory. I mean, I respect the gonzoness of it all, but I actually started enjoying book one eventually and did not get there with book two, even though I might read book three just to rubberneck.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Charles Stross, Dead Lies Dreaming: Changing one of the basic premises of a series is risky; when Stross had the stars come right, the Laundry Files faced some major narrative challenges, and he’s chosen to start with a bunch of new characters, mostly criminals-but-not-so-bad, along with an ex-police officer turned private investigator/enforcer-type now that the New Management has eliminated most public functions. It’s hard not to see the narrative shift being affected by Brexit and the pandemic, too; the general idea is that most people keep on doing their ordinary things even as the extended public executions begin and there’s no longer any pretense of the law binding the rich and powerful too. But that’s background to the more specific caper: there’s a scary book, a codex to the Necronomicon, and a number of nasty types are competing to get it, along with our protagonists, who mostly work for one or another of the nasty types (or are said types themselves, in one instance). I’ll go with it because I’m invested but I really wish I knew what was happening to Mo and the old crew.
Emily Tesh, Drowned Country: In this sequel to the first novella, Silver and Tobias have split up; Tobias is with Silver’s mother, until she comes to get him to investigate what they think is a vampire who’s taken a young woman. It turns out to be a bit more complicated, and they have to deal with the attractions of Fairyland while figuring out how to navigate Silver’s new immortality and Tobias’s new mortality. It’s nicely done.
Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material: He’s the kid of C-level celebrities whose bad reputation is threatening his job and also our narrator. He’s an upright and uptight barrister whose family wants him to bring home a boyfriend. They agree to fake date to solve their problems, but you can probably guess what happens next. The narrator’s self-loathing/ “who could ever want me” schtick got pretty old for me pretty fast, but there’s witty banter and developing feels so if this is the kind of thing you like, you’ll like it.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Expert System’s Brother: Short novel featuring humanity’s inheritors on a planet they have transformed themselves to adapt to; when someone breaks too many community norms they can be un-transformed and exiled and the planet itself will kill them. The narrator accidentally gets burned by the un-transforming potion; his sister then gets stung by the wasps that carry the “ghost” technology that lets programs talk through people and gets (partially) taken over by the doctor ghost, who wants to finish the exiling job. Of course there are wasps and arachnids! When the narrator finds a group of exiles led by a fanatic who wants to un-transform everyone, he will have to choose what he values-old family or found family; the prospect of change through violence versus the risk of stagnation.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Firewalkers: Short novel about Mao and his crew: Firewalkers who go out into the desert that humans have made of the equator, maintaining the solar panels that bring power (and preserve water) to the port that takes the wealthy off-planet so they can escape the dying. The precariat around them hangs on for scraps. But with the solar panels failing at a much greater rate than normal, the Firewalkers are sent to find and fix the problem-and discover much more than they expected. If your deus ex machina wants to kill all the wealthy to stop their hoarding, should you go along?
Alina Boyden, Stealing Thunder: Razia was assigned male at birth-actually she was assigned princehood at birth-but escaped to become a hijra, with many associated risks including the contempt of many powerful men. (In this fantasy realm, the alchemists supplement surgery with hormone therapy-like potions.) If her emperor-father ever finds out, he is likely to send his assassins to erase the shame he feels. She felt she had no choice because of her woman’s soul, though the one thing she really missed was riding her dragon, a valuable creature reserved to the most important princes. When she meets a handsome prince whose nation is a bitter enemy of her birth empire’s and foolishly lets her secret slip, she gets involved in dangerous politics. Also she’s a thief on behalf of her dera, which creates its own set of problems, but also gives her important skills. I got frustrated that she couldn't seem to keep her mouth shut about her identity, but it wasn't ridiculous characterization for a reckless teen. If you can’t stand her having to be deferential to men who casually insult and threaten her-including one who previously assaulted her-then be warned that there’s a lot of that here given the power and gender relations. Razia does negotiate greater power for herself, but it’s from a position of being the “special” woman who gets to break the rules and help a couple of others.
James R. Gapinski, Fruit Rot: Chapbook/short story about a tree that appears in the front yard of a struggling artist couple; its tree produces fruit that heals any ills-but only the first bite. After that first bite, it rots and turns to bugs-and there’s another side effect of eating a rotten bite. And there’s a limited supply of fruit. There is more to the story, but to me the basic question posed was: Does wealth make you a villain, or is there a way to be a hero when you’re sitting on resources that can’t be fully shared but can be hoarded?
Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade: The protagonist is a young woman who enlists in the military after the Martians (human colonists) destroy her home city and kill her remaining family; earning citizenship, and thus access to health care and education, from the reigning corporation would be a nice side benefit. But the transmission technology they use has side effects, and as she starts coming unstuck in time she begins to suspect that the stories of the war they’ve told her are false. Obvious comparisons to The Forever War, with only humans and corporations as enemies; I liked it more than the other Hurley book I read.
A.K. Larkwood, The Unspoken Name: Very engaging fantasy with a lot going on. Csorwe was raised to be the mouthpiece and then sacrifice for/to a goddess; when a strange sorceror convinces her to run away instead, she learns to be his enforcer. Uncertainties, betrayals, and conflicts across multiple worlds-some of them dying or already dead-follow. Csorwe does not necessarily do the right thing, but she does care for something more than her own survival, even as her loyalties change (she falls for a sorceress who is destined for a personality-destroying merger with others due to her restrictive religion). I liked it!
Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January: In early 20th century America, mixed-race January is raised in the house of a wealthy collector while her father searches for more rarities for him. But when her father disappears she discovers there’s much more to it than that-the collector is interested in Doors to other worlds, and it turns out that January can open those doors. As a secret society hunts her down, January has to learn how to survive and love in a world that favors the white and wealthy. I found the writing repetitive at the sentence level and not particularly compelling, but it would definitely be possible to enjoy January as a welcome addition to the plucky girl heroine genre-especially since she’s not always plucky; sometimes people with power over hurt her and she gives in for a while before figuring out what to do next.
Jim Butcher, Peace Talks: A relatively short Harry Dresden book (because it ends with them heading to a bigger confrontation). Harry is in a loving relationship with Murphy now but still notices how hot the women around him are, which is excused by the lusts raised by carrying the Winter Knight’s mantle. Sure. Also he still notices Marcone in almost exactly the same terms other than the explicit acknowledgement of his lusts, so there’s that. Plotwise: everyone’s in town for peace talks, yay, but then Harry’s brother attacks an ally and Harry has to work with the White Court to rescue him, which means the Wardens think he’s gone evil. So, par for the course, really.
Lauren Beukes, Afterland: A white South African woman is stuck in the US after a pandemic that killed off 99% of the men; her immune twelve-year-old son is considered a national asset. Her sister, a petty criminal and excellent scammer, talks her way into the facility where they’re being held and offers to get them out, the only price being her son’s sperm. This doesn’t go well, and soon mother and son are on the run, with the mother convinced she’s killed her sister (the reader knows almost immediately this isn’t true because of the alternating POVs) and the son disguised as a daughter and, soon enough, starting to believe in the cult of apology/misogyny that they hook up with as a means to travel the semi-apocalyptic landscape to try to get out of the country, back to where things are less mean. Beukes writes about human cruelties exquisitely; I don’t really like her take on average weakness and pettiness, especially in the US, but I can’t say she’s wrong. I did think the idea of a global ban on pregnancies from stored or immune men’s sperm-in order to give the world time to work on a vaccine/to allow the virus to burn itself out-was both scientifically dubious and politically implausible, especially in the US. Even with men absent as a political force, American women would have been getting themselves inseminated and killing any politicians who tried to stop them.
K.B. Wagers, Beyond the Empire: Final volume in the trilogy introducing Hail Bristol, gunrunner-turned-Empress. Putting down the male-led rebellion against her matriarchal empire (don’t worry, though, she’s a reformer/egalitarian though still totally committed to the whole “empress” thing), Hail fights enemies foreign and domestic, building to the final confrontation with Wilson, the man who killed most of her relatives. Wilson ended up a bit too cartoony for my tastes, but there’s a lot to like if you like palace intrigue in space.
Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth: This sequel is more batshit than the original, which is really saying something. Structural problem: the character we came to know and kind of like from the first book is absent for most of the second. Also, I have only the faintest idea what was going on in most of the book, which goes back and forth between (1) maybe-replays/fake memories of what happened in the first book up to and including a meet-cute at a coffeeshop-analogue (these occur without much narrative resolution-they lack coherence even though their existence is ultimately explained) and (2) Harrow’s not-actually-training to fight on behalf of the Emperor against the forces trying to destroy them. And while it was easier to ignore the genocidal foundations of necromantic power in the first book because the protagonist wasn’t a necromancer and Gideon/Harrow didn’t actually kill a lot of people, that’s not the case here. To mangle a movie quote, to make me like her Harrow would have to be one motherfucking charming genocidaire, and she doesn’t quite make it, largely because she is fairly passive throughout. While she solved major puzzles in book one, here she seems to have no idea what’s going on with the older lectors, who amidst their present-day power struggles make jokes intelligible to people with late 20th/early 21st-century pop culture knowledge but not to her. It made sense that she was a necromantic genius but didn’t understand anything about people, but it wasn’t that much fun to read about when she didn’t do very much or observe enough to really put together the backstory. I mean, I respect the gonzoness of it all, but I actually started enjoying book one eventually and did not get there with book two, even though I might read book three just to rubberneck.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.