Fiction
Laura Sebastian, Castles in Their Bones: It had me from the title. Three princesses raised to destroy three kingdoms and recreate the empire that their Empress mother rules now only in name. Lots of palace intrigue-in three palaces!-and really pretty dark for YA, including some major character death.
Tade Thompson, Far from the Light of Heaven: Murder on a spaceship! Only the pilot is supposed to be awake, but there are over thirty bodies … or missing bodies or parts thereof. With a mix of artificial life, heavily manipulated humans, and the occasional maybe-alien, Thompson mixes stay-alive adventure with the unraveling of the reasons for all the deaths. I didn’t find it as compelling as the Rosewater books, but if you want Afro-futurism that mixes spirituality and visions of civilizational variance in space, this might deliver for you.
Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby: Ella and Kev are poor and Black and well-loved by their mother, but Ella has fits in which she can destroy things around her-or levitate, or see into others’ minds. When she flees to learn to control her powers, Kev falls into one of the many traps for young Black men and is imprisoned in a ten-years-from-now carceral state with implants and drone monitors that has learned even better how to extract value from Black bodies. This short book is about the anger of the oppressed and how it can make destruction seem like the only reasonable option.
T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Strength (The Saint of Steel Book 2): A paladin whose god died is making a new life, chasing down some seriously creepy murderers, when he encounters a lay sister of an order that was attacked and nearly destroyed. The attackers discarded her because she was sick, but now she’s better and looking to rescue her sisters. Did I mention she’s a bear shifter? The best thing about that is that her bear is conflict-averse and tends to respond to danger by (1) manifesting and (2) running away if possible. Anyway, banter and romance ensue, as well as danger when they arrive at the lawless city that is the source of both of their problems.
Alex Lubertozzi, Any Other World Will Do: In eighties Spain, Vikram meets Miles and Anna, two young people desultorily getting ready for full adulthood, and recruits them for his mission. His mission is that he’s from a planet that has already had its anthropogenic-equivalent disaster of global warming and destroying the nearest habitable planet, and is now searching for other solutions. Our World has religious and linguistic divisions and multiple cultures, and Miles and Anna encounter them with openness and wonder. I dunno, it had a very “literary” feel to it, with a very slow start changing to wars among city-states in which thousands died.
Olivia Atwater, Half a Soul: Regency Faerie Tales, #1: A childhood encounter with a faery lord leaves the protagonist with half a soul, which manifests as neuroatypicality-limited affect, very little sense of what is socially appropriate to say; this is a significant problem for a genteel young lady. When she goes with her beautiful cousin to London, they meet the Lord Sorcier, who may be able to help, but he has trauma and secrets of his own. I thought it was fine but am not moved to read the rest of the series.
Harlan Ellison, Ellison Wonderland: Collection with interminable introductions (I began at one point to wonder if this was a Nabokovian joke with only introductions); Christ, what an asshole. Shockingly, his assholery targets a lot of women, especially in publishing where he obsesses a lot about the Jimmy Choo obsession that he expects female editors to have in lieu of (his) good taste. Among other things, he recounts an incredibly “just asking questions” trolling memo he sent challenging (mostly women’s) editorial decisions, and the time he made an editorial assistant cry, both times like he’s the hero, claiming he was being totally respectful when he was obviously being incredibly disrespectful. It’s like if Holden Caulfield were writing at 80, having gotten nothing but crankier. Mostly it made me wonder how many people of equal or greater talent didn’t get multiple chances in publishing, or Hollywood, because they didn’t have the right race or gender presentation.
Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow: When the apocalypse hits, a small Anishinaabe community doesn’t notice at first, because losing power and cellphone service isn’t that uncommon. But as the days stretch out, it becomes increasingly clear that something has gone very wrong outside. And then the white refugees start to turn up. A low-key apocalypse, where the whole point is that the world has ended a number of times, and yet some people survive.
Stephen King, Billy Summers:Another writer protagonist, this one a killer for hire doing the cliched one last job. It goes south and then he rescues a young woman who’s just been gang-raped, who seems mostly a vehicle for Billy to try to do something good with his violence and ill-gotten gains rather than a character in her own right. Also repeated mention of the rape of a child. It wasn’t awful but it definitely wasn’t King’s best.
Rachel Neumeier, The Year’s Midnight: Novelette (I think) about a psychiatric patient whose delusions of being an immortal warrior-Death’s Lady-are very coherent, up through her being initially arrested because she was waving a sword around and unable to speak English or any other recognizable language. But her psychiatrist wins her trust and provides her with therapy to acknowledge her grief and anger about all the things she did in order to get revenge on the immortal king who killed her husband and son (which her doctor of course believes stand for something else). It’s an intriguing setup but it’s clear that the rest of the story will take place back in her world, with the doctor and his daughter along for the ride, and I wonder if I want to go there.
Rachel Neumeier, Of Absence, Darkness: I tried it! The second book in the series is set in Tenai’s world and there are a lot of politics that the doctor and his daughter have to guess at. If anything the palace intrigue was flattened by the two outsiders just trying to figure stuff out or being told capsule summaries of the relationships among the people who’d known each other for years. Unusual in its focus on not starting a war, and perhaps in the doctor’s desire to put modern psychological concepts to work on these magic-using feudalists.
Rachel Neumeier, As Shadow, A Light: Matters come to a head in Tenai’s world as both the doctor and his daughter have to fight for their own places and survival. I confess that by the end I was a bit squicked by their happy acceptance of all the feudalism and honor culture, which was helped by their immediately achieving incredibly high status and favor. In some sense, it’s not all that different from Ankh-Morpork being governed by Vetinari … but at least there you had the sense that they might be heading for democratic representation, which is not the case here.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shards of Earth: Forty years after the Architects destroyed Earth and a bunch of other inhabited planets, humans have started squabbling again. A group of cloned/parthogenesis-reproducing warriors are either interested in getting rid of anyone else or determined to be humanity’s protectors, depending on who you listen to; a bunch of planets have become clients of alien overlords whose tech is capable of keeping Architects away, and they’re proselytizing, and the remainder of humanity is semi-united under the name Hugh, continuing the process that produced the one successful anti-Architect tool by enslaving and killing hundreds of criminals for every one who emerges able to navigate unspace. That’s when things go south. Look, there’s a lot going on, and species I haven’t mentioned, and it’s a wild ride; the characters have different voices and senses of humor, and I think it’s my favorite of his I’ve read.
C.S. Pacat, Dark Rise: Will is on the run from Simon, a magician of some kind who killed his mother and wants to kill him. Will is the descendant of the Lady, who defeated the Dark King, and he’s supposed to fight the reborn/resurrected Dark King, but can’t figure out how to do it. Violet is the illegitimate daughter of a merchant who works for Simon; she shares her half brother’s unnatural strength and wants to follow in his footsteps, but a chance encounter with Will changes her course. It starts as a fairly standard “chosen one” narrative, but takes some interesting turns along the way. Decent YA; violence but not sexualized (there is a bit of close-to-chaste consensual kissing).
Charles Stross, Glasshouse: A historian-turned-tank-turned some kind of memory-wiped criminal and/or victim, in a posthuman world where body modification and memory modification are standard responses to trauma and extended lifespans, signs up for an experimental emulation of the Dark Ages (1950s-1990s) and gets way more than he/she bargained for. There’s a lot of ideas going on here, and I appreciate the way Stross has the protagonist encounter today’s ordinary things, think they’re weird, and then use the period-appropriate names for them for ease of narrative understanding, but it’s so busy that it’s a bit chilly, even when it’s about horrific trauma or nonconsensual personality modification. Warning for rape, including rape committed by a sympathetic character back when he/she was brain-colonized by a fascist meme.
Rainbow Rowell, Any Way the Wind Blows: I don’t think the constant switching of first person narrators served this Simon Snow novel as well as another strategy might have. The core four return to England, struggle against various smaller monsters and challenges including Simon’s own terrific insecurities, and find some new paths. I wasn’t very invested in Simon’s angst, or Baz’s constant attention to it, but I did like how Penelope and Agatha got chances to figure themselves out.
Claire O’Dell, A Study in Honor: A Novel (The Janet Watson Chronicles): Holmes/Watson retelling-ish set after the second American Civil War, with Watson a Black surgeon with a bum cyborg arm that keeps her from doing the work she’s trained to do. Holmes is annoying and cold in the standard way. Not really my thing.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Tade Thompson, Far from the Light of Heaven: Murder on a spaceship! Only the pilot is supposed to be awake, but there are over thirty bodies … or missing bodies or parts thereof. With a mix of artificial life, heavily manipulated humans, and the occasional maybe-alien, Thompson mixes stay-alive adventure with the unraveling of the reasons for all the deaths. I didn’t find it as compelling as the Rosewater books, but if you want Afro-futurism that mixes spirituality and visions of civilizational variance in space, this might deliver for you.
Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby: Ella and Kev are poor and Black and well-loved by their mother, but Ella has fits in which she can destroy things around her-or levitate, or see into others’ minds. When she flees to learn to control her powers, Kev falls into one of the many traps for young Black men and is imprisoned in a ten-years-from-now carceral state with implants and drone monitors that has learned even better how to extract value from Black bodies. This short book is about the anger of the oppressed and how it can make destruction seem like the only reasonable option.
T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Strength (The Saint of Steel Book 2): A paladin whose god died is making a new life, chasing down some seriously creepy murderers, when he encounters a lay sister of an order that was attacked and nearly destroyed. The attackers discarded her because she was sick, but now she’s better and looking to rescue her sisters. Did I mention she’s a bear shifter? The best thing about that is that her bear is conflict-averse and tends to respond to danger by (1) manifesting and (2) running away if possible. Anyway, banter and romance ensue, as well as danger when they arrive at the lawless city that is the source of both of their problems.
Alex Lubertozzi, Any Other World Will Do: In eighties Spain, Vikram meets Miles and Anna, two young people desultorily getting ready for full adulthood, and recruits them for his mission. His mission is that he’s from a planet that has already had its anthropogenic-equivalent disaster of global warming and destroying the nearest habitable planet, and is now searching for other solutions. Our World has religious and linguistic divisions and multiple cultures, and Miles and Anna encounter them with openness and wonder. I dunno, it had a very “literary” feel to it, with a very slow start changing to wars among city-states in which thousands died.
Olivia Atwater, Half a Soul: Regency Faerie Tales, #1: A childhood encounter with a faery lord leaves the protagonist with half a soul, which manifests as neuroatypicality-limited affect, very little sense of what is socially appropriate to say; this is a significant problem for a genteel young lady. When she goes with her beautiful cousin to London, they meet the Lord Sorcier, who may be able to help, but he has trauma and secrets of his own. I thought it was fine but am not moved to read the rest of the series.
Harlan Ellison, Ellison Wonderland: Collection with interminable introductions (I began at one point to wonder if this was a Nabokovian joke with only introductions); Christ, what an asshole. Shockingly, his assholery targets a lot of women, especially in publishing where he obsesses a lot about the Jimmy Choo obsession that he expects female editors to have in lieu of (his) good taste. Among other things, he recounts an incredibly “just asking questions” trolling memo he sent challenging (mostly women’s) editorial decisions, and the time he made an editorial assistant cry, both times like he’s the hero, claiming he was being totally respectful when he was obviously being incredibly disrespectful. It’s like if Holden Caulfield were writing at 80, having gotten nothing but crankier. Mostly it made me wonder how many people of equal or greater talent didn’t get multiple chances in publishing, or Hollywood, because they didn’t have the right race or gender presentation.
Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow: When the apocalypse hits, a small Anishinaabe community doesn’t notice at first, because losing power and cellphone service isn’t that uncommon. But as the days stretch out, it becomes increasingly clear that something has gone very wrong outside. And then the white refugees start to turn up. A low-key apocalypse, where the whole point is that the world has ended a number of times, and yet some people survive.
Stephen King, Billy Summers:Another writer protagonist, this one a killer for hire doing the cliched one last job. It goes south and then he rescues a young woman who’s just been gang-raped, who seems mostly a vehicle for Billy to try to do something good with his violence and ill-gotten gains rather than a character in her own right. Also repeated mention of the rape of a child. It wasn’t awful but it definitely wasn’t King’s best.
Rachel Neumeier, The Year’s Midnight: Novelette (I think) about a psychiatric patient whose delusions of being an immortal warrior-Death’s Lady-are very coherent, up through her being initially arrested because she was waving a sword around and unable to speak English or any other recognizable language. But her psychiatrist wins her trust and provides her with therapy to acknowledge her grief and anger about all the things she did in order to get revenge on the immortal king who killed her husband and son (which her doctor of course believes stand for something else). It’s an intriguing setup but it’s clear that the rest of the story will take place back in her world, with the doctor and his daughter along for the ride, and I wonder if I want to go there.
Rachel Neumeier, Of Absence, Darkness: I tried it! The second book in the series is set in Tenai’s world and there are a lot of politics that the doctor and his daughter have to guess at. If anything the palace intrigue was flattened by the two outsiders just trying to figure stuff out or being told capsule summaries of the relationships among the people who’d known each other for years. Unusual in its focus on not starting a war, and perhaps in the doctor’s desire to put modern psychological concepts to work on these magic-using feudalists.
Rachel Neumeier, As Shadow, A Light: Matters come to a head in Tenai’s world as both the doctor and his daughter have to fight for their own places and survival. I confess that by the end I was a bit squicked by their happy acceptance of all the feudalism and honor culture, which was helped by their immediately achieving incredibly high status and favor. In some sense, it’s not all that different from Ankh-Morpork being governed by Vetinari … but at least there you had the sense that they might be heading for democratic representation, which is not the case here.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shards of Earth: Forty years after the Architects destroyed Earth and a bunch of other inhabited planets, humans have started squabbling again. A group of cloned/parthogenesis-reproducing warriors are either interested in getting rid of anyone else or determined to be humanity’s protectors, depending on who you listen to; a bunch of planets have become clients of alien overlords whose tech is capable of keeping Architects away, and they’re proselytizing, and the remainder of humanity is semi-united under the name Hugh, continuing the process that produced the one successful anti-Architect tool by enslaving and killing hundreds of criminals for every one who emerges able to navigate unspace. That’s when things go south. Look, there’s a lot going on, and species I haven’t mentioned, and it’s a wild ride; the characters have different voices and senses of humor, and I think it’s my favorite of his I’ve read.
C.S. Pacat, Dark Rise: Will is on the run from Simon, a magician of some kind who killed his mother and wants to kill him. Will is the descendant of the Lady, who defeated the Dark King, and he’s supposed to fight the reborn/resurrected Dark King, but can’t figure out how to do it. Violet is the illegitimate daughter of a merchant who works for Simon; she shares her half brother’s unnatural strength and wants to follow in his footsteps, but a chance encounter with Will changes her course. It starts as a fairly standard “chosen one” narrative, but takes some interesting turns along the way. Decent YA; violence but not sexualized (there is a bit of close-to-chaste consensual kissing).
Charles Stross, Glasshouse: A historian-turned-tank-turned some kind of memory-wiped criminal and/or victim, in a posthuman world where body modification and memory modification are standard responses to trauma and extended lifespans, signs up for an experimental emulation of the Dark Ages (1950s-1990s) and gets way more than he/she bargained for. There’s a lot of ideas going on here, and I appreciate the way Stross has the protagonist encounter today’s ordinary things, think they’re weird, and then use the period-appropriate names for them for ease of narrative understanding, but it’s so busy that it’s a bit chilly, even when it’s about horrific trauma or nonconsensual personality modification. Warning for rape, including rape committed by a sympathetic character back when he/she was brain-colonized by a fascist meme.
Rainbow Rowell, Any Way the Wind Blows: I don’t think the constant switching of first person narrators served this Simon Snow novel as well as another strategy might have. The core four return to England, struggle against various smaller monsters and challenges including Simon’s own terrific insecurities, and find some new paths. I wasn’t very invested in Simon’s angst, or Baz’s constant attention to it, but I did like how Penelope and Agatha got chances to figure themselves out.
Claire O’Dell, A Study in Honor: A Novel (The Janet Watson Chronicles): Holmes/Watson retelling-ish set after the second American Civil War, with Watson a Black surgeon with a bum cyborg arm that keeps her from doing the work she’s trained to do. Holmes is annoying and cold in the standard way. Not really my thing.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.