Fiction
Garth Nix, Newt’s Emerald: Regency-ish fantasy about a young woman who masquerades as a man so that she can join the hunt for her family’s stolen emerald, which apparently has powers great enough that they might even be able to help Napoleon out of the stone in which he’s been immured. Experience diminished by bad recording quality; seemed slight overall.
Amanda Foody & Christine Lynn Herman, All of Us Villains: A lot of worldbuilding, maybe a bit too much: high magic has disappeared from most of the world, but in one town, seven families fight to control it every twenty years in a duel to the death among their teen champions. But someone revealed the secret of the contest, and now the government has sent overseers, though the curse itself can’t be interfered with. This year’s teens include an assortment of types, including at least one who’d like to destroy the whole thing if possible. It was brisk enough once you got all the data dumping out of the way; the contest starts in this book but does not finish.
Andrea Stewart, The Bone Shard Daughter: Lin is the Emperor’s daughter, but he won’t name her heir until she recovers her memories, lost in some mysterious way, and learns to use bone shard magic, which is what the Emperor uses to control the constructs that help him rule. Bone shards are extracted from the empire’s citizens as children, except for the ones it kills and the ones who are sent to join the Shardless rebels; using them in the constructs slowly drains the survivors’ lives. Jovin is a smuggler looking for his lost wife who rescues a strange creature and starts to experience stranger events. Phalue is the daughter of the governor of one of the Empire’s islands whose lover is trying to convince her of the problems with the current system. And then there’s the memoryless woman on the isolated island who starts to wonder what’s going on. So: palace intrigue plus magic on floating islands some of which are starting to sink, and I haven’t even mentioned the dangerous Alanga who the constructs were created to fight. It’s stuffed but fun.
Andrea Stewart, The Bone Shard Emperor: Lin has become Emperor but can’t necessarily keep the role. There is even more palace intrigue and backstabbing than in the first book, enough to seem almost over the top, and then I think about the backstabbing in our own failing government and think: well, sure. It was an engaging read.
Grady Hendrix, The Final Girl Support Group: What if hand-massacring groups of teenagers had become just as popular as school shootings? The most well-known survivors of two rounds of attacks have a support group in LA, until things start going bad-one killed, others endangered and also accused of participating in/organizing the murder sprees they survived. Like other Hendrix books, it’s both about the harm that women do to each other and the patriarchal system in which they do it. Nothing supernatural and ultimately I didn’t find it to be a workable alternate world precisely for the reasons explained by one of the many “nonfiction inserts” in the book: School shootings became widespread because guns are different.
Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate: Senior year in the Scholomance. This book goes straight for “reluctant hero who’s supposed to be the bad guy discovers with annoyance that what they really want is to save people, ungrateful or no,” and it’s propulsive fun as El recruits more and more people to try to fix the Scholomance and save as many of the students as she can. Warning for immense cliffhanger (almost literally) at the end.
Jonathan Strahan, ed., The Year’s Best Science Fiction, vol. 2 (2020): Max Barry, Pat Cadigan, Yoon Ha Lee, Ken Liu, Tochi Onyebuchi, and others, with a lot of climate change and posthumanism. A good overview of what’s going on.
Charles Stross, Iron Sunrise: After the Singularity scattered humanity across thousands of worlds, one of them has its sun blown up. Only scattered survivors are left, including a young girl whose imaginary friend knows a lot more than he should, and may be connected with the Singularity’s continued interest in humans. The victim world’s automated defense systems send retaliatory gunships at sublight speed, and only the surviving ambassadors can stop them-but someone is killing the ambassadors. And there’s an autocracy rising based on erasing humans and turning them into puppets, though even in the autocracy there are factions. Stross is much more willing to include sexual coercion in his sf than in the Laundry Files, which I find abstractly interesting but is worth pointing out in case that’s not what you want to read.
Charles Stross, Neptune’s Brood: Posthumanity, thousands of years in the future, has colonized many worlds at sublight speeds, financing it through a variation of blockchain lending and debt that is paid off by launching new colonies (that is, a Ponzi scheme of sorts). Our hero is the clone of a prominent financier whose hobby of investigating lightspeed frauds ends up threatening to expose a dangerous secret. A lot of shenanigans, financial and otherwise, ensue; one funny note is that Stross likes “abyssal” and “Cherenkov radiation” as much in his sf as in his Bob Howard fantasy.
Charles Stross, Saturn’s Children: Another posthuman story, this one closer to the time of humanity’s extinction, featuring a protagonist designed as a sexbot with inherent submissiveness to the extinct species, which makes her very sad. (All desire here is heterosexual because apparently humans only designed hetero robots.) Her programming means she’s aroused by partners’ arousal, so there’s a fair amount of casual sex and also rape, especially in the backstory explaining why one of the bad robots is bad but also some fairly coercive conduct towards the protagonist-whose personality changes a bunch when different chips are in her head, including one known as a slave chip. Anyway, she’s just trying to survive in an increasingly hostile universe-people who look like her are out of fashion-and gets swept up in a chase to acquire a real human who would be able to command all the powerful people because their programming was never changed. Not nearly as fun as Neptune’s Brood; I like Stross better focusing on accounting than sex.
Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun:In feudal China, a young girl takes her brother’s place and fate, escaping starvation to become first a monk and then a general in the rebellion against the Mongol rulers. Her destiny entwines with that of the prized eunuch general of the Mongols. (Her pronouns never change internally, but that doesn’t stop her from thinking of herself as a man in order to fool Heaven that she’s entitled to her brother’s destiny.) The fantasy elements are that she and some others can see hungry ghosts, and that those with the Mandate of Heaven can manifest it as heatless flame. I didn’t connect with the story very much emotionally-there was a lot of killing over which people would hold power but they were all going to wield it in similar ways-but it was very interesting to read a story with different background assumptions about fate and with primarily Buddhist characters.
Susan R. Matthews, Blood Enemies: At last, back in the universe of Jurisdiction, or what it has become after the single dominating government fell apart. Raiders are slaughtering outposts in the name of the Angel of Destruction, while representatives of the Malcontent are trying to stop them, and in wanders Andrej Koscuisko, trying to fix his past mistakes and screwing up his cousin’s plan in the process. A lot of maneuvering ensues, but somewhat less death after the initial pages.
Susan R. Matthews, Fleet Insurgent: Story collection: “novelettes, stories, and vignettes from The Life and Hard Times of ‘Uncle’ Andrej Koscuisko, who is Not a Nice Man.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Amanda Foody & Christine Lynn Herman, All of Us Villains: A lot of worldbuilding, maybe a bit too much: high magic has disappeared from most of the world, but in one town, seven families fight to control it every twenty years in a duel to the death among their teen champions. But someone revealed the secret of the contest, and now the government has sent overseers, though the curse itself can’t be interfered with. This year’s teens include an assortment of types, including at least one who’d like to destroy the whole thing if possible. It was brisk enough once you got all the data dumping out of the way; the contest starts in this book but does not finish.
Andrea Stewart, The Bone Shard Daughter: Lin is the Emperor’s daughter, but he won’t name her heir until she recovers her memories, lost in some mysterious way, and learns to use bone shard magic, which is what the Emperor uses to control the constructs that help him rule. Bone shards are extracted from the empire’s citizens as children, except for the ones it kills and the ones who are sent to join the Shardless rebels; using them in the constructs slowly drains the survivors’ lives. Jovin is a smuggler looking for his lost wife who rescues a strange creature and starts to experience stranger events. Phalue is the daughter of the governor of one of the Empire’s islands whose lover is trying to convince her of the problems with the current system. And then there’s the memoryless woman on the isolated island who starts to wonder what’s going on. So: palace intrigue plus magic on floating islands some of which are starting to sink, and I haven’t even mentioned the dangerous Alanga who the constructs were created to fight. It’s stuffed but fun.
Andrea Stewart, The Bone Shard Emperor: Lin has become Emperor but can’t necessarily keep the role. There is even more palace intrigue and backstabbing than in the first book, enough to seem almost over the top, and then I think about the backstabbing in our own failing government and think: well, sure. It was an engaging read.
Grady Hendrix, The Final Girl Support Group: What if hand-massacring groups of teenagers had become just as popular as school shootings? The most well-known survivors of two rounds of attacks have a support group in LA, until things start going bad-one killed, others endangered and also accused of participating in/organizing the murder sprees they survived. Like other Hendrix books, it’s both about the harm that women do to each other and the patriarchal system in which they do it. Nothing supernatural and ultimately I didn’t find it to be a workable alternate world precisely for the reasons explained by one of the many “nonfiction inserts” in the book: School shootings became widespread because guns are different.
Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate: Senior year in the Scholomance. This book goes straight for “reluctant hero who’s supposed to be the bad guy discovers with annoyance that what they really want is to save people, ungrateful or no,” and it’s propulsive fun as El recruits more and more people to try to fix the Scholomance and save as many of the students as she can. Warning for immense cliffhanger (almost literally) at the end.
Jonathan Strahan, ed., The Year’s Best Science Fiction, vol. 2 (2020): Max Barry, Pat Cadigan, Yoon Ha Lee, Ken Liu, Tochi Onyebuchi, and others, with a lot of climate change and posthumanism. A good overview of what’s going on.
Charles Stross, Iron Sunrise: After the Singularity scattered humanity across thousands of worlds, one of them has its sun blown up. Only scattered survivors are left, including a young girl whose imaginary friend knows a lot more than he should, and may be connected with the Singularity’s continued interest in humans. The victim world’s automated defense systems send retaliatory gunships at sublight speed, and only the surviving ambassadors can stop them-but someone is killing the ambassadors. And there’s an autocracy rising based on erasing humans and turning them into puppets, though even in the autocracy there are factions. Stross is much more willing to include sexual coercion in his sf than in the Laundry Files, which I find abstractly interesting but is worth pointing out in case that’s not what you want to read.
Charles Stross, Neptune’s Brood: Posthumanity, thousands of years in the future, has colonized many worlds at sublight speeds, financing it through a variation of blockchain lending and debt that is paid off by launching new colonies (that is, a Ponzi scheme of sorts). Our hero is the clone of a prominent financier whose hobby of investigating lightspeed frauds ends up threatening to expose a dangerous secret. A lot of shenanigans, financial and otherwise, ensue; one funny note is that Stross likes “abyssal” and “Cherenkov radiation” as much in his sf as in his Bob Howard fantasy.
Charles Stross, Saturn’s Children: Another posthuman story, this one closer to the time of humanity’s extinction, featuring a protagonist designed as a sexbot with inherent submissiveness to the extinct species, which makes her very sad. (All desire here is heterosexual because apparently humans only designed hetero robots.) Her programming means she’s aroused by partners’ arousal, so there’s a fair amount of casual sex and also rape, especially in the backstory explaining why one of the bad robots is bad but also some fairly coercive conduct towards the protagonist-whose personality changes a bunch when different chips are in her head, including one known as a slave chip. Anyway, she’s just trying to survive in an increasingly hostile universe-people who look like her are out of fashion-and gets swept up in a chase to acquire a real human who would be able to command all the powerful people because their programming was never changed. Not nearly as fun as Neptune’s Brood; I like Stross better focusing on accounting than sex.
Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun:In feudal China, a young girl takes her brother’s place and fate, escaping starvation to become first a monk and then a general in the rebellion against the Mongol rulers. Her destiny entwines with that of the prized eunuch general of the Mongols. (Her pronouns never change internally, but that doesn’t stop her from thinking of herself as a man in order to fool Heaven that she’s entitled to her brother’s destiny.) The fantasy elements are that she and some others can see hungry ghosts, and that those with the Mandate of Heaven can manifest it as heatless flame. I didn’t connect with the story very much emotionally-there was a lot of killing over which people would hold power but they were all going to wield it in similar ways-but it was very interesting to read a story with different background assumptions about fate and with primarily Buddhist characters.
Susan R. Matthews, Blood Enemies: At last, back in the universe of Jurisdiction, or what it has become after the single dominating government fell apart. Raiders are slaughtering outposts in the name of the Angel of Destruction, while representatives of the Malcontent are trying to stop them, and in wanders Andrej Koscuisko, trying to fix his past mistakes and screwing up his cousin’s plan in the process. A lot of maneuvering ensues, but somewhat less death after the initial pages.
Susan R. Matthews, Fleet Insurgent: Story collection: “novelettes, stories, and vignettes from The Life and Hard Times of ‘Uncle’ Andrej Koscuisko, who is Not a Nice Man.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.