Book #10 of 2025: Interspecies | DNF: Wild Dog City
Interspecies: Volume 1 (The Inlari Sagas) by various.
Quick synopsis: Four novellas set in a world created by the four authors. Aliens (the Inlari) have arrived on Earth, followed by worse aliens. The Earth is mostly destroyed, humans are slaves to the less bad aliens.
Brief opinion: [Reread from 2016, original review here.] I rated this "loved" back then, but now it's closer to "okay". Not bad, but even though I didn't remember it at all, it didn't feel like new ideas. Two of the four stories also had unbelievable endings.
Plot: In the first story, an Inlari boy is trained to take on his peoples' memories, but he's not the only one who wants the position.
In the second, a human girl working as part of the resistance encounters an Inlari man and trust starts to form.
In the third, a human boy and an Inlari girl are in love. He's a slave of her family and of course inter-species relationship are not at all accepted.
In the final story, a kindly Inlari man takes in a young human slave girl and raises her. A really good idea, but the ending was so unbelievable.
Writing/editing: Both varied by story. Some really basic editing things were missed, things a spellchecking would catch (though they said they hired an editor...). For example: "An ornate scabbard, which t held her double-edge sword" and "small table at the entrance of the hall's far endl ".
Some of the writing was clunky and in two (of the four) stories, unbelievable things happened.
What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: All four stories had good ideas, but the writing didn't do them justice. Mostly I don't see what I had seen in these stories nine years ago.
Edit: Well. I looked into the author of each story to see if maybe there was something else I wanted to read. Woelf Dietrich, the author of the last one, is a right wing, pro-Trumper, with a pretty gross Twitter feed. I would have been more depressed about that if I had thought his story was better and wanted to read more by him.
Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ - Okay. There's a second book of stories set in this world, but I'm going to skip it.
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DNF #4: Wild Dog City by Lydia West. A talking animal story. All sorts of wild dogs (dingoes, coyotes, wolves, etc) live together in a city with no humans in it. It might have been an interesting idea, but the writing wasn't good enough to stick with it.