lightreads

.The Mimicking of Known Successes and two more

4/5. A series (two novellas and a short novel) about an investigator on Jupiter who reconnects with her old girlfriend, a professor, to solve crime.

Ignore that this is Holmes/Watson. I sure did. Making them lesbians does not suddenly make me care.

Also ignore the summary above which makes these sound like mysteries. I mean, they are. That is what is going on here. And the mysteries are fine, whatever.

No, I read these for the worldbuilding, which got more and more interesting the deeper we go. Our narrator – the professor – is a “classicist,” meaning someone who studies old Earth ecology pre climate collapse in the theoretical hope of one day rebuilding that ecosystem. As opposed to the “modern” faculty, who study life as lived on Jupiter, can you imagine, what a waste. It starts out reading like a bit of a joke, sometimes lightly funny, sometimes scathing, at the expense of academia. And then it gets more and more nuanced, and our narrator starts to untangle ever deepening layers of her biases, and questioning the project of her university and her life. And she has to ask genuine questions about whether she was, in a particular instance, the villain. And I have almost never seen that done like this, where it is a real question for the character and for the narrative, not just some stupid character self-indulgent sob fest. No, there’s a real and complex question there, and these books let it breathe.

Content notes: Toxic academic politics, futuristic racism, violence, depressive episodes.

Bonds of Brass

2/5. Frothy M/M scifi about the kid at military school who discovers his roommate – who he’s in love with – is the heir to the conquering oppressive empire.

A book has not made me this mad in quite a long time.

I picked this up because I have a terrible weakness for space royalty. Queer space royalty? Put it in my face.

But then I started it, and went Wait, what is happening here? And did some googling, and discovered that this book was straight up marketed as “pick this up when you’ve run out of Finn/Po on the AO3.”

Okay.

Look.

Do I love that publishing has been busily co-opting fannish language and customs? I do not. Don’t get me started on how shit terrible they generally are when they try to tag things. But do I acknowledge that the small glut of fannish authors turned pro and serial numbers filed off books has done good things for genre and for me personally? Sure.

But that’s not what this is.

This is a book that could chase a Finn/Po binge in the sense that . . . I mean it has space in it? And – I’m guessing here – the art of the two leads is clearly the actors? Otherwise . . . no. Not the slightest bit of the same thing at all. Which pisses me off because it's a total misunderstanding of why shippers ship. Yes it's because the actors are hot, but fundamentally it's about the character dynamic. So if you market me Finn/Po and then give me two people with a wildly different set of personalities and histories and interactions, well now I know that you really don't get what you're trying to sell at all.

But the thing that really burns my biscuits is how this book starts, on page one, blithely like “so I’m totally in love with him, anyway, here’s our story,” with no grounding as to why or how this alleged love came about. It definitely requires explanation, because the love interest in question is, well, yikes to say the least.

But we don’t get an explanation or any grounding. At all in the whole book, to be clear. We’re just dropped in cold and expected to buy it. Which is 100% a move you can make in a Finn/Po AU on the AO3. It is absolutely not a move you can make in an original fucking novel. Because in fact, co-opting the language and customs and narrative structures of fandom for traditionally published books is, quite often, a terrible idea with terrible results.

Don’t get me started on everything else wrong with this book, like how it’s a first person narrator who withholds a vital and completely relevant piece of information to the end of the book. That is a hard road, and the author does not have those chops. Nor does she have the chops for the delicate and complex story of collaboration and trauma and imperialism and internal conflict she was vaguely gesturing towards. Not even a bit.

Put the AO3 down, publishers.

I Who Have Never Known Men

4/5. A short feminist science fiction(?) novel originally written in french in the 90’s, when it acquired a cult following, whereupon it was translated into english a few years ago and acquired a new and different cult following. This is the first person account of a young girl who grew up in a cage with 39 women, all older than her, all of whom remember their former lives, unlike her. They know nothing but each other and the silent guards, until one day everything changes, and they escape to a strange, answerless landscape.

This is good. It manages that trick of being an incredibly bleak story, but told with a lot of tenderness and humanity, so it feels richer and more rewarding than ‘bleak’ implies. This is simply written, yet rewards complex thought. I think the author’s jewishness is important for reading it well, particularly in appreciating why there is never any actual ‘why’ for the atrocities committed here. I also strongly suspect the author had been reading Tiptree, and maybe Le Guin’s “Sur” (very different, and yet related), and maybe Marge Piercy? This feels very much in conversation with a lot of speculative feminist texts of the 80’s in particular, is what I’m saying.

I am less compelled by the reading suggested by the afterword in my english text, which glosses this book as about what a woman might be, should she exist in a world entirely without men. I mean, the title’s right up there, so sure, carry on. I just don’t find that a very rewarding train of thought in this iteration, and think this book is doing a lot of other things that I’d rather pay attention to.

Content notes: Captivity, depictions of mass death aftermath, euthanasia of a sort.

Bonded in Death

3/5. Latest of these – if you don’t know what they are by now, I can’t help you. An okay series entry that, as usual recently, took the safe and boring route. Eve is a half step ahead of the killer through the whole book, and the safety of everyone you care about is pretty much a sure thing. Some unsubtle but nice reflections on the ways groups of people bond in adversity, or in hard collective work, both Eve’s police team and extended network and the team of old spies at the heart of the story.

I was more interested in the history dropped here than the case. I’ve always wondered what these “urban wars” were about. The explanation we get here is plausible in parts – a mass movement to ‘burn it all down’ – and very silly in the whole – a worldwide(?) coordinated(?) breakdown of order in urban centers? Which is resolved after years of fighting without apparently really changing the geopolitics of anything? Okay, Nora, carry on.

Content notes: Murder, child abduction/harm.

3/5. Hard scifi about a couple of functionally immortal galactic citizens travelling to the core to find an unknown civilization sprung from the DNA panspermia; meanwhile members of that civilization work out the newtonian and relativistic principles that describe their extremely weird and risky existence.

Very much of its time (nearly twenty years ago) and just okay. A big idea book where I thought the big idea was only vaguely interesting, but there isn’t really much else to go on here, unless you like over a hundred pages of people talking about physics math. Which is not snide, considering I enjoyed that strand of the book more than the strand about the functionally immortal people, who do things like load up new modules to become experts in various fields in a few seconds, which really enhances their presentation as cardboard cutout post humans. Post humans who have left the constraints of embodiment behind, by the way, and who are nonetheless still deeply invested in the gender binary. Sure, okay.

Read Tchaikovsky’s Children books instead. Some superficial similarities, much more alive.

Dungeon Crawler Carl and five more

4/5. Carl ends up on an intergalactic reality show dungeon crawl to the death with his cat after aliens destroy most of earth.

N.b.: The latest book is not out in audio yet. Do not spoil me. Also, the first few of these have been picked up for trad publishing, but I read all in the original indie audio (very good productions).

Aw man, I ate these the fuck up. I was not so sure when I started the first book – too much dude humor, that thing where there are no female characters who aren’t inhuman or monstrous in some way, you know what I’m talking about. But then they got their feet under them more, and started sprinting, and yeah. You know that dopamine hit you can get off of opening a treasure chest in a video game? These books delivered that, repeatedly and creatively. I’m even here for the extended passages of dungeon game mechanics and stats!

These are messy as hell and weirdly paced. And I both respect him for writing on patreon and letting people vote on various things, and also wish he would take a little more time with his drafts. Am I confident that he will land some of the bigger ideas he is lofting as the series progresses, about violence and complicity and the costs of survival? Eh, moderately. But in terms of pure enjoyment? Top notch.

Also, I will say an absolute highlight is the extended cast. The setup almost made me stop reading – the remnant human population is supposed to be fighting itself to the death – but the books are so not into that. They are into teamwork and solving big problems with big collaboration, and making big messy friend groups work, and all sorts of things that are 100% my jam.

These books also do that thing where they are deeply enjoyable, and at the same time fully convince me that I do not want to go dumpster diving in the lit RPG space for more of this. Because I’m pretty sure I will not find it, and what I will find will not make me happy.

Content notes: Violence, both interpersonal and genocidal. Recollections of child abuse/suicide/attempted murder.

Bloodchild and Other Stories

4/5. Short story collection. Including her famous (infamous?) “pregnant man story” which, if it were on the AO3, would be tagged ova position and dead dove do not eat. She kind of lived in the dead dove do not eat tag, tbh. In a good way? I mean I’m into it. It’s all depressing as hell and twisty and psychological and horrifying. I read this months ago, and actually the few non-fantastical stories have stuck with me the most for being little jewels of twisted up circumstance and emotion.

Content notes: Um, ova position? Body horror, coerced reproduction, various kinds of sexual violence, mostly off page, references to incest, violence, many other things I can't clearly remember now.

The Stardust Grail

3/5. Scifi about an art thief who goes back to grad school but then comes out of retirement for the sake of scoring the alien artifact that eluded her before, but it’s more complicated than that.

Started out interesting, went steadily downhill. Her work gets called “literary,” which as usual seems to be purely about vibes. As in, the worldbuilding here is all vibes (I’m pretty sure that’s what literary means when it’s scifi). There’s just a lot of a lot going on here, some of it quite surreal like the virus our protagonist got as a child which makes her dream about the future. Sure, okay, but the whole book is a dozen threads like that which don’t come together.

Maybe sophomore slumpy? Her debut got a lot of buzz last year, but this felt over-complicated and underbaked.

The Mercy of Gods

3/5. Start of a new series in which humans (not on Earth, this is important) are subjugated by aliens. A university science team is taken to a work camp where they must figure out what they have to do to be useful enough to survive and, largely in theory, how they could possibly fight back.

Something of a departure from The Expanse -- way slower and more interpersonal. That’s not a criticism. Unfortunately, I was disinterested or put off by pretty much every interpersonal dynamic here. Way too much time spent on which unlikable man is in charge of what. I mean, it’s a book about a lot of realistically flawed people suffering unspeakable trauma and fracturing in various ways. It’s not that the book isn’t good at that – it is – but the particular fracturings here were unpleasant to me.

I do kinda want to know the resolution to the big alien power struggle, though not enough to read more books.

Content notes: Mentions of genocide, violence, suicidality, what it’s like to be mentally ill in a prison work camp where you can’t get your meds, mind control and associated dubious consent in the way where two people are having sex and one has not consented but the other does not know that and has no way of understanding what is happening

Lady Eve's Last Con

N.b.: I know the author a smidge.

3/5. A con artist sets out to trick a young heir into marriage because he wronged her sister, but oh no help his sister is unfairly hot. Also, it’s science fiction but with shades of historical drama of manners.

This poor book. I did my best, but my reading of it was interrupted by long-awaited or otherwise urgent library holds arriving no less than five times. It suffered a lot for that. It’s a cute, sweet, occasionally sexy sapphic tale of hot girls and family problems and being a class outsider and being good to your siblings except what does that mean, again? This probably would have had more emotional traction with me if I’d read it at all coherently; as it is, I found it fun but a little insubstantial. Not like that’s necessarily a bad thing.