lightreads

The Obsidian Tower

3/5. Fantasy about the woman who is the one with apparently necromantic magic in a family of vivomancers, and what happens when the door her family has guarded for thousands of years (they have a stupid rhyme about it and everything) is opened.

I picked this up because I liked her more recent release. This has many of the same good elements: bisexual heroine, complex webs of relationships, actual politics, and interest in friendship and teamwork. But I did not like this one nearly so much. I am generally in a bad mood right now, so take this as you will, but the protag’s repeated emotional victimization by two-thirds of the people in the book (including herself), and how she takes on guilt for basically everything, and her self-sacrificing tendencies really irritated me. I imagine the arc of this trilogy will be towards better relationships and some actual self-worth but meh, I’m not along for the ride.

Content notes: Torture.

.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.

Where the Axe Is Buried

4/5. A near future scifi thriller about the violently authoritarian surveillance state (it’s Russia) where the president is downloaded into successive bodies which the population steadfastly pretends not to notice, and the western european powers that have “rationalized,” i.e., installed AI prime ministers. A book about regime destabilization, and surveillance shadows, and thought control, and inception.

I was reading perfectly acceptable books, and then I picked this up and was like oh damn. Now this is good writing. This is tight (less than 100,000 words, probably) and intense and strange and bleak and hopeful. It stradles several genres and as such I suspect will not satisfy a lot of people: too literary and ambiguous for some, too much thriller for others. But this really landed for me.

Dense, chewy, controlled, beautifully written. Terribly sad on the costs of defying authoritarianism. Hopeful, in a complicated way.

Content notes: State violence Disappearances, camps, etc.

The Shots You Take

3/5. Another one of these M/M hockey romances. This one is even less about hockey than usual – old estranged teammates reconnect post retirement when one’s father dies. They have a lot of baggage having to do with how they used to sleep together, and one of them was in love and one of them had a lot of internalized homophobia.

I mean, I suppose someone did have to title a hockey romance that at some point.

Anyway, this one is nice, particularly for having actual adults in it. It also successfully walks that tough line where one half of the pairing treated the other half very poorly in the past, and there’s a lot of justifiable anger, but it is a romance after all so we have to retain some sympathy for both sides. So yeah, I liked this one fine. I’m not liking any romance more than fine at the moment, though, so who even knows what’s good anymore.

Content notes: Parental death and the raw aftermath.

A more Beautiful and Terrible History

3/5. A fascinating look at the way civil rights history is used and abused and retold, most often to serve current racial status quo.

I liked this and found it helpful, but hesitate to casually recommend it to people. The problem is that the author occasionally drops a comment that is squarely in my expertise and that she is dead wrong about. Which, people are allowed to be wrong about things not in their wheelhouse, but it makes one wonder about the rest of their thinking.

An example: I don’t have the exact passage bookmarked, but she says something super casual early on about how the 2016 election was stolen and then moves on without addressing that at all. I suspect this is an artifact of that particular 2017 twitter brain rot that infected many people on the left. My problems with this are many. There has been extensive legal and factual investigation of this, and it simply isn’t true. Did we know that in 2017? No, but speaking for myself, I was pretty sure of it at the time and was validated by all the evidence subsequently gathered. Second, gosh, where have we heard this particular bit of red pill thinking before? Or since, I should say? “My guy lost so it had to be illegitimate?” Hmm. This is where all the Jan. 6 defendants started out, mentally. It’s

Look, she could have been saying something more fundamental about the nature of U.S. elections – how structural racism has permeated them to the point that they are not legitimate. I have heard these arguments and yeah, you can get me there. But if so, why is 2016 the one we point to? And why doesn’t she unpack that? Saying an election was “stolen” can mean approximately ten thousand different things, be precise, people! Here, it’s just leftie red pill stuff. And if her thinking is that messed up on that, boy, I don’t know. I don’t love marking a book down hard for throwaway comments, but then again, it’s the throwaways that really tell you how someone thinks, isn’t it?

Content notes: Racism, structural and personal. Historical accounts of civil rights history which, of course, include much racial violence.

Letters to Half Moon Street

3/5. Short epistolary queer norm historical romance with fantasy elements, about the shy (and possibly demi) younger son in London for the first time catching the eye of a society gentleman.

A charming frip of a book with good epistolary. This has all the trappings of an early nineteenth century historical romance, except it’s queer norm. The worldbuilding is paper thin – that’s not the point, I realize – but I’m the sort of person who asks too many questions of a book like this. Like okay, you’ve replaced heterosexism with a model that relies even more heavily on birth order, and yet that seems to have changed the way that class and inheritance and power work in this setting not at all or very little? How is that possible? Yes, I am interrogating the text from the wrong direction, I acknowledge I am the problem here. The author’s note is like “I wanted to write queer norm historical so I did and I stuck fantasy magic in it, so there,” and like, sure, I respect it. I’m just not the best at reading it.

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.

Shroud

4/5. Our narrator, vassal of a future space exploring hell corporate, tells the story of how she survived many days on the surface of a mysterious and deeply hostile moon, populated by inexplicable and frightening life forms. Then things get weirder.

Good standalone scifi with a long section of survival horror. This makes an interesting companion to Alien Clay, another recent book of his. Both are about humans who are powerless within an oppressive and unfair human system, and how they encounter terrifying alien life, and how those aliens embody another way of being sentient in a radical departure from the human way, and what that illuminates. The two books come at that story from very different angles, but to interesting effect alone and together.

Content notes: Death, corporate dehumanization, the existential horror of alien consciousness

Determined

2/5. Nonfiction on one of my hobby horse topics of interest: how humans have way less agency over our actions than we believe we do.

I went into this prepared to get an up-to-date summary of the related research, since I haven’t done a deep dive on this in about a decade. There’s plenty of info here, but I was too distracted by developing an overpowering dislike for the author. I did have some amount of foreboding since I’ve heard his lectures, and he’s made several jokes that landed very poorly with me.

But here, the irony is thick. He notes – entirely correctly – that one problem with being a determinist is that you keep company with a lot of really unpleasant people who think really unpleasant things. He says he is not such a person, and that part of the point of the book is to make an argument in favor of – my words here – liberal values.

And then he turns around and makes all those arguments, and peppers them with the exact sort of little “jokes” that those assholes make. You know the ones. About how the child of a poor drug user is basically a write off as a human being from the second trimester in the womb. There are a lot of these. It’s been months, so I don’t remember them all, but yeah. He’s not being ironic (though there’s some of that, and my man, no, stop), he’s not being funny, he’s just being exactly the sort of awful he set out to avoid.

Malice

2/5. Chonker epic fantasy that is the first of four books about a prophesied god war where the avatar of good will fight the avatar of evil. Yeah, you’ve heard this one before.

The booktube girls got me again. They love this. I do not.

Partly, sure it’s the women problem. This book has many points-of-view. They are all men except for one, who is a girl but wait, come back, it’s fine, she’s not like other girls, you see, she likes knives. This is relevant because every single other male POV is drowning in boring warrior culture masculinity issues. Several of them are young, and all of them are concerned with what it means to be a man. And the ven diagram in this book between ‘man’ and ‘warrior’ is a near perfect circle. I don’t caaaaaaare.

Also, I was told that these books were “twisty” and would “make you really think about who is good and who is bad.” Except I got literally a third of the way through the first book, saw the writing on the wall and went ‘oh no, is what they’re talking about this?’ And googled, and, uh. Yep. The book is trying to set up this ambiguity where you supposedly aren’t sure who is the avatar of good and who is the avatar of evil, because their actions are deeply contextual and blah blah, you get it. Which, (1) I figured out who was who plain as day apparently more than two books before I was supposed to; and (2) it kind of offends me. The book is, it appears, trying to trick the reader by deploying some epic fantasy tropes and cliches, and it will then presumably do a rug pull at some point and go “ha ha, I fooled you into believing my cliché of believing in what it means to be noble and a good man, you should be a smarter reader.” Which, okay, fine, but to make that work, you have to write a book that doesn’t entirely depend for its every beat and gesture on boring tired epic fantasy cliches that it takes staggeringly seriously.

Anyway, whatever, I was pretty bored and annoyed from that point on.

Content notes: Animal harm, violence, bullying.