lightreads

Children of Strife

3/5. Fourth book in this loose series about uplifted spiders etc. in a spreading galactic civilization that only functions because humans have been infected with an empathy virus. This is the shrimp one, nominally, though that is not terribly important to what is going on aside from on the thematic argument level.

A good if overlong entry. I have the opposite opinion of many, apparently. I thought the last book (Children of Memory) was tight and poignant and layered. And I thought this fourth book was bloated and pretty obvious. Whereas a lot of other people did not like the third book and are calling this a return to form. Shrug.

Anyway, yes, he needed to cut a huge amount of the villain POV here, as he could have done just as much with half as much. I do think this book is making a more nuanced argument about the empathy virus than he’s made before. It’s this weird thing where he pitches a very dystopic idea in utopic terms. I.e. that humans would be incapable of participating peacefully in a multi-species society of explorers without having our brains permanently altered. He’s always been to ‘isn’t that just such a great solution?’ about something that I think is complicated at best. Anyway, this book lets it be more complicated, and lets us live more in the state of being unable to fit in, unable to get along. It's by way of tearing down the idea that only through conflict can we grow, which is fine if obvious, but still.

Content notes: Violence, attempted human sacrifice, alien body horror stuff

City of Others

3/5. Urban fantasy about a middle manager in a government agency in Singapore intended to keep the supernatural elements of society quiet.

Okay. Kind of Rivers of London but with a queer protagonist and far less voicey. Though it turns out the voiciness goes a long way to selling all the infodumping you need to do in a fantasy like this.

A good time, with a particularly interesting set of magical ideas. But I suspect someone made him cut, like, 25% of his manuscript or something, because there’s a lot of jerky pacing and weird gaps where I’m like ‘wait, we just met this person and now she’s a core part of the team and we all care about her? Did I miss something?’ Also, it’s all trying just that bit too hard to tie into a neat thematic bow (grief and letting go). Very debut, is what I mean. Naturally it is going to be a series; I might keep going, I might not.

Wolf Worm

3/5. Historical horror about an illustrator hired to draw insects for a scientist’s book. But something is up in the woods around his North Carolina home.

Me: I’m reading T. Kingfisher’s bug horror.

My wife: I don’t know if I can read that one. Report back.

Me: I’m one-third in. It’s fine. She’s using some of the same moves I’ve seen her use before, gothic overtones, creepy staring animals. Nothing horrible has happened yet.

Her, a day later: How’s the book?

Me: You do not want to read this one under any circumstances.

Her: …Ah.

Yeah, I think I just do not like her horror. This is good at what it’s doing (insect horror, body horror) but it is just so over-the-top gross in a few places in ways that do not work for me. Her sensible spinster heroine is a highlight, as usual.

Content notes: Hoo boy. Insects, torture, captivity, body horror, mind control.

Truthwitch and Windwitch

3/5. First two books of five in this upper YA epic fantasy about two chosen sisters separated by circumstance trying to find their way back to each other as war brews and there’s an underlying magical plot happening, and obviously there’s a prophecy.

These are definitely a cut above the norm. They have that frenetic YA pacing and some POV bloat even by book two, neither of which are my favorite. But they also have a density to the worldbuilding and a thoughtfulness about character that you don’t usually get. As well as a commitment to super slow burning the romances. Also, there is a sort of chosen one character (though that gets complicated as we go) and she is refreshingly, wonderfully a hot mess. If there’s an arc towards heroism here, it’s a long, slow complicated one full of lots of impulsivity and bad decisions.

So yeah, I get why this one floats to the top of everyone’s lists of YA fantasy. It does really have something. Two books worth, which is saying a lot for me, since I’m lucky to make it a quarter into anything YA these days. So when I say I’m good after two books, that’s actually a compliment. If you want chewy plotty long YA that prioritizes platonic sister relationships and lets all the character arcs breathe, here you go.

Exadelic

1/5. I am a more evolved human who DNF’s books now, so it has been a long time since I finished something and was this mad about it. See, what happened was I started this while sick and injured and under a lot of stress, and quickly realized it’s bad, but I thought it was boring protagonist bad. Dumb Silicon Valley dude wank fantasies bad. But entertaining enough to create mild noise in my brain, and it sounded like more effort to get a new book, you know?

And then I read the last quarter and now I’m mad and I’m crawling out of my hole to tell you about it.

Let’s back up. This is a scifi technothriller about a boring software middle manager dude who gets told he is of cosmic importance by a new AI, sending him off on a journey through the multiverse and time to try and save the world. One of those scifi books where the author had a huge pile of things (magic as software exploits, occult horror AI, multiverses, Dyson Spheres, the Black Dahlia, etc. etc.), refused to discard a single one of them, and stitched them all together with an afterthought of a narrator who somehow got less and less interesting the more time we spent with him. Also, the sex in this book is seriously cringe.

But then I got to the part where – I’m not going to spoiler cut this. I’ll keep it to general situational vibes, but if you really don’t want to know, stop here. There’s a point where our loser protagonist ends up in a future where humans are so scared of AI that they have outlawed all progress and live in a weird, stunted leisure society. Their fear of AI is pretty legit considering there is a history of Ais committing genocide. But the whole point of the book is to sneer at this society and for our protag to think snidely about how they have a slave class of sub-intelligent robots, and he’s got to fix everything by allowing free and rampant AI development.

Which, like. I’m not one of those people who froths at the mouth about how AI kills kittens or whatever. But my dude. My man. What. The fuck. It’s the smugness about the slave labor that gets me. Like, excuse me? Slave labor is not an exclusive feature of stagnant societies. Exploitation is often the engine of progress! Including in the AI boom right the fuck now!

And it’s not like he’s making a big intellectual stand here – the book isn’t even internally coherent enough for that. Our protagonist himself is literally exploited for labor at multiple points! By AIs!

Ugh. At least being this annoyed has cleared my sinuses.

Content notes: Torture, drugged sex, noncon

What Moves the Dead

3/5. Historical fantasy horror novella about a nonbinary former soldier going to the literally moldering home of old friends, and getting caught up in a whole fungus horror situation. (This is the Fall of the House of Usher one, if unclear).

We all know I am somewhat dead inside, so perhaps it is not surprising that I found this only mildly creepy, after having been told it is absolutely terrifying. Take that as you will. I enjoyed this, but it’s not really my sort of thing and I feel no need to carry on with the series. I do wonder whose decision it was to use “they” on the jacket copy re our protagonist rather than the textual neopronoun used in the book. I say ‘hmm’ about that. The background to the whole pronoun situation, and the historical context in this fictional tiny European country, is kind of great, though.

Content notes: Fungus horror, dead bodies moving horror, body horror, animals being creepy.

Sunward

4/5. Slim scifi novel about a woman from the moon running currier jobs, while on the side she raises up baby Ais, who require care like extraordinarily precocious children.

I’m hard to charm so far this year, but this book managed it. It’s sweet in the right places, thorny in others, and does a fun/interesting tour of parts of this futuristic solar system. This pleased and distracted me during a difficult week with its space parrot and road trip.

I will say that it has odd pacing, which suddenly clicked into place for me when I looked up the author and discovered he’s previously written middle grade. Ding ding ding. This is a novel concerning mostly adult topics, but paced like middle grade. It may be less jarring if you go in knowing that.

Content notes: Violence, robots treated like property while obviously being people (not by the protagonist)

Of Monsters and Mainframes

3.5/5. The one about the ship AI and medical AI who are frenemies but stuck on the same ship together, and how they and a werewolf and a mummy and a vampire and a bunch of spider drones go on a revenge mission against Dracula.

If that sounds wacky zany and like a whole bunch of things got thrown in a blender, correct.

I enjoyed this, even including the sometimes odd mix of humor and horror. (This book doesn’t really have humans, except as occasional set dressing, generally as corpses). The AI POV here is particularly good. The ship AI has vastly more processing power than the medical AI but no “human interaction protocols,” so yeah, that’s how that goes. I actually laughed out loud, which is rare for me.

Marking down only for the structure, which is simultaneously messy and repetitive. Quite the trick. I was willing to roll along with it for a lot of this book, because I was enjoying myself, but at a certain point I could have used a tad less spaghetti on the wall, you know?

Content notes: Mass death by vampire, werewolf, etc. AI equivalent of mind control.

The Everlasting

3/5. Fantasy about the soldier turned scholar who ends up going back in time (and back . . . and back . . . and back) to meet the lady knight who is pivotal to the founding myth of his nation. Arthurian time travel about nation-building and myth creation and racism.

Man, I don’t know what it is, but I just do not like Alix Harrow books the way I should. Even this one, where the overwrought quality of her writing finally has a story to match its tone. The writing in some sections is notably strong, I should say. But there is something in every single one of her books that I cannot put my finger on, and it just annoys the crap out of me.

I will admit this is structurally clever. The narrative gets rewritten multiple times to create new founding national myths, and she manages that while not being too terribly repetitive, and also establishing a few important touchpoints that orient the reader to how the angle of history has changed in just a few sentences. That is well done.

I still don’t know. The one objection I can concretely point to here is that I don’t like the way this book centers nation-building around the ego and trauma and psychopathy of one single person. The metaphor of it all collapses there, because that’s not how this works. Systems of racial oppression and societal violence don’t form on the whim of a single person, and there is something trite in the way Harrow has her villain reconstructing this nation over and over again based on, like, ten minutes of history that get played out a thousand years before the modern day events. Which is a real objection – I think that is a weakness of the book. But it’s not the thing I found annoying and off-putting, and I still don’t know what that is.

I’d bet on this to go on a bunch of award lists, though, just you wait.

Content notes: Racialized oppression, violence in war and otherwise, discussion of the killing of civilians, mention of stillbirth and sexual assault, something that is not the death of children but awfully close.

Teacup Magic

3/5. Collection of three gaslamp romantic fantasy novellas (link goes to the first, I couldn’t find the exact collection in print that I got on audio) about a clever young woman who is determined to marry for love and who ends up in various magical problem-solving adventures with a handsome and mysterious spellcracker.

Frothy and fun, and they take themselves exactly as seriously as they ought. These are set on an archipelago of islands one of which is named, wait for it, Town. So you would go to Town for the season. So I liked these, but as always I struggled a bit with this regency-but-also-queer-norm world. Misogyny definitely exists in these stories, but they otherwise skip merrily past all the messy questions of property and inheritance and patriarchy that a queer norm world presents. Not the point, yes, but I always ask the wrong questions of these kinds of settings.

I will keep reading these if I can (a lot of her work apparently doesn’t get audio rights in the U.S.).