A Sudden Wild Magic by Diana Wynne Jones

A Sudden Wild Magic

3/5. DWJ writes adult fiction, except it's sorta Chrestomanci with banging? Basically, a group of Earth witches set out to another dimension which is secretly parasitizing off our reality. Their plan is to infiltrate an all-male outpost and defeat the men with sex?

This is . . . weird? It is doing lots of things – it's about parasitic relationships of all sorts, and the stories you have to tell about another world or another person in order to feed off them. But it's also just – maybe it's unfair of me, but I have this quietly offended sniff sniff reaction to DWJ writing about adults generally making their problems worse with sex. I just feel that the way she writes about children is more complex and interesting than this, is the thing.

Also, separately, the way she introduces a few gay guys just to kill them off to eliminate any reference to gay sex is really something.

Gamechanger by L. X. Beckett

Gamechanger

4/5. Humanity has clawed itself back to a tenuous survival after global environmental collapse. In this "rapid response democracy" characterized by constant surveillance ("mutually assured disclosure") a gamer and proto lawyer becomes entangled in the case of a mysterious new online entity, with implications for the survival of the species.

This book really had to win me over, as it had to overcome the choice to insert "hashtag" and "@" all over the text as a piece of world building. This is, so, so annoying in hashtag audio, and I really wish that the_author had thought about this harder.

But it did win me over. This is queer and floridly creative and fun and weird and optimistic about us and our future. And it lets things be complicated without leaning too hard on them, like the society which exists both in authoritarian and democratic spaces simultaneously. This is a book about parenting and responsibility and making families and how hope extracted by force is still a kind of hope. I found it extremely readable and creative.

Oh also, there's a major character who is nonbinary, if that's an attraction for anyone (I believe the author is also nb).