lightreads

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.

House of Bane and Blood

2/5. Romantasy about a sort of arranged marriage for reasons between a magic dude and a not magic heiress who both have secrets.

So boring. Also, if you think you know what is up with the heroine and her tattoo and all that within the first 10%, yes, you are correct. I think the thing that offends me most here is actually the sex scene. It employs kink (breathplay) in the most boring way. It just came out of nowhere exactly in the way kink should not. Why were these two people interested in that? And in that moment? What did it express about their developing relationship?

Nothing. The answer is nothing. It came completely out of nowhere and expressed or explained nothing, aside from a sort of obvious shallow thing about (unearned) trust. It’s exactly what good kink writing should not be.

Content notes: A lot of violence, false imprisonment, exploitation.

Exordia

2/5. Huge chunky scifi about a transnational encounter with aliens in remote Kurdistan which sweeps earth into a galactic conflict with the evil overlords who want to metaphysically pin human souls to the proper narrative.

This started out great (funny surreal portrait of a young woman enduring the long-term effects of trauma, then she meets an alien in Central Park, it’s great) and went steadily downhill into not just weird, but long and turgid weird. I read the whole thing for the ideas and theming, which are doing a lot – the worst kind of iterative trolly problems and what they do to people, the monstrousness of making a thing only more like itself forever and ever, the work of breaking out of your own narrative. But boy, he did not want to make this book accessible. Or enjoyable. The thing is, he knows what he’s doing – two men spend the entire book in this gross psychosexual attraction/competition narrative over a woman, and in the very brief appearance she makes, she utterly and pointedly refuses to go along with that story. The book is about that kind of resistance. But I still had to read 250,000 words of their gross psychosexual posturing (and don’t get me started on the not real version of that woman they create).

I almost respect this for being one of the weirdest and most specific books I’ve ever read. It shares some meta concerns with Prophet, but bears little resemblance to basically anything. And his writing is, as always, strong. But choices were made here and I am not into them.

Also, there are lesbians here, and there is just something about the way he writes female desire that sets my teeth on edge. I thought so in his prior books, too. I can’t put words to it, but it just always makes me cock my head a little and go ew, please don’t.

Content notes: Genocide, murder, a lot of body horror, military violence.

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.

On Vicious Worlds

4/5. Impossible to talk about as it’s the sequel to an extremely twisty scifi. More intense identity drama, more danger for a remnant population attempting to escape the grasping reach of an authoritarian government, more opera in the space opera.

I continue to really like this, and to think it’s not going to be for all tastes. It’s going to be too dramatic for some. But I remain impressed that these books have managed to pack this much subversive queer longing into a queer-norm universe. How did she do that? It would be spoilers to say, but yeah, she sure did.

Content notes: Violence, discussion of past genocide, off-page torture.

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.

Alien Clay

4/5. A dissident professor is shipped off authoritarian earth to a prison labor camp on a planet where evolution took a very different tack.

Classic Tchaikovsky – a story told by a dude who is both sympathetic and insufferable, very political, fucking weird. This one is about revolutions and why they fail and how to fix that. The “fix,” in this case, being one of those moves he likes where he “solves” a problem seemingly inherent to humanity in a way that is effective and yet deeply alien and unsettling. On purpose, to be clear. It messes with a readers priors and loyalties in ways I’ve come to appreciate.

I liked this one. It’s tighter than some of his other recent books, and gets the job done well in the space it takes.

Content notes: Prison planet, recollections of authoritarian regime and its enforcers.

Cage of Souls

3/5. Pairing these up because of an artificial similarity and to get myself to finally write this one up, which I read months ago. Here’s the artificial similarity part – a dissident academic is shipped off to the prison from which no one ever returns on end days earth.

Aside from that start, these books have very little in common. This one is much longer, more confused and confusing, and concerned with some stylistic pretentions reminiscent of an eighteenth -century novel. There is some interesting stuff here about the end of civilization and how knowledge is passed or not, but this is definitely not his most successful outing, I’ll say that.

Content notes: Misogyny, carceral violence, body horror, other stuff I’m not remembering because it’s been a long time.

We Solve Murders

4/5. Start of another mystery series, this one about a bodyguard and her client and her father-in-law who get tangled up in international moneylaundering, for reasons.

This uses many of the same cards as his other books: a strong lean on platonic and nontraditional friendship bonds; short, punchy chapters; a mix of the zany and the serious. It did entertain me, but not as well as his other books did. Some of these short character sketches missed the mark on funny for me and came way too close to mean, for one. I’ll try the next one, because sometimes it takes a series a while to find its feet.

Content notes: Murder, grief, lost spouse.

The Sky on Fire

3/5. Fantasy set in a world where dragons pair with riders, but the riders aren’t the ones in charge. A ragtag group of dragons and riders and thieves and dissidents get together to do a big heist on the evil head dragon for reasons, then stuff happens.

This is okay, but did not excite me. That is sad because it features the development of a polyamorous triad, which is my jam, but not this unsatisfying iteration. See also other things I like: heists, dragons, a queer-norm and kink-norm world, and yet, eh. It’s fine. I DNF’d her other fantasy series, so maybe I should just cut my losses here.

I would be curious to know if anyone else who read this found the back third kind of disorienting? Did I miss a step, or was the book casually connecting threads that just did not meet?

Content notes: Violence, graphic description of falling and fear of heights.

Penric and the Bandit

3/5. A Penric novella, this one half outsider POV as Penric falls into the company of a man trying to rob him, but it’s a bit more complicated. I read this entire novella while cooking dinner* (crispy tofu and green beans in peanut dressing with smashed potatoes) and it was pleasant for that purpose. Slight, zero stakes in that way where there are stakes on the page, but absolutely none in a doylist sense. Comforting, is what I mean.

I do wonder where she’s going with this thing where Pen is not aging. Recompense for killing Miles so young….?

*Yes, I read audio at a very high speed

Black Water Sister

4/5. A young closeted woman begins to hear the voice of her dead grandmother when she returns to Malaysia with her parents. This leads to encounters with gangsters and gods, and some family reckonings.

Ah, now this is the Zen Cho book I’ve been waiting for. My wife absolutely adores her short fiction, but neither of us have been really impressed with any of her novels. But this one. It’s depiction of this extended Asian family – its secrets and lies and religious conflicts and the gifts and failings of its women – ah. It’s so specific and perfect. I also particularly recommend the audio, which lends a wonderful cadence to the dialogue, much of which is spoken in English translation for the reader, but is not in English within the story.

All of that wraps what is at its heart a simple story of a girl working her way around to come out to her conservative parents in a blanket of complexity and nuance. Lovely.

Content notes: Threatened rape, allusions to past domestic violence/rape/murder, homophobia and fear thereof.

The Spellshop

3/5. Cozy fantasy about a shut-in librarian who escapes the city convulsed by revolution with a load of illegal magic books, which she takes back to the tiny island of her childhood where she starts a jam shop and begins providing it’s-totally-not-magic “remedies.” Also, there’s a hot boy.

I should just quit on cozies. This one started out quite nicely. It’s all extremely to spec – jam shop (you must have a small business in a cozy, it’s the law), Cute talking plant companion, small town shenanigans. But then it overstayed its welcome by a good 25,000 words, and the romance did nothing for me, and it took a distinct bend to the saccharine. I think I should just go to fanfic when I want the particular satisfaction of a cozy.

Long Live Evil

4/5. A young woman dying of cancer is given the chance to go into her (sort of) favorite dark fantasy series. She arrives in the body of the villainess the night before her execution. But changing that changes all sorts of other things.

This was, on the one hand, delightful and absorbing. It’s obviously very metatextual – our protagonist is forever commenting on genre convention, sexism in fantasy, the shape of stories, etc. And it’s also very funny. There’s an “as foretold” joke in here that made me straight up cackle. Also, I detect some Tamsyn Muir DNA in here, if that’s an inducement.

On the other hand, this did not reward any look beyond the surface. I think it meant to, but I didn’t find anything that stuck to me in all the talk of stories and conventions and villainy. I’m not mad about it, to be clear. I still had a pretty great time. But I did think there could have been more. Maybe the sequel will provide.

Content notes: Zombies, violence, threatened rape, recollections of terminal illness.

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.

Passions in Death

3/5. My preferred type of these, a good old-fashioned personal murder mystery. She puts queer people in her books now, and not entirely just as victims anymore, though there’s still that here. This is a pleasant procedural, made less interesting by the thing where Eve is the bestest detective ever who solves these cases on her gut hundreds of pages before the evidence lines up, and she is never wrong. Let the woman be wrong sometimes! Being wrong is interesting and a doorway into revealing character – why is she wrong? What are her biases (she has lots, and yet they never seem to get in the way)?

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea

3/5. Cozy sapphic fantasy about a queen’s guard who runs away with her powerful mage girlfriend to start a tea/book shop (which is immediately successful, that’s how you know it’s fantasy), also dragon stuff.

This is fine. Cozy fantasy is as particular and personal as romance, and my hit rate is correspondingly low. This one is fine and hits the expected beats (small town politics, renovating to open your business, cute companion animals, you know the drill) but did not distinguish itself in any way. Not even the established relationship, which is normally my jam, but these two did nothing for me.

An Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love

3/5. An extremely silly “historical” romance about two rival ornithologists competing (and accidentally working together) to find a particular magical bird.

I think I’m over India Holton now. This is her fourth book, and to say they are variations on a theme is to vastly understate their repetitiveness. It’s a pleasant enough theme – a cartoonish approach to plot, a romance with little real conflict but hitting the same general notes every time of reaching each other through loneliness, banter, entirely unexplicated worldbuilding, a light narrative voice that says things in the general tone of “he kissed her so quickly the narrative could not come up with a metaphor.” Some playfulness with tropes, but it never amounts to anything, like the inn room they are forced to share that has not one bed, but seven. Cute, but nothing other than cute.

A pleasant diversion, but I’ve had four of them now and I think I’m good.

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

A Letter to the Luminous Deep

4/5. Epistolary novel set on a water world where two people begin writing to each other to process their grief about the mutual loss of their siblings, who it turns out had developed their own epistolary relationship, but investigating that raises more questions than it answers.

Lovely. It’s odd to call a book so concerned with grief "cozy," but I think it’s true. This is a book about a strange, dreamy world and some strange, dreamy happenings, and academic politics, and mental illness. But the heart of it is friendship and romance, held in equal importance here. There are two nested relationships – a slow, sweet romance between two very lonely people (at least one of whom is disabled and on the ase spectrum, btw) – and the other a deep and abiding friendship that draws two families together as they try to navigate loss. It’s the sort of book that will make you sigh quietly to yourself when you put it down.

I will say, since I always comment on epistolary, that this is done pretty well. There are a few contrivances, as there always are, but I forgave them easily. E.g., the book includes a written transcript of an important conversation upon first meeting your dear pen pal, because the two characters sat in silence next to each other and wrote notes. But the reason for that was so integral to them – their shyness, one’s mental illness, the circumstances – that it worked. I love epistolary so much, but man, it is not easy.

Content notes: Grief, mental illness – agoraphobia, anxiety, maybe OCD.

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.

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Entries tagged with fiction

Incandescence by Greg Egan

House of Bane and Blood by Alexis L. Menard

Exordia by Seth Dickinson

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

On Vicious Worlds by Bethany Jacobs

Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler

Adrian Tchaikovsky

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman

The Sky on Fire by Jenn Lyons

Penric and the Bandit by Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Black Water Sister by Zen Cho

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst

Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan

The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei

Passions in Death by JD Robb

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne

An Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love by India Holton

The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey

A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall

Lady Eve's Last Con by Rebecca Fraimow