lightreads

Villain

4/5. Sequel to Hench. More supervillain monsterfucking bisexual maelstrom (IYKYK).

It took five plus years for this sequel to come out, which the author says is because she completely rewrote it multiple times. I have a guess that she was rewriting as part of the process of deciding how hard to go. She goes pretty hard, in the end. Not so much on the monsterfucking itself, but on the implications of becoming involved with a supervillain who thinks surveillance is a form of affection. This book lives a lot in some deeply uncomfortable spaces, very much on purpose. This is not a romantasy, and one comp I saw to such is absolutely unhinged.

Oh I mean she also goes pretty hard on the villainy, but you know, good for her. My wife and I were discussing this book in front of our six-year-old, which triggered a conversation with him in which he had a hard time grasping how the villain can be the main character of a book. This is a really interesting example of that; it is doing the usual thing of showing her reasons, all of which make sense, but it’s not particularly interested in justifying anything. She’s a villain. She does terrible things. The book has bigger fish to fry.

Content notes: The book has a good thorough note up front, actually.

On the Calculation of Volume

3/5. First of seven volumes in translation from the Danish about an antiquarian book dealer who finds herself repeating November 18 over and over again.

I like books that take a cerebral spin on a speculative concept, and this one is that. But I was lukewarm on this book, in which everything is meticulously observed and very little happens. I understand that there is some actual movement in later books in places other than inside the protagonist’s head, but I don’t know if I’ll stick it out. It’s not the literary pretentions that get me; those are generally well done. But the jacket described this as having “the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper,” and man, IDK, that is correct and also not a thing I want.

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

Platform Decay

4/5. A good outing. Murderbot does a complex rescue in corporate space, and there are juveniles, terrible.

Things I like:

• Getting a nuanced and varied look at just what life in corporate space looks like, particularly for average people. And how those people deal with the various kinds of violence and oppression that surround them. A lot of this was extremely sketchy and gestural before, but this book does a huge amount of background work on adding texture to the world.


• Wells playing out some of the consequences of the governor module hack code being out there now in ways that the fandom has been chewing on for a while.


• Murderbot getting to snark a bit on the ways that Preservation’s utopia is also sometimes really full of itself and incorrect about its own righteousness, as utopias do.


• Emotional self-awareness (oh no, terrible, how could a murderbot have a worse fate).

So yeah, pretty good, even with the tragic absence of most of the usual main cast and crew.

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

Chilling Effect

3/5. Adventure scifi featuring a Latina space captain trying to go straight with her ragtag crew, until the space mob kidnaps her sister.

I enjoyed the first half of this – repetitive but in a rompy way, messy family dynamics, great crew of women and aliens, unapologetic about the Spanish sprinkled in and not spoon-feeding translations of everything, did I mention Latina space captain. But it overstayed its welcome by a good 40,000 words and the last third is a hot mess. For real, if you find yourself as an author doing a “character is secretly a [redacted!]” okay, fine, but then if you do the exact same plot twist with literally the exact same redacted on a different character 30 pages later, you’ve just got to stop yourself and cool it, you know?

Points for cute interspecies romance (though I’m me, so I have questions about how the fade-to-black sex worked, exactly).

Content notes: Violence.

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.

Slow Gods

3/5. Science fiction about a guy who grows up in and gets crushed by a kleptocratic fascist state, and how he is transformed, and what happens when an alien arrives to tell the scattered worlds of humanity that a supernova is about to wipe half of them out.

Interesting. Lots of things to say here. First, to be clear, you won’t ever catch me arguing that North isn’t a talented and unusual writer. She’s a good stylist, too. This book is science fiction in set dressing, but that’s wrapped around an eldritch and fantastical core that she is too smart to ruin by explaining or caging. I won’t spoil it more than to say that a lesser writer would have made this book about the protagonist’s attempts to understand the weird and creepy thing that happened to him. Instead, the reader understands that, mostly implicitly, and the book can go on about its business of being about immigration and politics and cultural preservation and assimilation.

Also, this is a book about autism. An autism metaphor, specifically. North has said this was a result of her own recent diagnosis, and I’m not in the business of critiquing how a person processes that in fiction. I will say that I would be critiquing the substance of it if this were not own voices, because I think parts of the portrayal (the equivalent to autism meltdowns, in particular) lean into a kind of scary stereotype of the violently uncontrolled autistic person. But because it is own voices, I’ll sit here and defend North’s right to process as she sees fit, even if that means grappling with some stereotypes in a messy way that didn’t land, at least for me.

All in all it’s an interesting book and I’m glad I read it.

Content notes: Fascist hellscapes – debt slavery, violence, imprisonment, medical experimentation, mass death and genocide through negligence.

This Brutal moon

3/5. Third book in this scifi trilogy, really do not start here.

Damn, it didn’t land it. It didn’t terribly fumble it either, but.

Let’s back up. I really liked the first book in this trilogy, which you should absolutely go into unspoiled because the ride is worth it. But she had to do different modes with the next books for plot and structure and not repeating herself reasons. Unfortunately, I was glad to see these people again, but I think this whole series lost momentum and vitality. And the deeper this series got into the story of a remnant population barely clinging on after a genocide several decades ago, well. She says they aren’t supposed to be space Jews, but, like, girl. These books are doing that thing where they valorize an oppressed population and an oppressed culture in a way that is both satisfying and also uncomfortable, if you get me. Satisfying in the way a reductive viewpoint is satisfying. Uncomfortable in the way a reductive viewpoint is uncomfortable.

Also, I am not at all qualified to opine on this, but I’ve caught the edges of conversations from people who think she has valorized her space Jews right over the border into weird antisemitic trope land, which did jump out at me when ( spoilers for the end of the first book ). Anyway, do with that what you will.

Look, I’m complaining about this a lot, but I genuinely think the first book is doing cool stuff, and I genuinely think the whole series is thinking about identity and refugees and cultural violence and retribution and repair. All chewy, important stuff. Also, the way women and nonbinary people are allowed to be intense and obsessed with each other and over-the-top in the first book is the good shit. I’m glad I read it, even though the last book had serious POV bloat (way too many) and didn’t land with the force I wanted it to.

Content notes: Torture, violence, discussions of genocide, child loss.

Salvage Crew and Pilgrim Machines

4/5. A pair of related scifi novels largely narrated by sentient ships in a plausible corporatist space future. The first book is a sort of survival horror first contact situation, and the second is philosophical space exploration and consideration of mortality on the personal and galactic scale.

I like these. They manage that trick of feeling old-fashioned in the best way. Particularly the big ideas exploration book – it’s giving Niven or Vinge or Baxter or similar, except, you know, not variously phobic and -ist. Actually, several of the characters are Buddhist, which offers a really interesting lens on some more classic science fictional topics.

I’m a little suspicious about why these books didn’t take off, TBH. He got buzz early on, then seemed to fall off the map. I’m pretty plugged into new and interesting SFF, and I’ve only heard about him from one person. I have a suspicion this is because he openly talks about how he uses AI. E.g., in the first book here, he had AI generate hundreds of short poems on various themes, and he picked several for his AI ship to “write.” He is transparent about how he prompted and why he did it that way. I suspect this got some sort of AI stink on him, professionally, which is a real shame.

I will also add, they got Nathan Fillion to read the first audiobook. Normally I do not like these celebrity narrators, but actually, it’s kind of brilliant? He has this bro-y cynical depressive emotionalism that hit just right for the ship narrator of that book.

Content notes: Corporate hellscape stuff, body horror.