#sffbookclub

She Who Became the Sun is a historical fantasy duology, retelling the rise of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty. This is a reread for me before I get to the sequel for a belated #SFFBookClub sequel month.

My favorite part of this first book is the ways that the major characters all uniquely grapple with their own gendered otherness:

Ouyang is an enslaved warrior eunuch working for the Mongol prince of Henan's son, Esen. Ouyang is the most masculine of characters, but copes with his otherness through anger and shame. He so strongly denies the femininity that other people project onto him that he extrudes that rejection into misogyny. His relationship with men is similarly uneasy and hits a classic trans refrain: "he had no idea if it was a yearning for or a yearning to be, and the equal impossibility of each of those hurt beyond belief". For Ouyang, "the worst punishment is being left alive".

Zhu (the titular sun-becomer) is a famine survivor who decides to claim the great fate of her dead brother by becoming him. Her burning desire for greatness forces her to overcome impossibility through ingenuity. To Zhu, gender and otherness are not a source of shame or a limitation, they are merely tools to work towards greatness or obstacles to work around. She's a delightful contrast with both Ma and Ouyang; her direct contradiction of Ouyang is such a good character and plot moment: "However tired I am, however hard it is: I know I can keep going, because I'm alive."

Wang is the half-Mongolian, adopted brother of Esen. Wang is a scholar out of time, reviled for his effeminate behaviors and unmasculine administrative and accounting interests. Unlike Ouyang, he has no denial or shame about this and accepts ongoing humiliation bitterly; however like Ouyang, he turns this humiliation inward into anger and desire for revenge. Wang is the petty bureaucrat working behind the scenes; even as his work is dismissed, he guides the efforts of his brother Esen from the shadows through funding, diplomacy, and assassination. "In having told yourself so often that I'm worthless, have you forgotten what my domain actually is? I'm an administrator."

Ma is the precious cinnamon roll who keenly feels her own emotions and continually extends love out into the universe to those who don't deserve it, even as it is only returned with suffering. Other than being an extremely endearing character and the caring heart of a novel otherwise filled with selfish desire and denial, she feels like the epitome of self-limited excellence; she is extremely capable but simultaneously trapped by her own inevitable circumstances of being a woman.. "She was a woman and [..]. everything that could be wanted was all equally impossible".

She recognized pragmatism taken to its natural endpoint: the person who climbed according to his desire, with no regard to what he did to get there. Zhu was surprised to feel, instead of sympathetic attraction, a tinge of repulsion.

Parts of this book remind me of The Traitor Baru Cormorant, in particular the resource management of Wang, the political struggles, and the pragmatic way that all of these characters do some occasional horrible things to work towards their own desires (loyalty, revenge, power, greatness).

Both books posit that these desires create suffering (and in an explicitly Buddhist sense here). However, I think Baru is a brutal gutpunch of a book that wants you to believe that sacrifice and suffering is always required (both of the characters and the reader); this book seems to believe in Zhu who can (sometimes) find another path when confronted with an impossibility. Ma also explicitly balances out Zhu's monomaniacal pursuit of greatness and helps Zhu feel some level of revulsion towards pure pragmatism. Together, they are a source of queer joy that creates hope and possibility. These things together make this book work for me and make me able to find love for these complicated characters, while reading Baru left me cold.

This third book was a great send-off to the Daevabad series. The ending did a good job of coming all the way back around (in several ways) to how the whole book started. It filled in historical details that previous books been teasing. Mostly though, it was an emotionally satisfying ending that neatly wrapped up the stories of the major characters. I think a lot of the politics I enjoyed from the earlier books fell away into more personal dynamics and larger plot happenings, but I think that shift worked here for a final third climactic book.

My single favorite part of this book were some of the new side characters. Fiza!!! Sobek!!! Mishmish!!! Fiza deserves her own book, just sayin'.

Overall, this series is not some Sandersonian book where details about the world and magic are eventually explained to a wikiable degree. At the end, there's still quite a few unanswered questions about history, the world, and especially around magic itself: the ring, the nature of several resurrections spoilery handwave, the lawyer parrots. In the end, these elements are ultimately not the focus of this story (in the way the three major characters are) and ultimately the ambiguity and uncertainty don't get in the way of the story that's being told here. (Although, folks who want these kinds of details might be disappointed.)

I wrote about the last book that I wanted more Aqisa and Zaynab and so I was delighted that my ebook had some extra bonus scenes with them that were edited out of the book. It makes me excited to go read River of Silver and get a little bit more taste of this world and the characters before I'm done with it.

I have some additional comments that have mild spoilers, which I will put in this reply.

cc #SFFBookClub for November sequel month

The Library of the Dead is the October #SFFBookClub pick. Overall, this was just ok for me.

Ropa is a scrappy fourteen year old dropout who is supporting her family as best she can by charging for passing messages from the dead to the living with her necromantic telepathy. She ends up taking on a pro bono case to find the child of a ghost at the behest of her Gran. I think my favorite part of the novel is that Ropa's got a frenetic teenage voice that goes a long way to carry the novel.

One element that didn't work for me is that this novel is clearly the first book in a series. It's laying out a lot of threads to pick up later. The Tall Man. The Library of the Dead itself. Gran and her magic. Sir Callander's motives and relationship with Ropa's Gran. Gran herself. The everyThere. This near future Edinburgh that's had a catastrophe of some sort and is decaying and flooded. The authoritarian King that gets invoked at every turn.

But the end result of all of these threads is that this book feels a bit haphazard and the plot feels loose. Some of the threads tie up to resolve the mystery that Ropa is chasing down, but a large part of the book's work feels unresolved and preparing for the rest of the series rather than furthering the main plot of the moment.

If anything, the titular Library of the Dead feels like an optional side quest that's not quite as relevant to the plot as the title might imply. Sure, Ropa gets some magical defense and offense there incidentally but I was surprised by how little the plot hinged on this. This is not a book about the library or about learning magic. (In the end, I'm not even sure I understand why this magical library was a library "of the Dead" either.)

I read Remnant Population from the #SFFBookClub backlog. I had a lot of fun reading this. This is a first contact novel with the main character being an older woman in her seventies. At the start of the book, Ofelia is living with her only remaining adult son and his wife. When the colony she is on loses their contract and evacuates, and she decides to hide and stay. It turns out that the planet had undiscovered intelligent life, and these aliens come to investigate her. In the end, she's caught in the middle between these friendly aliens and returning humans.

I think what I most appreciate about this book is the wry internal perspective and character development of Ofelia. She is an old woman who has put in the work, and whose primary character trait is that she's just tired of putting up with other people's expectations and attitudes. Her daughter-in-law harangues her about how she dresses, and the fact that she will be free and able to live blissfully in solitude is the real motivating factor for her to not leave with the rest of the colonists.

When the aliens show up to curiously investigate her, Ofelia begins by treating them like irresponsible children; when they track mud in her house, she tries to teach them how to mop. The aliens certainly interrupt her solitude, but ultimately give Ofelia the community and respect that she never previously had, even despite the language and species barriers.

When more humans show up, they're a threat to the aliens, but they're just as much as threat to Ofelia's new-found independence. These new humans treat her more or less the same as the previous ones (via an ageist and ableist lens), rudely unable to take Ofelia or her experience seriously or believe that she can communicate in rudimentary ways with the aliens, let alone that she has an accord with them. In the end, it's an opportunity for Ofelia to come into her own and be able to finally ignore the people-pleasing internal voice that tries to keep her small.

Ofelia reminds me in some ways of the aiji-dowager Ilisidi from CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series. Ofelia is not crafty and maneuvering like Ilisidi, and instead leans on her own introverted stubbornness. That said, they're both irritated at all of these condescending youngsters who think they know better, who can't even bother with politeness or sharing some tea. And, when confronted with the unknown, they both treat it with kindness and courtesy.

I read The Core of the Sun because it was on the #SFFBookClub backlog.

This book is about a woman in a (gender-)dystopian Finnish society that puts public health above all else. Applying eugenics, gender stereotypes, applying science like the fox domestication experiments to humans, this society divides everybody into men and women, and further into H.G. Wells-esque eloi/morlock categories, all based on childhood appearance, behavior, and health. Eloi women especially are forced into extreme feminine stereotypes. The main character has been secretly educated but pretends to be eloi.

I think the most weird and delightful part of the book for me is the focus on chili peppers and capsaicin. It's been made illegal (along with alcohol and tobacco), and so a lot of the book is focused on the main character getting her chili fix, illegal pepper drug trade, and the transcendental experiences from having too many scovilles. The book takes this all quite seriously, interspersed with mostly true facts about peppers, but it's hard not to feel some unintentional comedy about it.

Not that every book has to be fresh and unique, but I'm not quite sure what the dystopian part of this novel was getting at here that hasn't been done elsewhere. Unlike other dystopian novels, this book doesn't seem to be a musing on abortion, or capitalism, or democracy, or even really a queer story about not fitting into gender roles and questions of passing (though it could have been). Maybe I just expect a dystopia to be playing with and exaggerating a particular idea; I never got the feeling this book was going for any of that, and so the dystopian worldbuilding mostly felt tiresome and well-trodden. (Maybe I'm just tired of gender stereotypes.)