We're a plural system who loves queer & anarchist scifi.
But recently we just read a few randomly picked up mystery books in a row, in German, and we tend to review books in the language we read them in. That or similar may happen again, be warned.
So I think I'm going to like this, with some exceptions like I think there might be 0 women on this ship.
But uhm...... they just..... they're on a planet that they know is dangerous in some unknown way. And that's why most of the people aren't allowed off the ship yet. And the few that go outside for some measurements? They go "no protective suits, oxygen mask is enough". And then they measure what the atmosphere is made from and if it's radioactive. I mean, all the measurements are fine. But still. This seems like really bad strategy to me!
It's again this super confusing mix of concepts that I understand and concepts that I'm quite sure I don't. This time with a planet! And another perspective that I feel the same about! Soooo it's a lot of fun..... in a really distanced dry way.
Power to Yield is a collection of speculative tales exploring gender identity, neurodivergence, and religion …
Power to Yield
5 stars
This short story collection by Bogi Takács is highly recommended from me. It's tough to evaluate a set of stories as a whole, but this is a set of great stories in a sea of consistently really good ones. Unsurprisingly, this collection deals in gender, religion, and neurodiversity; characters are messy outsiders and never fit simply into boxes.
In lieu of reviewing stories individually, here are some fragmentary moments that stick with me:
* a magical apprentice during a war transformed into a water caltrop as a punishment and inadvertently abandoned
* a student living in a housebeast and contractually feeding it blood on a regular basis
* cultural appropriation of magical clothes harming their wearers
* a city maintained by suffering, but rather than an Omelas sense it's a consensual bdsm sense
* one story got at nuances between different non-binary identities, something I'd never seen in fiction before
A crew must try to survive on an ancient, abandoned planet in the latest space …
Ghost Station
4 stars
I enjoyed the suspense and tension in this slow creeping mystery in this scifi horror novel. Ophelia, a psychiatrist from a rich family with quite a bit of buried trauma in her past, tries to save her name by joining a remote planetary reclamation crew as a therapist. The crew is tight-lipped and grieving a past crew member's death, and resent her presence (and her family). They all land on a planet to explore an abandoned station, and things quickly start to fall apart. It doesn't help that Ophelia is involved in trying to prevent ERS, a sort of "space madness" syndrome that causes people to get violent and paranoid.
What I enjoyed the most about this book was its slowly building tension. Traumas and secrets from the past intersect delightfully with mysteries in the present. There's a lot of delicious ambiguity in all of the creepiness. Are events just …
I enjoyed the suspense and tension in this slow creeping mystery in this scifi horror novel. Ophelia, a psychiatrist from a rich family with quite a bit of buried trauma in her past, tries to save her name by joining a remote planetary reclamation crew as a therapist. The crew is tight-lipped and grieving a past crew member's death, and resent her presence (and her family). They all land on a planet to explore an abandoned station, and things quickly start to fall apart. It doesn't help that Ophelia is involved in trying to prevent ERS, a sort of "space madness" syndrome that causes people to get violent and paranoid.
What I enjoyed the most about this book was its slowly building tension. Traumas and secrets from the past intersect delightfully with mysteries in the present. There's a lot of delicious ambiguity in all of the creepiness. Are events just pranks or hallucinations or truly real? Are strange physical symptoms a sign of impending ERS? How much can Ophelia herself even be trusted?
This was just a solidly good horror book for me. Nothing world shattering, but all the threads are woven together satisfyingly.
Es ist das erste Was-ist-was-Buch, das ich im neuen Stil ohne die Fragenkästchen lese. Finde es hat ein bisschen unnötiges Blabla, aber immer noch genug Infos. Text vor Foto-Hintergrund find ich halt unnötig anstrengend zu lesen. Ich hab sicher einige Sachen gelernt.
The fourth and final installment of the Finder Chronicles, a hopepunk sci-fi caper described as …
Ghostdrift
4 stars
I didn't think we were getting another Fergus Ferguson book, as the last one ended in a way that felt much more conclusively than the others. It turns out this is due to the first three being a book deal with uncertainty around future books, and this one ends with an easy hook for the next one, so I'm crossing my fingers for more.
If you haven't read any of these books, I feel like Fergus fills a similar role to Miles Vorkosigan. He exists as an element of chaos. You add him into a small trap for a few people and ten minutes later he's finagled his way into capturing a starship. They're not the same characters at all--Fergus is definitely angrier, less gregarious, and more space MacGyver than Miles is--but there's a similar delightful escalation to everything they both get involved with.
This book was a lot of …
I didn't think we were getting another Fergus Ferguson book, as the last one ended in a way that felt much more conclusively than the others. It turns out this is due to the first three being a book deal with uncertainty around future books, and this one ends with an easy hook for the next one, so I'm crossing my fingers for more.
If you haven't read any of these books, I feel like Fergus fills a similar role to Miles Vorkosigan. He exists as an element of chaos. You add him into a small trap for a few people and ten minutes later he's finagled his way into capturing a starship. They're not the same characters at all--Fergus is definitely angrier, less gregarious, and more space MacGyver than Miles is--but there's a similar delightful escalation to everything they both get involved with.
This book was a lot of fun. The vast majority of this book is spent with new characters among a pirate crew; I am a huge sucker for spaceship crew dynamic stories and so I ate this up. Also, I forgot just how funny Suzanne Palmer's writing is and there were quite a few lines that made me laugh. If I had any complaints, it's that I'm generally less excited about deus ex Asiig and would really just prefer more localized Fergus shenanigans, but their intervention here also answers a lot of questions.
In general, these books feel like one off action adventures (and this one especially feels like a side adventure) with enough worldbuilding depth to keep me intrigued; and, this one manages to bring back touchpoints from all of the previous books in ways that felt really satisfying too.
Hopefully, some day Fergus can figure out where home is.
Dieses Buch ist so viel weniger aufregend als sein Titel. Nach dem Erste-Hilfe-Teil bin ich nun im Katastrophen-Teil. Und der hat tatsächlich ein paar spannende Fakten aus den letzten 20 Jahren, die ich nicht aus 20 Jahre alten Kinderbüchern bekommen kann. Aber leider. Ich hör das Hörbuch. Und. Der Tonfall in dem es gelesen wird macht mich fertig! Es ist dieser "wir reden über etwas sehr bedauerliches"-Tonfall, der klingt als wär er keine drei Schritte vom Weinen entfernt, den Leute aber einfach nur verwenden, um klarzustellen, dass sie die Tragik der Ereignisse begriffen haben. Ich halt den schon in echt nicht gut aus, aber da sind es wenigstens üblicherweise nur wenige Sätze. Ein ganzes Buch so? Ich bin mir ehrlich nicht sicher, ob ich das pack. (Angebracht wäre meiner Meinung nach übrigens großteils ein nerdiger "gut zu wissen!"-Tonfall.)
I enjoyed it. It has a good balance of making the myths sound exciting, and explaining why they're just myths. I didn't go looking for inaccuracies, but ofc I looked up the cat, so: it says Onzas were proven to exist in 1986.
When young Tenar is chosen as high priestess to the ancient and nameless Powers of …
Ok yeah I liked it
No rating
It's the kind of story I'd like to follow a bit further. Also, I'd love some more exploration of how the reality and the worship are connected. But I was happy as it was.
The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, …
Was hard to read but I couldn't stop
No rating
So, I think this is worth reading simply because Britney Spears is someone media loves to be very cruel to, and it's good to read something actually coming from her.
It is a very chronological memoir, and during some phases, the present-day commentary annoyed me a bit. But I think I might not have given Spears enough credit while reading – I think some of the comments that seem meek and understated might actually be a bit sarcastic.
I was a bit puzzled why Spears put so much focus on how prayer and a telepathic connection to her fans saved here, and not at all on someone putting the story out there (Wikipedia says "a voicemail message from a source who claimed to be a former member of Spears' legal team"). But eventually I concluded it's probably for legal reasons and also none of my business.
