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picklish@books.theunseen.city

Joined 1 year, 9 months ago

I read largely sff, some romance and mystery, very little non-fiction. I'm trying to write at least a little review of everything I'm reading this year, but it's a little bit of an experiment in progress.

I'm @picklish@weirder.earth elsewhere.

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Aliette de Bodard: Navigational Entanglements (2024, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) 4 stars

Nhi hadn't liked Ly Châu. She was overbearing and controlling, and she'd enjoyed bossing them around far too much. And the four juniors might have quarreled about many things--about most things, really, insofar as Lành and Hạc Cúc were concerned--but they'd all agreed she was a terrible person, and they couldn't wait for the mission to be over so they could be rid of them.

It was, therefore, both terribly appropriate and terribly unfortunate when they found that Ly Châu was lying on the bed, dead.

Navigational Entanglements by  (Page 24)

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Service Model (AudiobookFormat, 2024, McMillan Audio) 4 stars

To fix the world they must first break it, further. Humanity is a dying breed, …

Service Model

3 stars

This book reads to me as satirical Gulliver's Travels style book with a task-following robotic protagonist, but leaning more towards social commentary than political. However, I have such mixed feelings about it. Even if I agree with the book's messages about wealth disparity, meaningless jobs, and how systems need kindness, the length of the book overstays its welcome and the didactic ending feels heavy handed.

Some of its travel destinations felt repetitive by the end, and in my opinion a number could have been edited out without the book losing much at all. (If I were to make these edits, I personally would have trimmed out Decommissioning, the Library, Ubot; oh, and also, some of God's employment opportunities, as I feel like the Jul@#!% scene covers that just as effectively.)

reviewed The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey (The Captive's War, #1)

James S.A. Corey: The Mercy of Gods (2024, Orbit) 4 stars

How humanity came to the planet called Anjiin is lost in the fog of history, …

The Mercy of Gods

4 stars

This is the first book in a new James SA Corey series, and I enjoyed it a bunch.

High stakes academia gets interrupted by alien invasion; their research then becomes even more high stakes while having to navigate trauma and powerful alien political currents. A pithy but unhelpful summary is that this book is about systems thinking vs the just-world fallacy.

The aliens are interesting in several fresh ways; one in particular is that they largely don't give a shit, emotionally speaking. They aren't angry or greedy or vengeful, which gives a much different flavor to an alien invasion. A lot of enjoyment in any book where humans encounter aliens is also about their relations and the slow reveal of who and what the aliens are, and so I'll hold back some more spoiler-y opinions.

(One side note about this book is just how straight it felt. Maybe I just …

P. Djèlí Clark: The Dead Cat Tail Assassins (Hardcover, Tordotcom) 4 stars

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins are not cats.

Nor do they have tails.

But they …

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins

4 stars

This is a quick romp of a novella. I know it's overused to call something a romp these days, but this truly is a whirlwind of action, humor, and snark. The amount of banter and fight scenes make it feel like it's material that would also make a good comic, but I also quite enjoyed the unfolding mystery and worldbuilding.

This is also a much funnier book than a lot of Clark's previous work. There's ongoing jokes about assassin rules ("Assassin rule 305: always be ready to torch your safe house"). There's some great banter about work friends vs actual friends. I was also amused that Aeril the Matron of Assassins also runs really good restaurants (due to the knife connection), and one of the assassin bureaucrats is a foodie trying to angle their way into the restaurant business.

Yume Kitasei: Stardust Grail (2024, Flatiron Books) 4 stars

Save one world. Doom her own.

From the acclaimed author of The Deep Sky comes …

Stardust Grail

4 stars

A repatriating art thief turned grad student goes on one last job for her dear alien friend Auncle to save xyr species as well as all of humanity.

This was a fun adventure of a book. I really enjoyed Maya and Auncle's deep friendship across species boundaries; that Maya feels seen and connected, even by an alien she can't fully understand. I liked that all of the characters (and species) aren't perfect, and have done things that they regret but still felt like were for the right reasons. The heist sequences were fun, and there was also a dangerous ruins sequence that reminded me of Martha Wells's fantasy novels.

I wish the other crew members had a little bit more depth to them, but overall this was still solidly enjoyable.

I think the most interesting part for me is to analyze a little how this book positions AI compared to other books in the genre.

I don't know if this is just my own bias (and aversion to techbros), but there's something about this version of AI in this book that seems like it's meant to be an extension of LLM airquotes AI hype. It's something about the wording of "when AI began participating in creative tasks" that twigs that feeling for me. There's almost nothing here about sentience or consciousness. AI is both simultaneously a critical focus of the book while also relegated to the background.

We're told that AI has "worked magic on municipal planning and administration freeing the world of poverty" (citation needed). The book mentions one-off forensic evidence of "companies [that] were created by AI that emerged organically from global networks" but that's the last we …

reviewed Counterweight by Djuna

Djuna: Counterweight (EBook, 2023, Vintage) 2 stars

On the fictional island of Patusan—and much to the ire of the Patusan natives—the Korean …

Counterweight

2 stars

Overall, this book didn't work for me. After finishing it, I found out that Counterweight was originally intended as a low budget scifi movie and it feels like it. The characters are thin, and there are almost more characters talked about off page than we see on page. The book emits its ideas in a smoke cloud of cyberpunk chaff without engaging deeply with any of their implications.

This is a cliché critique, but most of what didn't work for me was how much this book told instead of showed. There's an entire chapter midway through where the protagonist dumps the backstory of the old LK president's misdeeds that they've chosen not to share with the reader until that point. The book continually laments how AI will slowly run more of the world and humans won't be necessary, but we see little evidence (and directly very little of AI in …

Scott Hawkins: The Library at Mount Char (Hardcover, 2015, Crown) 4 stars

Carolyn's not so different from the other human beings around her. She's sure of it. …

The Library at Mount Char

4 stars

I was hooked by the setup in this book of a group of adopted children, partially pulled out of time by a god-like Father, and each set to learn one specific branch of knowledge and ancient power. My favorite part of this book was the slow unfurling of background machinations and scheming that all paid off in the end. The characters somehow manage to be somewhat relatable even as the book continually demonstrated how extreme power alienates them from their own humanity.

Parts of this book reminded me of Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series, especially around the US government attempting to "negotiate" with people who have fantastical power.

I will say also that this book goes to some very dark places, so content warning for abuse and violence and and torture and trauma. To put it one way, when somebody has enough power to read minds, bring people back from …

Scott Alexander Howard: The Other Valley (EBook, 2024, Atlantic Books) 4 stars

For fans of Emily St John Mandel and Kazuo Ishiguro, an exhilarating literary speculative novel …

The Other Valley

4 stars

I read this story because the conceit of mapping some other idea onto physical space itself reminded me of Lifelode; in that book, the presence of magic is mapped to how far east or west you are; in The Other Valley, time itself is mapped onto physical space. There is a sequence of towns in valleys each twenty years apart in time; travelling east will let you see the town twenty years in the future. Access to other valleys is tightly controlled for timeline safety and only allowed for reasons of grief.

This book is marginally about time travel and information from the future affecting the present, but it's all in the background of a school friend group that is broken up by a tragic death. The book follows the narrator Odile whose life is pushed off course from this death, made worse by her future knowledge that it was …

Rebecca Thorne: Pirate's Life for Tea (2023, Thorne, Rebecca) 3 stars

A Pirate's Life for Tea

3 stars

A Pirate's Life for Tea is book two in an ongoing cozy fantasy romance series. I had a lot of fun with the first book, but this one worked less well for me.

Having the perspective of the book continue to be from Reyna and Kianthe's perspective blunted the dynamic between Serena and Bobbie, especially with Reyna and Kianthe wink-winking at each other (and the audience) about their matchmaking schemes. Overall, this sequel felt a little too cozy for my tastes--nothing really had teeth in the same way that the first book did, and all of the new characters felt instantly either on side or not. Bobbie seemed like the only character who had any growth.

This sounds like I'm being quite negative, but it was fun to revisit this world and its puns and real-feeling relationships. I am looking forward to the next (final?) book as it will likely …