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.
Content warning
full spoilers for Jinn-Bot of Shantiport
One thematic bit of this book that I enjoyed is the tension around "swinging big", especially with respect to change and in the context of wishes.
For most of the book, Lina is trying to stay under the radar of the occupying clan and Bador chides her repeatedly to swing bigger and come up with bigger schemes. Then the lamp and their mother Zohra enter the picture, and despite being a revolutionary she wants to establish a council and move slowly and Lina is impatient with her. But then on top of that all the jinn has its own desires to uplift the population into some post-scarcity world and if it could it would do so in a terrifyingly catastrophic short-term way regardless of the consequences. (Tellingly, when Zohra does wish to remove somebody from power it is a disaster for the city. The results of Lina's even larger wish are more ambiguous at the end of the book.)
I like this story about wishes and a lamp because it's not just about "what and how would you fix things with a magic wand" but also "there are huge consequences to change, even change that is ultimately good" and the tension between short and long term needs on the path to a better future.
@screamsbeneath@bookwyrm.social I haven't read this or How High We Go in the Dark. If I was going to read one, would you recommend one or the other to start? They both sound really intriguing.
From international bestseller Samit Basu, The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport is an exuberant new sci-fi adventure …
Jinn-Bot of Shantiport
4 stars
Jinn-Bot of Shantiport is an exuberant action-filled science fiction novel with Aladdin and ~Murderbot vibes[*]. The narrator here is Moku the flying bot, who in service to squabbling siblings Lina and Bador, the other two main characters. Bador is the monkey bot brother with dreams of escape to space and of bot liberation, while carrying a lot of anger at how his family treats him for not being human. Lina's the daughter of failed revolutionaries who works hard to avoid surveillance and has her own ideas of how to make the city better. And that's all before the lamp granting wishes shows up.
This book reminded me a lot of Suzanne Palmer's Finder book; both are set in a city with warring factions, there's some weird alien technology, and both are stories filled with banter and action. They are not the same story by any stretch, but there's a lot …
Jinn-Bot of Shantiport is an exuberant action-filled science fiction novel with Aladdin and ~Murderbot vibes[*]. The narrator here is Moku the flying bot, who in service to squabbling siblings Lina and Bador, the other two main characters. Bador is the monkey bot brother with dreams of escape to space and of bot liberation, while carrying a lot of anger at how his family treats him for not being human. Lina's the daughter of failed revolutionaries who works hard to avoid surveillance and has her own ideas of how to make the city better. And that's all before the lamp granting wishes shows up.
This book reminded me a lot of Suzanne Palmer's Finder book; both are set in a city with warring factions, there's some weird alien technology, and both are stories filled with banter and action. They are not the same story by any stretch, but there's a lot of parallel vibes and I think if you enjoyed one you'd probably enjoy the other.
Extremely minor asides: I appreciated that although the book focuses on Shantiport for the whole story, there's still a taste of politics in the larger universe. I also enjoyed the fact that this felt like a third person perspective book, and then halfway into the first chapter the book busts out a first person pronoun for Moku with no warning. Love that introduction.
My disappointment here, if anything, is that the denouement of the story let me down. Some bits were overexplained (Lina) and the story opened up too many loose ends that didn't get tied off. On top of that, several of the final chapter's developments felt surprising and out of place for both Bador and Moku. It just (subjectively, for me personally) didn't quite give me the closure and satisfaction that it felt like the book was leading up to. Maybe this would land differently for other folks.
(A few extra bonus spoilery thoughts in this post too.)
Overall, this was still great fun and I'm glad I read it.
[*] (Loooook, I hate always saying that any book where there's a non-human narrator who looks askance at human behavior and has a bit of a wry tone is "like Murderbot", but it's mildly true here? You can't really say "it's like Star Trek's Data" because that involves a lot of "but that's not logical, Captain" and that's not really the vibe; Murderbot, Emergent Properties, and this book all are about bots dealing with emotions while also being non-human. Murderbot definitely deals with its own trauma and emotional avoidance in a way that these other stories aren't really about at all, but there's just still some similar "wry non-human outsider" vibes here that I'm not sure how to gesture at non-referentially even as they're all very different stories.)
From international bestseller Samit Basu, The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport is an exuberant new sci-fi adventure …
Humans are just so incredibly tacky, Bador signals. They see entry calls for a bot combat tournament, and they just have to tie toasters to their heads and apply. Anyone asks questions, they say they identify as bots! Bot allies!
We also got a naysayer who’d previously been ignoring the whole project and now wanted to complain to Tanesha about what we were doing. "It’s very sad and all, but it’s not like the lady who needs oxygen is going to get better," he said. "You’re just delaying the inevitable."
Tanesha gave him a narrow-eyed look. "You delay the inevitable every time you eat lunch."
The Year Without Sunshine is a hopeful sf climate change short story/novelette from Naomi Kritzer. The premise is a small Minneapolis neighborhood bands together to try to take care of each other after an off page disaster that covers the sky in dust and ash.
I really appreciate how refreshingly optimistic Naomi Kritzer's science fiction is. I felt this way too about her short story Better Living Through Algorithms (or the CatNet stories), especially in terms of starting with something that is often a dystopic story idea and looking at it with a different light.
While learning the ropes from a crafty Jazz Age bank robber, a young stowaway discovers …
It’s a hard thing to stay in a form that’s not your own, even when you love the people who know you in it. It feels like flying when you can be what you really are, even if you love pretty dresses and golden jewelry.
While learning the ropes from a crafty Jazz Age bank robber, a young stowaway discovers …
On the Fox Roads
5 stars
Nghi Vo's online short story On the Fox Roads was a delight. It's about Midwest bank robbers who acquire a stowaway, but also ultimately about found family and authentic selves.
At this point Nghi Vo is on my "will read anything and everything" author list.
A young woman discovers a strange portal in her uncle’s house, leading to madness and …
I had always had mixed feelings about Narnia, mostly because of the heavy-handed lion-Jesus allegory. I suddenly had very strong feelings that C. S. Lewis had not spent nearly enough time on the sudden realization, when moving between worlds, that nothing could be taken for granted.
A young woman discovers a strange portal in her uncle’s house, leading to madness and …
The Hollow Places
4 stars
The Hollow Places is a horror novel by T. Kingfisher. The premise is that newly divorced Kara goes back to live in her uncle's curio museum; when a mysterious hole in the wall appears and goes to what seems to be another dimension, she and her barista friend investigate. Overall, horror is not usually my cuppa but this was an enjoyable creepy ride (and I'll read anything by T. Kingfisher at this point).
But he groaned and stomped around the hall for a few minutes, then said, "Okay. But this is how people die in horror movies, you know."
"You're not the teensiest bit curious?
"I'm incredibly curious! I've just also seen horror movies!"
This book is intensely creepy at times, and the horror elements all the more unsettling for being fuzzy and unseen and unknowable. I wish a little that there was a little bit more character development or …
The Hollow Places is a horror novel by T. Kingfisher. The premise is that newly divorced Kara goes back to live in her uncle's curio museum; when a mysterious hole in the wall appears and goes to what seems to be another dimension, she and her barista friend investigate. Overall, horror is not usually my cuppa but this was an enjoyable creepy ride (and I'll read anything by T. Kingfisher at this point).
But he groaned and stomped around the hall for a few minutes, then said, "Okay. But this is how people die in horror movies, you know."
"You're not the teensiest bit curious?
"I'm incredibly curious! I've just also seen horror movies!"
This book is intensely creepy at times, and the horror elements all the more unsettling for being fuzzy and unseen and unknowable. I wish a little that there was a little bit more character development or reveal (such as a more tight thematic coupling of Kara's backstory or marriage with the present events). However, I really enjoyed both the banter and also the centering of the museum as a welcoming and protective home rather than playing it just for creeps.
The author's note said that this was based on the 1907 short story The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood and I wish I had read that first so that I could understand some references that would have passed me by otherwise.
What does it mean to "be-in-kind" with a nonhuman animal? Or in Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon’s …
You're grabbing for cash that could be spent on pragmatic interventions for actual habitat stabilization, or assisting with disaster refugee displacement, or whatever else, but these projects aren't as sexy. It's all appearances with you. This grant could fund my department's grad researchers, who I will remind you are almost all working with people and places whose experiences of climate catastrophe are on the knife's edge, several times over. And why are wolves your focal point, anyway? Why not rats, they're better survivors. Because people think wolves are cool.
What does it mean to "be-in-kind" with a nonhuman animal? Or in Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon’s …
Feed Them Silence
5 stars
Feed Them Silence is the best fiction I have read all year.
It's a near-future sf novella about a researcher who is using new technology to neurologically interface with a near-extinct wolf pack, in order to "become in kind" with them and understand how they make their way in a tough world. Thematically, this novella is dense and chewy and interleaves so much into such a short length. It's about relationships and power dynamics, the fantasy of truly understanding animals (and other humans [and ourselves]), but also about global warming and the objectivity of research.
For me, this is science fiction at its best, using a what-if future science to ask troubling and incisive questions. Even as it presents its own conflicting opinions, it asks far more questions than it has answers for. The novella also walks a tight line in generating compassion and understanding for the protagonist Sean, even …
Feed Them Silence is the best fiction I have read all year.
It's a near-future sf novella about a researcher who is using new technology to neurologically interface with a near-extinct wolf pack, in order to "become in kind" with them and understand how they make their way in a tough world. Thematically, this novella is dense and chewy and interleaves so much into such a short length. It's about relationships and power dynamics, the fantasy of truly understanding animals (and other humans [and ourselves]), but also about global warming and the objectivity of research.
For me, this is science fiction at its best, using a what-if future science to ask troubling and incisive questions. Even as it presents its own conflicting opinions, it asks far more questions than it has answers for. The novella also walks a tight line in generating compassion and understanding for the protagonist Sean, even while she makes poor decisions and even while she is being (justifiably) emotionally eviscerated by her wife.
This TOR interview with Lee Mandelo was extremely worth reading and added a lot of context for me about how the author thinks and the book's background. I think it has some minor expectation spoilers, but can be read independently. That interview itself quotes from this interview with Donna Haraway which was also worth reading and gets more into the communication fantasy of understanding animals.
"It was the only way I knew how to fight back, Jamshid. The only way I could protect the people I loved who were left, the city I was supposed to serve... was to get rid of everything that might hurt them, however viciously it needed to be done. I know... I know what that makes me."
"And what does it make you?"
A monster. A murderer. "My father." Muntadhir whispered.