User Profile

This was one of the books up for the #SFFBookClub poll that didn't win. The airquotes downside of putting the polls together is that everything on there is something I want to read, so I end up reading them all anyway.

This book was pitched as "a generation ship novel in verse" and it delivered. It felt like such a fresh way to talk about old concepts, and its flowery imagery felt less out of place than it would have in prose. It could have stood to be more weird, but each point of view had striking and effectively different styles, especially in terms of format, but also in imagery and tone and pacing. Overall, the plot didn't strike me as being particularly novel, but it was enjoyable and that wasn't really why I was coming to this book in the first place.

Hey you! (Yes, you!) If you're seeing this, then you probably have an adjacent taste in books, so this could likely be of interest to you.

We're reading The King Must Die during this February for #SFFBookClub.

SFFBookClub is an asynchronous fediverse book club. There's no meeting or commitment. If this book looks interesting to you, then you can join in by reading it during February and posting on the hash tag #SFFBookClub with any feelings or thoughts or reviews or quotes.

More details: sffbookclub.eatgod.org/

When I heard of this book--a generation ship novel entirely in verse--I was excited and felt some trepidation, because it can be easy for a technical feat like that to overshadow the story. Once I had it in hand and flicked through, I felt both of those things more intensely, because parts of the book employ the sort of creative layouts I associate more with zines than novels.

It turns out that all of that drives the story and characterisation with a singular focus. Even the wackiest-looking page layouts are a guide for pacing and mood, and work fantastically well. I am unusually tempted to just go back to the beginning and read the whole thing through again.

It is also an interesting story, and the three main characters are compelling. It made sense to mostly focus on them at the expense of the ship's crew, but at the end I was left a little frustrated that one question was never addressed: what would have motivated rank-and-file members of the first generation crew to sign up?

It is also a deeply Christian story, enough so that I feel like that needs to be a potential CW. But this is handled in a very interesting way that worked for me as a non-Christian reader.

#SFFBookClub

This is one of those 5/5 ratings where I don't think the book is perfect, but it gets it because it is so intensely targeted at my own interests and I'm so grateful to have read it. Some bullet points to entice you:

• anti-capitalism, anti-cop
• train heists
• found family vibes
• first person point of view with an internalized narration to a second person "you"
• fantasy religions that don't feel like direct analogies of real ones
• revenge plot and revolutionaries
• gaaaaaaay

The book is so unapologetically queer and kinky, it's great. The author credits Stone Butch Blues (among many other things) in the end notes, which feels entirely unsurprising. The gender-y and queer bits also both intersect with the in-world religions in realistic ways.

It's a book that desperately needs a map; there's a pile of countries, religions, and politics especially when it hits the Chauncey estate section. The book does a good job of keeping it all ~~straight~~ queerly differentiated but the world has so much texture--it's a ttrpg campaign setting crying out for illustration! It also feels like a living world; characters having a life both off-page and outside of the protagonist make it feel even more real.

The book opens with a labor dispute and police violence and sworn revenge, but from there it doesn't shy away from critiques of power and incrementalism and reformers. There's some wild rich people monologues where they unintentionally bare themselves as soulless vampires. There's a bandit charade of a hidden equitable country, pretending to be part of a baronial system.

Sunlight licked between bruisy limestone smokestacks and telegraphy spires, and the crumbling knuckled colonnades of an empire that's long gone.

I found the writing to be a delight: the narrator is at times unreliable, and the writing is full of dreamy metaphors. At times, somebody will bust out with a multi-page exposition about religion, or a set of introductions to a full dramatis personae worth of baronets. The final lap of the book has its own tonal shift that I won't get into for reasons. Somehow this all held together for me; maybe it's that none of these parts overstayed their welcome. I'm sure some folks will bounce off of this writing style, but I'm not folks, that's for sure.

Being a Hereafterist is a commitment to creating a brand-new world all the time. It is the method of making a new world, it does not stop, we are never there yet. We have never arrived at a restful Hereafter, we must keep making. We will become a liberated collective, a plague will roll over us, and a famine, and fifty thousand bullets, and we will need to make choices. We will need to change. We must resist the ossification of precedent. We march toward Hereafter, not tomorrow, we march past tomorrow, we know tomorrow will be hard.

In the end, this is a fuck yeah revenge story about disaster queers fighting capitalism with violence. It's less about answers or even hope, and more about conveying a sense of angry determinism working for a future none of them will see.

@eldang@outside.ofa.dog I also put this on my personal to-read list after it fell off the sffbookclub poll. This is all exciting to hear; if you're reading it right now, maybe I'll give it a go next too so I can read in parallel.

No matter how much I liked the first two books, this book was "just ok". I think it just wasn't as philosophical as the first and it didn't have the thematic strength of the second. There were some attempts to tie together metaphor through the family tree but it felt more told than shown for me.

(And to my eye, there were some missed opportunities for connections and depth. So many hooks of ideas that could have connected better: the chives vs baomind mind over distance, human desire for narratives, human tendencies towards binary thinking, or the way humans treat AIs.)

Overall, this is an interesting trilogy of books. Every book has a different protagonist and a very different feeling to it; there's some loose continuity going on, but it's more like a series of different windows into this universe rather than a strong arc plot. It's not what I expected at all.

I mentioned that I felt like the previous book had a bit of a mystery vibe to it, and that continues here. To be clear, I think both of these are "mystery adjacent action" where there's some attempted murders and mysterious goings-on; in both cases, it's there as a way to build tension and not as the main vehicle for the novel or something the reader could solve on their own.

Also, pettily I had some minor complaints which maybe made this book less enjoyable:

This book opens with Sun off on a far away research trip without her wife and kids. I wrote a note to myself at the time: "is every book in this trilogy going to be about absent family?" In this case, no. Sun's wife Salvie surprises Sun by showing up with the kids.

Salvie has some neat backstory of not fitting into the alien gender roles of her species (which we don't hear enough about), and then in practice she's got a single facet: the supportive wife for Sun's problems. Sure, the story isn't about her, but... also... it could be more about her. It's made worse for me that Sun is so often resentful(!) of Salvie, especially around her showing up unexpectedly. Even this point of conflict and resentment felt over very quickly and not processed very thoroughly. (It should also be noted that Sun left the kids that she didn't want to take care of with Salvie to do full-time parenting for five years.)

And that sort of leads me into the other point, is that maybe I just didn't enjoy Sun as a main character? In a world full of rightminding, Sun felt incredibly emotionally immature and deregulated. Their interaction with their kids felt like a very trope-y arc, especially with her feeling paranoid and overprotective. (If her behavior towards her children had tied in more clearly to her backstory about hab failure trauma, maybe this would have felt more nuanced?)

Finally, the main nemesis figure (Vickee Devine) felt quite flat. It was INCREDIBLY funny for Sun to bring up this long-time academic and personal rival, only to have said rival's entrance be showing up piloting a spaceship (surprise ferrying Sun's wife and kids) and then doing some hot shot flying during a pirate skirmish to save Sun. Overall though, I was expecting more of a twist or some nuance with her character. In the book there was even a direct nod to Malka Older's narrative disorder and the bias that Sun feels towards Vickee and tries to ignore, which felt like an opportunity for some other story to be told here; in the end it seemed to be exactly what it said on the tin.

This book was not what I expected. It's got a different protagonist than the first book, and also steps a bit more into mystery and horror genres. It's also a second book in a series that I liked better than the first, if such a thing is possible.

I think this book starts off with a bit of almost space horror, with Dr. Jens investigating a ghost colony ship and trying to figure out what's gone wrong with its ancient crew that are now all in cryo. If I had to try to pin some genre on it, I'd say the bulk of the book feels like mystery/space politics with the start leaning horror and the end leaning action. It's a tasty blend for me, specifically.

What I liked the most about this book is how characterization and themes tied in so strongly to the plot. Dr. Jens wears an exo (prosthetic adaptive exoskeleton) for her constant pain; talking obliquely to avoid spoilers, the climax of the novel revolves around her confronting her relationship with her disability and her exo. The book also deals quite a bit with what it means to have faith (in institutions, but also friends, and religiously).

I am amused a little at how much Master Chief Carlos feels like the gender anachronauts from Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder. Characters out of time and out of step with current mores. Certainly, their function in each novel is very different; also, Carlos manages to be infuriating but also somehow sympathetic at the same time, and that makes him a much more interesting character than I had expected.

If there's any disappointment in the writing for me, there is a bit where Singer from the first book shows up as a deus ex celebrity, and it feels a bit like a distraction rather than something that added to the story. I think he could have been edited out without the story losing anything. Oddly, Cheeirilaq showing up again worked for me, possibly because we get to see it as a foil against Rilriltok and learn more about their species. Also, bug friend(s).