Reviews and Comments

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/

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.

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).

Ancestral Night is a snappy and grippy space adventure. The big "future idea" here is not faster than light travel or even arguably the alien artifacts from long-disappeared alien races (although these things appear in the book); it's instead that humanity has discovered "rightminding", or the ability to directly manipulate emotions and hormones such that they can get past tendencies towards hierarchy or antisocial behaviors and coexist peacefully with aliens.

Rightminding reminds me of the mood organ from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. However, instead of being a metaphor for the similarities of humans and androids (and also being a tiny side mention), here it's the meat of the story and gets at the line between brainwashing and merely adjusting your brain to get along better with others.

I love how talky this book is. Yeah, sure, there's stolen alien spaceships and sexy space pirates and giant ancient space squid. But also, there's constant rumination and bickering on what makes a just society, what it means to be a person, and what an individual's responsibility to their society is.

The other thing I think is done well is that nobody and nothing is perfect here. Maybe the Synarche is better than alternatives and involves a lot more consent than similar systems, but also it's built on atrocities and there's rightful criticisms you can make about what little you see. Similarly, rightminding is a useful tool, but also any tool can be misused.

Anywho, I quite enjoyed this. Fun ideas and interesting characters wrapped up in an action space story.

(A few more spoiler-y opinions in this post.)

This is the final book in the first Foreigner trilogy, and to me is the most solid of the three in a lot of ways.

My favorite part of this book is that Jase from the ship has landed and is trying to fit into the Atevi world. When the series starts, we are already past the point where Bren has trained his entire life to be the paidhi but the language and culture is entirely new to Jase. Bren tries to acculturate Jase, but they are at such a disconnect socially and emotionally for most of the book. Jase wants some "humanity" from Bren, and there's some question of "how far" Bren has mentally adopted being Atevi and doesn't express emotions or even uses Atevi phrase constructions in English. The disconnect and Jase's anger dovetails so well with Jase having his own secrets and ship politics happening off page that it's quite effective.

My second favorite part of this book is probably the development of Bren's relationship with Jago, such as it is. Despite being such an Atevi communicator, there's still a large cultural gap about what this means to Jago, and she is also not willing to fill Bren or discuss it either. It's a nice parallel to the pitfalls that Bren falls in considering Atevi as "friends" or "liking" them. I complained about this a little in my review of the first book, in that I feel like this isn't a series about gender or biology, and I am always a little disappointed when "I am having an emotional and sexual relationship with an alien" gets glossed over when there should be so many rough edges. It feels a little too human with too much unsaid and too much working too easily.

Finally, I do feel a little here that this is another book where Bren does not have much agency. His role is to try to smooth tensions, get Jase up to speed, and to negotiate complicated nuanced politics with old school Tatiseigi who hates the way humans have corrupted Atevi. In the end, Bren pushes for a fishing trip that he has promised Jase, but it turns out that even this wasn't of his own design.

This is the second book in the first Foreigner trilogy, and one where Bren gets a little bit more agency than the first, where he is mostly kept in the dark.

It's a classic Foreigner book where the bulk of the book is careful, slowly building politics--internal Atevi ones, external mainland ones with Deana Hanks the temporary paidhi, and ones from the ship with its people imminently landing--all of which come together in a satisfying action sequence. I think this book is where the first trilogy really starts going, and sets up the third book which is probably my favorite of the three. It's the book where Bren starts to realize that his loyalty is truly more towards keeping the treaty and its peace than with the institute of his own state department that technically gives him the authority to do what he is doing.

I like the tension here with Bren's fiance Barb and the increasing romantic tension between Bren and Jago. Barb is absolutely incredibly emotionally immature, both pushing Bren away because the relationship is (understandably) not working for her but also asking for him back (because her new relationship isn't working either); I think it is a little over the top but it works because it's such a contrast with Atevi mindsets.

I said this in the first book, but I feel like this entire first trilogy is one where Illisidi is an independent wild card, where she has her own agenda and politics and Bren (and the reader) can never fully depend on her support and where her loyalties will lie.

Also extremely minor, but as touchpoints for future books, we also get our first pizza party, our first trip to the Taiben hunting lodge, and our first meeting with Tabini's fiancee Damiri.

I have read other Cassandra Khaw, and this story continues in their writing vein of being bloody and extremely visceral (literally and metaphorically). It's less body horror and more horror horror; it's the fiction version of the last twenty minutes of The Substance where everything turns monstrous and there's a firehose of blood and gore.

This is another "dark academia book", where magic children who have apocalyptic abilities are sent (or taken) to keep them safe from the rest of the world. Obviously where there's power, there's abuse of power and this is fundamentally a revenge story from a traumatized woman who likes her bodily autonomy.

The story is told from the main character's perspective in both the present and the past, with the past narrative catching up to the present eventually to help explain some of the in medias res. I do really like this technique when it's done well, and I feel like it helps flash back to backstory for characters and create some level of doubt about the main character's motivations. The present is mostly action, and so it makes for satisfying pacing to have interleaved backstory and tension.

I think this book is best viewed as a classic horror story--it feels very much like a movie where parts of the cast are slowly being killed off. It's about establishing characters rather than a strong sense of place. Still, it's interesting to compare some of the world building of Scholomance to here. Despite the fact that both contain the classic trope of a school that constantly rearranges itself, the Scholomance has a map and a sense of threat about being in a lower room or getting lost. Here, the physical school itself is mostly just a side detail and I don't really have a sense of space or tension.

This is not to say I didn't enjoy this book, but in comparison to other adjacent dark academia genre books I think it just doesn't quite stand out. The worldbuilding and deadly graduation ceremony was much more thin than in the Scholomance. I found the characters in Emily Tesh's The Incandescent to be much stronger and more interesting. Even Khaw's previous Little Mermaid retelling The Salt Grows Heavy sticks with me much more than the moments in this book.

I wonder if this will land better for folks who are more into horror than I am.

This Christine Love story is an extremely anime story about a student learning to fight robots with a giant sword and falling in love with her turncoat fencing teacher.

I wanted to like this, but I just felt like it wasn't for me (in the literal sense that perhaps I am not the target audience). Maybe I haven't seen enough Gundam. Maybe anime tropes aren't quite my cuppa. I wish the worldbuilding around universal language and the Voyager broadcast weren't quite so thin. I have love love loved Christine Love's games writing universally, and Get in the Car, Loser! is one of my most favorite games, but somehow this just didn't land for me. I don't mean that as a euphemism though; I know this will really land for some folks.

A conversation on Mastodon prompted me to read this novella. It's a coming of age story on some future flooded planet with a history of angels that used to exist, and is largely about disillusionment with religion (specifically one with Christian overtones).

(This story is also surprisingly accessible for Greg Egan; I think this is my own recency bias in reading several of his novels over the years. There's an escalation of the science aspects over narrative as the years go on (Clockwork Rocket was not for me), but Oceanic is more like what I expect from his earlier work.)

Just as women and men were made indistinguishable in the sight of God, so were Freelanders and Firmlanders. (Some commentators insisted that this was literally true: God chose to blind Herself to where we lived, and whether or not we’d been born with a penis.)

It's got a little bit of tangential gender stuff going on, but it also feels quite dated to me. Maybe I just forget what 1998 looked like. The main detail is that people's bodies in this universe transfer a penis from one body to another during piv sex. There's some social gender around this (e.g. "who brings a bridge to this marriage?", although this attitude is considered dated by some characters), but when this comes into play for the protagonist it feels more like a virginity metaphor than a gender one. This mechanic seems like it should have a larger social impact in terms of surrounding cultural context, but it functions more like fun unrelated worldbuilding in this story.

This body horror pregnancy trans dysphoria story was... a lot, but it was also raw and real and quite good.

Crane is part of a local cult, run by a hive of sentient flies and worms, and when he gets pregnant the hive insists he carries the child to his utter distress and terror. It's visceral and disturbing--full of trauma and abuse, self-loathing and self-injury, and shitty choices in a shittier world.

This review seems like a recapitulation of my feelings after Witch King: I was gripped by the world, have mixed feelings about the book as a whole, wish more characters had depth, and was disappointed by parts of the ending. It's not to say I didn't enjoy it (and maybe it's just that my expectations were too high) but overall it was "fine".

One thing I really enjoy here is that we get into some really good Martha Wells fantasy ruins. Witch King and Queen Demon both follow in the path of City of Bones (my favorite Martha Wells fantasy story) and some of the Raksura books as well. I'm not sure what makes these so appealing, but I think there's something about her use of dangerous and creepy structures full of unknown danger that she does a great job with.

This book continues with interleaved narratives from the past and present. (As an aside, I do wonder if this will be a trilogy and the past narrative will cover all the way up to the present narrative in the first book.) The first book interestingly had both narratives in the same Summer Palace location at different times, which echoed nicely. This book's present timeline foreshadows some of the dust witch history, but otherwise feels quite disconnected.

I continue to be somewhat skeptical about the effectiveness of this structure for this story; there's not much tension about what's missing in between the two parts and they are not particularly great foils for each other. If the book weren't committed to this structure, some flashbacks to more moments with Arn would have gone a long way to making some emotional moments feel more impactful.

But maybe that's a larger problem of feeling the book is a bit muddy. Both halves of the first book ended with wanting to unburn the world, but I don't know if I'd say that's the story here. Is working to destroy the Hierarchs truly unburning the world? If there's any consistent theme, it's coming together to resist authoritarian rule of any sort, but even that is maybe a stretch.

The characterization also continues to feel pretty shallow for everybody who is not Kai and Bashasa. Tenes and Sanja especially feel like they need more screen time and characterization or reason for being with the rest of the party. Nightjar and Highsun similarly feel like they're important characters but we hear and see quite little of them despite them being involved in pivotal moments.

The ending is my biggest disappointment. At least the present narrative carries the tension, but the past narrative just ... elides it? Maybe this is just a big editing decision here to just cut out action to keep the book at four hundred pages, but it feels like there could be such an emotional contrast to Kai's rescue in the Summer Halls and Kai's actions in Descar-Arik and all we get is a small concluding moment with Bashasa at the end. Additionally, there feels like there's some uh pretty momentous reveals at the end of the present narrative and they just get buried :drum: in the final moments of action and they're gone almost as soon as they appear. Both halves end unsatisfyingly, each in their own way.

I will almost certainly read the next book, but I really hope it can tie everything together in a more satisfying way.

Time Shelter was our #SFFBookClub October 2025 pick.

I have such mixed feelings about this book. Thematically and topically, it manages to be quite consistent, but it felt like there were too many ingredients in the soup. It feels like there could have been a much tighter and less rambling story or two (or three) assembled from the various pieces of this novel, but then it wouldn't have been this book, either.

There's a lot that I enjoyed about this book, in terms of its discussions about the weaponization and productionization of nostalgia and the past. But also the way that we produce and manufacture memory as well, in similar fashion. I liked the parallels of the national and personal with respect to the uncertainty of the future and wanting to dwell safely in the past. The slow collapse of the narrator during the final chapters.

Despite that, I also struggle with "was this a good story" or "did I enjoy reading this". Probably not, if I'm being honest. I was gripped the most by the personal narrative and the narrator's relationship with his imagined collaborator/self Gaustine, but the story took so many tangents that I'm not sure that any of its threads came together for me satisfyingly.

(Truly also, I have been struggling with reading this month, and a book that challenged me so much as a reader is likely not the best fit for my current capacity. I feel like there is probably more here that I was unable to connect or fully grasp.)

I think time travel stories where the past can be rewritten ultimately feel like nothing matters and it makes me hard to care about it as a reader. On the positive side, I think it's always interesting to have a villain who can rewrite the past (hello, Saint of Bright Doors). I also think there are a lot of fun details about slightly alternate universes and the ending goes very Millenium Actress in a delightful way.

There is clear setup for future books here, but much of what was revealed explicitly felt already clearly foreshadowed (to me at least) and the bonus worldbuilding on top of the first book felt thin (or at least less interesting).

I will continue with this series for sure, but this was a little bit of a disappointing second book.