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Series by James SA Corey really like to have optional novellas in between the longer novels. Livesuit is "book 1.5" in their latest Captive's War series.

It's a short military sf story from the perspective of humans fighting against the Carryx. This novella functions as supplemental worldbuilding for impatient readers, and also brings a different perspective than the one from the captive humans in the novels.

Ultimately, the story is weak and doesn't stand on its own. I would consider this novella strongly optional.

Book two of this series is the expected broadening of worldbuilding and perspectives. It's not that the first book didn't follow multiple characters but they were largely all in the same situation, and this book opens up to parallel stories. From a pacing and tension perspective, this development diffuses the impact of the plot.

This is all less of a critique and more of an observation. There's only so many places a story can go like this, and this is a natural path for an ensemble cast story. That said I enjoyed it a lot, but it's also book two of a trilogy, so from a closure perspective you could sleep on this one until the final one is out.

Other assorted thoughts in no particular order:

I am a sucker for the drip feed of worldbuilding reveals about the Carryx, their war, their opponents. I always always love exploration of wrecked planet and space ship settings. I love the ongoing exploration of captivity sociology and psychology, of the variety of coping mechanisms that characters use to deal with their lives that have irrevocably changed and are much more out of their control.

I like what's going on with the swarm here. I really like its complicated relationship with Dafyd. They have reasons to hate each other, they have reasons to love each other, they are forced together because they both have the same singular secret goal. The swarm does struggle with "should I tell Dafyd these secrets that he will rightfully be angry at", but it is also a spy in enemy territory and managing the emotions of its greatest ally makes sense too. You could argue that this book is an (approximate trans? non-binary?) identity arc for the swarm as well. Despite the fact that Dafyd explicitly gives good reasons why he pushes away the Jellit swarm and is closer to Clae, the dynamics here feel quite heteronormative. Finally, and minorly, the swarm feels a bit like a plural system adjacent story too, but in other ways not.

I love Vaudai the slug's buddy comedy routine with Ghati and Campar. I love Jessyn continuing to be super competent. I laughed at the lamp shading of "we'll do horrific things to prosecute a secret war against the Carryx, but we won't force people to have children". Mostly, I love Dafyd trying to hold everything up and together even as everybody hates him for it.

Whew, the ending felt so sudden I think I hurt something.

The Navigating Fox is like a thousand-page fantasy epic crammed into 150 pages. It's super well written, and the setting is great and I want more, particularly the Northern Membership - although I could stand to go a few days without reading the word "knowledgeable". Now give me the thousand-page edition. 😀

#SFFBookClub

It's funny synchronicity that both this book and The River Has Roots are up against each other in the same Hugo category, as they are both fairy borderland stories. They feel entwined together in my mind and it's hard to talk about one without the other. The River Has Roots is about riddles, songs, and promises. The Summer War is about curses, revenge, and unbreakable oaths. They're both about the bonds between siblings where one sibling is lost to the faerie equivalent of the book.

What I like most about The Summer War is that despite being a very fairytale story with a pat ending, all of the characters (even their father) get a little bit of an arc and depth to them.

“I was only twelve,” Argent went on. “I barely even knew, yet. I didn’t understand what you were trying to do. All I understood was that there was something wrong with me, the same thing that was wrong with them, and you were showing me what it meant. What you had to do about it. And I didn’t see anything I could do to stop being wrong, because I hadn’t done anything to start. So afterwards, I was only waiting for you to come and take me, to do the same.”

It's a minor point, but an early plot point in the novel is the judgement of a case by Celia and Argent's father. Their father deliberately brings Argent along to court to show him harshly punishing two men who are involved with each other illegally. But the reason he does it is not from overt homophobia of believing this is truly wrong but from the more subtle homophobia of not wanting his son Argent to be judged negatively by others for something similar in the future. This is the plot point which causes Argent to leave, and it more or less breaks his father for the rest of the novel.

I like it because the more nuanced "I have made horrific parenting mistakes" leaves a lot more room for the father to come around. But also, it feels more applicable as a fairy tale for this age. Maybe I have just heard enough thirdhand stories lately of parents and grandparents wanting to shove young queer kids back in the closet to """protect""" them from the bullying of others that this rang particularly true to my ears.