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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Beck Garrison lives on a seastead — an archipelago of constructed platforms and old cruise …
"This might be a falling-down house," Debbie said. "But it is our falling-down house. We'll figure it out."
— Liberty's Daughter by Naomi Kritzer (83%)
Beck Garrison lives on a seastead — an archipelago of constructed platforms and old cruise …
This is a near future story about Beck Garrison, a precocious teenager growing up on a libertarian seastead off the coast of California. Her part-time job is finding things (or people) for others, and this work gets her into things and places she's not supposed to, all while trying to stay out from under the eye of an overbearing father.
It's also got: Reality shows! Unions! (Un)believable backlash against said unions! Shitty controlling parents! Mad scientists!
This book certainly gets at everything you suspect would go wrong with a libertarian seastead. What situations would cause people to flee the United States to go there? What kind of immoral shady behavior would people get up to? What terrible capitalism is everybody living under? What sort of a sham of worker's rights even pretends like it exists here? BUT, if that were all this book were about, it'd be just another …
This is a near future story about Beck Garrison, a precocious teenager growing up on a libertarian seastead off the coast of California. Her part-time job is finding things (or people) for others, and this work gets her into things and places she's not supposed to, all while trying to stay out from under the eye of an overbearing father.
It's also got: Reality shows! Unions! (Un)believable backlash against said unions! Shitty controlling parents! Mad scientists!
This book certainly gets at everything you suspect would go wrong with a libertarian seastead. What situations would cause people to flee the United States to go there? What kind of immoral shady behavior would people get up to? What terrible capitalism is everybody living under? What sort of a sham of worker's rights even pretends like it exists here? BUT, if that were all this book were about, it'd be just another good book in the overflowing "capitalism is bad, actually" pile.
What works in this book especially for me, is that Beck likes the seastead she's grown up on (even as she moans about not getting to ever leave like her friends have). She cares about making it better. People listen to her. She has leverage to make things better, and goes out of her way to help people when she has the power to. I think her care for a place that is both broken and also hers makes the story work; it feels like a metaphor for our own broken and messy places that we still want to try to fix.
Content warning Spoiler for A Gallery a Century, a Cry a Millennium
@Tak@reading.taks.garden yeahhh grimacing emoji
@Tak@reading.taks.garden yeahhhhhhhh this chapter was one in particular that prompted me to say something about content warnings
To cope with rising misogynist violence, the US government offered people a golden opportunity: any …
This book is exactly what you think it is: a snarky non-binary special ops agent dispatched to shoot their way through an internet meme island prison for shitty dudes. Pulpy, amusing, doesn't outstay its welcome.
To cope with rising misogynist violence, the US government offered people a golden opportunity: any …
They don't call me Mankiller Jones for nothing. They call me Mankiller Jones because I tell people that's my name and I throw kind of a fit if anyone calls me anything else. Honestly, I have a feeling most people call me Shirley behind my back. Or Mx. Jones if they're feeling formal.
— Escape from Incel Island by Margaret Killjoy, Jonas Goonface (Page 1)
Some bits I enjoyed out of the December issue of Small Wonders:
An amusing story about carefully striking bargains with your fae neighbors who have invited themselves over.
A story about a girl who is captured by the Brujo in her local creek after giving up her name. The multiple reveals in the ending were fun.
A story about misunderstandings with alien visitors who don't exist in any particular time and space (or alternatively exist in all of them).
Aurora is a 2015 novel by American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The novel …
When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?
— Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (Page 227)
Aurora is a 2015 novel by American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The novel …
I enjoyed this Kim Stanley Robinson take about (the problems of living in) a generation starship. A friend who once saw KSR's WisCon talk about this book recommended it to me.
This is not my first KSR rodeo, so I knew a bit of what to expect from his writing style. It's a bit of a dry, plot-driven story. There's not particularly strong emotional beats. And, it's a vehicle :drum: for KSR's opinions on generation ships, insular biogeography, and the Fermi Paradox.
One thing that I think works very well in this book is that the narrator is the ship itself, having been exhorted to summarize the journey in words by the chief engineer. It can explain away some of why the book focuses on only a few characters and also why it's largely dry and descriptive. (The ship does in time learn to enjoy metaphors and wordplay, like "once …
I enjoyed this Kim Stanley Robinson take about (the problems of living in) a generation starship. A friend who once saw KSR's WisCon talk about this book recommended it to me.
This is not my first KSR rodeo, so I knew a bit of what to expect from his writing style. It's a bit of a dry, plot-driven story. There's not particularly strong emotional beats. And, it's a vehicle :drum: for KSR's opinions on generation ships, insular biogeography, and the Fermi Paradox.
One thing that I think works very well in this book is that the narrator is the ship itself, having been exhorted to summarize the journey in words by the chief engineer. It can explain away some of why the book focuses on only a few characters and also why it's largely dry and descriptive. (The ship does in time learn to enjoy metaphors and wordplay, like "once in a blue muon".) The ship is probably the best character in the book.
I have mixed feelings about the end of the book, but it's hard to talk about things without being too spoilery. Suffice it to say that I found the penultimate 10% of the book fun and think it would have been stronger to end there before the shift into the more didactic final 10%.
enne📚
boosted
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …
The #SFFBookClub January pick is How High We Go In The Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu.  Thank you to all who voted and/or suggested books.
Deception Well is a world on the edge, home to an isolated remnant surviving at …
Edges is a science fiction space story about uploading and alien technology.
There's a lot of fun ideas here, like the captured alien spaceship that requires constant negotiation and consensus, or (similar to Children of Time) putting yourself to sleep for long periods of uninteresting time as needed, but ultimately this is a story a dictatorial spaceship captain, an invader, and the people caught between.
One thing I couldn't get past reading this was the horror of consciousness splitting. Sometimes people are instantiated into bodies and then it's "welp I'm done with this body now", but excuse me that new you was conscious and you just killed it? There's some nod to this, but mostly it's waved past in an unintentionally horrifying way.
A nobleman's daughter with magic in her blood. An empire built on the dreams of …
I went back to read this book because I had really enjoyed the characters and relationships in the Jasmine Throne and Oleander Sword. I enjoyed the worldbuilding and the magic, but I personally struggled to enjoy the relationship between Mehr and Amun here that felt like it should have been the emotional backbone of the novel.
What would you give to win the world?
Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, is riding …
But if you were determined to want the impossible, there was a better way to get it. Zhu thought with amused defiance: Change the world, and make it possible.
— He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan (Page 7)
Content warning full spoilers for He Who Drowned the World
A couple of small things first:
Ouyang's rejection of Zhu after the scene with Fang makes so much sense. It was especially heartbreaking because I loved the two of them working together after being enemies for so long, but it also made logical sense that Ouyang's unchecked misogyny is not something that would so easily be resolved.
I worried a bit about the presence of Ma in most of the book. She shows up for a heist in the opening scene, but other than some brief moments she is mostly not around. I think it makes some logical plot sense (she's running things while Zhu is off stealing salt or fighting battles) but she comes back for the big emotional finale. Having Ma there at the end as the compassionate heart to Wang really makes the end of the book. It feels like Ma is always the one that pulls Zhu back from the brink of ruthless pragmatism, and having her there in the finale where Zhu and her ghost sword give Wang mercy adds a lot of weight to that moment. I still wish there was more of her around, but I am glad for what we got.
I had mixed feelings about Wang's point of view. It was certainly tough to read somebody so hell-bent on self-destruction, personally. In some ways, it's a similar bent as Ouyang, revenge against the people who have wronged him, but for Wang it's emotional revenge on the world at large, but more specifically Esen. I think what ended up working for me by the end was the parallels between Wang and Madame Zhang, where they both had larger goals that were interrupted by unexpected tenderness and truly caring for others that they thought they were using (the third prince, General Zhang), and that they both achieved what they wanted but only found ashes.
Larger things:
The emotional hinge of this book for me was the scene with Chen, Xu, and Zhu after the boat battle where Chen is threatening to maim and kill Xu unless Zhu surrenders. This is definitely the moment where I feel like Zhu falters the most; she is desperate to try to come up with some other plan, she doesn't want to surrender and she also doesn't want her best friend to be hurt.
In the end, the resolution is that Xu kills himself to end the standoff. In some ways this felt like an easy and unsatisfying answer to an impossible problem where Zhu is able to avoid making a hard decision. However, the more I thought about this, the resolution where we learn that Xu has done this (and many things) as a willing sacrifice for Zhu and the world she is trying to create; this to me makes all the difference emotionally. It's not Zhu choosing to sacrifice Xu for victory, but rather Xu's own choice. It's still heartbreaking, but it turns a moment of cold pragmatism into a moment of grief, and in retrospect I feel like this moment sets the tone for the rest of the novel.
Even with that tone set, the moment where Ma tells Wang that she is pregnant fully brought me back to the moments with the third prince. In the moment, the pregnancy reveal feels like a lie to cover up the murder of Jiang. It gave me some dread that this was a parallel of the previous fake pregnancy, of potentially the now-empress Zhang using the same medicine that killed the third prince on Ma to try to kill Ma's child (and instead kill Ma). That Ma, like Xu, would then sacrifice herself for Zhu and Zhu would pay the price of losing yet another person that she loved. FOOF. I think tonally this would have made for a very different ending, and yet I felt like it was still very possible here in the moment.
Finally, I love also that the four main characters all come together for the finale scene where Zhu takes Ouyang's ghost sword, Ma reveals herself as Zhu's wife to Wang, and Zhu gives Wang mercy if he gives up his mandate. It's just such a powerful scene to have all of these four characters who are all connected come together for that moment of mercy. Chef's kiss.
What would you give to win the world?
Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, is riding …
I deeply enjoyed the conclusion to this duology. At times it was bleak and dark, but I feel like my thoughts on the first book continued to ring true in this book more than I had expected.
It's hard to talk about this without spoilers, but the thing I liked the most about this book is when it brings two characters together that are ostensibly similar to each other to highlight their differences. Zhu and Ouyang (both not men in their own way) go on adventures. Chen and Zhu (both pragmatically pursuing greatness) face off against each other. Ouyang and Wang (both focused on revenge) have a showdown. I just love seeing all these characters be such foils for each other.
The finale especially was satisfying emotional closure that brought all these main characters together. Even through sacrifice and suffering, there was more hope than I thought there might be. …
I deeply enjoyed the conclusion to this duology. At times it was bleak and dark, but I feel like my thoughts on the first book continued to ring true in this book more than I had expected.
It's hard to talk about this without spoilers, but the thing I liked the most about this book is when it brings two characters together that are ostensibly similar to each other to highlight their differences. Zhu and Ouyang (both not men in their own way) go on adventures. Chen and Zhu (both pragmatically pursuing greatness) face off against each other. Ouyang and Wang (both focused on revenge) have a showdown. I just love seeing all these characters be such foils for each other.
The finale especially was satisfying emotional closure that brought all these main characters together. Even through sacrifice and suffering, there was more hope than I thought there might be.
(I wrote some longer thoughts with spoilers in this reply).
