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.
On a dusty backwater planet, occasional thief Jun Ironway has gotten her hands on the …
These Burning Stars
4 stars
A debut science fiction novel about secrets, genocide, and revenge.
I enjoyed all three point of view characters. Jun is a hacker with a secret past on the run. Esek is selfish, violent, and literally terrible, and yet she manages to be a captivating character. Chono is good-hearted and looks like a rule-following institutionalist, but her conflicting loyalties to people overrule her lawful tendencies. Chono and Esek are tied together by their relationships with Six, a mysterious figure who used to be a student with Chono; Esek spurning Six in the opening scene creates a feud that escalates out of control. I enjoyed the worldbuilding, but as you can see from this description, the heart of this book was in the relationships.
A content warning especially for genocide here. A good bit of the plot revolves around the Jeveni people; they were mostly killed on a small moon and the …
A debut science fiction novel about secrets, genocide, and revenge.
I enjoyed all three point of view characters. Jun is a hacker with a secret past on the run. Esek is selfish, violent, and literally terrible, and yet she manages to be a captivating character. Chono is good-hearted and looks like a rule-following institutionalist, but her conflicting loyalties to people overrule her lawful tendencies. Chono and Esek are tied together by their relationships with Six, a mysterious figure who used to be a student with Chono; Esek spurning Six in the opening scene creates a feud that escalates out of control. I enjoyed the worldbuilding, but as you can see from this description, the heart of this book was in the relationships.
A content warning especially for genocide here. A good bit of the plot revolves around the Jeveni people; they were mostly killed on a small moon and the remaining few are now economically exploited and hated. Folks tut about the past while doing nothing about the present. Other content warnings for quite a bit of bloody violence on page, and mentions of rape and pedophilia.
(On the minor space gender front, this book also has characters wearing "gendermarks" which felt sort of like pronoun pins of the future. One character switches up their gendermark from scene to scene. There seems to be some non-binary [this is my word] options too. It reminded me a bit of the signifiers in Everina Maxwell's Winter's Orbit.)
The book was a bit slow to start. Jun is on the run from Chono and Esek, and for a good chunk of the book we see Chono and Esek repeatedly showing up just too late to find Jun. I wish the chase on their end did a little bit more narrative work.
I think my favorite part of the book is its use of flashbacks. The reader gets teased about the names of some events that we eventually get to see. Esek shows up with a mangled ear, and oh boy do we find out about that in a later flashback too. The novel takes a little bit to get going, but these reveals about the past mixing with action in the present make for some great twists and a satisfying conclusion.
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work …
How High We Go in the Dark
5 stars
I read this for the #SFFBookClub January book pick. How High We Go in the Dark is a collection of interconnected short stories dealing with death, grief, and remembrance in the face of overwhelming death and a pandemic. Despite getting very dark, I was surprised at the amount of hopefulness to be found in the face of all of this.
It was interesting to me that this collection had been started much earlier and the Arctic plague was a later detail to tie everything together. Personally, I feel really appreciative of authors exploring their own pandemic-related feelings like this; they're certainly not often comfortable feelings, but it certainly helps me personally, much more than the avoidance and blinders song and dance that feels on repeat everywhere else in my life.
It's hard for me to evaluate this book as a whole. I deeply enjoyed the structural setup, and seeing background …
I read this for the #SFFBookClub January book pick. How High We Go in the Dark is a collection of interconnected short stories dealing with death, grief, and remembrance in the face of overwhelming death and a pandemic. Despite getting very dark, I was surprised at the amount of hopefulness to be found in the face of all of this.
It was interesting to me that this collection had been started much earlier and the Arctic plague was a later detail to tie everything together. Personally, I feel really appreciative of authors exploring their own pandemic-related feelings like this; they're certainly not often comfortable feelings, but it certainly helps me personally, much more than the avoidance and blinders song and dance that feels on repeat everywhere else in my life.
It's hard for me to evaluate this book as a whole. I deeply enjoyed the structural setup, and seeing background characters narrate their own chapters added quite a bit of emotional nuance. Pig Son especially would have hit differently without the background from a few chapters earlier. Some of the stories were quite full of knives, but my one complaint is that some stories in the back half felt like retreading similar grounds of grief and remembrance; they just didn't have the same level of impact for me. Both the final chapter and the title-generating chapter were thematically strong, but didn't quite carry the same level of emotional weight or closure that I wanted. I am not sure subjectively why I felt this way, but I think this is some of the flipside of its short story nature--that there's only a consistent emotional thread running through the book rather than a character or plot arc.
I'm really glad to have read this, and feel like a lot of these stories and feelings are going to stick with me for a long while.
Beck Garrison lives on a seastead — an archipelago of constructed platforms and old cruise …
Liberty's Daughter
4 stars
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.
To cope with rising misogynist violence, the US government offered people a golden opportunity: any …
Escape from Incel Island
4 stars
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.
Aurora is a 2015 novel by American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The novel …
Aurora
3 stars
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%.
Deception Well is a world on the edge, home to an isolated remnant surviving at …
Edges (Inverted Frontier)
3 stars
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 …
Empire of Sand
3 stars
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.