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Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is the second time in its comparatively short life that I’ve been surprised and impressed by Erewhon Books putting out something that is a very fresh, very modern instance of a genre I don’t see much. Olivia Chadha’s Rise of the Red Hand is dead-center-of-the-genre classical cyberpunk. It deals with a gigantic gap between the haves and the have-nots; it literally uses the word cybernetics for its concerns; there is even a character who gradually goes more and more by their hacker name over the course of the book.

But utterly modern. Yes. This book is set in South Asia, in a world divided into continent-spanning provinces by the powers that be. The environmental concerns are entirely pervasive, much more successfully so than in old-school cyberpunk. The way that issues of family and truth and social balance are handled are fresh and contemporary. The “punk” sensibility is on every page, with dismantling toxic systems on every level the main concern–including the way those toxic systems are reflected in individual and familial relationships.

So if you’ve been missing cyberpunk and yet know that you wouldn’t react the same way to old cyberpunk if you encountered it for the first time now–Olivia Chadha’s got your back. And since this says “book one of The Machinists,” it looks like she’s got plans for more. Yay.

Melissa Bashardoust, Girl, Serpent, Thorn. Poisonous girls and Persian mythology. This was captivating and lovely.

Eileen Hunt Botting, Artificial Life After Frankenstein. Discussed elsewhere.

Hayley Chewins, The Sisters of Straygarden Place. This is a middle-grade book about a family in a magical house and the creepy and delightful things the house does and the sisters do and…how they put it all back together.

Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections. Elegant, insightful, lovely, offbeat short stories. Very excited to discover this author.

R.F. Kuang, The Burning God. The third in its series–do not start here–it is relentless in its follow-through, it is going all sorts of places that are alarming and inevitable.

Darcie Little Badger, Elatsoe. This was so much fun and so engaging. I read it all in one gulp while waiting in the car for a family member to have a medical procedure. The ghost dog is amazing! I love everybody here!

L.M. Montgomery, Emily’s Quest. Reread. This was always my least-reread volume of this trilogy, and I can now see why: it feels more like a summary than a novel. It’s as though Montgomery knew what was to happen in Emily’s life in broad career and romance strokes–and as a child I was thrilled that the career part got as much focus as it did, compared to Anne–there is all sorts of stuff about sending out manuscripts and how it all worked at the time. But the little anecdotes where Emily does something funny or Cousin Jimmy says something weird or whatever (hashtag Team Cousin Jimmy 4eva) are very sparse on the ground here. And the romantic relationships are…well, Dean Priest remains incredibly odious and terrible and I hate him forever, Emily forgave him but I do not. And Teddy Kent…is a Ken doll, basically; he is a label that says “childhood artist friend,” he is not a person. So when Emily achieves publishing success comparatively early in the book and her happy ending is, “hey also you get to be with this potted plant of a man,” well. I hope Ilse and Perry stop by often, is what I’m saying.

Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Laughing to Keep From Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century. Discussed elsewhere.

Jan Morris, Battleship Yamato: Of War, Beauty, and Irony. I had only read her Hav books, so when I heard the sad news of her death, I went to see what the library had of hers. And it was this: an exceptionally small book of photos and thoughts on the topic of the subtitle. As much as Hav connected for me, this completely did not; Morris had ideas about how “we” respond to war imagery that…I don’t, no, I really totally do not. Still interesting, and I’ll be curious to see how much her other nonfiction is alien in a way that Hav is not, if at all. Maybe this is an outlier.

Trung Le Nguyen, The Magic Fish. Graphic novel with fairy tale retellings tangled up in family stories in a beautiful way. Another one I read in one sitting. Just lovely.

Scott D. Seligman, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City. Discussed elsewhere.

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Future. Sheldrake has that “we are our own best experimental subjects” attitude that you find baked into a lot of mycologists and mycological enthusiasts, but the enthusiasm is in some ways lovely and refreshing, and reading about a lot of nice fungus in the midst of this year is not a terrible life plan. I wanted some of this to be deeper, but not any more so than with most popular science books.

Shveta Thakrar, Star Daughter. I mistook the genre of this completely and thought the girl on the cover was a starship captain. In defense of the lovely people who actually worked on marketing the book, I could not have made that mistake if I’d read any of their copy at all instead of just saying “ooh Shveta’s book!” and sallying forth. Anyway this is a YA fantasy with stars and art and love and friendship, and it was a lot of fun, so go ahead and say, “Ooh, Shveta’s book!” and pick it up anyway.

Django Wexler, Ashes of the Sun. I think this is the best thing Django’s written. Siblings with divergent life paths, sometimes fighting at cross purposes, both stubborn and fierce and committed to their view of the right thing. Such a fun epic fantasy.

Joshua Whitehead, ed., Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. Lots of interesting work here, and the beginning of something good I think. My favorite stories were Kai Minosh Pyle’s “How to Survive the Apocalypse for Native Girls” and Darcie Little Badger’s “Story for a Bottle.”

Review copy provided by the publisher.

What a weird lot of conceptual holes this work of science fiction criticism has in it. There are whole large sections on which Botting is extremely sound–the rights of the child, for example, and its evolution in science fiction from Shelley onward. Good stuff. Unfortunately, that appears to be her previous book, and in this one she has extended her arguments about political science fiction in some very weird ways.

Whenever I am presented with a taxonomy, I want to look for its underlying assumptions to find the places where it may be missing things. In this case they leapt out at me without much looking. Botting divides political SF since Shelley into Apocalyptic, Hacker, and Loveless, based on its primary anxieties. Problem: not all political SF is primarily anxious. Problem: in order to make political SF fit those categories, you have to warp interpretations of vast swaths of it.

Since Botting seems to have swallowed whole cloth the history of SF that was in vogue 20+ years ago when I was in college, many of the earlier works that would have complicated this taxonomy are absent. I don’t know why the recent ones are except that they don’t support her argument. She doesn’t appear to have ever encountered Lois McMaster Bujold’s speech/essay on science fiction as the fantasy of political agency, which is odd because Bujold is not exactly a minor figure in the field she purports to be examining nor is her work even remotely irrelevant to the continuity of Shelley’s influence in political SF. Missed opportunities.

The text was also filled with small errors and ideas that, if they were not in error, certainly were not supported. Particularly egregious was the label of Shelley as genderfluid in the same passage as Botting directly quoted Shelley as identifying, if anything, more completely with womanhood than Shelley’s estimation of the women around her. Genderfluid does not mean the same thing as bisexual/pansexual, and I would expect either a critic in 2020 or at the very least their editor to understand that.

I wanted this book to be so much more thoughtful and thorough than it was.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is an academic work, with all the analysis that implies; it is not itself a work of humor. That analysis, however, is well worth the price of admission for anyone who cares about satire, about 21st century African-American culture, and I think in fact for American culture in general. Morgan is magisterially far-reaching when it comes to satirical lenses of the 21st century. She has no apparent genre bias but sees the potential for satire in any and all genres.

She also sees its potentials for failure. The section on failed attempts at satire and why they missed their mark is fascinating, and by itself it would have been enough to make the whole book worthwhile. While this is academic analysis, she is entirely ready to include “this wasn’t particularly funny, no one was laughing, and for good reason” in failure modes of satire. She’s not doing a comedy turn herself, but she never loses sight of what she’s actually analyzing–and I felt inspired at several places to look for the more successful attempts she describes, to experience or re-experience them.

Morgan gives the reader a solid grounding in pre-21st century works in this genre, quickly and concisely but in a way that made me miss Richard Pryor, which seems like exactly what ought to happen with a work like this. I enjoyed this book a lot, and it also made me enjoy some things more deeply–not required of criticism, but excellent when it can happen.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

One of the great things about my adult life is that there are so many more histories published that are not Great Man or even Great Event histories. This is one of them. Even with my immigration interest–I literally wrote a kids’ book about Jewish immigrants to the US–and my interest in labor relations, I had never come upon anything about the Kosher Meat War of 1902.

This is compelling stuff. There are people who are struggling to feed their families in an unfamiliar land, there are new technologies causing upheaval on a commodity landscape, there are communities attempting to recreate their favorite parts of community in their previous home only to find that not everyone shares their preferences.

And there are middle-aged ladies breaking glass and pouring kerosene on beef.

The leaders of the Kosher Meat War took a lot of lessons from the labor movement and also contributed some interesting experience to it, but for the most part they were not labor leaders or even labor leaders in training. They were ordinary people who had been pushed too far. What people do in a situation like that is fascinating, and so is this book.

Barbara Bourland, Fake Like Me. A young artist’s studio burns, and the paintings that survived the fire are worth far more. Problem: they didn’t survive the fire. So she has a few months to completely remake a giant show, and also to delve into her assumptions about life and art and other artists. There were some dubious rich people assumptions–namely that a working class artist would get more attention than a rich one, pull the other one, Bourland–but it was still an interesting read and different from everything else.

Allie Brosh, Solutions and Other Problems. By the author of Hyperbole and a Half. This had some funny bits and some sad bits and some frankly deeply alarming bits; the times when Brosh is made unhappy by the world are sad but her own philosophy seems to be making her less happy also, and that’s more alarming to watch.

Emily Carroll, Through the Woods. This is another graphic novel, this one of creepy fairy tale-adjacent stories of monsters and dark places.

Roshani Chokshi, The Silvered Serpents. Second in its series, and I would start with The Gilded Wolves, because this has a lot of implication and ramification that follows from that. I raced through it and had a great time with it.

Zoraida Cordova, Wayward Witch. Another sequel, this one the third in its series. I sometimes like the shape of series where the setting and events continue to ramify but the narrative focuses on a different character each time, and this is one of those. I like this series a lot and recommend it.

Robert Darnton, Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. Three different case studies of censorship in Western history. While I would also like a farther-reaching study of this topic, some of the ways in which censorship varies a lot with its environment and assumptions were really interesting–and the fact that Darnton got to interview actual East German censors about their work was just great.

Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. Lots of large marine mammals, lots of cultural shift here. I particularly liked having this angle on world history, from a region that had a very different concept of what world there was and how to handle it than many of the dominant regions. Content warning, as you would expect, for mass slaughters.

Joy Harjo, ed., When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. This had some really interesting poems in it, but it’s one of those anthologies that skews toward picking poems that are About This Ethnic Experience, which can give a distorted view of what marginalized groups choose to write about or are allowed to write about. So this is another of the “don’t let this be the only thing you read on this topic” category. It’s organized geographically and then temporally within each geographic section, which I enjoyed.

S.L. Huang, Burning Roses. Fairy tale crossover novella from multiple cultures, thinking about monstrousness and relationships. Delightful if you know all the source material Huang is riffing on, but I think it would still work if you only knew some of it.

Sujata Massey, The Satapur Moonstone. Early twentieth century Indian setting for this mystery, which takes some time to really get going.

Hilary McKay, Love to Everyone. This historical makes me feel like McKay is branching out in genres, which I enjoy. It’s got a WWI setting and covers quite a lot of ground. I really like how it–like other McKay–allows the child reader and the child protagonists to see through some of the social niceties adults will claim on behalf of other adults. There’s a certain set of tropes about who dies in the Great War, what specific kind of person, that…goes back to stuff that was written at the time but still is a little frustrating. But in general I enjoyed it anyway.

L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon and Emily Climbs. Rereads. I was always an Emily girl as a kid, more than an Anne girl. These two are fun. I would never be friends with Ilse in real life, but I enjoy her immensely on the page, and I enjoy Emily’s career focus and I enjoy the bits where she is dealing with her large and exasperating extended family. Things I do not enjoy: Teddy Kent; Dean Priest. I knew Dean Priest was creepy when I first read these, when I was younger than Emily. But rereading them now that I have two godchildren Emily’s age when a man in his 30s starts hitting on her…aaaaaaaagh go away and stay away, basically every dude character in these books who isn’t Cousin Jimmy. Maaaaaybe on a good day Mr. Carpenter. Maybe. (I’m a little alarmed by how much Mr. Carpenter is Adult Dude Ilse. But okay, onward.)

Amy Tintera, All These Monsters. Fun monster-fighting YA SF that takes on toxic relationship tropes and kicks their teeth in. Very much enjoyed this.

Megan Whelan Turner, Return of the Thief. I think this most recent volume in this series might be my favorite. It’s got a protag who isn’t the king of anything, and it’s thinking about disability and assumptions a lot. But for heaven’s sake don’t start here, it won’t make sense without at least some of the earlier books in the series.

W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. There are things I aspire to do and things I dread, and reading the collected poems of Yeats was a third category that fewer people seem to have than the previous two, which is things that I expect I will do without feeling particularly strongly about that expectation. “Yeah, that sounds like me,” rather than “ooh!” or “oh no.” Anyway, in addition to the attempts at a mythic ethnic poetry and the poems to various friends and lovers, there was an entire middle section that was substantially about being in a country wracked with plague and political upheaval while adjusting to middle-age (as a pretty bumpy road), so…yeah, poetry, punching you in the teeth between the pretty parts. This is what I wanted from it, and lo, this is what I got.