Category: Uncategorized

Diane Ackerman, Jaguar of Sweet Laughter. Reread. The colonialism fairy has visited the early poems in this volume, and there is more self-directed sexism than I could see when I first read Ackerman nearly twenty years ago. But I could also–easily–find in this volume the poems that are the reason I came to like her, the reason I bought so many of her works in the first place–“When You Take Me From This Good Rich Soil,” of course, and “Nuclear Winter” and “At Belingshausen, the Russian Base, Antarctica.” Poems that stick around doing the things they meant to do after nearly twenty years, so that I’m glad I returned looking for them.

Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades. Sequels are hard. This one feels like a particularly difficult tonal shift, from the shattered mirror dead god experience of City of Stairs to a very human set of consequences. It’s an interesting book, an engrossing book, but not ultimately one that succeeds as well for me as its predecessor. I think it depends on the reader which will be more favored. I think it relies on knowledge of the previous volume for impact, but I can’t swear to it.

John Bowker, ed., Orthogonal SF: The War at Home. Kindle. A quirky and fascinating new entry on the SF magazine scene. I felt that the positive standout stories were “#Anon and the Antlers” by Michael J. DeLuca and “A Citizen’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven” by Josh Pearce, and Alana I. Capria’s “Gelatin Molds” was really really not my thing…but it was not my thing in a way that committed whole-heartedly to what it was doing. It was not trying half-assedly to be something else. None of the stories were mealy-mouthed. Two stories out of five that make me go “oh hell yeah”–and zero stories that I can’t remember, zero stories that make me go “wait, which one was that?”–not at all bad for a start.

Chaz Brenchley, Sister Anthony Comes Down. Kindle. Short piece in the same universe as the Crater School and bearing immediately upon it but not, for the most part, sharing its style. However, it’s the kind of bonus you get with the Patreon, and it is not in serial form, so I took advantage of its self-contained nature to jump in and be able to jump out again.

Marie Brennan, Chains and Memory. Kindle. Discussed elsewhere.

Keigo Higashino, Salvation of a Saint. A murder mystery very much in the puzzle novel style: practically entirely composed of “how will they prove it.” Translated from the Japanese, with cultural assumptions intact. So okay then.

Gwyneth Jones, Midnight Lamp. Reread. There is no point to even trying with this series without starting at the beginning, with Bold As Love. By now they are deep into the weeds, far far into consequences and follow-on effects. Fiorinda is putting herself back together after having saved the world once. So are Ax and Sage. California Adventures! And so on. I like how this book doesn’t escalate directly. Sequels that manage not to do that and still find interesting things to say are better.

L.M. Montgomery, Rainbow Valley. Kindle. Reread. When I was sick in ’15 I read the first six Green Gables books. When faced with a fairly loud setting and a need to read on my Kindle, I reached for this familiar volume, which has a balance of kids’ antics and adults’ love lives as most Montgomery does. It was one of my favorites when I was little, and I still like it reasonably well. Note that there will be moments of unthinking racism against persons not present, as part of the fabric of the culture depicted, and some of the parenting practices from the kinder and more progressive parents are still pretty barbaric.

Emma Newman, Planetfall. A fascinating science fiction psychological study of an individual and a community dealing with colonization and background aliens while completely failing to cope with a mental health issue that is central to the book. I found the ending not at all satisfying. “Wow!” I kept saying to myself. “This is really compassionate and understanding, I wonder how she’s going to stick the landing?” Uh…better luck next time? Seriously, the rest of the reading experience is worth following Newman’s career and trying again, but the ending…did not quite make it, for me, and I will be happy to talk on email with those who either have already read it or find the details important enough that they want spoilers.

George O’Connor, Olympians: Apollo, The Brilliant One. Discussed elsewhere.

Benjamin Parzybok, Sherwood Nation. Drought and crisis and how people come to the end of their rope, what they do when they get there. Particularly interesting to read fairly close to Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, which are very different water/drought books set in the Pacific coast states. Parzybok’s scenes of family life in externally imposed crisis are particularly poignant and believable, and having “Maid Marian” and her crew to cheer for keeps it from getting to be too grindingly much. Also the very last page works in so very many ways that I am kind of fidgety to talk to people who have read the whole thing about what I like about it.

Mary Rickert, The Memory Garden. Beautiful domestic fantasy with lots of old women as protagonists and supporting characters. I have no idea why this book hasn’t come up when we were discussing Lifelode and The Dubious Hills as domestic fantasy, even though the setting is this world instead of secondary world. Full of garden life and ad hoc families and the way that people cope and then shape their lives around their coping.

Ysabeau S. Wilce, Prophecies, Libels, and Dreams: Stories of Califa. These are in the Flora Segunda universe but not nearly as middle-grade-skewed as the Flora books, which is an interesting balance. The prose voice also varies in how much it’s off into the twee land of Flora–for all that it took me a couple of tries to really get into the voice of those books, I found I missed it a bit in the more restrained stories, even though I saw why Wilce made the choices she did for each. Writing adult stories in the world of your children’s books is just the sort of fun interesting totally non-commercial thing I think more people should do, so I want to call this particularly to the attention of Flora’s fans.

Kai Ashante Wilson, The Devil in America. Reread. I remembered liking something by the author, so I picked up this beautiful little bound version from the free table at ConFusion. Turns out that what I remember liking is this. Well, still, now I have a beautiful little bound version, and that’s no bad thing. Racism, bargains, cost.

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

The muses hustle you through Apollonian mythology. Seriously, this is a whirlwind tour. Birth! Slaying Python! Daphne! Marsyas! Hyacinth! Asklepios and his centaurs! Fighting, screwing, the lyre, the sun, healing, wheeeee! So much Apollo. Seriously so much. In one very, very short book.

If you’ve been reading Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy, you will notice that this comic brushes past events covered in more depth in The Just City and The Philosopher Kings. Apollo! He’s a thing there! But even if you’re not interested in that series, this is reasonably pretty and a decent introduction or refresher. I would say “for young people,” and it is, but only if you don’t mind the young people not getting a completely prettied up version. Daphne is nearly raped here; Marsyas is flayed. The Greek gods: you don’t want to invite them to your parties. Or pointedly not-invite them to your parties! Lest they show up and turn you into a goat!

I feel like it’s such a fast run-through that it’s not the best of the series, but the series is worth having, and this is a reasonable installment of it.

Please consider using our link to buy Olympians: Apollo, The Brilliant One from Amazon.

Review copy provided by the author, who is also a personal friend. Also I backed the Kickstarter for this book.

While very thoroughly a sequel to Lies and Prophecy, Chains and Memory avoids the trap of doing all the same things. Kim and Julian are not still at college. Their relationship has progressed. Their roommates and best friends, while still emotionally close, are physically distant, and other secondary characters have taken the stage. If you want “more just like that,” this is not more just like that.

If, however, you want a sequel that is trying to take the next step with worldbuilding consequences–that is thinking through implications and pushing them–that is saying “yes, and another” to relationships not only between the main characters but with the other people and in fact institutions in their lives–it is that.

So it really depends on what you want from a sequel.

The roles of the Seelie and Unseelie in the human world have also progressed, and their hand in how humans–varieties of telepaths and non-telepaths–interact with each other, reaching back through history, are thoroughly examined in this book. There are passages about which kinds of telepaths are like theater kids, and then there are passages about Congress. There are action scenes. There is not fencing, but there is fighting, torture, revenge, and true love. Of more than one sort.

There is not actually a mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, though. I suppose one can’t have everything. At least not in a book of this length.

Please consider using our link to buy Chains and Memory from Amazon.

Exclusive of manuscripts, which I don’t talk about publicly.

Octavia Cade, Chemical Letters. This was a joyful, beautiful, nerdy romp through poems and chemistry. The world needs more like this. Hurrah. Hurrah.

Thomas Goetz, The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis. Oh, this book. So first of all: it is gross. It does not stay with the parts of TB where someone dies looking pale and ethereal. It goes into TB and the rest of medicine in the time, in ways that are useful and disgusting. Now, me, I am the sort of person who read this while eating lunch, no problem. You judge for yourself whether you are, though, because Goetz…does not hesitate to go there. And not just with the gross, though. It is tragic: people not accepting procedures that will be lifesaving. People self-deluding that they have cures they do not. Koch, a great medical man in some ways, gradually painting himself into a corner wherein he believes himself to be unjustly persecuted just because he peddled a false TB cure and also opposed pasteurization of dairy products. (OH IS THAT ALL. POOR YOU HOW THEY PERSECUTE YOU THERE THERE.) The other thing this is, though, weirdly, is a piece of biographical criticism, of how Arthur Conan Doyle could become the man who could invent and write Sherlock Holmes in the first place. And John Watson. The influences upon him, the things that touched his life that pushed and pulled and added up to…yes, there he is: the creator of Holmes and Watson. And it’s not even a very long book, to pack in the medical background of the time, serious amounts of Franco-Prussian War politics, and the character of the two men and their families. So if you have the stomach for it, I do recommend this. But if you don’t, I don’t blame you for it.

Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard, The End of the Sentence. A spooky ghost novella, but a kinder one than I feared to begin with, and worth the trouble. I’m glad that Magonia made me seek it out.

Tove Jansson, Sculptor’s Daughter: A Childhood Memoir. I should have guessed from reading the Moomin books that Jansson would have an unerring feel for what it is like to be a child, but you can’t tell in advance that someone is going to write a memoir in that frame of mind, in the frame of mind of what it was like at the time. Remembering that perspective. It was so lovely, because she was sensible in the way that children are sensible, and there were so many important details that adults leave out, things that one would want to know about 1910s-20s Finland.

Fiona MacCarthy, Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, 1860-1960. Lots of pictures, less text. The jacket copy focuses on radical sexual politics, which is not much in evidence in the minimal text at all–I personally am a better source on that than this book is–and there’s a bit more on radical non-sexual politics, but only a bit. As for influence, yes, there’s some of that, but only darting into it here and there, considering how broad and deep Morris’s influence runs. I’m glad to have this book, but it’s weirdly frustrating. Not even so much shallow as spotty. And that particularly surprised me from MacCarthy, who gave us the giant exhaustive Burne-Jones biography that took up so much of my time in 2015–but this was a volume from curating an exhibit, so. Well, there’s other Morris stuff out there.

Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here. Fascinatingly, the fantasy plot is both completely crucial and entirely relegated to the edges of this book. What a neat needle to thread. This is a YA telling the story of the kids who aren’t in the middle of saving the world from the giant fantasy menace. They’re caught up in their own senior year relationships, and oh, does Ness remember what it’s like to be a high school senior. To be in love with your best friend, to be weirdly awkward with your other best friend for reasons you don’t fully understand, to be trying to figure out how to be good to your family and still have things the way your newly adult self needs them…with magic you can’t control or even quite see, that isn’t much to do with you, all around the edges…yes, Ness has a handle on the end of childhood very, very well.

Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd’s Crown. The last Terry Pratchett novel, and you can see where it’s not quite done, where in some spots it’s an outline–gesturing at Terry Pratchett Discovers Third Wave Feminism, sketching in Pterry’s Last Love Letter To the Old Codger He’ll Never Get To Be. And yet he gave us one more bit of Tiffany Aching, and the death of Granny Weatherwax–the loved ones of Granny Weatherwax mourning her–and you know, that was enough, I think. Not his chart-topper, his greatest masterwork. But enough. Trying for more even to the last, I hope we can all say as much.

Alter Reiss, Sunset Mantle. I must admit that I critiqued this novella in draft form. And now it’s published! Go team! This is fantasy with strong religious worldbuilding (by which I mean in-world religion, not our-world religion) and a military component, with a loving central relationship and practical work, all packed into a plotty action-filled novella. But I’ve admitted my bias.

Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell, eds., Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. In addition to having amazing cover art (seriously, who did that?), this covers a wide range of what Delany has meant to various people, in both fiction and nonfiction. Some people are just doing their own thing, which is influenced by him indirectly. Some are more directly trying to demonstrate his influence. For me the standout stories were Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “The First Gate of Logic” and Nalo Hopkinson and Nisi Shawl’s collaborative “Jamaica Ginger,” but I imagine that this is very much a “something for everyone” anthology, and what that something is will vary considerably.

Gordon Shepherd, Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters. My subtitle: “Why Nonfiction Voice Matters.” This is a book whose author does not know who his audience is. Is it people who are interested in highly technical things? That would have been fine. Is it a lay audience with no technical skill? That would have been okay, too, because I could have skipped it; his voice when writing for the lay audience is really, really patronizing, and his metaphors completely unenlightening if you didn’t understand them from the technical passages. And then there are the chapters where he wanders off outside his own fields of expertise to speculate about things like Why Modern People Are Obese and goes completely off the rails, and if you want someone speculating about that on little to no expertise, why pick someone with a terrible prose voice? The parts that were Shepherd writing technically in his field were a-okay with me, but for that I think looking up his papers in journals on academia.edu or some such is a far better way to go. Also this is what happens when people who are obsessed with visual processing try to do other things; they can’t even see that something that is processed spatially in the brain may not be processed visually, come on, people, this is not hard. ALSO. Let me be the first to tell you that it is possible to write about taste/smell and memory without dwelling on Proust. Do it now. Do it today.

Salla Simukka, As Black As Ebony. The third in the “Snow White” trilogy of Finnish crime YA novels. It felt tacked on, obligatory; Our Heroine…does some stuff…figures out some stuff…has some stuff done to her and triumphs in the end. All very short chapters. If you liked the first two in the series, this one is still skippable, unless you are really really set on learning what happens to Lumikki.

Leslie Valiant, Probably Approximately Correct: Nature’s Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World. This…is an excellent example of what happens when you know your own field (mathematics/computer science) really really well, are interested in someone else’s field (biology/evolution), and…do not perhaps take as much time as you ought to understand what they are saying. About evolution and its mechanisms and why. As a result Valiant is very clear when he’s talking about algorithms, and less insightful than he hopes when he’s talking about evolution.

A bit late, as the new year has been a series of minor mishaps. Ah well, no one is on a very tight schedule to find out what the last few things I read in 2015 were, I don’t think.

Mike Allen, ed., Mythic Delirium Issue 2.2. Kindle. I find that whenever I get things to read on my Kindle that are also available online, I end up mostly reading them online and then flipping through to confirm that I didn’t miss anything. Up side: this confirmed that it was a very solid issue and I should make more of a point to read Mythic Delirium regularly if this is the sort of stuff they’re putting out. Good to know.

Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection. Like if Chesterton and early Lethem had a rain-soaked bike-riding baby. (Okay but I meant that as a compliment.)

Leah Bobet, An Inheritance of Ashes. A heartfelt and beautiful book about the aftermath of war and its effects on the homefront. Also about the ripple effects of abuse in a family, and about keeping the world turning–practically and emotionally–with the limited resources we have, and–stuff. There’s a lot here. Go read it.

Chaz Brenchley, Three Twins at Crater School, Chapters 4-7. Kindle. I read a lot of boarding school books as a kid, and so I was sufficiently excited about Chaz’s Patreon project to let my enthusiasm for it overwhelm my general sense of how serials work for me. These are short chapters. I need to let more story stack up before I read more, because I am impatient for more about the aliens. MOAR ALIENS NOW CHAZ KTHX.

A.C. Buchanan, ed., Capricious Issue 1. Kindle. For me the standout story of the first issue of this new magazine was A.J. Fitzwater’s “She Must.” The way the prose twisted around the fairy tale tropes entertained me. I’ll keep an eye out for more Fitzwater and more Capricious.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents. Reread. This is not one of my favorite of Butler’s body of work. It’s still worth the time–I’m not courting controversy to say that everything of hers is–but the crucial step of how the insightful young teenage refugee becomes the cult leader is elided, dreadfully elided. Swooped through. Skimmed. The heartbreak of the mother-daughter relationship is entirely clear. So the emotional core, she doesn’t flinch from. But the science fiction plot is oddly unbalanced for me this time through. Especially with the end commentary, where Butler is talking about what she did and didn’t know how to do in this story. A partial success, I guess.

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber. I finally got this for Christmas after years of feeling like it should be in every library system I used and not finding it where it was supposed to be. I particularly connected with “The Erl-King” and “The Company of Wolves”–yes, give me the deep forests, I am predictable both as a person and as an ethnotype–but in general it was interesting particularly remembering how early it was in the fairy tale retelling sub-genre, how much it was shaping and informing the things it looked like to my eye.

Diane Duane, Lifeboats. Kindle. A Young Wizards novella that read mostly like fanfic by its own author. Kit and Nita are side players to the main thing going on, deliberately this time, and introduce aliens to crucial Earth culture while they struggle with how to celebrate Valentine’s Day. A reasonably entertaining thing to read on an airplane, but not horribly deep, ends abruptly, uses a really cliched joke/story as its central premise.

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, The Rabbit Back Literature Society. Finnish magic realism about books mutating and relationships mutating and garden…creatures…and general oddments. Really lovely, less repressed than a lot of fiction that gets translated from the Norden, more overtly speculative than some magic realism and yet still feels like it belongs in that category. Weird stuff. Recommended.

E.K. Johnston, A Thousand Nights. Very, very different from her Owen books. Not as funny. As one might expect from the title, it’s a riff on the Thousand and One Nights story: a desert civilization, a bride telling tales and figuring out how to survive. She is brave and strong, a weaver, a sister, and while this is not Owen and Siobhan, I don’t actually want the authors I like to get stuck doing one thing for their whole careers, so: yeah. Neat different thing.

Naomi Mitchison, Travel Light. A classic I am delighted to encounter. Bears! Dragons! Princesses who go off their own way to do their own dragonish things and stomp around alternately-named Byzantium and decline the opportunities to choose the slain! How could I not love this book from the moment the bears got involved?

William Morris, A Dream of John Ball and A King’s Lesson. Kindle. Two entirely separate things packaged together by Gutenberg. The former is a Robin Hood tale/early Socialist lecture from when you had to have some frame story excuse to be telling a fantasy at all, and it’s largely a discourse on What Was Wrong With England Then And Now. The latter is What Is Wrong With Monarchies. William Morris: fascinating about vegetable dyes, not always Captain Subtlety. I was reading this for research on him and not for pure pleasure; and a good thing too. Unless you also have a research interest in Uncle Will, skip it.

David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861. Entirely about faction politics between formally active white male politicians of some means. Had interesting spots, but if you’re interested in acknowledgment that, for example, Native Americans had agency in this period, or that immigrants were relevant in some way other than as a focus of Know-Nothing ire, this is not the book. It should by no means by the only book on the era anybody reads. For filling in gaps, okay. Nobody in this book likes anybody else in this book. I was relieved when the Fremonts showed up, because they at least appeared to like each other. Then the Fremonts left again abruptly. Drat.

Karina Sumner-Smith, Defiant. Second in its series, definitely wants the first to make sense. Backstory development while forward motion continues, focus on friendship while not losing politics and worldbuilding. Eager to see how the series resolves in the third book, and I’m behind enough on my to-read pile that it’s already available, so.

Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 7. Kindle. Another of the “making sure I’ve caught up on what’s in this issue” issue.

Derek Walcott, Omeros. A Homeric epic by a contemporary Caribbean poet. I like the passages about the sea best–yes, who’s being ethnotypical again–but the characterization is fascinating, the places where it draws on the classics and the places where it’s making its own place, engaging in an erudite way with its own locale and making the classical texts feel their own context more strongly. Would like to talk about this with people who have stronger Mediterranean feelings than I have.