Month: October 2018

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

Math is nearly everything to Cas. It’s her solace when her mind is too loud, her means of making a living (albeit somewhat unconventionally), her identity, her core. The closer she can come to articulating axioms for individual people, the more comfortable she is dealing with them.

Which is good, because comfortable is in pretty short supply in this book otherwise.

Cas’s life is violently efficient retrieval services. She associates with people who have even more violence in their worlds–most notably Rio, a psychopath kept on the rails with a strong moral code external to his sense of self. But the situation she falls into at the beginning of Zero Sum Game is an even more dangerous one than she’s used to–not just in its violence but in its dangers to her own brain.

This is a fast-paced thriller with some clever twists and an uneasy resolution and a few math jokes along the way.

Please consider using our link to buy Zero Sum Game from Amazon.

Wow, this was a notable fortnight for bouncing off books. I discarded fifteen books unfinished, so…yikes. Here’s what I did read.

K Arsenault Rivera, The Tiger’s Daughter and The Phoenix Empress. (The latter discussed elsewhere.) This is a big fat fantasy series of leisurely structure. If you’ve been missing the kind of fantasy where we get to see the protags grow up and learn to be the people they’re going to need to be, this is definitely that kind. The Tiger’s Daughter is a coming of age story for a couple of women (couple in both senses), one of whom is Empress and the other of whom is…extraordinary in other ways. That would be a major spoiler.

James Baldwin, The Amen Corner. A play about righteousness and families and who can learn and who can’t. Did not take long to read, much longer to think about.

Kelly Barnhill, Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories. Not only is this fantasy collection a lot of fun, there are some stories in it that speak my language down to the potlucks. It is very, very Minnesotan in spots, in ways that can be delightful whether you’re a native, a transplant, or an outside observer.

Justina Ireland and Troy L. Wiggins, eds. Fiyah Issue 8. Kindle. Martha Darr’s “Octopus” was the real standout of this issue for me, staying with me for days after I finished reading it.

N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate. This is the second volume in a justly multiply awarded fantasy series. The craft of it is just staggeringly good, and the ideas keep poking at me. It is, however, extremely grim, so if you hear “geology fantasy” and think “yaaaaay!”…that’s accurate, it’s just not complete. I’m very much looking forward to the concluding volume…but not right away.

T. Kingfisher, Clockwork Boys. A novella that is very clearly the beginning of a series, full of the kind of interesting creatures you would expect of Kingfisher (who is, in another life, Ursula Vernon). Like many such novellas, the pacing is a little weird, but the entire thing is charming enough to forgive it.

Rebecca Roanhorse, Trail of Lightning. This book is structured like a thriller–short chapters, short sentences, fast pace–but has a lot more depth of worldbuilding and characterization than your average thriller. I often want more well-done fantasy set in the future, and this is that–with a future that’s more than superficial shine. Definitely looking forward to the next.

Lynne Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, and Michi Trotta, eds., Uncanny Issue 24. Kindle. I am in this. I don’t review things I’m in. But it’s there if you’re interested.

Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. This was more contemporary than I was hoping for. It was still informative in spots, and enraging/satisfying, but if you read a lot of women on Twitter, you may well already know this stuff–you may well have been there for it. It goes beyond Twitter and the #MeToo movement, but not as far beyond as I anticipated. Also it was emotionally grueling.

Martha Wells, Exit Strategy. The fourth and last Murderbot novella–there will be more Murderbot, but in novel form! This was a satisfying conclusion to this portion of the arc, lots of fun, return of characters whose return was implied by the structure of the series, hooray. Delightful, recommended–but don’t read this one first, read all of them. Read all of them! Yay all of them!

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is the second volume in its series, and you really should not start here. It’s structurally interesting in that it’s like the opposite of a romance novel: the central couple has already gotten together, and the question is can they stay that way, what will happen within their established relationship.

It’s the kind of setting and scope where “what will happen within their relationship” includes possibilities like one of them becoming a rampaging undead monster, or mismanaging an empire into ruin, or…there’s a lot of scope, is what I’m saying here. Continents and lifetimes, not just of the main characters but of thousands upon thousands of bystanders.

The setting is Asian inspired, with different regions not quite standing in for the Mongol steppes, China, Japan, and other real-world analogues. The feeling of vastness that I get from reading nonfiction about China through time is not there. This is a much more contained space to play in. On the other hand, the central couple I’m talking about in this plot is a lesbian couple, so some kinds of space are more expansive than would be traditional–and this is the kind of relationship story where people are actually living with the realities of their decisions, not a coming out story or a “first flush of love and that’s it” story. This is the story of the complexities of an ongoing relationship. Complete with zombie-equivalents and apparent gods and family dynamics. If you don’t like big fat fantasies at all, you probably won’t like this one, but if you’ve been waiting for sprawling epics that happen to center two women–plus a large cast of supporting characters who are not all or even mostly men–you’ve come to the right place.

Please consider using our link to buy The Phoenix Empress from Amazon. Or start at the beginning with The Tiger’s Daughter.

Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood. This is an urban fantasy with very strong metafictional roots, fairy tales and meta-fairy tales, and also it’s a YA with the emotional life of its teenage protagonist done well and suited to her circumstances. I stumbled on this one without hearing anything about it, and I’m glad I did.

Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks at Last. It feels to me like Birdsall has spent this entire series trying to tell the sort of children’s family narrative that was common for kids’ books a couple generations ago, but without the sexism. This is what happens when you write a late-series book where The Oldest Sisters Are Now Getting Married! but you’re trying to undermine some cultural tropes about that. It isn’t entirely successful on that front, but it’s a fascinating thing to watch through that lens. And there are sweet entertaining family moments as in the rest of the series. And lots of dogs.

Ruthanna Emrys, Deep Roots. I read this in beta and liked it then; it has only gotten better. It continues Ruthanna’s series that is treating Lovecraft as an unreliable narrator about things like the racial worth of various persons, and taking on those narratives from an entirely different worldview. Still filled with very alien aliens, things rugose and squamous, but…differently so, and better. Yay.

Patricia Fara, A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War. This was fascinating and infuriating in about the proportions you’d expect, but the crucial bit is that it was the subject matter, not the author, infuriating me. Lots of work here about what kind of science is valued and valorized, what kind of contributions to history matter.

John M. Ford, Heat of Fusion and Other Stories. Reread. Some of these stories just hit so hard, no matter how many times I read them. I fall in love with “Chromatic Aberration” and “Erase/Record/Play” over and over and over again. I also see the places where Mike was leaving us messages we would need after he was gone, and that’s…hard and wonderful.

Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. This was wonderful. Hilarious in parts, harrowing in parts–I remember now why I read tree books when I need to relax and not just nature books, because good heavens have humans killed a lot of beavers over the years, and often for terrible reasons. But there is a lot to be hopeful about in this book, and also there are funny stories, and I’m so glad I read it. (Beavers and their contributions to watershed health: wow, wow, wow.)

Kate Heartfield, Alice Payne Arrives. This is a time travel book with some quirks (do not expect historical accuracy to be a focus–things are diverging a lot), but it definitely doesn’t assume that people are the same through all sorts of historical changes and that the same people are always fated to be important. Which I appreciated. It’s also the school of Tor.com novella that is telling the beginning of a story rather than a complete story, so–more story for those who are interested, not a complete arc for sticklers for that.

Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. A fairly early (1980s) volume about the women of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, among books on that subject matter; I know this subject matter has been covered since, and parts of this book are…very much of their time. However, the author is sympathetic…as long as you’re not one of the people she feels doesn’t deserve sympathy, specifically the men who were jackasses to the women in this book…and compulsively readable. If you already want to kick John Ruskin in the shins, buckle in.

V. E. Schwab, Vengeful. Discussed elsewhere.

Dana Simpson, Phoebe and Her Unicorn in the Magic Storm and Unicorn of Many Hats. I caught up on this series and giggled my way through it. I don’t actually like the long plot arc stuff as well as the shorter plot arc stuff for this comic strip, but that’s okay, even the longer plot arc in Phoebe and Her Unicorn in the Magic Storm was still fun and had good moments. It was a time for Marigold Heavenly Nostrils, that’s what I have to say about that.

Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the Water. This was less science fictional than Life on Mars but equally compelling poetry, definitely will be worth keeping up on her new work.