Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is an entirely new fantasy setting by Wells, and Tor (her publisher) is quite rightly sounding the horns and banging the drums about it. Wells spent twenty years writing mostly fantasy before Murderbot came out, and now she’s right back in the game. This is also a stand-alone. (I can see several of your eyes lighting up with heart emojis from here.)

We’re not in an era where secondary world fantasy really has a mold that everyone else is doing, but this sure is not it. Its protagonist, Kai, whose name is sometimes modified for various informative reasons, is a demon who inhabits bodies that would otherwise decay and rot. Dead people. He pilots dead people around all the time. This is not a book that handles it in a gross way, but it’s sometimes emotionally important whether he’s switched bodies and so on. There are also another couple of types of magic users, and there is quite a lot of conflict among them, who gets to be in power over whom, what things it’s ethical for them to do to each other.

All that sounds fairly abstract, but in the book it’s handled very concretely: there are two timelines, one of which gets you the backstory of these characters and their relationships (both the political and the personal) and the other is–well, they’re both adventure plot, more or less, with a lot of “who are we going to overthrow today and who can we trust” mixed in. It’s not a book with a lot of interiority (a funny thing to say about a book whose protagonist is literally interior to several other people along the way…), but it’s got a lot of interesting moving parts.

Review copy provided by the authors, who are friends of mine. (This is a joint pseudonym.)

COURT POLITICS. Do you like fantasy novels about court politics? Because this sure is one. I like them myself, so I need to assure you: when it has “schemes” in the title, it is wall to wall scheming. The titular Wayfarer, various members of royalty, and nearly everyone else. All scheming, all the time.

Well, not quite all the time, there’s also food and sex and fighting. But many of those things come with a side of scheming sauce.

Keth has risen to the sort of minor prominence that comes from military service, and now her duties are mixed between the very physical kind of policing the Guard still needs to do and standing around smiling at annoying courtiers, wearing fancy court armor with a sword that wouldn’t do her any good in a real fight. She is startled to find that one of her old…friends? no…enemies? nnnnot quite…crushes? well, that’ll do…has returned to court as a wise and serene Wayfarer, ready to offer her services to the kingdom that raised her. All out of pure-hearted gratitude, of course…and all of Keth’s fears about “real” fights in court dress are about to come true, for various values of “real” and “fight.” Some of which include a gleeful minotaur. So onward, romping all the way.

Andrea Barrett, Natural History. Barrett has been writing historical fiction about people who care about science and the natural world for decades now. Her characters and settings interconnect and span a great deal of time and a large range of personalities. This is a collection with several more short stories in that oeuvre. It’s probably neither the best nor the worst place to start; as someone who’s been reading them for most of that span, my reaction was “oh good, more of this thing, hooray.”

Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann. What a very strange book to want to write. It’s mostly a professional biography of von Neumann aimed at people who have never heard of him and have no understanding of modern math, physics, or computer science, which is in itself a very weird thing to do (is this audience very interested in a von Neumann bio, then?) and not one Bhattacharya does exceptionally well. But he does take side trips into personal matters more or less for two topics only: 1) to tell you if someone is fat; 2) to tell you if they are mentally ill. He is happy to expand on #2 at length, giving very detailed accounts of the suicides of people close to Johnny von Neumann…but not to say how that might have affected him, and in most cases it could not because they happened after his death. I was thinking I would put a content warning on this book for that purpose, but honestly it’s just not a very good book.

Roshani Chokshi, Aru Shah and the Nectar of Immortality. Do not start here! This is the last volume in this series! It is fun and satisfying and does all the lovely things the rest of the series does, but seriously, start at the beginning, get the whole thing, friendship is magic, goofy jokes are magic, magic is also magic. Yay. I would be sad to see it end but I like good endings, and also it looks to me like Chokshi is happy to write other things I’ll probably like (hey, thanks for that!), so generally yay for a solid ending to a favorite series.

Rachel Corbett, You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainier Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin. This is a short joint biography of these two artists and the relationship they had as artists, solidly done and briskly written. They knew ten million people in their era, and it’s astonishing how many of them are relevant in a biography this short.

J. R. Dawson, The First Bright Thing. Discussed elsewhere.

John M. Ford, Casting Fortune. Reread. If you haven’t read other stuff set in Liavek, you may be tempted to think, oh yes, it’s Mike being opaque again. But he’s really not, he’s drawing on stuff you know from other works, or don’t, as the case may be. I love the way he does his theater company and all the moving pieces in that one. I love it all, but the moving pieces really just looked so well-done this time around.

V. V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless Night. Discussed elsewhere.

Laura L. Lovett, With Her Fist Raised: Dorothy Pitman Hughes and the Transformative Power of Black Community Activism. Lovett takes the famous portrait of Hughes and Gloria Steinem doing the Black Power salute together and uses it as a springboard to talk about how much more Hughes did and in what context. I picked this up because it popped up on a completely unrelated library search, and I like knowing more things; it was quite short and interesting.

Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait. I wished O’Farrell was doing more with the pentimento theme in this book. It was a pretty straightforward story of Lucrezia di Cosimo de Medici, interesting enough but not as much larger as I wanted it to be from where it started.

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City. A geographic memoir, full of photographs, beautifully done, thoughtful about place and neighborhood and influence.

Jessie Singer, There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster–Who Profits and Who Pays the Price. This is one of those books that talks about things I think I already know about dangerous environments and the rhetoric of responsibility but gives them a much more thorough and detailed grounding than I had before. Lots of statistics without being dry, lots of analysis of propaganda that creeps into all sorts of weird corners of our lives. Well worth thinking about.

Moses Ose Utomi, The Lies of the Ajungo. Discussed elsewhere.

Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories. When I saw this in the used bookstore, I snapped it up without even reading the back to find out which period that might be called “the Chinese Enlightenment” it referred to. The answer is the early 20th century, and Wang did extensive interviews with several women who had been involved in feminist movements and other women’s political action of the time. Really good stuff, hearing from a lot of interesting people firsthand and with analysis that gives good context.

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, Haunt Yourself. Kindle. A collection of horror stories I didn’t quite get around to when they sent it out near Halloween. Merc is quite good at this, good enough that I’m happy to read a collection of horror stories even though I am not basically a horror reader. Some may be familiar if you’re a regular reader of their work, but that’s okay, now they’re in a nice little digital collection, yay.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a very short work, not on the long end of novellas. In the afterword, Utomi thanks people who helped him situate this book on the spectrum from fantasy to fable, and that’s it, that’s exactly what it is, it’s very much in the middle of that spectrum. I was surprised to see in the marketing materials that there will be a sequel, because it works very much on the level of stand-alone fantasy novella.

Which is not to say there is not more to be said of the Forever Desert and the City of Lies, simply because there’s space left that might be filled with almost anything. But Tutu’s story as the hero of his waterless city is very well contained in these 84 pages–the friends he finds where there are said to be no friends, the powers in the rest of the world but also in himself, and the beginnings of the shape of magic in the Forever Desert. The descriptions of thirst are appallingly strong, distressingly strong, and this is not a fable in the sense of it being comforting or easy. This is a tale of betrayal, death, despair, and definitely, certainly lies. After 84 intense pages, you might well want a breather.