Tag: bookses precious

Megan Abbott, You Will Know Me. This…might not have been the best time for me to read a noir novel. It’s quite well done, and I’m not taking Abbott’s other books off my library list. But there is nobody whose age is in the double digits who is a kind and thoughtful person in this book; it is the story of how far a family is willing to go to preserve one member’s gymnastics career. It’s brutal in directions that we don’t often see people willing to be brutal in fiction.

Lloyd Alexander, Westmark, The Kestrel, and The Beggar Queen. Rereads. I have loved this series for thirty years. I see different things in it every time I reread it. On this reread–how circumscribed and how limited the hope. And yet hope. The image that accompanies the death of Stock the poet is one of the very specific images that has stuck with my very non-visual self. And this is where my button for barricades in fiction got installed. It still works on me. I think it always will. This time it struck me how fast people in this series fall in love and how matter of fact Alexander is about it: oh, he’s in love with her, she’s in love with him, yep, that’s what’s going on, no need to beat around the bush. Okay.

Karen Babine, Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life. These essays. Wow. This is…this is one of the books that speaks very well for me in many of its parts. We have several things in common, Babine and me. I was not expecting the chapter on the Red River flood to segue into her showing up on the Gustavus campus post-tornado. That was a little close to home. I cried. Highly recommended even for people who are not me, though.

John Bierhorst, The Mythology of Mexico and Central America.This is not a compilation of myths but a discussion of their patterns, and of how scholars figure out which regions share similar myth structures, which are culturally quite different. It’s one in a series of three, with North and South America each getting their volume. You can tell that Mesoamerica is where Bierhorst’s heart lies, though; he goes into more detail here and also puts some parts of Mexico in with North America and some parts of Central America in with South America. As if he didn’t have enough to cover in those entire continents.

Alan Bradley, Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d. The most recent Flavia de Luce mystery. Not enough chemistry in this one, and not enough character development–he’s picking up the arc after what could have been a firm series ending, and the developments he’s throwing in feel a bit forced. Flavia is still a fun detective narrator, but this is not the peak of the series. If you only read one, don’t let it be this one.

Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan. This is the meaning of  “modern” that is not contemporary, and it is focused mainly on the countryside. With those caveats, it’s an interesting book–talking about the roles of women in rural Japan, family relationships, farming, village life, ethnicity formation within a genetically non-distinct group, all sorts of things.

Nalo Hopkinson and Kristine Ong Muslim, eds., Lightspeed: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction. A strong collection of fiction here. The reprints were almost all things I had liked before, which would be frustrating if I wasn’t aware that I’m not the main audience for that sort of thing–and there is a main audience that will benefit from having things like Octavia Butler’s “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” which is one of my favorite stories of all time. Standout new work included Karin Lowachee’s “A Good Home,” Gabriela Santiago’s “As Long As It Takes to Make the World,” and S. B. Divya’s “Binaries.” The nonfiction and personal essays were also interesting, and the art gallery was a lovely touch (well done, Kickstarter). A valuable collection.

Charles Johnson, Dab Neeg Hmoob: Myths, Legends, and Folk Tales from the Hmong of Laos. This is extensively scholarly, with each tale told in both Hmong and English, in two aligned columns so that you could compare the translation if you spoke Hmong, plus pages of endnotes for most stories. Some of the notes are things that are kind of basic, but that’s needed in the context of an ethnic group where every single book seems to start with “the Hmong: who the heck are they anyway”–even if I’m not the target for that sort of thing and find it a bit frustrating.

Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas. I wanted to love this, but I don’t find Mann reliable. She would probably say that’s because I have a Eurocentric focus, and that may be true. But it’s also true that she’s willing to belittle other Native/First Nations people and use wrong ethnic terms for them if they disagree with her, and to denigrate women from European cultures in terms that smear all cultural distinctions together. So…which parts of what she says about Iroquoian women are true? Hard for me to say, when she’s willing to do that sort of thing. Also, for a book that was supposedly about Iroquoian women, quite a lot of it was dedicated to rants about European men. I can read other books about European men, so that made it less useful to me.

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. A series of prose poems about Rankine’s lived experience as a Black woman in America. They very effectively sum in a way that microaggressions and racist encounters also sum, showing how one incident could be nothing but all of them together are a great burden. Interesting stuff.

Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence. I have loved a Rushdie book, but it was Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which is a bit of an outlier. This was not something I loved. It was clever and reasonably entertaining but fairly cold in its character relations.

Rick Wilber, Alien Morning. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by Tor.

Also, Rick was one of the very first people I met in this genre, since he is the administrator of the Dell (Asimov) Award for Undergrads. The introductory acknowledgments to Alien Morning show you the kind of person Rick is in this community: he not only thanks people, he thanks them meticulously and specifically. He’s warm and considerate and always there to make sure other people get credit.

…which is why I was relieved that I liked his book, because the people you like and the books you like don’t always go together. Whew.

Alien Morning is a first contact story that’s also a near-future speculation about media, tech, and human relationships. Its protagonist, Peter Holman, is on the cutting edge of a new kind of journalism/social media, sweepcasting, which lets people share his sensory experiences. He’s walking on the beach near his Florida home when mysterious lights appear in the sky, and gradually he becomes one of the first humans to figure out even a piece of what’s going on.

The S’huddonai visitors appear to be kind and friendly at first, even slightly comical, but their tech and personal abilities are beyond what humans know how to manage–and they are not entirely forthcoming about who is doing what to whom and why. The S’huddonai politics clash pretty quickly with the politics of Peter’s own dysfunctional family. If you want the galactic brought in to the personal scale, this is a book that does that on every page. It’s setting up for the rest of a trilogy, so there are events in motion that aren’t resolved in this volume–but the others appear to be coming soon.

Please consider using our link to buy Alien Morning from Amazon.

Blue Balliett, The Calder Game. The third in a series of kids’ books that are nominally mysteries. The plots basically don’t work–there is handwavium and then something falls into their laps–but that’s not the point of these books. The point of these books is to talk about things Blue Balliett thinks are cool in a way kids can understand. They’re factually rather than morally didactic–hey, kids, let’s talk about mobiles! let’s talk about modern art!–and honestly they work just fine that way.

Colin Cotterill, I Shot the Buddha. The most recent Dr. Siri book–we’re into double digits, and he’s showing no signs of stopping. We have hit the part of the series where the books get written whether Cotterill has really cool inspiration for one or not. In this case it looks like not. So this is in the category of “if you like this series, here’s another one!”, but for heaven’s sake go back and start with The Coroner’s Lunch if you don’t know whether you like the series.

R. F. Delderfield, To Serve Them All My Days. A gigantic mess of a book. It was pitched to me as “man home from the trenches of the Great War heals from shellshock as a classroom teacher in rural Devon,” and that’s true for as far as it goes, and then there are something like 500 pages more of various things. The protagonist comes right out and cheerfully states that the ups and downs of his life have paralleled those of Britain in the interwar period, and that’s true…and less interesting because it’s both fictional and stated aloud in words. Also the last third or so of the book is weirdly sketched in, in terms of character motivations, and covering 20+ years of being a teacher means he’s constantly feeling the need to remind you which boy is which when they show up again later. Which is better than asking you to remember ten gajillion British surnames, but…yeah, I don’t know. I’m not sorry I read this. It was very episodic, and the episodes were entertaining. But 600 pages was a lot of this type of episodes, and the overall arc plot got less and less satisfying as it strayed from the initial premise.

Rita Dove, Collected Poems, 1974-2004. One of the things I’ve been loving about reading large collections of poems by one poet is seeing their breadth and range. Rita Dove has quite a lot of it. Lyrical poems, prose poems, persona poems and personal poems, history poems ranging through time and space, linked series of poems…she does it all, or at least quite a lot of it. I really liked “November for Beginners”–good timing there–and “Arrow” went straight through me in a way I don’t think it would have before I hit my mid-thirties. Which is not to say there wouldn’t have been plenty to read here earlier, just–different pieces would have jumped out, I think.

Maija Gimbutas, The Balts. This is an old book about the prehistory of the southern Baltic and the people who spoke Baltic languages there–Latvians, Lithuanians, East Prussians. Lots of stuff about potsherds and axeheads, which I find interesting, and it’s a region of the world that’s hard to read about in English. It wasn’t one of those nonfiction books that transcends individual interests, but if you’re interested in this place-time, it does what it can. And the last section about the pre-Christian religion of the region is worth the price of admission. Or at least worth the price I paid for admission; hard to say what a used book might cost elsewhere.

Linda Hirshman, Sisters in Law: how Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World. Basically a joint biography of these two Supreme Court justices, and Hirshman really gets the bit between her teeth when she gets a chance to talk about their working relationship. I love working relationships, and it seemed clear to me that Hirshman found them more interesting because they worked together than she would have if they were personal besties. Also, if you’re feeling like we’ve had no progress in the last fifty years, read this book. Some of the court cases will curl your hair. Some of the ones you were alive for will make you say, “They didn’t get that settled until [year]???” and pace and rant.

James Laxer, Tecumseh and Brock: The War of 1812. This is also something of a joint biography, but more an exploration of the role of the War of 1812 in building Canadian national identity. Which is a weird thing to do, but okay. Also taking the Native American/First Nations front in that war seriously is a good thing to do and far too rare.

Ken Liu, ed., Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation. Discussed elsewhere.

Garth Nix, To Hold the Bridge. Most of the short stories in this were not to my taste. The title story was set in his most famous world, the world of Sabriel et al, and as a story its structure was very weirdly balanced. I keep saying, ruefully, that nerds love training sequences. This story was almost all training sequence. One of the common failures of novellas is to have the setup of a novel and the payoff of a short story. This did that. But the individual sentence-level and page-level reading experience was fun.

Katherine Rundell, The Wolf Wilder. A brutal and beautiful children’s book about Russia under the last days of the tsar, a girl who helps aristocrats’ pet wolves learn to be their wild selves again, a boy whose dreams don’t fit the military mold he is pushed toward, and more. I’m going to be very careful which children I give this book to, because there are sad and angry parts that will not be right for every kid who is skilled enough to read the words. And yet it’s so good.

David Salsburg, The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century. And speaking of having the idea of progress reinforced–reading history of statistics basically gives a clear picture of how little we knew in the 19th century and how we had no idea how well we knew it. This is a pop math book, so Salsburg is careful how he handles technical subjects for the amateur. A bit more careful than an amateur with a physics degree probably needs, but–dive in, the water’s fine.

Noelle Stevenson, Shannon Watters, Brooke Allen, et al, Lumberjanes: Out of Time. I love the Lumberjanes and their relationships. I am not very coherent about these comics because they hit both my “I loved Girl Scouting and 4H” buttons and my “fantasy writer and modern weirdo” buttons, all at once. Start at the beginning, not here.

Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation. I really enjoyed this author’s book about Belarus. This history of Ukraine was not nearly as vivid. More dry, more downbeat. Still interesting, still glad I read it, but there just seemed to be less spice–it’s more in the “recommended if this is an interest of yours” category than the “recommended for all” category.

Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams, eds., Press Start to Play. I feel like there are a lot of really cliched things to be done with a speculative anthology with a video game theme. For people who like these particular tropes, they’d probably be described as “tried and true,” but I ended up feeling like a lot of the stories were rote and familiar. One exception was Holly Black’s “1Up,” which handled video game playing relationships as well as other tropes, did it well, and wrapped the story up while I was still enjoying it rather than dragging on.

Yoss, A Planet for Rent. Add another entry to the list “works in translation I wanted to like.” Yoss is Cuban, and this hits the humans in the galaxy as a metaphor for Cubans in the world note early and often. I totally get why people under regimes with a lot of censorship often use that kind of correspondence to say what they can’t say out loud, but it meant that the book got fairly tedious fairly quickly. And also…also I am kind of a tough sell on sex workers as metaphors. I feel like sex workers are handled badly enough often enough in fiction that if you don’t have a really really good reason why you need to use them as a metaphor…probably don’t. Let’s go with don’t. Even if you think you have a good reason, actually. Probably just no. Sigh.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

I was in a book doldrums when I got this review copy, and oh, was it a relief. An anthology where I didn’t skim half the stories! What a treat. I was a little surprised to see that Ken Liu made the choice to include multiple stories by most of the authors, but I really liked that once I got used to the idea: it gives at least a little bit of triangulation on an author’s career, rather than letting a single story stand for an entire body of work.

I’m particularly pleased that Ken Liu focused so much on newer Chinese authors–I feel like the temptation and the expectation, when you know that you’re doing an anthology from a region that hasn’t appeared in that language before, is to try to rehash the entire history of a field/region, and that’s not necessarily the most readable or interesting anthology from anything but a scholarly viewpoint. Further, an anthology of this length could not possibly cover the entirety of China’s SF history. Ken Liu makes the point that it isn’t doing that, it isn’t trying, in multiple places–people will certainly try to take this anthology as representative and/or interpret it through the lens of their own politics. Immunity to the latter tendency is hard to come by. But the reader is given no excuse to do so, no encouragement–and in fact active discouragement–from the text.

Some of these stories were familiar to me and may well be familiar to you also–“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” and “Folding Beijing” were the ones I remembered seeing before. And yet the other stories by those two authors, Xia Jia and Hao Jingfang, were at least as good in my estimation, possibly better. I also really enjoyed the Chen Qiufan stories, all of them–and I came away with a very different opinion of Chen Qiufan than any one story would have given me.

I’m not surprised that there were Liu Cixin stories in the anthology–he’s the Hugo winner, the big name in China, the person whose novels Ken Liu has translated. (The reason why I’m saying Ken Liu every time instead of just defaulting to Liu!) And yet for me these were the weak point in the anthology. Upon reflection, I don’t think they’re a weakness per se–I think including them was a good idea–but they’re not the stories that spoke most to me. And this is no surprise: when I reviewed Liu Cixin’s novels, I said that the thing that excited me most was the prospect that they were the tip of the iceberg, that there would be more new Chinese SF in translation coming our way. I’m glad to see Tor carrying through on that. Long may it last.

Please consider using our link to buy Invisible Planets from Amazon.

Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. This was interesting but not very satisfying. While it makes some gestures in the direction of being about an entire hemisphere, it really focused on broad movements of Anglophones–neither the specific stories of individual situations nor the rest of hemisphere as a whole in nearly as much detail as I would have liked. It’s kind of one of those in-between books that tries to do a whole lot and ends up not doing as much as would have been useful if it had focused. I particularly wanted more about the enslaved peoples’ thoughts and lives as best we can know them at this point. It’s probably a valuable addition if you’re building a reading list about the history of slavery and freedom, but it should definitely not be a main source by itself, or even with its preceding volume. Also, what is lacking between the establishment and the overthrow is the experience–which varied considerably over the Western Hemisphere, and I think that a study that went into those experiential differences would be fascinating. This is not that book.

Berit I. Brown, ed., Nordic Experiences: Exploration of Scandinavian Cultures. A series of essays by various authors about various Nordic figures–Grieg, Strindberg, etc. Having recently been to an exhibition of 19th century Swedish outsiders in painting, the insider nature of the choices was particularly glaring (overwhelmingly male, no Saami figures), but taken individually they were reasonably interesting scholarly essays. This is another “add it to your shelf if you have a shelf but don’t read it as the only thing” book.

A.S. Byatt, Passions of the Mind. Critical essays, where before I have only read her fiction. Mostly quite interesting, and they motivated me a great deal more than the Brown collection above did to add various authors to my collection, or bump them up the priority queue. Not anything like as engrossing as, say, The Children’s Book or The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, but I didn’t need it to be.

Mat Johnson, Pym. What a weird book. What a weird, weird book. This is about Edgar Allan Poe and race in modern America. It follows the shape of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, including the abrupt and unsatisfying ending. It tells you that it’s going to do that, it foreshadows the crap out of the abrupt and unsatisfying ending. And there are funny satirical bits, and quite a bit of it takes place in Antarctica, and…yeah. This book. This is the kind of book that totally qualifies as speculative fiction and yet doesn’t seem to come up in discussion very much in the genre community, so: this is a thing, read this thing.

Astrid Lindgren, The Brothers Lionheart. Reread. This was a childhood favorite. It is stark and spare and morbid and beautiful and Swedish. It is also a prime example of how the reader’s 50% is more like 80% in the case of children’s books. There’s a lot you have to fill in for yourself, not plot-wise but in terms of what the small descriptions and character interactions mean. Which is not a bad thing, just a thing.

John Lindow, Trolls: An Unnatural History. A brief survey of how trolls are portrayed in sagas, in folk tales, in literature. Interesting but not life-changing.

Microsoft (?), Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft. Kindle. This was a free offering, and I do hate to look a gift horse in the mouth. There are a lot of authors I like in here. But Elizabeth Bear’s story was the only one I really liked, and that meant that I was gravely disappointed because there were a lot of other stories I expected to like. Conclusion: Microsoft is maybe not the best source of cutting-edge science-inspired science fiction? or maybe just doing a one-off like this isn’t? I don’t know.

Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration. It really is what it says on the tin. Goes into different trail-formation patterns and techniques in the animal kingdom, some discussion of humans–especially North Americans–and their different concepts of trails (as opposed to roads). Appalachian Trail is present but not obnoxious. Quite an interesting meander through the concept.

Karina Sumner-Smith, Towers Fall. The end of a trilogy. Threads wrapped up, good triumphant and evil downcast, more or less. The ending is healthy and organic in ways that it was not obvious that it would have to be. I was also delighted by the imagery of the very ending, and I’d be interested to see if it was also delightful to people who don’t know Karina personally.

Andrew Wilson, Belarus: The Last European Dictatorship. The subtitle of this book put me off for some time. On the one hand it’s got “DICTATORSHIP” right there in the title, which does not promise a sprightly read, and on the other hand, “the last,” really? that seems optimistic. But the title aside, this was really lovely. It talked about various proto-Belarus ancestral states. And crucially, it skipped over the sentences that would have started, “Like the rest of the tsar’s territory at this time, Belarus…” or, “As in other Soviet Republics, Belarus….” So it could spend its time on things that were unique to Belarus, confident that if you care, you can get the other information elsewhere. And in fact I can! and more time to medieval sorcerer-kings was all for the best for me. Also, I hit a moment where I was thinking, “He really hasn’t talked much about the Jewish population, this was a really important region for Judaism,” when bam, entire section on Jewish Belarus. I call that thoughtful. Now I’m looking forward to the history of Ukraine I have on my pile by the same author.

Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman. This is another book that is totally speculative fiction and yet I haven’t seen it discussed by many people in the community. It’s a mystery novel where the policeman in the title is investigating deaths in the face of an impending apocalyptic asteroid strike. People are coping via hedonism, despair, and various other extremes, and then there’s our hero, making sure that people are not neglected and the law is upheld. I’m not sure I need more in this series, but this was an interesting thing to do, created a mood quite thoroughly and yet followed through on implications.

Fiona Wood, Wildlife. This is mainstream YA, and it points out how fine the line is between a problem novel and a novel of character. It would be very easy to make this sound like a problem novel, where grief and toxic friendships are the problems in question. Instead it was a novel of character, far more broadly worth reading. I like Wood’s characters, fumbling as best they can toward treating each other decently, and I will look for her other work.

Susan Jane Bigelow, The Demon Girl’s Song. Discussed elsewhere.

Chaz Brenchley, A Day on the Water and Three Twins at Crater School Chapters 9-18. Kindle. I am terrible at reading serials. One chapter at a time is drastically unsatisfying. One stand-alone Mars boarding school adventure novella plus ten chapters, however, is enough of a chunk of story that it doesn’t leave me feeling completely unsatisfied. Just eager for more. This rollicks. It is both light and earnest in ways that most of my current reading does not manage. I only wish it was done as a book already.

Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Mark read this before I did, and he said, “I’m in the middle of this book, and everybody is being nice to each other.” They are, mostly. Within whatever they’re able to do. These are people who are trying their best for each other. I find this refreshing. The fact that the word “angry” appears in the title is not at all a reflection of the emotional tone of the book, which is hopeful. Also this book is full of lots of different kinds of sentients from different planets working together. They have varying culture, individual personalities, orientations, senses of what orientations are possible (in oh so many ways)…and they perk along doing their best, and sometimes there is a crisis. If it sounds like you want this, yes, probably you do.

Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton. This is a magisterial biography. It’s the one that Lin-Manuel Miranda was inspired by when writing his show, so of course there are clear throughlines there. Do you want 700 pages of Alexander Hamilton? Maybe you do. To me this is not like the Morris bio of Teddy Roosevelt where you might want to read it even if you don’t already know you want to, because it’s that good. To me this is just a really good bio of Alexander Hamilton, not a category-transcending work of nonfiction. But quite a few people want a really good bio of Alexander Hamilton at the moment, and you know what, this is one.

Paul Cornell, Don’t Worry, You Aliens. Kindle. Melancholy empty-world short, beautiful.

C. C. Finlay, ed., F&SF March 2016 sample. Kindle. I think I sort of see the point of doing a sampler like this, where there’s not much fiction and a ton of nonfiction. But I think it may not be doing F&SF a service when they’re putting it out to try to get people to subscribe, because I think that while the nonfiction they publish is fine, I don’t think that’s their main point, and giving people a “sampler” that isn’t really a sampling may not get as many readers. On the other hand: giving away content that you are accustomed to receiving pay for is a difficult proposition to sort out, and maybe this will work just fine. I hope so.

Haikasoru eds. (Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington), Phantasm Japan. There is a structural strangeness in this volume that works out great for me: Zachary Mason’s A Tale of Japan shorts are a series of very short stories throughout the volume. I don’t recall ever seeing this sort of thing in an anthology before–linked short shorts, yes, but mostly all mashed up in one spot. I liked them, and I liked having another one coming along as a palate cleanser between other stories. Other stand-outs in the volume were Project Itoh’s “From Nothing With Love” and Miyuki Miyabe’s “Chiyoko.”

Andrew Leon Hudson, ed., Ecotones: Ecological Stories from the Border Between Fantasy and Science Fiction. Kindle. Sometimes in a sub-genre you like there will be chunks of it you really don’t like. That happens to me with environmental SF and fantasy with things that are basically horror universe stories: stories of an actively, consciously hostile universe, stories in which the fabric of the universe is Angry At Us. I see why this is tempting, but I feel that it actually undermines the workings of indifference: there doesn’t have to be some conscious entity “at home” in order for things to go badly haywire with an environment. Ah well; not all anthologies are for all readers.

Leena Krohn, Datura. Kindle. A plant-focused vaguely hallucinatory Finnish phantasmagoric sort of thing. I want more Leena Krohn in English.

Cixin Liu, Death’s End. Discussed elsewhere.

Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. An intriguing thing to write a study of–how the language white writers use and the things white writers highlight create attitudes about Native peoples in this region–but after pointing out some simple but meaningful things about “the first baby born in this village” and “the last [person of insert tribe here] died, leaving three children and fourteen grandchildren” and what each type of language assumption meant for white and Native peoples in the region, it handled itself with examples that did not seem to further illuminate. So this should be a small piece in your understanding rather than a big one, I think. Fine enough if you have no grander expectations of it.

Sarah Porter, Vassa in the Night. Discussed elsewhere.

Cherie Priest, The Family Plot. Discussed elsewhere.

Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, and Michi Trota, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issues 8-12. Kindle. I have this thing where I don’t tend to go to read online issues of Uncanny straight through because I get them on my Kindle, but then I don’t read my Kindle very much at home. So I end up with piles of things I want to read but have not read yet for obscure, personal, not-very-good reasons. Some highlights I hadn’t encountered yet included Maria Dahvana Headley’s “The Virgin Played Bass,” Sarah Rees Brennan’s “The Spy Who Never Grew Up,” and Aliette de Bodard’s “A Hundred and Seventy Storms.” Every time I let things pile up like this, it becomes clear that I’m missing out. And yet not, because the stories are still there when I come around to them.

Lavie Tidhar, ed. The Apex Book of World SF Volume 1. Quite often I want a volume like this to introduce me to new authors, people I haven’t read yet. In this volume, the stories I liked best were by authors whose work I already knew: S.P. Somtow and Aliette de Bodard. On the other hand, it’s churlish to complain about having gotten good stories from any source, so I won’t.

Fran Wilde, Cloudbound. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by Tor Books. Also the author is a personal friend.

What do I want in the middle book of a trilogy? Well. I want consequences from the first book. If the events of the first book are unimportant, it’s not so much a trilogy as a set of standalones. I want further developments of the characters. If they are exactly who they are at the beginning of the first book when the beginning of the second book rolls around, that undermines the importance of the events of the first book. And I want more worldbuilding. Whatever made the first book cool, there should be more of it. I like even stand-alone books to give me a sense that there’s more there there than will fit in one book; I want that sense to expand with the middle book in a series. Nuance, complication, detail.

Cloudbound does all of that. The point of view character changes from Kirit to Nat, which gives some obvious ways to handle everything good in a sequel: Nat’s thoughts and opinions and knowledge are not Kirit’s. His priorities are not Kirit’s. His skills are not Kirit’s. So there is an entirely different angle on the towers, the Spire, the Singers, and the culture at hand–in addition to the new events unfolding before us. Science! Treachery! Exploration! Protective interpersonal relationships! There’s plenty to sink your teeth into in this book.

Because it is so thoroughly the middle book of a trilogy, I would recommend starting with Updraft. But that’s readily available in new formats now, so there’s really no reason not to. The worldbuilding will be clearer if you’ve read the first book, but more importantly, the emotional impact will be stronger. So go ahead and get started on that!

Please consider using our link to buy Cloudbound from Amazon.

Review copy provided by the author.

One of the things I’ve seen a lot around this field is reviewers who don’t belong to a particular marginalized group not understanding the value in representation for people who do belong to that group. I want to avoid that mistake in this review: it’s very easy for me, as a heterosexual woman, to read a book like The Demon Girl’s Song and think, well, I don’t care one way or the other that the protagonist is a lesbian. People have all sorts of orientation, and for me as a straight lady with plenty of representation in fiction, it would be easy to say, “It doesn’t matter to me either way, I only care about the story.” And I do care about the story. But the protagonist, Andín, does care about who she loves. Her story is hers, it matters to her, and it matters to readers who don’t see themselves enough in quest fantasies.

The beginning is a little rocky, but things smooth out a lot when Andín starts traveling. If you like the central conceit of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric’s Demon novellas, Bigelow is working with a similar idea but different enough that it’s clearly not the same story, just some of the same furniture. Andín and her demon also have to find an accommodation, but in different ways than Penric–with larger-scale consequences.

Please consider using our link to buy The Demon Girl’s Song from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor.

I don’t always, or even usually, note who translates a work in translation, but Ken Liu did such a beautiful job with the balance of fluid English prose and not flattening out cultural differences. He also translated the first volume of this trilogy with similar skill, and I was pleased with the translator of the middle volume, Joel Martinsen, as well. I hope that both Ken Liu and Martinsen get further translation jobs, because I would love to have more Chinese SF out there to compare and contrast.

Because of how the publishing industry works, this makes me encourage people to buy and read and talk about this book and the two before it in the series, even though I…didn’t really enjoy it. I respect some of the things it’s doing. It’s a major achievement. But enjoy? No. I can’t say that I did.

Here’s why: this is basically a horror universe, which is not my jam. The universe is not indifferent, it is actively hostile. And not just outside forces in the universe. “Space was like a distorting mirror that magnified the dark side of humanity to the maximum,” is a line in the book that is not really contradicted by anything else in the book. It is, in fact, exemplified by a lot of things in this book. There is more than one discussion of cannibalism in fairly flat affect, so if you’re not down with that, this is not the book for you.

Further, while it has central female characters (unlike the book before it), the degree of sexism and gender essentialism is pretty staggering. Somehow Liu managed to get to 2016 without realizing that “she was a woman, not a warrior,” needs to be preceded with “Dammit, Jim” or omitted completely. (Seriously, can you imagine writing, “he was a man, not a warrior”? No? Then cut it out. “She was a woman, not a” should be finished with “man” or “genderqueer/nonbinary person” if absolutely necessary. Otherwise, in this century and most of the last one we acknowledge that womaning doesn’t interfere with professions, thank you and good night.) Further, there is a whole long riff on feminized men in the middle, culminating in a time jump forward to: “This was another age capable of producing men.”

There is one autistic character who doesn’t ever appear on stage, he is just there to be the source of genius solutions and “tortured by his illness.” Do I even need to? NO JUST DO NOT DO THIS.

So. This is a book that is Stapledonian in scope, the entire age of the solar system available. It is sweeping, it is full of ideas about space travel and the continuation of the human race. It is doing some interesting things. And I want there to be more Chinese SF translated into English, so I really want to encourage people to buy and read and talk about this book. But for weird and substantially external reasons, so I’m pretty conflicted about that.

Please consider using our link to buy Death’s End from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

At my house we often complain that urban fantasy is not actually urban, but more sort of vaguely suburban fantasy. Vassa in the Night does not have that problem. In the least. It’s set in a magical all-night convenient store.

Well, not very convenient. Baba Yaga is involved.

Vassa is one of three sisters of highly assorted parentage, grumpy and snarky and not at all sure what she wants out of life other than that this is not it. She has an even grumpier, snarkier magical wooden doll that she keeps secret from even her sisters. And magic is an integral part of her world–no one thinks twice at having to sing an incantation to a convenient store that dances on chicken legs to get it to stop and let a customer in.

Add in a mix of swans, the Night itself, non-human attorneys, and independently functional hands like the worst nightmare of Thing from The Addams Family, and you’ve got a book that is really, really not like your average retold folktale. It’s bloody and strange and headlong, willing to look at the night without flinching but ultimately hopeful. This is the right way to stand out of the teen urban fantasy pack.

Please consider using our link to buy Vassa in the Night from Amazon.