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Eleanor Arnason, Ring of Swords: Humanity encounters a highly sex-segregated alien race (men prepare for and make war; women run everything else and control reproduction, which is mechanical; heterosexuality is the greatest perversion). At a peace conference, a traitor human, the lover of the alien leader, meets a scientist researching whether a third species is intelligent, and she takes a dangerous risk to keep the traitor from suffering at the hands of human military intelligence. The story kept me engaged, and the alien way of life had the feeling of a feminist thought experiment by way of Robert Sawyer’s Hominids; not sure what I think about the tormented heterosexual who sublimated all his self-hating desire into producing the generation’s greatest plays, but it sure was different.
Warren Hammond, Ex-Kop: Juno Mozambe, embittered formerly corrupt cop on a backwater planet, ekes out a living blackmailing wealthy offworlders. Then a series of horrific murders leads the one good cop on the force to hire him on the side, and Mozambe quickly gets drawn back in to police politics and other nasty things. It's a brisk noir sf tale with plenty of human nastiness and an antihero who was easy to root for.
Wen Spencer, A Brother’s Price: In a world where the male/female ratio is heavily distorted towards women, men are property. At best they’re husbands to families of sisters; at worst constantly drugged and kept in brothels to be raped. Upper-class sexual morality is similar to our Victorians, though, possibly because STDs are widespread, so a respectable young man can be ruined by sexual contact with a woman not his wife. I had high hopes that the setup would do something interesting with the role reversals, but actually the plot is all about palace intrigue and our young ingenue Jerin falling in love with the royal sisters and having adventures where his plucky determination gets him through even though lesser men would fail. Though Jerin has a couple of thoughts about how much it sucks to be property and to be raped, he buys into the system, and as far as I can tell none of the royal sisters ever even have those couple of thoughts. Given initial conditions, this is plausible—Jerin benefits in many ways from being pretty and of sufficiently noble blood, and, well, they’re royal sisters. However, I hated every one of these people and their general satisfaction with their Elizabethan-lite world and their dismissal of lower-class “river trash” as worthless. While I choose to read the last happily-ever-after paragraph in the same light as “He loved Big Brother,” I rather wish I hadn’t even started. Oh and also, almost ironically, though the book specifies that men like Jerin have long tresses and military women at least have buzz cuts, the cover image shows what looks like a man with shoulder-length hair carrying a long-haired woman. Blech.
Lee Konstantinou, Pop Apocalypse: I have narrow tolerances for if-this-goes-on satire, because mostly if this goes on I think we’re going to drown and/or starve, and for the first half of this book I thought that the over-the-top world of intellectual property claims (perpetrators of a terrorist act own the rights to it, make lots of money), capitalism (the Freedom Coalition invades places, including Berkeley, to make them safe for Milton Friedman official ideology with crony capitalism reality), and evangelical Christian end-times theology (the people in power in the US think they can win the apocalypse) was not going to do it for me at all. But the satire grew on me, and while I don’t think there’s any particular lesson in it on the dangers of extreme IP rights, extreme capitalism/industry capture, or extreme piety, I did ultimately enjoy the adventures of Eliot Vanderthorpe, wayward scion of the country’s most powerful family, drawn through a combination of stupidity and growing moral uncertainty into a plot that just might trigger global thermonuclear war.
Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck writing as James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes: Humanity has colonized Mars and the Belt, and those have started to chafe against Earth’s rule. When a not-so-great ice hauler’s crew stumbles across a mystery, and a not-so-great cop on Ceres starts chasing a missing persons case harder than his bosses want, the results spiral out towards system-wide war. But that’s just a sideshow as humanity faces an even bigger threat. Space opera, good and chewy, with enjoyable worldbuilding even if having two redeemable loser men as your central characters (each with unbending but conflicting moral codes) seems like overkill. Abraham/Corey clearly took a lot of the crew’s ethos from Firefly, and generally that’s to the story’s good, though this version of the “if I don’t come back, you come get me”/“what, and risk my ship?” exchange lacks the Whedon spark.
Warren Hammond, Ex-Kop: Juno Mozambe, embittered formerly corrupt cop on a backwater planet, ekes out a living blackmailing wealthy offworlders. Then a series of horrific murders leads the one good cop on the force to hire him on the side, and Mozambe quickly gets drawn back in to police politics and other nasty things. It's a brisk noir sf tale with plenty of human nastiness and an antihero who was easy to root for.
Wen Spencer, A Brother’s Price: In a world where the male/female ratio is heavily distorted towards women, men are property. At best they’re husbands to families of sisters; at worst constantly drugged and kept in brothels to be raped. Upper-class sexual morality is similar to our Victorians, though, possibly because STDs are widespread, so a respectable young man can be ruined by sexual contact with a woman not his wife. I had high hopes that the setup would do something interesting with the role reversals, but actually the plot is all about palace intrigue and our young ingenue Jerin falling in love with the royal sisters and having adventures where his plucky determination gets him through even though lesser men would fail. Though Jerin has a couple of thoughts about how much it sucks to be property and to be raped, he buys into the system, and as far as I can tell none of the royal sisters ever even have those couple of thoughts. Given initial conditions, this is plausible—Jerin benefits in many ways from being pretty and of sufficiently noble blood, and, well, they’re royal sisters. However, I hated every one of these people and their general satisfaction with their Elizabethan-lite world and their dismissal of lower-class “river trash” as worthless. While I choose to read the last happily-ever-after paragraph in the same light as “He loved Big Brother,” I rather wish I hadn’t even started. Oh and also, almost ironically, though the book specifies that men like Jerin have long tresses and military women at least have buzz cuts, the cover image shows what looks like a man with shoulder-length hair carrying a long-haired woman. Blech.
Lee Konstantinou, Pop Apocalypse: I have narrow tolerances for if-this-goes-on satire, because mostly if this goes on I think we’re going to drown and/or starve, and for the first half of this book I thought that the over-the-top world of intellectual property claims (perpetrators of a terrorist act own the rights to it, make lots of money), capitalism (the Freedom Coalition invades places, including Berkeley, to make them safe for Milton Friedman official ideology with crony capitalism reality), and evangelical Christian end-times theology (the people in power in the US think they can win the apocalypse) was not going to do it for me at all. But the satire grew on me, and while I don’t think there’s any particular lesson in it on the dangers of extreme IP rights, extreme capitalism/industry capture, or extreme piety, I did ultimately enjoy the adventures of Eliot Vanderthorpe, wayward scion of the country’s most powerful family, drawn through a combination of stupidity and growing moral uncertainty into a plot that just might trigger global thermonuclear war.
Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck writing as James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes: Humanity has colonized Mars and the Belt, and those have started to chafe against Earth’s rule. When a not-so-great ice hauler’s crew stumbles across a mystery, and a not-so-great cop on Ceres starts chasing a missing persons case harder than his bosses want, the results spiral out towards system-wide war. But that’s just a sideshow as humanity faces an even bigger threat. Space opera, good and chewy, with enjoyable worldbuilding even if having two redeemable loser men as your central characters (each with unbending but conflicting moral codes) seems like overkill. Abraham/Corey clearly took a lot of the crew’s ethos from Firefly, and generally that’s to the story’s good, though this version of the “if I don’t come back, you come get me”/“what, and risk my ship?” exchange lacks the Whedon spark.
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