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Entry tags:
Fiction/graphic novels
Andy Weir, The Martian: Well, I see why it sold as a movie treatment! Our hero is accidentally stuck on Mars with nothing but his wits and a billion dollars of equipment, and he has to survive long enough to let the folks back on Earth know he’s still out there. Much science and engineering ensues. It’s a brisk enough adventure in the vein of the good clean gee-whiz bits of Heinlein, not the horrific racist and sexist bits, but don’t expect great dialogue or deep characterization.
Kurtis J. Wiebe et al., Rat Queens vol. 2: The Far-Flung Tentacles of N’Rygoth: I missed the first volume of this, but that won’t be true for long. The Rat Queens are four carousing fighters with backstories of varying levels of complexity. In this volume, a bad guy returns to town on a mission of revenge, targeting the magician Hannah’s sometime lover—but it’s the skull-necklaced, skeptic Dee who turns out to have the closest connection (as well as a big surprise for the other Rat Queens). I really enjoyed the story, which as you can tell from the title borrows some of the general contours of its bad magic from the Cthulhu mythos, and I also enjoyed the variety of sexualities and body types on display—including some full frontal male nudity, for once.
Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven: Told in flashback and flashforward, this elegeiac novel traces the loosely connected interactions of several survivors of a plague that wiped almost everyone out, all of whom were somehow connected to a pre-plauge performance of King Lear at which a famous actor had a stroke and died onstage. Twenty years after the plague, small communities exist, some in better shape than others, and some people make a living as traveling minstrels/traders. A dangerous prophet is on the move, and so is a caravan of Shakespeare performers. There are definitely moments of plot that would be the key to a book written other ways, such as confrontations between the prophet and those he wishes to control and/or kill, but this novel’s way is more about the persistence or failure of memory, the meaning of clinging to objects that are now useless, and the way that change is both loss of what once was good and promise that things might get better. The interweaving of time periods suggests that we are always in the past and the present and even the future, a pattern spinning out even if we can’t see it until it’s all but over.
Alis Franklin, Stormbringer: Sequel to the previous book about Loki’s sort-of survival (it’s complicated) as a tech magnate, aka Lain, who finds the reincarnation (sort of) of his lost wife Sigyn in a geeky boy named Sigmund. Now that Lain has settled some things about his own identity, he goes back to Asgard—I’m not doing the orthography, but Franklin does—and immediately gets captured and forced to help Thor’s children try to retake their father’s hammer, the better to wage war with. Meanwhile, Sigmund also leaves the human realms, first to help Loki’s daughter Hel claim her birthright and then to save Lain, and there’s a lot of palace intrigue and betrayal and Sigyn rising up out of Sigmund to guide him through tricky situations. I liked some of the ideas—particularly Loki’s use of memes to change the narrative of good guy/bad guy when Hel showed up with her army at the gates of Asgard, and also Loki’s ideas about introducing modernity to people for whom arrows were the height of technological warmaking. I’m still not emotionally connected to the characters, but if you want modern fantasy with Norse mythology, this will deliver.
Genevieve Valentine, Dream Houses: Novella about a deep-space traveler with a troubled past who wakes up too early—there aren’t enough supplies to last her—and with all her crewmates dead, including the captain she worshipped/was fascinated by. Her only companion is the ship’s AI, which has quite a mind of its own … and maybe something else. This is a psychological thriller, where the details of the narrator’s past come out slowly, and it’s a tough read (slow starvation and cannibalism feature heavily) with an ambiguous ending. I’m not sad I read it but I like Valentine’s other work better.
G. Willow Wilson & Adrian Alphonsa, Ms. Marvel vol. 1: No Normal: Late to the party on this one. Kamala Khan gets superpowers and struggles to deal with them in classic teen fashion, leaving most of her peers to think she’s still a dork and her parents to think she’s rebelling in more traditional ways (drinking and boys). It’s cute—Kamala writes fanfic and yells “embiggen” to grow larger—and I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes from the general teen power origin story.
Lilah Pace, Asking for It: New Adult, or whatever we’re calling explicit erotica with plot these days; free review copy. Content warning: The relationship centers on the protagonists acting out their rape fantasies, consensually, with a lot of negotiation and limits that are respected. The encounters are very explicit and include physical and verbal violence. There is also a rape in flashback, and discussion of other rapes and harm to children. Vivienne is a grad student working on her art, and Jonah is a professor in another discipline; they find that their fantasies match up and begin a relationship that quickly moves past sex—though the narrative spends a lot of time writing about the sex! Vivienne’s self-disgust and her related attempts to accept her desires and deal with an underlying sexual trauma that has alienated her from her family are a big part of the story, which is in her POV. Unsurprisingly for the genre, Jonah is wealthy and also carries a grim and Grand Guignol-ish secret that eventually comes out. This is not my kink, but the author brought her A game and made the sex increasingly sexy to me as the characters got into it, and—true confessions time—I teared up a little bit at the ending. Turns out I wanted those two crazy kids to work it out!
Kurtis J. Wiebe et al., Rat Queens vol. 2: The Far-Flung Tentacles of N’Rygoth: I missed the first volume of this, but that won’t be true for long. The Rat Queens are four carousing fighters with backstories of varying levels of complexity. In this volume, a bad guy returns to town on a mission of revenge, targeting the magician Hannah’s sometime lover—but it’s the skull-necklaced, skeptic Dee who turns out to have the closest connection (as well as a big surprise for the other Rat Queens). I really enjoyed the story, which as you can tell from the title borrows some of the general contours of its bad magic from the Cthulhu mythos, and I also enjoyed the variety of sexualities and body types on display—including some full frontal male nudity, for once.
Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven: Told in flashback and flashforward, this elegeiac novel traces the loosely connected interactions of several survivors of a plague that wiped almost everyone out, all of whom were somehow connected to a pre-plauge performance of King Lear at which a famous actor had a stroke and died onstage. Twenty years after the plague, small communities exist, some in better shape than others, and some people make a living as traveling minstrels/traders. A dangerous prophet is on the move, and so is a caravan of Shakespeare performers. There are definitely moments of plot that would be the key to a book written other ways, such as confrontations between the prophet and those he wishes to control and/or kill, but this novel’s way is more about the persistence or failure of memory, the meaning of clinging to objects that are now useless, and the way that change is both loss of what once was good and promise that things might get better. The interweaving of time periods suggests that we are always in the past and the present and even the future, a pattern spinning out even if we can’t see it until it’s all but over.
Alis Franklin, Stormbringer: Sequel to the previous book about Loki’s sort-of survival (it’s complicated) as a tech magnate, aka Lain, who finds the reincarnation (sort of) of his lost wife Sigyn in a geeky boy named Sigmund. Now that Lain has settled some things about his own identity, he goes back to Asgard—I’m not doing the orthography, but Franklin does—and immediately gets captured and forced to help Thor’s children try to retake their father’s hammer, the better to wage war with. Meanwhile, Sigmund also leaves the human realms, first to help Loki’s daughter Hel claim her birthright and then to save Lain, and there’s a lot of palace intrigue and betrayal and Sigyn rising up out of Sigmund to guide him through tricky situations. I liked some of the ideas—particularly Loki’s use of memes to change the narrative of good guy/bad guy when Hel showed up with her army at the gates of Asgard, and also Loki’s ideas about introducing modernity to people for whom arrows were the height of technological warmaking. I’m still not emotionally connected to the characters, but if you want modern fantasy with Norse mythology, this will deliver.
Genevieve Valentine, Dream Houses: Novella about a deep-space traveler with a troubled past who wakes up too early—there aren’t enough supplies to last her—and with all her crewmates dead, including the captain she worshipped/was fascinated by. Her only companion is the ship’s AI, which has quite a mind of its own … and maybe something else. This is a psychological thriller, where the details of the narrator’s past come out slowly, and it’s a tough read (slow starvation and cannibalism feature heavily) with an ambiguous ending. I’m not sad I read it but I like Valentine’s other work better.
G. Willow Wilson & Adrian Alphonsa, Ms. Marvel vol. 1: No Normal: Late to the party on this one. Kamala Khan gets superpowers and struggles to deal with them in classic teen fashion, leaving most of her peers to think she’s still a dork and her parents to think she’s rebelling in more traditional ways (drinking and boys). It’s cute—Kamala writes fanfic and yells “embiggen” to grow larger—and I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes from the general teen power origin story.
Lilah Pace, Asking for It: New Adult, or whatever we’re calling explicit erotica with plot these days; free review copy. Content warning: The relationship centers on the protagonists acting out their rape fantasies, consensually, with a lot of negotiation and limits that are respected. The encounters are very explicit and include physical and verbal violence. There is also a rape in flashback, and discussion of other rapes and harm to children. Vivienne is a grad student working on her art, and Jonah is a professor in another discipline; they find that their fantasies match up and begin a relationship that quickly moves past sex—though the narrative spends a lot of time writing about the sex! Vivienne’s self-disgust and her related attempts to accept her desires and deal with an underlying sexual trauma that has alienated her from her family are a big part of the story, which is in her POV. Unsurprisingly for the genre, Jonah is wealthy and also carries a grim and Grand Guignol-ish secret that eventually comes out. This is not my kink, but the author brought her A game and made the sex increasingly sexy to me as the characters got into it, and—true confessions time—I teared up a little bit at the ending. Turns out I wanted those two crazy kids to work it out!
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The Rat Queens and Station Eleven sound especially intriguing to me. I will put them on my reading list.