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Kurtis J. Wiebe & Roc Upchurch, Rat Queens Vol. 1: Sass and Sorcery: The Rat Queens are four mercenaries of differing talents, cultures, and sexualities who are out of favor in a once-lawless, now more lawful town. When they’re attacked by an assassin, they have to figure out who’s behind the assault. But the real pleasures here are in the variety of characters and the joy of watching brawling, cussing, vicious women kick ass. I read Vol. 2 first, but now I’m along for the whole ride.
Courtney Milan, Trade Me: Unusually for me, I enjoyed this contemporary romance—thanks, recommenders! Blake is a tormented billionaire software genius, and Tina Chen is a poor student who lives on almost nothing in order to send money back home so that the lights stay on and her sister gets her medicine, while her mother spends her time fighting for asylum applicants. After a classroom confrontation gets personal, Blake offers Tina a chance to swap lives, as a way to get away from the pressures of his own life. Tina agrees, because the money is so good (the confrontation she has about this with Blake’s overbearing father, about how money is life for her and her family just as he values his company as more than just a pile of cash, is one of the book’s highlights), but then her attraction to Blake complicates matters considerably. Tina is smart and driven and Blake never tries to manipulate her; he is very much in the Mad Max/Raleigh Becket/Peter Bishop model of “guy who stares adoringly at woman he has correctly identified as amazing.” Their dialogue was good and I felt the attraction between them. Content warning for disordered eating/exercise.
Elliot Kay, Poor Man’s Fight: Free review copy, which is great because I wouldn’t have taken a chance on this military sf otherwise. Tanner Malone is Kip from Have Space Suit, Will Travel without the paternalism (and, sadly, without Peewee): he is intelligent, dutiful, hard-working, kind, etc. etc., and he is also too poor for college. (Part of the plot involves a future of far-flung colonies in which corporations make you pay for your own education so you start off hugely in debt.) He enlists in the Archangel space navy, and for half the book he trains while we get some others’ POV intertwined between his chapters, including a guy who accepts the recruiting pitch of a pirate crew. Then Tanner starts to see action, and it is bloody and leaves him devastated, but he also gets to be a hero on a large scale. This is power fantasy done right, with believable good guys who are very far from saints (except Tanner) and bad guys who aren’t bad guys in their own minds. Looks like the next book might involve more of the politics behind the space pirates and corporate oligarchs, and I’m looking forward to it.
Wesley Chu, The Deaths of Tao: Two competing factions of aliens who live in human host bodies and pervasively manipulate major events, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, are escalating their battles, with resultant consequences for humans. The “good” ones (Prophus) are somewhat less awful than the “bad” ones (Genjix) in their relative concern for humans. The Prophus use human hosts to do their bidding, while the Genjix have bred human sociopaths as their hosts and kill Prophus and humans alike with near indifference. Although the torture/experiments of the Genjix clearly made them the ones to root against, I was hardly able to root for anybody; the human characters had desires and aims beyond being puppets, but none of them struck me as particularly sympathetic. Also/relatedly, I don’t like it when all human accomplishment and badness (from the invention of purple dye to the American Civil War—actually I do think it was about slavery, thanks—and more) are attributed to the decisions of aliens. Though if you want a mom being a badass, this book has one on the Prophus side.
Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem: Part of my Hugo reading. Physics goes wacky and nearly drives scientists mad, making politicians nervous. Scientists debate the nature of reality and so do philosophers, in part inside a virtual reality game that emulates the rise and fall of civilizations and may have something to do with the strange things going on outside (like a countdown that appears in any photo taken by one particular scientist, but nowhere else). It’s nice to see civilizations portrayed as internally divided (I’m being vague to avoid spoilers) on deep ideological grounds, like ours are. Eventually the pieces fell into place for a reasonably entertaining conspiracy/science-heavy plot, but it took too long to get going for me to be really invested. The translation gives useful notes on some of the Chinese politics behind the premise, but I felt that the characters were stiffer/less interior than I prefer, which may be an effect of translation or of style.
Xavier Grillo-Marxuach et al., The Middleman vol. 5: The Pan-Universal Parental Reconciliation: I listened to this a long time before I read it, which is probably why I didn’t get around to reading it for a while. It’s a nice ending to a beloved series (see the title), but I think it plays better in the voices of the characters I grew to love than on the page (where they meet up with the original versions of the characters, somewhat paler).
Courtney Milan, Trade Me: Unusually for me, I enjoyed this contemporary romance—thanks, recommenders! Blake is a tormented billionaire software genius, and Tina Chen is a poor student who lives on almost nothing in order to send money back home so that the lights stay on and her sister gets her medicine, while her mother spends her time fighting for asylum applicants. After a classroom confrontation gets personal, Blake offers Tina a chance to swap lives, as a way to get away from the pressures of his own life. Tina agrees, because the money is so good (the confrontation she has about this with Blake’s overbearing father, about how money is life for her and her family just as he values his company as more than just a pile of cash, is one of the book’s highlights), but then her attraction to Blake complicates matters considerably. Tina is smart and driven and Blake never tries to manipulate her; he is very much in the Mad Max/Raleigh Becket/Peter Bishop model of “guy who stares adoringly at woman he has correctly identified as amazing.” Their dialogue was good and I felt the attraction between them. Content warning for disordered eating/exercise.
Elliot Kay, Poor Man’s Fight: Free review copy, which is great because I wouldn’t have taken a chance on this military sf otherwise. Tanner Malone is Kip from Have Space Suit, Will Travel without the paternalism (and, sadly, without Peewee): he is intelligent, dutiful, hard-working, kind, etc. etc., and he is also too poor for college. (Part of the plot involves a future of far-flung colonies in which corporations make you pay for your own education so you start off hugely in debt.) He enlists in the Archangel space navy, and for half the book he trains while we get some others’ POV intertwined between his chapters, including a guy who accepts the recruiting pitch of a pirate crew. Then Tanner starts to see action, and it is bloody and leaves him devastated, but he also gets to be a hero on a large scale. This is power fantasy done right, with believable good guys who are very far from saints (except Tanner) and bad guys who aren’t bad guys in their own minds. Looks like the next book might involve more of the politics behind the space pirates and corporate oligarchs, and I’m looking forward to it.
Wesley Chu, The Deaths of Tao: Two competing factions of aliens who live in human host bodies and pervasively manipulate major events, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, are escalating their battles, with resultant consequences for humans. The “good” ones (Prophus) are somewhat less awful than the “bad” ones (Genjix) in their relative concern for humans. The Prophus use human hosts to do their bidding, while the Genjix have bred human sociopaths as their hosts and kill Prophus and humans alike with near indifference. Although the torture/experiments of the Genjix clearly made them the ones to root against, I was hardly able to root for anybody; the human characters had desires and aims beyond being puppets, but none of them struck me as particularly sympathetic. Also/relatedly, I don’t like it when all human accomplishment and badness (from the invention of purple dye to the American Civil War—actually I do think it was about slavery, thanks—and more) are attributed to the decisions of aliens. Though if you want a mom being a badass, this book has one on the Prophus side.
Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem: Part of my Hugo reading. Physics goes wacky and nearly drives scientists mad, making politicians nervous. Scientists debate the nature of reality and so do philosophers, in part inside a virtual reality game that emulates the rise and fall of civilizations and may have something to do with the strange things going on outside (like a countdown that appears in any photo taken by one particular scientist, but nowhere else). It’s nice to see civilizations portrayed as internally divided (I’m being vague to avoid spoilers) on deep ideological grounds, like ours are. Eventually the pieces fell into place for a reasonably entertaining conspiracy/science-heavy plot, but it took too long to get going for me to be really invested. The translation gives useful notes on some of the Chinese politics behind the premise, but I felt that the characters were stiffer/less interior than I prefer, which may be an effect of translation or of style.
Xavier Grillo-Marxuach et al., The Middleman vol. 5: The Pan-Universal Parental Reconciliation: I listened to this a long time before I read it, which is probably why I didn’t get around to reading it for a while. It’s a nice ending to a beloved series (see the title), but I think it plays better in the voices of the characters I grew to love than on the page (where they meet up with the original versions of the characters, somewhat paler).
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Horrifying dystopia!!!
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The Rat Queens sound particularly intriguing to me. Thanks for these reviews.
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