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Fiction!
Sorry I've been gone so long. I'm not sure I even posted my Yuletide pitch hit story, a Severance fic focusing on Helly.
Hernan Diaz, Trust: Not my usual fare, but very interesting: four different stories intertwine. The first is a novella about a capitalist who rises from family wealth to unimaginable wealth in the Gilded Age and through the Great Depression and then loses his wife to some kind of mental illness and the treatment he inflicts on her. The second is a half-outlined retelling, ostensibly by the man for whom the first book was a roman à clef, in which he is better (by his own lights). The third is a memoir by the woman who wrote it for him, and the fourth is diary entries from the wife. Each retelling raises new questions about how money works in America and the previous narrative, as well as the nature of narration generally (trust, get it?). I enjoyed it though it doesn’t leave me wanting to read more general fiction.
Ann Leckie, Translation State: A whole bunch of other cultures exist besides the Radchhai, including the descended-from-altered-humans Presger Translators. This book—which really feels influenced both by Murderbot and by The Goblin Emperor—focuses on three people (ish): a middle-aged person who gets sent on a seemingly impossible mission to find a Translator who escaped to human space 200 years ago; a young man who’s always felt out of place with his adopted family, but not sure how to handle the people who insists he’s actually descended from the rulers of a destroyed space station; and a Translator juvenile who, after an attack, doesn’t want the role reserved for them. Bad things happen, but there’s also a lot of kindness. I enjoyed it a lot.
P.B. Rainey, Why Don’t You Love Me?: Graphic novel in which the protagonists are unhappily married and neglectful of their kids—the mother keeps trying to send the kids to buy her wine and cigarettes, while the father can’t remember his son’s name. But there’s more to the story—the mother seems uncertain that this is really happening, for one thing, and the father says he’s a barber and not a website manager, as everyone around him thinks he is. If you can stand the suffering of the children, which is not downplayed, it’s an intriguing look at depression (maybe metaphorically) and also a story about forging human connections where none existed before, in the face of terrible loss.
M.A. Carrick, The Liar’s Knot: Second book in Rook & Rose, with even more city-state intrigue as the characters plot, reveal secrets, and learn more about the magic that is trying to tear their city apart. The magical artifacts they’re after corrupt everyone who touches them, but there may be no alternative if they are to destroy the artifacts and prevent the rise of a new tyrant. It’s good fun (though I’m still hoping for an OT3 outcome for the three main characters).
Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark: Really, really good, but a pandemic book, so don’t try if that will be too much. This is a series of short stories/novellas linked by some of the characters: a POV character in one story is a minor/mentioned character in another. The book starts with a virus that comes out of the melting tundra and kills millions, especially children at first, slowly and painfully. It’s about how people go on—still being people, good and bad, all traumatized, some of them making changes and some of them staying in place even as the world changes around them. It’s really well done, including the one from the POV of the condescending older scientist married to a young woman whose contributions he dismisses while pretending to honor; that one turns even more ironic by the end as the story comes, in some ways, full circle.
Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves: Monette says that many of her short stories come from dreams, and oneiric is definitely a word that could describe many of these stories. There’s a genderbending alternate history spy story, a sf military bodyswap (sexual violence aftermath graphically described), a selkie story, and a number of others. I liked it.
John Scalzi, Travel by Bullet: Another Dispatcher story: when murder isn’t permanent (but other forms of death are), people can exploit that in various ways, and this noir sees our hero dealing with some billionaires and some cybercurrency shenanigans. It’s exactly as deep as I wanted.
Ben H. Winters, Self Help: A horror novella: The protagonist’s audiobook starts addressing him directly with suggestions about how to get what he wants. The suggestions get more aggressive. The gotcha ending did not work for me.
R.B. Lemberg, The Four Profound Weaves:In this fantasy, a trans man physically transitioned late in life; that estranged him from his culture, which doesn’t recognize transition. He has relatively powerful magic and wants the powerful woman who helped him to give him a new name, so when a trans woman who transitioned as a young girl also turns out to be looking for that person (her aunt), they join up despite misunderstandings and mistrust. Her aunt is something between a vampire and the incarnation of Death, and their journey is structured by the wounds of the past—the aunt left before teaching the woman how to weave in the fourth magical way necessary for true mastery; the man encountered the aunt when searching for a magical weaving to ransom one of his lovers from a cruel ruler, but the cruel ruler had the lover killed anyway and is still interested in collecting magic weaving. Especially if you’re interested in older protagonists, albeit aided in physical combat by magic, it might be of interest.
Everina Maxwell, Ocean’s Echo: In one isolated planetary system, warring factions developed “Architects” and “Readers”—the former who can command obedience for a short time, the latter who can read minds. Readers are mistrusted and blamed for an attempted coup, but useful synced with Architects to navigate the disturbed space that isolates the system. For the synced Reader, things are less fun: they are always vulnerable to being “written” by the Architect. The ne’er-do-well Reader nephew of the ruler is shipped off to be synced, but encounters a strong Architect who also has a strong moral code, and they agree to fake the sync until the Reader can escape. So it’s a variant on forced bonding, with a lot more politics and a lot more attention to the unpleasant sides of forced bonding, and Maxwell successfully complicates the politics as things go on. Not super tropey—they accidentally fall in love, but, in what is catnip to me, they recognize that the ongoing coup attempt/low-level war they’re in is more significant until stablized. If you like strangers-who-probably-should-be-adversaries-to-lovers and lots of politics, you might enjoy it too.
Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent: Alex Stern has a mission: Get Darlington out of Hell. Unfortunately, he’s already partway out, and the adults in charge of magic at Yale don’t want to help her or even listen to her. Plus, the Israeli gangster whose brother she killed wants her to pay him back by becoming one of his collectors, since he knows she’s got powers of some sort. Bardugo adds demons to the mix, plus more Yale architecture. It’s a lot of fun, but it definitely ends with more story to tell.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls: It’s the end of humanity—there is only one remaining city on a world with a swollen sun (legacy of past human attempts to control destiny, perhaps), with many technologies that still work but are unrepairable once broken. The protagonist is sent to a prison island, where many terrible things happen (there’s no sexual assault, but the possibility of sexual coercion is very much on the table). As the protagonist tells the story of his life, he’s at the fringes of pivotal events—if the dying out of a civilization can be said to have pivots. It’s a readable story; its strength is the way that it is clear that all the characters have an equally complicated story and life even if the narrator lacks access to them.
Lawrence Block, John Ferris, & Stephen King, Transgressions: Terror's Echo: Three Novellas: Three thriller-ish novella-ish things loosely organized around “post-9/11.” Block’s hit man volunteers to serve food to people searching the rubble of the Towers, but otherwise continues to be a hitman and overthink things; Ferris tells a deeply unpleasant story of a beloved male artist whose female subjects seem to end up withdrawing from public view; and King has a short story about a man going through a divorce when the maître d’ breaks down and starts killing people. Not really worth it.
Karin Tidbeck, Amatka: Communist sf! This is a lost colony—generations past came here from Earth, and can’t get back, but where they are is slippery. Unless material came from Earth, it quickly loses its form unless constantly marked/reinforced, so people have to aggressively walk around naming things routinely. In these circumstances, collectivity is all; living alone or disagreeing about what something is can be deadly, as witnessed by the fate of a settlement that collapsed. A young woman comes to the mushroom farm settlement in order to do market research, but finds love, and then finds that things are deteriorating—or perhaps changing to what they have to be for anything like long-term coexistence with the environment. It’s a little dreamlike, and very interesting.
A. K. Larkwood, The Thousand Eyes:Fascinating followup to the first book, which chronicled the adventures and love story of Csorwe and Shuthmili as they escaped the wizard who abused them. But this book starts with Csorwe’s body being taken over by a god—and then jumps fifteen years to find Shuthmili serving the god, hoping against hope to rescue Csorwe. As with the first book, some bad deals are made, some betrayals occur, and both the protagonists and their antagonists are complicated and self-justifying. I enjoyed it.
Hernan Diaz, Trust: Not my usual fare, but very interesting: four different stories intertwine. The first is a novella about a capitalist who rises from family wealth to unimaginable wealth in the Gilded Age and through the Great Depression and then loses his wife to some kind of mental illness and the treatment he inflicts on her. The second is a half-outlined retelling, ostensibly by the man for whom the first book was a roman à clef, in which he is better (by his own lights). The third is a memoir by the woman who wrote it for him, and the fourth is diary entries from the wife. Each retelling raises new questions about how money works in America and the previous narrative, as well as the nature of narration generally (trust, get it?). I enjoyed it though it doesn’t leave me wanting to read more general fiction.
Ann Leckie, Translation State: A whole bunch of other cultures exist besides the Radchhai, including the descended-from-altered-humans Presger Translators. This book—which really feels influenced both by Murderbot and by The Goblin Emperor—focuses on three people (ish): a middle-aged person who gets sent on a seemingly impossible mission to find a Translator who escaped to human space 200 years ago; a young man who’s always felt out of place with his adopted family, but not sure how to handle the people who insists he’s actually descended from the rulers of a destroyed space station; and a Translator juvenile who, after an attack, doesn’t want the role reserved for them. Bad things happen, but there’s also a lot of kindness. I enjoyed it a lot.
P.B. Rainey, Why Don’t You Love Me?: Graphic novel in which the protagonists are unhappily married and neglectful of their kids—the mother keeps trying to send the kids to buy her wine and cigarettes, while the father can’t remember his son’s name. But there’s more to the story—the mother seems uncertain that this is really happening, for one thing, and the father says he’s a barber and not a website manager, as everyone around him thinks he is. If you can stand the suffering of the children, which is not downplayed, it’s an intriguing look at depression (maybe metaphorically) and also a story about forging human connections where none existed before, in the face of terrible loss.
M.A. Carrick, The Liar’s Knot: Second book in Rook & Rose, with even more city-state intrigue as the characters plot, reveal secrets, and learn more about the magic that is trying to tear their city apart. The magical artifacts they’re after corrupt everyone who touches them, but there may be no alternative if they are to destroy the artifacts and prevent the rise of a new tyrant. It’s good fun (though I’m still hoping for an OT3 outcome for the three main characters).
Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark: Really, really good, but a pandemic book, so don’t try if that will be too much. This is a series of short stories/novellas linked by some of the characters: a POV character in one story is a minor/mentioned character in another. The book starts with a virus that comes out of the melting tundra and kills millions, especially children at first, slowly and painfully. It’s about how people go on—still being people, good and bad, all traumatized, some of them making changes and some of them staying in place even as the world changes around them. It’s really well done, including the one from the POV of the condescending older scientist married to a young woman whose contributions he dismisses while pretending to honor; that one turns even more ironic by the end as the story comes, in some ways, full circle.
Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves: Monette says that many of her short stories come from dreams, and oneiric is definitely a word that could describe many of these stories. There’s a genderbending alternate history spy story, a sf military bodyswap (sexual violence aftermath graphically described), a selkie story, and a number of others. I liked it.
John Scalzi, Travel by Bullet: Another Dispatcher story: when murder isn’t permanent (but other forms of death are), people can exploit that in various ways, and this noir sees our hero dealing with some billionaires and some cybercurrency shenanigans. It’s exactly as deep as I wanted.
Ben H. Winters, Self Help: A horror novella: The protagonist’s audiobook starts addressing him directly with suggestions about how to get what he wants. The suggestions get more aggressive. The gotcha ending did not work for me.
R.B. Lemberg, The Four Profound Weaves:In this fantasy, a trans man physically transitioned late in life; that estranged him from his culture, which doesn’t recognize transition. He has relatively powerful magic and wants the powerful woman who helped him to give him a new name, so when a trans woman who transitioned as a young girl also turns out to be looking for that person (her aunt), they join up despite misunderstandings and mistrust. Her aunt is something between a vampire and the incarnation of Death, and their journey is structured by the wounds of the past—the aunt left before teaching the woman how to weave in the fourth magical way necessary for true mastery; the man encountered the aunt when searching for a magical weaving to ransom one of his lovers from a cruel ruler, but the cruel ruler had the lover killed anyway and is still interested in collecting magic weaving. Especially if you’re interested in older protagonists, albeit aided in physical combat by magic, it might be of interest.
Everina Maxwell, Ocean’s Echo: In one isolated planetary system, warring factions developed “Architects” and “Readers”—the former who can command obedience for a short time, the latter who can read minds. Readers are mistrusted and blamed for an attempted coup, but useful synced with Architects to navigate the disturbed space that isolates the system. For the synced Reader, things are less fun: they are always vulnerable to being “written” by the Architect. The ne’er-do-well Reader nephew of the ruler is shipped off to be synced, but encounters a strong Architect who also has a strong moral code, and they agree to fake the sync until the Reader can escape. So it’s a variant on forced bonding, with a lot more politics and a lot more attention to the unpleasant sides of forced bonding, and Maxwell successfully complicates the politics as things go on. Not super tropey—they accidentally fall in love, but, in what is catnip to me, they recognize that the ongoing coup attempt/low-level war they’re in is more significant until stablized. If you like strangers-who-probably-should-be-adversaries-to-lovers and lots of politics, you might enjoy it too.
Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent: Alex Stern has a mission: Get Darlington out of Hell. Unfortunately, he’s already partway out, and the adults in charge of magic at Yale don’t want to help her or even listen to her. Plus, the Israeli gangster whose brother she killed wants her to pay him back by becoming one of his collectors, since he knows she’s got powers of some sort. Bardugo adds demons to the mix, plus more Yale architecture. It’s a lot of fun, but it definitely ends with more story to tell.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls: It’s the end of humanity—there is only one remaining city on a world with a swollen sun (legacy of past human attempts to control destiny, perhaps), with many technologies that still work but are unrepairable once broken. The protagonist is sent to a prison island, where many terrible things happen (there’s no sexual assault, but the possibility of sexual coercion is very much on the table). As the protagonist tells the story of his life, he’s at the fringes of pivotal events—if the dying out of a civilization can be said to have pivots. It’s a readable story; its strength is the way that it is clear that all the characters have an equally complicated story and life even if the narrator lacks access to them.
Lawrence Block, John Ferris, & Stephen King, Transgressions: Terror's Echo: Three Novellas: Three thriller-ish novella-ish things loosely organized around “post-9/11.” Block’s hit man volunteers to serve food to people searching the rubble of the Towers, but otherwise continues to be a hitman and overthink things; Ferris tells a deeply unpleasant story of a beloved male artist whose female subjects seem to end up withdrawing from public view; and King has a short story about a man going through a divorce when the maître d’ breaks down and starts killing people. Not really worth it.
Karin Tidbeck, Amatka: Communist sf! This is a lost colony—generations past came here from Earth, and can’t get back, but where they are is slippery. Unless material came from Earth, it quickly loses its form unless constantly marked/reinforced, so people have to aggressively walk around naming things routinely. In these circumstances, collectivity is all; living alone or disagreeing about what something is can be deadly, as witnessed by the fate of a settlement that collapsed. A young woman comes to the mushroom farm settlement in order to do market research, but finds love, and then finds that things are deteriorating—or perhaps changing to what they have to be for anything like long-term coexistence with the environment. It’s a little dreamlike, and very interesting.
A. K. Larkwood, The Thousand Eyes:Fascinating followup to the first book, which chronicled the adventures and love story of Csorwe and Shuthmili as they escaped the wizard who abused them. But this book starts with Csorwe’s body being taken over by a god—and then jumps fifteen years to find Shuthmili serving the god, hoping against hope to rescue Csorwe. As with the first book, some bad deals are made, some betrayals occur, and both the protagonists and their antagonists are complicated and self-justifying. I enjoyed it.