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Lauren Beukes, Bridge: Bridget’s mom taught her to use dreamworm to visit alternate realities, but then Bridget grew up and decided it was fake. When her mom died, though, she found more dreamworm in her mom’s effects—and decided she had to go find her mom, who must have jumped out of her body to some other reality. Also, other people can jump realities, but they are not benign, nor are the effects of being jumped into. As with her other work, Beukes takes an idea that’s been done before but does it very differently, drawing our attention to the costs to the jumpees and the various ways in which lives can go wrong.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick:Nobody told me this was hilarious! I listened to an audiobook, which helped, but if you think about Ishmael as only 95% serious at the most desperate of times, and 25% the rest, this is an extremely funny book, even (especially) the stuff about whales. The list of whales, in fact, made me think of Borges, and I discovered that Borges called it “the infinite novel.”
Sarah Monette, A Theory of Haunting: A return to the adventures of Kyle Booth Murchison, who is ordered to help catalog a private library in order to give him an excuse to dissuade the museum’s great patron from supporting the occultist living in that house. But the house has many dangers. It was the same kind of creepy as the earlier stories, although it’s pretty sad that Murchison doesn’t seem to acquire any more chutzpah.
Ilona Andrews, Magic Tides & Magic Claims: Kate Daniels and Curran just can’t stay out of trouble, despite having left the pack. They need a power base to protect their son, so they just kind of start one, fighting new locals. It’s exactly what you expect at this point.
Ilona Andrews, Iron and Magic: Hugh, exiled by Roland, enters into a marriage of convenience to find a home for his Iron Dogs. Elara, the witch, enters into a marriage of convenience to get a fighting force big enough to protect her castle and her people, still endangered by unnamed enemies. They fight each other and fall in lust, of course, and leaving Kate Daniels lets the writers have more fun, I think. I’ll read the next volumes if they come.
Emma Newman, Before, After, Alone: Ten short stories set in her capitalist hellscape future; nothing stood out a lot but it reminded me that I really liked the main books.
T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge: A retelling of Sleeping Beauty in which the hero is Toadling, the human raised in/altered by Faerie, who’s sent to protect the human world from the changeling princess but ends up just putting her to sleep for hundreds of years. When another human finds her, Toadling has to confront her fears that her small powers won’t be enough. It’s a fine retelling with a refusal of the myth of beauty meaning goodness.
Lavanya Lakshminarayan, The Ten Percent Thief: Series of linked vignettes about life under the Bell Corporation, which replaced the Indian and other governments with its supposedly meritocratic rule that twenty percent are full citizens, seventy percent partial, and ten percent Analogs who can be harvested for their organs, or much worse. (We eventually learn that “ten percent” is a myth; they just don’t count any kids born to the ten percent, but you can be dumped into the ten percent for being insufficiently Bell-oriented.) It has many of the beats you’d expect with rebels trying to take the system down, but there are some interesting moments with some of the slice-of-life stories, especially the musician struggling between computerized perfection and actual playing.
Cory Doctorow, Red Team Blues:A forensic accountant in his 60s does one last big job for a tech billionaire, retrieving a stolen laptop, and his percentage fee is hundreds of millions of dollars. But the bad guys want revenge, so it’s not all Pappy and smiles (on the other hand, he sleeps with more than one attractive woman during his adventures, although at least they aren’t twentysomethings). Benign geek power fantasy, I guess.
Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup: Imperial fantasy meets Nero Wolfe: A young man with a secret that could destroy him is assigned as the assistant to a disgraced investigator; she stays in her rooms, dealing with her enhanced perceptions, and he goes out and asks the questions. He’s been modified to be able to remember everything he sees, hears, etc., one of the many modifications available to aid the Empire or its powerful gentry. When an Engineer—one of those responsible for keeping out the great leviathans that constantly threaten total destruction—is murdered on a local estate, they’re swept up in much larger conspiracies, with a threat to the very walls that protect against leviathans. It’s well-done, and I appreciated Bennett’s author’s note, which explained that writing a murder mystery is above all about logistics: is everybody in the right place for the setup to work and the clues to come out at the right times? “You essentially become the Jeff Bezos of killing dudes you just made up.” A worthy followup to his previous trilogy; I look forward to more.
Christopher Rowe, These Prisoning Hills: Really fascinating novella with a ton of worldbuilding in the background (the Voluntary State of Tennessee, formerly ruled by the AI Athena Parthenus, the reconstituted federals who have adopted some of the AI’s strangest and most terrifying tech as their own, the not-human semi-sentient dependents, and Marcia, a former fed from Kentucky who is just trying to survive her completely reconstituted and repopulated homeland) and a confusing, shifting landscape that includes the last of Parthenon’s Commodores, giant mechas with near-godlike powers. I don’t know what it means but I really enjoyed it.
Christopher Rowe, Telling the Map: Stories: I read these after the novella; most of the stories are set in the world of the Voluntary State of Tennessee, mostly during the reign of Athena Parthenus and the attempts of the people of Kentucky to deal with their ambiguous border status. The longest story, about bike racers whose mother was taken by a sentient river and whose father is off evangelizing against the Voluntary State, didn’t move me, but the overall world is startling and engaging, from car/horse hybrids to moles that eat entire coal seams to power the Voluntary State. There’s also one about a detective dog that seems set in a separate universe; it’s noir of course.
Chuck Tingle, Camp Damascus: The good: inventive plot—what if a gay conversion camp was literally demonic? Despite what you might have expected from horror tropes, it’s almost all set post-camp, among people who don’t necessarily even remember their time there, but who suffer greatly when they feel same-sex attraction—demons can punish thought crimes! Also nice that the found family doesn’t all have the same attitude towards religion, though the protagonist has a serious crisis of faith when she discovers that she’s been gaslit and brutalized by her parents. There’s some handwaving about recovering memories of the camp, but, fine, it’s lampshaded. The not as good: Desperately needed a line edit based on show-don’t-tell and a confiscation of adverbs until they could be deployed responsibly. I hope it gets made into a TV series once the strike is over.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick:Nobody told me this was hilarious! I listened to an audiobook, which helped, but if you think about Ishmael as only 95% serious at the most desperate of times, and 25% the rest, this is an extremely funny book, even (especially) the stuff about whales. The list of whales, in fact, made me think of Borges, and I discovered that Borges called it “the infinite novel.”
Sarah Monette, A Theory of Haunting: A return to the adventures of Kyle Booth Murchison, who is ordered to help catalog a private library in order to give him an excuse to dissuade the museum’s great patron from supporting the occultist living in that house. But the house has many dangers. It was the same kind of creepy as the earlier stories, although it’s pretty sad that Murchison doesn’t seem to acquire any more chutzpah.
Ilona Andrews, Magic Tides & Magic Claims: Kate Daniels and Curran just can’t stay out of trouble, despite having left the pack. They need a power base to protect their son, so they just kind of start one, fighting new locals. It’s exactly what you expect at this point.
Ilona Andrews, Iron and Magic: Hugh, exiled by Roland, enters into a marriage of convenience to find a home for his Iron Dogs. Elara, the witch, enters into a marriage of convenience to get a fighting force big enough to protect her castle and her people, still endangered by unnamed enemies. They fight each other and fall in lust, of course, and leaving Kate Daniels lets the writers have more fun, I think. I’ll read the next volumes if they come.
Emma Newman, Before, After, Alone: Ten short stories set in her capitalist hellscape future; nothing stood out a lot but it reminded me that I really liked the main books.
T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge: A retelling of Sleeping Beauty in which the hero is Toadling, the human raised in/altered by Faerie, who’s sent to protect the human world from the changeling princess but ends up just putting her to sleep for hundreds of years. When another human finds her, Toadling has to confront her fears that her small powers won’t be enough. It’s a fine retelling with a refusal of the myth of beauty meaning goodness.
Lavanya Lakshminarayan, The Ten Percent Thief: Series of linked vignettes about life under the Bell Corporation, which replaced the Indian and other governments with its supposedly meritocratic rule that twenty percent are full citizens, seventy percent partial, and ten percent Analogs who can be harvested for their organs, or much worse. (We eventually learn that “ten percent” is a myth; they just don’t count any kids born to the ten percent, but you can be dumped into the ten percent for being insufficiently Bell-oriented.) It has many of the beats you’d expect with rebels trying to take the system down, but there are some interesting moments with some of the slice-of-life stories, especially the musician struggling between computerized perfection and actual playing.
Cory Doctorow, Red Team Blues:A forensic accountant in his 60s does one last big job for a tech billionaire, retrieving a stolen laptop, and his percentage fee is hundreds of millions of dollars. But the bad guys want revenge, so it’s not all Pappy and smiles (on the other hand, he sleeps with more than one attractive woman during his adventures, although at least they aren’t twentysomethings). Benign geek power fantasy, I guess.
Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup: Imperial fantasy meets Nero Wolfe: A young man with a secret that could destroy him is assigned as the assistant to a disgraced investigator; she stays in her rooms, dealing with her enhanced perceptions, and he goes out and asks the questions. He’s been modified to be able to remember everything he sees, hears, etc., one of the many modifications available to aid the Empire or its powerful gentry. When an Engineer—one of those responsible for keeping out the great leviathans that constantly threaten total destruction—is murdered on a local estate, they’re swept up in much larger conspiracies, with a threat to the very walls that protect against leviathans. It’s well-done, and I appreciated Bennett’s author’s note, which explained that writing a murder mystery is above all about logistics: is everybody in the right place for the setup to work and the clues to come out at the right times? “You essentially become the Jeff Bezos of killing dudes you just made up.” A worthy followup to his previous trilogy; I look forward to more.
Christopher Rowe, These Prisoning Hills: Really fascinating novella with a ton of worldbuilding in the background (the Voluntary State of Tennessee, formerly ruled by the AI Athena Parthenus, the reconstituted federals who have adopted some of the AI’s strangest and most terrifying tech as their own, the not-human semi-sentient dependents, and Marcia, a former fed from Kentucky who is just trying to survive her completely reconstituted and repopulated homeland) and a confusing, shifting landscape that includes the last of Parthenon’s Commodores, giant mechas with near-godlike powers. I don’t know what it means but I really enjoyed it.
Christopher Rowe, Telling the Map: Stories: I read these after the novella; most of the stories are set in the world of the Voluntary State of Tennessee, mostly during the reign of Athena Parthenus and the attempts of the people of Kentucky to deal with their ambiguous border status. The longest story, about bike racers whose mother was taken by a sentient river and whose father is off evangelizing against the Voluntary State, didn’t move me, but the overall world is startling and engaging, from car/horse hybrids to moles that eat entire coal seams to power the Voluntary State. There’s also one about a detective dog that seems set in a separate universe; it’s noir of course.
Chuck Tingle, Camp Damascus: The good: inventive plot—what if a gay conversion camp was literally demonic? Despite what you might have expected from horror tropes, it’s almost all set post-camp, among people who don’t necessarily even remember their time there, but who suffer greatly when they feel same-sex attraction—demons can punish thought crimes! Also nice that the found family doesn’t all have the same attitude towards religion, though the protagonist has a serious crisis of faith when she discovers that she’s been gaslit and brutalized by her parents. There’s some handwaving about recovering memories of the camp, but, fine, it’s lampshaded. The not as good: Desperately needed a line edit based on show-don’t-tell and a confiscation of adverbs until they could be deployed responsibly. I hope it gets made into a TV series once the strike is over.
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For my money Wheel of Time had better-differentiated characters and that was part of its appeal, although some of it was Of Its Time; I have been really pleased with how the TV adaptation made the material more inclusive generally (at least one f/f couple on-screen that I recall, major characters cast as Not White, etc.) while capturing the appeal of the canon, at least in S1.