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fiction/poetry
Charles Stross, A Conventional Boy: Going back in time in the Laundry Files, even though I really want to know what’s going on under the New Management. Derek was imprisoned as a fourteen-year-old mildly autistic, somewhat magically talented boy because of a moral panic over D&D and never released. Nearing fifty, he breaks out to attend a gaming convention—that just happens to be where a cult is trying to raise a god. It’s what you’d want from a Laundry Files novel (other than timeline progression); there are also two previously released short stories to make it a bit longer.
Adam Roberts, The This: A bunch of riffs on group consciousness as the next stage of/enemy of individual human consciousness. Wittily enough, it spreads as a social media platform embedded into a person’s skull—hands-free tweeting! There are different riffs on the concept, including Forever War-like interludes, a 1984 pastiche where Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania are warring group consciousnesses, and weirder stuff. I am not even sure I liked it, but I thought it was interesting.
James Alan Gardner, All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault: In a world of superpowers and magic, an accident leaves four grad students with superpowers. Kim, an agender geology student, becomes Zircon, who can become incredibly tiny and super-hard, with some other extra powers as well, but they’re still hung up on their ex-boyfriend, a rich kid who several years previously broke up with them and joined the Dark forces. That’s kind of how it goes—it’s fun and not too serious despite all the explosions.
The Best American Poetry 2014, ed. Terence Hayes: I’m not a huge poetry fan, but I was struck by Tony Hoagland’s viciously witty Write Whiter, (“When I find my books in the ‘White Literature’ section of the bookstore,/dismay is what I feel—I thought I was writing about other, larger things”) and of course Patricia Lockwood’s astonishing Rape Joke.
Asha Greyling, The Vampire of Kings Street: Radhika Dhingra is a lawyer in late nineteenth-century New York, struggling under the dual burdens of her race and sex, when a vampire comes stumbling into her office, begging her to write his will. Then he’s arrested for murder. Vampires can only be sustained by the most wealthy, and his patron family quickly swoops in and tells Radhika her services are no longer needed, but she’s already swept up in the mystery. I would’ve liked this better if Radhika were a better lawyer; she talks about keeping client confidences, but her concept of this is TV-level at best as she spews relevant, privileged information to cops and journalists. Useful for plot advancement, I guess, but horrendously unethical and likely to get actual clients convicted and actual lawyers disbarred. Arguably things would be different in the magical (but still racist and sexist) nineteenth century, but it’s hard to see why they would have been; the basic principles were in place and were likely to have been applied particularly harshly to a legal outsider.
Kage Baker, The Machine’s Child: This seventh novel in Baker’s series about the time-spanning Company and its immortal slaves suffered both from my long delay between books and more from the fact that Mendoza, the most compelling character and the main character most of the way through, is here both amnesiac through most of the book and also actively being gaslit by her rescuers. They did rescue her from horrific torture, but they are also actively concealing that there are three separate entities sharing one body—all three of which are in love with her and having sex with her, which does not come off very well. She spends almost the whole book behaving like a Heinlein heroine, enjoying sex with her man/men as she accepts and aids their plans. They’re plotting to overthrow the Company and setting up for a final battle, but I’m not sure I am invested enough to read the final book in the series. (There are two subsequent standalones in the Company universe and some short stories.)
Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams and Other Stories: Short story collection, some sf and some fantasy-esque or just lives of quiet desperation in which middle-class 70s white American women fantasize about escape from the lives they are expected to live.
David Mitchell, The Bone ClocksLiterary sf done reasonably well (to my somewhat grudging surprise). In a narrative starting in 1984, loosely connected people in England have strange experiences involving psychic powers, missing time, and people appearing and disappearing around them. The men were mainly tedious, though that was clearly on purpose. Most interesting: Mitchell’s choice to extend the story past where a conventional plot about the secret war between good and bad immortals defending/preying on humanity would have ended to show a world that had a seemingly unrelated climate collapse anyway (though still preserving stakes for the individual participants).
MJ Wassmer, Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend: A Very Apocalyptic Vacation: Dan Foster is on a Caribbean vacation with his girlfriend, Mara, when the sun disappears. When the people in the luxury accommodations start hoarding all the resources, things get bleak very quickly. Will class war kill them before the cold does? And is there any chance of survival? The tone is a lot more flippant than the summary, and though there are deaths and serious injuries, many of the people do survive for vaguely-plausible-within-the-framework reasons. I don’t know, don’t think too hard about it, and you might enjoy it.
TJ Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea: Linus Baker is a mild-mannered, dutiful caseworker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, visiting orphanages to ensure that magical children are not being abused. He takes his job very seriously, although not everyone does, and lives an otherwise gray life. When he’s sent to an isolated orphanage with some very special magical children, he finds them—and their intriguing headmaster, Arthur Parnassus—challenging his determination to stick to the rulebook. It’s a nice YA about embracing difference and magic.
Rivers Solomon, Model Home: Three sisters grew up in an otherwise all-white enclave in Texas, in a home that hated them. The oldest has a dissociative disorder, and believes that she was possessed by the woman with no face who lived in the house—a woman at least one of the other sisters had also seen. What follows is a horror story about racism. The story felt over the top in the way the best horror can be.
Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift, ed. Kristie Frederick Daughtrey.
Look, it’s an obvious money/attention play, but good for them and if they can get more attention to poetry, it’s a win. Radioactive Apology by Subhaga Crystal Bacon has lines that slither around, changing meaning as they go in ways that do feel Swiftian enough that I didn’t notice until I double-checked that there’s really only one actual rhyme in there. Amy King’s Lessons Learning is a poem about how being in love is the only worthwhile thing—again very Swiftian in a puckish way. (available here (gift link) I found Anti-Sonnet by Mag Gabbert poignant.
Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear: Another Wayward Children novella, set this time mainly in one of the worlds before the return. Nadya is a Russian orphan adopted by well-meaning Americans who think her missing arm is a disability in need of correction; when they force a prosthetic on her, she escapes through a Door, but she doesn't really mean to do so, which causes trouble later despite the life she builds in a Drowned world. I thought it was well done.
W.H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939: I’m not sure there are any gems that aren’t already well known, but it was fascinating to read these in concert with a bunch about Churchill to get the literary version of the lamps going out all over Europe—lots of poems about dread. If you want one that hits different now, right before “Musée des Beaux Arts” there’s “Gare du Midi”: A nondescript express in from the South,/Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face/To welcome which the mayor has not contrived/Bugles or braid: something about the mouth/Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity./Snow is falling, Clutching a little case,/He walks out briskly to infect a city/Whose terrible future may have just arrived.”
Adam Roberts, The This: A bunch of riffs on group consciousness as the next stage of/enemy of individual human consciousness. Wittily enough, it spreads as a social media platform embedded into a person’s skull—hands-free tweeting! There are different riffs on the concept, including Forever War-like interludes, a 1984 pastiche where Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania are warring group consciousnesses, and weirder stuff. I am not even sure I liked it, but I thought it was interesting.
James Alan Gardner, All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault: In a world of superpowers and magic, an accident leaves four grad students with superpowers. Kim, an agender geology student, becomes Zircon, who can become incredibly tiny and super-hard, with some other extra powers as well, but they’re still hung up on their ex-boyfriend, a rich kid who several years previously broke up with them and joined the Dark forces. That’s kind of how it goes—it’s fun and not too serious despite all the explosions.
The Best American Poetry 2014, ed. Terence Hayes: I’m not a huge poetry fan, but I was struck by Tony Hoagland’s viciously witty Write Whiter, (“When I find my books in the ‘White Literature’ section of the bookstore,/dismay is what I feel—I thought I was writing about other, larger things”) and of course Patricia Lockwood’s astonishing Rape Joke.
Asha Greyling, The Vampire of Kings Street: Radhika Dhingra is a lawyer in late nineteenth-century New York, struggling under the dual burdens of her race and sex, when a vampire comes stumbling into her office, begging her to write his will. Then he’s arrested for murder. Vampires can only be sustained by the most wealthy, and his patron family quickly swoops in and tells Radhika her services are no longer needed, but she’s already swept up in the mystery. I would’ve liked this better if Radhika were a better lawyer; she talks about keeping client confidences, but her concept of this is TV-level at best as she spews relevant, privileged information to cops and journalists. Useful for plot advancement, I guess, but horrendously unethical and likely to get actual clients convicted and actual lawyers disbarred. Arguably things would be different in the magical (but still racist and sexist) nineteenth century, but it’s hard to see why they would have been; the basic principles were in place and were likely to have been applied particularly harshly to a legal outsider.
Kage Baker, The Machine’s Child: This seventh novel in Baker’s series about the time-spanning Company and its immortal slaves suffered both from my long delay between books and more from the fact that Mendoza, the most compelling character and the main character most of the way through, is here both amnesiac through most of the book and also actively being gaslit by her rescuers. They did rescue her from horrific torture, but they are also actively concealing that there are three separate entities sharing one body—all three of which are in love with her and having sex with her, which does not come off very well. She spends almost the whole book behaving like a Heinlein heroine, enjoying sex with her man/men as she accepts and aids their plans. They’re plotting to overthrow the Company and setting up for a final battle, but I’m not sure I am invested enough to read the final book in the series. (There are two subsequent standalones in the Company universe and some short stories.)
Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams and Other Stories: Short story collection, some sf and some fantasy-esque or just lives of quiet desperation in which middle-class 70s white American women fantasize about escape from the lives they are expected to live.
David Mitchell, The Bone ClocksLiterary sf done reasonably well (to my somewhat grudging surprise). In a narrative starting in 1984, loosely connected people in England have strange experiences involving psychic powers, missing time, and people appearing and disappearing around them. The men were mainly tedious, though that was clearly on purpose. Most interesting: Mitchell’s choice to extend the story past where a conventional plot about the secret war between good and bad immortals defending/preying on humanity would have ended to show a world that had a seemingly unrelated climate collapse anyway (though still preserving stakes for the individual participants).
MJ Wassmer, Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend: A Very Apocalyptic Vacation: Dan Foster is on a Caribbean vacation with his girlfriend, Mara, when the sun disappears. When the people in the luxury accommodations start hoarding all the resources, things get bleak very quickly. Will class war kill them before the cold does? And is there any chance of survival? The tone is a lot more flippant than the summary, and though there are deaths and serious injuries, many of the people do survive for vaguely-plausible-within-the-framework reasons. I don’t know, don’t think too hard about it, and you might enjoy it.
TJ Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea: Linus Baker is a mild-mannered, dutiful caseworker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, visiting orphanages to ensure that magical children are not being abused. He takes his job very seriously, although not everyone does, and lives an otherwise gray life. When he’s sent to an isolated orphanage with some very special magical children, he finds them—and their intriguing headmaster, Arthur Parnassus—challenging his determination to stick to the rulebook. It’s a nice YA about embracing difference and magic.
Rivers Solomon, Model Home: Three sisters grew up in an otherwise all-white enclave in Texas, in a home that hated them. The oldest has a dissociative disorder, and believes that she was possessed by the woman with no face who lived in the house—a woman at least one of the other sisters had also seen. What follows is a horror story about racism. The story felt over the top in the way the best horror can be.
Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift, ed. Kristie Frederick Daughtrey.
Look, it’s an obvious money/attention play, but good for them and if they can get more attention to poetry, it’s a win. Radioactive Apology by Subhaga Crystal Bacon has lines that slither around, changing meaning as they go in ways that do feel Swiftian enough that I didn’t notice until I double-checked that there’s really only one actual rhyme in there. Amy King’s Lessons Learning is a poem about how being in love is the only worthwhile thing—again very Swiftian in a puckish way. (available here (gift link) I found Anti-Sonnet by Mag Gabbert poignant.
Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear: Another Wayward Children novella, set this time mainly in one of the worlds before the return. Nadya is a Russian orphan adopted by well-meaning Americans who think her missing arm is a disability in need of correction; when they force a prosthetic on her, she escapes through a Door, but she doesn't really mean to do so, which causes trouble later despite the life she builds in a Drowned world. I thought it was well done.
W.H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939: I’m not sure there are any gems that aren’t already well known, but it was fascinating to read these in concert with a bunch about Churchill to get the literary version of the lamps going out all over Europe—lots of poems about dread. If you want one that hits different now, right before “Musée des Beaux Arts” there’s “Gare du Midi”: A nondescript express in from the South,/Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face/To welcome which the mayor has not contrived/Bugles or braid: something about the mouth/Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity./Snow is falling, Clutching a little case,/He walks out briskly to infect a city/Whose terrible future may have just arrived.”
no subject
But I might give the Mitchell a try, bc I'm a sucker for literary sf done well!
Thanks, as always, for your reviews!!!
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no subject
I really liked the lawyer/vampire/19th c idea, but I trust your taste there to be not dissimilar to mine (though I'm sure my bad lawyer shenanigans tolerance is much higher than yours :)
no subject