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Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang: Maybe most books that inspire action in the real world, as this one did, aren’t good at a literary level. The thing that surprised me was how incompetent the protagonists—a loose group of a handful of men and one woman who burn down billboards, destroy construction equipment, and make a half-assed assault on a dam—were, and the book knew it. They were united by a generalized sense of grievance against the world and a feeling that the natural beauty of the West was being destroyed, but they also happily littered as they went (everyone else was doing it so holding back would make no difference). Not to mention the fairly standard anti-Indian racism and sexism (the woman gang member has, I think, the only female speaking role in the book, and is constantly whining and crying and demanding special treatment). Anyway, it has the energy of a pulp thriller but it’s puzzling, in retrospect, that this was so inspirational for Earth First and the like. There’s nothing like a good title, I guess.
Ben Aaronovitch, Stone and Sky: Abigail and Peter (and his river goddess and their two-year-old twins and Nightingale) go to Scotland to investigate sightings of a strange big cat. Abigail falls in love or lust or both, which consumed too much of the narrative for my enjoyment. Aaronovitch seems to know he needs to build out the world or leave it for a new one, but this one seemed a little flat to me.
Rachel Hartman, Among Ghosts:Set in Hartman’s existing world (dragons can take human form) with a bunch of new characters. An early-teens boy, raised in a remote village by his mother who fled his father’s violence, chafes at restrictions and bullies—and encounters ghosts. When old enemies seek them out, his bond with the ghosts may be his best chance for survival. It’s nice to see a protagonist who chooses kindness, again and again, and sees it by and large rewarded.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bee Speaker: Bioengineered sapients, including a lizardform and dog-form, whose predecessors escaped the catastrophe on Earth by carving out space on Mars, return to Earth to try to help out, but misunderstand the situation. That situation is complicated by the existence of multiple types of intelligence, including Bees, a distributed machine intelligence that has become a religious focus where the Mars crew touches down. It didn't move me much.
KJ Charles, Death in the Spires: Standalone mystery set in pre-WWI England. Ten years after the unsolved murder of the leader of their set, a letter accusing one of them of the murder loses him his job. He decides to investigate, in order to be able to move on; class, race, and gender prejudice mean that justice will never be found in actual courts, and it ends up as an interesting exploration of what moving on might mean in those circumstances.
Antonia Hodgson, The Raven Scholar: A big book with a big recommendation—really wonderful palace intrigue. There are eight totems; seven sets of worshipers send competitors to be the new Emperor as the old one’s term ends. But murder, intrigue, and crimes reaching out from the past to spill new blood complicate things, as does the fact that if the leading contender wins, he might bring the Eight back and end the world. Expertly blends fantasy with the mystery technique of revealing new information that reframes or at least adds a lot of nuance to each person’s acts. I can’t wait for the next volume.
The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume One (2018), ed. Neil Clarke: Always interesting to look back after a few years. Big themes: China and pandemics (whoops). Some good stuff in there, including two Naomi Kritzer stories.
Richard Siken, I Do Know Some Things: Written after and significantly about a stroke, these poems are different in style from Siken’s earlier work—they’re prose paragraphs, from about half a page to a page and change, often juxtaposing specific images with metaphorical musings (“a line ends when it is broken”). They purport to be fragments from his life, though the last poem in the penultimate section suggests that this, too, is craft.
Scott Carson, Departure 37: One night, pilots around the country start receiving messages from their mothers telling them not to fly—even when their mothers are dead. The explanation involves DARPA—and DARPA’s past projects. The comparisons to Stephen King are relatively apt, though Carson doesn’t have King’s genius for character, and although he’s not overtly sexist there were some choices around women that made me nervous (though ultimately didn’t do really dumb stuff). I’d read another by him to see how he’s doing.
Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster: This has a “cozy” vibe—the protagonist, a student trying to finish her PhD, discovers magic through intuition and, when she tries to teach it to her mother in order to help mend their disagreements/help assuage her mother’s grief over her other mother’s death, things go very wrong, albeit on an individual scale. The only way forward is to resolve the wounds of their past. I found the younger characters annoying (so much rehashing of emotions!), which is a sign that I am old, and the worldbuilding unpersuasive, which I would have totally forgiven if I’d been more interested in the characters.
Melissa Caruso, The Tethered Mage:In an Italianate city-state system, the ruling city/empire monopolizes strong mages within its boundaries, requiring them to be “tethered” to servants of the ruling power. The nearest alternative involves mage-kings and -queens who kill with impunity—a group that is threatening the borders of the empire. When the daughter of an important noblewoman accidentally tethers a rogue mage, binding their lives together, they become caught up in a potential rebellion as well as other intrigue. Enjoyable; on to the next volume.
Chuck Tingle, Lucky Day: I really wish I liked Tingle’s writing more because I love the cut of his jib. But this book—focusing on a professor of probability whose life is destroyed by the “Low Probability Event,” which kills seven million people in gruesome and unlikely ways, and who is several years later recruited by the organization set up to investigate the event—is both clunkily written and suffers plot-wise from the walrus/fairy problem. I don’t know how fairies work, but I know how professors work, as well as how consultants to government organizations work. A professor of probability would not refuse to believe that a low-probability event could happen because it’s so unlikely, and the concepts she explains to her recruiter would not surprise him years into the investigation. These were super fixable problems that could be addressed with a few edits! But they occurred so early in the introduction of the respective characters that they soured me. A better editor to fix word choice/repetition would also have helped. Jason Pargin is doing similar cosmic horror mixed with banal absurdity, but works much better for me.
Kate Elliott, The Witch Roads:In a dangerous world full of spores that can very quickly take over and kill any life, Elen has carved out a life as a lowly courier. But when an arrogant prince arrives at her outpost and then a vicious enemy from her past follows, her secrets—and her nephew—are at risk. It was an intriguing setup; warning for lots of sexual assault as a background threat.
KJ Charles, A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel: Just after the Napoleonic wars, a veteran unexpectedly becomes an earl. His disappointed relatives are desperate to figure out a way to disinherit him, and a young secretary’s story of a potential earlier marriage for his father might offer the key. But the secretary’s motives are unclear at best. This felt good in the moment, and definitely scratches the itch for “people abused by their families of origin becoming both greater and better than those families” but I ended up a little queasy: without Charles’ earlier fantasy elements, it was a social fantasy about a few people thinking about emotions and sexuality in early 21st-century terms and thus avoiding the oppression around them as long as they kept the gay sex secret enough.
Ray Nayler, Where the Axe Is Buried: In a world where Russia/environs are controlled by a totalitarian surveillance state, and the “free” world is run by artificially intelligent prime ministers, a new technology arises—one that allows access to a person’s mental state, and maybe more. A Russian educated in the West who returned and was trapped, along with a dissident living in internal exile, may be the key to everything. How does one rebel in such circumstances? How should we think about the people who don’t? I had a few worldbuilding questions, but it was a great exploration of the threat of surveillance in an increasingly networked world and recommend it for anyone who can stand reading about oppression in a world that might not be very far from ours.
Ray Nayler, The Tusks of Extinction: Set in Nayler’s loosely-connected story world where oligarchy and climate change have continued to get worse but technology allows consciousness to be uploaded and reloaded into bodies. The protagonist was an elephant guard but is now in the body of a mammoth, into which she was loaded to teach resurrected versions how to be mammoths. But the funding has run out and so the institute that created her has authorized a mammoth hunt, which will allow the whole project—including lots of other noncharismatic organisms—to survive longer. It’s gripping. (I’ve been working through Nayler’s short stories online—linked from his site—and his world is depressing but fascinating in the best thought-experiment way.)
Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea: In a future controlled by predatory corporations, one is trying to crack the code of intelligence not just by building robots but by talking to octopodes. This is a sf novel in the classic style: based on ideas about consciousness and exploring unknown worlds. The parallel story of a man on an automated slave ship stripping the sea of what remains of its fish has a satisfying intersection.
Matt Dinniman, Every Grain of Sand: The Shivered Sky - Book 1: Another RPG-ish fantasy in which people who died wake up in a strange world of contending demons and angels. It doesn’t have the immersive/propulsive energy of the later work (and it lacks a cat), so I won’t be continuing.
Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning: I’m sure this is very ambitious, but I found it confusing and offputting—it’s set in a future world where everyone chooses their own government (a real emphasis on the “exit” in exit, voice, loyalty). A controversy over a tampered-with list of the most influential people in the world starts the main plot, which is essentially court politics. It’s primarily narrated by a person enslaved for his crimes, which you don’t learn about until most of the way through and they are extremely horrible. He doesn’t seem actually reformed in attitude, although his behavior is constrained, possibly by the magical child he’s helping conceal. Also, Palmer clearly wants to make his focus on people’s “racial” and gendered characteristics weird, and succeeds, but that still meant a bunch of weird descriptions and claims.
Allie Therin, Liar City: Urban paranormal/crime novel: the paranormal here is the existence of empaths for the last generation-ish—people who strongly feel others’ emotions, which makes them extremely averse to harming anyone but nonetheless has triggered a repressive moral panic about mind-readers. When an anti-empath politician is murdered, our empath protagonist and his cop sister—who has a secret superpower of her own—come to the attention of the Dead Man, who takes care of problem empaths. It’s heading in a m/m direction for the primary couple; I found it diverting enough, though it reads differently in a year when right-wingers are denouncing “the sin of empathy.”
Allie Therin, Twisted Shadows: Second book, ends on a cliffhanger and the third one isn’t out yet, so fair warning. Empath and empath hunter—a forbidden love that is complicated by the fact that the empath literally passes out from touching the hunter. But there are these empath-blocking gloves that offer some possibilities … Plot-wise, it has some middle book problems in that it’s setting up dangers from the military-industrial complex, which wants to control/exterminate empaths, and also from rogue empaths, who turn out to be capable of some bad things. I’ll probably read the third book.
Mira Grant, Overgrowth: I know this was my own fault, but I didn’t think I’d despise this book. In the past, I’ve enjoyed Grant’s story generation/plotting and come to hate her style. Here we have a failure of the first, and now I’m probably madder at myself than I am at Grant.
On style: This book could have been half the length and told the exact same story with every metaphor and concept intact. But it isn’t. Practically every other sentence is doubled, sometimes by using synonyms and sometimes by using pronouns and negations, often just by repetition. On and on, again and again. (See what I did there? Did you?) Among other things, this style makes every character sound exactly the same despite supposed variation in their personalities and backgrounds.
On story: Plotwise, it’s Little Shop of Horrors x Invasion of the Body Snatchers: As a small plant, our Audrey consumed a small child and took her place. And insisted ever since that she was the vanguard of an alien invasion, as do all the other alien plants (heh) around the world, despite being physically indistinguishable from the humans they replaced. But she actually is! Spoiler-ish discussion: Whether this is supposed to be a critique of human indifference to others’ suffering or not, it reads like the satisfied musings of a genocidaire, and even if Grant were a subtle enough writer to pull off satire, the worldbuilding would make that fail.
There are framing quotes from Wells’ War of the Worlds, including where Wells suggests that, having happily slaughtered people who were different from them, humans could hardly be surprised that Martians would treat them similarly. And Stasia, our protagonist, ends up mad at the humans for not wanting to be drained of their blood. Except some of them aren’t drained—turns out the conversion process can also occur for mature humans, some who chose it and some who (apparently) are chosen because of their political status, who retain their memories, so yay, Stasia doesn’t have to lose the human love of her life, who instead will subsist on the blood of the unlucky drained—that is, the billions of other humans. (I don’t see how the resource math works otherwise, and it sure sounded like the result in each prior invasion was “a couple hundred body-snatched versions of the originals survive.” I also can’t decide whether the fact that the plants apparently drink the blood of multiple alien worlds’ varied species is (1) a failure of basic science or (2) a claim that evolution here was directed by the plants to spec. I also set aside whether the blood has to be sapient—the plants apparently gained sapience when they drank the blood of animal aliens who arrived on the plant planet, and they seem to enjoy sapient blood best of all—setting up schemes designed to involve planets with native sapience rather than ones without it—but then there’s a scene where they happily chow down on cattle.) Stasia is blithely confident that this process will preserve the “best” of humanity, like a good colonizer.
But Stasia was also changed by the invaders’ pollen, becoming more bonded to them—biologically compelled to speciesism, compared to her earlier identification with humans. She endorses the abusers’ logic: humans forced the aliens to eat them by being mad and scared when they showed up to eat the humans. But hey, her betrayal of humanity was probably biologically based rather than the result of persuasion, because that is an awesome message to be putting out right now. (Mostly, I think this is just incoherent.)
At one point, the aliens say that if anyone had ever believed the plant children who insisted they were the vanguard of an invasion and told them not to come, they would have held off. Maybe we’re supposed to read this as obvious nonsense, but: If that’s so, there’s no clue in the text; Grant might at least have used a quote describing how Spanish conquistadors would read out announcements in Spanish and then hold that native peoples were bound thereby. If that’s not so, then this really is just sadism: The children were biologically compelled to announce that they were a vanguard, but not physically different (at the time). Nor were the children aware of anything else, so when asked for details they could not respond “the invasion will be genocide by blood-drinking plant,” which might at least have drawn further concern. Indeed, we’re told that some people did in fact believe the children’s claims, but apparently none of them ever used the magic words “please don’t eat us.” I feel like Grant’s view of the book is “Isn’t it wild to write a book from the alien invader’s perspective?” and mine is “Why would I want to read a book about the inside of a genocidaire’s head and all the excuses they give for why someone else’s suffering doesn’t count? I could just read history if I wanted that!”
Ben Aaronovitch, Stone and Sky: Abigail and Peter (and his river goddess and their two-year-old twins and Nightingale) go to Scotland to investigate sightings of a strange big cat. Abigail falls in love or lust or both, which consumed too much of the narrative for my enjoyment. Aaronovitch seems to know he needs to build out the world or leave it for a new one, but this one seemed a little flat to me.
Rachel Hartman, Among Ghosts:Set in Hartman’s existing world (dragons can take human form) with a bunch of new characters. An early-teens boy, raised in a remote village by his mother who fled his father’s violence, chafes at restrictions and bullies—and encounters ghosts. When old enemies seek them out, his bond with the ghosts may be his best chance for survival. It’s nice to see a protagonist who chooses kindness, again and again, and sees it by and large rewarded.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bee Speaker: Bioengineered sapients, including a lizardform and dog-form, whose predecessors escaped the catastrophe on Earth by carving out space on Mars, return to Earth to try to help out, but misunderstand the situation. That situation is complicated by the existence of multiple types of intelligence, including Bees, a distributed machine intelligence that has become a religious focus where the Mars crew touches down. It didn't move me much.
KJ Charles, Death in the Spires: Standalone mystery set in pre-WWI England. Ten years after the unsolved murder of the leader of their set, a letter accusing one of them of the murder loses him his job. He decides to investigate, in order to be able to move on; class, race, and gender prejudice mean that justice will never be found in actual courts, and it ends up as an interesting exploration of what moving on might mean in those circumstances.
Antonia Hodgson, The Raven Scholar: A big book with a big recommendation—really wonderful palace intrigue. There are eight totems; seven sets of worshipers send competitors to be the new Emperor as the old one’s term ends. But murder, intrigue, and crimes reaching out from the past to spill new blood complicate things, as does the fact that if the leading contender wins, he might bring the Eight back and end the world. Expertly blends fantasy with the mystery technique of revealing new information that reframes or at least adds a lot of nuance to each person’s acts. I can’t wait for the next volume.
The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume One (2018), ed. Neil Clarke: Always interesting to look back after a few years. Big themes: China and pandemics (whoops). Some good stuff in there, including two Naomi Kritzer stories.
Richard Siken, I Do Know Some Things: Written after and significantly about a stroke, these poems are different in style from Siken’s earlier work—they’re prose paragraphs, from about half a page to a page and change, often juxtaposing specific images with metaphorical musings (“a line ends when it is broken”). They purport to be fragments from his life, though the last poem in the penultimate section suggests that this, too, is craft.
Scott Carson, Departure 37: One night, pilots around the country start receiving messages from their mothers telling them not to fly—even when their mothers are dead. The explanation involves DARPA—and DARPA’s past projects. The comparisons to Stephen King are relatively apt, though Carson doesn’t have King’s genius for character, and although he’s not overtly sexist there were some choices around women that made me nervous (though ultimately didn’t do really dumb stuff). I’d read another by him to see how he’s doing.
Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster: This has a “cozy” vibe—the protagonist, a student trying to finish her PhD, discovers magic through intuition and, when she tries to teach it to her mother in order to help mend their disagreements/help assuage her mother’s grief over her other mother’s death, things go very wrong, albeit on an individual scale. The only way forward is to resolve the wounds of their past. I found the younger characters annoying (so much rehashing of emotions!), which is a sign that I am old, and the worldbuilding unpersuasive, which I would have totally forgiven if I’d been more interested in the characters.
Melissa Caruso, The Tethered Mage:In an Italianate city-state system, the ruling city/empire monopolizes strong mages within its boundaries, requiring them to be “tethered” to servants of the ruling power. The nearest alternative involves mage-kings and -queens who kill with impunity—a group that is threatening the borders of the empire. When the daughter of an important noblewoman accidentally tethers a rogue mage, binding their lives together, they become caught up in a potential rebellion as well as other intrigue. Enjoyable; on to the next volume.
Chuck Tingle, Lucky Day: I really wish I liked Tingle’s writing more because I love the cut of his jib. But this book—focusing on a professor of probability whose life is destroyed by the “Low Probability Event,” which kills seven million people in gruesome and unlikely ways, and who is several years later recruited by the organization set up to investigate the event—is both clunkily written and suffers plot-wise from the walrus/fairy problem. I don’t know how fairies work, but I know how professors work, as well as how consultants to government organizations work. A professor of probability would not refuse to believe that a low-probability event could happen because it’s so unlikely, and the concepts she explains to her recruiter would not surprise him years into the investigation. These were super fixable problems that could be addressed with a few edits! But they occurred so early in the introduction of the respective characters that they soured me. A better editor to fix word choice/repetition would also have helped. Jason Pargin is doing similar cosmic horror mixed with banal absurdity, but works much better for me.
Kate Elliott, The Witch Roads:In a dangerous world full of spores that can very quickly take over and kill any life, Elen has carved out a life as a lowly courier. But when an arrogant prince arrives at her outpost and then a vicious enemy from her past follows, her secrets—and her nephew—are at risk. It was an intriguing setup; warning for lots of sexual assault as a background threat.
KJ Charles, A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel: Just after the Napoleonic wars, a veteran unexpectedly becomes an earl. His disappointed relatives are desperate to figure out a way to disinherit him, and a young secretary’s story of a potential earlier marriage for his father might offer the key. But the secretary’s motives are unclear at best. This felt good in the moment, and definitely scratches the itch for “people abused by their families of origin becoming both greater and better than those families” but I ended up a little queasy: without Charles’ earlier fantasy elements, it was a social fantasy about a few people thinking about emotions and sexuality in early 21st-century terms and thus avoiding the oppression around them as long as they kept the gay sex secret enough.
Ray Nayler, Where the Axe Is Buried: In a world where Russia/environs are controlled by a totalitarian surveillance state, and the “free” world is run by artificially intelligent prime ministers, a new technology arises—one that allows access to a person’s mental state, and maybe more. A Russian educated in the West who returned and was trapped, along with a dissident living in internal exile, may be the key to everything. How does one rebel in such circumstances? How should we think about the people who don’t? I had a few worldbuilding questions, but it was a great exploration of the threat of surveillance in an increasingly networked world and recommend it for anyone who can stand reading about oppression in a world that might not be very far from ours.
Ray Nayler, The Tusks of Extinction: Set in Nayler’s loosely-connected story world where oligarchy and climate change have continued to get worse but technology allows consciousness to be uploaded and reloaded into bodies. The protagonist was an elephant guard but is now in the body of a mammoth, into which she was loaded to teach resurrected versions how to be mammoths. But the funding has run out and so the institute that created her has authorized a mammoth hunt, which will allow the whole project—including lots of other noncharismatic organisms—to survive longer. It’s gripping. (I’ve been working through Nayler’s short stories online—linked from his site—and his world is depressing but fascinating in the best thought-experiment way.)
Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea: In a future controlled by predatory corporations, one is trying to crack the code of intelligence not just by building robots but by talking to octopodes. This is a sf novel in the classic style: based on ideas about consciousness and exploring unknown worlds. The parallel story of a man on an automated slave ship stripping the sea of what remains of its fish has a satisfying intersection.
Matt Dinniman, Every Grain of Sand: The Shivered Sky - Book 1: Another RPG-ish fantasy in which people who died wake up in a strange world of contending demons and angels. It doesn’t have the immersive/propulsive energy of the later work (and it lacks a cat), so I won’t be continuing.
Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning: I’m sure this is very ambitious, but I found it confusing and offputting—it’s set in a future world where everyone chooses their own government (a real emphasis on the “exit” in exit, voice, loyalty). A controversy over a tampered-with list of the most influential people in the world starts the main plot, which is essentially court politics. It’s primarily narrated by a person enslaved for his crimes, which you don’t learn about until most of the way through and they are extremely horrible. He doesn’t seem actually reformed in attitude, although his behavior is constrained, possibly by the magical child he’s helping conceal. Also, Palmer clearly wants to make his focus on people’s “racial” and gendered characteristics weird, and succeeds, but that still meant a bunch of weird descriptions and claims.
Allie Therin, Liar City: Urban paranormal/crime novel: the paranormal here is the existence of empaths for the last generation-ish—people who strongly feel others’ emotions, which makes them extremely averse to harming anyone but nonetheless has triggered a repressive moral panic about mind-readers. When an anti-empath politician is murdered, our empath protagonist and his cop sister—who has a secret superpower of her own—come to the attention of the Dead Man, who takes care of problem empaths. It’s heading in a m/m direction for the primary couple; I found it diverting enough, though it reads differently in a year when right-wingers are denouncing “the sin of empathy.”
Allie Therin, Twisted Shadows: Second book, ends on a cliffhanger and the third one isn’t out yet, so fair warning. Empath and empath hunter—a forbidden love that is complicated by the fact that the empath literally passes out from touching the hunter. But there are these empath-blocking gloves that offer some possibilities … Plot-wise, it has some middle book problems in that it’s setting up dangers from the military-industrial complex, which wants to control/exterminate empaths, and also from rogue empaths, who turn out to be capable of some bad things. I’ll probably read the third book.
Mira Grant, Overgrowth: I know this was my own fault, but I didn’t think I’d despise this book. In the past, I’ve enjoyed Grant’s story generation/plotting and come to hate her style. Here we have a failure of the first, and now I’m probably madder at myself than I am at Grant.
On style: This book could have been half the length and told the exact same story with every metaphor and concept intact. But it isn’t. Practically every other sentence is doubled, sometimes by using synonyms and sometimes by using pronouns and negations, often just by repetition. On and on, again and again. (See what I did there? Did you?) Among other things, this style makes every character sound exactly the same despite supposed variation in their personalities and backgrounds.
On story: Plotwise, it’s Little Shop of Horrors x Invasion of the Body Snatchers: As a small plant, our Audrey consumed a small child and took her place. And insisted ever since that she was the vanguard of an alien invasion, as do all the other alien plants (heh) around the world, despite being physically indistinguishable from the humans they replaced. But she actually is! Spoiler-ish discussion: Whether this is supposed to be a critique of human indifference to others’ suffering or not, it reads like the satisfied musings of a genocidaire, and even if Grant were a subtle enough writer to pull off satire, the worldbuilding would make that fail.
There are framing quotes from Wells’ War of the Worlds, including where Wells suggests that, having happily slaughtered people who were different from them, humans could hardly be surprised that Martians would treat them similarly. And Stasia, our protagonist, ends up mad at the humans for not wanting to be drained of their blood. Except some of them aren’t drained—turns out the conversion process can also occur for mature humans, some who chose it and some who (apparently) are chosen because of their political status, who retain their memories, so yay, Stasia doesn’t have to lose the human love of her life, who instead will subsist on the blood of the unlucky drained—that is, the billions of other humans. (I don’t see how the resource math works otherwise, and it sure sounded like the result in each prior invasion was “a couple hundred body-snatched versions of the originals survive.” I also can’t decide whether the fact that the plants apparently drink the blood of multiple alien worlds’ varied species is (1) a failure of basic science or (2) a claim that evolution here was directed by the plants to spec. I also set aside whether the blood has to be sapient—the plants apparently gained sapience when they drank the blood of animal aliens who arrived on the plant planet, and they seem to enjoy sapient blood best of all—setting up schemes designed to involve planets with native sapience rather than ones without it—but then there’s a scene where they happily chow down on cattle.) Stasia is blithely confident that this process will preserve the “best” of humanity, like a good colonizer.
But Stasia was also changed by the invaders’ pollen, becoming more bonded to them—biologically compelled to speciesism, compared to her earlier identification with humans. She endorses the abusers’ logic: humans forced the aliens to eat them by being mad and scared when they showed up to eat the humans. But hey, her betrayal of humanity was probably biologically based rather than the result of persuasion, because that is an awesome message to be putting out right now. (Mostly, I think this is just incoherent.)
At one point, the aliens say that if anyone had ever believed the plant children who insisted they were the vanguard of an invasion and told them not to come, they would have held off. Maybe we’re supposed to read this as obvious nonsense, but: If that’s so, there’s no clue in the text; Grant might at least have used a quote describing how Spanish conquistadors would read out announcements in Spanish and then hold that native peoples were bound thereby. If that’s not so, then this really is just sadism: The children were biologically compelled to announce that they were a vanguard, but not physically different (at the time). Nor were the children aware of anything else, so when asked for details they could not respond “the invasion will be genocide by blood-drinking plant,” which might at least have drawn further concern. Indeed, we’re told that some people did in fact believe the children’s claims, but apparently none of them ever used the magic words “please don’t eat us.” I feel like Grant’s view of the book is “Isn’t it wild to write a book from the alien invader’s perspective?” and mine is “Why would I want to read a book about the inside of a genocidaire’s head and all the excuses they give for why someone else’s suffering doesn’t count? I could just read history if I wanted that!”
From:
thanks, as always!!!
Like you, I've found The Raven Scholar to be maybe my favorite SFF of the year so far. I liked the Aaronovitch more than you did, but I think at this point it's 90% the audio that keeps me coming back. i liked both Charleses [?] more than I have most of hers, but you're, of course, totally right about the guilty pleasure of the secret fantasy. I don't know how to solve the issue though. You can just be realist and depressing or just ignore the past and do Bridgerton...or this weird anachronism where you're trying to square the circle.
I liked these Therin books much more than the first trilogy. Somehow the characters were more interesting and I'm looking forward to the conclusion.
Oh, and I've tried Palmer so many times, so your response makes me feel less weird :)
I tried Grant years ago when my older son was reading some of them and never got into her, but OMG this one sounds like a stylistic and moral mess. There are ways to maybe possibly do the villain POV interestingly (though I'd probably bounce off it at this historical moment), but this sure doesn't sound like it.
From:
Re: thanks, as always!!!
PS have you tried Jason Pargin? He used to write as David Wong.
From:
Re: thanks, as always!!!
I think I may give The Witch Road a try tonight. I've been listening to some Alastair Reynolds, but I feel I may need to read my way into that. I keep on trying the kinda hard scifi/military dudebro recs and then give up, because it's not what I want. Every once in a while it works for me, like some Tchaikovsky or Mammay's Planetside series, but usually I get bored and they linger on my phone til I run out of room and have to delete something :)
I think empty calories are just fine, but it's an issue when authors and readers pretend it's more. But we may have that discussion after Katabasis....
From:
Re: thanks, as always!!!