![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Hugh Howey, Wool: Set in the Silo—a dystopian society in which people live entirely underground and the death penalty means being sent to “clean” outside, where a poisoned landscape quickly kills the cleaners. When the new sheriff starts to ask questions about why the previous sheriff volunteered to clean, she’s thrown out—but somehow she survives (this is explained sensibly) and discovers that her Silo is one of many. I have questions about how the TV adaptation is going to handle various plot points not yet touched on in the show. It was ok, but not particularly inspiring.
Stephanie Burgis, Wooing the Witch Queen: The abused Archduke of a duchy at the fringes of the Empire, about to be assassinated by his father-in-law, escapes instead to the castle of one of the Empire’s strongest enemies. He discovers how much they hate the “Archduke” for all the evils of his regent, but is mistaken for a wizard librarian and becomes caught up in cataloging the witch queen’s library. Oh no, they are both very sexy and misunderstood! It was deeply silly and quite pleasant to read; there are clearly other volumes coming, one het and one f/f (at least). I haven’t yet decided whether I can suspend my disbelief (re: how power in human societies works, half-medieval/half-1850s setting, etc.) for the froth of subsequent books.
R.F. Kuang, Katabasis:In the 1980s, an ambitious magical scholar at Cambridge goes to Hell to rescue her (hated) advisor, so she can get a job. Her main rival attaches himself to her in the journey, and they travel through different levels of Hell all reflecting academic sins. The fury of The Poppy War shook me; Babel didn’t work as well; this is somewhere in the middle. It’s interesting to consider that the story wouldn’t actually work if it was set now—the institutionalized sexism is not gone, but the manifestations—and in particular, the lack of formal support structures for students abused by professors (whether effective or not)—were really different then, which I can say because this actually was the period in which I was educated. I remember thinking pretty much exactly as the protagonist did: Discrimination had mostly been defeated, and if you were good enough, it didn’t matter, so women who were good enough could just ignore it.
Qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division: Ideas that disappear, that cannot be remembered, that erase the people who investigate them are at the center of this story, which because of problems of memory reads both like a single story and like a handful of overlapping stories about the people who fight monsters that can only kill you if you know about them. Well-done if you won’t be frustrated by all the gesturing at horrors we cannot comprehend.
Mia Tsai, The Memory Hunters: A climate-change-ravaged Appalachia has pockets of thriving communities, anchored by temples and museums that are both sustained by “memory diving”—using mycelium to access human memories from blood. When Key, the heir apparent to her temple, discovers a dangerous memory on a trip for the museum she loves, her life and that of her guardian—the person who protects her physically and will kill her if a person from her memories takes over her body—change forever. It moved briskly, though I have worldbuilding questions.
John Scalzi, R. F. Kuang, Peng Shepherd, Kaliane Bradley, Olivie Blake, P. Djèlí Clark, The Time Traveler’s Passport: Six short stories about time travel. My favorite was Clark’s, a story about what a person like Elon Musk would try to do with time travel and a young Black woman who knows things should be different.
Francesca Serritella, Ghosts of Harvard: Kady is a freshman at Harvard, where she went in search of answers about her brother: He died by suicide as a junior, a few years after he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. But at Harvard, Kady starts hearing voices herself—and they seem to be voices of Harvard’s dead: an enslaved woman and two male students, one of whom has a famous name. They complicate her investigations, which might implicate the living. This book made me almost unbearably anxious because, even when Kady believed she was hearing real ghosts, her experiences were not meaningfully different from those of someone with auditory hallucinations, and the people around her understandably reacted as if they were hallucinations. I don’t know if it was good, and I found the ending too mushy, but while I was reading it the book did keep me in a state of dread.
V. E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic: Kell is one of the few remaining people who can travel between alternate worlds (Londons, specifically). He serves the ruling monarchs of his London, but does a little smuggling on the side. This lands him in deep trouble when he unwittingly smuggles a forbidden relic from a lost London; in the course of his adventures, he encounters petty thief Delilah Bard, who really wants it to be her adventure. It was fine!
Stephanie Burgis, Wooing the Witch Queen: The abused Archduke of a duchy at the fringes of the Empire, about to be assassinated by his father-in-law, escapes instead to the castle of one of the Empire’s strongest enemies. He discovers how much they hate the “Archduke” for all the evils of his regent, but is mistaken for a wizard librarian and becomes caught up in cataloging the witch queen’s library. Oh no, they are both very sexy and misunderstood! It was deeply silly and quite pleasant to read; there are clearly other volumes coming, one het and one f/f (at least). I haven’t yet decided whether I can suspend my disbelief (re: how power in human societies works, half-medieval/half-1850s setting, etc.) for the froth of subsequent books.
R.F. Kuang, Katabasis:In the 1980s, an ambitious magical scholar at Cambridge goes to Hell to rescue her (hated) advisor, so she can get a job. Her main rival attaches himself to her in the journey, and they travel through different levels of Hell all reflecting academic sins. The fury of The Poppy War shook me; Babel didn’t work as well; this is somewhere in the middle. It’s interesting to consider that the story wouldn’t actually work if it was set now—the institutionalized sexism is not gone, but the manifestations—and in particular, the lack of formal support structures for students abused by professors (whether effective or not)—were really different then, which I can say because this actually was the period in which I was educated. I remember thinking pretty much exactly as the protagonist did: Discrimination had mostly been defeated, and if you were good enough, it didn’t matter, so women who were good enough could just ignore it.
Qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division: Ideas that disappear, that cannot be remembered, that erase the people who investigate them are at the center of this story, which because of problems of memory reads both like a single story and like a handful of overlapping stories about the people who fight monsters that can only kill you if you know about them. Well-done if you won’t be frustrated by all the gesturing at horrors we cannot comprehend.
Mia Tsai, The Memory Hunters: A climate-change-ravaged Appalachia has pockets of thriving communities, anchored by temples and museums that are both sustained by “memory diving”—using mycelium to access human memories from blood. When Key, the heir apparent to her temple, discovers a dangerous memory on a trip for the museum she loves, her life and that of her guardian—the person who protects her physically and will kill her if a person from her memories takes over her body—change forever. It moved briskly, though I have worldbuilding questions.
John Scalzi, R. F. Kuang, Peng Shepherd, Kaliane Bradley, Olivie Blake, P. Djèlí Clark, The Time Traveler’s Passport: Six short stories about time travel. My favorite was Clark’s, a story about what a person like Elon Musk would try to do with time travel and a young Black woman who knows things should be different.
Francesca Serritella, Ghosts of Harvard: Kady is a freshman at Harvard, where she went in search of answers about her brother: He died by suicide as a junior, a few years after he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. But at Harvard, Kady starts hearing voices herself—and they seem to be voices of Harvard’s dead: an enslaved woman and two male students, one of whom has a famous name. They complicate her investigations, which might implicate the living. This book made me almost unbearably anxious because, even when Kady believed she was hearing real ghosts, her experiences were not meaningfully different from those of someone with auditory hallucinations, and the people around her understandably reacted as if they were hallucinations. I don’t know if it was good, and I found the ending too mushy, but while I was reading it the book did keep me in a state of dread.
V. E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic: Kell is one of the few remaining people who can travel between alternate worlds (Londons, specifically). He serves the ruling monarchs of his London, but does a little smuggling on the side. This lands him in deep trouble when he unwittingly smuggles a forbidden relic from a lost London; in the course of his adventures, he encounters petty thief Delilah Bard, who really wants it to be her adventure. It was fine!
From:
no subject
From:
no subject