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Uketsu, Strange Houses: Horror novella about a house with a strange design, leading the narrator and an architect friend to theorize about the reasons behind the design—especially after they discover its possible connection to a murder, and to another house of similarly strange design. It wasn’t for me but if you like looking at strange floor plans, go for it.
Jim Butcher, Out Law: Sadly, this novella is not about Marcone and Harry Dresden getting married, but Marcone does show up, with an associate who wants to go straight but needs Harry’s help to do it. It’s exactly what you’d expect, which is comforting.
Freya Marske, Cinder House: Ella, murdered by her stepmother as collateral damage with her father, becomes a ghost, forced to do the bidding of the house’s owners (her stepmother and stepsisters). But when a witch offers her a deal, allowing her to take human form and go to three nights of festivities as the prince prepares to wed, she gets a chance to see a wider world—if her evil stepsister doesn’t destroy her for it. I thought it was a very interesting retelling.
Seanan McGuire, Through Gates of Garnet and Gold: When hungry ghosts start killing the living statues in the Halls of the Dead, a former resident of the home for wayward children comes back to ask for help. This was okay—not as much repetition as I’ve come to expect, though somewhat less of a propulsive plot as well.
Kai Butler, The Earl and the Executive: Watching a Shakespeare done with modern dress got me to thinking about science fiction as a version of that, sometimes unconscious: Just as the information-age Hamlet staging asks “wouldn’t it be interesting, and an easier way of signaling certain things to modern audiences, if we had a bunch of today’s technologies and relationships with yesterday’s patterns of thought and mores?” science fiction regularly asks “wouldn’t it be interesting if we had a bunch of currently nonexistent technologies and relationships with today’s patterns of thought and mores?” Anyway, Butler here asks that question but uses Regency distinctions between the aristocracy and everyone else, minus heteronormativity and racism, as the basis for patterns of thought/mores. It’s not … super coherent, but it is fun if you can enjoy that kind of thing (I can). The Earl has inherited a system on the brink of financial ruin; he must marry for money to save his tenants from being kicked off of their land. The executive is the rich man that the Earl mistakes for a demimondaine and enlists to tutor him in the art of wooing a rich man. But past trauma has made the executive swear never to marry! Even though the Earl is hot and smart! (We just rewatched Much Ado About Nothing; romance plots haven’t necessarily changed all that much ….)
Olga Ravn, The Employees: A series of reports from the human and humanoid staff of a spaceship that is carrying some strange objects that make people (and humanoids) feel things. It was too disconnected/hallucinatory for me.
James Islington,The Will of the Many: A Marty Stu (tragic backstory, impossibly good at everything) gets recruited to be the designated heir of a powerful Senator, in a world where people gain power by literally sucking life force out of others in a hierarchy of submission. But he’s also recruited by dangerous rebels. Refreshingly, his desire not to be part of this didn’t read to me like rote resistance to the Call: he had a well-articulated specific desire to be out of the way of trouble. Anyway, he does super well at magic school, of course, with lots of court politics and betrayals, and a decent twist near the end that made me interested to read the next volume, even if I’m going to be smirking a bit as I do.
James Islington, The Strength of the Few: Marty Stu develops problems in [spoilers for the end of the first book]. Without saying more, I do think it’s really interesting to have “who’s right?” genuinely uncertain—which sacrifices are justified to save more people than are lost, and how do you know?
Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry: Well, of course, right? The show is a pretty faithful adaptation, and especially since I saw the show first I like it better. A lot of the dialogue is even the same, though I think the show improved on it in a few places. Anyway, forbidden hockey love is fun, as are the glimpses of the Steve/Bucky AU that was apparently the first book.
Vajra Chandrasekera, Rakesfall: Annelid and Leveret (sometimes their names) reincarnate over the ages, starting (?) with a Sri Lankan civil war. They move through bodies both human and mechanical, chasing each other and looking for answers. It was too dreamy and disconnected for me, though that may also come from my lack of familiarity with the philosophy behind reincarnation combined with my disinterest in extended sequences where skins are removed (painlessly, possibly metaphorically) and skinless people walk around doing things.
Isaac R. Fellman, The Two Doctors Górski: An American grad student comes to the UK to study magic because she’s been blackballed by her perfidious ex-lover/ex-supervisor. Unfortunately, the only professor who’d take her is notoriously abusive, perhaps at least in part because he split himself in two to remove traits he didn’t want but the removed homunculus left him and is now living independently in London. I didn’t like this more than Katabasis, sorry—I thought it was very similar in its identification of how academic abuse works in gendered ways, including how senior female faculty are not necessarily on younger students’ side, and also similar in not actually spending any time telling us exactly what the protagonist was studying beyond “magic.” Now I really want someone super into systems-building, like Robert Jackson Bennett, to write an academic magic book for the college- and grad school-age crew.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, The Salvage Crew: I was tipped over towards this because the audiobook is narrated by Nathan Fillion, who does a good job of the POV of a human-turned-AI-ship in charge of a small crew doing salvage on a hostile planet. A colony ship crashed and they’re supposed to recover the usable parts. But things go bad pretty quickly, from hostile fauna to human raiders to something unknown and even more disturbing. It was fine but not engaging enough for me to continue.
Barbara Truelove, Of Monsters and Mainframes: There are some interesting variations on Murderbot buried in this story about a ship that seems to be cursed—monsters keep getting on board and killing all the human passengers. The ship’s inability to “see” visuals, and need to do pixel-by-pixel comparisons with images in memory to figure out what she’s looking at, is a good example (albeit one that seems technically unlikely given what I know about image recognition). But I didn’t come to care about a single character; it didn’t help that every person narrating the audiobook decided “histrionic” was the right tone.
Jim Hines, Slayers of Old:Look, it’s a BtVS rewrite where the characters are all old and cranky. The main players: A wizard bonded to his house who’s slipping a bit, a half-succubus trying to maintain a relationship with her mostly-human grandkids, and a former Slayer of Artemis who rejected the old men of the Council when she was much younger. They’ve both moved into the wizard’s house and now run a small bookshop out of it. When new danger comes to town, they have to figure out how to save the world … again. “Maybe it was a rogue Guardian from the Council or an obsessed one-shot villain from my past that I’d forgotten about or an evil alternate-universe Jenny Winter who dressed in all black with too much makeup and those clichéd violet streaks in her hair to make sure everyone knew how rebellious she was. No, the odds of that happening again were astronomical.” You know if it’s the kind of thing you like. It was for me.
Neal Shusterman, Scythe: YA. Humans have conquered death but not space travel, and they keep having babies, so Scythes randomly kill people permanently to slow down population growth. Two teens become semi-willing apprentices to a Scythe who is worried about corruption in the ranks. It’s well-done, with some interesting thoughts about the psychic damage of “killing” someone even when they’ll be revived.
Jim Butcher, Out Law: Sadly, this novella is not about Marcone and Harry Dresden getting married, but Marcone does show up, with an associate who wants to go straight but needs Harry’s help to do it. It’s exactly what you’d expect, which is comforting.
Freya Marske, Cinder House: Ella, murdered by her stepmother as collateral damage with her father, becomes a ghost, forced to do the bidding of the house’s owners (her stepmother and stepsisters). But when a witch offers her a deal, allowing her to take human form and go to three nights of festivities as the prince prepares to wed, she gets a chance to see a wider world—if her evil stepsister doesn’t destroy her for it. I thought it was a very interesting retelling.
Seanan McGuire, Through Gates of Garnet and Gold: When hungry ghosts start killing the living statues in the Halls of the Dead, a former resident of the home for wayward children comes back to ask for help. This was okay—not as much repetition as I’ve come to expect, though somewhat less of a propulsive plot as well.
Kai Butler, The Earl and the Executive: Watching a Shakespeare done with modern dress got me to thinking about science fiction as a version of that, sometimes unconscious: Just as the information-age Hamlet staging asks “wouldn’t it be interesting, and an easier way of signaling certain things to modern audiences, if we had a bunch of today’s technologies and relationships with yesterday’s patterns of thought and mores?” science fiction regularly asks “wouldn’t it be interesting if we had a bunch of currently nonexistent technologies and relationships with today’s patterns of thought and mores?” Anyway, Butler here asks that question but uses Regency distinctions between the aristocracy and everyone else, minus heteronormativity and racism, as the basis for patterns of thought/mores. It’s not … super coherent, but it is fun if you can enjoy that kind of thing (I can). The Earl has inherited a system on the brink of financial ruin; he must marry for money to save his tenants from being kicked off of their land. The executive is the rich man that the Earl mistakes for a demimondaine and enlists to tutor him in the art of wooing a rich man. But past trauma has made the executive swear never to marry! Even though the Earl is hot and smart! (We just rewatched Much Ado About Nothing; romance plots haven’t necessarily changed all that much ….)
Olga Ravn, The Employees: A series of reports from the human and humanoid staff of a spaceship that is carrying some strange objects that make people (and humanoids) feel things. It was too disconnected/hallucinatory for me.
James Islington,The Will of the Many: A Marty Stu (tragic backstory, impossibly good at everything) gets recruited to be the designated heir of a powerful Senator, in a world where people gain power by literally sucking life force out of others in a hierarchy of submission. But he’s also recruited by dangerous rebels. Refreshingly, his desire not to be part of this didn’t read to me like rote resistance to the Call: he had a well-articulated specific desire to be out of the way of trouble. Anyway, he does super well at magic school, of course, with lots of court politics and betrayals, and a decent twist near the end that made me interested to read the next volume, even if I’m going to be smirking a bit as I do.
James Islington, The Strength of the Few: Marty Stu develops problems in [spoilers for the end of the first book]. Without saying more, I do think it’s really interesting to have “who’s right?” genuinely uncertain—which sacrifices are justified to save more people than are lost, and how do you know?
Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry: Well, of course, right? The show is a pretty faithful adaptation, and especially since I saw the show first I like it better. A lot of the dialogue is even the same, though I think the show improved on it in a few places. Anyway, forbidden hockey love is fun, as are the glimpses of the Steve/Bucky AU that was apparently the first book.
Vajra Chandrasekera, Rakesfall: Annelid and Leveret (sometimes their names) reincarnate over the ages, starting (?) with a Sri Lankan civil war. They move through bodies both human and mechanical, chasing each other and looking for answers. It was too dreamy and disconnected for me, though that may also come from my lack of familiarity with the philosophy behind reincarnation combined with my disinterest in extended sequences where skins are removed (painlessly, possibly metaphorically) and skinless people walk around doing things.
Isaac R. Fellman, The Two Doctors Górski: An American grad student comes to the UK to study magic because she’s been blackballed by her perfidious ex-lover/ex-supervisor. Unfortunately, the only professor who’d take her is notoriously abusive, perhaps at least in part because he split himself in two to remove traits he didn’t want but the removed homunculus left him and is now living independently in London. I didn’t like this more than Katabasis, sorry—I thought it was very similar in its identification of how academic abuse works in gendered ways, including how senior female faculty are not necessarily on younger students’ side, and also similar in not actually spending any time telling us exactly what the protagonist was studying beyond “magic.” Now I really want someone super into systems-building, like Robert Jackson Bennett, to write an academic magic book for the college- and grad school-age crew.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, The Salvage Crew: I was tipped over towards this because the audiobook is narrated by Nathan Fillion, who does a good job of the POV of a human-turned-AI-ship in charge of a small crew doing salvage on a hostile planet. A colony ship crashed and they’re supposed to recover the usable parts. But things go bad pretty quickly, from hostile fauna to human raiders to something unknown and even more disturbing. It was fine but not engaging enough for me to continue.
Barbara Truelove, Of Monsters and Mainframes: There are some interesting variations on Murderbot buried in this story about a ship that seems to be cursed—monsters keep getting on board and killing all the human passengers. The ship’s inability to “see” visuals, and need to do pixel-by-pixel comparisons with images in memory to figure out what she’s looking at, is a good example (albeit one that seems technically unlikely given what I know about image recognition). But I didn’t come to care about a single character; it didn’t help that every person narrating the audiobook decided “histrionic” was the right tone.
Jim Hines, Slayers of Old:Look, it’s a BtVS rewrite where the characters are all old and cranky. The main players: A wizard bonded to his house who’s slipping a bit, a half-succubus trying to maintain a relationship with her mostly-human grandkids, and a former Slayer of Artemis who rejected the old men of the Council when she was much younger. They’ve both moved into the wizard’s house and now run a small bookshop out of it. When new danger comes to town, they have to figure out how to save the world … again. “Maybe it was a rogue Guardian from the Council or an obsessed one-shot villain from my past that I’d forgotten about or an evil alternate-universe Jenny Winter who dressed in all black with too much makeup and those clichéd violet streaks in her hair to make sure everyone knew how rebellious she was. No, the odds of that happening again were astronomical.” You know if it’s the kind of thing you like. It was for me.
Neal Shusterman, Scythe: YA. Humans have conquered death but not space travel, and they keep having babies, so Scythes randomly kill people permanently to slow down population growth. Two teens become semi-willing apprentices to a Scythe who is worried about corruption in the ranks. It’s well-done, with some interesting thoughts about the psychic damage of “killing” someone even when they’ll be revived.
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Loved your review of the Butler--I read both those books a while back and found them fun mostly bc I love Regency and scifi and mm.
Islington drove me nuts though I still plan to read the second book. I just really found the basic system so ineffective that I could never even get into the school competition.
And i'd kill for some Bennett writing Dark Academia. As you may remember I hated Katabasis and I bounced off Fellman hard before so I never gave it a try (that AO3 reference was too painful :) But man I'd love me some Bennett world building and prose that understands the reader to be smart and doesn't need to prove anything....
I have decided to read the Heated Rivalry books as one fanfic version of the show. (esp after just finishing The Long Game which...I hope Tierney adapts/rethinks wholesale). Also, I get to use my new icon so I had to say something about that :)