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Sarah Rees Brennan, All Hail Chaos: Volume two: Rae struggles to deal with the Emperor she betrayed to his death, even though he still seems enamored of her. As more forces join in contention for rulership and more potential/past narratives come out, chaos is the right description. This volume didn’t work quite as well for me as the first; characters generating versions of well-known lines seemed reaching for the fun of recognition instead of organically referential, even with the excuse of having a story frame whose “author” could know what Star Wars was. I am invested enough to read the final volume, though!
Cameron Reed, What We Are Seeking: Earth humans have given themselves over to the aiyi, with godlike powers to destroy that they use on other groups of humans who commit disfavored acts. Other humans live on spaceships with substantial modifications and a fair amount of contempt for the planet-bound. A doctor from a culture that doesn’t have marriage is dumped by a ship, along with a translator who’s had his brain modified to communicate with aliens, on a planet with strange biology that might include intelligent life. The human colonists there are under threat from Earth and divided among themselves, coming from two different patriarchal cultures. I’m not even done with the setup, but it’s a brilliant exploration of different kinds of culture clashes, cultural changes, and how one kind of openness can close off others, as well as of how people make lives even while being harmed by their cultures. The characters all have different perspectives and jump off the page; the one who says “If you try to leave me here alone I will cut your throat to have your corpse’s company” could say nothing else and no one else in the book could say it.
Daryl Gregory, The Porcelain Sisters: Ruth Winslow and her sister Isabel, literally a haunted porcelain doll, try to fix Isabel’s accident-damaged body and learn more about their own past and their mother’s. But as with any Gregory book, that description is really not indicative of the pleasures of the book, which I would call Pulp Fiction-style horror-inflected fantasy: redheaded unkillable French assassins, busybody neighbors who can rock a baseball bat, criminal animals with translator henchpeople, etc.
Bob Proehl, The Nobody People: Serial-numbers-filed-off X-Men story (complimentary). People who “resonate” have various powers, physical and psychic. Society reacts predictably badly, with mob violence and attempts to register and corral them. I didn’t love that a main POV character—a journalist who’s also a father of a very powerful daughter—was a classic “alcoholic journalist whose obsession with the truth costs him his family” type, but if you like the X-Men of the first few films, this may scratch the itch.
Meg Elison, Foundling Fathers: Elison describes this as a satire, which seems right. Four clones of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Adams (Hamilton having been eliminated in utero for, seemingly, having nonwhite ancestry) are being raised on an isolated island, believing that it’s 1750 and free to sexually exploit the nonwhite servants while being educated as future leaders. Shockingly, it goes badly in some predictable and unpredictable ways. Trying not to write spoilers: the scope of the narrative is smaller than you might have expected from the description, which is part of the point.
Kemi Ashing-Giwa, The Splinter in the Sky: A young woman from a culture violently colonized by an empire that considers her religiously impure and culturally inferior ends up as a hostage in the main Imperial palace. Both the empire’s enemies and the Emperor herself want to use her. It leans a lot on colonialism is bad, actually, and also on the main character being really attractive to powerful women.
Matt Dinniman, A Parade of Horribles:This is still fun to read because of the vibes—crazy shit keeps happening, new and confusing “explanations” for the various levers of power in Dungeon World pop up and disappear, and poor Donut has a difficult floor. I’m interested to see whether Carl will be forced to take on new shapes in the next book.
Martha Wells, Platform Decay: Murderbot is on a rescue mission for different members of Mensah’s family this time (they really need a serious talking-to about approaching the Corporate Rim). It’s also got some new emotional support software. It’s exactly what I wanted from a new Murderbot adventure, with bonus Three doing things in the background (sometimes literally) with potentially large long-term effects.
Robert Jackson Bennett, A Trade of Blood: Another Ana and Din mystery, this time set in an agricultural area where two powerful, feuding families control cattle and cattle feed. This time there’s a lot of fungus, as well as figures from Din’s past. It strikes me that what makes this Sherlock Holmes homage work is that it’s also set at a time of great technological innovation and imperial anxiety.
Adrian Tchaikovsky,Lives of Bitter Rain: Tyrant Philosophers novella. Angilly, a Pal orphaned because she was the child of Pal soldiers, experiences various losses and compromises on her way to the circumstances in which we find her in an earlier book. This is another look at how tyranny corrupts individual goodness and ambition.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head: I read this series chronologically backwards, but they’re independent enough that it’s not a huge deal, albeit a little depressing about the moments of hope. Mars is under construction; Jimmy is one of the biomodified humans altered to survive in low atmosphere, and a drug addict to survive the grimness. Low on cash, he hosts some illegal data—that turns out to be the consciousness of a dead cyborg bear, a rights activist back on earth. A relentless sociopath, happy to put hardware in the heads of humans and Bioforms alike to require their subservience, is the main menace here, on top of the fact that Earth’s climate is fucked.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Dogs of War: Rex is a Bioform dog, with near-human-level intelligence but a digital Collar to require his obedience. After one massacre, a dispute among his human handlers leaves him and his team on their own. It’s somewhat more episodic than the other books in the series as Rex passes through various stages of an existence spent figuring out what he wants to do given the constraints he faces.
T. Kingfisher, Wolf Worm: More crawly things horror! In 1899, a down-on-her-luck illustrator arrives at a remote Southern home to sketch bugs for the naturalist who owns the place. But he’s got secrets, and there are parasites in the woods. It’s what Kingfisher does in this vein—if you can’t handle screwworms, don’t read this.
Charles Soule & Ryan Brown, Eight Billion Genies:Suddenly every person on Earth old enough to reason gets one wish. Genies can interpret wishes creatively and sometimes do. This leads to a fast-then-slow population decline, as well as interesting wish harvesting schemes. As the story moves further out from the initial event, it becomes somewhat less interesting, and most of the death, especially the large-scale death, is offscreen, so we don’t ever find out about how competing genocidal wishes worked (but maybe they just did). My spouse thinks it’s about AI; it is definitely about how much easier it is to destroy things than to build them.
Cameron Reed, What We Are Seeking: Earth humans have given themselves over to the aiyi, with godlike powers to destroy that they use on other groups of humans who commit disfavored acts. Other humans live on spaceships with substantial modifications and a fair amount of contempt for the planet-bound. A doctor from a culture that doesn’t have marriage is dumped by a ship, along with a translator who’s had his brain modified to communicate with aliens, on a planet with strange biology that might include intelligent life. The human colonists there are under threat from Earth and divided among themselves, coming from two different patriarchal cultures. I’m not even done with the setup, but it’s a brilliant exploration of different kinds of culture clashes, cultural changes, and how one kind of openness can close off others, as well as of how people make lives even while being harmed by their cultures. The characters all have different perspectives and jump off the page; the one who says “If you try to leave me here alone I will cut your throat to have your corpse’s company” could say nothing else and no one else in the book could say it.
Daryl Gregory, The Porcelain Sisters: Ruth Winslow and her sister Isabel, literally a haunted porcelain doll, try to fix Isabel’s accident-damaged body and learn more about their own past and their mother’s. But as with any Gregory book, that description is really not indicative of the pleasures of the book, which I would call Pulp Fiction-style horror-inflected fantasy: redheaded unkillable French assassins, busybody neighbors who can rock a baseball bat, criminal animals with translator henchpeople, etc.
Bob Proehl, The Nobody People: Serial-numbers-filed-off X-Men story (complimentary). People who “resonate” have various powers, physical and psychic. Society reacts predictably badly, with mob violence and attempts to register and corral them. I didn’t love that a main POV character—a journalist who’s also a father of a very powerful daughter—was a classic “alcoholic journalist whose obsession with the truth costs him his family” type, but if you like the X-Men of the first few films, this may scratch the itch.
Meg Elison, Foundling Fathers: Elison describes this as a satire, which seems right. Four clones of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Adams (Hamilton having been eliminated in utero for, seemingly, having nonwhite ancestry) are being raised on an isolated island, believing that it’s 1750 and free to sexually exploit the nonwhite servants while being educated as future leaders. Shockingly, it goes badly in some predictable and unpredictable ways. Trying not to write spoilers: the scope of the narrative is smaller than you might have expected from the description, which is part of the point.
Kemi Ashing-Giwa, The Splinter in the Sky: A young woman from a culture violently colonized by an empire that considers her religiously impure and culturally inferior ends up as a hostage in the main Imperial palace. Both the empire’s enemies and the Emperor herself want to use her. It leans a lot on colonialism is bad, actually, and also on the main character being really attractive to powerful women.
Matt Dinniman, A Parade of Horribles:This is still fun to read because of the vibes—crazy shit keeps happening, new and confusing “explanations” for the various levers of power in Dungeon World pop up and disappear, and poor Donut has a difficult floor. I’m interested to see whether Carl will be forced to take on new shapes in the next book.
Martha Wells, Platform Decay: Murderbot is on a rescue mission for different members of Mensah’s family this time (they really need a serious talking-to about approaching the Corporate Rim). It’s also got some new emotional support software. It’s exactly what I wanted from a new Murderbot adventure, with bonus Three doing things in the background (sometimes literally) with potentially large long-term effects.
Robert Jackson Bennett, A Trade of Blood: Another Ana and Din mystery, this time set in an agricultural area where two powerful, feuding families control cattle and cattle feed. This time there’s a lot of fungus, as well as figures from Din’s past. It strikes me that what makes this Sherlock Holmes homage work is that it’s also set at a time of great technological innovation and imperial anxiety.
Adrian Tchaikovsky,Lives of Bitter Rain: Tyrant Philosophers novella. Angilly, a Pal orphaned because she was the child of Pal soldiers, experiences various losses and compromises on her way to the circumstances in which we find her in an earlier book. This is another look at how tyranny corrupts individual goodness and ambition.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Bear Head: I read this series chronologically backwards, but they’re independent enough that it’s not a huge deal, albeit a little depressing about the moments of hope. Mars is under construction; Jimmy is one of the biomodified humans altered to survive in low atmosphere, and a drug addict to survive the grimness. Low on cash, he hosts some illegal data—that turns out to be the consciousness of a dead cyborg bear, a rights activist back on earth. A relentless sociopath, happy to put hardware in the heads of humans and Bioforms alike to require their subservience, is the main menace here, on top of the fact that Earth’s climate is fucked.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Dogs of War: Rex is a Bioform dog, with near-human-level intelligence but a digital Collar to require his obedience. After one massacre, a dispute among his human handlers leaves him and his team on their own. It’s somewhat more episodic than the other books in the series as Rex passes through various stages of an existence spent figuring out what he wants to do given the constraints he faces.
T. Kingfisher, Wolf Worm: More crawly things horror! In 1899, a down-on-her-luck illustrator arrives at a remote Southern home to sketch bugs for the naturalist who owns the place. But he’s got secrets, and there are parasites in the woods. It’s what Kingfisher does in this vein—if you can’t handle screwworms, don’t read this.
Charles Soule & Ryan Brown, Eight Billion Genies:Suddenly every person on Earth old enough to reason gets one wish. Genies can interpret wishes creatively and sometimes do. This leads to a fast-then-slow population decline, as well as interesting wish harvesting schemes. As the story moves further out from the initial event, it becomes somewhat less interesting, and most of the death, especially the large-scale death, is offscreen, so we don’t ever find out about how competing genocidal wishes worked (but maybe they just did). My spouse thinks it’s about AI; it is definitely about how much easier it is to destroy things than to build them.
From:
no subject
I thought that given only one wish per person,
people would make wishes like
"change the carbon levels in earth's atmosphere to what they were in 500 AD"
"cure everyone with disease X"
"make all humans live healthy lives to age 150"
"make it so no one with a uterus can become pregnant unless they genuinely want to become pregnant"
"bring back extinct species X"
"bring endangered species Y back to sustainable population levels"
"reverse the desertification in area Z"
or they would make wishes for fame and fortune for themselves.
From:
no subject
"make it so that human beings can only form opinions about other humans by their actions/behaviour, not by their religion/ethnic group/language/skin colour"
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject