Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant: Second volume in the series featuring Baru Cormorant, taken from her home to serve the empire that conquered it and that despises her for her racial inferiority and her tribadism. I found it violent and confusing and more interested in jerking Baru and others around than I was in following the twists of the story.
Ilona Andrews, Blood Heir: Kate’s adopted daughter, much changed by her encounter with Moloch, returns to Atlanta to save Kate’s life, followed by a prophecy that if Kate sees her then Kate will definitely die. Lots of politics and magic ensue, and a bit of romantic longing. It’s what I wanted without requiring things in Kate’s life to get undone, which was nice.
Tobias Buckell, Shoggoths in Traffic: Short stories; the zombie pandemic one where we all die because racism was a little on the nose for me, though the fact that it was written in 2018 suggests that I need to keep reading. I preferred the retelling of The Emperor’s New Clothes where the news reports on the controversy and doesn’t judge. Buckell’s interest in complicity, including complicity with destroying the world as well as in smaller crimes, shows in various ways.
James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Falls: Final novel, they say, in the Expanse series. The core characters are older and changed, especially Amos, except in the ways he’s exactly the same (he’s not very communicative on the matter). Holden and Nagata do what they do—him rigid insistence and her subtle politics—and they try to deal with the fact that old gods are trying to kill them.
Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow: Zetian volunteers as a concubine for the kaiju-fighting mechs that keep her country safe; concubines are routinely killed by the male pilots who consume their minds as part of piloting the mechs. But Zetian plans to kill the man who killed her beloved older sister. Among other things, she discovers that, in a mech, her bound feet don’t make it all but impossible for her to walk. But her plans are disrupted when she’s assigned to an equally disliked male pilot—a murderer who is allowed to pilot only because he’s stronger by a lot than anyone else. When he can’t kill her either, they become central to a planned attack—but still despised. I saw someone say that this seemed very second-wave feminist, in that the bad guys are just outright willing to harm women, and the society of which they are a part, because of misogyny, and that seems correct. Enough interesting threads were left hanging that I’d pick up the sequel.
C.M. Waggoner, The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry: Fantasy starring a gutter firewitch who’s a bit too fond of gin. In an attempt to make the rent, she joins a crew of witches protecting a fine young lady before her marriage, one of whom is a respectable clanner who might be a great meal ticket for her. But things get complicated, both murderously and romantically, and she has to somehow infiltrate a drugmaking operation and make the very stuff that her mother is addicted to, in hopes of being able to save those she loves (and some she’s not so fond of). It’s a lot of fun, and includes a skeletal mouse named Buttons who is both cuter and more horrifying than he sounds like.
Songs of Love and Death: All-Original Tales of Star-Crossed Love, ed. George R.R. Martin: Contributions from big names including Peter Beagle, Jim Butcher, Marjorie Liu, Diana Gabaldon (different time traveler than Outlander, same idea), Robin Hobb, and Neil Gaiman, but I didn’t feel most of them. The Gaiman story was a nice chilly reversal of the imaginary girlfriend trope—a man’s high school imaginary girlfriend starts trying to reconnect with him.
Jacqueline Carey, Miranda and Caliban: A retelling from the perspective of the two titular characters. I found I didn’t like it as much as her LoTR retelling; patriarchy/colonialism has and keeps the upper hand throughout the novel, so be prepared.
Charles Stross, The Traders’ War: Second book in the Merchant Princes revised series; Miriam aka Helge is not settling well into her medieval princess role, instead getting into various trouble that leaves her much more powerless than a standard protagonist. But lots of politics are happening in all three worlds and she gets caught up in all of them. Also, various wars break out and there is a forced pregnancy (via reproductive technology). It is interesting but tends in the direction of “humans inevitably screw things up one way or another.”
Hark! The Herald Angels Scream, ed. Christopher Golden: Really more winter-themed horror than entirely Christmas-themed; a number of stories using the short story format effectively to end just as or before the really awful thing happens, like Scott Smith’s Christmas in Barcelona (child death). I disliked the last story by Sarah Pinborough, The Hangman’s Bride—it’s about the ghost of a murdered Japanese woman who ends up saving a white woman to be the new bride of her widower in Victorian England, so the function of the nonwhite horror trope is to give the surviving white people a happily ever after.
Nancy Kress, The Eleventh Gate: In the distant future, humanity is scattered across a few different planets, none of them Earth; some are run by libertarians (controlled by a single family because that’s how power works) and others are run by a corporate nanny state, with only Polyglot having something like democracy. When the discovery of a new gate between worlds, promising access to a new planet, destabilizes things, war breaks out and internal dissent threatens to take down both non-Polyglot regimes. It’s got Kress’s standard pessimism about governance as well as a lot of palace intrigue and some sf on the nature of consciousness.
Eliot Schrefer, The Darkness Outside Us: Two teens on a mission to Titan to save one’s sister start to wonder if something else is going on, since the ship’s AI won’t tell them certain things and there are certain oddities in the setup. What is actually happening is disclosed midway through and the rest is working out what to do with it—this is a book largely about how to accept unmoveable constraints and plainly-seen-in-front-of-you losses. Also a teen romance, though how romantic it is to connect with the only other person in your world is perhaps debatable; the protagonists are from two contending cultures and have both mistrust and a bit of misperception to get past.
Steven Brust, The Baron of Magister Valley: On further thought, I still find the mocking-old-fashioned style of “I want to know X,” “Oh, you want to know X?” “I have hardly wanted anything else for a week now” more unpleasant to read than not. The basic story is of a young man betrayed and imprisoned in a secret jail for hundreds of years, while he learns all the skills and his fiancee and her brother, orphaned in the same course of shenanigans, struggle to survive. You may recognize the outlines from the Count of Monte Cristo, but it is very integrated into Dragaeran lingo.
Charles Stross, Halting State: In a sort-of-independent Scotland, a bank robbery in a gameworld draws the police into something far stranger, with spies, people pretending to be spies in a game, and the occasional murder. Packed with Stross’s love of tech and bureaucracy, but not really him at his best.
The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea ed. Ellen Datlow, authors include Michael Marshall Smith (zombie-ish horror), Seanan McGuire (not super interesting family revenge story), and Stephen Graham Jones (deserted island variant). Alyssa Wong’s What My Mother Left Me is a great variation on an old story, and Bradley Denton’s A Ship of the South Wind seems a bit of a stretch—there’s no sea, only a former sailor on the plains—but it’s a pretty good horror story nonetheless.
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