#sffbookclub

This was the #SFFBookClub book for February 2025. I am honestly a little surprised that it got a sequel. While I enjoyed it, I think this book suffers a little from being in the shadow of such a strong first book. It brings back nearly every character, although rooted in one world rather than worldhopping, and as such you really need to have read the first book to enjoy this one. The pitch for this book read almost as a murder investigation, but with foreknowledge from book one, it seemed incredibly obvious what the cause could be. This could just be a case of incorrect expectations on my part that the book would have more of a mystery element.

Thematically, I'm here for this story about justice and tearing down borders that separate the hoarding and exploitative rich from the poor. Here for the anger about how these rich people will casually break promises and ignore consequences for undesirable people. This book ends up feeling extremely quotable, but in doing so sometimes come off as didactic and telling more than it shows, even while I am nodding my head in agreement.

One thing I think this book does really well is having the main character from the previous book show up here as a foil to the new main character Scales. We get to see ways in which Scales and Cara are very different people and the biases that Cara brought to the world. It also means that we get to see the runners and Nik Nik in a much different light than the first book too. Cara could have stolen the show, and the book manages to make it not about her.

This is the step some civilians don't understand, the step Cara rejects: We can only make good on our promise of protection if there's blood on our hands. We can't bluff. The city only speaks the language of power, and we have to speak it right back for them to listen.

A minor observation, but I feel like there's a psychological shift in recent fiction (or in me) from "violence is never the answer" to "existing power will only respect violence". Babel (and its explicit subtitle) is certainly example of this too.

I read this book five years ago, and thought I'd refresh myself before the #SFFBookClub read of the sequel this month. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoyed this story and world. The writing has a brusque, hardboiled tone from the cynical point of view of a survivor, and it really works for this particular kind of book.

This is a multiverse travelling story, where there is technology that can send people between similar worlds, but only safely to ones where their "other selves" are not alive. Cara is somebody who has fought to survive her whole life and thus has few other selves alive, so she gets a job as a "traverser" to be sent to other worlds to collect information. Because it deals with worldwalking between closely related worlds rather than wildly different ones (like Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series), it gets the opportunity to explore the same characters in different timelines where their lives had taken different paths.

The post-apocalyptic wasteland locale of this novel is split into the wealthy folks of Wiley City living behind a wall (literally and metaphorically the airquotes nice white people of this story), the religious Ruralites, and the survivors of Ashtown between them. Cara is constantly code switching and crossing borders, both locally and multiversally--she is pretending to be a Ruralite, is secretly from Ashtown, while she precariously lives in Wiley City (hoping to get citizenship). Thematically, I love how the book ends with doubling down on Cara's role as an intermediary between worlds.

Bones & Runes was the #SFFBookClub January 2025 selection. It's a modern mythological quest of three friends trying to recover something stolen and grow as people and friends along the way. Overall it was a bit of a disappointment.

@eldang's thorough feelings after stopping reading sums up the majority of my thoughts. I'll try to get at a couple of other thoughts past that.

This book is attempting some interesting things by trying to mix together African, Irish, Hindu, and Greek mythology all at once. I can understand a story that is trying to stir together a variety of myths and methods of accessing the divine, but overall there's too many ingredients and everything is weaker for it.

Subjectively, I was disappointed by the writing. For a book that is so thoroughly rooted in South Africa and Durban in particular, I did not come away with much of a sense of place in most of the scenes. Part of this is that the characters are driven around by Ganesh from place to place in a way that makes it feel like the cast is teleporting between scenes.

But this isn't some seven stages of hell, Dante. These are African gods. The hero doesn't always survive. Forget heaven and hell. We've got no time for the devil here. Here, in this land, on this rock, we've got so many aspects of evil that one being doesn't suffice to hold its might; it's true strength. Maybe in your western worlds where everything is black and white, where you can afford one being to hurl your hatred at; one place that is good and one that is bad. This is Africa, baby. Here the good can be both bad and good at the same time.

I quoted this because this whole statement is repeated twice in the book almost word for word, but it feels all talk and no show. There is precious little ambiguity in this fantasy quest. There are a number of dangerous and neutral characters who deal in bargains or seem chaotically neutral, but the main players all seem fairly clear cut and shallow.

This was the #SFFBookClub January selection, and I bounced off it kind of hard. Which is particularly sad considering that I'd added it to the shortlist, after it was cited by an article from which other recommendations have been fun. But this one did not work for me, in ways that actively put me off.

I think I'm probably prejudiced against it by the physical book being so poorly printed that it's more work to read. There are no margins, meaning that starts and ends of lines disappear into the centre fold. And even within that it's aligned so poorly that a number of pages have a last line more than half of which is off the page. These are not the reasons I'm bouncing, but they definitely made me less patient.

What put me off the most is a weird imbalance between the book doing a lot of 'splaining in the mouths of its characters--kind of Legend of Zelda style--while at the same time throwing a lot of Bantu (I'm not sure which specific language[s]) vocabulary at the reader without notes or translations - in at least one case, about 1/4 of a page. I have a lot of time for using the languages that cultural references come from, without necessarily translating ( outside.ofa.dog/book/146782/s/david-mogo does this to good atmospheric effect), but it made the over-explaining all the more jarring.

I then learned that the author is white, which bugs me for a story so heavily rooted in Bantu mysticism. He clearly is knowledgeable about the subject, but these aren't his stories to tell, and in this light the over-explaining feels like a white man showing off how cool he is because he knows about the subalterns' culture. I think the "Runes" character (a jumbled Celtic / New Age Druid wizard in Durban) is meant to be self-deprecating, but he's so secondary to the "Bones" character (the Bantu wizard) that I'm still left feeling that the wrong person is telling this story, in ways that are definitely to the book's detriment.