Reviews and Comments

I recently inherited a beautiful edition of Wilde's complete works from my great-aunt--with her signature dated 1946 in the inside cover!--so it's time I finally read this story. ...and it just occurred to me that the physical book in my hands is older today than this story was when my great-aunt bought it.

So much to love about this book, how it weaves together unanswerable questions about consciousness and computation, together with a much more didactic message about humans' consumptive relationships with, well, everything including each other, and enough of a mystery story to keep the plot moving along. Also some great evocations of places (ahhh, multiple key scenes on Istanbul ferries), and of the ways peoples' reputations misrepresent their selves.

It's not a strongly character driven book - every character that is fleshed out seems to be a variant of "loner who wishes for connection" and largely a vehicle for the author's ideas - but there's enough depth to the characters to keep me reading. My one real criticism is that the ending felt a bit rushed. Not in the sort of too convenient, story-undermining way, but not quite satisfying either. It doesn't feel like a set up for a sequel, but I kind of want Nayler to write a few short stories filling out the characters a bit more and picking up some of the loose ends - perhaps something like Sofia Samatar did with The Winged Histories.

One little thing that's bugging me about this book, while I'm otherwise enjoying it very much, is that either author or publisher couldn't be bothered to typeset Vietnamese properly. We get the diacriticals for Mínervudóttir, but in rendering Côn Đảo as "Con Dao" not only are the diacriticals missing: "Đ" is a fully separate letter from "D". It's odd because Vietnam is the one place in the book that it's clear from the author's bio he did live in for a while.

"Rustem" also feels wrong to me (it should be Rüstem or maybe Rostam), but there I may be overapplying Turkish defaults which might not fit right for Tatar. I'm just going to keep reading it as "Rüstem" because that sounds right in my head.

Lent to me by a friend who loved it and whose recommendation is reason enough to read a book I know barely anything about. The cover certainly has my attention....

I repeatedly almost put this book down, and each time I was brought back in by the sheer beauty of the writing. It's simultaneously a reworking of assorted Russian folk tales and a magical realist retelling of ~30 years of Russian history, from the October Revolution to the Siege of Leningrad. It's full of interesting ideas and engaging imagery, but much of the time also has this sense that nothing any character might choose changes anything.

I'm having trouble articulating my thoughts about this book, but I think I largely agree with this review: strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/deathless-by-catherynne-m-valente/

A fun, light read, with a charming protagonist who's fiercely independent and very wily, but quite prone to underestimating others.

#SFFBookClub October 2023 pick

This ended up being the third of 4 stories I read this year that were all variations on the Fall of the House of Usher (including the original), and I think it's my favourite. The slow pace with which the protagonist (and by extension us the readers) learn what exactly is up with the house felt realistic and made for great tension because there's such a long period in which it's clear that something is Very Wrong but not what it is. And along the way Moreno-Garcia gets in some choice digs about what colonisers are and do, including to themselves and each other. Deliciously gruesome.

#SFFBookClub May 2023

What a joy this book was! It's a fairly light adventure, but with an emotional journey, some relatable characters, and a setting that feels like a relatively positive future with some unspecified dark times in its past.

This was the #SFFBookClub April pick

I really can't get enough of Janloon and Kekon, and thoroughly enjoyed this shorter return to it. It pulls of the wonderful trick of being a totally self-contained story with all new characters for the important roles, while tying in very well to the bigger arc of the Green Bone saga, giving major characters from that satisfying cameos, and reinforcing the human stakes of the events of the big saga.

Wow. This really wraps up the series perfectly, with a lot of sadness and some hope. I continue to be in awe of Fonda Lee's ability to make me care about a bunch of violent gangsters - this really isn't a genre I usually go for but she hooked me in and kept me reading. And I continue to love the image of Janloon and wish I could visit it for real - the tourist guide appendix is a very nice touch.

I love the premise of this book, and like any multi author collection the quality of the content is all over the place. Many great stories, some that don't quite work.

I started it excited about having an alternate history collection that wasn't going to be about "what if the Nazis won". It actually doesn't quite meet that bar, though at least there are only a couple of stories that plumb that particular horror, and the more original of the two is perhaps the highlight of the book: a psychological study of the oppressor that I was mentally chewing over for a long time. Meanwhile, the story that mashes up Scottish and Jewish history was an unexpected delight - it started out looking like the whole concept was just going to be a few puns ("Moshe Ben Nevis"; "The Hebraides") but fleshed that out into a genuinely interesting fantasy.

The one real sour note for me was "The Time-Slip Detective", in which the vision of a happier, more prosperous Israel is clearly predicated on 'what if the Palestinians just didn't exist?', which was a chilling and infuriating concept even when I read it a few months ago, before the latest horrors. Some what-ifs are better not entertained at all, and just as I'd love to never read another goy's "what if the Nazis had won", I also never want to see another Jew's "what if we just wished the Palestinians away".

Skip that story, and this collection is a worthwhile read.

I read this over a few months with an in-person book club, and it was a great choice for that because it has a lot to discuss. It opens with an incredibly harrowing description of the sort of heat wave disaster that the world hasn't seen yet but I think is plausible not far in the future. And from there it basically follows three interwoven threads: * The UN establishes a climate change super-org that gets dubbed the "Ministry for the Future" because its official name is far too unwieldy government-speak * India decides after the heatwave that it can't afford to wait for the world to get its shit together, and starts going it alone on geoengineering, to global consternation but also spurring some more serious action from other parties * The character from whose point of view we saw the disaster is very deeply scarred by the experience and devotes the rest of his life to climate action by any means necessary

In true KSR style, the book is very long on research and loving descriptions of places (mostly Switzerland this time; he's made me want to visit Zurich), and relatively short on three-dimensional characters. I think this one does a better job with the characters than Red Mars, because he picked a couple (Frank and Mary) to focus on and managed to bring those to life somewhat, while letting others just be functions in the story. But it's definitely still his weak point as a writer.

The book goes through a grim ride, in which there's a lot more loss, and it takes a huge amount of work and delay to get to meaningful global action. All of which seems sadly realistic to me. I think KSR's also right that in the end the levers will be social and financial system changes, not some amazing new technology. But his proposal for those changes feels weirdly credulous about Bitcoin, and thin on details about how it would actually achieve its social objectives - which would be fine for a straight work of fiction, but is jarring compared to how much deep research there clearly is in the climate system and technology parts of the story.

It eventually leads to a sort of optimistic conclusion, a somewhat believable scenario of humanity living within its means at last, and some aspects of that vision being genuinely appealing. But that end state has two glaring omissions which ultimately detracted a lot from the book for me.

One is that there's been a triumph of this "half Earth" movement about physically limiting human habitation to half of the land surface, to rewild the rest. But... everywhere habitable is someone's ancestral land. What happened to those people? Were they consulted, compensated, persuaded, or moved along yet again? And most of those ecosystems' stable pre-industrial states were ones of dynamic equilibrium actively maintained by humans - simply withdrawing wouldn't do what this book seems to assume it will.

The other is that there's this lovely vision of long haul travel being done by boat and airship, which in turn is practical because people get to work on their laptops. Which would be great for me! But what's a plumber supposed to do? I can only be so happy about a future in which migrants' ability to see our families is contingent on us having remote work compatible jobs. And the way that's not discussed left me feeling like KSR had only really thought about this future for himself.