Radiant Basket of Rainbow Shells, scholar of curses and magical history, has spent several years …
Finished creating a list for all the works cited in Reactor Magazine's article "Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2024". There's a lot of really interesting looking books mentioned there. This is the last book from that.
The list can be found on SFBA.club. If you follow me, your bookwyrm instance should have the list as well. I made sure all the books on the SFBA.club version have high-res covers and descriptions, but other instances will only pick that up if they didn't already have a copy of the book listed. (There's two short stories without covers.)
One afternoon in November 1975, ten-year-old Miranda Larkin comes home from school to find her …
I have absolutely loved Landay's three previous books. He does something interesting every time. Mind you, this is only his 4th book, and it's been a decade since his last. Landay puts care into his novels; there's no churning them out. Aware of the gap, the book starts out with this:
After I finished writing my last novel, I fell into a long silence. You might call it writer’s block, but most writers don’t use that term or even understand it. When a writer goes quiet, nothing is blocking and nothing is being blocked. He is just empty.
I had to look… is this a preface or an introduction? No. It's the story. Landay is already doing something to engage me.
Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate …
A skeptical dive into space settlement
4 stars
If you've looked askance at Elon Musk's claim/plan to settle Mars this century, this book will validate your priors in a most entertaining way. The first 3 parts cover the physical & mental aspects of space settlement. As someone who works on satellites, none of this is surprising to me. At least a couple times a week, someone in the office will exclaim "space is hard!" as we try to solve a problem. Additionally, the book spends 2 parts of the legal and geopolitical environment of settling space. The authors' position is that space settlement nerds don't really spend enough time thinking through the ramifications. In particular, while there are better frameworks for space settlement than what we have, there's not a clean path to get there and space settlement nerds aren't really moving society in a real way to get there. There's an extended discussion of an attempt to …
If you've looked askance at Elon Musk's claim/plan to settle Mars this century, this book will validate your priors in a most entertaining way. The first 3 parts cover the physical & mental aspects of space settlement. As someone who works on satellites, none of this is surprising to me. At least a couple times a week, someone in the office will exclaim "space is hard!" as we try to solve a problem. Additionally, the book spends 2 parts of the legal and geopolitical environment of settling space. The authors' position is that space settlement nerds don't really spend enough time thinking through the ramifications. In particular, while there are better frameworks for space settlement than what we have, there's not a clean path to get there and space settlement nerds aren't really moving society in a real way to get there. There's an extended discussion of an attempt to establish a new state in space by dint of a small cubesat launched by a space society. (As a side note, I'm quite surprised that the book doesn't go into the attempts to create micro-states such as Sealand. Those would be a lot easier to attain statehood with that space environments, and yet none of those has even come close to succeeding.)
What really makes the book though is that the authors are both funny and pay attention to the weird facts of space. Steve Bannon once ran Biosphere 2! The humor won't be a surprise to regular readers of Zach Weinersmith's web strip, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Newly married and navigating life with a preschooler as well as her adopted adolescent son, …
Maybe my favorite police procedural
5 stars
A police procedural set in Cambridgeshire England, with DI Manon Bradshaw. The character still grates on me because she is so unhappy in her own life. She alternately wants to be free of her relationships and family and desperately wants them to never go away. I found myself frequently thinking "stop waffling and commit" because of how much time the text spends inside her head.
However, I love her as a police detective, and I loved this particular crime-solving tale. Lukas and Matis are undocumented Lithuanian immigrants to England, living in squalor in effective slavery. The townsfolk hate them because they think the Lithuanians are taking their jobs and women. The neighbor particularly hates Lukas because he has been sleeping with his wife, and another hates Matis because he's spent time with his impressionable daughter. The Lithuanian bosses use them ruthlessly and are apt to disappear them if trouble arises. …
A police procedural set in Cambridgeshire England, with DI Manon Bradshaw. The character still grates on me because she is so unhappy in her own life. She alternately wants to be free of her relationships and family and desperately wants them to never go away. I found myself frequently thinking "stop waffling and commit" because of how much time the text spends inside her head.
However, I love her as a police detective, and I loved this particular crime-solving tale. Lukas and Matis are undocumented Lithuanian immigrants to England, living in squalor in effective slavery. The townsfolk hate them because they think the Lithuanians are taking their jobs and women. The neighbor particularly hates Lukas because he has been sleeping with his wife, and another hates Matis because he's spent time with his impressionable daughter. The Lithuanian bosses use them ruthlessly and are apt to disappear them if trouble arises. One fellow resident of the house gets sick. Rather than get medical care for him, they let him die and disappear his body.
All of these people are viable suspects when Lukas body is found hanging from a tree with a note reading "Mirusieji negali kalbėti" attached.
What I loved most about this is that the crime & investigation doesn't involve a bunch of improbable coincidences, and that the investigation is basic police legwork: interviews, reviewing surveillance video, reviewing logs of phone calls & license plate readers, etc. It's a mark of a good writer that Susie Steiner was able to craft a compelling story with twists & turns and do it without the improbable crutches so prevalent in the genre. It's a shame she died, as this book was the best of the series and I would have eagerly snapped up new entries.
A delightful A-to-Z menagerie of the sea—whimsically illustrated, authoritative, and thought-provoking.
For millennia, we have …
Delightful
4 stars
This is a collection of essays about ocean animals, arranged from A-Z and including everything from abalone to zooplankton. Includes descriptions of the animals and often discussions of their importance in ocean ecology and how humanity has affected each, usually to the detriment of animals. However, what makes this book so delightful is the framing device, stories of human encounters with each, taken from writings as far back as the ancient Greeks and as recent as poetry from the 2020s. Scientists such as Charles Darwin and Rachel Carson, explorers like Matthew Perry, and seamen like Thomas Albro and Alexander Selkirk all get pieces of their stories retold. Recommended.
