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enne📚

picklish@books.theunseen.city

Joined 1 year, 8 months ago

I read largely sff, some romance and mystery, very little non-fiction. I'm trying to write at least a little review of everything I'm reading, but it's a little bit of an experiment in progress.

I'm @picklish@weirder.earth elsewhere.

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The Space Between Worlds (Paperback, 2020, Hodder & Stoughton) 5 stars

Eccentric genius Adam Bosch has cracked the multiverse and discovered a way to travel to …

Why have I survived? Because I am a creature more devious than all the other mes put together. Because I saw myself bleeding out and instead of checking for a pulse, I began collecting her things. I survive the desert like a coyote survives, like all tricksters do.

The Space Between Worlds by 

The Space Between Worlds (Paperback, 2020, Hodder & Stoughton) 5 stars

Eccentric genius Adam Bosch has cracked the multiverse and discovered a way to travel to …

The Space Between Worlds

5 stars

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 …

The Transitive Properties of Cheese (2024, Neon Hemlock Press) 4 stars

The Transitive Properties of Cheese

4 stars

This is a strange little queer transhuman[*] science fiction novella about cheesemaking, embodiment, and trauma. It follows Wayland Millions, part of a group that has continually copied themselves into more and more selves. It's also got cheese forgery and a cheese heist?

This story feels pretty plural (or at least plural-adjacent) to my eyes: there are a number of situations where multiple people share the same body, but it's in a future where selves can copy themselves and instantiate themselves in different bodies as well.

Overall, I'd say this book largely has a lighthearted plot, but also takes itself seriously in a balance that really worked for me.

[*] in the trans trans human sense, as it should be, not that I'd expect anything different from Ann LeBlanc

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A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Hardcover, 2022, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) 4 stars

After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) …

A worthy sequel, in its own way

5 stars

This novella picks up directly where A Psalm for the Wind-Built ends, but continues in a more spaced out pace. We follow Dex and Mosscap through a series of vignettes as they tour the human side of Panga, which gives Becky Chambers the opportunity to showcase more of her exquisite world building. While in the first book we learned about the history and glimpsed at a slice of human life, in this one we meet more varied communities, each with their unique spin on the prevailing hope punk aesthetic.

Unlike the first story, which relied heavily on interactions between just Dex and Mosscap, here we see them engage with different characters on their journey. In a way this dilutes the narrative; the numerous side characters are not as deeply developed, the exchanges with them not so philosophically intricate. At first I resented this difference in treatment, but by the end …

On the distant world of Kiln lie the ruins of an alien civilization. It’s the …

The Mandate is very into polar binaries, it's in all their rhetoric. "What?" they'd say. "You don't want this unpleasant circumstance we're forcing on you? Then you're obviously in favour of this absurdly exaggerated opposite we've just invented." Or countless variants on that. "You don't want these laws? Then you must want rampant anarchy!" was the one you saw trotted out most often.

Alien Clay by 

On the distant world of Kiln lie the ruins of an alien civilization. It’s the …

Alien Clay

5 stars

This is now my favorite Adrian Tchaikovsky book. The writing is grippy, the narrator is wry, and I love the way the plotlines of revolution against authoritarianism and academic exploration of alien biology intertwine with each other.

Some extremely minor asides that I appreciated:

The narrator is quite funny and I appreciate the way he sometimes deceives the reader; there are several scenes where you get the surface level view of the scene and then find out shortly afterwards that he's also doing something furtive simultaneously.

I love that the authoritarianism is all about black and white binaries, and the book casually infers that one of the characters fell into political disfavor because they are some flavor of non-binary (without using that word, thank goodness).

This is also somehow the second academic adjacent alien book that I've read recently, with James SA Corey's The Mercy of Gods being the other. …

Winter's Orbit (Paperback, 2022, Tor Books) 4 stars

While the Iskat Empire has long dominated the system through treaties and political alliances, several …

He’d always known he would marry at some point and probably not for love, though he’d had a vague notion that eloping might be fun. It was just that even in Kiem’s most realistic moments, he’d thought at least he and his partner would have a few months to get to know each other. But to convince a grieving stranger not to resent everything about the situation after being forced into a rushed marriage—that would take more than being persuasive. You’d need to be a bloody miracle worker.

Winter's Orbit by 

Winter's Orbit (Paperback, 2022, Tor Books) 4 stars

While the Iskat Empire has long dominated the system through treaties and political alliances, several …

Winter's Orbit

4 stars

I gave myself a comfort reread of this book to remember again how much I enjoy it. It's still great.

Winter's Orbit is a queer romance / science fiction book. Personally, I think folks who like one genre but don't read the other would enjoy this book, but in practice it seems like the combination seems to make folks bounce from the idea. I wonder if perhaps this is why nobody else seemed intrigued to read this for hashtag SFFBookClub. Also, the romance is largely PG rated, if that's important to you one way or the other.

The plot hook is that reticent and duty-bound Count Jainan has recently lost his husband; in order to politically preserve an interplanetary treaty, he is quickly remarried to easygoing and irresponsible Prince Kiem. When Kiem's friendly overtures are rebuffed, Kiem tries to give Jainan space to mourn and not push him or through …

Bones and Runes (2022, Unknown Publisher) 3 stars

"Your kind need everything to be visible, and obvious," the voice came closer. "You lack imagination. You insist on seeing where you are going. Does that really help? Does it help any of these creatures moving towards their destiny? They have been moving in the same direction since they were birthed from the Source. Does it serve you in the long run?"

Bones and Runes by 

Bones and Runes (2022, Unknown Publisher) 3 stars

Bones and Runes

3 stars

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 …

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The Dark Forest (2015) 4 stars

The Dark Forest (Chinese: 黑暗森林) is a 2008 science fiction novel by the Chinese writer …

Evokes golden age Sci-Fi in some good & a few problematic ways

3 stars

I read this novel by accident. I looked it up after hearing about the dark forest hypothesis and I somehow missed the fact that this is the second book in a trilogy. I read the Three-Body Problem few years ago but didn't particularly like it. I found the same faults repeated in this novel too.

This book reads like a story from the science fiction's golden age: it has an interesting sci-fi concept at it's core, and it logically extrapolates from there. Cixin Liu does a really good job at this; at times it feels like Asimov's Foundation. Unlike the previous book, this one takes the plot into the farther future, and Liu gets to flex his creative muscle. The depiction of future cities and spaceships is well thought out and realistic. As a whole this book felt like reading through a game of chess.

Which leads me to the …

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2016, Baen) 3 stars

Three years after her famous husband's death, Cordelia Vorkosigan, widowed Vicereine of Sergyar, spins her …

I’m not sure there is any such thing as recovery; there’s only forgetting. One just has to... keep forgetting till one slowly gets better at it.”

Her echo of his thought briefly unnerved him. He said, “It’s as if people have to die twice, that.”

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by 

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2016, Baen) 3 stars

Three years after her famous husband's death, Cordelia Vorkosigan, widowed Vicereine of Sergyar, spins her …

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

3 stars

On paper, this final book in the Vorkosigan saga is doing some really neat things. It creates such a pleasing parallel bookend to the opening book, Shards of Honor. Both are set on Sergyar with Cordelia as a point of view character, Aral features heavily in both (although as a palpable absence here), and both thematically are about choosing new directions for your life. It's a nice way to send a series off into the sunset.

This book also has an incredible plot hook, to my mind. We learn that Aral, Cordelia, and Jole have been discreetly in a relationship together for twenty years off page. Or, probably better put, Cordelia and Jole have both been orbiting around the gravity well of Aral and both been in a relationship with him. This isn't that surprising as the reader was already aware that Aral was bi, and Cordelia is Betan …

CryoBurn (Vorkosigan Saga, #14) (2010) 3 stars

Cryoburn is a science fiction novel by American writer Lois McMaster Bujold, first published in …

Like a great tree the old general had been, but a tree did not only give shelter from the storm. How would Barrayar be different if that towering figure had not fallen, permitting sunlight to penetrate to the forest floor and new growth to flourish? What if the only way to effect change on Barrayar had been to violently destroy what had gone before, instead of waiting for the cycle of generations to gracefully remove it?

CryoBurn (Vorkosigan Saga, #14) by