Reviews and Comments

One sentence: loving couple does mystery investigation during a magic-driven industrial age

Things I enjoyed about the book:

• established caring relationship between two very different people, who understand each other's quirks and needs (reminds me some of MRK's Glamourist Histories)
• investigators who aren't cops (and are also anti-royalist)
• setup for future books, but not in a way that detracted from this one
• interesting magic system that also has social implications
• an industrial age powered by fuel from portals to a hell dimension (and requiring people to fight back monsters trying to come back through said portals)

I know "romp" is overused as a fiction description, but this is a romp if ever I've seen one. It's grippy action scenes and compelling characters, but more than that a romp for me is fiction that calvinballs its way to undiscussed locations or adding new worldbuilding details with very little foreshadowing. I think this can be done poorly in a way that feels shallow or disconnecting, but here I was entertained and compelled.

This may be my own categorization, but there sure have been a lot of books recently that are written in an interconnected mosaic structure. When reading one of these, my brain goes into a similar mode as a good mystery novel, but instead of pinning suspicious plot elements to my cork board, I'm instead sifting out small fragments of imagery and theme. It's not unlike the feeling when you see a lot of online posts talking indirectly about the same current event, while you are uninformed and trying to feel out the shape of the subject from only its subtooted outline.

I start with this context because I have read a lot of these mosaic books lately, and it's tricky for me to distill my feelings about this book without making direct comparisons. Primarily, Remember You Will Die suffers from coming in the immediate shadow of the emotional punches of Rakesfall and In Universes (both of which were winners of the 2024 Otherwise Award). How High We Go in the Dark from 2022 also sits in this mosaic space and casts its own long shadow, especially given that I think it is a stronger thematic treatment of adjacent ideas.

Remember You Will Die is a book told (largely) through obituaries ranging from a mildly speculative version of our past and into a very science fiction speculative future. However, it also has some additional texts from etymology and web searches. Broadly, it's about death, art, and meaning but it's also about AIs, invasive species, and parenthood.

Nerds of a Feather has a much better review that is an incomplete list of recurring motifs found in the novel. Its text is almost more of a compelling piece than the novel itself, and I highly recommend reading it instead of my own blabs.

What this book suffers the most from is its choice of form: the obituary format. To its credit, it is hard to imagine it doing better, and many bits are quite compelling little narratives. What doesn't work is that an obituary is largely detached observation of the legacy of a person's life. You get the shape of a person but at an emotional distance. It feels impersonal, and when the obituary quotes something the deceased has said, it often feels jarringly like the author trying to directly tell the reader something. This obituary structure thus becomes both too subtle and not subtle enough simultaneously.

There is an immediate story in the connective tissue of this novel about an overprotective parent and a child's escape from their smothering grasp. But, in the end I am left with only the outlines of these characters and very little of their heart; ultimately it makes the whole novel seem shallow and hollow when it feels like it should instead be the core.

The condition of living is eventually leaving.

Endings are an outline, a frame, a shape. An unfinished painting hangs nowhere.

This was a fun novella about 17th century London midwifery where there's a spate of babies being born with monstrous appearances and magical abilities. This is the September 2025 #SFFBookClub pick.

There's a fun angle of respectability politics, of not wanting to be publicly seen as queer so that Sarah can get better midwife clientele (and survive as a widowed woman), but also taking the angle of her having to cover the parts of herself that are uncanny. (Sure, sure, I am a sucker for the metaphor of queer as monstrous.) There's also a strong gendered metaphor of Sir Christopher Wren, creepily representing science and men cataloguing the world (and thinking they truly know it) versus the midwives having their own knowledge of other worlds and of magic.

Overall, this book met my expectations for exactly what I thought it was going to be in a good way. I love a solid novella that can fit in good worldbuilding and plot and some character development without leaving me feeling like there's elements missing or it's rushed. It feels like the kind of story that would make a good movie. (This is all especially in comparison to previous novellas we have read for #SFFBookClub, like Countess.)

I have some thoughts about the ending, which I will put in a separate spoilered post.

This is a short, pulpy sci-fi action novella about a trans scavenger who picks up a mask that contains the mind of a dead woman seeking revenge. It's the first in a duology.

The worldbuilding of this story is that everyone wears masks that can modify their physiology, communicate mentally with the wearer, and also run low level tasks. It's got sort of a YA over-explained vibe where these masks have names like "Mark I Rabbit" or "Mark V Chameleon", and yes they're all animal themed and yes they give stereotypical animal powers. Everybody, even scavengers, seem to use this one corporation's masks (who are obviously the bad guys). Honestly I just wanted to know more about the world. Where's the DIY culture? Why are the masks all animals? Do folks switch them out frequently? Do mental effects (such as prey animal masks) persist after using them? Where in this universe are the furries who are self-actualizing with masks? How did this culture start? Are there holdouts?

The ideas were fun and fluffy, but the writing and execution let me down. It's a plot driven story and I felt a lot of the chemistry between Wylla and Sable was told and not shown. Why are you so impressed by or attracted to each other, other than the fact that you're the main two characters in a story? Ace trans woman space scavenger with telepathic friend should be my cuppa.

It is weird for me to have a romance with a touch averse and desire averse trans woman culminate in desire for kissing and some virtually imagined bodies. Given that Sable only exists in the mind of Wylla, it felt like a missed opportunity for something more interesting here. Where is the chance for plural selves-love and Wylla learning to share in Sable's appreciation for their own body? Or an emotional moment that's not physical? The romance moments in the book just felt so out of character for who I had been told Wylla was. There's so much unexplored disappointing potential in the space between a trans woman who has worked hard to have a body she wants but who doesn't have desires, and a woman without a body who does have those desires.

(I would also love to hear any opinions from plural systems about how this book felt; it feels like it almost could be a story about choosing to adopt a headmate, but I'm not quite sure it is either.)

It was amazing how stupid teenagers could be, Walden thought, with enormous, grieving fondness. She knew she wouldn’t change them for the world.

The Incandescent is a fun novella about a magic boarding school and its demon summoning problems, but from the perspective of an older teacher.

This book could have been a "gosh those teenagers" story, but I love that the narrator Saffy herself is an adult who remembers her own teenage failures and is able to bring a lot of compassion as a result. And also, she makes the same mistakes her teenagers do--she internally comments on their relationships while she's having her own awkward romance; she also makes mistakes from the same place of hubris that they do.

Because an elite education was an investment in power. Magic was the least of what you gained at Chetwood. What mattered was the power to walk the walk and talk the talk, to have your résumé picked out of the pile and the interviewer already speaking your language.

One component I liked about this book that I feel like gets skipped in a lot of stories like this is the worldbuilding around the privilege around attending a private magic school. Given that the narrator Saffy went to the school herself and then is now a teacher, I appreciate that we get the opposite of this in the marshal Laura Kenning who is shocked that kids can live in the postcard environment and feel like it's normal, all because they have rich parents.

(In the books about magic schools department, I think A Deadly Education does this really well too, although that book is more about how outside wealth and privilege reflect on standing inside the school and at graduation, but that also makes sense given its student point of view rather than the teacher perspective here.)

No sensible woman over the age of twenty-five felt anything but dubious in the face of a smiling posh chap with good cheekbones.

This book has a romance component, but it's pretty minor. Saffy is a workaholic and primarily the book is about her relationship with her work and her school and her past. If anything, I appreciate the romance more than a lot of other books. Saffy and Laura are staid and awkward in a way that feels authentic, and I will admit that I do like the progression of professionally butting heads to an eventual appreciation of each other's talents.

ALSO, let me repeat that the main character is nicknamed """Saffy"""; her two main love interests are: (1) butch lesbian with a motorcycle and a sword, and then (2) smarmy posh guy. We'll leave it to the romance experts to figure out where the cards fall on this one.

Just your average socialist vampire novella about climate change, featuring a comfortably cynical leftist podcaster discovering his own values and what he'll do for them.

(also, lots of drugs and a shitty narrator who thinks he's a nice guy to trans women)

I will go on the record and say that I generally dislike vampire stories. I watched Sinners recently with some friends and I hated how much it was like "hey it turns out it's vampires, thank goodness everybody has already internalized vampire tropes so we can immediately deal with them". Leaning on tropes is such a lost worldbuilding opportunity.

Needless to say, I was delighted about the ideas in this book around vampires being naturally long term thinkers, concerned about how the mass of humanity was treating the planet. But also about being vampires. In some ways, this reminds me of the setup of the Philip K. Dick short story Human Is, where a kind alien replaces an abusive husband and the wife knowingly pretends that he is still her husband. But, this story is also a larger authoritarian dream, of wishing powerful beings will show up and parentally take care of the irresponsible children of humanity who can't be bothered to care for each other or the planet.

It's very much a book of the current moment, and despite everything ends with some much needed, unexpected optimism about possibility and change.

Incredible.

We've read a number of books for #SFFBookClub that have a short story structure with interconnecting themes and worldbuilding (How High We Go in the Dark, and Under the Eye of the Big Bird) but In Universes is my clear favorite among all of these.

Structurally, this book is a series of short stories with a single point of view. Each story takes place in different adjacent-ish branching multiverses, some of which veer into more magical realism and externalized metaphors while others are more realistic. Thematically, this book is about dealing with internalized homophobia, trauma, depression and grief. But it's also about (queer) possibility and transformation and acceptance.

It's interesting to me just how many things I underlined (virtually) while reading this book. Delicious turns of phrase. Devastating sentences seemingly directly targeted at my feelings. Interconnecting thematic ideas everywhere. I found myself utterly engaged in its writing and imagery.

What is most striking about In Universes is that even when some chapters veer off in fantastical directions ("my mother is a horde of bees", "I am pregnant with an octopus", horse telepathy), there is such a coherent emotional progression for Raffi across the entire book. A lot of similarly structured books suffer from meandering too far afield with their ideas that they fail to come together, but In Universes feels so intentional with how it deploys its imagery and pacing. If anything, the final part of the book, consisting of a single chapter, resonates the strongest of all of them and I love the way it reprises the previous stories to bring everything together.

CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series is one of my favorites, and I feel like it's wildly underappreciated. I'll keep my future reviews shorter I promise, but let me pitch these thirty year old books to you.

Here's what brings me back to these books:

(1) Interesting alien psychology. The alien Atevi do not have a concept of "love" or "trust". They are instinctually and biologically hierarchical, with upward loyalty in their associations. This creates all sorts of translation friction across cultural boundaries. They are also incredibly numerically-minded, with the numerical equivalent of astrology, finding particular numbers innately more felicitous than others. They do truly act in interesting and non-intuitive ways, and it's so fun to read.

(2) Humans aren't particularly privileged. This isn't an uplift story. Although the humans show up with more technology initially, the Atevi have their own inventions, and have very mixed feelings about how they are being pushed by the injection of another culture's ideas. Both Atevi and human politics are complicated and messy, and the series delves into intricate political worldbuilding about various internal factions on both sides.

(3) A blend of action and politics. There's a lot (a lot) of diplomacy and talking about and (thinking about) politics in these books; but also Atevi also believe that assassination is a respectable and legal means of solving disputes. The combination mean these books read like grippy fantasy political thrillers.

He had no idea what its native customs or expectations must be. It could have very little idea about his. But it was possible to be civilized, all the same, and he found it possible to be gracious with such a creature, odd as it was

(4) The tea drinking. I feel like a through-line of this whole series is about trying to be civilized and gracious even and especially when you don't understand the beings on the other side of the table. It's no surprise to me that the Ancillary books took the tea-drinking detail from this series.

On the flipside, I think CJ Cherryh does not do "alien gender" or "alien bodies" very interestingly here. (One could argue that it's not the point, or the similarity is part of what creates the trap of thinking the characters and the reader can understand them through a human lens.) Maybe I'm picky about this particular detail, but even as I love the alien psychology, it is wild to me to write aliens that are so human-like in other ways. What does stand out to me is that Atevi have two binary genders, which are somehow legible to humans from the first moment they meet. If my memory serves me, these books are also incredibly straight. It just feels like a missed opportunity.

One other thing that makes these books hard to recommend: their length. The series is written as arcs of three novels. Currently, there's seven (7?!) full arcs and one additional novel, for a total of 22 books as I write this. On the positive side, the novels are on the shorter side (no giant fantasy tomes here), and each novel (as well as each trilogy) ends with a great sense of closure. The pacing is quite good (and maybe almost too regular). Personally, I think the first two trilogies cover the most ground and so you could stop there as a reader and still come away with most of the scope.

Ok, let me talk about Foreigner, this first book, specifically.

What I love the most is that Foreigner is a first contact story that is not about the moment of first contact. I've read too many books about the very first moments of meeting aliens; this book brushes past that two hundred years into the future to talk about the politics and power dynamics between stranded humans on an alien world who have a tentative understanding with said aliens. (Incredibly tangentially, but this is the same premise I love about Mira Grant's Feed, a zombie book that zooms twenty years past any initial zombie uprising to talk about the politics of trying to get on living in such a world.)

This first book (and most books) follow the point of view of Bren Cameron, the treaty-established human paidhi. His job is to translate and mediate and be the single point of contact between the Atevi and human governments.

I want to warn a little up front, but the pacing of this first book is a bit wild. Let me try to break it down. There's a few chapters about how humanity ended up on this planet and then time jumps forward. There's some initial action as Bren is attacked in the night. Soon after for his own safety(?), he is carted off to the countryside manor of the Atevi leader Tabini's grandmother, Illisidi. At this point, Bren is out of contact with his government, unsure about who to trust; his security keeps disappearing and won't answer any of his questions; he can't get his mail or a power charger; he gets poisoned (intentionally?); there continue to be attacks (but from whom?); he starts getting paranoid of Atevi that he's previously trusted. I would almost describe this part of the book as worldbuilding through Bren's anxiety, where the things he is worried about help to explain Atevi psychology to the reader. Things get to a breaking point and the book ends with some really good sequences and action, where Bren's will and motives are truly tested multiple times.

What's dangerous about this to me is that for a large portion of the book, Bren (and the reader) have no idea what's going on. There are events and politics happening off page that nobody will tell Bren about no matter how he asks. He is, essentially, a prisoner in Illisidi's country manor. I think this exercise in uncertainty and mistrust is something you could largely only do in a first book in a series, as the reader will know (better) in future books which recurring characters are "on side" or not, as much as you could ever say that with Atevi. This whole section works for me because I think it functions quite well as worldbuilding, but also truly gets into Bren's psychological state as the single human inside the larger Atevi world, trying to cope with his human emotional needs not being met by Atevi who do not understand them and cannot meet them.

At any rate, I love this book. It's such a good introduction to the world and the politics and the characters. This series surely isn't for everybody, but I keep coming back to the interesting aliens, cross-cultural misunderstandings, and intricate fantasy politics.

This was the #SFFBookClub book for August 2025.

In some ways, this book structurally reminded me of How High We Go in the Dark; they're both a post-apocalyptic, interconnected series of stories about humanity trying to survive. The stories here are further in the future and feel much more surreal and dreamlike. If anything, I feel like I've missed something critical as a reader--I can't quite put my finger on what this book is trying to do.

There are a few things that don't work for me. I think the stories largely don't stand on their own: there's many interesting ideas, but they don't feel connected via plot or resonate with a theme. There's also a penultimate chapter of the book where the book just out and out tells you everything it's been hinting at previously. I had guessed at a good bit of it, but it felt underwhelming to have it laid out so plainly rather than sketched across stories.

A short and fluffy space heist book. It's part of a trilogy of novellas, and so it leaves a bunch of larger worldbuilding questions unanswered. I love that the last ~15% of the book is reports with footnotes where there's a slow realization of what has just occurred.

The romance angle did not work for me. The book cover immediately felt like a huge indicator of a romance component so I knew it was coming, however it felt all told and not shown. What does Ada see in Rian other than immediately liking his eyes? We also don't get any of Rian's perspective here, and so it's extremely not clear what Rian sees in Ada either, and I'd honestly expect him to be more suspicious than he already is. If either was just using the other for their own ends, it would have honestly been a more interesting story.

I have a few quibbles with the heist elements too. One critical element of any sort of heist plot to me is that characters need to be deceiving other characters and more critically I think there also needs to be a deception and surprise for the reader--something unexpected, actions off page, motives unsaid. In this book, Ada lets too much slip to the reader about her secret motives and actions, while her main nemesis Rian is not effective. The book blurb says "she may not be entirely sure who's manipulating who until it's too late" and this wildly overstates the dynamics at play. I think it's also that I've read other books recently that do a better job of deceiving the reader in a way that feels effective and earned, especially The Dragonfly Gambit and even parts of Alien Clay.

When a novel feels like it strongly stands alone and ends with such closure, it's hard to imagine what a sequel would be like. This sequel to A Memory Called Empire is different, stranger. I like it a lot, but it is also not what I expected.

It grows a few more points of view, over the original's singular voice from Mahit. It's also a first contact military sf story in space as opposed to the first book's city-centered succession politics and poetry. It's a story about not being able to truly go home again after travelling, about disobeying orders that don't sit well in your heart, about the psychology of different kinds of consciousnesses (in some ways similar to the Ancillary series), and about what peace means to individuals and empires.

One thing I enjoy is that the book gets into the friction between Mahit and Three Seagrass. The first book is a whirlwind week of adventure, and ends with a smooch between them during a momentary pause before the climax of the book. There's no time for conversation or for feelings or for anything other than an emotional moment of connection. This book gives them more space and time, where feelings that were smothered in the first book about the complications of perception rear their head and have to be processed. This also makes it feel much different than the first book, where everybody, and especially Three Seagrass, feel more "on side", even when relationships and goals are complicated.

I don't think either of these books are creating larger worldbuilding that would extend out to a longer series. However, I do think they each are remarkably thematically tight books and both worth reading.