Reviews and Comments

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.

This book follows Mahit, sent as ambassador from the small space station Lsel to a large empire, in order to investigate what happened to her predecessor and to try to prevent the Teixcalaanli Empire from inevitably absorbing that home station.

As you might expect, it's a story about empires (being terrible), but what I like about this book is that it gets at reasons why empires can be dangerously appealing apart from just raw power. Mahit simultaneously wants to protect her homeland but also wishes to be part of larger Teixcalaanli culture that is eating her own. But also, no matter how much poetry she's memorized, she will never truly be a part of this culture.

The reader quickly learns that Lsel secretly has machines that implant the memories of their predecessors, and has sent Mahit off with one of these devices. The extra internal perspective of Yskander commenting or just providing emotional memory on Mahit's experiences adds a fun additional layer to all of the events.

I love the politics; I love the writing; I love the characters. Highly recommended.

This novel is always such a delight to get back to on a reread of the series. My love for ART also carries a lot of my feelings too.

I wasn't sure how Murderbot was going to stand up to the longer length the first time I read this, but I like that there's more space for side stories to develop; in particular, we get to see flashbacks to Murderbot and Amena back on Preservation, we get to see Arada grow as a leader, and we get to see Murderbot 2.0.

This novel also reprises previous parts of the series in a really satisfying way. Even more ART (and more ART snark). We get more about Mensah handling trauma. Murderbot 2.0 is an explicit parallel to Miki's death. The ending of this novel escalates the end of Exit Strategy where Murderbot doesn't know how to feel about everybody feeling protective about it or wanting to save it.

It's all just so good.

I don’t hate you. I hate that I don’t have better answers to all that’s wrong in my city. The only choices shouldn’t be bloody vengeance or doing nothing. I hate that the Codicíans’ ‘gift’ of empire is generations of trauma.

Overall, I think I'm a bit mixed on this book. I was most intrigued in the messy middle, where all of the characters are caught between competing and interesting tensions. It felt impossible for any character to do right by another while being caught in such structural traps. The focus of the book also (surprisingly?) felt firmly on these relationships between people who care about each other, and the messed up ways that colonialism warps their love.

I also quite enjoyed a character whose magic is tied to her emotions, and so she quite literally has to repress her anger and sadness in order to survive and hide.

It's also certainly a rare book where the straight relationship felt more interesting than the queer one, but maybe I just don't have much patience for religious "I can save her!!!" self-hatred stories.

#SFFBookClub

This isn't a bad Murderbot novella, but it doesn't really move enough forward enough for me to appreciate it as anything more than an action/detective side event in between the much more emotionally impactful Exit Strategy and Network Condition. I think my favorite parts of this book are Murderbot snarkily interacting with Indah and station security, where it's trying to one up them but also do its job and also (mostly) obey the rules that they've given to it.

This novella does get some more into Mensah's trauma (and avoidance) but I'm not sure this story is doing extra on top of what Home or Network Condition is doing, and her trauma is not the thematic focus of this novella either. (Although what that focus is, I'm not sure I could really pin down. Maybe that's part of the problem.)

If Murderbot was going to stick around in Preservation space and Indah was going to become a recurring character, or we were going to have ongoing themes of Murderbot trying/failing to fit into Preservation systems and culture, then maybe this could have felt more impactful in retrospect.

I have a spoiler-y offhand comment, so I'll post that separately.

This is a short story that can be read online. The most notable part about this for me is that it was the first story not from Murderbot's point of view, but from Mensah's instead.

This viewpoint shift works for me because Mensah's trauma around being abducted on TranRollinHyfa comes through much more clearly in her own voice. It functions similarly to Rapport in that getting to see the other side of a relationship strengthens your understanding of both sides.

Her feed notifies her of a message packet, addressed to her and Bharadwaj. It’s a link to some sort of catalog weapons supply service. Ayda sighs, mostly amused. “It’s listening to us right now.” It must be hard to respect other people’s privacy when you’ve had to fight and scheme for every minute of your own. Hard not to be paranoid when you remember all the times your paranoia was justified.

But I also quite enjoy seeing how (and why) Murderbot is always compulsively invading everybody's privacy. Mensah clearly understands and (mostly) feels cared for by it. And also it's awkward and invasive too, and I don't think that we'd be able to get all of that without being in Mensah's head.