Reviews and Comments

This is an unexpected novel about disability and family and writing and fame and stories. Subjectively, I don't think it all cohered in the way I wanted. The story within a story felt particularly heavy-handed, and it weakened the impact of the titular theme's exploration. I can imagine it landing for other people, but it's all just a bit too loose for me.

There is a meta element near the end, which I think the reader can choose how to interpret, although the real answer feels besides the point. It feels there to reinforce the book's larger point about what death of the author means—Okorafor is stating here that "author, art, and audience [...] create a tissue, a web, a network". The fact that this is such a personal work for Okorafor along multiple dimensions only adds to this feeling, as they seem inseparable from the book itself.

There wasn’t another button to not accept. And if she didn’t tap it, maybe the doors wouldn’t open, and she’d end up talking to customer service for an hour. Besides, she was alive and the SUV had done its job. When one got into an autonomous vehicle, one knowingly accepted certain risks.

This is a minor point, but there is some wild techno-optimism on the page. It's hard to tell how much of this is a deliberate nod to science fiction's own default optimism, and thus is more of a storytelling device to embellish the "realistic" point of view. I could especially see this with a given reading of the meta element at the end.

There's just so much of this opinion woven throughout: early in the novel, Zelu uses an automated vehicle: "she could be like a robot with built-in wheels ready to carry her whenever she wanted." I thought the above quote about being forced to click accept to escape said automated vehicle might be the beginning of a more critical arc, but it was not to be. On top of that there's also ai robot exoskeletons, a (creepy to my eyes) billionaire with a private spacecraft company, and experimental space vaccinations (to add chromosomes for essential amino acids) that Zelu accepts without hesitation. This book isn't really a story about tech cynicism though, no matter how much of that I am bringing as a reader. If anything, this optimism ties into how Zelu's family continually denies her agency and respect and are always airquotes protecting her from the perceived dangers of the unknown and novel.

This tech optimism is so at odds with my own opinions that it's quite jarring. I can't read this unvarnished optimism abstractly—I am compelled think about the "tissue, web, and network" of capitalism and exploitation that these technologies are contextualized in, even as they create possibilities and accessibility.

I have such mixed feelings about Daughter of Crows. It's a GRIMDARK (imagine a heavy metal font and growly voice saying this) fantasy story that centers around a school for assassins.

This book is driven by carefully deployed character reveals. It's told from the perspectives of the aging woman Rue (hiding her assassin past), the childhood of Eldest (in a gaslighting abusive childhood manor), and the violent assassin academy via Bek (100 girls enter! three leave!). It's not clear to the reader who all these perspectives are, or if they're the same person, or how they might be connected. This uncertainty gives the author space for surprises and concealing information and connections from the reader until the right moment. It's nothing I haven't seen before, but I think it's quite effective.

The shifting perspectives also help with the pacing. Maybe I'm a bit exhausted by magical school stories, and over the course of five years of assassin school, we only see a couple of scenes per year, rather than this just being a school-driven story. Moreover, the other perspectives often provide immediate context for the next chapter of a different perspective, making me more invested in the different story arcs.

On the negative side, the worldbuilding is quite weird. Suffice it to say that all of humanity has been relegated (or chased?) to the two islands of Gog and Magog, and the rest of the world is unknown. In a religious sense both the furies and Morrigan exist, literally. There are also mentions of Yggdrasil and Christ and Saraswati. It's very big on the triple goddess idea. Oh yeah, there is also an afterlife ferryman.

There is a part of me that says that if you're going to riff on preexisting myth and stories, then you should pick one and do it well. This hodgepodge of stories feels quite weak. I think the best you can hope for is that this is some alternate/future/virtual world where there is some reveal or reasoning why all of this fits together. Overall, I find myself more skeptical than intrigued.

The other thing I think makes this book weaker is the existence of necromancy. Sure, there's a good moment early. However, despite loads of people dying in this book, the main character literally dies several times and is sometimes even chased into the afterlife by other characters. It feels a little too much like protagonist plot armor.

I think this all makes it tough to recommend, even if there are bits I really enjoyed.

I found out about this book because I saw mcc talking about it.

Slow Gods is a weird little book. It's about space politics, focusing around an impending supernova event that is going to wipe out many planets. It's from the perspective of Mawukana, who is just a pilot and seemingly exists more on the edges of the story, and yet is also ultimately at the heart of things.

I wonder whether it is possible to exist as a person at all without measuring yourself against others. I wish sometimes that I was strong enough to be myself in company without company turning me into something else. I wonder who that person would be, and am sometimes grateful never to find out.

Maw is also an odd, monstrous protagonist. He is not particularly driven, and is affected strongly by the expectations of others. It's not that he doesn't have feelings, but more that many times he needs to be gently nudged into action by the people around him.

As a narrator, Maw also likes to periodically intersperse some anthropological digressions on the nature of ritual, or arcspace pilots, or gender across various societies. It can be a blunt instrument for worldbuilding, but it's in character for Maw as a curious academic. It's also always just long and infrequent enough to fill in some details or whet my own curiosity, and this style works for me.

Ultimately, this is a story about grief and death and connection. It's a caricature of capitalism and the ineffectiveness of ways that countries (fail to) confront capitalist empires. I was gripped by it the whole way through and quite enjoyed it.

I will change, as everyone changes throughout life. We change when we learn new things, when we meet new people, when we move to a new place.

What We Are Seeking is an incredible book.

Let me pitch this to you by comparing it to other touchpoints. It's got a similar anthropological and gender focus to Left Hand of Darkness. There's alien biology, transforming yourself to meet it, and (some) humility about colonialism that feels reminiscent of To Be Taught if Fortunate. The protagonist comes from a planet without marriage nor social homophobia and gets into an Ethan of Athos-y situation when he is forced onto a planet where most people are married and have strict het gender roles.

It's also a story about being the only person carrying your own culture with you in a community. It's got first contact and linguistics. It's about queer solidarity in the face of oppression. It's about the meaning of vows. It's about religious trauma. It's a story about third genders and the cost of "driving a wedge into other people's heads to pry open a space to live". There's just so much going on. This is not even getting into the worldbuilding that spills over outside the immediate plot about other planets and earth and the ship culture and the aiyi and and and

It's a slow, meandering, interpersonal sort of book. It's prone to cultural monologues. Structurally, it's a story that weaves a number of self-reinforcing parallel threads that all come to a similar point. Thematically, this book centers on the idea of change, and each of these story threads ends with taking a step into a new and destabilizing future together. We see the friction and the feelings and the decision point, but the reader isn't handed any certainty about the future. It's a form that lands with deep emotional resonance (especially that exquisitely worded final sentence), but it's also one that doesn't end with the typical level of plot closure you might be expecting.

It's not perfect, it's sometimes clunky, and it's not for everybody, but this is a book that is just going to rattle around in my brain for a long while.

I am sometimes a grumpus about fairy tale retellings, because it's been done so many times in so many ways that it's hard to find anything fresh.

This book is Cinderella by way of: what if Cinderella dies in the first paragraph, becomes a ghost that is also a haunted house, and goes to the ball mostly to eat food. Honestly, delightful.

The final scenes come a little too quickly for my tastes, but there's only so much space in a novella. (Something something, I guess that's what fanfic is for.)

I quite enjoyed this book.

Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found – or even founded – in the world because of no words?

Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?

Gliff is a surveillance dystopia novel—thematically about words, borders, and questions about authentic reality.

The point of view in this book is a child being raised on the margins of a system; they're an unreliable narrator who doesn't quite understand everything enough about the world to lay it out explicitly for the reader.

Stylistically, the writing is a stream of consciousness in the narrator's head, relating the past. Sometimes not having quotation marks for speech can feel jarring for me as a reader, but somehow here it lent itself to a feeling in the narrator's head, of a story being told stream of consciousness style. Because this book focuses on words, there's also some fun wordplay.

Despite being a dystopian story, all of this gives it a dreamy quality that I quite enjoyed.

New Murderbot! An action snack, but a bit shallow. It was fine—I will read every Murderbot until the end of time—but also, there just isn't enough here for me.

I said, “We’re not sacrificing anybody.” It just came out, I couldn’t help it.

(Emotion check: Apparently there is an easier way to do things, but I wouldn’t know. I like to do it the hard way, and take as much physical and emotional damage as possible.)

The new shtick this book is that Murderbot has installed a mental health module that checks in with it when its neural tissue generates "weird chemicals or whatever". Murderbot has to explicitly deal more with its feelings that normally it would ignore. Unfortunately, this narrative device doesn't feel like it has the same level of impact on the story as something like the trauma response in System Collapse.

I wish we had gotten more character development or even just character reveals. We get more Farai, but there's not enough ART or Three for my tastes.

This was on the #SFFBookClub poll but never got picked.

The Bewitching is three intertwined stories that all revolve around witchcraft. In 1998, struggling grad student Minerva is researching Beatrice Tremblay who wrote a novel the Vanishing roughly based on the disappearance of her friend Virginia. The second thread is that Minerva gets a chance to read Beatrice's journals, and so we hear Beatrice's perspective of mysterious and traumatic events of 1934. The final thread is Minerva's great-grandmother Alba who tells Minerva a story on her deathbed about events from her childhood in 1908.

At night the three of them talked on ICQ about meaningless and profound topics.

I am a sucker for parallel stories, but I especially love how rooted each of these different narratives are in highly specific times and places.

As a horror story, the pacing reminded me a lot of her previous book Mexican Gothic. There's a slow foreshadowing of creeping horror where things are going slightly awry (or maybe it's coincidence). And then, very late, there is a mask off moment where it's explicit what is happening. Having three intertwined stories that each have their own arc of tension only makes this stronger.

Choppy prose, sloppy plotting, thin worldbuilding, poor pacing. Do not recommend.

If I were just going to write a review, I'd probably just leave it at the above. I don't like to hate read things. If I'm going to spend my time on a book, it's gotta be something I at least think I'm going to enjoy.

Sometimes though, a friend says: I read this book everybody told me was good, and I have a lot of feelings but I can't quite find the words. Maybe you should read this to have some context and we can have a book discussion. A book discussion, you say! I'm in.

And now, because several of my friends have read this for whatever reason and want to talk about it, now I have to think more about this book that wasn't for me. I am told that the later books are more interesting, but I... just don't have it in me with so many things in the to-read pile.

If I was going to steer people towards other books that are adjacent to Red Rising, I'd say:

If you want people acting as gods on Mars presiding over mock warfare, Dan Simmons did a much better job of this in his Ilium and Olympos duology. (Also featuring: literary references and gay robots on a submarine.)

If you want a competitive school environment that transitions into the Hunger Games, also featuring the most special YA protagonist who is secretly there to burn down all of society and can't let anybody know what his true identity is, I think the Will of the Many is a better choice. (I also appreciate the way that book constantly ratchets up the tension on the protagonist's secrets.)

If you just want arbitrary stratified dystopian social classes, might I recommend this classic ghosthoney video: www.tiktok.com/@ghosthoney/video/6884050977389874437

Here's the extended remix of my grumpy feelings.

Catching up on the Hugo noms for this year, I picked up Alix Harrow's The Everlasting, a time loop-esque narrative about empires and the power of stories. Owen Mallory is a historian that has been researching Una the Everlasting who gets sent back to Una's time to write a good story about her to make the future country stronger.

One narrative issue with time loop stories is that they get repetitive in their structure. The reader has already seen the scenes, and something needs to shift to keep them fresh. (Sometimes you can lean into that discomfort for narrative reasons like In Stars and Time, but I think that would work less in a written format.) What works quite well for me in this book, is that the first time we see everything through Owen's perspective, who is coming in with his own biases about who Una is and is trying to learn about the world (along with the reader). The second time through we get Una's perspective, which is much different and delightfully directly refutes a lot of Owen's misperceptions.

As a warning, I will say that this story leans on Arthurian legend—the book Mallory is reading/writing is called The Death of Una Everlasting. It's not a direct retelling (thank goodness), but it does take a number of names, characters, and ideas and kind of smears them around to tell a new story. Personally, I think these direct references aren't necessary as the story stands well enough on its own, but I'm a bit of a hater on the Arthur front. These bits were blurry enough (and the story fresh enough) that I could squint and enjoy it.

Overall, I really liked this novel. There's a lot of good details early on that seem like innocuous character building but are instead well-laid foreshadowing. Love some romantic yearning. Lots of fun, quite grippy, would recommend.

They left even their sexes behind, dressing sometimes as two men or two women, binding or stuffing their chests, lengthening or shortening their stride. This, at least, came easily to them, for neither of them had ever quite been what they were supposed to be, or acted how they ought to act. They were too manly or too womanish, too loud or too soft-spoken, too tall or too slim, too strong or too weak. It was no hardship to trade one disguise for another.

This is a side comment, as this isn't really a story centered on gender, but it does have some interesting things going in that department all the same.

Owen and Una both feel like they are "doing a poor impression of what they are" and live outside gendered expectations. It's a good contrast to Vivian, who feels imprisoned, and whose goals are entirely rooted in gendered reasons (or at least the way other people treat her for it).

There was a certain pleasure, God knew, in following orders, in placing the heavy reins of your life in somebody else's hands. All your sins were not truly yours, then; all your unruly desires were safely curbed.

Also, incredibly minorly, but I appreciated this moment of kink that felt well-earned from a story and character perspective.

Series by James SA Corey really like to have optional novellas in between the longer novels. Livesuit is "book 1.5" in their latest Captive's War series.

It's a short military sf story from the perspective of humans fighting against the Carryx. This novella functions as supplemental worldbuilding for impatient readers, and also brings a different perspective than the one from the captive humans in the novels.

Ultimately, the story is weak and doesn't stand on its own. I would consider this novella strongly optional.

Book two of this series is the expected broadening of worldbuilding and perspectives. It's not that the first book didn't follow multiple characters but they were largely all in the same situation, and this book opens up to parallel stories. From a pacing and tension perspective, this development diffuses the impact of the plot.

This is all less of a critique and more of an observation. There's only so many places a story can go like this, and this is a natural path for an ensemble cast story. That said I enjoyed it a lot, but it's also book two of a trilogy, so from a closure perspective you could sleep on this one until the final one is out.

Other assorted thoughts in no particular order:

I am a sucker for the drip feed of worldbuilding reveals about the Carryx, their war, their opponents. I always always love exploration of wrecked planet and space ship settings. I love the ongoing exploration of captivity sociology and psychology, of the variety of coping mechanisms that characters use to deal with their lives that have irrevocably changed and are much more out of their control.

I like what's going on with the swarm here. I really like its complicated relationship with Dafyd. They have reasons to hate each other, they have reasons to love each other, they are forced together because they both have the same singular secret goal. The swarm does struggle with "should I tell Dafyd these secrets that he will rightfully be angry at", but it is also a spy in enemy territory and managing the emotions of its greatest ally makes sense too. You could argue that this book is an (approximate trans? non-binary?) identity arc for the swarm as well. Despite the fact that Dafyd explicitly gives good reasons why he pushes away the Jellit swarm and is closer to Clae, the dynamics here feel quite heteronormative. Finally, and minorly, the swarm feels a bit like a plural system adjacent story too, but in other ways not.

I love Vaudai the slug's buddy comedy routine with Ghati and Campar. I love Jessyn continuing to be super competent. I laughed at the lamp shading of "we'll do horrific things to prosecute a secret war against the Carryx, but we won't force people to have children". Mostly, I love Dafyd trying to hold everything up and together even as everybody hates him for it.

It's funny synchronicity that both this book and The River Has Roots are up against each other in the same Hugo category, as they are both fairy borderland stories. They feel entwined together in my mind and it's hard to talk about one without the other. The River Has Roots is about riddles, songs, and promises. The Summer War is about curses, revenge, and unbreakable oaths. They're both about the bonds between siblings where one sibling is lost to the faerie equivalent of the book.

What I like most about The Summer War is that despite being a very fairytale story with a pat ending, all of the characters (even their father) get a little bit of an arc and depth to them.

“I was only twelve,” Argent went on. “I barely even knew, yet. I didn’t understand what you were trying to do. All I understood was that there was something wrong with me, the same thing that was wrong with them, and you were showing me what it meant. What you had to do about it. And I didn’t see anything I could do to stop being wrong, because I hadn’t done anything to start. So afterwards, I was only waiting for you to come and take me, to do the same.”

It's a minor point, but an early plot point in the novel is the judgement of a case by Celia and Argent's father. Their father deliberately brings Argent along to court to show him harshly punishing two men who are involved with each other illegally. But the reason he does it is not from overt homophobia of believing this is truly wrong but from the more subtle homophobia of not wanting his son Argent to be judged negatively by others for something similar in the future. This is the plot point which causes Argent to leave, and it more or less breaks his father for the rest of the novel.

I like it because the more nuanced "I have made horrific parenting mistakes" leaves a lot more room for the father to come around. But also, it feels more applicable as a fairy tale for this age. Maybe I have just heard enough thirdhand stories lately of parents and grandparents wanting to shove young queer kids back in the closet to """protect""" them from the bullying of others that this rang particularly true to my ears.

A darkly comedic story about humans being the domesticated pets of large wolf-like Grays that have taken over the world. It's kind of a Planet of the Apes situation, with some Grays treating humans as things and some trying to treat humans as best they can imagine.

The story hook here is that John's owner Martok is perennially skirting poverty (along with John) and has squirrel-esque enthusiasm for shiny new schemes that will surely work this time. He treats John well (as these things go), but his latest scheme puts John's life in the bargain; as John has little leverage or power, he lands himself in increasingly risky situations as he tries to save Martok's financial situation and thus his own life.

After the Fall is written by the same author who wrote Mickey7 if that gives an idea of the dystopian black comedy tone here. Cynical me wishes the ending were a little bit less upbeat, but there's good closure for all the character story threads and enough worldbuilding reveals to satisfy.