Reviews and Comments

Ancestral Night is a snappy and grippy space adventure. The big "future idea" here is not faster than light travel or even arguably the alien artifacts from long-disappeared alien races (although these things appear in the book); it's instead that humanity has discovered "rightminding", or the ability to directly manipulate emotions and hormones such that they can get past tendencies towards hierarchy or antisocial behaviors and coexist peacefully with aliens.

Rightminding reminds me of the mood organ from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. However, instead of being a metaphor for the similarities of humans and androids (and also being a tiny side mention), here it's the meat of the story and gets at the line between brainwashing and merely adjusting your brain to get along better with others.

I love how talky this book is. Yeah, sure, there's stolen alien spaceships and sexy space pirates and giant ancient space squid. But also, there's constant rumination and bickering on what makes a just society, what it means to be a person, and what an individual's responsibility to their society is.

The other thing I think is done well is that nobody and nothing is perfect here. Maybe the Synarche is better than alternatives and involves a lot more consent than similar systems, but also it's built on atrocities and there's rightful criticisms you can make about what little you see. Similarly, rightminding is a useful tool, but also any tool can be misused.

Anywho, I quite enjoyed this. Fun ideas and interesting characters wrapped up in an action space story.

(A few more spoiler-y opinions in this post.)

This is the final book in the first Foreigner trilogy, and to me is the most solid of the three in a lot of ways.

My favorite part of this book is that Jase from the ship has landed and is trying to fit into the Atevi world. When the series starts, we are already past the point where Bren has trained his entire life to be the paidhi but the language and culture is entirely new to Jase. Bren tries to acculturate Jase, but they are at such a disconnect socially and emotionally for most of the book. Jase wants some "humanity" from Bren, and there's some question of "how far" Bren has mentally adopted being Atevi and doesn't express emotions or even uses Atevi phrase constructions in English. The disconnect and Jase's anger dovetails so well with Jase having his own secrets and ship politics happening off page that it's quite effective.

My second favorite part of this book is probably the development of Bren's relationship with Jago, such as it is. Despite being such an Atevi communicator, there's still a large cultural gap about what this means to Jago, and she is also not willing to fill Bren or discuss it either. It's a nice parallel to the pitfalls that Bren falls in considering Atevi as "friends" or "liking" them. I complained about this a little in my review of the first book, in that I feel like this isn't a series about gender or biology, and I am always a little disappointed when "I am having an emotional and sexual relationship with an alien" gets glossed over when there should be so many rough edges. It feels a little too human with too much unsaid and too much working too easily.

Finally, I do feel a little here that this is another book where Bren does not have much agency. His role is to try to smooth tensions, get Jase up to speed, and to negotiate complicated nuanced politics with old school Tatiseigi who hates the way humans have corrupted Atevi. In the end, Bren pushes for a fishing trip that he has promised Jase, but it turns out that even this wasn't of his own design.

This is the second book in the first Foreigner trilogy, and one where Bren gets a little bit more agency than the first, where he is mostly kept in the dark.

It's a classic Foreigner book where the bulk of the book is careful, slowly building politics--internal Atevi ones, external mainland ones with Deana Hanks the temporary paidhi, and ones from the ship with its people imminently landing--all of which come together in a satisfying action sequence. I think this book is where the first trilogy really starts going, and sets up the third book which is probably my favorite of the three. It's the book where Bren starts to realize that his loyalty is truly more towards keeping the treaty and its peace than with the institute of his own state department that technically gives him the authority to do what he is doing.

I like the tension here with Bren's fiance Barb and the increasing romantic tension between Bren and Jago. Barb is absolutely incredibly emotionally immature, both pushing Bren away because the relationship is (understandably) not working for her but also asking for him back (because her new relationship isn't working either); I think it is a little over the top but it works because it's such a contrast with Atevi mindsets.

I said this in the first book, but I feel like this entire first trilogy is one where Illisidi is an independent wild card, where she has her own agenda and politics and Bren (and the reader) can never fully depend on her support and where her loyalties will lie.

Also extremely minor, but as touchpoints for future books, we also get our first pizza party, our first trip to the Taiben hunting lodge, and our first meeting with Tabini's fiancee Damiri.

I have read other Cassandra Khaw, and this story continues in their writing vein of being bloody and extremely visceral (literally and metaphorically). It's less body horror and more horror horror; it's the fiction version of the last twenty minutes of The Substance where everything turns monstrous and there's a firehose of blood and gore.

This is another "dark academia book", where magic children who have apocalyptic abilities are sent (or taken) to keep them safe from the rest of the world. Obviously where there's power, there's abuse of power and this is fundamentally a revenge story from a traumatized woman who likes her bodily autonomy.

The story is told from the main character's perspective in both the present and the past, with the past narrative catching up to the present eventually to help explain some of the in medias res. I do really like this technique when it's done well, and I feel like it helps flash back to backstory for characters and create some level of doubt about the main character's motivations. The present is mostly action, and so it makes for satisfying pacing to have interleaved backstory and tension.

I think this book is best viewed as a classic horror story--it feels very much like a movie where parts of the cast are slowly being killed off. It's about establishing characters rather than a strong sense of place. Still, it's interesting to compare some of the world building of Scholomance to here. Despite the fact that both contain the classic trope of a school that constantly rearranges itself, the Scholomance has a map and a sense of threat about being in a lower room or getting lost. Here, the physical school itself is mostly just a side detail and I don't really have a sense of space or tension.

This is not to say I didn't enjoy this book, but in comparison to other adjacent dark academia genre books I think it just doesn't quite stand out. The worldbuilding and deadly graduation ceremony was much more thin than in the Scholomance. I found the characters in Emily Tesh's The Incandescent to be much stronger and more interesting. Even Khaw's previous Little Mermaid retelling The Salt Grows Heavy sticks with me much more than the moments in this book.

I wonder if this will land better for folks who are more into horror than I am.

This Christine Love story is an extremely anime story about a student learning to fight robots with a giant sword and falling in love with her turncoat fencing teacher.

I wanted to like this, but I just felt like it wasn't for me (in the literal sense that perhaps I am not the target audience). Maybe I haven't seen enough Gundam. Maybe anime tropes aren't quite my cuppa. I wish the worldbuilding around universal language and the Voyager broadcast weren't quite so thin. I have love love loved Christine Love's games writing universally, and Get in the Car, Loser! is one of my most favorite games, but somehow this just didn't land for me. I don't mean that as a euphemism though; I know this will really land for some folks.

A conversation on Mastodon prompted me to read this novella. It's a coming of age story on some future flooded planet with a history of angels that used to exist, and is largely about disillusionment with religion (specifically one with Christian overtones).

(This story is also surprisingly accessible for Greg Egan; I think this is my own recency bias in reading several of his novels over the years. There's an escalation of the science aspects over narrative as the years go on (Clockwork Rocket was not for me), but Oceanic is more like what I expect from his earlier work.)

Just as women and men were made indistinguishable in the sight of God, so were Freelanders and Firmlanders. (Some commentators insisted that this was literally true: God chose to blind Herself to where we lived, and whether or not we’d been born with a penis.)

It's got a little bit of tangential gender stuff going on, but it also feels quite dated to me. Maybe I just forget what 1998 looked like. The main detail is that people's bodies in this universe transfer a penis from one body to another during piv sex. There's some social gender around this (e.g. "who brings a bridge to this marriage?", although this attitude is considered dated by some characters), but when this comes into play for the protagonist it feels more like a virginity metaphor than a gender one. This mechanic seems like it should have a larger social impact in terms of surrounding cultural context, but it functions more like fun unrelated worldbuilding in this story.

This body horror pregnancy trans dysphoria story was... a lot, but it was also raw and real and quite good.

Crane is part of a local cult, run by a hive of sentient flies and worms, and when he gets pregnant the hive insists he carries the child to his utter distress and terror. It's visceral and disturbing--full of trauma and abuse, self-loathing and self-injury, and shitty choices in a shittier world.

This review seems like a recapitulation of my feelings after Witch King: I was gripped by the world, have mixed feelings about the book as a whole, wish more characters had depth, and was disappointed by parts of the ending. It's not to say I didn't enjoy it (and maybe it's just that my expectations were too high) but overall it was "fine".

One thing I really enjoy here is that we get into some really good Martha Wells fantasy ruins. Witch King and Queen Demon both follow in the path of City of Bones (my favorite Martha Wells fantasy story) and some of the Raksura books as well. I'm not sure what makes these so appealing, but I think there's something about her use of dangerous and creepy structures full of unknown danger that she does a great job with.

This book continues with interleaved narratives from the past and present. (As an aside, I do wonder if this will be a trilogy and the past narrative will cover all the way up to the present narrative in the first book.) The first book interestingly had both narratives in the same Summer Palace location at different times, which echoed nicely. This book's present timeline foreshadows some of the dust witch history, but otherwise feels quite disconnected.

I continue to be somewhat skeptical about the effectiveness of this structure for this story; there's not much tension about what's missing in between the two parts and they are not particularly great foils for each other. If the book weren't committed to this structure, some flashbacks to more moments with Arn would have gone a long way to making some emotional moments feel more impactful.

But maybe that's a larger problem of feeling the book is a bit muddy. Both halves of the first book ended with wanting to unburn the world, but I don't know if I'd say that's the story here. Is working to destroy the Hierarchs truly unburning the world? If there's any consistent theme, it's coming together to resist authoritarian rule of any sort, but even that is maybe a stretch.

The characterization also continues to feel pretty shallow for everybody who is not Kai and Bashasa. Tenes and Sanja especially feel like they need more screen time and characterization or reason for being with the rest of the party. Nightjar and Highsun similarly feel like they're important characters but we hear and see quite little of them despite them being involved in pivotal moments.

The ending is my biggest disappointment. At least the present narrative carries the tension, but the past narrative just ... elides it? Maybe this is just a big editing decision here to just cut out action to keep the book at four hundred pages, but it feels like there could be such an emotional contrast to Kai's rescue in the Summer Halls and Kai's actions in Descar-Arik and all we get is a small concluding moment with Bashasa at the end. Additionally, there feels like there's some uh pretty momentous reveals at the end of the present narrative and they just get buried :drum: in the final moments of action and they're gone almost as soon as they appear. Both halves end unsatisfyingly, each in their own way.

I will almost certainly read the next book, but I really hope it can tie everything together in a more satisfying way.

I think time travel stories where the past can be rewritten ultimately feel like nothing matters and it makes me hard to care about it as a reader. On the positive side, I think it's always interesting to have a villain who can rewrite the past (hello, Saint of Bright Doors). I also think there are a lot of fun details about slightly alternate universes and the ending goes very Millenium Actress in a delightful way.

There is clear setup for future books here, but much of what was revealed explicitly felt already clearly foreshadowed (to me at least) and the bonus worldbuilding on top of the first book felt thin (or at least less interesting).

I will continue with this series for sure, but this was a little bit of a disappointing second book.

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.

A solid fairytale story of two sisters, songs, and a murder. Amal El-Mohtar's writing here is excellent as always, and the world and characters felt fresh.

(This is unrelated to the writing itself, but a general gripe about book length meta expectations and publishing choices. I would really prefer if half of this ebook was not filled with a preview of other works. The murderer in this story was unmasked """halfway""" through the book and I was suddenly wondering about the pacing and where the story was going to go from there, but it just ended instead. If anything, my expectations left me with some bonus disappointment. It would have been a worse story for sure had it not ended where it did, but I was intrigued by the possibility.)

The shtick: intelligent robots traumatized by war, capitalism, and oppression struggle together to establish a noodle shop in war-torn, separatist San Francisco.

Other than thinking robots and tube delivery technology, the worldbuilding is a fever dream of the current moment despite being set in 2064: it's got crypto, LLMs, delivery apps, ghost kitchens, slang like "rizz". But it's unfair to take this aspect too seriously; it's not a hard sf novel trying to speculate about the future. At its heart, it's a comfy emotional novel about forming community around food in a ruined future.

It's fluffy, it's fun, it was something I needed right now.

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.)