Reviews and Comments

Overall feelings: the ideas were fun, the middle felt like it dragged on, and the politics often felt heavy handed

The part of this book that I enjoyed the most and felt like was the strongest was all of the interpersonal dynamics. The first book ends with waking up the legendary emperor Qin Zheng, who in this book takes control immediately. The triangle dynamics of Zetian, Shimin, and Yizhi from the first book are broken up, with Shimin hostaged, Yizhi becoming Qin Zheng's advisor, and Zetian becoming Qing Zheng's wife. There's a lot of good tension between the fact that Qin Zheng is an authoritarian tyrant that rules with violence, but also establishes some policies that try to address inequalities from the previous regime. Zetian loathes his controlling nature, but also finds that he listens and can be extremely reasonable when given policy advice. And, all in the background, the gods are manipulating everybody and everybody is trying to deceive each other and the gods. It adds up to a nuanced dynamic that was really intriguing to me.

Another thing I liked is that the ending of this book (like the ending of the first) is a great escalation. The first book ended with "oh wow, you're just going to reveal for free that [major spoiler]". The ending to this book likewise breaks up established dynamics, creates additional tensions, and remixes and stirs up interpersonal conflicts.

That said, I do think that it just took a while to get to this ending. The politics felt didactic and heavy handed to me, and the overall plot was much slower than the first book.

This book is off the #SFFBookClub backlog, and I saw it mentioned on Imperfect Speculation (a blog about disability in speculative fiction).

The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic near future world where most people have lost the ability to dream, and the only "cure" is through the exploitation of bone marrow from indigenous people who still can. The book follows Frenchie, a Métis boy who has lost everybody he cares about and travels with a found family trying to find safety and community. The metaphor here resonates directly with the horrors of Canada past, as armed "recruiters" capture anybody who looks indigenous to send them off to "schools" to extract their bone marrow.

I know this is a YA novel, but I wish some of the characters and the protagonist Frenchie had more depth. Maybe this would land better for somebody else, but I also don't have any room in my heart for jealousy subplots, and the one here did not create any extra characterization that could have made it interesting.

Even if some of the plot points felt a bit weak and unearned, the book still ended in a very emotionally resonant way that worked for me.

I enjoyed this recontextualization of the Count of Monte Cristo into a science fiction story of revenge against empire and colonialism. It riffs on many elements from the original, but ultimately takes them in a different direction. Here, Virika is still framed by one of her peers due to his career jealousy, but it's also because of rebuffed sexual advances. Instead of "wait and hope" from the original, this book has the much more modern "success or perish" mantra.

As both a personal and thematic moment, the final scenes of negotiation come satisfyingly full circle, but sadly there's not that much room for worldbuilding in this short novella. It makes the larger diplomatic picture feel shallow, and the end of the book feel abrupt.

#SFFBookClub

A delightful gay science fiction novella about a carefully planned revenge against an empire. I read this because it's a nominee for the Nebula best novella this year.

Enemies to lovers tropes aren't always my thing, but it works for me here. Both sides personally have reasons to be attracted to the other, but aren't betraying their values because they each feel like they're using the other to their own ends. Moreover, this dynamic feeds into the larger double-crosses and secret-keeping going on.

This book went from good to great right at the stinger at the end of chapter seven, when the layers of deception start to peel back. I won't spoil the line directly, but chef's kiss.

I gave this book a reread before getting to the sequel because it had been a bit.

I forgot how this book starts off with such a YA anime-esque tone. There's something about celebrity mecha pilots and media companies that rings a lot of hunger games-esque bells. But the world itself is almost too overly defined, where pilots have an objective "spirit pressure" for their piloting strength and there's both a mecha and enemy taxonomy that feel like something that could go into a wikipedia entry. In the end, these largely (thankfully) fall away and are more hook than truth.

One thing that's interesting to me is that Wu Zetian is a messy character who does unlikeable things at times. The plot is fundamentally a revenge plot that escalates, and she's willing to get her hands dirty to do what she feels is right.

The book ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, but it manages to be satisfying all the same. For a book where Zetian has literally smashed through everything holding her back, it's compelling to add some elements for the next book that can't be overpowered through ruthlessness.

These Fragile Graces is a fun trans noir murder mystery novella. It's a story that focuses much more on interpersonal and community relations than it does on a well-plotted mystery or detailed worldbuilding. That focus also sums up my feelings about what I felt worked and didn't in the story.

Mostly, I wish the mystery plot was a little bit more cohesive, and that there was more detail about the state of the world itself rather than being in a vague near-future urban decay. I loved the small detail of having memory implants to deal with trauma-based dissociation from childhood, but I wish the ideas around implants/augments and a rejection syndrome connected more to the plot.

It is nice to see an anarchist commune in fiction (I feel like maybe I've only read this in Margaret Killjoy's work previously) and how the protagonist Dora wrestles with her relationship with the people in it, wishing she could keep them safe in ways that they don't want to be. And, the heart of this novel is a very trans story about how Dora deals with a (non-estrogenated) clone of herself who comes to murder her but she ultimately ends up protecting. From the moment her clone showed up and yelled traitor, I knew exactly where this story was going, but it was still satisfying to get there all the same.

#SFFBookClub

I love a mystery! I love an epistolary novel! However, The Examiner just did not work for me. This is largely going to be a negative review, so feel free to skip. If I wanted to pitch this book positively, I would say that it is a mystery novel about an art master's program told through the artifacts of its forum posts, class assignments, and group chats. An external examiner has been called in to make an accounting of the program, and becomes increasingly concerned that somebody may have died during the course of the class.

This is my first Janice Hallett book, and most of the way I bounced off of it is that the writing doesn't feel like text chat. Everybody capitalizes sentences and ends with full stops. There's very few sentence fragments. Characters have a largely similar writing style, even when they range from ages 20 to 60. The writing was so stilted that I almost set it down several times. I looked up some reviews (which were almost all hugely positive) that suggested there were interesting twists later, so I pushed through to a painful and bewildering end.

Honestly, the author really needs to go read Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet about the different ways people speak online, especially in generational senses. It'd also be great if only the emails and essays were business formal so that there could be different modalities of communication, but everybody sounds equally stilted in their private chats. There's a rare sprinkle of "OMG" and "FFS" thrown in (always capitalized) in a way that feels the author is trying too hard while holding a skateboard over their shoulder.

I am a huge sucker for telling a story through online artifacts, and so in my mind I compare this with other fiction that has done this much more effectively. I would recommend instead Sarah Pinsker's Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather short story or even the posts in Christine Love's don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story game or the text chat in Naomi Kritzer's Catfishing on CatNet novels. These all feel like real people writing online in ways that this novel did not.

I'm going to try to speedrun the rest of my grumps here.

The pacing is wild. It takes sixty percent of the book before you get any sense of what might be going on. To me, this doesn't feel like a proper mystery where the reader has any chance of understanding the whodunnit until it's brought directly to their attention with new details. There's often plenty of bread crumbs that make (some of) the reveals feel plausible, but there's just not enough here. Also, when the first half of the book is such low stakes academic squabbling, it's hard to care more deeply about it when you find out there's secret reasons behind some of it. Telling me for half the book that something more interesting has been going on secretly that I haven't seen yet is just not effective storytelling.

The descriptions of the way technology works big and small are ridiculous in ways that threw me off as a reader.

The politics are wild! This book has some discussion about environmentalism and ecology, and one might think there could be some good things to be concerned about, maybe around checks notes capitalism or global warming or oil pipelines or pollution. (spoilers but haha jk these are definitely not the environmental concerns of this story)

Sure, sure, there are some twists and reveals of things the reader may have guessed or in other cases had no way of knowing. I'll be kind and not spoil them here, but some of them are just wildly implausible and so disconnected from what the rest of the book is about that it makes the book feel scattered.

At any rate, not a fan, would not recommend.

This was the #SFFBookClub book for February 2025. I am honestly a little surprised that it got a sequel. While I enjoyed it, I think this book suffers a little from being in the shadow of such a strong first book. It brings back nearly every character, although rooted in one world rather than worldhopping, and as such you really need to have read the first book to enjoy this one. The pitch for this book read almost as a murder investigation, but with foreknowledge from book one, it seemed incredibly obvious what the cause could be. This could just be a case of incorrect expectations on my part that the book would have more of a mystery element.

Thematically, I'm here for this story about justice and tearing down borders that separate the hoarding and exploitative rich from the poor. Here for the anger about how these rich people will casually break promises and ignore consequences for undesirable people. This book ends up feeling extremely quotable, but in doing so sometimes come off as didactic and telling more than it shows, even while I am nodding my head in agreement.

One thing I think this book does really well is having the main character from the previous book show up here as a foil to the new main character Scales. We get to see ways in which Scales and Cara are very different people and the biases that Cara brought to the world. It also means that we get to see the runners and Nik Nik in a much different light than the first book too. Cara could have stolen the show, and the book manages to make it not about her.

This is the step some civilians don't understand, the step Cara rejects: We can only make good on our promise of protection if there's blood on our hands. We can't bluff. The city only speaks the language of power, and we have to speak it right back for them to listen.

A minor observation, but I feel like there's a psychological shift in recent fiction (or in me) from "violence is never the answer" to "existing power will only respect violence". Babel (and its explicit subtitle) is certainly example of this too.

I wanted to like this queer witchy Appalachian book a lot more than I ended up enjoying it. The setup is that Benethea Mattox has sacrificed everything to find out why her friend mysteriously died in a mining accident; she rescues a mysterious woman from a river, who turns out to be a hundred plus year old witch with her own vendetta.

The perspective of the book alternates between Bennie in the present and Motheater in the past. What doesn't work for me is that most of the interesting tension happens in the past; Bennie's own agency and mystery solving in the present is largely subsumed in service to helping Motheater with her own plot.

One interesting observation is that I read the conflict as being between protecting the people vs protecting the land. Motheater wants to provide for her people but is competing with the growing needs and desires of her town that lead them to increased mining, either on their own or through a company. Surprisingly, this turned out to be much less than I expected about mining companies exploiting people than it was about mining generally hurting the environment.

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 characters in different timelines where their lives had taken different paths.

The post-apocalyptic wasteland locale of this novel is split into the wealthy folks of Wiley City living behind a wall (literally and metaphorically the airquotes nice white people of this story), the religious Ruralites, and the survivors of Ashtown between them. Cara is constantly code switching and crossing borders, both locally and multiversally--she is pretending to be a Ruralite, is secretly from Ashtown, while she precariously lives in Wiley City (hoping to get citizenship). Thematically, I love how the book ends with doubling down on Cara's role as an intermediary between worlds.

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

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. The power dynamic contexts are different enough that they end up taking different collaborator vs revolutionary approaches.

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 his silences; meanwhile, traumatized Jainan (who believes himself at fault for everything) feels pushed away but also that he deserves to be.

One trope that can frustrate me in a lot of romances is where two characters don't communicate and I feel like I need to yell "why won't y'all just talk to each other". Here, it feels less that these two don't talk, so much as they continually try, but end up talking past each other and making bad assumptions about why it's going poorly. This dynamic manages to work for me because the writing makes it believable why both of them think what they're thinking and why they don't push each other for better understandings. (But, I could also see this not working for some readers!)

The afterword mentions that this is a book that came from fanfic, and between how grippy it is to read and its use of some popular tropes, I think it shows (in a positive way). It opens with arranged marriage and there is definitely a scene with only one tent. (I don't know which fandom this is meant to have come from.)

But I also think saying this book comes from a fanfic undersells it. What I love is how solidly it intertwines the developing relationship between Kiem and Jainan with the developing space politics. For plot reasons, these two need to uncover the truth around the details of the death of Jainan's former husband, but this also results in uncovering Jainan's traumas and fears. Being vague for spoiler reasons, but the climax of the book has Jainan wrestle with being gaslit about his past, having to trust Tiem, working through his insecurities, and holding true to the strong parts of himself; and all this directly in the context of solving the space politics plot. It's this moment in particular where this book really melds these two genres together perfectly.