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This book is the October/November #SFFBookClub book. It's a collection of stories about an empire that has fallen and been rebuilt multiple times, each focusing on a very different place and time, and each told with a narrated fable-like style. One stylistic choice that stands out immediately is that the sentence structure is quite long and there are often comically long lists of names or places or ideas or things or professions or or or... I found this to be overall a delight, personally.

This may be due to expectations that I had going into this, but the stories in this novel felt loose and disconnected. This is especially due to coming off collections of short stories like How High We Go in the Dark or even North Continent Ribbon, which interconnect the stories together with shared characters or worldbuilding. Kalpa Imperial had very few touchpoints between stories other than a loose thematic sense, and this created a storytale atmosphere where places and characters and words washed over me, unlistened.

Nothing was rooted in a time. Most stories were barely rooted in a place, and at best were set against "the south". Characters are referenced and never touched on again (or at best mentioned in passing elsewhere once). The storyteller narration references historical context that the in-universe listener would know to situate this story in, but to me the reader it felt like noise rather than worldbuilding, akin to opening the Silmarillion to a random page with no further context.

Theoretically, I can imagine placing any book on some hypothetical scale of narrative detail. (As a joke, let's say this is a scale with one end being the TV series Lost and the other end being a Brandon Sanderson wiki). I don't need all the details in a world spelled out, but there's a tipping point where there's enough detail where I believe that the author could fill in the blanks if needed. Well before that tipping point, it feels like authors are largely making everything up whimsically as they go. I think you can tell a set of disconnected stories where all the details are constructed out of whole cloth, but there needs to be some strong thematic through line to carry it, at least for me. This novel just doesn't quite have that.

To come back and treat this book for what it is rather than what I expected it to be, thematically I would try to pin this book down as about being about telling stories and taking the long view of history--that all places and empires and people change dramatically over time and can become something different. I think secondarily, it feels like it's a set of critiques and observations about empires and humanity; it's full of wry critiques of power, of nobles, and of human nature. I found the book amazingly quotable and quite funny in parts.

This is a hard book to recommend; even as I enjoyed it, its lack of coherence and whimsical storytale nature make it more a book that I enjoyed in passing than one that will stick with me.

This fantasy novel has a fun blend of politics, murder mystery, and rivals-to-lovers romance.

Lorelei Kaskel is picked to lead a small expedition to find the Urspring, source of all magical power, for King Wilhelm to unify his fragile empire. On her team is her infuriating academic rival Sylvia von Wolff. Once on the boat, Lorelei's mentor is murdered, and Lorelei has to work with Sylvia to continue to the expedition and find the murderer.

The dynamics of enemies-to-lovers don't always work for me, but somehow this one was a lot of fun! I felt like there was a lot of nuance around class and power dynamics, around misunderstandings, and around the tension of Lorelei not wanting to abandon her culture any more than she already had. This romance was as bumpy of a ride as you'd expect, but that bumpiness didn't feel artificial--it revealed characterization or heightens the mystery and politics. The ending of the book felt a little anticlimactic, but even so I found it satisfying in the way that it realistically addressed the needs of all the characters.

The Old Goat and the Alien is a cozy, fluffy scifi novel that is largely inwardly focused on character growth and interpersonal conflict. It's also hella queer. This book is exactly the soft hug I expected it to be.

The main plot hook is that grumpy, goat-shape Avari inadvertantly becomes the host for the newly arrived "alien" (human) Jenna who shows up through a portal with no resources and no friends. This book has a confetti grab-bag of genders and trans and queer and disability flavors. I love love the gift economy. I also super appreciate the detail of having a major side character be a plural system that is chimera-shaped.

A story with this many identities also creates so much space for nuance; there's different kinds of disability accommodations, there's two very different ways of being autistic, there's many different ways of being trans.

(also Tak! shoutout in the thanks section??)

This anthology of transfeminine cyberpunk stories had some gems in it. The pitch made me hope for transformative ways of being intersected with surviving under oppressive social structures (it's always capitalism), and it very much delivered. It's rare that every story in a collection lands for me as a reader, but it seems a positive trait that they all didn't in this one trying to go in weirder and stranger directions.

There are so many good quotes I want to share from this collection but I'll try to limit myself.

A taste of my favorite stories: * a woman who drives a giant robot cube on the moon for scientists as a second job and dreams of moving there to have less lag in her embodiment * a bespoke body-creating artist (with their own nuanced dysphoria) trying to create body euphoria for others in a world where their bodies are callously sold at auction * an underground group who syncs their memories with each other working to collectively survive (and fight) puritanical fascists * a scientist who injects herself with own soon-to-be-shutdown nanite project and tries to figure out how to be a mother to them

This is a "dark academia" book about a down-on-her-luck college dropout Lennon who receives a mysterious phone call congratulating her on being accepted to the interview stage at Drayton College, a place she's never heard of and that she definitely didn't apply to. Drayton is a place where people learn the (magic) art of "persuasion", of forcing other people and sometimes the world into doing whatever you want (at the cost of great physical pain and harm). See also: exlusive school clubs and social hierarchy, an incredibly problematic relationship with mysterious academic advisor Dante, and unspoken mysteries about the school itself and its past.

This book's plot pulled me along via reveals about the world and Dante, but character-wise it was far too light. It felt like plot rather than personality pushed the characters forward; I got to the end and didn't feel like I had a solid sense of who anybody was. There were also a number of worldbuilding details that I wished got built on more, but were only mentioned offhand or for a plot point and then not brought up again. My overall conclusion was that I enjoyed this as I read it, but the more I marinated on it, the more shallow it felt.

Monstrilio is a hard novel for me to pin down. If I had to attach some labels to it I'd say literary fiction with a dash of horror.

It's a story rooted in loss: Magos and Joseph's son Santiago dies suddenly; Magos is enthralled by a tale about regrowing a child from its heart and so cuts out a piece of Santiago's lung from his body to do the same. As she feeds it and grows this lung, it becomes a monster that she treats as her son, and names Monstrilio. The book is divided into four parts from different perspectives: Magos, longtime friend Lena, Joseph, and finally Monstrilio.

But it's not just about grief, it's a story about family and relationships with the monstrous. Magos lives in denial and tries to believe her lung monster Monstrilio is her child Santiago again. Joseph speedruns acceptance and tries to forcibly conform his own life and Monstrilio into a facade of normality.

It's satisfying to me that the book ends from the fractured perspective of Monstrilio, rather than through the projecting biases of the adults in his life. It's interesting to see how the adults largely try to cover for Monstrilio's (at times horrible) actions and coerce him into humanity, while Monstrilio himself covers his own monstrous feelings from the adults and tries to exist in an ill-fitting human world.

I was quite engrossed by this book, although it is definitely quite (deliberately) uncomfortable at points and the book doesn't shy away from (usually off page) gore.