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I enjoyed this Kim Stanley Robinson take about (the problems of living in) a generation starship. A friend who once saw KSR's WisCon talk about this book recommended it to me.

This is not my first KSR rodeo, so I knew a bit of what to expect from his writing style. It's a bit of a dry, plot-driven story. There's not particularly strong emotional beats. And, it's a vehicle :drum: for KSR's opinions on generation ships, insular biogeography, and the Fermi Paradox.

One thing that I think works very well in this book is that the narrator is the ship itself, having been exhorted to summarize the journey in words by the chief engineer. It can explain away some of why the book focuses on only a few characters and also why it's largely dry and descriptive. (The ship does in time learn to enjoy metaphors and wordplay, like "once in a blue muon".) The ship is probably the best character in the book.

I have mixed feelings about the end of the book, but it's hard to talk about things without being too spoilery. Suffice it to say that I found the penultimate 10% of the book fun and think it would have been stronger to end there before the shift into the more didactic final 10%.

I deeply enjoyed the conclusion to this duology. At times it was bleak and dark, but I feel like my thoughts on the first book continued to ring true in this book more than I had expected.

It's hard to talk about this without spoilers, but the thing I liked the most about this book is when it brings two characters together that are ostensibly similar to each other to highlight their differences. Zhu and Ouyang (both not men in their own way) go on adventures. Chen and Zhu (both pragmatically pursuing greatness) face off against each other. Ouyang and Wang (both focused on revenge) have a showdown. I just love seeing all these characters be such foils for each other.

The finale especially was satisfying emotional closure that brought all these main characters together. Even through sacrifice and suffering, there was more hope than I thought there might be.

(I wrote some longer thoughts with spoilers in this reply).

As is maybe obvious, I've been quite enjoying all of the Small Wonders issues. I don't get a chance to read a lot of short fiction, let alone flash fiction. It certainly looks like a tough job as a writer to squeeze an interesting story into such a small space. In the notes from the editors this time around, they say "flash fiction lives in the transition zone between poetry and story", which explains a lot about why they would create a magazine that covers both (and also why I sometimes misremember a story as being poetry as prose).

Here's a couple of my favorites again from this one:

• Imagine Yourself Happy by Premee Mohamad

Whoever gets to autopsy me, congratulations, this really will be a first in the literature if you're allowed to publish.

I really enjoyed this story about a scientist narrating their unexpected last moments. As the title implies, it's one about taking pleasure in the small moments you have.

• Kodakromen by Elizabeth R. McClellan

Every selfie will eventually be a picture / of a corpse

A poem about the burden of seeing the future through photos.

• Chocolate Pudding by David Hammond

"When you wake up,” she says, “we’ll have 'gravity.'"

A fun story about a kid on a spaceship returning to earth; I like the adults in this story who are trying to share their nostalgic joy about gravity or birds or earth itself to a kid who really would just prefer to float forever and is trying to translate alien adult joy into something more relatable.

I read Olga Ravn's The Employees ("A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century"), and this book sure has some attributes.

The format of this book is ~entirely in disjointed and anonymous (confessional?/professional)? statements to an off-page undescribed committee.

Statement 015 I'm very happy with my add-on. I think you should let more of us have one. It's me and yet it's not me. I've had to change completely in order to assimilate this new part, which you say is also me.

Statement 011 The fragrance in the room has four hearts. None of these hearts is human, and that's why I'm drawn toward them. At the base of this fragrance is soil and oakmoss, incense, and the smell of an insect captured in amber.

I've included two partial statements here for flavor from adjacent pages, because this is the only way I feel like I can convey the Annihilation-esque vibes of this book.

The book opens with a preface that these statements are to help improve future workflows and prevent future deviation(!). There's a lot of creepy workplace language of productivity and add-ons and forced updates, but the book itself dwells more on employees struggling with uncertainty about what it means to be a human or a constructed humanoid.

I am still not sure what I think about this, but I am glad to have read it.

Small Wonders Issue 4 is another one full of really great stories. Here's a couple I especially enjoyed:

• On the Bare Unwelcoming Shore by Zohar Jacobs

About most things in life you can be an agnostic; arrival day is the exception. Only our dreams deny the reality of where we are.

A story about the struggles of a Martian colony celebrating the day their ancestors arrived. This was a fun read especially after recently finishing A City on Mars, but I think thematically the idea of carrying hope for the future just through continuing to struggle towards it day by day resonated a lot.

• Sever by Lora Gray

a secret passenger the ship’s manifest would never recognize, tucked, painfully, into the hollows of my skull.

I love love the idea of this poem about the narrator's relationship with the alien that bursts out of them.

• Five Functions of Your Bionosaur by Rachael K. Jones

One thing your great-aunt forgot to mention: bionosaurs imprint for life.

An endearing story about our relationships with pets, in this case a robotic dinosaur.

She Who Became the Sun is a historical fantasy duology, retelling the rise of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty. This is a reread for me before I get to the sequel for a belated #SFFBookClub sequel month.

My favorite part of this first book is the ways that the major characters all uniquely grapple with their own gendered otherness:

Ouyang is an enslaved warrior eunuch working for the Mongol prince of Henan's son, Esen. Ouyang is the most masculine of characters, but copes with his otherness through anger and shame. He so strongly denies the femininity that other people project onto him that he extrudes that rejection into misogyny. His relationship with men is similarly uneasy and hits a classic trans refrain: "he had no idea if it was a yearning for or a yearning to be, and the equal impossibility of each of those hurt beyond belief". For Ouyang, "the worst punishment is being left alive".

Zhu (the titular sun-becomer) is a famine survivor who decides to claim the great fate of her dead brother by becoming him. Her burning desire for greatness forces her to overcome impossibility through ingenuity. To Zhu, gender and otherness are not a source of shame or a limitation, they are merely tools to work towards greatness or obstacles to work around. She's a delightful contrast with both Ma and Ouyang; her direct contradiction of Ouyang is such a good character and plot moment: "However tired I am, however hard it is: I know I can keep going, because I'm alive."

Wang is the half-Mongolian, adopted brother of Esen. Wang is a scholar out of time, reviled for his effeminate behaviors and unmasculine administrative and accounting interests. Unlike Ouyang, he has no denial or shame about this and accepts ongoing humiliation bitterly; however like Ouyang, he turns this humiliation inward into anger and desire for revenge. Wang is the petty bureaucrat working behind the scenes; even as his work is dismissed, he guides the efforts of his brother Esen from the shadows through funding, diplomacy, and assassination. "In having told yourself so often that I'm worthless, have you forgotten what my domain actually is? I'm an administrator."

Ma is the precious cinnamon roll who keenly feels her own emotions and continually extends love out into the universe to those who don't deserve it, even as it is only returned with suffering. Other than being an extremely endearing character and the caring heart of a novel otherwise filled with selfish desire and denial, she feels like the epitome of self-limited excellence; she is extremely capable but simultaneously trapped by her own inevitable circumstances of being a woman.. "She was a woman and [..]. everything that could be wanted was all equally impossible".

She recognized pragmatism taken to its natural endpoint: the person who climbed according to his desire, with no regard to what he did to get there. Zhu was surprised to feel, instead of sympathetic attraction, a tinge of repulsion.

Parts of this book remind me of The Traitor Baru Cormorant, in particular the resource management of Wang, the political struggles, and the pragmatic way that all of these characters do some occasional horrible things to work towards their own desires (loyalty, revenge, power, greatness).

Both books posit that these desires create suffering (and in an explicitly Buddhist sense here). However, I think Baru is a brutal gutpunch of a book that wants you to believe that sacrifice and suffering is always required (both of the characters and the reader); this book seems to believe in Zhu who can (sometimes) find another path when confronted with an impossibility. Ma also explicitly balances out Zhu's monomaniacal pursuit of greatness and helps Zhu feel some level of revulsion towards pure pragmatism. Together, they are a source of queer joy that creates hope and possibility. These things together make this book work for me and make me able to find love for these complicated characters, while reading Baru left me cold.

This didn't quite resonate as the whole of issue 2, but there were still a lot of fun moments in Small Wonders Issue 3. If anything, I'd say this one leans more lighthearted overall than previous issues. These were my favorite stories:

• How My Sister Talked Me Into Necromancy During Quarantine by Rachael K. Jones

I knock on Lila’s bedroom door and catch her red-handed (literally; her hands are coated in blood) before a brand-new portal as a Vampire Queen and her familiar step out.

Despite my own reservations about the use of the word "quarantine" or "lockdown" for people's early covid experiences, I find myself deeply enjoying seeing how people process their own covid experiences through writing. This in particular is a fun fluff story about necromantic summoning in confined spaces.

• To Persist, However Changed by Aimee Ogden

The diffuse awareness of the Moonmind comes to an agreement: Soon. Cross-currents of debate run through the Consensus as analyst colony-lobes suggest: next-day or two-day, three-day, six-day. One stubborn early-generation lobe insists no-day, never-day, distance, separation.

This is the kind of fun idea that only works as a short story.

• Festival by Christine Hanolsy

The Vindeans are sailors. These rituals bring them comfort. Three days to mark the solstice; three days to lighten one’s heart. A slip of paper, a handful of words, a lantern to carry them up and away: regrets, promises, wishes.

A story of queer regrets told in the interstices of a description of the narrator's traditional festival.