Queen Lily, by Theodora Goss

Queen Lily crept onto the Locus Award list, probably because Theodora Goss has written some other good things.  I just couldn't get into this one at all.  The point of view changes without warning or sense, and is just confusing.  The setting is Alice In Wonderland, which has had a lot of rework over the years so if one is going to go back there one has to have something really new to say.  About all there is here is that Lewis Carroll was a pedophile--we knew that already.  I have to rate this one down.

The Donner Party, by Dale Bailey

The Donner Party is a Locus Award finalist in the novelette category.  It has nothing to do with the historical Donner party.  So that name just has a hard go of it.  Because it actually does have to do with the Donner Party--in that the people in the story eat human flesh ("ensouled" flesh).  In this case by choice, with full awareness.  The story is set in Victorian England, and the protagonist is a social climber--it's more of a horror story than anything speculative, but it's pretty darn horrible.  Weak 3 stars from me.

The Only Harmless Great Thing, by Brooke Bolander

The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Brooke Bolander writes like a boxer. Punch, punch, punch. If you're ready for it, you can appreciate it. I wasn't ready when I read And You Shall Know Her By the Trail of Dead (and also I really don't think the story was that good). This time I was ready, and can appreciate what she's doing. It's a really searing look back at two unrelated historical cruel acts, one in slow motion (Radium Girls) and one faster (electrocuting an elephant). I know in my gut that this kind of lookback is coming for those of us living now (climate change, plastic, strip mining, etc, etc, etc). And in fact this take on history is supposed to make us think in just that way--how will our actions (and inactions) be seen 50 years from now. It's jumbled beyond what it needs to be to get the point across, so I can't give it 5 stars, but I'm glad I bought it.



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No Flight Without the Shatter, by Brooke Bolander

No Flight Without the Shatter by Brooke Bolander

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Brooke Bolander's work can be hard to read. Sometimes it's just in-your-face violent. At other times she crosses over into unsparing hard truth. That's when she's at her best, and this story represents that side. Life on earth is not going to come to an end because of humans, but it's going to be so different that humans as they are won't be able to live outside of bubbles. Neither will any other complex oxygen-breathing creature. That's what Bolander is describing here. It's a fable. Fables can clarify what is only dimly seen in reality. Like all apocalyptic SF, Bolander is mourning what we have not yet lost.



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No Flight Without the Shatter on TOR.com

How to Swallow the Moon, by Isabelle Yap

How to Swallow the Moon is a Locus Award 2019 finalist. And an OK choice I guess, though it's a really old story that gets retold a lot.  The only twist, and anymore it's a pretty mild one, is that the lovers from extremely different social castes, where the lower caste one is the tutor to the higher one, is that they are both women.  Now, the ending does in fact have a twist worth the read, and that makes it worthy of consideration.  So I got a surprise out of that.  It's a good story, I can recommend it.

Okay, Glory, by Elizabeth Bear

Okay, Glory is the first piece of what could be considered "hard" SF by Elizabeth Bear that I have read.  Except it's almost not speculative, seems just about a year or two in the future.  An eccentric tech billionaire who likes to be left alone has constructed an IOT Fortress of Solitude and turned control over to a house AI called Glory.  It takes good care of him and he's very fond of it.  Except it gets hacked--the AI gets convinced that the outside world has had the Zombie Apocalypse--and locks him in.  Who'd 'a thunk it?

We're getting to the point where it's easy to believe that anyone who turns that much of their life over to IOT devices is asking for trouble.  Might have been more interesting if his Smart House was air-gapped and they still found a way to hack it.

In any case it's a good story, and nice that it found its way into a free online source from the print collection (Twelve Tomorrows) that it was in.

Quality Time, by Ken Liu

Quality Time is part of the anthology Robots vs. Fairies, and was a finalist for the Locus award for novellas this year.  Liu is a master storyteller at this length, and in this one he takes on Silicon Valley.  The protagonist is a liberal arts major hired on as a project manager at a robot company.  It's got all the tropes--engineers going forward heedless of the problems their inventions are causing, founder worship, and an older female engineer providing a needed dose of skepticism.  But it's a more positive story than many in this vein.  I think Liu believes that technology is on balance going to continue to be a force for good, if we watch over it.  I hope so.  A strong 3 stars.

Umbernight, by Carolyn Ives Gillman

Umbernight was a Locus novella nominee for 2018, the only one that is available online.  The story has a very classic feel--an explorer from a colony on a hostile planet leads a team of colonists on a mission to recover a shipment from Earth.  They have barely been surviving, in part because the planet is actually orbiting a binary with a nasty X-ray star, which was not anticipated.  The colony normally shelters through the long time when Umber's X-rays bathe the planet, but the X-ray season came early and the colonists were caught out.  They find that the planet is teeming with life, much of it hostile.  It's a good nostalgic tale, kind of like older Venus stories.  But less optimistic, more burnt out.

The Freeze Frame Revolution, by Peter Watts

The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Well...of the other stories in the Sunflower Cycle I have only read The Island, and I don't remember it well, and also I have not decoded the red letters in the book. With those caveats, I have to say that I liked the story a lot and can highly recommend it. Watts' very intellectualized and engaged pessimism about human nature leads him to write interestingly layered plots and characters. The plot itself reminds me of another book featuring a rebellion across time--I thought it was Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In the Sky but I can't confirm it. Sunday as a heroine struck me as very brave and real. It's a fine and satisfying read on its own--probably would feel more complete if I read it in with the others in the series.



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The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It's no surprise this novel scooped up all the major awards this year. It's a solid book by a veteran author in a year of many good first efforts and less great books from the usual suspects. It showcases how SF can illuminate current events, and has enough hard SF in it to be satisfying to a technical fan. Is it the best thing I ever read? Not quite. As much as this book sprawls (covering race, gender, and religious discrimination, as well as science denial) it ends up missing a lot that's important in alternate histories. The tension comes entirely from the aforementioned social context issues, and while that's real, in the outside world those issues intertwine with geopolitics and personal conflict. We get none of the latter. The result for me is that Elma's story is compelling (I eagerly read it all the way through) but not really challenging in any way. Stetson Parker, overbearing white-guy test pilot, is about the only character with any real complexity in the book.

Still, I liked it, and it's an easy book to like.



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The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds

The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I read this as preparation for reading Elysium Fire, second in this subseries. Now I really wish I had read Revelation Space first. But at this point I am used to joining series mid-stream, so was able to interpolate pretty well. This is pretty classic space opera, but the emphasis is really on the stoic Tom Dreyfus and the dedicated Space-FBI Panoply. The society is a pretty direct lift from 20th century Europe, and the technology pretty much assumes you are a veteran science fiction reader and don't really need to have an explanation of how the Glitter Band's space technology works. Or maybe that's in Revelation Space. In any case, it's a very competent story, with a good amount of excitement and mechanical know-how. We have a nod to racism in Tom's relationship with hyper-pig Sparber (no other examples of his kind, so we don't really know much about them), but it too is very 20th-century. Not sure yet if I'm going to back up to read the others or not. But this one is fine.



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The Descent of Monsters, by Jy Yang

The Descent of Monsters by J.Y.  Yang

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


You are reading this because I am finished. I finished the book, that is. This installment in the Tensorate series tells the story of horrifying experiments by the Tensorate and the Protectorate (in cahoots) that go wrong, through the letters and reports of the investigator assigned to the case. It can be an interesting device if done well, but this was just so-so. I don't feel like I learned much more about the Tensorate or the Protectorate (these tendencies were well-documented in the first two books). We get a little of Rider, the rebel who moves via Slack, but in general the limiting of the perspective to the investigator constrains the story too much. I'm guessing that the problem set up here gets more definition in the next installment, but I'm not sure I can justify going on. Meh.



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How Long 'Til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin

How Long 'til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Jemisin is an amazing novelist--her Broken Earth trilogy is among my favorites, and the Inheritance Trilogy (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms) has the broad reach I like to have in the SF novels I read. The introduction to this collection is really interesting--Jemisin came into writing in a different way from a lot of the current award-winning writers. She learned mostly on her own, and started with novels. Better for the pocketbook if it works, which it did.

So after starting a successful career as a novelist, she goes back to learn about writing by crafting short stories, and going to some workshops. Her setup effectively sets expectations for the collection--these are exercises. She is pretty explicit about viewing our current society through the lens of speculative fiction, which is what I think is so amazing about the whole genre. There are several great stories in here, the strongest of which is The Evaluators, which I have reviewed elsewhere. The Locus Award nominees are reviewed below:

The Storyteller's Replacement
The story of a king troubled by impotence, who is advised, as so many are, to eat some part of an endangered animal--in this case the heart of a male dragon. But he can't find a male one (hunted to near extinction) so he eats a female heart instead. His mileage definitely varied. Some give Jemisin some credit here for the replacement storyteller bit, but I don't know that it does that much. 3 stars

Cuisine des Memoires
A woman has invited her friend to a very special restaurant--they can recreate any meal in exact detail, if you can locate it in time and space. So obviously there's some spacetime viewer stuff going on, and Jemisin lets this part contribute a bit to the atmosphere. Mostly it's about the emotional connections we have to food, and specific meals. I liked this one, but I liked The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections better.

Overall a worthy win of the Locus for collections.  But I could wish that she had taken on the title of her work more directly.  There's not a lot of Black future here, some Black alternate history and some fantasy but the techno nerdy part will have to wait



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Embers of War, by Gareth L. Powell

Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This isn't a terrible book, but I just can't bring myself to give it more than 2 stars. As space opera it is OK, though not as exciting as space opera can be. So much of it is kind of cardboard plot drivers. A genocide of a sentient forest that we are not motivated to care about--spending about 3 chapters developing it as a feature of the novel would have jumped up the interest all by itself. We have a sentient spaceship, and a little bit of effort to sort out its artificial but really pretty human personality (reasonably explained and even used in the plot, but again not enough depth). It's good as a writing exercise but feels more like an assignment for a novel-writing class than a story to believe in. Lots of opportunities for spinning out some detail on how this universe works are started and then closed off, so it ends up feeling like a place we have seen many times before. Oh well,



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Rogue Protocol, by Martha Wells

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


By the third installment of this series the protagonist is growing a bit, though he (it? they? Murderbot presents as male but does not seem to have any interior masculine talk) is still kind of one-dimensional as far as I am concerned. These are simple books with simple plots, but they do have a lot of well-constructed action sequences that make for an exciting read. Am happy to have picked it up. It would be interesting if she started doing more to work through how Murderbot is neither male nor female, and how that interacts with its vicarious (but growing more personal) interest in emotions.



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Time Was, by Ian McDonald

Time Was by Ian McDonald

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I was fortunate enough to not read the misleading book blurb or the Goodreads spoiler blurb. Letting the book tell you about itself is probably the best way to experience it. That said, I kind of liked it but did not love it. It is a book-based time-travel/gay romance/mystery that unfolds pretty slowly and ends in a mild but not earthshaking twist. Our main character is kind of feckless for most of the book, and his semi-helpless singlemindedness is somewhat hard to like. It's a very literary book in a genre that doesn't value literature over ideas, so...hard to get excited about it, but I'm not sorry I read it.



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Tomorrow's Kin, by Nancy Kress

Tomorrow's Kin by Nancy Kress

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is about a 3.7 rounded up. I for one think Nancy Kress is getting better as she writes more. This is an excellent expansion on Yesterday's Kin, with a lot of satisfying plot twists. The early part will look familiar to those who read number 0.5, but the story is taken further and effectively delivered. Socially it's very current, extrapolating on our current inability to face any sort of disagreeable fact with anything more than a knee-jerk blaming of someone identifiably Other. But there's some perspicacious breakdown of that reaction, also--it's harder to be reasonable when you have lost someone close to you, or have no room for setbacks. Having the "Denebs" be fully human, including acting that way, is leaving lots of room for good storytelling. I'm pretty sure I'll be back for the next one.



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Red Moon, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The last two books I read by Robinson were 2132 and New York: 2140. I loved 2132--the speculation was amazing and detailed, and the main character was a fascinating personality. I liked New York: 2140--again strong speculation, and an endearing earnestness.

This one was not up to those standards. Actually it was pretty dry. Lots of infodump exposition. There are two main characters--Fred Fredericks, a quantum computing specialist on the autism spectrum, and Chan Qi, the daughter of a top Chinese Communist Party official. Fred's portrayal is accurate but kind of dull, and Chan Qi only comes reflected through others as kind of a one-dimensional idealistic hard case. Not much serious speculation--though it's set in the 2040's really it's kind of present tense, right down to the politics. That being the case, I predict it will not age well. Supposedly the Chinese will have an extensive moon base by then. We'll see. In any case, it is OK but not great.



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Unholy Land, by Lavie Tidhar

Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've read many SFF books by writers of Jewish origin, but Lavie Tidhar is the first Jewish author I have read that really brings his Jewish voice and heritage to his work, so this was a treat for me. It was also really interesting to learn about the alternatives being considered for a Jewish homeland--the way Tidhar explores these alternatives shows exactly what speculative fiction can do that no other literature can.

As for the book itself, it's a good read but not quite perfect. One of the features of this set of alternative universes is that the author is in it. Tidhar attributes his most famous work, Osama, to protagonist Lior Tirosh, an author who has since that time descended into formulaic detective novels. The novel is a bit heavy in the middle--maybe not quite enough of the interesting explication for me, and a little rushed at the end. But it's good stuff--reminds me of China Mieville's "The City & the City", in a whole lot of ways. I have yet to read Central Station but this does tempt me to do so.



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The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society, by T. Kingfisher

The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society by T. Kingfisher

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Not a lot new here but it's an entertaining description of Fey males getting the tables turned on them, I thought it was quite fun to read. Agree with other reviewers that these characters could be in other stories.



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STET, by Sarah Gailey

STET is set as a brief academic article and a dialog between the author and editor through editing notes.  I learned as part of this reading that STET is a term used by an author to tell the publisher (typesetter, back in the day) to ignore the edit.  Fun stuff.

The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat, by Brooke Bolander

The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat by Brooke Bolander

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a fun little story, still bloodthirsty like a lot of Bolander but the humor cuts through the gore. Our protagonist is a typically bright, vivacious princess betrothed to a dense as wood prince. They deal with raptors. Absolutely worth a read, but probably won't win (was nominated for both a Nebula and Hugo).



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The Thing About Ghost Stories, by Naomi Kritzer

The Thing About Ghost Stories by Naomi Kritzer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I enjoy these kinds of "inside baseball" stories. Kritzer has done some research on the study of folklore, and gives us an intimate view of what it looks like inside the academy. I learn something from these. The protagonist's transition from studying stories from the outside to having her own was really well done. The ending was just a tiny bit pat, but this is absolutely worth reading.



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When We Were Starless, by Simone Heller

When We Were Starless by Simone Heller

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was a strong entry for the Hugos this year. It's a postapocalyptic tale of a nomadic tribe just barely getting by on the leavings of a previous civilization. In that sense it is pretty familiar. The protagonist, Mink, is an obviously non-human being, a scout and "ghost banisher" for her tribe. Part of the fun of this story is trying to figure out what Mink is, and what her relationship is to the "ghost" (a human hologram) that she is supposed to be banishing. Mink does a lot of reflecting on the lot of her people, and whether they can keep going as they are. It isn't a super-easy read since it is very tightly packed, but it's well worth the effort to work through. It's a strong three stars, tempting to give it a four but not quite.



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Nine Last Days on Planet Earth, by Daryl Gregory

Nine Last Days on Planet Earth by Daryl Gregory

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a story that expanded my mind, just a bit, on how stories work. It's an alien invasion of plant life that looks intended to take over for something coming next--reminded me of David Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr series. But here, the battle is not the focus of the story. Instead it's the biography of the protagonist, LT, as he tries, along with the rest of humanity, to make a life around this slow-motion takeover. So many good characters--his mother, his father, even an alien plant. It is absolutely delicious to read, I enjoyed every bit of it and can recommend it highly.



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If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again, by Zen Cho

If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again by Zen Cho

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


There are a lot of short descriptions of this novelette. It's a story about relationships. About persistence. About love. But the short descriptions really don't do it justice. Zen Cho develops a lot of depth in such a short work. And the Korean mythology angle was interesting--I knew about the relationship between dragons and earthworms, but Imugi were new to me. It's about a 3.6 rounded up for me, but it made an impression. Beautifully told, made you feel like it was highly original even though the themes are as old as time.



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The Rule of Three, by Lawrence Schoen

The less Lawrence Schoen writes about buffalitos, the more I like him.  The Rule of Three is a very clever YA level tale of alien contact.  The alien comes to Earth in a part of China that has almost no contact with the outside world.  The story is from the perspective of a man with roots there, but who lives in the west, working for the state department.  When he hears of the alien, he immediately goes there to be with his grandmother and see it. 

The alien's "macguffin" is that it only values, and can work with, things that have a close connection to their maker.  No more than three degrees removed.  I can make something, and I can give it to someone else, and that person can pass it along again.  After that, it becomes disconnected from life.  So all of our modern-sourced products are disconnected.

The cleverness is mixed up in the conclusion so I will not reveal it, but the story is well thought out and a solid choice as a Nebula award nominee.  Definitely worth the time.  Strong 3 stars.

Beneath a Sugar Sky, by Seanan McGuire

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I can just barely give this book three stars. It's sort of fun to read, but it's definitely the kind of YA novel that made me avoid YA novels like the plague when I was actually a YA. It's a very formulaic quest book, with the point of the quest being a stop on the way to something else. We are also hit over the head repeatedly with the moral messages (the true pitfall of YA novels--the belief that they have to be so direct. Youth are not as obtuse as adults when it comes to getting a moral point that applies to themselves. They get a lot of practice at it).

Seanan McGuire is very talented at executing a story. I have seen this kind of devolution before (in the Feed series) where the plots just kind of run out of steam. The trick is to stop writing before you run out of things to say. Or come up with more things. It's gotten several award nominations, but that may say more about the state of the written word in F&SF than its quality.



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Binti: The Night Masquerade

The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


By the third entry in this series I think I finally got my head around it, and the other two books became more enjoyable on reflection. Binti's world and story are completely different from other alien/space travel stories, even though they intersect in a lot of places. Living ships and hard-to-understand aliens are standard stuff. But seen through the Himba cultural lens (as told by a writer of Igbo descent) the emphasis changes--things that might seem important to us careful readers elsewhere (lots of dangling plot points--(view spoiler)[Why did the Meduse and Khoush start shooting again after Binti had done "magic" to bring about peace? If magic fails there's supposed to be a reason. It felt like a dangling plot point (hide spoiler)]) might not be so important. Phones are bespoke and intimately tuned to their users (this feels a bit dated, in that it is happening now).

I felt like this series was more disjointed than the other book I read by Okorafor, Who Fears Death. The world in that book was like Binti's, and challenged the reader, but it all made sense. Still, the persistence paid off and I ended up enjoying it.





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Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This book reads like you took an armload of glam rock albums, put them in a blender, covered them with chocolate sauce and set them on fire. It has all the nuance of a trash compactor, all the character development of an overripe mango, and all the wonder of a six year old..cat. Reading this, I felt like I had run several miles in a three piece suit, sat in a hot tub, gone break dancing, and then sat in the sun for several hours.

Just about no effort to turn out the above, and that's the whole book. I have no doubt that the author crafted these sentences herself, but it reads like it could have been written by a neural network from the 90's. There's a wafer-thin plot, and a touch of character development, in a sea of overdone metaphors and similes pretending to be clever. Not sure how this gets all the award nominations, since there's just not that much there. I saw it through to the end, but was glad it got there. Exhausting to read, and not much in the way of payoff.



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Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Most novels tell a story that's meant to hold together as a narrative. Not all of them. This one is several individual stories, none of them exciting heroes, nasty villains, or tragic victims. These are people more like most of us who read SF--we see tragedy, we watch the news, the general tone of society impacts us, and we try to get by in it.

But I read it anticipating that it would, at some point, turn into a story and it never did. That makes it harder to appreciate it for what it is, which is more of an ethnography, told both through an actual ethnographer (though called a reporter) and through personal stories of the people the ethnographer is writing about.

The Exodans escaped a collapsing ecosystem on Earth, and self-selected as basically an ideal communist society--everyone is guaranteed what they need to live, and everyone does what calls them. They share the work no one particularly wants (sanitation etc) as volunteers. Decisions are made collectively. Some critique this book for having an overly saccharine view of human nature, but this is a group selected for that trait. It's an examination of how that society is diversifying now that the pressure of staying alive in self-contained ships is off. They live among aliens, and among humans that chose other paths. It's bringing wealth and causing problems.

And as an exposition, it's all right, except for being not real. As a story, it's ultimately frustrating. I did finish it and wasn't sorry I did, and I even liked it a little for the view of how people *could* be if they cared for one another. I guess I'm not even surprised it got award nominations, since it is interestingly different and nested in a series where the other two books did. But it's not a space opera. Kind of the opposite.



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Blackfish City, by Sam Miller Jr.

Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Overall I thought this was a pretty good story--lots of different speculative elements I enjoy. Qaanaaq (love the palindrome) is a really interesting take on climate change--some burst of technology and cooperation allowed for an anchored platform city of over a million people to grow near the arctic circle. It's very much an idea driven book, though toward the end the characters really start to grow and come through.

Like a lot of people I had trouble getting traction with the book. It's not exactly slow, it just didn't really grab me, and I found myself struggling to continue. About halfway through it came together. I really enjoyed Soc, the non-binary character, and the nanobonded woman Massaraq ended up it a tastily complex plot resolution.

I read in the question section that all of Miller's fiction is in a shared universe. That does make for a lot of rich possibility--he'll have a lot of material to draw from. I would definitely try him again.



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Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, by Kelly Robson

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'll say this, it's really different from A Human Stain. We go from a horror story to a corporate story. Our protagonist is a survivor of the collapse of civilization under the pressures of climate change and pollution, and subsequent plagues. Humans figured out how to live underground, and are just now re-emerging, so it's in a tough but hopeful universe. But highly corporatized--the progress is funded by very familiar looking banks, mostly state owned. Our protagonist, Minh, is a plague survivor project manager. I think that what some have complained of as unfamiliar language is corporate speak--we have work breakdown plans, dashboards, reviews, health and safety analysis as a plot driver, all very familiar to this veteran desk jockey. It really read kind of like a dramatic description of an oil company prospecting trip, except it was about ecology.

I really enjoyed the characters in the story. They are quite distinct, and bring out interesting parts of this future. I'm not as enamored of the plot--it makes sense but doesn't quite hang together, and the ending is kind of abrupt--it felt like a lot got tied together in a very few pages. Overall it was a fun book, and I felt a funny sort of nostalgia for old analysis and review grind reading it. Amusing.



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Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The second entry in this series is pretty much like the first one. I liked it OK, but I honestly don't see what the fuss is about, and why the first actually won awards. Murderbot is an angsty teenager, slightly more so in this book (tends more to colloquialisms, and is aware of beginning to think of itself as human). The whole novella is from this point of view. In this installment Murderbot gets a sidekick, ART (A******* Robot Transport), and we even get a "kill all humans" moment. So there's some potential for variation. The mystery has room to deepen, but it's on the shallow side right now. It's still a likeable book, I can see its appeal. But a likeable pulpy page-turner is different from work that operates on many levels, or asks for more than minimal attention from the reader, or anything like that. Whatevs.



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Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've been reading a lot of fantasy lately and think it has its limits, but this one is all-around wonderful for how it takes the fantasy elements and lets them bring out all that's available, and then some, in the characters.

The limits: It's pretty much set in Central Europe, with made-up country names. Not sure why she didn't just use the real ones, since Polish and Russian culture are presented pretty much as-is.

The strengths: The characters are amazing. The central characters are three strong women, each in a different circumstance but with similar grit. Novik manages to give each of them a different voice and show their virtues and flaws in realistic ways. Great storytelling there.

I'm not seeing any reviewers mention Stepon, the young boy in the story who also has a major voice. It's different again from all the others--very simple and direct, yet thoughtful. His view of the story highlights the others, and made it that much more enjoyable.

It's going to be hard to beat this as a favorite from 2018. Absolutely worth reading.



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The Black God's Drums, by P. Djeli Clark

The Black God's Drums by P. Djèlí Clark

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a really good introduction to Clark's work--for a completely different, also multiple nominee work see "The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington". Our protagonist Creeper is a fun, tough kid, easy to root for. The story moves right along and doesn't get boring.

I guess I'm not rating it higher because I'm sort of over New Orleans as a fantasy setting. Seems like I've read hundreds of these, and while this one is good and somewhat different it draws on many of the same tropes. I want a fantasy set in Gary, Indiana, or maybe one of those anonymous factory towns in China with 4 million people. Let's mix it up.

Props for good world building around Free New Orleans and the Surviving South. I think this can get bigger, or he can create other more complete worlds. Worth a read, particularly since I borrowed it from my local library.



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The Poppy War, by R. F. Kuang

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is an engaging book--I found it so all the way through. The plot builds well and we have several engaging side characters surrounding the heavily oppressed but incredibly capable protagonist Rin. For a first novel it is very good and I can recommend it but with several caveats:

1) Unrelenting, realistic violence: Some compare this to horror, but horror violence is over-the-top in a way that lets one disengage. As incredibly brutal as the war scenes are in this book (and I'd say that's over 50% of it) one gets the idea that they are based on factual descriptions, and the author confirms this in her own description. The book is about people embracing genocidal Pol Pot-level evil in order to avoid something worse. Bring a strong stomach.

2) Derivative: We've seen this movie before, including the female lead. The anxiety and stress of the terrible choices Rin has to make are very well drawn. But her rise and ultimate victory seem very telegraphed, though what she does to get there does surprise. The coming-of-age core of the first book makes this read somewhat YA, though it is not at all appropriate for the YA category (not to say that teens should necessarily avoid it--they can handle plenty).

Like I said, it's a good book and a promising series. Whether I'll bring myself to read more of it, I don't know.



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Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The only other work of Roanhorse's that I have read is her award nominated story from last year, "Welcome To Your Authentic Indian Experience". That one was very subtle, much more layered, and much more relaxed. None of that here. Maggie Hoskie is a full-on female superhero. The Sixth World is fantasy in a Navajo (Dine) setting, which sets wonderfully far apart from werewolves, vampires, zombies, and elves. We get a lot of hints about how that world emerged after the Big Water, the earthquake that sundered America, that leave me wanting more.

I have to say I miss that subtlety. Maggie Hoskie ends up pretty one-dimensional, though her partner, Kai, has a bit more depth. He's pretty much a feminist ideal man--gorgeous to look at, non-violent, yet very strong and powerful in his own way as a medicine man and healer. Overall it's a pretty bleak story, though I think there's room for optimism as the Dine overcame incredible hardship to have it as good as they do.

I have the feeling this series is going to get better as it goes along, as Roanhorse brings the subtlety she is capable of into the plotting.



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An Agent of Utopia, by Andy Duncan

An Agent of Utopia by Andy Duncan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This review is specific to An Agent of Utopia, which is all I have read so far. And as these stories go it's a good one--the best thing about it is the period setting, particularly his florid descriptions of the filth of the Thames in Shakespearian London. The story centers around Thomas More and his execution, imagining Utopia as a real place with an active presence in London. Good if you like Andy Duncan already.



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Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee

Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


With each book in this series, I figured out a bit more and liked it better. I could hardly get a grip on the first book at all, but at this point I got into the characters and began to care about it.

The K-drama perspective adds depth in a way that you just don't get in standard David Webber military SF. Everyone, no matter where they line up, is concerned with aesthetics and allows themselves distractions. It comes off as people living very intensely, fighting for their lives but also over calendrical calculations and art arrangement. The characters go beyond real into a sort of technicolor.

Jedao is a pretty amazing protagonist--he has lived all of this more intently than anyone, including being dead and placed in suspended animation, then versioned for this final episode.

Pacing is still an issue--the book takes about 100 pages to get going, and then gets weird at the end. Calendrical effects come off much more as magic than anything scientific, and I never figured it out to any greater depth than "If a certain system of time measurement, including holidays and observations, is adopted it will grant powers within its influence". Meh. But the twist that makes so much fall into place is worth all of it. So many books don't end well, and this one does. Lee says the series is complete, but there's room for more if he ever changes his mind.



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A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies, by Alix P. Harrow

Apex Magazine Issue 105 by Jason Sizemore

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Review for A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies.

Librarians as magical figures are a staple in fantasy literature, and I think the reasons are easy enough to discern--most writers spend a lot of time in them and develop a real attachment to the atmosphere. I am a serious library user myself, but am also a librarian, and am pretty sure our magic is confined to locating books right in front of the noses of patrons (I no longer practice and have lost some of the mojo--a library aide did this for me just the other day). The idea of books responding to the patrons (in ways only the librarians can see) was a fun one. I thoroughly enjoyed the story and would recommend it to anyone.



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The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington, by Phenderson Djèlí Clark

The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington by P. Djèlí Clark

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This story is structured as a fantasy history done in vignettes, and is based in historical research. I really like these kind of stories, they are perfect for short fiction and give that atmosphere of authority to a story that makes it extra entertaining. This one is excellent, and I think it's a contender for the Nebula and the Hugo for sure.



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The Court Magician, by Sarah Pinsker

The Court Magician by Sarah Pinsker

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a good story, almost a 4 but not quite. Pinsker sets us up with an introduction about a curious orphan, and stage magic, and real magic, but the point of the story goes past those. The theme is common enough--what will you give up to learn the "real truth"? But the way this one works out saves it from being too ordinary. I think it's probably a contender for the award, but I haven't read them all yet...



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And Yet, by A. T. Greenblatt

The protagonist of And Yet is now an accomplished scientist, a theoretical physicist.  He got peer-pressured into going into a haunted house with some "friends" as a kid, and he's pretty convinced it is a real physical phenomenon worth investigating, so he's back.  His disability plays into it.

It's a good bedtime snack of a story, quickly told.  The author has published in a disabled SF anthology, so this is an area of activism for her.  Convincing?  No, not really.  But nice anyway.

Alice Payne Arrives

Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The summary starts out as something of a button-pusher--lesbian check, steampunk check, women of color check. The blurbs definitely read that way. But the book does well at lifting up and affirming the perspective Alice brings, and by the end of the book I was seeing something new in time travel. The romance was pretty standard issue, but it drove the plot OK. It's really a good setup for the next book. It's nominated for the Nebula as a novella--in a good year it should contend but maybe not win.



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The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections, by Tina Connolly

The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections by Tina Connolly

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Usually short fiction doesn't have enough time to develop the depth I like in a story. But this one was great on several levels. I'm a foodie and really connected with the idea of food bringing back powerful, realistic memories--it would only take a touch of magic, and that light touch was deftly conveyed in how the protagonist (the baker's wife, and food taster for the evil Duke) remembered her husband making pastries. It's extraordinarily clever and delivers a complete experience in a brief read. This one is a real contender for the Nebula.



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Witchmark, by C. L. Polk

Witchmark by C.L. Polk

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was a good, fun read, fine for a first novel, and its structure sets up well for the sequel. Sets it up to be better than the first, in fact. I guess there weren't better candidates for a Nebula? Well this is good encouragement, though the book is not a winner.

The setup is not a strong point--we have Dr. Miles Singer, "witch" and runaway scion of a wealthy family. He's a heroic character, but as others have pointed out, really naive, in a way that is hard to believe given his experience. He's hiding out from his father, the Voice of the Mages--in his home town, in medical practice. Hmm...

This being a modern book, we get all the trappings of gay romance in the person of Tristan, a literally inhumanly beautiful being who has come to investigate the disappearance of souls from Miles' home country of Aeland. Submission to their beauty is both tragic and inevitable, and much futile romantic resistance dialog is delivered.

The book moves forward, but not quickly until the very end, when we are treated to a lot of juicy reveals that are the setup for the series. One might have wished for a bit more meat earlier on.

All in all it's a decent, if predictable book, and probably worth picking up the sequel



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The Vital Abyss, by James S. A. Corey

The Vital Abyss by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was a decent read, but pretty dark stuff. The protagonist is able to reflect very dispassionately on his experiences, because he made a decision to have his empathy centers cut out. Now he has empathy for no one, including himself. There's a few connections to the main line of the story--the only one I could identify was Michio Pa from Cibola Burn. I struggled with where in the timeline the story goes--it's published after Nemesis Games, but the action definitely takes place before it. Still, I think the ending is going to explain some things that happen later in the series.

That said, it doesn't seem like an essential read unless, like me, you are compulsive about reading complete series.



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Nemesis Games, by James S. A. Corey

Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This series is great for escapist reading--you can put the news aside and spend time with some characters that, while they deal with a lot of rotten human behavior, in the end have total faith in people.

All of them. James Holden, Naomi Nagata, Alex Kamal, and Amos Burton come to this from different directions, but they all end up in the same spot in terms of having faith in people. That does take somewhat different forms--James is more about people being fundamentally good, while Amos goes for people being people. Alex and Naomi are more biographical. But in the end they are in the same place.

There's some pleasing space opera wrapped around that. The aliens are a presence in this novel, but not much of a one--more of a foreboding of things to come. This is a good stage-setter for the rest of the series. I'll keep reading.



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Children of Blood and Bone, by Tomi Adeyemi

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I picked this up for its relevance to racial justice--the author goes into detail on that in the postscript. But I found it hard to connect those dots. There's a similarity to N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance series--people lacking magical powers misunderstanding and oppressing those who have them. That's as close as I could get.

Otherwise it's a fairly straightforward YA romance in a fantasy setting, but special in that the setting is West Africa. Some commenters have mentioned the strong, platonic friendship between the protagonist and the main supporting female character. There seems to be a strong expectation that those relationships become sexual, but that's not how it's played here. All the relationships are hetero and cis-gender, though there's a minor supporting character that could go either way.

Doesn't break new ground as a fantasy plot, but having different faces as heroes could bring in a new audience.



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Cibola Burn, by James S. A. Corey

Cibola Burn by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm in the process of catching this series up. This book seems to be the real turning point when we settle into a long running franchise.

The book takes a long time to find its stride. Setting up the immigration/colonization situation and the natural disaster component takes several hundred pages. But once it gets going the main characters settle into their familiar, explicitly explained roles and the action gets going.

The authors are putting forward a basically positive view of humanity, with the crew of the Rocinante making the best of the situation through their faith that most everyone will, given enough chances, do the right thing. Not everyone does, but enough to save the situation.

As noted, the main characters are predictably themselves. The side characters are somewhat weak--Elvi and Basia are facets of the main characters. Havelock is sort of interesting in that he is a reflection of who he's following, and he knows it, but again, this is explicitly stated. The series is a reflection of its main character. James Holden is known as a man without subtexts, and so is this series. I'm still enjoying it, though.



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Abaddon's Gate, by James S. A. Corey

Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm catching this series up--read Leviathan's Gate early on, then didn't pursue it. As space opera it's quite excellent--your pulse races and settles all the way through, and you never lose interest. But I have to say this did feel like the middle of a long march, rather than a new exciting installment. Jim Holden as the hero is kind of a parody of a wooden hero, and the books kind of wink at him. "He made his reputation as a man with no subtexts". In this book he has a sort of female counterpart in Anna V., that minister on the cultural mission.

This book spends a lot of time on the meaning of justice and revenge, and not quite as much on technical subjects. The Ring is out there scaring them all--is it a gate? Is it a space of its own? The technical side is mostly about the ships that navigate the expanse, especially the converted generation ship Nauvoo.

The Ring is pretty much in Fantasy territory, and the authors are comfortable there. At the very end we get a sense of how much bigger the Expanse is going to get, which is interesting. All in all it's more than enough to keep me going in the series.



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Drive, by James S. A. Corey

Drive by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As short stories that are small part of a larger series go, this is a really good one. We get some good character setup, and then the whammy.
(view spoiler)[The story spends most of its time developing the character of Solomon Epstein, inventor of the spaceship drive that makes the Expanse possible. We see what motivates him to create it, and his relationship with his wife. And all that is disposed of due to the success of the experiment. He grows quite philosophical at the end, thinking about the great future he is making possible but isn't going to get to see. It reads very well. (hide spoiler)]
It's more of a piece for people that have already read the series, but that's fine. If you liked Leviathan Wakes you should spend about half an hour and catch this up.



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The Hidden Girl, by Ken Liu

The Hidden Girl was nominated for a Locus award last year and is part of The Book of Swords anthology, edited by Gardner Dozios.  The protagonist is a daughter of a high ranking noble in China, one just under the warlords that run the country in lieu of the emperor.  A wandering Buddhist monk, who is really a head of a supernatural girls' combat academy, steals her away against her will for training.

The story is pretty much set in a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon universe, with young women fighting while swinging on vines.  Their special power comes from being able to go into a "space that is not a space", and access our three dimensions as though through a fourth spatial one.  At heart, it's a superhero birth story.  Decently fun to read, with a self contained plot but it still doesn't stand alone all that well.  3 stars from me.

Agents of Dreamland, by Caitlin Kiernan

Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I guess horror just is not my thing. This tiny book seems to set out to push all the cliche buttons that can be reached. Fear of fungus, rampantly layered conspiracy theories, "agents" so thoroughly hard boiled that their blood would not run if cut (except it would, because horror). I almost thought it was a parody. It's grammatically correct and all, but as much as I try to like Kiernan's fiction I just can't bring myself to do it.



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Ka: Dar Oakley In the Ruins of Ymr, by John Crowley

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr by John Crowley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


There's a lot of strong elements in this book that got me to finish it. Dar Oakley is a great character, a Crow who ends up with a fair amount of People rubbing off on him--he is aware of it and concerned the whole time. Crowley told the tale from the perspective of someone listening to Dar Oakley tell his story, so it's a Crow perspective filtered through a human, and he gets that right. The prose is lovely, it may be just a bit old fashioned now but it's wonderful to read. The story of Dar Oakley's long, long life is wonderful and mysterious.
(view spoiler)[There are hints that the storyteller is living in apocalyptic times--the world seems to be in active but not violent collapse. Environmental. Timely, almost too much so now. (hide spoiler)]

But oh, the pace. There's a whole lot of words here for what is actually accomplished, and even though they are good words they are too many. This book could be about a third shorter and be better. The action does not really build to a conclusion, so the interest in the book is in how it rolls out, and I began to tire about halfway through. The payoff was just not adequate for so much reading. Overall I'm glad I read it, but I am left wanting at least some of my life back.



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Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor

Home by Nnedi Okorafor

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Okorafor's Binti series is equal parts fascinating and frustrating for me. Her approach to technology is completely fresh, and I came away understanding it better in this story. What at first seems fantastical is given scientific explanation later. There are stronger hints that the time is post-apocalyptic, or at least that people came to some very different understanding of how they wanted to relate to technology--possibly it was a way to survive? A telling quote: "That was back before people had mobile phones!". So there's a connection between today's phone and the story's "astrolabe". The setting of technology in African culture is fascinating and brings something very different to SF.

But as a story it's really choppy and abbreviated. Binti decides to go home to do her pilgrimage "because it's time" without preamble. It's not like an abbreviated story, more like we're jumping from part to part without a lot of it being told. The writing is kind of YA and not in a real wonderful way. What's frustrating is I do not recall this being so much of an issue in Who Fears Death. That book had its own problems but it was clearly a work for adults and explored large themes. The Binti series wants to go there, but there's just not enough book.



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Three Parts Dead, by Max Gladstone

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The sixth book in the sequence, The Ruin of Angels, was up for a Locus fantasy award but I like to read books in the order written, so just picked this one up. It was one of my favorite reads this year, and has held up well. As a first novel, it's pretty amazing, in fact.

The world Gladstone builds works with familiar fantasy themes (schools of magic, magic as Law), but approaches them very differently from most of the work I've read recently. It's a world where humans wrested control of Craft (magic) from the Gods (who have limitations, like highly enhanced humans) and left it in a very complicated place. If you like world building this is really great stuff, as the explanation is a strong presence in the story without totally taking over the plot. And Max Gladstone knows how to end a book--the ending was exciting, powerful and unexpected in several ways.

Some reviewers have made much of Tara being a black heroine. Yes, the cover illustration is a black woman, and Gladstone describes her as having dark skin in the book. But there is no indication that this matters or is a factor in any way. It's a default universe, that is to say, White. Not throwing shade, just saying it as it is. Contrast this with N. K. Jemisin's work, where characters are not identified racially but the racial metaphor is very clear.

All that said, I really enjoyed the book and just might read more.



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