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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