Noor, by Nnedi Okorafor

I've read the Binti series by Okorafor, and I'd say in this one that she is getting better as a writer (particularly in speculation) but the plot may not live up to her skills. AO is a woman with severe disabilities and has chosen heavy assistive body modifications to be able to live a normal life. This puts her into an oppressed category, and drives the story. Her Nigeria is a dystopian place pretty directly extrapolated from today--corporate exploitation and disinformation are her major obstacles. Ultimate Corporation is pretty much Nigerian Amazon.

I'm beginning to see the rationale for how Okorafor names her advanced technologies--an "anti-ajej" is a device for excluding sand from your immediate vicinity in a sandstorm. In traditional SF spaces you'd call it a force field, but that brings to mind a lot of colonial-military SF imagery that she avoids with her terminology.

An interesting take with this book and Who Fears Death (the first of hers I read) is that they both feature protagonists that are deeply unwanted babies. In Who Fears Death it is directly stated that the mother would never consider abortion, but not in Noor. Instead the parents pray for her death in the womb and later publicly denounce her augmentation and her association with Fulani herdsman DNA. It's an argument against abortion but sort of for it at the same time.

The ending is disappointing, either through not enough explanation or understanding. I'd call this one a case of growing pains.

Hummingbird Salamander, by Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer as an author takes some getting used to. His books are very dark, with a lot of inevitable degradation and characters struggling through deeply depressing and weird settings. I came to appreciate the Southern Reach trilogy and had some hopes for this one. And they were somewhat fulfilled.

Jane Smith, the oversize security consultant, is an unreliable narrator and unlikeable protagonist. Reading those books can be a brutal experience, though they also give space to be really great. Can't say this quite makes it. But I found her to be a very interesting person, a basically brutal woman (with reasons for her brutality) moving through a brutal world. She sometimes tries to care for others (like her assistant or her daughter) but doesn't really have her heart in it. Why she fixates on Silvina the climate terrorist (and savior maybe?) is not too clear--it doesn't relate to her work or life, though her relation of the news shows she is concerned. Maybe that was supposed to be enough.

The world of this book is pretty much ours, and very foreseeably dystopian. I think this might have been a mistake, making this basically an extrapolation of our world and simplifying some of the deep Weirdness of the shroom books and Southern Reach. It is more accessible, but the motivations still don't quite make enough sense to drive all this. And yet, given what is happening, her actions make a lot of sense.

Hard to say I enjoyed this book, but it really did engage me. With a little more "why" for Jane personally it would have worked for me.

My Goodreads Review

The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey

This is in many ways a difficult book to read, at least until you figure out where the protagonist is coming from. Dr. Evelyn Caldwell starts out as a wronged wife who is taking it particularly hard. Full of bitterness at her ex. She reveals more of herself as she goes along--a driven, brilliant scientist with a very complex inner life driven by an abusive upbringing. She is very bound up in living an ethical life, but it is all in relation to her own standards. This allows her to perform acts that, to an ordinary human reader, would be monstrous. One reviewer compared her to the Nazi scientists experimenting on concentration camp inmates in WWII, and I think that's accurate. She is in many ways sociopathic.

As you realize this, it might occur to you that her opinion of her ex-husband is distorted by this pain and distance from humanity. But events continue to evolve, as the process of preparing clones is detailed and it is clear that Nathan, the ex-husband, participates in the same monstrous "conditioning" processes that Evelyn does.

Then we meet a rule-bending clone, Martine, the "echo wife" of the title. Nathan has prepared her in secret to be a better version of Evelyn--"better" as in more responsive and subject to her husband's needs. Evelyn does not regard clones as human (nor does the law), but comes to view Martine that way.

The science in the book is hard to connect to the possibilities of cloning as it is today, but the book is aimed at a broader audience and hard SF people pay too much attention to this. They advise skimming past the overwrought feelings. Don't do it. The feeling expositions develop Evelyn, and all the other characters through her eyes. The science is there to make these characters possible, and it does that well. I'm more of a hard SF person which is why I'm giving this four stars.

The afterword explains all, very well. The book is not strictly autobiographical but these issues are front and center for Gailey, and the acknowledgments capture this effectively.

So far I would have given this the Locus, and am surprised it didn't get any other major nominations. It is tagged LGBTQ+, but only because of the author--issues of living as a sexual minority are not explored. Personally I'd tag it horror--the ending, where she is more enabled in her research, is classically horrifying. Read this and you'll have something to chew on and worry over for awhile.

My Goodreads Review