And What Can We Offer You Tonight? by Premee Mohammed

Closer to a 2.5 but not enough for a 3. Premee Mohammed models this book after Aliette De Bodard's work, but it's not quite that powerful and I'm not a superfan of De Bodard so this one doesn't cut it for me. It's executed OK but just doesn't have the drive. Can someone write some fantasy that isn't centered around Houses? Sometime?

My Goodreads Review

The Past Is Red, by Cathrynne M. Valente

This has to be one of my favorites from Cat Valente. She is reaching for some new literary ground here, and while the voice of the protagonist (the most hated in Garbagetown, essentially for telling the truth, and some know it) gets a bit grating in places it's a really powerfully told apocalyptic story. What is left of humanity is mostly living on a floating land mass made from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch collected and sorted. Everything else is under water. Not geologically accurate (there was a fair amount of dry land on Earth even when there was no ice) but it drives the story really well. Valente captures the insanity of living in that place really well, and in the afterword (important to read) says she is trying to offer a positive message as well. Life will go on even in the absolute worst case scenarios, unless it doesn't, and it is possible to enjoy it. Well worth the read.

My Goodreads Review

Remote Control, by Nnedi Okorafor

My feelings toward this book are very complex. Nnedi Okorafor gets better at writing all the time, and the prose in this book is very smooth and evocative. Some of the earlier work was kind of blocky in places, and you still get that feeling here but now it's more like a style. As for the story itself, it is set in the near future and there is technical speculation but the core of the story is fantasy, so it is hard to classify. Sankofa is, in my mind, a tragic character, cursed with incredible power that with its first use costs her everyone she ever loved, and that even by the end she can still only partially control. Even harder is that all this happens to her as a child. She wanders Ghana as a spirit would, being placated and loathed, and occasionally appreciated.

The book kind of stops rather than ends. Feels more like a starting point for a novel than a complete story. I hope Okorafor comes back to Sankofa at some point, I think she has more to say here.

My Goodreads Review

A Spindle Splintered, by Alix E. Harrow

A lot of stories are retellings without disclosure. This one discloses, and makes the story part of the driver. It's hard for me to give a derivative story more than 3 stars, and I'm not tempted here. It's a nice story--really, it is--and protagonist Zinnia is satisfyingly complex. She is dark and fatalistic but not depressed. She seems to be wringing what life she can out of a flawed body, just lamenting that it's not enough. Harrow also gives us a good indication of how much emotional energy very ill/terminal children can spend taking care of their parents and others ostensibly taking care of them. Again without dwelling on it.

The erstwhile Sleeping Beauty (Princess Primrose) is well done also, imbued with a steel backbone. Harrow generalizes--this applies to princesses everywhere that are trapped by their circumstances.

So it's a good book. Glad I read it. Full disclosure, I am not a teen girl so I did not connect with it, and that may be why it left me in the end unmoved. It will move others.

My Goodreads Review

The Unbroken, by C. L. Clark

This book takes a heckuva long time to get to the reward. The first half is kind of slow, but having finished it I realize that the time was taken to really unpack the protagonist (Touraine). Touraine is really well drawn as a character--a downtrodden Sand (conscript soldier), respected leader, incredible fighter, assault victim, etc. There's just a lot going on and she makes mistakes that are not undone (plenty of fantasy novels have protagonists bemoaning their choices and blaming themselves, but they are offered clear choices that redeem all. Not happening here). Luca is a good foil as a would-be queen who tries to use Touraine to quell the colony's anger but ends up with a relationship (they would go Sapphic, but they just can't bring themselves to do it).

The book is a really good exploration of the pain of colonialism, but the long march to get to the point kind of takes away from it. I guess I'm craving a geopolitical SF story that doesn't invoke royalty to introduce hierarchy. I may be asking too much. I'm glad I stuck it out.

My Goodreads Review

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler

This is not a perfect book, but wow has it aged well. Octavia Butler said "I write not to predict, but to warn!" but the predictions seem right on track. The 1200-year drought in the Southwest had not started when she wrote this, but here we have a climate novel that captures that situation.

Lauren Olamina as a narrator is plain-spoken. She is coping with civilization's dissolution in what seems to be the most rational way--with a plan for the future. She carefully builds her team for surviving the collapse, and collects her ideas of a spiritual foundation for getting through and rebuilding. I had not read this until now, and am reading it with a background of having read adrienne marie brown's book Emergent Strategies, highly influenced by Butler. You can't pick this up today and read it as a work of fiction--it is a deeper part of the literary canon of our time, a description of the process of capitalism's collapse along with American civilization. Things might be going better elsewhere, like Canada, where so many of the refugees in the book are trying to go.

Butler's warnings in the book have gone unheeded by those who could most make a difference. Some will take inspiration and try to apply them to the world that is to come.

My Goodreads Review

A Psalm For the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers

I liked this more than a 3 but not enough to make it a 4. Another reviewer has called this "comfort SF" and I wish I'd thought of it. The book is a very cozy story of self-discovery, and lays out the author's philosophical roots as an existentialist. At least the robot is an existentialist. I am very happy that main character Dex is provided the space and resources to go find himself--in fact that very provision is a grounding for the book. Many of us would love to live in that world, which sounds a lot like what Martin Luther King's (or maybe Josiah Royce's) idea of the Beloved Community would look like. We do not live in that world, nor will we. Chambers alludes to hard sacrifices made by previous generations to release the sentient robots from their servitude, clean up their planet, and clean up their relationships with each other. That work is ours to do, and knowing that we work to create that future will have to be enough to comfort us.

My Goodreads Review

Fireheart Tiger, by Aliette De Bodard

 Well...it's a novella, and I read it. Very standard plot for De Bodard and not as much heart as usual. She could have chosen to play this as a romance that just happens to be between women, but she throws in the mother's potential disappointment in sapphic romance without making it serious, and at that point it's a below-average entry in LGBTQ+ literature. Oh well.

My Goodreads Review