Tiamat's Wrath, by James S. A. Corey

 I don't give out a whole lot of five star reviews. This book earns it in part based on all that leads up to it. All of the characters are incredibly real, and that realism rubs off on Teresa Duarte, whom we don't know nearly as well.

Hard for me to say anything previous reviewers have not. The main characters have an incredibly intense relationship, and the authors ride right on the edge of having the intensity spill over into sappiness. There are a lot of authors trying to do this kind of book or series now, but this is the one they have to live up to for sheer entertainment value. I don't know if there's any one aspect where The Expanse is the best of its kind, but it's so close to the top in all of them that it's my favorite in 50 years of reading SF. I loved Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga series, but this one edges it out and I can't think of any other extended series that comes close.

Now comes the hard part--the ending. So many series in fantasy and science fiction come to an unsatisfying end. But I think they're going to pull this off.

My Goodreads Review

Laughter Among the Trees, by Suzan Palumbo

Laughter Among the Trees is a Nebula short story finalist.  Horror story, lost child coming back to haunt the living trope.  Good execution probably, since horror is not as much my thing I may not fully appreciate it.

Unknown Number by Blue Neustifter

I think it's kind of interesting that a Twitter thread gets a Hugo nomination, but that's what makes it special. As a story it's a well-explored trope--the letter, phone call, etc. from someone who seems to know a lot about you that only you know. Those get harder to do now because there's so much of our lives that is surveilled and recorded. So it was fun to chase this down and read it in the thread, but as a story, well, it's fiction I guess. The author wrote it the way she did because she is against others trying to monetize her work.

My Goodreads Review

Tangles, by Seanan McGuire

Like a lot of others, I think Tangles is OK for what it is, which is a story especially written for Magic: The Gathering lore. McGuire is a competent writer and can bring the story off. I'm kind of assuming that the explaining about the roles of the characters is to make them fit in the MtG world. So I'm not sure how it got on the Hugo list, though it's a great thing for MtG fans.

My Goodreads Review

The Black Pages, by Nnedi Okorafor

I'm rating this a 3 but it's a 3.5 I just couldn't quite round up. I really did like the story. The setting seems to confuse some folks, since it mentions Al-Quaeda but is not set in Afghanistan or the Middle East. Al-Quaeda is active in Africa also, and this story is set in the sack of Timbuktu. The protagonist has been off making his way in America, but returns to Mali to see his family and retrieve his sense of place. But he arrives in the middle of a battle between the French and Al-Quaeda, which ends in a lot of destruction, murder and book burning. The book burning releases a genie, who rescues a book of power.

The story lifts up heritage and sense of place in the face of terror. Like a lot of short stories it doesn't really conclude, but that's fine, it's more of a setting.

My Goodreads Review

Crazy Beautiful, by Cat Rambo

Crazy Beautiful is in the March/April 2021 issue of F&SF Magazine.  An AI is created that can make art, and can take works of art and transform them into "living" digital works.  It decides to "liberate" master art work that is being stored in Paris warehouses by wealthy collectors, hidden away from the world.  In so doing it creates rather a big mess.  Fun to read.

emet by Lauren Ring

This review is for by Lauren Ring. This is one where the world has caught up--the facial recognition technology the protagonist is working on in the story exists and is in use. So more of a fantasy story in that we have fantastic golems working with the resistance to it. Kind of a stab to the conscience of all of us working for an enterprise we know is destructive, and that's where a lot of today's wealth in America is coming from. Glad to have read it, deserving of its Nebula nomination.

My Goodreads Review

Broad Dutty Water, by Nalo Hopkinson

This is a good, solid, enjoyable story. Jacquette is an interesting protagonist but mostly a canvas for the setting, which is the Gulf Coast adjusting to disastrous sea-level rise. She is out for a ride in a 3-d printed ultralight plane with her modified pig Lickchop when they encounter rough weather and have to ditch. I'm surprised, maybe not surprised, that this didn't get more attention for the novelette category in the Hugos or Nebula. Paywalling does not help, but F&SF did make it available for free for awhile so there's more to it, and Nalo Hopkinson is an unapologetically Black author. She is getting a grandmaster award at the Hugos.

My Goodreads Review

An Arc of Electric Skin, by Wole Talabi

An Arc of Electric Skin is a classic short story in that it works with one plot point and one speculation.  Kind of gory, as that one plot point is assassination of corrupt African political leaders, but you can tell the author feels pretty strongly.  So it was fine as an example of that kind of single-focus story, but I can't say much else about the literary value.

Huginn and Muninn and What Came After, by Michael Swanwick

Huginn and Muninn and What Came After is a story of alternate reality--maybe a dream, maybe something else.  Michael Swanwick is very much a literary stylist, and when you read him you get caught up in the writing, perhaps more than the story.  That's definitely what happened to me here.  He has a really interesting take on gender identity and fluidity, and escape from unwanted relationships.  I liked it.

For Lack of a Bed, by John Wiswell

For Lack of a Bed was nominated for Locus and Nebula awards in 2022.  Wiswell brings his own acquaintance with chronic pain to the story.  And it's very inventive and fun--the world is familiar in that we have people struggling to make it, just barely getting by on their clerk jobs.  Our protagonist is scraping by on what she makes from a pet shop job, and can't afford basics like a bed to allow her to manage her pain better.  The clerk jobs are in a more fantastic place with pets from hell (hellhounds).  She gets an offer of a sofa from a friend, which is really comfy, but the sofa isn't a sofa and it's hungry.  Had a good time reading this one.