The Red Scholar's Wake, by Aliette De Bodard

Romance stories aren't usually my thing but I can enjoy a good one. Not so much here. This book is really light on plot, really light on characterization, not even a whole lot of sex (though what there was, was uniquely described and interesting speculation), but much, much, much feelings. All the feelings. Romance is supposed to be about feelings, but there has to be something to hang the feelings on, and there's just not enough here. Other critics mentioned the way the mindship and the protagonist wanted to bang each other right away, the romance kind of exploded rather than developing. It's a love overcoming differences story, but the differences (pirates do bad things! They steal, kill and indenture! I got kidnapped by the pirates and given no choice! But I love the pirate leader anyway!) just get stated over and over rather than developed in any way. De Bodard has written a lot in the Xuya space and there's plenty to speculate on with mindships, but we don't see it here. A ship is just a person with a large and complex mechanical body.

This got a Locus nomination. Oof.

My Goodreads Review

Eversion, by Alastair Reynolds

It's a bit hard to review this novel without either spoiling it entirely or misleading the reader. Most reviews choose to do the latter. So I'll just say that this is a novel for our time, in a lot of different ways. It's one you should put in a time capsule from the early 2020's and get out 20 or more years from now, not for the predictions necessarily but for what we were thinking about at this time. And the way Reynolds goes about it is very clever. He plays with how fiction works in the narrative--fiction itself has a role. The adventure part of the story doesn't get a lot of attention, but it's not the point. Reynolds has given us a clear look at ourselves by way of our latest and greatest creation. I'll think back on this one regularly.

My Goodreads Review

Neom, by Lavie Tidhar

Central Station, the world in which this novel is set, was a fix-up from stories Tidhar wrote over a decade or so. It reads like one but it's still interesting, I read it in order to be ready for this one. Neom was not really supposed to be a fix-up novel, but it still reads like one. Much is explained in the afterword. Tidhar did not know where the narrative was going, he just took the setting and started writing chapters to see what would happen. Some writers put this stuff aside after using it to craft a narrative. Tidhar rolls with it and puts it out there. So we have interesting characters and an increasingly complex world to unpack, but as a story it's more slice of life or even soap opera (the central plot doesn't resolve in any particular way, though a side romance does). But it's fun to read, kind of an amalgamation of science fiction and magical realism. Tidhar is a capable writer and enjoys what he's done with this, so we could see more and even better stories in the future.

My Goodreads Review

Central Station, by Lavie Tidhar

I actually liked this book, but just barely enough to give it four stars. It's not really a novel--it started out as a series of short stories and novellas that have enough of a relationship to sequence them. So I didn't get a sense of continuous plot progression so much as a series of snapshots. Maybe more lifelike. I liked the characters enough to rate it well--there is a lot going on and they lead full, complex lives. Central Station is set on an Earth that has worked through some of the problems we have today and feels like it is past the crisis point. So I hope we can get to something like this, it's much better than I expect.

Central Station is science fiction, with a heavy dose of magical realism. Characters like Ibrahim the alten-zachsen man inhabit a space somewhat beyond human. It makes this book difficult to classify, in a reasonably good way. It's not a totally amazing book but it is an amazing world. I'm reading Neom now, we'll see if the novel inhabiting this space enhances it.

My Goodreads Review