How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, by Django Wexler

In my mind this is better than a 2 but not quite a 3. Lots of problems. I think the content warning was clear enough, and if it isn't you figure that out within a page or two. Grisly Groundhog Day. I was able to get past the problems enough to read the whole thing, and even enjoy parts of it mildly. The importance of friendship and thinking outside the box are always good for a plot.

But like pretty much every other reviewer I find that Wexler doesn't come close to bringing off a female character. All the sexual references pretty much come off as porn. A book full of this is cloying and leaves a bad taste.

We have a character who's lived over 200 lives, each multiple years, so she's been at this a long time. And hasn't really reflected on what kind of time loop she's caught in. And claims to have forgotten much of her previous life, but remembers enough to drop every current cultural reference the author knows.

The plot so far is just too shallow to justify the over-the-top grossness of the character. I could have used my time better.

My Goodreads Review

Furious Heaven, by Kate Elliot

I persevered all the way to the end of this very, very long book. Not just physically long, it felt long. There's a lot of landmarks and players, but the plot in the end is pretty ordinary galactic fantasy. It is modernized with sapphic romance, but we've had that around long enough for it not to be an automatic qualifier. Space in this series is a very pure metaphor for the ocean--the battles give the book a lift but not really enough. Elliot has fallen in love with Sun, I think--the book tends toward hagiography for Sun, especially toward the end. Lots of hyperbolic descriptions of royal responsibility and honor. If you're pushing the boundaries in speculative fiction now, you're pushing back on the very colonial ideas of empire and royalty that Elliot uncritically embraces. Having the conquerors have an Asian, as opposed to European/Celtic origins, does not let this off the hook. The length just isn't justified--it's mostly a chronicle of Sun's conquests, with some clever interludes from her companions. I kept on, looking for a story, and I'm not sure that really ever happened--just a collection of incidents with Sun at the center.

My Goodreads Review

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu

I am sad to give this a two-star review. I gave it all the chances I could, reading it to the bitter end. But I can't do any better. If you have read St. Augustine of Hippo's meditation on time you get the flavor of the protagonist describing his experience of time. There's also a suggestion of technical detail, which was potentially pretty intriguing, suggesting that the techology *might* be simply a way to get into a mental state.

But it goes on and on. The time meditation gets repetitive, which is possibly intentional but still irritating. And the father-son story is just sad, mostly, without a lot of redeeming value. Leo Tolstoy said that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way--I think we may have found the disproof right here. I feel like I have met this family several times. There's just not enough in the relationship story to carry the heaviness of the chronodiagetic exposition.

I think this book would have worked better as a novella. Mostly it just needed more of a reason to exist.

My Goodreads Review

Incident at Bear Creek Lodge, by Tananarive Due

I read this story in The Wishing Pool and Other Stories--It's also in Other Terrors.  I do not know what to make of a writer who does not finish her stories.  Finishing stories is the hard part.  At first I thought maybe it was an error in book production, because the story seemed cut off.  But no, according to reviewers this is a pretty normal thing for her stories.  The Incident in question never occurs, though the setup is pretty good.  If you're David Foster Wallace you could get away with this, because his books contain so much other work it is worth reading them even if they don't resolve.  Due is not there yet.

Sweep of Stars, by Maurice Broaddus

So this book has gotten a lot of positive attention. Broaddus' viewpoint is an underrepresented one and needs to be heard. He has a great idea for a solar system and galaxy-spanning tale of cultural clash. Now he just needs to learn to write. "Show, don't tell" is a basic instruction to would-be authors, and he violates it all the way through the book--right down to having the character state a line of dialog and then telling the reader what the character is expressing through that statement. The didactic prose made it a real slog. There's a bit of sex and violence (together) to try to hold interest. But it doesn't work. There's a science framework but it doesn't show any evidence of research, just kind of putting together what the author already knows and hope it sounds good. Confusing "attenuated" with "attuned" was a constant irritant. There are so many great African authors. Broaddus could be one but it will be a lot of work. It does him no favors to say that a work like this is worthy of award consideration (the Locus) when it's an early writing exercise. Keep trying, and listen to those who will work with you, Mr. Broaddus. 

My Yelp Review

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

Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

It took me forever to read this book. Superlative and plot overload. There is so much going on, and I was able to relate some of it back to the earlier books but the whole thing just never did resolve and make sense to me. Could have to do with it being kind of an impromptu book wedged in between Harrow and Alecto. Nona is kind of a cute character, but I was really distracted trying to relate what she was narrating, and what the others were doing, back to Gideon and Harrow. Gideon Nav appears but is really someone else (happens a lot) and Harrow might be appearing? "Dead" is a term of art, dead people walk around and act pretty much like anyone else (except in John's interludes, which are the most interesting part of the book since they give it a little structure)(are we on Earth for this one?), and the word and idea are used so much, with so many different kinds of fairly animate people, that the word loses its meaning.

Layered snark also loses its effect with repeated use. Again, the other books push the line in interesting ways, but this one just goes over.

There are complex plots and there are confusing ones, and it's a fine line an author has to walk to write a book like this. The other two in the series just barely pulled it off for me, and this one just didn't.

My Goodreads Review

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

The Giants of the Violet Sea, by Eugenia Triantafyllou

Not sure what to make of The Giants of the Violet Sea. The setting is a colony on an inhospitable world where most life is toxic to the colonists. One of these toxic life forms is highly revered--the Venedolphin. More like a whale, and the colonists understand it to have a complex social structure. But they are being poached. The protagonist is a girl child of a Venedolphin tamer and a healer. The society has structured gender roles so she could not be a tamer, but didn't want to be a healer like her mother so she left for a time. She comes back to solve the mystery of her brother's death.

The story is mostly confusing and kind of hard to follow. There's a lot of side issues, like a more-favored sister colony that seems to have ruined its environment, that are introduced but don't really go anywhere. In the end it all resolves but it's in a kind of awkward space where the author needed a lot more space to develop it all, or a lot less plot. It's also a bit awkward to read for a major award nominated story.

My Goodreads Review

Flowers for the Sea, by Zin Rocklyn

Maybe better than a 2 but not a 3. The book jacket description--Rosemary's Baby by way of Octavia Butler--is pretty accurate. Kind of dead on really. There's a lot of really luscious description of body horror, quite organic and messy. Pregnant Iraxi is definitely a force on this doomed ark (climate change refugees, probably?) in all sorts of ways. As literature it works pretty well. But it feels like it is just getting started, and yet had nowhere to go. So in the end just OK for me. Some uniqueness as a Black horror writer, it comes through in the writing, not quite enough for me to really like it.

My Goodreads Review

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

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

Interlibrary Loan, by Gene Wolfe

 Gene Wolfe was an amazing literary talent. I will never forget the Book of the New Sun. But I think these later works began to get lost, and Interlibrary Loan is definitely incomplete. We revisit the smaller but rougher "A Borrowed Man" world where authors are cloned as library resources and are not treated as human. One mildly refreshing thing about this work is that it is one where the library is not painted in gushing terms. It starts out as a somewhat meandering mystery, mostly there to showcase Ern A. Smithe's thoughts on his life and not-really-human status. Then it takes a turn for the weird as alternate universes kind of sneak into the story. Then the book ends.

I think it was worth publishing, but not really worth consideration for awards. But I will miss Gene Wolfe for sure.

My Goodreads Review

Where You Linger, by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

Where You Linger is a time travel story--an author has become successful enough to afford a process where one can travel to the past and change one's own timeline.  That part isn't very fully explored, there are no consequences enumerated.  The protagonist had a complicated sex and relationship life and intends to save her past self from some of that.  Mostly it is a dialog between her present and past self as they travel through her experiences.  I don't know, I've seen versions of this that had more impact on me.  

Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

Well, I finished it. Took a very long time, relatively, and I guess I am glad I did. Most of the book is both confusing and brutal. It's not just the second person perspective. The reveal on why it is written that way is actually pretty cool and helped make sense of some parts for me. But then it keeps going, and the perspectives all mush together. Also, the same characters go by a lot of different names with only the barest connection to bring them together.

All the emotions in the book are awful, and described as hyperbolically as possible, with relief being the only tiny respite. And it's not enough. There's a lot of "You're wrong, and impossibly stupid" "No, YOU'RE wrong, and impossibly stupid". Back and forth. With all this going on it's really hard to pick out how the plot is driven--I sort of think I figured out that Resurrection Beasts are a consequence of some actions the Emperor undertook.

There's some good fight scenes toward the end that get the blood going, but the subsequent reveal is more of the same--confusing, "everything you know is wrong" "No, everything YOU know is wrong".

Hard to say if I'm going to read the last one in the series. I'll have to hear that it's better.

My Goodreads Review

The Ascent to Godhood, by Neon Yang

I don't know. I read the first three books. Everyone seems to love this one, but I just didn't really get it. Having this relationship told as a drunken monologue just seems to sell it really short. To me it came out sounding like an ordinary authoritarian monarch story, and the first three entries had a lot more going on. There's not really any drama, since it is all recollection. So the loose ends are now tied. I just hoped for more. My Goodreads Review

 

Caine's Mutiny, by Charles E. Gannon

I did not completely hate this book. It was a comfortable read at the end of a long day, just engaging enough to keep me awake but not enough to make me lose sleep. A comfortable read for a long, long time. There's enough plot here for a short novel or novella, but it is doled out over 800 pages. Gak. Very long and detailed battle scenes with lots of acronyms, which should be good for military SF buffs and seems to work for some, but way too much of it to make the action interesting. The plot is convoluted, which would be OK except I lost track of things because they occurred so many pages back. With a heavy editorial hand it might have been nominated for Gannon's fourth.

My Goodreads review

Wanderers, by Chuck Wendig

 Reading this book was like being at a bad diner, where they burn your french fries so they give you extra to make up for it. It was both bad and long. Some reviewers say it had potential, but given how it was written I don't see where.

Not that the writing was bad. It was competent, other than being twice as long as necessary--maybe more. It was just so basic. I am sympathetic to where Wendig is coming from, but when I read something that reinforces my point of view I want to learn something. Literally nothing new here. Evil Trump-analog politician tears at the political fabric (he might as well have just used Donald Trump) while a white supremacist rapist militia leader (yep, there's a graphic man-rape scene) hobnobs with powerful right-wing leaders. A weak-willed pastor that loses his faith. Cardboard characters all (Shana, sister of the first Wanderer, comes closest to being human but Wendig just can't quite pull it off). Oh, and to top it off we have an artificial intelligence engaged in finding the cause of the disease that causes wandering, and another world-ending plague happening at the same time (Is the AI involved? What do you think? Gawd.)

It is probably too late for most who would consider it, but you really don't have to read this book. Just imagine the end of the world from the perspective of MSNBC and you pretty much have it. It got nominated for a Locus award. Don't know what they were thinking...and I want three weeks of reading life back.

My Goodreads Review

Queen Lily, by Theodora Goss

Queen Lily crept onto the Locus Award list, probably because Theodora Goss has written some other good things.  I just couldn't get into this one at all.  The point of view changes without warning or sense, and is just confusing.  The setting is Alice In Wonderland, which has had a lot of rework over the years so if one is going to go back there one has to have something really new to say.  About all there is here is that Lewis Carroll was a pedophile--we knew that already.  I have to rate this one down.

The Descent of Monsters, by Jy Yang

The Descent of Monsters by J.Y.  Yang

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


You are reading this because I am finished. I finished the book, that is. This installment in the Tensorate series tells the story of horrifying experiments by the Tensorate and the Protectorate (in cahoots) that go wrong, through the letters and reports of the investigator assigned to the case. It can be an interesting device if done well, but this was just so-so. I don't feel like I learned much more about the Tensorate or the Protectorate (these tendencies were well-documented in the first two books). We get a little of Rider, the rebel who moves via Slack, but in general the limiting of the perspective to the investigator constrains the story too much. I'm guessing that the problem set up here gets more definition in the next installment, but I'm not sure I can justify going on. Meh.



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