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

Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki

This book leans in hard on the story of the protagonist. Katrina Nguyen has led a life of misery as an abused transsexual girl, and that feeds her art. She is a self-taught prodigy, and Shizuka Satomi, the other main character, recognizes it in her role as a recruiter for Hell. Shizuka is in many ways a perfect foil for Katrina, and their stories meld in a way that made me reluctant to put the book down when it was time for bed. Some of the reviewers don't think the characters grew in the book--I absolutely disagree, both Shizuka and Katrina evolved considerably and it's a core element of the story.

I think a lot of people kind of glossed the rarified world of top-level violinists and violin makers, perhaps because Ryka Aoki didn't want to double the volume of the book to go into the depth of, say, junior tennis in Infinite Jest. The over-the-top drive in that space makes soul-trading and sex work for music very believable.

There are parts that don't work as well. The space aliens and demons from Hell are not integrated in any plausible way. They come together mildly at the end in a way that is kind of disappointing. But ending books is both difficult and in some ways optional, especially once one has read a lot of fiction. The story in between is the point. I can only give this 3 stars but I still think it's a deserving contender for the awards it is nominated for.

My Goodreads Review

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers

For what Chambers says is the last installment in this series, she gives us My Dinner With Andre, with aliens. The plot does not relate to the characters at all--a disastrous satellite accident strands a set of aliens at a space truck stop/motel with nothing to do but interact with each other. The intent is in no way disguised so this is fine.

The aliens are all humanoid and represent various ways of being human. A human is offstage (the Aeulon Pei's boyfriend) and is the only mentioned human, but the aliens represent various social types here on Earth--privileged (the Aeulons), xenophilic (the Laru), xenophobic (the Quelin), and oppressed (the Akarak). They come from different circumstances but basically share a value of caring for others that drives the interactions in the book, as it does for the others in this series.

So really Chambers is only trying to do one thing in this book and that's show how very different people can get along with each other. And she does it very well. It is a heartwarming read from end to end in a coldhearted time in world history. My quibble with it would be that despite the differences the aliens are really very close together in personality. Real people differ more fundamentally than these "aliens" and it's more challenging to see each other's humanity. And the moral blind spots of the more privileged ones are brought up, but not really worked. Still it accomplishes what Chambers wants, which is to allow us to hope and breathe for a bit. Would give it a 3.6 and round it up.

My Goodreads Review

Machinehood, by S. B. Divya

I enjoyed this novel, and am glad to see S. B. Divya putting out a full-length work. Her writing is very different from most SF writers' prose and it's refreshing.

The social speculation is interesting here--we have an arms race between people and machines with people using ever-more dangerous enhancements to continue to compete with weak AIs (WAIs). From the omniscient author's perspective this situation is very contrived, with "funders" playing WAIs and humans against each other, but the protagonists of the story are very attached to it. On the surface the plot is a little simplistic and a very straightfoward extrapolation from current events. But I like her characters--they are not super-introspective deep thinkers and have kind of ordinary wants and desires for their lives, something I think SF readers forget about most of the people they encounter in the world. And there's more to this plot than meets the eye--the movement for machine emancipation is the central motivation for the action, and yet there is no WAI character or description of a situation from a WAI perspective. It's a pointer to the WAI emancipation being a sideshow--and the characters are aware of this possibility. This is not really resolved at the end of the book so it's hard to say if I'm actually seeing something that the author intended. Don't know...

I do know that the action carries the book along nicely and I read it with interest all the way through. Worthy of its nomination for a Nebula.

My Goodreads Review

A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine

This series is absolutely unique in the SF space today. The dedication from the first book, which so many repeat and I will again-- "To all those who fall in love with a culture that is slowly devouring their own"--is a completely accurate description of the perspective. This second volume builds off the scaffolding of the first to tell a more intimate story about protagonists Three Seagrass and Mahit Dzmaire. It is set against the large and exciting space opera of an existential threat to both Teixcalaan and Lsel Station. In the reviews I see some DNFs at around the 60-70 percent mark. You gave up at the wrong time. The book sort of revels in Teixcalaan during the first two thirds while the action is constructed, but then it becomes something you can't put down.

And who wouldn't love Teixcalaan? A society where all regulations and court proceedings have to be conducted in verse, where poetry is so woven into the culture that everyone writes it and the best are rock stars? Beauty and brutal destruction are inseparable. The cultures of Lsel Station and Teixcalaan are recognizable (marry British global ambition to Asian aesthetic sensibilities) but very different from America so that the lessons are easier to handle. Three Seagrass repeatedly illustrates microaggressions while growing to love Mahit, and Mahit is scarred by them but not able to help loving her back. Ambition so large it has its own gravity is compelling, and Martine very ably conveys that it's not an individual thing--everyone in Teixcalaan behaves as they do because they are part of it. I can only give it four stars because it took a bit of grinding to read the first part, but overall it really is better than the first book and is incredibly worthwhile. I desperately want to know more about Teixcalaan in all its flawed glory.

My Goodreads Review

The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal

I've enjoyed this series so far--fairly light reading but has good takes on serious topics, including climate change, women's rights and racism. The series is coming together as a world, centered on the United States, that has to grow up faster than they would want.

This entry in the series is pretty typical. We get the perspective of Nicole Wargin, astronaut and society woman married to an aspiring presidential candidate. She has a lot of difficult territory to navigate, including severe anorexia. The action is solid, though the villains are still mostly faceless.

For me it's a 3.5 rounded up. I have some misgivings. Mostly I think it's OK to gloss the science a bit in order to develop characters, but in this case the science on the challenges of living in space, particularly on the Moon, is pretty readily available. There's basically no way the early astronauts from 1968 on could have stayed on the moon any longer than they did. The dust got into their suits and equipment. The suits were leaking like sieves when they left. We aren't particularly close to figuring out how to have self-sustaining space colonies, and all that gets glossed in order to drive the plot on how to escape earth. With the technology demonstrated in this series so far, they couldn't save anyone.

For a fun and entertaining read that keeps up with current sensibilities this works just fine.

My Goodreads Review