The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds

The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I read this as preparation for reading Elysium Fire, second in this subseries. Now I really wish I had read Revelation Space first. But at this point I am used to joining series mid-stream, so was able to interpolate pretty well. This is pretty classic space opera, but the emphasis is really on the stoic Tom Dreyfus and the dedicated Space-FBI Panoply. The society is a pretty direct lift from 20th century Europe, and the technology pretty much assumes you are a veteran science fiction reader and don't really need to have an explanation of how the Glitter Band's space technology works. Or maybe that's in Revelation Space. In any case, it's a very competent story, with a good amount of excitement and mechanical know-how. We have a nod to racism in Tom's relationship with hyper-pig Sparber (no other examples of his kind, so we don't really know much about them), but it too is very 20th-century. Not sure yet if I'm going to back up to read the others or not. But this one is fine.



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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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How Long 'Til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin

How Long 'til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Jemisin is an amazing novelist--her Broken Earth trilogy is among my favorites, and the Inheritance Trilogy (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms) has the broad reach I like to have in the SF novels I read. The introduction to this collection is really interesting--Jemisin came into writing in a different way from a lot of the current award-winning writers. She learned mostly on her own, and started with novels. Better for the pocketbook if it works, which it did.

So after starting a successful career as a novelist, she goes back to learn about writing by crafting short stories, and going to some workshops. Her setup effectively sets expectations for the collection--these are exercises. She is pretty explicit about viewing our current society through the lens of speculative fiction, which is what I think is so amazing about the whole genre. There are several great stories in here, the strongest of which is The Evaluators, which I have reviewed elsewhere. The Locus Award nominees are reviewed below:

The Storyteller's Replacement
The story of a king troubled by impotence, who is advised, as so many are, to eat some part of an endangered animal--in this case the heart of a male dragon. But he can't find a male one (hunted to near extinction) so he eats a female heart instead. His mileage definitely varied. Some give Jemisin some credit here for the replacement storyteller bit, but I don't know that it does that much. 3 stars

Cuisine des Memoires
A woman has invited her friend to a very special restaurant--they can recreate any meal in exact detail, if you can locate it in time and space. So obviously there's some spacetime viewer stuff going on, and Jemisin lets this part contribute a bit to the atmosphere. Mostly it's about the emotional connections we have to food, and specific meals. I liked this one, but I liked The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections better.

Overall a worthy win of the Locus for collections.  But I could wish that she had taken on the title of her work more directly.  There's not a lot of Black future here, some Black alternate history and some fantasy but the techno nerdy part will have to wait



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Embers of War, by Gareth L. Powell

Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This isn't a terrible book, but I just can't bring myself to give it more than 2 stars. As space opera it is OK, though not as exciting as space opera can be. So much of it is kind of cardboard plot drivers. A genocide of a sentient forest that we are not motivated to care about--spending about 3 chapters developing it as a feature of the novel would have jumped up the interest all by itself. We have a sentient spaceship, and a little bit of effort to sort out its artificial but really pretty human personality (reasonably explained and even used in the plot, but again not enough depth). It's good as a writing exercise but feels more like an assignment for a novel-writing class than a story to believe in. Lots of opportunities for spinning out some detail on how this universe works are started and then closed off, so it ends up feeling like a place we have seen many times before. Oh well,



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Rogue Protocol, by Martha Wells

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


By the third installment of this series the protagonist is growing a bit, though he (it? they? Murderbot presents as male but does not seem to have any interior masculine talk) is still kind of one-dimensional as far as I am concerned. These are simple books with simple plots, but they do have a lot of well-constructed action sequences that make for an exciting read. Am happy to have picked it up. It would be interesting if she started doing more to work through how Murderbot is neither male nor female, and how that interacts with its vicarious (but growing more personal) interest in emotions.



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Time Was, by Ian McDonald

Time Was by Ian McDonald

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I was fortunate enough to not read the misleading book blurb or the Goodreads spoiler blurb. Letting the book tell you about itself is probably the best way to experience it. That said, I kind of liked it but did not love it. It is a book-based time-travel/gay romance/mystery that unfolds pretty slowly and ends in a mild but not earthshaking twist. Our main character is kind of feckless for most of the book, and his semi-helpless singlemindedness is somewhat hard to like. It's a very literary book in a genre that doesn't value literature over ideas, so...hard to get excited about it, but I'm not sorry I read it.



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Tomorrow's Kin, by Nancy Kress

Tomorrow's Kin by Nancy Kress

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is about a 3.7 rounded up. I for one think Nancy Kress is getting better as she writes more. This is an excellent expansion on Yesterday's Kin, with a lot of satisfying plot twists. The early part will look familiar to those who read number 0.5, but the story is taken further and effectively delivered. Socially it's very current, extrapolating on our current inability to face any sort of disagreeable fact with anything more than a knee-jerk blaming of someone identifiably Other. But there's some perspicacious breakdown of that reaction, also--it's harder to be reasonable when you have lost someone close to you, or have no room for setbacks. Having the "Denebs" be fully human, including acting that way, is leaving lots of room for good storytelling. I'm pretty sure I'll be back for the next one.



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