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| 0593135059
| 9780593135051
| 4.00
| 9,885
| Aug 04, 2020
| Aug 04, 2020
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liked it
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**spoiler alert** The idea of the multiverse is captivating, no? The thought that there are infinitely-many yous out there, that at any moment the cho
**spoiler alert** The idea of the multiverse is captivating, no? The thought that there are infinitely-many yous out there, that at any moment the choice you make diverges you from them a little more. I do so love parallel-universe fiction and other, similar, world-hopping stories, so I was excited for The Space Between Worlds. The fact it has a queer protagonist of colour? Even better! Indeed, Micaiah Johnson isn’t just telling a multiverse thriller here. This is a postcolonial novel about not belonging, about belonging only when you are useful, and how you calibrate your life when that is all you know how to do. Minor spoilers in this book because it is rather difficult to discuss the story without them, but I won’t spoil anything major. Cara is one of a small number of people who are useful to the Eldridge corporation as traversers, world-walkers. She is useful because she has died in most of the nearly 400 worlds that the corporation can access. She travels to these worlds to collect information that could enrich Eldridge. But Cara has secrets—for one thing, she isn’t Caramenta from this Earth 0; she is Caralee from Earth 22, who managed to impersonat Caramenta after the latter arrived, broken and dying, on Caralee’s Earth (this is what happens when you try to visit an Earth where your counterpart lives). Matters at Eldridge are coming to a head, because Cara and all the other traversers might be out of a job soon. So she has to find a way to protect her interests, lest she is deported back to the impoverished town on the outskirts of Wiley City that she hails from (in any universe). Unfortunately for Cara, it isn’t even clear who her allies or—or her enemies. Cara’s secret identity is revealed early in the book (this is why it’s a minor spoiler) and is what got me hooked on the whole plot. Up until that point, I wasn’t sure what Johnson was playing with here—there are so many directions a multiverse story can go in! When she revealed Cara is not actually from this Earth, holy wow, yes, I was so in for stakes like that. As Cara travels to visit her family in Ashtown, and flirts/spars with her handler, Dell, we see the cracks in her facade. It’s hard to pretend to be someone you’re not, even when that person is also you. Indeed, Cara is a great example of an unlikable protagonist. She is very self-interested and spiky, a result of her rough and difficult upbringing, so she doesn’t fit into the mould of lovable heroine that we might want from a book like this. I like this choice by Johnson, just as I like that Johnson doesn’t shy away from social commentary about the way we (white people and corporations) use Black and brown bodies as labour to build our cities and businesses while simultaneously impoverishing and punishing those same bodies. There’s also a queer romance hiding in here, although to be honest it was developed in a somewhat slapdash way with far too much of a helping of exposition. That would be my complaint about this book: the characters are cool, but the plotting that brings them together doesn’t always satisfy me. After electrifying me for the first few acts, the final act was convoluted and even anticlimactic. In the end, I was left wanting more. More use of the multiverse and traversing. More poignant scenes between characters. More careful plotting and exposition in a way that didn’t leave everything so obvious. The Space Between Worlds is intriguing and enjoyable, yet there was something about it that didn’t quite gel for me. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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Dec 21, 2020
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Dec 22, 2020
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Dec 21, 2020
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0553278398
| 9780553278392
| 4.13
| 69,368
| May 1988
| Sep 2004
|
it was ok
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There must be some law about how, the longer an author is allowed to play in their sandbox, the worse their stories get. At some point, every author w
There must be some law about how, the longer an author is allowed to play in their sandbox, the worse their stories get. At some point, every author who has a long-spanning saga feels encouraged to go back and fill in gaps in the chronology, creating that wonderful dichotomy of possible reading experiences: publication order and chronological order. L.E. Modesitt’s Recluce saga is one of the most notable modern examples. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is a classic. Prelude to Foundation is one of the last Foundation stories Asimov wrote, yet it is chronologically the earliest. It is in many ways a great folly yet it also shows Asimov’s abiding love for a genre that he nurtured and helped kickstart into a thriving industry. I am starting to think Asimov himself is very much like this book: he should not be overlooked, but when you do look at him, he isn’t all that great. Hari Seldon arrives on Trantor to give a talk at a conference. He speaks of a glimmer of an idea—psychohistory—and this is enough to get the attention of Galactic Emperor Cleon I. After a disappointing audience with the emperor, Hari thinks he is on his way home to Helicon. Instead, he is swept up by a journalist who is obviously so much more into a whirlwind adventure, touring various sectors of Trantor while under the protection of a love/lust interest, Dors. As Hari and Dors flee from sector to sector, experiencing each one’s diverse culture and customs, Hari considers whether predicting the future of humanity is indeed mathematically practical. The answer seems to lie in a common theme that arises throughout these novels: the forgotten origin of humanity, and the truth behind Earth and robots. Frankly, as a novel, this book makes sense in many respects. Yet in some ways I miss the early Foundation novels that were compilations of shorter novellas. Working at that length, Asimov had reason to keep his plots crisp. Prelude to Foundation feels too long for all it accomplishes, too prone to filler. It is the indulgence of an author so established in his career that he gets a pass when it comes to editing. In previous reviews of this series, I have tackled Asimov’s writing style as well as his relentless and gross male gaze. The latter is still present here, although I am pleased to report someone told him to tone it down. Sexism lurks beneath subtly undermined attempts to portray societies here as equal. Hari and Dors’ story is obviously one of those romances where the characters start at odds yet, as they overcome bigger struggles, they grow to love one another. Hari is just as much of a dog as the other Asimov protagonists; he just doesn’t have as much opportunity to put this into practice given the predicaments of plot. In terms of big concepts, Prelude to Foundation is probably, at this point in the publication order of the series, Asimov’s most honest attempt to explain the nature of psychohistory. Up until now, he has handwaved it as incredibly complex mathematical formulas that only really really really smart people can know how to do. This book humanizes Hari in a way that the previous books couldn’t, and we come to see how fraught the early days of psychohistory were. And thus comes Asimov’s big idea, exemplified by the role of Chetter Hummin, this idea that it could be possible to guide humanity to a better future. Writing this in the late 1980s, having lived so long a life already and experienced so much of the tumultuous twentieth century, with its technological upheavals, I can bet that Asimov more than ever wished psychohistory could be science fact rather than science fiction. And the power hungry nature of those who would abduct Hari to use him for their own ends underscores this belief. For Asimov, psychohistory is the ultimate triumph of human ingenuity over human atavism: if we can predict and guide humanity in a way that overrides the follies of flawed individuals, we will be better. We will evolve. I am close to the end of my re-read of the series. I intend to stop with Forward the Foundation; I don’t plan at this time to read any of the estate-authorized works, nor do I feel compelled to dive into the rest of Asimov’s oeuvre. I’m glad I embarked on this project, but my opinion of Asimov remains decidedly mixed. On one hand, he is so overrated. On the other, as noted above, his works contain a true genius of hopefulness about humanity, a commitment to writing science-fiction stories that show us ways forward beyond our own single world. In my last review of this series, I will discuss how I feel about Asimov’s place overall in the canon of science fiction. For now, know this: Prelude to Foundation is a valuable insight into the final era of one of the most prolific science-fiction writers of the twentieth century. Given that, it would be, if it came from any other writer, a profound disappointment of a novel. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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Nov 24, 2020
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Nov 28, 2020
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Nov 24, 2020
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Mass Market Paperback
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| B084ZZM6YJ
| 3.88
| 48
| Nov 13, 2020
| Nov 13, 2020
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it was ok
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When I learned after finishing this book that Kimberly Unger is a video game designer, much more about this book began to make sense. Nucleation is a
When I learned after finishing this book that Kimberly Unger is a video game designer, much more about this book began to make sense. Nucleation is a science-fiction novel that wants to wow you with its video game–like aesthetic—this is a novel that craves the label of cinematic for its descriptions of how its protagonist virtually manipulates robots in another star system in high-stakes, high-pressure situations. Nevertheless, even if such moments capture your attention (I’m not sure, for me, that they did), they do very little to hide this story’s paucity of plot or character development. I got this for free from NetGalley and Tachyon Publications, but that isn’t going to stop me from being brutally honest here. Nucleation is a snooze-fest. We open in space. Helen is virtually manipulating a robot in another star system from the comfort of her job back here on Earth. She and her partner run into a problem, and Unger unfolds what should be a nail-biting scene of intense action … except she holds it for too long before pulling us out and giving us enough exposition to understand what’s going on. This opening chapter drags on past its expiry date, establishing what becomes a theme throughout the book. Indeed, we’re a quarter of the way through the book before we’ve even moved past the inciting force, and well over halfway through before the main conflict really picks up steam. The urgency Unger wants us to feel when Helen is in her coffin, doing her virtual OP stuff, is nowhere within the scenes outside the coffin. With that being said, this next critique might seem contradictory: this book is way too focused on its main plot. Seriously, though, the cast of characters here is slim, the sets are like something from a budget cable TV show, and the scenes are so restricted in scope I started to chafe. I think we get like … two parts of the book that take place outside of Helen’s work—a wake at a bar, and then later on in a hospital. Otherwise, all the scenes (not counting the parts in space, obvs) take place on the Far Reaches campus. Helen barely interacts with anyone outside of her team—and yes, Unger handwaves this because Helen is “sequestered” along with the rest of her team, fine. But even her interactions with other members of her team don’t work for me. Pretty much the only downtime we get are meals that actually serve as a chance for some exposition. Meanwhile, Helen herself seems to have a single mood (“damn you all, I’m just trying to do my job while you’ve got one arm tied behind my back!”) without much range. She’s got depth but it’s like … not used. She gets stuck in that emotional feedback loop (probably because we don’t get to see her breathe, as discussed above), so focused on this single plot that takes too long to develop anyway. I wasn’t interested. I didn’t care about her beyond a base level of empathy. This is all so unfortunate, because the science fictional premise of this story has legs! Tiny robot swarms in another system, building jump gates and possibly making first contact with alien robot swarms? Yes, sign me up for this adventure! Wait, you’re going to make me read repetitive chapter and repetitive chapter without really advancing the plot or telling me more until the very end of the book, in the hope that hey, I’ll stick around for book 2? Eject. Eject. Eject. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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Nov 03, 2020
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Nov 04, 2020
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Nov 03, 2020
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Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
| 0765378035
| 9780765378033
| 4.19
| 4,090
| Mar 07, 2017
| Nov 28, 2017
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really liked it
|
For some reason I thought this book semed way shorter than the first one, but I’m realizing now it’s just that I read Too Like the Lightning in hardco
For some reason I thought this book semed way shorter than the first one, but I’m realizing now it’s just that I read Too Like the Lightning in hardcover, so it seemed thicker and more imposing. That being said, Seven Surrenders was less exhausting and easier to digest than the first book. At first I thought that was because I was just used to Ada Palmer’s writing, but now I think it’s also because this book is more focused. Whereas the first book educated us about this future world, Seven Surrenders is much more invested in unravelling both the political plot at the heart of this book as well as the existential and epistemological questions Palmer cloaks in this science fiction story. This book picks up where the last one left off (so spoilers for the first book, but not for this one). Mycroft Canner, convicted murderer in a world of peace, must protect Bridger, a child with god-like abilities, from those who would corrupt or manipulate them. Meanwhile, we learn more about a conspiracy at the highest level—a conspiracy to murder just enough people every year, basically using statistical analysis to determine who to murder to keep the world’s powers balanced and humanity at peace. At the centre of this story? Mycroft’s fervent belief that J.E.D.D. Mason is another universe’s god made flesh, and that they and Bridger together can avert a war brewing despite anyone’s best efforts to the contrary. What strikes me immediately about Palmer’s writing is how she brings her Renaissance historian perspective to writing the future. I commented on this in my review of the first book, but let’s talk about it again. This book has shadows of Umberto Eco. Its scenes are mostly intense dialogues between two or more characters, dialogues that verge upon philosophy and shade into the deepest questions of the human condition. Seven Surrenders asks us to consider what qualities make good leaders, how gender roles and ideas influence our behaviour, and how our religious and spiritual beliefs shape our ability to conceive of the world. Although set in the future, the language and intrigue would equally belong to the seventeenth century (something one character lampshades after the climax of the story). This is, of course, the purpose of science fiction in general (to explore the human condition and hypotheticals thereof), but Palmer’s use of Renaissance and Enlightenment motifs creates an interesting, compelling style to the entire piece. It’s challenging and not something I would like to read all the time, but I appreciate having my mind challenged in this way. The gender stuff, of course, really jumped out at me. I read and reviewed Too Like the Lightning at the same time that I was questioning my own gender (and eventually landed on woman, hi!). So of course I’m interested in how science fiction books reimagine gender. In this 25th century, Palmer imagines a world that has pursued what we might call gender abolition. It’s not that sex is gone, but no one is supposed to care about anyone else’s gender—everyone is supposed to use they/them pronouns. This sounds liberating, but honestly as a trans person it kinda sounds like just a different kind of hell. Having fought so hard to figure out (and now assert) my true gender, the idea of erasing/ignoring that identity in a quest to erase gender roles and stereotypes doesn’t appeal to me. Gender abolition’s goals are noble but conflate the symptoms with the disease: gender as a social construct is not a problem, but the ways we police gender are. So I appreciate that Palmer depicts some of the problems with this approach to dealing with gender stereotyps. A kind of prohibitionism of gender is apt to backfire because it creates the opportunity for a “gender-aware underground,” which in this case becomes the framework for allowing an egotistical megalomaniac to corrupt and manipulate the major leaders of this world. One of the subplots in Seven Surrenders eventually coalesces around the Cousins, a Hive (think … philosophical movement turned into club) that focuses on doing good for others. Without getting into spoilers, let’s just say that the subplot hinges on the idea that the Cousins embody the feminine in our society, but because this future society has worked to eradicate stereotypical gender roles, they’ve also eradicated the language that allows people to express this idea. As a result, the Cousins are at an existential impasse, unable to fully grasp and articulate the true nature of their work. This made me think of Eugenia Cheng’s thought-provoking x + y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender . Cheng also zeroes in on the difficulty of using terms like masculine and feminine while avoiding stereotypes. For that reason, she proposes new language—particularly the terms ingressive and congressive to describe behaviours, because we can more easily divorce these from our concepts of genders. This seems to be missing from Seven Surrenders—that is, I don’t agree with Palmer that it follows that, if we abolish gender, we also lose language to discuss traditionally gendered activities. As Cheng points out, it is going to be work, but I think we can shift our language to abolish gender stereotypes when talking about behaviour (I just don’t think that should or needs to then turn into an abolition of gender itself). Finally, let’s consider the religious themes in this book. One of the big reveals of Too Like the Lightning was that Mycroft (and many other powerful people) think J.E.D.D. Mason is literally the incarnation of a god from another universe. Palmer further develops this idea here while still keeping the idea fairly postmodern: there is room to interpret this as metaphorical, to view J.E.D.D. Mason as a particularly delusional youth shaped by his bespoke upbringing. Consequently, I found this particular mystery unremarkable. I don’t really care whether or not J.E.D.D. Mason is a god. But the idea that J.E.D.D. and Bridger complement one another is far more intriguing. And here we come full circle, for Palmer uses this plot to explore Western ideas on the best way to govern a society, to avoid war, to have peace. Some characters believe a benevolent dictatorship by J.E.D.D. Mason, perhaps assisted by the miraculous powers of Bridger, would ensure the continuity of peace. Others believe it would lead to stagnation or more division. That is ultimately one of the most interesting mysteries in Seven Surrenders. Will I read the next book? Yes but not right away—I need a break again. This is definitely not candy science fiction; there’s so much going on here. And just in general, the style and the heavy focus on so many named characters is exhausting. So take this as the high praise it is when I say that, despite such frustrations, I still enjoyed and found this book a valuable addition to my 2020 reads. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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Nov 15, 2020
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Nov 17, 2020
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Aug 15, 2020
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1781088055
| 9781781088050
| 3.87
| 222
| Aug 18, 2020
| Aug 18, 2020
|
it was amazing
|
Let me tell you how I thought this review would go. As I began reading The House of Styx (which I received free via NetGalley and publisher Solaris),
Let me tell you how I thought this review would go. As I began reading The House of Styx (which I received free via NetGalley and publisher Solaris), I thought that I would enjoy this book, for sure. Derek Künsken had, after all, reignited the faint embers of my love for posthumanism with
The Quantum Magician
and then fanned those flames with a dose of time travel in
The Quantum Garden
. However, I also thought that the thesis of this review would be, “This is a fun SF book that I liked but did not love as much as The Quantum Evolution books.” I prejudged it based on its being a planetary romance rather than a space opera. I am so, so wrong. The House of Styx surpassed my expectations in every conceivable way. Not only does Künsken deliver another excellent, diverse science-fiction future, but he does so with humour and grace—and he just drops a trans character in my lap like oops no big deal. More on that at length, I promise, in a bit. Trigger warnings in this book for portrayal of gender dysphoria/gender incongruence, as well as scarification. In the future, humans have colonized the upper atmosphere of Venus. More specifically, Québécois have colonized Venus—yes, Künsken, Canadian, reaches into his Québécois heritage for some cultural inspiration here, exposing a wider audience to the glorious, sacrilegious profanity of Québécois French. La colonie, in debt to a powerful bank, barely scraps by, and the D’Aquillon family is even worse off. That is, they make a discovery, in a cave on the inhospitable and nearly unreachable surface of Venus, that could change everything. It could certainly alter the fortunes of the family, not to mention all of la colonie—if this monumental discovery doesn’t fall into “the wrong hands.” So the book quickly turns into a race of against time: how does the family recruit enough trustworthy allies to capitalize on this discovery before the executive powers that be complete their political de-clawing of Marthe, the family’s representative in l’Assemblée? It’s going to take a combination of political and social negotiation as well as good ol’ engineering know-how! Along the way, Künsken gives us these amazing scenes of what he conjectures life in the Venusian clouds could be. From herding, modifying, and even bio-engineering the “trawlers” (gigantic Venusian life forms that live in the lower clouds) to flying with wing packs while wearing survival suits designed to resist the corrosive and toxic atmosphere, The House of Styx is replete and resplendent with a fantastic imagining of what life on (or at least, above) Venus might entail. I haven’t read much fiction concerning Venus; Künsken lampshades this in the book by reminding us that the major exploratory nations kind of wrote Venus off as a dead end after their few probes. So I love that Künsken looked at this planet and said, “No, there is so much more to talk about here,” and then turned that into reality. While this imagination was present in The Quantum Evolution books, it was spread across the numerous settings within those novels. Here, Künsken deploys it in a more concentrated way. There are exciting, cinematic scenes that would be incredible to reify on film if anyone ever wanted to adapt this series. After the success of The Expanse I could easily see this working as a TV show. Beyond the poetical vistas and musing on the stark, brutalist beauty of Venus’ surface and atmosphere, The House of Styx also features excellent characters and relationships. First we have the interplay among the D’Aquillon family themselves. Künsken invests each character with such an interesting, three-dimensional personality, from the steady, dependable Marthe to the black sheep of Étienne. There’s the relentlessly warm Jean-Eudes, who has Down’s syndrome, and then of course, there is my personal favourite character, Pascale. I was not expecting a trans character in this book, and I think that says something important about our expectations for trans representation in literature. There is this misconception sometimes, I think, that for books to feature trans characters then their coming out/transition/journey must be the main focus of the story. That’s all that’s important about us, right? So the fact that here it’s not the main plot, and that feels unusual, is so important. Künsken’s portrayal of Pascale’s journey—the questioning, the agonizing over the questioning and her dysmorphia, the acceptance she receives from the people in whom she has confided so far—is excellent. Yet it all happens as a subplot within a book that is, really, more about exploration and the power struggles within a small colony. Other cis authors, pay attention: this is how you do it. Normalize trans people existing against the backdrop of your larger story. Pascale is far from the only character who grows and undergoes challenges in this book. Each of the main characters struggles with the responsibilities that the D’Aquillon discovery foists upon them, as well as their own flaws and fears. And of course, there is a truly heartbreaking event at the climax of the story that no doubt will set up some intra-family conflict in the sequels. Indeed, the character dynamics in The House of Styx are just great. There are very few one-dimensional characters here—even the nominal antagonist, Présidente Gaschel, gets some page-time from her third-person limited perspective so that we can understand why she’s acting the way she does and avert the idea that she is a bumbling, maniacal villain. Meanwhile, the people who ally themselves with the D’Aquillons do so cautiously. There is no automatic, trite pledges of loyalty here. There is careful discussion of the economic and political ramifications of what they plan to do. There are also other power dynamics at work: sex and attraction, resource management in a resource-scarce environment, etc. Künsken carefully layers all of the rich ingredients that together form our spheres of human motivations. So, in the end, what do we have here? The House of Styx is a science-fiction novel set on/above Venus but with the potential to open up into so much more in the sequels. It focuses on a core group of characters who are diverse in personalities, sexualities, gender identities, etc., including an excellent portrayal of a young trans woman. I do want to be clear: I’m not giving this book 5 stars just because there’s a trans character here (though that helps); even without such a character this novel is an excellent story in every respect. But Künsken’s attention to so many aspects of characterization truly elevates it. After the clunky, sexist read that was Foundation and Earth , this was such a refreshing contrast from the tunnel-vision of so-called “classic” science fiction. The House of Styx is exactly what I want from modern-day science fiction: it is imaginative, inclusive, and incredible. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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Aug 12, 2020
|
Aug 13, 2020
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Aug 12, 2020
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0345339967
| 9780345339966
| 4.06
| 57,166
| 1986
| Oct 1987
|
it was ok
|
I simultaneously enjoyed and loathed reading Foundation and Earth. This might be the best Foundation novel yet also the worst. I know I called
Foun
I simultaneously enjoyed and loathed reading Foundation and Earth. This might be the best Foundation novel yet also the worst. I know I called
Foundation’s Edge
the best, but this one surpasses it in terms of plot. Asimov does as amazing a job of ratcheting up the tension surrounding the search for Earth as he does a terrible job of avoiding the objectification of women. Moreover, when we look at this novel in the context of the Foundation series and Asimov’s other works, it’s possible to read this as Asimov giving up on Foundation. Yeah, this review is going to be … interesting. Trigger warnings for this book, by the way: in addition to the massive amounts of Asimovian sexism/womanizing you would expect, add a hefty dose of highly inappropriate, medicalized portrayal of an intersex person, including the use of the h-slur. Foundation and Earth picks up exactly where Foundation’s Edge ended. It follows a classic quest structure: Golan Trevize has decided, somehow, that the planetary networked consciousness that is Gaia will one day be allowed to expand and form a galactic consciousness called Galaxia. But he isn’t happy with this decision; he doesn’t understand it. So he decides to take up, earnestly, the bogus quest for Earth that was his initial smokescreen in Foundation’s Edge. Janov Pelorat and his newfound Gaian lover, Bliss, accompany Trevize on what proves to be a dangerous expedition across the galaxy. This time, the search for Earth seems to have lesser stakes—no one really cares this time, except Trevize and maybe Pelorat in an academic way—yet it is all the more intense. It’s worth noting that both of these novels were written in the 1980s, thirty years after the original Foundation stories were written and published. Asimov’s writing has markedly improved over that time. I spent most of my review of Foundation and Empire criticizing Asimov’s writing style, criticism I think was fair and justified but which I can’t level against these books. Moreover, whereas the earlier stories were shorter and compiled into novel-sized books for retail purposes, these two stories were definitely conceived of and designed to be unified novels. As someone who has repeatedly stated her highly subjective and personal preference for that literary form, there’s no wonder I prefer these two books to the previous ones. So, there I was, enjoying this book thoroughly until I ran into a scene fairly early in the novel where Trevize seduces his way out of a situation. Ok, maybe it would be more accurate to say he allows himself to be seduced. However, you interpret it, the fact remains that Asimov’s writing skills have improved in every category except his portrayal of women:
If that didn’t make you throw up in your mouth a little bit like it did me: the next chapter begins with Trevize congratulating himself on being such a stud. Not only did he correctly surmised that the poor, sexually-repressed woman in a position of power “would want to be dominated,” but she goes on to call him “a king of sexuality.” This is the kind of stuff I expect to read in bad erotica. Moreover, aside from being bad writing, it’s just so incredibly exclusionary—there is little doubt for whom Asimov is writing here (straight, cis men)—while the rest of us just have to deal. That’s not the only example, of course—Asimov doesn’t seem capable of not objectifying women—just the most egregious that jumped out at me. I could go deeper into the gender dynamics aboard the Far Star, the way Bliss is portrayed as the nurturing and soft personality who naturally has to go out of her way to rescue a child (while Trevize casually advocates not just leaving the child behind to be killed but, later in the novel, genociding all Solarians because he “fears” them), the constant jokes or questions about the nature of Bliss’ relationship with the two other men on the ship. And then we have the intersex characters, Bander and Fallom. After the promising beginning of Bander interrupting Trevize to request that Trevize stop misgendering them, Asimov quickly dehumanizes these characters by using the pronoun “it” and dwelling most inappropriately, as he does with his female characters, on their various physical attributes. We’re supposed to excuse this as the curiosity and flawed biases of our main characters, but it’s still a gross portrayal of a marginalized identity. (I should acknowledge at this point as well that there’s additional conflation happening here of sex/gender: intersex is not the same as non-binary, agender, or bigender, which are all gender identities. Many intersex people use he/him or she/her pronouns. It’s complicated!) Indeed, this is perhaps the most striking thing for me, as a trans woman reading this book in 2020: Asimov, like so many other straight white dudes writing science fiction in the 20th century, has this brilliant imagination when it comes to a future humanity sprawled across the galaxy. He dreams up hyperspace, positronic robots, and mental telepathy; his books touch on the complexities of empire-building, linguistic drift, history versus mythology, and the Gaia theory of consciousness. Yet this same man is unable to wrap his imagination, in an empathetic way, around alternative presentations of sex and gender. And this is something that will never not boggle my mind about the so-called “great” and classic science fiction of the previous century. It seems to me that all science fiction must be queer simply because science fiction is about embracing and exploring the most amazing variety of possibilities for our future, and queerness is necessarily present among the varieties—unless it is deliberately excluded, as Asimov and others do by dint of a very limited worldview. Finally, there’s also a sense of fatigue in this book. This comes across most stridently in Trevize’s fixation with finding Earth, but it is also evident in the rushed denouement and Daneel’s Wizard of Oz reveal. I don’t have anything against Asimov wanting to unite his Foundation and Robot novels into a shared universe. Nevertheless, the way he does this across these two novels strikes me as an interesting bit of retconning of the original premise of the Foundation books. Trevize lampshades this when he questions the legitimacy of psychohistory as a science. I’m not sure if this represents Asimov trying to revise his views after over three decades of contemplating it—certainly an author should be allowed to change and evolve in their attitudes towards their earlier works and the ideas therein—or if Asimov is just kind of … done … with Foundation and wants, at this juncture, to move on from it once again. In any case, the ending to Foundation and Earth is rushed, perfunctory, and disappointing compared to the quest that led up to it. Two more books now to read, both prequels, one published posthumously! Will they be improvements? We will find out soon. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. My review of the Foundation series: ← Foundation’s Edge [image] ...more |
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1
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Aug 11, 2020
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Aug 12, 2020
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Aug 11, 2020
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 1250126436
| 9781250126436
| 3.72
| 9,507
| Aug 28, 2018
| Jul 07, 2020
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it was ok
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Mirage reminds me, in a good and less racist way, of Dune. I wish I had liked it more, because honestly this is the type of science fiction I want mor
Mirage reminds me, in a good and less racist way, of Dune. I wish I had liked it more, because honestly this is the type of science fiction I want more of: science fiction that might be set in space and in the future, sure, but that focuses more on the intrigue and relationships than on the tech and whizz-bang special effects, and in a way that centres people of colour. Mirage does all that, a great elevation of the planetary romance subgenre—unfortunately, I personally found it boring. Amani has the misfortune of appearing nearly identical to the Vathek Crown Princess, Maram. As a result, the Vatheks kidnap her to act as Maram’s body double at precarious public appearances. Amani is Andalan, her world occupied by the Vatheks somewhat extralegally, her culture only barely hanging on after decades of oppression. She has no love for the Vatheks, but her choices are cooperation or death (not even cake!). Unfortunately, as Amani studies how to be the cruel and callous Maram, she worries she might get too good at her job. And she has to balance her desire to help her people—as a spy, for example—with her own survival. Like, every ingredient of this book sets it up for success. I love everything I mentioned in the above paragraph. The setting is great, the clashing cultures Daud has created are fantastic. There is life to this setting, a sense of history. There is richness here. I say this all because I don’t want to damn this book with faint praise—I don’t think Mirage is poorly written, bad, and even though I found it boring, I don’t think that means you necessarily will. So I feel like, as occasionally happens to me, I let down this book. The romance subplot was predictable (and maybe that is fine for some!). The spy subplot was under-developed. Amani’s precarious bonding with Maram was actually kind of fun—I really liked the baking/cooking scene! That too, however, felt like it never really went anywhere. I guess, upon reflection, that’s what I disliked about Mirage: the subplots together lack a sense of unity and coherence in their structure, and individually they might be entertaining, yet they don’t culminate in any fulfilling way. I originally sought out Mirage because so many people on Twitter were hyped for its sequel, Court of Lions—but I want my first book in a series to really stand alone while also setting up future conflict. Mirage does the latter but is not as good at the former. So my advice would be not to pay too much attention to my review and try the book for yourself, if it seems like it’s your thing. If it doesn’t seem like your thing, don’t go into it expecting it to change your mind. I’m happy so many people enjoyed this one, but it didn’t work for me. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
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1
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Dec 29, 2020
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Dec 30, 2020
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Aug 03, 2020
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Paperback
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| 1534431012
| 9781534431010
| 3.96
| 41,651
| Jul 16, 2019
| Jul 16, 2019
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liked it
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Like so many time-travel stories, This Is How You Lose the Time War is frustratingly, endearingly, eerily beautiful. It takes a special kind of talent
Like so many time-travel stories, This Is How You Lose the Time War is frustratingly, endearingly, eerily beautiful. It takes a special kind of talent to write time travel well—you need not only that non-linear perspective that many writers find necessary even for linear plots, but you also require a certain level of sheer, Lewis Carroll-like madness to conceive of a multiverse so vastly alternative to our tiny slice, or strand. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, fortunately, both possess this talent. This book is an achingly beautiful and poetical epistolary romance, yet it is frustrating and ultimately, I have to confess, uneven. Red and Blue are agents on opposite sides of a war across time. “Up” and “down” the race along the threads of time, braiding these together into stronger and stronger strands that match their side’s vision for the future. Along the way, they cross paths enough times to take notice of each other, to develop a mutual respect. After Blue opens the lines of communication by writing Red a letter, the two agents’ correspondence soon becomes a game in and of itself, one that threatens to supersede their allegiances across time and space. Each chapter follows either Red or Blue, with a letter addressed to them at the end to drive forward the actual relationship. In this way, El-Mohtar and Gladstone take the old star-crossed lovers trope and amplify it in exciting dimensions. The language here is a exquisite revelry in diction, structure, and tone. One of my Goodreads friends calls this a prose poem, and that is such an apt description of what’s happening here. Epistolary novels have always shared a liminal space with poetry, given that some novels emerged from exchanges of letters of poetry, and for El-Mohtar and Gladstone to reach backwards in time (heh) and reconnect with this lineage is a powerful move. The letters that Red and Blue exchange are not simple, terse monologues. They are precious curations of thought and feeling filtered through the perspective of a time traveler, which is really where the differences emerge. Red and Blue are both posthumans, for some variation thereof, and their forms change with their particular missions. Their letters aren’t always plain words on paper—indeed, this is where we run into the limitations of the novella’s form as words on paper, forever unable to truly represent the impressive steganography of these posthuman pen-pals. The romantic elements of this book are difficult for me to critique. It’s not just my usual hesitation as an aromantic person who feels like her grasp of romance is shaky on a good day; the romance here is quite alien because Red and Blue are, in some sense, alien. They are observers of a multiverse of humanities that did not or will not exist, tourists and dilettantes and contributors to historical events. I agree largely with my friend Julie’s evaluation that the depth of the romance develops too quickly, probably because of the short length of the book itself. There is, I suspect, an in-universe justification for that, in the usual circular paradoxical way that time travel offers. Moreover, one could also read the romance in this book as not quite romance. The relationship begins, after all, as one of wary mutual respect. In a way, Red and Blue’s love is more of an affinity for one another, a recognition of kindred spirits that is far stronger than their sense of belonging in their respective camps. This time war burning brightly in the background? Intriguing, yes. The vocabulary that El-Mohtar and Gladstone use is fun and inventive. As usual, I find myself comparing this to Palimpsest , perhaps my favourite of all time travel stories, definitely my favourite time travel novella. Both stories create a distinct flavour to their time travel, and I appreciate that. The Time War in This Is How You Lose the Time War is slightly immaterial beyond being a plot device, of course. Yet I would also say that it obviously informs the depth and magic of this story. Star-crossed spies have been done in historical fiction, done in space opera, etc. Time travel definitely brings more dimensions (pun intended) to the equation. At the same time, most of the tropes feel very familiar: the superiors who wouldn’t ever understand this fraternization, the dehumanizing treatment by one’s own side, the curiosity about an enemy you never really confront directly because this is ultimately a cold Time War … it’s intriguing, yet it is also very familiar. In the end, did I like it? Yes, absolutely. It was a great way to pass an afternoon on my deck. El-Mohtar and Gladstone weave a brilliant, passionate story. Yet as a plot, as a love story, as a story about exceeding the limitations of one’s programming, conditioning, education—however you want to put it—This Is How You Lose the Time War is lacking. This is a firework that burns brightly, but once it has fizzled out, you are still left in the dark and the cold. [image] ...more |
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1
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Jul 12, 2020
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Jul 12, 2020
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Jul 11, 2020
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ebook
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| 1473619807
| 9781473619807
| 4.15
| 80,056
| Jul 29, 2014
| Aug 13, 2015
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liked it
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Well, this book lives up to its title: they definitely take the long way around. Although nominally space opera, if you were hoping for sweeping galac
Well, this book lives up to its title: they definitely take the long way around. Although nominally space opera, if you were hoping for sweeping galactic politics and high stakes, you might want to look elsewhere. The Wayfarer is in the middle of a tense diplomatic situation for sure, but this story isn’t about that. This story is about the Wayfarer crew, their journey rather than their destination, and the things you learn along the way. Becky Chambers hasn’t written space opera so much as space pop, and I’m cool with that. This is a difficult book to summarize, because the back cover makes it seem like Rosemary is the main character, but in actuality this is an ensemble cast. Chambers takes the time to ensure each of the crew receives at least some time in the spotlight. Rather than trying to introduce them all, let me just say that there is an eclectic mix of Humans and other aliens, each of whom has distinctive personality traits, some as a result of their species and some as a result of their personality. What’s interesting to me is how Chambers manages to make most of the characters fairly round. There are moments when you love each character as well as moments you dislike them, and that takes talent to do repeatedly. This crew lives and works primarily in space, and the story is more about their relationships than their mission to tunnel a wormhole from alien space back to familiar territory. Chambers explores the conflicts that arise from multiple species living in close quarters, the misunderstandings and the fun, as well as the stress that is possible when you are an unarmed vessel out in deep space. Though I would likely describe this book as a slow burn, there are moments of action and tension that kick the pace up into heart-pounding territory. I love the thoughtfulness Chambers has put into her species. Some people will no doubt fault the level of exposition in this book, and you know … cool. That is a legitmate critique here, and I’m not going to say you’re wrong. But I think that’s the case for a lot of science fiction (Charles Stross called), so this is more about whether or not you like or can tolerate infodumping. If you can, if you want to go on this fun ride through the gallery of alien biology, customs, and foods that Chambers has created, then you will have a good time. Another noticeable stylistic element is just the way that Chambers weaves humour throughout the book. This is particularly evident in the dialogue, which is rich with asides and moments that, in a tightly-paced 43 minute TV show or a novel that took itself too seriously, would be cut for time. This book revels in the idea of breathing room, the idea that there really isn’t any hurry to get on with the main plot. And while it is tempting to single out humour as the dominant emotion on display, I think that misrepresents the wealth of tones Chambers infuses into these scenes. There is plenty of humour, yes, but there is also anger and righteous fury; there is awkward bigotry and accidental insults; there is intense attraction and abiding love. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is one of those books where, if you like it, you like it for the reasons others dislike it. If you want direct, precision-plotting, this book is not for you. This is a book for people who religiously complete every side quest in a video game before daring to continue the main plot. If you want a book where you get to hang out with video game NPCs for a couple of hours—and oh yeah, galactic events are happening just outside the ship, but let’s not worry about those—then this is the book for you. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
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1
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Dec 06, 2020
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Dec 08, 2020
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Jul 05, 2020
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Paperback
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| 1786892723
| 9781786892720
| 4.23
| 112,318
| Aug 13, 2020
| Aug 20, 2020
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really liked it
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So I have had mixed results with Matt Haig to date: I adored
How to Stop Time
but disliked
The Humans
. In both cases, I appreciated Haig’s per
So I have had mixed results with Matt Haig to date: I adored
How to Stop Time
but disliked
The Humans
. In both cases, I appreciated Haig’s perspicacity and philosophy, but the overall storytelling in The Humans didn’t work for me, whereas How to Stop Time was cute and romantic and poignant. So I was looking forward to The Midnight Library acting as a kind of tie-breaker to tell me if I should keep reading Haig. I won’t keep you in suspense: this is one of the good ones, folx, every bit as or better than How to Stop Time. Trigger warnings for attempted suicide on page and mentions of suicide, death, alcoholism, cancer, car crashes. Nora Seed is full of regrets, and after a particularly bad day in which she loses her cat, her job, her only piano student, and even her responsibility to pick up prescriptions for her elderly neighbour, Nora decides she doesn’t want to live. But instead of death she finds the Midnight Library, where a person in the form of her old school librarian, Mrs. Elm, greets her and exhorts her to choose a different life. Each book on each of the infinite shelves in Nora’s library represents a different Nora, a different life being lived based on one more slightly divergent choices from our Nora’s root life. So the story unfolds, chapter by chapter, life by life, as Nora explores and expunges her regrets. In this way, Haig explores the perennial question of: if you could change something about your life, would you? And what effect would that have, really? Nora’s first attempts at finding a new, more satisfactory life are as fumbling as you would expect. They falter more on semantics than anything else. As she refines her ability to express the type of life for which she is looking, Nora learns soon that concepts like happiness and success are not easily quantified or even qualified. Indeed, much like the wonderful Siddhartha , what I took away from The Midnight Library is the important theme that happiness is not a state you can achieve but rather a transitory experience that comes and goes. There is no life out there in which I am happy all of the time. Every version of my life has happy moments and sad ones. The pursuit of happiness is illusory and elusive, because it is not something to be attained but something to enjoy while it endures, and to remember when it slips away. I think about this a lot right now because, of course, I am going through a big transition. In my review of Transhood, an HBO documentary, I ruminate on whether I am better or worse off for having realized I am trans at 30 rather than at 5 or 13. What would my life have been like if I had transitioned earlier? And no matter how much I ponder, I have to admit the only answer that has any merit is: different. My life would have been different. Probably not better or worse, but just different. That’s the secret Nora discovers and Haig unfurls as he travels the tapestry of her lives: most of our alternative lives are neither better nor worse than the one we have; they are different. So I wasn’t all that surprised by the ending, by Nora’s ultimate fate. My prediction didn’t spoil my enjoyment, because Haig’s writing is beautiful and his distillation of poignant philosophical ideas is a soothing balm after a year of existential dread. I think some people will be dissatisfied with the ending because they somehow want more from this book, and I wouldn’t blame them, because Haig sets himself a nigh-impossible task with this kind of story. All I can really say in apology is that this is very much a book that is about the journey, not the destination. Inevitably, The Midnight Library reminded me of My Real Children , which absolutely blew my mind. They basically have identical themes, yet each is different enough in conceit to stand on its own, and I enjoyed Haig’s approach to these ideas. But if you liked this book, do yourself a favour and pick up Walton’s, because there is way more where this came from. I’m not sure I’ve decided what criteria make me love versus dislike a Haig novel yet. Maybe it’s the way he writes his main characters. Maybe it’s just the premise behind the story. I guess I’ll have to keep reading him, and at some point, in some life, I’ll have it figured out. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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Dec 25, 2020
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Dec 26, 2020
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Jul 04, 2020
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0345308980
| 9780345308986
| 4.14
| 70,950
| Oct 28, 1982
| Nov 1983
|
liked it
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This might be the best Foundation novel yet? Foundation’s Edge departs from the formula of the previous installments in the series: instead of related This might be the best Foundation novel yet? Foundation’s Edge departs from the formula of the previous installments in the series: instead of related novellas, this is an actual, honest-to-goodness novel. It follows two, parallel stories: Golan Trevize is a Foundation council member who suspects the Second Foundation was not actually destroyed, and he strikes off (not exactly of his own accord) to investigate; meanwhile, Stor Gendibal is a Second Foundation council member who believes there is a mysterious third force manipulating the Seldon Plan. Dun dun dun! This is a very political book compared to the previous ones. There isn’t a lot in terms of action here, few space battles or physical confrontations. Rather, there is a lot of intellectual sparring and trials (or the appearances thereof). At times, Asimov takes this to an extreme, and it can be very boring to watch two characters discussing everything like they’re in a first-year logic class. There’s a certain roundabout formalism to Asimov’s dialogue that permeates the entire book, regardless of character. Nevertheless, the conversations are some of the most fulfilling parts of the story. In particular, Trevize and Pelorat’s discussions while on their ship were really fascinating, because they add to the air of mystery: is there something out there, manipulating the First and possibly even Second Foundations? How is it connected to the murky origins (and location) of Earth/Gaia? In these respects, Asimov does a great job setting up a lot of questions that he mostly resolves by the end of the book. The final confrontation is indeed climactic: the strange equilibrium created by the mental superiority of the Second Foundation and the technological superiority of the First Foundation is clever. I'm less enthusiastic about the actual climax and the role that the Gaians force Trevize to play. It seems … ethically dubious at best. Of course, no review of Asimov’s work would be complete without pointing out his ongoing and shameless objectification of women. That’s on full display here (pun intended): of the few female characters on screen, none escapes without a comment about her potential attractiveness to men, whether it’s her hairstyle, her breasts, or her buttocks (yes, that’s what he says). Truly, I’m not sure how I would survive reading a Foundation novel without the constant commentary on women’s appearances! Foundation’s Edge is an interesting and simple story at its core: a mystery about what’s out there and potentially manipulating an already manipulative plan. Asimov surmises that after 500 years of slavishly following the Plan, the Foundation might be thinking they can do better and accelerate things towards an even earlier revival of the Galactic Empire. In this, he demonstrates again that he has excellent intuition for the ideas and fabric of science fiction stories; he can think big. However, if you’re looking for depth in your characters and their desires, you need to look elsewhere. This was a pleasant diversion on my deck in the sun, but whatever debt we owe to Asimov for furnishing us with many of the tropes of science fiction has by now been discharged. This is a classic, but as I have discovered through steadily re-reading this series, I’m not sure it holds up as anything more than that. My reviews of the Foundation series: ← Second Foundation | Foundation and Earth → ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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Jun 14, 2020
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Jun 17, 2020
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Jun 14, 2020
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 9798645362140
| 4.19
| 508
| unknown
| Jun 16, 2020
|
liked it
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I had finally caught up on my NetGalley reading, so I went on the hunt for more books to request, and Aethon Books was kind enough to grant my request
I had finally caught up on my NetGalley reading, so I went on the hunt for more books to request, and Aethon Books was kind enough to grant my request for Black Sheep: A Space Opera Adventure. The description sounded very promising, and for the most part I would say that Rachel Aukes delivers on that promise. The protagonist is also disabled! Content note: the book contains ableist language, which I will discuss shortly in this review. “Throttle” Reyne is the captain of a colony ship out of the violent Trappist system. When the ship suffers a catastrophic failure, she and her small but plucky crew must abandon it to search for help. They find a derelict vessel that might be their answer—except, when they return to their original ship, they find that pirates have stolen it! Eventually, Throttle and her crew end up in the Ross system, which has previously been colonized by other Earth expeditions. They are at odds with the pirates who stole the colony ship, and they need to find a way to get the ship and the cryogenically-preserved colonists back before it's too late. I was pleased to encounter a disabled person as a protagonist! Specifically, Throttle has a childhood spinal injury resulting in paraplegia. To be clear: I am not disabled, so I’m not going to comment overly much on Aukes’ portrayal of Throttle’s disability. That being said, I have to question whether Aukes had any sensitivity readers for this book, because some of language used to refer to Throttle and her disability made me cringe. Almost at the very beginning of the book, Aukes refers to Throttle as “after spending much of her life confined to a wheelchair” (emphasis mine). I’m given to understand, in my learning about how to be less ableist, that many wheelchair users feel this language is harmful because their wheelchairs actually provide them with freedom and mobility they wouldn’t otherwise have. They are therefore confined/restricted without their wheelchairs. A bit later in the book, Aukes mentions: Throttle found herself as comfortable, if not more so, in zero g. There, her useless legs weren’t nearly as much of a detriment as they were in gravity. I’m sure there are more examples throughout the book, or even subtler things I’m not picking up on because I’m abled. Look, I get that you want to explain how your protagonist’s disability makes her more comfortable in zero g, because it obviously alleviates some of her mobility concerns. There are ways to do that, however, that don’t compound ableist portrayals of disabled people. And this is an excellent example of why we need (paid) sensitivity readers in publishing: this is careless use of language and therefore easily fixed. Aside from the word choice, I didn’t pick up on any hugely problematic aspects of Throttle’s portrayal (but, again, I’m not qualified to do a sensitivity read here). Ok, let’s move on from that and look at the rest of Black Sheep. Let me confess this book grabbed me more than I expected. I didn’t want to stop reading after I began it later one night, and I finished it the next day. I was into it! I like the snappy characterization, the way Aukes differentiates between their various personalities, and the way that each character gets a little more depth throughout the book. Certainly some of the tropes felt a little too worn—the computer with a heart of gold that just wants a friend, for example—but Aukes is skilled enough at making you not care about those clichés because you’re just having a good time. The plot is fairly sensible and keeps to a good clip. Aukes sets up realistic problems and her characters come up with realistic solutions, with a good amount of wrenches thrown into the works for dramatic effect. My only real quibble here is with the ending itself. Without going into spoilers, let’s just say that Aukes pulls one of those fake-outs where you think everyone is safe and then BAM, disaster strikes. I understand the desire to leave on a cliffhanger to get people reading the next book. Nevertheless, on a purely subjective level, I would have preferred a happy ending and for this … explosive event … to occur at the beginning of Book 2, to jolt me out of my seat. I also like the world into which Aukes throws us: for the first part of the book, Throttle and her crew from the Trappist-1 system believe theirs is the only one successfully colonized by Earth. So there’s a good element of mystery throughout, such as Rusty’s origins, and this doesn’t disappear once they reach the also-inhabited Ross system. Indeed, I love how Aukes answers a few of our questions but leaves more of them open for future books—or perhaps never to be answered at all (life isn’t fair)! The subtitle is a little on the nose, but what can I say? It’s true. Black Sheep is space opera, is adventure, is fun with pirates. Throttle is that sassy-yet-capable heroine in the style of Dutch from Killjoys, and she has a good crew around her. Will I read the next book? Definitely maybe. [image] ...more |
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1
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Jun 12, 2020
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Jun 13, 2020
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Jun 13, 2020
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Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
| B07TFB5PT4
| 3.14
| 1,045
| Mar 03, 2020
| Mar 03, 2020
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What, I come out as trans and suddenly I’m DNFing books like I don’t have a care in the world? Who even am I?? The Companions unfortunately continues m What, I come out as trans and suddenly I’m DNFing books like I don’t have a care in the world? Who even am I?? The Companions unfortunately continues my NetGalley slump. Despite being provided this lovely free review eARC, I could not bring myself to finishing Katie M. Flynn’s story of a robot with the brain of a dead girl on a journey to self-actualization. I think I got about 15% of the way through before I realized … I don’t care. There is no centre to this book. Lilac is ostensibly the main character, but for the 15% I read, I never felt connected to her. If we’re supposed to feel sorry for the companions and how they’ve been treated, fine, sure, ok I guess. I can do that. But feel invested in Lilac’s particular journey? Not really. The cover copy of this book makes it sound like some intense dystopian fiction where Lilac knows she’s a real girl but everyone else thinks she’s just a mindless drone running on some repurposed wetware. In reality, this story is just very dull. The other characters are … ugh. The mother at the beginning is just a broad-strokes stereotype with very little going for her. Even Dahlia doesn’t seem to exist as much more than a foil for Lilac. Could not get into it. Really don’t want to put myself through, if some other reviews are accurate, what is actually a very twisty-turny plot. So, to the DNF shelf you go! ...more |
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| 3.96
| 4,853
| Feb 25, 2020
| Feb 25, 2020
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it was ok
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Yet again I feel like I steered myself wrong on NetGalley!! The Sound of Stars, courteously provided to me by Inkyard Press, didn’t win me over. What
Yet again I feel like I steered myself wrong on NetGalley!! The Sound of Stars, courteously provided to me by Inkyard Press, didn’t win me over. What should have been a tale of survival and starcrossed love set in the aftermath of an alien invasion of Earth proved to be a somewhat boring adventure across open country full of exposition and underwhelming action. It’s not all bad—Alechia Dow does her best to give us a dynamic, multi-dimensional protagonist in Ellie, and I’d say she succeeds at that. The Illori invade in the book equivalent of a Star Wars prologue scrawl, with the plot taking place after the Ilori have solidified their control. M0Rr1S is a “labmade” Ilori, which makes him a second-class citizen compared to the “true” Ilori, and he’s doing more than just questioning his loyalties to the Ilori empire. He teams up with Ellie, who is running an illegal library (the Ilori are not big on preserving human culture; they see humans more as … vessels). Together, the two of them head on a road trip across America so that Morris can sabotage the Ilori’s plans. Some good stuff: representation. Ellie is Black, fat, and possibly pan/demisexual (I say “possibly” because Ellie says her friend has suggested she’s demi, so that isn’t Ellie confirming the label). Also, in general, Dow includes multiple non-binary characters and makes it a thing that the Ilori introduce themselves with their gender. (Pronouns would be more … useful, maybe? Gender doesn’t always imply pronoun.) Dow also tries to tackle the subtlety of classist and racist discrimination when living in upscale areas of New York. So I’d say that The Sound of Stars is very self-aware and definitely tries to engage with issues of social justice, and for that alone I wish I had liked the book more. As far as the plot goes, though … it’s just dull. I don’t care that Morris is betraying the Ilori, because I barely care about why the Ilori are here at all. The interspersed interviews, etc., with The Starry-Eyed (Ellie’s favourite band) feel so out of place, despite the revelation at the end of the book. Characters get introduced in awkward ways, with a lot of exposition afterwards. And Ellie’s demi-ness aside, just the fact that she and Morris have to fall in love to make this a romantic plot doesn’t work for me. I found myself actively avoiding this book when I should have been finishing it. I only kept reading because I feel bad about DNFing NetGalley books. The Sound of Stars didn’t work for me. It might for you. But for me, it just left me wanting so much more. [image] ...more |
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Feb 18, 2020
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Feb 22, 2020
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Feb 18, 2020
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| 4.34
| 198
| Feb 11, 2020
| Feb 11, 2020
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Yeah, so I try really hard not to DNF books I receive for free from NetGalley, because it doesn’t feel very fair. But it also doesn’t feel fair to for
Yeah, so I try really hard not to DNF books I receive for free from NetGalley, because it doesn’t feel very fair. But it also doesn’t feel fair to force myself to finish a book, because that will almost always result in a review it doesn’t really deserve. It’s my fault for being so lukewarm about the sequel after reading
Off Planet
; I probably should have listened to my gut and not accepted the second book. I don’t think Off Balance is all that bad. I think this is definitely a cause of book and reader incompatibility—exacerbated by me already being in a reading slump and really wanting comfort food, which this is not for me. So I’m going to explain what annoys me about this book, but just know that I don’t consider any of these universal flaws for every reader. First, the soulmate-ish destined romance thing never works for me. I understand that Erin tries her best to distance Amihanna and Lorne’s … condition … from the classic idea of soulmates. Nevertheless, you’ve got two people who don’t know each other experiencing an irresistible attraction that causes them to want to marry each other. We’re not talking chemistry or “love at first sight” or whatever (even though those are blah). The whole amnesia thing is weird, and while I think it’s great Lorne at least acknowledges that, at the end of the day, Amihanna is all glowy-glowy, and I can’t. I just can’t. Second, more generally, just not vibing with the whole “Aunare energy frequency” stuff (yeah, I said vibing). Again, there’s no reason this shouldn’t be a thing. It’s just not working for me. Finally, the characters are just … ugh. Is one-and-a-half dimensional a thing when it comes to characterization? Because they aren’t exactly flat, but they’re close to it. I just have a hard time getting attached to these characters. I don’t really like any of them. I’m not excited to spend time with them or play in this world. So … where does that leave us? Off Balance is probably a good sequel to Off Planet, but I’ve decided I’m not going to stay long enough to find out. I’ve let down this book, and I’m ok with that. There are plenty more for me to read! ...more |
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| 4.31
| 80,420
| Aug 15, 2017
| Aug 15, 2017
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liked it
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Look at me, finishing a series within a year! Who even am I? The Stone Sky is the last book of The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. She give us an Look at me, finishing a series within a year! Who even am I? The Stone Sky is the last book of The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. She give us answers to some of the questions from the first two books, as well as closure—of sorts—for most of the main characters. I’m not sure I would call the ending satisfying, but it is certainly thoughtful. This is how I’ve come to regard Jemisin’s storytelling and how it interacts with my sensibilities as a reader: she doesn’t always deliver the type of story I want, but I can appreciate that she is delivering a top-quality story. Spoilers for the first two books but not this one. Picking up just a few days after the end of The Obelisk Gate , this book is narrated in the second person. Hoa the Stone Eater tells Essun her own story, beginning with her return to consciousness after successfully using the obelisks at the end of the last book. Essun’s ability to use magic as well as orogeny now means that any such actions will petrify a part of her body. Nevertheless she remains committed to using the Obelisk Gate to recapture the Moon. She also needs to find Nassun—and here Jemisin alternates perspectives, allowing us to follow Nassun’s parallel journey to take control of the Gate and execute a plan, far more destructive, suggested by a rival Stone Eater. Who will make it to the Gate first? And what’s with the interspersed chapters about the ancient city of Syl Anagist? I’d forgotten how young Nassun is! Only 11 years old! I’m trying to remember what I was like at 11—certainly not that capable. Of course, much of her apparent maturity has been forged in the painful crucible of necessity. Jemisin does a good job of displaying the trauma that weighs on Nassun’s young shoulders, the mistakes in judgment, etc. In a genre littered with youthful chosen ones, Nassun stands out. She has been chosen in the sense that others found her, groomed her, influenced her. Yet she is also broken; she is not serving out a destiny but rather stumbling towards something resembling the resolution of millennia of stagnation. Both Nassun and Essun’s stories are about family. In the most narrow sense, both protagonists are attempting to find or reform their family: Nassun, having literally killed her biological father, chooses Schaffa as a new father; Essun becomes closer to Lerna even as she searches for a hint of belonging in Castrima. And of course, Essun yearns for reunion with Nassun, even if the latter has no idea her mother is still out there. As the world enters another apocalyptic Season, as the survivors of Castrima march desperately through a desert towards the ruined city of their would-be conquerors, these characters strive for those simplest, most basic connections. In a broader sense, The Stone Sky questions who we consider family at a species level. Bigotry has been a bedrock of this series from the beginning. As Jemisin fills in some of the gaps about the origin story of orogenes, we understand that this isn’t merely about “roggas versus stills.” This is a rondo of discrimination: throughout thousands of years, humans repeat a pattern of discrimination caused by needing a narrative of difference to justify the subjugation of people who can be exploited. In this way, Jemisin tackles the white supremacy of our society from a high-concept, highly abstract perspective—the parallels are not exact; the correspondences are not one-to-one, but they are present in the themes and variations of these stories. As I mentioned at the beginning of my review, Jemisin is a writer whose words I have come to respect and admire even if I don’t always enjoy the stories they create. The Broken Earth series has impressed me. And I would say I enjoyed it on some level. The style, particularly the characterization and narration, don’t appeal to me. Yet these are decorations atop a much more compelling and careful story that does have something important to say. Moreover, Jemisin is doing good work elevating and energizing fantasy and science fiction with these stories. I love the diversity of voices and storytelling happening in these genres these days, and The Stone Sky is the end of a series that epitomizes that diversity. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
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Sep 28, 2020
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Sep 30, 2020
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Feb 10, 2020
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| B07QMJ9FSF
| 3.91
| 264
| Feb 11, 2020
| Feb 11, 2020
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it was ok
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Relativity can be awful sometimes. You get in your spaceship, leave a planet, and you come back a few months later only to find that years have passed
Relativity can be awful sometimes. You get in your spaceship, leave a planet, and you come back a few months later only to find that years have passed and your family is old or dead and all your plants died because YOU COULDN'T WATER THEM LIKE I ASKED, KEVIN? Anyway, most science fiction stories use a trope, like faster-than-light travel, to avoid dealing with relativity. Not so R.W.W. Greene. In The Light Years, the time dilation effect is embraced as a principle plot device. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley and Angry Robot in exchange for a review. Adem Sadiq needs a wife. Well, he doesn’t need one. But his mother, captain of the Hajj, wants him to get one who is knowledgeable in the physics of an extinct culture, the United Americas. So he contracts with a couple who will have a child, and then when the Hajj returns to that planet in 20 or so years relative, the child will be old enough to marry him. It’s very creepy, and if it were a straight-up romance I might have to throw my Kindle across the room. Fortunately and unfortunately, The Light Years is more of a time-dilated thriller with a hint of odd-couple comedy thrown in, and I guess that’s ok. My major issue with the book is that the main characters take so long to bake I felt like I’d aged 20 years. Adem has very few defining qualities for the first half of the book. We just kind of … exist alongside him. Eventually we learn he likes playing music and he has an overly-developed conscience. Yay for defining characteristics! Other than that, however, he’s just so bland. Hisako is a little better—we literally see her grow up from a baby to a young woman, so she kind of has to have character development—but the snapshot effect means we seldom see her grapple with issues on that micro level. And since, as I said before, the whole “I arranged for your creation” thing is extremely creepy, I’m glad the romance angle doesn’t actually land hard, because that would make things worse. Similarly, the principal antagonist is very one-note in his moral development. We get it: he’s a profit-driven bad guy who doesn’t respect human rights, whereas Adem and most of his family are upstanding, moral people. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this dynamic, but like Adem himself, it’s just a little bland. The tension created by the structure of the Hajj’s shareholders isn’t sufficient by itself to keep me interested. The Light Years is at its most interesting when Greene pulls back the curtain on the wider universe he’s designed and invites us to consider the side effects of relativistic inter-system travel. The cycle of political unrest on various planets and the social inequity is very fascinating. I dig the amount of thought Greene has put into this world, as well as the time taken to craft the story itself. However, the actual style in which the story gets told? Doesn’t work great for me. [image] ...more |
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Feb 02, 2020
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Feb 11, 2020
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Feb 02, 2020
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| 1683319443
| 9781683319443
| 3.75
| 8,134
| Aug 09, 2018
| Feb 12, 2019
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it was ok
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From women writing subversive TV now to women inventing time travel! The Pyschology of Time Travel is a quirky part mystery, part love story. As the t
From women writing subversive TV now to women inventing time travel! The Pyschology of Time Travel is a quirky part mystery, part love story. As the title suggests, Kate Mascarenhas focuses more so on what it would be like to be a time traveller rather than on the social, historical, or future repercussions of mucking about with a timeline. Along with bringing up the usual questions of free will versus determinism, etc., this book seeks to address such burning queries as: what would you call it if you had sex with your future or past self, and is that cheating? I’m being tongue-in-cheek—there is a lot of serious, weird stuff in this book. But my overall impression is that there were better stories that could be told here. There are two main characters: Ruby and Odette. Ruby is the granddaughter of Barbara, one of the four women who invented time travel in the 1960s. Barbara fell out with her fellow inventors after she had a breakdown on national television, so Ruby and her mother have always lived at a distance from the world of time travel. This changes in big ways, for a mysterious note from the future prompts Ruby to look into the Time Travel Conclave. Odette, on the other hand, thinks the Conclave holds the answer to what killed a dead woman she discovered in the basement of a museum. She joins up to look for those answers, but of course, the reality is much more wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey! Mascarenhas follows a block time, self-consistent approach to time travel: if you know the future, you are doomed to complete it, no paradoxes allowed. She delves a little into what this does to time travellers’ attitudes towards deaths of loved ones—how do you grieve someone who is accessible to you by travelling to the past? Similarly, how do you live a life when you know the outcome—your date of death, how you die, who your friends and partners are at that time? We humans are so accustomed to the linearity of our time, and to the arrow of time being such that we know our past absolutely yet our future in no true sense—what would time travel, really, do to us? (It seems strange to me that Ruby is a therapist, yet she spends little enough time ruminating on this herself.) I, for one, do not want to know how or when I die. I like that uncertainty. Time travel affects more than just romantic relationships. The relationships people have with Margaret Norton, the Conclave’s inaugural director, are an interesting example. Apparently she gets nastier as she gets older, and many characters remark that they prefer dealing with her younger selves. What would a job be like if you could talk to your boss across different time periods? Mascarenhas never actually takes us on a time travel adventure. She offers up interesting tidbits on how our society has evolved after a few centuries of time travel. Perhaps the most tantalizing is that it’s impossible to travel beyond 2267, as if the time travel machines just disappear after that. Oooh, what a cool mystery! But that’s never brought up again—and in a weird continuity error any editor should have caught, they keep mentioning how time travel justice is inspired by “twenty-fourth century British law,” even though the 2267 cap is in the twenty-third century. Oops. Speaking of errors, I’m not sure if this is a stylistic faux pas or a typesetting issue, but the dialogue habitually runs together—the speaker changing mid-paragraph. This kind of thing annoys the hell out of me, and honestly there were moments I wanted to put down this book simply because of that habit. So, in short, this book could have used another editing pass, I think. The main plots are all well and good, but in the end I guess I was just hoping for more after that set-up. I feel like there are more stories, better stories, more interesting stories happening here, yet we are on the periphery looking inwards with Ruby and Odette. Furthermore, while I give Mascarenhas due credit for attempting to use her time travel framework to tell the story in a non-linear yet comprehensive way, I wish she had taken more risks. I wonder if this is because this book attempts to be a more “literary” approach to time travel? In any case, The Pyschology of Time Travel has a great premise, but the story itself and the characters within fall flat for me. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
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Oct 24, 2020
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Oct 24, 2020
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Feb 01, 2020
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| 1250236967
| 9781250236968
| 4.45
| 3,103
| Jul 14, 2020
| Jul 14, 2020
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really liked it
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I didn’t realize until I started reading that The Relentless Moon, while technically a sequel to
The Fated Sky
, is more of a spin-off in the serie
I didn’t realize until I started reading that The Relentless Moon, while technically a sequel to
The Fated Sky
, is more of a spin-off in the series. Mary Robinette Kowal writes from the perspective of Nicole Wargin, a white woman who was a side character in the first two books. She is one of the original astronauts (or astronette, ugh) alongside Elma York, the Lady Astronaut and narrator of the first two books, who is on her way to Mars during the events of this book. Nicole is also the wife of Governor of Kansas Kenneth Wargin. So Kowal gives us a healthy mixture of political intrigue, semi-religious fundamentalist terrorism, and true physical danger. The Relentless Moon is the mystery I wish
Artemis
had been. Trigger warnings in this book (and review) for mentions of anorexia/eating disorders, anti-Black racism. Nicole Wargin is headed back to the moon, albeit not as a pilot like she has always craved. No, the IAC still doesn’t let women fly the rockets, eh? Nicole is entrusted with a secret mission: help the administrator of Artemis Base figure out who is working with the terrorist group Earth First to sabotage missions. Some of that very sabotage nearly finishes Nicole before she can begin, however, and after that point The Relentless Moon becomes a slow drumbeat march against the inexorable ticking clock. As blackouts become more frequent and the enemy seems to get bolder and bolder, outside events put Nicole under the most stress she has ever experienced. Yet it’s up to her and a small group of trusted colleagues to unravel this conspiracy before humanity’s presence is space is doomed forever! So, no pressure. For anyone worried that Nicole isn’t as formidable or enjoyable a narrator as Elma, let me just reassure you right away: Nicole’s great. She’s different, of course. She has the political experience that comes with her upbringing and her marriage, so she knows how to put on a face and schmooze in a way that Elma came to a lot later in her life. Nicole is very pragmatic in that way, even though we are privy to her true thoughts about the boorish or unproductive behaviour of some of the men around her. Perhaps what sets Nicole apart the most from Elma would be that Nicole likes being slightly out of control. She relishes the edge, and the moments that make her despair most are the ones where she shares with us her fear that she might not get to do that anymore—might not get to fly, might not get to go to space, etc. The Relentless Moon has two very relatable elements for me. The first one, almost everyone will relate to: quarantine in the face of an infectious virus! I don’t want to go into too much detail for fear of spoilers, but let’s just say that “polio on the moon” sounds incredibly scary. Kowal in her author’s note had the opportunity to comment on the parallels between polio epidemics in the mid–twentieth century and the COVID19 pandemic. Just be aware going into this book that if you want to escape from pandemic protocols, you might not get that chance here! The second relatable element is Nicole’s broken arm. Again, no spoilers. But I broke my arm in June 2019. Much like Nicole, I wondered how much mobility I would recover after physical therapy, whether or not I’d be able to do the tasks that I had up until then really taken for granted, such as typing, knitting, and riding my bicycle (which was how I broke it). Now, I didn’t have to worry on top of that about the brittleness of my bones from living in low gravity! Nevertheless, Nicole’s experience really rang true for me. (In case you’re wondering, I’m doing great! I have less mobility in my left wrist than in my right, but not to the point where it limits my daily activities. I now have a “weather elbow” as they say.) I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect regarding the plot. The first act of The Relentless Moon takes place Earthside and is very concerned with politics and the optics of the space program. I was tempted, at first, to dismiss this as boring. But that’s very shallow of me. One of the best parts of Kowal’s Lady Astronaut universe, or LAU as she calls it, is how she is shaping the alternative history of the 1960s. We see this unfolding with the U.S. capitol now relocated to Kansas City, and a very different political landscape from the one we’re familiar with from our 1960s. I am very intrigued to see how the situation on Earth, with its drastically accelerated climate change timetable, affects the development of technologies that we take for granted, particularly when it comes to electronics and computing. While one might argue that a lot of those inventions will still occur because of necessity from the space program, there is room for Kowal to delay certainly, and perhaps bypass entirely, certain developments, should she choose. After we get to the moon, the plot definitely kicks into a higher gear. I enjoyed every moment of Kowal throwing Nicole into a new and different problems to help solve—or, frustratingly, when Nicole realizes she can’t really help solve the problem and has to wait. I really like that Kowal isn’t afraid to sideline her protagonist—obviously when this is done at an inopportune time it’s annoying, but when done appropriately as Kowal does here, it helps keep the protagonist humble. That way, when they do pull off little miracles, the reader is more impressed than if they were a superhero the entire time. I can’t remember if Kowal hinted at or outright mentioned Nicole’s eating disorder in the earlier books, but it features heavily here. Kowal says she put a lot of effort into avoiding triggering portrayals; I, not having experienced eating disorders, can’t evaluate that. All I can say is that I appreciate that Kowal depicts Nicole’s eating disorder so complexly. It’s not something she “beats” and then she’s fine. It’s a monster that is always lurking in the background, something that she battled when she was younger and now it rears its head over and over throughout her life, especially in times of stress, which The Relentless Moon certainly qualifies for. As much as I love books that are about people struggling with mental health issues, we also need books that show protagonists who just happen to have mental health issues. I want to say Kowal is normalizing eating disorders, except, you know, this is a book about an alternative 1960s where people are colonizing the moon. Speaking of which: hats off to Kowal for tackling the thorny issues of colonialism and eugenics in space. Although the Earth Firsters are, broadly speaking, terrorists and their actions are reprehensible, Kowal carefully finds a way to make it clear that they have a point. In the rush of various countries to make space, the moon, and Mars a viable alternative for human habitation given Earth’s dire prognosis, there are serious questions about who will get to survive in this new future. Kowal doesn’t hesitate to address racism in space, particularly as it relates to the Black characters of Eugene and Myrtle Lindholm. Similarly, she mentions the problematic selection criteria for space travel—both the practical, physical requirements as well as the highly political ones. All in all, The Relentless Moon is just as good as the original LAU novels. I’m holding back on five stars only because I don’t want to give the impression that this is better than the original novels; I’d need to re-read those first. But I ran, not walked (ok, I drove my privileged ass) to the bookstore to buy this book the week it came out, and I have no regrets. If you want a book about women on the moon, solving mysteries with math and guile, The Relentless Moon is the book for you. [image] ...more |
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Jul 20, 2020
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Jul 25, 2020
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| 4.28
| 97,941
| Aug 16, 2016
| Aug 18, 2016
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really liked it
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In a very rare move for me, I picked up The Obelisk Gate on my visit to the library after reading
The Fifth Season
. N.K. Jemisin’s sequel picks up
In a very rare move for me, I picked up The Obelisk Gate on my visit to the library after reading
The Fifth Season
. N.K. Jemisin’s sequel picks up where it leaves off, with a little backtracking to fill in Nassun’s story. Short review? If you liked the first book, you’ll like this one. The mysteries of this world deepen, the characters grow and both gain and lose. Longer review? Well, keep reading. Spoilers for book one but not for this book. Essun, aka Syenite and Damaya, recently arrived at the concealed comm of Castrima. There she finds her former lover/protégé, Alabaster, who is slowly turning to stone as a side effect of harnessing orogeny in strange and unsanctioned ways. Alabaster is desperate to teach Essun enough for her to finish what he tried to start. Unfortunately, a combination of the dysfunction in their relationship and Essun’s other involvement in Castrima’s society makes progress difficult. Meanwhile, far to the south, Essun’s daughter Nassun has been recruited by the former Guardian Schaffa, who is not at all right in the head. The central question of The Obelisk Gate is this: whose side are you on? The problem, as Essun soon discovers, is that it’s really hard to see what the sides are, let alone what side you’re standing on. Mad props to Jemisin for not giving us easy answers. Some burning questions one might have after The Fifth Season include whether this is a future version of Earth. Certainly it’s possible. But does it matter? Absolutely not. It doesn’t matter if orogeny and its related phenomena are magic or sufficiently-advanced science or whatever. Jemisin sweeps aside this curiosity in favour of a far more pressing issue: power. As I opined in my review of the first book, power and who has it is the primary axis around which this story revolves. Essun’s power dwarfs that of the orogenes in Castrima, even the feral Ykka who has just barely held things together to this point. Her power is such that Alabaster thinks she is his only viable successor. Her power is such that a stone eater, Hoa, has chosen to protect and elevate her as his champion. Her power is such that, as Essun comes to realize over the course of this book, although she will always be a pawn in some ways, she can also make a lot of choices for herself. A similar, slightly more scoped version of this narrative happens with Essun’s daughter. While it seems like Schaffa has the power, as a Guardian (or something of that ilk), Nassun is special. She has inherited Essun’s innate talents (and perhaps, with enough experience, might even exceed her mother’s abilities). So, like Essun, other powers want to co-opt, coerce, or otherwise influence her. But Nassun (who is only 10!) has some ideas of her own. I find it very interesting, the way Jemisin uses this nested mother-daughter arc, with both women being manipulated while they simultaneously explore their abilities and redefine their goals. The Obelisk Gate cements this series as a type of fantasy that I only sometimes enjoy, but when I do, I love it. I’m talking about fantasy series that are largely character-driven and less concerned with the war between good and evil than they are with how much a single person can fuck it up. There is this backdrop of a grand war between the “evil” Earth and … others. But that’s not really the story here. The story here is about a small number of people struggling against literally epochal forces, and the realization that while it is impossible for a single human or group of humans to survive such forces, even the biggest rocks can be moved by the application of a smaller force at the right fulcrum. My reviews of The Broken Earth: ← The Fifth Season [image] ...more |
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Jan 26, 2020
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Jan 28, 2020
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Dec 08, 2019
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| B07VFVRS3K
| 4.26
| 1,237
| Oct 15, 2019
| Oct 15, 2019
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really liked it
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**spoiler alert** Time travel stories are tricky. The best ones give me a headache but not too much of a headache. I guess it’s the literary equivalen
**spoiler alert** Time travel stories are tricky. The best ones give me a headache but not too much of a headache. I guess it’s the literary equivalent of the adrenaline rush one gets from momentarily being upside down on a roller coaster (which is definitely not for me): I want my brain to hurt as I contemplate 4-, 11-, or 22-dimensional spacetime … but I don’t want to get so confused that I feel the author could basically just do anything. (This is why Doctor Who is often such a crapshoot depending on who is writing for it.) Fortunately, with The Quantum Garden, Derek Künsken returns with all of the magic from
The Quantum Magician
—and honestly, I think he outdoes himself this time! I received a copy of this for free from NetGalley and Solaris. Belisarius Arjona has succeeded in pulling off his biggest con yet. The results, however, are a little more dramatic than he might have wanted. He has precipitated a war between two large powers. He stole a pair of time gates. And as the book opens, he watches a warship from one of those powers exact retribution on him by destroying the home of his subspecies, Homo quantus. Now, if I were in his position, I would probably not deal with that loss very well. Belisarius has a … different idea. He has some wormholes that let him travel in time, so naturally … he just travels back in time two weeks and develops a gambit to save his people. It’s not quite that simple, of course, because it will also end up involving travelling forty years into the past, accidentally wiping out an entire species, shattering someone’s entire perception of themselves and their wife … need I go on? I’d forgotten how much humour these books have. I dove back into this universe and immediately started enjoying it, although to be honest, it wasn’t until Stills showed up that I truly started laughing out loud: “Yup. And I need a pilot.” I’d forgotten how Stills’ unapologetic vulgarity is an excellent chaser to the quantum mechanical technobabble from some of the other characters. The diversity of Künsken’s characterization remains top notch. Moreover, this particular exchange tickled me because it perfectly lampshades the absurd scope of some of Bel’s adventures without being too cutesy about it. It’s like how the main characters of Stargate SG-1 eventually start joking, around seasons 7 and 8, about how many times they’ve saved the planet: they’ve earned the ability to do that, both in the show and the show itself. The Quantum Garden is much the same. Some books will make a comment like this, and it will annoy me, because the book has done nothing to earn such grandiose comments. Künsken definitely has, with both the first book and now its sequel. Interestingly, as some of you may know, heists are my kryptonite as far as stories go … yet I actually preferred this book, which is less of a heist than the first one. It’s more straight-up espionage. But I think Künsken took everything that I liked about the first book and amplified it here, while having a tighter cast of characters and a less convoluted plot (and that is saying something, considering that we’re involving some knotty time travel here!). The time travel logic, while definitely timey-wimey, makes sense if you unpack it. I can see the thoughtfulness on display, the way Künsken was careful to set everything up to avoid paradoxes while still maintaining a sense of suspense. That’s not easy to do. Related to the time travel would be the Hortus quantus Bel encounters in the past, and their very unique mode of existence/propagation. Künsken demonstrates even more creativity than we encountered in the first book (which is saying something)—I love when authors push the boundaries of what we can conceive, when it comes to alien beings, and this species is quite something! It’s so easy for people to dismiss quantum mechanics as “weird,” simply because it is unintuitive owing to our three-dimensional bias. Yet if you push past that initial weirdness, you can explore and play with so many cool concepts and ideas. This is why I love reading posthuman SF like The Quantum Garden. Most of the main characters experience some good growth. In particular, I like how Cassandra has more opportunities to shine and come into her own. She has more responsibilities, and it galvanizes her into being a more decisive actor. She holds her own with Stills as they battle the Scarecrow, and it’s a sight to see! As far as the Scarecrow goes, this is a small area in which The Quantum Garden disappoints. We learn a lot more about his origins, which is fine, but as an antagonist goes he’s fairly unimpressive in this book. I’m hoping that changes in the next one. The story is exciting and entertaining all the way through: I literally only put this down to go to work after I started reading it on Tuesday morning, and I stayed up way too late trying to finish it that evening. It’s not for e everyone, but if this subgenre is what you enjoy, you are in for a treat. Künsken builds on what came before while setting up the tantalizing possibility of more stories, more adventures, more bright ideas. This is one of my top reads of 2019 for sure. My reviews of The Quantum Evolution: ← The Quantum Magician [image] ...more |
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1
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Oct 22, 2019
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Oct 24, 2019
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Oct 22, 2019
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Kindle Edition
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| B07Y8N638R
| 3.44
| 27
| Sep 22, 2019
| Sep 22, 2019
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it was ok
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Why does AI always end up being the bad guy? Because we love to explore evil in the form of the Other. Also, it usually turns out that the bad guy was
Why does AI always end up being the bad guy? Because we love to explore evil in the form of the Other. Also, it usually turns out that the bad guy was us, the creators of the AI, all along! Anastasia Slabucho’s Waterdown retreads these ideas but within the context of the climate change crisis we currently face. She posits that someone might have the right combination of drive, ingenuity, and wherewithal to create an AI that can take over running our society, if only we’d just listen. But would such a life really be living? That’s what this novel attempts to explore. Geo Spears created Fusion, the superintelligent AI that now runs the world. In this brave new world, humans are either Permanents or Temporals. Permanents, like Geo herself, have uninhibited memory and intelligence, yet they live socially isolated lives. Their purpose is to work every day on the administrative tasks Fusion assigns them, and in particular, they scrub history of all the nasty little records that might upset someone. Temporals, on the other hand, are the labourer caste. They can have the full range of human experience, but their cognitive landscapes are governed by a brain device that limits their long-term memory storage and mediates their perception of the world. When Geo discovers that she is dying, she wakes up to the problematic nature of Fusion’s dominance over humanity. She has to gain the trust of a group of rebels and help them take down Fusion before it’s too late. I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley. The Kindle version doesn’t let you override the font choices. This is merely irksome to me, but for people who have accessibility issues that require them to use certain fonts, I can imagine it would be upsetting and potentially prevent them from reading the book. As far as the story goes, Waterdown has its entertaining moments, yet it never quite comes together into the unified and coherent dystopian thriller it seems to want to be. Slabucho does her best to avoid needless exposition. I applaud this, in theory, yet in practice I was left wanting … more. We only get minimal hints of what society is like before and after the waterdown. The flashbacks remind me of low-budget sci-fi TV series from the early 2000s that would try to signal you’re in the future because everyone is wearing weird fashions and hairstyles—how has society actually changed by that point? Similarly, in the present, we get the barest of hints about the dichotomous lifestyles of the Temporals and Permanents, but it’s never explored very clearly. I also have a hard time enjoying Geo as the protagonist. I get that she’s supposed to be an unlikable character, at least at first. Her face turn seems so abrupt, though—one moment she’s cruising along, enjoying life as much as one can as a Permanent, and then the next moment she has a terminal diagnosis and she starts fomenting rebellion. OK, I’m exaggerating. Nevertheless, whatever shock to the system Geo receives, she seems really willing to turn on her creation. And the others trust her pretty quickly at that. Even the crisis with Scott dissolves into a non-issue without much in the way of confrontation. That’s probably the least satisfying part of the novel: the conflicts feel either forced or toothless. Take Hel’s bizarre dislike of Geo. It’s never explained nor justified; she is essentially a plot device to explain some loose ends and give Geo some of the final motivation she needs to take down Fusion. Scott receives time as a viewpoint character, yet he never really seems to have to make much in the way of decisions or contribute to the plot beyond, again, being there. Finally, Waterdown runs into the same issue that similar stories with AI antagonists often face: faceless AIs are boring. There’s a reason why the I, Robot movie with Will Smith involves a lot of explosions and why the Terminator movies relegate Skynet to a backseat role. Yes, intellectually, the idea of an AI suborning humanity is certainly scary. But in practice, an AI villain lacks the chutzpah of a good, scenery-chewing bad guy. The confrontations between Geo and Fusion are so underwhelming, even when Slabucho characterizes Fusion as “gloating.” Fusion isn’t evil; it’s just following its programming. It’s a storm more than a villain—yet we attempt to sandwich it into the villain role, instead of treating it like a natural disaster, and it just isn’t menacing enough, at least how it’s portrayed, to fit that role. I can’t fault Slabucho for the concepts within Waterdown. Those are definitely intriguing. And while AIs run amok have been done to death, this particular remixing of the concept is new. So it’s a really cool science fiction idea. But ideas alone do not make for great stories. The characters and the conflict have to surf the ideas along the ocean of story, and that doesn’t happen here. Lots of potential here, but it’s still very rough, still very much in need of polish and plot workshopping. And having done that, it would be possible to go even deeper into these interesting ideas, resulting in a novel that truly expands the mind as much as the waterdown diminishes it. [image] ...more |
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1
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Oct 18, 2019
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Oct 21, 2019
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Oct 18, 2019
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Kindle Edition
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| 9781946501141
| 3.81
| 70
| unknown
| Sep 24, 2019
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did not like it
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I received this book from Tiny Fox Press and NetGalley in exchange for a review. Apocalypse How? is a messy trainwreck, and if that’s your style, you’l I received this book from Tiny Fox Press and NetGalley in exchange for a review. Apocalypse How? is a messy trainwreck, and if that’s your style, you’ll probably enjoy it. For the rest of us … let’s just say that I kind of knew how I felt about this book less than 50 pages in, and maybe I should have stopped there. This is basically “Indiana Jones in space” but make Indiana a young woman named Dakota Adams and instead of being an erstwhile archaeology professor she’s a struggling archaeology streamer. Pile on a few more Hitchhiker’s, Doctor Who, and other cult references—I’m sure there’s plenty I missed—then add a frenetic, non-stop rush from one nonsensical set piece to the next, and you’ve got the formula for this book. Galen Surlak-Ramsey pays tribute to numerous cult classic and pop cultural properties of the past, and I’m sure it comes from a place of love. But the overall effect is a bit too cutesy, a bit too rompish, a bit too put on for my tastes. Allusion is a tricky literary beast. Like most seasonings, a little bit goes a long way. The protagonist’s name, or another name here or there, might have been fine by themselves. But the constant little references makes it seem like the book is showing off. I don’t feel like an insider being rewarded for getting the in-jokes; I feel like I’m being forced to sit through 300 pages of the author showing us how clever he is for working them into the story. It distracts and detracts from the author’s own original ideas—and let’s be clear here: Apocalypse How? does have a cool plot to it. Oh, right, yeah, sorry, you probably want one of my one-paragraph plot summaries! Here we go. Dakota Adams is Space Indiana Jones. She gallivants around the galaxy for the glory, the gold, and the 6 people who watch her livestream. She has a furry partner (in the Wookie sense, not the lifestyle sense) named Tolby, and he keeps the ship running so Dakota can keep running from whatever nasty alien creature is chasing her at the time. Dakota’s dream is to find tech from the elusive, perhaps mythical Progenitors, who are exactly what they sound like. When she finally does, the story really gets started, because now an interstellar mob boss is after her, except she suddenly acquires the ability to hop through space-time at the expense of her memories. Soon we’re in a non-linear race to escape a multidimensional spacetime museum that is going to be/will have been/has been destroyed (ugh, time travel tenses). As mentioned above, I have zero issues with the plot itself. I don’t mind authors leaning on the idea of nigh-omnipotent extinct advanced species who scatter their tech around the universe like candy. The idea that Dakota is on the run from a criminal with enterprise-level resources, and that she’s then in a race against time (literally) to escape before this museum gets destroyed? Makes total sense. I’m in. Let’s do it. Alas, Surlak-Ramsey’s writing style just leaves me so unsatisfied. First, we almost never get a break. I really like the “scene and sequel” approach to storytelling, but what we get with Apocalypse How? is mostly scene and precious little sequel. The sequels we do find tend to be repetitive and circular (Dakota’s fragmentary memory and time travelling doesn’t help this). Instead, Dakota is typically barrelling from one crisis directly into the next. (I’d comment that this sounds like an Indiana Jones movie, but actually I’ve never watched one. I know, fie!) The consequence is my second complaint: there is so little character development here it’s like trying to watch paint dry if paint could jump through time. Dakota starts the book as an overconfident, smartass adventure-seeker. She ends the book the same way. Once in a while there are moments where it looks like she’s reflecting and maybe growing and learning some humility. But nope. It bothers me when books’ protagonists start out as badasses without having demonstrated why they’ve earned it. Dakota keeps screwing up, time and again, and it’s really only the time travel power she has that lets her get out of numerous bad decisions. Ironically it might be Tolby, her sidekick, who experiences the most character development of anyone. The rest of the characters, from Pizmo to the Curator to Mister Cyber Squid, are literally one-dimensional stock and archetypes. Nothing wrong with those, of course. But if all your characters are paper-thin, the light source at the top of the literary skybox shines through way too easily, and suddenly it’s all just shadows on the cave wall, you dig? We briefly interact with Dakota’s brother, and she mentions her parents a couple of times, yet we never actually learn where they’re at or what her relationship with them is really like. In other words, Apocalypse How? is a novel of brilliantly squandered opportunities. I think this is pretty common when authors try to be humorous at the expense of digging deeper. Douglas Adams, from whom Surlak-Ramsey borrows a surname and a lot of references, understood deeply that the absurd is a tool for holding back the despair that we get when we stare into the abyss, the emptiness on the edge of human consciousness. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series begins with the destruction of the Earth, and each book becomes progressively darker, despite its patina of humour, because Adams is ultimately writing about the cold, capricious nature of life. Every time Arthur Dent tries to do something proactive, the universe smacks him down; the most well-adjusted characters, like Zaphod or the character who might be God, are the ones who go with the flow and accept that life is inherently nonsensical. Moving further afield, consider another favourite TV show of mine, Farscape. This is a show about a human stranded far, far from home without much hope of ever returning there, and he falls in with a group of fugitives. The show is unforgivably funny yet also incredibly sad and bittersweet as well—again, because the writers understand that the humour goes hand-in-hand with the darkness that it must stave off. Despite its title and the intense, life-threatening situation in which Dakota finds herself, Apocalypse How? never stops mugging for the reader long enough to establish that essential contrast to make the humour work for me. There is a competent adventure story here, but I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy it as much as I wanted. Your mileage might vary, but if you’ve been reading my reviews long enough to get a sense of my humour and what works/doesn’t work for me, you can judge whether you’ll be in my camp or not. [image] ...more |
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none
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1
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Oct 10, 2019
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Oct 13, 2019
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Oct 10, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0399587640
| 9780399587641
| 4.12
| 469
| Jan 21, 2020
| Jan 21, 2020
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it was ok
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Turns out I remembered almost nothing of
Stars Uncharted
, the first book in this series (duology?). As I began Stars Beyond, very little of the ov
Turns out I remembered almost nothing of
Stars Uncharted
, the first book in this series (duology?). As I began Stars Beyond, very little of the overall story came back to me. I contemplated re-reading Stars Unchartd, but by that point I was 50 pages in and felt committed. Fortunately, as I forged onwards, the plot of this volume cohered into something pretty easy to follow. Or should I say … plots? Because, upon re-reading my review of the first book, it turns out my criticisms apply largely to this sequel: too many characters competing for too many goals. Stars Beyond picks up where the first book left off. Captain Roystan and his small but plucky crew are very close to unlocking the location of a treasure trove of transurides, rare elements much coveted across the galaxy. But they have enemies on their trail: corrupt agents of the Justice Department, a company executive who is unhappy his pet assassin botched the job, and people who want to talk to Nika Rik Terri, the hotshot body modder who has found herself pat of Roystan’s crew. From pretty much page one, everyone is up to something, in trouble, and moving. I will say this for S.K. Dunstall: they know how to keep the book going at a nice pace! Epic action sequences aside, time and again I came back to this problem: Stars Uncharted has no clear protagonist. Everyone wants something a little different, and while some people could be natural allies, the book flits between various groups such that I can’t tell exactly whom I should care about most. Alistair and Cam? Nika and Snow? Josune or Roystan? (Certainly not Wickmore, of course!) This is not Game of Thrones where we aren’t supposed to be cheering for any character, really. But is it possible for me to root for them all? Which brings me to my second issue: the ending feels very contrived. I’m not going to spoil it. I just want to say that everything comes together in such a nice, fitted way. Each of the candidates for protagonists mentioned above gets, if not exactly what they want, some kind of satisfaction. This is … boring. Dunstall throw numerous obstacles in the way of the main characters throughout the book—oh, we took Roystan out of the machine too early; oh, we don’t have the right genemod machine; oh, I can’t track down Nika Rik Teri—and so on. Yet these obstacles are small potatoes compared to the larger plot, which decides to resolve itself without much strenuous participation from any of the potential protagonists, it seems. At least with the first book, I had my criticisms but I could genuinely say I liked it. This book bored me more than I want to admit, given how much I know I enjoyed Dunstall’s first science fiction series. I wish I could praise this series equally as much. But the confoundingly boring cast of characters combined with the lack of support for the supposed high stakes of the plot just leaves me shaking my head. Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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Oct 27, 2020
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Oct 29, 2020
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Sep 22, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0575090634
| 9780575090637
| 3.78
| 3,123
| Jan 10, 2019
| Jan 10, 2019
|
liked it
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I love fierce sister duos. You know, the kind where the two sisters have complementary skills and get on each other’s nerves yet always have the other
I love fierce sister duos. You know, the kind where the two sisters have complementary skills and get on each other’s nerves yet always have the other’s back? That kind. Yeah, Shadow Captain isn’t quite that kind of story. Adrana and (Ara)fura Ness have managed to dispatch the fearsome space pirate Bosa Sennen, taking her ship in the process. These young women are way out of their league, however, and now that they are in charge of the Revenger, as they’re calling their prize, everyone else is going to think they’re the pirates. Adrana, our narrator this time around, is still trying to recover from her torture at Bosa’s hands. Meanwhile, she is worried about what Fura had to do to rescue her, and the long-term effect that’s going to have on Fura’s mental health. The sisters try to put up a united front for everyone else, but as far as they’re concerned, they’re on shaky ground. Although a part of me yearns for that good ol’ sister duo ferocity, I will admit to enjoying the conflict Alastair Reynolds creates through the Ness sisters. With each of them on edge, for slightly different reasons, nothing ever quite feels right in this book. Moments of possible redemption turn on a dime into disappointment and bitterness—not through deliberate, over-the-top betrayal, per se, but more through the slow attrition of mistrust. This is a book about how small cracks in relationships and grow into wedges and fractures that threaten to shatter at the slightest pressure. Expanding this to the wider cast: no one here is really a friend. Some are friendly, like Prozor. Others are cagey, like Strambli. Whatever the case, the book reminds me of the crews of Serenity in Firefly or Moya in Farscape: joined together more out of common cause, or having no place else to go, than any real like of each other. Reynolds reminds us that this can work just as well when it comes to having characters work together towards a common goal. Shadow Captain feels slow to me, because the majority of the book is spent approaching and then tiptoeing around Strizzardly Wheel. I kept waiting for the “plot” to happen, by which I mean further developments in the sisters’ involvement with the overarching conspiracies afoot—the quoins, the mysteries of the Occupations, the aliens, etc. I never expected those matters to truly take over the foreground, but I kept waiting for more to happen than “we need to visit this station and oh look we’re running afoul of the criminal overlord of the week oh no.” I felt like most of this novel turned into one big sidequest in a space version of Bioshock. I continue to dig that overarching story. I’m really intrigued to see where Reynolds goes with all this (I have some ideas, but of course there’s still so much left up in the air right now). That’s his hope, of course: tease the reader with just enough to keep them reading into the next book, even if the rest of the story wasn’t as satisfying. I just hope that the next book presents a more dynamic plot, in which the Ness sisters have a little more agency than “get into trouble at Strizzardly.” I guess I come for the mystery and stay for the sister relationship. There are points in the book, when Adrana asks Paladin to keep something between them, when Adrana makes decisions or uncovers certain facts that Fura might have been obscuring … points when I was reading this, sipping a cup of tea, in my nice, hot bath, and it felt like Reynolds was really capturing the importance of that family dynamic. As sardonically critical as I am of the story here, this protagonist duo is probably one of the best I’ve seen in a while, purely on the ground of the depth of feeling beneath the tension in their relationship. It’s not something that can or even should be resolved easily, and I’m really happy that Shadow Captain goes in the direction of widening the gulf instead of closing it easily. My overall impression of this series may hinge on the next book (if it is indeed the concluding volume) and where it takes us…. My reviews of the Revenger series: ← Revenger [image] ...more |
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none
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1
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Sep 07, 2019
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Sep 09, 2019
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Sep 09, 2019
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0765342286
| 9780765342287
| 3.91
| 13,342
| Aug 1992
| Feb 18, 2002
|
it was ok
|
I’ve had Jumper on my computer for a while now and never got around to reading it, not sure why. Sometimes with books like that, I feel extra trepidat
I’ve had Jumper on my computer for a while now and never got around to reading it, not sure why. Sometimes with books like that, I feel extra trepidation going into it. Why haven’t I read it yet? Is it because I can sense it’s bad? What if I don’t like this book?? I’m on vacation; I want my reading to be good!! Fortunately, although by no means a home run—by dint of Gould’s somewhat blah narration—Jumper managed to captivate me and keep me reading right until the end, and I’m almost tempted to pick up the sequel now. Trigger warnings in this book for scenes of child abuse and domestic violence, child sexual abuse, terrorist attacks (particularly hijackings), alcoholism, and discussions about parental abandonment/neglect. David Rice first discovers he can teleport while being beaten, again, by his alcoholic and abusive father. David quickly becomes more adept at jumping, as he calls it, and runs away from home, ending up in New York City at seventeen with no diploma, no ID, and no money. So he robs a bank! Set up with riches, David quickly discovers life isn’t that simple. He falls in love, but being an autodidact with a lot of money isn’t enough. It doesn’t fill the hole left in his heart, the one asking him to search for his mother, who left him and his dad when he was younger. And then, of course, government agents get involved…. I do have to give Gould credit: teleportation is a fun superpower to have, but it would be so easy to screw it up as a plot device. Instead, Gould gets creative and fairly practical with the ways in which David exploits his ability. There are sensible limitations on it, but Gould also considers how the ability would shape David’s understanding of how he should navigate the world. For example, at one point David starts constructing a little hideaway house in a remote part of the Texas desert. For a long time, he doesn’t bother building a bathroom (and thus figuring out all the attendant plumbing requirements); when he needs to go, he just jumps somewhere else with a bathroom. It makes sense. Similarly, Gould writes combat/fighting that David engages in with an eye for how teleportation would help (or hinder) the experience. I also really liked how Gould doesn’t shy away from David’s mental health considering his abuse and abandonment issues. More than once, Millie suggests that David should see a therapist—this is a good idea. And it’s clear from their interactions, as well as a lot of David’s other dialogue, that he is aware of his issues. He wonders if he has an inclination towards alcoholism like his father. He realizes when he isn’t “being rational” about something. Although running away and living independent forces him to grow up and act more adult than his years might credit, deep down he is, in many ways, a scared kid. My major critique, though, is about David’s narrative voice. It’s just so flat. I spent the first half of the book wondering if Gould was intentionally trying to make David come off as psychopathic, because it almost felt like he was faking his feelings. He’s so cold and logical, the way he describes all his decisions. Eventually he exhibits a lot more emotion—but even that’s portrayed in a flat way that makes it feel hyperbolic or somewhat disturbed. And it took me a while to decide whether that was intentional or not. I’ve landed on the side of it being fairly unintentional, of it being Gould’s style and skill (or lack thereof) in establishing a narrative voice. It’s a shame, of course, because the entirety of the novel gets filtered through David’s head, and so I can understand why someone might toss this book just because of this issue. I also don’t know why David and Millie are together beyond reasons of plot. What, exactly, do they have in common? David tells us he loves her and is basically obsessed with her (Millie is much better at boundaries). But after that initial meet-cute at the musical, we don’t actually observe them sharing many common interests. Millie is a university student and David is a somewhat younger high school dropout who, yes, has educated himself fairly decently, but still … what exactly does his do with his free time, other than read and practise his jumping? Gould is great at describing how David overcomes the practical challenges of living on his own and how jumping factors into this. He is not so good at describing David’s emotional journey, despite this being such a core motif in the book. Gould aims for a powerful theme—something along the lines of how having more power doesn’t necessarily let us get what we want, because sometimes the things we really want, like the return of a loved one, are unattainable no matter how much power you have. Yet the execution feels bumpy and inconsistent. Jumper is a book where the concept is so fascinating you almost wish you could distill that and only that, but no, you have to wrap it up in a plot and characters so you can have a story. And the story itself is only so-so, hampered by a writing style that just does very little for me. Lest that sound too harsh, consider that I still enjoyed reading this over two days while on vacation in Montreal, when I could very easily have abandoned it to something else on my Kindle. So there’s that. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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Aug 18, 2019
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Aug 19, 2019
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Aug 19, 2019
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1590623827
| 9781590623824
| 4.15
| 4,034
| Aug 1989
| 2009
|
liked it
|
Labyrinth is a short Miles Vorkosigan adventure that starts as a simple covert pick-up and ends with a new recruit for Miles’ Dendarii mercenaries, no
Labyrinth is a short Miles Vorkosigan adventure that starts as a simple covert pick-up and ends with a new recruit for Miles’ Dendarii mercenaries, not to mention some romance for one of the side characters. There’s a lot to like about this novella: it’s paced quite well for its length, and although very science-fictional, it’s definitely more special-ops thriller than anything else. Labyrinth shows why Miles is the hero of this series. He’s capable of seeing the potential in others, and of questioning his prejudices and pre-conceptions, in a way that some others aren’t—particularly those more traditional nobles on Barrayar. When Miles meets Taura, he’s taken aback by the revelation that there is more intelligence to her than meets the eye. He was set up to expect a ravening beast of a soldier and instead meets a sensitive young woman. It’s these kinds of twists that make Bujold a force to be reckoned with in this genre. She uses science fiction so effectively to help us explore the liminal spaces of humanity, whether it’s one’s genital configuration and gender identity; one’s limbs, bone structure, etc.; or one’s overall genetic profile and destiny as a short-lived soldier science experiment. There’s very little, beyond the obvious technology, to this story that would be out of place in a contemporary thriller. The plot is simple and straightforward despite the twists and turns that Bujold loves to serve up. Pick-up and leave turns into smash-and-grab turns into ransom-and-escape, and it’s fun watching plans fall apart, backup plans fall apart, etc. Miles is one of those protagonists always poised on the brink of being a Mary Sue, given how everything seems to go his way, but there’s always those little setbacks—usually as a result of his own hubris—that keep the game interesting. That is, we know Miles will emerge victorious eventually, but he’s probably going to be in mortal peril quite a few times before it’s all over. Another fun, brief journey back into the Vorkosigan universe. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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Aug 19, 2019
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Aug 19, 2019
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Aug 19, 2019
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ebook
| ||||||||||||||
| 0553293362
| 9780553293364
| 4.25
| 149,106
| 1953
| Jun 2004
|
liked it
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Okay, so instead of five years passing between re-read books, I’ve only let a year elapse. That’s not too bad on the Ben Scale of Book Series Completi
Okay, so instead of five years passing between re-read books, I’ve only let a year elapse. That’s not too bad on the Ben Scale of Book Series Completion! My reception of Second Foundation is much more positive than my review of Foundation and Empire, in which I skewered Isaac Asimov’s writing style. Honestly, I found this book to be far more readable and even enjoyable at points! As with the previous book, this one is essentially two novellas. The first takes place five years after “The Mule” from Foundation and Empire. The Mule has consolidated his hold on the volume of space he wrested from the Foundation’s control, but he has delayed any further expansion. Instead he’s searching for the mysterious, shadowy Second Foundation. When the story starts, he is about to dispatch his two Top Men™ on one more expedition to locate the Second Foundation, who the Mule believes to be mentally manipulating his own manipulated men (try saying that 5 times fast) but weak in physical defences. What follows is a bit of a romp in which Asimov is extremely parsimonious with characters. Seriously, you could be forgiven for thinking he has some kind of novelist character budget going on here, because it’s almost as if Pritcher and Channis are alone on that big ol’ ship of theirs. The novel is basically a three-hander play acted out between Pritcher, Channis, and the Mule, with a few supporting characters in the form of subordinates and the Speaker characters from the Second Foundation (which, shockingly, does exist). Both novellas share in common the theme that the Second Foundation survives through subterfuge regarding its location. They don’t just exist in a secret location; they actively obfuscate and misdirect anyone searching for them. Asimov quite enjoys playing around with what “at the other end of the galaxy” could mean in various literal and metaphorical senses. But there is a bigger issue here, one which is addressed more explicitly and satisfactorily in the second novella. Basically, the Second Foundation’s leaders have clued into the fact that as long as people are aware of a Second Foundation, Seldon’s grand Plan is in serious jeopardy, Mule or no Mule. The Second Foundation is both bogeyman and guardian angel: “oh, no worries, the Second Foundation will step in and save us!” This faith distorts the actions of people on a grand enough scale to make the Plan’s probabilities and calculations useless. So the events of Second Foundation are part of an attempt by the eponymous organization to remove itself from the equation, so to speak. Of course, this all feeds into the overall series theme in which Asimov questions whether or not we could ever really control the fate of our species to such an extensive degree. I think it’s interesting that science fiction has examined this from so many angles. Foundation imagines a true beneficent conspiracy to manipulate humanity on the species level. Others take a more anarchic approach, imagining it virtually impossible that humanity won’t fragment off into clades and groups and sub-species. It seems like this latter perspective has gained in popularity since Asimov was writing in the middle of the twentieth century. Certainly, the future our species—regardless of whether it involves a galaxy-spanning stagnant empire—seems far less clear-cut than Foundation proposes. The best way to appreciate these books, I think, is to bring some New Historicism into the mix and look at the context in which they were written. The first couple of books make a big deal of atomic weapons, which were so new on the scene at the time Asimov was writing. Now we turn to an emphasis on the human mind, then (and only slightly less so now) a great mystery. Asimov really tries to capture the wonder involved in being able to record brain waves and use them to get a glimpse literally into how people might be thinking. In this respect, Second Foundation is definitely a great work of science fiction for the sheer level of imagination and questioning it introduces. Characters? Plot? Story? Eh. As with my previous reviews, these rereads are definitely not endearing me any more to Asimov as a writer. Though he includes a precocious 14-year-old girl as a protagonist this time out. So … yay? Anyway, Second Foundation allayed the minor dread I felt when I went into it, having re-read my review of Foundation and Empire. It’s a good pair of novellas and was a delightful way to spend an afternoon on my deck. My reviews of the Foundation series: ← Foundation and Empire | Foundation's Edge → [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
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Aug 11, 2019
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Aug 12, 2019
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Aug 12, 2019
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0380978938
| 9780380978939
| 4.03
| 26,721
| 2003
| Jul 22, 2003
|
liked it
|
Longtime readers of my reviews will recall I have a tumultuous relationship with Dan Simmons’ books. I didn’t like
The Terror
or
Drood
, but I
Longtime readers of my reviews will recall I have a tumultuous relationship with Dan Simmons’ books. I didn’t like
The Terror
or
Drood
, but I warmed up to Simmons through his epic Hyperion Cantos. In my review for the final book of that cycle,
The Rise of Endymion
, I commented, “Even if you don’t like the series, it is hard to dispute the scope and style of it.” Simmons lives up to this judgment with Ilium, which does for the Iliad what Hyperion did for Keats and Romantic poetry (although I’d argue it goes further than that). I doubt I’ll ever refer to Simmons as one of my favourite authors, or even as one of my favourite SF authors. Yet I have no doubt he is actually a great SF author, one of the greats of our age, even if he isn’t one of my favourites. Let’s dive into Ilium and see why. Summarizing Ilium is not an easy task, but I’ll do my best. It’s a couple of thousand years into the future. Humanity experienced a posthumanist singularity, including an event vaguely alluded to as “the rubicon,” and mastered nanotechnology and quantum tunnelling/quantum teleportation. Now, beings claiming to be the Greek gods inhabit a terraformed Mars and have recreated the Iliad in the flesh. They’ve also recreated Thomas Hockenberry, a twenty-first–century scholar of the Iliad, essentially to provide commentary on them? But Hockenberry gets pushed into a situation where he has to go off-book, and things soon prove … revolutionary. Meanwhile, some moravecs (self-evolving AI robots descended from robots sent out by humans) from the moons of Jupiter have arrived on Mars to investigate all this untoward quantum activity. Meanwhile meanwhile, on Earth, some slightly-not-baseline humans are living a peaceful yet empty existence devoid of culture or true learning/introspection, until of course, someone jolts them out of it. The result? By the end of the book, all hell has broken loose of course! Look, the actual plot of this book is unimportant. Seriously, the plot is one of the least interesting parts of the book, and I’m going to mostly ignore it. I want to talk about what Simmons is doing with regards to the intersection of classical literature and science fiction and why it’s so goddamned brilliant, and then I will slam him for some dirty male gazey bits. Read on! For the record, I did read the Iliad (Fagles), but didn’t review it because it was … a difficult book. It’s really not a great book for reading silently to oneself in translation. It is meant to be declaimed, in ancient Greek, but that is not a skill I have. Although debates over its historicity and the extent to which it is an oral tradition abound, one thing is clear: the Iliad is, like so many epic poems from antiquity, a complex work that has been altered by each of the cultures who have translated it, studied it, and reinterpreted it through their own biased lenses. Also note that you don’t need to have read the Iliad to follow Ilium. Ilium is, fundamentally, a story about literacy. Every relationship, every plot development, every conflict, is a facet of Simmons examining the meaning of literacy in various human societies, the role of literacy and storytelling, and the ways in which our technology might influence those two things. I have often criticized the posthumanist stories I’ve read of late because of the tendency for the technology to be so advanced it’s basically magic. Simmons lampshades this and employs posthumanist SF to good effect by just leaning into the whole magic angle. Yes, at face value, the idea of recreating the Iliad in “real life” is absurd and impossible—but if you arrange the tech tree of our evolution just so, it becomes just incredibly improbable (and as the book explores, probability is a key underlying element of the story—not that that’s important, as I said). The Greek gods of this story are incredibly powerful, yes—but they are also illiterate. In a society where technology has progressed to the point that you can alter your form at will, communicate information through nanotechnology … what good is writing anymore? Savi makes a remark at one point about the pre-literate meeting the post-literate when Odysseus meets Harman and Daeman, and it’s a very telling statement. Odysseus and the other Greeks represent humanity prior to the dominance of the written word. Simmons presents them as emphasizing action and embodiment over contemplation. Contrast this with Mahnmut and Orphu, whose human-like intellectual existences within their very non-humanoid bodies revolve around contemplation of Shakespeare and Proust, respectively. There is an irony that the only literate beings in this story are an anachronistic professor and robots from Jupiter’s moons! However, the moravecs have more in common with Harman et al than you might think—both have a dearth of lived experiences when it comes to the struggles of the human condition that we consider de rigeur. The moravecs, by dint of their access to the sum total of human literature, are more aware of the human condition. But as Mahnmut discovers throughout this story, he has led a very sheltered life and has not paid attention to much beyond his myopic niche interests. Everything in Ilium is wrapped in literary texts—not subtext but actually part of the text. The antagonists, from the Greek gods to Prospero and Caliban and the mysterious Setebos, are all allusions to famous literary characters. Beyond that though, the textual references—the passages of Shakespeare dissected, the interrogation of characters like Falstaff—create the impression of a conversation between these authors and the characters of Ilium. Even Hockenberry marvels at his own role as a kind of ersatz intervener in a drama that was conceived by Homer and is now being re-staged by the enigmatic Zeus: he goes from observer to participant, driving events further away from the text of the Iliad. This makes him uncomfortable not just for the personal risk he accrues as a result but for the fact that it shifts his understanding of the people around him from characters in a farcical recreation of a tragedy to living, breathing humans whose autonomy and agency he must respect rather than ignore or co-opt. This is reinforced numerous times when he underestimates the guile or commitment of the Greeks and Trojans, particularly Helen. As Mahnmut and Orphu debate the meanings of life explored by their literary crushes and Savi opens the eyes of her new friends to the ideas they never knew they were missing, Simmons invites us all to consider the different options with regards to literacy. Those of you who are able to read this, like me, take our literacy for granted to an extent—I don’t mean to imply that none of you struggled for this. Some of you might have had to struggle to learn to read, or struggled to get access to education in the first place. But we take it for granted that our species, our societies, are literate. Literacy is a technology, not a biological certainty. As Simmons demonstrates here, literacy is one way to add depth to a culture—but it is not the only way, and it introduces its own complications and dead-ends as well. Whether or not our own technology takes us as far as the posthumans of Ilium get, it behoves us to consider how that technology alters our relationship with literacy. It’s already happening right now. As a teacher, I often ponder how my students (some of whom, because I teach adults in high school, are older than me) look at reading and writing differently because they have cell phones and the Internet. As a millennial, I grew up online. I am, in some ways, more comfortable reading and writing than I am speaking. My younger students, while even more attached to their devices than I am, are not necessarily more literate as a result—because the way we negotiate the digital spaces we’ve created has changed. While that sounds curmudgeonly, it’s more observation than complaint or criticism. It can’t really be either of those until we have a deeper, wider conversation about what’s happening—we need to stop saying “kids can’t read” or “kids don’t read” and instead check our assumptions about why we expect kids to read the same way we read. After all, we didn’t always read the way we do now. Of course, the complex conversation happening within Ilium would be improved if it didn’t centre 2 dead white guys and a dead Greek poet to whom we attribute the Iliad. Simmons’ emphasis on the Western tradition of literature is an unfortunate limitation that ignores the rich history of both literate and oral traditions in countless other cultures around the world. On top of that, I wish I could praise this book wholeheartedly, but I almost put it down only a couple of pages in, when Simmons has Daeman meditate all about the hot nude body of the woman he’s trying to seduce. Ew. And then there’s Hockenberry. It should have been redemptive, this flabby middle-aged white guy from our time running around the Age of Heroes and basically being unremarkable … but as much as I admire Simmons for undermining Hockenberry’s brief hero moments via the machinations of Helen, Andromache, and to a lesser extent Hector and Achilles … I can’t get behind Hockenberry’s utter male gaze and objectification of the goddesses and women he meets. The whole scene where he just goes and poses as Paris so he can have sex with Helen? Hello rapey and gratuitous and ew. So … yeah. Ilium as a work of literature has vast chasms of thought-provoking ideas as deep as Olympus Mons is tall. I was enchanted by the way Simmons teases out the various contradictions around literacy. Simmons is a huge literary nerd and a talented SF author, and I love that combination. But I can’t praise that this book without calling out the intensely uncomfortable male gazey moments that are, unfortunately, all-too-common in books written by otherwise intelligent white guys. Seriously, do better. Is this book for you? I don’t know! It’s big and convoluted and sprawling but oddly satisfying if you decide you want to put up with the lengthy digressions, the problematic stuff I noted, and the frustrating tendency to digress at length (as mentioned) but never actually reveal the really interesting stuff (what are the voynix? Who is Setebos?). I guess that’s what sequels are for. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
|
Dec 09, 2019
|
Dec 11, 2019
|
Aug 11, 2019
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0316491349
| 9780316491341
| 4.30
| 10,615
| Nov 27, 2018
| Nov 27, 2018
|
really liked it
|
It seems like every time I review a short story anthology I always start with a disclaimer about how short stories, and by extension, their anthologie
It seems like every time I review a short story anthology I always start with a disclaimer about how short stories, and by extension, their anthologies, are not really “for me.” In this case I need to say it because How Long ’Til Black Future Month? is one of those rare exceptions where I … I actually liked pretty much every story in here. Not equally, of course. But there were only one or two stories that left me scratching me head and shrugging and saying, “Eh, I didn’t get the one.” The rest were … wow. I’m doubly surprised, because my foray into N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was less successful. It put me off reading her much-acclaimed Broken Earth books for a long time (I’m still on the fence). To be clear, it’s not a question of her writing skill but just my particular tastes. What this short story collection does that her novel did not do for me is throw so many amazing ideas in my face. Some short story anthologies have the obvious superstars along with one or two duds and then a handful of mediocre material that’s all right but not really anything special. That’s not the case here. Every short story in this collection is a revelation of storytelling. The one thing in the back of my mind reading this was, “Damn, this is like Ursula K. Le Guin–level good.” Jemisin deserves a long and celebrated career in speculative fiction and grandmaster status, because she has got it. It’s really difficult to single out any stories for praise. Firstly, because there are a lot of them—you get your money’s worth for this collection, or in my case, my library certainly did. Secondly, because they do blur together, in the best way. Emergent AI consciousnesses downloading into meatspace from a futuristic descendant of the Internet. Singing to cities as they become sentient. Cooks challenged to create impossible meals. Dragons adapting to a new life. Epistolary evidence of a parasitical threat to humankind from contact with another alien species. The personification of Death wandering a post-apocalyptic Earth. The list goes on. Jemisin’s imagination crystallizes here with breathtaking results. And yes, the stories are full of Black and brown characters and queer characters but regardless of the representation they are also just so good I didn’t want this collection to end and I also kind of did because it was hurting me that they were so good. The last story, “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters,” shouldn’t have worked for me. I didn’t like it at first. But the oddball friendship between Tookie and the lizard just … it’s just good, okay? This whole book is good. How Long ’Til Black Future Month? has reignited hope that maybe I’ll enjoy some of Jemisin’s other novels. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll only ever enjoy her short stories, ironically, since we share in common a hesitation to embrace the form. That’s okay too. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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none
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1
|
Jul 17, 2019
|
Jul 21, 2019
|
Jul 17, 2019
|
Hardcover
|
|
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|
|
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|
my rating |
|
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 4.00
|
liked it
|
Dec 22, 2020
|
Dec 21, 2020
| |||||
|
| 4.13
|
it was ok
|
Nov 28, 2020
|
Nov 24, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.88
|
it was ok
|
Nov 04, 2020
|
Nov 03, 2020
| |||||
|
| 4.19
|
really liked it
|
Nov 17, 2020
|
Aug 15, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.87
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 13, 2020
|
Aug 12, 2020
| |||||
|
| 4.06
|
it was ok
|
Aug 12, 2020
|
Aug 11, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.72
|
it was ok
|
Dec 30, 2020
|
Aug 03, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.96
|
liked it
|
Jul 12, 2020
|
Jul 11, 2020
| |||||
|
| 4.15
|
liked it
|
Dec 08, 2020
|
Jul 05, 2020
| |||||
|
| 4.23
|
really liked it
|
Dec 26, 2020
|
Jul 04, 2020
| |||||
|
| 4.14
|
liked it
|
Jun 17, 2020
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Jun 14, 2020
| |||||
|
| 4.19
|
liked it
|
Jun 13, 2020
|
Jun 13, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.14
|
not set
|
Mar 07, 2020
| ||||||
|
| 3.96
|
it was ok
|
Feb 22, 2020
|
Feb 18, 2020
| |||||
|
| 4.34
|
not set
|
Feb 11, 2020
| ||||||
|
| 4.31
|
liked it
|
Sep 30, 2020
|
Feb 10, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.91
|
it was ok
|
Feb 11, 2020
|
Feb 02, 2020
| |||||
|
| 3.75
|
it was ok
|
Oct 24, 2020
|
Feb 01, 2020
| |||||
|
| 4.45
|
really liked it
|
Jul 25, 2020
|
Jan 01, 2020
| |||||
|
| 4.28
|
really liked it
|
Jan 28, 2020
|
Dec 08, 2019
| |||||
|
| 4.26
|
really liked it
|
Oct 24, 2019
|
Oct 22, 2019
| |||||
|
| 3.44
|
it was ok
|
Oct 21, 2019
|
Oct 18, 2019
| |||||
|
| 3.81
|
did not like it
|
Oct 13, 2019
|
Oct 10, 2019
| |||||
|
| 4.12
|
it was ok
|
Oct 29, 2020
|
Sep 22, 2019
| |||||
|
| 3.78
|
liked it
|
Sep 09, 2019
|
Sep 09, 2019
| |||||
|
| 3.91
|
it was ok
|
Aug 19, 2019
|
Aug 19, 2019
| |||||
|
| 4.15
|
liked it
|
Aug 19, 2019
|
Aug 19, 2019
| |||||
|
| 4.25
|
liked it
|
Aug 12, 2019
|
Aug 12, 2019
| |||||
|
| 4.03
|
liked it
|
Dec 11, 2019
|
Aug 11, 2019
| |||||
|
| 4.30
|
really liked it
|
Jul 21, 2019
|
Jul 17, 2019
|
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