psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
I did not do a great job reading this year, and as a result there are authors whose works might be perfectly good or even great who are getting shortchanged in my votes, and that's what's happening. At this point all I can really do is try to do better next year.

ExpandRead more... )
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
Somehow I managed to sneak in an entire 12 episodes of television - six hours!! Overall I'm glad I watched it, they did a reasonable job with it, and I liked some of their choices more than others. Behind the cut, a longer review with major spoilers for both the adaptation and the original book series.

ExpandRead more... )

Asunder

Jul. 17th, 2025 04:12 pm
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
Asunder, Kerstin Hall, 2024 fantasy novel. Really good - compelling worldbuilding, vivid characters, a strong central premise and interesting episodes around that. She's currently working on the sequel and I will be eagerly awaiting it. Old and new powers, some more eldritch and demonic than others, an involuntary soulbond/possession situation, several weird forms of transportation. Recommended to people who liked Perdido Street Station but would like something Mieville-free and woman-centered, or... I'm flailing for a good comparison here. Martha Wells' new fantasy series maybe.
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way, written by Ryan North, art by Chris Fenoglio, 2024 graphic novel. I tricked myself out of Hugos hooky by reading this book not on my own voting behalf but on the theory of just looking into it to see if I thought someone else should bother, and then it was fun and I got hooked and it was a nice evening's read. Cute and clever take on the choose-your-own-adventure format, satisfying story, worked for me even though I don't know the slightest thing about Lower Decks (but I do know TOS/TNG decently well and there were a lot of references). And now I suppose I might as well take a look at the rest of the graphic category, maybe, hm.
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
Rules for Ghosting, Shelly Jay Shore, 2024 novel. I was still playing Hugos hooky, after also reading two-thirds of Asunder which got interrupted when my ebook expired, but I have a paper copy as of this afternoon so expect to hear about that soon. I came across this book in a couple of different contexts (a book group I'm not in but am adjacent to was reading it, etc) and was intrigued - queer (m/m) romance, literal ghosts, Jewish funeral customs? Sure! If that sounds good to you you will probably also enjoy it, although I felt like it was stronger as a family drama in some ways than as a romance - it almost felt like some of the early "getting to know each other" scenes might have been deleted for length, since there was a kind of weird jump to them knowing more about each other than had happened on the page. Pluses: learning about taharah and shmira, interesting low-key take on including paranormal elements. Minuses: dog squick (really hard for me to enjoy a schmoopy scene of the couple kissing and cuddling if one of them just kissed his dog, ew ew ew), author mentioned in a Q&A at the back of the book that she was picturing one of the couple as an actor whose face I hate, which kind of ruined the ship for me tbh. I mean, at least I had already finished the book, but it killed any post-romance-novel afterglow. Maybe don't read the Q&A if you have any actors whose faces you hate. Could be a plus or minus: I am not qualified to evaluate how good a job Shore did writing in a trans POV, but it seemed reasonable to me? But also seems plausible that a review by a transmasc person might point out things I wouldn't catch? (Shore herself is a she/they person.)
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
The Tomb of Dragons, Katherine Addison, 2025 trilogy conclusion. Previous one here. I haven't been able to make myself read any Hugo homework recently but I've postponed this a couple of times while trying to make myself prioritize said homework and it came up again and it was like, oh, I could read that, I know more or less what it will be like and it will be a pleasant read, and, lo, so it came to pass. A lot to be said for that. (I am very much in one of those moods where I'm like "what if I gave up on sff and just read KJ Charles romances for a month" but this kind of sff is fine. Possibly I just really don't want to do any more homework.)

One spoiler: ExpandRead more... )
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
I honestly can't remember if I remembered to vote in these this year or not - I think I did? Anyways, here's the Locus winners, below or here.

ExpandRead more... )
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
I just saw the Le Guin Prize shortlist and gasped because there's [personal profile] ursula! Look at that that is so cool!

Also this is a solid list all around:

Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera
Archangels of Funk, Andrea Hairston
Blackheart Man, Nalo Hopkinson
The Sapling Cage, Margaret Killjoy
The West Passage, Jared Pechaček
Remember You Will Die, Eden Robins
The City in Glass, Nghi Vo
North Continent Ribbon, Ursula Whitcher
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
Here, or behind the cut.

ExpandRead more... )
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
The 2025 Infinity seems to have gone to Frank Herbert a month ago (here) and I didn't hear about it. Herbert seems like a timely choice with the Dune movies happening; [personal profile] elysdir had once listed him as a possibility so I had him on my potentials list, although I will continue to be surprised every year it isn't DWJ, and I'm a little surprised they picked a white man at this time of official erasure of women and people of color. (Although in fact I think my whole potentials list is white, doh.)

Nice speech from Nicola Griffith.

Huh, they're adding a graphic novel Nebula next year! Fascinating! I wonder how this might shift who nominates for/votes for the graphic Hugo. And poetry! Neat!

Cut for the whole list of winners with my comments:
ExpandRead more... )
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
The Maid and the Crocodile, Jordan Ifueko, 2024 YA. I liked this a lot. Charming characters, enjoyable voice, some great moments, the exact right amount of story for the space. I couldn't remember much about Raybearer except that I had really liked it (this is in the same world) but Ifueko did a good job of filling in who the overlapping characters were and anything else you needed to know. ExpandRead more... ) I still have three more Lodestar nominees to read but this is definitely a strong contender.
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley, 2024 novel. My first problem with this book was that I couldn't buy into the premise; the set-up as given did not feel like a way anyone would go about doing what they were ostensibly doing, nor did that thing even make sense to me, so it seemed like something else must be going on, and I was not very interested in plodding along waiting for a reveal. My second problem was a turn towards romance where I was put off by the ship. In the end the whole thing felt muddled and contrived - Bradley's interest was clearly in this one historical blorbo, to use the fannish term (possibly literally a fannish blorbo if the genesis of this book was in Terror fandom) and she knew what beats she wanted in the story about them and had tried to assemble a plot that would give them to her. But to me some of them felt arbitrary and under-motivated and the whole thing didn't quite hang together.

I do get to rank Hugo novels now, though. ExpandRead more... )
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar, 2025 novella. This is really good - a very satisfying fairytale/murder ballad retelling with some gorgeous writing. Highly recommended if you like that sort of thing at all. I look forward to seeing it on next year's ballots. The book comes with a bonus story, "John Hollowback and the Witch", previously in a 2024 anthology, which was also good.
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett, 2024 novel, first of a trilogy. A young apprentice investigator with total recall like Simon Illyan, only these abilities are granted via Witcher-like potions (apparently even giving some people the white hair and yellow eyes), gets involved in a murder case in an empire threatened by kaiju and maybe also the manipulations of the Cetagandan-haut-like gentry. Which is to say that if an author admits to being an LLM user, even if he claims he isn't using it for his creative writing, I cannot help but start playing the "which parts of this seem borrowed" game. In all fairness it was a good book, fun, fast read, the mystery seemed to hang together as far as I noticed and I enjoyed the plant-tech worldbuilding. I'll probably read the other two. (I wasn't into Foundryside, but I liked the City-of books, so he is neither a definitely-read or definitely-don't-read author for me at this point.) And I'm actually all in favor of creative recombining/repurposing/riffing! If there's, like, a person doing it. I don't want to think I'm reading a book if I'm actually reading extruded text product though.
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
Navigational Entanglements, Aliette de Bodard, 2024 novella. Can I call this xianxia in space? Four space cultivators from rival space cultivation clans are sent on a space mission to deal with a space monster, but then, oh no, space cultivation politics. Fun and I enjoyed it, although I probably wouldn't have Hugo-nominated it myself. The romance felt a little rushed and the writing got a little repetitive (does the one cultivation style need to be "slow and ponderous" *every* time it's mentioned?). I would read a sequel, though!

Also I guess I can rank Hugo novellas now? ExpandRead more... )
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell, 2024 fantasy novel. This was cute and fun and then I got kind of tired of it, which might say more about my short attention span than it says about the book. I don't know, insofar as it wanted to center the main characters' relationship (I hesitate to say romance, since it seemed like it was maybe more of an ace/aro queerplatonic partnership kind of thing) that relationship didn't particularly hit any of my squees or zings. And while there was some evidence early on of not the tightest editing (like, mention of a damaged eye, which I couldn't find any sort of antecedent for where it *took* damage), as the book kept going I ended up feeling pretty nitpicky about it, which I think tends to be a sign I don't feel sufficiently entertained.

(But, like, armor with "something denser than gold" under a gold coating? Like what, tungsten? Platinum? If you had platinum armor why would you put gold over that? Or a *spruce* tree with "succulent crimson and tangerine hues of the tree's leaves", one of which falls fluttering? Has neither Wiswell nor his editor ever seen a spruce? And I was thrown by the use of "allosexual" in a fantasy setting, like, okay, this one is a style choice and I respect that sometimes if you want to include vocab of whatever sort in whatever setting, sometimes the easiest thing is to just use modern words, especially if you are not doing the sort of fantasy where you're making up *other* words so your shaych or your marnis or whatever would really stand out. However, I think I personally find short Germanic-ish words like "gay" or "queer" to have a better ring of plausibility, a more organic feel, than technical-sounding, deliberately coined words like "homosexual" or in this case "allosexual". (Or, like, "lesbian"... are you saying this second world has a Lesbos somewhere?) I personally probably would have tried to rephrase "allosexual virgins" as something like "fantasizing virgins" or "attraction-flushed virgins". I can only assume that Wiswell didn't because he specifically wanted to get "allosexual" in there, but it felt like a break in the voice to me.)

Anyways. Not terrible, but I don't particularly think it ought to win a Hugo, although I'm also feeling a general lack of enthusiasm re the Hugos given open questions like "how much of their credibility did Nicholas Whyte take with him when he bailed". :/
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
Yoke of Stars, R.B. Lemberg, 2024 Birdverse novella. In the way that Four Profound Weaves was directly tied to Cloth of Winds, this one turned out to be pretty directly tied to Portrait of the Desert in Personages of Power, and also minorly to Profound Weaves/Cloth of Winds, and in rereading Portrait of the Desert it turned out that one was connected to The Unbalancing in ways I totally hadn't gotten when I read that, and some of the earlier stories also circle around certain of the same characters from different angles/relationships/periods of their lives. I feel like I had maybe been thinking of the Birdverse as primarily a *world*, a setting, with stories set about totally different people in different places, and there is some of that, but it is also a saga, telling the history of a hero (in the epic sense) and stories that branch out from them from the people around them. And it's interesting to see how Lemberg has revisited/revised this key character ranging from their early appearances in 2011 and 2015 stories to their appearance here. (Also I'm starting to feel like this is a fandom that could really use someone doing some meta fanwork - maybe a dramatis personae, to help catch characters if/when they show up again... maybe a really nice Complete Birdverse edition someday with all the miscellaneous stories, which I think are not all in the recent collection...)

Anyways, I liked this a lot. The structure is two people telling their stories to each other and we slowly start to see how it is that they have both come to be where they are and what that means for each other. Some neat moments and worldbuilding and different perspectives on the world's lore and some events we've heard about before. I thought it had a clearer throughline than The Unbalancing and definitely makes me curious what we'll see in this world from Lemberg next.
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
Mirrored Heavens, Rebecca Roanhorse, 2024 fantasy novel, concluding her Between Earth and Sky trilogy started with Black Sun and continued in Fevered Star. I've probably said this before but it's a real struggle for me these days to read a trilogy spread out over a span of years. I didn't have time to sit down and reread the first two and so I came to this one without much of a recollection of what was happening or what I was hoping to see happen. I said about the last one that I thought Roanhorse was doing a good job balancing the intrigue plot and the epic fantasy plot, but reading this one I didn't feel particularly invested in either, and the end felt muddled and kind of anti-climactic. One of my favorite aspects of the previous books was their settings, and in theory we were spending some time in some new locations in this one, but I never got much of a sense of them. It was a fast read despite its length and had some good fantasy-action sequences, so, what more could I ask for, I guess, and I think I'll still give the series my Hugo Series vote. (With genuine enthusiasm - there is some definite Cool in these - although also out of disinterest in the other nominees. I mean, I'm definitely not voting for InCryptid, Stormlight, or whichever Tchaikovsky series that is, I read a Tasha Suri book a few years ago for the Astounding and wasn't into it enough so much as to to not want to read more of her work, although apparently that book is not part of this particular series, and I read Annihilation and decided not to read more of those, although apparently I liked it okay. Maybe I'll give those my second-place vote, hm.)

NEFFA

Apr. 27th, 2025 12:43 pm
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
I've been having some big sad feelings about whether I would ever be able to dance again - *not* because guilty feet have got no rhythm, thank you, but because last time I wore my right ankle brace for anything it messed up my right knee, and I can't dance safely without my ankle braces, but I can't do stairs and hills without my knee. So I have been all woe, alack, maybe I don't want to even be around the dance scene if I can't dance, but I really wanted to see some friends, so I decided to get over myself and go to NEFFA. And! I danced! I did the medley prep where we learned the dances for the ECD medley, and then danced the medley, and my ankles and knees both did fine, and the only thing that felt bad this morning was a muscle in my left thigh. So apparently the brace is not just instant poison for the knee - maybe it was something specific I did in it last time, like walking up- and downhill, or driving in it, but ECD is not that thing. So maybe I can do more of it, and maybe even experiment with some walked Scottish, or - who knows! The contra medley next year? It felt so good and I was so happy to get to dance again.

(I did screw up the medley fairly significantly, but not for ankle or knee reasons - I was dancing with a contra dancer but ECD newbie and forgot the important rule of having newbies dance the position they've been learning, and then we collided with another couple who were confused about whether they were ones or twos and got really confused about whether *we* were ones or twos, and that took multiple times through to sort out while we vexed various other couples who were expecting one or the other. But I think she had fun, and I've always enjoyed trying to get a less-familiar dancer through a dance, so it was fun for me. Although it's weird in a mask! I'm, like, smiling away, and is that even coming across? Anyways, this felt like a totally normal and reasonable way to botch a medley, as opposed to, you know, my secret dread of rolling an ankle and bringing the entire dance to a halt while I have to be helped off the floor, so enh, it felt like a glorious victory even if by frequent-dancer standards it was a poor showing.)

Other highlights of NEFFA included getting to watch two friends' ritual dance groups (both of whom have now been joined in said groups by their teen children! which is neat). And dinner with one of said friends, and a fun musical performance/history lesson about queer maritime music by the Ranzo Boys, who have an album coming out that I look forward to buying, and listening to the contra medley music even if I wasn't dancing it. (Whose album I suppose I could also buy!) So, that was great. An excellent NEFFA, after I don't know how many years away. (Okay, we apparently went in 2010 and 2011 when the first kid was a baby/toddler, and then in 2013 and 2014 when the second kid was a baby/toddler, but then in 2015 I had had one of the really bad ankle re-sprains, and after that we were more like in "wrangling children who don't want to be dragged to NEFFA and have weekend activities of their own" mode. As far as dancing at all, I apparently went to Harvard English once in 2017, successfully, and meant to go back and just didn't (and/or had more poorly-timed ankle events), and then we began a pandemic.)
psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
The Pomegranate Gate, Ariel Kaplan, 2023 fantasy novel. It's the Inquisition and the Jews are getting expelled from (mildly-fantasy) Spain, but two young adults get entangled with the (definitely-fantasy) parallel magical universe and their own magical heritage. I felt like this had a lot of potential, and overall I did like it and hope to read the rest of the trilogy, but it also had a number of problems which I am now going to complain about as is my way. It was really long and slow, and was the kind of plot that is more driven by the slow reveal of epic backstory than a sense of forward momentum, only I felt like I was having a lot of trouble even connecting that, like, characters A and B in one POV were the same people as characters C and D in another POV, so I'm not sure if I figured out that they were the same people at the right time or really belatedly or what. And there were sometimes reveals that, like, F was actually G! Only I had no idea why that mattered. Or, there's a couple of macguffins, only it took most of the book to even figure out what they were or why anyone cared, and then, like, now someone we've never heard of has one of them, what am I even supposed to make of this? I don't know. There was maybe something interesting going on with the full-magic people doing magic intuitively, but part-human magic users needing to use words and breath and writing (which felt relevant to it being a specifically Jewish fantasy) and I wanted to go back and reread some bits related to that but my ebook expired. In other ways, the magic-item and magic-court-intrigue parts felt like a weird fit with the moments of real Sephardic history where the human Jewish characters were trying to figure out where they could go, making choices about seizing possible chances for safety vs trying to reunite with loved ones, and seeing their homes and possessions taken from them. Like, that stuff all had some real weight, and then you're back to the magic people, who I think Kaplan cared a lot more about than I did. I did like that there were a couple of older women with some interesting complexity of character and interesting conflict between them; I suspect my feelings about the next book may depend a lot on how much of them we get, and how much the plot is able to take off now that the whole stage is set.

Profile

psocoptera: ink drawing of celtic knot (Default)
psocoptera

July 2025

S M T W T F S
   12345
6789101112
13141516 171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

Expand All Cut TagsCollapse All Cut Tags
Page generated Jul. 31st, 2025 11:40 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios