Entry tags:
big book boom
This review post started several days ago as "I haven't been doing anything lately but read" but then since then I did our taxes and played Terraforming Mars and dragged the spouse and kids on a passport-renewing expedition and even during the "not doing anything" phase there were still six loads of laundry and some cooking, so, you know what, whatever.
For Darkness Shows the Stars, Diana Peterfreund, an sf YA retelling of Persuasion. I mostly read this to see what she was going to do with it, and I thought she did a reasonable and plausible job, the main problem with which was that Persuasion isn't actually better as YA. YAified, it loses all of Anne's grappling with aging and regret that makes the original so poignant to me - in the Darkness version, the Anne character's choice is more clearly the right choice for her responsibilities/concern for the enslaved workers on her family's land, and her father is closer to a cartoon villain than a snob. I liked how Peterfreund wove the sfnal plot about genetic enhancement into the Louisa character's injury though, and the romance worked, more or less.
(The enslaved workers thing got me thinking about sffnal depictions of slavery, perhaps inspired by the brilliant "robots are class and class is robots" post I read the other day (find it here) - in Darkness, a past technological catastrophe has rendered the descendants of the genetically-enhanced majority heritably developmentally disabled, in ways that aren't entirely specified, and which the "Luddite" ruling class may be deliberately exaggerating (for instance they're mostly mute, but have some signed language, which the Luddites don't encourage), but which limit their independence and ability to learn complex skills. Setting aside the whole "this society's response to mass disability was to enslave everybody" thing - which, I mean, is gross but Peterfreund knows it's gross and she's doing a port of 19th century Britain to this future and honestly 19th century Britain was pretty gross - I think there's something more subtly problematic in sffnal depictions of slavery in which the enslaved people have diminished capacity compared with the enslaving class, through whatever mind-control/genetics/magic/etc, namely that the slavery that for most of us USian readers is the slavery we think of, American chattel slavery, was very much a theft of *skilled labor*, like, my understanding is that African agricultural expertise was part of why African people were so valuable to the American colonizers. And so these sffnal depictions of slaveries that reduce their victims (Peterfreund's slaves are literally called "the Reduced") are erasing an important aspect of real slavery, in a way that might make worldbuilding sense in a given incarnation, but that cumulatively becomes troubling.)
Clockwork Boys, Wonder Engine, and Swordheart, Ursula Vernon as T Kingfisher, which turned out to be a duology and then the first book of a separate trilogy in the same world. I enjoyed these a lot - Vernon is funny and extremely readable and does clever and satisfying setup-and-payoff business and I gasped out loud at [redacted], and the, er, scientific investigation business in Swordheart was *hilarious* and also the best representation of who I would be in a fantasy world that I have ever seen, like that is *totally* the kind of thing I think about. I was a little thrown in Clockwork Boys by expecting the gnole to be worse news than he was, despite there not being cues for that in the text and that not really being Vernon's style... I eventually realized that I was probably bigoted against gnoles on account of The Man Who Sold Rope To them. So, on the one hand, evidence that fictional depictions read 25+ years ago can totally still have subconsciously prejudicial effects, and on the other hand it's not like I had encountered any gnoles since then or done any work examining my gnole stereotypes, and now I have, I guess.
A Tyranny of Queens, Foz Meadows, the sequel to An Accident of Stars, discussed here. I've been reading this for awhile because I had to get it on paper, but finally finished. It's a good followup, Meadows continues to be smart and interesting and this is good high fantasy. I liked the inclusion of a trans character who doesn't want to change their body despite living in a world with magical gender-conformation transformations (that another character has opted for) - that made a lot of sense to me, that whatever the options, people are always going to have a variety of reactions and preferences. These are strong in that way in general, that there's a lot of realistic disagreement and plurality of opinions and overlapping-but-not-identical agendas and such. But also some classic high fantasy epic conflicts. Nicely constructed.
Exit Strategy, Martha Wells, the fourth (and final) Murderbot novella (until we get the novel next year eeeeee). My only regret is that I got this too late to add it to my Hugo nominations... this was *so good* and made me cry and I'm not going to put which part even behind a cut because there are like six books in this post and someone might want to comment without spoilers sitting here but I have A Lot Of Feelings and I guess that itself might be a spoiler but what can I do. (Er, okay, I can't resist: "Cyrnfr, gurl jvyy xvyy ure." Jura Zheqreobg vf nyy bhg bs pyrire unpxf naq culfvpny gevpxf naq gurve ynfg zbfg qrfcrengr erfbeg vf *nfx sbe uryc*, gb nccrny gb gur uhznaf naq ubcr gung gurl jvyy fcner nabgure uhzna'f yvsr, bu zl tbq.)
For Darkness Shows the Stars, Diana Peterfreund, an sf YA retelling of Persuasion. I mostly read this to see what she was going to do with it, and I thought she did a reasonable and plausible job, the main problem with which was that Persuasion isn't actually better as YA. YAified, it loses all of Anne's grappling with aging and regret that makes the original so poignant to me - in the Darkness version, the Anne character's choice is more clearly the right choice for her responsibilities/concern for the enslaved workers on her family's land, and her father is closer to a cartoon villain than a snob. I liked how Peterfreund wove the sfnal plot about genetic enhancement into the Louisa character's injury though, and the romance worked, more or less.
(The enslaved workers thing got me thinking about sffnal depictions of slavery, perhaps inspired by the brilliant "robots are class and class is robots" post I read the other day (find it here) - in Darkness, a past technological catastrophe has rendered the descendants of the genetically-enhanced majority heritably developmentally disabled, in ways that aren't entirely specified, and which the "Luddite" ruling class may be deliberately exaggerating (for instance they're mostly mute, but have some signed language, which the Luddites don't encourage), but which limit their independence and ability to learn complex skills. Setting aside the whole "this society's response to mass disability was to enslave everybody" thing - which, I mean, is gross but Peterfreund knows it's gross and she's doing a port of 19th century Britain to this future and honestly 19th century Britain was pretty gross - I think there's something more subtly problematic in sffnal depictions of slavery in which the enslaved people have diminished capacity compared with the enslaving class, through whatever mind-control/genetics/magic/etc, namely that the slavery that for most of us USian readers is the slavery we think of, American chattel slavery, was very much a theft of *skilled labor*, like, my understanding is that African agricultural expertise was part of why African people were so valuable to the American colonizers. And so these sffnal depictions of slaveries that reduce their victims (Peterfreund's slaves are literally called "the Reduced") are erasing an important aspect of real slavery, in a way that might make worldbuilding sense in a given incarnation, but that cumulatively becomes troubling.)
Clockwork Boys, Wonder Engine, and Swordheart, Ursula Vernon as T Kingfisher, which turned out to be a duology and then the first book of a separate trilogy in the same world. I enjoyed these a lot - Vernon is funny and extremely readable and does clever and satisfying setup-and-payoff business and I gasped out loud at [redacted], and the, er, scientific investigation business in Swordheart was *hilarious* and also the best representation of who I would be in a fantasy world that I have ever seen, like that is *totally* the kind of thing I think about. I was a little thrown in Clockwork Boys by expecting the gnole to be worse news than he was, despite there not being cues for that in the text and that not really being Vernon's style... I eventually realized that I was probably bigoted against gnoles on account of The Man Who Sold Rope To them. So, on the one hand, evidence that fictional depictions read 25+ years ago can totally still have subconsciously prejudicial effects, and on the other hand it's not like I had encountered any gnoles since then or done any work examining my gnole stereotypes, and now I have, I guess.
A Tyranny of Queens, Foz Meadows, the sequel to An Accident of Stars, discussed here. I've been reading this for awhile because I had to get it on paper, but finally finished. It's a good followup, Meadows continues to be smart and interesting and this is good high fantasy. I liked the inclusion of a trans character who doesn't want to change their body despite living in a world with magical gender-conformation transformations (that another character has opted for) - that made a lot of sense to me, that whatever the options, people are always going to have a variety of reactions and preferences. These are strong in that way in general, that there's a lot of realistic disagreement and plurality of opinions and overlapping-but-not-identical agendas and such. But also some classic high fantasy epic conflicts. Nicely constructed.
Exit Strategy, Martha Wells, the fourth (and final) Murderbot novella (until we get the novel next year eeeeee). My only regret is that I got this too late to add it to my Hugo nominations... this was *so good* and made me cry and I'm not going to put which part even behind a cut because there are like six books in this post and someone might want to comment without spoilers sitting here but I have A Lot Of Feelings and I guess that itself might be a spoiler but what can I do. (Er, okay, I can't resist: "Cyrnfr, gurl jvyy xvyy ure." Jura Zheqreobg vf nyy bhg bs pyrire unpxf naq culfvpny gevpxf naq gurve ynfg zbfg qrfcrengr erfbeg vf *nfx sbe uryc*, gb nccrny gb gur uhznaf naq ubcr gung gurl jvyy fcner nabgure uhzna'f yvsr, bu zl tbq.)