psocoptera

Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells, Murderbot #3 of four. I still heart Murderbot and Wells' ability to write gripping action scenes. I had some reading comprehension trouble with this one and misunderstood a couple of key things, leading to some confusion, but eventually sorted it out. Still highly recommend the series and look forward to the fourth one.

The Girl In The Tower, Katherine Arden. #2 of the trilogy that started with The Bear and the Nightingale (link to my comments on it). I did not find this as gripping as the first one, which I couldn't put down; maybe it was not being in the mood for impetuous young protagonists doing rash things, or villains making rape threats, or just that this book felt less like a fairy tale remix and more like a generic fantasy (although there are certainly still some fairytale elements here). I was keen to see what would happen between the protag and her sister and was a bit disappointed but there was some interesting stuff and we're maybe now in a place for more interesting stuff in the next book? (Spoilers)

( Read more... ) I do think I will read the next book, at this point, just to see where it all ends up. And there were some good sequences in this one, particularly some of the horse-riding bits, so there might be more of that and that's fun.

Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/450610.html

I am... halfway? partway? through the most non-stop part of the summer parenting-wise. Still consuming media (there are the swim lessons, the karate lessons) but not so much thinking of any clever things to say about it.

Harbors of the Sun, the second half of the Raksura duology that follows the original trilogy and the novella collections, was fine. Better than Edge, more going on. I'm still not sure there was enough in Edge to be its own book but I also see why she split it where she did. Nothing in these quite hit me in either the sensawunda or the feels like the original trilogy but there were some good lines and moments in Harbors so I'm glad I read them.

Sorry to Bother You is a bitingly satirical non-franchise Black-directed-and-starring science fiction film, and I just reordered those descriptors twice trying to figure out the most natural-sounding order for them. Anyways, it is various things in which I am interested and I would love to see it make the Dramatic Long Hugo ballot and lose to Black Panther.

Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/433971.html

Weave A Circle Round, Kari Maaren. Norton (Nebula YA) finalist but lost to Art of Starving.

Let's do this in stages. If my recommendations sometimes work for you, and you like Diana Wynne Jones, I am recommending this one, and I think it's the kind of book that's fun to read while knowing absolutely nothing about it (except that it's YA that someone thought was Norton-eligible, obviously, although there are ways that it feels more like upper-middlegrade, and as a further tone/content data point I'm planning to suggest it to Junie).

If you would like at least a couple of hints from the first couple of chapters about what you might be getting into here,

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And if you would like still more of an idea of what this book might be like or why you might like it, here's a probably-not-complete list of Diana Wynne Jones books that I think are being referenced or homaged here:

( Read more... ), My best guess is that even if you haven't read much DWJ this is still a really fun book, just in a somewhat different way. I promise that if anyone hasn't read much or any DWJ and wants to share their reaction to Weave in the comments I won't reply saying "YOU HAVEN'T READ ANY DWJ??". There are several books on that list I only read as an adult, and at least one more I only *liked* as an adult. ...Junie, it occurs to me, has not read any DWJ, and is thus the perfect test subject for this investigation. (I know, I know, how has she not, but she went through a phase of resistance to my book recommendations. I think she's come around now that she's reading so fast she's having trouble keeping herself in things to read next though. Muahaha, my day has arrived.)

Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/433164.html

Duuuude. That was some epic high fantasy... and contained a phenomenal action sequence... I really would not be at all sorry to see this series take the Best Series Hugo. I think I said somewhere that City of Stairs stands alone pretty well and I'm not taking that back BUT reading the whole trilogy is *so worthwhile*.

Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/433048.html

Fanzines and I'm donezo.

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Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/432252.html

Are short editors like small college presidents?

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And hey, also long editors, because I've hit the point of really wanting to be done with this.

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Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/432044.html

Behind this cut.

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Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/431816.html

But first, two more books from serieses:

City of Blades, Robert Jackson Bennett. Grittier and less fun than the first one, but kudos to Bennett for making a real attempt to grapple in a fantasy context with USian wars of occupation in the Middle East. I'll read the third one (although not before voting). Oh hey, also I found out he's apparently a double Shirley Jackson winner for two of his previous novels (this is mostly for Chaos's benefit now that we're interested in the Shirley Jacksons).

The Edge of Worlds, Martha Wells. First of a duology following the original Raksura trilogy. The first two thirds of this were very slow; by the end it had gotten somewhere interesting and I want to read the second one, but gah. A lot of buildup before we got into Wells' typical excellent settings and action. Also as much as I love Moon, I kind of wish she had decided to tell this story primarily from a fresh POV, and let us enjoy seeing someone else's POV on Moon.

Further comments and ballot behind the cut.

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Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/431612.html

Fan Writer is sort of like Related Work but worse, being a person award and thus fuzzier of boundary. I don't nominate in either but I guess I feel entitled to vote in any category I'm willing to consider seriously? Anyways, I read through the packet and have come up with a ranking.

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Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/430401.html

Behind the cut

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Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/430063.html

Whole thing behind a cut for your avoidance convenience.

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Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/429717.html

Fell behind while we were in San Diego, trying to get back on track.

Some grown up books:

In the Labyrinth of Drakes and Within the Sanctuary of Wings, books four and five of Marie Brennan's Lady Trent series. Wow I loved these. (spoilers)

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Stories of the Raksura 2, the novellas The Dead City and The Dark Earth Below. I enjoyed these a lot, especially The Dark Earth Below. She does such a good mix of character development and fantasy adventure.

Some picture books:

Leave Me Alone, Vera Brosgol. Adorable story about a woman looking for a quiet place to knit, from the former Pants Press comics writer/artist. Q really liked this one.

The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdős, by Deborah Heiligman, illustrated by LeUyen Pham. So, on the one hand, this is charming and heartwarming in the way that picture book biographies sometimes are, yay Uncle Paul who had friends all over the world and did lots of great math, and on the other hand I can't help but notice how many of those friends were men, and when they talk about how his friends had to do his laundry and cook for him and pay his bills, they show men, but, realistically, were they, or did this inevitably fall to the ubiquitous supportive wives? Like, yes, some people are nonneurotypical and I want to live in the kind of world that supports them in realizing their potential, but I'm pretty done with the trope of the genius man-child who's too special and important for self-responsibility, and a picture-book level take on Erdős can't really tell me how much it was one or the other (or both, or neither, life is complicated). I just can't help but imagine that *women* who woke people up at 4 am to do math were more likely to get sedatives than hundreds of coauthors.

Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez & Her Family's Fight for Desegregation, Duncan Tonatiuh. Despite growing up in SoCal I had never even heard of Sylvia Mendez, whose case came seven years before Brown v. Board. Thurgood Marshall wrote friend-of-the-court briefs for the Mendez case, and Earl Warren was the CA governor who signed the desegregation of CA schools into law because of the Mendez case. Anyways, we read this as part of my ongoing effort to make my kids aware of the history of racism in this country. It's always a little nerve-wracking to read a book in which characters express bigoted views, since, like, what if that's what Quentin remembers and takes away, but we talked some about how those were hurtful lies, and it ends on a page celebrating interracial friendships, so, fingers crossed? (Junie read it by herself but I talked to her about it too.) I just really want to try to get some ideas of justice in there before our new white supremacist dictatorship enrolls the kids in the MAGA Youth and starts indoctrinating them, aaaaaaugh.

Some movies:

Won't You Be My Neighbor, the Mr. Rogers documentary. I grew up watching a great deal of Mr. Rogers (although I could never interest my own kids in it) so it was really interesting to look back on it and get this perspective.

Ant-Man and Wasp. I enjoyed the heck out of this - definitely the "lighthearted fun" end of the superhero spectrum, but, you know what, I love that end. Great action, some really fun games with size (love that trope forever), highly attractive people... (spoilers)

( Read more... ) Anyways I really enjoyed the 3D and thought it was a great call to see it that way, really enhanced the action.

Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/429452.html

I was surprised by how much I was into volume 2 of Monstress - I had remembered feeling lukewarm about the first volume despite the gorgeous art (ranked it third in last year's voting, found it hard to get into until near the end), but, dang, either the pacing/narrative coherence has made a big leap, or just being in a part of the story where we have a much better idea what's going on has made it pretty awesome and gripping. And the art is still gorgeous. (And, you know, genuinely complicated women characters, and women in most of the important and/or awesome roles - I said about volume one that I might roll my eyes at the whole thing if a pair of men were writing and drawing the same story about male characters, but we still don't have anywhere near enough over-the-top high fantasy or fantasy/horror about women for that to feel old.)

Black Bolt: Hard Time might conceivably have been interesting if you already knew and cared about the character, but it was not a good introduction. The kind of superhero comics that's all battle effects and cheesy narration, yawn.

Space!

My Graphic ballot:

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Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/429193.html

I left the Le Guin for last on the grounds that I thought I might actually enjoy it, and I did. Her skill with words and her skill of observation are on such a different level than the rest of this stuff, and, I don't know, her wisdom? Like I'm genuinely interested in what she has to say about random things, in her insight and perspective. (And I'm so ongoingly sad that the world has lost that. Le Guin and Carrie Fisher, man.) (Although I admit I did skip all the parts about her cat.)

For me personally, the most emotional part was when she talked about the kinds of fan letters she did and didn't like - I thought for years, on and off, about writing to her with a question, but never did, and sometimes I'm sad about that, now that the opportunity is definitively past.

(The question, if you're curious - SPOILERS for the entire Earthsea series:)

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Space!

My ballot ranking and comments:

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Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/428843.html

A Lit Fuse - do I actually have to care about Harlan Ellison in 2018? I mean, sure, he wrote some memorable and/or important stories (I was just talking about "I Have No Mouth" the other day, right?), I'm not saying we need to erase his place in sff history, but given that he himself is a dick (and, it would seem from this excerpt, a liar - I ended up reading more than I intended to, and his version of his mother's death vs reality jumped out at me), why do I want his perspective on his own life? If I actually wanted to understand his career arc, I would want to read something written by someone with some distance, not a sycophantic take where I can't tell what's real and what's lies and self-aggrandizement. The part about Ellison dealing with old age and decline was sort of interesting from a general grappling-with-that-stuff angle, but mostly I just don't caaaare.

Crash Override - in one sense I care more about Zoe Quinn than about Harlan Ellison, and yet as it turns out I don't really care about the exact details of her harassment by GamerGate? The "how we can win the fight" parts might have been more interesting but that's not the excerpt we got. I am very sympathetic to Quinn and I think her experience is important and possibly I'll want my kids to read this or something like it when they're older to understand the ugliness of that side of internet culture but I don't feel like I got anything out of this personally.

I am exempting myself from reading about Iain M. Banks on the grounds that I've never read any of his books but would still like to someday and would rather approach them without whatever background or interpretation might be in this book about him.

Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/428765.html

Paper Girls 3. Iiiii dunno, I was super into this series when I started it and now I just... don't care?? Various Things keep Happening but is it going anywhere, do they add up to anything? And, I don't know, the character voices and reactions just didn't seem quite... convincing somehow. Possibly this series needs actual women/people who were once 12yo girls involved with it somewhere?

Packet excerpt from Sleeping With Monsters, Liz Bourke. So... I don't really "get" related works? Like, what am I supposed to be getting from this? Maybe that's ironic because I do a certain amount of book reviewing myself, hi, but I when I write stuff up here, it's a) for myself, so that I can remember later what I thought, b) for friends who know me and might sometimes find me a useful source of tips about books (or an amusing source of snark about books), c) for anyone who wants to read my blather who's bothered to figure out how my tastes calibrate against theirs and can thus extract something useful from my opinions. Bourke and I, from this excerpt, have some overlap but not solid overlap, she's not saying anything that gives me any particular new or interesting insight into the things I have read... basically I don't get this.

Likewise I'm about a third of the way into Luminescent Threads and I don't get it either. What everyone is writing is obviously deeply meaningful to them but why am I reading it? I read my notes about last years Relateds and I apparently got a lot out of the Gaiman book and something out of the LeGuin, so this category isn't a total lost cause for me. Four more to try I guess.

Meanwhile, though, Tropic of Serpents and Voyage of the Basilisk! (Numbers 2 and 3 of Marie Brennan's nominated series.) Yes I know I said I wasn't going to read more Series books until I made more progress on Graphics and Relateds but these were so conveniently in the packet in phone-friendly format and they just seem to be getting better as they go and now I reaaaally want to read 4 and 5. (Spoilers)

( Read more... ) Anyways, I also may have reread/reskimmed the first three Raksura books, to remind myself who everyone was (I have a harder time getting the noun-names to stick somehow), so I'm clearly not not working on serieses.

Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/428303.html

Watched the Hugo Dramatic Short-nominated Black Mirror episode USS Callister. Good stuff, tense and clever. Got me thinking about [spoilers]

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Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/427662.html

I had made an attempt at these a month or two ago when I first got them from the library and couldn't get into them, in an "ugh if I wanted to slog through the horrors of the carceral state it should probably at least be true stories" sort of way, but I made another attempt and this time got more into them. Dark humor is a difficult mood I guess. Although it does feel sort of quaint here in June 2018 that in this dystopian future they wait to send people to internment camps until they're adults. Anyways, Bitch Planet, it's like V for Vendetta as written by women and populated with something approximating actual incarceration demographics (so, lots of women of color, Black women specifically, trans women, etc). Volume 2, President Bitch, is up for the Hugo Graphic and will surely be on my ballot somewhere. (Okay, yes, that's clearly true. Probably somewhere in the *middle*, is what I'm implying?)

Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/427354.html

Not related to City of Brass or City of Bones or City of Gold and Lead or anything else we came up with after I read City of Brass.

City of Stairs is by Robert Jackson Bennett and is the first book of a Hugo Series-nominated trilogy, although it ends like a complete story and I understand the other books move to other POV characters. I really liked it... it's sort of pitched as a spy thriller with fantastic elements but it's also serious epic fantasy. Compelling stuff about what happens later after major overturns in the world order, some great action... bit of a slow build so it's hard to even say too much about where it ends up, but I'll compare it to Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence (of which I've only read the first three so please no spoilers beyond that!) or Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy. I look forward to reading the other two - ideally before finishing my series ballot, although after, if not.

(For voting purposes, I probably need to focus on Graphics or Relateds at this point, where the difference between having read and not having read something is more stark than chasing additional books of serieses, although I also don't plan to finalize my series ballot until the last possible minute just to see what I do have time for.)

Please note this is a 2014 book and I'm tagging it as 2017 so I can track it with other Hugo reading.

Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/427244.html

I just finished Hugo Graphic-nominated My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, read over the course of today, and WOW, it's been a long time since I read a graphic work that blew me away like this. The ART, oh my god the ART, the main conceit, the way the flashback story fits into the present day story... this is an *amazing* work, highly recommended if you're interested in comics as a medium or in powerful, complicated stories in general. Things you should know: what we got in the packet/what's available right now is the first half of a 700 page story; the second half seems to be coming out in August. I read it in scroll so I could make it big enough to read the words easily, but am going back through again in two-page mode to look at the layouts/spreads. Also I think we may be missing a page somewhere near the end. :( Also heavy-duty content notes which I am going to put behind a cut:

( Read more... ) About the only thing I can compare this to is Maus, although the art is maybe more Stuck Rubber Baby.

Spoiler:

( Read more... )

ETA to name the author: Emil Ferris, this is her first work and she worked on it for 15 years (!).

Crossposts: https://psocoptera.livejournal.com/426927.html

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Entries tagged with 2017sff

intermediate parts

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DWJ readalike!

City of Miracles

fanzines

editors

semiprozines

BEST SERIES HERE WE GO

Fan Writer Hugo comments and ballot

Fan Artist Hugo comments and ballot

Professional Artist Hugo comments and ballot

a big catchup of reviews

Monstress, Black Bolt, and my Hugo Graphic ballot

No Time To Spare and my Hugo Related ballot

more relateds

misc Hugo reading

USS Callister

Bitch Planet, Vol 1 and 2

City of Stairs

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

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July 2025

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