psocoptera

A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett, 2025 fantasy, sequel to The Tainted Cup. Perfect for a tedious transatlantic flight, a nice mix of mystery, world-details, and character stuff about the central detective pair. I hadn't particularly been reading it as commentary on anything and then got to the author's note, in which RJB made it clear that he was writing against certain trends in real life and also recent trends in fantasy (( Read more... )) and I thought it was interesting the way Incandescent was also an answering back to a work with undue cultural dominance. I mean, I suppose in one sense everything is always responding to something else, but it was an interesting coincidence to read two back-to-back that were more starkly so.

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.

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.)

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. ( Read more... ) I still have three more Lodestar nominees to read but this is definitely a strong contender.

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.

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". :/

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.)

Remember You Will Die, Eden Robins, 2024 sff novel. Epistolary near-future science fiction and alternate history, told primarily as a series of obituaries, interspersed with a few other kinds of documents like newspaper articles or search results. I really enjoy this kind of playing with format, and on the whole it's a pretty neat project. It's not perfect - too many of the obituaries are written with too-similar a voice, even the ones that are pretty distant in time period and should sound more different. (And there are a couple of characters who are themselves the writers of some of the obituaries, and I might have liked them to have more distinct voices from each other, for it to be more obvious when one of them was writing.) (Although there might be reasons for some of this, see below.) Also, this book has a bit of a "jack of all trades master of none" problem, in that it's trying to do a lot of things at once, and I felt like some of them were working against each other - the satirical parts undermining the parts trying to be profound or touching, the fantasy elements somewhat at odds with the science fiction. At its strongest it was a clever and creative look at the idea of legacy and artistic influence/inspiration and the ways influence moves out from people in multiple directions which sometimes recross. (I did make a second pass through the book to draw a crazy chart of the connections and caught a couple that I hadn't on my first read. Also a timeline of the events of one particular time period. It was that kind of book.)

Spoilers below! ( Read more... )

The West Passage, Jared Pechaček, 2024 novel. I went through a few phases reading this - an early phase of "holy shit this is brilliant", a later phase of "hm, but there's rather a lot of it", and then a final phase of "... huh". Considered as a whole I think I come down on the side of it being awesome, but it's not a fast read. It's the kind of book that works well having no idea what you're getting into, but I know that's not much to go on, so, uh, a little triangulation: Piranesi, Tombs of Atuan, Dark Is Rising, Neverending Story, Kameron Hurley's The Stars Are Legion. Also I'm sorry I didn't get my library hold until after Hugo nominations; I would have loved to nominate it for Best Novel and Pechaček for Astounding. I did go change my Locus vote for Best First Novel at least. Oh, here is one other potentially useful piece of information, there are illustrations/decorative chapter headings, and they're neat and relevant, so this is maybe one not to do as an audiobook.

Some big-ish spoilers: ( Read more... )

The Deep Dark, Molly Knox Ostertag, 2024 YA graphic novel. I was hooked on this as soon as I picked it up and ended up reading it in one sitting once I got my hands on a library copy. A reunion with a childhood friend and a supernatural secret and a nicely-realized near Joshua Tree setting and a sweet F/F romance. I really enjoyed Ostertag's art - mostly black and white with some excellent use of spot color, switching to full color for flashbacks and similar purposes. One particular sequence was just - wow. The pacing and plot were all very well done too; Ostertag did some neat stuff to help us track the passage of time (ranging from setting the story around the winter holidays to showing time and day stamps on cellphones) and wove the various plot threads together in a really satisfying way. I'm definitely adding this to my Hugo Graphic ballot!