Occasionally Heated Discussion

Everything I\’ve read in 2020.  See 2018\’s list for explanations.

2020 Novels

• Paladin\’s Grace, T. Kingfisher
• Imaginary Numbers, Seanan McGuire
• The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin
• Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
• The Baron of Magister Valley, Steven Brust
• Network Effect, Martha Wells
• A Killing Frost, Seanan McGuire
• The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson
• The Relentless Moon, Mary Robinette Kowal*
• Sixteenth Watch, Myke Cole
• The Last Emperox, John Scalzi
• Seven Devils, Laura Lam

 2020 Novellas

• Finna, Nino Cipri

2020 Novelettes

• The Alaska Escape, K.B. Spangler

2020 Young Adult Novels

• A Wizard\’s Guide to Defensive Baking, T. Kingfisher
• Over the Woodward Wall, A. Deborah Baker
• Tristan Strong Destroys the World, Kwame Mbalia
• Ikenga, Nnedi Okorafor

2020 Nonfiction/Other

• The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), Katie Mack
• Beowulf: A New Translation, Maria Dahvana Headley
• Hexarchate Stories, Yoon Ha Lee

Non-2020 works read in 2020:

• Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, Kwame Mbalia
• The Armored Saint, Myke Cole
• Queen of Crows, Myke Cole
• The Killing Light, Myke Cole
• Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• The Lady\’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics, Olivia Waite
• Jade City, Fonda Lee
• Jade War, Fonda Lee
• Sandman Slim, Richard Kadrey
• The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
• The Collapsing Empire, John Scalzi
• The Consuming Fire, John Scalzi
• Stone Mad, Elizabeth Bear
• Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir (review)
• Magic for Liars, Sarah Gailey
• The City in the Middle of the Night, Charlie Jane Anders
• The Light Brigade, Kameron Hurley
• Amberlough, Lara Elena Donnelly
• Feed, Mira Grant
• The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow
• “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom”, Ted Chiang
• The Deep, Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes
• The Haunting of Tram Car 015, P. Djèlí Clark
• To Be Taught, If Fortunate, Becky Chambers
• “The Archronology of Love”, Caroline M. Yoachim
• “Away With the Wolves”, Sarah Gailey
• “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye”, Sarah Pinsker
• Emergency Skin, N.K. Jemisin
• “For He Can Creep”, Siobhan Carroll
• “Omphalos”, Ted Chiang
• “And Now His Lordship Is Laughing”, Shiv Ramdas
• “As the Last I May Know”, S.L. Huang
• “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger”, Rivers Solomon
• “A Catalog of Storms”, Fran Wilde
• “Do Not Look Back, My Lion”, Alix E. Harrow
• “Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island”, Nibedita Sen
• Deadline, Mira Grant
• Blackout, Mira Grant
• Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, Sarah Vowell
• Feedback, Mira Grant
• Rise, Mira Grant
• Witchmark, C.L. Polk
• The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson
• The Monster Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson
• The Dragon Stone Conspiracy, Amanda Cherry

We may be only a third of the way through 2019, but I\’d be surprised if anything manages to surpass Seanan McGuire\’s upcoming novel Middlegame as my favorite book of the year.

McGuire has said that it took her ten years of publishing novels to develop the skills she needed to write Middlegame.  I\’ve been reading her books for most of that time, and looking back I can see how she\’s been building up to this.  She has pulled together the best aspects of her various other series into one cohesive whole.  Middlegame has the intimate, emotional character arcs of her Wayward Children novellas, melded with the tight, edge-of-your-seat plotting of her Mira Grant books and the gradually epic scope of her Toby Daye series, grounded in the love of folklore and children\’s stories that runs through all of her work.

Honestly, if you like her other stories half as much as I do, \”Seanan leveled up\” is probably all you need to hear.  But there are so many things I love about this book, both in how it resonated with me and how well McGuire crafted it.  I\’m going to start by discussing some broad character elements and the first couple chapters (which are available on Tor.com), but I\’ll put a spoiler warning before I talk about anything past that.

Growing up as a \”gifted kid\”, I connected really strongly with Roger and Dodger\’s childhood experiences.  The alienation from their peers, the strange cocktail of pride and concern from their parents, the incomplete solace of long-distance friendships – all of it felt familiar to me.  (And as someone who can grasp mathematical concepts at an intuitive level, but who finds language to be filled with bewildering and terrifying ambiguities, Dodger in particular is dear to me.  I have very rarely felt so seen.)  The way the characters stumble through building a connection with each other resonated with me, too. McGuire deftly and compassionately portrays their vulnerability and their shared, aching need to be understood – and the defensiveness they sometimes adopt in response.

Middlegame\’s plot is no less compelling than its characters.  One of McGuire\’s strongest skills as an author is grabbing the reader\’s attention right from the first page, and never letting go.  Middlegame starts with \”Book VII: The End\”, containing a single chapter entitled \”Failure\”, taking place \”five minutes too late, thirty seconds from the end of the world\”.  Before we even read the first line of prose, we\’re already feeling both curiosity and tension.

Then the first line is \”There is so much blood\”, in case you had any doubt that this is a Seanan McGuire book.

The first chapter only lasts two pages, but McGuire makes the most of them.  By the end, she\’s already established the plot\’s stakes, given us a brief and tantalizing glimpse of the twin protagonists and their particular talents, and hinted at a few of the story\’s fantastical elements.  Then we rewind – not to \”Book I\”, but \”Book 0\”, over a hundred years prior, where McGuire anchors the other end of her plot with another short chapter, \”Genesis\”.  In both chapters, she has crafted the exposition with precision: she dangles just enough information for us to have all these things to wonder about, but not enough to have a solid idea of what any of it means.  We\’re left with a pile of questions and the promise of answers to come – a promise which the book more than delivers on.

And here\’s where I put a spoiler warning – there\’s one particular element of the story that I want to discuss in a bit more detail, but it goes beyond the first few chapters.

Ready?

Okay, so it\’s pretty clear early on that the first \”Failure\” chapter is a future that can be avoided.  Roger and Dodger are definitely older in that than they are when we next meet them as young children.  The same chapter recurs a few more times across the book, each time with subtle differences, and we realize that Roger and Dodger are somehow rewinding their timeline in order to avoid that failure, like reloading a save file in a video game to avoid the bad ending.  Despite my default suspicion towards time-travel stories failing to address paradox effectively, I find it a pretty cool plot device when used well – I\’ve also seen it deployed (with a very different feel) in the webcomic Skin Horse, and enjoyed it there too.  In this case, the text of each failure chapter is almost identical, but the small changes from one to the next show us that Roger and Dodger are slowly pushing this event towards a better conclusion.

But that\’s not all McGuire does with the repetition of that scene.  The initial scene left us with a lot of questions, but on every subsequent iteration, we have a little bit more sense of what\’s going on, and we\’re also reminded of the things that we still don\’t understand.  That feeling of grasping something that previously eluded you is gratifying, like stepping back from a puzzle you\’re solving and seeing a new element of the picture come into focus. It\’s one of the many things that I enjoy most about reading science fiction and fantasy, and it\’s one of the many things I loved about this book.  And if you\’re the sort of reader that enjoys rereading stories multiple times to pick up all the little bits of foreshadowing and nuance that you missed your first time through, I think you\’ll find Middlegame to be particularly rewarding in that sense as well.

Middlegame comes out tomorrow, May 7th, 2019.

Starting writing this a little later than usual.  See 2018\’s list for explanations.

2019 Novels

• ☆ Middlegame, Seanan McGuire
• ☆ The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon
• ☆ A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine
• ☆ The Sol Majestic, Ferrett Steinmetz
• ☆ Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia*
• That Ain\’t Witchcraft, Seanan McGuire
• The Unkindest Tide, Seanan McGuire
• Empress of Forever, Max Gladstone
• The Lady\’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics, Olivia Waite*

2019 Novellas

• In an Absent Dream, Seanan McGuire
• In the Shadow of Spindrift House, Mira Grant
• Minor Mage, T. Kingfisher
• This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
• The Killing Light, Myke Cole*

2019 Novelettes

• The Dinosaur Heist, K.B. Spangler (unsure of word count)

2019 Graphic Stories

• TODO

2019 YA Novels (for Lodestar Award)

• Dragon Pearl, Yoon Ha Lee
• Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, Kwame Mbalia*

Non-2019 works read in 2019:

• Life Debt: Aftermath, Chuck Wendig
• Empire\’s End: Aftermath, Chuck Wendig
• Ardulum: First Don, J.S. Fields
• Radiance, Catherynne M. Valente
• The Monster Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson
• In the Labyrinth of Drakes, Marie Brennan
• Within the Sanctuary of Wings, Marie Brennan
• The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal
• The Fated Sky, Mary Robinette Kowal
• The Tea Master and the Detective, Aliette de Bodard
• All of Seanan McGuire\’s \”Incryptid\” short stories published to date
• An Unkindness of Magicians, Kat Howard
• Record of a Spaceborn Few, Becky Chambers
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling
• The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
• The Sea of Monsters, Rick Riordan
• The Lost Hero, Rick Riordan
• The Son of Neptune, Rick Riordan
• The Mark of Athena, Rick Riordan
• The House of Hades, Rick Riordan
• The Blood of Olympus, Rick Riordan
• The Titan\’s Curse, Rick Riordan
• The Battle of the Labyrinth, Rick Riordan
• The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks
• The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
• Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks
• Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold
• \”Aftermaths\”, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Indexing, Seanan McGuire
• Indexing: Reflections, Seanan McGuire
• All Systems Red, Martha Wells
• Artificial Condition, Martha Wells
• Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells
• Exit Strategy, Martha Wells
• The Warrior\’s Apprentice, Lois McMaster Bujold
• The Vor Game, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Cetaganda, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Ethan of Athos, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Labyrinth, Lois McMaster Bujold
• The Borders of Infinity, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Brothers in Arms, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Memory, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Komarr, Lois McMaster Bujold
• A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Winterfair Gifts, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Diplomatic Immunity, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Captain Vorpatril\’s Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, Lois McMaster Bujold
• The Last Olympian, Rick Riordan

When I was a kid, October was my favorite month.

It started, every year, with anticipation for my birthday - I\’d go from \”my birthday\’s next month\” on September 30th to \”it\’s almost here!\” on October 1st.  The lovely two-week stretch of beautiful fall weather that signaled the transition from Michigan\’s suffocating, humid summers to face-achingly cold winters usually fell in early October.  Then, with my birthday party behind me and the last of the leftover cake eaten, October would slide smoothly into the Halloween season, with just enough time for me to make a costume and plan a trick-or-treating route and maybe carve a pumpkin at some point.  And even thirty years ago, Halloween was the gateway to the holiday season; we could spot Christmas looming over the horizon before we\’d even gotten halfway through our candy.

But at some point, it became easier to buy things for myself, and the raw, materialistic glee of birthday presents and free candy began to fade; birthdays became a yearly memento mori and Halloween became a bulwark defying Christmas\’s constant encroachment.  At some point, I moved to Seattle, where the beautiful fall days belong to September, while October is the beginning of six months\’ worth of near-daily rain.  At some point, October became a biannual whirlwind of political garbage, as campaign ads and Facebook arguments raise to fever pitch and democracy seems to be crumbling in real time.

At some point, my mom died, just a couple hours into October.

She was 47.  She should have been at my wedding, the following year.  She should have met her grandchildren.  She should still be here, lively and full of love.  She should have had decades more time.

Ten years later, it seems like the worst October yet.  We\’re bogged down in one fight for our lives after another, against a constant stream of horrible people who have given up any pretension of acting in anyone\’s interests beyond their own.  We tell ourselves stories of justice, of the eventual yet inevitable victory of good if we just fight hard enough, of clear evidence of wrongdoing being enough to ensure that consequences actually ever happen.

But October taught me that justice is a lie.  It\’s a fairy tale with no impact on reality.  There\’s no inherent moral sense to be made of a world where someone like my mom dies at 47 but Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell survive into their 70s.

I miss being a child, sometimes; I miss the comforting lies I used to believe about how the world made sense, how good would win eventually, how my mom would always be there for me.  Thirty-five Octobers have stripped all that away.

This year\’s Hugo finalists for Best Short Story are a wide-ranging batch of stories, ranging from light-hearted and humorous to depressing and angry, but I enjoyed all six of them to various degrees. In order, starting from my top choice on the ballot:

1. \”Fandom for Robots\”, Vina Jie-Min Prasad

2017 seems to be a wonderful year for delightfully relatable, socially awkward machine intelligences.  \”Fandom for Robots\” is the story of Computron, a robot – the only sentient robot ever built, in fact – who is a fan of Hyperdimension Warp Record, an anime show streaming episodes once a week.  In two paragraphs (and a third consisting of a single sentence), Vina Jie-Min Prasad cuts to the core of that slightly obsessive (and only just a little alienating) feeling of fandom that so many of us are familiar with.  The story then rewinds a little to show us Computron\’s discovery of the show, prompted by an enthusiastic teenage girl who suggests (at a public Q&A session at the museum where he is an exhibit) that he might enjoy the show since he resembles one of the characters.

Then Computron runs out of episodes.  Then Computron discovers fanfiction.

\”Fandom for Robots\” is a love letter to fandom of all kinds, and the way that people who feel isolated from \”normal\” human society can find comfort and friendship within it.  The story might come across to some people as a little pandering, particularly as a finalist for a fan-voted award, but the way Computron\’s fandom and friendships develop is just so well-written, with sincere joy and love for the community.

2. \”Sun, Moon, Dust\”, Ursula Vernon

The archetype of the crotchety, wise old grandmother with no patience for anyone else\’s nonsense – particularly from her own family – may well be one of Ursula Vernon\’s favorites to write.  It\’s certainly one of my favorite categories of her characters to read.  Though in this case, the grandma manages to avoid stealing the show by dying in the first scene, and her poor potato-farmer grandson, Allpa, is left with a magic sword and no notion of what to do with it.

Reluctant, well-meaning but slightly confused heroes might be another of my favorite Vernon archetypes, come to think of it.  And then there are occasional digressions into potato varietals, and spirits whose expectations about the hero are immediately turned on their head, and goats that think they\’re far more clever than they actually are…

Basically, \”Sun, Moon, Dust\” is another classic Ursula Vernon story.  If you\’re familiar with her other work and you liked it, you\’ll enjoy this too.  If you aren\’t familiar with her other work, this is a great introduction to her distinctive and entertaining style of writing.  If you\’re familiar with her work and didn\’t like it… well, our tastes are probably different enough that you should take the rest of my recommendations with a grain of salt.

3. \”Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experienceâ„¢\”, Rebecca Roanhorse

Roanhorse\’s story discusses the tragedy of modern American Indian culture in a white-dominated society.  Jesse is a guide at a business offering virtual-reality experiences of Indian life to predominantly white tourists.  He and his coworkers package up and sell a sanitized version of their own culture, hamming up their exoticism because it\’s what their white customers expect.  They speak to their customers in broken English and adopt different names when their own names aren\’t Indian-sounding enough (Jesse Turnblatt goes by \”Jesse Trueblood\” at work).  Jesse is uncomfortable with his job and his boss\’s increasingly stereotypical ideas for experiences, but is afraid to speak up because he needs the job.

The whole situation is less an allegory than simply a fictionalized example of the problem Roanhorse writes about – indigenous people forced to cheapen their own culture and sell it to whites because the alternative is poverty and starvation.

But then a more thoughtful-seeming white man shows up, clearly dissatisfied with the cartoon-Indian experience Jesse\’s company typically offers tourists, and engages Jesse in discussion outside of work.  He just wants to know more, he says.  Get to know an actual person, not the \”How\”-saying caricature Jesse typically portrays.  They talk over drinks, multiple times, and Jesse thinks he\’s made a friend.  But here\’s where the more allegorical part of the story comes in, as his new friend insinuates himself into Jesse\’s life and starts to replace him both at work and at home, while provoking Jesse\’s own behavior to degrade into the worst stereotypes of modern-day Indians

\”Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experienceâ„¢\” is a cautionary tale for the marginalized cultures exploited by white European society, about the dangers of participating in the commoditization of your own culture for consumption by others.  Coming to it as a white reader, the story has another message as well: look what you have done to us, Roanhorse says.  Look what you continue to do, every time you appropriate someone else\’s culture for your own amusement.  Look at the lives your people have destroyed.

I suspect a lot of white American readers are going to feel attacked by this story.  Rather than getting defensive about it, I hope at least some of us can reexamine our own relationship with indigenous cultures and others that America has marginalized if not outright destroyed, and think about ways we can do better.

4. \”Carnival Nine\”, Caroline M. Yoachim

A gentle, bittersweet story about clockwork folk, measuring out their lives in the house of their maker by the turns of their mainsprings.  We follow Zee through her entire life, starting from early childhood.  Zee is blessed by the maker with a mainspring that can hold more turns of her winding key than most people, so she is naturally full of energy and inclined towards adventure and exploration; this spirit leads her to the nomadic life of the carnival, and to Vale, a carny boy she meets there.  Zee and Vale build a son together, leaving the new body on the maker\’s workbench for the installation of a mainspring, but in the morning they discover that their son, Mattan, has a particularly weak spring, only capable of a handful of turns.

Like many of Yoachim\’s stories, \”Carnival Nine\” has a folk-tale feel to it – it\’s written simply and conversationally, but still touches upon some profound concepts of human emotion. Here Yoachim addresses with her usual empathy the difficulties and sacrifices of raising a disabled child, including the tension it introduces into the parents\’ relationship and the totality with which it can consume the parents\’ lives and identities.

5. \”Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand\”, Fran Wilde

A bizarre story, deliberately disorienting from the beginning.  The narrator is a guide through some sort of museum of curiosities or circus sideshow which you, the reader, are visiting.  But the narrator is also part of the museum herself, and the reader is also somehow involved with – possibly even responsible for – some of the things on display.

As the tour goes on, the narrator\’s running tour-guide patter grows more pointed and even a little hostile towards the reader.  I expected the story to be drawing to some kind of a twist or a reversal to contextualize the menagerie of weirdness on display – but ultimately, both within the text and as a reader of it, I was escorted to the end of the story and then unceremoniously booted out of the exit.  I\’m still not sure how I feel about it, but it sure was an experience.

6. \”The Martian Obelisk\”, Linda Nagata

After catastrophic climate change, and diseases, and wars, humanity is in decline.  Susannah Li-Langford has been remotely controlling equipment from an abandoned mission to Mars to build a massive cenotaph for the human race.  She\’s lost her husband, her children, everything in her life except for this one last effort to build an obelisk on Mars, an effort which has consumed her life for the last seventeen years.

Then a vehicle from another Martian settlement – thought dead and abandoned for nearly a year – shows up at the building site.  Has an AI gone rogue, or has someone on Earth taken control of the other settlement\’s vehicles?  Is the Obelisk project at risk?

\”The Martian Obelisk\” is a pretty depressing and pessimistic story, but it does suggest that even in humanity\’s bleakest moments, life can continue and there is still some hope for an eventual better future.  However, I found the means by which the story drives this point home somewhat trite and implausible; I felt it undermined the story\’s hopeful message with its reliance on a convenient coincidence of timing.

Unlike my reviews of the Hugo finalist novels and novellas, the Novelette category has works short enough that I think I can address them all in a single post – but it\’ll be a slightly longer one than usual.  That does also allow me to put them in order of my preference on the ballot, though.  So, starting from the top and working downwards…

1. \”Extracurricular Activities\”, Yoon Ha Lee

Years before Shuos Jedao massacred both the enemy and his own troops at Hellspin Fortress, and four centuries before the events of Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem, he was a commander in the Kel military.  As the story starts, he\’d already gained a mostly-deserved reputation for both infantry tactics and special operations.  He\’s assigned to an covert mission outside the heptarchate, in a neighboring real called the Gwa Reality, where he is to rescue a former classmate of his who had been in place as a spy – and who has apparently gotten into some trouble.

While the Machineries of Empire books have included occasional bits of Shuos Jedao\’s past, I\’m always up for more – he reminds me of Miles Vorkosigan in his brilliant, unconventional problem-solving abilities and also his generally brash attitude.  (He\’s not quite as good at talking his way out of situations as Miles was, but with assassin-level unarmed-combat abilities in his toolbox, he hasn\’t needed to be.)  And the Gwa Reality reminds me just a tiny bit of Cetaganda as well, with their obsession with poetry and aesthetics and their penchant for genetically engineered viruses as a weapon.

\”Extracurricular Activities\” has a wry sense of humor and an entertaining spy plot, with a few twists to keep Jedao and the reader alike on our toes.  And taking place as it does before the main trilogy, I think it\’s mostly accessible to new readers as well; though the author uses faction names (Kel, Shuos, Andan) as shorthand for certain traits, they\’re either understandable from context or not crucial to the story.

2. \”Wind Will Rove\”, Sarah Pinsker

Rosie is a middle-aged history teacher and fiddler aboard a generation ship.  She tries to connect folktales (such as the story of her grandmother playing fiddle on a spacewalk) with old Earth history, which is made particularly challenging by the Blackout, a massive data-loss incident earlier in the ship\’s own history.  She sees herself as a bridge in the ship\’s history, a conduit to old Earth history, trying to connect her memories of her grandmother (who was among the original passengers who left Earth) to the present and the future of her community.  Rosie contends with a minor rebellion in her class, led by a student insistent that learning history is pointless, as well as with memories of her own mother and others who rejected history in various ways.

\”Wind Will Rove\” is a meditation on history and the way our understanding of it changes over time and generations.  Using as an allegorical standin the evolving, branching lineage of a folk song – the lost original, \”Windy Grove\”, its offshoots \”Wind Will Rove\”, \”Wendigo\”, \”When I Go\”, and later interpretations like the hip-hop remix \”Wild Will Roam\” – Pinsker contemplates the meaning of history and the way each generation understands it anew.  The themes of the story will feel very familiar to anyone who\’s spent time thinking about the musical Hamilton and how it fits into the dialogue of American history, as a reinterpretation of past events in a modern context that makes them more accessible while simultaneously (and, in my opinion, unavoidably) eliding parts of them that don\’t fit into the narrative for various reasons.

This is the second story of Pinsker\’s that I\’ve read for the Hugo ballot this year, and while my sample size is tiny so far, I\’m definitely getting a sense that the ambiguous, open-ended conclusion is a distinctive aspect of her style of writing.  In both cases, she\’s ended the story at a pause from which it could proceed in any number of directions, and suggesting to the reader several possible ways the story could continue without dictating any of them with certainty.

3. \”The Secret Life of Bots\”, Suzanne Palmer

This was one of the novelettes on my nominating ballot (and in fact the only one to make it on to the final ballot).  I still like it quite a bit!  It\’s the story of a bot aboard a spaceship assigned to investigate a biological infestation.  9 is the oldest bot on the ship, and a little unusual by the standards of its younger comrades, but its different perspective and multipurpose functionality enables it to employ some unique problem-solving in addressing the intruder.

\”The Secret Life of Bots\” is filled with gentle humor as well as a dose of adventure and a variety of mostly sympathetic bots.  It\’s a cute story, and it succeeds at portraying the bots\’ perspective as an interesting counterpoint to our more usual human outlook; the places where the human and bot approaches to the problem come into conflict are particularly rich sources of both humor and drama.

4. \”A Series of Steaks\”, Vina Jie-Min Prasad

The story is set in an ambiguously near future where 3-D printing of biological matter is possible.  Extruded food is perfectly edible, but many people still care that their fancy beef comes from an actual cow.  Helena Li Yuanhui produces counterfeit meat to try to earn enough money to escape her life and past misfortune.  Then, someone who knows her past blackmails her into taking on an impossible job…

The unmarked transitions between the main story and the handful of flashbacks detailing Helena\’s backstory were a little confusing, but those flashbacks also helped to establish setting and background with a minimum of expository narration.  \”A Series of Steaks\” was a fun, quick story, with sympathetic characters and a satisfying ending.

5. \”Children of Thorns, Children of Water\”, Aliette de Bodard

I have been curious about Aliette de Bodard\’s Dominion of the Fallen series for a while, but for whatever reason never got around to reading House of Shattered Wings, the first novel in the series.  So unlike some readers, I went into this story – set between the first and second novels – completely new to the world.  This made the opening scenes a little disorienting, but the author did an excellent drop of dropping just enough bits of detail and explanation here and there that I was able to piece together the context in which the story took place.

The meaning of the story itself, on the other hand, I feel like I don\’t entirely get.  At the surface level the plot was relatively straightforward – Hawthorn House is testing servants to hire (and potential future members of the House), and a couple members of a rival faction intend to take the opportunity to infiltrate the House.  But beyond that, there seemed to be a lot of important details of politics and the meaning of the House within which the story takes place, and while I could tell they were there I couldn\’t really make much sense of them on their own..  The conclusion of the story looked to me to be primarily about setting up the main character for future plot complications.  Overall, while I am definitely intrigued (and will probably be picking up House of Shattered Wings soon), this story just didn\’t do much for me as a standalone novelette.

6. Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time\”, K.M. Szpara

This novelette juxtaposes the concept of vampirism with life as a transgender individual.  Unlike in many vampire stories, here the vampires are known to exist and live more or less openly in society, but with their behavior strictly regulated and often relegated to the corners of society all the same.  This slightly unusual approach to the setting enables discussion of transgenderism on multiple levels.  It\’s not that the medical establishment doesn\’t know vampires exist, for example, but rather that vampirism is a complication to normal medical issues, and one that most doctors will not address, being unqualified to do so, or unwilling to even bother, or both.  Thus also with being transgender.  The bureaucratic issues and society\’s general distrust compounds more fundamental issues of feeling betrayed by one\’s own body and struggling to gain any control over it.

Unfortunately, the story\’s approach to feeling a lack of agency included multiple scenes of actual violations of bodily autonomy, which seemed to get smoothed over far more easily than I felt was warranted.  Perhaps there\’s some additional aspect to the story\’s subject matter that I\’m missing here, but the shrug-and-move-on approach to those violations left a bad taste in my mouth.

Raven Stratagem is the second book in Yoon Ha Lee\’s excellent \”Machineries of Empire\” series.  The first book, Ninefox Gambit, was nominated for the Hugo last year, and I put it at the top of my ballot.  I admired Lee\’s inventive science-fiction mechanics – the \”exotic effects\” enabled by the particular configuration of the local calendar, as well as by the positional formation of troops in battle – as well as the use of game design and its pedagogical capabilities as a plot point, and the sympathetic protagonist and her mathematical genius…

The first book did a lot of worldbuilding, about not only the mathematically-driven nature of the world but also the political intrigue proceeding in the background; the second book takes all that setup and runs with it.  Ninefox Gambit\’s core theme of the hard choices made in war is carried through, of course, but Raven Stratagem dares to contemplate the possibility of another way – if not peace, then at least a world in which war isn\’t quite so terrible.

Raven Stratagem also expands the core cast of characters beyond Kel Cheris, the protagonist of the first book, and Shuos Jedao, the brilliant yet insane ghost that had been attached to her.  The narrative of Ninefox Gambit frequently made brief visits to other viewpoints to provide context or show something that Cheris and Jedao could not have directly observed.  Raven Stratagem is built almost entirely around other viewpoints, and while Cheris/Jedao still acts as the central figure in the story, we get very little time inside their shared head for most of the story.  I recognize that it was an extremely effective choice for the story, but nevertheless, this was probably my least favorite aspect of the book – I really enjoyed seeing how Cheris and Jedao thought about things in Ninefox Gambit.

On the other hand, the new characters we get in exchange are nearly as good.  Kel Brezan has a unique perspective on the Kel by virtue of his ability to resist orders from his superiors, something that most of the Kel are conditioned to be literally unable to do.  Kel Khiruev\’s conditioning is working as intended, but she faces her own set of moral quandaries and trust issues in figuring out how to serve under a person she knows only as a traitor and a madman.  Shuos Mikodez, the hexarch of the Shuos faction, is an oddly warm character for all of his merciless plotting.

Ninefox Gambit grabbed my attention in part with its flashy, weird concepts of technology.  Possibly it\’s because I was already familiar with it, but Raven Stratagem seems to calm down on that front a little bit, focusing a lot more on the relationships between the characters and the conflicts they create as they each pursue their own goals.  It\’s a more mature story in that way, and ultimately a more engaging one, particularly as it\’s easy to see two characters come into conflict and still sympathize with both of them.  There are very few places where there\’s an obvious right side and wrong side to a fight, and seeing the characters grapple with that concept as well makes for thoughtful and occasionally challenging reading.

As with the first book in the series, Raven Stratagem ends up at the top of my Hugo ballot this year.  It\’s a tough field, and I think a good argument could be made for any of the six nominees being the most deserving of the rocket, but I really do hope that Yoon Ha Lee gets some more recognition for the richly detailed and thought-provoking series he\’s put together.  (And if not this year, well, I suspect we\’ll be seeing the concluding volume Revenant Gun on the ballot next year as well…)

My final Best Novel ballot:

1. Raven Stratagem, Yoon Ha Lee
2. Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty​
3. The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin
4. Provenance, Ann Leckie
5. New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson
6. The Collapsing Empire, John Scalzi

The Collapsing Empire is the first book of John Scalzi\’s new Interdependency trilogy.  The titular Interdependency is another space monarchy in the tradition of Barrayar and Manticore, an empire of factions held together by political bonds and mutually assured disadvantage.  The Interdependency is a particularly mercantile empire, in which trading guilds wield most of the power, and humanity\’s prosperity is possible thanks to the Flow, the unidirectional hyperspace/wormhole phenomenon that serves to enable faster-than-light travel in this particular universe, and allows the various human settlements to trade their various life-sustaining goods with each other.

The problem, discovered by a physicist who was also a friend of the recently deceased Emperox of the Interdependency, is that the Flow is about to start shifting and falling apart, marooning each of humanity\’s settlements in turn and eventually leaving every habitation on its own for survival.  The newly crowned Emperox, Cardenia, is already having trouble consolidating her power, and also grappling with the ethical uses of that power.  The physicist\’s protege needs to reach Cardenia to present the evidence of the imminent end of the Interdependency, but since travel through the Flow by its nature makes direct point-to-point travel difficult, they have to deal with multiple petty fiefdoms of various types in the process of getting there.

The Collapsing Empire was an entertaining read, and I\’m definitely looking forward to the other two books in the trilogy; it has that Scalzi nature of being light, easily-digestible reading that nevertheless gives you a lot to think about if you\’re willing to spend the time.  It\’s not a challenging work, nor is it meant to be.  But it\’s a worthy entry in the tradition of space-opera page-turners.

My Best Novel ballot so far:

1. Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty
2. The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin
3. Provenance, Ann Leckie
4. New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson
5. The Collapsing Empire, John Scalzi

Mur Lafferty\’s novel Six Wakes opens with one of the main characters waking up in the cloning bay of a spaceship, surrounded by corpses – including her own, which appears to have aged multiple decades since her most recent memory.

(I feel like that hook, plus the assurance that the author successfully delivers on the premise, is really all I need to say to recommend the book.  It certainly grabbed my attention from the beginning.  But I will continue on anyway…)

The other five crew members wake up shortly thereafter, and they soon come to realize that they need to solve their own murders in order to feel confident that they\’re not about to be killed again.  This is complicated by multiple factors, of course.  The rest of the crew is also missing decades of memories, so none of them remember each other, or have any reason to trust each other, either.  The AI piloting the ship has been disabled, and the ship is off course.  And, as the crew members start to compare notes, they start to realize commonalities and overlaps in their lives prior to the voyage.

The narrative aboard the ship is interspersed with flashbacks providing some details about each of the crew\’s histories, as well as background about the social and political ramifications of cloning.  It would be an understatement to say that humanity as a whole did not handle the emergence of that particular technology very well, and the resulting upheaval is a crucial part of the story\’s background.  The reader gets to piece together the complete history of the crew, and of human society as a whole, from the bits and pieces we get from each character\’s flashback, and I found it to be a rewarding and entertaining experience.

Six Wakes is a wonderful example of the kind of storytelling that science fiction as a genre is capable of.  Mur Lafferty skillfully imagines the social strife around the development of cloning, and its microcosmic strife among the crew, and while the technological aspects of her imagined future are fascinating, it is the human reaction to it that makes a great idea into a fantastic story.

My Hugo ballot so far:

1. Six Wakes, Mur ​Lafferty
2. The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin
3. Provenance, Ann Leckie
4. New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson

You know that bit in Hamilton where the characters take a moment to exult in the unique glory of New York City as both an exemplar and a template for urban life?  That same Big Apple swagger can be applied to speculations of future history just as easily as reinterpretations of past history.

Kim Stanley Robinson\’s New York 2140 is a classic near-future science-fiction novel, postulating humanity\’s failure to adequately respond to the threat of global climate change and the resultant chaos and upheaval that ensue when all of Earth\’s coastal cities are flooded by rising sea levels.  The story of that upheaval would be interesting, of course, but Robinson sets the story multiple decades after the latest major change, instead looking at what the \”new normal\” might be in a New York City where most of what we currently consider to be prime Manhattan real estate has become an intertidal zone.

Robinson looks at this new world through multiple lenses via multiple viewpoint characters.  Our cast of characters includes multiple people from different segments of the financial industry, an NYPD inspector, a pair of treasure-seeking street urchins, an airship-piloting nature-adventurer YouTube star, a building superintendent, and an unnamed \”citizen\” whose function falls somewhere between expository historian and opinionated rambler.  The picture the author paints of the 22nd century is, accordingly, well thought out from multiple angles; while parts of the story are more or less a paean to the glories of New York City, others are completely unflinching in their analysis of how our present social and political systems have failed us.  As he did in his Mars trilogy, Robinson brings together a dizzying array of disciplines in imagining the world of 2140 – economics and finance, geology and hydrology, engineering and architecture, history and cartography, political science and sociology – and the result is a well-rounded, convincingly speculative narrative of where the next century-plus is going to take us if we don\’t get our metaphorical shit together.  The conclusion is a little more optimistic than I felt was warranted based on the rest of the story, and Robinson\’s usual extrapolation of complex situations seemed to be eliding a few factors in order to bring the story to a satisfying end, but it\’s also possible optimism just feels a little naive to me lately.  Nevertheless, like all good science fiction, New York 2140 offers a lot of insight into the present day.

My Hugo ballot so far:

1. The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin​
2. Provenance, Ann Leckie
3. New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson