I read a lot of fiction. 99% of it is Science Fiction and/or Fantasy. I’m not great at reviewing stuff, but maybe some of these will be useful for you. I should probably just go and post these all as reviews on Goodreads or whatever, but not today. Today you get a big ass blog post you didn’t ask for with some of the books I’ve read in the last year or so.
T. Kingfisher – What Moves the Dead
A novella that examines “The Fall of the House of Usher” through the lens of this tumblr post:
The story has wonderful gender fuckery, a terrifying “antagonist”, and overall just scores 10/10 on the Poe vibes scale.
Mary Robinette Kowal – Shades of Milk and Honey
Jane Austen but add a dash of magic. Honestly, the brilliantly realized “glamour” magic system isn’t even the most fantastical element of the story; that would be the fact that a woman in the 18th century had any hope of personal fulfillment in her creative endeavours while simultaneously also finding a loving husband who encouraged said endeavours.
It’s a wonderful story that perfectly nails the tone of the source material while giving us quite a bit more insight into our heroine’s mind. It was a breeze to read and I’ve got the next few books in the series queued up already.
T. Kingfisher – Nettle and Bone
I was hesitant to start this, having heard it described as “Dark Fairytale Fantasy”. For some reason that made me expect, well, misery, suffering, etc. I guess I missed the word “fairytale” because that’s definitely the dominant note here.
This book is absolutely wonderful. Personally, for me, it was the inventiveness and the generosity of weird ideas just tossed out and moved on from that anyone could have reasonably based a whole book on. Whenever there was an obvious trope that could have served, Kingfisher reaches deeper and finds something more startling, amazing, suggestive of an incredibly rich world.
And to address my initial hesitation: yes, the book starts in a very dark and miserable place: a girl piecing together the bones of a dog to… re-animate it? I guess? But we very quickly move on to why she’s here, the wonderful quest she’s on, and then the rest of the book is just her meeting wonderful character after wonderful character, going up against impossible odds, and maybe possibly (spoiler?) finding love? It’s so good.
Please read this. It’s wonderful.
Skyler White, Steven Brust — The Incrementalists
Did not finish this one. The setup sounds fascinating: an ancient conspiracy of people who are effectively immortal by continuously downloading their memories and personality into new people when they die, and their mission is to make the world just a little bit better. This sounds like just the kind of thing I love normally, but somehow the book managed to be both more outlandish and more boring than I expected. Might give this another chance at some point, but I gave up about 2 hours into the audiobook.
Michael Chabon — The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel
Yeah, I’m late to this one. I’ve been aware of it since it won the Nebula, the Locus Award, and the Hugo in the same year. Deservedly! But for some reason I never got around to it until last year.
And god, what a book! It surely helps that in between this book having been written and me reading it I converted to Judaism, and I enjoyed understanding like half the in-jokes.
But most of all, this is just a damn good noir detective story, and I can’t believe I’ve not read another book that combines the fatalism, downtroddenness, and sarcastic acceptance of the noir detective with the fatalism, downtroddenness, and sarcastic acceptance of Judaism. It’s a perfect fit. It’s a great whodunit, featuring an archetypical detective for the ages, and a compelling alternate reality where Israel was snuffed out in ’48 and instead a bunch of Jews were given land in Alaska (an actual plan that had actually been under consideration at one point). The oppressive cold also fits the overall mood perfectly.
Don’t think this is a sour, bitter, sad book. It’s funny as all fuck, as good Jewish fiction should be, and it moves at a great pace. Highly recommended.
Travis Baldree — Legends & Lattes
I’d been promised a warm hug of a book and that’s precisely what I got. An orc (we’re sidestepping The Unbearable Baggage of Orcing completely here, and I’m not the person who should dig into this further than to point out that Jemisin’s seminal treatise exists and you should read it if you haven’t) Barbarian adventurer decides to retire and open a coffee shop in a city where no one’s heard of coffee.
The book is chock full of odd and lovable curmudgeons who come together to create this wonderful found family. Conflicts are exclusively solved through kindness and communication, and there’s of course a wonderful happy ending.
Travis Baldree — Bookshops & Bonedust
The prequel to the above, similarly cozy and warm, but with slightly more of an edge of violent conflict and our protagonist being the odd woman out. Not 100% sure this was necessary as it’s basically in many ways a retread of the themes of the first book, but I loved the fuck out of it, and it hyper-targets bookworms like me with its charming but crumbling bookshop kept open mostly through absolute love and spite.
Greg Egan — Orthogonal Trilogy
Oh boy, this one’s a doozy. The trilogy consists of the books “The Clockwork Rocket”, “The Eternal Flame”, and “The Arrows of Time”. Egan writes stupidly hard, scientific science fiction. How scientifically plausible this whole thing is I won’t even dare to venture a guess; the basic math necessary to understand the even the simplest version of how this world is different from ours is beyond me.
It’s an incredibly fun read from a wordbuilding perspective, and I was able to take most of the in-depth physics and mathematics discussions in stride, understanding just enough that I was able to venture a guess occasionally regarding where the narrative was heading. Unfortunately it’s not only a world with entirely different physical laws, it’s also a world of people just now discovering these laws and being uncertain about them. What was identical to our world and what was different, and in which ways, went way over my head.
And there are very long sections where nothing much happens except some scientists excitedly chatting with each other about this or that theory and how it does or doesn’t explain experimental results.
The third book goes into time travel and that’s where it really lost me. It seems to subscribe to some sort of inevitability / the universe finds a way version of time travel (and most of the time travel save a bit at the end is very much of the “sending information backwards in time” variety). There was a lot of head scratching and “I guess so”, as I was now so thoroughly out of my depths that I could only shrug and take Egan’s word for it.
That said, I still had a great time with the books. Never read anything quite like them.
Elizabeth Kostova — The Historian
A sumptuous globetrotting paean to academia and love.
Sometimes when you read a book’s summary you get an image in your mind of what kind of experience you will have reading the book. Rarely is that image correct. But for me, in this case, I got exactly what I hoped for. A sprawling epistolary novel spanning decades, jumping from astonishing location to astonishing location, visiting various parts of Eastern Europe and Turkey at various points in time.
This is a novel about the researchers tracking the great Dragon. The famous antagonist himself is barely in the book, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Eccentric academics, proto-Soviet apparatchiks, and in a welcome breath of “Dan Brown but smart and well written”, a certain ancient society. The book introduces these things very slowly and leisurely.
Most of all, there’s an atmospheres, a vibe as the kids would say, that slowly envelops you as you read this.
Quick note on the narration: splitting narrating duties between a male and a female narrator works extremely well. The man narrates mostly letters written by men and the woman handles the rest. Characters are recognizable and consistent between the two narrators and they both do an amazing job upholding the same academic gravitas that makes the text so delicious.
Absolutely, highly recommended. Lose yourself in this for a few weeks.
Alistair Reynolds — Eversion
What a voyage. What to say so as not to spoil this excellent novel. It is at once exactly what you think it is–a doomed voyage of men going beyond what they can understand–and an intricate puzzle box of structure and plot.
Charles Stross — Season of Skulls
Surely God knows how many novels into the extended laundry verse, Stross couldn’t keep getting better? Could he?
He can and he does. I am looking forward to the conclusion of Bob’s story but honestly? Eve is the more interesting character and this book is incredible. Time travel, ancient evil deities, and a regency romance novel with a side of magical spy thriller. So good.
Kameron Hurley — The Light Brigade
A story about war, power, capitalism, and ordinary people.
What an incredible story.
There are very clear recognizable bits of sci-fi thought in here: the Starship Trooper-esque militarized society where in order to be a citizen you have to sign up to fight (unless of course you benefit from inherited status and wealth), the Star Trek notion of transporters, machines that break people up into their atoms and then turn those into data to be beamed long distance; but each one of these is made more interesting and more relevant by a twist or a question: yes you have to fight to become a citizen but who is it those in power really fight? Yes we can transport people long distance but isn’t that kind of fucked up, taking people apart and putting them back together again? I’m not just talking Tuvix style transporter mishaps (although there is an incredibly gorey version of that in here) but philosophically: does the same person arrive? What does it mean to be nowhere in space?
And then there’s the politics. In many ways, this is the anti Starship Troopers. The corporations who rule this world are like the corporations in our world: cruel, inhumane, interested only in profit and control. Is there a better way? And if so, who will get us there? Who is the hero who can make a better tomorrow?
Spoiler warning: it’s all of us.
Becky Chambers — Record of a Spaceborn Few
This is Becky chambers doing what she does best: imagining a different world not from the perspective of the rulers and the shapers but from the ground up. Everyday people with everyday problems. Convincing, fully fleshed out, written with love and empathy and honesty. I loved every second of this and cried many times.
Mary Robinette Kowal — The Spare Man
A sassy whodunit on an interplanetary cruise ship where every chapter is named after a cocktail and mixology plays an important role in uncovering the mystery. But also, the most important character, in my opinion, is a very good dog.
This is a sci-fi world of super-rich people with super-rich problems, and yes, our protagonist is incredibly rich herself and probably belongs lined up against the wall with all the other guests on this ship, but there is that archetypal burning desire for justice and a deep recognition that wealth inherently corrupts leading her to use her resources for good.
Hey, it’s fiction.
Wonderfully funny with an actually interesting mystery at its core and a solution I don’t think I’d seen before in spite of how much whodunit content I devour. And the whole thing’s just a vibe. Very tempting to do a drink-along, but I do most of my reading via audiobook while doing chores, so that didn’t work out for me.
John Scalzi — Starter Villain
Okay, look. I know that some time soon Scalzi will send his cat assassins (cassassins?) after me for calling his writing “fast food” one too many times, and that moniker carries a lot of negative connotations I do not intend with it, but I’ve yet to find a better way to describe what it’s like for me to read a Scalzi novel.
Essentially, I know that once I start, it will fill my every free moment, and it’ll be over way too soon, and I’ll enjoy every bit of it, ricocheting between laughter, astonishment, righteous indignation, and more laughter. Even his most “serious” endeavor, the “Collapsing Empire” trilogy, has all of that in spades.
After the last one of the Collapsing Empire books, something happened to Scalzi though. That something was the combination of the Pandemic and January 6th. He writes about it eloquently in the afterword for the actual book. Summarizing poorly, he had a different, broodier, weightier novel that he couldn’t write and (correctly) bailed on. And then the Kaiju Preservation Society (another absolute banger) happened. He’s now said that KPS, Starter Villain, and a third book to be published in 2025, inadvertently formed a vibes-based trilogy.
I bring this all up to say that, at least from my perspective, whatever changed between The Collapsing Empire and The Kaiju Preservation Society, Scalzi became even more himself. This book right here, Starter Villain, has all the Scalzi stuff I love in spades, and it’s even lighter and funnier, and more addicting than the rest of his work, which, remember, is a pretty damn high bar already.
All that to say: this book is incredible, made me laugh out loud every other page, represents an outrageous work of worldbuilding, and will leave you with a big fat smile in the end. I’ve read it twice, and I’ll say that for my usually dumb fast food analogy: it’s usually not this nourishing.
Adrian Tchaikovsky — Shards of Earth / Eyes of the Void / Lords of Uncreation
In early 2023, I stumbled over Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series and was immediately blown away. I’ll have more to say about that when we get to it, but this is his other big trilogy (“The Final Architecture”) and I love it at least as much as the saga of the sentient spiders (and friends).
I’m a sucker for impossibly big space opera, impossibly long odds, and impossibly large concepts. There’s a reason out of the 3 Body Problem books, the third, Death’s End, was my favorite.
Here’s how I like to explain The Final Architecture to people: it’s the future, mankind has spread across the stars, we met a bunch of other races, some friendly, some unfriendly, some all-devouring and incomprehensible (it’s fine, it’s a trauma response), until one day a black pyramid appears in a star system, approaches the inhabited planet, and transfigures it into a large sculpture, killing everyone planetside.
Not only can we not defeat or even fight these things, they don’t even seem to notice us. Only through a breed of weird psychics can we even reach one of these Architects, and it seems that this the first time they actually NOTICE us… and immediately they go away. And that’s just the prelude to what happens in the books.
Another trope that gets me every time is the impossibly old and shoddy spaceship inhabited by a found family of weird outcasts getting dragged into things too large for anyone to understand, and yup, we’ve got that here too.
But what I loved the most was the culture of the spacers we get to meet. There’s a funeral ritual they have where the friends of the deceased gather to essentially shit talk the dead until the captain chimes in to call them family, “safe hands”, and one of us. And I’m not going to lie, Tchaikovsky got me BAD a few times with this. I cried more than once over silly weird alien characters.
And then of course the whole thing goes cosmic and, as the kids would probably say, even further beyond. I loved every bit of this, from the weird powerful aliens that cause cults to spring up where they go to the curmudgeonly crew, to the central mystery of the architects and what or who’s behind them. Very satisfying resolution in the end of the third book as well.
If you can’t tell, this one is highly recommended.
Richard Rumelt — Good Strategy/Bad Strategy
Let’s do some non-fiction! This one was recommended to me by a colleague at work and I was very thankful for the recommendation. This is one of these “you probably think you know what a word means but you don’t really know what the word means” books that points out the emperor’s stark fucking naked for an entire swath of “strategists” and corporate consultants.
Very useful definition of strategy and even more usefully a plethora of examples of what isn’t strategy. (And to be clear, we’re talking business strategy here, not Sun Tzu stuff) (although unsurprisingly he’s invoked at one point).
Rebecca Skloot — The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
More non-fiction! Wished it was fiction! Racism is bad! Medicalized racism is especially bad!
This is the story of a black woman with cervical cancer who’s had some of her cancerous cells scraped off her tumor without her consent or without even being informed of it, and this line of cells is why we have like half of modern medical treatments.
Because they just wouldn’t die.
We still don’t really know why, and there’s a few more cell lines like this now, but that’s not mainly what the book is about. It sure explains the medicine and the science and it tracks a lot of the breakthroughs we have thanks to the HeLa line of cells, but the meat of the story is the author’s quest to get the woman’s daughter to trust her enough to get her permission and help in creating this book. The relationship between the two women–one a White Northwestern journalist, the other one a Black woman with plenty of evidence why she shouldn’t trust White people who approach her with questions about her mother and a hundred kinds of trauma in her life–is the beating heart of this book. Deborah, the daughter, died before the book was published but gave her blessing after traveling the country with the author, looking for the truth. It’s a fantastic story, part journalistic detective work, part roadtrip story, and a deep and painful look into the many ways that medicalized racism killed and hurt Black people while simultaneously profiting immensely off them.