Tuesday, June 30, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Automatic Reload by Ferrett Steinmetz

Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 28, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.



Automatic Reload is the latest novel by author Ferrett Steinmetz and what appears to be his 6th novel overall.  Steinmetz is actually one of the first authors I read when I came back to the genre, with his "mancer" series, which came recommended by an author I really enjoyed at the time.  I enjoyed the first of that trilogy (Flex), but at the same time just found myself uninterested in continuing with the 2nd book when I tried it (The Flux) so I wound up DNFing it.  But as I'd heard good things about one of his later novels, I was happy to give this novel a try when I saw in on NetGalley.

And I'm glad I did, Automatic Reload is a really interesting and pretty fun SF thriller.  And I mean thriller - the basic plot features a protagonist narrator facing off and on the run from an implacable enemy through the use of lots and lots of military ordinance/firepower.  It deals heavily with the theme of automaton and what becomes of a future in which automaton starts to replace human workers (the book very much follows an Andrew Yang-esque argument of future events), and not just in how the protagonist has literally automated his own arms and legs.  It has a few of the tics that kind of turned me off from Steinmetz' first trilogy - a habit of trying to too hard to be clever with its narration to the audience - but those mainly go away after the first act and the result is a very solid scifi thriller.


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Monday, June 29, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Chaos Reigning by Jessie Mihalik


Chaos Reigning is the final book in Jessie Mihalik's "The Consortium Rebellion" trilogy, a space opera romance series that began with Polaris Rising (Reviewed Here) and continued with Aurora Blazing (Reviewed Here).  I've really enjoyed this series - it might be what some could consider "trashy" - but it's very good at what it is, with aspects of space opera, spy novels, and oh so much romance, lust, and sexy moments.  Add in a bunch of strong heroines - a different one for each novel - and you get a really fun series that I have gladly read at a time when everything around us is so damn depressing.  So I was praying this book would come off my library hold as soon as possible, and when it did I read it immediately, within 24 hours.

And I think honestly Chaos Reigning is my favorite of the trilogy.  Book 1 featured a lust filled romance with a heroine who couldn't admit - to herself and others - that her feelings were more than lust; whereas Book 2 was more of a slow burn romance between people who wouldn't admit their mutual attraction until a final act explosion.  This book switches it up by being somewhere in the middle - plenty of lust, admitted mutual attraction not too late, but things get in the way repeatedly.  Oh and you once again have a kick ass heroine constantly underestimated by her enemies with a secret to hide as she tries to protect all she cares about - which was awesome in previous books - but here you honestly get my favorite supporting cast (and love interest) in the series.  This is not a serious series for the most part - again, I don't think trying to think about the implications of the setup of this series works very well - but it is oh so much fun.


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Saturday, June 27, 2020

A Pale Light In The Black (by KB Wagers) Reread - Chapters 32-34 (Really Chapters 26-28)



Welcome back to my reread of K.B. Wagers' "A Pale Light in the Black!"  You can find the other posts in this reread here.  For those somehow seeing this post first instead of the others, A Pale Light in the Black is a space opera featuring a SF space version of the Coast Guard in an optimistic future universe.

When we left off, we were in the middle of this book's second act - the team has gotten together in tight, won the Boarding Game prelims, and is now investigating just what exactly the System Jumper smuggling was about and how it connects to LifeEx.  Unfortunately, while the NeoG's boarding operation of a new smuggling freighter went off more or less without a hitch, a parallel NeoG operation on Trappist-1 to hit the smuggling facility the freighter came from resulted in an explosion that gravely injured Nika.

Now, Jenks, Ma, and Max are onboard a Navy ship carrying Nika - who's being tended to by Max's asshole father - as they attempt to figure out what to do next......


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Friday, June 26, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Bond Undone by Jin Yong (Translated by Gigi Chang)


A Bond Undone is the second part of Jin Yong's "Legend of the Condor Heroes", the classic Wuxia (Chinese Kung Fu) story that is finally receiving an official English translation in the US.  I went into the first part - A Hero Born (review here) - not expecting much because while I've enjoyed the few Wuxia movies I've seen in the theaters, action sequences in novels are not my thing.  But instead I found a book that I enjoyed immensely, filled to the brim with outrageous Kung Fu feats and combat in a way that doesn't resemble the action sequences I expected, with a propulsive plot whose response to any change in situation is: Let's start a new fight!  It was so much damn fun, and I could see why and how it has inspired other works over the past 60-70 years - and it ended on a bit of a cliffhanger so I was eager to pick up the second novel fairly quickly.

A Bond Undone is more of the same - actually, it's emphasis on creating more and more ridiculous fighting situations is even more extreme....and that's a good thing!  This is not a novel where you expect some logical character development - the main romance/attraction sort of springs up out of nowhere - or a deep story: but it is one where kung fu is used in a million ways in fascinating, fun and often hilarious manners from start to finish, before (sigh) ending on another cliffhanger.  It does have some gender issues, but honestly not as bad ones as I expected from a 70 year old Chinese novel, and it's just so much fun, that I can't wait to pick up the third one.


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Thursday, June 25, 2020

Reviewing the 2020 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Novella

Hugo Award voting should open soon and will continue through the July 15.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last three years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

This is the 4th part of this series.  I have previously reviewed the nominees for:
Best Young Adult SF/F (The Lodestar Award), Best SF/F Short Story, and Best SF/F Novelette.

You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.

This time around we're getting to one of the more popular awards, the Hugo Award for Best Novella.  Novellas are defined as being between 17,500 and 40,000 words long, which tends to roughly come out to about 90-200 pages on average (although a lot of novellas don't count as such by the Hugo definition leading to some books missing out).  The result is that Novellas are a type of work that fast readers (like myself) might finish in one day, but others will take a few days to get through them, and they have a lot more substance for characters, story, and ideas.

This has also meant that my feelings on the quality of these works is a lot more varied than for the shorter fiction, with some works I just plain didn't like having been nominated in the last few years (same is true of Best Novel for the same reason).  And yet this year, despite the works being perhaps the most varied in origin in a number of years (there are only two Tor.com novellas, which used to dominate this category), I like pretty much every novella on the ballot - I scored each one with a rating out of 10 when I posted my initial review, and all of them rated an 8 out of 10 or above.

And yet, there's a clear winner for me here, and an easy favorite......which I'll get to after the jump.

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Wednesday, June 24, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: ReV: The Third Machine Dynasty by Madeline Ashby


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 14, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.



ReV is the third and final book in Madeline Ashby's "Machine Dynasty" trilogy, which began with 2012's "vN".  The trilogy features a world in which a genius con man created AI robots, VonNeumanns (aka vNs), which can self replicate with enough food and serve as servants, sexbots, companions and more for humanity, all of which have a "failsafe" which prevents them from tolerating any sort of harm to humans.  Or well, they're supposed to, hence the series.  The trilogy's first two novels came out in 2012 and 2013 and were among the first two books I read when I began reading SF/F again, with this trilogy ender being listed on Amazon as coming shortly thereafter.  I really enjoyed the first novel in the trilogy, and though I didn't love the 2nd one, I was excited to see where it would all end up.

Only Rev didn't come, and after a year of occasionally checking for a release date (and the book's listing seemingly being dropped) I gave up on ever expecting it to (Ashby would release a different novel in the meantime).  So I was surprised to see Rev pop up for a review copy on Netgalley, and requested it out of sheer curiosity.  Of course, that meant that when I was accepted for it, I suddenly had an issue in how little I remembered from the original two books, which could've been a problem.  I managed to skim the first few chapters of book 2 and the final 2 chapters to refresh my recollection, and hoped that would be fine.

I needn't have worried too much - ReV is a really enjoyable and interesting trilogy ender, and one that works if you only have the barest of refreshers of what happened in the first two novels (going in blind is not fully advisable, but you can probably pull it off based upon your years old recollection).  The story switches its perspective to the trilogy's prior main antagonist, which really alters the tone to a far more humorous one, while still also keeping alive some of its themes.  It also ends on a note that is full of far more righteous fury than I remember in the other two novels, but it also absolutely works.  It has some content that I don't exactly love - but less than its predecessors mind you - but it's still a really interesting short novel.

Trigger Warning:  Sexual/Physical Abuse: There is no explicit rape in this novel but a major theme of this series has always been an inability to give consent and while that's largely not an issue for the main characters in this book for once, some side characters suffer abuse in some small scenes at times.  If you enjoyed the first two books enough to want to read this though, you've already been through worse.


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Tuesday, June 23, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 21, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


Trouble the Saints is the latest novel from Nebula Award winner Alaya Dawn Johnson, and her first in a few years (as well as her first non YA novel in a lot of years).  I loved her last two books, the Norton (Nebula Award for YA) nominated "The Summer Prince" and the Norton-winning "Love is the Drug."  Both featured stories of love and family, but also dealt tremendously with themes of privilege, class and race - The Summer Prince through its post apocalyptic supposedly-utopian setting while Love is the Drug through its near future story of a well off Black teen in DC - and featured characters who you couldn't help grow in love with as they dealt with those problems.  So yeah, when I noticed (late) that Johnson had a new novel coming out this year, I was so happy to get it early via Netgalley and read it less than a week later despite having a whole bunch of other books on my backlist.

And Trouble the Saints is a tremendous novel, diving even more openly into themes of race and oppression than the prior two Johnson works I've read, through an alternate history novel set around 1941 in mob-riddled New York.  The book's a bit of a mess honestly, especially in the beginning, but its three main characters are tremendous, as they try and deal with being people of color in a racist New York, and the obligations that come upon them from having "the hands", a juju-esque magic found only in non-whites which seems to demand them act in some way.  Make no mistake: this is not a fun book, it's a bloody one with a lot of pain and agony, as our protagonists - not good people themselves - struggle with a system that both then and now spits out people of color and chews them out in favor of those less deserving.  But it's a damn powerful one, and if not a tour-de-force, it's close.


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Monday, June 22, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 21, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


Axiom's End is the debut novel from culture critic Lindsay Ellis, known mainly for her YouTube videos analyzing/critiquing movies and other parts of pop culture.  Ellis' videos are done in a really entertaining fashion and I've enjoyed when I've been linked to them, so I was interested in trying out her debut in the genre I love when it popped up on NetGalley.  Of note:  the book is marketed as a stand alone (apparently the publisher only bought this novel originally), but it is apparently part of a series, and ends as such.  So that might affect your reaction to this novel and whether you want to try it in the first place.

And Axiom's End is a really interesting start to a new series - it's a First Contact novel featuring a strong heroine, interesting aliens, and an alternate version of 2007.  It isn't some tremendously original take on the First Contact subgenre - again to the extent that anything is original these days - but it takes a bunch of classic genre tropes - young woman on the run with an alien; aliens with moralities that don't quite mesh with human ones; government/military short shortsightedly making things worse with aggression; second set of more antagonistic aliens chasing the first....etc.  As with any novel, the key is how this novel puts these things together, and Axiom's End does so in an interesting way, with some strong characters and surprising plot twists, although the ending is incredibly and awkwardly abrupt.

One last note before we go in depth - though the novel is enjoyable and not a tragedy in any form, it also doesn't have the same comic type of entertainment as Ellis' YouTube analyses, so if you're looking for that here, you won't be satisfied.

Final Note:  I'm going to talk about the aliens to some extent in depth in terms of their characteristics, even though I won't go into plot points here. So if you want to go into the book completely unspoiled, you may want to skip the rest of the review.

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Saturday, June 20, 2020

A Pale Light In The Black (by KB Wagers) Reread - Chapters 29-31 (Really Chapters 24 & 25)




Welcome back to my reread of K.B. Wagers' "A Pale Light in the Black!"  You can find the other posts in this reread here.  For those somehow seeing this post first instead of the others, A Pale Light in the Black is a space opera featuring a SF space version of the Coast Guard in an optimistic future universe.

Yeah, I didn't think the world could get more depressing when I started this reread, or that we would have such a clear inkling of problems with the modern military and to see it deployed on our own American soil - with the actual Coast Guard being surprisingly among the military deployed by Donald Trump to Washington D.C. according to some reports (it's kind of unclear).  I don't mean to bring these real world issues into these posts - this reread was started for me to read a very positive book in a future I could wish for, and to get any other readers into such a similar book, because god I could use that around now.  But kind of hard to ignore it entirely given the above, sooooo yeah, that's a thing that has to be mentioned.

This Reread Part will cover the next Letters segment, and the next two chapters, which the book labels as Chapters 29-31, but more accurately by my count is Letters 24-25.  Here we have some serious action:  Two NeoG cruisers conduct an actual Boarding Mission and one of our heroes is seriously injured!

So here we go:

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Friday, June 19, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Planetfall by Emma Newman


Planetfall is a 2015 SciFi/Fantasy novel by author Emma Newman, and the first in a series of connected novels which was nominated for this year's Hugo Award for Best Series.  I'd missed the novel when it first came out, despite it getting a decent amount of acclaim (probably because I'd just started my increase in SF/F reading around that time), but the entire series is included in the Hugo Packet, so better now than never.

And Planetfall is pretty interesting, even if I'm not sure I really liked it?  It's a SciFi story focused upon a main character - a woman who is one of two members of a colony on a foreign planet who knows the terrible secret and lie behind their colony, and has spent the last two decades suffering mentally trying to hold it all in.  It's very much about the mental illness of its protagonist, as the secrets she bears exacerbates what might have already been there once as outside influences - a stranger with ties to the past - pick at the scab until its all done.  And for that it's well done, but even as I grew to care about this protagonist and found the book engrossing, I'm not really sure the ending really worked for me?  It's...interesting.


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Thursday, June 18, 2020

Fantasy Novella Review: In An Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire



In An Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

In an Absent Dream is the fourth in Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children ongoing series of novellas, all of whom have been nominated for the Hugo Award (among other awards) and the first of which (Every Heart a Doorway) actually picked up the award.  McGuire is one of my favorite authors for her InCryptid and October Daye serieses, but I've had mixed reactions to this series: it's always well crafted, but the series' interesting format has to me resulted in me disliking the works more than I otherwise would.

The series features a world in which portal fantasies are real, and children who find themselves uncomfortable with reality find doors to fantasy worlds...only many come back, unable to find their Door again, and find themselves unable to cope and thus wind up at the school known as the Home for Wayward Children.  Every odd numbered book in the series takes place in the present, at the school at least to start, while every even numbered book (this one and Down Among the Sticks and Bones) has taken place in the past, showing the portal fantasy world of one particular kid at the school and how it all went wrong.

In my prior experience with this in an even numbered work, I found that it just didn't work: because I'd met these characters before in the prior novella, I knew exactly how things were going to go, and it just felt slow and pointless.  But I'd actually really liked the third novella Beneath the Sugar Sky, so I was willing to give this second "even" novella a shot and to my surprise I liked it a lot.

More after the jump:

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Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Reviewing the 2020 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Novelette

Hugo Award voting should open soon and will continue through the July 15.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last three years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

This is the Third part of this series.  I have previously reviewed the nominees for Best Young Adult SF/F (The Lodestar Award) and for Best SF/F Short Story.

You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.

In this post, we're going to continue covering the nominees in the Short Fiction categories with the nominees for Best Novelette.  Novelettes are stories between 7500 and 17500 words, basically longer "Short" Stories - you should probably consume these all in a single sitting unlike a Novella or Novel, but it will take you more than a few minutes to do so.  But the Hugo Nominees in this category have generally been worth it to do so.

4 of this year's 6 nominees are available freely online, and are linked below when I discuss them.   As with my prior posts, I'm going to separate the works below into tiers in addition to just straight ranking them.



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Tuesday, June 16, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Anthology Review: The Book of Dragons edited by Jonathan Strahan and Featuring Peter S Beagle, Zen Cho, Kate Elliott and Many More


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 7, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


The Book of Dragons is the latest SciFi/Fantasy Anthology put together by Editor Jonathan Strahan, featuring a large number of short stories - and a few pieces of poetry - all based upon a common theme: the presence of Dragons.  The anthology format is a tricky one to review - since stories within the same collection can vary greatly in quality - but in this case it allows its cast of writers to write a variety of stories that deal with the subject - Dragons - in many many different ways: you have technological dragons, eastern dragons, western dragons, draconic spirits, dragons that are illusionary or imaginary, etc.

And WHAT a cast of writers, ranging from classic SF/F favorites like Peter S Beagle and Patricia A. McKillip to more modern favorites like Ken Liu, Kate Elliott, Aliette de Bodard, and more....I could go on and on.  The quantity of award winning authors involved here is frankly astonishing, and the results are more often than not damn good.  They produce stories and poems that hit practically every possible tone, from bittersweet to inspiring, and features far more hits than misses.  If you are looking for a collection of stories to read, this is a damn good one.

TRIGGER WARNING:  Several stories feature spousal or child abuse within, usually via emotional abuse, but at least one instance of recalled physical abuse is also mentioned.  Please be advised.

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Monday, June 15, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Old Lie by Claire G Coleman


The Old Lie is the second novel by Claire G. Coleman, author of "Terra Nullius" (which I reviewed here).  Terra Nullius was a brilliant but brutal work, with Coleman presenting a SciFi world in which the atrocities committed upon people of her heritage - Coleman is part of the South Coast Noongar people (Indigenous Australian) - occur once again.  That novel was released to acclaim in Australia, only coming over to the US a while later thanks to a small press.  The Old Lie was published in Australia in 2019, but has not yet been picked up by a North American Publisher - so the only format you can buy it here is in ebook.  But Coleman's work is well worth the extra effort to obtain, so I went ahead and purchased it despite having plenty available from other sources to read.

And it was well worth it.  The Old Lie is essentially a spiritual successor to Terra Nullius, once again using science fiction to apply the atrocities of the past - particularly the atrocities inflicted upon the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities - to more generalized humanity.  In this case, it's a military science fiction novel showcasing the horrors and abuses of war - from what it does to the victims caught in the crossfire, to what it does to the people fighting it, and beyond....as those who make the decisions to wage war abuse that power to their own ends, and inflict those abuses even on those who are fighting for them.

This is a brutal book, filled with harsh themes and lessons from the past.  And while it isn't as perfectly put together as Terra Nullius, it is devastatingly compelling and powerful and impossible to put down once it gets going.  Worth your dollars now, and I hope a North American publisher brings it over here soon.

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Sunday, June 14, 2020

Video Game Review: The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 3





Trails of Cold Steel 3 is the 3rd game (Duh) in Nihon Falcom's Trails of Cold Steel (also known as "Sen no Kiseki") series and the eighth game in Falcom's larger "Kiseki" (or "Trails") series, which began with Trails in the Sky.  For those who are utterly new to the series, this is a JRPG series in a very classic sense - there aren't random encounters (enemies are visible on the map and can be avoided) but there is still turn based combat, a large cast of characters, side quests in addition to a main story quests which can be skipped if you want but add more story and benefits to a playthrough, the works.  The Kiseki/Trails series is known for its large often fascinating worlds, where often every side character has their own stories you can find out about if you want (regardless of whether there's any gameplay benefit to doing so) and the Cold Steel subseries is the third arc in the series, although the second arc was never released in the U.S., so this is really the 2nd for American Audiences (I have played the 2nd arc via translation patches).

Note:  As you might imagine, you will be pretty damn lost if you try playing this game before playing Trails of Cold Steel 1 or 2 first so don't do that.  You can skip the first Trails arc, Trails in the Sky, before playing this game if you want - this game makes far more references to the prior arcs than the first two, but you'll be fine without the knowledge from having played it.

I've really enjoyed this series, especially the First Arc (Trails in the Sky) and the Second Arc (Trails From Zero/Azure), but the first two Cold Steel games I was a bit more lukewarm about.  The games included a Persona-like "link" system, in which you had school segments in between exploring new areas (and in the 2nd game, you had the equivalent of the same thing really) and I found those honestly boring and uninteresting, and the games were honestly way too easy even on the highest difficulty - the games had a billion options and gameplay mechanics that could be abused, and uh even someone just fooling around with the game could figure out how to do so, which kind of robbed me of some of what I look for in a JRPG.  The plot was enjoyable, but too much of the gameplay annoyed me for me to truly love either game.

And alas Trails of Cold Steel 3 continues in the same vein....and honestly turns it up to eleven: this is a game filled with incredibly lazy game design and it shows.


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Saturday, June 13, 2020

Reviewing the 2020 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Short Story

Hugo Award voting should open soon and will continue through the July 15.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last three years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

This is the second part of this series.  You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.

In this post, we're going to start covering the nominees in the Short Fiction categories - specifically, the nominees for Best Short Story.  These are works of no more than 7500 words, and can often be particularly short, such as only a 1-3 pages long.  This length requirement does not mean that these stories cannot make a big impact - indeed past and present nominees often come with a punch so strong to make one feel it for a while.  Which isn't to say that all of the nominees for this category have to be serious or impactful - fun, wistful, and heartwarming stories get nominated all the time.

That said, we actually don't have any fun stories in this year's batch of nominees; instead we have a sextet of stories with punch, with the lightest two stories being more bittersweet and longing than anything.  Which is not to say it isn't a hell of a ballot, and an incredibly hard one to rank - and with the Nebula Award winner in the same category not on this ballot, it's really hard to know what will win.  But well, I Have to rank these in order to vote, so I guess I shall.

All of this year's nominees are available online, and as such I have provided links to them for you to read below.  I encourage you to do so.


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Thursday, June 11, 2020

SciFi Novella Review: Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang




Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang

Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom is a novella by award winning and otherwise acclaimed (think "Arrival") SF/F author Ted Chiang.  The novella is actually part of his short fiction collection "Exhalation", which was released last year, and is one of two stories from that collection nominated for a Hugo this year (the other is the novelette, "Omphalos").  Despite Chiang's reputation, I've never actually read any of his work before, so this was a first for me - that said, I wasn't surprised to see at least some of his work nominated this year given his reputation.

And Anxiety is a really interesting piece of idea based science fiction, with the central idea in question being that of how one's free will - and whether we have free will - reflects upon one's character.  It takes a SF concept of multiverse theory - where different universes branch off from our own based upon choices taken and not taken - and extrapolates it to hit those themes, with a story centered around two characters in particular.  And it works very well in doing so.  It's certainly not a mindblowing or must-read type of story, but it's very good and the award nomination is not undeserved.

More specifics after the jump:


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Wednesday, June 10, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Rule by Rowenna Miller


Rule is the final book in Rowenna Miller's "The Unraveled Kingdom" trilogy, which began with "Torn" back in 2018 and continued with 2019's "Fray."  The series, featuring a seamstress who can add charms for luck or love into her work who gets involved in rising class conflict, has from the start had an ambitious agenda - using its fantasy story to tackle a number of interesting themes.  It has....not always done well at that, with the first book in particular having a rather unfortunate and i'm pretty sure unintended implication, but I've always appreciated the attempts, and the characters and general story have worked well enough to carry my interest.  So I was curious to see how the trilogy would end - both for the characters and the themes Miller has tried to play with.

And perhaps fittingly for this series, Rule is a bit of a mixed bag.  It's a solid conclusion to the clearly French Revolution-esque story, with the novel focusing on all out war that's broken out between Royalists and Reformists after the prior two novels, and Sophie struggling to find her place in it.  It again deals with themes of incrementalism vs faster-paced reform, as well as themes of the transitions of power, forgiveness, nationalism, and more.  Does it handle each of these themes well?  Eh, as I said, it's a mixed bag, but the result is still an interesting story with characters I did like and care about, so I don't regret the read, and look forward to seeing what Miller will do in the future.

Note: This is book 3 of a trilogy, so spoilers for Torn and Fray are inevitable.

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Tuesday, June 9, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Hero Born by Jin Yong (Translated by Anna Holmwood)


A Hero Born is the first volume in a four volume translation of Jin Yong's "Legends of the Condor Heroes."  In China, Legends of the Condor Heroes is an absolute classic of literature - originally published as a serial - and is apparently, the most famous inspiration for the modern Wuxia genre, the genre featuring Chinese martial artists fighting using elaborate moves and techniques (for a well known to America example, think Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon).  An official translation into English of this classic had long been missing until 2018, when St. Martin's Press opted to bring the series over to the US, with this first volume translated by Anna Holmwood.

And A Hero Born is simply a tremendous amount of fun, even for this reader, who blog readers may remember is not a big carer about action sequences in general.  Most of the book features its many many characters bumbling into battles of outrageous kung fu, with techniques having wilder and wilder names, resolving their fights and then somehow going their own way mostly alive to fight again another day.  These sequences are so silly outrageous sometimes as to always be very amusing, even to a non-fan of action sequences, and the book somehow also manages to decent develop its important characters to have made me care about them in the end.  I will definitely be coming back for the second volume sooner rather than later.


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Monday, June 8, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Or What You Will by Jo Walton




Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on July 7, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Or What You Will is the next book by prolific award wining science fiction and fantasy author, Jo Walton.  I have.....loved some of Walton's work (The Just City, Necessity) and disliked others (The Philosopher Kings, Tooth and Claw).  Her most awarded novel, Among Others is one of the first books I reviewed for this blog, and I merely enjoyed it but didn't love it.  Still, Of What You Will has drawn comparisons already to Among Others for good reasons - like that book, it's often incredibly explicitly referential to the genre itself, and features a story (in part) of a person trying to escape past trauma that changed her life.

Unfortunately, I don't think it works nearly as well as it did in Among Others.  Whereas that novel featured a clear plot progression for its character that was the core of the story, Of What You Will essentially tries to work in two or three plots - a meta one about a SF/F author and her imaginary friend/muse trying desperately to find a way to keep her alive and a related fantasy plot told by the author and friend using characters from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (from which this book's title comes) and The Tempest.  And then there's frequent asides about the beauty and wonder of renaissance Italy.  It's a testament to Walton's craft that all of these individual elements work on their own, but the combination of them just didn't seem to work for me and felt more confusing than anything.

The above is kind of a bad explanation but I'll try to explain better after the jump:

Trigger Warning: Physical/Spousal Abuse, Parental Neglect.

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Sunday, June 7, 2020

Reviewing the 2020 Hugo Nominees: The Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book





Hugo Award voting should open soon and will continue through the July 15.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last three years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

ConZealand has basically dropped the ball this year, and Hugo voting is not yet open at the time of this writing, meaning voters will have basically a month to vote on the award, so I'm starting these posts before I even get a chance to log my votes.  I know COVID has given them the difficult task of switching to a virtual convention, but they really don't have an excuse for not opening voting even yet, especially when the convention and voting end dates are the earliest in years.  Oh well.

The Lodestar Award is in its third year at being awarded with the Hugo Awards.  It's the Hugo equivalent of the Norton Award - the Nebula Award for the Best Young Adult (YA) Science Fiction or Fantasy Book of the year - and I remain really glad it was added, because YA has added a ton of excellent works to the genre - and deserves extra recognition for it.  I keep waiting for one of my favorite books to make both the Best Novel and Lodestar Award Nomination shortlists, and the quality of YA in the genre is so high that it's only a matter of time....but we're not there yet.

Which is not to say this year's nominees aren't high quality, because this is another tremendous slate of award worthy books, that are really worth your time.  I have no idea what's going to take home this award, but am pretty sure whatever will do so will be a worthy winner.  But since I have to rank the books in question, here's my ballot....after the jump.


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Saturday, June 6, 2020

A Pale Light In The Black (by KB Wagers) Reread - Chapters 27 and 28 (Really Chapters 22 & 23)



Welcome back to my reread of K.B. Wagers' "A Pale Light in the Black!"  You can find the other posts in this reread here.  For those somehow seeing this post first instead of the others, A Pale Light in the Black is a space opera featuring a SF space version of the Coast Guard in an optimistic future universe. We're finished the first half of this book and now it's time for a break in the fun (well kind of) for some long term plot ramifications!  So I guess its too late for me to say you can easily catch up, but well, if you want to try it's well worth your time - and these posts aren't exactly going anywhere mind you.

You may note the jump in chapter numbers in the title of this post.  As I mentioned a few posts ago, the book doesn't include the Chapter number at the top of every chapter, titling many chapters with just the timestamp or "Letters."  Given the shortness of the Letters (1-2 pages), I'd have assumed those wouldn't be counted as chapters, but here we are, and our first Chapter # in a while seems to have counted them, jumping us from what I assumed was Chapter 21 to Chapter "27".  For continuity sake I'll be using both chapter numberings from here on out.

Anyhow, last time out, a heroic space rescue nearly went horribly wrong, as Jenks' pack malfunctioned, sending her and an 11 year old girl spiraling out of control in space right in the trajectory of deadly solar radiation....until Max disobeyed orders to save them.  Truly awesome stuff, and someone should make a TV show just of such rescues seriously.

This time around, we get the aftermath, as the crew discovers the malfunction wasn't as innocuous as it seemed......

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Friday, June 5, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review; Deeplight by Frances Hardinge



Deeplight is a 2019 young adult fantasy novel by acclaimed YA author Frances Hardinge, whose 2017 novel "A Skinful of Shadows" was one of the first nominees for the Lodestar (Hugo) Award for best SF/F YA Novel.  Deeplight is one of this year's nominees for that same award and I really liked A Skinful of Shadows, so I was really happy to see the full novel contained in this year's Hugo Packet.  Like that novel - and I suspect like a lot of Hardinge's work - this one really straddles the line between middle grade and YA, with the novel featuring zero sexual content or even romance whatsoever, but still containing more violence and grim situations than I guess you'd expect in Middle-Grade, although just barely.

And well, Deeplight is fine, but it's not up to the level of A Skinful of Shadows and it never really breaks out into the levels of really great that i hope for in award nominated works.  The story features as its central protagonist a teenage boy, whose major struggle is realizing when he's being taken advantage of by a "friend" and finding it in himself to assert his own ideas, as he gets shoved between powerful forces throughout.  It's also a story of pirates, of undersea gods and monsters, of mad science and priests - all good stuff that could've in my opinion made a really good story, but I just didn't like the protagonist enough to actually feel it got there; a feeling made more apparent by a secondary character being far more interesting than the main hero.

I'm glad I didn't DNF this so I could properly review it, and it's not a terrible nomination for this award, but there's a lot of YA from last year I'd recommend above this one.


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Thursday, June 4, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Riverland by Fran Wilde





Riverland is a 2019 Middle Grade/YA Portal Fantasy novel by author Fran Wilde, who previously one the Norton Award - the Nebula Award for best YA SF/F novel - for her novel "Updraft", and has been a Hugo/Nebula nominee for multiple other works.  Riverland itself wound up winning this year's Norton Award for best YA/Middle-Grade Fantasy novel and is nominated as well for the Lodestar Award, the equivalent award in the Hugos.  In short, Wilde is critically acclaimed in the field, especially in writing for YA audiences, and while I haven't always loved her works as much as some, they've always been interesting, and so Riverland was the first book I decided to read from the now released Hugo Voters Packet.

And Riverland is worth the praise....but it's an utterly brutal one, and I absolutely wish it wasn't necessary.  This is a tale of parental abuse, and while the abuse basically never gets physical, it's no less brutal for it, and Riverland pulls absolutely no punches.  it is not a long book, but it took me longer than a book nearly twice its size to finish because it is the type of content that is that rough to read.  And yet, while the fantasy elements are probably not the strongest, Riverland is a terrifyingly believable story of abuse that will absolutely be useful for the many many kids who grow up in such a household, and god, I wish that wasn't the case.

Trigger Warnings: Emotional Parental Abuse, if you couldn't tell from above.

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Wednesday, June 3, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Catfishing on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer

Catfishing on Catnet is a young adult novel by Hugo Award winning author Naomi Kritzer.  It's actually an expansion upon the same idea that won her her recent Hugo Award for the short story "Cat Pictures Please."  And its an expansion that has been highly critically acclaimed, picking up nominations for the Norton and Lodestar awards - the Nebula and Hugo (sorta) awards for YA literature.  I was waiting for the Hugo Packet to come out to get to it myself (I half expect it to be in there), but some twitter recs made it too tempting to read, so.....I didn't wait.

And Catfishing on Catnet was really worth it.  It's a YA novel featuring two protagonists - a 17 year old girl and an AI trying to figure out who they are despite circumstances that constantly conspire to prevent them from doing so.  Oh and we have a group of LGBTQ friends on a website that is based around chatting over cute animal pictures -(cat pictures preferably but any will do), a group of non straight white male friends at a high school finding each other and a near future where autonomous cars and robots are common place.  It's a lot of fun throughout, and its most frustrating point is that it ends on a cliffhanger (the sequel comes out in 2021).  So yeah, this is a strong contender for the aforementioned awards.


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Monday, June 1, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on June 23, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

The Angel of the Crows is the second* novel from Katherine Addison, the author of the Hugo and Nebula award nominated The Goblin Emperor.  The Goblin Emperor was one of the biggest critical darlings (and fan enjoyed) books in the last few years, and even if I didn't quite love it as much as the general consensus, it was a masterpiece of setting and character-building.  So people have been waiting for Addison's next novel for some time and finally with The Angel of the Crows, we have it.  To add to the reasons this book is highly anticipated, it's another fantasy adaptation of Holmes and Watson, and seeing Addison put a spin on that is highly appealing.

*Addison is actually the pen name for author Sarah Monette, but this is the second novel for this pen name.  

 And The Angel of the Crows mostly delivers.  Once again Addison pulls of a fantastic setting - a fantasy version of London filled with Angels, Vampires, Werewolves, and more - and main characters that are a hell of a different spin on classical archetypes.  This Holmes is an Angel - albeit one who shouldn't be able to exist and is not trusted as a result - and our Watson is carrying very different secrets and traumas (which I'm not going to spoil here) than the original. These changes, plus the fantastic setting, draw you in and make this a hard book to put down (I literally finished this at 2 in the morning.)  On the other hand, despite all the above, the book is at the same time often somehow also a by the numbers adaptation of a number of classic Holmes stories which will be of less interest to anyone with major familiarity with those stories.


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