SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Escape Velocity by Victor Manibo

 

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 May 21, 2024 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.

Escape Velocity is the second novel by Filipino author Victor Manibo whose prior novel The Sleepless was an anti-capitalist sci-fi Noir exploring a world where some people no longer had to sleep. It was a really interesting debut and made me very intrigued to see what Manibo would do for an encore. Escape Velocity is the result: a novel that takes the anti-capitalist themes up a notch, as the novel is centered around an elite prep school reunion for the ultra rich and powerful on a state of the art luxury space station....above an Earth those same rich and powerful have left devastated, such that the average person is barely able to survive a constantly changing for the worse climate.

The book is marketed as a thriller and contains elements of a mystery and yet...isn't really either of those things and yet it's still very interesting and very good. Most of the book is centered around the past and present stories of the 1% main characters, who you will very much wish will get their comeuppance very soon into the book as they are largely assholes, even if they have some sympathetic moments (Ava, the trans girl who was abused by her murdered brother and whose poor lover was blamed for the murder, is the most sympathetic but even still). And then there's the workers on the station whose perspectives show them scheming in some fashion underneath it all, whom you will hope more and more to succeed. The result is really an interesting exploration of class and anti capitalist themes that is also kind of a commentary on other books which center such rich protagonists - I'll try to explain better after the jump.

SciFi Novella Review: Rose/House by Arkady Martine

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 April 18, 2023 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.

Rose/House is the latest novella from Hugo Winning author Arkady Martine (A Memory Called Desire). The novella is ostensibly a sci-fi locked room murder mystery - except the locked room is an Artificial Intelligence that comprises the setting itself, a strange house built by an eccentric/mad designor Deniau who passed away and locked it up for no one but his protege to see...except someone else has gotten in and died there. And so three main characters Detectives Maritza Smith and Oliver Torres (investigating the situation) and Selene Gisil, protege of Deniau, come to the house to figure out what happened.

In the end, it's less of a murder mystery (although more of a horror novel) than a combination of a lot of ideas - of mentorship and training and trying to get away from one's shaping, of how we envision ourselves (whether that be humans or AIs) at any given moment, at desires and what people want with Art and what Art truly is, and more. Does it work as a coherent story whole? That I'm a little less sure of.

More specifics after the jump, although please be aware that I read this like two weeks prior to writing this review, so I'm gonna be a bit more vague.  

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Witch and the Vampire by Francesca Flores

 

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 March 21, 2023 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 Witch and the Vampire is a YA novel marketed as a "queer Rapunzel retelling" featuring a witch and a vampire (hence the title).  I'd honestly forgotten about this marketing in the months between getting this book and reading it, and well...I have to say the marketing is incredibly misleading: there's little in this book that reminded me of Rapunzel at all.  Instead you have a YA story here featuring two female protagonists -Ava, a root witch turned vampire trying to escape to freedom and her former best friend Kaye, a flame witch whose mother was killed by a vampire and has trained her whole youth to hunt and kill them...both for the good of humanity and for revenge.  The story features a chase between the two protagonists until naturally they have to work together to stay alive in a dangerous forest, where they each discover surprising truths about the world and a romantic connection between themselves.

The result is a novel that's pretty to be honest rote by numbers and most readers, even younger YA readers (for whom this book might be appropriate, as there's no sexual content and the romance is limited to kissing) will see a lot of the twists coming.  I'm also not super sure the romance worked for me - the book tries to pull a bit of a former best friends to romantic couple plotline wit the main protags and I'm not sure I really believed in the shift the book was trying to sell.  That said, the story does work and the protagonists are easy to root for and care about and the book isn't very long, so readers are likely to have a fine time and aren't likely to be disappointed if they pick this up.  

More specifics after the jump: