Ode to the Half-Broken
Several people have been raving about this for a few months, and I finally got around to reading it. (As with the Isabel J Kim, I am not late to reading this – it only came out in May! They were early.) If you are even vaguely interested in sentient robots, post-collapse of the existing world, getting-a-ragtag-team-together stories, with a healthy dollop of snark, you just want to stop reading this now and go read the book.
The (deliberately, consciously) unnamed narrator wakes up having lost 36 hours, in a bathtub, with their leg missing. They’re a robot so that’s not life-threatening – the electromagnets in the tub are a bigger problem – but they’re still human-shaped, so it’s going to present a locomotive issue. Once they finally get out of the tub – there’s a talking dog involved, it’s not as twee as it sounds, not least because the dog would be angry at having the word applied to them – our narrator’s mission is straightforward: find whichever bastard stole their leg and retrieve it. Which of course necessitates figuring out some stopgap (heh) for the missing leg, which means talking to a lot more folks than they’ve talked to in about two decades, and leaving their home which ditto.
This is the getting-the-team-together aspect, because of course some of the folks they meet over time end up joining in, for reasons of their own. Our narrator’s quest ends up being much more than they bargained for (of course). Their world has a lot of robots, of varying sizes, abilities, intelligence levels, and attitudes towards both other robots and humans. There are humans, but it’s a lot fewer than there are now.
That’s only half the narrative, though. The other half is set some indeterminate time in the past – that is, it starts in 2037, but we don’t know when the leg-stealing occurs. In this past, Dr Milton has figured out how to create mindchips, which will enable sentience to form – as has happened with our robot narrator. Milton is interested in the science but not the business, which is bad because it means other people who have taken over the business in ways that he did not expect or desire. This part of the narrative covers several years, and gives a glimpse into how things got to where they are in the “now” of the rest of the book.
There are some obvious parallels to be drawn between this robot and Murderbot, which I’m sure other folks have drawn. Both wish to have nothing to do with gender; both have issues with names. Both would prefer to just be left alone – this narrator has been working on entomology for decades rather than watching soap operas, but really, that’s basically Desperate Ant-wives. Both end up interacting with humans in ways they would rather not; most of the time I think Palmer’s character is less anti-social than Murderbot, but I’m ambivalent about that. This is not to say that they’re the same, of course! But both Palmer and Wells are riffing on a long genealogy of robots/AIs and the variety of ways they might interact with humans, and other robots, if you don’t choose the Skynet option.
Again, the short version is that I enjoyed this enormously. I liked the writing itself, I was intrigued by the characters, some of the villains were excellent villains and others were suitably ambivalent and complex. Our main narrator totally won my heart, and the revelations about their history were beautifully presented, drip-fed at a rate that didn’t make me bored or anxious. 100% will read again.
Sublimation, Isabel J Kim
I feel like I’m late to this party, because so many people I know have been talking about it, but it’s actually only a 2026 book! So I am not late, they’re just early.
This book is brilliant and if you’re up for a world that’s just off from ours – in a very significant way and yet still the world is recognisably ours – you would do worse than just go out on a limb and read this. But if you need to know more…
This is a world where crossing a border might give rise to an “instance” of yourself. Not sure if you do want to go home from that holiday? Not sure if you want to take that overseas posting? Being forced out of your home by natural or human forces? Any of these might create an instance. Who is a real, live, human being, with all of your memories and traits up to that moment. They are you. But they stay, while you go – or they go, and you stay.
I’m sure you can imagine some of the large-scale problems, as well as the small-scale. For migration, as well as for families.
Soyoung instanced when she was a young girl; she lives in Korea, while her instance, who goes by Rose, lives in America – with the instance of Soyoung’s mother. Yujin instances when he leaves Korea for study leave in the US; they also live in those two countries.
Here’s the thing I didn’t mention: if instances meet, and touch, they will generally reintegrate. Again, you can probably imagine the large- and small-scale problems. What if one instance wants to reintegrate, and the other doesn’t? Reintegrating gives the person both sets of memories – imagine living like that!
And now, imagine the techbros rubbing their hands at the opportunities this affords: what about something to guarantee forced reintegration can’t happen? What about… well, there are all sorts of possibilities if instancing could somehow be managed.
Sublimation isn’t about the technological stuff, exactly, but it does run through the whole book: Yujin’s instance, YJ, works for the company who made MERGEBREAK (bracelets that should stop reintegration). And the whole question of reintegrating or not is at the core of the novel, so external efforts to affect that are pretty important.
This is a book about migration, of course: about choosing to migrate, about the consequences of doing so, and what it means to leave somewhere. And it’s about identity – how could it not be: what does it mean if you’re torn between choices? How can you reconcile with yourself?
I haven’t even mentioned the structure of the novel. First thing: large swathes of it are written in the second person. Bold choice! It means you (heh) switching between a Soyoung, Rose, Yujin and YJ – you say, you do, you think – and it makes the whole experience remarkably visceral. And when you (heh) suddenly flip to reading in the third person, it’s quite discombobulating. Which is really clever. Second thing: there’s a lot of asides about literature across the novel. There are references to a Korean fairytale, a Korean song, The Odyssey, and the Book of Genesis. The last two are what I know best, but they all suggest the same thing: in a world where instancing has always happened, how does that change literature? What if Odysseus instanced when he left Ithaca – what does that say about him? And what if – this one is the most challenging, IMO – the act of creating the world (and everything in it) was one absolutely epic example of instancing?
Some thoughts about the very end below the cut, but look – this book is just great, you should read it.
Continue reading →Frankenstein Rex
First off: if you’re reading this while the blurb still talks about immortality and seeking an heir, that blurb is WRONG. I won’t speculate about how that happened – not my business – but it’s very, very wrong. That is not what this book is about at all.
To head off any other jokes: it’s also not about a dinosaur. It is indeed a play on Shelley’s Frankenstein, and specifically the creature – and yes there’s a whole bit about the name choice.
So what is it about, then? Well, Frankenstein (the creature) has been king of the world for many, many decades. Since not long after Napoleon popped up, in fact, and it’s now just our time. Frankenstein does seem to be immortal; he’s not ageing or changing, and assassination attempts in the past have failed. Of course, that doesn’t stop other people from trying.
Frankenstein rules as a benevolent (ish) dictator. All land belongs to him – with just a couple of carve-outs, like Jerusalem and Mecca – and he leases it back; but he has strict expectations about energy efficiency etc. The lingua franca is French (heh). National sentiment is forbidden, and regarded as irrelevant by the powers that be. Decade on decade, Frankenstein swings between more liberal and more tyrannical. Someone is arrested for planning to assassinate the king… and the novel goes from there.
It’s very important I let you know that the opening chapter has some quite gruesome torture. I had to skim a couple of paragraphs after I realised what was going on. There’s nothing like it for the rest of the book, so it’s a shocking opener but not indicative of the novel as a whole.
As well as being a novel about trying to understand a would-be assassin, this is quite blatantly a book about politics. If there is literally a monster in charge, how do and should humans act? (Yes, of course there is discussion to be had about whether the creature is a monster, and you’ll note that I don’t use ‘monster’ to describe him.) Sometimes there is something darkly appealing about having one person in charge forever and ever! Change is hard and sometimes painful! … and there will always be collaborators, who are either all-in on the regime or out for whatever they can get; and there will be people who are just muddling along and putting up with it because what else are you going to do; and there will be some few who are defiant and maybe reckless and endanger both themselves and others because they think there’s a better way. Where does righteousness lie? What is appropriate? I know what I think; and Roberts manages to be a lot more nuanced than many other writers would achieve (which does not surprise me, because… well. It’s Adam Roberts. Man knows how to be complicated).
I do have thoughts about the ending; spoilers below the cut.
Continue reading →Rakesfall
I just.
What.
Why have I read so many not-straightforward books recently?
Why do I read books where I’m really not sure that I’m smart enough to understand them?
Well, in this case it’s because so many people talked about this book that I got incredible FOMO and decided to finally take the plunge, even though I knew – from all that talking – that it was going to make my head spin.
And it did. Mostly in a “I think this is enjoyable?” kind of way, but… yeh. Spinning.
I could try to outline the story, but that would be something of a fool’s errand. There’s versions of worlds, or perhaps dimensions? Some characters maybe keep recurring across centuries. There are things hidden from mortal ken, and probably none of the worlds are our world, and things happened in the past that echo through to the future. You should definitely read Ian Mond’s review of it in Locus, because he does a better job of summing it up than I could.
So why bother writing this review? Really I just wanted to note, out loud as it were, how impressed I was while also flailing a bit to understand what was going on. Even through that flailing, I was drawn on, because the writing is just that good. And I felt hope that, even if I didn’t completely understand everything by the end, I’d at least have some sense of… completion, or resolution, or something. And I did. Not entirely completion, but certainly as though events and characters made some sort of sense, even if there were still gaps.
It really is excellent. Hard, and excellent. I can’t quite imagine where Chandrasekera will go next – anywhere, I guess.
What A Fish Looks Like
I’ve liked everything I’ve seen out of Stelliform Press; they focus on fiction that centres climate change and how it affects the planet and people. Often hopeful, like solarpunk, but not in a blinkered, rosy-glasses way.
The overarching story here is that a spaceship is soon to take off, and some tickets have come available for folks who didn’t expect it. The question of whether to take one or not is driving wedges between people. In particular, between Seb and Jay. So the story is sort of about that. But it’s about more than that: it’s about community, and how a changed world can be understood, and how and why we tell stories – to understand what’s going on and to shape what’s going on.
Rather than being a straightforward narrative, Beker presents a montage of myths and fairy stories, along with ephemera like party invitations and graffiti. The stories are found in a book Seb has left for Jay. They remake old stories to be more appropriate for the changed world: Beauty and the Beast becomes What a Fish Looks Like; The Little Mermaid becomes Playlist 4Merx in Times of Sea Levels Rising.
Characters come in and out – mentioned in ephemera and then in a story, times looping in and out, so it’s sometimes a tease trying to figure out who is known to be where. It’s incredibly clever and I can only assume Beker must have created one of those enormous pin boards with string to keep it all together (literally or metaphorically).
I’m late to this party but I can see why folks were talking about it last year. The structure works really well – done with thoughtfulness, the inclusion of ephemera adds enormous depth to a world, and the design works beautifully here. I like Beker’s ambivalence about the state of the world: maybe leaving will be the right decision! Maybe staying and trying to make things better on this planet is the right decision! … maybe both are right, for different people. And I liked, too, the hints at community building and support. I’m increasingly being drawn to that sort of fiction.
The Silver Book
So what happened is that I found out about the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize. It values works that combine fiction and nonfiction and generally do interesting things. That’s how I found out about The Book of Records and it’s how I found The Silver Book. This is even less like the works that I usually read. I have no regrets.
Nicholas is a young English artist, running away from a suffocating and difficult England. In Venice, he meets Danilo Donati. It’s the 1970s, and Donati works in cinema, with both Fellini and Pasolini – preferably on costuming, sometimes also on sets. Fellini is making Casanova; Pasolini is making Salo.
Politically, it’s a tremendously difficult time for Italy: fascists and their collaborators from under Mussolini are still around, times are hard economically, and so on. Socially, being homosexual is somewhat accepted within the arty world – certainly at least some people don’t go to any lengths to hide their preferences – but in the wider world… well. It’s the 1970s. And personally, both Fellini and Pasolini are not exactly easy to work with; and Nicholas and Donati have their own personal demons to deal with.
Nicholas is invented, representing young men who have sought adventure and love and difference – and who have fled difficulty. The other main characters, like Donati, are or were all real. Some of the events are real: the challenges of creating both films, what Fellini and Pasolini were like both artistically and politically, the general atmosphere in Rome and Venice. Laing draws all of these together to create a truly superb novel that’s important on a personal level, as well as on the political.
Salo was made in the 1970s; it was about late fascism in Italy, as well as about its own time. The Silver Book is set in the 1970s… and it’s absolutely about our own time as well. It’s not always an easy read; some dreadful things happen, although mostly off-page. It is, though, magnificent.
The End of Everything, M John Harrison
This is a very difficult book for me to even consider reviewing.
How to talk about the plot? Well, it’s sort of post-apocalyptic – certainly there was a crisis some years ago, involving an alien arrival (… ish) and folks are figuring out how to live in the aftermath. Phillip is a beachcomber, and an object he finds one day becomes more than he bargained for. For a while we follow Phillip, and then we follow his aunt. They occasionally act, but more often things happen to them and they react – or don’t – and then the it’s the end of the book.
Are Phillip and Marnie “main characters”? Not really; certainly no one would be accusing them of having main character energy. I wouldn’t even comment on whether they’re likely; I didn’t get to know them well enough for that.
There’s not that much detail, but post-crisis British society was the aspect I found most fascinating. I’m sure that for people who live there, there are all sorts of resonances with their post-Brexit and -Covid world. Even from the outside I could see some of the points that Harrison is poking. The people who are resolutely unaware that anything has changed; the people living like everything has changed; the utter weirdness of towns that have been abandoned for no apparent reason.
This is not the style of book I tend to read for pleasure. It reminded me a lot of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation for that reason; prose that isn’t straightforward, almost certainly references that went over my head, and a narrative that left me with more questions than anything else. Annihilation is definitely weirder, and I think more oblique, but anyone looking for “a story” in The End of Everything is looking in the wrong place. I don’t think that’s why anyone would read it – and if you were misinformed about the sort of book you were reading, you’d either give up in disgust or hate-read to the end (don’t ever do that, it’s not healthy). I certainly don’t regret reading this, but also I’m not going looking for more in the same vein. It’s just not my scene.
Echolands: A Journey in Search of Boudica
I love a really good travel book. (Do I know what I mean by that? Not really. But apparently, from recent experience, it often includes at least a little bit of history.)
I also love good history books; and Roman/British/women centric is definitely up there as a favourite.
Echolands is fantastic.
An English archaeologist decides to visit all the can-actually-be-identified Boudica-associated sites. And discusses Tactius, Dio, and the archaeology (what’s been found + the history of the finding – is there a word for historiography but it’s archaeology?) along the way. Plus adds some appropriate personal aspects – both about the travelling (some by foot, some by bicycle, some by car, some by train), his career, and occasionally his family. Plus some reflections on the modern physical landscape, and what Boudica means today.
It’s 300 pages long, and it’s extremely readable.
There are many aspects I found fascinating, but one that really stood out is his experimentation with caligae – the hobnailed “sandals” Roman soldiers wore, often – yes – with socks. His conclusion? Incredibly comfortable and sensible for long treks – especially on gravel and other such surfaces, not on tarmac and other such formed surfaces where the nails get little grip. Having heard just a little bit about things like trench foot, just the fact of airflow makes a lot of sense!
Mostly I was enchanted by the way he visits places like the castle at Colchester, and then also places that look completely unremarkable (weird little lakes created by peat mining in WW2), talks about why those spots were so important in the Boudica story, and presents the history of archaeological discovery in the area.
You don’t need to have any Roman or Iron Age British history knowledge to appreciate this.
The Book of Records
I feel like a fraud even trying to write a review of this book. I don’t think I have anything particularly coherent to say – I’m sure that since it came out last year, people who actually know something about Hannah Arendt and Baruch Spinoza and Du Fu have made all sorts of thoughtful, insightful, comments about how they’re portrayed there. And I’m sure literary critics have written fabulous words about how the book is structured; and philosophers have examined what it has to say about time, and love, and freedom, and choice.
I don’t really have anything to add. But I do want to add my tiny little flag, waving, to say that this is an amazing book and people should read it.
Somehow this passed me by last year – I hadn’t heard of it until I came across the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize 2026, for which the book was shortlisted this year. This prize is for a book that does clever things with nonfiction, and that’s exactly what Thien has written.
A young girl and her father, fleeing Foshan in China for environmental reasons, arrive at a liminal space called The Sea where people from across the world end up as they leave one place and go somewhere else. They stay much longer than most, however, because of her Lina’s father’s illness. As she tries to understand this new place, she has little to comfort her, except for three books her father snatched up as they fled: biographies of Arendt, Spinoza, and Du Fu. Eventually she meets three adults who are prepared to spend time with her, and tell her stories – especially when they see these books, because (and it’s a slight spoiler, but I already knew it going in and it actually improved the reading experience for me, so there you are) these three are Arendt, Spinoza, and Du Fu. And they share the stories of their lives and fill in what those books missed.
The choice of these three people is a fascinating one, and one that I am not fully equipped to analyse. Arendt and Spinoza in particular have some similarities that require more understanding than I have to untangle, in their approaches to life and philosophy – plus, Arendt studied Spinoza herself. The inclusion of Du Fu is probably a more surprising choice from the point of view of most Western readers… actually who am I kidding, lots of Western readers haven’t heard of Arendt or Spinoza either, or know basically nothing about them (and I know only slightly less than nothing, so I’m not exempt from this criticism!). Anyway, they all faced immense trauma – the Holocaust, the plague and being exiled from your community, famine and civil war – and all created art before, through, and after. One of the balancing acts Thien manages here is not minimising any of those horrors, but also not making the book only about them; instead she keeps pointing to the living that goes on around them.
All of this is also relevant to Lina, whose own life has been upended – her family torn in half – for reasons she really doesn’t comprehend.
This is, at best, a surface level explanation of the novel. It sounds weighty and I guess it is; there are definitely bits that I didn’t understand because I just don’t know enough philosophy. But it was still a remarkable book, and I hope lots of people will come to it.
Merryll of the Stones
Apparently I last read, and reviewed, this in 2012. Most of the reason for that is that my sister had my copy for some reason, and she’s just returned it to me.
This was published in 1989, and there are aspects where that definitely shows: Lots of Capitalisation to indicate Importance, plus some pretty weak naming – the Power, the Gift, the Families. There’s also the very… old-fashioned reference to Aboriginal people – it’s definitely not intended to be derogatory, and if anything there’s a nod to including the Dreaming within the big idea that Caswell is setting up here. Still, it’s there. Poor Kylie and her being on the ‘wrong side’ of eleven stone… but also there’s Tieu, the refugee from Vietnam, who has made friends with Megan and Kylie: this aspect of 1980s Australia I approve of.
Merryll is sent into the stream of time for her own protection when her father, the king (obvs) is killed. She is born as Megan – born in Wales, moves to Australia with her family at 2 years old, moves back to Wales when her parents are killed in a car crash, in the aftermath of which she starts have distressing dreams. Meanwhile Emlyn, living in the same Welsh village, Megan goes to, is also having weird dreams and is obsessed with Welsh mythology and history. There’s a bitchy cousin and difficult school transition, as well as the mystical elements of time travel and the existence and use of magic.
Would this book appeal to a 15 year old today? Absolutely no idea. I do know that I devoured it whenever I got it, presumably in the early 90s. Is it a classic example of far-too-smart-for-15-year-old characters? Absolutely, but I would argue that this sort of too-smart is part of the reason that kids like I was (read a lot, often feel uncomfortable with their peers, can’t fully explain their ambitions, etc) read books like this.
Also it’s 250 pages long and only took me a few hours to read. Caswell’s writing style is straightforward, while still carrying the beauty of the Welsh landscape and some of the terror Megan/Merryll confronts. (Although I do think one of the things lacking is appropriate acknowledgement of the grief Megan would be feeling for her dead parents.) I have no regrets for having read it again.
