Caliban’s War: Redux
This review will contain spoilers for Leviathan’s Wake, the first in this series. As with that book, I’ve just reread this one, so this is the REDUX…
Leviathan Wakes: redux
I have the fourth book in the Expanse series waiting to be read… but I haven’t read the other three in a long time, and then only once each. So, yes, I am re-reading. And I’m now going to do a Le Guin and REDUX my review of Leviathan Wakes.
Patchwerk
I received this book from the publisher at no cost.
This is a really hard story to talk about without major spoilers. So initially, let me know: the premise is quite clever – man makes machine that may well interfere with the very fabric of reality – and there are some nice points of world building. There’s a point at which you may well wonder whether your version of the text has somehow been corrupted (I did), but it’s actually the story itself, as you discover when you keep going (… unless your copy actually is corrupted…). However, I had some issues, mostly in the characters which I’ll mention in the spoilers section; partly it was in the prose itself, which at times just felt clunky.
Ancillary Mercy
This book was provided to me by the publisher at no cost.
Spoilers ahead for Ancillary Justice (reviews here and here – yes I loved it enough to review it the second time around) and Ancillary Sword.
Sooo… first thing to admit: it took me reading someone else’s review to realise that Justices, Swords and Mercies are all the sorts of ships that Breq is in charge of. How embarrassing that I did not realise that.
Secondly: yes, I love this series, I love Leckie’s work, I love Breq and the world she inhabits. My love is true and remains unshaken.
Further note: I’m just going with ‘she’ to refer to everyone, when I have to. I think there’s one person whose gender is actually confirmed (… maybe…insofar as that ever can be in these books) and it just does violence to my brain to go with he/she when Leckie herself (ahaha) goes with SHE. So nyer.
As with Justice to Sword, Mercy starts almost immediately Sword finishes off. I quite like this, since it means there doesn’t need to be any tedious filling in of blanks. It also means I’d like to see an omnibus edition where you can just read the whole lot, start to finish. It wouldn’t even be that much bigger than a complete edition of The Lord of the Rings. Breq continues to have issues with Anaander Mianaai, ruler of the Radch and therefore of civilisation as the Radch defines it… Continue reading →
Domnall and the Borrowed Child
This book was provided to me by the publisher at no cost.
I did not love this book.
It’s perfectly adequate as a re-hashing of the ideas about Faerie stealing children and possible consequences and so on, but I don’t think it’s as clever as it thinks it is.
I think the idea of only the old and somewhat pathetic faeries still being around is meant to be – amusing? challenging? – but instead it just comes off as a bit confusing, because the reason for that isn’t really explored; sometimes an info dump can be useful. Additionally I think what happens with the mortal woman is meant to, I dunno, challenge expectations or something. Didn’t really work.
Domnall comes across as a bit boring, rather than the somewhat sly, hard-working and long-suffering fae that I think was the intention. And if he wasn’t meant to be that, and was instead meant to be the lazy good-for-nothing whose butt is kicked to get more done – well, that didn’t really work either. The sidekick that he accidentally ended up with didn’t have enough character to be a funny, ambitious, or appropriately sidekick-y sidekick, and there were a couple of uncomfortable moments between them too (of a sexual nature – nothing too squick, don’t worry).
The plot itself is serviceable, and if that sounds like damning with faint praise… that’s probably about right.
Galactic Suburbia 130
In Which We Have High Expectations Of What Lies Beyond Equality, but in the meantime there’s Party Down. Get us from iTunes or at Galactic Suburbia.
We apologise for the sound quality of this episode, which had a few glitches that even the Silent Producer could not magic away, notably Alisa’s emergency phone call which the mike occasionally picks up. (Everything’s fine now.)
What’s New on the Internet
7 Jewish Authors Get Personal About Anti-Semitism (Alisa finds 7 new authors to read)
SF Editors Picks – Recommendations on great new SF/F/H stories by top editors.
Twitter @SFEditorsPicks
Facebook SFEditorsPicks
Mind Meld w/ Tansy & Tehani – Books That Made Me Love SFF
What Culture Have we Consumed?
Alisa: Scandal S1 and S2; Party Down S1 and S2; Coode St Podcast Ep 251: Kristine Kathryn Rusch and women in SF; The Serial Dynasty podcast
Tansy: House of Shattered Wings, by Aliette de Bodard; Alias by Brian Michael Bendis (Tor.com reread leading up to the show on Nov 20), SHIELD 50th Anniversary comics – Mockingbird [woo since we recorded this they announced it was going to series with the same writer!], [Don’t call her] The Cavalry, Agent Carter, Fury, Quake
Alex: Aurora: Beyond Equality; Up the Walls of the World, James Tiptree Jr; Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Samuel Delany
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Rampant
By Diana Peterfreund
Sadly I did not love this book as much as I had hoped. Partly this is me, partly it is the book.
I had read the novella, Errant, so I thought I kinda knew what the story was going to be about. But Errant is set… I forget when, some time in the past. Rampant is not; it’s about a girl in modern America learning about unicorns. Which is fine, it was just a bit of a surprise. I had t read the blurb, deliberately; I didn’t want any spoilers since I figured it was going to be the sort of book I’d like anyway.
Killer unicorns? How can that not be awesome? That’s what it’s about, by the way. Unicorns are real and they hunt animals and people. Only certain people can hunt them in return. This is the learning-about-your-abilities book. If that’s your thing, feel free to ignore my whinging! Just go read it; it’s certainly enjoyable enough that I wouldn’t dissuade potential readers automatically.
Anyway, what I really had not expected was how much the book would be focussed in sex. Not having it, how people feel about you if you do or don’t, etc (do American teens really feel pressured to have sex before they leave high school??). It does make sense, given that Peterfreund has kept the virginity aspect for her unicorn hunters, but… it felt like it got in the way of what I was expecting, which was learning about unicorn hunting and dealing with that aspect of your nature. Which, yes, virginity is part of that. But there was a lot of going on dates and agonising which I guess just isn’t what I was interested in reading.
So I’m willing to agree that in that aspect, definitely a problem of my expectations. And I did like the discussion around rape, attitudes towards and reactions to, although the victim seemed to deal with it faster than I would expect. (Not that I want intense victiming either, necessarily.)
On the book’s side, I felt that the plot went a bit too fast sometimes; fast enough that things got a bit improbable (yes yes, around the killer unicorns bits) and too convenient. In the characters I especially found Astrid’s mother a bit much; a bit ridiculous.
For all its faults I will definitely read the sequel, Ascendant, at some point.
Up the Walls of the World
This book is absolutely bonkers. Mad. And completely wonderful.
This was Tiptree’s first novel, but naturally enough many of the concerns and interests of his short stories are present here as well. I am so sad that he did not write more novels; this made me so happy, as did Brightness Falls from the Air, that I do wonder what else could have come from that amazing brain.
Let’s start by talking about the authorial situation and get that out of the way. This was published in 1978. Tiptree had been revealed as Alice Sheldon at the end of 1976. I was surprised therefore to discover that the brief bio in the end flap (oh hard backs I really do love you) makes no mention of him being her, although it does acknowledge Tiptree as a pseudonym. But I guess that pre internet, how are people going to know about the identity? Via Locus maybe, and fanzines, and word of mouth. Tiptree was not such a big deal that the New York Times was going to run an expose. Presumably therefor with this publication your more casual, less crazy SF fans aren’t going to know who Tiptree ‘really’ is – and Tiptree is enough of a name (… and male…?) to make it worth keeping the pseudonym. But THEN I turned to the back and the back cover image is Sheldon! Now I’ve seen the pic before and it’s quite obvious to me who this is; but others have suggested that this could, actually, be an ambiguously gendered person. I’m not entirely convinced. But anyway, there’s that.
Now, to plot. I’m going to be entirely spoilery because I really want to think about what Tiptree is doing here.
Aurora: Beyond Equality
I felt like a traitor giving this book only three stars on Goodreads. But it has to be said that I don’t feel the anthology lived up to what it was setting out to do.Does that make me a heretic? Possibly.
In the introduction, Susan Janice Anderson discusses how hard a lot of people said they found the topic. That they had to invent an entirely new society in order to talk about men and women being actually equal (to which in my head I say, duh; you’re writing SF aren’t you? Maybe that’s a bit harsh). It was very interesting reading about what they wanted to avoid (female monsters), and how hard it was to find models of what they did want. The Dispossessed and “When it changed” were of course mentioned.
The stories:
Sorcerer of the Wildeeps
This was provided to me by the publisher.
This is not a straightforward novel. The plot is not linear, the characters are slippery, and so is the language sometimes. But it is engaging and haunting and (much as its trite to say) challenging.
1. The plot is not linear. The focal character, Demane, sometimes has flashbacks to his past experiences – and sometimes to the experiences of other people, and sometimes he’s simply reflecting on history. It’s not always clear when this is happening, which I think is a stylistic choice; it took me a little while to understand when that was happening, but once I left myself go with the flow it usually made sense. The only frustrating thing by the end of it was that I really, really wanted to know more about Demane’s history and that of the world he lives in, with its Towers and demigods gods who have gone back to the stars…
2. The characters are slippery: this is somewhat related to the lack of narrative linearity (did I mention this isn’t a problem? It’s not a problem, as long as you don’t mind having to work a bit). Demane is definitely not straightforward – he’s got one mammoth backstory that only gets revealed in dribs and drabs, and that’s nothing on Captain, whose life is like a picture that’s entirely in shadow except for one tiny bit where one spotlight hits. Again, not a problem, but it does make it hard to explain what you’ve just read: “There’s this guy who works with a merchant caravan at the moment but he’s had this amazing life in the past, where he was kinda taught magic except it’s not magic, and in the present he’s trying to keep everyone around him alive…”
3. The language is slippery too. I’m not referring to the dialogue here, which is written very much in a spoken style (I know nothing about Wilson but I presume he’s thought long and hard about the use of the n-word; I can’t imagine Tor leaving that in a book without it being very deliberate and considered, either); dialogue doesn’t bother me. I think the elusiveness of the language often related to the non-linearity of the narrative actually. It took me a few pages to get the hang of it anyway, and once I was properly immersed it flowed beautifully.
I will look out for more work by Kai Ashante Wilson. Well recommended.
Randomly Yours, Alex 