Calculated Risks, by Seanan McGuire (InCryptid # 10)

[rachelmanija]

sholio recommended it to me on the basis that the heroine is an alien raised by humans who ends up stranded in another dimension with a bunch of her friends who don't remember who she is due to magic. This intrigued me enough to check it out. Excerpts from emails to sholio follow:

Rachel: I just started reading it. You didn't mention that the heroine looks human but is actually a giant bug!

Rachel: She has no heart, no blood, and no circulatory system! Because she's a bug.

Sholio: A bug with boobs, which you will be hearing about at length.

Rachel: I look forward to the explanation of the boobs' existence. Or maybe I don't.

Also, there are orders of mice priests. I am unexpectedly charmed.

Rachel: Ah. The bugs lactate, due to "a quirk of evolution."

Rachel: I just hit the respectful pronouns for zombies.

Rachel: And the question of whether the word zombie is culturally appropriative.

Sholio: Worrying about zombie pronouns is exactly how you get eaten in the zombie apocalypse.

Rachel: I am at the 50% mark of the Seanan McGuire book and 60% of it is the heroine delivering exposition, either internally or to the other characters who don't remember her. Another 10% is the mice clergy delivering exposition. This is surprisingly entertaining. So far this is the only Seanan McGuire book I have ever actually enjoyed.

The rest consists of 10% action and 20% angsting about consent.

Sholio: This makes me want to make a pie chart.



This is book 10 of an 11-book series, so the massive amounts of exposition were more interesting than they would have been had I read the previous nine books.

Sarah Zellaby is a "cuckoo," from a race that evolved from wasps and are generally sociopaths who dump their children into human families; the cuckoo children invariably murder those families. Sarah is one of only two known non-sociopathic murderer cuckoos. She is telepathic and can mind-control people, so her human adoptive parents drummed it into her that consent is the highest value, with respect for others a close second. This results in her being very concerned over things like not misgendering zombies who are currently attacking her, plus a tendency to martyr herself.

She ends up stranded on another planet, along with a college campus, assorted students, a bunch of zombie cuckoos, and several friends and family members, one of whom is her true love (they're not biologically related), none of whom remember her due to magic but all of whom do remember that cuckoos are very dangerous. Hence the First Half of Exposition.

The second half of the book is about 50% giant bugs, 30% action, and 20% angsting about consent.



It heavily features giant flying millipedes, an extremely adorable giant spider, and plenty of angsting over the ethics of mind-controlling non-sapient giant bugs. Sadly, the mouse clergy get forgotten about for most of it.

I enjoyed this book despite a number of odd quirks of the sort that normally put me off McGuire's books. The heavy-handed lecturing about consent actually made sense for this character and her situation. Other quirks were just peculiar, like the breast thing. Female characters comment on their own breasts a lot. Sarah is obsessed with finding a bra for the first third of the book. I get that she specifically would feel very uncomfortable without one, presumably because she has behemoth bug boobs, but she narrates at great length about how ALL women need bras, that sports bras are not real bras (apparently underwire is superior - not an opinion I share), and that ALL superheroines would want to wear bras at all times.

I will just say that for most of 2020, when lots of people did not have to go anywhere, most of the women in my apartment complex, myself included, did not wear bras most of the time.

The book has a novelette at the end narrated by Annie, who turned out to be insufferable as a POV character, so much so that I only got a few pages in. In general, I really liked Sarah, the mouse clergy, and the giant bugs, but I was not so big on her family. So while this individual book was fun, I probably won't be continuing with the series.

Comments

[scioscribe]

The fact that the mice clergy vanish in the second half is so dispiriting. I love even thinking about mice clergy.

I really like the idea of the cuckoos, too. I've only ever read her Mira Grant Newsflesh trilogy, but I might have to check this out as a faux-standalone.

[sholio]

I've only ever read her Mira Grant Newsflesh trilogy, but I might have to check this out as a faux-standalone.

It honestly reads really well that way! (I say as someone who also read it as a faux standalone; technically I read the first book in the series a long time ago and didn't like it, which gave me some grounding in the worldbuilding, but I don't think anything I remember from the first book is applicable to this one.)

[rachelmanija]

What did you think of Newsflesh? I didn't read it because I dislike books involving modern politics and media.

[dantesspirit]

Sarah has a 2 book arc in the series, so really, start with Imaginary Numbers, as Calculated Risks is the second and concluding book of her arc.

[swan_tower]

I'm curious what normally puts you off McGuire's books. The only ones of hers I've read have been Middlegame and Over the Woodward Wall; I keep meaning to try others, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

[rachelmanija]

In the Toby series, I was put off by the heroine being astoundingly stupid and also having a baby when she knew there was a 50-50 chance it would die horribly, and also by everyone in the book behaving in ways that just made no sense.

In the Every Heart a Doorway series, in the first book I loved the premise and was frustrated by most of the book not being about the premise; later books were more about the premise, but were too twee and preachy for me.

There's also something about her tone/voice that tends to rub me the wrong way. It worked in this book because the narrator is an alien who learned about humans by study and practice, and is consciously applying learned principles. So when she behaves and speaks in an odd, self-conscious, lecture-y manner, it makes sense. It annoys me when human characters behave in a wildly nonsensical manner and their inner narrative is a mix of lectures and wisecracks.

[rachelmanija]

What did you think of the ones you read? I haven't read those.

[sholio]

BEHEMOTH BUG BOOBS.

I think it's interesting how some of the quirks that would have driven me crazy in a different book, like the ongoing angsting about consent, worked fine here because of the nature of the narrator, who has spent her whole life trying to fit herself into the human world and not use her natural predator abilities on people, so she both has trouble thinking and feeling some of the things (most) humans do naturally, and is hyper-attuned to any sense that she's doing it wrong or pushing too hard on the people around her.

Everything is more fun when an alien predator wasp is doing it.

I did keep thinking that one nonsensical aspect of the worldbuilding, which is that bugs on her world just randomly evolved to look like humans (complete with ginormous boobs) would have been incredibly easy to work around in this setting, which is just to give them some kind of magic that adapts them outwardly to mimic their prey in whatever new world they go to. This would have been so much easier for me to buy than a bunch of alien wasps just happening to evolve to look exactly like humans on a planet with no humans, including mammalian secondary sexual characteristics.

(If this had been an Adrian Tchaikovsky book, she would definitely have been doing more weird wasp stuff.)

But in general I think the fact that I thought about it at all was mostly a side effect of urban fantasy tropes - it's all handwavium! Don't worry about it! - running headlong into a book that was basically stranded on an alien planet scifi (and a fun example of it!). There was another bit that felt very urban fantasy to me, which was where they lie to the kids on the campus about what's really going on and convince them that it was a gas main explosion instead of stranded on an alien world with zombies. It would make way more sense and give them a much better shot at survival to tell them the truth! But "never tell normals about the magic" is really integral to a lot of urban fantasy worldbuilding, even when it didn't really make sense here.

On the whole, though, boob obsession and alien anatomy aside, I really liked it and I'm glad you did too!

100% second you on Annie being completely insufferable; I also got a few pages into the backup novella and noped out hard. I can't even imagine what the experience of reading an entire Annie-POV book would be like.

[grammarwoman]

100% second you on Annie being completely insufferable; I also got a few pages into the backup novella and noped out hard. I can't even imagine what the experience of reading an entire Annie-POV book would be like.

THANK YOU. I generally enjoy the series, but Annie is such an asshole brat that it's really hard to stay in her POV without wanting to fling the books. I wonder sometimes (uncharitably) if McGuire is a youngest sib and is venting by proxy.

[rachelmanija]

I did keep thinking that one nonsensical aspect of the worldbuilding, which is that bugs on her world just randomly evolved to look like humans (complete with ginormous boobs) would have been incredibly easy to work around in this setting, which is just to give them some kind of magic that adapts them outwardly to mimic their prey in whatever new world they go to. This would have been so much easier for me to buy than a bunch of alien wasps just happening to evolve to look exactly like humans on a planet with no humans, including mammalian secondary sexual characteristics.

That would have been a GREAT workaround. I kept thinking about cockroach milk and wondering if anyone was ever going to mention that.


There was another bit that felt very urban fantasy to me, which was where they lie to the kids on the campus about what's really going on and convince them that it was a gas main explosion instead of stranded on an alien world with zombies. It would make way more sense and give them a much better shot at survival to tell them the truth! But "never tell normals about the magic" is really integral to a lot of urban fantasy worldbuilding, even when it didn't really make sense here.

Ohh, that makes a lot of sense. I was confused and irritated when everyone just bailed on the stranded college students without even warning them to stay inside and lock the doors, when they knew that they'd be attacked by giant spiders overnight. I actually thought I must have been missing some key information, and when it turned out that the spiders mostly ate the cuckoos I thought that they'd always figured that would happen (though they still should have warned them!) But it being an urban fantasy trope does make that make more sense.

[dantesspirit]

00% second you on Annie being completely insufferable; I also got a few pages into the backup novella and noped out hard. I can't even imagine what the experience of reading an entire Annie-POV book would be like.

Not as bad as you think.

Magic For Nothing, I believe, starts Annie's arc. It concludes in That Ain't Witchcraft, right before Sarah's 2 book arc - Imaginary Numbers and Calculated Risks.

Annie suffers from *a lot* of '3rd, extra, spare of the spare, youngest' child syndrome, so a lot of her attitude is informed by always being, more or less, overlooked as 'unnecessary in the grand scheme'.

It can get grating at times though.

[stranger]

I'm going with the idea that Sarah knows all women, especially superheroines, need proper bras, based on the floating-basketball breasts shown on women in superhero comics. (It's possible her human mother had formulated this view after looking at '90s comics with a clear eye, and passed it to Sarah.) *Those* women clearly need all the support there is, and skin-tight lycra isn't enough given normal physics.

[rachelmanija]

Hahahaha! That makes sense.

It's magic molecule-rearranging lycra.

[carbonel]

I petered out on reading the Incryptid books around #6 or 7, but I love the religious mice. I liked Sarah as a subsidiary character in those books, so I might try this one as a standalone.

I read the Newsflesh books as part of my Hugo homework when the first one was a Hugo nominee, and liked it well enough to read all the others, even though I really dislike both zombies and horror. But I am done done done with it all now, even if there turn out to be more books later.

[sartorias]

Sounds like she was channeling Heinlein in this one.

[sabotabby]

I honestly don't remember if I read this one or another book in the same series that has mice clergy and a cuckoo, but not enough of the former, and now it's bothering me. I didn't bond with either InCryptid or Indexing as much as many of her others.

[sheliak]

I read the first three books in quick succession and enjoyed them, but then basically felt like I'd eaten a vast amount of cotton candy and given myself a stomachache, and never felt like continuing in the series. I think Sarah was mentioned in the books I read but didn't appear.

I did like the mice clergy! They were a lot of fun. (I was a little annoyed by the thing where they call female members of the family priestesses but male ones gods, though.)

[cgbookcat1]

As an individual who has to buy bras online because most regular stores don't carry them in large enough sizes, I found Sarah's bra journey very understandable. Lounging around without support is ok if I'm at home, but if I'm off on an adventure I'd be very upset to be in nightclothes and without a good bra.

[mific]

I haven't worn a bra since 1976.

[dantesspirit]

To be honest, you really should have started with book one, or at the very least, Imaginary Numbers, as Sarah has a 2 book arc and Calculated Risks is the 2nd and concluding book in that arc. A lot of things about Sarah and the rest of the Prices would make more sense.

And read her Wayward Children series, her Toby Day series and all of her Mira Grant books. And Middlegame, Seasonal Fears, check out her Smalls Gods series in Instagram...

[rachelmanija]

I don't like Wayward Children or October Daye.

[melebeth]

The mouse clergy are why I read that series

[starlady]

I definitely wore a bra every day during the pandemic, but I have accepted that apparently my liking having boob support makes me an outlier.

McGuire writes so many books that I have had to consciously choose which series to follow, and I chose Toby Daye and Wayward Children (and the Middlegame books)--my impression was that Incryptid was on the pulpy side. And this does sound very pulpy! But also fun, I'm intrigued by the mouse clergy.

[rachelmanija]

I expect it depends on cup size. I'm a B.

[cupcake_goth]

I’ve read the whole InCryptid series, and while I enjoy them, I DO feel that the talking mice clergy are the best characters.

I absolutely adore the Wayward Children series, but 1) I was one of those kids who was always searching for mysterious doors, and 2) Jacqueline and Jillian Wolcott resonate with me for many, many reasons.

[branna]

There is a plot twist at the end of the first Sarah book Seanan spent years taunting me with. Overall it amused me but the whole Johrlac magical math thing drives me slightly nuts.

I like the InCryptid novelettes featuring the great grandparents more.