A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Here is a rundown of some the books I read this year which 1) were new to me rather than rereads, 2) which I managed to record (so disproportionately ebooks), 3) which I did not do full reviews of already, and have given up on all hope of doing so, but remember well enough to do very short ones. You'll see that I felt mostly meh about them. Generally I feel compelled to write a review when I love a book, hate a book, or have strongly mixed feelings about a book.



The House is on Fire, by Rachel Beanland. Historical fiction about a real theatre fire in Richmond, Virginia in 1811, in which an enslaved blacksmith saved a lot of people's lives. I meant to write it up to rage about it, didn't have time, and then couldn't remember the exact details. It's written by a white woman and you can tell she means to illuminate racism, but WAY understates the actual racism of the time - something underlined by her afterword, in which she explains how she deviates from historical facts.

Her deviations mostly make white people way nicer than they really were, like completely making up grateful white women whose lives he'd saved raising money so the heroic black man can buy his wife's freedom. The white people in the town did eventually take up a collection for him... but it was FORTY YEARS LATER, when he was destitute, way after his enslaved wife had been sold away and lost to him forever. And also, in real life, after he saved the lives of multiple white people, he still didn't get freed for another TWENTY YEARS, and that was because his bought his own freedom with money he'd saved. The whole book can be summed up with white people calling him, a SLAVE, Mr. Hunt. I don't think so!



Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones. Odd little novel, eccentrically structured, about a family of werewolves leading a very marginal existence; being a werewolf mostly means there are about a million ways in which the modern world is liable to kill you. A lot of it reads like Jones listing every thought he's ever had about how werewolves might really work. A sharp portrait of outsiders and drifters, sometimes very funny, sometimes gross, sometimes oddly sweet. LOTS of animal harm. Any given part is engaging but it doesn't have a lot of forward momentum.



The Root Cellar, by Janet Lunn. A lonely, poorly socialized white orphan girl travels back in time to Canada during the American Civil War, and makes friends with some white Canadians who are involved in it. I learned some stuff about Canada's involvement in the American Civil War, which is a subject I had not considered before and will undoubtedly never consider again.



The Helios Syndrome by Vivian Shaw (the Greta von Helsing writer). A novella about a necromancer who helps with plane crash investigations and gets haunted by the ghost of a dead pilot. I was entertained while reading, but now remember almost nothing about this.



In the Drift, by Michael Swanwick. Depressing dystopia about America after a Chernobyl type nuclear accident. Swanwick's prose is gorgeous and that plus ambiguous psychic powers kept me reading, but it was a fix-up novel and felt a bit aimless. I wasn't that interested in the politicking and there was lots of it.



Saturation Point, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A novella about a scientist in a depressing dystopia who gets tapped to go another expedition back to a deadly area, after the first one she was on 20 years ago ended in disaster. The area's deadliness is largely because of its wet bulb temperature. I enjoyed this while I read it but the ending felt like it belonged more on a short horror story than on the book it had been up to that point. Very little characterization. Not his best work.



Horizon, by Scott Westerfeld. A bunch of teenagers crash-land in a very weird environment filled with weird things. This was pretty entertaining, kind of a more science fiction-y middle-grade Lost. But then I realized that the subsequent books in the series were written by other writers and no one seems to like the ending, so I stopped there.

These three novellas deal with the issue of community, oppression, resistance, and violence in worlds which are dealing with the aftermath of an apocalypse.

Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Ogres are bigger than you.
Ogres are stronger than you.
Ogres rule the world.

In this apparently medievaloid fantasy world, humans are ruled by ogres. In addition to being bigger and stronger, ogres are physically capable of eating meat, which makes humans very sick. Humans are passive and non-violent... until a young human, Torquell, dares to fight an ogre. Torquell then flees to the forest, where he meets some Robin Hood-like human outlaws. But that's just the beginning...

From this premise alone,I had a pretty good idea of where this story was going. With the exception of a nice final twist, I was absolutely correct.

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Ogres has a strong leftist theme about class warfare and resistance, but as a story, it's pretty cliched. The Hugo nominees liked it more than I did.



Everything That Isn't Winter, by Margaret Killjoy

A tea-growing anarchist commune after the apocalypse is threatened by violent outsiders.

Killjoy is a trans woman anarchist of the practical variety: self-sufficiency, community-building, and punching Nazis. I approve. She has a great Twitter and two excellent podcasts, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff (resistors in history) and Live Like The World Is Dying (prepping for anarchists).

I was excited to read her fiction, but this novella was just... fine. It's exactly what it says on the can.



Nothing but the Rain, by Naomi Salman

In a small town where it rains all the time, the rain has started to erase people's memories. A single drop will take away the memory of the last few moments. More than that, the last few hours. And so forth. Enough exposure will erase your entire mind. No one can remember exactly when or how this started, because by the time anyone realized that they need to write down what happened, a lot of their memories had already been erased. The town is surrounded by soldiers who won't speak to them or let them leave.

The narrator, Laverne, is a doctor who keeps a journal to try to keep her self as intact as possible, and to read it back to remember what the rain erases. This structure is essential to the story, and used in a really brilliant manner. She's more isolated than many of the people in the town, for reasons which are gradually revealed, but she does have one contact, a woman with a toddler.

The premise is really well done, working out all the implications in a terrifyingly believable manner. I would call it a horror story, not because of any conventional jump scares, but because the entire premise is essentially horrific.

Be aware going in that you will never get an explanation of exactly why the rain is happening or what's going on in the wider world, though you do get enough bits and pieces that you can construct a plausible explanation for some questions.

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Thanks to just_ann_now for the rec; I never heard of this before and it's great.




All these novellas deal with community and resistance to oppression.

In Ogres, resistance is necessary, violent resistance is also often necessary, but there is a danger of new bosses taking over for the old bosses.

In Everything That Isn't Winter, community is most important thing and the threats to it are primarily from outside forces. But because there are threats from outside, self-defense is necessary. This story deals with cost of violence on the people who commit it, even if their reasons are essentially good.

Nothing but the Rain has an optimistic view of people's willingness to resist, but a pessimistic view of its likelihood of success. It deals with the impossibility of staying morally pure in extreme situations, and the awful choices people are forced to make in order to survive.

A rare singleton from Tchaikovsky, and also a book with shockingly few bugs - I think the only bug content in the entire book is a couple giant dragonflies and a single dog-sized hairy spider that appears in exactly one scene.

In a vaguely Napoleonic time period, impoverished aristocrat Emily Marshwic lives with her two sisters, her younger brother, and her brother-in-law. Her biggest problems are her lack of money, her flighty younger sister's habit of running away every time she feels especially aggrieved, and the family feud with the mayor, Mr. Northway, whom they blame for their father's suicide after he lost all the family money.

Then war breaks out. All patriotic men of age volunteer... and mostly don't come back. A draft is instituted to scoop up the men of age who didn't volunteer. Emily's teenage brother volunteers and her brother-in-law is drafted. Then the draft is widened to encompass younger and older men. But it's still not enough. In the midst of privation and desperation, the draft is widened to include women. Rather than feeding a terrified young servant into that meatgrinder, Emily volunteers, and is sent to the swamp part of the front.

An excellent war novel and study of leadership in a horrendous war of attrition. The fantasy aspect of the book is comparatively minor--the king has a magical ability to create mages, and there are native people of the world who are not human--but it's primarily an alternate history of a war that might have been.

It's an extremely intense book, especially once you realize the reason why Emily is the main character. ( Read more... )

Emily is an unreliable narrator of the variety who tells the absolute truth as she sees it, but who may believe things that aren't correct. You can tell early on that she probably doesn't have a full picture of exactly what went down and why regarding her father's suicide, and it becomes increasingly clear that she takes the party line about the reasons for the war at face value. Which leads to another interesting (very spoilery!) aspect of the book:

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A vivid, suspenseful, intense, dark yet ultimately hopeful novel.

Warning for attempted rape and standard war novel content.

I keep trying and failing to do a proper review of this, so I will just say that I loved it and found the ending very satisfying. I could have read ten books of it—let’s be real, I could have read an infinite number of books of it—but it was also perfect as was.

Massive spoilers under cut.

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Tchaikovsky has gotten a lot better at writing romantic relationships. I actually shipped people in this book, while in the kinden books I was mostly anti-shipping them, especially the canon romances.

The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3)

This is the first Tchaikovsky book I’ve read that has no bugs in it. However, it makes up for it with VELOCIRAPTORS.

In a land in which everyone is a shapeshifter, Maniye has shapeshifter-related problems. Her father is the asshole leader of the patriarchal Wolf clan that defeated the previously dominant Tiger clan, and her mother was the captive Tiger queen who was executed immediately after Maniye’s birth.

Most people can only shift into one animal form. But Maniye can shift into both wolf and tiger. She’s kept the latter secret, as usually having two shift forms drives you insane, and if she reveals her tiger self, it will be cut from her. This is even worse than it sounds, as the shift form is also your soul, so she’d be losing half her soul.

First level of spoilers here. This covers stuff in the first few chapters which might be more fun to discover by yourself.

Comments will include spoilers through the end of the book, so don’t read the comments if you only want first-level spoilers.

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The worldbuilding in this book, especially when it comes to shapeshifting, is beyond outstanding. Every detail is incredibly cool and often very original, from naming traditions to magic to Gods. To take just one example, a human wearing armor and carrying a sword who becomes a wolf will be a wolf whose hide is almost as tough as iron and whose claws are almost as hard and sharp as the sword.

The cultures roughly correspond to pre-Columbus America, Asia, and Africa, but it’s pretty rough. There’s no “the wolves are Japanese,” and while wolf culture is very different from hyena culture, the wolves and hyenas all also have their own clans with their own customs, and within the clans, people still have different ideas about things. But it’s all distinctly non-European bronze age as it begins to become iron age, which is an unusual setting that I really enjoyed.

Despite some dark elements and the rape in the backstory, the overall feel of this story was just incredibly fun. It has the same gleeful inventiveness of the Apt books, only this time it’s shifters rather than kinden.

I feel confident that bugs will appear at some point, though. There are three fat books, he won’t be able to resist.

Second level of spoilers, through the end of the book!

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Engagement with premise: A+. Delivers both iddy wish-fulfillment of a downtrodden girl coming into her own, and ALL the cultural and magical shapeshifter worldbuilding you could possibly desire.

The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1)

Two collections of short stories about my beloved bug people.

The first, Spoils of War, takes place entirely during the Wasp invasion of the Commonweal and is unsurprisingly gloomy. My favorite stories were about a Thorn Bug woman’s private war, a Wasp soldier and his Dragonfly opponent who share a moment of respect and understanding in the middle of the war, and a Roach’s search for his kidnapped daughter. But a lot of them blurred together into “war is hell.”

A Time for Grief covered a much wider span of time and so was less gloomy, though still often fairly dark. A number of the stories are in distinct genres, like a noir private eye story, a backstage theatre story, a western horror story, kitchen sink gritty realism in the slums of Helleron, etc. This was really fun and I liked those stories a lot.

I really hope Tchaikovsky writes more stories (or full novels!) in this world. He clearly has it all so well worked out, and there’s so many corners still unexplored.

Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)



A Time For Grief (Tales of the Apt Book 2)

A book about intelligent spiders by Adrian Tchaikovsky… oh wait, all his books are about intelligent spiders. You have to admire a person who has a niche enthusiasm and really goes for it. I applaud his commitment to all things entomological and arachnid, and if he ever visits Mariposa he can sleep in the Spiderhouse.

If you do not want to read about spiders, skip this entire post.

This book is fantastic. I am arachnophobic and I loved it anyway, though admittedly my issue with spiders is how they look, not reading about them. (In fact, the parts of the book I found squicky and horrifying and phobic-triggering all involved ants, not spiders.) I can’t believe how attached I got to the valiant spiders and their civilization, and how much I was rooting for them to succeed.

[OH SHIT as I am typing I noticed my cats staring at something and there is a GIANT FUCKING BLACK SPIDER ON THE OUTSIDE SCREEN OF MY DOOR!!!! IT’S GOT A BIG FAT BODY AND THICK LEGS AND IT’S FUCKING HUGE!!!! I am not making this up. Um, so I guess this book did not cure my arachnophobia. Luckily someone came to the door and the spider scuttled away. Welp. Guess I won’t be using the back door any time soon.]

So, back to Children of Time. It’s old-school, big-picture, sweep of history, cool ideas, sense of wonder anthropological science fiction – something I haven’t enjoyed in ages. It reminded me of how much I used to like it.

The premise is that Earth has been largely trashed by wars and environmental damage, and there is currently a war between the humans who are trying to terraform other planets, and humans who are trying to stop this from happening. One woman is doing an experiment in which she plans to seed a terraformed planet with monkeys and

[AAAAAH I JUST NOW REALIZED THAT THE GIGANTIC SPIDER IS INSIDE THE DOOR, BETWEEN THE GLASS AND THE SCREEN AND THERE IS A BIG CHUNK OF GLASS MISSING ON THE INSIDE OF THE DOOR SO IT CAN GET TO ME. I just ran and grabbed tape and taped the inside of the door so it can’t get in. Hopefully there is a way out that it can use to get out the same way it got in. And thanks to decluttering, I knew instantly where my tape was. Marie Kondo just saved me from the spider.]

Um, so, this scientist, Dr. Kern, intends to seed a planet which has already been terraformed with Earth plants, bugs, and some small mammals like mice with a literal barrel of monkeys and a nanovirus which will enable them to evolve extremely fast, so what would normally take millennia will occur over a few thousand years. Her intent is to create a monkey civilization that will be intelligent but not as much as humans and can be used as servants. But things go drastically wrong, the entire Earth civilization blows up, and the monkeys never make it to the planet. But the nanovirus does. And it turns out to be quite compatible with spiders…

Meanwhile, a motley handful of human refugees flees the now-destroyed Earth in a generation ship. They have cryogenic sleep, so the story of the same few humans continues on their ship over a period of thousands of years, as they wake up for a few days or months or years at a time. At the same time, the spiders are evolving. We follow generation after generation of spiders as they fight wars and plagues, develop new technologies, and try to communicate with the mysterious thing in the sky—the AI that’s all that remains of Dr. Kern—that keeps sending them messages…

I don’t want to say too much about the spider civilization is because it’s so much fun to discover it on your own, but as a lure, I just want to mention that they figure out how to make colonies of nonsentient ants work as living computers. But seriously, the spider technology and culture is SO FUCKING COOL.

It took me longer to warm up to the human characters, and I was almost always more into the spiders’ story. But I did end up enjoying the humans’ story too. But the spiders? I LOVED the spiders. And not just as a civilization, but as individual, complex characters.

The nanovirus also uplifted some crustaceans, and in the midst of all the spider and human drama, every now and then we get an update about how the crustacean civilization is living out its own grand epic underwater and 99.9% off-page. It was delightful and slightly hilarious.

Spoilers: ( Read more... )

[Okay, my door spider is now out of the door and has been swept off the balcony. Pretty sure it’s fine and will live out its spidery life, hopefully very far away from me.]

More book spoilers. ( Read more... )

Only $2.99 on Kindle! Children of Time

The cover is both correct and not really representative of the experience of reading the book. However, an accurate cover would probably make at least a quarter of the intended audience flee screaming, so there's that.

Gave up on writing a coherent review; incoherent notes below cut. Extremely spoilery! ( Read more... )

What a wild ride. So glad I heard about these books via Layla. Darkness and tragedy notwithstanding, they were wonderful and I wish there were ten more of them.

War Master's Gate (Shadows of the Apt Book 9)

Seal of the Worm (Shadows of the Apt Book 10)

Oh, my brave and heartbreaking bug people!

Book 7 was fantastic and had me biting my nails every other chapter; Book 8 was probably my single favorite of the series so far, despite zero appearances from two of my three favorite characters (but my third had a huge role). It was even more of a nailbiter and heavily featured one of my favorite things, the culture of fighter pilots in a time period when you can actually see the faces of your opponents.

All else is spoilers. ( Read more... )

Heirs of the Blade (Shadows of the Apt Book 7)



The Air War (Shadows of the Apt Book 8)

I took a break from the series after The Scarab Path and just picked it up again, so this isn't a review, just some flaily notes inspired by having just dived into the series again.

I'm glad I'm reading it right now, because the themes of doing your best in incredibly dark times and trying to make the right choices when it's not at all clear what is the right choice, is really something I want to read now.

It's a series largely about war, and without being very gory/gruesome, doesn't sugarcoat it at all. It's emotionally rough, but not despairing. So far at least, it's actually very hopeful about the good in humanity, and is that rare fantasy war series in which the characters who want peace and think it's possible to negotiate with the enemy are not presented as naive morons.

The brutality of the war is also offset by the sheer glee and exuberant inventiveness of the world. I fucking love the kinden, and every time a new one is introduced I share in the author's obvious delight. There's an especially good one in The Scarab Path.

Please don't spoil me for any new kinden introduced after The Air War! Especially, the nature of what's under the seal, which has not yet been confirmed. I love discovering them for myself.

I am not big on bugs in real life, but I admire and enjoy Tchaikovsky's obvious enthusiasm for all things insectile. Can you imagine his room as a young boy? It would be like my parents' cabin only on purpose.

Also, once I got over the hump of the Apt/Inapt divide being 1) essentially magical and so not based on Earth logic like how one defines a machine, 2) being based more on time period, i.e., people from the Bronze Age existing at the same time as people from the Industrial Revolution, than on literally how machines work, it became really fascinating and I love how he's exploring it and introducing new aspects of it.

I've read through book 8 (The Air War) by now, and my book notes include spoilers through that. Please no spoilers past that point! I am delighting in not knowing WTF is going to happen next.

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