A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

After a war between humans and aliens ends in Earth getting blown up, a rag-tag group of human survivors set up a fascist cult on an asteroid, intent on revenge. Kyr, short for Valkyr, is its perfect child: genetically altered to be be a supreme soldier, and fanatically devoted to the cause. But when she gets the one-two punch of being assigned to forced pregnancy rather than to the military, followed by her brother being sent off on a highly suspicious mission, she starts having second thoughts.

I strongly suspect that this book was inspired by the "Humans are space orcs" Tumblr post. Humans are bigger, stronger, faster, and tougher than any alien species. They can easily kill aliens in hand-to-hand combat. But aliens have superior technology.

I'd heard this was extremely grim and it has a very long list of trigger warnings (genocide, child abuse, fascism, homophobia, etc) but I idly clicked on the Look Inside and got so hooked that I bought it and read it in a day. It has some grim content and Kyr is terrible at first because she's been brainwashed from birth, but it's a compelling, fast-paced, fun read with a surprising amount of humor. Kyr's character development is very well-done - her morality and perspective changes, but she becomes essentially a better version of the same person. It has some unexpected plot developments that I enjoyed a lot, plus a lot of nifty space opera tropes and gadgets.

I enjoyed this a lot right up until the last few pages, which introduce a plot twist I hated on every possible level.

If you count Silver on the Tree/The Drowned Country as a single work, Tesh is now two for two for writing books where I loved the first part, only to be disappointed by very strange authorial choices later that I not only hated, but which cast an unpleasant retroactive shadow on the earlier parts that I'd initially loved.

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He felt himself for a moment as the stump of a rotten old tree, putting up thin green shoots at strange new angles.

A gorgeous fairytale which I am pretty sure started out as Green Man/Male Folklorist. Tobias is the wild man of an English forest in Victorian times, patrolling his wood and conversing with dryads and letting his mossy hair grow long. He's lived like this for four hundred years, until a flirty, bright-eyed folklorist named Henry Silver shows up at his cottage in a rain storm, soaking wet and very friendly.

I love forests and trees and moss and green, and this novella is a love letter to them. All the details of the magic and the woods are beautifully worked out, and feel both very magical and very grounded. The romance is a sweet, low-key slow burn. It's mostly about what it would be like to be the Green Man of an English wood, and how it would feel to start getting drawn back into human affairs. It's incredibly atmospheric, and the characters are great - Tobias, Silver, a dryad named Bramble, Silver's slightly Granny Weatherwax-esque mother.

I loved the ending to this, and it works perfectly well as a standalone. There's a sequel which I don't recommend.

I listened to this on audio. The performance by Matthew Lloyd Davies is outstanding.