A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

A Watership Down-esque epic fantasy about an ant colony under threat.

I don't expect talking animal books to be totally faithful to actual animal behavior, but I do want them to at least evoke the general concept of the animal in question. Peter Rabbit may wear a blue jacket, but he also sneaks into danger to get carrots. T. H. White's ant colonies are strictly regimented, with dissent literally unthinkable; they're metaphors for fascism, but it feels intuitively correct that ants could sort all things into DONE/NOT DONE.

The closer the animals are to actual animals, the more faithful I expect them to be to actual animal behavior. I expect less rabbit-ness from Peter Rabbit, who wears a blue jacket, than from the Watership Down rabbits, who don't wear clothing and live in burrows. If the animals are clearly intended to more-or-less be real animals, I definitely expect their biology/anatomy to be correct. Even Peter Rabbit shouldn't have an exoskeleton or thumbs.

Hawdon's ants are clearly intended to be real ants, except talking and intelligent. They climb blades of grass. They live in a colony. They are in danger of being stepped on.

1. WORKER ANTS ARE ALL FEMALE, HAWDON. YOU DON'T GET TO MAKE ALL THE ANTS MALE EXCEPT FOR THE QUEEN JUST SO YOU CAN AVOID HAVING MORE THAN ONE FEMALE CHARACTER IN THE ENTIRE BOOK.

2. Ants do not have lungs.

3. Ants do not have skulls.

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.

Over a month ago, I bought a praying mantis egg case and stuck it in the rosemary. It never hatched, and I gave up on and then forgot about it...

...until I just now discovered a bazillion adorable praying mantises in the rosemary! Just look at them!

I had heard that baby mantises can be cannibals, so I madly rushed back and forth with mantises in my hands, one by one, to deposit them in particularly bug-infested parts of the garden. My garden is scattered all over and the rosemary is upstairs, so I am now soaked in sweat but more importantly, the wee mantids are everywhere and will hopefully thrive and eat all the aphids.

They are so so tiny. And they jump, in addition to taking standard mantis poses. I hope to be discovering them for many months to come. There were at least twenty of them.

A 1969 children’s book about three kids and an absent-minded scientist having scientific adventures. In this case, they (plus the excitable terrier one of them is dog-sitting) fall into Professor Bulfinch’s smallifying machine.

I loved this series as a kid and the ones I’ve re-read have held up very well. They have accurate science presented in a fun way, they’re funny, they have a lot of sense of wonder, and while they’re obviously set in a particular time, they’re otherwise not particularly dated.

This book, for instance, has exactly one line about “girls are a nuisance except Irene who’s great,” but that is literally it as far as sexism is concerned; while Irene is the only girl, she is indeed great and is never looked down on, sneered at, stereotyped, or left out of the action. Which is a whole lot better on that front than a lot of current media.

The Smallifying Machine is unsurprisingly one of my favorites of the Danny Dunn books. It’s chock-full of sense of wonder, in this case exploring the world while you’re teeny-tiny. Far from many books that don’t really explore the premise, despite its very short length this book has the kids riding butterflies, eating nectar, whacking a pool of water with a tiny nail to get some droplets to drink (this is the book that taught me about surface tension, in a way that ensured that I’d remember it), being knocked off their feet by an earthwormquake, and much more. It’s entirely delightful.

Also, I think Irene should be introduced to Adrian Tchaikovsky. Here she is explaining the tarantula wasp (which, thankfully, they do NOT meet in their adventures):

“Ugh,” said Joe. “How grisly.”

“It isn’t!” Irene said, warmly. “Not any more than people wanting to eat fresh meat. It’s wonderful. You just think about it. The wasp will never see those babies of hers. [more horrifying description] Long after she’s dead, her children are all taken care of.”

“That’s the most touching story I ever heard,” said Joe. “I’m going to write a poem about it. I think I’ll call it M is for the Million Spiders You Gave Me.”

Now available on Kindle for $3.99: Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine

Complete in three volumes, this manga is a cozy post-apocalypse tale about the adorable adventures of a young girl and her beloved pet giant mutant tentacled spider.

It’s also a cooking manga.

12-year-old Nagi is living alone and lonely in the mountains since her dad wandered off. But luckily, she encounters and adopts a giant mutant spider baby, which she names Asa. Asa doesn’t speak, but they and Nagi communicate just fine anyway. (Nagi uses “they/them” pronouns for Asa; it’s not stated whether it’s because Nagi doesn’t know Asa’s gender, or if she does know and Asa is nonbinary.)

Each chapter features Nagi and Asa having some kind of adventure and also cooking, so you get titles like “Danger & Pita Pockets.” Recipes included. That is, Nagi or people who Nagi meets cook, and Asa helps out, eats, and carries trays of food on their back.

I only read the second two volumes of this—Lyda and Mason left it with me, along with other manga, to mail back to them. But it was easy to pick up on earlier events, which I gather prominently featured pumpkin dumplings.

Giant Spider & Me is bizarre and also extremely sweet. Some people think Asa is a dangerous monster, but nothing ever gets too threatening and the love between a girl and her giant spider always carries the day.

Adrian Tchaikovsky would enjoy this. I did too. It’s like there’s some kind of conspiracy afoot to make me fall under the spell of our new many-legged overlords, I mean our adorable arachnid friends.

Giant Spider & Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale Vol. 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)

All is spoilery. Except that I fucking LOVED the worldbuilding in this particular book.

Only in this series, unlike most, the worldbuilding itself becomes a spoiler after a certain point, at least to me, because I so enjoyed finding for myself which kinden we'd be introduced to next. So even saying "This is the one with the [some kind of bug] people" is spoilery. And so I will put that behind a spoiler cut.

( Read more... )

The Sea Watch (Shadows of the Apt Book 6)