Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. Set in the world of today, it’s mostly an excellent story; the primary POV was Katrina Nguyen, a young violin prodigy on the run. She’s very much a modern youth, who interacts oddly with Shizuka Satomi, a violin teacher with a dark past. In parallel, Lan Tran, a starship captain in disguise runs a donut shop. I had to push past the “you’re putting peanut butter in my chocolate” for the melding of modern, fantasy, and space opera; fortunately, the strong characters keep you riveted and moving through.
The River Road by Karen Osborn. Another book set in the world of today, without any fantasy to relieve it. It’s mostly about how two families deal (and fail to deal) with tragedy. There’s a lot of confused memory, glorious flashbacks and unbridled youth. It’s a very nicely textured deep look at a rural near town friendship, and the slices we each see of each other.
Crip Up the Kitchen is a book filled with excellent advice about how to work around disabilities and conserve spoons, with careful and detailed explanations for the various tools and their uses. The recipes are similarly carefully detailed and thoroughly explained — even new cooks, and cooks exploring new tools are setup for success. The stories of adaptation and perseverance are excellent and inspiring; the gatekeeping lectures preceding each recipe that the author has a personal cultural connection to were wearying and repetitious.
Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, N. K. Jemsin Editor. A very broad mix of short stories, most relatively short and well crafted. I’d come across a few stories in other collections, and they run the gamut from quite familiar to entirely unique. Not every story was a great match for my taste – but the majority were, and craft was evident in them all.
It’s been a while since it visited the library, so I’ve been rereading several novels. (I have added many more books to my library queue and requested several, so I’ll soon be back to new books.)
World War Z by Max Brooks was a fast reread; the various little tales are all quick, and when you start to encounter characters again in the second half of the book, there’s a warm burst of familiarity. A minor flaw is that the lack of continuous storyline meant that it didn’t embed in my mind, preventing it from being as useful when trying to sleep.
Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman was a fascinating flash back to the world of 25 years ago, where a story centered on an asexual aromantic lead character was played up as genuinely alien to standard galactic society. Tedla, blands, and the whole society of Gammadis are a fascinating look at where desires for service and gender interact – and don’t.
The Dispatcher by John Scalzi is a fun thought experiment, looking at a world where most murder victims pop back to life immediately after dying. It’s fleshed out to tackle some quick exploits – like integrating Dispatchers, basically licensed assassins, into high risk surgeries, or the adaptation of society to mercy killings basically as a “do over” for nasty accidents, etc. It feels like a long short story – one big concept well explored, rather than the complex storylines of most novels.
Vatta’s War is a five book series by Elizabeth Moon. We follow a few POV characters, but the anchor is Ky Vatta. The series kicks off with Trading in Danger, where Ky begins the story by getting kicked out of the academy for “helping” in a way that backfires with terrible publicity. She’s a great character, who is put through a lot of misery but comes through it surprisingly well. There are a number of parallels to Moon’s Deed of Paksenarrion books, but Ky manages to stand apart – in part because the universe is facing a different threat than Pak’s tale.
Moses Ose Utomi’s debut novella, The Liesof the Ajungo, was a fascinating read. It feels much like a good Leguin novel, with a carefully selected words and a very deliberate pace and feel.
The reversals and subtle revelations are well paced and great to experience.
Rule 34 is an interesting Charles Stross book set in a downward sliding Scotland, and a whole host of disinvestment and rot in public institutions after the great recession.
We’re guided though the worlds (physical and internet) with a few viewpoint characters. Liz is a cop, who mostly reviews the net side of crimes… with a slowly revealed backstory explaining how she got derailed from promotions and into her current role. The other half is anchored by Anwar, a scammer out on parole, trying to make some money and support his family in a very challenging world.
There are some interesting detours into pseudo-states and international crime, some characters from the main characters’ pasts come back to complicate their lives, and AI runs amuck. Solid, but not my favorite of his.
Imago was a good conclusion to the Xenogenesis trilogy. It doesn’t include the rough toddler POV that made the middle book harder to love. Jodhas is a very interesting adaptation to Earth; very human looking and male to begin, but with a fascinating development path.
We get to see the threads begun by Akin in the previous book flourish, though it’s not directly addressed or a main focus. The huge slide of the human settlements that we saw last book has slowed, but there are new settlements to find.
All in all, a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy… though Dawn is enough stronger than the other two that I’d recommend it as a stand alone to most… and just let them know that the other books exist if they want to see the whole sequence together.
Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites is a sequel to Dawn. It’s a rough start, following a super baby – it definitely sets Akin apart from the children of our world, though it’s all weirdly plausible and consistent.
After the time jump forward, into adolescence, Akin feels less weird (though still intentionally very weird). There are interesting meditations and debates about what is inherent, genetically preloaded, and what things can and should be changed and cherished. The slow slide of Phoenix is fascinating and sad.
Adulthood Rites was a reread – probably my second read, and a couple of decades apart.
Picnic on Paradise was new to me. It’s a weird, stylish future, quickly reduced to a lengthy trek and squabbling through hardship. A few quirky and interesting characters, several that never really develop depth.
It’s well written, but not one I’m likely to read again.
The Softwire: Virus on Orbis 1 by P. J. Haarsma was hanging out in our library; I don’t think I’ve ever read it, so it likely came from Jax’s library. It’s compellingly written, and moves at a quick pace. It’s a well written exploration of a truly alien environment – without the separation and control that adults visiting in a ship would have.
It feels like good YA, but is willing to include a lot of subtler elements in the world building that don’t make it feel so straightforward that it’s just for kids. By the end, there was a foe and a straightforward conflict – but it took an intriguing path to get there. I started looking for the next book, but since it was published in 2006, it’s not actively stocked. I’ll have to keep it in mind when combing bookshops.
Dawn by Octavia Butler was a reread. It’s a fascinating study – the Oankali feel intriguingly different and alien, and the initial setup of Lilith as a rat in a maze, being examined and tested, is hard to take… it’s a rough setup, which primes her for the role that she’s reviled for.
The Oankali concept of trade being off kilter, and the anxieties of humans at being pieced together from isolation and forged into small bands feel all too authentic. We’re all mutts that would bite the hand that feeds us, if that hand was so alien.
The Cold Between and Remnants of Trust by Elizabeth Bonesteel
An interesting deep future, divided into three significant factions, and a number of colony worlds that think they’re more independent and self-sustaining than they really are.
It’s a tale of humanity divided – no on screen aliens, but some alien ruins do play a part. The three major factions are Central, PSI, and the syndicates.
We follow Commander Elena Shaw in both books; while we get other POV chapters and they’re often significant, they mostly round out Elena’s story. She serves aboard a Central Gov ship, which means that we’re mostly experiencing the universe from a Central POV.
PSI serves a big role in both books; local politics tangles the two groups together, and working their way through the accusations keeps Trey (our ex-PSI love interest) and Elena running together and sorting through decades of rumor and distance.
Central and PSI are both written as organizations of people as people, with factions and cross cutting interests, popular kids and those passed over and seething, keeping them from being one dimensional. [The third faction is mostly off screen and more inscrutable – the Syndicate – though they are foregrounded more in Remnants of Trust.]
The universe feels authentic, with lots of human touches — like all three factions existing largely to prop up colonies that constantly skate closer to collapse than their citizens can bear to understand; lots of wishful thinking and willful ignorance fills the colonies – but they’re not one-dimensional people sitting around waiting to be rescued either.
There’s also some love scenes; they begin early in The Cold Between, so you’ll quickly know if they’re to your taste, or more involved than you’re used to.
Becky Chambers is probably my favorite author, certainly my favorite that I’ve discovered within the last decade. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is the sequel to A Psalm for the Wild Built, and continues to inspire. Both books were “delicious” in a way that made me pick it up and start reading it again the night after I finished my first read through.
Prayer is very much a book about friendship and obligation; the interaction between Dex and Mosscap is rich and layered and a beautiful way to muse about what we want out of life and our relationships.
If you want action and adventure, this is not the series for you. This is a world descended from an era that faced tremendous challenges, accepted them, and realigned their life to live sustainably and harmoniously. Even their sharpest edges and gravest worries feel like small beer in the 21st century… but what a beautiful approach to utopia they’ve created.
Dead Space by Kari Wallace is set a few centuries from now, in a more plausible and certainly more selfish future – one that’s easy to imagine that modern corporations have set us on the path to build.
Hester is a wage-slave police investigator for a corporation that she’s indebted to. She winds up elbowing her way into investigating the murder of a friend… who has their own secrets and discoveries that come to light as the investigation progresses. There are lots of twists and revelations that keep revealing new layers of the onion…
In interesting book, written back in the era when you could talk about the future President Gore and look ahead to 2004.
It reminded me of the big idea books of old science fiction – mostly about a big new technology, and exploring its consequences. There are more women and more emotional engagement than in rockets and physics lecture sci-fi, but it’s consciously and intentionally uses a drier reporting style to avoid first person POV.
The cast of characters is interesting, though the main character, Pete, is a genius very much in the mold of older sci-fi. His two friends David and Diana are destined for greatness, much like Pete.
The core of the book, though is about the intersection of a society trapped in a rising tide of crime, and willing to make tremendous tradeoffs to solve the issue.
In the end, it’s an interesting thought experiment, and Pete is an appealing lens to examine just what we’d trade for safety — and the tremendous changes that society would undergo if lying became impossible.
A low key, “everyday reality” kind of sci-fi book, where UBI (or “ooby”) is just another casually accepted element of reality a generation after passage. Very well written and often fascinating; the parallel storylines don’t cross, but do an excellent job of showing just how everyone has an opinion, rich or poor — even though most people shrug and take it for granted.
This cluster was generated at the Crazy Squirrel RPG Meetup in October 2010. Will, Brian, Bryan, and Scott participated, each creating two planets.
I didn’t drag home many notes, so this is incomplete. If you have additional information, particularly for the two worlds you created, please expand on them in the linked pages. (In fact, Sojurn and Xori are hazy recollections of the actual names–if I blew it, let’s fix them!)
Cluster Overview:
The cluster is in a 1950s style cold war, divided between the two slipstream faring powers, Creche and Wheeler.
Creche is the home of organized humanity, at least in this push since the last collapse; its corporate structure and viewpoint is stamped on all of space faring culture. The generally low tech levels in the cluster suggest that Creche and Wheeler attempt to retain their technological supremacy, and collude to keep technology out of the hands the other worlds. (This may be because of Wheeler’s successful breakaway/independence; they want no significant rivals.)
Access to anti-aging drugs on Xori is a major source of rivalry and competition between corporations, both on Creche and between Wheeler and Creche.
Worlds of the Cluster: Austeria, Boulders, Creche, Desolation, Pilgrim’s Rest, Sojurn, Wheeler, and Xori
(T1,E2,R-1). Slipstreams to: Boulders and Creche – Playground of the rich and famous
– Large Ag plantations
Boulders
(T-1,E-3,R2) Slipsteam links to: Austeria and Creche – Life is hard and short; most who come here want to leave. – Mining colonies are scattered across the system-wide asteroid fields. – Many miners are prisoners from Creche, sentenced to hard labor.
The penal asteroids have a docking platform that ties into the original starting point of the mining operation. The first stage of building a penal mining facility is to create the tunnels and chambers that will make up the actual prison facility. This will contain administration, operations, and security. The chief administrator/warden is directly over the operations chief and security chief, who act as assistant wardens over those areas. Penal mines are placed only on the largest asteroids due to the stability and space required for such prisons. Mines that are played out can still be used as maximum security facilities or turned over to corporate council for a multitude of other purposes. It is rare for corporate to waste the facility once it has been established. All prisoners from Creche are implanted with a tracking/explosive device at the base of the neck. Once the prisoner reaches their assigned asteroid, the explosive device is activated. There is a grid of transmitters and relays across the prison facility. If a prisoner travels beyond 4 km from the grid, the explosive device will detonate and kill the prisoner. The devices can also be triggered by a Warden using a special code, but there must be exigent circumstances and the specifically input concurrence of the operations and security chief for summary execution to be carried out. These explosive charges are removed upon completion of sentence or parole. The tracking device remains during the parole period, after which it too is removed unless parole has been violated.
Creche
(T2,E-1,R-1) Slipsteam links to: Austeria, Boulders, Desolation, Pilgrim’s Rest, and Sojurn
– Corporate bureaucracy stifles everything. – Struggling to maintain its colonial empire. – The world is like a downtown; the place you go to work and make money, but not where you want to raise kids or retire.
Desolation
(T0,E-1,R-2) Slipsteam links to: Creche, Pilgrim’s Rest, and Wheeler – The desert makes them strong – They fight to earn what they lack – The contract is king
Pilgrim’s Rest
(T-1,E1,R0) Slipsteam links to: Creche, Desolation, Sojurn – The “quaint” first colony–nothing goes on here. – Those with skills or ambition are drawn to Creche
Sojurn
(T-1,E3,R1) Slipstream links to: Creche, Pilgrim’s Rest, Wheeler, and Xori – One gas giant is orbited by several lush moons – It’s a balkanized neutral zone, with the moons divided between various corporations (including Wheeling) – Temp World: Employees are only permitted to serve for four years before they’re shipped out – It’s the gateway to Xori
Wheeler
(T2,E2,R3) Slipstream links to: Desolation and Sojurn – Wheeler II is lush, ripe for exploitation; with factories concentrated in domed outposts on Wheeler I and III. – “We’re close knit, cunning rebels, resisting Creche’s tyranny” – Striving members of the Corporate Council
Wheeler is a large lush system with several worlds, dominated by the Wheeler Corp “family council”. The system was discovered by Wheeler Corp after a “mis-jump” from Desolation . It has been quietly developed by Wheeler over almost a century since its discovery; a limited population and insular culture remain among the remaining challenges.
Despite abundant resources and habitable space on both Wheeler II (a beautiful shirtsleeve world) and Wheeler III (a world of domed encampments, to retain warmth and oxygen in human compatible concentrations), Wheeler Corp restricts immigration to limit subversion by the other corporations of Creche.
In style, Wheeler’s relation to Creche is something like the relations between Britain and the US throughout the 19th century, and limited proxy wars/scuffles with Creche’s corporations. In general, Wheeler Corp is larger than any of the individual Creche Corporations, but is dwarfed by the human resources the Creche Council can command as a whole.
Xori
(T-3,E-1,R1) Slipsteam link to: Sojurn – We drive out men into the forest; only the strongest return – Only the priestesses know how to refine the anti-aging drug – The spice must flow – It’s a matriarchy, led by ancient but physically youthful women, who practice the old ways.
