Lewis
Contains spoilers
Interesting worldbuilding and plot hampered by one of the two protagonists being extremely unlikable, and to be rewarded for his manipulation and arrogance with ascension to an even more condescending state of superiority at the end of the book.
Pacing of revealing the mysteries was a bit too slow, and keeping the audience in the dark about some elements felt contrived (and not necessary since we could appreciate the core mystery even if we got the architect only details earlier).
Read for a speculative fiction short story book club.
I’ve read a number of speculative fiction short story collections in the past couple of years, and this one leaves something to be desired, for me. I think it is not the best showcase of Black Canadian Speculative Fiction that it could be, though there are a couple of stories in it that worked reasonably well. The volume would have benefitted from being longer/including more stories, a bit more editing/revision for some of the stories, and probably also benefited from the inclusion of authors’ postscripts or editor’s notes on the stories (this is a general preference I have for any collection like this, but I think some of these stories in particular would have been aided by contextualizing notes).
The stories that I most recommend from the volume are: Ravenous, Called Iffy (Chimedum Ohaegbu) and Just Say Garuka (Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga).
This was a decent read, it went along at a good clip, but it was framed as a sort of mystery and the mystery wasn’t super satisfying.
A bunch of young folks are on a privately funded generation ship headed to settle some distant Planet X, when there is a mysterious explosion. Our protagonist was investigating the mysterious object spotted on the hull when it exploded killing her friend who was also doing the spacewalk investigation, and so gets deputized by the captain to figure out who was behind the bomb (since she is most likely to be innocent as she almost died in the explosion). Oh and also everyone on the ship has augmented reality implants to keep them from going stir crazy on a boring spaceship during the voyage. Asuka (our protagonist) is not the best detective and her implant seems to be on the fritz post-explosion.
It was a decent read but could have stood to be a bit more challenging.
I picked this up after reading Rosewater, and I think I’m in a position to say that I generally expect I will like Tade Thompson’s writing, but that Rosewater was more my thing than Far From the Light of Heaven wound up being.
The characters got slightly shorter shrift here, and there was less conveyance of the world-building than I would have liked (I suspect that the world is thoroughly built, from Thompson’s end, I just wanted to have better breadcrumbs of what the lambers were, and the intergalactic politics, etc.). Thompson apparently really likes to bounce around perspectives when writing (in Rosewater it was jumping back and forth in time, here it is switching who we are focused on) and I think it would serve the story well to ratchet than tendency back a bit. I noted in my revue of the loop that I don’t particularly value gore; it is good that I am not bothered by it, though, as Thompson does not shy away from gore in his writing.
I liked the character Shell, I liked the character Fin. I liked Servo from what we met of him, but would have appreciated more depth. I wasn’t a huge fan of Joké, who was written a bit too much as a sort of manic pixie dream girl (imo).
Overall, though, I found it a pretty engaging book and found myself eager to finish it.
I described this to someone as “Canticle for Leibowitz in space, meets cosmic horror” and while that’s not inaccurate having gotten to the end, this book doesn't quite stick the landing. It does give me a good example to point to of the sort of thing that I am looking for in a space horror book, because “generation ship so old that it lost its own sense of history encounters inscrutable, dangerous alien ship and explores it” is a thing I want to read.
Some things we don’t get answers to that I am fine with: who are the aliens and why are they violent/dangerous in this particular way? Why was this human ship made with a giant cathedral in the center and externally visible Christian stained glass displays? What was its’ mission?
Some things we don’t get answers to that I do want answers to: Is it a mistake to recolonize Antioch? Do the church records have any location data or historical information that would have been useful for the ship prior to alien encounter or for Bartolomeo’s plan (I realize it is moot given that they abandon his plan, but we spend all that time on access to the records). What was the deal with the girl who looked like Father Veronica? What were the machines that the bishop was building before they encountered Antioch?
A lot of those are quibbles, but I do think the book could have used an edit to tidy up some of these weird threads or just generally streamline the narrative and then also, the ending sort of feels like there should be a sequel or like we need something more definitive.
A small group of outsiders in a Pacific Northwest town try to survive and fight back against a sudden onslaught of rage-and-violence that appears to be related to some new biotech being tested in the area.
I don’t read a ton of horror but as with horror movies, this isn’t because I dislike the genre, it’s because I have very particular things I want from horror and most horror isn’t doing that.
This book is pretty action-heavy and high gore. Neither of those things is bad, per se, but I am always looking for things that would be described as “atmospheric” and “tense”, which is just orthogonal to that at best.
Pros: I enjoyed the characters, and the story kept moving along at a good pace. The threat escalated nicely and felt ever present.
Cons: I read another review that said the motive was underexplained and I don’t think that’s true, but I do think it is unsatisfying and demystified a bit too much. All of our questions get answered, which sounds good, but ultimately, it would be good for this story to leave us with some questions to ponder.
Contains spoilers
Piranesi is both an extremely similar book to Strange and Norrell and an extremely dissimilar book. The commonalities are that both books concern ambitious people seeking forbidden or hidden knowledge and power, people who are careless with others in their quest for knowledge and power, and intriguing liminal spaces where such power spills over from its true source into our world. It also features people who are more pure hearted who have an easier relationship to these places of magic/power/knowledge, but who were not seeking to explore them in the first place. Strange and Norrell is written like an academic tome with footnotes and digressions and the plot only incidentally strums along (the tv show is impressive for its ability to function as a narrative!). Piranesi is shorter and more traditionally narratively structured. It is a gripping tale and makes it easy to love the labyrinth and its beloved child. I love both books but I will find myself re-reading Piranesi more times over the years, I suspect.