Becca
Martha Wells is an excellent world builder. This is a fun setting (a world, on a leviathan!) and some interesting cultural clashes between the different groups in their world and a very nice metaphor about what different communities need to be sustainable and thrive. The Rift plot didn't work that well for me, and I wish there were more development of many of the metaplot questions raised in the first book. Solid 3.5 stars
I don't always review short stories, but people need to know about this one, which I was lucky to stumble upon a link to in a GR friend's review of something else.
This is one of the best things I read all year. Like goosebumps, mixed with trying to pick out key quotes that kept spiraling from a sentence to a paragraph to a page of amazing prose. This very light fantasy story is about what books mean to us – how they can speak to our emotions and how the right book can guide us through hard times. It is poignant and very funny.
Don't take my word for it – go read: https://apex-magazine.com/a-witchs-guide-to-escape-a-practical-compendium-of-portal-fantasies/
Merged review:
I don't always review short stories, but people need to know about this one, which I was lucky to stumble upon a link to in a GR friend's review of something else.
This is one of the best things I read all year. Like goosebumps, mixed with trying to pick out key quotes that kept spiraling from a sentence to a paragraph to a page of amazing prose. This very light fantasy story is about what books mean to us – how they can speak to our emotions and how the right book can guide us through hard times. It is poignant and very funny.
Don't take my word for it – go read: https://apex-magazine.com/a-witchs-guide-to-escape-a-practical-compendium-of-portal-fantasies/
Sometimes you can learn a lot about a person by comparing themes across their works. Wells loves to write books about protagonists who are different and slowly come to find their place within a group. They have morally ambiguous pasts, about which they feel guilt. Her settings are expansive and luscious with rich world-building. Her villains have mind-control powers. It gives you a sense, right?
This was a very solid epic fantasy. I'm not in love yet, but I wasn't in love with murderbot by the end of the first book either. I'm interested to see what happens next.
I wanted to love this a lot. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend spoke to me in a way that's hard to explain: I didn't really identify with the main character, and it was a little too cringey for me, and a little to explicit for me, but it still kind of made me feel seen somehow. So I expected the same from this. And in so many ways it was just like Crazy Ex: good, but a little cringey and a little explicit and I didn't really identify, but somehow the magic wasn't there. Some of the essays got very close (especially the one at the end, where Rachel talks about shapewear & the upfronts). Some of the essays were even further. Overall, funny, but it didn't really come together into something bigger.
+Some of her affectation is challenging. I was hoping she'd be more real.
+She portrays herself as being completely unsure of herself and doomed in love, but she met her husband at 21 and was a writer for TV at 23. But realizing that a lot of the book was her own insecurity talking was charming?
You'd think I'd love this: I've played joust and zork and programed in BASIC and have feelings about THACO. And, well, I think I would have loved this had I read it in 2011, when it first came out, but in the last 9 years my tolerance for self-absorbed men who don't see women as human beings has deteriorated. You see, I've been a computer scientist while being a woman. You know that guy who begrudgingly tolerates you as long as you mind your place while he objectifies women, don't challenge his litany of his geeky obsessions and self-aggrandizing behavior? What if that guy wrote a not very well-written book (plot holes you could drive a spaceship through!), in which a thinly veiled version of himself was the main character, who became rich and famous for his geeky obsessions and then he became a multimillionaire? Yeah...
I'll give Sanderson this: his ideas of “hard fantasy”, meaning magic has to have rules and limitations and be entirely consistent works for some very nice world building. But I've just never been big on epic fantasy. I think my feelings on the whole trilogy were summer up by Sanderson's introduction in which he reported that he was so proud of the epic story he was able to tell in “only” three 700+ page books that would have taken someone else 10. And I just thought of all of the amazing stories I've read that have been single novels or 300-500 page book trilogies and had richer worlds, characters and settings. Sanderson needs to edit. He needs to realize that not every single perspective needs air time and tighter stories are better stories. Also, a world in which every city ruled by a non-noble degenerates into a Communist Russia stereotype and “all religions have a martyr figure and a good/bad duality” was a little much. I'm not big on the Christian manifest destiny, and I couldn't ignore it.
Jemisin has this trick of writing books that harness the tropes of speculative fiction, such that if you try to describe one of her books it sounds like a generic fantasy novel. However, within that she manages to not just invert or subvert the cliches, but actually build something entirely new, while maintaining enough of an homage to classic fantasy that it feels thrilling the way your first introduction to SF/F was. What can I say about the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms to really capture that? The setting of Sky was refreshing, the Arameri truly cruel & the characters nuanced.
The bookest of the Wayward Children so far, this follows Jack and Jill in the aftermath of Jack killing Jill in the first book (and Jill getting better...) McGuire clearly loves Jack and Jill the most out of all of her characters, and it shows here: the characters are more developed and more nuanced than any of the others by this, their third appearance. (Unrelatedly, do boys ever get to be protagonists for McGuire? Kade and Christopher also put in their third appearances and still are flimsy setting material.) Taking a diverse cast into the monotone, horrific setting that is the Moors provides some dark humor and also some depth to what otherwise starts to feel bland in its darkness.
I liked that we actually got a narrative arc and I finally felt like I had a full story, both plot-wise and emotionally, of Jack and Jill. This was the first novella that actually felt satisfying. On the flip side, I don't actually enjoy Jack, Jill or the moors, so ups and downs. (I know, right? I don't actually like the sardonic female scientist character? Oh yeah, because she's a monster.) But overall, as a canon, the books are stronger than they are individually.
A snippet of a story, McGuire gives us back an adventure from book 4, and actually introduces the pivotal character in shaping Lundy. In doing so, she tells us more about the rules of monsters in the world and while the scene is short (and sad) it feels like a fundamental part of the story. I wish she hadn't cut this and the other such scenes from the novella
Ok, so this just isn't how books work. McGuire leads us up to the climactic battle and then...the next chapter opens the next day as they recouped from their wounds. Not just once but again and again throughout the book. I know this is a Thing she's doing on purpose, perhaps focusing on the interstitial days that actually make up a life? But it's jarring and distracting and I never did like Lundy that much anyway. The setting, as always, is fascinating and creative but I just could not get into this.
Journeying through three worlds, McGuire showcases her strength as a world-builder. Worlds that could seem silly or frivolous, like Confection, are still both part of a greater theme, and also thoughtfully depicted with internal consistency, backstory and a lush sense of place.
The characters continue to be flat, and the murder mystery of the first novel continues to diminish in importance with nonsensical resurrections, but this time I knew what I was in for, and just relaxed and had fun with it.
So, I'm curious: has Seanan McGuire ever...read a book? Does she know what they are and how they work? Because I kind of like her schtick, but it's profoundly not a novella. By which I mean, Down Among the Sticks and Bones only has any sense of narrative structure and emotional payoff in retrospect in the events of Every Heart a Doorway, it's prequel. And the murder mystery in Every Heart a Doorway doesn't actually make any sense until you read Down Among the Sticks and Bones. I spent a lot of time frustrated by the murder mystery of Down Among the Sticks and Bones because it felt like cheating to have a murder mystery when the rules turned out to allow resurrection. Down Among the Sticks and Bones makes that slightly more palatable (although not really until book #5 is it really addressed).
As a standalone, this works barely at all. Jack and Jill are flimsy characters and the plot is basically nonexistent, with the book fizzling just as it should be hitting a climax. Where it does succeed is where Seanan McGuire seems to excel: a beautifully depicted setting (in this case, a canonical horro movie) and a rich fairy tale-esque theme. It's beautiful reading, but when the spell breaks I'm still at WTH did I just read?
Sigh. Linguistic nonfiction is my literary security blanket. I've read pretty much every pop linguistics nonfiction book out there and enjoyed them all. But not this one!
Emmy Favilla seems to have no sense of who her audience is: she veers wildly between offering highly specific advice for those developing a style guide for heavily perused blogs and pedantically defining “prescriptivism.” No sooner does she tell people to follow their own instincts than she derides those whose instincts include “whom.” She comes off as pretentious, self-important and judgey. My biggest problem with the book is that I didn't like her. But I didn't like the book either: without much central structure, it wanders through half-hearted odes to descriptivist language use, punctuated with screenshots of the author's slack chats and buzzfeed articles.
Because Internet covered many of the same topics more comprehensively and was much more fun to read.
Becky Chambers' mom is an astrobiologist (yes, I'm jealous, too) and they worked together to imagine how spacefaring might work in this world. I love super-realistic space stories and there are so few of them, without ansibles and hyperspace drives. To Be Taught leans in to the boundaries of the speed of light. There is no going home, there is no instantaneous communication with earth, light years away. There is the claustrophobic feeling of being with the only humans who come from the same era as you, of being years away from hearing a response to your question. How do people cope with that? How does a society build up an astronaut plan and a culture to accept that? These are the fascinating questions of space travel and Chambers doesn't flinch from them.
If the novellas were each a TV episode, Network Effect is the two-hour season finale. With a full-length novel, the plot has a little bit more room to breathe and develop. At times, the adventures with alien adversaries feel a little too drawn out, but mostly, this room is good to allow somewhat of an emotional arc for Murderbot's complex relationships with ART and Mensah's daughter to develop. The series has always leaned hard on the ideas of identity and how this interacts with hard-wiring, and the plot really let those themes shine.
Network Effect was also the book in which Wells' full setting comes into focus: the conflicts between the corporate ring and Mensah's independent planet, and the university that owns ART. What does a corporation really want and what can unchecked capitalism develop into as the governing system for a solar system?
Realistic, gradual and sustained character growth is rare in novels. And yet, Murderbot has clearly grown in this fourth installation, which it reunites with many of the characters from the debut novel. Murderbot starts having and believing in its emotions and starts believing that relationships with people matter. Most of this novella is emotional work and it feels deeply satisfying after the first three books.
I found this duology the perfect brain candy – zippy dialogue, light science fiction, a fun detective mystery with a light helping of commentary on privilege and other modern social issues. Head On lacks some of the zing of Lock In, because it is a return to the same world, but I thought it still really had a lot of fun elements. And I liked the way the book explored what happens when a space (or sport) is built for a disadvantaged community and then commercialized and co-opted more broadly.
In this episode of Murderbot: the delightful foil, Miki, who is a friendly and social bot. Also, perhaps my favorite of the adventurous romps against an entire evil factory. In the second book, I spent some time worrying about whether each book was truly going to be episodic and isolated from the characters of the last. In this book, the glory of the structure became clear. Wells has written these each like a TV episode with a standalone arc and set of characters, but an arching metaplot. (With a reading speed of 100 pages/hour, I also finished these off in only trivially more time than a standard television episode.) This feels like an adorable callout to Murderbot's favorite hobby. As much as Murderbot learns about its world by watching soap opera, we learn about this world (and by extension our own society and the interaction between people and corporations) through Murderbot.
After multiple rounds of abandoning my intended to-read, I decided that the only way to get to COVID was to read like I was a teenager again: back-to-back science fiction and fantasy, preferably in serial form. Good news: in the two decades that have passed, spec fic has gotten super high-brow. Murderbot carried me through all of July. In this, second outing, despite it's best intentions, Murderbot keeps making friends. ART, arguably Murderbot's best friend, is my favorite character. Fresh off of its first human friendships (and unwilling to acknowledge them as such), Murderbot needs another bot to be friends with. And ART is not human, although charmingly a bit arrogant, and definitely more than a bit pedantic, ART is a beautiful foil to the sardonic and asocial Murderbot.
The second book in the series spools out some of the backstory hinted at in the first, but the central focus is exploring what makes a bot itself and not just any generic construct. I loved this: I think it had a lot to say about people, growth and relationships.
Becky Chambers just writes the warmest, most comforting books. Writing in her characteristic episodic manner, she shows us what life is like for the Exodans – humans who stayed on the generation ships originally built to go off in search of a new human homeland, but which have instead become the long-term homeland themselves.
My friend who recommended it to me said: “there's something so profoundly Jewish about it.” I think she's right (although I doubt that was Chambers' intention). This is a diaspora story about a people who leave their homeland with the plan to return to a new home shortly and instead spend generations in space, learning to redefine who they are as a community and culture and their relationship to physical spaces.
This is a cute exploration of the world in which Lock In is set, how it functions and how the pandemic spun out of control. Does it feel a little bleak to the 2020 reader to read about the denial and spread of a pandemic? Sure does. Does it feel even bleaker to read about the nation coming together to respond...
Anyway, maybe not the best 2020 reading, but well put together and a solid piece of world-building.
Stop me if you've heard this one: people can inherit a genetic mutation that makes them super human. For some insane reason this is not inherited truly as a Mendelian trait, but more like an...autosomal dominant trait with incomplete penetrance? (Or perhaps like a trait invented by someone with only the faintest idea of how genes work.) Despite being genetic its expression has an extreme amount of intrafamilial variability, such that the same gene can cause flying or invisibility or superhuman strength? And also the government wants to either control or eliminate these X-men, uh, Brilliants, because normal people will otherwise feel bad about themselves. Also, women exist to seduce the protagonist.
I mean, I also like watching the X-men movies and this is basically that: fast-paced, action-y, no character development, and about 5 minutes of thought put into the setting. But it's 2020 and there's much better spec fic out there. 2.5 stars.
So my “recommended to me” notes for Uprooted were “ A feminist twist on an Eastern European fairytale with interesting characters and a compelling magic system” and, it's...mostly as billed. But my personal kryptonite is immortal (or super old) character falls in love with a teenager. It bursts through my suspension of disbelief, my engagement with a book and just makes me want to set everything on fire. To add insult to injury, Uprooted also repeats the “guy is super dismissive to girl and she falls in love with him anyway” trope that I first met in Spinning Silver. In Spinning Silver it was haunting and evocative of the frozen tundra of the setting. Seeing it again from the same author? I think it's just her schtick and it made me not like Spinning Silver as much in retrospect. I resent that a lot.
But there are other parts of Novik's schtick I like: the interaction between magic and a place; the way a place shapes a people; strong female friendships between female characters with complementary strengths and profoundly evocative settings. Do they balance? Hard to say.
The star of the murderbot diaries is murderbot, the neuroatypical, disaffected cyborg filled with ennui and a desire to binge TV. Certainly, the series was sold to me that way but much as I liked murderbot, the true heroes of this first novella for me were Wells' fascinating setting playing out the corporatocharcy of the 21st century and a cast of characters that were united as a team to communal ends (as shocking to murderbot as it was to the reader!)
Although the central mystery was decently compelling, most of the tension in this book comes from Murderbot's reluctance to be treated as a person, concern that people will see their face and assumption that all people are dumb, profit-motivated and ready to betray the group at any time. It's rare that the first book in a series isn't the strongest, but I just really enjoyed the later books where more character and setting development really shined.