Alexa

There are classics that are impressive for being the first of their kind and still standing the test of time, and others that make you so happy for how far a genre has come. Neuromancer is the latter for me. Gibson here seems more invested in cramming in as many made-up techie-sounding words into a sentence rather than building anything interesting character or story-wise. I love cyberpunk because I love the interaction between man and machine, but while Gibson drops cybernetic terms left and right, there's no real cultural, biological, or personal significance to any of it.

The prose has no rhythm, no allure. The character interaction is so stilted its laughable - the main female character, Molly, is such an obvious 80s action girl fantasy, who of course immediately jumps on the dick of this depressed drug addict, Case. I couldn't really tell you much else about what anyone did because I could not focus on any of it between all the random tech lingo and uninteresting plot. Oh right, and all the white people hanging out in future Japan. eye roll

Cyberpunk, and sci-fi in general, has come a long way since Neuromancer. I think I'd rather keep going forward than look back.

I don't think I will ever understand why the point of view of so many classic novels is placed at such a distance from the subject of the story. I think it was the reason I found [b:Dracula 17245 Dracula Bram Stoker https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387151694s/17245.jpg 3165724] so profoundly boring. At least [b:Frankenstein 35031085 Frankenstein Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1498841231s/35031085.jpg 4836639] is told from Victor Frankenstein's perspective, even if it is within the pretense of him telling someone else. When The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde began, I was willing to humor the point of view, even though it does seem to be designed to be as uninteresting as possible. Banality can in fact be quite striking when placed as a backdrop to the extraordinary, and the presence of the rogue and demonic Mr. Hyde is quite extraordinary. At first. Though the story of Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde has been rewritten mythologically in our culture as one of the duality of good and evil, it is in fact more about restraint and lack thereof. Dr. Jekyll, by his own admission, does not manage to rid himself of his unearthly desires, but rather gives himself a means for indulging in them that does not damage his reputation. Edward Hyde is less an alternate personality and more an elaborate disguise. The problem arises when he can't take the mask off. Whatever proclivities Jekyll has that he uses Hyde to enact are never elaborated on. I suppose that's the point - when we are told Hyde is evil, but Jekyll was simply “wild” in his youth, we're supposed to come to our own conclusions about what that means Edward Hyde is running around doing. Not going to lie though, it is mildly disturbing to think that whatever Jekyll wants to get up to so baldly but doesn't want to get caught doing, he's willing to to experiment on himself with dangerous chemicals in order to get away with it. Hyde's not the one that bothers me. It's the upstanding scientist whom everyone thinks is swell but in secret wants to....I guess you can just insert your personal evil here. It makes the good doctor far from sympathetic. His scientific advancements are less spooky and more like the predecessor to rohypnol.In short, this novella is more like a building block than a particularly good story in itself. It's no wonder that it has inspired movies, tv shows and books galore. By the time the story devolves into droning letters (much the same way Dracula does), its pretty clear why so many of those adaptations take the original story as inspiration, rather than direct source material. Ah well. At least I can say now that I read it.

Where do I even fucking start? Gideon the Ninth is a barn burner, and what I mean by that it will burn up your mind like a house made of straw and gasoline.I'm not really sure how to summarize the basic premise of this book without going exorbitantly in depth - depth which this novel, mind you, doesn't really bother with most of the time. But here goes - Gideon Nav is an indentured servant, a foundling raised since she was a day old, to the House of the Ninth, Keepers of the Locked Tomb, creepy fucking nuns in death's head face paint who can raise skeleton servants from bits of bone. This is a world of necromancers - and space travel. And swords. Don't think about it too much, just go with it. Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon's nemesis since childhood, is called by the Emperor, Necrolord Prime, along with the heirs of each of the other seven houses, with their cavaliers, to stand the trials to become Lyctors, achieving the pinnacle of necromantic ability and serving the Emperor directly. Nonagesimus' assigned cavalier is a wimp, so she wants Gideon, who just so happens to very good with a sword, just not a rapier. Once they arrive at the First House, the “trial” they realize is a riddle wrapped in a experiment spiced with a whole lot of what the fuck.The reason why I hesitated so long on reading this book, despite the glowing reviews, is basically because of all of waves hands that. Adult hard science fiction and high fantasy, aside from often being very obtuse and big on new vocabulary, also frequently has an...ickiness about it. It often detaches itself from the body and the head's of its characters in lieu of creating vivid and complex settings, so much that the characters feel kind of like meat puppets that terrible things keep happening to. But Gideon the Ninth is wholly committed to its characters, in a way that most authors would not even attempt. It is so grounded it is subterranean. Gideon, reluctant cavalier, lover of comic books, dirty magazines and her longsword, is deliciously irreverent. This is like if someone took, I don't know, Game of Thrones or The Witcher, whatever courtly and swordly story suits your fancy, and mixed it up with Army of Darkness. Both in content and tone. There isn't actually a character with a chainsaw for a hand, but if there was it would not be out of place at all.Tamsyn Muir is doing her thing here. I was not at all surprised when I read the acknowledgements and saw that one of her Clarion instructors and mentors was [a:Jeff VanderMeer 33919 Jeff VanderMeer https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1522640540p2/33919.jpg], because what I kept thinking as I reached the third act of this book is that I so wanted to read the next book in the Southern Reach Trilogy. The reason being is because Muir writes on an edge between body horror and cosmic horror, that also overlaps with VanderMeer's New Weird. It's just absolute flesh chaos, at points. It's not just gore, its magicians using their own bodies - flesh, bone and spirit - to become terrifying weapons. It's unsettling in a way I did not realize I could be unsettled.Muir is also breaking a lot of story telling conventions, not really bothering to tell you the whole plot or the whole setting or how anything works. There are whole chunks of narrative that are just not there because Gideon wasn't there, or just wasn't terribly interested, and you just gotta roll with it. Muir puts a lot on her plate - nearly sixteen primary characters, a complex magic system, an interplanetary conflict, not to mention individual cultures, prejudices and fields of study for each of the Houses. There are a couple moments where the story buckles under the pressure (that poor continuity editor), but most of the time I didn't even notice what I didn't know, because I was having so much fun.Because this book is so much fun. Like I said, it's rooted in its characters and great character moments. The fact that Muir created such a unique an interesting cast is incredible. The fact that she so completely unafraid to make them irreverent, hilarious and utterly vicious has my head spinning. Gideon and Harrowhark are a fractious, charming and heart-breaking pair. You know as soon as you see how many different ways they say they hate each other that they mean more to each other than either of them will say. And on top of it all, you have some bad ass duels, epic monster fights, and a bunch of necromancers being unapologetically nerdy about raising the dead.Gideon the Ninth is a hell of an accomplishment. You can still tell its a debut novel though, as you can feel Muir testing things and experimenting as she goes, so technically I'm giving this 4.5 stars, but for Goodreads that's a 5, so who cares. This book is snarky, brutal and bat shit crazy.

What an absolutely evil little piece of fiction. Like spending the day with the worst person you've ever met, but hey, he knows how to land punchline.

This is not a book I would have normally picked up. I'm not typically a fan of romance, of historical fiction (even the alternate universe kind that this one is), and stories about manners and etiquette often bore me. And yet, The Beautiful Ones was the most enjoyable read I've had in ages. I became so emotionally invested, that by the time the climax arrived I was stamping my feet with excitement and trying not to startle the other people sitting by the pool where I was reading.

Which is interesting considering that The Beautiful Ones is an emotionally powerful song strung together with quiet, understated notes. This is not a story about love at first sight, its not about two people immediately swept away by everlasting love. Its about two people who are inextricably connected, but have a remarkable amount of growing to do before they can love each other in the right way. Hector is a driven theater performer consumed with an infatuation with a woman who he was engaged to years ago, and seizes an opportunity to get close to her again by courting her husband's young cousin, Antonina. In the process he realizes what a foolish thing he is doing, and that Antonina, a young woman who is in many ways the polar opposite of the object of his obsession, has a value and beauty all her own.

I don't think I've related to two characters on opposite sides of a situation as I have with Hector and Nina. I know exactly what Hector means when he describes what its like to be so consumed with the idea of a person that it becomes a part of who you are. I was startled when I saw Nina doing the same thing I did when I was trying to rid someone from my mind - repeating their name habitually in an attempt to make the sound mean something else. These are two very honestly-written characters. They are distinct, flawed and endearing but also deeply relatable, and the same can be said for the story's antagonist.

Throughout the book Hector's once-love, Valerie, evolves from a complex woman forced to make a terrible decision, to an outright wrath-inducing villain. This isn't a simple case of pitting two women against each other - one shallow, vain and superficial while the other is more “real”- but rather the ugliness of a system that uses women as bartering chips and the choices a person is left with when they are a part of it. Because for all of Valerie's fury and pettiness, she had a choice. She had many choices - she could have taken the risk and waited for Hector, she could have decided to care for the husband her family chose for her instead of resenting him for not being the man she turned away, she could have supported other women so that they could have more options and more happiness than she was allowed. She did none of the those things, instead she boiled herself in anger and self-hatred until the only thing she had to offer anyone was bitterness. By the end of the book, Valerie is easy to hate, but she's also easy to understand, which makes her all the more effective as a villain.

Oh right, and then there's that business about telekinesis. There's also the fact that even though this setting looks a hell of a lot like 19th-century France, its not actually France and this isn't our world. It's a world where you can go to the theater and watch a man actually levitate things with his mind, and no one talks about Paris but rather Loisail. Ultimately, the science fiction of The Beautiful Ones is much like the pretty gowns that the women wear, and Nina's love for insects and the natural world - it adds flavor and detail to the story, and does have a role in the climax and in Nina's growth as a character, but its far from the central focus. This treatment takes the story from science fiction to magical realism. Not the same unruly, unpredictable magical realism that defined the genre, but rather in the idea that magic is intensely, mundanely normal. Neither Hector or Nina's abilities are ever viewed as a threat, merely a curiosity. Hector can levitate himself on mirrors and turn a glass full of water over in the air, but still no one thinks “Hm, maybe I shouldn't start a fight with this guy.”

Instead, the presence of telekinesis serves as a way to connect our main characters, but also as a means of illustrating the limitations of the upper class. To the aristocracy of this setting the only things that matter are money and appearances. Love, happiness, even personal growth and satisfaction are useless sentiments, so its no wonder that there's little place for superpowers. Their only issue with Nina's use of her ability is that it will drive suitors away, but otherwise no one considers that they shouldn't back a woman into a corner when she can break all the windows in the house with her mind. Clearly, no one in this universe has seen Carrie. For these people, it never occurs to them that someone from a lower class or disenfranchised group could ever have power over them. It's a brilliant, perplexing and absolutely wonderful take on genre fiction. All that said, I still wish Nina had given Valerie at least one telekinetic smack in the mouth.

I loved this book. The Beautiful Ones carries you confidently and easily through an emotional arc that is satisfying and exciting, despite its mostly calm waters. Its most thrilling and climactic moments have a way of sneaking up on you, so I wouldn't recommend this to someone looking for a fantastical roller coaster. Rather, its for anyone looking to be swept off their feet in a way that you don't even realize your feet are leaving the ground.