Category: Review

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Review

The Rest of Us Just Live Here

“… I hate myself, Dr. Luther.”
“But not so much that you didn’t come asking for help.”

I hope it’s pretty obvious to everyone, by now, that I’m a big fan of the superhero tropes. And it’s just that, actually- tropes. I recognize where things are generic story elements being slotted in, and I love it- it’s something familiar, and quite often people can do interesting things with them. It’s like the people who build functional computers in Minecraft- sure, there’s only a couple different elements you can use, but good lord is there some impressive work being done, overall.
This book… wasn’t like that. There was a little bit of it present, in the weird little chapter headings1 – a mechanic that took me a little while to catch on to, actually. It’s a very fun idea: the story plays itself out during the chapters themselves, but each heading describes the generic-YA-adventure-novel tales of Satchel and the other “indie kids.”
The goal of the book was, clearly, poking fun at those- the title is a hat-tip to that, with everyone trying to live in a world that’s plagued by the occasional outbreaks of whatever was popular in our world’s adventure novels at the time. They had zombies. Most recently was a spate of “beautiful vampires.” Sound familiar? And then, my favorite bit, the John Green nod, with references to “all the indie kids dying beautifully of cancer.”
Except the book didn’t quite get away from all that. In writing style, I’d call it almost a John Green novel itself. Or, rather, the child of John Green and Terry Pratchett. If Pratchett had written a summary or idea for a book, sketched out a couple of the characters,2 and then handed it off to Green to finish up.
I liked it, I suppose, though not as much as I could have. It was just a little bit too depressingly real for my tastes, I suppose.3
Nonetheless, a good book, one that I felt compelled to read through rather than do my homework today. Give it a go, I suppose.

  1. Think those Victorian novels. “Chapter the Third: The Queen is kidnapped. A gaslight chase. Sir Harold is injured.” And so on. ↩
  2. Though not, I should note, the Love Interest. ↩
  3. So I like escapist fantasy. Sue me. ↩
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Review

Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’ve Got Henchmen

I started reading this book yesterday about dinnertime, and I’d finished it before I went to bed. Which isn’t to say that it’s a short book, because it isn’t. It’s a dangerous book, because I couldn’t put it down. I adore this whole series, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting this one since I found out the author was working on it.1 And, to be honest, it was everything I was hoping for.
The second book in the series had a lot of Plot going on, to the point where it got to be too much: it got a little bit hard to follow, and I’m still a bit unclear on who some of the various factions were and what, exactly, they wanted. This went the opposite direction: there was no huge story arc throughout the piece, just a sort of “this is the life of a super-powered middle-schooler” story. Which was wonderful. I didn’t want a big story arc going on, I just wanted to experience more of this crazy chaotic world that the characters live in.2
We got a lot more of Bull in this one, and some explanation of what, exactly, is going on with Claudia, which I thought made for a beautiful little plotline, there. It was sad and sweet, and really helped to humanize Claudia, explain what’s going on with her life.
Penny, the delightfully manipulative main character, got some more of the spotlight for inheriting her mother’s (apparently non-super-powered) manipulation-streak, and for winning the “superpower genetic lottery” or some such. It was really cool, actually, to see her start getting the sort of public respect that she deserves, though not really for what she’s actually been doing.
And, of course, there were some really touching scenes with her and her family. Which is, basically, exactly what I want from a book: superhero families.3
I could not have loved this book more. I wish there was more of it. Go. Read. Now. It’s spectacular.

  1. The author’s blog is a great source of that sort of information. ↩
  2. One of my favorite things in the series is the description of the various video games the characters play – I really want Roberts to write a game at some point, preferably with a lot of control over the gameplay mechanics, because they all sound so fun. ↩
  3. I’ve got strange reading preferences but I STICK TO THEM, dangit. ↩
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Review

Invincible: Compendium One

I’d started to read Invincible at some point in the past and never finished it, apparently. Realized I still had the entire compendium sitting around1 and decided to throw it onto my phone2 for some reading material while on the bus over the first week of February.3
And I quite enjoyed it! I am, admittedly, a bit of a sucker for the whole “superhero’s kid” trope, but it got a bit beyond that. In the beginning it kinda struck me as a bit of a DC satire, in the same way that “The Boys” was a Marvel satire, but it grew beyond that.4 Their government agency is distinctly accurate to the real world in that it’s secretive and embedded in as much dark stuff as the CIA was in the 70s.
And oh, did I ever love the idea of a Superman character actually being an invader. It makes sense, though- Man of Steel had Superman accidentally killing like a million people and devastating a city over the course of a few minutes, imagine how much damage a single unfettered Kryptonian could do if given a lifespan of a few thousand years?
And then there’s Eve and Robot, two of my favorite characters present. Robot is a ‘misunderstood genius’ type, and goes a bit supervillainish at times, but I appreciate someone who’s willing to do some concerning things to get stuff done. And Eve? Oh, Eve. Someone finally did that power right- she quit being a superhero and moved to Africa to actually change things. Which is totally the right thing to do- if you can turn any molecule into any other molecule, you are absolutely wasting your time punching bank robbers.5
So yeah, that’s about it for my review. Quite a good comic, and a pretty well-developed universe. It’s got a hint of space opera, in the regard that there’s a lot going on in the background, but the main character is still distinctly a main character, both on Earth and on the galactic scale.

  1. As a single massive PDF ↩
  2. “I’ll use AirDrop for this, that won’t keep my phone from being able to do anything else for the next ten minutes or so, right?” ↩
  3. Choir tour. Eight hours of bus a day. My everything hurts. ↩
  4. Which is not saying that it wasn’t a DC satire in the beginning because it absolutely was, they’ve got a Batman knock-off named “Darkwing” who lives in a city that’s been magically cursed to have the same color palette as Gotham. ↩
  5. Though I’ll admit, the fact nobody’s had her build a space elevator yet is a bit annoying. ↩
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Review

The Shepherd’s Crown

“Look up here, I’m in heaven” – David Bowie, Lazarus

The Shepherd’s Crown was Terry Pratchett’s last book, published after his death. And man, I thought that Raising Steam was hard to read but, oh, The Shepherd’s Crown was so much worse. Because Raising Steam was a lively romp across the entire Disc, a chance for every single one of the characters we love to show us their lives one more time. Little glances that showed us they were doing well, living on even though we wouldn’t be able to see any more of them.
The Shepherd’s Crown wasn’t that. Part of this is because it’s for a different market – the Tiffany Aching series is the Young Adult branch of the Discworld, and so the assumption that we know all these characters isn’t there. The short introductions given to concepts that I know well, having read every Discworld book, seemed strange and out of place to me.1
And oh, those first couple of chapters were rough. (I try to avoid spoilers, but that’s not going to work this time, so consider this your spoiler warning. If you haven’t read the book yet and you want to preserve it for yourself… why are you reading reviews, anyways? It’s Terry Pratchett, it’s guaranteed to be good.)

Alright, I’ll assume that everyone who hasn’t read the book has stopped reading now.

Granny Weatherwax wasn’t just an integral part of the Aching series, she was an anchor for a number of other books as well. Seeing her go… she was okay with it, but I must say that I wasn’t. And nor was anyone else. Reading Ridcully’s hearing about her death, and his response to it, was hard.
And yes, a lot of that is because of the echoes of Terry Pratchett himself in her character. It’d been common knowledge for a while that he didn’t have much time left – he was very public about the advanced form of Alzheimers that he had2 and his own desire to not allow the disease to make his end debilitating. In short, he knew that he was dying. And, in much the same way that his death was a momentous event for the people of the Disc, so, too, was that of Granny Weatherwax.
Basically, while Raising Steam was a chance for the people of the Discworld to say goodbye to us readers, The Shepherd’s Crown was Terry Pratchett’s goodbye. And lord, but I hate goodbyes.
The book gives us a while to dwell on that sadness, mourn the loss, but then it’s time to get going again. Time halts for no man nor woman, and Tiffany has big shoes to fill. From there, it’s almost a coming-of-age story: Tiffany takes the place that everyone but her knew was coming for her, as the first-among-equals leader of the witches of the Disc. And, slowly, she comes into her own: as a young woman, she’s got that same lack of self-confidence that’s almost a key component of any young adult, but she’s also a powerful witch in her own right. The book is her coming to terms with that, the good and the bad. And in that regard, it’s wonderful.
I think I’m going to stop here, because anything else I could say would be spoiling more of the book than I already have, and I couldn’t live with myself were that the case. I quite enjoyed it, sadness and all.
A hat tip to Sir Terry: you were one of the greatest writers of our time, and you are sorely missed.

  1. This sort of thing is, I think, the reason I never much got into the Tiffany Aching books. I have them all, as I’ve got every Discworld book – except the Science of Discworld series, but I’m working on that – but I don’t go back and reread them like I do the others. ↩
  2. Don’t cite me on this part, I’m writing it from memory while in a moving vehicle so I can’t easily Google to verify my memory of the facts. ↩
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Review

Future Visions

I picked this little science fiction anthology up when Microsoft emailed me to let me know that it was available for free. I mean, c’mon, who skips out on free stuff?
I know for some things of this sort I’ve done per-short-story review type things, but I’m a bit too lazy to do that.1
The concept for this anthology, so far as I understand it, was basically this: Microsoft invited2 a bunch of big-name science fiction writers to tour one of their research centers. From there, they were free to write whatever short story they wanted to, and so they did. The result was quite interesting – some of them were recognizably influenced by certain forms of research (the Skype team’s work on instant translation was very obvious in a couple of places) while others have very little connection – the final story includes a few small references to the same sort of translation technology, but paints it in a less-than-flattering light.
All told, it was an interesting read, good for reading in bits and pieces when you’ve only got a few minutes to spare, and who can beat that lovely low price of free?

  1. And, to be honest, I do those any time that I haven’t read the entirety of an anthology. This one I read cover-to-cover, with the possible exception of part of the comic that was included, as it crashed my Kindle when I was trying to read it. ↩
  2. Or, presumably, ‘paid.’ ↩
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Review

Humble Indie Comics Bundle

The Humble Bundle is a wonderful thing – it started off as games only, but they’ve since expanded into books and various other media. The short explanation is that it’s a charity, of sorts – you get a bundle of products, you choose your own price, and you choose the split between the creators of the products, a charity or charities, and a ‘Humble tip’ to help them keep their servers up and running.
I picked up the Humble Comics Bundle – Image, featuring Creators Own Worlds. Or whatever the correct capitalization of all that is supposed to be. Long story short, it’s a bunch of stuff published through Image that’s set in worlds created by the same people who did each comic – not part of, for example, the shared Marvel universe.
Now, I haven’t yet read everything in there, and I probably won’t read all of them for quite a while yet.1 But I’ve read a few, and I thought I’d share my thoughts here:

Virgil

A violent little romp through Jamaica; it didn’t take too long to read, but told a nice short story. I’d put emphasis on the word ‘violent’ in that description.

Injection (vol. 1)

This one was really interesting, and I can’t decide if it felt like a TV pilot, one of the double-length ones that only ever airs as a ‘bonus content’ type of thing after the show got picked up, or if it’s more like the entire first season of a show. It’s a complete story, but it left a lot of room for sequels to follow up, and some prequels to fill in a bit. It’s dark and grimy and a lot mysterious, and I think it worked quite well. The art style fits the content very well, and I was left wanting more.

Nowhere Men (vol. 1)

Injection left me wanting more by dint of being a lovely self-contained story with plenty of room for expansion. Nowhere Men left me wanting more by being a tease with information. It’s set in a world where, rather than the Beatles taking over the world with their rock music, a group of four scientists rocketed to the global spotlight with their intellects. It’s a little bit unclear on when, exactly, everything is happening – a sort of smeary, always-now kind of setting is implied, so I think it’ll hold up pretty well – and shows off a lot of science-fiction going on in interesting ways. It’s also very mixed-media – the comic is interspersed with magazine interviews, book excerpts, and newspaper clippings that all help to fill in the world very well. Or, at least, from the public’s point of view – the actual story being told is a heck of a lot of dark-research and behind-the-scenes fighting going on. Very interesting, although the most aggravating plot twist in there is finding out that volume 2 isn’t out yet.

Jupiter’s Circle (vol. 1)

Oh my god it’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a superhero comic. There’s a reason The Boys was one of my favorites, in spite of the brutal nature of that comic. This is a little bit less ultraviolence-and-everything-is-awful than The Boys; it’s all wrapped in a lovely post-WWII-early-Cold-War aesthetic, but it’s the same sort of “yeah, there are superheroes, and yes, everyone sees them as upstanding citizens, but… they aren’t.” It was, actually, this one that convinced me to buy the entire Bundle – the ‘preview’ showed us a bit of those heroes, and then the first of their ‘issues’ cropping up – one of them is a closeted gay man. Being the 1950s or so, this is a bit of a problem. And it all got more interesting from there.

Trees (vol. 1)

There’s a sweet little love story, a bit of political intrigue, some scientific what-now, and a hint of geopolitics. This one’s clearly lining up for the rest of the series, and I’m quite annoyed at it because the single biggest “I want to know what’s going on” plot line of the whole thing ended on a massive cliffhanger. But oh, it’s an interesting world – intelligent life showed up from somewhere beyond the Earth… and didn’t notice that humanity was there. Thus, the Trees: alien megastructures that landed wherever they felt – including one that crushed wide swathes of New York City during its landing, and flooded the rest. They’re apparently indestructible, at least to anything humanity is capable of throwing at them, and they’re harder to get any information out of than they are to actually damage. I’ll have to keep an eye out for the rest of this series.

Bitch Planet

The background details of this one are fascinating – it’s set in some kind of alternate future, although apparently the difference here is that feminism never happened- or went horribly wrong, somehow. The patriarchy rules, quite literally, and does so with an iron fist. Most of the story takes place in an off-world prison, and you see things in the list of ‘crimes’ for which people (all women) were sent there that include “seduction and disappointment” and “bad mother.” It’s a scary thought.

Wayward

I wasn’t sure what I was going to think of this one, but it turns out that I quite enjoyed it! The best case scenario.
Irish-Japanese girl moves from Ireland to Japan, from her father’s home to her mother’s. There, she starts seeing things, understanding patterns at a way that shouldn’t be possible. Plus there’s all the weird monsters attacking her. It’s just a fun little comic,2 with an enjoyable story, a pretty good ending to it, and a few lovely little hat-tips to manga.3
My favorite scene was a moment in the background – one of the characters is the Cat-Child, or something like that, which basically means ‘she can turn into a bunch of cats.’ The first time you see that is just a little burst of light and a bunch of cats flying all over the place. Basically I was sitting here giggling about the fact that she just exploded into cats.

Low

The introduction to this one is the writer, talking about how he was trying to write an optimistic character for once. And he succeeded, at that, creating someone that, despite living in a doomed city on a doomed planet, continues to be hopeful that everything will come out alright. And I like her for that.
So I don’t like the writer, because he then proceeds to take everything from her – she watches her husband be murdered and her daughters kidnapped. Her son dies in front of her. Her daughter is found and lost again.
An engaging universe for things to be set in, but one that’s already coming to an end. Too depressing for my tastes.

  1. I do actually have to do classwork every once in a while, it’s a Rule or something. ↩
  2. Well, “little” being “it’s a 330-page PDF,” but still. ↩
  3. I don’t know a whole lot about manga, but my roommate last year was a big fan and I picked up a few things. ↩
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Review

So Not A Hero

I actually read a book again! I’m slowly having more time for that, mostly because instead of binge-watching shows on Netflix I binge-do homework, and I’m starting to run out of homework for the semester. At which point I start reading again.
Anyhow, I just read S.J. Delos’ So Not A Hero – it’d been on my list for a while, and I finally got around to it when I realized that my Amazon Prime lets me get a free book every once in a while.
I quite enjoyed it, to be honest – there were a couple scenes of a graphic nature that I skimmed past, because I’m not really interested in that sort of thing, but other than that, I found it all enjoyable. Sure, there were one or two things that slipped past the editor,1 but it’s the first book Delos has written, and I’m certainly not going to be up in arms about one or two spelling mistakes. It happens.
Now, a bit of background on the story: it’s a Superhero Story, where people randomly become Enhanced, some sort of Mysterious Cosmic Energy2 giving them various superpowers.
The heroine of the story, an asian-american who goes by Karen,3 has just been evicted from her (rather terrible) apartment. The reason? Her landlord found out that she’s an ex-convict, out on parole at the moment. Her parole officer starts giving her a hard time about being down on her luck and is just generally an awful person.
You see bits and pieces of what she went to prison for, but the long and short of it is that she was a supervillain. “Crushette” may not be the best name, but there’s a lovely bit of tongue-in-cheek referencing to copyright law here where the book discusses a law that was passed after the first Enhanced folk started showing up, when “every city had their own Superman and Hulk.” The comic book companies leaned on Congress, and Congress made it illegal4 to use an existing superhero/villain name for yourself. Helpfully, they also established a centralized database of the names, which kept everything from getting too complicated.
And then, while waiting for the bus, Karen catches a plasma blast5 that would’ve hit the non-Enhanced people also waiting at the bus stop. She gets them to safety and helps the superhero in the fight take down a group of supervillains, some of whom she’d worked with in the past.
And he offers her a job, saying that there’s a spot open on his superhero team.
At which point she goes into a lovely little spiral of self-doubt and introspection, and the book becomes a sarcastic redemption story. Karen spent two years in a maximum-security prison: she’s not going to accept that good things can just happen to her, and she spent too long as a supervillain to not have some great banter ready for every situation.
From there, the book gets fun. The superhero team is a dysfunctional little group, the villains aren’t afraid to swear, and Karen has a running issue with the fact that, while she’s indestructible, her clothes aren’t.
Basically, it’s a villain-becomes-hero superhero story told for adults, and I quite enjoyed it. Give it a read.

  1. Or rather, weren’t edited in such a way that made me wonder if there’d been an editor at all – not egregious errors, just, like, spelling mistakes every once in a while. ↩
  2. I use capital letters to express my sarcasm ↩
  3. She changed her name to fit the ‘American standard’ to spite her family, it’s a whole plot arc. ↩
  4. Punishable by, if I’m remembering right, something like five years in prison. ↩
  5. Or something, I’m paraphrasing here – this is still the first two chapters that I’m describing, and the book is significantly longer than that. ↩
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Review

Young Wizards: Lifeboats

Hey, it’s been a while since I did a book review! My whole “read every book on my Kindle” project really slowed down when school started. I wonder why?1
This one is a bit of a cheat on that project, because I just got the book a week or so ago and have been slowly reading it since then. Nonetheless, I’m going to do a review.
So, let me start this off by saying that Diane Duane is one of my favorite authors. Seriously, she’s wonderful. The Young Wizards series is one of those things that I read growing up – I got the first book, So You Want To Be A Wizard, when I was in elementary school, and I (technically) own every book in the series now.2 It’s also wonderful because it feels like the characters grew up with me: when I started that first book, they were excited kids being dropped into a world of magic and adventure, just like I was when I first opened the book. By the time of Wizards at War – my first hardback in the series, which somehow gives it more weight both literally and metaphorically – they were in high school, taking the same classes I was. (And, in their spare time, fighting in a galaxy-spanning war, which I can’t really lay claim to without getting so metaphorical that I lose track of what I’m trying to say.)
Lifeboats is part of a three-piece cycle that Duane wrote, a ‘transitional trio’ that leads from A Wizard of Mars into the upcoming new book, Games Wizards Play.3
Some bits of the afterword, read last night right before I went to bed, stuck with me. And I think they’re very true. The book4 takes advantage of something Duane does that few other authors have taken advantage of: the ability to sell directly to the reader. Her eBooks Direct store sells DRM-free versions of most5 of her (and her husband’s) books. It’s a wonderful thing, and I’ve bought quite a few books that way. It’s a nice feeling to know that 100% of your purchase is going to the author, rather than being filtered through a supply chain and a publisher or two.
More importantly to the book, though, is the fact that Lifeboats was written entirely without the intervention of her publisher(s). It was direct-to-ebook, and that afforded her more freedom than normal. Going through a publisher, a book has to be marketable. It has to be something that people will buy. Market forces stop for no man.
Lifeboats, then, wasn’t a labor of economic forces. It was a labor of love. It was free to be whatever Duane wanted it to be.
And that showed: it expanded on a few side references from earlier books6 while dropping a couple others7 that I must now desperately hope get explained somewhere along the line.
And it was able to be something other than an adventure story following the hero around.
This wasn’t a ‘save the world’ kind of adventure. This was a ‘the world is doomed, try to save what’s left’ sort of thing.
The setting is a planet, close to the galactic core, that lives in the shadow of a moon almost the same size as the planet. The moon is an oppressive presence to our Earthling heroes, weighing down on them from above and providing a constant reminder of the doom that’s already underway: that moon is disintegrating, and as it does so it’ll wrack the planet below with tidal forces, earthquakes and tsunamis, all while raining pieces of itself down from above. A thousand Chicxulub impacts a week, and eventually something that’ll look like firing a bullet through a billiard ball when the metal core of the moon falls out of orbit and hits the planet with all the force that a sextillion tons of iron pick up by being in free-fall for weeks on end.
The main characters aren’t the main characters here: they’re just a viewpoint into a massive evacuation operation, a network of worldgates8 being used to evacuate the planet’s entire population, as well as a sizable chunk of the ecosystem as a whole and as much of the civilization’s cultural artifacts as possible. From Earth alone, something like 60,000 wizards were brought in to orchestrate the operation, and tens of other planets were also tapped for their wizardly resources. The scale of the operation is mind-boggling.
And we never get to see it, because we’re watching through Kit’s eyes as he acts like a cog in a much larger machine, keeping one of the worldgate complexes running while hundreds of thousands of people walk out of one of a set of small ‘feeder’ gates and into the larger upstream gate.
The book gets to spend more time looking at the relationships between the characters, expanding on the sort of thing that gets a few pages of introspection in one of the novels, but gets nearly a third of the book here.
And, quite frankly, I think that’s wonderful. It’s an expansion of the universe in all the best ways: the characters get more time in the spotlight, there’s a heck of a lot of world building, and we get to see people just… doing their jobs. It felt like a behind-the-scenes look into a world that I love, and I enjoyed every minute of it.
My only complaint is that it didn’t make good before-bed reading, because I wound up too invested in it and stayed up too late reading. And that’s the best problem for a book to have.

  1. Probably something to do with the fact that I’m taking 130% of a regular credit-load. Whoops. ↩
  2. I say ‘technically’ because there’s a few that were loaned out to people and never returned. I’m a bit more careful about keeping track of who I loan books to, these days. ↩
  3. I have a lot of excitement for that book and I have no idea when it comes out or anything. At this point, I know I’ll enjoy it, it’s just a matter of waiting or it to be released. ↩
  4. Actually more of a novella, I think, though the distinction between the two is a bit fuzzy and tends to change depending on who you ask and what time of day it is. ↩
  5. Not all, some aren’t available due to licensing restrictions from the original publishers. ↩
  6. I love any reference to the Crossings, and thus was overjoyed by the opening sequence of Lifeboats. ↩
  7. What happened at the Kola Superdeep Borehole? ↩
  8. Or, y’know, portals, for those who like the more boring words for things. ↩
Categories
Review

Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 57

Not exactly a book, but still part of my read-everything-on-my-Kindle project. For this one, I’ll only be talking about the various works of fiction that were published in the magazine – I wouldn’t even know how to go about reviewing the bits of nonfiction, interviews and whatnot, that’re included in the magazine.
Since it’s a series of short stories, I’ll break it up into pieces.

And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead

All sorts of bad language included in this one, but a rather enjoyable read. Reminded me of Neuromancer with the cyberpunk aspect of the whole thing, as well as the overall sense of grittiness.

Buffalo

This one didn’t strike me as science fiction. At all. With H.G. Wells present in it, I was hoping for something along the lines of Warehouse 13.1 What I got was something that felt like it should’ve been part of the nonfiction section, filed under ‘depressing.’

Red Planet

Pretty good, and reminded me of the WWW trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer, though from the other side – the WWW books are pervaded by a sense of wonder at what’s possible, and a distinctive dint of the ‘blind people are broken’ ideology that pervades society on some level or another, whereas “Red Planet” focused on the benefits of being blind and why someone might choose to stay that way. Interesting.

Veil of Ignorance

Confusing and a bit hard to follow, but that was done on purpose. Definitely an interesting read, and done in something that reminded me of a space opera way, where the actual sci-fi aspects of things are glossed over entirely, accepted as normal.

Cerile and the Journeyer2

A sad little story, but an enjoyable one. Not a whole lot to say about it.

Things You Can Buy for a Penny

This one was interesting to read just because of the way that it was built in layers – pieces of story hiding behind one another. I quite enjoyed the overall aesthetic of it, a sort of folk tale with a light brush of horror, and definitely that genie-you-got-what-you-wished-for plot twist to each of the little pieces.

In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns

This was the novella included in the magazine, and I loved it. Futuristic murder-mystery aside, the setting for the whole story was a truly wonderful bit of speculative fiction. They took the current global warming crisis and ran with it, expanding biotechnology and the ever-spreading Internet of Things while highlighting the growing cost of traveling long distance and the energy scarcity that we’re creating for ourselves.
For being such a short story, there was certainly a lot of material in this one.
My final opinion is “this novella made the entire magazine worth the purchase.” If there had been nothing else of value in there,3 In the House of Aryaman would’ve made it entirely worth it.

  1. I wasn’t hoping for anything as awesome as Helena Wells, of course, but she’s rather hard to beat. ↩
  2. If you’re following along in the magazine, you’ll have noticed that I just skipped a couple things. You’d be right – I don’t write reviews of things I don’t finish reading, and I wasn’t able to make it through those two bits of fantasy. ↩
  3. And this was not the case, several of them were worthwhile reads, as I’ve mentioned above. ↩
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Review

Bleeding Violet

I’m still working on reading every book on my Kindle, it’s just slowed down a lot thanks to all that pesky school.
Bleeding Violet was next on my list, and it easily passed my “20% test”1 – I was almost halfway through the book in my first sitting, and only noticed when my roommate got back and asked why I was still awake.
Of course, I woke up the next morning, having gone to sleep right after putting the book down, frightened by some strange2 nightmares. The book is creepy, for a few different reasons. First off, it’s set in a town where things like ‘milkworms’ (they eat calcium, starting with milk and ending with ripping the bones out of your body), giant flying leech things (I don’t think the official name of these was ever said, or if it was I’ve forgotten), and ‘breeders’ (every ‘the bug laid its eggs in me’ horror story ever, crossed with hints of a vampire from Twilight). The first monster we get a good look at is a blob of color that lives in the windows of the high school3 and sucks the color out of people, leaving them as glass statues. So that all creates a nice scare factor in the book.
The part that’s really creepy, though, is the workings of the protagonist’s mind. She’s got a suite of medication for a suite of conditions, currently taking lithium to try to manage manic-depressive disorder, if I’m remembering properly. And by ‘taking’ I mean ‘only taking when someone bothers her about it.’ Her first conversation is with the hallucinated ghost of her father, and the suicidal urges she has are dealt with by the direct intervention of a wooden carving of a swan. She’s been institutionalized in the past, and a little ways into the first chapter you realize she’s covered in blood from (possibly) bludgeoning her aunt (and legal guardian) to death.
The story is told from her perspective, so we get to occupy her mind throughout, and it’s strange. Everything makes perfect sense to her, and you can almost follow along… until you realize exactly how strange a situation she’s in, what exactly she’s doing. Best example I can come up with? Trying to earn her mother’s love by offering to burn down her childhood home. It makes perfect sense at the time… right up until your brain goes, wait, what?
The creepiness, though, makes the book interesting, and it fits nicely with a space filled with unanswered questions. What is the Mayor? Why do people still live in a town filled with horrible monsters? What in god’s name is going on around here?
Of course, those aren’t the interesting questions, but I’m trying to avoid giving away too many spoilers. Go read the book, it’s fascinatingly dark.

  1. I decided, arbitrarily, that if a book hasn’t captured my interest by the time I’m 20% of the way through it, it isn’t worth my time to read the rest of it. Those books that I give up on I don’t write a review of, so you may not have heard of this before. ↩
  2. And most nonsensical ↩
  3. The main character being, of course, a high school student. ↩
Categories
Review

The Astronaut Wives Club

Apparently I’m adding television shows to the things I review on here from time to time? What the heck, it’s still summer break, I’ve got time for it.
Anyhow, I just finished up the first season of The Astronaut Wives Club.1 The style kinda reminded me of Manhattan, with the following of a major historic event from a more personal standpoint, but Astronaut Wives captured my interest much better than Manhattan ever did. I really couldn’t say why, although it might have something to do with my slight obsession with the Cold War, rather than World War II.2
It’s a little bit hard to keep track of all the characters, at first – it starts off with the seven Mercury wives (and, to a lesser degree, their husbands) – and then adds the Gemini wives at some point. By the time Apollo rolls around, they aren’t really bothering to introduce the new set of astronauts and wives, they’re just accepting that it’s too many people.
That aside, though, the show is quite enjoyable. It’s historically accurate to a degree that I feel comfortable filing in moments of history that I learned from the show with the rest of my knowledge about the world, though I wouldn’t recommend it as a way to study for a test.3
The show is definitely predictable if you’re a history buff, but that is something that I am distinctly not, and the few specifics about the space program that I actually did remember, I managed to block out long enough that everything could be a surprise. That made a couple moments – one of which was one hell of a sucker-punch at the end of an episode – incredibly effective storytelling, and very emotionally charged at that.
Tl;dr: I enjoyed the show, and it’s worth taking the time to watch it once it pops up on Netflix.

  1. And I just now looked it up and saw that it was cancelled after one season, so apparently that should say ‘only season.’ Oh well. ↩
  2. What can I say, I’ve got a favorite historical period. ↩
  3. More because you won’t be getting tested on things like “who was cheating on who, and which wife was known for her baking prowess?” ↩
Categories
Review

War of the Fae, Book 1: The Changelings

I think this one was a ‘free on Amazon’ book that I picked up, and let me tell you, as a marketing effort, that worked. The book ends on a one-sentence plot-twist that acts as an incredibly effective cliffhanger, so props to the author for that.
As to the content, it’s a general fit in the young-adult-fantasy-adventure genre: kid runs away from home (though, admittedly, the reasoning for that is more ‘young adult’ than ‘young adult,’ a slight change that helped to hold my interest), gets involved in a weird situation, finds out magic is real, yadda yadda saves the day. There’s a bit of a ‘hunger games’ vibe to the weird situation, and the ‘magic’ bits are more hinted-at than outright-confirmed for a while.1
The book gets bonus points for a female protagonist, and since I’m now staring at the end-of-book about the author page and just now finding out that the author is a female2 it makes sense how well she was able to portray the female mind. As a dude, I am eternally doomed to be unable to understand the inner workings of the other gender, and I’ve come to terms with that.
On the other hand, it gets docked a few points for two issues: first, the occasional Mary Sue moments with the protagonist – there are three main male supporting characters, and between the three of them at least two are very clearly in love with her.3 More points were docked for the fact that the closest the book has to LGBTQ representation is comparing the motions of a vampire, actively killing someone, to “a gay teacher [the protagonist] had in tenth grade.” Look, I get that every Disney villain ever has been a hodgepodge of stereotypically-gay traits,4 but I’m still going to be disappointed when anyone else gives in to the trope.
Other than that, the only issue I had was a single recurring spelling error,5 and overall I enjoyed the book. It’s easily worth what I paid for it, and the fact that that was ‘nothing’ is how I’m going to justify buying the next book in the series.

  1. Although, being a total mythology-and-legends nerd I picked up on it earlier than the average reader could really be expected to. I have a mental filter for these sorts of things, so it doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment of a book too much. ↩
  2. I think the ‘read every book on my Kindle’ thing I’m doing is going by author-alphabetical order, but I’m not actually looking at the names, so… ↩
  3. I’m not docking many points for that, though, because she’s the only girl in the group for most of the story, and I have a low opinion of the average man. ↩
  4. Hades, anyone? ↩
  5. ‘Break’: to separate. ‘Brake’: to stop. I don’t think the word ‘break’ is used anywhere in the book, but ‘brake’ shows up multiple times, and it’s spelled wrong each time. C’mon. ↩
Categories
Review

The Poison Eaters and Other Stories

Sometimes I like anthologies, and other times I don’t. My theory is that it depends on whether or not one story catches my attention more than the others – if there’s just the one, I want an entire book of that and the inclusion of the rest just strikes me as a sad second.
This was that other case, where all of them catch my attention almost equally, and I enjoy myself the whole way through.
There were a few short stories that I liked more than the others, but again, nothing that stood out too much.
A Reversal of Fortune was surprisingly hopeful, for the kind of tale it was.
The Night Market was a lot sweeter than I was expecting, and I’d read more of this sort of thing.
I took a bit of issue with The Dog King, but I think that was mostly because it reminded me of Teen Wolf for no good reason.
In Vodka Veritas was a wonderful little story, and I think I’d read a sequel, though I get the feeling the sequel wouldn’t be quite as happy as the work itself. An impressive amount of ‘coming of age’ story crammed into a small amount of space.
The Coat of Stars was my favorite of the anthology, though not easily. It fit nicely in with my knowledge of the fair folk, and the sort of sad-turned-happy story that catches nicely in the mind. I wound up wanting to write, not my own continuation of the story, but my own version of it- a different cast of characters, but a similar situation. It was lovely.
The Land of Heart’s Desire was my second favorite, though by a thin margin. I actually put down the book while I was reading this one and texted my friend1 that he needed to add the anthology to his list of books to read. It was sad and sweet, and it felt like there was a lot of backstory that I’m missing out on, to the point that when I’ve got internet again I’m going to look up Holly Black and see if she’s written more in that world.

And now? On to the next book. I’m working my way through the list, collecting a lot of sun while I read this weekend. I must say, a stack of books and a sunny beach is a great way to wrap up summer vacation- I highly recommend it.

  1. More laborious than it sounds, because as I’m writing this I’ve got cell service in the ‘I had to stand on top of a car to make a phone call’ range. ↩
Categories
Review

Eastern Standard Tribe

I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe during my weekend camping trip – out in the desert, the river is great for swimming in once it warms up, but it takes until pretty deep into the day for it to be anything other than ‘borderline arctic’ temperatures, so I had plenty of time to read.
Anyhow, Eastern Standard Tribe. My favorite thing about Doctorow’s writing is how clearly he understands modern technology – there’s some nods to IRC in the book, and a lot of what I know about common cryptography I learned from his books.
EST has two plotlines going on at once, though both follow the same character, just at different times in his life. They’re separated by a few months, and the one in the ‘past’ runs faster than the ‘current’ one, catching up to where the one started by the end of the book.
I’m pretty happy with the plot of the book, actually – I still find the concept of the Tribes weird, but it got explained in a way that makes a lot of sense to me, so at least it didn’t stay confusing the whole time. The inclusion of all the user experience stuff was really interesting, and I quite enjoyed the MassPike music thing that wound up being a significant chunk of the plot.
It’s warming up enough that I’m going to get ready to head down to the water, so I’ll finish this up with yet another call to action: go read something Doctorow wrote. I don’t care if it’s Eastern Standard Tribe or not, but he’s a wonderful author, and everything he’s written is available for free on his website, craphound.com

Categories
Review

Mad Tinker's Daughter

I’m still going strong on the book-binge project, guys. It’s an excuse to sit around doing nothing but reading, how could I resist?1
Anyhow, today’s book was Mad Tinker’s Daughter, which I think was also one of those indie-book-bundle pickups.
Long story short, I loved it. The core concept is a little bit odd at first, but pretty easy to follow once you get into it: the twinborn. The story takes place across two worlds, and there are the occasional people who’re ‘twinborn’- born in both worlds, sharing the same appearance2 and a common mind. Some can occupy both bodies at once, others switch back and forth, running one body while the other sleeps.
The main character is the titular Mad Tinker’s Daughter, and a fierce tinker in her own right, inventing a magic-powered coilgun that she uses, within the first few pages, to crash something equivalent to a subway train. Full of police officers.
So, yes, she is a criminal, but in a system that’s hardly fair: the police officers are all a different species, the ruling caste of that world. Humankind occupy the same space that the african-american occupied prior to the Civil War: occasionally a freeman, but usually someone’s property.
It’s a mad romp through two different worlds, all of which are full of a lovely steampunk-adjacent aesthetic and enough of those lovely hints of ancient magic to keep me happy throughout. Sure, it’s the first book in the second trilogy set in these paired worlds, but I had fun trying to figure out what exactly was going on the whole time.
Anyhow, I’d recommend the book to anyone who’s got some spare time for reading. It definitely ends on a higher note than the last book I reviewed, though that’s all I’ll say for fear of giving away too many spoilers.
Go, read, enjoy! Literacy is never a bad thing, folks.

  1. I hope y’all don’t mind that my taste in books is almost entirely the action-adventure-fantasy-scifi blok; if you’re looking for more of the literature style, check out my friend’s blog. ↩
  2. And, presumably, parents. ↩