Tag: fiction

Categories
Review

“Avatar, the Last Airbender”: Various Comics

Gene Luen Yang, Gurihiru, Michael Heisler Faith Erin Hicks, Bryan Koneitzko, Michael Dante DiMartino, Peter Wartman, Adele Matera

This started off as a series of reviews, one-by-one, and then I realized that I was doing each one in very short form, and it felt better as an omnibus post instead. I’ll go ahead and drop my disclaimer here: these are Bookshop affiliate links, so if you buy the book after clicking on them, I’ll get a wee little commission. Less of a commission than your local bookstore gets from each Bookshop purchase, though, because they’ve got their priorities in the right order. Seriously, buy your books with Bookshop, not Amazon.

“Smoke and Shadow”

Skipping around a bit, apparently—it seems that I read the first couple of Avatar comics, but missed the conclusion of Zuko’s search for his mother, so there’s a lot going on here that I wasn’t aware of.

I’m continuing to enjoy the way that these comics expand the series into topics that don’t fit quite as well in the show. In this case, it’s… the invention of domestic terrorism? Yowza.

This one was a weird vibe compared to the Korra comics. An interesting read, sure, but… weird.

“North and South”

Yes, I am in a completionist mood for these comics, why do you ask?

Seems like we’re doing a “the Gaang learns about realpolitik” arc, here? Another round of domestic unrest, in the Southern Water Tribe this time, featuring xenophobia, a Saudi Arabia-level oil find, and a little bit of “what do you mean Hakoda went on a date?” from Katara.

Again, interesting to read, but, boy, this sure is a lot of events going on in not a lot of book.

“Imbalance”

It’s the origin story of Republic City! I really enjoyed this—it’s setting up some of the seeds of what’ll come up in the first season of Legend of Korra, and showing a bit more of how the city developed into what it is by her time. Really enjoyable bit of world-building; check it out.

“The Rift”

Further back into the origin story of Republic City! I’m reading these all sorts of out of order. I like the thought that there’s geological features that came from spirit intervention—in this case, a big ore deposit because a metal-themed spirit made their home in this place. A fun concept.

Categories
Review

“The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire”

Bryan Koneitzko, Michael Dante DiMartino, Michelle Wong, Killian Ng

What was I gonna do, not read the next one? Don’t be silly.

This wasn’t quite as queer as Turf Wars, but I did still really enjoy it. Kuvira is a really interesting character, and seeing some of her backstory was super interesting. The redemption arc she was going through felt rushed, honestly, but it is, after all, a graphic novel, so the pacing is different than a prose novel.

I also really enjoyed touching on some of the broader-scale changes taking place in this world. Two geopolitical things going on at once, in overlapping territory: the collapse of what I viewed as a USSR-analogue,12 and the voluntary dissolution of the monarchy in a China-analogue, to be replaced with democratic elections. Both of which are messy, messy things; the fact that they’re happening in the same place makes it even more of a mess. Good luck, everyone!

For bonus points, they also pulled in some dangling threads from the previous series. Yeah, I get that the Gaang was horrified by Long Feng’s mind-control program and tossed it, but… a whole lot of Dai Lee knew how to do that mind-control trick. It was probably written down somewhere, too. That’s an awful lot of temptation for a ruler…

Another great expansion of the Avatar universe; also, absolutely worth the read. Check it out.3

  1. Mostly by dint of “Republic City is clearly a USA-analogue” and “season 4 was about the invention of nuclear weapons.” ↩
  2. Footnote on that footnote: if you think plutonium is unbalanced in our world, spirit weapons are bonkers in this universe. So, you take a certain vine, electrocute it, and then it’s a nuke? That’s all it takes? Oh, don’t worry, the vines can only be found in one giant mystical swamp in the middle of nowhere- oh, wait, they also grow everywhere in Central Park. This is probably fine.
    (The best take I’ve ever seen on this was in Repairs, Retrofits, and Upgrades, which I also recommend as a read.) ↩
  3. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“The Legend of Korra: Turf Wars”

Bryan Koneitzko, Michael Dante DiMartino, Killian Ng, Irene Koh

As this is the comic tie-in to a show I liked, my expectations weren’t exactly sky-high going in. I think the Avatar universe works reasonably well as a comic, but it still feels like it’s losing something of the kinetic energy of the action scenes by not being fully animated.

That said, this story was delightful. I suspect because it’s the comic tie-in, and not The Show itself, it was able to do the sorts of things that corporate overlords tend not to like. In this case, that meant giving more than a meaningful holding of hands and Word Of God to show us that Korra and Asami are lesbians, Harold. And, beyond a cute little first date vacation montage, we got… a genuinely nice coming out arc for Korra with her parents, Kya casually dropping in her own queer history, and then extending on to tell us about the queer history of the Avatar world as a whole.1

Beyond that, there’s just some expansion of the world going on that I greatly enjoyed; a whole campaign cycle, some of the politics of running a city that suddenly has an interdimensional portal in the middle of it, and some gang violence to keep the fight scenes running. This was a lot of fun to read; I highly recommend it. Check it out.2

  1. Short summary: the air nomads are chill as hell, the water tribe is culturally Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the fire nation was fine with it up until—you guessed it—Fire Lord Sozin attacked, and the earth kingdom is… conservative. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

Moist von Lipwig

Terry Pratchett

I never feel quite right about writing a book review of a book that I’d already read before, but sometimes I can bring myself to do it with a series. In this case, it’s a sub-series—the Moist von Lipwig books within Terry Pratchett’s greater Discworld series. I didn’t quite intend to, but wound up rereading all three of them. In reverse order, in fact, which really highlights the “didn’t quite intend to”—had I known that’s what I was doing, I probably would’ve done it in the proper order, but I read the last one and then went “I want a bit more of that,” read the second one, and thought “well, I might as well finish the set.”

It’s not a surprise to me that I love these books, that they’re some of my favorite in the whole series, that I come back to them fairly often. There’s a specific aspect to them that I love: the feeling of building something. Moist, and oh what a name, is a man who works only in words—something I can relate to, being a programmer—and yet these books are three different times that he used that to help build something real. Rebuild the post office, rebuild the banks, and then build the railway.

I never regret reading a Pratchett book. In your case, dear reader, I’d say to actually go from first to last, rather than mixing it all around: start with Going Postal.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Night Sky Mine”

Melissa Scott

I really enjoyed this one! I think it counts as cyberpunk, but the digital world stuff was a really neat take on evolutionary programming. I’m actually over here wondering how much this was an inspiration for Code Lyoko, the visuals I was imagining felt very similar.

The setting is basically that, at some point, software engineers went “screw it, we’ll just evolve software to do what we want instead of trying to write it ourselves.”1 Skip forward a mystery amount of time, and they’ve accidentally created entire ecosystems – pieces of software acting like flora and fauna in a networked environment, preying on one another and, occasionally, going all cancerous and crashing the entire substrate running it all.2

The book takes place a long time after that; there’s entire careers in software breeding now, as well as people who go hunting in the wild parts of the net, looking for useful programs.

My only negative I’ve got is that the pacing feels off; the ebook came in at something like 440 pages, and the denouement hit on, like, page 430. It felt rushed, and like there was closure missing for the characters and the story itself. I suppose that means I need to go see if there’s a sequel.

I also spent the entire book reading the title with the word ‘mine’ meaning ’belonging to me,’ despite the fact that the asteroid-mining megacorporation in the background is named Night Sky Mine Co., but that’s more on me than the book.

Anyhow, I quite enjoyed the read – check it out!3

  1. If this feels familiar, you are correct, that’s what all the modern AI stuff is. ↩
  2. This goes poorly for people relying on other software running on that substrate – for example, navigation and life support systems for faster-than-light starships. ↩
  3. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
Categories
Review

“A Wizard of Earthsea”

Ursula K. Le Guin

I know this is one of the classic fantasy novels, but I must admit, it just didn’t click for me. Maybe I’m coming to it too late—too many of the things it did have become norms, part of the standard lexicon of fantasy novels. It did have two things about it that stuck with me, though:

  1. The protagonist, and most of the characters, aren’t white. It’s sorta snuck in—benefits of being a completely different world, if there isn’t a history of racism being A Thing, then people just… don’t think about it as much.
  2. This fantasy novel from 1968 has a magical Roko’s Basilisk in it. It’s not described that way, but it’s an extremely powerful entity trapped in a box, which has suborned its captors and is trying to use them to in turn suborn more powerful entities.
Categories
Review

“The Paradox Paradox”

Daniel Hardcastle

This… is one of the greatest books I have ever read. I’ll tackle the easy thing first: the comedy is sublime. Not surprising, given that Hardcastle is one of my favorite YouTubers, and has been for checks notes over a decade. He’s got this ‘entertaining people’ thing down.

Next easiest to tackle: the cast and setting. The cast is delightful, a wonderfully diverse mix of species, and watching them all interact is an absolute delight. Everyone is likable, everyone has a fascinating backstory, every last one of them I want more of. And the setting is absolutely gorgeous; it has that Douglas Adams feel of some of the details being played purely for comedy, but every last one of them still works. Like, towards the end, there’s a throwaway line about banana peels having been re-engineered to be edible centuries ago, and it’s meant as a joke about the fact that they still taste like the wrong kind of banana the same way all fake banana stuff does, but that works. Centuries of scientific progress, and of course we’d have some little detail like that that we’d hang on to for the sake of nostalgia rather than sense. The future won’t be shiny and perfect, but it will be shiny, and full of interesting decisions that people have made because they’re still people.

And now, the hardest bit to talk about, particularly without spoiling anything: the time travel. It’s named “The Paradox Paradox,” of course it’s about time travel. But this is, I think, the best-thought-out system of time travel I’ve ever seen. I’m not entirely certain that I’m grasping the whole of it, but it all works. And the way the book is put together makes it work even better – the chapter numbers are chronological, the chapters themselves are not. Because it’s a book about time travel, of course the sequence of events doesn’t follow the calendar! But, beyond that, the chapter numbers don’t match the table of contents. I was reading this on an e-reader, one that shows the chapter title up at the top of each page, and those don’t always align with the actual title card at the beginning of the chapter. You can’t trust the chapter numbers, but they are deeply meaningful. They just might be lying to you. And it is sublime.

I finished this book feeling a sense of awed delight. This is a masterwork, this is one of the greatest things I have ever read. I cannot recommend it highly enough; please read it.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“The Haunting of Tram Car 015”

P. Djèlí Clark

A couple big reviews of big books recently, so I very deliberately went for something small this time. And this was a delightful little read! Wound up going through the whole thing in a single sitting and absolutely loving it. Just the right amount of world-building in what is a very interesting setting; it fed me new bits of background information at just the right speed to keep me hooked. The title had me worried that I was making a mistake, grabbing this as my before-bed reading, that I’d be setting myself up to be too spooked to sleep well, but there was very little “horror” to the feel of it at all.

Very enjoyable read, and the print version was very satisfying in the hand, with a lovely bit of cover art. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Hex Americana”

Bree D. Wolf

This is a fun setting – vaguely modern American, but with the addition of a massive variety of magic and magical creatures from folklore. Honestly, I think we should call that kind of thing ‘hex Americana’ in general, it really fits the vibe. The protagonists are a yokai and a ghost, and there’s also appearances by what look to be a wolf man, a Medusa, a cyclops, a mummy, and Baba Yaga. It’s a fun mix!

The actual story I mostly enjoyed – it’s a bit more “high schooler making bad choices” than I tend to prefer, to the point that my reading had a month-long break, but I did enjoy piecing together all the backstory. Definitely worth the read, and hey, I get to support a local author, too! Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“The Deep and Shining Dark”

Juliet Kemp

This is one of those books that makes me think about hard versus soft magic systems. A hard magic system has strict rules; an extension of the laws of physics. Soft magic systems are a lot looser; the rules are “whatever the plot requires them to be.” Pros and cons to either.

In this case, we have a pretty soft magic system; the only real rule seems to be that you need blood to control magic. With the exception of Marek, a city whose founders negotiated a deal with an angel, and it came to live there, interceding between the people that raw magic, making it a much safer affair overall. And, in true “wisdom of the ancients” style, they were very clever about it, and the deal included things like “you can’t use magic for politics” and “the angel has to keep the good of the city in mind.”

All of which worked quite well as backdrop for what is, essentially, a political intrigue. It may have taken a few hundred years, but no system works perfectly forever. Not without maintenance, at least. Once most people forget why and how the magic works, it gets easy to assume that it works that way because it works that way. You stop thinking about it. It becomes a norm.

But, eventually, someone comes along who doesn’t accept the norm. Who thinks, well, this rule seems breakable. Nobody’s actively enforcing it anymore.

I don’t think this book was meant to be quite as topical to politics as it felt, given that perspective, but it worked out well. Made for a very interesting read overall, and I can definitely recommend it. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Still the Sun”

Charlie N. Holmberg

Oh, this was a delight of a read. Sort of a slow burn overall, but it made it very effective at building up over time. By the halfway point I didn’t want to put it down, and at 4/5 of the way through I couldn’t. In a way, it’s a lot of filler, but it’s beautiful filler, and without the filler it’d be too quick. It’s the fun of digging through the filler to find the little pieces of the puzzle.

My favorite moment, and this will be a spoiler, is reading the very careful, analytical description of an artifact of the Ancients, and saying to myself “it’s a sundial. Obviously it’s a sundial. How have you not figured this out?” And then we get to see this lovely analytic mind of the viewpoint protagonist answer that question: why would you know what a sundial is on a planet that isn’t rotating? Would you look at that, the title makes sense.

As I said, an absolute delight to read. The protagonist is building something, and I get that seem feeling of building towards something as I try to piece together the mysteries. Give it a read.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“A Feast for Flies”

Leigh Harlen

This was chaotic and fun to read; it did a pretty good job of capturing the feeling of being in over your head, one normal person trying not to be squished by the movements of the movers and shakers of the world. A mind-reader, forced to work for the police, hating her job but legally not allowed to leave it. Bea, the support dog, was a fun concept—there’s a passing reference to people with less sci-fi reasons for needing a support animal getting by with robots, but here, the disability is “can constantly hear the thoughts and feelings of people around her,” and being in contact with the dog (or through the conductive leash) dampens all of that.

The mind reading was done fairly well, I thought, and just different enough in the details that it felt interesting but still easy to follow. A fun, quick read; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Little Nothing”

Dee Holloway

I didn’t quite click with this one. The closest I got was with the “little nothings,” the small pieces of magic, and even there, I wanted it to be a bit more. I want magic that actually feels like magic, not magic that feels like someone believing in themselves by telling a story in their head that it’s magic. The biggest ‘little nothing,’ as it’s referred to, that appears in this book is someone getting themselves untied… and the way they do that spell is to spend an hour slowly fidgeting with the rope until the motion and them bleeding on the rope from the sores on their wrists loosen it enough that they can pull the knot the rest of the way undone. The spellwork is simultaneously treated as “enough of a threat that they have to be tied down so they can’t move their hands” and also “basically a form of self-affirmation” and it just bugged me.

Complaints about magic aside, it was an interesting read—I’ve never been much for Civil War-era stuff, so the perspective of people loyal to the Union, living in Florida, in the lead-up to the actual declaration of the Confederacy, was a new perspective to me. Worth it for that, I suppose, though the concept of “what if Florida had carnivorous swimming horses in addition to the alligators” was a bit more fun of a twist. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Off-Time Jive”

A.Z. Louise

An interesting little story. Not long enough for me to really figure out the magic system in any detail, which was a bit of a bummer—I quite liked the idea of there being an Old School of magic and a New School of magic, and tying it together with race relations in the Jim Crow era sure did add an interesting twist. A surprisingly good ending, everything came together better than I was expecting. Worth the read, I think.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Rabbits of the Apocalypse”

Benny Lawrence

I’m kinda amazed by how much I enjoyed this book, because it’s a hodgepodge of a bunch of things I really don’t like. It’s post-apocalyptic, for god’s sake! And not even a particularly hopeful post-apocalyptic, it’s a “and things are still getting worse!” post-apocalyptic. Gross.

I suppose what shone was the characters—I was interested in all of them, in their relationships. Which, again, kinda surprising, because they’re basically all terrible. Hell, one of the main characters in this spends a whole lot of time justifying their actions, and even towards the end where they’re starting to crack and admit that the Big Bad they work for is, in fact, not the good guys… they never address the fact that said Big Bad is a slave empire. Like, c’mon. Have some self-awareness.

I dunno, though. Like I said, I did enjoy reading it—fairly well-written, and the banter really brought a lot of joy to it. If you’re into… Fallout, but as a sapphic romance(?), and a little bit of X-Men, then this might be the book for you. Worth a shot, anyways.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩