Absolutely a mixed bag in the way that only an anthology can be. There’s some stories in here that I really didn’t like—I hated “Our Lady of the Open Road,” it just felt crushingly depressing all the way through.
And then there’s some that I really liked. The final story, “And Then There Were (N-One),” was absolutely masterful: a murder mystery set at an interdimensional continuum for various iterations of one person. Now that is a concept!
Weirdly, the ones that I quite liked were the ones about grief. “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” and “The Narwhal” were both really touching pieces about loss. “Remembery Day” was beautiful and aching and sad. And I loved it. Usually I don’t; usually I want upbeat things to read. But it worked.
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I quite liked this—the three arcs it’s split into each feel different in a fun way, and expand on the universe more.1 Bouncing back and forth between two viewpoint characters also worked very well, and the fact that both of them are the “Proxies”, supporting their “Primes”, the ones who are very clearly driving the action most of the way through, made it all the more interesting. It captures a little bit of that space opera “there’s a lot of big things happening in the background” feeling, whilst staying very close to the action.
Overall, I enjoyed the heck out of this one; it’s significantly longer than my last couple reads, but that didn’t stop me from plowing through it in a single day. Definitely a page-turner. Check it out.2
I’m quite curious if this counts as taking place in the same universe as Scarlett Odyssey – it seems very possible, the magic system in that feels very “sufficiently advanced technology. ↩
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The ‘jumping the shark’ moment for this book was in the appearance of one of the Pern books in-universe. A bit on the nose to have your “fantasy setting, but it’s actually another planet that got colonized by humans before the big civilization collapsed” book feature, as one of the Ancient Artifacts… a book about the exact same concept. In this case, the threat is still unknown, but we do get to see it, and it’s a bit more… active than thread.
That said, I did really enjoy the setting; I’m a firm believer in the whole “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” thing, and dropping the general level of technology available to people lowers the threshold on “sufficiently advanced” enough to make it more recognizable.
It also helps that the love arc here was just… hilarious. I quite liked all the characters, and seeing them interact, but the fact that there’s at least one love triangle, one member of whom keeps thinking about jumping ship to a different love triangle, makes it fun.
Overall, I quite enjoyed the book; my main complaint is that it’s an entire book’s worth of setup, and the payoff is going to happen in, presumably, the third book of the trilogy. I’d rather one long book to three medium-short ones. Still, a fun little fantasy/science fiction thing, worth a try.1
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I started to get more into this book the further I read; it starts off as a spy drama kind of thing, and transitions into being a guerrilla warfare story instead. It’s an interesting setting—a conquered Terran Empire, and a resistance trying to accomplish anything, really, from amidst the ruins. The lost blackcollars, elite, superhuman warriors trained in ancient forms of combat, combines well with that setting to make me think, as I’m reading the author’s bio and seeing how much Star Wars he’s written, “oh, of course.” It does, indeed, feel like a homier version of that story, including some attempts at the “I am your father” level twist.
It was a fun read, worth the time I’d say. Check it out!1
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. ↩
I really wasn’t sure what to expect from this book; turns out, it was amazing. Four different stories, told in five parts, and they all pieced together beautifully.
It starts with the meta-story, the one we see a vignette from every couple years along the timeline, with a historian going to space. Then, the first half of the book she’s writing, a translation, another translation, and the second half of the book.
And let me tell you, that first transition, where she comes up from writing the first book and decides to tackle another project, and it’s a timeskip of a five-digit number of years into the past? A heck of a change, but it all made sense by the end. Each piece forms the context for the others, so that by the end you’re feeling things snapping together, waiting for characters a little bit in the past to figure out things that happened long in the past, but a little after the bit we got to read through… oh, what a delightful mystery.
I also found the writing style incredibly enjoyable. It is… heavy on the As You Know, Bob. Which I was briefly annoyed by, then quickly came to love, and much later realized actually makes sense within the context of the book—it’s a book within a book. In the meta-story, the historian never does this; but each of the books she’s writing are for a specific audience, who will almost certainly not know the sorts of things she’s talking about. In light of that, it becomes “As You Know, Bob,” but I’m in on the joke that it’s for the in-universe readers of her book. And, aside from that, it was just a lovely expression of “oh yeah, Buzz Goddamn Aldrin is a coauthor of this thing.” In places it feels like each chapter is 3 pages of plot and then 17 pages of detailed explanation of orbital mechanics, or how a spaceplane works, or what policy changes would be necessary to create this lovely science-fiction future. It’s the feeling of in conversation realizing that a) this person is an expert on something and b) you’ve just set them off on it and now you’re coming along for a very educational ride. I love those moments.
Overall, I absolutely loved this book. It got weird, and it was fun, and I loved it. It’s hopeful science fiction, and I adore that kind of thing. Check it out.1
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. ↩
Somehow I had mixed this up in my head with the Honor Harrington books. Which isn’t much of a mystery; it’s space combat sci-fi, it’s got “Honor” in the name, easy enough to conflate.
That said, “Shards of Honor” was a good read; it’s got some Star Trek vibes in the beginning, but getting into the actual Space Combat Sci-Fi parts, it has a whole bunch of different vibes to it. The latter story arc got surprisingly comedic; I think it’s just the protagonist having a solid sense of humor as she faces adversity.
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. ↩
“Queer science fiction anthology” might be my favorite genre, at this point. Save a couple creepy ones, the stories are almost all hopeful, and the last one in the collection was an excellent anchor to end on, a nice little redemption story. Definitely a bit predictable in what the twist was going to be, but it’s a 40-page short story, there isn’t that much room for surprise.
The ‘wild west’ framing is also a fun one, particularly in the handful of cases where the authors decided to twist what that actually meant. Really it’s more of a “frontier” collection than anything else, it’s just that “western” is the genre we think of for that concept.
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. ↩
This was a fun little romp of a book. It starts as a first contact scenario, a nice hectic experience for everyone involved as the various contacted governments scramble to pull together contact teams. And then it promptly goes off the rails for them, as nobody’s expectations about what First Contact will actually look like have anything to do with what happens.1
There’s some fun twists and turns in the book, and I quite enjoyed it. Towards the end it went a little funny, but I think… reasonably stuck the landing. Check it out.2
And I am, frankly, delighted that the book managed to come up with a coherent reason for why this first contact was completely nonsensical in a way that most First Contact stories completely fail at. They’re from space. Do you know how much stuff there is out there? Why would an advanced race bother landing on a planet to mine for resources? ↩
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I’m really starting to like this ‘small, episodic’ format—it makes it easy to get into things quickly, and also provides clear points at which you can notice that you have once again stayed up too late reading and need to go to bed so you can function tomorrow.
This sorta reminded me of reading, like, an old Sherlock Holmes thing. Or, maybe, Elementary, rather than classic Sherlock Holmes, because of that episodic (and modernized!) vibe. Each one has a nice amount of mystery going on, that feeling that you’re racing the protagonist to figure out what’s really going on. And done in that very satisfying way, too; in the first story, I figured out Patient #1 almost immediately, and felt quite happy when my suspicion was eventually confirmed.1
The introductory material felt a bit overly-congratulatory, but I found myself agreeing with it eventually. Vajra did a really great job of creating interesting aliens—not only is there a very impressive amount of variety in the physical appearances of the aliens, but there’s also some fun cultural differences on display as well. That latter aspect feels like it’s a rich vein for exploring that hasn’t been nearly thoroughly explored enough, but the former, this may be one of the best explorations of this “aliens can be weird” thing I’ve ever seen.2 The aliens are, truly, weird; even with the visual descriptions, there’s a couple that my brain just gave up on trying to visualize, and I wound up as that parable about blind men arguing about what an elephant is.
The third story did a great job of tying things together, and felt like a reasonable close to the series. There’s definitely room for more, if desired, but in these three pieces we’ve got a complete arc, and I was quite satisfied with the ending. Plus, it just had a great sense of cosmic wonder to it, which is a great note to end on. Hopeful science fiction! This is what I want to read.
Overall, I really enjoyed this; it’s a fairly quick read, and manages to hold onto that ”god bless you, old sci fi, you had such high hopes for us”3 kind of vibe while also, like, knowing that cell phones exist. Striking a great balance. Give it a read.4
Spoiler:“She’s a baby!” I muttered to myself, over and over, as I read that one. ↩
The other contender I can think of is Robert L. Forward’s Rocheworld series — between the flouwen and the icerugs, he’s got some really interesting alien lifeforms as well. ↩
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. ↩
Picked at random out of my library of science fiction ebooks, and came up with a good one! The general vibe I have of this book is that, while it could use one more pass from a good editor, it’s got solid bones; the plot tracks fairly well, and feels engaging all the way through, and I was delighted to find that I couldn’t predict the ending ahead of time.
My notes to the authors, should they ever read them:
There’s a little of “as you know, Bob” at times—the explanation of the difference between a fission and fusion reactor felt a bit silly, given that it was happening on the moon. By the time you’re there, you’ve probably picked up enough background knowledge about science in general to get the concept.
Not every story needs a romance arc!1 The first time around I actually, for the benefit of nobody but myself, pantomimed gagging. It felt forced, and also highlighted how thoroughly male-dominated the cast is.2
The pacing feels a bit odd towards the end—about 50 pages from the end, I started wondering if this was going to end on a cliffhanger to set up the next book.3
Editing notes aside, however, I really enjoyed it! I should come up with some kind of pseudo-award to give out to books that successfully trick me into staying up late reading; this would be a winner. And really, what higher praise can I give? Give it a read.4
Well, if you’re writing a romance novel, maybe it does — although, come to think of it, a romance novel without a love story does sound like a pretty interesting exploration of genre. ↩
The president being a woman is a nice touch, but a) I can’t recall her actually having a name other than “the President”, and b) I don’t think she ever talks to another woman, so, there goes the Bechdel test. ↩
Spoiler: It didn’t, the book actually tied things together reasonably well; while it feels like there’s still room for more, it’s less “second movie” and more “spin-off TV series” territory. ↩
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. ↩
I’m not a big fan of the whole ‘death of the author’ thing, and this book really drove home just why I feel that way. It’s a great example of it, really. It’s a collection of stories written by different authors, so surely we can view it separately from the name on the cover, right?
But to set aside the name on the cover, you have to set aside a great deal of context. The people choosing which stories made it into this collection… work for the L. Ron Hubbard foundation. They chose to work there. They looked at that name, and the legacy of it, and thought “yes, I want to be associated with this.” And, a step beyond that, everyone who submitted a story to this contest did so having, again, looked at the name L. Ron Hubbard and thought “yeah, I’m fine with being associated with that.”
That’s a lot of context to throw away, is it not? And it provides a certain amount of explanation for why some of these stories were the way they were. There’s one in here that reminded me of what I don’t like about Orson Scott Card—it treats the female protagonist as if her only purpose for existence is to make babies. Given that the setting feels like it started from the inspiration “what if Handmaiden’s Tale, but in space?” it takes some gall to have the story end with “anyways then she found the right man and they had kids and then happily ever after!”
When it comes to science fiction, I’d rather read hopeful things. This anthology did not deliver on that; I think the most hopeful story in there was one that’s a man in a mental institution, starting to recover from the fact that his sister responded to their parents dying by trying to murder him for the inheritance. Cheery!
Unlike most of my reviews, I’m not gonna end this with a call to action. This wasn’t a good book. Don’t pick it up—Hubbard’s legacy doesn’t deserve that kind of support. Go look for an anthology of queer fiction instead, those are usually better.
The first chapter sorta set me on the wrong mindset for this book; I think, actually, that’s why I bounced off it the first time I tried reading it. It feels like it’s going to be a lot grittier than the book turned out to be. Someone with Secrets, having just done Crimes to escape their Mysterious Past? That’s a very specific vibe, one that, quite frankly, feels rather generic at this point.
That isn’t what this book is.
This book is a study in characters. It’s an exploration of cultural differences on all sorts of different scales, from the ancestral privilege enjoyed by the Martian subset of humanity to the interspecies differences in what the concept of love means.
It’s about found family, and biological family, and how the former can help replace the latter, or heal the wounds imposed by them.
It’s a collection of vignettes, a journey—no, an odyssey—of over a year, the moments of excitement along the titular long way to what does turn out to be a small and angry planet.
Overall, it’s an absolutely beautiful read. I devoured it in an afternoon, and finished reading it watching the sun set and the stars come out, and that’s maybe the perfect way to have done so. It fit the flow of the story. So much of the science fiction I read is about action sequences and big things happening. ‘Ordinary people reacting to extraordinary circumstances.’ This felt like it was starting to fall into the other side of that quote—‘extraordinary people reacting to ordinary circumstances.’ For all that the setting is so very, very much built around the fact that it’s in space, in the future, that isn’t important. What’s important is the people you’re traveling with, and the way you feel about one another.
I loved this book, and I highly recommend it. Go give it a read.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. ↩
The problem with a book being Book 0 is that you know it’s all setting you up for something. It’s a prologue! Prologues don’t tend to end on “and then everything was great and there was no major conflict left, they all lived happily ever after.”
Which was pretty rough, because I absolutely loved this book and the characters. This feels like the love-child of my favorite parts of Star Trek and FTL. From the former, you’ve got a cast who are all very smart people that are passionate about what they’re doing; that sense of exploration, of a great big galaxy in which there’s trillions of people living their lives, and this group in particular is doing their best to make it a better place for all of them. And from the latter, that feeling of building up, starting with a Default Starship and then customizing it into a lean, mean, fighting machine.1 And, as the plot goes on, the feeling that even after all the upgrades you’ve put into it, there’s still always a bigger bad out there — you remain the scrappy underdog, punching above their weight class, trying to fight the evil hypercorporation.
This is a really fun universe to play around in, is the thought I kept having. I want to see more of it, I want to see where else the characters go to explore. It’s book 0, and I think right now there’s something like 9 more, and I’m hooked; at some point, once I finish reading through my whole gigantic backlog, I’m gonna have to pick up at least Book 1 and see how it is.2
All in all, I loved this book; my biggest complaint is that it was setting me up for the rest of the series, and if the series turns out to be this good, that’s a pretty nice problem to have. Give it a go.3
The fact that the hull is made of “ergranian steel,” which has the never-really-explained property of being able to regenerate when charged with energy from the reactor, adds to that videogame-y feeling – you can heal up in between fights! All it takes is energy, which you have a limitless free supply of courtesy of “the reactors” and some big collecting scoops on the front of the ship that gather space dust. ↩
The transition from Prologue to Main Story feels like it’s gonna be something on the other side, and that’s about all I’m gonna say to avoid spoilers. ↩
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. ↩
Atomic Robo is one of my favorite comics, one I’ve been reading long enough that I wish I had some way of figuring out exactly how long I have been reading it. It’s getting a review now, however, as I recently did an all-the-way-through reread.1
Here’s the concept of the comic: Nikolai Tesla built a nuclear-powered, fully sentient robot. He’s creatively named Atomic Robo Tesla, and generally goes by Atomic Robo, or just Robo to his friends. Being a bulletproof, super-strong robot, he gets into some adventures! Being an ageless machine, those adventures occur across a wide range of time. Being a world where it’s possible for Nikolai Tesla to build a nuclear-powered, fully sentient robot, those adventures involve a whole lot of pulp science fiction—there’s an entire comic early on where Robo spends a few hours fighting giant insects while having a discussion via radio about why giant insects are impossible.
Basically, it’s some of the most fun science fiction I read, and I absolutely love it. There’s some really interesting storylines, and there’s also some really funny storylines. Just about everything that Dr. Dinosaur shows up in absolutely hilarious—everything else in this world feels like it’s following some rules, though different ones than our world, but Dr. Dinosaur is just running around inside his own personal reality distortion field. And he shows up precisely often enough to maintain the hilarity of how well he plays off of Robo.
So, hey, if you’re at all interested in any of this, go read the comic. The nice thing about webcomics is that it’s all free online! And, honestly, I really recommend starting from the beginning—it makes the most sense that way, and while there’s some early references to stuff that shows up again later, it’s more little hints that make it better on reread.2
Well, in April; these reviews aren’t exactly timely. (Which I usually avoid admitting to, but in this case, the specific things going on in the comic at the time were what set me off rereading from the beginning, I wanted to remember what was being called back to. ↩
Seriously, I had a moment on this most recent reread where I realized that something really early on had been foreshadowing of a storyline that happened, in publishing time of the comic, something like a decade later. Their ‘about’ page says “Everything that happens will fit into the larger setting; everything that happens will happen for a reason” and they mean it. ↩
This was a fascinating read; I wasn’t really sure what to expect going in, and it turned out to be a really lovely work of science fiction. In short, this is a coffee table book from a different timeline, one where WWII research invented some kind of magnetic chicanery that lets battleships fly. It’s all centered around a small town in Sweden, something of a company town for the largest particle accelerator ever built.
And I really love that concept. It’s not a science fiction novel, it’s not particularly interested in telling the big story. It’s a coffee table book, an art series by someone who grew up in a place, telling their own story and explaining their paintings. It just happens that the place they grew up was at the center of a lot of weird stuff.
Stålenenhag’s art style works really well for this; something about it feels like concept art that comes out of film and video game studios. That air of mystery, of cinematic effect, and the fact that it’s not a fully fleshed-out story about every last aspect of these things makes it so much more interesting. There’s a lot more room for you to come up with your own explanations.
I almost wish the cover was subtler; it’d be fun to make a version of this that’d blend in, and watch people flip through it and slowly realize “hang on…”
This is a fun read, full of beautiful paintings. Check it out.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. ↩
