Twenty-Four books

[firstfrost]

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars (by Christopher Paolini)

OK, OK, I liked the cover. And I had forgotten that Paolini is the Eragon author. He's not terrible, but I can't think that getting to fire his editor at age nineteen was great for honing his craft. The plot is pretty good - main character ends up accidentally bonded to alien tech and can't initially control it, add a lot of space opera and a nice starship crew of misfits. But the book is too long for what it covers (856 pages), it's a bit of a slog, and the plot points vary a lot from super-telegraphed to strangely pointless side quests.

The good: All the scenes of Kira learning to control the Soft Blade. It's not just "and then through sheer force of willpower" (at least not until the finale). The progress is measured but clear, particular frustrations get overcome as her control and power expands but then there are new issues at the higher level. That worked well. The scenes with the misfit crew are nice, and the crew are nicely varied though each of them is kind of one-note. The humans in general are an entirely plausible combination of good intentions plus stubborn and selfish.

The bad: Kira's fiance is just too perfect - I spent the first N pages sure he was going to do a heel turn and turn out to be evil, and when he didn't then I switched to being sure he was going to be fridged. (Is is still fridging if it's a guy?). He was. The side quest for the Staff of Blue (which really belongs in a fantasy instead of SF) finds it not there. In The Dagger and the Coin the failed side quest for the Spider Goddess is a perfect dramatic revelation. Here, it's a waste except for a meeting that could have been done much more plausibly not at the end of the quest path.

Three stars

Shards of Earth (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)

A surprisingly insect-light book from Tchaikovsky. In fact, if I didn't know who the author was, I'd think Alistair Reynolds or Peter Hamilton, it's that flavor of space opera. Humanity (including several variants) is a small fish in a universe of alien bigger fish, including the Architects, who are less sentient competitors and more existential threats. Last time round, after the architecting (destruction but much more artistic) of Earth, humanity managed to barely fend the Architects off, through the use of the Intermediaries (a psi/tech variant) and the Partheni (a splinter faction, basically space Amazons). Now the Architects might be back. I listened to this on audiobook, but this particular exchange snagged me enough to copy it down. Idris is the last of the first-generation Intermediaries; he hooked up with Solace (a Partheni) when they were serving together. Much later (now) she's turned up to offer him a job. He's talking about her to a crewmate.

"You like her."
"We... went through a lot in the war. We were close, after Berlenhof, before she rejoined her unit. I needed someone, and she... I don't know what she wanted."
"Why not just the same as you?"
"I don't think Partheni are like that, are they? All that warrior spirit and selfless sacrifice... I don't think they need shoulders to cry on, like regular human beings. They edit that shit out of them in the vats. Or what's the point? What's the point of making better people, if they're still sad and afraid and lonely?"

I generally like Tchaikovsky; this is probably my favorite of his books so far.

Five stars.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built (by Becky Chambers

Becky Chambers always writes thoughtful stories. This is no exception. It's a novella, I guess, but I listened to it on audiobook so it was harder to tell. (Hey, there is a name for this genre now - "solarpunk". I missed that! ("How might the future look if we solved our grimdark present?")). Anyway. Dex is a traveling tea monk. They used to be a gardening monk but found they needed to do something else, and became a tea monk. But then they found themselves wanting something else... Oh, and there's also a robot. Mostly, that's what happens. I tend to not invest deeply in stories about the meaning of life, because "does my life have meaning?" is not at present one of my angsts. But that's because I'm really really deeply invested in the meaning of my life being 1) being good at the thing I do and 2) the thing I do being more or less a good thing to do. That works for me most of the time... to give it a cynical turn, I've evolved admirably well to live in the American late-capitalist dystopia. Of course, that means that some of my deeply suppressed trauma comes from when I wasn't good at the thing I was doing, and stopped doing it, and my not particularly suppressed rage from when the thing I was good at and loved doing, stopped loving me back. (Yes, "Surface Pressure" in Encanto is me here too.)

A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a story about, in part, how to have meaning when you are good at doing a thing, and it is a good thing to do, and it is still not enough. It crept up on me and resonated, in ways that I really don't usually find "o woe is me what is my purpose?" to be at all interesting or engaging. And I'm still thinking about it. Next time I have to stop defining myself by what I do, I should read this again. Five stars.

The Last Graduate (by Naomi Novik)

The sequel to A Deadly Education, and there is clearly at least a third book to come. Novik really likes the mic-drop cliffhangers here. I really liked this one too, though not quite as much as the first. My ability to suspend disbelief works much better when the things I need to believe are introduced in the premise. If the magical anti-Hogwarts is introduced as evil, then I won't devote much analysis to why it's evil. But heaven help you if you give me the full explanation of why it's evil in book two and it doesn't hold sufficient water. In particular, there's a portion of the book where narrator El is explaining why particular things are happening, and they just... didn't make a lot of sense to me, and then I started pulling at those threads and a lot more things didn't quite make sense either. Then it turned out, El is mistaken about some things, and I figured out how she was mistaken before she did and spent a couple chapters arguing with her in my head, and that really distracted from the plot. Still, that only brought it down from five stars to four stars, and I really want to know what happens next.

New Found Land: The Long Haul (by Austin Grossman, Neal Stephenson, and Sean Stewart)

Audiobook only. Honestly, this one is hard to review, not because it was bad, but because it files itself very neatly into the "podcast" category of my fiction, and I mostly haven't reviewed podcasts (mostly because they don't finish!). It's a multiple-cast narration (including one Southern trucker podcaster, that being the long hauler in the title) of "rayguns, magic, secret societies, and parallel worlds." It's fun and plot-twisty and I kind of just listened along with an air of "I have no idea why this is happening or what will happen next" and enjoyed it quite a lot without taking anything seriously.

Because Internet (by Gretchen McCulloch)

Hey! A non-fiction book! A linguistic excursion into online speech, this was definitely interesting. "emoji are gestural additions to speech" makes a lot of things make sense. (I do a bit of the same thing in writing RPG email with stage notes for extra expression in the dialogue, and MUD-type chat rooms had the convention of switching between physical desctotion (:boojum yawns:) but the rest of the internet does not seem to have evolved that way.) And the four cohorts of Internet People was fascinating and also makes me understand more clearly where a lot of my Original Internet cohort's "get off my lawn" reactions come from. I found it all of fun, informative, and well documented, so strong approve if this subject appeals to you at all. (Also, it very much did the Hofstadter trick of surprising me with the end of the book, since about 1/3 of it was references.)

The Night Sheriff (by Phil Foglio)

I think this is his first actual novel (other than the Girl Genius novelizations), but I have always enjoyed his comics, so sure! Interestingly, it has kind of the same genre as one of the InCryptid novels - that is, monsters/cryptids in/working for/lurking in Disneyland (except that all the serial numbers are filed just enough off that Disney can't destroy them), with the main character being the unofficial "night sheriff" of the park, combination of highest ranking security guard and boss monster who makes sure that neither cryptid nor human monster eats the kids. I quite liked it - the main character is nicely menacing but still a good guy. The backstory of the Disney Zenon brothers and the flashbacks are doled out at a nice pace, the plot moves along at a nice clip, there are some touching moments, and the plot twists are decently hinted beforehand. Maybe too hinted, and this touches on my only real quibble. Some things about the pacing, and the flashbackery, remind me a lot of the pacing of Girl Genius, a very long-running webcomic. Obviously, the pacing of a novel and a forever serial are different, and also obviously, the micro-pacing of a book and a comic are different. But I think Night Sheriff is a novel written by an absoute master of a slightly different media. The plot twist hints carefully placed on the mantel are disguised enough to not shout "This is going to come back later" very hard, but if it was Girl Genius they would have been placed there two years before using them and been a complete brilliant surprise. Since I read the book in a weekend, they were easier to spot before the reveal. And something about the plot of the book was more serial-things-happen than arc-ramp-up-then-finale. But it's not a quibble that really detracted, it's something that I found interesting. (That undead cat thing on the cover is clearly a mashup of a skeletal Mickey Mouse and Krosp.)

Four and a half stars.

Greenwing and Dart: Stargazy Pie, Bee Sting Cake, Whiskeyjack, Blackcurrant Fool, Love-in-a-Mist, Plum Duff (by Victoria Goddard)

These are... something. It's like if Georgette Heyer decided to write a comedy of manners set in a Europe-flavored but very distinctly worldbuilt fantasy setting, about the escapades of a bunch of role-playing PCs in search of an arc plot. These are so my genre. But I didn't quite realize at the moment, so I nearly bounced off at the beginning. The first book, Stargazy Pie opens with Jemis home after several years of university, now working in a bookstore. On the way back from the bakery on a rainy morning, he sees a mysterious cloaked figure leaving a pie on a nearby fountain. He investigates! It is a pie with FISH HEADS POKING out (okay this is apparently actually what a stargazy pie is), and as this is DEEPLY MYSTERIOUS, Jemis absconds with the pie back to the bookstore, where he and the owner INVESTIGATE.

All of that happens while the author drops names and place names and passing backstory references with a liberal hand. Here's the third paragraph, though they aren't all this dense.

Ragnor Bella's major claims to fame, in the views of the one travel writer who discusses it, are the house of Chief Magistrate Talgarth, which is one of the finer examples of Late Bastard Decadent Imperial architecture in Northwest Oriole; the unparalleled and undefeated racehorse Jemis Swiftfoot, which was personally commended by Emperor Artorin; and the strange and disturbing history of Major Jakory Greenwing[*], who was also personally commended by Emperor Artorin, and subsequently arraigned as one of the worst traitors in Astandalan history.

So, my eyes were glazing over a bit with the fire hose of worldbuilding names (it does all connect though it took me a couple of books to be able to connect the dots together), and then there is this utterly inexplicable behavior about the pie! What on earth? Who does that? But. The answer "who does that?" has an obvious answer - PCs in a role-playing game. Just think about it. There's a character who works in the bookstore. The GM says "Make a perception roll. 13? You see someone in a grey cloak put some sort of flat dish on the fountain and then skulk off." OBVIOUSLY they go see what it is. Maybe they chase the grey-cloaked figure. It's a plot! That's what you do when the GM says there's a plot. (Well, maybe if you are Charles you don't always.) The PC discovers a Mysterious Fish Pie! OBVIOUSLY you bring it back to your fellow PC in the bookstore to INVESTIGATE. Looked at from that point of view it all makes perfect sense. Anyway, once I had that settled in my head I enjoyed everything immensely. The two main PCs (Greenwing and Dart) leap about after plots like enthusiastic greyhounds after all the rabbits. Weird cultists! A mermaid in a bathtub! Someone's arm is turned to stone! Someone else is growing weird plants! Yet someone else is clearly in disguise. Everything must either be chased, or run away from, depending on the numbers and the peril. In the end - who was that in the cloak? I think we found out. Why the pie? I... I still have no idea. Sometimes runs are like that.

The * from above: the strange and disturbing history of Major Jakory Greenwing. Now, we come to the backstory of the main character, Jemis Greenwing. Jemis Greenwing is clearly played by someone who had never before been permitted by a GM to make up as many plot hooks in his backstory as he wanted, and he has run with it. Jemis's father, Jakory Greenwing, went off to war when Jemis was little. Word came back that he had been hanged as a traitor after betraying his company and country. Woe! His estate is forfeit to his brother. His widow is shunned. Then contradicting word came back that he had been killed after heroically saving the day. The village isn't sure what to think, but his widow is still a widow. She remarries and has a baby daughter when, three years after being twice declared dead, Jemis's dad comes home. Bigamy! Woe! Major Greenwing is found hanged - everyone says suicide - and suicides and traitors are both definitely bad. Jemis's mother dies. Her second husband remarries. The second husband, Jemis's stepfather, dies while he is off at college. Got it? This is one of Jemis's plot hooks. There are quite a few more, each about that level of complexity and angst.

I adored these books. They are kind of muddled sometimes, and there are a lot of plot threads that I am not sure I ever saw resolved, but they are fun and dryly funny and full of fascinating little set pieces like the Late Bastard Decadent Imperial Style Dinner Party and the Leap over the Magarrin Strid, and the card game called Poacher.

Oh, I forgot to talk about Poacher, but I'm not sure I can do it justice. You draw Fish cards, and you draw Happenstance cards, and they go together to let you build a hand that tells a story of the things that happened while you were out fishing. Also it stands in for all the sorts of metaphor that card games get to have ("You gotta know when to hold em, and know when to fold em. Know when to walk away, know when to run...") and a lovely story-based paint all of its own. Here's one of the times it turns up:

Poacher is a game of nerve and chance, of swift calculations and topsy-turvy odds. Neither Jack nor I looked much at our hands, though I'm sure he was counting what cards had come and gone as much as I. The dance of Fish and Happenstance and skill and luck, which like an allegory reveals even as it hides the souls of the players.
I'd been in games of Poacher that lasted ten minutes, and one that lasted four hours. This one took perhaps forty minutes from the first warning to the last stand.
Quite how it happens I don't know. How is it that a man can reveal his soul so well picking up a card, discarding another, creating a story by what is taken and what is left that is almost always not the one described at the end? I don't know. I only know that of my last three games of Poacher with a skilled stranger, one had left me soiled, one with the conviction that my opponent was the most dangerous person I had ever met, and this one ...
I sighed with regret that the game had to end as it came time to turn over the Emperor card and see what alchemy it wrought on one's hand. I knew that the Emperor card was the Holy Grail; I also knew that excellent though my hand was, Jack's beat it.
"Well?" he said.
"Friend, Local Boy, Vengeance, and the Salmon of Wisdom. I hope you find the last, sir."
There was a perfect silence. Then Jack started to laugh. He turned over his cards to show they were the ones I had named. "And here I wondered what you could possibly do with Two Fat Carp, A Mysterious Letter, A Stranger, and A Storm."
"You forget the Holy Grail, sir."
"Oh, indeed not," he said, and exchanged one of his deep glances with the visibly nonplussed Ben. "That's how you play the game, Ben." Jack offered me his hand. "Thank you, lad. It's been a long time since I enjoyed myself so much."

Strange that I don't think I've run into Victoria Goddard before; she has a lot of books and I can't be the first person in my circle to have read one.

Four to five seven-pointed stars in an antiquarian font comprised only of different kinds of stars.

The Phoenix Feather: Fledglings, Redbark, Firebolt (by Sherwood Smith)

The Exordium series, starting with Phoenix in Flight, by Sherwood Smith, is one of the first books/serieses that I pushed on people. I've read some but not all of what she's written since. The Phoenix Feather is her pandemic "Just the fun parts" foray into xuanhuan (not a term I knew, it's the "mysterious fantasy remix" genre of wuxia). What is I believe the last book in the series (Phoenix and Dragon) will be out in March so hopefully complete then. I also adored these. They're fun in a conscious "use all the good tropes" way, the way The Princess Bride (without frame story) does. And there's also an appearance by Dragon's Great Crane Spirit, more or less. I won't quote that because spoilers but here's a bit I did highlight, between a court artist and his new apprentice.

"Excellent. Now, to our matters. I'm certain you are aware of the difference between scholarly artists and court artists, am I correct?"
"I ... think so?" Yskanda said. At that moment he was unsure that his feet were still attached to his legs. His entire body seemed to have turned to water.
"Let's begin at the beginning. I am a court artist, not a scholarly artist. Depending on who's talking, one is hidebound while the other achieves greatness, or else one makes contributions of importance that will resonate down the centuries while the other creates frivolities that don't last past the next festival. I don't care what the sages say, or what the nobles say. None of us can control what will be deemed valuable by our progeny. We can only do our best, always. Even if the emperor tells us to draw ducklings for his children, or grandchildren when those come into being. They will be the very best ducklings you can contrive. If you can promise me that, and believe it, then you and I can work together."

Five stars

Paladin's Hope (by Ursula Vernon / T Kingfisher)

This is the third of the romances about the once-paladins of the Saint of Steel. Third book, third paladin, third love plot. I do like that although all of them go through the standard cadences of attraction-denied, attraction, terrible misunderstanding, reconciliation, they don't have at all the same characters or causes. (The paladins are more similar than the love plots are. Grace is only partially healed from her abusive ex. Clara is incredibly strong. Piper has more emotional armor than a tank. (Also, a guy, since that's not obvious from the name). There's a surprising amount of dungeon crawl in this book, though maybe it shouldn't be surprising because of the D&D bones. And a final hint that maybe we'll someday learn what actually happened to the Saint of Steel. Maybe only four stars for this one because I'm really not sure about the dungeon crawl, but still lovely.

How Rory Thorne Destroyed The Multiverse and How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge (by K. Eason)

The most inexplicable part of these books are the titles. I thought at first it was some sort of John Dies At The End (spoiler: he does not die at the end of the first book), but the second title does sort of presuppose the destruction happened in book one. A more accurate title would be How Rory Thorne Played A Major Role In Quite Shaking Up the Political Status Quo.

The conceit, of a mashup of fairy tale and space opera, works quite well. How else do you end up with the plucky princess as quite such an icon in both genres? And it gives unapologetic license to saying "sure, we're oversimplifying the politics because that makes for a more fun story" which is sometimes a thing that bugs me if done without an excuse. :)

I liked the first book better - inter-planetary war, a bunch of running around and political maneuvering on a space station, an evil regent, a loyal cyborg guard, a clever vizier, a plucky princess, two sus lordlings, a proletariat rebellion... a lot of fun bits. The second book seemed to forget a little about the fairy-tale paint, and got into a lot of confusing alien races scheming against each other and everyone taking everyone else prisoner back and forth, sort of like playing Go Fish where you just keep trading the six back and forth. And the Rose character... too many questions, not enough answers. The first book was reasonable fun, but you might stop there.

The Long Price Quartet (by Daniel Abraham)

I read the first of these when they first came out, but somehow didn't get to the rest. I think they were what first hooked me on Daniel Abraham, though! Each book is more or less self-contained, but together they span the lifetime of a set of characters. The premise of the setting is that there are entities called the andat, which are concepts bound and instantiated into immensely powerful and sentient (but resentfully so) spirits by the poet-sorcerers who serve the city-states of the Khai. Scale is nothing to an andat; the andat Stone-made-Soft serves the city of Machi by hollowing out mines, but it could just as easily melt the entire continent. The empire of the Galts have no andat (though they are getting better at technology), and much of the plot is driven by Galtic schemes to cause the andats to be unbound. Which, of course, the andats also support. The andat personalities are more or less created by the poet who first binds them; Seedless is viciously psychologically cruel to his master, because his master hates himself. Stone-made-Soft, bound for generations, is more like a placid roommate of his young poet-master, but the time he nearly gets free (he apparently tries once per poet when they are most vulnerable) is an impressive battle of wills. Like all of Abraham's work, there is a sense in all the plots that they lead inexorably to the next thing; everyone and everything has momentum. Of course the existential threat of the andat drives Galt to terrible defensive decisions. Of course a decent person might go quite far to keep their own Khai lord from learning about Galtic perfidy, lest the andat be used to utterly destroy them. Tradition, loyalty, ethics, love - all of them drive people in different directions, to do different things, and plots move inexorably forward to the final choices.

Five stars, but trigger warning: miscarriages