About twenty more books
Dec. 6th, 2022 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firstfrost- Nettle and Bone by T. J. Kingfisher
I felt bad for liking this story (in the "dark fairy tale" genre) only as much as I did. It has a lot of interesting things going on it it - the most notable one is that the heroine ends up doing a lot of adventuring-party-building, including doing Three Tasks for the dust-wife, but instead of getting a Quest Reward Thingummy, the dust-wife comes with her because she obviously needs help. There are a lot of things that are just a little sidewise like that (especially the fairy godmothers), in an entertaining way. The heroine is shy and convent-raised and maybe I just wanted her to be more forceful, or clever, or something? I'm not sure why it didn't grab me as much as some of the author's other books; I might have to read it again to check, as a loyalist. Four stars.
- How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It and A Practical Guide to Conquering the World by K. J. Parker
Hmm. Very mixed feelings about these, the two sequels to Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City. I quite liked the first one for the combination of "engineering hackery" and commentary on colonialism and empire and supply chain logistics. The second one goes for the standard "actor must impersonate the ruler" comedy, lampshades it a couple of times, looks like it's going to be farce, and then there are heads on pikes all over the place. The third one is basically straight up antihero (well, it does say conquering the world instead of defending the city) and I'm deeply suspicious of the plausibility of the army combat mechanic. I was remarking to Marcus (midway through book two) that I was wondering if K. J. Parker was evolving back into Tom Holt as far as comedy I wasn't entirely fond of, but then the heads on pikes showed up, and in book three there is QUITE A LOT of explanation about how to make a sinew-backed bow and a rather horrible main character, so we were back to Parker again. I listened to these on audiobook, which meant I also have one of my traditional complaints (I have never heard a female narrator do such a bad job with men's voices as some male narrators do with weomn's voices. 'nasal harridan' in particular didn't fly for me as the Most Beautiful And Charismatic Actress in the World) and an entirely new variant of a standard complaint (pronunciation of names not being consistent between narrators) - but this time it was the same narrator and he wasn't consistent between the two books. They were recorded two years apart, but I listened to them back to back, so it was kind of jarring. The main character in book two, once he's in character, is Lysimachus, which was pronounced "Lissy Marcus". In book three, he's referred to as "Leesy Marcus", including by the character who is in both books. I did finish them, but by the end it was more like homework than fun. Three stars.
- The Embroidered Book (by Kate Heartfield)
I definitely bought this for the cover. I do that sometimes. This is an alternate history of the politics of late-1700s Europe, the main characters two of the daughters of Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria - both named Maria [othername] but they grew up into Charlotte, Queen of Naples, and Marie Antoinette after their mother married them off for alliances. Anyway, the interesting thing is the magic system, which both sisters secretly begin to practice, and the magic is woven all through the story, including explaining some of the weird real life things like the Diamond Necklace Scandal (in which Marie Antoinette did *not* buy a diamond necklace but it was a terrible scandal anyway). Also, the painter Angelica Kauffman was really good - why have I not heard of her before? Never mind, I can guess the answer. The magic system reminds me of the Unknown Armies magic system - everything is paid for in sacrifice, of objects and emotions and memories.
This is going to be a long quote, but it captures a lot of what got its hooks into me.
She opens the embroidered book. On the thirtieth page, there is the spell she needs, in her long-dead governess's patient and frilly handwriting:
For an item of clothing, reproducible and inexhaustible, to confer on the wearer persuasion of a listener's mind beyond the natural, these proofs have been found: convaincre &rarr oonvainore &rarr ooovaioore &rarr oooaaioore &rarr oooaaiooue. For the prime magister, these were the sacrifices corresponding to the letters of power, in sequence dextral: ooo, for the love, an affection, written; aa, for the body, clippings of all fingernails; i, for the hope, a passing fancy or appetite, written; oo, for the second love, a fondness, written; u, for the memory, one jape or trifle, written; and at the last, e, for the treasure, a clipped groat.
'It's mostly writing this time,' Charlotte murmurs. 'You have pen and paper? I brought the other things.'
The other things are a velvet coin-purse filled with her own fingernail clippings and a small copper coin, with the shield of Austria on one side and '1 HELLER 1765' on the other. She doesn't have a clipped groat, and she hopes this will do.
She goes now to Antoine's dressing table, where her sister has laid a few scraps of paper, an inkwell, and a quill. Charlotte has already decided on the hope: for chocolate cake tomorrow. A passing fancy or appetite. The memory, small as it is, is harder than she thought it would be: the people who used to tell jokes were Papa and Charles, and they are both dead, and she doesn't want to sacrifice her memories of them. Finally, she remembers the way her little brother Max dramatically lifted his coat-tails to sit down at dinner the other day, in imitation of a certain cousin. She smiles and writes that down.
The loves are difficult. For the fondness, she writes the name of Mops, Antoine's little pug. It's hard to imagine not being fond of Mops, with his perpetually confused face and delightful little ears. The affection is a little trickier, but ultimately she settles on Lerchenfeld, her new governess. She's been a good governess, even something like a friend.
Charlotte folds the papers, so that Antoine won't see what she's written. They do this to spare each other.
Into each point of the star, she puts her sacrifices, walking around twice clockwise so she can place them in order as they are in the spell.
Then Charlotte pulls the final item out of her pocket: the long white gloves with her monogram on them. Mama says it is a waste for the unmarried archduchesses to monogram anything; soon they will have new initials, once they're married. But Charlotte likes to mark the things that are hers.
She steps gingerly over the ash lines of the star, places the gloves in the middle, and steps back.
'I give these things,' she pronounces.
She takes a deep breath, pulls out a handkerchief and puts it to her nose. She can hear Antoine doing the same. But she smells nothing, sees nothing. Perhaps the sacrifices aren't worth enough. The coin is wrong, or the memory too trifling. Or they misunderstood the spell altogether. They've never tried this one before.
Then, small but real movement: the little pile of fingernail and toenail clippings darkens and shifts. The coin rusts and wears, going green and then bright orange and then brown. The bits of paper become ragged and thin and, as with every spell, there is a horrible moment when the words come off the paper, in a stream of ink that rises into the air as if someone were tugging on them. Little currents of dark ink in the air, dissipating, gone. The paper itself is a pile of brown threads, and the pile of nail trimmings is now a kind of sludge. Everything goes brown, eventually. The coin, the paper, the nails.
It's working.
Charlotte watches it all with her usual fascination. It distracts from the fact that she is losing things, including some she will not remember. No matter how small, these losses are deaths, unnaturally hastened. They have given death more than its due. But now she is fifteen, and she has need of important magic.
There it is at last: the smell of decay and death. They hold their handkerchiefs tightly to their faces, but the smell fills Charlotte's nostrils anyway.
The coin lasts the longest. For several minutes, the pile of brown dust remains, smaller and smaller, until a breath of unseen wind takes it. The items in the points of the star are gone, as if they never were. She doesn't care what they eat for dessert tomorrow, and Lerchenfeld is just an old sycophant in a bonnet. She glances at the pink-lined basket where Mops is snoring gently, disgustingly.
As for the memory, it was there - a moment ago - but it is gone. She can see her hand setting down the words, but her mind's eye can't make sense of what she wrote. Her breath catches - it always comes with a lurch, this loss of memory - but she is fairly sure that it was nothing of any importance, this time.
So much of the emotional narrative is tied into this sort of sacrifice - pruning away what you think you can bear to lose, and then forgetting it when it's gone, and trying to be the same person afterwards. There's a particularly wrenching bit most of the way through, where Charlotte needs needs needs a particular piece of magic, but she doesn't have enough hope left to pay the sacrifice of hope. A friend is dying, and she goes to ask him for a final terrible favor - he's a happy, good person, and she asks him to sacrifice his hope for a better world, at the end. He does. But then he lives.
There's more I could go into, but I just had a page of quotation which I think catches the poetic melancholy better than I could describe. Four and a half stars.
- Spelunking through Hell (by Seanan McGuire)
This is book eleven in the InCryptid series. I've really forgotten how everyone is related to everyone else by this point. Still moderately fun popcorn, though this one, like the last one, spends pretty much the whole time not on Earth; the cryptids are the fun part, so let's get back to them.
- Those Across the River (by Christopher Buehlman)
I really liked The Blacktongue Thief (last set of books) and I also really liked The Necromancer's House a number of years ago. So I thought I'd go look for some more of this author. (I also read The Suicide Motor Club which was fun popcorn). This was his first book, set in the Depression in a little Southern town with a serious horror problem. So, the atmosphere is about 30% racism, 10% more sex than I needed to read about, and 60% seriously atmospheric creepiness, until you actually find out the details of the horror, which is kind of a letdown. Anyway, there are some bits that are amazingly creepy, and some bits that are just middling. But it was his first book, and like a puppy with big paws, shows a lot of potential. Three and a half stars.
- Eyes of the Void (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)
Part two of the Final Architecture trilogy, after Shards of Earth. It does suffer a lot from middle book syndrome - there isn't nearly as much wild and new as the first book, and it doesn't manage to conclude anything as much as I'd like. And Idris spends way too much time in a cycle of understanding yet one more epiphany about unspace (This One For Sure).
- Battle of the Linguist Mages (by Scotto Moore)
This was very eccentric. Charles Stross called it a dance off between Snow Crash and Gideon the Ninth, and there's Snow Crash all over it, but I'm not sure about Gideon. Amazon's quick summary is: "Isobel is the Queen of the medieval rave-themed VR game Sparkle Dungeon. Her prowess in the game makes her an ideal candidate to learn the secrets of "power morphemes" - unnaturally dense units of meaning that warp perception when skilfully pronounced." As it turns out, neither sparkles nor raves is really my genre (and they are really pretty antipodal to goth necromancers), but the idea of punctuation marks having been an alien species that colonized our minds was kind of intriguing. As a side note, I think this is the first SF/fantasy book I've read that dealt with people's pronouns not as a solved social protocol, but as a work in progress like it is now - there's a lot of mini-asides when meeting new characters about how the protagonist gets their pronouns (from the introduction, or by looking them up on line, or whatever). It's a pretty wild ride, a lot like Snow Crash was, but I'm too grey and old for sparkle raves. Three stars.
- Tuyo, Nikoles, Tarashana, Keraunani, Suelen (by Rachel Neumeier)
(There is a sixth book that I haven't read yet). I click on the occasional Kindle Unlimited book; mostly they are fine, but I quite liked Tuyo, enough to get hooked on the series. It's a YA fantasy world with the summer country and the winter country and the culture clash between them. Not just the cold north and the hot south, but with extra magic applied. Ryo (a young man from the winter country) is left as a sacrificial tuyo as his clan retreats from the summer country's army. If the foe accepts the sacrifice, then they get to do whatever they want to him, but any revenge / hard feelings / extra vengeance has to be taken out on the tuyo rather than further war. Lord Aras, the summer commander, accepts the sacrifice but says "whatever I want, is you have to be my translator." The world building is fun, the two cultures both seem interestly complicated, and the clash between the two is nuanced and neither side is the Bad Guys. There is the occasional actual bad guy; they tend to be more over the top "I am bad because muah hah hah" than I'd prefer, but it's okay. The angst is pretty angsty. Anyway, generally four stars for the series.
- A Half-Built Garden (by Ruthanna Emrys)
This was a lovely solarpunk first contact. The world is clawing its way back from climate apocalypse mostly due to the rise of watershed networks (one per watershed) that coordinate via a sort of AI crowdshared decision making. The main political factions are the watershed networks, the global corporations (based out of offshore techtopias), and the national governments. Then aliens arrive! The aliens want to get humanity off of its "obviously dying" planet and out into the solar system.
- Watershed Networks: "But we were just starting to turn things around! If everyone gives up on the planet now, it's back to doomed!"
- Corporations: "A system full of resources and new ability to harvest it all? Count us in!"
- Nation-states: "Wait - is NASA finally relevant again? We have authority here!"
Redbug poked their head out of the tent. "Are you folks seeing this?"
Five stars.
"Everyone's seeing this," said Mendez. "Any word on a fix? Or a cause?"
"I'm on call this week for debugging malware." They ducked their head. "I'm supposed to organize---but there hasn't been an event this extreme in decades. I can't work from here. And I can't work from home---my household has text, but the whole neighborhood's out of power."
"Wait," said Rhamnetin. "Your communications are out so you lost power? Do you need us to send shuttles?"
Ytterbium shoved him, knee against knee. "It's a planet, you moron. Their life support's fine."- A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (by Becky Chambers)
A sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built. It's a circle round the same thoughts and lessons as the first one, so it didn't hit me with as much of a surprise wallop as the first story did, but I find it kind of hard to review coherently because as of this writing (but not the reading), I'm on medical leave from work due to surgery recovery, and am really having to struggle with the question of "who am I if not the person doing the worthwhile job that I'm good at?" in a way that I haven't hard to think about since quitting MIT (well, or seeing Encanto; "Surface Pressure" punches pretty hard there too, though in a different way.). I think all I can really say here is, it's a worthwhile sequel. :)
- Nona the Ninth (by Tamsyn Muir)
I'm pretty sure nobody needs me to tell them about this book to decide whether or not to read it. I didn't love it as hard as Gideon but more than Harrow - Harrow is probably the most accomplished, but I don't enjoy really broken narrators enough. Nona finally gives us some backstory on how we got from Earth to Everything Is Necromancers; it's huge exposition dumps but I appreciated it. Nona is really the first book that's set in an actual societyinstead of a setting with Named and Numbered characters. There are crowds. There is a school, with a feral pack of kids that is oddly reminiscent of the Them from Good Omens. Also, good heavens is each book in the series a different genre. Four and a half stars? I don't think anything will be able to top the sheer head-exploding exhilaration of Gideon.
- Of Mycelium and Men (by William C Tracy)
(Honestly, I think this book was written to fit the title.) Start with a generation ship - the crew is zero-G adapted and moderately short-lived. The admins are genetically modified to be long-lived, and are mostly in cryosleep. The third group are the soldiers, much more genetically modified. The ship is running out of theoretically hospitible planets to land on, so the admins make the decision to land on this one, before determining that the local ecology is pretty much all one huge fungal super-powerful biomass. There are lots of skips forward in time, so we get many decades of battling the planet to try to survive. The premise isn't bad, but the reawakened admins are just such assholes about everything that it's implausible. "This was originally the admin lounge. Doesn't matter that it was repurposed a thousand years ago, we're having the police clear the current inhabitants out because it's an admin lounge." And playing politics against the other admins is more important than actual, y'know, survival. I did want to see how it turned out, but too many subplots trail off or get executed by the secret police, and if there's an ending it's going to need to be in the sequel. Two stars.
- Station Eternity (by Mur Lafferty)
What if everyone started thinking Jessica Fletcher was a serial killer because she discovers so many murders, and she started getting investigated by the FBI about it, and then she ran off to an alien space station so she wouldn't be around humans? A bit of a twist at the end there. I found this interesting and fun to follow along, but not quite solid. I think I had a similar reaction to Six Wakes by the same author - the premise is intriguing, but it's like a TV showith a solid pilot that didn't quite plan out the entire season.
- Cage of Souls (by Adrian Tchaikovsky)
This is different than the other books of his that I've read. It's very... jungle river. I wonder if it would remind me of Apocalypse Now or Jungle Queen if I had seen either of those. We've got multiple mini-dystopias in the same place - the Cage, which is the downriver floating jungle prison ruled by the tyrannical Marshal and the detached Governor. It's downriver of the city of Shadrapar, the last city on the dying Earth. Shadrapar has its own dystopic tyrant issues, and so does the Underworld (physically underneath as well as criminal). The story is very atmospheric, dank and fetid and swampy, lit by the dying sun, just... generally oppressive in all the directions at once. I didn't see how it could possibly end happily, and it mostly doesn't, but I was still compelled to keep reading. Also, I loved this little throwaway reference to Hunting of the Snark:
Jon's shelter turned out to contain a case of chemicals of dubious provenance, a working machine which could extract pure samples of such chemicals and several ancient personal effects, which were all good merchandise on the jewellery and cosmetic market. In addition there was an astonishingly fragile manuscript in one of the known ancient languages which was worth more than the rest put together and bought us both our scholarships to the Academy. It was in the form of an ancient parable concerning quests with terrible ends undertaken by the unprepared, and it included in it the haunting refrain, "What I tell you three times is true."
There is a giant spider (kind of), but it's a person who has been turned into one. So I guess it's not completely outside the Tchaikovsky ballpark. :) Four stars.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-07 07:18 pm (UTC)I liked A Half-Built Garden, but I wished the author had known/cared a little more about the science and the how-did-we-get-from-there-to-here worldbuilding. It wasn't meant to be the focus of the story, which is fine, and I enjoyed the stuff that *was* the focus of the story, which was really fleshed out and nuanced. But there was just enough science and worldbuilding that I kept tripping over "wait, how are they affording to ship all that sugar and power all those electronics, and what are all the people in the US who aren't in watershed communities doing, and what power do the nation-state governments have, and how did all this get put in place apparently comparatively peacefully despite then-powerful people/institutions objecting?"
Nona the Ninth made me realize that a thing all three books have in common is not only is the narrator unreliable/doesn't understand a lot of what's going on, but a a lot of the important and exciting stuff occurs off-screen, not even in front of the unreliable narrator. Which, when I think of it that way, seems like an odd stylistic choice, but clearly the author is fond of it. (Also, I read the first two books back-to-back less than a year ago and was struggling to remember what had happened in them and who all the people were. On the other hand, I felt like reading Nona mostly gave me enough prompting to remember the important stuff.)
hmm
Date: 2022-12-08 10:32 pm (UTC)Re: hmm
Date: 2022-12-08 10:48 pm (UTC)(One of the few things that has always stuck with me from The Mote in God's Eye is the bit where someone says "this means we'll never see another banana." Also the guy who uses his library to bargain for a supply of insulin.)
But what this author is actually interested in is the social side of the watershed community, and the meeting of the different cultures and the very personal nature of those political negotiations. So that's where she spends most of her development points.
But everyone would be in a watershed, wouldn't they? I didn't get the impression that everyone was politically in a watershed, even though they would be geographically in some watershed or other. It seemed like there were the "nation states" including the remains of the US government, which included agencies like NASA, that were separate entities from any of the watershed collectives, like the corps were separate entities. But that part was offstage and very vague and handwavy.
Re: hmm
Date: 2022-12-09 04:00 pm (UTC)Like, I'm subject to MA law and federal law and also any EPA requirements about whether or not I put radioactive biohazards in my trash.
(I can kind of sort of imagine getting the US to that state. I can't imagine at all how to get the whole world to have watershed communities with political power on the same timeframe. :-\ )
Re: hmm
Date: 2022-12-09 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-08 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-08 10:51 pm (UTC)