Review: The Everlasting

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Alix E. Harrow is one of the few authors I buy sight unseen, as soon as a preorder link for one of her books goes up. I may not even know what it's about, and I'll still order it. My faith in her has consistently been rewarded, as with each subsequent release she seems to get better.

That pattern holds true with this book, which is not only her best, it's one of the best books I've read this year.

A running theme in her work is the power of stories, and how the stories we tell ourselves define who we are. This theme is expanded upon again in this book, as the story of the titular Una "Everlasting," a takeoff of Arthuriana/the Green Knight, is the defining tale of the country of Dominion. For a thousand years the legend of Una Everlasting, the female knight who served the first queen Yvanne and died a heroic, tragic death, has inspired the country and its rulers. There are many versions of the "Death of Una Everlasting," the book that the protagonist Owen Mallory, a scholar and war hero, is tasked with translating. This pristine book, newly discovered, is shipped anonymously to Mallory, and he takes up the task of its translation.

But as he soon discovers, there are many layers to the tale of Una Everlasting, and not all of them are true. He finds this out because the book, forged from a magical yew tree, has the power to make people travel through time--and Owen himself is sent back by the Minister of War, Vivian Rolfe, not to translate the book but to write it, and invent the legend that will found the nation.

Una Everlasting did exist, but as Owen discovers as he travels with her, her story is not at all what it was later made out to be. She is a hero, but she is also a complicated woman who is becoming disillusioned with her queen and does not want to live out the legend she has become. And Owen knows how the story ends, with her death. He knows the future, and as he comes to know the woman (and falls in love with her), he finds he wants to change the story so she can live.

But Vivian Rolfe, the master manipulator who sent him back, has her hooks into Una's story and time itself, as she navigates the endless alternate timelines spawned by Una's life and Owen's attempts at interference. At first obsessed with making sure her country of Dominion becomes what she thinks it should be, Vivian's ego gradually takes over (the epitome of "absolute power corrupts absolutely") and she wants to rule Dominion herself. She sends herself back to the many alternate timelines, becoming not only the first queen--"Yvanne," in the Dominion language, is an earlier version of "Vivian"--but other historical characters down the thousand-year timeline. She forces Una to die and return to the story of her final quest, over and over and over, and she forces Owen to go back and write Una's story once again, until he can get it "right," or what Vivian believes is right. There are four "Deaths of Una Everlasting" in this book, each more different and more heartbreaking, until the final confrontation between Una, Owen and Vivian at the very beginning of the legend.

These different variations of the same story, and Una and Owen's desperate quest to break free of Vivian, constitute this tragic, beautiful love story, exquisitely written. I've marked multiple pages where the lovely prose stood out, but here is just one example:

Once, there was a woman who wanted more than she was given. She wanted it so badly that she shattered time itself beneath her heel and pieced it back together in the way that suited her best. History no longer simply happened, like an accident; it was told, like a story. And the queen told it many times.

The story of Dominion had many villains over the years, shifting along with the borders of her empire, and many storytellers. But it only ever had one hero, and her name was Una Everlasting.

Una the dragon-slayer, Una the queen-maker, Una the tragedy. Una, who died and was resurrected a hundred times, until she fought as no mortal could fight, with the memory of every battle burned into her very bones. (There was awe in your voice, even now--but surely a dog might learn any trick, given a thousand years of practice.)

I was not alone, in your story. I was trailed always by a cowardly historian, a man chosen by the queen to lead me to my death, like a farmer driving a balking animal to the butcher. And so--here your voice turned bitter as burnt hair--the historian buried the hero, over and over, and wrote her tale in the queen's book.

Until at last they began to remember themselves, or at least each other. This the queen could not permit. So she told one final story--a story so perfect it gave her an empire and a crown, a thousand years from now--and hid the book away. But the historian stole it and ran back to his hero.

And now, finally, we might write our own ending.

This book tackles the enduring power of stories, for good and bad, and what myths and legends mean to a people and a nation. As I was reading it, I kept thinking of the famous question asked by the Hamilton musical: "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?" I don't know if Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton's creator, meant for that question to be answered--but Alix E. Harrow's book answers it.

This book is damn near perfect. Do not miss it.

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Absolute Wonder Woman Vol. 1: The Last Amazon--a Wonder Woman for the Ages

 I heard about this from someone I follow on Facebook. I also have Absolute Batman and Absolute Superman teed up on my library hold list, but I can't imagine them being better than this--or any other comic/graphic novel I read this year, as a matter of fact.

Folks, this is fan-fucking-tastic. 

Before this, I had read Grant Morrison's reboot of Wonder Woman from 2016. At the time, I sort of liked it, but looking back on it now...it has aged poorly, to say the least. The Suck Fairy had a field day with this book. Morrison's choice to cast Steve Trevor as African-American led to some extremely unfortunate imagery (Diana's putting a collar on him, for fuck's sake), and the whole thing comes off as some fratboy's fantasy of Wonder Woman and the Amazons, with no real understanding of Diana Prince as a character. I wouldn't go so far to say that Wonder Woman should always have a female writer, but it seems like a woman would have a far better chance of getting to the core of who she is.  

That is certainly true in this case. Kelly Thompson understands Wonder Woman inside and out, and shows it. This particular re-imagining dispenses with Themyscira, Hippolyta, and the Amazons altogether: the Amazons are banished by Zeus and baby Diana is taken away, and Apollo brings her to an island in Hell to be raised by the surprised and at first uncooperative sorceress Circe. Circe is banned from  even saying the word "Amazon," which leads to one of the most electrifying panels in this graphic novel, when Diana says "the word" and realizes what she is. 

In Morrison's version of Wonder Woman, Diana is young, naive and impulsive, with a great many--often painful--lessons to learn about "man's world." Here, because of her upbringing in Hell, Diana has already learned those lessons. She is, not quite cynical, but realistic, and sometimes world-weary. But the character's essential kindness and compassion always shows through. Even when she is killing monsters to save Gateway City, she never glories in it. She positions herself as defending Earth and always gives said monsters a choice: give up, retreat, and they may live. She is willing to sacrifice much to advance her cause. When Steve Trevor (not African-American this time around, although it wouldn't matter if he was, since Thompson completely avoids Morrison's problematic missteps with the character) is marooned in Hell, Diana finds a way out for him--by chopping off her right, dominant arm. (Later, she and Circe conjure a magical mechanical replacement for it.) Trevor returns the favor at the story's climax, when Diana uses one of her magic lassos to transform herself into Medusa and turn the monster threatening Gateway City to stone. Declaring that there is "she cut off her own arm to get me out of hell. There's no scenario where I leave her out there alone," Steve blindfolds himself and goes out to remind Diana of who she is, talking her down and returning her to herself. 

This first volume is mainly an introduction to a magic-wielding Diana who assumes the mantle of protector of Earth, but it also takes a deep dive into the character. Her relationship with her adoptive mother Circe is central to her character, far more than her relationship with Steve Trevor, which isn't even a romance at this point. She also rides the resurrected skeleton of the flying horse Pegasus, gifted her by a Titan who she briefly frees from his captivity. The final pages of the graphic novel are adorable little one-page stories of a young Diana, learning to wield magic and adopting all kinds of magical creatures over Circe's objections.

I don't know how long this particular reboot is going to last, but go forth and snatch it up while it's here. It's absolutely terrific. 

Review: Spread Me

Spread Me by Sarah Gailey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

John Carpenter's film The Thing is a classic movie of paranoia, alien invasion, and body horror that has only grown in stature since its 1982 release. Naturally, it has inspired scores of imitators. I don't know if this book is so much an imitator as a gender-flipped retelling (seeing as the original was definitely a sausage-fest) layered with a very healthy dollop of sex.

The basic story is the same: an isolated research station and the discovery of a lethal organism that picks off the inhabitants one by one. In this case, the station is in the middle of the New Mexico desert, with nobody within a hundred miles, and a seemingly never-ending series of sandstorms take out the phones and internet so no one can call for help. (But once you learn just where the invading organism comes from, the uncomfortable thought occurs that it's the desert itself, or rather the infected "cryptobiotic crust" within, that's causing the storms.) The "thing" here is strictly speaking not an alien, although since it's an unholy combination of a lichen and a giant virus that eats people alive and reconstitutes them in its own image, it could be termed as such. It's also intelligent and seeking to learn about humans--and it's fixated sexually on our protagonist, the station chief, Kinsey.

Naturally, Kinsey is fixated right back. She has a peculiar, particular sexual kink involving viruses and bacteriophages, which is made clear by a lengthy scene of her masturbating to a photo of a bacteriophage. But there is more than once kind of kink on display here, as seemingly all of the station's inhabitants (except Kinsey) take turns fucking each other. This also feeds the growing paranoia as the lichen monster settles in, as the surefire way of telling that Kinsey's coworkers have been replaced is that they start coming on to her. The body horror grows until, at the climax (heh), we see this:

The light illuminates the fullness of what they've become. It's a perfect, massive facsimile of the lichen's microscopic structure. Arms and legs frill around a wide net of body parts, lips and labia and nipples and ears all strung together across a sticky web of flesh. Lacelike fingers and toes tassel out to stick the creature to the wall. Grains of sand and pearly beads of moisture collect at the places where the long strands of skin intersect. Kinsey can't tell if the liquid is sweat or tears or plasma or pure slick pleasure. The creature's musk fills the airlock, more invasive and inescapable with every second, and Kinsey understands what it tried to tell her when it was pretending to be Domino. She can taste it on the air, just as it swore it could taste her. She can taste its desire. Her tongue curls inside her mouth, seeking more even as she desperately searches for a means of escape.

Of course, if this thing gets loose it will mean the end of the human race and likely all life on the planet, which is why Kinsey locks the lichen inside the research station at the end. (Although that really doesn't solve the problem, since sooner or later somebody will come looking for them.) She then drives out into the desert and joins with the lichen in its native habitat, burrowing into the cryptobiotic crust and letting it take her (in more ways than one).

If you like raw sex/erotica with your alien invasion/body horror, you will enjoy this. It isn't for those who want to see the invader eradicated, as the story ends with that definitely not the case. I respect the author in that they make clear what they want to do from the start, and the story carries its premise through. The ideas here are well told. For me, the ending was abrupt and ambiguous, as we know the lichen is still out there, waiting for someone to find it and fuck it again. It leaves the reader with an uneasy feeling as they close the back cover, which is no doubt the author's intent. I don't know if this book is better than John Carpenter's movie, but it is an effective counterpoint, I think.

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Review: Angel Maker

Angel Maker by Elizabeth Bear
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The genre known as "steampunk," which usually encompasses alternate history, airships and clockwork automatons, had its heyday about ten years ago, which is when the first book in this series, Karen Memory, came out. It has somewhat (forgive me) lost its steam since then, to the point where the author was forced to self-publish this to get it out in the world.

That's traditional publishing's loss. This book may not be quite as good as the first, but it is definitely another Rollicking Good Story, with liberal use of historical characters (one of which will surprise the heck out of you). It also has some deep lore about horses and the burgeoning silent film industry of the late 19th-century American West. All this is topped off with a murder mystery, a sweet understated romance between Karen and her wife Priya, a discussion of the hard work and compromises necessary to make a relationship succeed, and an exploration of toxic people and what drives them.

It's held together by Karen's voice, which for me is the main attraction of these books. Karen is an excellent character, smart and pragmatic and determined. She's worked as a prostitute and faced down a Mad Scientist wielding a mind-control machine, and now she is trying to get established as a horse tamer. This book lands her and Priya in the middle of another murder mystery, but this setting is a film company making a silent movie in Rapid City. There are all the attendant quirky characters assocated with the film industry (including a yucky entitled rapist male star who definitely gets his comeuppance), as well as the horse of Karen's dreams, the titular Angel Maker.

There's also an automaton powered by tapes, gears and a mainspring named Cowboy, who is almost as interesting a character as Karen. Priya get to work some Mad Science of her own and lands an apprenticeship, and Karen wins her bet to own the stallion she has gentled. This is a complete story, but the ending is open and hints at further adventures. I certainly hope the author gets to write some more of these delightful stories.

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Review: What Stalks the Deep

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This third book in the Sworn Soldier series centers on Alex Easton, a non-binary retired soldier from a fictional European country, Gallacia, who has a habit of stumbling upon alien and/or supernatural beasties. The first in the series, What Moves the Dead, is a chilling retelling of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" with a creeping sentient fungus that can puppet dead bodies. What Stalks the Deep, inspired by--according to the author's afterword--H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," moves the series in an interesting science fictional direction.

Alex and their friend Angus come to America at the request of Dr. James Denton, a character from the first book who stood beside Alex during the horrors of the "tarn" (the lake infected by the fungus in the first book). Denton has seen something he cannot handle, and urgently asks for Alex's help. Denton's cousin Oscar has disappeared in a played-out old coal mine in West Virginia, after writing Denton letters saying he had discovered something very strange within. Denton went to the mine but did not venture very far inside, as he said it just "felt wrong," the same way the Ushers' house and the tarn did. His first thought was to reach out to Alex for help, and despite their strong wish to run away from anything like the tarn, Alex comes.

The mystery of the Hollow Elk mine turns out to be an ancient hive-mind jellyfish-squid creature who has spent thousands of years asleep at the bottom of the mine, only to be awakened by modern blasting during the search for coal. Said blasting calved off a section of the creature, a Fragment (which is what it names itself) who cannot reunite with the "wholeness" and ventures into the human world to search for ways to return to the rest of its kin. This creature is a boneless, gooey shapeshifter who must use sticks absorbed into its body to walk, and in one memorable scene, it skitters along the ground with a human-looking torso atop a slimy centipede body with many legs. It is also intelligent and followed the human miners through the mine while it was being worked, eventually learning to read and write.

Fragment is the most interesting character in the entire book, as it helps Alex and their friends defend themselves against Sentry--another chunk of the hive mind originally intended to guard its people, who eventually came to want to be its own "wholeness." To survive, Sentry ended up eating organs from the bodies of nearby townspeople and impersonating a dog. Fragment talks to Alex and their friends about being human, and persuades them to see it as a person instead of a monster. At the end, with Sentry burned and gone, Denton and Angus help Fragment reunite with its wholeness, and the former owner of the pseudo-dog agrees to stay and guard the mine against any further intrusions.

Along the way, we learn a lot about coal mines and their various kinds of "damp," one of which plays a crucial role in the climax. As usual, Alex Easton is the down-to-earth practical sort of character with a dry wit at which the author excels. I really liked this, however, for the unexpected SF turn to the story. It's a nice exploration into the mind of an ancient alien sea creature. I hope, if there are any further books in this series, the author keeps that science-fictional bent.

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Review: The Library at Hellebore

The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Horror is currently in the midst of a resurgence, for what should be obvious reasons. Especially for those of us living in the US, the real-life horrors in the news each day require some sort of escape, I think. A chance to face down the monster, in a simple black and white world where they are evil and we are good, and send said monster whimpering back to its lair, never to be seen again.

Of course, that sort of thing can easily be twisted to make a monster out of something or someone that isn't monstrous at all (as is also happening in real life). People are far too easily categorized as "the Other," Not One of Us and therefore suspect, and when that happens, it calls into question exactly who is the monster. That's one of the themes this story tackles. This book is also part of a recent subgenre that could be called "dark acadamia" and/or "boarding school horror." There are several books I have read that are part of this category: Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy, R.F. Kuang's Katabasis and Babel, and Emily Tesh's The Incandescence (with the latter two being sterling examples and fantastic books you should absolutely pick up).

The Library at Hellebore is both of these, but it falls much further into the "dark" and "horror" end of the genre. In fact, it reminds me of a book I doubt many people remember nowadays: The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins. I read this book ten years ago, and to my knowledge there's never been a sequel to it. I don't know if Cassandra Khaw was inspired by that book, but hers is similar in a lot of ways.

Including, to be blunt, the sheer scale of the horrors within. This is one of the most gruesome books I have ever read, full of death and blood and guts and gore. If you have any aversion to full-on body horror, do not touch this with a ten-foot pole. At the same time, said death/blood/guts/gore is so beautifully, poetically written that I could not bring myself to abandon it, even as I was wincing and squinting my way through it (and had to take it in small doses with deep breaths after, which is why it took me several days to finish it).

This sounds like an oxymoron. I assure you it is not. Just a few examples of the prose (spoilers for delicate stomachs):

SPOILER

SPOILER 

SPOILER (also, do not eat while reading this, or the entire book for that matter)

This was neither the first time I'd come to with a body at my feet, nor was it even the first time I had returned to consciousness in a room transformed into a literal abattoir, but it was the first time I woke up relieved to be in a mess. The walls were soaked in effluvium. Every piece of linen on our beds was at least moderately pink with gore. The floor was a soup of viscera, intestines like ribbons unstrung over the scuffed wood; it'd been a deep gorgeous ebony once, but now, like the rest of our room, it was just red. (from p. 1)

The word hirsute didn't begin to describe Ford's abundance of beard and curls and overgrown brow, dark and sleek; he was a bear of a man, a figure cut straight from the annals of Viking history, a fact he recognized and celebrated, I think. No one else on campus swanned through the winters swaddled in a bearskin coat with the poor animal's head for a marching, still-attached-t0-the-body-by-a-strip-of-neck-fur toque, and if Ford wasn't quite so massive, so oppressively jacked, he'd have looked like any white trust-fund kid with a costume budget.

While there was no official route out, Hellebore wasn't inescapable. At least not if you were inventive. There was a canopied bend of road that curled behind the school's greenhouse, a monstrosity of plated glass and cast iron pained white. A behemoth disrobed of its meat, green where its lungs should have been, green along the carved ribs of its roof. Condensation slicked the glass like sweat: it seemed to pant some nights, heaving with life. Most of the time, Professor Fleur marched us past its front door when leading us to class. But on this day, we had to make use of the more circuitous route--a failed ritual had left a thin lamina of living godbrain over the usual path. If I hadn't already been looking, if I wasn't so desperate to get out of Hellebore, I might have missed it. 

The titular Library is where kids are taken, kids who abruptly awaken with deadly magic that can kill and overthrow governments. Many of them, like the protagonist Alessa Li, are girls who discover their powers under stress, such as when they are threatened with rape by their stepfathers. (Let's just say that in Alessa's case, the stepfather begged her to kill him.) She is told she will graduate in a year, once she has learned to control her powers, but she soon learns that won't be the case. It's likely neither she nor her fellow students will even be alive in a year. As she discovers, the faculty are not human at all, but eldritch horrors straight from the depths of Lovecraft who will kill and consume the students one by one over the course of three days, until only one is remaining.

This is the story of how Alessa fights, kills, and ultimately survives. It is told in a somewhat non-linear fashion, flashing back and forth between times Before and Days One, Two and Three of the trial (all helpfully noted in chapter headings). It is a bit of work to remember what's happened and keep up with the narrative, but I appreciated that the author didn't condescend to her audience, trusting that they could follow along. Over the course of those three days, and amidst much gore-soaked death, Alessa discovers how to defeat the faculty. The ending is a bit ambiguous, I think, as it implies that not only did she survive the bloody climax, she is now some kind of avenging spirit, coming for all those who would capture and use kids like her. She has learned how to be a monster, and she is good at it.

This is definitely not a book for the squeamish, but if you can handle it it has a lot to say about power, authority, and monstrosity. In its way, it is the perfect book for our times.






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Review: Flight of the Fallen

Flight of the Fallen by Hana Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the second and final book in the Magebike Courier series, a recent trend I like. In the past, so many authors sold massive trilogies with only two books' worth of plot, and the middle volume was on many occasions a meandering underwhelming mess. The recent trend of duologies, however, means that if well done, the author sets up the characters and world and makes the stakes plain in the first book, and ramps up the tension and resolves all those plot/character threads in the second.

This second book does all that, and does it right. We learn much more about this world and its history, and the characters and their relationships are deepened. This series also dips its toes into what I personally like to call "science fantasy." We discover there is actually something of a science fictional background for this universe--the world and its civilization was a colony planet abandoned by its colonizers, the long-ago Road Builders. Whether these Road Builders were human is left up in the air, although it's plausible to this reader that they were. The Road Builders were not the greatest bunch of people, however, as evidenced by the fact that their descendants, the people living in the wasteland cities, were apparently genetically engineered by the Road Builders and abandoned as "useless and abhorrent." But these descendants have powers that come down firmly on the fantasy side of the equation: Talents, which use a magical and increasingly rare substance called "mana" as their fuel.

In fact, the scarcity of mana fuels a major part of the plot, as our three main protagonists, Jin, Kadrin and Yi-Nereen, become embroiled in a search for the so-called "First City," the mythical original settlement of the Road Builders. This is necessary because the magical storms of the wastelands are becoming worse and more deadly, threatening to overcome the shieldcasters protecting the remaining kerinas, or cities. Yi-Nereen is an extremely powerful shieldcaster with a secret: she can literally steal another person's mana, and thus their Talent, from that person's body, and take it for her own. (She does just that in the first book to save Jin's life, and the aftermath of suddenly being made Talentless forms a major part of Jin's character arc.) The search for the First City also embroils those who wish to overthrow the tyrannical religious factions controlling the kerinas, in particular the main city in which most of the action takes place, Kerina Sol. As the magestorms destroy neighboring cities and Kerina Sol is forced to take in refugees, the tensions between the Talented and Talentless, and the rulers and the ruled, come to a boiling point. When a crisis strikes and Kerina Sol's mana spring appears to be drying up, Jin and Yi-Nereen, along with a couple of others, strike out across the wastelands on their search. They find the First City and the secrets of the Road Builders, and have a final showdown with Yi-Nereen's father Lai-Dan, who wants to take the First City as his own.

This story is mostly told through the rotating viewpoints of Jin, Kadrin and Yi-Nereen, who eventually end up becoming a polyamorous triad (and I rather appreciated the author's not writing an explicit sex scene when they get together). The book's ending focuses on Jin and what she has been through and learned, and wraps everything up in a nicely satisfying manner. This book is definitely better than the first, and it's nice to see the author leveling up like this.

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Review: Realm of Thieves

Realm of Thieves by Karina Halle
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The latest publishing craze is "romantasy," which is a cutesy mashup of "romantic fantasy" that is being pushed like it's a Brand New Thing (it isn't). I tend to be wary of such books on general principle, but occasionally I test the waters. Most of the ones I've read are unsatisfying on both counts, the "roman" and the "tasy." Unfortunately, this book falls into that category.

Now I will admit that I am sometimes demanding of both my fantasy and my science fiction. The most important thing about an SFF book, to me, is worldbuilding, followed closely by characterization. I can forgive a lot--even a slow, meandering plot--if those two items are up to snuff. In this book, the worldbuilding is sketchy at best, and some of what's there doesn't even make sense. For instance, one of the protagonists has purple hair, and some other characters have blue and green? What's up with that? (The male protagonist, on the other hand, has good old-fashioned dark hair. I get the feeling that she has lavender hair because she's Supposed To Be Special, which is, ummm....not a good way of indicating that.)

This is a story of dragons which are not the usual sentient, talking creatures--these dragons are wild, savage animals. Their eggs, or more specifically the fluids drawn from those eggs known as "suen," give enhanced abilities to those who ingest it, up to and including immortality. The dragons are confined to an island by a magical dome, but some people--thieves--visit the island to steal eggs for their suen. Our protagonist, Brynla Aihr, is one such thief, and as the book opens she and her giant teleporting hound, Lemi, going to steal some dragon eggs. (How Brynla and Lemi can pass through the wards but the dragons can't is a bit of handwaving that is left as an exercise for the reader.)

But on the island, Brynla is confronted by a man, Andor Kolbeck, who unbeknownst to her has been observing her for a while. House Kolbeck needs Brynla for a special heist, one that will shore up their house and its allies for a war that is coming. Andor is determined to persuade Brynla to work for them, even if he has to resort to a bit of subterfuge (and kidnapping).

(As a side note, it's a bit unfortunate that this is his name. Every time I read it, it kept reminding me of Star Wars' Cassian Andor, who is a more complex and better-written character in every way.)

Thus Brynla is swept up in the politics and the court intrigues of the Houses, and also into a romance with Andor. This is another place where to me the book falls short. When the romance gets started, it pretty much shoves the worldbuilding to the side, which I don't care for. I mean, if you've seen one cock/cunt/mind-blowing orgasm you've seen 'em all, you know? I find if you have to have a romance, I am much more invested in the emotional beats of the relationship than the physical ones. (And if you are writing explicit sex scenes, please do only one. Any more than that wastes pages and becomes boring and redundant.)

Nevertheless, Brynla and Andor pull of the heist and steal the immortal dragon egg, and Brynla discovers something about herself that....severely broke my suspension of disbelief. That was pretty much a "wtf" moment, which kind of ruined the book's ending. Yes, the two protagonists have their happy ending and the epilogue sets up the next book in the series, but I don't think I'm going any further. Rebecca Yarros may go completely overboard with her own sex scenes, but she knows her dragons and her worldbuilding, and that makes all the difference.

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Review: The Folded Sky

The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the third book in the White Space series. The author does an interesting thing with this series: each book is a complete story for those particular characters, with the "series" part coming only in the common setting (although a prominent character in Book 1, Ancestral Night, does make an appearance in the second volume, Machine ). This far-future, hard-SF setting showcases the Synarche, a multispecies federation humans are a part of.

In this particular book, the protagonist is Dr. Sunya Song, an "archinformist" whose speciality is hunting down, sorting and making sense of alien historical information. She is participating in a research study of the Baomind, an ancient artificial intelligence orbiting a dying star. The Synarche is trying to rescue as many pieces of the Baomind as it can, but the situation is complicated by pirates who hate any kind of artificial intelligence and want to destroy it. Sunya's ship is attacked by the Freeporters, pirates, on its way in, and they succeed in setting up a blockade around the system. The Baomind will protect the researchers and their station, but the pirates are attempting to starve them out.

This story of big stakes is balanced by the personal stakes of Sunya's family--her alien wife Salvie and their two children--as well as Sunya's personal insecurities and her having to deal with a rival scientist, Vickee DeVine, who years ago stole Sunya's research. These two conflicts could have ended up dragging the story down, but the author handled the opposing plotlines very well. Sunya has to shake off the lingering trauma of her previous relationship with Vickee DeVine, readjust her family relationships, and oh by the way save the Baomind and the people aboard the research station. It's quite a stew, with some terrific, well-written action sequences. This is also some pretty hard, physics-oriented SF (once you get past the necessary handwaving of "white space" with allows for faster-than-light travel).

This series seems to be getting better as it goes along. I've heard there's a fourth book coming. I certainly hope so; the series is on my must-buy list.

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Review: Katabasis

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is not going to be an easy book to talk about, mainly because in my view it languishes in the shadow of its fantastic cousin, Babel . Babel was the best book I read in 2022, and one of the best books I've read the past few years. I would not hesitate to say that at this point in time, Babel is Kuang's masterpiece. Still, that isn't really fair to this book, which deserves a chance to be judged on its own terms.

Its own terms, however, are what makes this book difficult to discuss, because I am in no way a philosophy major, and that is the main theme of this book. In fact, we dive so deep into the weeds of philosophy and logic that my head was spinning for a good deal of the narrative. Combine this with a satire of academia, and while this book may not be considered a slog (though I can see why people would feel otherwise), it is surely rather....challenging to get through. (Which is why it took me ten days to finish it.)

The setup for this book is simple: graduate student Alice Law takes a trip through a magical interdimensional portal to the realm of Hell to rescue the soul of her mentor, Professor Jacob Grimes. She does this because she thinks she is accidentally responsible for his death (she neglected to fully seal one line of a pentagram when the professor was working a summoning magick, with the result that a demon came through the portal and tore him apart) and she needs him for the recommendation that will make or break her career. Unfortunately, her rival, the highly regarded Peter Murdoch, has reached the same conclusion, and he insists on accompanying her. The two descend into Hell and traverse its eight levels (roughly corresponding to Dante Aligheri's account, although Peter and Alice's maps are different) to reach the Lord of Hell and bargain for the Professor's soul.

Along the way, we find out that Professor Grimes' soul is in no way worth bargaining for (it turns out he was a domineering, manipulating sexist shitbag) so the real journey undertaken here is the inner journey of Alice and Peter. Alice, to begin with, is a passive, guilt-ridden, not very sympathetic character. She does make the decision to go after Professor Grimes, but that's more out of panic and her sense of self-preservation than anything else. Peter, on the other hand, is the golden, god-touched white boy who can do no wrong. He has a secret of his own: a chronic illness (Crohn's disease) he has been hiding all his life, out of a sense of stubborn pride--he does not want to see what he thinks will be the pity of others. The study of magick and philosophy comes easy to him, and frankly, as a character, he seems too good to be true. This journey with Alice will break Peter down and rebuild him as a more complicated person.

The magick in this world is quite a bit different than Babel's beautiful, elegant system of linguistics and translation. Here, one gets magickal results from mathematical and philosophical paradoxes:

The paradox--the crucial element. The word paradox comes from two Greek roots: para, meaning "against," and doxa, meaning "belief." The trick of magick is to defy, trouble, or at the very least, dislodge belief. Magick succeeds by casting confusion and doubt. Magick taunts physics and makes her cry.

All it took was to tell a lie--and to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that all the rules could be suspended. You hold a conclusion in your head and believed, through sheer force of will, that everything else was wrong. You had to see the world as it was not.

Now Alice, as she proceeded through her coursework, got very good at this. All skilled magicians were. Success in this field demanded a forceful, single-minded capacity for self-delusion. Alice could tip over her world and construct planks of belief from nothing. She believed that finite quantities would never run out, that time could loop back on itself, and that any damage could be repaired. She believed that academia was a meritocracy, that hard work was its own reward. She believed that department pettiness could not touch you, so long as you kept your head down and did not complain. She believed that when professors snapped at you, when they belittled and misused you, it was because they cared. And she believed, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that she was all right, that everything was all right, that she did not need help, that she could just stiffen her upper lip and keep on going.

That right there sums up all the themes of this book, and every belief of Alice's that is torn to shreds as she and Peter proceed through Hell. As far as the magick in this book goes, it's more than a little handwavium, and better applies to the character of Alice than any magickal results she produces from it. Which would be fine if Alice was an interesting person to spend time with. Except that she really isn't, at least not until three-fourths of the way through the book when she believes that Peter is dead (and to be fair, he is, though he gets better), takes her head out of her behind, and starts kicking ass and taking names.

That's my main knock against this book, that the author doesn't really seem to commit to it, at least not the way she did with Babel. Now, Babel was not subtle in the least. It was a brutal and thorough takedown of racism, white supremacy and entitlement, and colonialism, and the reader knows this from the first chapter. At times the author's rage is palpable. The satire and deconstruction of academia in this book feels like it's padded with cotton, and as a result the author's blows land feebly, if they land at all. Possibly you as a reader will like this sort of authorial distance. I loved her not beating around the bush in Babel, which is why I adore that book. But this one is a painfully long journey to Alice's making up her mind to actually do something, and probably some readers will reach the draggy middle section, say "screw this," and go on to something else.

I didn't--possibly only because I bought the Deluxe edition (which is a lovely book, with gorgeous sprayed edges, and heavy enough to serve as a brick in the wall if I wanted) and felt like I had to finish it to maybe get my money's worth. In the end, though, that's only a "maybe." I must face up to the fact that, as far as I am concerned, Babel is the real deal....and this isn't.

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