Review: All the Hidden Paths

All the Hidden Paths by Foz Meadows
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This second book in the Tithenai Chronicles takes a slightly different tack than the first, concentrating more on the romance and court politics than the magical elements. Once more, the protagonist Velasin is in danger, threatened because of his marriage to a Tithena nobleman, Caethari.

There is a lot of character work in this story, because Vel and Cae, despite being thrown together in a political marriage that neither of them wanted, find themselves falling in love. Velasin in particular, coming from a country where same-sex relationships/marriages are frowned upon and gay people are discriminated against, has to do a lot of growing to adjust to this new situation and his expanding feelings for Caethari. Throw in an assassin after the two of them and a separate person sent by the king of Ralia (Vel's former country) to break up his marriage, and he has a lot to deal with.

But Vel is clever and politically savvy, and he is able to navigate the treacherous waters at the Tithenai Court and secure a place for himself and his husband. He also has to deal with his own feelings and the completely new situation he finds himself in: a secure relationship in a place accepting of gay people, where he can be open with his love for Cae. Caethari, on the other hand, has to cope with the trauma Velasin experienced in the previous book, as well as his own countrymen not accepting his marriage and working against it. Layer a murder mystery on top of all this and we have an intriguing and complicated stew with many different plot threads to deal with.

The author does all this with aplomb. They also have a deft hand with character work (page 364, when Velasin realizes how he feels about Caethari):

Everything around me slowed and blurred, as if I were an insect incased in tree-sap. My heart wrenched erratically against my ribs, for all the world like a leashed dog straining to greet a friend, and I realized, in a bright and sudden unfurling of truth, that I loved him. Oh, I thought stupidly. The realization washed through me with all the sweet shivering shock of brandy drunk on an empty stomach. I stared at my husband, at the desperate worry in his face, and felt my blood beating within me like wings. I'd thought myself in love before, but in that moment, the strength of my feelings for Cae cast every prior romance in the retroactive light of infatuation. I had yearned for love, had hoped for, cherished and feared it in nearly equal measure, but all of that paled before my sudden certainty that, if my heart was a ship, Caethari had become its harbor.

There's some lovely writing in this book, and a strong sense of pace and balance. The romance does not crowd out the political shenanigans and vice versa. The main characters have depth and nuance, and while I would love an entire book about Vel's servant/best friend Markel, he does make a good showing here. I don't know if this is the final book in the series, but if so, it wraps things up very nicely.

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Review: Iron Flame

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As far as I can tell, the first book of the Empyrean series, Fourth Wing, started the whole "romantasy" craze (in fact, Goodreads invented a whole new "romantasy" category for the Goodreads Choice Awards last year, which Fourth Wing of course won). This book is the second in the series--of a projected five books, according to what I've read--and it is a honking doorstopper of a volume at over 600 pages.

This is the story of Navarre and their dragon riders, and their war with both gryphon riders and evil mages who drain magic from the land (and people, killing them). This war was first fought over 600 years ago, and afterwards Navarre retreated behind its borders, sealing them with magic to protect both its people and its dragons. They also set up a brutal war college, Basgiath, to train (and weed out) potential dragon riders to continue the fight. The protagonist, the general's daugter Violet Sorrengail, is sent against her will to Basgiath and becomes a rider, in the process falling in love with the ruthless wingleader Xaden Riorsen and discovering the truth behind the war.

To be honest, I didn't like this book as well as the first. There are good things about it--the action scenes are suspenseful and well written as usual, and I appreciated the deepening of the worldbuilding and history, and the central mystery of exactly what happened during the first war with the evil "venin" centuries ago. The dragons, especially Violet's two, grumpy Tairn and moody adolescent Andarna, are well drawn. However, this story began to drag. The series is much better when it focuses on the world of Navarre and the war plot, and the romance between Xaden and Violet just drags it down. I mean, Yarros writes explicit sex scenes tolerably well, but I don't need more than one or two to get the point across, you know? And their ongoing trust/relationship drama (she doesn't trust him because he won't reveal his secrets etc) got tiresome after a while.

Also, in this book Violet begins to feel a little....over the top. Part of that may be because the series is written from her first-person point of view. But after a while, it seems like she is the only one who can come up with the near-miraculous solutions to solve their problems, even though she is a second-year cadet and is surrounded by all sort of military people and strategists who would presumably have ideas of their own. Also, the book's climax--where Violet realizes her second dragon Andarna is the "seventh" breed of dragon that can restart Basgiath's wardstone and save the day, and she herself is some special super-strong Chosen One Andarna has been waiting for--had me rolling my eyes a bit. "Chosen one" tropes are also getting tiresome.

All this made this 600-page doorstop a bit of a slog, despite the fast, almost frantic pacing. I think future books would do better to be about half its length, or many readers (including this one) might drop out.

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Review: Generation Ship

Generation Ship by Michael Mammay
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I ended up liking this book, but my approval is a bit...tepid. That's because despite its being nominally "science fiction," it is rather light on the science. Especially with the setting of a 250-year-old generation ship, which is a dicey proposition at best, and there is precious little info given as to how this ship actually works. The author is far more concerned with shipboard politics, factions and revolutions. This overriding theme runs through the first three-quarters of the book, and the sudden turn in the last chapters to a tale of first contact is somewhat disconcerting. Not that the aliens found on the planet aren't interesting, but it feels like we should have spent a lot more time with them instead of all the political machinations.

The characters are also not delved into in any great depth. For example, one of several viewpoint characters, scientist Sheila Jackson, is written as if she is somewhere on the autism spectrum, but that's not explored in any detail. That aspect of her personality would be important to the plot, and it feels strange that it's not addressed. The characters are also not differentiated enough to make a lasting impression and became hard to tell apart after a while, even with chapter headings stating which character is taking center stage for the chapter.

Bottom line: this book was pleasant enough for what it is, but it is also eminently forgettable. I really like my generation ship space operas to have better characters and science.



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Review: After World

After World by Debbie Urbanski
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is one weird book. I'd almost classify it as a literary writer's idea of what a dystopian science fiction future should look like, except the writer's bio says she's published SF stories before (in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, no less). It's definitely experimental: it has almost no plot and a non-linear narrative, and more than one page is taken up with seemingly random dribbles and drabs. (See: page 317, where the artificial intelligence that has named itself Ennis, and who the reader gradually realizes is the book's narrator, says "I erase Sen's source documents from the DHAP servers, as they are no longer necessary to her or to me--" and then proceeds to list all of said files, for the next two pages.)

It's also a depressing book, as Ennis the "storyworker" is chronicling the last days of Sen Anon, the last human alive on earth after a deliberately induced sterilization virus that causes the extinction of humans and the collapse of civilization. It takes place at the end of this century, when climate change is wreaking havoc, species are going extinct at the rate of a dozen per day, and the only solution, according to the artificial intelligence behind Jenninet, is for humans to take themselves out of the ecosystem. Most of the 12 billion people alive are digitally mapped and uploaded to the virtual reality known as the titular "After World," and following Sen's death from starvation, the Digital Human Archive Project is completed and Afterworld is begun.

Only thing is, as the reader gradually realizes, this "solution" is forced on the human race as the ultimate genocide. We never find out who engineered the sterilization virus, but the uncomfortable implication is that it is the artificial intelligences running Afterworld. This huge issue is never explored and barely mentioned, as the author's focus is on how people (primarily Sen and her two mothers) are reacting to the end of the world, as well as the gradual awakening to sentience of the storyworker Ennis, who falls into a somewhat creepy love/obsession with Sen. The book hops, skips and jumps around in time and place, as it talks about humanity dying and uploading, and also discusses previous speculative fiction works dealing with this same subject and how they did not at all predict what actually happened. This is all extremely meta, even navel-gazing (at one point there is a reference to a presumably real-life article written by the book's author, under her real name).

If you don't like experimental fiction, you won't like this. I barely finished it, and indeed read the last half in a train-wreck state of mind, shaking my head at what I was encountering. The book I started after finishing this is a plain old-fashioned space opera with an actual plot and story, something I badly needed following this book.

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Review: Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 207

Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 207 by Neil Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another stellar issue of Clarkesworld. Notable stories in this issue:

"Thireen Ways of Looking at a Cyborg," Samara Auman, written in the first-person POV of an intelligent crow and its murder mourning the person who rescued them from a lab. This is a beautiful, sad story about grief, loss, and moving on.

"In Memories We Drown," Kelsea Yu, a post-apocalyptic story about a team of researchers trapped in a habitat on the ocean bottom after an apparent surface apocalyptic event. This is another sad story of loss (which is a bit of a theme in this issue) but it's lovely.

"Kill That Groundhog," Fu Quiang, translated by Andy Dudak, is a hard-SF story by a Chinese writer dealing with a group of people trapped in a time loop and their efforts to break free. The ending is not at all what you would expect.

"Eight or Die," Thoraiya Dyer, is the second part of a serial that began in the last issue. You really need to have read Part 1 to make any sense of it, but it's an absorbing story of an alien species and culture and the human who is tasked with helping to hunt down a rogue alien.

If you like these stories, please consider subscribing. Go here. The magazine was hit hard by Amazon's recent boneheaded decison to discontinue direct Kindle subscriptions, and they could use the help.

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Review: Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 206, November 2023

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 206, November 2023 by Neil Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was definitely one of the better issues of Clarkesworld this year. The highlights:

"To Carry You Inside You," Tia Tashiro, is incredibly the author's first published story. This is the tale of a former child actor who ages out of her former profession and becomes a surrogate for dead people (via memories uploaded into a port in her neck, allowing the dead person's digital ghost to take possession of her body and visit former families). Of course, one of her dead "clients" figures out how to take over her body, and a titanic struggle follows. This story is told in second person present tense, which is a damn difficult thing to pull off. That this is Tashiro's first story augers well for her future.

"The Parts That Make Me," Louise Hughes, is only three pages, 1120 words, but this short-short story packs quite the punch. It's a "ship of Theseus" tale, of a freebot who loses pieces of itself and the engineer on board its current ship who brings one important part back. The themes of identity and memory, what makes up the most important parts of our lives and what we wish to hang on to, are all touched on in this thought-provoking story.

"Eddies Are the Worst," Bo Balder, is the somewhat grim tale of a future of plummeting birthrates and labor shortages, and a brother and sister who are trying to save up enough money to pay for a clone baby.

"Bird-Girl Builds a Machine," Hannah Yang, is a closed-loop time travel story about a mother and daughter, and the machine the mother is building.

"Thin Ice," Kemi Ashing-Giwa, is to me an hard science fiction retelling of The Thousand and One Nights, with its narrator (and this is another second person viewpoint story) the last survivor of their clan, on a dying planet with a cyborg invader who steals their clan's culture and stories to transmit to its superiors.

As always, please go to Clarkesworld's website and subscribe if you can. I subscribe to the print edition. This magazine, like many others, has been hit hard by Amazon's idiotic decision to end its Kindle subscription program, and they could use the help.



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