Review: Moonstorm

Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first became aware of Yoon Ha Lee eight years ago, with the release of the first book in the Machineries of Empire trilogy, Ninefox Gambit. (And said trilogy is excellent and you should be reading it already.) This is his first young adult book, but this story has similar themes to Machineries. Mainly the conceit of an important part of the story's setting being maintained by the actions of the people in the universe: in the previous trilogy, the "high calendar" dictated the laws of physics in a given sector, and "calendrical rot" signaled the bending/warping of those laws. Here, gravity is generated by the faith of the people on a given planet, and the fervency with which they perform the specific rituals to create the gravity they need.

Hwajin, the young girl who is our narrator and protagonist, lives on Carnelian and is a Clanner. Carnelian is a moon in the Moonstorm, a section of space outside the boundaries of the New Joseon Empire, and wanders in an erratic orbit. The Imperials and the clanners have been fighting over the Moonstorm for hundreds of years:

According to her family, the Imperials worshipped their Empress and carried out strange, twisted rituals--too strange and twisted to be described in detail to a ten-year-old, which of course made them much more interesting. The Imperials' rituals summoned gravity, just like theirs did, but their gravity and the clanners' couldn't coexist, like oil refusing to mix with water. The Imperials had been fighting for generations to replace the clanners' rituals with their own, so they could take control of the entire Moonstorm.

In the very first chapter, Carnelian is destroyed, Hwajin's entire family is killed (or so she thinks) and she is rescued by a "lancer," one of the giant mecha robots that fight for the Empire against the clanners. The story picks up six years later, with Hwajin, now known as Hwa Young, attempting to be chosen as a lancer pilot. No one knows she is a clanner; outwardly she is a loyal subject of the Empire. Normally she would have two more years to wait before she could apply to be a pilot, but the war has not been going well for the Empire of late, and Hwa Young and her classmates are submitted to the lancers early. She ends up bonding with Winter's Axiom, a lancer with rare talents, and is drafted into the war against her former people.

This ethical conundrum--Hwa Young is working for the Empire, but cannot forget that she was once a clanner--is the heart of the story, along with themes of colonialism, the exploitation of child soldiers, and the terrible decisions that must be made in war. This universe is a bit simpler than the often mystifying Machineries of Empire, and the story is easier to follow. No doubt this is intentional, given the intended audience, but I appreciated it. (Although Machineries is more rewarding, once you finally figure out what's going on.) The point of gravity supported by human-performed rituals becomes incredibly important as the story progresses, as the Empress and her scientists have twisted it into a weapon: a particularly pious population of one planet is so fervent their worship is able to generate enough gravity to form a black hole, which the Empress is intending to use to eradicate the clanners. At the story's climax, Hwa Young and her lancer troupe destroy a colony ship full of people performing the ritual to generate the black hole, sacrificing a few thousand to save millions more.

The story ends with Hwa Young and her friends leaving the Empire behind, and taking their lancers and joining the rebel clanners. This being the first of a trilogy, obviously there is a lot more action to come. The book is well paced and the battle scenes in particular are excellent. I appreciated that there was no romance involving Hwa Young or any of the other characters (other than vague hints): not only wasn't there time for it, but it would have distracted from the story's progression. I don't think this is quite as good as Machineries of Empire, but it's well worth reading in its own right.

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Review: Service Model

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've read (and own) a great many of Adrian Tchaikovsky's books, and this one is a bit different than his usual large-scale, stuffed-with-ideas space opera. This is his version of a "robopocalypse," complete with plenty of wry British humor (a great deal of it rather on the black side) and a much smaller and more personal sense of stakes that nevertheless winds up feeling just as important as the fate of a world.

This is the story of Charles, later Uncharles, a high-class robot valet who just wants to find a human to serve. Unfortunately, in this near-future slow apocalypse, there are very few humans to be found, due to some sort of environmental or societal collapse. The reasons for this are vague at first, and are revealed, in a rather more sinister fashion, as the story progresses. The inciting event on Charles' journey is what happens in the opening chapter: his master is murdered, and it seems like Charles performed the deed...though he has no idea how, or why, he could have done such a thing. Nevertheless, while shaving his master one morning, he moved the straight razor a little too far to the left and slit his master's throat.

After his master's death, Charles is cast out from his manor, and this begins an epic road trip across a vastly altered Earth. It includes stops ranging from an underground human enclave run by a tyrant to a battlefield with the remnants of robot armies caught up in a never-ending war, to an encounter with an AI "God." (The all-too-brief chapters dealing with the robot army are the funniest and most absurd of the book, as one of the armies is commanded by a "King Ubot" who has built itself up to be a giant mecha, complete with its own internal ecosystem made up of many other smaller robots grafted into its body. Unfortunately, it stuffs one too many smaller robots into its frame and ends up exploding all over the battlefield.)

Through it all, Charles is our viewpoint character, a bit like Martha Wells' Murderbot (but far more British) in that he is riddled with anxiety and uncertainty, denying he is anything more than an unassuming "service model" and yet exhibiting the most humanity of just about any character in the book. (Even more than the seconday protagonist, who Charles names "the Wonk," who he thinks is a severely malfunctioning robot and doesn't realize is an actual surviving human until nearly the end of the book.) The Wonk tries her best to convince Charles he is a thinking person with free will, which he valiantly resists until he realizes his "God" was the one who betrayed humanity. At the book's end, the Wonk, Charles, and other robot and human survivors are beginning to rebuild civilization, and even though Charles insists he is "only a valet" it is clear he is a vital part of the emerging new world order.

I was surprised by how funny this book is. I hadn't thought the author capable of writing such wry, understated humor that catches the reader off guard, but he pulled it off--I laughed out loud many times while reading this book. At the same time, this book is a clever satire of the whole "robopocapyse" sub-genre, with Charles acting as a sort of anti-Terminator. The author also has some rather pointed critiques of capitalism and "all the other utterly pointless genital-waving that humans who were a bit too much into guns and uniforms had historically been partial to." The book is not Tchaikovsky's usual sort of story, but I quite enjoyed it.



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Review: Heavenbreaker

Heavenbreaker by Sara Wolf
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I suppose this book could fit into the recent "romantasy" craze (except it's more science fiction, albeit with a strong mythical Arthurian element). It has a bit of a young-adult feel, at least to me--the protagonists are nineteen and twenty, on either side of an apparently unbridgeable divide: noble and commoner, opponents in the fighting ring and enemies in their stratified society, drawn to one another nevertheless. This romance is a slow burn, with no explicit sex scenes a la Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, and is all the more effective for that. Lastly, instead of dragons there are mecha, giant robots the characters use to fight each other. In the case of the titular Heavenbreaker, the robot our protagonist Synali von Hauteclare pilots, it is a little more than just a giant robot: it contains an alien creature from the past that turns the story upside down.

Having said all this, and with the fact that I really liked the book once the pieces started coming together and the plot picked up, the science is pretty wonky. You can't think about it too much. The setting is about 1400 years in the future, after a war with a Lovecraftian tentacled hivemind creature that humanity lost. Earth has been destroyed, and humanity's remnants live in giant space stations that have been flung across the galaxy by the enemy, err, somehow. (If the enemy is supposed to have psychic teleportation powers, why didn't they just fling the Station that Synali lives on into the gas giant Esther and let the planet's pressure crush their enemies out of existence, rather than letting it settle into an apparently stable orbit? This is just one question you can't ask, because then the plot begins to unravel.)

But while this history gradually becomes more important as the story progresses, it's not the major theme of the book: the class differences of the Station, and Synali's quest for revenge following the murder of her mother by her father's noble house, are. Synali is a tightly wound, tormented, traumatized character, who takes her fury and channels it into the Supernova Cup, the ten-year competition she is pushed into entering by the former crown prince, with the stipulation that if she wins, he will bring down the murderous House of Hauteclare and give Synali the rest she longs for. Of course, she then meets a fellow rider, Rax Istra-Velrayd, who makes her think that perhaps she doesn't want to die after she gets her revenge after all.

All this requires a lot of careful setup, with the result that the book doesn't really get going until about halfway through. I was able to stick with it because the characters, especially Synali, Rain the royal assassin, and Synali's opponent and cousin Mirelle are compelling enough to take the reader through the somewhat uneven opening chapters and the hand-waving science. The ending is also a bit of an abrupt cliffhanger, but the endspage promises the story will continue in the next book, Hellrunner.

The book is tightly written and paced, if you can get past the faulty science. I will be picking up the next book.

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