Dream with Our Eyes Open

So teleworking my head off, missing human contact beyond my long-suffering husband, and playing Flight Rising: even under social distancing, there should be more to life than this.

I read a lot of books on JoCo, and am still reading. So -

I'm planning to write up all of them, but get me started, please? You can pick more than one.

I really enjoyed this, although I won't pretend to understand why we have Mixtecs in SPAAACE, nor why so many well-read reviewers didn't recognize the distinctive name formations. Six Direction, Thirty Larkspur, Nineteen Adze, and the others are clearly linguistic descendants of Eight Deer, Six Rabbit, and all the others in the Mixteca Codex Bodley and other sources.

As the book opens, Mahit Dzmare, of the small, independent space station/nation Lsel, is arriving at the capital of the huge, voracious Teixcalaanli Empire to serve as the ambassador of her people. This is a position she's wanted all her life: she's a huge fan of Teixcalaanli culture, has been learning the language since she was very young, and can even write poetry in it: an important skill among the Teixcalaanli people.

Reviewers are comparing this book to the works of Ann Leckie and Yoon Ha Lee. I would imagine that fans of their works (and those of C.J. Cherryh, especially the Foreigner series) are likely to enjoy this one. (And it turns out that Martine is a friend of Max Gladstone ... there seems to be some very rich cross-pollination going on. See NPR interview with Martine here.)

As one review noted, the payoff for all this is somewhat slight, but it looks like a sequel is in the works. I'm looking forward to reading A Desolation Called Peace.

I wanted to like this. It's not a bad book, and Kowal is a lovely human being who has several times poured oil on the troubled waters of the professional SF community, but I couldn't get hooked properly.

The story of Elma York, the Lady Astronaut, started out in The Calculating Stars. As others have noted, this was very much an AU of Hidden Figures, except from the point of view of a nice liberal Jewish white woman who is a pilot and a calculator. I should perhaps point out that I am also a liberal Jewish white woman (dunno if I'm nice). This second volume takes the AU space program past its moon base stage and into the long voyage to establish a base on Mars. Elma is part of the crew, which is split across two ships.

I should like like Elma, but I don't. Maybe it's a bit of a culture clash: she's a southern U.S. Jew from my parents' generation, whereas my folks were from New York City (well, the Bronx) and I was raised in the DC area. She never seems very Jewish to me, no matter how many times she goes to synagogue, whispers prayers in Hebrew, and celebrates holidays. In fact, there are only two times she really comes alive for me. The first when she deals with her near-crippling social anxiety (usually by mathematical means, such as mentally reciting as many digits of pi she can remember).

The second time is a confrontation she has about halfway through the voyage with two of her African American colleagues. They discover that she's been trying to intervene secretly on their behalf in the matter of the unequal assignment of menial versus scientific duties (as well as in a subplot about African Americans accused of sabotage back on Earth), and they are unsurprised to find out that it's backfired on them. It's happened all too many times before. Elma is about to go off in a classic display of White Women's Tears (stoic brainiac version) when she has her revelation: it's not about her. It was never about her. I remember my own similar but much less dramatic epiphany (which occurred during Racefail, IIRC) that intention is not magic, and that when you screw up, you need to deal with it and not make your own discomfort the center of the discussion, and I appreciate what Kowal is doing.

Finally, Kowal seems to have a habit of using characters for one particular purpose and then more or less forgetting about them. Once Elma has her Burning Bush episode with her black colleagues, they fade into the background. Once the commander finally confronts the real racist in the crew, we barely hear a peep about the creep for the rest of the trip. Given that we're talking about less than a dozen people crammed into two small ships, this is pretty odd.

On the other hand, as the stakes ratchet up, there's some real tension about how the crew will get to Mars, and in what condition. Things get grotty and immediate in a very effective way about a third of the way along, and at that point reading became compulsive.

So, a mixed bag. This felt like a dutiful and carefully written attempt to make an old-school space adventure with new-school heart, inclusive and personal, but I didn't care about the story's flaws while characters' lives were on the line.

I found myself in the mood to re-read this series (five volumes plus two books of shorter fiction). I don't think I have re-read the entire work since the final book, Harbors of the Sun, came out in 2017. I've just finished re-reading the third book.

The rough outline is that a young male being, a shapeshifter, finally finds his people after being on his own since childhood. He then has to fit himself into their culture and community, and then help them face a threat not only to their species but to dozens of other types of intelligent beings with whom they share their world.

There are spoilers here, y'all.

After I blogged Kingfisher's Clockwork Boys, lydy recommmended Swordheart enthusiastically. Thanks, because I really enjoyed this.

Halla is a widow Of a Certain Age, well-endowed in the bosom department but otherwise not remarkable in appearance. She has been working as her late husband's great-uncle Silas' housekeeper and has learned to hide her intelligence under a mask of twitterpated idiocy, because (as she explains at one point), no one pays much attention to a stupid woman.

As the book opens, Silas has died, and he has left all his decent-sized fortune to Halla. Unfortunately, her late husband's aunt is quite sure that the house and the money should be hers instead: after all, Halla is not even a blood relation! The aunt's solution to this is that Halla should marry the aunt's moist-palmed mother's boy son, and the two barricade Halla in her room, to remain a prisoner until she submits to their plans.

One reviewer on Great Big South American River made a big deal of the fact that Halla should have simply escaped and called the law on her offensive in-laws. Clearly this person is not in touch with the lives of women in this sort of medieval setting, real or fantasy: Halla has no reason to think that such a course of action will put her anywhere but the madhouse. So she decides instead to kill herself by using the impressive sword that hangs on the wall of her room, which is overcrowded with part of Silas' collection of antiques.

After a horrifyingly funny planning session in how to use the sword on herself, Halla draws the weapon—and a scarred, heavily muscled man appears in a flash of light. This is Sarkis, the servant of the sword, and our second narrator.

Sarkis is magically bound to protect the wielder of the sword, but none of his former wielders had Halla's type of problems: Sarkis is far more used to having to make mince of dragons. Soon the two of them are off on a very strange road trip, and over time, they become more than a little fond of each other. And Halla's self-doubts and Sarkis' very dark past are every bit as much of a threat to the two of them as are the clerical inquisitors, legal entanglements, and greedy traitors they encounter along the way.

There is no getting around the fact that this is a romance, so if you are allergic to such, you have been warned.

The author of this book is a finalist for for the "not-a-Hugo" Campbell Award, give to "the best new writer whose first professional work of science fiction or fantasy was published within the two previous calendar years."

Fang Runin ("Rin") is an orphan, adopted mainly to do housework for a family with no daughter. Faced with a marriage to a suitor whose main qualification is the wealth he'll bring to her foster family, Rin takes one of the few avenues available: she studies herself nearly blind and demented and manages to snag a position at her nation's elite military academy, Sinegard.

Unfortunately, rather than being impressed with her determination and hard work, most of the faculty and students at Sinegard despise Rin for being a peasant. Some actively want her to fail out. Her situation becomes better in some ways and rather worse in others when she pledges herself to the eccentric Lore Master Jiang rather than one of the more respected masters. Jiang detects and encourages Rin's hidden potential for shamanic magic—"lore." She begins to think she may have found a place.

Meanwhile, the Empire is threatened by a powerful invader, the Federation of Mugen. When the Federation makes its move, Rin and the other Sinegard cadets have an all-too-real practical example of the benefits and limits of their military education. As many have noted, this is where the story takes a very dark turn. Kuang uses the accounts of real-world atrocities such as the Nanking Massacre as the basis for a series of horrifying scenes in which Rin and her new comrades, a band of intriguing misfits with unusual powers, do their best to stem the tide. One of the effects of all this is that Rin is finally able to tap the core of her powers.

The result is not pleasant. Raised with little if any sense of compassion or ethics, accustomed to having to push herself to the utmost for results, and lacking any superiors whom she respects, Rin starts to become a monster.

I will probably want to continue this series if only tp find out whether Rin ever comes back across the moral event horizon. But this is not a light-hearted read.

On a Sunbeam was first published as a webcomic and has been nominated for this year's Hugo Awards in the Graphic Novel category. Apologies to anyone who loves this: I finished it feeling more bemused than anything.

Mia is starting a new job. We see her peering through a window in a spaceship, approaching what seems to be a cathedral floating in space. Tethered to it are a variety of things: some are close to conventional depictions of SF spacecraft, but one looks like a camper bus and another looks like nothing in particular. Mia gets off her transport and is guided into an elevator, which takes her to a corridor with a tall door at the end.

No sign of an airlock.

Through the door is the spacecraft that will be her new home and her transportation to her new employer's job sites. There are high ceilings, random boxes of stuff on the floor, a cat. She's directed to sit on a bench. The pilot tells her to hold on. No seatbelts or any other restraint are in use,

The ships takes off with a slight hint of acceleration in the drawing: maybe as much as an automobile pulling away from a traffic signal.

And then we get an outside view of the ship. It looks like a cross between a goldfish and a pigeon.

So yes, this is certainly not any sort of hard science fiction. We are in science fantasy territory, and it's rather odd even for that.

As Mia gets to know her new workmates and boss, who are engaged in reconstructing and preserving historical buildings (which seem to be simply floating in space), we get flashbacks to her boarding school days. She's a difficult child without many friends at first, and then she makes friends with a bright loner named Grace. The two fall sweetly in love, and then Grace has to leave abruptly in response to a family emergency.

Mia doesn't get to say goodbye.

In the story's present, Mia becomes close to her crewmates, but she's also obsessed with her first love and the farewell she never got. Because Grace's home is a mysterious, dangerous, forbidden world, it seems impossible that Mia will ever see Grace again.

Or is it?

The story is powerful on an emotional level, but just about every other aspect of it left me thinking "... what?" I'm not talking about the fact that everyone seems to be female (except for one character who is specifically described as non-binary), which is an interesting choice (after all, many classic SF stories contain only male characters, with possibly some women as memories or prizes but not really characters). I'm talking about things like the way space itself is not nearly as hostile an environment as Grace's world. The accident with the fish-spaceship at the end, for example ... .

The artwork makes me think most of Mushishi: the same kind of apparently simple drawings that are ably grounded in anatomy and perspective. But instead of Mushishi's grey wash and textures, we have flat color, maybe one or two shades per frame.

Despite the trappings of future and space fiction, I find it easier to think of the setting for On a Sunbeam as something like Diana Wynne Jone's Multiverse. The journeys from world to world really do seem to me to be more like going from one magical dimension to another.

It's not *bad*, but it didn't really hit any of my sweet spots.

ETA: And it should have, because HELLO, families of choice, big time. But I couldn't connect.

The Hugo reader's packet is out. I liked so many of the authors of this year's Best Novel nominees that I had already bought and read them all by the time nominations closed. Ditto the novellas, which I had either read or ended up buying to read on JoCo. Now I am hitting the YA stuff and the shorter fiction.

Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman is sort of a side story to Hartman's earlier Seraphina and its sequel Shadow Scale. Tess Dombegh has always been, in her own estimation, the kind of girl likely to get spanked. Her non-identical twin sister Jeanne is good and pretty, and Tess has grumpily but loyally devoted most of her young life to helping their mother and other relations make sure that Jeanne marries well. By the time we're a couple of chapters in, it's pretty clear that Tess is pretty depressed and is self-medicating with alcohol when she can. Shortly after we learn why, she runs away from her life and hits the road.

As another reviewer has noted, Tess' physical journey mirrors her mental/emotional arc. She has various misadventures, does some good deeds, and learns some truths about herself and the world. When she returns to her home city and takes up a temporary job that provides a much better home than she had previously, she develops a new addiction: scholarly acclaim. As she did with drinking, Tess overdoes things and commits what is, as far as I am concerned, her only real sin. By the end of the story, she's off another journey, one that may give her a chance at making amends for what she has done.

To me, this is not as magical as the earlier Hartman books, and I'm not as moved by Tess' situation as I would have hoped, despite some similarities in our lives (depression and very moody, resentful mothers). I also thought there weren't enough immediate consequences for what Tess caused to happen near the end. If anyone else has read this, I'd be interested in your take on this issue.

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland is a complete page-turner that kept me up far too late the night I started it. In this alt-history horror/fantasy, the Civil War was interrupted when the dead began to rise. The South is now a Shambler-haunted wasteland scattered with armed compounds, while the North is finding Shamblers (read "Zombies") coming closer to its well-guarded cities despite their best efforts. (Like the troll infestations in the webcomic Stand Still Stay Silent, the Shambler menace spreads more slowly in regions with cold winters.) Although outright slavery has been abolished, Black and Native youngsters are generally taken from their families and trained in special schools or camps to fight the Shamblers.

Jane McKeene, a clever, strong, independent, and not-overly-truthful teenager, is being trained in the finest school around, Miss Preston's School of Combat for Negro Girls. Graduates of this institution are usually placed as Attendants, bodyguard-companions to wealthy white women. Jane is excellent at most combat skills (except for rifle shooting), but she is lousy at (and rebellious about) etiquette, unlike the lovely, light-skinned blond Katherine Devereaux, who is the teachers' pet. And the less said about Jane's one-time beau, the fascinating Red Jack, the better.

All three teens end up pursuing the mystery of what happened to Jackson's little sister, who was housed with a local white family, and find out far more than they should. They are apprehended and shipped off to Summerland, a supposedly idyllic settlement on the Great Plains that's run by the Survivalists, who believe that the freeing of the slaves is one of the causes of the Shambler menace. If life in the suburbs of Baltimore was unpleasant for a person of color, life in Summerland is a waking nightmare, even without the ever-increasing Shambler attacks.

In addition to being a rip-snorting zombie-slayer adventure, this story has real depth and grit. The real story of Jane's parentage comes out in tiny morsels throughout the story: she is an exceedingly unreliable narrator, and yet I never felt cheated: she has reasons for what she is. The subtleties of Katherine's equally sad situation are also well worked out. The story ends rather abruptly; perhaps there will be a sequel.

And I may have to continue tomorrow. I also read two Hugo-nominated novelettes and the latest volume of the manga Ooku

Good Lord, it's been a while since I got around to this.

After I finished the Clocktaur War duology, I felt a need to read something I already knew, so I added Diana Wynne Jones' Magids books to my Kindle and steamed through them. I love them, even when they get info-dumpy. I don't think I'd ever realized how out-of-synch Nick and Roddy are with each other, emotionally, in The Merlin Conspiracy. In fact, SPOILER I don't believe she has any idea how much he's crushing on her, and that's probably just as well. More realistic that way, too.

Now I'm doing some re-reading for a writing exchange. Contrary to my usual practice, I actually have the story outlined: I outlined it on JoCo, during a writing-time meetup.

Then I should do some more Hugo reading. I don't like reading comics electronically (unless web comics), so I bought On a Sunbeam and Abbott, and I should re-read vol. 3 of Monstress which I zipped through much too fast when I got it for Hanukkah.

After that, I guess I'll start looking for Hugo nominee short stories online, but I don't want to mess with the YA nominees untll I learn whether there's going to be a Voter's Reading Packet this year. It's a really sweet deal when they have one, especially now that I've learned how to get the files onto my Kindle.

So, the Hugo nominations deadline has come and gone, and I'm still reading the tail-end of something I didn't nominate because I didn't finish it yet.

This did lead to some contemplation on the subject of the various "Vol. 1 in a Series" books I read recently (of which this "unfinished" was one). If you're excited by the first book in a series, is it weird to nominate it for Best Novel, given that most of these don't quite stand on their own?

I had no compunctions about nominating Ancillary Justice and The Fifth Season in their respective years because they both blew me away, and they both wrapped up their endings enough to give some closure. But Robert Jackson Bennett's Foundryside ends quite deliberately on a very blatant teaser for what's to come. In fact I did nominate it because it was some of the best fun I've had in a book for a while, but I do have reservations in that it's nowhere near a complete work.

Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller wants to be a great, timely, and significant book. It has ecological disaster, a Cool City, found families, people of diverse gender and sexuality, and its own "edgy employed street kids" answer to the skateboarding couriers in Snow Crash. On the other hand, the degree of improbable relatedness of significant characters gives that in the original Star Wars trilogy a run for its money, and Miller spends lots of time telling us how cool these characters are rather than showing us. He has some (self-consciously) beautiful set pieces near the end of the book that just didn't strike me as honestly earned. He didn't show me enough about (say) Character X to make me impressed and excited about her actions at the end. And this was true pretty much across the board, not just for one character. I found myself thinking that this must be the work of a novice author but in fact, he had a book in the running for the YA not-a-Hugo (now called the Lodestar) last year. And I didn't think much of that one either. Miller just doesn't seem to be a good match for me. Needless to say, I didn't nominate this one.

Then I read three novellas, but I am giving them their own post (likely tomorrow) because this is getting LONG.

Next, Semiosis by Sue Burke starts out very depressing. In fact, it put me in a funk for a day or so on my lovely (book-filled) vacation last week. But part of its grimness is realism: a clear-eyed look at a human colony settling what seems at first to be a very peasant world, with foods people can eat and plants that can be used for building etc. Life's never that simple in reality, of course. The secret of why people are dying and what exactly is going on with the ecology here turns out to be fascinating (and perhaps improbable ... but although I thought this once or twice, the story had me by then). There will be a sequel, and the ending of the current volume is pretty clearly the end of a major story arc rather than the whole work. Potential readers should note, as mentioned elsewhere, that there is a rape early in the story. I didn't feel that it was unnecessarily graphic, and perhaps more importantly, it's framed as one of several acts of violence done to the target in question. She reacts that way as well: it's just one more thing that happened, and she is not defeated by it. I nominated this one.

After that, I read Fire Ant by Jonathan P. Brazee, and hoo boy, was that a weird and unhappy contrast to what I'd been reading. It's not that the book is bad, and in retrospect, Brazee really wasn't terrible with his female characters either. But his prose is clunky, no more than serviceable, where most of the other authors I have read recently actually write well, And the first chapter with Beth, the pilot of a mostly automated survey scout ship, obsessing about her "pee tube" began to get unpleasant — not because it made me squeamish, but just ... alright already, we get it. Beth is not a prude, and being in these ships is no picnic. Once things really got rolling, there was lots of derring-do and camaraderie and siblings-in-arms, and Beth gets a tough female friend so that we know Beth is not Smurfette. I don't regret reading it, and it might be interesting to see where Beth goes. But there are plenty of other books to read, and I'm not sure I want to bother. Your mileage may vary. (No, I didn't nominate it.)

Now I'm reading The Philosopher's Flight: A Novel by Tom Miller. This is a sort of alternate history with a touch of magic — only the faux historical book extracts at the start of each chapter insist it's not magic, it's philosophy. Some people in this world can bend natural forces to their will via the art of "sigilry," in which the practitioner draws special sigils (duh) or glyphs to focus the powers. At the time the story opens, early in the 20th century, philosophy has become Magitek, used for all sorts of practical purposes, from transporting goods and people across distances to putting badly injured patients into stasis until they can receive proper medical attention. One striking feature of the system is that women are naturally better at it than men. Robert Weekes, son of a doughty women of strong philosophical abilities (and possessed of a dark history that her son does not learn until later), proves to have an abnormal talent for philosophy (for a man) and is encouraged to enroll at Radcliffe College. A lot of is made of his gender-role-reversed fish-out-of-water status (he's from backwoods Montana), mostly to good effect. But I'm 95% of the way through, and the thing seems to be running off the rails a bit. We'll have to see how it ends.