Dream with Our Eyes Open

I must point out something first.

In Scalzi's earlier book, The Kaiju Preservation Society, we have Jamie Gray, who in the opening pages of the book loses his unremunerative job as a food delivery courier and then gets dragged into a mysterious international organization that is doing things that are pretty unbelievable.

In Starter Villain, we have Charlie Fitzer, who in the opening pages of the book loses his home and is spirited away from his unremunerative career as a substitute teacher to get dragged into a mysterious international organization that is doing things that are pretty unbelievable.

Just sayin'.

Now, there really are differences. Jamie is a mouthy asshole but actually turns out to be pretty brave and competent as an action hero. Charlie is meek and almost milquetoast but stubborn and loyal - and also actually pretty brave. Where Jamie was dragged into a very sci-fi scenario involving preserving magical megafauna on a planet that's apparently in another dimension, Charlie is dragged into a merely James Bondian scenario involving a secret cabal of obnoxious supervillains, with whom his recently deceased uncle was somehow involved.

Oh, and also "talking" cats - although they have to use specially modified keyboards to communicate. If this reminds anyone of science fiction author Mary Robinette Kowal's cat Elsie, it's not by accident, as the author notes in an afterword.

This was a moderately entertaining book, but not a great one.

The awful thing about this is that I like Scalzi as a human being. He has done a number of very good things for science fiction and its fandom, and he is IMO one of the wittiest people on Earth with a tweet (or whatever they're being called these days). But this is not his best effort. I might have been able to ignore that if this book hadn't been shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

At the end of February, I had told my management I was going to retire at the end of March, and. I realized that Hugo nominations were due mid-March. So I rather frantically obtained a bunch of novels that were on the Locus and other lists

I hadn't finished them when time came to put in my nominations, but nothing could stop me now! I was a reading machine! So I finished everything I'd downloaded, and then realized that I had books I had downloaded earlier but never read. So I read those. And then I realized that sequels had dropped for a couple of series I was following. So I obtained and read those.

When the dust settled, and I switched to a re-read of something for a writing exchange, I had 11 unreviewed books. If I did one per week (which would be a vast improvement over what I've managed recently), that would still take me into the summer.

Help me prioritize. Which books do people actually want to read about? You can vote for more than one.

Thanks!!

I have mixed feelings about the much anticipated sequel to Gideon the Ninth. In some ways it's a very clever piece of writing (a great deal of it in the second person), and it's both gritty enough and ironically humorous enough not to come across as too full of its own cleverness. But it suffers very much from a huge lack of Gideon Nav.

You can think about that last statement some more later.

I'm going to cut this because it's really impossible to discuss Harrow without some monster spoilers for Gideon.

When I finished this, I thought I would not want to read it all over again very soon. But now, having told you about it, I think I do.

This is part of my Hugo Award Reading. I read Anders' first novel, All the Birds in the Sky, back in 2016 and was meh for me. This book is better but still ends up wandering off into nowhere.

The book starts with a small info dump in the guise of translation notes, such as the fact that the people who colonized this planet, January, named the native creatures after animals from their homeworld. You have been warned.

We then join our first protagonist, Sophie. She's from a lower-class family that might, in other settings, be called peasants. Faced with a future as a producer of more peasant agriculturists, she studies with desperate diligence and wins entrance to the university in the city, where she develops a deep crush on her roommate, Bianca. Bianca is beautiful, bright, and at her core, not a great person. She dabbles with the concept of being a revolutionary from a position of extreme privilege, and when things go south, it's not Bianca who falls.

As this story unfolds, we learn about the city and to some extent, the world. In Xiosphant, the activities of the city are controlled to the hour, at a minimum. Timed signals throughout the day tell the citizens when to wake, to eat, to go to work or school. No one breaks curfew, or they are punished. Maniacal little rules occupy any spare thought cycles people might have: food can only be bought with special food currency, for instance, and there are a variety of other currencies for other purchases. Bianca's daring revolutionary actions are trivial: if they were anything else, she'd be dead.

From Sophie's memories, it seems that this draconian governance is somehow a response to the planetary situation. January does not rotate. One side is baked to a fiery hell by its sun; the other side is deathly cold. A narrow temperate zone exists between the two, home to two cities: Xiosphant and Argelo, which we learn about later.

When Sophie takes the blame for Bianca's stupid act of defiance, she is cast out of the city into the edge of the cold zone to die but is unexpectedly saved by a creature considered a hideous and violent monster. When she comes back, she is unable to take up her old life and instead goes to work in a fascinating coffee shop where people can come be different for a short period of time.

At this point, I figured the book was heading into its final arc. I was intrigued and excited. I thought, this time Anders has really nailed it! Somehow Sophie and the underpeople represented at the coffee shop will make things go right! The only thing that didn't seem to work was this strange parallel arc about a traveling merchant called Mouth, part of a desperate crew who bring in contraband goods from Argelo, a strange and dangerous journey. Mouth discovers that the sacred text of her people, whom she lost at a young age, is in the museum in Xiosphant, and plans a burglary under cover of the nascent revolution under the partial leadership of -- you knew this, right? -- Bianca.

And as you've probably also guessed, the book was, in fact, only about half over at that point.

The revolution and Mouth's caper both go badly, and pretty soon, everyone is fleeing back across the horrible leagues between the two cities. After many misadventures, most of the group arrive in Argelo. Mouth and her partner try to fit into non-traveling life, and we get some rather nice "stranger in a strange land" as Sophie and Bianca learn about Argelo. Sadly, Sophie also finally begins to learn about Bianca, who very quickly makes herself at home with the most powerful of the free-wheeling criminal organizations that run the place. Bianca has plans, and Sophie is going to be part of them.

In the final 15% or so of the book, there are battle and horror and catastrophe, and then things just kind of stop.

Anders has a wonderful imagination, and she sometimes has a way with words. But the pieces simply aren't hanging together yet, at least not for me.

I also want to note that the book strikes me as, in some way, a homage to the works of Ursula Le Guin. An obvious inspiration is Le Guin's The Dispossessed, with the two cities and their very different approaches to life on the hostile planet standing in for the worlds of Urras and Anarres. We also have the world January, its very name echoing that of Winter, the outsiders' name for the planet Gethen, setting of Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which also considered the challenges of maintaining a complex civilization in a very hostile environment.

This is the fifth installation about Murderbot, the cranky, media-addicted security android that hacked its governor module and went rogue (sort of) in the first novella, All Systems Red (published 2017). It is also the first full-length novel in the series.

This is not a very objective review because I love Wells' work in general and Murderbot in particular.

As the story opens, Murderbot has settled down—again, sort of. Its mentor and former owner, Dr. Mensah, has taken it home with her to the planet Preservation. Murderbot is doing its best to cope with being the only really paranoid security being on the calm and mostly peaceful planet. Murderbot should be happy, except that it doesn't do happy, and in addition, Dr. Mensah is suffering from some serious problems herself.

Then Murderbot, Mensah's daughter Amena, and several other worthy (and not-so-worthy) humans are kidnapped and end up on a transport vessel that looks awfully familiar to Murderbot. A transport that seems occupied only by some bizarre grey-skinned almost-humans and their previous sad-sack prisoners.

Oh no. Seriously, oh no. I was almost as devastated as Murderbot (who would tell you that no, it was not devastated).

Is Murderbot's not-friend dead? Why the kidnapping? Who are the grey people and who are their hapless prisoners? How long has everybody actually been on the transport, and why do people have such differing view on that supposed fact? It takes a lot of drastic action scenes involving drones, AI virus attacks, and eventually a large and scary agricultural robot to solve these mysteries. And Murderbot is forced to face its own foibles and shortcomings in more ways than one.

I have to say here how much I love Amena. She is not a stereotypical smartass teen, probably because we have Murderbot for that. She is actually the person who comes closest to understanding Murderbot, and when she does her best to defend Murderbot's privacy, my heart goes all squishy and warm.

Some of the reviews online have criticized the pacing of the first section. Possibly it's less than ideal. I didn't feel the story dragging, but as stated, I'm not objective about this.

Final note: if you're enjoying Murderbot and haven't read The Books of the Raksura, Wells' previous series, you should give it a try.

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.

The author of this book is in their second year of eligibility 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." An Unkindness of Ghosts was published in 2017.

On the generation ship Matilda, which has been voyaging for hundreds of years, darker-skinned passengers live on the lower decks and perform menial tasks to support the ship's population and in particular, the ruling class, the Sovereignty. Seemingly no one, even the loftiest of the Sovereignty, really knows the ship's destination or how long it will take to get there. In fact, the Sovereignty claims that any sins committed by the population of the lower decks is delaying the day when they all arrive at their new home. This is one of the many excuses they give for their brutal control of the lowerdecks population.

Aster Grey, intersex, neurodivergent, and dark-skinned, has a little more privilege than many of her fellows because of her medical skills and more importantly, because of her odd friendship with Theo, the Surgeon General. However, as Aster's inquisitive mind drives her to explore more of the mysteries of the ship and its voyage, she begins to run afoul of the Sovereignty, which already takes a dim view of her relationship with their most brilliant doctor. As the novel reaches its climax, Theo's protection fails her.

This is a grim and sometimes brutal but well-written book. I do think some of the plot elements drive right off the edge of the cliff of logic. The whole coronation sequence made no sense to me, although the scene where Theo gets Aster ready for the event was very charming. The ending gave me a certain amount of pause as well. A lot of these issues may well be remedied in future works as Solomon becomes a more seasoned author.

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.

Driveby: I'm having a tiring week, and need to go to bed ASAP.

I finished The Calculating Stars, and it ends well enough for me to look forward to reading the sequel, The Fated Sky. It was also pubished in 2018, so I'm not sure what the rules are re Hugo Award.

I'm now reading Circe, by Madeline Miller. People seem to be excited by this book, including recommending it for Hugo nominations. I am about 70% of the way through, and it is grim, sad, grim. Man, the Titans are disgusting, and the gods are nasty. A seemingly "you are there" inside Circe's head re-telling does not help these facts. I'm also not sure I want to call it fantasy. It's well written, though?