sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: science fiction

Disclaimer: this book is written by a friend so I am biased going in. But on the other hand this book is amazing and I'm not biased at all in saying that!! (I am, for better or for worse, the kind of person who Will always have honest critiques available to offer on request.)

Lady Eve's Last Con is set in space in the far future. Our viewpoint character, Ruthi, is a con artist infiltrating high society in order to get revenge for the way her sister was treated by one of these rich dudes. Too bad the older sister of the dude she's conning is so compelling!

(the back cover of the book says Sol is Esteban's YOUNGER sister but the cover copy writer is wrong. She's older. and she very much has older sibling vibes, and that's important.)

Anyway I adore both Ruthi and Sol, and their relationship with each other, and their relationship with their respective younger siblings. And also the worldbuilding, of the specific satellite where the action is taking place, and the broader universe it's situated in!

The connection between Ruthi and Sol is so palpable, and you really believe in why they would be interested in each other, despite everything else going on between them. And each of them stand out so well as Very Specific People with their own foibles and drives and values and interests. And the secondary characters are great too - really their own people as well.

And there' some delightful stuff about the bias of pov, even though the book is all through Ruthi's pov. Through much of the book you see Esteban very much through Ruthi's eyes and she doesn't like him at all -- but you hear a bit nearer the end about what Ruthi's sister saw in him, and he's the same guy but with a different lens of interpretation put on things and you can see why someone would love him!

And the way Ruthi imagines herself versus the way her sister sees her omg! SIBLINGS.

There's great class-related content, and great jewish-identity content, and great lesbian con-artist content, and great space content.

and the way it's written is just so funny and delightful and heart-felt and well-phrased, and and and.

I wish I'd written this review more promptly after finishing the book because I feel like I did have other elements I would have enjoyed talking about more fully! but I did not, so this is the review I have for you. I loved it wholeheartedly! Highly recommended.

This is a science fiction novel from the 1960's, featuring a cast of odd characters wandering their way through interactions with each other In Space. It's mildly sexist in that 1960's way, it's hard to keep track of all the characters, and honestly I'm still not sure what the plot was -- but I still mostly enjoyed the process of reading the book.

I just really enjoyed the writing style! I wish I could articulate what it's doing that I like so much. The prose is pretty pared-down yet expressive, and it does things via odd juxtapositions of ideas and events. It's fun and engaging and it made me want to pick it apart to figure out just what it was doing!

So like....I don't think I particularly enjoyed this book as a book, but I'm still going to hang on to my cheap second-hand copy and maybe refer back to it in the future.

This is a murder mystery novel set in space in the future, but among other things the sheer quantity of classic cocktails all the characters drink made me wonder what was going on with its vibes, and the answer appears to be that the book is based on a 1960's movie. Which explains a lot, tbh.

It felt to me like it was trying to have 1960's mystery vibes while also updating its general social consciousness, but for me personally, the way this particular book did the mashup did not work. It gave me the feeling that it simultaneously wanted to be like, "I understand about prejudice and oppression and intersectionality!" and also "this is an unexamined power fantasy about being rich!" and the two did not mesh nicely with each other.

also..... the heroine is a tech billionaire named Tesla travelling to Mars. I couldn't help being reminded of a certain other billionaire in the news a lot these days.

Anyway, I didn't feel the worldbuilding was strong, and I didn't particularly like or care about any of the characters, and I wasn't intrigued by the murder mystery, so all together there wasn't a lot for me in this book.

Some readers may appreciate though that the main character is someone who lives with disabling chronic pain and PTSD, which are regularly kept at the forefront of her experience of life. However, she also has a service dog for her PTSD and the sheer quantity of time she spent releasing the dog to say hi to other people and get petted.... I think the dog spent more of the book off-duty than on. Not at all, from my understanding, the usual priorities of people with service dogs.

Overall, I expected better from this author given the other things I've read from her, and I'm not sure what happened here. Hopefully this is just an off book and not the beginning of a trend for her!

A timey wimey book about spaceships! Aww yeah. Thank you

skygiants for reviewing it last year, so that I heard about it!

In this book: a bunch of people get stuck all together on one spaceship in a rift in space separated from the two time periods the people are from. Each has different histories, perspectives, motivations, and goals. Most of them don't like or trust each other or even want to work together, multiple of them have fraught histories with each other, and I was rooting for ALL of them.

One group of people is the ragtag crew of 5 aboard a ramshackle smuggling ship called the Jonah from the middle of a massive war between humans and an alien species. Of those five, three are the actual crew, one is a paying passenger trying to escape authorities, and one tried to hijack the ship.

The other group of people are paid employees on a major corporate-owned research vessel from a time 150 years into the future, the war a distant memory except for the legends of the Fortunate Five, the crew of a small spaceship called the Jonah who singlehandedly brought about peace and ended the war. But the people in this Jonah that the corporate vessel found with them in the rift don't match what they know about the Fortunate Five.

What's going on with the rift? Who are the crew of the Jonah? Is there any way for them all to make it back to their own times safely? Will this whole encounter change history and result in humans losing the war after all?

All of this was extremely fun, and I loved all the different characters, and seeing their backstories as they got slowly doled out to the reader over the course of the book. And the ending was so satisfying, and I definitely got emotional.

And I particularly enjoyed that one of the most important relationships the book is investigating is the complicated friendship between two men. Yes! Friendship IS so important! And learning how to be a better friend!!

I did have a couple complaints though, which I'll put behind a spoiler cut.

Click here for spoilers

Ok first of all, multiple quotes on the back of the book refer to it as a "mystery" and it just doesn't seem that mysterious to me? But the book did seem like it was set up to be mysterious!

See, it felt obvious to me from the very beginning that what was happening wasn't all of them changing history, it was them making history happen exactly as it had happened the first time. But no, almost the entire time, everyone's like "all these things that are so different from how we always understood the Jonah's history, how concerning, really hoping we aren't breaking history as we know it!!"

I just wish that SOMEBODY had brought up the possibility of this being how history actually had happened, even just to be immediately shut down as ridiculous. But no, it isn't even raised as a thinkable interpretation until very nearly the end, in a way that makes it feel to me like the reader isn't supposed to be thinking of it as a possibility either. So then instead of feeling like I was in on a secret with the narrative, I felt like I was being condescended to by the narrative, almost.

Second....I spent an enormous portion of the book genuinely wondering if this was going to turn out to be the kind of sff book where Everyone Is Het. One character being queer is made clear in the back half of the book, thank goodness, but honestly the vibe throughout continued to be pretty het-flavoured in terms of the narrative focus tbh. Which like, sure whatever fine, but I do like a little more exuberantly expansive queerness in my specfic these days.

Also the backstory for one of the main male characters involves a fridged female love interest. His backstory would still have been personally tragic for him if she'd stayed alive and simply left him for good! The fridging felt unnecessary, and tbh felt honestly to me like it lessened the, like, personal responsibility sense of having lost her because of his bad decisions.

Three characters actually had a Dead Important Person in their backstory. Dafnë the fridged love interest, a dead brother, and a dead female student. So at least not all of them are female; that's something. But still! It kinda bugged me.

Third, Shaan felt to me like she came across as way too young for the age that she had to be in the story. She's someone who went through some intensive schooling, became a teacher, taught a number of students, had her Traumatic Loss experience, and is 6 years out now from that experience. Like she must be 30 at least, I would think! But I spent most of the book convinced she was much younger than any of the other characters, until enough of her backstory was revealed that I realized what her age must be. It just felt jarring to me. And maybe that's just about the way she personally responded to her trauma, but that's not really how it came across to me in the writing. Unless I missed something here, maybe?

Finally, of the Fortunate Five, I felt like we spent almost no time really with either Jaxong or Kva-Sova, and I thought they were both super interesting and wanted to know more! Tell me more about illegal peace activists! Tell me more about smart science women! Tell me more about the fashion for body mods!

Anyway, despite the complaints, I did still thoroughly enjoy the book for what it was doing, and I'm glad I read it. I am always here for explorations of what history means via the trope of time travel, especially when it's about history that isn't actually real life earth history!

A future sci-fi story about what it means to have grown up in a radical militaristic doomsday cult in space - it does an amazing job of writing something incredibly readable from the pov of a horrible person. Kyr was raised to believe in the cult's values wholeheartedly so she is awful but she cares so MUCH about the things she believes in, and is so sure she's doing the right things, that the reader is drawn in anyway.

( cut for spoilers because there's a lot to talk about that's spoilers! )

I read this as Frankenstein Weekly, a book club email list that was set up after the popularity of Dracula Daily last year. I'm glad, because I’ve been meaning to read this book for years but never got round to it, and having it show up in my inbox by chapter was very convenient.

And certainly the book is an interesting read. But one I enjoyed more as a historical artifact than as a novel to my tastes, honestly.

I genuinely enjoyed the part from the Creature’s pov; he was sympathetic, even if he made bad choices in the end. But the vast majority of the narrative is from Frankenstein's pov and I find him just irritating tbh. He has no drive to take responsibility for his actions ever, and not even in an interesting way! And yet Walton is entirely admiring of Frankenstein, and Frankenstein seems to be presented to the reader as a guy you’re supposed to sympathize with.

BUT. Despite all the pro-Frankenstein content, the Creature gets the last word in the book, in the end! I love that.

It strikes me that in the context this book was written, when sff didn’t exist as a genre yet, expecting the reader to sympathize with a monstrous and unnatural being was likely a big ask, and so what the book is doing is trying to show that even when people with many admirable virtues hate a being they see as a monster, that monster can still have virtues of its own and a reasonable perspective worth listening to, and shouldn’t be shunned without question. Which, hey, a moral that continues to be relevant!

This is the first time in my life that I have gotten to hold in my hands a real actual published book written by a friend of mine, and let me tell you, it is a GREAT experience and also this book lived up to absolutely everything I hoped for from it. Five stars, would collapse into a puddle of emotions again. And I say this without bias! I would have loved this book even if I didn't know Becca!

So The Iron Children is a scifi novella about cyborgs warriors and a robot nun and one squishy human traversing a treacherous landscape together in the midst of war, and also is about questions of identity and religious ethics and duty and kindness and freedom. I loved EVERYTHING about this, I adored all the characters, I loved the worldbuilding, I loved its careful pacing and the way it built on its ideas, I loved that it managed to pack so much into such a short book without ever feeling like it was overcrowded.

The book is told through three different POVs: the squishy human, Asher, who's a young nun-in-training getting thrown in over her head; Barghest, the leader of the cyborg warriors, whose dedication to duty is above and beyond the call of duty; and a character whose identity is a mystery until partway into the book but is definitely one of the other cyborg warriors. The first two characters get their POV sections in third person, but the mystery character's sections are in first person.

I have gone on record in the past as stating that I find it irritating when there's multiple povs and some of them are, for no reason, in a different person than the others.

BUT the key here is that there IS a reason in The Iron Children, and when there's a reason it works! It's got a destabilizing effect, to have one of the three in a different person than the other two; it shows that character as other, as separate. It works thematically! (Okay and incidentally it lets the name be hidden to allow a reveal later on as to which character this one is, which is convenient!)

And now let me go into the realm of spoilers because I have to to talk about everything else I love.

( Read more... )
ANYWAY read this book!!!

This is a fascinating novel about first contact with aliens in the relatively near future, that's doing great things around ideas of what we owe to the Earth in terms of mitigating the environmental harm we've caused through climate change and other destructive actions. Not everything about the book worked for me, but I think it is still overall very worth reading.

The basic set-up: in the near-ish future, much of the earth is now organized not around countries and nationalism, but around "dandelion networks" where you belong to the network of whatever river you live in the drainage basin for. Within that network everyone has a voice – all humans, but also their communication technology is set up to provide voices for the natural environment as well, so that any decisions properly take into account the needs of the ecosystems around them. The dandelion networks are closely entwined with their local environment and feel a great deal of pride for the way they're managing to turn things around and make human life on earth sustainable long-term. However, not everyone is part of a dandelion network; there's still some nation-states hanging on to existence, though with much less control, and also corporations have been stripped of their power but are not gone and have become basically their own little nation-states as well.

In this context, an alien ship arrives, landing in the Chesapeake network, who want to save all humans from what they see as an urgently dying planet! Who gets to decide who is communicating with the aliens on behalf of all humans? What will the various groups do to make sure their voice is heard? What values should direct everyone's actions in this fraught first contact? Judy, our viewpoint character, happens to be first on the scene when the aliens land, and ends up being the main liaison from the dandelion networks to the aliens as a result, but Judy and her priorities don't get to stand alone for long.

I love this set-up, and I love the themes the book is exploring. All the nature imagery, and the conscious hard work going into keeping the earth thriving as much as possible, and the history of activism that underlies all the dandelion networks' current work.

And the way that creating relationships is depicted as something requiring work and attention to grow them into something full of trust and understanding. Judy's relationship with her wife, Carol, is shown to be already strong and deep and loving and supportive, but Judy and Carol's relationship with their co-parents, Dinar and Athëo, is still new and fragile. But there's also the humans' relationships with their planet, and the dandelion networks' relationships with their local governments, and with the corporations, and with the aliens – and the aliens relationships within themselves as well. I love all of this! And the smaller-scale and larger-scale relationships are like, thematically resonant with each other in a very effective way.

But I think to talk about this book in further detail I'm going to need to go behind a spoiler cut!

( Read more... )

And okay yes this was a whole enormous pile of words analysing my not entirely positive feelings towards this book, but overall I think what I want to say about it is that it's interesting and thoughtful enough to be WORTH arguing with! I enjoyed thinking about it, I enjoyed spending time with these characters, there were some moments I found genuinely touching and emotional, and I argue because me and the book are both united in caring about things. So I do recommend it! And please come argue with me about this book!

A collection of short fiction by NK Jemisin. I don't have a lot to say about this collection, tbh! Jemisin's a good writer, and she has a bunch of very good stories in her. Like in almost any short story collection*, I don't love every story in the collection, but when you're reading a collection by a writer who works for you, the baseline level of worth-reading in the collection is still not bad. And some of the stories are excellent!

A few of the stories in the collection I've read before, but most of them are new to me, and the ones I already knew were worth rereading.

My biggest problem with this collection, tbh, is the ongoing war between my descriptivist values and prescriptivist instincts for language, as applies to the title of the book. "Until" as a word is actually a derivative of "till" so if you want a short form of "until," "till" is right there! You don't need to go for "'til"! That's a form of over-correction! But given the prevalence of "'til," including (obviously!) in professionally-edited writing, I think I am losing this one, and I need to learn how to accept it. Sigh. The eternal struggle.

*every story collection except Zen Cho's Spirits Abroad, where I love every single story!

Really not sure WHAT I just read or how to explain/describe it, but dang I was into it. It's kind of science fiction and fantasy at the same time, it doesn't do a lot of explaining what it's doing or how the worldbuilding works but just sort of presents it to you, and it is not linear. Its use of language - of languages - is fabulous, and the rhythm of the prose. I love how Wilson writes!!! And the way he can draw characters and worlds so well in such a short space.

And the whole thing is written with such confidence that it just carries you along through the things that don't make sense as an understanding is gradually built up in your mind of the things that matter.

The one issue is that I'm not quite sure how I feel about the ending.

( spoilers for the ending! )

The other thing is a technical issue with the ebook copy I have, which is a collection: In Our Own Worlds #2: Four LGBTQ+ Tor.com Novellas. And there are some footnotes in Sorcerer of the Wildeeps; not a lot, but the ones that are there are important. And they are placed at the end of each chapter with no link to take you from your current page to the footnote and back again. So when you get to the footnote you've entirely forgotten the context of what was being footnoted. This is highly unhelpful! I kind of want to reread in hard copy now. Or a better ebook.

Okay so this is a stand-alone book that is set in the same universe as Everina Maxwell's first novel, Winter's Orbit. It is also about two guys falling in love IN SPACE and it is so much fun!

Somewhere I saw one of those graphs with one axis being Cause Problems - Solve Problems, and the other being On Purpose - By Mistake, and with the main characters of this book placed firmly in the "cause problems on purpose" quadrant and YES and it is SO GOOD. And the best part is that they are extremely different flavours of this, but they work so well together. One of the leads is approximately as chaotic as a person can get, and clearly thrives off of it, he loves the feeling of being like, well what would happen if I did THIS completely bonkers thing on impulse and see where it goes. The other lead is the kind of person who memorizes regulations and can recite them at will, and has a very firm set of principles and morals, and is perfectly comfortable causing problems for other people via unorthodox applications of rules in order to effect what he thinks is right. TOGETHER THEY WILL - well, you'll find out.

And I love how the combination of these two characters making Choices means that the book kept on going in directions I was totally not able to anticipate. I recognized tropes, and then the narrative just zoomed RIGHT on by the expected arc of those tropes to do some other weirder thing!

It's got an excellent balance of relationship building and plot building, too. The author talks in the end-note about how it'll read for people coming it either from the romance genre or the scifi genre, and as someone who loves both, I think its way of integrating the two was perfect.

I also loved how many wonderful secondary characters the book contains, both sympathetic and less so! The sister, the aunt, the dead gen-parent, the previous governor, the governor general, the two rankers....all of them were amazing. (yes I am bad at names, how did you guess.)

And! It is about TELEPATHIC BONDING (and about pretending to be telepathically bonded!). Hot damn.

The funny thing was, as much as the book kept on doing its own thing, I was also unavoidably reminded of two other narratives I've previously read. The alien remnants stuff put me in mind of Tanya Huff's Confederation series, in terms of interacting with mysterious, powerful, and incomprehensible alien objects that can do unexpected things. And the brain powers and forced military mind-bonding to subjugate the powers of a particular type of person thing reminded me very strongly of astolat's Person of Interest fanfic Dangerous If Unbound!

Ocean's Echo is doing rather different things with both of these elements than either Huff or astolat, but it's fun that it still manages to be in conversation with other things I've read.

I thoroughly loved reading the whole thing, and kept on having to pause to like, scream silently inside my head about various aspects. Good times!!!

This book started out SO strong, with a bunch of space nuns living in a living spaceship grown from a species of slug, each of the nuns with their own personalities and foibles and strengths and weaknesses that make living together in a small, isolated community a fun challenge. And it was so good at this!!! So good!!!!!! But then we went and had plot happen.

( cut for spoilers )

When I read A Memory Called Empire I absolutely adored it and was blown away by it, and so when this sequel came out I a) bought it immediately, and then b) failed to read it for a year and a half because I was afraid it wouldn't live up to the first one.

And.....hm. A Desolation Called Peace is an excellent book, a five star book, doing many interesting things. The kind of book I want to pick into pieces because it has so many pieces TO pick; it's doing lots of things, and it's interesting and compelling and I care very much about all the characters and what's happening. But I don't love it to the degree I loved A Memory Called Empire.

I think I'm more confused about the ultimate themes that underlie everything this one is doing, is part of the problem. The first book was, among other things, about what it means to always be an outsider for whom belonging and fitting in isn't possible; about degrees of assimilation and whether they're inevitable or not, desirable or not. The sequel both continues some of that AND seems to be trying to say that there are always connections and similarities between people, no matter how different they seem, and that sometimes assimilation is the way forward. And the way they're implemented in this book makes it feel to me like those two themes were working against each other, instead of building together.

I love the thing where everything a book is doing all works together so perfectly that it creates something that's greater than the sum of its parts, and I feel like the first book did that beautifully, and this one not so much, as great as all its parts are. And it's disappointing! I think if I didn't have the first book to compare it to I would be writing a much more gushing review of this book.

I did really love many things! The complexity of the relationship between Mahit and Three Seagrass, everything about Eight Antidote and how he relates to the people around him and to the kind of world he is ensconced in, TWENTY CICADA omg he's so interesting I want to know everything about him, the subversive comic Mahit picks up in Lsel Station (I want to know more about the political teen artist stationers!), and so much more! And Martine is also just really good at writing prose that makes you want to keep reading.

I don't know. Talk to me about this book! If you've read it, what do you think? Did the management of the themes work better for you than it did for me? Am I missing something or misunderstanding something? It's possible that I just haven't cogitated over this one enough, but the hugo voting deadline is end of day TOMORROW so I wanted to get my thoughts up asap!

Omg this is so funny it's like an Andy Weir novel except the Exciting Cutting-Edge Science Things it's about are....electricity, the mysteries of ocean life, and the classification of species. Because those were new and exciting at the time Verne was writing! I get easily bored with the kinds of modern scifi novels that have merely a vague trapping of plot and character from which to hang lengthy scientific exposition, but when it's from over 150 years ago, the vibes are entirely changed, and I am here for it, lol. I mean, it's still boring and I still skimmed over a not-insignificant amount of the lists of sea creatures and their classification, but I am charmed by it instead of irritated by it?

Anyway, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is from the perspective of a gentleman scientist who is on a mission to help kill an enormous and destructive sea monster, but that monster turns out to instead be a technologically advanced submarine, and the pov character, along with his trusty servant Conseil, and also the harpooner Ned Land who struck the submarine, are captured by the captain of the submarine and are told they will never be allowed to leave again, so that the secrets of captain and ship will not be revealed.

Then the rest of the book is rapturous descriptions of scientific marvels as they travel around the world -- the 20,000 leagues of the title is the distance they travel around the globe, for the record, not the depth beneath the ocean they reach, which was a surprise to me as that's not how I'd interpreted the title.

Throughout, there are hints given of Captain Nemo's tragic past that has led him to reject the world of land-dwellers entirely and desire some sort of unspecified revenge for the unspecified tragedies of his past. But it's a noble revenge and a noble rejection by a thoroughly admirable scientific man, of course.

There are many very funny elements to the book that are definitely not intended as funny, mostly due to incongruity which my modern perspective discerns. Like the way the book is simultaneously like, "oh no it's bad to hunt the black whales, the cruel whale industry is soon going to wipe them out, what a tragedy; BUT those mean nasty sperm whales deserve to die in a complete massacre." Or some of the particularly outlandish scientific errors that the author didn't know enough to avoid. (The bends? What are the bends? We don't know her.) Or the way it sometimes feels the need to make it clear how COOL and VALUABLE an experience is by talking about how much money something they see would be worth if it was sold, despite the otherwise prevalent viewpoint that the important thing is the scientific knowledge gained. The narrative just can't help itself about making it clear that it's also CAPITALISTICALLY worthwhile to engage in scientific discovery.

Be ready for some racism if you read this book; it's about educated white Victorian-era men being world travellers so of course there are "savages" encountered at one point and other stuff like that. Unfortunate, since this is ostensibly a book about people who have entirely cut themselves off from the world of the people on land, and it STILL managed to insert this stuff.

It's also subtly classist in a way where it's not even aware enough to notice that it has any opinions about class, but just these little hints Ned Land and Conseil are not the pov character's peers and thus not really company the way Captain Nemo can be. And Ned Land and Conseil are both just entirely composed of a one-note stereotype each, with no dimension. I mean, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed both of them! But the treatment of their characters as compared to Nemo is obvious. (It's also very funny that the narrative keeps on referring to Ned by the epithet "the Canadian" as if that's the most important thing about him!)

When I reached the end of the book though, I was outraged to discover that we DON'T ACTUALLY GET TO LEARN ANY OF CAPTAIN NEMO'S SECRETS. We learn that his family is all dead, and that he wanted revenge against a particular ship, but that is the extent of the information we learn. No further details about any of the rest of the context that was alluded to exist. And NOTHING about why the rest of his crew also chose to abandon the world to live in the submarine full-time, or about where the language they all speak with each other originated, or what the crew think of these additional passengers who Nemo took on board, or any other context about any of the actually interesting plot elements. No, it was far more important to dedicate page time to fish lists.

Anyway now I want fanfic because surely SOMEONE out there has taken it upon themselves to write more about the characters Verne created!

In a surprising turn of events I actually really liked this book. I often do not get along with Valente's writing, but on rare occasions she manages to write something that works for me, and it turns out this is one!

This book began life as a short story in 2016 (The Future Is Blue), which is now the first 32 pages of the published novella. I enjoyed the short story back in the day, and it was fascinating to see where things went from there, after what was the end at the time!

It's a post-apocalyptic climate disaster story, but told from the perspective of someone for whom the flooded and garbage-filled earth is the only world she has ever known, and she loves her world and her people and her life, even though/even when things are really hard.

And a lot of really hard things do happen to her! But she always finds something to love, something to live for, something to hope for. I loved Tetley, and I loved getting to see the world through her eyes.

....huh, I did not expect to be as compelled by this book as I ended up being! I had seen a bunch of hype for it and deliberately decided not to read it because it didn't sound like my kind of thing, but then it ended up on the Hugos list for this year so I read it after all, and. It isn't exactly my thing? But I really liked it regardless!

It's a YA fantasy historical-futuristic reimagining of the story of the chinese empress Wu Zetian, with giant mecha battles.

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It's for moments like this that I work my way through the Hugo lists every year: that feeling when I pick up a book I probably would never have otherwise bothered with, and discover that it is actually 1000% my thing. This book! This book!!!!!!!!!!!

It is a book about the struggles to communicate between people of very different cultures and experiences and frameworks for understanding the world, and about what happens to a colonized planet that is no longer in contact with the rest of the universe, and about being haunted by your past, and about trying to do things and believe in things and make a difference, and about the importance of human connection and the stories we tell. It's beautiful and fascinating and emotional and so, so good.

Highly recommended!!

(also...the Dragonriders of Pern books were my first and most formative exposure to the notion of a planet colonized and then abandoned, and interacting with the technology left by the original colonizers without understanding it -- so throughout the book I kept on being inescapably reminded of how much I once loved the Pern books, except this book is uhhhhh actually good, unlike Pern, lol)

This book is very good at being the kind of book it is, and I'm very happy for it, but unfortunately it's not my kind of book. Yes, another book read for the hugos! Yes, I somehow find it rewarding to read books I don't like in service of a greater cause!

Anyway this is a YA sci-fi adventure novel, with spaceships and daring rescues and attempts to save the universe and all that, and a group of ragtag misfits working together to fight evil against all odds. Also it's interrogating the idea of being a Special Chosen One. It does all these things well! But it's just not my thing.

I found it tedious, and the characters a bit one note, and I don't enjoy action scenes, and I just don't care about Chosen One narratives even when the point being made is that it's your actions and choices that define you, rather than what you were intended to be. Also it ends with a Big New Bad Thing being discovered to make you want to read the sequel. I hate when a Big New Bad Thing is introduced in the last pages of a book!

But you know what, I'm pretty sure that if this kind of book is your thing, you'll find it a fun read. It is very earnest about the things it's doing, which is charming, and Anders is a generally good writer! (I mean, I have yet to actively like a single novel she's written, but they're always good even if not my thing.)

Well this is perhaps the most Andy Weir book it is possible for a book to be. I've only read Weir's debut, The Martian, and this is basically exactly that again but different, tbh. Lone scientist stranded in space who must science the shit out of things to save the day, shallow one-note characterization, and a narrative that is clearly enormously excited by the minute details of how the science things work.

And like, I love that for Weir, that he's found and succeeded in his niche so well, and I'm charmed by how much he loves science, but.....I do really wish he were at all better at writing people. I enjoyed The Martian a great deal, but the kind of book Weir writes feels to me like the kind of book I only have interest in reading one of. I wouldn't have even bothered to pick this up if it weren't for the Hugos.

But also, even though this book is the same kind of thing again, I think it's not as much to his strengths as The Martian!

Half the book takes place in flashbacks to the time when the main character is on earth and preparing for the crisis along with a bunch of other people, and I was just SO impatient in those sections tbh, because we already know where it leads (him going to space), and all it does is allow for more talking about science but without the same level of like, urgency and interest? Plus extra focus on interpersonal dynamics, between his various one-note characters, which I found boring and occasionally all the way to uncomfortable. And I really dislike the general narrative vibe of "oh well when it's an emergency it's helpful for someone to act like a dictator about it so this is good actually" with respect to the leader of the project, Stratt, so I kind of hated every scene she showed up in, which was most of them in the flashbacks.

And the sections of the book that take place in the "present" of the main character involve alien first contact and let me just say that Weir is not a man who understands the difficulties with cross-cultural (cross-SPECIES!) communication, and how very complicated language and translation can be! He and the alien just quickly and easily knock up a computer-translation software between them after figuring out what words in english translate to what words in the eridian language and then communicate with remarkable ease after only a few days of this effort, including very high-level abstract concepts. They even seem to have compatible senses of humour, to a degree. That is a whole bunch of wishful thinking, my guy!!! (And it also makes me wonder what else he's drastically oversimplifying to the point of hilarity in the various other science things he talks about, tbh. Or is it just that he thinks soft sciences aren't real sciences and he doesn't need to do the same degree of research into them?? Sigh.)

Also this is just an extremely petty personal thing but I don't like that Weir chose to use "astrophage" as both the plural and the singular. You have one astrophage or two astrophage or a lot of astrophage. And yes, english has some words that do that with pluralization, but they're irregular nouns, and it's weird to do that with a brand new invented noun, and it threw me off every time he referred to a whole lot of astrophage as such. (Also he capitalized astrophage on every usage which I feel even pettier about. Disagree with that choice!!)

And look. Look. I recognize that the science is what Weir is ultimately here for, so that's where he focuses most of his energy -- but I don't actually read novels to be given science lessons, and most of the time when his characters expounded on some scientific concept for paragraphs or pages, I just skipped over the lessons to get to why the thing they were talking about mattered. Because the specific detailed explanations DON'T matter to the story being told!

So all in all, this is a book that is aimed at an audience who has VERY different priorities in their fiction reading than I do, and I mostly alternated between being bored and annoyed. Weir does have a rather moreish narrative voice though, and made me want to find out how the book would end, so I was carried along through my boredom and annoyance with more ease than one might expect. And in the end the book did get me in my feels a bit. The power of friendship means a lot to me, what can I say!

So. Not the worst book, but I really didn't enjoy it overall.

Sometimes I finish a book and groan a bit at the thought of writing it up, because I don't know how to organize my thoughts into coherence, but I know I'll be happier if I do because then I'll have a better handle on my own understanding of the book!

So this is a sequel to Catfishing on Catnet, and after the exciting events of that book Steph and her mom are trying to settle down and live a "normal" life, now that the threat of her dad is gone. But because of a number of reasons, including her friendship with the AI CheshireCat, Steph gets drawn into trying to save the world from another AI. Among other things.

There's a lot that's good about the book, and I really enjoyed it a lot, when I wasn't totally stressed out with worry about what was going to happen to these kids. I felt so much for Nell, doing her best to escape the fundamentalist religious cult she was raised in but not yet sure how to feel confident in who she is outside of it. And Steph and her mom are doing their best after the chaos and trauma of the last many years but still struggling to learn healthy ways of relating to each other and to the world. And they're all in SO MUCH DANGER! As well as Nell and Steph's respective girlfriends, and their various other friends, and tbh most humans??

But one thing that made me laugh was how much I enjoyed all the adults in this YA novel......signs you've gotten old, I guess. (other signs you've gotten old: I just realized I referred to the main characters as kids in the previous paragraph.) But hot damn, Nell's dad's polycule! Steph's grandmother! the random lesbian activist in whose house they take refuge at one point!

I appreciated that there were understandable explanations for why a lot of these kids would not feel comfortable going to the adults in their lives for help, and also about interference in communication when they DID try, so that various excellent adults could be present and part of the story while still allowing for the usual YA thing of making sure the teens are the ones to save the day. Nicely done.

However. A lot of the plot in this book is kicked off because of all these people using what are honestly EXTREMELY sketchy apps, and it takes people forever to be like "hmm maybe there's something concerning about this app" EVEN AFTER it's convinced them to do all sorts of things that any reasonable person would be suspicious of. The cult's app, sure, it's a cult, that checks out. But the other apps???

Anyway as long as I turned up my dial in suspension-of-disbelief alllllll the way up, I think it was a good book. But that was a heck of a lot of belief to suspend, tbh.

Okay was this review helpful to me? might it be helpful to you? idk on either point but here we are.