sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: space

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! )

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 )

The third book in the Locked Tomb ~~trilogy~~ quartet! I had to reread the first two books because like, this series may be great but it is also MEGA confusing and I already struggle enough with remembering what happened in previous books when the new book in a series comes out! This time I went into Gideon the Ninth armed with an illustrated guide to all the cavaliers and necromancers, which house each belongs to, and what various names/titles they all go by. This helped ENORMOUSLY in being able to follow the dang thing, and I had a much better experience than my first go. And then, having been able to follow the first book made following Harrow the Ninth much easier too! I knew who Ianthe was, for example, and could understand her character better, and was capable of having opinions about her!

So then I felt as prepared as I could be to go into Nona the Ninth.

And it was GREAT. Was it also confusing? Yes, absolutely. Being confused is the Normal State Of Being when interacting with these books, in my humble opinion. But I understood enough! And oh gosh there are many amazing things about it!

Except that the first thing I did upon finishing reading it was go to my rss reader and read through all the tumblr posts, so now I kind of feel like all the important things have already been said by other people, which makes it much harder to write a review. Oops.

But I cared so much about so many characters, and I have so much admiration for Tamsyn Muir's writing (she uses words so deliciously, and also is great at creating imagery!), and I cannot WAIT to find out what happens in Alecto the Ninth!

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!

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.

This is a book exactly in line with what one would expect based on the previous works in this series, but somehow this one didn't land all the way for me, and I'm not sure why.

Did I like reading about a bunch of different aliens all dealing with their own stuff but doing their best to be reasonable to each other when unexpectedly stuck together for a multi-day emergency? Sure! But I never felt exactly invested, the way I did for the previous books. It was merely a mildly nice way to spend a couple hours. Which isn't a bad thing for a book to achieve, but is not quite what I hope for out of Chambers. Disappointing. :(

The thing about this series that has been nagging at me from the first book, but haven't been able to articulate to myself until now, is that it is simultaneously too hopeful and not hopeful enough. It makes it hard to believe in the hopeful future the books are clearly trying to work towards. ( cut for spoilers for the end of this book ) And one of the the other effects of this hope/hopelessness is it also kind of makes me feel like the efforts at diversity are asking for an ally cookie instead of feeling like what would actually happen in the version of history posited by the series. Given how sexist/racist/homophobic/etc the powers that be are, would they really be letting all these people into space? Even given the dire urgency caused by the asteroid? Bigoted people will shoot themselves in their own foot facilitate their continued bigotry tbh!!

I rated the previous books in this series highly and wrote positive reviews, but I had a sense of unease all along that I just ignored because I couldn't figure out what I was reacting to. I'm still not sure I'm able to fully explain my position here, but. The above at least points towards it.

Anyway, let me talk more about this book specifically! This book focuses on a different female astronaut than the Lady Astronaut herself. The hero of this book is Nicole Wargin, caught between her professional ambitions and her role as a political spouse to support her husband. I really enjoyed this aspect of the story. But the main driving plot of the book is: there's one or more saboteurs on the moon, endangering everyone in the nascent colony there! And this was EXTREMELY STRESSFUL for me to read about, which made the whole book super hard for me to actually read. I nearly gave up on it several times.

This was made harder by the fact that I was reading it while away in a provincial park on a canoe trip with no internet access, so I couldn't google for spoilers to lower my stress levels as I otherwise would have!

I also was not a fan of the fact that ( spoilers! )

Anyway I do overall still like this series, but not as much as I once did.

The marketing for a book does a lot of work in terms of setting up expectations for what kind of a book you're reading, and honestly setting correct expectations is super important. It lets the right kind of readers find the book, and it lets the readers be in the right mindset to appreciate the kind of thing the book in question is doing.

All of which is to say: ( I guess this is spoilers, given that it's information the cover copy doesn't want you to know )

A good book, and a book that I think I would even say I mostly liked, but a book I have complicated feelings about in the end.

So Martha Wells just tricked me into reading a murder mystery, didn't she. I don't read a lot of those! Well -- I read a lot of them by two specific authors and nothing else.

(...wait, were any of the previous murderbot books murder mysteries and I just failed to notice??)

Anyway this is the latest Murderbot novella and it is excellent as expected, I love Murderbot and this was a satisfying book to read, and is there anything else really to say? If you love Murderbot then this book is wonderful and it's probably something you've already read or are intending to read. If you haven't read Murderbot yet then start at the beginning because it's truly worth it, but this book is probably not the place to start.

A few years ago there was a novel-length work of m/m original fiction posted to AO3 called "Course of Honour" and I read it and I loved it and then I reread it several more times. And then some acquiring editor with excellent taste purchased it for publishing!

Winter's Orbit is the updated, edited, published version of that origfic and it is even BETTER and I love ittttttttt. It's a delightful addition to my slowly growing collection of queer space opera, and even the cover commits. It is very Bisexual Flag Colours In Space and I commend the cover designer for their choices.

Anyway the book is about an Arranged Marriage For Politics Reasons with a subplot of Who Killed Jainan's Previous Husband And Who Else Do They Want To Kill (For Politics Reasons) and it is delicious. Two people who are very different from each other and wary of their marriage must learn how to get along and how to be supportive of each other, with a timeline of being able to present a good face to the public within a month because of treaty reasons! Both are very competent at very different things and both contribute materially to making important things happen, while doubting their own worth! Also there are a bunch of secondary non-romantic relationships that are deeply important to the main characters as well!

Kiem and Jainan, the lead characters in the romance, are both wonderful and I love them both very much. And I love that even though both of them have a history of not being valued for who they are, they both see in the other a person worth valuing and admiring. And they learn to trust and like each other, and are willing to do so much for each other, and it's amazing. And okay, maybe they get to love a little fast (they've only known each other a month!!!) but they do go through a Lot together in that month so I'm very willing to be understanding.

(Bel, Kiem's aide, is a definite favourite character as well btw. Her arc is GREAT.)

I love that one of the things updated for the professionally published version of this book is expanded quantities of worldbuilding, because the original was honestly pretty light on anything but the (admittedly excellent) feels. I'm always there for worldbuilding, and the added content is great, except now I just want even more. The author has unleashed a hunger within me!

It's fascinating the way that this is set in the context of an empire that annexed a minor planet (Kiem is from the imperial family and Jainan is from the annexed planet), but where the empire itself is small beans in the broader context, being only 7 planets in size, and having basically no power when it comes to the universe-wide political shenanigans; I want to know more about this. I want to know more about the radical Thean students. I would love to know more about the Emperor! Tell me more about the remnants! More about the Iskat planetary ecosystem! More about Thean clan heraldry! Differing perceptions of gender amongst the different cultures that make up the Iskat empire! The culture and history of the other 5 planets in the empire! I am insatiable.

A retelling of The Secret Garden IN SPACE! And it's really well done and gave me feelings.

( I guess everything is spoilers? )

Anyway it's a free self-published ebook so if you want to read it you can download the pdf uhhhhhh SOMEWHERE, I lost the link and googling it isn't helping me find it. But it looks like you can read it chapter by chapter on the author's patreon if you subscribe to it, at least!

Well I kind of disappeared from view here for a while! I just got kind of tired and overwhelmed. But some rest has done me good and I'm back with another book post. Today's book thoughts are for two novellas by the same author that I read back to back so I figured I might as well post them together.

A Duet for Invisible Strings, by Llinos Cathryn Thomas

A nice little fantasy f/f novella, featuring two musicians. I liked it a lot, and I loved Heledd, and the slow reveal of what was going on with her. But the ending felt pretty abrupt, and the off-balance power dynamics throughout made me feel uneasy about how this relationship will work out - Heledd looks up to Rosemary so much, sees her as the one who is competent and in control, and there's a ten year age gap and they met when Heledd's pretty young and also she works for Rosemary. Which would have been fine, if the book was interested in exploring how these power dynamics affected their relationship, but it wasn't. So I wanted to love this book, but it wasn't quite there for me.

Sparks Fly, by Llinos Cathryn Thomas

Unfortunately this one works for me even less than A Duet for Invisible Strings. This one is a sci-fi f/f novella, featuring two women who work in a zero-gravity performance art form, one as a performer and the other as a teacher.

I struggled with understanding the performance art form in question - the performers are in antigravity pods, and the display seems to be mostly about the light coming from the pods? So it feels like there's much less scope for the artistry of the performer, if it's just about zooming around in little space pods while the performer isn't even visible. And it even talks about how it's possible to program the pods to do the routine themselves! So what's the performer in there for then?? It sounds like the only art is in the choreography, and the performers are just there for no reason.

It's possible I'm not properly visualising or understanding the art form, but as it is, it just didn't make sense to me. So that was one major barrier to me, that I couldn't appreciate the thing that these two women had dedicated their lives to.

The other issue, which is even more important to me, is that the shift in relationship dynamics between the two of them felt off to me. It's an enemies-to-friends-to-lovers storyline, but honestly both of them start out fairly unlikeable in how self-centred and arrogant they each are, and their shift to first appreciation of each other and then love feels to me unearned from what the reader is actually shown on the page.

It's too bad that neither of these two novellas worked for me! But I really liked the short story I've read by Llinos Cathryn Thomas before ("Storm Story" in Consolation Songs), so I'm not going to give up on giving her a try just yet.

As with Gideon the Ninth, it took a long time of reading before I got invested in Harrow the Ninth. But it was even longer for HtN -- I was well over halfway through before I really started caring. The thing is, I find Tamsyn Muir to be a charismatic writer with interesting ideas, but that can only take a person so far!

A lot of the book is about Harrow just sort of....drifting along and reacting to things as they happen, without any particular wants or goals or anything. And there are some very good plot-relevant reasons why this is the case, but I think it gets in the way of helping the reader find reasons to care to keep reading, when the viewpoint character you're reading about doesn't seem to care about much of anything or anyone. There's no narrative or emotional drive, no "can't want to see what happens next!"

Anyway eventually things started feeling more interesting and relevant to me, and I started caring a bunch, and I think when I compare the parts of GtN I was invested in vs the parts of HtN I was invested in, HtN works for me SO much more. It's less directly a horror novel (though there's still uhhhh plenty of gore), and there were fewer major player characters for me to keep track of so it was less confusing. And also it's a book about ( hmmm I guess this is spoilers now )

Some misc final thoughts: Muir has successfully taught me a new word, I've never come across "tergiversation" before; this book reads in places like its author is someone for whom the Sabriel-Lirael-Abhorsen books were formative; yep the memes were indeed rather jarring, at least the ones I was able to notice/recognise.

Third and final in the Interdependency trilogy, and by this point in the series I was finding myself....bored. Look, as I said in my reviews on the previous books in this trilogy, the characterizations are shallow and the narrative tone is lightweight, even when the book is dealing with some fairly serious issues. I'm not given any reason to care about anything in this series, and it turns out there's only so far I can be carried along with nothing but easy read prose and kinda interesting ideas to hold my attention. I almost didn't even bother reading this book.

But in the end, well, the library ebook was right there, and I did more or less want to know how things would be wrapped up, so I essayed a quick read.

And yup, it's more of the same. Cardenia and Marce continue to be so bland as to be presenceless and thus extraordinarily boring to read about, Kiva and Nadashe continue to be mildly fun watching be their one-note selves, politics and science happen. I couldn't even bring myself to be annoyed about a major thing that happens in the last half of the book that would ordinarily be a thing I HATE in a book, because I just didn't care that much.

Oh well. This book is not aimed at an audience of me and that's fine. Probably I'm going to be more cautious with bothering to pick up Scalzi books going forward, because I am recognizing more and more that he does trend towards not being interested in the same kinds of things that I am interested in.