bloodygranuaile

Spent more of the long weekend sitting around rereading Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy, which is the further adventures of Breq Mianaai, formerly the troop carrier Justice of Toren. Most of this one is still spent in and around Athoek Station, although for civil war reasons quite a lot of it is also spent hiding out in gate-space, between Athoek System and the Ghost System. Gate-space is more fun than you’d think since it allows us little breathers to hang out with all the insane people Breq has collected on her journey, including Presger Translator Zeiat, who likes to drink fish sauce and is so glad she’s not Translator Dlique; an ancillary from the long-lost, pre-Radch spaceship Sphene, who is rude and snarky to everybody except sometimes Zeiat; Mercy of Kalr, who is learning things from Breq that are emotionally difficult for Breq to deal with; and cross-class lovers Lieutenants Ekalu and Lieutenant Seivarden, who are on a long and painfully slow journey toward Seivarden being ever so slightly less of a self-absorbed asshole. There’s also a single instance of the shittier Anaander Mianaai, who manages to royally piss off Athoek Station, to satisfyingly funny results. The ending definitely feels like a setup to further books, and also makes extremely explicit that the Point (with a capital P) that Leckie is making here is that “endings” are just the beginnings of other things and politics is never over, but it does appear that Breq did succeed in her mission of absolutely fucking up Anaander Mianaai’s whole deal, so that was nice. Overall, still a great, fun entry in the “Disaster Queers in Space” subgenre of space opera. I’m very glad I reread it.

On a recent trip to Vermont I indulged myself in the purchase of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, and my girlfriend indulged me with buying the two sequels to read herself and then to promptly hand over into my possession so they could stay together and I wouldn’t blow up my books-purchasing count.

Ancillary Justice is a big fun space opera from the point of view of an AI, which is a type of science fiction that I have a big weakness for (see also: my beloved Murderbot). “Breq” used to be a big ship but is now only one human body. This reduction in stature has not stopped her from being on a mission of revenge against the many-bodied ruler of the Radch empire, Anaander Mianaai. This mission of revenge brings her to an ice planet full of (justifiably) cranky provincials where she on purpose finds a scientist with a useful antiquities collection and accidentally finds a former lieutenant of hers named Seivarden, who is herself an antiquity, as she once got stuck in a suspension pod for a thousand years and then woke up to find everyone she’s ever known dead. Seivarden didn’t handle this well and wandered off out of the Radch to do drugs for a bit before Breq scoops her up and saves her life, basically against her will. Breq pretends to be a foreign tourist until she maneuvers herself into a position to get an audience with Anaander Mianaai, or at least some of Anaander Mianaai. Breq ends up being suborned into a bunch of inter-Anaander Mianaai politics even though if she had her druthers she’d just shoot all the Anaander Mianaais on both sides of her internal conflict.

At the time this book was published it was subjected to a lot of discourse and now, with the discourse in the back mirror, I was wondering if it would hold up. I think it does. Without a bunch of discourse about people bugging out about pronoun use in the Radch… well, you get used to it after a few pages and then it’s a fun space opera about a bunch of traumatized military goons doing revenge and intrigue and hinting at the threat posed by bigger, weirder, more powerful forces than the Radch, although of course we don’t meet the Presger yet because that is what sequels are for. There is explosive space combat and fussy imperial shit about manners and tea. It’s a great time.

Oh no! I’m now out of Murderbot to reread!

I reread all of Fugitive Telemetry in one sitting, because I’m still 10% sick and welched out of doing literally anything else at all that evening. I regret nothing.

This one is a straight-up murder mystery, where someone has been mysteriously murdered on Preservation Station even though that sort of thing never happens. Murderbot reluctantly joins forces with the human-and-augmented-human Preservation Station Security team to collaborate on solving the murder and also, at Dr. Mensah’s explicit directive, to improve its working relationship with them. In attempting to figure out whodunit they end up exposing both a crime ring (the good kind, i.e., the crime is breaking Corporation Rim “contract labor” laws) and some corporate espionage (DEFINITELY the bad kind). Murderbot has to learn how to do crime-solving in a non-surveillance-state, which it finds frustrating but which I loved. Gurathin continually saves Murderbot’s ass and Murderbot is too self-loathing to realize that Gurathin doesn’t actually hate it anymore. Murderbot and Gurathin are just similarly task-oriented and it is clear to ME that Gurathin is taking care of Murderbot, he’s just not touchy-feely about it, which Murderbot OUGHT to be able to RECOGNIZE except that it doesn’t want to. Anyway. I’m definitely normal about Murderbot and the Preservation survey team, I promise.

I was having a slow morning at work Tuesday, during a week that I had been assured would be very busy (the busy has not happened yet), so I took a short break mid-morning to pick up my copy of Tamsyn Muir’s Nona the Ninth, which the bookseller had to pick out of a giant pile of pre-orders. I was pleased that the pile, and therefore my copy, had black-edged pages.

Having decided that I couldn’t attend the launch party in Brookline because I thought I would have to work late, but then not in fact having to work late, I consoled myself by curling up with some fancy (sort-of) coffee and binge-reading the shit out of it, with only a few snack breaks.

First of all I am pleased to report that my guess on who Nona is–both the body, which was pretty obvious, and the soul in it, which I flatter myself was somewhat less so–was correct, although there was a lot I did not predict and could not possibly have guessed about both the consciousness that is Nona and also everything else. John did overtly confirm a bunch of stuff that I had previously picked up on but hadn’t been said in so many words about before the Resurrection. Also, like, wow, John is such a fascinating character (he sucks, of course, but he’s a great character).

It is entirely possible that, despite what Tamsyn and her editors say, Nona did not absolutely need to be an entirely separate book, but I still enjoyed it thoroughly so I am overall pleased that it did turn into a separate book. (I also have a soft spot for quartets; nobody writes quartets anymore.) Trying to figure out what’s going on through the eyes of Nona, the most ignorant character alive (in her defense, she is only six months old), is often challenging but at least as often a smugly pleasant exercise in dramatic irony, since the reader has presumably read the first two books and Nona has not. The constant oscillation between “aha I know things Nona doesn’t go me” and “help I have no idea what the fuck is going on” is probably not going to be every readers’ cup of tea, but it probably is exactly the cup of tea of the sorts of readers who made it this far into the series anyway, because we are all gluttons for punishment, especially if that punishment is very funny.

I’m not entirely sure what to say that wouldn’t constitute spoilers because in this series the terrain of understanding of what is going on shifts every couple hundred pages. We get some fun new characters in Blood of Eden, including the long-suffering and appropriately named cell commander/faction leader We Suffer and We Suffer and the deeply obnoxious Pash. Nona works at a school where she is in a gang of hilarious children, mostly of the preteen and early teen variety, who have hilarious names like Hot Sauce and Beautiful Ruby and Honesty (it’s funny because he’s a pathological liar), except for Kevin, who is named Kevin. The six-legged dog on the cover is named Noodle. Noodle is a good boy.

We also get John’s whole accounting of the Resurrection and the events leading up to it, which is fascinating, because John is a dick, but he’s telling the story and manages to sometimes make a plausible-sounding case for how he’s just some guy and the whole situation got away from him because so many of the other players in the story are also dicks. I think it’s also great because earlier in the series the question of “What if God was just some guy” comes off basically as a comical conceit, but by the end of this we’ve taken a real serious deep dive into why it’d be very bad for God to be just some guy, and also John’s constant “I’m just some guy” schtick paired with the “setting himself up as God” thing makes me want to throttle him (he’s not even wrong per se about either side of it; it’s just an infuriating combination). I do have some sympathy for his palpable frustration with the half-dozen trillionaires’ selective animal welfare concerns. There’s people committing crimes against humanity left and right and John gets discredited not for any of his crimes against humanity, but for his crimes against hamburger meat. Fucking typical.

The main plotline for most of the book is that the Resurrection Beast known as Number Seven is hanging out over the planet that Nona is hiding out on with Pyrrha and Camilla Hect and the ghost of Palamedes Sextus. This drives any necromancers in the vicinity mad, but there aren’t that many, at least not anymore since Number Seven has apparently been hanging out there for a while. There’s a lot of complicated plotting and intrigue between various cells of Blood of Eden and defectors from the Nine Houses, including the entire Sixth House, which seceded from the Empire and is now being held hostage by a particularly hardline Blood of Eden wing. Ianthe, piloting the preserved corpse of Naberius Tern, shows up to negotiate on behalf of the Emperor and to generally be a douchebag to everyone about everything. She arrives with a SURPRISE COMPANION that has upset the fandom greatly (in the best way). A lot of politics and fighting happens. Nona understands basically none of the political situation but her preternatural skills at reading body language mean she does pick up on a lot of information that is useful for the reader and would probably be useful for the other characters if Nona communicated it to them in a timely fashion, which she frequently fails at, because all sorts of shit keeps happening all the time and Nona is an easily overwhelmed baby.

As usual this book is incredibly Catholic in a way that really highlights just how fucked up Catholicism is, and is stuffed with references to the Bible and Shakespeare and Poe and ancient Greek drama and also the internet. This continues to be the only book series written truly and completely in my native tongue as a terminally online millennial nerd. I am, for Reasons, trying to remember what year Cask of Amontillado memes got really big on Tumblr. Might have to go read some classics to keep myself occupied until Alecto comes out.

It is almost time for Nona the Ninth and, in the interest of being minimally confused (unlike when I first read Harrow), I figured that meant it was time for a reread of Gideon the Ninth (and hopefully I’ll be able to fit in Harrow the Ninth sometime in the next two weeks as well).

While I continue to largely enjoy this book because it is pitched directly at me personally in a manner that makes me want to bang my spoon on the table and chant “One of us, one of us,” I also am genuinely hooked on wanting to know what the goddamn deal is in this Catholic-but-worse-because-God-is-just-some-douchebag Empire. Rereading definitely let me pick up on things I’d missed or just sort of blown past in earlier reads. Rereading also lets me gain a deeper appreciation for just how fucked up everyone in this series is, which is always fun.

Am I gonna reread this series every year? I will at least until it’s all published.

Two friends recommended Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire to me in a very short space of time, which was really just as much prompting as I needed to pick it up when, three cocktails deep, I stumbled across it being sold at a steep discount in the middle of Harvard Square. Did I have any idea what it was about? Not at all! But it’s a Tor book and it seemed vaguely in the Disaster Queers in Space genre, and many of not most of my favorite recent discoveries have been Tor books about Disaster Queers in Space, so I was willing to pick it up on the strength of the author’s name being closely networked with the likes of Tamsyn Muir, Ann Leckie, and Martha Wells.

This strategy did not fail me and I am reasonably confident in saying that if you liked the Imperial Radch trilogy you may also like this book as well. It is a big sprawling space opera featuring an outsider who gets caught up in the inner machinations of an empire at war with itself, although in this case it is also at war with the small independent mining territory that our protagonist, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare, hails from. It’s got culture clashes and palace intrigue and a conspiracy that requires several hundred pages of complicated uncovering, and some Deep Thoughts on cultural assimilation and empire, and an understated sapphic romance. In an unusual twist the big all-devouring evil empire here seems to be based on pre-Conquest Aztec civilization, which makes the hostile alien threat outside of both Stationer and Teixcalaanli space just that bit more intriguing as a plot point. (I assume fighting the alien hostels is the subject of A Desolation Called Peace, and I plan to get around to verifying that assumption reasonably soon, once I… uh… *looks at the TBR pile of doom and sweats*)

The core of the plot here is a murder mystery--Ambassador Mahit’s predecessor has mysteriously died, and the last 15 years or so of records of his memory that Mahit ought to have had access to have died with him, so she and her cultural liaison, Three Seagrass, and Three Seagrass’ mischievous best friend, Twelve Azalea, have to try to solve the murder and figure out what sort of machinations the previous ambassador was involved in and try not to get killed themselves. All the Teixcalaanlitzlim have names that are like [number] [common object] even though all the other empire words are jaw-cracking pseudo-Aztec sci-fi monstrosities like “Teixcalaanlitzlim,” but you get used to it, especially if you read a lot of sci-fi. It gives the book a very specific texture about what’s being translated and what’s not; I’m sure Martine has her own logic about how she handled it but I was mostly just rolling with it because I wanted to find out who was going to get into what sort of trouble next.

Despite it being a reasonably big novel--at 450 pages, it’s not that long for a space opera, but it’s not exactly short either--I read the whole thing in the space of about 36 hours, which did mean I ended up neglecting everything else I was supposed to do yesterday, but oh well. It’s going on the shelf of queer faves with slick black covers, now that it’s been moved off the shelf of queer TBRs with slick black covers.

 

Upon hearing my complaints that there was a six-month wait on Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells’ newest Murderbot novella, at the BPL, a friend very kindly bought be a copy from Porter Square Books, which is very exciting because now I have on in hard copy, with the spiffy cover art an everything, and not just in ebook. In a daring adventure of my own I managed to swing by PSB to pick it up before my second vaccination appointment yesterday and still squeaked into Hynes just in time to get jabbed a few minutes before my 5 o’clock appointment. I do not particularly recommend this course of action, especially not the part where I got stuck going four miles an hour behind the world’s slowest kombucha truck in Inman Square, but I do not regret it. 

With no side effects in the hours immediately following the shot except my left arm feeling a little weird and some satisfyingly dismal rain outside, I was happy to curl up last night with some tea and read the entire novella in one sitting. 

This one takes place on Preservation Station, sometime between the events of Exit Strategy and Network Effect. The plot of this one is a murder mystery, which is very exciting for everyone except Murderbot, since Preservation is pretty low on murders. (Murderbot, of course, would rather watch TV.) There is a lot of petty bullshit because Murderbot and Preservation’s security division do not get along real well, which is why it is so emotionally satisfying when they have to work together on solving this murder until they all grudgingly learn to respect each other and start getting along, but not in a touchy-feely sort of way. Murderbot is a big asset on this team because it can talk computer-to-computer with bots, who are consistently the best and funniest characters. 

It’s also nice to see more of Preservation Station, which, while not precisely being a socialist utopia, is at least a very marked social-democratic contrast to the corporatist hellscape of the Corporation Rim. Like, it provides free food and healthcare, and slavery is illegal, which don’t sound like very high bars but the Corporation Rim is, you know, a technofeudal corporate dystopia. Another interesting thing about Preservation is that it is not an all-seeing corporate surveillance state, which provides some interesting challenges for Murderbot as it attempts to figure out what’s going on without being able to just rewind and watch every single second of everything on camera. It was a very good storytelling use of putting constraints on a character, and I would love to see more of that type of thing. 

Anyway, I heard recently that Martha Wells has been contracted to write three more Murderbot novellas, and I cannot wait! 

Another day, another Murderbot novella. A mere week after starting the series I knocked out the fourth one, Martha Wells’ Exit Strategy. In this one, Murderbot’s favorite human has gone missing, most likely kidnapped by the extra-evil corporation GrayCris, and probably as a direct result of the shenanigans Murderbot had very helpfully gotten up to in the previous book. 

 Immediately upon finishing All Systems Red I began reading Martha Wells’ Artificial Condition, the second novella in her Murderbot Diaries series. In this one, Murderbot has fucked off from the planet in which they were supposed to be granted “citizen” status--but a qualified form of citizenship that basically resembles a modern-day employment visa instead of, like, literally be property, but if you know anything about modern-day employment visas you’ll know that they are not the actual same thing as citizenship rights--and is now on a journey to uncover the mystery of their tragic past (the one that caused them to name themself “Murderbot”). In journeying to Ganaka Pit to research the Ganaka Pit Incident, Murderbot befriends a research transport pilot bot that they name ART (it stands for Asshole Research Transport), is hired as a security consultant by a group of human researchers (Murderbot seems to like researchers and scientists, inasmuch as they like any humans), and liberates a sexbot (but like, not in a sexy way). While this is not a very large cast of characters, it is quite a lot for Murderbot, especially the ones they have to pretend to be a human in front of. Murderbot is relatably bad at things like “eye contact” and “not acting weird” and is frequently surprised when passing as a human means that people occasionally listen to them. Murderbot attempts to pick up some human mannerisms, like sighing when people say stupid things. It’s so much fun.

 

I said I was going to read everything Tamsyn Muir has ever written this year and I meant it, but also I can’t find my copy of The Deepwater Bride right now, so instead I popped on over to Tor.com and scrounged up the hilariously titled Locked Tomb short story The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex. This one concerns the academic adventures of Camilla Hect and Palamedes Sextus when they are thirteen years old, although thirteen-year-olds with a remarkable ability to keep a straight face when confronted with a historical figure named “Doctor Sex.” 

The basic plotline here is a short mystery about a study that has been sealed for 460 years and yet, when it is finally opened, it contains--among much 460-year old academic detritus--a pair of skeleton hands that are unambiguously between 200 and 210 years old, no more, no less. Our bright young teen must therefore do some detectiving, which they do, and it is all very satisfying.

There are also lots of little tidbits and references dropped in about other things that happen in the world of the Locked Tomb, including some correspondence from Dulcinea Septimus, some tantalizing hints about the Resurrection, and a few jokes at the expense of other houses. There are also many excellent jokes about academic bureaucracy. 

Overall, a very good, if brief, read. Now I will go back to trying to find my copy of The Deepwater Bride and whinging piteously until Alecto the Ninth is published.