bloodygranuaile

I have committed myself to reading one book each month of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, so that I can be prepared for Readercon 2026 when we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first publication in the series. Ordinary you’d think enthusiasm for this would be left to people who are already fans of the series, but I love a reading challenge and I do not love being left out of whatever the hot topic of discussion is at Readercon, so I’ve got a lot of books to read, only most of which are in my library’s network! I read Shards of Honor several years ago, which I remember was fun although I don’t really remember what happened in it other than that there was lots of escaping from hostage situations. The next installment–chronologically, though not in publication order–is Barrayar, which follows the adventures of Cordelia Vorkosigan, nee Naismith, as she arrives on the militaristic, feudal planet of Barrayar with her husband and her natural pregnancy, and is immediately besieged by the plot happening.

On Barrayar, the old emperor is dying and the new emperor is a four-year-old boy. Cordelia’s husband, Aral Vorkosigan, is chosen by the old dying emperor as Regent until Emperor Gregor reaches his majority at age twenty. This puts Cordelia, Aral, and the unborn heir to the Vorkosigan countship in the middle of a very volatile political situation, which Cordelia frankly has very little respect for, since she thinks the traditional Barrayan attitudes toward class and militarism are both thoroughly idiotic. Cordelia has to learn about Barrayar quickly whether she likes what she finds or not, though, both because she lives here now, and because plot keep happening to her that will require her to assume a variety of disguises, build alliances with people she didn’t already know, cut deals, execute plans on the fly, and other adventure shenanigans where cultural incompetence could prove very, very costly. A couple assassination attempts on Aral and Cordelia, an emergency surgery to transfer Cordelia’s unborn baby into an artificial uterus so that it can be subjected to emergency medical experiments, and a political coup by one of the douchey super-conservative counts sends Cordelia into a sequence of planetary wildernesses that she’s not used to–hills, caves, the poor neighborhoods of cities. Much of these shenanigans involve very young children–at one point Cordelia is responsible for hiding the young Emperor; at another point she has to rescue an also-pregnant friend and help her have her baby in the least convenient time and place Bujold could think of; late in the book she has to heist her own baby out of the city before the artificial uterus fails from lack of maintenance.

Despite the bad dreams it gave me about babies with fucked-up bones, this was overall a pretty fun set of “competence porn” action-adventure shenanigans. Cordelia is smart and resourceful and gathers up a ragtag band o’ misfits whose various competencies are either ignored or rejected due to Barrayar’s very narrow ideas of appropriate behavior, and together they survive various horrors and eventually show everybody who exactly it is they’re messing with, that sort of thing. Fun and satisfying, and I hope the rest of the series remains as enjoyable even though I understand we are ditching Cordelia as our main character and will be going most of the rest of the series with the medical experimentation baby as the protagonist. So we’ll see how that goes.

I have finished the first book of the year! It’s later than I intended and later than usual even for a 700-page book (usually I read the first 600 pages in December and then I can finish it on January 1 or 2), but I’ve done it! The honors this year go to Nicola Griffith’s Menewood, the long-awaited sequel to Hild, which further follows the fictional adventures of the early life of the renowned seventh-century abbess Hild of Whitby.

Menewood kicks off a few months or so after the end of Hild (if I recall correctly) and things seem to be going well for the now 18-year-old Hild. She is the Lady of Elmet alongside her husband and secret half-brother Cian Boldcloak, sworn gesith to King Edwin and Lord of Elmet, and she is pregnant. Elmet is small and under-defended but they are building it up, and Hild and Cian are also secretly supplying a refuge in a hidden valley within the boglands of Elmet: the titular Menewood.

Hild hopes they won’t have to use it, but the winds of war are blowing, and this promising beginning–all the things Hild has won for herself by the end of the first book–are set up pretty much just to be brutally knocked down, so Hild has to start building all over, and that’s what makes up most of the book. King Edwin is threatened by a Southern king named Cadwallon, who loathes the Yffings and wants to burn them and everything they have ever touched (which is… most of northern England) to the ground and kill them all and steal their gold. He has essentially no interest in ruling Northumbria; he just wants to loot it and make sure nobody else within six degrees of separation from the Yffings gets to rule it either. Cadwallon has allied with another southern king named Penda, who is slimier if less psychotic, and taking out Penda is shaping up to the subject of Book 3, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Cadwallon and Penda manage to pincer a desperate and pretending-to-be-confident Edwin Yffing and decapitate him, killing off a good half of the cast we’ve met so far in the process, including Cian Boldcloak. Hild is grievously injured in the battle that she wasn’t able to avoid being caught in, despite being literally nine whole months pregnant, and as you can probably imagine that doesn’t go well for baby. With the help of her former slave Gwladus and her young runner Morud, Hild manages not to die, but she’s pretty severely injured, both physically and emotionally. I must say that Griffith does an excellent job of building up the dread and sense of claustrophobic inevitability leading up to Hild’s darkest hour, and having read nothing at all about the book beforehand I was definitely caught up in the oh no how are they going to get out of this one, I don’t see how they’re going to get out of this type of anticipatory dread and it is because, broadly speaking, most of them don’t get out of this. The first third of the book is some of the bleakest shit I’ve read in a while, and it was hard to read more than a couple dozen pages at a time. It was very good January reading after all.

Menewood, however, serves its purpose, and after Hild spends a couple months recuperating with a bunch of poor fisherfolk who live on the very edges of what passed for civilization even in seventh-century Britain, a bit of tough-love therapy from Gwladus, and a surprise visit from some of Hild’s former group of mutilated spearmen–the Fearsomes, technically sworn to King Edwin when he was still alive–Hild and co. make their way to Menewood and start slowly and carefully rebuilding, gathering allies and news and resources as Hild starts to put together a plan to take down Cadwallon Reaver and install a suitably sensible, non-psychotic king of Northumbre. This involves a lot of fun intrigue and heists and letter-writing and diplomacy and teaching a bunch of traditional gesith types how to do things like “sneak” and “steal” and “ambush very quietly” instead of always charging honorably into battle face-first with your flag flying. After the bleak and brutal first part of the book, it’s incredibly satisfying to watch a complex plot come together, with all sorts of characters and resources and stuff, and all go off magnificently, as Hild takes the offensive back and pulls all the squabbling factions of People Cadwallon Has Fucked Over into one big, complicated, sneakily implacable instrument of revenge. I feel like I just ran a marathon and can’t wait to see them take on Penda (although I am hoping this campaign does not necessitate the total destruction of everything Hild built over the course of this book, both because we’ve already done that and because I’m not sure I could take it).

The texture of this series is great if you like really immersive historical fiction; it is less great if you don’t like reading about bees and sausage-making and tonsures and sealing-wax and 500 different people all named Os-something and basically every detail of life in seventh-century Northumbria that a character could possibly run across while interacting with every level of society. I personally love this shit, although there were a couple nits I had to pick with some of the words Griffith chose to not modernize–is it really necessary to say “middaeg” instead of “midday”? I don’t think “midday” would have hit me as sounding too modern, just that I expect the novel to be translated into modern English and not actually be written in “Anglisc” (Old English/Anglo-Saxon). If I want to read stuff in seventh-century languages I have a copy of the dual-text Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf (which is shouted out in Menewood as both new and a favorite of Edwin’s). But overall I love the language; the book contains not only a map and a cast of characters but also family trees and a glossary, to help those of us modern dumb-dumbs who don’t know our names for the different ages of sheep but still want to be able to follow what’s going on when the characters talk about sheep (Griffith isn’t going to insult us by pretending that nobles in the 7th century weren’t concerned about sheep. This was a pre-industrial society. You were never too rich to stop caring about sheep, certainly not if you wanted to stay rich).

I hope it doesn’t take a full 10 years for the third book to come out, but if it has to take that long to be as good as the first two, then Nicola Griffith should take her time and I will pick up that third book as soon as it’s published, likely no matter what else I have in the hopper.

I’ve been bad at carving out time to really sit down and read these past few weeks but I did finally finish The Hero of Ages, the third book in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series.

This continues the trend from the other two books where a whole bunch of mysterious stuff that was set up previously pulls together in a series of very large reveals right near the end, making a story that’s 80% slow(ish) paced action-mystery (despite the numerous fight scenes) followed by 20% high-octane roller-coaster ride.

SPOILER: I also appreciated that Sanderson was ballsy enough to stick the landing after building up his Big Bad so much. It’s always a letdown when someone builds up their crushingly powerful villain to be so all-powerful that it seems like only God Himself could stop him and then our intrepid hero manages to take him down with like the power of friendship or loving his mama or solving a riddle or something. Sanderson is willing to not only have his main character become a god but to follow that up with another character actually becoming monotheistic God Himself in order to do all that needs to be done before the series can wrap up satisfyingly and end, leaving us only one bite-sized little mystery about Allomancy to tease a sequel series.

Anyway, we’ve got puzzles and battles and intrigues galore, and a body count that’s starting to look like about 90% of the Final Empire’s populace, and we learn all kinds of fucked up things about the various magic systems–there’s a whole-ass secret other one that we hadn’t learned about in the first two books, in addition to the secretly-still-around one and the “main,” openly acknowledged one that has a lot of misinformation around it.

Sanderson can certainly write a battle scene and now that Elend is a Mistborn we get even more of them. The destruction mounts and mounts as our characters level up to absurd lengths that always seem like they ought to break the game except that it’s not a game and also Ruin seems to always be one step ahead of them still. The various “hard” magic systems are understandable and precise enough that I did find myself getting sucked into being wowed and horrified by the general mad-science-ness of the reveals about them, which is impressive because I as a reader am prone to not even really trying to figure out or remember what’s going on with that sort of thing and putting it all into the “yeah yeah, bounce the graviton particle beam” category (I am not a gamer and I can see why lots of gamers like Sanderson, for all the reasons that I am not a gamer). The additional romantic plotlines seemed about as pasted on as the first one but did not take up too much page space or do anything too idiotically disruptive, but were milquetoast enough to make the blurb on the front cover from noted homophobe and religious zealot Orson Scott Card about “understanding… how love takes root in the human heart” extremely funny. Apparently love takes root in the human heart when a lady says one moderately observant thing to a man, and that’s basically it.

I am going to try to knock out some other reading before embarking upon the Wax and Wayne post-trilogy quartet. I am not entertaining the notion of picking up any other series until at least next year, at which point I am sure I will be entertaining that notion very hard.

While maybe technically not Gothic enough to constitute “spooky reason reading” proper, I nonetheless checked out the sequel to Mistborn: The Final Empire, Brandon Sanderson’s The Well of Ascension, from the library. This turned out to be pretty good “hanging out on the couch recovering from a cold” reading once the cold recovery moved into book-reading territory (the first few days I couldn’t really manage more than video). This is in part because it was 600 pages long so it kept me occupied, but also it was pretty good! It started off a bit slow, and partly this may have been because I wasn’t feeling 100% (usually I’m fine with slow) but also it is genuinely quite a lot of what is clearly setup - classic “middle book syndrome” but still a pretty solid middle book. What it has been setting up towards has thus far had good payoff, very twisty and slippery - the last 150 or 200 pages were riveting once I had put in all the work to get that far and get invested. Vin once again picks up the conversational idiot ball when confronted with Straff Venture’s progeny and spends far too much time saying anything at all to Zane other than “Why are you here, you weirdo?” and I was relieved that he died when he did because he was frankly an insufferable edgelord. Elend on the other hand is fleshed out more and becomes less annoying than he was in the last book, running face-first into the hell that is actual, non-theoretical self-governance as part of an August Deliberative Body and handling the frustrations thereof with some measure of integrity and dignity, as well as admirable restraint from grandstanding. Overall I feel like the politics of this book are a little iffy in a very traditional fantasy direction but Sanderson certainly has “everything that sucks about working in committee” down, except for “having to learn Robert’s Rules.”

Possibly my favorite plot threads were the ones involving Sazed, the religious scholar, and Tindwyl, the bitchy biography expert, both of the secret order of forbidden thing-knowing from Terris. They are in a “the Power of Friendship and Document Review” story and in an unusual twist for that genre it is the “Document Review” part of that where betrayal awaits. So that was really fascinating to me as someone who both enjoys Power of Friendship and Document Review stories and also has some criticisms about the degree to which many writers’ belief that the answer to everything is either finding or committing writing seeps into their stories.

Vin keeps leveling up to terrifying degrees and also manages a little character growth as well. She is a solid protagonist but I still found myself more interested in the secondary characters this time around; she is a very comfortable and enjoyable character type for me so while I enjoyed reading her perfectly fine I still felt like her internal struggles, while not badly done, were still nothing I haven’t seen from like at least three Tamora Pierce heroines and three hundred knockoff Tamora Pierce heroines. I trust she will manage to save the world without accidentally unleashing Something Even Worse by the end of the series; that’s how these things go. Hope she gets to retire peacefully and doesn’t have to die tragically in order to make that happen, but we’ll see.

Overall, solid fantasy doorstopper, will keep reading.

On the recommendation of several people–plus some curiosity about what the fuss was about that snuck through my attempts to steadfastly ignore the Brandon Sanderson Kickstarter Discourse–I picked up Mistborn: The Final Empire, the first book in the Mistborn series, which is apparently a trilogy that is then part of a larger series called the Mistborn Saga.

This book fits pretty squarely into two fantasy sub-genres that are particularly beloved by me, “Teenage Girl Has Magic Powers, Overthrows Evil Government” and “Lovable Rogues of Criminal Underworld in Gritty Mercantile City Plan Heist,” so it is no surprise that I found this book to be a lot of fun and will probably check out the sequel as soon as spooky season is over (I have spooky season reading to do for the rest of spooky season, and this is pretty squarely epic fantasy, not horror/gothic enough to qualify as spooky season reading despite some effective spooky elements).

The main magic system, Allomancy, was interesting–it’s definitely a very “hard” magic system (unsurprising given that I’m pretty sure it was Brandon Sanderson who coined or at least popularized the notion of “hard” and “soft” magic systems), and has many of the flaws of “hard” magic systems, like filling the book up with a lot of magical jargon and Capital Letters, and giving a little bit of the vibe that there will be a companion RPG released sometime in the next 18 months (it’s not in “the RPG came first” territory, which would force me to judge it as bad). This is a thing that I think is essentially baked into a certain type of fantasy adventure book and if you it as given that this is that kind of fantasy adventure book, I think it was handled pretty well. One thing that helped was that the magic system–technically systems, plural–was believed by the characters to be “solved” but it wasn’t really, leaving us at least some measure of mystery to unravel and providing a reason to pay attention to the explanations. (Coming off the Locked Tomb series it felt a bit like being spoon-fed information, but compared to the Locked Tomb basically everything feels like being spoon-fed information; I think this might actually just be regular-level “introducing your audience to the world you made up” exposition.) It also was clearly well planned out and internally consistent, which is important if you’re going to go the hard magic route.

The plot is essentially thus: A thousand years ago, a hero rose to save the world from something called the Deepness. Nobody really knows what the Deepness was (I assume this will feature prominently in the sequels) but defeating it plonked an entity now known only as the Lord Ruler on the throne. The Lord Ruler sucks enormously and rules over what is now a colorless fiery wasteland with extreme violence. Society has exactly two classes–the nobility, which seems to encompass minor nobility whose fortunes have fallen to constitute the closest thing we have to a middle class, and the skaa, an enslaved working class who are all considered the property of the Lord Ruler and are “rented” out by the nobility to mine and farm and all that basic stuff. In addition to the thousand years of oppression, the Lord Ruler seems to be using some kind of magic depression powers to keep everybody too despondent to rebel.

Enter our local Thieves With Hearts of Gold, led by a guy named Kelsior, a skaa with magic powers. Skaa are not allowed to have magic powers and are subjected to extreme reproductive control to try to stomp out any Allomantic bloodlines in their population; nevertheless, there are still quite a number of skaa who are Allomancers. Kelsior gets a reputation that borders on the mystical for two reasons–one, he can use multiple kinds of Allomancy instead of just one, and two, he escaped from some prison mining pits that nobody ever escapes from. He is one of our main viewpoint characters and is basically the Big Damn Hero.

Our protagonist, Vin, is a teenage street urchin of the sort whomst nobody would ever think would be a Big Damn Hero except people who read lots of books about teenage girls/street urchins/teenage girl street urchins overthrowing the government. Vin is resilient, extremely emotionally damaged, and, unbeknownst to her, an extremely powerful Allomancer (this is hereditary and related to her Mysterious Parentage, in tried-and-true street urchin heroine fashion). When she joins the crew, after getting over her initial bafflement at being fed and clothed properly and spoken to like a human being, she is given the job of pretending to be a noblewoman and infiltrating the nobility’s interminable series of balls, so as to glean information about their weaknesses and spread destabilizing rumors.

Vin does a pretty good job of this despite a number of elementary blunders of openness that I wouldn’t pull at an average dinner with extended family, let alone if I were A Literal Spy going undercover. These were the most annoying and least believable parts of the story to me, but they seem to have been necessary to establish the Obligatory Romantic Subplot between Vin and the heir of the most powerful of the Great Houses, a philosophical-minded reformer who reads subversive books and… well, mostly sits around waiting to inherit so he can run his House less horrendously than his father does. Perhaps it is my inherent dimwittedness about these matters, but despite having a pretty strong familiarity with various fictional and historical Nobility Customs, I completely missed when Vin and Eland went from “talking to each other at balls” (one of the main activities at parties of all kinds) to being in enough of a “relationship” that they could be said to have broken it off. Honestly, Eland was a perfectly fine character but the only reason I could determine for there to be a romance there is that it is still illegal in publishing to go to print without one.

There are a number of other things that are done well enough to make up for the pasted-on romance. The action scenes kick ass. The “trying to recruit people to a rebellion and get them to do things” stuff features a very realistic vacillation between “people think this is impossible, so you can’t get them to do literally anything at all” and “the people who have decided it’s not impossible after all now believe it’s impossible for them to fail and will go recklessly off-script at a moment’s notice because they think victory is inevitable,” which definitely made me cry in organizer. The stakes are high and the violence is gruesome; the secrets have secrets. All in all it’s quite fun.

In preparation for Nona I read Harrow the Ninth for the third time. This time I tried to read it more slowly, even though my reading-slowly-on-purpose skills have somewhat deteriorated over the years. I don’t think I’m quite clever enough to have figured out who’s in the last section, but I will only live in ignorance for another week or so. (I don’t usually try to guess twists, I just want to see how they happen, but I’ve been wondering Who Is Nona for like a year now so I tried to pay attention.)

Even knowing the big reveals, this was still a tricksy little hobbit of a book. Only part of this is due to the protagonist being possibly-insane-possibly-haunted-definitely-unwell; the rest is due to much of the rest of the cast also being possibly insane, haunted, dead, and various other things (and definitely unwell). God continues to be just some guy, and extremely cringe to boot. I can’t wait for the next book.

Another book that I brought up to Maine was Alwyn Hamilton’s Rebel of the Sands, which I admit I did not really expect to like very much. I’ve sort of gone off YA a bit and basically picked up a few this weekend so that I could get them off my TBR shelves, and figured it was a good weekend to read them because my brain is soft and tired and made of cheese, and I was worried that once my head is good and rested I would simply never be able to read them. Also, I was slightly suspicious of a desert-flavored adventure written by a white author, because fantasy writing is full of white people writing exotic desert locales in very cringey ways, starting with Dune and going from there. So, in short, my expectations were not very high going in.

That said, said expectations were nicely surpassed. Clocking in at around 300 pages, it’s a fast-paced, frequently funny, very readable little gunslinging adventure about djinns and overthrowing tyrants and how much it sucks to live in a dying factory town in a militarized society under unaccountable armed occupation, and lots of terrible dudes get the shit beaten out of them. It is neither subtle nor thought-provoking, but it is fun. I liked it maybe slightly better than Vengeance Road but not as much as Gunslinger Girl, but overall I’d say if you liked one or both of those you may like this one too.

Every year when I visit Maine I like to read something nice and nautical, usually about pirates, and this past weekend was no exception. I’d run out of regular pirate history books, though, so I figured it was finally time to indulge in a find I’d made in my Aunt Birdie’s book box when my dad was cleaning out her storage unit: a weeded library copy of a 1986 historical novel titled Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas, by one Morgan Llywelyn.

I expected this book to be very ‘80s and frankly I also expected it to be very bad, and I’m pleased to report that I was quite correct on the first front but not as much on the second. There’s something in the particular cadence of pseudo-old-timey writing and the particular brand of essentialist-but-thinks-its-doing-a-feminism gender politics that reminds me a lot of The Mists of Avalon, but I really can’t figure out a way to describe it other than “it’s what women who were interested in medieval shit wrote like in the ‘80s,” and if you know what I’m talking about then you know what I’m talking about.

For all that it is full of hilarious overwriting and cheesy sex scenes, I ended up getting very sucked into the book! It seems pretty well-researched, though obviously much license is taken for the sake of writing a narratively and thematically coherent swashbuckler. I am also not at all bored by things that apparently bore a lot of other readers, like all the complicated webs of relationships and rivalries that characterize old Gaelic clan life. It’s got exciting naval battles and petty internecine power struggles and a couple of really hateable villains (there’s a terrible priest, who is probably fictional, and Sir Richard Bingham, who sadly is not). The characterization of this version of Grace O’Malley is pretty well-done; she does some character growth over her long life but is a recognizably strong personality throughout. It’s not a fantasy book but there’s some mysticism around the old religion that peeps through. Overall, it was an effective mix of things to mightily entertain me specifically.

I’ve followed Natalie Ironside on Tumblr for a couple years now, because, idunno, I have no rhyme or reason for why I follow people on Tumblr. So I knew about The Last Girl Scout well before it was published. But I really only pushed it up my to-read list when real live people that I know not from the internet also started reading it and said it was very good.

And it is. It is extremely fun. It is about a bunch of militant communists and anarchists killing Nazis in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where there are zombies and vampires and stuff. And also talking about their feelings and arguing about Lenin. There’s lots of jokes and swearing and blowing stuff up. There are a lot of trans characters, including both our protagonists–Mags, a political commissar in the Ashland Confederated Republic, and Jules, an ex-Arditi with lots of unfortunate tattoos–and one of the major villains in the second half (Natasha Wenden, an Arditi military doctor, foil for Jules and a not particularly subtle example of why doing the oppressors’ dirty work for them to keep yourself safe will always have an expiration date).

As a self-published book it could have used another round of at least copy edits; as much as I would have loved to see a more polished version of this that had gone through the whole process of professional-level attention, I do not think that a book this explicitly Bolsheviksy would get bought by a mainstream publisher without a certain amount of ~toning it down~, and the total lack of toning it down is a big part of what made it so enjoyable. It’s satisfyingly indulgent for a somewhat niche audience of leftist queerdos whomst have actually spent time trying to do a left unity and fight fascists–the reds and the blacks bicker good-naturedly but always manage to work together without major mishap; the Nazis have superior numbers but are both stupid and overconfident, and have a tendency to defect. Some helpful vampires appear out of nowhere. An entire U.S. military base gets nuked. Jules gets a kickass motorcycle. Mags sings John Brown’s Body and everyone claps. Just good clean fun all around.

A few years ago I picked up a stack of interesting girl-power-y-looking YA books at Wellesley Books and then have not gotten around to reading them, so on my latest jaunt to Maine I promised that I would read at least one of the books from that pile. I picked Lesley Livingston’s The Valiant, the first number in what is apparently a trilogy, a historical fiction about female gladiators in ancient Rome.

I had… somewhat mixed feelings about it? It seems very well researched and it’s a lot of fun, and there’s lots of kickass stuff about gladiatrixing, but the main plot is basically about Fallon (our protagonist, a Celtic princess whomst is captured by Roman slavers and sold into gladiatrixing) coming to terms with being literally enslaved and like… redefining her personal ideas of success and her win conditions to navigate the power structures of imperialist Rome? And like, pragmatism and adaptability are important but it’s a little jarring to me to read a YA novel about the importance of selling out and of allowing one’s mind to be colonized. But it’s like, distressing political messaging aside, it’s a really exciting and interesting adventure in getting into and then out of all sorts of scrapes and navigating treacherous political scenarios and becoming an excellent gladiatrix? So, yeah, really just not sure what to make of that overall, but also it was a ton of fun and I enjoyed reading it quite a lot.

The other thing I found jarring is, actually, the obligatory heterosexual romantic subplot; my YA consumption has dropped precipitously from a few years ago and the only YA I have read since Vengeance Road last August has been either ace or sapphic or both. So I found myself mildly confused by the romance with the gallant Roman decurion fellow, and the total lack of even the mildest bit of romantic tension between Fallon and Elka, the tall funny Viking chick that Fallon starts off literally chained to and is sold to the ludus in a pair with and has a generally very charming enemies-to-best-friends arc with. Like, honestly. This is the obvious ship.

Other than those two things, it was good! I like Girls With Swords type books and I had fun reading it! I would be down for reading the sequels one of these days.

After reading Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint I borrowed a copy of the sequel, The Privilege of the Sword, from Gillian, and this seemed like just the kind of lovely summer weekend to read it. In this one, our protagonist is Katherine, the teenage niece of the Mad Duke Tremontaine, who lives out in the country with her parents and her brothers and the lawsuits the Mad Duke keeps them tied up in. Or at least, she does until the Mad Duke, whomst you may remember from the first book as Alec, sends for her with a deal: she lives with him and trains to be a swordsman for six months, and all the lawsuits will be called off and the debts forgiven.

There is an enormous amount of weird family history behind this decision that eventually makes it sort of make sense, but it certainly doesn’t make any sense to 15-year-old Katherine, who finds herself living in a strange city, with her extremely strange uncle, forced to wear strange clothes (i.e., boys’ clothes), practicing swordsmanship with a series of somewhat infuriatingly mysterious tutors and basically not allowed to do anything else. Nevertheless, as the months progress Katherine does manage to meet people and get caught up in various interesting plotlines that go a lot deeper into politics than she realizes. A number of these plotlines involve a popular sensation novel titled The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death, which among other things proves motivational for Katherine to take her swordsmanship studies with some degree of seriousness.

Unlike Swordspoint, this book deals very explicitly with the shitty hand dealt to women of all classes in a feudal society like this one. One of the major secondary characters is Artemisia Fitz-Levi, the sheltered daughter of an aristocratic family. Artemisia is the type of character who could easily have been a villain in a less compassionate story--she’s quite comfortable in her highly privileged class, she likes all the things she’s supposed to like and her goals in life are precisely what they’re supposed to be, and she is just as silly and romantic and superficially charming as women of her class are supposed to be. But the book is brutally careful to show that she is exactly who she was raised to be, and it is not her fault that what she was raised to be is completely defenseless, blindsided by reality after being carefully raised on a lifetime diet of pretty lies. Another secondary character is Flavia, the Mathematical Girl, who is quite simply a woman who is utterly brilliant at mathematics in a world in which that’s not the thing women are supposed to be good at.

Overall, this is extremely my kind of book and especially my kind of comfort read. It’s got many of the same elements that keep me coming back to Tamora Pierce novels year after year--girls dressed up as boys kicking ass with swords, pseudo-medieval fake politics, witty banter, and some poignant coming-of-age stuff, but it’s definitely not YA, which is nice since I’m finding it increasingly hard to read YA as I become increasingly less young of an adult. It’s just a very definitely adult novel about a bisexual sixteen-year-old girl learning to defend herself and other sixteen-year-old girls with a sword in a city full of the most debauched, insane people you’ll ever meet in your life, and occasionally going to the theater. A+ power fantasy nonsense, would read again.

Current Mood: amused

In Oh God How Many Book Clubs Am I Even In Now news, the BSpec book club is reading Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars, which for some reason I thought was a standalone but is actually the first book in the Lady Astronaut series.

The Calculating Stars is about one Dr. Elma York, a young Jewish mathematician who served as a pilot in World War II and now works as a computer at not-quite-NASA. Her husband Nathaniel also works there as an engineer. Elma and Nathaniel are taking a nice quiet break from their high-powered jobs in a little cabin in the Poconos when a meteorite hits Earth in the ocean off Washington DC, immediately obliterating a chunk of the East Coast and setting into a motion a killed-the-dinosaurs-esque extinction event. This puts Nathaniel and Elma on track to work in the new International Aerospace Coalition’s new and very important project to establish human colonization in space.

This is a very Tor Books kind of book in that it is in some ways comfortingly familiar--a fun sci-fi adventure with a recognizable genre flavor that’s unapologetically a power fantasy (or, more specifically, a hypercompetence fantasy) for its readers--but still quite imaginative, socially aware and deliberately catering to an audience of (usually very online) progressive nerds outside the traditional audience of straight white guys. The Calculating Stars does not fit the Disaster Queers In Space model that marks Tor’s most best work (in my extremely biased opinion), as Elma and Nathaniel are heterosexual, although like in her other works, Kowal makes a point of developing the relationship to showcase it as mutually affectionate and supportive and generally healthy. Like the other issues of social and political importance that are touched on in the book--and there are several--there’s not much here in the way of subtext, it’s just text, which on the one hand is nicely straightforward (people talk about stuff, just like in real life!) but on the other hand means I’ve not got much to analyze in review other than to note that Kowal deals with such subjects in the context of a fun space adventure. Our protagonist, Elma, has social anxiety and specifically a terror of public speaking, which becomes an issue as she becomes an increasingly public-facing figure in her quest to push the politically timid space program to put women into space. As white Jews, Elma and Nathaniel also face antisemitism while working to fix their own white people nonsense and become more aware of the racism in the space program. And, of course, navigating the crushing casual sexism of the ‘50s, the deliberate attempt to push women back into domestic spaces and downplay their accomplishments during the war, the sexual harassment and constant belittling at work, is a driving theme. Kowal also manages a distressingly realistic portrayal of political timidity in the face of catastrophic climate change; the parallels to contemporary political issues are about as subtle as Las Vegas but it provides a cathartic fantasy of maybe possibly still being able to do something about them.

Anyway, it was generally a fun read, it’s got planes and math and space and other such entertaining things, and I think it’ll be fun to talk about at book club, although I’ll be unsurprised if we also don’t because it’ll be our first in-person book club since last summer so it might turn into social time. It is likely I will read the sequels at some point, so that I can follow Elma’s adventures fighting sexism in space.

Last weekend I did so many things that I ran out of willpower by the end and decided it was time to treat myself, by which I meant not check my email, go to Porter Square Books, and buy a fantasy new release and read it in the bath, to give my poor brain a break in between books about Nazis. So I put on my two masks and dipped in real fast to pick up a copy of C. L. Polk’s Soulstar, the third and final book in her Kingston Cycle, a political steampunk fantasy about an Englandish country that is, quite literally, powered by the oppression of witches and the desecration of the souls of the dead. My absolutely deaded brain had sort of been like “Oh yeah, the gay steampunk murder mystery series, I need more of that right now for escapism reasons” and then I started reading it and it was like, whoops, not as escapist as I had intended, I had sort of forgot the uhhh whole point of the series, with its very well done but not precisely subtle subject matter about climate change and capitalist exploitation and imperialism and all the things? Also the main character in Soulstar is Robin Thorpe, a grassroots organizer with the revolutionary democracy group the Solidarity Collective, and let me tell you, we were in some Very Familiar Territory here, only with a suspicious lack of Signal chats. But it had all the rest of it, from gossipy steering committees and tedious strategy meetings in church basements to having to give ~stirring speeches~ on the fly while being like “what the fuck, I’m only here because I’m the only nerd willing to make all the lists” and having the police riot unprovoked all over your public assembly. I occasionally felt like Robin was a bit uptight about direct action but I have also definitely been at plenty of street actions where I was like “if people could stop being DUMB and ADVENTURIST and THINK about their STRATEGY for a second before they ESCALATE, please” and I haven’t even seen half the shit Robin has seen in this series. The bit where they storm the palace reads a little weird after the events of this winter where we had actual fascists doing the “storm the seat of government” thing but that is not really the book’s fault, it is clearly drawing on a long history of people storming palaces because the government was further right and more oppressive than the people doing the storming (that’s even the more common instance, I think).

There is a romantic plotline here but it is a little different from the previous ones in that it does not start at the beginning of the romance, but instead it already has a history. Robin, it turns out, has a spouse who was arrested and put into one of the power grid prisons twenty years earlier, and who, when khe gets out, promptly denounces kher shitty rich real-estate-mogul family and goes to live with Robin in the Thorpe clan house, which plays real nice for the press in a dramatic scene at the train station but which is then sort of awkward. It’s well done and Zelind is a pretty badass character in kher own right--an inventor of useful and creative gadgets--but I did find some of the obligatory marital strife boring (this is because I find marriage boring, not because of any weaknesses in the actual handling of the subject). But overall I just felt sort of at home in this series where everyone is queer and obsessed with politics in a way that is now normal to me and that makes all the books full of “normal” straight people whose lives don’t revolve around politics feel even more like they’re about aliens than they always did.

I was very surprised but I think kind of pleased that Polk did not have her characters magnanimously wuss out of one very important thing that happened at the end, which seems a bit of a departure from the usual rules of Good Revolutionaries in literature, and I really liked that choice.

Anyway. Murder! Police kettles! Old hotels! I enjoyed this book and this series very much. I hope once all the turbines are up and running Zelind invents Signal, it will make Robin’s life easier.

I had intended to do this in January immediately after my reread of Gideon the Ninth but then life and book clubs got in the way, so it was only this weekend that I finally reread Harrow the Ninth, the second book in Tamsyn Muir’s certifiably insane and gothically delicious Locked Tomb trilogy. Notable occurrences upon second read, especially so soon after rereading Gideon, include “I understood what was going on a lot better,” “I caught more hilarious references that had apparently passed me by the first time,” and “OK now it’s actually quite clear what’s going on, I can’t believe I was so confused the first time, did I read this in a coma or something,” although the more likely culprit is just that my close-reading skills have atrophied in the 10 years since I’ve been in school from doing only business writing where the actual task at hand is to just find the simplest big-picture points to distill out of a page of writing. But in novels, it turns out sometimes the details are important!

Anyway, while most of this book is a lot darker and more fucked up than the first one, especially in the beginning, there were still several moments where I couldn’t help actually laughing out loud, a thing that rarely happens for me when I’m reading, and which especially hadn’t been happening this week, when I hit one of those walls where I got tired of doing responsible shit and just dropped all my coping mechanisms and opted to go ahead and be miserable for a bit. It was also frankly sort of soothing to read about people having a way worse time than I’m having and not necessarily powering through it like emotionally unbreakable protagging machines.

Because Harrow is a tiny nerd, this book did not inspire me to do between-chapter workouts as much as Gideon did, although I did manage to roll off the couch and make myself do 15 minutes of yoga about halfway through it, which is more than I’d managed all week. Neither did it inspire me to make soup.

There are a limited number of works in the aromantic spec fic canon and basically all of them are written by one Nicole Kornher-Stace. I read her post-apocalyptic ghost story Archivist Wasp last winter, and it had lots of things I like in a story, like the apocalypse, ghosts, and socially awkward dorks making friends by having tasks to do, and terrible people getting their well-deserved comeuppance, and lots of feelings!! but that weren’t romantic feelings. So recently I decided to read the sequel, Latchkey, because I wanted more of all of those things.

I had been momentarily hesitant about reading Latchkey because Archivist Wasp was a perfectly complete standalone novel and now it’s going to be a trilogy and there is always the risk that the middle book in a trilogy has, you know, Middle Book Syndrome, but I need not have worried. Latchkey has more ghosts and more feelings and more fucked-up sci-fi stuff, plus some bonus setting things on fire. It kicks off three years after the end of Archivist Wasp, during which time Wasp, now back to her original name of Isabel, has been running a more or less functional all-women’s monastery/commune thing in what is still basically the rectory for Catchkeep’s shrine. She has not seen the ghosts from the last book in three years because the whole town is warded with ghostgrass, for protection from the normal (i.e., dangerous) kinds of ghosts, and it is an unfortunate side effect that it keeps her friends out as well. However, the town has now been hit by an earthquake and is about to get hit by a pack of raiders--devotees of Carrion Boy, who seem vaguely inspired by the Reavers from Firefly--and Isabel decides to hide the better part of the townsfolk in the tunnels underneath the town. This is a good plan but like most plans it survives contact with reality for about 0.5 seconds and then things get weird. Weird in this case involves running into the nameless ghost and his ghost partner Catherine Foster again, but this time Foster has tracked down a bunch of the ghosts of the other subjects of the Latchkey Project, an attempt to turn children into supersoldiers that ended up killing all but a few of them horribly. Saving the town, figuring out what happened in the Latchkey Project, and trying not to drown all become inextricably knotted together into one big and extremely complicated quest. Like the first book, Latchkey is incredibly dark and violent and everyone gets banged up and various levels of deaded and almost-deaded quite a lot, but it also has a humorous streak and is occasionally heartwarming in a fucked-up sort of way. I am sure I will be motivated to read the third book in a much more timely fashion than I read either of these, especially because we still don’t know the ghost’s name and I am absolutely dying to find out if it’s going to be something suitably dignified or if it’s going to be goofy.

When Lyndsay Ely’s Gunslinger Girl debuted, the launch party was in the upstairs bar at Trident Booksellers, and the authorial interview portion was conducted by Erin Bowman on the basis that she had also written a YA western with a female lead. While the two books are very different, “YA western with female lead” has enough points of interest in common with Gunslinger Girl that I made sure to pick up a trade paperback of Vengeance Road at the party. (It helps that it has a beautiful cover.)

While those unfamiliar with the genre might assume that YA has a limit on how gory it’s allowed to be, those persons are wrong, and Vengeance Road is a nonstop grand guignol of shoot-outs, fires, natural disasters, and… well, more shoot-outs, mostly. It’s great. The story starts when a gang of outlaws burns down protagonist Kate’s house and murders her dad, stealing his treasure map to an abandoned gold mine in the Arizona desert. Kate very sensibly decides to hunt down this entire gang of outlaws and personally murder each one of them, despite the protestations of various other people she comes across who think she should let it go and do something less likely to get herself killed. Sidekicks she picks up over the course of this quest include her pony, her dad’s horse, the two oldest sons of her dad’s (also dead now) friend Abe, a genre-savvy Apache girl who makes fun of her constantly, and a crazy old German guy who lives in the desert. The oldest of the two sons of Abe, Jesse, is telegraphed from his first appearance as the love interest; he follows a fairly standard love interest arc of being tortured and insufferable and eventually sort of getting over it, but also helping Kate get slightly less tortured and insufferable. But mostly he just helps Kate shoot her way across the Arizona Territory in search of the gang in search of the gold mine. It is a lot of old-fashioned straight-up cowboy bullshit, updated for the 21st century where girls can do stuff now and in hindsight maybe the Apaches had good reason to keep raiding the white settlers who kept building shitty mining towns on their land.

I feel like I ought to have more to say about this given how much I liked it, but really I just picked it up, sat my ass in a chair with a can of watermelon beer, zipped through the whole thing in a few hours, put it down, and went “Dang, that was a really good Western.” So… yeah. It’s a really good Western. Got all that really good Western shit. I hear the companion novel has more trains; I might check that one out sometime too.

Despite my difficulties focusing on reading fiction lately, I borrowed an ARC of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic from a friend, because I am a stubborn bitch and I was absolutely DETERMINED to relax at least one weekend this ridiculous summer, and that means reading YA novels by the lake in Maine, goddammit. I didn’t get to it on my last Maine trip because I just napped through that one, but I decided to put it at the top of the list for this weekend, when I went up for three days, none of which were holidays, and had a bit more reading time even if I did end up taking some naps.

Mexican Gothic was definitely a good choice for me for trying to get back into a fiction groove because it is squarely within one of my very favorite genres of all time: one in which a lovely young girl meets a tall, dark, and brooding house. (Usually there’s a dude somewhere around too, but he’s usually kind of boring.) In this case the house is named High Place and it is a full-blown crumbling eighteenth-century English mansion, inexplicably stuck in the mountains well outside Mexico City. Well, not that inexplicably; there is definitely an explanation for why an English mansion has been painstakingly constructed in the middle of Mexico, and it unsurprisingly involves some super racist rich English people.

Our heroine, Noemi, is a 22-year-old socialite and anthropology student in fashionable 1950s Mexico City, where her pastimes involve going to parties, smoking cigarettes, changing her major, and squabbling with her dad, a paint company executive. It’s all fun and games and regular-level familial dysfunction until her dad gets an extremely creepy letter from her cousin Catalina, who married a rich English guy in a scandalously rushed fashion last year and who no one has seen since he whisked her off to his ancestral mining estate in the countryside. Dad sends Noemi to investigate, to see if Catalina needs to come to the city for psychiatric treatment or something, which seems to everybody to be the most likely situation.

High Place is a masterpiece of Manderleyesque creepery, a place where everything is falling apart as the handful of obsessive weirdos inhabiting it refuse to let anything change. There is a mean and judgemental female housekeeper, a lecherous old eugenicist patriarch who everyone is terrified to cross, Catalina’s handsome but vicious husband, some brainwashed servants, and the housekeeper’s son Francis, the only person around with half a personality and therefore the obligatory male romantic lead. Also Catalina, who may or may not be mad/poisoned/suffering from tuberculosis/whatever, but at any rate isn’t allowed to be in Noemi’s company nearly as much as she’d like, and therefore winds up being a fairly minor character. There are a few normal people down in the town--like a real doctor, and the village wise woman, who apparently get along quite well, have a healthy respect for each other’ s practices, and are united in their dislike of the weird-ass English doctor who has been treating Catalina for “tuberculosis”--and… actually, that’s mostly it, there’s just doctors everywhere and nobody else.

Anyway, High Place is very, very clearly and obviously haunted, regardless of whether you believe in hauntings or not, and so Noemi has to figure out what kind of haunting it is and how it works before she can do the thing you always have to do in haunted house stories, which is put the haunting to rest. I have to say that as much as I am pleasantly familiar with all the genre stuff that Moreno-Garcia is drawing on for this book (I have read a lot of girl-meets-house books), I absolutely did not see this particular backstory of madness and murder coming. It’s quite fascinating and extremely well set up; there’s all sorts of clues in the earlier parts of the book that I just zipped past at the time but were clearly foreshadowing in hindsight. Like all good horror novels, the story is rooted deep in questions of social order and family, and just how fucked up people can get about them. Like, the obligatory romantic plotline is reasonably boring as a romantic plotline but you get invested in it anyway because in order for it to work between Noemi and Francis, Francis has to extricate himself from the house and the family, and I use the word “extricate” here very deliberately--it’s not as simple as leaving.

The book also reminded me that I know fuck-all about Mexican history; I should probably do something about that.

Anyway, this was a really fun and suspenseful addition to one of my favorite genres of fiction, and I recommend it highly if you, too, like books where stubborn young women fight evil houses (and win).

In an act of supreme generosity, my friends, whomst I have been most shamefully blowing off pretty much since lockdown began because I can only handle so many Zoom calls and also my ability to people has worn away, kept me in the rotation for the now rather battered ARC of Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth, the sequel to my new favorite novel in the history of absolutely ever, Gideon the Ninth. I have been having severe trouble focusing on fiction during this pandemicpocalypse but if anything was going to get me to actually pay attention to a fiction, it would be the dysfunctional goth lesbian space nuns of Drearburh, repressed nerd necromancer Harrowhark Nonagesimus and her dumb jock cavalier Gideon Nav.

I was a little disappointed but, given the ending of the last one, not entirely surprised that Gideon is not there for most of the first *mumblemumble* of the book, but it’s OK because we spend that time getting to know Harrow a bit better, and Harrow is also a hilarious character, if in a bitchier and more antisocial sort of way than Gideon, which is perfectly fine with me. The book is not written from Harrow’s point of view, although we certainly get inside her head a lot; rather, the book alternates between third person omniscient and second person, where an unnamed narrator is explaining to Harrow all the shit she’s gotten up to in the months before the Emperor’s murder. That’s not a spoiler; it’s how time is marked in the chapter titles.

I’m honestly not even really sure where to start reviewing because the structure of Harrow is deliberately confusing; it’s one of those jigsaw-puzzle-like books where you keep reading in part due to the tantalizing possibility of getting to the part where you understand what’s going on. I personally love this sort of thing; the narrative tension it provides is much more my style than, say, romantic or sexual tension, of which this book also has a good deal of but mostly just for seasoning; it doesn’t really constitute a subplot and it doesn’t ever do anything so boring and conventional as get resolved. Harrow is a deeply prudish character (which, relatable) in addition to literally being a nun so all instances of sexual tension (in many cases it’s not even attraction, just tension, due to everybody being very tense) are wrapped in several layers of distaste, either from Harrow (who hates everybody and describes them all in very unattractive terms) or from everybody else (Harrow is horrendously in love with A CORPSE, literally a dead body, who is referred to throughout the book explicitly as “the Body”). For a book whose back cover text reads “The necromancers are back, and they’re gayer than ever,” not very much actually happens on that front, except at one very drunk dinner party that Harrow flees as soon as she’s allowed to. This is not a complaint; if anything, this is perhaps the only book series I’ve ever read that rings true to my real-life experience, where everyone is queer but I have absolutely no idea what, if anything, anyone is up to at any particular time because it has nothing to do with me and at this point most people don’t even try to talk to me about it, both because I am also a deeply prudish character and because there is always other stuff to do instead, although at least in my case it usually doesn’t involve reanimated skeletons. (On the other hand, a lack of nonbinary characters is beginning to be something that significantly messes with my suspension of disbelief, and if I have one request for Alecto it would be that.) Anyway, I love a book that forgoes the obligatory romantic subplot in favor of just a lot of people avoiding dealing with their very complex feelings and blowing things up instead.

I meant to be dithering about structure there but ended up dithering about feelings, but I’m going to keep it, because I think that’s actually why the book is the way it is. It mirrors the stuff that is going on in Harrow’s brain, which is extremely messed up, due to lots of traumatic shit happening but also for magical reasons. Harrow’s general personality is already geared toward a pretty hardcore, disordered sort of asceticism--foregoing sleep to hyperfocus on studying, unable to bear the stimulation of food or drink (with one very memorable exception), uncomfortable being seen in any way other than completely covered, including her face (also relatable, although I just wear a full face of people makeup every day and not skull makeup, because I am a coward)--and there are times where she just Harrows herself into total dysfunction and you don’t find out about it until later. It’s fantastic. One downside is that it seems to have kicked up something ascetic and Catholic deep in my psyche and I have been in a weird mood since Sunday, but that’s probably also quarantine-related.

While Harrow is not quite as much of sentient pile of memes as Gideon, she still has her moments, as does...well, everyone else. In fact, two out of the three jokes that made me nearly throw the book off the balcony were made by God, the King Undying, whose real name is apparently John. One of the main features of this installation of necromantic nonsense is the appearance of a lot of high-ranking religious figures, as Harrow and Ianthe Tridentarius have ascended (or mostly ascended) to Lyctorhood, putting them in the legendary ranks themselves if they can survive more than a few months. Most of the book’s action takes place trapped in God’s enormous, eclectically decorated safe house/space station, and the only people around Harrow and Ianthe are God and three of the ancient and terrifying Lyctors, all of whom are just absolute bastards. Augustine, the Saint of Patience, is my favorite, because his entire personality consists of using flippancy as a coping mechanism. Mercymorn, the Saint of Joy, is also a delightful character, in that she is a hypercritical, waspish bitch who really wants nothing more than for Harrow to die already and get out of her hair. Ortus mostly just keeps trying to murder Harrow, which makes for some very gory action scenes, so no complaints from me.

There’s another Ortus, who was a minor entertaining character in the first book but is back as a much more substantial and extremely entertaining character in this one. He has one personality trait, which is being a Poetry Guy, which could have been annoying if the book treated this as being in any way deep or admirable, but mostly the book treats it as being entirely insufferable, which is good and correct. Honestly, if you are in any way a cranky or judgmental person, there’s just too much shit in this series that is so immensely satisfying. At one point someone is eulogized with a line like “She never said an unkind word, unless it was extremely funny,” which is certainly not a good description of me but is definitely a good description of some of the people I count as the kindest and most generous-hearted folks in my life, because anyone that can’t at make a decent mean joke when it’s warranted just isn’t going to be someone who stays in my life very long. These books are definitely for people who need to make that caveat even for the nicest people we know. Harrow is basically the triple-distilled form of my worst, most impatient self when I am trying to do shit and people are in my way (a thing that I’m struggling with a lot during quarantine especially) and I, at least, find reading her to be extremely indulgent in ways that probably don’t say flattering things about me.

The proper publication date for this book is August 4, which I am setting as now the date by which I need to konmari my book collection, so I can reward myself by buying hard copies of both Gideon and Harrow and rereading them and also just keeping them on the shelf where they can spark dumb, dysfunctional goth jock joy every time I see them.

For the last BSpec book club I was able to prod my friends into agreeing to read Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which I was very pleased about for two reasons. One, I had bought it in paperback a few months ago, so I did not need to read it in ebook, which is nice because I'm a little sick of ebooks after reading *checks notes* one (this, of course, is why I just bought nine ebooks from Verso. Whoops). Two, I am utterly incapable of reading fluffy escapist stuff right now, and I have a very generous definition of what counts as fluffy and escapist to start with, so I'm grateful that my friends were willing to read the sort of thing that everyone else is apparently attempting to escape from.

Parable of the Sower takes place in a post-apocalypse in denial, a near-future version of the U.S. where climate change, plague, drugs, political corruption, and other assorted fuckery have combined to break down all but the last formal vestiges of the U.S. empire. There is a president, but nobody votes and the president doesn't really do anything. The states have begun acting largely as independent countries, ruthlessly policing their borders from the hordes of economic and climate refugees wandering around seeking employment. Private companies are again taking over entire communities, turning them into company towns where the lure of waged work sucks in people to desperate to mind that the wages never cover the expenses of living in the company's housing. Sound familiar?

Within all this chaos is a small community, what was once a single street in a suburban sort of neighborhood, now turned into a sort of walled tenement as multiple generations of extended kin networks cram into what were once single-nuclear-family homes. Our protagonist, Lauren Olamina, the oldest daughter of the Baptist preacher, lives in one of these with her dad, her stepmom, and her three stepbrothers. She is very lucky to have parents with jobs and only one family jammed into the house. She is somewhat less lucky to be afflicted with a condition known as hyperempathy, or "sharing," which means she can feel pain when nearby people (or animals, sometimes) experience it, which can be pretty brutal in a society where drug- and desperation-fueled street violence is a casual occurrence.

Lauren is a responsible, obedient sort in most ways, with two big exceptions: One is that she is sexually active--a part of the plot treated so casually that I'm almost not sure what the point of including it is, except verisimilitude--and the other is that she has her own religion, which she has been working on developing the founding writings for for several years. She eventually calls it Earthseed, and its central belief is that God is change. It's a very responsibility-focused belief system, and I found myself liking it a lot more than I figured I would like any sort of fictional religion. (One of the chapter epitaphs, which are all excerpt's from Lauren's Earthseed notes, just says "To get along with God, consider the consequences of your behavior." I laughed way too hard.)

One thing about reading this book in lockdown is that the first half, where times are "good," more or less, in that the compound where Lauren and her community live is intact, felt to me much darker than the stuff that happened after the compound is destroyed and Lauren goes out into the wild world to try to walk up the California freeway to somewhere where there might be work. That part was a very good Long Walk sort of storyline, but it was essentially a Long Walk storyline, a thing I have much experience reading about and, quite, thankfully, no experience actually doing myself. The claustrophobic bits, where everyone is crammed into a tiny cramped community trying to pretend things will go back to normal ever and where a bunch of people are in denial about just how badly everything's falling apart, hit much more close to home for the time being, in a way that can't help but make me wonder what happens next, even more than I am already spending all my mental energy wondering what happens next.

One of the few things left going on out in national-politics-land during this story is that the shredded remnants of the federal government have been taken over by right-wing elements who have decided to shut down the space program, on the basis that it constitutes Fraud And Waste and probably namby-pamby liberal nonsense like science and general intellectualism, just after a crewed mission to Mars ends in the death of an astronaut. Lauren is displeased about this, both because the astronaut in question was something of a role model for her, and because one of Earthseed's other core tenets in that its destiny lies in going to space. We had a very interesting discussion at book club about the ethics of space exploration and colonization, especially in light of what a pig's ear we've made of Earth these last couple centuries.

I do really want to read the sequel, although I might wait a bit until I can get my hands on a physical copy of that, too (I'm not exactly running low on books to read in quarantine... time to read them is a different story). One of these days I will remember that reading Octavia Butler is never a bad idea, and make myself do it more often.

In a remarkable move for me, I read a book within a month of it being published! I am never so timely. But in my last batch of things I checked out from the library I included C. L. Polk's Stormsong, the sequel to the utterly charming Witchmark, which just came out in February.

Stormsong follows Miles' sister Dame Grace Hensley as she attempts to manage the fallout of the destruction of the aether network, which has left the entire country of Aeland without power. Newly appointed as Chancellor, she has to manage several different parties' political maneuvering, and determine how much of the truth should be allowed to get out--and manage the justifiable outrage that would ensue if it does. Grace's initial political instincts are bred of her class position and are, predictably, extremely cringe; she gets better as the book goes along (which is probably also predictable, but in a good way, because I want to be correct when I predict that a book will tell a good story instead of a bad story). Grace also has the hots for a nosy reporter who used to be an heiress but ran away from her family to be scandalous at a newspaper; perhaps unsurprisingly, Avia Jessup is my favorite character in the book.

While this book is sadly lacking in bicycle chases, it's still charming and I was able to devour it pretty quickly. The politics it has are not very subtle, and are solid if not particularly revolutionary, amenable to most modern progressive sensibilities--the shock at the end of the last book has worn off by this one so the depictions of monopoly, corruption, exploitation, climate change, and other hot topics aren't quite as viscerally upsetting. But it's still all very well done, and I'm glad I got to it so fast for once.

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Entries tagged with kickass ladies

What is so crazy about wanting your bones

Of Os-things and Yffings, and sheep

I left ruin behind me when I returned, but I also carried ruin with me

Of process and prophecy

Mists and myths and magic, oh my

Memory, memes, and mysterious parentages

I like to read about teenage girls overthrowing the government

Ta Grainne Mhaol ag teacht thar saile

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Life in the ludus

Diary of a Young Sword Lesbian

We're Jews out in space, if trouble appears we'll put it right back in its place

"Bottoms and tops, we all hate cops" but make it steampunk

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Ghosts and secrets

A girl, her guns, and a quest for revenge

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A near-future dystopia

War crimes and winter