ase

I read most of the Novelette and Short Story nominees in one go during an airport adventure and flight home that felt like the repayment of years of good flying karma. So I may be judging these with less tact than I should.

"Six People to Revise You" by J.R. Dawson: Okay, I get it. What if you could do a surgery to fix the parts of your personality you don't like? What an arresting idea! Would you do it? Why would you do it, or not do it? What pressures would you feel to change yourself?

This is not that story, it's using counting as a structure element, and there are color-coded physical paper forms as part of the process. In a story published in 2025. Perhaps I am showing my preferences and age, but aren't we in the era of emailing PDFs and filling out forms on website portals? Okay, back to the story: the conceit is an interesting way to talk about the different facets of a character, but I feel like that's not being used to full effect. It's got to be knit up and go somewhere. Along the same lines, ending on on a "you are fine the way you are" takeaway needs a little more nuance for me.

"In My Country" by Thomas Ha: censorship bad. Is there a second layer to the story that I am missing? Is there something I'm missing in the fates of the protagonist's children? Solid but not brilliant. Might need a reread to find the second layer.

"Wire Mother" by Isabel J. Kim: Teenager in a future where people have decided AIs are sentient enough to be a life companion, but the teenager believes AIs are programs, not people. Feels very of the moment in these days of AI psychosis. ("ChatGPT loves me" no, ChatGPT is programmed to affirm you, even if you're completely detached from reality, unless you manually set up a lot more guard rails than it sounds like you did.) I think this is a story that makes a good jumping-off point for AI discussions.

"10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days" by Samantha Mills: with two things I hate in the title, we're off to an iffy start. I am deeply suspicious of therapy talk outside therapy, and I am deeply suspicious of using numbered lists in place of alternative plot scaffolding.It often feels like a shortcut to managing the story organization or tension, and this (or the distracting tension headache as we waited for the gate crew to do their thing) did nothing to change my thoughts. I live in 2026, I don't need a surprise Hellmouth and its impact on a queer family, especially in second person present tense. Writers need to be on Tamsyn Muir levels of prose control before I will enjoy second person present tense, instead of asking, "now explain why this couldn't have been first person or third person PoV. No, not to me, now, make it evident in the story." I think it's for the last line, but I have to get there though the nails-on-chalk reading experience, which is not the best mindset to be in when reading.

"Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything" by Effie Seiberg: disabled protagonist is discriminated against by the local chapter of the superheroes union. Straight-up revenge of the character who just wants an ADA compliant ramp.

"Missing Helen" by Tia Tashiro: every time someone names a character Helen, I think, "of Troy?" This has nothing to do with Nolan Odyssey Summer, it's the relationship of a clone and the woman who sold her cloning rights for college money. I was all for it until the very end, when the story ends on a "will she / won't see" note. I like a little decisiveness in my conclusions, especially when the story is about a decisive character!

Ranking: Wire Mother, Helen, County, Laser Eyes, Six, Ten, No Award.

In reading order:

( What Stalks the Deep (Kingfisher): Eh. )

( Automatic Noodle (Newitz): Meh? Not my thing. )

( Murder by Memory (Waite): Cozy murder mystery eh. )

( The Summer War (Novik): I just like Novik's writing. )

( The River Has Roots (El-Mohtar): Not my thing, but very competently crafted. )

( Cinder House (Marske): This is whump. I dislike whump. Whatever noise ranks below meh, that's my rating. )

First shot at rankings: Summer War and River duke it out on craft, vs how I feel about application of that craft. Then everyone else in a pile, with maybe the Kingfisher coming lower because I don't need West Virginia as a backdrop with hicks, where the protags swoop in.

I had plans to keep an up to date book log. Well, that didn't happen.

The Will of the Many (Hierarchy, Book 1) (James Islington) (2023): In audiobook, narrated by Euan Morton. At 17, protagonist Vis experiences unexpected elevation from the bottom of the Hierarchy's boot to its elite academic academy, a new player in several schemes related to the phlebotinum the Hierarchy runs on, except like all good pseudo-Rome fantasy with phlebotinum underpinnings, guess what, it might destroy the entire world or something, more to come in Book Two.

I spotted this while browsing at a romance bookstore, and based on the blurb, I couldn't figure out why it was there. Having listened through the audiobook, specifically the part where the girlfriend is strongly implicated to be lying through her teeth about A Lot and oh yeah, literally tries to stab him to death, I'm still not sure how it got there.

Is The Will of the Many playing every trope of Manly Man In An Epic, Fighting Against Overwhelming Empire, 100% straight? Sure looks like it from here. Vis spends a lot of time being emotionally tortured by memories of His Secret Past that He Must Keep Secret Or Die, and also performing physical feats of great strength, stamina, agility, etc. It must be nice to pull double all-nighters while running marathons and stuff.

The novel hammers in that the Hierarchy is Bad, and their primary opponents, the Anguis, are also Bad, because human rights violations and hypocrisy, there's no good choices, blah blah. In Baru Comorant style, Vis is forced to join with his enemies to investigate its secrets (and maybe trash the evil hegemonic empire) from the inside. Except the interesting non-hetero worldbuilding is missing.

The cool part of the novel would be the phlebotinum, if the author were interested in it. Citizens of the Hierarchy have Will taken from them, which deprives them of energy, but gives Will wielders super strength and "imbuing" powers to make small magic devices - super-locks, trackers, lights - as well as great public works, like magic flying trains. I guess you could also heal with it, if that was something the novel was interested in. (Spoilers, the novel doesn't seem that interested in it.)

I think it'd be deeply interesting to think about imperial pressure to participate in this transfer of energy / executive function / whatever as a metaphor for all sorts of stuff, but mostly the novel uses it as "and then we had plot convenient superpowers or trains or whatever," which is disappointing.

The plot builds to an epilogue revelation that the Will phlebotinum is connected to a technology to copy and split yourself across three linked (?) worlds (???) - Res, Obiteum, Luceum - which is also connected to an ancient Cataclysm that some idiot(s) might trigger again in their grasping at Moar Power or something. Also there's some Larger Conflict (tm).

Pretty sure Vis isn't going to do the smart thing, which would be to find the Final Boss protecting the Will technology core, then destroy the Will technology beyond reconstruction, at least not without two more novels of being emotionally and physically tortured by the author's fictional proxies. If we're lucky maybe he'll reconcile with the girlfriend who tried to kill him before she perishes at the hands of his enemies / sacrifices herself for him.

The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson) (2020) in large cast audiobook. Premise: addressing carbon emissions and by proxy climate change by legislation, also some terrorism.

I read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy in my teens, and some of his other works between then and now. It feels like he has a specific utopian vision expressed repeatedly in his works, but as an American who read this in January 2026, his belief in a more peaceful, ecologically wise, equitable human future seems as dreamlike as Tolkien's First Age. That somehow this better world also comes into place through assassination and property damage doesn't help with my suspension of disbelief. Possibly the experience of one (1) pandemic, plus January '26, killed my willingness to believe in KSR's "if you build it" fiction.

Between the Islington and the KSR I reread some Scholomance as a "terrible schools and the societies that make them" palate-cleanser. After the KSR I reread a bunch of Radch series and Murderbot because sometimes you need to hang out with some unreliable and very angry narrators.

Novellas were the next-shortest choice, so novella nominees I read.

“Loneliness Universe”, Eugenia Triantafyllou, podcast reading by Matt Peters: epistolary sequence. A woman slips out of consensus reality, then everyone slips out of consensus reality. Look everyone, accidental horror story! Or perhaps deliberate horror story.

I get caught up in how that would even work, since humans are highly interdependent. Is this a response to the pandemic? Maybe. A response to atomized modern life? Also maybe. And yet. If we're all drifting apart, how do the lights stay on?

“Signs of Life”, Sarah Pinsker, podcast reading by Erika Ensign: First person past tense, sisters reconnect after a long, long separation.

I was wildly distracted by the Maryland vibes. I remain happily committed to California, but I did grow up in Maryland, and I do have thoughts on how much the entire experience of Veronica and Violet's summer reunion would feel, at a sweaty, dusty, sticky level.

Also, Violet has sometimes wished people into existence, and has a request for her sister related to that.

I wasn't close paying attention during the intro, so missed this was a Pinsker story. I think I enjoyed it more because of that. The pacing is on the slower side, but I liked that, too; it worked for the reunion component of the story.

“The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video”, Thomas Ha: First person past tense. The protagonist, while settling his mother's estate, finds a "dead" library book and becomes drawn into a conflict around the book.

There's vibes? Post-cyberpunk vibes? There's a girlfriend who isn't all that committed to a shared emotional life, and the Brotherhood of physical stuff, and Caliper John, who wants the book so he can either control it or destroy it, jury's out on that question.

It's a story, but it's very "yep, that happened, I wonder if there's some Dark Tower in the DNA of the novel-within-a-story."

“By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars”, Premee Mohamed: Third person past tense. Firion the wizard has an apprentice, Cane, and a secret: she's lost her magic. The story covers Cane's apprenticeship under Firion, and his final test: repelling the monstrous raiding Bouldus.

A perfectly acceptable story, very workmanlike. Points for lack of twee.

“The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea”, Naomi Kritzer: First person past tense. Lightning has struck and someone wrote a selkie story I didn't hate. Probably because there was less pining and more active mayhem.

Anyway. Protagonist Morgan, husband Stuart, and daughter Cordie (short for Cordelia) move to Finstowne, MA, for Stuart's sabbatical year. The plot builds up to the fairly predictable revelation that Stuart stole and hid Morgan's field research raw materials, which prevented her from finishing her doctorate. This comes out when he and Morgan are on a beach in a town alleged to have been founded by four selkie sisters, so that's it for Stuart, end story, Morgan and Cordie last seen settling comfortably into the local social fabric.

None of the novelette is earth-shattering, even the Wrath of Ocean instead of Moping For Ocean, but I liked it a lot.

“Lake of Souls”, Ann Leckie: Alien coming of age road trip, in third person past, and a little exobiology plus murder plot involving a human anthropologist, in first person past, as a treat. Interesting alien biology articulated by the human; the lived experience from the coming-of-age PoV is also interesting; definitely cleared the "not actively annoying me" bar, and also, the "I liked read this" bar.

Off the cuff ranking: Leckie, Kritzer, Mohamed, Pinsker, Ha, Triantafyllou. Most of these could shuffle quickly; there's a lot of solid work in this year's novelette category, but not too many instant standouts to my mind.

The Tainted Cup (Robert Jackson Bennett) (2024): murder mystery in a secondary world empire where biological husbandry seems to have beat out chemical synthesis, also there are kaiju leviathans. It's likely the leviathans are linked to the bio-engineering in ways that are glossed over in this novel, from the shape of the this novel and what I know of the sequel. (Only one sequel so far.) The detective-apprentice duo namechecks Holmes and Watson, which is a crime-solving template whose use I'm neutral to dubious about seeing, but Ana and Din mostly stand on their own.

Cup has a pretty speech about "when the Empire is weak, it is often because a powerful few have denied us the abundance of our people," which is a nice summing-up of one of the major themes. (I am all for compelled offering of that abundance, but later.)

Worldbuilding, plot, and characterization very much in a Hugo tradition from the '90s or '00s. I'd put money on Cup getting high marks in some circles.

Someone You Can Build A Nest In (John Wiswell) (2024): "cozy horror", which is a new to me subgenre, where human-eating monster Shesheshen falls in love with a human. And also eats people.

I forgot about the bonkers body count until I tried to fill cahn in on the ending. So let's start there.

( Major plot spoilers. Also major theme spoilers. )

Since this won a Nebula, clearly I am missing something. Maybe I'm getting hung up on the baroque Wulfyre murder-hookup chart and how the precocial biology works when I'm supposed to be getting "they're all monsters, we're all monsters, monstrous is as monstrous does" as the message and moving on. Am I just supposed to assume "Bloodchild" is in the DNA and move on? I am so baffled.

Service Model (Adrian Tchaikovsky) (2024): DNF. I started the audiobook, I stopped one sentence in. I tried the ebook, I stopped two sentences in. I did not have a good time slogging through Alien Clay and a survey of reviews tells me I'm not doing that to myself again.

The recurring theme of the 2025 Hugos (so far) seems to be people using other human beings as depersonalized tools. Literal robots (Service Model); totalitarians ship people off to labor camps (Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay); mother uses daughter as abused pawn in her avaricious plots (T. Kingfisher's A Sorceress Comes To Call); ditto Someone To Build A Nest In; The Ministry of Time going full spy-thriller tropes; to a lesser extent Din's apprenticeship with Ana in The Tainted Cup, but since there's a big empire, a murder investigation, elective (or "elective"?) biological modification of imperial subjects, and city-destroying toxic monsters periodically attacking, I am willing to read on in the suspicion someone is using someone horribly as their tool.

Quick ETA: Cup audiobook narrated by Andrew Fallaize, Nest audiobook narrated by Carmen Rose. When googling "someone you can build a nest in audiobook", the second hit is libro.fm, visible content An adorable romance of people falling in love for the first time set in a wonderful fantasy world, this book is perfect for you! ...wow.

All thirteen entries (so far) in Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric and Desdemona series, either first reads or rereads (2015 - 2024).

There are excellent "sick on the couch" reading. The stakes are "how will Penric and Des get out of this one?" (spoilers: mix of hiding and chaos), sometimes with added "should we give people second chances?" (spoilers: yes) though occasionally it's "has this person burned up their second, third, etc chances and needs a smiting?" (spoilers: often enough yes, occasionally with Des setting things on fire, sometimes with many witnesses to the smiting). The stories are pretty indulgent, especially once the reader gets to some of Desdemona's meddling (I say vaguely, avoiding spoilers) in "Demon Daughter" and "Penric and the Bandit".

The Incandescent, Emily Tesh (2025): Insta-reaction: WOO MORE TESH. In audiobook, read by Zara Ramm. I was surprised how fast it went, and blame certain big fat space operas who clock in at, let's see, 19 to 21 hours per novel for making me think a 12 hour audiobook is short.

Summary: Saffie Walden, Director of Magic at posh Chetwood Academy, juggles her decidedly unromantic responsibilities as a teacher and administrator, until a magical incursion shakes up the school and Saffie's committment to the persona of Dr. Walden, Teacher, she inhabits with deliberation.

( Thoughts cut for spoilers. )

He Who Drowned The World (Shelley Parker-Chan) (2023): Sequel / second of the duology started by She Who Became the Sun.

The duology is totally doing a bunch of tropes that aren't my tropes, and that's cool. But if the novel can start with Zhu Yuanzhang doing massive construction to re-create a city in the image of his capital, why isn't it until the end that Zhu Yuanzhang can start with social construction? "Now we can make the world we want to live in." Well you've been making a world with sword and powder for the last several hundred pages, let's think about that a bit.

I'm also a little dubious about how to put together the historical inspiration of the Hongwu Emperor, who had many consorts and many children, with the monogamy portrayed in the novels. And then there's the statecraft and nation-building issues, which I'm not qualified on at all, but get right back to my issue with "you've been making a world for the last several hundred pages."

Solid, interesting duology, worth reading, but aimed a little off to the side of what I like the most.

Exit Strategy (Martha Wells) (2018): Reread in audiobook. I meant to pick up the latest Murderbot, but I wanted to reread the one before the latest, and forgot which was penultimate in the current series, and which was ante-penultimate. Exit Strategy does fine as read by Kevin Free. He does voices, which is good, though I'm not sure I agree with all his choices. Hazards of reading the novels before listening to the audiobooks, you make up your own voices.

Network Effect (Martha Wells) (2020): Actual penultimate novel. Previously read, apparently not previously logged. Started in audiobook, finished in ebook, as one does. Murderbot hates on planets and the Corporate Rim, has a minor breakdown (maybe not so minor?), picks a fight with its best friend, makes ethically complicated killware with its best friend, etc. A+ will read again.

System Collapse (Martha Wells) (2023): The Murderbot series has included The Power Of Narrative as a theme since page one. I completely understand that. Murderbot taking control of the narrative and using video media as a persuasive tool against a Corporation Rim entity is absolutely on brand and a fantastic evolution of that theme. I am all for this. However, I also read the Expanse novels more recently than I reread Murderbot, so I am having a moment where The Power Of Narrative has intentional and also unintentional consequences.

I've seen some remarks that System Collapse reads as the wrap-up of Network Effect, which I can understand. But I also think it's setting up a chain of events where increasing numbers of SecUnits get access to ( spoilers ). So I wonder how the Network Effect and System Collapse sequence will look when another couple of stories are out.

Sweet Promised Land (Robert Laxalt) (1957 / 1974): Journalist goes to French Basque country with his father, Dominique, who emigrated 47 years previous. The epilogue focuses on Robert's brother Paul. The copy I found in a Reno bookstore has a "compliments of Senator Paul Laxalt" stamp on the frontispiece; I suspect the epilogue was added to a print run related to his 1974 campaign.

Robert Laxalt summarizes his father's pre-Depression success as a sheep-herder and ranch owner, followed by the Depression bust, followed by decades of herding in the Nevada ranges and the Sierras. The family of four boys and two girls was mostly raised by their mother, sometimes a hotel owner and business manager. Only a sister's stroke and decline convince Dominique to come away from the sheep. The author recounts his father's quirks factually, from the family scheme to get the trip to Basque country rescheduled from an ever-receding "next year" to his compassion for his fellow countrymen, American and Basque. It was a pleasant reflection on a sliver of early Nevada immigrant experience on a weekend I was unexpectedly in Reno.

People Make the Hospital: The History of Washoe Medical Center (Anton P. Sohn & Carroll W. Ogren) (1998): My other Surprise Reno Weekend local history reading. Medical history is my jam and the only thing that could make this more my jam would be The Pathology Department: A Retrospective, by Multiple Medical Professionals. This isn't the strongest entry on the theme, but filled some time.

The first three chapters are relatively dry recitations of facts. Carroll Ogren arrives at the hospital, the focus goes to his recollections of hospital construction and changes for chapters 4 - 6. Chapter 7, "The People Make The Hospital", is 30 pages of brief reminiscences on Washoe Medical Center employees. Chapter 8 touches on early Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH) inspections, and sweeps on through school of nursing and school of medicine challenges of the '70s. Chapter 9 is attributed to Anton P. Sohn, sketching out the hospital lowlights and highlights between 1978, the last year of Carroll Ogren's administration, and 1998, the year of the book's publication.

The Preface, Forward, and first chapter (slightly confusingly titled "Introduction") have some of the strongest "the past is a different country" content. The disparagement of 1998 health care is an experience, particularly the denigration of the County Commissioners that "left me with little hope that any governmental institution could effectively compete with the private sector." (Foreward, p xxi) Yet the solution put forth to combat "merger mania has infected the hospital industry attracting for-profit corporations with their greedy appetite for profit, and therefore, perpetrating fraud with unnecessary hospitalization and laboratory work," in the first chapter is to vote! (p 3) Oh to be a retired Nevada health administrator in 1998, when the scam was running more people through the hospital to drive up billable work, instead of living the 2024 challenges of insurers denying coverage for expensive but effective surgeries and treatments.

What's both old and current is Ogren's heartfelt admission in the Forward that he was fired from Washoe Medical Center for what seems to have been uncontrolled alcoholism. "I spent a year in a recovery mode with the help of a lot of Alcoholics Anonymous friends and a higher power. During my earlier years of denial, there were many who tried desperately to help me fend off my demon. Among those I tearfully and gratefully acknowledge are..." and half a paragraph is named, many of those names to reappear elsewhere.

(  Additional highlights from this history of Washoe Medical Center under the cut. )

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (Shannon Chakraborty) (2023): I had a tough time with the audiobook - earnest dedication plus definitions plus slow-ish start - and switched to ebook when my hold came in. Overall reaction: "...it was fine." ( Massive spoilers. )

The novel checks some boxes - fantasy that's not European-centric, middle aged female protagonist, queer representation - in a pleasant way. I found the definitions section superfluous; if less than ten definitions are too complex to be in-clued during the novel text, well, something isn't right. I got all the understanding I needed from context.

So would I rec this for awards? Probably not. Would I rec it as a pleasant read? Yes.

A Memory Called Empire (Arkady Martine) (2019): "This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own..." slight sigh at the earnestness "...(And for Grigor Pahlavuni and Petros Getadarj, across the centuries.)"

This was another hard novel for me to get into. Somewhere in the last ten years, my patience with sf/f taking itself Very Seriously and being widely applicable to the human condition got a little strained. Sometimes the work speaks deeply to a very small subset of people, and that's okay! Sometimes you just need Muppets and an increasingly beat-up astronaut who will not stop referencing pop culture the rest of the crew doesn't know to make your point.

(I don't know why I have Farscape on the brain, except... oh yeah, I just figured it out. More on that later.)

My first try was in hardcopy after it was nominated for the Hugo, but I stalled before Mehit got on-planet in the Teixcalaan empire. This time I listened to the audiobook, read by Amy Landon, on the theory it's a lot harder to stall on a three and a half hour drive repeated multiple weeks running, and made it into chapter two before taking a break for an expectation adjustment.

The next stop was wiki. AnnaLinden Weller, better known under her pen name Arkady Martine... was born and grew up in New York City. Her parents are classical musicians of Russian Jewish heritage: her mother is a professor of violin at Juilliard and her father played for the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera; she has described herself as an "assimilated American Jew".

Well. That might be a start on that "devouring culture" thing.

Expectations adjusted, I charged through the rest of the novel.

Mahit Dzmar, at twenty six, is summoned to the Teixcalaan capital world as the new Lsel Station ambassador, after the unexpected passing of her predecessor at forty (almost forty-one). The novel takes place in the eventful week of her arrival on Teixcalaan, where she is plunged into intrigue at the highest levels of an acquisitive empire that may have its sights set on Lsel Station as its next conquest.

The novel's near-ceaseless motion has positively Cherryh vibes: within three days of arriving on-planet, Mahit's acquired massive sleep debt, culture shock, a murder investigation, an identity crisis, and some tid-bits about the previous ambassador's sex life that aren't making any of the above easier.

The identity crisis pulls in two directions: Mahit's negotiation of her Lsel identity in the capital of a culture she's studied and engaged with, both intellectually and culturally, since her pre-teen years; and her relationship with her imago, a piece of Lsel technology that gives her the memories and experiences of the person whose imago is implanted in the recipient. Mahit's fifteen-years-out-of-date imago of the previous ambassador was implanted in a rush job; further imago-related challenges manifest on Teixcalaan. Mahit would really like to lean on a friendly voice, as she plunges into Teixcalaan culture, politics, and current events, but that "imago line as friendly voice" thing doesn't go as planned.

After reading the novel, I looked up Pahlavuni and Getadar. Pahlavuni seems slightly better known, being involved with Byzantine religion during a time of upheaval (?). The first hit on Getadar was wiki; a number of the first page links were Martine, by penname or doctorate name, including this interview that validated the Cherryh vibes coming from A Memory Called Empire. "Thematically, A Memory Called Empire is a pretty direct response to the Foreigner series . . . I reread Cyteen every year or so, if that says anything."

Pahlavuni and Getadar add to the "devouring culture" thing, I guess.

Miscellaneous notes:
- where is the embassy staff? Sure, one Lsel citizen as ambassador, but where's the staff? Security, an office manager or errand-runner, anyone, local or from Lsel, who has worked at the Lsel embassy in the last ten years? Okay, great, Cherryh's Foreigner series is called out as inspiration, but that series went out of its way to set up a one person information channel. Empire just goes "the Lsel ambassador" and doesn't interrogate, lampshade, or otherwise explain the lack of support staff.

- "Yskander was so old!" Yskander was forty when he died. A twenty-six year old would think forty is old. It's a wonderfully age appropriate character moment.

- Imago tech goes on the "humans really thought this would never be abused by the Opposition and/or Designated Bad Guys, ha ha," list, along with Union drug-learning tech, Hexarchate formation instinct, the protomolecule, the separate technologies corporate space bundled to make SecUnits... probably some Octavia Butler and the speciMen developments in Nnedi Okorafor's novels too.

- The city AI gives me "gun on the mantelpiece" vibes. Is it a thinking algorithmic AI? What biases are unthinkingly encoded in its algorithms? What biases were actively coded into it? Did Ten Pearl leave a sysadmin back door into the production code? Come back, city AI! Someone run a Turing test!

A Desolation Called Peace (Arkady Martine) (2021): Read in audiobook, Amy Landon returning as narrator. "This book is for all the exiles..." not so quiet sigh at the earnestness, "(and for Stanislav Petrov, who knew when to disobey orders)."

Some people read the first novel and were blown away by Mahit's experiences in the first novel. I was in a much more neutral place at the end of the novel, but enthusiastic enough to load up the Desolation audiobook and give the cold open a try. "Well," I said, pausing after the prelude, "this can't be good," and cackled, because sometimes the cheap references targeted for people who probably haven't gotten into later novels of a completely unrelated series are the funniest.

( Everyone's here at once. So are the spoilers. )

I'm going to try to take Desolation on its own target goals. It starts its thesis as Exiles, Dude, Let's Talk About Exiles, and also quotes Tacitus and an academic tome on Incan-European first contact. But let's also talk about craft.

Usually I think of novels as being driven by plot or by character. Cherryh is my go-to for plot driving a novel; Bujold is the character-driven argument. However, theme can be a driver as well. This may explain why some novels absolutely baffle me: I can understand why plot drives what happens, I can grasp why characters drive what happens. But make theme the engine of story action and it's entirely possible I am going to miss the point, unless it's coupled to plot or character.

It's possible that Desolation is being driven by theme, which explains why it's so messy from other structural angles.

( Trust was a word you couldn't translate. But the atevi had fourteen words for betrayal. And more than fourteen spoilers. )

So, yeah, I'm not doing a great job at taking Desolation on its own goals. I have so many "why would you not put the [redacted] in your best shot at BSL-4 until biosafety concerns, including allergens, are ruled in/out," questions.

( Your mind is about to crack, and I cannot allow that, I was here first... true, the Ancients were here first, but... )

A reread of Some Desperate Glory for Yuletide reasons. The reread did nothing to reduce my thoughts on Mass Effect showing up in the DNA.

All nine Expanse novels (2011 - 2021), and the collected short stories, in a mix of audiobook and ebook. All 1.5 million words, give or take. In a month.

Apparently I am the target audience for "members of scrappy found family (Paladin who rolled minus one million on comprehending Actions vs Consequences, oblivious to or actively ignoring that his chosen family is made up of disaster humans; quiet engineering genius with a history that comes out of nowhere in book five; pilot who is 90% chill unto conflict avoidant and 10% 'you threatened my favorite engineer, this can only be solved with a railgun'; and Amos) claim they're just trying to live their lives while fighting large evil corporations, selfish and short-sighted government factions, and sometimes men who believe they can be God."

For a series that has Massive American Dudebro Energy, The Expanse has a couple themes not usually accompanied by Dudebro Energy: first, for all the gun-fights and spaceship duels and fist fights, a larger bomb solves almost no problem ever. Larger bombs, or more guns, or better guns, usually make larger problems. Talking, now, that sometimes maybe solves problems. Second, the writers really do seem to have taken to heart the adage that the third spear-carrier to the left's gender is irrelevant, why not make a minor, tertiary, or secondary character a woman? Why not make them a minority? Third, our dumbass paladin and the only person to get one of the rotating PoV slots in all nine novels is, well, a glorious dumbass paladin. As one character says, "you talk out your ass better than most people do using their mouth and sober. Plus which, no one on this ship will try harder to jump in front of a bullet for me than you will. I find that appealing in a captain."

Source checks: golden age SF, classic space opera, the last round of New Space Opera. Herbert, Vinge, Andy Weir shout-outs. Firefly's in the DNA, but I didn't notice any shout-outs. If there isn't some Kim Stanley Robinson in the Mars worldbuilding, I will be shocked. Norabombay thinks Naomi has Cordelia Vibes, but she watched the TV show first, which doesn't count for novel influence assessment. On the other hand, I think Amos has Bothari vibes to go with the What If We Upgraded Jayne Cobb vibes, so... checks out. I don't think the authors meant to give me Diane Duane vibes, but first of all, polyamory and diverse family arrangements are baked into the worldbuilding, which feels a lot like the Tale of the Five novels; second, if there isn't some deep American progressive-leaning Protestant themes about sacrifice in the background of Young Wizards and The Expanse, well, I'm wrong and I am going to sulk while sandwiching Deep Wizardry between Leviathan Wakes and Cibola Burn and scrowling. Anyway. There's also a Le Guin nod in one of the late series ship names, because the Earthsea trilogy is awesome, and the extended series is... well, it's an interesting choice.

The authors have mentioned they're also pulling from different genres in each novel, which is fun. The first novel is soaked in noir and the second novel's realpolitik gives me Cherryh vibes. It's also a monster thriller I guess? IDK, Bobbie showed up in her power armor and Avasarala used cheap and largely empty threats against men's reproductive organs as a cover for her far more serious threats to their political, economic, and social power, and I was sold. Third novel is doing a bunch of plot stuff to set up Babylon 5 vibes long term. The fourth novel is such a Western, there had to be a shoot-out. And so on.

The authors have been pretty up-front that the worldbuilding and characters came out of a role-playing game; the worldbuilding leaves a lot of unfilled space if you're into that sort of thing. (See: Babylon 5 vibes.)

Fourth Wing (Rebecca Yarros): First in a proposed five novel series. Twenty year old Violet Sorrengail, third child of a general of the dragonriders, is hustled off to dragonrider school after the death of her father, a gentle Scribe who wanted his chronically ill daughter to follow in his footsteps.

Yeah, no, where's the fun in that?

Instead, Violet is ordered to the fight-or-die Rider's Quadrant, which boasts a 75% mortality rate among the cadets who a.) want to be there b.) trained to be there c.) aren't blessed with something which looks like plot-convenient Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Graduates are part of the dragonrider elite, bonded to the dragon who hand-picked them until their death (dragons usually survive their rider's death; riders don't) and with access to magic powers via the bond with their dragon.

Violet spends most of the novel trying to survive her first year in the Rider's Quadrant and battling her attraction to tall, dark, and lethally handsome Xaden Riorson, son of the man who lead an uprising and was killed on Violet's mother's orders. Xaden has the biggest muscles, the most brooding gold-flecked onyx eyes, and the most badass dragon among the trainees, at least until Violet - well, you figure it out.

My friend who read this said she did not think it was good, but that it was fun, and as a veteran of the fantasy and the AO3 trenches, I cannot disagree with her assessment. I can't even fault her for having no idea who Adam Driver was when I was texting her my reactions, she's not fannish and would have no logical reason to know about Reylo. So let's be clear: Violet is the Most Special. She has the Most Special challenges to being a dragon-rider. She has the Most Special dragon. She has the Most Special hot boy pants-feeling problems. She has the Most Special angst since emo Herald-Mages roamed the world (though this is straight person angst, rather than very gay angst). She has the Most Special dragon magic power. She also has the Most Special Hair. Etc etc etc. I can put up with everything except the part where Hot Boy didn't tell her about his secret plan to resist the evil censorship state, and she takes it as him not trusting her, so she can't trust him with her heart. Well, I guess that's one way to set up some will-they-won't-they sexual tension in the second book.

(Every PoV character of the Expanse is over here saying, "it's called operational security and you shouldn't take it personally, Violet," except for maybe James fucking Holden (1). Holden's possible support is more than balanced out by Avasarala's opsec speech, which probably would start with insults to Violet's intelligence, threatening Hot Boy's balls, and include Avasarala saying "fuck" at least twice. Fifty foot tall fire-breathing dragons have nothing on Chrisjen Avasarala in a bad mood.)

(1) But then, Holden would be appalled that trying to fight the censorship state got a bunch of people killed in a war half a generation back, and he'd do what Holden is notorious for doing, which is an unauthorized press release that triggers a war and gets a bunch of people killed.

Other trope highlights: Hot Boy and Violet's dragon collaborate on secretly inventing a dragon saddle, complete with stirrups, because apparently saddles are Not To Be Endured by our murder dragons, until they are; Nice Boy Next Door turns out to be Not Nice; dead people are - plot twist! - not dead.

The novel is told in first person present tense. The audiobook switches narrators for the last chapter, which is told from Hot Boy Xaden Riorson's PoV, so readers can really appreciate how much he burns, heh, for Violet's passionate love. The narrator switch threw me hard, especially after untold millions of words with the Expanse audiobook narrator, who can't pronounce "gimbal" consistently but does great voices.

Iron Widow (Xiran Jay Zhao) (2021): Another road audiobook. YA, Pacific Rim meets Han Chinese mecha sci-fi AU. Angry peasant girl Wu Zetian volunteers to be a pilot-concubine, a typically subservient and short lived role, to avenge her dead older sister on the pilot she believes murdered her older sister. Instead of getting a chance to stab him with a blade disguised as a hairpin, she pulls all his qi in battle, earning the "Iron Widow" epithet used in the novel's title. Wu goes on to survive the army's attempts to get her killed in battle or break her resistance, while trying to solve most of her problems with murder. Along the way, she solves her love triangle problem with convicted murderer Li Shimin and gentle rich boy Gao Yizhi by going for the thruple. Good job, kids, good job.

If you're here for "angry young woman rages her way to the top of the pile," is this the novel for you.
If you're reading for subtlety, Iron Widow is not the novel for you. Wu's Huaxia is built on crushing and hobbling women into subservience, with the foot binding tradition bringing literalism to any possible metaphors.

The audiobook was read by someone who either knows Chinese much better than me or fakes it well, which I think helped sell the worldbuilding to me.

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (Sheri Fink) (2013): Presenting in two parts and an epilogue a chronicle of events, during and after Hurricane Katrina, at Tenet Memorial Medical (sold by Tenet as part of a post-Katrina divestment from Louisiana, currently Ochsner Baptist Medical Center); legal investigation into rumored patient euthanizations; and lessons learned (or not learned). An expansion of a 2009 New York Times article, "The Deadly Choices at Memorial".

The persons, motivations, and actions at play in the book incidentally or deliberately hit on trends that continue to bloom and bear fruit now, almost 20 years later. Emergency preparedness and assigning patient acuity during a crisis. The devastation of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season ties into climate change and other hurricane disasters, such as Sandy in 2012 (whose New York City impact is touched on in the epilogue); Harvey and other major 2017 hurricanes; or the misery of the 2020 season, which started early, generated a record-breaking number of storms, ended late, and incidentally broke some of the records set by the 2005 (Katrina) hurricane season, during the first year of the COVID pandemic. The encroachment of profit motives on the healthcare sector. The interaction of race and perceived guilt, or perceived intention.

The first half of the book, "Deadly Choices" does a fantastic job communicating to the reader that on-the-ground decisions were made in relentless heat and tropical humidity, in a brick building with failed air conditioning, so forget about nighttime temperature recovery, on a background of shifting and sometimes contradictory information.

Fink makes some good incidental points that other hospitals struggled with the patient care and evacuation issues Memorial was challenged by, including a case where one patient was left for dead and later picked up, quite alive. She also touches on Charity Hospital being in the same floodwaters as the rest of the New Orleans hospitals, but somehow Charity Hospital seemed to avoid the patient mortality and possibly the worst of the morale problems Memorial suffered.

She also makes clear that the healthcare response to New Orleans' inundation was just as overwhelmed as any other part of the humanitarian disaster that followed Katrina.

The second half of the book, "Reckoning", focuses on the legal and social ramifications of two doctors' choices to euthanize a number of patients, as well as the ethical underpinnings. The MD ultimately put on trial had several things going for her: the chaos of events; being a second generation MD, the daughter of a doctor well-connected in New Orleans health care social circles; and being an upper-class white woman in the South. Fink highlights how this MD benefited from social connections and a snazzy media campaign, when it came time for a grand jury to find her innocent or guilty of second-degree murder.

(I will never, ever not be salty about the tidbit that the cancer center's generator maintained power, so the C-suite used the cancer center, with its working generator, as a break room, while patients with thermoregulation problems and dehydration were lying on mattresses on the floor one functional skyway away.)

Another thread of Memorial's messy outcomes was the AMA* recommendations for triaging critical patients when resources get limited, and limiting doctor liability in times of crisis. It seems to me that once you've opened the door to crisis compromises, it becomes a lot easier to find or manufacture a crisis, especially in settings that require skilled, in demand workers. There's a line right from Memorial and Katrina to the healthcare staffing of 2023.

*American Medical Association, not "against medical advice".

Wiki tells me that Fink received a PhD and MD from Stanford, and embarked on humanitarian work before or while getting into journalism. This is the sort of resume that makes one reconsider one's life choices.

Desiring a palate-cleanser, I reread a great deal of Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Lois McMaster Bujold) (2012). The overall plot is: Ivan accidentally gets married, his wife's family turns out to be of Jacksonian-Cetagandan extraction, Nazi gold Cetagandan occupation historical artifact shenanigans ensue. There's a clear pivot at Ivan's realization he is, in fact, quite in love with his wife, where suddenly Tej's family appears to put outside pressure on Ivan and Tej to sort out their fake marriage. The pivot doesn't do great things structurally, and also takes some of the wind out of a small-scale novel focused on Ivan and Tej. Bujold's used the juxtaposition of character work, sweeping plot arc, and theme to good effect in Mirror Dance and Memory, but for me it didn't line up as neatly in CVA. I think the theme in this one was supposed to be "reconciling family and legacy" or something along those lines, mirroring Ivan and Tej as successful adults who are not the adults their parents wanted, but it gets a little obscured in the stop-start plot speed.

I see my original comments ended, At some point I'll appreciate CVA for what it is, rather than what I'd like it to be, which I find unintentionally amusing in light of above thoughts on theme.