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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.

Missing Reading Wednesday, but here's some reading.

Some Desperate Glory (Emily Tesh) (2023): ( Why look, I took notes as I read. )

B+ novel. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't vote it as The Best Novel of 2023. I also would make all my friends read it, so we can talk about it until we are talked out.

Together We Will Go (J. Michael Straczynski) (2021): Bought this immediately on release. Started reading on vacation last year, put it down for a while, picked it up again in April, blazed through it in a couple of days. Just had to be in the right place, I guess.

This felt very JMS, in a good way: ensemble, human condition, a deeply emotional scene about how much someone loves their cat. If I were the crying type, I would have cried.

The final discussion was a little pat, but I also appreciated the format showing different people coming together, and their different experiences. And the different pains, physical or emotional, that lead to their wish to live one good road trip and end it on their terms.