ase

First, some winter that I missed: Victoria Goddard's The Game of Courts (2023) and Derring-Do For Beginners (2023). The Game of Courts is Conju gap-filler / prequel for The Hands of the Emperor. If gap-filler is your thing, and people making friends with Cliopher Mdang is your thing, this will be enjoyable. Derring-Do For Beginners is Red Company pre-story, around the meetings of Damian Raskae, Jullanar Thislethwaite, and Fitzroy not-yet-Angursell. It's pleasant enough, but I was really struck by Damian's difficult relationship with his mother and brother. "How interesting," I thought, "if Goddard has decided to write this character, the leader of the Red Company, as someone who has difficulty reading and understanding others' emotions; with very limited and obsessive interests in swordsmanship; to the point that his brother and mother think hard on how to adapt to the challenge of a family member that doesn't recognize their social cues..."

...and then it turned out Damian's "just" so farsighted he needs glasses to see anything less than six feet from his face. That wasn't the invisible disability I was expecting, so I've had to adjust my reactions from what I thought I read (neurodivergence) for what the author intended (physically can't see indoors without glasses).

So it's another case of "if you liked everything before, you'll probably like this," with the corollary also applicable.

Wheel of the Infinite (Martha Wells) (2000): Audiobook, narrated by Lisa Renee Pitts. Cranky middle-aged Maskelle and the performance troupe she is traveling with bend their steps for the holy capital Duvalpore, Maskelle's once-home, on the eve of a ceremony of renewal. Dark omens shadow Maskelle's path, as she is forced to make alliance with the wandering swordsman Rian, fleeing his own distant troubles, to renew the Wheel of the Infinite before the world is plunged into the chaos the Wheel protects it from.

If you've read Wells, you know the themes and tropes that appeal to her, and either you are along for that or you're not. If you haven't, tthere's an author's revised / updated edition coming out this November. I'm curious to see what gets tweaked, to be honest.

Iron Flame (Rebecca Yarros) (2023): Violet Sorrengail, Most Special Protagonist of Fourth Wing, beat the 75% fatality odds seen in Rider's Quadrant first year cadets, falling into Most Eligible Bachelor Xaden Riorson's passionate embrace along the way... but now it's second year, and Violet faces new challenges. Can she survive the pitfalls of Basgiath War College's secrets, or the dangerous callings of her ladybits heart?

So. Well. How does one say this?

Google "reylo", hold it up against Iron Flame, and then google "corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture."

Reylo is pretty much a big list of "nope" for me, which is too bad for anyone trying to get me to read, well, any romance novel ever.

There are some other romance tropes in play, but it's really clear I am not the target audience for a single thing this series is doing.

( I guess it's spoilers. )

Project Hail Mary (Andrew Weir) (2021): Protagonist Ryland Grace wakes up alone, in something almost but not entirely like an automated hospital, with no idea who he is or how he got there. He has to solve those questions, plus the questions and hands-on problems that unfold in response to the answers to who he is and why he is where he is.

A straight up Weir engineering scramble. As mentioned by others, strong on the hard science "what if" ideas, weak on anything other than theoretical physics, applied physics, software, or math. If you like your biology, the softer sciences, or the humanities evoked with accuracy, seek elsewhere.

The older I get, the easier applied science problems seem, and the harder anything to do with getting groups of thinking organisms to act cooperatively seems, so this was fun escapist literature for me. Picking apart all the ways the underpinning assumptions don't work is part of the fun, really.

One thing that gets particularly shafted by the weakness on things Not Physics Or Software is that the protagonist has, either intentionally or unintentionally, the personality and social background of someone with weak personal social structures, which could be played up as a personal arc, but it's sort of a bonus concept thrown in late in the novel, when he has some go / no go decisions to make. Not to mention the final scene is stupid cute and also plays to sentiment rather than any deep interrogation of [redacted] neuropsychology and applied pedagogy. Still, it was a fun Saturday fluff read.

Currently reading Shannon Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, in ebook, for the Hugos. I made it through all of two-thirds of the audiobook dedication - the dedication! Not even the prologue! - before giving serious thought to chucking my phone at an open car window (walls being in limited supply on an I-80 San Francisco to Reno run). The written version is going more smoothly.