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.

The Tea Master and the Detective (Aliette de Bodard): Consulting detective solicits the skills of a maker of blends that have psychotropic properties, allowing people to survive "deep space" (FTL?) unscathed. Deep space and bad experiences there shape the narrative.

Unlike Peach (see below), I figured out how to read this: close enough to Sherlock Holmes and John Watson to start there. Notably, most of the characters are women; it's as if Bodard has taken to heart "why make Third Spear-Carrier on the Left a man when they could be a woman?" and carried that through to, "why not make everyone a woman?"

As a nominee... it's rock solid writing, would not be sad if this took a rocket home.

The Black God's Drums (P. Djèlí Clark) (2018): Steampunk (?) historical AU in the free city of New Orleans. The orisha-touched protagonist overhears a deal involving the Confederate States and a Haitian scientist who aided in the construction of a doomsday weapon, and enmeshes herself in a counter-plan.

Drums is perfectly acceptable writing. It doesn't do anything new, but it does a competent take on existing memes. Would be a safe choice compared to the wildly variable creativity and skill in the novellas this year.

Beneath the Sugar Sky (Seanan McGuire) (2018):Third of the Wayward Children novellas.

( So close, yet so far. ) The more I think about the moral underpinnings and worldbuilding assumptions of the Wayward Children series, the less I like the implications.

Binti: The Night Masquerade (Nnedi Okorafor) (2018): Binti confronts personal tragedy and a crisis in Meduse-Khoush relationships as she asserts her Hausa identity, even while she continues to change.

( More ambitious than successful. ) Not my favorite of Okorafor's work, and for me, not a strong contender in this year's field.

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach (Kelly Robson) (2018): ( I do not understand what just happened. )

Anyone who understood what this novella was trying to do, please explain it in comments. Anyone as baffled as me, let's be mutually puzzled in comments!

Artificial Condition (Martha Wells) (2018): Previously read. Interstitial, which is a minus, but includes ART, who is currently my favorite minor character in the Murderbot series.

Prelim rankings: Artificial Condition, Tea Master, Drums, Night Masquerade, Peach, Sugar Sky, No Award. I have no idea what Peach was trying to do, but it was failed in interesting ways. I may shuffle rankings before voting closes, but mostly in the middle and bottom of the range.

Paired reading suggestion: All the Birds in the Sky and The Goblin Emperor, yes?

Fool Moon (Jim Butcher) (2001): Second Dresden Files novel, in audiobook narrated by James Marsters. Harry's woman issues something werewolves something something mafia boss trussed up for werewolf bait something Harry's savior complex something. The gender politics are antiquated, but Butcher is a born storyteller.

Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik) (2018): ( By women, about women. )

The Traitor Baru Comorant (Seth Dickinson) (2014): ( Bogs down in collaboration and sacrifice. )

Since I also finished the Machineries of Empire trilogy this summer, which I felt also bogged down in the collaboration question, I'm a little burned out on protagonists tortured by their choice to sacrifice people on the pyre of a Greater Cause. It's particularly notable in contrast to my other recent fiction: I tripped and fell into rereading Jo Walton's My Real Children (2014), which is one of those very Walton "let's have an interesting idea and run it a couple of hundred pages" novels. Family matters a lot, suffering for the sake of suffering is generally avoided (though suffering because of your terrible marriage, well, sometimes you are young and commit to obnoxious guilt-ridden gay closeted Catholic men). It's not a big sweeping novel, but it doesn't want to be.

"The Levin-Gad" (Diane Duane) (2018): ~20k novelette in the Tale of the Five series. Herewiss goes out to nurse a quiet drink and pick a fight with the Shadow, as you do. This isn't a standalone: an attentive reader can probably pick up the essential backstory from context, but the story thoroughly spoils the closing action of The Door Into Sunset, and will take a lot less puzzling-over to understand if you've read the three novels that precede The Levin-Gad.

"Lior and the Sea" (Diane Duane) (1986): Standalone Middle Kingdoms novella about a Rodmistress who falls in love with the sea. The sea falls in love right back. That's it, that's the story.

Artificial Condition (Martha Wells) (2018): ( Second Murderbot novella. )

Skin Game (Jim Butcher) (2015): ( Meh. )

Me, early 2017: I will be better about reading and writing about what I've read!
Me, November 2017: So that's going to be a 2018 goal, as well as a 2017 effort.

God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine (Victoria Sweet) (2012): A memoir of practicing medicine at Laguna Honda Hospital, one of San Francisco's last-ditch facilities for long term care. The memoir is infused with Sweet's research into the medical practice of Hildegard of Bingen.

I opened this with a vague idea I'd get a look into one facet of San Francisco's health care history. That's not what God's Hotel is most interested in. Its focus is on the human face of doctoring, as experienced by Dr. Sweet during her tenure at Laguna Honda, and how her approach to medicine was influenced by her doctoral research on Hildegard. It's a topic that needs periodic reinforcement: the myriad tools available for medical intervention are secondary to healing the sick. Sweet emphasizes cutting back on dramatic intervention and letting time and the human body do their work. It's the same lesson Shem wrote down forty years ago: the delivery of good medical care is to do as much nothing as possible. Sweet emphasizes the more positive interpretation: the delivery of good medical care is to figure out what's blocking the path to health, and get rid of the blocks, including the egos of the doctors, nurses, and other people involved with caring for the patient.

Provenance (Ann Leckie) (2017): standalone in the same universe as the Imperial Radch trilogy, set shortly after the trilogy, but essentially unrelated. Ingrey Aughskold, daughter of ambitious and politically connected Netano Aughskold, takes a daring course to challenge her brother for inheritance of Netano's name and position. This gets complicated by Hwae politics, an upset Geck ambassador on her way to the Conclave, and the provenance, or lack of provenance, of Hwae's most revered cultural artifacts. If you've read the Foreigner series, the the complicated political dynamics muddied by personal concerns, and the personal relationships muddled up by the political situation, are going to feel pretty familiar. Provenance takes that muddling in directions that feel pretty homey if you've read the Imperial Radch trilogy.

I was lucky enough to attend a reading when Leckie was on book tour for Provenance's release, and got to hear her say - I'm paraphrasing - that she'd learned some things about gender and gender presentation during or after writing the Ancillary trilogy which got put into Provenance. Hwae society has three genders, thrown in as part of the worldbuilding along with the family and inheritance structures. Those social constructs that have profound implications for Ingrey and her family, and tie into the thematic questions about where things come from and how are they - ha! - made significant.

All this, and aliens too. The Geck ambassador's involvement brings with it a pervasive fear of breaking the Treaty. The Geck angle brings with it questions of humanity and identity that thematically ties back to the previous three novels in the universe. Provenance is a lighter and faster read than the Imperial Radch trilogy, but very preoccupying for the characters and enjoyable as a lighter thing.

All Systems Red (Martha Wells) (2017): first novella in the Murderbot series.

Murderbot is the chosen identification of the protagonist, a self-proclaimed cheap security droid whose defining traits are being responsible for a mass casualty event and later hacking the governor module that made it kill 55 people. Secretly free of its override protocols, Muderbot's most significant change in habit is its unrestricted space!TV addiction. All Systems Red covers a contract job gone sideways, which forces Murderbot to reveal its self-actualization to a group of softhearted humans.

Murderbot is... not necessarily the most reliable narrator? Wells has a fondness for a certain type of isolated, distrustful protagonist who is convinced revealing their true nature will end with rejection, more isolation, and maybe death. Murderbot follows the trend, with bonus self-deprecation and psuedo-indifference to the governor module incident that is totally over, cough, which has nothing to do with why it calls itself Murderbot. Ahem.

I suspect this will come up again in the future novellas, which I look forward to reading.

After many years and several tries I finally got through Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (1993). When I first tried to read it I had a vague assumption it would focus on the mechanics of comics, and it does that, but it goes much deeper into how comics function as art and also into the hows and whys of symbolism in comics. A tougher read than expected but very rewarding.

Raven Stratagem (Yoon Ha Lee) (2017): does one of my favorite things in fiction, the late-story plot twist that is a wonderful surprise and also totally fits with everything that came before. There's limits to that strategy, but Lee hasn't reached them yet.

Thrawn (Timothy Zahn) (2017): Months after reading this I can say it was reasonably clever, it was as good as I expect from Zahn, and the Pryce backstory was nice, but it made me terrifically nostalgic for The Last Command.

Binti (2015) and Binti:Home (2016) (Nnedi Okorafor): young woman defies tradition to attend space university, has adventures. If you've read Okorafor, these novellas will feel very much in her style.

Three Parts Dead (Max Gladstone) (2012): Craftswoman Tara Abernathy, cast out of the Hidden Schools of the Craft, is recruited by Elayne Kevarian, of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to deal with a tricky case of Craft whose roots trace back to the God Wars that changed the world, and cut through a tangle of Craft and personal relationships.

If that summary is a mess, well, the novel is ambitious to a fault. The PoV is tight-ish third noir-ish in a D&D-ish fantasy world. But it most reminds me of old school science fiction, the sort where the clever plot turns on the writer explaining the way everything works except for the pivot-element that swings the final twist into action. In the epilogue, Elayne remarks, engineers: they spend so much time solving physical problems and obeying physical rules, they forget that nonphysical phenomena obey rules every bit as strict.

A couple of years ago the Legion of Honor hosted an exhibit of Breguet watches, fancypants high-end timepieces of the last three or four centuries. The plot of Three Parts Dead reminded me of the tiny interlocked gears powering the conventional hour, minute, and second hands, as well as all the complications that could be imagined and packed into a handheld device. Like some of the honological complications on display, I didn't quite see the appeal of the threads of history and action connecting the deaths of Judge Cabot and Kos Everburning to Tara, Elayne, Novice Technician Abelard of the Church of Kos Everburning, addict and agent of Justice Catherine Elle, Shale of the Guardians (gargoyles), Craftsman Alexander Denovo, and the vampire Raz Pelham. There is a point where piling on history, secondary worldbuilding, personal backstory, and red herrings turns a cats-cradle plot from a tense interconnected story to a mess.

The book does a number of things "right" - women as protagonists, Bechdel test pass, people of color as characters with agency - but the execution it felt bloodless, clockwork, to me.

On a really petty, petty note, every time someone talked about the city of Alt Coulumb I had college physics flashbacks. It was really, really distracting.

A Closed and Common Orbit (Becky Chambers) (2016): Hugo nominee. Double timeline story about AI fish-out-of-water Sidra's first steps into personhood played against young Jane 24 (aka Jane, aka Pepper) and shuttle-AI-slash-parent-ish Owl teaming up to fix a junked spacecraft.

Orbit is a character book. If you're interested in the characters and their personal journeys, you're going to enjoy this book. The plot acts in service of time with the characters, winding through there's Sidra's challenges as an AI stuck in an un-AI body, with attendant dysphoria; an exploration of Port Coriol's people and cultures; and Pepper's history, topped off with a Leverage-esque shuttle heist / family reunion at the end of the novel, because this is a novel about identity, found family, and not leaving people behind.

There's a sense of a lot of influences, not that far under the surface. That doesn't always work to Orbit's benefit. The Dispossessed has a memorable, tightly structured, thematically resonant double timeline narrative. The other double timeline narrative that has rocked my world is Ancillary Justice. There are interleaved usenet-slash-irc-slash-reddit-ish excerpts with people being people, with AIs on the table, accidentally evoking A Fire Upon the Deep. Orbit includes a glancing interest in how to make a person, which is right up my thematic alley, but that's secondary to its focus on self-actualization, see "focus on characters". Orbit is a competent but not brilliant or definitive take on the tropes and ideas in play.

This year I finally finished The House of God (Samuel Shen) (1978), a semiautobiographical novel of a first year medical intern's trial by fire, gomer, and administrivia. It's dated, raunchy in the least erotic way possible - there is an awful lot of kind of objectification and doctor/nurse sex - and yet the issues of patient care raised are still painfully relevant to American health care almost forty years later.

Thick As Thieves (Megan Whalen Turner) (2017): Slave Kamet escapes the calamitous death of his owner in the Mede Empire. Since this is a King's Thief novel, there is a big, plot-changing twist, perhaps even several. If one builds a reputation on surprising readers, there's a point where the readers know the story isn't being told straight and start to question closely the statements the characters take for fact, which works against that element of surprise. There's a limit to the strategy of plot twists for the sake of plot twists, which Turner might be starting to bump up against.

I reread In the Garden of Iden (Kage Baker) (1997) in the run-up to vacation, because sometimes what you really need is some slapstick with tragedy. It's been... a decade? More than a decade? Since I originally read this, so I'd forgotten some of the set pieces: the "unicorn", the Christmas celebration, the dubious consequences of Sir Walter's deal with the Company. Iden has most elements of the Company series, in a nutshell, including that pompous git Mendoza's boyfriend. It's so good! The writing is fluid and smart and funny and the plot flows together wonderfully. Baker's early death was a great loss to the SF/F writing community.

The Winged Histories (Sofia Samatar) (2016): Samatar's second novel, set in the same universe as her first, A Stranger in Olondria. It's Samatar's take on epic fantasy. Histories is divided into four parts, presenting four POVs on a civil war in Olondria. I bogged down at the opening of the third part, almost exactly halfway though, which opened with second person present tense. (And by "bogged down" I said, "oh, no," and pulled the next book in the to-read queue.) This is nominally standalone, but I struggled to assemble a sense of the characters, their relationships, and what made their stories sufficiently compelling that I should keep reading. Histories also suffered from the tension of being epic fantasy and being critical of epic fantasy. It's hard to reach for an affecting touchstone Crowing Moment of Awesome while taking a hard look at the assumptions that make that Crowing Moment of Awesome so affecting. Also, epic fantasy just isn't my genre. On the outside, it looks like it should be. It's a genre that runs long in wordcount and intricate in worldbuilding. But epic fantasy rarely digs into the spin-off of the worldbuilding assumptions, the second order assumptions. GRRM unintentionally nailed it: The common people pray for rain, health, and a summer that never ends. They don't care what games the high lords play. I want to know what causes the Westeros wacky seasonal variation, how that impacts the society - I want some impact on society - and I really don't care about a bunch of people fighting over power. Power is boring, limitations set the state for interesting stories. Histories has the right idea - the characters have limits - but again, the execution is almost there.

Also, there's an xkcd graph that is relevant to this novel. I thought the plethora of fictional plants, animals, trade goods, what have you, was a Le Guin style ethnographic argument on cultural contextualization and atomization or something, but it's an example of epic fantasy imitating the forms of the genre's founders while forgetting that one of the founding giants was an obsessive philologist whose smash hit was a spin-off of his conlang projects (note the projects multiple). Okay, I exaggerate? But to make my point that the outward shape is reproduced, not the inner truths readers found in the reading experience.

Points for ambition. I want to like The Winged Histories, but the execution didn't do it for me on this pass. But apparently I want to talk in detail about its ambitious failure, which might get me to try other fiction by Samatar, or even grit my teeth and finish the second half. Eventually.

Lab Girl (Hope Jahren) (2016): I think this might have been an NPR book? It paid off very well for an NPR read, if so. Memoir by a die-hard plant nerd, focusing on the adventures of life in pursuit of the tenure track and also on the awesomeness of plants. It's a 304 page account of a lifelong love affair with green things. There's a relaxing effect of the writer skimming across her experiences, touching on the tenure track struggle, the desperate state of research funding, the experience of being a woman in academia and a field research science, adventures and misadventures in mental health, family relationships, and not delving too deeply into any one of these, except maybe the awesomeness of Jahren's partner in crime and research.

The City of Bones (Martha Wells) (1995): Scrappy loner with wacky survival abilities thanks to long-vanished Ancients - and his partner in dealing Ancient relics - are reluctantly drafted to save the world. Scrappy loners are one of Wells' go-to character types, which is useful for talking about societies, and the odd things that make up the culture, like burning people's bones to prophesy, or trading their sanity for mage powers, or engaging in high risk trades in Ancient relics, because money, against a backdrop of postapocalyptic desert scarcity. It's a bit Mad Max, minus the cars. And also with the strong female protagonists - loner Khat and his partner Sagai are drawn into high level intrigue by Elen, a junior Warder of the city-state Charisat. Elen and Khat have contrasting emotional arcs: Khat struggles to keep his distance from Sagai and Sagai's family, Elen struggles with stepping out of her mentor's shadow. If you like Wells' other fiction, you'll probably like this too.

The Ships of Air (Martha Wells) (2004): Second in the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy. Road trip, including worldbuilding, with political marriage of convenience, only by "marriage of convenience" the story means "and they actually are kind of MFEO" with the occasional secondary character death to make me feel vaguely like this is not pure swashbuckling indulgence. Wells does really good ensemble work, which I really enjoy. The end of novel character reveal was... eh, I'd been spoiled by a Gate of Gods blurb. But structurally, there'd been a little too much of Absent Character infodump to be anything but setup.

The Gate of Gods (Martha Wells) (2005): Final novel in the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy. More of the same! The later reveals about the Gardier were adequate, if not as much fun as Our Protagonists and their trans-universe journeys on the Queen Ravenna, a close cousin of the Queen Mary. I could read about Tremaine and the Rienish factions figuring out how to deal with the Syprians all day. The larger scale politics aren't as much sheer fun. I like Wells in "people in small groups work to overcome obstacles" mode. I like the sense of humor at work. ( Oblique spoilers. ) I'm mentally bookmarking that for the next time I need something to cheer me up.

The Statue Within: An Autobiography (François Jacob) (1987): The 1988 Franklin Philip translation. One of the scientists who netted a Nobel for lac operon work describes his life, 1920 to 1959.

It's difficult to tell what style is an effect of translation. A certain approach to the structure of a sentence, of a paragraph. Short sentences. Almost too short. The gulf between the writer and the reader, widened by a translation. Does the sense of familiarity, of a like-minded outlook, reflect true similarity, or an effect imparted by chance? Questions unanswerable without learning another language.

Without getting too bogged in the exercise of imitation, this is not the most brilliant or compelling autobiography ever. There's moments of character sketches, there's moments of contemplation, but when I thought Jacob was going to skip over his WW2 experiences I cheered, because I picked this up with science, and insight into the creation of science, in mind.

With that said, there are moments of great beauty and personal resonance in the book. Reflections of the roles luck, chance, serendipity play in life; that unfocused mid-twenty's period; the way Jacob describes falling in love. It's a mind I am glad I met in text, where I can read a presentation with unthinking absorption, and again with a critical eye, and maybe once more with both layers added to the context of a wider world. Especially when the narrative lyrically opens into meditation on some incident or theme, like here on isolation, and a particular moment after WW2:

Doubtless, one is always alone. But not to the same degree, not in the same way. In Africa, it was the sudden break with my whole past that had given me a sense of isolation. Returning to Paris, I should have found what I had been missing. But it did not work out that way. I felt out of step. I felt I did not matter a great deal to anything or to anyone. Loneliness had become a sort of natural setting, an element; and in it, I immersed myself, as both island and ghost. Perhaps I was missing the fellowship of fighting men. Perhaps I envied those who were active in a political party and could say "we." But I had an aversion to parties and their lies. For several months, the conquerors remained isolated by their victory, the conquered by their defeat. The time came to reunite. To smooth things over. Which revolted me. One evening near the Ópera, I entered a café. It was the hour when the colors begin to falter, to free themselves little by little from the sun before being lost in the oncoming evening: as the fish that one throws back in the river take on the color of the water before disappearing in it. Though the window of the café, I looked at the crowd going by on the boulevard. I was trying to identify people. To type them. To search their faces for signed. Signs of the hangman and of his victims. Clues to the torturer and to the tortured. To those who had fought the Nazis and to those who had done business with them. But everything was leveled, equalized in the evening's grayness. Nothing but smooth and neutral faces. All these people passed one another, ready neither to flee from each other nor to come together. The world was submerging the horrible tragedy that had lasted five years, closing over it like water over a stone. Then what would joining a political party be but a coat with holes? An illusion thrown over loneliness.

(p200 HC).

That moment of timeless theme and personal experience is sticking with me.

Dreamsnake (Vonda M. McIntyre) (1978): skygiants read it, so I decided it was time to reread this for the first time in more than a decade. The catalyst of the story is the novice healer Snake losing her dreamsnake, the symbol and tool of her practice, and setting out to explain her failure to her teachers - then switching up to seek out a new source of the rare, difficult to breed dreamsnakes to atone for her mistake.

The '70s, you guys. The Seventies. The tail end of the New Wave. So the narrative structure is loose: Snake's goals change more than once as she interacts with and connects to new characters. The "hard" technology of the Campbell years, spaceships and nuclear power, is not an unmitigated good or the inevitable march of progress. In this postapocalyptic landscape, the desert Snake crosses is dotted with radioactive craters, the deadly aftermath of a conflict so distant the hard fallout is its only legacy. The speculative elements are the social structures and genetics. There's unquestioned polyamory, and pretty frank discussions of sex, but homosexuality is oddly invisible.

In my usual fashion, the only thing I remembered was the dreamsnake reveal at the end, and the irony that the healers' successful attempts to breed more dreamsnakes were accidents; I'd forgotten 90% of the novel. Snake's rashness, pride, and self-consciousness about her failures, I'd spaced out on those. The three-ness of the human relationships, and the three-ness of the snakes, is something I'd also spaced on.

I'd like to say there's a three-ness to the structure or themes, too, but that's not quite right. The wandering structure drapes over episodes about fixing things, either injuries or attitudes, in a way that I'm still thinking about. ( Spoilers. ) It's definitely SF in the postapocalyptic vein, rejecting the Old and trying out new things. I like that; even when it doesn't entirely work, I like it when fiction stretches my brain.

Two novels very good in very different ways:

Star Wars: Razor's Edge (Martha Wells) (2013): Reread. A fun SW romp. Wells is really good at the sort of second-order worldbuilding I can't get enough of. Not just saying "abandoned mine taken over by pirates" but digging into that premise, and bringing out the sense of things pirates might do with an abandoned mine: yes to shooting galleries and slave pens, no to routine maintenance. Very standalone, which is a plus and a minus. Sometimes, it's really cool to see authors tie into and interpret existing material (from other writers, I, Jedi comes to mind); sometimes it's fun to see what new ideas authors can come up with (Alderaanian pirate ship!).

Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) (2006): Fiction set during the Biafran War, or the Nigerian Civil War, of 1967 - 1970. Picked up after an NPR interview with the author; it's certainly a capital-L Literary novel. The reader can engage on the level of "Richard wants to be a Writer more than he actually writes"; or the psychology of Odenigbo's affair, and Ugwe's horrified reactions; or Richard and Olanna sleeping together, especially in the context of Richard's dismissiveness toward the expat community*. Certainly it's possible to be gripped and bored by turns during the war itself, as the conflict radically alters the characters' lives: middle- and upper-class Igbo like Olanna and Kainene struggle with privation, and Ugwe is drafted, exposing readers to the ugliness of combat and how the chaotic military life affects those fighting.

*"But this was expatriate life. All they did, as far as [Richard] was concerned, was have sex with one another's wives and husbands, illicit couplings that were more a way of passing the heat-blanched time than they were genuine expressions of passion." (chapter 21)

But there's the other level, too, where one remembers this is a novel, where the author has made choices. The choice that Olanna and Keinene do not speak for years after Kainene's lover sleeps with her twin Olanna; the significance of Olanna and Kainene's twin-ness; their shifts in fortune and friendship with the struggles of Biafra. So it's tempting to read extra signficance into each character and relationship: European Richard's infatuation with angry Keinene can become a metaphor, as does his impotence, literal and narrative; the child Baby, not just Olanna's lover's daughter, might also be a symbol of Biafra or the Igbo attitude toward Biafra. Kainene's disappearance is not only the open wound of family missing in war, for months and years, but carries extra weight as it occurs during the dissolution of Biafra. Even the PoV choices - Olanna, her lover's servant Ugwe, Richard - become significant, especially in light of the romantic affair that fractures the narrative, and the strained relationship between Olanna and Keinene. Even the lack of perspective from the passionate revolutionary Odenigbo comes into play.

Next up: Hild has floated to the top of the to-read pile, yay!

2012's going down as one of the less consistent book log years.

The Best American Science Writing 2010 (Jesse Groopman, editor; Jesse Cohen, series editor):. Table of contents below, ask for reactions to any titles that strike your interest.

( ToC )

The Best American Science Writing 2011 (Rebecca Skloot, Floyd Skloot, editors; Jesse Cohen, series editor): Not as good as the 2010 edition, with a standout for "The Mathematics of Terror" for comprehensively demonstrating the need for better math education in the States.

( ToC )

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Lois McMaster Bujold) (2012): Despite serious consideration of suicide by Komarran balcony, implied war crimes, that ImpSec thing that probably wasn't insured, and the laying to rest of unquieting family tradition,s this was charming without ever being challenging. It's... it's fluffy. A gooey warm-feeling novel, with few sharp edges. At some point I'll appreciate CVA for what it is, rather than what I'd like it to be.

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) (1813): Reread. Classic romantic story of two proud, intelligent personalities forced to reflect on their flaws, and reassess their assessment of the character of others. P&P took three tries to accomplish the first complete reading, which may be a strong argument for letting people find books at their own speed and maturity. It's grown on me; I doubt I will ever be Darcy's partisan, but the wit and observation of human foibles that weren't appreciated by a teen have greater appeal as I get a little more sympathetic and less judging.

Emma (Jane Austen) (1815): The focus on a young woman with more energy and self-regard than application in a closed society made for curiously relevant lunchtime and public transit reading. When I was giggling at Emma's matchmatching schemes instead of reviewing for the board, or absorbing the narrative's reflections on the anxieties of Society (Highfield, classroom, and/or workspace), Austen's people sense seemed uncannily universal.

I reread The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein) (1966) in that way you do. As I get older, I have a harder time taking Heinlein's characterization seriously.

The Cloud Roads (Martha Wells) (2011): Moon, orphan and wanderer of the Three Worlds, is reunited with his people, and must face challenges of integration, trust, and the Big Bad.

( Cut for length and minor spoilers. )

This isn't deep: I marathoned The Cloud Roads and its sequel in one weekend, and didn't have much impulse to reread after closing the second novel. The ancilliary comments about the Arbora (nonwinged Raksura, usually the makers, sometimes ground fighters) and Aeriat (winged, usually the leaders and fighters) also highlighted, how to say it? Who gets the bulk of the writer love. I mean, flying people, what's not to love.

The Serpent Seas (Martha Wells) (2012): Sequel to The Cloud Roads. Moon had been consort to Jade, sister queen of the Indigo Cloud court, for eleven days; nobody had tried to kill him yet, so he thought it was going well so far. Moon's integration into a Raksuran court and their relocation to a new home is interrupted by the theft of a core element of their new home.

( Rich worldbuilding... sometimes a little too rich. But the characters are awesome. )

So I have mixed feelings: on the one hand, fun adventure novels. On the other hand, the second-order worldbuilding is sometimes not as clever as I'd like.

The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring (JRR Tolkien) (1954): Reread. I wasn't foolish enough to open The Hobbit before watching the new movie, but late fall is Tolkein weather.

The Siren Depths (Martha Wells) (2012): Third novel and sequel to The Serpent Seas; Wells fills in missing pieces of Moon's history, and he lays to rest some of his angst. ( Some of it! Don't worry, there remain plenty of unresolved issues for future novels to deal with. )

Numbers game: 10 total finished. 8 new, 2 reread; 8 fiction, 2 nonfiction.