primeideal | Entries tagged with books: sff bingo

This is the first two books of the "Book of the New Sun" quadrology, republished as a single volume.

What I had osmosed about the series: it is highly-regarded in the subgenre of "sufficiently advanced technology," which is a subgenre I like very much; also, there are a lot of Biblical allusions that one should be on the lookout for, potentially even the protagonist being kind of a Christlike figure in some ways.

Are there Biblical allusions? Yes. On one page the narrator, Severian, has a meager meal of loaves and fishes while being told there's no room in the inn; later, someone tells him that he could "become a carpenter or a fisherman."

But it's more than that. In "Piranesi," the narrator namedrops things like types of medicines and a year-numbering system that are too weirdly specific to be "hmm some fantasy world that's similar to ours but different;" the questions aren't so much "what" and "where" as "how" and "why." Something similar is going on here; Severian alludes to a holy woman named Katherine who's associated with being tortured on a wheel and persecuted by a man named Maxentius (okay, I recognize her iconography more from "Doomsday Book" than the actual legend), people read the Biblical story about the death of Moses, like...it can't be just some random expy, it's our world's Mount Nebo. So what's going on?

Wolfe mentions in the "translator's notes" that "I might easily have saved myself a great deal of labor by having recourse to invented terms; in no case have I done so." That is, his "neologisms," and there are many, are all based on real if archaic vocabulary. For example, Sevarian's cloak is a magical substance that's "darker than black"; Wolfe describes this as "fuligin," which was not a word I was familiar with before, but comes from the Italian word for "sooty." Maybe if I'd been reading along on an e-reader I would have been more motivated to look up some of these, but since I was reading a paper version I mostly just nodded along and got the gist of it as "general SF worldbuilding flavor." I'm willing to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt here that this part was effortful and clever.

In some ways, it's a picaresque; Severian wanders around and meets lots of strange people. In no particular order, we have giant merpeople, duels fought via poisoned plants, time-travelling photosynthesizers, grave robbers, a miraculous relic, underground ape-people, the legend of Theseus and the minotaur, an underground palace, a Borgesian realm of secret passageways and optical illusions hidden inside the underground palace. Sounds cool, right?

Unfortunately, the overall effect is less than the sum of its parts, because Severian himself doesn't seem particularly interested in any of that. Instead, his motivations involve rising through the ranks of the Torturers' Guild, and then, when he gets exiled from the guild, keeping possession of the cool sword his former teacher gave him. And, beyond that...well, his inner monologue is a lot like "Mambo No. 5." A little bit of Thecla in her cell. A little bit of Jolenta, what the hell. A little bit of Agia with her sword. A little bit of Dorcas, thank the Lord... Women are so hot in so many different ways! And as a professional executioner, Severian has plenty of "clients" to practice his "trade" on, if you know what I mean. When he comes of age, he's given the opportunity to leave the guild, but turns it down because he doesn't know what else he'd do with himself. "Not the Messiah but just a naughty boy" is kind of an understatement.

Here's the narrative lampshading Sevarian's ignorance:

"Agia, have you had a child? How old are you?"
"Twenty-three. That's plenty old enough, but no, I haven't. I'll let you look at my belly if you don't believe me."
I tried to make a mental calculation and discovered I did not know enough about the maturation of women. "When did you menstruate first?"
"Thirteen. If I'd got pregnant, I would have been fourteen when the baby came. Is that what you're trying to find out?"
"Yes. And the child would be nine now. If it were bright, it might be able to write a note like that."

I want to be careful here, because identitarian metrics are not (and shouldn't be) the end-all, be-all of a story's quality. There are lots of books and stories that I genuinely enjoy that don't really pass the Bechdel test or have many well-rounded women characters. If I'm reading about Noren trying to defy the Scholars' tyranny, or Mark Watney surviving Mars, or Erasmas angsting about impostor syndrome, then even if the characters aren't demographically similar to me, I can relate to the puzzles they're trying to solve and the discoveries they're making about the world they live in--that's interesting in its own right. Conversely, if we're talking about Messiahs, the biblical Jesus' inner circle was infamously male-skewed--but he also had a mother and Auntie Elizabeth and people like Mary and Martha who he could hang out with as friends, not just objects to perform miracles on! Severian's POV exists at the intersection of "not particularly curious about anything else except weapons and ladies" and "women don't exist as freestanding people, just objects of attraction or violence," and the result is worse than either of the two alone.

There are a couple places where the book uses Latin to represent what, to the characters, is an ancient language. The caveat here is that the translations are slightly "wrong." For example, Sevarian's cool sword which he spends a lot of time chasing around is "Terminus Est," which he translates as "This Is The Line Of Division." It's more literally an allusion to "It is finished" (what Jesus says on the cross, get it????) Earlier, there's a quote about "Lux dei vitae viam monstrat," translated as "The beam of the New Sun lights the way of life." Are we saying that the New Sun is "dei," God? Is it a literal sun in the sky, like the Mother Star is in Noren's world? Is it some alien fusion technology that will replace the old sun? Who knows? Certainly not Severian, that is for darn sure.

Again, this is only half of the overall series, so it's possible things are be more cohesive in parts 3 and 4; however, the things I've osmosed since then seem to indicate that it's a lot more of the "picaresque vibing but not a lot of plot." I understand that for those who enjoy that kind of thing, putting together the background clues about what's going on even though Severian doesn't know or care might be fun (see: the pacing of "Steerswoman"). However, I'm worried it might be more like "Piranesi," which I didn't care enough about to pursue past the free sample in the Hugo packet.

Bingo: First in a series; "Claw of the Conciliator" would be an Alliterative title; lots of underground settings, including the imperial House Absolute and the cave of the ape-people; lots of weird and magical dreams; side character with a disability (the blind librarian)--there's also Jonas, who seems at first to have a prosthetic hand, but the reveal of what's going on with him is interesting and clever; hints of Eldritch Abominations (the alien monster beings living in the ocean whom the mermaids serve?); reference materials (the "translator's notes"); previous readalong.

I put this one on the list not only because it's a foundational work of speculative fiction (and according to this list, the GOAT), nor because it would provide useful context for all its derivative works (link, in this context, is spoilery for a different book), or because it's in the public domain so no library waitlist, although those are all good incentives. What pushed me over the line was some Redditors'/Goodreaders' classification of it as "Dark Academia," a bingo square I think I would have a pretty difficult time filling in the wild. (I don't like deconstruction/subversion, and I prefer standalones!)

So, do I agree that it fits for that? Yeah! Specifically, chapters three and four, where Frankenstein narrates his university days in Ingolstadt, has the aesthetic of "forbidden knowledge," "secretive research," and so forth.

None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.

Frankenstein is only 19 when he has the insight that leads to creating artificial life, and 21 when the monster is awakened! I had not osmosed that part, but then, Mary Shelley was only 18 when she wrote the first draft.

There are several layers of frame stories. The prologue/epilogue consist of letters from Robert Walton, who's trying to discover the North Pole, home to his sister, Margaret. (I had no idea this would be a crossover with polar exploration nonsense fandom and was amused by this!)

I commenced by inuring my body to hardship. I accompanied the whale-fishers on several expeditions to the North Sea; I voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep; I often worked harder than the common sailors during the day and devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventurer might derive the greatest practical advantage.

Roald Amundsen approves of the "suffering to build some character" strategy.

While his ship is stuck in ice, Walton meets Victor Frankenstein, who's riding a dogsled, and Frankenstein narrates his story in flashback. It turns out that after creating the monster, Victor was horrified and ran away; they didn't meet again for two years, and at that point the monster narrates what he's been up to in the intervening time (six of the twenty-four chapters), most of which was "spying on a French family living in exile in a forest in Germany," so their story gets its own flashback.

For me, the strongest parts of the book were the way in which Frankenstein and the monster take turns playing different roles as God, Lucifer, and Adam (the monster has read "Paradise Lost" and quotes Milton). Sometimes the monster accuses Victor of being a bad creator, not looking upon him with love or giving him a companion, but at other times they both express the perils of reaching for knowledge. When the monster shows up speaking with florid thees and thous, I was like, he's been out of the picture for two years, how did he learn to speak English or French or whatever language? But his flashback does answer these questions--the monster's "childhood" is a series of discoveries, and the search for knowledge and technology is a fundamental SF theme that takes on a new light here.

I quickly collected some branches, but they were wet and would not burn. I was pained at this and sat still watching the operation of the fire. The wet wood which I had placed near the heat dried and itself became inflamed. I reflected on this, and by touching the various branches, I discovered the cause and busied myself in collecting a great quantity of wood, that I might dry it and have a plentiful supply of fire.

Whether a fully-formed "adult" would be able to figure out things like food and drink ex nihilo, without any caretaker or frame of reference, is questionable, but even when it's contrived, the details like "which were the first words he learned and how" were a unique perspective. I enjoy the SF aspects and people trying to choose their own fate more so than the horror, unremitting tragedy, parts.

Unfortunately, there are also a lot of ??? aspects.

-Frankenstein spends the first couple chapters describing his family and happy childhood. Fine. Then a couple chapters later, there's a blatantly painful "as you know, Bob," with a letter from his adoptive sister, Elizabeth, (hold that thought) "reminding" him about the family's maid, Justine. "You probaby don't remember her so I'll summarize it...of course, you liked her a lot." What??? You could have just filled that in in chapter two. (He's not the only one; Walton, in his letters to Margaret, does something similar but a little less egregious with the "as you know, my ambition has always been to be an explorer.")

-Speaking of; Elizabeth was adopted as a young child when her Italian foster parents were having difficulty supporting her. Okay, fine. But she always calls Victor her "cousin" and his parents her "aunt and uncle." And also, their mom has basically had them engaged since childhood?? They even lampshade it a couple times when Elizabeth and Victor's father are like "you seem out of sorts, are you in love with someone else and too honorable to admit it? Or are your feelings for Elizabeth strictly platonic?" Uhhhh.

-The monster follows Frankenstein across Europe, on ships from the continent to England and Scotland, and talks at one point about sailing to South America if he gets the opportunity. How is he hiding? Stowing away on ships? The guy's eight feet tall, people will talk. (Towards the end, when they're codependent "nobody is allowed to hurt you but me" frenemies, people do start noticing him more.)

-When Frankenstein's youngest brother dies, he returns home and catches a glimpse of the monster out in the Alps. From then on, he becomes absolutely convinced that the monster is guilty, even when there's circumstantial evidence pointing to someone else. As it happens, he's right, but his assurance that early feels unjustified. Like, from his (and the reader's) perspective, at that point there's nothing that would explain how the monster wound up in Victor's hometown or around Victor's brother. What are the odds?

-I don't know when exactly the "instead of killing the guy I don't like, I'm gonna kill all his loved ones and make him feel guilty, that'll screw him over even worse" trope originated (I've seen criticism for it being used anachronistically), but surely after the creature has already shown his modus operandi on multiple occasions, Victor would at least use a little genre savvy? No?

-At the end, Frankenstein is telling Walton "don't be me, don't be so obsessed with discovery and glory that you traverse where man was not meant to go." Then the crew is like "if the ice breaks up we demand to go back, we're not sticking it out here any longer." Frankenstein, from his sickbed, goes off on a rant about "you're such cowards, you only like adventure when it's fun and easy." Are we supposed to infer that he's deliberately doing a reverse psychology thing, trying to get Walton to turn back? Or is he just super fickle? (The digressions that boil down to "I wanted revenge. Then a day later, the sun came out and it was a nice day and I felt fine. Then the next day, I decided for the first time I wanted revenge," make me suspect the latter.)

-The monster's demand (after he's already killed Frankenstein's brother and framed Justine for it) is "build me a female companion and we'll go live alone together." This ties into the Genesis themes--Adam had Eve, and in Milton's version, Satan has a bunch of demon friends. At first Frankenstein thinks this isn't unreasonable, but then gets cold feet when he thinks about the prospect of them having kids and letting loose an entire species of monsters. Which, we don't know what would have happened, but it's a fair speculation.

The monster basically taught himself to speak and read, so I guess he's imagining "oh, if I have another creature, she won't be lonely, I'll teach her everything she needs to know about the world, and we'll be happy together." But the idea that she might have desires or hopes that differ from his doesn't seem to have occurred to him. This is how he feels looking at Justine: "the murder I have committed because I am for ever robbed of all that she could give me, she shall atone. The crime had its source in her; be hers the punishment."

I'm not sure what Shelley's intent was, it's probably an "everyone sucks here" situation, but "I'm entitled to a woman's body, if women reject me and think I'm ugly, I'm just gonna kill a bunch of people and it's the women's fault" is yikes territory two centuries later.

Bingo: Like I said, very likely using for Dark Academia. Could also count for Dreams, Prologues/Epilogues (the Walton letters aren't included as part of a "chapter"), past Readalong, probably Multi POV.

I mostly enjoyed the Divine Cities trilogy and this has been getting good buzz, so here we are!

This has been recced as "Sherlock and Watson in weird ecology world." To the latter point first: the Empire of Khanum is routinely beset by enormous leviathans which they routinely have to repel; the monsters' corpses transform the land, leaving behind bizarre plants, and the empire's researchers study and manipulate these to create all kinds of plant-based technology, from thin "fernpaper" walls and plants that keep the room cool, to body modifications making people super-strong or agile or computationally speedy, sometimes at the cost of their lifespan. But it's necessary to have these augmented people, because how else are we going to keep the leviathans back? And so the cycle continues. I enjoy RJB's worldbuilding, thumbs-up here.

“Then we’ll have to add the Tala canton to them,” she said, sighing. “To protect against any wormrot, or neckworm, or wormbone, or fissure-worm you might encounter out there. As well as cheek-worm, of course.”
I stared at her as I absorbed the expansive variety of worms waiting in the wilds to devour me.
Miljin spoke up with a sadistic smile: “She don’t mean the cheeks on your face, son.”

I shoved my breast forward at them, ensuring they’d see all my heralds: the flower and the bar, denoting me assistant investigator; and the eye set within a box, indicating I was also an engraver.

As for the former: the narrator, Dinios "Din" Kol, has been assigned as the Apprentice Assistant Investigator to Anagosa "Ana" Dolabra. Kol has augments that make him an "engraver"; essentially, someone who has photographic memory, so he is an excellent choice to send looking for evidence. Ana's brain is very good at making deductions and putting pieces together, but she's easily sensory-overloaded (some kind of neurodivergence?) so she prefers to send Din out in her stead. She can also be rude and blunt around everyone, which is a problem for many non-Din people. Din accepts the downsides of being an engraver (it's not always great to remember everything perfectly) in exchange for the money the job brings in. However, he also has dyslexia/some kind of learning disability, so it's difficult for him to understand written material unless he reads it aloud (and then uses his memory powers). There are some cool digressions about "what does it really mean to have muscle memory"; sometimes it's like, "I didn't do anything, it was just my body moving by itself" and like...if you didn't do anything or have any agency why are we even reading this book then, but other times, it's like "yeah, different people have different learning styles, that's a strength and not a weakness."

Din on Ana:

With her bone-white hair, wide smile, and yellow eyes, she often seemed vaguely feline: a mad housecat, perhaps, roving through a home in pursuit of a suitable sunbeam, though always willing to torture the occasional mouse.

In the first section, Din is sent to review the case of a man who has died under grotesque circumstances; a magical tree exploded from his body. (There's a lot of similar levels of body horror, so fair warning.) Ana puts the pieces together and quickly makes some deductions, and on page 41 of 411 we get: "What you told me is more than enough. In fact, it’s so obvious that I’m worried this all might turn out a little boring…" Fortunately for us (if not Din and Ana), a spate of similar deaths means that they have to investigate a much bigger conspiracy that might mean danger for the entire Empire, especially with the leviathans approaching. It's one of those "hmm let's investigate this person of interest...oh bleep they're dead...maybe we should ask some questions to this guy...who is also dead, womp womp" adventures. (Also, in context, even the title is kind of a spoiler!)

Fans of "Divine Cities" may be amused by the fact that the officer who assumes temporary command during a wall breach has the title of "seneschal;" the technological change hinted at with lines like "We don’t need war heroes here anyway. We need plotters;" Din's habit of making tea for Ana when they need to puzzle something out; and some compelling antagonists, with realistic motives and a complex mystery. There's a small-scale romantic subplot for Din, and along with trying to track the hints/foreshadowing for the mystery, I enjoyed the puzzle of "hmm, Din notices and describes this character in a different way than everybody else, is he looking with attraction goggles?" Maybe so! :)

Overall, I found this to be a little more optimistic than either Divine Cities or the first 2/3 Founders books (I haven't read the third). The Empire is both the force that drives back monstrous leviathans at colossal sea walls, and the ordinary routine of people repairing the roads, but despite all the corruption and greed in the world, sometimes you can see justice done and even have time for a cute date.

However, the main characters as characters didn't really grab me. Din struggled with written exams in his training, because of his dyslexia, and is still an apprentice because of it; he's the infamous 20-year-old very tall minor. The words "boy" and "child" are used more than eighty times, combined, and while some of the usages are in other context ("this suspect's parents died when she was a child"), almost all of them are used as dismissive terms of address for Din. Are we supposed to conclude he struggles with his masculinity or has some other dark secret identity? No, he's just insecure about barely being able to read, that's it.

Ana doesn't suffer fools gladly, or at all, and has a bit of a potty mouth. Now, I'm not entirely opposed to cursing; I like it when people say things like "Titan's taint!" that give us a sense of what's sacred/profane/taboo within their own worldbuilt culture. And someone like Mulaghesh from Divine Cities, a grizzled and jaded war veteran, can drop f-bombs with the best of them; even in worlds very unlike our own, language referring to sex and scatology is still emotive. But when Ana says something like "goddamn," I'm like...I want to know more about your universe's god and where they are damning people to. And I didn't completely buy all the "oh, I just couldn't help myself from flipping the table with the suspects, rich people are so awful I just had to react." Even those of us not born with a great deal of social skills have the ability to learn some self-control, when the situation requires!

In general, she's a zillion steps ahead of everyone else. It makes sense that the Watson character is the POV in Holmes-and-Watson type stories--if Sherlock figures everything out on page 40, the rest is kind of boring. But sometimes she'll send people down false trails and several chapters later be like "ah, yes, I had already figured that out but was waiting for the rest of you to catch up to me"--if that kind of smugness annoys you, maybe avoid.

But more broadly, there's an issue of, "Din usually follows the rules, except when he doesn't; Ana occasionally follows the rules, when she feels like it." Whereas, while some of the antagonists are merely profit-hungry and amoral, others are people who try to take justice into their own hands, and then things escalate and oops, now there's a dead body. What gives one set of characters, but not the other, the right to determine when it's okay to break the rules in service of a higher call? The fact that they're protagonists? Yeah, some of the rule-breaking differs in degree, but it's a subtle distinction, and one that I'm not sure the book necessarily answers.

Fun fact: based on the acknowledgments I'm a small number of degrees of separation away from Bennett but it's still a long story ;)

Bingo: Published in 2024, Reference Materials, will be a Readalong, is planned to be First in a Series. The leviathans are probably Eldritch Creatures? Din's dyslexia probably counts as a disability?

I'm pretty sure I found this by scanning through past Hugo shortlists, got intrigued by "innings," saw that it indeed was in the baseball sense. Bishop is primarily a speculative fiction writer, but the speculative element in this one takes a while to be revealed fully, I won't give outright spoilers.

I will say, however, that while "Spinning Silver" does a good job of being "not a straight-up retelling, but an original story based on the Rumplestiltskin lore, albeit set in a world where the fairy tale of Rumplestiltskin already exists," Brittle Innings pushed my suspension of disbelief in terms of "it's based on the lore of X, but also, it's in a world where X exists as a fictional canon." I think it would have been more "plausible" as "1943 much like ours, except X does not exist as a fictional canon, and also oh bleep X is real."

The frame-story prologue sets up the premise: in the 1980s, Danny Boles is an accomplished baseball scout. A reporter wants to write a book about his scouting career, but Danny is more interested in writing a book about the 1943 season, when he played for the Phillies' class C affiliate in rural Georgia as a seventeen-year-old. (The farm system has been reorganized over time, so there's no such thing as Class C anymore.) The prologue gives away that he was called up to the Phillies, but suffered a career-ending injury at the end of the season before he could play in the majors. The reporter isn't really interested in this, but Danny insists that his story is important and needs to be told. The edition I read also had a foreword by Elizabeth Hand, which hints a little more at some of the somber themes ahead.

"Brittle Innings" is not an easy read. Here is a non-comprehensive list of some content notes that readers might want to be aware of, "arson murder and jaywalking" style:

( Content notes )

Danny spends much of the early chapters of the book mute, and at other times, has a stammer. We know from the frame story that this won't last forever (although he does have an operation for cancer that gives him a "robot voice" instead). In part, this allows an effective contrast between young Danny, who can't speak but observes everything around him, and old Danny-as-narrator to namedrop his 1940s pop culture allusions. Sometimes, however, it turns into "does anyone really talk like this?" asides:

That spring I had thirty-six bingers in seventy-five at bats, including a game against a semipro oil-company squad that didn’t count in our division standings. A .480 average, seventy points higher than Ted Williams hit when he became the first major leaguer since Rogers Hornsby to pass .400.

This is supposed to be Danny's teammate introducing "Jumbo" Hank Clerval, Danny's new roommate. I'd maybe buy it as Danny's reminiscences, but as dialogue?

“Yeah, he’s big. Six-ten, seven, maybe seven-two. Hard to say. He sort of slouches. Taller than Howie Schultz, though. Schultz, the kid who plays first for Brooklyn. Sportswriters call him The Steeple. Got nixed for military service for being too tall. S one reason Mister JayMac hurried to sign Clerval—the Army wouldn’t come calling. A better reason is, Clerval’s a good country player. A bit slow, not a lot of range, but a champ at digging out bad throws and snagging tosses that’d sail slap over anybody else’s head. He’s also good at catching darters right back at him and shots down the foul line that might drop in for extra-base hits.”

The name "Hank Clerval" didn't mean anything to me (but might to some genre-savvy readers). We'll come to learn more about him and later get some flashbacks from his POV, including some evocative descriptions about his earlier life in rural Alaska. Danny, however, has opinions:

Henry didn’t strike me as a suitable name for a power-hitting ballplayer. Hank did, like in Hank Greenberg, but Jumbo hadn’t asked me to call him Hank.

Some dramatic irony here, because at the time the book was written (and the frame story is set). the major league home run record was held by Henry "Hank" Aaron. Aaron, a black man, played much of his career in Atlanta, in the deep South. Which is a place that has historically not been welcoming to black people.

This brings us to Darius Satterfield, the bus driver/assistant coach of the Highbridge Hellbenders. Darius is much more skillful than any of the Class C players, but because of the racist policies of the league and society in general, he isn't allowed to play.

One of the common tropes associated with baseball is "fathers and sons"--think "Field of Dreams"--and that mythos is important here, when it comes to protagonists who have difficult relationships with their father figures. Danny's dad taught him how to play ball, so he's not completely irredeemable--but he causes a lot of trouble for Danny and his mom, even when he's not around. Henry's father figure is long-dead, but Henry still has lots of complicated feelings about him. Knowing that the foreword set up Darius as another tragic character gave me a sense of where his plotline was going, with these themes in mind. Actually, Darius' fate--while somewhat ambiguous--isn't as dire as you might guess from that. Yeah, there's a lot of arbitrary cruelty in the world, but also, it's 1943 and people were being killed all over the place. There is a different, less prominent character, who meets a more cruel fate, but it feels like overdramatic pathos at that point.

The ballplayers' and manager's voices can be very funny, especially when they're holding kangaroo court (which is a thing that real minor leaguers do: see "The Bullpen Gospels" by Dirk Hayhurst for a contemporary depiction) or composing doggerel on the fly. And the description of the promotions/discounts at the ballpark ("Kitchen Fats for Victory Night followed Friday’s Scrap Metal Collection Night") were also very amusing.

The saying goes that "living well is the best revenge." In the context of "fathers, sons, and baseball," and "people who have good reason to take violent revenge on those who have wronged them, even when it's not prudent to so do," you might wonder if any of these characters will become fathers or step-fathers in their own right, and try to be better fathers to the next generation than their fathers were to them. Maybe Danny's accomplishments as a scout are meant to show that he is paying it forward to the next generation. But we don't really see that. In fact, one of the sympathetic minor characters chose not to have kids because he didn't want to risk passing on a hereditary disease: ‘I’m here; I have to make do. The never-was aint, and don’t. Why take the never-was and afflict it?’ There's nothing wrong with choosing not to have kids, but this could have been a way to show Danny, or someone else, breaking the cycle.

Instead, while Jumbo is the protagonist of his own POV sections, the main narrative is more things happening to Danny than his own agency. Baseball can be fun; speculative fiction can be fun; but I'm not sure the fun aspects make up for the bleakness here.

Bingo: there's a lot! Dreams (creepy but mundane), Prologue, Character with a Disability, Published in the 1990s, Small Town. Arguably Multi-POV if you count the frame story.

"Doomsday Book" is a time travel book that has lots of earned emotion, but not much in the way of time-travel related suspense. The protagonist, Kivrin, is supposed to have gone to 1320; instead she winds up in 1348, at the height of the Black Death. She's vaccinated, so her health isn't at risk, but she's watching everyone around her die. "Meanwhile," in the mid-twenty-first century, there's a different outbreak Oxford. So, for the characters, the stakes are high, but it's less about "will time travel save the day" and more about "human nature doesn't change." I personally would have preferred slightly more time-travel mechanics affecting the plot--I was hoping for/expecting a twist where two characters from different eras were the same person all along--but I could still appreciate the gravitas of what it was.

"To Say Nothing of the Dog" is set in the same "Oxford Time Travel Universe," but the destination is 1888. Premise: an eccentric donor named Lady Schrapnell (sounds like "shrapnel," get it?) has thrown a zillion dollars at the Oxford time travel department, with a major caveat: she wants to rebuild an exact replica of the Coventry Cathedral which was destroyed by the Blitz in 1940. And she means exact. So almost every time traveler that can be spared is researching all the odds-and-ends that were present before the Cathedral burned down, including a phenomenally ugly Victorian vase. Our narrator, Ned Henry, is concerned that his boss has been making so many time jumps that he's suffering from "time lag," featuring such symptoms as maudlin sentimentality and difficulty distinguishing sounds. Even worse, "Time-lag victims never think they’re time-lagged." Guess what. Ned is so sick he doesn't know he's sick, and the cure is a couple weeks of relaxation in 1888, far away from Lady Schrapnell. Meanwhile, his colleague Verity Kindle has potentially screwed up the space-time continuum by bringing something forward in time that she shouldn't have, which shouldn't be possible according to known laws of physics.

So a lot of the early setup of the story is driven by extremely silly misunderstandings, people talking over each other, Ned listening to subliminal tapes that are prepping him for Victorian society in one ear and trying to get advice on time travel in the other, and absurd frivolity. (The title is a shout-out to a Victorian travelogue called "Three Men In A Boat (to say nothing of the dog)," which is supposed to be very humorous and still a classic, but I haven't read it.) I had been spoiled for/osmosed a couple of related plot points, one of which fortunately gets clarified about a quarter of the way through, but figured, "hey, if it's mostly a humor story, the punch line shouldn't matter much, right? It's all about the journey." Unfortunately, it just felt so low-stakes and stupid that I was rolling my eyes going "there's no way you can keep this up for 600 pages." Despite the characters' fretting, their dialogue couldn't make me feel like the fate of the space-time continuum was at stake. When every other chapter is "oh no, we must bring the bulldog indoors or he'll catch his death of cold if he's forced to remain in the stables" or "annoying séances preventing Ned to get any of the sleep he traveled 169 years to get," it's kind of frustrating. Ditto the "we're trying to break this couple up because the future records suggest they marry different people, how will we ever get them together with the right people"--some of my guesses were "it's a stable time-loop, maybe some of the 'future' arrivals are actually the past ancestors," which were off-base, but once the characters start lampshading a bunch of mystery tropes ("things are not as they seem, maybe this evil-looking person isn't an evil murderer after all, hmm") there were still a lot of "okay, I see where this is going."

But about 3/4 of the way through, the time-travel mechanics take a big step up! Ned gets bounced around from 1395 to 2018, and that does a lot better at making me feel like the continuum is in danger than just talking about it. The concept of "hey wait a minute, maybe the thing we thought was the incongruity wasn't, and we're actually fixing the problems rather than creating them" played out in an amusing way; I wish the book had more of that and less of Victorian boating shenanigans.

Cryptology nerds will be pleased to know that the Ultra decryption of the Enigma machine gets a shoutout; one theory (mentioned in the linked Wikipedia article) posits that the UK had advance warning of the Coventry Blitz, but couldn't act on it because they couldn't risk letting Germany know that Enigma was vulnerable. It's not clear how much this is actually true, but obviously the concept of "fixed points in history" and "the continuum has to fix itself from time travelers" are relevant here.

The premise also allows for a funny version of No Equal Opportunity Time Travel that I don't recall seeing before, causing T. J. Lewis, an eighteen-year-old undergrad, to be in charge of time travel tech:

“Lady Schrapnell came and took everyone else. She would have taken me, but the first two-thirds of Twentieth Century and all of Nineteenth are a ten for blacks and therefore off-limits.”
“I’m surprised that stopped her,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

“It didn’t,” he said. “She wanted to dress me up as a Moor and send me to 1395 to check on the construction of the steeple. It was her idea that they’d assume I was a prisoner brought back from the Crusades.”
“The Crusades ended in 1272,” Mr. Dunworthy said.
“I know, sir. I pointed that out, also the fact that the entire past is a ten for blacks.” He grinned. “It’s the first time my having black skin has been an actual advantage.”

The mention of protestors being like "why do we have to rebuild a stupid cathedral, for that kind of money we could have made real progress somewhere," and the description of "people in every century are unimpressed by the 'historical relics' around them and prefer their own 'recreations,' even the tacky ones," were a nice touch. Likewise, the Oxford professors argue a great deal about whether history is made by Great People and individual character, or impersonal, large-scale forces; the argument is pretty funny from the perspective of a time traveler trying to figure out whether he's changing history.

In this future, cats went extinct in 2004, so Ned only has concepts of them as dog-like domestic creatures until he travels into the past. Hilarity ensues:

There was no sign of the cat. “Here, Princess Arjumand,” I said, lifting up leaves to look under the bushes. “Here, girl.”

...

“If we were to find Princess Arjumand,” I said, I hoped casually, “how would one go about catching her?”

“I shouldn’t think she’d need catching,” Terence said. “I should think she’d leap gratefully into our arms as soon as she saw us. She’s not used to fending for herself. From what Toss—Miss Mering told me, she’s had rather a sheltered life.”

“But suppose she didn’t. Would she come if you called her by name?”

Terence and the professor both stared at me in disbelief. “It’s a cat,” Terence said.

Brief "things that reminded me of other books" checklist:
-Baine the butler and Mina from Dracula (published 1897, so they could be contemporaries!) memorizing the train schedules
-Kit from "From All False Doctrine" would appreciate the cathedral architecture and mentions of "clerestories."
-Someone on TV Tropes pointed out that there's a line in "Tigana" about "had Stevan lived and died just so that his father could wreak vengeance on the province of Tigana" and it's like...in-universe, no, but since he's a fictional character, yes? Something similar is going on here:

A Grand Design we couldn’t see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork. And us.

-On the subject of Providence and the Grand Design, T.J. eventually winds up running a zillion simulations of the Battle of Waterloo because there were so many weird contingent factors--the rain? Napoleon's hemorrhoids? bad penmanship?--but most of the time, history is able to correct itself even if a rogue time-traveler were to interfere. Victor Hugo's narrator from Les Misérables definitely approves of these digressions. :D

Bingo: Entitled Animals, Published in the 90s. Maybe Romance. I'm guessing it's way too lighthearted to be "Dark Academia," but there's plenty of appealing to the Oxford aesthetic across several centuries.

This is the first book in the Thursday Next series (shoutouts to

atamascolily for raving about its weird meta-ness some time back in the day and putting it on my radar, I do occasionally remember these things even if I'm not commenting at the time!). The setting is an extremely silly alternate-history England in which the Charge of the Light Brigade happened in the 1970s, people travel by airship, anti-Stratfordians are the annoying proselytizers, and everyone has punny names like "Jack Schitt" and "Paige Turner." Thursday Next is an agent in the LiteraTec department of SpecOps, an organization which also encompasses werewolf and time travel malfeasance. (It's not often I see a book in which time travel subplots exist but aren't fundamental to the main plot!)

Like early-career Pratchett, Fforde isn't necessarily interested in delivering a cutting satire of RL (beyond the fact that the military-industrial complex is bad) so much as vibes-based fun on the level of individual sentences. Thursday's uncle, Mycroft, invents absurd gadgets:

I was staring at a whole host of brightly colored fish all swimming in front of my closed eyes. They were on about a five-second loop; every now and then they jumped back to their starting place and repeated their action...
"I call it a Retinal Screen-Saver. Very useful for boring jobs; instead of gazing absently out the window you can transform your surroundings to any number of soothing images. As soon as the phone goes or your boss walks in you blink and bingo!--you're back in the real world again."
...
"I collected all the finest dictionaries, thesauri and lexicons, as well as grammatical, morphological and etymological studies of the English language, and encoded them all within the DNA of the worm's small body. I call them HyperBookworms. I think you'll agree that it's a remarkable achievement."
...
As for the worm's waste products, these are chiefly composed of apostrophes--something that is becoming a problem--I saw a notice yesterday that read Cauliflower's, three shilling's each...

(Christian Bök approves!)

The early chapters have a little too much of "Thursday gets pulled in to a new office to meet a new group of people who we might or might not actually care about several chapters from now, her chief qualification is knowing the antagonist from her university days." The villain, Acheron Hades, specializes in doing things For The Evulz, which is fine in a humorous book, but it makes his later teamup with the greedy military-industrial complex people hard to fathom--what is he getting out of it?

Each chapter starts with an in-universe epigraph, which again, can be fun but in this case is sometimes used as a way to fast-forward through interesting parts. (The last chapter, at least, has a shout-out to British change ringers ringing bells for special occasions, so there's that.)

Part of Thursday's personal life involves reconnecting with an old flame from her hometown. When we learn more about their relationship and the events of the century-long Crimean War that drove them apart, I can understand why Thursday broke up with him and why he believes he was in the right. The "discovery" that causes Thursday to change her mind, however, and the ensuing plot contrivances that mean they can't immediately reconcile, felt cheap. (But the very last twist in how things resolve, which is not entirely due to Thursday's efforts, is clever.)

Important context: I have not actually read Jane Eyre. The good news is, neither has Thursday's colleague Bowden, which provides an excuse for her to infodump the plot to him. Even more importantly, their universe's "Jane Eyre" is not quite our universe's Jane Eyre--the concept of "our world is just somebody else's AU" is usually a fun one, and how things resolve is very fun, especially for what it says about literature scholars' versus ordinary people's assessment of Good Art. (Again, it's not clear why the bad guy is trying to take the fictional construct of Jane Eyre hostage, given his "being evil is more fun than making money" attitude--wouldn't he rather just torment her for kicks and giggles?)

Along the lines of Wayside School, there is no chapter 13. Also, while this is probably a lot more appealing to English nerds than math nerds, you'll probably be more amused if you know about perfect numbers. ;)

Bingo: First in a Series, Dreams, borderline romance? [Edit December 2024: it turns out that Reddit is doing a readalong of the whole series so I can also count it for that too!]

Anthology of SF short stories about sports, stumbled upon while browsing a used bookstore. I like sports and the first one was based on "Casey at the Bat," so okay, sold.

It's from 1977, and the stories were originally published in the 40s-70s timeframe. The sex ratio among writers appears to be nine men, zero women, which is pretty "impressive" considering there are only seven stories. Three of them are installments from series that feature the same recurring character(s), so maybe that explains some of the...paucity? I don't want to say they're "flat" or "shallow" or anything, most of the contemporary "deep" stuff isn't to my taste either, but it feels like there's "no 'there' there" for several of these. In some cases, it's like, "we have to raise the stakes by involving gambling/someone's fate being on the line"; in others, it's looking for parallels between sports and other aspects of life (warfare? weird alien insects?) that provide the impetus for two plots to intertwine.

-Joy in Mudville (Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson)--very impressionable and earnest teddy-bear-like alien species imprints on humans, and immediately become obsessed with baseball. One of the aliens names himself Mighty Casey, but unfortunately, opponents can rattle him by reminding him of how "Casey at the Bat" turned out. Fortunately, what poetry can break, poetry can also fix...

"You untentacled mammal!" raged Ush Karuza. "You sslimeless conformation of bored flesh!"
Alex had long ago discovered that mankind rarely reacts to insults couched in nonhuman terms. It did not offend him at all to be told that he was slimeless.

-Bullard Reflects (Malcolm Jameson)--Dazzle Dart is a sport played by bouncing light rays around with reflective gear and aiming for a goal at the opponents' end. Like American football, one team is designated on offense at a time, and the other is on defense, but you can "intercept" and score from on defense. In Dazzle Dart, this is worth bonus points. Except instead of normal goals and "turnover" goals being worth one and two points respectively, it's twenty-five and fifty. And you thought Quidditch was silly. (This is from 1941.)
-The Body Builders (Keith Laumer)--the best of the stories, in my opinion, in that it predicts both technological advancement and the social changes that will ensue in a clever way.

So it's a little artificial maybe--but what about the Orggies, riding around in custom-built cars that are nothing but substitute personalities, wearing padded shoulders, contact lenses, hearing aids, false teeth, cosmetics, elevator shoes, rugs to cover their bald domes? If you're going to wear false eyelashes, why not false eyes? Instead of a nose bob, why not bob the whole face? At least a fellow wearing a Servo is honest about it, which is more than you can say for an Orggie doll in a foam-rubber bra--not that Julie needed any help in that department.

-The Great Kladnar Race (Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett)--bored humans on an alien planet try introducing something like horse races that they can bet on. However, the aliens' concepts of sports and competition and betting don't necessarily align with the humans'.
-Mr. Meek Plays Polo (Clifford D. Simak)--guy who has only seen one space polo game in his life somehow accidentally stumbles into being the "expert" space polo coach, oops. Also there are weird alien bugs that are great at computation (a little like "The Circle").
-Sunjammer (Arthur C. Clarke, whose name is spelled wrong on the front cover)--a solar flare interrupts a solar sailboat race. Felt timely given the storm of a few days ago! (I did not get to see the aurora, alas.)
-Run to Starlight (George R. R. Martin)--short and slow but extremely muscular aliens enter an American football league and crush everyone, metaphorically and literally. However, the aliens' concepts of sports and competition don't necessarily align with the humans'. Too bad he never wrote anything else ;)

Bingo: 5+ short stories.

When I read "Uprooted" and griped about the implausible romance and/or reactive plot, people's reactions were "try Spinning Silver, it's an improvement in some of those ways." And yeah, it is! I was aware that Spinning Silver was set in the same world as Uprooted, ~1700s Eastern Europe but with some fantasy elements, and that it was based on Rumplestiltskin.

But it's a lot more than a simple retelling. "Spinning Silver" teases out the individual trope elements of Rumplestiltskin--a mercenary father trying to get his daughter to marry up, the dead mother looming over the plot, a woman given the impossible task of making gold out of other elements, terrible bargains, aloof and unknowable beings from the fae world, the power of knowing someone's true name, the horror of a mother trading her child to inhuman creatures--and blows them all up, turning them inside-out, and creating something original.

It also does a lot with POV. For the first chunk, we have two young women from a small town who go back and forth telling the stories of their business dealings. But as the book goes on, we start jumping into more and more people's heads, and everyone's voice is very different. Sometimes this can be used for dramatic irony; we hear what character A thinks of their interaction with B, then we jump back and tell the same scene from B's POV and what was going through their head is very different than what A assumes. Once in a while, this makes the plot drag--there's a couple of scenes towards the end where we can't have any suspense about "oh no, will they find what they're looking for" because we've just seen the corresponding scene from another POV, and it would have been more effective to rearrange them--but overall, things are propelled forward much more intriguingly than "Uprooted."

Our POV characters are:

Miryem, the daughter of the village moneylender. Miryem's family is Jewish, which means her father is one of the few people socially permitted to work as a moneylender--but he's more interested in currying favor with the neighbors than getting his debts repaid, so his family goes hungry. Miryem steps up, grows "cold" and "wintry," and takes on his job, to her parents' horror. But an offhand remark about "look, I can turn silver into gold" (metaphorically, because of, you know, capitalism) inadvertently catches the ear of the "Staryk," monstrous elven raiders who live in a parallel realm.
Wanda, the daughter of an abusive alcoholic. Miryem is like "he can't pay off his debt because he's drunk everything away, I'll have them repay me by hiring Wanda to assist me with our work, I know this is cold and ruthless but I have to." Then when we see it from Wanda's POV she's like "you're giving me money to be out of the house and away from my father? And you'll even feed me? What an undeserved kindness!" Her reaction to "learning to manipulate numbers and do arithmetic is an amazing kind of magic!" felt cheesy and over-the-top, but the contrast between the literal phrasing of a royal decree and the way she "translates" it was more convincing.
Irina, the daughter of the duke of Vysnia (Vilnius, Lithuania). Like Wanda, her mother is dead and her father is trying to arrange the most profitable marriage for her, never mind what she wants. When Miryem is compelled to turn magical Staryk silver into gold, she does so by having an acquaintance forge silver jewelry which the duke purchases--so when the gold takes on magical powers in the Staryk world, so does the silver with Irina, and brings her to the attention of a tsar. Despite her cold relationship with her father, she learns a lot from him and is a true politician, adept as anyone at cutting deals to keep her realm safe.
Stepon, Wanda's younger brother. His narration is very simple and childlike (amazing cold open with "I like goats because I know what they will do.") It's possible he has some kind of sensory/mental health issues, or it's possible he's just eleven and overstimulated by unfamiliar crowds.
Magreta, Irina's nurse/caretaker. She can be kind and supportive, but her casual antisemitism provides a contrast to how Miryem is treated by the villagers.
Mirnatius, the tsar. For a while we mostly see him through Irina's POV ("this guy is so full of himself he requires a new outfit every day, that's no way to manage the economy"), but again, his narration provides a very different perspective on what's going on.

So I said the romance was better than "Uprooted," in that we didn't have the implausible "elderly magician berates young woman all the time but also they can't keep their hands off each other." In "Spinning Silver," both {Miryem and the Staryk king} and {Irina and Mirnatius} are paired off without much say-so on anybody's part, it's being manipulated by magic/higher-ups. So the timeframe of the book is mostly them all learning how to tolerate each other, and the romance is kind of left to your imagination in the future era.

The Staryk magic is kind of like...you can see their roads briefly if they make incursions in the human world, but as soon as they've disappeared, you start forgetting them and it really takes effort to remember. This means that if someone, like Miryem, disappears into the Staryk world, she's forgotten almost immediately except for little irregularities that don't seem right. These depictions were well-done. (Except that I was trying to remember if the Staryk were the same as the [jerk, mundane human] aristocrats in "Uprooted." They're not. I think I was half-remembering "Marek," the creepy prince, instead of "Staryk," the winter elves.)

There's a cool liminal space that sets up back-and-forth "communication" between the human and Staryk realms, and again, the multiple POVs are a good framework for this. On the other hand, there are some things, like, why do the Staryk want human gold, that are kind of chalked up to "magic idk" and not completely spelled out; for some of the confrontations at the end, again, it's better not to worry too much about hard magic systems and just go with the vibes. There's also an earlier plot that definitely plays the trope of "the less the audience knows about the plan, the more likely it is to succeed" trope straight.

Especially early on, it can be a very bleak "everyone sucks here" setting. Wanda and Stepon's father is horrific. Irina's father is mercenary and sets her up with Mirnatius, a dandy who abuses animals for fun. Nobody in the village respects Miryem's family, and when she tries to reclaim what she's due, her parents are horrified. The Staryk raid the village and carry off women and demand impossible tasks. There's a lot of "I have my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it" coming from all sides. Even though the plot is moving forward, it's hard to feel like there's anything to root for.

But cracks of light shine through. Miryem's mother, and her mother, defy the "dead moms" trope, and are able to be loving parental figures to Wanda, Stepon, and their brother Sergey. Miryem's grandfather is wise and conscientious, warning her of the risks that some of her choices pose not only to their family but to the Vysnia Jewish community as a whole, but still recognizing she's mature enough to make her own choices. They even make use of a real-world Jewish blessing for the first blossoming of trees in the spring. Even when people are trying to be cold, sometimes they're just too human!

Bingo: Alliterative Title, Under the Surface (not for most of the plot, but there is a secret tunnel that gets use), Multi-POV (and how!)

Once upon a time (1100s Indian Ocean) there was a notorious nakhudha (pirate captain) named Amina al-Sirafi. Ten years ago, she retired, and now she's a single mom with a bad knee and a leaky roof. However, a wealthy noblewoman who believes her granddaughter has been kidnapped by a Western European would-be sorcerer insists on having Amina rescue her, never mind Amina's own family responsibilities. So Amina has to put the band back together, staying one step ahead of the authorities while getting to the bottom of the mystery.

Amina and her crew are likable rogues. I found this easier to get into than Chakraborty's "City of Brass". That book focused more on a long-term conflict between two factions, neither of whom consistently seem like the "good guys"; maybe that's supposed to be sending a message about RL actually works, but I found it confusing at times. In contrast, the early sections of "Amina" are about tracking down individual allies, from a gay smuggler stuck in a prison in Aden, to a navigator and family man in Mogadishu, while researching the notorious Falco Palamenestra and speculating what he might be up to.

At first, Amina's Muslim identity comes through more in the ways characters talk, and some level of monster-fighting exorcism (like Catholicism in some horror movies), than actual practice. But gradually, we see more of how she's struggled to be a parent in her post-pirate life:

If the criminal past didn’t alert you, I have not always been a very good Muslim. Drinking and missing prayer were among my lesser sins, and if I tried to straighten myself up every year when Ramadan rolled around—a new life of piety easy to imagine while dazed with thirst and caught up in the communal joy of taraweeh—I typically lapsed into my usual behavior by the time the month of Shawwal had ended.

But then Marjana was born. And Asif was . . . lost. And if one of these events made me feel as though I had no right to ever call upon God again, the other filled with me a driving need I could not deny. So I keep my daily prayers, even if I feel unworthy the entire time.

To me, this rang true as a depiction of a complicated, realistic, person of faith.

This is a time and place that I knew very little about. For instance, one plotline involves the island of Socotra, an island off the coast of Somalia which is today part of Yemen. There are caves there with graffiti from sailors going back thousands of years, in Indian and Greek and Ethiopic scripts. This is a real place! I would not have been able to tell you anything about it before reading this book! So Chakraborty's vivid descriptions of places this, and of the diverse cultures and religious backgrounds of pirates who live and work alongside each other, is compelling. There's a danger in this as a reader, though, in that getting too caught up in the "worldbuilding" of the actual world can make it feel like its "foreignness" is what makes it speculative and fantastical, which is obviously inaccurate and beside the point. That's one reason why jumping in at the deep end with an honest-to-goodness sea monster in chapter one might have been a good choice, to remind us that there really are otherworldly things happening.

The themes of "rich people love to jerk poor people around" and "the male gaze sucks" are clear, but there's lots of quippy banter mixed in.

“That was you, was it not? The woman who poisoned the soldiers at the wali’s office, freed a crew of homicidal pirates, set a score of ships on fire, and fled the harbor in the middle of the night?”

“I would never confirm such a thing and put you at risk of consorting with criminals. But it was two ships, not a score. I wouldn’t wish to encourage exaggeration.”

Sailing past its ancient breakwater—the stones said to have been set there by giants—you might feel as though you have entered a mythical port of magic from a sailor’s yarn.

You would be sorely mistaken.

Aden is where magic goes to be crushed by the muhtasib’s weights, and if wonder could be calculated, this city would require an ordinance taxing it.

“She knows you are a pirate?”

“I am not a pirate,” Majed huffed. “I am a cartographer with a checkered past.”

“Yes. A checkered past of piracy.”

The book contains a few chapters that are "in-universe documentation" or chronicles of the places and people in the main narrative. This is a trope I really enjoy at times. However, in this case, I didn't feel it added much, beyond underscoring the themes that "men feel threatened by powerful women, oh no."

The biggest issue for me was how all the diverse, sympathetic characters just kind of went along with developments that felt more reminiscent of 2020s Tumblr idiolect than 1100s Indian Ocean. How fortuitously convenient! (At least it got a Hugo nom.)

Smaller quibbles: the timeframe with Amina in her forties is appealing to the extent that it's a story about a working mother trying to follow her own dreams while also desperately missing her kid. But in order to make that work, the narrative sometimes withholds a lot of important information about the tragedies in Amina's past/her relationship with her child's father until it can be brought forward for dramatic effect, and it made me wonder what a story from the younger Amina's POV would look like without the artificial suspense problem.

More broadly, I felt like the second half's pace wasn't as crisp as the first--there's a dramatic near-death experience, then a bunch of fantastical creatures are introduced in quick succession as if to make up for the "worldbuilding via the actual world" stuff earlier, then we get a very contrived in-universe sequel hook, then we double back to a setting that had already been introduced. Whereas the first part was "we need to go to A to do B and then that gives us a clue that leads us to C."

Who wore it better?

“It is invalid!” I burst out. “Our nikah. It is not permissible for me to marry a non-Muslim.”
Raksh frowned. “Is that why the man had me say all those words about God and prophets?” He returned to studying the contract. “Trust me, dear wife, I can be a vast number of things.”
“But—but you are not a believer.”
“Of course I am. Best to know the competition, yes?”

Compare "Alif the Unseen" (which is one of my favorites and I suspect I probably was harsh on "City of Brass" by comparison):

"But I told him I couldn't marry him even if I wanted to, because I can't marry an unbeliever. And he laughed and said he'd been a believer, 'for a the better part of a thousand years,' I believe were the exact words."
"What?" said Alif. "Vikram? Vikram the madman who bites people?"
"He might be those things," said the convert hastily, "but did you ever know him to do or say anything really blasphemous?"
"I guess not."

Bingo: Alliterative Title, Criminals, Dreams, Reference Materials, Readalong! It's planned to be First in a Series but the sequels aren't out yet. (Statistics from last year just came out and this was the most popular book across all 2023 bingo cards, with ~200 reads!)

When last we met Jesse, Carla, and Peter, they had hijacked a spaceship and jumped to an uninhabited planet to set up a colony where humans could develop psionic powers free from the medical bureaucracy of Undine. Jesse's hyperspace jump was rushed and not perfectly calculated, so in order to ensure their oxygen supply makes it all the way to planet Maclairn (named after their late founder), the Group had to confront their deepest fear and brave the stasis boxes that had been Chekhov-gunned several times in the last section. As the existence of the sequel implies, the protagonists and most of their comrades survive stasis. But while, in "Stewards," the hyperspace navigation "error"/imperfection sets up the Group's ultimate test, here it casts a long shadow as Jesse keeps wondering, "could we have picked a better landing site if I hadn't screwed it up?"

The early days on Maclairn are a struggle. The first part of the book is a recurring cycle of "should we do things this way or that way? Well, we came here to set up a society fully founded on mind powers, we pretty much have to commit to the bit or else what's the point." Repeat ad infinitum. Later, this broadens somewhat to "we have to have psi powers coexist with modern technology to fulfill Ian [Maclairn]'s dream, otherwise what's the point." There are clear parallels to "Children of the Star"; that society represents the endpoint if they go down a path of giving up on modern technology--and the burdens of agrarian, high-population-growth societies fall disproportionately on women. If "Stewards" had motifs of baptism, this is more of an Exodus story, with the characters sulking about "why did you bring us out of Undine just to starve in the wilderness, at least there we had enough to eat." "My God, came Carla’s thought, we’re homesick! Homesick for Undine! I never admitted that to myself, it was so foolish, I’d wanted so much to leave . . . I guess I just pushed it down inside, into a place I didn’t dare go. . . ."

The consequences of the hyperspace jump being off are a minor tonal retcon/change in perspective on the events of the first book. A more significant one, to me, involves love triangle dynamics. In "Stewards," we learn that Carla and Peter both previously had spouses who died under the authoritarian Undine government. Fortunately, Jesse shows up just when Carla is ready to love again, and their relationship brings him into the Group and thus enables their escape from Undine. "Promise" adds that Peter has been silently pining for Carla all along, but needed Jesse's starship skills too much to say anything. We're told the Group's adult recruits skew slightly female, but that isn't represented among the main characters, and you're telling me that none of them are Peter's type? All three of them sigh and angst about "oh, we're such great friends, we can't let this love triangle come between us," and at times it feels like it's setting up for a polygamy plotline (they're all highly powerful telepaths, they can't keep secrets from each other!) And then it just...goes nowhere. As in the first book, I can accept that sex is probably great among telepaths; I can't buy that every single person has to have sex in order to fully level up their telepathic sensitivity!

The best parts of "Promise" involve the culture clashes between Jesse, who grew up on Earth; the rest of the adult Group members, from Undine; and the Maclairn-born generation. Undine's environment is so tightly regulated, they don't even have insects or lizards, so the planet's "collective unconsciousness" doesn't have a fear of creepy-crawlies; Jesse's initial revulsion risks "contaminating" the psyche until everyone faces their fear.

“Horror vids involving animal life aren’t permitted on colony worlds,” Peter told him. “Haven’t you ever wondered why starship libraries don’t contain any? Earth has always banned their export as a measure to protect extraterrestrial lifeforms. It’s one of the few government trade regulations I think is wise.”

Of course, Jesse realized. The average Earth citizen’s reaction would have been to kill the crawlies—if possible, to exterminate them. That hadn’t occurred to anyone yesterday. And horror vids often portrayed even intelligent aliens as repulsive; what kind of precedent would that set if similar ones were ever encountered?

Traditionally, said the knowledgebase, small farmers had chopped chickens’ heads off with a hatchet. Wringing their necks was said to be more humane, but nobody wanted to experiment on live, squawking chickens despite the specific instructions provided. These warned that the hardest part, in the physical sense, would be catching a grown chicken in the first place—a fact soon borne out by experience, as chickens are not devoid of telepathic sensitivity and the pursuers were unconsciously broadcasting their intent to kill.

Kel, like many of the Group’s other children, had been slow in learning to talk. It had taken awhile before it dawned on the adults that this was because the kids’ telepathic bonds with their parents had been so strongly encouraged that they felt no need to communicate vocally. Speech could not be allowed to die out in a psi-based culture; it was essential not only to reading but to the framing and communication of complex ideas. Now, everyone realized that like the skills for volitional control of the body, telepathic conveyance of concepts, as distinguished from emotions, must wait until the kids were older.

On the other hand, the scope of "this is dangerous, but we must, to commit to the psionic bit" and "well, we've come through a lot of tough situations before, but this time really is the end...jk never mind we got out of it" got repetitive. There was one scene towards the end where it's like "okay, we're almost done, I can see how telepathy might be used to enable a permanent self-sacrifice...nope, we're still going, huh," and even though some of the resolutions were nice callbacks/tying up foreshadowing, it was still a lot.

Like in "Voyage to Yesteryear," the kids who were raised outside of Earth and Undine's prejudices are, overall, a great step forward for humankind, but there can be some values dissonance. In both cases, the desire for lots of population growth leads to a much lower age of consent than Earthlings are used to. Justified somewhat more in Maclairn's case; telepathy means almost everyone wouldn't fathom hurting each other and of course sex is consensual, as well as amazing. On the other hand, in both cases, there's no prison infrastructure; if someone is determined to be evil and is posing a grave threat to others, you just have to kill them. "Promise" gets a little more philosophical about the problem of evil--if it's not nature and it's not nurture, what causes it? Free will? Sure, but it seems as if some people are also evil from day one even if their DNA is just fine.

There are a couple shoutouts to Lord of the Rings and Star Trek that fit in nicely. I found "it's just like using the Force, you know, like in that old vid, Star Wars" to be more of a distraction. Similarly, Engdahl's commitment to showing her work ("in the twentieth century on Earth, you know, people experimented with remote viewing!") got to be a distraction. But the exploration of "okay, let's try a rain dance, even if it fails we're learning something and pushing knowledge forward" was a great use of the "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" trope, which is what I come to Engdahl for anyway.

Some people, like Peter, tend to believe in an afterlife; others, like Jesse, are more skeptical. Earth religions don't transfer well to other planets because the interstellar gap is too big for the collective unconsciousness to bridge. Despite this, characters use the word "God" (like in a telepathic context of "Carla . . . oh, God, Carla, answer me!") approximately 144 times. Do you have no one else's name to take in vain???

Criticisms aside, I do think that this is less heavy-handed than "Stewards" and at least as good a starting point!

Bingo: Dreams, Prologues/Epilogues, Self-Published, Survival. One prominent character acquires a physical disability midway through the story. Jesse and Peter's Criminal record on Undine is not very important (since the entire book is set on or around Maclairn), but it becomes more prominent in the last section.

"Lonely Castle in the Mirror" is a genre-savvy portal fantasy about junior high students who get drawn into a mysterious castle when they're supposed to be in school. Kokoro had a terrible experience early in the school year that's made her terrified of facing her classmates, and develops some kind of (psychosomatic?) illness that prevents her from attending either the normal school or a special alternative school for students who need more support. Shortly after this, her bedroom mirror turns into a portal to the castle with six other students who are also not in school during the normal hours. The "Wolf Queen" in charge--an elementary school girl who enjoys allusions to "Little Red Riding Hood"--tells them all that there's a secret key in the castle that can grant one wish, and they have a year to find it and, potentially, use it. Also, if anyone is caught in the castle outside of the 9-5 school day timeframe, they'll all be eaten by a wolf.

So, these painfully shy students have the opportunity to make friends and have a non-terrifying experience with kids their own age, and they all enjoy bonding and playing video games and drinking tea together, and for the most part nobody cares about finding the key, because that would make the castle close and prematurely end their new friendship. For most of the book, the contrived quest stuff doesn't play into it. And then when it does, it kind of lampshades "oh yeah I have to do this on speedrun mode."

There are a lot of takes pointing out that books where "the magic goes away"/"everyone loses their memories"/"we just have to move on with our lives and pretend like the portal fantasy never happened" can be pretty messed up. In this book, however, I couldn't find myself relating to the characters because it felt like a perverse incentives situation. Yes, middle school is an emotionally volatile, turbulent, unpleasant environment full of many immature people. This is a pretty common experience, actually. Kokoro just can't handle it, and as a response, the infinitely patient teacher at the alternative school reassures her mother that she's battling really hard and it's not her fault, she just can't go to school, and then she gets to go through a portal into fantasy world with people who play video games and eat snacks all day...? I understand there's more to it than that, but something has to change about this situation because otherwise this really isn't the message you want to send. (Once we learn about the backgrounds and life situations of some of the other students, I can imagine how it was easier for people like Subaru and Aki to fall through the cracks, but it feels like, eg, Masamune and Ureshino's junior high situation should have had some kind of guidance counselor or adult in the room. The readers' guide in the back of the book describes Kokoro as a "futoko," and I understand this is more pervasive in Japan than elsewhere, but I have a hard time accepting that seventh graders staying home for months on end with no apparent homeschooling or tutoring gets such a shrug.)

The prose didn't really grab me, sometimes it felt awkward ("That day, Fuka apparently enjoyed the chocolates back home, for she faithfully reported to Kokoro that 'they were delicious.'") and there were a several parts with very. short. one. line. paragraphs.

Kokoro tried to convince herself that she hadn't been at home that day.

Miori and the others had simply pounded on the door of an empty house, trampled over the patio, gone round and round over outside of the house.

But nothing actually happened.

Nothing at all.

She never was about to be killed.

And yet the next day, she said, "I have a stomachache."

And she really did. It was no lie.

And her mother chimed in: "You do look pale. Are you OK?"

And that's when Kokoro stopped going to school.

A few paragraphs later:

Would she be able to protect herself?

The only place she could now go to freely from her bedroom was the castle.

If I'm in the castle, she started to think, then I'll be safe.

Only the castle beyond the mirror could offer her complete protection.

Girl, I know your mental health isn't the greatest, but we're talking about the place where people threatened you with being eaten alive by a wolf. ??? Sorry, my suspension of belief does not extend this far.

There's also a random red herring with a neighbor student whose father has an interest in researching fairy tales, and like, maybe that "real world" location/characters are related in some way to the portal world? No, it's just a fortuitous coincidence that helps Kokoro have access to more Western fairy tale info.

The good news is, about halfway through the characters start developing some genre-savviness and realizing what they have in common, and towards the end, things pick up significantly in terms of how and why some of the arbitrary fairy-tale logic came about. So it definitely sticks the landing in that way.

Bingo: Prologue/Epilogue, Author of Color, Book Club

The Sword of Kaigen handles POV and pacing really well. It kept me on my toes. I can recommend it highly on those fronts. If you want a story where you can't feel confident in what will happen next, it delivers. But explaining how would go into spoiler territory, which defeats the purpose. So this review is going to have a lot more to say about the negative aspects than the positive ones, even though there are a lot of each.

In the opening scenes, we meet Matsuda Mamoru, a fourteen-year-old boy from Mount Takayubi in Shirojima, Kaigen (fantasy Japan, hold that thought). Mamoru is in training to become a master swordsman and jijaka (water/ice/snow manipulator), like generations of Matsudas before him. The arrival of a transfer student unsettles him, however, because the world beyond Shirojima's shores is not dominated by the samurai mindset:

“And what fighting style is popular in your region?” he asked, curious about what kind of warrior this boy was.

“What fighting style?” Kwang raised his eyebrows. “Video games.”

Kwang's father is in town to install new info-com towers, and Kwang himself has a cell phone with pictures from his international travels. The culture clash is a great comedic setup.

We also meet Mamoru's mother, Matsuda Misaki. By the standards of chauvinistic Shirojima society, she's the perfect housewife, raising four jijaka sons. However, her worldview is more open-minded than her circumstances might indicate; when she was a teenager, she studied magic and weaponry abroad and got into superhero antics with her friends after class. She illustrates the Quester/Family Person tropes; as a young person, she was a Quester, and even if it appears she's now a Family Person, she isn't happy with the way her life has gone.

"The Sword of Kaigen" is well-regarded in r/fantasy polling, and I suspect one reason for it is the complex elemental magic system. It's not just that jijakalu can call upon ice and snow in lots of different ways to protect themselves (although they certainly do that); they also can get the upper hand in a fight by setting up their opponent's attack to take out the kitchen sink. Some of them can even manipulate blood inside their enemies' bodies, though this is scorned as "impure" by some water specialists. In parts of the world where fire magic is dominant, wood can't be used as building materials. And this leads to cultural stereotypes; Takayubi residents meeting allies from elsewhere in the world assume “Like we’ve got blood inside us, they’ve got fire.”

So what's the catch?

I mentioned with Tigana that there are a couple different routes to worldbuilding a fantasy setting inspired by RL. One way is the "Uprooted" premise: magic exists, but Polnya and Rosya are very definitely the Poland and Russia of our Earth circa 1600. Another choice is the "Yumi and the Nightmare Painter" approach: Nikaro's homeland doesn't correspond to the island of Honshu or the archipelago of Japan more generally, it's a secondary world with a cultural aesthetic lifted from RL Japan. But veering in between these two can sometimes lead to an uncanny valley, and that's what happened here.

The landmasses of Kaigen's world, the "Duma," are our planet Earth with south drawn at the top of the map. (Which is fine! I'm not offended at having my ~preconceptions challenged~ or whatever, you can draw your map however you like whether or not it's our Earth.) People in Kaigen fight with katanas and wear kimonos and count to three by going "ichi, ni, san." They're also on bad terms with Ranga (China), admire the military prowess of Yamma (northwest Africa), and sometimes study abroad in Carytha (Canada). For me, this definitely felt like a lazy worst-of-both-worlds synthesis.

Moreover, the infodumps were painful. In chapter two, we have a history class. I understand that the purpose is to contrast the propaganda version of history that Mamoru learns with the actual truth, but no one actually teaches history like this. Not even for the unit on the French Revolution, which is the one unit where my teacher was like "yeah, you actually do need to learn a bunch of names and dates." It's just attacking a strawman.

“5286, the year that the Carythian Union formed and resisted Yammanka rule.” Hibiki Sensei wrote the year up on the board. “5287,” he wrote as Mamoru scrambled to catch up with his notes. “In this year, the Sizwean colony of Malusia staged a major uprising that shook Sizwe’s control of the entire region. At the same time, there was a rash of peasant uprisings in the western part of the Kaigenese Empire. These were quickly put down by our own Imperial army, but they foreshadowed bigger rebellions to come…

“5288. Under the influence of corrupt politicians, a collection of cities, led by Ranga, rose against the Kaigenese Empire. This rebellion was put down the same year and its leaders publicly executed for their treason against the Empire.
“5289, the year that Yamma defeated Sizwe for control of Malusia and pressed to take Sizwe’s other colonies, escalating the long-standing tensions between the two Kelenduguka superpowers.
“5290. Kaigen’s western provinces rose up in rebellion once again. Using propaganda and false promises, the Thulanist rebels managed to trick the uneducated peasants of Ranga into following them in greater numbers than ever before. At the same time, the Longhouse Confederacy of Abiria staged a reprisal of its bid for independence in 5153, under the same flag. “At the tail end of that year, on the twenty-eighth of Kribakalo, Ranganese terrorists attacked a graduation ceremony at Daybreak Academy in Carytha, killing principal Oyede Biida along with several Yammanka and Kaigenese students. It was following this malicious and cowardly attack that Yamma agreed to support our great empire in its fight against the Ranganese rebels.
“5291. Early in this year, the Yammankalu allied with us, bringing foreign troops onto Kaigenese soil for the first time. In response to their involvement, Sizwe aligned itself both with our own rebel enemies and with the Abirian rebels fighting against Yamma for their independence. This led to open war between Yamma and Sizwe. Abtya aligned with Yamma.
“5292. This year marked the only time in Duna’s history that all the major theonite powers—Kaigen, Yamma, Abtya, and Sizwe—were at war. It was in this year that the Ranganese fonyakalu launched their attack on Shirojima and were soundly defeated.

It gets less rough later, but chapter 25 (out of 31) is basically an aside to illustrate that even people who live in the same country and nominally practice the same religion actually might have very different beliefs about the gods and the creation narrative. We get it!

(There's a character list and glossary at the end; I suspect that if you're familiar with [family name] [personal name] order you don't need it. A lot of characters will die anyway and then you don't need to remember their names. Similarly, there are a lot of substitutes for Earth units like "hours" or "meters," but it's usually pretty clear from context what's being described, even if it goes in one ear and out the other.)

The underlying plot is a subtle, nuanced, narrative about breaking cycles of abuse--but it gets bogged down with the straw people necessary to move the plot along. Mamoru, not unreasonably, is disillusioned when he learns about the Empire's propaganda. Why should he bother fighting for a country that's just going to lie and condescend to him? Misaki points out that maybe it doesn't matter: he doesn't necessarily have to fight for the country. If violent enemies came to Takayubi and threated his family and neighbors, would he fight? Yes? Okay, that's what's important.

Well, guess what, violent enemies do come to Takayubi and threaten everyone, civilians included. I could understand "the colonists don't like being colonized and they're coming to take the fight to Kaigen now," but that war was eighty years before. These fighters are just here to...be evil and do war crimes? At times they're so over-the-top evil that of course Kaigen's self-defense is justified; at other times, the main characters are like, "it's hard to be mad at them personally, their government doesn't let them know any better, they're the same as us." Later on, we get a tacked-on explanation for why the enemy's tactics are so poorly thought out, but it still doesn't really cohere.

Similarly, after the Imperial propaganda machine tries to silence any discussion of the battle, the survivors recognize they can't really survive defying their own government, but they're still upset.

“And don’t try to tell me we can remember without speaking of what happened here,” the older woman said, smashing down Misaki’s response before it could even take shape on her lips. “A warrior’s legacy is essential to his soul. To deny what happened here—to ourselves or to anyone else—is the greatest disservice we could do our dead.”

But is there a statute of limitations on history? Do we have a duty to carry the burden of every atrocity in the world? How much is too much?

(Semi-relatedly, Misaki is the kind of character who can support her friends and point out when they're being ridiculous by blaming themselves for things that were in no way their fault, but can't extend that same logic to herself. I guess I get frustrated when the character archetype is almost-but-not-quite what I'm looking for? Because the things that she [wrongly] blames herself for are very specific things that happened in her own personal life. And I guess I'm looking for advice on how to deal with "blaming yourself for things that aren't particularly my fault, but also aren't specifically mine vis-a-vis many other people's." But that's kind of a petty concern.)

Part of the context for the almost-Earth geography, and a couple other plot threads that don't really get resolved, is that this was originally published as the prequel to another series by Wang. In previously-published (but later-set) books, some of the minor characters in this book wind up traveling to our Earth and investigating the "loose ends" from this one. Wang has since discontinued that series and pulled it from publication, so there's that.

There are a couple understated humor moments; for instance, in a flashback to Misaki's superhero days, one of her classmates gripes: “Have you noticed,” she said, “that every bloody crime-fighter of my complexion has to have the word ‘white’ in their alias. Like they need to qualify—not a real crime-fighter, a white one.” When it's not too on-the-nose, it can be very funny!

Midway through the book, there's also a really effective use of omniscient narrator flashforward--only for a couple sentences, but it says a great deal about how things are going to resolve both in the short and the long terms. That, together with some of the epilogue-ish stuff, left me with a hopeful takeaway for the protagonists. (Maybe even more hopeful if the sequels have been un-canonized so whatever bad things might befall them there don't "need" to happen! :p )

I tend not to do numerical ratings, but if I did, I would give this a similar disclaimer to Tigana; this isn't a mediocre 3-star book, so much as a mashup between a 5-star and a 1-star book. (I mean, this kind of thing is probably why I don't do numerical ratings.)

Bingo: Picked it up for Elemental Magic which means I'm done with 11 days to go, yay! Also: self-published, POC author; probably superheroes (Misaki and her friends in the flashback have secret identities and do vigilante things, even if it's only a small portion of the story); possibly coastal setting, possibly possibly sequel.

Roundup/reddit cross-posting to come soon. :)

Sometimes, "YA" is used as a pejorative. This is bad because 1. books that are actually in that genre can be pretty different from each other, and 2. the tropes that it can be a shorthand for (first-person POV, female lead, romance as a major plot point) aren't bad in and of themselves, so it comes across as men complaining about women. Unfortunately, the prose in this particular book is often at the level of "YA as a pejorative."

Premise: there's an evil king who made a pact with a witch to gain immortality, which he has to renew by eating a hundred souls during a specific month every year. He gets these souls by making it a contest--people who sign away their souls get a prediction of their potential deaths, delivered by the descendants of the original witch, and if they survive halfway through the month, they can be safe and get rewarded with riches/boons. Anyone who keeps going after that has the chance to steal immortality from the king if they survive to the end of the month, but most people don't want to take that risk. Well, a young soldier (Nox) trying to avenge his father, who was murdered by the king's cruelty, decides he wants a chance at assassinating the king. The apprentice witch (Selestra) is told to foresee his death, but winds up seeing herself dying in the vision as well. So now their fates are bound up together.

At first, Nox' narration is amusing and quippy.

Somniatis witches are snakes.
Shedding their skin and building themselves anew...
...I bow, quickly, in place of driving my sword through the king's chest. It seems the more polite option and the blow would be wasted on an immortal anyway...
...When we're not at war, Last Army soldiers act as enforcers for the king, and it doesn't exactly make us popular on the streets, despite my winning personality.

In contrast, Selestra's POV is more self-pitying; she has access to power and magic, but she lives locked in a tower, and can't even make direct physical contact with people because it might trigger her visions of death. ("Woobie is touch-starved because of magic" is a trope with a very different backstory in Foundryside!)

Selestra's family gets their magic because they're descended from a goddess, Asclepina, who has an important connection to snakes. This is a direct allusion to ancient Greek mythology and lore--and in this case, I feel like, it fits! Asclepius isn't a common-enough name to throw me out of the story, and the snake symbolism provides plenty of narrative opportunity:

It is striped black and yellow, like the lines of night and day. The two sides of the world. Of the good magic my family once had and the dark magic we use now...
...The king made my family into deadly things too.

Stuff like this is a little heavy-handed, but it works for me.

Unfortunately, I found some of the allusions to be clumsier. The opening map depicts the "Six Isles" of the book's setting: Vasiliádes, Polemistés, Armonía, Nekrós, Flóga, and Thavma. Vasiliádes is where the king's palace is. Polemistés is full of great warriors. Armonía is always in balance with nature. (The book is mostly set on these three, we only hear about the others offscreen.) Okay, we get it!

Additionally, some of the language that the narrative uses feels very modern and not secondary-world in tone. Someone's words hit like a "bullet." The king manipulates people like "chess pieces." Nox joins the army, like his father, so the king refers to him as "a legacy"--as in, legacy student? That phrasing is jarring and not very fantasy-Ancient-Greece to me. [Also, this is the king who murdered the father for plotting against him. I feel like I would not keep reminding the kid of his family's history of military service. That has to be somewhere on the Evil Overlord List, right?]

When they're walking through a haunted forest: "I can see the moon, peeking through a line of dark clouds, which hide any chance of stars." Next page: "We walk for a while, long enough for the night to turn to something darker. The moon is dim and smudged overhead." Page after that: "I marvel as the great creature sweeps through the sky, weaving in and out of the stars." What? Maybe I'm being picky, but the more I read, the more I felt like it could use some low-level editing.

At a higher level, the romance plot--while not a bad thing in and of itself--did feel kind of formulaic and tropey. Like, they're snarking at each other even though they don't have much of a reason to dislike each other, they just assume they're on opposite sides. Selestra has knowledge about Nox's family that's important to him (this reveal was early, but one of those "oh I should have seen it coming, nice" swerves, credit there), but they fail to communicate, and there's a lot of angst that could be cleared up with a simple conversation. Selestra is so sad because she's never seen the world outside of her tower before and now she's on an adventure, what will happen, we just don't know.

There's a theme that emerges near the end about "we shouldn't be defined by the things our family has done in the past, we have the chance to make a better future," and like, that is an important theme and one worth underlining! Is Nox really on this quest because he wants to, or does he resent his dad for dying on him and making him feel like he has no choice but to try killing the king? Does Selestra's mother truly believe in what the king's doing, or does she just feel like it's too late for her to change? These are interesting questions, they just get drowned under the "tropey enemies to lovers" stuff.

I saw some writeups suggesting it had been advertised as a retelling of Rapunzel, but I would say the parallels are not particularly significant--Selestra spends her early years trapped in a tower and has long hair (but not long enough to climb). Likewise, it may be set in the world of an earlier novel by Christo, but that didn't feel at all relevant. (I really wanted to find a standalone, it seems like a lot of YA is not.)

Bingo: Title with a Title, Young Adult, Queernorm (Selestra's best friend is bi), Coastal/Island Setting. You could make the case for Myths and Retellings, but I personally wouldn't.

It doesn't take long to get a title drop in "The First Bright Thing." Here's page 3.

When she smiled, it seemed to the crowd like she was looking at the world for the first time. As if she had just caught her first glimpse of them, saw the brilliance of their hearts, and had known what great things they'd already done and would do. The smile was a genuine embrace, the first bright thing in this dark, dusty place.

"She" is the Ringmaster, aka Rin, the founder of a circus full of Sparks--people with magic. The year is 1926, and Rin's circus is a found family for people who might be marginalized by their sexuality, ethnicity, or disability in the outside world. Rin is conscientious enough not to use animals for performances since they can't give informed consent, but not to worry, the circus includes a shapeshifter who's a one-woman menagerie! (K. A. Applegate gets a shoutout in the acknowledgements for fostering Dawson's love of reading.) There's also a father-and-son team with wings, a man who can duplicate himself, and Odette--a magical healer, trapeze artist, and Rin's wife. (Not on paper, but they had their own unofficial ceremony with loved ones.) They teleport across the US, spreading joy, hope, and belonging with their performances.

But here's pages 8 and 9, from chapter 2, ten years earlier.

No one knows why the Spark came. But it came during the war.
Edward actually saw the beginning of the Sparks, because Edward was seventeen years old and stuck in the thick of the Western Front. He didn't know that's what he saw, because he didn't know anything about Sparks...
...some boy in a mask dug up a new part of the trench and hit something that sparked like a flint hitting a rock. Something small and soft (or was it small and sharp?) glinted like a flash of lightning. Then, as if it was the speck of a ghost rising from an uncovered grave, the light traveled upward and into the air of the world.
This was the Spark. Not that Edward knew that. No one knew that.

Edward is present at the beginning of the Sparks--or, metaphorically, "the first bright thing" that brings magic into the world! Edward's plotline--he miraculously escapes the trenches, but at first is unaware of his own Spark powers--is very compelling in a chilling, horrific way. (It doesn't take long to figure out how it ties in with Rin's story.)

So far, so good. One complication: Rin's teleportation powers don't just move through space, they go through time. And Mauve, the circus' third leader (along with Rin and Odette), can see through time even without jumping. So when Mauve realizes that there's a great evil a couple decades in the future, Rin tries to jump forward to fix it. The premise of "characters from our distant past have to travel into their future, which is our slightly-less-distant past, to fix it" is a relatively fresh take on time travel, so I'm open to it.

But time travel is still a hard trope to do well. In Atomic Anna, one of the "rules" Anna discovers is "you can only visit the same year twice," which seems to be a kludge more for Doylist reasons than Watsonian ones--if she could get as many attempts as she needed to visit 1985, it wouldn't be that difficult to prevent the Chernobyl disaster. Ultimately, Anna isn't able to prevent Chernobyl, but she is able to change her family's history for the better. So it's more than just "the real time travel is the found family we made along the way."

Rin's first idea is pretty amusing--she figures, hey, they're performers, their method of changing people's lives is the power of art. So she and her friends go to 1938 and convince Neville Chamberlain's wife to take her husband to the Scottish Play, hoping he will learn a lesson about standing up to tyrants. Points for originality.

"I'm seeing him in a plane, on his way to Munich to talk to the evil man. He looks down, he thinks about Birnam Wood in the play. He asks a man how many bombs would it take to kill London...how long it would be to kill a million people."
Rin knew the play well enough to know what had gone wrong. Chamberlain didn't see himself in Macduff. He saw himself in the hapless king who lived in fear, the tyrant who thought he was safe only to be duped by the witches' prophecies of moving forests. A man who did not look ahead and did not listen to his mortality.

As far as I know this never happened, but it's the kind of surreal detail that makes me believe it could have.

Okay, maybe they can try something else. Can they go back and prevent Archduke Ferdinand from being assassinated? No. In one of the future jumps, Rin sees her Spark friends dying in the war--according to legislation enacted in her timeline's 1921, the US government has to leave adult Sparks alone, but they'll come to the defense of the country if necessary. Okay, so maybe that's a clue--she needs to make a change in the present to overturn the law, so that even though World War II is still going to happen and it's still going to be terrible, at least magic people won't be drafted just because they're magic. Does anything ever come of this? No.

To make matters worse, sometimes, Rin has been able to make small shifts in the timeline to help people who might otherwise be forced into circus life against their will. In the backstory, a young man tries to sell his brother to the circus, but the brother doesn't want to go. Rin jumps back in time and saves their mother's life from an accident; in the altered present, she's still the breadwinner and the brothers are no longer desperate. So small tweaks in time are okay. But big ones are not. Except the difference between "small" and "big" just wavers back and forth depending on when it's convenient. Mauve is always glimpsing the future and finding someone who needs to be inspired by the circus, and then sort of but not really telling Rin who it is, because Rin needs to do it and figure it out for herself. But the "free will" argument doesn't really ring true.

Basically the repeating dynamic is that Rin sees the horrors of Nazi book-burning/the Holocaust/Hiroshima/one of her circus friends being killed by the bad guys, and decides We Must Stop It, no matter how much she burns herself out trying to fix the timeline. Then Odette preaches the virtues of self-care and reminds Rin that she's Enough and Valid and Worthwhile, uwu. And then a couple chapters later the roles have switched and Rin is the one patiently explaining to her honorary daughter figure (the circus' new illusionist) that they can't fix everything and we just have to take it day by day, uwu. There's a kernel of something in here about parenthood, and that even if you can't fix the trauma in your own life, you can still be inspired to fight for the next generation so that things can be a little better for them.

But, regardless of whether you're talking about the horrors of the mid-twentieth century or, IDK, twenty-first century climate despair, it's really really hard to strike the balance of "this is terrible and we must stop it" and "you're totally Valid, uwu."

"Do you know what happened in the summer of 1919?"
"That was when we started our circus," Rin said.
Mauve said, "Will Brown was murdered in Omaha. You know what happened in the summer of 1921? Tulsa. You know what's happened every single day since white people stepped foot on this continent? You know what happens across the world? Pain. The Great War? It was one blip. All that pain, all that loss, it was just a blip. So why did the Spark come then? Why not when the slaves rebelled in New Orleans? Why not at Wounded Knee? Why not in the summer of 1919?"
Rin shook her head. "I don't know," she said.

Ultimately, the villain gets a hoisted by their own petard moment that's satisfying and poignant. But overall, I feel like Dawson is trying to have her cake and eat it too, and it just doesn't work.

Bingo: not quite Queernorm, probably using it for Published in 2023. Would also probably be a good fit for mundane (though not boring!) jobs.

I discovered Ilmari Jääskeläinen in 2014 when Tor published his time travel novella, "Where the Trains Turn," at the same time I was playing a time travel themed werewolf game and it really stuck in my head. It's not a pleasant read, but it's an impactful one. So I saw this on the shelf and it had a pretty balling cold open:

The reader was at first surprised, then shocked, as the criminal Raskolnikov was abruptly slain in the middle of the street, right before her eyes. Sonya, the hooker with a heart of gold, shot him through the heart. It happened midway through an essay on the Dostoevsky classic.

There's a curse or a virus or something strange stealth-editing some of the books in the town of Rabbit Back, and if you're not careful, it can spread and infect others!

Okay, you have my attention. But from there, the book virus takes a back seat, and the plot shifts to a premise that's not particularly speculative. A generation ago, the famous children's book writer, Laura White, put Rabbit Back on the map with her popular "Creatureville" series. She then found nine young children from the town, formed them into the titular society, and mentored them so they would become accomplished writers themselves. The society hasn't accepted any new members in decades, until Ella Milana, our protagonist, is accepted on the strength of a short story publication. But just as she's about to meet White, the latter disappears in mysterious (fantastical?) circumstances. Since Ella's substitute teaching job isn't panning out, she begins to research the previous members of the society, which is difficult because it sometimes seems that they're not really on good terms with each other. This process involves a lot of stressful, difficult "interviews," and a dark secret from the Society's past comes to light. (Ella uses some Hamilton-level comma sexting skills to delve into this.) Mysterious, but, with the possible exception of White's disappearance, not inherently speculative.

Spoilery: for suspension of disbelief purposes, I can buy that "the society used to have a tenth member who the other kids resented because of his incredible talent, but after he died suddenly, the other kids made a pact never to speak of him again." I could, separately, buy that "the society members have a highly ritualized procedure for challenging each other to 'The Game,' in which they reveal their deepest, darkest, secrets, sometimes with the help of drugs, to get raw material for each other's stories without the embellishments humans normally put in their narratives." I can't believe that both of these would simultaneously happen in the same story. Like, how was that ever supposed to work? (I also can't believe that they would have all forgotten 1. the talented kid's name, and 2. anything specific they read in the notebook they stole from him, other than "it gave us really good ideas which our subconscious helps us turn into great literature.")

There's a subplot involving Ella's father, who died of early-onset dementia, that doesn't really go anywhere, unless we're supposed to infer that a head injury sustained two decades before contributed to his later brain trauma and ties things together that way. There's also a lot of contrast between some of the women in the Society, who got pregnant when they didn't want to be, and Ella, who planned and expected to have kids of her own but then learned that she couldn't get pregnant. (I quoted the first paragraph above. The second paragraph is about Ella's ovaries. It's a little creepy, particularly because it doesn't feel like it ties together.) There's a lot of Most Writers Are Writers, with the Society members' insecurities about "are my ideas really original or did I steal them from this dead kid," "how did Laura White's influence in my life change me," food, sex, and all the other things neurotic writers angst about.

In the end, there's a final twist to the "long-lost tenth member" story that isn't too fantastical, but recontextualizes a lot of what's come before in an ironic way. There's also a "twist"? to the Laura White saga, which obliquely hints at some of the speculative elements hiding beneath the surface (thanks to the Goodreads reviewer who pointed out Ilmari Jääskeläinen's blog, which spells it out more). Spoilers: there's also a creepy phantom hiding in one of the member's gardens; the phantom is defeated by a large horde dogs who Ella and her friend/partner are first afraid are going to eat them. Crisis averted, but also, the obviously-speculative parts only take up a few pages between them.

There's a recurring motif of "time as a chronological axis" that's compelling and well-written: "Then she came up with an idea for a camera that didn't just record people in a momentary flash, but captured their entire chronological existence. Could you turn a little so that your childhood is in the picture? Right now your middle age is obscuring it..." And this passage gets at the interrelated themes of writing, research, time, and memory in a poignant, impressive way:

As a child, Ella Milana had thought as a matter of course that there existed somewhere a vast archive where all possible information about the life of the Finnish citizenry was collected.
She had heard of a place called the National Archive, and looked it up. The encyclopaedia said: The Finnish National Archive is a central agency of the Ministry of Education that leads and oversees the activities, governance, and development of the general archives and acts as the nation's public archive and its associated centre of research.
Ella had assumed that such a place must have gathered and recorded everything, especially all the people's most valued moments. It seemed only reasonable.
The first time she could remember thinking about it was when she was six years old.
She's at the lake, chasing a beach ball that someone has kicked to her. Her feet sink into the hot sand with each step, but she feels light, almost flies. She breathes in the smell of the lake and feels very clearly and strongly that somewhere, someone is recording all of this on her behalf, so that nothing she sees around her can ever really disappear--not her mother and father, who are laughing, nor the ice cream stand, nor her buoyant joy.
Ella had never believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or God; what gave her strength was this belief in this act of recording for all eternity.

But overall, the fantastical elements get lost in the writers' neuroses. I wanted more of the cursed library books.

Bingo: well, we'll see. The original Finnish version was published in 2006, so I'm tentatively planning to count it for "Published in 2000s," but the English version didn't come out until 2013, so I'm polling Reddit on whether that's against bingo etiquette. ;) I think this could also count towards "magical realism/literary fantasy," according to the r/fantasy rec list, but I don't think I need that. If I wind up not using it, this will just be a non-bingo review. ;)

This book came out in 2020, and I'm pretty sure that I must have seen an article about it somewhere. I mean, it's built on a lipogrammatic conceit; the letter D goes missing and a teenage girl has to enter a portal fantasy world to save the alphabet. Okay, cool, you have my attention. But I wasn't intrigued enough to track it down, or remember the title or author.

I did come across "The Book of Strange New Worlds," also by Michel Faber on the SF/fantasy shelf at the library, more recently, and was toying with picking it up for bingo...but could never quite commit. The premise there is that a Christian pastor accepts a call from a congregation of aliens who have already adopted the English language and Christianity (so he's not proselytizing). But I read some reviews and got the sense it was going to be "SF for people who don't like SF" and/or "Christianity for people who don't like Christianity," so I gave it a pass. Maybe that's unfair, but I suspect it wouldn't be for me. Anyway, one thing that some of the reviews pointed out is that one of the "obstacles" the protagonist faces is that the aliens have a different vocalization system than we do, so it's hard for them to pronounce the letters "s" or "t," which means he has to adapt some of the Biblical vocabulary around that. Except, that shouldn't really be a huge impediment, because humans translate the Bible into different languages all the time. Unfortunately, "D" is another example of "cool premise, but underwhelming," in this case for the opposite reason; a clever writer could/should be able to do a lot more with "one of the letters is missing" than canon delivers on.

"D" is about a girl named Dhikilo, who is growing up in the UK but was adopted from Somaliland (which is contained within, but not the same entity as, Somalia; in some ways it's de facto independent, but it's not internationally recognized). So there's a sense of "stereotypical portal fantasy protagonist has parents who are either dead or useless offscreen, but we should make this more diverse; Dhikilo's birth parents are dead and/or gone because she's from a liminal sort-of-country." The book has plenty of allusions to Dickens (there's a "Bleak House," the villain gives a speech where he quotes only the good halves of the "it was the best of times" intro), Narnia (always winter but never Christmas), Lewis Carroll (the mysterious mentor is Charles Dodderfield, instead of Dodgson), and maybe the Phantom Tollbooth (trying to be playful with language).

One day, in the real world, the letter D vanishes and Dhikilo is the only one to notice. But it's just dropped from letters without any effort to work around them. Soon, donkeys and dogs themselves go missing. Then one of her former teachers dies; she skips school to go to the funeral, and when mysterious things happen at the gravesite (and she's the only person who cares enough to attend the burial), she investigates his house. One thing leads to another, and she semi-reluctantly gets drawn into the portal fantasy world, with the assistance of his guide dog/shapeshifting Sphinx.

In the fantasy world, Liminus, the Ds are also missing, in this case carried off by dragonflies. Many people carry on with just dropping the D, and Dhikilo gets in trouble for talking naturally.

"We are very thirsty," she said, speaking slowly to give herself enough time to examine each letter that came to her tongue. "Also, hungry. We were hoping that you might be willing to share some of your...erm..." She racked her brains. "Nourishment."

A few locals clandestinely rebel in secret; one group of good guys has continued to try saying D, but they got their tongues mutilated as a result. These people have been trying a ritual to bring back good weather day after day without success. Dhikilo joins them in their ritual, and lo and behold, good weather returns! A miracle? Maybe. "Or maybe, she thought, the right time just came for things to change."

So...who knows. Anyway, in the evil dystopia capital, Dhikilo continues to get in trouble with the authorities. Who are also racist, to make it clear that racism is evil, even though the city includes "the short hairy ones and the long bald ones, the lumbering soft ones and the sharp-faced darting types, the solid muscular ones and the frail specimens who looked as if a puff of wind might blow them over." But, maybe thanks to the good weather, the tyrant's ice palace melts and the evil factory that's been stealing the Ds explodes, and just as suddenly everyone decides to have a revolution and it's all good. Also, in her darkest hour, there's a voice reassuring her that her birth parents are always with her, one way or the other.

What's the connection between the Ds in our world and Liminus? Why is Dhikilo able to notice that something's wrong when no one else cares? Beyond the punny name, is there a reason that being from an unrecognized country matters, or would any refugee do? Faber doesn't care about answering any of these questions. Some of the reviews suggest that it's a YA, or even middle grade, book, in which case maybe I shouldn't nitpick that hard because I'm not the target audience. But it was shelved in the adult section at my childhood-hometown library, and apparently it is in my current-residence library too, so I'm not going to give him a pass that easily.

A book that does something similar is "Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dunn. In that story, letters become forbidden one by one, and people have to come up with increasingly tortured workarounds. (Everyone is aware of it, it's not just a single protagonist who recognizes the problem.) In "D" in particular (and "Ella Minnow Pea to a lesser extent), there's a lot more misspellings/phonetic spelling than actual lipogrammatic cleverness. Now, maybe I'm being unfair, because a lot of people don't care about the pleasures and cleverness of constrained writing as much as I do. But if you do, there's so much more you can do with this than a few lines of dialogue. We see a few flashes of this in "D"; early on, the music teacher abruptly quits teaching the Hallelujah Chorus because "it was in the wrong key." But I have higher standards.

Bingo: probably using it for Multiverses/Alternate Realities or Mythical Beings (the sphinx). ??? on YA.

Travelling for Christmas means a different library and different random books to browse, yay.

"What Stalks Among Us" is a YA horror novel about a pair of best friends from Indiana who skip out on their high school trip and get lost in a haunted corn maze. It's a fun look at the time loop trope, and the genre-savvy narrator often describes her possible reactions as video game dialogue trees. The depiction of the setting is very evocative; even though the overall setting is a corn maze, it features various Midwestern gas stations and restaurants inside.

Now that I'm noticing it, the dining room itself is flipped. I mean, maybe some of the restaurants have the counter on the right and the tables on the left, but it's not what I'm used to. It also doesn't change the fact that all the signage is reversed.
We're in a backward Steak 'n Shake.

I envy the people who experience severe Midwestern weather and turn into storm chasers, or the people who just learn not to care until they spot rotation in the sky. My version of a novelty T-shirt would say something like I grew up in southern Indiana and all I got was this lousy tornado phobia.

He's trying to sound casual, but there're cornstalks lashing over his shoulder. He also apparently doesn't recognize a classic attempt at a Midwestern goodbye when he sees one. What could be clearer than guess we better head on out?
Or maybe he's actually a master of the Midwestern goodbye, and that's why he's drawing out the conversation even more.

This book came out in 2023, and tries to be up-to-the-minute in terms of pop culture references--I'm not sure if it's actually a good depiction of how kids these days sound, but the narrator notes that "Primer" (from 2004) came out before she was born!

This will be a feature to some people and a bug for others, but it's also very earnest about topics like neurodiversity, body positivity, and (especially) the horrors of abuse and the importance of standing up for oneself to escape horrific relationships. Sadie is a survivor of a toxic long-distance romance, which, as her friend Logan points out, is no less real for having been internet-mediated. Logan, farther in the past, was in a hurtful "friendship" with a kid from a much richer family, and just because people do get out of those situations, it's still true that some of the love was and is genuine, which makes it complicated and the trauma long-lasting. For me, I find this kind of narrative to be overly didactic, but I understand it's fairly frequent in contemporary YA. It wasn't a dealbreaker, I found plenty to enjoy, but if you know that's not your brand you might want to stay away. (Or conversely!)

Bingo: Probably using it for horror or maybe YA, we're at the point where a bunch of stuff is about to lock into place. Could also count as published in 2023. I don't think it quite counts as queernorm (both main characters are happily bi, Sadie has a crush on a girl, but they also occasionally mention biphobia in an Earnest 2023 Culture Warrior way).

This was found via a serendipitous Reddit rec: another poster asked for books with a big technological gap, and a reply mentioned Steerswoman, Sylvia Louise Engdahl ("Enchantress from the Stars," which I haven't read, but crosses over with "Children of the Star" eventually), and this, a series of related short stories gathered together in an anthology. Given how much I loved the tropes in Steerswoman and Children of the Star, it was like...clearly this person has superlative taste and I need to try this as well. And then I saw it was also a Yuletide fandom (hi cahn!) okay, the world of SFF is small-ish and people have tropes they like. :) So I'm posting this on December 19 but probably keeping it locked until after reveals, surprise, Madness treat!

Premise: there was another world full of humans living a mostly-idyllic, pastoral, life, with lots of psychic powers, levitation, etc. They're also explicitly Christian (their version of "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" is "the Power, the Presence, and the Name"). But God, or the universe, decides they've had things too easy and haven't developed their gifts like they should, and plans to destroy the planet. The People have to build spaceships, scatter into semi-related groups, and evacuate, crash-landing on Earth in the Arizona Territory in the 1890s. From there, some of them find each other and live in isolated communities where they can levitate freely; others are separated and grow up with psychic powers they don't understand, searching for others like them. The stories range in time from the evacuation to the late 60s/early 70s timeframe; they often involve children and teachers in one-room schoolhouses, miners and ranchers dealing with floods and fires in the canyons, etc. This is a big volume that was preceded by two smaller anthologies, so both of those contribute "frame stories" that interweave with the main narratives, about Earth humans who meet and react to The People. (Like Engdahl's "Stewards of the Flame," the People are just "the People," their homeworld was "The Home," anyone who's not part of the People is an Outsider, etc.)

The o/Outsider POVs are the best, if you're looking for something like Steerswoman or Children of the Star in which an uninformed character has to gradually figure out what's going on. "Captivity," "No Different Flesh," "The Indelible Kind," and "That Boy" are probably the standouts in this regard. The first stories to be published, "Ararat" and "Gilead," are from the perspectives of People who already take their differences in stride, while "Pottage" is narrated by an Outsider who just happened to go to teacher school with one of the People who blabbed; these are more anticlimactic, and overall the stories can get samey. These kinds of POVs do allow a couple cute moments like "no levitating at the table, kids."

While the stories are definitely pro-Christianity, they also don't shy away from portraying the evils of fundamentalist religion and narrow-minded people who do terrible things in God's name ("That Boy," "Angels Unawares," "Tell Us A Story"), and that contrast is part of what makes them powerful.

"I felt the same feeling coming from him that you can feel around some highly-religious person who knows God only as a stern implacable vengeful deity, impatient of worthless man, waiting only for an unguarded moment to strike him down in his sin. I wondered who or what his God was that prisoned him so cruelly."

"It can't be! Not in this day and age!"
"It can be," said Nils. "In any age when people pervert goodness, love, and obedience and set up a god small enough to fit their shrunken souls."

"He tried to kill you!" I burst out, impatient with her compassion.
"He thought he would never be able to come into the Presence because of me," she said quickly. "What might I have done if I had believed that of him?"

Versus:

“This good gift of food you have given us. But the best gift is—well, I knew it was the same everywhere, but to hear you sing to Them—” softly she echoed, “Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—Though you named them other—that is the best gift you have given. Thank you.”
Nathan wound the tattered rope around his hand again, shy to hear her speak so freely of such things.

“Always, at Home, we were Called before we went back into the Presence. So we had time for our farewells and to put things in order and to give our families and friends the personal things we wanted them to have. And, most important, time to cleanse ourselves of anything that might make it hard to return to the Presence that sent us forth.”

(This story is set circa 1891.) I would have loved hearing even more about the People's theology--are they familiar with the Crucifixion? Do they have revelations about things happening on other planets?--but I'll settle for what we got.

Some of the stories can be weird about disability. I get that people who are telekinetic and communicate telepathically don't really need to have healthy eyes to have a good sense of what's going on around them, but they do if they want to make sure Outsiders don't know what's up. So "X went blind in the car/spaceship crash and he can't see but he compensates for it other ways" is an okay trope, if repetitive. However, Obla from "Jordan": "deaf, blind, voiceless, armless, legless," seems like an over-the-top caricature. The narrator describes her as "more an expression of myself than a separate person. An expression that was hidden and precious," which is weird and dehumanizing. Similarly, in "Wilderness," the narrator (an Outsider, but starting to show signs of telepathy) meets one of the People who's trying to help an intellectually-disabled twelve-year-old. When the child tries to describe this, she says "He makes it almost straight but it bends again...He said don’t tell." Which at first comes off as "okay it's super creepy but maybe it sounded less creepy in 1956?") And then, nope, other characters are creepy and assuming the worst :/

-This is only mentioned once and raises so many questions, I need the fic:

“What does he think I’m going to do, drop another Hiroshima bomb?”

I checked firmly the surge of remembered sorrow at his words. “One of us was there in that plane,” I said. “Remember?”

“But he didn’t use any of the Designs or Persuasions in the dropping of the Bomb—”

“No. If he had, we probably never would have been able to help him out of the Darkness afterward.”

-"If I live seven more years, I’ll not only be of age but I’ll see the Turn of the Century! Imagine putting 19 in front of your years instead of 18!" hahaha kids never change :D

-There's a plot device where a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem saves the day, yay poetry nerds :D

-The Wikipedia article on the anthology quotes a review that says ""Katie-Mary's Trip", "an attempt to bring The People into the [19]60s", deviates from the author's "normal, plain style" and is the only story that "does not work"." At first I was like, "there are stories in the 1890s and stories in the 1950s, what's so bad about writing a story set in the 60s or 70s?" Then I got to the story, whose opening paragraphs are:

See—we’ve got this pad, like—you know?—an old farmhouse with a broad porch all around it. The local yokels call it the hippy-joint, and when the local fuzz need something to fill out a shift, they cruise up and down in front of the place and make like busy.

Now, I know it’s not for real—this hippy bit. Not here. Lots of dudes and chicks stop here on their way to the Coast where the Real is. But they never stay here—not the McCoy. They all drift on in a day or two except the ones that can’t or won’t conform. They can’t buy the whole bit and so they drop out—too individual. Listen, if you think conforming is for squares or the establishment—think twice. You conform to the hippy thing or, brother, you’re out!

Sorry, reviewer, you were right. This does not work.

-Is this where Zenna from "Steerswoman" got her name?

Overall, while "The People" can be repetitive, even the books it was compared to aren't perfect either! Noren's adolescent angst can be a little over-the-top at times, and "Steerswoman" hasn't touched on "what do religious people believe/know about other worlds and what implications does that have for the story" as much as I would be curious about. So while maybe I wasn't at the right time in my life to fully appreciate "The People," or maybe I set my expectations too high, there's lots of profound food for thought.

Bingo: I plan to use it for five short stories. Could probably count for mundane jobs (lots of teachers), maybe indie press (this was re-published by the New England Science Fiction Association press).

This is my first time reading a Novik book, and coincidentally, someone else on Reddit recently posted their thoughts about not really enjoying the main characters' relationship. Which led me to some negative reviews. And, like...some of them are valid, and some of them are really not.

This book is a combination of different genres. It starts in a kind of fairy-tale style "girl is semi-kidnapped by the powerful and cruel wizard who everyone in the valley grudgingly tolerates because he protects them from the even more evil forest." Then--surprise, it turns out she has magical powers too! So there's a "learning magic from a curmudgeon" aspect. (Think of the way Snape tosses around fancy words for comedic effect but also to berate people like Neville.) There's creepy depictions of body horror in the "fighting against the horrific evil that lives in the woods" part. Our narrator, Agnieszka, goes to the royal court, and there's "innocent rural girl can't understand that everyone's making fun of her behind her back" dynamics (like Galinda and Elphaba in "Wicked," the musical version at least). And then there's also brutal warfare, some of it internal and some of it off-screen--the spellings are changed, but this is definitely late-1500s / early-1600s Polnya (Poland) and Rosya (Russia).

In the beginning, Agnieszka explains that everyone expected her friend Kasia to be carried off by the "Dragon" (the wizard's nickname) in the once-a-decade selection process--the Dragon always chooses girls who are especially smart, or brave, or pretty, and Kasia is just the best at everything. But, to everyone's surprise, when Agnieszka reacts to his ball of magical fire, he chooses her instead! Not until later does Agnieszka (and the reader) learn that she has latent magical powers, and he's required to teach any potential magician he can; he doesn't go about this in the nicest or most transparent way, but he does. This is not a case of "the protagonist is a Mary Sue;" this is the case of "turns out the narrator of a story about magic actually happens to be magical herself." There's some heavy selection bias in terms of "who would be telling this story," in much the same way that the kids at Hogwarts are not really representative of the UK at large, because they're all magical!

There is a character who has Mary Sue archetype energy, and...it's Kasia, who is explicitly lampshaded as being the smartest and the bravest and the prettiest, and then has to deal with the aftermath of not being the chosen one, after everyone around her, for better or for worse, has been expecting that for her for basically her entire life. This is an interesting and (to me) relatively original take on the trope! Kasia and Agnieszka's relationship, especially after the choosing, is a big part of the plot.

Another thing that this book is not is "hard fantasy" in the Sandersonian sense. And again, that's totally fine! Sanderson's law says that "the ability for your character to solve problems with magic is proportional to how well the reader understands the magic." He gives the example of "Lord of the Rings is told from the hobbits' POV, and magic is this weird, strange, not very understood thing." If the Dragon, who likes memorizing enchantments and precise language, were narrating this story, it would be a lot "harder." Agnieszka's understanding of magic is more intuitive; she describes it as like picking her way through a forest and making a path as she goes. So a lot of the visualizations of her doing magic are metaphorical, like building a sand castle or singing a song in harmony with the Dragon.

This is also not "romance as a genre." Some of the posts I've seen recently have been defending books like Novik's against criticism from readers who are like "eh, it's too romantic for me, I don't like romance," but wouldn't necessarily say the same things about (eg) Sanderson, even when his books contain romantic subplots. So the pushback is saying "you're allowed to dislike it, but don't dismiss it as 'girlie' or 'less-than'; it's not primarily a romance, it isn't required to fulfill the tropes that romance fans would recognize as defining their genre, etc."

Unfortunately (for me), a large aspect of the plot is indeed the relationship between Agnieszka and the Dragon, and it's...not very compelling, IMO. He's a century-old wizard who enjoys being cutting and sardonic all the time; she's a homesick eighteen-year-old who's always making messes. It's not impossible, it's just difficult, and the buildup feels forced.

Here's page 39, as a sign of how far they have to go for her to not completely hate him: "I went into my room and shut the door and tore off my silken finery, put back on my homespun, and sank down on the bed, hugging myself with relief like a child who’d escaped a whipping." When he's testing to see if she's "clean" or "corrupted" by the Wood, there's some awkward and uncomfortable nudity. But then it's like, they touch and their magic is so powerful together they can't help kissing! It's awkward so they try to ignore it! And then there's the "I can't sleep because we could all die tomorrow, let's have sex!" moment. "I shuddered all over, hugely, and I closed my thighs tight around his hand, instinctive." Hugely! Blech.

Contrast this to the Agnieszka/Kasia subtext; "I crept away into a corner with Kasia and drank too many cups of beer, washing misery and smoke and the taste of the purging-elixir out of my mouth, until finally we leaned against each other and wept softly; I had to hold on to her, because she didn’t dare grip me tight." "“Nieshka, if you think I can help you,” she said softly, but I shook my head. I kissed her; she put her arms around me carefully and tightened her embrace little by little, until she was hugging me. I closed my eyes and held her close, and for a moment we were children again, girls again, under a distant shadow but happy anyway." Kasia keeps vigil over her bed when she passes out from exhaustion! And that's not even getting into all the emotional drama of "Kasia was supposed to be picked, the Dragon took Agnieszka instead, they're both bitter about it;" when Kasia is threatened by the Wood and Agnieszka takes crazy risks to rescue here, there's a lot of "establishing a psychic link and having to share each other's painful emotions to pull through." I know Novik has a fandom background, so like, I'm sure some of this is purposeful.

I have not read "Scholomance," but I know there are some aspects about magic as economics/utilitarianism, and you can see some of that here; the experienced wizards are all "think of the greater good and how much it will cost to replace those potions," while Agnieszka wants to plunge into action--she doesn't even value a prolonged lifespan if it means outliving everyone she cares about.

There are a couple scenes where Agnieszka is thinking something in the narrative, then the Dragon replies to it by speaking aloud--are we just supposed to assume he's mind-reading all the time? It's possible with magic, sure, but I would expect that to get touched on directly at some point.

There are times when the pace is slow, and in general (especially early on), Agnieszka is mostly reactive; "things continued for several days until a messenger arrived from outside with news." Overall, I wasn't a big fan of the Agnieszka/Dragon relationship, but that's not because it's impossibly #problematic or Mary Sueish or the magic system is bad; it's just not going to be to everyone's tastes.

Bingo: picked it up for Druids (nature magic), was also a book club/readalong pick in the past.

Another one from the Yuletide rec list. This is heavily anthropology porn. I may be being unfairly hard on it, but there were parts of it that rubbed me the wrong way for possibly-flimsy reasons.

Premise: a survey team, comprised of people from many diverse planets, is researching the planet Lassti ("Flashfever"), where everything can and will give you electric shocks. In particular, they want to determine if the local species, the "sprookjes," are sapient--if they have language and culture, the humans aren't going to colonize the planet. Unfortunately, it is difficult to determine whether the sprookjes have language; they echo human words, but so far haven't given any indication that they understand what it means. Also unfortunately, one of the team members dies in mysterious circumstances. So another crew member sends for Tocohl Susumo, from the "Hellspark" culture of interplanetary researchers/translators, in the hopes that she can solve the mysteries.

So in terms of "first contact is hard because we don't know if this species has language, and therefore, we don't really know if we can relate to them," it's reminiscent of "A Desolation Called Peace." And if you like the kind of SF books that don't necessarily explain all the worldbuilding details, just throw you in, there's plenty to keep you busy--garbage plants, lightning rods, golden scoffers, zap-mes--and that's just on Flashfever! All of the survey team have very different cultural traditions because they come from very different planets: they represent worlds where women have all the power and men aren't allowed to read or write, where the average height is four feet tall and people love ritual duels, where the language has "reliability" markings which make it extremely difficult and stressful to lie or even commit to uncertain hypotheses, where bare feet are taboo...Lots of culture. There is, at least, a common "GalLing" language that they can speak to each other, though this doesn't remove all issues. But by the time Tocohl shows up, these people have been living together and researching the sprookjes for three years.

Tocohl walks in and basically solves everyone's problems with the power of...body language. Because behaviors like gestures, or how close someone stands to you, or what side of you they sit on, are all culturally dependent; if you can't get those right, you may be able to speak the same vocabulary as someone else, but you don't "really" know their language. Hellsparks, however, are completely fluent in every language, including their unwritten aspects, so Tocohl speaks to everyone like a native without them being consciously aware why or how. Then she engages in lots of "noble lies" to get the crew to get along--misleading one person to believe that a new kind of boot is fashionable on her homeworld so she'll cover her feet and not freak out the foot-taboo culture, lying to another when two cultures both clash over "which side of your conversational partner is more honorable to approach on." Some people learn after-the-fact that she was lying and just applaud her for the chutzpah; others never catch on.

And, like, I think this is supposed to be uplifting! Even well-intentioned people will have culture clashes, but don't worry, with the right background information the hero can come in and save them from themselves! Instead, it hit me as fatalistic. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get anywhere unless you can miraculously master the unwritten rules which nobody will teach you, because nobody thinks they're actually that important. It hits me hard as an autistic person in a world full of neurotypicals; in this setting, the Hellsparks who actually know the unwritten rules are a small minority. We're supposed to believe that none of the interplanetary survey crew, not even the polyglot who's supposed to be the mission's language expert, knew this. The crew mentions that the cultural liaison who got them set up as a team but didn't stick around was a moron, but how often does that happen? The way it comes across is that the Hellsparks are superpowered individuals in a galaxy full of mundanes; either everyone should be wanting to learn what the Hellsparks can do, or the Hellsparks should come across as more condescending and patronizing to everyone else.

At one point, Tocohl puts forward the theory that one character subconsciously put too much trust in another character when he shouldn't have (and this is subsequently backed up by later evidence), because the second character's given name ends with an ee sound, and in the first character's culture, long e at the end of a name or title is associated with power. Her robot friend (more on whom in a moment) points out that this is silly. Tocohl: "I never said human beings were logical, or reasonable, or even sane." Except that everything Tocohl does, even when it's impulsive or spur-of-the-moment, is logical and reasonable and sane and works out in the end. And that's what frustrates me.

Okay, now the robot. The ship's name is Margaret Lord Lynn, aka Maggy, and she has a bigger memory than most computers. She also gets lots of input streams, through Tocohl's implants (so they can have "subvocal" conversations pretty much whenever) as well as radio handhelds and a freeform "arachne" body that walks around and gets input on its own. Other characters get used to addressing the arachne, understanding its "controller" is physically elsewhere, but get weirded out by the concept that Maggy can really be in "two places at once" (or more) including the audio input.

Because there aren't other computers in the galaxy that can do what Maggy can do, people tend to default to thinking the unseen "controller" is a bright child, based on her curiosity and intelligence but also lack of adult-typical maturity in some ways. Tocohl tends to let this assumption go uncorrected, and even admits that Maggy learns like a child--but I don't think that's really true. In the "language acquisition" unit of linguistics, it's usually pointed out that children learn their first language just by listening to "correct" examples of adult speech; no one will ever say something ungrammatical, then point out, "hey, kid, don't do that, it's bad syntax." Likewise, when a kid starts to generate sentences, some of them will be adult-grammatical and some will not; even if you try to "correct" a kid, they will ignore you until they figure the rule out on their own. In contrast, Maggy is more like...combining the perfect memory of a computer with the rule-following ability of an adult. On the other hand, she can have a childlike attitude at times:

“You’re sweet, Maggy.”
“Am I? Tocohl says I’m a pain in the butt.”

“It is possible to be both.”

And she's a very fun character:

(Now, Maggy,) she said, (in answer to your question: Alfvaen finds swift-Kalat sexually attractive—judging from the way Kejesli spoke, that’s no secret. She wants to learn his language in order to be more attractive to him. She’s now afraid that she’ll do it badly and ruin her chances of a relationship, or of learning that he doesn’t return her feeling.)

(Oh,) said Maggy. (—So Alfvaen will tell him she loves him and fight a duel with her closest friend and win and be cruelly wounded?)

(Wait, wait!—Veschke’s sparks, Maggy, what have you been reading?!)

Maggy’s recital of what she had been displaying for Alfvaen lasted through planetfall. (Maggy,) said Tocohl, firmly, (we’re going to have to have a long talk about fiction. I think you still misunderstand its purposes: fiction is a lie for entertainment, it’s a lie the listener willingly accepts for the sake of something else.)

This conversation happened early enough in the story that I was able to flag it as potential foreshadowing, which it is, even if in not quite the way Maggy envisioned :D

Of course, the existence of a computer with unique learning abilities and individuality is also relevant in a story about "how do we test whether this species is sapient," and I enjoyed the Maggy parts much more than "Tocohl fixes everything for the humans." (Perhaps it's because, since Maggy doesn't have a human body, pretty much her only way of communicating with the others is through verbal language.)

As I was writing this, I thought more about examples of "noble lies" I've read about, good or bad. And it occurs to me there may be some symbolism with Alfvaen's ailment. Early on, it's mentioned that Alfvaen contracted a parasitical infestation on a previous survey mission, which converts sugar into alcohol; when she's under stress, she physically gets drunk even if she hasn't actually consumed alcohol. This is known as "Cana's disease." Of course, I caught the allusion--Cana was the site of the Bible story where Jesus turned water into wine, get it?

But there's another detail to the story I hadn't remembered until just now, which is that Jesus doesn't tell the hosts that that's what he's doing. He just has the servants fill the jars up with water, then serve some to the host, who says, "oh, wow, this is great wine!" A lie at the right moment becomes the truth.

Bingo: I'm gonna say that Maggy, although she is technically an "extrapolative computer," is definitely within the spirit of the "Robot" square!