primeideal | Entries tagged with books: sff bingo

"Tress of the Emerald Sea" is the first of Brandon Sanderson's "secret projects" released via kickstarter this year. And it's also a Sanderson novel set in the wider Cosmere universe. This has its pros and cons. The pros: I like Sanderson, and I've devoured most of his oeuvre over the years. The cons: the interconnected Cosmere magic systems lend themselves to "kicking it upstairs" explanations at times, and trying to recall/review all the relevant canon can be intimidating. Like, I haven't tried Stormlight Archive 4 or the newest Mistborn Era 2 installment yet--dare I try this sight unseen? (Mild spoilers ahead for both this book and the Cosmere as a whole, nothing too incriminating IMO, but warning for the very averse.)

Tress is a window-washer from an island called "the Rock" in the "Emerald Sea" (more on that in a minute), who is in love with Charlie, who unconvincingly claims to be a gardener when he is quite clearly the duke's son. (There's an aside about "some people aren't always what they seem" and I thought it might have been a set up for "what if he's not the duke's son, despite all the evidence" but that's not it.) When Charlie is taken captive by a cruel Sorceress, and the duke shrugs it off, Tress figures "well, if nobody else is going to do anything about this, I guess I better step up," and leaves home to rescue him. This quickly involves her falling in with a ship that recently became pirates and then having adventures in piracy. So for most of the story, Charlie remains a flat cipher--yeah, the entire adventure is motivated by Tress seeking him, but he's more a MacGuffin than a personality.

The Emerald Sea is not an aquatic sea. The twelve enormous moons hovering near Tress' planet (which I think fill space around the planet in a sort of dodecahedron sphere packing, leading to pentagonal seas below!) each drop colorful but dangerous spores, and ships sail over the oceans of spores, which are violently reactive to water. So any amount of bodily fluids present imminent danger. The different types of magic include immense vines that can grow into or out of a person, mangling them in horrific ways (like hanahaki but for pirates!!), and winds that can be used to propel cannonballs. But different types of metal (such as silver or aluminum) will contain these reactions, making them valuable (shades of "Mistborn.") This type of magic system stuff is classic Sanderson--if it bores you, too bad, but I'm definitely here for it.

Ships need "sprouters" who study the spores and make use of them. For obvious reasons, most people are terrified of spores, and so the profession attracts the foolhardy and they have a short life expectancy. Fair. But some of the "discoveries" the characters make felt a bit cheesy/predictable, especially if you've read "The Reckoners"--like, your mental state and attitude towards the spores influences the magic? Who knew? I guess there are only so many ways to approach mental magic, but still.

Sanderson has said that this book began as a private story for his wife early in lockdown. To some extent, the characters' fear of the spores and vigilance against infection felt like a pandemic story at first--but with Tress in particular, things go in a different direction.

So there's Tress, the pirates, and the magic system. But there's also the narrative voice. One of the running Easter eggs in the Cosmere is that every book, across space and time, features a minor jester/wit character named Hoid who dispenses cryptic advice. Hoid is also the narrator of this book. Which is great, as it allows the prose to feature lots of humor and turns of phrase that Tress' rescue quest on its own might not have called for. If I listed all my favorite Hoidisms we'd be here all day, but a few: his disdain for slant rhymes, "a jaw so straight it made other men question if they were," "miners...chatting about their boring boring." The "you" he narrates to appears to be a resident of a modern Earthlike planet, because a lot of the vocabulary he uses is contemporary jargon that Tress might not recognize, but I'm not sure who that is or where they fit into the Cosmere.

The fact that Hoid appears everywhere in the Cosmere means he has to be extremely powerful and fluent in magic, compared to the other main characters. In most of the books, this is compensated for by making him a minor side character who only shows up for the cryptic advice. Here, that isn't going to work. Instead, he's nerfed by being under a curse that makes him speak almost complete gibberish when talking to the other characters (but not as the narrator, fortunately). The first half or so of the book is pretty accessible if you don't have much Cosmere knowledge: it basically helps to know who Hoid is, and that there is a species of shapeshifters (known as "kandra," but that word doesn't appear here) who are almost immortal, although their methods of shapeshifting tend to gross out unfamiliar humans. But towards the end, Hoid makes offhand mention of a bunch of the other magic systems the Sorceress has access too, and even if you just go with it, it's like...who is she? What does she want on this world? Should I recognize her? So that can be a little distracting.

There is a talking rat in this book. So far, the Cosmere has mostly been about humans and humanoid creatures--there aren't a whole lot of Redwall-esque anthropomorphic animals. So I was curious how this was going to fit into the larger magic system. No spoilers, but Sanderson stuck the landing without making me question the human-centricity of the series so far. Knowing that he likes big "ending avalanches" made me on the lookout for foreshadowing--like, there's one character who excels in a certain skill that you figure has to tie into an apparently unrelated plot element, and yes, it does. On the other hand, there's another character who I felt was being set up to be "a hidden agent of the king's authority" based on other foreshadowing/people not being what they seemed, but nope, this person is just who they say they are. Also, "tress" is a universally-used nickname based on the messiness of her hair, and I wanted that to be more of a hindrance/plot element rather than an informed trait.

Tress begins as someone who's very polite, accommodating, afraid to impose or ask for help. But her time with the pirates changes her, and she eventually becomes more willing to stand up for herself and ask for what she wants. Hoid (who may or may not be a reliable narrator) makes the point that this is a good thing; there are good people in the world, you can do your friends a favor and they will pay it forward. But I found this unsatisfying. As Matthew 5 points out, it's easy to be nice to people who are nice to you or can pay you back. Anyone can do that. I feel like the real world calls for a lot more zero-sumness--helping someone else by giving of yourself and, therefore, having less of what you want. Granted, a lot of this is my neuroses and goes beyond what Sanderson can help me with. But it's something to be aware of.

I can say that this is a very funny story with an engaging magic system and characters you can root for, while the tie-ins to the wider Cosmere are not necessary to follow from Tress' POV (but might be confusing for the reader). I think most interested people will have made up their minds about whether Sanderson is an author they like and don't need a thumbs up/thumbs down from me. But just in case, overall thumbs-up!

Bingo: I was happy to see that this counts for "name in the title," which is one of only a couple outstanding squares! (And now that I only have a couple outstanding squares...I should probably reread Mistborn Era 2 before diving into "The Lost Metal," regardless of whether I get around to "Rhythm of War.") Would also be a lock for weird ecology. And the kandra is a shapeshifter.

One of the main reasons I got back into reading a lot of fiction in the last year or so is reddit bingo, and one of the main reasons I got into that was a group of SFF nerd friends at work, the ringleader of whom I'll call J. In some ways, our tastes line up very well--he's one of the rare Steerswoman fans I've met in the wild, and he cares enough about RL sports to argue over the weaknesses about Quidditch from a sports worldbuilding sense. And he keeps up with a lot of contemporary short fiction, which is a useful perspective for me as a (very amateur) writer. On the other hand, he has a lot higher tolerance for didactic/ambiguous/Deep stuff than me. So knowing that R. A. Lafferty is his favorite...I wasn't sure whether that would be a rec or an anti-rec for me. But when I saw a chance to read at least some of this anthology in hard copy, I figured I might as well use it for the "author uses initials" bingo square.

The verdict: by and large, Lafferty does not do it for me.

Here are some themes: distortions in space and time (hours that pass like weeks, a valley that is either half a mile or five feet across), children that don't sound like children and do sound bizarrely genre-savvy (“Great green bananas,” said Cyril, “I’m only three years old. I don’t see how it’s even my responsibility.”), negative views of urbanity, characters who speak a vernacular with odd syntax (“Oh look, is snakes behind you!” the girl cried. “Oh how you startle and jump!” she laughed. “It’s all joke. Do you think I will have snakes in my nice bar?”), and extremely bizarre prose:

“Here is the change of person-subject shown by the canted-eye glyph linked with the self-glyph,” Steinleser explained. “It is now a first-person talk. ‘I own ten-thousand back-loads of corn. I own gold and beans and nine buffalo horns full of watermelon seeds. I own the loin cloth that the sun wore on his fourth journey across the sky. Only three loin cloths in the world are older and more valued than this. I cry out to you in a big voice like the hammering of herons’ (that sound-verb-particle is badly translated, the hammer being not a modern pounding hammer but a rock angling, chipping hammer) ‘and the belching of buffaloes. My love is sinewy as entwined snakes, it is steadfast as the sloth, it is like a feathered arrow shot into your abdomen—such is my love. Why is my love unrequited?’”

Lafferty was a white man from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Oklahoma, as many of the writers who contributed introductions can point out, is notable for being a longstanding "Indian Territory" before the entry of colonists from the greater US. So there are a lot of stories that deal with colonization and/or resistance thereto, both with indigenous Americans and others. Part of me sometimes wonders "would this get published today" when reading older stories, and often it's from a perspective of "what would the market want"--like, does anyone want to hear a white person with these takes, or his experience sufficiently inauthentic? But sometimes it's from a perspective of "is this even good?"

This is kind of an unfair sample (some of his verses are better), but take this from "Ride a Tin Can":

“Knockle, knockle.”

“Crows in cockle.”

“Wogs and wollie.”

“Who you?”

“Holly.”

“What’s a dinning?”

“Coming inning.”

I forget where I read it but I think someone said something similar about Dr. Seuss last year. He's not problematic just because some of his characters ride a camel or eat with chopsticks, but he is overrated because anyone can come up with rhymes for "pocket" if you're allowed to make up the word "wocket!" ;)

The introduction to "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" points out that it's "classic counterfactual fiction: it is an illustration of what happens when you change history to create alternate history; and it comes into being through the writer’s choice of a divergence point, which creates a new branch that confounds history as we (think we) know it." The characters try to take careful notes to compare branches of history, but once they change the past, the new timeline has always been that way, so no one remembers changing history. Fairly standard SF premise. The introduction goes onto speculate "whether this is a science fiction story at all … or whether it might just be an anti–science fiction story." I would say this is right for the wrong reasons; Lafferty isn't subverting SF just because his characters don't remember the changes they've made, he's frustrating because (in general, not just this story) there are no "hard" rules, things just happen, characters attempting to make sense of the world are thwarted, and when characters break the fourth wall to laugh about it (the punch line of one story is "that was just for dramatic effect"), it feels unearned.

But there's always an exception that proves the rule. For me, the highlight of the collection was "Land of the Great Horses." At first it seems to be another "aftermath of displacement/diaspora" story, this time focused on the Romani people, which could be boring at best and cringeworthy at worst. But the end goes in a phenomenal and entirely unexpected direction, and sticks the landing. I'm always a fan of in-universe documentation when it's done well, and this was fantastic. So while I wouldn't recommend this book overall, someone else might find a different needle in the haystack!

Bingo: using it for "Author Uses Initials." Would obviously fit for "5+ short stories." Apparently as an anthology it was "award finalist but non-winner," it seems a bit of a stretch to use an anthology for that since at least one of the stories included won an award on its own (Eurema's Dam, Hugo 1973).

Visiting family for Christmas, I picked up this from the library, not because I expected it to fit one of my remaining bingo squares, but because I had enjoyed Hao's novella "Folding Beijing" and hoped this would feature similarly creative worldbuilding (and hadn't run across it at my local library). Ultimately, I decided that it fits for "Revolutions and Rebellions," because it throws around versions of those two words many, many times compared to most of the other stuff I've read this year, particularly towards the end. You might think that there would then be some serious revolutions in this book. In fact, almost nothing happens in this book. And it's six hundred pages long.

The intro tells us that Mars and Earth have been in a sort of cold war. Five years before the book begins, a group of Martian teenagers went to do "study abroad" on Earth, and they're just now returning, and finding that they don't completely fit in on either planet. "It was the year 2190 on Earth, the year 40 on Mars," the narrator tells us on page 20. The book jacket reports this as the year 2201. You had one job, book jacket.

Earth is very capitalistic; its artistic types are inspired by the public domain on Mars and think "the creative commons should be free for everyone, none of this intellectual property/copyright nonsense." In contrast, Mars is very socialist; housing is provided by the state (but only married couples can have houses, singles are stuck in dorms). You have limited freedom to switch your "atelier" or career track if you don't like it, and although there's no real economy to worry about, different research labs compete for funding and when there are accidents, there's a tendency towards covering one's rear to minimize the scale of punishment.

Each generation winds up, in a sense, "rebelling" against its predecessors. Spoilers for stuff that happens well before the book begins but isn't revealed until later on: generations ago, a woman who had just given birth in a remote cavern on Mars died because they couldn't send a rescue ship for her, because the Earth companies were paranoid about their technology being stolen. Her husband became a symbolic leader of the freedom fighters who wanted Martian independence. Their son inherited a leadership role from his father, and ruled as unchallenged consul for many years. His son and daughter-in-law were at a protest demanding change to the housing system; the protest caused accidental deaths (life is precarious when all your air is inside a dome), so he had to exile them to a mining colony where they died. (But then the government eventually adopted their housing proposal anyway.) Their daughter, Luoying, is one of the exchange students who doesn't feel like she fits in on either Mars or Earth anymore.

Now the government is debating the next stage of terraforming--will they stay in a domed city like the one they have, or try a more audacious open-air proposal? Luoying's grandfather, Hans, is partial to the domed city, in part because one of his founder friends designed it, but wants to remain neutral. Her brother, Rudy, favors the alternate plan, in part because he wants to make a name for himself instead of living under a system where the elders' achievements dominate everything.

So the students put on a play about how stifling Mars life is and how they want change. Then Rudy encourages their protest movements, in order to gain political influence for his faction. Luoying doesn't really have strong feelings, she just wants to be part of something and feel caught up in the energy of youth.

There are some intriguing worldbuilding takes: a visitor from Earth is at first like "they have literal glass houses, wow, no privacy whatsoever" and is then told "yeah, sand is the one raw material we have plenty of on Mars, of course we build from glass, you can change the opacity if you want." "Oh duh, that's a good point, good thing I didn't jump to conclusions." And the idea of moving Ceres to become a third moon in order to eventually get its water was neat.

But overall, there's a lot of people verbosely talking about their feelings (or tedious love triangles), and the plot points don't really seem to have lasting consequences. Luoying wants to find out about her family's history--were the exchange students hostages? Was her selection related to her grandfather's position?--and then when she gets answers, it's just like "eh, whatever." Rudy tries to "help" Luoying in a dance recital, winds up making the situation worse, and...no consequences. Towards the end there's a realization of "in order to get the resources needed to do the more large-scale terraforming, we might have to have another hot war with Earth" "oh that'd be terrible, we need to do whatever we can to prevent that!" and that was interesting, it was just not enough to carry 600 pages worth.

Bingo: Standalone, Family Matters, No Ifs Ands Or Buts, Author of Color, Award Finalist but Non-Winner...and like I said it's by far the most "revolutionary"/"rebellious" so far, so I'm counting it.

We're getting to the point where I'm seeking out specific recs for squares I haven't filled. J mentioned that, while this is technically the first of a series, it works okay on its own and is a good fit for "Weird Ecology," so I gave it a try. I had read the first Murderbot and it hadn't clicked for me, but in part I had lower expectations for this one, because a big part of what didn't work for me about Murderbot was being sold as "oh this character is so not neurotypical and has a great outsider POV on humans, it handles that aspect really well," and I'm like..."I'm not neurotypical either but that doesn't necessarily mean I could write a book about it."

Anyway. Once upon a time there was a lonely shapeshifter named Moon who never hurt anybody, but through no fault of his own, he had trouble finding a place to fit in. Because everywhere he went, he had to hide the secret of his flying dragon-form, because if the "groundlings" ever saw him, they would assume he was one of the evil dragons who just wanted to kill and eat everybody, even the other sentient species. This is the premise of the story, and right away it feels like it's a premise that's not going to sustain an entire novel on its own. But then there's a twist! Moon finally meets shapeshifters who look like him, the "Raksura!" Except by now he's bitter and alienated because he's never had a place to belong before, and what if it's too late? Besides, the good Raksura are being hunted by the evil Fell, and even though Moon has others like him, he can't escape the fight! Again, this doesn't feel like a real premise either.

The next potential twist is that in the colony of Raksura he meets, there's disagreement over the best way to deal with the Fell. Many want to stand and fight, including Jade, a young future queen. (Raksura live in "colonies" and have caste roles like insects, with different subtypes who specialize in reproduction/warriors/teachers/etc. Since Moon was raised away from his own people, he doesn't know any of this, which allows for some narratively convenient infodumping.) However, the incumbent queen, Pearl, wants to let some of the Fell in to negotiate with them instead. Okay, politics, now this is getting interesting...

Just kidding. The Fell are just straight-up evil and apparently never have considered the whole "killing and eating other sentient people is maybe bad" thing, and nobody bothers to convince them otherwise, because Fell gonna Fell. I understand the concept of predators and the circle of life, but "these dragons are just evil and eat everyone, because," feels like a pretty weak trope by the standards of modern progressive SFF?

And then it switches over into woobie hurt/comfort mode. Not only has Moon never been a threat to the groundlings he's lived with before, but also, on many occasions he reveals that he's fundamentally brave and good-hearted and leaps into action to defend others. But he's gripped by angst about "oh no, no one likes me, I'll never fit in." There are ficcy tropes like "ooh, taking a bath, so domestic and luxurious!" or "just act like you could be Jade's potential consort long enough for her to challenge Pearl and take control of the colony" and "by the way, I need to tell you a horrible secret, I was once abused many years ago"/"no victim blaming, what happened to you is not your fault and nobody has any right to use it against you!" I just...really don't care and was not interested in most of the emotional beats. Sorry.

On the other claw, the worldbuilding is neat. The setting is referred to as the "Three Worlds" because the land, sky, and sea all have peoples living in them. There are werewolf shapeshifters, merpeople, and "sky islands." Groundlings build magical airships that sail across through the sky (this becomes an important plot point, since not all Raksura can fly). Moon has always had a sense of which way south is--sensing the planet's magnetic field, like Earth animals do? And there are lots of ruins of ground and sky societies that have come and gone in generations before--like the Wheel of Time, it gives a sense of rich lived-in history, that the characters we see are only one small part of a complex, intricate world. This was all neat. Overall, though, I'm just really not the target audience for this one.

Bingo: in addition to Weird Ecology, would certainly fit for Non-Human Characters and Shapeshifters. It's not a major plot point yet, but the series as a whole is on the r/fantasy LGBTQIA list--Moon's chemistry with his male friend Chime is more than platonic. Apparently it was also an r/Fantasy readalong.

In "The Wizard and I" from Wicked, Elphaba sings about how her family resents her because of her unnatural green appearance. But she also hopes that meeting the wizard will allow her to find a purpose behind "this gift or this curse" of magic, and that he won't judge her by her looks. In Forrest Gump, the titular character inadvertently bumbles through decades of US history, exposing the Watergate scandal and teaching Elvis Presley to dance. From the viewers' perspective, there's a lot of dramatic irony, because they know the significance of those events, but the simpleminded protagonist does not. I recognize my pop culture allusions are not particularly diverse or scholarly, and I don't mean to denigrate or shortchange Midnight's Children by comparing it to these two. But Saleem Sinai is an incredibly compelling narrator, whether he's talking about the search for meaning in his magical destiny, his family drama, or the tragic weight of history.

I read an anniversary edition with a new preface from Rushdie, and he talks about the mythical-scale narration:

I was thinking of India’s oral narrative traditions, too, which were a form of storytelling in which digression was almost the basic principle; the storyteller could tell, in a sort of whirling cycle, a fictional tale, a mythological tale, a political story, and an autobiographical story; he—because it was always a he—could intersperse his multiple narratives with songs and keep large audiences entranced.

As a narrator, Saleem is nearly omniscient (he goes into detail about events that happened in his grandparents' lives, decades before his birth, and it doesn't seem like even magical powers could have informed him of that), but also unreliable--in the frame story, we hear him addressing "Padma," who rolls her eyes at his flights of fancy. He interweaves different narratives very non-linearly, sometimes rapidly jumping back and forth between several different dialogues that would be part of consecutive but separate scenes in a more traditional chronicle, and other times foreshadowing his own future by namedropping characters who won't appear for several more chapters. I'm not an expert on other cultures' mythology, but from what I know, this kind of rapid-fire shift isn't specifically Indian so much as an epic-scale precursor to the "traditional" novel.

If you're willing to suspend disbelief and take for granted that Saleem, as the narrator, just knows all of this backstory (rather than ascribing it to being a fantasy), the speculative element is actually pretty slight. The eponymous "Midnight's Children," those born in the first hour after India's independence, have magical powers. But they really only communicate with each other during the age 10-14 timeframe, at which point none of them are really exerting large-scale influence on the world. Later, Saleem loses his telepathy and gains, instead, a preternatural sense of smell, which not only allows him to experience normal senses but also emotional, subjective ones. He perceives it as magic, but it's also related to his role as narrator which allows him to sense things that would be unnoticed otherwise.

If you're tired of the verbal tic "[concrete noun] of [abstract noun]"--the onions of injustice, the baby clothes of bitterness, the bicycles of colonialism--I am sorry to say that Midnight's Children is a worse offender here than a dozen purple-prose fanfics put together. On the other hand, some of the depictions of metropolis life often feature nouns thrown together without commas--"turning flamethrowers machine-guns hand grenades upon the city slums." This stylistic choice worked for me, in the sense of indirectly portraying everything happening all at once.

Before reading this book, my knowledge of the history of modern South Asia was limited to, approximately: "the British realized that they needed to give the area independence so they drew a very rough boundary that approximately separated the Hindus and Muslims, the Hindu side became India and the Muslim side became Pakistan, this was obviously a crude approximation and the border region was very contested, but the British were like 'eh we're done being colonizers it's someone else's problem now.'" I actually didn't feel like I needed to be an expert in order to appreciate the book--I will say I did learn a lot. For instance, the area that's Bangladesh was the "East Wing" of a non-contiguous Pakistan from 1947-1971. Is that good to know? Yes! Am I going to beat myself up for not knowing it? I could, but I won't, because...

...there is no one who beats themselves up about history more than Saleem Sinai. He sees everything that happens in history (including stuff before his birth, like the bombing of Hiroshima) as psychically linked to his family. Language riots, border clashes, coups--he is the twin of India, born in the same minute, so its suffering is his responsibility. In turn, when his magical powers emerge, he feels a desperation to do something important with them, to figure out a purpose. He feels like he has to earn his parents' love, to repay their investment in him, particularly when revelations come out that might threaten family loyalty (in the end they don't). I have a wonderful, healthy, loving relationship with my parents, and (as far as I know) have no telepathic powers. But I feel like everyone who's been called a gifted kid at some point or another has also struggled with the question of "so what do I do with these talents, what's my purpose?" And I'm not sure if everyone else feels the strain of "everything that's happening around the country, around the world, is my fault, oh no" as acutely or painfully as I do, but that made Saleem a very sympathetic woobie from my point of view!

A minus: the version of the book I read was about 648 pages (not including the preface). I feel like you could have cut out a lot of the potty humor and incestuous vibes and still had a very sizable, even more readable, book.

And some random bullet-point stuff I enjoyed or found striking:
-there's a funny interchange about a Catholic bishop giving advice to one of his priests about what to do if a parishioner asks you about what Jesus looked like.

God is love, and the Hindu love-god, Krishna, is always depicted with blue skin. Tell them blue, it will be a sort of bridge between the faiths; gently does it, you follow; and besides blue is a neutral sort of color, avoids the usual color problems, gets you away from black and white: yes, on the whole I’m sure it’s the one to choose.

-speaking of colorism, there's a part where Padma is dismissive of Saleem's mother because the latter has very dark skin. This was also an issue in "A Master of Djinn." On the one hand, it's kind of a relief to know that Europeans don't have a monopoly on discrimination--people can be judgmental and petty everywhere! On the other hand, it sometimes feels cynical or hopeless--"look, even the Oppressed people aren't able to be Good and Just, because the Evil of the Oppressor people has irreparably worn off on them!" Might just be me.

-"When the blackmail letters arrived, they contained a list of “satisfied customers” who had paid up and stayed in business. The Ravana gang—like all professionals—gave references." Hahaha.

-one character plays "Kashmiri Song" (written by British people) on a player piano handed down from the Englishman who sold her the house. I recognized the opening line because Agha Shahid Ali riffed on it to write his own poem!

-When the identity of Mahatma Gandhi's assassin is discovered, the Muslim family are like "oh, thank God, it's not a Muslim name, there won't be backlash against us." Too real. :/

-"Muhammad (on whose name be peace, let me add; I don’t want to offend anyone)" this aged well :/

-speaking of giving offense, Indira Gandhi (prime minister, daughter of the first prime minister, not related to Mahatma) is portrayed seizing power--tens of thousands of people were arrested, hundreds of thousands displaced, millions coercively sterilized. In the first printing of the book, Saleem suggests that her son blamed her neglectful attitude for his father's death and that that gave the son undue influence on her. Indira took offense to that last one.

-telepathy obeys the Doppler effect!

-There were 1001 original Midnight Children; Saleem points out that this is a symbolic number because of the 1001 Nights. Unfortunately, 420 died before he learned of their existence. This, obviously, is symbolic because 420 is a bad number. Is this a pot joke? Was 420 already the pot number in India in 1981? Nope: in the Indian Penal Code, Section 420 refers to cheating, con men, and the like. But wait a minute, the midnight children were born in the same hour as the country--were the laws already a known quantity pre-independence? Yes! The original code was first drafted in the colonial era and came into effect in the 1860s, so it had decades to become a known quantity (literally and figuratively) before Saleem came onto the scene. Meme numbers!

-Saleem sends an anonymous blackmail letter by clipping from newspaper headlines: "cutting up history to suit my nefarious purposes." Nice blend of personal and national.

-There's a long clipping from an in-universe document written in a very different register than Saleem's main narration, which paraphrases a story about a magical child who survives the destruction of his home to be raised by ordinary Earthlings. I don't know a whole lot about superheroes, but as I read this, I was like "...isn't this literally just the plot of Superman?" A few pages later, Saleem takes over again, and says "I guess I'm the only person here familiar with Western pop culture, because this is literally just the plot of Superman." Score one for me!

-"The way it was: Begin.—No choice?—None; when was there ever?" This is all Saleem talking to himself and girding himself up to talk about an extremely dark time, but the tone gave me Rosencrantz and Guildenstern vibes.

-Saleem's father once had an ambition to rearrange the entire Quran in chronological order. Muhammad Daily!

-"Time has been an unsteady affair, in my experience, not a thing to be relied upon. It could even be partitioned: the clocks in Pakistan would run half an hour ahead of their Indian counterparts."

-"The sons of the great unmake their parents. But I, too, have a son; Aadam Sinai, flying in the face of precedent, will reverse the trend. Sons can be better than their fathers, as well as worse..."

In context (more than 70% of the way through), Saleem mentioning that his son is named after Saleem's grandfather comes as a hopeful sign. He also mentions that one reason he's writing the story is that his son can learn from him--no matter the failings and shortcomings of Saleem's generation, the younger Aadam will have a chance to build on it. But the very end is kind of bleak--yes, Aadam and his peers may have their own magic, but what if they're also cursed to suffer under the weight of history?

But there's one other hopeful twist, reading this book in 2022, that Rushdie couldn't have planned on:

There were also coconuts and rice. And, above it all, the benign presiding influence of the goddess Mumbadevi, whose name—Mumbadevi, Mumbabai, Mumbai—may well have become the city’s. But then, the Portuguese named the place Bom Bahia for its harbor, and not for the goddess of the pomfret folk...

Well, in 1995, Saleem's hometown changed its name back to the local Marathi-language name. It's not easy, and it's not always linear, but India--like everywhere else--is building its own history, one bigger than any one person can take the blame for.

Bingo: I planned on using it for Historical Fantasy; it's also a gimme for Family Matters, Standalone, No Ifs Ands Or Buts, Author of Color. I'm wondering now if it might be borderline for Urban Fantasy, Anti-Hero, and/or Revolutions/Rebellions? We'll see.

I tried to get involved with the "Dracula Daily" liveblog on Tumblr, but while the real-time conceit/reorganization was cool, the pacing didn't really work for me. So I just sprinted through it after the fact so I could understand the memes everyone was talking about. ;)

I had not seen any of the adaptations so I was not familiar with any of this. The only thing I knew was that "van Helsing" = "good guy, vampire hunter" and "Renfield" = "evil human who works with the vampires but is not himself a vampire," and the only reason I know that was from...online werewolf games. And the generic "vampires are scared of garlic" stuff where I wasn't, and still am not, sure whether this was the trope maker or just the trope codifier.

Dracula is an epistolary novel that knows it's an epistolary novel. We begin with the diary of Jonathan Harker, a British man who's recently passed the bar exam and is very proud of it, going to Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase some property in England. Oops. Later, Dracula winds up in the seaside town of Whitby, England, where by a spectacular coincidence Jonathan's fiance Mina is visiting her extremely close friend Lucy ("I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb..." Okay.) and Lucy's three (!) love interests, all of whom propose to her in a matter of hours. (I don't think there's ever any IC reason given for why Dracula just happens to wind up here?) Mina and Dr. Seward, one of the jilted suitors, take turns writing in their diaries as, unbeknownst to them, Dracula has bitten Lucy and made her one of his victims. Dr. Seward knows something is up, so he writes to his mentor/teacher from Amsterdam, Dr. Van Helsing, who comes and tries to investigate the case. Sadly, despite everyone's best efforts, Lucy dies of vampirism. Even worse, she comes back from the dead and starts biting young children. So Van Helsing has to provide evidence to her actual fiance, Arthur, as well as the other men that something is up. With the help of garlic, crucifixes, and a stake, they're able to defeat vampire-Lucy once and for all and ensure that her soul passes on in peace.

Meanwhile, Jonathan escapes from Dracula's castle, traumatized by his experiences. When creepy things start happening, Mina reads his diary and the group works to put the pieces together, by typing up copies of the previous documentation so that everyone has access to the story as revealed in letters. Everyone is impressed with Mina's shorthand knowledge. But oh no, we can't have women going into danger to fight the vampire! So we leave Mina behind to...get bitten. The group destroys Dracula's London hideouts, but he escapes back to Transylvania, so they have to follow him and it goes back and forth between "we must share information, we are all on the same team" and "Mina could be mind-controlled by Dracula so we can't tell her anything."

So some of it is frustrating, because all these men are in love with Lucy, but it's not enough to save her. Then Mina gets bitten, and it's basically starting the whole "we are so chivalrous that we will fight for the good and pure woman" thing over again. Like, at least do things a little differently! Also, we almost never get Van Helsing's POV, and he's the vampire expert, so a lot of it is just dramatic irony--the readers know something's up, but the characters don't. At one point Van Helsing even lampshades this to Seward, like, "You've had so many clues, both from the evidence you've seen and from me, don't you realize what the deal is?"

The end is kind of an annoying timeskip--"don't worry, both the young guys who survived are married now" (if you read it fast it sounds like 'to each other'!) Like, the guy who was engaged to Lucy just gets married to a nameless character because Epilogue Heterosexuality? Meh.

I enjoyed the humor, which was kind of Dickensian in a dry way. Like, Jonathan is such a big deal because he's been to ~law school~, and the contrast between him and the working-class people is a running joke--"hauling coffins around is such hard and laborious work that we tend to develop a thirst, perhaps you could give us some financial remuneration to assist in this quest" ie "buy me a beer, dude, and we'll talk." There's a part about "if you want to break into a house, don't just do it violently, act like you're a lord and ask a locksmith to help you access your property--the police will figuratively, and literally, open doors for you!" which was not quite Hugo-scale, but still funny. There's a morbid elderly fellow from Whitby whose accent nobody understands half the time, including the characters, and a man who drops his H's and then hypercorrects. Renfield is a male version of the old lady who swallowed a fly; first he eats flies, then spiders, then birds, and is working his way up to cats.

The characters point out "yeah it's sure great to have money"--there are no bad guys (except maybe Renfield, and it's not clear how much he is a victim of circumstance), just loving and good and grand and heroic fellows being virtuous. Which was nice, but makes things relatively easy!

The book is quite explicitly Christian--vampirism is a fate worse than death, you need to be killed off for real in order for your soul to return to heaven where it belongs. Even more, it's about Catholicism versus Protestantism. In the beginning, Jonathan is dismissive of the mainlanders' "superstitions" like crucifixes and the rosary. But it's Van Helsing who's able to come to the rescue and say "okay, you need a crucifix, you need the sacred power contained in the communion wafers." (In general, Catholics make a bigger deal about how, when the priest says the words of institution, the wafers/bread are fundamentally transformed and become the body of the crucified and resurrected Christ, whereas Protestants are more handwavey about "eh maybe it's symbolic, whatever.") However, the Protestant English characters still have their own ritual in the liturgy--Mina says "we found an English pastor who was able to perform the marriage ceremony even way out in Hungary," and "I'd appreciate it if someone read the Burial Service for me while I was alive, just in case I become a vampire." Van Helsing mentions that "oh of course every country has their own vampires in history, Ancient Greece, Rome, India, China..." and I'm curious what methods they use to fight against them. Even if you believe that Christianity is a uniquely true and meaningful religion, that nothing really expresses God's love and hope in the same way the cross and the Eucharist do...maybe garlic is a cultural universal?

On a related note, it's also interesting that Dracula has a lot of second language anxiety. He complains to Jonathan about "I still speak English with an accent, I'll never sound like a native speaker," and Jonathan is like "you're fluent, your syntax is perfect" but that's not enough. Felt contemporary. In contrast, Van Helsing speaks with a very thick accent, and nobody is fazed by him.

Sometimes you have tropes you love that run up against the line between "very hot" and "squick." For me, Dracula mostly stayed on the hot side of the line, but I can imagine it being weird. The trope in question is "I love you, and you love me" (in this case romantically, but could be platonically), "so I trust you and I'm asking you to kill me if need be to spare me from a fate worse than death." "Uh..." "Look, by definition, death is preferable to a fate worse than death." Lucy dies and un-dies before she can have that conversation with anyone, unfortunately, so Van Helsing has to do it for her: "look, who loves her enough to do this...okay I know you all do, bad question, who would she have chosen." Mina is lucid enough to have the talk with Jonathan, who's hesitant. But she points out "where there's life there's hope, I'm not gonna ask you to preemptively kill me before we set out on our quest, that would be bad mkay." Which is also a great point!

"'Euthanasia' is an excellent and a comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it." Seward the linguistics nerd, but also kind of yikes. Also, definitely not Jonathan's reaction, either.

(The trope works here because we know that vampirism is terrible, undead Lucy goes around sucking the blood of small children and trying to kill them too. Very bad! Van Helsing cites some academic authority to say "yeah when you're a vampire your soul is lost to God, only once you become post-undead can you go to heaven, for sure a fate worse than normal death." I like this trope when it's in the context of something supernatural or torture by human enemies that we know is bad. When it gets into RL-adjacent disabilities or illnesses is where it becomes a Nope for me.)

And the characters (Mina particularly, since she has firsthand experience, but everyone else too) take this seriously enough that they kill off all of Dracula's other sidekicks, as well as the guy himself, and see brief looks of peace on their faces! Even Dracula isn't outside God's reach of love and redemption, once he's no longer undead! I appreciate the consistency here.

Some other random fun facts:

"It seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?" - Jonathan complaining about those crazy Europeans and their ways. George Orwell has a very similar passage in "Homage to Catalonia."
The "if you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake, pinch yourself" trope is already common, Jonathan references it as if everyone would know what that means.
A couple other Hugo parallels/coincidences besides the classism; Dracula as the one competent leader among peasants reminded me of Lantenac, and the cry of a woman pleading for her child (who he's kidnapped) then sounded like Michelle Flechard. Unfortunately Dracula is, by this point, much less human than Lantenac. :(
Lucy's love life. "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?" And Mina: "Some of the 'New Women' writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing and accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won't condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too!"
Van Helsing speaking in chess allusions ("Check to the King!")
There were a couple Tumblr posts about autistic icon Mina. "You forget...that I am the train fiend. At home in Exeter I always used to make up in the timetables, so as to be helpful to my husband. I found it so useful sometimes, that I always make a study of the timetables now." Train fiend!
And her real name is "Wilhelmina," hahaha.

Bingo: I was planning on using it for Name in the Title. Could also be Standalone, No Ifs Ands or Buts. As I look at the list, though, I see that it also works for "Shapeshifters," which is something I was still looking for, and I think it'll be easier to browse for "name in title" than "shapeshifters." Yay for, um, being able to turn into bats!

They say, write what you know. Harry Turtledove wrote about a graduate student at UCLA born approximately 1948 to a Jewish-American family, who in his spare time, writes science fiction. Okay.

"Arrival" is a movie about a linguist who gets volunteered for a first-contact mission by the US army. "Project Hail Mary" is a movie about a xenobiologist who gets volunteered for a space travel mission by a quasi-dictatorial power that steps up to deal with a global crisis. "Stranger Things" is a TV show about nerds in the 80s who quote pop culture and make allusions and have political campaign signs in their yards to tell you It's The Eighties, Everyone, Have We Mentioned We Love Star Wars.

All of these fictional works are interesting because, in the first two cases, you can clearly see how Louise and Ryland's professional study make them especially qualified to handle extraordinary events, and in the latter, the kids have surreal, out-of-this-world adventures that don't hinge on what decade it's in. (Admittedly, some of the older characters' sideplots get dragged down by less fantastical and less engaging Cold War shenanigans. Hold that thought.) "Three Miles Down" wants to be in that category, but it's not.

This is an alternate history based on a stranger-than-fiction story; the CIA really did attempt to secretly raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the bottom of the ocean, in disguise as a mining ship sponsored by eccentric zillionaire Howard Hughes (to be fair, eccentric zillionaire provides a cover story for military-industrial complex is a very plausible story in any decade). In the fictionalized version, there's a cover story inside a cover story. The submarine was actually taken out by a derelict alien spacecraft, and young Harry--sorry, Jerry--is the weird hippie on a ship full of conservative CIA goons who might be able to use his SF knowledge to puzzle things out.

There are some good parts. The designated hitter was still new-ish in 1974, and I'm a sucker for a good baseball allusion (as you know). The day-to-day minutiae of grad school life rings true:

Interlibrary loans all went through the Research Library at the north end of campus. It would have been nice if he could have done this through the Biomedical Library in his preferred part of the sprawling university, but no such luck.

At UCLA, science, engineering, and mathematical types mostly hung out in the southern part of the campus. The north was for English majors, would-be historians, students of foreign languages, and others even less likely than marine biologists to land jobs after graduating. There were more girls up there, but that was only of theoretical interest to him these days.

And some of the Nixon jokes are funny/poignant:

"This project has approval up to the very highest level. You can be sure of that," Steve said.

"You mean the President?"

"The very highest level," the man from RAND repeated.

Considering what Jerry thought of Richard Nixon, that didn't seem recommendation enough.

Unfortunately, the running joke about "what if the aliens say 'take me to your leader' and the leader is Nixon, I can't believe people are still stupid enough to support such an incompetent crook, I sure hope nobody this terrible ever holds office again" wears thin quickly. Likewise "haha isn't this weird, it's like we're in a science fiction story:"

...a character in a well-written story wouldn't try to do something so important while being so ignorant. Then he remembered Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. So much for that! In The Lord of the Rings, though, at least people on Frodo's side hadn't lied to him about what was going on.

Ad nauseum. We get it.

Jerry is studying whalesongs, which you might think would come in useful in a first contact story, but nope--it's just his writing skills. He gets a personal rejection letter from Ben Bova of Analog and calls him back to schmooze and get advice:

You started with the top markets, sure. But if you didn't sell there, you sent your brainchildren to magazines with less prestige and less money. Getting paid at all beat getting zilch for what you did.

Still good advice! But it just feels like a self-insert wish-fulfillment character who brainstorms strategies based on "what would Gandalf do" and that's enough to impress everybody.

There isn't a whole lot of diversity on the project--okay, fine, it's 1974. (The Russian spy ships are mixed-sex, though!) But the one prominent female character is Jerry's fiance-turned-wife, Anna, and...it's not clear that they really like each other? He keeps seeing her in terms of "tests" he has to pass, like, "do I have to read her mind and figure out that she doesn't want sex tonight? Will that earn me points? Oh no, women are so strange."

It's billed as a first-contact book but, spoilers, there isn't...really...any first contact? The plot stakes at the end turn into "will the US and the Soviet Union start World War III over who gets to play with the spaceship," and this is resolved, in the sense that they don't start World War III, but the end is somewhat open in terms of "will we communicate with the aliens." Some of the Goodreads reviewers suggest that this may be sequel bait/Turtledove likes to work in trilogies, which would explain why some plot threads kind of fizzle out. And it's possible the whalesong stuff might matter then. But as it is, I found the book on its own to outstay its welcome. Quoting SF writers good, Nixon and company bad. We get it.

Bingo: probably using it for "published in 2022," could also count for "No Ifs Ands or Buts," standalone (although see above). Would 1974 qualify for "historical" SFF? :S

Yuletide is coming! And I picked this up based on a rec from the Yuletide promo post, so thanks, reccer. :)

The initial premise of "Constellation Games" is that an alien fleet--featuring many different intelligent species who have met each other and journeyed together over millions of years--has just arrived on Earth. And while governments are panicking over how to approach this governmentally, and astronauts are feeling like they've been made useless, Ariel Blum, a video game programmer from Austin, Texas, decides he would like to review the video games the aliens have published over those millions of years.

It's a simple conceit, but a charming one. Ariel is genre-savvy, and his occasional insights about needing to rely on his friends for a car because he doesn't have one resonated with me. The aliens are extremely thorough in their analysis of Earth, and when he tries to make their acquaintance, they're able to identify him by the cash-cow pony games he makes for tween girls, as well as by the Sonic fanfic he wrote in junior high. And while he can be plenty irreverent, his censoring the name of G-d is a nice characterization of his Jewish identity:

In Caveman Chaos you communicate with your primitive isometric-view tribes the same way G-d does in real life—by pummeling the shit out of things!

And the portrayal of the "Constellation" as not just one species, but a dizzying variety of them, was also well done. There's one species called the "Aliens" (capital A), another called the "Goyim" (yes, really), a hivemind named "Her" built of tiny individual bug-units called "Them," and many more. There are the Fereng, who consist of two minds in one body that trade off with a shared memory, but not-quite-seamless overlap. This reminded me a lot of "Two Spacesuits," which is a recent short fiction piece that my friend J. (whose admirable reading habits are kind of what dragged me into r/fantasy in the first place) really enjoyed...and only after I finished the book did I realize it was the same author. Some of the Aliens try to learn English, but there's a steep learning curve: "It offpisses me." I think "Constellation Games" does a good job with the trope of "well of course we shouldn't expect extraterrestrials to have the same kind of life cycle/social stereotypes/anatomy as we do, they're extraterrestrials!" Creative worldbuilding is a feature in this case--it just gets weird when people try to back-project it onto Earth and say "therefore, these neologism human identities are valid."

The Constellation are post-scarcity anarchists--everything is about consent and cooperation. Some of them want to help the humans fix Earth's environmental hazards; others are ready to write the planet off and look for actual fossilized civilizations, the kind they prefer studying. Both the unrequested "help" and the threat the Constellation poses if they turn violent make human authorities edgy, and the government tries to restrict communication/travel to the space station. Ariel has a great quip about the ubiquitous Paperwork Reduction Act. And with a lot of Constellation help, humans eventually visit Mars...

Wondering why the flag looks like that? Some poor NASA graphic designer was told to design a flag that was simultaneously the Chinese flag and the Stars and Stripes. ESA got word and wanted in, then the Russians and the Brazilians, and then the UN and countries that never even had an astronaut program. And then the Gaijin started putting even more stuff on the flag, basically out of spite. Now it's a Technicolor soup, a graffiti-covered wall with "Ordem E Progresso" tagged on the bottom, which is Portuguese for "Fuck you, Mars."

Ariel has a human friend named Bai, who is "dating" an AI on his phone named after the fictional video game character Dana Light. Once the Constellation's AI (which consists of nested subminds, the lowest-level very dumb and the highest-level very powerful) arrives, Ariel seems pretty blase about Dana--"hey, she can't be any worse than those yes/no customer assistance bots." This didn't ring true for me even with a decade of AI development since the book came out; there's nothing wrong with not having a human significant other, but Bai's demands that his friends take Dana seriously feel stupid, and I can't really tell what Ariel and Bai's friendship was originally built on, other than "video games."

During the last third or so of the book, the themes/conflict took a turn that didn't really land for me. There have been a couple hints dropped about "Slow People"; it transpires that that's the word for species/individuals that have uploaded themselves into a digital mindscape. So if the Constellation gives up on Earth, instead of the risk being that humans will go extinct through their own stupidity, it's that Slow People will discover us and everyone will happily be absorbed into the digital afterlife. For Ariel, this is a scary threat, enough to throw himself into making sure the Constellation stays. But when it comes to utopian afterlives, it feels like the main reason it's bad is because it has to be bad in order for there to be narrative tension. (There are some characters who push back against Ariel's belief, including one close to the end of the book and thus affecting the message the reader takes away--but Ariel is the primary narrator.)

Also, while I think all of the (many) Earth video games Ariel namedrops are fictional, towards the end he starts namedropping a bunch of RL artists, influenced by his friend Jenny. Jenny shows up from the beginning as "a close friend of Ariel's," who eventually joins his project to adapt Constellation video games for Earth as the artist. There doesn't need to be a reason why they aren't dating, sometimes men and women are friends and don't date, that's realistic! But towards the end there's a big, long flashback where Ariel monologues about his feelings for Jenny that boil down to "we're just too similar, weirded out by the existential horror of our own insignificance in the universe, it probably wouldn't work out...unless...?" and I felt that that whole direction was unnecessary. But again, I'm probably biased because I don't share his priors about human insignificance!

"Constellation Games" was amusing and clever, I'd just have preferred more of the early "wow, let's see what this video game tells us about this alien culture" to where the plot ultimately went.

Bingo: I'm probably using it for self-published/indie-published. Definitely counts as "No Ifs, Ands, Or Buts." Probably also Award Finalist but Non-Winner, mayyybe "Set In Space"? (There's a lot on a space station, but I don't think 50%.)

One of the things I didn't plan on doing, but have wound up doing, as part of this bingo project is to draw parallels between the books I'm reviewing and other books. To some extent, I think this comes from a reticence to give criticism or an appraisal overall--I know I'm a prolific reader and a verbose commentator so no false modesty there, but I can get insecure about "what if I just am not deep enough to appreciate this book like Real Adults." In contrast, saying "it reminded me of X meets Y with some Z" may or may not be a value judgment--for some people, parallels to X are a positive, for others, a negative.

"Nine Princes in Amber" starts with a first-person narrator waking up in a hospital bed with no memory of who he is or why he is there, much like Project Hail Mary. Once he manages to escape and find his alleged sister, he talks to her while trying to hide the fact that he has no idea what's going on and is just bluffing his way through everything, a little like Jessica faking her way through the conversation with Shadout Mapes in Dune. As part of this act, he winds up agreeing that he'll "try for it," without really knowing what "it" is but "somehow" realizing it's his goal. He has a lot of "somehow" moments.

I felt a strong desire to kill, to destroy whoever had been responsible, and I knew that it was not the first time in my life that I had felt this thing, and I knew, too, that I had followed through on it in the past. More than once...

And I knew, somehow, that somehow, again--ah, somehow!--that several were missing.

I felt comfortably strong. I knew I'd be willing to take on any one man in a fair fight without any special fears. How strong was I?
Suddenly, I knew I would have a chance to find out.

I decided—with a sudden certainty—that he was somehow adding and subtracting items to and from the world that was visible about us to bring us into closer and closer alignment with that strange place, Amber, for which he was solving.

(These are all in the first fifty pages.)

The magic of the Amber setting is neat, and better-described than Malazan. Amber is the true world of which all other worlds, including Earth, are "Shadows," or imitations. The fourth quote above describes how one of the narrator's brothers "walks" through Shadows by slowly using his mind to move through/create weird intermediate worlds that slowly morph from Earth into Amber. There are also decks of cards with copies of each member of the royal family that the siblings can use to talk/teleport to each other. (A friend on another site has run some RPG-type games in this setting so I was familiar with this aspect, which is why Malazan's magic tarot reminded me of it.) And there's a weird labyrinth thing called the Pattern in Amber (as well as its mirror world in the undersea realm of Rebma--get it??); "walking the Pattern" restores the narrator's memories and ability to move between worlds.

Eventually, he (his name is Corwin) realizes that he's committed to challenging his nemesis brother, Eric, for kingship of Amber. (Any or all of the brothers could create their own utopias with the shadow-walking, but none of them will be as the real Amber.) Corwin teams up with another brother, Bleys, who is also ambitious but willing to temporarily make a truce with him to take out Eric, and they look for cannon fodder who are susceptible to believing that the brothers' internal power struggles are some kind of holy war. (Again, shades of Dune.) Corwin has some lampshaded moments about "we're just treating these guys like undifferentiated mooks and asking them to die for us, seems a little messed up...oh well, I'll immortalize them in a ballad or something." He also mentions that he's lived for centuries on Earth and witnessed all kind of RL history atrocities. At the risk of being too culture-warry, this also felt cheap, using RL tragedy just to show how Corwin is different from his brothers. He has empathy and stuff! He even checks in with their dad to see if he approves of this whole defeating-my-brothers-to-win-the-throne thing, which I actually did appreciate as a plot point. But like...eh.

This book was published in 1970, and one thing I thought was funny is how pervasive cigarettes are. Even in Amber, which seems kind of faux-medieval with dungeons and duels and sailing fleets, Corwin needs a carton of Salems!

Notes on potential squicks: in the beginning, Corwin is being kept in the hospital/forcibly medicated against his will. He's able to break out and threaten the doctors almost immediately, which might be a power fantasy for some and/or squicky for others. Later on, he is severely wounded and (temporarily) disabled in a squicky fashion (it's not dwelled on very long on-screen), and then there's a throwaway line about "ah, of course, because of this disability I could not move through the Shadows normally," and like...really? How was that ever foreshadowed or justified.

Anyway, this is just volume one (of a five-part series, and then there's another five books with a different POV character), and it didn't wrap up as neatly as I'd expected for a while. Between the relatively short length and intriguing magic, I'd be more willing to return to this than Malazan, but that's still not super likely--there was just too much carried by the "ah, somehow!" effect for me to enjoy.

Bingo: it's a gimme for Family Matters, also looks like "award finalist but non-winner."

"The Malazan Book of the Fallen" series was one I had not heard of before joining reddit's r/fantasy, but have seen mentioned there several times. Usually in pretty good company--like, "I enjoyed Wheel of Time and Malazan, I want another epic worldbuilding series with lots of characters and locations and magic." As someone who loves Wheel of Time, I considered this a pretty good recommendation! But unfortunately, it didn't really live up to the hype for me.

This is not because it had "too many" characters, as some criticism has put it. Yeah, I'm not going to keep every name 100% straight, but the overall plot arc was relatively straightforward to follow. Malazan is an empire rapidly trying to expand, conquer other lands, and bring their leaders under the empire's authority. Seven-ish years before our story begins, the Empress assassinated the former Emperor and took power; there was a purge of many of the leaders close to the late emperor, and those who survived are still watching their backs. So the Malazan troops are worried about infighting and friendly fire that might be trying to take out some of the old-timers. There are two large cities named Pale and Darujhistan that the Malazan armies are now trying to conquer. Darujhistan is interesting because it's a "city of blue fire" and "built on a rumor"--generations ago, legend had it that there was some powerful magic buried deep in the hills. People went searching for it and dug deep, but all they found were gas mines; it turns out you can control the gas to produce blue-green light and have gaslamps in the city, so it's beautiful as well as technologically advanced. This is also going to come up later when it comes to "what's buried in the hills" and "what are the dangers of attacking this kind of city," so good work there, I liked this part, thumbs up.

The problem is that the characters don't really make interesting decisions so much as get jerked around by deities. In the first couple chapters, one character has their mind overridden and controlled by magic not once but twice, and people spend most of the book going "hmm, that person is creepy and weird, are they really human?" Another character finds themselves in possession of an object linked to the gods of chance, so weird things happen around them, and lots of factions send secret agents to protect that person/keep the object safe. There's magic, but we don't get a good sense of how it works, just that characters can tap into "warrens" that let them do magical stuff and teleport. (If a mage is in the presence of a warren that's different than theirs, they might get a migraine, which, relatable.) And some characters wield a magical tarot deck to see what the influence of the gods is on things, but I don't really know or care about the difference between Darkness, Shadows, or Chaos when it comes to suits in the deck. I guess I wanted a magic system that was a little "harder" in the Sandersonian sense, and this isn't it.

Here's a wizard doing a ritual to communicate with a living marionette, this is the kind of description I liked and wanted more of:

In a secluded glade in the forest, Quick Ben poured white sand in a circle and sat down in its center. He took five sharpened sticks and set them in a row before him, pushing them to various depths in the loam. The center stick, the highest, rose about three feet; the ones on either side stood at two feet and the outer ones at a foot.

Some other gimmicks include:
-in-universe poetry/prophecy/literature at the beginning of each chapter, which I understand is supposed to give us some sense of the themes/magic/worldbuilding, but didn't really work for me as poetry. (I realize I could be a poetry snob.)
-a character who has prophetic dreams and always talks about himself in the third person, which was more annoying than funny
-mages and nonhuman characters who have lifespans much longer than typical humans, there are occasional glimpses of "what would your mind be like after that long"? but it didn't engage as much as I'd hoped.
-I don't have a great sense of what the nonhuman characters really look like, there's one guy who's like "seven feet tall with silver hair and magical color-changing eyes and an enormous sword and sometimes he turns into a dragon!" so I'm mentally parsing him as "...elf??" but I'm not sure if that's what I'm supposed to do.
-names with Superflu'Ous A'Postrophes

[Edit because I forgot this part and it's funny: there's a great "can we agree that duels are dumb and immature?" moment from a second in a duel towards the end:]

“I hereby make it known that I oppose this duel as facile and trite.” He stared at Turban Orr. “I find the councilman’s life irrelevant in the best of times. Should he die,” the tall man looked over to Rallick, “there will be no vengeance pact from the House of D’Arle. You, sir, are freed of that.”

I understand that war is hell, and the decisions made by officers and magicians at the top mostly wind up screwing with the lives of the little people on the ground who don't have much of a say in the matter. So maybe that's the impression I'm supposed to get from the Elder and younger gods. But it turned the book into a slog, and I need something more than "war is hell but individual soldiers and leaders can still have heartwarming, honorable, loyalty, d'aww!" to care about the characters. On the plus side, it moved another book with weird tarot magic up my TBR list, because at least it'll be shorter... >.>

Bingo: Cool Weapon, Shapeshifters, Award Finalist but Non-Winner?

"It's not their fault they exist." In "A Desolation Called Peace," one of the characters says this about a species of space cats who have gotten into the vents of his flagship after a recent military engagement, and now, the ship just has to put up with them, because when you're a travelling warship you pick up strange but cute creatures in your travels, it's what you do. Hold that thought.

"A Desolation Called Peace" is the sequel to "A Memory Called Empire," and both novels sort of tell you where they're going in their dedications. In "Memory," the dedication is to people who are "falling in love with another culture that's destroying your own..." This is the context in which we meet Marit Dzmare, the ambassador from small Lsel Station to the vast Teixcalaanli Empire. Marit appreciates Teixcalaanli poetry, but feels like she can't really fit in there because she's from Lsel. But despite that intro, I thought the dedication set up the story to be bleaker/heavier than it turned out to be in the end. (Granted, I am working off memory from three years ago.) There was a whole lingering Chekhov about evil aliens in the background that never got resolved, though, so that's the sequel hook.

"Desolation," however, is dedicated in part to "Stanislav Petrov, who knew when to question orders." So already, for those of you who recognize the name (and/or Wikipedia it), you can guess where the book is going. Which means some of the rising action/inaction felt kind of redundant--like, yeah, we know imperialism is bad, WMDs bad, let's see some aliens.

There are several different plotlines; one follows Eight Antidote, the eleven-year-old Imperial heir. His tutor, Eleven Laurel, tries to teach him puzzles about the history of Teixcalaanli military conflict, and this provides an effective way to get up to speed on who some of the major admirals are and why getting promoted to a commanding officer might be a double-edged sword.

Eight Antidote loved the constraints best of all. Delimiters. This happened, so it must be possible. Solve it.

I got Ender Wiggin and Mazer Rackham vibes from these two right away! And to some extent, it feels like "Desolation" is trying to be a subversion of "Ender's Game"--like, kids can be very smart and good at solving puzzles, but they also might have panic attacks trying to navigate a crowded spaceport for the first time, because life is scary when you're eleven. On the other hand, Ender's Game (uh, spoilers) confronts the "if you annihilate an entire planet, but there's only one hive mind there, are you really only killing one person?" issue more effectively than "Desolation." If you have qualms about annihilating a planet, it should be because killing a planet (one individual or many) is bad, not because it might have knock-on empathy effects for other beings nearby!

There's a general sense of "the military department doesn't trust the civilian intelligence agency, who doesn't trust the science department, who doesn't trust the postal service..." Which, as anyone who has worked in the government bureaucracy can tell you, felt absolutely spot-on, A++.

In physics/philosophy, there are several different variants of the "anthropic principle," which in some way boil down to "conditional on intelligent observers perceiving the universe, the universe has to be like it is, because if was vastly different, then we wouldn't be here." Some are tautological, some are stronger. First-contact books sometimes border on a medium form of the anthropic principle: if you're gonna have aliens, they will probably be very different than humans in many ways, but if you want them to influence the plot (say, by talking to humans), they need to have at least something in common with us, physically and mentally, so that we can communicate with them. A type of creature who lived on timescales that were orders of magnitude greater or lesser than ours is never going to be able to carry on a conversation with us. Finding single-celled organisms on another planet would be fascinating, and in a different subgenre "what will humans do when they meet non-Earth life?" could have carried the plot, but for a book about "can we make peace with the aliens," there has to at least be a possibility of intelligent communication, even if its forms are different from human language. So I thought some of the "oh no, they communicate, but they do so without language! And their sound waves make my ears hurt? Whatever shall we do?" panicking was unnecessary. Can't you at least copy-and-paste reproductions of sound waves on your computer without listening to them? Even Ryland Grace knew how to do that. :p And maybe it's just the linguist in me talking, but Earth linguists tend to keep tweaking the definition of "language" so that "anything sapient, self-aware creatures like humans do is 'language;' everything else, no matter how complex [bees wiggling!] is just 'communication.'"

The flagship where this first-contact and/or war drama is playing out is called "Weight for the Wheel." And I'm not quite sure I get the joke. Is it a pun on Farscape's "Wait for the Wheel?" The Hope Eyrie "weight of the wheel?" Daenerys from Game of Thrones who wants to break the wheel of history? Help me out here. (On the other hand, "I feel like there's a subtle cultural allusion here that's going way over my head" is an extremely Teixcalaanli mood, so there's that.)

Okay, so--you know how I said "Memory" was less preachy/didactic than the dedication primed me for? This one felt more so. Fortunately, the Petrovian "patience and prudence" approach wins--it would be extremely disappointing to make it through almost 500 pages and then not--but Mahit's struggles with Teixcalaan felt more lampshaded here (again, I haven't read "Memory" in three years and may be misremembering). Guess what, in Teixcalaanli "Empire" and "world" mean the same thing, so there are no real "people" outside the "world!" (Hi, Sapir-Whorf!) Guess what, Teixcalaanli people tend to call anyone who isn't Teixcalaanli "barbarians," and that's bad! Guess what, Mahit enjoys Teixcalaanli poetry, and hates herself for it, because she'll never be accepted like a real Teixcalaanli! What's the point.

Space cats are cute and adorable. And you can't blame them for existing, because it's not their fault. However--and I recognize that this probably says more about me than the book--you also can't keep raising the Reverse George Bailey problem and kicking it down the road. If you feel like you should jump off a bridge, you can maybe wish you'd never been born and hopefully an angel will persuade you of the error of your ways. If you actually feel like you, or your culture, or your empire, ought to never have been born, what are you supposed to do? If there's anyone who has that answer, they're probably not writing science fiction novels.

Oh uhhhh I almost forgot bingo. Set In Space, Readalong. "Memory" is on the /r/fantasy LGBTQIA list so this might count as a sequel even though it came out later? I don't think there's enough of an alien setting to count as "weird ecology," although the aliens themselves are weird biological creatures.

"Redwall," a fantasy series about anthropomorphic rodents and other woodland creatures, was one of my favorite series as a kid. The heroic quests! The varieties of organizations and accents! So when I saw a Reddit post looking for recommendations of similar books, I was intrigued by the "Deptford Mice" trilogy, which was billed as a dark fantasy. And while the first book didn't really work for me, it's an interesting compare-and-contrast with the Redwall series.

Like Redwall, "The Dark Portal" features mice as the good guys and an army of rats as the enemy. And like Redwall, there's not a whole lot of moralizing or speculating about what makes mice good or rats evil--it just is. They both are written by UK authors, and feature a range of accents depicting the linguistic diversity of the British Isles. Redwall is set in a fictional secondary world, and while there are a few anachronistic this-world mentions in the first book, by and large humans and their creations don't exist. In contrast, as the name might suggest, the Deptford Mice speak Cockney rhyming slang, visit Greenwich Observatory, and cross the road like they're playing "Frogger." (I wanted to see even more of this weirdness--what do human objects look like to a mouse scale?)

Redwall goes back and forth between several different POV characters, in third-person limited. The Deptford Mice jumps back and forth much more quickly, paragraphs at a time, so that it's effectively third-person omniscient. In both cases, there's humor to be drawn from the villains' infighting and power-struggles; they often are much more cruel to each other than the villains are to them. In Redwall, we get to hear in-universe poems and songs (although I know some readers aren't fans of this trope in general); in Deptford, we have to settle for summaries.

He was shocked at the way the rats glorified death and sang about it in this way--murders, stranglings, guttings and roastings, all sorts of barbaric cruelties were chanted.

And then there's the matter of religion.

Redwall is set at the titular Abbey, and the first book features an evil snake named Asmodeus. Quests are often given by the spirit of Martin, the Abbey's founding Warrior, appearing in people's dreams and giving them mystical advice. Critics may point out that this is kind of cheesy and/or cliche.

But the Redwall protagonists are beasts of action and free will next to the Deptford Mice, who very rarely "do things" so much as "react to things being done." The prologue lampshades this when Albert Brown strays into the Grille, a scary evil place that leads to the realm of the rats:

There was just no reason and he kicked himself for it. With a shudder he remembered the warnings that he had given his own children: ‘Beware of the Grille!’ He had never been brave or overtly curious, so why did the Grille call to him that spring morning, and what was the urge to explore that gripped him so?

And into the last chapter:

...something was guiding her small, delicate feet towards him. It was as if this meeting had been decided long ago fated since before she had been born. Now she was merely carrying out the part set for her.

While Albert is missing, his children, Arthur and Audrey, go through a coming-of-age ceremony where they pass through the Chambers of Winter and Summer to receive their mousebrasses, metal icons that represent some symbol of their destiny. The Maypole imagery here is very reminiscent of the Bel Tine festival in the first Wheel of Time book--and the worldbuilding seems to be based on British pre-Christian religion and mythology. Included in that is the Green Mouse, who at first seems to be an expy of the Green Man. (Ironically, I saw a book review recently that suggested that, while some ancient religions' reconstructions in the modern day do seem to be truly old-school deities, the "Green Man" himself may be more a synthetic reconstruction--which of course didn't stop Robert Jordan from stealing him, either.)

But then the tone shifts rapidly, and the Green Mouse becomes referenced as someone whom pious mice pray to--"if there really is a Green Mouse, why does he allow such suffering?" Arthur's ceremony goes off without incident, but Audrey's is a mystical experience--she beholds the Green Mouse, who tells her never to surrender her new mousebrass. She refuses to accept her father's death, and goes into the Grille in search of him; when she returns, she promises her mother never to return. But then, oh no, she left her mousebrass behind! So she really has to have someone go back on her behalf, it was important, she had a vision and everything, but she promised her mother. And then there are the mysterious bats in the attic of the house. It really feels like the "higher powers" are duking it out and the POV mice characters are just dragged along for the ride. Maybe that's supposed to be making a statement about the nature of faith and the divine, but it's not very interesting to read a book with this little agency.

There's a foreign rat from Morocco who I'm guessing would be considered "problematic" by today's hot-take crowd, she speaks in an affected accent and is hungry for magic powers beyond the fake fortune-telling she does. The ebook copy I read may have suffered from poorly-uploaded OCR, because there felt like a lot of typos and misplaced punctuation. This book may be better for middle-grade readers, and/or as a readaloud with amusing accents. Ultimately, I think it's possible that if I reread Redwall it might not hold up as well as I remember it, but I still think that it would do everything "The Dark Portal" does, and better.

Bingo: Non-Human Protagonist, probably Family Ties, maybe Urban Fantasy?

I can't give a better summary of "Project Hail Mary" than this post from

cahn : "It's basically as if a Randall Munroe book (or his blog) came to life and I am here for that." Yeah. Our hero is trying to fix the sun, while doing science and explaining esoteric human concepts like sleep.

Unfortunately, he can't even remember his name. So at the beginning, he's trying to figure out things like "who am I, where am I, is gravity being weird?" and he solves it with SCIENCE, such as trying to build a pendulum and measure gravity (like Rowan in "The Steerswoman"!). And like Paulie in the Hugo-nominee "Proof by Induction," he also gets cute with complex numbers and their roots, just to challenge the capacities of his not-quite-human interlocutors. There's a running joke about "I must be an American scientist, judging by the fact that my brain thinks in inches and miles by default but also occasionally throws in cubic centimeters, really unhelpful." But like, he's a total blank slate at this point--almost more of a video game protagonist, the reader can project anything or anyone onto the outline, it's the science and technology that matters.

Weir is at his best when he's hypothesizing "so, okay, how would you science the bleep out of this?" While some of the descriptions can get a little long-winded, this book worked better for me than "The Martian" did along those lines, in part because the technology is a little more speculative and impossible to actually do all the research and then infodump it. Shortcuts can be taken, and while we'll all disagree on "which parts were cut too short, which could be longer,' overall it struck a good balance.

Gradually, our everyman begins getting flashbacks to Earth, which reveal that he was briefly a research scientist interested in hypothetical non-water-based extraterrestrial life, but then ditched academia for a teaching career. When he discovers the dead bodies of his fellow crew, he's like..."wow, they must have been really good people, too bad they died out here," and tears up slightly. But the grief is always informed rather than based on knowing them or having memories of travelling through space together--it's like, trying to "show not tell" but not necessarily succeeding. Like Dalinar in "Oathbreaker," the amnesia is suspiciously laser-guided, and makes us wonder what's going on beyond plot convenience.

So then there's the whole "actually, the sun is going out, how do we fix it?" problem that requires lots of scientists/technologists/bureaucrats to marshal the world's resources and find a solution. One issue here, as the narrator lampshades, is that science doesn't usually advance by lone geniuses sitting in a secret lab and researching away from the world--in this century, we have peer review and lots of collaboration and checking each others' work. Another issue is that, in light of recent events, "world community works together to do science and solve a problem" may be dismissed as unrealistic escapist fantasy by many readers. My personal belief is that, if you're going to write ~500 pages (or even orders of magnitude less than that, though this is more divisive), and the upshot is "haha actually just kidding, everything sucks and humans are too terrible to be saved," I'm not interested because I have better things to do with my time. But yeah, there's that caveat.

There were a couple places where I would have expected more genre-savviness. The narrator's initial reaction to "we need a few people to go on a suicide mission because it's the only way to save humanity" isn't only "welp, count me out" (which would be a reasonable reaction!) but "you're actually getting volunteers, really?" Maybe I just read too many books, but "die a hero on an interstellar adventure, or die alongside everyone else on a dying planet" doesn't seem like a particularly excruciating choice (assuming I could survive the physical difficulties of zero-G, etc.). And there's a part about "we always assumed our first contact with aliens would be a sophisticated, technologically advanced space-travelling species, we never imagined unicellular life." Like...really??? What about all the searches for fossils on Mars? I don't buy it from the leader of the scientific project.

But the most unlikely contrivance is that an international, UN-backed, 2020s space project would have the name "Project Hail Mary"--the provincialism of referencing a Catholic prayer that gave its name to an American football play!--just so we can set up the stealth pun of the main character, when he remembers his name, being Dr. Grace. Dr. Grace in the Hail Mary. Get it?????

Okay, those are quibbles, but they are really only quibbles. Verging on spoiler territory here (for a twist that's like ~1/4 of the way into the book), but it turns out to be a story about collaboration, and how people with different skill sets can complement each other and work together to experiment. If "The Martian" was in some ways about the world coming together to save one person, "Project Hail Mary" is in some ways about two people coming together to save the world(s). And while it might be a little unnerving to wonder "well what can Weir do for an encore, we've already made the stakes about as high as they can get," the basic cycle of "what's the basic problem facing us right now? do some science, okay, that worked, there's hope. one step back, two steps forward" is a simple but effective combination.

Ultimately, "Project Hail Mary" is the kind of book where I wanted to dive back in because I cared about what happened to the characters, both on a personal and global level. Which shouldn't necessarily be high praise, but in this case, it is! The "lanes" of contemporary SFF have become fragmented in such a way that many books aren't trying to do the same thing this is. And while I'll always appreciate more like this, "Project Hail Mary" definitely quenched my thirst for this genre!

Bingo cards: IN SPACE! Also Standalone, (Hugo) Readalong, No Ifs Ands Or Buts

So we've already had one anthology of speculative short fiction translated from Chinese, and here's another! This volume features the work "of female and nonbinary creators" as writers, translators, and editors. All of these are new in English, although I did a double-take at "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Tai Chi Mashed Taro" by Anna Wu--a different short story from the same "frame story" setting appeared in "Broken Stars," but this one is new.

There are several motifs that pop up across stories here--several stories in this book deal with visual art as a theme, and others focus on animals. (I saw a headline a few months ago, although I only skimmed the article, about "the percentage of (kids'?) books that deal with animal characters is trending down over time, is this a sign of how detached and alienated we've become from the natural world?" But I wonder whether that's the case cross-linguistically.)

Overall, the stories here didn't have the same sense of timey-wimey whimsy that "What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear" or "The First Emperor's Games" did, but there are still some lovely turns of phrase. A few highlights:

"The Tale of Wude's Heavenly Tribulation," by Count E, is about a fox who becomes a cultivator. I appreciated having read "Journey to the West" to give me some context for these tropes!

When Wude first attempted human form, he dared only reveal the fruits of his accomplishments to a creek next to his home. First it was a fox head and a human body, then a human body with foxy paws or furry legs. When he finally managed four complete limbs and clear human features, his pesky tail insisted on coming out to play.

"Baby, I Love You" by Zhao Haihong: the idea of contrasting the real-world struggles of parenting with the challenge of simulating an enthralling virtual life isn't necessarily original, but can still be well-executed:

I had to acknowledge the greatness of creation. Here I was, tearing my hair out over one virtual baby, while that mysterious force churned out a few billion humans and hundreds of trillions of plant and animal species, plus the infinite starry cosmos to boot.

the title story, by Wang Nuonuo, is a cute blend of fantasy fairy-tale-like tropes and more scientific narration:

The axis extends from the North Sea into the earth's core, where it connects to a gear wheel. When Pangu split heaven and earth apart, his heart became the gear at the center of the world. His heartbeat makes the gear move a little bit every day, and the earth above slowly tilts accordingly. This gradually adjusts the angle of the earth. The sunlight changes according to these rules, which is how we get the four seasons in order.

"A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language," by Nian Yu, features large-scale worldbuilding--and the end, describing how it ICly came to be written, makes the experience of reading it in translation particularly compelling. However, the narrator's frequent italicized comments tended to pull me out of the story.

Cameras attached to the drilling machinery had exploded seven seconds after exposure to this space devoid of matter. But in those seven seconds, those images had flown into ten million cocoon-shaped abodes. On that day, Ilians and Beinakans faced the heavens, the universe, the world beyond the ice barrier and took their first--albeit delayed--glance at the world beyond ours.

Like "Broken Stars," "The Way Spring Arrives" also features nonfiction essays, although interspersed rather than clustered at the end. Again, some of it was boring, but some was interesting. I have not seen the live-action "Mulan" film, but apparently, a line of dialogue about the virtues of the ideal woman gets reused to describe the virtues of the ideal soldier: "quiet, composed, graceful, disciplined." In the Chinese translation, the word used for "quiet" has some specifically feminine connotations, which make the parallels across gender lines less effective. Also, learning about the history of web novels in Chinese (which have given rise to television adaptations like "Nirvana in Fire" and "The Untamed") was an interesting look at fandom outside English-language spaces.

Ultimately, anything that tries to make a statement about fiction written or translated by women is probably going to come with handwringing about "can we make any generalizations, I mean, really, when you get right down to it," but the stories can still stand on their own!

Bingo squares: two or more authors, published in 2022, five-plus short stories, author of color.

"Atomic Anna" starts with a bang--literally. In 1986, the Soviet scientist Anna Berkovna is working at the Chernobyl reactor when it melts down. The radiation causes a ripple in space-time, and she jumps to December 1992, when her daughter, Molly (aka Manya), is bleeding out in a secret laboratory in Armenia. Molly tells Anna that she needs to research time travel and change the past to save Molly's daughter, Raisa; Anna also has survivor's guilt from the Chernobyl disaster once she returns to her own time, and so a three-generation family quest is underway.

The next few chapters are less directly SF, and another example of "literary fiction writer switches gears to speculative fiction, results rocky at first." All the chapters begin by identifying the POV character (Anna, Molly, or Raisa), the timestamp, and the time relative to the prologue: "September 1961, Thirty-One Years Before Molly Dies on Mount Aragats" feels like forced drama to remind us of the "countdown"--we know how to subtract--and because some of the early chapters span long time periods, the pacing can feel awkward. (That first chapter starts with Molly age ten, and goes through the summer before her junior year of high school.) Here's young Molly, after a "we'll explain it when you're older" conversation with her adoptive parents:

"Shh," Mama said, and their voice dropped. Molly leaned back and felt the weight of what she had just heard like an anvil on her chest. She didn't understand everything. Space-time, gamma rays, and ripples were all new words, but her instinct was to defend her birth mother. Surely Molly didn't come from a woman who could build a bomb to kill millions of people. But her parents didn't lie to each other--which meant Molly's birth mother built the Soviet atomic bomb, the reason behind that stupid shelter in their basement.
...
Molly went around and around in circles before she convinced herself that Anna was like the superheroes Molly had been reading about. Her power was her brain. She used her brain for good, and evil characters, the Soviets, took what she did and used it for bad. "That's it," she said out loud, convincing herself. "Anna needs to fight them so her work is only used for good. For good guys." The notion helped settle her a bit.

"Kid overhears parents talking about disturbing family secret and jumps to conclusions" felt kind of stale. Similarly, when Anna begins her time travel research, she has the idea that she'll first fix Chernobyl, then jump again to fix her family issues, and a colleague basically tells her "what if you're not able to do both, you need to choose between saving the world and your family," which felt kind of lampshady. Then Anna, and the readers, discover the "rules" to how time travel works in this universe: a jump can last at most two hours, you can only visit the same year twice, and can't be too close (geographically) to your original self. So, because she originally tried visiting her lab in 1985, and that failed, she can't just jump back again to "easily" fix Chernobyl.

This slow start primed me to be nitpicky about later developments. I can certainly believe, for instance, that Anna would have had a hard time with sexism in the Soviet labs during and after WWII, not only because women in nuclear physics research were rare (but not unheard of--she meets the RL Lise Meitner!), but also because the Soviet regime was very harsh and brutal towards suspected foreign agents. But for Raisa in 1980s Philadelphia to be the only girl at all in math competitions, or "steal" library books without checking them out because Molly just detests math that much, felt like a stretch--she can still be a special snowflake without being the specialest evar. Also, Anna has difficulty with one time jump because she can't tell whether a handwritten date is in 1970 or 1986. If you're confused about both of the last two digits, wouldn't 1976 or 1980 also be candidates? :P

But as the story unfolds, even the non-SF aspects of family dynamics and how one generation's fears and hopes influence the next become more engaging, and the cascading timelines--what happened "before" Molly's death, both in that timeline and across timelines?--are neat. The author's notes mention that the secret cosmic ray station is actually based on a real place, which I had not expected!

Like "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel, there's narrative nonlinearity circling around family dynamics that play out across generations. And most specifically, both titles refer to an in-universe comic book that is more fantastical than the characters' real world. Molly finds creating comic books a way to express girl power, but also react against her mother's scientific background; later, Anna sends the fictionalized comic books to Raisa, asking for her help in the research. And like "A Swiftly Tilting Planet" by Madeleine L'Engle, we see the pain and grief in a family over several generations; finding the key to where Anna needs to jump involves forcing her to confront her own past, and the resolution isn't when you might expect.

Bingo squares: Standalone, Name in the Title, Published in 2022, Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey, No Ifs Ands or Buts, Family Matters (hard mode and then some).

The thing about satires is: they should be funny. And while a near-future dystopia that extrapolates from current issues with the use and misuse of technology doesn't necessarily have to fall into the "satire" genre, I'm more likely to be engaged with it if it does.

Right from the beginning, "Qualityland" benefits by interspersing "in-universe" documentation such as advertisements and news stories with the narration. Even when they don't advance the plot, this method of worldbuilding augments the dry humor on display. This is from the introduction (a little reminiscent of "Jennifer Government" by Max Barry):

Even QualityLand's inhabitants were renamed. They couldn't just be ordinary people, after all; they had to be QualityPeople. Their surnames in particular sounded very medieval and didn't fit with the new progress-oriented country identity. A land of Millers, Smiths, and Taylors isn't exactly a high-tech investor's wet dream. And so the advertising agency decided that, from that moment on, every boy would be given his father's occupation as a surname and every girl the occupation of her mother. The deciding factor would be the job held at the time of conception.

We wish you an unforgettable stay in the land of Sabrina Mechatronics-Engineer and Jason Cleaner, the most popular middle-class rap duo of the decade. The land of Scarlett Prisoner and her twin brother Robert Warden, the undefeated BattleBot jockeys of the century. The land of Claudia Superstar, the Sexiest Woman of All Time. The land of Henryk Engineer, the richest person in the world.

Scarlett and Robert never come up again, but the double-take "yikes" that line causes is, for me, a lot more effective than just sanctimoniously talking to the reader would be.

The opening third or so is filled with these sorts of digressions. The main character is Peter Jobless, who owns a scrap-metal press for disposing of obsolete robots (although that doesn't necessarily mean he uses it). In the social credit system in use thanks to the monopolistic tech companies, Peter's prospects are mostly "useless," which thwarts him in his love life as well as business endeavors. Meanwhile, the politicians are attempting to nominate an android for president. Like Asimov's Stephen Byerley, the android is the most thoughtful and progressive candidate you could ask for, he wants to help humans get ahead by providing both a universal basic income and finding ways to give their lives meaning in the absence of the producer/consumer dichotomy. Of course, such progressiveness is far too nice for the politicians and advisors, who keep trying to make him be a little more normal.

Eventually, Peter finds himself in possession of an object that the algorithms suggested for him, but he decides he doesn't want. This launches him down a path of "this system is actually bad, how do we bring it down and create something better." Which makes it sound like the plot is picking up. Unfortunately, I actually felt like it dragged more; the characters start having more and more explicit references to modern-day SF, or unintended consequences of economic development, so it felt more like "look, let me show you my learnings" than the zany humor that I'd enjoyed in the beginning.

This book was translated from German by Jamie Lee Searle; the original came out in 2017. So, obviously, a lot of the issues that people worry about in the US (hyper-personalized electoral ads! fake news! no one actually reads the terms and conditions because you have to accept to get any use out of the product!) overlap. However, I appreciate the opportunity to read books from different places and times, not because they're necessarily edifying, but precisely because they aren't from inside the bubble of contemporary USian hot takes. There's also a wild scene with a fake-Nazi theater usher android (!) where I'm not sure if I had the intended reaction--I suspect Kling might have been making a serious point about "those who can't remember the past are doomed to repeat it," history is important, yada yada, but I found it more to be a fun if darkly humorous point about just how weird this world is.

As might be fitting for a book involving androids, there are a lot of powers of two references. Like, a lot. I, of course, am a great fan of powers of two, I put 256 in my usernames, yada yada. I would dare not say there is such a thing as too many powers of two. But, after a while, it does start to feel like "okay, we get this joke," and perhaps someone less enamored of powers of two might get tired of the conceit. (On the other hand, someone less enamored of powers of two might be less likely to notice the significance of 8,192.)

Like The Resisters, it takes "in order to keep the economy in balance some people have to consume and some have to produce, that's just the way it is" up to new heights, and like Minna Sundberg's "Lovely People," it extrapolates the peril of a quantifiable social credit system into a Western society. And while the humor may wobble, it's still present start to finish!

Bingo: probably using it for "No Ifs, Ands, or Buts." Is also a standalone.

This is my seventh entry for SFF bingo this year and already I have two baseball dystopias, so clearly this is a hot subgenre. ;)

In this future, genetic/biological experimentation and cybernetics have become rampant, at least among those with the ability to pay. The narrator, Kobo, has a bionic arm, and was a player in the short-lived Cyber League; his adoptive brother, JJ Zunz, plays for the Monsanto Mets in the Future League (which features lots of drugs and modifications, but no mechanized prosthetics). Kobo tries to scout both players and scientists who will give his clients a technological edge, to pay off his rampant medical debts from past upgrades. When Zunz dies in suspicious circumstances during the playoffs, Kobo naturally wants to investigate to get revenge for his brother/longtime friend, and then different people start trying to collaborate with or complicate the investigations. Of course, everyone is in it for themselves, and the incentives aren't always what they seem. Meanwhile, the Mets are still in the World Series, so that's going on as background noise--but again, who wins or loses the baseball games isn't really the point.

"The Resisters" focused on climate refugees in floating cities and other new constructions; "The Body Scout," while it also features similar worldbuilding elements (including a significantly altered US and similar future-dystopias elsewhere in the world), is more grounded in New York, both of the characters' past and future. I found this tension--every era is someone's nostalgic "good old days"--to be effective!

"Mets manager Gil Stengel hasn't commented on how this will affect the starting lineup when the game resumes tomorrow night. No matter what we learn, this is a sad day for baseball and a tragic loss for the Monsanto Mets."

"It was a busker dressed as JJ Zunz, a human statue on an injection pad. His sign scrolled R.I.P. to a New York Hero. Ya Gotta Bereave!

"The walls were covered with posters of old New York baseball stars: Derek Jeter, Mike Piazza, Aaron Judge, Barack O'Neil, Colton Diaz, and Matt Haddock. Heroes from back when the game was pure."

As the name might suggest, the book features "Gideon the Ninth" levels of gross-out body horror; lots of drugs and violence, and occasional episodes of sex made disturbing by technology and capitalism. The diverse range of characters and viewpoints means it's not too preachy or didactic on the overall costs and benefits of technology. On one hand, vat-grown meat could be a more humane alternative to factory-farming! On another, there are Deaf people who want to keep their language and culture alive rather than opt in for anything that might grant them "typical" hearing. On a third...hey, look, this mutated creature has three hands now, huh. Some of the antagonist characters reach cartoonish levels of villainy, but it's hard to criticize that as unrealistic when you've recently experienced a cartoon villain head of state.

Like "The Resisters," there are groups that protest the entire way of life and want to bring down the system, but this isn't really about them, either. Kobo and his friends seem to conclude that creating real change is impractical--some corruption is too endemic to root out, and the rift between Kobo and JJ had been growing well before JJ's death. But you might at least be able to find a few people you care about and want to protect, so maybe that's good enough.

Again, someone like me is going to ask: why baseball? As a critique of the "nation" it's supposed to be the "national pastime" of? Towards the end the characters make the point that steroids had once been illegal, but once teams realized there was more money to be made in promoting and relying on them, things rapidly changed--so it's useless to appeal to tradition or arbitrary ideas of what is or isn't "fair." But then, those history shoutouts seem to be saying "look, I love baseball too, I enjoy this tradition." It kind of feels like "spit in your readers' cake and serve it too," but I recognize that could be sour grapes.

Overall: this is more fast-paced and action-packed than "The Resisters," but draws on similar themes of family and sports as identity even in a fractured world. Again, I'm not really a dystopia person myself, but I want to show the world that there's an audience for weird baseball SF!

Bingo: Standalone for sure. Beyond that...? "Family Ties" is a stretch, "Revolutions and Rebellions" doesn't quite fit either. Kobo is arguably an antihero in that a lot of his motivation is just "getting out of debt and getting the loan sharks off my case," but "my best friend/adopted brother died, I think it was murder, let's set this right' is more of a stock hero mold. I'm probably going to just leave it as "Standalone," which means (at only 7 books in) I'm going to need to be a bit more selective if I want to make this a deliberate goal.

Some books get better as they go because slow worldbuilding in the first half pays off with Chekhov's guns firing in the second half. This book got a lot better as it went, but it's not a novel, it's a collection of short stories in the order they they were originally written, from 1956 or thereabouts to 1993. How much of this is due to Lem's style changing or my tastes is subjective.

Although Lem is a big name in mid-century SF, I'd never actually read him. The book starts with a foreword from Kim Stanley Robinson, who has a lot of praise for Lem's novel "...masterpiece Solaris, which tells the alien story so definitively that it renders unnecessary any more alien stories. Nothing further can be said on this topic, and saying the same thing again in a different way is not very satisfying; possibly it can be said that there should be no more alien stories, that when one feels the urge for such a thing one should simply reread Solaris and learn its lessons again." I understand this is supposed to be a badge of honor, but to me it makes me more likely to disengage (with Robinson at least)--if I happen to like alien stories that have been written in the last six decades, does this just make me a poser?

The first few stories, to me, felt very dry. Lem does a lot of descriptions of "realistic" settings, and to me the prose-to-action or dialogue ratio dragged. In discussion with one of my work buddies, it came up that 1. stories in translation may be more challenging, and 2. stories, especially in older subgenres, that do a lot of idea exploring but not much plot or characterization can be off-putting. But it occurred to me that Cixin Liu matches both of these criteria as well, and I adore his novels (some of his short stories can be flat, though).

But as the anthology continued, Lem's styles branch out to more fantastical settings and story formats; in fact, large portions of "The Hammer" are dialogue-only, between a human and a robot, without even speaker tags.

"Why do you talk like a man?"
"I don't understand."
"Your pronouns are masculine. You don't have a sense of gender, do you?"
"Would you like me to talk like a woman?"
"No. I'm just asking."
"It's more convenient for me like this."
"What do you mean, more convenient?"
"It's to do with an established convention. Certain--preliminary assumptions. I am--psychologically, right now--a man. The abstraction of a man, if you prefer. Certain differences do appear in the network systems--relating to gender."

Some of today's culture-war stuff is too didactic for me, but this was from 1959!!

Credit to Antonia Lloyd-Jones for a sometimes-imposing translation task; this paragraph is typical of "The Journal."

How they imagine this originator, we cannot know, but here too we are free to form various conjectures. If they were modest in their demands and circumspect in their hypostasizing, they would probably recognize that the Being that originated their Totality is imperfect, though not devoid of a sense of humor, a singular one, in that it metamorphoses into mathematical forms, and, by delighting in complex ambiguities, it betrays certain weaknesses: vanity, for example. Because it was partly out of vanity that we conceived all the Cosmoses, dark with chlana, bright with ylem, or others that revolve within our boundlessness, loaded with the persistence of activated alterations, separated by the abysses of our thinking: the fact that this readiness for creation was at least partly assisted by conceit is not one we could deny. We do not know if they are capable of understanding the split between omnipotence and logic that has often troubled us, because we refused to sacrifice one to the other, and endeavored, as much as we could, to preserve moderation, which was not always fully possible.

("Ylem" is actually a thing rather than the author being cheeky and naming something after himself. "Chlana" is a neologism, I think.)

"The Truth" is even more reminiscent of Cixin Liu, both in the matter-of-fact descriptions of weird experimentation, and then a tangent about ball lightning, which was itself the topic of one of Liu's novels! And then "One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Seconds" was an amazing depiction of news and computers in the age of Twitter...that happened to be written in 1976. Robinson had hyped it up in the intro, but given the intro and the first few stories my expectations had fallen off by the time I got to that point, and they were indeed surpassed!

Overall: my silly recommendation would be to read the stories in reverse order, and if you get bored, feel free to stop. ;)

Bingo: it's a gimme for "five or more short stories," but I was kind of hoping to use my Escape Pod flash fiction for that square. We're allowed one mulligan, so maybe I'll look for "works in translation" or something on a previous year's card and swap that out. Or, gasp, I could just read the flash fiction without counting it towards bingo, what a shock ;)

"Elder Race" falls in the subgenre of "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And that's a genre that I like!

Lynesse Fourth Daughter, a princess from the realm of Lannesite, is on the cusp of adulthood, but a mysterious threat is plaguing the border realms. The petitioners who come to court can only describe it as demonic; it's not any form of creature they recognize. But to make matters worse, Lynesse's mother and older sisters don't take it seriously, they assume it's just villagers exaggerating a political threat.

She wasn't a child anymore, and her mother and her sisters and tutors and the snide majordomo took pains to remind her of it, until she had looked in the smudged bronze of the mirror one morning and known it was true. And that things like the glorious ballads of Astresse Regent and her sorcerer were becoming like the bright clothes she could barely fit into, where all her new clothes were severe and stateswomanlike and sombre.

I enjoyed this characterization because, even though I do not have a lot of firsthand experience with sorcerers or even being a princess, I relate to the pressure of feeling like I'm being told: "those stories you enjoyed as a kid? stupid and shallow, time to be a Real Adult now! Real Adults hate Narratives, only boring ambiguity for us!"

So, in one last burst of childhood adventurousness, Lynesse does the obvious thing that any hero of a ballad would; namely, go on a quest to the nearby tower to consult the ancient sorcerer, last of the Elders.

Unfortunately, the sorcerer, Nyr, even though he's intervened on Lannesite's behalf in the past, has no experience with demons. So their back-and-forth of their different perspectives on this world and what might be haunting it sets up the story.

Nyr's society is a lot more technologically advance than Lynesse's, but they haven't figured out a long-term treatment for depression or anxiety.

And I am absolutely intellectually able to agree, yes, all of this great crashing wave of negative feeling is not actually being caused by the things I am pinning it to. This is something generated by my biochemistry, grown in my basal brain and my liver and my gut and let loose to roam like a faceless beast about my body until it reaches my cognitive centres, which look around for that worry du jour and pin that mask on it. I know that, while I have real problems in the world, they are not causing the way I feel within myself, this crushing weight, these sudden attacks of clenching fear, the shakes, the wrenching vertiginous horror that doubles me over. These feelings are just recruiting allies of convenience from my rational mind, like a mob lifting up a momentary demagogue who may be discarded a moment later in favour of a better. Even in the grip of my feelings I can still acknowledge all this, and it doesn't help. Know thyself, the wise man wrote, and yet I know myself, none better, and the knowledge gives me no power.

Even though my symptoms aren't as severe as Nyr's, I think this is a great description of the relationship between "the most recent stimulus that triggered the anxiety" and "the anxiety itself, which would have attacked anyway eventually."

What Nyr does have is a Dissociated Cognition System, a device that filters out his emotions in the medium term so he can make more detached, functional decisions. However, the DCS isn't able to work indefinitely, he needs to intermittently remove it and process his emotions alone. To some extent, I feel like this is sending the message, "your emotions, good and bad, are both part of you, you have to deal with them eventually, but there are technologies that can help make this disease less debilitating." Which...I understand that this is an important message for people in our world to hear (myself included). But in-universe, with all the technological accomplishments of Nyr's world, including highly advanced spacefaring technology that they're very proud (even vain) about, this is still the best they can do? "Sorry, we can't take away the terrible bad feelings without dampening the good feelings too?" That can also be a dangerous/stigmatizing message, and just as a piece of in-universe worldbuilding, it feels a little bit like a cop-out.

The contrast between Nyr and Lynesse's perspectives on the world, and the ways this does or doesn't cause conflict, is nice. There's a lot of emphasis on language, and "just because I say X and you hear X doesn't mean we're necessarily getting the same concept across." And there's some clever foreshadowing in terms of the overall plot resolution. The book is a novella and a fairly quick read; however, that brevity means we don't get to learn a great deal about the demons; for all Nyr's scientific knowledge, there comes a point when even he has to shrug and go "okay, sure, we'll call it 'demons'." In terms of this subgenre, I tend to prefer worlds where we have time and space to dive into the science of even weird, adversarial threats.

But overall, "Elder Race" is a nice addition to a subgenre I really enjoy, so I give it a thumbs-up!

Bingo cards: Standalone, (Hugo) Readalong, Features Mental Health, No Ifs Ands or Buts. (This is a novella, the rules for novellas are "they count, but use discretion and don't go overboard.)

The setting of "A Master of Djinn" is an alternate-history Cairo. In the 1880s, a figure appeared calling himself al-Jahiz (who may or may not be the writer and zoologist of the 800s) appears and magically tapped into the Kaf, the homeland of the djinn. Once-hidden djinn came into public view, and the world in general--and Egypt in particular--dealt with the influx of magic, which brought social and political changes as well as the obvious technological ones. Now it's 1912, and Fatma el-Sha’arawi, an agent for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, goes around investigating mysterious occurrences.

The worldbuilding here is excellent. "Clockwork eunuchs" (robots) serve in coffee shops. Airships sail through the Egyptian skies. So-called "angels" have magical bodies inside enormous mechanical gearworks. Fatma's father was a small-town watchmaker, and the asturlab he made her is an elegant tool in a steampunk era. (I have not read a lot in this subgenre and I know that some people will get into catfights about "steampunk is inherently colonialist and therefore problematic!"/"no my steampunk is deconstructionist, so it's great!"/"it was always deconstructionist, you didn't invent the gear here!" This book is a Hugo nominee in 2022 by a historian of African studies. Obviously it's going to be post-post-post-colonial everything. When I say "steampunk" in this context, I mean "has cool aesthetics like clockwork eunuchs and airships and mechanical angels," as well as "alternate technology leading to alternate history" (rather than the other way around). And even though I'm not super familiar with this genre, I definitely enjoyed the aesthetics of this book.)

Fatma is also a sympathetic character. The Ministry of Alchemy etc. often dovetails with the police, because they often find themselves investigating criminal activity. But, as the book makes clear, the police are not necessarily a force for good in the lives of poor and working-class people! Fatma wants to investigate and, potentially, bring suspects into custody without violence; she's easy to root for. The book begins with an unnecessary first chapter, describing the murder of a bunch of English colonialists from one of their POVs, and introducing us to the killer's persona and their MO--they claim to be al-Jahiz himself, and can clearly demonstrate supernatural abilities. But everything we learn about what how the killer works is something Fatma finds out later while investigating, and I didn't think we needed the perspective of the colonialist to realize "oh these guys are terrible and their deaths are not gonna be a loss." (See "Hugo nominee," above.)

But, when supernatural forces are clashing, the role that Fatma can play is a very limited one. Almost all the plot would have proceeded in the same way if she wasn't present; she's reactive, but not able to defeat the killer on her own. Even with the help of a love interest who's great in a fight, knows lots of useful informants, and feels almost too good to be true. So the parts where Fatma does take agency feel a bit deus ex machina in that context.

Then there's the procedural plot structure. Right from the beginning, we know that the killer is claiming to be al-Jahiz. So there are basically only two options; al-Jahiz really has returned, or someone is going around pretending to be him. Fatma defaults to the second option and takes it basically as fact, but this feels unsupported. al-Jahiz had unparalleled supernatural powers; who's to say he couldn't reappear after a forty-year gap? If he appears among the poor and oppressed, pointing out the ways that modernity has failed them even as it's benefitted the rich--well, that seems plausible for a radical world-shaker? If he kills a bunch of English dudes with magic--well, he wasn't known for violence last time around, but again, they're colonizers, who's gonna miss them?

Then when Fatma finally finds evidence pointing to a contemporary who is not al-Jahiz, it feels like the book drags and avoids pointing out confirmatory details we've already been made aware of several times. But then there's another twist, and while smarter people than I saw it coming earlier than I did, for me the "oh, aha" moment came at a good time (shortly before Fatma figures it out) to make me feel like that was a success.

There are a couple other of plot devices that are slow at first but gradually pay off. There turns out to be more to the aforementioned love interest than meets the eye, which is nice, given that the character felt somewhat overpowered otherwise. One minor character turns out to have a mundane secret that has no relevance to anything else in the plot (except to point out how Fatma sometimes doesn't notice things, pointing the way to other twists? I guess? that character confused me). And for a book titled "A Master of Djinn," that includes djinn sometimes being polite and other times being violently OOC, it takes the characters way too long to realize that...the killer...might have powers to control djinn. :O (Um, spoilers.)

Intertextual bonus: one class of djinn mentioned is the daeva. And in a discussion of the One Thousand and One Nights, the characters talk about the story "The City of Brass," Both of which explain some things about S. A. Chakraborty's "The City of Brass"/Daevabad trilogy! There's also a very serious-business librarian that I wouldn't be surprised to learn was a Discworld shoutout.

The Ministry has "mechanized screens of black and gold ten-pointed stars and kites," which reminded me of Penrose tiling--and there's a name for the Islamic architecture tiling patterns!

It would be boring if the aftermath of "the whole world has magic now" is "everyone's relative power levels stay the same;" instead, some countries fear and suppress magic while others embrace it, which leads Egypt to become one of the new world powers. (Women already have the right to vote in 1912, ahead of the UK and US!) But personally, I would be interested in more glimpses of what magic looks like elsewhere. (Germany, for instance, has goblins instead of djinn, but the US oppresses magic, as well as people who make magic with their music.)

Angels are funny:

Two big men in white robes and turbans stood guarding an entrance. Each held long lances ending in a gold crescent and Star of David crowned by a pointed cross. Angels liked to cover all their bases.

And that's without even getting into the reconstructionist ancient Egyptian religions that have made a comeback since the arrival of al-Jahiz' magic.

This is the first novel in Clark's "Dead Djinn" series, but there are several callbacks to "on Fatma's previous case..." which reference A Dead Djinn in Cairo, an earlier novella. In this particular case, the callbacks made me feel like it might have helped to read that one first, so I went back to it after the novel. And it turns out that that has most of the worldbuilding aspects I thought were neat, without the draggy "who is the real al-Jahiz?" or "when will Fatma's actions impact the wider plot?" slowdowns of the full-length novel. So my recommendation would be, start with the novella. And if you feel like you need even more of Fatma's Cairo, then try the novel, with the understanding that its cool factor-to-page count ratio will be smaller.

Bingo squares: Historical SFF, (Hugo) readalong, author uses initials (in his pseudonym, for hard mode!), urban fantasy, set in Africa, author of color, shapeshifters. I foresee this book showing up on many, many bingo cards!