primeideal | Entries tagged with books: sff bingo

The rec for this book described it as divided into four sections for four women POV characters--a soldier, a scholar, a poet, and a socialite--and their perspectives on a war/rebellion, with effective worldbuilding, beautiful prose, and increasing intensity as each POV gives different perspectives on the same events. Okay, sold!

This is set in the same universe as Samatar's "A Stranger in Olondria." I have not read that one. It's possible I might have gotten more out of this if I had, however, there are plenty of reviews saying this one works as a standalone, so I'm reviewing it as a standalone.

Premise: Olondria is an on-again, off-again empire, built from three closely-related peoples--the Laths, Nain, and Kestenya. The Laths consider themselves favored of the gods (unfortunately, one of the side effects of divine intervention is creepy vampires), and try to conquer/ally with the other two. Their default line of succession is from the king to his sister's son, and only to the king's son if he has no nephews of his own, which allows for neat political dynamics (Arthuriana vibes, nice!) The feredhai are nomadic people from Kestenya, who resent the concept of land ownership and other border controls imposed by authorities with written rules. A couple generations ago, one of the rebellious Kestenya leaders grew too horrified at the Laths' slaughter of civilians, and betrayed his allies to seek a peaceful resolution to the war. In return, he was granted the Lath princess' hand in marriage, and the new royal family is a blend of Laths, Kestenya, and Nain families, with a pair of sisters marrying a pair of brothers to create a double cousin dynamic. Meanwhile, a new ascetic religious movement, the "Cult of the Stone," has emerged and gained influence among the ruling elite; the devotees try to translate inscriptions off an ancient stone, and put them together to build a scripture focused around the value of reading and writing while avoiding sensual pleasures or wealth, while ignoring any texts that don't seem to fit the austere tone.

Prince Dasya is the heir to the throne; Siski and Tavis (aka Tav) are his cousins. Tav dresses up in boys' clothes to join the army and fight against the Brogyars, but becomes disillusioned with war and empire, and later falls in love with Seren, a feredhai poet. Tav and Dasya plot to start a revolution to bring down the Olondrian empire and the Cult of the Stone and win independence for Kestenya. Results are mixed.

What I just summarized is much more straightforward and linear than the way the book is actually presented. Each section is highly nonlinear in a kind of free association way: one character smells or sees or hears something that evokes of her past, and it abruptly jumps around between timeframes. There's a lot of descriptive prose, but to me, it felt more like "throwing a lot of words at the wall and seeing what sticks." Sentence fragments. Like this. No verbs. Or run-on sentences that talk about this war and then the war two generations ago and then the war described by In-Universe Scholar in her epic poem, "War Is Hell," and then a vague reminder there are vampires but that's probably not very important. I like in-universe documentation when it's done well, but here it didn't feel like it was adding much, just a vibe-based barrage of names.

I'm semi-randomly going to quote a representative example from each of the four sections:

Already it was spreading into the highlands: rumors reached us of a carriage waylaid on the road to Bron, two Olondrians slain, tiny bells found in their mouths. Bells, for prayer. I wondered how Fadhian had received the news—if he, so cautious, was ready to hear the words Kestenya Rukebnar. Delicious motto of the traitorous dead. Sometimes I could not sleep, thinking of how I would say those words to him. Kestenya Rukebnar. In their silver resonance I would be revealed: not merely an eccentric noblewoman amusing herself with highland games, but a link between rebellious Kestenya, the rebellious Valley, and the rebellious north—a key, a chance, a bell, a sword.

When Ivrom was small he dreamt of gorging himself, as rich children do, on pigs made of almond paste. One year on the Feast of Birds he stole a handful of nuts from a vendor’s cart and was beaten and locked in the coal cellar for two days. The sweetness of cashews, their unctuous buttery flesh, the way they collapsed between the teeth as if in longing to be eaten, combined in his mind with the darkness and cold of the cellar and the struggle he waged with his body before he gave in and relieved himself in a corner. The shame of it, the stinging scent of the lye his father made him use to scrub out the cellar afterward, his terrible helplessness, his rage—all of these insinuated themselves into the atmosphere of the Feast of Birds: into sweetmeats, the worship of Avalei, and the spring.

Let’s say and let’s get it out that your grandfather was Uskar of Tevlas who signed the shameful treaty that ended the last, unsuccessful war for independence, that he was a pawn and a dupe and also a traitor who knew very well what he did and a mystic in thrall to a man with ribs like gullies in a drought. Your grandfather prayed with the great Olondrian visionary who made your grandfather sleep on planks that brought out sores on his soft and timid body, and my grandfather slept in a mass grave on the road to Viraloi where he was hung by the heels with seventeen others until they died of thirst. Let’s say that. Let’s write it.

Home. The hook where she hangs her cloak, the threadbare rug in the hall. Light from an inner room, translated light. It is the glow of the library fire reflected in a mirror and flung out here, to this hall with the flaking walls. Walking past, she drags her fingernail along the plaster and a white chip drops. A little bit each day.

Tav says that she's not really good with words, she's just a soldier, but I personally found all of the sections to be more concerned with trying to convey a sense of "poetic" prose than giving distinct character voices.

The closest "comparison" book I would think of for this one is Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay, which has vivid prose and also deals with the pros and cons of trying to overthrow an empire in the name of older nations, outsider POVs on the prince who's trying to take back his homeland, and evocative descriptions of in-universe religion and lore. Tigana, however, has more of a sense of humor, and the prose--while rich--is more straightforward both on a sentence level and overall chronological level.

(On the other hand, "Tigana" also has a creepy but pointless sibling incest plot; "Winged Histories" has a complicated cousin incest plot that actually goes somewhere. So advantage to "Winged Histories" on this specific comparison.)

In describing feredhai music, Seren notes that "You will have noticed that all the great songs are sad." Nobody in this book spends a lot of time being happy, and while I understand that war is hell, when it's just unrelenting misery it makes it difficult to care! Tav's sympathetic backstory is "my terrible aunt threw my book of women soldiers in the fire." Tialon makes up a trauma-porn backstory for her father, then admits it's a total fabrication because he never told her anything about himself. Seren loves Tav...except that her people are warriors who die while Tav's people are spoiled sellouts, because empire is terrible and destroys everything it touches. Maybe we're supposed to believe they can change the narrative, but I'm not confident! And Siski has nothing else to live for, so she might as well die with her cousin, except maybe she's not actually going to die, maybe it's a new beginning. Maybe. Imagine. Perhaps. Ambiguity. All vibes. The loose ends that "Tigana" left unresolved were frustrating; "Winged Histories"' weren't, because I didn't really care in the first place.

Bingo: Hidden Gem, Down with the System, Book In Parts, was a previous Readalong, Author of Color, Small Press, LGBTQIA protagonist.

This is a hard copy anthologizing/reissuing "The Warrior's Apprentice," "The Mountains of Mourning," (novella) and "The Vor Game." It turns out my family had owned a hard copy for eons but I'd never tried it, probably because it was part of a series and I wasn't sure where to start? IDK, but having read the Cordelia books I was very ready to jump back into this world!

"The Warrior's Apprentice" follows Miles after he fails the entrance exams to the Imperial military academy. Because of the poison he was exposed to in utero, he's topped out at 4'9" with very brittle bones; however, as the son of Cordelia and Aral, he's a natural military genius. He takes some time off visiting his grandmother on Beta Colony, and likes this plan because he thinks he might be able to find the place where the mother of his childhood friend/crush is buried, and impress her, after their computer hacking attempts fall short. The "seventeen-year-olds' skewed priorities" premise is fun. However, Miles quickly fails upward, and winds up accidentally acquiring a few, then several, then many, mercenaries loyal to him. This quote is actually from "Mountains of Mourning," but it sums up "Warrior's Apprentice" to a tee:

Holding two deuces and the joker. He must surely either concede or start bluffing like crazy...

(The Tumblr post about "you ever fuck up so hard you accidentally overthrow a dynasty" seems relevant here, although Miles is more concerned about keeping his emperor on the throne than deposing him.)

Bothari, who we met in the Cordelia books, is Miles' lifelong bodyguard (he carried Miles around before he learned to walk, at age four and a half). Early on, Miles realizes the horrors of war, when he orders Bothari to torture a captured pilot until he spills his secrets; Bothari removes the man's brain implants, which winds up killing him, and Miles carries that on his conscience forever afterwards. Later, we get closure of sorts to Bothari's plotline; again, I'm not entirely thrilled with the way he goes back and forth between "a character who makes bad decisions but has the potential to grow beyond them" and "Cordelia's dog." (He and Miles have a conversation about "hey if I die you'll bring my body back to bury at your mother's feet, like a dog, right? "...????" "Your father said I could. He gave me his word as Vorkosigan." Miles, speaking for the reader: "okay, when my father and I give our word as Vorkosigan that means it has to be done, that is a long-running theme of this series, but also why are we having this conversation.")

Bujold is very good at "leaving out the parts people skip." I thought the Cordelia books were a little crisper in terms of "one thing following into the next;" these novels are a little more "things happening to Miles/him failing upwards," so they don't quite rise to those heights. However, "Mountains," and "Weatherman," the novella that got turned into the opening chapters of "Vor Game," are very tautly paced!

"Mountains" sees Miles journey into the Dendarii mountains (namesake of the mercenary troop) to investigate a case of infanticide; an infant who was born with a cleft lip was found dead a few days later, and the mother suspects the father. The Barrayarans' extreme prejudice towards "mutants" means that Miles is a very prominent symbol of change, and Aral putting him on the case makes that even more prominent. (I guess it's hinted at that Barrayaran was inadvertently separated from the rest of the galaxy early in their terraforming process, so evolution went awry and everyone's inherited a fear of "mutants" ever since, but I wanted a little more about that.)

What's powerful about this is the relationship that Miles has with his late grandfather, Piotr, and the shadow he casts over the story. Piotr was very prejudiced against Miles, but Miles still burns offerings for him. This lends a stark contrast to the way the mystery plot resolves, and the fact that Miles can speak so highly of him says a lot about his own character:

"He was called the last of the Old Vor, but really, he was the first of the new. He changed with the times, from the tactics of horse cavalry to that of flyer squadrons, from swords to atomics, and he changed successfully. Our present freedom from the Cetagandan occupation is a measure of how fiercely he could adapt, then throw it all away and adapt again. At the end of his life he was called a conservative, only because so much of Barrayar had streamed past him in the direction he had led, prodded, pushed, and pointed all his life."

"Weatherman" sees Miles sent to be a weather officer on an Arctic island where infantrymen train so he can learn to work with, and under, ordinary people who don't share his intellect. Hazing ensues. So do even worse problems, and while Miles is really trying not to rock the boat (so he can get promoted to an actual spaceship), he winds up having to defy authority anyway--on behalf of people he has good reason to dislike! Bujold's afterword (in this edition anyway) has some fascinating backstory about how she came up with some of these themes.

Anyway, after that, it goes back to mercenary shenanigans, and again, I feel like this part is not quite as compelling but still very good. There's a great scene when one officer in the mostly-male Dendarii complains about how someone else betrayed them and took over, and a woman officer politely points out "actually, if the rest of you had paid attention to how he treats me, maybe you could have assessed his character earlier." Their different reads of the situation say a lot about how sexism can inadvertently take hold in institutions, without being too heavy-handed about it. Another very funny and too real situation: the bigwigs are like "our security systems are classified and airgapped, how could anyone have exfiltrated data?" "Well, it just takes one person who's looking up information on the classified network and also willing to talk to someone outside via the unclassified network." "Are you saying we have to be on guard against insider threats, too?!?" Being a spy is hard :(

A few more highlights:

"I wish I'd known more about this [his unusual prenatal situation] as a kid, I could have agitated for two birthdays, one when Mother had the cesarian, and one when they finally popped me out of the replicator."

"If he gets extradited home, the penalty's quartering. Technically."
"That doesn't sound so bad." Hathaway shrugged. "He's been quartered in my recycling center for two months. It could hardly be worse. What's the problem?"
"Quartering," said Miles. "Uh--not domiciled. Cut in four pieces."
Hathaway stared, shocked. "But that would kill him!" He looked around, and wilted under the triple, unified, and exasperated glares of the three Barrayarans.
"Betans," said Baz disgustedly. "I can't stand Betans."

The boys, once the facts penetrated their sleepiness, thought it was all just great, and wanted to return to the tent and lie in wait for the next assassin. Ma Karal, shrill and firm, herded them indoors instead and made them bed down in the main room. It was an hour before they stopped complaining at the injustice of it and went back to sleep.

"I saw casualties in Vordarian's Pretendership before you were born--"
I was a casualty in Vordarian's Pretendership before I was born, thought Miles, his irritation growing wilder.

This is way too real, please tell me there is fanfiction of it:

Miles knew about criminal orders, every academy man did. His father came down personally and gave a one-day seminar on the topic to the seniors at midyear. He'd made it a requirement to graduate, by Imperial fiat back when he'd been Regent. What exactly constituted a criminal order, when and how to disobey it. With vid evidence from various historical test cases and bad examples, including the politically disastrous Solstice Massacre, that had taken place under the admiral's own command. Invariably one or more cadents had to leave the room to throw up during that part.
The other instructors hated Vorkosigan's Day. Their classes were subtly disrupted for weeks afterward. One reason Admiral Vorkosigan didn't wait till any later in the year; he almost always had to make a return trip a few weeks after, to talk some disturbed cadet out of dropping out at almost the finale of his schooling.

One question: Cordelia is in-universe famous, at least on Beta Colony, their version of history credits her with killing Vorrutyer (which she didn't do) and singlehandedly changing the tide of the war (which she did). Miles travels under the name "Mr. Naismith" as his mercenary identity, and this somehow doesn't raise any questions. I assume the intended in-universe explanation is "she's not actually that famous beyond Beta," but I can think of several other theories:

"Naismith" is like the "Smith" of Beta, "Mr. Naismith" is everyone's "John Doe" name
"Naismith" is a rare name, but it's everyone's "George Washington" name because of Cordelia, everyone realizes it's an alias but it's the obvious alias an idealistic Betan would pick
everyone assumes he named himself after this Naismith for the irony because he's so small!

The cover art is a double-sided Jack (the playing card) with one view of Ensign Vorkosigan and the other direction as Mr. Naismith. I can't tell if his facial features are supposed to be distorted/strangely proportioned because of his disabilities? At the risk of being a prejudiced Barrayaran I must admit he doesn't look very attractive to me :/ but I'll try to keep an open mind, appearance isn't everything!

Bingo: "Warrior's Apprentice" and "Mountains of Mourning" were originally published in the 80s; the former was also a previous readalong.

I'm not really into horror, but I kickstarted this anthology published by Apex, gotta support SFF short fiction presses :D

The standout story for me was "The Salt," by Lavie Tidhar and Nir Yaniv, set at the end of the Dead Sea scrolls era (parallel with early Christianity). Agent XII is an operative from the Imperial Office of Incognita Natura; what others understand to be divine, world-shaking events, he interprets as punch-clock bureaucratic issues.

From there I made my way by land to Jerusalem, which sits atop the mountains and is a small, dismal sort of place, filled with rebellious Jews, dodgy expatriate Romans, dangerous Nabatean merchants, and lecherous Greeks--in short, a place much like any other in the Empire.

This forms the frame story to the recollections of "Joseph Son of Amram," who comes to the Qumran community as a spy for the religious authorities in the city.

Various messiahs in different times, anywhere between the return of the Israelites to Canaan and the completion of the second temple, claimed to have prevented a calamity, to have argued with God and averted the end of the world.
Others claimed that the end of the world has already happened.
As weeks and months passed, the pattern became clearer. The world has already ended. Numerous times.
The world ended with Noah. The world ended with Lot.

I'd recently heard a discussion about how Abraham's argument to spare Sodom and Gomorrah is in some ways the quintessential story of the Jewish scriptures--arguing with God for the sake of righteousness--so it was neat to see that theme reframed through a horror lens.

There are a lot of recurring themes--the real horror is misogyny/racism/small towns dying out and being left behind by economic change; infodumping legends about the backstory. A couple stories avoided the "here is the legendary version of this town's past" trope by intercutting between a past and a present-day storyline, with parallel themes. I think this plot device can be effective, in that it does a lot in a relatively short format, but there's no need to italicize every single flashback when the flashbacks amount to half the story!

Shoutouts to "Map of the World" by Pan Morigan, which displays world maps with many of the location names penciled in, surrounded by evocative images from the stories; a violinist, a panther, a woman gagged with soil and vines in front of a narrow cave entrance, generations of ancestors who continue to watch over living generations.

Bingo: Published in 2025, Five+ Short Stories, Small Press...presumably Hidden Gem but it might still count as "new release" so probably not that one.

(This part will be more applicable when I crosspost to Reddit:) I know there have been a lot of takes of the form “here are the parts of Wind and Truth that didn’t click for me,” and I suspect this is going to overlap with many of them, so sorry. With a book/series of this scope it’s hard to really do a coherent/organized review, so this is mostly going to be bullet points of things that worked and didn’t work for me. My overall enjoyment of the series isn’t necessarily a function of how many bullet points are on either side.

( Just walk out! Hit da bricks! )

Bingo: Perfect fit for Knights and Paladins (the hard mode is “the character has an oath or a promise to keep,” lolololol), A Book In Parts (hard mode, four or more parts), Gods and Pantheons.

There are some works that are like "literary fiction author thinks they're inventing the wheel, but if they had read more widely in speculative genres, they would realize they're not inventing the wheel." There are others that are like "science fiction for people who don't like science fiction." I don't think this is either of those, exactly; I think it's a litfic novel, for a litfic target audience, which happens to use a speculative trope of the time loop.

Tara Selter is a rare book dealer on a business trip to Paris. She is reliving November 18th over and over again. When the book starts, she's on day 121 of the cycle (but about the first half of Book I is summarizing the first 120). Sometimes she tries to explain her experience to her husband Thomas, but he never remembers it, because, time loop.

This book is relatively short (161 pages, but it's only Part I of a seven-part series being translated from Danish); it was a Christmas gift; it completes my bingo card; it might be appealing to litfic people. Can I recommend it to SF readers? Not really!

The Other Valley didn't have any dialogue tags because French is like that sometimes. "On the Calculation of Volume" has no dialogue tags because there is no dialogue. At all. It's hinted at in summaries. Tara and Thomas talked about the time loop and they talked about what to have for dinner. They had sex on the living room rug. They talked about collecting Roman coins. It's just all like this.

Some time loop stories have a getting-together romantic arc to them; in "Groundhog Day," Phil tries to change to become a better person, and in doing so, become worthy of Rita. Others have kind of a puzzle-solving aspect to them--discovering that another character is experiencing the same loop, for instance. "Volume" starts with an established relationship, that frays apart over the first few months, as Tara comes to believe that the gap between them is becoming too wide to bridge. Early on, they experiment with the loop, and find that it doesn't have rigid rules; it doesn't start exactly at midnight, sometimes if Thomas makes an effort to stay up late he can stay in the same "day" as Tara, but eventually he drifts off just for a moment and resets. Is this "litfic authors think that hard SF-type systems are shallow and gimmicky?" Maybe I'm cynical...

By the time the book begins, Tara has retreated to staying in her guest room and hiding from Thomas; she's memorized all the sounds of the house and knows when to get up and move around so he won't hear her.

I hear Thomas's footsteps around the house. There is hardly any distance between us. I count days, but they no longer make the distance greater. I have found my way into his day. We move as one, in harmony, we are playing a duet, or we are an entire orchestra. We have the rain and the shifting light. We have the sound of cars driving past, of the birds in the garden, we have the water gushing through the pipes in the house.

This kind of "duet" imagery is sweet. But then she realizes that Thomas' physical presence resets every loop; food he's eaten is back on the shelf the next November 18. Hers, however, does not; she can move around and change locations, and she'll wake up in the same place she went to sleep. A burn on her hand she acquired the first time around slowly heals and scars over the successive days. And most ominously, food she's eaten stays gone, leading to shame about consuming resources or "taking up space," so to speak.

I know that if I take to foraging in gardens I will be stealing from the birds, the worms.

Is this an evocation of the shame of living in the developed world in the 21st century? Is it worse for women? Who knows. Tara's physical "volume" is something bad, and it's easiest when she can retreat into nothingness between Thomas's noises, and repeat the same tiny sensory details. Again, maybe I'm uncharitable, but the point seems to be "being alive, taking up space, trying to discover how the world works, trying to communicate with people, is agonizing in general and the time loop just makes it more apparent, the best you can hope for is listening to the same birdsong for the three hundredth time in a row."

Towards the end, Tara glimpses the "underlying" weather that might exist if she'd lived through a full year and it was really September or October again, and decides that she needs to go back to Paris in time for the 366th November 18, the anniversary of the "real" November 18. Because...vibes. Will it work? IDK, but there are six volumes to go!

Bingo: First in a Series; the English translation was published in 2024 (but I tend to go by date of original publication for these squares)

Wrap-up post coming soon and with it my plans for the next few months ;)

This is a book that I'd seen around a couple times and neglected to pick up because I wasn't sure it would fit for any bingo squares (I know, I know, this has overall been very good for getting me to read fiction but does have some perverse incentives). But I'm doing well enough I figured it'd be worth a read even if I couldn't gamify it, and you know what, I'm very glad I picked it up because it's very well-crafted. Having just bounced off a book with a lot of jarring sentence-level constructions, I found this to be well-written without being too heavy-handed or preachy overall.

This book is set in the fictional empire of Becar, and the fundamental conceit is society's belief in reincarnation. Depending on your deeds in this life, you will be reborn as another kind of animal, in an endless cycle of death and rebirth (there isn't an emphasis on breaking the cycle or achieving nirvana). However, there's one dishonorable exception; the kehoks are chimera-like monsters that are made from the most evil souls, and basically only become other kehoks, never returning to the normal balance of creation. The augurs are the religious class, selected from children with pure souls and trained to read other people's souls so that they can report on whether others are on the right track to a healthy rebirth. In Becar, kehoks are used as race animals in an important bread-and-circuses type of entertainment that placates the populace.

What works well is that so much revolves around belief in reincarnation, augurs, and their temple structure, and it shapes everyone in ways that come off as realistic.

A young racer talking to her kehok:

"What did you do to be reborn like this?" Raia asked. "You're lionlike, so you must have hunted the innocent in your past life. Were you a murderer? An assassin? Did you seek people out to be cruel to them? Did you hunt with words or knives? Your body is metal, so you must have been cold. Unfeeling. A hard man. Did people hate you? Did you hate them? Both?"
She knew she was babbling, but the words wouldn't seem to stop. "Did you know you would come back like this? Did you ever try to change? You know that's what augurs are for--to help you make the right choices and help you lead an honorable life. They could have prevented this from happening to you, if you'd let them, which you obviously didn't. Why not? I mean, I know why my parents don't ask augurs to help them."

A young temple student talking to an adult augur:

"...can you please describe this Raia?"
"She has no bumpy edges," Shalla said. "Some shimmering lines. Overlapping ovals, but they are full of holes." The holes, she knew from her studies, were from fear. The lines were from choices not yet committed to. But the ovals indicated she was on the right path. A truly balanced soul would be all circles, with no sharp or rough edges.
Augur Clari graced her with a slight smile. "Tell me her appearance when not seen with the inner sight."

An exhausted trainer meeting one of her foolhardy ex-racers:

She hoped the little idiot didn't die in the race. While that would teach him a valuable lesson, he most likely wouldn't remember it in his next life.

So the specific plot here--and hear me out, because I recognize it's a weird comparison--is a little bit like "The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi" meets "The Goblin Emperor." On the one hand, we have Tamra, a washed-up racer who's now unsuccessfully trying to pivot into training future racers. All she cares about is making enough money to pay off her debts and make sure her daughter, Shalla, can continue her prestigious augur lessons at temple school. Her eccentric patron, Lady Evara, is willing to support her financially, but only to a point. So she has to make do with cheap kehoks, and racers, that nobody else will take. Like Amina, she's basically like "I'm too old for this, I have so many aches and pains, I only care about my kid." And then she meets Raia, a young woman who's trying to escape an arranged marriage and is willing to do basically anything else...

Meanwhile, in the capital, Prince Dar is waiting to be coronated after the untimely death of his brother, Emperor Zarin. Like Maia, Dar is a decent person thrust into power unexpectedly; his brother was a good man, he misses him, and he doesn't really know what to do--especially because, since he hasn't yet been coronated, he doesn't have any authority to sign laws or order soldiers about. No wonder the populace is disgruntled, they have no government. Why can't they just coronate him already? Well, that gets back to the worldbuilding. When Dar and his advisor, the devout Augur Yorbel, are introduced as POV characters, the foreshadowing of "hmm, I wonder how these two plotlines will intersect" felt a little obvious, like, we can't go 400 more pages with this being strung out as a "mystery"? Not to worry, the characters do communicate and move things along.

There are also a couple other POVs, like the ambassador from a neighboring kingdom trying to take advantage of Becar's political instability. But he hates it in Becar because, well, he doesn't like sand. It's course and rough and irritating. And it gets everywhere. Lest you think I'm exaggerating:

Inside the palace, in a suite with a view of the Aur River, Ambassador Usan of Ranir decided he despised sand. It wormed its way in everywhere, making even the finest silks feel gritty when the wind blew, which seemed to be all the blasted time. When he'd first arrived in Becar, he had found it mildly irritating. But now, he reflected, he loathed it.

The stakes of the races are a little contrived--like, Raia has to win at least one of her qualifiers to make it to the major championships, but oh no, the financial situation is so dire that they have to win Everything Ever? Except if they don't? And then in the championships-before-the-grand-final she racks up a bunch of wins but...why does she need to, there are twenty racers in the grand final, are they still having money problems? That isn't clearly communicated. And while "if the augurs weren't really as incorruptible and pure as we all believe, that would rattle the foundations of society" is handled well, Tamra's counterargument is "I don't worry about the next life, I just protect the people who I care about in this one," and...I don't think that's enough, either.

Similarly, there are some broader themes about "even if individual parents, or "parental" beings, truly want what's best for their children, good intentions that lead to paternalistic manipulation can blow up spectacularly," that worked well for me. On the other hand, there's also a theme of "to excel in racing you have to put aside past and future or everything else, just live in the moment, the moment is all," but at the same time...these people have important needs and concerns for the future, that's what motivates them to do this dangerous job. Maybe a distinction without a difference.

Overall, though, I think this was a really good example of taking one or two core worldbuilding ideas, extrapolating them a few steps, and exploring the consequences!

Bingo: Multi-POV.

Almost done with bingo, so this is again the winter-vacation acquire-books-from-a-different-library phase. ;)

The titular character, Exaran ("Ex") is a young member of the Hunters' Guild, who travel throughout Suyoram (fantasy Thailand) hunting demons and other monsters, collecting their body parts to sell to hedgewitches and shamans or bring back to the guild headquarters to prove their accomplishments. This would usually be the place where I link to some Wikipedia articles describing these creatures' basis in Thai lore, but Wikipedia has become increasingly garish, so let's settle for Wiktionary articles about krasue and kuman.

The phi hunters were once respected by the monarchy and common people alike, but the king is increasingly trying to "modernize," following foreigners' example; Sangha (Buddhist monks) have a place at court, and so does a sorcerer (necromancer?) but hedgewitches and phi hunters are losing status. As the title suggests, Ex worries that he might be the last of his kind. And there's a mix of Buddhist and Hindu influences in worldbuilding, that takes seriously the themes of reincarnation and karma--what does it mean for the same souls to be born again and again, in different bodies, across different lifetimes? These concepts, and the different magic users' distrust and rivalries, are where the book shines.

Unfortunately, the book could have benefited from more thorough proofreading. There are a lot of dangling modifiers/weird subject-verb constructions; you know what the author meant, but after a while it becomes increasingly jarring on a sentence level. One example, from a flashback/nightmare scene: "Skin peels back into bones, opens the case and sees a stack of gleaming blades piled high as timber." There are also cases of "spellcheck won't fix this:" "[The horse] snorted every time Ex pushed him over a cantor." (Interreligious worldbuilding!) Two pages later: "The innkeeper spoke in a bouncing island accent, probably from the Kutsu Aisles." That one even shows up on the map at the beginning of the story so maybe it's deliberate, but in conjunction with everything else... :S

The main plot is an escort quest, with Ex accompanying a woman named Arinya who's on the run from the capital. Arinya is, among other things, an experienced boxer, and saves Ex's life on a couple occasions. But the relationship plot feels like kind of tropey box-checking. There was only one bed, check. Let's go out and enjoy a night on the town, probably nothing will happen despite all the bad guys chasing us, check. Oh no we both want to have sex with each other but we can't because...reasons...so let's miscommunicate about it terribly instead of just explaining that you're under a hex, check.

There are a couple glimpses of other POVs; a krasue trying to break the cycle of reincarnation and become human was a nice contrast to Ex's worldview of "you can't negotiate with monsters." But some of the backstory (she was a spoiled aristocrat! his parents were rebels persecuted by the crown!) felt more infodumpy than earned emotion. And while the themes of "letting go" seemed to be handled poignantly in the context of reincarnation, the epilogue felt kind of rushed in contrast. Also, I personally found that some of the modern curse words/vocabulary pulled me out of the story.

Bingo: there's a lot! Under the Surface (not much, but there are secret tunnels and a creepy evil lair); Dreams; Epilogues; Indie Publisher; romance as a main plot line? (I'd argue); Multi-POV; Published 2024; Author of Color; I'm not using it for Judge a Book by Its Cover but I think it would be a good choice, you could probably make a case for Eldritch Creatures with the devas; Reference Materials (the map with the "Aisles").

J really loved this one and I like time travel, so sure, let's try.

Odile's home is a valley that's part of a string of time-shifted versions of itself stretching east and west. If you go east far enough, you see the same town twenty years in the future; go west, and you see the same town twenty years in the past. Because of the potential for paradox, travel is strictly regulated by each copy's version of the "Conseil" (it's Francophone, although the book is originally written in English). The only valid reason to go is to surrepitiously look on someone that you're grieving (or won't live to see) in your own present. But in her senior year of high school, Odile inadvertently glimpses two masked visitors and realizes they're the older versions of her classmate Edme's parents, which means he's probably going to die soon. Causality problems ensue. Then there's a timeskip, and we meet thirty-five-year-old Odile, whose career hasn't gone the way people expected...

One thing that will come up quickly with this book: there are no quotation marks, because...literary fiction? Everyone just talks like this, Odile said.
I understand, said Edme, that's how it is in our valley.
This was a minus for me, but not a dealbreaker.

There's a lot of descriptive prose about nature in the valley, and sometimes this shades into thematic discussions of time:

I'd given myself a rule: to carve only in the field, from observation alone, never from memory or a pencil sketch. Thus, I would keep adding to this particular block while I was posted to this sector, then store it away until my schedule rotated me back here in a few months. It was impractical in every way, but it was my game for passing the days. Because of it, a single carving often took me a year to finish. In the final product, four seasons occupied the same landscape, like a distillation of time.

Jo gave the chisel a dubious glance and took a drag from her cigarette. Happy birthday, mine's in July. Thirty-six, good god, it's practically forty. What is it with age, how sometimes a number seems normal, and other times it seems completely bizarre?
I ventured a laugh. I don't know. It feels normal to me. I guess we always have our whole lives to prepare for the age that we are.

And early on there's a couple lines about "why does everyone assume I'm super smart and good at school?" "...because you're quiet? The shy ones always have big brains." "That's not how it works!" that were amusing.

But what I really enjoyed was the idea of a training program for future conseillers; students read case studies, study the principles of allowing visits, and argue for why someone should or should not be allowed a visit. They even do the "close your eyes and put your head on the desk, we'll vote by raised hands and secret ballot" thing! Candidates are winnowed down until only a few potential apprentices remain. So it's a combination of "magic school" and "compete against other students and eliminate them" (nonviolently) tropes, but in a very unique setting.

...L.M. had been a real person, no longer with us, whose petition had been approved by his local Conseil in Est 1 but denied here. That is not unusual, Ivret commented. She went on to describe how gendarmes relayed communications between the valleys, leaving sealed petitions in a safebox in the mountains and sending verdicts back the same way. Decisions about visits had to be unanimous, so L.M. had never gotten his trip. As the others raised their hands to ask more questions, my mind drifted off, through the oval window and over the square, past the marina to the hospice by the lake. I imagined L.M. keeping vigil at his wife's deathbed, dabbing her brow, listening to her panted breath. Hoarsely vowing that he would see her again in twenty years if he was well enough to make the journey, unaware that this had just been rejected in the neighboring Hôtel de Ville.

The theme of simultaneity comes up a lot, especially in the back half; the contrast of "what adult Odile is doing" and "what teenage Odile was doing twenty years ago" would be an effective split-screen movie.

The valley has radios; they use our world's names for months and days of the week; they have violins and printed books and other 20th-century technology. But there's no reference to what exists north or south of the strip of valleys. The lack of interest in worldbuilding is a bigger problem for me than it was for J. To some extent, the Conseil subsumes everything else in the valleys; there are chapels, but instead of RL religions, there's a vaguely-handwaved festival of "Cherishment" where we...cherish what we have and try to live in the present as opposed to the past or future? IDK, I wanted more about how religion and stuff is different here.

However, for all the Conseil talks about non-interference and consistency, the valley has some serious misogyny issues that aren't necessarily obvious to teenage Odile but become much more important in the second half. Pro tip: if you don't want people to screw around with the timeline, make sure your world isn't a dystopia. (They do have enough public housing that no one goes homeless, at least!)

When it comes to time travel, I'm strongly of the belief that "the longer the work, the more frustrating it is for the end to be 'j/k, you can't change anything, life sucks.'" So, does "The Other Valley" stick the landing? It takes a while to get there, but yes, changes are made, at a substantial cost. (The depiction of a "feedback loop" caused by meeting your past self and then having your own memories change in real-time was disconcerting and believable!) But then on the literal last page there's an ominous ~"or were they"~ dangled in front of us that's just unresolved. Are we supposed to assume that we're going to have good and bad timelines overwriting each other (and everyone's memories) at twenty-year intervals? I get it, litfic is depressing, but... :(

Bingo: Published in 2024, Small Town, Dreams; arguable romance-as-a-major plot (teenage angst/misunderstanding of "oh no he's talking to another girl, what if he doesn't like me" motivates a lot of the plot), potentially criminals? (In some timelines, anyway.)

What I'd succeeded in osmosing about this book: the in-universe language has a lot of honorific distinctions, the difference between second-personal informal "thou"/'thee" and first person royal "we" is very important. It's the kind of book that starts with an in-universe pronunciation and name etiquette guide, followed by a very long list of names that, fortunately, you don't have to remember before reading the book, most of the important characters are introduced in such a way that you'll remember who they are when they come up again, and those that aren't (the Duke of...whoever...is a bad guy) you'll remember eventually, it's not important.

Goblin Emperor drinking game: every time you're tempted to pronounce "c" as [s] take a shot, it's always the hard [k] sound.

What I had not succeeded in osmosing about this book: the land where it's set is the empire of the elves; the titular character becomes emperor through his father's elvish side, though his mother was a goblin. But he plans to marry an elf aristocrat and secure the succession. In other words, "elf" and "goblin" are not different species; they're ethnicities of people who can intermarry and produce fertile offspring. (I'm not really sure what D&D settings or original-work prompts are going for with character backgrounds like "half-orc," but...) Stereotypically, elves, in particular most of the elvish royalty, have very light skin; goblins have dark skin. Lots of people, like our hero, are somewhere in between. But he is very visibly Not The Typical Emperor. This isn't tendentious, but it isn't subtle, either.

So, our protagonist, Maia, was eight years old when his mother died and his father, the emperor, banished him from court to be raised by an abusive distant cousin. Ten years later, the emperor and his three oldest sons are all aboard the same airship when oops, it explodes (oh, the...elfity! elfhood? elfness?) and to everyone's surprise, Maia is thrust onto the throne despite knowing nothing about court life. Much more to everyone's surprise, he believes in being decent to ordinary people, and that women should have rights, and everyone's brain explodes and it takes them several hundred pages to put back together. Also, everyone does body language with their ears. Because they are elves.

The secondary world doesn't necessarily map onto a tech level from ours: there are airships and pocket watches and historical determinist anarchists, and also women with university degrees aren't marriagable material. (Although considering how long some elite institutions in our world took to become co-ed, maybe that's not saying much.) At one point, Maia has to settle a stupid legal dispute among different factions, and we see the role that "witnesses" play in the complicated political system.

By the time each representative had spoken and the history of the judicial proceedings had been summarized, Maia had a splitting headache and wanted nothing more than to tell them all to stop wasting his time, their time, and the time of innumerable secretaries and judges, and settle their damnable petty squabble like adults.
He bit the words back and looked next to the Witnesses vel ama, the Witnesses who gave voice to the literally voiceless; there was one for the river and one for the game preserve that had become embroiled in the dispute.

This part tangentially reminded me of The Tainted Cup; it's good to have legal protections for all these entities, even--especially--the ones who can't speak for themselves. But sometimes, when there's too much bureaucracy, we get "why doesn't our empire ever build things anymore?!"

Later, the idea of "witnesses for the voiceless" comes up again in a much more poignant way:

“Serenity,” Csovar said with a briskness that was as near to impatience as he seemed likely ever to come, “it is our task to witness for you precisely because there are things that you, as the Emperor Edrehasivar the Seventh, cannot say. It is the calling of Witnesses, to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.”

“You are a Witness vel ama,” Maia said. The idea was bitterly amusing.

I also mostly enjoyed the worldbuilding as it relates to religion. The elves have a pantheon of various deities, but piety is out of fashion at court. Goblin spirituality tends more towards meditation; that's what Maia learned from his mother, but he feels awkward practicing it at court, especially because emperors have no privacy ever.

Ulis, he prayed, abandoning the set words, let my anger die with him. Let both of us be freed from the burden of his actions. Even if I cannot forgive him, help me not to hate him.
Ulis was a cold god, a god of night and shadows and dust. His love was found in emptiness, his kindness in silence. And that was what Maia needed. Silence, coldness, kindness. He focused his thoughts carefully on the familiar iconography, the image of Ulis’s open hands; the god of letting go was surely the god who would listen to an unwilling emperor.

When he's threatened and it's "suggested" he abdicate and become a monk, taking a vow of silence:

The terrible thing, worse than anything else, was that he was tempted. Silence, austerity, the worship of the Lady of Falling Stars. No responsibility for anyone but himself.

One thing that struck me as odd was the emphasis on "compassion"--not that that's something unusual in a religious context, of course. But I've seen hot takes that are like "empathy is overrated, we should practice compassion instead!" and then...don't explain the difference as to what looks like in practice. Is it supposed to be indicating a Buddhist influence, in combination with the meditation? I don't know, it just struck me as "21st century our world phrasing," maybe that's unfair.

At the beginning it feels like it's setting up to be "isn't it weird that the top four people in the line of succession died, what's up with that" (most of the people at court are surprisingly chill about this, but Maia was just a kid exiled in the middle of nowhere and really could not have been the mastermind even if he wanted to) and "who will Maia marry"? (More on that below.) And both of these are...not really mysteries, in the sense that we as the readers aren't given enough information to puzzle it out, we just wait and things happen. To some extent, Maia shows agency by being an actual decent person, but also, he's limited by his role as a quasi-figurehead in a sprawling bureaucracy, and relies on others (including his nephew, who is only four years younger than him but has the formal education and court etiquette that Maia definitely does not) to change the course of events.

Every time someone just addresses Maia as "Serenity" and that's a complete sentence, take a shot. If the narrative points out the irony, because Maia is definitely not having a serene time, take another shot. Finish the bottle every time a heightened scene is interrupted so someone else can infodump their woobie backstory (not a lot but it's weird that it happened twice).

More spoilery thoughts:

In some ways, the second-to-last chapter is kind of an anticlimax compared to some of the stuff that's come before. Ending it there puts the focus on, not assassinations or formal ceremonies or mysteries, but the plot arc of "poor woobie Maia can never have any friends" -> "okay, I can't have 'friends,' but consider, I can have 'frRiEnDs'." Catharsis? Like, what he went through with Cala very much tugged on my pangs as a reader, and I definitely wanted Maia to be able to have the emotional resolution of "yes, this is friendship" by the end. But the way they resolve it just felt underwhelming, like a distinction without a difference. You already have the context of grammatical subtleties and philology nerds! Set up some foreshadowing with "no, we can't be wugen, but we can be zackle," or something!

Defiant antagonist being like "I know what I did will get me killed but I have no regrets, it is necessary to make sacrifices for progress and equality"--great, love it, sign me up for your newsletter.
Defiant antagonist being like "I know that I killed a couple dozen people, most of whom had nothing to do with the oppressive and tyrannical system, but I have no regrets, it is necessary to make sacrifices for progress and equality"--ooookay, not great, but that's why you're the antagonist I guess.
Defiant antagonist as above, when questioned/criticized: "I know I'm right, not just because historical determinism says so, but because we have a new leader who is enacting progressive change and also has dark skin. Could a light-skinned person have done such moral things? Absolutely not, QED." On the one hand, after being like "Maia isn't really doing that much, he's just along for the ride," it's nice to know that someone actually is driving the plot. On the other hand, UM.

Perks of reading on an e-reader: I see the names of the upcoming parts in Table of Contents view, like, Part Four is "Winternight." But some of them are too long so they get truncated. Part Five is "Edrehasivar the Brid..." Edrehasivar is Maia's regnant name. Awww, Edrehasivar the Bridegroom! That's why we're spending so much time on the quest for a decent empress, because it's gonna end with a royal wedding! That'll teach me to extrapolate. ;)

Bingo: kinda sorta First in a Series (there's a spinoff trilogy focusing on a side character), Under the Surface (the chapel where Maia meditates before his coronation is important, though it's only a short part of the book), Dreams, Orcs Trolls and Goblins Oh My! (why I picked it up), Reference Materials (glossary and in-universe grammar guide), previous Readalong.

Dinniman was one of the guests of honor at a convention I recently attended, and I figured I should check this out because it's one of the best-regarded examples of the subgenre of "litRPG." That is, it's a novel rather than a choose-your-own-adventure or interactive fiction, but the characters experience the world as in a videogame or tabletop RPG--gaining experience points, leveling up, unlocking achievements, equipping items, and so forth.

Work buddy MF said "this is like Hitchhiker's Guide meets Hunger Games," which is a very good summary. Like "Hitchhiker's Guide," aliens destroy most of planet Earth, claiming they filed the paperwork to do so years ago on the galactic timetable and it's the humans' own fault they didn't protest." Like "Hunger Games," the main characters are thrust into a reality TV show (now on a cosmic scale) where they have to fight to stay alive, but just as importantly, present a compelling narrative for the viewers to cheer for, because that's how you get sponsorship, and if the gamemakers know you're the big draw, they probably won't let you die. So it's less of a fair fight and more "in-universe reasons for the plot to revolve around these characters." This does justify some tropes like Unspoken Plan Guarantee--when Carl is taking advantage of a video game exploit, he doesn't want the gamemakers to listen in and patch it.

Also, shortly after the game begins, Carl's cat (actually his ex-girlfriend's cat) eats a magical item that gives her speech and human-like intelligence and makes her a competitor in her own right. She has decent intelligence/spellcasting ability, and absurdly high charisma; having previously been a star in the cat show world, she knows all about performing to an audience on TV. But her constitution score is terrible, so she needs Carl to carry her around and protect her. Now this is a premise you don't find in every video game, and it's a big part of what makes "Dungeon Crawler Carl" charming.

The video game "patch notes" are droll:

We've fixed the hallway bathroom bug. So, if you open the door, and someone else enters, they will no longer explode. Sorry about that.

Carl manages to take advantage of the "inventory" system (anything you can lift briefly becomes stored in your video-game inventory for later access), and puzzles out the game state according to video game logic, which is clever.

"But his whole story was bullshit. That Rebecca woman was a level three. He said they'd gotten into a firefight right away, but that couldn't be true. She had that apple core in her inventory. That meant she'd gone to a tutorial guild and gotten her inventory turned on. And then he ate that cookie, and I saw he received 9.8 experience instead of 10, which meant he was in a party with someone. Someone alive. Also, he had his arm draped over the chair, and I could see he was twitching his finger. He was typing into the chat. He hadn't figured out how to use it with just his brain."
Donut stared up at me as we ran.
"How is it you're James Bond when it comes to strangers, but Miss Beatrice could date three different guys at once, and you had no idea?"
"Three different guys?"
"Well, you were one of them, so two, I guess. Then again, it's three if you count Angel's owner. Does it count as cheating when it's with another woman? There's so many human nuances I don't understand."

I haven't played a lot of these kinds of games, but I understand what it means to open a loot box, get into a boss fight, and so on; these kinds of references worked for me. On the other hand, there were a lot of pop culture/TV shoutouts that didn't land, and I'm not sure if they'll age well. People from around the world have been sucked into the game (Carl is one of the relatively few Seattleites who were outside a building at 2 am local time, but elsewhere, there might be more); I'll give the premise the benefit of the doubt and assume that their video game interfaces don't have the same number of Anglophone internet humor shoutouts, but I would have preferred a slightly more cosmopolitan POV and less of the "haha, the system AI has a foot fetish and likes to see Carl defeat monsters with his strong sexy feet." Moreover, the edgy humor makes for an awkward contrast with the plotline of "hey, those NPC monsters aren't just virtual constructs, they had families too. Congratulations, you murdered a bunch of infants, you monster."

To use a parallel I've seen elsewhere: sometimes you're in the mood for an action-adventure fantasy about Prince Whoever going on a quest to reclaim his rightful-throne from the evil machinations of Duke So-and-So. Cool. You can enjoy those tropes in fiction without actually believing powerful hereditary monarchies are a good idea IRL. But if the author awkwardly pivots to include a dialogue about "oh, actually, aristocracy is usually a bad idea, but don't worry, these are good aristocrats and they will support the well-being of the common people," it can come off as more ham-fisted than if they hadn't tried at all. This is the first installment of a series (currently seven books and counting) so it seems likely that future volumes will go more off the rails in terms of "we should all be working together to fight the real enemy," but I'm not convinced I want to commit to that.

Compared to something like "The Long Walk," "Dungeon Crawler Carl" is more amusing if similarly puerile. The over-the-top nonsense of "the world above-ground has been destroyed, you'd better try your luck in the dungeon if you want to survive" is absurd enough that my suspension of disbelief rolls with it. But in both cases, there's an underlying premise of "people are generally terrible and love to ogle at others in misery," and, it's like...I don't agree with the charge you're accusing me of; what is there I can do to defend myself?

Bingo: First in a Series, Alliterative Title, Under the Surface, Epilogue, Orcs Trolls and Goblins Oh My! (did not expect to run across this one in the wild), Survival

This is an influential early work in the genre that became steampunk. The premise: Charles Babbage's analog computer, and Ada Byron (Lovelace's) punch-card programming system, were wild successes, and the UK government and economy were revolutionized by the technocracy. So a lot of the fun is seeing where RL historical figures are in this alternate history. Ada's father, Lord Byron, is the Prime Minister; Babbage and Charles Darwin are important members of parliament; John Keats did not die of tuberculosis, and is a successful "kinotropist" (pixelated animator); Texas is still independent (and the Confederacy arose early), and Sam Houston is in exile in London; Benjamin Disraeli is a well-connected journalist; Theo Gautier gets namedropped late (thank you Les Mis tumblr fandom for introducing me to the Romantic-adjacent RPF guys); there's a student society called the "Young Men's Agnostic Association." People ride around on wheeled shoes, there are new weapons for the Crimean War (a little reminiscent of the weird alt-history of "The Eyre Affair"), letters burst into flame (like Howlers!), and computing engines are run by "clackers" (shades of Discworld). Nice. One of the main functions of the government's central computer system is criminology, which, if you consider the uses big data is put to in our world, makes a lot of sense.

However, the main characters and plot are not as compelling. Sybil Gerard is the daughter of a deceased Luddite protester, and has since fallen on hard times; Edward "Ned" Mallory is a paleontologist who has recently returned from fossil-hunting in Wyoming. Both of them, several months apart, run across a mysterious box full of special punch cards, which are important enough that people are getting killed over them. So Sybil and Ned are trying to avoid getting killed, and possibly bring the villains to justice. Sybil is mostly in the wrong place at the wrong time; Ned has a little more agency, having accepted the box as a favor for Lady Ada herself.

Like "Shadow and Claw," the authors did a lot of work on diction and prose--a lot of the jargon is based on Sterling's exhaustive research into Victorian-era texts. As Cory Doctorow points out in the foreword to the 20th anniversary edition, this would be a lot easier now with the Internet, but took a lot of university library research in 1990. This leads to some fun turns of phrase ("flash mob" appears more than once, but not in the modern sense; "flash" meaning expensive-looking, stylish, showy, and "mob" in the more general sense of rabble). On the other hand, it sometimes crosses too far into "my learnings, let me show you them."

Huxley looked Mallory up and down, with the narrow-set, pitilessly observant eyes that had discovered "Huxley's Layer" in the root of the human hair.

When critiquing a piece of media for "male gaze" issues, it's important to bear in mind that depiction is not endorsement, and reasonable people will disagree on where the boundary is. I really enjoy "Blade Runner 2049," which portrays a society with lots of objectification of women (see: Joi the hologram). My interpretation is that the movie is trying to show why that attitude is a dangerous dead end, not something to strive for. But other people dislike it.

Sybil is a politician's "tart." Ned wins up sleeping with one of her former neighbors, who namedrops Sybil--maybe this is where the plotlines connect and they realize they're both in trouble because of the same McGuffin? No, it's completely superfluous and has nothing to do with anything. One of the villains tries to ruin Ned's family by sending an anonymous letter to his sister's fiance claiming that the sister was unchaste, and this is the inciting incident that gets Ned and his brothers to fight back. A group of young Japanese students eager to learn from the rapidly modernizing UK bring an automaton in the form of a woman who pours drinks. This is based on real technology, so it's not completely gratituous. But for me, it was one of those experiences where any one of these choices on their own might have been fine, but taken together, they got tiresome. (A snippet near the end suggests that Lord Byron's wife was the real power behind the throne, and of course Ada is an important figure when she's not in thrall to her gambling debtors, but after 455 pages a lot of impressions have already been formed.)

The most relatable I found any of the protagonists was when Ned was being interviewed by Disraeli for a series of newspaper columns. Ned just wants to talk about dinosaurs and what it means for his theories; Disraeli wants a "human interest" angle and keeps prodding Ned for more about his awkward sex life among the Cheyenne in Wyoming. Previously, we'd established that Ned supports the "catastrophist" hypothesis that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a single event, in contrast to the "uniformitarians." As modern readers, we know that the dinosaurs probably were wiped out by a single event, so Ned comes across as the rational one. But then:

"No one but a specialist wants to read about the hinging pressures of a reptile's jawbone, Mallory. Truth to tell, there's only one thing people really want to know about dinosaurs: why the damned things are all dead."
"I thought we agreed to save that for the end."
"Oh, yes. Makes a fine climax, that business with the great smashing comet, and the great black dust-storm wiping out all reptilian life and so forth. Very dramatic, very catastrophic. That's what the public likes about Catastrophism, Mallory. Catastrophe feels better than this Uniformity drivel about the Earth being a thousand million years old. Tedious and boring--boring on the face of it!"
"An appeal to vulgar emotion is neither here nor there!" Mallory said hotly. "The evidence supports me! Look at the Moon--absolutely covered with comet-craters."
"Yes," Disraeli said absently, "rigorous science, so much the better."
"No one can explain how the Sun could burn for even ten million years. No combustion could last that long--it violates elementary laws of physics!"

It's actually the Uniformitarians who have a more accurate understanding of the immense timescale of evolution. Neither camp is totally correct; that's part of the process of doing science. (On the other hand, the "surprise" of "actually the socialists are as wildly racist as anyone else" was sad as much as funny.)

Around the 90% mark, the narration zooms out; instead of the POV characters, we get snippets of in-universe documentation. Which, I'd already decided that those alt-history glimpses were my favorite part, so that was neat. The resolution of the MacGuffin plotline is a little suspension-of-disbelief-y; like, if there really was an enormous supercomputer behind the scenes of a country, there would certainly be people who would want to hack it or shut it down. But would accelerating the development of theoretical math by a few decades really let you do that? Eh.

Doctorow reminds us to "consider that Bill and Bruce wrote this book by FedExing floppy disks to each other..." (emphasis his), which is as gripping an image as any in the book, in terms of digital technology and how fast things change.

Bingo: Multi-POV, published in the 1990s, reference materials (alt-history map).

This was my pick for the "judge a book by its cover" square. The special first edition features intricate art on the inside covers, and metallic foils on the edges (flames? a phoenix in flight?) Neat!

This is a loose Mulan retelling, in a setting that's clearly some level of fantasy-China; I don't know enough to say what aspects of history and geography are accurate or original. (Terms like "Three Kingdoms" and "Warring States" get tossed around, but it's not clear if they map onto the RL equivalents; in-universe epigraphs date the chronology to year 923 of their calendar, but who knows that that corresponds to; the protagonist's father suffers from a severe opium addiction, but it's not in the context of a colonialist war.)

So, Hai Meilin's father is addicted to opium, and he wants to marry her off to a rich merchant for the dowry money. Both her father and would-be husband are physically abusive, and Meilin thinks, "hey, I know martial arts, I don't want to be a slave to the patriarchy, I might as well run away and take my father's place in the war." (He's a lazy draft dodger in this version.) She'll probably die, but at least a few months of freedom are better than helplessness.

There are a couple characterization notes that are thoughtful and deep. Meilin's stepmother Xiuying is only a few years older than her, but rather than resent the attractive young woman who takes her mother's place, she recognizes that Xiuying is like her sister, an ally against their abusive father/husband. And her reaction the first time she kills a man in battle was powerful:

His eyes were blank and unseeing, his expression frozen in perpetual grimace. I staggered back, nearly dropping my sword. I had just killed a man.
I had imagined this moment so many times before. Not this stranger, but always--Father.
It was during his moments of hysteria, when my father would slap, strangle, wrench at my hair like I was an animal. All those times, I never fought back. I never so much as lifted a finger against him. And yet, in my mind's eye, I had imagined so vividly--the act of killing him.

The warlord of Anlai (Meilin's home kingdom) has recently instituted a crackdown on spirit worship/magic, so the first few chapters have a lot of "thank the spirits! ...I mean, the Imperial Commandant," which was amusing. And Meilin's commander, the honorable and duty-bound Prince Liu, is a compelling character as well. When his soldiers are like, "we're gonna go into town and enjoy the attentions of the local women," at first it seems like just a setup for Meilin to be awkwardly like "I'll pass," but then a few pages later, we get Liu explaining, "actually this is a honeypot trap and it is a risk to security."

So far, so good. But this could all have fit under "historical fiction." How do the fantasy aspects play in?

Well, when Meilin leaves home, Xiuying gives her a jade dragon pendant that had once belonged to Meilin's mother, who succumbed to madness. Very shortly after, Meilin starts hearing a mysterious voice egging her on to acts of ambition and/or risk-taking. Many readers would probably discern some connection between these events, but Meilin is not so genre-savvy. So instead of Mushu, the cartoon helpful dragon, we have Qinglong, a spirit guide who appeals to Meilin's sense of ambition to bring out the worst in her.

Song explains in an afterword that she was responding to the traditional versions of the Mulan legend, in which Mulan either returns home humbly or dies from suicide rather than become a concubine; she wanted to write a story in which Meilin's (healthy!) ambition to be more than society allows runs into conflicts with the power structures, even after she's saved the kingdom. I think that portrayal is sad, but realistic. However, this version of the story has Meilin manipulated and jerked around by Qinglong, until we're not sure which of her ambitions are her own versus the dragon's; it's hard to get invested in her agency that way.

More broadly, the book suffers from many of the weaknesses of "YA as pejorative." It's a first-person narration from a young woman who has, exceptionally, been trained in martial arts and the meditative practice of qigong by an open-minded household servant; none of this is necessarily a flaw, if done well. But Meilin's narration spends a lot of time quoting italicized lines from earlier in the book to hammer home the important messages about ambition; much is made of her chemistry with various commanders and/or captors; she spends a lot of time being whumped, in captivity, being tended to and worrying about breaking free; she has to hide the fact that she's a woman, and just when she begins to get respect, has to start over hiding the fact that she's a spirit medium. Her self-pity is justified, but can get annoying.

I also had a hard time keeping track of characters in the magic-artifact plotline. The smallest of the warring kingdoms is Ximing, whose forces are led by Chancellor Sima; his personal name is Sima Yi, but when Meilin meets him in the spirit realm, he introduces himself as "Taiyang," a reference to his affinity for sun/fire magic. But Sima is weakened because someone stole his jade seal and broke it into pieces, so he has to go chase after them, while Meilin follows him to try to prevent him from regaining his strength. Is the thief's identity supposed to be a mystery until late in the book? There aren't that many characters aware of the jades and their powers; another important character in Ximing is introduced incognito, at first, and then revealed to be more politically powerful than he was at first glance. So if there was a mystery, it got lost/obscured in my confusion about "wait, who's Taiyang again."

Early on, Prince Liu explains that he's traveling incognito "To survey the city...and learn the discrepancies between the official reports and the lived experiences of my people," which seemed jarringly 2024 as opposed to fantasy-923. But then again, if you like fake identities and dramatic reveals, one person's flaw may be another person's feature.

Bingo: using it for "Judge A Book By Its Cover;" could also count for Dreams, Published in 2024, Author of Color, Reference Materials (maps), maybe Criminals (disguising yourself as a man to join the army is...not allowed) or First in a Series (ends with a "to be continued" but this one just came out so no details on the sequel yet).

One of the bingo squares is "bards," which includes musicians, poets, storytellers, etc. I saw this book recced for that square because it's about a rock-and-roll singer in 1980s Minneapolis; I was intrigued because I grew up outside the Twin Cities and had never heard of it, and wasn't running across anything else that would fit for the square, so sought it out.

Does it deliver on the local flavor? Yes, it does! This setting is a little before my time, but if names like Byerly's, Dayton's, Nicollet Mall, First Avenue, City Pages, the Metrodome ("not bad...for a glow-in-the-dark fungus"), and, of course, Prince mean anything to you, you'll appreciate it.

Okay, so what about everything else?

In "Neverwhere," Richard Mayhew shows compassion to a homeless person, and that's the kiss of death--he gets dragged into an urban fantasy with a bunch of quipsters, and can't go back to his normal life no matter how hard he tries. Here, Eddi McCandry doesn't even have an inciting incident to blame; she gets forcibly dragged into a faerie war because she has...the power of rock and roll?...and spends the rest of the book with a shapeshifting dog "phouka" keeping watch, being an insufferable quipster, calling her pet names every other sentence, and generally being annoying until it turns into Stockholm syndrome.

The contrived premise is that the Seelie Court (monarchist fae) are at war with the Unseelie (commoners?) but both sides are by default immortal; in order for their wars to have real stakes and for people to die, they have to have a mortal human in their midst. Eddi points out, very reasonably and frequently, that she didn't ask for this and there are lots of humans they could pick on, but oh well, she's stuck with it.

One of the things the book does well is that, when Eddi's bandmates are reasonably skeptical of the supernatural goings-on, the phouka reluctantly decides "okay, you're part of this too" and demonstrates his shapeshifting abilities. Music is a group activity; it's not just for the chosen one.

Eddi's friend Carla, the percussionist, is very Minnesotan; she says things like "you betcha" and "come with." Also, she recognizes the word "phouka" because it was used in an old movie--this is the same place where Harvey from Farscape got his name! (And in both cases, it's like, I can sort of see how a 1950 movie might still have barely been a cultural allusion for the target audience, but it's very much not for me.)

There's a running theme of "women have to be assertive to make it in the rock world; there's no shortage of self-centered male musicians who will try to flirt with you, and if you're strong enough to stand up to them, a faerie queen is nothing." And some of the foreshadowing will be familiar if you're genre-savvy, although I formed the wrong impression early on about "hmm, is this character actually the bad guys also trying to get to Eddi."

The fae have questions like: "Do your people ever write songs about anything besides love and death?" This could have gone in a more heavy-handed direction, like, "only the humans have good art because they appreciate the Transience of Life, us immortals don't really get it," which would have been annoying, so I'm glad they didn't. On the other hand, as someone who gets easily sick of those genres, I would have liked to hear more, weirder, faerie music.

The Seelie are set in their ways because they're 1. immortal and 2. monarchists, but the Unseelie are worse because...they're evil???

"It's not just for you, it's for the entire seven-county metro area. Couldn't we just let them have St. Paul?"

...

"This city is alive with the best magic of mortal folk. The very light off the skyscrapers and the lakes vibrates with it. If the Unseelie Court takes up residence here, this will be a place where people fear their neighbors, where life drains the living until art and wit are luxuries, where any pleasant thing must be imported and soon loses its savor."

I think Bull would agree that for her, Minneapolis is a magical place because she loves it; for someone else, any city could be that place, but they also have the potential to be lifeless, unmagical places.

At the end of the 2001 edition, there's an appendix--a note saying that the author and her husband have since adapted it to a screenplay, including a few scenes that aren't in the novel. This allows for POV characters, and corresponding settings, besides Eddi: her loser ex-boyfriend gets more of a character arc, and long-lost nightclubs in the caves above the Mississippi River make an appearance. I think this could be a change for the better (there were a lot of descriptions of clothing that weren't super engaging to me), but also, you do know books are allowed to have more than one POV character, right?

When Eddi and her friends are at a Midsummer gathering with the faeries, one of the songs they play is "Safety Dance." I can't tell if that was as silly/memetic in 1987 as it lands today. Either way, I think it's a useful warning that "giving shoutouts to the musicians you like" can't be your only reason for a creative project. And, like musical tastes, some of the "my primrose"/"my sweet"/"but thou must" flirting hasn't aged well.

Bingo: using it for Bards; would also count for Dreams, Prologues (introducing the magical elements, which is kind of superfluous because Eddi meets them in chapter two), Reference Materials (for the appendix). Borderline for romance-as-a-genre; I think the book might be better without the romantic plotlines, but it would also be a lot shorter.

Death games, as a genre, require some suspension of disbelief. "This is a dystopia and this just happens sometimes." In Battle Royale, one middle school class is drafted. In Hunger Games, kids are drafted from across the country, but have the opportunity to volunteer in lieu of their loved ones. In Squid Game, people in financial stress are incentivized with a huge cash prize, then given the opportunity to drop out by majority vote. In all of these cases, the reader/viewer has to set aside some of their "oh, come on" reaction, and go with "this is not the way the world actually works, but what if..."

The writers have several strategies to try to get the viewers to buy in. They can worldbuild alternate-history details that emphasize how this world is not our current world, and thus make it more plausible that other things have changed, too. Hunger Games has the 12 Districts instead of 50 States. Some continuities of Battle Royale have a "Greater East Asia Republic" that emerged after WWII, implying that the second half of the 20th century was very different around the world. And yet, Bruce Springsteen still emerged at the same place and time to write "Born to Run." Curious.

Another strategy is to emphasize how brutal and cutthroat our current gameshows are already. If we're willing to watch people do stupid, embarrassing, dangerous things for a chance at lots of money, might we be willing to watch teenagers get murdered onscreen? Quoting liberally from actual gameshows in epigraphs tries to make this case, but there's a chance it backfires, if the answer is "no, actually."

This can easily bleed into "hey, the in-universe audience are terrible people for enjoying this spectacle, but guess what? You, the readers, are also terrible people for enjoying the fictional spectacle. You wanted your faves to live? Well, screw you." (This is one reason why I've only skimmed the first Hunger Games book and don't plan to read the others. It's more prominent in the manga adaptation of "Battle Royale" than the book or movie.) But there's also an obvious retort to this, namely: "you wrote the book, did you want us to pick it up or not?"

Stephen King's approach to "don't glamorize this, this is really disgusting actually" is to focus on the physicality of the horror. The premise is that a hundred boys are walking south from Maine, four miles an hour, or else; anyone who falls below the minimum speed limit gets eliminated (from life). There are plenty of chances to be grossed out by feet, legs, lungs, appendices, guts, faces, blood, sweat, tears, pus, urine, feces, vomit, erections, all that good stuff. (If you thought Abebe Bikila's feet were bad, he was only running for two hours and fifteen minutes.) For sixteen-year-old boys, the fear of publicly relieving themselves is worse than dying, the emasculation of being outearned by your girlfriend is sometimes worse than physical violence, there's a lot of talk about Oedipus complex and their girlfriends' breasts, etc. They also decide that a pair of brothers entering together (so one will have to watch the other die, at least) is gross and weird, but everyone else's participation is totally fine.

Like "Hunger Games," there's only one POV character, so we don't even have the potential "decoy protagonist"/insight into different possible winners and losers that Batle Royale allows. Ray Garraty's distinguishing feature is that...he's from Maine, which is where most of the "action" happens, so a lot of the local fans are cheering for him for reasons that he understands are arbitrary and a little creepy. Why else should we care about him? Does he like music like Shuya or have a sickly mother to support like Gi-hun or anything? Nah. He occasionally shows his comrades basic human decency and receives it in return, but there are a hundred guys, we expect a lot of that is going on even if some of them are jerks.

The two characters who sort of have interesting motivations for joining up (if you win, you can have basically anything you want for the rest of your life, hold that thought) are Scramm and Stebbins. Scramm, though just a teenager, is already married with a baby on the way. He's practiced walking eighty miles, which is apparently more than most people do! So he figures he's a favorite and will be able to financially support his family with the prize. Stebbins seems to know too much about past contests and the weird intimacy forged among the survivors. Is he like Il-nam, just trying to revel in the suffering of others, or Shogo, trying to bring down the system? No. We do learn something interesting about him towards the end, but it doesn't really make a difference in anything else. In fact, I feel like you could randomize the order of most of the scenes and it wouldn't make a great difference--characters don't evolve, they just die gruesomely and their bodies give out on them in different ways.

Okay, so the idea is, you accept a 99% chance of death for a 1% chance of unlimited riches, and people willingly do this because we're in a dystopia controlled by the evil military? Again, I could sort of go with the suspension of disbelief if that was just "this is the premise of the book, take it or leave it." Instead, the more King tries to worldbuild, the less plausible I find it. We still have all this name-dropping like Tonka Trucks and Dunkin Donuts and Hank Aaron's home run record, trying to tell us that "yes, this is still the USA, it's just evil now, or maybe the USA is already more evil than you like to think." Most of the characters couldn't tell you themselves why they joined other than "ehhhh I guess we must all have death wishes, huh?" And then we find out that there are pre-qualifying mental and physical exams: "most of the kids in the country over twelve take the tests but only one in fifty passes." (Does that include girls?) Why are people doing this other than they don't have frontal lobes yet?

King also namedrops lots of other influences in terms of horror and/or teenage male ennui (Shirley Jackson, JD Salinger). And like, the more namedropping you have to do in order to be like "look, these are good authors, you should all know about them!" the less I am invested in your story. (Battle Royale was not immune from this either. We get it, you like Springsteen, but advertising for the Boss is not why I'm reading your book.)

There are a couple flickers of "what if this is all purgatory, what if the ghosts of the other contestants are still there, what if when we die it's more of the same" which take the horror beyond the immediate. In that sense, the weirdness/ambiguity of the end, which I would otherwise have been probably frustrated by, sort of blended into the rest of the dark vagueness and was more intriguing than frustrating.

I'm not necessarily proud of enjoying "Battle Royale"--the prose can be mediocre, the musical allusions are a lot, maybe it makes me a terrible person for reveling in fictional violence. But in the context of these ludicrously violent death games, it's compelling to see moments of friendship or bravery or sacrifice emerge. Here, any flickers of purpose and agency are quickly swallowed up in poop and dick jokes. At least it keeps a fast pace, literally and figuratively.

Bingo: Survival.

In "From All False Doctrine," Charlie Boult is a teenage car thief from the mean streets of Toronto, who's in the process of changing his ways and becomes an acolyte at Kit Underhill's church. In the last couple chapters, everyone (including Charlie) witnesses a miraculous event, and then has to deal with "how do we go back to our normal lives after we've just seen this."

"Neither Have I Wings" picks up twenty years later, as World War II is wrapping up in Europe. Charlie is an air force pilot stationed in Yorkshire; the other POV character, Evgenia ("Evvie") is volunteering at a hospital for recovering amputees. But one day, the police come by investigating a murder, and Evgenia is curious about the mystery; meanwhile, Charlie discovers something very strange hidden in the outbuilding, and all of the sudden he's back in the world of demons and miracles...

"From All False Doctrine" was a slow burn with a lot of wrong-genre savvy. "Neither Have I Wings" is brisker, faster-paced, and Charlie's plotline in particular is clearly supernatural from chapter one. Points for "Wings." (The title comes from a folksong called "The Water Is Wide." It's funny because Charlie is an airplane pilot. And angels sometimes have wings. Get it?) Evvie's, however, is a mix of "I've had supernatural visions in my life before so I'm primed to suspect miraculous events even on very weak evidence," and laser-guided amnesia, which leads to more "this is suppposed to be a fantasy book but a lot of it is a comedy of manners."

At first it seems like a legit standalone sequel--for the most part, you don't really need to know what happened with Kit, just that it was a miracle in the midst of Charlie's otherwise-mundane life. But towards the second half, as more characters get introduced and others get re-introduced, I was more appreciative that I'd read "False Doctrine" first, I'm not sure the entire thing would work on its own.

In "False Doctrine," Peachy tells lots of lies about him and Kit avoiding military service in WWI. It turns out that Kit volunteering put Peachy to shame, and he's uncomfortable with this, so he just lies and Kit rolls with it. But when Peachy is confronted by demonic forces, his hero-worship of Kit turns unhealthy--on some level, he wants to be Kit. Charlie takes this kind of hero-worship in a different direction; Kit served in WWI, so he'll serve in WWII. He is admirably honest with himself in a way that Peachy couldn't be. But the gap between the impossible ideal of goodness Kit represents to both of them, and their own flawed selves, is still there. Meanwhile, a completely different character turns out to be lying about almost everything in her life. I can understand a need for secrecy, there is a war going on, but the completely over-the-top frivolous details seem more distracting than helpful. She couldn't possibly have come from the Peverell Peacham school of Blatant Lies...unless...??

This was recced as subverting the friends-to-lovers trope, inasmuch as Charlie and Evvie are friends but don't become each other's lovers. I would caveat that, while their paths cross briefly early on, it takes a long time for them to actually interact with each other as friends. Their plotlines run parallel but don't directly intersect for a while (which makes for some funny moments when I realized how a couple minor characters were related).

Like "False Doctrine," "Wings" is very positive/optimistic about Christianity (specifically Anglo-Catholicism, and here also Greek Orthodoxy) and the power of God's love to overcome human prejudice and fear. "False Doctrine" featured two hetero love stories against the social conventions of 1925. "Wings" is far less heteronormative, and has more emphasis on the terrible things that can be done in the name of religion (including a character who's either the greatest or worst example of nominative determinism, you'll have to keep reading to find out which).

Charlie's plotline might feel a little too sweetness-and-light at times, things are not going to be easy with or without supernatural beings in the mix, and after the author makes a pretty powerful statement about love and commitment, trying to increase the tension by being all "what if it was just a lie" comes off as "Like You Would Really Do It"/"Unfortunate Implications." But in the long run, after some grief and pain, we can infer it's going to be a case of Earn Your Happy Ending.

Evvie's plotline was harder for me to make sense of. I could understand a case of "I know what I'm called to do in life, other people might not understand, but that's okay;" I could also have seen it as "I thought I knew what I was meant to do, but meeting people from different walks of life has opened my mind to different possibilities, and now I see how I might be able to serve God in a different vocation." What we got instead was a late swerve followed by a quick unswerve, and that didn't seem to resolve anything. Fic potential?

This book :handshake: Amina al-Sirafi :handshake: A Master of Djinn
What if we found the mystical artifact King Solomon used to control angels and demons. Solomon is having a moment!

This book is also very much cut from the same mold as "To Say Nothing Of The Dog." Keeping calm and carrying on in the war, aspiring to be cool detectives like Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, criticizing architecture that's trying to look medieval but is actually just Victorian pseudo-medieval...The Anglicans know what they're about.

There's a running joke about "angel wings need to change color to match the liturgical calendar," and like, I am very much part of the niche target audience this was targeted at. And if you think this is very amusing:

“It’s hilarious. Perhaps I won’t be court-martialled for desertion after all. Perhaps I’ll hang for murder instead.”

“Desertion?” Hal looked serious now. “You are absent without leave? You did not tell me that.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d understand.”

“Of course I understand,” said Hal. “I am myself essentially a soldier.”

Charlie hadn’t thought about it that way. “Right. But you couldn’t exactly desert, could you?”

Hal opened his eyes very wide. “Is that what you think? Your theology is very defective. Of course I could.”

“Oh. Free will. Yeah, I did know that.”

then you might be also. ;)

Bingo: Criminals (not a major emphasis but Charlie is an expert car thief), Dreams (and how), Prologues/Epilogues, Self/Indie Published, Romance, Multi-POV (including the prologue/epilogues), Disabled Character (neither of the POVs but a fairly prominent character and several minor ones--they are at a rehabilitation facility.)

I forgot that I'd discovered "Dragon's Egg" when

isis was reading "Children of Time" a year and a half ago and compared it to that one. I was intrigued and picked it up shortly after. Sure enough, reading this definitely reminded me of "Dragon's Egg," so...full circle. :p

The parallels between the two come from the writing style in the alien parts. In "Dragon's Egg," the alien species is a fictional entity called the "cheela," who live on the surface of a high-gravity neutron star; in "Children of Time," they're giant spiders, descendants of Earth spiders in an abandoned terraforming project. The alien sections focus in on individual aliens for a couple chapters, then timeskip many generations down the line, so we get glimpses of an entire technological civilization evolving over time. And the POV is a very distant third-person, not quite omniscient. It's "infodumpy," but not as a pejorative, because it's not ham-fisted into dialogue or exposition; rather, it's so alien that the only way to get across what's happening is to summarize in a more non-fictional style. In the early generations, when the spiders are basically the same as Earth spiders, there's no real language, so not much room for dialogue, but as spider society advances, it becomes more of a traditional narrative. In "Dragon's Egg," all the character names are unique; in "Children of Time," the main characters' names repeat every generation.

"Dragon's Egg" was kind of weird in that even though the cheela have no relation to Earth life, their sexual "recreational" habits felt somewhat unoriginal and sexist. In contrast, Earth spiders actually do have sexual dimorphism and ensuing cannibalism, which casts a long shadow over the developing spider civilization, and leads to some droll humor. "Eventually he is promoted from prey/not-prey to mate, because her behaviours are limited as regards males. After the act of mating, other instincts surface and their partnership comes to an end." Over 400 pages later, this pays off in a surprisingly affecting portrayal of the first spider astronauts. Points for Tchaikovsky.

"A strange thing that she, whose work places her at the very fang-point of scientific advance, feels that life is outstripping her, actually leaving her behind." I enjoyed turns of phrase like "fang-point" and the spiders' metaphors of perceiving everything in terms of "webs"--the more of this alien POV, the better! Or encoding images:

The code is simple: a sequence of dark and light dots, spiraling outwards from a central point, that together build up into a wider picture. It is as universal a system as Bianca can conceive of...
sending out formulae to describe the spiral that is the blindingly obvious way the image should be read.

(The joke being that humans' attempt to send an image to extraterrestrials defaulted to "rectangular raster scan, product of two primes," because of course the only way to see an image is rectangular.) In contrast, when the narrator mentioned things like the spiders' Thermopylae, or a spider character used words like "tenfold"/"hundredfold"/'thousandfold" (no base eight??) I was a little disappointed.

This should go without saying, but if you're extremely arachnophobic, probably an anti-rec. One thing I had not osmosed is that there are also oversized ant warriors, and like, I'm more phobic of ants than I am of spiders, so :S I was mostly able to do a mental find/replace and read "weird aliens" for "spiders" and "ants," which maybe defeated the purpose, but oh well, I'm a wimp. The scenes where humans interacted with ants were pretty disturbing, though.

Okay, so that's the mostly good-ish stuff. In "Dragon's Egg," there were also interspersing human chapters. Because the timescale on a neutron star is so fast, what equates to a couple weeks or months in human time is an enormous timespan, evolutionary speaking, for the cheela. But in "Children of Time," while spider lifespans may be somewhat shorter than humans', they're not many-orders-of-magnitude different. Instead, the timeskips in spider time correspond to human refugees from Earth jumping into and out of cryosleep while they try to find an inhabitable world. The main human POV character is Holsten Mason, a classicist who's the spaceship expert on the extinct languages of the "Old Empire" who ruined Earth and didn't get very far on the terraforming either. And the times when he's pulled out of cryosleep correspond to times when humanity is kind of in crisis (and/or having a very awkward romantic relationship). It is definitely sending the message of "Homo sapiens are basically garbage and even when the stakes are high, our petty shortsightedness gets in the way and ruins everything."

It had been too much. He, who had translated the madness of a millennia-old guardian angel. He who had been abducted. He who had seen an alien world crawling with earthly horrors. He had feared. He had loved. He had met a man who wanted to be God. He had seen death.
It had been a rough few weeks. The universe had been given centuries to absorb the shock, but not him. He had been woken and pounded, woken and pounded, and the rigid stasis of suspension offered him no capacity to recover his balance.

Is that fair? There were a lot of other characters I wanted to hear from; humans born on an experimental moon base, or on the spaceship in the service of a quasi-cultish leader, or on the spaceship in the service of a rational and good engineer. Surely, many of them were able to do their jobs to the best of their abilities, with the mindset of "the future of sapient life in the galaxy very likely depends on my comrades and I suceeding here"! Getting their POV might have undermined Mason's cynicism.

The spiders, because of their planet's prehistory as a terraforming project, have a "Messenger" in the sky that communicates with them (not always successfully) in bits. The worldbuilding here about "how would such an entity influence the planet, in terms of religion, and science, and some of each," was fun. But it bordered on glib--like, "here are the Good Rational people who follow Actual Evidence, as opposed to those Bad Believers who are crazy." Similarly with the human "cult leader"--like, the same guy is described as "always four moves ahead" by somone who doesn't even particularly like him. Do we really have enough information to judge his plans?

...those squabbling ape-things of the Gilgamesh will return eventually and make an end of it all in that mindless way that humans have always done. Monkeys or spiders, it will not matter to them. And she, Avrana Kern, forgotten genius of an elder age, will slowly decay into senescence and obsolescence, orbiting a world given over to the thriving hives of what she must nominally allow to be her own species.
Her long history will be done. This last corner of her time and her people will be overwritten with the fecund hosts of her distant and undeserving descendants. All of it will be lost, and there will be no record of her long and lonely aeons of waiting and listening, of her breakthroughs and her triumphs and her eventual horrifying discovery.

The wording of "elder age" brought to mind Tchaikovsky's "Elder Race," in which Nyr--who is acclaimed as an ancient wizard by others--has to get across that actually, no, he's just a human like them. Except, for all the faults and imperfections of the society Nyr was born into, he's basically a decent person. And so are Lynesse and her peers, who are definitely 100% human. What's the difference?

Unlike the story linked in the previous post, there are no noble lies here, and no fundamental thematic contradictions. To the extent that there are "winners" in the "game" of evolution (here played with both a Darwinian and a Lamarckian ruleset), they aren't humans or spiders but A Secret Third Thing. All the same, the cynical undercurrents are frustrating. Fortunately, the worldbuilding is fun on its own.

Bingo: First in a Series, Multi-POV (unless you treat all the "Portias" as being the same person :P), Space Opera, Survival, former Readalong.

This is the first book in the Vorkosigan Saga. Everyone (sample size: two) told me I needed to read Barrayar next, which is a direct sequel, but it might be a while before it comes in through interlibrary loan so I'm writing this up now before I forget.

The premise: Cordelia Naismith is on a scientific expedition on behalf of Beta Colony, exploring an allegedly uncolonized planet. Except oops, troops from the weird aristocracy of Barrayar are there, and they attack Cordelia's explorers, killing one, badly wounding another, and causing most of the crew to evacuate. Cordelia is left behind, and is captured by the notorious Aral Vorkosigan. In order to save the life of her wounded comrade, she surrenders and cooperates, and she and Aral prepare for a short little two hundred-kilometer walk to get food and supplies.

You can sort of see where it's going. There are tropes falling into place. People are speculating:

Youth, it appeared, was full of illusions as to how much sexual energy two people might have to spare while hiking forty or so kilometers a day, concussed, stunned, diseased, on poor food and little sleep, alternating caring for a wounded man with avoiding becoming dinner for every carnivore within range—and with a coup to plan for at the end. Old folks, too, of thirty-three and forty-plus.

Except then things swerve, and suddenly we get a sense of what Aral's POV on the whole situation is, and like...things escalate quickly. Events that you might expect near the climax occur around the 1/3 mark, or offscreen. Cordelia gets dragged into the Barrayaran conflict, which consists of a great deal of infighting beyond the whole "let's capture this uninhabited planet and use it as a base to seize some wormhole hubs" stratagems. There are plots within plots. The Barrayarans are militaristic and aristocratic to a fault; in comparison, things on Beta Colony seem much more like "democracy, science, women's rights, peace, yay, we like this." But it's not a utopia--the threats Cordelia faces there are less dramatic, but in some ways more relatable and therefore scary to people from a culture like mine.

Later on, we get a glimpse of Betan technology that has obviated some important forms of sexual dimorphism, and this says a lot about their culture's approach to warfare and life in general. Like, yeah, on average, men are going to be bigger and taller than women, and that makes a difference if you are fighting with sticks and stones--but a lot less so with space disruptors and stunners.

“Women shouldn’t be in combat,” said Vorkosigan, grimly glum.

“Neither should men, in my opinion.”

This ties into the recurring motif of "hey, do you want to kill your buddy/everyone on this ship so they/we can die with honor and won't have to suffer?!?!" "...don't be ridiculous we're not going to do that" "okay, just putting the option out there!" Which is a fascinating trope when it's done well; here, it's more about the culture clash between Cordelia and the exaggerated extremes of Barrayar at its worst. And like, #notallBarrayarans are monsters who inflict fates worse than death on people! But #notallBarrayarans are Aral, either.

Things that reminded me of other books/movies:
-Vorkosigan is infamous for the aftermath of a battle he fought on the planet of Komarr, which was supposed to be a splendid little in-and-out operation and, of course, blew up in people's faces. The "this is such a perfect textbook situation that it will be in...the military textbooks" reminded me a bit of "A Desolation Called Peace," with Eight Antidote studying history.

-Like Terra Ignota, people in the future reference Marquis de Sade; unlike Terra Ignota, this is not a good thing.

-Aral is manipulated by the Emperor to do unpleasant things; he accepts, not for glory or fear, but because he believes that the Emperor will just do it anyway and he can limit the damage better than anyone else. Galen Erso vibes.

There's a running joke about the Betan president, whose nickname is "Steady Freddy," and everyone is like "...I didn't even vote for him." Seems pretty funny for 1986 (although I guess "Tricky Dick" was a thing before then).

Aral is canon bi, but he has terrible taste in men. (His first wife was not a winner either, but Barrayar generally has a tradition of arranged marriage so you can't blame him entirely for that relationship.)

Cordelia's approach to religion--the honesty that even trusting in God doesn't mean things will always, or often, work out well--was powerful without being heavy-handed, IMO. This sums it up:

“We’re both looking for the same thing. We call it by different names, and look in different places. I believe he calls it honor. I guess I’d call it the grace of God. We both come up empty, mostly.”

But they persevere in looking for honor, separately and together, and the reward is worth the journey.

Bingo: First in a Series, Epilogues, Romance (as a main plot), Space Opera.

Disclaimer: I have a friend who contributed to this anthology, I won't be reviewing their piece!

This is an anthology built around a specific theme: what if neurodiverse people (ie, autistic, ADHD, OCD, etc.) were at an advantage when it came to making contact with aliens? After all, we already have a lot of experience dealing with minds that aren't like ours here on Earth!

Before I get to criticisms, I should say that the fact this book exists is not something to take for granted! A generation ago, the concept of neurodiversity and its upsides was not recognized and understood as broadly as it is today. We've come a long way since I was diagnosed with what was then Asperger's Syndrome as a first-grader in the 1990s. So that sense of perspective is important.

However, the flip side of this is that many of the stories run the risk of being Unintentional Period Pieces that might not age well. Depending on how you feel about pronoun rituals, the frequency of those may be either a feature or a bug. There's also a couple stories that include things like using TikTok to interview aliens, or Discord-like "servers" that have certain sections age-restricted.

More broadly, once you've read several of these stories, they can sometimes blend together in tone--which makes sense given the specificity of the theme, but it might mean that it's not a great volume to read cover-to-cover. Again, turns of phrase that might be empowering for one person ("they didn’t think they’d ever felt so seen") can become cliche to others, especially in close succession.

A few thoughts I had on individual stories:

-"The Grand New York Welcome Tour" (Kay Hanifen) is set not at the moment of first contact itself, but some time later, when aliens traveling to Earth for tourism has become more common. I think this choice worked well, since covering the entire range of "wow, it's aliens, what do I do now?" can be a lot to get through in a short story, whether or not the human protagonists are genre savvy.

-There are several examples of "not only do human minds come in different types, but so do extraterrestrial minds." Overall, I think this worked well, and provided the opportunity for fun alien POV. In "Impact" (Jasmine Starr), this is combined with "aliens don't have individual names, they're just all representatives of the species." That combination of tropes stretched credulity for me; are aliens going to consistently be like "oh, it's you, the one whose processing doesn't work like the rest of us, whatsername"?

-"Shadows of Titanium Rain" (Anthony Francis) had a cool scene of trying to communicate across language boundaries that reminded me of xkcd's "Time."

-"The Interview" (Brian Starr) goes back and forth between human and alien POV for dramatic irony that reveals more than either could alone.

It took a few beats for Tsah to realize that Ben was not planning to add anything further. She didn't actually have anything she wanted to write down, but somehow felt that scribbling a note onto his resume would suffice as a transition to ask the next question.
Ben, though, was certain that what she had written was Schklonian for "Earthlings are all useless and Ben Denton is the worst of them all."

-"Scary Monsters, Super Creeps" (Cat Rambo) is set in a world with superpowered individuals. "Seattle tempted me, but the supers out there got pretty weird sometimes." Shades of "Steelheart"! Like "Hench," it leans heavily into "even the self-proclaimed superheroes are usually no better than the villains," and again, I feel like books tend to deconstruct this trope that's played straight more in comic books and films. So as a primarily book person, I'm only seeing the deconstruction side!

-The Space Between Stitches (Minerva Cerridwen) has a poignantly genre-savvy character, and again, displays how far we've come in a generation or so:

“It’s funny, I dreamed pretty much my whole childhood that this moment would come. Someone asking me to get away to a world where I’d be fully accepted—still the alien, but spectacular because of it, you get the idea. Or maybe you don’t, but I kind of have a feeling you might.”

...

“Anyway,” Lutra continued, “I’m good where I am. Ibb, do you know how amazing life has become? I’ve got friends now, and most of them are also neurodiverse. We all love each other’s quirks. There are people in my life who can teach me, with my absolute lack of spatial awareness, something as complicated as crochet.”

-"A Hint of Color" (Jody Lynn Nye) had a sweet moment where aliens whose anatomy is very different from humans can nevertheless recognize and appreciate a team of humans taking care of their injured comrade; reminded me of "The Lost Steersman" :) "The bare minimum we can do is prove to them that we're at least as smart as they are."

-Sometimes it's funny when different stories independently hit on similar imagery for communicating ideas. Three different stories that play with the idea of Platonic solids:

Tangible Things (Jillian Starr):

People smell the anxiety on my breath, and they laugh because my smile isn’t right. Honestly, most of me isn’t right. Dodecahedron in a round hole and all that.

Meeting of the Branes (Kiya Nicoll):

“Yes,” he thought at it, and thought: tetrahedron. Cube. Octahedron. Dodecahedron. Icosahedron. Sphere.

It was the only way he could imagine to explain three-dimensionality, and the Angel recoiled again before returning. <<!!>>

Meaning Green, Unclear (Clara Ward)

Ari shaped a cluster of one thousand magnetic balls into Platonic solids: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and finally a twenty-sided icosahedron. Geode formed the same shapes using a rainbow chain-link fidget.

-There were also several poems and pieces of artwork included. Overall I enjoyed the art--it's hard to tell a story or illustrate "neurodiversity" in a single image, but it does a good job at portraying "communication with aliens" and other engrossing images. With regards to the poetry, most of the free verse didn't really click for me, but "Close Encounter in the Public Bathroom" (Keiko O'Leary) uses the pantoum form effectively to portray being stuck in place (due to OCD and/or alien technology not working). Also, "Meaning Green, Unclear" incorporated haiku into the story as a means of communication!

-The editors had fun with the legalese, so don't skip the copyright/acknowledgements stuff:

No express or implied guarantees or warranties are provided for any links, facts, ideas, concepts, recipes, formulas, memes, runes, platitudes, or paradoxes expressed herein.

...

This book is made of bits and presented using atoms: bits are fundamental units of information capable of distinguishing yes/no conditions, and atoms are small but nonfundamental particles in constant motion that stick together when close but repel each other when compressed.

Bingo: great fit for Character with a Disability; also Indie Press, Published 2024, 5+ Short Stories!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the narrative lampshading Sevarian's ignorance:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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