Book 11: The Language of Liars by S.L. Huang

A bookclub book! Specifically a novella, and it's the sort of space scifi mystery type story that I'm so glad is the length that it is. This is both because it involves lots of different species and translation and beings moving through space in ways that my brain simply will not picture while I'm reading, and so there was a lot of me just letting certain descriptive elements wash over me rather than stressing about it all. And I'm glad I did, because boy does it eventually pack a real emotional punch. 

The very short narrative logline for this story is that there's this alien Ro who's a linguist, and his species has the ability to jump into a different species and observe their language and report back. He's kind of an anthropologist, and they're trying to figure out how to help this other species, and so he jumps and learns much more than he was expecting to, in a variety of ways. I don't actually want to say much more because, well, that's the story, but in many way it's more of a morality play than a full story, which made it an ideal bookclub book to discuss and the read itself went by fast enough and gave me a lot to think about. Not my favorite kind of book but very compelling! 

Grade: B

Book 43: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Final book club book of the year! A lovely little novella about a future version of California that has split off from the U.S., and the food service bots who form their own restaurant collective and build their own community of bots and humans. It's very sweet and enjoyable, with some fairly obvious but still effective allegories, and I enjoyed my time with it a lot.

Grade: B

Book 18: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

A book club book! This is a sci-fi space allegory about castes and what we tell ourselves when we create processes to lift up those who have been restricted. It's basically got a Snowpiercer vibe but about academia. It read a bit more like an intellectual exercise than a story, but I did enjoy it, and it should be a good discussion starter.

Grade: B

Book 13: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

A book club book! Although I've read it well in advance for once. 

I think I may have gone into this book with expectations that were too high--there's a lot about this time travel book to like, and I had a really nice time reading it. But I kept expecting either the relationships in the book to really wow me, or for the structure and worldbuilding of this specific time travel project to hit me harder, and instead it was just nice! I liked what it did with the historical event of the HMS Terror and what happened to the men searching for the Northwest Passage, but it never quite clicked into place with the current day story for me, and I never fell in love with the romance the way I was supposed to. 

Part of that is that the narrator felt a bit too opaque and naive for my liking, and while some of that is because of various reveals that occur in the final third of the book, that only compounded what didn't entirely work for me about her. It was all fine! But I had been hoping for something that made me swoon, and unfortunately it didn't.

Grade: B

Book 10: The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older

The sequel to The Mimicking of Known Successes, this book picks up where that one left off, with our intrepid duo stumbling on a new mystery to solve on the rings of Jupiter! This one is in many ways an examination of why people within a society will contrive to create an "imposition of unnecessary obstacles" simply because they need to see themselves as living off the land or being good enough or having the ability to pull up those bootstraps that others can't, etc. And for obvious reasons, I found that pretty topical! Don't break things that are working but flawed because you're bored or because they're not perfect!!! Ahem. 

I will say that the relationship at the core of these books still isn't exactly my jam - there's too much hesitation and doubt for me, without an actual issue to give their relationship any real conflict. It's not the scifi novella series I'd most recommend, but if space colonization is your thing, it's fun!

Grade: B

Book 23: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

A book club book! This is a lesbian romance that's also a detective story that happens to take place on the rings of Jupiter? So there's a lot of genre tropes and narratives all kind of smashed together in it. The set up is that earth became uninhabitable, so humanity set up a space colony of sorts on the rings of Jupiter that's connected by all of these trains. Different settlements resemble different cultures or really settings of humanity, so you have one town which feels like the old west, another area that's basically a living zoo of all of the creatures and vegetation the colonists will want to bring back to Earth when it's inhabitable again, and then there's a university which feels very Oxbridge. The story is a fun noir involving two exes, even if I could have done with more development of why they broke up and why being together now makes sense. Looking forward to reading the next one in the series and finding out where it's going. 

Grade: B

Book 15: The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord

 A book club book! And one we all felt pretty ambivalent about, sadly. It’s very much what I think of as cozy sci-fi, in that while things are definitely happening (first contact on a future earth where unexplained things have happened to the cities of the world) it’s not actually that interested in suspense or peril? And sometimes that can be nice, but it can also tip over into a story with stakes that should be high but which always feel low because you’re never actually invested in the reality or in doubt of the result. There’s a kind of model UN setup where one of the aliens (surprise!) is in disguise as a teacher, and the students are being quizzed on what’s presented as a fictional scenario but which we know is real, and the entire description of the scenario made me feel like someone was explaining the backstory of their D&D campaign without actually letting me play it, or even watch other people play. I never got hooked into the characters or the world.

 

Grade: C

Book 12: Flux by Jinwoo Chong

A book club book! This is a first novel that feels it, in both really positive and slightly tiring ways. It's stuffed to the brim with ideas, and they don't all quite come together to make a cohesive whole. It's very timey-wimey but also has some of the best engagement in what it means to be a person who's deeply connected to a piece of media, and manages to depict that in a way that feels extremely accurate but also not instantly dated - I can't datestamp the author as being on tumblr in precisely 2014-2015 or whatnot. Overall I enjoyed it enough to be very excited about his next book, which is a great landing place for a first novel. 

Grade: B

Book 7: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

First book club book of the year! I was very happy when this book got chosen, because I've been meaning to read something by this author and this was a great excuse for it. This book club focuses on novels that exist within the speculative fiction umbrella, and I would say that this one qualifies but is closer to literary fiction than the standard scifi genre novel. The story spans four or five centuries, starting with a remittance man in Canada just prior to WWI, then stopping off in New York right before Covid hits, and then a worldwide book tour two centuries after that. How are they all linked? Well that's what everyone is trying to figure out. 

I hadn't read anything else by this author, but I've seen the first two episodes of the miniseries based on Station Eleven, so I wasn't surprised at how much of the story is about a possible future and also pandemics and what they do to civilization. I was surprised by the writing; for some reason I went into this expecting it to be a challenging read in some way, and instead I found it delightfully crisp and engaging. I think I went in fearing that it would be all of the things I like least about literary fiction as a genre, and instead it was what I like best. It also has a ton of incidental queerness, which is something I always appreciate. I really enjoyed reading it, and individual images and characters from the story are going to stick with me for a long time. Looking forward to going back and reading her earlier novels now! 

Grade: A 

Book 33: Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather

I really enjoyed this novella!! It was such an interesting sci-fi space opera setup about a convent of nuns in a living spaceship traveling through the galaxy who discover that their larger leadership is corrupt. They respond in fascinating ways, and all of them have really compelling relationships with each other and dynamics and secrets, and idk! It's just WEIRD in exactly the way I want these kinds of speculative fiction novellas to be. 

Grade: A

Book 26: An Unnatural Life by Erin K. Wagner

Another free Tor novella about humans and robots! This one fucked me up less regarding the pandemic, but did slightly fuck me up in terms of issues around legal rights and so forth, so it is possible that it is the world that's fucking me up rather than the fiction I'm consuming. Who could have guessed. 

This one centers on a woman named Aiya, who is a lawyer living on a space colony. She works for a program that is designed to rehabilitate robots who have committed crimes, but then she ends up representing one who has been wrongfully accused of murder. It deals with lots of questions about agency and control and who we hold responsible for various elements in society, and once again it was a story that was hard for me to engage with at the moment. But I found it very interesting overall. 

Grade: B

Book 25: Unlocked by John Scalzi

This was a free Tor download, and I've been meaning to read something by Scalzi for a while, so I thought sure! I'll give it a shot! And then discovered that it was a novella written in 2014 about a respiratory pandemic that overran the world and eventually resulted in some people's bodies no longer working, but their minds still did, so people invented a robot to interface with the people's minds to become that person out in the world, and it turns out I just cannot handle this particular story and the way politics are depicted right now! I found the things that were accurate to be just as upsetting as the things that weren't, and yeah. I have no idea how to objectively rate this, so take this grade as being more of a reflection of what I can handle reading rather than a judgment on the quality of the writing or storytelling. 

Grade: C

Book 14: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

 A book club book! And one which surprised me a lot, largely in how much I loved it.

This is the second book by Becky Chambers that I've read; the first one was fine, but didn't do much for me personally, and I had sort of expected that her work would remain in the category of "fiction that many people I know love, but that is not for me for whatever reason." But part of what's so nice about being in a book club is that sometimes I get nudged into giving an author or genre or whatever another chance, and in this case I could not be more delighted to have experienced this. 

This is a novella about a monk, who decides that the life they're living no longer works for them, and so they needs to make Big Changes and go out into the world. Do they have a plan? No. Do things immediately work out for them? No. Do they discover a previously unknown talent that makes it all worth it? No. But they get to live, and have an adventure, and go on a completely senseless roadtrip, and along the way they find what makes it worth it. 

The worldbuilding is wonderful, the relationships at the core of the story are so incredibly satisfying, and it's a story about reaching and searching that doesn't arrive at answers that are too easy, but it also doesn't punt on giving us answers the text implicitly promised us. I loved it and want to read it again immediately. 

Grade: A 

Book 1: Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee

We started the new year with a book club book! A book club book about a nonbinary artist named Jebi who somehow finds themselves in the middle of a revolution when really, they just wanted a job.

This story takes place in a speculative version of Japanese-occupied Korea, complete with a mecha dragon and magic derived from art, and secret revolutionaries and unexpected collaborators with the occupation, and no easy answers for anything. But it's also a love story, both between Jebi and the mecha dragon, who they create a telepathic means of communication via painting with inks which have distressing origins, and also between Jebi and a badass duelist. The tone has a lightness to it as well, in large part because Jebi is a delightful kind of unreliable narrator--there's so much of their world that they're clearly just not aware of, or haven't focused on, so they're constantly surprised by events in ways that feel believable, because prior to the narrative of the story, they just accepted the reality of where they lived and did their best not to think about it. 

Their older sister did think about it, a lot, and one of the things Jebi discovers through the novel is how much more involved she is in elements of the revolution. I really liked their relationship, because it was a great example of how two people can love each other and care for each other without truly understanding one another, and accept that distance. 

It's also an interesting book because Jebi's gender is just a fact, it's not notable one way or another, and there's a poly relationship that isn't necessarily socially acceptable, but for reasons beyond the number of people within it. The author is trans, and Korean-American, and I really, really enjoyed his perspective on this world and on this character. 

Grade: A

Book 66: Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

 A book club book! I knew nothing about this, other than the title, and it really knocked me back on my heels. It's a story about Ella, a young Black girl, whose brother Kev is born during the Rodney King riots. It follows them and their mother as they leave South Central for Harlem, and then Kev's incarceration in Rikers, and his release to a place called Watts. Ella has a Thing, where she can feel and sense the violence that's coming for people, and the story is somewhere between magical realism and sci-fi and dystopia, but really it's just classic speculative fiction. 

It made me think for obvious reasons of The Deep, and how narratives can pull apart trauma, and create a new narrative, and what that requires. It was also deeply affecting to read this book that was written in 2019 now, in a post-George Floyd world, because it was a pre- and current and post-Rodney King world before it was that, and it was an Emmet Till world before that one, and so on. But I wonder how ready I would have been to have read this book even a year ago, to say nothing of ten years ago, given where the narrative lands. This book will stay with me. 

Grade: A 

Book 57: Killing Gravity by Corey J. White

I think reading this novella after reading all of the Murderbot stories meant it really suffered in comparison--it's not the same exact kind of story, the central character is a human with special powers rather than a murderbot, but it's got a lot of the same elements and feel. And I did really love parts of it, especially those involving Seven, the main character's tiny cat-like pet/companion, and the main character herself, Mars, is an entertaining voice. But I never particularly cared about the world building, or really understood what the overall point of the book was, so while it was a pleasant enough read, there wasn't quite enough for me to latch onto.

Grade: B

Book 54: Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Boy I loved this book. It's a collection of speculative short stories, all of which manage to be the most interesting kind of sci-fi for me: they are deeply, deeply invested in exploring what it means to be human, and how we function, and how that would extend into multiple different settings and realities. The prose is so easy to read and fall into; it feels deceptively simple. And even his stories that are the clearest metaphors (Exhalation, for one) are so well done that you don't feel like you got hit across the face with it. They're simply another opportunity to figure out how we live. I took this out from the library but I may need to buy a hard copy. A wonderful read.

Grade: A

Book 52: Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone

 If you are up for a solid space opera romp where a person who's alone finds a team in the middle of a new universe she didn't know existed, and that person is also a woman of color who dates women, then boy do I have the book for you! 

Vivian Liao is a great character, and this is a space opera that's almost a portal fantasy--on the day she's about to undertake actions to completely transform life on earth by way of becoming a benevolent tech dictator, she is instead pulled into space, and is immediately on the run and gathers a group of four other people who are attempting to deal with the mysteries of the universe. There's a structure and a mythos to the universe at large, and they're well developed while also fairly standard representatives of the space exploration genre, but it's really Viv and her four new friends that I cared about. As a related comment, there's a revelation about two thirds of the way in that feels like it should be a bigger surprise than it is, but because the overall story is compelling enough, I didn't find that to impact my enjoyment of it. This book doesn't reach the heights of the novella he co-wrote last year, but it's a very good read. 

Grade: B

Book 51: Network Effect by Martha Wells

 Murderbot!!! When I started reading this book, the first novel after four novellas, I did wonder whether this story would truly feel like a full novel after so many shorter adventures. And the answer is that it really did! It built on the first four novellas a lot, but the emotional and logistical arc of both Murderbot and the people and other AIs in its universe really demanded a full novel's worth of exploration. 

After three adventures where Murderbot basically took a very dangerous gap year and learned important things about itself, it was reunited with its clients/people/certainly not friends. It then goes on another adventure that's even bigger and scarier, reunites with a character from one of those three novellas, and discovers that as much as it hates having feelings it does in fact have them. One of the central joys of this series from the very first novella is the contrast between the extremely dry narrative voice of a not-person who thinks humans are inexplicable idiots and its continual reckoning with its own emotions and desires. A sheer delight! I think this is my favorite of the series since the first novella itself. 

Grade: A

Book 47: Exit Strategy by Martha Wells

More Murderbot! This is the final novella of four, and it's the one that finally reunites Murderbot with its clients/people/FRIENDS from the first novella. I found the first couple of chapters of this pretty dry, I have to say--a lot of setup and well-voiced internal monologue, but for me these stories really take off as soon as we see Murderbot have to interact with bots or people or both. But the rescue mission to save Mensah is great, and watching it figure out what's going on and having to deal with emotions is always my favorite things. I also really liked the continuation of Murderbot's transformation into a being that is distinct from SecUnits, and then the process of it rebuilding itself after it almost deleted itself in a last ditch effort to save the day was great. I'm really excited to read the full novel now!

Grade: B