Born to Exile by Phyllis Eisenstein
Started: 3/26/18
Gave up: 3/28/18
Gave up on this. No character development, and there’s a taken-for-granted-women-are-objects-for-sex assumption that I just can’t handle.
What I’ve Been Reading
Exiles’ Return by Gayle Greeno
Started: 3/16/18
Finished: 3/25/18
The third book about giant telepathic cats. Totally over this series, but I do wish I had a giant telepathic cat of my own.
Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon
Started: 3/12/18
Finished: 3/16/18
Space merchants and space adventure! Fun, exciting, with a young competent protagonist with doubts who has to overcome space adversity. Also, it’s set in space.
Mindspeaker’s Call by Gayle Greeno
Started: 3/4/18
Finished: 3/12/18
Sequel to Finders Seekers, more comfort reading after the last disappointment. Giant telepathic cats! Update: The resolution to the love story was…problematic. And too quick and unexplained.
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Started: 2/25/18
Finished: 3/4/18
I really like Neal Stephenson, but this was NOT a good novel. It’s more of a technical manual about space stations and surviving in space and STOP TEACHING ME ABOUT SPACE. When he was telling the actual story, with actual characters, I was riveted, but that was no more than half the book. On the one hand, I appreciate the real science, but the way he did it took away from the story, and I need my fiction to be about STORY. There is a paragraph near the end of the book that makes me actually angry, where, after giving me every technical detail about surviving in space, he dismisses the same details about surviving in a mine as unimportant and unnecessary to the story. IT’S THE SAME EXACT THING, GOD DAMN IT.
First Rider’s Call by Kristen Britain
Started: 2/19/18
Finished: 2/25/18
Sequel to Green Rider (which I read back in Jan/Feb 2017). Good fantasy, good sequel. I found it relaxing after the pressure of reading new/unusual fiction (like The Stars are Legion – SO WEIRD).
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Started: 2/19/18
Finished: 2/19/18
I flew through this YA novel/thriller. I have a minor quibble with one of the ways the title is used, but otherwise, this was pretty good.
Passing Strange by Ellen Klages
Started: 2/17/18
Finished: 2/18/18
Lovely novella about lesbians in 1940s San Francisco with a little bit of magic.
Lotus Blue by Cat Sparks
Started: 2/10/18
Finished: 2/17/18
Post-apocalyptic Australia, so lots of desert. For whatever reason, I’m not a huge fan of desert stories, and this has been kind of a slog for me. Update: a slog through to the end.
Noumenon by Marina J. Lostetter
Started: 2/6/18
Finished: 2/10/18
A generation ship story with clones, told over a LONG period of time in a series of vignettes. Pretty good – we spent just enough time with the characters in each story to like or understand them. There was one episode that seemed a bit extreme, but it was good storytelling, so I’m okay with it.
The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley
Started: 2/3/18
Finished: 2/5/18
WEIRD. Like, I still don’t know what was going on exactly, or how that society worked. Are the ships alive? And there was this journey segment that, while it gathered up some companions for our hero, didn’t really teach her anything, so what was the point of that exactly? I found a lot of it offputting.
American War by Omar El Akkad
Started: 1/28/18
Finished: 2/3/18
Speculative fiction, second American civil war begins 60 years from now, the south refuses to give up oil. Told entirely from the point of view of a young southern woman fighting, not for the cause (she doesn’t care about oil), but because the war (and the north) destroyed everything she knew and loved. It felt real and dirty and uncomfortable, and I’m not sure I liked it, but it was good.
Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones
Started: 1/28/18
Finished: 1/28/18
Another novella, also good, but not as gripping as the previous two. Felt more psychological thriller than science fiction.
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
Started: 1/27/18
Finished: 1/28/18
Another novella, the second in the Wayward Children series. Very good, maybe not as good as the first one, but still really nice to dig into the actual through-the-looking-glass story of two of the characters.
The Murders of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson
Started: 1/26/18
Finished: 1/27/18
REALLY good novella. It was creepy and fascinating and I don’t want to tell you anything about it because I don’t want to give it away but I want MORE. What is WRONG with her? How did she get that way? What’s up with her parents? WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?!? More, please.
Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn
Started: 1/23/18
Finished: 1/26/18
The premise was interesting – post-apocalyptic world, society determines that overpopulation was one of the causes of collapse, so people have to earn the right to have kids – but it took a while to get to that explanation, and I never felt like it had a point. Also, the writing was ANNOYING. John was reading another of her books at the same time and had similar issues with the writing. I finished it, but it was difficult not to skim through to the end.
The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne Valente
Started: 1/21/18
Finished: 1/23/18
There’s a trope in comics, movies, TV, books, everything, about how the hero’s love interest has to die or be raped or whatever in order to give the hero a reason to go be heroic. The love interest is an object, a plot device, not a character. The trope (and there’s a website) is called Women in Refrigerators because a particularly egregious example involved a Green Lantern comic where the girlfriend was killed and actually stuffed into a fridge for the hero to find. This novella, focused on the comics aspect, is about turning those women into characters. Pretty darn good, too.
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
Started: 1/18/18
Finished: 1/21/18
Interesting, but not great. It suffers from telling, not showing, and the descriptions of locations were decidedly NOT clear. I couldn’t picture any of those locations, despite the descriptive text. I almost put it down a couple of times.
An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King
Started: 1/15/18
Finished: 1/18/18
It started out as an interesting family drama in a near-future China where the men vastly outnumber the women, and then it took an unexpected, I think unforeshadowed, violent turn. It’s told from the point of view of four characters, three of whom felt real. The fourth one, who, incidentally, is the one whose plotline took the thriller turn, felt like wish-fulfillment. Or maybe he was just not very smart.
The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden
Started: 1/14/18
Finished: 1/15/18
It was interesting and not at all what I expected and I LIKED it but I didn’t love it. A kid and a teenager and a demigod and some sentient robots in South Africa.