You Know What I Read Last Summer

[roadrunnertwice]

Martha Wells — Witch King

June 1, 2023

Hands-down my favorite book of 2023. Possibly first of a series.

You already know I love Wells' fantasy novels. But I'm very gratified by all the people I know who got into her via Murderbot and went "whoa oops Witch King slaps even harder than Murderbot." I've been telling you!!!

Okay, so what you’ve got here is a setting with both angels and demons, but they’ve got ecology instead of theology. It’s queer as heck. Kaiisteron is a demon from what seems to be a different layer of reality where everything’s mildly amorphous and protean, but he lives in the “real” world by restoring a fixer-upper corpse to better-than-life condition; for plot-related reasons, he can’t go home again, nor can other demons come into the world the way he did anymore. His original body was a young woman, and he was expected to bear children into her tribe as part of the summoning bargain, which he saw as a totally normal and sensible thing for an enterprising lad to do with his homeboys.

He helped save the world at one point, but now everything seems to have gone slightly wrong again. The narration alternates two different time periods, so you’re trying to catch up with two different versions of many characters on the fly. The answer to every question is both simpler and more complicated than you expected. There may have been a single "good guy" in the whole story, but he didn't survive into the future, and all the neutral guys are left struggling to live up to his memory.

Fukken do yourself a favor and read Witch King.

Ann Leckie — Translation State

July 9, 2023

This was great. I'll probably re-read it sometime this year.

Right, so previously there was the Breq books (Ancillary Etcetera), where the world resolved around the Radch, its depressed boats and former boats, and their limitless psychosexual obsession with their empire's inventively self-sabotaging dictator. And then there was Provenance, where the world opened up a bit more and we got a deeply absurd little farce in a parochial backwater, with a dusting of treaty-destabilizing violation of the whole Presger scheme of species category for flavor.

Translation State is the next episode in what is turning out to be a continuing multi-species/multi-nation/multi-genre story about an interesting adjustment period in the history of the human/alien/Presger treaty. It's sort of an inverted twin of Provenance, and I can't quite justify that statement but I'm very sure about it vibes-wise.

If you liked the previous four books, hell yeah, this is for you. If you liked the Ancillary trilogy but couldn't get on Provenance's level (or just haven't gotten around to that book yet), go for it anyway; it's a third new thing, not another instance of one of the prior things. (And it occurs after the further-destabilizing events of Provenance, but I personally think reading in order is overrated anyway and you could totally get away with swapping em.)

And damn, you know what we finally get in this outing? Some light shed on the fucking Presger. Well — okay, I lie. Some light shed on the Presger translators, though. It implies a thorough explanation for what was going on with Dlique and Zeiat! It's super gross and disturbing on literally every level! It's a heartwarming coming-of-age story! Content warning for something that has a family resemblance to sexual assault but is actually a great deal worse!

Elizabeth Hand — Generation Loss (re-read)

July 15, 2023

This is still really good, and I wanna re-read the other Cass Neary books soon. Glad we get to have a woman character who sucks this hard.

There's a scene that I remember being seriously revulsed by on my first read, something that I thought killed any real sympathy for Cass beyond wanting to see how the plot shook out. Interestingly, I don't feel that way about it anymore; instead, I see it as the moment where she finally exits any conventional human morality, which she'd never been able to properly justify her existence under in the first place. In the later books, it also proves to be the moment that severs her from the tatters of her former life — from here on out, she's fully a tool of the thing reaching down from the storm cloud. She can't and won't right wrongs, but she's uniquely empowered to shred occult corruptions which can only be harmed by being observed, hence the series's persistent obsession with cameras and light.

Anyway, badass noir with intensely good pacing.