Books: Scholomance, Count Zero, The Black Incal

[roadrunnertwice]

Hey, let's do a Friday bookpost.

Naomi Novik — the Scholomance trilogy

• A Deadly Education — Dec 26, 2024
• The Last Graduate — Jan 4, 2025
• The Golden Enclaves — Jan 13

These were delightful, and I blazed through em. (Only slightly delayed by waiting for Ruth to finish each book ahead of me, lol.) They're a wizard school story, with a bunch of familiar shapes and tropes, except the wizard school is a gruesome shithole with a staggering mortality rate, tolerated only due to the higher mortality on the outside.

The world has most of the same coherency problems you always get with stories about a separate magical society secretly overlaid on consensus reality, but Novik knows the correct solution: briefly wave a partial explanation around, then floor the plot and place your faith in the motion blur. Don’t worry about it too much.

What makes this series work so well is mostly two things: first, that Novik is just really that good at pacing, making exaggerated characters sympathetic, and understanding the core function of well-worn tropes. She’s done her time in the fanfic mines and she knows how to work a crowd! Second, she actually put a lot of thought into what an international magic school might look like in the 21st century — the political tensions/alliances/resentments, the compromises and adjustments over time, all kinds of stuff.

Anyway, if you wanna guzzle a dark fantasy trilogy that’s indulgent while never being dumb, this is a great pick.

Moëbius and Jorodowski — The Incal vol. 1: The Black Incal (comics)

Mar. ??

During a discord conversation about weird influential French sci fi comics, I remembered that I had PDFs of this series from a bundle somewhere, so I cracked it open.

This comic is unhinged, and teeters constantly on the edge of nonsense. It’s pretty cool.

All the Commonweal books over again

May ??

Sometimes you gotta re-read.

Susanna Clarke — Piranesi (re-read)

May 14

Sometimes you gotta re-read. I finally bought my own copy of this one.

William Gibson — Agency (re-read)

May 19

Sometimes you gotta re-read.

Ann Leckie — Translation State (re-read)

May 22

Sometimes you gotta re-read. Still really good!

William Gibson — Count Zero

June 9

Ah, the attraction and revulsion of cyberpunk.

Out of Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, I had only ever read Neuromancer, and that was a long-ass time ago. This one was frustrating and compelling; it has the grace and momentum I associate with Gibson, but it also has some amount of tedious macho horseshit, and the weird brand-name fixation that became the default gesture for any pastiche of these particular works. (His later work remains brand-interested, but he legit toned it way down.)

Anyway, I don't see this becoming a comfort re-read the way his later works (starting around Pattern Recognition) are, but I did enjoy it. Also, mixed in among all the cyberdeckers, one of the three main threads involved a woman with a background in the arts being contracted by a billionaire to search for something obscure, which was the same plot setup as the whole Blue Ant trilogy; I wasn't expecting to see a prototype of that in the Sprawl!

Martha Wells — the first four Murderbot novellas again, plus Fugitive Telemetry

June 25

Sometimes you gotta re-read. A friend started reading these and I got enthusiastic on his behalf.

Comments

[kamonohashi]

1. i just started a deadly education yesterday, but had to stop early due to incipient migraine. it's been on my list to read for a while and hopefully i can stick with it (i've been in a reading slump recently), especially as...

2. i got about a quarter of the way through babel which has also been on my list for forever, and it is great and has a lot to say about language and translation that i think is worthwhile, but you can tell that it's also going to be brutal, and the dread of that made me put it down until later (and then my library loan ran out so i'll try again in like a month when my hold comes around again)

3. i finally got around to reading the muderbot books! a bit late to the party, but they are so short that i couldn't justify buying them while i was trying to save up for moving/organizing an international move. so yay for the library!

[roadrunnertwice]

Oh yeah, I’ve heard that Babel is quite the endurance ride.

Yay for the library! Our neighborhood branch finally reopened at the end of the summer, and the new building is incredible. Lots of places to hang out and work on stuff, and lots of shelf space organized nicely.