Some Books I Loved

 **Delightfully meta fantasy.  Our heroes are pretty certain that they are in a fairy tale, and just hope that it has a happy ending** "In time to come, when the magic is draining so far out of the world that a vampire can be banished by crossed sticks and a sprinkle of water, when all that we do and say here will be spoken of in the brightest daylight or the darkest, wildest night without fear of bringing anything to pass, wise men will debate why there is any pain or suffering at all, and will say many foolish things and a few wise ones about it, but is it not enough for us to say 'pain has come this way,' and let it be?  We do not yet belong to the gray, dull generations, or to times without meaning, or to times when meaning drains even from stories." Though more well-known for his more traditional science fiction, in 1996 John Barnes decided to write a fantasy novel, and what came was a charming, unique, and delightful little piece of fantasy that has stuck with m...

 **A very well-done YA-ish space opera set in a fascist State.  Unfortunately, sadly, shamefully relevant these days** Honestly, I don't know why I have to write a review, when Shelly Parker-Chan (the author of "She Who Became the Sun", which will probably get a post on this blog at some point!) summed up the book already in a single sentence: "This book is for everyone who loved Ender’s Game, but Ender’s Game didn’t love them back." . . . I don't really know how to get much better than that.  But I can try to add on at least, here we go Let me back up a little bit and give the setup.  In the far far future (this is very much not "hard" scifi, Tesh didn't bother to work out the technology.  She admits in the Afterword that "the technology of shadowspace runs on purest narrativium."), humanity has lost a war to an interstellar empire.  However, hidden in the far reaches of space, the last survivors of humanity live on Gaea Station and ...

 **One of the more remarkable books I've read in a while.  If you're in the mood for something different, can't recommend this one highly enough** Honestly, superlatives fail me here.  Comparisons do too.  I guess it's like if Julian Barnes, Ted Chiang, and Jorge Luis Borges wrote a book together?  That's the best I can do, hah! Ok, let's back up.  So, this book is written almost entirely in obituaries.  The framing device, we quickly learn, is that it's an AI's attempt to process the death by suicide of its human daughter (the first obituary in the novel) After that, each subsequent obituary connected to the previous one.  A person mentioned in one obituary is the subject of the next, so the flow almost like someone clicking on links around Wikipedia.  It can be a little disorienting, and I was very glad that each obituary had a date at the top so I could keep track of the timeline (in addition, I was reading an ebook version, meaning it was...

 **While 'updated fairy tales' are having a fantastic Renaissance right now, there are few who do it better than Naomi Novik** The real story isn’t half as pretty as the one you’ve heard. The real story is, the miller’s daughter with her long golden hair wants to catch a lord, a prince, a rich man’s son, so she goes to the moneylender and borrows for a ring and a necklace and decks herself out for the festival. And she’s beautiful enough, so the lord, the prince, the rich man’s son notices her, and dances with her, and tumbles her in a quiet hayloft when the dancing is over, and afterwards he goes home and marries the rich woman his family has picked out for him. Then the miller’s despoiled daughter tells everyone that the moneylender’s in league with the devil, and the village runs him out or maybe even stones him, so at least she gets to keep the jewels for a dowry, and the blacksmith marries her before that firstborn child comes along a little early.  Because that’s what th...

 **The stories that The Iliad and similar epics left out.  The stories of the women of the war** Sing, Muse, he said, and I have sung. I have sung of armies and I have sung of men. I have sung of gods and monsters, I have sung of stories and lies. I have sung of death and of life, of joy and of pain. I have sung of life after death.  And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough. Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them. A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we? And so here we are, hearing stories that have gone untold for millennia--the stories of the women of the Trojan War.  This book is, simply put, a masterpiece The framing device for th...

 Black History Month was wonderful reading, let's slide right into Women's History Month for March (with Zora Neale Hurston providing a wonderful bridge).  While specifc in general and science fiction in particular have always been a bit of a boy's club, there have always been women who made their mark on the genre (and let's not forget that more or less the first ever Western science fiction novel was written by a woman . . .) Every year, I enjoy going back to some of the badasses who shaped the genre and the voices saying fantastic things today First, a few books of Feminist Speculative Fiction that I have loved: * * * "Where the Wild Ladies Are" by Aoko Matsuda (short fiction; collected 2020) Absolute perfection, modern feminist retellings of classic Japanese myths.  Finally, the women of these stories that have so often been reduced to either monster or victim get to have their time in the spotlight "The Refrigerator Monologues" by Catherynne M. ...