Some Books I Loved

**Simply put, one of the finest works of fiction ever written.  Not just science fiction, but fiction period.  Written by a master who was decades ahead of her time** Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords. The year was 1969.  Science fiction, though exiting the "Golden Age" and entering the "New Wave", was still largely dominated by male authors writing for male readers.  Although the industry had somewhat moved past the raygun adventures with sexy alien babes of the 50s, it was still very much a boy's club.  While much was made of science fiction "maturing" as a genre, in practice that still basically meant adventures with author-insert characters, and the "maturity" was just adding in sex and drugs (not to say that it was a complete desert, of course.  I think the work of some guys like Bradbury and Vonnegut still hold up very well.  But they were few and far between) Anyways, into this walked Le Guin, writing a novel about a cisgendered ...

**It's a big, big galaxy out there.  It's hard to find your place in it.  Becky Chambers is here with a message of hope** This series is truly wonderful.  And I'm not saying anything radical here, this series has gotten its laurels and deserves every one of them.  But it's worth writing about, because it really is just a hand of friendship extended out into the darkness I'm tagging this as "Series (concluded)" although there's no reason why it should be.  The four books are only loosely connected to each other, occasionally a character from one books shows up in a later one (or sometimes is only mentioned, and the author trusts the perceptive reader knows who is being talked about:  "‘Which homesteader are you from?’ ‘I’m from the Ratri.’ Pei smiled blue. She knew the name. ‘I have a friend from the Asteria.’ ‘Our waterball team is better.’ ‘He’d fight you on that.’ ‘Yeah, well, he’d lose, just like his team does under pressure.’").  Becky Ch...

 **Chubby nerd becomes secret agent, hilarity ensues; basically "Chuck" but with scifi and aliens and amusing historical Easter Eggs** Ok so, the setup is that there are aliens called Quasing that have inhabited this planet for millennia upon millennia.  Unable to survive in Earth's atmosphere, they must inhabit living creatures as "hosts", and in this capacity (speaking to their hosts) they have secretly guided all of human history.  Like, actually, all of human history, at one point a Quasing remarks, "To this day, an argument still rages about whether the Neanderthal or the Cro-Magnon was worthier of being raised."  The endgame of course is to get humanity up to the level of interstellar travel, so that the Quasing can finally go home During the Middle Ages (the exact incident is a plot point, I won't spoil it), the Quasing split into two factions:  The Genjix (bad guys) who believe in the Conflict Doctrine, the idea that manipulating humanity i...

 **Gorgeous, baffling at times but undeniably gorgeous, galaxy-spanning space opera inspired by Korean mythology** Yoon Ha Lee is a ton of fun, as an author.  He actually has a fantastic collection of Young Adult novels, I'd highly recommend them (released under the "Rick Riordan Presents" line).  He actually first came to my attention for his "flash fiction", short stories usually no longer than a page or two.  Some of them even shorter: Raven Tracks The thing to know about ravens is that they don’t leave tracks the way other birds do.  It is not just a matter of raven feet, of tearing raven talons. Rather, ravens leave their thoughts scattered sideways in out-of-print books, in footnotes that should not be there and that are written in extinguished languages.  Sometimes they discuss the number of coins it would take to imbalance a businessman’s greed.  Sometimes they dissect (pitilessly, that goes without saying) the libretti of operas where too many...

**An epic fantasy trilogy in the oldschool sense, driven by its robust and deep mythology to create a believable world for the characters and the reader to inhabit.  Also Sigrud is awesome** Robert Jackson Bennet has been under the radar for a while, quietly putting out quality book after quality book for a decade and a half.  Fortunately, it seems like "The Tainted Cup" is getting some well-deserved awards buzz, hopefully that will give his whole catalog some hype (personally, if you want to start with one of his standalones, "The Company Man" is a great little urban mystery scifi, "American Elsewhere" is a small town eldritch shenanigans story very reminiscent of Stranger Things, and "Mr. Shivers" reads like if Stephen King decided to write a John Steinbeck novel, or vice versa) But I want to talk about the Divine Cities trilogy, which I honestly think stands up as a masterpiece Are any of the three individual books masterpieces on their own? H...

 **Simply put, some of the best children's fantasy out there.  And with an all-time great main character** Long before "Shrek" came along, Patricia C. Wrede's fantastic (and funny) Enchanted Forest chronicles was playfully mocking the tropes of Western fairytales--while simultaneously being a fantastic story of magic and adventure Amusingly, even fans that grew up with the series might not realize that Book 4 "Talking to Dragons" was actually the first  book written, published a solid 5 years before "Dealing with Dragons", the first book in chronology and now considered the first book of the series Apparently, Jane Yolen (I don't know if you all know her name, but in addition to being a very well-respected editor, to me she'll always be the author of the truly fantastic "Commander Toad" series of children's books) wanted a short fantasy story.  She told Wrede, "well, what about the mother character in 'Talking to Drag...

**X-Men but make it queer.  Erm.  More queer.  Explicitly queer, I guess?  X-Men but make it explicitly queer.  So damn queer** I already wrote about this for my year-end list, but I feel like this series is deserving of a post of its own, because there is a whole lot going on here In a large and still-expanding universe (so far by my count, there are 5 novels in the main arc, 3 spinoff novels, and an anthology of stories written by other authors), Whitby has written a story about an X-Men fan who gets mutant powers, and says to herself, "ok.  I know what to do with these." [note, I'm tagging this both "Series (concluded)" and "Series (ongoing)", because the main storyline Whitby set out to tell goes through the first 5 books and the first spinoff, which takes places between Books 4 and 5.  But there's been more since then!] Let's get one thing out of the way right off the bat:  This series is woke as fuck.  There are characters who are homos...