Review: At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories by Kij Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There were two things about this collection that I didn't realize when I picked it up: 1) Kij Johnson is well-known and has a long career both writing and editing (at one of my favorite publishers, Tor!) speculative fiction and 2) the anthology was loosely themed, with most stories featuring some animal or another as a major character.

The first was great discovery. I bought this because I'd read Johnson's story "Spar" in Clarkesworld a few years back and when I discovered Small Beer Press had published an anthology, I was sold. And it was an excellent buy! Thanks to one of my local indie stores (Kramerbooks ) for carrying it because otherwise I wouldn't have known!

The collection reminds me a lot of Lisa Tuttle. Very solid SF work with interesting ideas, with one or two stories that blew me away. I think Johnson's SF premises are more modern and well-rounded - complex alternate worlds, a tight focus on characters, and a literary prose style. I'm writing this review almost a year later and I still think about "Ponies" anytime I think about character-driven SF with a world I'd give an arm to explore. "Spar" remains one of my favorites (though it's not for the faint of heart - and having just reviewed "The Stars Are Legion" I'm realizing I have a bit of a thing for weird body horror fiction).

Anyway, Small Beer Press publishes some great books and this is one of them. This collection is very smart (which makes sense - Johnson has my alternate-reality dream job of teaching sci-fi at the college level) and engaging.

View all my reviews

Review: Pretty Deadly, Vol. 1: The Shrike

Pretty Deadly, Vol. 1: The Shrike by Kelly Sue DeConnick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Oh man. Pretty Deadly and Monstress were easily my top comic reads this year. I was expecting that from Monstress but I hadn't heard about Pretty Deadly so it took me by surprise. I'm not a huge fan of Westerns - or, I thought I wasn't, but Pretty Deadly and Westworld may have convinced me otherwise this year - and the setting turned me off for a while. Oh, how glad I am that I read it anyway.

It's been too long for me to remember the details of the story so my review will be broad-strokes and brief. The plot manages feel mythological without sacrificing investment in the characters and their stories. It reminds me of Sandman, where Dream and his siblings are universal forces of nature that should be so generic they're meaningless, but are instead uniquely alive. The art - the art! Emma Rios is fantastic. Her color palettes are full of greens and pinks and oranges, colors that shouldn't look pretty but do. It matches well with the story, a dark story with bits of hope and love and fun.

View all my reviews

Review: The New and Improved Romie Futch

The New and Improved Romie Futch by Julia Elliott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book totally wasn't my jam but I enjoyed the hell out of it anyway. I'm not big on Southern Gothic and I've never read Moby Dick and I'm not even a huge fan of most modern SF that deals with cybernetic brain implants (lookin at you, Nexus by Ramez Naam). But damn do I love a book that makes me like it despite my initial hesitations.

Some scattered thoughts:
I totally thought this was going to end horribly for Romie. I kept thinking his hallucinations and the voices and the blackouts might actually be due to drugs and alcohol even though Elliott kept proving me wrong. At the end of Part Two I thought he was going to die. All throughout Part Three I thought he was going to die or fuck up. I'm kinda glad it was a happy ending, but I'm not sure I'm totally satisfied by it. I've probably been watching too much Bojack Horseman.

I almost feel the science fiction parts of the book were unnecessary. The real story here was his quest for Hogzilla (and his attempts to repair the trajectory of his life) and the SF was not as important. It didn't bother me in the moment, but in retrospect it's like I read two different stories that got stitched together.

I loved the silliness and the verbosity of Romie and his buds post-op. Lots of humor plus some beautifully written sentences. Awesome.

View all my reviews

Review: The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories

The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories by Joan Aiken
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Disclosure: I received an e-galley copy of this book through Edelweiss.

This was one of several collections of 'strange stories' - magical, weird, unsettling collections that don't pack neatly into a genre label - that I read this year. Many of them, including this one, are almost like fairy tales, and I'd describe Aiken's as more like the original Grimm's fairy tales, pretty horror stories, than anything else.

Many of the stories focus on children experiencing the fantastic in their dire situations. Sometimes they read like miniature animatronic dollhouses featuring strange and magical scenes. Often nature encroaches on old, Victorian English homes. This is one of the most beautiful collections I read, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone, whether you like fantasy, horror, or typical literary writing.

View all my reviews

Review: We Who Are About To...

We Who Are About To... by Joanna Russ
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love bookstores and libraries of all kinds. Big ones with an endless buffet of options, curated collections with a peculiar slant to them, haphazard piles of books that the owners clearly didn't know what to do with. But I have a secret test for any book vendor that few pass and those special few have a permanent place in my heart: is there any Joanna Russ?

Russ is a classic SF writer who published during the New Wave and won or was nominated for most of the major SF awards. She also wrote kickass feminist nonfiction. She's a big enough name that most people who've read SF have heard of her, but I've only seen her books on the shelf in two bookstores ever, and through one academic library's interlibrary loan. I went into D.C. with a few friends to play Pokemon GO and we wandered our way to several bookstores until we finally settled in one that was next to a Pokemon gym. Just after taking over the gym, my phone ran out of battery, so I was able to devote proper attention to the books themselves. Their SF section was delightfully pulpy and meticulously shelved, and when I climbed up onto a step stool to check the top shelf, I found two Joanna Russ novels with green-edged pages and crazy pulp covers. I was ecstatic. (I also got an old collection of SF by female authors, which is also a rare find - things like that are much more common from the past 15-20 years).

Anyway, the book itself starts out like a pulp sci-fi novel. A group of travelers crash-lands on an uncharted planet where it's fairly certain they'll never be found. It's essentially Gulliver's Island in space. The first-person narrator is savvy and cynical and knows several things from the get-go: 1) there is no hope for long-term survival, 2) her fellow passengers will hold onto hope and try to perpetuate humanity (which means impregnating all fertile women ASAP whether they like it or not) and 3) she finds a respectable death far preferable to most of her other options.

The first half of the book explores the passengers' first week on the planet, the alliances and plans that quickly take shape, the growing distrust everyone has for the narrator. The book takes a sharp (but not unexpected, especially if you read the spoileriffic blurb on the first page of the book) turn about halfway through. The focus narrows to the narrator as she chronicles her slow death by starvation. Her hallucinations, her memories, her vacillation between panic and acceptance, her determination to die a deserved death. It's solid Russ work - even in the more lucid passages it can be difficult to follow a line of thought, and most passages are meaty enough to bear re-reading. It's a short book, though, so even though the second half is a slow march, it doesn't feel too long. And unlike 'The Female Man,' another of Russ's books I've read, it was just challenging enough to make me work without leaving me completely confused and in need of a syllabus to prep me for a re-read. Russ shows us glimpses of her characters' pasts and the world they come from that make me want to read other books set in the same universe, but she (and the narrator) refuse to elaborate on the history implied by the bits and pieces because they are irrelevant to the main event: the narrator's slow death.

It's a fascinating read with equal parts pulp and intellect. If you can get your hands on it, it's well worth reading.

View all my reviews

Review: Ninefox Gambit

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Disclosure: I received a free e-galley copy of this book through NetGalley.

Ninefox Gambit is certainly one of the most original and daring books I've read in a while. The premise of the story - a galactic empire that uses a kind of magic based on math and patterns - is fascinating. The core relationship between Kel and Jedao provides a solid emotional trajectory. Overall, though, I left the book feeling vaguely disappointed, both because the the premise didn't pull off as well as I'd hoped and because the character-driven story was a bit predictable.

The way the magic works is essentially confluence based on patterns of movement of either ships or soldiers that produce larger effects - like explosions, or camouflage. The scope extends beyond the military and throughout their society, as everyone in the Hexarchate follows the same calendrical patterns/schedules. It's a thoughtful metaphor for traditionalist societies where every person has their place and best serves the universe by performing their role dutifully. The main problems for me were that the patterns/formations that are used to create magical effects are abstract enough that they were usually weren't visualizable, and because the effects are magical and arbitrary, it was hard to build tension; the reader can't possible know that X formation will lead to Y effect, so when all the soldiers are getting into formation X, we don't know what that means for the next scene.

The story is driven by this magic. A rogue faction is enforcing a different calendar, and it's disrupting the very carefully woven fabric of magic that pervades the galaxy. Kel is chosen to fight this rogue faction for two reasons: first, she is a soldier who is unusually good at math; second, she suggests resurrecting the person of Jedao, a commander who went insane and killed his own troops many decades earlier. Resurrecting Jedao means incorporating him into her own mind and body, for reasons that are still unclear to me.

While the larger story of the Hexarchate is the 'pitch' story, the one that shapes the book, the core of the story is the relationship between Kel and Jedao. Kel starts remembering things that Jedao has done as if she had done them herself, and while she sees his many atrocities, she also starts to learn that the history she has been taught isn't quite right. As I mentioned above, this part of the story feels almost too familiar - an upstanding citizen must pair up with a supposedly evil traitor to defeat a common enemy, and along the way they begin to understand each other, and it's revealed that the bad guy had some good motivations all along.

It's been a while since I read the book now and I honestly can't quite remember the ending, but I would certainly read a sequel. It was a pretty enjoyable read and the most difficult part for me was that there are very few physical descriptions of anything, and it felt like I was blind while reading.

View all my reviews

SF Women Read-A-Thon

I'm back! It's been a while since I've posted and I have a new project. I'm still going to read and review pretty much everything I read (including my yearlong backlog of read books, and including ARCs/galleys). But now I have a goal: prove to the world women have been writing sci-fi for as long as it has been around.

I'm tackling that goal by proving it to myself, first, by reading as much and as widely as I can by women who have written sci-fi. Then, when someone asks for recommendations for "something like Piers Anthony" or "really hard SF" I can offer up some great SF by a woman. Specifically a woman who is not Ursula Le Guin, who is amazing, but is so so often the only woman I see on 'best sci-fi' lists.

My methods are a little suspect but they're not difficult. I went to my favorite used bookstore and found about 20 sci-fi books written by women that were written in the 1970s or earlier. I picked women I'd never heard of, with a few exceptions for classics I hadn't read. It cost me about $16. I might end up reading a lot of mediocre sci-fi this way, but people have been reading a lot of mediocre sci-fi by dudes for decades and keep recommending those books so other people read them et cetera ad nauseum until they become canon. I know I'll also find some gems, then I'll recommend them, then hopefully other people will read them because I reached outside both the canon and my comfort zone.

Why? Because I want to help good books get read, and because people seem to believe that women don't write SF or don't write SF as well or didn't used to write SF for some reason and I want to prove them wrong. And because many good books by women especially from 30+ years ago get left on the shelf at the used bookstore because no one recommended them.

Largely, because every single time I go into a "looking for recs" thread for SF on reddit there are literally zero recommendations for books by women. Except Le Guin, probably because a lot of people didn't know Ursula was a woman's name when they were kids. (They only read a woman because they didn't know better!) In threads specifically requesting books by women there are always the 'why are you only reading women, that's sexist' responses, but when someone points out in other threads that only men have been rec'd, that's also called sexist. I'm tired of that. It is not the case that women don't write good enough SF to be recommended. It's not the case that women don't write SF, don't write hard SF, don't write good SF. 

And because these all seem to me to be problems that regardless of cause, I can't do much about except to be loud and vocal about books that I love, and to find more books I love and share them! So I'm going to stock my arsenal to launch a silo of recs.

I'm going to call this my Sci-Fi Women Read-A-Thon and tag my Goodreads shelves, Instagram, and blog posts with #readathon_sfwomen, so follow along!

I started this project about a month ago so I'm excited to see that other people like Liz Bourke from Tor.com feel the same way.