I know, #5 was only like four posts ago, but it's been many months in the interim! Thankfully, my drive to read is not as repressible by bad moods as my drive to write.
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Childhood's End (Arthur C. Clarke)
I think this is one of those things that, like a lot of Silver Age science fiction, you have to read as a kid to really love. Having encountered a bunch of its ideas filtered through all manner of improbable other channels (e.g., the novelizations of the Doom games—which I absolutely adored as a kid—riffed on the whole “aliens that look like demons from Christian mythology” thing), and being about seven decades too late for any of its ideas to seem forward-thinking, I can't say I thought highly of it. Sexist as a matter of course, trying hard to be racially progressive but stepping on every conceptual and linguistic rake imaginable (including the n-word over and over again), and too didactic to have much in the way of compelling plot. Cool ideas but fairly lifeless execution. A classic museum piece.
Platform Decay (Martha Wells)
It's Murderbot! We love Murderbot, don't we? My assessment of System Collapse still stands, more or less (“All the Murderbot books are starting to blur together in my memory a bit, which I think is 50% the extremely generic titles and 50% that, well, there’s a bit of a formula at work here. Still enjoyable!”) but this one, thanks to an interesting setting and a few gripping action scenes, actually stands out more in my memory than the couple that preceded it. Lots of grist for the Mothership module mill here. The humor is wearing a little thin, though.
Uprooted (Naomi Novak)
One of my best friends gave me Spinning Silver as a gift a while back, expressing regret that she hadn't been able to find a copy of Uprooted, which she liked better. And I've talked to at least two other people since who made the same assessment: Oh, you liked Spinning Silver? You gotta read Uprooted! It's even better! Well, I finally did, and reader, I did not like Uprooted nearly as much as Spinning Silver. It was enjoyable, certainly, and the first act is a clever twist on a bunch of hoary old wizard-school tropes (although the enemies-to-lovers stuff could hardly be hoarier or more bluntly telegraphed), but I thought it outstayed its welcome a bit—one grueling battle or other ordeal after another after another only to arrive at exactly the conclusion we expected all along. It did make me want to write more Cairn stuff, though, so that's a win.
The Correspondent (Virginia Evans)
Read this in order to make an informed guest appearance at the same friend's bookclub while visiting her. Found it not only to be pretty good, generally speaking, but oddly resonant with my own life; in some ways, the protagonist is a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God version of my mom (my mom is great, for the record; the grace of God is powerful stuff). Evans does an excellent job of giving her a voice that remains consistent and recognizable even as she code-switches widely across different media and different correspondents. A believably and reliably unreliable narrator.
Antarctica (Claire Keegan)
Borrowed this from my dad on a camping trip after he'd finished it, thinking I'd never read any Keegan. Kept surprising myself by realizing “Oh, I've read this before” and dimly remembering what came next—turns out I'd previously read at least six of the 15 stories in here. The narrative structures are sometimes a bit conventional, building methodically to a climactic moment of horror or catharsis, but the prose is wonderful, and her ability to conjure rural Ireland and the American South alike is striking. “Ride If You Dare” is my hands-down favorite.
Late Fame (Arthur Schnitzler)
Pretty lightweight, but enjoyable and evocative. Unsparing of its characters (and the tendencies of theirs you will surely recognize in yourself and people you know), but warm and good-hearted on the whole. I'm curious to see the serendipitously recent film adaptation starring Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee, both of whom I love.
The Great Believers (Rebecca Makkai)
Squarely part of the weird, uncomfortable little micro-genre in which straight women write relentlessly bleak, borderline cruel tragedy porn about doomed gay men. Credit where it's due, though, she's a great writer. Strong characters, a compelling story (or set of interlinked stories), a wonderful not entirely nostalgic vision of 1980s Chicago.
Orbital (Samantha Harvey)
Insubstantial but charming and beautifully written. Lovely descriptions of the station, of Earth from orbit, of the inner lives of the astronauts, of the fragility and impermanence of everything we know and care about.
The Cactus League (Emily Nemens)
Oddly gets a bunch of little things wrong about baseball, and doesn't really go anywhere narratively or thematically in the end, but features distinct, well drawn characters, some of whose little lives are tremendously moving.
The New York Game (Kevin Baker)
Baker is kind of an annoying old-school crank when it comes to baseball stats and strategy (the word “ribbies” appears repeatedly, God help us) but the New York history is delightful and hey, he is writing about ancient history, after all, as baseball history goes. A bottomless well of fun trivia.
Trouble and Her Friends (Melissa Scott)
In the same used-books section of the senior center shop in Hot Springs, Montana, where I scored the whole History of the Runestaff series and a bunch of Andre Norton novels for two bits a pop, I grabbed a couple of Melissa Scott hardcovers (for the relatively princely sum of $1.25 each). Was just flipping through things, reading the first couple paragraphs of each book to see if the prose was any good, liked the cyberpunk cover design of this one, enjoyed the first page, picked up another of Scott's (see below), thought the first page of that one was pretty solid too, bought them both. A whole year later, I finally got around to reading them. And they're really good! This starts out feeling, as a lot of early-90s SF novels do, like a relic, extraordinarily conservative in some of its predictions of the future a century hence, wildly over-optimistic about others. It just gets better and better as it goes, though, with strong characters and a keen eye for the social and political dimensions of the technology Scott is interested in (even if the technical dimensions are now quite dated). She has a wonderful yen for giving everybody and everything unusual, improbable names.
Dreamships (Melissa Scott)
Like Trouble, this features a mostly queer cast of characters; unlike Trouble, here Scott has confidence enough to imagine a future in which being gay or bisexual is so normal that it goes entirely unremarked on. Readers who are not old enough to remember the 1990s probably cannot fully appreciate how optimistic and visionary this was back in 1992, but it warms the heart. This one is a fun blend of cyberpunk and planetary romance, and again combines some rather dated ideas about future technology's physical form and capabilities with some really sharp, prescient ones about the social, political, and economic aspects of advanced computing and networking. The ethnic jumble of the setting being substantially Chinese and American made me think, naturally, of Firefly, and wonder whether that show's creators had read this. And, in silly Firefly-related news, I recently watched Flowers of Shanghai—I've been on a huge Tony Leung kick—and its score finally jolted me into realizing, 25 years late, that the Firefly score is an erhu-heavy mashup of American Western music with Chinese classical. Which, for all the show's heinous flaws, including its abject failure to ever live up to the promise of the setting (or feature Asian actors), is pretty neat.
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