Entry tags:
Recentish SFF + The Moon and the Sun
Bite-sized recentish (2020 onward, more or less) SFF reviews, read at various points in the past year--
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky: A disgraced ex-radical academic in a totalitarian society is sentenced to hard labor in a gulag on an alien planet, which soon proves to be an archaeological dig with its own secrets. My first Tchaikovsky, which I read for a local book club! It was a smart page-turner, basically, showing off the author's leftist sensibility and imagination and interest in alien mindsets: I enjoyed it and it made me want to read more Tchaikovskys, so it's good he's been prolific. I also believe people, including the other book club members, who say they liked his others better, especially Children of Time--it's both a book with significant imaginative chops and also something that feels like it was tailored carefully into a propulsive, cinematic whole. It's not exactly character-driven, although not devoid of personality either; I wish it'd spent more time with its weirder and more wondrous elements; also, I was amused by the end takeaway, politically and otherwise, which I think ran away from the author a little bit. But it was still a fun advertisement for his other books.
I was a little skeptical of the portrayal of the totalitarian society itself, which seemed very effective, very complete, and very sincere, and not at all a shambolic shitshow run by the stupidest assholes you've ever met. Which is at odds with my perception of oppressive societies: the commandant in Alien Clay is all smooth and mediocre and only implicitly pathetic, like a Star Wars admiral, not the kind of insane venal asshole this kind of position actually tends to attract. We talked about this a little at the book club; one of the other attendees pointed out that not every totalitarian regime is as much of a shitshow as every other, and named the heyday of the DDR and the Stasi as a contrast to, for example, the shitshow qualities of the USSR itself. But the DDR was pretty small, comparatively. Alien Clay's world-government seems like it would be a lot more Death of Stalin in practice.
I do think this is kind of a Star Wars inheritance, the unquestioned trope assumption that the world would be dominated and ruined by cold, bloodless, intelligent functionaries, and not, again, the most shoddy insincere stupid fuckers you've ever met constantly engaged in weird infighting and strange grifts. Ahahah. Alas.
The West Passage by Jared Pechacek: A pair of peons in a massive Gormenghast-ish world-castle go on parallel discursive quests to save their corner of the world, as they know it, from an obscure apocalyptic threat. This book was... creative, but I wish it had gone a little harder or done a little more. I think several times while reading it, and while![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gogollescent was reading it after, we kept going, "... this would make a great point-and-click game," and not derisively; I love point-and-click and I love interactive fiction, and I think either of those would have been a good medium for this work. As it is, as a novel... it's imaginative, it has a genuinely medieval-inflected sensibility in a way most fantasy (and indeed historical) novels don't, as far as the way the characters interact with and conceptualize of their odd, highly ritualized, very systematized world, it has gorgeous illumination-style illustrations done by the author - it's also kind of... slight, and lacking emphasis in parts, and does stuff I think of as a little cliche within the New Weird space, which isn't that big a space and yet has some pretty defined tonal and semantic cliches. It also has a really unindicative title and some very strange blurbing choices, but I guess I'm not in book marketing? I just would've gone a little more slipstream and weird as far as publishing imprint and target audience for this - and I'd still be ambivalent about the book itself, but at least it wouldn't be trying to target Travis Baldree's readers?? But: like I said, not a publicist.
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo: A patron demon presides over the swift razing and slow rebuilding of her city, while developing an ambivalent relationship with one of the angels who destroyed it. Definitely something where I got the impression the author had ambitions towards the strange, the slipstream, the experimental, etc. that the prose and stylistic conventions didn't quite serve - still enjoyed it, still had a good time, generally, but I dunno if third person limited & the conventions of cinematic-ish scenes served the intended scope and perspective of the characters.
Speaking of conventions, there was also the unspoken fantasy rule followed where the godlike protagonists follow a number of mortals over the years, and the mortals are various, but they're pretty much all: a. remarkable, b. sexy, c. subversive in some way. This is a big interest-dulling thing for me in recent fantasy and I feel like it goes really unremarked-upon: the demon, Vitrine, is intended to be essentially amoral towards humanity specifically while benevolent towards the city as a project, but the people she champions are always... I dunno, pirate queens and such. I feel it is not very amorally challenging in today's fantasy landscape to support a pirate queen. I would have been more amused if being an amoral city-demon over the ages involved fondly sponsoring, for example, Robert Moses, or a really nutso Giuliani or Eric Adams-type mayor. But that sort of thing is implicitly outside the genre bargain struck by Tordotcom-type books. Which I think is a shame. Let your haters be yo-- That is, let your haters be your wai--
Rose/House by Arkady Martine: A creepy crazy genius architect leaves his sinister AI-smarthouse palace in the American Southwest to his troubled academic protege; a death then occurs in the AI-smarthouse, forcing the protege to be called back to help the local police investigate. A novella, solidly meh, sort of a mix of vibes and procedural, but the vibes were heavy-handed and the procedural was not a great idea. In general I think the urge in SF novels to add an outsider POV from a tenacious, scrappy local police detective (and they are almost always female, for various uneasy reasons having to do with police power and imagery, I think) is a bad one; I don't say that primarily here for ACAB-type reasons, except maybe indirectly, in that it requires drawing on a sterile fantasy version of the local cops which adds very little if it isn't the main focus of the story. I'm ambivalent about copaganda escapism at this point in my reading life, but I just never am like "let's go back to the outsider POV, the Determined Detective On the Outside" in an otherwise non-procedural story.
But the stuff of the story itself, scrappy cop aside, is also just kind of... well, the house starts talking right away in a sort of cartoonishly sinister voice, and it's all very unironic. All like: CARTOONISHLY SINISTER THING, said the house, and a shiver went down her spine: it almost sounded alive. But it couldn't be! And then it continues in that register.
Asunder by Kerstin Hall: A spirit-medium-of-sorts getting by in a world where the old, earthly gods were recently massacred by powerful new cosmic horror-esque celestial ones gets accidentally soulbound to a dying man and goes on a road trip to try to separate them and save his life. I thought the world in this was pretty fun, albeit it suffered from the squarely, uh, functional and entirely unnuminous effect a lot of immanent fantasy gods evoke: you know, when the world technically Has Gods but as far as vibe they basically feel like menacing extraplanar entities in a Forgotten Realms way, not premodern or polytheistic religious figures per se. I do genuinely blame Forgotten Realms and other D&D-adjacent properties for some of this. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a little like this, a lot of fantasy is... Asunder is definitely like this.
That being said, I enjoyed this book's divinities, worldbuilding-wise, especially the remnant old religions; candidly, the rest frustrated me a lot. I was lukewarm on the characters and the emotional meat of the story, for various reasons; the romance and the relationship between the two protagonists creeped me out a little, all the more so due to the attempts to deconstruct and render things less problematic and whatnot--if anything, that just shed light on the gendering of the story, in the way a lot of "this totally isn't gendered" things unintentionally do. Often I feel more charitably towards things that admit they're doing something messed-up, and revel in it, than I do to things that claim to be the thoughtful, non-messed-up version, and aren't.
Karys's story also just struck me as kind of... sentimental, and with sort of an angsty sensibility. I like horror, I like fiction, including fantasy and sci-fi, that wrestles with violence and pain and hard choices; as a counterpart, I really dislike that one New Yorker (or is it NY Magazine) article that's like "aren't we all sick of... The Trauma Plot?" that gets posted around a lot, as I think it is pretty shallow and just trying to get ahead of the next trend, and yet I sometimes find myself also sick of The Trauma Plot, or at least certain versions of it that have a lot to do with absolution and hurt/comfort. It's hard to define; it just doesn't work for me. It's a very nonsticky, validating approach to an inherently sticky subject.
And one not at all recent book:
The Moon and the Sun by Vonda McIntyre: A young lady-in-waiting to the royal household of Louis XVI finds her life disrupted when her Jesuit brother returns to court with a prize in tow, a "sea monster," who she soon suspects is more than just a beast. 90s historical fantasy ahoy, and does it show! Honestly, I enjoyed the hell out of this silly book by the end, even with a lot of eyerolling. It was a bit of a drag starting out, in ways I was kind of fond of but still slowed me down. Talking togogollescent about this I said something like "remember when you could just describe a bunch of stuff in an SFF book for no reason?"--and seriously, remember when? It's a vibe that I also had when I read Joan D. Vinge's The Snow Queen last year or the year before; it's not even so much about plot-slowness is it is about the like... inert thickness of stuff. Back in the day you didn't really have to evoke a mood, or hint at an atmosphere or foreshadow an inner conflict or set a scene for something, really. You could just trowel on a ton of stuff. In The Snow Queen that's (nominally) hard sci-fi stuff; in The Moon and the Sun that's Versailles stuff. Versailles as far as the eye can see. Before you know anything else about where the story is really going, you know you are in Versailles, all right.
It's still a charming book. It's very cheesy. It's earnestly atheist-humanist in a heart-on-its-sleeve, didactic kind of way: the protagonist is on a journey to doubt and dissent, and this book is on doubt and dissent's side, 100%, and loads the dice cornily in their favor. The portrayal of the Jesuit brother in particular is a bit silly and could've used more nuance: not "nuance" here as code for "the Jesuits were and are totally progressive and intellectual and cool and he shouldn't have been an obstinate blocking figure," but rather that it would've been more interesting situated in the historical context of his order, including its at-the-time nascent (and always ambivalent) humanist inclinations. This being said, I did find him a little endearing, and could believe him as an unusually inflexible and naive figure within his context: but that would've needed more establishing.
The novel also is laden with entirely unacknowledged bisexuality on the heroine's part: the whole thing is concerned with the female body, and embodiment, and sexual and mortal shame, and a lot of it is related to her own sense of chastity and shame as contrasted with the freedom and embodiment of the mermaid, but it doesn't actually go there. There's also a dubiously pat plot involving an enslaved Turkish half-sister and a (to me) hilariously evil bisexual rake where the author takes pains to step aside and specify that his wickedness, regardless of what the church says, is unrelated to his bisexuality, in pure 1997 style. It is very GRRM-contemporaneous. Anyone here probably knows I am a GRRM fan, one way or another, and also that I say that with a sigh.
TBH, I am always running into books that are secretly Dunnett-inspired, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of them. This is Dunnetty in a different way from some others: instead of pulling the classic Dunnett-heir "outsider POV on misunderstood hero" type thing, it's more Dunnett as per Queen's Play or Ringed Castle or parts of Pawn in Frankincense, a lot of enmeshment in an opulent, sumptuous, compromised court + the role of the monarch as this strange, ambivalent, remote figure who eventually passes judgment in the climactic act.
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky: A disgraced ex-radical academic in a totalitarian society is sentenced to hard labor in a gulag on an alien planet, which soon proves to be an archaeological dig with its own secrets. My first Tchaikovsky, which I read for a local book club! It was a smart page-turner, basically, showing off the author's leftist sensibility and imagination and interest in alien mindsets: I enjoyed it and it made me want to read more Tchaikovskys, so it's good he's been prolific. I also believe people, including the other book club members, who say they liked his others better, especially Children of Time--it's both a book with significant imaginative chops and also something that feels like it was tailored carefully into a propulsive, cinematic whole. It's not exactly character-driven, although not devoid of personality either; I wish it'd spent more time with its weirder and more wondrous elements; also, I was amused by the end takeaway, politically and otherwise, which I think ran away from the author a little bit. But it was still a fun advertisement for his other books.
I was a little skeptical of the portrayal of the totalitarian society itself, which seemed very effective, very complete, and very sincere, and not at all a shambolic shitshow run by the stupidest assholes you've ever met. Which is at odds with my perception of oppressive societies: the commandant in Alien Clay is all smooth and mediocre and only implicitly pathetic, like a Star Wars admiral, not the kind of insane venal asshole this kind of position actually tends to attract. We talked about this a little at the book club; one of the other attendees pointed out that not every totalitarian regime is as much of a shitshow as every other, and named the heyday of the DDR and the Stasi as a contrast to, for example, the shitshow qualities of the USSR itself. But the DDR was pretty small, comparatively. Alien Clay's world-government seems like it would be a lot more Death of Stalin in practice.
I do think this is kind of a Star Wars inheritance, the unquestioned trope assumption that the world would be dominated and ruined by cold, bloodless, intelligent functionaries, and not, again, the most shoddy insincere stupid fuckers you've ever met constantly engaged in weird infighting and strange grifts. Ahahah. Alas.
The West Passage by Jared Pechacek: A pair of peons in a massive Gormenghast-ish world-castle go on parallel discursive quests to save their corner of the world, as they know it, from an obscure apocalyptic threat. This book was... creative, but I wish it had gone a little harder or done a little more. I think several times while reading it, and while
gogollescent was reading it after, we kept going, "... this would make a great point-and-click game," and not derisively; I love point-and-click and I love interactive fiction, and I think either of those would have been a good medium for this work. As it is, as a novel... it's imaginative, it has a genuinely medieval-inflected sensibility in a way most fantasy (and indeed historical) novels don't, as far as the way the characters interact with and conceptualize of their odd, highly ritualized, very systematized world, it has gorgeous illumination-style illustrations done by the author - it's also kind of... slight, and lacking emphasis in parts, and does stuff I think of as a little cliche within the New Weird space, which isn't that big a space and yet has some pretty defined tonal and semantic cliches. It also has a really unindicative title and some very strange blurbing choices, but I guess I'm not in book marketing? I just would've gone a little more slipstream and weird as far as publishing imprint and target audience for this - and I'd still be ambivalent about the book itself, but at least it wouldn't be trying to target Travis Baldree's readers?? But: like I said, not a publicist.The City in Glass by Nghi Vo: A patron demon presides over the swift razing and slow rebuilding of her city, while developing an ambivalent relationship with one of the angels who destroyed it. Definitely something where I got the impression the author had ambitions towards the strange, the slipstream, the experimental, etc. that the prose and stylistic conventions didn't quite serve - still enjoyed it, still had a good time, generally, but I dunno if third person limited & the conventions of cinematic-ish scenes served the intended scope and perspective of the characters.
Speaking of conventions, there was also the unspoken fantasy rule followed where the godlike protagonists follow a number of mortals over the years, and the mortals are various, but they're pretty much all: a. remarkable, b. sexy, c. subversive in some way. This is a big interest-dulling thing for me in recent fantasy and I feel like it goes really unremarked-upon: the demon, Vitrine, is intended to be essentially amoral towards humanity specifically while benevolent towards the city as a project, but the people she champions are always... I dunno, pirate queens and such. I feel it is not very amorally challenging in today's fantasy landscape to support a pirate queen. I would have been more amused if being an amoral city-demon over the ages involved fondly sponsoring, for example, Robert Moses, or a really nutso Giuliani or Eric Adams-type mayor. But that sort of thing is implicitly outside the genre bargain struck by Tordotcom-type books. Which I think is a shame. Let your haters be yo-- That is, let your haters be your wai--
Rose/House by Arkady Martine: A creepy crazy genius architect leaves his sinister AI-smarthouse palace in the American Southwest to his troubled academic protege; a death then occurs in the AI-smarthouse, forcing the protege to be called back to help the local police investigate. A novella, solidly meh, sort of a mix of vibes and procedural, but the vibes were heavy-handed and the procedural was not a great idea. In general I think the urge in SF novels to add an outsider POV from a tenacious, scrappy local police detective (and they are almost always female, for various uneasy reasons having to do with police power and imagery, I think) is a bad one; I don't say that primarily here for ACAB-type reasons, except maybe indirectly, in that it requires drawing on a sterile fantasy version of the local cops which adds very little if it isn't the main focus of the story. I'm ambivalent about copaganda escapism at this point in my reading life, but I just never am like "let's go back to the outsider POV, the Determined Detective On the Outside" in an otherwise non-procedural story.
But the stuff of the story itself, scrappy cop aside, is also just kind of... well, the house starts talking right away in a sort of cartoonishly sinister voice, and it's all very unironic. All like: CARTOONISHLY SINISTER THING, said the house, and a shiver went down her spine: it almost sounded alive. But it couldn't be! And then it continues in that register.
Asunder by Kerstin Hall: A spirit-medium-of-sorts getting by in a world where the old, earthly gods were recently massacred by powerful new cosmic horror-esque celestial ones gets accidentally soulbound to a dying man and goes on a road trip to try to separate them and save his life. I thought the world in this was pretty fun, albeit it suffered from the squarely, uh, functional and entirely unnuminous effect a lot of immanent fantasy gods evoke: you know, when the world technically Has Gods but as far as vibe they basically feel like menacing extraplanar entities in a Forgotten Realms way, not premodern or polytheistic religious figures per se. I do genuinely blame Forgotten Realms and other D&D-adjacent properties for some of this. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a little like this, a lot of fantasy is... Asunder is definitely like this.
That being said, I enjoyed this book's divinities, worldbuilding-wise, especially the remnant old religions; candidly, the rest frustrated me a lot. I was lukewarm on the characters and the emotional meat of the story, for various reasons; the romance and the relationship between the two protagonists creeped me out a little, all the more so due to the attempts to deconstruct and render things less problematic and whatnot--if anything, that just shed light on the gendering of the story, in the way a lot of "this totally isn't gendered" things unintentionally do. Often I feel more charitably towards things that admit they're doing something messed-up, and revel in it, than I do to things that claim to be the thoughtful, non-messed-up version, and aren't.
Karys's story also just struck me as kind of... sentimental, and with sort of an angsty sensibility. I like horror, I like fiction, including fantasy and sci-fi, that wrestles with violence and pain and hard choices; as a counterpart, I really dislike that one New Yorker (or is it NY Magazine) article that's like "aren't we all sick of... The Trauma Plot?" that gets posted around a lot, as I think it is pretty shallow and just trying to get ahead of the next trend, and yet I sometimes find myself also sick of The Trauma Plot, or at least certain versions of it that have a lot to do with absolution and hurt/comfort. It's hard to define; it just doesn't work for me. It's a very nonsticky, validating approach to an inherently sticky subject.
And one not at all recent book:
The Moon and the Sun by Vonda McIntyre: A young lady-in-waiting to the royal household of Louis XVI finds her life disrupted when her Jesuit brother returns to court with a prize in tow, a "sea monster," who she soon suspects is more than just a beast. 90s historical fantasy ahoy, and does it show! Honestly, I enjoyed the hell out of this silly book by the end, even with a lot of eyerolling. It was a bit of a drag starting out, in ways I was kind of fond of but still slowed me down. Talking to
gogollescent about this I said something like "remember when you could just describe a bunch of stuff in an SFF book for no reason?"--and seriously, remember when? It's a vibe that I also had when I read Joan D. Vinge's The Snow Queen last year or the year before; it's not even so much about plot-slowness is it is about the like... inert thickness of stuff. Back in the day you didn't really have to evoke a mood, or hint at an atmosphere or foreshadow an inner conflict or set a scene for something, really. You could just trowel on a ton of stuff. In The Snow Queen that's (nominally) hard sci-fi stuff; in The Moon and the Sun that's Versailles stuff. Versailles as far as the eye can see. Before you know anything else about where the story is really going, you know you are in Versailles, all right.It's still a charming book. It's very cheesy. It's earnestly atheist-humanist in a heart-on-its-sleeve, didactic kind of way: the protagonist is on a journey to doubt and dissent, and this book is on doubt and dissent's side, 100%, and loads the dice cornily in their favor. The portrayal of the Jesuit brother in particular is a bit silly and could've used more nuance: not "nuance" here as code for "the Jesuits were and are totally progressive and intellectual and cool and he shouldn't have been an obstinate blocking figure," but rather that it would've been more interesting situated in the historical context of his order, including its at-the-time nascent (and always ambivalent) humanist inclinations. This being said, I did find him a little endearing, and could believe him as an unusually inflexible and naive figure within his context: but that would've needed more establishing.
The novel also is laden with entirely unacknowledged bisexuality on the heroine's part: the whole thing is concerned with the female body, and embodiment, and sexual and mortal shame, and a lot of it is related to her own sense of chastity and shame as contrasted with the freedom and embodiment of the mermaid, but it doesn't actually go there. There's also a dubiously pat plot involving an enslaved Turkish half-sister and a (to me) hilariously evil bisexual rake where the author takes pains to step aside and specify that his wickedness, regardless of what the church says, is unrelated to his bisexuality, in pure 1997 style. It is very GRRM-contemporaneous. Anyone here probably knows I am a GRRM fan, one way or another, and also that I say that with a sigh.
TBH, I am always running into books that are secretly Dunnett-inspired, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of them. This is Dunnetty in a different way from some others: instead of pulling the classic Dunnett-heir "outsider POV on misunderstood hero" type thing, it's more Dunnett as per Queen's Play or Ringed Castle or parts of Pawn in Frankincense, a lot of enmeshment in an opulent, sumptuous, compromised court + the role of the monarch as this strange, ambivalent, remote figure who eventually passes judgment in the climactic act.
no subject
(would have loved the world in which Vitrine placed her benevolent hand on someone legitimately powerful and off-putting. alas, you are right that I do not think Tordotcom would ever have allowed this to happen)
no subject
We were totally robbed re. Vitrine, IJS.