Archive for the Novel Category


The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin

July 19th, 2020

I know you know, because I tell everyone, that I love my state. I love it with a deep and visceral love. I almost weep with joy at the loamy smell of the Northeast woodlands and the salt/tar/sugar/suntan lotion air of our much-maligned Shore. I love the hot burning smell of asphalt on summer days, the scent of wet snow about to bury us in the winter, the warm autumn days and the clarity of the air on autumn nights, the green of spring for a month before flowers show up. I love the traffic, the vulgarity of the people, the diversity, the everything.  

The thing is…I’m not alone. Our closest friends feel the same way. Sometimes, we’re stuck in traffic caused by poorly planned construction or at a Hungarian festival, eating sausages made by some old lady sold out of a cooler and we’re full of glee at the New Jerseyness of it all. We’ve all talked for years about how deeply rooted we are in this place, how much we honor our genus loci; the loud, dirty, impossibly beautiful place we live in and which is part of us.

The moment I opened up N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, I felt that this was a book about those of us who love a place so deeply, so viscerally, that everything beautiful and awful about that place become a beacon of existence for them.

A man stumbles off the train to find he has lost who he was and has become, beyond belief, part of a city. An artist whose ancestry is traced back to the first people on the land and to many of the people that colonized that land after, a musician turned politician, a homeless person and a unloved woman find themselves drawn inexorably into an ancient battle as part of a Lovecraftian paean to New York City.  I didn’t want this book to end and I’m so very glad that there will be a sequel.

I loved this book. It’s angry and it’s hateful and it’s gorgeous and it’s beautiful and it is real. I do not doubt for a second that there are avatars of places, because as I said above…I know people whose roots run deeper than the sewer systems of their cities.

If you like MURCIÉLAGO, you will very probably like this book for many of the same reasons – eldritch horror, queer characters, creeping paranormality. This book also has characters you will believe in and root for, sometimes even when the decisions they make are the wrong ones for the worst reasons. They are immensely well-conceived characters and well-written. I can tell you nothing about them that wouldn’t be a spoiler. ^_^

Ratings:

Characters – 9
Story – 10
Queerness – 9

Overall – 10

This novel had the perfect climactic scene. Made me sit up and say, “Fuck, yeah…!”





A Little Light Mischief by Cat Sebastian

July 13th, 2020

Last summer ,I broadened my horizons by reading a lesbian romance novel, Courtney Milan’s Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure. It was an entertaining caper story about superfluous women who teamed up to take revenge on a horrible man.

A Little Light Mischief by Cat Sebastian is now the second superfluous women team up to take down a horrible man lesbian novel I’ve read recently and, as a result, I think this deserves a sub-genre of it’s own. I’m open to suggestions as to what we can call it. ^_^

Alice Stapleton is the daughter of a well-placed, and chronically abusive clergical father in England during some unnamed 18th-century-ish period, or maybe early 19th, it’s really hard to tell. She’s been rescued from a life of misery by a woman who knows the terrible secret in her past, and who whisked her away. But now, sundered from her family, Alice has nothing to do and nowhere to be. Worse, her benefactor has unwittingly puts her into the path of the man who harmed her.

Luckily for Alice, former criminal, now maid, Molly knows exactly that type of man and throws in with Alice to take him down. As they grow closer, Molly and Alice share their secrets, find love and desire in each others’ arms…and take down the rat bastard who ruined Alice’s life.

This book is a quick read and an amusing one, nothing here is designed to make an impression. Summer reading, vacation reading – not that any of us are taking vacations this year. If you’d like a cheap, fun read, this makes a nice investment of $1.99 on Kindle.

Ratings:

Overall – 8

Sometimes we all need a cheerful “lesbians get revenge on a terrible man” story.  ^_^

Now, what are we going to call this sub-genre of superfluous women getting revenge on terrible men?  I propose Lesbian R&R (Romance & Revenge.) Let’s have your suggestions in the comments!





Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

June 21st, 2020

The Hero’s Journey consists of leaving a stable and welcoming home, facing trials which grant power and skill, gaining a psychomp who will – one way or another, through some great trauma – force the Hero into a predictable series of sacrifices, culminating in, but not ending with, the sacrifice of the hero themselves. They may return from this journey but they can never go back home again. Not as the person they were.

There is a second path available, however. Let us call it the Anti-Hero’s Journey. The Anti-Hero might begin with an apparently stable beginning, but as their journey commences, we come to understand that there was nothing stable about it. Limned with trauma, betrayal, loss of hope and self, the Anti-Hero begins their journey with nothing left to sacrifice, clawing their way back to a purpose and forming a personality from the wreckage of their torment. They may may come back, but they can never return.

In Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth, there is a third way –  a course that never leaves the liminal, rebounding from one interstitial to another with no “there” there. The choice is never normative versus non-normative – what we might think of as sanity or insanity. The choice is between this form of insanity or this other one, with options for a third or fourth form waiting in the wings.

Harrowhark, née Nonagesimus, is a prodigy among necromancers at the very pinnacle of achievement for her House. She should be spending her days in study, in refinement of her skills as the hand of God. Instead she is drowning, insane (by her own admission) and overwhelmed, surrounded by the most amazingly shitty people you can possibly imagine…or, more accurately, that Muir could imagine for you. Harrowhark learns that Immortals are capable of being both appallingly human and incredibly shitty immortals as the world is ending and it does not make her happy.

What made Gideon the Ninth a most delightful mix of filth still exists here. People continue to be peopley, cursing and fucking and eating, (although rarely enjoying anything but the cursing.) Gideon was a brilliant book. Harrow, too, is a brilliant book. It is a completely different brilliance, darker and colder, with at least as many sex jokes, possibly more. Harrow (and Harrow,) also is queer as fuck, in case you were worried at the end of the first book that the lesbian had left the building.

The fact that a stable foundation is both unattainable and, frankly, unimaginable, means that we spend most of this book doing high-wire tricks with our comprehension skills. Going with the flow is an absolute imperative, even as the flow is full of dead bodies and hungry ghosts.

Ratings:

Overall – 10

Harrow the Ninth will be available on August 4th in digital, paperback and hardcover. Alecto the Ninth is tentatively slated (based upon an unconfirmed rumor) for August 2021, but I hope to all the gods and the Necrolord Prime that humanity can hold it together long enough for me to read it. Then we can explode into the sun or be ripped apart by revenants or however we’re going down.

My very sincerest thanks to Tor for the review copy, to Meryl for facilitating, and to Tamsyn Muir for writing these most extraordinarily creative and intelligent books about necromancy. Absolutely stunning.





Network Effect by Martha Wells

May 17th, 2020

Imagine, for a moment, a story in which an non-gendered lead character’s gender was never an issue, in which pansexuality and polyromantic relationships existed and none of that made any difference and had nothing to do whatsoever with the story. Imagine, instead, that the story was about a self-aware rogue bodyguard cyborg who was a raging pop culture geek and had severe social awkwardness in a variety of dangerous and complicated situations that involved alien contamination, space colonization and computer hacking. Just imagine that.

Well, you don’t have to, because Martha Wells has imagined it for you in the Murderbot series. I mentioned All Systems Red back in an overview of Queer Friendly Science Fiction I’d been reading in 2018, but have never reviewed one this series, specifically. There are a lot of reasons why I have not done more than mention it, but today I want to entice you all to read the series if you have not yet done so.

In All Systems Red, we meet an organic-tech construct, a contract bodyguard that calls itself Murderbot. Murderbot prefers watching media to being with its human clients, who treat it like a robot or its corporate owners who treat it like equipment.  I will spoil nothing, but Murderbot’s story continues in Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy at the end of which Murderbot’s circumstances are vastly different than they were in the first novel.

Which brings me to Network Effect, the newest entry. In Network Effect, Murderbot is kidnapped and asked to do the right, most dangerous thing, for the right reasons by an entity Murderbot has a complicated relationship with. It is a rollicking action tale and would be worth reading on its own, but as part of this specific continuum is breathtaking. What makes Network Effect worthy of an Okazu review are key characters around Murderbot. Dr. Mensah, a main player in earlier novels is in a polyromantic familial relationship. That’s it. That relationship exists. People in it show affection and caring to one another. Two of our main female supports are in a partnership. None of this has anything to do with the plot per se, although the relationships are relevant to what happens and why. Like any relationship might be. Murderbot is uninterested in being gendered and ultimately finds “it” more comfortable, presumably to keep a hold onto it’s not-humanity, in which it finds comfort.

If you had asked me, I would have assumed the series would end at the finale of the 4th book, but Wells has skillfully set up a scenario in which she can continue to plausibly write Murderbot for as long as she desires, and has provided room for spin-offs and sequels that would be wholly organic. Pun intended.

Since the first four books are novellas, they make quick reading and although this book is a full-length novel, I had to keep my reading paced or I would have blown through it quickly. More than ever, the action was very visually evocative. In places I felt that this book was being written for the movie it will hopefully one day become. (With flashbacks to fill in the earlier books). For once, that really worked.

This book is not “lesbians in space,” its “well, yes there are lesbians in space, but there’s an actual story that involve them and not just some YA coming out schtick in space or vague mentions of lesbian-ish relationships.”*

Ratings:

Overall – 9

For action filled action, a non-gendered dorktastic protagonist, and alien worlds with queers in space, Martha Wells’ Murderbot is among the best, along with Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series and Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series. We are in a renaissance of queer sci-fi and I, for one, am loving it.

*I’m still looking at you Melissa Scott.





Novel: JK Haru is a Sex Worker in Another World

November 24th, 2019

Last night I had to call 911 because a man was beating a woman outside my house. It was not a good evening to finish JK Haru. But I did finish it. I have many thoughts about this book, some good, some bad. There will be sleep lost for a few days while I deal with it. Much like Psycho-Pass, my brain has to work through the trauma of experiencing someone else’s trauma third-hand. So let me provide some context for my perspective.

In the 1980s, there was an anthology series called Sword and Sorceress. It began in 1984 and ran for 30 volumes through 2015. The first volume began with an introduction, The Heroic Image of Women: Woman as Wizard and Warrior by editor Marion Zimmer Bradley.* She was and remains a big name in 1980s fantasy literature. I was never a fan of her work at the time, although I ended up reading a great deal of it. I felt her work as a editor was vastly superior to her writing. It was her introduction to a later volume that changed my life. She talked about how the first volume contained stories about women proving themselves in sexist fantasy worlds, of women earning the right to be a warrior or wizard. In her introduction, Bradley paraphrased an earlier science fiction editor who spoke to prospective writers. Those writers were often at great pains to spend their time with the technical details of their technologies, at the expense of the story. Bradley noted that the early volumes had been at pains to establish women’s right to be a warrior or wizard and that future volumes would run stories that assumed that right. No more “why can’t women do x?” stories. Women can, women do, and then, you can just tell the story.**

That was in the late 1980s, more than 30 years ago. And yet, here we are still reminding everyone that women can and women already do everything they do. Over and over.

JK Haru is a Sex Worker in Another World by Ko Hiratori was a very rough read for me. Highschooler Koyama Haru is killed by a truck, along with her classmate, Chiba and they awaken in another world. This other world is structured like a RPG game and characters are given abilities at random. Only men get to be adventurers or soldiers and the world is overtly misogynist. Haru becomes a prostitute.

The bulk of the book is scenes of sex work, some consensual, some rape. You know I do not shy from violence, as long as it is between equals. This is not that. The book’s climax is a worse-for-being-entirely-predictable gang rape of Haru and another prostitute and the other’s death. At which point, Haru decides she’s had enough. The book had made a point, but failed to develop the point it had made. Instead, it retreated into a fantasy revenge narrative, dropping the one potentially excellent plot point into a literal single line of conclusion. “It was raining.”

Yes, Haru does create change by the end of the book. That was a positive note. We are left at the end of the book with the belief that things can change for the better.

But I’m still left having read page upon page of sexual and psychological violence against women.  I’m pissed that once again, the humiliation of women is a plot point. It confused me that the author*** said this book is “for women.” What are women supposed to gain from it? “Life is unfair, but the most exceptional of you can take revenge for those who can’t,” isn’t really a lesson we had to be told, surely. Sex workers are always at high risk of violence. (From:17 Facts About Sexual Violence and Sex Work.) Sex work is work. Sex workers deserve to live without stigma. Sexual harassment is disease. Sexual assault is a plague.


In the end, the most crushing thing about the entire story is that not one man in the entire story had learned anything at all. ****
 

Ratings:

I am unable to rate this.  It wasn’t written poorly, but it wasn’t something I’d recommend for entertainment. Perhaps as a reading for a class on social justice. The ending is all right, but I really did not enjoy the ride.*****

 

Kudos to translator Emily Balistrieri and editor Aimee Zink for not just making this book make sense but for giving characters unique “voice.” That takes a lot of skill.

 

*Yes, I am aware that she is a child abuser. If you thought it might be some incredibly relevant point to make, please rest assured, it isn’t.

**I adopted this policy for the Yuri Monogatari project. Stories about coming out were done in V1 and from there contributors were expect to move forward and tell a story.

*** I do not know, nor do I care, if the author is male or female. It’s not really relevant to my reaction to the interview. The interviewer really needed to ask a follow up, like, “In what way is this ‘for women?’ Can you explain what you mean by that?” If I were asked for to suggest a book that outlined “female power fantasy” I would not recommend this book. Not only was more space in Sexiled taken up by women working together, it had a much less violent outcome.

**** Arguably Sumo is the exception. He was never a threat and in the end became an ally. Whether that would be enough, we’ll never know, but we do know the sweet kids Haru played Kickin’-the-Can with did not grow up to be allies, which I would have hoped.

*****Yes, there will be a sequel. I am reviewing this book and how well this book handles its own material in this review.

If you are about to comment with *any* version, of “well….” or “but…” or “actually…” stop. It won’t be approved. In fact, I am going to be very strict about comments on this post.