A Selection of Strangeness
Review: The Catalyst by Nat Bickel
I’d call this paranormal romance, but the fantasy elements are honestly pretty light. It mostly reads like a contemporary with a little bit of magic tossed in.
Unfortunately, it contains two of my least favorite tropes: Soulmates/Fated Mates and the primary conflict being He’s An Asshole.
There was no external conflict at all, and the male lead didn’t deserve to end up with the female lead. Some people like that. I’m not the target audience here. (Also, the Romani spiritual nomad didn’t sit hugely well with me).
My other problem was that it was set in Chapel Hill. Apparently. (I read it in Siler City). It didn’t have a solid sense of place.
It did have a good cast of supporting characters and I liked the female lead quite a bit. It deals with mental health in some interesting ways, but that falls down when…look…love is not a treatment for anxiety.
In other words, I didn’t like this, but I have a feeling that people who enjoy these specific tropes will find it quite pleasant.
Review: Teramar: Beasts of the Field by Thomas Michael Murray
This book is being marketed as a novel, but is really a series of linked stories…the plot is coherent, but each chapter also stands almost alone.
I’d call it neopulp. Suspiciously humanoid aliens with a Roman style warrior culture show up through a wormhole and involve Earth in their succession feud.
Very suspiciously humanoid. Is this a case of one world being a lost colony of the other? I’m suspicious, but this book doesn’t go that far. It doesn’t really end fully…it’s clear the author has a lot more in mind here.
It’s not bad, and some of the characters are interesting, but it doesn’t have quite enough of a pulp feel to me. (Except in the way it treats women, although it’s not how the author treats them…Murray treats his female and gay characters well, but the world doesn’t).
It’s interesting, but the author needs a bit more maturity to really pull this off. If you have a hankering for something which reminds you of Burroughs, though, pick it up.
Review: The Fifth Seal by Robert Albo
If you grew up in a certain kind of household in the 1980s and 1990s you were probably exposed to the rash of not very good God vs. Satan fiction. There was a lot of it. It all had more or less the same plot.
The Fifth Seal reads exactly like that, except with a New Age, universalist feel…and also a bit of an anti-science feel.
I can’t actually review this properly without spoilers, so all I’m going to say is that the bad stuff isn’t as bad as it initially seems..and a lot isn’t what it seems at all.
It’s the kind of book that rewards more if you can get through it, but I wouldn’t blame anyone…especially somebody traumatized by crappy religious fiction…for a DNF.
(If, on the other hand, you find it funny, you might appreciate this one better.
Review: Rabbit in the Moon by Fiona Moore.
For this book, on the other hand, I absolutely am the target audience. I have never had the guts to attempt it myself, but I am a sucker for weird post-apocalyptic futures with almost magical biotech (as long as they’re not written by Gene Wolfe). Particularly, Michael Swanwick’s Chasing the Phoenix and Jason Sanford’s Plague Birds.
Rabbit in the Moon isn’t quite as good as either of those and has a twist to it that, if done only slightly differently, would have made me never want to read the author again.
But the way it was done, it worked. Ken Usagi is a journalist in a post-climate America, the United States having split up, the Arctic being colonized, and the lab mice having evolved sentience. Maybe. I’m pretty sure the lab mice evolved sentience.
Totchli is a genetics researcher in a post-climate…Mexico. But not our Mexico. This confusion is resolved later in the story.
Both men’s name means rabbit, and their destinies are tied together…in a world that contains rogue biotech and, yes, the afore-mentioned evolved lab mice. A world in which humanity is dying and possibly deserves it. There’s a certain amount of climate nihilism here, which I wouldn’t normally go for, but Moore has so many other things I’m there for.
And it also talks about adaptation in the extreme and about colonialism.
Overall, I liked this book. If you hit the bobble I hit, just keep reading.
Recommended.
Review: The Ragpicker by Joel Dane
The best word to describe this book is “strange.”
In Dane’s world, the apocalypse is that everyone got so addicted to virtual reality that society collapses. Some people are trapped half in, half out. These twitches (was Dane thinking of the streaming site) are insane and not entirely mortal…until, that is, their charge runs out.
Which is now happening, and the society in the ruins has to deal with that and the fact that their defenses are also failing.
Against this backdrop is Ysmany, a young woman who is determined to save a baby from the local twitch, who has protected her town…but at a price…and the Ragpicker, a twitch who has maintained far more of his sanity than most, and who has fragments of his dead husband in his head.
Did I mention this book is strange?
As strange as it is, it’s a quest story at its heart, falling firmly under “There and back again,” and an oddly hopeful future. Civilization has fallen, but humanity…in all senses of the word…survives and the Earth thrives.
It contrasts quite dramatically with Rabbit in the Moon, where the crisis is also destroying the planet and the species.
But it’s also a cautionary tale about spending too much time on social media…
I liked it well enough, although the experimental format got to me (at one point the book is interrupted by a stage play) and it does that dissolving into poetry thing at intervals. Is that some new literary fiction fashion that’s found its way into spec fic now?
Review: The Hiding by Alethea Lyons
So, I had one problem with this book. It’s a nit. I’m going to pick it.
This is a rare volume…an urban fantasy set in York. (I’ve considered attempting one myself…York is, after all, a supernatural and profoundly haunted city). Rather than being your typical contemporary, however, The Hiding is also alternate history. Lyons has built a world where the supernatural has always been more active…and history is also different. For example, Elizabeth I was never queen and was, in fact, executed.
And one of the things Lyons did to reflect the changed past was to call the Minster a Cathedral.
I lived in York for three years.
It’s the Minster. It may be a cathedral, but absolutely nobody calls it that. Instead of showing knowledge or highlighting the different world, it just made me go “Nope” and threw me out of the book for like two chapters.
Which is a shame, because this is actually a really interesting book. The protagonist, Harper, is a Seer raised by a family of demonhunters. Note: They think all magic comes from demons. Because of course they do.
The book is all about Harper and her adopted sister realizing that’s not true. It’s about hatred and xenophobia and all that jazz…but interestingly, the author includes a significant supporting character who’s Muslim. (Unfortunately, she also misunderstands what a jinn is. Unless the Muslim’s the one who’s right…ahem).
Definitely an interesting take on the classic demonhunter story. I enjoyed it.
But don’t change the name of the Minster…
Review: The Extrapolated Man by Doug Franklin
This is very much a hybrid between space opera a la The Expanse and space opera a la Alastair Reynolds.
It actually feels like the root of a Reynolds or Hamilton space opera…the origin story that could easily lead to The House of Suns or The Dreaming Void. Maggie is a scavenger living on Mars after the warsingers confined humanity to the planet. The warsingers being living, breeding machines.
She finds a brainstone of a man named Gray…who turns out to have been erased from history for his role in the start of the war and the singularity.
Add in hyperspace sending people crazy and starships having propellers, mekosystems of machines on a Mars that more closely resembles Barsoom than the real Mars…but a Barsoom created from the real Mars.
There’s even a princess, of sorts, not to mention casual homages to Heinlein and Burroughs. All of these influences are brought together in a surprisingly coherent way. It’s not a great work, but I did like it. Franklin writes good characters, builds an interesting world, and approaches AI in a not-quite-standard way.
Also, poor Gray. I feel really sorry for Gray.
Recommended.
Review: The Library of Broken Worlds by Alaya Dawn Johnson
CW: Sexual assault of a teenager (described metaphorically).
As you might guess from the title, this book is about stories. The central conceit smacks of The Arabian Nights. Freida, the protagonist, is telling stories to win her life…and those stories are the book.
Those stories also contain stories, fake folktales that illustrate something about the world Johnson has built…and human nature. This is the far future or, perhaps, another quantum reality. Material gods that are also faster than light that…
It’s very much in the Reynolds/Hamilton vein, but it’s also anti-colonialist and profoundly, obviously Black.
Freida has to stop a war, kill a god, and also deal with the baggage of being assaulted in virtual reality when she was barely a woman.
And tell stories, because we are the part of the universe that tells stories about itself. This book is strange, weird, and verges on body horror in a few places.
It’s also beautiful and incredibly well written.
Recommended.