Review: Crying Out For Magic by P.S.C. Willis

I seem to be finding a lot of queer YA romances now. Draven is a young mage in his initial rotation to choose which Guild to apprentice to. Niall is just...some kid in our world.

And the magic world withdrew from our world because they were "running out of magic." The truth, of course, is a lot more complicated than that.

As is the relationship between Draven and Niall, which is sweet, flawed, and ultimately realistic. Niall is afraid to come out to his parents. Mage society appears to be free of homophobia...

...but they have created a world so free of bad things that there are no good deeds left to do. So this book speaks a bit to the nature of good, and also to the fact that you really should be doing good to do good, not to get magic you can use to change your hair color!

(When they finally have enough magic, all they do is frivolous stuff and parties).

This is a fairly light book, definitely YA, but it has a realistic romance. Unfortunately, it does not stand quite enough alone; the ending is a HFN, but lacks satisfaction in other ways. Clearly there's more to come.

Recommended for YA romantasy fans.

Review: The Mechanic by Jon Austin

And now for something completely different. First, a warning: The Mechanic is a tome. The file I have is a PDF taken from the print files and it weighs in at 586 pages. And this is not a space opera or an epic fantasy, it's a near future cyber thriller.

At some levels, it could use to be shorter. The author has done his research, and the rest of us have to suffer for it. There's a bit too much exposition...but Austin writes exposition pretty well, so I didn't care as much as I might.

Austin's protagonists, Nekko and Shep, are good friends...and it's nice to see dual protagonists, a man and a woman, that don't end up in a sexual relationship. Shep, mind, is a lesbian, which helps with that. Nekko is part of a "serial marriage" and lives on a polyamorous commune. Shep is a disaster lesbian who just can't maintain a relationship to save her life. The polyamory rep is done reasonably well.

One place where the author does fall short, though, is the presentation of China. The CCP are the bad guys, and Americans who do this often struggle to stay out of the Yellow Peril range. Austin actually doesn't do a terrible job of that but, for some bizarre reason, his Chinese government officials are using Greek mythology as a source of names. A bit of research to find appropriate names from Chinese mythology would have been so nice here. So would having one person on the good side be of Chinese American descent, although that can be done badly too.

On the technical side, I think the author is overly optimistic about quantum computing to the point where handwavium is involved, but entirely too accurate about AI's influence on the labor force. And the pandemic is scary (don't worry, the pandemic is in the past, although it impacts the plot).

This is a longer review because there is a lot to this book. The plot is about an emergent AI and how the world deals with it, but the book is about the world and how a plausible future might be impacted by a black swan event of this magnitude. And about how you prevent a killer AI (hint: It involves good role models).

(Also, the author may not have done his research on Chinese mythology, but Austin does seem to know quite a bit about aircraft maintenance).

Recommended for people who like to explore near future SF. Just set aside some time for it.