An extremely busy June meant that my Pride month reading efforts were limited, but the two books I did manage to finish were queer and pretty excellent!

BOOKS READ:

AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS by RIVERS SOLOMON (2020) The colony ship Matilda has been wandering aimlessly through space for over three centuries, with what little remains of the ships luxuries going to the white residents of the upper decks. Salvation, however, is closer than they think… but only if lower deck doctor Aster can decipher her dead mother’s encoded diaries before violence consumes the last of humankind.

I always enjoy a good colony ship-gone-wrong story, and Solomon delivers a solid entry to the subgenre (sub-subgenre?). They build a rich, culty little world within the confines of the Matilda, basing the oppression of the future firmly in patterns of the past, and pin it all to a fascinating — if occasionally frustrating (complimentary!) — protagonist. A satisfying standalone for people who enjoy contained space stories and a little hope in their dystopia.

THE VANISHED BIRDS by SIMON JIMENEZ (2020) 2020 was a fantastic year for standalone space-based sci-fi debuts! But where An Unkindness of Ghosts is contained to a few decks of a single ship, The Vanished Birds spans ships, stations, planets, and generations.

At some point in her staggered, light-speed-traversing life, cargo ship captain Nia buys and gives away a cheap flute, and so lays the foundations for the most important relationship of her life, and the possible salvation of a very special young man. This is an epic space opera not in terms of page count (it clocks in at just under 400 pages) but in scope. The cast is large, the narrative shifting effortlessly between points of view and styles of storytelling, and the years covered number in the thousands.

As in his spectacular second novel, The Spear Cuts Through Water, Jimenez displays a particular skill for making his worlds feel richly built and populated. No matter how small a character’s role may be in the overall narrative, Jimenez portrays them with inner lives, histories, cultures, relationships, and hopes and dreams, and he does it with an efficiency that will have you falling in love with them within paragraphs, then mourning their disappearance from the narrative. Heartbreaking, yes, but all in service of one of the main themes of this book: that despite the seemingly inexhaustible power and contempt of capital, every life is as precious as it is fleeting. The Vanished Birds is as much a love story as The Spear Cuts Through Water, but where the latter is one that tends more romantic, Birds is most concerned with the filial. And while I think Spear is the better crafted book of the two (and boy do I love to see an author develop through each work), Birds got me a little bit deeper in the heart. It’s a gorgeously bittersweet novel, an ambitious and impressive debut, and I am already rabid for whatever Jimenez announces next.

MEDIA WATCHED:

Bugger all, honestly. Managed a couple episodes of SPIDER NOIR, which I was enjoying as a love letter to and send-up of film noir, but which inspired in me such an urge to watch ACROSS THE SPDIER-VERSE again for the first time since I saw it in a cinema that I abandoned it (temporarily) to do that instead. And I have no regrets. Spider-Verse #2 is delicious to look at and narratively thrilling, and now that we have a proper date for the third and final instalment (next year sometime?) I feel less attacked by the surprise cliffhanger.

And that’s it! Quality over quantity, as they say.

And on that theme, I’m going to shake up the format of this newsletter/blog/thing and see how it goes as a curated quarterly report, rather than a monthly overview of everything. At least until my time gets a little freer again.

So thank you as ever for reading along, and other than one email I’ll send out re: the launch of a very cool short story anthology that I have a piece in later this month, I’ll see you in September!

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