I realized last month I put 2023 in the title, because I am very smart and extremely temporally grounded. It's 2024, gang. Whoops. Let's get going, then. Spoiler alert: I read a lot about fear this month.

Jurassic Park / The Lost World - Michael Crichton

People were so naive about plants, Ellie thought. They just chose plants for appearance, as they would choose a picture for the wall. It never occurred to them that plants were actually living things, busily performing all the living functions of respiration, ingestion, excretion, reproduction--and defense.

I used to love Crichton's books. I still have a terrible fondness for some, for these two and The Andromeda Strain and Sphere, and I still think the Westworld movie is a masterpiece, and also fuck this guy he was the worst fuck him, but the Jurassic Park movies are always worth the time, even the bad ones.

River Mumma - Zalika Reid-Benta

It was a peculiar thing to feel such a profound sense of pride in the resistance, in the will to live of the people who came before her, and to feel personally lacking in the face of that ability at the same time.

Don't do anything else until you go read this book. It's great and fast and funny and deeply viciously angry and great again. And it's masterfully executed, I was pulled along in the current so fast I didn't realize I'd finished it and expected another hundred pages or more. It's about race and diaspora communities and memory and fear, and it's fucking great.

Fathomfolk - Eliza Chan

No matter the uniform she wore, the exams she passed, the ideas she brought to the discussion, they would always see her as fathomfolk first.

Same as the previous, go fucking read this right now. I admit it took me a hot second to get into it, the first half is beautiful worldbuilding and very slow plot, but it's very much a similar story about terrorism and xenophobia and immigration and pride and fear, about both the boiling pot full of crabs and the ladders handed down.

The Circle / The Every - Dave Eggers

“You sit at a desk twelve hours a day and you have nothing to show for it except some numbers that won't exist or be remembered in a week. You're leaving no evidence you lived. There's no proof.”

I really don't love either of these and while I don't hate-read I do occasionally binge on junk - I'd read the first a million years ago and never heard there'd been a sequel. But the man can write, and the plot pulled me along, and if I fundamentally disagree with 90% of the text that doesn't mean it's not a perfectly fine way to spend an afternoon (also I think the second is probably better done just because our protagonist isn't so deeply empty and so clearly there to be specifically pointed a particular way but I digress).

The Blue, Beautiful World - Karen Lord

"...if you go into this fixated on us and them, you have already lost.”

Good shit, gang. I think Karen Lord writes some of the most interesting premises around, and if I often struggle through the actual prose the ideas are always snares for my little heart and stick with me for much longer than the book in which the ideas are found. And I didn't realize it's the same universe as The Best of All Possible Worlds, which I've read, as well as The Galaxy Game, which I haven't. Anyway it's about fear and colonialism and change and memory like so much of what I read this month, and it's a first contact story? Kind of? And it starts out a little like Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente , but it's not that at all and it's not at all what you're thinking. I didn't love this, but I thought about it a lot while I wasn't reading it, and I'm still thinking about it, and there's something to that.

The Siege of Burning Grass / The Butcher of the Forest - Premee Mohamed

A very rapid sort of natural selection, like everything else in war. Survival of the fittest. But fittest didn't mean the most fit. It meant the one who fit best into the tortured shape the world made around them.

She thought of her own house in the village, and the two elders within waiting for her to come home, and the two guards without, and the two guards within, and the dented, yellow-enameled kettle on the top of the iron stove. Alive and well, alive and well.

Premee Mohamed should be as big of a name as anybody else working in fantasy right now, I'm fucking obsessed. Siege is about fear and torture and nationalism and war and pacifism and loyalty and lies and magic and science and devotion. And Butcher is about death and fear and childhood and childhood ruined and duty and fatalism and lies. And they're both perfect and I can't stand that I'm not currently rereading them over and over to just roll in them like mud.

The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles - Malka Older

Gimme! That! Sapphic Holmes/Watson in space! Also these books are always, always about class and power and money, about who has it in this allegedly post-scarcity future, about what people do with it, about how even after every shred of how they all got here is gone the old divisions are still strong and stalwart and aimed at keeping certain people out of the room forever. I will note that this one isn't as tight or delightful as the first but it mentions a Murderbot opera so like fuck off it rules.

High Times in the Low Parliament - Kelly Robson

If Broad City was set in a weird fae courtroom currently grappling with a very serious time crunch before the whole thing floods and everyone dies, it'd be this book. I loved it unreservedly.

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water - Zen Cho

“Yes,” said Tet Sang. “Open death, open atrocity, open persecution. But a silent war. It’s safer to be silent in these times.”

ZEN CHO PLEASE you gotta write longer fuckin books I would read 400 pages of this specific story you're KILLING ME PERSONALLY. Anyway it's about war, and faith, and fate, and violence, and fear, they're all fucking about fear, do you see what I'm getting at here?

Notes From the Burning Age - Claire North

I want to take him down, down, to the cold archives beneath the temple, to the tunnels where we keep the past, to show him selfies and pictures of food, jokes and terrible puns in dead, archaic scripts, tell him, look, look - look at people living. Look how beautiful it is to be alive.

GODDAMMIT okay look this one was the exact length it needed to be and it did exactly what it intended and I finished it and stared into the middle distance furious because yeah, fuckin, yeah, dude, that's it, that's the whole thing, that's 90% of the shit I have ever written about or wanted to and you just did it, just fuckin did the thing, and anyway godDAMMIT. It's great. Go fuckin' read it.

The Second Rebel - Linden A. Lewis

“Asset has little to no regard for her humanity. Believes death of those she deems ‘harmful’ to Asters more important than the preservation of her species.”

I don't think I'll read the third of this series. This one was okay, had a couple of very cool parts, and I just didn't like it as much. Perhaps it's because I'd just finished an absolute run of certified bangers but this was serviceable and fine.

Mister Magic - Kiersten White

Maybe, in addition to regular rules, you were given a god who watched everything from an easy, safe distance. A god you poured love into, who gave you rules and condemnation in exchange. A magic man demanding perfect obedience and the performance of a life instead of the living of one.

Sigh. Okay. Look. The first time I read this, I read it in one gasping horrified sitting, making such facial expressions that my spouse kept asking what was wrong. Everything, and also nothing, because once this book reaches its actual setting it becomes so, so clear what it's actually about (memory and religion and FEAR goddammit and loyalty and the boxes we put ourselves into to try and make something, anything, love us even a little bit) and anyway this time I read it in small, careful sips, savoring each moment. Fuckin' christ, man.

Starter Villain - John Scalzi

“A stupid villain threatens, Charlie. A smarter villain offers a service.”

I like Scalzi almost always. Whenever I don't adore a book of his (I adored Redshirts and continue to, see also Agent to the Stars and the first couple of Old Man's War books), I at least enjoy them. This one had some cute things to say about the inherent incredible evils of capitalism and corporations, and some nice moments talking about animal rights, and a brilliant real estate agent slash surveillance cat. So like. Winner. It was an outlier this month in that the fear it's about was relatively normal: fear of failure and loss, of losing your house and your job and dying of a very preventable cause because you wouldn't be able to afford whatever cure (food, medicine, shelter, hope) everyone else seems to have. And underachieving, too, that fear's all over this book in a way I think Scalzi quite likes to talk about. He likes, I think, to write about people who are perceived as underachievers who are in fact doing what they can with what they have where they are, who either end up looking better to other people or truly and genuinely giving up on ever earning exterior validation (and being happier for it). Anyway this one was cute and I enjoyed it fine.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid

“Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.”

I know everyone else already read this and guess what I also read Daisy Jones & the Six way after everybody else too, what do you want from me, there's all these robot books to read. I think Daisy Jones is much better done, for the record. I can see why everyone liked this so much when it came out and I'm not mad at it or anything, but I think the other one was more interesting and despite being a version of the Behind the Music-style story where we start out already knowing the main beats of what's going to happen because we've all heard of Fleetwood Mac/the Civil Wars/whoever, I think it was less telegraphed and more surprising. But I enjoyed this fine, and I liked Evelyn, and I enjoyed Harry so much I would almost rather have read his book, if I'm honest. Fear here, too, of course, queer stories always have to work with fear one way or another, and Reid did a capable job of it. No complaints, I sped through it and enjoyed it.

Anyway, fear: it's what's in the air right now. We're so afraid (I'm talking about me) and we're afraid of being afraid, and every book I read this month, every single one, was about fear. Some were about fear of other people, or of ourselves, or of the way the world is going to end someday, or what might be left of us after that. Some were about fear of something bigger than us, like war or death or magic or religion. But so much fear, so much, and if I take away nothing else from this month, may I take away that the fear is there and real and I'm not making it up, but neither am I allowed to live in it. I have to make it a part of my life with which I can function, or I will drown and starve and melt away, and that's not how I prefer to go out.

Stay frosty, kids.

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