2023 Bookish Wrap-Up

Well, what do you know, it’s my first post on the blog since…last year’s wrap up! It’s been a busy year, and I’ve been writing and posting a lot elsewhere; see below for more.

Volume-wise, this was not the best year for my reading goals. We moved from Chicago to Buffalo, which went fine, but it wound up being a very hectic year, with my father getting sick and passing away, and many many road-trips to Pennsylvania as a result. It feels strange to relate my reading levels to something so enormous, but I’ve also been having a very hard time getting my brain to think about anything other than Gaza over the last several months.

I don’t have as big an extra-bibliographic wrap-up as I did last year: a lot fewer conventions, book clubs, and other literary events for me this year. I did make it to Wiscon, which was really lovely, and enjoyed trying to rally folks to write more negative reviews on a critical panel there. Despite struggles, I did a fair bit of writing in 2023, and I’m immensely proud that the Ancillary Review of Books, where I’m the publishing editor, did so well this year. We published a lot of great stuff; I’m particularly pleased with Dan Hartland’s Snap! series, the lovely interview Misha Grifka Wander did with Nicola Griffith, and many of our reviews. I also rushed out a kind of op-ed that I’m pretty happy with, kind of an airing of multiple grievances with science fiction that got prompted by some mild online drama.

All that said, here’s my reading list with brief notes (probably missing a few):

• Mr. Breakfast, Jonathan Carroll
  A “fine but not for me” modern fantasy. Vaguely reminded me of Gaiman; didn’t grab me.
• The Necessity of Stars, E. Catherine Tobler
  Absolutely lovely weird first contact novella, packing in friendship, aging, climate change, and really weird aliens. Highly recommended.
• The Caretaker, Doon Arbus
  A strange, finely crafted novel that’s kind of about…the inherent futility and madness of categorizing the world to know it? Reviewed for CHIRB.
• Lone Women, Victor LaValle
  A nice Western/horror hybrid; a creature-feature diving into under-represented angles of the western expansion. Perhaps actually too good at clipping along, and at neatly concluding, but some nice stylistic flourishes. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• The Strange, Nathan Ballingrud
  Another Western/horror hybrid, this one further mixed with Bradbury-esque science fiction. Weakest at the seams but very enjoyable, with some great imagery and vivid weirdness. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• Feed Them Silence, Lee Mandelo
  A nice dark grim cold novella about fracturing ecosystems and relationships. Great sense-and-body-focused writing, and I really like the moral ambiguity of the protagonist. Reviewed for Locus.
• Cuckoo’s Egg, C.J. Cherryh
  Hadn’t read this in a quite a while (for me), and really enjoyed returning to it—another glimpse of the kind of society Cherryh would like, built around truly just judges (who are also like werewolfy ninjas) and with a fascinating emphasis on education and what it means to raise someone. Club read.
• 40,000 In Gehenna, C.J. Cherryh
  Still, I think, the best at representing in one book what Cherryh’s all about (as opposed to needing to read five or six): future history, thinking through long changes. Some really great, weird, disturbing stuff here, and it’s as close as she gets to feminism. Highly recommended. Club read.
• Scale, Greg Egan
  Egan doesn’t miss, and it boggles my mind that all his new stuff—at least in US availability—are self-published and under-discussed. This is great, a premise that’s so simple & extreme that it sounds silly—a world where humans (and lots else) exist at vastly different scales (of size, primarily). Worked through as rigorously as Egan readers will expect, initially packaged as an investigative mystery before spiraling into larger and more political strangeness.
• Extended Stay, Juan Martinez
  A phenomenal book, the most genuinely scary and classically horrific thing I read this year. Haunted buildings, body horror, cosmic horror, all alongside more worldly terrors. Reviewed for Locus.
• The Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff
  My first Sutcliff read, quite liked this—kind of gentle, really good at capturing a certain kind of richness to the world and the characters, and with some fine and unexpected haunting bits. Club read.
• Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh
  Very fun book, a bit closer to YA than I usually read, but solid. Quick-moving action sci-fi with big ideas. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• Titanium Noir, Nick Harkaway
  Immensely enjoyable little book—much shorter than the usual Harkaway but with much of his usual flair. Noir homage with science fiction/superhero angles, great fight scenes and quips. I was gearing up for a big piece on this that didn’t work out, but led to me re-reading a lot of his earlier stuff: no loss.
• Burning Paradise, Robert J. Wilson
  Read this for another piece that didn’t work out (well, yet). Wilson’s an interesting writer, big ideas here (alt-history about an intelligent organism that lives in the ionosphere and meddles in human politics) and a kind of very slowly-revealed pessimism that dovetails unexpectedly with some of the other cosmic horror elements.
• A Brief History of Living Forever, Jaroslav Kalfař
  Interesting novel, seemingly a ghost-story that’s also about life extension technology and the interesting life story of a Czech woman (our ghostly narrator); tonally I’m not quite sure where this is trying to land, but the bits about a low-budget film based on Čapek’s War with the Newts will stick with me. Reviewed for Locus.
• Stations of the Tide, Michael Swanwick
  I wind up re-reading this most years and this year was no different. Seemingly an endlessly re-interpretable little book, a real delight.
• Starfish, Peter Watts
  Another “for a project” re-read, hadn’t picked this up in ages—really dark stuff, heavily-modified humans working in the crushing ocean depths. Watts suggests playing Sarah McLachlan’s “Possession” at high volume while reading.
• Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway
  Goddamn this is fun, just absolutely bonkers. Like all the separate bits of something like Indiana Jones—the occult, the action, the politics and espionage—have been turned up until you’d think the machine would fly apart, and instead it takes off into the sky. Has bits of startling realism plunked in that that I still think about (“It just felt like that to you, because you were on the outside”), like a convergent evolution to the kind of effects magical realism sometimes achieves. But in reverse.
• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
  I say this in the nicest, most appreciative way possibly: for me at least, the thing that is, increasingly, the most interesting about this book is how it’s aging. Many little bits—the ice!—will last as long as we’re reading, though.
• The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz
  Definitely the best of Newitz’s so far, this is doing a lot of interesting things, particularly in terms of time scale. Still didn’t sit right with me somehow—some things kind of pedantically (like the anaerobic stuff), other things more nebulously, tonally. Some odd ethical gaps or mismatches. Copy-and-pasting heavily-moralized “green” values onto an entirely other planet didn’t work for me.
• Flux, Jinwoo Chong
  Strange novel, pitched as kind of cyberpunk but actually rather weirder and less genre science fiction than that—lot of play with memory (and maybe time/reality) manipulation. Long recurring bit about a fictional detective show that felt so much more real and intense than the rest of the novel that it kind of tears out of its surroundings.
• A Tidy Armageddon, BH Panhuyzen
  Strange interesting ambiguous apocalypse, in which unknown forces have sorted all artifacts on earth into giant stacks in Canada; only survivors seem to be a small military outfit who were in an underground bunker. Interesting premise, and the book’s simultaneous strength and weakness is that it doesn’t really have any other ones. Might make an interesting Ballard pairing.
• The Body Scout, Lincoln Michel
  Finally got around to this, good stuff! The most genuinely cyberpunky thing I’ve read in a bit. I…still can’t care about baseball, I used up all my brain’s careaboutbaseballlorphine on Underworld a few years back.
• The Thick and the Lean, Chana Porter
  Hands-down the novel I have most mixed feelings about this year. The writing is next-level; it’s doing absolutely fascinating stuff with religion, food, body, and sex culture; it has what feels like major miscalculations in the back half. I dunno, read it and talk to me.
• The Circumference of the World, Lavie Tidhar
  Very fun, style-and-perspective shifting book that’s kind of an alt-history of…Scientology? A very different creature than, say, Central Station, but I’d definitely recommend. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• Swim Home to the Vanished, Brendan Shay Basham
  I don’t like to overuse “poetic” for prose works, but it definitely applies here; I was underlining practically everything. A magical, dreamlike book about loss and transformation; great bits of food writing, as well. Reviewed for Locus.
• Womb City, Tlotlo Tsamaase
  Was hyped for this but found it all but impossible; sentence-level writing issues constantly throwing me out, and it has what seemed like massive, plot-impacting worldbuilding fails. Hoping I just got a too-early ARC or something.
• Inversion, Aric McBay
  A treat of a book, kind of Le Guin plus Chiang—pastoral utopia & permaculture, in a pocket universe, with space opera waiting outside. Reviewed for Locus.
• The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera
  My book of the year, no question, and likely to be a contender for my book of the decade. Sumptuous, subtle, inventive. Feels real in unexpected ways. Honestly it’s going to take me more readings to get a critical handle on it; I did manage to review it for Locus.
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
  First time reading for me. I found it a bit of a slog, to be honest, not so much for writing as for subject; C19 British lit was a major ingredient in my departure from the academic track I thought I was on, so many years ago, and that’s not Jane’s fault. Club read.
• The Deep Sky, Yume Kitasei
  Noped out of this one pretty quickly; generation ship story with some writing and set-up issues that really didn’t work for me.
• Uranians, Theodore McCombs
  Amazing, essential collection. Left me with that vibrating post-book high; there’s some really deep and lovely thought here, and the title novella deserves to change the course of an entire subgenre. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
  Picked this up for the first time in a long time on his passing. I don’t know what to say that hasn’t been said; read this if you haven’t.
• The Marigold, Andrew F. Sullivan
  Fantastic super-weird super-urban mashup of a novel, full of rain and sludge and potholes. And dark realtor magic and giant fungal intelligences—this is not to be missed. The variety of perspectives here is the real genius, perhaps.
• Darwinia, Robert Charles Wilson
  Another re-read, another weird and intriguingly grim entry from Wilson. What I love about this is that it takes one very big weird idea and uses it mostly just to obscure an even larger, weirder idea. Wish we got more of the Darwinian ecosystem, though.
• Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
  Ran out of books on a trip and picked this up at a blessedly open-late bookstore in DC. I read this, as they say, hooting and hollering. My god.
• Godfall, Van Jensen
  I hope this makes it onto genre folks’ radars; odd interesting SF book, kind of in the mode of The Last Policeman; giant dead alien lands in a hodunk town, local sheriff struggles with all kinds of issues in the wake thereof. ACAB, of course, but the larger issue lies in how the novel doesn’t quite seem to realize how badly it wants to defend and re-throne God.
• Wave Without A Shore, C.J. Cherryh
  If I haven’t told you to read this, we haven’t properly met. Club read.
• Blindsight, Peter Watts
  Felt like a re-read. There’s an alternate, better universe in which this novel rerouted science fiction the way, say, Gibson did. But probably not a lot of people can write like this—an energetic, informed, gleefully self-horrified cosmic pessimism, with a kernel of real horror that’s primarily philosophical.
• Dracula, Bram Stoker
  Remains great; remains thankfully weak at sublimating its barely-repressed queer poly energy. Interesting to look at this structurally, too, and Stoker’s calculated need for verisimilitude; interesting to contrast with the similarly-epistolary but more deeply-felt (and much earlier) Frankenstein. I was also struck a lot by the semi-comic lower class rep on this read. Club read.
• Same Bed Different Dreams, Ed Park
  Triumphant, ambitious novel, one of the most fun reading experiences I had this year. Incredibly masterful weaving of different tones, styles, and voices, and genuinely funny in parts. Bonus points for Buffalo. Reviewed for Locus.
• The Navigating Fox, Christopher Rowe
  Terrifically fun little novel; Rowe does a great job at implying a large, complex world without getting bogged down in describing it. I have the vague sense that one could say something really interesting about this in terms of its positioning within different mythic/fable traditions.
• City of Last Chances, Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Took me forever to get my hands on this, and so glad I did—normally giant chonky fantasies are decidedly not my thing, but I was willing to give Tchaikovsky a go. Really fantastic, a mosaic novel about an occupied city, reminded me quite a bit of Miéville, Pratchett, and Swanwick; interesting how Tchaikovsky doesn’t really pick a lane, thematically or tonally, as decisively as any of those three do, but still pulls this off. Highly recommended.
• We the Parasites, AV Marraccini
  As I come to this, I’m realizing that I wasn’t great at tracking my non-fiction reads this year, to which I say: huh. But there’s no forgetting this one—a rich, potent book of criticism, mixing memoir and discursive essay. Absolutely adored the commitment to the parasite metaphor, and am still kind of in awe of how strongly this is asking “what are we doing here” re: criticism, and how strongly it’s answering. My pick for ARB’s Notable Books of 2023.
• Drifts, Kate Zambreno
  Hey I think this might be one of those (inclines head and lowers voice dramatically) autofictions. Amazingly good. I’ve really been missing having writing groups and writing friends this year, and this felt like having one.
• An Immense World, Ed Yong
  Okay apparently I also recorded this non-fiction. It’s so good! If you’re interested in science, animals, perception, this is a must read, a philosophical Attenborough doc in written form. Also, essential for anyone thinking about or constructing aliens.
• Liquid Snakes, Stephen Kearse
  Interesting, angry, funny novel about environmental racism and chemical revenge. Bonus points for getting coffee right. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar
  I don’t love the phrase “this book destroyed me” but, once again, this book destroyed me.
• The Winged Histories, Sofia Samatar
  And this one too, in different ways! This time through, amid lots else, I was really noting some of the playfulness of the narration, the complexity of the polyvocality. Thinking about death a lot! Club read.
• The Archive Undying, Emma Mieko Candon
  I’m probably going to have to re-read this at some point; I admired the prose and the inventiveness, but the stakes were obscure enough that I found myself completely un-immersed for any given scene. Also feeding into my “mecha are actually only effective in visual format” theory.
• The Free People’s Village, Sim Kern
  Most unexpectedly, complexly, and I think unintentionally depressing read of the year. I adored Kern’s previous book, but—I’d need to write a lot longer about it to get it all out, but this is essentially if accidentally committed to a weird kind of poly-futility.
• Rose/House, Arkady Martine
  Gosh this is good. Particularly after the sprawling, break-neck Teixcalaan books, very cool to see Martine nailing a totally different tone and pace, while still picking at some familiar themes. Highly recommended. Reviewed for Locus.
• This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
  Felt like a re-read; it is still excellent.
• The Employees, Olga Ravn
  So good. More SF like this please. Weird, inventive, haunting.
• Erasure, Percivall Everett
  Have been meaning to read some Everett for a bit now and picked this one somewhat at random, not knowing the film adaptation was on the way. Holy cow this is great: funny, complex, manages both scalpels and sledgehammers.
• Ripe, Sarah Rose Etter
  A book that had me saying “whoof” at regular intervals: a biting and brilliant novel about depression and workplace toxicity. Pretty brilliant in how it captures modern shittiness.
• I Will Teach You Retribution, Timothy Moore.
  This collection opening with a Barthelme quote is almost too on-point; like Barthelme’s, these stories really have no right to work as well as they do, land as hard as they do, given how bonkers and experimental they are. A frantically energetic, powerful little book. I occasionally run into something that makes we want to impersonate a professor just to teach a course on it; there’s at least a class or two just in Moore’s story about a mistaken ass.
• The Scar, China Miéville
  Needed a re-read—it’s not the Miéville I recommend the most, but it’s the one I return to the most. I used to think Miéville’s kind of weak at character, but lately I’m not so sure; he’s just more interested in action and the material it’s embedded in.
• Desert Creatures, Kay Chronister
  Finally got around to this after much hollering about it from critics I trust. They were right, this is brilliant, weird and innovative, goes on the same shelf with Annihilation and The Etched City. Lots going on here, but its investment in faith, in miracles, really caught me.
• Tigerman, Nick Harkaway
  This is really lovely, very Vonnegut-like in some ways, and also a meditation on superheroes and waning colonial power. Great cast, great set-up, great pay-off.
• Prophet, Sin Blaché & Helen Macdonald
  What a strange book! I had absolutely no idea what to expect when I saw Macdonald attached to an SF project—so I absolutely did not expect this, which if I had to elevator pitch is “Gay X-files slash where they walk away from The Hurt Locker and wind up in Solaris instead”. Does it even matter if it’s good after that pitch? It is, though. Reviewed for Locus.
• Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
  I’ve gone through a parabola with this where the first time I read it, it blew my mind and changed my life; over time the mis-steps (what the heck is this colonial take? And the less said about women here the better) lowered my feeling for it; but now I find it’s still amazing after all. Club read.
• The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
  Whoops, another re-read, guess who was depressed. Thinking a lot about the Eöl plotline this time through, and also how Tolkien can’t bring himself to depict horniness so he has people sing a lot.
• The Violent Century, Lavie Tidhar
  Filling in some gaps in my Tidhar reading, just got to this. Good, and went directions I wasn’t expecting, but I can’t get overly excited about superheroes, even in this alt-history, le Carré-inflected mode. I’ve been trying to float “low cape” as a subgenre, is that anything?
• The Museum of Human History, Rebekah Bergman
  So I read this and thought it was mostly just okay, though well-written and kind of smoothly intricate, but then the more I thought through its connections and what they’re saying, the more my estimation of it grew. Also with some Vonnegut-like threads! Probably my favorite book to review this year, because my thoughts on the book changed so much in the process of revisiting it. Loss and memory are overt themes here, and I feel like climate disaster is a secret one, or maybe that’s just me. Reviewed for Locus.
• OKPsyche, Anya Johanna DeNiro
  Gosh dang can DeNiro write—a painful, playful book with elements of science fiction and magical realism, incredibly anchored in the narrator, brimming with devastating lines and several kinds of desire. Reviewed for Locus.
• Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal
  Still possibly the best novel. Definitely the only novel I was inspired to read this year by the removal of a Yoda statue.
• Perdido Street Station, China Miéville
  It’s funny, I re-read The Scar a lot and reference Iron Council a lot, but haven’t come back to this one in ages. Remarkable how its rambling, sprawling nature is inextricable; and I had never noticed how closely it’s setting up elements that come up again in Iron Council.
• Cursed Bunny, Bora Chung
  Great spooky, uneasy collection, lots of good ghosts and curses, with an interesting and not-overplayed interest in aspects of the body and the domestic.
• Exordia, Seth Dickinson
  Absolutely superb action-thriller-contact novel with deep political/ethical interests. Whip-smart and brutal. Review forthcoming.
• The Siege of Burning Grass, Premee Mohamed
  I went into this with basically no expectations, and it is lovely—pairs quite nicely with the Miéville and Tchaikovsky I’ve been reading lately. The fantastic elements feel fresh without being too extreme, and the focus on pacifism is really interesting. Review forthcoming.
• House of Open Wounds, Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Sequel to City of Last Chances, could easily be read standalone. Every bit as good, and with some shifting of thematic focus; more Pratchett-like in good ways. Review forthcoming.
• The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
  I initially had the fear that this was kind of over-written, but that fairly quickly went away. Saying surprisingly little about Christianity or evangelicalism per se, but a lot about other and related topics; very good in its character/family/psychology dynamics, and the decisions to basically split the book in half, with the latter bit over a longer/later stretch of time, really elevates the whole. Club read.
• Other Minds and Other Stories, Bennett Sims
  Grade-A collection, by turns weird and funny, cerebral and horrific. Actually, not by turns: Sims somehow layers all of these qualities at the same time. I felt seen by “An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel”, and I do not like it: probably the best single short piece of writing I read this year. Review forthcoming.
• The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler
  A fine short novella about resurrected mammoths; like A Mountain in the Sea, perhaps a bit talky, but the talking points are good. An interesting follow-up to Feed Them Silence, and has me once again wondering how deep the influence of Peter Dickinson’s Eva goes, or if it’s just convergence. Review forthcoming.
• The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett
  Extremely fun and page-turning new fantasy from Bennett, whose previous series I have quite enjoyed. This one in the mode of a detective story (slightly but not overly Sherlockian in model); fantastic mechanics, imagery, and plotting, though I’m pondering some of the larger implications. Review forthcoming.
• Arboreality, Rebecca Campbell
  This, this is why awards exist: to get the best books into my hands, mine personally, when I somehow missed them the first time around. This is the absolute best kind of climate fiction, holding hope and despair at the same time. Shook me, and will stick with me.

2022 Bookish Wrap-Up

Well, that was a year.

Personally, bookishly, it was pretty good. I’ve still been reviewing for the Chicago Review of Books, and started writing for Locus towards the end of the year. I attended quite a few clubs—Think Galactic, Chicago Nerds, and a handful of Weird & Wonderful meetings—and organized and ran a staggering number of Hugo clubs for Chicon.

Spoil the Conference was one of the best academic conferences I’ve been to in ages, transformative and enriching. The Depaul Pop Culture Conference, as usual, was energetic and delightful—on Sherlock Holmes this last year. It was great to be back at Wiscon in person; had some great panels and conversations. And I caught a lot of great events and readings around Chicago, including some great panels at the American Writers Festival and Printers Row Lit Fest.

Chicon (which was last year’s World Science Fiction Convention) was a massive amount of work; I worked on the Outreach team, became the Literature Area Head for programming, kinda sorta mostly took over Fringe, and did a lot of triage/troubleshooting for Program Ops through the con itself, as well as appearing on a few panels. It was rewarding and interesting and I don’t think the con-running bug has exactly bitten me. We’ll see.

I sold a lot of books at City Lit (I mean, not to brag, but: a lot of books), did a lot of work for events there, and contributed a lot of staff picks to their 2022 picks, speculative and otherwise.

I didn’t write anything of note for the Ancillary Review of Books this year, but I clicked “publish” about 100 times—I’m immensely glad we’ve kept it going after near-total editorial turnover, with a lot of great folks contributing this year. I have some hopes and ideas for Ancillary in 2023 that I hope pan out. And, although it’s pretty much just the calendar these days, I’ve kept Positron Chicago updated with clubs & literary events.

I have a lot of reading and writing plans for this year, some of them more choate than others. But, without further ado, my reading list from 2022, probably missing a few somehow:

• Devil House, John Darnielle
  First novel I read this year, a heck of a bar to set. This book is monumental, gets better the more you think about it—argumentative, conversational, thorny and thoughtful and deep. Reviewed for the CHIRB.
• Last Exit, Max Gladstone
  This was a little disappointing, but in interesting ways. Gladstone’s an excellent writer, and that is true here, but this felt like it was struggling with where to go—doesn’t quite know the change it wants to see. Reviewed for the CHIRB.
• No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
  A perfect novel, a bleak reactionary poem of a book.
• Far From the Light of Heaven, Tade Thompson
  A surprisingly unpredictable book, very inventive, and went off at angles I didn’t expect. Highly recommended. Chicago Nerds read.
• These Prisoning Hills, Christopher Rowe
  I really like Rowe’s biopunk Appalachian post-singularity-war stuff, and this did not disappoint. Very good.
• Dark Eden, Chris Beckett
  A really fascinating and fantastic book; I’m shocked I haven’t heard more about it. Very “classic, big idea” kind of SF: fascinating world, doing a lot with language, and very adventure-y and plot-driven.
• Dark Matter, Blake Crouch
  Gosh this is bad. Lots to ding here (Chicago geography fails for one lol), but it’s how deeply unimaginative it is that really killed it for me. Weird & Wonderful read.
• Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin
  Riotous, gory, disturbing and triumphant.
• Dead Collections, Isaac Fellman
  Wow this is good: great premise, extremely effective and playful style, doing some really potent shit with vampirism and transitioning, remarkably concise character work, and great meditations on media and identity construction. Think Galactic read.
• A Country of Ghosts, Margaret Killjoy
  Worth the ticket—pretty thin on plot and character, but fascinating and recommended for its anarchic utopia, anyway. Brought up a lot of comparisons to The Dispossessed and Iron Council. TG read.
• All Systems Red, Martha Wells
  Murderbot is such fun, a lot of simple, well-known ingredients combining in surprising and delightful ways. CNSC read.
• The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway
  Superb, a riot, daring and outrageous. I often say of Harkaway that his books feel like he fought off an editor who wanted (reasonably) to cut 200 pages or so, but his books are better for the sprawl.
• Woman, Eating, Claire Kohda
  Interesting, well-done, unusual vampire novel; extremely contemporary and finding some unexpected resonance between vampire tropes and millennial malaise, and tapping into some pretty heavy themes.
• Spear, Nicola Griffith
  An instant classic, one of the absolutely most perfect books I’ve read in years. A joy to read—lyrical, effortless, wild and transportive. Reviewed for the CHIRB, and a CNSC read.
• The Awoken, Katelyn Howe
  Easily the worst novel I read this year: excellent example of “novelization style” (written as though a novelization of a film or TV work), jaw-dropping plot/logic/science fails, unable to get a handle on what it’s doing metaphorically (disability rights? Reproductive rights?), all patched over with the most melodramatic of hackneyed tropes.
• Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Adore this novel, big sprawling spider civilization plus generation ship troubles. CNSC read.
• Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
  Still knocks my socks off, just a brilliant perfect novel. TG read.
• Anathem, Neal Stephenson
  Head and shoulders above…most things, really. A perennial re-read for me, suggested for all science/philosophy types.
• The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
  Really gets better on re-reading, there’s a lot going on here. TG read.
• Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki
  Mixed on this one: aspects of it were really raw and potent and unexpectedly triumphant, yet the mixing of speculative elements felt pretty goofy to me, and some parts of the ethical schema re: souls were distracting. Overall, still recommend. CNSC read.
• Acadie, David Hutchinson
  Weird fun “gotcha” novella, felt like an homage to Watts’ or Sterling’s biopunky space stuff.
• Siren Queen, Nghi Vo
  Extremely well done, great voice & world. I wasn’t quite as bowled over with this as with some of Vo’s other work, but I think only because I’m not terribly interested in fame & celebrity as phenomena, and those are tied to the silver screen magic of the novel.
• How To Blow Up A Pipeline, Andreas Malm
  Good, affirming, very usefully walks through a complete takedown of “nonviolence is good for its own sake”. Felt a little too context-free—core points stand, but wasn’t grappling enough with the fact that in many countries (including America) you’ll get straight up state-murdered for these kinds of hijinks.
• Embassytown, China Miéville
  Just felt like a re-read. One of the greatest SF novels of all time; a must for language lovers.
• The Death of Vivek Oji, Akwaeke Emezi
  Jaw-dropping, sad, insightful, charged with psycho-socio-sexual energy. Was thinking a lot about Jane’s Meander, Spiral, Explode reading this—has an unusual but highly effective structure.
• You Made A Fool of Death with Your Beauty, Akwaeke Emezi
  Felt weird about this one—a genuinely good romance, v. steamy, with some heavier bits about grief and bigotry; but it also felt like a name-droppy ode to classist success in ways that rubbed me weird after the clear-eyed compassion of Freshwater and Vivek Oji. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• Invisible Things, Mat Johnson
  Fun, punchy, the kind of pointed allegorical SF I don’t seem to see much of anymore. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
  Well, it’s great, but I think I need some time to digest before I can say much more about it. The purposeful shifting to yet another narrator with highly-incomplete information about the world is an interesting one, but I hope that doesn’t hold; the use of what felt like consciously uwu-soft-child POV in this world also interesting. I do not love [spoiler].
• Across the Green Grass Fields, Seanan McGuire
  Eh, don’t need to get into it but didn’t love this. Felt real slapdash.
• Zodiac, Neal Stephenson
  I’m still kicking around an essay I want to write about climate change and techno-optimism (and -pessimism), made me come back to this. It’s real good, honestly, and doesn’t suffer for being such a clear Monkey Wrench Gang analog. Interesting to see some of the impulses that go in different directions later in Stephenson’s career.
• Endless Endless by Adam Clair
  Delightful book about the Elephant 6, and the style and structure match the subject. Powerfully, strangely nostalgic, and reminded me of the potency and, for lack of a better world, spirituality of music (and art generally) that I still believe in, but was closer to my surface when I discovered Neutral Milk Hotel when I was 18 or whatever.
• She Who Became the Sun, Shelley Parker-Chan
  Fantastically written and compelling; left me feeling a little strange because I fundamentally can’t get behind the protagonist. Don’t get me wrong, this book is really good, but I think that quality helped me identify an issue I have with books about the power-hungry.
• Drunk On All Your Strange New Words, Eddie Robson
  This was a blast; I’ve been watching for new work for Robson since the wild ride of Hearts of Oak. Inventive set-up that spirals into and out of ever-stranger conspiracy theories. Highly recommended. 
• The Grief of Stones, Katherine Addison
  Pretty good—kind of “more of the same” but of a world I quite like. Left me wanting some progress in a few different ways, but I’ll wait and see what’s next.
• The Spear Cuts Through Water, Simon Jimenez
  Holy heck, what an achievement. Feels important, on a craft level, as few other things I read this year do. Immensely readable despite its deep and thorough stylistic experiments. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler
  Tons of fun, artificial intelligence and octopuses. Very Gibson-y on some levels, very Crichton-y on others. It’s quite talky—tell vs show a bit imbalanced—but a delightful read.
• The Past is Red, Catherynne M. Valente
  Loved this. Playful and creative and ominous, great voice.
• Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
  Entertainingly awful. The science is not actually good, please stop saying that.
• Into the Riverlands, Nghi Vo
  If you’ve liked the Singing Hills books, don’t miss this! If you don’t know them, go back and start, they’re great! Vaguely Le Guin-esque, and apparently taking a tour of slightly different fantasy structures, this one veering into wuxia territory.
• A Half-Built Garden, Ruthanna Emrys
  Per everything on the tin, I should have loved this—eco-sff, first contact, anarchic social structures. It didn’t quite work for me, something about the stakes & alien-ness felt off.
• Venomous Lumpsucker, Ned Beauman
  Screamingly good, one of the best things I read this year. Jaggedly sharp and darkly funny. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• An Immense World, Ed Yong
  This is such a treat. Yong’s a great and approachable writer, the subject matter here is “stick it in my veins” nature doc stuff, and this should honestly be on any potential SF writer’s shelf just for “non-human sensoria” reasons.
• TITAN, Mado Nozaki, translated by Evan Ward
  Interesting strange book; as sometimes the case with translated fiction, I’m worried I’m missing context, but the mecha roots here are pretty clear. I felt that this completely biffed its central question (“what is work?” in the context of a post-scarcity society), but still kind of fascinating. Reviewed for Locus.
• Neom, Lavie Tidhar
  This is great! Like Central Station, a fascinating blend of huge and tiny ideas; quiet and believable, shot through with vivid oddness, and chock-full of allusion to other works. Highly recommended.
• Legends & Lattes, Travis Baldree
  Like my distaste for Chambers, this isn’t really the author’s fault, there’s just this type of “low-or-no-stakes” SFF that really doesn’t do it for me (and contrasts pretty sharply with the kind of plotless stuff I do love). This felt done quite well for what it is, even if very obviously a D&D outgrowth; unfortunately I have also spent too much time in coffee for unrealistic coffee shop AUs to go down very well.
• The Two Doctors Gorski, Isaac Fellman
  Fellman, what the hell. This is really good, and different from his previous outings. Bitter and distilled, like an endorheic lake. Reviewed for Locus.
• Under Fortunate Stars, Ren Hutchings
  Didn’t like this, don’t get it. Wildly predictable, bland Trek fic. CNSC read.
• The Tiger Flu, Larissa Lai
  Fascinating and occasionally beautiful, but really hard to read, felt like a real slog to get through.
• Depart, Depart, Sim Kern
  Wow, great little book. Remarkable authorial balance, this is getting a lot done in very few pages, without any element overpowering the others or feeling unnecessary. Top notch. Anthropocene Book Club read.
• The End of the World Might Not Have Taken Place, Patrik Ourednik
  Delightful, weird, Vonnegut-esque, occasionally on the edge of cringe. Enjoyed quite a bit.
• The Galaxy and the Ground Within, Becky Chambers
  Meh. I disliked this less than any of the other Wayfarer books; Chambers works better for me the more the novels know there’s no real plot. Still not a huge fan.
• Elder Race, Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Superb novella, really rich with ideas and subtlety, at the intersection of classic fantasy and classic SF. CNSC read.
• 40, Alan Heathcock
  Interesting weird climate novel that doesn’t quite know what to do with its own striking imagery; it was cool to see apocalyptic American Christianity put central in a cli-fi novel.
• Fireheart Tiger, Aliette de Bodard
  Nice novella; felt like I lacked some of the cultural context to figure out emotional/social stakes, and there wasn’t quite enough space for worldbuilding. But, to be honest, I’ve always enjoyed every de Bodard story I’ve encountered, and this was no exception.
• The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
  Yeah, it’s great. I think this year the thing jumping out at me a lot was the sense of humor throughout this. Also made me briefly get up in arms about Gimli reclamation—Jackson movies made him into something quite different than in the text.
• A Spindle Splintered, Alix E. Harrow
  Eh, not for me, a bit too by the numbers, and the writers who can pull off “meme references that don’t make me want to autodefenestrate” are very few.
• The Sleepless, Victor Manibo
  Cool setup that didn’t quite land for me. Little touches about the premise were nice. I think part of my ambivalence is familiarity with Kress’s Beggars in Spain, a troublesome but massively more ambitious novel about the same central idea.
• The Library of the Sapphire Wind, Jane Lindskold
  Drove me right up the wall. Fascinatingly a throw-back to a kind of SFF I don’t feel like I’ve seen since the 80s/90s but not, you know, in a way I personally liked. Actually went over fairly okay at club—CNSC read.
• The Cartographers, Peng Shepherd
  Not great in somewhat interesting ways; doing the same kind of thing that irks me in a lot of “literary” spec fic, where it’s not really thinking through the mechanics & ramifications of its own speculative elements. Also had some more mundane character/motivation issues that tossed me out even harder.
• The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
  Limp and toothless and not very interesting, sad to say; seemed like there was potential here (Wells’ original is haunting), but things didn’t quite come together for this one.
• Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence, R.F. Kuang
  Didn’t think I was going to love this—period English fantasy & rigorous magic systems are decidedly not my thing. But this novel is just perfect and a treat top to bottom, I ate it right up. Angry and right. CNSC read.
• Self-Portrait with Nothing, Aimee Pokwatka
  A fun, strange debut novel that I quite enjoyed. Felt like Gibson mixed with, I dunno, Link or Saunders maybe? Reviewed for the CHIRB.
• Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
  Just wanted some centipede protagonists, you know? Still loads of fun and weird.
• The White Mosque, Sofia Samatar
  Gorgeous, insightful memoir/travelog, proof positive that “more specific=more universal”. If you’ve read any Samatar and liked it, read this. Lots here about warped but potent utopianizing, about living with feet in multiple cultures, about the way the past percolates through everything.
• The Stars Undying, Emery Robin
  Space opera very much in the vein of Martine & Elliott; this was extremely well done but still left me asking “why tho” a little. Review forthcoming.
• The Hero of This Book, Elizabeth McCracken
  Easily among the top of my reads this year. Just a masterclass in writing, in character and memory.
• Feed Them Silence, Lee Mandelo
  A carefully bleak and measured novella; fascinating approach to a flawed character, and kind of haunting. Review forthcoming.
• Vacuum Flowers, Michael Swanwick
  Don’t remember exactly why I came back to this, but it’s still a treat. Fun reminder of the “cyberpunks go to space, too” phenomena, with lots of vivid bits. Potentially in the same world as the inimitable Stations of the Tide, and rhymes oddly with lots of other unusual space opera stuff.
• The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older
  Pretty fun, simple, Sherlock riff, more interesting for the setting than anything else—post-Earth-catastrophe civilization set on Jupiter.
• The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz
  Definitely the most I’ve enjoyed a Newitz novel thus far, and there’s some fun stuff here; there’s also some strange assumptions or blindspots that kept throwing me out of it.
• No Gods No Monsters, Cadwell Turnbull
  Lots of kind-of interesting stuff here that doesn’t quite shape up into enough of a story, and I felt it suffered from some metaphor problems. Cast was so large, and the plot so incomplete, that it felt very pilot-y. TG read.
• The Sentence, Louis Erdrich
  Most “interrupted by the pandemic and I’m just gonna roll with it” novel I’ve yet encountered. This is pretty writerly, and the ghost element is fairly minimal, but I genuinely liked it quite a bit. The book lists at the back are nice, too. CNSC read.
• Station 6, S.J. Klapecki
  Love the setup—unionizing action on a space station. Execution fairly weak.
• Extended Stay, Juan Martinez
  Whew, this is REAL GOOD. Haunted house with extreme body horror that gets way more speculative/extreme than I was anticipating. Good catharsis, memorable scenes, solid body hits of socially relevant critique without feeling preachy. All the content warnings, but don’t miss this if you like weird horror.
• The Genesis of Misery, Neon Yang
  Mixed feelings at best! Part of this were pretty rad, many more parts of this made me want to chuck the book out the window. Attempted a lot of diction shifts in a way that really didn’t work for me, had some editing fails, and enough about the structure/setup made me mad that I kinda want to drag it at length, but no reason to for this list! CNSC read.
• Wave Without A Shore, C.J. Cherryh
  Simply the best; has structured my entire intellectual life since before my frontal cortex jelled. This time through, thinking a lot about how totalitarian apparatuses (apparati?) get those policemen in your head, so you do most of their work for them.
• Pew, Catherine Lacey
  Very weird! But good! Weird & Wonderful read.
• How Far the Light Reaches, Sabrina Imbler
  Holy chao is this good—memoir and science writing, both a metaphor for the other.
• What If? 2, Randall Munroe
  It’s a treat, you know what you’re in for if you know XKCD.
• Reconstruction, Alaya Dawn Johnson.
  Fantastic collection from a master stylist, with a couple of just top-tier stories. I reviewed for the CHIRB back when it came out, and this was a TG read.
• Cursed Bunny,  Bora Chung
  Weird and delightful fantasy/horror stories, lots of body stuff. Review forthcoming.
• Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis
  Some of that longtermism/effective altruism bullshit reminded me so strongly of the villain’s final speech in this that I had to come back and read. Dang, this is good. I got beef with Lewis but the first two entries in the Space Trilogy are really fantastic. There are aspects of these that I would love to see in more SF.

Big News!

We’ve been talking about this for a while, but I keep running into people who missed the memo:

Alison & I are leaving Chicago! We are moving, in my case back, to Buffalo. (Yes, like that one slightly disturbing Kottke song.)

We’ve had “eventually leave Chicago for a mid-sized city” on our plans for a long time, but we’d assumed, pre-pandemic and pre-both-of-us-getting-career-shakeups, that it would be a lot further in the future. A variety of factors lined up, and we’ll be in Buffalo for the new year.

I’ve been in Chicago almost a decade, and it’s a bittersweet decision, but I’m looking forward to the move. A chance to change gears, focus on writing and other projects, and to be closer with my family.

It’s been fun making coffee and selling books here. Made a lot of good friends, took a couple good knocks. I’m sure we’ll be visiting again.

I’m trying to keep my Linktree updated, so you can see where to find me & my writing online, and I’ll be doing a few more posts before we head east.

My Worldcon Schedule!

Idiomatically, I might say: I can’t believe Chicon is here already! But the truth is, friends, I can believe it. Indeed, I cannot disbelieve it. I’ve been running around like mad doing various tasks to help out, and I’m super excited that the con’s about to start. If you’re interested in catching me on panels, here’s where I’ll be:

• SF Scholarship for Fans: Thursday 9/1 @ 11:30am in Michigan 2, also streamed live to Airmeet 7.
  Pretty jazzed about this one, as the overlap between scholarship and fandom is kind of my whole deal.
• So You Want to Be a Reviewer: Thursday 9/1 @ 2:30pm in Grand Hall L.
  Also very excited for this one: I take reviews seriously, and this is a great list of panelists. I believe this panel is going to be targeted in the “practical advice” direction, but expect some broader thoughts & theories, as well.
• Queerness, Taboos, and Love (moderator): Monday 9/5 @ 10am in Michigan 2, also streamed live to Airmeet 7.
  I’m kind of the emergency moderator for this one, but I’m looking forward to it: this an academic panel, and both papers sound excellent.

I’ll be running around doing all kinds of stuff for Friday-Saturday-Sunday, and I’ll probably to write up at least a few things for Positron; I’m not doing the full Hugo guide for Ancillary this year, but plan on doing some post-award analysis (because I just love those Sankey diagrams, and the potential of preferential voting, so darned much).

I’ll also be at a few of the Fringe events! Hope to see you!

Maudlin Coffee Funk

Last night, I got in a strange maudlin funk thinking about the transformative sensory experiences I’ve had in coffee, and contrasting that with how rarely I encounter them now. Off the cuff, things that sprang to mind:

• Bolivia Takesi Typica, gun-to-my-head the best coffee I’ve ever had. Like licking a Pinot Gris off a clean piece of slate. One of the most terroir-forward things I’ve ever encountered in my life—the altitude, the cold, the minerality, all there in the cup somehow.
• Cheese and coffee pairings at Intelligentsia Pasadena; aggressive bright SL-28s, classic blackberry and tomato, bouncing off hard crystally sheep cheese. Dang.
• The really odd-but-still-great tasting notes that cropped up sometimes, the ones we didn’t quite know how to sell. The Pacamara that tasted hand-to-god like onion bhajia, with a tiny dash of mango chutney.
• Still remember the first cupping that bowled me over, pun intended, I might have wound up with a different life if not for this one: Idido Misty Valley at Grumpy in New York. I yelled, breaking protocol. Fruit Loops, if Fruit Loops were real fruit, and each one distinct, and perfectly framed against a cocoa nib backdrop.
• Siphon bar at Blue Bottle, astonishing grapey-plummy Honduras, paired with an utterly extraneous and delicious house-made bourbon marshmallow.
• “Zero Defect” Yirgacheffes, how can something be this lemony without being sour or cloying?
• 100% Sumatran espresso from Equal Exchange, 100% not a coffee I would ever seek out, but perfect: buttered popcorn without a single dry spot or sharp edge.
• The Burundis that stole my heart, deep and clean and sweet. Maybe not the lightning-strike revelatory kind of coffee, but hands-down the one I’d choose to drink most mornings if I could.
• Too many great dials at Intelligentsia to remember unprompted, I’d have to look through notes. Years of mornings with 3 or 4 outstanding coffees, getting to know them, co-workers figuring out how to brew & describe them. Arguing over alt espressos and going for really weird specs, pulling strange delicious shots that you needed to sit with and process for a while.
• That bizarre and delicious natural Bali Michael & I got our hands on in Buffalo, like an entire bouquet of candied flowers with some dirt. “Like a genuinely happy funeral.”
• Those Colombian Pink Bourbons that are just like the Batman theme, pow! Zap! Right in the kisser!
• Geshas everywhere these days, but I had one—late 00’s, Panamanian from Social in Ontario—that was Why The Hype. Stood there making “hm, aha” noises and tilting my head funny for minutes. Like base jumping through clouds of astonishing flavor. Huge fruit and an ever-so-slightly minty finish.

Godshots are real and I hate that we don’t talk about them more.

While sensory connoisseur-ship often plays into class dynamics, there’s an aspect to it that is strangely but strongly egalitarian, that resists (if not escapes) consumerism. When it comes to what’s actually in the cup, you might be able to fool some people, but you can’t actually fake it, and the people who are really committed to quality learn to see it, and each other. I tell this story a lot, but another experience that set me down the road of coffee was seeing such different people at the same table, literally and metaphorically, at coffee events I went to—young baristas, seasoned farmers, polo-wearing exec types, techs and roasters and importers from all over the world, taking each other seriously and enthusiastically. Passion and quality don’t erase the barriers in the world, but they have a way of reaching over them.

And things like coffee are a physical act of collaboration, of intersection. Evolution and genetics; politics and practices; geoclimate and commerce and local food culture.

The pandemic kicked me out of coffee, at least temporally. It’s real strange out here. Having that intense relationship—I genuinely dislike the word “spiritual”, but that’s probably the best way to describe it—suddenly attenuated is very weird; most people don’t care that much about coffee, and that’s fine, but I used to be surrounded by coworkers who did, and a lot of my social circle was other people in the food & beverage industries who were similarly passionate about their fields.

Add to that the fact that the pandemic intensified a corporate shift that was already underway, as well as causing huge changes and challenges across the food service industry. I have a hard time expressing how depressing it is to go into places that used to be bastions of quality, and getting mediocre coffee from uninspired baristas. Craft quality does not scale, which is interesting and complicated but also just: seems to hold true. Which again is part of that complicated relationship between quality and capitalism: we value (and price) things by quality, but quality gets paradoxically impossible to maintain above above some financialized/corporatized threshold.

Add to that the elephant carcass in the room: global warming is bad for coffee. Coffee’s not going to go away as a commodity, but the good stuff is going to become more rare, more expensive; a lot of the plants and producers who create the quality in the first place are going to go away. And you can’t add it in later. This is one of the reasons that reading KSR often has me on the verge of tears, one of the reasons I was screaming throughout Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker. High-quality, sensitive, place-based foods like coffee are canaries in the coal mine.

Wow this get depressing, more so than I intended! I am hopeful that the state of coffee is not as dire as it feels like, and that this is me being a little “old man yells at cloud”. I moved to Chicago for coffee, and the other week when a friend was in from out of town and wanted to know “where the exciting coffee is”, I honestly didn’t know what to say. Big part of that’s on me, slash the pandemic: I am still not eating out maskless indoors, so I’m out of the loop with a lot going on in the café scene. (Shout out to the extremely good espressos I got from Four Letter Word walk-up window—in paper, such heresy!—over the last couple years.)

But. Transcendent coffee experiences are real, and I miss them.

(Belatedly) Wiscon!

Alison, Jo, Tiptree & I en route to Wiscon

It’s been a whirlwind couple weeks—inventory/POS switchover at work, Chicon schedule work & all-staff meeting, American Writers Festival, lots of writing & editing for ARB & CHIRB—such that I totally forgot to put up anything about my Wiscon schedule! So, a recap of the past, and a preview of what’s to come:

Friday:
-Marriage Story: SFF and Literary Fiction. 1pm, Conference 4. Nice panel on the porous boundary between genre and mainstream literature. With Mary Anne Mohanraj & Alex Jennings.
–Reproductive Technology in Spec Fic. 9pm, Assembly. (Oh my gosh, I literally forgot Wiscon had panels so late. WAY past my bedtime.) Really great, deep conversation—this could literally have been its own conference. With Myriad, Kristy Anne Cox, & Rebecca J. Holden.

Saturday:
–Math As Technology, Math As Metaphor. 10am, Conference 4. Got invited to this, pretty excited about it. I come bringing some orneriness about “mathemagicians” and mysticizing. With Marie Vibbert, S. Brackett Robertson, Jessica Finn.
–Remembering Early Women SFF Authors. 1pm, Capitol B. Another one I’m excited about—leaning Cherryh-wards, but there’s so much to talk about here. With Margaret McBride, Ruthanna Emrys, & Tessa Crosby.

Sunday:
Genre as Works In Conversation. 4pm, Ansible B (online). This is like, sorta kinda what I’m all about—genre as tradition, the way works talk back to each other. I may try to sneak a little Matthew Arnold in here. With Kiersty Lemon-Rogers, Anna Blumstein, Jenny Hamilton, & Eileen Gunn.

---

So, so excited to be back at Wiscon—it’s still a strange time, but it’s good to be back.

2021 Fiction Reads & Re-Reads

Tags

booklist

2021 was definitely a better reading year for me than last year, although I still had multiple dry spells due to, you know, the stress of living on this planet right now. I also felt pretty good about my writing and conference presentations this year; I’ve linked to my reviews below.

---

• Reconstruction, Alaya Dawn Johnson
  Superb collection; explores some connected themes across a wide range of styles and genres. “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i” is still one of the best short stories I’ve read in years. Reviewed at the CHIRB.
• Afterland, Lauren Beukes
  Handmaidian story about a virus that kills most human males; follows a woman and her son in the aftermath. It was fine? Seemed like it was going to do more with gender presentation; didn’t. Left me, as most “the men are dead, oh no” stories do, begging people to research how easily current technology could keep reproduction going. Chicago Nerd Social Club read.
• The Echo Wife, Sarah Gailey
  Cloning murder-mystery psychological-horror. Science is a bit hand-wavey but the moral ambiguity and Jackson-esque narrative control were very cool. Reviewed for ARB.
• The Not Yet, Moira Crone
  Very strange, meandering, multi-faceted novel, post-sea-level-rise Louisiana setting. Didn’t particularly love it, but it was interesting. Think Galactic read.
• The Memory Theater, Karen Tidbeck
  Kind of folk/fairy-tale-like story with big surreal ideas. Put me in mind of Gaiman and Link a bit. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• The Vanished Birds, Simon Jimenez
  Adored this. Classic SF—felt like it was strongly connected to both Alfred Bester-esque stuff and more recent found-family space opera—but with a wonderful, thoughtful, literary bent. Really good.
• Vita Nostra, Marina & Sergey Dyachenko
  Dark magic school. Didn’t love! The Russian background felt very real to me though. CNSC read.
• The City in the Middle of the Night, Charlie Jane Anders
  Enjoyed this even more on a re-read. Meta-messy, I dig the musings on time, and the “friends with weird aliens from the dark side of the planet” is a sci-fi vitamin my body constantly craves. TG read.
• Machinehood, S.B. Divya
  Squicked out by the confused politics and assumptions in this one. Coupled with poor writing, didn’t much enjoy. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff VanderMeer
  Really quite liked this, as discomforting as it is. Brutal intersection of personal and planetary trauma, great paranoid espionage/noir voice. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• Unconquerable Sun, Kate Elliott
  Was alright, I enjoy a big complex space opera. The gender-switched Alexander the Great retelling stuff was a lot less interesting to me than the weirder modified human stuff. CNSC read.
• Sorcerer to the Crown, Zen Cho.
  Surprisingly good—I don’t love regency-and-adjacent stuff, but this was fun. I was a little derailed by the ethics (or lack thereof) of the protagonist in the last section. TG read.
• Oceanic, Greg Egan
  Whoof, this one. Superb entry in the “big but complex atheist feelings” SF.
• The Witness for the Dead, Katherine Addison
  Quite liked this! I really enjoyed The Goblin Emperor, and this is dramatically stronger. I like the meandering flaneuriness of it, the well-digested Sherlockiness of it, and just a compelling character and world. Reviewed for ARB. CNSC read.
• The City & the City, China Miéville
  Re-read for my ongoing “anti-fantasy” academic project. A damn classic, this one, can’t recommend it highly enough.
• The Doors of Eden, Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Great fun! Alternate worlds and histories, evolutionary possibilities, supergiant superintelligent bug gods, sign me up. Tchaikovsky’s got a real gift for making big chonky doorstoppers into snappy, idea-rich page-turners.
• The Unraveling, Benjamin Rosenbaum
  Argh this book, everyone read this book as soon as possible please. So terribly inventive and clever and good. Reviewed for CHIRB, and my pick for the ARB Notable List.
• On Fragile Waves, E. Lily Yu
  “The book that knocked me over like a sneaker wave, 2021.” Barely know how to talk about this, still, without just shoveling descriptors at it: devastating, insightful, relentless, compassionate. A masterpiece. My pick for the CHIRB 2021 list.
• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, V.E. Schwab
  Everybody seems to be reading this book. I did not love it! Might have been a fun novella, but the central premise doesn’t hold up if you think about it at all; overall too cute for me. CNSC read.
• The Light Brigade, Kameron Hurley
  Time-traveling, hallucinogenic riff on Starship Troopers. I dig the critique but the coolest parts felt like they were left off the page.
• Sisters of the Vast Black, Lina Rather
  Very fun novella, a stock “space opera corporate government is evil” plot, but the details—well-sketched nuns wrestling with faith and pragmatism, giant living slugships—were excellent.
• Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, Kelly Robson
  Another very fun novella, time travel and body modification and some interesting future generational philosophy stuff.
• The Odyssey, Homer, Emily Wilson translation
  Superb, extremely readable. Not the riot that Headley’s Beowful is, but so clear and graceful that I felt like I could simultaneously be absorbed by the story and note a lot of the weird differences in cultural/moral assumptions.
• The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
  Re-read for Witness review. Quite good. Could not help thinking about this as a fantasy version of Dave (1993).
• Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
  Easily the best book I read this year. Was ready to hate it; it won me over within pages. Astonishing mastery of voice. CNSC read. ARB Hugo Guide.
• The Four Profound Weaves, R.B. Lemberg
  Interesting novella; maybe a little imbalanced in terms of figuring out the world in a short work, but with some insightful, joyous stuff about identity. TG read.
• Rimrunners, C.J. Cherryh
  Every time I read this, I’m increasingly sure it’s her best novel. Maybe tied with Gehenna. Space combat setting with high physical and psychological realism, memorable protagonist.
• Downbelow Station, C.J. Cherryh
  Re-read for conference paper. It’s good, but really not the Cherryh I’d suggest people start with. Some parts are excellent, the Downers are not great, and the overall brutal reality-portraying feels vaguely like Russian literature.
• In the Watchful City, S. Qiouyi Lu
  Feels more like a fix-up—a couple short stories stitched together—than a cohesive single story. Some interestingly disturbing ideas, but on the whole I found it fairly weak. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• Blindsight, Peter Watts
  Just felt like a re-read for some reason. Remains unmatched for high-concept space horror, and it’s just a treat to read.
• Echopraxia, Peter Watts
  Only suggested if you just need more Blindsight. Loads of interesting ideas but it just doesn’t cohere the way its predecessor does.
• A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar
  Olondrian novels are turning into an annual read for me. Aching, lovely, graceful book, can’t say enough about it.
• The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nghi Vo
  Gobsmacked by this; a top contender for best book of 2021. If you’re not into Gatsby, I still highly recommend this; what Vo is doing with style, imagery, and theme, within her chosen limits, is breathtaking.
• When the Sparrow Falls, Neil Sharpson
  Was ready to be underwhelmed by this (dystopian AI stuff) and was instead quite charmed; Vonnegut-ish, with unexpected and effective resonance with works like Koestler’s Darkness at Noon or Milosz’s The Captive Mind. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• Hellboy Vol. 1, Mike Mignola
  Had been wanting to read this for a while. What a treat! Just fantastic. Among many other things, left me thinking about the balance of irony and seriousness that, for instance, the MCU can’t maintain.
• A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine
  Adored this; has rather a lot going on but I was practically saying “yum” after every chapter. Interstellar/interspecies diplomacy and translation stuff, intrigues and weird tech, great characters. Very much feels like the modern heir to Cherryh & related SF. Still waiting on a few big loose threads to resolve, which is awesome.
• Midnight Riot, Ben Aaronovitch
  Finally read this. Fun, light, maybe a little too cavalier/plucky for me; this kind of urban fantasy often lands wrong for me but this was enjoyable enough.
• Bitter Root Vol. 1, David Walker et al
  Strikingly, startlingly Ring Shout-esque; art and ideas are great but this reminded me of why I don’t read many comics. TG read.
• We Have Always Been Here, Lena Nguyen
  Some promising elements here, but I was extremely disappointed by this on several levels; nail in the coffin was the snake-oil quantum quackery endorsement. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers
  This was all right, and lacked most of the bad science that often distracts me in Chambers, but just not really for me—I’m intrigued by the gentle/no-stakes aesthetic, but need a little more going on.
• The Relentless Moon, Mary Robinette Kowal
  Ironically, I think this might be the strongest entry in the “Lady Astronaut” books, but it’s not different enough from previous entries to really stand out in my head. Also, and this is not Kowal’s fault, but the “Earth is doomed, flee rather than invest here” idea has been rather well tainted by awful billionaires since the series began. ARB Hugo Guide.
• Two Truths and a Lie, Sarah Pinsker
  Great, goofy, creepy story. ARB Hugo Guide.
• The Inaccessibility of Heaven, Aliette de Bodard
  Pretty good noir-ish tale; was intrigued to see what looks like the “Fallen” universe in a modern setting. ARB Hugo Guide.
• Burn, or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super, A.T. Greenblatt
  I have a weird and unfair-to-them ambivalence about “low superhero” genre stories, where I will watch/read them but feel kinda conflicted about how much I care, because the core idea of superhero-dom is not one that resonates for me. This is a pretty good entry though. ARB Hugo Guide.
• Helicopter Story, Isabel Fall
  Great story, loved the neurotech and voice; a lot of tragic drama around this story, unfortunately. ARB Hugo Guide.
• Monster, Naomi Kritzer
  Nice, polished CRISPR-thriller. ARB Hugo Guide.
• The Pill, Meg Ellison
  Wow, this story: Ellison is one to watch. Potent, cutting, makes the obvious fresh and goes beyond it to less-obvious places. ARB Hugo Guide.
• Come Tumbling Down, Seanan McGuire
  Just gotta be honest, this series does nothing for me. ARB Hugo Guide.
• Upright Women Wanted, Sarah Gailey
  Fun re-appropriation of the Western for queer, anti-fascist ends. ARB Hugo Guide.
• A Master of Djinn, P. Djeli Clark
  Smashing fun; fairly light but with a great setting (alt-history Cairo) and a rollicking pace. CNSC read.
• Cyteen, C.J. Cherryh
  Re-read for a conference paper. Whew, Cyteen; to be clear, I’m the biggest Cherryh nerd you’re likely to meet, and I have to say, even though they’re the Hugo winners, Cyteen and Downbelow Station are so not the ones you should start with. Cyteen in particular is a troubling, problematic, claustrophobic work—it is among her most important, but very far from most enjoyable or approachable. Reading it this time, I couldn’t help thinking how some drastic edits—just cutting a few big chunks—would have made this more effective by upping the ambiguity and centering the perspective more firmly on Ari II. Cherryh’s grasp on the potentials and limits of genetic and psychological manipulation remains breathtaking—she takes as basic and foundational what most SF writers decades later haven’t quite got their heads around.
• Regenesis, C.J. Cherryh
  …and then there’s this, the decades-later sequel, which attempts to retcon, sanitize, and disambiguate Cyteen in very disappointing ways.
• Exhalation, Ted Chiang
  Oy, so good. Maybe not as 100% slam-dunks as his previous collection, but every story here is great; the title story and The Lifecycle of Software Objects are top-tier (for Chiang and SF as a whole). TG read.
• 40,000 in Gehenna, C.J. Cherryh
  “The good one.” Shows in miniature what Cherryh normally needs multiple books to showcase: the “future historical” mode of storytelling, societal changes, the profundity of the alien other. I really think this should go on more “feminist SF” lists. Needs to be reissued with a non-terrible cover.
• Summer Sons, Lee Mandelo
  Extremely good, somewhat messy mystery/ghost/gay-coming-of-age story. CNSC read. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• Vox, Christina Dalcher
  Extremely Trump-era Handmaidian story; one can agree with its general politics and still note the weirdness of the fantasy. Wasn’t very impressed with this.
• Riot Baby, Tochi Onyebuchi
  Good, challenging, angry book. TG read. ARB Hugo Guide.
• Mordew, Alex Pheby
  Ugh, did not like. Not sure why I finished it, but I did. Reviewed on blog.
• Persephone Station, Stina Leicht
  Heavily Star Wars-y, Firefly-y shoot-em-up caper. Barely stayed in my brain after I closed it.
• Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
  Finally got around to reading this. It’s good! Does what it says on the tin, though in retrospect the plot is weirdly distanced from Mexican cultural influence. I’m gonna knock off a couple points for “giving a complete and naturalistic explanation for the supernatural bits”: it kind of closed off any lasting creepiness at the end of the book.
• Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders
  I like Anders’ novels but I love her short work, and this is a tour de force collection. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• Light Chaser, Gareth Powell & Peter Hamilton
  I almost wrote a longer review of this just to work out how much I didn’t like it, but I think this brief one will do. Unintentionally but personally offensive (I’m offended!) in how poorly it thinks out its core premise.
• Elder Race, Adrian Tchaikovsky
  What a lovely, balanced, delight of a novella, light and lively but with some serious and interesting depths. Fantasy quest with SF trappings, commenting on genre, intercultural assumptions, and mental health. Blurbed for IndieBound.
• Stations of the Tide, Michael Swanwick
  Just felt like a re-read. Love this book, wish more short novels aspired to this level of allusory and thematic richness.
• The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie
  Re-read for club, gosh I like this! To steal a blurb, “The story of Macbeth as told by a rock who is a god.” Weird pitch but dang this is good, smart and surprising and interesting on several levels. TG read.
• My Heart is a Chainsaw, Stephen Graham Jones
  Slasher homage, quite good. I think it was maybe a little too frenetic, a little too kitchen-sink in its approach, but that might speak to how well it dives into its teenage protagonist’s head.
• After the Dragons, Cynthia Zhang
  Gentle novel about dragons and a queer romance, quite nice. CNSC read.
• The Actual Star, Monica Byrne
  A lot of thoughts and feelings about this one; this is a big, ambitious novel with a lot going on. The utopian future timeline feels like a spiritual successor to Piercy’s Mattapoisset, which: stick it in my veins.
• Femlandia, Christina Dalcher
  Another Handmaidian, this one more awash than usual with problematic white feminism. Deeply squicked out by this one, did not like. Reviewed for CHIRB.
• 16 Ways to Defend a Walled City, K.J. Parker
  I was so incredibly taken with Prosper’s Demon that I’ve been meaning to explore more of Parker’s work. 16 Ways is a medieval-ish secondary fantasy world, with an engineer unexpectedly thrust into the position of protecting a city from an invading army. Unexpectedly (and I think unintentionally), it rides right on the edge of being real uncomfortable race-wise (it’s a “pale-skinned minority” setup). Witty, snarky, and full of delightful snippets and observations. A little bit like Dickinson crossed with Pratchett.
• Sisters of the Forsaken Stars, Lina Rather
  Disappointing follow-up to a book I quite liked; none of the elements that worked so well in the first quite came off here.
• Network Effect, Martha Wells
  Had to re-read because, while I am absolutely certain, in my soul, that Murderbot is the best, I couldn’t actually remember the plot of this until I came back to it. ARB Hugo Guide.
• Hench, Natalie Walschots
  Another “low cape” story, about a henchperson who becomes a supervillain in her own right (of course, the villain/hero dichotomy is heavily criticized from page one). As I’ve said, mixed feelings about this genre, but this was excellent, really well done and fun on a number of levels. Solidarity with my fellow Excel-using supervillains. TG read.
• Termination Shock, Neal Stephenson
  Big feelings about this big ol’ book; expect an essay from me about this (at least partially) in the next month or two. This is probably Stephenson’s most readable since Seveneves, leaning into the competent techno-thriller, this time thinking about geoengineering to lessen the blow of global warming. If you like Stephenson, this is him at his strongest—giant book that reads page-a-minute, strange asides, big ideas, wikipedia-style infodumping that he makes really entertaining. If you don’t like Stephenson: stay clear!
• The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
  Yep, re-read, yep, depression. I meant to write more on my read-through this year and some reflections on “fate” and “foreknowledge”; may still.
• Spear, Nicola Griffith
  Already an extremely strong contender for best book of 2022; I’m not sure what’s coming out that might challenge it. Holy heck is this good, queer Arthurian retelling that leans into the Welsh. The language and structure here is outstanding. Cannot wait to talk more about this book with people.
• The Once and Future Witches, Alix E. Harrow
  I was pretty meh on this, a little too predictable & sloggy. Would have been twice as good at half as long. CNSC read.
• Dead Silence, S.A. Barnes
  Awful lot of space horror for me this year! This was okay; I wasn’t blown away by it, and was pretty disappointed by how it tried to combine supernatural and technological horror.

---

That’s it! Have a couple in progress that I suppose I’ll keep to next year’s list. And, whatever other horrors it probably holds, I’m already excited about some of the books coming out in 2022. If you’re interested, you can also see my lists for 2020, 2019, and 2018, before which I apparently did not keep track.

Quick Review: Mordew by Alex Pheby

I can imagine this book being for someone, and, based on the positive press I’ve seen for it, those someones do exist. But I, alas, am not among them.

Firmly in the (perhaps slightly dated?) tradition of the New Weird, Mordew is a tale of weird, gross magic, following an apparently insignificant boy who rises to prominence in a surreal and vaguely Dickensian dystopia.

Imagine The Decemberists by way of David Cronenberg and you’re most of the way there. Gross-out body-horror galore, with corpses, rats, mud, sickly orphans, and ghosts every which way.

All of which I am not, in theory, opposed to, but I found this execution uncompelling at best. Mordew merely revels in its filth and gore, without any sense of what it’s really about. There is a truly astonishing lack of agency to the story: Nathan Treeves is constantly moved and manipulated by others, and when he does act on his own (often with horrifying but, more off-puttingly, horrifyingly meaningless violence), it’s with all the calculation of a sleepwalker. It’s dreamlike, indeed the perfect example of what it’s like to be told someone else’s dream: full of weird ideas and detail, oddly lacking in motivation, and deeply, deeply boring.

A lot of this novel reminded me of Miéville (without the smarts) and Pratchett (without the charm), and the larger world is kind of like a grossdark (new genre alert!) version of Le Guin’s Earthsea. Pheby clearly has his aesthetic down pat, and a few sections were quite interesting—the philosophical and verbose canine Anaximander’s disquisitions on the impact of scent on cognition were quite good—but the extent to which the novel retcons its own early chapters, combined with its utter failure to give either cultural or theological context to who God was and why we should care God’s dead, left me quite unimpressed with the final chapters.

Which, should be noted, end on a seeming cliffhanger, and all still without a convincing main character. I even entertained the idea that this is an elaborate satire of “chosen one” narratives (amidst its many intentionally unsavory smells, there’s an unfortunate whiff of Potter about Mordew)—but, at 600 pages and with “series just beginning!” in a flashing marquee at the denouement, I don’t think that lands. It is wordy, inventive, richly-detailed, covered in magical mud and guck, and I’m sure it’ll find its fans, but I was quite happy to wash my hands of it.

Returns

Oh shoot, I forgot I had a blog for a minute there! Well, the nice thing about not updating for a while is that it engenders the illusion that I’ve a lot going on…

Alison and I and the dogs went out West for a minute: sabbatical hiking in Oregon. Amazing trip, lots of adventures, kind of surreal to move through so many different landscapes and then back to Chicago.

Baked the whole time I was out there, and then returned to Chicago to find that our oven had mysteriously broken while we were away. Insert Edvard Munch Scream emoji, etc. Just got it fixed!

I’ve been keeping busy with various writing and editing projects: lots of good stuff going on at the Ancillary Review of Books. Lots of reading and some reviews, I’ll have to do a separate post on some of my favorites of the last few months. And, very excitingly, my talk for the Anglia Ruskin Centre’s conference on science fiction and migration went very well; lovely conference and lots of good conversations.

Big news: I’m heading back to the retail world, and not coffee (insert Edvard Munch Scream emoji)! City Lit Books is reopening its doors in one week, and I’m gonna be behind the counter pushing speculative fiction on the good burghers of Logan Square.

That’s it for now, more soon!

Hugo Nominating Season!

Meant to post this earlier—Capricon was loads of fun, and then I got kinda busy immediately after. Among other great panels, I was on a lovely one about nominating for the Hugos, and wanted to round up some of my recommendations. On the panel, we talked a bit about what the Hugo “means”, and how personally evaluate what to nominate; for me, it’s kind of a three-way balance of how much I personally liked a work, how well crafted it seemed, and how it’s moving the conversation somehow.

I love nomination season—more important to me than the awards themselves, actually, because it allows me to fill in my reading list and find worthwhile stuff that I’ve missed. That’s especially true for short fiction, which I genuinely love, but have a hard time keeping up with through the year.