Author: katenepveu

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Waggoner, C. M.: Unnatural Magic

I’m logging C. M. Waggoner’s Unnatural Magic for two reasons:

First, it’s absolutely charming;

Second, everything you need to know is in Becca’s blog post, so I don’t really have to write anything myself!

Unnatural Magic is composed of two extremely different storylines that only intersect about 80% of the way through the book. […] This half the plotline has very much a Regencyish fantasy-of-manners vibe, along the lines of Stevermer’s College of Magics, and is fun in much the same way. […]

Meanwhile, in the other half of the plotline, Tsira, a gruff half-troll with a chip on her soldier, rescues Jeckran, a depressed, queer, overeducated soldier in distress, and carries him back to her cave to convalesce. […] She’s the muscle … and the brains … and the boss …. and he’s got good looks and a fancy accent, which occasionally also come in useful!

(Well, except that it’s more queer than the impression I got from Becca’s post; troll gender is self-declared, and same-sex relationships are unexceptional at least a couple of the societies.)

If you like the idea of those characters and their interactions, don’t mind weird pacing, and find the rather 90s’ vibe [*] of the whole thing (as accurately identified in comments) a plus, or at least not a negative, metaphorically run to your nearest book vendor. Bonus: as I write this, it’s only $3 in ebook. I have already preordered Waggoner’s next book, which is set in the same world and due out in January.

[*] There’s a particularly thing that feels highly 90s fantasy, especially in the way it happens ninety percent of the way in, is shown from the viewpoint of a third party, and then hardly comes up at all after!

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Millar, Margaret: Vanish in an Instant; The Listening Walls

And yet, despite putting down a series because it was too dark for me, I somehow ended up reading noir and liking it? I genuinely don’t understand what happened there, and this is going to be a frustrating entry, because I quite enjoyed Margaret Millar’s Vanish in an Instant and I can’t be nearly as specific about why.

I came across a blurb for Millar’s The Listening Walls last fall and thought it sounded interesting, being in a mystery mood at the time. It’s a very time-and-place mystery, about an American woman on vacation in 1950s Mexico; her traveling companion dies, and she … just doesn’t come back. I found it a little chilly but twisty, tight, and astute, and I was glad to discover an acclaimed writer with a big and readily-available back catalog.

I have no idea why I landed on Millar while scrolling and scrolling my list of unread books; I do know that I picked Vanish in an Instant at random. In this one, a woman is arrested for the murder of her presumed lover after being found blackout drunk and covered in blood near his body. We mostly follow her lawyer as he attempts to determine what happened.

On the basis of two books I am declaring Millar a writer who I find compelling while feeling surprised about it. She randomly head-hops, Vanish includes an entirely unconvincing romance, arguably she doesn’t always play fair in the way she presents the third-person POVs … but her atmosphere and the complexity of her characters just pull me in, and the stories feel very well-constructed though in a slightly claustrophobic way.

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Wein, Elizabeth E: Winter Prince, The; A Coalition of Lions; The Sunbird

I feel vaguely that I ought to post something much more momentous for the annual-ish dusting off of this booklog, but quite simply, I wrote a decent chunk of this in another forum, looked at it, and said, hmm, if I expanded this  just a smidge it would be a booklog entry. So:

The Winter Prince, A Coalition of Lions, and The Sunbird are the first three books in Elizabeth E. Wein’s Arthurian/Aksumite Cycle. I’d read The Winter Prince years ago, but never got past the first chapter of Coalition. However, I was told that when the series transitions to Africa, it’s very good, so I somewhat randomly decided to give the whole thing a try again recently.

Like my friend Becca, I forgot a fairly major component of The Winter Prince: “… it’s the incest, the thing I forgot was the incest.” Even by Arthurian standards, there is a lot of it (and that’s not the only kind of abuse by a long shot, be advised). This is an intensely psychological and internal book, told in first-person direct address [*], specifically the Mordred-equivalent telling Morgause about his dramatic experiences with, and highly-conflicted feelings about, his father’s legitimate heir, Lleu. It’s very compellingly done, and if this is your set of tropes, it shall be catnip.

[*] It is not second person, this is the weirdly specific and inconsequential hill I am willing to die on. Everyone says that this, and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” and Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower (and another series that is possibly a spoiler to name) are in second person, but they are not, all of these stories are one character talking to another character, and that makes the character who’s talking the first-person narrator.

The series has a somewhat weird relationship with the Arthurian mythos, I guess is all I can say without spoilers; in the second book, A Coalition of Lions, it moves to the Aksumite Empire and is narrated by Lleu’s twin sister, Goewin, who apparently has no analogue in the mythos. For years I held this book an enormous grudge because of its first chapter, but this time I powered through. Unfortunately, though I like Goewin very much, I did not enjoy this book; extremely little happens in it, in a frustratingly-claustrophobic way. I’d been advised that this could be regarded as a transitional book, however, so picked up the third.

The Sunbird is the opening of a trilogy, with a new third-person protagonist, Telemakos, and yes, Coalition probably is skippable. The Sunbird is also about attempts to contain a plague, which I did not realize going in. But that was not actually what made me decide to stop reading these books here. Rather, while I know full well that Wein likes to put her characters through the wringer (see: Code Name Verity), and while I know there is a minimum amount of wringer required for characters who are Lymond-analogues, it turns out there is such a thing as too much wringer for me–especially when the character being wrung is not yet twelve years old. It’s well-done wringing! Just not what I’m looking for. So, having confirmed that this continues by skimming the openings of the next two books, I set them aside.

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Fabian, Katherine & Iona Datt Sharma: Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night


Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma’s Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night is a self-published fantasy 30k novella (Amazon | Smashwords) that I really liked and therefore am setting a timer to write up because, self-published fantasy novella: it could use the publicity.

This is set in a modern London in which Faerie is, sometimes, over the water; that proximity allows magic into our world. Meraud was born over the water to human parents, and is really good at magic as a result—maybe a little too good, because now he’s gone missing, and his girlfriend Layla and his partner Nat have to find him.

So this is a form of fantasy that is more in the Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell line—Dunsany is explicitly name-checked—which itself is unusual and, to me, welcome. (To the Dunsany – Lud-in-the-Mist – Kingdoms of Elfin – JS&MN lineage, I wonder if we shouldn’t add The Face in the Frost? There’s a snowglobe in this story that reminded me of it, and while it doesn’t have Faerie-as-adjacent-or-intrusion, the magic seems to have some similarity. I’d reread it but I’m tired of being cold.)

It is also a story about people who are queer and poly. Layla and Nat are not romantically involved and indeed do not particularly like each other, at least not at the start of the story; but they are both concerned about Meraud and so bring all their sometimes-prickly adult emotional complexities to their partnership. Which allows for both self-insight and growth, and a lovely extension of community and support between and around them. (Also Layla is Hindu and married to a woman, and Nat is Jewish and non-binary.)

I have three minutes left on my timer. I like Layla and Nat a lot; unsurprisingly I also really like Layla’s wife, who I would like to emulate in efficiency and kindness, but basically all the characters are great. The only exception is Meraud himself; I suspect I would not actually like him, but I believe that Layla and Nat care and have good reason, and that’s enough to carry me through.

I thought at first the plot was a high-fantasy quest for a McGuffin, being subverted by a very domestic focus; now I think it’s a fairy tale, unless there’s not actually a difference between the two. (The very fact that it doesn’t matter whether I like Meraud weighs a little on the MacGuffin side, with him as MacGuffin. Maybe.)

Basically, as I said on Twitter, reading this made me feel very cozy and also like dying my hair as a Pride flag. If that, plus some JS&MN-ish magic, sounds appealing to you, definitely check it out. (I will even try to figure out the Kindle loan thing if you are short on cash at the moment!)

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Bergin, Virginia: Who Runs the World? (The XY)

As usual, I read books because I go conventions; this year, I went to WisCon and moderated a panel on the 2017 Tiptree Award and Honor List. The winner is Virgina Bergin’s Who Runs the World?, which will be published in the U.S. this November under the title The XY.

This is a very interesting book that is fundamentally not to my taste. I appreciated how hard it worked to avoid “all the men die” cliches, and its worldbuilding is very thoughtful. (For one thing, it acknowledges that “possessor of a Y chromosome” and “man” are not synonymous.) It has particularly nice intergenerational relationships, which are refreshing. I quibble with the authorial decision to elide all racial descriptions, because intersectionality exists and means that one can’t really focus just on gender; but I will handwave that those kinds of conflicts would have been worked out as part of the mass restructuring of society that took place well before the start of this book.

Unfortunately, the voice is just not for me; this is a YA book, with first-person narration, and, well, here’s the opening of the first chapter:

The hand is across my mouth before I can even scream, the other arm wrapped tight around me and my brain is exploding – instantly – with shock and horror and fear and anger and confusion CONFUSION CONFUSION because who would just ATTACK another person and –

‘Who’s with you? Huh?!’

The voice! Growling and sick and deep and broken and stinking.

MAN
MEN
MURDER
GUNS
WAR
KILL

Every strange and scary thing I’ve ever half heard said about XYs comes bursting into my head, but it cannot be. It cannot be.

I am too old for that narration, and generally for a whole book of a fourteen-year-old discovering that gender is a thing that exists and is socially constructed. As a result, I think it ends just as it’s getting interesting, but I admit that the next things would have been extremely difficult and possibly an entirely different book.

If the description at the Tiptree Award website sounds interesting to you, and the voice is not offputting, I do recommend checking it out.

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Lee, Yoon Ha: (01) Ninefox Gambit

I was talking about Yoon Ha Lee’s first novel, Ninefox Gambit, at Arisia today, which gives me a handy way of writing it up: just try to recreate what I said.

It took me forever to read this book because it had such a reputation of being difficult to start, and as you may have inferred from the status of this booklog, I haven’t had a lot of time or brain for difficult novels lately. But I finally sat down with it, and honestly I don’t think it’s nearly as hard as people say—if you’re approaching it with SF reading protocols. That is to say: if you’re comfortable with understanding the effect and emotional importance of a technobabble in an SF work, without necessarily being able to envision the nuts and bolts of said technobabble, then you’ll do just fine with Ninefox. And it has two awesome central ideas.

The first is that it’s set in an empire that brutally enforces a high calendar, which is a consensus reality, because particular calendars enable particular exotic technologies—magic, effectively. In other words, this empire is maintained by modes of thought, only instead of the kyriarchy, it’s the high calendar.

The second is that our principal POV character, Cheris, is a soldier who becomes host to an undead general, “Shuos Jedao, the Immolation Fox: genius, arch-traitor, and mass murderer.” I love the way this is implemented. She and Jedao talk inside her head, but they can’t read each other’s thoughts, and he can’t speak to others or control her body; but when Cheris looks in the mirror, she sees him. And then there’s her shadow:

The shadow wouldn’t have looked like her own even if it weren’t for the eyes. Not only were proportions wrong, there were nine eyes, unblinking and candle-yellow, arranged in three triangles. As she watched, the eyes moved to form a perfect line bisecting the shadow.

I just think that image is amazing.

There’s a lot else of interest about this book: it has great robots; it uses short hops into the viewpoints of secondary characters to good effect; and it has a killer ending. But really, the takeway from this entry is that if those two main things sound interesting, don’t let the book’s reputation stop you.

Nb.: this book would read considerably differently if one had read a related short story first, as it’s from Jedao’s POV; I’m not sure I have an opinion about that, I just wanted to note it for the record. (The story is “The Battle of Candle Arc” at Clarkesworld.)

Disclaimer: Yoon is a friend.

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Wells, Martha: (101) All Systems Red

I’m at Readercon, where I’ve been recommending Martha Wells’ All Systems Red at every opportunity, including at a panel I was on. I was about to write up the panel (edit: here are the notes), and I decided to log the book here separately, so it would be properly indexed. (I have also been recommending her Books of the Raksura series, but I promised Tor.com a post on those.)

All Systems Red is the first in Wells’ new series of SF novellas, the Murderbot Diaries, which is the very best name for a series ever. It opens thusly:

I COULD HAVE BECOME a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

Murderbot is a construct, partly organic (from cloned human material) and partly robot. It’s a SecUnit, rented security for a planetary exploration team, forced on the team by an insurance corporation. It is apathetic about its job, it has social anxiety, and it just wants to be left alone to consume media. It is, in other words, pretty darn relatable.

Except that the exploration mission turns dangerous, and Murderbot might be apathetic, but that doesn’t mean that something gets to kill its humans.

Here are the things I love about this: Murderbot’s narrative voice. That it’s a how-to-person story, which I am a sucker for. That Murderbot is agender and asexual. That it’s a fun adventure story. That it’s the right shape and length to fit the novella format. That the humans are casually demographically diverse on multiple axes and, basically, all pretty nice. That it’s a corporation-dominated future.  And that it has the exact perfect ending.

Basically, this is a great book and an extremely promising start to a series, and you should read it. Go, shoo, what are you waiting for?

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Valentine, Genevieve: Persona and Icon

I can feel myself running out of steam in my booklog-catchup effort, but looking over my notes to myself on past books, the ones I wanted to talk about most are Genevieve Valentine’s Persona and Icon. I doubt I can do them justice in this state, but I’ll try to give an impression, at least.

The fastest way I can describe the setup of these is that they’re near-future political thrillers in which UN(ish) ambassadors are called Faces and are celebrities, as in red carpets and paparazzi and careful public image management. Suyana Sapaki is the Face of the United Amazonian Rainforest Confederation; Daniel Park is an unauthorized photographer who witnesses an assassination attempt on Suyana.

Another way to describe them is that Persona is Suyana’s origin story and Icon is an exploration of the problems with superhero stories. Suyana is not literally a superhero, to be clear–these are SF by virtue of being near-future–but those were my strong impressions when I finished each (indeed, the day I finished Icon, I said on Twitter that it was what the MCU will never give me no matter how much I want it to). So if that sounds appealing, you should definitely check these out.

Other things that may be useful to know: the books are full of excellently varied women and non-white people and their relationships to each other. They are unflinching in their acknowledgment of complexity, compromise, and loss, while also containing moments of progress, gain, and hope. And they are fast-paced reads, not long, and a complete duology.

Disclaimer: the author is a friend.

A spoiler post follows.

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Doyle, Debra, and James D. Macdonald: (01-05) Mageworlds reread

(This entry was 95% drafted nearly a year ago, as will become immediately apparent.)

Hey fandom: I hear you like your space opera with a new generation dealing with the aftermath of a galaxy-spanning war, plus central female characters and a main character with dark skin?

So now would be an awesome time to introduce you to the Mageworlds books by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald, which were published in the 1990s and remain available as ebooks. I have never actually asked the authors about this, but I am morally certain that they began as Star Wars fanfic—and now that the Star Wars movies have moved into the next generation, I thought I’d dust these off and see how they held up.

I think they do pretty well, though honestly I imprinted on them hard back when I first read them, so I can’t promise I’m entirely objective. [*] But yeah: space battles, hand-to-hand combat with glowy things, non-human species, and complicated family relationships (no incest or close calls with, though), plus more worldbuilding and moral complexity than I, at least, got out of the Star Wars movies. Oh, and can I interest you in a main character who cross-dresses and supporting characters who are canonically in a same-sex relationship? (Sadly, like the Star Wars movies, apparently we can only have one dark-skinned character at a time, unless they’re that one character’s kids; but I do love Llannat a lot. And Mageworlds does way better than Star Wars on its number and range of female characters, though it still doesn’t manage actual parity. (I counted.))

[*] The only thing I noticed this time around was that there was a fairly stereotypical depiction of sex work–not shaming the worker, not in the least, but viewing sex work as something intrinsically degrading that would only be done out of necessity. It’s a very small part of the series, however.

The first three books are a trilogy: The Price of the Stars is a bit more standalone, but Starpilot’s Grave and By Honor Betray’d are the Second Magewar, which goes in satisfyingly different directions than its presumed inspiration. Then The Gathering Flame jumps back a generation to tell some of the First Magewar; but read it in publication order, because it doesn’t really have a full arc on its own, and some of its revelations won’t land properly if you don’t know the rest of the story (and they are so good if you do). The Long Hunt jumps forward a generation again, and is slighter and part of its plot doesn’t really work, but does wrap up something from By Honor Betray’d, plus it’s nice to see everyone again. (There are also two way-back prequels, The Stars Asunder and A Working of Stars, which I didn’t reread this time around.)

Basically, these are extremely readable fun with solid substance underneath, and if you’re in the mood for “more like Star Wars that isn’t exactly Star Wars,” or just generally fantasies of political agency with lots of competence, you should really pick them up.

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