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Fred Fordham's watercolor-style art is absolutely gorgeous. The adaptation plays to the medium's strengths, allowing the visuals to tell the story when possible, keeping Ursula K. Le Guin's prose when needed. Wide seascapes, rocky coasts, forested landscapes, people (not whitewashed! and dragons...

Cross-posted from my website

A delightful "dictionary" filled with the same style of humor and illustration that Mosco brings to her occasional comic strip Bird and Moon, and worth keeping out after you're done so you can always flip to a random page for a laugh.

Cross-posted from my website

I did like this book, but not as much as I'd expected to.

At the level of plot, it's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. On a character level, it's about trying to go through life knowing you're different from everyone around you. And thematically, it's about friends and family vs. the world, and vs. each other, and figuring out where the lines are between who you can trust and who you can't.

The prologue is not for the squeamish. But the rest of the novel is more eerie sci-fi and less horror.

It's mostly told from Stasia's (the plant person) point of view. Most of the other characters aren't...well, maybe I shouldn't say "fleshed out" when half of them are plant people, but while Stasia's puzzlement over their motivations supports the story thematically, it makes it less engaging. Though there is an interesting shift in perspective as the advance vanguard becomes less human and more plant.

I also can't help but think of this as a more cynical, post-COVID take on some of the same themes as the Newsflesh trilogy. The author remarked recently that she no longer has the faith in humanity that we'd band together against an existential threat, and that echoed through my mind a lot while I was reading this.

Cross-posted from my website.

Automatic Noodle is a short, joyful tale of creating the future you want out of the present you've been stuck with.

The main robots are all well-drawn, individual characters: The octopus-like search-and-rescue bot whose chemical sensors were perfect for analyzing taste and smell, who has fond memories of the falafel truck they worked at after the war (and is seriously into speculating cryptocurrency on the side). The bot with articulated arms and hands, who wants to make something worthwhile with them. The former bank teller, partly humaniform, who becomes more comfortable expressing her inner robot-ness as she explores logistics and supply chains. And the former combat robot, who finds himself tired of working in management and wants to get back into protecting people (both human and robot) and the restaurant, and discovers there are more ways to do that than just muscle (or rather servos) and ammo. The sentient car doing delivery gigs who has a thing for old media and will tell you exactly what's wrong with the offensive robot stereotypes in, say, Transformers.

Cross-posted from my website.

I just discovered there's a third book in the series. Looking forward to how this picks up on the threads in the epilogue from Interference.

An intriguing followup to Semiosis that weaves several drastically different sentient species (both plant and animal) into a story about factions, community, freedom, communication and war.

In the centuries since the human colonists left for Pax, Earth's civilization collapsed and a fascist patriarchy took control and has rebuilt things to the point that they can check in on some of those outer-space colonies from before the fall.

Like the first book, each chapter is told from a different character's point of view (including Stevland, of course!), though this time around it's all focused on the arrival of the new expedition and the events leading up to it. The psychology of the bamboo's and the Glassmakers' perspectives is notably different from the humans', and of course each species has its factions, and each faction has its priorities, and each person has what they do and don't know and assume. (The chapter in which the Earth expedition arrives at the colony has the narrator repeatedly making and revising assumptions.)

And there are more factions in a war fought on plant timescale.

Despite it being more tightly compressed in time, it feels less focused than the first book. There's a side expedition late in the story that's both necessary thematically and narratively awkward. I'm not sure how I feel about the epilogue as an epilogue, but as I put the finishing touches on this review I've just discovered that Burke wrote some related short stories set during Semiosis...and a third book that picks up on those threads and was published just last year.

Cross-posted from my website.