User Profile

The Dawnhounds is a book that is doing so many different things that any comparison will be a misrepresentation. I think people will mostly point to the way that the technology has been mostly replaced by biology; most obviously, the city is built of fungi, but this isn't a soft solarpunk fantasy; cnidocytes have also been adapted to use as weapons by the police, who as always work to keep the underclass under control.

This world is so radically different that the only clues we are not dealing with a secondary world fantasy are a few words in Maori and some Mandarin dialogue. The history recounted does not resemble the history readers know. Unhappily, some of the repression does.

The protagonist, Yat, is someone who grew up from a disadvantaged kid, to a discriminated against cop with a drug habit and not a lot of introspection. She knows she gets the shit jobs because her bisexuality makes her suspect, but not as suspect as someone who eschews men entirely. The police force is corrupt, but life sucks everywhere and for everyone, and she's got to fund her drug habit somehow.

Then she dies and things get weird.

Certain things happen in the course of this story that make it into a different kind of story than the one I have just described, and I am not sure what to do about those things, but I'm glad the story is bigger and weirder than I expected going in.

I was reading Cyberpunk in the 90s when this was first published, although I never encountered it. Cyberpunk in the 90s was, as I encountered it, slick and cool and flashy. Dystopian, but the charismatic and capable protagonist made it look sexy. To be honest, I was a teenager, and it felt like it was calculated to appeal to a teen.

It seems difficult to believe this was grown from the same soil. This is dystopian, but the dystopia doesn't serve to underline how cool our protagonist is. Maya, our protagonist, is a reporter whose job and life is constrained by an event in her past which has put her under the suspicion of the political police in totalitarian Russia. It is simplistic to say she is a reporter, rather, she is a camera: one whose job is to experience things and transmit her experience; sight, sounds, sensations, and thoughts. As such, even her thoughts can implicate her.

Maya hopes to regain some currency as a reporter by getting an interview with a survivor of the gestalt massacre which put the current regime in power. She is paired with a new "filter" for this job, someone who partners with her to pare down what she experiences into something more coherent (and politically palatable) for broadcast. Maya mistrusts her new filter, and knows that searching for this story may put her at odds with the censors, but it's the only goal she has that allows her to pursue meaning in her life.

Then, of course, her new filter and the story she is pursuing both turn out to be much more than and different from what they originally seemed.

This is a rough read, including some first person accounts of future war crimes which are not technologically possible at present but are certainly based on gulags of the past. There is human and animal experimentation, a kind of conversion therapy, and an ever present of paranoia that felt very close at the moment.

On the other hand, it's a hell of a story.

Sometimes you don't want to read anything too grim. If you've ever read a romance and enjoyed it, you will probably enjoy this one; it does a very good romance that avoid the main ways romances fail (for me.)

Although the romance is real and compelling, and you believe that the two characters are falling for each other, and can be good for each other, the main attraction for me was the portrait of queer community. Many books described as "cozy" miss the mark for me because they fail to portray the hard work and irritation of building community. If queer community just happens magically when the right people are in proximity, then we are given no tools for what to do when one person in the community is, for example, incredibly annoying, or keeps borrowing things and not returning them or spreading malicious gossip.

I feel I am getting off topic, and misleading you into thinking this book is about what it is not. This book is about Eleanor, a nurse, whose emotional wellbeing is tied up in roller derby, and Robin, the new girl, who doesn't take derby seriously, which Eleanor finds incredibly annoying. Why is Robin so careless! Why is Robin so cute!

But the background against which this takes place is the community of friends and acquaintances, room-mates and derby members who are so beautifully sketched in. This community feels real in the way "cozy" community portraits often don't.

I read this in an afternoon and felt cozy afterward.

This book is aggressively, in your face queer in a way that is hard to come by. Reading it was mildly hallucinatory, partly because the protagonist has a disability that causes her to hallucinate, and the prose echoes this, becoming disjointed when she is experiencing this. (The book is extremely written, and the prose required a little bit of alertness from me.)

This book is about a child whose world is detroyed by capitalism when her family and loved ones are gunned down at the factory they are striking at. She survives this to become a train robber, and when she grows up, the only way to give the people who took her in and gave her a new life a chance at survival is going undercover in a society of rich capital class lesbians, all of whom have been trained from birth to viciously claw their way to the top.

And everyone agrees she's not really the ideal person for the job, but that person's dead, and so maybe her ability to smooth talk her way into a lady's pants and/or skirt will help?

She does her best, but she is never going to make a good decision when faced with a hot girl, and things are so much bigger than her, and as a warning, if you're hoping for an ending where they enemy is defeated and the hero and her sweetheart ride off into the sunset, this is not... that. (The book's cover expresses that it is for "fans of Princess Bride and Gideon the Ninth." I do not think this accurately conveys much about the book except swords and lesbians!)

I enjoyed this book immensely, partly for its own sake, and partly for giving me something I have not found elsewhere.

This is a book that grabs you in the same way Bronte and Shelley grab you, although the voice is more Bronte. A clever, fierce woman who looks around her and sees how limited her options are is definitely Bronte's influence, but the novel is a direct response to Shelley's Frankenstein.

The novel is interested in how we permit people to make their way in the world, and what it means to pursue immortality, either through children, fame, or work. This sounds tedious, but even when the narrator is moping or grinding away at thankless labour, it never is. The novel's charm is (again, Bronte) the voice of the narrator, a woman who is a little ghoulish, a lot clever, and very frustrated by what she is permitted by society and the men around her.

The writing is tight and competent, the historical research is never obtrusive but just gives everything a lifelike feel, and the plotting was satisfying except for one plot turn at the end that I can't decide if I find thematically satisfying or not.

Recomended if you like Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, or got really into a paleontology podcast last spring. Or women being gay.

This book will occasion comparisons, I think, to Peter S Beagle or Patricia A. McKillip, if either of them were interested in transing the genders. The world feels like a strange and wonderful tapestry, and the characters within it feel like they have been produced by that world.

This is a story about two people later in life whose lives seemingly have left them at loose ends. One character has finally been freed by the death of his partner to make the change she made him promise not to make. The other character, Uiziya, has been betrayed by her aunt and mentor who as going to pass on the Four Profound Weaves she had spent her life hoping to learn. The man, who calls himself nen-sasaïr, (no name) because he doesn't know how to name himself as a man, doesn't know how to order his life. The culture he comes from has very different roles for men and women, and although he has always known he was a man, he's lived (mostly) according to the rules for women for the last sixty years. He yearns to be accepted among men, but he has a better idea than most of what that entails giving up.

These two go on a journey together to try to find what they need to fashion a new life, and get caught up in the net of a man called The Collector, who owns people and treasures that appeal to him, and rules a city where all magic is used only by him.

This is a book that those who like that sort of thing will like, so if that sounds like you, I urge you to give it a try!