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I dunno how to rate this.

I mean, I guess if you like stories about people who rise from the ashes to do extraordinary things, stories about terrifyingly powerful magics that are hidden behind reality, maybe this is your jam? It reminds me a little of the Chinese 'cultivation' story, but I'm not familiar enough with that genre to really pick apart the similarities and difference, so just dropping that in there for people more familiar.

the blurb gives you an idea:

After all, she was a normal American herself once.

That was a long time ago, of course. Before her parents died. Before she and the others were taken in by the man they called Father.

In the years since then, Carolyn hasn't had a chance to get out much. Instead, she and her adopted siblings have been raised according to Father's ancient customs. They've studied the books in his Library and learned some of the secrets of his power. And sometimes, they've wondered if their cruel tutor might secretly be God.

Now, Father is missing—perhaps even dead—and the Library that holds his secrets stands unguarded. And with it, control over all of creation.

The most charitable description of this book is that it's about overcoming suffering, and learning to reject becoming what one's abuser was. The least charitable description is that it's about how abuse makes you strong, so it's all worth it in the end. I don't know if either of those are true, but as you can tell, the thing that stuck with me was the abuse.

This is "Lady Sherlock Holmes" plus "Inter-dimensional Travel, but also Vampires" so you should know if that's your jam. Also, as Dr. Science says, "we're all queer here." It is extravagantly, joyfully queer.

Lady Sherlock (Shaharazad Haas) is one of the colder versions of Sherlock, but Haas' calculating ennui is offset by Watson (Wyndham)'s warmth and concern, and charming narrative voice. Wyndham is convinced that Haas is fundamentally a good person; I'm less so, but I'm willing to stick around to find out.

Most of the charm in this book, for me, was in its writing. It's a little overwrought, as is appropriate in a Holmes pastiche, and one recurring joke was Wyndham's refusal to commit any vulgar language to paper, even thought it becomes very apparent that everyone around him is saying "fuck" all the time. He is also a little bit incapable of telling when men are flirting with him, and very bad at talking to the police.

(Also, although I generally do not care about the author's intentions, I really want to know if Wyndham is getting laid on page 268???)

In this world, interstellar humanity is ruled by the AI gods their ancestors created. The gods need humans, and claim their souls after death, so they mostly rule them with an eye to their well-being. Mostly. One of the greatest threats to the gods and, (perhaps?) humanity, is the Outside, a force/worldview/way of thinking that threatens reality. Humans touched by it tend to go mad, and spread their madness, so the gods are ruthless in excising Outside influence.

I love this book's world-building. The Outside is a sort of cosmic horror that is a bit more cosmic than usual, in this book. It undermines physics and causality and seems to have an agenda of destruction. The gods, on the other hand, are ruthless dictators with the agenda of all dictators: to hold on to power by whatever means necessary, but with a light touch on the day-to-day lives of their subjects. They let the worlds under their power develop independently, so long as they hew to the laws of the gods, and offer them worship.

Yasira, the protagonist, comes from a world that is better about disability and mental health than some. Her autism was celebrated and supported there, although she's encountered other attitudes when she went to school. She's trying to build an energy source that will decrease her world's dependence on god-technology. This is a problem because it turns out she's been contaminated by the Outside, but the gods are giving her a long tether to try to discover new means of confronting their old enemy.

This does not go well for Yasira, or, ultimately ,the gods.

I want people to read this, but if you don't like cosmic horror, you might not like this. It doesn't marinate in it the way Lovecraft does, but it certainly visits that territory. There's also some accounts of abuse in a therapeutic context that maps pretty well onto ABA. This is not a major theme, but it's central to one character's back-story.

I feel like there are several classic SF stories on the theme "Oh no, a bunch of us have been abducted and we're on an (abandoned?) alien space ship and don't know how it works or why we're here so we're just kinda stumbling about sticking our human forks into alien light sockets and trying to learn stuff." But I can't think of any in particular, so maybe it's a subgenre I have made up.

But in case I have not, this is the fantasy version of that SF trope.

Protag Isoka has murdered her way into a somewhat comfortable position as a mid-level mob boss, but now she's stuck on a mysterious ghost ship with a bunch of other people who have been stuck on the ship longer than her; long enough to have murdered their way into their own murder-based social order. Can she solve the problem with more murder? Or is the solution... lesbianism???

(Surprise! It's both.)

(Isoka might not consider herself a lesbian, because she has sex with men? But she seems to consider them relatively unmemorable athletic equipment. Then she meets one pretty girl and forgets how to form sentences, so honestly.)

Last time I read nonfiction I think it was [b:Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People|1523436|Evolution's Rainbow Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People|Joan Roughgarden|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1184690702l/1523436.SY75.jpg|1515317], so this is very clearly only happening because of my descent into dog-sledding madness.

Listen, do you want to read a book about someone who discovers that what she really wants is to live somewhere that has 18 hours of light in the summer and eighteen hours of dark in the winter, to pick up industrial quantities of dog-poop every day so that she can get pulled through the darkness by dogs? This is your book!

Despite being not really my sort of book, this was a fairly easy read. Knight Pace is a talented writer, and made Alaska come alive vividly, made hard work seem like epic poetry, and the entire thing shines with her love of dogs, and Alaska.

(The bits I found a bit hard where two bits about relationships not working out, and I may be overly sensitive, because despite them being difficult to live through, they were really only the ordinary amount of awkward and painful for breakups.)

This is a fascinating book as a historical artifact and fairly readable book as a book, so I hope I can tease out the differences.

As a book itself: The ship Bhattya needs a first officer, and when Rafe presents himself, he seems a very attractive prospect until Commander Rallya learns he has been mind-wiped; the punishment for an oath-breaker, which doesn't speak well for his character. Eventually, Rallya is persuaded to accept him onto her ship anyway; he's forthright about his history, and if anything, too good at his job.

Rafe doesn't know anything about his past before the mind-wipe, not even his name, but it becomes evident that his history remembers him; people keep trying to assasinate him, and Rallya doesn't like it when people interfere with her crew. She's willing to make herself unpopular trying to find out what is happening.

Rallya is one of the book's charms. She's kind of an asshole, the sort who wouldn't send you to poke a wasp's nest, but might not tell you about the wasp's nest, just to see how you'll deal with it.

As a historical artifact: This book was first published in 1988, and contains an m/m couple treated pretty neutrally; neither fetishized nor villainized. Rafe and Joshim begin sleeping together out of compatibility and proximity, and become closer with time, as one might. Later, we learn that two other men are obsessed with Rafe, but this is treated not as a matter of his great beauty or personal charms, but rather as fairly strong and inexplicable overreaction on the part of these men.

One of these two men is on the brink of going to war to get Rafe back, and Rallya is pretty offended: she's mad that someone's stolen Rafe too, but she considers it, (as most reasonable people would, I think) morally indefensible to risk a million lives to retrieve one, however beloved.

Another fun historical trace is the imagined communications of the future. Apprentices are sent running messages across the ship, and a major precipitating event is when they have to go into a library carrel on a specific space station to gain access to database in order to look up a public figure's biographical details. It is impossible to write an imagined future, now, in which instantaneous access to information and people is not ubiquitous, or if it is not, the author is required to explain why.