Reviews and Comments

This is a cyberpunk noir novella about a trans woman who returns to her anarchist commune in the decaying remnants of Kansas City. Dora is as unwelcome as her parting shots were when she stormed out years ago, but now she's the only one who can solve the murder of her ex. Caught between two warring pharmaceutical companies, Dora faces shadows of her past.

I thought this was a lot of fun and really had a good noir vibe to Dora's perspective. Given it's quite short, I think there was an opportunity to add a little more to make her a little more well-rounded, flesh out the supporting characters a bit and add more dynamics to the commune (as much as I feel this with every novella, I'm starting to like the simplicity that comes with brevity). I did nevertheless enjoy it and it was paced well for its length. Avoiding spoilers here, but I also liked the trans take on a particular old sci-fi trope and how it played into a good discussion about the nature of identity.

In an alternate 1883, The Veil between the living and the dead thinned and purple-eyed mediums speak with the dead under the auspices of the Royal Speaker Society. That is, male purple-eyed mediums; women born with those spiritual eyes are barred from spirit work and are treated as nothing more than breeding stock for the Speakers regardless of their age.

Enter 16yo Silas, to be married off by the end of the year. Despite having those valuable purple eyes, Silas isn't a perfect daughter, or even a daughter. A lifetime of being bullied into masking his autism, his transness and his proficiency in surgery has left him desperate to escape. But when his attempt to flee is uncovered, he is thrown into a brutal asylum for women suffering from a vague "Veil sickness". There, the spirits of women murdered within its walls beg for help, and for Silas to run before it is too late.

Despite the fantastical elements, all of this tracks very closely to the brutal Victorian practices on surgery and mental health. Despite a lot of horror around beatings and vivisection, I felt most chilled by the constant thread of helplessness. The helplessness that comes from never being believed simply for who you are, of having everyone you could turn to being complicit in your horror, and being constantly weighed down by a lifetime of abuse for who you are.

I felt deeply for Silas and the women imprisoned there and the book expertly conveys Silas' internal doubts and fears. I felt trapped alongside him which perhaps also shows how deeply personal some of these themes can be.

Becky Chambers makes me cry again, this time in a hope punk novella about existence and purpose. Long ago, humanity's Factory Age ended when robots suddenly gained consciousness and decided to leave. Humanity respected their agency and choice, allowing them to leave into the wilderness and legend while restructuring human civilization into a sustainable, solarpunk society.

Sibling Dex is a tea monk, going from town to town offering people their ear, their counsel and the perfect cup of tea to soothe their worries. But Dex themself feels an emptiness and pain; they feel guilty for not being happy in a life which - on the face of it - gives them everything it should. This inner conflict they keep from those they help really resonated with me from the very start.

Hoping to find an answer in anything but their routine, Dex goes off track into the wilderness. There, they bump into the first robot to meet a human in centuries, Mosscap. Through its wide-eyed excitement at learning about humanity again, seeks an answer to a query the robots have about humans: what do people need? In such a short space, Chambers beautifully cuts through to our inner conflict and need for purpose and how to simply find joy in simply existing.

A small region is stuck in a perpetual winter. Offerings from locals to the goddess to bring spring have gone unanswered. Ellery, no longer believing in the gods, leaves his family's frozen farm to work in a city diner to help support his family trying to scrape by with greenhouses to grow crops.

When Ellery meets Knox, a runaway familiar from the Other World, his understanding of the world and the perpetual winter is thrown upside down. Ellery helps protects Knox from the shades who seek to drag him back in exchange for finding out the truth about the winter. But as Ellery helps Knox experience more of human life, they both begin to feel more than they bargained for.

This is a very cute YA romance with an enby protagonist, an adorably OTT sapphic couple and contemporary magic with goddesses and underworlds to boot. The characters are lovely even if Ellery has that teenage insufferability sometimes (just stop antagonising demigods for once, please).

Set in ancient Briton as the Saxons advanced across the island, the kingdom of Dumnonia has begun to abandon the old gods and their magic to favour a Christian missionary and the promise of alliances and trade deals which would follow. As the king's ties to the land's magic fade, so do the kingdom's prospects and defences.

The king's three daughters possess some latent magic still, as forbidden as it is to acknowledge it. But enter Myrdhin, a magician/witch who works to restore the kingdom's connection to it's magic through the children before the Saxon's overrun them. As well as reconnecting the children to the land, they help the eldest daughter, Keyne, be see as he truly is: as the king's son and heir.

The story twists between the perspectives of the king's three children as the kingdom teeters on the edge of invasion, and the rifts that emerge between them over a stranger and their pasts. I really enjoyed all their stories but obviously Keyne is who grabbed my attention in a really thoughtful portrayal of their struggles to be taken seriously by their family and the men in power. Their bonding with Myrdhin, who's pretty genderbending themself, was a great conduit to explore our ancient ties to the earth vs a faith that demands we look away from it to the heavens.

Morgan Ross is that high-flying career lady character who is a big-time event planner only to have a little career snafu when she accidentally kisses her client's fiance. Oops, now that 'New York Promotion™' is on the line and your clients are deserting you.

Hey, why not take up that job in your hometown you were derisive about a few seconds ago? Some small easy win and you're back in the game. I mean, the town is only full of heartbreak and regret, right? Totally solid plan. Though maybe it isn't the best entrance to crash your car into your former girlfriend's sign at the entrance to her tree farm. That's right, she's a hot, toned plaid-clad lumberjack called Nicole Coenen. No wait, my imagination got away with me there. She's called Rachel Reed and it turns out she's actually the client! Sort of.(But go on, insert Nicole in there and imagine she says okey-dokey every other word)

Save her tree farm from the evil capitalistic corporation that sucked the soul out of the neighbouring town already. Also, the corporation is run by your dad's former lover who turned down his proposal and broke your life a little. Ooo, revenge motivation.

Defend the authentic small-town getaway which is incongruously progressive lest we get the idea rural areas are homophobic or racist in any way. We've got small local businesses to save with a magical fundraiser in a barn and maybe win back someone's heart! But will Morgan find a way to screw this up before a last-minute dash and a public declaration of love? You betcha, 'cause this is a Christmas romcom.

Telling the life Cal Stephanides, an intersex person from Detroit, starting with their family history as Greek expats who fled the Turkish expulsion of Greeks from Asia Minor to America. The story follows two generations before reaching Cal, describing major historical events on the way such as the Detroit race rot in 1967.

It felt to me like two great but disjointed books. One being the story of Greek emigrants and the other being the life of Cal, growing up without understanding they're intersex until a chance discovery as a teenager and an attempt to force surgery upon them. The way they're tied together feels unsatisfactory, leaving the family story without a meaningful ending and Cal's story underdeveloped (though perhaps that is inevitable either way from a cis writer?).

It is nevertheless an interesting read both as a multigenerational family tale covering period events, and as the tale of a misunderstood intersex child who thankfully wasn't mutilated at birth, but still had to contend with rather primitive attitudes. I would be curious to hear an intersex opinion on the book's representation.

Earth was mostly abandoned after the climate catastrophe. Those who remained, creating a religion of isolation, life is now a wild west society of sheriffs and gunslinging. But one day a ship crashes on Earth and one visitor (the first in hundreds of years) begins her desperate search for the rest of her crew (though mainly, the woman she loves).

The structure of the book follows the visitor through the experiences of different people she encounters as she makes her way across this new west (and the protagonist’s moniker changes through each of their perspectives). This kept things fresh but I felt many of them deserved far more attention and I wish we could have spent more time with them and fleshed them out. But it certainly helped to broaden the world as you pass through it.

It’s been referenced to be as being similar to Becky Chambers and there certainly is some of that in the setup but I don’t think it carries the same level of hope punk. But it certainly puts humanity and ordinary people at the heart of its world. 

So humans fucked up Earth, and then fucked up Mars with piss-poor terraforming, then fucked up with genetics. Sensing a pattern? Well so did their genetic offspring. Their augmented descendants, the Alloys, alter themselves to an environment, not the environment to them, and largely life in space flying around the galaxy? The humans? At best, troublesome children. At worst, a danger to everything else in the cosmos that deserves existence. At least that’s the narrative for the past centuries as humans remain Earth-bound while the Alloys clean up their mess.

But Jayanthi dreams of more, not being stuck on Earth but being able to travel the galaxy and have the rights to contribute to the collected knowledge of their society. Born with sickle cell, Jayanthi figures she and others with the condition would be uniquely suited to surviving on a newly discovered planet, Meru, with elevated oxygen which would be a problem for anyone else. If she can prove she can thrive there, then humans can leave Earth without needing to damage another world through terraforming. It would be an opportunity to show humans have moved beyond their destructive past. But there are plenty of Alloys out to sabotage the experiment.

It had a very sweet forbidden romance and I loved this book’s original take on genetics, both as the huge extent of possible human directed evolution in space and the use of sickle cell as a method of adapting to a different biome. Also, the changes in human culture from having centuries of guilt and infantilisation was interesting, though I’d like to have seen more exploration of it from a human perspective. And the large nonbinary rep throughout was awesome. 

Chloë Parker Stanton leaves her love, Leigh Andrea Hunter, behind to fight in the US Civil War by posing as a man in the Union Army. At the Battle of Gettysburg, she is lost.

Appearing in 2020, Chloë finds herself at the Joint Temporal Integrity Commission which helps reintegrate temporally displaced people into 21st-century society. The person assigned to her is a former sergeant and trans woman by the name of Leigh Andrea Hunter.

Leigh's life in the past echoes to her future self without her fully understanding what is happening, while Chloë grows closer to what feels like the reincarnation of her lover who promised she’d wait for her. But casting a shadow over it is the secret behind the Temporal Integrity Commission's work.

It's a fairly short and light romance focusing on the time-displaced bond of the lovers rather than anything focused on the sci-fi element itself, which I appreciate. It carries a lot of commentary on the horrors of history and present, notably those related to government fuckups, through their shared bond of PTSD and sense of justice.

It's an enjoyable, casual read though not something that really hides any twists or turns. It is forward about everything and largely focuses on the emotional journey. While I am tempted to say there could have been more explored it actually feels quite nice as an easy romantic tale across time.

Also, I never thought I'd read so much dirty talk using army puns.