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I rewatched Fringe! Still love Olivia and Astrid (hoo boy that musical episode), Peter is ok too I guess. Walter, like Frankenstein, is still the monster. I did appreciate some of the functions Walter performed in the story, but how much work everybody else did to excuse the legitimately monstrous stuff he did, and how he was the only one who acknowledged that after a while (like when he told Olivia that he saw how much she'd been forced to forgive), really grated on me. He got to be gracious and have grace extended to him, and the narrative bent over backwards to excuse him (it was actually his wife's fault!). One more old guy saint with a troubled past. That we got to see Astrid rolling her eyes sometimes didn't suffice for me to be ok with it.
Yoon Ha Lee, Phoenix Extravagant: Jebi, a nonbinary artist with a rebel older sister, is forced to work for the (Japanese-analogue, I think) invaders who control their (Korea-analogue) country and who, it turns out, are destroying the art and artifacts of “Area Fourteen” in order to create the magical pigments that run their automatons. Jebi is supposed to fix one of those automatons, a dragon that went awry and massacred soldiers, but instead falls in love with the duelist Vei and tries to free the dragon, with mixed results.
K.B. Wagers, Behind the Throne: Hail Bristol has been a gunrunner for two decades when agents of the matriarchal empire she fled show up to take her back to be the heir to the throne, since her older sisters and their daughters have all been killed. She goes back and lots of exciting palace politics (including lots of fights and explosions and poisonings) ensue. It’s engagingly done.
Martha Wells, Network Effect: Murderbot goes on an expedition with Mensah’s kid, which is going fine until the kidnapping by weird altered humans, which turns out to have been engineered by ART for reasons having to do with the weird altered humans. Much fighting and watching of media during downtime ensues. Murderbot remains unhappy with squishy human feelings other than anger but does start to recognize a few more. It was fun!
Sarah Kuhn, Haunted Heroine: Evie and Aveda go undercover as grad students at the college where Evie dropped out of grad school to investigate ghostly and dangerous events. Since Evie is pregnant and struggling with much anxiety over being a superhero parent of a demon-influenced baby, there is a lot of family drama intersecting with Evie’s bad memories of how she destroyed the school library on her way out, when she saw her professor/lover having sex with someone else there. (She donated to build a new one afterwards!) It’s pretty cute and everyone processes their emotions, though sometimes only after initially bad reactions.
Sue Burke, Semiosis: Human colonists arrive on a planet with sentient plants. Attempts at understanding and misunderstanding ensue, with both death and hope. I thought the idea was cool but I didn’t end up too invested in the thought processes of plants. Contains a brief and unsexualized rape.
Emily Tesh, Silver in the Wood: Novella that began life on AO3. Tobias is the Green Man of the Wood, huge and scary, who’s defended the woods for hundreds of years. Silver is the new legal owner interested in folklore. When an evil force steals Silver, Tobias finds that he can’t leave things as they have been for so long (also prodded by Silver’s very forceful mother). I would read more stories about Tobias and Mrs. Silver fighting monsters.
Katherine Addison, The Angel of the Crows: Sherlock Holmes rewritten with angels (Holmes is one), hellhounds (Watson is one after a wound in Afghanistan fighting the Fallen; Watson is also a trans man and trying to escape exposure of both of his secrets, since registration is required for hellhounds), werewolves, and so on. There’s the Hound of the Baskervilles and Jack the Ripper. I didn’t feel it came together in a particularly coherent way but if you like Holmes pastiche then this one may satisfy.
M.R. Carey, The Trials of Koli: I guess this is actually book two of a trilogy, though I picked up what I needed to. Koli and Spinner are from a small village in post-apocalyptic Britain. Post-apocalyptic Britain has a little bit of leftover self-healing tech; a lot of nature that will aggressively kill you; and a dying human race that seems determined to accelerate the end, village by village, despite the existence of good people as well. Carey is good at this stuff but I could not enjoy another apocalypse.
Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch: Sunny is American-born but being raised in Nigeria by her parents, who returned the family to the country of their birth. She discovers that she is a Leopard Person, with special powers, and part of a group of other youngsters whose duty is to fight the rise of dark powers. My daughter really liked it but it was too young for me.
Naomi Kritzer, Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories: F/sf short stories for the way we live now, from alien sex toys to a search engine-turned-AI that only wants cat pictures to Baba Yaga and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union to a bird flu pandemic-meets-food blog story. If you like the concepts, the execution is fine.
Naomi Kritzer, Catfishing on CatNet: The AI search engine from Kritzer’s short story is trying to improve people’s lives, and settles on a teen whose mother keeps them moving constantly to avoid her violent ex/the teen’s father. Found family, unhelpful authority figures, hacking/social engineering, and cats ensue. I enjoyed it.
Robert Jackson Bennett, In the Shadows of Men: Ghost/horror novella about a man who leaves his life (his wife just left with his daughter) to join his brother in remodeling a motel they hope to make profitable because of the shale boom in Texas. A distant relative once owned it, and did very bad things to women (and babies) there, as they slowly discover. If you are ok with a male narrator who isn’t able to articulate why he wants to be better than his father and other male legacies but—despite ghost urgings—really does want that, this could work for you.
L.X. Beckett, Gamechanger: Post-apocalypse, the recovery generations are trying to put the world back together using massively distributed referendum voting and pervasive surveillance to determine social credit (strokes for prosocial behavior like volunteering to help clean up a public space, strikes for abusive behavior). Rubi Whiting, a well known virtual gameplayer and would-be attorney, gets caught up in the case of an antisocial being who might not have a physical body, which would make him an illegal polter or even a more-illegal rogue AI. (Or maybe it's an alien!) Her love interest and game antagonist Gimlet, Gimlet’s child, and Rubi’s brilliant but heavily damaged father all get involved in various ways. I found the book sprawling and full of ideas about hope in a climate-ravaged world, but rarely connected with it, which may be either cause or consequence of the fact that it took me months to get through it. (Took it out of the library right before the coronavirus shutdown and so didn’t have to return it.)
Yoon Ha Lee, Phoenix Extravagant: Jebi, a nonbinary artist with a rebel older sister, is forced to work for the (Japanese-analogue, I think) invaders who control their (Korea-analogue) country and who, it turns out, are destroying the art and artifacts of “Area Fourteen” in order to create the magical pigments that run their automatons. Jebi is supposed to fix one of those automatons, a dragon that went awry and massacred soldiers, but instead falls in love with the duelist Vei and tries to free the dragon, with mixed results.
K.B. Wagers, Behind the Throne: Hail Bristol has been a gunrunner for two decades when agents of the matriarchal empire she fled show up to take her back to be the heir to the throne, since her older sisters and their daughters have all been killed. She goes back and lots of exciting palace politics (including lots of fights and explosions and poisonings) ensue. It’s engagingly done.
Martha Wells, Network Effect: Murderbot goes on an expedition with Mensah’s kid, which is going fine until the kidnapping by weird altered humans, which turns out to have been engineered by ART for reasons having to do with the weird altered humans. Much fighting and watching of media during downtime ensues. Murderbot remains unhappy with squishy human feelings other than anger but does start to recognize a few more. It was fun!
Sarah Kuhn, Haunted Heroine: Evie and Aveda go undercover as grad students at the college where Evie dropped out of grad school to investigate ghostly and dangerous events. Since Evie is pregnant and struggling with much anxiety over being a superhero parent of a demon-influenced baby, there is a lot of family drama intersecting with Evie’s bad memories of how she destroyed the school library on her way out, when she saw her professor/lover having sex with someone else there. (She donated to build a new one afterwards!) It’s pretty cute and everyone processes their emotions, though sometimes only after initially bad reactions.
Sue Burke, Semiosis: Human colonists arrive on a planet with sentient plants. Attempts at understanding and misunderstanding ensue, with both death and hope. I thought the idea was cool but I didn’t end up too invested in the thought processes of plants. Contains a brief and unsexualized rape.
Emily Tesh, Silver in the Wood: Novella that began life on AO3. Tobias is the Green Man of the Wood, huge and scary, who’s defended the woods for hundreds of years. Silver is the new legal owner interested in folklore. When an evil force steals Silver, Tobias finds that he can’t leave things as they have been for so long (also prodded by Silver’s very forceful mother). I would read more stories about Tobias and Mrs. Silver fighting monsters.
Katherine Addison, The Angel of the Crows: Sherlock Holmes rewritten with angels (Holmes is one), hellhounds (Watson is one after a wound in Afghanistan fighting the Fallen; Watson is also a trans man and trying to escape exposure of both of his secrets, since registration is required for hellhounds), werewolves, and so on. There’s the Hound of the Baskervilles and Jack the Ripper. I didn’t feel it came together in a particularly coherent way but if you like Holmes pastiche then this one may satisfy.
M.R. Carey, The Trials of Koli: I guess this is actually book two of a trilogy, though I picked up what I needed to. Koli and Spinner are from a small village in post-apocalyptic Britain. Post-apocalyptic Britain has a little bit of leftover self-healing tech; a lot of nature that will aggressively kill you; and a dying human race that seems determined to accelerate the end, village by village, despite the existence of good people as well. Carey is good at this stuff but I could not enjoy another apocalypse.
Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch: Sunny is American-born but being raised in Nigeria by her parents, who returned the family to the country of their birth. She discovers that she is a Leopard Person, with special powers, and part of a group of other youngsters whose duty is to fight the rise of dark powers. My daughter really liked it but it was too young for me.
Naomi Kritzer, Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories: F/sf short stories for the way we live now, from alien sex toys to a search engine-turned-AI that only wants cat pictures to Baba Yaga and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union to a bird flu pandemic-meets-food blog story. If you like the concepts, the execution is fine.
Naomi Kritzer, Catfishing on CatNet: The AI search engine from Kritzer’s short story is trying to improve people’s lives, and settles on a teen whose mother keeps them moving constantly to avoid her violent ex/the teen’s father. Found family, unhelpful authority figures, hacking/social engineering, and cats ensue. I enjoyed it.
Robert Jackson Bennett, In the Shadows of Men: Ghost/horror novella about a man who leaves his life (his wife just left with his daughter) to join his brother in remodeling a motel they hope to make profitable because of the shale boom in Texas. A distant relative once owned it, and did very bad things to women (and babies) there, as they slowly discover. If you are ok with a male narrator who isn’t able to articulate why he wants to be better than his father and other male legacies but—despite ghost urgings—really does want that, this could work for you.
L.X. Beckett, Gamechanger: Post-apocalypse, the recovery generations are trying to put the world back together using massively distributed referendum voting and pervasive surveillance to determine social credit (strokes for prosocial behavior like volunteering to help clean up a public space, strikes for abusive behavior). Rubi Whiting, a well known virtual gameplayer and would-be attorney, gets caught up in the case of an antisocial being who might not have a physical body, which would make him an illegal polter or even a more-illegal rogue AI. (Or maybe it's an alien!) Her love interest and game antagonist Gimlet, Gimlet’s child, and Rubi’s brilliant but heavily damaged father all get involved in various ways. I found the book sprawling and full of ideas about hope in a climate-ravaged world, but rarely connected with it, which may be either cause or consequence of the fact that it took me months to get through it. (Took it out of the library right before the coronavirus shutdown and so didn’t have to return it.)
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