Ursula

For folks in the US, today is the deadline to comment on proposed rule changes that would subject all federal science funding to political control. Here's what I wrote.

Porting a pair of book reviews over from Bluesky:

Fonda Lee's Last Contract of Isako is terraforming cyberpunk. It's also a samurai movie in book form--directly, rather than in the secondhand way you'd get by riffing on cyberpunk without knowing the sources. Last Contract of Isako is thinking through what it means to have a moral code--an unrelenting and in some ways horrifying code--in service to someone who has no ethics at all. It comes down more or less on the side that some ethics are better than none, which is refreshing when you're used to grimdark, or real-world nihilism. It's also tremendously tightly plotted, in that way where as a reader you know one thing will happen but aren't ready for the sudden unfurling of ramifications!

Last Contract pairs well with Ann Leckie's Radiant Star, in the sense that both are portraits of people who are fucking things up for deeply embedded cultural reasons. Though the book I think you should read Radiant Star against is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Leckie loves point of view experiments, and Radiant Star is experimenting with an opinionated nineteenth-century style narrator who can dip in and out of other points of view.

Like Jonathan Strange, Radiant Star is particularly interested in the ways that social stratification of various kinds leads people to ignore the knowledge of those they think are inferior, at great peril. When the narrator of Radiant Star comments that a decision is really very understandable, it is about to become a giant clusterfuck, and this becomes funnier and funnier (and scarier and scarier) as the book goes on. You can read most of Radiant Star with general awareness of Ancillary Justice, but the end will be most satisfying if you remember the events of Ancillary Mercy (it's close in time to that book, though places & characters don't repeat).

I requested both of these books from Netgalley, and I'm very glad I did.

I'm writing a story for What Elegant Stars, an anthology of stories about space opera and fashion (or textiles!) that's Kickstarting right now.

I don't seek out horror stories. As a result, when I encounter a piece of media that has a lot of horror in its DNA, my reactions can be a bit off-kilter. The normal failure mode here would be to get too creeped out. But sometimes, trained by happier adventure stories, I go the other way and am not scared enough.

I was off-balance in one direction or the other throughout much of A.D. Sui's novel The Iron Garden Sutra. There's a scene early on where the protagonist Iris, a monk who has dedicated himself to caring for the dead, falls asleep in a mossy clearing beside a pile of skeletons. Iris is comforted by the hard ground and the quiet dead. I, a person who likes moss, loves camping trips, and routinely picnics in graveyards, found it genuinely cozy. I slowly worked out that this was the wrong approach to take.

Iron Garden Sutra is a haunted house book--but the house is an overgrown generation ship, and all of its passengers are long dead. The book contains a gruff but good-hearted engineer, a biologist who's fascinated by tree signaling, and the delights of apples from long-abandoned orchards, all of which are rightfully compelling. But because this is a haunted house book, if Iris is venturing out of his self-imposed isolation to connect with someone or something, there's a good chance that someone's about to get killed.

The element of the book I found personally most stressful wasn't death or dying, but rather Iris's approach to fasting. This is part of his monastic practice, but it's inflected through his childhood trauma in ways that are eating-disorder-adjacent; if that's a topic that's difficult for you, you may want to tread carefully here.

Because I missed or wilfully ignored much of Iron Garden Sutra's classic horror foreshadowing, yet was reading through my metaphorical fingertips in some of the quieter passages, my sense of the book doesn't entirely cohere: I can tell you about the structure from an intellectual standpoint, but my own experience was one of fragments. I liked many of the fragments very much! I enjoyed the authorial stance that one of the scariest things you can do is hand a firearm to an untrained person, and I thought the eventual romance was sweet.

This isn't the sort of horror story where everybody dies; indeed, despite my struggles with haunted-house structure, I'd say science fiction genre demands win out. The gore and the preoccupation with whether it's possible to communicate with the inhuman (or even with other humans) are both at Adrian Tchaikovsky levels, if that helps with your own calibration.

(I read this book via a Netgalley ARC; in the US, it comes out in February. A.D. Sui and I are friendly via Neon Hemlock.)

My October AMS Feature Column, The Hypergeometric Flower Pot, follows a train of thought from high Balatro scores to a famous infinite series.

My local library interviewed me about North Continent Ribbon!

It was an interesting conversation because the interviewer isn't a habitual science fiction reader. I'm always curious about what non-genre readers focus on.

I have acquired a literary agent! I'm going to be working with Lauren Bajek, of Liza Dawson Associates, who represents both science writing and science fiction.

I'm tremendously excited and a little bit boggled--I'd been keeping an eye on this agency because I'm acquainted with Hannah Bowman's husband in my mathematician guise, and Lauren's literary taste sounded a lot like mine, but I didn't expect anything to happen this fast.

Earth Day call log:

ursula used Governor Gretchen Whitmer's contact form to ask her to deny a permit to the proposed Line 5 oil pipeline, and will further celebrate Earth Day by attending a protest in support of EPA federal employee union members this afternoon.

The Sierra Club is trying to break a record for the most origami fish, if you want a fun craft for celebration.

If any of you are looking for a last-minute thing to do in NYC, I'm reading at the KGB bar tonight!

My most recent newsletter has good news about a friend and a bunch of book and story recommendations.

Also, Neon Hemlock is running a celebratory 50% off ebooks sale with the code ALLEMPIRESMUSTFALL. If you'd like a personalized rec, let me know what sort of mood you're in or what kind of representation you're looking for!