book review: Apocalypse Nyx
Aug. 12th, 2018 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursulaI read Kameron Hurley's Apocalypse Nyx courtesy of Netgalley.
"It's selfish to make somebody's life or death about you. It was her life. Let her live it as she chose."
Apocalypse Nyx is a series of short stories about the protagonist of Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha series. Each of the first few stories describes the way Nyx met a member of her team. (There are some discrepancies in the timeline, but Nyx isn't the most reliable source.) I think the ideal reading order would be to pick this collection up after the first book: Nyx and her team are still very young, in these stories. Though none of them exactly grow wise, their relationships shift over the course of the trilogy in a way that these introductions don't reflect. On the other hand, if you miss Nyx's first team, before compromise and explosions and politics tore things up, this collection is a chance to spend time with them again.
The most unexpected story is the last one, in which we meet parrot shifters who have chosen not to be human circling around a tower, and learn that although Nyx is a terrible shot, she's genuinely good at disarming mines. Nyx is also good at staying alive, and slightly better at keeping a team alive along with her than she would like to admit. I hesitate to call her honest, but she has a weird compelling straight-line stubbornness that I keep coming back to.
"It's selfish to make somebody's life or death about you. It was her life. Let her live it as she chose."
Apocalypse Nyx is a series of short stories about the protagonist of Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha series. Each of the first few stories describes the way Nyx met a member of her team. (There are some discrepancies in the timeline, but Nyx isn't the most reliable source.) I think the ideal reading order would be to pick this collection up after the first book: Nyx and her team are still very young, in these stories. Though none of them exactly grow wise, their relationships shift over the course of the trilogy in a way that these introductions don't reflect. On the other hand, if you miss Nyx's first team, before compromise and explosions and politics tore things up, this collection is a chance to spend time with them again.
The most unexpected story is the last one, in which we meet parrot shifters who have chosen not to be human circling around a tower, and learn that although Nyx is a terrible shot, she's genuinely good at disarming mines. Nyx is also good at staying alive, and slightly better at keeping a team alive along with her than she would like to admit. I hesitate to call her honest, but she has a weird compelling straight-line stubbornness that I keep coming back to.