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obstacles and exile
Aliette de Bodard, A Fire Born of Exile, and Malka Older, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles.
These are both smart, good-hearted queer romances that reference nineteenth-century novels and are written on the principle of incorporating as many of the writer's escapist impulses as possible. I suspect this means that how well they work for you will depend on how closely the writer's psyche mirrors yours.
I loved Older's previous novella in this sequence, Mimicking of Known Successes, and Unnecessary Obstacles was just as good. The general setup is lesbian Sherlock Holmes on Jupiter, with an academic devoted to studying lost Earth ecologies in the role of Watson. Pursuing intellectual questions by reading old books by a cozy fire while somebody else bakes the scones is absolutely wish-fulfilment. But Older's well aware of the layers of exploitation built into university projects, real or imaginary, and both the mystery plot and the romantic uncertainties depend on the protagonist Pleiti's growing awareness of these inequities.
My feelings about Fire Born of Exile are more mixed. The reference for this one is the Count of Monte Cristo. I've read another Count of Monte Cristo in space novel (Gwyneth Jones' Spirit: or, The Princess of Bois Dormant), but I've only read the very beginning of the original novel. I think it might have helped to know going in that the main arc is "protagonist wonders whether an elaborately planned revenge has gone too far" rather than heist-like competence fireworks around the revenge itself. I ended up most invested in the third viewpoint character, the teenager Minh who is trying to break free from her mother the cruel judge, rather than either of the romantic leads.
This is a book with lots of kids, from teenagers to toddlers. Some are human and some are spaceships (as one might expect from a de Bodard novel), but all are charming and generally good-hearted. Aliette de Bodard has written about the erasure of mothers in fiction, and it's clear that the presence of children in her work is a matter of both love and politics. If representation of parents and parental figures is important to you, you'll find it here in spades.
The danger of this particular mission is that being good with kids can become shorthand for being a good person. Fire Born of Exile definitely slips over this line from time to time. I don't find it as claustrophobic as, say, the recent work of Lois Bujold, which often reads like a memo requesting more grandchildren, because de Bodard is interested in relationships of siblings, aunts, teachers, and informal mentors as well as literal mothers. But it doesn't bring me the sense of expanded possibility it might hold for another reader.
(I read both of these books as Netgalley ARCs.)
These are both smart, good-hearted queer romances that reference nineteenth-century novels and are written on the principle of incorporating as many of the writer's escapist impulses as possible. I suspect this means that how well they work for you will depend on how closely the writer's psyche mirrors yours.
I loved Older's previous novella in this sequence, Mimicking of Known Successes, and Unnecessary Obstacles was just as good. The general setup is lesbian Sherlock Holmes on Jupiter, with an academic devoted to studying lost Earth ecologies in the role of Watson. Pursuing intellectual questions by reading old books by a cozy fire while somebody else bakes the scones is absolutely wish-fulfilment. But Older's well aware of the layers of exploitation built into university projects, real or imaginary, and both the mystery plot and the romantic uncertainties depend on the protagonist Pleiti's growing awareness of these inequities.
My feelings about Fire Born of Exile are more mixed. The reference for this one is the Count of Monte Cristo. I've read another Count of Monte Cristo in space novel (Gwyneth Jones' Spirit: or, The Princess of Bois Dormant), but I've only read the very beginning of the original novel. I think it might have helped to know going in that the main arc is "protagonist wonders whether an elaborately planned revenge has gone too far" rather than heist-like competence fireworks around the revenge itself. I ended up most invested in the third viewpoint character, the teenager Minh who is trying to break free from her mother the cruel judge, rather than either of the romantic leads.
This is a book with lots of kids, from teenagers to toddlers. Some are human and some are spaceships (as one might expect from a de Bodard novel), but all are charming and generally good-hearted. Aliette de Bodard has written about the erasure of mothers in fiction, and it's clear that the presence of children in her work is a matter of both love and politics. If representation of parents and parental figures is important to you, you'll find it here in spades.
The danger of this particular mission is that being good with kids can become shorthand for being a good person. Fire Born of Exile definitely slips over this line from time to time. I don't find it as claustrophobic as, say, the recent work of Lois Bujold, which often reads like a memo requesting more grandchildren, because de Bodard is interested in relationships of siblings, aunts, teachers, and informal mentors as well as literal mothers. But it doesn't bring me the sense of expanded possibility it might hold for another reader.
(I read both of these books as Netgalley ARCs.)