Ursula

Into the Riverlands is the third in Nghi Vo's series of novellas about Chih, a cleric who wanders the world with their highly intelligent not-quite-bird companion, collecting stories and histories for their monastery. Each of the novellas experiments with genre, contrasting the shape of the way a story is told with the ways people frame their own experiences. The Riverlands genre is wuxia: the Riverlands are beset by bandits, but they also provide a place where weird, stubborn people with startling martial talents can find a way to flourish.

Into the Riverlands pairs well with Zen Cho's Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, another novella influenced by both wuxia and queer American fantasy. Both stories feature members of religious orders who aren't saintly in the ways one might expect. Chih is polite, but not always socially deft, despite their skill at extracting stories. They have no trace of martial skill, and are unnerved by death the way ordinary people often are and fantasy protagonists often aren't. But they take their new and strange traveling companions in stride, and their companions return the favor, protecting them with casual grace.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)

It's 2022, there's an old pandemic and a new war, and maybe you just want to read about a fallen angel babysitting. That's the spirit in which Aliette de Bodard's newest novella, Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances, is written: the universe as a whole may be bleak and cruel, but for the span of this particular story, we can concentrate on kindness, caring, and men wearing fine linen shirts. There's a ghost child whose wishes are uncertain--she might wish to play with other children, or to eat them--and a mystery involving a derelict shrine. But the focus of this story is definitely on Asmodeus the fiercely protective fallen angel, his husband the river-dragon Thuan, and their affections.

This isn't the place to begin with Thuan and Asmodeus. Read House of Shattered Wings or House of Binding Thorns if you want the grand sweep of competition among fallen-angel Houses. For a more domestic introduction to the setting, you could try Children of Thorns, Children of Water, which is half about Thuan attempting to spy on the household of his future husband and half about a cooking contest, and follow up with Of Dragons, Feasts, and Murders, which I reviewed here.

By the time you get to Of Charms, Ghosts, and Grievances, you can relax and enjoy your old favorites. You may form some new ones along the way! I was personally a bit impatient with the romance side of the plot (Thuan is scared and ungenerous for once, and the narrative is clearly designed to prove him wrong), but I enjoyed Thuan's opinionated apothecary ex-girlfriend very much.

(I read this novella in an ARC provided by the author.)

There's a particular satisfaction I associate with long serieses of literary novels--I'm thinking of A.S. Byatt's Frederica Potter books or the Jane Smiley trilogy that starts with Some Luck--where a conflict between two people appears intractable because it's fundamental to who those people are, but slowly, over the course of many years, the people change and the world transforms around them, until at last a realization crystallizes: the old irreconcilable problem can be, not overcome, but gently set aside.

Jade Legacy is like that, but with knife fights and martial artists downing helicopters.

At the beginning of the novel, the Kaul family, leaders of the No Peak Clan and therefore informal rulers of half the island nation of Kekon, are in serious trouble. Their old enemy, Ayt Mada of the Mountain clan, is ahead of them in terms of subordinates and resources. Worse, they don't trust each other. The cheerfully ruthless Pillar, Hilo, isn't talking to his sister Shae, the clan's Weather Man and business leader. ( His wife Wen... ) The family needs everyone's skills--Hilo's warrior leadership, Shae's business acumen, Wen's personal insight, and even contributions from their cousin Anden, who has chosen not to fight with jade at all--to stand against the Mountain.

I read the first chapters of Jade Legacy slowly, balancing the bleakness of the setup against the bleakness of the real world. No Peak members swear an oath: "The clan is my blood, and the Pillar is its master." At the quarter-mark, that oath heralds a transformation: an excruciating doom I had dreaded was turned aside, and the story becomes bigger and stranger. After all, Ayt Mada might not be the Kaul family's greatest threat. Kekon is only one island. Other nations, particularly the great powers locked in the Cold-War-like Slow War, would love to take Kekon's superpowered jade for themselves. The Kauls understand that wearing jade requires honor and responsibility--there are rules to follow and balances to maintain. The foreigners just want drugged-up supersoldiers. I sped through the remaining hundreds of pages in a matter of days.

If you began the series when Jade City came out, you have some idea what Jade Legacy might offer. If you're just picking up the series now, you'll find a fantasy story sideways from the twentieth century, rather than the more common medieval-ish technologies, that doesn't center fantasy-Europeans. These are books where bias and bigotry are real but are not destiny. They contain astonishing and bloodthirsty martial arts sequences, people who excel at mayhem, people who understand that finance is also mayhem, and small children who are their own people. Come for the jade; stay for the rich, layered, inexorable sense of transformation.

(Jade Legacy officially comes out on November 30. I read an ARC courtesy of Netgalley.)

Kate Elliott writes long fantasy and space opera series that are densely packed with world-building. Servant Mage is the first installment in a new YA series. In Elliott terms, the YA part means there's only one viewpoint character and the plot develops more quickly. This novel also gestures toward a love triangle involving the heroine Fellian and two nobles of very different backgrounds, though my sense is that the series will reconfigure the YA love-triangle trope rather than leaning into it.

As Servant Mage opens, Fellian is illegally teaching a friend to read. A few decades before that lesson, a rebellion overthrew an oppressive monarchy. Because mages once served the monarchy, the new government oppresses them in turn, binding children with mage talents into service and refusing to teach them the details of their craft. A secretive group of mage Loyalists recruits Fellian because her talent completes their team: together, they make a full hand of earth, air, water, fire, and aether mages. By combining their skills, they can locate a baby who might become the next monarch--but the government's August Protector is ahead of them.

In another fantasy novel, the baby's right to rule would be unquestioned. But Kate Elliott is more interested in exploring the way inherited power shapes character than she is in justifying it. We see the damage that the Protector's government causes, but Elliott slowly shows us the other kinds of damage that the Loyalists take for granted. Fellian's loyalties lie somewhere else. By the end of the book, she's talking to her own friends and kin about what self-determination looks like. I'm very interested in seeing how this develops across the course of the series!

(I read this book as an ARC courtesy of Netgalley.)

blackswanseer asked, "Is there a book you're particularly looking forward to coming out in 2021 and if so, what what has you excited about it?"

I've simultaneously been doing a lot of reviewing and a lot of comfort reading, which means I've already read some of the 2021 books I'm excited about (Desolation Called Peace and Galactic Hellcats, for example), while I'm behind on other series where I'd usually jump on the latest release (how did two more Foreigner books come out when I wasn't looking?). I'm excited about voting in the Hugos this year. I'm not a completist about my ballot, but last time around I definitely found stuff (especially in the novella and series categories) that I wouldn't otherwise have known about. 2021 Hugo voting means 2020 releases, though!

One book I'm definitely looking forward to is Aliette de Bodard's novella Fireheart Tiger. I know it has women falling in love, and fantasy based on Vietnamese history. I hope it also has some literal tigers!

(If you'd like to suggest another topic, you can do so here!)

Galactic Hellcats, by Marie Vibbert, is coming out next spring. I read an ARC provided by the publisher.

Three women (a thief from Cleveland, an anxiety-plagued veteran from the Moon, and a bored rich girl from another planet) form a biker gang--except they don't have bikes, they have personal spaceships called solo-flyers. They bond by rescuing an abused prince who has been trained to please women but would rather meet a handsome young man of his own.

Galactic Hellcats has an old-fashioned pulp aesthetic. For example, there's a planet where everyone wears elaborate eyeshadow, a pair of disturbingly flirtatious androids, and a nomadic group on a patched-together spaceship who reminded me a little of Mass Effect's quarians. It's light-hearted and ecumenically sexy: I particularly enjoyed the scene where the formerly law-abiding veteran Margot yearns as her new teammate Zuleikah paints her solo-flyer with flames. But this is a story shaped around friendship and lucky heists, not romance: absolutely nobody's longing is reciprocated.

Vibbert's work is grounded (here, literally, at the bottom of the space elevator) in her working-class Ohio experience. In this book, that experience shows up in sharp-eyed observation of the way the repo man cheats and a sequence where naive Moon-raised Margot learns the important moral lesson that you never, ever trust the cops. If you're fortunate enough to live near Cleveland, you can find croissants like the ones so delicious that they almost disrupt a hacking attempt at the On the Rise bakery in Cleveland Heights.

All of the Hellcats are embarrassed and inadequate sometimes--the prince nearly flubs the final heist because he has never heard of a kumquat--but they all get chances to shine, as well. Even Margot's unromantic experience as a space navy stock clerk turns out to be crucial. I learned from working on cars with my dad that sometimes you lay out everything carefully, with the parts you removed neatly labeled in painstakingly washed salsa containers, and sometimes you just have to bang on part of the engine until everything aligns. Galactic Hellcats provides both of those satisfactions, the planning and the crashing. At last everything slides into place with purring motors and a team setting out to explore another star.

I read Charlie Jane Anders' new YA novel for NetGalley. It's coming out from Tor Teen next spring.

Victories Greater Than Death is about a girl named Tina who is a clone of a six-foot-tall purple-skinned alien general who was, more or less, her society's Jean-Luc Picard. She was disguised as a human and raised by an adoptive mother. But as soon as she figures out how to trigger the rescue beacon full of stars hidden just under her heart, she will fulfill her destiny.

If you're an adult who loved She-Ra or Steven Universe or Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, then this book is for you. If you know a tween who has read Harry Potter all the way through Order of the Phoenix and you want to give them an adventure story about being special and different and fighting evil that isn't racist and painfully transphobic, this is the book you're looking for.

But did I like it? Well, that's complicated.

Victories Greater Than Death is for people who have been told that their feelings are too much, who need to hear that even though their emotions are big and awkward and unwieldy and weird, there are people out there who care, who will value all of that huge powerful messiness and help them channel it toward good. But some of us have been told instead that our feelings are not enough, that we are distant or unreadable or cold, or just too practical to (ever) make a fuss. When I read a story that is actively didactic about the idea that Big Emotions Matter, I don't feel warm and cared for. I brace for impact. Because it's so, so easy for the message to slip from Big Emotions Matter to Your Emotions Don't.

So does Victories Greater Than Death hurt? Actually, no. Part of the reason is that it's clear-eyed and realistic about the way teenage bullying works, both when it's serious and when it's just low-key isolation. I particularly appreciated Tina's reminiscences about not fitting in at improv camp.

But also, Anders writes autistic-coded characters in a way that feels genuinely sympathetic. I've read multiple books recently with big diverse casts of characters and messages about acceptance where one of the characters was autistic, and most of them failed this test. If you have to repeat that the person your characters are accepting is strange and difficult and obsessed with incomprehensible boring things and fey more than twice, then guess what, "acceptance" might not mean what you think it does!

In Victories Greater Than Death, on the other hand, we learn in passing that Rachel struggles with social anxiety, gets tense in crowds and new places, and doesn't always like being touched, but the facts that are repeated every time she appears are that she is the! most! amazing! artist! and Tina's bestest friend in the universe!!!1!1 We see Rachel working hard to make strangers feel welcome, and then coping with the stress of having been "on" for too long. She gets a romance with a future pop superstar who makes musical robots. And her artistic talent is the key to the end-of-book triumph over evil.

In Victories Greater Than Death, Charlie Jane Anders seems to be writing a book for her younger self--a person who was weird and brave and needed to hear that dressing up in a pink sequined dinosaur suit is a good first step toward saving the world. I wasn't quite that girl, and the book I would design for my own younger self would be sideways from this one. But when Anders preaches acceptance for everyone, I believe she means it.

Though Aliette de Bodard's novella Of Dragons, Feasts, and Murders, which I read in an ARC provided by the author, falls after the main action of her Dominion of the Fallen trilogy, you could read it at any point after meeting the dragon prince Thuan and his fallen angel husband Asmodeus. The story, set in the underwater dragon kingdom in the days leading up to the holiday of Tết, is in many ways an excuse to spend more time with the couple. Thuan is responsible, kind, and has a history of using books to hide from politics. Asmodeus is compelling, ruthless, and fiercely protective of his household, but he doesn't have the contacts or expertise needed to navigate the dragon kingdom. I am personally more interested in Thuan than in Asmodeus, and I enjoyed the moments when he displays his insight. I particularly liked the conversation where Thuan dresses Asmodeus down for dismissing a problem that's about projecting an image of power as superstition. I also liked the disgraced official Van. She is a little bit of a crab in the same way that Thuan is a little bit of an underwater dragon, or that a threatening imperial consort has the white eye-spots of an orca.

As in many of de Bodard's stories, there is a mystery. Here, the central threat involves careful maneuvering for imperial power, but dead bodies accumulate around the edges. Thuan is a diffident detective, and the more confident Asmodeus would prefer to leave this gently molding kingdom behind and go back to his own territory, so the investigation proceeds in fits and starts. This fragmented path is worth it, though, for the details: an official robe tailored to fit an undersea creature's inconvenient carapace, Asmodeus's bond with Thuan's most terror-inducing grandmother, or Thuan himself in full serpent form, half-swimming and half-flying to a rescue.

fiction in progress

Neal Stephenson, Fall, or Dodge in Hell. I'm kind of enjoying the sections that the title references, though Dodge's work background does seem oddly convenient.

Fonda Lee, Jade War. Really interesting balance between violence and ordinary family life, here. I'm not yet far enough to see the shape of the story.

This Is How You Lose the Time War
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This book is made of words.

Depending on your preferred flavor of literalism, I imagine you are now protesting either, "But so is every book," or, "Strictly speaking, this book is made of 1s and 0s encoded in the circuits of your phone." I mean something specific by my claim, though: certain sound-focused writers, especially science fiction poets (Amal El-Mohtar, Sonya Taaffe, Yoon Ha Lee sometimes) pile word on coruscating word, glistering. If you're an image-focused reader like me, the effect can be almost too much: each word is its own picture, layered, overbalancing. I worried about that effect, approaching This Is How You Lose the Time War: would I be overwhelmed? Certainly this is a book focused on individual words and associated separate images--agents braid time and dance through it, and you never quite learn how or wherefore, the process is the point--but I had underestimated the sheer exuberant fun of it. This Is How You Lose the Time War is an accurate title: it's a dare, from one agent in that time war to another.

It took me a little while to settle into reading, in large part because I was trying to sort out the differences between the two characters: one woman is named Red and the other Blue, and about half the book is letters from Red to Blue about what Blue might be doing or vice versa, so it's easy to coast along in ambiguity. I eventually--more slowly than might seem warranted--arrived at the mnemonic that blue is like green and Blue is from the Garden future, where everything is more or less a growing plant. Meanwhile, Red is from a future of machines and artificially enhanced intelligences.

Red's first letters to Blue are aggressively silly (timey-wimey something something). The book's first shift in tone involves a ridiculous, over-the-top, embodied pun. I was hooked in around that point, the moment that Red and Blue shift from writing to each other as enemies to writing as rivals who might understand one another. The story shifts again after Red's superior, the Commandant, realizes that an agent from the other faction has taken an interest in her, and shifts once more as Red reacts to Blue's reaction. Somewhere in there I started sending my friends messages consisting entirely of exclamation marks.

The ending is complete unto itself: the promise of a love story and the promise of a universes-spanning, time-spanning rivalry, woven in together.

(This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley.)