Ursula

Kate Elliott, The Keeper's Six.
Rose Lerner, Sailor's Delight.
Rebecca Subar, When to Talk and When to Fight.

These are three completely different books in completely different genres about labor organizing from a Jewish perspective.

When to Talk and When to Fight is the how-to manual its name suggests. The subtitle is The strategic choice between dialogue and resistance, and the fight it envisions is specifically organizing for social justice--in other words, the question is when to negotiate with people in power, and when to focus on building power in its own right for a movement. The discussion mixes easily memorized big-picture discussion with personal anecdote. Subar points out that most people are more comfortable with one type of tactics than the other (I'm definitely in the talking camp, by training and inclination), and this seems like a very practical sourcebook for people who, like me, are trying to become more comfortable switching back and forth.

The Keeper's Six is a fantasy novella with a lot of portal fantasy and a little bit of video game in its DNA. The tagline is about a mother rescuing her adult son, who has been captured by a dragon, but the arc is really about negotiating for his release. Along the way, Esther and her son often pause to talk about labor rights with the denizens of the dragon's hoard. Esther isn't a perfect leader; the "six" in the title is a team of people with the skills to negotiate travel between dimensions, and some of Esther's team members are frustrated with her history of prioritizing good causes over the team's needs. I appreciate the way Elliott lets characters' good and bad decisions stem from the same fundamental character traits--stubbornness and ambition come up a lot in this story, from lots of different angles.

Sailor's Delight is a queer historical romance between a naval officer and the agent who looks after his business affairs, which takes place around the High Holidays. It's not as actively focused on the process of organizing as the other books in this group, but like all of Lerner's novels, it's very interested in class and the nature of work. The importance of work is obvious in the case of the main couple, whose working relationship provides an easy social explanation for their emotional connection, but makes it hard for each to be sure that the other wants more. Two separate subplots center around women finding ways to support themselves that don't entail a conventional marriage. I love the way that Age of Sail stories mix adventure with economics, and it's fun to see how Lerner develops the economic details of daily life--though this is also a book with masses of pining and a ship called the Cocksure, if you're looking for less cerebral kinds of fun.

(I read Keeper's Six as an ARC provided by Netgalley and Sailor's Delight as an ARC provided by the author.)

Tasha Suri's novel The Oleander Sword is the middle book in a planned trilogy that began with The Jasmine Throne. It's the kind of book that comes with maps and lists of characters from different countries, and it opens with a war, as Malini, who has just crowned herself Empress, seeks to defeat her fanatical, princely brother. But Oleander Sword doesn't sprawl across new viewpoint characters and their disconnected subplots, the way one might expect from a book in this sort of package. It's fundamentally a very focused story. Half is how Malini will balance her drive to consolidate power with her love for Priya, once a servant girl. The other half is how Priya, newly filled with magical force from the treelike yaksa she worshipped as a child, will square the demands of her own power with her love for Malini. There are sudden betrayals and the fulfillments of mysterious prophecies--the book's title, in particular, cuts in an unexpected way--but if you've read Jasmine Throne, the confrontation that Oleander Sword sets up for the final volume will not astonish you. The satisfaction is not in authorial sleight of hand, but rather in game pieces clicking into place.

Suri's fantasy novels are inspired by medieval India, rather than vague impressions of England or France, and I particularly enjoy the way that this upends fantasy conventions. Inheritance isn't driven by birth order, for instance, and the trope of the ambitious priest carries different weight.

I have a reviewerly confession to make: I never finished Parable of the Sower. I read every other Octavia Butler book I could get my hands on as a teenager--my favorite was the Imago series, which tugged on my feelings about desire, embodiment, and trauma in ways I was not ready to articulate--but I didn't want to read then about the ways in which teenage girls are powerless, and I have not returned as an adult. That means I can't tell you whether Tochi Onyebuchi's novel Goliath is like Parable of the Sower in any deep and fundamental sense. But it is absolutely like the way people talk about Parable of the Sower.

If you want to read a gorgeous, literary, terrifying near-future novel about race in America--if you want to metabolize a brilliant person's take on where things are going that you may look back on, thirty years from now, to say, "Fuck they were right"--you should read Goliath.

I read Tochi Onyebuchi because I am personally and abidingly angry at the American quote-on-quote justice system in ways that middle-class white people mostly don't talk about. (Grand sweep of ideas? Yes. Background-radiation family trauma? Not so much.) This puts me in an odd position as a reviewer, because on one hand there are huge swathes of this book that are familiar in the sense of familial, and on the other hand I'm white and this book isn't for me, in ways it makes painstakingly clear.

This book is also not for Jonathan. That might be less obvious, because Jonathan is a prominent viewpoint character, especially in the early sections. Jonathan grew up on a space station, safely away from polluted, climate-crashing Earth, but he has working-class New Haven roots, and he yearns to go back. He also yearns for his boyfriend David.

Basic English-lit-class training tells you that if you're reading a book called Goliath about characters named David and Jonathan, tragedy is coming. This is perfectly true. Goliath is a tragedy in the technical sense--someday, a high school student is going to write an essay on hubris and catharsis in this novel, and when they do, I hope they get an A. But neither David nor Jonathan is the tragic hero.

At the center of Goliath are the stackers. Most of New Haven--the parts not under domes--will kill you if you're not wearing a breath mask. But the houses are still beautiful. A drone can reduce a house to its components in seconds. Then a crew of humans collects the lovely, weathered brick. It's tough, physical, satisfying work, if you don't think too hard about the symbolism.

In the space of a year, the team--Bishop, Linc, Mercedes, Bugs, Timeica, Sydney, and their colleagues--becomes a sort of family. Much of Goliath is a sort of literary collage, telling you who the stackers are, where they came from, what kinds of grief they carry, what kinds of grief are impossible to carry--and what they find that is beautiful, and what happens in the spring.

(I read this book as a NetGalley ARC, but it's now available to everyone!)

After many adventures, my essay Your Own Private Universe: Neal Stephenson, Max Gladstone, and Cyberpunk’s Midlife Crisis is live at Ancillary Review of Books!

M.A. Carrick, The Liar's Knot.

The Liar's Knot is the second in a twisty, plotty trilogy filled with class and cultural contrasts. The setting feels a bit like seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Venice. It's refreshing to read a long fantasy series that's unapologetically urban, with magic woven into the fabric of the world rather than tacked on for flashy special effects.

At the end of the last book, our heroine Ren saved the city and was inscribed in the Traementis family register. But questions still remain. Chief among them: why was Ren struck by the Traementis curse, when her claim to be a long-lost cousin was part of an elaborate con?

At the beginning of the story, Ren, the uneasy officer of the watch Grey Serrado, and the jumped-up river rat Vargo are at odds. Some of the conflict is caused by misunderstandings, a plot device I always find stressful. If you're like me, rest assured that in the course of the story, many masks are removed. Ren, Serrado, and Vargo team up to investigate the greater mysteries behind a secret society of spoiled aristocrats, expanding the kinds of magic and magical threats that we know about.

Liar's Knot provides answers to some ongoing puzzles, such as what's going on with Vargo's pet spider, and some fun authorial triple crosses. For example, I thought I'd guessed the identity of the mysterious Rook early in the first book, later concluded I was wrong, and learned in the course of the story that I'd been half-right all along. Since this is a middle book, it also offers larger mysteries--and leaves some puzzles, such as the identity of Ren's father, yet to solve. If you'd like a series to sink into at the turning of the year, this is an excellent choice!

(This review is based on a Netgalley ARC.)

Depending on how you count, Charles Stross's new novel Invisible Sun is either the conclusion to a trilogy that began with Empire Games, or the latest installment in a series that began with The Family Trade in 2004. Science fiction readers know the feeling of staring at a massive tome, a book heavy enough to merit a warning from Human Resources, and wondering, "Is this story actually going to end?" Due to a dearly lamented cat who used to eat books, I have shifted most of my reading to electronic format, but the slowly creeping percentage bar has some of the same emotional force. Here, therefore, is a FAQ about what kinds of resolutions to expect from Invisible Sun.

Q. Are there a lot of nuclear weapons in this book?

A. Yes. A truly obscene number of nukes appear in this book. They are used both in peaceful technologies and for offensive purposes.

Q. I read the first Merchant Princes series and now I'm getting worried. Does the US government murder all the humans on some version of Earth for a second time?

A. No. The first Merchant Princes series channeled anger about Bush-era government. This series offers a different flavor of chilling: a fractured and dystopian federal government that is more statesmanlike and more competent than the actual United States.

Q. Do we ever find out what the deal was with that miniature black hole?

A. Yes.

Q. Does it pose an existential threat to humanity that can't possibly be resolved unless Stross gets a contract for a follow-up series?

A. Well, sort of. But at the end of Invisible Sun, all the humans on the Earths we care about are safe, decisively. For a while.

Q. So, what does this book actually feel like?

A. It feels like a bureaucracy pulling off a heist.

The lumbering nature of bureaucracies is part of the aesthetic, for layered reasons: because one of the governments in play favors the proletariat over aristocratic fripperies, because old-fashioned technology is more amenable to radiation hardening, and because this book is riffing on Cold-War-era thrillers.

There are two different Cold-War-esque conflicts in play here. The first conflict is between an alternate United States and a shiny new North American democracy in another world. Here, we see Stross meticulously working out the implications of world-shifting technologies on larger and larger scales. This plot strand is full of tasty, crunchy spycraft, as well as German police officers being sarcastic about American lapses in civil liberties.

The second conflict is between humans across all kinds of worlds and something that is decisively not human. This conflict reminded me a bit of Mass Effect. That seems like convergence of tropes, rather than direct reference--to the best of my knowledge, Stross is not that sort of gamer!

Q. But it's a lot of fun to imagine Brilliana giving spy lessons to Commander Shepard, isn't it?
A. Yes!

(Disclaimers: I received an ARC for review from Netgalley, and I read part of a pre-publication draft of this book.)

For the past year or so, the shape of escapism I've wanted has been a murder mystery. I struggle with stories that are too frothy and joyful when the world around me isn't. Mysteries offer a world where evil exists, but can be contained: a fantasy of justice. But for the past year I've been more acutely aware than ever that justice in America is a fantasy in the pejorative sense.

P. Djèlí Clark's book A Master of Djinn, set in an alternate 1912, is a mystery novel for people who want to imagine that justice could work differently. The heroine, special investigator Fatma el-Sha'arawi, works for the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, a new bureau formed to manage the chaos caused by the late nineteenth-century reappearance of djinn. Egypt is central, here. It is the cosmopolitan land that the djinn chose; Cairo is now full of shining buildings designed by djinn architects. The colonizing European countries, suspicious of magic, form a smug sort of backwater.

Master of Djinn waltzes backwards and in very sharply shined shoes through a number of classic mystery tropes. I particularly enjoyed seeing Fatma, with her bowler hat and huge collection of coordinated pinstriped suits, as the cynical and grumpy senior detective resisting a new partner. The partner in this case, Hadia Abdel Hafiz, is a feminist activist who wears bright blue hijab and knows a mosque that holds Friday services for women. Like all good grumpy detectives, Fatma is entangled with a mysterious and alluring woman. The femme fatale in question holds an unsettling allegiance to the goddess Hathor and occasionally manifests literal claws. She also has a large and loving family who run a bustling restaurant, and an aunt who, in classic matriarchal fashion, dispenses wise advice. But my absolute favorite reframing of mystery tropes is the moment when the masked antagonist who has been posing as a literal master of djinn reveals a fascination with Fatma, a grand rivalry propelled by rhetoric about twins and shadows, and Fatma laughs at the ridiculous overweening arrogance this construction entails.

Though Master of Djinn is hanging out in a cool club drinking sarsaparilla with mysteries, its home is the fantasy genre. The clues that matter are clearly telegraphed, but the reason why each clue matters involves magic and the nature of the city itself, and the reader won't have the context to generate these explanations until the story gets there. The key, I think, is interlocking gears. The center of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities is a clockwork brain designed by a djinn. It represents the interlocking factions and desires, some humans and some more than human, actively maintained by the commitments and collisions that make a city. I hadn't read Clark's previous stories about Cairo, but I'm looking forward to consuming all of them, joyfully and in no particular order, bolstered among pillows or curled in a cozy chair, or (someday, again) on trains and planes.

(I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.)

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.