Ursula

Aubrey Wood's Bang Bang Bodhisattva is set ten years from now in a California city that doesn't exist. Its aesthetic is equal parts black-and-white noir movies, cyberpunk, and Tumblr. There's a trans girl hacker who keeps getting stuck debugging smart toilets! An alternately charming and terrifying them fatale! Gender exploration, MMORPG edition! Casual body modification at different price points! The bearish member of our heroine's polycule flirting with the detective by means of a pot-enhanced therapy session!

Wood is a New Zealand writer with a UK publisher, so her New Carson can feel like the American equivalent of Ruritania. I enjoyed the book most when I thought of the setting as a movie set, rather than a literal attempt at prophecy: it's full of wisecracks, adventures, and commentary on what it's like to be not-quite-thirty now (as opposed to ten years from now).

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)

This year I published a short story, a novelette, and two speculative poems.

novelette

"The Last Tutor" was in Asimov's Science Fiction this spring. It involves a furious, isolated teenager hacking their way to great justice:

All of Ise’s tutors had this problem. They thought that because Ise was neither a girl nor a boy they would be obsessed with fucking mysticism and want to spend all their time reading poetry about the ineffable oneness of the universe. The Saint of Vines, if they existed, would not love Ise. No one did.

I wrote a little about the story's inspirations on the Asimov's blog.

short story

"The Spirits of Cabassus", a Byzantine ghost story, was on the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast.

A donkey had bitten Prisca's brother once, while he was trying to recollect a quotation of Plutarch, and he had nearly dropped a saddle-bag in the mud. Prisca found herself telling the story, which somehow led into the childhood game where her brother portrayed a martyr and she was all the lions. “We should have found a cat like your ship-friend, for realism.”

“I hope you had better friends than your brother and stray cats!”

Prisca, by and large, had not. She felt as if that might be changing—but this was an illusion born of Taesis' charm. The other woman would be off to the next holy site soon enough, no matter how much fun it was to trade stories of the impossibleness of brothers.

poetry

Going Up to Hanford, which was in Asimov's last summer, is about science, engineering horror stories, and my fraught relationship with rainbows.

Packing Up, at Polu Texni, started as half a dare from sovay about the unpoetic nature of moving, and became a thing of its own.

The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older.

I requested this book because it was by Malka Older and then slammed the download button without re-reading the marketing copy, which means I went in cold, with no conscious knowledge of the concept, length, or premise. It's novella-length; if you want to recreate my experience of reading the entire book in one joyful Friday evening of discovery, hit the pre-order button now.

Mimicking of Known Successes is the kind of book you get when a really smart person makes a list of their favorite tropes and then writes them all simultaneously. (In that sense, Aliette de Bodard's novellas are a good comparison.) To give you an example, at one point two characters visit their favorite restaurant:

Slow Burn was, most exceptionally, in the center of a small but dense wood. The owner had purchased soil, and saplings, and cultivated the fastest-growing firewood species she could find, all within her small allotted plot on Valdegeld platform. Tiny paths led through the trees to a slender building, and within the visitor found a long hearth...

There are layers on layers here: a joke about the book's central relationship, a cozy fire, an example of the crafted ecological management/historical recreation that forms the viewpoint character's career, and a reference to the platforms along rails above a gas giant that form both story setting and mystery structure.

The one major element of the premise you can't extract from this piece of gleeful scene-setting is that in addition to being a gaslights-on-a-gas-giant ecological adventure, Known Successes is a lesbian riff on Sherlock Holmes. Or maybe it's as fair to say, a queer riff. The Holmes character is clearly a woman, but for a while I thought the Watsonesque narrator's gender was deliberately ambiguous in the style of the Hilary Tamar mysteries. That was a misapprehension on my part, but the rumpled academia readings are certainly comparable to the Hilary Tamar books. You'll also find hot scones and levels of hurt/comfort you could scoop up with a spoon--and background musings on ecological disequilibrium.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)

As a teenager, I vowed never to read another book that said "epic" on the cover. I was tired of stories that stacked cliffhanger on cliffhanger, accumulating points of view without resolution. I read Kate Elliott's Furious Heaven, the sequel to Unconquerable Sun, without knowing the final cover design, so I don't know whether reading it violated my vow. But I can report that Furious Heaven is a rare thing: a sprawling, multistranded story about galactic conquest that reaches a satisfying resolution in two volumes. There could be a sequel--and indeed, it seems that Elliott is planning one--but there doesn't have to be. That's a difficult balance to strike!

Furious Heaven begins with a hefty dose of dynastic plotting. Princess Sun, the story's Alexander the Great equivalent, is her mother's most likely heir, but her succession is not inevitable, and plenty of people both within and outside the Republic of Chaonia would love to introduce some chaos. Sun's new Companion, the brash Persephone, is impatient with politics, but she's more embedded in systems of privilege than she recognizes. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Apama at Sabao, who wanted to be an ordinary fighter pilot, is stuck dancing attendance on her father, one of the cabal of people with two literal faces that rules her empire. Apama's father wields power in a way that's most terrifying for its boringness--he doesn't need to posture villainously when he can simply command.

There's a point in Furious Heaven where Sun concludes that sustained aggression is safer than standing still. I tore through the book's second half in a rush, caught up in Sun's momentum. Elliott does a phenomenal job of conveying both the strategic logic and its contingency on tiny circumstance. Sun is successful despite and because of the risks she takes.

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)

sovay once claimed, in the ennui that follows the tribulation of moving, that it is impossible to make packing boxes poetic. Naturally, I took this as a dare. The resulting poem about someone not quite human is up now at Polu Texni.

This weekend I expanded some old class notes into a draft Simple guide to classical Greek names. Comments are welcome! I also recommend browsing the list of sample occupational names, which is lots of fun.

My poem "Going up to Hanford" is in the current issue of Asimov's, and right now you can read it on their website.

My story "The Spirits of Cabassus" went live on the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast today!

My draft file for this story was called "ghost migraine". This is very much a story about learning to trust in one's own perceptions and one's own community. It's specifically about a fourth-century religious community, and I've tried to give some sense of how weird and radical those early intentional communities were.

The May/June issue of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, including my novelette "The Last Tutor," is officially out! Shout if you see it in the wild--I think it may be a while before my contributor copies and I are in the same place.

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!)