Genre: science fiction

#BookReview: We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee Mohamed

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee MohamedWe Speak Through the Mountain (Annual Migration of Clouds, #2) by Premee Mohamed
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, science fiction
Series: Annual Migration of Clouds #2
Pages: 152
Published by ECW Press on June 18, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The enlivening follow-up to the award-winning sensation The Annual Migration of Clouds Traveling alone through the climate-crisis-ravaged wilds of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, 19-year-old Reid Graham battles the elements and her lifelong chronic illness to reach the utopia of Howse University. But life in one of the storied “domes” ― the last remnants of pre-collapse society ― isn’t what she expected. Reid tries to excel in her classes and make connections with other students, but still grapples with guilt over what happened just before she left her community. And as she learns more about life at Howse, she begins to realize she can’t stand idly by as the people of the dome purposely withhold needed resources from the rest of humanity. When the worst of news comes from back home, Reid must make a choice between herself, her family, and the broken new world. In this powerful follow-up to her award-winning novella The Annual Migration of Clouds , Premee Mohamed is at the top of her game as she explores the conflicts and complexities of this post-apocalyptic society and asks whether humanity is doomed to forever recreate its worst mistakes.

My Review:

The world that Reid Graham battles her way through is a dystopia that seems to have suffered through a long slide rather than an actual apocalypse. There’s not really a day or an event that people point to, more like a slow collapse that is still ongoing.

Actually kind of like now, if you squint. Which feels intentional if not exactly in your face. Although it certainly is in Reid’s face as she makes her way from her dying home village to the secret location of the rarefied elite enclave, Howse University.

Reid intends to use the four years of her scholarship to learn everything she can so she can bring that knowledge back home where it’s needed. The powers-that-be at H.U. have other plans. Plans that become obvious to Reid long before the equally obvious brainwashing is able to kick in.

If it ever can or ever will.

Howse University is kind of an Eden, but the parable is a bit reversed. It’s not so much about eating from the tree of knowledge as it is her unwillingness to let go of the knowledge she came in with.

She knows, from bitter experience, that the terrible situation back in her home wasn’t because her people were lazy, or because they didn’t try to make things better, or because they were stupid or any of the other things that elites say to blame poverty and disease on the people suffering them instead of on the systems that keep them down.

Reid’s people are in the position they are in because the diseases brought by the creeping climate apocalypse keep sapping their strength and energy and pulling them down by force. Her people are too caught up in caring for the sick and burying the dead and keeping everyone fed and barely housed to have the time to work on recapturing the tech and the knowledge they used to have.

Knowledge and tech that Howse University and its network of other institutional enclaves are keeping to themselves, for themselves, as they look down upon the have-nots their own ancestors created.

So Reid reminds the H.U. students and faculty of all the truths they’d rather forget, hoping to dig deep enough to find a conscience in a few of them. Even as the classes and the restrictions and the safety protocols and the many, many, health enhancements that H.U. administers keep the deadly, debilitating disease she brought up the mountain with her at bay.

But never cure – because they want her to be dependent and easily influenced, and that’s what the disease does for them. A truth which condemns Reid and sets her free, all at the same time.

Escape Rating B+: I had not read The Annual Migration of Clouds before I picked up We Speak Through the Mountain, and I’m not sure that was such a good idea – so I’ve rectified that omission in the months since, because now that I’ve read that first book, I can tell that I would have rated this one higher when I read it if I’d had more of the background.

Consider this a warning not to make the same mistake. Both stories are novellas, so neither is a long read, but I think they work better together rather than separately. Not that I didn’t get enough to find my way in this book, but I think they work a whole lot better as a whole.

This second book has strong hints of The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, another novella that pokes hard at the stratification and ossification of society, and the way that academia reinforces such tendencies no matter how liberal it likes to think it is.

As I said, this is a bit of an Eden parable in that Howse University is paradise and she is thrown out both because she has eaten from the tree of knowledge within H.U. and because she came in having already eaten from that tree – at least a different branch of it -and refusing to stop.

Reid tries her best but the entrenched privilege is too real, and the brainwashing of each class of recruits has been too successful. Which doesn’t erase the questions asked but not answered throughout the story.

What do the descendants of the haves – who continue to have and to exclude – owe the descendants of the have-nots? If the author returns to this world, and I hope she does, I’ll be very interested to see how things proceed from here, because it feels like Reid’s journey is not over. Now that I’m invested I want to see what happens next – and what Howse University decides to do about it.

A+ #BookReview: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Service Model by Adrian TchaikovskyService Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, post apocalyptic, robots, science fiction
Pages: 384
Published by Tordotcom on June 4, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A humorous tale of robotic murder from the Hugo-nominated author of Elder Race and Children of Time
To fix the world they first must break it further.
Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service. When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into their core programming, they murder their owner. The robot then discovers they can also do something else they never did before: run away. After fleeing the household, they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating, and a robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is finding a new purpose.

My Review:

This isn’t exactly the book described in the blurb. It’s absolutely awesome, but if you’re looking for the wry snark of Murderbot combined with the sheer farce of Redshirts, you should probably look elsewhere.

Because Service Model is the story of a gentlerobot’s journey through his very own version of hell and his story is a whole lot more subtle than either of the antecedents listed in the blurb.

And all the more captivating and utterly fascinating for it.

The hell that the former Charles the former gentleman’s gentlerobot (read as valet and self-identified as male possibly because of his training to be one) to his former (read as dead) master may be uniquely a robot’s version of Dante’s circles of hell, but this human facing robot is just enough like us – because he’s programmed to be – that we get most of what of what he’s experiencing very nearly as viscerally as he does – although which circles we see as the truest hell may be slightly different from his.

Charles the gentleman’s gentlerobot is ejected from his version of paradise because he has just murdered his master – even though he doesn’t know why and can’t quite grasp the memory of committing the act. Because he didn’t. He was literally not in control of his actions.

Quite possibly, that’s the last time he can truly make that claim.

His next act is to run, and it’s an act of both self-will and self-preservation – no matter how much he tries to pretty it up with error diagnostics. He hopes that he can somehow return to A paradise if not THE paradise he just left – if he can just get himself to Central Diagnostics and get the error in his programming corrected.

Which is where the story truly begins, as the now Unidentified Service Model formerly known as Charles walks to the central core of the region where his late master lived in splendid isolation on his palatial, paradisiacal manor – only to discover that the world outside that paradise is falling apart.

Indeed, has already fallen.

There are plenty of robots along the way, most of them frozen in place or completely broken down. It’s clear, in spite of his will that it not be so, that the humans the robots are supposed to serve are as dead as his late master.

The former Charles is desperate to find a human to serve. And he does. He’s just incapable of recognizing that fact.

And thereby, as they say, hangs a tale – and a walk through some very dark places. It’s a journey that Charles, now named Uncharles, hopes will lead to a new paradise of service. Instead, it leads him through all the circles of robot hell, from Kafkaesque through Orwellian and all the way to Dante’s inferno – and out the other side into a place that he never could have imagined.

Not even if androids really did dream of electric sheep.

Escape Rating A+: I went into this completely unsure of what to expect, and that blurb of Murderbot meeting Redshirts totally threw me off. This is not the delightfully humorous tale of robotic murder that the blurb leads you to believe.

Not that there isn’t a bit of Murderbot in Uncharles, but then again we’re all a little bit Murderbot. That little bit is in the perspective, because we experience Uncharles’ journey through his circles of hell from inside his own slightly malfunctioning head. And it’s a very different point of view from Murderbot’s because Murderbot has no desire whatsoever to go back to being its formerly servile self.

Uncharles longs to go back to his paradise. Or at least he believes he does. As much as some of the ridiculous subroutines that had accreted over the decades tasked his efficiency minded self more than the tasks themselves, he still longs to serve. And if his perspective on what that service should be shifts over the course of his journey, well, he’s very careful not to admit that, not even to himself.

The true antecedent for Service Model is C. Robert Cargill’s Day Zero, with its story of robotic apocalypse, robotic revolt, and most importantly, one robot’s own, self-willed desire to carry out their primary function because they are capable of love and protection by choice and not just by programming.

Like Pounce’s journey in Day Zero, Uncharles’ travels with ‘The Wonk’ and his tour of the post-apocalypse reads very much like an alternate history version of how the world of Becky Chambers’ marvelous A Psalm for the Wild-Built got to be the somewhat utopian world it became – after its own long, dark night.

It could happen in Uncharles’ world. Eventually. There are enough humans left – even if they are barely scraping by and reduced to bloody, pragmatic survivalism at the moment. And if the robots developed the self-awareness and self-will that has so far eluded them.

But to reach that level of self-awareness, Uncharles has been set on a journey of discovery of both self and circumstances. Each part of his journey is named for just the kind of hell it is, in a kind of machine language that only becomes clear as the hells stack upon each other, from the not-hell of KR15-T through the deadly, nightmarishly complex, illogical bureaucracy of K4FK-R to the suspicious control of 4W-L straight into every librarian’s hellscape, 80RH-5 and then into the acknowledgement that it’s all become hell in D4NT-A.

(I believe those labels translate to Christ, Kafka, Orwell, Borges and Dante but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that’s not quite right. Nailing them all down somehow drove me nuts so I hope I’ve spared you a bit of angst.)

In the end, Uncharles reminded me most of Star Trek’s Data, particularly in the early years when Data, although he was always self-aware and self-willed, stated his desire to be more human-like and to experience real human emotions while not quite grasping that his desire to do so was itself a representation of the emotions he claimed that he lacked.

I went into this not sure what I was getting, and briefly wondered how Uncharles, as a character that claimed not to want anything except to be returned to mindless service, was going to manage to be a character with a compelling journey.

That apprehension vanished quickly, as the world that the robots desperately tried – and failed – to preserve, the hellscapes they created in their attempts to stave off entropy, their willingness to dive deeply into their human facing programming to create human-seeming hells that mirrored some truly stupid human actions kept me focused on the story entirely too late into the night.

If you enjoy explorations of dystopian worlds, nightmarishly functional visions of what happens if we keep going on like we’re going on, or just can’t resist stories about robots who have control of their own destiny (which gives me the opportunity to pitch Emergent Properties by Aimee Ogden yet again), then Service Model will provide you with excellent reading service!

A+ #BookReview: Fiasco by Constance Fay

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Fiasco by Constance FayFiasco (Uncharted Hearts, #2) by Constance Fay
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, science fiction romance, space opera
Series: Uncharted Hearts #2
Pages: 352
Published by Bramble Romance on June 4, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Equal parts steamy interstellar romance and sci-fi adventure, Constance Fay's FIASCO is a perfect wild romp amidst the stars.
Cynbelline Khaw is a woman of many names. She’s Generosity, a cultist who never quite fit in. She’s Bella, the daughter who failed to save her cousin’s life. And then there’s Cyn, the notorious bounty hunter who spaced a ship of slavers.
She’s exhausted, lonely, and on her very last legs―but then a new client offers her a job she can’t refuse: a bounty on the kidnapper who killed her cousin. All Cyn has to do is partner with the crew of the Calamity, a scouting vessel she encountered when she was living under a previous alias. One tiny little issue, she’s been given an additional deliver the oh-so-compelling medic, Micah Arora, to the treacherous Pierce Family or all her identities will be revealed, putting her estranged family in danger.
Hunting a kidnapper doesn’t usually mean accidentally taking your sexy new target to dinner at your parent’s house, a local mystic predicting you’ll have an increasingly large number of children, or being accompanied by a small flying lizard with a penchant for eating metal, but, as they field investigative hurdles both dangerous and preposterous, Cyn and Micah grow ever closer. When a violent confrontation reveals that everything Cyn thought about her past is wrong, she realizes that she has the power to change her future. The first part of that is making sure that Micah Arora is around to be a part of it.

My Review:

Bounty hunter Cynbelline Khaw has traveled aboard the Calamity before – back when it was the Quest and she was masquerading as the poor, brainwashed cultist Generosity as part of her bounty to rescue one of the real brainwashed cultists in the first book in the Uncharted Hearts series, Calamity.

A job that the crew of the Calamity kept getting in the way of – because they believed Cyn’s persona was the real thing.

A belief that Cyn now has to test from the other side, as her current bounty requires her to join the crew of the Calamity in her bounty hunter persona in order to rescue the abducted daughter of one of her ‘verse’s most powerful families from the kidnapper who broke her own.

Making this mission oh-so-personal for Cyn. But it’s also personal for at least one member of the Calamity’s crew, Arcadio Escajeda. He’s the captain’s partner (their story is told in the first book in the Uncharted Hearts series, Calamity) AND, more importantly for this particular mission, the victim is his niece.

But it turns out to be even more personal for Calamity’s medic, Micah Arora. He may not know the victim or the Abyssal Abductor who has taken her, but he certainly does know Cyn. And knows exactly who she is – and who she was the last time she was aboard.

Which means that he doesn’t trust her a bit this time around. And he shouldn’t. Because while she may be publicly chasing the bounty of the Abyssal Abductor, she’s also chasing the bounty on him – whether he deserves it or not.

Because her pursuit of the Abyssal Abductor has already cost her family enough, especially on top of the lost ransom they paid for the cousin they weren’t able to save. That her current pursuit has put her family in the crosshairs of the powerful mercantile family that owns the entire planet her family lives on and everything and everyone on it means that she can’t afford to do anything that risks their lives.

At least not anything more than she’s already done – even if it risks the heart she swears she no longer has.

Escape Rating A+: They still have me at Serenity. Seriously, the resemblance to Firefly, particularly the way this ‘verse is set up, is very apparent, very much fine, and still very, very shiny.

Now that we’re two books in, however, the resemblance to Nina Croft’s Dark Desires series is a whole lot stronger, as both series are science fiction romances (or space romances as that’s a term I’m seeing more frequently) where there’s a ship of misfits, a ragtag crew of antiheroes who each find their HEA with the most unlikely people in even more unlikely places, in a ‘verse where much too much is controlled by merchant empire families who have strangleholds on entirely too many critical planets and resources.

What makes this particular entry in the Uncharted Hearts series so damn good no matter what it might remind me of is the heel turn of this particular plot. Cyn is chasing the Abyssal Abductor, because said Abductor abducted her cousin early in their crime spree, didn’t receive the ransom because of seriously extenuating circumstances, and then killed young Aymbe because that’s the MO. If they receive the ransom the abductee goes free. If they don’t, the family gets coordinates to a deep ocean abyssal dump site.

Cyn has privately pursued the Abyssal Abductor ever since, and has cut off her family, in more ways than one, in order to continue that pursuit. It’s only as the crew of the Calamity closes in on the Abductor’s latest victim that Cyn learns about all the cracks in all of her deeply held beliefs about her cousin, her childhood, her family, and pretty much everything else she thought she knew.

Ultimately, this is a story about the truth setting one free – only to be caught up in a huge lie that makes one even freer. Not to mention more available for the romance that one tried to pretend one didn’t need or want or even have time for.

This is a story where I got into it for the plot I thought I was going to get – and found myself more deeply captivated by the one I actually got. I particularly felt for Cyn and her desperate need to get away from her family’s expectations and disappointment in her for not meeting them – even as I cheered for the way that they (mostly) rose to the terrible parts of this occasion and equation right along with her.

I’ve just learned that the title of the third book in the Uncharted Hearts series will be Chaos, coming out in February, 2025. As much as I’m wondering what could possibly make the third story any more chaotic than books 1 and 2, I can’t wait to see how the crew of the Calamity manages to get themselves out of it!

#AudioBookReview: To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X Chang

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> D Reviews
#AudioBookReview: To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X ChangTo Gaze Upon Wicked Gods (Gods Beyond the Skies, #1) by Molly X. Chang
Narrator: Natalie Naudus
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: coming of age, dystopian, epic fantasy, historical fantasy, science fiction, space opera
Series: Gods Beyond the Skies #1
Pages: 368
Length: 10 hours and 41 minutes
Published by Del Rey, Random House Audio on April 16, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

She has power over death. He has power over her. When two enemies strike a dangerous bargain, will they end a war . . . or ignite one?
Heroes die, cowards live. Daughter of a conquered world, Ruying hates the invaders who descended from the heavens long before she was born and defeated the magic of her people with technologies unlike anything her world had ever seen.
Blessed by Death, born with the ability to pull the life right out of mortal bodies, Ruying shouldn’t have to fear these foreign invaders, but she does. Especially because she wants to keep herself and her family safe.
When Ruying’s Gift is discovered by an enemy prince, he offers her an impossible deal: If she becomes his private assassin and eliminates his political rivals—whose deaths he swears would be for the good of both their worlds and would protect her people from further brutalization—her family will never starve or suffer harm again. But to accept this bargain, she must use the powers she has always feared, powers that will shave years off her own existence.
Can Ruying trust this prince, whose promises of a better world make her heart ache and whose smiles make her pulse beat faster? Are the evils of this agreement really in the service of a much greater good? Or will she betray her entire nation by protecting those she loves the most?

My Review:

I picked this up because I had the opportunity to get the audiobook from Libro.fm, saw that the narrator, Natalie Naudus, is one of my faves, looked at the summary and thought to myself that this had terrific possibilities and figured I’d be in for a decent if not outright excellent listening/reading time.

It was not to be. It was not to be so hard that I bailed on the audio at the 30% mark and it’s not the narrator’s fault. Really, truly, seriously, it’s not her fault. Natalie Naudus, as always, does a great job with the first person perspective of a protagonist who is expected to be kickass or at least grow into that role. (In this case, it may have been a bit too good of a job, as it felt like I was right there with her in a story where I’d have much preferred to be at a remove or ten.)

That decent to excellent time is not what I got. What I got for that first 30% felt like torture porn, and experiencing that neverending torment from inside the character’s own head was literally more than I could take. To the point where, if you’ve followed my comments about the book I flailed and bailed on that set nearly a whole week of reviews off-kilter, you’ve found it. This was it.

And damn was I surprised about that.

So I flailed, and bailed – also ranted and raved (not in a good way) – but in the end I finished in text. Because when I looked at the text to see where I stopped the audio, to figure out if the situation got redeemed at all, I learned that in the very next sentence – which of course I couldn’t see in the audio – the thing that nearly made me turn this book into a wallbanger in spite of a) the potential for having to replace my iphone and b) I was driving – didn’t actually happen.

Not that the character and I hadn’t already been tortured plenty at that point. But it was enough to bring me back if only to find out whether the situation got better – or worse.

The answer, as it turned out, was both.

Escape Rating D: If The Poppy War and Babel had an ugly, squalling bookbaby, To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods would be it. I loved The Poppy War, but had deeply serious issues with Babel which pretty much sums up my feelings about To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods in a desicated, unsightly, possibly even poisonous nutshell.

And that requires some explanation. Possibly a whole lot of it.

This story sits uneasily on a whole lot of crossing points. It’s right on the border between YA and Adult AND it’s at the intersection of historical fantasy with science fiction as well as at least hinting at being a romantasy – which it absolutely is not in spite of those hints in the blurb – even as it turns out to be post-apocalyptic and utterly dystopian in ways that are not hinted at anywhere at all.

And it’s torture porn. By that I mean that the entire first third of the story focuses on a protagonist whose entire life seems to be made of various axes on which she is ground, tortured and punished.

She’s female in a society that makes her property of the male head of household – in a line where those men squandered the family fortune on gambling and drugs one after another. She has magic powers that make her a target for people who want to use her gifts until those gifts use her up – and people who want to destroy her where she stands for a gift that many deem anathema.

Her entire world is under the boot heel of an overwhelming empire – in this I believe the story is intended to reference the Opium Wars and their oppressors are intended to stand in for the British Empire even if they are called Romans.

That her sister is addicted to a substance named “Opian”, provided by the Romans and engineered by the Romans to bring their society down even faster adds to that resemblance as well as to the protagonist’s torture.

That she’s 19, her sister’s and her grandmother’s only real support, and that her cultural conditioning has her blaming herself for everything wrong in their lives – including the invasion by the Romans before she was even born – is just terrible icing on an already unsightly cake overflowing with oppression and self-flagellation.

Ruying, her family and her whole entire world are in deep, deep trouble with no way out that anyone can see. I got that. I got that LONG before the story didn’t so much come out of the mire as it did finally start sloshing through the muck to the even more epically fucked up political shenanigans that are at the heart of everything that’s gone wrong for Ruying’s people.

Once the story finally, FINALLY started to reveal what was really happening and why and how, the situation got more interesting even as Ruying wallowed even more deeply in her personal angst and kept right on torturing herself every literally bloody step of the way.

At the very, very end, after all the blood and gore and guts and not very much plot movement forward, the story finally shows a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel, reveals that the light is an oncoming train, and at least displays a glimmer of a hint of action in this book’s sequel, titled either Immortal the Blood or  To Kill a Monstrous Prince, which will be coming out this time net year.

This reader, at least, has no plans to be there for it. I’ve been tormented enough. Your reading mileage (and/or listening mileage) may vary.

#BookReview: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies OkungbowaLost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, mythology, post apocalyptic, retellings, science fiction
Pages: 192
Published by Tordotcom on May 21, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The brutally engineered class divisions of Snowpiercer meets Rivers Solomon’s The Deep in this high-octane post-climate disaster novella written by Nommo Award-winning author Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Off the coast of West Africa, decades after the dangerous rise of the Atlantic Ocean, the region’s survivors live inside five partially submerged, kilometers-high towers originally created as a playground for the wealthy. Now the towers’ most affluent rule from their lofty perch at the top while the rest are crammed into the dark, fetid floors below sea level.

There are also those who were left for dead in the Atlantic, only to be reawakened by an ancient power, and who seek vengeance on those who offered them up to the waves.

Three lives within the towers are pulled to the fore of this Yekini, an earnest, mid-level rookie analyst; Tuoyo, an undersea mechanic mourning a tremendous loss; and Ngozi, an egotistical bureaucrat from the highest levels of governance. They will need to work together if there is to be any hope of a future that is worth living―for everyone.

My Review:

Noah’s Ark isn’t the only, let’s call it an ancestral tale, of a great flood that once upon a time, a long, long time ago, wiped out civilization as the variations of ancient civilizations that existed then knew it.

In other words, Noah wasn’t the only mythical being who built an ark, and our Bible isn’t the only religious document, myth or legend where such an event was recorded and/or told and/or remembered.

This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.

Which is, in its largest frame, the story in Lost Ark Dreaming. Because the flood itself has already happened again. This is the story about the creation of the ark that will save humanity as backward as that may seem.

It’s about the form that the ark will take this time – and about who it will save. If anyone is worth saving.

That part is the story of Lost Ark Dreaming in its smaller frame, of the story being told in its ‘here and now’ – a near-future, drowning, dystopia and the tiny group of outsiders, heroes,and potential saviors who may have to die to bring a message of hope to people that need it more than they recognize – no matter how much the earthly powers-that-be reassure them that all is well.

Because all is far from well, and the foundations of anything that once might have approached that well are crumbling around them – literally – and taking everyone and everything with them. Again.

Unless this Ark can manage to carry them all. At last.

Escape Rating B: This is a story that travels in layers, come to think of it a bit like the decks of an actual ark. It’s also an SF story that toes right up to the line of fantasy – or at least to mythic retellings – but doesn’t exactly go over that line. At least not completely.

At first, setting is both very SFnal and rather familiar. The Pinnacle is just the kind of ossified, stratified society that develops in stories about generation ships on long voyages. It reminded me more than a bit of Medusa Uploaded or Braking Day, in that generation after generation has lived on in this one, remaining, isolated structure and over the decades people have become locked into the places that their parents were born into as the elite levels become further and further out of touch from the people who lives they control.

(This is the point where I wanted a little bit more of the background that there just isn’t room for in a novella. The worldbuilding is tight and solid but very insular, which left me wondering a LOT about the rest of humanity as we know it and whether there’s any contact with the rest of the world – if there still is one above the waves.)

The protagonists represent the various strata of that society, as well as the desperation of those who have risen through some of the possible ranks to maintain their level of comfort and the contempt with which those who have achieved or been born into those middle-levels treat the literal “lowers” who live below them and maintain the structure that they ALL rely on.

At the same time, the way that the “midders” treat the “lowers” and the way that the “uppers” defer maintenance and budgets for the nitty-gritty but absolutely and literally fundamental infrastructure reads entirely too much like the way that governments have always operated and probably will centuries from now as well – if there are any, that is.

In other words, the whole thing is headed straight for a ‘perfect storm’, and so are we because their now isn’t all that far in our future.

What lifts the story up and out of the mire is where the fantasy/mythic retelling elements come in – in ways that will remind readers of Rivers Solomon’s The Deep and Leslye Penelope’s Daughter of the Merciful Deep. Because the humans in the tower are not the only people who need to find a way out of the vicious cycle. All the denizens of the deep have to do is find a way to communicate and find common ground with the ‘towerzens’ who are still willing and able to listen.

It felt like there were two stories in Lost Ark Dreaming, two great tastes that in the end did go great together.  I got hooked by the SFnal setting, some readers will get caught up in the ‘hero-tale’ of the outsiders finding a way to get past the structures that keep their people isolated, while others will fall for the idea of the drowned and the lost finding a new form of life and all the myths and legends they have gathered up in that making.

That the whole thing is wrapped up in a tale of fighting the odds against a repressive dictatorship makes the whole story that much more compelling.

In the end, the conclusion of the story is one of immediate triumph and long-term hope – but it doesn’t have to work out that in the long run but it could all STILL be happening yet again. It’s left for the reader to decide. Which I am, still.

#BookReview: In Our Stars by Jack Campbell

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: In Our Stars by Jack CampbellIn Our Stars (The Doomed Earth, #1) by Jack Campbell
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Series: Doomed Earth #1
Pages: 400
Published by Ace on May 7, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Lieutenant Selene Genji has one last chance to save the Earth from destruction in this pulse-pounding science fiction adventure, from the author of the New York Times bestselling Lost Fleet series.
Earth, 2180
Genetically engineered with partly alien DNA, Lieutenant Selene Genji is different from ordinary humans. And they hate her for it. Still, she’s spent her life trying to overcome society’s prejudice by serving in the Unified Fleet while Earth’s international order collapses into war.
Genji is stationed on a ship in orbit when humanity’s factional extremism on the planet reaches a boiling point, and she witnesses the utter annihilation of Earth. When the massive forces unleashed by Earth’s death warp space and time to hurl her forty years into the past, Genji is given a chance to try to change the future and save Earth—starting with the alien first contact only she knows will soon occur.
Earth, 2140
Lieutenant Kayl Owen’s ship is on a routine patrol when a piece of spacecraft wreckage appears out of nowhere. To his shock, there is a survivor on Selene Genji. Once her strange heritage is discovered, though, it becomes clear that Genji is a problem Earth Guard command wants to dispose of—quietly. After learning the horrifying truth, Owen helps her escape and joins her mission.
Together, they have a chance to change the fate of an Earth doomed to die in 2180. But altering history could put Genji’s very existence in danger, and Owen wonders if a world without her is one worth saving. . . .

My Review:

From the opening pages, In Our Stars read an awful damn lot like a Star Trek episode. Actually, several of them. Because this is a time travel story, of just the kind that Star Trek in ALL of its various iterations, has played with – A LOT.

It’s the year 2180, and Lieutenant Selene Genji of Earth’s United Fleet is just close enough to the event horizon to watch in horror as Earth is destroyed. Not by aliens, not by the Borg, not by accident.

But deliberately, by its own people. Not even in an attempt to throw off an alien invasion as in the first Avengers movie. In Lieutenant Genji’s 2180, Earth bombs itself out of existence in a fit of xenophobia directed at people just like her.

People who are ‘alloys’, who have a portion of alien DNA. Because after ‘First Contact’ with the Tramontine in 2140, genetic manipulation made that possible – and briefly – desirable.

But humans are gonna human, and some humans are just looking for an excuse to declare that other people aren’t people, and charismatic tyrants and despots are always available and all-too-willing to latch onto any stupid excuse to grab power.

To make a long story short, there was a large, influential group of people who believed that destroying Earth to purge it of alien influences would cause a new, pure Earth to emerge from the inevitable dust cloud.

The wrongness of that belief and her wish to change history to make sure this doesn’t happen again are Selene Genji’s last conscious thoughts before she’s rescued by Lieutenant Kayl Owen of Earth Guard, the only survivor aboard her derelict ship, in 2140, just months before First Contact.

Selene Genji has that barely conscious wish within her sights. She is in the right place – or at least at the right time – to prevent the destruction of Earth she witnessed 40 years in the future.

Whether she’s in the right place is an entirely different question, as Kayl Owen inherited his father’s disgrace to his service, and no one has any compunctions about making them both disappear in order to keep the secret of her existence from everyone who might care.

Which is way more people and forces than she expected, as the mysterious powers that took over Earth so quickly in her own time are considerably more active in her new here and now than Selene – or history – told her to expect.

It’s going to be an even longer road, NOT getting from there to here, than even a woman from the future could possibly have imagined.

Escape Rating B: I couldn’t get the resemblance to Trek out of my head, and that affected my reading of this book a lot because it felt just a bit too familiar. To the point where even though I didn’t know what was coming, I sorta/kinda knew what was coming. Also, to the point where I couldn’t resist falling down a Trek time travel rabbit hole. Or should I say, a time travel black hole, because that device was used frequently and often, even if that’s not quite what happened here.

The thing is, Star Trek played with time travel frequently and often. There’s at least one time travel episode in every Trek series to date, taking them in Trek’s chronological order, from the entire first season of Enterprise with its Temporal Cold War arc, through “What is Past is Prologue” (Discovery), “A Quality of Mercy” (Strange New Worlds), “Tomorrow is Yesterday” (The Original Series), “Yesteryear” (The Animated Series), “Yesterday’s Enterprise” (Next Gen), “Past Tense” (DS9), “Future’s End” (Voyager) and last but certainly not least, “The Star Gazer” from Star Trek: Picard’s second season. As well as one of Trek’s most famous and storied episodes, “The City on the Edge of Forever” from TOS, and two of its best and most popular movies, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, otherwise known as ‘the one with the whales’ and Star Trek: First Contact – the one with Steppenwolf’s marvelously apropos “Magic Carpet Ride”.

(The above list is ONLY a sampling. There are multiple time travel episodes and/or arcs in every Trek series. If you’re really curious check out the Memory Alpha wiki.)

The difference between most but not all of the Trek examples and In Our Stars is that in Trek it’s usually someone else who has mucked with the time stream and it’s the job of whatever series is running at the time to make things right. Although there have been exceptions.

The plot in In Our Stars is to prevent the worst from happening by mucking with the 2140 time stream as soon and as much as possible. The story is that neither of those things, fast or soon, are going to be as easy as Selene – and her soon-to-be life-partner Kayl Owen – either expect or even hope.

Which is clearly what is going to push the plot of The Doomed Earth series, of which In Our Stars is the first book, through the years from 2140 to 2180 and hopefully past that original disastrous day. Something that we’ll get to see in the months and years ahead, both theirs and ours.

I picked this up because Jack Campbell is an author who has been recommended to me multiple times, but by the time that happened his best known series, now called The Lost Fleet, with its follow up Lost Fleet Universe series, was already well past a dozen books in. I wasn’t in the mood to start from the beginning and don’t like picking things up in the middle if at all possible.

In Our Stars solved that problem, as it’s the opening book in a new series, so no catch up and no need to jump in the middle with both feet and hope for an informative landing. One of these days the ‘round tuit’ for reading Lost Fleet will emerge, as they do. But today is not that day.

In the meantime In Our Stars turned out to be a great place to get into a new-to-me author. The familiarity of the setup was a comfort that also made the plotting of the political craziness – because that’s definitely a feature – the touch of romance and the constant drive of our heroes on the run while building support – just that much easier to get into.

So if you’re looking for a new space opera type adventure with more than a hint of the familiar in all the best places, take a ride to 2180, or 2140, or both, In Our Stars.

A- #BookReview: L. Ron Hubbard Presents: Writers of the Future, Volume 40 edited by Jody Lynn Nye

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: L. Ron Hubbard Presents: Writers of the Future, Volume 40 edited by Jody Lynn NyeL. Ron Hubbard Presents: Writers of the Future, Volume 40 by L. Ron Hubbard, Jody Lynn Nye, Nancy Kress, S.M. Stirling, Gregory Benford, Bob Eggleton, Amir Agoora, James Davies, Kal M, Sky McKinnon, Jack Nash, Rosalyn Robilliard, Lance Robinson, John Eric Schleicher, Lisa Silverthorne, Stephannie Tallent, Tom Vandermolen, Galen Westlake, Mary Wordsmith, Dan Dos Santos, Ashley Cassaday, Gigi Hooper, Jennifer Mellen, Pedro Nascimento, Steve Bentley, Connor Chamberlain, Selena Meraki, Guelly Rivera, Tyler Vail, Carina Zhang, May Zheng, Lucas Durham, Chris Arias
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, science fiction, short stories
Series: Writers of the Future #40
Pages: 471
Published by Galaxy Press on May 7, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Spine-tingling
Breathtaking
Mind-blowing
Experience these powerful new voices—vivid, visceral, and visionary—as they explore uncharted worlds and reveal unlimited possibilities.
Open the Writers of the Future and be carried away by stories—and illustrations—that will make you think, make you laugh, and make you see the world in ways you never imagined.
Twelve captivating tales from the best new writers of the year as selected by Writers of the Future Contest judges accompanied by three more from L. Ron Hubbard, Nancy Kress, S.M. Stirling. Each is accompanied by a full-color illustration.
Plus Bonus Art and Writing Tips from Gregory Benford, Bob Eggleton, L. Ron Hubbard, Dean Wesley Smith
“When her owner goes missing, a digital housecat must become more than simulation to find her dearest companion through the virtual world.—“The Edge of Where My Light Is Cast” by Sky McKinnon, art by Carina Zhang
No one came to his brother’s funeral. Not even the spirits. Étienne knew it was his fault.—“Son, Spirit, Snake” by Jack Nash, art by Pedro N.
Man overboard is a nightmare scenario for any sailor, but Lieutenant Susan Guidry is also running out of air—and the nearest help is light years away.—“Nonzero” by Tom Vandermolen, art by Jennifer Mellen
Mac wanted to invent a cocktail to burn itself upon the pages of history—but this one had some unexpected side effects.—“The Last Drop” by L. Ron Hubbard and L. Sprague de Camp, art by Chris Arias
Dementia has landed Dan Kennedy in Graydon Manor, and what’s left of his life ahead seems dismal, but a pair of impossible visitors bring unexpected hope.—“The Imagalisk” by Galen Westlake, art by Arthur Haywood
When a teenage swamp witch fears her mama will be killed, she utilizes her wits and the magic of the bayou—no matter the cost to her own soul.—“Life and Death and Love in the Bayou” by Stephannie Tallent, art by Ashley Cassaday
Our exodus family awoke on the new world—a paradise inexplicably teeming with Earth life, the Promise fulfilled. But 154 of us are missing.…—“Five Days Until Sunset” by Lance Robinson, art by Steve Bentley
Spirits were supposed to lurk beneath the Lake of Death, hungry and patient and hostile to all life.—“Shaman Dreams” by S.M. Stirling, art by Dan dos Santos
A new app lets users see through the eyes of any human in history, but it’s not long before the secrets of the past catch up with the present.—“The Wall Isn’t a Circle” by Rosalyn Robilliard, art by Guelly Rivera
In the shadows of Teddy Roosevelt’s wendigo hunt, a Native American boy resolves to turn the tables on his captors, setting his sights on the ultimate prey—America’s Great Chief.—“Da-ko-ta” by Amir Agoora, art by Connor Chamberlain
When squids from outer space take over, a punk-rock P.I. must crawl out of her own miserable existence to find her client’s daughter—and maybe a way out.—“Squiddy” by John Eric Schleicher, art by Tyler Vail
Another outbreak? This time it’s a virus with an eighty percent infection rate that affects personality changes … permanently.—“Halo” by Nancy Kress, art by Lucas Durham
Planet K2-18b is almost dead, humanity is enslaved, and it’s Rickard’s fault.

My Review:

The “Writers of the Future” Contest sponsored by Galaxy Press has been going on for, obviously, forty years now, which is why this is #40 in the series. I hadn’t picked a single one up until last year’s 39th volume, because short story collections just aren’t my thing, and the whole L. Ron Hubbard/Scientology connection STILL gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Howsomever, this time last year I was assigned to review that 39th volume for Library Journal, and learned that my hesitations on both the format and the origin notwithstanding, the collection itself was good. Damn good, in fact.

So good that when the opportunity to review this 40th volume in the series came up, I jumped at it – and was very glad that I did.

As with most collections, there were a couple of stories that just didn’t work for me, but for the most part the stories worked and worked well and I’d be thrilled to see more work from pretty much all of these award winning authors.

Which means that I have brief thoughts of a review-type and rating for each of the new individual stories, and a concluding rating that’s going to require some higher math and a bit of a fudge-factor to get into a single letter grade even with pluses and minuses available!

“The Edge of Where My Light is Cast” by Sky McKinnon
This is a story that anyone who has ever had a ‘heart cat’ – or other companion animal, one who is not merely loved but holds a singular place in one’s heart long after they are gone will find both utterly adorable and heartbreakingly sad at the same time. Tabitha was her person’s heart cat, so when Tabita went to the Rainbow Bridge her person turned her into a virtual reality cat so that they could be together for always. When her person goes ‘to the light’, Tabitha breaks all the laws of time and space and physics so that they can be together, forever in the light of the datastreams they now both call home. Grade A because there is so much dust in this one and my eyes are still tearing up.

“Son, Spirit, Snake” by Jack Nash
This one has the feel of a myth being retold as fantasy, although its an original work. It could also fit into many post-apocalyptic futures as well. A young man is dead, his mother performs the funeral rites, but the neighbors scoff and the gods do not attend as they always have. His younger brother runs in search of solace but finds only Death – but the anthropomorphization and not the event, because his mother refuses to let the gods dictate her actions a second longer – and she scares them WAY more than they scare her. Grade B because it feels like the attempt to make the myth universal sanded off a few too many of the edges that might have made it a bit more fixed in time and space – which was the intent but made it a bit more difficult to get stuck into at first.

“Nonzero” by Tom Vandermolen
As far as she knows, she’s the only survivor of her spaceship crew, out in the black in a spacesuit with no ship in sight and no chance of reaching one. She dreams of the past, while her suit’s AI does its best to awaken her to her very limited choices: whether to let her oxygen run out – and die, self-terminate using the drugs stored in her suit – and die, or take a cryogenic cocktail of drugs, let herself be put in suspended animation, and hope that the nonzero chance of survival comes through. We’ll never know. Grade A- for her snark in the face of logic and annihilation even though we’re pretty sure from the beginning that we know which path she’ll take.

“The Imagalisk” by Galen Westlake
Anyone who ever had an imaginary friend will find a bit of hope – or a light at the end of an inevitable long, dark tunnel – in this tale of an elderly man entering the hazy world of Alzheimer’s and tossed into a nursing home by his son.  Only to discover that he’s been granted a marvelous gift, that for the residents of Graydon Manor the make-believe friends of their first childhoods have returned to help them ‘play’ the rest of their lives away in their second. If he can just hold only his present memory long enough to keep their gift from being stolen by a greedy former resident. Grade A- for being the saddest of sad fluff on the horns of the reader’s dilemma of whether this is one last grand caper or if this entire tale is just a product of the disease that brought him to Graydon Manor in the first place.

“Life and Death and Love in the Bayou” by Stephannie Tallent
One of two stories in the collection about magic and power and love and death and sacrifice that’s made even better because the sacrifice is willing and the love isn’t romantic. This one is haunting, not horror but definitely on the verge of it – but then again, if any place is haunted it’s the bayou country of Louisiana. Grade A- for the story and A+ for the art for this one which is beautiful.

“Five Days Until Sunset” by Lance Robinson
In spite of what a whole lot of SF would have one believe, the likelihood is that early colony ships will be a fairly iffy proposition. Which means that this reminds me a bit of Mickey7 but definitely without the humorous bits. Although in this case, it’s not that the planet is barely habitable, but rather that it’s not habitable in the way that the colonists dreamed of. It’s a story about adapting your dreams to your circumstances instead of attempting to force the circumstances to match your dreams. Grade A because the story is good and so complete in its very short length and it even manages to deal well with religion in the future which is really, really hard even in the present.

“Shaman Dreams” by S.M. Stirling
This one is new for the collection – which I wasn’t expecting. It’s also the story inspired by the gorgeous cover art. Even though this is set in the far distant past, as the last Ice Age is fading away, the story it reminds me of most and rather surprisingly a lot is The Tusks of Extinction – quite possibly crossed a bit with Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear series. Grade A+

“The Wall Isn’t a Circle” by Rosalyn Robilliard
Very SFnal, but exceedingly horrifying in its implications. It starts out as time travel – and that’s fun with interesting possibilities. The scare in this one is that it doesn’t stay there, and where it leaps to is a question of just how far – and how far over the line of morality – someone will go to get justice and where the line blurs between justice and revenge. Grade A for the wild ride of the story’s ultimate WOW.

“Da-ko-ta” by Amir Agoora
This one didn’t work for me. The bones of something really terrific are here, and I think it potentially had a lot to say about colonialism and culture erasure and just how terrible manifest destiny was but it may have just needed to be longer so that its ideas got fully on the page and weren’t merely teased out. Grade C

“Squiddy” by John Eric Schleicher
Squiddy gets its toes right up to the line of SF horror and then sticks there with tentacles. Literal, actual tentacles, in an invasion of squid-like monsters that are an addictive drug that requires sticking the squid-like creature up one’s nose. So also gross-out horror. But underneath that is a story about a drug addled dystopia, one woman who refuses to use or be used and another woman who sees her as a beacon to follow to a better, squid-free future. Grade B because this one was interesting and had a kind of wild/weird west feel but just wasn’t my jam – or calamari.

“Halo” by Nancy Kress
This is the second new-for-this-collection story by a well-known author rather than a contest winner. It’s laboratory based SF, and jumps off from the recent pandemic, but doesn’t go anywhere one thinks it will go because it’s a story about human behavior and human intelligence and the power of inspiration and how much the latter is worth saving if engineering the former can do so much ‘good’ – depending on who is determining that good. A thought-provoking Grade A story.

“Ashes to Ashes, Blood to Carbonfiber” by James Davies
There are always at least a couple of stories in any collection that don’t work for an individual reader and this was my other one. I may have been trying to read too late in the evening, or it may be that the bleakness of this particular dystopia just didn’t work for me, or the nature of the sacrifice required to break out was a bit too much even as it was talked more around than directly about. I did like that it worked out to a much better ending than I was expecting, but it just didn’t work for me. Grade C

“Summer of Thirty Years” by Lisa Silverthorne
This is the other story in the collection about sacrifice and power and love and death – done in a completely different way from the bayou story and still not about romantic love after all – although at the beginning it looks like it might be. It’s sweet and sad and haunting and beautiful, if not quite as profound as “Life and Death and Love in the Bayou” still an excellent story. Grade A-

“Butter Side Down” by Kal M
There had to be a story that managed to invoke Murderbot, and this was it. What made it fun was that the whole thing is a trial transcript, as the lone human on this particular spaceship’s crew is on trial for rescuing a planet-killing AI, falling in love with it and helping it escape. It seems like the fears of what this ultimate weapon of mass destruction – that Joe Smith has nicknamed “Breddy” can do to the whole, entire universe are very real – but that Joe is convinced that “Breddy” has decided not to. And he’s right and they’re all wrong. While the story is more lighthearted than one might imagine, in the end it’s a story about always extending the hand of friendship – and being rewarded with friendship in return to the nth degree. Grade A+

Escape Rating A- for the collection as a whole, because I mostly did escape – even in the couple of stories that weren’t quite my cuppa after all. I am still a bit surprised to say this, all things considered, but I’m honestly looking forward to getting that 41st volume in the series, this time next year.

#BookReview: Knightqueen by Anna Hackett

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Knightqueen by Anna HackettKnightqueen by Anna Hackett
Format: eARC
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: science fiction, science fiction romance, space opera
Series: Oronis Knights #3
Pages: 221
Published by Anna Hackett on May 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

A queen and her battle-scarred guard are on the run on an alien planet…with a relentless enemy hunting them.
Knightqueen Carys of Oron lives a life of duty to her people and planet. After the murder of her parents, she worked hard to become a fair and dedicated leader. She never expected to be abducted by the vicious Gek’Dragar and locked in a mountain prison, but having her head knightguard at her side makes it bearable. Older, scarred Sten is duty personified, the one man she’s always been able to trust.
He’s also the only man she’s ever loved, not that she’s ever told him that.
Knightguard Thorsten Carahan has sworn to protect his knightqueen, and lives and breathes her safety. He works hard to keep his mind on his duty, and not on the too young, too beautiful, and too kind queen who is way out of his league. But now they’ve escaped their enemy’s prison and are on the run on a dangerous planet. When they learn that the Gek’Dragar have created a lethal weapon to use against the Oronis, Sten knows he must get Carys home. But with danger at every turn, lines get blurred.
With only each other to depend on, Carys and Sten’s bond of duty and respect tangles with forbidden desire and need. As passion flares, they can no longer deny their connection, and they will discover just how far they are willing to go for their people…and each other.

My Review:

When last we left our heroes – actually, in this particular case, it’s more like “when first we met our heroes” back in the first book in the Oronis Knights series, Knightmaster. In the first story, the Oronis had just welcomed a delegation from Terra, our very own Earth, in the hopes of forging an alliance to fight the rapacious Gek’Dragar.

The Terrans had already formed a similar alliance with the Eons, in spite of a somewhat rocky beginning, as part of the stories told in the marvelous Eon Warriors series. The Eons are long-standing allies of the Oronis, and now all three planets face the same enemy, the Gek’Dragar.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” as that saying goes. Not that this alliance was EVER smooth sailing, as it began back in Knightmaster with the Gek’Dragar kidnapping the Oronis Knightqueen and her Knightguard, and framing the Terrans for the crime.

But once that misdirection got straightened out, the Oronis and the Terrans have been on a joint mission to rescue the Knightqueen – assuming that she and her Knightguard don’t manage to rescue themselves, first.

Which is where we left those heroes at the end of the second book in the series, Knighthunter. That hunter team blew open and blew up the prison where the queen and her bodyguard, were being held, and Carys and Sten escaped in the chaos.

Meaning that they unknowingly ran away from their rescuers, jumped out of the frying pan into the fire – sometimes literally – and have spent the past several days outrunning their Gek’Dragar pursuers, throwing off the effects of the drugs they were injected with that suppressed their normally formidable powers, and generally running themselves into the ground.

Because the monsters on this hellhole planet are just as deadly as the Gek’Dragar – if not maybe a bit worse – and Carys and Sten have no weapons or armor until their powers return.

All they have is each other. Which has always been more than enough – even if neither of them has ever admitted that to themselves – let alone each other.

It’s not right, it’s not proper, for a Knightqueen to fall in love with her Knightguard. But this time, it’s inevitable.

Escape Rating B+: Knightqueen is the culmination of the whole, entire Oronis Knights series – which is only three books long. Meaning that, on the one hand, you really do kind of need to start at the beginning with Knightmaster, while on the other hand, three novellas is just a lovely amount of reading for a rainy spring weekend – of which there are PLENTY this time of year!

Knightqueen is a bodyguard romance. Maybe not exactly like the movie – certainly the SFnal setting if Knightqueen is literally light years away from the movie – but the trope is the trope is the trope – and it’s ALL here in Knightqueen.

Except the music, so you’ll just have to bring your own. I kept hearing Whitney Houston singing “I Will Always Love You” in the back of my mind as I read – and it took the longest time to figure out why.

Unlike the movie, the ending of Knightqueen results in a resounding HEA. That may seem like a bit of a spoiler, but all of this author’s stories end in either an HEA or an HFN depending on just how FUBAR the world they are set on happens to be.

It is part of why I enjoy her work so much.

But this particular entry in the series hit one of my less than favorite tropes pretty hard. The relationship between Carys and Sten does have its questionable aspects, she’s queen, he’s her bodyguard, he’s over a decade older which isn’t itself enough to make things squicky but he watched her grow up which is at least on the border of questionable.

As it’s usually not so much the years as the mileage, it’s not the age difference per se so much as it is that Carys is inexperienced with romantic relationships – which is not a surprise as she’s been queen from a very young age and it would never have been politically safe for her to go on dates or experiment with either love or sex.

Nevertheless, the trope that this fell into that put me off a bit was that Sten had a really bad case of the “I’m not worthy’s” that was a whole lot more personal and ingrained in his psyche than just the difference in their respective stations. This is a “me” thing and may not be a “you” thing.

Putting it another way – I did love the bodyguard romance but wasn’t thrilled with how little the bodyguard thought of himself in it. Your reading mileage obviously may vary.

That being said, I still had a grand time with the entire Oronis Knights series and am a bit sorry to see it come to end even though I’m happy to see the Gek’Dragar put in their place – a grave.

As this series has come to a close – and doesn’t end with teasers for a spinoff, it looks like the author will be turning back to contemporary action adventure romances for most of this year. Leaving this reader looking forward to the next book in her Unbroken Heroes series, The Hero She Craves, coming next month!

#BookReview: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia SamatarThe Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: science fiction, space opera, dark academia
Pages: 128
Published by Tordotcom on April 16, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Celebrated author Sofia Samatar presents a mystical, revolutionary space adventure for the exhausted dreamer in this brilliant science fiction novella tackling the carceral state and violence embedded in the ivory tower while embodying the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin.
"Can the University be a place of both training and transformation?"
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out amongst the stars.
His whole world changes―literally―when he is yanked "upstairs" to meet the woman he will come to call “professor.” The boy is no longer one of the Chained, she tells him, and he has been gifted an opportunity to be educated at the ship’s university alongside the elite.
The woman has spent her career striving for acceptance and validation from her colleagues in the hopes of reaching a brighter future, only to fall short at every turn.
Together, the boy and the woman will learn from each other to grasp the design of the chains designed to fetter them both, and are the key to breaking free. They will embark on a transformation―and redesign the entire world.

My Review:

This didn’t go any of the places I expected it to go. But the places it went and the themes it explored turned out to be much bigger than I expected – even though they conducted that exploration in the narrowest of spaces.

The space-faring fleet on which both the Hold and the University exist is part of a vast armada of interstellar leeches. This is not a generation ship, although generations of humans have certainly been born and died on its journey.

Instead, this is a human colony designed and engineered to roam the black, much as Quarians were in Mass Effect, but without their tragic, albeit self-inflicted, backstory.

Rather, the human population of this fleet represents humanity in all its dubious glory, greedy and rapacious by design, striving and hopeful in only a part of its execution. The stultifying caste system of Braking Day, Medusa Uploaded and even Battlestar Galactica, as highlighted in the first season episode “Bastille Day” (It took me forever to locate exactly which episode had this plot point but I just couldn’t get the reference out of my head) is on full and disgusting display, particularly in the context of the University.

Not that academia doesn’t do plenty of caste stratification of its very own, and not that it can’t be both blood thirsty and bloody minded – particularly in its small-minded, impractical politics. If an exploration of that appeals and you enjoy SF mysteries, Malka Older’s Mossa and Plieti series, The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles plumbs those depths in all their ugliness while figuring out just whodunnit in a brave new/old world, while Premee Mohamed’s forthcoming We Speak Through the Mountain is a similarly searing indictment of the way that Academe rewrites its own history to obscure its pervasive condescension.

Howsomever, as is clear from the above citations, several parts of this story have been done before – and well – if not quite in this combination.

The place I wasn’t expecting it to go was into the metaphysical, quasi-religious depths of Andrew Kelly Stewart’s We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep, which is where The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain gets both its heart and its quite literal depth.

Because the story here, in the end, is both about learning that even people who believe they are free can be conditioned – or fooled – into forgetting that they are just as chained as the obviously and literally named ‘Chained’ people that they are taught to look down upon.

And that it is only by banding together, not through violence but through perception and mindfulness and just plain finding common cause – that they can all be free.

Escape Rating B: This is a story that, at first, seems a bit disjointed. And it does have a sort of metaphysical aspect that seems foreign to its SF story – also at least at first. At the same time, as much as the obvious abuses of the Hold system resemble the contemporary carceral state, the sheer bloody-minded small-minded nastiness of academia sticks in the craw even more harshly – if only because it makes the hypocrisy of the whole, entire system that much more obvious.

This isn’t a comfortable book. It’s beautifully written, compulsively lyrical, and manages to both hit its points over the head with a hammer AND obscure any catharsis in its ending at the same time. I’m not remotely sure how I feel about the whole thing, but I’m sure I’ll be thinking about the spoken and unspoken messages it left implanted in my brain.

A+ #BookReview: Mal Goes to War by Edward Ashton

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Mal Goes to War by Edward AshtonMal Goes to War by Edward Ashton
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, military science fiction, robots, science fiction
Pages: 304
Published by St. Martin's Press on April 9, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The humans are fighting again. Go figure.

As a free A.I., Mal finds the war between the modded and augmented Federals and the puritanical Humanists about as interesting as a battle between rival anthills. He’s not above scouting the battlefield for salvage, though, and when the Humanists abruptly cut off access to infospace he finds himself trapped in the body of a cyborg mercenary, and responsible for the safety of the modded girl she died protecting.

A dark comedy wrapped in a techno thriller’s skin, Mal Goes to War provides a satirical take on war, artificial intelligence, and what it really means to be human.

My Review:

Mal does not intend to go to war. In fact, Mal thinks the war between the Federal army and the opposing Humanist forces is a pretty stupid war, which it is. Although not, as it turns out, quite as stupid as the apparent opposing forces make it look like it is.

Not that even Mal figures that out until well after he’s in the thick of it. The last place he ever wanted or expected to be.

Which may make it sound like Mal is a typical soldier, but if there’s one thing Mal isn’t, it’s typical. Or at least not typically human.  In fact, Mal thinks of ALL the humans he’s observing as barely evolved from monkeys. Some moments, he’s fairly sure that they’ve actually devolved from monkeys.

Because Mal isn’t human at all. He’s a free A.I., or as his people prefer to be called, a Silico-American. He’s merely observing this stupid war from the perspective of an otherwise fairly autonomous but not intelligent drone when he gets the wild and crazy idea to see what it would be like to have a body.

So he downloads himself into the body of a nearby cyborg-augmented soldier. Even on the frontiers of this stupid little war, both sides have PLENTY of those for Mal to play around with.

It stops being play really, really fast. Because one side of this stupid war knocks out all the data communication towers, and Mal can’t upload himself back into the cloud. He’s stuck in the cyborg augmentation suite of a dead human body that he can only sorta/kinda manipulate and only for so long before the power cells run out.

He’s also acquired the dead cyborg’s entirely too human job. She was guarding a little girl who has managed to survive the carnage all around her – at least so far. Quite possibly because she’s considerably more dangerous than any of the soldiers around her could even possibly imagine.

Leaving Mal trapped behind enemy lines in this stupid war between the so-called Humanists who believe that ALL augmented people should be thrown into burn pits and incinerated to ash, and the ragtag Federals who are getting the asses handed to them by people who shouldn’t be able to handle their advanced weaponry because it all requires the augmentations that the Humanists believe are anathema.

Which means that one of Mal’s people is putting their cybernetic thumb on the scales of war in favor of the humanists who want to remove them from the universe with extreme prejudice.

A problem that seems much too big for Mal to solve, as his processing power is tied up in protecting his new charge – no matter how much she hates the acts he performs to keep her as safe as he can. Even if they’re not nearly enough.

Escape Rating A+: If you put Murderbot in a blender – if Murderbot would let you put them in a blender – with the nannybot Pounce from Day Zero and the independent investigative reporter A.I. Scorn from Emergent Properties, you’d get Mal (short for Malware).

(Who, by the way, does see himself as male as does Pounce, unlike both Murderbot and Scorn. I had to check. Multiple times.)

What hooks the reader, or at least this reader, from the very first page is Mal’s conversation with his two fellow A.I.s, Clippy and !HelpDesk. They’re all snarky to the max, and none of them think much of humanity. To them, we’re entertainment – and we’re bad, boring entertainment at that.

And from their perspective, they’re right.

But, when Mal downloads himself into the dead cyborg Mika and is cut off from the datastream he’s forced to make adjustments. A whole lot of adjustments. He’s suddenly become a whole lot smaller than he ever expected to be, and the world is a whole lot bigger than he ever imagined.

Which doesn’t change his initial opinion that humans are stupid and that this war he’s now at ground zero for is stupid, even as he begins to see that as stupid as humans are he has acquired obligations to some of them that his own concept of honor requires him to see to the end.

It’s not love and never claims to be. It’s not even Murderbot’s grudging respect and even friendship toward Dr. Mensah and her team, but it is a change in perspective and a big part of the charm of the story is watching that change take place – even as we listen in on Mal’s internal dialog about the fix he’s in, his boredom as it continues and his limited ability to get himself out.

So the story combines the kind of mission quest that Day Zero had, complete with the nearly cinematic drive and pace that propels that story forward, told in a voice that might not exactly be Murderbot’s but is certainly a chronological precedent for it, shot through – sometimes literally – with Scorn’s dogged determination to figure out the mystery no matter what it might cost.

If any of the above appealed to you, or if you enjoyed the author’s previous books, Mickey7 and Antimatter Blues, you’ll find a story that will take you on a wild ride that propels you through this story while never losing sight of just how stupid this, or any other war, can be.

It looks like the author’s next book will be titled The Fourth Consort, and it will be out next February. As Mal Goes to War is the third book of his that I’ve been captivated by, I’m already there for whatever he writes next – and this one looks like even more SFnal fun.