After the Fall by Edward Ashton

 

I didn’t know anything about Edward Ashton until last year when I got an email from NetGalley telling me I was auto-approved for a bunch of books by authors I had never heard of.  I decided to say “what the heck!” and I ended up really liking The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton. So I was looking forward to this new book by him and I appreciated getting an eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

I didn’t enjoy this one as much as The Fourth Consort. After the Fall is set on Earth a few generations after an alien invasion. Humans are kept as pets, basically, by aliens that have wiped out most of the independent humans on the planet. The book is told from the perspective of a human pet who was adopted like a shelter dog by one of the aliens who then sets out to open up a bed and breakfast for other aliens. The tone of this book feels really weird. Sometimes it touches on the horrors of humans being conquered and enslaved, and other times it’s wacky hijinks. The plot hinges on some coincidences that I didn’t buy. Overall, this book was a bit of a letdown. 

Trace Elements by Jo Walton and Ada Palmer

OMG this book was like it was written just for me!

For starters, I love Jo Walton’s books. I first encountered her in 2013, when I checked Among Others out from the library - I knew it had won the Hugo and the Nebula Awards and I wanted to see what it was about.  I was in love with this book.  I loved the protagonist and I loved the magic.  I remember reading through the section on how the narrator thought she had used magic to conjure up the book club at the library and then I turn the page and found a bookmark that some previous reader had left in this library book I was reading. The bookmark turned out to be a torn our page from her day calendar. The day of the calendar page was the day of my first child’s birth. This only made the book feel more magical.

So when My Real Children came out, I borrowed from the library and I also loved it. And then I found out about her Thessaly books.  As a lapsed classicist who loves robots, time travel, and Greek mythology, this seemed like the perfect book for me. And it was! I devoured the series and was thrilled to be able to meet Ms. Walton at a bookstore in Brooklyn for her book tour of the third volume, during which I got her to sign all three books in the series. 

Also on that book tour with her was Ada Palmer, who had just come out with her first book, Too Like The Lightning. I enjoyed that, but the writing style was a little too archaic for my tastes. I tried picking up book two in that series as an audiobook but I couldn’t focus on it. 

Sometime around this time I found Jo Walton’s nonfiction essays on tor dot com. I loved them! They reminded me of the parts of Among Others where the protagonist talked about books. I happily bought and devoured her nonfiction essay collections What Makes This Book So Great and An Informal History of the Hugos. 

So when I saw this book on NetGalley I just had to request it! A nonfiction book about science fiction by two great writers? And I was right to be so excited! This book was excellent- I could not put it down! I learned so many fascinating things from it and the writing style made it a page turner from beginning to end. I may have become slightly insufferable when I kept sharing cool tidbits of the things l learned from this book with my wife, like the reasons why mass market paperbacks have the page inside about torn off covers and how the size of spinner racks dictated novel length in the 20th century. 

If this book doesn’t win Best Related Work at the Hugos next year I will be quite surprised!

Obstetrix by Naomi Kritzer

 

I have been so excited for this book and it did not disappoint!

I first encountered Naomi Kritzer’s writing when her short story “Cat Pictures, Please” was nominated (and later won) the Hugo Award. It was just delightful in every way and I cannot recommend it enough. It’s about a benevolent artificial intelligence that just wants to help people and to look at pictures of cats. This story was included in a short story collection after it won, Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories, and I enjoyed that collection very much. 

Later, Ms. Kritzer took this premise and turned it into the award winning Catfishing on Catnet, in which the AI hangs out with a bunch of teens in a chat room and helps out when the protagonist is pursued by her stalker of a father.  It was a delight and deserved every award it won. (And more!) I also very much enjoyed the sequel, Chaos on Catnet, and her more recent book, Liberty’s Daughter. 

So of course, when I went to Worldcon for the first time this past summer and I saw that Ms. Kritzer was reading from a new upcoming work, I had to be there! She read from this book, Obstetrix, which is set in a not too distant future in which an obstetrician is kidnapped by a cult. I couldn’t want to read the rest of it, so I was so thrilled when Tor and NetGalley approved me for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

It did not disappoint. Once again, the author creates an immersive world with believable characters that make you unable to stop turning the pages. You really feel you are there, captive, with the protagonist, and you share her creeping dread.

I predict this book will be on the Hugo ballot next year - it’ll certainly be on mine!

The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott

What an interesting conclusion! Before I’d read The Witch Roads, I’d seen the name Kate Elliott in the past, when browsing bookstore shelves or at the library, but I’d never really heard of anyone reading her work or read any online chatter about her books. I loved the  Witch Roads - it was fantastic and was exactly what I needed at the time. You know how sometimes you just want a big long fantasy novel to sink your teeth into? The Witch Roads was that and more. 

So I was very excited when I got an advance reader copy from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review of the sequel and conclusion to the duology, the Nameless Land. 

This book was good, but was not what I expected. After the end of the last volume I expected to see the protagonist accompany the prince to the capital for imperial succession drama. Instead, the book detours into the titular nameless land where we learn more unexpected backstory of the protagonist. The ghostly shorn dragon from the first book returns, because of course he had to, but it happened much later in the story than I had anticipated and the return was worth waiting for. Overall, I liked this book a lot, even if I liked it less than the predecessor - and part of that was a mismatch between what I had anticipated and what we got that is not fault of the book itself. I definitely will pick up Ms. Elliott’s next book set in this world. 

For We Are Many by Dennis E. Taylor

I’m so glad I started reading this series! 

As I said in my review of the first book, I didn’t know anything about the Bobiverse series except that I would see this book pop up on Audible occasionally as a suggestion in the Science Fiction section, but it didn’t seem like it would be for me because the back cover blurb made it seem like an irritating comedy. 

Now that they are publishing new editions, Saga Press gave me an e ARC of this book exchange for an honest review.

I thought this sequel was alot of fun! This book follows up on almost all of the lingering plot threads from the first volume, including the survival of humanity and Bob’s oversight of the first alien species he contacted. This book also introduces a new external threat, some interesting Borg-like aliens. Other than the space combat stuff, which ended up feeling a little dull, I found this book to be a page turner. I really wanted to find out what happened next, and I am looking forward to book three. 

Red Star Hustle / Apprehension by Sam J. Miller/Mary Robinette Kowal

 

I was too young for the era of the Ace Doubles - volumes with two short books in them bound back to back - so I have no nostalgia for the format. However, I love Mary Robinette Kowal, and I’ve enjoyed the books by Sam J Miller, that I have read, so I was intrigued by this interesting publishing experiment. I received an eARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review, so I cannot comment on how the physical book works as an object. 

I had heard of Sam J. Miller when his Blackfish City was nominated for a Nebula but I still haven’t gotten around to reading it, but I did really enjoy his short story collection Boys, Beasts & Men. The stories in that collection ran the gamut from scary to angry to sad to kind but they all had a raw humanity that I loved. 

Red Star Hustle seemed like it was trying to achieve that same feeling, but it fell short. A skillful author can do wonders with tropes, but it’s a tricky tight rope to walk. It’s easy to fall into the pitfalls that make them tropes in the first place. I fear that Mr. Miller did not succeed in rehabilitating the “ hooker with a heart of gold” trope, and none of his characters felt particularly real in this book. None of the addiction narratives rang true, and I didn’t enjoy the time I spent in this world with these characters because none of them were particularly interesting and I didn’t really care about what happened to them. If I had gotten this book by itself, I would’ve felt a little bit disappointed.

I have loved Mary Robinette Kowal ever since I devoured the Calculating Stars. (Actually, I fell in love with her writing before that - she wrote a blog post on tor dot com before that book came out about her visit to NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab that was just amazing and has stuck with me for years.) I loved the Fated Sky even more than the Calculating Stars, and I was a little frustrated when the book ended when they reached Mars and we didn’t get anything of the trip home. I adored the Relentless Moon and the Martian Contingency and was thrilled to get a book signed by her at NYCC a few years ago. 

I really, really liked Apprehension, Ms. Kowal’s half of this double feature. It are really fun adventure of spies and a kidnapped kid and his plucky grandmother who helps rescue him. I thought the disability of the protagonist was handled much better here than in the authors prior book, the Spare Man, and I would’ve enjoyed spending much more time in this world with these characters. I hope we see them again.

Through Gates of Garnet and Gold by Seanan McGuire (Audiobook)

 

This is yet another fantastic Wayward Children novella!!

I love Seanan McGuire’s writing. (Note: I review a bunch of her books so I am copying part of some of my other reviews here to save time.). She has quickly become my favorite living writer and I feel very lucky that she is so prolific. I was first introduced to her work when her book Parasite, written as Mira Grant, was nominated for a Hugo Award. I loved it and quickly devoured the Newsflesh series before I realized that Mira Grant and Seanan McGuire were the same person. 

I was already a big fan of Ms. McGuire’s when the first wayward children book, Every Heart a Doorway, came out, and I loved it! As a kid who grew up loving the Oz series and resenting the Christian imagery in Narnia, it was right up my alley. It is a wonderful book and this is an excellent series, definitely deserving of its Best Series Hugo win.  In this series, the odd numbered books are the main timeline, and the even numbered books tell stories outside the main timeline - sometimes introducing us to new characters when they travel through their Doors, and other times showing up backstory of preexisting characters. 

I was overjoyed when tordotcom and NetGalley awarded me an eARC of Through Gates of Garnet and Gold, especially since it is an odd numbered book, meaning it is advancing the main timeline. 

And we are back with Nancy, who started us off in the first book as our main character before she went back to her world, the Halls of the Dead, where she remains motionless as a statue for most of her time there. 

But Nancy returns to the school because something is killing the residents of her world. The adventure ropes in perennial favorites Sumi, Kade, and Christopher, and introduces a new girl from a world of moths and stories.

It sometimes felt like part of the reason behind this book is existing is to answer some critics of the first book that thought that Nancy was suicidal in wanting to return to the halls of the dead. By more fully fleshing out this world, the author helps to explain the appeal of this realm for Nancy, and how it has nothing to do with wanting to be dead. The cause of all the problems ties back into another character from earlier books, but I do not want to spoil that reveal here. Suffice it to say, that this book really moves the story forward in interesting and surprising ways and I cannot wait for the next odd number book in two years.

I listened to this at 2x speed.