The Blighted Stars by Megan E. O'Keefe

 

This book was absolutely wonderful! It was just what I wanted and I can’t wait for the next one. I had never read anything by Megan E. O’Keefe before, but I had heard good things about Velocity Weapon (and I found it on my virtual TBR pile, purchased when it was on sale ages ago). 

I had been longing for a good space opera. I love fantasy, but I love science fiction more, and my reading has been tilting more fantasy lately and I had been yearning for something with spaceships or robots. This book has both! (Well, the robot content is minimal but still enjoyable). 

The book is set in a future where several rich families control the resources necessary to run civilization and a mineral is needed to help back up people’s brains so they can be downloaded into new bodies that are printed as needed from large biological 3-D printers. 

The blurb on the back of the book promised the possibility of an opposites attract romance between the son of an oligarch and the family bodyguard who rebelled and tried to take down the unfair society. When I started reading the book, I really enjoyed the worldbuilding, but I was like “no way, this romance will never work.”  I also hadn’t realized how long the book was when I first got it. In the beginning I was like “this is going to be a slog, why can’t this speed up?”  

But I was wrong on both counts. The length of the book gave it time to grow, and by the time the romance began, it felt real and earned. Bravo!

This book was so good! Thanks to Orbit and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review. 

Future Artifacts by Kameron Hurley

As I have said before, Kameron Hurley is a treasure.  I first heard about her on Ann Leckie’s blog a few years ago, when Leckie had gushed about Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion several months before it was published.  When it finally came out, I got a copy from the library and was blown away.  Her worldbuilding was so intricate and her characterization just amazing. And then there is her book, The Light Brigade, which I found to be unputdownable. A masterpiece! 

So I was thrilled when the publisher and NetGalley gave me a copy of her short story collection, Future Artifacts, in exchange for an honest review. 

This collection, mostly consisting of stories from Hurley’s Patreon, is wonderful. In a short story, an author has so much less space with which to create a fully realized universe, but time and again Hurley managed this monumental task with aplomb. 

Highly recommended!

Robots through the Ages edited by Robert Silverberg and Bryan Thomas Schmidt

As I have said before on several occasions, I am often wary of anthologies - I worry about changes in quality and tonal whiplash between stories in themed multi-author collections. But I am a sucker for stories by my favorite authors. This collection includes a new story by Seanan McGuire which was brilliant and haunting and just fantastic. It also includes a story by Connie Willis written years ago for a different anthology, Foundation’s Friends, honoring Isaac Asimov, which I read once in the library years ago and was so so happy to see it again. This book is worth it for those two stories alone. 

Thanks again to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Old Babes in the Woods by Margaret Atwood

Who doesn’t love Margaret Atwood? I still remember how chilling it was when I read the Handmaid’s Tale the first time, realizing that I recognized the Harvard campus and how real and chilling that made the story, and how every year since then realizing how real this piece of SF was as the Right forces us closer and closer to its reality. I know Ms. Atwood sometimes eschews the label of science fiction author, but that seems more like a marketing strategy. Her Maddaddam books, for example, are amazing SF. 

So I was super excited when I got an eARC of Ms. Atwood’s new short story collection in exchange for an honest review. 

Her prose sings. I have no other way to put it. Every word is a masterpiece. 

Many of the stories are interconnected and told from the perspective of a woman after losing her husband. Having lost my father recently and seeing my mother continue on, this book hits very close to home. Sometimes you need a book to help you process your emotions. 

This book is a must read. Go get it today. 

Phoenix Precinct by Keith R.A. DeCandido

I’ve been reading Keith R.A. DeCandido’s reviews on Tor dot com for years and I’ve loved them. His Trek rewatches and superhero reviews are excellent. So when I saw one of his novels on NetGalley I was curious to see what his fiction was like. The answer: not bad? It’s a police procedural in a generic D&D-esque fantasy kingdom. The mystery is cookie cutter, the characters interchangeable- and the plot by the numbers.  But the writing is adequate and it was a pleasant way to pass the time. 

The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis

I have said it before and I will say it again-  love Connie Willis. She used to be my favorite living author, and she was eclipsed mainly due to my discovery of Seanan McGuire - I still love her books to pieces.  But it can be hard to love your old favorites with the same intensity when their productivity slows. I have had the pleasure of meeting her twice at conventions and I treasure those moments. I last saw her when her last novel, Crosstalk came out in 2016. That was a long time ago. 

 Il still remember the first book of hers that I read - I got a copy of Doomsday Book from the science fiction book club when it came out on the 90s. It took my breath away. I love her novels and her short stories and her novellas. Her books make me laugh and make me cry and I wish I hadn’t read them all already because reading one off her books for the first time is a singular treat. 

So I was thrilled when her publisher and NetGalley approved me for an eARC of The Road to Roswell, her new novel coming out this summer. Connie Willis has been mentioning that this book was in the works for many, many years and I was so happy to finally read it!

I didn’t just read it - I devoured it! It was so much fun! Like many a great Connie Willis story, it had a protagonist just trying to do the right thing while surrounded by realistic yet ridiculous people who are more than they appear, who also have encyclopedic knowledge of esoterica, and a slowly simmering romance. 

The plot is simple but compelling - a woman going to stop her best friend from marrying a UFO nut gets abducted by an extraterrestrial and wackiness ensues! I don’t want to spoil any more but the resolution was quite satisfying and the alien encounters felt real and not too slapstick. 

This may be the last time I read a new Connie Willis novel. If so, this is a good one to go out on. I cannot recommend this enough. 

The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard

I was not a fan of Aliette de Bodard before  reading this book. I had previously read The Tea Master and the Detective when it was nominated for the Hugo Award and found it did not make an impression on me. But then I heard a lot of buzz about this book, and so I figured those people might know something I don’t, so I requested an eARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. I later saw the book on some best of lists and I was like, I really have to get to this one. So I read it. 

I don’t know exactly why, but this book did NOT work for me. It was a slog from start to finish. I disliked all of the characters, except the Censor, who I believe I was supposed to dislike. This book was billed as a pirate romance novel between a woman and a mindship. I guess it was that? But in the worst possible way. The protagonist is effectively captured and forced into marriage with the mindship, in a way that if the mindship was a corporeal man would feel very rapey. The mindship is a pirate who doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with rape, theft, and murder, and is completely unsympathetic, although I don’t think she’s supposed to come off that way. The protagonist is supposed to be sympathetic- her partner is dead, her child is left alone on a planet with friends! But there is no emotional core to her abandonment of her child, and she goes out drinking and partying pretty quickly once they get to a pirate space station. She does nothing to try to reconnect to her daughter and gives up very quickly. Then, when she find out her daughter is going to be sold into slavery she decides to go get her, and the author breezes past the child sex trafficking going on so quickly that I had whiplash. 

None of the characters feel real or lifelike, the sex scenes felt needlessly graphic and also out of character, and the spouses calling each other things like “little sis” came off as creepy instead of affectionate. I regret the time I spent reading this book.