Reviews and Comments

To call The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport a cyberpunk version of Aladdin would be a disservice. It takes that as a starting point and gleefully launches into a tale of political upheaval, prize-fighting robots, kaiju and mechs, unwanted legacies, family secrets, betrayal, loyalty, a Not-Prince, oppression, opulence, AI rights, pervasive surveillance, masking who you are, and of course sufficiently advanced technology that can grant wishes (only three for the trial period, but unlimited wishes can be unlocked for...well, you get the idea), all set in a crumbling spaceport slowly sinking into the mud on a backwater planet where everyone's sure the world is ending soon, but no one's sure how or why, and it hardly matters because no one can afford to leave anyway.

It's a glorious mishmash of all this and more, wrapped around the human Lina and her monkey-bot brother Bador, filtered through a storytelling bot who has just woken up from being factory-reset and is trying to make sense of the totally illogical humans and bots, not to mention the city itself.

Great fun, highly recommended.

(Cross-posted from my website)

When I first heard of Little Fuzzy, long before I read the first book, I had no idea there were any sequels. I think I may have also gotten them mixed up with the Hokas (with perhaps good reason). After reading Piper's original and Scalzi's reboot, I got curious about how Piper continued the original story.

There's a loose plot following a kidnapping investigation, but it's mostly there as a framework to explore the human/fuzzy relationship and how the colony is changing. With the question of sapience established, it gets into the politics of shifting from a company town to an eventual democracy, the ethics of human colonization and native relations with the Fuzzies, and biology, considering where the Fuzzies fit in the planet's food web and why they're so fond of a particular prey animal and a particular brand of human-made emergency rations.

Many of the original characters return, but shifted into new roles and new alliances. Jack Holloway is an official liaison between humans and Fuzzies. Victor Grego, the corporate boss who fought so hard to keep the Fuzzies from being recognized as people, has adapted to the new normal and discovered that he actually quite likes their newly-contacted neighbors. People of both species are picking up the others' language, and factories are gearing up to mass-produce devices to shift the Fuzzies' voices into human-audible range.

It's still very much the Mad Men approach to ecological space colonization: All the humans smoke, cocktail hour is a sacrosanct ritual, most of the active, in-charge people are men, and even the good guys treat the Fuzzies like children. But at least they're trying to work on the Fuzzies' behalf, unlike the traffickers and opportunists. And there's a female scientist who shows up her egotistical boss quite well. But within that context, it's an interesting read.

(Cross-posted from my website.)

Accessible and intricately researched, with scattered humor to keep the reader's interest.

Getting to space is the easy part. Staying there is going to be a lot more complicated than anyone wants to believe. There are plenty of established tropes in science-fiction and among serious space enthusiasts, but a lot of them have major gaps in them when you start pressing for details. What happens to a fetus in microgravity? Can you scrape together enough soil nutrients to supply agriculture for a whole Mars city, or do you need to constantly import fertilizer from Earth? How do you make sure you have enough medical supplies on-hand?

The authors wanted to write about what we know about space settlement. But it turns out it's a really good primer for what we don't know and need to research before we can get serious.

It's also an interesting companion to Under Alien Skies, which takes the approach of "assuming we're able to work out the details, this is what it would be like there." And, well, we have a lot more details to work out.

(Cross-posted from my website.)

Similar to A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, but a tighter story, with better-defined secondary characters and internal story logic.

Again there's a young apprentice with small, oddly specific magical abilities, who gets drawn into a caper, blamed for it, and finds herself as the only person who can resolve it, and has to both stretch her magic and convince the adults around to help her (and let her help them).

This time the magic is art. Paintings and drawings, if done the right way with the right details by by someone with the right ability, can become magical objects. Rosa was born into a family of Illuminators. A very eccentric family. Each with their own eccentricity. And that's before she encounters the magical talking crow (who is very taken with shiny objects) and the malicious creature he was guarding.

The stakes are more personal: the Scarling has it specifically out for the Mandolini family. But there's a clear potential for it to spiral out of control. Like Mona, Rosa makes mistakes, but again they're believable mistakes. And in this book the adults have character reasons for finally believing her, not just plot reasons.

There's a lot of mischief and magic, though only one mandrake as I recall. And because Rosa doesn't need to leave home on her hero's journey like Oliver (Minor Mage) or Mona, everyone in her family takes part in the story instead of just being window dressing for the framing sequence.

It's aimed at kids, yes: kids who appreciate not being talked down to. And it's written so that adults will have fun with it too.

(Cross-posted from my website.)

Minor Mage is firmly in the "kid goes on scary quest and comes back stronger" genre. The 12-year-old protagonist is cast out to complete a nigh-impossible quest alone (aside from his armadillo familiar), facing ghouls and starvation and bandits and ghosts and murderers. He's a wizard, yes, but he's barely half-trained and only knows a handful of spells (though his herbal lore is pretty strong). Like the young heroes of A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking and Illuminations, he has to learn how to make the most of his limited abilities in order to survive -- only this story takes place not in a city but mostly in wilderness an abandoned farmlands.

From an adult perspective, Oliver's constant lamenting that he's "only a minor mage" starts to grate after a while. But that's not the perspective it's written for: it's a kids' book, and operates on kids' fantasy logic.

Speaking of the target audience: In the afterward, Kingfisher/Vernon talks about trying to convince editors that yes, this is a children's book, and getting constant pushback that it's "too scary." (This is how she ended up publishing it as Kingfisher rather than Vernon) It reminded me of similar comments Neil Gaiman wrote about Coraline, remarking that it was too scary for adults but not too scary for children.

Sometimes I wonder: Do these editors remember being 12?

(Cross-posted at my website.)