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This is the final book in the Lady Astronaut series, with Elma York landing on Mars to help establish a base. This book has the mix of space stuff, politics, relationships, and technical trouble that you would expect from the rest of series, but fundamentally, this book is about Elma learning to be a leader and it's a good capstone on her emotional and professional journey.

Unfortunately, most of the action in this book takes place off page. Early on Elma realizes people are covering something up, but that event has already happened. There's some feint that maybe more problems from Earth First terrorists could happen, but this does not materialize. And sure, there are some real consequences from the coverup, but the majority of them also happen off page. It is not as if I am reading the Lady Astronaut series for action and adventure, but it's hard not to feel like there's a more engaging story being told next door. (To that end, I wonder if this book would have been better told from Leonard's perspective.)

One thing I do really appreciate about this book is seeing Elma and Nathaniel's relationship continuing to grow. For me, Mary Robinette Kowal's writing excels at telling a story with believably married characters who each have their own foibles and needs, and I feel like that's the case both here and in her Glamourist Histories series. It's nice to see the two of them care about each other, but also argue and disagree and be understandably frustrated with each other in a way that I don't see many books engage with.

Overall, I love this novel's ideas but the genres it mixes together work against each other rather than being stronger for the combination.

(also please name your protagonist, it's so awkward, thank you)

I found the writing here to be surprisingly funny and engaging. The dialogue between the protagonist and Graham continually made me laugh, and the book is peppered with delightful drive-by analogies like "he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font" or "I lay in my own body like a wretched sandbank".

The strongest part of the book to me (and the part that I found the most engaging) was the relationship and dialogue between the protagonist and Graham. A 19th century sailor is a great foil for modern London life; however, it also does a good job of making both the protagonist and Graham real, fallible characters who each make incorrect assumptions about the other. One other way this relationship also works for me is that it lets the book delve into the parallels of being an expat forced into a new time versus a new place work really well, or of not being be able to go "back".

However, the construction seams of this novel show, and that's where it gets weak. The more "serious" time travel and time war shenanigans feel tacked on, and thematically don't really integrate with the rest of the story (tonally or thematically). As a time travel story, it's not doing anything particularly novel here, and these bits weaken the rest of the novel.

(This was the #SFFBookClub book for May 2025.)

Overall feelings: the ideas were fun, the middle felt like it dragged on, and the politics often felt heavy handed

The part of this book that I enjoyed the most and felt like was the strongest was all of the interpersonal dynamics. The first book ends with waking up the legendary emperor Qin Zheng, who in this books takes control immediately. The triangle dynamics of Zetian, Shimin, and Yizhi from the first book are broken up, with Shimin hostaged, Yizhi becoming Qin Zheng's advisor, and Zetian becoming Qing Zheng's wife. There's a lot of good tension between the fact that Qin Zheng is an authoritarian tyrant that rules with violence, but also establishes some policies that try to address inequalities from the previous regime. Zetian loathes his controlling nature, but also finds that he listens and can be extremely reasonable when given policy advice. And, all in the background, the gods are manipulating everybody and everybody is trying to deceive each other and the gods. It adds up to a nuanced dynamic that was really intriguing to me.

Another thing I liked is that the ending of this book (like the ending of the first) is a great escalation. The first book ended with "oh wow, you're just going to reveal for free that [major spoiler]". The ending to this book likewise breaks up established dynamics, creates additional tensions, and remixes and stirs up interpersonal conflicts.

That said, I do think that it just took a while to get to this ending. The politics felt didactic and heavy handed to me, and the overall plot was much slower than the first book.

This book is off the #SFFBookClub backlog, and I saw it mentioned on Imperfect Speculation (a blog about disability in speculative fiction).

The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic near future world where most people have lost the ability to dream, and the only "cure" is through the exploitation of bone marrow from indigenous people who still can. The book follows Frenchie, a Métis boy who has lost everybody he cares about and travels with a found family trying to find safety and community. The metaphor here resonates directly with the horrors of Canada past, as armed "recruiters" capture anybody who looks indigenous to send them off to "schools" to extract their bone marrow.

I know this is a YA novel, but I wish some of the characters and the protagonist Frenchie had more depth. Maybe this would land better for somebody else, but I also don't have any room in my heart for jealousy subplots, and the one here did not create any extra characterization that could have made it interesting.

Even if some of the plot points felt a bit weak and unearned, the book still ended in a very emotionally resonant way that worked for me.

I gave myself a comfort reread of this book to remember again how much I enjoy it. It's still great.

Winter's Orbit is a queer romance / science fiction book. Personally, I think folks who like one genre but don't read the other would enjoy this book, but in practice it seems like the combination seems to make folks bounce from the idea. I wonder if perhaps this is why nobody else seemed intrigued to read this for hashtag SFFBookClub. Also, the romance is largely PG rated, if that's important to you one way or the other.

The plot hook is that reticent and duty-bound Count Jainan has recently lost his husband; in order to politically preserve an interplanetary treaty, he is quickly remarried to easygoing and irresponsible Prince Kiem. When Kiem's friendly overtures are rebuffed, Kiem tries to give Jainan space to mourn and not push him or through his silences; meanwhile, traumatized Jainan (who believes himself at fault for everything) feels pushed away but also that he deserves to be.

One trope that can frustrate me in a lot of romances is where two characters don't communicate and I feel like I need to yell "why won't y'all just talk to each other". Here, it feels less that these two don't talk, so much as they continually try, but end up talking past each other and making bad assumptions about why it's going poorly. This dynamic manages to work for me because the writing makes it believable why both of them think what they're thinking and why they don't push each other for better understandings. (But, I could also see this not working for some readers!)

The afterword mentions that this is a book that came from fanfic, and between how grippy it is to read and its use of some popular tropes, I think it shows (in a positive way). It opens with arranged marriage and there is definitely a scene with only one tent. (I don't know which fandom this is meant to have come from.)

But I also think saying this book comes from a fanfic undersells it. What I love is how solidly it intertwines the developing relationship between Kiem and Jainan with the developing space politics. For plot reasons, these two need to uncover the truth around the details of the death of Jainan's former husband, but this also results in uncovering Jainan's traumas and fears. Being vague for spoiler reasons, but the climax of the book has Jainan wrestle with being gaslit about his past, having to trust Tiem, working through his insecurities, and holding true to the strong parts of himself; and all this directly in the context of solving the space politics plot. It's this moment in particular where this book really melds these two genres together perfectly.

The Old Goat and the Alien is a cozy, fluffy scifi novel that is largely inwardly focused on character growth and interpersonal conflict. It's also hella queer. This book is exactly the soft hug I expected it to be.

The main plot hook is that grumpy, goat-shape Avari inadvertantly becomes the host for the newly arrived "alien" (human) Jenna who shows up through a portal with no resources and no friends. This book has a confetti grab-bag of genders and trans and queer and disability flavors. I love love the gift economy. I also super appreciate the detail of having a major side character be a plural system that is chimera-shaped.

A story with this many identities also creates so much space for nuance; there's different kinds of disability accommodations, there's two very different ways of being autistic, there's many different ways of being trans.

(also Tak! shoutout in the thanks section??)

This anthology of transfeminine cyberpunk stories had some gems in it. The pitch made me hope for transformative ways of being intersected with surviving under oppressive social structures (it's always capitalism), and it very much delivered. It's rare that every story in a collection lands for me as a reader, but it seems a positive trait that they all didn't in this one trying to go in weirder and stranger directions.

There are so many good quotes I want to share from this collection but I'll try to limit myself.

A taste of my favorite stories: * a woman who drives a giant robot cube on the moon for scientists as a second job and dreams of moving there to have less lag in her embodiment * a bespoke body-creating artist (with their own nuanced dysphoria) trying to create body euphoria for others in a world where their bodies are callously sold at auction * an underground group who syncs their memories with each other working to collectively survive (and fight) puritanical fascists * a scientist who injects herself with own soon-to-be-shutdown nanite project and tries to figure out how to be a mother to them

Monstrilio is a hard novel for me to pin down. If I had to attach some labels to it I'd say literary fiction with a dash of horror.

It's a story rooted in loss: Magos and Joseph's son Santiago dies suddenly; Magos is enthralled by a tale about regrowing a child from its heart and so cuts out a piece of Santiago's lung from his body to do the same. As she feeds it and grows this lung, it becomes a monster that she treats as her son, and names Monstrilio. The book is divided into four parts from different perspectives: Magos, longtime friend Lena, Joseph, and finally Monstrilio.

But it's not just about grief, it's a story about family and relationships with the monstrous. Magos lives in denial and tries to believe her lung monster Monstrilio is her child Santiago again. Joseph speedruns acceptance and tries to forcibly conform his own life and Monstrilio into a facade of normality.

It's satisfying to me that the book ends from the fractured perspective of Monstrilio, rather than through the projecting biases of the adults in his life. It's interesting to see how the adults largely try to cover for Monstrilio's (at times horrible) actions and coerce him into humanity, while Monstrilio himself covers his own monstrous feelings from the adults and tries to exist in an ill-fitting human world.

I was quite engrossed by this book, although it is definitely quite (deliberately) uncomfortable at points and the book doesn't shy away from (usually off page) gore.

This is the first book in a new James SA Corey series, and I enjoyed it a bunch.

High stakes academia gets interrupted by alien invasion; their research then becomes even more high stakes while having to navigate trauma and powerful alien political currents. A pithy but unhelpful summary is that this book is about systems thinking vs the just-world fallacy.

The aliens are interesting in several fresh ways; one in particular is that they largely don't give a shit, emotionally speaking. They aren't angry or greedy or vengeful, which gives a much different flavor to an alien invasion. A lot of enjoyment in any book where humans encounter aliens is also about their relations and the slow reveal of who and what the aliens are, and so I'll hold back some more spoiler-y opinions.

(One side note about this book is just how straight it felt. Maybe I just read too much queer fiction on the regular, but this [like other books by these authors] felt subjectively in the vein of "old school heterosexual science fiction" that I might have read when I was younger. Not everything has to be everything, but it was just something that stood out to me.)

Overall, this book didn't work for me. After finishing it, I found out that Counterweight was originally intended as a low budget scifi movie and it feels like it. The characters are thin, and there are almost more characters talked about off page than we see on page. The book emits its ideas in a smoke cloud of cyberpunk chaff without engaging deeply with any of their implications.

This is a cliché critique, but most of what didn't work for me was how much this book told instead of showed. There's an entire chapter midway through where the protagonist dumps the backstory of the old LK president's misdeeds that they've chosen not to share with the reader until that point. The book continually laments how AI will slowly run more of the world and humans won't be necessary, but we see little evidence (and directly very little of AI in general).

Here's some more blabs about AI in this book that I've left in a second comment for length.

#SFFBookClub

Set on a near-future artificial island in the arctic, this book focuses on the interplay of two characters and their worlds: Antonio, a survivor of raider attacks turned artist in residence for rich traders of extraterrestrial microorganisms, and Par Augustus, a personal assistant program that has spontaneously and secretly become sentient, and comes into the keeping of Antonio.

This book goes into a lot of different directions: the relationship between humans and machines, arguments about the nature of art and artists, utopias both human and machine, the lure of authoritarianism, and a critique of attempting to be neutral. I really enjoyed the complicated relationship of Antonio and Par as it developed over time, and the interactions of the machines with each other.

A few touchpoints in this book that reminded me of other things I've read: The tone is quite different, but the way this book talks about the dual world of machines and humans reminded me a lot of Suzanne Palmer's short story The Secret Life of Bots. The way that machines coordinate things magically for Antonio feel like parts of Person of Interest, although Par feels like it has more of an agenda. This book also has machines trying to work around Asimovian robot laws. Finally, the neutral Thulians also remind me a lot of the Vorkosigan Saga's Beta Colony, where they both force people into coercive therapy and counseling when their views are misaligned.

This is easily my favorite book in the Singing Hills cycle. Cleric Chih goes back home to Singing Hills abbey, and the reader finally gets to see it in person with all of its neixin and politics. There's something about having this book set in Singing Hills that makes it a lot more grounded than the other one-off travel pieces. I love Chih coming back to their friend Ru, now acting Divine of the abbey, and having to renegotiate what their friendship looks like after so much time and change on both of their parts.

But, it's also a book about grief and transformation and the way we know others through stories. I love how the theme of change weaves throughout--it makes an ending that could have felt too pat instead resonate in a thematically satisfying way.

(One nice thing about a series of novellas that can be read in any order is that if you miss one, you're not lost. On the other hand, HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING it's easy to go read book five and then remember you never read book four. Just saying.)

"Will I dishonor Cleric Thien's memory, their chosen life and their work, and allow them to be buried under a name that is no longer their own? Is that what you are asking me?"

This is a bonus gender observation, but one thing that works really well for me specifically and that intersects neatly with the themes of change and grief is that the core of this story is a conflict over identity and deadnaming[*]. Cleric Chih comes back to find that the old Divine, Cleric Thien, has died. Thien's grandchildren have come along with mammoths to forcibly take Thien's body back home with them, while Singing Hills wants the body to stay and honor Thien's life work as a cleric.

Despite all clerics using they/them pronouns, these grandchildren Tui In Hao and Vee In Yee both continually refer to Cleric Thien as "grandfather" and "he" throughout. They also go out of their way to deride Cleric Thien's award-winning scholarly work (with a side of fantasy racism). If this conflict over identity wasn't clear enough (or for readers who maybe aren't hyperaware of pronouns and gendered language), Cleric Chih even explicitly chides these two that Thien was "not a man, a cleric".

[*] A tangent tangent, but I mean deadnaming here in what feels to me to be the original sense of the term--it's not just using the wrong name under any circumstance, but more specifically it's the threat of being buried and eulogized under the wrong name by spiteful and unsupportive family.

"The key is never to forget. Memory must be kept alive. It helps us understand our past, situate ourselves in the present, and position ourselves for the future."

This new novel by Suyi Davies Okungbowa was on my list to read even before we read David Mogo for hashtag SFFBookClub two months ago. Perhaps understandably, post-apocalyptic climate disaster fiction seems to strike a real chord these days. Compared to his debut novel, I enjoyed this more recent novella quite a bit more.

This story takes place set in a set of skyscrapers off the coast of what used to be Lagos, after the Atlantic Ocean has risen. Its three point of view characters come from different levels of this stratified society and quite literally cross class boundaries to investigate a disturbance that turns out to have much larger implications for their whole society.

If I had any complaints about this book is that its novella length doesn't give a lot of room for any of the characters or the world to truly stretch their legs. The story even fades to black right after the climax--although there's a satisfying echo of the opening dream, it leaves plenty of unanswered questions about the world and the future.

That said, I love the interstitial poetry and redacted historical reports between chapters that add such color to this world. They carried metaphorical heft in terms of layers of ark mythology, exploitative capitalism both historical and contemporary, and the power of memory and stories.