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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.

Rebecca Thorne's Can't Spell Treason Without Tea is a cozy sapphic romance fantasy, explicitly in the vein of Travis Baldree's work. The book focuses on the (prexisting, and secret) relationship between a palace guard and a powerful mage. When the queen pushes too far, they treasonously abandon responsibility to set up a combination teashop/bookshop in a small town, like you do. It feels like there's larger stakes here than in similar books, but they're still personal and local ones. I'd also argue that these two are so competent in their own domains that any conflict feels much more about the potential emotional impact than a true worrisome threat.

I appreciated the amount of worldbuilding heft here. I am always a sucker for anything that opens with a fantasy map, and I felt like small bordertown Tawney was interestingly situated both geographically and politically. It's caught between three countries, and has two local governers who butt heads over who actually is in charge. It's just got the sense of place that I want out of a fantasy book. The book also has some magic system details that had more depth than I was expecting from this sort of book.

Overall, this was quite the cozy read, and it's definitely the kind of treat my brain needed right now. I'm looking forward to more novels in this series, as it felt like there were quite a few hooks for future complications. I laughed at the in-world explanation for why the biggest of these hooks lands itself in the "quite important but not at all urgent" category, which seems perfect for ongoing fantasy hijinks.

The Husbands is a light-hearted book whose core premise is a marriage-themed time loop/multiverse situation: whenever Lauren's husband goes into the attic, an entirely new husband comes down instead, and reality warps itself so that this is the husband she's always had. Shenanigans.

This goes in a lot of directions I enjoyed. It explores the "what if" feeling of imagining what different relationships and lives would like with different people in them. There's funny montages of "nope not this one, nor this one, nope nope nope". There's a hilarious "is this husband cheating on me" scene. There's an incredibly awkward "oh I have a different job and I have no idea how to do it or even who my boss is" moment. There's also the nature of understanding who you are by seeing the ways you do and do not change in different multiverse situations.

Some of the time loop-esque bits reminded me of playing the game In Stars and Time recently, in the feelings of impermanence and loneliness through living a life that you can't share or record. There's also questions of how responsible you are for the state of other people's lives when you have reality-changing powers.

(That said, there were also some dark moments that I found quite discomforting; when reality can only be reset by getting one specific person into one specific attic, Lauren goes to some awful places a couple of times, knowing that whatever she has done will be un-done.)

Despite being a book about a magical series of marriages, I wouldn't say this is a romance book. Lauren's major character trait (to me, at least) is that she is pretty accommodating and so the book's core arc here is her learning about herself and what her wants are, now that she has the power to make reality-changing choices.

The Woods All Black is a queer and trans 1920's story about a nurse named Leslie being called out to help the small Appalachian town of Spar Creek. The initial foreground of trying to provide services to chilly and creepy Christian townsfolk is backgrounded by both gothic and body horror, as well as some romance.

One element of this book that I thought was done well is that it deals with Leslie's wartime trauma (and homophobia trauma). In this aspect, it echoes a lot of the things I liked about T. Kingfisher's What Feasts at Night, about somebody trying to understand what they can trust about their own perceptions in a strange and disturbing environment.

I love the queer solidarity in this book, about people trying to be themselves while being torn down by the airquotes community around them. The feeling of being somewhere unwelcoming and magnetically being pulled to befriend the one other outcast resonated particularly strongly for me.

I also appreciated reading a book taking on a historical trans perspective. Of course that's my language, and not the book's. Leslie calls himself an invert, and follows butch femme scripts that he learned in Paris, not having any other signposts to follow. Stevie is a local to Spar Creek that the locals read as a willful tomboy; he doesn't have the same language as Leslie, but still has a strong sense of his own identity. Mostly, I love that they each have things to teach the other about themselves.

The subtitle to this book is "When they call you a monster, show your teeth". It's got a delightfully sharp "be gay do crime" ring to it, but it's also an accurate depiction of the shape of its story and the revenge fantasy of fighting back against hatred by being the things they hate you for.

I love the concept of the Wayward Children series as a whole, but individually a few of the books have been hit or miss for me. If I had to pick, In an Absent Dream and this book have been my favorites out of the whole series, largely in that they both focus on a single character and so the plot and theme can be a lot more tight in the short space of a novella.

Lost in the Moment and Found follows Antsy, who runs away from horrific step-dad, finds herself lost, and steps through a door into the Shop Where the Lost Things Goes. (I also deeply appreciated the Author's Note which precedes the book and content warns for grooming and adult gaslighting, but also gives the reassurance that "before anything can actually happen, Antsy runs.")

In this book, the reader gets teased with larger worldbuilding hints about the Doors and how they operate, but thematically for Antsy it's all about abuse and loss. She's literally lost and in a shop that collects lost things; she has lost trust in adults and the safety of the world; by the end, everything she's lost all ties together really satisfyingly. Some more spoilery thoughts.

Six months after Abby was born, her mother sat her down in the living room and took her hands, as she'd done twice before. Antsy sat rigid, having learned that these were the moments where her life changed for the worse, where things she didn't even know could be lost were ripped away from her and thrown aside.

This is a minor detail, and I certainly differ a lot from Antsy on many points, but boy howdy did this quote hit me right in the psychologically unsafe "serious conversations" feelings.

This was a fun prequel to Legends & Lattes. It was a much stronger book for me with much more depth; Viv is stuck injured in a small seaside town and has to figure out what to do with herself while she's recovering. It's a cozy book about finding new directions, supporting friends who are stuck, and connections even when they're temporary. These are very different books, but it made me want to go reread Bujold's Memory, which is also a book centered on sorting out your life when its expected trajectory has been suddenly altered.

It's also a book about loving books and caring for a bookstore, which immediately endeared itself to me. Fern (the foul-mouthed rattkin who owns said bookstore) recommends Viv a series of books from different (in-world fantasy takes on) genres. The snippets from these books are entertaining but each one ties implicitly and explicitly into the themes and plot. Mystery! Action! Romance! Friendship! Local authors! Maybe it's a little too on the nose, but it worked really well for me.

(As a super minor aside here, it's also interesting to me about where the tension in this book comes from. Certainly, there's a larger necromancer in the background that creates the larger plot. Secondarily, money in the book is also a concern, but it's less that any of these characters will starve and it's more an emotional worry--Fern is concerned that her bookstore will fold and she will have failed her dad and her own dream. There's a lot of discussion of Viv paying for baked goods and her room and board, but despite being a young mercenary there's never any "how am I going to support this lifestyle of staying at this inn all summer" worries. It reminds me of the kind of cozy worldbuilding that Zandra Vandra does, where there's emotional tension but the normal grinding terribleness of the world has been softened at the edges.)

I deeply enjoyed System Collapse--it was a nice followup book to the events of the previous one and I don't think could stand alone. Murderbot has certainly been through a lot, but the last book was particularly intense and it makes sense that there's lasting effects from it. It felt like a smaller and more internally-focused book with less snark and more trama, but I am here for that.

To me at least, Murderbot and its series feels like the embodiment of vulnerability avoidance: handwaving, the first few books seemed like Murderbot coping with learning it cared and people caring about it; Network Effect was about """relationships"" (with ART and 2 and 3); this book in particular explored the vulnerability of trauma and being partially human (or at the very least having some fleshy parts). I think it helps to better situate Murderbot as a construct--not a bot, not human, but somewhere in between with the problems of both.

On the surface, this certainly looks like a shift in Murderbot's competence. (It's certainly a shift in its self-perceived competence; Murderbot both seemingly does a good job while also beating itself up for not being perfect; it's hard to see past the narrative bias.)

Previous Murderbot dealt with situations and humans out of its control (still does but used to too), but in this book there's an extra struggle of coping with its own [redacted]. Given that it has people around it that care, it also has to deal with the shame of these people covering for it too. Dr. Mensah dealing with her own trauma during the last book felt like a nice foreshadowing here for what Murderbot is going through here.

Bonus joy moments: * the documentary! * ART being a jerk to both Iris and Murderbot * ART and Holism butting heads