The Murderbot Diaries novellas just get better and better (this one is #3). Murderbot’s narrative voice is a work of art – it feels emotions but doesn’t want to admit to them, or talk about them, so we get beautiful, terse little notes like “I don’t know, everything was annoying right now and I had no idea why.” But we all know why; it’s because someone is trying to treat Murderbot as worthy of friendship and respect, and Murderbot absolutely cannot deal. The characterization was great, especially that of Miki, a friendly little bot whose sweetness would have been saccharine except for how it was presented through Murderbot’s annoyed eyes. Wonderfully condensed piece, where mystery and sci-fi action and those emotions that Murderbot hate so much combine and build towards a beautiful and poignant conclusion, propelling Murderbot unwillingly towards further character growth and plot development.
Tag: genre-scifi
Noor, by Nnedi Okorafor
This may be unfair, because this is only the second book I’ve read by Okorafor (I’m counting the Binti series as a single book), but I am beginning to see a pattern: 1) she comes up with really cool ideas and characters, and then 2) writes a frankly incoherent and rambling story around them. Born malformed and then further injured in an accident, narrator AO defies social norms by repairing and augmenting herself with mechanical parts. AO lives in a futuristic Africa which has harnessed the punishing effects of climate change (scorching sun, blistering windstorms) to generate solar and wind power. From that foundation, we devolve into an illogical and disjointed tale that unsuccessfully mixes together cool concepts such as an evil megacorporation, nomadic herdsmen in the age of technology, an entire hidden city of technocrat rebels, manipulation of crowds through social media and superstition, and the cherry on top: a rather abrupt love story between two characters with no chemistry and nothing in common. Quite a letdown, really.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers
Another cute robot story. It’s set generations after robots became self-aware and humans let them walk into the wilderness rather than continue to enslave them, and also after the small number of remaining humans have decided to minimize their footprint on the earth rather than continue to destroy it. In that time, a tea monk named Dex (they/them) finds themself unsatisfied with life, goes literally off the beaten path, and meets a robot named Mosscap who has decided its mission is to figure out what humans want. Since this is also what Dex is trying to figure out, the two go off on an odd-couple journey through the wilderness, having philosophical discussions along the way. Quiet, thoughtful, and adorable.
Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells
Murderbot Diaries #2 is almost as good as its prequel, which is to say that it’s still extremely good. In this story, the security cyborg that calls itself Murderbot is investigating some strange events in its past, and reluctantly accepts the help of a bored research transport ship in doing so. Murderbot being Murderbot, it also finds itself once again reluctantly protecting naive humans who get themselves into dangerous situations. Love Murderbot’s exasperated and sarcastic internal monologue, and how Wells gently eases in the character development and moments of growth. Beautifully done. And there are space station battles too, which are always fun.
Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki
This book is so many things: a love story to the food and immigrant culture of LA, an adoring paean to videogame and classical music, a coming-of-age rescue of a trans girl escaping abuse, a Faustian bargain involving cursed violins, and also aliens who have disguised their stargate inside a donut shop. Quite often the prose is beautiful, lyrical, evocative… and yet the writing is super choppy, the first person perspective comes across as awkward, and the POV switches so rapidly between characters that it’s honestly really annoying. I liked this book anyway, but I liked it despite the writing style.
Sinopticon 2021: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction, edited by Xueting Christine Ni
A good anthology, no duds, smooth and lyrical translation. The editor did a great job writing afterwords that gave insight into each author’s life and tied it to the story; for instance, Ma Boyong’s amazing “The Great Migration,” about how hordes of Martian immigrants crowd onto the space shuttles to visit Earth every time the planets approached one another, was inspired by his experience with the annual travel crush during Chinese New Year. Other stories look back at traumatic events in Chinese history, like Zhao HaiHong’s “Rendezvous: 1937,” which had time travelers reacting to the Nanjing Holocaust; or reference folklore like Regina Kanyu Wang’s “The Tide of Moon City,” which jumps off the legend of the cowherd and the weaver girl to explore political and personal tensions between binary planets in a shared star system. I think my favorite was “The Last Save” by Gu Shi, which allowed people to go back to previous save points and reload events and try again after they’ve messed things up, and then pivoted to inspect the impact such actions would have on their loved ones.
All Systems Red, by Martha Wells
The Murderbot Diaries had been recommended all over the place and the praise is well deserved. I really liked the self-named Murderbot, a security cyborg AI provisioned to a planetary exploration team. Murderbot managed to hack into its controller module to gain its freedom… and proceeds to carry on doing the bare minimum required by its job while binging on entertainment serials in its spare time. (So relatable!) Despite Murderbot’s general antisocial tendencies, it finds itself trying to take care of its assigned humans as things around them get suspiciously dangerous. Murderbot is a super adorable character, the humans around it are well-sketched, and the plot moves really well. Next few books on hold!
Red Rising, by Pierce Brown
The writing style didn’t really work for me at the beginning, lots of sentence fragments and testosterone, but it grew on me until I found myself paging fluidly through to the end. Incredibly dystopian from top to bottom: the futuristic society’s caste structure is reinforced by bioengineering so that the top castes are literally superhuman compared to the poor workers at the bottom, but even the highest caste children have to go through a Hunger Games type culling to come out on the very top. It’s nuts and weirdly compelling. There’s definitely a lot of casual violence but it’s all presented as mind games, so it doesn’t feel unnecessarily excessive.
In the Watchful City, by S. Qiouyi Lu
A dreamy, nonlinear novella in which a mysterious visitor with a box full of stories gets the unwilling attention of a spirit-caretaker for a city. The spirit-caretaker is innocent and empathic; the stories open ær eyes (yep, this is one of those stories with extremely nonstandard pronouns) to the moral gray area æ inhabits as æ tries to uphold the city’s isolationist standards. The overarching plot is a bit thin, but the interstitial stories are poignant and pretty.
Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson
I had no idea this was a new release, but it’s definitely timely: for instance, his characters can consult their pandemic apps to gauge their relative safety among others and determine whether they need to wear masks, or distance, or both; and one of the main characters has lost his sense of smell to covid-23 or something. I really enjoyed this book, which I consider Stephenson at his best and most focused; none of the thought experiments were really that wild, the characters were confidently drawn, and the casual references to realistic details (I too know what it looks like to see ski lights floating disembodied above the Vancouver skyline!) made the fantastic elements that much more believable. A great thought experiment about fighting climate change and sea level rise, and just some of the geopolitical fallout that could result.