Other Ever Afters

Melanie Gillman's Other Ever Afters is a cute collection of graphic short stories. Maybe fables? They are not as heavy-handed as traditional fables, and they center feelings and belonging. The back copy describes the book as "original, feminist, queer fairy tales" but the queerness is a light touch because they are fairy tales, so the important bits are things like "there is a giant outside our village" and "the goose-keeper lives outside the castle". The drawings are bright and softly round-edged and lovely.

It's overall cute, and a quick little collection of stories.

This post's theme word is pussivant (v. intr.), "to meddle, fuss, move around busily." The villagers pussivanted around the square in an attempt to find the yearly sacrificial maiden.

The Mere Wife

I adored Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf and was curious to read her earlier novel, The Mere Wife, which draws on the story of Beowulf. In several reviews I see that The Mere Wife has been described as a "modern retelling" of Beowulf from womens' perspectives; to me, the entire book was vague and ethereal in its storytelling, so I could not be sure that it was "modern", as opposed to simply a different setting with more glass windows and trains than are strictly described in Beowulf.

The setting begins with a vagueness about the specifics of Dana Mills --- what year is it? what middle-eastern country is she a soldier in? is this meant to be modern reality or just to draw on elements of modernity? --- and the book never provides answers or clues or these questions. How did she come to be pregnant? If she is realistically hungry and afraid of starving and being attacked by other humans, then how did she manage to give birth alone (to Grendel) in an abandoned train tunnel, with no apparent difficulties? Probably I read this book in the wrong frame of mind, as I kept trying to puzzle out these logistics even though the prose flowed poetically and only suggested the shape of descriptions, durations, feelings, logical connections.

Some of the vagueness comes from details and story explorations beyond Beowulf. Parts of the book focus on Willa, the wife of Roger Herot, son of the founder of (planned and gated community) Herot Hall. In the Willa chapters, the vagueness and dissociation of the prose seemed to be a reflection of her isolation and emotional coldness, and the ways in which her expected role limited her freedom of movement, dress, what to eat, how to act, what to say. This was effective and skillful writing but I found myself looking for a moral, or a scrap of redemption, or even a suggestion of feminism and empowerment. This left me feeling as cold as Willa, and it seemed like the story had been written --- or perhaps constrained by the original Beowulf --- to close all avenues of imagining a different or better life for the women of the community.

And on occasion, the women got first-person-plural chapters to spin their own mythology directly to the reader. Chapter 21 is only 3 pages long  (pp 153-155). It begins "Hark! We slap the bell on the front desk of the police station." This is deliciously close to the structure of some more traditional translations of Beowulf and I appreciated that. This perspective is delivered in first-person-plural, from the perspective of the nameless and amorphous group of neighborhood women. "There's a long tradition that says women gossip, when in fact women are the memory of the world. We keep the family trees and the baby books. We manage the milk teeth. We keep the census of diseases, the records of divorces, battles, and medals. We witness the wills. We wash the weddings out of the bedsheets." (page 153-154) This is delightfully close to Alice Frasier's repeated joke (paraphrased from memory): "History is a record of what men do while women are busy maintaining civilization by keeping everyone fed, clean, healthy, and alive." Frasier's original is more pithy.

Chapter 21 ends, "We will not surrender. We will not back down. Soon, soon, the mountain will be covered with men in uniforms, hounds, cars moving fast, people telling and yelling. Soon, soon, we will have what is ours." (pp 155) Sinister, creepy, skin-tingling, excellent. The follow-up chapter 29 uses the same creepy first-person-plural telling and reframing of the entire story, and ends (pp 206), "We're the ones who make the world, the warriors who stand watch, the women on whose wrong side you would not want to walk. What do you get the women who have everything? You get them more."

Contrast this with Dana's perspective, late in the book (pp 212-213), "Who's the monster now? ... No one even looks at me. You don't really own anything. Nothing is yours forever, not your body, not your youth, not even your mind." Her perspective is grim and dismal throughout, even when contemplating how to care for her son. "Here's the truth of the world, here it is. You're never everything anyone else wants. In the end, it's going to be you, all alone on a mountain, or you, all alone, in a hospital room. Love isn't enough, and you do it anyway. Love isn't enough, and it's still this thing that everyone wants. I see what he wants. I know him better than I know myself. I know his whole history, and I don't know my own."

The coldness of the chorus of women is a sinister weight that oppresses both Dana and Willa and drives the story on to the bloody conclusion of Beowulf (pp 268):

We question Willa. She tells us that Dana Mills is back and Ben Woolf is deranged, and we believe her. Murderer not dead? Check. Monster not slain? Check. Hero not heroic? Check. 

We take over. 

Everyone thinks all we've been doing, for thirty years, is planting award-winning begonias. It's always the mothers who are hated. The fathers are too far away, home at 5:30, off the train, perfume on their jackets. The mothers are the clay pigeons children want to shoot out of the sky. Imagine being a target for fifty years, from your moments of first nubility to moments of humility, when your skin feels like paper and you stop sleeping forever, unacknowledged as being the armed guard of civilization.

Creepy and overwhelming.

Overall this was a weird one. Familiarity with Beowulf made me keep looking for clues and connections, differences and editorial decisions. This was at odds with the tone of the book, which was more of an ungrounded meditation on women's feelings of pressure and social isolation. If I were looking for a book that focused on a character secondary to the main plotline, I would prefer to reread Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth, which is vague but gives clues about a substantive plotline (and has more sarcasm and female characters who are allowed personal agency).

This post's theme word is proscription (n), "a prohibition or the act of prohibiting." Eating more calories was not proscribed, and yet every housewife avoided it and policed her peers to enforce the unstated limits.

Witch

Finbar Hawkins' novel Witch tells the story of teenage Eveline, who sees her mother murdered by witch hunters and struggles to keep herself and her younger sister safe in an English countryside rife with suspicion and mob violence. The story is set in 1646 and the novel is dedicated to the men and women persecuted by the witchfinding craze.

Hawkins tells a fascinating story and manages to draw in the reader. Most of the book is balanced on the delicate question: is this a historical fantasy where the story is based on historical facts and magic is real, or is this a historical fiction where the story is based on facts and magic is not, as far as anyone can reproducibly demonstrate, real? As a modern reader I found this balancing act superb, an act of authorial skill that is like watching someone juggle while also riding a unicycle. It made the story feel real and emotionally accessible in a way that hit me differently than a direct fantasy-world-where-magic-is-definitely-real.

This post's theme word is ruth (n), "compassion or contrition." The community is held together by the ruth we hold for each other.

Galaxy: The Prettiest Star

Galaxy: The Prettiest Star is a graphic novel by Jadzia Axelrod and Jess Taylor. It's a joyful, colorful celebration of lines and active drawings; also, incidentally, it is a metaphor for trans-ness. The main character is a vivid alien princess, in disguise as a normal human highschool-age boy. There is also a playful supervisory robot corgi.

The story explores attempts to blend in at high school, experimenting with self-presentation, the malleability of friendships and social pressure and how high school feels very high-stakes. Plus there is a charming corgi! (I've recently met a corgi puppy who lives a few blocks away and is a charming ball of energy.)

The story is straightforward works really nicely. It holds up for me as a way to discuss masking, coming out, being yourself, and transition. Always feeling watched and surveilled on personal presentation. Some parts are definitely fantasy and I was left bemusedly trying to figure out if anything lined up with the secret radio transmissions, or the eternal space war.

This post's theme word is reck (n), "care or concern." The entire basketball team had little reck for the prom night dancing kerfuffle.

Howl's Moving Castle

Diana Wynne Jones' novel Howl's Moving Castle is a fun fantasy novel. It was adapted into an animated Mikazaki film but the adaptation changed many of the text-rendered delights of the story. The book sidles up to a sort of genre-savvy knowledge about fantasy stories. Protagonist Sophie is the eldest of three daughters, so she inherently understands that any choice she makes will go wrong in order to better frame the improved choices of her younger sisters; the youngest, of course, will make the best choice of all and have great fortune in life. Sophie understands everything in her life in this light --- working in the family hat shop, living in a provincial town, avoiding the maidens'-heart-devouring wizard Howl whose wandering castle emits puffs of steam as it haunts the fields outside her town.

The narrative voice here is joyful, and Jones is a master. (I read this book after having it strongly recommended, years ago, and that recommendation absolutely holds up!) All narration is in limited third-person and we mostly follow Sophie, but the reader is allowed to witness and notice things like hints being dropped and then named as hints by other characters in the scene, or Sophie's own magic which she denies having but frequently uses. The biggest and most fantastic reveal is (spoiler) that the wizard Howl, whose actions seem disjointed, fickle, and mysterious to Sophie, is actually a 27-year-old Welsh grad student who escaped into this fantasy world to (probably) avoid defending his thesis. I admit I filled in some of that invention, but most of it is actually right there in the novel.

This was a quick read and I'd recommend it. My edition had some Q&A with the author in the endnotes, which only increased my enjoyment of the story.

This post's theme word is hierophant (n), "an interpreter of esoteric knowledge." The skills of a wizard and a Ph. D. student are both obtained from close study with a hierophant and years of diligent work.

Charmed Life

Diana Wynne Jones' Charmed Life is a children's fantasy book (apparently it is chronologically the third in a series of six! although it was the first published and is the recommended entry point).

This book is a joyful play on common children's fantasy ideas. The protagonists are a sister and brother, orphaned in the first few pages, and we follow them on their next steps. Gwendolen is a gifted witch, whose future is foretold to bring her great power, and she drags her magic-less little brother Eric along with her as she takes determined steps towards her destiny. She is stymied by the usual barriers: orphans have no adults advocating for them, magic is hard to learn, and the adult world runs on opaque and mysterious rules that children must obey (or discover by transgressing and being punished).

I came to the story with the usual Grown-Up Fantasy Genre Questions: how does magic work? how does one learn? what are the rules? ... and I was delighted that all of these questions were absolutely diversions from the way the story wanted to go! Gwendolen is a bit stubborn and direct --- as are many girl protagonists --- but when facing punishment from adults, things went completely off the rails and my expectations were entirely subverted.

A quick read, suitable for many ages, and cheery. Recommended to me, and I pass along this recommendation to others.

This post's theme words and contexts come from the novel:

• limbeck (n), "an apparatus used in distillation." One table was crowded with torts and limbecks, some bubbling, some empty. (page 88)
• cresset (n), "an iron vessel or basket used for holding an illuminant and mounted as a torch or suspended as a lantern." The cresset was out. The torts and limbecks and other vessels were all clean. (p 219)

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

 The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is N. K. Jemisin's debut novel. The fantasy novel setting features a large empire where gods are real, personified beings that it is possible to interact with. The protagonist is suddenly bumped up from an estranged-former-heir-to-a-throne to a politically-relevant-yokel-swept-to-the-capital and has to navigate all new relationships, power structures, politics, alliances, and so on.

The book was good (I read it awhile ago) but not enough of a draw that I continued to read the rest of the trilogy. I really loved this author's Broken Earth trilogy (previously 1, 2, 3) and recommend those books as very emotionally powerful and a really interesting fantasy world.

This post's theme word is hyaline (adj), "like glass; transparent or translucent." This post displays my hyaline intent to work through my tall to-be-read and to-be-blogged stacks of books.

Fine Structure

Fine Structure is a scifi novel by author qntm. It starts in the present day with some physicists constructing an experiment to test their new theory. So far so good! Unfortunately for them, their theory is correct. Except that every time the test shows their theory works, the fundamental laws of the universe change so that the experiment (and the effect and the theory itself!) is not reproducible.

Scientific reproducibility turns out to be a minor concern among the other issues this creates.

This is a very cool premise, and the entire novel is full of very cool science-fiction ideas. The narrative style, however, jumps around between different storylines and timeframes in a way that I found completely removed the stakes from the story. (Spoiler: there's no tension in the current high-stakes chase scene if I've already seen a future scene where these characters are alive and fine, and everyone else is gone.) At some point I also realized that none of the characters was sympathetic or interesting, as characters --- the author is basically moving them around like puzzle-pieces in order to get to the parts of the story where the cool scifi idea can happen.

Quite late in the novel I was wondering "why did this end up in my TBR stack?" and suddenly there was a paragraph about antimemetics and realized that this must be linked to SCP (previously).

I'd recommend this for vacation reading but the lack of characterization meant that it was missing some depth my brain kept looking for.

This post's theme word is fulgent (adj), "shining brightly; radiant." The prose aims to be fulgent and lands somewhere around "thesaurus explosion" for the most abstract scenes.

Time to Orbit: Unknown

Time to Orbit: Unknown is a novel by Derin Edala. It's the length of maybe 5 standard novels, but available to read in its entirety online here (some typos). This is a work in the specific genre "hypergraphic authors for voracious readers", subgenre "scifi themes". I only recommend it if you are in the target audience "voracious readers", in which case I strongly recommend it.

The story opens on an interstellar colony ship, with one passenger unexpectedly awakened from transport hibernation. This is a great setup from a novel standpoint, as the first-person narrator has no idea what is going on and provides a great introduction to the world for the readers. The fact that he has to figure out what's broken on the spaceship, from first principles, since he is not an astronaut, adds to this framing device convenience. It also makes the mystery delicious: we are discovering things at the same time as the narrator. A mystery! In space!

The author is excellent at their craft. I don't know how else to express it. This story starts as a space-scifi-mystery and every once in awhile, it completely shifts genre. (Spoilers: logistics challenge! science puzzle! rogue AI! social conflict leadership struggle! murder mystery! international interplanetary geopolitical conflict! sociology study of voluntary colonization! philosophical exploration of individuality!) Every time the genre shifted, I was absolutely convinced it was a good idea and the author brought me along. At some point I realized the game was "genre shift in an apparently-endless story" and I loved that, too.

Last week the author published the end --- chapter 183! --- of the story. It didn't end in a way I find satisfying, and it seemed a bit rushed, but honestly I don't know that any end to the infinitely-extensible-feeling beginning of the story would ever feel satisfactory.

Recommended if you have interest in a long reading project that is a bit silly and a bit tense and 100% scifi in the post-publishers-encouraging-doorstop-series era.

This post's theme word is ontic (adj), "having or relating to a real existence." Certain genre staples of science fiction are purely joyful, not ontic.

Six Wakes

Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes is a science fiction novel set on an interstellar ship, a whodunnit novel about clones and implanted memories. The premise seems interesting and I've read (and listened to podcasts of) much of Lafferty's other work.

This book suffers from writing that seems like it is trying to be adapted to a movie or maybe a TV series. Descriptions are sort of basic and don't use the full expressivity of written language. (I know this is a niche complaint, I am a reader of Specific Tastes.) Every chapter ends with a dramatic cliffhanger. These cliffhangers are often resolved by suddenly revealing backstory that the audience (and other characters) could not possibly have known or guessed. I was most irritated by the reveals that critical plot points depended on societal norms and laws about cloning, since the existence and details of those laws would have precluded a lot of the earlier points of confusion and plot.

If what you want is a mystery puzzle set on an interstellar colonizing ship, I've been enjoying Derin Edala's Time to Orbit: Unknown (which you can read free online).

This post's theme word is aspersion (n), "a damaging accusation; slander." It's strange to me that I have read so many books upon which I cast aspersions.

We Can Fix It!

Jess Fink's We Can Fix It! is a brief graphic novel that investigates the question: what if you could travel back in time to formative points in your youthful memories, to try to advise your younger self against making embarrassing mistakes?

What follows is a series of comedic exchanges. Some people never change, and the self-awareness to realize this makes the entire comic wry and clever. No big solutions are achieved, but saving your younger self from choking, from making out with the wrong teen, and from various self-esteem missteps is presented in a charming and delightful manner.

Recommended! It's a quick read.

This post's theme word is skiamachy (n), "a mock fight or a fight with an imaginary enemy." Philosophists debate whether the metaphorical skiamachy with insecurity is too on-the-nose when represented as a slap-fight with one's childhood self, enabled by time travel.

Spear

Nicola Griffith's Spear is a short, fascinating novella that retells a side quest legend in the Arthurian constellation of stories and characters.

It's lovely. The prose is gorgeous, as always from this author. The main character is a woman who gets to make her own choices and have skills and an identity as an individual, which is the kind of detail I wish I didn't have to highlight but I'm glad to see.

Just as with Hild, this book included certain details of daily life and choices that stayed with me. It's raining and two knights are escorting through the woods? One must offer to go hoodless, for the peripheral awareness. Is magic real or is it just cultural significance and placebo suggestions? I loved this, and it was a brief and delicious read.

(I was left with the impression that I missed significant plot choices and story details because I'm not familiar enough with Arthurian legends and lore. That's okay, the book was great anyway.)

This post's theme word is evanescent (adj), "fading quickly; transitory." The evanescent details of lore dimmed beneath the onslaught of accrued cultural Arthurian baggage.

There is no antimemetics division

There is no antimemetics division is a novel / series of short stories / piece of collaborative fiction authored by qntm. The entire work is readable for free online. It is vaguely unsettling horror --- not my usual preference --- but excellently written and with a compelling premise.

There is no antimemetics division lives inside SCP, a huge online collaborative fiction site loosely based around a single fictional prompt and set in roughly the same universe. If you read widely on the SCP site, you will eventually find some mutually-incompatible storylines; these are explicable under the premise of the universe: the site documents a sort of parallel reality (or is it) where certain ideas have the power to erase themselves from your memory. These are "antimemes", and they can propagate just like memes but are much more difficult to secure, contain, and protect against (SCP).

I don't usually enjoy horror, but this novel and the SCP project more widely are very gentle about the horror angle. If you go looking to be scared, you can find that --- but there are also storylines that are 100% playing the premise for comedic value, entire stories based around one pun punchline, and nudge-nudge-wink-wink stories that play with the tropes of horror joyfully. Spending many hours reading this novel, and various other SCP works, convinced me that I'm actually OK with horror, as long as it is psychological and interspersed with jokes. SCP is more like Jasper Fforde's sense of humor, melted with Peter Watts' attitude and then forced to write exclusively in the format of bureaucratic filing reports.

Rereading the above, my opinion might not be clear. I'm trying to be descriptive. 

I strongly recommend There is no antimemetics division. Try the first few chapters and see if they scratch a particular brain itch for you, as they did for me. If you like the premise, then I hope you've already read Peter Watts' Blindsight (GO READ IT RIGHT NOW, it remains my #1 most-recommended-to-others book).

This post's theme word is descript (adj), "having distinctive features or qualities." This novel made me much more cognizant of the aggressively descript and nondescript elements of my environment.

Jhereg

Stephen Brust's Jhereg jumped to the top of the TBR queue because of Cory Doctorow's strong recommendation. It didn't hit any sweet spots for me: it was a quick ~230 pages of fantasy, told in first-person by an assassin, in a fantasy world with sorcery and witchcraft and Dragaerans (descriptions render these more human than the name would suggest). There were action sequences and preparation scenes and scheming and thousand-year internecine feuds. No plot twists were surprising, although the narration chose at many points to casually reveal things that shifted the entire world-building operation (for example, at one point --- and this is not much of a spoiler --- it is revealed that death is not particularly permanent, and in fact is just a way of sending a snippy message to your enemies).

I might read the next book in the series, but it's low-priority. There's a new Jasper Fforde book out! And I still haven't read the sequel to Hild!

This post's theme word is gegg (v intr / noun), "to play a hoax or practical joke; a trick or practical joke." In a world where magic is a daily practice, there is a breadth of possible geggs.

If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe

If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe is a fantasy (?) horror (?) comedy novel by Jason Pargin, who also wrote John Dies at the End.

Like John Dies at the End -- as well as Pargin's other self-descriptive novels titled This Book is Full of Spiders, and What the Hell Did I Just Read -- this novel's title completely gives away the tone and contents of the book, while still preserving enough wacky mystery that the book can surprise. In this case, I vaguely remembered that John Dies at the End was sort of gonzo-humor and so my surprise came mostly from the graphic horror elements of If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. I wasn't expecting those, didn't want them, and don't usually seek out that particular genre for my pleasure reading.

The comedy was suitably wacky, the mystery of the book was indeed clued variously throughout the book but readers would not ever have guessed the actual way it would resolve, and as the title declares, the book does attempt to describe its own provenance and the issues that it causes.

Overall this was a fine book --- a quick read at 432 pages, although I had to stop reading it before bed because the graphic horror scenes were not good pre-sleep brain fodder for dreams. The cover is an electric green-yellow and the cover art is great; the color, art, and title probably mostly explain why I picked this up and read it. It also was a good brain puzzle.

Recommended if you like horror or ghastly comedy. Pretty gorey and dark, plus I'm pretty sure almost every character is described in the depths of depression and various other mental illnesses, as well as everyone suffering under wretched capitalism and societal decline.

This post's theme word is penultimatum (n), "the demand made before an ultimatum." Climactic scenes should feature an explicitly-identified penultimatum, so that all readers can appropriately ratchet their anticipation.

Wolfwalkers

 Wolfwalkers is an animated film from the same director as The Secret of Kells. It has a similar sort of art and line style, with movements easily flowing across the screen in a way I found very aesthetically pleasing. You can read the plot summary on Wikipedia, so I'll just give some viewing notes:

If possible, you should view this on a bedsheet in a neighbor's backyard.

Cover your delicious blood with skin, and cover that with clothing, then bugspray. (You will still be bitten on the face, and hands, and through your socks. This is the destiny of the delicious. Your itchy discomfort will be offset by the bug-free experience of neighbor kids.)

At the appropriate time --- and trust me, you will know the appropriate time --- you should absolutely howl along with the onscreen wolves. Everyone else, on their lawn chairs and picnic blankets, will absolutely do this, especially if < 7 years old.

Five stars, highly recommended. Not entirely historically-accurate.

This post's theme word is eidolon (n), "an idealized form" or "a phantom". The animation smoothly showed transition between physical humans, eidolon scents and spirits, and wolves.

Artificial Condition

Artificial Condition is the second in Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries" series; it won a Hugo award in 2019. It continues the first-person account of a now-rogue human-robot construct which used to be an armed security agent but is now free(ish) to pursue its own interests --- but notably still constrained by the weird hodgepodge of spacefaring human societies and their various legal and social restrictions, the most relevant of which is that Murderbot is not considered a full, independent person and is regarded as something closer to property or a slave.

This book continued the tone and themes of the previous one, central among them the Murderbot's increasing self-awareness of things like emotional state, body language, facial expression, and social relationships. But in an extremely sardonic and analytical tone, of course --- this leads to some delightful things like "pouting" by powering down or the classic description of the murderbot development cycle: "But you can't put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security... So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects." (chapter 2, 9%) It also hit some poignant storytelling beats that land particularly hard given the narrator: in discussing TV dramas, it says, "But there weren't any depictions of [murderbots] in books, either. I guess you can't tell a story from the point of view of something that you don't think has a point of view." (chapter 2, 17%)

In addition to casting aspersions on all humans for their idiotic/bigoted attitudes towards non-humans, the book does a fair amount of oblique emotional growth for Murderbot --- for example "I shouldn't have asked myself that question. I felt a wave of non-caring about to come over me, and I knew I couldn't let it." (chapter 3, 19%) Murderbot's one true passion is watching teledramas, which often get referenced "in an effort to figure out what the hell was going on with humans. It hadn't helped." (chapter 7, 73%) Nevertheless Murderbot has some self-realizations like "And now I knew why I hadn't wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person." (chapter 4, 32%, delightfully reversing many decades of "robots want to pass as human" tropes in fiction!) and the final portion of the book, which included a lot of introspection like "I wish being a construct made me less irrational than the average human but you may have noticed this is not the case." (chapter 7, 78%)

I liked this book --- it was again very quick and enjoyable. I am curious what future adventures Murderbot can get up to, since book 1 was "liberation" and book 2 was "uncovering past secrets" so the future can only hold new wrinkles. We readers got a taste of what is going on in the broader human civilization and it seems like an omnishambles. Given the extremely high number of times that bots/constructs casually edit security logs, footage, and human databases, my estimate of this human civilization is that its documents are swiss cheese and completely unreliable, and it only limps along because all of the non-human intelligences basically tolerate the humans because life would be boring without them --- but the humans have no idea! I'm curious if this will be explored more.

This post's theme word is Gallionic (adj), "indifferent or uncaring." The intelligences running ships are neither rule-bound nor Gallionic regarding their human passengers.

All Systems Red

All Systems Red is the first in Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries" series; it won a Hugo award in 2018. It is a first-person account of a human-robot construct which is tasked with corporate security on an exploration mission to a new planet. It's quick and short, and the fun parts are:

• the story is told in the first person from a point of view which includes interfacing with drone cameras and so is much broader and more comprehensive than a usual human, BUT which also occasionally glitches or shuts down
• the internal monologue voice is dry and a little sarcastic, but the vocalized speech is all pretty straightforward --- this contrast was very satisfying
• on the second read, I noticed that the narration was impeccable about the Murderbot both not having a name and not having a gender; this was done so smoothly that on first read I had mentally pictured Murderbot as a woman (I guess because it was first person and that's how I perceive myself)

There's a ton of delight to be had in closely examining the story in retrospect --- it is essentially an entire narrative centered on the narrator's feelings, emotional state, expression of sentiment, and social cues like body language, but in a "doth protest too much, methinks" way, the narrator's main focus is persistently to avoid feeling or engaging with any emotion. (Multiple scenes include the lowering of an opaque visor or the narrator moving to stand facing the corner mid-conversation.) It's very well-crafted, to be a sneaky story about feelings which constantly mentions how feelings aren't there and shouldn't be acknowledged and could we please just focus on not all getting killed?

I picked it up again as a palate cleanser and enjoyed it; there are many more in this series, all queued up in my library.

This post's theme word is pensum (n), "a task, especially given as punishment." The ability to self-edit and control administrative privileges removes the threat of pensums.

How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It

K. J. Parker's How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It is the sequel to Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and begins approximately 10 seconds after the previous book ends.

Ok, maybe more like seven years? But we get enough flashbacks with our shiny, new unreliable narrator, that it is possible for the reader to piece together the continuous storyline of what has happened in the empire --- now reduced to a single walled city --- since the first book.

This book's narrator is an actor/playwright who, in the opening chapter, pitches a play wherein a nobody gets poached off the street by "the lord high chamberlain and the grand vizier. In disguise, of course. ...And they point out that the man bears an uncanny resemblance to the king. ... And it turns out that the king's been abducted by traitors in the pay of the enemy, who want to start a war, so we need you to pretend to be him" (p. 1-2). This is an incredibly bold move! -- to open a book with a Chekov's screenplay so heavily foreshadowing that it seemed like I might require the attention of a head trauma specialist. The snide narrator, of course, does this all with a wink-to-camera so big that he probably required an optometrist visit afterwards, all while waving and dancing and screaming "I am an unreliable narrator!" What a way to start a novel, ending chapter 1 with a sneering summary of plot points to make a story marketable:

Virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns. I have to confess I'm no scholar, so for all I know there may be unicorns, in Permia or somewhere lie that, so maybe one component of that list does actually exist in real life. Wouldn't like to  bet the rent on it, though. (p 3)

I found this fun and absolutely in the style of the previous book, except that for some reason I liked this unreliable narrator more than that one. Maybe it was the incredible boldness of starting with such an obvious completely-unhidden augury that I actually wondered if all those things would come true, and which would be subverted, by the end --- would there be a unicorn? Maybe as a metaphor? Maybe as a prop?

The house was easy to recognize, because some clown with an unfortunate money-to-taste ratio had thought twin gateposts in the form of winged horses was a good idea. (p 32)

I liked this hint of unicorn-y-ness and the phrase "unfortunate money-to-taste ratio".

There was a ring of authenticity in the actor-narrator's reflection "I'm being him, which I can do as easily as I am me --- which isn't exactly easy in any realistic sense of the word. Because being me has never been easy. and on balance I'd far rather be anybody else but me." (p 51)

And there was an aching bruised feeling to the summary "I looked for just such a plan. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, or maybe it's top secret. Or maybe --- It slowly dawned on me that it's possible for the wise men who run your life for you to see disaster coming and  not have a plan for dealing with it; because they know what needs to be done but there are vested interests in the way, or they can't figure out the politics, or they think it'll be horrendously unpopular, or it'll cost too much money, a commodity you can't take with you..." (p 77)

Overall I liked this book better than the previous one, although the two narrator characters were basically identical in attitude and tone. I enjoyed that book 2 started by immediately disavowing the entirety of book 1 and even calling into question whether the narrator in book 1 even existed. My main negative about this book was that it tried to have so many twists that it twisted itself up, and the solution that was obvious from early in the book --- that one solution that would completely resolve all the plot conflicts --- was just ignored in favor of weird oblique strategies-with-a-twist!, as if this were some sort of Oceans-Eleven-style caper. It's not. So the final book resolution was the thing that had seemed obvious from the start, and I did not believe that the smart characters were surprised, because even I, with the limited information made available by the unreliable and manipulative narrator, was able to anticipate the conclusion.

It was diverting, and the cover art is great! Weirdly, book 1's cover is velvety but book 2's cover is crisp, even though I got matching editions.

This post's theme word is annelidous (adj), "of or relating to worms." There is an annelidous sequence of undermining, counter-undermining, contra-counter-undermining, and Bitter-Butter-Battle-style tunneling in this book about a besieged walled city. 

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

K. J. Parker's Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is a low-fantasy swirl of sardonic, unreliable narration. It is told in the style of direct address, with the narrator in full acknowledgement of his readership audience and historical context; it tells the story of how a lowly ethnic-minority army engineer lied, cheated, manipulated the bureaucracy, and used commonsense engineering-brain to protect the capital city from complete obliteration.

The narrative style was clever and comforting, but after about three chapters which end with a twist or cliffhanger, I came to expect it. This undermined my enjoyment of the unreliable narration, since it was easy to make the assumption "some stuff is lies and the rest is obscured to make a dramatic reveal later" in every chapter and always, always be correct. In the end it answered lots of questions and didn't leave me with much to mull over.

The very clever and self-contradicting narrator, in a style of direct address, the preface and addendum notes that directly disavow the historicity of the contents of the narration (it's a low-fantasy medieval walled city of no particular resemblance to anything), all the snide to-camera comments making fun of personalities around him... all these are elements which I enjoy, but overall the book didn't capture me and I found myself thinking wistfully of how excellent A Deadly Education was. This book doesn't seem like it will stick with me, but it was fun.

We've been ingenious, resourceful and inventive, and we haven't let ourselves be hindered by outmoded or irrelevant ways of thinking. It's a shame, really, because nobody will ever know how clever we were. (p 113)

This post's theme word is propugnaculum (n), "a fortress; defense; protection". The trained defense soldiers and maintenance workers are a vital part of your walled city's propugnaculum; in this case, the public gardeners! 

P.S. Every time I catch the title of this book out of the corner of my eye, it triggers my subconscious and "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover" starts playing in my head. I had been idly humming it to myself for days before realizing that this book was the cause.