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.