Meanderings and Maunderings on the Edge of Science Fiction and Fantasy
I love sff, but I don’t always read or write about it. In this world, pretty much everything’s science fiction, somehow or other.
It Takes Two: Warrior Children
Ok, so technically the protagonists of this first series are not children throughout, but most of what we base our opinions of books on is feelings, and this feels like a series about children. Maybe it’s the framing, I dunno.
So the two series I’m talking about are the Tensorate series, by Neon Yang, and the Poppy War series, by R. F. Kuang. Yes, I’ve talked about the Poppy War before, it’s fine.
When I think about the kind of transcendent writing that I aspire to but don’t ever feel like I could achieve, I think about Yang. There’s just something about their words that are … more than everything else. Which may explain why I feel the way I do about these novels, specifically The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune.
These are companion novels, meant to be read in either order, and they tell the stories of twin children, given away at birth to a monastery by their mother, who is the Protector (ruler, essentially) of their empire. Each has special abilities that meant they needed to be protected, but also in a way that the world needed to be protected from. Each novel tells the story of one twin, and what they do when they discover the ways in which they have been deceived.
The Poppy War, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, is a generation and empire-spanning trilogy in which the biggest war of them all is fought, essentially, by children. True, these are the mostly rich children of the nobility of all the provinces in Nikan who attend the prestigious and extremely demanding Sinegard Academy. These are kids being trained to take over defense and administration of the empire, except war and rebellion intercede, and they become the generals and rulers.
Both of these series excel at showing us the potential in each world, in the characters who inhabit them, in the technologies and magics they possess, and each has a way of stabbing the reader in the heart. To be fair I haven’t read all the Tensorate novels yet, but the first two instilled in me the same feeling that no matter how much, and how purely, characters want to do good in the world and could if they only had the chance, there’s always someone else who would rather cause destruction, or at the very least ruin everything just because they can.
Also these are really good series and you should check them out if you haven’t yet.
The Tuesday List: Weather Wonders
In honor of all regions experiencing out-of-season, scary, or just plain bizarre weather events this week, this Tuesday List features books or series in which weather is the focus.
1. The Kingston Cycle
It’s pub day for Soulstar, the third book in C. L. Polk’s Kingston Cycle trilogy, and weather has been the driving force, you might say, for the entire world. The books revolve around a cabal of sorcerers whose very existence is what’s keeping the nation of Aeland afloat. Without them protecting their lands from the storms which would otherwise wipe them off the map, they couldn’t survive, much less become one of the most powerful monarchies in the world. These novels revolve around Miles Singer, his sister Dame Grace Hensley, and his friend Robin Thorpe, all magic users, trying to right the wrongs of the past and salvage the country.
2. The Spiritwalker Trilogy
In Kate Elliott’s series, “an alternate, post-fall-of-Rome historical-European, proto-steampunk fantasy with fairies and magic,” (https://www.thebooksmugglers.com/2020/12/when-i-grow-up-by-kate-elliott-a-spiritwalker-short-story.html), magic and weather are closely intertwined. Cold mages live in cold climates, need special architecture to support their need for cold. Fire mages live in hot climates. Plus their are feathered dinosaurs and a spirit world that the main character must navigate in order to figure out and come to terms with her heritage.
3. Parable of the Sower
Drought is the main weather/climate concern in Octavia E. Butler’s prescient dystopian novel, where rich people live in secure compounds and poor people live in close-knit communities that nevertheless can be torn apart at the whims of violent outcasts or those from other settlements who just want a little more.
4. Planetfall
Plenty of novels deal with alien planets/climates, but Emma Newman’s Planetfall series, and the titular first book, tend to stick in my head. Planetfall is the story of a generation ship that has made the perilous journey to a planet light-years away, and attempts to set up community. The main character is an engineer whose job is to maintain the 3D printers that basically keep everyone alive by providing building materials, food, clothing, everything. But Ren has a dark secret that has followed her across the stars.
5. Trail of Lightning
The first novel in Rebecca Roanhorse’s Sixth World series is set in Navajo territory after a world event called the Big Water, an apocalyptic flood that killed millions and left the North American continent divided into tiny oases of community amidst desert and other inhospitable climates. Maggie Hoskie is a monster hunter, a magic wielder, who must take on gods and monsters in a quest to protect her people from a witch who has given rise to a new sort of monster for his own deadly ends.
Book Bites: The Poppy War (series), by R. F. Kuang
How can I possibly talk about an entire epic fantasy trilogy in a few paragraphs? Well, the short answer is I can’t, but I’m gonna try anyway.
I read this entire series via audiobook, and one of the things I realized was that I had a hard time keeping track of all the characters, in the first two books, and what was going on, all the time, but that I was completely riveted to whatever plot action was happening at the time. Something about these novels makes the reader unable to not care. As a lot of people have said on Twitter, it has a lot to do with the pain, the amount of raw emotion in every line, but also it’s just the epic scale and feel of the series. It’s Hamlet, except in a million more lines and the tragedy is so much deeper because it’s the pain of an entire people and not just some spoiled prince.
Another thing that kept coming back to me over and over during The Burning God was just how young this cast of characters is. And it’s not the tragedy of them having to grow up and come of age in one of the worst conflicts of their country’s history, it’s that they never got a chance to grow up, despite Rin being twenty-one. They are still processing things that happened to them at sixteen, when they went through military school, when their entire lives became about bowing down to a past wisdom that would never be able to save them. And so many of them didn’t even make it to see the catastrophes of the last book.
But yeah, the thing about it being Hamlet, that still stands. Fight me.
The Tuesday List: Triangle Trilogies
Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of the Tuesday List. Today brings us five different trilogies featuring a triangle of characters. Note, not necessarily love triangles. But triangle relationships without which the stories would not have come to be.
- The Daevabad Trilogy, by S. A. Chakraborty
Nahri, Ali, and Dara all want different things, and yet they are bound by the nature and history of djinns, caught up in a world of schemes and power struggles.
- The Poppy War trilogy, by R. F. Kuang
Brought together at Sinegard and united in their battles to defend Nikan from enemies within and without, Rin, Kitay, and Nezha hate, love, and fight each other until the bitter end.
- The Shades of Magic trilogy, by V. E. Schwab
Lila Bard wanted adventure and a way out of her gray existence. Kell is a creature of unimaginable magic, put to work at the bidding of the royal family of Red London, seeks control over his circumstances by smuggling items between the Londons. And Rhy, prince of Red London and adoptive brother of Kell, wants to prove he is more than just his family name. All three are brought together in a last-ditch effort to save all the worlds from collapse brought about by dangerous magic long thought exterminated.
- The Winternight trilogy, by Katherine Arden
Vasilisa, Moroshko, and Medved. Two are the spirits of winter and death, bound to the land and beliefs of the people. The other a witch who must be the bridge between magic and modernity.
- The Broken Earth trilogy, by N. K. Jemisin
Essun and Nessun, mother and daughter. One looking for survival and a way to save the earth; the other raised in chaos and convince the only way forward is destruction. And Alabaster, the fomenter of that chaos and a lifelong slave, now being devoured by the power he once accessed. All three have a part to play.
Book Bites: Behind the Throne
First in the Indranan War series by K. B. Wagers, Behind the Throne throws us bodily into the world of Hail, princess, gunrunner, and once again princess of the Indranan Empire, forced back to her homeworld by the deaths of her sisters and niece, making her first in line to the imperial throne.
My first introduction to Wagers’ writing was A Pale Light in the Black, and though the Indranan War books were written earlier, Behind the Throne definitely did not disappoint, with hints of the found family that makes the later novel so strong. Hail is tough but not bad, which for me is an important distinction. I don’t actually enjoy reading about good things happening to bad people, or seeing wholly unredeemable characters somehow manage to gain the trust/admiration/loyalty of otherwise strong, intelligent characters.
Most of the work of building out the world happens sort of in hindsight; Hail’s family is introduced to us through her memories of them, which provided just as much character building for them as for our main character, whose reasons for running away to become a gunrunner are almost just as murky by the end of the novel as at the beginning. I’m hoping we find out why her life took that path, and also learn more about her world/empire/universe in the next books.
The Tuesday List: Backlist Bonanza
Trying to get back onto blogging again, so this seemed appropriate. Today I’m going to highlight some authors of the SFF persuasion who are may have been in the spotlight lately (depending on your circles) whose early work is worth checking out. And remember, this list isn’t meant to say only these authors are worth looking at. This list is mostly a microcosm of what I either have loved for a long time, or have recently been reading, or what I know is hot right now. If you know of SFF authors with a great backlist, do chime in!
- Kate Elliott
Yes, I talk about Elliott quite a bit, and it’s for a good reason. She was one of the most formative writers of my early sojourn into SFF; I’ve been on record as saying Crown of Stars was the first SFF series I read and realized a long series could actually get better, rather than start strong and peter out by the end. Everything I have read by Elliott has been great, and even her earliest stuff (under her other name) is worth checking out.
2. Elizabeth Bear
Bear has been astoundingly adaptable throughout her career, experimenting with a number of SFF subgenres, from sort of hard/mil SFF in her earliest novels, to urban fantasy with the Promethean Age novels, and multiple post-apocalyptic series including one of my favorites, the Edda of Burdens. Also definitely worth checking out are her works of short fiction, many of which have been published in her recently The Best of Elizabeth Bear. Of course her most recent are the Eternal Sky trilogy, which now has a companion trilogy in progress (two novels so far released), as well as the White Space series, beginning with the inimitable Ancestral Night.
3. N.K. Jemisin
Jemisin has gotten a lot of press recently for openly questioning structural inequality, with a lot of chatter about The City We Became, which I have not read yet, as well as the Broken Earth trilogy. But she’s always written these kinds of novels. It’s just that the literary juggernaut hadn’t picked her to be their one true representative of black woman SFF writers back then. But all of her novels are definitely worth getting into.
4. Nnedi Okorafor
Like Jemisin, what you see with Okorafor is what you get. She’s always been writing this way, and just as unapologetically. So if you loved any of her newer stuff, definitely go back and get the rest because it’s well worth it.
5. Martha Wells
Yes, Murderbot is huge right now, but did you know Wells also has a fantasy series, dubbed by Renay (of Feminist Ponies and FanGirl Happy Hour) as murder dragons? The Raksura novels are really great if you want to just dive into a completely different world where the main character is just as clueless as we all are, with bonus winged women ready to eviscerate the nearest enemy. I also recently finished the novels in her Ile-Rien cycle (a couple standalones and a trilogy) and in addition to them being good novels, it was a really fascinating look into some of her formative works as a writer of SFF. One of my favorite things about Wells as a writer is her awareness of tropes in whatever subgenre she’s writing in, while not being reliant on them.
It Takes Two: Dragons for Dinner
Having read some amount of Robin Hobb’s Fitz and the Fool, and Assassin’s Apprentice series, I recently picked up the Rain Wilds Chronicles (4 books). I’ve also been slowly making my way through Marie Brennan’s Memoirs of Lady Trent series, of which I’ve read the first two books.
The Rain Wilds Chronicles was extremely readable. Hobb is known for writing long novels, but I actually kind of flew through them. There was a lot of action and plot, a large cast of characters, and a clear goal at the end of the four books. Hobb didn’t get bogged down overtelling all the various character’s stories, sticking mostly to a few key viewpoints, and planning the plot on a timeline that required things to move fairly quickly. Overall I liked this series quite a bit, and it was a nice foil to the novels that take place in the Six Duchies. It also ties in nicely with the Liveship Traders novels, giving just enough to make me want to read them without heavily relying on them.
The Memoirs of Lady Trent novels are presented through a first person lens, rather than third like the Hobb’s novels, and are much more introspective, with fewer characters and a much tighter plot. Although at first I was worried they’d fall into the somewhat lazy tropes in the Naomi Novik’s Temeraire novels, the title character’s introspection and self-awareness redeem whatever reliance on our own earth’s colonizer history the series has, and (I’m only speaking for myself here) generally avoids caricature and stereotyping in the cultures she encounters while on her dragon-studying adventures.
I picked these two series, incidentally, because each is based on the trope of the scholarly young woman quality whose family fears she will never find a proper husband because she is too much x and not enough y. But from there they converge quite rapidly, and on the whole I found the Lady Trent direction much more satisfying to read, aside from the differences in dragonkind each studies. Each young woman eventually finds a way to assert her own agency in a world that generally doesn’t value her, however the Rain Wilds series relies on a certain amount of in-built homophobia in its worldview that I found more than a little off-putting.
Either way, I look forward to reading more from each author, and enjoyed the ways in which they imagined dragons and civilization.
Book Bites: Noumenon (Series)
Winner of the award for series most likely to go somewhere I did not expect goes, full-throttle, to Marina J. Lostetter’s Noumenon series. I knew I was in for an exploration of the unknown, but the willingness of the author to speculate so boldly on what the future of humanity could look like, and to bring in so many compelling characters–in the middle of the series, no less–absolutely blew me away.
The chapters in this series (all three books, if I remember correctly) were pretty long, compared to your average SFF novel, but I honestly barely noticed, because I just wanted to know what was going to happen. Lostetter has written a page-turner of a series that takes place over thousands of years–no small feat.
This series reminds me, in that back part of the brain that’s always thinking without anyone paying attention to it, of Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space-era work, and also, perhaps oddly, of the Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight. I guess if I had to pick more recent comps I might go with Bear’s Ancestral Night, or Emma Newman’s Planetfall series, though Bear’s is more action/mystery and Newman’s is more sort of psychological thriller-esque. But that’s what you get when I have to think about things.
Sci-fi Goes West
In which streaming services take on the big space exploration stories that have obviously never been done before because the showrunners just came up with the idea.
Not to be all negative or anything, but sometimes people need to be told they just don’t have the range.
Recently (what is time, anyway?) spouse and I watched a show on Netflix called Another Life, which is something something space artifact (spartifact) shows up on Earth and because humans in that near-future timeline have inexplicably invented FTL even though they still can’t cure leukemia, they decide to go to the planet from whence they think the spartifact has come.
We actually made it through the entirety of season 1 (all that’s available, so far). I think it’s mostly because we’d just finished binging Kim’s Convenience and needed something to take our devastation out on, as we spent the entire time “watching” Another Life picking apart basically everything. I won’t get too negative, but basically it had no idea what kind of show it actually wanted to be and had so many plot holes I don’t know how the actors got through filming without a mutiny.
And speaking of actors, this show had a nonbinary character played by an actual nonbinary actor, and a fat character who was actually taken seriously (though I can’t guarantee there were no fatphobic issues because, again, I didn’t watch it terribly closely). Plus the cast was pretty evenly split on the gender binary, and the bad guy turned out to be the rich white guy after all, which is always satisfying.
In the case of Away, on the other hand, we were not able to get through more than the first episode. It is slightly more near future, in which the first mission to Mars is about to launch, and holy fuck was there a nuclear holocaust just before this thing got up and running because if the crew in this show represents the best and brightest, I have to think they’re picking from a seriously depleted earth population to end up with these six people.
On top of that first major plot hole, the pilot episode of this supposedly groundbreaking show was so slow and boring that if we had to sit through ten episodes of that I might have torn the tv off the wall and just made my own fucking show out of paper cutouts and legos.
I guess the main takeaway here is that if producers want to make big sciency space shows, they should do the work, otherwise they’re just infantilizing viewers with poorly researched trash that couldn’t make it past a room full of fifth-graders, much less a fanbase who have access to actual qualify science fiction written by vastly more talented authors (no, I’m not bitter about GRRM getting his long-winded not even finished “series” turned into an HBO drama when there are so many better written, more entertaining, actually finished series out there written by vastly more talented authors, why do you ask?).
Which of course leads us to the part where I recommend some those vastly more talented authors in lieu of the aforementioned “space” shows. When I first saw the description of Another Life on netflix, my first thought was ‘oh, like Noumenon.’ Except no, it’s nothing like Noumenon because Noumenon, series and novel, are well-researched, full of interesting social commentary, and written by an author who actually knows what she is doing. The technology development tracks with the earth history, and the ramifications of space travel are dealt with in a believable way, both aboard the convoy and for those who remain on earth. This series is written by Marina J. Lostetter, and highly recommended.
Instead of suffering through Away, I recommend picking up the Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal. First of all, it’s actually believable. Second, it’s alt-history. Third, it’s so well-researched it will change the way you watch (or read) space travel fiction forever. And it’s also massively entertaining, which is really a thing whoever tried to make Away should think about, because seriously.
Not directly related to discussion of these two “shows” but also big recs for big idea space travel fiction:
White Space series, Elizabeth Bear
Sun Chronicles series, Kate Elliott
Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty
Planetfall series, Emma Newman
Murderbot Diaries series, Martha Wells
Wayfarers series, Becky Chambers
An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon
Machineries of Empire series, Yoon Ha Lee
The Wanderers, Meg Howry
Untamed Shore, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Even though Untamed Shore is marketed as a thriller, in all my years of reading SFF I find that Moreno-Garcia is one of the most versatile authors I’ve ever read. Starting with Certain Dark Things (I came too late for Signal to Noise, which I understand is currently out of print), to The Beautiful Ones, to Gods of Jade and Shadow, and now Untamed Shore, she moves between subgenres with the skill of a ballroom dancer changing costumes between the tango and waltz.
I said Untamed Shore is marketed as a thriller, but there is so much of the novel that is steeped in myth, legend, history, and religion, that it meets those speculative qualities enough for me to read it as a subgenre of SFF anyway. Viridiania is the woman who becomes the shark of her fantasies, always moving forward, willing to shred anyone who gets in the way of her ambitions, even if those who get in the way are themselves the sharks when they first swim into town.
That Viridiana thinks of her father when she looks at the sharks, that his attempt to—and failure at—hunt sharks like the locals is to her representative of his failures as a husband and father at first reads like a typical teenagers gory musings on the melodrama of her life, particularly when juxtaposed with the order and calm of Reynier’s house, his civilizing influence from which Viridiana has benefited. The tension between Viridiana’s feelings for these two men, neither of whom has managed to actually fit into Desengano, sets up the conflict that eventually leads to Viridiana’s decision to materially alter the course of her life.
It isn’t so much, then, that Viridiana must choose which version of civilization, which version of tameness she wants to inhabit, but that she decides how much of Baja California to carry with her, how many teeth she wants to show.
Baja California, itself, takes on a life in this novel, becomes a character in the struggle between Viridiana and her antagonists. Like all of Moreno-Garcia’s novels, Untamed Shore has a strong sense of place. With very few words the author establishes the feel of her setting. I kept thinking, as I read, that the novel is very Hemingwayesque for that reason. I don’t mean to say that her writing feels like Hemingway wrote it, or that his work was an influence, but that there is a certain efficiency to her words. They say a lot while taking up very little space.
The 1970s setting, the inclusion of U.S. tourists, brings to mind the lush fabrics and patterns popular during that decade, a brief slip into a liberalism that was often façade and so soon abandoned, but also the descent into an era of crime families, gangs, and protection rackets. The idea that things can be so cheap, and yet cost so much, pulls at the seams of this story. Baja is, was, part of California, is part of Mexico, and yet is on its own, cut off from everything. It is home to a rich cultural history, patterned over by the arrival of empire, now a place inhabited by those who either never got out or those vampires who suck every drop to be had from the few tourists who still come through in search of a version of Baja California that never existed.
From a structural standpoint, the novel is impeccably written. All the pieces, assembled at the outset like the disparate buildings of the lonely town of Desengano itself, fall into place one after the other: a satisfying ending. More satisfying, though, is Viridiana’s refusal to be fundamentally changed by what happens to her. Instead she becomes more herself.
Edge Cases 
You must be logged in to post a comment.