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Nghi Vo: City in Glass (2024, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) 3 stars

A demon. An angel. A city.

The demon Vitrineā€”immortal, powerful, and capriciousā€”loves the dazzling city ā€¦

City in Glass

4 stars

This novella is a story about memories, transformation, and love; it follows the demon Vitrine, whose best love is the city Azril that she writes about in a book kept in the glass cabinet of her heart. When angels raze the city to the ground, she curses one of them with a piece of herself, and gets to the work of rebuilding the city into what she remembers.

This is an interesting book to pair with Kalpa Imperial from the #SFFBookClub this month. The way Vitrine remembers the ghost of the old city interspersed with what the new city is becoming feels like it could be a chapter from Kalpa Imperial. Subjectively, there's sort of a similar lyrical style between the two as well.

I continue to love Nghi Vo's writing, and the way this book juxtaposes the fantastic with the literal rebuilding of a city brick by brick. However, ā€¦

AngeĢlica Gorodischer: Kalpa Imperial (2003, Small Beer Press) 3 stars

Ā«Oh, sĆ­, mis buenas gentes, sĆ­, ya lo creo que sĆ­. Se puede vivir en ā€¦

Kalpa Imperial

3 stars

This book is the October/November #SFFBookClub book. It's a collection of stories about an empire that has fallen and been rebuilt multiple times, each focusing on a very different place and time, and each told with a narrated fable-like style. One stylistic choice that stands out immediately is that the sentence structure is quite long and there are often comically long lists of names or places or ideas or things or professions or or or... I found this to be overall a delight, personally.

This may be due to expectations that I had going into this, but the stories in this novel felt loose and disconnected. This is especially due to coming off collections of short stories like How High We Go in the Dark or even North Continent Ribbon, which interconnect the stories together with shared characters or worldbuilding. Kalpa Imperial had very few touchpoints between stories other ā€¦

Anton Hur, Djuna: Counterweight (Hardcover, 2023, Pantheon) 2 stars

Counterweight

4 stars

Counterweight is a nearish-future scifi thriller set on the island of Patusan, which I have just learned today has a long literary legacy.

The plot follows an unnamed employee of the LK Corporation as he attempts to unravel a series of events revolving around the world's first space elevator, erected by LK on Patusan. I enjoyed the originality of the setting, but I found the whole thing fairly convoluted and somewhat difficult to follow.

The dystopian corporation-state future where having a literal worm implanted in your brain is a condition of employment is becoming all too plausible at this point.

#SFFBookClub

reviewed Counterweight by Djuna

Djuna: Counterweight (EBook, 2023, Vintage) 2 stars

On the fictional island of Patusanā€”and much to the ire of the Patusan nativesā€”the Korean ā€¦

Counterweight

2 stars

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 clichĆ© 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 ā€¦

Waubgeshig Rice: Moon of the Turning Leaves (Paperback, Random House Canada) 4 stars

Ten years have passed since a widespread blackout triggered the rapid collapse of society, when ā€¦

Moon of the Turning Leaves

4 stars

Moon of the Turning Leaves was an enjoyable follow-up to Moon of the Crusted Snow. (Every month can be #SFFBookClub sequel month if you want it to be.) If the first book was about turning inwards and more immediate survival, then this second book feels much more about turning outwards. I liked that it explains a little bit more about the what and why of the events outside their community. That said, this too is not a book directly concerned about answering these questions, and its focus remains on community and survival.

It feels akin to other post-apocalyptic journey stories, about survival, strangers, and trust. Nangohns represents the younger generation and to me feels like the focal point of the book. I love her growth into more authority, and especially her speech a third of the way into the book that convinces everyone to keep going. If I had a ā€¦

Waubgeshig Rice: Moon of the crusted snow (2018) 4 stars

"A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice. With winter looming, a small ā€¦

Moon of the Crusted Snow

4 stars

Content warning plot discussion

Waubgeshig Rice: Moon of the crusted snow (2018) 4 stars

"A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice. With winter looming, a small ā€¦

Moon of the Crusted Snow

5 stars

Moon of the Crusted Snow is a story about a small, remote Anishinaabe community surviving through the beginning of an apocalypse. Power goes out, communication is down, and they turn inward to try to take care of their community, through leadership struggles, limited food, and the chaos of taking in strangers. I read this as a part of July's #SFFBookClub book.

I quite enjoyed the smaller focused story of survival here, where the outside world is at the margins. It centers a small Anishinaabe community, and about its dread and uncertainty and adaptation as everything starts to slowly unravel when winter sets in.

For me, the part that set the tone of the entire story was the conversation that Evan Whitesky has with the elder Aileen Jones, about halfway through the book. She says that there's no word for apocalypse in Ojibwe. But more than that, she says that their ā€¦

reviewed Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

Nghi Vo: Siren Queen (Hardcover, 2022, Tordotcom) 5 stars

It was magic. In every world, it was a kind of magic. "No maids, no ā€¦

Siren Queen

5 stars

I suggested this for #SFFBookClub, and so I gave this a reread so I could enjoy it again. I love the way this novel takes Hollywood and its obsession with stars and all of its racism and homophobia, and mixes it with fey magical realism. Overall, it's definitely a book whose strengths are in its setting and its writing, rather than in a tight plot, but I still love the characters.

In particular, probably my favorite part of this book are the constant turns of phrase that bring in fey elements at unexpected times. You're just reading along and then you get hit with a line like "The cameras were better now, I told myself. They had tamed them down, fed them better." Silent movies steal people's voices. Film stars are (ambiguously but also maybe literally) stars in the sky and wield their star power. Names are sacrificed, or ā€¦

For forty years, Colony 3245.12 has been Ofelia's home. On this planet far away in ā€¦

Remnant Population

4 stars

I read Remnant Population from the #SFFBookClub backlog. I had a lot of fun reading this. This is a first contact novel with the main character being an older woman in her seventies. At the start of the book, Ofelia is living with her only remaining adult son and his wife. When the colony she is on loses their contract and evacuates, and she decides to hide and stay. It turns out that the planet had undiscovered intelligent life, and these aliens come to investigate her. In the end, she's caught in the middle between these friendly aliens and returning humans.

I think what I most appreciate about this book is the wry internal perspective and character development of Ofelia. She is an old woman who has put in the work, and whose primary character trait is that she's just tired of putting up with other people's expectations and attitudes. ā€¦