Power to Yield is a collection of speculative tales exploring gender identity, neurodivergence, and religion …
I added this to the SFFBookClub poll for the month of January because I super enjoyed it.
If you don't know about it, the SFFBookClub is our informal fediverse science fiction and fantasy book club. I figure that folks from bookwyrm probably might be more interested in reading and talking about books so I wanted to post this here as well. We vote, read a book together, and then discuss via the #SFFBookClub hashtag over the course of the month. Take a look if any of these books sound interesting to you and you want to read along with others.
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels …
The woman woke to the crackling of her anklet and knew the boy had come upstairs. She leaned toward her clock: the numbers glowed 06:00. The stars outside the window were growing pale. She would not sleep again now.
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels …
The boy was taken upstairs without warning, unprotesting as he had been through all the changes in his seventeen years, the shifts from cell to cell each time he outgrew the bolt on his ankle and the Doctor came to exchange it for a larger one, an operation performed with a tool the Hold people called the Mallet, which jarred the whole leg and sometimes made the blood spray from the anklebone, and caused a sense of queasiness and superstitious awe in the boy, who would glimpse, for the instant during which the bolt and chain were removed, the shiny and alien-looking patch of underexposed skin on his leg which, according to the prophet, housed the seat of the soul.
The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city …
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, …
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, the emotional crux is the relationship between the angel and the demon and this just wasn't my jam.
«Oh, sí, mis buenas gentes, sí, ya lo creo que sí. Se puede vivir en …
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 …
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 than a loose thematic sense, and this created a storytale atmosphere where places and characters and words washed over me, unlistened.
Nothing was rooted in a time. Most stories were barely rooted in a place, and at best were set against "the south". Characters are referenced and never touched on again (or at best mentioned in passing elsewhere once). The storyteller narration references historical context that the in-universe listener would know to situate this story in, but to me the reader it felt like noise rather than worldbuilding, akin to opening the Silmarillion to a random page with no further context.
Theoretically, I can imagine placing any book on some hypothetical scale of narrative detail. (As a joke, let's say this is a scale with one end being the TV series Lost and the other end being a Brandon Sanderson wiki). I don't need all the details in a world spelled out, but there's a tipping point where there's enough detail where I believe that the author could fill in the blanks if needed. Well before that tipping point, it feels like authors are largely making everything up whimsically as they go. I think you can tell a set of disconnected stories where all the details are constructed out of whole cloth, but there needs to be some strong thematic through line to carry it, at least for me. This novel just doesn't quite have that.
To come back and treat this book for what it is rather than what I expected it to be, thematically I would try to pin this book down as about being about telling stories and taking the long view of history--that all places and empires and people change dramatically over time and can become something different. I think secondarily, it feels like it's a set of critiques and observations about empires and humanity; it's full of wry critiques of power, of nobles, and of human nature. I found the book amazingly quotable and quite funny in parts.
This is a hard book to recommend; even as I enjoyed it, its lack of coherence and whimsical storytale nature make it more a book that I enjoyed in passing than one that will stick with me.
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.
On the fictional island of Patusan—and much to the ire of the Patusan natives—the Korean …
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 cliché 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 …
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 cliché 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 general).
Ten years have passed since a widespread blackout triggered the rapid collapse of society, when …
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 …
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 disappointment, it's that narratively it felt a bit too straightforward, and that the climax of the book has one outcome that felt somewhat contrived even if thematically on point.
