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I was reading Cyberpunk in the 90s when this was first published, although I never encountered it. Cyberpunk in the 90s was, as I encountered it, slick and cool and flashy. Dystopian, but the charismatic and capable protagonist made it look sexy. To be honest, I was a teenager, and it felt like it was calculated to appeal to a teen.

It seems difficult to believe this was grown from the same soil. This is dystopian, but the dystopia doesn't serve to underline how cool our protagonist is. Maya, our protagonist, is a reporter whose job and life is constrained by an event in her past which has put her under the suspicion of the political police in totalitarian Russia. It is simplistic to say she is a reporter, rather, she is a camera: one whose job is to experience things and transmit her experience; sight, sounds, sensations, and thoughts. As such, even her thoughts can implicate her.

Maya hopes to regain some currency as a reporter by getting an interview with a survivor of the gestalt massacre which put the current regime in power. She is paired with a new "filter" for this job, someone who partners with her to pare down what she experiences into something more coherent (and politically palatable) for broadcast. Maya mistrusts her new filter, and knows that searching for this story may put her at odds with the censors, but it's the only goal she has that allows her to pursue meaning in her life.

Then, of course, her new filter and the story she is pursuing both turn out to be much more than and different from what they originally seemed.

This is a rough read, including some first person accounts of future war crimes which are not technologically possible at present but are certainly based on gulags of the past. There is human and animal experimentation, a kind of conversion therapy, and an ever present of paranoia that felt very close at the moment.

On the other hand, it's a hell of a story.

Sometimes you don't want to read anything too grim. If you've ever read a romance and enjoyed it, you will probably enjoy this one; it does a very good romance that avoid the main ways romances fail (for me.)

Although the romance is real and compelling, and you believe that the two characters are falling for each other, and can be good for each other, the main attraction for me was the portrait of queer community. Many books described as "cozy" miss the mark for me because they fail to portray the hard work and irritation of building community. If queer community just happens magically when the right people are in proximity, then we are given no tools for what to do when one person in the community is, for example, incredibly annoying, or keeps borrowing things and not returning them or spreading malicious gossip.

I feel I am getting off topic, and misleading you into thinking this book is about what it is not. This book is about Eleanor, a nurse, whose emotional wellbeing is tied up in roller derby, and Robin, the new girl, who doesn't take derby seriously, which Eleanor finds incredibly annoying. Why is Robin so careless! Why is Robin so cute!

But the background against which this takes place is the community of friends and acquaintances, room-mates and derby members who are so beautifully sketched in. This community feels real in the way "cozy" community portraits often don't.

I read this in an afternoon and felt cozy afterward.

This book is aggressively, in your face queer in a way that is hard to come by. Reading it was mildly hallucinatory, partly because the protagonist has a disability that causes her to hallucinate, and the prose echoes this, becoming disjointed when she is experiencing this. (The book is extremely written, and the prose required a little bit of alertness from me.)

This book is about a child whose world is detroyed by capitalism when her family and loved ones are gunned down at the factory they are striking at. She survives this to become a train robber, and when she grows up, the only way to give the people who took her in and gave her a new life a chance at survival is going undercover in a society of rich capital class lesbians, all of whom have been trained from birth to viciously claw their way to the top.

And everyone agrees she's not really the ideal person for the job, but that person's dead, and so maybe her ability to smooth talk her way into a lady's pants and/or skirt will help?

She does her best, but she is never going to make a good decision when faced with a hot girl, and things are so much bigger than her, and as a warning, if you're hoping for an ending where they enemy is defeated and the hero and her sweetheart ride off into the sunset, this is not... that. (The book's cover expresses that it is for "fans of Princess Bride and Gideon the Ninth." I do not think this accurately conveys much about the book except swords and lesbians!)

I enjoyed this book immensely, partly for its own sake, and partly for giving me something I have not found elsewhere.

This is a book that grabs you in the same way Bronte and Shelley grab you, although the voice is more Bronte. A clever, fierce woman who looks around her and sees how limited her options are is definitely Bronte's influence, but the novel is a direct response to Shelley's Frankenstein.

The novel is interested in how we permit people to make their way in the world, and what it means to pursue immortality, either through children, fame, or work. This sounds tedious, but even when the narrator is moping or grinding away at thankless labour, it never is. The novel's charm is (again, Bronte) the voice of the narrator, a woman who is a little ghoulish, a lot clever, and very frustrated by what she is permitted by society and the men around her.

The writing is tight and competent, the historical research is never obtrusive but just gives everything a lifelike feel, and the plotting was satisfying except for one plot turn at the end that I can't decide if I find thematically satisfying or not.

Recomended if you like Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, or got really into a paleontology podcast last spring. Or women being gay.

This book will occasion comparisons, I think, to Peter S Beagle or Patricia A. McKillip, if either of them were interested in transing the genders. The world feels like a strange and wonderful tapestry, and the characters within it feel like they have been produced by that world.

This is a story about two people later in life whose lives seemingly have left them at loose ends. One character has finally been freed by the death of his partner to make the change she made him promise not to make. The other character, Uiziya, has been betrayed by her aunt and mentor who as going to pass on the Four Profound Weaves she had spent her life hoping to learn. The man, who calls himself nen-sasaïr, (no name) because he doesn't know how to name himself as a man, doesn't know how to order his life. The culture he comes from has very different roles for men and women, and although he has always known he was a man, he's lived (mostly) according to the rules for women for the last sixty years. He yearns to be accepted among men, but he has a better idea than most of what that entails giving up.

These two go on a journey together to try to find what they need to fashion a new life, and get caught up in the net of a man called The Collector, who owns people and treasures that appeal to him, and rules a city where all magic is used only by him.

This is a book that those who like that sort of thing will like, so if that sounds like you, I urge you to give it a try!

I feel a need to start out by explaining that this is not my sort of book. Usually when books are not my sort of book, I simply do not read them. This one, however, engaged me sufficiently to pull me effortlessly through all the bits that were not shaped in a way familiar to me, which is very much to its credit.

The general shape of this book is as follows. Ames is living a somewhat boring (to me? But also to him, I think) job at an ad agency and having somewhat thrilling (to him, mostly) sex with his boss. (Probably the fact that this is self-evidently a bad idea adds to the thrill.) Until his boss calls him into her office to ask why she is pregnant when he had assured her he could not get her pregnant. He had been under the impression he could not, because when he went on feminizing hormones, during the period of his life when he was a woman, he was told this would destroy his fertility. Katrina, his boss, wants to know if he will commit to raising the baby with her, as she plans to have an abortion otherwise.

Ames panics, torn between wanting to keep the baby and not wanting to commit (I think?) and proposes instead that Katrina raise the baby with Reese, his girlfriend back when he was Amy, who has always desperately wanted a baby. Katrina has never met Reese, and also was not aware Ames was at any point a woman, and is fairly resistant to this idea but eventually agrees to consider it. Adding Reese to their somewhat messy relationship only makes it messier. Reese finds Ames' detransition suspect and perhaps ridiculous. Reese lives passionately, pursuing something indefinable, a wholeness she finds just out of her reach but searches for mostly in relationships with men who treat her badly.

None of this sounds like my jam. Furthermore, I found the book quite challenging because of its approach to its characters. This is a book that pries into the crevices of the human soul and finds the unlit and grotty chambers of the heart where pettiness and uncertainties and small meannesses hide, and contemplates them all with a faintly interested air that isn't cruel, but isn't exactly kind. I am aware of peoples' pettinesses and doubts and meannesses, as I am a people, but I do not particularly enjoy watching them catalogued. You might feel differently!

I feel I am talking too much about this book's stumbling blocks, for me, so the part I enjoyed:

This is a book that wants to look at how different women relate to womanhood.

The Sex and the City Problem wasn’t just Reese’s problem, it was a problem for all women. But unlike millions of cis women before Reese, no generation of trans women had ever solved it. The problem could be described thusly: When a woman begins to notice herself aging, the prospect of making some meaning out of her life grows more and more urgent. A need to save herself, or be saved, as the joys of beauty and youth repeat themselves to lesser and lesser effect. But in finding meaning, Reese would argue—despite the changes wrought by feminism—women still found themselves with only four major options to save themselves, options represented by the story arcs of the four female characters of Sex and the City. Find a partner, and be a Charlotte. Have a career, and be a Samantha. Have a baby, and be a Miranda. Or finally, express oneself in art or writing, and be a Carrie. Every generation of women reinvented this formula over and over, Reese believed, blending it and twisting it, but never quite escaping it.

Yet, for every generation of trans women prior to Reese’s, the Sex and the City Problem was an aspirational problem. Only the rarest, most stealth, most successful of trans women ever had the chance to even confront it. The rest were barred from all four options at the outset. No jobs, no lovers, no babies, and while a trans woman might have been a muse, no one wanted art in which she spoke for herself. And so, trans women defaulted into a kind of No Futurism, and while certain other queers might celebrate the irony, joy, and graves into which queers often rush, that rush into No Future looked a lot more glamorous when the beautiful corpse left behind was a wild and willful choice rather than a statistical probability.

This book is very much about how women related to womanhood or, if you prefer, "womanhood", that tricky beast. The book is incredibly insightful, on this one. There is a scene where Reese is surrounded by cis women at an 'essential oils party' that is genuinely hilarious. Reese's anthropological observations of the cis woman in her environment are absolutely spot on and very good.

It is also very written. Either you find this writing compelling, or you do not, but I definitely did:

Reese first came across Tammi at Saint Vitus, a dank club that primarily hosted music of the angry male variety. Every surface of the interior was painted black and therein such ample moshing had occurred over the years that the accumulated musk of sweaty post-adolescent boys forever lingered in the circulation-free air. A straight Tinder boy who was into noise had suggested meeting Reese there one night, and she agreed, primarily because she’d know immediately whether he was worth fucking or whether to flee after a drink, and either way, her apartment was two blocks away. Onstage, a cadre of boys hunched over keyboards. Among them, the only thing truly worth looking at in the whole club: a trans woman on guitar. Six foot three, tattoos jagged on lean porcelain arms, slashes of asymmetrical dark hair bisecting a face made up so expertly vampiric that had Elvira known about it, she’d have stopped by to learn something. The woman less played her instrument than throttled it every ten seconds or so, between which attacks she gazed with poised stillness at some unfixed point over the heads of the audience, listening to the reverberations of her own sudden violence, as a hiker who has shouted over an empty alpine lake holds quiet for the moments it takes his echo to return.

I am now going to dip into a thing that is not strictly book review: responding to other book reviews. It is not generally my custom! But a cursory skim of reviews on goodreads for this book reveal a number of people saying that the protagonist is a rapist, and I genuinely do not know what they are talking about. It is possible to write a sex scene that some people might feel was consensual if poorly negotiated, and other people might find non-consensual, but generally, if that happens, I at least know what sex scene people are talking about. There is a fair amount of sex in this book, not much of it closely described, some of it merely alluded to, so it's possible I missed the scene they are referring to. In fact, there is a great deal of sex that was, all things considered, probably ill-advised. But so far as I recall, there was no sex where everyone present did not want to be there! Some people had mixed feelings! But everyone wanted to be there more than they wanted to be elsewhere! Have a number of reivewers noticed some event I overlooked? This is possible. It is also possible these people... are terfs? I did not investigate closely, but it seems possible!

I've found myself reading more Climate Fiction recently, not because I've been searching it out, I don't think, but because it's so much on everyone's mind that more is getting published. In any case, I would not have expected to enjoy it, but I've had a recent run of "climate fiction" that I would describe as optimistic. Possibly, it used to be that it felt like the urgent agenda re: The Climate was convincing everyone it was really that bad, but now it feels like the urgent agenda is convincing people that there is something to be done about it.

In any case, A Half Built Garden falls into the latter camp, but it is also a first contact story, which I am predisposed to like. In this story, the Earth is covered by autonomous but interconnected "Dandelion Networks" who work to restore Earth's ecology and strictly measure out their carbon budget. Complicating this, governments still attempts to govern, but have lost control of many of the resources they once commanded, including much of their public support. Furthermore, "the corporations" have been firewalled away on artificial islands, for their refusal to curtail their environmental impact, but still are active and engaging in trade for goods no one else can make.

Then the aliens arrive, and our heroine is in the right place at the right time carrying the right baby to get her foot in the door first as the aliens' favourite negotiator.

I like that Earth in the future is full of petty squabbles and dumb meetings, because I can believe a lot from my speculative fiction, but not that humanity has changed that much. The Dandelion networks are supposed to be utopian, but they do not require to me to believe that everyone gets along frictionlessly. One of the key technologies that permits the dandelion networks, however, is an algorithm that facilitates collaborative decision-making, upvoting and downvoting certain kinds of discussion threads to promote decisions in line with the network's declared values, and I admit this is the point where I felt the story had introduced Unobtainium to make the plot work.

I really enjoyed that big queer family structures were central to the characters' lives and even the plot. Every society had subtly or strongly different ideas of how families and genders worked, and this gave the humans and aliens different points of friction and connection, and I felt this was well done.

I enjoyed that the aliens were very alien, both biologically and socially, but also had individual personalities.

I am going to be honest that I enjoyed this book so much that I am not actually very objective about it. I loved this book. This book for me is what Becky Chambers' books are for other people.

This book's lineage is, at a guess, Hamilton/The West Wing/That brief liberal mania after the election of Obama. It is very much a fantasy of a different political system, one not captured by big money, where politicians may be ruthless or use means you don't approve of, but are serving in politics because of something they believe in. It is a fantasy of an America that could elect a divorced woman president.

On the other hand, if you can't have fantasies in your romance novels, where can you?

I didn't check this out for a long time because I find celebrities, politicians, and royalty, all vaguely squicky, and this book is written on the assumption that all of these are something you are at least a little into. However, the book doesn't rely on your kink for the aforementioned; it has a lot going for it. The book has a full cast of characters who are delightful, the banter is non-stop, and if you like your books to playfully reference real events, you will be rewarded.

The main couple are also constantly comparing themselves to other literary and historical couples, so if you enjoy that sort of thing, it is the sort of thing you will like.

A lot of this book was not the sort of thing I like, but honestly, it's so well written! Do you like writing?