#sffbookclub

These Fragile Graces is a fun trans noir murder mystery novella. It's a story that focuses much more on interpersonal and community relations than it does on a well-plotted mystery or detailed worldbuilding. That focus also sums up my feelings about what I felt worked and didn't in the story.

Mostly, I wish the mystery plot was a little bit more cohesive, and that there was more detail about the state of the world itself rather than being in a vague near-future urban decay. I loved the small detail of having memory implants to deal with trauma-based dissociation from childhood, but I wish the ideas around implants/augments and a rejection syndrome connected more to the plot.

It is nice to see an anarchist commune in fiction (I feel like maybe I've only read this in Margaret Killjoy's work previously) and how the protagonist Dora wrestles with her relationship with the people in it, wishing she could keep them safe in ways that they don't want to be. And, the heart of this novel is a very trans story about how Dora deals with a (non-estrogenated) clone of herself who comes to murder her but she ultimately ends up protecting. From the moment her clone showed up and yelled traitor, I knew exactly where this story was going, but it was still satisfying to get there all the same.

#SFFBookClub

This was the #SFFBookClub book for February 2025. I am honestly a little surprised that it got a sequel. While I enjoyed it, I think this book suffers a little from being in the shadow of such a strong first book. It brings back nearly every character, although rooted in one world rather than worldhopping, and as such you really need to have read the first book to enjoy this one. The pitch for this book read almost as a murder investigation, but with foreknowledge from book one, it seemed incredibly obvious what the cause could be. This could just be a case of incorrect expectations on my part that the book would have more of a mystery element.

Thematically, I'm here for this story about justice and tearing down borders that separate the hoarding and exploitative rich from the poor. Here for the anger about how these rich people will casually break promises and ignore consequences for undesirable people. This book ends up feeling extremely quotable, but in doing so sometimes come off as didactic and telling more than it shows, even while I am nodding my head in agreement.

One thing I think this book does really well is having the main character from the previous book show up here as a foil to the new main character Scales. We get to see ways in which Scales and Cara are very different people and the biases that Cara brought to the world. It also means that we get to see the runners and Nik Nik in a much different light than the first book too. Cara could have stolen the show, and the book manages to make it not about her.

This is the step some civilians don't understand, the step Cara rejects: We can only make good on our promise of protection if there's blood on our hands. We can't bluff. The city only speaks the language of power, and we have to speak it right back for them to listen.

A minor observation, but I feel like there's a psychological shift in recent fiction (or in me) from "violence is never the answer" to "existing power will only respect violence". Babel (and its explicit subtitle) is certainly example of this too.

I read this book five years ago, and thought I'd refresh myself before the #SFFBookClub read of the sequel this month. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoyed this story and world. The writing has a brusque, hardboiled tone from the cynical point of view of a survivor, and it really works for this particular kind of book.

This is a multiverse travelling story, where there is technology that can send people between similar worlds, but only safely to ones where their "other selves" are not alive. Cara is somebody who has fought to survive her whole life and thus has few other selves alive, so she gets a job as a "traverser" to be sent to other worlds to collect information. Because it deals with worldwalking between closely related worlds rather than wildly different ones (like Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series), it gets the opportunity to explore the same characters in different timelines where their lives had taken different paths.

The post-apocalyptic wasteland locale of this novel is split into the wealthy folks of Wiley City living behind a wall (literally and metaphorically the airquotes nice white people of this story), the religious Ruralites, and the survivors of Ashtown between them. Cara is constantly code switching and crossing borders, both locally and multiversally--she is pretending to be a Ruralite, is secretly from Ashtown, while she precariously lives in Wiley City (hoping to get citizenship). Thematically, I love how the book ends with doubling down on Cara's role as an intermediary between worlds.

Bones & Runes was the #SFFBookClub January 2025 selection. It's a modern mythological quest of three friends trying to recover something stolen and grow as people and friends along the way. Overall it was a bit of a disappointment.

@eldang's thorough feelings after stopping reading sums up the majority of my thoughts. I'll try to get at a couple of other thoughts past that.

This book is attempting some interesting things by trying to mix together African, Irish, Hindu, and Greek mythology all at once. I can understand a story that is trying to stir together a variety of myths and methods of accessing the divine, but overall there's too many ingredients and everything is weaker for it.

Subjectively, I was disappointed by the writing. For a book that is so thoroughly rooted in South Africa and Durban in particular, I did not come away with much of a sense of place in most of the scenes. Part of this is that the characters are driven around by Ganesh from place to place in a way that makes it feel like the cast is teleporting between scenes.

But this isn't some seven stages of hell, Dante. These are African gods. The hero doesn't always survive. Forget heaven and hell. We've got no time for the devil here. Here, in this land, on this rock, we've got so many aspects of evil that one being doesn't suffice to hold its might; it's true strength. Maybe in your western worlds where everything is black and white, where you can afford one being to hurl your hatred at; one place that is good and one that is bad. This is Africa, baby. Here the good can be both bad and good at the same time.

I quoted this because this whole statement is repeated twice in the book almost word for word, but it feels all talk and no show. There is precious little ambiguity in this fantasy quest. There are a number of dangerous and neutral characters who deal in bargains or seem chaotically neutral, but the main players all seem fairly clear cut and shallow.

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.

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.

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).

Here's some more blabs about AI in this book that I've left in a second comment for length.

#SFFBookClub

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.