My Top 17 Books for 2017

It's time for my annual retrospective post on the best books I read in the previous year. Earlier instalments are here: my top 16 books for 2016 (actually only 15, I now realise), my top 15 books for 2015, and my top 14 books for 2014.

My total numbers are up a little from last year, with 85 books read instead of the 77 I read in 2016. Here are my figures in a table:

	5 star	4 star	3 star	2 star	Total
2017	10	56	19	0	85
2016	11	53	12	1	77
2015	11	68	19	2	101
2014	9	70	23	2	104

Once again, the bulk of the books I read get 4 stars, meaning I enjoyed them and they were well done, but they weren't so well done or so enjoyable that they deserved a fifth star. Three-star books I didn't dislike, but they were either significantly lacking in their execution or failed to enthuse me; a two-star book, for me, is pretty much a failure, neither well executed nor enjoyable, though showing some hint of potential that lifts it above one star. I didn't read any of those this year. I don't finish books I think are going to be one (or two) stars, and I don't rate books I don't finish.

I did give a couple of books three stars that I considered only giving two. I'll single out one of them, because of its win in the Science Fiction category of the Goodreads Choice awards: Andy Weir's Artemis (link is to my full review). I'm awarding this my Most Disappointing Book of 2017 special non-prize (which, of course, totally cancels out the Goodreads Choice win, right?)

I suspect that many of the people who voted for it don't read a lot of new SF, like Andy Weir himself; if you're looking for a pretty straight-up Heinlein homage, and can ignore the enormous plot hole at the end, it is amusing and clever in places, but as a piece of SF written in 2017 it failed for me at multiple levels. I won't be surprised if it gets on a certain group's slate for the next Hugos (if there is a slate this year), since it's sufficiently old-fashioned, sexist, and non-literary to appeal to their claque/clique. They'll probably forgive the fact that the protagonist is supposedly a Saudi woman, because her being Saudi makes no visible difference, and her being a woman is played entirely for the male gaze.

Anyway: this year's countdown. Links are to my Goodreads reviews. Superheroes, unusual detectives, genre mashups, determined young female protagonists, and refreshed tropes abound in this year's crop.

I'd like to start with a few honorable mentions. These were strong books that might well have made the top 17, but just had one thing that caused them to miss out. In no particular order:

The Thorn of Dentonhill, Marshall Ryan Maresca: if Batman were a magic student in a sword-and-sorcery city. Well-maintained tension, but let down by the copy editing (shame, Penguin, shame).

The Native Star, M.K. Hobson. Gaslight fantasy, strongly and competently plotted, though I thought the romance subplot was subpar.

Necrospect, J.B. Markes. A promising start to a series, with a necromancer detective and his determined young assistant. Reads as if English isn't the author's first language, though his biography suggests otherwise.

The Uploaded, Ferrett Steinmetz. A dystopian that I actually liked, which is a miraculous feat of writing; nothing wrong with it whatsoever, except that I passionately despise the genre, and even doing it extremely well wasn't enough to completely make up for that.

The Summoned Mage, Melissa McShane. Capable writing and excellent editing yielded an entertaining book, but it didn't quite have the depth to rise to five stars, and the diary conceit made the pacing uneven.

And now, the best of the 4-star books, the seven that almost made it across that 5-star threshold.

17. Weave a Circle Round, Kari Maaren. An engaging YA magical/mythical/time-travel story bursting with eccentric, complex characters.

16. Kalanon's Rising, Darian Smith. An ex-warrior physician/detective in a sword-and-sorcery city, with a twisty plot that ended up surprising me.

15. An Alchemy of Masks and Mirrors, Curtis Craddock. Skyships ply between floating continents and islands, and a determined, intelligent young woman sets out to bring a seemingly impossible peace.

14. Flotsam, R.J. Theodore. Another skyships-and-floating-islands book, with a crew of daring adventurers desperately opposing an alien invasion while dealing with their own considerable issues.

13. Abounding Might, Melissa McShane. An earlier book in the same series made last year's list, which makes me want to pick up the remaining one. Napoleonic military supers meet Regency romance, and kick its butt. In a good way.

12. Superhero Syndrome, Caryn Larrinaga. A fresh take on (modern-era) supers, with a determined protagonist battling crime and corruption with creativity and verve.

11. The Beautiful Ones, Silvia Moreno-Garcia. A glorious and well-earned ending caps this insightful, beautifully written, and moving book.

And now the top 10, all of them winning five stars. It was a tough fight here; there's not a lot to pick between most of them, especially the top five. On another day I might put them in a different order.

10. Uprooted, Naomi Novik. Full of spectacular magic, conflicts of moral purpose and personal connection, and complex and nuanced relationships.

9. All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault, James Alan Garner. Another fresh take on the supers genre (with plenty of urban fantasy on the side), this offers a thrill-ride of tension and cool set-pieces that actually mean something, cleverly told in an appealing voice.

8. The Flaw in All Magic, Ben S. Dobson. Magicpunk in a secondary-world setting. With a great dynamic between the main characters, it manages to combine depth of characterisation and relentless action in an excellently crafted book.

7. The Wrong Stars, Tim Pratt. Refreshes the space opera genre with a dash of Mythos, and combines sparkling banter among a strong ensemble cast with fun, adventure, and a subtle meditation on the consequences of abuse.

6. Shadows of Self, Brandon Sanderson. Supers and slightly steampunked Western collide, injure each other physically and emotionally, make a wisecrack, and spring an astonishing twist, in a book of many well-crafted dimensions.

5. Heirs of Grace, Tim Pratt. Refreshes the tired urban fantasy/paranormal romance genre with a sensible, empathetic protagonist, and offers a terrific conclusion to a capable tale told with wit and originality.

4. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, Patricia E. McKillip. Complex, mythopoeic, epic without needing an (on-stage) battle, and anchored in the depths of human psychology, this classic offers appealing wisdom and a magnificent ending.

3. Kismet, Watts Martin. The book you should read if you think that a novel about queer furries can't also be a well-executed, entertaining space opera with masterfully escalating stakes. It makes the political both personal and essential to the plot.

2. Dreadnaught, April Daniels. The book you should read if you think that a novel about a trans teenager can't also be a well-executed, exciting supers story with deep characterisation and a tense plot. Emotionally true and deep. 

1. The Philosopher's Flight, Tom Miller. The book you should read if you don't think a man with an MFA can write about a man trying to make his way in a world where women have more magic without making it cringeworthy and awful. World War I-era, more-or-less supers, but in a more realistic scenario where they serve mostly in transport, communications, rescue, and civil defence roles; I found the main character instantly appealing, and was often moved by his struggles, losses, and triumphs. (Note: won't be published until February 2018; I received an advance copy for review.)

Gender Breakdown

Out of interest, here's the author gender breakdown for my top lists over the past four years. I tend to read about 50:50 men and women, taken over the long term, without setting out specifically to do so (I had to look up the genders of several of this year's authors to calculate the table, which I've based on the information in their Goodreads profiles). My top lists do tend to feature more women than men, though, apparently.

Out of the 17 books on this year's list, 15 feature a determined young female protagonist (counting secondary protagonists in Shadows of Self, The Beautiful Ones, The Philosopher's Flight and The Flaw in All Magic); of the remaining two, Forgotten Beasts of Eld features a determined middle-aged female protagonist, and Kalanon's Rising has a couple of secondary female characters who hold their own very effectively. Of the honorable mentions, The Thorn of Dentonhill underutilises its sole female character, but even she is capable and competent; the rest have either female primary protagonists or (in the case of Uploaded) capable secondary female characters who make a strong impact on the plot. Heck, even Artemis has a female protagonist, though she's unconvincing and handled poorly.

Note that I messed up last year and actually only posted a top 15, not a top 16 as I'd intended.

	M	F	Total
2017	8	9	17
2016	6	9	15
2015	10	5	15
2014	4	10	14
Total	29	33	62

I look forward to lots more good reading in 2018. Thanks to Netgalley, through which I received many of these books for review.

Review: The Flaw in All Magic

The Flaw in All Magic by Ben S. Dobson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I think I found this by looking through the steampunk category on Amazon. It's more magepunk than steampunk, with magically driven engines and an airship lifted partly by spells; a steampunkish/dieselpunkish feel to the setting, but with lots of magic-as-technology and an assortment of fantasy races (elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs, goblins, and so forth).

Because this is pretty close to what I often write myself, I read it with great interest. Because it's extremely well done, I also read it with great enjoyment.

The protagonist is a man without magical ability who was able to fool the magical university authorities for several years using a combination of sleight-of-hand and bluff, culminating in a dissertation which revealed his deception, and argued that only someone without magic could really understand it, because the flaw in all magic is the mage. Mages, being human(oid), are subject to error, and egotistical blindness to their own errors. (I was reminded of the flaws in computer programs introduced by programmers.) He's a rogue, but an ethical one, a little bit obsessive, and courageous when he needs to be.

His sidekick is a half-orc who has come to the island where magic is still freely practiced because she wants to see amazing sights. Her sense of awe and wonder is a beautifully handled part of her character, and asserts itself even when she's in great peril. She's a good-natured character, contrary to orc stereotypes, and despite the fact that she's experienced prejudice her whole life (her orcish relatives see her as too human, and everyone else sees her as too orcish). I enjoyed the fact that she was the muscle in the pair. It's a simple, even a common, trope-switch to make the woman the physically dangerous one, but the main character's easy acceptance of it without any discussion gained the book extra points with me.

Both characters are terrific, with enough backstory to feel real and sympathetic, introduced (like the worldbuilding) just when it's needed, and just as much as it's needed for the reader's understanding. Their collegial relationship is a joy to see, particularly since there's no attraction between them, but there is respect.

The plot is a mystery/thriller, with a locked-room murder (of someone who mattered to the protagonist); politics (including echoes of current real-world politics of the arrogant, regressive far-right sort); fights, pursuits, and edge-of-the-seat physical danger; and roguish cleverness. The pacing, I felt, was a good balance between keeping things constantly moving and not failing to pause for reflection.

On top of excellent editing, this all-around facility with the craft of writing helped push this into 5-star territory for me, and made this one of my favourite books this year. I'm very glad to have discovered another author who I can trust to tell a good story well.

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Review: Wish

Wish by D. L. Lewis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The author is clearly in love with the semicolon, which is a wonderful punctuation mark. Unfortunately, almost all the cases in which she uses it should actually be commas.

The prose is otherwise competent, but stiff and formal, and the minor characters mostly consist of a single quirk - and often seem to be there only so that a more important character has someone to talk to.

The resolution seems hurried, and even lampshades the fact. It's therefore shorter than I was expecting.

It's far from being a bad book, but it has plenty of room for improvement.

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Review: The Continuum

The Continuum by Wendy Nikel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Disclaimers: Wendy Nikel and I are both members of the same writers' forum, but as far as I can remember we haven't interacted directly. I received a copy via Netgalley for review.

As I would expect, this is a well-crafted, competently-written book. Unfortunately, I felt it was lacking that extra spark that would take it from competence to excellence. The problem may have been that it was too short, with the character arcs and plot arcs resolving too quickly at the end, without enough middle in which they could be earned. Or it may have been that I somehow didn't find the characters' dilemmas visceral and compelling enough, or that the villains were a touch cartoonish, or that the relationships between characters were underdeveloped.

The time travel aspect is well handled, with a surprise ending (which could have had a bit more groundwork laid for it). However, I didn't fully believe that a man from 1912 could understand the workings of, and improve, a miniaturized electronic device, and since this was central to the plot that was a problem.

Enjoyable, and in places textbook (the escalation of the stakes, for example), but missing something vital to make it compelling for me.

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Review: Infomocracy

Infomocracy by Malka Ann Older
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had vaguely heard good things about Infomocracy, so I waited for it to be on sale and picked it up. Frankly, I was disappointed.

For me, it combined a thing I dislike about cyberpunk (disconnected and more-or-less alienated characters) with a thing I dislike about hard SF (a story that has to fight its continual tendency to be exposition about the setting rather than a human drama). The result was a novel that, while well executed, was something I was never going to love.

I also didn't manage to fully suspend my disbelief. Firstly, we are shown a setting in which "microdemocracy" has taken hold over most of the world, and governments are elected for "centenals," units of 100,000 people - so two neighboring parts of the same city can be under completely different governments, each of which also governs people in geographically distant parts of the world. (They're referred to as "governments" rather than "parties," which I suppose is defensible, but the government that wins the most centenals also has some central pseudo-federal powers and responsibilities, and is referred to as having the "supermajority". Clearly it doesn't have an actual supermajority, though, since there are five governments in close contention for that honour, and it's mathematically impossible for five different groups to be within striking distance of a percentage significantly greater than 50% - which is what "supermajority" means in the dictionary. "Plurality" would have been a better term.)

The thing I didn't believe about microdemocracy was that it had been adopted at all - a given for the setup of the novel, which is about the third election under the microdemocracy system. I simply wasn't shown enough history to believe it, particularly since it doesn't, on the face of it, seem especially practical.

Other backstory, however, I was given in quantity. There's an inevitable amount of infodumping in a story like this, and it wasn't handled terribly, but it still clogged the action.

The main thing I didn't believe, though, was all the single people with no kids. One character has children (no partner), but the children are a lightly sketched inconvenience rather than real people. Everyone else appears to be single and childless, even the senior people.

Now, I work in tech, and my experience is that people's families are very important to them (their parents and siblings as well as their partners and children). Even if they're not important to the story, as such, they should at least seem to exist. I realise that in startup culture, there are a lot of single, disconnected people with not much going on outside work, but Information, the organisation in which most of the novel takes place, isn't a startup. It's a tech bureaucracy.

I also didn't believe the instant attraction-leading-to-relationship between two of the characters, or the way they met by chance after we'd already been following both of them separately.

I didn't believe the crisis, which brought down Information (or very specific aspects of it). It seemed technologically implausible.

And finally, I didn't believe (in light of recent elections and referenda) the ending, in which rationality carries the day. In fact, I didn't really believe that the various microdemocratic governments permitted Information to exist and to act as a combination of Google and Politifact, annotating their inaccurate claims for people.

Characters with too few dimensions and too few relationships (and the main one implausible), and some sociological and technological unlikelinesses that were inadequately sold to me, combined with too much exposition to place this at three stars for me.

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Review: The Philosopher's Flight: A Novel

The Philosopher's Flight: A Novel by Tom Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was excellent, and I'm really glad I took the risk with it.

It was recommended by a fellow writer on a forum we both frequent, and when I saw it was on Netgalley I picked it up. My big concern was that the genderflip inherent in the premise - women are, for unexplained reasons, the best at magic, and a young man tries to establish himself among them during the period of the First World War - could so easily have gone terribly wrong. (I'm thinking of that awful raceflipped Pearls thing from a few years back.)

I'm relieved to report that for me - and you have to remember I'm male - it succeeded in not being horribly tone-deaf in its treatment of the genderflip. First of all, many of the female characters, including the protagonist's mother, sisters, colleagues, and friends, are the kind of pragmatic, competent women that my own mother, sisters, colleagues, and friends are. Secondly, they're not idealised; though they're fine people in all the ways that really count, they're often coarse, they make bad decisions at times, and they struggle with assorted character flaws and blind spots. Other female characters are petty, selfish, silly, shallow, manipulative, all the things that real people (of both genders) are. If you're going to portray people who are not like you, this is the way to do it: make them feel like real people.

Then the genderflip itself, the man struggling to succeed in a woman's world, is well done. I found Robert instantly relatable; he has a noble dream, to be part of the Rescue and Evacuation Corps who save wounded soldiers on the battlefield, using "sigilry" (the magic system) to fly them to safety. It looks like he can't have that dream. Even the women who support him becoming the best sigilrist he can be don't believe he can be accepted to the Corps; even his mother, his hero and inspiration, doesn't believe he should be accepted, even if he qualifies.

He'd be a distraction to the women. He wouldn't fit in. He'd be a curiosity. It would be an exercise in political point-scoring, not a merit-based appointment. He wouldn't be able to do the work as well as a woman. If he was accepted, he'd have to be called a Sigilwoman; that's the name of the rank, and you can't simultaneously ask for equal treatment and ask for special treatment, now can you? Women bully him, haze him, threaten to boycott a major sporting event if he takes part, mark him down unfairly, strip him of an honour he's won by tremendous effort. He has to be better than most women to even be considered. He has, in other words, the experience of any outsider trying to enter a social space that's traditionally been closed to people like them.

It's a story about family, and love, and friendship, and overcoming prejudice and injustice. Apart from a very early infodump, there's not a craft misstep in it; the author has both an MFA and an MD, which is an unusual combination, and draws on his knowledge of emergency medicine to make the multiple rescue scenes gripping and realistic. I loved Robert's competence in a crisis, demonstrated very early on and repeatedly after that, and so clearly learned from his mother.

Robert doesn't just have societal prejudice about gender roles to contend with, either. The Trenchers, a political/religious group opposed to sigilry of all kinds and willing to take extreme measures against those who practice it, are constant threats, with some terrifying encounters that test Robert's values and ideals severely. This, too, is established right out of the gate and persists as a strong thread throughout.

I enjoyed the epigraphs to the chapters, quotations from various invented documents which give intriguing glimpses into the characters' future and make me want to read more of their story - if I didn't already want to do so because of the excellent quality of this book. I very much do want to read more, and I will eagerly await a sequel.

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Review: The Philosopher's Flight: A Novel

The Philosopher's Flight: A Novel by Tom Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was excellent, and I'm really glad I took the risk with it.

It was recommended by a fellow writer on a forum we both frequent, and when I saw it was on Netgalley I picked it up. My big concern was that the genderflip inherent in the premise - women are, for unexplained reasons, the best at magic, and a young man tries to establish himself among them during the period of the First World War - could so easily have gone terribly wrong. (I'm thinking of that awful raceflipped Pearls thing from a few years back.)

I'm relieved to report that for me - and you have to remember I'm male - it succeeded in not being horribly tone-deaf in its treatment of the genderflip. First of all, many of the female characters, including the protagonist's mother, sisters, colleagues, and friends, are the kind of pragmatic, competent women that my own mother, sisters, colleagues, and friends are. Secondly, they're not idealised; though they're fine people in all the ways that really count, they're often coarse, they make bad decisions at times, and they struggle with assorted character flaws and blind spots. Other female characters are petty, selfish, silly, shallow, manipulative, all the things that real people (of both genders) are. If you're going to portray people who are not like you, this is the way to do it: make them feel like real people.

Then the genderflip itself, the man struggling to succeed in a woman's world, is well done. I found Robert instantly relatable; he has a noble dream, to be part of the Rescue and Evacuation Corps who save wounded soldiers on the battlefield, using "sigilry" (the magic system) to fly them to safety. It looks like he can't have that dream. Even the women who support him becoming the best sigilrist he can be don't believe he can be accepted to the Corps; even his mother, his hero and inspiration, doesn't believe he should be accepted, even if he qualifies.

He'd be a distraction to the women. He wouldn't fit in. He'd be a curiosity. It would be an exercise in political point-scoring, not a merit-based appointment. He wouldn't be able to do the work as well as a woman. If he was accepted, he'd have to be called a Sigilwoman; that's the name of the rank, and you can't simultaneously ask for equal treatment and ask for special treatment, now can you? Women bully him, haze him, threaten to boycott a major sporting event if he takes part, mark him down unfairly, strip him of an honour he's won by tremendous effort. He has to be better than most women to even be considered. He has, in other words, the experience of any outsider trying to enter a social space that's traditionally been closed to people like them.

It's a story about family, and love, and friendship, and overcoming prejudice and injustice. Apart from a very early infodump, there's not a craft misstep in it; the author has both an MFA and an MD, which is an unusual combination, and draws on his knowledge of emergency medicine to make the multiple rescue scenes gripping and realistic. I loved Robert's competence in a crisis, demonstrated very early on and repeatedly after that, and so clearly learned from his mother.

Robert doesn't just have societal prejudice about gender roles to contend with, either. The Trenchers, a political/religious group opposed to sigilry of all kinds and willing to take extreme measures against those who practice it, are constant threats, with some terrifying encounters that test Robert's values and ideals severely. This, too, is established right out of the gate and persists as a strong thread throughout.

I enjoyed the epigraphs to the chapters, quotations from various invented documents which give intriguing glimpses into the characters' future and make me want to read more of their story - if I didn't already want to do so because of the excellent quality of this book. I very much do want to read more, and I will eagerly await a sequel.

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Review: The Paper Magician

The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Other reviewers have complained about the pacing of the central part of this book (from roughly the 40% to 80% marks), when the main character is in another character's heart, and has an Alice-in-Wonderland journey through his memories (happy and not), his hopes, and his fears.

For me, that part worked all right. The character had a clear goal (get through the heart and save her apprentice master, whose heart it is). There was a ticking clock - or rather a beating heart, which was going to stop beating if she didn't succeed. It was clear that she was going to have to go through all four chambers, meaning that there was always a sense of progress and of how far there was still to go. Her experiences in the heart were varied and, to me, interesting. It's true that she was often more an observer than a participant, but I thought the author got away with it.

What I am going to complain about is the incidental anachronisms, and, to a lesser extent, the Americanisms. I more or less expect a book by a modern American author set in historical Britain to use modern American English, not period British English; period British English is hard to do, and for most authors, better not attempted. It still jars me a little when I hit an Americanism (like a British character referring to her mother as "my mom"), but most readers aren't going to care.

What I find less forgivable are the anachronisms. The sense of time and place in a book depends on little throwaway details that aren't directly important to the plot, so if you are trying to create such a sense of time and place, you need to get them right. You need to not have a tire swing in 1870s England, in other words; or a bistro in London around the turn of the 20th century (since bistros originated in 1920s Paris); or a young woman living with a not-very-much-older man to whom she isn't married or related, with nobody else in the house, and it not causing a scandal; or a mixed-gender school in 1890s England, where the teachers merely swat a boy with a ruler in passing for kissing his girlfriend in the hallway. Or (and American authors almost never get this right, because in America the continued existence of class is covered over by a fiction of equality) a lack of respectful address between people of different social status.

Yes, this is clearly an alternative history, but if anything that means that incidental details are even more important to anchor the sense of time and place. If they don't matter to the plot, don't get them obviously wrong, is my view, or your setting will seem bland, undeveloped, and poorly thought through.

Apart from those annoyances, I found this an entertaining book. Its greatest strength is the magic system, which is original and varied, though it wouldn't bear close logical scrutiny; it's more on the symbolic than the literal side, which is fine if that's what you're going for. Characterization is a mixed bag; because we get shown a lot of the magician's life, but mainly told about the main character's, he seems a lot more developed than she does, and they are the only developed characters (apart from the rather cartoonish villain). The editing is good, as I've come to expect from Amazon Publishing, with few and minor glitches.

The question that always comes up at the end of a mixed review like this is "Would I read another in the series?" I'm honestly not sure. If the author had given me more confidence in his historical knowledge and commitment to getting the small details right, or if I'd liked the main character more, then probably, but as it stands, perhaps I would and perhaps I wouldn't. I've read a lot of worse first novels, and it does show some promise. In the right mood, I'd probably give the series a second chance.

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Review: The Wrong Stars

The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a lot of fun, and also has a subtle point to make about abuse and what it leads to (without getting super-graphic).

I don't read much space opera anymore, mainly because so much of it is military, and that doesn't especially interest me. This, however, is more of a classic old-school space opera, suitably updated for today.

The author doesn't have a particularly firm grasp on astrophysics and how acceleration, deceleration, spin, and gravity work, and the book does exhibit the genre trope where somehow thirty or forty years' worth of technological and social change, and apparently no new cultural creations, have been crammed into several centuries; but I can overlook those issues for the sake of a gripping plot, a great ensemble cast, and sparkling banter. Banter such as:

"Have I told you lately that I'm a genius?"
"I'm not sure. I don't usually listen when you talk."

Rather than the usual ragtag freighter crew skirting the edges of the law, possibly from the outside of it, we have here a group of what are more-or-less law enforcement contractors - think something between corporate security, bounty hunters/skip-tracers, and deputized civilians, with just a touch of Judge Dredd. This is a good variation on a classic formula, and drives parts of the plot satisfactorily.

There are aliens, but only one kind (or so the characters initially believe) - the Liars, squidlike beings so called because you can't trust anything they say about their origins, their history, their agenda, or even what they were doing this morning. The plot that unfolds is cosmic in its implications, with a nod to Mythos, among other sources, but remains at the intimate level of a couple of ships' crews.

Speaking of intimate, if lesbian romance is a problem for you, or characters of nonbinary gender, you're probably going to want to skip this one (unless you need to feed your outrage, I suppose - I don't know what goes on in your head). It doesn't get explicit, though.

There's plenty of adventure, varied and entertaining, and the author is highly capable and assuredly in control of his material. I thoroughly enjoyed his urban fantasy Heirs of Grace, which took a genre that's been feeling mined out and flooded with bad copies and made it fresh, interesting, and intelligent again. That's why I picked this one up, and I wasn't disappointed; he does the same for space opera, giving us a book that's both richly entertaining and also has a bit of depth and weight to it.

Fans of L.J. Cohen and Ann Leckie are likely to enjoy this one.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: Toru: Wayfarer Returns

Toru: Wayfarer Returns by Stephanie R. Sorensen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm going to start with what I learned from the author's afterword, and work backwards.

The author has been a foreign-exchange student in Japan, where (it seems) she was welcomed, treated with great hospitality, and came to love the country and its people. This is great, but it also leads to the main problem of the book.

The problem is that the author has then written what's essentially a wish-fulfillment fantasy about how great it would be if Japan had become that peaceful, hospitable, amiable country more or less directly from being a rigid, feudal despotism under the shoguns, without going through all the pain of the invasion by Commodore Perry's Black Fleet, the subsequent long and difficult process of modernization, and World War II.

Instead, she shows us - or, often, tells us about - a Japan in which a young man, sent clandestinely to America to spy and bring back its technology, is not executed on his return (as was the law) but convinces everyone - fearful peasants, harsh feudal lords, everyone - to modernize in an absurdly short space of time, leapfrogging American technology so that they can confront Perry on his arrival with a superior force.

I didn't believe it. I didn't believe (having worked on projects for 20 years) that such a major program could be completed so quickly; I didn't believe that an illiterate peasant blacksmith could become, first an engineer (maybe sort of believable), then a pilot, then captain of an airship, then admiral of the fleet; I didn't believe that someone we're told was a conservative old feudal lord would let his daughter dress and behave like a man just because she wanted to; I didn't believe that everyone would listen to a commoner; I didn't believe that the feudal lords would do away with their own power because of love for country; and I certainly didn't believe, though we were repeatedly told, that the heroes would be executed. That was the problem: there was a lot of telling, and what we were told contradicted, as often as not, what we were shown, and I didn't believe any of it. And then what we'd been told, over and over again, just ended up not being true, because it had to not be true or else the story would be tragic. And there was no believable reason why it wasn't true.

As a result, it barely squeaks three stars, and that's only because there's a good heart behind this unbelievable story, and I don't want to be harsh to it.

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Review: Starlight's Children

Starlight's Children by Darian Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll just say starting out: I usually don't find that books as essentially good-hearted as this one have such a high body count. But it definitely is noblebright, not grimdark, despite that, and well written to boot.

I very much enjoyed the first book in the series, which introduced the mashup of police procedural, secondary-world fantasy, and forensic thriller that continues in this one. The lead investigator, a former soldier who's trained as a physician in part as a way of atoning for the lives he took in the war, is intelligent, determined, and brave, and ably supported by a cast of secondary characters who manage to be morally complicated while still, mostly, people you can cheer for. Nobody is lily-white, but unlike in a grimdark fantasy, they haven't given up on becoming better people, or lost hope that they can do what's right.

The dialog and, to be honest, many of the social attitudes are modern rather than of the technological and social period of the setting, but that would be almost my only criticism. This is a good concept, well executed.

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Review: First Year

First Year by Rachel E. Carter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I hovered between three and four stars for this one. The premise - Hogwarts as merciless boot camp - ended up wearing a little thin. In a way, too, it was dropped right at the end, in what I felt was a bit of a gift to the heroine - not undeserved or unexpected, and yet it felt disappointing to me - a cheat.

The fact that the antagonist/love interest had a name that began with D and a father named Lucius made me suspect that the book began life as Harry Potter fanfiction; I may be wrong. It isn't very Potteresque, in the event, apart from the setting in a magic school. There's no whimsy or fun here, and it needed some.

The other thing it needed was a really good professional edit. The author credits an editor and five or six "proofers" in the acknowledgements, but there are still commas placed where no comma should ever, ever be, and repeated basic homonym errors like poured/pored, hoard/horde, and worst of all, shown/shone. The odd and awkward phrasings of many sentences had me wondering sometimes if the author spoke English as a first language.

Those frequent language errors were what, for me, tipped it over into three-star territory, along with the humourless tone and the frantically signalled setup for horrible tragedy later in the series. There wasn't a lot to counterbalance those issues, either; the setting and characters were pretty much by the numbers.

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Review: Starlings

Starlings by Jo Walton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

By the author's own admission, several of the "short stories" in this book are not actually stories. They're exercises in mode, or jokes, or the attempts of someone who knows how novels work but not how short stories work to write a short story.

This doesn't sound promising, but Jo Walton is such a good writer that she mostly gets away with it in any case. In fact, some of the stories have been published in prestigious publications like Strange Horizons and Subterranean. Unfairly, I occasionally thought, "I wish I had the kind of standing in the SFF community that meant I could get published in those publications by writing a story that isn't a story," but that's not the only thing that's going on. Walton is a deep thinker, a close observer, and a master of language, and all these things shine through, even when her "story" is only an exploration of a clever idea with no real beginning, middle, or (especially) end.

"Three Twilight Tales," for example, the first piece, explores a small town that has remarkable magic, but the magic is a means to look at the people and their relationships. "Jane Austen to Cassandra" takes the idea that Jane Austen's letters to her friend and correspondent Cassandra go astray and reach Cassandra's original namesake, the prophetess who nobody believed. And are answered. "Unreliable Witness" is from the POV of an elderly woman with dementia who may or may not have encountered aliens. "On the Wall" is, as the author says, the beginning of a novel, a very different version of Snow White, from the perspective of the mirror, but because we know the original story we don't need the rest. This kind of implied narrative is something I'm interested in, taking advantage of the familiar tales to create resonance and tell a minimal story where the reader fills in what's missing.

"The Panda Coin" is SF, following a coin through a number of hands in a somewhat dystopic space station. "Remember the Allosaur" is a joke, but a beautifully written one. "Sleeper" I think I've read before somewhere (probably Tor.com, since it was published there, or in one of their collections); it's about a Russian sleeper agent in late-20th-century Britain whose consciousness is simulated by a researcher in a dystopian future. Like most of the others, it doesn't have an ending so much as imply a continuation.

"Relentlessly Mundane" is a consideration of the question "what do the kids do after they come back from the portal fantasy world and grow up?" It's an idea that's been tackled at greater length since by Seanan McGuire, but this is a good treatment.

"Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction" is a series of vignettes and pseudo-documents that build up a picture of an American dystopia (there's a bit of a theme going with the SF in this volume), in the old alternate-history-where-the-Nazis-won-WWII genre. Not as original an idea as some of the others, but well done.

"Joyful and Triumphant" is a meditation on the idea that each planet gets an Incarnation, in the "character explains as if to n00bs" mode. It's not a mode I think much of, and this is, for me, one of the weaker stories, though it's an interesting idea. Later in the volume, "What Would Sam Spade Do?" posits a world with multiple clones of Jesus, who have become a kind of ethnicity, and "What Joseph Felt" explores St Joseph's feelings around the Incarnation. "Out of It" is based on the Faust legend, so Christian mythology (if I can use the term) gets thoroughly inspected.

"Turnover" is a what-if-the-later-generations-in-the-generation-ship-don't-want-to-go-to-the-new-planet story. As it happens, I read a very similar story by Ursula Le Guin almost immediately afterwards ("Paradises Lost"), and comparing anyone else's story to a Le Guin is usually unfair to the other writer, but this one stands up reasonably well. The sense of place is well handled, in particular, and though it's another story with an "ending" that's more of an implication of future events to come, so is Le Guin's.

I won't mention all of the stories, just a couple more. "A Burden Shared" is set in a world where people can (through handwaved technology) shoulder one another's pain, featuring the mother of a woman with a chronic illness as the main character. As someone who lives with a person with a chronic illness, it rang true to me, and the theme of how caregivers (especially mothers) can neglect their own needs is an important one.

The other story, which is actually a play, is "Three Shouts on a Hill," an odd mishmash of Irish legend with bits and pieces from other times and places that's as much a meta-meditation on story as it is anything else.

Overall, then, this collection is proof that, if you're a good enough writer, you can write a successful piece of short fiction in a lot of different ways. Not all of the pieces are excellent or weighty, or even original, but those that are lift the average considerably.

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Review: The Censor's Hand

The Censor's Hand by A.M. Steiner
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I stopped reading this twice.

The first time, at maybe 15%, I went off and read several other books. I didn't feel much desire to go back to it, but I wasn't hating it, so I gave it another go. In part, I wanted to figure out why it was that I didn't care about any of the characters, and give the author a chance to change that.

I got to 64% before I realised why it was that I didn't care, and at that point I stopped.

The narrative follows three loosely connected main characters. One is in financial trouble and about to lose the family business, which would mean his ill mother, his wife, and their baby would have no means of support. You'd think this would make me care about him, but he's so hapless and hopeless, and makes such bad decisions, that I never did. His family seems to be more of a constraint on his actions than people that he cares deeply about.

The second is the first character's brother. He's a competent fighter, and ambitious to clean up their old neighbourhood by becoming a Censor, a kind of lawman. Again, a laudable goal, and you'd think I'd care, but he fumbles around, not showing a lot of focus or competence, serving an obviously heartless organization which considers him a tool, and not a particularly valuable one.

The third character is a woman student - the first woman student - at a magical college, at which the second character is also a student as part of an undercover investigation. They become involved. So why didn't I care about a woman who's making her way in a man's world by being better than the male students? Normally I'd love that story, but this character is so nakedly ambitious, and so uncaring about anyone other than herself, that I had no sympathy for her goals.

And that was the overall problem, I think. Nobody combined competence with idealism; everyone was missing one or the other, and nobody had any noticeable compassion or empathy. Faced with a cast of characters who didn't much care about each other, I didn't care about them either, and stopped reading with no regrets.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: Abounding Might

Abounding Might by Melissa McShane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Melissa McShane crashes the superhero genre into Regency romance, by way of Napoleonic military adventure. The effect is... pleasing.

In part, it's pleasing because she has a sure hand on the wheel when it comes both to basic storytelling and the mechanics of grammar, punctuation, and word choice. There was nothing to distract or detract from my enjoyment of the characters, the plot, and the setting, and those elements were very well handled.

I much enjoyed the first in this series, Burning Bright, with a heroine who could control fire battling pirates in the early-19th-century Caribbean, and this volume is as good or better. Set in the British-dominated India of the East India Company during the Regency, it follows Lady Daphne, a teleporter ("Bounder") who is determined not to let her small stature or feminine nature prevent her from becoming famous for her skill. She lifts weights, since, to transport other people, she has to pick them up; and she chafes against, and often effectively circumvents, the restrictions imposed on her as a woman.

She does, at one point, make a less-than-sensible decision which leads to bad consequences, but it's a completely believable one (not just shoehorned in against character in order to complicate the plot), and she deals with the consequences with courage and determination. She's principled, intelligent, and in general exactly the kind of character I enjoy reading about. Her love interest, while perhaps a touch bland compared with her (since we're in her viewpoint throughout, we don't really get to see his inner life), is worthy and capable.

I wasn't sure I quite understood how the minor antagonist was disturbing the hero, though I do have a theory, which Daphne would realistically have been too naive to think of. Apart from that, everything was clear, and I didn't spot any plot holes or obvious historical gaffes.

A very sound effort, and I believe I'll pick up Book 2 and watch out for Book 4, if there is one. I received both Book 1 and Book 3 via Netgalley for purposes of review.

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Review: Masked

Masked by J.D. Wright
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've been in the mood for superhero fiction lately, but it's hard to find good stuff. Most of it is poorly edited and not especially well executed, and I'm afraid this one isn't an exception.

At first it got the Randy Jackson reaction: It was just OK for me, you know, dogg? I could have overlooked most of the issues - even titanium not being a good conductor of electrical blasts, although the same electrical blasts were destroying creatures made of rock, and even the gradual drift from third person limited into more and more headhopping - but what dropped it down to three stars was the implausible stupidity of the characters.

So let's say you have important information about a wanted supervillain - who he is, that he's even still alive, that kind of thing. And let's say that this supervillain, if not stopped, is going to kill more people, like he already has several times. And let's say that you have contact with a highly effective organisation that has much better resources than you do, many trained agents with lots of experience, and you're a group of late-teenage supers just starting out. And you have no reason to expect that there will be any negative consequences to telling this organisation about this villain, who is, again, killing people and needs to be stopped.

What do you do? Well, of course you agree not to tell them, and to go after him yourselves, and none of you even questions that this is the right thing to do in the circumstances.

Nope, sorry. Blatant stupidity in the service of setting up a sequel gets your sequel left unread.

Apart from that, it was, as I say, OK. A bit more detail about the teenage sex than was needed, maybe, but generally average. There were two black characters, both of whom were tech wizards, which seems to often be the lot of black supers (think John Stewart, John Henry Irons, Cyborg and his father...). It's interesting how this trope, which theoretically is about black people being intelligent, in practice often works out as giving them a subsidiary, supporting role in which they're not expected to protagonise or to need a character arc (which is the case here).

Maybe that's improved upon in the next book. I'll never know, because that one moment of supreme stupidity put me off reading it.

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Review: The Thorn of Dentonhill

The Thorn of Dentonhill by Marshall Ryan Maresca
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

OK, fantasy authors, listen up. This is simple, but I see a lot of you getting it wrong - including this author.

The phases of the moon are caused by the angle between the moon and the sun.

This means that, if two moons are in the same part of the sky, they cannot be in different phases.

It's not even basic astronomy; it's basic geometry.

OK, with that out of the way: apart from the moon-phase error and the frequent absence of the past perfect tense (plus the usual number of minor typos and homonym errors), this was good. No better than plenty of much cheaper indie books, so I'm glad I waited until Penguin discounted it; but good, nevertheless.

A superherolike vigilante mage in a sword-and-sorcery setting, seeking revenge on a drug lord for what was done to his parents? Yes, please.

The protagonist is getting by on not enough sleep, getting beaten up and injured, overtaxing his magical strength, and he keeps promising himself and his concerned friends that he'll definitely rest up and heal, that he won't go out again the next night - and then something happens to raise the stakes, and his principles won't let him stand by, and he gets beaten up again and barely wins again and staggers back covered in blood, to vow that this time he'll look after himself...

It's a good way of maintaining tension, and setting it up so that the lone vigilante needs the help of those who care about him to triumph against the increasingly scary odds with higher and higher stakes. Good storytelling, in other words. Along the way, the secondary characters are developed and gain depth and individuality, as well as having their own character arcs.

There's only one female character, and she's a bit under-utilised, but not weak; though she does need rescuing, she also shows competence and ability in rescuing another character.

The Batman parallels are strong, but not excessive. Overall, solid work.

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Review: Necrospect: Chronicles of the Wizard-Detective

Necrospect: Chronicles of the Wizard-Detective by J.B. Markes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Promising, with some impressive twists. The idea of a necromancer detective is good, and the characters were well developed, though the viewpoint character, to me, seemed insufficiently motivated for the sacrifices she made.

It does read as if the author's first language is not English; there are quite a few muddled idioms, plus the occasional incorrectly punctuated bit of dialog and a few missing words. I thought that referring to "the wizarding world" was a mistake; it immediately made me think of Harry Potter, and when you're setting a book in a magic academy, you should probably try not to evoke that comparison (particularly since there's not a lot of resemblance).

I did enjoy it, though, and I'd read another.

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Review: Sensation

Sensation by Kevin Hardman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good piece of YA superhero fiction. The moral lines are clear, which personally I like, and the main character is on the right side of them - though he's justifiably angry, and messes up believably in the way that inexperienced young people do.

He's overpowered. I prefer my heroes to be underpowered rather than overpowered, from a bias towards underdogs, but it is justified by the story that the author is telling, and the author does, at one point (albeit briefly), set it up so that the protagonist loses each power as he uses it. He has so many that it almost doesn't matter, and when it's crucial to the plot he doesn't lose one, but at least the attempt was made.

A couple of dangling modifiers, a few homonym errors, "alright" instead of "all right", and the inexcusable use of multiple question marks and exclamation marks (together) keep it off the "well-edited" shelf, but it's pretty clean apart from that.

I would have bought the next one, except that the subsequent books are all priced at $5.99. While it's good, it's not twice as good as plenty of books I can get for half that price, so I'll read those instead.

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Review: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'd vaguely heard good things about this book, and bought it when it came up on sale.

I ended up being disappointed because it didn't go in the direction I was expecting, in terms of the relationship between the characters, and even more because I ended up thoroughly disliking the main female character. Not just for her selfishness, but for her ill-conceived and irresponsible actions, and her attitude to the other main characters.

Now, partly this is a matter of taste in types of story, and has nothing to do with quality. But on the question of quality, there are quite a few accidentally omitted words; "harrow" as a mistake for "furrow"; a confusion between baron and baronet (which are completely different); and a safety catch on a revolver. It's not terrible, but it needs more polish.

Everyone - the Japanese Buddhist, the well-brought-up young lady, everyone - has only one swear: "Christ". This struck me as both mildly offensive and unlikely.

I won't be looking for more books by this author.

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Review: The Uploaded

The Uploaded by Ferrett Steinmetz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't read dystopian, as a rule, and it's a pretty firm rule. Nor do I generally like books with a high body count. But by the time I discovered that this book is both of those things, I'd been charmed by the voice of its viewpoint character. I finished it and even enjoyed it, despite the fact that it's not the sort of thing I usually like.

It's told from the flipside of the "Rapture of the Nerds," the technological advance that enables personalities to be uploaded. The conscious dead outnumber the living, who are their miserable slaves, maintaining the servers and trying to be the kind of people the dead will eventually vote into the paradisal afterlife - or, as it's known, the Upterlife. Most people's greatest ambition is to be dead; culture consists of an endless series of reboots of franchises that were popular when the oldest dead were alive, and anything creative is in the realm of the dead. In self-defence, the dead have forbidden the living from learning to program. The most excruciating suffering of the living is dismissed with the argument that they'll get over the trauma in two or three hundred years.

The main character is an orphan (thanks to a mutated plague), whose parents are so busy on their World of Warcraft-style quests in the Upterlife that they neglect him and his sister. Partly in order to protect his sister, and partly because he's just a rebellious person, he links up with a rebel underground and with Neo-Christian insurgents (who see the Upterlife as blasphemous) to take on the inventor of the Upterlife, who is permanently President of the United States.

It's over-the-top. It's funny, moving, tragic, and eventually triumphant, though at high cost for all the characters. It's cleverly and skilfully written. If I didn't dislike dystopian stories with a high body count so much, I would certainly be giving it five stars.

I received a copy from Netgalley for review.

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Review: Artemis

Artemis by Andy Weir
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this author's book The Martian, despite the abundance of infodumps (and the annoying habit he has of using an exclamation mark as well as a question mark in the same sentence, which, if I was his editor, I would not allow). This book has the same faults, and many more, but is lacking the main thing I liked about The Martian: a viewpoint character I could really get behind and cheer on to succeed.

Jazz, the viewpoint character in this book, is like Mark Watney in The Martian in that she's a smartass. But while Mark's emphasis is on the smart, Jazz's is definitely on the ass. She tells us three or four times that she makes poor life choices, and demonstrates that this is true even more often; she refuses to fulfil her considerable potential out of, as far as I could tell, immature rebelliousness; she's a petty crook; and her main story goal is to commit major sabotage on vital infrastructure (there is a good reason, but still), while Mark's straightforwardly laudable goal is to survive and escape against the odds.

Artemis is a kind of heist, something I normally enjoy, but for me to enjoy a heist it needs to be more clever than this and pulled off by a lovable rogue - and I just didn't find Jazz lovable. Yes, she has one area of ethical firmness (she will always deliver on a contract), and she eventually acts heroically (to fix something she has broken), but it didn't make up for the other issues with her character. Her arc is that she learns to trust and work with other people, which worked for Lego Batman, but is a bit cheesy here.

She's supposedly Saudi, by the way, but is effectively American. The moonbase is owned by the Kenyans, but is effectively American; all the domes are named after the first American astronauts to land on the moon. None of the nods to cultural diversity were quite believable to me; it all just seemed American. Not to mention that Jazz isn't entirely convincing as a woman, either. Men can write convincing female characters, and Americans can write convincing non-Americans, but it's harder than many people (including most male American writers) seem to think.

The infodumps, too, as well as being annoying in themselves, are sometimes too close to breaking the fourth wall, in that Jazz thinks to explain things that a reader of today would find remarkable but she would not - for example, the lack of a drinking age on the moon. And then there are the ones that are just unnecessarily detailed. "How much do you know about aluminum?" says a character. To myself, I mutter, "As much as I want to. Less than I'm about to."

After all of the dull expository lumps of Space! Science!, the McGuffin seemed to me, as a layperson, to break or at least unconvincingly bend the laws of physics with regard to transmission of light through a non-vacuum. And while there are references to the original American moon landings being about a century before, which places us at least in the 2060s, the technology isn't (apart from the unconvincing McGuffin) anything that we couldn't build today; nothing really seems to have advanced, and the world hasn't changed a great deal.

What really sunk the story for me, though, was the ending. I'm going to have to use spoiler tags here to talk about it in detail.

(view spoiler)[
Firstly, Jazz screwed up really badly in a way that left several thousand people unconscious, but nobody died. This struck me as unrealistic, but it had to be that way so she didn't get in more trouble than she already was.

Secondly, and more fatally for my suspension of disbelief, in order to keep from being deported to a miserable life of gravity sickness on Earth, she makes a deal that she couldn't realistically make, using an argument that defies how economics works. She claims that the base administrator is better off with her, a known smuggler with principles who doesn't bring in weapons or hard drugs, than with the smugglers who would bring those things - who she's supposedly driven out of business by undercutting their prices. But if someone isn't supplying what you want, their prices are irrelevant; you'll go to someone who will supply it. Jazz has no realistic way of preventing anyone else from smuggling anything they want, so her deal is pure bluff, and the administrator - an economist - would know it.

Oh, and the nerd gets the girl. This is annoying enough as a trope when the nerd is the protagonist; but when the girl is the protagonist, and the nerd hasn't really done a lot, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the nerd gets the girl because the author is a nerd and thinks nerds should get more sexy girls, as of right. At one point, Jazz thinks about how to reward the nerd for helping her with something, and "have sex with him" is one of the options she considers. Which is all kinds of offensive.
(hide spoiler)]

So the author writes himself into a scenario where, by all logic, the main character would be in a near-fatal amount of trouble, and gets her off by fudging severely and, to me, unconvincingly.

Overall, I thought this book caught fire on the launchpad. It didn't succeed in terms of craft, character, plot, or setting. I give it three stars only because it's amusing in places, and occasionally clever.

I received a copy from Netgalley for review.

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Review: The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought I'd read this before, but I didn't remember it once I got into it, and I would have remembered a book like this. I think I'd just heard about it so often that I assumed I'd read it, particularly since I love the author's other work.

McKillip writes with a magnificent complexity and depth, in the mythopoeic style championed by Tolkien. Lest we be fooled by the commercial epic fantasy of the 1970s and 1980s into thinking that Tolkien was all about armies and orcs and a quirky mixed group on a quest, this book reminds us that there was another, deeper layer to his work, which few subsequent authors have the skills to emulate. It's poetic, without ever trying too hard for beauty for its own sake; it's mythic, while also being anchored in the reality of human psychology; it's epic, without depicting a single battle on stage (though a battle forms an important part of the backstory).

Love, revenge, betrayal and jealousy weave powerfully through the plot, as do wisdom and self-understanding. (view spoiler)[It has what I'm going to start calling the Glorious Ending, in which love, kindness and wisdom head off what seems an inevitable tragedy born of bad choices, fear, betrayals and resentment. (hide spoiler)]

The central characters are magnificent, grand, and wholehearted. The setting is vivid, rich, and magical. The beasts of the title are worthy to stand beside the great dragons, lions, cats, swans, and boars of myth and legend.

A couple of quotations, to give you the flavour:

"My heart is in your heart. I gave it to you with my name that night and you are its guardian, to treasure it, or let it wither and die. I do not understand you. I am angry with you. I am hurt and helpless, but nothing would fill the ache of the hollowness in me where your name would echo if I lost you."

"I have many people who know my name, but only one or two or three that know who it belongs to."

The wisdom at the heart of this book is that, in caring for others, we come to understand ourselves; and the person who comes to this insight most clearly is not the young boy, but the magically powerful middle-aged woman. It's a landmark work in the fantasy field, and I'm glad it's being reissued in ebook, and that I had the chance to read it through Netgalley for this review.

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Review: The New Voices of Fantasy

The New Voices of Fantasy by Peter S. Beagle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a collection of stories by authors who have recently hit the upper levels of speculative fiction writing - publication in the top venues, award nominations, and so forth.

I'd read several of these before, mostly in the The Long List Anthology Volume 2: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List; some of them were good enough that I read them again. I skipped Alyssa Wong's "Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers" (which was more horror-like than I prefer), Carmen Maria Machado's "The Husband Stitch", a magic-realist story that didn't have a strong enough payoff for me to want to read it again, and Usman T. Malik's "The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn," which was good but, let's say, took a lot of words for the amount of story in it.

I did re-read Maria Dahvana Headley's "The Tallest Doll in New York City," a lovely Runyonesque that I'd previously read in the Tor.com anthology, and Max Gladstone's "A Kiss with Teeth", which I'd read twice before in other anthologies. It's that good. His novels are, for me, a frustrating blend of brilliant and flawed, but this story is excellent. Even though a lot of its excellence is in the masterfully maintained tension, and even though I (obviously) already knew the ending, it rewarded rereading.

The other story I re-read was Sofia Samatar's "Selkie Stories Are for Losers", which, the first time I read it, didn't do much for me. I appreciated it more on a re-read; like most of these stories, what it's about is human relationships, and it takes an allusive and indirect approach that, for me, needed a second read to get.

As I write this review, I'm partway through reading Event Horizon 2017, a collection of stories by authors eligible for the Campbell Award - that is, people who've recently made their first professional sale. I'm trying to figure out what the difference is between those stories and the ones in this volume; haven't quite put my finger on it yet, but it's something to do with having a second level to the story, and and extra degree of skill in weaving it together. While I didn't necessarily like every story in this volume, I appreciated the authors' ability.

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Review: The Door in the Hedge

The Door in the Hedge by Robin McKinley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's Robin McKinley, so it is, of course, beautifully written (with a caveat I'll get to in a moment).

It's in the fairy-tale genre, so you need to be willing to accept that princes and princesses are (nearly) all wise, beautiful, good, brave, and kind. There is one commoner protagonist, but the rest are all royal, and noble in both senses of the word.

You also need to be able to accept that marrying people off to other people who they've never spent any time with is a reasonable thing to do, and that (in at least one case) the woman's consent is not particularly required for this. Leave your feminism, as well as your Marxism, if any, at the door. You could blame the source genre, but... eh. The author managed to give a female protagonist plenty of agency in The Blue Sword. I found the king offering his daughters up as prizes hard to forgive.

My other gripe is about the semicolons. An occasional semicolon is fine; it shows that two thoughts are linked together more tightly than two separate sentences would convey. But when the vast majority of your sentences include a semicolon (I am not exaggerating - far more sentences have one than lack one), and not a few of them contain two semicolons, at that point it's moved beyond a stylistic choice, and has gone all the way past an annoying tic to become an outright fault in the writing.

If none of those three issues bother you too much, these are beautifully told (or retold) stories by a highly capable author.


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Review: The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by John Joseph Adams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was OK. It could have been much better had a really good copy editor got rid of the Americanisms, the anachronisms, the misused words (two separate stories use "sojourn" to mean "journey," which is the opposite of what it means), the out-of-character moments, the occasional infodumping, and the cases where some of the authors attempted to sound 19th-century and only managed to sound stiff.

We have many (a great many) different visions of Holmes and his supporting characters here. In a couple, he wears the deerstalker hat, which was introduced by the Basil Rathbone films and never appears in the books. In one, he despises and disparages Gilbert and Sullivan while Watson enjoys it; in another, vice versa, which seemed to me much less like his canon character. In some of the stories, he shows a familiarity with popular literature which, in canon, he explicitly avoided reading; in some, he is much kinder and more polite than canon Holmes; in many, he is prepared to believe in non-rational explanations. In one, he's mistaken for an applicant for a servant's position, which is ridiculous; no British servant in the 19th century would mistake an (undisguised) gentleman for an applicant to be an underbutler, any more than he'd mistake him for a woman, and for much the same reason: cues of voice, dress, and manner proclaimed social class, and everyone was well aware of them from an early age. Not to mention that an applicant to be the underbutler would never knock at the front door.

In one story, a thoroughly OOC Holmes, his desire for a more intimate relationship with Watson thwarted by Watson's marriage, and hiding out in Paris after his apparent death, commits adultery with Irene Adler, who claims to love her husband even as she deceives and betrays him.

Most of the stories are from Watson's POV, though the very British, very Victorian Watson sometimes uses American or modern language that the authors and their copy editor seem oblivious to. A few are from other characters' points of view, such as Mary Robinette Kowal's story, from the POV of someone helped by Holmes and Watson. Although I respect MRK's advice on the Writing Excuses podcast very much, her actual stories usually disappoint me, and this was one example. The POV character has little agency, being mainly an observer, and this is one of several stories which was clearly referencing things outside the Holmes canon with which I'm not familiar - meaning that I missed the significance and that part of the story failed.

There are also several stories in which the author shows far too much of their research, turning Watson into an infodumper.

There were good stories, too. The Stephen King, for example, does a better job of Watson's voice than most of the others (voice is a talent of King's). The Neil Gaiman story, which I'd read in a couple of other collections, skilfully blends Mythos with a deeper familiarity with the Holmes canon than many of the other stories showed. I was amused by the story which took Conan Doyle's The Lost World>/i> as a point of departure for a clever pastiche, involving a dinosaur, trombones, and a ridiculous exaggeration of Holmes' mastery of disguise.

There were some good moments, but not, for me, enough of them to make up for the issues, and it ended up only average on the whole.

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Review: Heirs of Grace

Heirs of Grace by Tim Pratt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Independent, modern young woman narrates, in First Person Smartass, how she was just an ordinary person with an ordinary life who didn't believe in the supernatural, but then it turned out that the supernatural believed in her, and around about the same time she met this guy...

There are hundreds of authors writing that exact book at the moment, many of them very badly; and when I see an instance of it, I usually move on, sometimes with an eyeroll, to the next book in the hope of something I haven't seen dozens of times before. But I was vaguely aware of the name "Tim Pratt" - I think I've read one or two of his short stories - and paused long enough on this one to get the sample and see if he wrote it well.

He wrote it very well indeed.

I was surprised, when I read the back matter, to discover that (as T.A. Pratt) he's the author of the Marla Mason series. I stopped reading that series because it is so completely unlike this. Marla is lacking in empathy, violent, and amoral; the protagonist of this book is intensely empathetic, and her rejection of the easy, violent solution gives us an ending that I found fresh, unexpected, and extremely satisfying.

Also, there's a mysterious magical house, and for some reason I love mysterious magical houses. There are some cool magical items, too, and the author wisely dodges the Q trap (where every single one of them turns out to be the only thing that will save James Bond at some key moment of the plot); some of them are simply cool rather than being at all useful.

I appreciated that the protagonist didn't rush into her relationship with the man she met, and that she took the time to communicate with him about something that could have split them apart (this is lampshaded as something that would resolve practically every romantic comedy plot much more quickly, and is a thing that real adult human beings do). She makes good decisions throughout, in fact - not only good-sensible but good-morally - so the plot is not driven by her stupidity and risk-taking, meaning that when the love interest saves her it's not infuriating.

Overall, annoying tropes are avoided or averted, the characters work well together, the protagonist's voice is genuinely witty and amusing, and we end up in an unexpected and satisfactory place after an enjoyable ride. This book demonstrates that even an overused premise can still be the starting point for a fresh and well-executed story.

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Review: Zeroes

Zeroes by Scott Westerfeld
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fresh take on the YA supers genre. No high-tech gadgets or inexplicable flying here; these teenagers have subtler powers, mostly to do with interaction with other people. Scam has a voice that, when he lets it speak, knows exactly what to say to get what he wants. It has knowledge he lacks, but doesn't have much wisdom, and is as likely to get him into trouble as out of it. Bellwether, also known as Glorious Leader behind his back, can influence other people to do what he wants. Flicker, who's blind, can see through other people's eyes. Anon is forgotten, or not noticed, by everyone, even the other Zeroes, even his family. Crash destroys technology. And Mob can influence the mood of a crowd.

It's a diverse group; Bellwether is Hispanic, Crash is an African immigrant, Flicker is disabled, and Crash, Flicker and Mob are female.

Scam is, frankly, a screw-up, and as you'd expect from someone who can usually get what he wants, not exactly the most admirable character. But he does try to do better, and partially succeeds. Along the way he gets the Zeroes involved with two separate groups of drug dealers and Mob's small-time criminal father (which is how Mob joins the group), and triggers a disastrous extraction from a police station.

The stakes are high for the characters, though they're not saving the world, just each other. Things go horribly wrong, and they fight hard and pull together to set them as right as they can, though that leaves some very rough edges.

The writing is as smooth and professional as you'd expect from Scott Westerfeld. I spotted one very subtle homonym error ("leeched" and "leached" are often hard to distinguish between, but when you're talking about vampires, it's definitely the "sucked out" rather than "washed out" one you want); a misplaced apostrophe ("peoples'"); and a minor typo, but since I spot about two dozen errors in the average book, this is nothing. The kids' voices are all similar, but the characters are different enough that it doesn't matter. The tension is well maintained and well resolved.

Overall, a good read.

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Review: Rotherweird

Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A highly unusual book, a kind of portal fantasy/historical fantasy/contemporary urban fantasy blend. It reminds me most of Robert Holdstock or Charles de Lint, though less ominous in tone than either.

There are a great many characters, and according to the author's afterword, there were originally a lot more. I had a cold when I read it, so my brain was fuzzy, and I sometimes had to think hard to remember who a character was when they were mentioned after being offstage for a while. I felt that it could have been achieved with a tighter cast; in particular, I didn't really see why the villain found it necessary to supply himself with not only a fake wife, but a fake son, since the son never seemed to contribute to his plans in any way. I could see why the author involved him (he played a minor, but important, role in the plot), but I couldn't figure out why the villain did so. The "son" was also oddly subservient to the villain, given the rest of his character.

One thing I disliked was that strong, fulfilling relationships between men and women were conspicuous by their absence. As well as the fake marriage, there are a couple of marriages which have obviously been contracted for political reasons, and in which the wife is a cypher, never developed as a character. Another marriage is threatened by the husband's drinking. I can only remember one relationship (the publican and his wife) where both partners are developed and effective, and where they don't seem to be in conflict, but that's because they don't seem to be in anything; they take action separately, but don't really have a scene together where they interact. The outsider who is the best candidate for "central character" (he's not really a protagonist, or less so than some of the other characters, but we spend a lot of time with him) (view spoiler)[never manages to develop a satisfactory relationship with any of the several women he's attracted to (hide spoiler)].

The point of view is, I suppose, omniscient, though it mostly follows one character per scene (fooling me for a while into thinking it was third person limited), occasionally switching heads mid-scene. This is necessary in part because there's no one protagonist in the complicated plot.

The setting is a town separated by statute from England at large, to preserve a terrible secret. It's an odd mixture; it has a long tradition of scientific inquiry (something best done while not isolated, in general), and the school - a secondary school, not a university - produces cutting-edge research, yet there's little evidence of modern technology; the scientific prowess of some of the characters is an idea more than it is a developed element of the plot. The overall feel of the town is a lot closer to its Elizabethan origins than it is to the present day, which directly contradicts the strong imperative to forget about the past and forge towards the future. I felt that this aspect hadn't been fully thought through.

It's sounding as if I didn't enjoy it, but I did. The mysterious, and never fully explained, portals to the other world, the Elizabethan backstory, the various mysteries, and the joint maneuverings of the large cast kept me involved and interested. I did think it was, at one and the same time, over-elaborate and yet not completely worked out, but it shows a lot of promise, and I will be watching for the sequel.

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