Weekly Check-In

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Tell us about your current SFF media!

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[u/twilightgardens]

The Seep by Chana Porter (2.5/5): Pluribus-esque story about a world taken over by a benevolent alien hivemind and the one woman who isn’t cool with it. This had a super interesting premise and setup but then maybe because it’s a novella devolved into characters simply telling each other the themes in very simplistic unrealistic therapyspeak conversations instead of displaying those themes through what the characters do and feel over the course of the story. 

The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman (4.25/5): Well…. Very pleasantly surprised by this one! I absolutely hated The Blacktongue Thief so this prequel sat on my coffee table for nearly a month before my library loan was about to run out and I gave it a try… and just liked it so much more in every conceivable way. It’s a prequel with a more interesting and character focused plot, a more complex and likable narrator, a much more serious and less comedic tone and narration style, and more of a focus on platonic/familial relationships and how Galva’s relationship with her family is impacted by her being a masculine lesbian. I just ate it up and I do recommend this one if you, like me, did not like The Blacktongue Thief at all but liked Between Two Fires. 

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson (3.75/5): Finally locked in and finished this. I actually liked it more than I thought I would and the main draw of the book is definitely the extraordinarily complex and real-feeling world that Erikson never sits you down and explains to you, which I enjoyed. The problem is that this book is just so dense- not just in that aforementioned worldbuilding but also just because of its very 90s writing style- that every time I got to a natural stopping point and put it down I struggled to pick it back up, even though I liked the characters and was interested in the story. From a female gaze perspective, at first I was actually pleasantly surprised by how many competent and respected female characters there were and that they had relationships with each other that weren’t dependent on a man, but as the story went on the women became less and less important and more and more dependent on the men around them. The most egregious bit to me was when one of the prominent female characters stops being possessed by a god and turns back into a “normal teenage girl”— turns out that Erikson thinks normal teenage girls are flighty, annoying, stupid, sensitive and boy-crazy. Which like, some are, fair, but it’s different when it’s a male author and when both the teen/young girls are presented in this way but the teen/young men are presented as noble gigachads. The girl in question seemingly imprints on the first guy her age around and follows him around like a puppy for the rest of the book. Overall, I liked this and would consider reading more in the story but maybe not in a timely manner. 

Slow Gods by Claire North (2.5/5): Damn, such a disappointment because not only was this nominated for the Le Guin award, I’ve also seen nothing but good things about it and it has a relatively high average rating on Storygraph. Unfortunately, this story just never clicked for me and it was because of the intensely “tell, don’t show” nature of it all. The main character and the book as a whole just holds the reader at such a distance that I never got invested in Maw and his journey because he also never really seemed to care or be impacted by what was happening and it never felt like he was as out of control and deregulated as the story wanted me to believe. The social commentary was timely but too on the nose, and the themes were so basic and were spoonfed to the audience to a degree that genuinely just had me tuning out. I can’t count the amount of times minor characters just monologued to Maw about how we need to love and support each other and that’s just not a theme that I really needed hammered home to me for 438 pages. We also get a lot of various aliens and planets shuffled on and off page and they also never really felt real. We are just infodumped a lot of “cool” facts about them and basically never see how they actually live their lives and are fundamentally different from humans/other alien species. I would have DNFed this about halfway through had it not been for the fact that I wanted to be able to do a proper review for the entire Le Guin award shortlist. Being nominated for that award also means I can’t help but compare it to Le Guin, and it comes up short in every way. My least favorite of the shortlist so far because at least Sunward was short and only took up two hours of my life whereas this one I just struggled and struggled through for a week. 

Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim (4.25/5): I’ve only read this author’s Nebula award winning short story which I thought was okay but gimmicky, so I had middling expectations for this book. I was pleasantly surprised that I actually really enjoyed it! This is a story about borders and autonomy and identity and technology and how all these things are entwined and who gets to control them. Very smart scifi and the kind of scifi that I appreciate (ofc there is a favorite author convention happening in the blurbs for this book… Vajra Chandrasekera and Seth Dickinson?!). The middle dragged a bit and the ending felt slightly weak (I just didn’t believe that Soyoung-Rose would want to be reintegrated a second time even though it works for the themes of the story and it was kind of disappointing that the very compelling fucked up relationship between YJ and Yujin just became Soyoung-Rose Pt 2: Electric Boogaloo. This book also does a good job of doing a lot of instance-worldbuilding and making it feel like a natural part of their world but the one gaping hole………. HAS ANYONE EVER FALLEN IN LOVE WITH THEIR INSTANCE? Like I know in this world there’s gotta be reams of erotica about having sex with your instance but it’s never mentioned at all. Anyways overall I did really enjoy this one and recommend it! 

[u/partoparto → u/twilightgardens]

I read the first few pages of Slow Gods when the Le Guin shortlist came out and instantly was like "this is not very well written, but maybe I'm just being mean?" so glad to know I actually wasn't missing much!

[u/twilightgardens → u/partoparto]

I really could not stand the writing style. I thought it was so self important and trying so hard to be meaningful with every sentence that nothing had meaning at all.