Dem Bones Goan' Rise Again: Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
All I can say is that it was complicated back in Canaan House, and sometimes a cute older girl shows you a lot of attention, because she's bored or whatever, and you sort of have this maybe flirting maybe not thing going on, right, and then it turns out she's an ancient warrior who's killed all your friends and she's coming for you, and then you both die and she turns up ages later in the broiling heat on a sacred space station and, like, it's COMPLICATED. Just saying that it happens all the time.
This is the second of the 2021 Hugo nominated novels that I read, and--whoo boy. I am not sure I can be of much help in talking about it. It's the second in a trilogy that started with Muir's 2020 Hugo-nominated Gideon The Ninth (Bookpost, November 2020). the beginning of the book relies on plot spoilers from the earlier one.
Just--Hot Lesbian Punk Necromancers Animating Skeletons In Space. Planets with souls that can be killed. Plot twist after plot twist, and the best use of the Second Person narrative I've seen in my life so far. You're either going to have a wild ride reading it, or you'll be like What the Actual Fuck for a while before not finishing. L loved it, but I'm not sure I understood the whole thing.
Dynastic Cozy:The Rainbow, by DH Lawrence
Her whole soul was implicated with Skrebensky--not the young man of the world, but the undifferentiated man he was. She was perfectly sure of herself, perfectly strong, stronger than all the world. The world was not strong--she was strong. The world existed only in a secondary sense--she existed supremely.
I'm finding it best to read the older books a few at a time, instead of trying to cram the "best" of a particular age into a single year. Read amidst the Hugo books, it came across as a little dull, but then I've never particularly enjoyed DH lawrence.
The book is 460 pages and four generations of English country family gradually rising in status from farm to town. Roughly the last half is the saga of Ursula, the kind of heroine portrayed in the early 20th century as "strong, independent woman", but sabotaged by the author into being a fool with an iron whim that gets her into trouble, and oh how she should have listened to her elders and betters. Ursula makes one wrong choice after another but, like Scarlett O'Hara, remains true to her own spirit, whatever the cost.
Murderbot: Network Effect, by Martha Wells
I've had clients who thought they needed an absurd level of security (and I'm talking absurd even by my standards, and my code was developed by a bond company known for intense xenophobic paranoia, tempered only by desperate greed). I've also had clients who thought they didn't need any security at all, right up until something ate them(that's mostly a metaphor. My uneaten client stat is high).
The third book I read from the Hugo list confused me a bit, because the protagonist has appeared in a series of "Murderbot" novels, and Network effect is billed as "its first standalone novel.'
I read the full Jack Reacher series last year (and stopped including it in my Bookpost after I'd run out of things to say talking about the first five. they're all the same story, and ,b>Network Effect is the same story, except that the Reacher character is closer to Robocop--controlled by an internal governor that can kill him if he breaks protocol, but still superpowered and bound only by his own moral code, which thankfully emphasizes protection of its clients.
The world Wells creates is innovative, the mystery a standard one enlivened by sci-fi tropes, and the Murderbot protagonist a sly, sharp parody of the Rambo/Reacher/human killing machine "hero" portrayed as an actual AI machine. Amusing, and highly recommended.
Astronaut Women FTW: The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal
"I'm going to make a recommendation that, in the future, we paint the BusyBees bright orange."
"Hot pink. Then none of the men will touch them." helen winked. "Job security."
"With a bow on top." I could feel her watching me with the biscuit, so I put the next bit into my mouth."
"Maybe some lace?" She folded her log book and tucked it back into her flight suit.
The fourth of the 2021 Hugo nominated novels, and as of this writing, I feel like I've found my choice for favorite. Which isn't fair to the other two. we'll see what I'm saying in next month's bookpost...but The Relentless Moon will be hard to beat, I love it on so many levels. It is genre fiction, modern history with a twist, inclusive social justice writing, and a clever espionage story, with excellent character and atmosphere. I'd call it "The space age...as it should have been", except that this space age was hastened by an extinction-threatening meteor hit on earth, so I wouldn't want to change our actual timeline for this one.
I have a problem. Kowal's first "Lady Astronauts" novel, The Calculating Stars, was nominated for the Hugo (and won it), and so I knew it existed, and read the living shit out of it. there's a second book, The Fated Sky, that was not nominated, and I learned it existed from looking at the jacket of the third book in the series, which I had on three-week checkout with other holds on it, so I couldn't wait, and I read it while missing vital background information from the second book.
It was OK. I didn't really feel like I was missing enough to make the story suffer. But we've leapt from the 50s to the 60s, with a moon colony actually in place, a different narrator from the first novel, and a right wing terrorist sect similar to 21st century anti-vaccination Q people trying to stop the space migration that could be the only thing that saves at least some of the Human Race.
The Right Wing terrorists are called "Earth First", which makes sense as analogous to "America First" terrorism, but which is jarring to an Oregonian to whom "Earth First!" means an environmental protective group that was often falsely accused of "terrorism".
The systemic sexism and racism of the American 1960s is portrayed just heavily enough that we can--almost--pat ourselves on the back for no longer thinking like that, but not enough to distract from the excitement of the space story. Very highest recommendations.