#hugo nom

This was the second-last nominee for best novella in this year’s Hugos, and the last without a multi-month hold queue at the library. I find Novik’s work a bit variable, in that I adore Spinning Silver, find the Scholomance trilogy solid fun, and it’s probably best for everyone involved that I never get around to trying Temeraire or Uprooted. I went into this one more or less blind but with optimistic expectations, and found them satisfied several times over. I’m a very easy sell for fairy-tale fantasy with a current of fey tragedy and pleasantly poetic prose, and this delivered all three in spades. Not a book to change your life, but sitting down and devouring it was at least probably the highlight of my week.

The story stars Celia, the youngest child (and only daughter) of her kingdom’s greatest general and (from his king’s perspective) most problematically overmighty vassal. On the cusp of adolescence, she comes into profound magical power, becoming the kingdom’s first sorceress in generations. She discovers this by laying a curse upon her eldest brother, the shining knight and perfect heir who came home to tell their father he hated him and was casting aside his name and inheritance without sparing a thought for how he was in the same breath abandoning the baby sister who worshipped the ground he walked on. In the years that follow, she and her (much-derided and neglected by everyone until then) middle brother begin to scheme about how to rescue Argent from the unending life of heroism and glory she had cursed him to. Until, just as they are ready to move, Celia finds herself entrapped by first royal marriage politics and then the ancient thirst for vengeance which drives the king of Summer who for so long raided and ravaged her kingdom.

All of which is just about half the novel’s plot, which is mostly scene-setting and preamble. It’s a fairly plotty and efficient novella, insofar as it quickly skims over long periods of time while conveying whatever relevant things actually occur during them. Doing so without sounding like the Wikipedia summary of your own book is a skill I wish more authors would develop, honestly. The real meat of the book – and where it really matures into feeling like a fairy tale – follows Celia’s wedding and captivity, and Argent’s endless and gloriously doomed series of duels to try and free her.

I’m a great fan of fantasy told in the idiom of fairy tales generally, and have (mostly accidentally) ended up reading a decent amount of it over the last few months. Novik has without question captured what I find charming and evocative about the style better than basically anyone else, and as a bonus done so while telling (I believe) an entirely original story rather than riffing one of the classics everyone can recite from childhood. Her summerlings (fae/elves, essentially) are psychologically alien in a way that fits the tone well, there is basically exactly enough exposition to make the world feel magical and make the plot cohere, and the story is basically the perfect length and density to fill out a novella.

A large part of the reason it justifies being a novella instead of a cramped short story is that (unlike a lot of both classic fairy tales and modern fantasy aping them) most of the cast are fairly fleshed out and compelling instead of broad archetypes or narrative marionettes. Celia and her brothers and the Summerling king all manage to evoke some real pathos and make you want them to find some sort of happy resolution to the great snarl they’re all entangled in. I’m not sure the ending needed to be quite so relentlessly and uniformly bright (the redemption of the siblings’ father in half a page at the very end felt both needless and out of nowhere), but that aside it’s really rare I get so invested in so many arcs and romances in such a tight pagecount.

The second novella I picked up because it got nominated for a Hugo, and one I’m almost certain I never would have touched otherwise. Which makes it an excellent argument for this yearly ritual I put myself through, because it was a very well-done and entertaining read throughout. If one that I find leaves me without too much of particular interest to say about it.

The book is amusingly exactly what the title says it is – Cinderella, except she’s a house. Or, properly, except she dies (is poisoned) at the same time as her father, and then becomes a ghost haunting and to some extent becoming the family home her stepmother and sisters just inherited. Bound to the house, and feeling every bit of damage to it as if it was a wound to her living body, she is quickly tortured and coerced into becoming a perfect servant for her ‘family’, helpless and forced to attend to them for nearly their every waking hour. Even after she discovers a loophole to escape into the city’s public spaces, her existence is a miserable one; her only solaces a warm correspondence with a foreign scholar, a wary friendship with a faerie trickster in the nightly market, and surreptitious excursions to the royal ballet. And then – eligible prince, royal ball, faerie magic but only until midnight, peculiar glass slippers. You more or less know the story.

I have, more or less accidentally, been reading a lot of various fairy-tale retellings over the last little while. This is absolutely not a complaint – done poorly, the genre can either be absolutely insufferable or just painfully twee (or both!), but done well I have a deep and abiding affection for the voice, style and general range of aesthetics. Cinder House was close enough that I found it charming throughout, and that it made use of the novella length to tell the fable it wanted without feeling either padded or rushed. The setting and the mechanics of haunting and different kinds of magic are given as much detail as they need, and aside from the final confrontation (which felt a bit clumsy and rushed) the plot and pacing flowed nicely.

Despite the whole ghost and haunted house thing (and, in an odd fit of political realism, changing the romance to an informal polycule situation involving the prince and the diplomatically advantageous foreign princess he was always going to marry. Because c’mon, magic and ghosts are one thing but be serious), the most interesting changes to most tellings of the fable to me were in characterization. Partially this is because I am easily charmed by shamelessly untrustworthy faerie merchant characters, so the book’s take on the fairy godmother was a delight. But the way the book treats the Wicked Stepmother and -sisters is rather more significant.

The story gives more time and attention to the character of the Wicked Stepmother than possibly any telling I’ve seen, and makes her positively nuanced. Not good, but the text empathizes with her and keeps her a step removed from any of the really sadistic cruelty and abuse Ella is subjected to. The two stepsisters are slightly more developed than the usual one-note caricatures, at least enough to give them distinct identities and personalities, but neither gets anywhere near the development of their mother. A sort of narrative conservation of malice also meant that all the horror and wanton abuse that neither the Stepmother nor the older Stepsister would inflict was all given to the younger instead, who is thus reduced to basically a devil in human skin without a single positive trait displayed at any point throughout the novella.

The book puts more effort into its love story than the original fairy tale (in that it puts any at all), and manages to sell it quite well. Well, to me anyway – I’m hardly the target audience for romantasy, but at novella-length it’s quite palatable. Though the characters of prince and princess were hardly about to leap off the page. They both work, and neither’s painful to read or anything, but compared to Ella, the Stepmother and the Fairy Godmother they did feel closer to cardboard cutouts than living, breathing people.

Tchaikovsky is probably one of my favourite authors currently writing, but also he publishes like a half dozen books a year and he’s not that much of a favourite so I have basically given up on keeping track of his releases outside of the Children of Time sequels. I had thus never heard of Shroud before it got nominated for best novel in this year’s Hugos, and that pushing it to the front of my TBR is another argument in favour of my whole project of reading every nominee each year. One of my favourites out of his whole bibliography, and probably the strongest execution yet of some of the themes he seems compelled to keep gnawing at across different works.

The book is set in a far future where humanity has left the ruins of Earth behind to become an ever-spreading spaceborn diaspora, its brutal corporate system justifying itself as the only government capable of the grand civilizational mission to spread across the stars and ensure no single disaster can ever threaten the species as a whole again. Specifically, it is about the special projects team of a specific prospecting and resource extraction mission, thawed out of cryo to investigate the strange barrage of radio and electromagnetic signals emerging from the local gas giant’s moon. With great effort, they discover that hidden beneath the heavy and toxic atmosphere there is life – horrifying, monstrous, alien life, adapted to thrive in a world as inhospitable to humanity as can be imagined while still having a biosphere. Then one of the million corners cut to meet deadlines and minimize resource expenditure across the project causes something of a crisis, there is an unplanned explosion, and Juna Cleelander (executive assistant and general ego-manager and spare pair of hands) and Mai Ste Etienne (engineer) find themselves slamming into the planet’s surface with only the shell of an experimental manned probe to protect them from the world beyond. Their only hope is trekking across very nearly an entire hemisphere to reach the recently deployed polar space elevator – and so, despite both of their fervent hopes, wishes and prayers, they find themselves becoming humanity’s foremost experts on alien life and all the ways it might kill you.

I don’t like to read too much into an author’s beliefs or preoccupations from their work, but Alien Clay and Shroud coming out within a year of each other makes it really hard to avoid. Both are science fiction where a dystopian but seemingly omnipotent system dominates humanity and has spread its tendrils through the stars despite the limitations imposed by relativistic distances and decade-long travel times. Both follow a less-than-orthodox technical expert thrown by that system at the task of understanding alien life – life which appears to be mindless, predatory, and just all around horrifying to the audience and the protagonist both. A sudden disaster leads to forced close encounters with that horrifying alien life, and the discovery of the intelligence underlying it. In the grand final confrontation, the key to victory – and even to liberation – is embracing and communing with the alien and finding a new, symbiotic relationship with it. And that’s not even all the similarities. It’s not like they’re the same story – the final confrontations and endings are very different and trying to do very different things, the executions of the basic concept and of the alien world are very distinct, and generally I think Shroud is just a more interesting and better-handled take on the idea in most particulars. But it’s still pretty amusing the degree to which they could have been written from the same initial bullet-point elevator pitch.

Leaving those specific plot beats aside, First Contact scenarios, communicating and finding peaceful forms of coexistence with horrifying-seeming aliens, and just xenophilia in general have all been consistent throughlines of Tchaikovsky’s science fiction since at least Children of Time. The xenofiction interludes and speculative biology explaining how life evolved towards the form encountered by the humans in the main narrative have been fairly consistent elements of his work since then, and they show up in fine form here. The finale of Shroud also has a more than passing similarity to that of Children of Time, though it’s simultaneously less cynical about human nature and much more equivocal and uncertain about what the future holds.

I am generally a big fan of weird aliens and of xenophilic science fiction, so I of course support Tchaikovsky’s preoccupation here entirely. Though it’d be nice if he put the hive minds back in the box for a little while at this point, or arranged the balance of power for his big final moments of truth in a way where the Alien of the story couldn’t effortlessly slaughter every human in the solar system if they don’t come to an arrangement. Not that I’m opposed to either, just as a novelty thing.

The humans of the novel are, honestly, significantly more interesting and memorable than they often are in these stories. Well, at least a few of them are, but this is a very low bar. Juna is genuinely a very fun protagonist to spend the novel in the head of, with a strong internal monologue and an incredibly compelling trauma-bonding-with-your-standoffish-coworker dynamic with Mai. The corporate dystopia around them is also quite richly drawn, and manages the feat of using the corporate jargon and euphemisms without laying it on too thick and coming off as too cartoonish to take seriously. The way that the need to prove your worth and not get put back into cold storage is such a warping effect on the general culture is really just fascinating, and I appreciate that the vast majority of characters were just kind-of-okay, kind-of-shitty people who have never even conceived of really questioning (let alone rebelling against) the terms and structures their lives are ordered by.

This is another novella I picked up because it was nominated for this year’s Hugo. In this case I’m grateful to everyone who nominated it, because I had entirely missed that Kingfisher had published another one of these in the last year. While it’s pretty far from reaching the heights of Moves the Dead, it was significantly better paced and more satisfying to read than Feasts at Night, and generally a good read (assuming one does not suffer too badly from claustrophobia).

This is the third instalment in the Sworn Soldier series, following Alex Easton (plus reliable valet but on this occasion less one valiant steed) to the strange and exotic climes of America (West Virginia coal country, to be specific). They’re there on the request of Dr. Dennet (returning from the first book), desperate for help investigating his brother’s disappearance near an abandoned coal mine he had the title to. Alex is less than enthused by both the prospect of crawling into an abandoned cave system bursting with entirely mundane ways to die and the fact that Dennet wouldn’t have written them if he wasn’t sure something otherworldly was afoot and wanted a veteran in its help. Both fears prove entirely justified, and Alex quickly becomes very well-acquainted with all the ways one can meet a horrible end with thousands of tons of rock between their body and the sun.

I have a bit of difficulty deciding what genre the book best fits. It’s a horror series, and most of the first two thirds or so of the book are very much a horror story, both in terms of general atmosphere of ominous ambient dread and teased-at horrible revelations and all the luxuriating in how absurdly terrifying crawling through the cramped, crushing, dark, damp, dangerous and potentially already occupied tunnels of an abandoned mine would be. Past the two-third mark or so the story’s tone and genre change almost entirely. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but it becomes much more Weird Fiction than horror – closer to a Star Trek episode than a horror story, in the main. A good Star Trek episode, overall, but the jump to philosophical debates and the wonder of discovery and some minor character drama took some getting used to. More problematically, it did kill most of the story’s tension and sense of urgency.

I use ‘Weird Fiction’ in the somewhat archaic sense here because the series is clearly deeply indebted to (if not an outright pastiche of) the genre. The period setting is a not insignificant part of hitting the tone the story aims for, which I’d probably describe overall as ‘charmingly antiquated’. The clearly extensive research into the details of (for example) cave geometry and speculative biology do sit a bit oddly with the series’ studied disinterest in really dealing with (or directly portraying) social issues or period-accurate attitudes about...much, really. More so than the first two books, the defined and specific American setting occasionally risks coming across as thin and theme-park-ish, but the sharply limited cast and novella length keep it from ever becoming a real issue.

When thinking about the Sworn Soldier books, I always end up comparing them with the Singing Hills Cycle in my head. Both begin with a thematically and aesthetically ambitious novella that succeeds at what it’s doing and even today is still quite unique. Both then become episodic series, leaving behind the events and themes of the original novella but continuing to follow the point-of-view character as they go on further adventures. The sequels are less ambitious and much more character-focused, released semi-annually and clearly shaped around whatever interesting things happened to be preoccupying the author at the time. The results are fine-to-good, but neither achieve nor really even reach for the heights of the original novella. The nuance and development has been great for Alex as a character, and I’m happy to keep reading as many of these as Kingfisher ends up writing, but they do rather feel like they should be judged on a different scale to What Moves the Dead.

Which is not to say the book doesn’t have thematic ambitions of its own. The necessity of connection, communication and supportive relationships, and the madness and death of true isolation, isn’t exactly new ground, but the book weaves it all together well. I may need to raise my bar somewhat, but that it managed to do so with both consistency and a bit of subtlety gets high marks from me.

This is the latest in my attempt to read every nominee for Best Novel and Novella in time to actual give an informed vote at the Hugos this year, and the first that I can be really pretty positive I would never have read otherwise. In this case, for good reason – I aspire to dip my toes a bit into romance as a genre sometime this year, but suffice to say that temperamentally it is just Not My Thing All the more so because the overall incredibly positive buzz about this book has been the kind (cozy, affirming, heart-warming, relatable main characters, etc) that’s honestly more of a red flag than anything to me. But I made an arbitrary commitment and have said I want to expand my horizons so – I really have no one to blame here but myself.

The story follows Shesheshen, the much-reviled and feared shape-changing ‘wyrm’ whose occasional man-eating predations have long troubled the inhabitants of the isthmus she calls home. After being awoken from her winter hibernation by a trio of monster hunters (properly: two monsters and an aristocratic blowhard who hired and is ‘leading’ them) and very nearly killed, she falls off the side of a cliff and very luckily happens to still look semi-human when her body is found by the travelling scholar Homily and nursed back to health. Shesheshen, have little (read: literally no) experience with being cared for and shown unconditional kindness, falls head over heels in love with her and very quickly begins dreaming of making a family together – which, for her species, means implanting her eggs deep within Homily’s body so their children will grow healthy and strong on her flesh as they hatch. Some issues of communication and cultural differences quickly present themselves.

For all that the romance is the centre of the book’s marketing (and, clearly, appeal), this is actually really quite a plotty story. Romance (and the romanticization of predatory or sacrificial relationships) are major themes, of course, but honestly it feels like the better part of the page count – and certainly most of the action and big set pieces – are instead dedicated to dealing with monster hunters, abusive family, and the overlap between the two. Theoretically, the book’s preoccupied with themes I am intensely interested in (romance aside) and would be very easy to sell on. In practice, everything came out so painfully heavy-handed and focused on making sure the audience both knew and knew the author knew the correct reactions to have that it became kind of insufferable.

I have, it must be said, something of a long-standing grudge against books that market themselves as and play with the aesthetics and genre trappings of ‘horror’ but are actually just life-affirming tales and acceptance and found family which happen to have some fangs and pseudopods scattered across the main cast. Which, to my great displeasure, was more or less exactly what this turned out to be. This is not a book that really asks you to sympathize with monsters – Shesheshen has theoretically been eating people for years and years as the mood and appetite took her, but the book is quite conscientious about making sure she does basically nothing actually unsympathetic while we know her. There is functionally never a point in this book where there is any sort of actual moral ambiguity or tension – it is clear within a page of meeting them how much you should like a character, with signifiers and symbolism applied so thickly it’s be impossible to miss, and the book absolutely never challenges or makes you go back and reconsider those judgments. There are a few somewhat engaging or slightly tense action scenes, but horror? It deserves the label less than the Adams Family.

While I might consider this false advertising, it’s really just more of a genre mismatch – this is a romance with some light horror aesthetics, not a romantic horror story (this is a meaningful distinction I will fight to defend the honour of). I am significantly less qualified to judge the book as a romance, save that it didn’t really work for e. Which is fairly unsurprising – there are definitely stories whose romances are as or more prominent and fundamental to the story than this one which I loved, but none of them were really genre romances like this one was. So like yeah, if you go in expecting The Locked Tomb (or even This Is How You Lose The Time War) this is a 0/10. But also why would you do that.

Though even for a romance where genre constraints preordained a happy ending for the main couple, there really was a tragic lack of real interest or conflict in that driving relationship. The actual drama and tension of the story was more or less exclusively between Shesheshen and Homily against their families and the world – internal to the relationship, there is a lot of Shesheshen angsting about how to admit the whole ‘shapeshifting man-eating monster who has ostensibly cursed and is hunting her family’ thing that all leads up to getting resolved by love and acceptance like 3 pages after it finally comes out.

Which is a shame, because if you squint a bit at the basic conceit – lifelong scavenger and predator who has never received selfless care before in her life realizes to her horror that she fell in love less with the woman and more with her unhealthy coping mechanisms and martyr complex – is in fact an incredibly meaty and interesting character dynamic. But doing anything with it would require Shesheshen to actually show some edge and be less than sympathetic to people you’re supposed to care about (also, for Homily to be even slightly interesting at some point).

It is tempting for me to say that the book’s fundamental issue is that the author spent too much of the 2010s on twitter, but I really have no way to know that. Still, for a basically unsocialized shapeshifting, human-eating magical predator whose narration takes pains to establish that she never talks to people for longer than strictly necessary to acquire a meal, has no idea how to make a first impression, and generally finds human contact hateful and viscerally uncomfortable, Sesheshen’s internal monologue is truly inexplicably emotionally intelligent, attuned to and outraged by the subtleties of exploitative or abusive relationships, and prone to making profound and all-encompassing statements on the nature of human psychology and trauma that line up very well with the progressive conventional wisdom of that milieu. As there was a great deal of buzz about what a compellingly alien and inhuman protagonist she was – and as that was the aspect of the book I really was legitimately looking forward to as I opened it – the incoherence of her character that results is a profound disappointment.

This was another book I picked up largely on account of being nominated for a Best Novel Hugo. 700-page tomes that start with multiple rather generic-looking fantasy maps otherwise being something I rarely have much enthusiasm for these days. This was, at absolute minimum, an incredibly different read than I went in expecting from those traits – nothing I really fell in love with, but something I finished without resenting the amount of time spent reading it. Though I’m not sure I’m invested enough to keep reading through two more books of the same length, especially since the plot now seems to be leaving the entertaining intrigue and mystery behind for something a bit more generic epic fantasy.

The book is set on the great palace-island where the imperial court resides full-time and the seven great monasteries all maintain palaces housing various high administrators. Neema Kra, a common-born genius archivist and historian, is the emperor’s High Scholar and pet nerd and held in universal contempt by roughly the entire rest of the court. As the emperor’s scheduled abdication approaches, her cherished plans to spend the next decade following him into retirement and writing his official biography fall apart before her eyes – first by an old rival appearing with a dirty secret from their school days that would end her career, and then the suspiciously convenient murder of that same rival the night after she aggravated the Emperor and humiliated Neema in front of the whole court. Forcibly volunteered to replace her as one of the contestants for the throne, Neema has to split her time between competing in various horrifically dangerous trials and investigating a murder that only grows more suspicious and conspiracy-laden with each new thing she learns.

Which is still a woefully incomplete summary and ignoring several very important plot threads. My irritation with the book’s length aside, it’s not as if it doesn’t use the pages.

But of those many plot threads, the mystery is probably the most important, and is in any case definitely the strongest. It is very entertainingly twisty and full of onion-ish reveals in a way I always appreciate for a story which actually has the time to space them out. Most of the clues even seem fairly earned and arrive without too much obvious twisting of circumstance for narrative convenience, even! As often occurs in stories with layers upon layers of dark secrets and nested reveals, some fairly consequential actions by characters near the heart of the mystery do become rather difficult to justify once you discover their actual deal and motivations – something the story resolves by steadily sanding away every interesting personality trait and bit of apparent nuance the main villain has in favour of pure self-aggrandizing evil and having a prophecy to follow as the story goes on. Which isn’t exactly elegant, but it does at least get the job done and minimizes the number of people with the problem. I just dislike it turning out that someone acted the way they did because a vision told them to rather intensely as a big character-defining reveal.

Which is a shame, because for most of the middle half of the book said villain actually seems to be a really interesting character with some compelling internal contradictions. Most of the main cast is at least entertaining and usually even interesting, though I found the book’s sense of humour as conveyed through several of them very hit-or-miss (and with a bad habit of repeating the same jokes several more times than they could really sustain). Aside from some (unusually justified, admittedly) miscommunication-induced melodrama I even found the romantic subplot pretty fun and the two leads’ dynamic more endearing than insufferable.

There are plenty of side characters that are much less memorable, or are just a plot device with 1-3 bullet points of personality, but that’s inevitable in these sorts of projects. Especially when it’s supposed to launch a trilogy and needs to introduce and set up characters for thousands of pages down the line.

Nothing that is really going to wow or amaze with its originality or the sublime beauty of its execution, but it got me through the book. The most striking (positively, anyway) thing about the whole story is actually the narration – the regular sections that switch from fuzzy close-ish third person around Neema to the incredibly opinionated internal monologue of the Raven, the patron deity who spends most of the book fluttering around Neema and trying to prod her into carrying out the will of the gods. It’s an angle I wish the book had leaned into much more, really (though the comedic side of the narration was already wearing a bit thin).

As for the other main plot threads – well, the whole operatic family tragedy and intertwining attempts at revenge for a horribly murdered princess a decade before was in principle great but a bit underbaked and could have used a bit more clarity and focus. Still, using the entire prologue to set up what clearly seems to be the start of a heroine’s epic fantasy ascent to greatness only for it to be a brutal fakeout whose consequences echo through the whole book was lovely, possibly the single best idea in the whole thing.

The tournament to determine the next Emperor on the other hand...

The most succinct (if uncharitable) way I can put it is that this whole very prominent and important plot thread feels like a YA novel that was hastily polished and punched up to qualify as adult fantasy. The way emperors are decided makes no sense whatsoever except as a way to justify such high-stakes fantasy tournament trials. The politics of the empire as a whole (both the dynamics of the imperial court and what we see of different power centres across the empire and how they interact) make no sense at all as soon as you start thinking about them. Which would be mostly fine, if so very much of the story didn’t occur directly adjacent to those elements and keep inviting me to notice what paper-thin ISO generic fantasy worldbuilding they are. Even the great revelations and magic set pieces of the finale feel like something from a high school D&D campaign.

This was the last of this year’s Hugo nominees I had to read and – going by the wait time to get my hands on it from the library – roughly an order of magnitude more popular than any of the other five up for best novel. Which makes sense, given that in addition to being nominated for a niche genre award it’s also been talked up everywhere from Obama’s summer reading list to Amazon’s best books of the year. Given that, it’s perhaps not surprising that I didn’t really care for it – hardly the worst of this year’s nominees (still Someone You Can Build a Nest In in a walk), but mostly just a bit of a frustrating read.

At some point in the extremely-near-future, the British government discovers a way to open doors through time and pull people through them. As an initial experimental use of this, five people are nabbed from moments before their deaths (to minimize potential-timeline-destroying-fallout) and pulled through to the modern day. They are then studied to see if either they or the environment around them will spontaneously explode in one way or another, and while they’re around anyway are assigned ‘bridges’ – Ministry agents who both keep an eye on them and slowly socialize and integrate them into modern English society. Our unnamed protagonist is one such bridge, lured out of a job as a diplomatic translator by the eye-popping compensation offered for a job whose basic description was classified. Her charge is Commander Graham Gore, rescued in 1847 from the doomed and now-infamous Franklin Expedition. Over the next year, the two of them fall rather desperately in love even as the true goals and intentions of the Ministry – and the shape of the future its rise heralds – grow ever more clearly sinister.

So, the best way I can describe the reading experience of this book is that it is simultaneously a) a very sharp and pointed short story about assimilation, complicity, and the dangerous appeal of both control and belonging, b) a moderately incoherent but compelling time travel spy story in the Le Carre vein and c) someone’s rather high concept The Terror modern au slice of life OC shipfic. Rather unfortunately, for the first 80% of the book it’s by far the third bit that predominates. It is, to be fair, very well-written drawn-out flirtation and romance and (weird fetishization of specifically-Victorian masculinity and the fact that Gore is very clearly set up as the thematic foil and compliment to the protagonist’s mother rather than her aside) is well above average as far as these things go (and there is obviously a market for it). It’s just that personally I can’t muster that much interest for these things, and also really? This? For Obama’s book club?

Truthfully though my actual real complaint with the book is the protagonist. Or – actually, ‘the point of view character’ is probably more accurate, as it’s not as if she ever really acts. She spends very nearly the whole narrative as the passive, naive and just terribly repressed recipient of news and reactor to events, passively following orders and allowing herself to be manipulated while only ever noting and then promptly forgetting about with a shrug. It is somewhere between intensely frustrating and actively comic when so much of the book is spent on people either desperately trying to drag her into or actively taunting her over her failure to not pick up on The Plot only for her to go back to mooning over the oddly-cuddly 19th century naval officer with very good forearms. I was by the end just desperately, fervently wishing the story had followed almost literally any other character – especially for a woman who was ostensibly a career diplomat, the complete incuriosity just grated terribly.

There is a rather viciously anti-romantic reading here about the dangers of love as a pacifying, quietist force and how it can blind one to the dangers of the world and the demands of politics. Which isn’t not what the book is saying, really, but given the general framing and tone of things (the ending, especially) you don’t really get the sense that so hostile a reading is intended. But then, the book’s politics are just one of several subjects which are teased at and seem very intriguing but are crowded out by the need to describe at length teaching Gore how to bike.

The unsympathetic read of the protagonist that the book does pretty clearly endorse is that she basically walked out of the wikipedia article for ‘the banality of evil’. Which is part of what I find grating about her, really – if not grand, world-shaking dreams, I at least prefer unsympathetic protagonists with some kind of ambition beyond a healthy retirement account and a successfully socially normative romance – but does at least cohere into a compelling character study. The generational trauma of a mother who barely escaped the Khmer Rouge engendering a only-somewhat-understood drive for the safety and control of enmeshing herself in The System, a facile sort of progressism that required absolutely zero self-reflection about her work or the ethics of anything occurring beyond her direct line of sight, a tumblr account she shared BLM infographics on and her one black friend being a coworker she never actually got along that well with, treating the maintenance staff with a sense of annoyed entitlement whenever they’re less than perfectly prompt and polite, you get the picture. Even her badass evil future self ends up being kind of a fuckup. By the end of it the contempt the narrative holds her in is clear enough you’re almost surprised she gets a hopeful ending.

On a personal scale, anyway. I’ve read enough clifi that the intensely apocalyptic vision of the future the book has really stands out. It is, however, one of the relatively few I’ve seen where it’s just taken as a total given. Which is, again, a matter of picking your protagonist – there is a grand, desperate, potentially futile struggle over the shape of history going on, our protagonist just never seems very interested in it except when it forcefully intrudes on her life.