A Wilderness of Stars Shea Ernshaw On the first page of  A Wilderness of Stars , Vega (our first-person narrator) writes: I count the constellations, naming them in my mind -- a ritual that Mom insists I repeat night after night so I won't forget -- and it calms me, the pattern of unaltered stars, their position always right where they should be... Beyond the row of blue spruce trees on the far side of the summer garden, above the valley wall, I trace Clovis and Andromeda with my fingertip. I find Orion, the hunter from Greek mythology, and Rigel, a bright blue-white supergiant shimmering near the horizon. Each one tells a story. Indeed they do. Andromeda and Orion are real constellations, and Rigel is a real star, and it really is a blue-white supergiant. These are constellations and stars visible from Earth. That is the first hint we are given about where  A Wilderness of Stars  takes place and who the characters are. Indeed,  Shea Ernshaw 's approach to world-buil...

Fugitive Telemetry Martha Wells The action starts with the discovery of a dead human in a disused corridor on Preservation Station. The guy has been murdered by having something jabbed into the back of his head. Murderbot is initially concerned because it is her (on pronouns, see  my review of All System Red ) self-appointed job to keep Dr Mensah safe from GrayCris, and she worries that this murder may be a sign of GrayCris activity. Now, Preservation Station has a police force. The investigation of this murder is properly their job. However, murder investigations are not something that Preservation police have a lot of experience with -- their expertise runs more to keeping drunks out of harm's way and keeping port traffic moving. Mensah proposes that Murderbot join the investigation team, and everyone involved says yes, though for different reasons. Murderbot sees this as a way of pursuing her investigation of the GrayCris possibility and of checking on Station security, in which...

The Goblin Emperor Katherine Addison ** spoiler alert **  I'm marking this review as a spoiler because the central fact of  The Goblin Emperor  is that Maia is a really, really good politician. It is impossible to say that convincingly without also saying that he has political success. Of course, it could always happen that something goes horribly wrong in the end. But I would still have to admit that at some point in the book he is politically successful, which would be a spoiler. So, I'm taking the easy way out -- just mark the entire review a spoiler, and then I don't have to waddle awkwardly around the fact that Maia survives a coup attempt and an assassination attempt and ends the book as a successful and mostly well-liked leader. Now, I want to be clear, when I say "Maia is a really good politician", I understand that as a good thing. Politics is the name we give to the social mechanisms for making difficult decisions without violence. That is an extraordina...

The Six Deaths of the Saint Alix E Harrow After cudgeling my brains all night (poor brains!), I think I have come up with a not totally inadequate way to describe this story. It's a prose fugue. Let me explain. A fugue is an elaboration of a simple musical idea called a canon. A canon is a musical theme that can be combined with itself. The common rounds  "Row, row, row your boat"  and  "Frère Jacques"  are examples of simple canons: one person starts singing, then after a line a second signer joins in, and so on. The tune is structured so that these out-of-phase singers harmonize. Tunes can be combined with variations such as speeding up, increasing or decreasing the pitch, etc. It is difficult to compose a canon that works. (The master, of course, was  Johann Sebastian Bach .) A fugue is a canon set free -- a canon in which the composer allows themselves the artistic freedom to break the strict structure of the canon. For a brief, lovely example, look up ...

Anathem Neal Stephenson ** spoiler alert **  I read  Anathem  eleven years ago (23-Nov-2011). Actually, I believe I listened to the audiobook during my daily workouts over the course of some weeks. It's a long book -- 1010 pages in kindle. Fellow  Neal Stephenson  fans will recognize this as nothing out of the ordinary for  Stephenson . He is an author who writes  long  books, partly because he is always ready on the slightest provocation (or really, none at all) to leap into a 20-page treatise on orbital mechanics ( Seveneves ) or the genetics of North American feral pigs ( Termination Shock ). Those of us who love  Stephenson  recognize this as part of the experience and enjoy it. I would have thought the audience for this was small, but his books sell well and he's harvested a not insignificant number of major awards. The premise of  Anathem  is that we live in a quantum multiverse. (This proposition may be true, for certain...

Little Women Louisa May Alcott ** spoiler alert **  I first read  Little Women  somewhat late in life, by which I mean not as a child -- I was already a college student. That was still a LONG time ago, around 1975 at a guess. As usual for books I read long ago, I remember the characters better than the plot. (And actually, my memory of the plot of  Little Women  owes more to Greta Gerwig's 2019 film, which, while excellent, is not entirely faithful to the book.) The main characters, of course, are the March sisters. The definitive word on the sisters is this quote from Beth, Dear little bird! See, Jo, how tame it is. I like peeps better than the gulls. They are not so wild and handsome, but they seem happy, confiding little things. I used to call them my birds last summer, and Mother said they reminded her of me—busy, quaker-colored creatures, always near the shore, and always chirping that contented little song of theirs. You are the gull, Jo, strong and wild, ...

Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory Martha Wells Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory  is a short story in  the Murderbot Diaries . It is available  free from Tor , or if you want it on a kindle,  you can buy it from Amazon . The story takes place immediately after  Exit Strategy . It is told from the point of view of Dr Mensah. Murderbot and the PreservationAuth team are now back at Preservation Authority, and Mensah (who is a PreservationAuth political leader) is working out how to deal with the aftermath of the events of  Exit Strategy . Part of that aftermath, of course, is the presence at PreservationAuth of a SecBot, which is only dubiously legal and worries some citizens. The most interesting thing about this is that we are inside Mensah's head, not Murderbot's. Murderbot is, in a sense, very self-centered. This is not to say that she is selfish -- on the contrary, she is if anything too given to self-sacrifice. However, she makes plans based on...

The Diamond Age Neal Stephenson The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer  is my favorite of  Neal Stephenson 's books. By that I don't mean that it is the best, or most intellectually compelling, or has the best characters or world-building (although some of those things may be true). I mean only that it is the one that gives me the most pleasure to read. I have read it at least three times, once in paperback shortly after it came out, then again 23-Nov-2012 (exactly ten years ago) and 11-Oct-2020. If you read five-star reviews of romance novels on Goodreads, you'll see a lot of long gif-filled squeals of swoony love for the romantic relationships described. I can't read such reviews, because every one of them seems exactly like all the others. And I am certainly not about to write one. I mention them because that is how I feel about the relationship between Nell and her book. Am I seriously comparing a girl's love for a book to a romantic relation...

Boneyard Seanan McGuire Boneyard  is the third novel in the  Deadlands Series , based on the RPG of the same name. This is not, in my experience, a promising origin for a novel, but in my quest to read all of  Seanan McGuire 's fiction, I read it. I have not read and do not intend to read any other books in the series (or to play the game). Since this is book 3, I have undoubtedly missed out on some world-building. Here's what I gather from  Boneyard : the series takes place in an alt history world in which the Mormons managed to establish a technological empire in Deseret (what we call Utah) based in part on the uses of a substance called ghost rock. Most of that, as it turns out, is not very important to this installment. Despite its ominous sound, the word "boneyard" refers to a commonplace thing. When a traveling carnival stops in a town, in addition to the rides and shows they set up a support camp where the carnies can live, get fed, etc. This camp is called th...

El Tiempo Que Nos Toc ó  Vivir Jorge C. Oliva Espinosa The title is difficult to translate into English. The verb tocar means "to touch", but "nos tocó vivir" is idiomatic -- it means something like "It was our turn to live" or "It was our duty to live". And the preterite verb means it was in the past, and is now over and done. Thus the title means something like "The time it was our turn to live," or perhaps "When we had our turn to live." I read this, probably in 1999, not long after it came out. It is an utterly brilliant novel told from the point of view of an early leader of the Cuban revolution, who later became disillusioned with Castro's perversion of the revolution. There is also a love story woven in there. As far as I know, it was never translated. I don't know why that is -- it was SO GOOD, surely there are many other Americans who would love it as much as I did. And then it virtually vanished. It is now di...

Eight Strings Margaret DeRosia The story begins with our hero and first-person narrator Franco freezing outside the Minerva Theater, the premiere puppet theater of late nineteenth century Venice. Until yesterday Franco was a girl, Francesca, living in the bad part of town with her beloved grandfather and her not-at-all-beloved drunk and indebted father. She has just learned that her father has sold her to a local mafioso to pay off his debts. She was ostensibly sold into marriage, but in reality she is to be kidnapped into what amounts to prostitution. Thus Francesca, at the urging of her grandfather, becomes Franco. It works. Her grandfather tells her, "No one looks twice. You’re more yourself as a boy, not less. They think you’re one of them, Francesca." Franco barges into the Minerva and demands to be taken on as an apprentice to Radillo, the owner and master puppeteer of the theater. Franco (as Francesca) was taught by his grandfather to use the eight-string puppets that ...

The Future of Work: Compulsory Martha Wells ** spoiler alert **  The Future of Work: Compulsory  is a very short (two pages) prequel to  the Murderbot Diaries . It can be read for free  here . Even though this is a prequel, you should not read it before reading at least one of the novellas of  the Murderbot Diaries . The first,  All Systems Red , would be sufficient, I think, to make  The Future of Work  understandable. This story takes place shortly after Murderbot hacks her (on pronouns, see  my review of All Systems Red ) governor module, probably not long after the Company erased her memory of the incident in which she ostensibly murdered 50-odd humans. She is still owned by the Company. She is on-site with a bonded team. Because of having hacked her governor module, she can now devote herself to watching media, so she's watching "Sanctuary Moon". In the episode she's watching, one of the characters has just been buried under a collapsing...

The Cheshire Cheese Cat Carmen Agra Deedy, Randall Wright, Barry Moser (illustrator) I read  The Cheshire Cheese Cat: A Dickens of a Tale  ten years ago (28-Nov-2012). It has fared better in my memory than many books I read ten years ago. I don't remember any details of the plot. (Thus you are safe from spoilers.) I do, however, remember the characters -- a cat who doesn't want to eat mice, but likes cheese, and an erudite mouse who becomes his friend. As someone who has occasionally been made to suffer for being eccentric (or "weird", as kids these days say it), I appreciated this point of view. Amazon review Goodreads review  

Exit Strategy Martha Wells Brief recap. In  All Systems Red  GrayCris, which we now know to be a criminal organization that profits from illegal mining, murdered a DeltFall survey team and attempted to murder the PreservationAuth survey team. GrayCris thus (in what in retrospect looks like a classic shooting yourself in the foot maneuver) earned the enmity of Dr Mensah, the head of that team and PerservationAuth head of state, and our own much-beloved Murderbot, who was able to save Mensah and her team. Subsequently GrayCris ended up in what, in technical legal terminology, is called "deep doodoo". They are being sued down to their skivvies by PreservationAuth, DeltFall, and the Company that insured the survey teams (Murderbot's former owners). In  Rogue Protocol  Murderbot, who dislikes GrayCris even more than she (on pronouns, see  my review of All Systems Red ) dislikes most humans, tried to help Mensah out by traveling to Milu, where she hoped to catch GrayC...

What the Dead Know Nghi Vo Maryse and Vasyl make a living by pretending to communicate with the dead. Vasyl ("Doctor Janiv") plays the professor and Maryse the exotic initiate into an ancient religion that allows her to hover on the threshold of death, where she can hear the dead. They do a gig at a girls' seminary that has fallen on hard times, and something unexpected happens to Maryse. The act is not quite as fake as Maryse and Vasyl thought it was! Set in a near-reality fantasy world in which students at a girls' seminary learn simple enchantments. It is clearly meant to evoke the early 20th century when spiritualism was all the rage, and Houdini is mentioned. It's a brief ghost story, more straightforwardly told than I expected from my experience of  Nghi Vo 's  Singing Hills Cycle . The scammers are fun, and it is even more fun to see them caught in their own scam. Amazon review Goodreads review  

Stars Above Marissa Meyer Stars Above  is, as the subtitle says, a collection of stories about characters from the cyberpunk world of  Marissa Meyer 's  Lunar Chronicles . And yes, you DO need to read the four main novels,  Cinder ,  Scarlet ,  Cress , and  Winter . If you don't, you will not know who the characters are, with the exception of one story -- I'll get to that. (You can probably dispense with  Fairest  -- I'm not recommending that you do, since that's a good story. But you can understand most of  Stars Above  without  Fairest .) There are nine stories. These are longish stories. The first one, "The Keeper", is really a novella. Seven of these stories tell backstories of major characters from the  Lunar Chronicles : Cinder and Scarlet, Wolf, Carswell, Cress, Winter and Jacin, and Kai, Cinder, and Iko. If you liked the  Lunar Chronicles , you will not want to miss these insights into the characters and where...