Someone You Can Build a Nest In John Wiswell I  have mixed feelings about  John Wiswell 's debut novel  Someone You Can Build a Nest In . Intellectually, it's one of the most interesting attempts I've read at a problem Science Fiction authors have always struggled with -- creating aliens that are actually alien. But emotionally, alas, I didn't really connect with it. Sadly, I finished the book with a feeling of relief. I don't guess  Wiswell  was aiming at Science Fiction, but rather Horror Fantasy. Fine, I don't care where the bookstore shelves it. It stars an alien monster that a science fiction author would be proud of. What's more, the alien monster, Sheshehen, is the main point of view character. And she is truly biologically alien. She's a blob of flesh and can voluntarily take any shape and incorporate anything she eats. Does she have bones? If she wants to, and if she eats something with bones. Her life-cycle, though inhuman, is more familiar.  W...

The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald Many years ago, in high school, I got a list of 100 books every college-bound student should read. I read them, not for the purpose of boosting my college admission prospects, but because, with rare exceptions, they were VERY good books.  F. Scott Fitzgerald 's  The Great Gatsby  was one of those exceptions. I do, in fact, have a vivid memory related to  The Great Gatsby , and that is how quickly I forgot it. It was one of those books that one finishes with a feeling of relief, "Thank Gawd that's done!" (You ask, why did you keep reading if you didn't enjoy it? Well, I can't really say -- it's a long habit of mine. And it's not necessarily a bad one. The last few pages of a novel can completely change your feelings about it.  Crime and Punishment  was a long punishment to read, but the end made it worthwhile.) And then, even a week after finishing  Gatsby , I had forgotten what it was about. I could not have told you...

A Short Walk Through a Wide World Douglas Westerbeke Hey! Guess what? That title is not hypothetical. A Librarian *DID* write an adventure novel! And it's pretty good, too. His name is  Douglas Westerbeke  and the novel (his first) is called  A Short Walk Through a Wide World .  Here, from the Simon and Schuster web site  is everything I know about  Westerbeke Douglas Westerbeke is a librarian who lives in Ohio and works at one of the largest libraries in the US. He has spent the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award, which inspired him to write his own book. There's also a photo, in which he looks like a totally ordinary guy called Douglas. SWTaWW  is the story of Aubry Tourvel, who, in 1885, at the age of nine, contracts a disease that causes her to convulse and bleed uncontrollably if she spends more than 2-4 days (it's variable) at any one place. It's retroactive -- if she spends time at any place she's been befo...

Lincoln's Dreams Connie Willis ...that eventually turned out to be a good reason.  Connie Willis  is a highly variable author. I don't just mean that her best works are much better than her worst. That's true of any prolific author. What I mean is that even those who love  Willis  feel very differently about her works.  Lincoln's Dreams  is one of  Willis ' most famous and loved books, and has won an award or two. I however, disliked it the first time I read it, for a stupid reason. It's a novel about the American Civil War, told in a very clever way that I enjoyed. However, it presents a positive view of Confederate general Robert E Lee and a very negative view of Confederate general James Longstreet. Not long before  Lincoln's Dreams  I had read  The Killer Angels , an excellent historical novel in which Longstreet is portrayed positively, and I didn't like  Willis ' negative portrayal. Now, I did not at that time have any good re...

The Jennifer Morgue Charles Stross Charles Stross 's  Laundry Files  is my all-time favorite science fiction series, and  The Jennifer Morgue  is one of the best novels in the series, so it follows that I like it a lot. The four most important characters in  The Jennifer Morgue  are Bob Howard and Mo (Doctor Dominique O'Brien), whom we met in  The Atrocity Archives , Bob's boss James Angleton, and a new character, Black Chamber agent Ramona Random. (The Black Chamber is the US occult secret agency.) As usual, Bob is the first-person narrator, so we end up spending most of our time with him and Ramona, who becomes his mission partner. However, Angleton and Mo are the main plot drivers -- the puppeteers pulling the plot strings. The Atrocity Archives  was more of an investment in the future of the series than it was a story. That is to say, it told a story, but that was not the most important thing it did. Rather, it explained the unique magic techn...

She Who Became the Sun Shelley Parker-Chan Let me begin with a confession. My knowledge of  Ming dynasty China  and  its first emperor  is pretty much limited to their respective Wikipedia pages. These are mostly consistent with  She Who Became the Sun , with two main exceptions. (1) In the novel the  Mandate of Heaven  is a visible magical flame that may be seen surrounding those who possess it. Those possessing the Mandate have the ability to see ghosts. (2) The first Ming emperor was secretly a woman. So closely does  She Who Became the Sun  follow actual history that I am inclined to view it as historical fiction, rather than fantasy. In fact, most of the main characters are historical and are given their actual names. I was disappointed that  Shelley Parker-Chan  did not include an Afterword describing how their novel compares to actual historical scholarship or containing a reading list. I found no more information on their we...

The Poppy War RF Kuang Last year I began  a review  of  Guy Gavriel Kay 's  All the Seas of the World  with these words: How to describe Guy Gavriel Kay's books? He is a genre of his own. His novels live somewhere between fantasy and historical fiction. He has borrowed the words "a quarter turn to the fantastic" from a reviewer to describe it. I was mistaken.  Kay  is not alone.  R.F. Kuang 's  The Poppy War  is a fantasy with a similar relationship to history as  Kay 's. There are many valid reasons to dislike or feel uneasy about this approach to historical fiction.  Kay  has eloquently explained his approach in  an essay entitled "On the Strengths of Fiction Done as Near-History" . I find it persuasive. Now,  Kuang  is not as self-aware as  Kay . But  The Poppy War  was her debut novel, while  Kay  has been publishing novels since 1984. Without attributing  Kay 's thoughts to...

The Killer Angels Michael Shaara Michael Shaara 's  The Killer Angels  may be the best historical novel I've ever read. (The only close competitor would be  Herman Wouk 's  Winds of War duology , but that is so different in nature as not to be comparable.) My admiration of  The Killer Angels  is of course widely shared. It won a Pulitzer in 1975 and many other awards. The Killer Angels  tells the story of the Battle of Gettysburg from the points of view of some of the military leaders involved. There are 23 chapters. Seven are told from the point of view of Union colonel Joshua Chamberlain, six from the point of view of Confederate general James Longstreet. The third-most featured is Confederate commander-in-chief Robert E Lee, who gets four chapters. I was surprised that so much attention was given to two relatively obscure (to me, at the time) men. Now I know all you Civil War buffs out there are scoffing at me for calling Chamberlain and Longstreet ...

Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South Elizabeth R Varon My first knowledge of Confederate general James Longstreet came as a result of reading  Michael Shaara 's splendid historical novel  The Killer Angels , which  Elizabeth Varon , in  Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South  describes thus A finely grained fictional account of the Gettysburg campaign, the book conjured the strained relationship of Longstreet and Lee, casting Longstreet as a prescient pragmatist oriented toward the future, who symbolized modern warfare, and Lee as the prideful romantic, backward-looking and resigned to fate. Why had I never heard of Longstreet? Because the USA doesn't want to remember him. At the end of the Civil War, Longstreet, unlike the huge majority of Confederate officers, accepted defeat. Longstreet was a great friend of Union general Ulysses S Grant, and he was inspired by Grant's generosity in victory to behave in such a way as to d...

The Atrocity Archives Charles Stross Charles Stross '  Laundry Files  is my all-time favorite Science Fiction series. I call it "Science Fiction" rather than "Fantasy" because of  Clarke's Third Law . The only difference between magic and technology is mystery. Your cell phone is not magic because there is no real mystery about it. It was designed by human engineers who intended it to do what it does (bugs excepted), and we (collectively, if not individually) understand how it works. There is no actual magic in the  Laundry Files  because there is no mystery. Rather, what we call magic is a technology. As our first-person narrator Bob Howard explains The [Turing] theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (wave if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms—t...

The Girl with the Silver Eyes Willo Davis Roberts There is a thing about  Willo Davis Roberts '  The Girl with the Silver Eyes  that I liked a lot. There is another thing about it that I disliked a lot. Putting the positive first: Katie Welker, our point-of-view character, is wonderful. At ten years old she's intelligent, has great taste in books, and is a clear and independent thinker. What's more, she's neurodivergent. That word was not in use in 1980, but neurodivergent readers will recognize and like Katie. The thing I disliked about  The Girl with the Silver Eyes  is that it promotes pseudoscience. Specifically it presents the view that paranormal abilities are a real thing. At one point Katie thinks, "Lots of people had ESP; she knew that, she’d read about it often." That "Lots of people have ESP" is dangerous nonsense. There is no credible evidence for ESP. It is true that you will read this in many places, and that many people believe it. Tha...

The Briar Book of the Dead AG Slatter Personnes d’un certain âge had an experience that I think most of you young folks now manage to avoid: starting a small gasoline engine with a pull cord. Here's what that's like. You always start by flooding the carburetor. Then you pull the cord, the engine turns over, and stops. You do it again and again. Finally, maybe on the fourth pull the cylinder fires once -- "putt". Then, on the next pull, you hear it fire three times -- "Putt, putt, putt," and stall again. At last, you pull once more time, the engine catches, you open the throttle a bit -- "Roar!", and you're off. I mention this, because that's what reading  A.G. Slatter 's  The Briar Book of the Dead  was like. At the beginning I could feel  Slatter  trying to start this plot. She'd pull the cord, it turned over and failed to catch. Finally, about a third of the way into the book, I felt the engine fire. The next chapter after that it...