The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal. Been meaning to read this for an age, but I’m in a mood for SF much more rarely than for fantasy. (Disclaimer: the author is a friend.)

It starts off with a hell of a bang: a meteorite strike that not only causes unthinkably massive destruction across the eastern seaboard of the U.S. (and ancillary damage elsewhere, from tsunamis and the like), but in the longer term — fifty years, give or take — is likely to cause an extinction event, due to the effect it has on the global climate. As a result, the race is on to colonize other parts of the solar system before Earth can no longer support human life . . . but since that meteorite strike happens in the 1950s, the hurdles in the path of that goal include not only technological limitations, but howling levels of racism and sexism, plus a reluctance to believe it will really be that bad and are we sure it isn’t all some secret commie plot?

So yeah, it shares a lot in common with the T.V. show For All Mankind. There are differences, though: much more of a ticking clock (this isn’t just about beating the Soviets; it’s about saving the species), less focus on queerness and more on mental health (the narrator, Elma, suffers from anxiety), etc. By dint of being a book instead of a show, it can also drop you much more deeply into the science and the technical skills involved in things like piloting, which is great if you’re me and devour that kind of verisimilitude even when you don’t know what the words mean. The narrative significance always comes through, and that’s the important part.

The Lost Steersman, Rosemary Kirstein. Whoof, we’re reaching the part of the series where it gets hard for me to talk about things without spoilers. Which I personally tend not to mind — I always say that if ruining the surprise ruins the story, then it never had much going for it in the first place — but 1) that doesn’t mean I want to impose spoilers on other people and 2) given that part of the pleasure here is piecing together the information you’re given, steerswoman-style, to figure out what’s going on, it would be a shame to wreck that unnecessarily.

But I can say that I was delighted to have a previous theory of mine confirmed (I correctly explained why a certain thing happened), and I was asking some relevant questions before the answers were provided, though I didn’t twig to everything right away — ironically, in part because I had an existing theory in my head that took me too long to let go of. Bad steerswoman-reader, no biscuit. Parts of this dragged a little for me, because it’s harder to interest me in a stretch of narrative where the protagonist is completely alone, but after that it picked up again. The real problem here is that I’ve got only one book left before I join the ranks of fans desperately hoping Kirstein will manage to finish the series one of these days . . .

Dark Woods, Deep Water, Jelena Dunato. Standalone fantasy inspired by Slavic mythology, though very loosely so.

This book is rather badly served by its cover copy, I fear. I went into it expecting the bulk of the narrative would take place at the creepy castle where guests are sacrificed to an ominous goddess; instead you don’t get there until maybe halfway through, and one of the three characters billed as being among those guests doesn’t arrive until more like the three-quarter mark. What surrounds the folkloric bit is a good deal more mundanely political — which I don’t means as a pejorative, though ultimately I wanted that stuff to be interwoven a bit more completely with the folkloric parts (especially since there was at least one bit of apparent connection that got dropped).

I did still enjoy it, mind you! And the creepy castle is very suitably creepy. I just thought I’d get more of that than I did, and I might have enjoyed the whole more had I been more appropriately cued as to what to expect.

A Lily Among Thorns, Rose Lerner. I’ve enjoyed Regency-era spy romances before, and this one’s been on my wishlist for . . . I don’t even know how long. Probably a decade or more. Compared to some of the others I’ve read, it tilts more heavily toward the “romance” side than the “spy” side; it tended to be three or four scenes of emotional bonding to one scene of intrigue, which brings us back around to why I read very little genre romance: I would care more about the emotional bonding if there were more non-romantic plot interspersed.

The plot, however, is enjoyable, even if thinner than I would prefer. It’s got more sympathy for its villains than I expected, and a very clear-eyed awareness of just how badly a woman back then could be screwed over by the law and patriarchy, no matter how secure she has tried to make herself. The hero also has an unconventional profession, being a high-end tailor whose knowledge of chemistry makes him excellent at matching dyes; he is very clothing-focused in some entertaining ways. (One of my favorite moments in here comes when he sees the heroine disguised as a man: she thinks for a moment that he’s horrified by her cross-dressing, only to realize he’s offended that whoever made the clothing for her didn’t tailor it better to help with the disguise.) I’m not sure I was wowed enough to seek out more of Lerner’s books, but this one made for a pleasant evening or two.

Nightborn: A Coldfire Prequel, C.S. Friedman. As the subtitle suggests, this is a precursor to Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy, which I read and really enjoyed many years ago. I’ve forgotten quite a lot about those books, but that’s fine; this takes place centuries before the series, when the colonists first arrived on Erna.

With a book like this, of course, some of its key events are going to be a foregone conclusion. Therefore, at least for a reader like me — someone who knows what that conclusion is — it lives or dies by its ability to make the journey there interesting in its own right. (Yes, Star Wars prequels, I am looking at you.) I know why the seedship’s computer spent ninety years analyzing Erna before deciding to wake the colonists up from stasis; I know what they’re ultimately going to have to do about it. So the real question is: will the book make me care?

Yes, mostly. Not everything here worked for me; specifically, I didn’t care much for the extended italicized flashbacks. I imagine they’re mean to flesh out the colonists, showing their reasons for getting on a ship in the full knowledge that they’ll never see Earth again, but it felt a little awkward. (If I’m being honest, it also felt like they were meant to flesh out the book: even with them included, this is quite a short novel, and the last section turned out to be a separate novelette? short story? that Friedman wrote some years ago, which takes place six hundred years later and has to do with Tarrant, from the trilogy.) But when the characters burble about how hey, in a few days time there will be four minutes when the sun and the Core and all three moons have set and they’re going to have their first bit of actualfax true night won’t it be neat, I’m over here looking like that Edvard Munch painting — which is exactly the effect I want from something like this. And I also had a good moment of waitasec, why does your name look faintly familiar . . . OH.

The one thing I wonder about — and if anybody has read both Nightborn and the trilogy and remembers the latter better than I do, please chime in — is whether there are discrepancies between what happens here and what the trilogy says happened back then, or whether my recall has simply slipped. I actually hope the discrepancies are real! Enough time passes between colonization and Damien’s day that it would be entirely realistic for the historical record to have drifted a bit away from the truth. And that, if it indeed happened, opens up space for Friedman to not simply follow the sheet music, but to riff in ways that allow for a bit of surprise here.

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Vol. 2, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. Second of five volumes in the not-a-series that was adapted to TV as The Untamed — I say not-a-series because the webnovel really was written as one continuous thing, not narratively divided up into five volumes, and boy howdy does that show even more here than it does with The Lord of the Rings.

Because I watched the show before reading this, I’m having a lot of thoughts about adaptation. In particular, there are two major sections in here that I think feel much more integrated to me because of how the novel approaches them; the combination of the interiority prose can bring to the table (you’re witnessing these events through the eyes of the protagonist) and where they fall in the sequence of the story makes both sections much more successful for me than they were on the screen. Which is going to have knock-on benefits for how I feel at the end, I suspect, since a thing that felt to me kind of like it came out of left field and didn’t have much to do with anything else has now been seeded much more firmly, much earlier on.

(I think. It’s been years since I watched the show, so I can’t 100% swear to how everything was sequenced there; I just remember that it was very different.)

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance, Foz Meadows. Queer political fantasy, where one of the protagonists gets shipped off into an arranged political marriage — but not with the woman he was intended to marry, because the foreign envoy, having realized he’s gay, swaps in that woman’s brother instead. Intrigue ensues.

I do like much of the worldbuilding here, which attends to differences of language, gender, and law. If I have a quibble, it’s that Tithena gets to enjoy a fairly uncomplicated status as The Good Country: unlike Ralia, it’s not sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or appalled by the notion of more than two genders. It has an aristocracy, but they don’t reserve the use of magic to themselves the way the nobles of Ralia do, and there doesn’t seem to be much class oppression in general. There’s a small amount of ableism, but heck, even Tithenai food is better. It’s not a pure paradise by any means, but its issues seem to be individual rather than systemic, rooted in specific personalities making bad or selfish choices . . . at least so far. I’ll be interested to see whether the sequel complicates that picture, since my preference tends to be for settings where there isn’t clearly one place that has made all the right cultural choices.

That’s a quibble, though, rather than a dealbreaker for me. I liked the character work in here a lot, and the way this handles trauma — which, fair warning, is very much front-loaded in the plot, so that time can be spent on the recovery process. (The book itself warns you of this, in a prefatory note.) There is recovery, though, because this is ultimately romantic fantasy, not a grimdark slog, and I am very much here for that.

Elfquest: Shards
Elfquest: Legacy
Elfquest: Huntress
Elfquest: The Wild Hunt Rereads all, picked up as canon review for my Yuletide fic. I’m not attempting to list authors/artists/etc. because this is well into the part of the series where Wendy Pini was no longer doing everything herself, and so who’s involved depends on which issue you’re looking at (and isn’t always apparent in the first place, because of how the collections are put together).

I remember not being as engaged with this later stuff, and going back through it now, that opinion stands. I generally don’t like the art as well, nor do I think it’s as high quality as it was earlier in the series; in particular, many of the artists don’t share Pini’s knack for making characters recognizable even when they’re tiny silhouettes in the background, and also there are time where I feel like the flow of the dialogue bubbles (or even their placement) is much less clear than it could be. If I am noticing those things, as someone who rarely reads comics and has never attempted to write or draw one of her own, then I suspect the flaws are non-trivial.

Story-wise, it reminds me of certain TV series after the original showrunner stepped back from close involvement: the plot concept is mostly fine, but the execution doesn’t hit as hard as I think it could have. And I get a little weary of how from here on out, practically every problem in the World of Two Moons ends up being the work of Winnowill, the Djuns, or both. I’m more interested in the smaller-scale stuff, the interpersonal conflicts where there’s not so much of an obvious villain. The issue where Cutter and Rayek work out their problems remains a favorite for me, even if the art style there plays less well in my collection’s greyscale rendition; the narrative logic behind it is strong enough on its own.

The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri. I love this kind of worldbuilding, where it’s less Fantasy India and more that India is the clay from which the secondary world is constructed. Not that I don’t enjoy the former as well (y’all know me), but this frees up an author to imagine whole new concepts of religion and government and so on: the temple children of the Hirana, the names given to the followers of the nameless god, the mothers of flame, and so forth. There’s some really interesting ideas in here, including some that remain intriguingly ambiguous as of the end of the first book — I’m thinking particularly of the relationship of the yaksa to the rest of the world.

If I have a complaint, it’s that here and there I felt this could have been a little tighter. Not in the way I think that comment is often meant, when said by readers who want “extraneous” (usually character-building) material to be pared away until it’s nothing but the plot, ma’am; rather that the most minor stratum of viewpoint characters wound up feeling to me like they didn’t deliver enough meat to be worth the diversion from the protagonists of more central significance. This definitely needed its major perspectives, though, to adequately show the forces at play here — it would have been much weaker if it had gone the semi-conventional route of limiting itself to the two main heroines.

Definitely interested in the second, though I probably won’t read it right away. (These days I’ve found I enjoy series better if I space their installments out a bit, rather than binging it all in one go.)

The Portuguese Affair, Ann Swinfen. Criminy, was this the wrong book to take with me to read over Christmas.

Like the previous book in the series, it felt in places like this was too much Your Tour of Sixteenth-Century History, with the protagonist there simply to observe stuff happening. This time, however, the tour covered the counter-armada England sent after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, which was supposed to destroy what remained of the Spanish fleet, put a claimant back on the Spanish-usurped throne of Portugal, and for a stretch goal, take over the Spanish control of the Azores. It failed at all three, and something like three-quarters of the pathetically terrible army assembled for these tasks died (often of dysentery, cholera, or starvation) before the survivors managed to limp back home. So for much of this book, you’re watching the English commanders botch every job they were given, while the protagonist has no ability to influence their decisions.

Nor do her own activities go much better! She also has three goals, and of those, she succeeds at one, has the second fail in basically the worst way possible, and never even gets a chance to try at the third. Then, as icing on the cake, the book ends on the cliffhanger of something else clearly having gone wrong, but you don’t get to find out what until book four. Which I have ordered, and will read . . . but I’m definitely not enjoying this as much as I did Swinfen’s Oxford Medieval Mysteries, and given that this series is nine books long, it’s possible I will nope out before the end.

All Systems Red, Martha Wells. Yes, I have finally hopped aboard the Murderbot train. And yes, it feels ironic that a series titled “The Murderbot Diaries” should operate as a pick-me-up after the previous title, but, well, here we are. Murderbot is indeed as charming as I’ve been told, and while the resolution to the mystery here felt a little unsatisfying (hinging as it does on setting details that the constrained space of a novella gave no room to provide before the reveal), that was never the selling point anyway. I have bought the next two and await their arrival.

Firekeeper’s Daughter, Angeline Boulley. Non-fantastical Anishinaabe mystery; YA, but with little of the “YA feel” that I’ve started to get burned out on — in part because of how it leans into its cultural milieu, creating different social dynamics than the ones I see in so many other YA novels. (By “cultural milieu” I’m pretty sure I mean hockey as much as I mean Anishinaabe traditions.)

It takes a while for the mystery to get rolling, though — longer than I expected, and because I’m a philistine who kinda needs some sort of genre content, fantastical or otherwise, to hook my interest, I was a little iffy on this until that finally kicked into gear. I stayed in part because I very much appreciated one particular male character being really good at respect and compassion and basically just being the poster-boy for non-toxic masculinity, plus I liked the view into Anishinaabe society.

Both of those things continue to be selling points even after the mystery gets started, and the other thing that gives this novel an unusual shape is that the protagonist, Daunis, has very culturally-rooted reasons to be leery of trusting law enforcement of any stripe. She’s not rabidly against those institutions, but she’s very aware that their priorities are not the same as hers, and she spends much of the novel trying to navigate that tension — as well as maintaining her involvement with personal aspects of her life, rather than ditching them the moment the plot shows up. This fits very well with the novel’s overall emphasis on community, and paid off in two very different, but equally fabulous, scenes involving her tribal Elders. (The one with the affidavits and the one on the ferry, for anybody who’s read this.)

There’s a sequel of sorts, but in this case I’m glad to see that instead of being the further adventures of Daunis, instead it centers on her twin nieces who have a side role in this book. Since this one is set retrospectively in 2004 — sorry, but I can’t make myself call it historical fiction; my brain throws a rod when I try — the next can leap forward ten years or so to when the nieces are teenagers. The sample chapter at the back makes it clear that Daunis will be appearing in it as their cool twenty-something auntie, and I’m hoping it might throw me a bone re: something that was left appropriately unresolved here but dammit I want some later closure for it.

The Hacienda, Isabel Cañas. Gothic fantasy set in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence. Beatriz marries Don Rodolfo and moves to his hacienda hoping that this will provide security for herself and her mother after the death of her father, but the house turns out to be . . . if I say “haunted” that implies there’s a ghost in it, when the problem is in fact far more pervasive than that. (Cañas explicitly cites The Haunting of Hill House as an inspiration.)

I was drawn to this far more for the historical context than the Gothic-ness of it, which I’m personally less interested in; the result is that I can’t say for sure if the pacing in the middle was boggy or if it was just me not being quite the right audience for the material. I do wish Andrés’ thread of the narrative had felt a little more integrated with Beatriz’s — it jumps around in time a lot, and doesn’t have quite the “puzzle pieces falling into place” feeling I want when it’s showing us material from years ago — and that Juana hadn’t basically left the stage for so long a span, as I didn’t feel as engaged with either of those characters as I wanted to. Ultimately I don’t regret reading this, but I’m not sure if I’m inspired to seek out more — at least, not if future novels are also Gothic.