Review: Wolf Worm

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've read plenty of T. Kingfisher's books, but this one is one of the most disturbing stories she's ever written. (Seriously, if you have an insect and/or a worm phobia, do not tackle this book. There are several points in the narrative where you will throw it against the wall and run away screaming.) Nevertheless, once everything was set up and the dominoes started to fall, I couldn't put it down. I stayed up until well after midnight to finish it.

This is a Southern gothic, which means that the atmosphere and setting figure prominently. We are in North Carolina at the turn of the century, where artist and illustrator Sonia Wilson has arrived to chart and sketch the extensive insect collection of noted naturalist Dr. Matthias Halder. Dr Halder's life's work has a focus on parasitic insects (with a special emphasis on botflies and screwworms) and he needs someone to paint the many bugs in his collection. Sonia, left adrift and nearly penniless after the death of her father (because society is so kind to unmarried women over 30 in 1899), takes the job and naturally has no idea of what she's getting herself into.

Due to the nature of the genre, the plot elements take a while to set up. This may make the opening chapters feel like slow going, but don't skimp. From the huge and strangely empty main house, to the whispers of "blood thieves" in the surrounding woods, to the supremely talented illustrator who preceded Sonia and whose presence still lingers in her rooms, to the odd locked shed on the back of the property that Sonia spots Dr. Halder visiting at night, carrying a live chicken...everything has its place and purpose. When it all comes together and the story shifts into high gear, you are left gasping. Then there is the twist that takes the story into not supernatural, but more scientific horror, and how the author puts a unique spin on what could have easily been a cliche.

Say that you were a scientist who studied parasites. There is only so much that you can observe from dead specimens. You need to watch their process through living flesh. But host animals are small and often hard to keep alive, particularly if you wish them to be infested over and over. How often can you pull a screwworm out of a rabbit before it dies of massive infection?

Say that you learned about another kind of human. One who heals at an astonishing rate. One that feeds on blood and viscera and who can endure astonishing hardships.

Say that your wife was about to run away with someone, and you caught them. You shot him and crammed his body into the shed you had once kept animals in, expecting him to die, but instead he healed, and you realized that he was one of these others.

Say that you realized this was the solution to your problem. A subject that would not die, no matter how many holes you put in him, digging screwworms out of his flesh. No matter how many botflies lived beneath his skin. An endless source of material for your studies...assuming that you were willing to commit atrocities that no one should inflict on another living being.

Say that you hated him enough to do it anyway.

If this excerpt squicks you out, be warned--because Kingfisher goes all the way with her premise. There are flies and worms galore here, and we are shown in icky, loving detail what they can do. It gives the protagonist PTSD, and maybe the reader as well. Nevertheless, this is one of the author's best books. Sonia is one of Kingfisher's patented older, sensible heroines, who tackles the horrors she sees from a pragmatic, scientific point of view (after the initial skin-crawling shock). There isn't a romance in this one (at least not for Sonia) because it isn't necessary. At the end, she is making her own way in the world, working as an artist/illustrator, with some mental scars and more than a few nightmares. The ending is unsettling, and deliberately so, but it couldn't have ended any other way. I guess this is a qualified recommendation, because your enjoyment of the book will definitely depend on your mental and intestinal fortitude--but if you can handle it, it's really good.


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Review: Twelve Months

Twelve Months by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the eighteenth book in the Dresden Files, one of the few urban fantasy stalwarts from the oughts still standing. (It must be selling in sufficient numbers, since the books have now graduated to hardcover releases.) Harry Dresden, our protagonist, has been through several different kinds of hell, and this book is a much-needed change of pace: slower, more thoughtful and reflective. Which it would have to be, after the fire and frenzy of the previous book. I really enjoyed this, and think it's one of the better offerings in the series.

As the title reflects, it follows twelve months in Harry's life: twelve months of pain and healing. Twelve months of PTSD and recovery after the previous volume's Battle of Chicago. Most important, this book chronicles twelve months of grief over the death of a pivotal character. You may not agree with what the author did in Battle Ground, and you may think it was a quite unnecessary "fridging." That would be valid. Nevertheless, this book takes Harry in new directions and sets him up with a new found family. It gives him more responsibility and explores his relationships with his daughter, his brother, and the White Court vampire queen, Lara Raith, he is being forced to marry (presumably in the next book). Harry finds a way to make the best of that sticky situation, and in the end, he and Lara end up as partners and wary allies.

This book's dedication has a hint that the author may have based this on his own "year of hell." This is just speculation on my part, but the book definitely gives off that vibe. It takes time for Harry to recover, and for the most part, he gets that time. Unlike other volumes in the series, there is not one overarching Big Bad (although that seems to be coming). Rather, it's a series of slowly escalating incidents--aftereffects of the Battle of Chicago--that Harry has to deal with. He struggles to put aside his own pain and begin helping people again, and we see the depths of that struggle. This story is also something of a character study of Harry Dresden, and it's very effective.

We do get a magical fight scene at the end of the book, when Harry is able to take up his staff again, and it's a banger. It is mercifully short, compared to the last book (which was more or less one chaotic extended battle), and I think it packs a helluva punch. Just as an example:

I slammed my open right hand against the wall of Merlin's fortress as the three corpses whirled toward me, reorienting after the sudden absence of resistance. There was an instant of frozen silence.

"You should have come on a school night," I said harshly.

And then, at my will, the enchanted, obdurate stone of the second floor, that entire portion of the second floor, tons and tons and tons of rune-etched rock, slammed down more swiftly than a blinking eyelid, like a vast and ancient sledgehammer coming down on three doomed cockroaches.

It was messy as hell.

Black ichor, thick and sticky as tar, sprayed everywhere in a fine mist.

And that was that.

Well, that's one way to get rid of your enemies.

Harry is in a better place at the end of this book, and ready to take up the challenges ahead. I don't know how many more books the author has planned for the series; I heard it may end with book #22 or #23? In any event, I hope he keeps up with the plot and character threads he has laid down here. This book should provide a good launching pad for the series' endgame.



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Review: This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ilona Andrews (a husband-and-wife writing team) is better known for writing urban fantasy, particularly the Kate Daniels post-magical-apocalypse series, all of which I own. This book is a sort of urban fantasy, but it takes place in the second-world country of Rellas and its capital city of Kair Toren. This world is based on an infamously unfinished epic fantasy series that the protagonist Maggie has read over and over again. This knowledge proves to be her lifeline when she goes to bed one night in her bog-standard US apartment--and wakes up cold and naked in the streets of Kair Toren.

(This opening is an interesting stylistic choice, by the way. The book's first chapter starts with Maggie already in Kair Toren, stealing a blanket to wrap around herself and searching for food. We get no beginning scene of her actually waking up in the country of her book. Which is rather an extreme example of in medias res, but it certainly grabs the reader's attention.)

Maggie isn't a superhero, or a Renaissance veteran with a sword, or a kickass karate queen. She's an ordinary young woman who is capable of being hurt by this new world. Or even killed....although as we soon discover, if she dies she comes back to life (hence the series title, Maggie the Undying) and even regrows chopped-off fingers (in a rather gruesome torture scene). Her superpower is her intimate knowledge of the characters and storylines in the two published books of the series, and how she can use that to predict Kair Toren's future--and ultimately, try to change it. Because Kair Toren and Rellas will be subject to political betrayal and sorcerous manipulation that will eventually culminate in an apocalyptic war, something Maggie is determined to prevent.

Of course, she has no idea how she got there, and when, or if, she will ever return to Earth. But as time goes on and she survives, and gets to know the people of Kair Toren, she decides that doesn't matter. The people who previously only existed on the page are there before her in messy, vivid life, and she realizes she must try to save them if possible.

So she becomes Lady Maggie with her own house, and begins working behind the scenes to prevent the war. Her book knowledge is vital to this effort, although as she begins influencing and changing events, that will eventually lead to diminishing returns. She also discovers characters and incidents that were not mentioned in the books. And the fact that the third and final book remains unpublished puts a severe constraint on her knowledge, as she has no idea how some things will ultimately turn out. This, however, does not stop her.

As you might have gathered from all this, the worldbuilding in this book is rich, layered, and fascinating. It's right up my alley. The city of Kair Toren is as much a rounded character as Maggie and the other humans. Politics and backstabbing court intrigue figure prominently. Maggie's delicate dance to maneuver through all of this, while not revealing her deepest secret--that everyone and everything here is a figment of someone's imagination, impossibly come to life--makes for absorbing reading. There are manipulations, betrayals, desperate last stands, an unwilling slow-burn attraction, and some magic-powered animals that are decidedly different than the usual run of dragons et cetera. This is the first of a trilogy, as the title page (and the cliffhanger ending) makes clear.

I don't know if this is meant to be a rebuttal to some real-world unfinished fantasy series (George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss, looking at you), but it is definitely an exploration of why it may not be such a great thing to be tossed into the world of your favorite book. It deals with some important questions along the way, such as: if you know a tragedy is coming, is it your responsibility to try and stop it? Is it ethical for you to manipulate the characters in your story-come-to-life, even to save them? In one way, Maggie is setting herself up as a little-g God. Does she have any right to do that?

The authors have most assuredly leveled up with this one. I can't wait for the next book.

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Review: Murder by Memory

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This "cosy" SF mystery is set aboard a generation ship, the Fairweather. The protagonist, ship's detective Dorothy Gentleman, is abruptly awakened in a body not her own, and has to solve a murder. Unfortunately, the body her mind has been uploaded into is one Gloria Vowell, who proves to be the prime suspect.

This book could have been better, but the setting, worldbuilding and characterization is, as the saying goes, a "mile wide and an inch deep." Thin and shallow, in other words. The very real and potentially life-threatening problems of life on board a generation ship are not even touched on, and the ramifications of a technology where people's brains are mapped into "memory-books" for uploading when their current bodies wear out, thus making them functionally immortal, are similarly ignored. The Fairweather, or Ferry, as she is known, has a shipboard culture that appears to be both socialist and capitalist at the same time? which makes for some uneasy bedfellows, to say the least. (In fact, the latter is the villain's motivation for the murders, as she works a centuries-long financial grift whereby she loans people money, murders them, and gains untraceable interest on the loans during the time period until they are decanted into new bodies. It's not like they're gone forever, after all! They come back!)

Yeah, that....doesn't make a whole lot of sense. She may gain a fortune, but what's she going to do with it when they reach their destined colony planet in seven or so centuries? It's not like those extra dollars are going to do her much good, light-years away from Earth while the ship and its inhabitants fight to terraform their new world.

This may be the result of the story's 100-page novella length: the pacing is tight, and some of these things needed more time and space to breathe. Still, at the end I wasn't very fond of either Dorothy Gentleman or her ship.

There are better generation ship stories around, and much better mysteries. (See: either one of Robert Jackson Bennett's Shadow of the Leviathan fantasy-mysteries, The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption. ) This one, I think, can be safely passed over.

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Review: Downfall

Downfall by Marc J. Gregson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the third book in the young adult Above the Black trilogy, and brings everything to a pretty satisfying end. As I predicted in my review of the second book, Among Serpents, the new and nastier villain is the protagonist Conrad's uncle Ulrich, the self-proclaimed "King of the Skylands" (even though he gained his position through treachery and mass murder). Ulrich schemes against and manipulates everyone around him, and is not above sending his nephew to what will likely be his death in the monster-ridden Below.

We learn quite a bit more about this secondary world in this concluding volume, especially about the Below and its inhabitants the Lantians. In fact, that is my main issue with this book--there is so much necessary plot and background to be revealed that the first third of the book feels overstuffed. There is seemingly endless running and hiding and fighting, and the characters (and reader) scarcely get a chance to breathe. It's not till the middle section of the book that the pacing thankfully slows down, as Conrad lets everyone believe he is dead, takes on a new identity, and begins the preparations to challenge his uncle. He has to become a far better duellist than he's ever been, and he also has to prepare himself to take on the mantle of leadership--because if he defeats his uncle, he will be the new King of the Skylands.

This volume explores Conrad's dilemma, and how he will use what has been given to him by both his mother and father, the seemingly opposing traits of compassion and ruthlessness respectively, and his melding the two. At the story's climax, he does defeat his uncle, but the author acknowledges that the work won't end there. Conrad has to basically rebuild the world, undo the damage the Skylands has done to the Below, and balance many opposing factions. The situation is fragile and precarious, but the book ends with a reason to believe that Conrad will pull it off.

Taken together, these books boast well-thought-out worldbuilding and a satisfying story. They're nothing like most YA fantasies out there, to be sure. I'm happy to have read all three of them, and I think others will be too.

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Notable Short Fiction: Clarkesworld January/February 2026

There are three stories in this issue (January) I liked and would like to share. They are:

"The Desolate Order of the Head in the Water" by A.W. Prihandita is a creepy little horror story, and the title is fully accurate. This is a near-future story of an all-conquering AI, and is as bleak as you might expect. It's probably not something you want to read if you're depressed. Having said that, why did I like it, you ask? Well, even bleak stories, if written well enough and with compelling characters, can worm inside your head and stay there. This is one of those. 

"The Stars You Can't See By Looking Directly," by Samantha Murray, is an interesting little story that is a cross between science fiction and magical realism. The precipitating event, snow on Christmas Day in Australia at the height of summer, sets off a chain of events that represent a new evolution for the human race, with all babies conceived thereafter apparently genetically modified humans. The story becomes a quiet, thoughtful examination of the past and the future of humanity, and what it will mean for the respective children of the protagonist and her best friend, one of which will be an "old" human and one of which will be new. This story packs quite a punch. 

"Donor Unknown," by Nika Murphy, is a clever, complicated story of an android matchmaker wearing the holographic face of a human, who goes hunting for a painting taken from a Jewish family during the Nazi occupation in 1941. This story deals with prejudice and ghosts of the Holocaust, and generational trauma. It talks at the very end about "loving one's true self," so it has a nice uplifting conclusion. 

The February issue cover art has another instance of the funny little robots that artist Matt Dixon apparently loves--they've made several appearances. This issue has two outstanding stories. 

"Painstaking," by Rich Larson, is a cyberpunk story set in Nigeria dealing with family and identity. The premise is a bit bonkers--the protagonist, Mars, is inhabited by an immortal alien organism that has turned his body into something resembling a starfish, capable of regenerating a twin, called a "clone-brother," Balarabe, after Mars was accidentally cut in half. This is a rather gross idea that get explored in detail in this story, and ends up being quite interesting. 

"Three Fortunes on Alcestis As Told By the Fraud Baeliss Shudal," by Louis Inglis Hall, is the tale of a "false" fortune-teller who nevertheless manages to tell quite a bit of truth. This story has a touch of the horrific as well, as the protagonist reads the mad emperor's fortune in the "shattered entrails of an entire civilization." This is another story that is on the quiet side, but the further you read the more steam it gathers, and the more it pays off at the end. 

I also want to once again plug Clarkesworld Magazine. I've been subscribing to them for years, and even if you get a print subscription through their Patreon (as I do), this high-quality magazine is worth the expense. There's a reason editor Neil Clarke is a four-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Editor. In the meantime, please check out the above stories. 

 

"The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for": Project Hail Mary

This is the second movie made from one of Andy Weir's books, after 2015's The Martian. The settings are different, but the plots are similar: someone faced with a near-insurmountable problem he has to science his way out of. The stakes are a little higher in this one: The Martian's Mark Watney was an astronaut stranded on Mars all by his lonesome, who would have starved had the world not pulled together to rescue him. In contrast, Hail Mary's Ryland Grace has to solve the problem of an alien "astrophage" that is colonizing and dimming the sun, the consequence of which will be the freezing of Earth and the extinction of the human race and all life on the planet if he cannot figure out a way to stop it. 

(Yeah, no pressure, right? Also, another similarity is the main character: a Competent White Guy. Of course, Andy Weir is a White Guy, so that's what he wrote. The layers surrounding this are an entirely different conversation, however, one I am not having right now.)

I saw this film in a giant IMAX theater, and let me start by saying it is gorgeous. The colors are crisp and clear, and the practical sets--there doesn't seem to be much CGI in this, except obviously for the exterior space shots--are well designed and much appreciated. It's a good thing Ryan Gosling makes an excellent Ryland Grace, the science teacher forced into the role of astronaut and savior of humanity (and other beings) because he is on the screen nearly one hundred percent of the time. It's a very good performance throughout. Unfortunately, the Academy tends to overlook lead actors in SF films come award time (although with Michael B. Jordan's Best Actor win this year for Sinners, one hopes that might be changing), but I wonder if the studio will make a push for a Best Actor nomination for Gosling next year. As far as I am concerned, his performance deserves it.

I am aware there's been some rumblings about inaccurate science in this film. In particular, PZ Myers at Pharyngula tossed off a disgruntled--nay, disgusted--post on the subject. (Short version: the premise is garbage and the movie is fucking stupid.) Of course, this view is perfectly valid, as he's looking at the film from the perspective of a scientist and evolutionary biologist. I'm sure movies such a viewpoint can approve of are few and far between. 

However, that's not how I'm looking at it. Look, I read a lot of SF every year, and I've resigned myself to the fact that nearly every science fiction book and story I read is going to have inaccurate science, to a greater or lesser degree. I'm personally fond of space opera stories, and one of the central tenets of that genre--FTL travel--is not allowed by the laws of physics as we currently understand them. That doesn't stop me from loving well-written space operas (a recent example: Claire North's fantastic Slow Gods, with her extradimensional "arcspace"). My "fucking stupid" boundaries are different than PZ's, but I definitely have them. (Just ask me how stupid Independence Day: Resurgence was. 🙄)

For me, however, this film does not cross those boundaries.

That's because the plot of Project Hail Mary and the story are to me two different things. The plot is A to B to C, this happens and causes D effect, and then E happens; or, X problem pops up and is solved, leading to Y problem, and then the big ZZ problem at the climax. But that's not the story.

The story is this:

1) Ryland Grace's friendship with Rocky the alien; and 

2) As a direct result of that friendship, how Ryland grows from a milquetoast, non-confrontational, even cowardly person to a person who will take his ship to rescue his friend, his own life be damned. 

That's the story, and Project Hail Mary delivers.

Viewed from this perspective, the movie is as much a character study as it is an SF blockbuster. I mean, you have a guy who is terrified at the idea of going into space, who is so scared that during the flashback scene after the scientist on the three-person Hail Mary team is killed, and Ryland is the only one availble to meet the extremely tight launch window--never mind that he's not an astronaut--and if he refuses he is literally dooming the human race to death in thirty years--even then, he says no over and over again, stating "I don't have it in me," and they have to chase him down, drug him, and drag him aboard the Hail Mary. (Which is not a great look for the mission commander, but really, what else could she do? She was also trusting Ryland not to slit his wrists when he woke up aboard the Hail Mary and realized what had been done to him.) 

But as one of the key lines in the film proclaims (paraphrasing): "You can be brave if you find someone to be brave for," and this is what happens to Ryland Grace. His relationship with Rocky (I'm almost cringing at the thought of calling it an "alien bromance," but that's exactly what it is), enables him to first, solve the astrophage problem; and secondly, after he and Rocky part and Ryland realizes the solution to the problem will infect Rocky's ship, strand him in space, and lead to his slow death by radiation exposure and starvation, Ryland makes the film's central choice. He loads his data and the engineered astrophage predators onto four probes (named John, Paul, George and Ringo after the Beatles) and sends them on their way to Earth; and knowing he doesn't have enough fuel to get home if he goes to rescue Rocky....he takes off to rescue Rocky anyway. 

Personally, I can overlook a lot of bad science for a story like that. Yes, Ryland, you did have it in you after all.

This film is a box-office hit, and it deserves to be. If, like PZ Myers, you can't get past the bad science, that's fine. But I think you're missing out on someting special.

 

Review: Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 2: As My Mothers Made Me

Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 2: As My Mothers Made Me by Kelly Thompson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Absolute Wonder Woman Vol. 1: The Last Amazon was one of the best graphic novels I read last year, and this volume continues that excellence. In this volume, Diana of Themiscyra, stolen from her mother and sisters as a baby, raised by the sorceress Circe in Hell, called Diana, witch of the Wild Isle, daughter of Circe and (she thinks) last of the Amazons, begins her search for her sisters. This leads her to a labyrinth where she meets a bull-headed monster, Ferdinand, pursued by "fish-men," and the sorceress Clea, who rules over the labyrinth with an iron fist. Clea throws Diana down a well, where Diana finds a secret society of survivors trying to tunnel their way out--and Io, one of her sisters. Diana spins up a magic ball to break through the labyrinth and free these people, and goes back to rescue Ferdinand.

At this story's climax, we get another example of how this series' writer, Kelly Thompson, understands the character of Wonder Woman so well. Instead of killing Clea, Diana breaks open one of the tunnels and floods the labyrinth with the sea, freeing Clea and her minions, taking a chance that even though Clea was a monster inside, she will not be one now that she is free. Along this line, as another exploration of the love and compassion that is Diana's heart, we have a flashback to one of her earlier tests as a child in Hell, where she met the goddess Artemis as a snapping bloody-fanged panther and had to stand up for one of the island animals who is her friends.

What really stands out in this volume, for me, is the art. It's not the typical nine or six square panels, at all. Each two-page spread has its own design, from circles to angles to triangles to loops. It's fascinating how the artist, Hayden Sherman, juggles all these different page spreads while enabling the reader to still follow the story. It's worth taking time to go back and look at each page, savoring how the pieces fit together to draw the eye and move the story forward.

I preordered this volume from my local bookstore as soon as I heard it was being released, and I'm glad I did. The back blurb says Absolute Wonder Woman won an Eisner Award for Best New Series, and it is well deserved. This series is ongoing, and I will continue to buy the collected volumes as long as they are coming out.

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Review: Jitterbug

Jitterbug by Gareth L. Powell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have several of Gareth L. Powell's books. He has written series in the past, but his last couple of books have been standalones, which is a good thing in my mind. (Just looking at Brandon Sanderson's fifty-pound bricks exhausts me.) That continues to be the case with this book, a one-and-done space opera with a few timey-wimey twists at the end.

This story also falls in the category of....I don't know if you could really call it Big Dumb Objects, because the objects that make up what Powell calls the Swirl are actually pretty interesting. They're the remnants of the outer planets (Pluto, the Oort Cloud, Neptune, Saturn and Jupiter) which were taken apart by--something--a hundred years ago and re-formed into several segments facing and orbiting the Sun. These segments are so unimaginably huge (hundreds of millions of miles long and wide) that they hold their own atmospheres and are inhabitable. In fact, humanity has begun doing just that: leaving Earth and Luna and settling on these segments, building towns and planting crops and making lives for themselves. (Since Mars is also unraveling and humans don't have the slightest idea how this is done or how to stop it, the unspoken horrific expectation is that eventually Earth will be taken apart as well and the Swirl will be the only place humans can live.) The Swirl has become the Wild West of the outer solar system, a place where people can disappear into a segment that can hold a million Earths and never be found again.

Our main POV character is Copernicus Brown, the captain of the titular sentient starship Jitterbug and a bounty hunter who tracks down the outlaws who attempt to disappear into the Swirl. Following a successful bounty, Copernicus and his crew are on their way back to Luna when they run across a ship under attack by pirates. They divert to render assistance, only to discover when they get there that both the ship who called for help and the pirate ship have been taken apart by an unseen third vessel that cut them both open like tin cans and disappeared. The Jitterbug comes under attack by one of the last survivors of the pirates and one of her crew members is killed. Upon scanning the mangled ships another survivor is found hiding in a water tank. Copernicus goes to set this person free, and finds a woman calling herself Amber Roth who is claiming to be a captive of the pirates and who attempted to escape. But Amber Roth has secrets of her own, as evidenced when the Jitterbug scans her and sees an encrypted data crystal in her stomach, which she apparently swallowed when the pirates attacked.

This one fateful decision sets the plot in motion, as Copernicus and the Jitterbug's crew soon realize they have stumbled upon a system-wide conspiracy involving the higher-ups at the Solar Assembly, the organization tasked with managing the Swirl and space travel. This chip holds evidence that something is coming, that a huge object a thousand miles wide is on its way insystem. The Jitterbug and her crew are tracked down by the Deputy Speaker of the Solar Assembly, Danielle Lanzo, and tasked with meeting this object, which the Solar Assembly thinks may be an alien ship, for first contact. But there are other players who wish to get there first, and the plot becomes a race between the Jitterbug and these other players, some of whom are willing to kill to protect their place in line.

The final third of the book details Copernicus Brown and his ship meeting the alien object, and the reveal involves the timey-wimey shenanigans I spoke of earlier. There are also other aliens inbound to Earth, a locust-like species that strips planets of every resource, murders the inhabitants, and leaves the solar system with nothing but burned ruins behind. Copernicus and the Jitterbug (or a couple different alternate versions of them) are trying to rescue the human race.

As usual with this author, the sentient starship Jitterbug is a major player in her own right. Powell likes several alternating first-person viewpoints in his stories, and in this one there are clear differences between the characters and their voices (especially Danielle Lanzo's). Some of the ideas in this book could have actually used more room to explore, but this story, also typical of Powell, is a lean and mean 300 pages.

I think my favorite work of Powell's is still his Embers of War trilogy, but this one is right up there. If you're a fan of space opera, you won't go wrong with this.

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Review: Slow Gods

Slow Gods by Claire North
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'd never read any of this author's work before, but after seeing a couple of glowing reviews I decided to take a chance on it. I'm glad I did, as it's one of the best books I've read so far this year.

This is a space opera, but it's unlike any space opera I've ever read before. Most space operas have casts of thousands and galactic- or universe-wide stakes. This book has plenty of characters, but it's told entirely through the eyes of one Mawukana na-Vdnaze, a protagonist who starts out as human, then becomes something utterly inhuman, and is slowly working his way back to something close to human as the story ends. This is all summed up in a terrific opening line: "My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself."

It's also the story of the Shine, a fascistic interplanetary regime who commits atrocities against its own people and who is brought down in the end. It is brought down by a huge, ancient artificial intelligence called the Slow, who traverses the cosmos and tends to descend on settled planets to warn them of momentous upcoming events. In the story, the Slow may as well be a god, given how it seems to predict the future and manipulates events...and possibly manipulated Mawukana's existence and life. That is left ambiguous in the story, but the implication is definitely there.

It's also the story of the author's version of FTL travel, known as arcspace: an alternate dimension that ships use to jump across the lightyears, which can only be accessed by a ship operated by an organic Pilot. In the Shine, people are forced into this position and used until they die and/or go insane. Mawukana was a Shine Pilot, and on one arcspace jump he died. Then something in those fathomless depths brought him back to life, recreating him out of the stuff of arcspace itself, leaving him immortal and impossible to kill, and utterly inhuman. At the beginning of the book, he is pretty much an inhuman monster, and over the course of the story he becomes....less so. He learns to feel, to regret, to help others--and even to love, a love so profound it will guide him through the rest of his days.

All these elements are brought together by the chunk of hard SF that sets off the plot: a binary star system collapses on itself, and the resulting shock waves of radiation will obliterate all life within an 83 light-year radius. This includes several Shine worlds, and the Shine, as befits a corporate fascist, refuses to acknowledge this is happening (at least for its employees and its indentured workers/slaves--its Managers and Executors get free rides out, of course). The Slow is the one who warns the people in these various systems of what is coming, and it is the Slow who orchestrates the downfall of the Shine, sacrificing (Mawukana figures) nearly two billion people to save many billions more.

This story is beautifully told, with lovely prose and many different, well-thought-out and fascinating cultures. Time-wise, it covers over two hundred years, the entirety of Mawukana's life and then some. It's not flashy or bursting with glorious battles, but it grows on you from that opening line. This is a terrific story that gets my highest recommendation.

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