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This is the final novella in the Tensorate series. The narrative setup here is that Lady Han (leader of the Machinists) is in a bar mourning; the book itself is her retelling the story of her past relationship with Hecate the now-dead Protector to (an implied an off page) pirate queen Kayan as the audience (along with the reader). This is not really a spoiler as it happens in the opening paragraph.

(Aside: this may be the only book I've ever known that has a pirate queen in multiple books who manages to remain entirely off page!!)

It's an interesting choice to me to have the final book focus on Akeha and Mokoya's mother Hecate, the hated antagonist from book one and the head of the Protectorate. It's also quite a choice to start the book off with Hecate dead and to talk entirely about the past rather than about how that came about. That said, I found myself intrigued by the story of how Hecate came to power and how Lady Han and Hecate ended up falling out, but I was surprised by how few details there were about the fall of Hecate overall. In terms of the plot, there's good reason why there are such scant details, but as a reader I was a little unsatisfied to have this action happen off page.

I appreciate the extra texture and details it gives to Hecate and to the Protectorate as a whole. I don't know that I'd say that this humanizes Hecate very much, as the book does not make excuses about empire; if anything, even if Lady Han believes that things were better under Hecate's rule than they were in the past, she also makes no excuses for the horrible things that Hecate (and she) did to preserve that rule.

Because this novella is such a snapshot of Lady Han's own story, I found myself hungering for details about Lady Han's sister, or more details around the events of Hecate's death, or even more details about where the future was going from here (especially re: Rider and Tua but also the larger world). This may just be more "I want more in a novella than it has room for" feelings. That said, I think this novella's focus is much more on emotional themes of trust and relationships across power differentials that additional perspectives would have detracted from that emotional thrust.

(One final gender thought from this series is that there's an implication that the "delayed puberty" and confirmation practices from the first book are maybe a localized or privileged position: "You have to understand, out in those areas, we didn’t do gender like they did in the capital. You get born as one thing, you’re expected to stick to it." I think the gender worldbuilding and plot details of this series got less important into the later books, but I still appreciated the small details that added a lot of color to how the world worked.)

Overall, the whole series feels like a snapshot of a revolutionary time period in an empire told through the perspectives of characters on the periphery of power, and also told in a surprising variety of narrative styles. It's two children of Hecate, it's an investigator looking into the empire's misdeeds, and finally it's the lover who turned against that empire. All of these perspectives in part are in the shadow of Hecate the protector and her fight against the Machinists and to consolidate power. The larger arc plot around prophecy is slowly revealed in bits each book and ties into the conclusion of each.

I enjoyed this series a good bit. The strength for me is that each novella is a standalone great emotional arc for a single protagonist, while fitting in worldbuilding and character details in the wake of this arc. However, because of this, even as I enjoyed each book individually, the series taken as a whole feels a little disjointed and less cohesive than I wanted.

This is the third novella in the Tensorate series. It's got a new protagonist and a wildly different style, sounding much more like a fantasy noir detective investigating a mystery. There's also different tonal shifts between chapters themselves, as some chapters are written as reports to authorities, some are redacted transcripts of interviews, while others are unfiltered journal entries. Overall, this is a very different feeling book than the previous two but I really enjoyed the read.

As a mystery proper, it feels much less about the "whodunnit" (as arguably the second book did) and more about the "what" and the "why". It's very clear from the get go that the authorities are almost certainly at fault here, somehow. There's also a strong horror element of investigating a gory scene while the perpetrator is almost certainly around, but I'd argue that it's secondary to the mystery theme as the "horror climax" takes place largely off-page and is only briefly described in a transcript.

The ending feels a bit like an abrupt cliffhanger, but it also does fit satisfyingly for both the genre and the protagonist, as well as gently continuing the larger arc plot. This is maybe just me complaining about the length of a novella, but I do wish there was a little bit more resolution after the final reveal.

(An ongoing gender details update: it's implied that one character has changed to using they/them pronouns at some point before this book. It's a small one-off comment, but it was honestly very refreshing to just have a character who made one decision about their gender and then later made another. It's not something you see much.)

This book is the second novella in the Tensorate series. I had read that this followed Mokoya instead of the way the first novella followed Akeha and also that these first two novellas could be read in any order. Because of that, I had half expected that this was going to be some John Scalzi Old Man's War Lost Colony vs Zoe's Tale situation, following Mokoya off-page during the events of the first novella. However instead, this book is some time after the first novella ends and feels to me that it gives a lot less background on the world than the first book. I am not sure I can imagine reading them in the opposite order.

If the first book is about struggling against the tides of fortune, that theme very much continues here, however it's also a tale about trauma and grief and fractured relationships. One thing that works a lot better in this book for me is that because it is not stretched across so many years (in needing to do worldbuilding lifting and character development), it's a much tighter plot and overall is a lot more satisfying to me.

I really enjoy the technological detail of Mokoya having visions of the future but also having a way to physically capture and record these visions in a way that can be revisited in the future. It's a nice detail that plays in really well as a coping mechanism for grief.

In ongoing gender feelings about this series, this book mentions "archaic gender-neutral first person pronouns" indicating that maybe the push towards binary gender is a more recent (or possibly localized) development. I also appreciate the focus on a new non-binary character here as well. Interested to see what if anything continues on the gender worldbuilding front for the other two novellas.

I'm reading the Tensorate novellas as part of the SFFBookClub's "sequel month". I've read this once upon a time in the past, but haven't read the other three yet.

I enjoyed this book a good bit, but mostly as a setup for future novellas. This book follows twins Mokoya and Akeha who are under the thumb of their mother the head of the Protectorate. Thematically, the book is about resisting the will of fate, against prophetic visions that Mokoya has but also arguably against the inexorable will of their mother. It's also a story of the resistance of common people against the will of an empire that controls magic.

I think the novella does a lot of work of worldbuilding and characterization in its short length. If I had any criticism, it's that it is much more focused on hitting emotional beats than about narrative beats. The sections skip through time as Mokoya and Akeha grow up to give a picture of their story, but the plot itself meanders and feels disjointed. Emotionally, the final scenes all hit their mark but the worldbuilding historical details and plot were not as tight as I wanted and left me wanting to know more about how we arrived at each moment.

There were some fun gender bits to this world that I quite enjoyed. In this world, kids grow up ungendered and puberty is postponed with magic. At some point, children choose to "be confirmed" in a particular (binary) gender which also involves some magic rearranging of their body. It's certainly a trans dream to have choose-your-own-puberty. It's an interesting choice to me as well that this world (so far?) also seems to prioritize binary gender as an expected outcome for all children. One character who has chosen not to be confirmed seems to have some shame (or at least expect criticism) for deciding to do that.

I'll be interested to see if the binary gender focus is due to the focus of this particular novella (maybe this is a cultural part of this protectorate region or time period) or if the friction against non-binary identities and bodies is an ongoing piece of the rest of the novellas. (Given that Neon Yang is themselves non-binary, it certainly feels to me like an exploration of this friction rather than some unfortunate authorial view.)

This is the second (of three?) books in The Sun Chronicles. I'm having a hard time writing my thoughts about this book, because I didn't enjoy it as much as the first, but I'm also having a hard time putting my finger on why.

One thing is that, even for me, this book is a verrry long 700+ pages and it takes even longer than the first book to get going and with a lot more downtime. It may be that I don't have a historical background to enjoy the parallels, but for an epic tome I need more foreshadowing to make future events have the import that they are probably intended to have. One example for me is that the Trinity Coalition takes up a large part of the middle of the book, and yet there's no mention of them in the first book at all; I have no sense of why they're important; as a reader it felt like a surprise that the plot went there at all and so it felt less impactful. (Give me a space map, even!) On a smaller scale, it's a similar issue to Persephone bringing five mystery things with her; it wasn't satisfying as a reader to (several times) only know a specific something right before it comes into play. As a comparison, I feel like Guy Gavriel Kay writes history with a fantastical edge that comes off to an underinformed reader much more as a cohesive standalone narrative.

I still wish we had more perspective on Sun herself. Despite being the "main character" in many ways, she's still held at a remote third person perspective. I know more about her indirectly from her wake than directly about her own motivations and feelings. I'm glad we got a little extra character background on James and Alika this time around, but I still feel like there's more companions than even this large tome has time for (adding even more in book two). Maybe I just expected to be more invested in Sun than I am, but it continues to be hard when we can't get close to her.

I especially enjoyed Zizou's perspective the most this time around. His desire to free people who aren't sure they want to be freed, and trying to find a path through life when everything he's previously held onto has been taken away or called into question made for the most enjoyable pov chapters for me. Apama's are a close second.

I really don't like leaving a bunch of negative thoughts about a book. I wanted to like this a lot more than I did, because there's a lot of really great pieces here. In the end, I just had a hard time getting into this and enjoying it as much as I did the first book.

My library delivered me the sequel this week, so I thought I'd give this first book in the series a comfort reread. I don't think I'd describe this book as necessarily telling a ground-breaking novel story (I am a smidge tired of ye olde crumbling intergalactic magic transportation network built by an ancient civilization not around anymore at this point), but I think the characters are fun, the space politics and worldbuilding are intricate, and overall it's a heck of a ride.

This book is billed as "gender-swapped Alexander the Great in space" and (mostly) follows Sun the heir princess trying to prove herself in the shadow of her mother the Queen-Marshal, and Persephone who is trying to escape her high-ranking family and make her own way in the world. There's also some perspectives from the "enemy" here as well, which puts the overall conflict more in the realm of space resource and territory squabble, and less of a fight about morality.

The book starts a little slowly, but once it gets going, the action really gets going. I feel like it rolls from escape sequence to ground battle to space battle and further without missing a beat. Some of this is Sun herself who refuses to be put on the defensive or put on the sideline, and chooses action where possible. The space politics are also quite excellent; I love the backstabbing and treachery and plots both internal and external. The chapters have great titles like "In Which the Wily Persephone's Hopes and Dreams are Shot Through the Lungs and Turned to Grey Ash".

I think the other thing that struck me about this book on reread is how much it deals with family as a central theme, both chosen and not. Sun as the heir is in a somewhat shaky place, and in some ways is driven partially by wanting her mother's reluctant approval. Persephone and Perseus (and maybe Erishkegal) are all trying to escape their horrible family in their own way. Apama and Tiana both are closely tied to their own family and have some [spoiler] backstory that comes out. One worldbuilding detail I think is fun, is that the heir and Queen-Marshall (at least) take Companions from different high-ranking houses in sort of an inner circle / chosen family / political trade sort of way as well. Sun feels pressured to bring more people in as Companions to show favor to these houses and have political connections, but is also not wanting to bring in people who can spy on her or that she can't trust.

I think there are a few things that work less well for me. The main point of view chapters are Sun (in third person past tense) and Persephone (in first person present tense). It's not just the narrative point of view at play here, but the Persephone chapters feel much more introspective and I have a much better sense of her feelings. The Sun chapters are much more curt and to the point, with short sentences and lots of action. There were some parts of the Sun chapters (especially the industrial complex assault sequence), where I got lost on where everybody was spatially because the descriptions were scant (for me). Overall, I also think there's so much going on that Sun's Companions don't get that much room to grow either, and feel a little bit one-note. My hope for future books is to get more of Sun's inner world than we did in this one, and to get some more Companion backstory to found them out.

I think the part of this book that I enjoyed the most was the worldbuilding dive into Presger Translators, as this is the first character with this POV. In previous books, Dlique and Zeiat both are wild characters who felt like comic relief foils compared to the over-serious Radchaai. So much of all of their nonsense along with various other mysteries get some partial explanation here. It's delightful to go back and rethink parts of previous books and have at least a slightly better understanding of what's going on. I'm not even sure that I need to know anything about the Presger at this point; I think I enjoy enough all of the wrangling in their ominous shadows.

It is definitely a wild narrative turn to have this POV though. There is a lot of body horror and casual violence going on that is treated very normally by all of the characters. It worked for me, and put a lot of the Presger Translator behavior into context, but it was also a surprising change of tone.

I enjoyed all of the characters on their own individually, but I feel like in some ways there wasn't quite enough meat on the rest of the story. It's hard for me to really put my finger on it, but if I had to pin it down to one piece, it's that I feel like Enae felt like the third wheel. Enae is handed hir investigation that nobody wants solved and the answer to a two-hundred year problem just appears right before hir. If anything, sie mostly just seems like support for Reet. I would have also wanted some more local politics or repercussions for Enae actually making progress on an investigation that some people probably didn't want solved in the end?

At any rate, in Ancillary Mercy, Provenance, and now Translation State it feels like there's a very consistent theme in this universe on the question of what makes something a Significant Species as well as legal shenanigans of how to determine who gets to be part of which species. The conclave continues and continues to come up, and I am really excited for the potential of some space politics / legal theater book wrangling all of these pieces together.

I reread this book for the SFFBookClub this month.

Personally, I deeply enjoyed this book and series, but I think it is not for everybody. I highly recommend folks read the first two chapters online here to get a taste of the voice: www.tor.com/2016/04/12/excerpts-ada-palmer-too-like-the-lightning-chapters-1-and-2/. Mycroft the narrator is self-deprecating, frequently addresses the reader, and is most definitely a very unreliable (and heavily edited) narrator. You can read it in the link above, but never ever have I ever seen a book do so much world-building via content warnings.

This book (and series) is trying to do so much, and regardless of whether you feel like it worked or not, it's hard not to be in awe of the ambition and the sheer density of ideas threaded together here. In the first chapter we've got flying cars, a secret magic kid who can turn toys into real life, mention of a Church War and sensayers (religious therapists) in the wake of it, Mycroft letting the reader know that he's misgendering everybody for ~reasons~, legal punishment alternatives in a Servicer system, questions about free will, and alternative family structures called bashes. This is before we get into 18th century philosophy, ethics, religion, and Greek myth. FOOF

This book is really catnip for me even on a reread; I find Mycroft to be extremely engaging as a narrator, and I appreciate so much how all of these details are spooled out at just the right pace to keep me intrigued but not overwhelmed. It felt like each chapter was carefully crafted to introduce a new location, bring in some world details and history, focus on a slightly different set of world leaders, and push the mystery investigation of the 7-10 list theft forward. It never felt like too much, and I constantly hungered to find out more about the world.

I talked about this after reading Infomocracy for SFFBookClub, but I really appreciated how much flying cars in this story drove so many social changes. If people can be flown across the globe in a few hours, then borders lose meaning. And if borders lose meaning, then what does that mean for governments that are based on geography. Clearly, the hive system is not meant to be posited as some ideal government solution, but for me at least there's something idealistic and positive about the idea of people being able to (more) freely choose their own laws and government in ways that aren't constrained by the power of geography.

I enjoyed the rest of the series as well, but I feel like the first two books are by far the strongest for me as a reader. The final two books are no longer an edited history and so Mycroft becomes even more of an unreliable narrator (if such a thing is possible) and the fourth book goes off on some epic :drum: diversions. I enjoyed the final two books a lot (and the ending lands SO well) but in some ways it wanders much more philosophically and is not as tight of a story as the first two books for me.

Unsurprisingly, I have a bunch of gender thoughts on this book too, which I'm going to put separately, because there's a lot of them: books.theunseen.city/user/picklish/status/87074

This short story can be read here: clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/

This was a fun story about a mysterious new wellness app, which seems to actually have people's best interests in mind. People call you (yes phone calls???) to remind you to do things like time to wake up but don't forget your appointment, or open your curtains, or maybe try out these hobbies you're interested in but never quite make the time for. It turns around the fact that most technology is out there exploiting you and working against your own needs, and asks what it might look like if it were the opposite.

In some ways, this is almost feels like escapeism from therapy, where some of the hard parts about self-care and self-knowledge are externalized, where external folks not only know what you need but gently nudge you through it. (But maybe things would be a lot better if everybody had this much direct and mutual support in their lives from others?)

I feel like this story is in the same optimistic vein as some of Kritzer's other work, like Cat Pictures, Please and also the CatNet series. Her ideas about what communities and technology could look like continue to just be really refreshing.

Children of Memory is the third (and final?) book in the Children of Time saga. I have very mixed feelings about this book (and also this series). If I had to sum up my feelings, the last 50 pages of this book are absolutely excellent but the middle ~200 pages drag on for quite some time. If I had to review the series as a whole, I am glad I read these three books personally, but my recommendation for others who hadn't read any would be to read the first book and stop there.

One thing I think this series does well is that each book has a very different vibe overall. Book one is very space opera / evolutionary theater, book two adds in a significant horror element, and book three feels more like a mystery (fairytale?) of strange contradictory events. I strongly agree with Tak, who described this third book as Locked Tomb-esque.

The technological development arc in this series reminders me a little of Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past series. By book three of each of these series, the technology level has just gone so far into post-human / galaxy teleporting / immortality / body uploads / consciousness-splitting developments that it almost feels disconnecting to me as a reader. What are the desires and needs of people who live like this even like? I think this book gets into some of what that might be, but in both of these series I found it harder to connect with characters as time went on.

Similar to the previous two books in this series, which each have their own featured uplifted animal, this book also brings in some extremely smart corvids. Other characters are not sure what to make of them and spend a lot of time trying to figure out if they are sentient or not. (The birds say they are absolutely not.) I found the birds Gothi and Gethli to be very endearing characters. I love love loved the small interstitial chapters where they are wittily talking to each other and making jokes. I felt like it nailed "birds are really interested in shiny new things and uninterested in everything else" angle as well as the "corvids are both extremely chatty and smart" one.

This book also adds a lot of good development for characters from book one and book two. I like that we get to see extra sides of Kern(s), as well as a significant perspective from a character who is Those-of-We trying to be a Human named Miranda that they knew specifically. They're coping with the tension of wanting to know everything, with being a terrible entity in the past that they're ashamed of, with various emotional traumas, and with the stress of pretending to be one thing when really they are many many things at once. I felt like the book two perspective on Those-of-We was necessarily limited and I was glad that book three has a chance to let them shine.

I feel like any discussion of the end of the book is going to be extremely full of major spoilers, so I will leave that in a follow-up comment. Suffice it to say that I felt like the ending to this book was as solid (if not more solid) than book one and really tied together everything that the book put out there in a satisfying way.

This is the sequel to Children of Memory. It's got some similar set up to the first book, in that it's got a dual perspective (historical development of Nod and Damascus, and then current time trip there with characters from the first book) and it's got some uplifted non-human creatures (octopuses!!). However, I think this book also has a huge new horror element to it that the first book didn't have that it pulls off very successfully and creepily.

This book suffers a little bit from second book syndrome in that the first book felt much more tightly crafted and the ending resonated in a satisfyingly foreshadowed way. Book two is doing a few too many similar things, and it doesn't quite all come together in the same way. I think for a book two of a (presumed?) trilogy, I was hoping for more indication of some larger planned arc plot tying these books together, and without that this book feels more like a serial than part of a larger work.

Probably my biggest disappointment was really that most of the characters in book two felt very flat to me. I don't think the characterization in book one was particularly strong, but I did enjoy seeing various humans change through time as well as getting a window on different Portiid individuals as well. In this book, Senkovi certainly is a stand-out here as a wry scientist. The part I did really enjoy about the characters was in the spider/human relations. Fabian and Meshner supporting each other and Meshner understanding Fabian's social standing and Meshner having a good backstory for why he was interested in Fabian's research. Helena realizing that her peer relationship with Portia has a lot more of a unstated power and social dynamic than she thought previously.

I do really like the octopus psychology brought in here, in terms of reflecting the fact that an octopus's brain is split across its tentacles; that it imagines wanting something and then its tentacle brains just make it happen and appear. As with book one, I wish these octopuses also had real names that were not just repeated across multiple characters. This book tries to write in some reasoning for why this is happening here, but it still doesn't work for me as a reader, sorry. Given the fluid nature :drum: of octopus society too, I felt like the brief windows into octopus life were also not as effective for me as they were with the Portiids.

I have a few spoiler-y ending thoughts, which I'll leave in a separate comment.