Alliance Unbound, by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher
Follow up to 2019’s Alliance Rising (my review) and only the second Alliance / Union novel published in the last fifteen years, which is far too long for my taste which is a statement I’ll make while ignoring the ten plus Alliance / Union novels I have yet to read. Alliance Unbound jumps right into the action of the previous novel with Ross Monahan having taken refuge on Finity’s End, a top of the line and incredibly powerful merchant ship following the takeover of his family’s ship, The Galway, during the conclusion of Alliance Rising.
It’s a little difficult to talk about Alliance Unbound without talking about the larger galactic politics and how this book fits into the larger series of generally connected novels because the actions with both Alliance Rising and Alliance Unbound center around the founding of the titular alliance between merchant ships to counter the encroaching power of the Earth Company as a border and buffer against the Union of other worlds and space stations. It’s both incredibly important for understanding the underlying landscape (spacescape?) of Alliance Unbound and not at all important because with very limited exceptions across some thirty novels, these books can be read and enjoyed in any order.
The core of Alliance Unbound is the founding of the Merchanter’s Alliance and my favorite bits of the novel are the ones that are dealing with the minutiae of interstellar politics and the issues merchant ships have with Earth Company (and it’s projected power of the home planet against ships and stations it views as their property even when years can pass between possible communication). The Neihart family of Finity’s End is compelling, though certainly a bit heavy handed as the rich / powerful merchant family, as they work on getting the last two family run ships signed on to the Alliance and discover a possible Earth Company
It’s not just the devil being in the details, it’s what the novel hangs on. Fans of Cherryh will find a lot to like here, especially if Cyteen was a hit though Alliance Unbound is shorter and moves around more than that novel but it has some of the same delightful awkwardness and power politics of Cyteen.
Nuclear War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobson
The most truly frightening book I’ve read in a long time is Annie Jacobson’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. The “A Scenario” part is incredibly important here because Nuclear War isn’t a novel though part of it is fiction and it’s not a non-fiction work even though a significant portion of Nuclear War is deeply researched history and background detail for how Annie Jacobson knows what she knows and how she is building this scenario of what a nuclear war would actually look like with a minute by minute (and sometimes second by second) explanation of what would happen if…
In Nuclear War Jacobson takes us from the second a surprise attack from North Korea is launched against the United States. Jacobson walks readers through how quickly detection occurs, how information gets relayed from the detection points through military commands to the President, what potential barriers to communication and decisions are in place, what policies are in place to guide those decisions, how little time there really is make those world altering decisions, what can go wrong, and what little hope there really is for the rest of us if there is a nuclear launch.
Nuclear War is part fiction. Unless we all live in a simulation that is continually reset, this hasn’t happened. Nuclear War isn’t a novel, though. It’s a thought experiment wrapped in deep and intensive research about how this all works with more information than we might have imagined is out there (but with so much more still so deeply classified that the only way out is via a deathbed confession, which, according to Jacobson, is functionally how some of the policy detailed in this book did come out).
Nuclear War isn’t science fiction and it’s not even the “five minutes in the future” sort of storytelling that bleeds into the genre but I can’t help but think of Nuclear War: A Scenario as being tangentially related in the sense of what writers could take from this book to build off onto their own terrifying futures. Clearly being riveted to Annie Jacobson’s incredible creative nonfiction and being terrified out of my gourd as to how little we’ll know until it’s too late (and hoping that somehow Nuclear War can be a warning call to today’s global leaders) wasn’t enough that I needed to start thinking about how this book could impact genre fiction as well.
That was almost how I began writing about Nuclear War, actually. I wanted to make an argument about how Nuclear War could fit into genre awards as a nonfiction work or a “Related Work” as the Hugo Awards go. This isn’t a genre work and is only genre adjacent in the sense that science fiction has a long history of thinking about how nuclear war could impact the world, the future, and everything around it. And yet - Nuclear War is so immediate that it seems to be a part of everything. Want to know what the future could look like? Read Nuclear War. Want an underpinning to the next decade of near future science fiction? Read Nuclear War. I don’t know. Nuclear War feels right as being genre adjacent, but I also look at a lot of things through a genre adjacent lens.
Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear, by Seanan McGuire
It’s taken ten novellas, but Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is the first miss for me in the Wayward Children series. It’s worth noting, as a well established fan of Seanan McGuire that this “miss” in this instance means that I enjoyed it fine but my level of expectation is significantly higher for this series and its emotional resonance than it is for other stories.
Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is the tenth novella in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series which began in 2016 with the practically perfect Every Heart a Doorway (my review). The general concept is that some children who don’t quite belong in whatever life situation they are in will find a doorway with the words “Be Sure” written above and when they pass through they are dropped in a weirdly magical world where the rules are all quite different but the child in question finds a place in which they truly belong. The series as a whole is about belonging, and the books alternate between the worlds through the doorway and the kids who come back home again and are very much not the same person they were before going through.
This is one of the through the doorway stories and features Nadya, her life in a Russian orphanage, her adoption into the United States, and her journey through a doorway. Nadya was previously seen in Beneath the Sugar Sky (my review) and frankly, at this point I don’t remember a thing about Nadya’s prior appearance or how she interacted with Eleanor West’s.
To that point, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear felt somewhat more disconnected from the wider series (perfectly reasonable in a through the doorway story) but possibly more importantly Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear doesn’t *seem* to add much to the series / world beyond where it will certainly connect with other readers far more than it did with me. Coming off of the two Antsy books which had a truly compelling lead character and a new take on the wider universe (multiverse?), Nadya’s journey into the drowned world was lacking something.
Seanan McGuire is historically very good at layering her series work and seeding little bits that will pay off in big ways later, so I’m more than willing to be absolutely wrong in another three books about how this is secretly the second best Wayward Children book. I don’t expect that because despite the giant turtles, immigration, and physical disability, Nadya’s story is much less immediate and feels like it has been told before.
All of this sounds far more negative than I intend it to be and that’s one hundred percent tied to how much I love Every Heart a Doorway and how successful most of the Wayward Children novellas are. A novella that is absolutely fine and lovely only pales in comparison to those stories that shine as bright as so many from this series. It’s good. It’s doesn’t reach the heights of the rest of the series.
Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather, Hugo and Ignyte Award Winner. Minnesotan.
