Book Review: The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear adds pirates, a chewy social drama, and a big alien puzzle to her White Space space opera universe. 

Sunya is a researcher traveling to the edge of the galaxy. She studies information and the collection and interpretation of information, and a cache of ancient alien information is the biggest known. But her arrival there is not easy. Pirates are blockading the system. The star that the cache is orbiting, as well as the space station for the researchers, is probably going to go supernova any time now. And then there are the attempted murders. And just what are those mysterious things Sunya is seeing in the corner of her vision?

This is the story of The Folded Sky, the third and latest in her White Space space opera, following Ancestral Night and Machine. It takes place roughly in the same time period as Machine, thus some time after Ancestral Night (the actual Ancestral Night ship makes a brief cameo in the novel). If you will recall, these novels revolve around a spacefaring community of aliens, humans among them. Ancestral Night involved salvaging lost ships, and weird alien technology, as well as doing a lot of the heavy lifting in setting up this verse for the reader. Machine was very much Bear’s love letter to the James White’s Sector General novels, focusing on alien medicine an the ethics of healing and medical care.

So what is The Folded Sky, then? Well just like I was rather reductivist in my descriptions of Ancestral Night and Machine, I could be reductivist with The Folded Sky and say that it was a pirate novel (yes there are pirates in Ancestral Night, but this is a pirate novel). The pirates are a big threat in the novel, but of course, as with any Bear novel, a lot more is going on here. Just in terms of plot, we have the Baomind, an artifact/information reserve of the lost civilization of the Koregoi (who built the Ancestral Night by the way). We have attempted murders. Oh, and did I mention that the star that the Baomind is around that is being studied is on the verge of going supernova?

But, of course, a Bear novel is hardly just about the plot these days, if they were ever. Let’s take our POV and primary character, Dr. Sunya Song. She’s an archinformist, a data historian, someone perfect for taking on the task of organizing the vast library of information sitting in the Koregoi datamind. It’s a work trip of months and years away from her wife and children, or so she thinks. Turns out they are coming to stay at the ramshackle orbital station (really just a collection of ships and parts) after all. Unfortunately for Sunya, they also came on the same ship as Dr. Vickee DeVine, who has also come out to the site. To say that Sunya and Vickee have a personal history would be to say that the Battle of Kursk was a tank battle. Vickee is Sunya’s former mentor, former girlfriend, and is always sets herself as the center of any group of people, and quite successfully at that. She is quite literally the last person Sunya wants to work with on this space station.

Thus, in addition to the overall ticking time bomb of the plots (in additional to the stellar problems, the pirates get a pretty effective blockade going, and supplies are running out, and there is no ansible to easily contact civilization for help), we get a lot of chewy social and philosophical drama, debate and discussion. Rightminding comes in for discussion and debate here, as it did in both Ancestral Night and Machine, but here since we have attempted murders, the debate is how someone who was rightminded (whoever it was) make the attempts. We also get debates on interspecies relations and tolerance (the pirates are intolerant of AIs, transhuman technologies, and aliens), first contact protocols, and the challenges of a work life balance with your spouse and your teenaged kids.

And did I mention the cats?

The central image that I keep going back to in this novel, however, a throughline and a symbol of Sunya, of humanity, of the entire interspecies culture she belongs to, is a bonsai. Sunya’s family has had the bonsai for over a hundred years, from planet to space station, to starships, and all the way here to the Baomind. The bonsai is resilient, but needs care. It’s shrunken and under stress, but it has survived a lot. It is not the biggest, or the baddest, but for some, such as Sunya, it is the epitome of beauty. Humanity is a bonsai. The interstellar polity is a bonsai. And most importantly and most directly, Sunya is a bonsai.

This is never so clear, and never so unmistakable, in comparing her to Vickee DeVine. Their clashes and comparisons are throughout the book. Vickee is seemingly everything Sunya wants to be. Successful, the center of attention and power, supremely confident in her abilities. She is the Queen Bee of the high school of the group of scholars and researchers in Town, and she knows it. Their interactions and conflicts are a major portion of the book. Sunya is constantly seeing herself in the shade of Vickee, and part of the journey of the book is Sunya coming to terms with Vickee. There are some extremely messed up dynamics here, even in a society of Rightminding, People are, in the end, going to be people, and those social dynamics and personal dynamics are central to the book and what it does.

And then there are the social dynamics with the AIs (can AIs be assholes? Bear explores that!), the aliens, all in a confined and restricted space (see above, blockade). Bear has a lot of fun of seeing how these people react to each other under pressure. There is a lot of thought about pirates, and why they fight and strive for what they do, social dynamics laid bare at the barrel of a gun in a blockade.

In addition to those social dynamics, Bear is interested in history, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, first contact (which I mentioned before and mention here again, but am being deliberately vague about any further, save to say that Bear treads into, and exceeds, some of the ideas of Stephen Baxter in his Xeelee novels.). There are also echoes and reflections of writers such as L.E. Modesitt's space operas, Kristine Kathryn Rusch (the Diving novels) and Jack McDevitt, just to name a few. 

So, thinking about Baxter for a moment, in addition to the social science fiction there are also relativistic space battles, interesting technology, quirky and unusual physics, codebreaking (of a sort), and much more. Bear has put a variety of scientific disciplines and speculations into the novel, and seemingly no matter what kind of science fiction speculation you are into, you are going to find something to love here.

And then there is Town itself. It’s a fascinating place to set most of the narrative, even without adding that blockade into the mix . It’s more than a bit of a cobble, something that is commented on multiple times. It’s been slapped together because, as Bear notes, high manufacturing of a habitat in a solar system far away from the Core is just not practical. It’s rather skin-of-your-teeth engineering and general feel puts me in the mind of the Finder universe of Suzanne Palmer.

So with all of this going on, you might be asking one important question at this stage, and indeed, it is a concern going into this book? Does it hold together? Yes. Bear manages this by a strict and tight point of view on Dr. Song. There is a creed, for lack of a better word, said at the 4th Street Fantasy Convention (which the author does help run), that “point of view solves everything”. This is the idea that a lot of problems that come up with a narrative can be tackled by how and from whose perspective, or perspectives, you tell your story. Or as the musical Hamilton put it “who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”. But the problem and challenge for the author here is a big book with lots of plots, narratives, big damn ideas, a big damn object, pirates, attempted murders and family drama. And that doesn’t even cover some of the other subplots and the setting and other things to find. How can a reader make sense of this as a narrative? So Bear’s solution is a tight and intimate third person point of view that gives us a deep and penetrating dive into her story, her mindset, her concerns, and her perspective. We get to intimately know Dr. Song, enough that when the murders occur, Vickee is immediately a suspect (and immediately questionable as one) because of how Song feels about her and their shared history and how it comes though that first person perspective and narrative.

As far as the question of whether this book stands alone, I think it does, although you will need to do a tad more work than if you had read Ancestral Night or Machine. There is no overlap of characters (sadly, there is no “Mantis Cop” in this one, although Xhelsea makes a damn good Goodlaw in his stead). This book relies a bit, but only a bit, on you having been in this universe before, but it is not a complete plunge into the unknown. You could start here, if the prospect of this narrative intrigues you the most. Like the previous two books, The Folded Sky is queer, full of interesting characters, and immensely readable.

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Highlights

• Queer, inclusive space opera, with aliens, AIs and more
• Pressure cooker environment turns up the drama 
• A bonsai tree of a space opera novel.

Reference: Bear, Elizabeth, The Folded Sky [Saga Press, 2025]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Summer Reading List: Joe

There are many things in this life which I really, really like. Two of them are reading books and making lists. A third would be making lists about reading books. Strangely, I'm not sure if I want to read a book about making lists, so we'll just move right on from there, shall we?

It is something of a tradition here at Nerds of a Feather to post one's Summer Reading List. It is also becoming a bit of a tradition to post these later each year than the year before but hey, this is - what - the nineteenth month of 2020 and we're having a hard time keeping track of time. But despite the beginnings of normalcy returning to parts of the United States and my impending return to the office, time is getting away from us and the summer is a third of the way gone and it's time to get moving on our summer reading lists.

So, with all of that said, I do rather enjoy making lists about books. Nerds of a Feather is a genre blog, so while I plan to continue to read more non fiction each year and I've been reading an increasing amount of non SFF fiction, I do still get through more than one hundred books each year, so what I'm going to highlight is some of the science fiction and fantasy I plan / hope to read this summer.
 
For those keeping score at home, I read five of the six books I listed last year and expect to get the last one this summer. So let's go.

1. Machine, by Elizabeth Bear
Bear has been one of my favorite writers for a number of years now and her return to science fiction and space opera two years ago with Ancestral Night was very welcome indeed. Ancestral Night was fantastic and Machine is Bear's follow up White Space novel. It's a new story in the same overall universe and I'm thrilled to read it this year. Elizabeth Bear has been at the top of her game for years.

2. Brittle Innings, by Michael Bishop
Brittle Inning is a fantasy novel about baseball, which in some ways is everything I need to know. I am absolutely in the mood for a langerous baseball novel with a dash of the speculative - minor league baseball in the 1940's - with a twist? Absolutely. Brittle Innings was also a finalist for the Hugo Award, The World Fantasy Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

3. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin
I've had a massive single volume omnibus of The Inheritance Trilogy sitting on my shelf for years and I think I'm ready to crack it open. Besides just wanting to read the novel for its own sake, I want to track Jemisin's development as a writer. This was Jemisin's debut, though I believe it was written after her Dreamblood Duology. For an epic fantasy novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is relatively svelte at 400+ pages and that's also refreshing in a year I've already read a 1200 page novel.

4. Heroine Worship, by Sarah Kuhn
I read Heroine Complex three years ago in 2018 when Sarah Kuhn was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (now, Astounding Award) and thought it was absolutely delightful and wonderful and for no good reason I never picked up the second novel and I really wish I had. It's time. It's more than time.

5. Green Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
I am in the midst of a final push to read all of the Hugo Award winning novels. At the time of writing this, I only have nine remaining and that means it is also time to read the Mars Trilogy. Red Mars was the first novel I finished in 2021 and, in my third attempt, I appreciated and enjoyed it this time - enough so that I've been looking forward to moving on to Green Mars. I'm also on a bit of a Kim Stanley Robinson reading kick. So here we go.

6. The Snow Queen, by Joan Vinge
Another selection from my Read All the Hugo Winners project, though I have more immediate plans to read The Snow Queen before Green Mars. I've been dancing around The Snow Queen for at least two decades now, sometimes picking it up at my local book store (RIP,  Uncle Hugo's, may your revenant bring us books once more in the future) before putting it down again. Notwithstanding the relatively few number of Hugo winners I have left, I appreciated the Sword and Laser episodes on the novel a year or so ago and I've been extra meaning to get to the novel. Let's do it.

Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 5x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him

Mind Meld : One Spot Holodeck

For years, the essential sci-fi blog SF Signal published Mind Meld, a regular column I and others created that featured a weekly roundtable discussion of the tropes, themes, politics, and future of genre fiction. The Mind Meld solicited answers from writers, editors, readers and fans on a rotating basis. After the closure of SF Signal, this feature was picked up and continued for a time by the Barnes and Noble Sci Fi Blog. I am delighted that I have resumed the feature here at Nerds of a Feather.

Today’s Mind Meld question is the following...

Congratulations. You have been given a Star Trek style holodeck, fully capable otherwise,you can bring in anyone you want, hold a roomful of people but not an entire Worldcon in it,  but you can only program it to be fixed to one time and place or the verse of one fictional work or series. 

Where/what do you program your holodeck for? (Star Wars and Star Trek are off the table!)

Fonda Lee

Fonda Lee is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of the Green Bone Saga, consisting of Jade City, Jade War, and the forthcoming Jade Legacy, which releases on November 30. 

Assuming I can program the holodeck to also give me the illusion of powers in said fictional world, I’m definitely heading to the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Who wouldn’t want to travel in style on a flying bison to visit the different kingdoms? Myself, I quite like the idea of striding down the deck of a Fire Nation warship in Azula’s boss outfit and and bending the elements to my will. 

Beverly Bambury

Beverly Bambury is a publicist who promotes and markets SFF, horror, mystery and more. Find her at beverlybambury.com

I would set my holodeck for Themyscira. Who could be better personal trainers than the skilled and strong Amazons? I mean, maybe if I hung out on the island and followed their routines I could get the buff shoulders I’ve always wanted. It's not all about fitness, either. Time spent in Themyscira would be time I’d never have to worry about any men sending unsolicited, um, photos. What’s not to love? Anyhow, I am the furthest thing from a badass warrior, but I like to think I’d learn a thing or two from the Amazons. 

Cora Buhlert

Cora Buhlert was born and bred in Bremen, North Germany, where she still lives today – after time spent in London, Singapore, Rotterdam and Mississippi. She has been writing, since she was a teenager, and has published stories, articles and poetry in various international magazines, and is a two-time Hugo finalist for Best Fan Writer. Visit her on the web at www.corabuhlert.com or follow her on Twitter under @CoraBuhlert.

I've decided that I'd like to program my holodeck for the solar system as it was imagined in the pulp science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. 

There are plenty of fascinating places to explore, whether it's the dying desert world of Mars with its canals and ancient ruins, the fog-shrouded jungles and misty oceans of Venus, the twilight belt of Mercury, the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn and of course the asteroid belt with its floating casinos and pirate hideouts. Every single world in this version of the solar system is not just habitable, it's also full of fascinating alien lifeforms. You can hop between planets in gleaming finned rockets and enjoy an early 20th century idea of futuristic luxury.

The pulp science fiction shared solar system is a fascinating place I've always wanted to explore, so that's what I'd program the holodeck for.

Arturo Serrano

Arturo Serrano, is translator for Constelación Magazine, and reviewer for Nerds of a Feather Flock Together, currently querying an alternate history novel. 

I would travel to the DCAU, which is still the unsurpassed interpretation of the DC heroes (and the work that introduced me to Vixen, the best superhero ever). What struck me about the DCAU is how seamlessly it handled varying scales: one day you could have a massive spacetime anomaly and the next day you could dismantle a weapon smuggling mafia, and it would still feel like the same universe. Plus the characters were masterfully layered and you never felt you were done knowing them.

Mikaela Lind

Mikaela Lind is a Swedish fantasy author who started to write in her teens. She is somewhat surprised that she is still doing it, and equally surprised that people actually read her books. You can find her on twitter as  @mikaela_l , on Facebook  and on www.mikaelalind.com where she irregularly blogs.

 When I read the subject for this MindMeld I immediately knew where I wanted to go. Maybe in a time of my life I would have picked something else, but right now I really, really need a vacation. So I am taking a bunch of my friends and going to a beach. Which beach? I am leaning toward the Shifting Sands resort, which is a fictional resort in the Caribbean catering to shifters. What can I say, after the last year I need sun and warmth and a frozen daiquiri. 

Hannah (H. M.) Long 

Hannah (H. M.) Long is the author of the Viking-inspired epic fantasy HALL OF SMOKE, the upcoming TEMPLE OF NO GOD (01.18.22), and numerous other works of fantasy and science fiction. She lives in a ramshackle cabin in Ontario, Canada, where she writes her books, reads too much and tries not to get eaten by the local wildlife. You can visit her online at www.hmlongbooks.com and find her on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook @hmlongbooks, as well as on Twitter @hannah_m_long. 

I feel like it’s telling that I didn’t even have to think about this... I’d go to Skyrim, Elder Scrolls V style. I’d lock that holodeck in on my own epic quest as Dovahkiin, bring in my family and nerd friends as trusty companions and *fus* a path to glory from Helgen to Sovngarde. The weapons! The enemies! The settings! The music would be a must too – some Jeremy Soule to back climbing snowy mountains, riding dragons and fighting draugrs in ancient tombs. 

Claire O'Dell

Claire O’Dell is a writer, a reader, a mother, and a geek. Her latest works include her Janet Watson series from Harper Voyager, and the re-release of her epic fantasy series, A River of Souls. Check out more details at www.claireodell.com.

Oh gods, there are SO many wonderful worlds to choose from. Okay. Plucking my first idea from the air…I choose Heather Rose Jones’s historical fantasy series, set in the mythical country of Alpennia, and taking place in first quarter of the 19th century. The books are all about women—women with swords, women as scholars, as friends and lovers, as scientists, seamstresses, and politicians. 

Maurice Broaddus

Maurice Broaddus is an exotic dancer, trained in several forms of martial arts–often referred to as “the ghetto ninja”–and was voted the Indianapolis Dalai Lama. He’s an award winning haberdasher and coined the word “acerbic”. He graduated college at age 14 and high school at age 16. Not only is he credited with inventing the question mark, he unsuccessfully tried to launch a new number between seven and eight. When not editing or writing, he is a champion curler and often impersonates Jack Bauer, but only in a French accent. He raises free range jackalopes with his wife and two sons … when they are not solving murder mysteries. He really likes to make up stories.  A lot.  Especially about himself.

You should already know my answer is going to be Wakanda. The great thing about it is the depth of it as a world and how it sets a great context for all sorts of interesting conversations. It is a culture of stories and how they relate to one another. A people’s history embedded into all of the traditions within it. It’s the intersection of art and science impacting its look, including its architecture. In short, every aspect of Wakanda as a setting reinforces and is defined by the worldview of the people. A place I’d be excited to explore. With guests.

Catherine Lundoff

Catherine Lundoff is an award-winning writer, editor and publisher from Minneapolis, MN. Her latest book is Blood Moon: A Wolves of Wolf’s Point Novel (Queen of Swords Press, 2021). www.catherinelundoff.net

I waffled around on my responses to this because while I normally go for adventurous fun times, real life has been awfully exciting of later. So I’m picking Lois McMaster Bujold’s Beta Colony as my holodeck destination and all of you who want to join me can come along.  Why? It’s so very civilized, with its relative calm and its earrings that signal one’s romantic and sexual interests, its emphasis on consent and art and beauty. Sure, there’s that pesky weapons-development thing, but it can be ignored, at least for a time, in favor of other scientific wonders. Maybe Cordelia can give us some pointers on what to go see.

K.B. Wagers

K.B. Wagers is a whiskey-drinking, non-binary author of science fiction whose latest NeoG adventure Hold Fast Through the Fire, drops July 27th. 

If I had access to a holodeck, I'd gather some of my closest friends to go spend the day sailing the open seas during the Golden Age of Piracy. All the joy of the wind in your hair, the salt in the air, the horizon stretching on forever, (okay and maybe some plundering as well *grins*) without the risk of scurvy or hanging! Who could ask for more? 

Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award winning author of around 30 novels and over a hundred short stories. Her most recent novel is MACHINE, a science fiction adventure about a trauma doctor who specializes in deep space rescue.

Because a holodeck is for recreation, I would pick a lovely laid back vacation spot, a pleasure garden of lush trees, sandy beaches, a constant mild warm temperature, and an array of great recreational opportunities. 

I think that leaves me with the Southern Continent of Anne McCaffery's Pern series, where you can go swimming, you can go horseback riding, you can lie on the beach and eat fruits named after primary and secondary colors, you can fly on dragon back or laze around on the veranda and as long as interstellar parasites aren't falling from the heavens, the skies are blue and full of telepathic lizards.

Camestros Felapton

Camestros Felapton is a blogger and a 2018 Hugo finalist Fanwriter. He and his cat can be found at https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/ His current work in progress is a history of the Sad Puppy controversy entitled "Debarkle".

I'm going to assume there is some massive and very creative AI behind this holodeck that can extrapolate the fictional universe it replicates and fill in the gaps. I'm going to go and visit the enigmatic Sisterhood of Karn from Doctor Who. There's only a small bunch of them but in theory, they are the most likely people to have the foggiest idea of what is going on in the crazy timey-wimey mess of Doctor Who continuity. They also look like a cool bunch of people to hang out with for a bit.

Andrew Hiller

This is the second time Andrew has melded minds. He now knows things he shouldn't. Andrew was named author of the year in 2019 by the Baltimore Faerie Faire for A Halo of Mushrooms and his first picture book, Pitter Patty Finds Another Day is scheduled to be released in 2022. You can find his work in print, on canvas, and on the radio at andrewhiller.net

When Geordie pulls off his visor to become Lavar and asks, “What world would you like me to read you into?” be careful. Being asked to enter a world created by a holodeck is as dangerous as parsing out how to phrase a wish a genie has just offered.

I mean do you want a house to fall on you? Do you want a Lost Boy to stab you? Are you going to risk indigestion at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe after the chef realizes that Yelp ratings don't matter once the universe ends?

Do your homework. Be specific. Don't blurt. 

Me? 

I might choose Catherynne Valente's Fairyland after the shadows were returned. Imagine the food, the celebratory magic, the creatures, and all that exuberant music.

Mind you, I'm getting out before the next book starts. 

K.B. Spengler

K.B. Spangler lives in North Carolina with her husband and two completely awful dogs. Her most recent book is The Blackwing War.

Before the pandemic, I would have said my Holodeck adventure was set in Pern, or Narnia, maybe even standing alone with my sword in a tulgey wood. An adventure! Something new, something novel, something beautiful and terrible and, most of all, beyond!

Now? I want to go back to Disney World with my family. It was our first vacation together since my niece turned old enough to have a personality. She loved it, experiencing all of these pieces of fiction that were recurring characters in the background of her daily life.

To me, Disney is a slick streamlined package of forced nostalgia and commercialism which exists to stripmine both intellectual property and bank accounts. Before the pandemic, I gritted my teeth and endured the crowds, commercialism, and Florida. Clarification: Florida in late July.

After the pandemic, I don’t want anything more than to see my niece lose her shit over Rapunzel.

I want to be there as my niece enjoys her Holodeck.

Nancy Jane Moore

Nancy Jane Moore’s fantasy novel For the Good of the Realm is coming June 1 from Aqueduct Press.

The Murderbot ’Verse. Not only am I, like many others, obsessed with Murderbot, but Martha Wells has created a universe with a huge realm of possibilities for play. For starters, people could run The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon along with many other shows from SecUnit’s media storage. You’ve got the Corporate Rim contrasted with Preservation, ART’s missions, and alien contamination. The minute I saw Amena pursuing the catalogue for the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland, I wanted stories about her as a student there. Plus all the nice moral dilemmas about who counts as a person.

Shelley Parker-Chan

Shelley Parker-Chan is an Asian-Australian former diplomat who worked on human rights, gender equality and LGBT rights in Southeast Asia. Raised on Greek myths, Arthurian legend and Chinese tales of suffering and tragic romance, her debut novel She Who Became the Sun owes more than a little to all three.

One of the most frustrating things about being a fan of Chinese danmei (queer) TV dramas is how productions have to bend themselves in knots to comply with China’s strict broadcast rules. Queer content, time travel, reincarnation: banned! Given that the source novels are full of disallowed content, TV adaptations can end up like Swiss cheese. One of the worst cases of a great novel turned incomprehensible show was Guardian (2018), which involves a mild-mannered professor who’s actually the King of Hell, and his cop boyfriend who’s the reincarnation of an elder god. I’d materialise the incredibly charismatic cast of that show—then I’d feed the original webnovel into the computer, and get myself a faithful, uncensored adaptation. With kissing.

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POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Microreview [book]: Machine by Elizabeth Bear

A potent and timely story about infection, disease, greed, and the power of collective action to deal with large-scale problems

Ancestral Night, in 2019, marked Elizabeth Bear’s return to big wide scale space opera and I was blown away by salvager Halmey Dz’s story of finding a rather strange and amazing prize and discovery that shakes up a lot of preconceptions in her future verse (my review). Memorable characters like the ship AI Singer, and “Mantis Cop” Cheeirilaq completed the novel and made it my favorite novel of the year and I think it is a “definitive and decisive book for SF readers who want to try her work.”

Machine is not a direct sequel to Ancestral Night, although the events of the novel are briefly referenced, and two characters, Cheeirilaq and Singer, do show up in less prominent roles. No, Bear has plenty of stories to tell in this verse and in this novel, Bear decides to tell -- a medical story. Her main character this time is Jens, of the I Race to Seek the Living, an emergency medical rescue vessel of the Synarchy, out of Core General. When the vessel is dispatched from a beacon, they find not only a ship in distress, but also an ancient generation ship, Big Rock Candy Mountain. But the exploration of that ship is not truly in Jens’ purview, and worse, their return afterwards to Core General coincides with strange breakdowns and coincidences. As it becomes clear something is dangerously wrong, it’s up to Jens and her allies to identify it, and fix it before things threaten not only Core General, but the Synarchy itself.

This is the matter of Machine.

Bear calls out in the acknowledgements the inspiration for Core General that was to me delightfully obvious but perhaps newer readers to SF might not be aware of. James White’s Sector General stories and novels describe the adventures of a hospital in space, and Bear’s Core General is clearly a spiritual successor and heir to White’s ideas. Bear of course brings her own sensibilities and ideas to a Hospital in Space but the bones of the homage are there, and the social mores and ideas of White’s novels are updated for modern sensibilities.  This is also done a bit explicitly within the novel itself, as corpsicles found on Big Rock Candy Mountain have some rather archaic, primitive, frankly offensive and un-Synarchy-like ideas about many things. There is a culture clash and some real conflict between Jens and the rest of the Synarchy with Helen, the AI of Big Rock Candy Mountain, and the crew of the ship that they manage to unfreeze and revive.

A feature of Bear’s novels is that many of her protagonists are “Broken, but still good.”. That is something that has been in Bear's novels since the days of Hammered, and if that does not appeal, you are going to have problems engaging with her work. I see so many reviews of Bear's work complain about the falliability and feet of clay of the protagonists. The reviewers do not seem to or do not want to see that Bear's choice is deliberate in using them. Halmey Dz of Ancestral Night extensively used Synarche techniques to improve and stabilize brain chemistry. Dr. Jens, too, is hardly a Heinlenian super protagonist, she has problems, fears, and weaknesses that she has to deal with, her  personality emerging from the first person narrative, and how others regard her and deal with her. As she digs into the central mystery of the book, and as things hit the fan, Jens has a challenge both personal as well as global and running those conflicts in twain is a conveyor belt of personal and station-wide drama that the author leverages effectively and excellently.

But theme is where this novel shines, where the plot shines a light on the themes of the novel and, Bear could not have predicted, themes resonant for a 2020 where we are running rampant with a pandemic. The disease and central problem of the novel is not a viral pandemic (although there are mentions of being worried the corpuscles of the generation ship causing one given how long they have been in space) but an infection of a different but no less dangerous nature. This pandemic allows Bear to explore a variety of themes--the availability of medical care, the responsibility of a community to protect its citizens, the dangers of a stratum of citizens hoarding such care, how a society pays for and supports care for its citizens and, even more subty, the devil’s bargains and tradeoffs that result from such efforts.  There is an overall bigger theme and it is this--that a society owes, should be designed as such, to be directed to the well being of every person  Every person. That, in 2020, is a dangerous and radical notion.  The Synarche is not a utopia, far from it, and less so than Dr. Jens thinks it is as events progress, but it does have a built in social contract that, frankly, the author’s home time and place lacks. 

Be you afraid, though, that this novel is a political treatise and nothing more, Machine fuses the worldbuilding and efforts and world of a multispecies hospital with a ticking bomb plot (once that plot gets fully in motion) that provides all the action and adventure beats you want. Even before the ticking bomb, we get exploration of the generation ship, and the hazards of space...but when things really get moving, the novel presents Jens and the others in a variety of high pressure set pieces and situations that keeps the pages turning. A hospital in space, near a huge Black Hole, and having an infection and a station-threatening problem running rampant, is a recipe for drama, action and adventure, and the author leverages setting, plot and character to make those action beats happen. It is a build to that back half of the novel, but the ramp upward is not boring, and when Jens is under the gun, the novel just flew for me.This novel, like the first, uses elements of the mystery chassis to propel the SFnal one, something Bear is awfully adept and long skilled at deploying.

The only real question is -- do you need to read Ancestral Night before reading Machine? Aside from the couple of crossover characters, there isn’t a lot of connective tissue. Ancestral Night does provide additional grounding in the world of the Synarchy, for readers who not want to be dumped into the deep end. And, frankly, I think Ancestral Night, as good as Machine is, is just slightly the better novel overall (but honestly it would take fractional points in our system to tell the difference). So I say, if you have the time, read them both. If you do not, pick up Ancestral Night and if you do, you know will be in good hands for coming to Core General. I still maintain the first novel is the best one volume introduction to Bear’s work. I think this second novel builds on Ancestral Night, but doesn’t quite manage to surpass it. It may be well that the theme of a pandemic, reading it in a pandemic, gave just the slightest welcome taste of lactic acid taste for the novel for me. 

Still, give me more White Space novels, Bear. My body is ready.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 Strong use of theme really drives the novel.

+1 for the worldbuilding and verve and daring to create a Hospital in Space for the 21st Century.

Penalties: -1 A novel regarding a pandemic may not quite be the novel that you want to read in a pandemic. 

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 very high quality/standout in its category

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Reference: Bear, Elizabeth. Machine  [Saga, 2020] 

New Books Spotlight

Welcome to another edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 new and forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about?

Baker, A. Deborah. Over the Woodward Wall [Tor.com Publishing]

Publisher's Description

Writing as A. Deborah Baker, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Seanan McGuire introduces readers to a world of talking trees and sarcastic owls, of dangerous mermaids and captivating queens in Over the Woodward Wall, an exceptional tale for readers who are young at heart.

If you trust her you’ll never make it home…

Avery is an exceptional child. Everything he does is precise, from the way he washes his face in the morning, to the way he completes his homework – without complaint, without fuss, without prompt.

Zib is also an exceptional child, because all children are, in their own way. But where everything Avery does and is can be measured, nothing Zib does can possibly be predicted, except for the fact that she can always be relied upon to be unpredictable.

They live on the same street.
They live in different worlds.

On an unplanned detour from home to school one morning, Avery and Zib find themselves climbing over a stone wall into the Up and Under – an impossible land filled with mystery, adventure and the strangest creatures.

And they must find themselves and each other if they are to also find their way out and back to their own lives.

Why We Want It: Over the Woodward Wall is Seanan McGuire's first middle grade novel and it's also a companion piece to her superb novel Middlegame (also a Hugo Award finalist novel and Locus Award winner). There's a novel within the novel of Middlegame that is referenced constantly and is critical to that story. Over the Woodward Wall is that novel, now fleshed out. A Deborah Baker is McGuire's second pseudonym (Mira Grant being the other) - but this one is also the name of the author within Middlegame, so it all ties together. Either way, anything new from Seanan McGuire is right at at the top of my list.

 

Bear, Elizabeth. Machine [Saga]

Publisher's Description

In this compelling and addictive novel set in the same universe as the critically acclaimed White Space series and perfect for fans of Karen Traviss and Ada Hoffman, a space station begins to unravel when a routine search and rescue mission returns after going dangerously awry.

Meet Doctor Jens.

She hasn’t had a decent cup of coffee in fifteen years. Her workday begins when she jumps out of perfectly good space ships and continues with developing treatments for sick alien species she’s never seen before. She loves her life. Even without the coffee.

But Dr. Jens is about to discover an astonishing mystery: two ships, one ancient and one new, locked in a deadly embrace. The crew is suffering from an unknown ailment and the shipmind is trapped in an inadequate body, much of her memory pared away.

Unfortunately, Dr. Jens can’t resist a mystery and she begins doing some digging. She has no idea that she’s about to discover horrifying and life-changing truths.

Why We Want It: Paul reviewed Ancestral Night last year for us last year (see his review) and had I read it in time to make either my Top Nine list or my Hugo ballot, it would have easily been on both lists. It is a spectacular space opera and one of the best published last year. Machine is the follow up in the same universe and that by itself would be enough to get me in the door. Elizabeth Bear has also long been one of my favorite authors and each new novel only affirms that, plus the blurb's comparison to Karin Traviss is an added bonus (Traviss's Wess'har Wars is an overlooked series)

McGuire, Seanan. Dying With Her Cheer Pants On [Subterranean]

Publisher's Description

Despite its humble origins, there is no more challenging or physically dangerous teen sport in the world than cheerleading. Cheerleaders are seriously injured and even killed at a higher rate than other high school sports. Their stunts are performed in skimpy uniforms without the benefit of proper safety equipment…and yet they love them, glittery eyeshadow, spirit bows, and all.

And then there are the Fighting Pumpkins, who take that injury rate as a challenge. Students of Johnson’s Crossing High School, they answer to a higher calling than the pyramid and the basket toss, pursuing the pep rally that is rising up against mysteries and monsters, kicking gods with the pointed toes of professional athletes chasing a collegiate career.

Meet Jude, half-vampire squad leader; Laurie, who can compel anyone to do as she asks; Heather, occasionally recreationally dead; Marti, strong enough to provide a foundation for any stunt; Colleen, who knows the rule book so well she may as well have written it; and Steph, who may or may not be the goddess of the harvest. The rest of the squad is ready to support them, and braced for the chaos of the big game, which may have a big body count. Prepare to jump high, yell loud, and look pretty with the Fighting Pumpkins, those glorious girls in the orange and green, whose high kicks could still be enough to save the world.

And if they’re not, it isn’t going to be for lack of trying.

Dying with Her Cheer Pants On includes three stories appearing for the first time anywhere: "Tryouts," "Trial by Fire," and "Compete Me."

Why We Want It: As a matter of practice we tend to spotlight only one selection from a given author so as to spread the light around - but this is my spotlight and I'm as excited for Dying With Her Cheer Pants on as I am for Over the Woodward Wall, just in very different ways. I've been working way through McGuire's back catalog including her stories, but this is the first I've heard of the Fighting Pumpkins. I need this in my life.

Roanhorse, Rebecca. Black Sun [Saga]

Publisher's Description

From the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Resistance Reborn comes the first book in the Between Earth and Sky trilogy, inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas and woven into a tale of celestial prophecies, political intrigue, and forbidden magic.

A god will return
When the earth and sky converge
Under the black sun

In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world.

Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio, is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain.

Crafted with unforgettable characters, Rebecca Roanhorse has created an epic adventure exploring the decadence of power amidst the weight of history and the struggle of individuals swimming against the confines of society and their broken pasts in the most original series debut of the decade.

Why We Want It: The trend of epic fantasies moving farther and farther away from what was the "standard" of the European Middle Ages is a welcome one, which is why Rebecca Roanhorse's magical epic of the Americas before Columbus is so damned exciting. Her Sixth World novels were a breath of fresh air in urban fantasy (though that's not a sub genre I'm as well read in) and this is a bold new direction for epic fantasy - part of the changing of the genre. Also, it does have a stunning cover.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for the Future [Orbit]

Publisher's Description

From the visionary, New York Times bestselling author of New York 2140 comes a near-future novel that is a gripping exploration of climate change, technology, politics, and the human behaviors that drive these forces.

Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the world's future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story.

From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined.

Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry For The Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come.

Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever written.

Why We Want It: I can't call myself a Robinson aficionado. He has been publishing novels since 1984 and I've only read his last two (New York 2140 and Red Moon), though I do own a small handful of his earlier novels that I swear I'll get to someday. Regardless of that, I appreciate the optimism that The Ministry for the Future offers that humanity might work together to solve the climate crisis (I write this in early September when the Environmental Protection Agency is doing the exact opposite of its name and mandate and allowing for greater pollution in the name of industry, so I can use a dose of optimism right now).

Vaughn, Carrie. Kitty's Mix Tape [Tachyon]

Publisher's Description

In the final installment of the bestselling Kitty Norville werewolf-DJ series, the paranormal escapades continue with Carrie Vaughn’s most captivating characters, including fan favorite characters like Rick the vampire and Jessi Hardin, paranormal detective, Kitty’s husband Ben, his cousin Cormac the bounty hunter, and the villainous Dux Bellorum.

Why We Want It: One of my greatest discoveries was winning an online contest that I don't remember entering and receiving copies of Kitty and the Midnight Hour and Kitty Goes to Washington in the mail. After giving them the side eye for no good reason, I started to read and Kitty Norville quickly became one of my favorite characters and I could not get enough of the series - and then it ended and Carrie Vaughn moved on. But wait! Here's a story collection and even though I've likely read at least half of the stories in it, there are two brand new Kitty stories! I'm here for this!

 

POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.

Adri and Joe Talk About Books: The Best of the Decade

As we near the end of a decade we had the highly original thought of looking back at some of the best novels of the last ten years. Ten years is ultimately as arbitrary of a way to divide and group novels as any, but it serves as sufficient reason to reflect back on some of our favorite novels and discuss which have had lasting impact on the genre, on us as readers, and what just stands out as just really damn good books.

Any list of the nine or ten (or fifty, or five hundred) “best” novels is subject to the biases and perspectives of the writers putting the list together. What we find to be excellent may not line up with someone else. We may not have read a book that otherwise would have found a place here. We might not have agreed on a particular book, but this is our consensus of nine of the best novels from the last ten years. And, because we can’t just create a list and let it go, we’ve selected three more novels as our personal honorable mentions. Even then, we still mourn the novels we left off due to arbitrary space reasons.

We don’t expect there to be consensus as to the absolute rightness of our list, but we hope it sparks conversation about some really great books that we loved.

So here we go.

Range of Ghosts, by Elizabeth Bear (2012): Elizabeth Bear is something of a chameleon of a writer. Whether it is near future cyberpunk thrillers, urban fantasy, alternate historical vampire fiction, espionage, space opera, steampunk, a Criminal Minds meets the X-Files mashup, or epic fantasy - Bear can write it all.

Eschewing the trappings of the stereotypical European setting, Range of Ghosts is silk road epic fantasy - meaning that the novel has a more Mongolian flavor and has an entirely different cultural grounding than what is so often considered “traditional epic fantasy”. Bear pulls no punches in delivering a full realized and top notch epic with rich characterization and incredible worldbuilding. The magic and religion and battles of Range of Ghosts is handled with a deft touch and the best thing is that all of this is set up for something far larger. Range of Ghosts is Elizabeth Bear at the height of her considerable powers. (G's Review) (Joe)

Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie (2013): The story of Breq, a woman who was once the AI of the spaceship Justice of Toren, spread across hundreds of “Ancillary” bodies. Now Justice of Toren has been destroyed, and Breq, the sole survivor, single handedly bent on revenge towards the Emperor who set her and her crew up to die, begins in this crushingly good space opera, full of tea ceremonies and folk songs and the exploration of an empire whose vision of “civilisation” is synonymous with its own culture. The dual narratives of Ancillary Justice, which tell of both Breq’s present and the events leading up to her death as a spaceship. Its a novel which operates with respect and care for the space opera tropes it deploys, while challenging any traditional assumptions about what aspects of human culture might be taken up by a remote spacefaring civilisation - to the Radchaai, gender is not a thing, but gloves very much are, and the ruling consciousness of Emperor Anaander Mianaai is spread across thousands of clones, who may or may not be working for completely common purpose. And, of course, its all driven by pitch-perfect action in both timelines, as Justice of Toren tries to hold it together on what it doesn’t realise will be its final mission, and Breq makes her way across the galaxy on her hopeless revenge mission. (Joe's review)  (Adri)

The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison (2014): The term "hopepunk" might have been coined by Alexandra Rowland a couple of years after the release of Katherine Addison's highly-charged elven political fantasy, but the centering of kindness and decency even in the most lonely and high pressure of circumstances was already a standout feature of this novel back in 2014, giving it an undisputed edge over other contenders in the "young royal out of their depth" field. The Goblin Emperor is the story of Maia, the unwanted fourth child of the elvish emperor, who was born from a political marriage with a woman from neighbouring goblin kingdom (elves and goblins, being in this world, different races of the same species, and elven prejudice against goblins being therefore far more akin to racism than any possibly-justifiable biological taboo). Raised in seclusion with only abusive minders for company, Maia is therefore as surprised as anyone when an assassination of his father and three half-brothers propels him to the throne. What follows is his attempts to develop alliances and figure out who to trust in a court he's barely set foot in before now: a task he rises to with grace and skill, despite the many enemies who would rather not see him on the throne. Come for the courtly intrigue; stay for the way Addison effortlessly includes the characters' ear movements into their facial expressions without it getting weird. (Jemmy's review) (Adri)

The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin (2015), by N.K. Jemisin: We’re not ones to claim that any subjective list of the best of anything is invalid because the list maker did not include our particular favorite, but we would definitely give the side-eye to any list of the best science fiction and fantasy of the last ten years that didn’t at least consider N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.

The Fifth Season was an absolutely brilliant opening novel to Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. When I wrote about the novel in 2016, I had this to say “While the worldbuilding in The Fifth Season is superb and extraordinary, it does not hold a volcano's breath to how strongly written the novel is and just how incredible these three women are. The nature of the terribly oppressive world of The Stillness, really of the Sanze Empire, is examined through the lives, actions, heartbreaks, oppression, heroism, grief, discovery, and amazing characters of Damaya, Syenite, and Essun. Jemisin will rip your heart out.” I have no doubt that not only is The Fifth Season stands out as one of the best of the decade, The Fifth Season will hold up as one of the all time great fantasy novels. (Joe's review) (Joe)

Black Wolves, by Kate Elliott (2015): Do you want an epic fantasy where most of the primary characters are fully mature adults? What about a world that sets up a particular worldview and culture and then spends the rest of the novel deconstructing everything we thought we knew about it? What about a novel dealing with persecuted minority cultures, oppressive religions, and a question about how reliable memory is when considering history? Black Wolves has all that. Highly competent women bringing the excellence in a variety of ways? Black Wolves has that. A very high body count and solid action? Black Wolves has that. Giant eagles? Black Wolves has that, too.

Black Wolves is as epic as epic fantasy can get and it was an incredible start to what should have been one of the best new series of the last ten years, except that we’re not getting the sequel because of publishing. Readers - Black Wolves is as good an epic fantasy novel as any that has been published in the last ten years and beyond, and even though I know that I am unlikely to get the follow up, I still heartily recommend everyone go read Black Wolves. You won’t be disappointed. (Joe's review) (Joe)

Infomocracy by Malka Older (2016) Informocracy is a bold and brilliant thought experiment on democracy, a novel which takes as its starting point a not-too-distant future where many nation states have dissolved in favour of a system of microdemocracy in which "centenal" units of one hundred thousand people elect their governments from a range of globally-active parties. What makes this possible, we are told, is the global system of Information, which provides an augmented reality fact-check to citizens in all parts of their daily lives, providing a particularly important service when it comes to the once-a-decade elections. Of course, with a new global system comes a new global bureaucracy, and Informocracy follows a couple of cogs in that machine - idealistic campaign manager Ken and Information agent (and maybe a spy) Mishima - as they try to keep the system working over a particularly hot election cycle.

What makes Informocracy special is not just the world it creates, but the book's ability to engage and invest us in the agency of its main characters, while still showing their relative helplessness in the face of the global political system they operate in. By introducing the concept of narrative disorder - a compulsion to fit objectively unrelated or coincidental occurrences into a satisfying but misleading single story - Older's series presents a political thriller that questions the very foundations that allow it to exist, while still delivering something that satisfies on all the levels that matter. Like many books on this list, it's here because its stayed with me well beyond reading, and I hope it's a book we continue to associate with our own political moment when we're looking back on genre in future decades. (Charles' review) (Adri)

Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire (2016): Reading Every Heart a Doorway was like coming home again to a story that I didn’t know that I had lost. It is a beautiful and heart wrenching story of kids who don’t belong anywhere except perhaps the one place they can’t get back to. Every Heart a Doorway is a portal fantasy where all of those kids who went through a wardrobe or a secret door and had adventures and a place to belong had to come home to a world that didn’t believe them and couldn’t understand them. What happens to those those kids when they come home? What happens is that Seanan McGuire writes a beautiful novel that seared itself so deep into my heart that it touched emotions I’m still not able to fully talk about almost four years later.

I wrote about the novel, “Perhaps moreso than any other book I am likely to read this year, my emotional response to Every Heart a Doorway has everything to do with who I am now and who I was when I was a teenager. I wish this is a story I could have discovered when I was twelve. I love this book with a warm and full heart as an adult, but I would have lived in Every Heart a Doorway as a child. I would have made friends with these children even though their experiences were so alien to mine. I can't imagine that I would have noticed that Nancy is asexual and that Kale is trans, or that I would have understood either concept. That part of the story wasn't for the child I was, but each of those elements are very much for other kids who would never see who they were in a story like this one. It matters that it doesn't matter for the story, if that makes sense.”

It is a beautiful, beautiful novel and I am so glad that it exists in the world. (Joe's review) (Joe)

Jade City, by Fonda Lee (2017): You've never read epic fantasy quite like this. The opening volume of Lee's Green Bone saga introduces readers to the island of Kekon, a culturally Asian island shrugging off decades of occupation and now ruled by rival gang families trained up in using bioreactive jade to power feats of martial arts prowess. The narrative follows various members of the No Peak clan - clan leader Kaul Lan and his siblings, the loyal but vicious Hilo and reluctantly repatriated sister Shae, as well as Anden, a cousin in his final year of training to be a Green Bone - as they try to see off challenges from the rival Mountain clan, as well as responding to wider geopolitical factors shaping the destiny of Kekon. Lee's writing is nothing short of outstanding in the way it brings the world of the Kauls to life, whether it's depicting regular scenes of Janloon street life or cinematically showcasing the supernatural powers of the Green Bone warriors. And, of course, it's all in service of a story that had me absolutely hooked from beginning to end, as we watch (possibly through our fingers) as the Kauls and their allies fight, torture, murder, get murdered, fall in love, make business deals (sensible or otherwise), fail to impress elderly parents, fight some more, and otherwise make difficult choices in service of family, honour and jade. (Adri's review) (Adri)

The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley (2019): It is a bold move to describe a book from the current year as one of the decade’s best, but The Light Brigade is a bold novel in the tradition of Starship Troopers, The Forever War, and Old Man’s War - which is not an opportunity to simply list the titles of significant military science fiction novels but a recognition of where The Light Brigade should be considered in a larger science fiction conversation and as to which novels get to be held up of classics of the genre which revitalize and engage with its past. The Light Brigade does all of that while telling a strong story about a soldier in the middle of an absolutely messed up war that is messed up even further when her combat drops sometimes place her in the wrong battle at the wrong time. Dietz is often not when she is supposed to be, and Hurley ties together all of the complicated timelines and fits it together perfectly. (Paul's review) (Joe)


As we discussed in the introduction we couldn't leave well enough alone and just live by a list of 9 novels which we believe are some of the best of the decade. And even after putting together our honorable mentions, there are still novels we feel like were just on the cusp of making the list. Joe nearly included The Calculating Stars and An Unkindness of Ghosts, and Adri regretfully left off Monstress and Ninefox Gambit. There have been so many excellent novels these last ten years, and here's a few more that we thought were pretty great.

Adri’s Honourable Mentions

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho (2015): Zen Cho's Sorcerer Royal books are set in an alternate regency world where magic and faerie are everyday parts of life for many people, but magic in Britain is considered entirely the province of elite white men, closeted away in an academy while elite young women with magic attend special academies to repress their powers and people outside the elite are left to their own various devices. It's only when the position of Sorcerer Royal falls, through an accident of bonded familiars, to Black former slave Zacharias Wythe, raised by the former holder of the post as part son and part racist curiosity, that the rest of the establishment finds itself confronting the realities of their own changing society. Meanwhile, Zacharias' attempt to hold on to the post brings him into contact with Prunella Gentleman, mixed-race ward of a women's "magic" school and a powerful, irrepressible force of nature in her own right. Racism and elitism in the British empire are heavy subjects, but Cho is able to use the conventions and wit of a Regency novel to eviscerate the white supremacist assumptions and the ridiculousness of the characters upholding them, all while offering a brilliant, hilarious adventure in a compelling alternate world. I loved it. (We missed reviewing this, but here's Adri's review of Book 2, The True Queen)

After Atlas, by Emma Newman (2016). Because of the time at which I read Planetfall, Emma Newman's series of a dystopian Earth - and the various factors and faiths that cause people to leave it - is embedded in my brain as a foundational example of science fiction. From the troubled, grief-stricken extrasolar colony of Planetfall itself, to the claustrophobic, unsettling mysteries of the Martian colony in Before Mars, the series combines a challenging vision of a future under technologically advanced capitalism, with a realistic but always compassionate look at what happens to people trying to survive, and their own personal traumas and mental health challenges. For this list, though, my pick has to be After Atlas, the story of Carlos Moreno, a corporate indenture investigating the murder of the leader of a religious cult - who also happens to be a figure from his own difficult childhood. Carlos' journey to figure out the truth leads him to uncover secrets both past and present about the Atlas mission, and the powerful figures attempting to control it, and humanity's access to the stars. It's a compelling mystery, but what really brings After Atlas to life is its vision of future life: where people and their rights can be bought and sold by corporations, "real" food is an unimaginable luxury to the majority of the population, and intrusive AR advertising is a reality for anyone not wealthy enough to turn off the algorithms that control it. Terrifying in its real-world implications, and compelling in its treatment of characters, After Atlas is by far my favourite "dystopia" of the decade, and a book that everyone should check out. (Sorry, we don't have a review of any of the Planetfall novels, but they're delightful)

This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (2019): This Is How You Lose the Time War is perhaps the weirdest book on this list - an epistolary romance between two rival agents for immensely powerful future factions ("techy-mechy" Agency and "viney-hivey" Garden), charting their travels through dimensions as they try to nudge futures in the direction of their respective overlords, and the letters they leave each other in various ephermeal forms throughout the timeline. In my review for Strange Horizons, I said that This Is How You Lose The Time War's greatest strength is "its exquisitely pitched story of romantic connection and its ability to bring all other aspects of the novella—its epistolary form, its expansive and yet understated worldbuilding, its themes of connection and agency and change—into the service of that emotional core. It's a romance whose portrayal of human connection is all the more powerful for the fact that it takes place between two beings who are otherwise not comprehensible to us, leaving their hopes, fears, and longing as the only elements left for a reader to cling to, and thus turning the love between Red and Blue into the most important thing in an unimaginably large multidimensional time war." I also mentioned it was the only book of 2019 to make me cry, and while that's not quite true any more (but that's a story for next decade's roundup) it still stands out as one of the most pure emotional experiences I have had reading a book - all the more incredible for the fact that it packs such a punch in novella length. (Paul's Review)

Joe's Honorable Mentions

 

Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer (2014): I find myself at a loss as to how to talk about Annihilation. There’s an expedition into Area X, the location doesn’t exactly matter but it’s in the American South presumably somewhere in Florida. What we know is that we don’t know anything. Area X is weird, it is unexplained - nobody knows exactly how or when it appeared and took over the land - and it is largely unexplored even though there have been eleven previous expeditions to do so. They haven’t gone well. This is the twelfth expeidtion.

Annihilation is weird, a little obscure, thrilling, occasionally claustrophobic, terrifying, and absolutely fantastic. I’m not sure there’s another novel like it, not even Authority or Acceptance - the two follow up novels to Annihilation. There are also few other novels this decade that have stuck with me for as long as this one has. I find myself thinking about the novel again and again, never quite getting anywhere with my thoughts but just wondering and letting the atmosphere of my memory wash over me. Even that is unsettling, just like everything is in the book. It’s an exceptional novel. (G's Review) (Joe)

 

Uprooted, by Naomi Novik (2015): Readers of childhood fairy tales will find so much that is familiar in Uprooted, but Naomi Novik is holding up a twisted mirror to those fairy tales while still holding tightly to the heart of what we so love and remember. Novik may not be completely deconstructing fairy tales here, but she is definitely playing with the form.

The star, driving force, and shining heart of Uprooted is the character of Agnieszka. The more conventional fairy tale that Novik appears to be telling in the first chapter is not necessarily the one that we get as the novel progresses. Agnieszka appears to be a wilting character, shrinking back from the anger and ubruptness of the dragon. This is not who she becomes. Through her own strength of character and intelligence, Agnieszka begins to grow into the person she never would have dreamed she could or would become. The concept of this Agnieszka would have been as alien and as foreign to her as the reality of life at court. Though still raw and impulsive, the progression of the novel begins to give her the seasoning required to not only help in the fight against The Wood, but also to become the sort of character parents will want to use as an example to their children.

Fairy tales are for kids, right? Uprooted straddles that line. It is both very much a novel that adults can, should, and will appreciate. Adults will recognize many of the things that Novik is doing in tweaking some of the conventions of fairy tales, but will also enjoy the novel simply for what it is. Older kids will enjoy Uprooted for simply being a kick-ass book with an awesome heroine and an exciting story for which they simply must know what happens next. Naomi Novik has a little bit for everyone in Uprooted. (Joe's review) (Joe)

Into the Drowning Deep, by Mira Grant (2017): If I told you that this was a novel about mermaids, you’d probably have visions of Disney and The Little Mermaid and maybe some vague sense of unease if you have recollections of historical depictions and sirens. Mira Grant’s mermaids are terrifying, compelling, and all too plausible. Grant herself said that the novel “does for mermaids what Jurassic Park did for velociraptors” and that’s entirely true. Into the Drowning Deep is a true page turner of the highest quality - you might not be able to sleep after, but you’ll want to stay up for one more page, one more chapter. (Joe's review) (Joe)



Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 3x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan

Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.