Cool Books I Read While I Was Too Overwhelmed To Review

You want reviews? I've got reviews! Small ones!

Back in February, I rounded up some recent-ish books that I received review copies of, and read, but couldn't find the time or headspace to review at the time. Well, surprise! There were more books that I still hadn't got around to reviewing! This is the second round of clearing the decks for me, inspired in no small part by all the great reviewers and creators I got to hang out with at Glasgow Worldcon. Let's get back into it:

The Last Hero by Linden A. Lewis wraps up the trilogy that began with The First Sister, and it's a book that particularly deserves attention for anyone looking for more books in the vein of Emily Tesh's Hugo winning Some Desperate Glory. While Lewis' trilogy doesn't have that book's 90 degree plot swerves, it offers a much deeper look at what radicalisation and deprogramming look like when the bullets are actually flying, and we get to watch the young protagonists from across different factions—the fundamentalist Geans, the caste-based Icarii and the marginalised Asters—grapple with what is expected of them within their respective systems, and the price of trying to overthrow them. Add in some great bits of worldbuilding and a hefty dose of character gender feelings, and you've got a trilogy well worth checking out.

The Bone Shard War by Andrea Stewart also closes out a trilogy (the Drowning Empire) about exploitation and the cost of change, and especially grapples with the question of who ends up on top when said exploitative system is overthrown. It is also, deliciously, about earnest but silly youths in love, who are being kept apart and even forced into betrayals! At this end of the Drowning Empire, the brutally high cost of bone shard magic isn't as viscerally present, and that feels like a bit of a loss despite the emergence of new magics and the rediscovery of how this world functions, and (relatedly) what those cute animal companions that the main characters picked up have been about this whole time. While it has its ups and downs, this is a cool trilogy by an author I hope to see even better things from in future.

Book three, but not a series ender, The Mystery of Dunvegan Castle by T.L. Huchu is part of the Edinburgh Nights series, and while I'll forgive this year's Hugo voters for not putting it on the best series ballot, my patience on that front is not endless (nor will the series be). These books are the chronicles of Ropa Moyo, a highly motivated Zimbabwean-Scottish teenager who is offered entry to a prestigious occult library... as an unpaid intern. This time, Ropa's aspirations and hustle come fully up against the barriers placed in her way, and this series does a great job of showing how institutional racism and classism are perpetuated not just by bigots in the institution, but by people who limit their allyship or try to offer "meritocratic" entry points rather than fighting the corner for marginalised people. It's an interesting shift for Ropa—who, to this point, has been a bit naive about her circumstances and whether she can just push through them—and it makes me even more eager to see what book 4 brings.

System Collapse by Martha Wells. The second Murderbot novel feels structurally closer to the novellas than the previous Murderbot novel, and at this point the recommendation is "if you like Murderbot, you'll like this Murderbot." Unlike the rather static-feeling Fugitive Telemetry, System Collapse does push things onwards from Network Effect in an interesting way, both literally (conflict de-escalation through documentaries!) and in Murderbot's character development and how it narrates its story. We quickly learn that Murderbot is not working at full capacity, and that it is keeping something from us about how this happened, and while the reader is used to the quirks and selectiveness of Murderbot's narration, this withheld information immediately puts the reader off balance, adding an extra layer of tension to both the conflicts and the crew relationships that are both staples of this series. Of course Murderbot and friends save the day with the power of love and justice—not that Murderbot itself puts it quite that way.

The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan wasn't a Subjective Chaos Award winner this year, but it was an interesting addition to a stacked ballot. This mosaic novel, centred around a future Bangalore now known as Apex City, shows us the ins and outs of a society where citizens are constantly tested against the "Bell Curve". The city's residents are constantly striving - through conspicuous displays of capitalist productivity - to be promoted to the super-privileged ten percent, and to avoid deportation outside the city to join the "Analogs", who are treated as sub-human and denied basic ameneties by a city that nevertheless relies on them for its continuation. Through the novel, we see both confident Virtuals and those barely clinging on inside the system, as new technologies create further alienation; we also see, though not with as much depth as I would like, the way in which Analogs are organising themselves to resist and overthrow their oppressors. It didn't add up as well as I wanted it to, but there's a lot going on here for readers to enjoy, especially if you like Black Mirror-esque technological absurdities and the overthrow of transparent dystopias.

Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee was just beneath the Hugo finalist cut-off this year, and it's a very well-crafted fantasy novella: Ester's story has a strong thread of revenge, but there's also more going on: her progressing in her vocation as a rukher to a roc named Zahra, the relationships she builds with her comrades (and her bird), and the strains of being part of a military campaign whose political and propaganda motives seem at odds with actually making the Kingdom safer. Untethered Sky does suffer from the "author of incredible thing (Green Bone Saga) goes on to write pretty good thing" but it works great. 

The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi is an incredible book, and somehow it's not on the Hugo longlist, but it is on the Ignyte novella shortlist so we can celebrate that recognition at least! The best thing about this story is its worldbuilding, which feels like it's come straight out of a fable: the protagonist comes from the "City of Lies," which has made the terrible bargain to cut the tongue out of every adult resident in return for an annual allocation of water from the Ajungo. This, of course, means that its residents can no longer tell their own story, and that their own history is now in the hands of their oppressors. When almost-13-year-old Tutu leaves the city in search of water to save his mother, he somehow avoids the disappearance that has befallen every other child who has left, and instead he finds out the truth behind the Ajungo's conquests and where his city falls within it. Amazing stuff.

Finally, Earth-space adventure Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod, fantasy adventure The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K.S. Villoso, and mecha-YA Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee are all series openers which fall into the "fun, but probably not reading on" category for me—a category which I need to be more firm in maintaining, as the list of books gets bigger and my time on this Earth grows shorter (fatalistic? me?) I did enjoy MacLeod's speculation of near-future superpower blocs, especially the split between Anglophone death capitalism and optimistic-but-also-vaguely-sinister European socialism; and The Wolf of Oren-Yaro did not disappoint with its main character's Bitch Queen credentials, but had me shrugging at its relative cliffhanger ending rather than rushing to download the second book. Moonstorm, I am simply not the target audience for, and that's OK! I think this is a great contender for the Lodestar list, especially since books by authors who have also been nominated for adult SFF do very well there, and I hope that this story of giant robots, terrible empires, friendships, rivalries and betrayals IN SPACE finds each and every one of its people.

Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, 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 Bluesky at adrijjy.bsky.social.

Microreview [Book]: The First Sister by Linden A. Lewis

A grim but effective tale of interplanetary conflict and societal loyalties

Content note: Sexual Slavery, references to rape and sexual abuse

The First Sister opens on a solar system at war between the Icarii, humans who live on Mercury and Venus and have harnessed advanced technology based on a mineral that's only found there, and the Geans, who claim Earth and Mars and rely on scavenged tech and a radicalised religious population to maintain their own strength. With poverty and inequality rife in the societies of both sides, two very different individuals are thrown into the war for their own survival, and both have their already fragile loyalties tested as they start to uncover the reality behind the structures that govern their cultures.

The first of these characters is the titular First Sister, who serves on a ship as part of the Gean's religious order, and is effectively a comfort woman for the soldiers who use her to confess their sins and are then entitled to her body. The Sisters undergo an ambiguous procedure which removes the memory of their names, and prevents them from being able to speak; even the title "First Sister" is a transient one, a position which she has won by ingratiating herself with the captain of her ship; if she loses the position, the protagonist would go back to being completely nameless. Because of her rank,  First Sister has made herself exclusively available to the Captain, winning herself a reprieve from sexual assault from the entire crew, but at the opening of the book her former Captain leaves, breaking his promise to take her home with him, and she is forced to try and build a relationship with the unorthodox new captain, Saito Ren. It should be noted that while the threat of rape hangs over First Sister due to her position, and she euphemistically mentions a couple of past assaults, there are no depictions of rape or anything more than brief unwanted physical contact during the story's present.  There also aren't any instances where "safe" characters suddenly turn on her for shock value. Lewis does an effective job building up the horror of the Sisterhood and what they are expected to do without having to resort to the shock value of actually depicting rape, and I'm grateful to the book for treading that line so effectively.

Providing the view from the Icarii side is Lito Sol Lucius, a man from a poor family on the Venusian city of Cytherea who has risen to become a duelist, training at an elite academy to become one of the Icarii's Special Forces. All Icarii soldiers are given neural implants and in the case of the duelists, they are paired with another soldier, one becoming a "rapier" and the other a "dagger", both playing slightly different roles in their missions with the rapier given tactical command. Lito has recently lost the dagger he was paired with, Hiro Val Akira, after a mission on the contested asteroid Ceres; now it turns out that Hiro is not dead but that they may have defected from the Icarii, and Lito is given a new partner and charged with tracking them down. Interspersed with Lito and the First Sister's chapters are "recordings" which it quickly becomes apparent are from Hiro's point of view, as they recollect the events that led to their disappearance, as well as their own family history as child of the dynasty which created the implants and much of the other technology that makes Icarii society function.

The First Sister sets up a grim world, where at least for the first few chapters its hard for us to think beyond the characters' survival. This is particularly true for First Sister, whose distress at being abandoned and put at risk of losing her tenuous sense of security is incredibly hard to read. However, as the characters start to get a little more comfortable in their circumstances and find the space to start questioning broader elements of their situations, things start to get juicy very quickly. The relationship between First Sister and Saito Ren, while uncomfortable in some of its romantic elements (this isn't a romance plotline, just to be clear, and those feelings seem to be largely one-sided), sets up some really interesting questions about Ren's history and current views; equally intriguing are the glimpses we get of the Sisterhood, and the motivations of the Aunt on the ship who attempts to use First Sister to gain information on the captain. As Lito is less confined, it is through him that we see some of the wider world of The First Sister, including Ceres - which has recently changed hands from Icarii to Gean control - and the Asters, a culture of humans who have undergone extensive genetic modification to live in the less habitable parts of space, and are now considered a separate species and constantly discriminated against in Icarii society. Both characters' positioning is effective in showing the war crimes and oppresiveness of their respective societies, from the horrors of the Icarii neural implant process, the threats made against Lito's families, and the treatment of the Asters, to the normalisation of sexual slavery in Gean religion and the secretive, misogynistic nature of the power structures behind it.

After an uncertain start, I was intrigued enough by the character-driven mysteries of The First Sister that it kept me reading very effectively. Being the first book in a series, the climax of this novel answers some questions, but it leaves the character arcs hanging to some extent, particularly when it comes to a reveal around one specific character which upends a lot of what we thought about them throughout the book. In a way, both First Sister and Lito achieve some of their initial goals, only to have the realities of the world they live in make those goals far more complicated than they first thought. It's an odd climax in some ways - that character reveal mentioned above didn't do much for me at all - but satisfying enough for a series opener even while I might have preferred some more closure for the amount of emotional turmoil some aspects of this story put me through. That's probably me expecting too much from grimdark adventures though - and if you go into this expecting that to be the case, I think you'll enjoy it just fine.

Having noted above that I think The First Sister deals sensitively with the sexual violence inherent in its premise, I was much more disappointed with its depiction of disability, which comes across as much less thought through. One of the defining characteristics of the Sisters is that they can't speak, due to the mysterious operation conducted on them when they enter the sisterhood. They have a sign language, but knowledge of this is restricted to the sisters themselves and their Aunts, and writing is considered taboo, meaning that there is no way for First Sister and her kin to communicate with the soldiers around her. This inability to communicate freely with the sisters she doesn't think she can trust and the Aunt who is actively putting her into a dangerous situation is an effective part of the book - but it's done in a way that minimises the role of sign languages as complete, useful languages in their own right. There's nothing to suggest that the sign language that the Sisters use is incomplete or limited in vocabulary, but even in the opening chapter First Sister laments that it's their "only" language. More frustratingly, a late plot point involves some sisters regaining the ability to talk, and these characters immediately express relief and jump to using spoken communication even though they already had the ability to sign and mutually understand each other. What starts out as a rather on-the-nose symbol of the Sisters' powerlessness becomes tied up in an assumption that sign languages are an inherently lesser form of communication, and that's an inaccurate and deeply unfortunate portrayal given the number of people who use sign languages either exclusively or alongside verbal communication and most certainly aren't "voiceless" in any metaphorical sense.

That aside, The First Sister is a book that's highly effective in telling the story it wants to tell - and it's a story that I found myself drawn into despite not initially being convinced by its grimness. While I'm reserving my full judgement to see how things play out in later books, this is a story that's got a lot of interesting places it could go and, linguistic ableism aside, I'm intrigued to see what First Sister, Lito and their friends get up to next. 

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 Feels a lot of care went into sensitively writing the sexual slavery aspects

Penalties: -1 An ending reveal that didn't really do it for me; -1 Throws sign languages under the bus for the sake of its metaphor around "voicelessness"

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, 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

Reference: Lewis, Linden A. The First Sister [Hodder and Staughton/Skybound Books, 2020]