Interview: S.L. Huang

Hugo Award winning and Nebula Award finalist S. L. Huang's next book is The Language of Liars (Tordotcom), a pulse-pounding sci-fi that explores the power of language and identity and how the two intersect! Huang’s worldbuilding and bold, complex characters are brought to life in vivid detail from the first page. The Language of Liars was included in “Most Anticipated” lists from Literary Hub, BookRiot, and Shelf Awareness, and has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. 

S. L. Huang is a Hollywood stunt performer, firearms expert, and Hugo Award winner who has been a finalist for a Nebula, Locus, and BSFA Awards as well as the ALA Carnegie Medal. Huang has a math degree from MIT and credits in productions like Battlestar Galactica and Top Shot. The author of The Water Outlaws, Burning Roses, and the Cas Russell novels, Huang’s short fiction has also appeared in Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Nature, Reactor, and more, including numerous best-of anthologies.

Nerds of a Feather: Congratulations on your forthcoming book,The Language of Liars! What do you think is the heart of the intersection between language, colonization and cultural identity?

S.L. Huang: Thank you! And wow, starting with a doozy of a question...

To be honest, I would say the heart of these issues is "complexity." On one side, building cultural bridges and seeking out intellectual understanding -- and on the other, stealing or overwriting the voices and traditions of living people -- it's a tangle that can turn heartbreakingly tragic even when everyone involved has the best of intentions, even before individual greed or cultural arrogance enters the picture.

It's an exploration that's close to my heart given my own family background, and there's so much there that I wouldn't be able to fit in an interview answer...but I suppose that's why I wrote a book!

NoaF: Is writing a character similar to absorbing another identity, in a way?

S.L. Huang: I've never thought of it that way, but now that you've said it, I sort of love it. It tickles me that as an author I'll become akin to the Borg -- ALL WILL BE ASSIMILATED!

 

NoaF: How does your math degree inform your writing, and your understanding of linguistics?

S.L. Huang: I think the biggest impact of my math background is correlative -- that is, in the same way I enjoy math, I enjoy other types of nitty-gritty riddle-solving, whether that's worldbuilding or linguistics or making a finely-tuned plot fit together precisely. It can be terribly difficult at times, but often results in the satisfaction of a solved problem, which is one of my favorite feelings in the world.

 

NoaF: How about your training as a firearms expert and Hollywood stunt performer? How does that inform your writing?

S.L. Huang: Fight design for movies is remarkably like choreographing action for books. You never want it to be about the individual moves -- instead, you want the emotions and stakes to drive it all. That's what I think needs to push any type of action, from sword fighting to romantic intimacy.

I think that's also the secret to what can make a particular type of action "interesting" even to readers who don't usually like that type of book.

 

NoaF: Who are some of your favorite spies in history and media?

S.L. Huang: Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space 9 is not just a favorite spy, but hands-down one of my favorite characters in media. Sassy bisexual space lizard whose motives keep us constantly guessing -- he might not be the most moral character, but he's by far one of the most interesting!

In The Language of Liars I went with a cinnamon-roll spy, but I aspire to someday write a book starring a protagonist as deliciously complex as "plain, simple Garak."

 

NoaF: What are you reading and enjoying now? Who are some other writers that Nerds of a Feather readers should have on their radar?

S.L. Huang: The 2026 book that I've already read a copy of and want to shout from the rooftops is Yoon Ha Lee's Code and Codex -- if you like linguistics or space opera or math or, well, literally any of the things my own book is about, you'll love Yoon's! It's like nothing else I've ever read.

And I haven't read these two yet, but other books I'm super stoked for this year include The Subtle Art of Folding Space, by John Chu -- out this month as well! -- and The Fist of Memory, by Wole Talabi, whose other works I've loved. Check them out with me!

--

Gabrielle Harbowy is an editor, writer, and literary agent based in Southern California. She can be found at gabrielle-h.bsky.social or gabrielleharbowy.com

Book Review: The Language of Liars by S. L. Huang

Linguistics science fiction that isn't just the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis redux? And that will emotionally devastate you? Hook it to my veins.

The first thing you need to know about The Language of Liars by S. L. Huang is that none of the characters in it are human, and that's great. 

It's not at all surprising that space-faring science fiction tends to focus on situations that at least contain some humans, even when they're a mixed species galaxy. Writing the alien is, I imagine, pretty hard, because aliens that feel properly alien but are still written to be accessible to a reader's emotions surely take some work to get right. It's a tight balance. I don't blame people for not doing it. But when someone does... it's always a little bit exciting. If I'm going to imagine a galaxy that contains a wide array of sentient life, it's nice to get a chance to revel in the unfamiliarity of it, to truly explore what that imagined spectrum of life looks like.

Huang predominantly explores that unfamiliarity via the medium of language, unsurprisingly given the novella's title. The main character, Ro, is a linguist, who has trained hard to become fluent in one specific language but with a lot of facility in a wide array of others. Moreover, Huang has written him as someone gregarious and chatty, whose internal monologue (and external dialogue, sometimes) is peppered with little factoids about this or that language and how it relates to culture and physiology of this or that species.

But Huang also takes care to embed Ro's narrative in his own body, as well as his thoughts about those of other species. While they never provide a full, clear description - the typical look in the mirror scene of the start of many novels - Ro experiences the world in terms of his physiology, and that is deftly conveyed in his internal monologue. We know he is furred, that he has two hearts, we know about his empathic capabilities, the shape of the world he lives in and how that reflects the shape of his own body. It's very well done, and very necessary. If a story is going to explore a perspective outside of the humanoid this way, downplaying it takes away half of the fun. 

Ro is, in mind and body, the perfect balance of strange and accessible, not least because of his own alienation within his society. He feels like an outsider, someone whose behaviour doesn't quite meet the demands of his elders, and in that difference he gives us a window into what that normal looks like, and what the deviation from it feels like for Ro. He is the ideal window into a story that goes on to focus on these kinds of alienations and disconnections.

The second thing you need to know about The Language of Liars is that it spans a whole universe of worlds, and their interlocking needs and differences. In brief, deft strokes, Huang manages to create the sense of a vast, complex and interlocking, galaxy spanning set of polities, not just through Ro's understanding of language, but in a wider, political sense. This is a universe whose function demands the constant mining and utilisation of a specific resource - meridian - to bridge the gaps between worlds. Many of those worlds, including Ro's own, would cease to function without it and lack the means to produce their own basic needs, right down to oxygen. While the story focuses in on Orro - Ro's world - there are constant nods and gestures to the other places within it, their needs, their respective status compared to Orro, their political inclinations and oppositions. Huang has the knack of explaining little but giving just a big enough suggestion of it to let me nod and carry on. Everything has enough sense to fit with intuition, to imply the necessary complexity, without having to get into the weeds of intergalactic trade routes. For which I'm grateful, because that's not really what I'm here for reading (sorry economics nerds). But it's also very difficult to do well, and a skill I think is particularly critical for novella authors.

There's a narrowing of priorities necessary to make a good novella, to cutting all the things that need to be cut to make something substantial fit into the space of 155 pages as this book does. There are a lot of ways to achieve it, but Huang has cut themself off from a lot of them by going for this high stakes - because boy the stakes are indeed high - and wide space narrative. And so, if they can't focus in tight and small, they instead have to skim things, hint things, let the reader do some of the work of embedding this world into plausibility. Luckily, they have done so masterfully.

The third thing you need to know about The Language of Liars is that even if you see the end coming, even if you know what the story is going to tell you about this world before you get there, the revelation is still going to hurt. Ask me how I know. I had an inkling early on that I might know where some of the clues were pointing, but it truly did not matter one bit. The discovery, the way Huang set up and deployed the information the book coalesces around, does not rely on surprise to deliver its value.

Such plot summary as I'm willing to give is this: Ro is a linguist studying to make what's called a "jump", that transports him into the body of an alien race called the Star Eaters. It's a rare talent for linguists on his world, but a necessary and highly honoured one, one that Ro is desperate to achieve as a way to prove his worth to the society he struggles to fit into (despite his great talent for languages). And, despite and because of his doubts about himself, he succeeds. The Language of Liars is the story of what happens when he does so.

It's about language, about relationships between people, about exploitation and the weight of moral decisions, and who gets to make them. And it's about the big impacts of small decisions, not just the sweeping horrors of the universe but the tiny, individual atrocities that can be committed too. It handles all of those things incredibly well, bringing them together to deliver a gut punch at the end that gets into a lot of big ideas about how history and politics work, and what the right choice is in a hard place.

And a last, little, enormous thing you need to know about The Language of Liars is one you'll only learn properly if you read it yourself: that it is an incredibly bold book, because it leaves you in a state of unresolved emotion that is far more productive than any tidy conclusion would be. Huang has made such a good decision in how they close this story, and the sort of thoughts they leave the reader to experience in the aftermath.

That ending, that sucker punch and the refusal to give the reader an easy closure, is the capstone of a bold, interesting, deep book, and a very worthy end indeed to the complexity of the story they've given us up until that point. The Language of Liars is an exquisitely formed novella, a stunning example of what good writing, good ideas and a willingness to do something different can achieve, without the need for sprawl.

And it's a book of science fiction linguistics that isn't just a rehash of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. That's a gold star right there.

--

The Math

Highlights: a story situated well in alien mind and culture, deep and full use of language to great effect, big stakes tackled thoughtfully

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: S. L. Huang, The Language of Liars, [Tordotcom, 2026].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Reading the Hugos: Short Story

Welcome back to Reading the Hugos, 2020 Edition! Today we are taking a look at the six finalists in the Short Story category.

None of the finalists were on my nominating ballot, but I read fewer stories last year than I would have liked. I've read some of the authors on this year's ballot before, but Nibedita Sen and Shiv Ramdas are completely new to me and I'm not sure if I've read S.L. Huang before, but that is certainly going to change after reading "As the Last I May Know".

Let's take a look at the finalists.


“And Now His Lordship Is Laughing”, by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons, 9 September 2019)
“As the Last I May Know”, by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23 October 2019)
“Blood Is Another Word for Hunger”, by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, 24 July 2019)
“A Catalog of Storms”, by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2019)
“Do Not Look Back, My Lion”, by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 2019)
“Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island”, by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, May 2019)


A Catalog of Storms: When the weather is almost sentient and angry, the only defense is people who are willing and able to sacrifice their own lives by turning into a more soothing weather. "A Catalog of Storms" reads better than that description, but that's the best way I can wrap my brain around this story. There's a lot here to appreciate, but there's something about Fran Wilde's fiction that just doesn't grab me, just doesn't work for me. That remains the case with "A Catalog of Storms". I can see the emotional heart of the story, but it remains empty for me as a reader.

Fran Wilde is also a finalist for the Lodestar Award with her novel Riverland. Riverland was the winner of the Andre Norton Award and "A Catalog of Storms" was also a finalist for the Nebula Award.


And Now His Lordship: There are stories you appreciate for the craft rather than the execution and this is one of those stories. The ending of "And Now His Lordship Is Laughing" is excellent, it's exactly what the story needed and what the story was leading up to. Shiv Ramdas is telling a story of colonization, magic in the real world, and the cost of those colonized and used for resources. Set back in World War II, the story resonates today. I admire so much about the story, except for my desire to actually read it.

"And Now His Lordship Is Laughing" was also a finalist for the Nebula Award.


Ten Excerpts: Perhaps the story would not have worked so well if it was longer or fleshed out in a more conventional narrative form, but I really wanted more of this story. Sen rolls out the story in little disparate bits of academic commentary, moving through the titular bibliography and giving the story of the Ratnabar women more context and more heartbreak, though that heartbreak is suggestive from the beginning. "Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island" is exceptional.

Nibedita Sen is on the Astounding Award ballot for Best New Writer this year. "Ten Excerpts" was also a finalist for the Nebula Award


Blood is Another Word for Hunger: It should be no surprise that a Rivers Solomon story is as good as it is powerful, and "Blood is Another Word for Hunger" is exactly that.  It's a story of an enslaved woman taking her freedom by taking the lives of her captors, but it each of those killings which drives the story forward by birthing spirit lives. This isn't a post-slavery tale so much as it deals with the trauma of slavery and it is a trauma that doesn't end with freedom - regardless of how that freedom is attained. This is an unrelenting story, an excellent one.

Rivers Solomon is also a Best Novella finalist for The Deep.


Do Not Look Back, My Lion: This is Harrow's first story since winning the Hugo Award last year for "A Witch's Guide to Escape" and it's another banger. Tightly written, "Do Not Look Back, My Lion" is a heartbreaking story of love and loss, of duty and promises to family. The story is perpetually on the edge of a war, but is centered on a desire to not have one of the children marked to be a soldier. This is a beautiful story, raw with grief.

Alix E. Harrow's debut novel is both a Hugo and Nebula Award finalist for Best Novel. "Do Not Look Back, My Lion" was also a finalist for the Nebula Award.


As the Last I May Know: S.L. Huang looks at the problem of nuclear weapons and the deeper problem of how easy it is for a single person (with or without checks and balances) to figuratively push a button and destroy millions if not billions people. Those weapons still exist, but the cost of using them is exorbitant - the access code is embedded the body of a young girl and the personal cost of using those weapons is that President must murder that girl. "As the Last I May Know" is perfectly told, painfully told - and it is a stunning perfect story.


My Vote:
1. "As the Last I May Know"
2. "Do Not Look Back, My Lion"
3. "Blood is Another Word for Hunger"
4. "Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island"
5. "And Now His Lordship is Laughing"
6. "A Catalog of Storms"


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

Interview: S.L. Huang, author of the Cas Russell series

photo credit Chris Massa

SL Huang is an Amazon-bestselling author who justifies her MIT degree by using it to write eccentric mathematical superhero fiction.   She is most well known for her Cas Russell books – Zero Sum Game and Null Set.  The third book in the series, Critical Point, hits bookstore shelves later this month.   If you like math geniuses with memory issues who typically solve problems by punching people,  found families, and gray morals, these are the action packed and snark filled books for you!

Her short fiction has appeared in Nature, Analog, Uncanny, Daily Science Fiction and in multiple anthologies and Best Of collections, and she recently wrote three episodes of the shared world series The Vela on Serial Box.

Huang is also a Hollywood stuntwoman and firearms expert, where she's appeared on shows such as "Battlestar Galactica" and "Raising Hope" and worked with actors such as Sean Patrick Flanery, Jason Momoa, and Danny Glover. Follow her online at www.slhuang.com or on Twitter as @sl_huang.

She kindly answered my questions about the newest novel in the Cas Russell series,  how Cas has developed over the years, the journey from self publishing to getting picked up by Tor, scientific werewolves, how much fun it was to work on The Vela,   the arcane magic of outlines, and more.


NOAF: What do you enjoy most about writing the Cas Russell books?

S.L. Huang: The snark! Nothing gives me greater joy than banter between my characters.
I also really, really enjoy writing characters who are often not nice or who make tremendously bad decisions - but in ways where we want to root for them anyway. They're very flawed but I love them so much. Cas’s impulsivity makes the books speed along, because she's so very likely to try to "solve" a problem by punching people, and then have a fifty percent chance of making things WORSE…


NOAF: Book 3 in this series, Critical Point, hits bookstores shelves at the end of April. What's the elevator pitch for Critical Point?   Without giving us any spoilers, can you tell us what scenes was the most fun to write? 

SLH: The real elevator pitch: "FAMILY! This book is all about family—the family you live with, but also the family you find along the way. And my very prickly main character has a lot to learn about it. Oh and LOTS OF EXPLOSIONS. Truly a staggering number of explosions."

The elevator pitch in my head: "THE ONE THAT IS SUPER GAY!!! Oh and also lots of explosions." As a queer author, it’s delightful to me that it fits this book to put my characters' queerness on the page a lot more than it has in the previous books!

The elevator pitch according to my first reader: "THE PILAR BOOK." I confess this is also something I love: Pilar has been working up in her gun-toting skills since she was introduced, and this is the book where she and my main character become an action duo in a lot of scenes. Two women of color, kicking ass and taking names, one of them who shoots too many people and one of them who is too nice to everybody.

As for the scene that was most fun to write… I adore a lot of the family scenes to the point where I had written many of them before I finished Book 1, because I knew this was where I was headed. Also the explosions. I am fortunate enough to have explosives and fire experts among my friends and family, and there's one rollicking fun explosion near the end that came from my sister, who is a firefighter, telling me: "Use this. This'll be fun!"

And it's SO fun. Well, not for the characters. They're not so happy about it.

NOAF: These are fast paced, action thrillers.  While outlining and drafting, how do you keep the pace of the story so fast? How do you know when to give the characters a break from the action?

SLH: Outlining, ha! I cannot outline. I wish I could. It is arcane magic to me.

I have to "write through" things to figure them out - but after that I'm pretty good at putting together the book by feel. I can usually sense when it starts to stagnate, or when the characters need a breather, and I'll go back and rewrite if the pacing feels like it’s starting to skew.

Then, once the book is done, my editor, Diana Gill, has a fabulous sense of pacing and thriller tension. She totally keeps me honest. If the stakes aren't quite high enough, she makes sure I raise them! I love how great she is at seeing that, and it makes me feel very secure at the publication stage that there's no way the excitement will sag for readers.

NOAF: You originally self published this series, and then the series was picked up by Tor. What changes, if any, were made to your original self published versions?  How was working with Tor different than going the self pub route?

SLH: The first book was changed a lot less - we added a chapter and then I rewrote most of the climax and ending from there, but the first 2/3 were mostly the same. The second book was originally the fourth book, and we tore that one apart pretty thoroughly - largely to make it stand alone more - though the general plot is the same and the characters start and end in the same place. The third book is brand new!

Personally, I love being with a publisher, especially with the fabulous people at Tor. My editor really "gets" the books and her comments only make them better - I'm so much more proud of the Tor versions! I also love not being an island; being with a publisher means a whole team is supporting me, and they're utterly fantastic.

NOAF: As the Cas Russell series continues, Cas has more friends and allies. But that makes her more vulnerable to the emotional weight of those relationships.  How does her character change and evolve through this?  Did you always plan for her to eventually be less of a lone wolf in this way?

SLH: Oh, yes, that was always exactly the plan. She's very much two steps forward, one and three-quarters steps back when it comes to her relationships with people, but I always wanted her to improve incrementally on this front. The character relationships are what make the books for me, so those awkward friendships are some of my favorite bits.

And yeah, her lack of emotional skill - and the conflicts it introduces - was always planned to be a big source of difficulty for her, but at the same time a huge source of growth. Er, very slow growth.

NOAF: Are you planning more novels and/or short stories in the Cas Russell universe?  Where do you see the story going from here?

SLH: As long as readers keep buying and reading them, I will keep writing them! Without giving away the end of Critical Point, the "powered" people in this universe and their intersection with society have so many terrible possibilities to explore. This is all getting bigger - way bigger than the conspiracies in the shadows the characters have dealt with so far.

Not to mention the unanswered questions we still have about the characters' backstories… I know readers have been champing at the bit about learning more of Rio's history in particular, since I've only been doling out bits and bobs of it. You learn more about all the characters in Critical Point.

Oh, and I really want to do a novella in which Rio starts becoming a werewolf. (Scientifically, of course.) That's been noodling around in my head for ages.


NOAF: In 2019, you wrote a number of episodes of The Vela, a  work of serialized fiction from Serial Box Publishing. Other authors involved in the project were Yoon Ha Lee, Rivers Solomon, and Becky Chambers. How was it different to write in a shared universe?  Because the episodes are a standard length and are full audio, were there word or time limits that you had to take into account, and how did that effect how you wrote your episodes?

SLH: I LOVED doing The Vela! The writing team was just so fabulous and I can't say enough good things about them.

Writing in a shared universe - with such fantastic co-authors - was marvelous. Like eating cake. They all had such good ideas, and we would build on each other in ways I could never do as a solo writer. I'm so very proud of the story we wrote. It's jam-packed full of topical themes like migration and climate change even though it's set in a far-flung solar system, and the characters we drew up are such an incredible cast.

The process was certainly more structured than when I'm writing alone - it had to be! - but not in any way that I felt was limiting. I'm pretty good at knowing what will fit into wordage of varying lengths, as I write enough short stories to have a feel for it, so it was never an issue for me to pick a chunk of story that would work out for the size of an episode.


NOAF: You also have a forthcoming novella coming out from Tor.com, called Burning Roses, where Rosa (Red Riding Hood) and Hou Yi the Archer join forces.  What more can you tell us about this? 

SLH: Two old queer ladies fight magical things together and angst about their families! In a mix of Chinese and Western folklore!
Also starring:
Goldilocks as an abusive con artist
Beauty and the Beast as a human trafficking story
The Jade Rabbit as a threatening dream guide because it's fun to make rabbits scary
And Puss in Boots because why wouldn't I throw in a cat in boots.
Also morally ambiguous dragon slaying, attempted matricide, birds MADE OUT OF FIRE and two very complicated families.

NOAF:  Thank you so much!  And consider me first in line to read Burning Roses!

Microreview [Book]: The Vela, by Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon and S.L. Huang

Serial Box's new space opera is an action-packed, politically-driven adventure written by an impressive author lineup.

The Vela, the latest exercise in collaborative serialised fiction from Serial Box, brings together an all-star quartet of science fiction writers: Yoon Ha Lee, creator of the mindbending mathemagical Hexarchate series; Becky Chambers, who brought the best kind of slice-of-life into space with the Wayfarers series; Rivers Solomon, Campbell nominee and creator of An Unkindness of Ghosts; and S.L Huang, whose action-packed Cas Russell series is being republished by Tor after an initial self-published run. Together, they take on a space opera that touches on the strengths of all four of these works, while being something very different. Welcome to the system home to Khayyam, Gan-de and Hypatia, where the careless extraction of hydrogen by wealthy inner planets is causing the slow collapse of the sun and the death, over centuries, of all inhabitable worlds - beginning, of course, with the blameless, impoverished outer worlds. Mix in a hardened soldier-for-hire who is herself an escapee from the dying worlds, and her naive non-binary sidekick, and you've got an indisputable recipe for success, right?

Pretty much. The Vela is written to be read in short novella-sized chunks over a period of time (although I managed to devour most of it in one sitting without losing interest) and the pattern of tension and plotting that goes with that style makes for a compelling, twisty experience that is more reminiscent of good quality TV than conventional literature. This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the model - Serial Box releases its titles in "seasons" for a reason - but it's still an initial adjustment when reading, and those new to the format might have to experiment a little with how best to engage. The plot kicks off with Asala Sikou, the aforementioned refugee soldier, who is brought in by the leader of the wealthy, still-comfortable world of Khayyam to take on an unusual mission: locate the Vela, a ship carrying the last refugees from the latest world on the system's outskirts to have become uninhabitable, and do it with his child, Niko, in tow. Given that the slow extinction crisis has produced a ton of ships full of refugees, the mission to find one particular set of them is odd from the outset, but it soon becomes clear that this is more than a token gesture for a politician's election campaign. Khayyam is not the only political force interested in the Vela and what it carries, and soon the militaristic leader of Gan-De - the closed-off world closest to the refugees - and rebels from the barely-habitable orbiting stations which said refugees are forced into are all involved in a struggle for the system's already tenuous future.

As you'd expect, what follows is a mixture of fast-paced action, fundamentally irreconcilable political showdowns, and some highly entertaining twists and reversals, as Asala and Niko find their way in and out of trouble, make their way across the system, and uncover the true reasons behind the Vela's importance and what it means for their future. The lead pair have a great dynamic and there's plenty of other interesting characters too, representing a diverse, ethically messy version of humanity which contrasts individual capacity for kindness with a hopeless lack of positive collective action. The cultural differences between the different worlds are understated compared to the inequality and political tensions between them, but the touches are there to make these worlds feel lived in. The text also uses its science fictional elements to underscore the sense of inequality between the haves and the have-nots: interplanetary travel is technically accessible to most, but for ordinary people it depends on once-a-decade planetary alignments which allow ships to use gravity rather than burning expensive fuel; only the very wealthy can afford to transport themselves directly under normal circumstances.

In its treatment of interplanetary politics, there's a strong comparison to be drawn between The Vela and The Expanse, which takes place on a similar scale and with similar questions about privilege and inequality. Indeed, while I'm a big fan of The Expanse's current trajectory, The Vela comes stronger out of the gate with its political machinations and its representation, in contrast to the somewhat less inspiring "hardboiled bros in space" feel of Leviathan Wakes. Like The Expanse, The Vela manages to satisfyingly balance the sense of huge, irreconcilable political realities that the refugee crisis is creating, which is beyond the power of Gan-de and Khayyam to solve, and the individual personalities at the helm of some of those forces. I do enjoy stories which push hard on the tension between "good people" and "people working towards good things" (some of whom are terrible), and there's plenty of that here without descending into outright misanthropy.

That said, there were times when I was expecting a little more from The Vela, in terms of its plot and characterisation. In particular, I was frustrated by the tight focus on a few, relatively privileged characters. Asala's presence as the main character should, of course, be the counterweight to that, but despite the exploration of her past as a refugee, her characterisation is strongly shaped by an early display of indifference towards a ship of illegal refugees, which underlines the position of power that she has reached in a way that makes it uncomfortable to view her as representative of the powerless masses at the heart of The Vela's universe. Other than Asala, and a couple of characters who turn up in individual chapters, ordinary people are seen only in nameless glimpses, and that feels like an odd decision for the authors to make in a story of this kind. Additionally, while there's a cracking couple of climactic chapters here, which really blow the possibilities for future instalments wide open, the closing moments of the story leave things on a frustratingly massive end-of-season cliffhanger, and I'm already nervous about the lack of announcement for a sequel. There is enough thematic closure to still make this season a satisfying investment on its own, however, and if you're bothered by excessive cliffhangers then Serial Box's model may not be the one for you anyway.

All in all, The Vela has got a lot going for it, and I do want to take a moment to appreciate the fact that a space opera collectively written by an author team that is mostly queer and mostly people of colour not only exists, but is being published as a headline event with an objectively all-star creative team. If I'm being truly honest, I have to admit I'm a victim of my own high expectations for this title: I feel like this team could produce an Indisputable Best Book Of The Year for me, which this doesn't quite live up to despite its strengths. However, taken with realistic expectations, The Vela is a wonderful adventure, and this is, I hope, just the start of our adventures with Asala, Niko and their broken, beautiful world. I'll definitely be signing up for future instalments.

The Math:

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 Satisfying interplanetary political machinations without an easy answer in sight.

Penalties: -1 A frustratingly elite cast for a story based on a refugee crisis.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: 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.

Microreview [Book]: Zero Sum Game by S.L. Huang

Zero Sum Game has some strong, subversive ideas, but weak characterisation and a slow-to-hook plot leaves it less than the sum of its parts.

Though it's new to print this year, Zero Sum Game was already on my radar in its previous, ebook only self-published incarnation, although it never made the leap from the ever-growing collection of Kindle Samples I keep around to inform potential purchases onto my actual TBR. This new version, published by Tor, has been revisited and polished up, and is now being released much more widely as part of the publisher's #Fearlesswomen initiative, bringing this unconventional superhero thriller to a bigger audience, and also to me.

Our protagonist Cas Russell is a mathematical genius, and a hired gun, but not in the way you'd expect. Far from being your average brains-over-brawn number crunching geek, providing support to a team from behind some giant, poorly lit computer display, her abilities let her calculate the trajectory of bullets, survive falls that should kill her and punch people much larger than her at just the right angle to drop them with minimum necessary force. Cas is extremely cagey about these abilities and keeps them very close to her chest, particularly as she lives in a world where she seems to be the only person who can do this kind of thing. However, after a routine extraction of a young woman from a Colombian drug cartel ends up leading her to an organisation led by someone with even more terrifying abilities, Cas ends up in the middle of a plot that's both more wide ranging and more relevant to her, personally, than she had realised.

The way Cas' abilities play out - and, almost as importantly, the way they don't - provides Zero Sum Game with its most unique and compelling facet. Our introduction to her capabilities is almost exclusively through her ability to manipulate real-world mechanics, giving her superhuman combat abilities and problem solving skills which allow her to, for example, move a series of random objects in an alley to manipulate the acoustics enough to hear a conversation happening in a distant room. This is all very cool stuff, and it absolutely sets the scene for Cas as an action hero subversion of the "maths geek" trope. In contrast, Cas' abilities to apply statistical analysis, while also developed in later chapters, take a long time to come to the fore, and importantly they never dominate the way the first-person narrative . Even when Cas does run the probabilities of what the people around her will do, it's embedded in interpersonal and emotional reactions to the situations she's in, and tends to come with a much lower rate of reward than her kickass physics-ninja skills. Cas is bad with people, but she's bad in a generally misanthropic way, not a "human emotions do not compute" way, and this makes for a more interesting character (especially for the purposes of first-person narration).

Cas is thrown into an action packed plot which kicks off right from the very first page and never really stops moving. I struggled with this in early chapters, as very little time is spent establishing the limited networks and sense of "normal" in Cas' life before these are ripped away from her in a move which feels rather like the prologue of a Bioware game, motivating her continuing interest in a case that otherwise doesn't hold much long-term appeal for such a self-interested character. It's not until the introduction of the big bad, and her own abilities, that I became more invested in where things were going. Dawna Polk is basically a telepath, in the way that Cas is basically a superhero - while she might not be able to magically read minds, her ability to interpret psychological cues is so good that she's able to read everything a person is thinking and, even more terrifyingly, manipulate the impact that encountering her has on the memories and intentions of others. The uncertainty this brings to what was formerly a fairly standard plot is chilling in all the right ways, and used to great effect both in the book itself and to set up hooks for the rest of the series.

Unfortunately, Dawna is a standout character in a story which doesn't really have any others. Even Cas herself is hard to like, and her characterisation is somewhat thin outside of the maths stuff, although some of the gaping holes in her background and motivations do make more sense towards the end. Also, this is yet another book where I was frustrated by the gender balance: besides Cas and Dawna, the only other women turn up near the beginning and are pretty much just there as victims, and there's no non-binary representation. By far my biggest annoyance was Rio, Cas' only "friend", who is supposed to be a compelling sociopath-with-a-code and whose motivations and relationship to Cas come to the fore at several points in the plot. Unfortunately, Rio's main functions are to do horrible things that Cas constantly makes excuses for, and mansplain her own emotions and behaviours to her for her own good. I can't help but note that Huang didn't need to make Rio a sociopath for this to be a plausible set of behaviours for him to exhibit towards a female protagonist, and the effect was far from endearing. Cas' other sidekick is Arthur Tresting, a Private Investigator who comes off better when his counterpoint is Rio, but is otherwise bland at best, getting upstaged by his bit-part hacker friend in the few scenes the friend gets to be in.

Ultimately, while I can certainly admire the elements that Zero Sum Game does well, for me the good didn't fully outweigh the things I didn't like about this story. Cas and Dawna both have highly compelling powers and are interesting characters in their own right (odd but ultimately justified choices on Cas' part aside), but the plot took a little too long to get its hooks into me, and the supporting protagonists were at best forgettable. For those who are more invested in fast paced action and don't mind the drawbacks I've mentioned here, Zero Sum Game's calculation might work out more in their favour, but alas, it's not going to go down as one of my favourite reading experiences this year.


The Math
Base Score: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 Genuinely brilliant reimagining of the "maths nerd" trope into something completely different, +1 If Cas Russell were reading this, she'd already have calculated the probabilities of where this score is going to go

Penalties: -1 Lacklustre characterisation outside of the compelling villain, -1 I'm suddenly really tired, I think I'll take a nap instead of justifying this score... what do you mean, psychic manipulation? No, no, none of that here, I assure you...

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 "still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore"

POSTED BY: 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.

Reference: Huang, S.L. Zero Sum Game [Tor, 2018]