A Granite Silence – Nina Allan

Posted on 27/07/2025 by Roseanna
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I don’t always take notes when I read; it’s usually a thing for when I start a book with the intention of reviewing it. But despite having absolutely no such intention with A Granite Silence – I picked it up having already written two reviews in two days, which felt quite enough to be going on with, thank you – I found myself making notes almost without thinking about it. This was a book where I wanted the act of reading it – and thinking about it – to be visibly narrated, so I could come back to it later. Which is fitting, since it’s a book that revels in the visible narration of the act of writing.

Nearly all of those notes, however, are questions. Some of them are questions with sub-questions nested below them, or arrows leading off to another section or another page, connecting them with all the other things I wondered and wanted to know. And nearly all of them are either “what is this doing?”, “what is it for?” or “how does it fit in?”, over and over again. It’s not that A Granite Silence is a confusing book – it may blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, reality and speculation, but its parameters are relatively clear throughout – rather that it is full of interesting pieces of work, moments of craft that strike me immediately as being purposeful, but whose purpose in the moment is not always clear to me. The prose shifts from third into second person – why? What effect is that setting out to achieve, and why here, how does that fit into the overall thesis of the story? Let alone, what is that over all thesis? Because those decisions, those moments of craft, are the parts I wanted to linger on throughout, far more than any mundanity of plot.

That plot begins with the author heading to Aberdeen on a train, musing about a novel she plans to write, and reading a book about historical crimes committed in the city. Reading that book changes the novel she plans, shifting its centre of gravity to be the little girl, Helen Priestly, whose murder she has just learnt about. Through various perspectives, formats and angles, the rest of the novel is shaped around this murder, and particularly people writing about it, either at the time or later. There are passages from the perspectives of those involved at the time, or those called upon to investigate or witnesses, and those who came later, digging for details, and some whose relationship with it is a little more tangential. Much of the plot drive is exploring the murder and investigation chronologically, from occurence to arrest to trial and to aftermath.

And so – very little confusion available in those details, which are generally laid out clearly and without undue fuss. There is not a great deal made of concealing who did the crime, or ramping up tension. This is not a thriller1.

So a lot of my thoughts are saved not for the what but the how and why. And because there’s a lot of how, there is naturally a lot of why to come with that. And it’s not even that I necessarily have or want an answer for all of these questions. Or… that’s a lie. I would love to present my list of questions to Nina Allan and receive a definitive answer. Of course I would. But that’s also somewhat beside the point. The point is the asking in the first place. The point is the reading of a text that’s so rich in its playfulness that I am moved to wonder how all these different moving parts fit together. The question is merely the way I, in my note-taking, signal that these sorts of things are happening. There does not need to be a definitive answer to make the observation of the different pieces and tools on display meaningful and enjoyable.

Ah, playfulness. Now we’re getting to the core of what I want to talk about.

There are two words (or pairs of words) that crop up over and over in my notes. Firstly, “playful”, in reference usually to moments that feel like clever slips between ideas or uses of different tools. The moment when a particular motif recurs again in a new context that links up between the two. A reference outside of the text, just a little nod. And just the moments that feel like art and skill on display purely for their own sake. But nearly as often as “playful” comes its twin, “slippery”, used for many of the same tools, but where their result is less clear to me, or seems intended to obfuscate rather than harmonise. This is the first pair.

Both of these tend to get used around each of my second pair – “intrusion” and “immersion”. Throughout the text, some of the sections are in first person present, the author speaking in the act of creation – sometimes explicitly about the text being created – and these moments, whether full chapter length or brief asides, feel sometimes as an external force breaking into the closed off garden of the third person. The third person is a safe narrative normality – as indeed one of the writer characters in the book describes – and these moments of first person meta upend that normality. They break immersion. And yet… they are the most immersive and immediate sections of the book (bar one, hold that thought). The first person and present tense are extremely effective in Allan’s hands at binding you to the process of writing this story, being in the train in the moment of reading about Helen Priestly, and the story changing shape. Her original story idea – a Russian émigrée named Susana, also an author – lingers about these sections (intruding herself?), but also steps out of them, back into that third person garden of creation, having sections in her own perspective.

These shifts of language are by turns abrupt or subtle. There’s one, in a section on Pearl, another writer, talking to her friend Billy, all third person as you like, where the slip happens right in the middle of a sentence:

How are you doing? Billy messages, in the present. Really, I mean.
Fine, Pearl replies. It’s been good to get away, and even as I write this I am still trying to decide what Billy is alluding to, what reason Pearl might have for wanting to get out of the city for a couple of days.

We’ve been with Pearl for several pages at this point, in her third person present, talking in generalities about her and Billy’s relationship – the present of habit and continuity2. We are… immersed. And so to break that, in the middle of a sentence, does feel like an intrustion – a break in the flow. But one that brings us closer to someone else instead, the I that tells us it’s writing this text we’re reading. It reminds us that this is a crafted thing, and that we are never quite safe in what feels like a familiar narrative space. Playful and slippery both at once.

And then. And then. It couldn’t always be that simple could it. Because there is another brief section, in the perspective of the murderer, in which we switch over to the second person – in a chapter entitled “Avengers Assemble”, which is its own strange intrusion of the temporal kind. Over 150 pages in, this stops being a story about writing about this murder, for a little while, and instead has us inhabit the killer instead. Another intrusion, another slip.

These two pairs of things – these sets of push-pull and the tension between them – are the best articulation I have for A Granite Silence‘s appeal. It’s that constant awareness of the story as a moveable, shifting process of creation, its terms renegotiated and crafted, with the reader as audience to it twice over – the thing itself, the object in our hands, and itself as a simulacrum of the act of making it.

And in that, I want to hold it in comparison/contrast with another 2025 novel – Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou (which I reviewed in this vein for ARB). Despite both having murder in mind, the two stories are quite different. The one concerned with real events, real people, but fictionalising them, the other taking a folk tale and wrapping the semblance of the real and the now into and around it. But both stories are intimately concerned with the act of their own writing. Both contain moments in which the author seemingly speaks out to the reader about what this text is. And it is why I enjoy both of them – this break out of purely immersive writing. Immersion, often, seems to seek to invoke an experience of the text in which the textness of it is immaterial – surely this is what streamlined prose is all about? The idea that you can be so fully absorbed in a story that it stops being words on a page and becomes some sort of platonic ideal of narrative happening inside your brain. Both of these stories reject that, by opening up the toolboxes of their creation, seemingly popping up the bonnet of the car and asking you to look inside with them at how the gears turn. And I love that. I love books because they are books, stories full of words, and I enjoy it when authors make a feature of that reality, makes it into something that could only ever exist in the form of words.

But where Sour Cherry feels as if it seeks to make the reader complicit in this act of writing, seemingly asking them questions, wanting to know if this or that setting decision will best give the illusion of historicity that will fool a different, third person reader, A Granite Silence does nothing of the sort. The reader exists only as a witness. There is never a “we”, here, no matter what other persons are invoked. Neither is better. Just different approaches to this idea of using the process as the story itself. It comes up in moments like the end of some of the chapters, where the first person bids farewell to that perspective, informing the reader that that person’s time and utility to the story is done. There’s no “need” for it – many stories have perspectives that come up only for a short time and let them pass away unmarked – except as part of that seeming invitation to witness creative process in the moment, and a tool that makes those first person, authorial sections feel all the more vivid, because we see their “result”.

And obviously this is done in full artificiality. I know that; it’s the writerly equivalent of the Renaissance painter including himself with brush in hand in the corner of his fresco. But it’s not about authenticity anyway – it’s about creating a reading experience that forces acknowledgment of the text as a text, as a crafted, chosen thing, that does not exist in some distant, perfect form to be evoked in different formats. That sort of perspective play doesn’t happen nearly enough for my liking in SFF or adjacent writing, and I am immensely glad when I find it, and when I find it done so deftly as both these authors do.

And that’s why I feel I am constantly drawn to asking questions while reading – because I’m being drawn into this narrative as if it’s an act of process, and so it feels natural to question that process in my turn. Ok, so this perspective, this voice, tense, format, character has been chosen for a purpose. I want to dwell on that, approaching it from all the available angles to try to better understand what I’m being shown, and why it exists exactly like this. Opening out of that single, immersive view – popping open the metaphorical bonnet – even if it’s not inviting complicity, is still going to give rise to questions as the story unfolds.

Some of those questions do linger. This is not a surprise – I said the value was in the asking, not the answering – but I would be lying if I said some of the uncertainties do niggle at me, and two in particular. They both feel… trivial isn’t quite the right word, but peripheral to a lot of the narrative and themes, but it is that disconnection that precisely bothers me about both of them. Why is this strange, discordant thing seemingly so irrelevant to most of the rest of what’s going on? It makes me wonder what I’m missing.

The first is covid – a spectre that hangs over the more autobiographical sections of the novel. Part of me wonders if it’s just there because well… it was there, and has nothing really to do with any of it, only that it was the context in which events happened. But that feels unsatisfactory. When I assume so much intentionality to the rest of the artistic choices, why would I assume this one is offhand? Allan’s mentions of covid linger more on the restrictions of freedom and the immediacy of compliance to what seems like a huge change to norms and this… I have to admit it rankles as well. There is my wondering of how those thoughts about freedom and attitudes fit into the wider themes, but there’s also just me, a person with my own opinions, wrinkling my nose at focussing on lockdown as a threat to personal freedom, rather than a defence of life and health. And perhaps that’s why I want it to have thematic import – I want this thing that bothers me on an emotional level to have a critical value within this as a story-object, so I can stop approaching it as a person with emotions, and instead approach it as a critic with questions. It’s too close for me to let it go quite on my own. I don’t think I’ve still quite let it go, or found myself an answer for it. A discordant note that still hangs quietly in the background.

The second is more ambiguous. At two points in the story, a silver cylinder is referenced. The first is as an object found in a dig in Riyadh, carried away by an archaeologist who wonders about its strange properties, and shows it to the forensic scientist whose evidence feeds into the murder trial back in Aberdeen. The second is a brief glimpse of an object which I assume must be the same one, at a show put on by Houdini. And never again. In a story that is, for the most part, wildly mundane, this object is an intrusion of the uncanny3 that is never resolved.

Except… it may not be resolved, but it harmonises perfectly with the story’s final section. Throughout, so far, the story circles this one murder through an ever-widening pool of perspectives connected (however loosely or fictionally) with it. It may be fictionalised, but its parameters remain realistic and indicative – this person could have felt this, done that, been there. The last section takes a leap into the subjunctive. The perspective shifts to Helen, the murdered girl, in a future she might have had, an adulthood she never reached in reality. She works in a luxury shop, and is being courted by a nervous gentleman. But she is herself haunted by the spectre of a murder in her childhood, of the friend who gave her little gifts, including a blue knitted hat that has cropped up throughout the story so far – a hat missing from her body, a hat distinctive in her description while missing, a hat whose etymological origin is the prompt for a whole chapter proseifying the Burns poem Tam O’Shanter. Earlier in the story, we get a very, very brief nod to the idea of the multiverse theory of the universe4, and so this final section leads me to wonder – is that what’s happening here? Is this another reality? Or is this just a could-have-happened? Or something else? Is that mysterious silver cylinder a nod to the uncanny?

In its original chapter, it prompts a moment of strangeness – a dying man looks at the woman who has carried it through the desert, a woman he has mistrusted all the while, and calls her a murderer. Does he see through her some connection to the murder at the centre of the story? To another version of things, another universe in which she is involved, is someone from the case somehow? But then she slips out of the story, and that chapter closes, bidding farewell to its perspective, the man whose forensic evidence damns the murderer in the true case.

They are only little nods, but they are enough for wondering, and it is the act of wondering that makes this ending so perfect, after a novel’s worth of wondering likewise. Earlier in the story, a character suggests that all fictions are true, because they live in the mind of those who create them. And so, I think, all interpretations are likewise true, because they connect to the version of the text that sits within the mind of the reader. There are a multiplicity of answers to all these questions, all of them just as right. In some – in mine, I think, though I haven’t fully settled – there is something of the speculative. There’s another world out there where these events did happen. Didn’t happen. Happened like this and like another thing entirely. They share in the motifs that cropped up over and again – the blue hats, the colour grey, the wet weather and dry or wet clothing, the French perfume that clings to a collar – peopled with these real/imaginary figures conjured up to shape this story. And it works – it all works beautifully – because there is so much substance to linger on in that wondering.

By blurring the lines between real and unreal, and the boundary between author and reader, Allan has given us a beautiful, rich musing on the overlap of truth and stories, their permeability but also their unresolvability – the story, in every step of its unfurling for us, is a demonstration of that. It invites witness. It invites question. It rewards both with its beautiful, drifting, vivid prose and push-pull tension of that act of creation. And it’s marvellous.

  1. There is another review of this book I could write – almost did write – that explored the story and its ideas through the lenses of the different genres it is and isn’t. I did consider it. But in the end I thought it insufficient to explaining what is so good about this story, that undercuts those types of distinctions entirely. Its genre is “yes”. Or perhaps “no”. ↩︎
  2. The temptation to start talking about aspect here is strong, but I shall resist. ↩︎
  3. Another point at which I linger on that other review I could have written. Is there a speculative angle? Maybe. ↩︎
  4. And I can’t help but think “Avengers Assemble” is another. ↩︎
Posted in All, Detective/Mystery, Else, Literary, Non-Fiction | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Hugo Short Fiction Roundup

Posted on 22/07/2025 by Roseanna

Cutting it close to the wire this year, but I have now finished the Hugo finalists for Best Short Story and Best Novelette. They were… quite different, as shortlists go.

Let’s start with Novelette, which I think has a pretty high floor this year. I honestly don’t really dislike any of them, though of course I have my preferences. It’s also a fairly spread out list, with only two from one venue (Uncanny) bookending my list.

6) “Signs of Life” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 59)

I don’t tend to love Pinsker’s short fiction (with the exception of Where Oaken Heart Do Gather, where the format really helped it along). There’s nothing wrong with it, our vibe is just not in alignment. Which, incidentally, is often true for stories in Uncanny. Clearly our tastes differ in the main, and that’s fine. There are exceptions, though, as will become clear later.

Which is mostly how I would describe this story. It’s pleasantly descriptive, and good at putting the reader in the place it’s happening in. But I found the plot twist fairly obvious, and wasn’t enormously grabbed by the character work. It was an enjoyable interlude, a while spent with very competent prose, and good for all that, but just not my thing.

And if this is the worst a ballot has to offer, we’re doing remarkably well.

5) “By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars” by Premee Mohamed (Strange Horizons, Fund Drive 2024)

Despite involving fighting off a cathedral-sized dragon intent on rampaging through a village, the first word that comes to mind to describe this one is “sweet”. It has a sort of… retro wizard vibe, the sort of thing that is what I imagine stories about wizards to be like, far more than is the reality of stories I’ve read recently. I wouldn’t want that vibe for a whole novel, but for a novelette, it was pleasingly nostalgic.

It also manages a good balance between being a story about burnout and the horrible, self-deluding panic of making sure no one sees your inadequacies, while also being charming and pleasant to read. Firion, the self-deluding wizard, is hovering on the right border of self-awareness, and so is very pleasant to inhabit, and has a relatively unformed but enjoyable to read relationship with her apprentice while doing so.

It has two main flaws. The first is that, like the previous two on this list, it’s far more a pleasant experience than something that has enough of a spark to stick with me after I’ve finished – I had to reread it to talk about it here. For the second… I almost wish the ending weren’t as hopeful as it turned out to be. I was expecting it to go in a slightly different direction, and found the slightly happier version… weirdly a let down? But for all of both of those issues, I had a good time, and was entirely absorbed while reading it, and I had a good time the second time around as well.

4) “Lake of Souls” by Ann Leckie in Lake of Souls (Orbit)

I think, if you had given this to me sight unseen, I probably could have pegged it for Leckie’s prose right off. Which is a good thing – I love how she writes. The dual POV was nicely managed, and having this kind of first contact story told from the perspective of the inhabitant of the planet as well as/more than the human visitor from space is a nice touch.

I enjoyed how the narrative felt well embodied in Spawn’s clear non-human perspective from early on, without belabouring it. It would be so easy to feel the need to elbow the reader in the side, making sure they spotted all the ways in which this person was different from a human, their body and perception different, but Leckie just lets it happen smoothly instead. The culture(s) of Spawn’s people felt real enough for the space they occupied, and again had their exposition sufficiently backgrounded that it existed in the space around the story, rather than stepping in front of it.

It left a lot of open questions, and I don’t know if they’re answered in other stories in this collection, but I almost hope not. Stories that do this, that leave wondering open at the end of them, tend to catch me better than fully closed off ones in short form. There is a lot of world and experience that clearly exists around this snapshot, which makes the snapshot feel all the richer.

3) “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” by Naomi Kritzer (Asimov’s, September/October 2024)

For a selkie story, this one is surprisingly unspeculative. Bizarrely, I like that about it. It’s mostly a story of human problems – relationship problems – with a bit of a speculative twist, but both parts work together rather than at cross-purposes. Morgan, the main character, a thwarted academic confronted with her lost passion once again feels deeply real, and her rush of longing for the study she lost is palpable and moving. There’s a lot of tensions in here, of academic career issues and motherhood, moving to a new place and having to find where you fit, but all are balanced well.

The ending of this has not a little darkness to it, and that feels apt for a selkie story too. Real folklore is often full of darkness. But there’s a balance between the darkness and the hope that is managed well, and made the story feel substantial.

2) “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld, May 2024)

My top two are really, really close. I dithered so hard about which way round to rank these, and I would be fully happy to see Ha take the win. This was fine margins and vibes.

This one blends grief and recovery, complex feelings about the dead, the value of the physical and the unchanging in a digital world, the insufficiency of money when tallied against some other things, and the value of a story with a complex ending. There’s something about the “updated” digital version of the story within a story having been changed to have a clearer, happy ending that just hits right and makes all the other pieces of the story fit together. And there are quite a few pieces, pulling in different directions, but in the end it does all really work to make one coherent thing. Along with the skilful prose, it does just feel like a really excellently put together story.

1) “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 58)

I’ve read a fair bit of Triantafyllou’s work over the last few years, awards nominated and otherwise, and her style of prose and storytelling tends to hit well for me. This is no different.

What strikes me most about it is… well, two things. The first is the clear voice – there’s a distinctive sense of a person who tells this story, who sends emails to her friends, and in-game chats to her brother. But it exists in continuity with the narrative voice. Not quite the same, but connected, which makes both feel all the better.

The second is how personal it is. The Science Fiction Thing that happens matters to the story, obviously, but we see it not through grand dramas but through the intimate, human loss of not being able to see the people closest to you. It matters on a human scale, in the most important ways. And I like those kinds of stories best of all – how do speculative Things affect people in their most people-y moments and feelings? Triantafyllou gets it just right in that, full of sympathy and sorrow and longing and hope. It’s a fantastic story, and I’m glad to put it at the top of my ballot.

It’s a good shortlist. I’d honestly be happy to see most of them win, though I am particularly fond of the top two.

Short Story is a different… uh… story. While there are two I quite like, alas, the rest did not feel like a strong showing, especially when held in contrast to some of the other shortlists which seemed to be actually pretty decent this year. We cannot have everything.

And so, my ranking and thoughts, starting from the bottom:

6) “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld, February 2024)

Ideologically… just stop. We don’t need another Omelas riff. I have never seen one that did something that wasn’t at least spiritually covered in the original. None of them that I have read have built on, improved, expanded or responded to Ursula LeGuin, in any sort of way I consider meaningful (unsurprisingly, given the original was pretty damn on the money). As a fundamental concept, they exemplify one of SFF fandom’s worst tendencies, which is to never let something – be it an idea or a joke – lie, when someone could try reviving it again for another go.

As they go, this one is fine. But I object to the concept.

5) “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 56)

It’s very… twee. I think purely in terms of craft object, I would rank this one lower than the Omelas story, but this one doesn’t form part of a pattern of reattempts that annoy me, so that’s a point in its favour. There aren’t really many others, though. I found the language… odd, wobbling in between different things it was trying to be (is it historical? Sometimes! Sort of!), the structure entirely pat and the idea… I mean, that’s what it is, it’s someone’s little “oh wouldn’t it be funny if” written up to the length of a story when it should have remained an idea. And it doesn’t hang together under any scrutiny. No one previously thought to use salt on a snail? The different parts of it – prose, dialogue, world, characters, story – just felt sort of flat and undercooked. And yeah, just all the way down, twee twee twee. No thanks.

4) “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones (Lightspeed Magazine, Jan 2024 (Issue 164))

A story trying to laden itself with more ponderous, dramatic significance than it can quite manage to hold. Or possibly an attempt at undirected meaning. Just… y’know. Meaning. I don’t quite know. But under the slightly overburdened prose, it just doesn’t feel like there’s all that much there. There’s an inversion, but to what end?

Part of me wants to say “this needed to be longer, to develop something more to actually fill out the space where meaning is supposed to go”, but I don’t even think that’s truly it. It might have helped a little, but I just think the fundamental concept doesn’t quite work. The story needs to be saying something of weight, and if it had done that, it could be as short as you like. But it isn’t. So I don’t.

3) “Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” by Nghi Vo (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 57)

And with a fairly big jump, I like this one, but not as much as I often love Vo’s work. In the prose, she’s as strong as she ever is, but there’s a little something missing that I’ve found in her other short fiction. It’s one I enjoyed in the moment of reading, and then promptly forgot most of within a day or so, and had to reread to shape my opinions here. It’s fine.

2) “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed Magazine, May 2024 (Issue 168))

I tend to like Yoachim’s work, and this one stood out back in pre-nomination reading for its concept and use of formatting. I like stories where I have to ask myself what order to consume their pieces in. No matter what the story says, I cannot read both/all sides simultaneously, so there’s a conscious choice going on as I read it (changing as I do so) as to quite how I approach the problem. It makes me read with intention, which is always a plus.

On the reread, the repetition perhaps overstays its welcome just a little – the point has been well made by the end – but I like it anyway. The contrast between the playfulness of the form and the melancholy of the content. That the repetition lives alongside a whole bunch of empty spaces and absences in which exposition could have lived, but doesn’t, because the reader doesn’t need to be told everything.

1) “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 58)

Stories about stories? Boring. Passé. Much covered. Stories about historiography? Sexy. New. Comes with references.

I love how Martine laces this work with little pinprick references out beyond it – to her other works, to her background in Byzantine history. It echoes a little – though does not quite rhyme – with enough of my own knowledge of the Romans that there feels something familiar in it. But more than that, it’s the way the disparate pieces pull together, the iconography, the tone/format shifts, the evocation of gaming and online community, the thinking about historiography in the context of looking forwards as well as back. Something about watching someone watch a story and think about how to tell their own one, echoing it, leaving something for the next person, to create the meaning that will be shaped by future hands, as well as shaping their own. The feeling of a link in the chain of history – not as a sequence of real events, but as narrativised implications of meaning.

It’s playful and serious all at once, and doesn’t overlabour the points it wants to make. Just enough and no more. And Martine has always had the grasp of just the right amount of drama.

Easy top of my list.

My concluding thought is that, for all I like two of the short stories, this is just… not a very strong shortlist. I am not certain I’d put my top spot in that position in another year’s ballot. It’s weird to have novelette feel so strong and yet short story so weak, especially when it doesn’t feel like a shortlist with a particular theme or vibe running through it that I can hold as to why it is as it is either – it’s not like it’s an AI shortlist or a covid shortlist or something, where it’s all responding to some impetus in the same way that just doesn’t land with me. But sometimes, I guess, it’s just like that. Alas.

Posted in All, Fantasy, Science Fiction | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

A Path Through the Landscape: A Journey Into Fantasy

Posted on 20/07/2025 by Roseanna

This is a story of my route through fantasy. It’s not the only story I could tell – there are so many books I’ve read, and so many narratives I could choose to impose on them. But this is the one I have chosen to tell. It isn’t exactly a lie, nor exactly the truth, because the truth is just a dispersed progression of book after book after book, without the drive that a narrative imposes. But it’s a nice and a plausible story, that does not disagree with the available plot points, so it’s good enough.

This follows on from my similar post about Science Fiction, which itself was inspired by reading Paul Kincaid’s book Colourfields. Because everything is more fun with a chain of antecedents. And like that similar post, this story starts with a very familiar name…

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There are a lot of Diana Wynne Jones books I could pick for my beginning. Strictly speaking, I think the first I read would have been Charmed Life (and indeed, the Chrestomanci books all deserve a lot of discussion for a whole array of things they do well or interestingly). But the one which I think lingers most, and has the most outsize impact on the way I went through fantasy, what books I picked up later, was Fire and Hemlock. It is still my most beloved and most reread of her works. It stands up – it absolutely stands up – to an adult eye and a modern view. It has layers. And it was, for me, the first in a number of things: my love for stories about the fae, for stories that look back to (but are not bound by the strict shape and details of) older texts, books where such magic as there is is subtle, intuitive and often unexplained, books with complex relationships that stretch outside the two main characters.

There are also a bunch of themes at play here that, looking back from a point of now, I see are going to come up again and again in things that matter to me. Whether they started here or this is simply the first symptom, who’s to say, but it’s certainly a point on the routemap of books that play with memory, and books who refuse to tell their secrets – indeed, I quote the book itself on that as “you mustn’t ask it to bits”.

There’s a lot to love, and a lot to dwell on and discuss, but the thing that truly sticks with me and that I come back to again and again is the portrayal of a changing relationship between two people over a number of years in which they are both, very clearly, growing up. It’s just so substantial and flawed and interesting.

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There are a few books on this list that go beyond just being influential on how I read, and are what I consider foundational texts. They matter, in a way I’m slightly distressingly earnest1 about. The first is Sabriel by Garth Nix (though really the whole initial Old Kingdom trilogy, and especially one chapter in Abhorsen that I occasionally come back to and read on its own when I’m not feeling my best2).

But the problem with it being a foundational text is that I struggle to articulate precisely why. It came before the why, when you dig down through all the logic and reasons and get right to the core matter of “I just think it’s neat”. There’s something about this book that aligned just right with whatever I was at that time, and has kept aligning nicely every since. That’s all there is to it.

I do remember being surprised by how well constructed the female characters were3. At the tender age at which I first read this, I still believed I just didn’t really tend to like girls in books. A number of years later, I would better articulate this as not finding many of them written in ways that felt sympathetic or with depth of character (predominantly but not exclusively by male authors), but that comes later. Here though… I loved Sabriel as a character. She feels whole. She fits into her world (or doesn’t, in a compelling way). And so this was a click of “oh, they can do that”… even if they were generally choosing not to. It’s also dipping its toe into “books that play with memory”, though not fully committing in the way some later entries will.

In any case, I can still chant you perfectly every single scrap of poetry from all three of these first books, because they are seared into me forever. The blend of gothic and hopeful that they do… agh, I wish there were more things like it. I don’t want grimdark and I don’t want cosy. I want whatever this is, always, right in the middle of it all.

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As in my route through SF, there are some negative interludes here, for books which absolutely still shaped how I moved through fantasy, but… not because I in any way liked them.

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Here, then, is where I encounter two very uneasy bedfellows: the collected works of Robin McKinley and The Lord of the Rings, who sit next to each other just because I came to both at a very similar time.

It’s 2001. I am 11. I have many friends who also read books. They are nearly all girls. All of them love Robin McKinley. The premise – retelling fairytales but very much set in the perspective of the heroine – was not an unappealing one. But something about them never clicked, and it was one of the first books I remember being so out of accord with specifically my peers, my friends, in my opinion about (but holding on to that opinion anyway because god damnit I’m right). I haven’t picked up one of her books in years, and the details are hazy, but I have a strong vibe memory of being told to read Spindle’s End by a friend because you’ll love this one and just… not. And feeling somehow guilty about that.

I suppose that also makes it a first in another storied tradition – telling someone, as gently as you can, that you just don’t like the thing they recommended to you. Sorry. *awkward pause* … sorry.

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Yes I chose this image specifically for violence

The Lord of the Ring, however, is a very different story. It being 2001, I read it because the film was coming out, and I was still in my youthful, unreconstructed era in which you just have to read the book before you see the film, because what if you have the wrong pictures in your head? And what if they get the details wrong??! I have… moved on, in the time since. But it mattered a lot then, and so I doggedly forced myself through all three books (though Return of the King took me three attempts, my eyes glazing over a number of times in the Frodo and Sam sections), and then wondered… what the hell? Why are people so into this? I didn’t get the poetry and the pacing boggled me and the use of language, the way people spoke and did not speak, the absolute disconnect with some assumptions my little self had started to form about how stories are told, about how immersion in a character viewpoint worked, how information was conveyed. I was simply not ready for it.

And then I loved the films. And regardless of the book coming first, the films supplanted any original mental imagery I may have had, and live forever in my head as the template for that story. I’m honestly pretty ok with it. They’re good films.

But it’s not the end of my relationship with the books…

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I have very strong memories of going into bookshops in my teens, and the thing put up right in my face being a section labelled “paranormal romance”. Did I like romance? No. Did I like vampires, however? Boy howdy yes. Which was kind of lucky, let’s be honest, given the period in which I grew up. Paranormal romance had a fucking boom, and you couldn’t shake a stick without hitting a book with a woman in leather trousers on the cover staring badassly at you, who ended up in love with some kind of supernatural being or other. I read… a number, let us say. Less lucky (maybe?) was the fact that I also, despite? because of? this vampire rich environment, decided to look a bit backwards in time, and so mainlined a whole bunch of Anne Rice books. Even though it (very probably) is the better book, the one that stuck with me wasn’t Interview with a Vampire, but instead the somewhat sillier The Vampire Lestat, in which one blonde, pretty, chaotic boy rattles around… historical Paris? I think? Experiencing terrible, depressing events and then being very depressed about them and battling his inhuman hunger or something. I don’t really remember much, other than him being extremely dramatique in a compellingly rakish way. He definitely murders some people. There are definitely some bits where the sexual tension was palpable enough for my teenage blankness to comprehend. But there are three lingering things Rice’s books gifted me, and they are:

  • a discovery of the delights of a fucking mess of a person as a main character, whose constant car crash situations are compelling to watch
  • a lifelong minor obsession with vampire fiction (much of which is really quite bad)
  • a crash course, a little later on in time, on how to deal with your feelings when you really like a book, but both it and the author are kind of… terrible4
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As if the paranormal romance boom wasn’t enough, this was also around the time I noticed YA becoming a Thing. To be a teenage girl between 2002 and 2009 was truly something. There are a lot of books I could pick for this step in the journey, some of them even good books, but for me the answer is clear – the Black Magician trilogy by Trudi Canavan. And particularly the final book, The High Lord. I received some really quite nice hardback editions of the whole series one Christmas, and burned through them for my first reading at the speed of light. Like Sabriel and like Fire and Hemlock, these are books I have read and read again. Unlike those first two, returning with adult eyes has not been kind to them.

The series is a hot, tropey mess, following a young, impoverished girl who turns out to have prodigious magical powers, the discovery of which pulls her out of her life in the slums against her will, to study at the magician university full of the wealthy and powerful. She is embroiled in conflict with them because of her lower class origins, but is helped by various good natured people too, and of course ends up in a love triangle between two dudes who are sexy and obsessed with her for different reasons, only one them Seems Bad but is Actually The Best (and so she ends up with him). Lot of drama. Lot of stupid martyrdom and people claiming they Actually don’t like each other no really when in fact the opposite could not be more true. Conquering challenges through Pluck and Determination. Fate of the world nonsense. Made up animal names5. The series truly has it all.

They are not, in any way, good books. But my god they are fun books, and I have read and reread them again as comforting pieces of nostalgia, from a time when everything was just… a lot simpler. Sometimes we have pleasing trash we hold on to, simply because it is pleasing. This is mine6.

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By something of a whiplash-inducing contrast, as I now head to university, we meet the book on this list that has remained my go-to answer for “favourite book” since approximately 2009. If any book on this list changed me as a person (or at least my taste), it is this one. Just as my SF list was characterised by steady reveals of “wait, you can do that?”, this is fantasy’s. It was a revelation. The prose… mattered? It was confusing. It was wildly non-linear. It was heavily metaphorical. It was obsessed with but not bound by history and mythology. It took all my simple, childish assumptions about the very concept of reworking an existing idea and ripped them into shreds. It is from here that I learned that what’s important isn’t, and has never been, so fragile a concept as fidelity to the details of the existing narrative, but instead the purpose with which you change and use the story to make something more.

Did I understand it the first time I read it? Absolutely not. Nor the second. It took I think my third go, sleep deprived to fuck and back, for the pieces of it to click in my brain and I have simply never looked back. If I could point to one book to illustrate Molly Templeton’s point in this excellent piece, it would be Vellum.

So much of what I love in books as an adult traces back to this point. My reading habits and tastes changed an enormous amount over a period of about six years from 2009 to 2015 or so, and I truly believe Vellum had a lot to do with it. I cannot be normal about this book, and I refuse to try. But it doesn’t remake me completely anew – it’s another book that plays with memory, another book that doesn’t share all of its secrets – and so it’s a perfect illustration of who I was before, and who I was going to go on to be.

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What else did I read at university? Well, there were a lot of big things going round in fantasy at the time – this was the rise of grimdark, and also the inception of the juggernaut that is Brando Sando’s Cosmere – but I have to admit that my memories of much of what I read at that time are now ambivalence. There were books I loved then, that I read with great gusto – The Name of the Wind sticks out strongly in that vein – but none that have made me, or changed me. None that have stuck. I liked A Song of Ice and Fire just fine when it was happening, but I honestly don’t think at this point I would carry on reading if the next book dropped tomorrow, and I never got on with Joe Abercrombie’s work in the first place.

And then there’s Brando Sando. The epitome, in my opinions, of aggressive ambivalence. In the work, of intense mediocrity. I read The Finale Empire on loan from some friend or other, and finished the series easily enough but it was just… there. It does what it does and then you’ve finished it there’s a bit of a hole where meaning might have lived, but not enough terribleness to vow never to read him again. I’ve liked some of the others – I quite enjoy Warbreaker and Elantris – but even they’re insubstantial, compared to both my actual loves, and their reputation out in the world.

And so this whole period, when I look back, feels like negative space. Trends I didn’t connect to or feel part of. Books I don’t care about.

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An apt point, then, at which to return to Tolkien’s work. I did say Lord of the Rings would come back. I think this occurs in 2013, in fact, when some madlad instinct directs me to, of all things, pick up The Silmarillion, and discover… I like it7? I think I needed an undergraduate degree in the ancient world and a whole lot more reading maturity to get to this point compared to where I was, but this time it clicked for me. I could look at the prose, the style, the poems, the shape of the stories, and see them for the thing they were, rather than trying to cram them into my childish understanding of what a story is supposed to look like.

I went on from The Silmarillion straight back into LOTR, and enjoyed it a great deal (having forgotten most of the things that weren’t in the films). There were bits that were deeply emotionally impactful, there were pieces of text I found intensely beautiful, and I was able to actually connect with the bones of the story being told about courage in dark times, rather than being put off by the shape and pacing of it.

Tolkien will never be one of my dearest loves, even so. But he matters for the growth he represents, of the person I became who was able to look with different eyes and find the things worth finding. And, though that’s still a few years in the future at this point, Tolkien is the best beloved of my now partner. They’re indelibly connected for me now, and his love of it – his much-explained childhood and adult thoughts and connections to it – have also made it richer for me.

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Next up is another shared love, though this one goes out a little wider. I initially came to Guy Gavriel Kay’s work via a close friend who insisted I would like The Lions of Al-Rassan, and though she proved entirely correct, it is The Sarantine Mosaic duology that truly lives with me of his work, particularly Lord of Emperors, the second of the two.

I am not, particularly, an emotionally effusive reader (or experiencer of media in general). I don’t cry at sad films. I’m not struck in the heart by things, for all that books that thrive on the emotional are often my favourites. But occasionally, that proves false, and never more so than here. Someone just needs to remind me of destroyed mosaics, of dolphins, of numinous bovids in the woods, and it stabs me in the feelings all over again.

So Guy Gavriel Kay stands on this list for feeling books. For exquisite, cathartic melancholy, and reading things that give me an emotional hangover from which I need several days to recover. I don’t think I understood why people talked about wanting to watch a film that would make them cry until I read this.

His work also picks up on another ongoing thread, of taking existing work (in his case, history) and playing around with it to make it into something else. While he sticks pretty close to historical facts in a lot of cases, Kay’s work introduces enough humanity into his characters to take them out of their context (aided by the brief intrusions of the fantastical). His work is proof that, while fidelity is not the standard by which reimaginings, reworkings and their ilk should be judged, nor is it a barrier to greatness. As with all things, its how they are executed. And his execution, his management of emotional arcs and personal feeling, is what makes these more than the sum of their parts.

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And then, a book I don’t quite remember when I read. A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar lurks in the shadows of my memory, in the hinterlands of my mid-twenties.

Its impact however… does not. This is yet another strand in the thread of books about people, the theme that never goes away, but one that drags it up into the macro by also being about culture, about estrangement and disconnection, as well as what a culture looks like and means. This is a thread that will be picked up by later loves (particularly, in SF, by A Memory Called Empire and by some of LeGuin’s work when I finally get there) but this, I think, is its first true flowering, and possibly the strongest iteration of it even since in fantasy at all. And, by being those things, it’s also a connection to the idea of being able to fall in love with a culture, or at least the little part of it you’re able to see as someone not fully immersed in it.

Samatar dwells a lot on language, how it feeds into into culture and identity, and how it is a tool that can be used on the self as much as the world, but also on the fragility of it all – the way incompleteness, the very biased nature of the act of writing or misunderstanding can fracture or muddle the connections between people as much as language forges them. In that, this work connects out also to other, newer loves – Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley, for instance. It’s a book about the power of words not in the trite way, not in the simplistic, hopeful, magical way of childhood stories. These are words as they have been used in reality, their power metaphorical but still vital.

And above and besides all of that, it’s simply a book that’s a beautiful piece of craft. It is another step along a path of realising how deeply that is something I value in my reading.

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As with my time at university, the rest of my mid to late twenties (about a seven year period) is characterised by so much mush. A lot (though not all) of it is urban fantasy, which was the style at the time. And like the last interlude, there were some I enjoyed just fine, series I read for a while and never finished – Rivers of London, Alex Verus, Shades of Magic, and even some that weren’t set in London but that really was the style at the time. Again as before, they aren’t things that have stuck in any meaningful way. They haven’t meant anything to me, or shaped me, or helped me in understanding why I read as I read.

I don’t know if that was the books, my inability to find the good ones8, or something about that period of my life. Maybe who and where I was then just wasn’t open to having my mind blown in the way I would be in the following seven years. Maybe this is all actually just an artefact of how I think about my past in reading, and the recency bias just obliterates much in its wake. I don’t know.

But in my heart of hearts, which no one can argue with when I’m the one writing this9, I just don’t think it was a particularly great period for fantasy books.

The only thing I think did change in this period isn’t a noticeable single shift, but a continuation of what has been going on in the background since 2012. I was still reviewing here, still writing, and getting better at it as I went. And it is as this period closes, as I go into the next section, where I think that change really does kick off.

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And so, the period from around 2017 to around now, of around 7.5 years. Like with SF, this is, more or less, the period in which I was really paying attention. I started reading Hugos a little before, patchily, but 2017 is when I start taking it seriously, when I track my reading, when I think I start writing in a way that doesn’t entirely shame my current self. This is a much richer period for books too, one where I am finally having to make choices about the things that mattered and shaped me, because there are finally options.

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The first one though is clear. It’s The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. It’s a book I reread approximately annually, and have done since I first picked it up in 2020 (it’s great, we can have hard facts now rather than vague memories; thanks spreadsheet10). Of all the things so far on this list, this one is by far the most like Sabriel in that I cannot really quite express why it means so much to me, only that it does.

And it plays in many of the same sandpits as many other beloveds (empire, culture, duty, loyalty, history, the power and limits on that power that a person might wield in a complex system). But more than any one thing it does, it gives me a framework to which I can return and find things anew on every reading, in a way I don’t really do with many other books. I just don’t really reread things but this… this is special. I go back, and where last time will have been a religion reread (because I really like how she not only integrates Maia’s personal faith but also the differing norms about how people approach religion across time and cultures, AND how religion in this is a cultural phenomenon, rather than my personal bête noire of ‘sup bitches, the gods are real), the next will be a use of language reread.

And that’s what this stands for, even if I can’t quite understand why I love it so. It’s a text that exemplifies the attitude to reviewing that a review isn’t a crystallisation of the truth of a work down into a digestible form, but a way of looking at that work, trapped in the amber of the moment and the reviewer and their very context driven approach to the text. I could review this book every time I read it and come out with something completely different and that’s exactly what’s great about it and the act of reviewing. There is no fundamental truth, to any work. There is only that which I bring to it in the moment. And it is that that I want when reading someone else – I want to see through their eyes, if only for a moment.

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So at last we come to the tenth book. It’s very hard to pick. The last few years have been rich pickings for me, in many ways, and in a few years more I might have five more options clamouring to make this list. But here and now, my choice is A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson, which epitomises (in the skilful way his prose seems to do five things at once in his storytelling) several key things about my reading recently.

I came to this book with purpose. I had been looking at the books I’d read, and noticed a pattern, where almost all the books about queer men were not written by men. While I’m not fully invested in own voices only and forever, that it had become a discernible pattern made me want to understand it – why was I tending to read those books? Was it to do with who was being published, or what I was choosing to read, or some other combination? So I asked for recommendations for books to read by queer men, and got many suggestions, of which this is the one that sticks most clearly with me. It does so for many reasons, not least of which being that it’s a stone cold, top tier banger. It’s emotionally vivid, does historicity in a way that other books could only dream of, has a twist at the end that made my jaw drop, and has prose you could just die for. It made me want to immediately consume every single thing this man has ever written. And I wouldn’t have found it, or at least not until much later, if I hadn’t felt the need to go poking at my reading for oddities.

But that’s not all. It’s also the only book on this list that’s not a novel. And so, alongside intentional reading, it stands for a medium I only came to in the last few years, but one I’ve come to love dearly11. So many of the books that were clawing for attention for this final slot were, likewise, novellas – the closest contender being Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune (which would have done double duty for “series that are greater than the sum of their parts”). But once I lit upon A Taste of Honey, I couldn’t let it drop. There is just something perfect about it. The way it combines doing so many different things, in such a small space, and yet never feels crammed or rushed. It is the absolute epitome of what a good novella looks like, because it occupies exactly and only the space it means to, does everything possible and some things that feel quite improbable with that limited space, and holds an outsize spot in my heart and memory because of it. It is, purely and simply, art.

Which is what I want to end my list on, at least for now. Like reviews, this is a context driven work, and will not – cannot – stand as a perfect, permanent record of a route taken through fantasy to the now. But the person who sits here right now, writing, holds this up as a great example of what and how she reads in this moment.

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This was a much harder journey to write than the one into SF. At first, I thought it was because I’m more of a fantasy reader – that’s how I think of myself, and is borne out in the stats of what I read – but as I kept writing, it became clear it was something else entirely.

I realised, as I was choosing books, how much of my fantasy reading is defined by negative space. There are big, noticeable things missing here, and it’s not just because I’m trying to be a reading hipster. There are some I’ve read and who just don’t live in the deepest recesses of my soul – your Lewises, your Zelaznys, your Hobbs and the like – but there are also many, so many, that I just… haven’t read, or haven’t completed. No Malazan, no Wheel of Time, no Sword of Truth, no Shannara, no David Eddings, no McAffrey, no Cook, no Feist, no Gemmell, no Donaldson, no Williams, no Pierce, and that’s just epic fantasy. There’s no Stephenie Meyer, no Anita Blake, here, and my god if I wasn’t perfectly placed to latch onto those ones.

There’s no clear answer for me quite why that is. And it leads me to wonder – what authority to do I even have to talk about books now, when all my own reading stands on such scant foundations? Can I truly know what I’m talking about, without being able to see the roots back into the past in the books of the now? I worry, sometimes, I really do. And that’s why I found this so tricky to write. Am I revealing the gaping hole in the centre of my knowledge, exposing my ignorance for all to see, and think me the lesser critic for it?

But I cling to that lens theory of reviews. Whatever my background, however scant, whatever touchstone missed that someone else thinks critical, those absences shape the way I look at the books I read just as much as the presences. There is no perfect lens, no perfect knowledge, only differently flawed views. I could play catch up forever and still not satisfy the urge. There would always be something more, and in chasing it, I would miss the richness of the now. And so, I have to hold that my lens is valuable as it is, for its idiosyncracy, because it means what I see is different from the next person. And so, my pathway into fantasy, full of holes. But mine.

  1. On main? Ew. ↩︎
  2. Chapter 29, “The Choice of Yrael”. Shivers every time. ↩︎
  3. In my since experience, I have come to believe that Garth Nix writes kick ass, solid, thoughtful, self-doubting but get-it-done female characters, and absolute wet hen men characters, and that’s simply what you’re going to get with his work. I’m fine with it, but I do find it interesting. ↩︎
  4. You might think, given my age, that another, rather more wizardly book would have been the cause of this, but Rice was quite shitty right up front and centre early on (especially in the early days of online fanfiction), whereas I didn’t twig JKR until some time later. I also don’t think HP really changed my brain chemistry the way Rice’s books did. I loved the books at the time, don’t get me wrong (and was fully along for the whole cultural moment we were all having with them), but I’ve loved a lot of books. This is about the ones that made a lasting difference to me and my reading. ↩︎
  5. Why call it a rat when it can be a Ceryni? No, I did not have to look that up, because I have the details from these godforsaken tomes engraved on my soul. Pity me. I did however look up the character named after one, and was greeted by one hell of a quotation for my pains: “His mother worked in the Dancing Slippers (a brothel), and his father, Torrin, was killed by The Thieves because he was a squimp”. What is a squimp you may ask? That, I do not recall. And I have no intention of finding out. ↩︎
  6. If I wanted to be either unkind to myself or simply accurate, depending on your perspective, I would call this series one of the few points at which my taste in books and films align. This is the book equivalent of all the films I love best. I have terrible taste in films. ↩︎
  7. Looking back, I genuinely don’t know why I did this, given I didn’t like LOTR. Why not The Hobbit? Why not LOTR again? But the me of 2013, hip deep in a masters in which she is trying to learn Hittite at a rate of knots and proudly eating pasta-pesto sandwiches and G&D’s as her staple food sources, is probably best not analysed too closely. ↩︎
  8. This is not an invitation to suggest good ones I missed. Every time people do this, it’s ones I read and didn’t like, and then I have to find a way to say “that’s nice for you, but I disagree” and it’s just awkward. ↩︎
  9. Feel free to in the comments or my bsky mentions. I’m not the boss of you. ↩︎
  10. Threadsheet. ↩︎
  11. If the monthly column on the subject wasn’t a hint. ↩︎

Posted in All, Else, Fantasy, Not A Review | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Six from Six – First Half of 2025

Posted on 29/06/2025 by Roseanna

The halfway point of 2025 approaches!

Of the forty-nine books I’ve read in 2025 so far, there have been seven 5 star reads – this is, for me, unusual (though it does make it easier to cut down for a six from six format). I had been getting a vague sense that 2025 hasn’t been a great year before I properly looked into it, but the stats bear out that feeling:

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This is obviously only comparing half of 2025 vs the whole of previous years, but I think it would be a little strange for all my bangers to be concentrated in the latter half of the year. I’m not sure I can construct a reason for this shift (which seems to be an extension of a trend since 2019), but there’s a number of plausible reasons. Maybe I’m getting pickier, the more I read? Maybe increasingly more of my reading is driven by factors outside of “I chose it”? Maybe it’s to do with what I’m reading? I don’t know.

I am leaning towards the me being pickier theory, simply because all of the excess is clearly getting dumped into 4 stars, so it’s not that I’m reading bad books, just that the absolute top tier is being shaved off.

On the flip side, it does look as though there’s a bump in 1 star, but that is just an artefact of being less through the year than previous ones – that bump is a single book, and is operating as I would expect, because there is nearly always one absolute clanger in my awards season reading.

Theorising aside, and for all that there were fewer options to choose from than I might expect, I have read some genuinely fantastic books so far this year. Some of them are throwbacks, but some of them are 2025 releases, and ones that I expect to be fully yelling about come awards season when it rolls around next year, which is at least a promising thing to hold onto. Fingers crossed the rest of 2025 delivers some extra bangers (and there are forthcoming releases I have my eye on in hope), but I have something to go in prepared with, at least.

Running through them chronologically, here are my pick for the six best books from the last six months:

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Kalyna the Cutthroat by Elijah Kinch Spector – review here

I finished this one on the 1st of January, which makes it predominantly a 2024 read, I will admit. But it was really good.

I read and enjoyed Kalyna the Soothsayer back in March 2024, but not a full 5 stars enjoyed. It was a good – and, more importantly, interesting – read, but it didn’t fully capture me. In a rare feat, the sequel absolutely did. Elijah Kinch Spector has taken everything that was good about the first book – the interesting character perspective, the creative use of immersion, the politics, the voice that brims over out of the book and charms the reader, warring with the behaviour of the character – and finessed it all. Not only that, but made the sequel shine precisely as a sequel. It’s very hard to talk about Kalyna the Cutthroat because a lot of what it does well is relational. It takes things presented in the first book and complicates them, or turns them on their head to examine them from a new angle. The most obvious of these is the shift in character perspective. We go from being submerged in Kalyna’s voice and thinking patterns, to viewing her from the outside, from someone specifically resisting her charming nature and the way that changes it all. I spent a lot of the time of reading this book looking back at the first and having to reassess sympathies, because it made clear just how much of Kalyna’s voice was what charmed me and defined the narrative. That’s… I mean it’s just great.

And it operates at levels other than just character. EKS is using perspective purposefully, and weaving it all in with a book that is, at its most fundamental level, about how people (and peoples) view one another, and the falsehoods that can sit within those assumptions. I cannot help but love a book where everything it does bends round to support its central thesis, where every choice in plot, form, tone, voice, whatever, is a tool used to the furthest extreme. This is a series that seems to be being slept on so far, and I really think it deserves more love, because it’s doing a hell of a lot and well.

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Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins – review here

Another January read, another 2024 book that has mostly been slept on.

This is a story told in obituaries. I expected it to be a little grim, and a lot sad, but mainly what it felt was, in the end, hopeful. There’s a lightness and playfulness to it that bonds well with the optimistic view of humanity at an individual level – and what level could one view but the individual when telling a story through obituaries.

Robins uses obituaries to build a picture in whose background one can slowly discern a story, told out of order, across a wide span of time and space, about a robot who had a human daughter and lost her. But around all that is also the stuff of the story. Not filler to hide the “real” plot behind, but a vast swathe of life – not all of it human – told in the intimate details of those close, or the remove of an obituarist, or from a plethora of other perspectives. It’s humanity telling humanity, in the story of a robot seeking to understand the same.

In many ways, it’s a hard one to discuss, because so much of what it does well is in the cumulative. Each individual obituary (and the occasional intrusion of other things like etymologies) are interesting on their own. You can discuss them, mine them for clues about the robot’s story, analyse them. But it’s only when they echo with all the other individual stories that the magic happens, and that’s much harder to pin down – Robins has the knack of just the right amount of subtlety (at least for me), so that the story builds in the subconscious rather than being smacked into the reader’s face. It’s there. It’s unmissable. But it’s not insistent about it. There are various thematic threads that crop up again and again, about loss and death and forgetting/remembering, and about personhood, whose exploration is made all the more sensitive by this choral approach.

It’s a book I loved wholeheartedly, and know I will come back to read again. I’ve been desperately trying to foist it on anyone I can, so consider this yet another nudge.

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The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar – review here

This one is an interesting one – the fun of looking back is in reassessing how time has changed your view of a book, and this one has been rendered into a pleasant haze. I remember loving it. I remember enjoying the lyricism of the prose, and how that captured the sense of folk songs from which the story draws its inspirations. I remember thinking about how artfully done that was.

Can I remember the plot though? Not… really. There are a couple of salient points that have stuck, but on the whole, it has drifted away from me. I don’t have the clarity I have with the previous two, where there are moments from the stories captured in amber in my brain, that I could talk about on and on. I think what this speaks to is what my experience of the story lingered on – what I enjoyed was the process, the experience, the voice and the vibes, rather than the linear progression of plot beats and sequence of events. If it were a folk song, say, I liked the singer and the vocal effects more than the tune and lyrics. I couldn’t hum it for you the next day.

Does that make this one less good? I don’t know. Does something have to stick in my memory for it to be worthwhile, or can a story be ephemeral and still excellent? Certainly for music, I do tend to think that if I can’t hum a bit of it later, it’s probably not stuck with me because it was less good. But for stories, I’m less sure. I do remember being intensely charmed by it in the moment, and that is something I value. It’s just impossible to hold that up in contest with things I have a full recollection of.

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Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou – review here

And in precisely that contrast, Sour Cherry succeeds on many of the same levels as The River Has Roots – lyricism, voice, drawing on folk tales – but has stuck in my memory. I read it less than a month later, but there are shards of imagery that are just as bright and sharp as they were the day I turned the last page.

What drew me to this one most is the extent to which it is about the process of storytelling. There is a lot of dwelling in it on what is and is not said, and how. The narrator speaks directly to the reader, and engages them – makes them complicit in – the changing of details and setting in order to make the story work better, or be more convincing. Right from the first page, the stall is set out that the story is being told in another register than it “truly” is, and the reader is left to work out exactly what the story beneath this story is. And some parts of that mystery are never fully resolved. There’s a give and take that is extremely skilfully managed, as well as the use of different voices, different ways of looking into and out of the narrative.

I am increasingly wary of myth and folklore retellings, but this is the pattern for what they should look like. Theodoridou is constantly in dialogue with his source material, taking nothing for granted, and using it purposefully, rather than simply reviving and refreshing something without making clear why it was necessary to work with an existing story at all. I do not believe I have ever read a retelling – or a story – quite like it, and it is beautiful.

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Foreigner by C J Cherryh

No review for this one, and a big ol’ throwback in contrast to two 2024 and three 2025 books on this list.

Foreigner is a book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time, after learning how many of my faves (not least A Memory Called Empire and Ancillary Justice) have it counted amongst their antecedents in genre and that a number of people whose taste I vibe with and respect adored it.

As is usual with “book a bunch of reviewers love”, it turned out to be great. Book people know what they’re doing talking about books, who knew?

And it was a fun exercise precisely because I was looking at it as an antecedent to some of my more modern favourites. My experience with older SF has often been that, because I’m familiar with the later versions that have messed around and built off its ideas, it feels like the original is a bit hollow. Not so here. I can see the rich vein of what was drawn on for later stories, but they haven’t made this all the lesser for their later entries in the same lineage.

I am always a sucker for good politics in fiction, because politics in fiction is fundamentally about people, and that’s always what I’m most here for reading. Cherryh has done politics excellently, and simultaneously done it while exploring a cultural clash between two sets of worldviews, assumptions and modes of operation that may even go right down to the biological. These are two sets of people who simply cannot examine the world – and their relationships – in the same way. They are fundamentally incapable of shifting view to overlap in that way! And that is the sexiest of all possible people stories. It is also the sexiest of all possible stories because its political context is not solvable by the events of a single book, and the choices of a single person. He can operate on the small scale parts, but there’s an acknowledgment of a wider world and problems that exist outside of the scope of a hero, and I love those books too. Complex systems! Complex people! That’s how you get me to read things.

Much like reading an Ursula K. LeGuin book, I closed the final page with an internal cry of “damn“, because I knew it meant that there was more catching up to do. But, as with LeGuin, it will be worth it.

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Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman – review here

This might be hyperbole. Maybe I will eat my words in six months time. If I do, it will say great things about the rest of the year. But at the moment, I feel very comfortable in saying this is my best book of 2025. It will take genuine miracles to shift this off my top spot.

I am a sucker for everything Fellman does, and this is Fellman doing all that at intensity. There’s the prose (delicious, haunting). There’s the characters (complex, flawed, tragic). There’s the world (tantalising). But above all, there’s an emotional core to the story that I struggle to pin down but which is what has stuck with me since reading it.

There are several stories being told here. One is of a boy’s – Griffon’s – escape from an oppressive home to new parents. Another, the one in which he reconstructs the story of those parents by using diary entries and other texts written by his new father, as they lived in a distant city during a revolution. That constructed story steadily reveals a world both familiar and strange (is it science fiction or fantasy? I would answer simply, yes), whose parameters operate differently but are never exchanged, and form an alluring backdrop for a revolution whose lasting impact is most prominently on the people Griffon came to only after they were shaped and hurt by it. Stephensport, the strange city, is a sucking hole in the narrative, source of mysteries both to Griffon and the reader. We can only construct it by the effects it has on people, those unwilling to answer questions about it, but how it nonetheless shaped their lives forever, and their ability to function out in the world beyond it.

It’s a story about relationships had by flawed people, shaped by their circumstances, but loving and rich with it. And it is, above all, a story about love in all its forms, for people who have been through many things, who carry the scars on body and soul. It’s a portrait, painted so we see the brush strokes – the way Fellman uses the different narratives to highlight how people are portrayed in their own words and others – and I love it the most for that. For being, resolutely, a book. It’s embedded in its method of storytelling, and I was unable to stop appreciating the craft of words as I read it.

Basically, it’s great at everything and you should read it, even if Tor makes it really hard to get hold of in the UK.

So, for all there were fewer to choose from, this year has had some properly stunning books in the first half nonetheless. Still, I hope I have a harder job of narrowing things down when I reach December. In the intervening months, I have a big pile of novellas to get through, a fair chunk of non-fiction and some novels I’ve had my eye on for, in some instances, years as well as the LeGuin shortlist to finish up and the usual run of reviews. There is cause for optimism. But if not, I hope at least I can figure out what it is that’s driving this downturn of bangers.

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But I’m not quite done…

I didn’t read it this year, so it doesn’t truly count, but it only came out in May (and I’d have included it if I’d read it then), so I am adding in The Incandescent by Emily Tesh as a bonus extra treat. I reviewed it here, and I loved it for its approach to class as a core component of the dark academia subgenre, and for the way the main characters so fully embodies a type of person I found intensely sympathetic in all her flaws and skills.

Posted in All, Fantasy, Not A Review, Science Fiction | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hugo Novella Roundup

Posted on 16/06/2025 by Roseanna

I’m not going to split out my Hugo Novella ballot discussion this year into separate posts, but handle it all as one. Part of that is because I’ve already reviewed several of them, another part because I cannot read one of them, a third because I’ve been on a podcast discussing them (you can listen to the Hugo novel and novella 2025 episode of A Meal of Thorns here, in which we are, of course, scintillating), and a yet further because one of them I just… don’t have a tonne to say about. But we’ll get to that.

The shortlist contains:

Screenshot from the Worldcon Website showing: Best Novella - The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo (Tordotcom) - The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed (Tordotcom) - Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard (Tordotcom) - The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar (Tordotcom) - The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler (Tordotcom) - What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher (Nightfire) 739 ballots cast for 209 nominees, finalists range 75 to 135

Before I get into other details, I want to acknowledge one big thing here. That’s a whole ass Tor sweep (Nightfire is a Tor imprint, if you weren’t aware). So apparently there was literally no other publisher putting stuff out that was better than any of these six Tor imprint novellas, in the whole year? I know that’s not actually how it works, but that is kind of the result of how it reads.

You may know (or not… maybe I haven’t yelled about it enough) that I have a column over at Ancillary Review of Books. Specifically, a column about small press novellas. This is my wheelhouse, at the moment. I have been in the trenches, and I can confidently say – there are non-Tor novellas that ought to be on this list. They are better, more interesting, more thought provoking, more fun, more enjoyable, whatever adjective you want. They are out there. And I am, it’s safe to say, mad about it. It’s not Tor’s fault, obviously. They’re doing what they ought to do which is marketing the heck out of their novella offerings, and before that, actually having a widespread novella offering to begin with. This is not the only Tor-sweep novella shortlist you could construct, even. Generally speaking, they get in good authors, who publish mostly good stuff, and then they sell it. And people buy it, read it, and nominate it.

The nominators are the problem, here. Us. We are the problem. People need to look even very slightly outside of this blinkered view of what’s available. Yes, Tor is easy to come by1. I get it. But to find another one is actually not that fucking hard. This is what comes up every year when people discuss it, how hard it is to find the other stuff. My beloved, if you were willing, if you wanted to find books better than just the first thing available to your awareness, if you wanted to try… no, it is not. There are people out there on social media screaming their lungs out about what’s on offer, you just have to listen. People like Suzan Palumbo, or the good folks at Lady Business with the Hugo spreadsheet of doom, or Elias or Abigail or… well anyway, you get the point. Oh and there’s me, of course. If you don’t want to look? Ok, that’s your prerogative. But be honest about it.

In any case, we have what we have, and for all that I have my issues with what does and does not get nominated, I cannot and do not hold any of the individual works or authors accountable for there being yet another Tor sweep. Like Tor themselves, they did as they should which was write novellas that people clearly resonated with. I can only evaluate them as works, as they are presented to me, and give my thoughts on them as individuals, as a ranking and as a set.

So, in the order I read them:

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The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

Reviewed2 for Nerds of a Feather here.

I enjoyed this one a lot, thought I didn’t love it with all my very heart. I had a good, if increasingly creepy, time reading it and appreciated how it gets to the heart of its themes. Because is this just a story about a deeply unsettling forest, or is it actually about power and tyranny and who deserves their fate. Who is innocent in a harsh, oppressive world? This is a loaded question; you know the answer. But Mohamed does the proper work through of it, and there is a genuinely coherent thesis on display by the end, rather than all relying on implication and a reader who probably just agrees. There’s tough emotional and moral stuff running all through it, and she never shies away from tackling that thoughtfully and interestingly.

I did not nominate it, because I had an absolute shit tonne of novellas I loved with my whole chest and it was super hard to pick, but I can imagine another year in which I might have done. It’s good, well written, intensely readable, and manages the balance of its aesthetics and heart extremely well to give something that feels like the horror is supporting the messaging extremely well. I also found Veris, the main character, an excellent ride-along perspective to be immersed in, and her moral dilemmas felt authentic and well-managed.

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The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

Reviewed for ARB here.

This one I did love with all my very heart. Because it’s phenomenal. I nominated it. It is hands down, no question, I will fight you in a car park, top of my ballot.

There’s a lot it does well, whether that be portrayal of faith, oppressive atmosphere, the complexities of social coercion, the problem of the academy, culture, character, much else besides, but the thing that sticks with me is how it tackles class and class mobility, beyond the surface level. It centres heavily the idea of “lifting” someone out of lower class life and into something “better”, but also examines the long-term legacy that that action has, not just on the person themself but their descendants, and how that assimilation does – or does not – work. It is thoughtful and cutting and carved out a space in my brain to rattle around in for months.

It also does a conclusion style I generally like with these sorts of stories that involve dramatic overturns of existing structures, which is “ending on hope”. You cannot hope to solve the whole of a culture in a novel or especially in a novella, so Samatar leaves it at the point of taking the first step, with a wide pool of possibility spinning out into the future beyond, but the ideas and themes are brought to a satisfying conclusion. I don’t need – or even want – every single loose end in every single work to be tidied away clearly. And this perfectly encapsulates that. What needs to be said has been said.

Truly amazing work, its place well deserved.

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The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo

Reviewed for Nerds of a Feather here.

I really like this series, but I’m not sure this is the best entry in it. I mean, it’s hard to keep something like this going for five (and soon to be more) volumes and have them all be banger after solid banger. The Empress of Salt and Fortune set the bar HIGH, and so we’ve been incredibly lucky how many of them have come so close (or even exceeded it). If I encountered it unfettered by comparison, I think I’d possibly be kinder to The Brides of High Hill, because it is fundamentally excellent – well plotted, well paced, well considered, and with the artful but readable prose Nghi Vo does so beautifully – but it comes to a me who has full knowledge of its fellows, and so it suffers ever so slightly because of the lack of novelty. And because it has a much less prominent structural conceit than any of its fellows, and that is the thing I most love and yearn for in a Singing Hills book. It suffered for the absence of something I have come to expect and love, which sucks but also… it’s part of a series. It exists within that context and unfortunately must live by it.

Incidentally, while I do not tend to nominate in Best Series because I don’t like it as a category3, I was sad to see Singing Hills still doesn’t have the wordcount in it to be eligible for nomination. Imo, if a five novella series isn’t substantial enough to make the cut, the minimums have been set too high. I hope it gets a shot in a future year, because if I am going to support something in Best Series as it currently exists, it would be something like this where it adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts, and where its Seriesness can be evaluated and appreciated outside of the success of a single volume.

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What Feasts At Night by T. Kingfisher

I… did not read this one. My partner read it before I did, and flagged up that it contains some stuff I am deeeeeply uncomfortable about (check footnote for possibly spoilery details4), and so I decided it was not worth me pushing myself through that for one more item on the shortlist, especially as I have read a metric shitload of T. Kingfisher already, and specifically the previous entry in this series. It’s an imperfect view of the shortlist, but one that doesn’t have me flapping my hands and feeling like I need a shower, so… And especially because it’s horror. What Moves the Dead was already pushing my comfort boundaries when I read it for the creepiness.

If it compares to its predecessor, I suspect my view of it would be that it’s “fine”. My experience generally has been that I prefer T. Kingfisher’s early, indie-pub work to her more recent tradpub, which I often find feels like it’s had too many of the sharp edges sanded off. She writes well, and the floor for quality of what she puts out is really quite high, but the ceiling isn’t being threatened by the last few I’ve read (which feels a massive shame to me).

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Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard

The first (and only) of these I read but did not like. I’ve picked up de Bodard’s work before (Xuya and otherwise) and we alas do not vibe generally. I was not a huge fan of The Red Scholar’s Wake last year, and unfortunately Navigational Entanglements does some of the same things that bothered me there, while also investing in some unfortunately clunky prose and underfed worldbuilding, even for a novella.

One of those things is insta-love, and I simply do not vibe with that. But I would possibly have been less bothered, had it felt like the world and politics happening around these two characters could support the weight needed for the story to make sense, or had there been fewer sentence level swings and misses, or very specific odd choices (at one point the narrative… explains that two eighths are a quarter? There is no context that makes that make sense). Sentences don’t seem to hang together and there are occasional intrusions of language that don’t seem to fit with tone and style of the whole (“vibe” gets dropped in somewhat without warning).

I also got the sense reading to that this could so easily have been a novel and better for it – a lot of what doesn’t work is because things aren’t fleshed out enough or given space to build more naturally, which might have be solved by… well, giving it more space. I tend to prefer novellas that embrace being novellas, and this did not achieve that quite so much.

It was a deeply unsatisfying read on a number of levels, and one I struggle a little more to see why it made the shortlist.

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The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

I left this until last because I always try to read the new-to-me shortlist from least to most anticipated enjoyment. But I was not expecting to like it quite so much as I did. It has much of what makes the previous book of his – The Mountain in the Sea – interesting, but without some of the things that held it back. The novella format suits the story well, and its brevity makes it a well-crafted idea that hasn’t overstayed its welcome. But more than anything, it’s the emotion that took me by surprise. There are some moments of real heft of feeling, where he really nails capturing the essence of an idea, of a moment, a memory or an emotion, and finds a way to put it into words. He lingers where he needs to linger and skims where he needs to skim. It isn’t overwrought, or desperately earnest, but there are just some deftly flicked lines of “oof”.

For all that this is a story about extinction, about human greed and destruction, and what it takes to reject and fight that, the part of it that stood out most to me was a different strand, in which this is a book predominantly about memory and identity, and how those intertwine. The elements of external dilemma and internal experience meld seamlessly into something more than the sum of its parts. What a great way to finish my reading.

—

Ok so… final ranking:

  1. The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain by Sofia Samatar (my beloved)
  2. The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler
  3. The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed
  4. The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo
  5. Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard

Unranked: What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher (if I didn’t read it, I’m not going to rank it because I don’t know where it belongs).

There are books I adored that I would have loved to see make this shortlist, and that I think are of higher quality than some of what’s here. I’d have been absolutely made up if we could have replaced some of my lower ranked options with Alex Jeffers’ A Mourning Coat or Lorraine Wilson’s The Last to Drown, or Karin Lowachee’s The Mountain Crown or Knicky L. Abbott’s Tanglewood or A. D. Sui’s The Dragonfly Gambit. But they were always a hope, not an expectation. As it stands, it’s a shortlist with a relatively high floor, as there’s nothing I hate (which is quite unusual) or even aggressively dislike. A relatively good selection, if we look aside from the single publisher, where I’d be moooostly nodding along for them to take the prize, but with one particular standout I’d be really keen to see win. It is hard to overlook that sweep, though.

I guess next year I somehow need to yell about small press novellas… even more? Suggestions for how to do that on a postcard.

—

  1. If you live in the US. Hardcopy Tor (and sometimes even digital) can be a fucking bitch to get hold of in the UK. One day I will own physical versions of all the Singing Hills books by Nghi Vo and I will be content. But until that day, I will constantly ask people when they say that Tor is just the most easily accessible way to get novellas – “for whom?”. ↩︎
  2. I don’t know what it was about 2024 (intrusion of sarcasm voice: sheer volume), but the stuff I had read that made the shortlists, I had predominantly not just read but reviewed. Clearly had a good year for being on trend or something. Very convenient for future me having to sort out my feelings about things. ↩︎
  3. For a number of reasons, but among them – I don’t think we can evaluate how successful a series is until it’s in some way “done”, and the way the award is set up is not geared to that; the rules for what is eligible are so much more complex than any of the other prose categories and I despair when trying to figure out if I can nominate something; there has not been a great deal of variety in the nominees while it has existed (one author – Seanan McGuire – has been on the shortlist every single year, and however good the work is, I don’t think it says great things for an award to be that repetitive). ↩︎
  4. Moths. Nope. No thank you. ↩︎
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Alien Clay – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Posted on 07/06/2025 by Roseanna
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The sixth and final Hugo nominee for Best Novel, and I’ve saved… if not the best, then certainly one of the contenders for last. It’s a thoughtful, dark, critical and sometimes genuinely funny take on biology, politics and the futility of rigid boundaries for taxonomy and humanity alike, and I think it leans into exactly what Tchaikovsky is best at.

Professor Arton Daghdev has been exiled from Earth. He has been deemed a threat – quite rightly – by The Mandate, an authoritarian regime who brook no disputes with their fixed view of the world and everyone’s place in it. Daghdev has dabbled a bit too hard in both the proscribed science and the revolutionary subcommittee, and after a year on the run from the authorities has been caught, put into to suspended animation and shipped off to one of humanity’s brutal prison/science planets, to survive what is left of his life exploring the deadly fauna of a world colloquially known as Kiln.

And there’s a lot of science to be done on Kiln. The wildlife does not behave at all like anyone expects, and surviving it is a full time job for the forced prison labour and the camp staff alike. The Mandate does everything by numbers, including acceptable human losses to the many risks presented by interplanetary prison-industrial colonialism, so it’s grim, grimmer and grimmest right from the outset. But the longer he spends on Kiln – when he’s not chipping in to an attempted uprising against the camp commandent – the more Daghdev begins to see that the Mandate’s rigid approach to the world, and especially to science, simply cannot accommodate the reality of what is being presented to them by this extremely alien environment. When his team gets stranded out in the wilderness, unable to return to camp for their regularly scheduled decontamination procedure in time, that wilderness starts to become an even more imminent threat, and what everyone thinks they understand about Kiln is forced to change.

This is, in my opinion, peak Tchaikovsky shit. We’ve got weird alien science. We’ve got politics. We’ve got some dark humour. We’ve got space stuff. All the things that go together to make what he does go brrrr. If you told me, absent context, there was a Tchaikovsky up for an SF award, this is pretty close to what I would imagine that to be, the platonic ideal of his work. It’s what made me read Children of Time and go “ooh”. It’s a particular sort of SFnal joy.

In this iteration, I think what actually shines brightest is less the science, and more how the science intertwines with the politics. In the current climate, it is not hard to see what conversations in the real world are being echoed by the Mandate’s rigidity, its determination to make the science and facts fit within their limited ideology rather than being willing to be led by the truth, however complex. I can think of several specific echoes right away, on both sides of the pond, and I’m sure there are a few more I haven’t considered. Tchaikovsky has managed to hit that precise right note of “current” that can be picked up by the various different iterations of the same problem. For me, the thing it kept bringing me back to was the recent UK Supreme Court ruling on gender, and the pervasive atmosphere of transphobia in the country that surrounds and preceeded it – the determination that biology and identity can be crammed into the simplest possible conception of gender, and then being upset when people and science both point out the obvious flaws. Tchaikovsky’s themes on this go hard and clear on their perspective – rigid binaries, rigid hierarchies of categorisation, just aren’t supported by reality. The evil government is the one that wants to restrict. Anyone with a lick of sense should be opposed to that heavy-handed, truth-twisting ideology. I’m sure someone could take the wrong message from the book, because such is the way of all fiction, but it’s trying its damnedest to make them work for it if so.

But the thing is, for all that it is incredibly clear in its thinking, it’s not heavy-handed in a way that feels claustrophobic, or as if it doesn’t trust the reader. I often find myself pushed out of novels where it seems as though every point, every idea, the author feels the need to confirm it, because the risk of the reader missing it is something that can’t be allowed. I flatter myself that I’m a relatively competent reader, and so in those often find myself going “yes yes, I get it, please”, harried by their solicitation and repetition. I like to be trusted. I know – specifically from reading commentary around R. F. Kuang’s Babel1, but not exclusively that – that for whatever point I think was blindingly obvious, there will be a reader who not only needed the nudge, but even still missed it and thinks the book is confusing. It truly takes all sorts. So I do try to be sympathetic to books like that. But I much prefer, as Tchaikovsky manages here, ones that don’t overburden me with clarity at the cost of flow and trust.

That being said, there are points where the story does feel overburdened, though not with explanation. There’s a moment around 2/3 to 3/4 in where we reach a critical point of the narrative, and on the cusp of it, the narrator decides that actually… we’re going to skip ahead until after. We’ll come back to the reveal in a bit, you can see the results first. Structurally, I really enjoyed this. But it necessarily comes with an amount of foreshadowing, and this started to overstay its welcome after a little while. It’s not a lack of trust, exactly, more akin instead to a joke that the teller still thinks is funny but the listener is starting to have enough of. We all know what’s going on. But it’s a moment I wasn’t reveling in as much as the telling clearly was.

It did however resolve, and after a fairly dramatic turn of events, bring the book to a conclusion I found both slightly surprising and very satisfying. I have mixed success with ambiguous endings, but this one – I think because it is only ambiguous within some very specific bounds – absolutely sidestepped those concerns. It ends on a moral dilemma of sorts, one that isn’t resolved on page, but the bounds and framing for it have been very clearly set up throughout the course of the story, so it also doesn’t really need to. The protagonist and those around him are left with a choice, some of whose parameters echo those they have been fighting against for the whole story, but which would ultimately be part of the fight against them. Can one do something monstrous as an act of liberation? Should one? It is left unsaid what the answer is, but something for the reader to ponder on afterwards, in the context of all the decisions made up to that point, and what we know about the brutality of the power from which liberation is being sought.

Ambiguity and I may not always be friends, but I do like stories that acknowledge that moral problems don’t always have truly “right” answers. Especially in a book that has been so clear when things do have obvious rights and wrongs, it feels honest to acknowledge the sticking points and linger on them when they do arise.

And in its portrayal of the monstrous, both the wildlife of Kiln and the possible decisions ahead of the protagonists at the end of the story, I find that honesty a refreshing contrast to another book on the Hugo shortlist, Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. I think it’s because, throughout his story, Tchaikovsky is always willing to allow complexity and genuine darkness, genuine compromise, to his characters. Daghdev isn’t nice, isn’t always good, hasn’t always made good or right decisions. He is stuck in a horrific situation, copes sometimes badly, but we read through that to reach some kind of catharsis because the story faces up to it. People on the right side of history have done bad things, been weak or crumbled under pressure. The resolution that comes for the story on Kiln is one of admissions – the wrongs of the community become known, and they are accepted alongside them, where Nest chooses always to find a way to make exceptions. Moral complexity, for me, requires the bad parts to be made text and confronted, even if there aren’t easy answers for them. Daghdev isn’t necessarily asking for forgiveness (although he – and others – may be quietly hoping for absolution), but they do get acceptance, and that only when the little secret crimes come out. Meanwhile Shesheshen gets forgiveness unasked, for all the things never owned, never confronted. It feels… unbalanced? Unearned? And that contrast made me realise how much I appreciated the catharsis I do feel when acceptance is finally found in Alien Clay.

It’s not a perfect book, and there are points I think where the plotting drags a little, but thematically, it feels mostly tight, and the way its ideas and themes are threaded through the worldbuilding is both satisfying and tidy. It’s a type of SF I don’t normally seek out, but done very well and thoughtfully. And also just being peak Tchaikovsky the whole time. It is also – in a way that seems counterintuitive to the grimness of its plot – genuinely very funny, at least to me, really quite often. Its full of the sort of gallows humour that I found such an authentic character response from Daghdev. Never all the way to actual jokes2, but dry, offhand comments, academic bitchiness and wry observations that worked so well because they were so integrated into the character and his context. That’s what Tchaikovsky does best here, for me: fitting all these pieces together so they not only work, but harmonise. It’s crafted, and crafted well, which is a thing just to be admired when it happens.

—

And so, final Hugo novel rankings are thus:

  1. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley – previously covered here, and the only one of my nominees to make the final ballot.
  2. Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  3. The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett – previously covered here.
  4. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher – previously covered here.
  5. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky – previously covered here.
  6. Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell – previously covered here.

Honestly, I went in expecting Ministry to stay top, and I’m not surprised it did. For all that I like some of the others, admire them, appreciate them… none of them hit me like Ministry did. I will be voting for it, and hoping for it, because it’s really great.

  1. Which I liked a lot, despite it feeling heavy-handed in this way. Reader reviews by people who were stunned that Lettie was a problem made me wildly re-evaluate what I felt about Kuang trusting the reader. Apparently we do not deserve it. ↩︎
  2. Yet somehow wildly funnier than the actually-full-of-jokes Service Model. Humour is so weird. ↩︎
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Someone You Can Build a Nest In – John Wiswell

Posted on 24/05/2025 by Roseanna
Cover of the UK edition of Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell. The cover is mostly green, with trees around the edges and two figures in the foregrolund, pointing to a hazy town in the distance.

This was a difficult review to write. Not because of any internal struggle with speaking my truth or anything – I’m sure we’d all be better off if I did a little less of that – but because uncomplicatedly good and uncomplicatedly bad reviews share one crucial thing in common: it’s hard to be interesting when you’re just banging the one drum. This review risks being one of the latter type.

I don’t want this to turn into just a list of gripes, as it so easily could. It’s not fun to write or read. So I’m going to look at the book at one specific angle, and I ask that you take it as read that there are a bunch of other things I would talk about, were I up to the task of being interesting about them all within a reasonable wordcount. A number of them are covered in Adri’s excellent review at Nerds of a Feather, if you’re interested.

Instead, I’m going to focus on the grace given to characters and the potential for forgiveness both sought by the character and offered at a more abstract scale by the narrative at large, and I’m going to talk about the book in the context of another story about monstrous actions – Bright Air Black by David Vann, a retelling of the story of Medea.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In is the story of Shesheshen, a monster who consumes humans and utilises their organs, bones and hair to survive and conceal herself. Woken early from hibernation by monster hunters, she proceeds to be rattled around by plot, underfed and understrength, avoiding a family convinced she’s cursed them, trying to eat enough people to survive, and getting involved on the hunt for herself while confounding the people out to get her. And falling in love with a human (which may or may not involve wanting to lay eggs in her).

From this premise you can see that there’s an expectation of moral grey area. Shesheshen eats people, which is generally considered impolite by humans in my experience, but she also is being hunted and so is acting to defend herself. In this space surely lives moral complexity? Alas, it does not, in practice. Obviously some of this is because we are embedded in Shesheshen’s perspective, and her very one-sided view on the world in which her eating people is totally normal and her being hunted down for doing so (and for eating her way out of somebody’s husband as an infant whose egg was laid inside him) is just not on. But the narrative events do not at any point serve to complicate, contrast or undermine Shesheshen’s own moral position. The narrative, in all its parts, extends her limitless grace for her actions, while never doing the same for the vast majority of the characters around her, up to and including those who are literal children or whose actions are shaped by a distinctly warped childhood.

And this simply does not work for me. It is my default desire, in reading, to extend the same (if not vastly more!) grace to a child I read as about 7 being a little shit than an adult being being entirely unrepentant about having a snack on people. Especially when the options available seem to be a very binary offering of “limitless grace” or “becoming a delicious snack”. I don’t want the story to lose the very interesting and promising central conceit of a protagonist who eats people and embedding in her perspective. I like that in theory. But I want it to be treated with the seriousness it deserves, and to have its corollaries and consequences thought through and on the page, so we can see that the book’s concept is actually being committed to.

So, in contrast, I hold Bright Air Black. If you are unfamiliar with the story of Medea, it’s one of a woman treated poorly, who responds to that poor treatment with… a lot of quite brutal murder. Often of people who matter to those who wronged her, but did not wrong her themselves, including children. You can see why I might be drawing some parallels here.

It’s a tricky myth to revisit in the way that a lot of modern retellings do1, because how do you tackle and present such a remarkably unsympathetic protagonist, who kills and dismembers her brother as a tactic to stall her father? Who murders her own children to spite her straying husband2? In Bright Air Black, Vann solves this by walking a very careful line of presenting understanding but not forgiveness or excuse. We see why she does as she does. It makes sense. But at no point do the events of the story justify those actions, exculpate her from the horrors she has absolutely committed, or offer her unearned grace for a forgiveness she neither seeks nor justifies. Instead, the story simply says – this is as she is, and as she did, and we can see why. And the blame spools out, a widening pool of it, to encompass the people who also put her in such an impossible position that she felt the only way out was through monstrosity. It forces us to think about situations in a more complex, interconnected way. It becomes a story about context, people and situations in which there is no longer any possibility of good action, or a simple solution, and that appeals to me a great deal through the simple honesty of it, and critically because it means the story has faced up to the necessary end point of its premises.

Having read a story willing to approach this kind of premise in such a clear way, I struggle with Someone You Can Build A Nest In. There’s a cowardice to it, because it never accepts that what Shesheshen is and does truly is monstrous. Every single time we see her eat someone on page, there’s a convenient moral sidestep that says “this one, this one deserved it”. Never mind that I don’t agree with the moral calculus of those “deserves” in some cases3, the problem is that the premise is never actually accepted, and so there can never be real resolution. It is implied that she has probably eaten some innocent people in the past. Logically, she must have. But we never see it.

Like Medea, she never seeks forgiveness for what she does. We sit within her perspective, in which none of her actions are unjust, and frankly as far as she’s concerned some people remain uneaten who were annoying enough to thoroughly deserve it, so she’s a saint. And yet, forgiveness Shesheshen nonetheless receives, or at least exculpation, both from the narrative resolution and from Homily, her new girlfriend. Homily, whose brother Shesheshen ate in that first encounter. While she ends up not mourning the rest of the dead for a variety of reasons, we see her being sad about that brother on page. She knows Shesheshen killed him. And yet the two factors are never dealt with in connection, she never holds Shesheshen accountable, Shesheshen never apologises for it, and it remains unconfronted and thus unresolved. It’s that narrative cowardice again, and once again it makes the book less interesting. Shesheshen gets to remain a cinnamon roll who has done no wrong in her life, rather than having to have a difficult but productive conversation with a woman who doesn’t get to be as complex as I think she deserves within the story, that could have resulted in a more satisfying resolution for all involved.

This approach spills out tonally too – for all that the concept of the story feels like it draws on the trappings of horror, the tone (familiar to me from Wiswell’s other short form work), remains firmly rooted in gentleness and softness. This contrast could be exploited productively to make something interesting, but I find instead it just takes the teeth out of the more fraught situations in the book, just as the narrative sidestepping of accountability does. The happy friendly tone is primed once again to offer unlimited grace to those it deems worthy – a small, tight few as defined by the unchanging perspective of the protagonist. That it offers none to anyone else is, at best, glossed over, because that soft tone cannot turn itself to hard conversations or moral quandaries.

And so, this book did not work for me, on any level. It fails, constantly and consistently, to take its premise seriously or treat its concepts honestly, and so forgives the characters I cannot, unearned, and condemns many I think deserve their chance to be more than their origins. Shesheshen is given that chance – she is allowed to exist outside of her biological programming and her upbringing, to reach a point of happiness and fulfilment. Despite clear parallels in situation, the wider cast are denied the grace she is offered, without the narrative ever owning up to that hypocrisy, and instead just hoping you’ll… ignore it, I suppose? I was unable to do so. I wanted a story actually committed to its own ideas, to accepting the premise it set out and actually approaching it, with honesty and clarity, as this does not. And so, I keep thinking back to Bright Air Black, in which the monstrous is accepted for what it truly is, and becomes more thoughtful, more interesting, more meaningful and more sympathetic for that moral honesty. I am entirely willing to give the monster a chance, when they are presented to me with fair stakes and genuine commitment to their ideas. No one is damned for being who they are, or being put in an impossible situation. The narrative needs more faith that the reader can follow where that goes, rather than constantly having to move the truth out of sight like a ball under a cup, slipped up a sleeve rather than inconveniently available to be found and, god forbid, genuinely confronted.

Like the person in that rigged street-magic game, I feel cheated, and far more uncharitable than I was when I went in – the story has achieved exactly the opposite of its goal, when there was such promise in the ideas it went in for. By failing to offer grace to any other of its characters, it ironically cuts itself off from any I might have extended to it.

—

And so, Hugo rankings. The current standings run thus:

  1. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley – previously covered here, and the only one of my nominees to make the final ballot.
  2. The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett – previously covered here.
  3. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher – previously covered here.
  4. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky – previously covered here.
  5. Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell.

I have actually finished Alien Clay, my last remaining Hugo novel, and will be writing up my thoughts on it shortly.

  1. (Derogatory). In the sense that a lot of the popular ones seek hard for relatability, for a protagonist whose suffering can be made personally approachable, her response comprehensible and justified. There’s a smallness and a safeness to them that Medea’s story cannot be confined within. ↩︎
  2. Other variants of Medea’s myth exist but these two are common versions of the telling. I don’t think there’s a version of her story that involves no murdering on her part. ↩︎
  3. For instance, they are waylaid by bandits at one point, and while self-defence is all well and good, I can’t help but think about the economic circumstances that turned them to banditry. Likewise, the very first death is a monster hunter, who as far as we know is hunting her because she ate his dad and presents a risk to the local town. As far as narrative logic goes, those are perfectly reasonable reasons to want to kill someone. If Shesheshen can kill bandits for banditing her, surely vengeance for dad-murder is equally, or even more, valid? But that would involve actually facing up to the moral implications of the premise, and the story is wholly unwilling to do that. ↩︎

Posted in All, Fantasy, Horror | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Γνῶθι σεαυτόματον, or rather, don’t – Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Posted on 16/05/2025 by Roseanna
UK cover image of Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A green background with a large moon or planet looming, in front of which a silhouette of demolished buildings and debris-strewn landscape, and a robot holding a tea service.

What is the appeal of a character who does not know themself? There’s clearly something in it, in seeing emotions in someone resolutely determined they don’t have them – it’s a character arc I’ve seen plenty of in a variety of media – but I just find it frustrating. The process of reading Service Model, the Hugo and Clarke award nominated novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky, was thus one of endurance rather than enjoyment. The protagonist – who goes by various names throughout the story, one of which is Uncharles – is a robot encountering some unexpected scenarios. Throughout the course of these, he frequently finds himself accused of emotions, or pondering which ones he might (hypothetically) have were he a character who experiences emotions, and of course, the funny bit here is that we can all observe him definitely experiencing those emotions that he’s desperately claiming he doesn’t have. Ha. Ha.

Uncharles makes his way through a world steadily revealed to be more and more broken, trying to find himself new employment after unfortunate circumstances leave him out of his current role as a valet in a fancy manor house. Along the way, he meets The Wonk, who proceeds to antagonise him into perpetrating both further journey and plot, and Uncharles is forced to face up to decisions that touch on both ethical problems and his own place in society. The relationship between the two characters, as well as between Uncharles and his task list and response to stimuli, and to the experiences he goes through as part of the story, focus on themes of self-determination and personhood, as well as the failure states of a society drawing heavily on automation. What could be the modern problem here being reflected, I wonder, hmmmmm? Well, I jest, it’s not just a book about AI – there’s a lot in the story, especially in the latter third, about societal priorities and justice, and what it means to adhere to rules in the absence of care, and meaningless bureaucracy (the last of which is the lubrication that helps facilitate the shift from the earlier, more comedic part of the story into this more seriously focused ending).

I say “more comedic”, but there are two main problems I experienced with this book, and the first is that I simply did not find it funny. I could observe that comedy was, theoretically, being perpetrated. I could see that situations were set up with contrasts or information provided to the audience but not internalised by Uncharles or a variety of other setups that clearly had the outward appearance of “joke”. But they did nothing for me whatsoever. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly why, though several things did start to stand out as I went along, one of which being that it felt like all the funnies were part of one, broader funny, which comes back to that point about Uncharles’ self-knowledge, and his awareness of the world. The wider joke of which most of the others (outside very small asides) form constituent parts of is effectively that Uncharles is in some way blinkered about the world and himself. As with all humour, it makes no sense when I type it out like this, so you’ll have to trust me. That single megajoke persisted. Oh boy it persisted. I remember saying to someone at around the 50% mark that I would dearly love for the book to get a second joke, because I was entirely done with this one, which I suspect would have been true even if that joke had landed for me at the start. If anything, it made it worse when about 65% through the story draws attention back to the joke by reiterating it in another context. The way the whole thing is played with is clearly deliberately leaning in for effect, but the effect on me is “grumpiness”.

This is a massive shame, because I’ve generally liked Tchaikovsky’s other work, and do find him funny in sentence-level aside situations in his more serious offerings. Every time I try to think about my opinions on this book, I find myself with sentences like that, determined to prove I do have a sense of humour, I promise, I’m not just an emotionless block, in a way I feel much less compelled to do with other responses I do (or do not) have to stories. Funny (ha) how it goes like that. The paranoia that I’m the problem, rather than the text. But to ignore that paranoia for a moment, I do think it’s a text problem, instead of/as well as a me one. I think reliance on a single megajoke is a weakness, as it requires the audience to keep finding the same thing funny, if they found it funny the first time (of which there is little guarantee). And even for the initial hit of it, I do just think it’s a weak joke. It’s being propped up by a bunch of absurdity, of robots continuing to do tasks in contexts where the task is no longer relevant or even sometimes possible, of futile repetitions, which hide a little of how small it is, but not entirely, and not for as long as it keeps on going.

But humour is subjective and hard to pin down, so I’m going to leave that one there and move onto my second problem: that, when there is a serious message coming up (which is true throughout but much more prominent in the last third or so), I did not find that message particularly worth the time being spent on it. I agree with it, I suppose, in general terms. But it was quite trite, quite baby’s-first-parable-about-capitalism, and I’m used to more sophisticated concepts and interrelated ideas, especially from Tchaikovsky.

And I can see why this one leans simpler. The seriousness is taking a secondary role to the more prominent comedy, so maybe there isn’t space to develop something big and deep that then might take the reins and distract from the funnies. If you start wanting to use the world to make a serious point, the world needs more elaboration. So to foreground the humour, that work gets reduced to make space. But that means that the climactic ethical conclusion feels a little unearned when we get there, a little shallow.

I’ve talked before about how I suspect reading something purely for an award probably makes me judge it more harshly. Maybe in another world, I might have given this one an extra star outside of that context. But I suspect, more truthfully, in that world I wouldn’t have picked it up, and if I did, I wouldn’t have finished it because I’d have recognised quickly that not finding it funny was going to significantly impact the reading experience. But I did read it, and I did feel how I felt about it. You can only read the book you have in your hands at the moment you encounter it; getting caught up in what-if justifications isn’t actually going to help because I cannot construct that hypothetical me with any accuracy. There’s always some context that affects my reading1. I’m a person. I’m made of context. This is just the one I have at the moment.

And in that context, I spent a book alongside a character failing to recognise his own experiences, that are being presented whalingly obviously to the reader. It stretched out, filling nearly the whole novel, alongside subsidiary examples of failing to spot things. Just as a mismanaged murder mystery where I work out the killer too early drives me up the wall, the information management here, this knowledge sitting with me unacknowledged by the story, frustrated me immensely. It won’t be everyone’s experience – clearly, because this has been double award nominated – but it is mine.

And this double award nomination may change the context of my reading… but I would argue it also should change the context. I’m not just assessing it as a book standing alone anymore. I am asking “will I vote for this in the Hugos?”, and where it ranks amongst its fellows. I have a pressing reason to look at it more closely, because its status as award nominee requires action and thought. And in that context… I find it severely wanting. The question “why did this make the shortlist?” can be asked in a varying spectrum of good faith, and here, I’m asking it with the implied “because I don’t understand and don’t personally believe it merits it”. I would genuinely like to know, but I have my own opinion on the matter. I looked up a bunch of positive reviews when I finished it to try to understand. But they didn’t give me any new insight. It simply comes down to a difference of sense of humour and preferences about depth of ideas exploration, and a preference for stories that don’t feel like they’re trying to be cute about something. All things I know about myself, but was unable to act upon because of the context in which I found myself reading the story.

So I suppose, however much I took heed of γνῶθι σεαυτόν, I have failed to act on it. Is it better? I mean, I got a review out of it, I suppose. Whether that was enough might be a question for the reader.

—

And so, Hugo rankings. The current standings run thus:

  1. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley – previously covered here, and the only one of my nominees to make the final ballot.
  2. The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett – previously covered here.
  3. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher – previously covered here.
  4. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

—

*I spent way too much mental effort – even enlisting help – on the stupid pun title and so if you come in and tell me a) the accent is in the wrong place or b) the o should be long because there should be o-o contraction (which thus means a) as well), well… good. I’m glad. In this fallen world, it would be nice to hold on to some truth, some rightness.

  1. And of course, it’s always the negative context that must be accounted for, but the times when a book got an extra star because I really needed cheering up or was tired or it came after a book I hated, those ones are just fine. ↩︎
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The Tainted Cup – Robert Jackson Bennett

Posted on 02/05/2025 by Roseanna
Image

Hugo season is upon us, which means “Roseanna hastily reads a bunch of things to try to be a good voting citizen” season is also even more upon us. Over the next few weeks1 I’m going to trying to get through all the novels and novellas on the ballot I had not previously covered (distressingly many), and coming up with my final slate for both before voting ends. I will likely also do some posts covering other categories, which will likely include at least novelette, short story and poem, and may or may not go further than that.

First up, we’re heading straight into the novels with The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett.

This is a book that I put down and felt a compulsive desire to buy the sequel so that I could read it immediately. I’m not using this as a mark of quality, exactly, although I do think the book is good, but instead more of a mark of the type of book it is, and the type of story and relationship structure it’s constructing – a murder mystery, of the kind that comes in long series, centralised around a pair of characters with an interesting relationship and working dynamic, which for me, tend to be incredibly moreish because they provide a relatively consistent vibe while providing new content in each volume.

No, I don’t actually mean Holmes and Watson here. Or not only. Other detective pairings do exist. And I think the fact that this has been often discussed as a Holmes and Watson reskin is both interesting, and somewhat misleading about the substance of the story.

The Tainted Cup follows what starts as a murder investigation of a single officer in a small town, but slowly blooms out into something more wide-reaching, and with implications about the security of the very empire in which the story is set. This is an empire that, every year, must face a dramatic, violent, existential threat to its continued existence, as the wet season sees titans rising from the depths of the ocean and come to throw themselves at the great sea walls that protect the land, and the people. The murder investigation takes the protagonist, Din, an assistant investigator to the erratic and idiosyncratic Ana, right up to those sea walls, to spend time amongst the people doing the hard, dirty work that keeps this fragile empire whole.

Which turns out to be a metaphor for the work Ana and Din themselves are doing, of course, in trying to prune the bad actors out of the body of the imperial system. I’m not stretching here; this is a book with on page discussions about the nature of the polity in which they live. It is a book very consciously about power, state organisation and corruption, and the work necessary to keep it going to serve the need it exists to sate.

This feels like a crucial point in how this isn’t a Holmes and Watson copycat – Ana and Din are part of the state itself, working for the Iudex, the investigative branch, and so are invested in the existence and continuance of the state, as well as its nature. They have the backing of imperial power behind them, and the authority to insert themselves into situations where their presence is not ideal, even at times like the wet season the story is set in, when everyone is primed in emergency mode. There is a motive driving them that is inextricably linked to the imperial project they serve. Ana may, at first glance, share some surface level similarities with Holmes (intense curiosity, incapability of coping with boredom, a desire for mind-altering drugs to alleviate that boredom) but this surface similarity obscures some key differences about the core impetus that drives each of these detectives. If nothing else, original Holmes has a fair amount of disdain in him for the police he occasionally works with – his disparagement of Inspector Lestrade is a recurring theme. While he occasionally serves the interests of the crown, his focus is far more often on the case, rather than the context. Ana, meanwhile, does hate to be bored and is absolutely drawn to the puzzling details of the cases she’s working on, but this obsession serves a higher purpose which is drawn out in the conversations that occur throughout the book between her and Din, her subordinate. They frequently talk about the purpose, validity and nature of the polity they serve. At every turn, it appears that, while Ana has a clear eye for the power imbalances, hierarchy and corruption that exists within the empire, not least within its gentry, she believes the work she does in excising that corruption has value, and that that value translates into benefit for the people at work around her.

For example:

“… you’ve had a horrid few days, and I think you need reminding of what the Empire is even for.”

I cocked an eyebrow at her, puzzled.

“It’s not all this!” she said. She waved her hand at the shuttered window. “It’s not all walls and death and plotting! Nor is it dreary dispensations and bureaucracy! We do these ugly, dull things for a reason – to make space where folk can live, celebrate, and know joy and love. So. Go to the banquet, Dinios. Otherwise I’ll find some truly dreadful shit for you to do.”

There is also a repeated touchpoint that Din comes back to, the motto of the Empire in its old language which runs sen sez Imperiya – “you are the empire”.

And, in case the point might be missed, through the course of the story, we encounter an issue with a specific canton of the empire which had been destroyed, when it might have been saved had not several other cantons disputed the proposed solution, slowing effective action down until it was too late and the problem had become so extreme that the canton had to be destroyed to preserve the rest.

Robert Jackson Bennett is presenting us with a world that faces a dramatic, existential threat to its existence. He is providing case studies of smaller instances where divided organisational structures fail in times of crisis. There is a question at the core of the book about whether singular, hierarchical authority is the correct response to a dramatic threat that risks the people – is empire, full of these inequalities and corruptions as we see them, a correct, appropriate response to circumstance? And we can only access the depths of that question as the author provides it because we have the context of those working both to excise the corruption and to carry out the hard maintenance needed to preserve the imperial body. It has depth. This is not a book that advocates for singular authority. It is not a defence of fascism. But by asking the question in a context that lends itself to an easy defence of that imperial structure, it takes the problem seriously. By having the person ask it be someone within the imperial structure themself, it makes the problem more interesting.

Ana (and Din)’s positioning in the story is critical because it makes their ongoing dialogue about the nature of the empire more than abstract musing – they are asking “is the work I do truly worthwhile? is it good?”. You could not achieve that dialogue with a true Holmes figure.

If I’ve made this sound like the book is an extended treatise on power and governance… ehhhh I’m not sure that’s untrue, but it doesn’t speak honestly to much of the tone of the book. For something so invested in the philosophical, it is intensely propulsive and consumable. I read the bulk of it in a single day. The philosophising is well integrated into the narrative, and it never feels as though the characters step outside of themselves to deliver a lesson. Instead, it is a natural part of their evolving relationship, and an obvious offshoot of their hierarchical dynamic.

It also manages the really quite tricky job of a well-paced murder mystery within a fantastical setting. Bennett does well to integrate (again, good at this apparently) the worldbuilding into the unfurling of the mystery – Din contextualises clues as they are presented without overlabouring their significance, allowing the reader to piece together the mystery even as they piece together the world. Certainly for me, it worked well enough that I was able to guess some key parts of the whole before the reveal, but not so far in advance as to make the ending feel delayed or dull. And this is all achieved while providing a genuinely interesting (if sometimes somewhat disgusting) world, in which body and mind modifications are the norm, from minor health tweaks to crafted monstrosities, and humans who keep growing throughout their elongated lifespans to become immoveable and house-sized. It has a consistent aesthetic, certainly, and that aesthetic is… fleshy.

The characters are likewise well-crafted, though it takes a little while for their dynamic to fully warm up. The Holmesian aesthetic that Ana gives off is by way of Gregory House, full of button pushing and social boundary crossing, with Din as her exasperated straight man, and that’s a dynamic I can get behind, so long as there’s more substance under the surface. And, luckily, there is. There’s something very rewarding in how infrequent the glimpses we get of Ana’s sincerity are, amongst all the posturing, and those moments pair well with Din’s more quiet focus. Their relationship is one of rank – Ana is Din’s superior – but within that RJB still makes room for something more personable, without compromising the authenticity of the working relationship feel.

The more I think about the many things this book is doing, frankly, the more impressed I am, and especially that it managed to do them all while remaining a propulsive, readable, consumable piece of fiction. The one thing I don’t have tonnes of good things to say about is the prose, but I don’t really have anything bad to say either. It’s doing streamlined (although with a decent hand at the dialogue so the characters feels individual and real), and I think this is a setting in which I’m more glad of that than I would be of something a little more ornate. So all in all, I liked it a lot, there was ambition in it that was absolutely backed up by skill, and it’s set up a lot of genuinely thoughtful substance to make me want to dig straight into the sequel. I want to know where the world is going. I want to know where the mysteries take me. And I want to spend time with these characters to get there.

So where does this leave my ballot so far?

  1. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley – previously covered here, and the only one of my nominees to make the final ballot.
  2. The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
  3. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher – previously covered here.

I will be very, very surprised if Kaliane Bradley is shifted out of my top spot, and it’s no shade on Robert Jackson Bennett to come in at second place to her banger of a book. There’s a bit more clear air between those two and the T. Kingfisher, which is sadly continuing the trend where I’ve tended to prefer her earlier indie work over the more recent – and more acclaimed – trad pub offerings. It’s a real shame, since I genuinely love the White Rat world works, but A Sorceress Comes to Call does not really exceed “fine”, at least when placed in the context of an awards ballot. It was a fun read, but not a great deal more.

Remaining to read:

  • Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell
  • Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I’ll probably try to break up the double Tchaikovsky by fitting in a novella or two as well, as I don’t think it will be entirely fair to him to read them back to back.

  1. I have an additional two things that expedite this deadline, even though voting is going to be going on for a while. I’m not just being weirdly keen. ↩︎

Posted in All, Fantasy | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

A Path Through the Landscape: My Own Route Through Science Fiction

Posted on 27/04/2025 by Roseanna

I recently did a review for Nerds of a Feather of Paul Kincaid’s new collection, Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction. In the collection, much is made of the multiplicity of the field, its fuzzy boundaries and its many subsections, and though I concur with the sentiment, one of my lingering feelings on the book is the strangeness of not seeing the SF with which I am familiar shown back to me. It contains a view of the genre, not the view, and it is one I barely recognised, which I linger on somewhat in the review without really getting into the weeds of what the one I would recognise might look like. With some prompting from Niall, this piece serves as that path through the field – another of the many ways through the house that is Science Fiction. It is a set of steps on my journey as a reader of SF, the turning points and the touchstones that made me the reader I am now, for good and for ill.

So these are the ten books I loved, and a few I didn’t, on that pathway, by way of contrast:

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It starts for me, as for many others, with Diana Wynne Jones.

While I think of her primarily as a fantasy author, the earliest work I might consider science fictional that lives in my memory is one of hers – Hexwood. It’s one that seems indicative, looking back as the person I am now with the taste I have, though in the interim that taste wanders away somewhat, because it does the thing I love above all things these days: fuckery. It remains in my memory because of that fuckery. It was unabashedly weird, and I absorbed it, its refusal of linearity, its refusal of boundaries. It is the first step of “oh, you can do that?”, and it sets the pattern. It is also a book deeply rooted in its characters – as a story which involves people embodying archetypes, it somewhat has to be, for them to shine through as people worth following through the twists and turns – another thing that I’ve held onto throughout my time as a reader. It has scenes that stick deep in the memory. There is a moment towards the end when the barren future England calls back its ancient forests in a sudden rush, and the picture I crafted in my head at whatever age I first read it has never left me.

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Next, a break in the story, for a book that I didn’t love and have never managed to bring myself back to. There will be several of these along the way as well, because the dislikes have shaped me as much, if not more, than the likes.

For this first one, Dune by Frank Herbert. Just Dune, because I’ve never managed to push onwards in his work.

It’s one of the first books I remember hating, and so it’s one of the very first books I remember trying to figure out how to articulate my thoughts for in a proper, coherent manner (something which will also become quite relevant in the future) because that hatred was a position I had to defend. I have a very clear memory of trying to figure out the problem I was having and phrasing it as: “well it’s very interesting as an idea, but it’s not very good at being a novel”.

I probably wouldn’t quite phrase it like that now, but I think the essential point still stands, and means Dune also stands for a type of SF that exists and shapes the genre that I read in – ideas forward, but specifically at the expense of the core constituents I personally feel a critical to a story being worthwhile as a book, as a written thing that I might actually enjoy reading. Things like characterisation, prose, decent pacing, that sort of thing. It’s been a long time since I last reread Dune, but I struggled with many of those aspects of it, and felt they were flat and too obviously subservient to the things Herbert was interested in (themes, ideas) and that I just… wasn’t. And still am not, unless they really make the experience of the book worthwhile along with them.

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Back to the story, and something that stands in absolute contrast: Mindstar Rising by Peter F. Hamilton. The first piece of adult science fiction I remember enjoying.

It’s another I haven’t read in a number of years, but I remember it being absolute trash (complimentary). The main character has a psychic gland, and there are talking dolphins in Rutland Water. It’s silly, but it’s fun. It was also the first book I remember that really named and tackled the concept of climate fiction, something which has come to dominate the current landscape far more. But it was at heart some kind of adventure story, with pacing, hijinx, dramatic stakes and absolute nonsense with scientific wording papered over it to keep things moving. I absorbed it, and its sequels, and it shaped the sort of things I wanted to read more of – from this I went on to a number of forgettable adventure stories, set in the present or future and full of fights and saving the universe, the sort of things I could consume in a single sitting with the sort of monofocus that doesn’t seem possible to adult me. It was science fiction that mirrored the delight I found in visual media fiction, consuming it alongside the other childhood staple for me of Star Trek. Both were eminently digestible, but contained within them seeds of things more thoughtful that I would come back to only later to pick at. But not yet.

At this point in the story, I leave for university.

So the interesting this is, I think of university as being critical to my experience of SFF, because it was, but it actually doesn’t have a huge impact on the SF books that linger in my memory as books, or reading experiences. The ones that linger are the nemeses (West of Eden, which I never actually caved and read), and the running jokes (there was one about a spaceship powered by orgasms, which I think is The Void Captain’s Tale by Normal Spinrad, which again, I didn’t read). The SF society I joined at university was, looking back, kind of weird when I got there (though it changed, in my opinion for the better, in the latter years), and had a preoccupation with a certain sort of ideas-forward-but-also-absolute-nonsense book that I could never get on with, or the sort of dry, hard SF that was a barely disguised physics PhD concept. Rarely were things discussed even from the recent past, and when they were, well…

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For our next interlude, we introduce the antagonist of a number of years of my SF reading – Peter F. Hamilton’s The Night’s Dawn trilogy. It looms large over my university experience, partly because everyone was talking about it, and also partly because I absolutely hated it and could never bring myself to finish reading even the first book. It haunted me for years. How could I call myself an SF fan when I couldn’t finish this one book? Especially since I had loved other books by him. This was a book of crisis, and it was only in around 2018 or so that I finally let it go. It had become too much bound up with an idea of obligation, of what being a reader was supposed to look like, and any benefit I might have got from reading it would have been far outweighed by that consideration.

But if it wasn’t critical to what I was reading, university was instead was critical to my friend group, and the people with whom I could experience and discuss books (who were not, incidentally, the people pushing the above books I didn’t like or wouldn’t read). They’re the people I still talk to about books, often. They’re the people who shaped how I experienced fandom. They’re the people who started to point me in the direction of things that might be a bit different, and a bit more to my taste.

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Which brings us to The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, which taught me something that had been absent since my childhood reading – SF could affect me emotionally too, and my god did it. If someone were to come up to me and just say “ils sont les innocents” even now, I would have A Moment.

It was also messing with a number of my assumptions about what SF is supposed to be. It had linguists in it. Normal people. It had god in it, when a lot of the people who dominated those early days of the SF society were outspokenly atheist (even while the people I actually made friends with were not). It broke the boundaries of my assumptions, and married up the literature I had been failing to enjoy with the reality of people I knew and things I did like, and alchemised it all back into something new and beautiful.

It also existed at around the point my tastes and my reading habits began to change, and turns towards thoughtfulness. I was a relatively uncritical reader as a child (as I think many children are), and this didn’t really begin to shift until my early twenties. I like to think five years of dissecting texts in other languages did something to the ol’ brain chemistry and made my thoughts turn those newly minted critical faculties back onto the things I read for pleasure in English. But whatever caused it, The Sparrow came along at the right time for it to work.

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I finished university in 2014, and then there’s a somewhat chaotic period of reading, at least in part because I was flat broke a lot of the time. There’s a lot of rereads and lends in here, one of which had rather more of an impact than the rest – Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks.

I have a very vivid memory of finishing this book. My partner had lent it to me, after I enjoyed Player of Games, coming back to Banks five years after bouncing right off Consider Phlebas (another of the uni years recommendations that did not land). I knew very little about it going in. I finished it with my partner sitting in the room, grinning ear to ear as I loudly exclaimed “Fuck! Fuck? Fuck.” and then immediately insisted on discussing it with him.

And that’s the key thing. Yes, it’s a story with a twist that fucks, but more critically, it’s a story that prompted conversation, and coincided with the reignition of “books as social practice”. It also came at a great time to get me back to an awareness of what space opera was, because that awareness was about to be upended.

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And so, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, which forms the hinge upon which all this turns. Not just because of the impact it had on the genre (obvious, significant) but because its release happens to coincide with a shift in my own awareness of genre, where I began to genuinely pay attention. To awards. To new releases. To genre as a thing with a shape and a culture and shifting currents. So it stands for itself and also for the point of growing awareness, and an approach to reading SF that was a little bit more curated and thoughtful, a little more deliberate. It was another point of “oh, you can do that” and also “oh, who can do that”. SF as social commentary, SF as point of conflict, SF as this big, broad, discursive, divisive, exciting thing that we were all engaging in.

And it was definitely a we – my copy of the book got passed around my friend group, and became lost somewhere in the process. Which was very sad, but also does really stand for what this book represents in my story of genre. And hey, in the long run, it was all good, because a friend got me a signed copy and shipped it all the way over from the US. Truly, the book of community.

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Continuing the “you can do that” theme, we come to Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. The “that” in question being “SF where the S is a subject I care deeply about”. The microgenre of redheads doing alien linguistics could stand to be expanded, but even if it remains as it is, it contains this banger.

I love the rest of the collection, to be clear, and it’s also the first short story collection I remember enjoying (it’s a format I have very mixed success with even now), but it’s Story of Your Life that really made the impact, and shaped my sense of what SF is and could be. It’s well written. It’s beautiful. It’s emotionally impactful. And it does science in a way that didn’t feel actively self-congratulatory or exclusionary to a reader whose last STEM excursion was an A level in 2008. It’s the antidote to all those stories that were thwarted Physics PhDs with a thin veneer of plot, because it recognises that story does not need to be subordinate to science – they can harmonise in a way I had never really grasped before.

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Then comes Kindred by Octavia Butler, expanding horizons yet further into “books that give me some very complicated feelings”.

I was not particularly politically aware as a child, teen or young adult. There were things I knew about, but didn’t really think about all that much, and politics, and particularly as that aligns with social issues, was somewhat among them. This book didn’t change that, good though it is. But I read it as that was changing, in the slow way these things do when you get a bit more mature about your opinions on the world and realise you might need to pay a bit more attention and do some thinking. And so, in this period, reading a book where the SFnal elements are a vehicle through which to talk about the more important themes was really important. The things I read could mirror the things I was caring about! SF could mean something, could have an opinion about something. Where had this been when I was being recommended schlock and nonsense? I wouldn’t have appreciated it properly, but I might have thought about the genre very differently.

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We’re now in around 2016. I am paying more attention to recent fiction, helped in part by being a member of an SFF bookclub. But mainly just by being more aware, spending more time in the right sort of fandom spaces to get this information. I’m reading more current work, and really enjoying it, including works that make awards shortlists. At this point, I encounter two books that my opinions of have shaped my relationship with at least the Hugo, and to some extent SFF awards more generally, as well as the fandom as I was experiencing it.

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Those books are The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, and The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin. They’re very different books. But the way I experienced them was surprisingly similar – I read them and thought they were… fine… and then was overwhelmed by public opinion telling me I had to love them because they were hot shit, which pushed me further and further into the opposite opinion. I hate being told what to think, and have been known to be a little bit fighty about books. There are a number of people convinced I hate Becky Chambers, but if you go back and read my blog post when I initially picked it up, I’m mostly just unfussed about the whole thing. For The Fifth Season, I read it off the back of loathing The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and thought it was much better than that… but still not hot shit. It was fine. I liked it fine. But then fandom did its thing – and I was sufficiently in fandom by then to observe that happening – and I just felt boggled and boxed in, out of sync with public opinion but absolutely committed to my position, which was steadily becoming more extreme.

Not the last time that has happened.

Jemisin and Chambers have undoubtedly shaped the landscape of the genre I inhabit – they have a gravity that the SF I read shifted around. And this was the first time when I was reading new and current that I found myself in opposition to that gravity. That conflict – that moment of self-doubt and then commitment to my own position – feels critical, when I look back.

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The next book is part of that same story. Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee was nominated for a Hugo in 2017, the first Hugo Award I voted in (though not the first year I’d committed to reading the whole shortlist). Up against it was The Obelisk Gate, which, like The Fifth Season, I thought was perfectly fine but not stunning. Ninefox Gambit though? Now that I thought was something else.

To some extent it harks all the way back to Hexwood, because it’s a book that broke apart a bunch of my assumptions about SF as a genre – it’s a book whose world and science are resistant to understanding and systematisation, where you simply have to accept the things that wash over you rather than trying to categorise and organise them. It’s an approach I realised I loved and frankly craved, but hadn’t really been exposed to before. And I desperately wanted it to win (which, alas, it did not, and nor did the sequels when they each got nominated in turn).

It becomes clear to me that much of the progression through genre for me is a process of realising all the rules could be broken, if the author was good enough, and that often the work was better when they were. The thing I had understood as being SF was not nearly so rigid or so singular as I’d always been led to believe.

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Hot on its heels comes Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire.

It’s taken nine books to get to Classics brainrot, but it had to turn up eventually. This is a book I have a lot of feelings about, many of which are mediated through my feelings about the ancient world and, particularly, the Roman Empire. The connection isn’t total, given that the empire used as a partial model for Teixcalaan is in fact the Byzantines, rather than the Romans, but there is still some connective tissue in there, enough to really hit hard on some of my innermost buttons1. And it contains a civilisation that feels real, and different, all at the same time. They have a culture! There’s poetry, and art, there’s a world outside of the awareness of the plot, and it’s implied well enough that we can fit it into our understanding of the story.

It is a book about empire, about cultural domination, about the lure of the thing that’s eating you up, but is beautiful nonetheless. And it’s about failure, too. I don’t reread as much as I should, but this I did, and I found myself in the narrative (derogatory), in the story of the man before the protagonist who made the wrong choices. So A Memory Called Empire stands for several things – for SF that understands people on the macro and the micro, for SF that’s worth coming back to over and again, and for SF that felt like it was speaking to me, that prompted a conversation that I desperately needed to continue. It’s a book I will always see through my own, imperfect lens, and one where I most felt, when I reviewed it, that it benefited from speaking that lens aloud as part of reviewing.

I’ve not talked much about criticism here, though I’ve been doing it2 since back before The Sparrow. It’s all available to scroll back through (though I’d rather you didn’t). But A Memory Called Empire, or at least around the period in which I wrote about it for the second time, feels like a moment of shifting in how I wrote about Science Fiction – the start of the realisation that what I like in criticism that I read is a lens through which to see a work, giving me a way of seeing that I might never have reached on my own, and that I could do that too. That I could put me into it, and that that might actually be good and worthwhile (though we had not yet reached the dizzying heights “and someone else might even want to read it3“). It’s the start of my reviewing where I feel like how I currently write begins.

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Throughout this, I’ve mostly been progressing from older books into newer books, but for the last entry, it’s looping all the way back. Because the last stop on the journey comes after I’ve made a lot of friends in books who have cool, interesting, thoughtful opinions, and who tell me about the cool, interesting, thoughtful books they read when they were younger, and I listened and picked those books up too.

So my final book is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin4. And it represents the realisation that the thing I grew up through, the thing I was aware of from the past, isn’t as homogenous as I was led to believe. That going back into the deep time could still reveal treasures.

I’m conscious that Kindred came only ten years later than this, but when I read it, I had no idea when it was from, and it wasn’t on my part an active choice in looking backwards – it was a book I was told was good and so I read it, and it was. Whereas Le Guin’s SF, for me, has always been an act of archaeology, fully conscious that I’m reaching a hand into the past to find something to grasp onto. I know a lot more now, year on year, about the SF of the past than I ever did when I was younger, and for all my continued neophilia, there’s an increasing yearning to keep looking back too, to find these antecedents I never knew existed and that clearly do inform the things I pick up today.

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It is perhaps worth noting that everything I’ve chosen here is a book, and indeed a novel. This wasn’t entirely deliberate, but once I noticed the pattern forming I thought it was apt to retain, because I think it offers a counter to something that came up a few times in Colourfields, as suggested by Kincaid or by those under review: the primacy of the SF magazine. Historically, I know this to have been true. Currently, I am well aware of a number of – and I stress this word – online5 magazines of SFF, which I read, enjoy and discuss. But in shaping the journey I took into SF, the landscape that it flowed through, magazines played almost no part in it. I didn’t know about them. I didn’t read them. The people I knew didn’t either. They simply weren’t relevant at a surface level (though I imagine it’s very possible they were the tectonic shifts below ground I wasn’t seeing, the currents that shaped which authors made it to the point of novels). And I think this is fairly crucial as well – the genre as I encountered it for the majority of my reading life so far has been novels6, which I don’t think is an unusual state of affairs from someone of my age, at least from the UK.

I’m not saying this is good, just that it is. In terms of market penetration outside of (one of) the bubble(s) of core fandom, only novels and a few of the well-pushed novellas really have the clout to make it. And that outside is where I came from and through.

Which brings me onto my final point, about the places and spaces I inhabit now, and the fandom reality that shapes my current reading. Until Glasgow 2024, these too were predominantly the internet. My blog. A fanzine. Another fanzine. Twitter, and then bluesky. A slack. A discord. Another discord. And because the internet is primarily America’s internet, these online spaces shaped my reading – and very much still do – in a way that prioritises voices that publish there. I have to put in conscious effort to focus back onto the UK, as well as outside of both, to choose to read more broadly. In this sense, my part of the colourfield maps all too closely to Kincaid’s, because that hasn’t really changed – the gravity remains in the Anglosphere, and we have to take conscious steps outside it and remind ourselves that the space which comes easily to us is far from universal.

I can see this in how the demographics of my reading shift around that hinge point of Ancillary Justice – the overwhelming whiteness, straightness and predominantly maleness of the childhood reading, shifting towards a broader understanding of the genre as I progress towards the present.

The part of the landscape I hope to occupy, if we’re to stretch the metaphor a little, is perhaps a hillock, from which more wide-ranging places can be seen, destinations for future visits, with new fellow travellers to meet and befriend. Where the start of the journey was haphazard, picking up only what was available and easily graspable, every step has moved me more towards intentionality in my reading, a process which brings with it increasing rewards. This can be around who I read – in 2023 I made it a mission to ensure I was reading more gay male authors writing gay men, because they were a gap for me, and if I hadn’t done that I would never have read Kai Ashante Wilson and my reading life would have been poorer – but also what, and with whom. Part of that intentionality for me includes paying attention to Tiktok and what’s big there, alongside things like the International Booker, as well as within the Worldcon fandom that feels like my home space. SF is just better when it’s broader, when I refuse to be siloed, and keep an open mind pointed at the future and the present.

You can choose the shape of the landscape you inhabit. I choose the shape of the landscape I inhabit, because all things are better when they’re done with care. I don’t regret the shape of the place I started, because I didn’t know, at the time, what was out there. I had no way to. But now I do. And I think that epitomises what I felt disconnected from, while reading Colourfields. My journey, at least as it has been for the last few years, is one of neophilia and exploration – trying always to look forwards and outwards to what’s just over the horizon. I don’t succeed always, but I try. And I find most fellowship with the people doing likewise.

  1. A phrase which sounds less than ideal now I read it back, but you know what I mean. Don’t make it weird. ↩︎
  2. Well. Reviewing. Not quite the same thing. ↩︎
  3. Logically, I recognise we might be there now. Emotionally… in between posting things, I mostly forget anyone reads this stuff apart from me. Someone talking about something I wrote is almost always a jumpscare. ↩︎
  4. Though it could have been Foreigner by C. J. Cherryh. ↩︎
  5. This is an entirely separate discussion not worth getting into, but I came into genre fandom after the discourse about online zines had settled down, and every time I hear about it it boggles me. Physical zines? What? Whaaaat? The idea that the online side of things isn’t valid is just so wildly outside of my experience that I cannot quite believe it, no matter how many times I hear someone use “real zines” to mean the mythical-to-me concept of print on paper. I am a child of the internet, and its existence shapes most of my life, let alone my experience of genre. A discussion that does not include that will definitionally not include me. ↩︎
  6. Yes, I have a column on small press novellas. I know. I know. But the genre I inhabit now and the genre I grew up in are wildly different. ↩︎
Posted in All, Else, Not A Review, Science Fiction | Tagged , , | 9 Comments