The Sentence – Gautam Bhatia

Posted on 06/04/2025 by Roseanna
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So… suspension of disbelief. It’s tricky, right? And, of course, intensely personal. For many, an incorrect historical detail or the use of an unexpected name1 can make or break their immersion2 within a story. Sometimes, this is fair enough – if you know a lot about a period, reading something that departs from your knowledge of that period without an obvious purpose can be jarring – though I do think it goes a little far sometimes3. But there is another angle to immersion, and one which I find does affect me – the intuitive assumptions in my mind while reading about what characters would and would not know about their own context, and whether they match up to the text I am presented.

The reason I begin with this, is because it is approximately my only criticism of The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia, an otherwise excellent, tightly plotted and conceptually fascinating story that combines alternate world SF and legal thriller to great effect.

The story is set in a futuristic city called Peruma, the old capital of a fallen empire, and the battle ground of much conflicting history. One hundred years prior to the events of the book, the director of the city’s council – a ruling body dominated by the richer half of the very divided Peruma – was assassinated, and his death at the hands of a single man, Jagat, from the poorer half of the city sparked a sudden revolution, the birth of The Commune and, after much turmoil, an agreement that held the city in a hundred years of fragile stasis. Not peace, exactly, but a cessation of out and out conflict. The laws of the city did not allow a death penalty, but something close – a cryogenic sleep of one hundred years, in which at any point a successful appeal could revive the convicted, avoiding the irrevocability of the death penalty. If nothing new came to light in the intervening time, the death would be made permanent as the deadline was reached, on the assumption that a century would be more than enough time for anything that may upend the sentence to come about. And so, another piece of stasis – a city and a convicted criminal both held in one hundred years of pause.

The story follows Nila, who works for the impartial third side of this conflict, a separated judicial body whose trainees are drawn from both sides of Puruma and drilled into strict neutrality on pain of expulsion. At the request of a descendent of Jagat, she must reopen the case of his conviction before the timer on his cryogenic sleep is up and his death becomes a permanent one, all while the stalemate between the city’s two halves is being relitigated by her classmates and teachers.

Being, as it is, a central legal mystery in an altermate world, it is no surprise that there’s a lot of information that needs to be conveyed to the reader about the world and the rules by which it is governed. Even trying to keep the premise down to two paragraphs here, I feel as though I’ve omitted a great deal. It’s tough. The two main characters seen for most of the story – Nila and her roommate Maru – are final year students in the Confederation of Guardians, who have studied law and precedent and argument for the entirety of their time in training. So not only are they immersed in their world, but doubly immersed in a deep specialism, whose real world equivalent is often opaque to laymen from the same context. In order for the reader to access the central ideological premise of the story – because it’s not just a legal mystery but a moral quandary too – the level of information needed for the stakes to truly make sense is pretty high, even by the standards of SFF. However… therein lies the problem. How does an author convey that much information, especially the sort of codified, rules-bound information that does not come up naturally in human conversation – across to the reader without feeling forced?

In the case of The Sentence… well… he doesn’t quite. In the early part of the book, particularly the first third, I found myself pausing again and again to wonder why these two people deeply immersed in their field would need to be explaining fundamental concepts to one another over and again. Yes, those fundamental concepts relate to the case being discussed, there’s a context, but it feels time and again like something that would resolve into shorthand in a real conversation, and its inclusion for the benefit of the reader is just… that little bit too obvious.

Which is daft, right? Logically, I know Bhatia is including this info because I need this info, because what I know about constitutional law could very easily fit onto a post-it note. But immersion isn’t logical, it’s intuitive. It is very hard for me to break myself out, moment to moment, of this feeling that these characters, in this place, would spell this information out time and again. It builds up to a point where it starts to affect their characterisation – their authentic humanity leeches away every time they behave in a way that does not feel natural or real to me as a reader.

Which is a real shame because outside of the sections where they have to give me a crash course in legal concepts, both Nila and Maru are easy to like and feel entirely plausible in both their separate existence and their friendship. They come from the different sides of the city, have different knowledge and approaches, but there’s an easy banter between them that is instantly recognisable and deeply enjoyable. Which makes the problem of those legal infodumps even worse, because it’s undermining something that really is a great strength of the story.

I’m not sure how the problem could be solved, truthfully. I’m not an author. I don’t know how to squeeze great tracts of information in, and Bhatia is doing a better job than a number of stories I’ve read that just abandon any pretence to being naturalistic. The setup, the framing is there… it’s just not quite sufficient. All I can say is that, at least for me, it is a problem.

That being said, it’s a problem that passes. Once the information has been conveyed in that dense early section and we start to clear out into the meat of the story and the central ideological dilemma, the prose does move along more easily. Once he assumes the reader is up to scratch, Bhatia does not handhold or patronise, and there’s a great sense of trust that I could follow along the logical steps that proceed from the premises and on to the implications and conflicts they produce, which is something I find many stories who succeed at the infodumps fail at far more spectacularly – if anything, I feel more talked down to when they don’t think I can connect the dots they’ve given me than when they assume I need the fundamental concepts laid out. And even in that early section, outside of the sections of information, there’s a lot to find that is deeply enjoyable – the tone is well-handled, the story proceeds at an enjoyable clip, and the world outside of the legal confines is presented far more intuitively and richly. This is a world whose poetry, art, fiction, fanfiction, news media, theatre, and political satire we see on the page, moment by moment. It’s a world with real depth in both the arts and the sense of a culture both connected and divided. It’s a world I can envisage people existing in with rich, separate lives, all against this backdrop but experiencing it differently.

And the ideological debate at the core – one that looks at the value of truth and the value of peace, and the place of the law in upholding them, as well as the weight of morality on the individual in playing their part within that system – is a better laid out and developed one that many of the central premises in even the more ideas-led end of modern SFF, If one wants to call SFF the literature of ideas, Bhatia is providing the evidence to back up that claim and then some, using it to speculate on a world that could be better, a world that could be worse, and a world that could just be different, and using that backdrop to explore a concept that is entirely relevant and current. Which is, ultimately, one of the great benefits of SFF – taking the dilemmas of the now outside of their contextual constraints and forcing us to re-evaluate them in a new light. On that metric? He’s absolutely smashed it. Doubly so, when considering that so much of the more “literature of ideas” end of SFF does not land for me, precisely because it may succeed at the idea and fail at crafting a real story to live around it, or a real world in which to set it. This is a novel just as much as it is a theoretical exploration.

There are also moments of both prose and structural flair that didn’t distract from the fundamental drive of the narrative, but I did enjoy immensely. There are snippets of poetry throughout, quoted on or dwelled on by various characters, and every time they felt deeply relevant in the moment but also… real, in the sense of being something a character truly would want to pause and reflect on in those circumstances. Not enough stories have poetry in them, for my liking. There’s also a very interesting choice right at the end of the story in exactly what to show and not show in the denouement which I think really works to provide the right amount of tension and drama, and indeed the right amount of trust in the reader’s knowledge, to appreciate the weight of the story that has been told. That, in that last chapter and epilogue, went a good way to repairing my disgruntlement from those early chapters, in fact.

Ultimately, I ended my reading on a high. It’s a substantial book, and one whose core question deserves the space and thought being given, and which will linger on in my memory. It achieves, in fact, that rare distinction of being a genuine dilemma, rather than an obvious answer the main character is failing to spot, even if the reader might have an answer they would intuitively pick from the off. It would probably be worth a less well-written book, to access that core dilemma, so doubly lucky us for the one we got. My immersion may have been broken in those early sections, but my interest never was, and so it never felt like a story I didn’t want to continue reading, only one I had to decide to put a little bit more effort into the act of consumption to get to the good stuff. And it was absolutely worth the effort. In a perfect world, sure, those early sections might have been handled more smoothly. But given the extent to which the story reminds us of the imperfection of even a well-intentioned world, I can accept the burden of a little bit of determined focus, if what I get at the end is a novel like this.

  1. The Tiffany Problem being a prime example of the concept. ↩︎
  2. I’m proceeding here with the assumption that immersion is both good and an expected part of the fiction reading experience, which is not necessarily my own position, but does hold true for this particular book and the area of the genre it sits within. At some point I will write up my thoughts about immersion more generally, but they currently exist as a nebulous collection of vibes in the dusty cobwebbed cupboard of my mind where essay ideas mature. ↩︎
  3. I’ve seen the argument multiple times that you can’t have champagne in an alternate fantasy world because it relies on the existence of the champagne region of France to be meaningful, and for the fizzy wine from that region to have the same cultural position within this world for the connotations to still be relevant. My response to this is approximately: bollocks. If you say shit like that, you can’t write your story in English because that presumes a world with the exact linguistic contexts to produce objects named in the language your audience is reading, and we’re heading into silliness territory there. The words are a shorthand – the audience knows “champagne” means “fancy, expensive drink often used for celebrations”, so let them have that rather than three paragraphs reinventing it. ↩︎
Posted in All, Detective/Mystery, Science Fiction | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Dragon Rider – Taran Matharu

Posted on 01/04/2025 by Roseanna
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For my most recent read, I am reminded of an emotion that I don’t actually have a word for. The feeling you get, when you experience something you thought long consigned to the scrap-heap of history, and suddenly here it is again like a bad smell, all 576 pages of it, and you have three days to read it because you’ve been somewhat chaotic at deadline management this year? Ok that last bit may just be this book. But that experience of “oh fuck, I thought we’d got past this shit” has hit me before, albeit on slightly different particulars.

Which is to say that, no, I did not like Dragon Rider by Taran Matharu. And because it’s been a while since I did a properly grumpy negative review, and it’s a muscle I think needs flexing every now and again to keep it in good working order, I’m going to tell you exactly why.

The story follows Jai, a hostage in the Sabine (pseudo-Roman) court, and third son of the dead High Khan of the Steppes. He is tasked with caring for the elderly and ailing former emperor Leonid, whose son now sits on the Sabine throne, but whose own legacy is the conquest that made the empire what it is now. When the Dansk turn up in their furs from the distant north, bringing dragons to an alliance with Leonid’s grandson Titus in which he will wed Erica, the Dansk king’s daughter, everything changes. Jai is swept up in the events of a political upheaval, forced to leave the palace in Latium and try to find his way back home to the Steppes.

If you rolled your eyes during that description, you wouldn’t be alone. My reading experience was one broken by cries of “are you fucking joking?” and “come /on/, surely not”, as each new piece of naming crime and worldbuilding distress made itself known to me. It was not a fun time, either for me or for those who had to listen to me suffering through it.

I have two predominant overwhelming impressions of the book. The first, as I began with, is that this harks back to an older style of fantasy storytelling, and one I’m not sad we left behind. The book clued me into this early on – within a handful of pages, I was noting the use of words like “swarthy”, which I have not seen in the wild in quite some time, and then “lithe” (describing a young woman whose skirts clung to her legs as she walked), both of which started to signal this story might be a little… unreconstructed. As I persisted (I’ll come to this again in a while, but it’s a book with the sort of prose one has to persist through, rather than be immersed in or, god forbid, actively enjoy), it became more apparent throughout all aspects of the story – it’s not just that the author has not interrogated some of the norms of older fantasy in its portrayal, but that he’s simply not interested in interrogating… well, anything.

The protagonist has grown up caring for the ex-emperor of this evidently awful, militaristic, conquering, slave-taking, hungry empire. The man who made it what it is. He is also fond of that man, despite the fact Leonid is responsible for Jai’s father’s death and thus the subsequent hostage-taking of the three living sons. Ok, cool, fertile ground for some complex emotions and the tension between one’s personal impression of someone versus who you know them to have been outside of that intimacy? Matharu… does not explore that. Leonid, in this setup, gets to be about the only character with any kind of complexity to them, in fact. His son, Constantine, and his son, Titus, are just pretty straight up evil. Like, self-sabotagingly evil, in Titus’ case. But it’s ok, because the noble-savage Dansk people are there to be unfairly cut down by the cruel political manoeuvering (you can barely call it that; it’s not complex in the slightest), and the beautiful handmaiden of the princess also escapes the carnage, so he can ally with her and they can both try to reach their own people to warn them of the coming war Titus wants to engineer. It’s giving coming of age in spades. Add to this, in this world, some lucky lucky people can soulbond with a creature (mostly mythical ones, but not always… Matharu is not a big one for consistency), including, among the Dansk, dragons. Dragons are increasingly rare, a dying breed, and the strongest creature anyone can soulbond with (and thus, making the strongest soulbound). The book is called “Dragon Rider”, we can all see where this is going.

And so, the plucky young hero must escape the cruel clutches of the empire, all while trying to learn how to control this new magic he must keep secret as he tries to make his way east to the steppes. Along the way, they pick up a gruff older man who seems mercenary but whose actions seem to suggest a nobler heart within, who also happens to know shit tonnes about magic and is willing to teach. Hurrah!

It is… well it’s exactly what I’m making it sound like. And that’s what I mean. There are hundreds upon hundreds of versions of this story, with the same recycled worldbuilding cribbing superficially from historic cultures (often the Romans, as here), the same recycled protagonist journey and burgeoning attraction to the woman who must accompany him, the same gruff mentor, the same animal companion, the same first learnings of magic and the discovery of being really quite good at it.

But I have seen fewer of those hundred same stories in the last few years. To some extent, this is because I know what I like and it isn’t this. But I think there’s more to it than that – I think it has become more the thing to actually dig into those pieces of worldbuilding and characterisation and do something with them, on… literally any level. Interrogate them. Rejig them. Whether through a desire to just not do the exact same thing again, or because there is something interesting to be found there, if only for the looking, the days of the unreconstructed hero’s journey to find the noble warrior people and fight against the evil emperor seem to have diminished and gone into the west.

Which I suppose might make Dragon Rider Galadriel? Seems a bit harsh on her. The metaphor may have got away from me. They’re out of vogue, is my point. I’ve been spoilt by books that invest a bit more love and attention into what they’re doing, and so this sort of retro simplicity was quite the slap in the face.

And for my second point (which dovetails my first, but is not quite the same thing) – some books, old or new, have themes, ideas, something fundamental to how the approach themselves that is worth tackling and considering when reading. Dragon Rider is, by contrast, ideologically vacant. The curtains really are just blue. There’s nothing going on in his approach to empire, power or politics, because there is no approach to begin with. These are all just set dressing, and they fall apart when considered even slightly, failing to hang together under even mild scrutiny, because they are simply not what the author is interested in or directing his energies towards.

I am not, by nature, a nitpicker of continuity or worldbuilding. I generally feel that once I start saying that the numbers don’t add up and actually surely that plant couldn’t grow there, it’s a sign the book has lost me on something more fundamental and I’m just finding extra things to gripe about. So it is here. There are a lot of things that don’t fit in the worldbuilding, character arcs and general details of the story. Ages don’t make sense, choices of inspiration clash, terminology seems awkward and mismatched. I could give you a list. I made a note of a lot of them as I was reading. But they’re just a symptom; they don’t actually matter. What matters is that complete vacancy at the thematic heart of the story – nothing hangs together because there isn’t a core that they all link into or derive from. They’re not working towards anything together, nor were they chosen to achieve, as far as I can tell, any particular effect other than “sound vaguely cool”. Instead of a purposeful, deliberate, coherent set of related decisions, it just has the feel of disparate lumps of plot and world from all sorts of traditional fantasy sources shoved into a literary blender and pulsed, so they’re still a bit chunky and you find pieces in your teeth. The continuity errors only matter because they are the easily identified, surface-level iteration of it.

So I’m left with a story whose events I can summarise for you, but whose purpose is opaque to me, if there is one at all. I’m inclined to think not. And without that purpose, the sequence of events, each of which are uninspired and derivative as all fuck, cannot come together to make a story. That is the sucking, gaping absence I found at the core here.

I could – and possibly should – leave it there, for brevity if nothing else, but this book made me cross as I read it, so I will add one final thing. Wherever you sit on the streamlined vs ornate prose spectrum, there exists the secret third thing of the bunch: just plain bad. I think the author was aiming for streamlined, but there were enough tonal clangers that I was brought out of immersion to occasionally marvel at a word choice, usually of the “please confiscate his thesaurus” kind. I am reasonably sure he doesn’t know what “expeditious” means, because he used it in a sentence and it did not make sense. But even aside from that, there’s a weird tonal dissonance across the whole thing – registers slipping and shifting without clear purpose, profanity shoved in haphazardly, and then absent for stretches of relative gentleness. In those haphazard sections, it’s full of swears and violence, casual (purposeless) brutality, and hints of sex and sexual violence under a thin, gauzy dress. And then, after a bit of pretend prostitution, the sex leeches straight out of it again. It’s like a YA book is having a fight with a grimdark adult novel for tonal supremacy, and it’s weird to read. And pretty hard going, because it never decides what it wants to be long enough for me to stay immersed in the story. On a gut level, it felt like it didn’t make sense.

And I suppose that’s the crux of it – it’s a story that hasn’t decided what it’s trying to be, on any substantial level, and so it is plagued by its own incoherence at every level. I can point out all these many ways that resolves during the reading experience, all the many ways it annoys me, but it’s a fundamental problem that goes all the way down to the base, to the ideas. It needed literally any, to turn into something good.

Posted in All, Fantasy | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Death of Stalin

Posted on 30/03/2025 by Roseanna
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I don’t normally review films. Hell, I don’t normally watch films. But sometimes, a reason important enough comes along that forces my hand, and that reason is “for the bit”1. So here we are.

My previous awareness of Armando Ianucci’s black comedy, The Death of Stalin, which follows those closest to him in power around and after his death, has predominantly come via the medium of gifs. Specifically, gifs of Jason Isaacs as General Zhukov. Having now watched the film… I think I had actually already seen all the best bits. Which is not to say the rest was, in any way, bad.

It’s a genuinely hilarious film, that very much puts the black into black comedy. While I’m not exactly against some dark humour in the right setting, in its description, this film does feel like it might be going a bit too far for me. I mean, there’s dark and then there’s Soviet Russia dark, right? And yet it never actually feels like it does cross the line, somehow. There’s some awful shit mentioned, quite a lot of on-screen (or just out of shot) deaths, many of which treated quite casually and yet it never feels trivialised – the comedy isn’t in handwaving it and getting to the laughs, but instead in the juxtaposition of the foregrounded politicking against this dark background. It’s funny, in a terrible, human way, because of what it is, not in spite of it. And that feels terribly hard to manage well.

Of course, it helps when you manage to cast what feels like half of every famous actor to be in it. You’ve got Simon Russell Beale in it for god’s sake, never mind half the BBC’s back catalogue, Steve Buscemi, Paddy Considine, Michael Palin, of course Jason Isaacs and god knows who else I somehow missed. It’s not a long film, and I spent a lot of it going “wait… isn’t that???”. And they are all bringing their A game. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Simon Russell Beale give a bad performance2, but this is better than just fine – as Lavrentiy Beria, he is sinister, competent, scheming and just deeply disturbing, the functional foil for the buffoonery surrounding him. And he’s far from alone. Everyone just seems, by some perfect alchemy, to have decided to have an excellent day and pull together to make something quite magical in its effectiveness.

Much of that magic lives in the dialogue. They’ve made a virtue of the absolute resistance to any kind of verisimilitude. Count, instead, the growing pile of wildly ridiculous insults, swears and invectives. The anachronisms and offhand, blasé treasons. And the delivery of it, chef’s kiss. A great decision made was to absolutely ignore historicity when it comes to accents. Everyone is speaking in their own (well, ok Jason Isaacs has gone northern for… some reason?), and that frisson of inaccuracy really adds something to it. Leaving aside the risks of just sounding terrible, put on Russian accents might just have tipped it back over into too serious again – something about the artificiality of it – where having an American and a Brit haranguing each other just undercuts it all, I think because of the implied casualness that emphasises the petty, personal nature of the politicking that goes on. Weird juxtapositions like this are also just incredibly funny. Don’t ask me why; I don’t make the rules. The costumes are beautiful and feel very plausible, the lighting, sets, staging, all of that could pass for a proper, serious drama – it is only in the audio and the affect of the actors that the anachronism lives, and focussing it down into that one axis just works.

In terms of all of that staging and dressing, for all that it is good and beautiful, it leans on the simpler side. Occasional wide shots of architecture and scenery, and then a predominance of close-in – small rooms, small gatherings, personal conversations. It is a comedy of the interpersonal – the interpersonal that will affect millions – and so the camera work keeps it close to reflect this. Likewise, there’s no grand explanations or exposition. We drop into media res, the thing is what the thing is, and you just go with the simplicity, the flow of it.

Likewise, at only 1h 46min, it’s a punchy thing. There’s nothing extraneous here to slow it down – we just slide through on the barest necessity of it, through some short but snappy moments of dialogue, onto the resolution. And again, this helps with the humour – we don’t need to be bogged down in explanations. We don’t need context. Keeping it tight and interpersonal means we can relate to it on that interpersonal level, and derive a lot of the laughs from it in that vein, while the ongoing understanding of this as the fate of a nation, as that ultimately blackly comedic backdrop, does not need to be constantly brought up. We know. We can see it in the background, and that’s more than enough.

I honestly struggle to find anything bad to say about it – it is just so tightly constructed, with everything and everyone working seamlessly together to make this tidy, efficient thing exactly what it needs to be. You have everything you need, with great actors, great dialogue and a great idea, and absolutely nothing to slow it down or pad it out beyond what is truly necessary to serve its purpose. Truly, a well-made thing.

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However, to loop back to the beginning, the reason those gifs are a director’s cut of best bits is simply this: Jason Isaacs steals the fucking show, even when that show was already pretty perfect. He doesn’t turn up until about half way through. He’s only on screen intermittently, for short moments. But even when he turns up only to deliver one line of dialogue, it is so absolutely top notch, so glorious, that it eclipses all else. Why does General Zhukov sound like Sean Bean? Don’t ask. He rocks up, shucks his coat like the coolest motherfucker ever to walk on screen, and then proceeds to deliver banger after quotable banger, crack jokes, punch a man and glare. If I could make a director’s cut of the film, it would be under ten minutes long and just feature him.

Some of his bangers include:

Right, what’s a war hero got to do to get some lubrication around here?

Jesus Christ, did Coco Chanel take a shit on your head?

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[as he opens his overcoat to reveal two AK-47s strapped to his hips] All right, boys, meet your dates for tonight.

A modern soldier’s greatest fear, it’s not death, it’s not starvation, it’s chafing!

Take his belt off. It’s hard to run away with your pants falling down.

They don’t sound quite as funny, written down like this, but when he’s delivering them? God I could watch that for hours…

Er… sorry where was I?

Right. Yes. Ahem. Review. Film.

In many contexts, one actor stealing the show might be a problem. It unbalances things. It doesn’t feel deliberate. But again, somehow, everything works here. I think precisely because Zhukov only shows up so late, and only has brief moments on screen, Isaacs doesn’t get a chance to genuinely dominate the film. Yes, when he’s there, he is the centre of gravity. But we move on, always, to something else, and so he is allowed to remain a punchline. He makes me mostly think of Blackadder‘s Lord Flashheart (albeit his mirror universe, rather evil counterpart) – both serve their purpose best because they are restricted to the smallest of doses, however potent. They operate at cross-purposes to the tone and dynamic of the rest of the show around them, providing humour by that contrast, but never stay long enough to drag the dynamic off its axis and onto theirs. He’s funny because he’s a breath of fresh air – he alone, backed by the Red Army, can just come out and say shit, punch a man, be something other than a scheming, politicking little rat. He can say “Spit it out, Georgy. Staging a coup here.”, while and because everyone else is talking around it. And so he makes it, by being that necessary contrast.

An excellent actor, in an excellent role, in a thoroughly excellent film. Absolute delight to watch and would highly recommend.

  1. Octothorpe episode 131, in which two of the three picks for the episode also had things I’d written a review of (which were referenced). It seemed only fitting to complete the set. ↩︎
  2. I saw him last year in AE Housman’s The Invention of Love, a play I have been yearning for since I saw Arcadia in the Peterhouse deer park as an undergraduate, and he was magnificent. ↩︎
Posted in All, Else, History/Myth, Off-Topic | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

The River Has Roots – Amal El-Mohtar

Posted on 25/02/2025 by Roseanna
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Many (too many) years ago, I had to write an undergraduate essay about coherence and cohesion, in the linguistics sense, and texts which can have one but not the other. In essence, coherence is about a text having more fundamental, overarching meaning, while cohesion is to do with the more granular, grammatical and structural ways of creating meaning1. This essay, and the ensuing supervision, has stuck in mind primarily for the discussions of both the poem Jabberwocky and the game Mornington Crescent, but also because it is a genuinely useful and interesting way to think about texts and their meaning, especially in an SFF context, and doubly so when the author is inclined towards a more abstract, poetic or unusual turn of phrase.

Cue: Amal El-Mohtar and The River Has Roots, a (very) loose novella retelling of The Twa Sisters, a murder ballad full of all the best kind of murder ballad shenanigans2, into which she incorporates a heavy dose of traditional fairytale motifs and themes.

Having read her work before, and specifically having read her poetry, I was entirely unsurprised in picking this up to find that she has leaned into the fairytale/murder ballad aspects in the way she uses language and tone – which is to say, with care, deliberation and intense playfulness. Add these up, and you get a story that takes something of the medieval riddle texts and turns it into magic, the sort of logic that exists in fairytales, where meaning shifts in type midway through an idea, from something that seems entirely mundanely obvious, to another type of meaning altogether.

Coherence/cohesion, you see?

The thing is, at every point, The River Has Roots does have both, but El-Mohtar makes you pause, moment by moment in a sentence, to make sure you grasp them. It’s a grammar that keeps you on your toes, forcing you to stop and… wait what? And so, you read more slowly (or at least I did). The text makes a natural path for you to spend more time languishing within it, soaking up the atmosphere, which it has in absolute spades. To what end? Well, none really. But that might be the end in and of itself – this isn’t a book about pace, twists or resolutions. Nor could it be – the inherent burden and boon of being based on a ballad is that many people will come to it with a sense of the story already3: there are key themes that crop up, murders, jealous love, swans, singing, harps and a calling to justice of the wrongdoers, as well as the eponymous sisters. So if a reader goes in expecting those, and you don’t plan to thwart their expectations, the value has to come from somewhere else. A large part of the value is exactly that atmosphere – El-Mohtar has made prose I wanted to spend time in, both because it was beautiful, but also because it was intensely, constantly playful.

To illustrate, one of my favourite, tiny moments of the book is a section of text that runs:

Most music is the result of some intimacy with an instrument. One wraps one’s mouth around a whistle and pours one’s breath into it; one all but lays one’s cheek against a violin; and skin to skin is holy drummer’s kiss.

In part, I enjoy this simply for the imagery – plenty of ballads do sex as well as death, and so getting the erotic allusions of wind instruments feels entirely apropos. But also, I’m a basic bitch who loves a little bit of Shakespeare dropped in as a treat. Is it big or clever? Absolutely not. But it gives that sense of lightness, of an airy joy of someone delighting in the talking, that runalong dash of not being quite sure what’s coming next but it may well bring a spark of joy. And the text is full of little moments like that, flashes in the dark of something that invites you to come play too.

To step aside from the prose for a moment – though I focus on it precisely because it is such a draw and so prominent (no streamlined-prose story this) – the plot itself is also well-handled. Having read (and not enormously enjoyed) another retelling of this same ballad4, I think much of the skill comes in simply the simplicity. The core story is fairly straightforward and tight, and El-Mohtar has not tried to spin it up too much so that it becomes overburdened by itself: there isn’t an excess of worldbuilding or backstory, save what is needed to serve the emotional core of the story. Magic exists, is seen, and flies past without deep understanding, because deep understanding isn’t needed. What is important is to understand where magic sits with regard to those core interactions, and that it can influence the story in dramatically emotive ways – which is clearly and gracefully set up right at the opening of the story, where the text dwells on the river and the landscape, and the transfigured trees that define the physical world of the protagonists. What comes after, though it may have the form of explanatory text, instead serves to demonstrate that magic is partially knowable and comprehensible, but also difficult, flexible and strange. Not the what or the why, definitely none of the how. Just that it can (and will, with an obvious but not ungainly sense of foreshadowing) affect this small cast of people in consequential ways.

And if it all goes to serve the emotional core of the story… does it? Yes. The version of the ballad I am familiar with is the one where the sisterly jealousy is central, but I know it isn’t the only one, and I’m quite glad another has been picked here. It’s not unsuited – jealous, nasty men are ten a penny in ballads and folklore after all – and I find that switching the core love to being the sisterly bond instead of fighting over the lover moves it away from territory firmly explored in other versions of this I’ve encountered, and other texts I have read recently. Nothing wrong with true love and all that, but I do like to see variety, and this kind of sisterly love does not get the spotlight others do, on the whole. It also brings in a whole extra layer when the story considers change, both in the mundane and magical senses. The love of sisters who have come from the same place, and in the same way, and must grow both together and apart offers a wonderful in for a story that is about transmutation – there is a constant balance of change and choice throughout, starting with smaller scale moments and building up to the crescendo, that is only amplified by setting them within a dynamic that must necessarily weather change without dissolution.

And then, to come back to the prose (because I cannot talk about this book without keeping on doing that), its other benefit in slowing the reading experience down is in helping make a feature of the shortness of the book. At 140 pages, it is relatively svelte, and so carries the risk of rushing on the reader’s part: it would be terribly easy to sit down and just consume it whole in one sitting. The brevity is a feature – the ballad can only bear the weight of so much extrapolation – but if it were told in plainer prose, aside from just being less aesthetically appealing, it would run the risk of feeling insubstantial, because there really isn’t all that much to it as a plot.

Which comes to the crux of it – if you want pace, action and a relatively straightforward narrative, this is a text that will constantly frustrate that desire. The prose is obstructionist in the best possible way. Go into it willing to sit with, to murmur and to chew on it as a text object, as a thing that could only be told in words, because the words are the whole of its art, and the focus of its interest. More than sisterly love, more than murder and betrayal, it is a book in many ways about words and meaning, and how their fundamental magic underpins everything else, and can be used to undo it. That seems trite, when said offhand like that… but works awfully well when turned into something with the lyrical, dreamy and intensely fairy-tale-feeling prose El-Mohtar delivers. She has captured the feeling of both ballad and fairytale, without sacrificing either of them on the altar of “being a normal novel”, and if that’s what you want? Then it absolutely delivers and delights.

  1. People who did linguistics more than just as a small part of their undergraduate degree, I am very sorry if I botched this explanation; it has been a while. Pls do correct me, I want to know. ↩︎
  2. If you don’t love a corpse-harp, what are you even there for? ↩︎
  3. But not all the answers, because there are about as many versions of the ballad as there are tellers. ↩︎
  4. Sistersong by Lucy Holland. My main memory of it is a story that got away from itself a bit. ↩︎
Posted in All, Fantasy | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Hugo Nominations 2025

Posted on 20/02/2025 by Roseanna

Maybe it’s because I read more books last year than any since records began1, but this time around in the Hugo nominations it has been such a dilemma cutting it all down into five per category (mostly, there are some exceptions). So I’m going to do a run down of my picks and some of the ones that didn’t quite squeeze in, and talk about what I think came out last year that might be worth celebrating.

In case you weren’t aware: nominations are now open for the 2025 Hugo Awards (details here). If you were a voting member for last year’s Worldcon, or if you bought WSFS membership before the deadline (I think 31st of Jan?), then you are eligible to nominate. I love nominating things. It’s like having turbo opinions, in that they may have an actual effect on the world, rather than just be a nuisance to those in my vicinity. As such, I have pulled together my current set of nominees for most of the award categories, and I’m going to tell you why some of them are on here (it’s because they’re great and you should read them, if you need a tl;dr).

Things I will not be discussing:

  • Lodestar (because I don’t read YA, so my opinions mean nothing)
  • Editor categories (because I don’t know how to spot good fiction editing)
  • Best Dramatic Presentation long and short (because I only watched one qualifying thing2)
  • Graphic Story or Comic (because I read some qualifying things but none of them were good enough to nominate)
  • Artist, pro and fan (because I don’t know enough to be a good discusser on it)
  • Astounding (because every time I think I have someone to nominate it turns out they published a single short story in 2016, so I keep having to go back to the drawing board)

So, starting at the top…

Best Novel

  • The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, Published by Hodder & Stoughton
  • Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, Published by Tordotcom
  • In Universes by Emet North, Published by Harper
  • Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins, Published by Sourcebooks Landmark
  • Private Rites by Julia Armfield, Published by Fourth Estate

There is a bit of a theme of “grimness” in the novels I loved from 2024, whether in tackling racism (The Ministry of Time), colonialism (Rakesfall), climate change (Private Rites) or more specific or varied types of unhappiness in the other two. But more critically than that, what unites all of these books, at least for me, is how deliberately prosey and bookish they all feel – they’re all things that would resist or outright reject attempts to adapt them to another medium, because they inhabit their textual format so thoroughly, with distinctive voices, and lived more firmly in my memory because of it. Particularly, Remember You Will Die is told through a collection of obituaries, a conceit I had never considered before, and yet in practice adored. And likewise In Universes slides us through universe after universe, using its vividly beautiful turns of phrase to illustrate the slips into weirdness and furthering from home that the protagonist(s) encounter. I love me a prosey book, I love someone doing a neat bit of weird, and in 2024 I had that in spades.

Best of the rest:

  • Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley, Published by Solaris
  • The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang, Published by William Morrow
  • The West Passage by Jared Pechaček, Published by Tordotcom
  • The City in Glass by Nghi Vo, Published by Tordotcom
  • Metal from Heaven by august clarke, Published by Erewhon
  • A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon (translated by Anton Hur), Published by HarperVia

I told you, it was a banger year. There were so many.

Best Novella

  • Tanglewood by Knicky L. Abbott, Published by Luna Press
  • The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain by Sofia Samatar, Published by Tordotcom
  • A Mourning Coat by Alex Jeffers, Published by Neon Hemlock
  • The Last to Drown by Lorraine Wilson, Published by Luna Press
  • The Mountain Crown by Karin Lowachee, Published by Solaris

Have you heard the good word of Neon Hemlock and Luna Press? Because I am becoming increasingly annoying about both of them. It’s worth it though, I promise, if you like good novellas that really embrace the format, rather than giving extremely abbreviated novels. Also emotional gutpunches, which somewhat characterises this list. We can be sad/mad about: historic racism in the Caribbean; the academy; dying dads; dead husbands, amnesia, the long term effects of a serious car accident and curses; colonialism. All of them take their emotional core and hone it into something really pointed, taking very little space to do something very big with each of their themes. Another set from a strong year, and another year in which I am just so entirely here for novellas.

Best of the rest:

  • The Dragonfly Gambit by A. D. Sui, Published by Neon Hemlock
  • The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed, Published by Tordotcom

There’s also North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher, which is technically over the threshold into novel, despite being part of Neon Hemlock’s novella lineup for the year. If it were a novella, it would be in my list. I would nominate it in a heartbeat. As it stands, I’m not quite sure what to do, because it’s in with a tough crowd in novel, and I worry moreover that it’s going to be put into novella accidentally… and then there’s the wiggle room the awards have for over/under wordcount so maybe I put it in here anyway? I don’t know. But it was so good.

Best Novelette

Before I say anything else, let me be very real with you all: please, I beg, get yourself a copy of Deep Dream and read The Limner Wrings His Hands. It’s worth it. It’s mad. It’s brilliant. It made me go “why does this man not have a Hugo?” repeatedly, in increasing tones of consternation. It’s just… nuts, in the best possible way.

Anyway, aside from that – normally, we come to nomination time and I realise that I have tragically failed on the novelette front, but not this year. I have read a lot more short fiction than usual, and so my boots they were filled. Two of them are further output from authors whose work I already know and love, but this was my first foray into Thomas Ha (thanks, I’ll be coming back for more of this bizarrity, love it), and an unexpected find in Lawrence Harding’s Old Habits Die Hard, which is fantasy action Cadfael. Never knew I needed that, but I did.

Best Short Story

  • “Labelscar” by Anya Johanna DeNiro, (Embodied Exegesis, ed. Ann LeBlanc)
  • “Halfway to Hope” by Lavanya Lakshminarayan, (Deep Dream, ed. Indra Das)
  • “Because Flora Existed and I Had Loved Her” by Anna Martino, (Samovar)
  • “Immortal is the Heart” by Cassandra Khaw, (Deep Dream, ed. Indra Das)
  • “Syndical Organization in Revolutionary Transition” by Izzy Wasserstein, (Embodied Exegesis, ed. Ann LeBlanc)

It may have become obvious at this point that I read and enjoyed Deep Dream very much. Which is true, I did. Banger collection full of banger stories, the like of which I would be deeply pleased to see on a Hugo shortlist. But I read another collection too, and this one was a little more surprising for me – Embodied Exegesis, with its additional titling Transfeminine Cyberpunk Futures. The surprising part? I don’t normally like cyberpunk. I find it very hard to connect to, as a genre, sometimes living more in the aesthetic and vibes than in something more interesting and tangible. This collection solves that problem, and grounds the cyberpunk most firmly into the body and the real. It’s a collection that places cyberpunk in the realm of the real, the individual and the quotidian, and it made me realise just exactly what is in the genre for me to like. These two stories did that particularly well, though again, I would not be sad to see much of the collection do well.

But I did also read and love a short story that wasn’t in a collection. “Because Flora Existed and I Had Loved Her” is told in excerpts of texts from in-world sources, and yes yes, once again I love some messing around with format, but it really does an excellent job in so small a space to craft a narrative in the background of other things, with just the right amount of withholding and proffering information just as you need it to feel perfectly paced.

Best Series

Ok, so. I don’t like the Best Series Hugo. I tend not to nominate in it, because I think it’s kind of poorly constructed, and isn’t measuring what I would want to measure to determine what would make a good series. I don’t think you can really begin to do that unless the series is, in some way, complete. To pick something not from 2024… what if Alecto absolutely fluffs the ending of The Locked Tomb? What if we’d best seriesed that? We’d have egg on our faces and feel like proper fools, right? Well, I would anyway.

However. If I were going to nominate anything based on the series category as we have it, not the one I yearn for, it would be Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle, where each book’s little conceit makes every new installment a delight, and the shifting modes of them between books makes it overall great as a series, not just as a bunch of great individual works.

Will I crack and nominate it anyway? It’s a strong maybe.

Best Related Work

  • Snap! Criticism by Dan Hartland (column at The Ancillary Review of Books, example here)
  • Track Changes by Abigail Nussbaum, Published by Briardene Books

Yes, there’s only two things on here. But do you know what these two have in common? My reaction to reading both of them was to just keep saying “fuuuuuck” to myself. What higher praise is there than that?

More seriously, Abigail’s collection is beautifully er… collected… and organised by theme, in a way that really makes you think about the reviews (many of which I had previously read in the wild) in a new light, by their contrast with their thematic siblings. She has a very immediate and engaging voice in her work, which to me feels like a conversation started, something hoping for a response, whether from later works in the collection, or as a hanging thread leaving the expectation of more later, from her or from the wider conversation, and that’s a feeling I very much enjoyed.

Meanwhile, Snap! Criticism makes me want to take notes to figure out how the hell he’s doing *waves hands* all of this. Connections! To things I would never have thought to connect! New thoughts through the lens of old thoughts. Seeing things through other things! Every time one drops, I am excited to read it. Genuinely one of the best things on the internet right now, galaxy brain thoughts, head exploding time. The good shit, through and through.

Best Game or Interactive Work

Am I going to nominate Dragon Age: the Veilguard? That’s the key question being posed by this category. Because it’s probably the game I was most excited to play in 2024, the one I put the most time into, talked about the most, invested in the most, and bombed through in a distressingly short span of time for the number of hours I played. I had a blast. But… but. The longer away from the experience of playing it I am, the more I think about it, the more uncertainty I feel about whether I’ll be nominating it or not. I worry that the enjoyment I found in it rested too heavily on my love for the previous games, and that the cracks that appear under scrutiny are too great for it to have a place here. I don’t think I’ll make a final decision until the last moment before the submission window closes.

On the other hand, I will definitely be nominating Tactical Breach Wizards, which is a delightfully puzzley romp in which you are wizard SAS having to solve XCom-ish combat situations, but where your primary solution for problems is to defenestrate people, and absolutely nothing in the game is taken seriously. The dialogue? Actually funny as hell. The art? Simple but effective. The mechanics? Easy to grasp, fun to implement. Everything you want in a relatively short indie game, it has. Also traffic warlocks.

Best Semiprozine

  • Strange Horizons
  • FIYAH
  • khōréō
  • Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
  • Small Wonders

The first three are frequent fliers on my nomination list, because they produce consistently top notch fiction that often graces my ballot (especially in years when I haven’t read two collections I’m obsessed with) and, in the case of Strange Horizons, also some banger review content and special issues. The latter two are new discoveries for me, as part of my determination to discover speculative poetry for the special Hugo, and the two who I felt most driven to continue to consume from reading their 2024 output. LCRW has a mixture of prose and poetry, but of the sort that made me slow down in reading it so I didn’t miss a thing. Small Wonders meanwhile kept giving me poems with motifs or themes that I loved, even when they’re ones I wasn’t aware fell into the buckets I am normally fond of, which was a delight.

Best Fanzine

In my opinion, the best kind of review is the one that you find yourself compelled to keep reading, even when you have not and will never consume the media it is discussing. Everything on my slate keeps doing that to me. Whether I want it to or not. Because yes, they’re all review-type content, on the whole, and it’s that I most want to see rewarded in the fanzine category because well… of course I do. And especially the kind that are willing to really dig into things, go a little bit further, write a little bit more, do a conversation or a column or just pause and be really insightful on something. Make me think.

I do happen to also write a column for ARB, but don’t let that put you off – they publish a bunch of really good stuff as well.

Best Fancast

  • Barcart Bookshelf
  • Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones
  • Hugo, Girl
  • A Meal of Thorns
  • Critical Friends

2024 was the year I actually listened to podcasts with any kind of regularity. It was great. Mainly because I had a craft project to do to keep half of my brain busy while I did it. Barcart Bookshelf is a youtube channel, and one that will leave you thirsty for cocktails as well as books, but the rest are all your classic audio situation, and all willing to get their hands dirty really digging into a text. Eight Days and A Meal of Thorns have wreaked havoc on my tbr, while Hugo, Girl has left me feeling vindicated and fortified in my feelings about books from long ago. And of course, Critical Friends occasionally pops into my ears to make me think big thinky thoughts, and wish there were more of it.

Best Fan Writer

  • Jenny Hamilton
  • Anna (forestofglory)
  • Archita Mittra
  • Liz Bourke

Just as a I like my fanzines full of big thinking, so too my best fan writers – and here we have a strong selection doing exactly that. The sort of reviews I want to reply to. The sort of posts I want to send to people and go “look! read this!”. The kind of opinions I write responses to even when jetlagged all to fuck, because the things they said were rattling around my brain so hard I had to do something about it (true story). The kind of essays and ideas that once again make me go “fuuuuuuck”.

Best Poem

  • Along the River’s Edge by Daniel A. Rabuzzi, (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #48)
  • Shattered Souls at Heaven’s Gate by Ayòdéjì Israel, (Deadlands Issue #36)
  • In a Cradle of Antlers by Avra Margariti, (Small Wonders Issue #13)
  • Journey by Tiki Bindu, (Samovar 28 October 2024)
  • Hiatus by River, (Deadlands Issue #36)

I did a whole separate post about the best poem Hugo here, so probably best not to clog up this already enormous post with that, except to say whittling those ten down to five was surprisingly difficult.

And there we have it – my tentative current selection which will no doubt get tweaked at least fifty times before the deadline. I say again, a banger year.

Lastly, if you got this far, I must3 mention that I am eligible for nominations for Best Fan Writer, and I have a post giving you some reasons why you might consider that here.

  1. 2017 ↩︎
  2. Which I am nominating, but a list of one isn’t interesting. It’s Season 1 of Delicious in Dungeon, which was absolutely delightful and would deserve its place on the ballot. ↩︎
  3. I mean, not really. But I shall. ↩︎
Posted in All, Else, Not A Review | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

One Fool’s Whistlestop Tour Through 2024’s Speculative Poetry

Posted on 01/02/2025 by Roseanna
Image of the Hugo Award logo, with the words "Hugo Award" below

There’s a new Hugo Award this year, just for the once, as a special little treat – and it’s for Best Poem! As a long time poetry reader and insufferable snob, I couldn’t be happier about it. Or… well. That was my initial thought. The thing is, although I’ve been reading contemporary poetry on and off throughout my adult life, what I haven’t really been doing is reading speculative contemporary poetry. I was only hazily aware it existed at all1, and it just never really crossed my radar in the wild2. Because I don’t like to do things by halves, especially being an insufferable snob, I felt the need to do plenty of reading in between the category announcement and nominations, to try to get myself a good sense of the field and a reasonable position from which to nominate.

And so I did. I have read, to use the technical term, a metric shit-tonne of the speculative poetry that exists in free to access magazines that I became aware of, or the ones for which I have a pre-existing subscription. I also read one speculative verse novel, and paid for a couple of things I didn’t normally have access to but looked promising. I did all of this in a relatively condensed time period, with a purpose in mind, which I will admit is not my preferred poetry consumption experience, but we do what we have to do.

From this experience, I have several conclusions, but I’m going to start with the difficult one: in my opinion, really quite a lot of it just isn’t very good.

To qualify that a little – I repeat, I am coming to this from a background of not reading much in the way of speculative poetry, but a lot of contemporary… non-speculative? I don’t know what the generic term might be. Poetry-poetry, what you find in the poetry section. That stuff. Outside of the speculative, I know my tastes pretty well and have refined the process by which I find new things in order to mostly get things I’ll enjoy while aiming to stretch myself a little in the process. I have favourite poets, favourite imprints, and favourite themes. I have none of that for speculative, and spent most of the time flying fairly blind, just picking things up and taking them as I found them, going in without any map or scaffolding to support me through. While I’m not sure that’s bad exactly, it did mean that I didn’t have the awareness to pre-filter out some things I might have known weren’t going to be for me before I actually read them.

Probably alongside this, speculative poetry has presumably developed enough of its own norms (that I’ll become aware of as I read more through the years3) that differ from other poetry, that I’m not at all fluent in, and so are rubbing my brain up the wrong way because they’re not speaking in the grammar(s) I expect from poetry elsewhere.

I am also not saying that all non-speculative poetry is good, or even better. I have read plenty of clangers, and indeed have dipped my toe into the semi-recent phenomenon of the insta-poet, which is, to be blunt, where poetic artistry goes to die4.

So I read a fair bit of guff, and as I went on, I found that there was a particular theme running through a lot of what I bounced off – work whose strength and value, whose emotive weight (whatever that emotion was) came from the core ideas, rather than the artistry of the text, or ideally a synthesis of the artistry and the ideas. A lot of the poems I read tackled highly charged subjects, and did so with arresting bluntness, but were delivering to me no different an experience than the same thing in full prose would have done, because their form did not contribute significantly to the value. Or did the same thing, but with a charming idea rather than a difficult topic. Something cute or whimsical or amusing, something too singular to be the core of a full-length story, turned into a fairly short poem whose format had no real bearing on it as an artistic whole. Not that they don’t have some sort of poetic structure, just that I find it has no real bearing on how they land with me.

I’ve been a little torn here about whether I should provide examples. But I think it’s important to make clear what I mean, especially because if you like these ones, nothing I have to say is going to be of any use to you. Which is probably good information to have. And so, stressing that these are merely a small selection for illustrative purposes rather than the full gamut of poems I didn’t like, I present two I think that make clear what I’m talking about:

Both have at their core deeply emotively charged topics, but I found my response to them both was predicated on my existing feelings/responses to their core topics, rather than anything engendered by them as poems. And if I were to nominate something for an award claiming to raise up a Best Poem, I would want some of that… well that bestness to be from it being specifically a poem. The poetry has to matter.

We likewise have examples like this:

It’s sweet. It’s perfectly nice. Aww, dragons, except they’re like real wild-life. At its core is the sort of idea that I can envision could be translated into a four-panel cartoon meme that would do the rounds – entirely effective as a little vignette of an idea, but… no bigger than that. Not something that would, for me, come into consideration for a best poem, because again, the emotive weight comes from the sweetness of the idea rather than how it’s constructed.

If what you want in your poetry is a short interlude on a weighty topic, or a brief excursion into whimsy – I’m afraid we’re not after the same things, so my recommendations will be of little use to you in this matter. As the Hugos ever are, this is going to be a situation in which there are n voters operating on at least n+1 constructions of “best”, so my metrics will get muddled up into the rest of them and we’ll produce… something. Who knows what. But at this stage, when all we have is a wide sea of possibilities, I may as well get my own thesis out there for what I would, personally, like to see in a Hugo Award for Best Poem: works who manage to use all three of those elements discussed so far, the speculative, the poetry and the emotive impact, to make something that feels like a deeply crafted, thoughtful, meaningful thing that will linger with me longer than the time spent to read it on a page.

And such things did exist in my forays! And so, for your perusal, I give you a recommended reading list5 of poems I think have that special spark of something worth honouring on the ballot:

Image of the cover of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet issue #48, a riotously colourful set of fantastical nature imagery
  • Starting with the thing which, for me, was the absolute best of the year with clear water in between it and the rest: “Along the River’s Edge” by Daniel A. Rabuzzi, in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #48. This presents a bit of a problem in recommending you read it, because it’s not a free-to-view magazine, but I would argue that the content of that issue was so strong across the board, it’s worth the cost. This was the first poem I got to in my foray that made me do a big sigh and think “ok, all is not lost”, and reminded me what good felt like to read. I tend to reach for poems that evoke the natural world anyway, so having that intertwined with the supernatural was a great start, but more than anything, it’s the use of language and structure, the way it intertwined with the imagery to reinforce the atmosphere being created… just excellent.
  • Cohen, Jie Venus; “Gaia Sings the Body Electric”, [Radon Journal Issue 8]. I love the formal play here – I find this kind of formatting stuff can be extremely hit or miss (see above the instapoets with whom it sometimes feels a little… arbitrary, trying to mimic the form of what a poem should look like without the meaning underpinning it). Here, however, it feels precisely calibrated to help deliver and emphasis the meaning, and realise the authorial voice’s draw on technology as perspective.
  • Cooney, CSE; “fowlskin”, [Uncanny Magazine Issue Fifty-Six]. I really enjoy the way the format here makes the pacing giddy, hurrying towards the end and echoing the dance of the content. There’s a breathlessness to it that is in pleasing tension and interplay with that ending.
  • Day, Kelsey; “Sunday in Atlanta”, [Reckoning]. Who doesn’t love a multimedia experience? I admit, I mostly like this one because I enjoy poetry being linked up to other forms at the same time. I’m a simple woman, and I like a nice picture, especially when the graphic style and the written tone marry up so well as they do here.
  • Israel, Ayòdéjì; “Shattered Souls at Heaven’s Gate”, [Deadlands Issue #36]. Another one I enjoyed because the use of structure and formatting felt pointed and effective. The extended pauses and disjointed line shape forcing you to succumb to the pace it sets you, and echoing the destruction at its core.
  • Margariti, Avra; “In a Cradle of Antlers”, [Small Wonders Magazine, Issue 13]. I do love a bit of alliteration, and the way this one lives in the descriptions, submerging the reader in the imagery, is exactly what I’m after in poetry (and again, nature imagery, for which I remain a sucker). It was just a beautiful bit of text to sit in and inhabit for a little while, reveling in the frozen moments of action being pinned into place, however briefly.
  • Ness, Mari; “Ever Noir”, [Haven Speculative, Issue Sixteen]. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of the fantastical and the noirish, and managed to do it to enough of a degree to make me smile without making it just… silly. There’s still weight to it as a poem, balancing just right against a neat concept.
  • Ogden, Aimee; “Entropy Brooks No Countercurrent”, [Kaleidotrope Summer 2024]. This one’s simple, effective, with clear imagery delivered using the poetics to emphasise and distill that simplicity into something more powerful
  • River; “Hiatus”, [Deadlands Issue #36]. I almost can’t put my finger on why this one works for me, but there’s something about the rhythm of it that just clicks into a gap in my brain (this is another key feature of poetry I tend to love, the rhythm – it’s why I find myself keeping going back to Kae Tempest’s work).
  • Tiji, Bindu; “Journey”, [Samovar 28 October 2024] (translated by Lakshmy Nair). I cannot imagine how hard it is to translate poetry so well it still lands in another language, so I am in awe of this one. This is another whose appeal to me sits in the vivid imagery, and “I dipped my fingertips in the blood and painted my first picture in the burning sand” particularly just… sticks for me. The use of imagery both of violence and growth, balancing each other out throughout was excellent as well.
  • Wheat, Steve; “The Last Voyage: Island Relocation Program”, [Radon Journal Issue 8]. I go back and forward with myself on this one, but I think it’s worth including nonetheless for what it does well – the parallel structures of the two different perspectives I think are excellent, even if some of the poetics are not to my taste in the end.
Cover of Calypso by Oliver K. Langmead, a profusion of pink plantlife, tending to green in the corners, against a black background

Now, I mentioned also that I read a verse novel. I’m not quite sure how that fits into everything in terms of awards categories, but given it was a book I agonised over reviewing for several months before scrapping the draft, and indeed poetry, I’m going to mention it briefly here as well. It was Calypso by Oliver K. Langmead. It tells the story of a planet-seeding, terraforming expedition into deep space, on a ship carrying cryogenically suspended crew members to bring the project to life when they reach the destination. However, as the first viewpoint character awakens, she discovers not everything has gone to plan, and not every plan was as she believed it to be. It’s told through the eyes of several crew members, and in verse, as events unfold dramatically. Purely as a story, it was perfectly interesting, though not breathtakingly so. However, as an object of poetry, I found it distinctly lacking. To be brutally honest, the phrase that has lodged in my brain since reading it and I couldn’t rattle out long enough to write something more… gentle… was “poetically naive”. There’s a lot of the raw stuff of which poetry can be made, but it never feels like it’s been distilled down enough into that sharpness of purpose that, at least for me, characterises the best of what I enjoy in verse. If I contrast it, for instance, to Deep Wheel Orcadia (as the only “poems in space” comp I have), it just feels a little overburdened by its own text. DWO has an almost brutal efficiency to the use of language, without ever compromising on the artistic effect or emotional heft, and this just doesn’t get anywhere close – there’s too much of the connective tissue between ideas that makes sense from a novel-writing perspective but which doesn’t quite land in a poetic context, because those pieces of scaffolding just aren’t contributing artistically to the whole. While I appreciate that it’s doing what it’s doing – I would love to see more verse novels in the world in general, and SFF more particularly – it just doesn’t do it with enough poise for me to feel like it worked as a coherent whole.

And so, there we have it. Some less well done things, some excellent things. I’m sure there were some wonderful works I missed because I never knew to look for them, but this is what about six months of concerted looking and reading have got me to, at least predominantly in what is available in the free-to-view market (which, realistically, is likely to be the pool from which the Hugo nominations mostly draw). I’m even less certain than usual how loose a relation my list might bear on the end result, but I enjoyed spending the time reading to get to it, and found some works and authors that were absolutely worth the searching out. Hopefully this list is a useful taste of what I’ve found for those who may not have had the time to dig into as much poetry (albeit one sculpted by my particular preferences), or a prompt for people to argue with me in the comments/on bluesky because I’m a fool with no taste whatsoever. Either’s fine with me.

  1. Apart from Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles, which rightly won the Clarke, knocked my socks off and I suspect set my expectations in the ceiling for anything else I might encounter. ↩︎
  2. It is at this point that I admit to earnestly having this experience despite regularly reading Strange Horizons, in which speculative poetry is a mainstay. I don’t really know how to explain that verse-blindness on my part, it just… happened. ↩︎
  3. Because this really did feel like a blind spot when the temporary Hugo was announced, and I’d like to correct it. ↩︎
  4. Insta-poets are very popular and I do see why, because there’s an accessibility of the emotion in the work they do that makes them very easy to digest. But if I’m reading poetry, I’m there for a good time and a long time, and I am prepared to spend the effort and hours needed to crack things open that take a bit more time to work through. I want poetry I read to feel crafted, artful and like it’s actually a fucking poem not just some prose with weird line breaks and orthography, ok? It doesn’t matter if it’s tackling an emotive subject, I need the poem itself to be part of the emotive process, not just an easy vector of Big Topic transmission. ↩︎
  5. If you tend to read Nerds of a Feather, you may notice that this list constitutes a strict (and fairly significant) subset of the recommended reading poetry list they did. That would be because “they”, in this instance, was in large part me. Much though I’d love to suggest this is an indicator of how excellent all these poems are that they appear in both places, it’s just my sticky hands getting everywhere. ↩︎
Posted in All, Else, Not A Review, Off-Topic, Poetry | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Eligibility Post – 2024 Edition

Posted on 27/01/2025 by Roseanna

It is, apparently, that time of year again1. It still feels weird to me to write these, but the urge to make a self-deprecating joke has always been at war with the need for self-promo, and I see no reason this should stop now.

I have written… it turns out actually quite a lot of things in 2024. Assuming I write about 1500 words per review (mostly true, sometimes wildly more, occasionally less), across my *checks notes* 74 pieces of writing last year (Jesus Christ), that would make… 111,000 words. Good grief. Anyway! A banner year, both for bashing out words on a keyboard and for putting myself out there to do new things. And I had fun, so hurrah for me.

If you were so inclined to include me your considerations for various awards, here’s what I have that might count for it, and give you a feel for the stuff I’ve written/organised in 2024:

Fan Writer/Criticism/Review

I got to do something I’ve been hoping for for lo, these many moons – I have a review in the fantastic Strange Horizons!

I started a monthly column at the Ancillary Review of Books covering small press novellas, an example of which from December can be found here:

There are also some reviews I’ve done for ARB throughout the year, my favourite of which (and possibly one of the best reviews I’ve ever written) can be found here:

Nerds of a Feather won a Hugo for our fanzine in 2023, and are recusing from awards consideration for our 2024 output in that category. However, as an individual contributor, I wrote a number of things there that I’m proud of, a selection of which can be found here:

I also, of course, continued to post on this here blog, and there are a few pieces I think came out really nicely:

Best Related Work

Waaaaay back in January, I ran a project at NoaF looking at small press novellas, which as a body of work could be considered for Best Related Work. You can find a few posts from it here that I personally did the writing of, and the final roundup contains links to all the works covered by all the contributors:

And then possibly the piece of work that has got the most interest and engagement for me throughout this year – The Bag. If you’re not familiar, every time I finished a book in 2024, I have been embroidering a little version of it onto a tote bag, and sharing the updates with the internet. The bag itself also came with me to Worldcon and made some friends. I am very proud of it, wobbly lines, dodgy letters and titles that don’t quite fit and all. Theoretically, maybe it’s a Best Related Work2? Maybe by the letter of the law, though not really the spirit. Nonetheless I am very proud of it, so would like you to have a look at this here thing what I made, so here it is:

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  1. Which appears to have started back in November, and will continue until something like April, I suspect. ↩︎
  2. This is a joke. I am joking. In case that wasn’t obvious. I’m not certain it actually would count, and there are things I would much rather see win in that category that I plan to nominate. ↩︎
Posted in All, Else, Not A Review | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Kalyna the Cutthroat – Elijah Kinch Spector

Posted on 19/01/2025 by Roseanna
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Kicking 2025 off with a slightly difficult one – talking about the second book of a series, when I never talked about the first one. Double down on that – talking about the second book in a series, when a lot of what it’s doing that’s interesting is in opposition to, or at least directly in relation to, what was being doing in the first book. Add another one – talking about a book I read as an audiobook1.

But the thing is… Kalyna the Cutthroat is such a good book, and moreover such a good sequel, that it really deserves talking about, despite the difficulty.

In the first book in the series, Kalyna the Soothsayer, it is revealed that Kalyna is not quite so able to say her sooths as she’d like everyone to believe – the daughter of a long line of people possessed of the genuine gift of foretelling, she was born without the ability to see the future, but needs to keep the family business going to support her father and grandmother. So she lies. She pretends. She’s a big ol’ trickster, and it’s been going just fine for her, until she gets pulled into the politics game by a big fish who’s heard of her abilities. She has to con her way through increasingly desperate and dangerous times in order to continue to keep her beloved father – and much less beloved grandmother – safe.

It’s a variation on a number of fairly common themes, but a good one, and the good comes predominantly from the very personable, very likeable voice of Kalyna herself. Sitting with her through her dubious decisions and hard choices, it’s very easy to be sympathetic to her as a victim, trapped in the awkward circumstances of politics way above her paygrade, just doing what she needs to do to survive it all.

So it’s very interesting when the sequel not only shifts viewpoint to a totally new character, but when we finally come back to our titular charlatan… the picture we get of her, when divorced from her internal monologue is really rather unflattering. Which of course makes sense – she’s a con artist, a flatterer, someone who needs to sell herself and her view of things in order to make money and survive. Of course she was doing exactly the same to us all along. But to have that as a two book long con? I have to admire it.

The characterisation delights don’t stop there though. After the initial burst of unlikeability, and the continuing exploration of it, there also start to be signs that all is really not well with Kalyna. A little time has passed since the end of the first book, and that break has, it seems, done her no favours. She is struggling. But we never see that from her perspective, only from without, and from someone not so inclined to trust her. It’s a book all about how people view each other, about the lies and the truths, and so having us constantly divorced from her perspective only adds to those themes. The viewpoint character Radiant spends so long uncertain about Kalyna, her motivations, when she’s being honest or lying, what truly matters to her, how far she’ll go, how far she has gone. It’s a deeply ambiguous position on her character, and one that resists resolution at all turns.

This attitude plays out in other aspects of the story too, and in particular, magic and curses.

We know some forms of magic exist in the Tetrarchia, because we know Kalyna’s family have the true sight. We are then given a main character who studies curses across different cultures, who comes from a culture that is vilified within his homeland for “atavistic practices”, who are considered to be practitioners of magic, and thus feared and despised. He knows that those practices are not the harmful witchery they are seen as. But he has contradictory, shifting views on whether curses do or can truly work, and that doubt is a touchstone that is returned to time and again, especially in regard to how different cultures and subcultures view one another as the perpetrators of evil spells. Whether he can or cannot curse someone is a question that takes the whole book to play out.

But it’s also kind of beside the point, because the book is far more about his people, their uncertain position within their home state as a repressed subgroup, expected to conform to the majority culture and perform gratitude for the blessing of being allowed to do so, and his role as a part of that community but currently outside it, the way he is seen as a member of his country in the Tetrarchia, despite that country actively putting his identity up for debate in his absence. To whom does Radiant belong? What does he see himself as? And how are identities forced upon or removed from him without his consent.

Which does tie us back nicely to the first book, where Kalyna is constantly seen as an outsider, wherever she goes, because her mixed heritage – combining ancestry from all parts of the Tetrarchia – always leaves her viewed as not sufficiently x, for any given identity within their melting pot country. She come back to this again and again in the first book, repeatedly telling us about that heritage, how it does link her to each group, each culture, even as those groups reject her. It is constantly notable how many languages she speaks, fluently, and this is a trait Radiant shares with her when we meet him in book two. They are both people who exist in spaces in between, not by choice, and who have learnt to move between things, to fit into things, and are suffering for the way the cultures around them refuse to accept them as they are.

So to watch this new character who has, to the reader, a great deal in common with the protagonist of the first book – she’s the only person he meets who isn’t from his culture who speaks not only the common tongue of the country, but the language of his specific people – distrust her at every turn is a fascinating choice.

Perhaps even more fascinating though is the fact that he spends almost the entirety of the book unaware of her… profession, so to speak. That she is, or is supposed to be, a soothsayer – a fact of such critical importance that it’s the title of the first book, and forms the central contradiction of her identity – does not come up is a hell of a choice for your sequel, but Elijah Kinch Spector has absolutely pulled it off. It’s a book very much thinking about identity, and he has worked this particular hole in the text into that whole musing beautifully. It helps, too, that while the first book was good, well written, enjoyable, all of those things, the second has really stepped it up a notch. The character work is on point, as it needs to be, but he has a knack for memorable and mildly amusing descriptions, and for dialogue that feels both distinctive and plausible (though this is helped for me by an absolutely top notch audiobook narrator2). Where he really shines in Cutthroat though is in the politics – there was perhaps a slightly saggy bit in the middle of Soothsayer where the cross-purposes of the various actors felt a little too tangled up, and there is none of that in the sequel. We cover conflicts at both micro and macro scale, and both feel tight, well balanced, and like everyone involved is making the decisions that would naturally come out of them as characters. And when you’re setting a story predominantly in a pseudo-commune, you have to be able to give us interpersonal conflict that makes sense and matters3.

I don’t know how many books will eventually be in the Failures of the Four Kingdoms series (though my gut says surely four, one for each kingdom), but whether this ends up as a trilogy or something else, Kalyna the Cutthroat has absolutely avoided the dreaded second book syndrome. Indeed, it manages the rare feat of the sequel that outdoes its predecessor, and shines a light backwards onto the previous story, making the series feel like more than the sum of its parts. In that, it has a lot in common with Harrow the Ninth. I was speaking to Eddie Clark about it, and he drew a tonal comparison with The Locked Tomb which has stuck with me since the conversation – both start us with a viewpoint character with charm, humour and an easy reading style that masks profound distress, and both then take us to a sequel that completely recontextualises that character, makes their hurt and their problems so obvious, in the way only an outside look sometimes can. Both are books that marry humour and tragedy in a way that cheapens neither, digging into some significant topics (in Cutthroat, “ethnic cleansing, genocide, refugee crises, and who gets left out of a petty bigot’s national project” to quote the author himself), while allowing the characters who experience them to feel the full range of human things, and share them with us in a way that compels from the first moment.

Despite the differences between the two books, it is this that unites them, and is their strongest feature and selling point: Spector can write a good character or fifteen and give you a great time working through their many, many problems. That everything else in the story is great is a wonderful bonus, but the characters are what I’m here for, and what I’ll keep picking up the series to find out more about.

  1. Both because I have no idea how to spell anyone or anything mentioned, and because I tend to read things in audio I don’t plan to review. My brain does not retain audio in the same way as text, so I’m going to have to write this down quickly, before the knowledge melts into the damp sand of my memory. ↩︎
  2. We read the first book for our book club, and it was very interesting that I was more positive than anyone else, and the only one to have read it in audio. I am convinced it’s a good book regardless, but I do think Samara Naeymi did a stand up job – she returns for parts of the sequel, but the majority is picked up by the equally excellent Michael Crouch. ↩︎
  3. He did a very interesting guest feature in Sarah Gailey’s Stone Soup here that chimed very well with me for how well written the magical and the political both are in this story. ↩︎
Posted in All, Fantasy | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

2024 in Everything Except Books (Mainly Reviewing)

Posted on 03/01/2025 by Roseanna

This is a new addition to the annual roundup. I don’t know if I’ll do it every year, but this year was rather full on, in a number of ways I wanted to mark, so here we are.

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The bag is now finished, and so I’m going to show it off again because I’m still really pleased with it

Firstly, and most obviously: Nerds of a Feather won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine. I’m proud of all the work that went into achieving it from the whole team, but also still slightly stunned that we did it.

Very much entwined with that is WorldCon. I’ve never been before, and going to Glasgow, seeing all these people who I only knew from the internet, or whom I hadn’t seen in years, making friends with all these cool people who write stuff I think is great, having excellent conversations… the whole experience was pretty much my highlight of the year. I was on panels for the first time, and it was just… really good fun! Guided discussion with cool and interesting people about topics I love talking about was just a really excellent thing to have the opportunity to do. But just, really, the whole con experience was infectiously enjoyable, and so we’ve booked ourselves in to go to Eastercon in 2025, having been told it’s the most similar thing available in UK cons. It won’t have quite the delirious sense I had standing in the main concourse in Glasgow of, having spent the last fifteen minutes saying “hi” to people walking past, realising this little space was full of people I knew and wanted to talk to, I know it will be smaller. But the whole con experience was just so fun, I have to chase that high.

I also wrote more reviews or review-adjacent-objects this year than I think I ever have before (even including the year I reviewed everything I read and regretted it). One of my 2024 goals was to put myself out there a bit more, try to get reviews in a bunch of other places and uh… yeah, that happened.

Just at the end of 2023, I replied to a call for submissions from the Ancillary Review of Books. Their content is always super interesting, thoughtful and properly critical, so I thought… why not? And they said yes, which was great, and also led to one of my other highlights of 2024 – being edited.

I know that makes me sound like an absolute weirdo. I know. But the thing is, I’ve been writing on my own blog for <mumbled counting> twelve years, right, and obviously here, no one checks my work but me. And then I’ve been writing for Nerds of a Feather for three years, where we do very light touch edits, predominantly to formatting… and even then, now I’m one of the people doing the actual editing anyway. So I’ve been wittering away for a good long while without anyone ever taking a red pen to my nonsense and saying “is that really how you want to say that?”. I’m lucky I’m not particularly prone to typos, but there’s always going to be a bit of a tendency to double down on the worst parts of my writing when it’s just me, unexamined1. I egg myself on, I know this. And so ARB, who do actual, red-pen-and-comments-in-the-margins, can-you-actually-back-up-that-wild-claim-please edits, by a bunch of very lovely, thorough people. And however painful in the moment it is pruning or toning down or streamlining, every time (because yes, they let me come back and write some more things), I felt the work getting better, and hopefully me along with it.

I am particularly proud of the second piece I wrote for them, about Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain. It helps that it is a properly fascinating, thoughtful book, full of things to grab onto and talk about, but I also just honestly think it’s the best review I may have ever written (so far? I hope so far).

And, since November, I have a column with them about small press novellas. Given how much I enjoyed running the project on the same theme at Nerds of a Feather at the start of the year, this is such a satisfying topic to be able to continue with.

Speaking of which, running the project for Nerds, while a lot of work, was enormous fun. It’s the first time I’ve done one, but hopefully won’t be the last, and I found I particularly relished that sense of a conversation that began to come out of them, of a group of posts all on the same topic, in close succession, often referencing the same themes and ideas. The first, but not last, time this year that theme of conversation has cropped up and made me have some emotions about things.

Another was a more extended process, but one which I documented here, discussing three collections of reviews, in which I kept coming back to this feeling of an ongoing conversation, and its absence in my experiences of reviewing. Rather delightfully proving me wrong… I got a fair number of responses to it, not least from Niall Harrison, who wrote one of the collections, but also – and as he mentions in his response – on bluesky.

So obviously twitter has been steadily imploding for a while. I’d been hanging on probably longer than I should have, primarily because twitter had always been my social medium of choice. It had the precise correct calibration for allowing me to feel like I could just post away, talking about whatever I liked, and people would see/not see, respond/not respond only as they pleased, and that yelling into the void really was a valid option. I liked it precisely for that feeling that I could just spam posts and no one would care, it wasn’t bothering anyone that I had just liveblogged six Star Trek episodes in an evening. FB feels too bound up with people known irl (and just increasingly terrible anyway), instagram horrifies me, I don’t run Linux so mastodon is out, I’m not personally charismatic enough for tiktok… twitter was always the sweet spot. So leaving it was harder than it should have been. But leave I did, and after abortive attempts at various of the replacements, I ended up on bluesky when it was still invite only, along with a fair chunk of SFF book twitter. It took a little while, and was massively kickstarted by the addition of starter packs (and my inclusion on several, which kept on surprising me), but over the course of the year, that has developed beyond what I was getting out of twitter into… well, yeah, that conversation.

By the latter part of the year, there were a bunch of people on there I could – and did – talk to about books with regularity, including some whom I’d only first encountered on the site. I have – maybe? – made some additional book friends on there. I’ve had some great recommendations, some DM chats, some gossip and some grumbling. All the good stuff.

So while I stand by my thoughts, the bittersweet feeling, of reading about the blogosphere of old, since that post especially, it does feel like things have changed in my little corner of the internet. Between bluesky and going to worldcon, 2024 was already feeling like the year of conversations.

And then, delightfully, add to this that Casella at ARB was starting a podcast – A Meal of Thorns – and asked did I want to come on for an episode. Of course I said yes, and we got to discuss Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman. It was great, and particularly so to get that nitpicky, detail-digging type of discussion about a specific book with someone so insightful who’d also read it and made me have new thoughts about it. Of course, I’ve thus also listened to the podcast since it started airing, and every single one is such a deep, incisive piece of discussion about the book in question that I more than forgive it for the effort I have to put in to listen2, and look forward to each new episode dropping. And then, Casella asked me back for the end of year roundup episode, and again, I had a really enjoyable conversation, rambling through a bunch of topics across the year and the book-related sphere.

Incidentally, 2024 is the year I ended up picking up three different podcasts to listen to, despite my general struggles with the podcast medium. The other two – Octothorpe and Hugo Girl – fill slightly different niches, but are equally things I look forward to listening to now, and both were made even better by meeting their perpetrators creators at worldcon.

Conversations all over the damn place.

And then, in December, I managed to achieve a goal I’ve had, in a meandering sort of hopeful way, where I come back and try again at it every 18 months or so, at the back of my head for a few years: I had a review published in Strange Horizons, discussing In Universes by Emet North. And again, that editing process, and again, the feeling that my work (and myself) were being visibly improved by it. Extremely satisfying, and something for which I am incredibly grateful.

And so, in this strange and busy year, my review count stands thus:

VenueNumber of Posts
readerofelse25
nerds of a feather, flock together42
The Ancillary Review of Books4
Column at ARB2
Strange Horizons1
Total74

For my own amusement, I did some paper napkin maths, and based on how long each of my posts tends to be, this probably shapes out to be somewhere in the region of 110,000 words, even with a somewhat conservative wordcount estimate. That’s… several novels worth. Putting it in these terms, I cannot really believe it. But that was a whole year of a lot of posts and I guess they add up.

So it’s been a rather unprecedented year, and one I cannot really hope to replicate any time soon for its sheer intensity and highlights (I mean, I won’t complain if Hugo nominations replicate that, but I hardly think it’s likely), but, I hope, one that also promises some good things to keep on going into the future. Especially those conversations, on various platforms, and with an ever growing group of thoroughly interesting people. And then, come April, with some of them in person at Eastercon. That’s what I’m hoping to hold on to, as well, and prioritise where I spend my energies – because the parts of it that have connected me to some sort of reviewing community have truly been some of the best things of the year.

  1. Sometimes, I feel like I’m only held in check by the voice of 2010 Professor Stephen Oakley asking me “where in the text are you getting that from? show me” and making me back up my assertions. His supervisions were a formative experience. ↩︎
  2. I find podcasts, especially ones with multiple voices, quite hard work. I have to put myself in exactly the right context (usually doing something crafty, though cooking can work too) so I have the right amount of brain that I can still listen and absorb everything, but not so much spare brain that I start distracting myself. ↩︎
Posted in All, Else, Not A Review, Off-Topic | Tagged , | 1 Comment

2024 in Books

Posted on 31/12/2024 by Roseanna
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A little hint of things to be discussed in the next post, plus Ood Kitty

New Year’s Eve arrives, and it is once again time for the traditional round up my year in reading. Except this year, I’ll actually be doing two. This will be the usual one, full of graphs, stats and silly awards, but I’ll be doing a follow up post in the next few days of my year in reviewing and fandom, because it has been such a year, and I feel the need to really talk about it all. But I also don’t want this post to become an unreadable monstrosity. You’re welcome.

Anyway – books!

This year, I set myself the rather ambitious goal of 120 books to read. This was simultaneously too many and not enough, though I did make it in the end. The release of Dragon Age: the Veilguard basically knocked three weeks out of my reading which… did not help matters, and left me scrambling for the finish line in the last few days of the year, without the slack in the goal to give me space to really let up at any point. And yet… there are still so many books I didn’t read. I just read Abigail Nussbaum’s post of her own end of year roundup, and I am amused to see the same sentiment I had wanted to talk about coming up for her too – the sense of not quite having got to all the things you could have. One of the things I’ve found, as I’ve reviewed more, is how much of my reading ends up tied to recency, and the need to feel like I’m up to date with what’s out there – not reading it all, because that would be impossible for one person, especially one who sleeps sometimes, but reading enough of it and knowing enough about the rest to feel in some way authoritative. It’s a strange relationship to have with books, sometimes, this desperate need to chase the ever-fleeing now, but I find I don’t mind it, all told. Or I like what I get from it enough to accept the costs it comes with. But one of those costs is constantly feeling like you need to catch up, like you can’t stop or you’ll miss something, and that can sometimes lead me to unhelpful reading habits, letting older books fall by the wayside, even ones I know I might love, in favour of whatever has just hit the conversation.

But that, for me, is the driving force behind it – that conversation. I want to talk about books, with other people, and the best way to do that is to be talking about the things that everyone else is reading. Or at least a given value of everyone else. Do I sometimes miss older things, for the sake of chasing the conversation? I’m sure. But ultimately… I think it’s worth it, for me, for now. As regards the number of books in particular? Well, we’ll come back to that shortly.

So – what did I actually read? Stats time!

Of those 120 books, the genres break down like so:

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Once again, Fantasy wildly dominates, but its hegemony has shrunk a little since last year, and mainly in favour of SF – a weird artefact, given that one of my overwhelming impressions of the year has been how dominated SFF has felt by the F, and increasingly so. Litfic has dropped by a chunk, something I rather regret (and should fix by reading some of the Booker long and shortlist hanging around the flat). Poetry has likewise suffered, although what the stats don’t show is the bunch of it I’ve read individually in various speculative outlets, to try to get a sense of things before its inclusion in the Hugos next year. Non-fiction has increased a little, largely thanks to some excellent review collections, and Speculative has increased, due to a number of books whose genre I had very little confidence in pinning down. While this is evidence of my own cowardice, it’s also a good sign because those are, usually, the books I enjoy the most – the ones fucking about with boundaries.

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I think the SFF domination of my reading might now be reaching the point of needing to be curtailed just a smidge – I like a little more variation than I’ve seen here – but the simplicity of assigning a single genre to things does sometimes hide complexity, and this was a good year for things which occupied multiple categories, only one of which was genre. The numbers may not necessarily mean what they look like they mean.

I do record subgenre, but honestly it’s almost impossible to do consistently (what even is high fantasy anyway? how do I truly define lowness or highness in any given book? what do words even mean?), so I don’t think the data is useful or meaningful, and the pie chart is a whole mess that displeases me aesthetically.

More of my books were “current” (read within 12 months of publication) than last year, rising to 59%, and 74% within 2 years of publication (a slight dip on last year). Rereads also dropped down to 3%.

I read more men than usual (though still only 34% or so), about the same number of authors of colour, and, rather surprisingly, fewer queer authors – that being said, queerness has always been a tricky thing to define (I only mark it when I see it from the author themself), and with the implosion of twitter, that self-reported info is often harder to come by. Anecdotally, the work has felt just as queer as previous years.

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Ratings have remained relatively static, compared to last year, though with a little increase at 5 stars and a bit of a drop at 1 and 2, which tallies with my gut feel which was that 2024 was a pretty good year. I certainly feel, when I come to ponder my potential Hugo nominations, that the problems will come from too many options rather than too few (which was last year’s issue – I definitely had some things I really loved, but not nearly so many as 2022’s jam-packed roster where I could have easily filled two ballots and been happy with all of my picks).

One of the things I think has also affected this slight nudge upwards is an increase in “a bunch of reviewers I respect said this is great so maybe I should get on and read the damn thing”. It’s almost like they know what they’re one about. Which is great, because more good books, but also sometimes annoying, when it’s something Ed has already told me was great and maaayyyybeee I should have listened to him three months ago. There may be the shape of a resolution in there somewhere.

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We had the usual peaks and troughs in reading, with the slight change that, this time, August was my tanked month. WorldCon had its downsides, and I got absolutely no reading done there, or in the slight hangover period afterwards. The 2020 monolith of 21 books in a month remains unassailed.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with my reading this year, and quietly surprised I hit my goal – especially given that, when records began back in 2017, my total was only 52. How far we’ve come.

And so, onto the awards, to talk about some books in particular.

Best Novel

I gave 17 new-to-me novels this year 5 stars, which is already a pretty good place to be picking from. Of those, the true contenders for the slot are: When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb, Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, The West Passage by Jared Pechaček, Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, In Universes by Emet North, The Breath of the Sun by Isaac Fellman, Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley and Private Rites by Julia Armfield. This is not a short shortlist.

If I have to pick one – and I do, because unlike the Booker judges of 2019 I am no coward (no I will not be letting that go) – then, with a heaving of great sighs and much prevarication, I think I ultimately land on Rakesfall. It’s such an inexplicable, hypnotic, intoxicating ride of a book, I couldn’t put it down while I was reading it and couldn’t get it out of my head once I put it down. In a strong year full of strange, it was stronger and stranger, and I loved it dearly right from the off. Above all, Chandrasekera’s command of tone really sticks with me, the way it can slip from formal to profane, right into fully online, and never feel like it’s escaped his control. I laughed. I boggled. I’ll absolutely read it again. Worthy winner.

Though if you ask me again next week, there’s a decent chance I’ll pick something else out of the solid list of bangers I have here.

There’s also a secret extra novel not included in this already long list, because it’s not coming out until next June, and so it feels rather unfair to it to hold it in comparison to 2024’s bunch. I’ll give it its fair shot in 2025 instead.

Best Novella

Novella too was full to bursting with the good stuff. I have a shortlist, and one I’m very happy with, one that, save for one tiny thing, would be an extremely tough decision to narrow down into one. But that one tiny thing is a banger among bangers, and I’d be lying if I said I had to think about it as a category at all.

My shortlist is: The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar by Indrapramit Das, Tanglewood by Knicky L. Abbott, The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain by Sofia Samatar, Seventh Perfection by Daniel Polansky, A Mourning Coat by Alex Jeffers, North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher and The Last to Drown by Lorraine Wilson. They’re all great. I’ve sung the praises of nearly all of them in reviews in various places.

But… Sofia Samatar gonna Sofia Samatar. The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain was simply stunning, and I can’t do it justice in a few words. I reviewed it for ARB here, and I think it’s honestly one of the best things I’ve written, simply because the novella gave me so much to talk about. I stand by every word.

Worst Book

I only had two 1 star books this year, which was a pleasant change of pace. Although some of the 2 stars came… really quite close to the borderline. My shortlist of disgruntlement runs thus: Starter Villain by John Scalzi, The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (don’t @ me classic SF bros, I will defend this position with my life), Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet by He Xi, The Three Body Problem Part One (graphic novel) by Cai Jin and Evocation by S. T. Gibson.

The Hugos feature prominently in this category, but like book club, they are unfairly maligned because they are simply one of the few times when I read things I haven’t picked for myself. I know my taste. The unthinking mechanism of democracy does not. They are also things for which I am inclined to finish the things I do not like, rather than call it a bad job and give up.

But this year, it’s book club that takes the wooden spoon, and The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester is the worst, most racist, most unpleasant to read things I’ve experience this year. Even the fact that there’s a character called Jizz could not save it.

Ed’s Biggest “I Told You So”

Looping back to the books I picked up much too long after Ed suggested I might like them, we come most particularly to Aliya Whiteley. He’s read several of her books. He’s been enthusiastic about her. I’ve nodded and believed him and never done anything about it. Until now. I read Three Eight One and it was phenomenal, and he was right all along, and now I must read a bunch of her other work to atone for my foolishness.

I reviewed it recently here, but if I wanted to condense it down, Three Eight One stuck with me more than anything for the entirely relatable portrayal of a person’s relationship with history, historical texts and people from the past, and the complex unknowability of people from a context alien to us, and yet the thread that pulls us to them anyway. I find classics in all sorts of places I look, and this was one of them, reminding me so intensely of how I feel about reading Catullus’ work. That it also includes some stunningly subtle worldbuilding, beautiful character development, interesting play with voice and form, and a nuanced attitude to building utopia is just a (rather significant) bonus.

Velvetest Underground

There are a bunch of things on a list that exists only in my head that I think of as Velvet Underground books – books that I don’t really know a tonne of people in real life who’ve read and liked, but which seem to have inspired a huge amount of the fiction I and people around me have read and loved. By far the top of that list, for many years, was Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey, which I finally picked up in February. I do not regret it, and very much see what prompted so much inspiration.

It’s a strange, very sexual book, and one full of taboo-pushing and complex darkness, but which nevertheless always feels thoughtful about the difficult topics it’s tackling. Would it be written quite as it is now? Almost certainly not. Some things have changed in how we talk about power dynamics and exploitation that I think would shift how the story is handled. But that feels more like surface level than substance – what its trying to do underneath felt intensely compelling and worthwhile, and was such an interesting contrast to today’s romantasy in talking about sex, love and attraction. They’re not the same thing at all, but holding them in conversation in my head produced some very interesting pondering.

Weirdest Shit

I have said, a number of times in a number of places, that this year has been a year for weird shit (complimentary). Things that fuck with genre boundaries, bounced of the walls and try something different. And I need to acknowledge and honour that. Many of this shortlist appear up page in others, because their weirdness is intensely to their benefit, but not all. The weirdest of the weird for the year are: OKPsyche by Anya Johanna DeNiro, Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, PEACES by Helen Oyeyemi, Private Rites by Julia Armfield, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner, Ixelles by Johannes Anyuru, The City in Glass by Nghi Vo, Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley, The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang, Metal from Heaven by august clarke, The West Passage by Jared Pechaček and In Universes by Emet North.

Not a single one of these is below a four star read for me, and all are ones that will remain highlights of my reading year, all substantial and worthy of discussion.

But measuring on pure oddity alone, and the lingering sense of things going on below the surface that I haven’t quite grasped yet but surely will, just give me a moment to think about it, there can be only one winner, and that is Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner. Can I explain the plot? No. Would a blurb help you decide to read it? Absolutely not. I’ll only say that it gave me the experience of both an unholy abomination spider version of Bambi, and the concept of the colour “neon beige”. Make of that what you will.

And so, to the end, and resolutions. Last year’s were:

  1. Reading goal. 120 books. Go hard or go home. Stretch goal. Aim for the stars. Why the fuck not. – ACHIEVE
  2. Awards! The Hugos are coming to Glasgow bay-bee, so if there was ever a year to commit, it is now. – ACHIEVED SO HARD WE WON A HUGO OURSELVES
  3. More awards! I’m gonna do it this time, I’m gonna read the Clarkes. They seem great. I want in on that highbrow bullshit. Maro Itoje was spotted at the awards one time. Why not! – A highlight of the year! Truly, should have done it sooner. Though Maro Itoje was not in evidence.
  4. Fewer awards! But that means I’m cutting the Nebulas unless there’s a significant crossover. I know my limits. – Honestly, didn’t miss ’em. The Clarkes were a worthy replacement.
  5. I say this every year I do these, but I still have a big pile to get through, so… more non-fiction. One year it’ll stick. – Technically achieved, but only just.
  6. Reviewing! Put myself out there. Try to get reviews up in more places. Throw my opinions upon the void, and see if the void shouts back. – Achieved with bells on. More on this in my next post.
  7. Travel! My reading holiday this year was a glorious success. I shall repeat it, and once again have a delightful, solitary time with a big ol’ pile of books, a log fire and a lot of bread. What more could a person want in life? – A*, great time had by all, much port and cheese consumed, and 2025 already booked.
  8. Arts and crafts! I’ve decided to do a little project – I’m going to do a (very simple) embroidery of every book I read this year, along with its star rating, on a plain tote bag, so I have a physical object recording my reading for all to look upon and hopefully say nice things about. – Another resounding success, as you can see:
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Image of the front of the bag only. The back… well, wait and see. I just need to finish the last little fun piece before sharing.

So… 2025. What do I aim to achieve?

  1. Smaller reading goal – I said 120 felt too much and I meant it. I don’t want to be scrambling. We’re going back to 100 and the perfectly tidy stats.
  2. Awards – we’re sticking with the Hugos, as always.
  3. Awards – and the Clarke, though I need to find someone who’ll do a discussion post of them with me, because that was excellent fun this year.
  4. Awards – and I’ll do one other, though what it will be? Yet to decide. Current frontrunner is the Ignyte novels, but I’m open to being swayed elsewhere.
  5. Reviewing – I’m not sure I can exceed 2024 in terms of volume (nor would I want to), but I will renew the goal of putting myself out there more, both in terms of writing for different places, but also pushing myself to write better, do different things with it, try to really expand my skillset. Which leads nicely into…
  6. Non-fiction – to combat the eternal non-fiction tbr pileup, and the feeling that there’s a lack of good grounding underneath a bunch of my opinions, I’m setting myself a little reading project to get some theory and SFF non-fiction in me, and try to get a better theoretical framework for my wittering about books to live in. I’ll be posting about it as I go, and hoping to do maybe one book per month.

That’s fewer goals than usual, but I the vibe I want to take into 2025 is to do just a teensy bit less, but do it better – put more time into polishing and crafting things, so I can always be happy with the output, rather than resigned and just glad I finished the damn thing. Wish me luck.

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