Arboreality

4/5. A novella consisting of linked stories of the slow climate apocalypse in western Canada, focusing on the relationship between humans and trees.

Ah, lovely. I am often skeptical of these more literary speculative projects, but this one is a winner (literally, I picked it up because it won the Le Guin a few years ago and that award is reliably looking at interesting things). A sad elegy strung through with hope, a hard book about hard things, a beautiful book about beautiful things. It’s telling a multi-generational story of the warming world through ecology. The angles here are unexpected – an old man rewilding his abandoned neighborhood, a luthier making the last violin he can make, the surly keeper of a tree cathedral.

Recommended if you like that sort of thing, and can take this book’s occasionally too self-conscious of its symbology-ness.

Content notes: The slow dissolution of modern life and what that means for treating the sick and dying.

This Brutal moon

3/5. Third book in this scifi trilogy, really do not start here.

Damn, it didn’t land it. It didn’t terribly fumble it either, but.

Let’s back up. I really liked the first book in this trilogy, which you should absolutely go into unspoiled because the ride is worth it. But she had to do different modes with the next books for plot and structure and not repeating herself reasons. Unfortunately, I was glad to see these people again, but I think this whole series lost momentum and vitality. And the deeper this series got into the story of a remnant population barely clinging on after a genocide several decades ago, well. She says they aren’t supposed to be space Jews, but, like, girl. These books are doing that thing where they valorize an oppressed population and an oppressed culture in a way that is both satisfying and also uncomfortable, if you get me. Satisfying in the way a reductive viewpoint is satisfying. Uncomfortable in the way a reductive viewpoint is uncomfortable.

Also, I am not at all qualified to opine on this, but I’ve caught the edges of conversations from people who think she has valorized her space Jews right over the border into weird antisemitic trope land, which did jump out at me when ( spoilers for the end of the first book ). Anyway, do with that what you will.

Look, I’m complaining about this a lot, but I genuinely think the first book is doing cool stuff, and I genuinely think the whole series is thinking about identity and refugees and cultural violence and retribution and repair. All chewy, important stuff. Also, the way women and nonbinary people are allowed to be intense and obsessed with each other and over-the-top in the first book is the good shit. I’m glad I read it, even though the last book had serious POV bloat (way too many) and didn’t land with the force I wanted it to.

Content notes: Torture, violence, discussions of genocide, child loss.

There Is No Antimemetics Division

4/5. A short novel about what it would be like to be an organization fighting anti-memes (powerful eldritch somethings that can effectively erase information from the universe, including from human memory). How do you fight a war for humanity when you keep forgetting a war is happening at all?

A very interesting mechanism of a book. I enjoyed watching its strangely-shaped gears catch one to the next, partly because this is the sort of story that my brain would not have come up with given several centuries of work. Not just the story itself, but the entire odd structure that makes it go. I do think I fundamentally disagree with one of this books premises about how human beings work, but sure, okay, I’m willing to go with the idea that the people who work at this particular organization are odd ducks who will, for example, have an entire decade of life scooped out of their head by a cosmic horror and who will just kinda shrug and go about calmly reconstructing their life from the evidence left behind.

I will say as a point of flavor more than a warning: this book has that particular approach to character where people are extremely unembodied. Indeed, you could be forgiven for picturing the entire cast as brains in a jar that go about acting on the world and on each other without much affect at all. People do have internal lives, but we glimpse them at odd angles and through narrow pinholes, like when we only get to know about a marriage when one of the spouses has forgotten the other and reads the surveillance reports on them. It’s all definitely a vibe, and not my style, but here it works.

Content notes: Cosmic horror, other kinds of creeping horror of knowing you’ve forgotten something terrifying, violence.

Salvage Crew and Pilgrim Machines

4/5. A pair of related scifi novels largely narrated by sentient ships in a plausible corporatist space future. The first book is a sort of survival horror first contact situation, and the second is philosophical space exploration and consideration of mortality on the personal and galactic scale.

I like these. They manage that trick of feeling old-fashioned in the best way. Particularly the big ideas exploration book – it’s giving Niven or Vinge or Baxter or similar, except, you know, not variously phobic and -ist. Actually, several of the characters are Buddhist, which offers a really interesting lens on some more classic science fictional topics.

I’m a little suspicious about why these books didn’t take off, TBH. He got buzz early on, then seemed to fall off the map. I’m pretty plugged into new and interesting SFF, and I’ve only heard about him from one person. I have a suspicion this is because he openly talks about how he uses AI. E.g., in the first book here, he had AI generate hundreds of short poems on various themes, and he picked several for his AI ship to “write.” He is transparent about how he prompted and why he did it that way. I suspect this got some sort of AI stink on him, professionally, which is a real shame.

I will also add, they got Nathan Fillion to read the first audiobook. Normally I do not like these celebrity narrators, but actually, it’s kind of brilliant? He has this bro-y cynical depressive emotionalism that hit just right for the ship narrator of that book.

Content notes: Corporate hellscape stuff, body horror.