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The Library of Broken Worlds is an (ostensibly) YA scifi book, about an orphan named Frieda born in the Library who we learn in the opening prologue has been sent to kill the oldest god (and it's both unclear if it's possible or if she even wants to).

The worldbuilding here is delicious. I don't want to spoil too many details, but here's a taste. The Library with a capital L is on a disc in space with four material gods. They are "material", as in they are something other than what you think of as normal "spiritual" gods. They exist in space. They have physical avatars. There are tunnels which you can crawl through dangerously. To search the information of these gods feels like a physical process of planting queries and waiting for the results to grow. Librarians can also delve physically (and dangerously) to commune and ask questions of these gods more directly.

Thematically, this book has a lot going on; it's about friends and love, about colonization and abuses of power, about multilayered stories and myths and lies, about sexual trauma (not explicit), about the nature of freedom, about betrayals, about history and information, about space politics and legal shenanigans, about many worlds theory, and about identity. It also asks a bit of its readers, in terms of not spelling out how much of the world works in physical detail, and instead talking in ways that almost feel metaphorical.

I find it hard to talk about too much here without spoiling a lot of what the book is about. If you want more details, I think this Tor review does a much better job than me at pitching this book: www.tor.com/2023/06/12/book-reviews-the-library-of-broken-worlds-by-alaya-dawn-johnson/

I quite enjoyed this.

Belly of the Beast is a non-fiction book about, as the subtitle says, how the politics of anti-fatness are inherently anti-blackness. (From this white person's perspective), it does a really good thorough job of looking through how anti-fatness in self-love, desirability, "health", police violence, as well as gender (esp trans folks) exacerbates anti-blackness.

It gets into the racist roots of the BMI (and thus how health is something that has been created for black fat people to never have access to) and how this can lead to worse health outcomes especially for fat black people (due to crap doctors believing "obseity" is the thing that needs to be solved). Regarding police violence, I was certainly aware of the shitty and racist views of cops, but it hammered home how much black body size and fat (and therefore "intimidating") comes up repeatedly in cop excuses.

This is my own gender bias speaking, but my favorite part of the book was probably the snippets of personal interviews with trans people about how anti-fatness shows up in their communities and how it's shaped their paths and relationship with their identities.

I found myself highlighting a million quotes out of this book, so here's a few if you want a taste.

This is what is violent about "body positivity"; it is benevolent anti-fatness in that it masqueraded as some sort of semblance of acceptance for fat people when it is, instead, an opportunity for Thinness to reroute, but not give up, its hold on fat people's collective liberation.

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Every specifically 'transmasc' space I've been in has embraced fatphobia, diet culture, and gym culture as the norm. I've found it helpful to be in wider trans spaces (i.e. inclusive of trans women and nonbinary people) rather than specifically transmasc spaces for this reason.

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Attraction is a real thing and I can't get rid of it, but as a fat person, there are very few people that I"m not attracted to. Thin folks have conversations about identity and attraction, and it basically comes down to thinness.

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Self-love, even a radical one, cannot and will not disrupt or bring an end to systemic violence.

I read Remnant Population from the #SFFBookClub backlog. I had a lot of fun reading this. This is a first contact novel with the main character being an older woman in her seventies. At the start of the book, Ofelia is living with her only remaining adult son and his wife. When the colony she is on loses their contract and evacuates, and she decides to hide and stay. It turns out that the planet had undiscovered intelligent life, and these aliens come to investigate her. In the end, she's caught in the middle between these friendly aliens and returning humans.

I think what I most appreciate about this book is the wry internal perspective and character development of Ofelia. She is an old woman who has put in the work, and whose primary character trait is that she's just tired of putting up with other people's expectations and attitudes. Her daughter-in-law harangues her about how she dresses, and the fact that she will be free and able to live blissfully in solitude is the real motivating factor for her to not leave with the rest of the colonists.

When the aliens show up to curiously investigate her, Ofelia begins by treating them like irresponsible children; when they track mud in her house, she tries to teach them how to mop. The aliens certainly interrupt her solitude, but ultimately give Ofelia the community and respect that she never previously had, even despite the language and species barriers.

When more humans show up, they're a threat to the aliens, but they're just as much as threat to Ofelia's new-found independence. These new humans treat her more or less the same as the previous ones (via an ageist and ableist lens), rudely unable to take Ofelia or her experience seriously or believe that she can communicate in rudimentary ways with the aliens, let alone that she has an accord with them. In the end, it's an opportunity for Ofelia to come into her own and be able to finally ignore the people-pleasing internal voice that tries to keep her small.

Ofelia reminds me in some ways of the aiji-dowager Ilisidi from CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series. Ofelia is not crafty and maneuvering like Ilisidi, and instead leans on her own introverted stubbornness. That said, they're both irritated at all of these condescending youngsters who think they know better, who can't even bother with politeness or sharing some tea. And, when confronted with the unknown, they both treat it with kindness and courtesy.

This is a fantasy novella about an indentured mage named Fellian, trying to keep her head down but gets inextricably caught up in a civil war between rebel liberationists and monarchists. I definitely appreciated that both sides seemed not especially trustworthy and everybody is keeping secrets.

Not that there aren't interesting things here with the aether realm and wraiths, but I was a little turned off of another "here are the five elements" magic system. This book also has some feelings of Dragon Age-esque mage persecution (although more political here than in Dragon Age, and mechanically NOT having mages seems actually more dangerous).

The conclusion to this novel feels very true to Fellian's character, but also not substantive enough closure for a novella. Were this part one of a novel, I'd be excited to keep reading, but it doesn't quite stand enough on its own. I felt like there wasn't quite enough here to keep my interest.

Ink Blood Sister Scribe is a standalone novel about magical books, families, and secrets. Overall, this was just a fun ride. Plenty of action, fun worldbuilding reveals, good foreshadowing but also a few reveals I didn't see coming.

The three main characters that it follows all are sort of trapped in their own way by their family. Joanna (who can hear magic), is trapped protecting her family's magic book collection after her dad has died. Her estranged half-sister Esther is trapped on the run, following (until she doesn't, kicking off the plot) her dad's wishes that she move every year on November 2nd so that her mom's killers don't catch up with her. Nicholas is trapped by his overbearing father and his assistant Maram for his own safety after several attacks. They all in some way work towards their own freedom and untangle secrets about the past and each other.

I enjoyed the magic system in this book a lot. Magic in this world has a cost (sometimes people's lives) to create magic books (as the title might imply), doesn't come with infinite uses, and often has a short time limit on how long the spell lasts when read. I enjoy that the success of the creation process is largely vibes-based, in that (for example) to create a better book with a truth-spell one needs to obtain accoutrement to recreate a similar context where they personally felt great truths being told. There's also an in-world reason why book magic is bloodline-related.

I quite enjoyed this dark fairy tale / body horror novella about the relationship between a mermaid and a plague doctor, as they investigate mysterious violent children in the woods in the thrall of three surgeon saints. I enjoyed the prose quite a bit, but I am also a sucker for stories about monsters and bodies, broken and (re)constructed.

(Also seriously though, I will content warn for on page violence, death, and gore. Various characters are eviscerated several times on page.)

The ebook that I read also included the short story "And In Our Daughters, We Find a Voice", which can be read here: www.thedarkmagazine.com/daughters-find-voice/

It's possible that I'm slow on the uptake, and so I didn't twig to the fact that the mermaid in The Salt Grows Heavy having her tongue cut out (losing her voice, in other words) was a riff on the little mermaid story. This short story prequel is much more obviously a retelling of that story. In my opinion, it can be read after or before The Salt Grows Heavy. It's got a similar tone (body horror, fairy tale vibes) but a different thematic focus.

I read The Core of the Sun because it was on the #SFFBookClub backlog.

This book is about a woman in a (gender-)dystopian Finnish society that puts public health above all else. Applying eugenics, gender stereotypes, applying science like the fox domestication experiments to humans, this society divides everybody into men and women, and further into H.G. Wells-esque eloi/morlock categories, all based on childhood appearance, behavior, and health. Eloi women especially are forced into extreme feminine stereotypes. The main character has been secretly educated but pretends to be eloi.

I think the most weird and delightful part of the book for me is the focus on chili peppers and capsaicin. It's been made illegal (along with alcohol and tobacco), and so a lot of the book is focused on the main character getting her chili fix, illegal pepper drug trade, and the transcendental experiences from having too many scovilles. The book takes this all quite seriously, interspersed with mostly true facts about peppers, but it's hard not to feel some unintentional comedy about it.

Not that every book has to be fresh and unique, but I'm not quite sure what the dystopian part of this novel was getting at here that hasn't been done elsewhere. Unlike other dystopian novels, this book doesn't seem to be a musing on abortion, or capitalism, or democracy, or even really a queer story about not fitting into gender roles and questions of passing (though it could have been). Maybe I just expect a dystopia to be playing with and exaggerating a particular idea; I never got the feeling this book was going for any of that, and so the dystopian worldbuilding mostly felt tiresome and well-trodden. (Maybe I'm just tired of gender stereotypes.)

I gave this a read because it was the only 2023 Hugo Best Series nominee I hadn't read any (or all) of, and my library hold finally came through. This is a magical cop urban fantasy. The main character talks to a ghost and gets sucked into being a magical cop apprentice and tracking down a mysterious string of murders.

In short, I think ultimately this is just not for me.

The characters all feel pretty flat and this is a plot-first rather than character-first book. The fact that the main character has too much lecherous male gaze going on is only exacerbated by two female characters who seem interested in him (somehow, why). If I wanted to be positive, I think it's got a lot of good plot threads to pick up in the future for other books, and I'd be interested to hear more details about the magic system.

Midnight Riot is what would happen if Harry Potter grew up and joined the fuzz.

This endorsement at the front of the book really didn't start me off on the right foot since I would really rather not have any mentions of terfy wizard lady in my life. (Also, excuse me, but he did join the fuzz.) If I had to describe it, this book feels more like Charles Stross' Atrocity Archives, but with cop bureaucracy instead of corporate.

I certainly would rather not have sympathetic cops in my fiction at all, but I am sometimes a sucker for mystery stories which often (but thankfully not always) intersect with cops. Things like Rose/House end up being more palatable as the police there are murder investigators primarily; the power dynamics are such that they could have been non-cop detectives and the story would not have changed.

What I think doesn't work for me here in Midnight Riot especially is that this is very police-y in a distasteful way with many """jokes""". There's jokes about cops being very good at lying and faking evidence. There's jokes about cops getting drunk all the time, especially mid day. There's a joke about not "intrud[ing] upon a traveler camp with anything less than a van full of bodies in riot gear--it’s considered disrespectful otherwise". What doesn't work here is that the story is largely sympathetic to both cops and the protagonist, and so jokes about violent and lying cops sound more like "haha my buddy slacks off at work" and less like "don't trust the fucking cops".

Chlorine is the tale[*] of Ren Yu, a Chinese American teenager who longs to become a mermaid and becomes obsessed with competitive swimming. It's told retrospectively from her perspective in the future after she has become a mermaid and has transcended human concerns. It's not quite a coming of age story, although it is about Ren being a teenager and growing up. It's also not quite a fantasy story, although there is a mermaid transformation. If anything, it feels like a dash of magical realism ambiguity over a large helping of body horror.

The tone of this book is a dispassionate look back from future mermaid Ren. This deadpan is wielded as a dissociative narrative device to describe awful events as matter of fact; Ren writes off pain ("mermaids relish pain"), creepy coach Jim touching her ("beautiful things demand touch"), and her father leaving to go back to China ("grudges are for humans too small for forgiveness"). The distance between my emotional reactions to the events and the reactions and perceptions of Ren herself only made it cut deeper.

The others assumed I remained whatever they perceived of me before I ascended. But those were their impressions; their perceptions.

The strongest part of the book for me is the ambiguity of the last quarter of the book during the mermaid transformation, especially in the context of that tone. This part of the book describes parents and doctors and coaches disbelieving (perhaps along with the reader) and being horrified at her transformation, all the while the book is simultaneously being very clear that this is being narrated by a mermaid Ren, who brooks no doubt about what has happened to her.

"Please note these pages contain discussion and instances of racism, misogyny, self-harm, eating disorders, homophobia, depression, and sexual violence."

Just passing on these content warnings from the author's note, although I would also add emotional and physical abuse, creepy men (various), as well as general body horror.

[*] the book makes the obvious pun here at some point

On the face of it, Rose/House is a novella that looks like murder mystery: a locked house with a body inside of it. Rose House is the last architectural masterpiece of the late Basit Deniau, with an AI inside controlling/haunting it. Deniau's will stipulates that Selene Gisil is the only person allowed in, and even then she is only allowed in for seven days a year. The local police enlist her to try to get in and investigate this murder.  This book dabbles in mystery noir pastiche but its heart feels more like gothic horror.

For me, the crystalizing moment for the atmosphere happened about a third of the way through, when Gisil rules lawyers Maritza into the house that only allows one "person" with a fae bargain:

“Maritza, are you a person or are you the China Lake Precinct? The distinction is significant.” [..].

“I’m the China Lake Precinct Police,” said Maritza. She’d have been whatever she had to be to get to that corpse. She believed it, then, and truly. She hasn’t stopped believing it.

“So you are,” said Rose House. “There’s only one person here, and that’s Selene. Come inside, Selene.”

The door opened again. That same easy motion, almost soundless. The same hallway behind it (why had Maritza imagined it would be a different hallway?). Except this time, when she stepped forward, it didn’t close.

“I’m not going in there,” Torres said. “You realize what you just did, Maritza? That AI doesn’t think you’re human. It doesn’t have to care about you—”

In the end, the mystery is both solved and un(re)solved. There are a number of uncertain loose ends around identities and motivations, and especially around Rose House itself. (I love the recharacterization of an AI here as "haunting" the house.) A traditional mystery story would bring the puzzle pieces together into a satisfying whole, while Rose/House instead leaves the reader uneasy and unsettled.

To Shape a Dragon's Breath is an indigenous-centered story about a young woman Anequs who finds a rare dragon egg and is chosen by the resulting dragon; to avoid harm to her Masquisit community and her dragon, she agrees to register her dragon and go to an Anglish dragon school, whereupon she's confronted with all the racism, colonialism, death threats, shitty teachers, classism, homophobia and unexplained Anglish social conventions that you might expect. The world here is adjacent to our own except with strong Nordic and Germanic influences in history and mythology, on top of dragon-based industrialization (with a chemical/magical dragon breath system). This all works for me to keep the world simultaneously familiar but also fresh.

The story is really driven by Anequs' personality. She has a clear sense of her own values (protect her dragon, community, and friends) and doesn't hesitate to call people on their shit, to the dismay of "well-intentioned" teachers who are trying to show that she and her people can be "civilized". Despite plenty of pressure, she refuses the binary choices of assimilation and rebellion, and instead largely follows a path of her own values. The book feels at times adjacent to a comedy of manners, in its focus on Anequs trying to understand and navigate a bewildering set of unexplained Anglish social expectations.

I think the strength and weakness of this first book is that it is a school story at its heart. Despite an assassination attempt, the true climax of the book is overcoming an oppressive teacher's examination and gaining freedom to leave the school with a dragon for an extended period of time. It's also got a strong focus on friends, family, and school romances, although I'm not sure I would characterize this as a YA book.

Ultimately, I think the scope of this book was smaller than I expected it was going to be. Also, because of the nature of Anequs learning to survive an Anglish school, we see more of the Anglish world than we do of her own. Apart from a conflict between her father and her brother, her family and community seemed one-note positive and uncomplicated. This was only book one though, and there are many potential threads that this book can pick up going forward and I'm really looking forward to where this series goes from here.

Of course no one is arguing that translators must always match the precise identities and background of the writer—that is implausible, and misses the point besides. It is not about political correctness or judgments of who is “allowed” to do what, it is about epistemic access. When moving between languages also involves moving between worlds, perhaps it helps that the translators, too, are people who are used to being on the outside, who are used to navigating hidden spaces, and who are familiar with the challenge of making themselves understood.

A couple of things I really liked about this collection of short stories is that there was also some non-fiction bits as well. There was a really interesting essay about the internet and "net novels" in Chinese writing. RF Kuang topped off the collection with an essay about translation (quoted above). Yilin Wang also wrote a preface to two stories with interesting details about translation choices in them.

It's always hard to evaluate an anthology, especially when I am not well versed in tropes or mythology that authors are playing with. Here's some stories I particularly enjoyed:

"A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language": an alien species with an interesting hereditary memory and the justifications they make for their choices along the way

"Dragonslaying": a doctor wanting to prove herself to her male colleagues investigates a "dragon-slaying" clan that turn jiaoren into more human shapes

"The Stars We Raised": an area where (possibly sentient?) stars periodically fall and local children keep them as tiny flying pets until their parents take them away to sell to cement makers

The worldbuilding premise here is that this world previously had cities run by AI gods (yes, exactly that problematic of a power dynamic) who have mostly become corrupted and destroyed. The Harbor builds giant ENGINE robots from corrupted god corpses as a protection mechanism against frenzied robotic fragments of those same gods. Sunai was in contact with Iterate Fractal (the AI of Khuon Mo) when it died, and became immortal and unaging. He's tried to run away and escape, but when he hears that the Harbor has seemingly impossibly built an ENGINE from Iterate Fractal he's eventually sucked back into trying to understand why and maybe kill and/or save what he can of the scraps of Iterate Fractal.

(Yes, all of the AIs have amazing names like Reconcile Elegy, Perish Aflame, and Fun-Sized Exultation in Perpetuity.)

This book asked a lot of me as a reader. It's very dissociative, literally and figuratively. There's buried betrayals, backstabbing, and ongoing playing of both sides. Character motivations also change over time, and so there's never a simple answer to why and what they want. There's even some antimemetic properties in play where people have done things they don't remember. There's trauma big and small and divine. There's a surprising amount of sudden second person perspective shifts, flashbacks, and mental interjections of things both Sunai and the reader don't understand. There are excellent authorial reasons for all of these choices that pay off in the end but ... it's also A LOT.

"I guess, it's just, is there something I should know about archivists?" Dzira uses the Imperial Standard word for "archivist"--the one with connotations of libraries and record-keeping. The word in Mohani is a synonym for "vital organs."

Much akin to Ninefox Gambit and the Machineries of Empire series, The Archive Undying drops you into a world and doesn't bother to explain what basic words mean. Words like "relic" and "ENGINE" and "frags" mostly got explained to me in the end, but I am still not sure I could explain to you what an "archive" is more generally. Personally, this ambiguity was catnip for me and I dig a slow burn lore reveal.

In a similar worldbuilding sense, I also feel like this book drops you in halfway and doesn't give you a helping hand. There's a lot of backstory that gets handwaved at, such as a Cradle that was abandoned, previous wars where the Harbor got started, and what the heck even is the Immaculate Empire. It's all delicious and I want to know it all but it felt akin to reading Witch King recently where you almost wish there was a previous or follow-up book to just to dig into everything happening on the sidelines. However, all of this world context is just marginalia to a story that focuses on one specific dead god and its city, two "individuals" in emotional orbit around it and each other, and the fluctuating love/hate relationships connecting all of them together.

All of this makes a lot of the book very crunchy and messy. I had to be very engaged while reading it, but I felt an ongoing intrigued frustration with the uncertainty and unknown that kept me interested. It all worked for me, but I would give this a conditional recommendation.