Review: Upgrade

Title: Upgrade

Author: Blake Crouch

Genre: Science Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, violence, injury, gore, guns, parent death, suicide (mentions), pandemic, terminal illness, body horror, body modifications without consent

Back Cover:

Logan Ramsay can feel his brain…changing.

And his body too.

He’s becoming something other than himself. Maybe even something other than human.

As he sets out to discover who did this to him, and why, his transformation threatens everything—his family, his job, even his freedom.

Because the truth of what’s happened to him is more disturbing than he could possibly imagine. His DNA has been rewritten with a genetic-engineering breakthrough beyond anything the world has seen—one that could change our very definitions of humanity.

And the battle to control this unfathomable power has already begun.

But what if humankind’s only hope for survival lies in embracing this change—whatever the cost?

Which side will Logan take? And by the time it’s over, will he—and the people he loves—even recognize him?

Upgrade is a stunningly inventive, ferociously plotted science-fiction thriller that explores the limits of our humanity—and asks what’s at risk when technology lets us reengineer not just the world around us, but ourselves.

Review:

This book was recommended to me, and I generally attempt to read books recommended to me. This wasn’t my first foray into this author’s work, either. I’d read his book Recursion a while back and found it a sci-fi kind of weird that isn’t necessarily my jam, but that was well-written and had some interesting ideas. So I figured this probably wouldn’t be bad.

And I was correct. Upgrade wasn’t bad. The protagonist may not have had very many interesting characteristics beyond being the protagonist, but the concept was interesting and Blake Crouch is a competent writer. The action moved along, the story was largely well-paced, and it kept me engaged the whole way through. Nothing spectacular, sure, but perfectly readable.

However. As you might have guessed by the tone here, I do have some criticisms. Again, Blake’s particular brand of sci-fi weird isn’t quite up my alley, so some of this could definitely be me. But some of it is I just take issue with some of the fundamental concepts of the book itself.

Upgrade is ambitious in scope and interesting in concept. In a world where genetic modification is very possible (but also very illegal), an anti-gene-modification enforcement agent finds his genes being modified against his will, making him almost superhuman. Now he has to tackle questions like “why did this happen?” and “would the world be better if it happened to everybody?” But as interesting and potentially thematic as this idea could be, the execution is a little wacky. Some parts are frighteningly realistic, others are laughably not, and the discordant combination made the whole thing feel a bit silly. It would have made a perfectly serviceable mindless action movie, but the attempt at thematic depth just emphasized how ridiculous some parts of it were.

I spent a lot of time trying to put my finger on my actual problem with this book. I had notes about how Logan Ramsey has big “r/iamverysmart” vibes, and whether or not killing the same character twice was too much, and how cruel Logan’s mother was and how I couldn’t believe that neither of her children realized how much they were like her. But then I was reminded of the word “eugenics” and realized my issue. Without giving away too many spoilers, the arguable antagonist of the first half of the book thinks climate change would be solved if people were only better in a specific way and wants to accomplish that with mass gene modification. It really feels like what a eugenics movement would look like in a world where you didn’t necessarily have to breed better traits into people because you could just modify people’s genes instead. But our protagonist seemed pretty against that whole idea, so I wasn’t too bothered. Up until the end, when (minor spoiler alert) he decided his problem wasn’t so much the eugenics-style idea, just which traits should be changed. It left a really bad taste in my mouth.

It’s very possible that at least some of my complaints are because while I find these kinds of stories fine, they’re not the type of thing I generally really love. And on the whole, Upgrade was fine. I didn’t love it, I think its themes were handled poorly, and I really didn’t love some of the vibes it gives off. But it was readable. I found it interesting enough to finish. If it were made into an action movie, I think it would work pretty well. I just don’t particularly recommend it as it is.

Review: The Genesis of Misery

Title: The Genesis of Misery

Series: The Nullvoid Chronicles

Author: Neon Yang

Genre: Space Opera

Trigger Warnings: War, death, violence, unreality (severe), injury, sexual content (consensual, minimal descriptions), terminal illness, parent death, religious trauma, religious bigotry (mild), mental illness (delusions/hallucinations), confinement, involuntary sedation with drugs, medical content (mentions)

Back Cover:

An immersive, electrifying space-fantasy, Neon Yang’s debut novel The Genesis of Misery is full of high-tech space battles and political machinations, starring a queer and diverse array of pilots, princesses, and prophetic heirs.

It’s a story you think you know: a young person hears the voice of an angel saying they have been chosen as a warrior to lead their people to victory in a holy war.

But Misery Nomaki (she/they) knows they are a fraud.

Raised on a remote moon colony, they don’t believe in any kind of god. Their angel is a delusion, brought on by hereditary space exposure. Yet their survival banks on mastering the holy mech they are supposedly destined for, and convincing the Emperor of the Faithful that they are the real deal.

The deeper they get into their charade, however, the more they start to doubt their convictions. What if this, all of it, is real?

A reimagining of Joan of Arc’s story given a space opera, giant robot twist, the Nullvoid Chronicles is a story about the nature of truth, the power of belief, and the interplay of both in the stories we tell ourselves.

Review:

I picked this up for two reasons: a nonbinary protagonist and the idea of Joan of Arc but in space. And you know, this book definitely has both of those things. Misery is most definitely nonbinary. And there definitely are Joan of Arc-type elements to the overarching plot (although you probably have to know that’s what it’s supposed to be to spot them – it’s definitely more “Joan of Arc-inspired” than “space opera retelling of Joan of Arc”).

But if you go in expecting just that, you are not at all going to be prepared for what The Genesis of Misery is going to throw at you. Because like I said, those elements are there, but they are definitely not the main thrust of the story.

Before I go too far, I do want to talk about Misery for a moment. (I’m going to be using she/her pronouns here, because while Misery uses both they/them and she/her, the narrative primarily uses she/her.) She’s an interesting character by herself. She’s a bit of a troublemaker – not for the sake of making trouble or being rebellious, but because she just has other priorities that rank higher than “obey the rules.” One of those priorities is self-preservation. Born with the disease that killed her mother, and experiencing the delusions and hallucinations that the disease causes, her driving motivation at the beginning of the book is survival. And the best way to do that seems to be to convince everyone that the symptoms of her terminal illness are actually symptoms of being god’s chosen messiah. All of that makes for a very interesting character. Her tenacity, resourcefulness, and general focus on prioritizing what matters to her over what people around her want her to do made her compelling and enjoyable to read about.

I haven’t read many unreliable narrator stories – not intentionally, that just hasn’t been a big aspect of my reading in general. Misery definitely qualifies as one, though, and in a really interesting way. She’s unreliable because she experiences hallucinations and delusions as a symptom of her illness, and she is very aware of that fact. So I may not be able to tell if the narrative is telling me the truth, but neither can she. In fact, she was so unreliable that I ended up believing the exact opposite of whatever she believed. At the beginning, she was 100% sure it was just hallucinations and she was faking the messiah thing as a survival strategy. At that point, I figured the twist would be that she was really divinely chosen after all. But as the story goes on, she began to slowly begin to think that maybe she was god’s chosen after all – and I began to doubt that she really was the messiah, or even that this deity existed in the first place. It wasn’t really an unpleasant experience, but it was weird to basically switch opinions with the protagonist throughout the course of the book.

This review is already pretty long, and I haven’t even gotten into the plot. But honestly, the plot is not really all that important here. In fact, you could argue that there really isn’t much of one. Misery’s people are at war with the Heretics, who have rejected their god and are trying to invade. Misery is playing messiah (or growing into the role of messiah, depending on who you believe) to cover for the fact that she has a fatal disease. A lot of people are doing politics and such around Misery and have big plans for this and that, but for the most part Misery is doing her best to 1. Stay alive, 2. Stay not imprisoned, and 3. Convince people that the weird stuff about her is from messiah-ness instead of mind-altering space disease, in that order. Sure, there’s some Pacific Rim-style mech battles in space, but those don’t come in until quite a ways through the book and they’re not what it’s about anyway.

What really makes this story work is the religious aspect. This society has one god, the one true god, who agreed to help the humans who dispersed among the stars. This deity chooses saints, identifiable by their iridescent hair, who have powers to activate and control special types of stone that are used for all kinds of things through this society. This religion is integrated so deeply with the society that they never actually talk about a religion or name the faith – knowledge of this deity, following religious observances, the way the saints’ ability to control special stones make society function, it’s just part of how things are. At the beginning, despite being raised in the church, Misery doesn’t even believe in this deity. But ideas of heresy, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, paying lip service to religious rules while doing what you want anyway, the difference between ethics and religiosity, power structures, belief, and fanaticism are wound throughout the whole story. I don’t really know how to describe it. As someone raised in a religion that was big into fanaticism, private hypocrisy, and ignoring the spirit of the rules where possible, I found it both strange and sci-fi while simultaneously intimately and painfully familiar. Watching Misery start to believe that maybe she was the messiah had a similar ring – it was nearly the same process as my journey out of religion, but the opposite direction. It left me feeling a bit disoriented – which is, honestly, an appropriate feeling for this book.

I don’t think I have adequately expressed yet my overall opinion of this book. It’s good. It’s very, very good. But it’s an uncommon type of good. Some really good books hype you up. They get your adrenaline pumping, leave you emotionally exhausted at the end, and make you want to yell from the rooftops that everyone should read this book. (Honestly, as much as I liked it, if you’re not up for a book that’s heavily about weird space religions, you probably won’t enjoy it very much.) Instead, it’s a much quieter kind of good. It makes me want to slow down, savor the story, and appreciate the richness of the world and the journey. It makes me want to think and linger over all the religious elements, both thematic and emotional. There’s some bittersweet tones as I understand exactly why Misery is doing what she’s doing but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be painful for her. I can already tell I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while.

The Nullvoid Chronicles:

1. The Genesis of Misery

Review: Resistance

Title: Resistance

Series: Divided Elements #1

Author: Mikhaeyla Kopievsky

Genre: Dystopian

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, needles/injections (severe), medical content, domestic violence (mentions), sexual content (mentions), injury, animal death (mentions), alcohol use (a lot), self-harm (brief)

Back Cover:

From the moment you are born, you are conditioned to know this truth: Unorthodoxy is wrong action, Heterodoxy is wrong thought. One will lead to your Detention. The other to your Execution.

Once known as Paris, the walled city-state of Otpor is enjoying a new Golden Age.

The horrors of the Singularity and Emancipation forgotten, citizens now revel in a veritable utopia of ubiquitous drugs, alcohol, and entertainment, washed down with full employment, universal healthcare, and affordable housing. All made possible by the Orthodoxy – a new world order where everything is engineered to maximum efficiency, including identities.

From an early age, citizens are aligned and conditioned to one of four neuro-social classes named after the cardinal elements of old: single-minded Fire to enforce, creative Air to entertain, technical Water to engineer, and base Earth to labour.

All four Elements exist in complete equality, fraternity, and liberty. But, not everyone is satisfied with the status quo.

Two generations after the Execution of Kane 148 and Otpor’s return to Orthodoxy, the Resistor’s legacy still lingers. Forbidden murals are appearing on crumbling concrete walls to threaten the city’s structured harmony – calling citizens to action. Calling for Resistance.

When Kane’s former protégé, Anaiya 234, is selected for a high-risk mission, Otpor is given the chance it needs to eliminate the Heterodoxy and Anaiya the opportunity she craves to erase a shameful past. But the mission demands an impossible sacrifice – her identity.

Subjected to a radical new procedure, Anaiya’s identity is realigned, allowing her to go deep undercover in search of the growing rebellion. But as the risk of violence escalates and every decision is fraught with betrayal, Anaiya’s fractured identity threatens to unravel not only her mission, but her mind.

Review:

I have read a lot of YA dystopian. This is largely because it was the primary YA genre during my prime YA reading years. If I’d read it back then, or even when it first released in 2017, I probably would have considered it a fine but not particularly noteworthy example of the genre. (Although it isn’t technically YA, it has a very YA feel, and I probably would have categorized it as such.) However, reading it in 2023 – with expanded adult reading tastes, an extra decade of reading and reviewing (and life) experience, and a much deeper understanding of books in general – makes it an absolutely wild experience.

There are some really great ideas and unique takes on dystopian tropes in this story. As much as I generally dislike the post-Hunger Games trend of dystopias sorting society into groups, this world’s idea of testing children’s aptitudes and then using neural conditioning/scifi tech to fully align their brains to particular elemental traits, making their elemental alignment basically hard-wired into their brains, was a unique take. I enjoyed the reconditioning element, where Anaiya got to experience emotions for the first time and all the complexities that emotions come with, especially when you’re not used to dealing with them. I found it both fascinating and relatable, and if the story dropped most of the attempted-dystopian elements and put the focus on Anaiya’s internal journey, I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more. The “are we the baddies?” idea is also a unique take on dystopian stories – instead of rising up from the oppressed under-class, the protagonist starts out as an agent of the dystopian government and slowly realizes that maybe the government isn’t as good as she thought.

However, despite the actually good ideas Resistance has, it has three major flaws that undermine it both as a dystopian story and as a reading experience.

First, it doesn’t convince me that this is a dystopian world. Characters talk about how terrible everything is, but not only do we not see that in the narrative, they don’t even give examples. The only actual described problem is police brutality (or, in this case, Fire element brutality) – it’s the only thing actually shown on-page and the only specific issue anyone complains about. Dystopian societies probably have police brutality, sure, but it’s not exclusive to dystopias. There is a curfew and the whole idea of conditioning people to elements in the first place, but these definitely more dystopian happenings are mentioned in passing as world-building. Nobody seems to actually have a problem with those.

Second, which ties into both the previous and next points, it never shows anyone in power in this society. The closest the story ever gets to someone “in charge” is the Fire element commander who gives Anaiya her initial re-alignment assignment. A dystopian society just doesn’t feel very dystopian without someone or a small group of someones at the top doing the oppressing, and this book never indicates that there’s anyone actually in power at all. It may be realistic that ordinary people don’t actually interact with those in power, but they should at least know who their king/”president”/commander/dictator/etc. is. Not only does it reduce the world’s dystopia factor, lacking an antagonist, even a symbolic one, makes fighting the system feel unrealistic.

Which brings me to the third problem: it fails to convince me that the resistance is a threat, or even that it exists in a meaningful way. Everyone is getting bent out of shape about the “Heterodoxy” and the brewing rebellion and how terrible this is going to be. But for the vast majority of the book, the entire rebellion consists of murals that say “Resistance.” That’s it. It does escalate a little towards the end, but not by much. The entire alleged rebellion against the entire alleged dystopia for most of the book is unauthorized paintings with provocative words. And, minor spoiler time, Anaiya’s infiltration finds there’s only three to five people behind the whole thing. The response to the threat of this Heterodoxy seems wildly out of proportion with the scope of the damage that five people doing unauthorized art can actually do.

I think I found this book so disappointing because there are some really good ideas. It does some truly fascinating things with standard dystopian tropes, and Anaiya’s personal arc is, quite honestly, superb. (That character resolution? Spectacular. Loved it.) There are a lot of interesting ideas in the world that had real potential. But then the plot itself fell so flat. I didn’t even hate the love triangle that much because none of it felt like it actually mattered. There was a fair amount of violence in the book, but it never felt like it had real stakes.

I did finish it. I started writing this review as a DNF, but at that point I only had about fifty pages left, so I went ahead and finished it to see if my criticisms bore out through the whole book. And in the end, I’m glad I did, because even though one of the twists felt entire out-of-the-blue and I guessed the other, the wonderfully satisfying resolution to Anaiya’s personal arc was worth it. Resistance isn’t a bad book, per se. I think I’m just disappointed that so many good ideas got a lackluster, stakes-less plot that didn’t do them justice.

The Divided Elements series:

1. Resistance
2. Rebellion
3. Revolution

Review: Winter’s Orbit

Title: Winter’s Orbit

Author: Everina Maxwell

Genre: Science Fiction/Romance

Trigger Warnings: Forced marriage, sexual content, domestic abuse, emotional abuse, torture, unreality, injury, blood, violence, guns, romantic partner death (mentions), medical-like equipment used in interrogation/torture

Back Cover:

A famously disappointing minor royal and the Emperor’s least favorite grandchild, Prince Kiem is summoned before the Emperor and commanded to renew the empire’s bonds with its newest vassal planet. The prince must marry Count Jainan, the recent widower of another royal prince of the empire.

But Jainan suspects his late husband’s death was no accident. And Prince Kiem discovers Jainan is a suspect himself. But broken bonds between the Empire and its vassal planets leaves the entire empire vulnerable, so together they must prove that their union is strong while uncovering a possible conspiracy.

Their successful marriage will align conflicting worlds.

Their failure will be the end of the empire.

Review:

Sometimes you get in the mood to read something absolutely emotionally devastating. The kind of book that will tear out your heart and crush it and leave you sobbing and grateful to have read it. And if you ever get into that mood, have I got a book for you!

Winter’s Orbit will crush you in the best way. There were a few points where my chest physically hurt from the beautifully devastating feelings (or it could have been because my new medication was entirely fucking me over – but I choose to attribute it to the book). It’s an arranged-marriage mutual-pining romance between two scared and hurting and uncertain young royals against the backdrop of empire-ending scifi politics. It’s wonderful and it hurts so much.

I loved Kiem. He was kind as an integral part of his existence, oblivious to anything that didn’t fit his experience until explicitly told (at which point he felt bad for not noticing), and very much trying his best. He knew how to handle his own life as a prince, for the most part, but had absolutely zero idea of how to handle being married. He was sweet and self-deprecating and I loved him.

And, unusual for a book with dual narrators, I loved Jainan just as much. He was uncertain, terrified, and absolutely dedicated to duty even when it involved excessive and painful self-sacrifice, and he had no idea how to deal with a partner as genuinely kind as Kiem. I called the dynamic between him and his first partner immediately (considering I have personal experience with it, it seemed obvious to be, but I can see how often oblivious and never-thinks-bad-of-people Kiem would miss it), and I was very pleased to see how everything worked out in this second marriage. I adored Kiem because he was sweet and fun, but I adored Jainan because he was hurt and broken and I wanted to see him heal and be happy.

The world itself was well sketched. It was done well enough that there were a few nice moments of culture clash, and I really enjoyed how Kiem’s and Jainan’s two cultures used clothing indicators like jewelry (Kiem’s people) and scarf knots (Jainan’s people) to indicate gender, rather than anything inherent in the physical body. There were definitely interesting parts, and it was detailed enough to support the story, but it took a back seat to the romance.

In fact, everything took a back seat to the romance. That includes the plot, which includes desperate politics to get an important treaty signed before the deadline, murder and assassination, and a far-reaching conspiracy with plans to destroy the empire. It’s enough to make an entire book on its own, and yet it fades into the background behind the two protagonists and their pining, uncertain, tentative, adorably awkward relationship. And even though I usually prefer plot and roll my eyes at romance, I enjoyed it thoroughly.

I’m still not fully clear on what was really so difficult about getting the treaty signed in the first place, which made the foundation of everything that happens feel very flimsy. But it was a solid book and a stellar romance. The plot was good, the characters were great, the emotions were intense and devastating in the best possible way. On the whole, it’s very good.

Review Shorts: The Murderbot Diaries

The Murderbot Diaries is a series of scifi novellas. Since they’re so short, I don’t have enough opinions for a full review of each of them. But they’re good enough that I want them to have their own post. So I’m trying something new – a Review Shorts post not for a particular month, but for a series.

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

See the series on The StoryGraph here

1. All Sytems Red
2. Artifical Condition
3. Rogue Protocol
4. Exit Strategy
5. Network Effect
6. Fugitive Telemetry
7. System Collapse (2023)

General spoiler warning: Though I try to avoid it, there is a high likelihood that each of these review shorts will contain spilers of the previous books.

Book #1: All Systems Red

Completed November 2022

This story was entertaining, irreverant, and a good time all around. I loved “Murderbot” and I really enjoyed the crew it was placed with and its dynamics. I especially enjoyed how Murderbot isn’t legally considered a person and doesn’t want to be considered one – it was an interesting idea. I also appreciated the way the crew insisted on treating it like a person even though that made it very uncomfortable. The plot itself was interesting, too – a capitalist hellscape universe, an interesting uninhabited planet setting, and a mystery to solve. It worked perfectly fine as a novella, but it could have easily been much longer, and I wish it was. I would have enjoyed spending a significantly longer time in this story with these characters unraveling this mystery. It’s kinda like how once you eat one potato chip you want to eat the whole bag – now that I’ve read this book, I want to devour the entire series.

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, violence, injury (severe), body horror, murder, mind control

---

Book #2: Artificial Condition

Completed November 2022

Like the first book in the series, this one was entertaining but way too short. Murderbot spent most of this one passing as human, which was fantastic. I found its attempts to figure out how to interact with people and act like a human amusing and remarkably relatable. (Also, watching Murderbot attempt to do an actual job interview was hilarious.) The human side characters were pretty good too. Murderbot’s goal this book is to get answers about its past – and it did, but the answers felt anticlimactic. Either there’s going to be more to it or the answers aren’t a huge part of whatever Murderbot is looking for. It’s on a journey looking for something, but it’s not really sure what yet (and honestly that’s pretty relatable too), and that made this whole book feel less like a self-contained story and more like one section of a larger book. It’s not like All Systems Red where it definitely could have been expanded – it was exactly as long as it needed to be, it just felt incomplete. Perhaps I should be reading this like a novel released in parts than as individual novellas? Regardless, I enjoyed it and I’m excited to keep reading this series.

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, violence, injury, kidnapping (mentions), mind control, medical content, guns

---

Book #3: Rogue Protocol

Completed November 2022

I love Murderbot so much. It’s so done with all of this bullshit and just wants to consume media in peace, but it keeps having to go save idiot humans from their own bad decisions. Murderbot’s strong narrative voice made for a fascinating mood in this book. By all rights, the setting should be space horror – an abandoned space station where something is not quite dead and trying to kill you. But Murderbot’s trademark snark and irreverence makes it almost funny. And it worked – it’s definitely unique, and as much as I like space horror, I also enjoy Murderbot viewing a space horror setting as nothing more than highly inconvenient. This series so far is ostensibly about Murderbot investigating a conspiracy, but that just seems to be a reason for it to travel around and do other stuff along the way. It’s less about answers than about Murderbot’s growth. And it’s fascinating to see how it has grown even over three books as uncomfortable-pretending-to-be-human Murderbot now has to pretend to be a SecUnit again. This one didn’t need to be longer – it was a solid story that didn’t feel rushed – but I wish it was longer because I enjoy these books so much.

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death (mentions/threat of), violence, injury, kidnapping (brief), grief (mentions), body horror

---

Book #4: Exit Strategy

Completed December 2022

Considering that Murderbot isn’t human, it’s surprisingly relatable. It’s just a fun, entertaining, compelling character, and I love it. I’m also glad to see Mensa and the rest of the crew from book one back in this book. And that was a good way to emphasize the strong emotional journey and growth that Murderbot has been through over the course of this series so far. For all the violence that follows my favorite SecUnit around, this book is remarkably wholesome. It has a happy ending – not just “immediate problems are solved,” but an actual satisfying happy ending. Which Murderbot definitely deserves. I think this was originally supposed to be the last book in the series, which I would believe because this is a solid ending point. But I’m glad there’s more because I want to read more.

Trigger Warnings: Blood, injury, violence, kidnapping, guns (mentions), mind control (mentions)

---

Book #5: Network Effect

Completed December 2022

This book is exactly what I wanted from a full-length Murderbot novel – the classic Murderbot combination of entertainment, snark, action, and emotion in a cool scifi setting, but longer. Dr. Mensah and several of the crew from book one are back, along with ART and a selection of new characters, and there’s a new threat in a new section of the universe. But the extra length provided extra opportunity for growth. There was still plenty of action, but Murderbot got to develop some relationships and feel some emotions. The book even dove more into the trauma responses that can happen from all the stuff Murderbot and company have been through. There was a lot of Murderbot wrestling with feelings and interactions with people. I love seeing it grow and deal with feelings – and I know it’s technically because of the robot parts, but Murderbot is full of relatable autism feels. The climax of this book got a little confusing, as it (very briefly) went to three point-of-view characters and it was difficult to keep track of who was talking, but overall it was very good. There’s snark, scifi action, emotional growth, and relationship development all in one book! I know there’s more Murderbot novellas in the series, but I definitely think the series could handle some more full-length novels. At the very least, I want some.

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, violence, injury, mind control, grief, kidnapping, confinement

---

Book #6: Fugitive Telemetry

Completed December 2022

Murderbot is always entertaining, no matter what it’s doing. In this case, it’s trying to solve a mystery on Preservation Station, and has to (horror of horrors) work with security humans. And it was a good time. It didn’t feel fully like a mystery because I don’t think there’s any way I could have figured out the culprit on my own, but that’s fine because the mystery is less about the mystery and more as a vehicle for Murderbot finding its place on Preservation. It got to interact with Preservation humans, work with security humans, and be snarky and good at its job. (Also of note, I’ve often noted that it’s part-bot mind is very relatable to my autism experience, but the beginning of this book had a bit where being a construct – part robot and part cloned human tissue – was very relatable to my nonbinary experience. So that was odd but cool.) This novella seemed lighter and quicker than previous ones in the series. Yeah, there was a murder, but it was overall satisfying and happy. I feel like I can tell Murderbot is adapting and becoming happier because it spends so much less time on-page watching media, and honestly that’s relatable too. I love Murderbot and I love this series, and I’m very happy that it seems to be finding a place in the world where it can live happily. I can’t wait until the next book comes out.

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, injury, murder, trafficking (mentions), slavery (mentions), guns

Review: So You Had To Build a Time Machine

Title: So You Had to Build a Time Machine

Author: Jason Offutt

Genre: Science Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, violence, insects, body horror, violence, vomit, injury, murder, child death, child abuse, parent death, gun violence, alcohol, unreality

Back Cover:

Skid doesn’t believe in ghosts or time travel or any of that nonsense. A circus runaway-turned-bouncer, she believes in hard work, self-defense, and good strong coffee. Then one day an annoying theoretical physicist named Dave pops into the seat next to her at her least favorite Kansas City bar and disappears into thin air when she punches him (he totally deserved it).

Now, street names are changing, Skid’s favorite muffins are swapping frosting flavors, Dave keeps reappearing in odd places like the old Sanderson murder house—and that’s only the start of her problems.

Something has gone wrong. Terribly wrong. Absolutely *$&ed up.

Someone has the nastiest versions of every conceivable reality at their fingertips, and they’re not afraid to smash them together. With the help of a smooth-talking haunted house owner and a linebacker-sized Dungeons and Dragons-loving baker, Skid and Dave set out to save the world from whatever scientific experiment has sent them all dimension-hopping against their will.

It probably means the world is screwed.

Review:

This book was spectacularly disappointing. I picked it up because I wanted something kinda light and fun to read and parallel dimension space-time shenanigans sounded like it fit the bill. It set up a lot of great stuff in the beginning, and I really enjoyed it. Then it completely fell apart.

Let’s start with the beginning. There’s Skid, a circus runaway -turned-bouncer – which is a little unbelievable but I’ll allow it. There’s Brick, who is built like a brick wall (although that has no relationship to his name, weirdly) but owns a bakery and loves Dungeons and Dragons. There’s Cord, who runs haunted house tours and uses gimmicks to convince ghost enthusiasts to part with their cash. And there’s also Dave, who is the only one who actually knows what’s going on but who keeps popping in and out of reality (or at least, this reality). Something went very wrong somewhere, and our three protagonists are doing their best to figure it out (and keep Dave in one place long enough to get answers).

As the ticking clock ticks down and our protagonists start switching through more dramatically different dimensions, though, the story starts to fall apart. I have problems with so many different things that it’s going to be easier to make a list.

• Brick treats the whole thing like a D&D adventure, complete with a self-created Adventurer’s Pack from Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. It was very entertaining at first, and I liked him a lot. But the more serious the situation got, the harder Brick doubled down on pretending it was a D&D adventure and not taking it seriously, and that got irritating fast.
• Skid was a characterization disaster. She had the tough-girl-really-good-at-one-particular-weapon trope going on, but the story tried to shoehorn in some childhood trauma that felt extremely forced because it only came up twice as a reason for Skid to not do something that would have made everything easier.
• Cord was set up as a protagonist just as much as Skid and Brick, but about halfway through the book he also started popping out of existence sometimes, neither Skid nor Brick seemed to care very much, and he proceeded to do absolutely nothing useful for the rest of the book.
• There was a weird disjointed subplot with Cord’s haunted house and the murder that happened there in the past that had absolutely no relationship to anything and wasn’t even connected to the characters because Cord was off doing Plot Stuff for 95% of it.
• The whole plot of this book is to push a button. Now, there are ways for “go to this place and push this button” plots to be interesting, but this one was not. The only “obstacles” the characters encountered on their quest to walk to the location and push the button was that dimension changes modified the landscape in often horrifying ways, sometimes including dangerous things to avoid or escape. Even the attempt at creating some “maybe we shouldn’t press the button” uncertainty was weak.
• The romance was absolute bullshit because the characters involved spend a total of maybe twelve hours together, tops. I didn’t know either of the characters well enough to fall for them and I spent a whole entire book with them.

It’s incredibly frustrating because there are so many great ideas here. The cast of characters – ex-circus runaway loner, D&D-loving baker, con man whose scheme is technically legal – is actually great in concept. If they were allowed to live up to their potential, take each other and the plot seriously, and stay together and build relationships through the story, they could have been great.

Time travel or no time travel, I love the plot concept, too. Parallel dimensions have been done before, but in this story the parallel dimensions keep crashing into each other and our protagonists have no choice about jumping into new ones on a semi-frequent basis. There are many weird things, new things, and absolutely horrifying things. This could have been a story about the characters banding together and overcoming the terrors of the multiverse, or it could have been a scifi horror, and I would have enjoyed it either way.

I was going to say that part of the problem with this book is that it was too short to really develop anything, but it actually wasn’t. It’s over 11 hours in audiobook, which should have been plenty long. But I remember it as being to short to develop anything because despite not a whole lot of plot happening (because there wasn’t much plot to happen), the whole thing felt rushed.

I can’t fully put my finger on what exactly went wrong here. I think a lot of things went wrong at once. Or possibly I just have bad opinions and didn’t like a really good book. Who knows. Either way. It gets five stars for some absolutely fantastic concepts, but only two stars for execution. It was okay enough to finish, so it does have that going for it, at least.

Review: Who Fears Death

Title: Who Fears Death

Author: Nnedi Okorafor

Genre: Post-Apocalyptic/Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, violence, genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery (mentions), blood, gore, pregnancy, rape (graphic), attempted rape, infidelity, sexual content, sexual content between minors, animal death, excrement, body horror, murder, parent death, child death, romantic partner death, major character death, suicidal ideation, incest (mentions), child sexual abuse (mentions), medical content

Back Cover:

In a post-apocalyptic Africa, the world has changed in many ways, yet in one region genocide between tribes still bloodies the land. After years of enslaving the Okeke people, the Nuru tribe has decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate the Okeke tribe for good. An Okeke woman who has survived the annihilation of her village and a terrible rape by an enemy general wanders into the desert hoping to die. Instead, she gives birth to an angry baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand. Gripped by the certainty that her daughter is different—special—she names her child Onyesonwu, which means “Who Fears Death?” in an ancient tongue.

From a young age, stubborn, willful Onyesonwu is trouble. It doesn’t take long for her to understand that she is physically and socially marked by the circumstances of her violent conception. She is Ewu—a child of rape who is expected to live a life of violence, a half-breed rejected by both tribes.

But Onye is not the average Ewu. As a child, Onye’s singing attracts owls. By the age of eleven, she can change into a vulture. But these amazing abilities are merely the first glimmers of a remarkable unique magic. As Onye grows, so do her abilities—soon she can manipulate matter and flesh, or travel beyond into the spiritual world. During an inadvertent visit to this other realm she learns something terrifying: someone powerful is trying to kill her.

Desperate to elude her would-be murderer, and to understand her own nature, she seeks help from the magic practitioners of her village. But, even among her mother’s people, she meets with frustrating prejudice because she is Ewu and female. Yet Onyesonwu persists.

Eventually her magical destiny and her rebellious nature will force her to leave home on a quest that will be perilous in ways that Onyesonwu can not possibly imagine. For this journey will cause her to grapple with nature, tradition, history, true love, the spiritual mysteries of her culture, and ultimately to learn why she was given the name she bears: Who Fears Death?

Review:

Note: This review discusses rape in several places because rape is an essential plot point. If rape is a trigger for you, take care of yourself and skip both this book and this review.

I was not all that excited to read this book. In fact, I passed over it several times because that back cover just didn’t sound appealing. But then I read The Book of Phoenix, which happened to be a prequel to this one. I loved The Book of Phoenix, so I decided I might as well give Who Fears Death a shot.

I have a lot to say about this book, and most of it has to do with the book overall. The details were, for the most part, strong. One of the best part of all of Nnedi’s books are the africanfuturism settings that beautifully combines technology just advanced enough from what we have to make it sci-fi with enthralling small villages and great deserts in near-future Africa. The worldbuilding is absolutely stellar.

Where it struggles is everywhere else. The story here feels very much like one of Nnedi’s “woman who is hated and feared for some aspect of how she was born goes on a long journey to nowhere in particular” plots (see Noor and Remote Control), just with more setup – Onyesonwu doesn’t leave the village until over halfway through the book. But this book attempts to give Onyesonwu’s travels in the desert a destination and a purpose. The purpose makes the desert-wandering feeling seem incongruous, and the desert-wandering feeling makes the purpose feel cheap and unnecessary. I just didn’t think it worked.

That’s how the book felt overall – like the story was trying to smash together two very different approaches and not succeeding at either. It took ideas for a plot-focused book – a uniquely powerful main character with a unique appearance who learns to use her innate magic to fulfill the prophecy that she will end the great evil plaguing the land – and tried to shove them into a character-focused story.

I’m using “character-focused” in the loosest sense of the term, because the focus is on only Onyesonwu’s rage. She very clearly has every right to be angry, but that is the only thing that seems to matter in this book. It glosses over interesting plot happenings and interesting character development alike. The story is driven by Onyesonwu getting angry, doing something incredibly stupid (which she usually recognizes was stupid as soon as she calms down), and then having to deal with the consequences.

Who Fears Death is also unrelentingly violent. It’s said right on the back cover that Onyesonwu was born from rape. What isn’t mentioned is that that rape is described in graphic detail multiple times, as well as several other rapes and one attempted rape. There’s also murder, genocide, physical violence, and more, all described with vivid, bloody thoroughness. (There was also some fairly graphic consensual sexual content between two minors, which wasn’t actually violent but still very uncomfortable.) It was very hard to read in many places, but in some ways it felt like that was the point. I mean this in the best possible way, but it felt a bit like the author was using the process of writing this to work through some stuff. There’s a scene in the book where Onyesonwu is trying to convince her village that genocide is really happening and they need to act. Nobody is listening to her, so she uses her magic to broadcast her mother’s experience of being raped to every one of them. In a way, this book feels a lot like it’s trying to do the same thing. There was a strong sense of “All of this has happened to real people in other places, the least you can do is read about it.”

I finished reading this not because I particularly wanted to, but because by the time I got around to thinking about switching to a different audiobook, I was two hours from the end and I figured I might as well finish. The whole story felt flat – not as in without depth or emotion, but as in without variation. There was no rising and falling action, no moments of heightened conflict or moments of respite. Onyesonwu’s rage was constant, the pace was constant, the violence never stopped, and the climax didn’t even feel like a climax because the pace and rage and violence were exactly the same as the rest of the book. I found the ending profoundly unsatisfying, for reasons that include spoilers: Onyesonwu attacked the antagonist twice with magic and spent half a year walking across the desert just so she could use her rage and her magic to kill him, only to fall in a terrified sobbing heap the instant she saw him in person, leaving her romantic partner to do the thing she went all that way to do.

What I wanted from this book was something plot-focused. More about Onyesonwu learning to use her magic and the strange spiritual world of the Wilderness, magic as a weapon and a tool with more details about its possibilities and limitations, the prophecy leading to a quest-style journey, a climax that involved a great magical duel between Onyesonwu and the antagonist. I also would have accepted something that made magic and prophecies the backdrop to a friends-to-lovers romance, complicated but unbreakable friendships, an antagonist-to-surrogate-father relationship with her magic teacher, and self-reflection and love and advice from friends leading to personal growth and fewer rash actions. But Who Fears Death tried to do both at the same time, and ended up making something that wasn’t satisfying on either level.

Review: Bonds of Brass

Title: Bonds of Brass

Series: The Bloodright Trilogy #1

Author: Emily Skrutskie

Genre: Science Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Violence, death, death of parent, death of child, genocide, war, colonization, sexual content (minor), injury (graphic), burn injury, torture, kidnapping, guns/gun violence

Back Cover:

Ettian’s life was shattered when the merciless Umber Empire invaded his world. He’s spent seven years putting himself back together under its rule, joining an Umber military academy and becoming the best pilot in his class. Even better, he’s met Gal—his exasperating and infuriatingly enticing roommate who’s made the academy feel like a new home.

But when dozens of classmates spring an assassination plot on Gal, a devastating secret comes to light: Gal is the heir to the Umber Empire. Ettian barely manages to save his best friend and flee the compromised academy unscathed, rattled that Gal stands to inherit the empire that broke him, and that there are still people willing to fight back against Umber rule.

As they piece together a way to deliver Gal safely to his throne, Ettian finds himself torn in half by an impossible choice. Does he save the man who’s won his heart and trust that Gal’s goodness could transform the empire? Or does he throw his lot in with the brewing rebellion and fight to take back what’s rightfully theirs?

Review:

I wasn’t sure about this book going in. I picked it up on author alone, because everything I’ve read from Emily Skrutskie so far has been good. By the time I got around to reading it the only thing I remembered was that it was sci-fi and set at some kind of military school, so I went in blind and more than a little doubtful.

I warmed up to the story pretty quickly, though. There was plenty of action, the protagonist is hopelessly in love with his best friend who turns out to be the heir to the empire that destroyed his life, and they end up on the run from people with vastly superior firepower armed with nothing but their wits and their military school education. Said best friend/heir was charismatic, funny, and a good friend and solid love interest. There was plenty of action and an interesting galactic world to explore. I was interested to keep going.

Then the middle almost entirely lost me. The only thing hampering the romance was Ettian’s insistence that it wouldn’t work out, the duo picked up a hanger-on who was teeth-grindingly obnoxious up until the penultimate scene, and at some point the goal “get Gal to his galactic ruler parents where he’ll be safe” became “Gal must return home a conquering hero” for no discernable reason (unless Plot Requires More Complicated Nonsense counts as a reason, because that’s the only one I saw). It wasn’t actually boring – there was plenty of action, plots and counter-plots, and the idea of the heroes leading a revolution turned on its head – but I couldn’t see the reasoning behind the characters’ choices so it all felt unnecessary.

I am also confused and a bit concerned about the themes and message of this book. On one hand, Ettian is a member of a conquered people dealing with the trauma of working for the empire that killed his family and destroyed his life while living in the colonized wreckage of his former world and choosing between bad and worse options for survival. On the other hand, everything else. Ettian allying with the colonial power is not only 100% a good thing but portrayed as the only reasonable choice, and his crisis at choosing the colonizer prince over the remnants of his genocided people takes him like three pages total to get over. The whole trilogy is called the Bloodright Trilogy because everything in this world hinges on blood rights – things pass only from parents to children and what kind of life you have is decided only by who your parents are. This is portrayed as universally a good thing and the best system. There’s even a bit about how crime only happens in a democracy and crime couldn’t exist if everything was based on blood inheritance. I am not sure what kind of message one is supposed to get from all this, but I have the feeling I don’t like it.

(I realize that there is potential for the other two books in the series to break down these ideas, but the message of “colonizers are the good guys and blood inheritance is the best, actually” seems promoted by the narrative itself, not just the characters. If the theme of the trilogy is going to be our protagonists realizing how screwed up this all is, absolutely none of it comes through in this book.)

Despite a pretty good climax and a solid ending reveal (even though I did see it coming as soon as I got how this world works), most of the conflict felt unnecessary contrived, and unless the next two books make some major changes I do not like what this book says thematically. I will not be continuing this series.

The Bloodright Trilogy:

1. Bonds of Brass
2. Oaths of Legacy
3. Vows of Empire

Review: Dead Silence

Title: Dead Silence

Author: S.A. Barnes

Genre: Science Fiction/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Blood (severe), gore (severe), death (severe), mental illness, forced institutionalization, death of parent, terminal illness, child death, violence, suicidal ideation, suicide, unreality, body horror

Back Cover:

A GHOST SHIP.
A SALVAGE CREW.
UNSPEAKABLE HORRORS.

Claire Kovalik is days away from being unemployed—made obsolete—when her beacon repair crew picks up a strange distress signal. With nothing to lose and no desire to return to Earth, Claire and her team decide to investigate.

What they find at the other end of the signal is a shock: the Aurora, a famous luxury space-liner that vanished on its maiden tour of the solar system more than twenty years ago. A salvage claim like this could set Claire and her crew up for life. But a quick trip through the Aurora reveals something isn’t right.

Whispers in the dark. Flickers of movement. Words scrawled in blood. Claire must fight to hold onto her sanity and find out what really happened on the Aurora, before she and her crew meet the same ghastly fate.

Review:

It’s a rare horror book that can start the story two months after the protagonist gets rescued, say in the first few paragraphs that the protagonist survives and everyone else dies, and still be interesting. And yet Dead Silence manages it.

I am slowly realizing that I don’t actually hate horror. I especially love the horror of big, dark, long-abandoned spaces, and the Aurora is that combined with “something horrible happened here and it could still get us.” Since it’s a spaceship, you also have the cosmic horror of the cold void of outer space, which doesn’t hate you because that would imply you were big enough to notice but will still kill you quickly and painfully just by its nature.

It’s intense, emotional, and terrifying. Claire is wrestling with an ugly combination of shame, regret, and survivor’s guilt that she can’t seem to escape, but she’s still doing her best to wrench an okay life from the wreckage of her past. She sees things that no one else sees that can give her information that she wouldn’t otherwise know, but can she actually see ghosts or is she severely mentally ill? Psychiatrists tell her it’s just hallucinations, but she is not confident of either explanation, and it makes her an unintentionally unreliable narrator. If she can’t trust that what she’s experiencing is actually happening, how can we the reader tell if it is or not? I’m not usually much for unreliable narrators, but an unintentionally unreliable narrator was fascinating.

I am glad I read this in broad daylight, because there were several spots where I had to yank my imagination out of the story and remind myself that it’s just a story, nothing is after me, and even if this is real it won’t get Claire because the book already told me she survives. It’s intense, emotional, and terrifying. I loved trying to piece together what happened on the Aurora from the bizarre, gruesome clues and trying to separate reality from unreality in Claire’s perception. My husband got to read this book vicariously as I told him each new revelation like it was hot gossip and sent multi-paragraph texts with my theories for how it went down. I started making a list in my head of all my friends who like scifi and/or horror who I could tell about this book.

Then about 80% in I finally got the reveal of what was really going on in the Aurora, and the whole glorious, vibrant, terrifying story fell apart.

I think I would have been less upset about it if I hadn’t already guessed the answer. Not only did I guess it less than a third of the way in, I immediately dismissed the guess because, as I told my husband, “It would be a really cheap answer.” And once I knew the answer and found it lacking, I found myself forcefully ejected from the magic of the story. Where the first 80% was deliciously nerve-wracking and vividly emotional, the last 20% felt predictable and melodramatic. The emotions felt less realistically overwhelming and more repetitive and overdone. The atmosphere of dread and the urgency of the very real threat to Claire’s life completely dissipated once I knew the ordinary, boring reason behind it, and once I wasn’t caught up in the volatile emotions of the story, I could see every plot point coming. And to top it all off, the two questions that kept me reading through that last 20% never get answered.

I don’t regret the read – at least now that I’ve had some time to let my rage at that ending simmer down. The atmospheric horror and the bizarre and gruesome mystery of the first 80% of the story were absolutely worth the time, and for as frustrated as I am with the answer to that mystery, I enjoyed the first 80% so much that I’m willing to overlook the sins of the last 20%. And let’s be honest here, my opinion that the answer was a cheap cop-out is just my opinion. Maybe I know too much about the relevant science to find it believable, or maybe I’m just mad that I guessed it so early. You may find it engrossing and thrilling all the way through. Personally, I’m glad I read it, but I don’t know that I’ll be recommending it to all my friends anytime soon – at least not the ones who know a lot about the real-world science behind this story.

UPDATE: It’s been several months since I finished this, and the absolutely fantastic first 80% have entirely outweighed my disappointment in the last 20% in my memory. In yet another example of why book reviews are never accurate, my remembering self has decided that Dead Silence is excellent, actually.

Review: Battle Royale

Title: Battle Royale

Author: Koushun Takami

Genre: Dystopian/Thriller

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, blood, murder, gun violence, injury, death of parents (mentions), grief, pedophilia (mentions), trafficking (mentions), sexual assault (attempted), sexual content, homophobia (mentions), rape (mentions)

Back Cover:

Koushun Takami’s notorious high-octane thriller is based on an irresistible premise: a class of 42 junior high school students are taken to a deserted island where, as part of a ruthless authoritarian program, they are electronically collared, provided with weapons of varying potency, and sent out onto the island.

If they are in the wrong part of the island at the wrong time, their collars will explode. If they band together to save themselves a collar will explode at random. If they try to escape from the island, they will be blown up. Their only chance for survival lies in killing their classmates.

Review:

This was a recommendation from a friend (the same friend who got me to read the Dark Tower series, incidentally). It’s the original “kids forced into a game where they kill each other until only one is left” story. It pioneered the idea that The Hunger Games made mainstream, gave a name to the entire battle royale video game genre, and the book where Fortnite got 95% of its rules and mechanics. Forty-two fifteen-year-olds are together on an island, and only one can make it out. (It is clarified that they’re fifteen, Japanese junior high is apparently a different age range than American junior high.)

Think of some adjectives that might describe a book like that. You might think of words like “violent,” “gory,” “dark,” and “bloody,” or perhaps even “sad” or “horrifying.” But I bet you won’t come up with the two words I’d use to describe the first half of the book: “Slow” and “political.”

The class starts with forty-two students, but our protagonist is Shuya, who teams up with his best friend’s crush Noriko and standoffish transfer student Shogo for the duration of the contest. The killing starts immediately, and the story switches perspectives often to show how everybody dies, but it keeps coming back to Shuya and Noriko (and Shogo after he joins them). For roughly the first half, Shuya and Noriko hide and talk about how they can’t believe their classmates are just killing each other, and after Shogo joins them there are several long political monologues discussing the fascist government that made this dystopia happen and all the problems with authoritarian governments. It’s a little weird going back and forth between Shuya and company’s story – which is mostly survival, disbelief, and political discussion – and the violent deaths of their classmates.

Reading this as an audiobook was not the best way to read it. The narrator kept the same patient tone of voice regardless of whether he was talking about sports, politics, or kids killing each other, and since I’m not very familiar with Japanese names, it got very confusing to keep the characters straight. It doesn’t help that there’s forty-two of these kids and many of them have names that sound very similar when spoken – Yukie, Yumi, Yuki, Yuko, and Yuka are five different characters. The descriptions, conversations, and deaths were sometimes difficult to follow, as I had to take a moment to figure out which classmate was currently being discussed.

About halfway through, Shuya and Noriko finally accepted that their classmates were killing each other and Shogo ran out of things to say about politics, and the story finally picked up. Despite all the deaths, it didn’t feel like the action got started until this point. After that, though, the action picked up, the plot started moving, and I actually started liking Shogo as a character. The rest of it ended up being pretty good, and there were two minor twists at the end that I did not see coming.

Battle Royale was not entirely what I was expecting. Yes, you get the gore and horror and survival elements of a bunch of kids stuck on an island until all but one is dead, but there’s also a remarkable amount of commentary on fascism and authoritarian governments, and considering the deaths start immediately, I found it surprisingly slow to start. But I pushed through, mainly because a friend recommended it, and it did get better. Overall, it was actually pretty good. Definitely not my favorite, but solidly good.