Book round-up: August 2024

[sixthlight]

 Started full-time work for the first time in eighteen months (life tip: getting laid off very shortly after you give birth is sub-optimal, avoid if possible) at precisely the same moment everybody in the house became various degrees of sick for two weeks and I think quite understandably reading a lot of books was simply not on the agenda in August. Reviewing has also fallen by the wayside but I will catch up again. This month is an easy start on account of having read three (3) books, all fiction, all new to me.  

Mirrored Heavens (Rebecca Roanhorse)

Final book in her Between Earth and Sky epic fantasy with pre-Columbian North/Central America vibes trilogy; I think she stuck the landing but I’m still not convinced this needed to be a trilogy instead of a duology. I suspect it would read better all in one but it’s long enough that I’m probably not going to do that anytime soon. As a side-note, has several worldbuilding elements which made me go “oh THAT’S where Robert Jordan stole that from” (the WoT fandom, including me, has historically been better able to recognise when he was pulling from European history than Indigenous cultures.) 

The Dawnhounds (Sascha Stronach)

First book in a SFF (New Weird flavour) trilogy about a cop in a biology-punk (if that’s not a word it is now) Singapore-esque city who dies on the job, and then things get really weird. NB: this is extremely not copaganda, even insomuch as you could accuse something like Discworld of such. It's a grim and visceral (often literally) world, everybody in this book is a queer mess making mostly terrible decisions and not many of them like each other very much, but it is nevertheless very compelling. The author is throwing a lot, and I mean a lot of stuff at the wall and I am interested to see what ultimately sticks. I’m reading the sequel as I write this, which came out this month, and it's hard to say more than this without talking about it, which I think is cheating when I haven't finished it. (Stronach is also the author of that essay I linked to on Tumblr a while back about writing in non-American English dialects; if you liked that, read this.) 

Alien Clay (Adrian Tschaikovsky)
Firmly science fiction rather than the messy SF/F boundary The Dawnhounds straddles, but equally concerned with biology, body horror, resisting fascism; gosh I wonder why those are popular themes these days. An academic is sentenced to the gulag a work camp on an alien planet where the native ecosystem is out to get everybody…or is it? A good read but not Children of Time. I am permanently a little frustrated by Tschaikovsky’s tendency to set his works in what is meant to be the future of Earth but in a way where everybody is so utterly divorced from the actual history of Earth it might as well be an entirely secondary-world setting. In a book which is all about how and if you can resist fascism, this feels a particularly sterile choice - the main character makes a number of statements about the history of this and I can’t tell whether he’s meant to be deliberately ignorant of popular resistance movements (because of the fascist government) or just wrong or what. It means that a moral of the book seems to be 'you can't effectively organise against oppression without [a genre conceit which does not exist in the real world]' and like. I have some problems with this, philosophically! Tchaikovsky also hits a naming nadir here with a guy called “Vertegio Keev”. Come on.