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BOOK REVIEW: Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse

- Meg

BOOK REVIEW: Black Sun, by Rebecca RoanhorseTitle: Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
Series: Between Earth and Sky #1
Published by Saga Press
Published: October 13th 2020
Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 454
Format: ARC
Source: Netgalley, Publisher
Buy: Bookshop(afflilate link)
Goodreads

From the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Resistance Reborn comes the first book in the Between Earth and Sky trilogy, inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas and woven into a tale of celestial prophecies, political intrigue, and forbidden magic.

A god will return
When the earth and sky converge
Under the black sun

In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world.
Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio, is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain.

Crafted with unforgettable characters, Rebecca Roanhorse has created an epic adventure exploring the decadence of power amidst the weight of history and the struggle of individuals swimming against the confines of society and their broken pasts in the most original series debut of the decade.

 Before receiving access to a digital arc, I had been eagerly anticipating reading Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun. I didn’t know much about it going into it aside from the fact that it’s high fantasy that isn’t European inspired. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some medieval-esque fantasy, but as it seems to be the “standard” in what’s out there, I want to read beyond that. The gruesome opening scene to this novel propels the story forward and kept me wanting to know how and why and what, and I devoured this in a matter of days.

This story is has the foundation of Indigenous mythology, and Roanhorse weaves culture and identity in delightful and refreshing ways. Nothing about this novel feels didactic; the characters’ genders, sexualities, and lives felt so immediate, real, and never forced. To be in a world in which you can be who you are and to have it accepted without a second thought is so refreshing, and I know this will resonate with a lot of readers who are trans and non-binary. While fantasy is often considered ‘escapist,’ this fantasy wants you to consider looking at your own world through a different lens. It especially made me want to learn more about precolonial indigenous mythology and literature.

The relationships and the conflicts among the characters against the backdrop of politics and celestial prophecies propel this story forward, and I’m already craving the sequel. I loved the matriarchal societies, especially the Teek, and I hope more of the Teek culture is featured in the next books in the trilogy. It’s one of those books in which I found every single character compelling, from the protagonists to the antagonists, because each “side” has credible reasons for behaving and believing in what they do, and to me that makes the conflict much more real, personal, and elevated.

I don’t want to talk about the details of this too much because so much enjoyment for me from this book came from the discovery of reading it. This is one of my top reads of the year, and I’m going to be talking about it and recommending it for years to come.

If you only read one high fantasy this year, make Black Sun your choice.

I received a digital arc from Netgalley/Saga for review! All opinions are my own.

BOOK REVIEW: The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley

- Meg

BOOK REVIEW: The Light Brigade, by Kameron HurleyTitle: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
Published by Saga Press
Published: March 19th 2019
Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 356
Format: Hardcover
Source: Purchased
Goodreads

From the Hugo Award­­–winning author of The Stars Are Legion comes a brand-new science fiction thriller about a futuristic war during which soldiers are broken down into light in order to get them to the front lines on Mars.

They said the war would turn us into light. I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world.

The Light Brigade: it’s what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back…different. Grunts in the corporate corps get busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief—no matter what actually happens during combat.

Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don’t sync up with the platoon’s. And Dietz’s bad drops tell a story of the war that’s not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on.

Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero—or maybe a villain; in war it’s hard to tell the difference.

A worthy successor to classic stories like Downbelow Station, Starship Troopers, and The Forever War, The Light Brigade is award-winning author Kameron Hurley’s gritty time-bending take on the future of war.

 When Kameron Hurley’s The Stars are Legion came out in 2017, I devoured it and recommended it to everyone who ever asked me for a recommendation. I since then have bought everything Hurley has written (a lot of it is still on the TBR) and preordered The Light Brigade as soon as I could.

Dietz is a non-citizen in a corporate-driven future in which citizenship is highly valued. When her home city is destroyed by a separatist Mars, Dietz signs up to join the military in order to have her revenge. Dietz discovers that the military has designed their own tech for travel — it involves breaking oneself down into particles of light and beaming from one zone to another. Of course the process isn’t perfect, and results in a lot of body horror and what it means to be contained in a physical body. Sometimes military sci-fi seems inaccessible to me because I’m not entirely too familiar with weapons and a whole lot of military protocol, but Hurley makes it easy, and that’s a difficult job to do. I felt like I could imagine myself being in Dietz’s place the whole time, struggling through her decisions and actions and rejoicing when she found shreds of hope.

The Light Brigade is everything I hoped for and more. It seriously exceeded my expectations and has already landed on my top ten reads of the year. Hurley harkens back to classic military sci-fi flavors while making it simultaneously, terrifically modern. Hurley doesn’t hold back on her examinations of capitalism, what would happen if corporations went beyond “being human” in the eyes of the law, war, sanity, time; and Hurley does this with so much passion and emotion that made it difficult to put the book down. I had to keep reading because I wanted to see where she’d take this.

It’s a sharp, dazzling sci-fi masterpiece that deserves a place on your shelf. It’s a little bit Haldeman, a little bit PKD, and a little bit Heinlein, but Hurley takes it to the next level. So pick it up, and The Stars Are Legion if you haven’t read that yet either.

BOOK REVIEW: The Refrigerator Monologues, by Catherynne M. Valente

- Meg

BOOK REVIEW: The Refrigerator Monologues, by Catherynne M. ValenteTitle: The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente, Annie Wu
Published by Saga Press
Published: June 6th 2017
Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 160
Format: Hardcover
Source: Purchased
Goodreads

The lives of six female superheroes and the girlfriends of superheroes. A ferocious riff on women in superhero comics.

A series of linked stories from the points of view of the wives and girlfriends of superheroes, female heroes, and anyone who’s ever been “refrigerated”: comic book women who are killed, raped, brainwashed, driven mad, disabled, or had their powers taken so that a male superhero’s storyline will progress.

 Catherynne M. Valente’s The Refrigerator Monologues is series of six loosely connected stories about female superheroes or the girlfriends of superheroes that are loosely based off of well-known characters in the Marvel and DC universes. The book is dedicated to Gail Simone, a female comic book writer fired from Batgirl who eventually created the “Women in Refrigerators” website in 1999. The website chronicles a lot of ways in which female characters are “fridged,” either “depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator.”

Each of the stories are set in Deadtown, the place comic book characters go after they die, and the characters in these six stories form “The Hell Hath Club,” which sets the frame story to connect each of these character’s individual stories. I loved that Deadtown provided that frame because it tied everything together so well. Each of the characters voices felt fresh yet identifiable with known characters in the Marvel and DC universes. I think my favorite stories out of the collection are “Paige Embry,” based off of Spider-Man‘s Gwen Stacy and “Daisy,” based off of Deadpool‘s Karen Page.

The stories contribute to the conversation about the treatment of women in comic books and in the media in general, and if you love comic books and superheroes and the women featured in these stories, you definitely need to read this book.

BOOK REVIEW: Stars are Legion, by Kameron Hurley

- Meg

BOOK REVIEW: Stars are Legion, by Kameron HurleyTitle: The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley
Published by Saga Press
Published: February 7th 2017
Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 380
Format: Hardcover
Source: Purchased
Goodreads

Set within a system of decaying world-ships travelling through deep space, this breakout novel of epic science fiction follows a pair of sisters who must wrest control of their war-torn legion of worlds—and may have to destroy everything they know in order to survive.

On the outer rim of the universe, a galactic war has been waged for centuries upon hundreds of world-ships. But these worlds will continue to die through decay and constant war unless a desperate plan succeeds.

Anat, leader of the Katazyrna world-ship and the most fearsome raiding force on the Outer Rim, wants peace. To do so she offers the hand of her daughter, Jayd, to her rival. Jayd has dreamed about leading her mother’s armies to victory her whole life—but she has a unique ability, and that makes her leverage, not a leader. As Anat convinces her to spend the rest of her life wed to her family’s greatest enemy, it is up to Jayd’s sister Zan—with no stomach for war—to lead the cast off warriors she has banded together to victory and rescue Jayd. But the war does not go at all as planned…

In the tradition of The Fall of Hyperion and Dune, The Stars are Legion is an epic and thrilling tale about familial love, revenge, and war as imagined by one of the genre’s most imaginative new writers.

 When you understand what the world is, you have two choices: Become a part of that world and perpetuate that system forever and ever, unto the next generation. Or fight it, and break it, and build something new. The former is safer, and easier. The latter is scarier, because who is to say what you build will be any better?

I read this book in March, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it or recommending it since. Kameron Hurley’s The Stars are Legion is on its way to becoming (if it’s not already there) one of those must-read science fiction books if you’re into even the barest sliver of science fiction. Science fiction often explores that question of “what if” and reflects on current aspects of life that are problematic in some way. Today, women’s bodies are policed. They are often told they cannot choose for themselves when and how to reproduce, and if a woman is control of her sexuality, she is seen as a threat. I sell this as a “politically charged womb-punk space opera that will thrill you and make you rage, oh, and there are no male characters in this at all.” Most of the time, I get a look like “… what?” My roommate even thinks that me liking this book so much is weird, but this book, at least for me, speaks of certain aspects of an experience that is difficult to convey to someone who doesn’t have a body part that has been consistently policed by men in positions of power.

Aside from this being an amazing space opera, The Stars are Legion has a cast of brutally unlikable characters, blood and gore up the wazoo, and feels like it could have come right out of that wave of sff that was written in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The characters are unlikable and cruel and you can’t trust anyone, but you’ll be rooting for them in the end. The Stars are Legion is a an angry, visceral yell into the void of space, and the world within the covers is just an expanse waiting for you to live in it for a while, get pumped up, and want to go kick some ass in the real world.

I mean, don’t you want to read about asexual ships that give birth to whatever the ship needs, cannibalistic women who eat their deformed young, and womb/uterus/placenta references (with all of the associated fluids) all over the place? Yes, you do. I don’t want to reveal too much about the plot or the characters because half of the enjoyment of this is getting to discover that for yourself. Just read it. ASAP. The hardcover is out now, the ebook is h*ckin cheap, and the paperback is out in November.

BOOK REVIEW: The Paper Menagerie, by Ken Liu

- Meg
BOOK REVIEW: The Paper Menagerie, by Ken LiuTitle: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
Published by Saga Press
Published: October 4th 2016
Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy
Pages: 450
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Purchased
Goodreads

Bestselling author Ken Liu selects his multiple award-winning stories for a groundbreaking collection—including a brand-new piece exclusive to this volume.
With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. This mesmerizing collection features many of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware” (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (Nebula and Sturgeon Award finalists), “All the Flavors” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie” (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).
Insightful and stunning stories that plumb the struggle against history and betrayal of relationships in pivotal moments, this collection showcases one of our greatest and original voices.

 Time’s arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.

Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie is one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read, period. It’s rare for me to read a short story collection and find something to enjoy and marvel over in each story, but I did with this one. I think the only other one that matches that ‘I love every story in this’ is Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others. After finishing The Paper Menagerie, I just wanted so much more, and I’m so looking forward to reading his Dandelion Dynasty series.

I think the thing I liked most about this collection of stories, aside from Liu’s deft skill at writing in and blending several different genres, is that so many of the stories focus on the idea of storytelling and what that means for us as people and as a society. In the collection, you’ll read about the ways in which species across the universe record their stories for the present and the future (“The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species”), the ways in which society tells us stories to keep us controlled and how difficult it is to break the illusions (“Perfect Match”), the literal power of words (“The Literomancer”), and the literal preservation of memory to be “read” and its upsides and pitfalls (“Simulacrum”).

This solid collection has fiction in all genres, and one of the heaviest stories to read was “The Literomancer,” because while it’s got a flavor of magic and magical realism, it’s firmly rooted in history, and it’s difficult to read about and stomach the atrocities people can do to one another, and it adds another layer of heaviness when the story is mostly from a child’s, an innocent’s, perspective, because we’re watching that loss of innocence unfold before us. I also really liked “The Waves,” and I found it one of the strongest recent science fiction stories I’ve read in a while.

Part of the joy of short story collections is the discovery within the covers, so I don’t want to go into too much detail about the stories themselves. But I will recommend this to you and everyone you know because it’s just that good.