Image of Little Dragon

 

Children of Time

The Children of Time series, Book 1

Orbit
Fiction, Sci-Fi
Themes: Artificial Intelligence, Diversity, Epics, Girl Power, Religious Themes, Space Stories
****

Description

One one blue world in an insignificant star system, millions of years of evolution and chance produced a prodigal, if destructive, species from nondescript ancestors. Now, Homo sapiens reaches out to the stars to repeat the process, only on their own terms. On terraformed planets seeded with Earth wildlife, an artificial nanovirus will, in theory at least, compress the ageless trial-and-error that created self-aware and technologically advanced humans into a few thousand years, uplifting a lucky population of primates to join humanity in exploring the vast and, thus far, empty void of space. Doctor Avrana Kern stands poised above one such world, about to trigger the process... but she has ignored the threat that has, for so long, held her kind back. She has ignored the discontent and desperation back home, the ideological schisms, and the increasingly violent calls to curb humanity's reach and ambition. Right on the very brink of her ultimate success, saboteurs destroy everything... everything except Kern, escaping into an orbital satellite with a hibernation chamber, and the nanovirus itself. But what can it possibly hope to do, on a planet without even the most basal primate to act upon? In the nature of life since the dawn of time, it will have to adapt - and it will do so in a way nobody could have possibly expected, when it discovers the vast, untapped potential waiting within invertebrate minds, particularly the species Portia labiata, known on Earth as jumping spiders.
Thousands of years later, the ark ship Gilgamesh has set out from a dying Earth with a remnant population of humans, one of a handful of hail-Mary passes into the unknown following old star charts salvaged from what came to be known as the Old Empire. Records of those days are sketchy, the ancients elevated to near-divine (or -diabolical) status in common culture, but provide the only hope for a future of the species. At last, they arrive at a green world - a world guarded by a satellite governed by a half-mad artificial intelligence. Nobody has heard from the other ark ships since departing Earth, and this planet - despite the angry satellite ghost of Kern and the bizarre monsters that appear to infest it - might be the only possible home for the displaced former masters of Earth. One thing humans have always been good at is species extermination and selfish survival... but they've never encountered an intelligence like the one waiting for them on Kern's World.

Review

This is not the first tale to speculate on "uplifted" animals, but among the few (that I've encountered, at least) to extend that speculation to spiders, whose minds are surprisingly sophisticated and utterly alien to even mammalian thinking, let alone humans. Not being a huge span of spiders myself (though jumping spiders never creeped me out like the web-spinners and wolf spiders), I was a bit iffy on this, but Tchaikovsky's spiders won me over, balancing a fine line between inhuman perspectives - their civilization, their strengths and weaknesses and cultural blind spots, come from somewhere between solid research and speculation - and necessary anthropomorphization for the sake of the human readers. By exploiting their natural abilities and those of the nanovirus that created them, they arrive at civilization by entirely different avenues than those taken by the species responsible for uplifting them, if not without their own setbacks and problems. The human cast, meanwhile, skips through their centuries thanks to suspended animation, with the primary point-of-view character, "classicist" Holsten Mason (an expert in "classic" Old Empire languages and history), being mostly a passive observer, often annoyingly so. He watches, through generations, as humans persistently echo the same strengths and weaknesses that led to both the rise of the Old Empire and its collapse (and Earth's eventual doom), tilting toward the latter as the stakes become more desperate. The common human fear of and revulsion for spiders kicks things up to a higher degree, even as the spiders struggle to grasp what little they see and learn of humans and their incomprehensible ways. It is inevitable that the two civilizations, one on the rise and one in decline, will clash, both desperate for the one thing they can both agree is top priority: their own survival. It wanders now and again, particularly on the Gilgamesh (I really got annoyed by Mason's lack of anything resembling a vertebral column; the spiders had ten times more backbone even without internal skeletons), and something about the end felt a little rushed, but overall I enjoyed the journey; I never expected to find myself rooting for spiders...

 

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Dogs of War

The Dogs of War series, Book 1

Head of Zeus
Fiction, Sci-Fi
Themes: Anthropomorphism, Artificial Intelligence and Robots, Canids, Dystopias, Soldier Stories
****

Description

Rex runs. Rex hunts. Rex kills. Rex is a Good Dog. A canine Bioform, he is the leader of a mixed group of elite Bioform soldiers in the employ of the mercenary group Redmark, currently deployed in war-ravaged Mexico. With the bear-formed Honey, the lizard Dragon, and the many-bodied Bees, all linked through headware, he does everything his Master, a man named Murray, tells him to do. Honey sometimes voices doubts about their missions, but a Good Dog does not doubt, let alone disobey, his Master.
Then something goes terribly wrong, and he and his unit are alone in the countryside... where it becomes apparent that Murray may not be a Good Man.
What happens next, the choices Rex makes now and in the future, may determine the fates of not only his pack, but the rest of the world's many Bioforms, military or otherwise. But how is Rex supposed to know what the right thing to do is anymore, if he doesn't have a Master to tell him if he's being a Good Dog?

Review

Dogs of War is a dark tale of a future where humans, having failed to properly control artificial intelligence in war robots, "uplift" animals in the form of altered Bioforms to do all the dangerous, inhumane tasks the robots used to do, particularly on the battlefield - providing one more layer of plausible deniability between commanders and war crimes. Rather than create a better world for all beings or even all people, everything just gets worse for everyone (except those at the top of the pyramid, as usual). Rotating points of view give the perspectives of humans and Rex, a dog who is trying very hard to be Good and struggles with the idea that a Master might be Bad. His growth is uneven and filled with setbacks, goaded on one end by the bear Honey, who understands far more than she lets on to anyone and tries to help him see the truth, and Murray, the Master he is intrinsically programmed to trust and obey. Meanwhile, the human world is its usual fickle, often short-sighted self, all too willing to see the worst in everything, even their own creations, and resent being forced to see just what they have done. Through this maze of ever-shifting public and political opinion, Rex must wend his way if he's to help secure a future for his kind.
While the ideas were interesting, and the plot not too predictable, sometimes Dogs of War felt a little long, like it was padded out to book length from a stronger, shorter work. There was also a plot twist that could've been set up a little more. On the whole, though, it's a decent, if sometimes bleak, story of war and how hope is too often throttled by baser elements of human nature.

 

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The Doors of Eden


Pan
Fiction, Sci-Fi
Themes: Alternate Earths, Artificial Intelligence, Cryptids, Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, Diversity, Girl Power
****

Description

When English college students Lee and Mal set off into the moors in search of a mysterious monster, it was supposed to be the usual cryptid hunt: poking about in obscure places and backwater villages, gathering odd stories from eccentric locals, maybe snapping a grainy photo or two that might resemble something unnatural or may just be swamp gas or an odd shadow. Neither ever expected to actually find anything. But this trip, something goes terribly, impossibly wrong. Lee comes back alone, shaken to her core by what she witnessed, and Mal... Mal simply disappears, as if into thin air.
Years later, Lee gets a strange phone call from her missing friend, just as a pair of MI-5 agents are called upon to investigate unusual occurrences surrounded one of the world's top theoretical mathematicians, peculiarly inhuman agents start turning up all across England, and a shady tycoon makes an unprecedented bid for power just as the world stands on the brink of literal oblivion... and not just our world. The strange events are linked to a series of other worlds, other Earths, with other ascendant life forms - and all of them are in grave danger.

Review

The Doors of Eden explores the possibilities of alternate worlds and evolutionary tracks, with unexpected successes and failures up and down the timeline, in a fairly active plot with hints of a spy thriller around the edges. The other Earths produce sapient life forms as bizarre and unknowable as any extraterrestrial, but all drawn from our planet's fossil record and the possibilities it entails, from essentially immortal giant trilobites meandering through space to overpopulated rodents in continent-spanning cities to nominally extinct amphibious beings who built a planet-sized supercomputer based on ice to accommodate an artificial afterlife on their perpetually frozen world, though the main players in this tale are generally of the human persuasion. Sometimes the characters could be irritating and a little slow on the uptake - Lee in particular often feels like a useless tagalong, and MI-5 agent Julian leans a little too hard into the stiff-upper-lip British agent persona who willfully refuses to broaden his thinking beyond his sworn duty to England when the entire multiverse hangs in the balance - and toward the end it feels like it's trying a little too hard and dragging things out a hair too long (not to mention hammering home its point about the diversity of life and minds being a boon rather than a threat a bit too repetitively, for all that it's very relevant in a world that seems to be turning backwards and inwards to its detriment), but there are also some great moments of sheer wonder and a real connection to the other sapients, who even in their alienness evoke a certain empathy.

 

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The Tiger and the Wolf

The Echoes of the Fall series, Book 1

Pan Books
Fiction, YA? Fantasy
Themes: Bonded Companions, Canids, Cryptids, Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, Diversity, Dragons, Epics, Felines, Ghosts and Spirits, Girl Power, Magic Workers, Religious Themes, Shapeshifters, Wilderness Tales
****

Description

In a wild world of ancient gods and shapeshifting tribes, Maniye is a girl torn in two. Her father, Akrit Stone River, is the ambitious chieftain of the Winter Runner clan of the Wolf people; when he made war against the Tiger people, he took their queen captive and forced a daughter on her, then had the woman killed to leave her matriarchal kin leaderless and lost in their eastern refuges. Maniye's childhood has been one of deprivation and resentment, harried by her father and the clan's priest Kalameshi Takes Iron (holder of the secret Wolf-gifted knowledge of forging weapons stronger than stone or bronze), but she holds a secret: she can step - change shape - into both wolf and tiger, having two animal souls within her own instead of the one of most people of the world. But tiger and wolf are natural enemies, and the rival spirits will tear her apart unless she chooses one and cuts out the other. Even as she faces this fate, she discovers Stone River's terrible plan for her. Fleeing the clan with an imprisoned priest of the Snake people, intended for sacrifice in the jaws of the Wolf god, Maniye sets out across the wide, cold crown of the world... crossing paths with a southern prince Asmander, a Champion of the southern Sun River Kingdom with a stepped form from another age, and his companions. A great change is coming to the whole world, a time that could see the many tribes and gods united against a common enemy - or see them fall, torn apart by men like Stone River, until all people die.

Review

This was another audiobook that I downloaded to kill time at work, but I enjoyed it enough to listen even on my days off. Tchaikovsky creates a prehistoric world with traces of our own ancient traditions, but mixed and melded into its own thing, a world of endless wilderness and cruel nature and ever-watchful gods and tribal rivalries that spill over onto neighbors. Nor is the shapeshifting confined to ordinary animals; Asmander's Champion is a velociraptor, and other Champions include ancient eagles and saber-toothed cats, part of the animal spirit-based cosmology of the fantastic world. Shifting even absorbs clothing and weapons to strengthen the animal form; a shifted Wolf hunter wearing iron mail has a near-impenetrable hide, while a Tiger warrior's bronze knife can become gleaming claws or teeth. It's a little thing, but adds a nice dimension to the shapeshifter concept, opening up interesting possibilities while also dealing with the eternal question of what happens to a werewolf's clothes.
Maniye starts out a somewhat weak character, undersized and beaten down, full of resentment and anger yet still determined to prove herself to the very people who hurt her, and to the Wolf god who knows her to be of mixed heritage. Try as she might, though, her dual nature cannot be denied, as the tiger and the wolf start quarreling within her for dominance. Her encounter with the Snake priest Hesprec sets her on a new path, if one that initially extends no further than escaping the Winter Runners and the stalking lone wolf Broken Axe, who may sometimes share her father's fire but is his own man with his own motivations. Meanwhile, Asmander has his own journey, a quest to secure the legendary "iron wolves" from the north as mercenaries in a looming war of succession in his native Sun River Kingdom, and the Snake priest Hesprec follows a hidden agenda. There are frequent battles, some bursts of levity, several reversals of fortune, and a few stretches of dialog that border on being too grandiose and weighty, but overall it's a decent story in a unique and interesting world, one I wouldn't mind revisiting in the sequels.

 

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The Bear and the Serpent

The Echoes of the Fall series, Book 2

Pan Books
Fiction, YA? Fantasy
Themes: Bonded Companions, Canids, Cryptids, Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, Diversity, Dragons, Epics, Faeries and Kin, Felines, Ghosts and Spirits, Girl Power, Magic Workers, Religious Themes, Shapeshifters, Wilderness Tales
****

Description

Once, the girl Maniye was torn between the tribe of her mother - the Tiger people - and the tribe of her father - the Wolf's disciples. She was chased across the crown of the world, forming unlikely alliances with a traveling snake priest and visitors from the distant southern lands, even spending time among the taciturn Bear folk, before finding her destiny as a Champion: one who, in addition to taking the animal forms of her parents' tribes, also holds the soul of a creature from ages past, a hulking carnivore of black fur and sharp teeth. But the northern tribes merely turned her from unwanted outcast to potential pawn in their eternal squabbles, even as the priests and wise folk talk of a coming doom that will destroy those who cannot unite to face it. Maniye decided to head south with the warrior Champion Asmander while she learns her new strength (and gives the crown of the world time to come to grips with the first Champion in their midst in untold generations - a Champion who cannot be used as a simple tool to address petty grievances or advance personal ambitions). With her travels a small war band, outcasts from their clans seeking to make a name for themselves in a distant land, as well as the Hyena woman Shayari, the reborn Serpent priest (now priestess) Hesprec - and, unexpectedly, the Wolf priest Kalameshi Takes Iron. What Maniye finds among the River Lords is a world as different from her own as night from day, the realm of Old Crocodile and chaotic Dragon and tribes and gods she has no names for, all embroiled in politics she does not understand. She soon finds herself plunged into a struggle that may best even her great Champion soul.
Meanwhile, in the far north, Loud Thunder of the Bear tribe struggles to fulfill the burden placed on him by his wise mother: a war leader charged with uniting the feuding tribes and clans of the crown of the world. But when word comes that the foretold threat has arrived - their ancient enemies from across the sea, the soulless Plague People, who destroy all they touch - the north is more divided than ever. He never wanted the mantle of war leader, but now he has no choice, not if he wants to save his land and his gods from these invaders.

Review

Picking up not long after the first book (The Tiger and the Wolf) ended, The Bear and the Serpent departs from the first tale by splitting the action into two theaters, the south and the north. Maniye Many Tracks must grow into her Champion role, leading an unlikely band into foreign territory and foreign politics that nonetheless carry a certain similarity to the politics and squabblings she left the north to escape. The Sun River Nation stands poised on the brink of civil war as the son and daughter of the old Kasra both claim the title of their dead father - and River Lords like Asmander's scheming father show more loyalty to their own fortunes than either potential ruler. Securing the services of the legendary Iron Wolves of the north was supposed to be a political coup for Tecuman, the son (and for Asman, Asmander's father), but Tecumah, the daughter, has made many gains while Asmander was away in the crown of the world... and the southern Champion himself, raised as friend and near-kin to both rulers, despairs as his own heart and loyalties are torn between them. Meanwhile, Hesprec returns to a priesthood he no longer recognizes, one that has inserted itself into the political wheels of the kingdom in ways that seem counter to the teachings of the Serpent... and they have made strange, potentially treasonous alliances. Up in the north, reluctant leader Loud Thunder finds himself in over his head as he tries - and initially fails - to pull the fragmented people together despite an endless list of internal feuds and rivalries, even as the true depth and horror of the threat becomes terribly clear by the arrival of a traumatized survivor of the ravaged Seal people. There's a nice twist to the nature and identity of the invaders, and Tchaikovsky continues to grow the shapeshifter world and its complex political and mythological landscape in interesting ways, and the characters do a fair bit of growing, if not without stumbles. As before, sometimes the dialog and tangle of alliances and rivalries can get a trifle dense and stilted, and some side characters seem a bit underdeveloped, but overall it remains just as intriguing and action-filled as the first volume. This one, however, ends on something closer to a cliffhanger, whereas the first one wrapped itself up reasonably well. I suppose I'll have to see if the third and (presumed) final installment is available on Overdrive now, to see how it all ends.

 

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The Hyena and the Hawk

The Echoes of the Fall series, Book 3

Pan Books
Fiction, YA? Fantasy
Themes: Bonded Companions, Canids, Cryptids, Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, Diversity, Dragons, Epics, Faeries and Kin, Felines, Ghosts and Spirits, Girl Power, Magic Workers, Religious Themes, Shapeshifters, Wilderness Tales
****

Description

With the Plague People - soulless foreigners with strange weapons and translucent wings whose very presence drives away the gods and spreads soul-stripping terror - colonizing the shores and spreading rapidly inland, the end of the True People is nigh. As former enemies unite in the face of this new threat, they quickly realize that all the spears and arrows in the world, every god and stepped animal or Champion form the people can take, will be as smoke in the wind before the Plague People's destruction... and the invaders don't even realize they're destroying anything but animals, unable to comprehend the True People, their souls or shapes or gods or ways. The northern Champion Maniye Many Tracks, the Serpent priest Hesprec, the southern Champion Asman of the Sun River Nation, the Bear man Loud Thunder, and others - including unlikely allies in the Pale Shadow People, who came to this land many generations ago in flight from their cousins, the Plague People, and long now for souls of their own - race to discover a weakness, a way to fight back... but it may already be too late, and soon the only god of this world or any other may be the monstrous bone-gnawing Rat of death.

Review

The conclusion to the (probable) trilogy of shapeshifting Bronze Age tribes fighting soulless faelike invaders maintains the epic sweep and active pacing of the first two installments. The battles grow bigger and more desperate, even as Maniye and the others learn that there is more to their enemy than meets the eye. Victories are few and far between, increasingly meaningless as the overall war (which the Plague People hardly see as a war, as the majority of them simply do not understand that the True People are in fact people - a clear parallel with real world colonizing forces sweeping away native tribes and practices without truly acknowledging the humanity of those they exterminate, or rationalizing the loss to insignificance) tilts against the tribes, spawning a despair from which a new threat arises: the cult of the Rat, who might kill the tribes as surely as any Plague weapon or magic. Worse, their tame arachnid and insectoid beasts of burden are escaping, an ecological disaster in the making as they spread across a land where they have no native predators or checks on their numbers. But the characters are not the same as they were when we met them, all tested by combat and the gods Themselves many times over. It all comes down to an epic confrontation on two fronts: the mortal plane and the realm of the gods, now a devastated wasteland. Significant sacrifices mark a satisfactory conclusion that leaves hints of future installments in the series, or at least the potential for them; the characters and the world are plenty big enough to support more adventures. It made an enjoyable, imaginative diversion.

 

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Elder Race


Tordotcom
Fiction, Sci-Fi
Themes: Aliens, Altered DNA, Demons, Girl Power
***+

Description

Lynesse Fourth Daughter may have seen enough Storm seasons to be called a woman, but to her royal mother and sisters she's still little more than a child, clinging to fireside stories of monsters and magic and heroic saviors who rise in times of darkness. When talk of a "demon" in the distant forest kingdoms reaches the castle, she alone takes the refugees at their word - and, against the queen's express wishes, takes it upon herself to travel to the mountains and the tower of the sorcerer. In ages past, it is said, Elder Nyr left his lofty tower to travel with her ancestor and stop a great evil, and he swore he would return if ever the crown needed his services again. Surely stopping a demon counts as such a need.
Nyr Illim Tevich came to this world centuries ago, a second-class anthropologist studying the lost colonies that survived from the first wave of humanity's spread across the stars. There used to be four archaeologists, using drones and satellites and stasis fields to unobtrusively observe the divergence in the local population over generations, which, like many lost colonies, has completely abandoned old knowledge and tech and relegated their origins to fanciful creation myths. But when trouble arose back home, the other three headed back to Earth... and never returned. So it was no wonder he took to bending the rules of the mission a little - or a lot, in the case of the very persuasive queen some years back, who needed help with a local unearthed old colonial tech and managed just enough mastery of it to become a danger. Nyr told himself that would be the end of it, that he'd stay in stasis even until his companions returned or signals from Earth resumed (or the technology failed). But now a princess stands on his doorstep, demanding that he honor a promise he made generations ago, with some likely-exaggerated talk of a "demon".
Despite himself, "Sorcerer" Nyr lets himself be drawn from his tower and into Lynesse's quest... only to learn that, despite his greater knowledge and technology, there are dangers even an "Elder sorcerer" may be too weak to solve.

Review

This is an oddball little novella, a "lost colony" story where old knowledge and technology has been relegated to the realm of wizardry, where the very language they speak prevents Nyr from explaining the truth to Lynesse and her companions: that he is no sorcerer, that there is no magic, and whatever role the storytellers may have assigned to him and his "Elder" race is just that - a story. His status as last of his group of anthropologists already left him prone to depression, which is only compounded when he comes to the realization that he may well be the last of his people in more ways than that, now that signals from Earth have stopped altogether. Technology lets him defer emotional reactions, but breakdowns can only be delayed, not prevented. Meanwhile, he struggles with his original "prime directive" of noninterference that he already violated, and his own realization that his anthropologist's point of view has left him seeing the locals as objects of study, not living human beings. Lynesse, meanwhile, strives to reconcile her lived experiences with Nyr with the stories she's heard of her heroic ancestor (and other tales she's inhaled like oxygen, with more credulity than perhaps was wise), literally unable to understand him when he tries to set her straight. She remains a little too naive a little too long, to be honest, though toward the end it's clear she's clinging to her dreams of heroism out of desperation more than strict belief anymore: not only has she pinned all her hopes, in defiance of her family, on Nyr's magic, but the "demon" - an all-too-real danger - is something so terrifyingly wrong that there is no other hope of defeating it save through the miraculous intervention of some hero out of legend. As a novella, it doesn't have too much space to explore its deeper ideas or issues, and something about the story starts to feel unbalanced as a result, in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on but which left me just unsatisfied enough by the end to shave a half-star from the rating.

 

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Shards of Earth

The Final Architecture series, Book 1

Orbit
Fiction, Sci-Fi
Themes: Aliens, Altered DNA, Artificial Intelligence, Diversity, Epics, Girl Power, Mind Powers, Space Stories, Thieves
****

Description

When the Architects came to civilized space, there was no warning and no defense, as the moon-sized entities peeled apart whole inhabited planets and sculpted them into bizarre shapes, seemingly without provocation or reason. Even Earth fell victim, humanity's homeworld destroyed in a matter of hours. Only a chance discovery lead to the intermediary project: experimental procedures and surgeries to turn human minds into something capable of touching the unknowable, navigating the unreal spaces and, somehow, turning aside the Architects. Idris was one of the first generations of intermediaries; along with Solace, a vat-grown Partheni warrior, they witnessed the last Architect attack.
That was decades ago now, yet somehow, even as the people of the galaxy slowly lose their wariness, Idris has neither aged nor slept. Intermediaries are still produced, but more for their usefulness at navigating unspace, enslaved by "leash contracts" and likely even subjected to psychological means of curbing their freedom - treatments Idris, as a first-generation "int", missed. These days, he works aboard the Vulture God, a patched-up deep space salvage vessel with a patched-up crew of spacer misfits, human and alien and artificial. When he found himself face to face with Solace again - still alive and relatively young, thanks to many years in deep freeze between missions for the Partheni nation - he knew trouble was coming.
Neither one of them expected that trouble to be a vessel lost in deep space, with all the earmarks of an Architect attack.
Is it a hoax, a fluke, or is the ultimate unstoppable enemy about to return to a civilized space still recovering from their last visit... a space that, fallen into partisan squabbles and power games, is woefully unprepared for the danger?

Review

With many familiar trappings from the space opera genre - the ragtag ship with its found family crew, the many species of sapient aliens with many unknowable strains of intellect and logic, the political squabbles and space battles, the ancient alien artifacts and deep mysteries of the universe - Shards of Earth may not bring a ton of new material to the table, but it does deliver a solid story that never loses its momentum. Idris was scarred in innumerable ways by the first Architect war, scars worsened by both his inability to sleep and by his frequent trips to unspace, which can drive ordinary minds over the edge with just a single trip outside of a sleeping pod. Solace is a loyal soldier, doing her duty by tracking Idris down and offering him a place in the all-female Partheni nation, but she comes to question her loyalties and even the purity of her superiors' offer as she spends time among Idris and the Vulture God's crew, which provides a range of perspectives and personalities and skills (not to mention clashes). Along the way, they become entangled with cultists, crime lords, nativists and other political and ideological extremists who have been on the rise ever since the threat of the Architects ceased to be a uniting factor, and other dangers. There's a nice, adventurous, lived-in feel to the galaxy Tchaikovsky creates, the parts coming together into an interesting whole that held my interest from start to finish. I'm looking forward to the next installment.

 

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Guns of the Dawn


Tor
Fiction, Fantasy
Themes: Girl Power, Magic Workers, Soldier Stories, Thieves
****

Description

When the nation of Denland murdered their rightful king and set up a parliament of commoners to rule them, the people of Lascanne could only look on in horror - then in fear, as the Denland armies, not content with destroying their own monarchy, turned toward their neighbors and one-time allies. Surely such a rabble of commoners would be easy to put down, when Lascanne still had the best cavalry in the world, not to mention their royally-appointed warlocks and the will of God as embodied in their king, on their side. But somehow year followed year, both sides dug in, and more and more men were needed for the war (which, of course, must nearly be won, only needing a few more soldiers to button the whole unpleasant matter up). When there were no more volunteers, the draft took all men and boys between 50 and 15... and, when they were gone, the draft demanded a woman from each household - even the noble houses like the Marshwics.
Emily Marshwic and her sisters had already given to the war effort, first a brother-in-law and then a young brother, neither of whom send much in the way of letters back home. When the women's draft called, many high houses sent servants in their place, but the Marshwics had always served the king proudly. Thus Emily dons the red uniform and takes up the musket, confident in the righteousness of her nation and cause. But war is nothing at all like she could have imagined, and her old ideas of right and wrong and noble causes are the first in a long list of casualties.

Review

Tchaikovsky is quickly becoming one of my go-to reliable authors for a solid, engaging story. Guns of the Dawn is by no means the first story to expose the horrors of war, especially in the musket and pistol era, but it successfully depicts one woman's awakening to those horrors and the gray areas that ultimately govern politics and life. She starts as a woman of a minor yet old noble line, convinced of the privelege of her rank and righteousness of her king without being excessively uppity or unlikeable; she takes to heart the idea that those of her rank should be caretakers of their lessers. She and her sisters carry a bitter grudge against the local acting governor Northway, a commonborn man with known shady dealings whose rise to power coincided with the fall of their father's fortunes, ending with the old man putting a bullet in his own brain. Emily and Northway's clashes - over class, over policies, over everything - become her first lessons in how far the real world is from noble ideals, for all that she does not recognize it for some time, and the war strips any remaining idealism from her as comrades in arms come and go, the latter often in rains of bullets from Denlander guns. Along the way, Emily grows from genteel middleborn noblewoman to true soldier, from mindless follower of propaganda to a more jaded viewer of events, through backdrops ranging from the aging family estate to a royal ball to the spirit-crushing swamplands where she spends the war. Action can explode from nowhere just like surprise gunfire from the swamp mists, though always Emily is moving and growing as a character, enduring setbacks and tragedies and battles that leave wounds physical and psychic. There are teases of romance along the way, but nothing like the idealized kind she might once have entertained, and her choices are nowhere near clear right up to the finale. The end feels just a hair abrupt, but brings Emily's journey and the story as a whole to a satisfactory and earned conclusion. While the world of Lascanne and Denland and the characters introduced could possibly carry a sequel or spinoff, things wrap up well enough here in one book, a somewhat rare phenomenon these days. I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

 

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Made Things


Tordotcom
Fiction, YA? Fantasy
Themes: Artificial Intelligence, Creative Power, Girl Power, Magic Workers, Thieves, Urban Tales
****+

Description

All mages (and half-mages, and even ordinary folk with big dreams) come to Loretz hoping to rise high in the magic city's society, but few ever get further than the slums of the Barrio, ending up in orphanages and workhouses, from which they tend to disappear without a trace. That was the fate of Coppelia's half-mage parents, and would have been her own fate had she not escaped into the streets to ply her trade and minor talents as a con artist and puppetmaker and thief. When she encountered the homunculi, secretive tiny beings made of inanimate material imbued with magical life, they formed a fast, if not entirely trusting, bond: the homunculi help her steal magical trinkets and stay alive, and in exchange she guards the secret of their existence, gives them half the take, and carves them new bodies to animate and enlarge their fledgling colony, but they all have their own agendas, and the Barrio is not a place that lends itself to honesty and openness. When Coppelia and her shady sponsor Auntie Countless get wind of a miraculous discovery in the catacombs beneath the palace - a human-sized artificial figure, like the legendary golems of old, only worked in precious metals and gemstones - both Coppelia and her homunculus companions are intrigued... but the discovery may lead them all to their dooms, unearthing a secret deeper and older than the mages and the city of Loretz itself.

Review

This was an odd little novella with a great setting and concept, reasonably solid characters, and a story that, while not relentless, never drops off. Loretz, like many cities, is a cold and cruel place to many who come to its streets and squares, and survival breeds a certain hardness even in the young. Coppelia is no pure and innocent victim of circumstance; even if she was initially pushed to thievery, she embraces it and learns to thrive in the dark corners and narrow alleys. With the homunculi, she feels a certain kinship as a puppetmaker with some minor magic of her own, a fascination in how they move and operate and the origins of their secretive society, but also knows that they're not being entirely open with her. They have their own goals, their own wants and needs, and through the wooden woman Tef and metal man Arc, they become every bit as big on the page as the full-sized human characters, magic-dependent beings struggling to survive in a city where magic is hoarded by the greedy and the gluttonous and just plain arrogant mages of the palace. At the heart of the tale is a heist with a collection of colorful characters, theft and trickery being the only way to survive when one's lives are run by the ultimate thieves and tricksters. The whole makes for a very good story, with characters and a setting that could easily support more tales.

 

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Walking to Aldebaran


Tantor Audio
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
Themes: Aliens, Cross-Genre, Space Stories, Weirdness
***+

Description

Gary Rendell always wanted to be an astronaut. Who wouldn't? It looked like great fun, flying in rocket ships and exploring the solar system, so much more exciting than accounting or running the train.
Nobody mentioned the downsides to the job: the political squabbling over mission directives, the tedium of long trips... the bits about being lost and alone, fighting monsters and traps concocted by unknowable intelligences that can twist universal rules like so much taffy, and eating bits of dead alien to survive.
Gary Rendell had the misfortune to become an astronaut just when Earth makes an astonishing discovery: an impossible artifact, clearly the work of some unimaginable alien intellect, out on the fringes of the solar system, one that does very strange things to space probes and defies just about every known law of physics and probably more than a few unknown laws as well. Being chosen for the manned exploration mission should've been a dream come true. Only the mission goes awry almost from the start, leaving Gary lost and alone. Now he wanders through the endless halls of a place he has dubbed the Crypts, scavenging what sustenance he can, talking to an imaginary companion to try to cling to some vestige of sanity.
Gary finds wonders beyond human comprehension. Gary finds aliens, living and dead and maybe somewhere in between. Gary finds insidious traps and places where ordinary laws take unexpected vacations. What Gary hasn't yet found is any sign of his fellow astronauts... or any sign of the way back home.
An audio presentation narrated by the author, this title is also available as a Kindle eBook.

Review

Another audiobook to help overtime seem mildly less tedious, Walking to Aldebaran starts sharp and fast, laced with clever, if sometimes dark, deadpan humor in the vein of Douglas Adams. In the tradition of Arthur Dent, he's a man who never asked to be caught up in great and dangerous adventures beyond Earth, and haplessly does the best he can when confronted with impossible situations. By the time we join him, his mental state is already not the greatest - hence his narration to the imaginary companion "Toto," the listener/reader - and it only deteriorates through the story as the artifact seemingly conspires to push him beyond the brink. And what is the artifact? Even after months lost in its bowels, Gary can offer no definitive answer in this cautionary tale whose moral is that just because a thing is there, that doesn't mean we should go poking it, or that it was put there for us. Tchaikovsky's delivery helps up the amusement factor on Gary's often-hilarious asides and observations, and I snickered more than once. Then I reached the ending, and the final twists that, while they did fit the overall narrative (and weren't just out of the blue) and had a certain nod to classic literature, left a sour taste in my mouth that cost it a half-star. Aside from that, though, it's a delightfully twisted little story of an astronaut's dream of space exploration gone horribly wrong.

 

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