Genre: science fiction

A+ #BookReview: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Death of the Author by Nnedi OkoraforDeath of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: African Futurism, books and reading, robots, science fiction
Pages: 448
Published by William Morrow on January 14, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The future of storytelling is here.
Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she's suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister's wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she's not sure what comes next.
In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life - she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.
What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu's life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.
Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.

My Review:

Don’t let the title fool you. This book is nothing like what that title leads you to imagine. Or anything like what you might possibly be imagining.

The story is a Möbius strip. The end is the beginning is the end is the beginning in an endless and utterly fascinating loop.

There’s a story here – and there’s a story within that story – and both are utterly captivating but are entirely different.

From the start, it’s Zelu’s story. She’s Nigerian-American, she’s paraplegic, she’s not all that interested in marrying, and her career – such as it is – is one that her large, extended family doesn’t seem to want to understand.

Which is par for their course, as what they really don’t seem to want to understand is Zelu herself. She doesn’t fit into ANY of the boxes that her family expects her to fit into – and she can’t stop beating at the limitations of those boxes even as she does her damndest to expel herself from them.

The thing is, her family might be right about a lot of the things that press her down. On the other hand, her family has done their damndest to emplace many of the attitudes and expectations that weigh her down.

All out of love, of course. No matter how much it hurts.

So when she’s fired from her barely-supporting job as an adjunct professor of creative writing, and she receives yet another publisher’s rejection of the fruits of her own creative writing – a novel she’s been shopping around for YEARS – while she’s at her sister’s destination wedding in Tobago – she has a meltdown. And it’s a big one.

But it’s also a productive one. In the depths of her despondency, her acknowledgement that everything she thought she’d done isn’t working for her – at all – she acts out and breaks out. She pours her heart and her feelings into a novel that she can’t make herself stop writing even though it’s nothing like anything she’s ever done before.

And it turns out to be a literary science fiction masterpiece.

Which is where the other half of The Death of the Author comes in. Because we get to read Zelu’s groundbreaking work, Rusted Robots, as the literary world and the entertainment world do their damndest to chew it up and spit it out in a form that will get the most money out of the most markets.

And if the author becomes a media darling and then a media scapegoat, well that’s the price of fame for a woman who doesn’t fit ANY of the molds that anyone wants to put her in – because she never has.

And never, ever will.

Escape Rating A+: The Death of the Author got its hooks into me early, and those hooks didn’t release until nearly 4 in the morning, when I turned the last page and my mind went spinning as the creator became the created and the act of creation worked both ways and it made me rethink everything I’d read.

Yes, I went into the story expecting Zelu to die in the end. The format of her part of the story, transcripts of interviews of the people in her life telling her story from their own biased perspectives, leads the reader to think this was written after her death.

But it’s the story that captivates, as each ‘contribution’ is set against Zelu’s own narrative of her own journey, when we get to hear the screams she kept on the inside because no one EVER seems to have truly seen her or listened to her or believed in her.

It’s also a story about the facile judgments of the anonymous faceless masses of the internet, and the way that their approbation never fills her up because it’s always manufactured and false and just as easily turned against her as their narrative requires.

And then there’s the story she wrote, the story that seems to consume everyone it touches, Rusted Robots. It’s a post-apocalyptic, post-human story of robots and artificial intelligences acting on their programming. We are their creators, we made them in our own image, and they act entirely too much like us whether they look like us or not.

Rusted Robots reads like a different variation on the seven robotic circles of hell in Service Model, even as the rusted robots themselves, Ankara and Ijele, transcend their programming, together. That their world is saved by the power of storytelling gave the whole book a breathtaking, OMG WTF happened, utterly SFnal ‘Sensawunda’, at the same time that it sends the reader’s mind scurrying back to the beginning to watch the whole, marvelous epic unfold again.

A- #BookReview: The Way Up is Death by Dan Hanks

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Way Up is Death by Dan HanksThe Way Up is Death by Dan Hanks
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: horror, science fiction, science fiction mystery
Pages: 400
Published by Angry Robot on January 14, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

When a mysterious tower appears in the skies over England, thirteen strangers are pulled from their lives to stand before it as a countdown begins. Above the doorway is one word: ASCEND.
As a grieving teacher, a reclusive artist, and a narcissistic celebrity children’s author lead the others in trying to understand why they’ve been chosen and what the tower is, it soon becomes clear the only way out of this for everyone… is up.
And so begins a race to the top, through sinking ships, haunted houses and other waking nightmares, as the group fights to hold onto its humanity, while the twisted horror of why they’re here grows ever more apparent – and death stalks their every move.

My Review:

When a mysterious tower appears over the English countryside, huge and dark and literally floating in the clouds, it seems pretty ominous to just about everyone. And that’s definitely EVERYONE, as the thing is filmed and photographed from every angle, 24/7, as it’s a fantastic – and possibly also fantastical – news story.

But the human attention span is short, so when the tower just floats there portentously but doesn’t actually DO anything, people stop watching. Even the pontificating stops. Which is, of course, when it finally does DO something.

It kidnaps thirteen people, seemingly at random, from the nearby countryside – including one flight attendant whose flight just happens to be passing through the tower’s catchment zone – whatever that might be.

What the tower’s criteria for choosing are – if they exist at all – is unknown. The assortment of humans it chooses seems entirely random. Worthiness of any sort was clearly not a deciding factor.

There is, however, one anomaly among the group. It’s made up of twelve adults – and one child on the cusp of adolescence. And that, as it turns out, means everything.

Escape Rating A-: It’s easy, as the characters initially face off against the tower, to see this story as a huge exercise in LARPing (that’s Live Action Role Playing) that’s a feature of many a science fiction convention. As the tower’s initial ‘level’ is based on a popular video game, it wasn’t difficult to fall down a rabbit hole of thinking that this would have some resemblance to Ready Player One – but that’s just the beginning.

The participants start out believing – or perhaps that’s hoping – that the whole thing is a ‘Reality TV’ show like Survivor, possibly combined with a bit of Lost. Except for one thing. Before they all enter the tower, the first member of the group dies. And unlike any of the things they collectively think this might be, his death is graphically ‘permadeath’. There’s no coming back from the messy pile of blood and viscera he was chopped into.

The further they go into the tower, the more horrifying the situation gets. That first level is drawn from the video game that young Rakie played over and over until she beat it. But it’s not because this is meant to BE any kind of video game. It’s because the memory was drawn from her head.

The remaining adults on this journey have MUCH scarier things gibbering in the dark corners of their minds. As they rise through the tower, each in turn sees the things born out of their worst traumas come dramatically to life – and to the death of one of their number.

For each level they rise, one person has to die.

What makes this story work aren’t the horrors, although most of them are plenty horrible. What makes it work are the relationships that develop among this random assortment of random humanity. They do not become better people on the journey, they become more of who really are.

For the grieving teacher, Alden, he discovers he wants to live even as he realizes that it’s not going to happen – and that it’s alright if it’s in a good cause. The reclusive artist finds her voice and her inner warrior after decades of pushing those both down, while the narcissist cuts down anyone who stands in his way of whatever grand prize he believes is at the top of the tower until his own inner demons finally catch up to him. Not everyone has their moment to shine and not everyone deserves a shining moment, but it all blends into a very human whole.

Even as they fall by the wayside, one by one.

In the end, the story turns out to be bigger than any of the characters initially imagined, and the ‘prize’ the survivor received at the end was absolutely worth the cost of the frightening, fantastic and compulsively readable journey.

Grade A #BookReview: Mechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. Wagner

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Mechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. WagnerMechanize My Hands to War by Erin K. Wagner
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: artificial intelligence, dystopian, post apocalyptic, robots, science fiction
Pages: 320
Published by DAW on December 17, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The debut novel from Erin K Wagner is a chilling nonlinear sci-fi that examines androids as a labor force in conflict with both human farmers and homegrown militias in near-future Appalachia
Deep in the hills of Appalachia, anti-android sentiment is building. Charismatic demagogue Eli Whitaker has used anger toward new labor policies that replace factory workers with androids to build a militia–and now he is recruiting child soldiers.
Part of a governmental task force, Adrian and Trey are determined to put a stop to Whitaker’s efforts. Their mission is complicated by their own shared childhood experiences with Whitaker. After an automated soldier shoots a child during a raid to protect Trey, both grapple with the role of androids and their use in combat.
Interrelated with the hunt for Whitaker, farmers Shay and Ernst struggle after they discover their GMO crop seeds have failed and caused a deadly illness in Shay. To help manage, they hire android employees: Sarah as hospice, and AG-15 to work the now-toxic fields. The couple’s relationship to the androids evolve as both humans get progressively more sick.
Timely and chilling, Wagner's nonlinear debut shares intimate narratives of loss, trauma, and survival as the emergence of artificial life intersects with state violence and political extremism in rural Appalachia.

My Review:

I picked this up because I fell hard into the author’s debut novella, An Unnatural Life, and was hoping for more of the same. I absolutely got it with Mechanize My Hands to War, as this was both more in its continued exploration of a future relationship between humans and sentient AIs, and more literally, as I wished that An Unnatural Life had a bit more time to explore its variations on that theme and this book is nearly twice as long.

Which it absolutely needed to be to get all the things it needed to, even as tightly packed in layers as it turned out to be.

The outer layer of this story is a bit of a near-dystopia. Or a could-be apocalypse. It’s 2061 and the U.S. is on the brink of a whole lot of things that could go really, really pear-shaped. That the setting of this story isn’t all that far out from when we are now is definitely part of the point.

The surface story is about two senior agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – and it’s the “explosives” part of that mandate that has dragged the Bureau into this situation.

A private militia has been growing throughout the heartland, recruiting people who feel that the lives they have built have been stolen from them by a government that is poisoning the land of their farms with poorly tested chemicals and/or filling their factory jobs with robots.

They’re not exactly right – but they’re not exactly wrong, either. Howsomever, their methods are problematic in the extreme.

First, they’re stockpiling explosives, which always draws the ATF’s attention. Second, they are recruiting and training child soldiers, and that gets everyone’s attention even as it complicates every single one of the ATF’s operations.

Because no human wants to shoot a child – even if that child is aiming a weapon right at them.

The situation reaches a flash-point, figuratively and literally, when a robot DOES shoot a child while following its orders and its programming to the letter.

In the midst of the firestorm of controversy, no one is willing to even think the hard truth – that the problem, and the blame – rest not with the programmed unit Ora, but with the humans who programmed him.

Escape Rating A: The story, the outer layer of it at least, is deceptively simple. And then things get really complicated, both in the story itself and in what’s hiding underneath it. Whenever I stop to think about it for even a minute, more ideas pop to the surface and swim underneath.

On the surface, that single story is already multiple stories. The first is the story of the extremely uncivil war between the Civil Union Militia and the ATF as proxy for the entire U.S. government. But underneath that layer, there’s the breakdown of the U.S. into factions, an extension of the tension between the cities and the heartland, that already exists.

A conflict that is exacerbated by the presence of robots as factory workers, mail carriers, and home health aides, doing any job that can be programmed reasonably effectively. But also as soldiers – and cops.

And that’s where Mechanize My Hands to War does what science fiction does best. Because on the surface that story is simple enough. The robots ARE, in fact, replacing humans in a lot of jobs, displacing a lot of people who had work that did not require a higher education, and not leaving nearly as many such jobs behind as there are people who need them. It’s a fear that has been played out recently in both the Writers Guild of America/Screen Actors Guild strike of 2023 and the Dockworkers’ strike of October 2024.

But the robots and the AIs did not create and program themselves to do these jobs and replace those workers. (They might, someday, but that would be a different story entirely – or a later one.) The robots are merely an easier and more reachable target for those who have been negatively impacted by the changes.

They represent the scapegoat that people are supposed to focus on, so they don’t attack who is really responsible – the corporations who have studied the calculus of profitability and know that replacing five humans with one human and four robots is better for their bottom line.

And it’s easy to see the robots of this story as the immigrants in today’s screaming – and all too frequently erroneous – headlines.

Which is where the story turns back upon itself into that original SFnal premise. Just because the robots were intended to be self aware but not sapient, does not mean that they have not evolved beyond their programming. That the more that the programmers attempt to create a complicated enough decision making matrix for the units, one that would keep another robot from killing another child even though that child is a clear threat, the more independent thought processes the robots have to work with.

The place where THAT might lead gives the story an open-ended and very SFnal ending. But the points that it raised keep dancing around in my head. As the best science fiction stories absolutely do.

#AudioBookReview: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> C+ Reviews
#AudioBookReview: Orbital by Samantha HarveyOrbital by Samantha Harvey
Narrator: Sarah Naudi
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from library
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction, science fiction
Pages: 207
Length: 5 hours and 7 minutes
Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on December 5, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour.
A book of wonder, Orbital is nature writing from space and an unexpected and profound love letter to life on Earth
Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft above the earth. They are there to collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

My Review:

It begins in the morning, as all of their alarm clocks wake them for a brand new day. But all of those things are a bit, well, liminal, as day, night, and even sleep are all a bit nebulous and artificial for the six residents of the International Space Station.

The International Space Station, as photographed by Space Shuttle Atlantis.

The alarm clocks are real. Electronic, but still real. It’s the rest of the circumstances that are a bit adrift. Humans are tied to the 24-hour rotation of the Earth – but the ISS isn’t ON Earth. It’s rotating the planet in Low Earth orbit, 250 miles above the surface, 16 orbits per ‘day’.

So it’s artificially morning as decreed by ground control, an attempt to keep the humans aboard the ISS tethered to the planet of their origin. For the people involved, that tethering gets more than a bit unmoored as their mission goes on.

Because they experience MANY dawns every single orbit. It might not even be daylight under them or over them when they wake up – and even if it is it won’t be very soon.

But throughout the meticulous structure of their days, from observation to experimentation to being themselves part of the experiment of life in space, the planet and the life upon it is never far from their thoughts – even when it seems like it is.

This crew, astronauts Anton, Chie, Nell, and Shaun along with cosmonauts Pietro and Roman, may be the biggest part of this story but not the only part. Because they are all reflecting upon the life below them, their personal lives and the life of the planet, even as they look outward towards the future that has specifically just passed them by, literally as well as figuratively, as they and the rest of the world watch as four astronauts in a space capsule head on their outward journey back to the place where many of their own dreams of space began.

Escape Rating C+: I picked this entirely out of curiosity. Because it’s been labelled as science fiction but it won the Booker Prize, one of the big literary awards. In general, SF and Fantasy are the red-headed stepchildren of the literary world and just don’t win the big literary awards like the Booker. SF wins SF awards, and literary fiction wins the Booker.

Having finished this in audio, I’m at least clear on my answer to the conundrum. Orbital is very much in the Literary SF tradition, with the emphasis firmly on the literary in senses both good and less so.

So if you’re looking at this as an example of SF, it’s really not. If you’re interested in literary SF there are better examples. I’m particularly thinking of Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea. If this makes you curious about SF and are looking for something that has a bit of this feeling but also has a real, honest-to-goodness PLOT, take a look at Becky Chambers’ To Be Taught, If Fortunate, which is also a love letter to Earth and the life upon it while still managing to GET somewhere as it goes.

The audio narration by Sarah Naudi was utterly lovely, and does account for the plus in the grade. This is a relatively short book, and the beauty of the narration was enough to carry me through.

I liked the idea of this story, because space travel fascinates me. I loved the feeling of being in the astronauts’ and cosmonauts’ heads as they go about their work and the world revolves below them instead of underneath them. The prose is luminous and frequently rises to the poetic.

But there’s just not enough there to coalesce into an actual story. It’s more like a day in the life, and the whole point of each individual day in the life of the residents of the International Space Station is that it’s not supposed to be all that exciting. As one of them jokes, “If you’re an astronaut you’d rather not ever be news.” And he’s very much right.

In the end, I was left with the feeling that Orbital does its very best to never allow its bare scrim of a plot to get in the way of its poetry. Which made the individual observations lovely but does not a good story make. Nor does it make for good science fiction.

As always, your reading mileage may vary.

A- #BookReview: How to Steal a Galaxy by Beth Revis

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: How to Steal a Galaxy by Beth RevisHow to Steal a Galaxy (Chaotic Orbits #2) by Beth Revis
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, science fiction romance, space opera
Series: Chaotic Orbits #2
Pages: 144
Published by DAW on December 3, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Sparks fly when Ada and Rian just-so-happen to find themselves at the same charity gala—but there’s something rotten behind the sparkling gowns and dazzling wealth on display

This heist turned rom-com from New York Times bestselling author Beth Revis is perfect for fans of sexy, romantic science fiction and readers of Martha Wells and Becky Chambers

Ada had no intention whatsoever to continue working for the rebel group that hired her to retrieve the government’s plans for a nanobot climate cleaner if they weren’t willing to pay her for it, but then they offer a different perk: an undercover mission to a charity gala where Rian will be in attendance. Rian, meanwhile, has volunteered his services for the gala believing that the rare items up for auction will attract Ada’s eye. Hoping to catch her in the act and pin her with a punishable crime, Rian has no idea Ada’s really after.

In a high-stakes game of theft and deception, Ada plays to win...and Rian will do anything to stop her.

My Review:

In this arresting follow-up to the first book in the Chaotic Orbits trilogy, Full Speed to a Crash Landing, mercenary hacker/thief Ada Lamarr is on the trail of a much more interesting quarry than a mere locked data box. This time she’s not after treasure, she’s after the person who has set himself up as the guardian of a whole, entire museum full of priceless antiquities.

Agent Rian White has his eye on Ada from the moment she arrives at the Museum of Intergalactic History, absolutely certain she’s planning to steal one of the Sol-Earth artifacts no matter how many times she’s says that she’s there for him.

She’s not even lying. She’s certainly toying with the man – but she’s not lying. Not that she wouldn’t like to steal one of the artifacts – and not that she wouldn’t enjoy tweaking the ego of the rich rat bastard who’s the star of this particular charity gala – but she really, truly isn’t there for either of those things.

She really is there for Rian White – for considerably more reasons than she’s willing to admit, even to herself. So all of Rian’s operatives are busy watching her, while she has her eye on her prize all along.

And not that she doesn’t put the dominoes in motion for a couple of secondary prizes along her way.

Ada may not be fooling with White – but someone else already has. Her job – for which she is being paid very good money – – is to remove the scales from White’s eyes and get him to come in on her saving the world caper.

She may be in it for the money, but he’s a true believer. All she has to do is get him to believe – in her.

Escape Rating A-: The caper – and it absolutely is a caper every step of the way – is delightfully frothy, light and sparkling, and filled with witty banter covering plenty of wry undertones and more than a hint of forbidden romance.

Ada is, after all, a thief, and it’s Rian’s job to keep her from stealing anything. But she’s also, in this particular case, the misdirection. He – and his fellow agents – are so busy following Ada that they miss entirely too much of what’s going on around them.

Which is what underpins the whole story of the series – and it’s a doozy once all the sparkling bubbles have popped.

Because White and his fellow agents believe that they are protecting the plan to save a world. This world, in fact. Earth-Sol, the cradle of humanity. They believe that the government that they work for is more-or-less on the side of the angels. That they are doing good while Ada and her employers’ efforts are getting in the way of something both righteous and virtuous.

But that’s not the way the universe works. Especially not when doing good gets in the way of making a really huge, neverending, profit.

The way that this particular story works is that Ada’s seemingly aimless wandering through the Museum Gala is meant to misdirect Rian White, any of his agents, the reader AND the story, all at the same time.

It reads like a bit of light froth, that she’s playing with him, while he’s doing his damndest not to play with her, and that she’s then playing with the scene around her and filling in time while something happens in the background.

And that’s somewhat true and also a bit of a tease for the reader. It makes the story seem much lighter hearted than it really is and keeps White guessing as well. We know Ada is wearing a mask, she even admits as much, but we don’t really see what that mask is in service of.

When she rips it off at the end it’s an ‘aha!’ moment for the reader and an utter shock to White – and that’s when we all get the shape of things to come – or at least we think we do. Ada may have fooled us all again and we won’t learn in exactly what way until the final book in the trilogy, Last Chance to Save the World, coming April. I can’t wait to finally see Ada put all of her cards on the table – and to see if Rian picks them up.

A couple of final notes. Readers who have played Mass Effect may find Ada’s infiltration of the Museum reminiscent of Kasumi Goto’s infiltration of Donovan Hock’s party in Mass Effect 2 – complete with sexy, high-end wardrobe. However, in comparison to Strom Fetor, Hock is fairly penny-ante even if he bears a strong resemblance to a certain real world tech billionaire, amasser of tech companies that he claims to have invented but then destroys, and all around teflon coated, egotistical, arsehole.

Your reading mileage may vary on that bit, but seeing Ada obviously set him up for some comeuppance at a later date did add a bit of just desserts to the impending evil in both worlds that added just an extra fillip of deliciousness to the whole story so far. The ending in Last Chance to Save the World looks like it’s going to be a doozy!

#AudioBookReview: The President’s Brain is Missing by John Scalzi

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews> Short Story Review
#AudioBookReview: The President’s Brain is Missing by John ScalziThe President's Brain Is Missing by John Scalzi
Narrator: P.J. Ochlan
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: humorous science fiction, science fiction, short stories
Pages: 29
Length: 47 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on July 12, 2010
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Better World Books
Goodreads

The question is, how can you tell the President's brain is missing? And are we sure we need it back?

My Review:

My brain is toast today which is what caused me to pull this book and audio out of the virtually towering TBR pile. I was looking for a bit of a laugh, something lighthearted that wouldn’t tax my own poor missing brain too much – and this certainly delivered!

It starts out with a simple but confounding idea. What if the brain of the President of the United States went missing? I don’t mean surgically removed or shot out or anything even remotely logical. But what if the President woke up one morning, felt a bit lightheaded, and his doctor did all the obvious tests and a few less obvious tests and determined that there was a void in his cranium where his brain matter was supposed to be.

And that he was otherwise healthy and as operational as he ever was.

It’s a crisis – and it’s a conundrum. There are plenty of jokes about whether anyone will notice that this particular president no longer has a brain. Likewise, plenty of people would notice if the president dropped dead because his brain had gone walkabout. Just because he seems to be fine – at the moment – doesn’t mean he will continue to be fine under the circumstances.

The human body is not meant to function without something up there.

So one poor low-level staffer is assigned to figure out what happened before they have to tell the president what happened. Because he’s not going to take it well – AT ALL. Who would?

That assignment that leads from the White House to an old high school buddy to Area 51 to white panel vans to, well, back to the White House. After the dust has settled and the crisis hasn’t so much been resolved as expanded and made totally moot – at the same time.

Escape Rating B: This turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. It was light, short and fun. It also, surprisingly, is NOT a commentary on any of the parties in the recent election – or the one before that or the one before that. The President’s Brain is Missing was originally published in 2010. It took me a while to remember which president this particular lack of braininess would have been lampooning at THAT time – but once I did it worked even better than it had initially.

And it most certainly did work.

It did remind me more than a bit of the author’s When the Moon Hits Your Eye in the sense that the crisis is just so completely off the wall and comes out of absolute nowhere. Although this story about the President’s missing brain did a much better job at, at least, nodding towards causality than Moon did and I liked it more for that.

Part of what made this so much fun is that it took me back both to a more innocent time – as strange as that seems – and it reminded me of a whole lot of wonderfully strange and geeky science fiction into the fun bargain.

There’s the obvious take off on the Star Trek: The Original Series episode Spock’s Brain – which was a terrible episode. At least Spock’s missing brain was considerably more apparent, as, after all, Spock USES his.

In addition to the multiple nods to Trek, and the beautifully played reference to the extremely applicable Clarke’s Law (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,) I also got some whiffs of nostalgia about the X-Files and even a touch of Stargate. The X-Files were specifically mentioned, but so was Area 51 where Stargate Command had a base that dealt with alien technology.

The President’s brain may, or may not, have been missing – or maybe it’s Schrodinger’s Brain after all – but the author’s deft touch with science fiction humor was certainly present. And this story turned out to be the perfect listen for my own missing brain to wrap up the week.

A- #AudioBookReview: Constituent Service by John Scalzi

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: Constituent Service by John ScalziConstituent Service: A Third District Story by John Scalzi
Narrator: Amber Benson
Format: audiobook
Source: purchased from Audible
Formats available: audiobook
Genres: humorous science fiction, science fiction
Length: 2 hours and 30 minutes
Published by Audible Studios on October 3, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

The aliens are here . . . and they want municipal services!

Ashley Perrin is fresh out of college and starting a job as a community liaison for the Third District—the city’s only sector with more alien residents than humans. Ashley’s barely found where the paper clips are kept when she’s beset with constituent complaints–from too much noise at the Annual Lupidian Celebration Parade to a trip-and-fall chicken to a very particular type of alien hornet that threatens the very city itself.

And if that’s not terrifying enough, Ashley is next up at the office karaoke night.

It's Parks and Recreation meets the Federation of Planets in this fast and funny audio exclusive by Hugo Award winner and Audible best seller John Scalzi.

My Review:

Constituent Service is a story about going the extra SEVERAL miles in order to do a great job – while being chased by KILLER HORNETS every step of the way.

But it doesn’t start there. It starts with Ashley Perrin’s first day on the job as the Third District Council Office’s latest community liaison. Ashley’s first day, first week, first month, first everything is just a bit more interesting than most people’s early work experience, which can absolutely be put down to the circumstances in which the job exists – as well as a lot to Ashley’s own personality – rather than to the parameters of the job itself.

Because this is a near-future Earth, and we (humans) KNOW we’re not alone. Not in the galaxy, and certainly not on this planet.

To be fair, most of Earth’s population still seems to be human, just as other planets where humans have gone are still mostly made up of their own native populations. Many intelligent species are quite adaptable, but not every planet’s environment conditions are survivable by every species, so this makes complete sense – or at least as much sense as some of this author’s wilder stories ever manage to do.

The Third District is different because it’s one of the few human-minority districts in the (unnamed) city. 90% of the district’s population is made up of a myriad of non-human species – a fact which is absolutely represented by the staff of the Third District Council Member’s constituent office.

That the Council Member managed to get his human self elected to the office in a district where his species is definitely in the minority is frequently remarked upon. That Ashley is only the second human to ever serve as the community liaison for the Third District office is also noteworthy. That previous human lasted less than a week – a record that Ashley is determined to beat – and certainly does.

The story in Constituent Service is the story of Ashley getting thrown into the deep end of the wild, weird and wacky work of constituent service in an office and a world where she has to sink or swim in a pool of utterly alien but marvelously supportive colleagues. While at the same time absolutely going over and above the line of duty to solve the surprisingly and potentially earth-shattering mystery of exactly what is bollixing up the sewer system under the district – and is on the verge of exploding. Explosively. With murder hornets.

Escape Rating A-: I absolutely did escape to the Third District, to the point where I wasn’t ready to come back at the end. In spite of the murder hornets, but because of Ashley’s horrifying but original solution to THAT problem – as well as the many, many other issues she faces during her first months on the job.

Even if Ashley and her colleagues never do manage to get back to karaoke. Or maybe because of THAT too, or just the idea that her alien colleagues have bonded over such a thing.

The story works, and works marvelously well, because it’s told entirely from Ashley’s first person perspective. We’re inside her head and it’s a fascinating – and really quirky – place to be. It also works because this mostly alien situation is totally grounded in the real and remains so, no matter how weird things get. Any reader who gets into Ashley’s humor and perspective and can do even its weird attitude is going to enjoy this book a LOT. (I certainly did!)

Because it’s not really about the aliens – not that they aren’t a marvelous feature. It’s really about the trials and tribulations and wacky humor and terrible jokes of being in any sort of customer service position dealing with supposedly sentient and sapient beings when they are in the midst of being pissed off about something they think someone else is supposed to fix.

It’s easy to drop into the situation right beside Ashley because her colleagues are wonderful, but also because the setup feels like something straight out of Alien Nation or Men in Black. If aliens did live openly among us, the reader can’t help but think that it would be just like this – right down to the importation of illegal pets, noise complaints about parades, and sewer problems bubbling up at the worst possible times.

That it also turns out to be a gigantic, not quite as alien as one might think, riff on the children’s book Everybody Poops! is, well, fun, stinky, scatological humor on an epic scale that is guaranteed to make the reader laugh out loud at just how shitty the whole situation turns out to be.

And now for the small bits of merde that kept this from being an A or A+ listen. They’re really small bits, think of them as, well, cling-ons. Or Klingons, as the case might be as the humor does descend to that level just often enough.

The subtitle labels Constituent Service as “A Third District Story”, implying that there are or will be others. Wherever they are, I want them. I at least want to know what and where they are if they already exist. Really, really badly because this was a ton of fun.

Second, and I recognize this is a me thing, because this is an Audible exclusive it will be audio only for a while until that exclusivity period runs out. It means that there’s no text. While on the one hand I absolutely believe that Amber Benson’s excellent narration will always be the better option for getting into this story considering it’s first person perspective, on the other hand, in the process of writing this review I would just about kill – or at least set a few murder hornets on someone – to get a cheat sheet of the dramatis personae and how the hell all their names are spelled. I’ve stuck to referring to Ashley because she’s the only name mentioned in the blurb so I know I’m spelling it right.

Last but not least, Constituent Service is very much in the vein of the author’s recent books, The Kaiju Preservation Society, Starter Villain, and the upcoming When the Moon Hits Your Eye, in that it’s a story where very weird things, huge ‘what if?’ scenarios, are happening to perfectly ordinary people and the extraordinary is treated, not just with off-the-wall humor, but as if it’s all in a day’s work and the story just runs with it without ever remarking on the weirdness of the weird bits AT ALL. I love those sorts of stories. Readers who love this author’s work generally do. But if it’s not your cuppa, or if he’s not your cuppa, this probably won’t be either.

I had a blast all the way through, with a delightful crunchy sprinkle of murder hornets on top!

A- #BookReview: In the Shadow of the Ship by Aliette de Bodard

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: In the Shadow of the Ship by Aliette de BodardIn the Shadow of the Ship by Aliette de Bodard
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: alternate history, science fiction
Series: Universe of Xuya
Pages: 96
Published by Subterranean Press on September 30, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Nightjar, sentient ship and family matriarch, looms large in Khuyên’s past. Disappearances drove teenage Khuyên from it, but death will steer her back.
Now an adult and a magistrate, Khuyên came for her maternal grandmother’s funeral but finds herself unwittingly reliving her past on the decaying Nightjar. Children are still disappearing as her childhood friends once did; and worse, her beloved Cousin Anh vanishes after pleading for her help.
Khuyên sets out to save Anh alongside Thảo, a beautiful and mysterious woman who seems to know more than she should about Khuyên and the ship. But saving Anh requires doing what Khuyên couldn’t do before: face her family, face the ship, face her own hopes and fears for the future—a future that might well include Thảo, but only if Khuyên can stop listening to the critical voice in her head.
A voice that sounds an awful lot like Nightjar’s...

My Review:

The Universe of Xuya isn’t so much a series as it is a sprawl of alternate history that extends from the early 15th century – the point where the butterfly flapped its wings differently from the history we know – all the way out to an undetermined point VERY far in the future.

It’s a vast, sprawling canvas of a universe that hinges on a single year in history (1411) where two events turned left instead of right. An internal political struggle at the Imperial court of Ming-dynasty China sent the Empire looking outward instead of in (as it did in our history) and a fleet of Imperial ships that planned to head east along the coast was struck by typhoons and found itself drifting north, across the Bering Strait to Alaska, resulting in an earlier “discovery” of North America, from Asia instead of from Europe.

And with those two almighty flaps of the butterfly’s wings, history goes down the other leg of the trousers of time (to thoroughly mix my metaphors) and results in the universe of this series, where China and eventually an independent Việt empire become the dominant influences in the world instead of the West – not that, by the time of this particular entry in the sprawl, the West hasn’t established its own hegemonies in the greater galaxy.

The past is another country, they do things differently there. And if they did things differently than what we know, the future would be an even more different country that it will be on history’s current trajectory.

But the thing about the Xuya Universe is that even though the author has a broad outline of what brought it about and some stories set in the historical past that illustrate some of the points, most of it is set in the future. The galaxy is big, the history and future history is potentially very long indeed, and there’s plenty of scope for pretty much anything to happen pretty much anywhere.

Which leads back to the Universe of Xuya being more of a sprawl than the way we usually think of ‘series’. Each story set in the Xuya Universe is intended to be standalone, and while it might link thematically with other stories, that doesn’t mean it will feature any of the same characters as previous or future entries. There’s obviously a publication order for the series, but the internal chronology is ever changing, and considerably more fluid than is usually the case.

I fell into this series, somewhere in the middle, with The Tea Master and the Detective, because it’s a Sherlock Holmes pastiche and that was an entry point that worked for me – as it usually does. (Also, Tea Master is one of the longer works in the series so it has time and space to get a new reader stuck into the world that’s already been built.) I’ve read around Xuya, but not thoroughly – at least not yet – ever since. Although I’ve just had the light dawn that several of the short stories that were in various SFF magazines are also available as podcasts and that’s an avenue to be explored.

I know I haven’t talked about this particular entry in the series yet, and that’s a bit by design as I have mixed feelings about whether this story is a good place to start. I found it fascinating but I don’t think it’s a good entry point. The author has an excellent precis of the history of Xuya, with a list of stories that give both a loose chronology and some suggestions of stories that might make good places to start on her website – so if you’re looking for an entry point or have visited Xuya and are wondering how it all fits together, take a look.

The story of In the Shadow of the Ship is deceptively small and at first seems simple. It’s the story of a young woman who left a conservative and restrictive home because she didn’t fit in. The life that was mapped out for her, even before her birth, was one she had no interest in or desire to follow. That it seemed like she never had a chance to earn her mother’s love or acceptance made it that much easier to leave the world of her birth behind.

She’s been successful, if lonely, in the intervening years. But when she learns of the death of her grandmother, duty and respect call her home. But home is not a planet, or even a station. Home is a decaying mindship, a refugee from the galactic war that destroyed so much and left so many refugees, ship-bound and planet-dwellers alike. A war that her home, her ship, her family, was on the losing side of.

A home that wants her back – even if her mother still does not.

As an adult, Khuyên has knowingly kept the secret of her family’s status from the empire she serves, even though she knows they are war criminals and that she is guilty by association – and silence. She can’t make herself turn them in, and she can’t bear losing her job and her purpose in the universe she’s made her own.

At the same time, as an adult, when she returns for the funeral, she is able to see that the ship is manipulating her and everyone around her, and that the terrible things she was told to ignore when she was a child are no longer ignorable – or honorable. And that they are wrong.

And that there is no second escape. This time, the only way out is through – no matter the cost.

Escape Rating A-: I enjoyed In the Shadow of the Ship, although it is a very shadowed story indeed and probably needs to be read with the lights on. There’s an underlying creepiness that is totally justified but isn’t revealed until past the halfway point.

Although there’s also a lovely sapphic romance that redeems that darkness – it just takes a while to get there.

That two of the characters of this story were mindships felt like the one, solid link to the Xuya Universe, at least so far as I’ve read into it. A reader who has come at this series from different angles might find more linkages, but it was fine as it was.

The story that it did remind me of, however, was the author’s “The Mausoleum’s Children”, one of this year’s Hugo nominees for Best Short Story. (BTW the award was won by “Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer, which I read and loved.)

In my review of “The Mausoleum’s Children”, I said that the themes were a bit too big for the package, that it would have worked better in a longer format. Those themes; survivor’s guilt, living with trauma, returning to the place that broke you in the hopes of saving others, and more, received that longer treatment here In the Shadow of the Ship, which made me like both stories just that much better.

Grade A #BookReview: Darkside by Michael Mammay

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Darkside by Michael MammayDarkside (Planetside, #4) by Michael Mammay
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: military science fiction, science fiction, space opera
Series: Planetside #4
Pages: 336
Published by Harper Voyager on September 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this thrilling, action-packed fourth installment in the Planetside series from acclaimed science fiction author Michael Mammay, retired Colonel Carl Butler gears up for another military investigation, full of danger, corporate intrigue, and tech people would kill for—perfect for fans of John Scalzi and Craig Alanson.
Colonel Butler has paid his dues and just wants to enjoy his retirement on a remote planet. But the galaxy has had other plans. He has been roped into searching for a politician’s missing son and an industry magnate’s missing daughter. He has been kidnapped, violated numerous laws, and caused the destruction of colonial facilities. He’s famous—or infamous, depending on who you ask—praised and reviled in equal measure across the galaxy for his exploits.
And he is determined to never let the government drag him into another investigation.
But when a runaway twelve-year-old girl whose father has gone missing asks him for help, well…it’s a lot harder to say no.
The girl’s father, Jorge Ramiro, was supposed to have been on Taug, a moon orbiting the gas giant Ridia 5, working on a dig with a famous archaeologist. But now there’s no sign of him and no record of him being there. Mining operations on the moon are run by two different consortiums, Caliber and Omicron—both of which have tried to kill Butler in the past. Butler doesn’t believe in coincidence.
Landing on Taug with his right-hand man Mac, computer genius Ganos, and an elite security squad, Butler soon finds that they’ve charged back into the crosshairs—because Ramiro is not the only who has disappeared, and the perpetual darkside of this moon is hiding more than the truth about a missing archeologist…

My Review:

Carl Butler has the worst best luck in universe. Or the other way around. He always gets his team out of whatever FUBAR situation he’s gotten them into. Then again, it’s a FUBAR situation that they’re in because FUBAR follows him around like a lost puppy that doesn’t seem to realize it’s already found a forever home.

Or, to put it the way that Butler’s ace hacker Ganos put it, “This is a Carl Butler operation. When is it not the worst-case scenario?”

Carl and company put themselves into this particular mess because an almost literal lost puppy – or at least a young girl with puppy dog eyes – has shown up on his rather remote doorstep.

He’s retired and he’s enjoying it. Dammit. At least that’s what Butler says, anyway.

But he can’t resist Eliza Ramiro and her crowdfunded campaign to hire him to find out what happened to her missing father. Based on her story, he’s pretty sure it’s going to be bad news. At 12, she’s old enough to know that as well.

Still, she needs to KNOW and not just assume. And he gets that. And he’s probably a bit bored – even if he’s trying to tell himself that he’s not.

His team knows he’s going as soon as Eliza tells her story. It just takes Carl a while to catch up. Which is fine because they are way ahead of him on planning this trip he says he doesn’t want to take – when they all know that he really does.

The problem that Butler discovers when he reaches the last place Jorge Ramiro was seen is that everyone on Taug is way, way ahead of him as well. Including not one but two interstellar mining corporations who have each done their damndest to kill Butler in the past – and are unlikely to have compunctions about doing so in the present.

Especially on a remote little moon where each corporation is sure that they control all the shots on the surface and all the lawyers and spin doctors they could possibly need to make sure that what happens on the darkside stays buried there forever.

Escape Rating A: I got caught up in Carl Butler’s (mis)adventures back in the first book in this series, Planetside, and I’ve been just as captivated by each of the subsequent “clusterf–ks” the man has somehow managed to get himself into, Spaceside and Colonyside. And now here we are on Darkside, literally the darkside of a moon. And it looks like Butler is going to leave this moon as the scapegoat for everything that happens – even the stuff that happened before he arrived – again.

Which seems to be his role in the universe. I wouldn’t say he’s exactly “OK” with that role, but he’s willing to accept it as long as the job gets done and he and his people get out more or less in the same number of pieces they started in. He’s honestly less invested in whether he, himself, gets out intact – but his team is VERY invested in THAT, in spite of himself.

What makes this book, and this whole series, work, is that it rides or dies – and does it ever ride – on the universe-weary voice of its protagonist, Colonel Carl Butler (ret.) Butler had and still has a reputation for getting the job done. At the same time, he had more than enough rank in the military to have gotten a good picture of how the universe’s sausage gets made. He’s pragmatic about pretty much everything except the fate of his team, and will bend ALL the rules to the point of breakage to take care of business.

He’s experienced enough and smart enough – when he lets himself take the time to BE smart – to understand how the levers of power get pulled – and to make sure that a realistic number of them get pulled in his favor whenever possible.

Above all, he’s loyal to his team – and they’re loyal to him. And that loyalty inspires others to be loyal as well. One of the things that he does very well, that shines as part of his personality, is the way that he does his best to bring out the best in everyone he works with.

He’s a good man who does some very bad things – but tries to mitigate the damage whenever he realistically can. Which doesn’t mean he isn’t perfectly willing to ream EVERYNONE involved in this CLUSTERF*** a new one. Then again, they deserve it. And we’re right there with him hoping that they all get exactly what they deserve.

At the top, I said that Carl Butler has the worst best luck in the universe. He’s actually not alone in that distinction. I was listening to Ghostdrift, coincidentally also the fourth book but in the Finder Chronicles, as I read Darkside, and Fergus Ferguson has pretty much the same kind of luck that Butler does. He’s a walking avatar for Murphy’s Law, he gets into the worst situations at the drop of a hat, everyone’s plans go straight to hell in his vicinity, but he somehow manages to survive and bring his team out intact. The two stories are both told in the first-person, and both characters have similar universe-weary voices which they each came by honestly although from different directions. Meaning that if you like one you’ll like the other. I certainly do.

Which means that I was thrilled to read in the author’s blog that he’s working on book 5 in this series and has started planning book 6. Wherever those stories take Butler and his team, I’ll be along for the ride.

Grade A #BookReview: Chasing New Suns by Lance Robinson

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Chasing New Suns by Lance RobinsonChasing New Suns: Collected Stories by Lance Robinson
Format: ebook
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: science fiction, short stories
Pages: 202
Published by Lance Robinson on September 12, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Seven tales of mind, heart, and spirit from award winning science fiction author Lance Robinson.
From Apartheid era South Africa to humanity's first foray beyond the solar system, from precarious ecosystems in northern Alberta to the shiny glam of time-adept neocolonialists between the stars, these are stories of possibility.
This thought-provoking collection includes: the Writers of the Future Award first place winning story "Five Days Until Sunset"; "Communion", a haunting story of guilt, empathy, and human connection; "Money, Wealth, and Soil", which explores the relationship between greed and nobler human motivations, as a collective humanity attempts to incentivize the restoration of the world's ecosystems; "Problem Solving", a witty satire on neocolonialism and post-modern blahs; "The Thursday Plan", a story of an alternate history in which Apartheid never ended in South Africa; "The Gig of the Magi", a satirical take on finding love while grinding it out day to day in the gig economy; and "Chasing the Sun", which continues the spiritual quest begun in "Five Days Until Sunset".
Chasing New Suns is science fiction with heart.

My Review: 

I first read this author’s short story, “Five Days Until Sunset”, in Writers of the Future, Volume 40, and as you will see from my review of that story below, I loved it. It turned out to be one of my favorites in a collection of mostly excellent stories.

So when the author contacted me about reviewing this new collection of stories, a collection that included a sorta/kinda followup to “Five Days”, I was all in. And as you will also see from my reviews of the rest of the stories in the book, I’m very glad I said “YES!” to the whole thing.

“Five Days Until Sunset” (originally published in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume 40)
In spite of what a whole lot of SF would have one believe, the likelihood is that early colony ships will be a fairly iffy proposition. Which means that this reminds me a bit of Mickey7 but definitely without the humorous bits. Although in this case, it’s not that the planet is barely habitable, but rather that it’s not habitable in the way that the colonists dreamed of. It’s a story about adapting your dreams to your circumstances instead of attempting to force the circumstances to match your dreams. Grade A because the story is good and so complete in its very short length and it even manages to deal well with religion in the future which is really, really hard even in the present.

“The Thursday Plan”
What if? What if history went down a different leg of the trousers of time? What if you could see what is, what was, what might be, and what might have been, all at the same time? What if you could jump between them? That is the dilemma and the opportunity faced by James Mfaxa in a timeline where Apartheid did not end in 1994, but instead continued and became even more repressive with the help of invasive technology that bears a much too sharp resemblance to slave collars – or to an enforcement mechanism of thought police. But that technology – and the jammers used to combat it – give Mfaxa a chance to envision a different world. Not a perfect one – in fact far from it – but a world better than the one he has. If he is willing to take a chance of making his world, perhaps not right but at least right-ER.

I found this to be an A- story in ways that I think are a “me” problem rather than an actual issue with the story. I just didn’t know enough about the history involved for the story to have as big of an impact as it would have for someone who did. And even then it still landed with a thought-provoking bang.

“Problem Solving”
This turned out to be a surprisingly funny story with more than a bit of a sting in its tail. From one perspective, it’s all a bit of a farce, as D.K. discovers that his lifelong run of bad luck isn’t so much bad luck as terrible timing. D.K.’s discovery of this, accompanied as it is by the presence of alien representatives of an intergalactic alliance that give off the whiff of being serious scam artists adds to the fun of the whole thing. The way that D.K. finally manages to take advantage of his combination gift and curse pays off the whole story beautifully. This one isn’t deep – unlike the rest of the collection, and offers a nice change of pace.  Grade B

“Communion”
As I read this one, it reminded me of another story, which I eventually figured out was the story “Nonzero” by Tom Vandermolen in that same Writers of the Future collection that included “Five Days Until Sunset”. Both are stories about humans who have become ‘lost in space’, untethered from whatever ship or habitat they were originally living in. The difference between the two stories is the difference between hope – however tiny – and resignation. Personally, I enjoyed “Nonzero” a bit more because it had that hint of hope – and because the protagonist’s relationship with her AI was considerably more supportive than the one between Matt, Barb, Ismail and Liem in “Communion” as the four honestly don’t like each other much and they are each more alone at their end than the unnamed protagonist of “Nonzero” is with her AI companion.

Pessimists – or perhaps realists – will probably enjoy “Communion” more than “Nonzero”. Readers who do not believe in no-win scenarios will prefer “Nonzero”. This one is a Grade B for me because I prefer that glimmer of hope.

“The Gig of the Magi”
This story is an homage to the O.Henry classic, “The Gift of the Magi”. A story which, in spite of being over a century old at this point, still lands with a beautiful punch – especially during the holiday season. (If you have never had the pleasure of reading the original work, it is still worth a read, and is out of copyright and available free in ebook from multiple sources, while public libraries are certain to have it in their collections.) The story here, “The Gig of the Magi”, updates all of the settings and circumstances, while still delivering the same lovely message as the original. Grade A-.

“Money, Wealth, and Soil”
This is a terrific climate fiction story that manages to both showcase the pervasiveness of human greed and make it the engine of a possibly better tomorrow – even as agents of that greek do their damndest to game a very complicated system. Because that’s what people do. It’s also a story about payback without that payback actually being a bloody revenge, but rather something righteously delivered that hurts absolutely no one who doesn’t deserve it.

This was my favorite in the collection. I loved the way that it made the forces that normally break a system become part of the system, that it counted on human greed rather than pretending it doesn’t exist, and that it created something good out of it instead. And that the right people finally got what they deserved for all the different ways that can be parsed. Grade A+

“Chasing the Sun”
This story is a bit of a quasi-sequel to “Five Days Until Sunset”, and it’s the story I originally picked up this collection FOR. And I was not disappointed. You don’t have to read the earlier story first – although if you read the collection in the order in which it’s presented, of course you will anyway.

By the nature of the worldbuilding, while the people of this world seem to be the descendants of the surprised colonists in “Five Days”, they don’t have much in the way of even ancestral memory of those long ago – by their standards – events. And as a result of the ways their planet interacts with its sun, they can’t put down permanent roots and maintain archives. They MUST carry all their possessions on their backs nearly every single day.

But one of the things that made that original story interesting, and that continue into this later one, is that the original did an excellent job of presenting the multiplicity of possibilities of human religious beliefs in a way that actually worked – and its the descendants of those belief systems that fuel the interaction in this later story – even if some of those beliefs work less well for them in their present circumstances.

At the same time, it’s also a story about pride going before a very big fall, and of the way that clinging to the beliefs and methods of the past prevents people, even an entire people, from adapting to a changed present. And that even the stubbornest of people can learn with the right incentive.

As with the original story, this was also a Grade A story – even though, or perhaps especially because – it is a vastly different kind of story than the one that came before.

Escape Rating A: Overall, as should be obvious from my ratings of the individual stories, I really enjoyed this collection. I will be looking forward to whatever this author comes up with next AND I’ll be looking forward to next year’s Writers of the Future collection in the hope that it will be as good as the one this sprang from.