Reviews and Comments

Tak!

Tak@reading.taks.garden

Joined 3 years, 6 months ago

I like to read

Non-bookposting: @Tak@glitch.taks.garden

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Emma Newman: Planetfall (2015, Ace)

One secret withheld to protect humanity’s future might be its undoing…

Renata Ghali believed in …

Planetfall

omg this is a gem, and I've slept on it for ten years!

Planetfall is a scifi novel about space exploration, community, betrayal, and mental illness, in no particular order. It's superbly written, and the characters are deep and complex, and the gradual unpacking of the narrative is masterful.

Close whatever you're reading this on and go read Planetfall!

Izzy Wasserstein: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart (EBook, 2024, Tachyon Publications)

Security expert Dora left her anarchist commune over safety concerns. But when her ex-girlfriend Kay …

Short and bitter

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a vignette about working through guilt and self-loathing toward self-forgiveness.

There's a lot going on in terms of themes: gender, transhumanism, anarchy and fascism, cloning, all mixed into a more standard crime plot.

Although the main thread is satisfactorily wrapped up, there's definitely room to explore the world further - I want more Dora!

#SFFBookClub

reviewed Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio (The Sun Eater, #1)

Christopher Ruocchio: Empire of Silence (Paperback, 2019, DAW)

It was not his war. On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the …

Empire of Silence

This is a book that isn't ashamed to show its influences - Interstellar space empire where magic shield belt technology has obsoleted guns in favor of knives and swords - "Highmatter swords" whose blades cut effortlessly through anything except each other, and whose blades can be summoned and dismissed from the hilt - Interstellar space empire that has regressed to feudalism, with the state religion taking a dominant role

There's some interesting stuff here, but there are also a lot of tired tropes. Every woman's appearance is described exhaustively. Every woman is either a love interest or an unfeminine drudge. The hereditary ruler scorns his intelligent, educated, hardworking son in favor of his other son who's a loutish brute.

It also has start-of-a-series syndrome - there's a lot of exposition and things started up, but hardly anything is concluded or resolved.

I don't know, I'm reading the next one, but

Annalee Newitz, Malka Older, Karen Lord: We Will Rise Again No rating

In this collection, editors Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older champion realistic, progressive social …

Astounding!! Finally you can see the cover of the anthology I've been working on for the past couple of years with co-editors @older@wandering.shop and Karen Lord! "We Will Rise Again" is full of essays, interviews, and speculative stories about protest, social movements, and hopeful resistance -- all informed by the experiences of real-life movement leaders and community organizers.

wandering.shop/@annaleen/114152401439112892

commented on Litany for a Broken World by Karen Conlin (Entangled Realities, #1)

Karen Conlin, L. J. Cohen, Chris Howard: Litany for a Broken World (2025, Interrobang Books) No rating

A young girl's disastrous first foray through the multiverse cleaves her from her family and …

reviewed Days of Shattered Faith by Adrian Tchaikovsky (The Tyrant Philosophers, #3)

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Days of Shattered Faith (2024)

Welcome to Alkhalend, Jewel of the Waters, capital of Usmai, greatest of the Successor States, …

Days of Shattered Faith

Days of Shattered Faith does feel like a proper sequel to House of Open Wounds. It brings back a bunch of interesting characters from earlier installments, but also introduces some fun fresh faces.

This time around, we're dealing with diplomatic imperialism, integration, and free will, again through a lens of magic, gods, and demons.

It's a solid story, and I'd be interested to follow some of the characters a while longer and see what they get up to.

reviewed House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky (The Tyrant Philosophers, #2)

Adrian Tchaikovsky: House of Open Wounds (2023, Head of Zeus)

City-by-city, kingdom-by-kingdom, the Palleseen have sworn to bring Perfection and Correctness to an imperfect world. …

House of Open Wounds

This feels like a big departure from the previous book. The first one was kind of a set of slices of life from a weird fantasy city under occupation, and this one follows one of the characters into an army field hospital.

The main theme seems to be exploration of what it would look like to attempt to rules-lawyer a world with magic, gods, and demons.

I enjoyed it, but I didn't get a real sense of continuity from City of Last Chances - they're essentially two distinct novels set in the same world.

Aliette de Bodard: Navigational Entanglements (2024, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) No rating