Ursula

Galactic Hellcats, by Marie Vibbert, is coming out next spring. I read an ARC provided by the publisher.

Three women (a thief from Cleveland, an anxiety-plagued veteran from the Moon, and a bored rich girl from another planet) form a biker gang--except they don't have bikes, they have personal spaceships called solo-flyers. They bond by rescuing an abused prince who has been trained to please women but would rather meet a handsome young man of his own.

Galactic Hellcats has an old-fashioned pulp aesthetic. For example, there's a planet where everyone wears elaborate eyeshadow, a pair of disturbingly flirtatious androids, and a nomadic group on a patched-together spaceship who reminded me a little of Mass Effect's quarians. It's light-hearted and ecumenically sexy: I particularly enjoyed the scene where the formerly law-abiding veteran Margot yearns as her new teammate Zuleikah paints her solo-flyer with flames. But this is a story shaped around friendship and lucky heists, not romance: absolutely nobody's longing is reciprocated.

Vibbert's work is grounded (here, literally, at the bottom of the space elevator) in her working-class Ohio experience. In this book, that experience shows up in sharp-eyed observation of the way the repo man cheats and a sequence where naive Moon-raised Margot learns the important moral lesson that you never, ever trust the cops. If you're fortunate enough to live near Cleveland, you can find croissants like the ones so delicious that they almost disrupt a hacking attempt at the On the Rise bakery in Cleveland Heights.

All of the Hellcats are embarrassed and inadequate sometimes--the prince nearly flubs the final heist because he has never heard of a kumquat--but they all get chances to shine, as well. Even Margot's unromantic experience as a space navy stock clerk turns out to be crucial. I learned from working on cars with my dad that sometimes you lay out everything carefully, with the parts you removed neatly labeled in painstakingly washed salsa containers, and sometimes you just have to bang on part of the engine until everything aligns. Galactic Hellcats provides both of those satisfactions, the planning and the crashing. At last everything slides into place with purring motors and a team setting out to explore another star.

I read Charlie Jane Anders' new YA novel for NetGalley. It's coming out from Tor Teen next spring.

Victories Greater Than Death is about a girl named Tina who is a clone of a six-foot-tall purple-skinned alien general who was, more or less, her society's Jean-Luc Picard. She was disguised as a human and raised by an adoptive mother. But as soon as she figures out how to trigger the rescue beacon full of stars hidden just under her heart, she will fulfill her destiny.

If you're an adult who loved She-Ra or Steven Universe or Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, then this book is for you. If you know a tween who has read Harry Potter all the way through Order of the Phoenix and you want to give them an adventure story about being special and different and fighting evil that isn't racist and painfully transphobic, this is the book you're looking for.

But did I like it? Well, that's complicated.

Victories Greater Than Death is for people who have been told that their feelings are too much, who need to hear that even though their emotions are big and awkward and unwieldy and weird, there are people out there who care, who will value all of that huge powerful messiness and help them channel it toward good. But some of us have been told instead that our feelings are not enough, that we are distant or unreadable or cold, or just too practical to (ever) make a fuss. When I read a story that is actively didactic about the idea that Big Emotions Matter, I don't feel warm and cared for. I brace for impact. Because it's so, so easy for the message to slip from Big Emotions Matter to Your Emotions Don't.

So does Victories Greater Than Death hurt? Actually, no. Part of the reason is that it's clear-eyed and realistic about the way teenage bullying works, both when it's serious and when it's just low-key isolation. I particularly appreciated Tina's reminiscences about not fitting in at improv camp.

But also, Anders writes autistic-coded characters in a way that feels genuinely sympathetic. I've read multiple books recently with big diverse casts of characters and messages about acceptance where one of the characters was autistic, and most of them failed this test. If you have to repeat that the person your characters are accepting is strange and difficult and obsessed with incomprehensible boring things and fey more than twice, then guess what, "acceptance" might not mean what you think it does!

In Victories Greater Than Death, on the other hand, we learn in passing that Rachel struggles with social anxiety, gets tense in crowds and new places, and doesn't always like being touched, but the facts that are repeated every time she appears are that she is the! most! amazing! artist! and Tina's bestest friend in the universe!!!1!1 We see Rachel working hard to make strangers feel welcome, and then coping with the stress of having been "on" for too long. She gets a romance with a future pop superstar who makes musical robots. And her artistic talent is the key to the end-of-book triumph over evil.

In Victories Greater Than Death, Charlie Jane Anders seems to be writing a book for her younger self--a person who was weird and brave and needed to hear that dressing up in a pink sequined dinosaur suit is a good first step toward saving the world. I wasn't quite that girl, and the book I would design for my own younger self would be sideways from this one. But when Anders preaches acceptance for everyone, I believe she means it.

comments on endings

Aster Glenn Gray, The Wolf and the Girl. ( I thought briefly... )

fiction in progress

N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky. Alabaster's journals; Hoa's comments on what you can choose about being loved.

Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The cover copy here has a lot to say about the empress and her love affairs, and very little to say about the clever cleric and their even cleverer bird, though the cleric's questions about the past form the frame story.

news

Will Oremus, What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage. Argues that the reason you can't find toilet paper in stores is that far more people are spending far more time at home, and retail toilet paper is different from the stuff sold to businesses.

SCA

Paul Buell and Eugene Anderson, A Soup for the Qan. A translation of a dietary manuscript written for a Mongol Qan, with lots of notes and historical context. The last time I had access to this book, I was in grad school and mostly cooking vegetarian food; I remember being frustrated that everything was based on mutton. These days I'm more carnivorous, so there might be more interesting recipes to try! I enjoyed the complaint that another translator had rendered as "kumquat" a word that in the context of the steppes made more sense as "acorn".

art

'No Flakes, a Flickr album of paper cutout "snowflakes" and the templates to construct them. Check out the intricate octopus snowflake or the ankylosauruses.

I read Marie Brennan's Turning Darkness Into Light courtesy of Netgalley.

This is a novel about Lady Trent's granddaughter Audrey, who is recruited to translate a sequence of Draconean tablets belonging to a private collector. The novel takes the form of diary entries, letters, translated excerpts, police reports, and so forth. I definitely classify "getting to be the first translator of an important ancient text" as an escapist fantasy; if you are in the same camp, this book will deliver good, fluffy amusement. (For reasons of literary exigency, the text itself is rather more coherent and rather less bloodthirsty than most of the ancient literature with which I am familiar).

The general villain of the story is prejudice against Draconeans, but the specific villain is Aaron Mornett, a beautiful young man who is "not a reputable scholar." Audrey's mixed feelings about Aaron Mornett are effectively and compellingly represented. I wasn't inclined to be all that patient with them as a reader, though: I've spent my fair share of time dealing with brilliant, entitled young men in the real world, and don't need to be assured that they really are that awful.

Aaron Mornett's opposite is Cora Fitzarthur, the painstaking niece of the man who collected the Draconean tablets. I hoped for a while that Audrey and Cora would fall in love: the way Audrey learns to trust her is so obviously a parallel to the way she learns distrust of Aaron. Also, I grew up on novels about the trials of being an orphan who becomes the ward to someone terrible. I would have liked to read more about Cora's tribulations, or, failing that, about her newfound expertise in volcanoes. Instead, the book ends with revelations about Draconeans, politics, and a surprising amount of violence and rushing about. (And, of course, with footnotes, which are not to be skipped.)

I received a review copy of Yoon Ha Lee's Hexarchate Stories from Netgalley.

Many of the Hexarchate Stories center on details of Cheris or Jedao's early life. They're sweet on their own, or filled with doom if you start thinking about the fates of Cheris and Jedao's families. Jedao's family menagerie often appears, including his mother's geese and a laid-back, tractable cat (I expected said cat to end up having kittens on a pile of clothes in the back of someone's closet, but apparently that memory belongs only to my childhood, not to Jedao's). Of the domestic stories, one from Jedao's older brother's point of view and another about Cheris's birthday particularly stand out.

The final story is "Glass Cannon," a novella which picks up a few years after Revenant Gun left off. Much of "Glass Cannon" is straight-up adventure, echoing the exuberant action scenes of the beginning of Revenant Gun. ( I was spoiled... )

I've been doing a lot of reading lately around violent resistance, nonviolent resistance, and counterinsurgency. This involves a lot of thinking about how ordinary people respond when they don't feel safe, and how those reactions can be shaped or exploited.

Here's an annotated bibliography/suggested reading list.

accessible introductions

These books make an emotional case using history and evocative personal anecdotes. I sometimes wished for a more nuanced, scholarly approach, but they are good places to get started.

Dave Grossman, On Killing. Grossman argues that the US military has become more effective at training soldiers to kill people, and describes the psychological cost. (Depending on the edition, this book may have a strikingly racist introduction about violent video games; Grossman has been involved in militarization of US police forces, so reading this book from a peace perspective is in some ways a matter of knowing one's enemy.)

Srdja Popovic, Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World. Popovic is one of the founders of Otpor!, a group that successfully pushed to overthrow Slobodan Milošević in Serbia. He writes about the techniques Otpor! used and their application in other conflicts.

between theory and practice

David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla. Kilcullen is an Australian counterinsurgency expert who advised US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. He writes in a compelling way about how small-scale conflicts become intertwined with large ones, often using examples from his own work. This book focuses on Afghanistan, and is a good introduction to Kilcullen's theory of counterinsurgency.

theoretical structures

These books provide new tools for thinking about how power structures work. They are serious works of political science that incorporate detailed discussion of alternative hypotheses, lengthy footnotes, and so forth. I recommend them highly, with the caveat that my bar for dense theoretical writing is quite high (I actually think these are quite readable, but that's in comparison to, say, the historiography of late antiquity).

Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works. Chenoweth and Stephan argue that nonviolent resistance is more effective than violent resistance in creating lasting political change. They construct a theoretical framework and use it to analyze multiple cases of resistance, both successful and unsuccessful.

Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Kalyvas theorizes that violence against civilians is most likely to occur in areas of "contested control", where armed groups are actively competing for power. He tests his theory using data from Greece.

further reading

Amelia Hoover Green, The Commander's Dilemma. Hoover Green is interested in measuring both lethal and non-lethal violence against civilians. The commander's dilemma is training soldiers to kill without inspiring them to indiscriminate violence. Hoover Green argues that institutionalized training can change the "repertoire" of violence that a force uses (or refrains from using) against civilians, using El Salvador as a case study.

David Kilcullen, Blood Year. What went wrong in Syria.

David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency. A collection of Kilcullen's articles. The description of his experiences as part of a peacekeeping force in East Timor is particularly interesting.

David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains. Argues that we should anticipate modern, interconnected, urban warfare where the line between institutional/state and independent actors is not clear. Case studies include Kingston (Jamaica), Mogadishu, and Bombay.

Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. 1960s training manual for leftist insurgents.

Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell. The war in Chechnya, as experienced by ordinary people. Politkovskaya was later murdered for her reporting. Review here.

US Army Sergeants Major Academy, Long Hard Road: NCO Experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. First-person accounts by non-commissioned officers who served in a variety of roles.

100 SF/F books James Davis Nicoll thinks you should consider reading, by way of various people.

The books on this list that I know I've read but can't remember anything about are all 1990s lesbian-inflected cyberpunk. I'm surprised that Lisa Mason's Arachne, a book about an angry lawyer and a falling-apart robot that reads a little bit like a forerunner of Max Gladstone, isn't also on the list.

( 100 books )

Netgalley is pushing an excerpt of Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. I grabbed it before I realized it was only an excerpt. I simultaneously rejoiced and was dismayed: this is a gorgeous book, a book with an eye for the seductions of literature and art, and a mystery that makes things harder and twistier than they first appear. I want the rest of it yesterday, and can't have it.

Aliette de Bodard sent me a review copy of her new novella, In the Vanishers' Palace. This book bills itself as an f/f retelling of Beauty and the Beast. It is, by a fortunate coincidence, the third queer Beauty and the Beast novella I have read this year: the others were Aster Glenn Gray's m/m fantasy Briarley, set in England during World War II, and an as-yet-unpublished aromantic take on the fairy tale, set in ancien régime France, which I will tell you all about as soon as you can buy it.

There are a set of questions that one asks when embarking on a retelling of Beauty and the Beast: how was the Beast transformed? Who are the Beast's invisible servants? What is the palace? Who is the fairy that transformed them all? Wasn't it immoral to curse an entire palace and all of its inhabitants, along with the Beast? How can the Beast justify trapping another person in an enchanted palace, no matter what promises have been made about love? Who are Beauty's family, and why did they agree to give Beauty up?

Briarley answers these questions head-on; its invisible servants, in particular, are delightful. In the Vanishers' Palace offers layers of hypotheses. It's not so much a retelling of Beauty and the Beast as an argument with it. In true fairy-tale fashion, the argument focuses on what is beautiful and what is good. (I'm sorting out my own argument about structure, here, so my language is necessarily stark. That's a disservice to the book's sense of beauty, which is complex and made of shifting light.)

In the first layer of answers, Beauty is Yên, a poor teacher who lives with her mother the doctor because she has failed the imperial exams. The Beast is Vu Côn, a dragon. She's a river spirit, with antlers, whose robe trails water and words. Like Yên's mother, Vu Côn is also a doctor: she takes Yên as the price for a magical healing, and Yên goes because the elders of her village are willing to trade her away. The palace belonged to the Vanishers, beings who manipulated genes and magic, broke the world, and left. That makes the Vanishers our fairy, in some sense, and their vanishing the curse.

The next layer becomes evident when we ask who was transformed, and why. Vu Côn is a dragon; but she has always been a dragon. She shifts between more-human and more-draconic forms for her own reasons, not the Vanishers'. Perhaps it would make more sense to think of Vu Côn as one of the palace's servants: she served the Vanishers, and she's still trying to carry out the duties of a dragon, even though the context of her work is gone and the world has changed around her. Meanwhile, Yên's shape is less certain. She's not a constant, steady Beauty; she doesn't know how she fits into either the village or her palace, and that uncertainty of mind is mirrored by an uncertainty of body, flickers in her pulse, a sudden intuition for magic.

Maybe the entire planet is the palace: after all, the Vanishers changed it, and then left. There's no easy spell to make it right again, though; kisses won't restore things, true love or not. The only answers here are partial and contingent. Much of the tension of this book involves the pull between power, duty, and responsibility: when do you have to try to fix things? If you broke them the first time, when do you have to try again? When is it your duty to sort things out on your own, and when do you need to ask for help?

One of the things I admire about this book is the way it takes both healing and teaching seriously as forms of power. The men who matter in this book (Vu Côn's husband, a farmer, a legendary scholar) all happen to have died before the story starts. We see women and nonbinary people trying to sort out what to do with the world. In particular, we see some of them grabbing for power and fucking things up. Healing and teaching are often coded as feminine, subservient, and selfless, but this story centers on the ways they are aggressive. These are forms of leadership, decisiveness, imposing your will on the world and pulling other people with you.

Sometimes you get it right. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you fall in love with a river.

comments on endings

Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale. The structure seemed a bit odd here: I really expected the interlude in the cabin to fall closer to the middle, and the Nightingale to be more important and more obviously at risk.

fiction in progress

Melissa Scott, Point of Sighs. Only a chapter or so in. It's always nice when people in historical fantasy settings have a limited wardrobe.

excessive background reading for game(s)

Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Chenoweth and Stephan directly compare primarily nonviolent and primarily violent campaigns to overthrow governments since 1900. Though neither strategy is guaranteed success, their analysis shows that on average nonviolent campaigns are significantly more successful, in large part because they are able to attract more participants. Moreover, nonviolent campaigns are successful in the context of repressive regimes, not just democratic ones. This holds in large part because when a regime reacts violently to nonviolent protesters, the protesters often attract new support. (If you're analyzing this tactic in terms of competitive control, the point is that nonviolent campaigns can make ordinary people feel that the regime won't protect them, even when they follow basic rules like "don't take up arms against the government".)