psocoptera

The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett, 2024 novel, first of a trilogy. A young apprentice investigator with total recall like Simon Illyan, only these abilities are granted via Witcher-like potions (apparently even giving some people the white hair and yellow eyes), gets involved in a murder case in an empire threatened by kaiju and maybe also the manipulations of the Cetagandan-haut-like gentry. Which is to say that if an author admits to being an LLM user, even if he claims he isn't using it for his creative writing, I cannot help but start playing the "which parts of this seem borrowed" game. In all fairness it was a good book, fun, fast read, the mystery seemed to hang together as far as I noticed and I enjoyed the plant-tech worldbuilding. I'll probably read the other two. (I wasn't into Foundryside, but I liked the City-of books, so he is neither a definitely-read or definitely-don't-read author for me at this point.) And I'm actually all in favor of creative recombining/repurposing/riffing! If there's, like, a person doing it. I don't want to think I'm reading a book if I'm actually reading extruded text product though.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell, 2024 fantasy novel. This was cute and fun and then I got kind of tired of it, which might say more about my short attention span than it says about the book. I don't know, insofar as it wanted to center the main characters' relationship (I hesitate to say romance, since it seemed like it was maybe more of an ace/aro queerplatonic partnership kind of thing) that relationship didn't particularly hit any of my squees or zings. And while there was some evidence early on of not the tightest editing (like, mention of a damaged eye, which I couldn't find any sort of antecedent for where it *took* damage), as the book kept going I ended up feeling pretty nitpicky about it, which I think tends to be a sign I don't feel sufficiently entertained.

(But, like, armor with "something denser than gold" under a gold coating? Like what, tungsten? Platinum? If you had platinum armor why would you put gold over that? Or a *spruce* tree with "succulent crimson and tangerine hues of the tree's leaves", one of which falls fluttering? Has neither Wiswell nor his editor ever seen a spruce? And I was thrown by the use of "allosexual" in a fantasy setting, like, okay, this one is a style choice and I respect that sometimes if you want to include vocab of whatever sort in whatever setting, sometimes the easiest thing is to just use modern words, especially if you are not doing the sort of fantasy where you're making up *other* words so your shaych or your marnis or whatever would really stand out. However, I think I personally find short Germanic-ish words like "gay" or "queer" to have a better ring of plausibility, a more organic feel, than technical-sounding, deliberately coined words like "homosexual" or in this case "allosexual". (Or, like, "lesbian"... are you saying this second world has a Lesbos somewhere?) I personally probably would have tried to rephrase "allosexual virgins" as something like "fantasizing virgins" or "attraction-flushed virgins". I can only assume that Wiswell didn't because he specifically wanted to get "allosexual" in there, but it felt like a break in the voice to me.)

Anyways. Not terrible, but I don't particularly think it ought to win a Hugo, although I'm also feeling a general lack of enthusiasm re the Hugos given open questions like "how much of their credibility did Nicholas Whyte take with him when he bailed". :/

Mirrored Heavens, Rebecca Roanhorse, 2024 fantasy novel, concluding her Between Earth and Sky trilogy started with Black Sun and continued in Fevered Star. I've probably said this before but it's a real struggle for me these days to read a trilogy spread out over a span of years. I didn't have time to sit down and reread the first two and so I came to this one without much of a recollection of what was happening or what I was hoping to see happen. I said about the last one that I thought Roanhorse was doing a good job balancing the intrigue plot and the epic fantasy plot, but reading this one I didn't feel particularly invested in either, and the end felt muddled and kind of anti-climactic. One of my favorite aspects of the previous books was their settings, and in theory we were spending some time in some new locations in this one, but I never got much of a sense of them. It was a fast read despite its length and had some good fantasy-action sequences, so, what more could I ask for, I guess, and I think I'll still give the series my Hugo Series vote. (With genuine enthusiasm - there is some definite Cool in these - although also out of disinterest in the other nominees. I mean, I'm definitely not voting for InCryptid, Stormlight, or whichever Tchaikovsky series that is, I read a Tasha Suri book a few years ago for the Astounding and wasn't into it enough so much as to to not want to read more of her work, although apparently that book is not part of this particular series, and I read Annihilation and decided not to read more of those, although apparently I liked it okay. Maybe I'll give those my second-place vote, hm.)

Moonstorm, Yoon Ha Lee, 2024 YA novel, the first of a planned trilogy. This was great - teen mecha pilots, divided loyalties, an interesting setting and worldbuilding where gravity is sort of a collective faith, and a rivalry that seems like it might be possibly heading for an f/f romance. On both the Norton and Lodestar ballots but recommended even if you're not reading for those.

The Transitive Properties of Cheese, Ann LeBlanc, 2024 novella. Transgender transhuman hijinks. A must-read if you like Greg Egan, or maybe Snow Crash, or just want to read about the pros and cons of repeatedly forking your personality. The end felt a little muddled but overall it was great - LeBlanc is both having fun with the possibilities of early-adopter uploading, and exploring them seriously. I'm sorry I read it too late to nominate it but at least I can recommend it here.

Puzzleheart, Jenn Reese, 2024 middlegrade. Cute fantasy about a sentient magical house that's a sort of living escape room. Did not quite entirely land for me - this is the kind of book that starts in the real world and then magical stuff starts happening, and the tween protagonist and new friend did not really seem like the kind of people who would accept this foundational break in world-logic without significantly more metaphysical distress (is there a better term for this? maybe supernatural shock?) - and I admit to doing some skimming, but it was sweet and fun and had a solid little middlegrade moral lesson about kids not being responsible for fixing their parents. I wouldn't necessarily rec it to other adults but I would cheerfully put a copy in every elementary-school library in America.

Young Hag and the Witches' Quest, Isabel Greenberg, 2024 YA graphic fantasy, or possibly I mean middlegrade. Arthurian, but mostly centered on an original character and taking place after Arthur's death, with flashbacks being told as stories within the story that mostly focus on the female characters. I enjoy seeing people find new directions to take the Matter of Britain and I thought this was a good one. Also it was funny and made me laugh out loud a couple of times, and Greenberg has a really interesting art style, kind of intentionally childlike and sometimes scribbly, but really expressive. (And nice use of a limited color palate, and some neat scenery stuff with standing stones and a river, and a cute and funny baby.) I had Hugo-nominated this on the chance that I would end up wanting to have done that, and, yay, I did, good call past me.

Also I ended up reading this book partly on Hoopla and partly on paper (with reading glasses! they work!) which meant I could do a direct comparison of which felt like a smoother/easier reading experience. Digital comics interfaces have come a long way - Hoopla will show you the page, then each panel so you can read it, then the page again, and only got confused about panel order on a couple of two-page spreads - but I tried timing myself reading 20 pages each way and it was still faster for me to read on paper. (With reading glasses, because the lettering here is small.) It's useful to know that the Hoopla interface is a workable way for me to read comics, though!

The Ghost and the Golem, Benjamin Rosenbaum, interactive "choose your own adventure" style text game. On the Nebula ballot for Game Writing and I have high hopes of seeing it on the Hugo ballot as well.

Rosenbaum wrote my favorite book of 2021 so of course I was excited about this, but then I put off playing it for a long time because of anxiety. Some technological anxiety (was I going to need some special software to obtain or play it? no, it turned out to be a thing I could buy for my phone from the Google Play apps store) and some anxiety that I have only recently managed to name *as* anxiety around interacting with what I am tentatively thinking of as "anisotropic media" or "directional media", encompassing both dramatized forms like TV and movies and games like this one with a one-way flow forward through the game and no way to flip back a few pages to check something or refresh my memory of something. This is an anxiety both around not having attention/emotional control (what if there's a boring part but I can't speed up? what if something is unpleasantly tense but I can't look ahead to check in on what to expect?) and attention/memory (what if my mind keeps wandering and it's hard to follow? what if I lose track of key stuff? my memory is not what it used to be, and in fact I did make one choice in one of my plays of the game that I definitely would not have made if I had recalled who that name referred to, although in fact there is a character list (and a glossary for the Yiddish) that I could have gone and checked and I just didn't for whatever reason), and no doubt seems absurd to most people in our very drama-normative culture (my mom, at least, finds it baffling that one of the reasons I don't watch much TV is that I find watching TV "hard"), but it is anxiety I actually have, and I have decided I get to, you know, name and look at those, if I want to. And it became easier to actually sit down and play once I had figured out what I was nervous about.

In the end my worries turned out to be pretty much unfounded - it did not feel at all unmanageable to play, and was in fact extremely fun and engaging, especially once I got to the end of my first playthrough and was like "oh, okay, now I've seen one way things can go, and I can just do this again as many times as I want to see what other outcomes I can get". There is a list of possible achievements, which hint at possible outcomes, and if you go online you can also find a list that includes all the "hidden" achievements where some of the most interesting stuff is. :) I really like having an idea of the range of potential outcomes - in two and a half playthroughs I have unlocked 21 out of 68, or 410 out of a possible 1000 points, and I have ideas in mind for two more approaches I'd like to try after this one. A lot of the choices you get to make have to do with your feelings about things or your approach to solving problems, affecting a list of stats about your talents and your nature, which I think then affect what options you see later in the game or whether you succeed or fail in some of your later plot attempts. So in my three playthroughs so far I've tried to be somewhat different people with different priorities - pushing a little further away, each time, from my own natural impulses, playing characters who are less and less "like me". Like, the first playthrough, I think I was thinking "what is the best thing to do in this situation", and on subsequent playthroughs I've been more able to get into the mindset of "but what would this character do in this situation that might make for a good story (or get me more of those various achievements/outcomes)" even if it feels like a "bad idea" that "I"/my proxy in this world "shouldn't" do. (This is a tension I find interesting in narrative games, the space between player and character - there's a Lovecraftian text adventure I played with my friend D that forced an action I found abhorrent that was both upsetting to play at the time and remains by far the most memorable moment of any text adventure we ever played - which honestly seems like something that Rosenbaum might well have found interesting about the medium as well, and something that I hope awards voters find interesting about this game.) Subsequent playthroughs have definitely been a lot faster than the first one, because some of the events repeat verbatim (so I can, like, skim through that meal description) and some Rosenbaum is probably altering in subtle ways but I can't remember the exact wording from before enough to catch, so might as well skim until I get to something really different. (I have caught some of the differences though and they are neat!)

Anyways if you are interested in what it's actually about, it's set in the Pale of Settlement in 1881 (so if you loved Forbidden Book and would like to spend more time running around that world, this is perfect for you) and there is maybe going to be a pogrom and there is the question of an arranged marriage (so far I've been playing female-presenting nonbinary characters, because there are a whole bunch of neat options about ways the character can be trans and/or nonbinary and/or intersex, although for one of those two other playthroughs I have in mind I want to try Being A Dude which I think might be really different) and as you might guess from the title there is possibly a dybbuk and/or a golem. I might make another post sometime in the future about some of my different outcomes (and which I was or wasn't ever able to achieve) but I'll keep this one spoiler-free. Highly recommended if any of this sounds interesting to you at all.

Sheine Lende, Darcie Little Badger, 2024 YA novel prequel to Elatsoe. I ended up liking this a lot, although after a strong beginning I thought the middle got a little slow and muddled. But the last act was strong and I have ended up adding it to my Lodestar nominations.

Went over to C&G's house for the now-traditional (in that we've done it twice) discussion of potential Hugo nominees and opportunity for me to browse/skim/read in their graphic novel collection. I was reminded that Aliette de Bodard's Xuya universe is series-eligible (and I want to nominate it even though I haven't read the most recent installment yet; I've enjoyed a bunch of them and I'm sure I'll get there eventually) and that Sacha Lamb's The Forbidden Book counts as a YA.

Some comics:

When I Arrived at the Castle, Emily Carroll. I like Carroll's work but this was just too surreal and oblique, over the line for me into my not being able to make heads or tails of it at all. :(

Plain Jane and the Mermaid, Vera Brosgol. I'm a long-time Brosgol fan (going back to Return to Sender) and this was cute and fun and delightful and I'm adding it to my nominations.

Young Hag and the Witches' Quest, Isabel Greenberg. This has gone onto the to-read list but I wanted to mention the exciting new experience I had of picking up a comic and finding the text was too small for me to read comfortably. :( Hoopla tells me my library's collective daily borrow limit will reset at midnight and I'm hoping I can read it in my browser and just embiggen it as much as I want. Plan B involves my reading glasses, which I have hitherto only used for sewing.

The Deep Dark, Molly Ostertag. I read the first ~30 pages of this and I am *so hooked*.

A last round of recs. After this I think I'm going to make separate posts to think about nominating novelettes and short stories, and then one for other categories.

The Best Version of Yourself, Grant Collier, Clarkesworld. A particularly unsettling Rapture-of-the-Nerds, and a woman's relationship with her mother. Novelette.

I'm Not Disappointed Just Mad AKA The Heaviest Couch in the Known Universe, Daryl Gregory, Reactor. I thought this had big Men In Black energy, although apparently Gregory meant it as an homage to Iain Banks, except it didn't have the ugly mean-spiritedness of the one of those I ever read, except I know many of my friends didn't find Banks so off-putting, so, IDK! YMMV! Novelette.

The Jaxicans' Authentic Reconstruction of Taco Tuesday #37, Stephen Granade, Strange Horizons. The concept of authenticity, and the weirdness of being expected to represent it.

Another Old Country, Nadia Radovich, Apparition Lit. The power of stories, and a high school student who just wants to go running. Thanks to elysdir for the rec!

The Goddess of Loneliness and Misfortune, Anna Bendiy, khōréō. A return to a war-torn homeland.

Flannelfeet, Ursula Whitcher, Frivolous Comma. A story about portal fantasies. I'm very fond of stories about people who are trying to be logical and practical when encountering the fantastical, and this is very satisfying.