Books read, February 2024
Mar. 6th, 2024 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerEmbroidered Worlds: Fantastic Fiction from Ukraine & the Diaspora, ed. Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Olha Brylova, and Iryna Pasko. Anthology Kickstarted last year. I'm trying to read more anthologies in general, because I keep adding them to my wishlist and sometimes my bookshelf, but it's a bit hard; I would almost always rather pick up a novel.
This one is broad in tone, because its theme is (obviously) a particular community rather than a topic or even a genre. As with The Way Spring Arrives, you get everything from epic fantasy to literary contemporary fantasy to surrealist SF to horror, based on whatever it is the author in question likes to write. Naturally, that meant I didn't wind up enjoying all the stories, because some of them are just not my type of thing. But sometimes it's nice to get a broad cross-section.
Network Effect, Martha Wells. Murderbot does a novel! I was enjoying the novellas, but it was nice to get a more substantial plot to sink my teeth into, with more stages along the way. Very happy to see a certain character return, and I legit laughed at "Anybody who thinks machine intelligences don't feel emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now." And as much as I like Mensah, I was glad the plot didn't feature her; she's got her rhythm now with everybody's favorite rogue SecUnit, and in a lot of ways it's more interesting to make Murderbot deal with people it doesn't remotely have that rapport with (yet).
This book did also deliver more of what I was commenting on before, with regard to the remnants. Oddly, though, I still feel a little unsatisfied there -- not sure if it's just me, or what. That aspect still strikes me a bit like a Macguffin to make the real story go, and I don't know if it will stay there or eventually rear its head to be the actual focus of the narrative or not.
(Side note: I always find it pleasing when I think "I wonder if this story will ever do X" and then five minutes/fifty pages later, X happens. In this case, it was the whole business with Three. I am pleased by this kind of thing because it means I'm on the correct wavelength for the story, foreseeing what might happen without either waiting too long for a development or being disappointed because I can see a cool possibility the author appears to be ignoring.)
The Language of Power, Rosemary Kirstein. Thus do I join the ranks of those waiting for this series to be finished! Not to mention poring over the bits and pieces Kirstein has shared from books five and six over the years/deleted scenes from earlier volumes/etc. in an attempt to divine something from their entrails. I know a lot of readers these days are extremely cynical about starting to read a series that isn't yet complete (which is bad for the chances of many series ever being completed), and it doesn't exactly inspire confidence that this one was published in 2004, with nothing else released yet. But 1) keeping the torch alive through recruiting new readers improves the odds that Kirstein will be able to spare the time from paying the bills to finish the last two books and 2) as I said in a discussion with a friend about my Wheel of Time fannish days, some stories are actually very rewarding to read while they're incomplete, because they leave you time and space for speculation.
This particular volume does seem to raise more questions than it answers, most of which I can't really say anything about here other than obliquely, e.g. "wtf was it that Kieran saw." I joined a Steerswoman fan Discord after finishing this, and at least nobody else seems to have a solid answer, either? Though there is much theorizing, about that and other things. Which really is one of the great delights about this series, and why I find myself being much more spoiler-averse in talking about it to friends than I normally am: I have enjoyed piecing together the clues to date, and I don't want to rob anybody else of that experience. Especially since "gather evidence and theorize about it" is kinda what steerswomen are for.
1602, Neil Gaiman, ill. Andy Kubert, col. Richard Isanove. We've been watching Marvel's What If? show, and the "1602" episode reminded me that Gaiman once did a comics miniseries by that name (and of similar, though not remotely identical, plot). Being a nerd for that period of history, of course I was interested in picking it up.
It's . . . okay? Admittedly, I'm coming into this not from a comics background; most of these characters I know from various movies. But also, this struck me as way too overstuffed -- more than two dozen superheroes crammed into eight issues, like Gaiman felt he had to get as many fan favorites in there as possible. I would have preferred fewer characters and more time spent exploring each, so we get to enjoy seeing how their particular powers and personality manifest in this era. I also would have preferred it to be its own, freestanding thing, rather than having it explicitly tie back into the Marvel multiverse and the main canon; it would have been great to have a Captain America who was actually Native American. Ah well.
Riding the Trail of Tears, Blake M. Hausman. So, imagine that the old Oregon Trail game was a virtual reality simulation. Except that instead of being (implied white) pioneers heading off to colonize other lands, all players/customers are Cherokee Indians being forcibly removed west. And in addition to perils like dysentery, you also have to concern yourself with being murdered by soldiers. (But don't worry! When you die, you get to go talk to the Wise Old Medicine Man, who is programmed to spout exactly the kind of New Age-y platitudes you want to hear.)
I really liked this book for a while. The first chapter was disorienting, but in a way that I trusted would make sense later, once the story looped back to focus on the narrator and what's going on there. After that, you follow one of the simulation's tour guides, Tallulah Wilson (one-quarter Cherokee), as she takes yet another group through the Trail of Tears -- only for things to start going very, very wrong. That part was great: kind of horrifying (their tour is for some reason operating at a higher severity level than the customers signed up for), very full of tension, and also dropping all kinds of historical information along the way that, surprise surprise, my classes as a kid never mentioned.
Unfortunately, that didn't last. One of the tourists gets separated from the group -- not just separated in the simulation of the Trail of Tears, but off somewhere else entirely in the VR system -- and her alternating chapters are full of characters having the sort of frustrating conversations where the other people aren't explaining anything and mostly everybody is talking past each other, the teeth of the gears constantly slipping and grinding. And then once the book moves into its final act, it basically opts to go full lit-fic rather than spec-fic, with more cryptic/elliptical conversations, a focus entirely on Tallulah's personal transformation rather than the question of what is going on with the simulation, and only the most fleeting of nods back toward that first chapter and the narrator presented there, so that all of that winds up feeling like a metaphor rather than the actual genre content I expected it to be. Even the Homeland Security agents who get mentioned time and time again (because people think the stuff going wrong might be the work of terrorists) end up not really mattering, their questioning of Tallulah afterward essentially irrelevant to the conclusion.
So, very disappointing to me in the end. Possibly more interesting to those who like lit-fic better, who don't mind the stylistic quirks here and the way the genre elements are more set dressing than actual content. Me, I would have enjoyed a book that kept following the Trail of Tears, fleshing out a history I don't know well at all, exploring the decisions made in coding this experience for capitalist consumption, and answering more of my questions about the ghosts in the machine.
Hideki Smith, Demon Queller, A.J. Hartley with Hisako Osako and Kuma Hartley. A fracking endeavor in North Carolina inadvertently releases Japanese monsters; the story is partly about how a pair of half-Japanese siblings deal with the issue, and partly about why exactly there are Japanese monsters in the North Carolina mountains in the first place.
The plot, for the most part, is ordinary enough, in terms of the tropes and so forth you expect out of this type of contemporary fantasy; what made me enjoy this one was the characters. Caleb and Emily (aka Hideki and Kazuko, though they never use those names) have been raised by an aggressively assimilationist nisei mother and a mild-mannered English father in a dying rural town where their immigrant grandmother is the only other Asian person in sight. The reason Hisako Osako and Kuma Hartley are co-credited with A.J. Hartley on this book is that the latter is writing from secondhand experience; his Japanese wife and mixed-race kid don't have it as bad as the Smith family, thanks in part to living in a more cosmopolitan area, but Hartley is definitely trying to represent their perspective here, with their input.
But it isn't all racism and suffering, either. I actively enjoyed the sibling relationship between Caleb and the slightly older Emily, which strikes an excellent balance of plausible bickering over love, support, and entertaining banter. Caleb's almost total ignorance of everything Japanese is laid against Emily's stealth investigations in that direction, sneaking behind their mother's back to stay in touch with the heritage -- and the grandmother -- the mom is so determined to cut all ties with (for reasons that, yes, tie into the story). The cast of supporting characters is relatively small, in part because this is so short, but there's a foundation there for more in the future; this book wraps up its own plot while leaving the door open for future adventures.
Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants, James Vincent. Nonfiction that wasn't quite what I expected it to be -- not necessarily a bad thing. Although Vincent starts out by discussing things like where we get our oldest units of measurement from, how they were maintained, and what happened when you got different competing units within nominally the same country, he's equally or more interested in the political side of how those measurements get used. As a result, many of the chapters are about things like the attempts to measure people (the guy who invented the first IQ test actively didn't want it being used the way we've wound up using it! he was trying to identify and then help students who had trouble in the classroom!), land (the surveying of the U.S. and how that was used to further the colonial project to oust indigenous tribes), and the various statistics we track about ourselves now, through devices like smartwatches. There's an entire chapter on metricization, why it's never fully happened in the U.S. -- though we use metric here in more ways than you may realize, e.g. as the means by which we define our yards and gallons and so forth -- and why some people in the U.K. are still trying to roll it back.
So ultimately, the focus is pretty heavily on the role measurement plays in our lives and our politics, with a slightly lesser proportion of attention to the creation of the measures themselves. I read it pretty quickly but didn't find it super engaging overall; as far as "readable nonfiction" goes, I'd place this in the middle of the pack.
Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries, Heather Fawcett. I kept hearing about this book in the context of comparisons to the Memoirs of Lady Trent, and, well. Female scholar in the nineteenth century travels the world to study dragons, told in the form of a memoir; female scholar in the early twentieth century travels the world to study faeries, told in the form of diary entries. Yeah, I can't say the comparison isn't apt.
This was enjoyable, though possibly the similarities made me read critically in ways I might not have otherwise. For example, I didn't feel this leveraged the diary format as effectively as it could have; there were places where it seemed to be forgotten or missed opportunities to play with the way time and event interact in that setup. The academic world as presented also felt a little out of period (not to mention gets multiple things about Cambridge profoundly wrong). It did a good job of evoking its environment, though, and I liked several aspects of how the fae were presented. I'm not sure if I'll read the second, because I kept quibbling with it so much as I read, but this isn't a case where I regret how I spent my time.
Summerland, Hannu Rajaniemi. 1930s espionage between Britain and the Soviet Union over the Spanish Civil War, with the added twist that an afterlife has been confirmed to exist -- the Summerland -- and so the spying is conducted across the borders between life and death. As the tag line goes, how do you deal with a spy who's already dead?
I liked this pretty well up until the ending. A female SIS agent finds out from a Russian defector that there is a double agent in her organization's ranks; in contrast with many stories that have that setup, she's told outright who the mole is, and so the challenge is not to identify him. Instead she has to figure out how to stop him when he's politically very well protected. Meanwhile, you also get the mole's side of the story, showing why he went over to the other side. (Er, the Soviets, I mean. But also the Other Side, because he's dead.) There's lots of great detail around the period and the premise.
Where it fell down a bit for me was the conclusion. Information comes to light that changes the playing field quite a bit; that part was great, as I am a sucker for complex realignments of loyalties. But the information itself is kind of an enormous bombshell that just . . . doesn't get dealt with in this book. Or ever, I think, since as far as I know, Summerland is a standalone. I recognize that following up on this element would send the story in a very different direction from the espionage games it started with, but its insertion wound up feeling a bit like something enormous was needed to make the ending fall out in a certain fashion, and the consequences were left by the wayside. Still enjoyable overall, but it didn't quite stick the landing.
Suffer the Little Children, Ann Swinfen. I am now halfway through this historical series, and while this one is more successful than The Portuguese Affair -- once again, it makes the intelligent choice to focus largely on events in a historical context, rather than historical events so large the protagonist is only a spectator -- it's a structural mess. The title refers to the book's major focus on the problem of orphans and abused children in Elizabethan London, with lots of smaller strands having to do with Kit looking for ways to help them; that part was fine. Then there's a major plot about a rich five-year-old heiress being kidnapped for ransom, in which the kidnapper appears to be a bit of an idiot and also some of the street children play an excessively convenient role (they just happen to be in the right place at the right time to do something pivotal).
And then oh, btw, there's an assassination plot against Queen Elizabeth that has nothing whatsoever to do with the kid-related stuff, which gets mentioned at the start and then almost completely forgotten until the last 10% or so of the book. (At which point the identity of the assassin becomes screamingly obvious to the reader.) The only element vaguely stitching these two things together is the continued presence of Burbage's theatre company, because they're invited to perform at the Twelfth Night festivities where the assassination attempt will occur, and they help out with some of the kid stuff.
I'm still reading this series for the same reason I read Swinfen's Oxford Medieval Mysteries, which is that I enjoy the exploration of the period setting. She does her research and brings interesting nuggets of it into her stories. But much more than that other series, this one really does feel like three separate things awkwardly grafted together: why is a physician deeply involved in code-breaking and espionage and also theatre people keep showing up in the story even though they're not really relevant? (Those latter two could fit together more smoothly if Swinfen were more willing to make use of Marlowe, but in his brief appearances here he's presented as a thoroughly dislikable and anti-Semitic jerk, and since Kit is a Portuguese crypto-Jew of confused religious sentiment . . .) It might have worked better to choose two out of three, or to write multiple series in this time period.
System Collapse, Martha Wells. With this, I have run out of Murderbot to read. (Yes, I've tracked down the short stories.) I didn't expect this one to be such a close continuation of Network Effect; the latter ends in a fashion that made me expect new adventures somewhere else. I don't really mind, because the conflict here is genuinely a different one than in the previous book, despite being in the same place and involving the same situation; the hunt for the other installation was nicely tense, and then the revelation of what problem has to be solved was a good twist away from what you were being primed to expect.
In a way, though, I think I'm glad to be pausing for a while here. Although I've spaced the material out a bit, I did read the whole series in about two months, and I think I'm hitting the point at which I'm overdosing on the flavor. I was really hoping to see something here that, in hindsight, was unlikely to happen because it's at odds with the series' tone: for all the combat that happens in these books, I've realized I find them emotionally cozy. The stakes in that regard are things like "will Murderbot learn to accept other people caring about it." So when I realized I was mentally rooting for the story to go harder on that front, it felt like a signal that I've had enough of this series for the time being, and am in a mood for something different that will put its main characters through more of a wringer. I'll be happy to return here when there's more!
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/4FtxN4)
This one is broad in tone, because its theme is (obviously) a particular community rather than a topic or even a genre. As with The Way Spring Arrives, you get everything from epic fantasy to literary contemporary fantasy to surrealist SF to horror, based on whatever it is the author in question likes to write. Naturally, that meant I didn't wind up enjoying all the stories, because some of them are just not my type of thing. But sometimes it's nice to get a broad cross-section.
Network Effect, Martha Wells. Murderbot does a novel! I was enjoying the novellas, but it was nice to get a more substantial plot to sink my teeth into, with more stages along the way. Very happy to see a certain character return, and I legit laughed at "Anybody who thinks machine intelligences don't feel emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now." And as much as I like Mensah, I was glad the plot didn't feature her; she's got her rhythm now with everybody's favorite rogue SecUnit, and in a lot of ways it's more interesting to make Murderbot deal with people it doesn't remotely have that rapport with (yet).
This book did also deliver more of what I was commenting on before, with regard to the remnants. Oddly, though, I still feel a little unsatisfied there -- not sure if it's just me, or what. That aspect still strikes me a bit like a Macguffin to make the real story go, and I don't know if it will stay there or eventually rear its head to be the actual focus of the narrative or not.
(Side note: I always find it pleasing when I think "I wonder if this story will ever do X" and then five minutes/fifty pages later, X happens. In this case, it was the whole business with Three. I am pleased by this kind of thing because it means I'm on the correct wavelength for the story, foreseeing what might happen without either waiting too long for a development or being disappointed because I can see a cool possibility the author appears to be ignoring.)
The Language of Power, Rosemary Kirstein. Thus do I join the ranks of those waiting for this series to be finished! Not to mention poring over the bits and pieces Kirstein has shared from books five and six over the years/deleted scenes from earlier volumes/etc. in an attempt to divine something from their entrails. I know a lot of readers these days are extremely cynical about starting to read a series that isn't yet complete (which is bad for the chances of many series ever being completed), and it doesn't exactly inspire confidence that this one was published in 2004, with nothing else released yet. But 1) keeping the torch alive through recruiting new readers improves the odds that Kirstein will be able to spare the time from paying the bills to finish the last two books and 2) as I said in a discussion with a friend about my Wheel of Time fannish days, some stories are actually very rewarding to read while they're incomplete, because they leave you time and space for speculation.
This particular volume does seem to raise more questions than it answers, most of which I can't really say anything about here other than obliquely, e.g. "wtf was it that Kieran saw." I joined a Steerswoman fan Discord after finishing this, and at least nobody else seems to have a solid answer, either? Though there is much theorizing, about that and other things. Which really is one of the great delights about this series, and why I find myself being much more spoiler-averse in talking about it to friends than I normally am: I have enjoyed piecing together the clues to date, and I don't want to rob anybody else of that experience. Especially since "gather evidence and theorize about it" is kinda what steerswomen are for.
1602, Neil Gaiman, ill. Andy Kubert, col. Richard Isanove. We've been watching Marvel's What If? show, and the "1602" episode reminded me that Gaiman once did a comics miniseries by that name (and of similar, though not remotely identical, plot). Being a nerd for that period of history, of course I was interested in picking it up.
It's . . . okay? Admittedly, I'm coming into this not from a comics background; most of these characters I know from various movies. But also, this struck me as way too overstuffed -- more than two dozen superheroes crammed into eight issues, like Gaiman felt he had to get as many fan favorites in there as possible. I would have preferred fewer characters and more time spent exploring each, so we get to enjoy seeing how their particular powers and personality manifest in this era. I also would have preferred it to be its own, freestanding thing, rather than having it explicitly tie back into the Marvel multiverse and the main canon; it would have been great to have a Captain America who was actually Native American. Ah well.
Riding the Trail of Tears, Blake M. Hausman. So, imagine that the old Oregon Trail game was a virtual reality simulation. Except that instead of being (implied white) pioneers heading off to colonize other lands, all players/customers are Cherokee Indians being forcibly removed west. And in addition to perils like dysentery, you also have to concern yourself with being murdered by soldiers. (But don't worry! When you die, you get to go talk to the Wise Old Medicine Man, who is programmed to spout exactly the kind of New Age-y platitudes you want to hear.)
I really liked this book for a while. The first chapter was disorienting, but in a way that I trusted would make sense later, once the story looped back to focus on the narrator and what's going on there. After that, you follow one of the simulation's tour guides, Tallulah Wilson (one-quarter Cherokee), as she takes yet another group through the Trail of Tears -- only for things to start going very, very wrong. That part was great: kind of horrifying (their tour is for some reason operating at a higher severity level than the customers signed up for), very full of tension, and also dropping all kinds of historical information along the way that, surprise surprise, my classes as a kid never mentioned.
Unfortunately, that didn't last. One of the tourists gets separated from the group -- not just separated in the simulation of the Trail of Tears, but off somewhere else entirely in the VR system -- and her alternating chapters are full of characters having the sort of frustrating conversations where the other people aren't explaining anything and mostly everybody is talking past each other, the teeth of the gears constantly slipping and grinding. And then once the book moves into its final act, it basically opts to go full lit-fic rather than spec-fic, with more cryptic/elliptical conversations, a focus entirely on Tallulah's personal transformation rather than the question of what is going on with the simulation, and only the most fleeting of nods back toward that first chapter and the narrator presented there, so that all of that winds up feeling like a metaphor rather than the actual genre content I expected it to be. Even the Homeland Security agents who get mentioned time and time again (because people think the stuff going wrong might be the work of terrorists) end up not really mattering, their questioning of Tallulah afterward essentially irrelevant to the conclusion.
So, very disappointing to me in the end. Possibly more interesting to those who like lit-fic better, who don't mind the stylistic quirks here and the way the genre elements are more set dressing than actual content. Me, I would have enjoyed a book that kept following the Trail of Tears, fleshing out a history I don't know well at all, exploring the decisions made in coding this experience for capitalist consumption, and answering more of my questions about the ghosts in the machine.
Hideki Smith, Demon Queller, A.J. Hartley with Hisako Osako and Kuma Hartley. A fracking endeavor in North Carolina inadvertently releases Japanese monsters; the story is partly about how a pair of half-Japanese siblings deal with the issue, and partly about why exactly there are Japanese monsters in the North Carolina mountains in the first place.
The plot, for the most part, is ordinary enough, in terms of the tropes and so forth you expect out of this type of contemporary fantasy; what made me enjoy this one was the characters. Caleb and Emily (aka Hideki and Kazuko, though they never use those names) have been raised by an aggressively assimilationist nisei mother and a mild-mannered English father in a dying rural town where their immigrant grandmother is the only other Asian person in sight. The reason Hisako Osako and Kuma Hartley are co-credited with A.J. Hartley on this book is that the latter is writing from secondhand experience; his Japanese wife and mixed-race kid don't have it as bad as the Smith family, thanks in part to living in a more cosmopolitan area, but Hartley is definitely trying to represent their perspective here, with their input.
But it isn't all racism and suffering, either. I actively enjoyed the sibling relationship between Caleb and the slightly older Emily, which strikes an excellent balance of plausible bickering over love, support, and entertaining banter. Caleb's almost total ignorance of everything Japanese is laid against Emily's stealth investigations in that direction, sneaking behind their mother's back to stay in touch with the heritage -- and the grandmother -- the mom is so determined to cut all ties with (for reasons that, yes, tie into the story). The cast of supporting characters is relatively small, in part because this is so short, but there's a foundation there for more in the future; this book wraps up its own plot while leaving the door open for future adventures.
Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants, James Vincent. Nonfiction that wasn't quite what I expected it to be -- not necessarily a bad thing. Although Vincent starts out by discussing things like where we get our oldest units of measurement from, how they were maintained, and what happened when you got different competing units within nominally the same country, he's equally or more interested in the political side of how those measurements get used. As a result, many of the chapters are about things like the attempts to measure people (the guy who invented the first IQ test actively didn't want it being used the way we've wound up using it! he was trying to identify and then help students who had trouble in the classroom!), land (the surveying of the U.S. and how that was used to further the colonial project to oust indigenous tribes), and the various statistics we track about ourselves now, through devices like smartwatches. There's an entire chapter on metricization, why it's never fully happened in the U.S. -- though we use metric here in more ways than you may realize, e.g. as the means by which we define our yards and gallons and so forth -- and why some people in the U.K. are still trying to roll it back.
So ultimately, the focus is pretty heavily on the role measurement plays in our lives and our politics, with a slightly lesser proportion of attention to the creation of the measures themselves. I read it pretty quickly but didn't find it super engaging overall; as far as "readable nonfiction" goes, I'd place this in the middle of the pack.
Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries, Heather Fawcett. I kept hearing about this book in the context of comparisons to the Memoirs of Lady Trent, and, well. Female scholar in the nineteenth century travels the world to study dragons, told in the form of a memoir; female scholar in the early twentieth century travels the world to study faeries, told in the form of diary entries. Yeah, I can't say the comparison isn't apt.
This was enjoyable, though possibly the similarities made me read critically in ways I might not have otherwise. For example, I didn't feel this leveraged the diary format as effectively as it could have; there were places where it seemed to be forgotten or missed opportunities to play with the way time and event interact in that setup. The academic world as presented also felt a little out of period (not to mention gets multiple things about Cambridge profoundly wrong). It did a good job of evoking its environment, though, and I liked several aspects of how the fae were presented. I'm not sure if I'll read the second, because I kept quibbling with it so much as I read, but this isn't a case where I regret how I spent my time.
Summerland, Hannu Rajaniemi. 1930s espionage between Britain and the Soviet Union over the Spanish Civil War, with the added twist that an afterlife has been confirmed to exist -- the Summerland -- and so the spying is conducted across the borders between life and death. As the tag line goes, how do you deal with a spy who's already dead?
I liked this pretty well up until the ending. A female SIS agent finds out from a Russian defector that there is a double agent in her organization's ranks; in contrast with many stories that have that setup, she's told outright who the mole is, and so the challenge is not to identify him. Instead she has to figure out how to stop him when he's politically very well protected. Meanwhile, you also get the mole's side of the story, showing why he went over to the other side. (Er, the Soviets, I mean. But also the Other Side, because he's dead.) There's lots of great detail around the period and the premise.
Where it fell down a bit for me was the conclusion. Information comes to light that changes the playing field quite a bit; that part was great, as I am a sucker for complex realignments of loyalties. But the information itself is kind of an enormous bombshell that just . . . doesn't get dealt with in this book. Or ever, I think, since as far as I know, Summerland is a standalone. I recognize that following up on this element would send the story in a very different direction from the espionage games it started with, but its insertion wound up feeling a bit like something enormous was needed to make the ending fall out in a certain fashion, and the consequences were left by the wayside. Still enjoyable overall, but it didn't quite stick the landing.
Suffer the Little Children, Ann Swinfen. I am now halfway through this historical series, and while this one is more successful than The Portuguese Affair -- once again, it makes the intelligent choice to focus largely on events in a historical context, rather than historical events so large the protagonist is only a spectator -- it's a structural mess. The title refers to the book's major focus on the problem of orphans and abused children in Elizabethan London, with lots of smaller strands having to do with Kit looking for ways to help them; that part was fine. Then there's a major plot about a rich five-year-old heiress being kidnapped for ransom, in which the kidnapper appears to be a bit of an idiot and also some of the street children play an excessively convenient role (they just happen to be in the right place at the right time to do something pivotal).
And then oh, btw, there's an assassination plot against Queen Elizabeth that has nothing whatsoever to do with the kid-related stuff, which gets mentioned at the start and then almost completely forgotten until the last 10% or so of the book. (At which point the identity of the assassin becomes screamingly obvious to the reader.) The only element vaguely stitching these two things together is the continued presence of Burbage's theatre company, because they're invited to perform at the Twelfth Night festivities where the assassination attempt will occur, and they help out with some of the kid stuff.
I'm still reading this series for the same reason I read Swinfen's Oxford Medieval Mysteries, which is that I enjoy the exploration of the period setting. She does her research and brings interesting nuggets of it into her stories. But much more than that other series, this one really does feel like three separate things awkwardly grafted together: why is a physician deeply involved in code-breaking and espionage and also theatre people keep showing up in the story even though they're not really relevant? (Those latter two could fit together more smoothly if Swinfen were more willing to make use of Marlowe, but in his brief appearances here he's presented as a thoroughly dislikable and anti-Semitic jerk, and since Kit is a Portuguese crypto-Jew of confused religious sentiment . . .) It might have worked better to choose two out of three, or to write multiple series in this time period.
System Collapse, Martha Wells. With this, I have run out of Murderbot to read. (Yes, I've tracked down the short stories.) I didn't expect this one to be such a close continuation of Network Effect; the latter ends in a fashion that made me expect new adventures somewhere else. I don't really mind, because the conflict here is genuinely a different one than in the previous book, despite being in the same place and involving the same situation; the hunt for the other installation was nicely tense, and then the revelation of what problem has to be solved was a good twist away from what you were being primed to expect.
In a way, though, I think I'm glad to be pausing for a while here. Although I've spaced the material out a bit, I did read the whole series in about two months, and I think I'm hitting the point at which I'm overdosing on the flavor. I was really hoping to see something here that, in hindsight, was unlikely to happen because it's at odds with the series' tone: for all the combat that happens in these books, I've realized I find them emotionally cozy. The stakes in that regard are things like "will Murderbot learn to accept other people caring about it." So when I realized I was mentally rooting for the story to go harder on that front, it felt like a signal that I've had enough of this series for the time being, and am in a mood for something different that will put its main characters through more of a wringer. I'll be happy to return here when there's more!
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/4FtxN4)
