Matthew's Journal

I've reached the point of noticing I have too many books I've not written up, and it's getting to be long enough ago I'll forget about them...

Sleep No More & The Innocent Sleep, Seanan McGuire (and the included novellas). These follow on from the cliffhanger ending of Be The Serpent, with the latter book telling the same story again, but from Tybalt's point of view. I enjoyed both of these, although the first I found myself feeling a bit like I knew roughly where the story had to end up and a bit frustrated about it not getting there yet. I felt like McGuire's grasp of Tybalt's voice wasn't quite solid at times in The Innocent Sleep, which is a shame given the story was always going to suffer somewhat from us knowing most of the plot points already.

There Is No Antimemetics Division, QNTM. Everyone knows what a meme is, but this SF/horror book is about anti-memes - entities and ideas that cause you to forget about their existence. The Antimemetics Division is trying to manage the risk that antimemetics pose to human society (and has developed some capability to resist amnestics), and recruits operatives who are able to rapidly re-make plans that they have forgotten about. This is an interesting and sometimes disturbing read; I don't think the final sections quite work, but the earlier parts are really good.

Bloodmarked, Tracy Deonn. This was on the Lodestar shortlist, but I didn't get to it before the voter deadline. It's the second of the series, and I suffered somewhat from not having read the first. It's a modern Arthurian story set in the US, with a black teenage girl as protagonist, and is substantially about generational trauma from slavery. For me it suffered a bit too much from the protagonist making bad decisions (though they were plausibly in-character), but it was still an engaging read.

This is the final part of the Scholomance triology, all of which have been nominated for the Lodestar Award. To my mind, it's the best of the trilogy; both in that there was less of the self-sabotage that irked me in previous books, and that it creates a sense of inevitable crawling horror about the way the world is ordered. The way wizarding society has set itself up is awful, but you also see how it has ended up that way, and that holds a mirror up to our society and the way we persuade ourselves it's OK to treat outsiders the way we do, and persuade ourselves the things we do to make ourselves comfortable are fine really.

I did spot some of the major plot points coming, but I think that may have been part of the point of this book - the chickens coming home to roost, previous books' events now being explained, and the reader can see El's denial slowly peeling away. Despite all of which, and the fact that there isn't a happy ever after, there is also hope at the end, that people trying to do the right thing can make a difference.

Also, points for canon bisexual character where it isn't a Big Deal :)

1. Nope
   
2. Everything Everywhere All at Once
   
3. Turning Red
   
4. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
   
5. Severance (Season 1)
   
6. Avatar: The Way of Water

I'm afraid I found these difficult to rank, since none of them really stood out for me in a good way...

This is the last entry on the Hugo Award shortlist for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. I'm not sure it's really practicable to compare a 9-episode series with a single feature film, but there we are.

I like the concept behind Severance, but found the tonal shifts a bit jarring; and the series ends on a cliffhanger rather than a satisfactory resolution, all of which left me rather underwhelmed.

The premise is that technology has been developed that lets an employer "sever" the work and not-work memories of employees - at work the "innie" has no knowledge of what happens outside the office, and the "outie" likewise has no memory of what they do at work. Which, of course, leads to rumours about the sort of top-secret things that "severed" employees might be doing that must be kept secret. ( Spoilers )

A rather depressing set, this.

1. Rabbit Test, by Samantha Mills. An angry story, which feels very contemporary in its politics.
   
2. Zhurong on Mars, Regina Kanyu Wang. Based on a Chinese folk tale, but set on Mars; I'm not sure why "they" wouldn't have worked for Zhurong.
   
3. D.I.Y., John Wiswell. A rather bleak future, where IP is more important than drinking water.
   
4. Resurrection, Ren Qing, translated by Blake Stone-Banks. Another bleak story; a soldier is brought back to life, but to what end?
   
5. The White Cliff, by Lu Ban. Interesting reflections on palliative care, spoiled by a very bad translation.
   
6. On the Razor’s Edge, by Jiang Bo. A hazardous space mission, again let down by the translation.
   

My voting order for these:

1. We Built This City, Marie Vibbert. The value of important but menial work; join a union!
   
2. If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You, John Chu. A cute story, addressing some serious issues (race & racialised policing; coming out; the media).
   
3. A Dream of Electric Mothers, Wole Talabi. What would well-meaning advice be like if it came from all your ancestors?
   
4. The Difference Between Love and Time, Catherynne M. Valente. A lovely story, some witty moments, but I wasn't quite convinced.
   
5. Murder By Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness, S.L. Huang. A fair enough take on the ethics of "AI" systems, but I don't think the fictional parts added much to this.

I won't rank The Space-Time Painter, by Hai Ya, because it's not available in any language I understand.

I've read all of these now, so need to rank them for voting purposes. Novels first:

1. Nettle & Bone, T. Kingfisher
   
2. The Spare Man, Mary Robinette Kowal
   
3. Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
   
4. Legends & Lattes, Travis Baldree
   
5. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
   
6. The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi

I'm pretty clear about my first and last choices here, but the ordering of 2/3/4 was quite tricky.

Novellas:

1. A Mirror Mended, Alix E. Harrow
   
2. Ogres, Adrian Tchaikovsky
   
3. What Moves the Dead, T. Kingfisher
   
4. Even Though I Knew the End, C.L. Polk
   
5. Into the Riverlands, Nghi Vo
   
6. Where the Drowned Girls Go, Seanan McGuire

This was a very strong field, and I struggled to rank it.

I really enjoyed A Spindle Splintered (I ranked it first for the Novella Hugo last year), and hadn't realised this was a sequel to it until I started reading. So that was a nice surprise :)

Again, this is a feminist multi-verse based re-examination of a fairy tale, that also asks about who is and isn't the protagonist in the stories they find themselves in. It's also a reminder that being the friend of a hero sucks!

I don't know how many books like this Harrow can write whilst still keeping them fresh and interesting, but I thought this one works really well.

Avatar: The Way of Water is a sprawling spectacle of a film - over 3 hours long, and a sight to behold (I imagine it is much more impressive in a cinema in 3D, but I'm still not sure cinemas are sensible given Covid). Unfortunately, there isn't really the plot to support such an epic - both not enough plot for a film of this length, and also not enough quality to the plot - it was pretty predictable, saggy, and rather repetitive (even one of the characters complains about being tied to a ship's railings again). I'm not sure there's a lot thematically new here from the previous film (which I watched recently), though I can't really object to "commercial whaling is bad" as a message. The model of fatherhood was pretty weak, though - is "protecting" really all there is to it?

Nope is an altogether different piece of work - a horror film with UFOs that's also about our love of spectacle, how people deal with trauma, and the erasure of black contributions to industry. It also has a great sense of alien menace; but unlike some horror where the antagonist is essentially random, here there is some sense to what is going on. Some good funny moments, too. I'm not quite sure it hangs together as a coherent story, though - there's almost too much going on, with some of the backstories, and the various different character arcs.

This is a detective story with occult elements, at least noir-adjacent. A magical detective discovers that a murder case is more sinister than it first appears, and that powerful occult players are at work. Plus it's 1940s Chicago, so they have to keep aspects of their private life hidden.

This is a pacy story with some well-drawn characters, and a nicely twisty plot. The ending works nicely unless you stop and think about it too much. ( major spoilers )