Giacomo Sartori's BUG (tr by Frederika Randall)

OK, given my known and recently expressed proclivities, you all might be forgiven for thinking that this is yet another bit of entomologically-themed speculative fiction in translation, but you're (mostly) wrong this time: the bug in the title of Giacomo Sartori's Bug refers more to an error in computer code* than to an arthopod. Mostly.

It is also the name of an entity that befriends our narrator, a nameless (again!) boy growing up in a singularly unique family with a father whose cover job is analyzing data for Nutella but whose actual job is terrorist hunting**; a Buddhist mother who is also a beekeeper and very much what holds his weird family together; a brother they call IQ in real life but is better known in cyberspace as Robin Hood and is a 13-year-old hacker god who is secretly building a robot and whose expertise daddy passes off as his own to not-Nutella; and a pot-smoking grandfather who used to be an anarchist but is now an amateur naturalist who studies earthworms and other nematodes.

Our hero, the baby of the family, is deaf, and his deafness is poorly accommodated at school, where no one even makes an effort to let him lip read, let alone learn to sign to him; he's just expected magically to keep up anyway (there is an incompetent teaching aid assisgned to help him but that person never makes an actual appearance in the book). The resulting misunderstandings, and the boy's poor judgment as to how best to make himself understood (by biting people) have left the poor kid with a reputation for behavioral problems even before the fateful day when his mother and closest confidante gets into a terrible car accident and winds up in a coma.

The book, therefore, is the boy dictating to a family friend what amounts to a blow-by-blow account of his life as addressed to his hospitalized and unconscious mother, but kind of played for laughs.

Meanwhile an entity starts contacting him, just as hilarious pranks begin to manifest at the expense of the family's adversaries. The entity doesn't outright claim credit for them -- at first it can't because its understanding of language is too poor to convey abstract thought, even to one such as our boy, but later on when its mastery is assured, it still plays coy about how the malignant neighbor/landlord's smart sprinkler system suddenly started spraying water on all of his fruit trees in the dead of winter, producing a rapturously beautiful effect the boy describes to us in lyrical prose until the weight of the frozen water starts snapping all of the trees' branches, or how a teacher who has made our boy especially misterable at school suddenly has a fake dating profile on a site for explicit golddiggers, or...

The pranks are all cybernetic in nature, so it's easy to guess the nature of the entity pretty early on, unless one has never read science fiction before, but that doesn't stop a rather charming relationship from developing, one in which our boy takes some solace as his world continues to fall apart.

If this all sounds familiar, well, it is, but despite that the book has some surprises for us. I was dead certain that BUG was going to turn out to be a certain thing that would end up doing a certain other thing, but that's not at all what happened, to my delight, for instance.

And it's a book that's just fun to read. The combination of Sartori's sense of humor and wonder and Frederika Randall's taste leaves us with a lot of vividly weird language and startling metaphors to ponder. For instance, late in the book our boy describes his return to school one day thusly:

When I got to school I was preparing to imitate a piece of bric-a-brac nobody pays any attention to, like those birds that peck away on wall clocks.

The weirdness is also on brilliant display in the chapter titles, all of which are directly quoted in the text of their chapters. "Hunkered down like an alligator in the mud of the cushions," "Words tied up in the white sheet of silence," "A corpse bought on Amazon" and my favorite, "Nutella isn't a cyber-weapon." Sure thing, young'un. That's why they have your father on their IT payroll... 

*Though of course that term derives from an incident when an actual insect messed up an early computer back in the days when computers were things that filled entire rooms.

**I imagine him as very much a colleague of those lovable misfits in the short-lived but much-missed data-thriller drama, Rubicon, and so imagine him as being played by James Badge Dale.

Clark Thomas Carlton's THE GHOST ANTS OF GRYLLADESH

It's been a while since I had a new "Antasy" to enjoy -- though it's rather bittersweet to be doing so right after we lost the great E.O. Wilson -- but at long last Clark Thomas Carlton has come through with the third in his bizarre and delightful series that began with Prophets of the Ghost Ants and continued in The Prophet of the Termite God. When I first encountered these books, I described them as "Dune with ant-riders" but as we move into this third novel it has so much more in common with George R.R. Martin's big unfinished fantasy series that this could almost be called "A Feast for Ant-Crows" or some such. Except, you know, not horrifyingly repetitive.

It is, however, as grim as AFfC for much of it. We'll leave aside for the moment some questionable tactics in this continuation of our boy Anand's quest to save the people he persuaded into a new way of life way back in the first novel (I guess there's neither a Security Council nor any Geneva Conventions in his world) because they are employed defensively (but make for rough reading if you're at all sensitive to things like biological or chemical warfare because trigger warning if you are); those aside this is still the darkest view of this world, in which humans have evolved into near-microscopic creatures who ride ants like horses (see cover art) and have entered into more-or-less symbiotic relationships with many other insects despite most of those insects being much larger than humans are, that we've yet seen.

We get a somewhat bewildering array of new and returning POV characters who, I guarentee, will send you scurrying back to the helpful dramatis personae at book's beginning just to keep straight*.  They all have very intense adventures once again as the world of the Antasy reels from the wars fought in prior novels, only to find itself embroiled in new conflicts as forces held down or blocked by the evil Hulkrite Empire are now free to seek revenge, conquer lost territory, and wreak general havoc on Anand and his forces -- and on the civilians who have been caught in the middle of it all.

Like in GRRM's opus, we get the perspectives of people on all sides of the conflict(s), including a refugee princess (Trelanna) who finally, after three novels, garners reader sympathy (she suffered plenty in the prior novels, but elicited schadenfreude rather than pity or sorrow, at least from this reader), not by enacting a redemption arc so much as just really becoming abject and pitiful as she gets swept up in an invading army's progress to attack her homeland and has a forced marriage to its leader to look forward to once her unborn children (by Anand!) are got rid of, one way or the other. Did I mention that The Ghost Ants of Grylladesh is grim? The Ghost Ants of Grylladesh is grim.

Of course, Trellana's mother Polexima, who joined with Anand in establishing a new nation based on freedom, tolerance, and an abandonment of her native land's absurdly rigid hierarchy, in previous novels, had it even worse and bore up much better, never wavering in her commitment to the new way even when hamstrung and hobbled and repeatedly raped by the terrifying army Anand defeated in the second book, so feeling for Trellana only goes so far.

Then there's Anand's cousin-I-think Terraclon, elevated last novel to what amounts to the pope of the religion devoted to Goddess Ant Queen and the series' sole LGBTQA+ representation (unless we count [REDACTED] the non-POV character who becomes his lover by this novel's end), who has pretty much held Anand's forces together while Anand has hared off on weird mission after weird mission on the back of a high-flying locust. Pleckoo, the main villain of the last two novels, gets a quick cameo but is basically fridged, while a new royal lady, Fewlenray has quite an arc of her own while, in one of the things I like best about Clark Thomas Carlton's work (besides the arthopods, of course), several villains get point of view chapters that win, if not our sympathy, at least our empathy as their plans clash with Anand's, assuring that no matter how this ends, somebody we've come to love, like a little, or at least respect, is going to be brought low and we'll cry along with them at least a little bit -- recalling that arch-villain Pleckoo started out his Antastic life as Anand's best friend and cousin, after all...

But the novel is still very much about Anand, whose character deepens and becomes yet more complicated as circumstances and his own shortcomings tempt him into atrocities of his own. He is still that poor nobody from the midden at heart, and while his time among the freedom-loving Dranverites taught him a lot and gave him the courage to share what he learned with his former society, he still reacts at times like that scared and bullied young man, even as he also copes with the fact that both of his very pregnant wives are captives of the very hostile nations who threaten his co-creation of Bee-jor. He becomes a little less lovable but a whole lot more believable in this book, does Anand. Would you have made different choices? Could you have thought of better solutions to his problems?

The novel ends on even more cliffhangers than did The Prophet of the Termite God, so I sure do hope CTC doesn't take our least favorite page out of GRRM's book. Write fast and stay healthy, Clark!

*Indeed, I dithered as I read over whether or not I should backtrack and read The Prophet of the Termite God again because for a lot of these characters, I was uncertain about whether they were completely new for the third novel, or just newly prominent and having emerged from the background of the previous two. I think I should have backtracked.

Kij Johnson's AT THE MOUTH OF THE RIVER OF BEES

"Where does it begin?" she says at last. "Where does it end?"

He is slow answering and she knows he is as trapped in its weird beauty as she. "No one knows," he says: "Or no one says. My dad used to tell me tales, but I don't know that he knew, either. Maybe there's a spring of bees somewhere, and it sinks underground somewhere else. Maybe the bees gather, do this thing, and then go home. There's no ocean of bees anyway." 

No guesses as to what attracted me to Kij Johnson's fantastic short story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees. My proclivities are well known to you all by now. But I mean, come on, just look at this cover. And yes, I think this bee's mouthparts look kind of weevil-y, but bees come in lots and lots of varieties and mutations and variations and I mean, she's just cute, right?

Johnson first won my devotion with her extraordinary Lovecraftian novella The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe, which took inspiration from Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, a piece HPL neither revised from its early draft nor got published in his lifetime, but which might just be my favorite thing he ever wrote and yes of course at least part of it is because Chad Fifer sold me on the space-faring kitty cats. For her take on this crazypants universe, Johnson gave me a childless spinster just like me as a tour guide, and I'm forever grateful for the resulting adventure.

So my expectations for this story collection were quite high going in, and I'm delighted to say they were more than met! For one thing, Johnson shows mastery in pretty much every sub-genre of speculative fiction here, meaning there is guaranteed something for every reader here. For another, she is that kind of writer best for short stories, a master at quickly sketched world-building that still feels complete even in just a few lines, the better to get on with the storytelling. Not everbody can do that, but Kij Johnson sure can.

I'm not going to discuss every story in the collection, though every one of them has something astonishing or thought-provoking or just plan cool to offer and only one of them is one I'd skip if there's a next time I read this collection because yuck (but yuck, too, can be a testimony to a writer's powers!).

But let's talk about themes for a moment. One is loss; many of these stories are explicitly about losing something, someone, or a whole lifestyle, and how to cope with it (not always gracefully) or, in one notable case, postpone it for a while. Another is animals, anthropomorphized or not. Another is Asia; several of these stories have explicitly Japanese or generally Asian-inspired settings and bear that extra burden of "writing the other" but bear it very well indeed.

Best among the animal stories (though not quite of the Asian) is the delightful "The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles" and no, no evocation of that song is necessary, thank you. Our little heroine, Small Cat, does not fall down at anybody's door, for a start. Raised in an abandoned city house and garden in Japan by a large family of feral cats who've developed their own take on fudoki, to which she hopes to add someday, Small Cat sees the downfall of this feline paradise and decides to live out a story from her ancestral fudoki about The Cat From the North, in reverse; instead of coming from the north, she will go north, eventually going as far north as a cat can go without crossing an ocean. Her adventures along the way are by turns exciting, heartbreaking, charming and adorable.

Of the Asian themed ones, "The Empress Jingu Fishes" is a standout. The titular empress is a shaman, blessed/cursed by the gods with complete and perfect foresight. She knows when she gets married that her husband would not live long, so she loved him as well and as fiercely as she could. She knows that he will die while their kingdom is at war with a neighboring one (though not the one the gods had commanded them, through her, to attack) and before their son could even be born. She knows that their son will be a great emperor in his time and will eventually be elevated to godhood. She knows all of this while she sits by a spring and fashions a line, hook and some bait to try to catch a trout that she doesn't need purely to feel at least a tiny illusion of having a bit of free will; she is powerless against the forces that took her husband and will take her son and wants to kill something, but this is her sole opportunity to do so. It's an exquisite tale.

Other stories are closer to our own experience, or seem that way at first. For instance, "Names for Water" seems like a mundane slow burn about a student looking for excuses to skip or even drop her math class and change her major, but turns out to have galaxy-spanning impact and implications by the time its few pages are off the paper and in the reader's head. For all we know, little things like this are happening every time our cell phones ring. But probably not. Kij Johnson is much better at writing realities than the hacks in charge of the one I live in are.

She's also good at 17th century naturalist pastische, as it turns out. "MyWife Reincarnated as a Solitaire - Exposition on the Flaws in My Wife's Character - The Nature of the Bird - The Possible Causes - Her Final Disposition." is just that, both a biting satire on the pompous and patriarchal style of narration fashionable at the time and a delightful poke in the eye of the kind of patriarch who wrote that way, as it tells the story of how his much disliked wife apparently reincarnated as an extinct flightless bird, as the title gives away, but has gotten a last laugh on him right under his nose the whole time. Henry Fielding would applaud. And possibly bite his thumb at Kij Johnson, sir. As such.

Then there's the title story, "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" in which a young woman and her ailing German shepherd find themselves on a road trip like no other, compelled to follow the course of an annual migrating bee swarm so large and long that it blocks major highways for days on its northward course. What she finds at the end of the journey is terribly bittersweet and doesn't have a whole lot to do with bees, but like in my favorite Paul Valery poem, the bee isn't really the point; it's a "tiny gold alarm" there to sting us into taking necessary action. For some reason, I pictured this as a major motion picture starring Dakota Johnson. Your milage may vary.

A final favorite I'll mention, and the story that occupies the biggest chunk of the volume, is the extensively imagined and constructed "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" which takes us either to a fantasy world or a science fiction one -- it doesn't really matter which -- in which a society at roughly the medieval level of technological development must contend with a unique geographical feature if its to extend the benefits of civilization to its outskirts and other side. Not only is there a vast river of water dividing the Empire, but over top of it is another, more dangerous and weirder, river of "mist", but it's not like any mist we've ever encountered. It flows along the course of the water but it's denser than water, dense enough to row boats across but corrosive AF and prone to strange disturbances and, oh yes, home to monsters the locals call Fish but are unlike any fish you or I are thinking about. For a start, the Big Ones could destroy whole towns if disturbed enough to surface. Our fish out of water coming to this mist-river is an architect there to build a vast suspension bridge across it, the first of its kind. The majority of the story concerns this effort of his and of those he hires to help him, including two members of a family whose hereditary duty has been to ferry people and cargo across this river, who won't be needed if this giant construction project is successful. This story I'd especially recommend to people who like reading about logistics and mundane projects like building. I promise you it's not boring for those who aren't into that sort of thing; just that those who are, will especially like this one.

There are also stories about marauding tribes in another fantasy-or-sci-fi setting (and how I love that Johnson is comfortable letting these settings of hers be either, just fine with the ambiguity), a bureaucrat who is being groomed for minor godhood but doesn't want to leave his mistress, a family of foxes who beguile a young husband into madness in order to survive, and an exceptionally brutal Galactic empire and how its tactics for keeping everybody unified actually affect populations at its edges. Like I said, there's not a bad story in the bunch, though if graphic and weird sex isn't your cup of tea, maybe skip "Spar", the slightest of these stories in any case.

All in all, this was the perfect collection with which to wind down my reading year, cementing Kij Johnson as a writer to watch and filling a lot of little moments in between tasks in exactly the way I most want a collection of short fiction to do. The buzz was warranted.

Bethany C. Morrow's MEM

Why is memory this way? Why isn't it content to hurt you once? Why must it remind you of all the times you've been hurt before?

What if Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but set in an alternate Montreal in the early 20th century with a strange and analog version of that technology? But what if the painful memories scrubbed from one's mind not only assumed human form but assumed your human form and could sort of be interacted with by others, a la Gene Wolfe's A Borrowed Man? And what if we got a whole short novel of same as narrated by one of those embodied ambulatory memories, permanently 19 years old and something of a celebrity because she's not like those other embodied ambulatory memories, she's actually self-aware, makes new memories and has lived an independent life of her own for the last 20 years?

Head spinning yet? It's gonna spin some more.

Bethany C. Morrow's Mem is the firsthand account of one of these embodied ambulatory memories, called "mems", who has led a somewhat different experience than the rest of her kind does. Generally what happens to make a mem is that an obscenely rich person who feels plagued by a particularly unpleasant memory pays an exorbitant sum to a Montreal clinic to have that memory extracted, creating an eerie and uncanny but very, very limited duplicate of the rich person: it looks almost exactly like that person* and to a very small extent it moves around and might even sound like that other person, but since the mem is trapped forever in the original's bad memory, all it can do sort of pantomime the original experience on and on until its physical form wears out. Mems are kind of weird to have around, so mostly they are kept by the clinic in an underground facility called the Vault, where they live out their weird little not-lives in dormitories housing others of their very specific kind, i.e. most people who undergo this treatment have done so more than once, creating more than one of these weird echoes of themselves, so each person's collection of mems shares a dormitory.

Our mem, however, officially referred to as "Dolores Extract No. 1" to designate that she is the first mem created for a person named Dolores, was different right from the start. Visually she is and remains a perfect copy of her original at the age at which she was extracted; the same tone of brown skin, the same vividly copper-colored hair -- a sign from the moment of her creation that something unusual had occurred. Not only that, DE1 was aware of herself as a person, capable of expressing wants and needs, remembered incidents and conversations and overall just really seemed like she might actually be a person. Eventually, her creator decided to release her into the world to live as such a person, under his and his wife's help and guidance. DE1 first lived with them but eventually moved into an apartment of her own, furnished fully with help from the colleague's wife Camilla (who very early on adopted DE1 as a kind of daughter, for reasons that seem entirely not-sad or sinister at first). Not long before our story begins, DE1 gets fixated on a movie, going to see it multiple times a day for a week and deciding to model herself on the movie's heroine a bit, even to taking on her name of Elsie.

As the novel begins, however, Elsie has been recalled to the Vault with no explanation. Having no legal status as an autonomous being, she has little choice in the matter and complies, and it's all a huge shock. For 20 years she has not only enjoyed considerable autonomy, but also been a bit of a celebrity -- the Mem who Remembers, feted at parties, written about, studied, admired (it helps to be permanently 19) -- but now she is not even a person. The clinic staff make little or no eye contact with her, are unambiguously uncomfortable in her presence even before she tries to have conversations with them, and quickly stick her in the dormitory where other Dolores Extracts live, currently occupied only by a very late mem, very faded and discolored and just lying in a fetal ball on a bed, only to "expire" that very night. Imagine watching a pale and shuddering copy of yourself -- or rather, of the person of whom you are also a copy -- just fade out and die before your eyes...

But there is worse in store for our Elsie, like the reason she's been summoned back to the Vault. The technology that made her has continued in its development, and her Source wants to take advantage of one that poses an existential threat to Elsie, who is, after all, her Source's property to dispose of as she will. Tears in the rain.

All of this gets resolved in unexpected ways as Elsie comes to a new understanding of herself, including why she isn't like other mems, is treated with a fair amount of physical violence, and teeters on the brink of a doomed love affair. I wonder if Bethany C. Morrow ever thought about writing for the soaps. She'd have been brilliant. Which to say there is a lot of High Emotional Drama to this story.

I stumbled across this looking through my "included with your subscription" selection on Audible, so this is another novel I listened to late at night when I couldn't sleep.  Narrator Soneela Nankani and her pleasant, sweet voice were ideal for this; nice to listen to, but not so much so that I fell asleep, though this was largely due to the Drama. Nankani wrang every last bit of it out without getting too melodramatic, and proved a perfect match for this story, with a light and delicate voice that sounds like a 19-year-old's might, but with a performance that actually sells that the character is twice as old as she appears, and is realizing that she'll just keep getting older without aging, even as everybody she has known gets left behind by time... or will they?

*Usually a bit paler, less vividly colored all around, like an old color photo that's starting to fade out, except of course color photography isn't a thing yet because this memory-extracting technology was developed at the dawn of the 20th century.

Rivers Solomon's AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS

 I can never resist a generation ship story, especially during another pass through the weird contained world of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun*, this time along with the boys from the Alzabo Soup podcast and their listeners, so when I found out about River Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts I ran, didn't walk, to my local library when I found out their copy was at last available, and now on hold for me.

Only it wasn't a hardcover. Sad trombone. And they didn't have the ebook in that lending pool, either. Sadder trombone.

But then I noticed that the audio book edition is part of the "Included in your subscription" selections and my head exploded into candy, especially once I listened to the sample and heard the narrator, Cherise Boothe, who has a pleasantly androgynous voice and a true talent for a variety of accents and speech patterns that makes her the perfect choice for this material.

The Matilda, on which this story takes place, is a hell of a generation ship, you guys. Like, Snowpiercer in space, only so much worse. Because it's basically a plantation in space, you guys. With all the horror that implies.

Our main characters are immediately people I wanted to cherish close to my heart even though I knew that they were both going to be in so much danger. There's Aster, born and raised and stuck in the levels of the ship referred to as the "Tarlands"**, where a hereditary underclass that just happens to be highly melanated live in semi-squalor between shifts doing manual labor on the gigantic ship's complicated array of enormous Valley Forge type farm modules where the whole ship's food supply is grown and tended to by hand. No cute little Hueys, Deweys or Louis, here. But at least no short-sighted bureaucrats are ordering that all of these modules get scrapped as economically unviable.

Everybody who lives in the Tarlands has to do a daily ten-hour shift in the farm modules, even if, as Aster is, they are devastatingly intelligent, educated, inventive and creative. Since Aster is all of these, Aster is perpetually stressed out, especially since she also serves the Tarlands as a sort of space age medicine woman, with a secret botany lab carved out of some forgotten sections of the ship where she experiments on everything from plant genetics to pharmaceutical development in addition to serving as an old-fashioned sawbones, in which role we first meet her as she is required to amputate a child's gangrenous foot -- the child having gotten severe frostbite when the upper decks of the ship decided to dramatically reduce if not outright cut off the power and heating to the Tarlands when their ancient ship myseriously stopped functioning at optimal levels. Better that than sacrifice their recreational uses for that power.

Aster gets away with this side work of hers largely due to her close-but-ambiguous*** relationship with an upper decker, Theo, himself born of a Tarlands mother but was light-skinned enough to pass as an upper decker and thus whisked into his father's privileged world. Theo has grown up to become an actual shipboard physician and, as the son of a late"Sovereign" of the vessel and nephew of the brutal warlord who is poised to become the next Sovereign (and as the novel begins, the current Sovereign of the ship is suddenly very unwell), Theo is actually the ship's Surgeon General despite still being in his mid- to late 20s. Raised at least partially by the same foster mother as Aster was, he has grown up as Aster's playmate and friend and most trusted confidante despite the difference in their stations, and uses (and abuses) his privilege to shield her from the consequences of her disregard for regulation and protocol as they hit adulthood. That they have sort of noticed that maybe they have developed feelings for each other that are not exactly of the sibling variety crops up, but really, for the most part, Aster considers herself mostly gay and Theo is taking advantage of some botanical decoctions of hers to sort of subtly transition into even more of a "girlie man" than his evil uncle already takes him for. A fraught and fascinating pairing, is Aster and Theo's... and then there's Giselle, another foster sister, who is cantankerous, moody, sexy, attention-grabbing and mean as a snake... 

That's all just setting up the pieces before Solomon starts moving them around the board in a bloody spaceborne chess game from hell. Aster's roommates perpetually come under undue scrutiny by sadistic power-drunk guards acting on the Lieutenant's imprimatur, who single out Giselle for sexual abuse and a pair of openly lesbian lovers for good old fashioned beatings. Aster's own movements keep getting curtailed as the Lieutenant, who fancies himself even more of a god-king than the usual "sovereign" of the Matilda does, begins to tighten his grip on the whole ship but especially upon those dark-skinned "animals" in the Tarlands, even to resorting to the good old fashioned "low diet" of Nelson's navy, to keep the Tarlanders' just healthy enough to work but not so energetic or capable of cognition to actually rebel against his increasingly cruel tactics.

Ah, but while the Lieutenant and his thugs are excellent at authoritarianism, terror and violence, they don't really understand the ship they and their ancestors before them have occupied for over 300 years and on which their descendants are likely to be stuck for hundreds of years more before it arrives (assuming it doesn't break down en route, or collide with an asteroid, or...) at the "promised land" of some unspecified exoplanet out there that might not even have been chosen back when the Matilda was launched. But there are other people aboard who do understand the ship, and one of them happens to have been Aster's mother, Lune, who was a genius engineering type despite the circumstances in which she lived, and who taught herself many secrets before giving birth to Aster and then disappearing, presumed dead...

BUT, someone else seems to have covered Lune's tracks, tearing pages out of precious library books and having "checked out" all the important ones 29 years before the events of An Unkindness of Ghosts. Aster's story shifts then into a detective narrative of sorts as she uncovers clues, interviews witnesses and does all the usual gumshoe stuff while also performing all of her other responsibilities and trying not to get brutally assaulted in the process because curfews keep getting tighter and Theo's passes start getting honored less and less frequently. Eventually she pieces together what needs to be done (and Book of the Long Sun echoes some more) but not before things come to a truly violent head that even seems to have troubled audio book narrator Boothe. So, some trigger warnings for violence and sexual assault and racism are in order, very much, yes.

But it's a fascinating enough tale to reward the (comfortable, white) reader who bows to the need to live with and digest narratives like these -- even though that reader is probably the one most likely to use the story's unabashed brutality as an excuse not to finish it. Don't be that reader. Be the reader that finishes it and honors Aster's and Theo's and Melusine's and Giselle's and Mabel's and Pippa's and Vivian's stories, and the Lieutenant's too, because they echo stories from our collective past, and warn us what our collective future is going to be like if we keep ignoring the lessons the past is always, always trying to teach us.

Let's take better versions of ourselves ad astra.

*And yes, just to address it, I do plan to finish "SUNS SUNS SUNS" sometime soon, since so many people still seem to be reading it even though I petered out several years ago. But I've got some original fiction very much related to this material that I'm working on this year and next, so it's gonna have to be squeezed in. I find myself wanting more to write about Book of the Long Sun than Book of the New Sun, but I don't like that BotNS is still incomplete on here.

**Yeah, yeah, it's not subtle. But look at what's going on in this endless year of 2020 And Some Months and tell me that subtle is going to get the job done.

***Really close but also really ambiguous. Because both of these characters, in addition to other burdens of their respective births, are also kind of gender fluid. Aster is what we'd call assigned female at birth, but she is powerfully muscled, has hard and masculine features (by her own description) and more than a touch of hirsuitism. Theo was always a bit too girly for his family's liking but eventually found their favor by his choice of profession, even though some of the medicines that Aster makes for him have some estrogen-like effects on him. Cherie Booth voices both narratives brilliantly, which is why she was the best possible choice for this audio book.

James S.A. Corey's LEVIATHAN FALLS

 I finally allowed myself to finish my first read-through of Leviathan Falls, the absolutely perfect concluding volume of the two-headed author monster we call James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, but had my mother not been patiently waiting to read it after me, I might still be dragging my feet and would not yet know that it is an absolutely perfect conclusion to one of the greatest science fiction series I've ever read. Though I had inklings right from the start because Corey hasn't let us down yet, not even a little bit.

I realize there is a bit of a lacuna with regards to this series on this blog because I read its later volumes during my hiatus. I'll write about them someday, especially about Tiamat's Wrath which wrung my heart out completely just in time to drown it in tears, or something, but we're here to talk about endings, how to stick the landing, and how they should now just go ahead and teach this series in every writing class ever.

Leviathan Falls was completed during the pandemic, but this shows in only the best of ways. As the unknown threat that destroyed the Builders* looms ever larger as an existential threat to all of humanity, no matter how far we have scattered via the physics defying technology the Builders left behind, we are reminded again and again, that we are in way over our heads, here. When the Builders began defying physics, they harnessed energies from a whole 'nother universe and damaged it terribly, earning them the wrath of whatever kind of force called that other universe home, and that force wiped the Builders out completely. Now that humans have sort-of harnessed some of the Builders' left-behind technology like a civilization sized John Frum cult, we've inherited the Builder's exterminating enemy as well. But where the Builders actually understood their technology and, to a degree at least, the forces it harnessed, and seemed to have a degree of unity within their civilization-or-species as to look to us like a hive mind, we, as series heroine Naomi Nagata observes several times, are having to do it all with humans. Who have not evolved beyond what they were when confined to just one gravity well, that of good old Earth. Jumped-up primates with brains that weren't even capable of the level of civilization we associate with, say, the Stone Age without a great deal of violence, coercion, kluges and savagery. Why, at the very height of our material culture (late 1950s/early 1960s USA, say), we were still involved in a Cold War with others of our same species, only allowed a minority subset of our population to own property, move freely about the country, hold political power, etc.

I make it sound like there's a lot of preaching in this book but that's not it at all. It's just that the very plight the Expanse's civilizations finds itself in mirrors our own current jackpot of existential threats, and it's the flaws of our individual primate brains that stand in the way of implementing the solutions that people are just barely capable of dreaming up. As people in our own world deny climate change, refuse life-saving vaccines and public health measures, etc, people in the Expanse's world, though many have been kept in the dark about the overwhelming nature of the Big Threat, are also incapable of seeing the big picture and following through on the strategies devised to save it. For instance, it's been known for a few novels now that the Gate system that has allowed humans to colonize distant solar systems within fractions of a human lifetime has its limitations, and a big one of them is the frequency with which it will bear traffic.** Exceed the discovered safe volumes and speeds and some ships "go dutchman", as in the Flying Dutchman, a famous ship from the Age of Sail that disappeared without a trace. While in previous novels, traffic through the gates was controlled, first by the Transport Union (a somewhat ad hoc authority cobbled together out of the remnants of Belter culture to supervise the weird not-space between the Gates) and then by the Laconian Empire (originally a renegade Martian military faction who stole a sample of protomolecule, disappeared through a Gate and emerged years later as a powerhouse of such overwhelming force that its leader, Winston Duarte, wound up being the Emperor of Everything); with both of those forces removed from the board, the Gate network is a free-for-all. Our girl Naomi has devised a brilliant way to manage traffic and keep anybody from dying/disappearing/whatever it is that happens to people when ships "go dutchman" but it requires things like cooperating, giving a shit about other people, being patient and other things that individual humans still aren't very good at, left to their own devices. Sigh.

But while this is going on, Naomi and what's left of her crew are back together on the Rocinante, and while Jim Holden has even more PTSD than he already did after years and years and years as a captive of the Laconian Empire, and while Alex Kamal has his mind on other things from time to time like the fact that out there in the churn is not only his son but a newborn grandson whom he might never even get to meet, and while Amos Burton has been transformed into something kind of unearthly even though he still mostly acts like our favorite Murder Mechanic, it's still the Rocinante's crew and it's as wonderful for us as it is for them to have them all breathing the same recycled air. And beloved characters from past novels turn up here and there, too, notably Elvi Okoye and her husband Fazal, now Science Big Shots for the remains of the Empire, and young Theresa Duarte (heir to the Empire but no she doesn't have blue skin or red eyes) and her aging but still intrepid dog, Muskrat are along for the ride, too, and you KNOW you've always wanted to see what it's like to have a dog in space. In zero G. Oh, man, if your head doesn't explode into candy every time Muskrat is center stage, see a therapist soonest.

We even get to see [REDACTED] again!

We only get to enjoy this a little bit, though, because not only is the Big Threat out there threatening, but so is Winston Duarte, who, through protomolocule monkey business over the course of several novels has metamorphosed from capable miltary officer to renegade leader to founding father of a nation state to immortal dictator of all of humanity and has since become... something even stranger and more dangerous. He poses very nearly as big a threat to humanity as the Big Threat, and is incommunicado unless he feels like manifesting as a sort of super-intense hologram of himself where he's least expected and there were so many times in these last few Expanse novels that I was nearly won over to liking him a bit so even this revelation of his inhumanly inimical intent hits hard in the feels, even before his daughter Theresa comes looking for him.

All of this is resolved satisfactorily, which would be awesome just for this novel, but also the whole giant series, which has covered the Rocinante's crew's entire adult lifetimes into old age, is also resolved more than satisfactorily. Even as I sat there sort of guarding myself the way someone anticipating a gut punch flexes her stomach muscles, I was in awe of how well all of this was being accomplished before my eyes, even as, a few times, I shook my mental fist at the two-headed author-monster for emotional distress inflicted on the way. So while I swore in the months before Leviathan Falls was finally released that I was not ready to see this go, no, not ever, I am pleased that it was ended so perfectly.

And I'm busily trying to carve out time to read the whole series again from the beginning as one, big expanse of novel, someday. Amidst all my other projects.

It's worth it.

*The eventual name of the civilization-or-hive-mind that were the original creators of the protomolecule that has been wreaking havoc with humanity since Leviathan Wakes first graced our literal and electronic bookshelves a decade or so ago

**Not can: will. For all we ever learn the Gates can handle whatever we throw threw them, but the Big Threat notices if our traffic through them gets too dense, and it strikes when it notices.

Polenth Blake's WERECOCKROACH

"Once this is over, I'm sure people'll want goot things to read. Distraction is good."

Personally, I'd be hitting the cute animal videos. It wasn't that I didn't like books, but you never know if a book will be good all the way through. A fun mystery has a weird rant about why women are all liars or that cute gay couple ends up being thrown in a meat grinder. That's not as comforting as watching cats sit in boxes.

 Rest assured, none of those terrible things happen in this novella, which is even more comforting and as fun as watching cats sit in boxes, especially if you understand that cockroaches are so much like cats that they spend a lot of time sort of comfortingly stroking each other with their antennae in their down time and, if something grody happens like being picked up by a disgusting yucky human being, they immediately freak out and need to clean themselves thoroughly to get rid of our cooties.*

Being as I am the kind of person who writes sonnet cycles about brand inspectors trying to manage small herds of cow-weres**, having at one stage of life kept a small family of Blaberus craniifer as pets in a college dorm room, and being also the kind of person who enjoys various portrayals of insects in literature, Polenth Blake's Werecockroach feels like a Christmas present from a complete stranger intended specifically for me. So of course right off the bat, I have to share my only complaint, and that is that Werecockroach isn't about 700 pages long. Good thing my beloved Clark Thomas Carleton wrote me another volume of his Antasy series, coming soon to a blog near you.

Werecockroach, at just 79 pages, is a light little whisp of a thing compared to the lit-chonks I tend to review on here, but its subject matter and wonderful cover of course made it a must whatever its length. And a lot gets packed into those 79 little pages; it is light in form rather than content.

We have but three characters to manage, but what characters they are. Rin is a agendered asexual aromantic person*** whose last residence burned to the ground before our story even gets going, who has managed to locate a new living situation in London, with two young men who strike Rin right away as rather unusual people in their own rights, though at first they merely come off as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist and a roommate who is way more tolerant of the theorist's eccentricities than is quite usual in modern day London. And the flat they're willing to share with Rin is very small and tight, with narrow corridors and rooms into which a bare minimum of furniture just barely fits, but that's fine with Rin, who has few belongings to stash, now, anyway.

Before long Things Happen that would ordinarily be the entire focus of a big fat novel, but here just serve as a reason to drive our three new friends out of their overly cozy living quarters and out into the big weird world which quickly exposes, well, the title gives that bit away (which is why I'm keeping the Things That Happen secret). How Rin reacts to the discovery that makes this title make sense is not what you're expecting; nor is how a whole group new group of maybe-friends talk, which is 100% hilarious and was just what I needed this week as the last of this wretched year 2020 And Some Months dwindles and seems to be fixin' to drag the wretched year of 2020 And Some More Months in on a gust of apocalyptic winds here in Casper, WY, USA.

Suffice it to say that I feel like Polenth Blake is maybe my new best friend, or at least someone whose work I'm always going to be on the lookout for. Hiss!

*Yes, these are actual observations made once upon a time by Your Humble Blogger.

**That being, of course, a being that transforms from a bovine to a human at the full moon.

***Whom I imagined sounding exactly like Abigail from Unwell.