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Connie Willis is an author I will always read and almost always enjoy. This is a collection of three older novellas I hadn't read before; they're not really connected in theme except perhaps that in a general way they are exploring potential futures.

The first and longest is sort of a western SF setting; surveyors on an alien planet trying to do their job, but also having their exploits documented as "pioneering heroes" of sorts back home. When a new person arrives who is a "fan" of their work and has some episodes of the show based on them, they see themselves through the eyes of back-home media for the first time and it leads to some reevaluation of their relationships. This story was also interesting in a couple of other ways; first because it is very ambiguous about the genders of several of the characters and I was most of the way through the story before I figured out that one of them was in fact female. And second, because it includes that the company funding the survey has to comply with very strict guidelines around the indigenous residents and deals with that in a detailed and often rather tongue-in-cheek way.

The second story is a look at intellectual property and what a world would look like when it's so easy to recreate the digital likeness of famous actors from the past, that nobody wants to see any new ones any more.

And the third story is about a very smart young woman who absolutely does not want to go into the interstellar service yet is inexplicably (to her) accepted into it anyway, despite the fact she never even applied.

I enjoyed them all in different ways, probably the last one best. I do think Willis' full length novels are my preference as it gives her time and space to tell a more detailed story in full length, but I enjoy her writing in any form.

This short novel is a fun cross between science fiction - junior anthropologist Nyr who is the only remaining member of a research expedition to observe a long-ago established and then lost colony - and a fairy tale fantasy - fourth-eldest princess Lynnesse sets off on a quest to win the help of the mythical wizard in order to save the land. The story is told from both viewpoints, so we alternately see Nyr as a depressed, despairing, second-class anthropologist and an incomprehensible, immortal, powerful wizard of legend; and the world they are on and the monsters they battle alternately as the stuff of fairy tales and the stuff of science. Even the language they use to communicate translates unexactly, so Nyr has literally no way to describe himself that doesn't translate into Lyn's language as "magician" or "sorceror" even though he is trying to say "scientist" or "academic" or similar.

The whole thing is a fun, very readable exploration of Clarke's Law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It was a quick read and I could easily have read more, but I enjoyed it.

This is the first book in a while that I've had trouble putting down, it kept me reading later than I intended more than once. It's a complex, touching story about friendship and the value of play, which spans several decades. During that time Sam and Sadie meet, have quarrels, make up again, quarrel again, fall in love with other people, and make video games both together and separately.

It's set in the world of video game development so knowing some of those terms probably helps a little but I don't think it's really necessary; it's more about creating art together than the games themselves. (The game making is a little simplified, and as someone who works in the game industry I found it a little unbelievable in places - making an MMO with the staff they appeared to have? No way.) But waving those beside in suspension of disbelief, I doubt they'd bother anyone who doesn't actually make games for a living.

Really the book is about friendship, and flawed, complex characters, and art, and loss, and being human. It's refreshing to read an entire book about a couple that is about friendship rather than romance. It was sweet, and touching, and thought-provoking, and also occasionally annoying when the characters are clearly being idiots, but they're so well written that at least you can understand why they're being idiots. I would highly recommend this book.

Trigger warnings: there are a couple of violent deaths mentioned, and there's non-graphic description of an inappropriate teacher-student relationship with non-consensual bondage elements. These are not dwelled on any more than needed for the story's purposes, but are unavoidable elements of the plot.

I really have trouble rating Okorafor's books, because she writes beautifully and her Africanfuturist settings are very interesting and evocative; but I am often left feeling as if the story itself in incomplete and missing something. In this case this novella is more like fable or folklore than the science fiction it's billed as; young girl acquires mysterious powers and becomes known as the adopted daughter of death, wandering the area of Ghana where the whole country comes to recognize her and give her food and clothing when needed. But you never learn anything more about why or how she got the powers, there's a mysterious fox that is never explained, there's a possibly Evil Corporation involved but who they are and what they want is never really clear, and even the end of the novel doesn't really answer more questions than it raises, although it does imply that the heroine has found a positive way to use her powers.

There are lots of interesting elements to the story. How a young girl handles the sudden acquisition of this power and various tragedies that follow. How such a power would affect a person. How differently the residents of this future-Ghana react to someone acquiring an extremely powerful ability is very different than how I imagine a North American citizens would react or how a North American writer would have written it. Rather than becoming a Marvel-style superhero or a dangerous freak that various government agencies would want to capture and study, our heroine becomes a cultural folk tale. But is Okorafor saying this is because it's in the future rather than the present, or because it's in Africa rather than America, or something else? I'm not sure.

As usual, I am left with more questions than answers, and I don't like finishing a book feeling so unsatisfied - perhaps that's on me and not on the author, but for me a book isn't a 5-star read unless I reach the end feeling satisfied, or enlightened, or affected in a way more than just filled with a bucket full of questions and no answers.

This is the first fantasy book I've read by Tchaikovsky, and maybe it's because I started with his "Children of Time" series that I found this one a little underwhelming, but it felt just downright TOO SHORT. It's the story of Coppelia, an apprentice puppet maker in a magical city who gets drawn into a daring heist; and also the story of tiny automata created through a combination of artifice and magic. These little puppet-sized people are trying to establish themselves in the city and make contact with Coppelia, who is fascinated and forms a partnership with them.

There are a lot of great elements in this book - the tiny automata, the magical city, the class stratification - but somehow they just didn't seem to deliver satisfactorily. Maybe I'm judging overly harshly because I know Tchaikovsky can and has done so much better, but the ending seemed to wrap up very abruptly and not entirely believably, and there are a lot of loose ends left unanswered that I would have loved to see included (like Coppelia's parents, and what happened to Auntie's collection). I will likely pick up the sequel to see if more is revealed there.

Described as "an Ethiopian-inspired debut fantasy retelling of Jane Eyre," how could I not pick this up? Having now read it, I don't see a lot of resemblance to Jane Eyre beyond it being set in a castle whose owner is named Magnus Rochester, but it IS an interesting piece of worldbuilding. We don't ever see a lot of the wider world, only the small village and the cursed castle in the desert, but through mentions we learn it's somewhere where the residents are predominantly Black, however the staff of the castle are almost exclusively white because, apparently, all the locals know better than to go and work in a cursed castle.

Magnus, the wealthy young man who inherited the castle and his father's fortune, also inherited his father's curse - the "evil eye" has afflicted him, and now nobody can look him in the eye without resulting in him turning into a cursed hyena at night to kill them (the embodiment of the evil eye itself). Our heroine, Andromeda, is what's known as a debtera - or at least an unlicensed one. She accepts the job out of desperation, because without a license, her options are limited; and Magnus chooses her for that reason also, knowing someone unlicensed will be more desperate for the work and can't afford to give up.

The system of curses, the haunted castle, the debtera magic (by crafting amulets), and the evil eye details are all very interesting and well described. Of course, since young Andromeda and young Magnus are thrown together, they inevitably fall for each other; I found this rather less believable as they seemed to go rather quickly from immediate dislike to declarations of love. However. Maybe that's a statement on my old and cynical heart more than anything else; if you like romances full of curses and bloodshed and spookiness then you'll probably enjoy this book. If you don't, then would suggest this is not the book for you, of course!

I've yet to meet writer who even comes close to the funny, sarcastic, incredibly clever writing of Jane Austen and that includes Claudia Gray. So don't go into this book expecting Austen's turn of phrase; alas, she's dead and gone and I don't think anyone will ever match her. However! If you love all her characters you may enjoy this book just to imagine them existing for a little longer, not to mention interacting with each other. While they are all slightly different ages (the author has a foreword in which she explains how she estimated their probable relative ages), all the major characters from all her books somehow end up as house guests of the Knightleys. When Mr. Wickham turns up unexpectedly to the house party and is forced to stay due to a storm, it turns out that almost all those present have reason to hate him for some reason or another. And, of course, when Mr. Wickham turns up dead, the book becomes a murder mystery investigation that is not only enjoyable for its own sake, but allows the author to share with us what she imagines each of the characters may have been up to since the Austen novels ended.

While most of the characters are directly from Austen, Gray introduces two new characters who act as the primary investigators: Julia Tilney (daughter of the Tilneys from Northanger Abbey), and Jonathan Darcy (eldest son of Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy). As Julia had never met or heard of Wickham, and Jonathan had an alibi, they take the opportunity to work together to investigate more deeply. And, of course, as they are roughly of the same age and Jonathan is now one of the most eligible bachelors in England, there's plenty of opportunity for understandings and misunderstandings along the way.

A couple of interesting choices the author makes in addition; Jonathan is pretty clearly presented as neurodivergent to some degree, likely autistic; while one of the other characters discovers their brother is homosexual and has to decide how to reconcile that with existing morals and Christian values.
Overall, a fun romp through a murder mystery party with characters you know and love, which feels like hanging out with old friends.

This is considered a sequel to The Giver but there's not actually any overlap between characters and setting, except that presumably they both happen in different societies that have arisen from the same post-industrial-downfall Earth. The author appears to be examining different possible societies that could arise in that situation, and where the setting of The Giver appears initially idealistic, the setting in Gathering Blue is described as unforgiving and survival-of-the-fittest from the very start as we meet Kira, whose life is threatened due to her physical imperfection (a twisted leg causing her to limp and need a stick to walk).

In similar form to The Giver, the protagonist slowly learns to see the truth about the society she lives in and start to challenge it. I didn't like this as well as The Giver however; maybe I already started suspicious due to having read The Giver first, but it was fairly obvious that nefarious things were afoot and most of the plot twists and "revelations" for Kira were not very surprising at all. Kira is also a very passive protagonist and her friend Matt was more interesting in many ways; after her initial fight for her life, she didn't seem to need to use her cunning or intelligence much at all. And I found the ending a bit abrupt, could have included a little more thinking about Kira's intended plan.

Interesting read nonetheless but lacked the impact of The Giver.

Apparently this is a YA book that's been out for a while, but since it's been an even longer time since I was a YA, I'd somehow missed its existence till now. I picked up the audiobook from the local library after reading a recommendation for it among lists of dystopian fiction, and I did enjoy it; quite a short listen at only 5 hours so it must be quite a quick read in text.

The story follows 11-going-on-12 year-old Jonas, through whose eyes we slowly begin to understand the community in which he lives. What seems at first to just be metaphor, for example about how things are colourless and how everything is the same, is slowly is revealed to be literal truth. It's very cleverly done the way the book slowly feeds the reader bits of information that bit by bit reveal a picture of an increasingly artificial, dystopian community where conformity and contentment are idealized at the expense of, well, pretty much everything else. When Jonah turns 12 he is given his life assignment as the Receiver of Memory and only then does he - and we through his eyes - start to understand how different his community is from our own, and what his predecessors chose to give up in order to create a "perfect" world.

It's very reminiscent in many ways of 1984, and is a cutting but very simply laid out examination of what exactly it would really mean to eliminate inequality and pain for every single person. Very thought-provoking. From reading other reviews I have also just learned that a movie was made of this, which I may need to go check out now.

I think I came across this recommended on a list of "enemies to friends" novels and since my library had the audiobook, figured I'd check it out. It's written in the form of letters, back and forth between two agents of opposing factions (The Agency and The Garden) in a sweeping time war across both history and the galaxy.

The two agents, Red and Blue, have crossed paths from time to time but an exchange of correspondence begins when Red finds a letter left by Blue. Both will lose the trust of their respective factions if their correspondence is ever discovered, so there emerges a series of elaborately hidden letters left across the decades and continents.

I liked the unusual setting and the elaborate ways they hid correspondence. I liked the fact neither faction was presented as better than the other, just both different. The writing is complex and sometimes beautiful. Also a little overly complicated, and full of 80s references, which seemed perhaps a little overdone considering they have all of time and history to pull from.

However, I also found it hard to follow in parts - I had to re-listen to the ending chapters a couple of times in order to figure out what exactly had happened. I also found it rather unbelievable how rapidly they moved from completely untrusting enemies to apparently trusting each other completely; as a reader, even up to the end I wasn't sure if they really trusted each other or if it was all an extremely long con. It was just a little unbelievable that it would happen SO fast and just through a letter every few hundred years.

I liked many things about it; not sure if I overall liked it enough that I would reread it though.

I enjoyed this sequel to Semiosis, though not quite as much as the first book, but I'm still eagerly awaiting the third in the now-trilogy. Continuing the story of Pax and the Pacifist settler colony and their mutual society with Glassmakers and Stevland, it's in much the same vein as the first, but now with the added twist that survivors from the original Earth (population now much reduced due to ecological disasters, wars, and biological weapons) are sending an expedition to Pax to reestablish contact with the colony. This book contains viewpoints from both perspectives.

I enjoyed most of the same things I liked about the previous book, but I liked less that there seemed to be a lot of unanswered questions and things left hanging or unanswered. The end conflict also seemed very chaotic and hard to follow. All questions that might be resolved in book 3 but it made book 2 somewhat less satisfying than the first. Raised many interesting questions to look forward to in the third book however!

This is definitely a science/plot-driven hard science fiction book, and therefore, probably not everybody's cup of tea; but if you enjoy generation-spanning colonization stories like Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, and philosophical questions about the nature of free will and symbiosis like Tepper's Raising the Stones, then you'll probably enjoy this book a lot. As I happen to have two botany degrees I really enjoyed the premise, which is that plants on an alien planet can develop a type of intelligence. The story follows the crew and descendants of a colony ship who settle on a new planet they call Pax, determined to form a new, peaceful, and empathic society. However, plants are the dominant species on this new planet and the colony will face very harsh conditions until they can find a way to coexist with the local plant life.

The novel skips viewpoints from person to person down through the starting generations of the colonists, showing the changes and development of the colony and how they attempt to adapt to this strange new environment and ecosystem.

While the premise of plants as the dominant life form in the ecosystem is very interesting, I found it a little unfortunate the author had the colonists give all the local plants earth-names, since it seemed like a missed opportunity to emphasize their differences. Although I'm also not a fan of books full of completely foreign invented words, I think I'd maybe have preferred names that were similar but not quite the same, e.g. implying iris-like but not immediately conjuring all the earth qualities of actual irises. Maybe just because I studied botany, my memory associates so many details with a specific name like irises, bamboo, etc that I was unsure which bits were relevant and which not. Are they called iris because of their appearance, or because of their levels of toxicity, or because of the way they reproduce, or...? Another reviewer, Jennifer, raised a more detailed lists of biology questions that were raised in her mind, which is a great list, though I'd also add that other than one passing reference the role of a mycorrhizal fungus-like organism was not mentioned at all, whereas it would be safe to assume that if they were anything like earth plants, as their earth names suggest, they would already have been in intimate symbiotic relationships with fungi and this could have added a very interesting additional layer to the plot.

However, I assume the author hasn't actually studied botany in depth and just did sufficient research for the story, which is still very interesting and a rare perspective on an alien plant world that I did appreciate with a little suspension of disbelief. I see there's a sequel to the book out already so I'll definitely be picking that one up also!

This is the story of a biracial 18-year old named Daunis, daughter of an Anishinaabe father and white mother and not quite fully a part of either community. Although not a registered tribe member, Daunis associates closely with her relatives on that side and participates in and respects the Ojibwe customs and elders. As such, she's a narrator who's able to see both sides as she tries to find her own path between them. Through her eyes the reader sees multiple tragedies striking the tribe, including drug addictions, murders, and sexual assault. With her knowledge of tribal medicine, her aspiration to become a doctor and a scientist in university, and her connections both inside and outside the tribe, Daunis is ideally placed to investigate how meth is being distributed into her communities and to try and stop the damage it's doing.

I really liked the way this book didn't shy away from the multiple problems and tragedies that affect real tribal communities like Daunis's, but also does not paint Daunis and her tribal peers as either "wise native" nor "poor victim". Both the FBI and the tribal elders/members are trying to solve the drug problem, with different approaches and different attitudes, and Daunis has to find her way between the two.