Category Archives: Science Fiction

Love, Death + Robots: The Official Anthology : Volume One

by Rebecca

Love, Death + Robots: The Official Anthology: Volume One
2021, audiobook 2025

I have not watched the animation series, but I’ve heard good things about it and I saw that this audiobook existed and so I got it and listened to it on my work commute. And I didn’t quit halfway through, though I was extremely tempted. It has some of the worst writing I’ve ever read/heard. Like, at least one story that’s right up there with Eye of Argon, and others that were close runners up. What’s also crazy is that, as I was listening, increasingly appalled with each new story, I realized that they were managing to cover a wide range of ways in which writing can be poorly written.

In retrospect, I realized that there were two entries that are explicitly screenplays and thus can be forgiven (I suppose) for going into details about exact camera angles, and scene changes, and repetitions of the exact time of day even though it didn’t change, but wow was it hard to get through on my commute. The fact that one of those screenplays (“The Witness” by Alberto Mielgo) literally opened with “a beautiful woman is naked in front of a mirror, applying make-up” felt like such a stereotype/cliche that I wondered if it was intended as a spoof. Sadly, if it was intended as satire, it never made any particular point.

A lot of the stories (“Suits” by Steve Lewis, “Sucker of Souls” by Kirsten Cross, “Shape-Shifters” by Marko Kloos, “Blind Spot” by Vitaliy Shushko, “The Secret War” by David W. Amendola) had men with overwrought machismo fighting slavering aliens, with the type of clinical descriptions of violence and gore that I might expect from an audio-description of a visual media, but not from even a book adaptation of a movie. (“Lucky Thirteen” by Marko Kloos, has a woman with machismo fighting human soldiers, but the rest remains the same.) Text and video are different types of media and text is better served trying to describe the impact of violence/gore on the characters rather than just a description of a picture. However, most of them couldn’t even make their violence impactful. Plus, a really eerie pattern I noticed was how in these stories, there was all this extreme violence between the “main characters “good guys” who feared for this lives but stayed strong through it all because they needed to protect their people, versus the “bad guy” alien others who were mindless killing monsters with no thought or culture of their own, only an endless desire to kill humans. But their actions were the same, extreme violence towards one another: just one side was good and one side was bad. It felt like video games for armchair warriors, who wanted to feel powerful and liked gun statistics and weren’t at all interested in the source of any given conflict.

Some of the stories (“Sonnie’s Edge” by Peter F. Hamilton, “The Witness” by Alberto Mielgo, “Beyond the Aquila Rift” by Alastair Reynolds) had an interesting concept and/or twist that I would have enjoyed seeing presented better and with less of a look at the authors’ sexual issues.

“Beyond the Aquila Rift” was actually the first story (ie, the seventh story) that I thought was genuinely well-written. And then it swerved into focusing on a middle-aged dude’s feelings about his extra-marital affair and it mostly stayed there for the rest of the story, pushing aside the interesting science fiction scenario and reminding me of the stereotypical English professor writing a novel about having an affair. The author tried his best to make the affair plot-significant and mostly managed to make the protagonist so self-centered he came across as a sociopath.

There were some decent stories. (“The Dump” by Joe R. Lansdale, “Fish Night” by Joe R. Lansdale, “Ice Age” by Michael Swanwick, “Alternate Histories” by John Scalzi.) It’s too easy to forget them when I think back on the book. But they were there. They were short, but interesting and fun and funny.

There were two genuinely good stories that I enjoyed a great deal and actually recommend. Luckily, I can even provide links to them (the written versions, not the audio):

“Good Hunting” by Ken Liu is excellent and heart-breaking and heart-warming and all that about China losing it’s magical culture during the British colonial period and then regaining it in a steampunk fashion.

“Zima Blue” by Alistair Reynolds is fascinating and thought-provoking and I have so many thoughts about it but also don’t want to provide any spoilers, because the story itself is so well laid out in the way it presents the situation and slowly makes the reveal, and then leaves the reader to continue to thinking about all the implications for days afterwards. It’s about an artist who went through extreme body modifications in order to have experiences no one else could, and the reporter who interviewed him about his final piece.

The Mars House

by Anna

By Natasha Pulley

You know how there are rare authors that you as a reader just trust implicitly? Like, even if the story doesn’t seem to be making sense or clicking, you know they’ll pull it off in the end. Well, I don’t trust Natasha Pulley – in fact, I actively distrust her. This is not to say that her books aren’t consistently excellent. They are! She just has a real habit of throwing in some actual crime against humanity, and having all the characters shrug it off like no big deal.

I wouldn’t even read this one until Kinsey read it first and gave me the all clear, and even then, I read it in a sort of mental flinch state. This also made me very suspicious of the slightest hint of genocidal tendencies in characters, so I was extra judgmental of them all and not quite able to actually like them as much as perhaps I would have otherwise.

Our main character is a principal ballet dancer for the Royal Ballet who has to flee the climate crisis in London for a colony on Mars. There, he is consigned to manual labor until a conflict with an anti-immigration politician forces the two of them into a contractual marriage (it makes marginally more sense in the context). This would all be brutal to read if the protagonist wasn’t such an utter golden retriever, just overall cheerful (and a little egocentric) regardless of harrowing circumstances around him.

It seemed clear from the outset that the politics were not all that they seemed, but I stayed extremely wary of Pulley trying to trick me into rooting for a war criminal or some such. Instead, though, she wove a very satisfyingly complex mystery that pulls in geopolitics, gender and cultural identity, disability rights, and so much more. The core relationship is, of course, the draw, but I find myself continuing to think through the various linguistic and cultural extrapolations Pulley creates here.

Detroit Zine Fest 2025

by Rebecca

I hadn’t been quite sure what to expect from the Detroit Zine Fest, but was delighted to discover that it was like a local mini Small Press Expo. Maybe somewhere between 50 and 80 vendors? Thus, it was still slightly overwhelming to browse through all the stalls, but was also delightful and I bought a number of really good zines:

Michigan Cryptids by Shi Briggs
A Michigan Unnature Journal by Shi Briggs
These are two books, 12 pages each, about cryptids natives to Michigan, with absolutely gorgeous illustrations and short descriptions. I don’t actually know much about cryptids, so I’m not sure how much these were researched versus created, but I did recognize the Michigan Dogman as a thing. But the black and white illustrations are so beautiful and creepy and inspiring.

Thank You by Eddie Roberts
2023
This is a gorgeous and pointed poem about the culture of consumerism and the push-pull of gratitude for getting things you desire with the discomfort of always having more pushed upon you. It described many of my own conflicting feelings. The author also experiments with some really interesting typography effects.

Passages by Liana Fu
2019
Is a series of poems and musings on being Chinese diaspora going to visit Hong Kong and trying to learn Cantonese, struggling to figure out where they fit in the world where all their native cultures see them as other, and how this intersects with the ongoing cultural struggle of Hong Kong itself under an increasingly oppressive Chinese government.

Of Course I’d still love you if you were a worm, but like we might have to renegotiate certain aspects of our relationship, y’know? It’s a big adjustment: A guide to safely and responsibly loving your partner post wormification by Seth Karp
This is hilarious and also the best kind of crack-treated-seriously brochure. It’s clearly a take-off of the “Would you still love me if I were a worm?” meme, but reminds me even more of an elaborate version of the Jack Harkness test meme. It’s got advice and perspective on what to do if your significant other spontaneously turns into a worm. (Step one: ask what kind of worm? There are different kinds of it will effect your decision.)

Helianthus by Jone Greaves
There is Something in the Basement by Jone Greaves
Instructional Musings for Encounters & Summoning by Jone Greaves
Intent to Carcinize by Jone Greaves
I spent some time trying to figure out which of Jone Greaves’ zines to get since they were all such fascinating titles and wound up getting four of them, each of which is unique and fascinating and thought-provoking. I’ve been getting into short-story writing competitions recently and I feel like these are all examples of how it’s done: to create a world and a concept and maybe a character in just a few pages.

Gentle Laundry by India Johnson
2023
This is a surprisingly fascinating non-fiction 24-page zine about laundry. As someone who mostly learned to do laundry to the extent of put clothes in a machine with detergent and it will come out Officially Clean regardless of any evidence to the contrary, this zine opens up whole new worlds of understanding about what is actually happening and what detergents, soaps, bleaches, etc actually do. It’s also tonally very approachable, although by about halfway through I was feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the all the options and decision branches. But it’s valuable information to know and I have a few ideas for changes I want to try when doing my own laundry. Once I’ve tried a few things, I’ll need to re-read it to see what else.

Naomi Kritzer’s prophetic vision(s?)

by Anna

Whew, it’s been a month (or three) hasn’t it?! I don’t have much else to say except to thank Rebecca for continuing to push this blog forward when I ran out of steam for a while there. You can thank her too for dragging me back in by sending me these links and then haranguing me until I finally read them:

So Much Cooking

Rebecca sent me the link to this novelette (8,410 words) that has been making the rounds on social media lately. Written in 2015, it is eerily accurate for 2020, down to some of the tiniest details. Told in the style of a food blog, it stays grounded in everyday life, capturing the broader human experience through the smaller individual shared experiences. Though Kritzer is anticipating (again: frighteningly accurately!) an unusually difficult period in the modern era, she also highlights the strength and generosity that people can and do bring to shared struggles, making it a much more hopeful reflection than one would expect.

The Year Without Sunshine

This slightly longer novelette (10,883 words) came out in 2023, along with readers’ hopes that it doesn’t turn out to be quite so on-the-nose this time around, though it sadly doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. Though the scope of the crisis is even larger this time, so is the community that comes together to bolster each other in truly innovative ways. I very much hope it doesn’t come to quite this extreme, but Kritzer again focuses on the positive, the basic good of most people and how they want to and can help each other. Through this, she provides some innovative blueprints for what different kinds of mutual aid can look like, and isn’t that what scifi does best, showing us a path toward a better future? I look forward to more of her writing (with only a little dread, haha)!

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

by Rebecca

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, a Monk and Robot Book
by Becky Chambers
2022

I enjoyed the first book in this series, and I think I like this one even more. It feels particularly relevant to my life right now as it considers what it means to have or not have a purpose, dealing with burnout, and the yearning for something undefined but different from what you have. Each of the six chapters is its own little mini-story on Dex and Mosscap’s journey from the deep woods through the rural and farming communities towards the central city. They’re not quite stand-alone stories but feel like individual stepping stones. It’s an overtly philosophical book, as the philosophy is not in the narration or the plot, but very specifically in what the characters are struggling with.

It’s also very open-ended. I can hope that there will be more books in this series, although I can understand why there might not be: the questions the characters and thus the author is asking are so very hard to answer. But I think even with just two books, this isn’t a duology like I’d thought when I read the first book, because the story doesn’t conclude with this second book. The characters are on a long meandering path that doesn’t have a definite end point, that they don’t want to have a definite end point.

It’s remarkably soothing and meditative. It’s also imaging a world where everyone has enough and no one is struggling just to survive, which is something that seems both entirely possible and also so out of reach. It leaves me yearning for something more, but also with the thought that maybe I can try to reach for that something more even if I don’t quite know what it is or how it will go.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

by Rebecca

A Psalm for the Wild-Built
by Beck Chambers
2021

This is a charming book that struck me immediately as a mixture of Nghi Vo’s The Singing Hills Cycle and Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot series with a bit of Mai Mochizuki’s The Full Moon Coffee Shop thrown in for good measure. It is also the first of a two-book series and I definitely need to check out the second book. Our main character is Sibling Dex, a monk who has been a gardener for many years but decides at the beginning of this book that they have received a new calling to be a tea monk: someone who travels around the countryside with a pop-up tea stall to provide the populace with tea and comfort. I do love fictional religious explorations and narrow focus narrations too about the tea and the carriage and the villages.

The setting is a quiet futuristic post-industrial utopia on a moon, several hundred years after the Great Awakening when the robots that manned the factories spontaneously developed awareness and declared that they were going to depart human society to explore nature and they didn’t want to be followed. In response, humanity had a Great Transition where they found a balance with nature and since have lived in essentially bucolic comfort. The exact details are not delved into, but it’s against this backdrop that Sibling Dex finds themselves yearning for something more than they have while being confused about how they can be dissatisfied with what they have. And yet.

And it is Sibling Dex, in the midst of their struggles to identify what they need that’s more than what they already have, who makes the first contact between humans and robots in centuries, with a robot who has come to see how humanity is doing. It is very much a culture clash of individuals who are both trying their best but also thoroughly confusing and confused by the other.

No solutions are found by the end of this book, but conversations are had and explorations of both ideas and locations. But overall it was very sweet and extremely relatable.

Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik

by Rebecca

Buried Deep and Other Stories
by Naomi Novik
2024

I’ve enjoyed Novik’s writing for years (decades?) at this point, so it comes as something of a shock to realize that this anthology increased my opinion of her as a writer. How was that even possible? Did I not already know that she was a fabulous writer? But this books has such an incredible breadth of stories, each with their own world-building and characters and tone. Some of the stories I liked more than others, but all of them impressed me.

There are thirteen short stories and/or novellas in this collection, and I’m not going to specifically review them all, but just call out a few:

“After Hours” was a wonderful return to the Scholomance, after the events of that trilogy, with the introduction of another whole culture of magic, because the world is full of different cultures, and so too would be an international school.

“Spinning Silver” is the original story that later grew into the novel, and thus has a lot of duplication, but also some fascinating differences such that I’m torn between which I like more.

“Seven Years From Home” is a stand-alone story in an entirely new universe, a science-fiction universe that almost takes as its premise that anything sufficiently understood is science rather than magic, and addresses politics and war profiteering. It’s almost comforting in its cold ruthlessness and dissection of the hypocrisy that can saturate a seemingly benign culture.

“The Long Way Round” is a story that’s not precisely a stand-alone one, but is a test piece for a new universe that Novik is working on, something that may well grow into a new novel or even a new series, developing a world and characters with a magic system, and political lines, and social structures. And this is the first view of it, and it is fascinating.

The Road to Roswell

by Anna

By Connie Willis

We have a little joke about Connie Willis: when she is good, she is very, very good; when she is bad, she is horrific. That is to say that she is so technically skilled that you will either be rolling on the floor laughing or deeply traumatized. Although this isn’t quite at Willis’ peak (for that, see To Say Nothing of the Dog), The Road to Roswell is quite funny, about a woman grudgingly attending an alien-themed wedding in Roswell and then even more grudgingly dealing with a real alien abduction, along with a ragtag group of other abductees.

It is very funny, in Willis’ customary gentle satire of people of all types. However, it also has Willis’ customary frenetic energy – she portrays the onslaught of minor stresses we all deal with every day so well that even her comedic books come with some visceral stress. Additionally, it is very much influenced by Willis’ love of movies – there is a constant stream of allusions to classic westerns, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and some heavy screwball comedy tropes, which I enjoyed less.

Our protagonist is doing her best under admittedly very trying circumstances, but is enough of a classic Ditzy Broad to make some eye-rollingly bad decisions. It was all fun and games until we got to a (PG-rated romantic) trope that is a particular squick of mine, so I had to speed read through that a bit. I will say that the ending is immensely satisfying in a suitably ridiculous way.

For those new to Connie Willis, this could be a very entertaining introduction; for us old fans, there’s a fair bit of retread as she returns to a number of themes (aliens, linguistic confusion, meandering road trips) that she’s explored in earlier stories that felt more groundbreaking (possibly simply because I read them first). That said, I was extremely interested to read in her bio that she is currently writing a new entry to her Oxford time-travel series, which is truly her standout work.

Small Press Expo, 2024

by Rebecca

I love going to the Small Press Expo every year and seeing what new and unusual things are available and buying a whole stack of comics/graphic novels, and hanging out with a really fun crowd of creators. This was the first year that I attended some of the workshops in addition to the panels and vendor market, and they were so much fun and extremely inspiring. I bought a stack of new comics and have already read a number of them:

Garibaldiology: Japan Travelogue 1 by Garibaldi, 2014
This is an extremely cute little travelogue/drawn journal about the artist going on a trip to Japan, and is quite funny in a day-in-the-life manner about exploring a new place and meeting new people being a little gremlin. What particularly struck me is how non-judgemental, good or bad, it is in narration even as the person is judging the things around them. Their opinions are their personal opinions and not to be taken as anything greater than that. The over-all effect is just: wow, this is a thing that happened. And it’s just very cute.

Myths of Making: True Tales and Legends of Great Artists by Julien-G, 2024
The art is really striking restricted pallet of only three colors, that works to excellent effect, with retelling 25 stories and legends from pre-64,000 BCE, up to 2022. I really enjoyed both the art and the stories, but what really caught my eye was the book binding, which is beautifully done sewn pages onto a fabric spine with heavy board covers, such that a quite thick volume can be opened to lay flat without any concern for the gutters. I do have an appreciation for the artistry in bookbinding.

No Pants Revolution #8: Acceptance by Andrea Pearson, 2024
This is the eighth issue in a series for which I haven’t ready any of the preceding issues, but it’s okay because each one is a stand-alone auto-biographical collection of thoughts and experiences. In this particular issue, the author is contemplating acceptance as in a stage in grief, a prayer for serenity, and part of self-care.

I Got a Tattoo Every Month of 2023 and Now I’m Broke, by Clau, 2024
I got this at the same stall as No Pants Revolution, because it is very small accordion format zine and I liked the way the artist used a cartoon kewpie figure to show where the tattoos were located. It also seemed like a representation of how many people are struggling to get through the year, finding their own methods for motivation.

Body Issues: Comics About Body Image, art by Babs New, 2022
One of the workshops I went to at this small press expo was a life drawing (ie, nude model) class hosted by the artist/author of The Cadaver Diaries, which I’d bought and enjoyed last year, and modeled by Babs New, the non-binary artist for this book. This book is composed of short accounts by people talking about their struggles with feeling comfortable with their own body and societal perception, and illustrated by this artist. Each speaker has a little cartoon animal representative and then concludes with a simple line drawing of them in the nude, revealing the body they’ve been struggling with.

The Cycle by Jerel Dye, 2023
This is gorgeous little accordion book that is so beautifully crafted that I bought it without even really considering the story, but the art is lovely and the story is both simple and increasingly deep as I continue to think on it. I do love the use of gold foil on the cover. It’s drawn as a single scene in both the front and the back but it’s also a timelapse of events, scanning over a scene. The author makes excellent use of the different ways the book can be read.

Far Distant by A Liang Chan, 2023
This is a beautifully illustrated stand-alone short story graphic novel about a researcher stationed alone on a distant outpost in charge of managing some transmissions, but receives a series of transmissions that at first seem to simply be corrupted, but instead are a communication from something else entirely. This is a really excellent example of stories that require thought to tease out the implications rather than having everything be explicitly told, and I really enjoyed it. It also felt like a good companion piece with The Cycle, although they are completely unrelated.

Devil in the Pines by Natasha Tara Petrović
This is a beautifully illustrated “short comic about the tragedy of the Jersey Devil“, which I hadn’t particularly known about before, but this is beautiful and tragic, and makes me sad for a little devil who’s own mother cursed it. It’s just 16 pages long, and feels like it sits in the middle ground between a comic book and a picture book. It’s just a little devil who was born that way, does no harm, and is lonely being it’s own unique self.

Coextinct by Edea Giang, 2024
This is just 12 pages in black and white, a short but direct manifesto about how extinction events are happening across all species, not just the cute and beautiful ones, and how important it is to not ignore the small and unsightly. It looks specifically at the louse that lived exclusively among the feathers of a single species of bird that was also going extinct. The rescue workers who successfully managed to pull the bird species back from the brink of extinction, were also the ones who killed the the last examples of the louse. There was no evidence it actually hurt the bird at all, merely that it lived among the feathers. And no one knows what the relationship was between the louse and the bird.

Black Box by Carlos Chua and Regina Chua, 2024
This is the first issue in a proposed comic book series, so it’s just setting the premise but the premise is both a delight and a horror: it’s a fantasy world based on magic, but it’s also a modern world with capitalism and stock exchange, and our main character is an oracle who’s feeling burnt out after years of running prophesies about how stocks will fluctuate, and finally quits after she prophesies a major disaster and her boss reams her out for not suppressing that in her report. It felt remarkably realistic.

2020 was HELL but the KPOP was good! by Kori Michele
The first workshop I attended at small press expo was held by this author, about making extremely small zines, with simple folding techniques: teaching us how to make them and showing us examples of artists who had used them to good effect. This isn’t an example of those folding techniques, but is an example of her philosophical approach, which was to just make a zine as a way to give information to her friends and families: such as a playlist of the songs she was enjoying. The workshop was both fun and inspiring, and I got one of the authors larger books as well, but I haven’t read it yet. I also got this little zine, because it was a fun introduction to a music genre I’m not particularly into. I have since watched/listened to all the music videos, and it was a fun intro, even though it’s still not my music genre of choice. But it remains an inspiration of a fun way to create a modern mix-tape, leaving it to the reader to actually acquire the songs.

And, of course, these are just the relatively short comics that I’ve already read in the week since I got them. I have another stack of five larger and more extensive graphic novels that I need to read. But just, I do love the Small Press Expo and the whole range of people and creations that I see there.

Noor by Nnedi Okorafor

by Rebecca

Noor
by Nnedi Okorafor
2021

This is really good and I highly recommend it. It’s Afrofuturistism with the plot beats of a YA novel but a complexity to the characters that makes it feel more adult. It’s set in a relatively near future that grew from our current world. It’s scifi with technology that has continued to advance from what we have, but with a thread of mystical realism that makes me look at the current world and wonder if that is how a religious true believer sees the world. (I’m in this with the main character, AO, who is solidly atheist and yet is beginning to wonder…) It’s set in Nigeria, which is a culture that I’m not particularly familiar with and thus can’t always tell what is based on reality and what has been fictionalized. But the characters and the world are so beautiful and so difficult.

The plot is that our two main characters have each been through separate traumatic attacks in which they defended themselves with lethal force. But they both know that society does not recognize them as having the right to self-defense at the cost of their attackers’ lives. Our primary main character, AO, was born with severe birth defects and now uses extensive and experimental prosthetics, that make many of the people around her question if she is truly human or not. On the run from both her own actions and societies judgement of her, she learns more about other people on the outskirts of society and the exact nature of the experiments that have been done with her and her prosthetics.

The plot also just feels very timely as it comments on how easily the terms “attack” and “defense” can be swapped back and forth when someone’s mere existence is considered a threat to a dominant power in society. And how useful having such a threat can be in maintaining that power, right up until it turns out to actually be a threat rather than carefully massaged propoganda.

Anyway, I really enjoyed and highly recommend this.