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Moggie wants to read The Witchstone by Henry H. Neff
Moggie finished reading We Could Be Heroes by P. J. Ellis
I read this book for the Queer Romance Club on Mastodon, because this month's main selection wasn't available where I live. I thought I was going to hate this when I first started to read it. It's about a closeted movie star who plays a superhero; he basically doesn't have a social life outside of coworkers due to a strict morality clause in his contract. It is very contemporary, filled with pop culture references. (All of this is stuff I have zero interest in.)
The book is really too preachy. It feels like the characters exist to support the sociopolitical commentary, rather than the sociopolitical realities underpinning the characters' lives and motivations. The romance part of it is ok, nothing special; the main feature of it is the movie star's gradual realization that he wants to come out publicly.
But there's a subplot, and that was the thing that made …
I read this book for the Queer Romance Club on Mastodon, because this month's main selection wasn't available where I live. I thought I was going to hate this when I first started to read it. It's about a closeted movie star who plays a superhero; he basically doesn't have a social life outside of coworkers due to a strict morality clause in his contract. It is very contemporary, filled with pop culture references. (All of this is stuff I have zero interest in.)
The book is really too preachy. It feels like the characters exist to support the sociopolitical commentary, rather than the sociopolitical realities underpinning the characters' lives and motivations. The romance part of it is ok, nothing special; the main feature of it is the movie star's gradual realization that he wants to come out publicly.
But there's a subplot, and that was the thing that made the book worth reading. The superhero story is based on a series of comic books written in the 1950s. There's rumored to be a finale to that series that was never published. The original series was attributed to the magazine owner who published it, but we see the story of the real authors, a married couple. The wife wrote the stories under a pen name, the husband was the illustrator. They were good friends, but they were married to each other mainly to conceal the fact that both were queer. What happens to them as a consequence of that would have made a more interesting book on its own.
If I say how that ended, it will be a pretty big spoiler.
Moggie finished reading The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
This is essentially a murder mystery, except it's the victim, who is now inhabiting a very bizarre afterlife, who is trying to figure out who killed him and why. (There is no shortage of people who had reasons to want him dead.) His recall of his life is patchy and memories return rather unpredictably. He's hampered by the fact that the living can't see him, and his ability to communicate with them is limited, as is his ability to control where he goes.
The living are almost entirely unaware that ghosts, demons, and sundry other spirits are everywhere around them, that animals have souls just like humans, these souls can talk to other ghosts; and that there is an afterlife where you have agency and have to make choices on the basis of incomplete data, just as you did in life.
Moggie started reading The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
Moggie finished reading Beyond the Light Horizon by Ken MacLeod
Moggie finished reading Beyond the Reach of Earth by Ken MacLeod
Moggie finished reading Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod
Book 1 of the Lightspeed Trilogy
Really enjoyed this trilogy. It reminds me somewhat of The Expanse, but the story is somewhat less convoluted and follows fewer characters. The plot revolves around the invention of faster-than-light travel, which gets independently discovered by at least four different people at different times, and has some peculiar side effects on time. It's also got a very interesting theme of panspermia with our solar system as the source template for life, spread onto many planets by an enigmatic entity billions of years old.
Moggie finished reading The Rivals by Jane Pek (Claudia Lin, #2)
This is a sequel to The Verifiers. I like its blend of mystery and science fiction with a dash of (mostly unfulfilled) romance, along with a side of sociopolitical commentary. The setting is either present day or very near future, so the science fiction aspect is speculation about what could be going on beneath the surface of the world we see. Nearly all of the important characters are women, and it's just presented as a given that they are whole people independent of any men.
Moggie finished reading The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women by Rosalie Gilbert
Moggie commented on Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell
Really enjoyed the story, though I would have liked to see the relationship between the main characters developed more. They're polar opposites in most ways, which you'd expect would make them irritating to each other, yet there's very little conflict or even misunderstanding between them. And by the end, neither is the same person they were at the beginning. You'd think that would have some profound effects, but they just kind of shrug it off.
I do have some nitpicks with the science fiction aspect. For one, it's heavily implied that consciousness and perception are something separate from the physical body. But if that is so, how would it be possible for genetic modification to alter these things?
And why would there still be a job doing manual data entry in a society with such advanced tech?
Moggie finished reading Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell

Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell
Rich socialite, inveterate flirt, and walking disaster Tennalhin Halkana can read minds. Tennal, like all neuromodified “readers,” is a security …














