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Moggie

EverydayMoggie@sfba.club

Joined 1 year, 8 months ago

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P. J. Ellis: We Could Be Heroes (Paperback, 2025, HarperNorth) No rating

BIRMINGHAM, Present Day.

When American actor Patrick arrives in England, finding love is the last …

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 …

Shehan Karunatilaka: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Paperback, 2022, W. W. Norton & Company)

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida—war photographer, gambler, and closet queen—has woken up dead in what seems …

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.

Ken MacLeod: Beyond the Hallowed Sky (2023, Start Publishing LLC) No rating

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.

finished reading The Rivals by Jane Pek (Claudia Lin, #2)

Jane Pek: The Rivals No rating

Claudia Lin—mystery novel superfan and, until recently, clichéd underemployed English major—has scored her dream job: …

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.

Everina Maxwell: Ocean's Echo (Hardcover, 2022, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom) No rating

Rich socialite, inveterate flirt, and walking disaster Tennalhin Halkana can read minds. Tennal, like all …

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?

finished reading Way of the Bear by Anne Hillerman (Leaphorn & Chee #26)

Anne Hillerman: Way of the Bear (2023, Kuperard Publishers)

An unexpected death on a lonely road outside of Utah's Bears Ears National Park raises …

I've read a lot of this series. They're fun as mysteries but mostly I read them for the setting, northern New Mexico and some of the surrounding areas, and for the culture.

finished reading Stealing Fire by Jo Graham

Jo Graham: Stealing Fire (Paperback, 2010, Orbit) No rating

Loved this book, but I always have a soft spot for historical fiction set in the ancient world. I think it's basically a retelling, with a great deal of embellishment, of historical events involving people who really existed, though I don't know the history of that period (around 350-300 BCE) well enough to be sure.