Reviews and Comments

I could say that Rose/House is a locked room mystery, but that would be selling it short. Except maybe if I add that the locked room is an AI and is itself on the suspect list, that gives it more of its proper credit. The titular Rose House is an architectural marvel and quite possibly its dead (of old age) architect’s crowning achievement. For reasons we never quite learn, he stipulated in his will that at his death Rose House would be shut up with all his archives and watched over by its AI, which permeates the house. Only one person, the architect's estranged former protege, is allowed to enter the house, and only for a week per year. As we begin the story, the house makes a legally required phone call to a police precinct to report a dead body on its premises. How did someone get inside? How did they die? How can the detective get inside to retrieve the body if only the protege is allowed inside? These are the animating mysteries that drive the plot. But the plot is only half (at most) of the mystery.

Read the rest of my review, along with thoughts about science fiction murder mysteries in general on my blog: rinsemiddlebliss.com/posts/2023-05-12-review-moon-moth-rose-house/

Simply the most useful cookbook on Western European cookery I’ve ever used. Not merely a recipe book, it teaches the principles of cooking following the French style. The recipes if read alone seem sparse compared to modern standards because they build on principles taught earlier on. At the same time, it’s a book for the home cook and is not precious about ingredients or over-fussy about perfectionist techniques that offer marginal gains. As an example, it offers the technique of flour mixed with butter as a simpler alternative for when you don’t have time to create a roux for sauce. Sure it’s not as stable or as delicious, but it’s much better than lumpy sauce.

Read and use this book if you want to build your base of cooking techniques. If you are an OK or good home cook, its instruction will elevate your baseline. If you are a recipe follower scared to improvise or whose improvisations come out wrong, it will teach you principles that will free you to improvise confidently within safe boundaries.

This books is probably of little use to vegetarians and of no use to vegans, as it relies heavily on meats and butter, following the French tradition.

Parts of this book are complete genius. The scene where the Liberator leads Pryn through the city market and narrates it all as he goes while Pryn observes what happens and it feels like they are in two separate cities at once? Genius. There are bits like that all over. Singular scenes, character sketches, perspective reversals that knock you flat. The uncomfortable and incisive depictions of slavery, and what it might be like to really travel as a woman in a sword and sorcery world are key thematic strengths. But there are also long sections where characters narrate Derrida exegeses or simplified Marxism for pages and some dreadfully repetitive dialogue. I can see this stuff is trying to make a point (perhaps that these people are tiresome), and I just long for more economy in the way the point is made. I think the book might also be making fun of the kind of just-so stories you find in Sword and Sorcery by instead replacing them with just-so stories lifted from critical theory, lifted without transforming them much at all. I can't tell though. The biggest problem I have though is the weak narrative. The book drags at points, hangs together a series of vignettes that don't ultimately seem to come together even though it's supposedly all about one character in a continuous story, and ultimately sets up some incomprehensible situations which don't seem to come to a point leaving me as a reader just as confused as our naive main character. Tales of Nevèrÿon, with multiple separate tales about different characters held together better, and did more to transform the key ideas both books lift from Derrida about the nature of language and the concept of difference.

It's an interesting experiment, and really fun in places. I'm glad I read it but I couldn't recommend it wholeheartedly, unless you're really interested in experimental sword and sorcery.

This review is for the entire box set of novels: Soulless, Changeless, Blameless, Heartless and Timeless.

The strengths: witty turns of phrase, the humorous dramatic irony between the point of view characters’ obsession with Victorian propriety and fashion faux pas in the face of mortal peril, the romance plots, the overall whimsy.

The mixed: The romance plots only really work when there is romantic tension, which is considerably lessened when the romantic leads in the first novel get together. After that, they may have their tensions and occasional dramatic separations, but it doesn’t carry the same frisson. If I were rating only the first book, I’d give it 4 stars, precisely because it works so well as an action romance. It even has, dare I say it, erotic moments, though not explicit.

In the later books there are romances between secondary characters, but we only really get the outside view. I’d probably be pretty happy reading books dedicated entirely to the romance plots of those gay paranormal couples. But I understand that’s not what these books were trying to be.

The action plots on the other hand are never as strong. They work as action-romance quite well, but when they take center stage they can’t quite carry the whole structure as well, and often rely on surprise reveals.

The fashion descriptions are fun in small doses, but sometimes left me confused about what I was supposed to imagine. I understand there’s a manga adaptation, which I bet would be fun for that.

The weaknesses: After the first book, Alexia does not grow as a character. In the first book, she finds confidence in herself and her power, but after that, she’s changeless. She has adventures, makes amazing discoveries, is betrayed, becomes a parent, and still, she does not change. She’s a fun character, I mean, I read 5 novels about her, but without character growth it feels unsatisfying. The other elements aren’t strong enough to make for that. And they could. I’m not a stickler for character growth as an absolute requirement: Bertie Wooster doesn’t grow but we forgive Wodehouse because the humor carries the books.

My recommendation: Definitely read Soulless. Read the rest if you enjoy the witty language, or just can’t get enough of supernatural steampunk.

CryoBurn continues the fun trend of Miles-solves-a-mystery storylines that started with Memory. With some of the story told from the point of view of other characters observing Miles, we get a distressing outside perspective of his physical deterioration after everything he's been through. Jin, the runaway kid who keeps a menagerie of animals is a particularly fun point of view character. If you've read this far in the series, you know what Miles is like, but seeing him from Jin's point of view, you get to see afresh just how intense and disruptive he is to others. The book suffers a bit from that typical one planet, one culture trope. In this case, somewhat uncomfortably, it seems like a planet of people descended from Japanese colonists and therefore still using Japanese honorifics and other small signs they're supposed to be Japanese-descended. I say uncomfortably because it seems a bit of a shallow veneer, and I'm not sure it really works. It's not terrible or super cringe, but I think the book would have been better with either a more grounded tie into it, or just a completely imaginary culture instead.

The two great strengths of Aurora, which are a running strength in every KSR novel I've read, are characters who grow, and sensitivity to ecology. The most interesting character is the narrator, the quantum computer running the generation ship, who begins to write a narrative of the ship's voyage at the request of its engineer. As the ship-narrator tells the story, it develops both narrative skill and a personality through the act of telling. It becomes increasingly self-aware and self-reflective, with some delightfully meta sections as the ship muses about the nature of metaphor and other narrative techniques. The narrative structure, the ship's perhaps-sentience, and the material recounted are wonderfully in sync. When the ship's self-consciousness is young, it tells the story simply about the events in the life of a child. As the ship matures, so does the child, and the narrative becomes more complex. Towards the end, there is a big payoff to having the ship as a character, because it can tell the story of complex orbital maneuvers as it attempts to decelerate using slingshot maneuvers. I know, it sounds dry, but it's fascinating and exciting.

Aurora is genre aware, in conversation with KSRs earlier, more optimistic takes on the idea of humans living outside of the earth, as well as, of course, the entire trope of "something has gone wrong on the generation ship." And oh boy, what hasn't gone wrong on the generation ship? In his exploration of the ways that the ecology of a closed, artificial environment could fail, KSR goes further than any SF writer I've read.

It's a big idea book, too, with a clear environmental message, something that KSR goes on to explore even further in The Ministry for the Future, though here it's held together more by the scaffolding of a narrative. It has the best answer to the Fermi paradox I've seen, though to tell you what would be a spoiler.

The lush prose, the fascinating characters, and the wonderful world building that holds a mirror to the problems of citizenship and ubiquitous surveillance — those things kept me going even when the pacing faltered, dragging or rushing at different points, the motivations of characters grew a bit too concealed from the reader, and the lushness veered into purple prose and creative language use stepped into malapropisms. I think these are all problems of scale. I liked Sriduangkaew’s shorter pieces a lot more, and here I felt like the structure and pacing of a short story or novella was expanded to novel size. But a novel needs a different structure, not just to be longer. It’s an uneven book, and worth reading for the good parts, by which yes, I do also mean the incredibly wonderful queer sex scenes. I think it might have worked a lot better for me, even with the pacing issues, if more of the exposition happened during sex scenes, where a bit of indulgent purple prose isn’t so bad.