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Incredible.

We've read a number of books for #SFFBookClub that have a short story structure with interconnecting themes and worldbuilding (How High We Go in the Dark, and Under the Eye of the Big Bird) but In Universes is my clear favorite among all of these.

Structurally, this book is a series of short stories with a single point of view. Each story takes place in different adjacent-ish branching multiverses, some of which veer into more magical realism and externalized metaphors while others are more realistic. Thematically, this book is about dealing with internalized homophobia, trauma, depression and grief. But it's also about (queer) possibility and transformation and acceptance.

It's interesting to me just how many things I underlined (virtually) while reading this book. Delicious turns of phrase. Devastating sentences seemingly directly targeted at my feelings. Interconnecting thematic ideas everywhere. I found myself utterly engaged in its writing and imagery.

What is most striking about In Universes is that even when some chapters veer off in fantastical directions ("my mother is a horde of bees", "I am pregnant with an octopus", horse telepathy), there is such a coherent emotional progression for Raffi across the entire book. A lot of similarly structured books suffer from meandering too far afield with their ideas that they fail to come together, but In Universes feels so intentional with how it deploys its imagery and pacing. If anything, the final part of the book, consisting of a single chapter, resonates the strongest of all of them and I love the way it reprises the previous stories to bring everything together.

I was hooked from the start with Tchaikovsky's description of sending prisoners to Kiln as freeze-dried corpsicles that are reanimated on arrival. Actually doable? Actually money-saving? Hell if I know. Grabbed my attention.

Kiln has life. Not only does it have life, it has monuments built be an intelligent species, but there's no sign of them. That's a secret that was kept from Earth by it's rulers, the Mandate. Arton Daghdev, our protagonist is an unorthodox xenobiologist. A prisoners because of the unorthodoxy. But also he didn't know because it was kept so tightly secret. And the last part of of the premise is that there aren't exactly species on Kiln. The flora and fauna, such as they are, are more agglomerations of species with one purpose each: a stomach and an eye and a leg muscle get together to form a symbiotic creature. But they can all split up and form other creatures somehow.

So Arton is doing two things: trying to figure out what happened to the builders, and fighting the Mandate as its prisoner. He's got gallows humor in spades. He's also a somewhat unreliable narrator, though it's mostly lies by omission. The story drags in parts. When Arton merits extra punishment, he goes into overlong detail on that punishment. And lastly, the suspicious nature of a subjugated population is hammered home again and again. Yes, I get it that people, especially prisoners, are going to wonder who the snitches are. But by the 5th or 6th time Tchaikovsky and Daghdev go into it I was just wanted to move on.

But Tchaikovsky also ties it all together pretty nicely. The nature of life on Kiln is especially vexing for a totalitarian orthodoxy, and provides some distinct advantages when the conflict between them comes.

Half a star off because it does kind of drag in places.

This is now my favorite Adrian Tchaikovsky book. The writing is grippy, the narrator is wry, and I love the way the plotlines of revolution against authoritarianism and academic exploration of alien biology intertwine with each other.

Some extremely minor asides that I appreciated:

The narrator is quite funny and I appreciate the way he sometimes deceives the reader; there are several scenes where you get the surface level view of the scene and then find out shortly afterwards that he's also doing something furtive simultaneously.

I love that the authoritarianism is all about black and white binaries, and the book casually infers that one of the characters fell into political disfavor because they are some flavor of non-binary (without using that word, thank goodness).

This is also somehow the second academic adjacent alien book that I've read recently, with James SA Corey's The Mercy of Gods being the other. The power dynamic contexts are different enough that they end up taking different collaborator vs revolutionary approaches.

The Wildelings by Lisa Harding was on a 'dark academia' reading list I came across. I don't know if it fits into that category. Still, it takes place at a fictional Dublin university (named after Oscar Wilde) and deals with some dark elements of human nature, so sure.

The story revolves around Jessica and Linda, two friends who met as girls in their small town, and who have come to Wilde together. Jessica is a pretty, talented, and ambitious young woman with aspirations in theater. Linda, on the other hand, came from a difficult home life and was essentially adopted by Jessica and her stepmom. Linda is shy, unsure of herself, and afraid of attention. From the beginning, Jessica has had a dominant position in the relationship, never seeing Linda as any threat to her popularity or social standing.

At Wilde, they meet Mark, a philosophy student who is in a graduate program at the university. 

Mark is enigmatic and strangely attractive. People gravitate to him, and he holds enormous control over his friends, a sort of cult-leader-in-the-making. Mark casts Jessica in his play, and at the same time, begins a romantic relationship with Linda. As Jessica falls deeper under Mark's spell, confused by her feelings toward him, she is challenged by Linda's happiness as the girlfriend of the most popular man on campus (despite being in a relationship with a hot French dude).

Jessica is equal parts an immature, selfish, vain, and attention-hungry young woman, and also perplexed and terrified at the loss of control she experiences as the plot unfolds. The book is written from her point of view, and I found myself oscillating between sympathy and a desire to slap some sense into her.

Mark's influence over the people in Jessica's life begins to look threatening when she notices people acting strangely toward her and each other. There's a palpable sense of danger in the narrative as Jessica finds herself on rocky footing socially while her best friend seems to be ascending. She suspects that Mark is intentionally creating this dynamic, but for what purpose we never find out.

The only part of this book that left me frustrated was the lack of clarity around Mark's motivations. Maybe this is intentional on Harding's part, but I finished the book - which had a dramatic and tragic ending - unsatisfied and wondering why all of this had to happen in the first place. Maybe Mark is just an asshole, and there are no real motivations, but that flies in the face of everything we learn about him along the way. He's controlling, manipulative, and highly intelligent with strong ideas that he forces on others in innumerable ways.

Regardless, I enjoyed reading this book. It’s filled with tension, and Harding captures the uncertainty and self-absorption of young adulthood perfectly. This is a solid read.