List: awards:nebula-award

Wow! This is a fantastic, clever, wonderful scifi book. I loved the explicitly humanoid species (that are probably expanded on, especially their origin, in other parts of the series). I loved the mostly-androgynous species, their peculiarities, the mechanics of it all, the implications. I loved the protagonist and the carefully spun story arch - but I loved most that the narrator/protagonist was both clever, relatable, and fallible - there were several instances where, in the middle of narration, you started to think "Hold up, I'm sure that's not quite …" or "Isn't that just your weird bisexual bias …?"

The Stone Sky is a great ending to a great trilogy. I dislike books where the ending is clear ahead of time, but the amounts of good storytelling and additional context we got made up for it. Nassun's development felt a bit heavy-handed at times, but she still makes a good character, and contrasts well with her mother Essun. I enjoyed getting the true backstory for the breaking of the earth!

I prefer this book to the first, more famous one. It's deeper, and more powerful, and doesn't rely on one cheap trick.

Rereading Ender's game six years later, I found it better than I remembered it. Sure, you'll never see the twist coming the way you saw it the first time, and when I read it the first time I didn't know about OSC's personal politics. But regardless: The book sucked me in, dragged me through a story as relentlessly cruel as it was enjoyable, and then spit me out three hours later, not without delivering a last minute kick straight to the feelings.

Among Others worked super well for me, especially considering that there is little-to-no plot and the whole book is a well-dressed bibliography. But the protagonist's (diary author) voice is super strong and realistic, and … okay, let's be honest here: I felt very pandered to in the best way. This book is in some way a modern equivalent to Gaudy Night, intellectual+atmospheric pandering to an in-group, and I'm in the in-group, and that's all there is to it.

I liked Binti a lot more than Akata Witch, which I enjoyed very much. Binti was impressive and creative scifi, and the tha fast pace (du to the <100 pages) was refreshing and very well executed. Binti is a wonderful protagonist, and the culture and belief system sketched out in the book made me hungry for more. (Also: living ships?! Living ships!)

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire is a nice little fantasy tale of the place where children go after going through a Door to Another Place (Fairylands, for example), and then coming back. It's short, and sweet, and sad, and gruesome. It's about real children, not a list of characters from other books, either. The gruesome part is the murder mystery half of the book, but that's really only window dressing for the exploration of the characters and worlds. It's short, and I'd have liked to see more exploration of both the children and their worlds – but that's what the sequel is there for.

How is Lois McMaster Bujold not one of the first authors to be recommended to people starting scifi? Falling Free introduces the Quaddies (humans with arms instead of legs), as seen and told by an Engineer, capital E. It's awesome, and it's got everything you'd wish for: a new culture, social implications, lots and lots of economic and corporate implications (I see where Charlie got his Laundry File bureaucracy from), and the cultural implications aswell. Also, very sweet and cool characters all around, and funny af. Leo Graf, the protagonist, is just ♥

A heart-breaking short story about belonging, and families, and a tiny bit of magic. But mostly heartbreak.

Uprooted by Naomi Novik was a perfect fantasy story/fairytale. It's got all the right parts (dark magic, regular magic, unimpressed heroine, ambivalent wizard, etc), but isn't terribly predictable, and forms real characters instead of shadows of well-known archetypes. By following the easy-to-like first-person narrator Agnieszka, and seeing her relate to the Dragon, her best friend Kasia, and all the others, painted a vivid and realistic picture of the world. We even get a surprising amount of moral ambivalence, considering the genre. A very good book. I may start to read Naomi Novik's fantasy series if Uprooted is any indicator for that series' quality.

The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard is a nie short scifi novella in a world where different sorts of teas can have a profound impact on how the human brain works, there is deep space that behaves entirely different from normal space, and we have sentient ships.

I first read Bloodchild last year, I think, and re-read it now. It's a very Octavia Butler story – aliens cohabitating with humans and making ties that touch on reproductive and life cycles is a thing she does. But she does it well, and it's not a repeated shtick. I didn't enjoy the story as such, but it was expertly written, and viscerally stuck in my memory. (Also: ew.)

Very very nearly a five-star book for me due to the ending, and I enjoyed it much more than the first volume. The story of Olamina told by herself, but commented on by her daughter, is really something. The pacing is outstanding and not very conventional (meaning you don't anticipate how the story is going to evolve and end). I was happy and impressed to follow Olamina through her budding community, her imprisonment, pregnancy, and founding a religion.

Sarah Pinsker's done it again: great story, this one in the form of forum/footnote discussions about a creepy creepy old English poem. Won awards for a reason, very well done. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Dune is a classic scifi novel, which can mean it's anywhere between breathtaking genius and hardly accessible anymore. I found it a bit difficult to get into at first, similar to Ancillary Justice. Once I grew used to the storytelling device of an aggressively all-knowing narrator (frequently giving both/all inner views to all sides of a conversation), the world-building was fascinating, and despite the extensive narrator-explanations the reader is forced to make connections themself. My only misgiving was that large parts of the plot were too laid-out: the Mary-Sue protagonist, the evil antagonists, the good Fremen warriors etc. I hope that further parts in the series alleviate the clear-cut morals and abilities of the characters a bit. I'm looking forward to it – the world-building was exemplary. (Also, I can finally watch the movie now.)

I liked the non-male focus on regular lives a lot! Tenar and Tenahu are both really cool. But the story was weird … pacing, content, it felt irregular and all over the place for me. Story 2/5, setting 4/5.

I liked Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes – even though the ending in itself felt predictable, it was very clear that the journey to that ending was the core of the book. It's not an easy question: How much does intelligence determine who we are, and what would happen if our intelligence were to rapidly in- or decrease? While I liked the concept of the book, I can't say that I enjoyed it though … it felt too stressfull with a hint of the kafkaesque for that.

Steampunk, non-Victorian edition: In 1912, Egypt is a rising world power due to its access to magic. Holding its own against the British and other world powers in a multicultural metropolis, Cairo is far from free and perfect, though: Our protagonist, Fatma, is one of the few women in the Ministry of supernatural stuff, where she works as an investigator, and gets to unravel the bloodless-but-supernatural murder of some British guys.

Not quite sure what to think of this one. It's fast paced, but I think it tries too hard. I liked how it plays with multiple realities, or layers of reality, but both the plot and the pacing felt so … forced.

Very Scalzi-ish (although, of course, the other way around). Took some getting used to the terse style, after that very well thought through and enjoyable. Especially all the implication of time dilation by long distance space jumps.

It's hard to judge All Systems Red on account of it being so short – it's fast-paced and engaging though, and I felt invested in the story. But after reading it, I was more interested in reading the next part and finding out more about the world and the protagonist – the whole book felt like it just provided a backdrop for the further series. As the series is generally well-liked though, I trust that things will pick up from here.

Let this website attest that I like Sarah Pinsker a lot – I'm not a short story person in general, and I love hers. That said: I wasn't a fan of this book. Her usual skill with small scenes and emotional gut punches showed, but the plot was so extremely on the nose that I did my best not to eyeroll my way through it. Hard to engage with the cool characters when the plot is yelling its generic dystopia blah lecture at you. (tldr: Brain enhancement that some want, others not, peer pressure, hmmm, wonder if the sleazy bigcos will have our best interest at heart, unconvincing HAPPY GOOD END. The end.) This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

This is a tricky one: Repent, Harlequin!, Said the Ticktockman by Harlan Ellison is a metaphor against an over-reglemented world. It's old, and I'm afraid to my eyes it hasn't aged too well. It's got an important message, and the scenario isn't bad either, and the language is poetic, but it didn't capture me at all.

Novella: recollections of a revolutionary. Very Zen.

The Calculating Stars by Marie Robinette Kowal sure is a book. It is set in the US in the 50s, just shortly after a meteorite drops into the sea next to Washington, kills millions, and starts what might be an extinction level event. Our protagonist is a woman with a PhD in maths, who flew planes in WW2 for WASP (officially never saw combat, but, y'know …), and whose husband is lead engineer for the NACA/IAC. Now that the earth might become uninhabitable within decades, the space programme kicks off in earnest and our protagonist works as a computer for the IAC. Then she realizes that she is perfectly qualified to go to space (apart from her being constantly on the Bad Old Drugs against her crippling anxiety, but hey, who's counting), but as you can imagine, in the US in the 50s, going to space as a woman is more-or-less unthinkable. This book shows a lot of important things, but … like running down a checklist. Life as a religious minority (the protagonist is Jewish). Life for black people (the protagonist slowly starts recognizing her own racial biases when confronted with them). Sexism, naturally. Some politicking, fake news, all that jazz. (And space, obviously.) Also. The characters are so one-dimensional. The protagonist's by-the-numbers issues were not handled well: It's as if she was created as a Mary Sue, then got slapped with a major crippling flaw to make up for it, and then the flaw was only clumsily integrated in the story. These are things I only noticed a couple of days after finishing the book, though – while reading it I was racing through it. If space or planes or alternate history or general geeky enthusiasm is your thing, and you can ignore flat characters and disregard for a global catastrophe, and incredibly, infinitely cringe sex scenes, this will be for you!

Horror is not my genre, and this one just didn't have an effect on me? Not a bad book, just book-reader-mismatch, I think. The protagonist had a good distinct voice, and Area X was weird in a good way, but it never clicked for me.

What is this, the book of a thousand subtitles? I wanted to justify my initial hype, and see the book listed as "Babel: An Arcane History", whereas I remember it as "Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution". Which, admittedly, is at least one subtitle too many, but you can also see how I'd be hella into that. Several other people I know were into the idea too, so we ended up doing an async buddy read over at Storygraph, which by the way has an excellent buddy read system. I was so, so disappointed. I haven't been this disappointed in a book in such a long time. It took me about 70% into the book to feel somewhat engaged, and that dropped off immediately again when the widely telegraphed plot twist happened. I don't even want to go into it too much, so here is a list of things I liked: "He had just learned about Platonic forms, and was convinced scones were the Platonic ideal of bread." – This is adorable, and the book contains several cute sentences. (Look, yes, I'm trying to be nice here) Mood turnover is fast and well done. We go from domestic violence to meeting Ramy (and later the rest of the gang, but it's Ramy who counts) in just a few pages. There's some very open, clear foreshadowing that I thought was paced well, eg. By the time they had finished their tea, they were almost in love with each other [...] The days had not yet come when Ramy wore Victoire's sloppily knitted scarves with pride. [...] Why had they refused to see the myriad ways they could hurt each other? Generally depicting friendships as the central defining feature of their lives, too. Group dynamics are hard, and this book made them work at least some of the time. (Still trying to be nice) "Which language do you dream/think in" is genuinely a good characterisation, shame it's wasted I do like that Robin is not a hero. He's a fucking coward, and so are we all when facing The System, and pointing that out is good. An etymology-based magic system that rests on connections and divergences is a super cool idea. Some of the etymology tidbits were cool too (and I suppose I shouldn't complain about knowing most of them already). Here are my complaints: The preface is a huge, huge defensive exercise in "I promise I know my Oxford" and felt petty and insecure – as a preface. I'm all for the nerd research notes, but they belong in an appendix, not telling me upfront what we'll be seeing in Oxford! The whole "dreaming/thinking in a different language" is depicted so clinically and abstract. Compare this to A Memory Called Empire that makes you feel what it means to not be at home in any culture or language because you stand in between! There is quite some time spent on building the protagonist's group and characterisation, and somehow, despite that, the characters remained flat and lifeless outside of their scenes. Maybe that was just because I wasn't into the book. Oblivious protagonists are the worst. The fact that Anthony isn't dead is not just telegraphed, it's all but YELLED at the reader, and the protagonist misses like three increasingly obvious clues. Please, we readers are not that desparate to be superior and clever. Letty having a terminal case of protagonist syndrome, completely unable to think things from other people's perspective – I liked that at first. I thought it was a neat characterisation, if heavy-handed. I desperately hoped that I wasn't right about her character arc, because it would be cheap, and obvious, and surely nobody would write a twist like that. Alas. Also everybody else's reaction was peak stupidity and I hated it. And here is the big one: I felt moralised at. Nonstop. The book was so busy being righteous and making sure that every reader Understands The Metaphore and how it Applies Today Too and that there is good and bad and the books has an answer and an explanation for everything (and it'll make sure we know it! God forbid the reader could have to use their own brain) … man, I hated Narnia for moralising too much when I was twelve. Twelve! I have not gotten more patient. Grumpy old man, signing off. This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.