My T- Rex Has Fleas

We are all mortals. Sometimes the Wednesday Reading Meme comes on a Thursday.

What I Have Read

Deal with the Devil - Mercenary Librarians #1 by Kit Rocha 

So this book is bad. Some reasons – it’s the first in an intended series, so the set up is dense and the payoff is lean.

The authors (Donna Herren and Bree Bridges) met while writing X-Men fanfic and this book reads like fanfic* - it is uninterested in establishing the characters as unique people; it takes as granted that the reader will find the romance between them compelling. At one point, the female romantic lead turns to the male romantic lead and asks that they end the conflict between them. Reader, it was maybe 10% into the book - there had been no conflict yet! They were already collaborating very well!

The dystopian worldbuilding is frustrating when it’s not intensely boring: Both of our main characters are modified supersoldiers and have run from their eeevil technological overlords. Their new goal? To find community in the vast network of free information they maintain as the Mercenary Librarians. Which should be fascinating, except none of it happens on the page. It’s shorthand to explain why they have lots of tech and food and live comfortably in a post-apocalyptic world.

This book knew things that good stories do and tried to do them? But it didn’t actually do them.

Drop of Corruption - Robert Jackson Bennett - The audiobook came and oooh, it's good, so I jumped in. The narrator, Andrew Fallaize, is very good at giving characters distinct pacing and intonation. (However, he is English, so he keeps saying “Ana” like he’s saying “Honor” and it’s jarring. Not offputting! But jarring.) Bennett excels at mysteries, and at complicated political situations, and this book is him rolling it both like a Labrador in a mud puddle. Highly recommend.

The Afterword was also very good. He takes a critical eye to fantasy’s fascination with monarchy, with kings as a trope of goodness and wholeness for a people. This books makes very plain what he thinks of them – slavers in fancy hats. Lest it seems didactic, it was not - obvious in hindsight, like a well-laid clue, but not grating. 

What I'm Reading
Space Opera by Catherynne Valente – I have started this book before- it always hits me as charming but a high demand read. Since it’s now up for a book club choice, I have the motivation. Already everything about this book is a masterclass in setup and payoff. I love Mr. Looney of the Tunes, point to Nani.

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky - static from last week
The Revolutionary Temper — Robert Darnton – like 10% in? It’s a cultural and literary look at the French Revolution. Many characters are old friends, but with a more detailed look and a specific timeline leading up to the actual Revolution. The book has scope and pace. Jo Walton talked about this in her July reading round up and I'm enjoying the audiobook. 

Lent by Jo Walton - Re-reading this for a book club. I think this hits me in a particular place - I adore a character who is in a one-sided fight with a neglectful God (gee, wonder if I have mommy issues much) and I love fantasy lets you come at the same problem from a bunch of different angles. I often use the image of a gem and facets as a metaphor for my favorite kinds of fiction - the author picks up a topic and shows it to the reader, giving us views of the many shapes of a single thing by skillfully directing our attention. This book absolutely shows Walton as a similar kind of thinker. 

What I'll Read Next
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison
The Fortunate Fall Cameron Reed - this book came up at Arisia AND in the note about ReaderCon 2025, so I am intrigued that my book club has picked it. We are a ways out. 
Monsters and Mainframes?

*I hope that, since you are reading this blog, you have enough context to know that I adore fanfic. I use the comparison to point out a structural element that, in fanfic, is not a flaw. But in an original work, your characters deserve a decent introduction.

https://seattlein2025.org/wsfs/hugo-awards/winners-and-stats

Hugo Awards thoughts

Best Novel went to The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett, and I think it's well deserved! This book was fun, well structured, and mastered set up and payoff exceptionally well. I have read Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, which was excellent, but not quite as tightly put together, so I would say that Tainted Cup represents both mature skill and growth. I'd recommend it, particularly if you like a good detective story. I read at least part of most nominated works in this category (I missed Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay entirely, and did not finish Ministry of Time in a timely fashion to vote) and I was pleased to see Bennett's win.

I want to plug one other nominee - Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This novel is experimental and fascinating - it rewards familiarity with the classics of both the Western canon and the speculative fiction, but it's riffing on them with a light touch. Tchaikovsky is taking serious concepts and looking thru an absurdist lens, taking things to an extra-logical extreme. These robots are both comprehensible and alien. They feel and yet they don't. A running theme is Tchaikovsky telling us that, in any given scenario, the character is a robot and therefore not feeling a particular feeling - but also not feeling any other particular feeling. This apophatic mode of characterization appeals to me so much - showing the reader the emotion while denying the existence of the emotion is a precision weapon for a writer to wield, and Tchaikovsky holds that pen deftly. The main character is even named for his negation - after leaving his role as valet, he is renamed Uncharles: because of course he's not Charles anymore, that is the name of the valetbot in a particular house serving a particular master. And of course he's still Charles: who else would he be?

I think the flaw with Service Model is the ending - as this is an experimental journey thru several literary imaginations, any ending that tried to mesh well with all of them would fail. So the ending becomes quite pragmatic, and attempts to address the ills being done to the characters that we have become attached to over the course of the story. It charms me, because I love when an author trusts that the reader will care what happens to the fictional people of a story once the book is over, but I concede that it is probably not thematically a strong as some of the book's middle. I don't care, but you might.

The Winning Graphic Novel - Star Trek : Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way - is simply a masterpiece of Choose Your Own Adventure techniques, where the story itself influences how you interact with the multiple routes thru the book. I highly recommend getting this book in physical form and settling in to just PLAY with it for a few hours. The story is not incredibly long, but there is a beginning, middle, and end that take the Star Trek characters into the scenario and then out the other side; I was compelled to keep trying until I figured out the puzzle. It's woven into the story really well! This was my first experience with Lower Decks and made me actually go and pick up the show, which is a delight.

I have yet to read my way thru the other categories, so I'll hold off on my full opinions there until I am Properly Informed.


In personal life news, I get to do more physical therapy - new body part, old issue. Frustrating to have let things get this bad and liberating that it might be fixable.