Zenn Scarlett by Christian Schoon
Part of the blurb (which, in my opinion, is a bit too long and too detailed but could be worse):
Zenn Scarlett is a bright, determined, occasionally a-little-too-smart-for-her-own-good 17-year-old girl training hard to become an exoveterinarian. That means she’s specializing in the treatment of exotic alien life forms, mostly large and generally dangerous. Her novice year of training at the Ciscan Cloister Exovet Clinic on Mars will find her working with alien patients from whalehounds the size of a hay barn to a baby Kiran Sunkiller, a colossal floating creature that will grow up to carry a whole sky-city on its back.
Zenn lives in a sort of veterinary abbey with her uncle, a nun and a small number of other workers. I wasn’t entirely clear why there was a religious order dedicated to caring for alien life forms, but I hope we’ll learn more about that in the sequel. Most of the other characters, namely the townspeople, where the abbey was set apart from the town, were very irritating. In a good way, from a writing point of view, but in a very “need a good slap in the face for being a bunch of red neck xenophobic hicks” way. A lot of the tension in the novel arose from the townies being afraid of aliens and barely tolerating the abbey’s continuing presence, even when the vets were actively helping them with their own pets and livestock.
In some ways, I felt the story didn’t tackle the issues of xenophobia and tolerance deeply enough. For a start, it wasn’t until a good way into the story that we learnt why there were so many hicks on Mars — it was used as a transportation colony — a point which rather baffled me up until then. To some extent, it boiled down a bit too much to “good guys nice to animals” vs “bad guys hate the good guys” although it did get more complex towards the end.
A lot of things about Zenn Scarlett improved towards the end. I felt the writing grew more readable as we went along, particularly since there were so many flashbacks near the start. I was also gratified that there wasn’t a very long gap between my guessing a plot point and it being revealed in the text. The last quarter or so was full of excitement, albeit the very end, after the main climax, culminated in a very frustrating cliff hanger, however. Frustrating because I could see it coming when there weren’t nearly enough pages to resolve new events. I want to read the sequel cliff hanger or not, but there’s something slightly soul-crushing about the looming inevitability of not having a proper resolution at the end. (I think I prefer the kind of cliff hangers that sneak up on you… or softer ones with less in the balance.)
I feel like I need to comment on the science in Zenn Scarlett, since that’s my thing. I can’t say much about the biology because that’s not my area, but as the blurb suggests, almost all the animals involved were quite giant. If they were on Earth I’d be questioning the biophysical plausibility, but with Mars’s lower gravity, there’s more chance of them being OK. There was one slightly creative physics moment that had be heckling the page, but in the scheme of things, it could have been much worse (it could also have been better justified…).
All in all, Zenn Scarlett was a fun read. I recommend it to fans of YA science fiction. I want to say it’s good for fans of something a little different, but I have to admit there were aspects which reminded me a little of Avatar (the James Cameron movie), more thematically than literally. I’m not sure I’ve read any YA on a similar theme, however. Anyway, fans of aliens and alien creatures in their SF will also enjoy this book, I think. I look forward to reading the sequel.
4 / 5 stars
First published: (early) May 2013, Strange Chemistry (Angry Robot)
Series: Yes. Book 1 of 2?
Format read: eARC on my iThings
Source: the publisher via NetGalley
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Stray by Andrea K Höst
Stray is about Cass, a Sydney teenager, who falls into a wormhole to another planet on her way home from her last HSC (High School Certificate) exam. In her school uniform and equipped only with her history notes, pencil case, an empty drink bottle, and a blank diary she’d bought as a present, she finds herself in a forest, all alone. The story is told through her diary entries.
I liked Cass. Her voice was entertaining to read and the main thing that saved the book during some of the slower patches. She throws in a lot of geeky and Australian references which made me think the book might be a little inaccessible (to non Australian geeks) until I got to the end and discovered that a) there was a glossary and b) it contained the geeky references and Australianisms as well as the alien stuff.
Stray starts off as a survivor story with Cass having to find food and water — and not get eaten by anything herself — on the planet she’s been transported to. It was believable; Cass didn’t have some secret past as a hard core scout or anything so she was mostly going off common sense and random snippets of half-remembered information. Eventually, after chasing sheep around for their wool and several brushes with death, Cass is rescued by psychic space ninjas (her phrase) and the bulk of the story takes place in an advanced alien society. With psychic space ninjas.
As I said, I enjoyed Stray, but found it a little slow at times. Because it’s written as a series of diary entries and the only days Cass skips writing are when she physically can’t, there were a few “nothing really happened today” entries. Those didn’t actually bother me much, it was the “things happened today but they’re not that crucial to moving the plot along” days that I felt could use tightening up. I suspect it’s the sort of thing a professional editor might have addressed and that would have made it feel like things moved along more quickly. The structure was a bit unusual too in the sense that it didn’t quite contain the traditional build-up, climax, resolution. Not that there wasn’t excitement and action — there was, what else would space ninjas do? — but I suspect the larger arc is spread over the entire trilogy.
Don’t let that put you off, though. I was never bored and now I wish I could read the next book straight away (but unfortunately I have some other books demanding my attention in the immediate future). I also hope Höst decides to write more SF in the future (other than And All the Stars, her other series are all fantasy) because more Aussie SF is always a good thing.
I recommend Stray to fans of science fiction and perhaps space opera (although it’s not quite space opera as I understand the definition) and science fantasy. The psychic aspects were (unsurprisingly) not exactly scientific and reminded me of a cross between super powers and the kind of astral plane Rowena Cory Daniells had in the Outcast Chronicles, though, again, not quite. I should also note that as far as putting fantasy into science fiction goes, Stray was the sort of mix I feel I can get behind. Psychic powers, yes; wizards in space, no.
4 / 5 stars
Series: Touchstone trilogy, book 1
Format read: ePub on iThings
Source: iBooks store (also available from SmashWords)
Challenges: Australian Women Writers Challenge, Australian Science Fiction Reading Challenge
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Ash by Malinda Lo
Ash by Malinda Lo is a retelling of the Cinderella story. It’s not a straight retelling of the fairytale (pun rather intended) with some variations on the theme, but I think it will appeal most to people who enjoy fairytale fantasy.
Ash opens with the titular character’s mother’s death and the story takes us through her father’s remarriage, death and Ash’s subsequent indentured servitude to her stepmother. (Gosh, it’s nice to be able to just lay out the plot like that because everyone knows it — very liberating!) As well as the Cinderella framework, Ash brings a fairly traditional view of fairies to the table — by traditional, I don’t mean “the same as in the Disney version of Cinderella” at all — and a dose of female empowerment in the form of the office of the King’s Huntress.
Ash by Malinda Lo is a retelling of the Cinderella story. It’s not a straight retelling of the fairytale (pun rather intended) with some variations on the theme, but I think it will appeal most to people who enjoy fairytale fantasy.
Ash opens with the titular character’s mother’s death and the story takes us through her father’s remarriage, death and Ash’s subsequent indentured servitude to her stepmother. (Gosh, it’s nice to be able to just lay out the plot like that because everyone knows it — very liberating!) As well as the Cinderella framework, Ash brings a fairly traditional view of fairies to the table — by traditional, I don’t mean “the same as in the Disney version of Cinderella” at all — and a dose of female empowerment in the form of the office of the King’s Huntress.
In fact, the Huntress was my favourite secondary character. For reasons we’re not told because they don’t matter to Ash (but I hope we find out in the sequel), the person in charge of the Royal Hunt, who also acts as a sort of mediator between what’s best for the forest and the meat the king requires, is the Huntress. Her job is to lead the hunt in the Woods and she has a team of mostly male hunters that follow her. I am quite intrigued to learn more about her and the office and this will be my main motivation for reading the prequel, I think.
At first I found Ash a little slow and was disappointed at how closely it stuck to the framework of Cinderella. However, I liked Ash as a character and at no point did I want to stop reading about her. Once the Huntress became more of a prominent character — and the hunt and fairyland important plot elements — I was sold.
The story is quite self-contained with the requisite fairytale happy ending (happier than I expected, but not quite a traditional sort of ending either) and I didn’t feel a plot-related burning desire to read the prequel (which I initially thought would be a sequel).
I enjoyed Ash overall and I recommend it to fans of fairytales and the sort of fantasy heavy in fairies and enchanted forests. It is technically a YA book, but I see no reason for adult readers not to enjoy it. I will be picking up the prequel when I get a chance (sadly, probably not very soon).
4 / 5 stars
First published: 2009, Little Brown & Company (US) but the 2010, Hodder Children’s Book (UK) edition is reviewed and pictured (with actual British spelling most of the time ZOMG)
Series: Yes. Book one of (currently) two. I don’t think there’s a series name but book two is Huntress.
Format read: Real life paper book *gasp!*
Source: Christmas present
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Guest Review of Havenstar by Glenda Larke
I read Havenstar by Glenda Larke several years ago, after having acquired a second hand copy of the out of print paperback version. Recently, Larke re-released an ebook edition of Havenstar, but to the excitement of fans (there were some copies of the second hand paperback being sold for ridiculously high prices on Amazon — money which sadly the author never saw). I purchased the ebook so that my husband could read it as my paper copy is currently in another country. And so, since I don’t know when I’ll get the chance to re-read it, I also asked him to review it. Behold, a review of Havenstar by Mr Tsana!
Keris Kaylen is the gifted daughter of a mapmaker who is not allowed by the Chantry to succeed him in his store due to her gender. Circumstances conspire to force her out of the Stability and into a journey through the chaos with a motley group of travellers on a quest to prevent the eventual destruction of the Stablities.
The world-building was fascinating. In the Stabilities, the Chantry forces everything to stay the same. No new gardens, no new houses, even mining and wood harvesting is kept to a minimum. Changes are only made at the discretion of the Chantry. In the Unstable, the only human settlements are on small patches of land that have proven resistant to the chaos, and even then they only last for so long before the Unstable reasserts itself. Anyone crossing the Unstable is also at the mercy of ley-lines, rivers of magic that can turn people into twisted mutants who are banned from the Stabilities.
While the basic structure of the book’s plot was very classic fantasy (motley group, journey across the land, evil Lord to defeat) the issues explored in the book are very modern. It illustrates the cruelty of enforced gender roles and the danger of blindly following tradition. It lacks a little subtlety, considering that pretty much all the characters seem designed to investigate some issue, but the characters are given enough depth for it to not be too off-putting. I did read Glenda Larke’s later books first, which I feel are more nuanced with their exploration of issues, so it’s possible that I only felt Havenstar wasn’t subtle because of a comparison with her later books.
I’d also like to say that it’s nice to see a fantasy book that actually involves a mapmaker, considering how many books have a map at the start. In Havenstar, mapmakers straddle the boundaries between the Unstable and the Stable. They must venture out in order to map the ever-changing Unstable, but in drawing the map they impose some semblance of order on it.
I enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone who wants a little bit of social criticism in their fantasy or wants to see mapmakers get just a little bit of credit for all the maps in fantasy books.
4 / 5 stars
Series: nope.
Format read: ebook
Source: Purchased from Smashwords
Disclaimer: Review by Tsana’s husband
Challenges: Australian Women Writers Challenge
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The Sunlit Zone by Lisa Jacobson
*Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan, which I’ll get around to reading and reviewing some time hopefully soon
The Sunlit Zone is told by North in two parallel time-lines: her present in 2050 and her childhood from birth in 2020ish through to high school and university. North is a marine biologist, working in the fictional Victorian coastal town Anglers Bay, where she grew up. The future chapters serve mainly to establish North’s character, friends and the setting. The real story, in my opinion, was the journey through her childhood.
The form of the writing means that mostly what we see isn’t quite a long narrative as prose would more likely be, but a series of moments, some directly connected to the ones either side, others a bit less so. The glimpses we see of North’s childhood show her growing up with her uniquely different twin sister on one hand (with allusions of selkie) and the neighbour’s perfect genetically engineered daughter on the other. The friction comes from both sides; her sister’s childish joy standing in the way of North’s chosen activities, and the neighbour’s sophisticated perfection, egging North on.
The science fictional elements in The Sunlit Zone are relatively minor, mostly confined to the genetic engineering and futuristic mundane technology. As a science fiction reader, I found the technology a bit iffy. The brevity of the form restricted the descriptions spent on future tech leaving fewer words with which to stuff it up. Nevertheless, there were a few odd things like referring to future ereaders generally as ibooks and similar. The sciencey strength, to me, was the marine biology and genetic engineering, although a biologist might disagree with me. Overall, the worldbuilding was the weakest part and the delivery (the writing) the strongest.
I was surprised how readable The Sunlit Zone was, given that it’s poetry of which I don’t usually read much. If you’re wondering, it’s not rhyming verse, although there are a few occasional scattered rhymes. I may be wrong, but I got the feeling that the more upset North was the more there was a rhyme and beat, although most of the time it was absent. I think others who don’t usually read poetry would equally find it readable and should give it a try. If you’re unsure (as I admit I was), you can read a sample in the Kobo store to get an idea of what it’s like.
I really enjoyed reading The Sunlit Zone, but ultimately I was disappointed by the ending. It was a bit too subtle for my tastes. The story is a personal journey for North in which she comes to terms with her past, which is fine. The disappointment comes from the fact that I feel if it was a more science fictional (or fantastical) story, the ending would have been a bit more hopeful and less mundane. I suppose it’s that I had an image in my head of an ending that almost but not quite came to pass. The real ending made me rethink the whole book and find it more depressing than I had upon first reading. Having given this point more consideration I’ve realised that my expectations were based on a spec fic trope that the author, being a poetry person, rather than a spec fic person (as far as I can tell from her website), probably wasn’t aware of/didn’t give consideration to while writing. And so the trope’s absence in the ending of The Sunlit Zone does not necessarily signify the depressing view I first thought. Interesting how our expectations can define how we perceive stories and how we think stories should work.
Anyway, The Sunlit Zone was overall a good if unusual read. I would recommend it to anyone looking for something different to the usual spec fic fare. I think it’s worth a read purely for the way it’s written (which I suppose is why it made the Stella longlist) and I imagine readers who usually shy away from speculative fiction would enjoy it as literature. It’s not a long read, either, and not the kind of poetry that one has to reread a few times to digest, so I do encourage you to give it a go.
4 / 5 stars
Series: No.
Format read: Kobo ebook
Source: Kobo store
Challenges: The Australian Women Writers Challenge, Australian Science Fiction Reading Challenge
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The Opposite of Life by Narrelle M Harris
Lissa Wilson has seen more than enough death in her family, so when people start being savagely killed whenever she has a night out in Melbourne with her beautiful new boyfriend, she’s determined to investigate and to make the killing stop. Even when she realises the murders must be the work of a vampire.
Things had been looking up for this librarian and 21st century geekgirl, but the murders make her remember why she prefers books to people. People leave you. People can die.
She finds herself teaming up with the painfully awkward Gary to get to the undead heart of the matter. But there are more challenges in store than Gary’s appalling fashion sense.
The Opposite of Life introduces Lissa and Gary and the vampires of Melbourne. It’s a somewhat darker book than Walking Shadows. There’s a lot more death in it — the story centres around a series of murders and Lissa has the poor fortune to discover several of the bodies. The associated trauma, of course, leads her to be somewhat less than chipper and besides that she has a lot of other emotional baggage to come to terms with. And since Lissa meets Gary for the first time part way through the book, there’s less opportunity for entertaining interactions between them. I liked that in Walking Shadows they were well established as friends.
The vampire mythos in Harris’s world is refreshing in not being overly romanticised. Vampires don’t feel much because they’re dead. Their brains also don’t work as well and they get firmly entrenched in old habits. Modern technology has made it harder for them to not draw attention to themselves and so they’re not generally inclined to run around killing people willy-nilly (any more).
Harris juxtaposes the numb emotions of the vampires with humans, mostly various members of Lissa’s family, who don’t want to feel any more and deal with it using more conventional means (drugs, alcohol, etc). It is the appeal of not feeling which is the lure to vampirism for some of the characters in this story, not just eternal life and youth, but the promise that it will hurt less to live an undead life. An interesting notion and not one that comes up too often in vampire fiction. Not that there aren’t a lot of jaded vampires around, but often they’re that way thanks to their longevity.
I enjoyed The Opposite of Life quite a bit and I look forward to reading more Lissa and Gary stories in the future. I enjoyed Walking Shadows a bit more, though, mainly because it was cheerier and caused more laughs. I highly recommend this series to anyone looking for less conventional vampire fiction. An excellent panacea for the reader sick of Edward Cullens and (YA-ified) Lestats.
4 / 5 stars
Series: Lissa and Gary, book 1 of ? (two so far)
Format read: ePub on my iThings
Source: Booki.sh, who have recently started allowing publishers to sell DRM free ePub files as well as their existing read in the cloud thing
Challenges: Australian Women Writers Challenge
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The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord
A proud and reserved alien society finds its homeland destroyed in an unprovoked act of aggression, and the survivors have no choice but to reach out to the indigenous humanoids of their adopted world, to whom they are distantly related. They wish to preserve their cherished way of life but come to discover that in order to preserve their culture, they may have to change it forever.Which makes it sound like there’s more action and adventure than there really is. It’s a slow burn type of plot. Told mostly from the point of view of Delarua, a civil servant on Cygnus Beta, the planet some of the refugee Sadiri come to settle on. There are occasional third-person interludes told from the point of view of Dllenahkh, one of the Sadiri, but really it is Delarua’s story. It’s told in a somewhat conversational style, with Delarua speaking to the reader at times.
Now a man and a woman from these two clashing societies must work together to save this vanishing race—and end up uncovering ancient mysteries with far-reaching ramifications. As their mission hangs in the balance, this unlikely team—one cool and cerebral, the other fiery and impulsive—just may find in each other their own destinies … and a force that transcends all.
The Sadiri came to Cygnus Beta to, among other things, repopulate their race, preferably by preserving as much of their genetic make-up as possible. Delarua’s tasked with accompanying them as they visit various settlements around Cygnus Beta to collect genetic information and negotiate the possibility of establishing partnerships. If it wasn’t for the compelling characters, I would have found it a bit boring since plot-wise there’s not much to it. But the characters were very compelling and I found myself laughing out loud at some of their interactions and staying up till three AM to finish reading (mercifully on a Friday night, so it could’ve been worse).
The Sadiri are very reserved as a people, abhorring outward expressions of emotion, which leads to them referring to things as “appropriate” a lot and often forcing Delarua and others to guess what they really mean. There is a wide variety of Sadiri in the story which allowed us to see a scope of reserved personalities rather than just one character bearing the brunt of stereotyping. A non-Sadiri character that’s worth mentioning is Lian, one of the team’s security detail and Delarua’s friend. Lian has chosen to live without a gender and so is never referred to by a gendered pronoun. The couple of times other characters might have learnt Lian’s biological gender, they don’t say, respecting Lian’s privacy. The way Lord handled one of the characters having a crush on Lian and the latter’s complete lack of interest in romance was well done. We never find out Lian’s “real” gender because we are not supposed to and it is not part of the story. Bravo.
When exciting and dramatic things did happen to the characters, they were mostly not dwelt upon very much after the fact. The exciting moment passed and they moved on with their mission. This is the aspect that I disliked most. It’s not that there weren’t any ramifications to various events, but I would have liked to see a bit more made of them, a bit more highlighting of pieces of adventure, I suppose. As is, it read like Delarua was downplaying each bit of excitement, which is entirely in character but made for less exciting (and seemingly slower) reading. A little bit more action would not have hurt.
I liked that the slow pace and grand scope of their travels accurately reflected how big a planet really is. I kept wanting to picture all the towns/settlements they visited as being in one country and then wondering how there was room for so many of them, but I had to keep reminding myself that it was actually an entire planet they were travelling around. I think it’s easy to reduce grand scales (planet-wide governments, multi-planet civilisations) to easily digestible chunks of terms we are more familiar with dealing with, and I commend Lord for avoiding this.
The Best of All Possible Worlds explores a lot of interesting issues. The most obvious is how an ethnic group can retain their identity when their homeland is destroyed — along with a larger percentage of their women (because the men were more likely to be off-world when the disaster happened) — and they are forced to live with and interbreed with other people who don’t necessarily share key characteristics that define them. It also explores, through the team’s visits to various settlements, how time and isolation can lead to the same culture developing along very different paths.
There is also some interesting hard science fictional world-building (as opposed to the social science fictional world-building I’ve already discussed) which came in glimpses until maybe three-quarters of the way through. I found it fascinating and I liked its understated inclusion. Without spoilers, it was the sort of thing another writer
As I said at the start, The Best of All Possible Worlds is quite different to anything else I’ve read. To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer springs to mind as somewhat similar in style but also very different in story and theme and issues. I’d say if you’re interested in a thoughtful exploration of the issues I’ve mentioned above, definitely give The Best of All Possible Worlds a go. If you’re looking for something a bit different from your speculative fiction I also recommend it. If you’re craving action and adventure, then probably give it a miss. I’m definitely interested in reading Lord’s earlier and future novels.
4 / 5 stars
First published: February 2013, Del Rey (Random House) in the US (and Quercus Pan Macmillan Australia with a different cover)
Series: Don’t think so.
Format read: eARC on my iThing
Source: the (US) publisher via NetGalley
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Rayessa and the Space Pirates by Donna Maree Hanson
Sixteen-year-old Rae Stroder lives in a hollow asteroid, a defunct refuelling station, with a brain-damaged adult, Gris, to keep her company. Low on supplies, they’ve been eking out an existence for years. Everything changes when Alwin Anton, ultra-clean, smart and handsome AllEarth Corp company auditor, arrives to find disarray. Full of suspicion, he interrogates Rae, threatening her with prosecution for theft. He uncovers the fact that she is not Rae Stroder at all, when space pirates attack.Rayessa and the Space Pirates was a fun read. Rayessa is gutsy but woefully undereducated through no fault of her own. She makes do on her sucky asteroid and, as one would expect, dreams of a better life. Although this novella was published by an imprint of Harlequin, it’s not really a romance story. There is a romantic element, but to no greater extent than you would expect from a non-romance genre SFF story. And that was fine by me. I am much more a fan of space adventure than of Romance with a capital R.
The setting doesn’t take itself too seriously — pirates! aliens! abandoned asteroids! — but which doesn’t (erroneously) oversimplify the science too much. Although, I will say the passing mention to it being set in the 2050s was a bit confusing and, based on the technology etc, off by at least a hundred years, probably more. It would take more than 37 years just to build an asteroid base like Rayessa was living on, let alone the giant Saturnian space station that shows up. Anyway, it’s a minor point that’s easily dismissed and there wasn’t anything glaringly silly in the rest of the sciencey stuff.
The style of the story reminded me strongly of Simon Haynes’s Hal Spacejock books. Actually, perhaps somewhere in between Hal Spacejock and Hal Junior (and not just because YA falls between adult and younger readers/”middle grade”). Rayessa is no incompetent pilot with an inflated sense of her own abilities, but she’s not just a kid getting into elaborate trouble either. In any case, if you enjoyed any of the Hal books, I strongly urge you to give Rayessa and the Space Pirates a try. I hope Hanson writes more stories set in the same universe, particularly about Rayessa.
I enjoyed Rayessa and the Space Pirates and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a quick and/or light-hearted space adventure romp. With pirates.
4 / 5 stars
First published: January 2013, Escape Publishing (digital only imprint of Harlequin AU)
Series: nope
Format read: ebook on my Kobo
Source: purchased on iBooks (link to publisher’s page with purchasing info) (DRM-free which is how it got on my Kobo. Isn’t lack of DRM nice?)
Challenges: Australian Science Fiction Reading Challenge, Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013
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Wolfborn by Sue Bursztynski
The main character, Etienne, is sent out to be fostered with one of his father’s allies when he’s in his teens — later than usual because as an only son he was needed at home. While serving with Lord Geraint, Etienne learns that Geraint is what Etienne himself has long feared: a werewolf born. However, Geraint is a good and fair master and quickly earns Etienne’s loyalty.
There are two types of werewolves in the Wolfborn universe, however: born werewolves, called bisclavret, who are descendant from creatures created by one of the gods, and the other kind, who made a deal with the Dark One to gain the power of shape-changing. Needless to say, the latter tend to be more evil.
For a short book, there several different aspects of mythology packed in — werewolves, faeries, gods — but not, I think, too many. It’s hard to judge since I am relatively familiar with Celtic mythology, but I thought the different ideas were sufficiently fleshed out and tied in well to the story.
I found it interesting that Etienne’s journey was not a heroic quest or some other common fantasy trope. Instead, it was about him going from fearing werewolves to accepting them (well, the bisclavret ones, anyway) as a normal part of his world’s nature. Oh, also, the blurb suggests it’s a romantic story but it’s not really. It’s based on a romantic story (wriiten by Marie de France in the twelfth century, as the afterword tells me), but the focus is shifted in this retelling.
The book reads like Etienne is telling the story well after the fact, when he’s older. There are some moments when he comments retrospectively on the events taking place. This reminded me a little bit of Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice where Fitz is more or less recounting his life story. There was some similarity in setting and themes too, although Etienne is a page, not an assassin, and Wolfborn is much, much shorter. I enjoyed that aspect, but to me it didn’t feel quite like a YA book for that reason. Although it’s the length of a YA book, however, and the main character is in the correct age bracket, I think it would work well as a bridging step between other YA fantasy books and “grown up” fantasy books like Hobb’s or the multitude of others, some of which I’ve reviewed. Mind you, I was reading Robin Hobb while I was in my teens (before, ahem, YA was it’s own category), so i don’t see why teenagers wouldn’t enjoy Wolfborn.
The book is quite short, coming in at less than 300 pages, and I think in parts it suffered a little for it. There were some aspects of the story which I think could have been fleshed out a little more. For example, there were a few scenes where I thought the characters could maybe have spent a bit more time talking about their predicament on the page, instead of summarising. It’s not that thinks weren’t thought through, but a little bit more on-the-page world building would not have gone amiss either, in my opinion. In the end, the story spanned about three years (although the last year was sort of an extended epilogue, so perhaps doesn’t count) which is a lot of time to squeeze into so few pages. It wasn’t hurried, though, and some “and then nothing much happened for x weeks” bits were rightfully skipped, but I still would have liked to stay with the characters longer.
I recommend Wolfborn to fans of Celtic-style settings in fantasy with a werewolf twist. I think it would be enjoyed by both readers of adult fantasy after a quick read and readers of YA fantasy. As I said, it’d make a good gateway dr— book for YA readers to transition into “grown up” fantasy books.
4 / 5 stars
Series: nope
Format read: paperback
Source: a review copy was provided by the author
Challenges: Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013
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The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata
Phousita is a slum girl in a future country/region that doesn’t exist at present but which I read as being in southern Asia (I don’t think anything specific was mentioned though, and it’s possible I missed a reference). Her country isn’t part of the Commonwealth, meaning that nanotechnology is less present and when present unregulated. The Commonwealth enjoys sticking its nose into other countries affairs and takes it upon itself to police everyone’s nanotechnology. But it doesn’t care about minor offences, only major ones which could threaten its way of life. So when Phousita is poisoned with nanotech that stunts her growth, or when her friend has his face disfigured no one cares. But as soon as an Important Person inadvertently infects Phousita with the potentially dangerous Bohr Maker (the general term for a nanotech system), the Commonwealth is all over it and Phousita is in different trouble to anything she could have imagined.
There was a lot to like about The Bohr Maker. I very much enjoyed the worldbuilding; one of my favourite things was the nanotech introduced into the river running through the slum (which was downriver of the rest of the city) which changed the water from foetid to clear with edible “fluff” floating on top of it that some of the poorest residents of the city collect to eat. Obviously, it sucks to have to eat river fluff, but how neat is the technology? It would be an awesome invention to carry through to the real world.
I liked the juxtaposition of the high technology belonging to rich people — including space stations, a sort of brain-to-brain communication system, and of course the nanotech — and the very low-tech world in the poorest regions on Earth. Phousita and her cohorts don’t know what nanotechnology is and interpret as magic and curses. When Phousita is infected by and gains control of the very advanced Bohr Maker, she thinks she’s possessed by a sorcerer and is becoming a witch. When she heals people with the technology, they see it as a spell. All of which makes perfect sense given the context.
What I didn’t like about this book, was many of the characters. I liked Phousita, who was genuinely a nice person, and I didn’t mind her friend Arif, who wasn’t a nice person but understandably so, given his circumstances (actually, I thought he was OK until Phousita started getting more power and threatening his power in their little family). Nikko, a genetically engineered human designed to survive vacuum (a character like him features in Nagata’s short story In The Tide, briefly reviewed here), was the other main protagonist and I liked him too. He finds himself in the rather intolerable position of having a fast-approaching expiration date on his genome. When his father created him, the Commonwealth forced him to put in the expiration date 30 years in the future, which he agreed to under the assumption that by then the law would have caught up and he could remove the fail-safe. It didn’t. Nikko sets out to try to steal the Bohr Maker (before it’s passed onto Phousita) to try to save himself. In the course of events he gets caught up with Phousita (and gets his brother caught up in the trouble as well).
The central character I really hated was Kirsten, the Chief of the Commonwealth police force. She was a horrible person and an unnecessarily large part of the narrative was told from her point of view. I say unnecessarily because while I acknowledge that she instigated a lot of plot-relevant things (she was the one trying to track down the Bohr Maker and get both Nikko and Phousita executed), there were also chunks of worldbuilding exposition filtered through her point of view. And really, it was her point of view that repulsed me. She didn’t see Nikko as a person, but as an animal (despite, prior to the opening, conducting an affair with him) and had zero compassion for anyone. She righteously upholds the spirit of the law (not the letter) by any means necessary, with her convictions reinforced by a zealous religious belief that the Bohr Maker and any other unsanctioned nanotech threatened the sanctity of natural life on Earth (unless it was minor nanotech making lives harder in the slums). I simply could not stand the religious zealotry. I’m not sure if she was supposed to be a partially sympathetic character, but she wasn’t and I felt I was inside her head too often. She wasn’t the sort of antagonist I love to hate either. At one point I had to put the book down for the evening because I couldn’t bring myself to finish the current chapter and get back to her sections. However, depending on your particular set of prejudices, your mileage may vary.
The only other thing that bothered me a little bit were a few slow points throughout the book. It wasn’t a particularly long book but there were a few bits when I wished the plot would hurry up because I wanted to know what happened next. However, they weren’t enough to ruin my enjoyment
In all, there is a lot to like about The Bohr Maker. Particularly notable is that almost ten years later, this book didn’t feel at all dated. I will definitely be picking up the next book in the series (or indeed any other science fiction of Nagata’s that crosses my path). I’ve now read her debut novel as well as her most recent novel (which I loved, and which was rather more fast-paced), and I see no reason not to fill in the blanks. I strongly recommend The Bohr Maker to fans of reasonably hard science fiction (although the technical details aren’t discussed in detail) as well as fans of sociological science fiction.
4 / 5 stars
Published: 1995, Bantam Spectra
Series: The Nanotech Succession, book 1 of 3 (not counting a prequel)
Format read: ebook
Source: purchased myself (rather a while ago) from Mythic Island Press, the author’s small press for reprinting her out of print books.
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