Reviews and Comments

I deeply enjoyed the conclusion to this duology. At times it was bleak and dark, but I feel like my thoughts on the first book continued to ring true in this book more than I had expected.

It's hard to talk about this without spoilers, but the thing I liked the most about this book is when it brings two characters together that are ostensibly similar to each other to highlight their differences. Zhu and Ouyang (both not men in their own way) go on adventures. Chen and Zhu (both pragmatically pursuing greatness) face off against each other. Ouyang and Wang (both focused on revenge) have a showdown. I just love seeing all these characters be such foils for each other.

The finale especially was satisfying emotional closure that brought all these main characters together. Even through sacrifice and suffering, there was more hope than I thought there might be.

(I wrote some longer thoughts with spoilers in this reply).

As is maybe obvious, I've been quite enjoying all of the Small Wonders issues. I don't get a chance to read a lot of short fiction, let alone flash fiction. It certainly looks like a tough job as a writer to squeeze an interesting story into such a small space. In the notes from the editors this time around, they say "flash fiction lives in the transition zone between poetry and story", which explains a lot about why they would create a magazine that covers both (and also why I sometimes misremember a story as being poetry as prose).

Here's a couple of my favorites again from this one:

• Imagine Yourself Happy by Premee Mohamad

Whoever gets to autopsy me, congratulations, this really will be a first in the literature if you're allowed to publish.

I really enjoyed this story about a scientist narrating their unexpected last moments. As the title implies, it's one about taking pleasure in the small moments you have.

• Kodakromen by Elizabeth R. McClellan

Every selfie will eventually be a picture / of a corpse

A poem about the burden of seeing the future through photos.

• Chocolate Pudding by David Hammond

"When you wake up,” she says, “we’ll have 'gravity.'"

A fun story about a kid on a spaceship returning to earth; I like the adults in this story who are trying to share their nostalgic joy about gravity or birds or earth itself to a kid who really would just prefer to float forever and is trying to translate alien adult joy into something more relatable.

I read Olga Ravn's The Employees ("A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century"), and this book sure has some attributes.

The format of this book is ~entirely in disjointed and anonymous (confessional?/professional)? statements to an off-page undescribed committee.

Statement 015 I'm very happy with my add-on. I think you should let more of us have one. It's me and yet it's not me. I've had to change completely in order to assimilate this new part, which you say is also me.

Statement 011 The fragrance in the room has four hearts. None of these hearts is human, and that's why I'm drawn toward them. At the base of this fragrance is soil and oakmoss, incense, and the smell of an insect captured in amber.

I've included two partial statements here for flavor from adjacent pages, because this is the only way I feel like I can convey the Annihilation-esque vibes of this book.

The book opens with a preface that these statements are to help improve future workflows and prevent future deviation(!). There's a lot of creepy workplace language of productivity and add-ons and forced updates, but the book itself dwells more on employees struggling with uncertainty about what it means to be a human or a constructed humanoid.

I am still not sure what I think about this, but I am glad to have read it.

Small Wonders Issue 4 is another one full of really great stories. Here's a couple I especially enjoyed:

• On the Bare Unwelcoming Shore by Zohar Jacobs

About most things in life you can be an agnostic; arrival day is the exception. Only our dreams deny the reality of where we are.

A story about the struggles of a Martian colony celebrating the day their ancestors arrived. This was a fun read especially after recently finishing A City on Mars, but I think thematically the idea of carrying hope for the future just through continuing to struggle towards it day by day resonated a lot.

• Sever by Lora Gray

a secret passenger the ship’s manifest would never recognize, tucked, painfully, into the hollows of my skull.

I love love the idea of this poem about the narrator's relationship with the alien that bursts out of them.

• Five Functions of Your Bionosaur by Rachael K. Jones

One thing your great-aunt forgot to mention: bionosaurs imprint for life.

An endearing story about our relationships with pets, in this case a robotic dinosaur.

She Who Became the Sun is a historical fantasy duology, retelling the rise of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty. This is a reread for me before I get to the sequel for a belated #SFFBookClub sequel month.

My favorite part of this first book is the ways that the major characters all uniquely grapple with their own gendered otherness:

Ouyang is an enslaved warrior eunuch working for the Mongol prince of Henan's son, Esen. Ouyang is the most masculine of characters, but copes with his otherness through anger and shame. He so strongly denies the femininity that other people project onto him that he extrudes that rejection into misogyny. His relationship with men is similarly uneasy and hits a classic trans refrain: "he had no idea if it was a yearning for or a yearning to be, and the equal impossibility of each of those hurt beyond belief". For Ouyang, "the worst punishment is being left alive".

Zhu (the titular sun-becomer) is a famine survivor who decides to claim the great fate of her dead brother by becoming him. Her burning desire for greatness forces her to overcome impossibility through ingenuity. To Zhu, gender and otherness are not a source of shame or a limitation, they are merely tools to work towards greatness or obstacles to work around. She's a delightful contrast with both Ma and Ouyang; her direct contradiction of Ouyang is such a good character and plot moment: "However tired I am, however hard it is: I know I can keep going, because I'm alive."

Wang is the half-Mongolian, adopted brother of Esen. Wang is a scholar out of time, reviled for his effeminate behaviors and unmasculine administrative and accounting interests. Unlike Ouyang, he has no denial or shame about this and accepts ongoing humiliation bitterly; however like Ouyang, he turns this humiliation inward into anger and desire for revenge. Wang is the petty bureaucrat working behind the scenes; even as his work is dismissed, he guides the efforts of his brother Esen from the shadows through funding, diplomacy, and assassination. "In having told yourself so often that I'm worthless, have you forgotten what my domain actually is? I'm an administrator."

Ma is the precious cinnamon roll who keenly feels her own emotions and continually extends love out into the universe to those who don't deserve it, even as it is only returned with suffering. Other than being an extremely endearing character and the caring heart of a novel otherwise filled with selfish desire and denial, she feels like the epitome of self-limited excellence; she is extremely capable but simultaneously trapped by her own inevitable circumstances of being a woman.. "She was a woman and [..]. everything that could be wanted was all equally impossible".

She recognized pragmatism taken to its natural endpoint: the person who climbed according to his desire, with no regard to what he did to get there. Zhu was surprised to feel, instead of sympathetic attraction, a tinge of repulsion.

Parts of this book remind me of The Traitor Baru Cormorant, in particular the resource management of Wang, the political struggles, and the pragmatic way that all of these characters do some occasional horrible things to work towards their own desires (loyalty, revenge, power, greatness).

Both books posit that these desires create suffering (and in an explicitly Buddhist sense here). However, I think Baru is a brutal gutpunch of a book that wants you to believe that sacrifice and suffering is always required (both of the characters and the reader); this book seems to believe in Zhu who can (sometimes) find another path when confronted with an impossibility. Ma also explicitly balances out Zhu's monomaniacal pursuit of greatness and helps Zhu feel some level of revulsion towards pure pragmatism. Together, they are a source of queer joy that creates hope and possibility. These things together make this book work for me and make me able to find love for these complicated characters, while reading Baru left me cold.

This didn't quite resonate as the whole of issue 2, but there were still a lot of fun moments in Small Wonders Issue 3. If anything, I'd say this one leans more lighthearted overall than previous issues. These were my favorite stories:

• How My Sister Talked Me Into Necromancy During Quarantine by Rachael K. Jones

I knock on Lila’s bedroom door and catch her red-handed (literally; her hands are coated in blood) before a brand-new portal as a Vampire Queen and her familiar step out.

Despite my own reservations about the use of the word "quarantine" or "lockdown" for people's early covid experiences, I find myself deeply enjoying seeing how people process their own covid experiences through writing. This in particular is a fun fluff story about necromantic summoning in confined spaces.

• To Persist, However Changed by Aimee Ogden

The diffuse awareness of the Moonmind comes to an agreement: Soon. Cross-currents of debate run through the Consensus as analyst colony-lobes suggest: next-day or two-day, three-day, six-day. One stubborn early-generation lobe insists no-day, never-day, distance, separation.

This is the kind of fun idea that only works as a short story.

• Festival by Christine Hanolsy

The Vindeans are sailors. These rituals bring them comfort. Three days to mark the solstice; three days to lighten one’s heart. A slip of paper, a handful of words, a lantern to carry them up and away: regrets, promises, wishes.

A story of queer regrets told in the interstices of a description of the narrator's traditional festival.

Defiant is the final fourth book of Brandon Sanderson's Skyward YA series.

Things I Enjoyed: * brought the series back around full circle to moments from book one * superb Gran-Gran moments * maybe the real friends were the hyperslugs we met along the way

This book was ~ok for me, but the pacing here didn't quite work for me; this is a character-driven series and so the focus on Spensa's emotional journey makes sense, but plot-wise the final book involves an incursion or two by the main squad, some [spoiler] with Spensa, and then we're right at the last[*] battle to wrap up the Superiority and the Delvers all in one. It's all just tied up a little too quickly for a four book series.

If I had to rate the series, the first book was a lot of fun, the second book brought in larger worldbuilding that I enjoyed, the third book went off the rails in a way that didn't work for me, the novellas in the middle here told some stories that wouldn't have fit otherwise, and the fourth book didn't quite bring it all back together with the satisfying closure I wanted.

(Maybe I shouldn't be comparing books to each other in a review, but if I had to recommend one other YA science fiction series that ended this year about the power of friendship and the horrors of space war, I would recommend Charlie Jane Anders' Unstoppable instead on pretty much all fronts.)

[*] I wanted to make a "last and first battle" joke, but book two has some of a Superiority/Detritus fight at the end even if I remember it mostly being about Delvers

A City on Mars is an enjoyable and easy to read non-fiction book about the (non)feasibility of space habitation. It's got a comedic-but-serious tone, which is not unexpected as half of the authors are responsible for the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic strip. Lots of digressions and breadth, but all enjoyable and accessible.

Despite space being really cool, I am personally went into this (and left!) with extreme skepticism about the feasibility of humans living in space any time soon. (It just feels like billionaire escapism from real problems that they are disproportionately responsible for causing!) There's probably some confirmation bias in my enjoyment here, as a warning. This book also treats several billionaires with much more respect than they deserve, although it's not fawning over them either.

We're pretty good at shooting things into space at this point (even if it's expensive) but largely past that I think I was amazed at just how little we know. We haven't had people in space for very long periods of time at all. We don't really know how radiation in space affects people long term. We have no idea if/how birth could work in low/no gravity. We have extremely little understanding of creating successful closed ecosystems. We certainly aren't doing a good job keeping our own planet going well.

One unexpected neat part was how much it went into space law (with a lot of deep sea and Antarctica analogies). It's not a topic that I feel like a lot of similar books have talked about, but it's incredibly depressing how exploitation-heavy all countries seem to be leaning at the moment. (Space socialism when?)

But we have not moved beyond conflict. Our ability to harm ourselves vastly outweighs our ability to protect ourselves. Settling the solar system will likely increase the danger, and we will not be leaving for distant suns anytime soon.

Even with my space skepticism, I had previous thought of space exploration as value neutral (or at least competing for resources that could have been used for better things), but this book convincing me that putting more people in space (and competition over space resources) would probably be actively dangerous for earth itself, especially given the lack of agreements (and peace) we currently have on earth.

I enjoyed everything out of Small Wonders Issue 2. Usually magazines with a bunch of pieces are hit and miss for me, but Small Wonders continues to consistently resonate for me. This one was especially good.

Here are my three most favorites from this issue (with extra trans bias this time):

• Guttation, Transformation by Devin Miller

"I don't think it's weird to want your body to be different than it was before," Lex says, wry smile beautiful.

A story about support in changing your body to become something else, through the help of plants. Not a trans story, but big trans vibes.

• The Only Way Out by Louise Hughes

I shouldn't be the one who has to leave my life behind.

Annie drives a taxi and hears the call of people who need to escape; she brings them to a reverse Lethe bridge, where everybody else forgets about them once they've crossed over it through the fog.

• Thrifting With the Snow Queen by M.J. Pettit

Marnie seeks a return, to regain Paradise. For me, on Saturdays, we are already there.

The Snow Queen and her servant, trapped in another realm, go thrifting together to try to find what they need to get home.

I deeply enjoyed System Collapse--it was a nice followup book to the events of the previous one and I don't think could stand alone. Murderbot has certainly been through a lot, but the last book was particularly intense and it makes sense that there's lasting effects from it. It felt like a smaller and more internally-focused book with less snark and more trama, but I am here for that.

To me at least, Murderbot and its series feels like the embodiment of vulnerability avoidance: handwaving, the first few books seemed like Murderbot coping with learning it cared and people caring about it; Network Effect was about """relationships"" (with ART and 2 and 3); this book in particular explored the vulnerability of trauma and being partially human (or at the very least having some fleshy parts). I think it helps to better situate Murderbot as a construct--not a bot, not human, but somewhere in between with the problems of both.

On the surface, this certainly looks like a shift in Murderbot's competence. (It's certainly a shift in its self-perceived competence; Murderbot both seemingly does a good job while also beating itself up for not being perfect; it's hard to see past the narrative bias.)

Previous Murderbot dealt with situations and humans out of its control (still does but used to too), but in this book there's an extra struggle of coping with its own [redacted]. Given that it has people around it that care, it also has to deal with the shame of these people covering for it too. Dr. Mensah dealing with her own trauma during the last book felt like a nice foreshadowing here for what Murderbot is going through here.

Bonus joy moments: * the documentary! * ART being a jerk to both Iris and Murderbot * ART and Holism butting heads

Now this was the sort of pirate queen adventure I was expecting when I had read Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea. (That book is historical pirate politics and internal musings about power and this book is more fantasy adventure; I liked them both, they're just different.)

Amina al-Sarafi is a middle-aged pirate queen who gets blackmailed out of retirement into "one last job", gets the criminal gang back together, and ultimately faces off against a sorcerer and his sea monster (as if the cover doesn't give you this hint). (Also, gender stuff! You love to see it.)

It's set in the same world as her Daevabad trilogy although you don't need to have read those books at all. (You might appreciate a single character briefly appearing as well as the lawyer parrots, but that's about the extent of it.) My opinion here is that this is a fantasy pirate heist book and so is a bit more accessible than a fantasy djinn politics book (even if here it means that the world feels more like a stage and the side characters get a little bit less air time).

All in all great fun, highly recommend especially if you liked SA Chakraborty's previous work.

It's extremely hard to only pick a couple of pieces of short fiction out of Small Wonders Issue 1, but I'm going to limit myself to my three most most favorites:

• CoverLetter_Version5 by Courtney Floyd

My advisor says it's perfectly normal--mage candidates pouring too much of themselves into job applications their first time on the market can lead to all kinds of grief.

"You're manifesting your own potential futures," she assured me when this all started, "They'll fade with time."

For me, applying for a jobs always feels like stretching yourself into the dream of some potential unrealized future you; this short story manifests that idea by having these future yous be literal.

• Sunnyside Daycare Employees' Chat Log, Post Alien Takeover by Amanda Helms

I don't have to listen to you tell me I should be happy for losing my job just because some other alien colonizer didn't eat me.

Continuing the through line from the previous issue of awkward alien invasions, this is a comedic short story about bad alien management who didn't know what they were getting into.

• Not Set in Stone by Gerri Leen

How long can you love me in this isolation?

This is a poem about a gorgon trying to cure themselves with the help of a dear friend; this line in particular hit me right in both the covid and the chronic health feelings.