Malinda Lo

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Books in brief: Lo, Palmatier, McGuire, Buckell, Carey Carey and Carey

Malinda Lo, Inheritance. Little, Brown & Co, 2013.

An excellent YA novel which I discussed very recently at Tor.com.

Joshua Palmatier, Shattering the Ley. DAW, 2014. ARC courtesy of the publisher.

A not particularly engrossing novel, a review of which I have submitted to Tor.com.

Seanan McGuire, The Winter Long. DAW, 2014. ARC courtesy of the publisher.

The next installment in McGuire’s ongoing Toby Daye series, in which Toby learns Awful Truths about her family history and has confrontations with villains old and new. Fun, but not as gripping as I was expecting.

Tobias Buckell, Hurricane Fever. Tor, 2014. E-ARC via Netgalley.

Buckell writes a tight, fast-paced near-future thriller. Hurricane Fever is tighter than Arctic Rising (although I liked Rising‘s protag more), and very hard to put down. The climax sneaks into James Bond territory – which is fun. I really enjoyed it, and I hope Buckell writes more in this vein.

Mike Carey, Linda Carey, and Louise Carey, The House of War and Witness. Gollancz, 2014. Copy courtesy of the publisher.

Read for review for Strange Horizons.

Mike Carey, Linda Carey, and Louise Carey, The City of Silk and Steel. Gollancz, 2013.

The House of War and Witness was the kind of good that finally overcame my reluctance to read this book, which had languished on my shelves for a year while I debated with myself over whether or not I had the patience to read a novel that could have been as problematic as some of the promo for this one made it sound.

Well, folks: The City of Silk and Steel is not at all the book I feared it would be. It is, instead, a brilliant story, a story about stories, about justice and hope, friendship and love between women. It is graceful and accomplished and in many ways one of the kinder novels I’ve read in the SFF genre. It’s a marvelous book, and I can now recommend it highly.

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Linky feels bad about not being more interesting

I promise, I’ll try to be original again soon.

Malinda Lo, On Space Opera: Why so many brothels in space?

So what’s with all the brothels? Because whenever I think of brothels, I think of one question: Who are the women working there? There was no indication in Leviathan Wakes that there were male prostitutes, even though one of the (male) main characters worked as a cop and seemed to have a lot (a lot!) of contact on the job with prostitutes. I’m gonna guess that sure, there might be male prostitutes, but the majority are probably female.

So who are these prostitutes? What kind of a future world is it that permits so much prostitution? Are the prostitutes regulated? Do they have health insurance? Are they part of worker-owned collectives so they don’t have to deal with pimps?

Foz Meadows, A Rule of Thumb for Escapism:

All of which is a way of saying that the big schism in SFF no more between leftwingers and rightwingers than it is between realists and escapists: rather, it’s between those for whom escapism is an extension of privilege, and those for whom escapism is a means of furthering representation. But even then, that’s far from being a binary position: there are many different kinds of privilege, after all, and in accordance with the principles of intersectionality, possessing one type of privilege doesn’t prevent one from lacking another. It’s simply a question of escapism: from what, into what, and above all, why.

Foz Meadows (is on fire lately), Sexism At Fantasy Book Café:

Let me get this straight: the way to get rid of sexism is to stop talking about gender? That’s like saying that the way to prevent STDs is to stop talking about sex: in both instances, the latter concept is integral to any meaningful discussion of the former problem, such that omitting it would render the entire exercise moot. And don’t even get me started on the pervasive cissexism of constantly defining gender in terms of plumbing and underwear: the issue at hand is concerns brains, not bodies, and trying to boil it all down to descriptions of bits is both childish and incredibly problematic.

Natalie at Radish Reviews, Over the Borderline: More on Genre, Gender, and Reviews:

This conversation about review coverage and gender parity isn’t about discrimination against specific authors–it’s about systemic discrimination. In short: the game is rigged and it needs to be un-rigged.