halojedha | Entries tagged with sci-fi

Aaaaahhhjhdksbsiskk this is SO GOOD. It's the sort of genre I didn't think I liked - I'm not normally into gothic horror - but it's so good on so many levels. Okay so it's a space opera with lesbian necromancers and skeletons, nice. BUT it is SO MUCH MORE than that.

It's the darkest angst I've read in years leavened by perfect potty-mouthed one liners. It's witty, sarcastic millennials plunged into high fantasy political drama. The narrative voice is totally original. The creepy creepy omg what happened backstory is SO CREEPY that even when you find out, you are EVEN MORE CREEPED OUT than when you were guessing the worst. It's the most compelling, convincing, trauma-bonded enemies-to-friends romance I've ever read, complete with being outsiders together, developing genuine respect for each other, discovering shared values, and ANGST, DID I MENTION THE ANGST. Through mutual animosity and rejections not once did I ever get bored of the hostilities between the two main characters and wish they would hurry up and sort it out.

That because this book moves fast. A lot happens. It has new plot and twists and turns every other page. You fall in love with characters and then terrible things happen. You find out crucial new information about people which totally changes your perspective. You spend pretty much the whole book not knowing who you can trust, and wondering if core protagonists are actually baddies. It's a closed door murder mystery, embedded in a magical/martial arts trial, embedded in a courtly political drama, embedded in high gothic fantasy, embedded in a dark far-future sci-fi. The setting and culture are more horrible than you realise, and simultaneously more humane.

The body horror is unrelenting, but also silly and videogamey enough to never be upsetting. The gut punch comes from the relationships.

The magical system is a gleeful mashup of everything death related which is weirdly compelling, and which made necromancy interesting to me for basically the first time ever. Morgues! Medical science! Bone art! Soul eating!

This book is so silly it would be fluff if it wasn't so heart-rendingly poignant, and so angsty it would be depressing if it wasn't so brilliantly funny. It's totally driven by the characters, with a massive ensemble cast of vividly realised nobles, anchored by a sympathetic narrator and an addictive love/hate relationship.

I can't stop thinking about these characters and am so sad that the second book isn't out yet!

5/5. I stayed up til 11.30pm finishing it while E slept beside me. A haunting, thoughtful, beautiful and profoundly moving novella. Four human astronauts go on a decade long mission to a red dwarf solar system to survey its four habitable planets. While they are traveling between them at half the speed of light, enzyme patches transform their bodies to adapt them to each new environment.

This is breathtaking. It's an ode to the joy and wonder of exploration and scientific discovery. It's glorious, imaginative glimpses into the extraordinary beauty of alien flora and fauna. It's about how we enter new spaces, how much space we take up, how we harm and are harmed. It's about the impossibility of seeing more than a tiny slice of the new life we encounter, and the arrogance and humility of thinking that mere glimpse has meaning. It's a rousing invitation to sort our shit out and get into space. It's an eerie, mournful glimpse into a dark period of Earth's future.

Oh, and it's a queer high functioning polycule consisting of trans, ace and neurodiverse characters, at least two of whom are (I think) of colour. Yay, queers in space! But the sex positivity and queerness is so background compared to the main thrust of the story, it barely gets a mention in passing.

I couldn't put it down. It's left my mind and heart ringing. Stunning.

A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet: One of my favourite novels of the last few years. Humane, charming, warm, funny sci-fi with characters you really want to spend time with. Queers in space! Tea, gardening, polyamory, chats about trauma! Plus a rich and compelling world and convincingly page-turny plot. Do like. It's only £2.99 for Kindle at the moment if you haven't already read it.
Somehow I found myself looking at this recipe for homemade toothpaste. I'm considering making it.
Ten photos celebrating post-baby bodies. I needed these. I'm loving what my body can do at the moment, but it's taking active effort to overcome the shoot beauty fascist conditioning and appreciate the way it looks. These help.
Banana peanut butter energy bites. Saving for later, I want to make these.
How to win a PIP appeal. I'm shocked (and simultaneously not surprised) at the way the DWP are behaving at the moment, rejecting claims seemingly by default regardless of how impaired someone is. This advice document looks like it might be useful for people intending to appeal?
Why are queer people so mean to each other? An article by a queer therapist about community building, trauma responses and call-out culture. Some great nuggets of wisdom. "Conflict happens, but we can survive it. People are often disappointing, and we are allowed to set boundaries on relationships — but if our boundaries are too rigid, then we will always be disappointed."
Gender as colonial object. Essay on how colonial, binary, heteronormative gender norms were imposed on indigenous cultures, including in Nigeria, Persia and the Americas. I want to read more into each of those histories; I also appreciated this take: "It’s useful to connect the imposition of colonial gender systems to the need for reproductive labor under capitalist systems. In other words, the reification of two fixed gender categories, the framing of these categories along teleological reproductive timelines, the exclusion of women from public life, serve specific purposes within a capitalist system: the division of labor into productive and reproductive. If capitalism is a driver of colonization, and if colonization transforms gender systems, it’s worth investigating how capitalism and gender might relate. Oyěwùmí is keenly aware of this connection, exploring how the subordination of newly discovered women coincided with the expropriation of communal land and installation of slavery and wage labor in Yorubaland."

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Entries tagged with sci-fi

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