Recent Reading, Two Really Excellent Short Pieces

 I've been meaning to recommend NK Jemisin's novella Emergency Skin, which has been sitting on my Kindle for a year or so but which I finally read over the holidays. Subtle it isn't. A soldier from a society founded by all the billionaires abandoning Earth before it's inevitable collapse into an over-populated, mixed-race, climate hellhole full of useless eaters* finds it isn't at all what he was led to expect.

Imagine Elon Musk and Peter Thiel having a baby society together....

This really changed the way I've been looking at Musk's whole Mars thing.

* Perceptions may vary for those among us who aren't white male billionaires.

And just today SL Huang's newsletter pointed me at her new novelette Murder By Pixel in Clarkesworld, which predates the news frenzy about ChatGPT (by a whole day she says!), but reads like it she has spent ages considering its implications. She says she's actually spent ages considering the whole field's implications, coming out at the same time as ChatGPT was just serendipity. It's presented as a journalist investigating a story of social media harassment, but keeps diving deeper.

Other Recent Reading:

Hammered, Lindsay Buroker

Competent urban fantasy. Elves and dwarves etc are sort of known about, but have mostly abandoned Earth (being policed by the military and their hired assassins might have something to do with it). Seattle house-flipper Matti Puletasi is a half-dwarf who tries to stay out of the military's eye, but the military killed her mother and jailed her father when she was a child, so when her latest project turns into a battleground between the local werewolves and an extremely arrogant elven assassin and draws in the military things get complicated.

Rachel Peng series (Digital Divide, Maker Space, State Machine, Brute Force), K B Spangler.

Re-read, technothriller spin-off from Spangler's A Girl and her Fed webcomics. Rachel's an OACET agent, meaning she has a quantum chip in her head that allows her to access any computer system, and the legal right to take over any law-enforcement investigation she wants. Meanwhile her job as liaison to the Washington DC Metro PD is to forge bonds with normal law enforcement. These two things do not sit naturally together. (Neither would the fact she's blind, if anyone realises she's dependent on the chip to see).

Possibly my favourite series, and the re-read isn't changing that. And timely, as Spangler has just announced the three other planned books in the series will be appearing this year.

Greek Key, K B Spangler

Re-read. A spin-off from State Machine, with Spangler's Girl as its protagonist. This is where she partitions the AGAHF weirdness from the Rachel Peng books. Hope Blackwell's rich, brilliant, lethal, and Ben Franklin's her best buddy, because she sees ghosts. She's also married to the head of OACET (aka the Fed, aka Sparky) and Sparky sends her to Greece, where he's legally forbidden from operating, to track down the foreign leads from State Machine. Also featuring Helen of Sparta (yes, that Helen, and no, not Troy), Mike, the world's worst pacifist, and Speedy, the koala.

Sidequested : K B Spangler, Ale Presser

New fantasy web-comic from Spangler and her AGAHF artist Ale Presser (apparently the original concept was Presser's). The main plot direction's not apparent yet, but Robin, daughter of the 'evil witchqueen' has just been 'rescued' from her tower by not the handsome prince, but the handsome prince's (female) cousin Charlie (our protagonist), with running commentary by comedy-vulture Peony. Charlie's engaging but a little bit of a cypher, while Robin is definitely perky-goth - Peach and Charcoal Grey, who knew that would work as a colour combination?!?

(Or is that coral and charcoal grey? I'm hopeless at colour nuances).

Halting State, Rule 34, Charles Stross

Re-read. Linked darkly humourous technothrillers set in a post-Independence Scotland. Halting State has the police and forensic auditors investigating a bank raid in a MMORPG that turns out to have rapidly escalating consequences in the non-virtual world (and that title is brilliantly appropriate). Rule 34 - that if you can think of it, the internet has porn about it, has its protagonists caught up in a rapidly widening set of murders by domestic appliance. (And pairs thematically with SL Huang's Murder by Pixel). I really wish Stross had written the originally planned third book.

Born Magic, the Diary of Scarlett Bernard, Melissa F Olson

This one's a bit weird. Scarlett's a cleaner for the Los Angeles supernatural underworld, meaning she knows not just how to get blood out of the carpet, but what to do with the bodies afterwards, and has played that role through a series of urban fantasies, but in this one she's on maternity leave. And what we get is "Dear protege, I know you're away at college, so I'm writing this diary just in case I die and you have to pick up looking after my baby, the promised one". It's a weird structure, but it sort of works, though with a few too many chapter breaks for "sorry the baby needed changing" and "sorry, the baby scared herself and levelled the house". Ultimately, it's flawed by being 'bringing up the promised one' with a side order of plot, rather than vice-versa.

Fastening the Grave, L A McBride

This is one of those books that you find really annoying, but end-up quite liking in spite of itself. Kali James sees ghosts, who inevitably want something from her, starting with her murdered twin sister who wanted her to find the man who killed her. So she's fled from Chicago and its memories to Kansas City, where to avoid the ghosts she's opened up a costume shop, in an entire suburb given over to haunted house attractions *facepalm*. A girl's night out in one of them climaxes with them walking in on a real dead body, and its ghost.

So that's okay as a setup, the problems for me were that the ghost is a really annoying dick, while Kali is irritatingly oblivious to the wider supernatural world around her and alternates hourly between "Nope, absolutely not doing the ghost thing again" and rapidly escalating law-breaking to dig deeper into the investigation.