David Gillon

 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. 

Halting State, Charles Stross

I wanted a light (re)read for my train trip and this suited my mood. In a semi-independent Scotland a company supplying in-game banking services is hit by an in-game bank raid that shouldn't have been possible and that could potentially tank their IPO, so an audit team is called in to find out what the hell just happened and so, accidentally, are the police. Which means everyone is trying to figure out not just whodunnit, but whether a crime has been committed (and in the case of the police WTF are these people talking about?). Major characters are a forensic auditor (and LARPer) and the conveniently out-of-work games programmer she hires as a native guide, plus a lesbian DS who really wishes her new DI wasn't quite such a high-flier, and the case so far out of her comfort zone nicking local neds. Things escalate quickly and by the end of the story they're rolling out a national state of emergency. This is Stross in a similar mode to The Laundry Files, managing a style that's simultaneously humorous and somewhat dark.

Rule 34, Charles Stross

This shares a character and the setting with Halting State, but about 5 years further down the Scottish Independence line (here framed as Westminster wanting an extra vote in Europe - if only!). Various people (primarily the no-longer high-flying DI from Halting State, a slightly hapless minor local criminal and a particularly nasty criminal facilitator), get caught up in an ongoing series of bizarre murders revolving around illegal fabricators and a breakaway bit of one of the post Soviet Asiatic states. There's quite an ingenious plot underlying things, but this is a darker book than Halting State (Rule 34 - if you can think of it, there's porn on the net for it). Content warning for technologically mediated paedophilia, it doesn't turn up much, but one of the instances is very early, and the later instance is pretty graphic.

The Great North Road, Peter F Hamilton

I've been wanting to re-read this for a while and took the chance while I was away. In a future Newcastle, a company executive turns up dead in the Tyne, his heart torn out by an unlikely five-fingered weapon. The problem is he's clearly one of the Norths, a clan of clones who run Northumberland Interstellar, the city's most prominent company and vital to the entire European economy for the oil it imports from St Libra, its company fiefdom on one of the planets of Sirius - gate technology meaning that importing oil from light-years away isn't a problem. What would be a problematically political case for the local plods rapidly escalates when it sets alarm bells ringing for the world's unified, and paranoid, military, because it matches the weapon used in the massacre of another batch of Norths out on St Libra 20 years ago. They convicted and jailed Angela Tramelo, the sole-survivor of the massacre, for life, despite her protestations that an alien monster did it, but if Angela's in jail, then is her monster real? And is it now on Earth? So it's decided that two investigations are needed, a criminal one in Newcastle, and an expedition into the jungles beyond the frontiers of St Libra (where animal life never evolved), to determine if there is a hidden enclave of alien monsters.

Which means we get an interleaved two-pronged narrative. On the one hand we have the Newcastle cops trying to pin down not just whodunnit, but whotheydunnitto (its a North, but which one?), which does a really nice job of extrapolating how crime and policing might evolve in a technologically advanced surveillance society. And on the other hand we have Angela Tramelo tagging along on the expedition into the wilds, as the one person ever to have fought the monster and won, despite it being led by Vance Elston, the military official who xtorturedx interrogated her before she was jailed, and who sees himself as a holy crusader for the defence of humankind. The Angela-Vance dynamic is a particularly interesting one, and that's true even before people on the expedition start to die.

('The Great North Road' gets multiple symbolic uses here -  it's the road from London to Newcastle, it's the road through Newcastle to the gate to St Libra, it's the road the expedition takes into the wilderness, and it's the diverse routes of the three branches of the North clan).

A Memory of Empire, Arkady Martine

Apparently I bought this and then completely forgot about it, fortunately I came across it while looking for books to read while away. OMG, it's so good!

Mahit Dzmare is the new ambassador from her home space-station to the vaguely Aztec meets vaguely Chinese (and poetry obsessed) empire of Teixcalaan, on whose avaricious borders it sits. Her instructions from home are basically "find out what happened to your predecessor, try not to get us annexed, don't let them know about our imago technology' - which technology means she's walking around with a 15 years out of date copy of her predecessor's memories at the back of her skull. Mahit's met at the spaceport by her liaison from the Ministry of Information Three Seagrass (Reed to her friends) and is quickly introduced to Three Seagrass's friend and colleague, Twelve Azalea (aka Petal), who has been poking around the previous ambassador's death. It rapidly becomes clear that Mahit has walked into a full-blown constitutional crisis, possibly of her predecessor's making. The aged Emperor is dying, there are at least four candidates to replace him, and an undetermined number of those may not be prepared to wait for him to finish the dying thing. And half the people she meets seem to have distinct expectations of Mahit, up to and including "I expect you to die".

But it's not the plot that shone out for me (though it's a good one), or even the worldbuilding (likewise good), it's the characterization. Mahit is thrown in at the deep end, but is determined to succeed, yet is also self-aware enough to realise that her lust for Teixcalaani culture might compromise her. Three Seagrass may only be Mahit's liaison, but she's a force of nature in bulling their way through the Teixcalitaani bureaucracy, Twelve Azalea is the usefully skilled but somewhat lackadaisical friend caught in her personal whirlwind and then there's the ezuazaucat Nineteen Edge, the edgeshine of a knife, one of the Emperor's personal advisors, who is the kind of force of nature Three Seagrass probably wants to grow up to be, and who apparently can't decide if she's trying to kill Mahit, or keep her alive.

The Delirium Brief, Charles Stross

Book 8 of The Laundry Files. Currently stalled half way through this one, as it got a little too horrifying. After the events of The Nightmare Stacks, The Laundry has been disestablished, half its leaders are on the run with arrest warrants on their heads (OTOH they have a Manic Pixie Dream Girl and they're not afraid to use her), and the Sleeper Under the Pyramid, the big bad from The Apocalypse Codex, is back and has suborned most of the Cabinet. We're into deals with Nyarlathotep the devil in pursuit of least worst outcome territory. And then Stross turns the horror level up to 11 and makes Michael G(r)ove the Minister for Supernatural Defence. Aiiiieeeee!!!!

Serpent's Reach, C J Cherryh

I accidentally re-read this when I picked it up off the bookshelf while waiting for a game to load. This is early Cherryn (1980) from when she was writing compact stories, before her post-Downbelow Station doorstop phase. No actual serpents in this, the Serpent's Reach of the title is the Hydri Stars, a self-governing (and quarantined) enclave within Cherryh's Alliance. At its opening Raen a Sul Hant Meth-Maren (Raen of the Sul Sept of House Meth-Maren) is a 15yo, growing into her heritage as one of the immortal Kontrin Hivemasters (though the Meth-Maren prefer Hive-friends). The Hydri Stars are the domain of the Majat,  bipedal insects working in a hive mind, and on capital planet Cerdin the Meth-Marens are the focal point for contact between the hives (peaceful Blue, Green, Gold and warlike Red) and the extended Kontrin family who hold the trade rights for Majat tech that makes the Reach fabulously wealthy. Then one night, Sul sept is betrayed and slaughtered by a conspiracy of Ruil sept, other Kontrin houses, and the Reds.

Raen alone survives, purely through chance, and pleads with the queen of Blue hive for vengeance, a vengeance that obliterates Ruil sept, but is put down by the rest of the conspiracy. An embarrassment to Kontrin society, Raen is exiled from Cerdin, and the human leaders of the conspiracy executed by the 700yo head of the Kontrin family (never assume the doddery 650yo standing up to speak at the dictator's request doesn't have a laser pistol up her sleeve).

Nineteen years later, Raen is a dilettante wanderer, intermittently monitored by the Family and other Houses, survivor of one assassination attempt, but showing no interest in further acts of revenge. Then she turns up, unheard of, on a public spaceliner, one of the craft that support the Betas, the non-immortal humans who provide the infrastructure for the Kontrins to parasitize. The Betas are terrified of her, no Kontrin ever stoops to public transport, no matter how expensive and exclusive it theoretically may be. High-rolling society vanishes into its cabins, leaving Raen to pick someone from the Azi crew (the short-lived, tape-programmed, bred-for-the-purpose humans parasitized by Kontrin, Beta and Majat alike) to join her in a seemingly endless series of games of Sej (rules provided in an appendix). Her bargain with Jim is simple: If he leads in number of games won when they arrive at Istra, the outermost Hydri system, to which only one other Kontrin has traveled in 700 years, then she will buy free his contract and make him independently wealthy. If she leads, she will buy his contract for herself.

Arriving at Istra, Raen's self-appointed mission begins to expose itself. Her trip is no whim, she had made the journey to protect a Majat emissary, a Blue Warrior. Raen, Jim, Warrior and a returning Istran commercial/diplomatic mission descend to the planet, only to be attacked by Reds. The diplomats die, and so does Warrior, but not before passing his message to Istran Blues, and in a hivemind, Warrior is immortal, no matter individual Warriors die. Raen's unlimited Kontrin wealth and power allows her to rapidly establish herself as the new pole in Istran politics, able to unblock critical overbreeding in the Azi at a stroke of a pen, even if the actual resolution of 18 years of Kontrin-directed overbreeding will take years to work through. Meanwhile poor Jim scrambles to keep up with her, his life turned upside down, especially by Raen's habit of putting him charge of things, when he's always been the one others are in charge of before now.

But it's not just the Beta and Azi society that's been critically overstressed, so too has Majat society, with inter-hive hostility spilling into the streets of the human city, and a scratch from a Majat warrior can kill. Raen's mission is to save Blue hive, but the conspiracy has an eighteen year headstart, and the threat extends far wider than even she had appreciated.

This is what Cherryh does best, xeno-sociological SF, where the implications of difference are rigorously pursued. Majat society is immortal, and effectively consists of 4 individuals, Blue, Green, Gold and Red. The implications of individuality are something the Majat grasp poorly, and the implications of individual death not at all, and so they made the Kontrin immortal, in order to remove the thing they could not grasp. (The Kontrin habit of self-promotion by assassination not withstanding). Raen is the last of the Meth-Maren, possibly the last Kontrin to perceive they have a duty to the Majat, and not just themselves. But even Raen's motives are clouded by her history, and the boundary between protecting Blue hive, and using Blue Hive is decidedly fuzzy. One thing I particularly liked about this is that people make mistakes, starting almost from the first page. Raen has unlimited power, but limited ability to apply it, and an incomplete understanding of the threat she faces, while poor Jim is distinctly out of his depth, and does make some serious mistakes when left without guidance.

And something the story brought home to me, that I'd not really appreciated before, is how completely Azi society is a slave-society. It's worse in the Reach than in the Alliance as a whole, because of the universal 'drop dead at 40' mechanic (very Logan's Run), but even the elite Alpha Azi of Cyteen and Regenesis are tools of their society, bred for a role and sent where needed, and even the right to understand they're a slave has been taken from them.

French Battleships, 1922 to 1956, John Jordan and Robert Dumas

French Cruisers, 1922 to 56, John Jordan and Jean Moulin

I bought these to go with the French Destroyers book by Jordan and Moulin I read recently and they're equally good - you know a technical history is detailed when it makes a point of listing who manufactured the anchors.... But what I found most fascinating was the two different accounts of Operation Catapult and the Battle of Mers el Kebir (the British attack on the French fleet post Armistice), which appear to show that Jordan is operating as a true translator for the sections written by his two French co-authors. Moulin's point of view (mostly in French Destroyers) seems to be "I suppose I see the British point, but it was a tragedy", while Dumas rages at the decision. He is convinced it turns on a (deliberate) British mis-reading of the Armistice terms, as translated from French to English, particularly the precise meaning of Article 8, which says the French fleet will assemble in 'ports to be determined' under the 'controle' of the Germans and Italians. Dumas insists that the proper interpretation/translation of 'controle' in this context is 'supervision', not the English 'control', that the ports would be their home ports, and that we should have trusted that Admiral Darlan would stick to his promise to scuttle the fleet before allowing the Germans to take it over (which he actually did when the Germans occupied the Vichy zone in 1942).  However Dumas is ignoring the reality that France had just betrayed its solemn undertaking to Britain not to seek a separate peace, that Darlan, despite his promise, had taken the position of Minister of Marine in the Vichy government, that peacetime home ports would put half the fleet in the Occupied Zone, that the French Fleet in Axis hands was an existential threat to the Empire's dependence on the route to India through Suez, and that Germany and Italy had a history of ignoring inconvenient solemn agreements for immediate advantage. Even if I adopt Dumas interpretation of 'controle', Churchill's decision seems inescapable, no matter how tragic the implications.