Review: The Wings Upon Her Back, by Samantha Mills

Publisher:	Tachyon
Copyright:	2024
ISBN:	1-61696-415-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	394

The Wings Upon Her Back is a political steampunk science fantasy novel. If the author's name sounds familiar, it may be because Samantha Mills's short story "Rabbit Test" won Nebula, Locus, Hugo, and Sturgeon awards. This is her first novel. Winged Zemolai is a soldier of the mecha god and the protege of Mecha Vodaya, the Voice. She has served the city-state of Radezhda by defending it against all enemies, foreign and domestic, for twenty-six years. Despite that, it takes only a moment of errant mercy for her entire life to come crashing down. On a whim, she spares a kitchen worker who was concealing a statue of the scholar god, meaning that he was only pretending to worship the worker god like all workers should. Vodaya is unforgiving and uncompromising, as is the sleeping mecha god. Zemolai's wings are ripped from her back and crushed in the hand of the god, and she's left on the ground to die of mechalin withdrawal. The Wings Upon Her Back is told in two alternating timelines. The main one follows Zemolai after her exile as she is rescued by a young group of revolutionaries who think she may be useful in their plans. The other thread starts with Zemolai's childhood and shows the reader how she became Winged Zemolai: her scholar family, her obsession with flying, her true devotion to the mecha god, and the critical early years when she became Vodaya's protege. Mills maintains the separate timelines through the book and wraps them up in a rather neat piece of symbolic parallelism in the epilogue. I picked up this book on a recommendation from C.L. Clark, and yes, indeed, I can see why she liked this book. It's a story about a political awakening, in which Zemolai slowly realizes that she has been manipulated and lied to and that she may, in fact, be one of the baddies. The Wings Upon Her Back is more personal than some other books with that theme, since Zemolai was specifically (and abusively) groomed for her role by Vodaya. Much of the book is Zemolai trying to pull out the hooks that Vodaya put in her or, in the flashback timeline, the reader watching Vodaya install those hooks. The flashback timeline is difficult reading. I don't think Mills could have left it out, but she says in the afterword that it was the hardest part of the book to write and it was also the hardest part of the book to read. It fills in some interesting bits of world-building and backstory, and Mills does a great job pacing the story revelations so that both threads contribute equally, but mostly it's a story of manipulative abuse. We know from the main storyline that Vodaya's tactics work, which gives those scenes the feel of a slow-motion train wreck. You know what's going to happen, you know it will be bad, and yet you can't look away. It occurred to me while reading this that Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory told a similar type of story without the flashback structure, which eliminates the stifling feeling of inevitability. I don't think that would not have worked for this story. If you simply rearranged the chapters of The Wings Upon Her Back into a linear narrative, I would have bailed on the book. Watching Zemolai being manipulated would have been too depressing and awful for me to make it to the payoff without the forward-looking hope of the main timeline. It gave me new appreciation for the difficulty of what Tesh pulled off. Mills uses this interwoven structure well, though. At about 90% through this book I had no idea how it could end in the space remaining, but it reaches a surprising and satisfying conclusion. Mills uses a type of ending that normally bothers me, but she does it by handling the psychological impact so well that I couldn't help but admire it. I'm avoiding specifics because I think it worked better when I wasn't expecting it, but it ties beautifully into the thematic point of the book. I do have one structural objection, though. It's one of those problems I didn't notice while reading, but that started bothering me when I thought back through the story from a political lens. The Wings Upon Her Back is Zemolai's story, her redemption arc, and that means she drives the plot. The band of revolutionaries are great characters (particularly Galiana), but they're supporting characters. Zemolai is older, more experienced, and knows critical information they don't have, and she uses it to effectively take over. As setup for her character arc, I see why Mills did this. As political praxis, I have issues. There is a tendency in politics to believe that political skill is portable and repurposable. Converting opposing operatives to the cause is welcomed not only because they indicate added support, but also because they can use their political skill to help you win instead. To an extent this is not wrong, and is probably the most true of combat skills (which Zemolai has in abundance). But there's an underlying assumption that politics is symmetric, and a critical reason why I hold many of the political positions that I do hold is that I don't think politics is symmetric. If someone has been successfully stoking resentment and xenophobia in support of authoritarians, converts to an anti-authoritarian cause, and then produces propaganda stoking resentment and xenophobia against authoritarians, this is in some sense an improvement. But if one believes that resentment and xenophobia are inherently wrong, if one's politics are aimed at reducing the resentment and xenophobia in the world, then in a way this person has not truly converted. Worse, because this is an effective manipulation tactic, there is a strong tendency to put this type of political convert into a leadership position, where they will, intentionally or not, start turning the anti-authoritarian movement into a copy of the authoritarian movement they left. They haven't actually changed their politics because they haven't understood (or simply don't believe in) the fundamental asymmetry in the positions. It's the same criticism that I have of realpolitik: the ends do not justify the means because the means corrupt the ends. Nothing that happens in this book is as egregious as my example, but the more I thought about the plot structure, the more it bothered me that Zemolai never listens to the revolutionaries she joins long enough to wrestle with why she became an agent of an authoritarian state and they didn't. They got something fundamentally right that she got wrong, and perhaps that should have been reflected in who got to make future decisions. Zemolai made very poor choices and yet continues to be the sole main character of the story, the one whose decisions and actions truly matter. Maybe being wrong about everything should be disqualifying for being the main character, at least for a while, even if you think you've understood why you were wrong. That problem aside, I enjoyed this. Both timelines were compelling and quite difficult to put down, even when they got rather dark. I could have done with less body horror and a few fewer fight scenes, but I'm glad I read it. Science fiction readers should be warned that the world-building, despite having an intricate and fascinating surface, is mostly vibes. I started the book wondering how people with giant metal wings on their back can literally fly, and thought the mentions of neural ports, high-tech materials, and immune-suppressing drugs might mean that we'd get some sort of explanation. We do not: heavier-than-air flight works because it looks really cool and serves some thematic purposes. There are enough hints of technology indistinguishable from magic that you could make up your own explanations if you wanted to, but that's not something this book is interested in. There's not a thing wrong with that, but don't get caught by surprise if you were in the mood for a neat scientific explanation of apparent magic. Recommended if you like somewhat-harrowing character development with a heavy political lens and steampunk vibes, although it's not the sort of book that I'd press into the hands of everyone I know. The Wings Upon Her Back is a complete story in a single novel. Content warning: the main character is a victim of physical and emotional abuse, so some of that is a lot. Also surgical gore, some torture, and genocide. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Reasons Not to Worry, by Brigid Delaney

Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	2022
Printing:	October 2023
ISBN:	0-06-331484-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	295

Reasons Not to Worry is a self-help non-fiction book about stoicism, focusing specifically on quotes from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Brigid Delaney is a long-time Guardian columnist who has written on a huge variety of topics, including (somewhat relevantly to this book) her personal experiences trying weird fads. Stoicism is having a moment among the sort of men who give people life advice in podcast form. Ryan Holiday, a former marketing executive, has made a career out of being the face of stoicism in everyone's podcast feed (and, of course, hosting his own). He is far from alone. If you pay attention to anyone in the male self-help space right now (Cal Newport, in my case), you have probably heard something vague about the "wisdom of the stoics." Given that the core of stoicism is easily interpreted as a strategy for overcoming your emotions with logic, this isn't surprising. Philosophies that lean heavily on college dorm room logic, discount emotion, and argue that society is full of obvious flaws that can be analyzed and debunked by one dude with some blog software and a free afternoon have been very popular in tech circles for the past ten to fifteen years, and have spread to some extent into popular culture. Intriguingly, though, stoicism is a system of virtue ethics, which means it is historically in opposition to consequentialist philosophies like utilitarianism, the ethical philosophy behind effective altruism and other related Silicon Valley fads. I am pretty exhausted with the whole genre of men talking to each other about how to live a better life Cal Newport by himself more than satisfies the amount of that I want to absorb but I was still mildly curious about stoicism. My education didn't provide me with a satisfying grounding in major historical philosophical movements, so I occasionally look around for good introductions. Stoicism also has some reputation as an anxiety-reduction technique, and I could use more of those. When I saw a Discord recommendation for Reasons Not to Worry that specifically mentioned its lack of bro perspective, I figured I'd give it a shot. Reasons Not to Worry is indeed not a bro book, although I would have preferred fewer appearances of the author's friend Andrew, whose opinions on stoicism I could not possibly care less about. What it is, though, is a shallow and credulous book that falls squarely in the middle of the lightweight self-help genre. Delaney is here to explain why stoicism is awesome and to convince you that a school of Greek and Roman philosophers knew exactly how you should think about your life today. If this sounds quasi-religious, well, I'll get to that. Delaney does provide a solid introduction to stoicism that I think is a bit more approachable than reading the relevant Wikipedia article. In her presentation, the core of stoicism is the practice of four virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. The modern definition of "stoic" as someone who is impassive in the presence of pleasure or pain is somewhat misleading, but Delaney does emphasize a goal of ataraxia, or tranquility of mind. By making that the goal rather than joy or pleasure, stoicism tries to avoid the trap of the hedonic treadmill in favor of a more achievable persistent contentment. As an aside, some quick Internet research makes me doubt Delaney's summary here. Other material about stoicism I found focuses on apatheia and associates ataraxia with Epicureanism instead. But I won't start quibbling with Delaney's definitions; I'm not qualified and this review is already too long. The key to ataraxia, in Delaney's summary of stoicism, is to focus only on those parts of life we can control. She summarizes those as our character, how we treat others, and our actions and reactions. Everything else wealth, the esteem of our colleagues, good health, good fortune is at least partly outside of our control, and therefore we should enjoy it when we have it but try to be indifferent to whether it will last. Attempting to control things that are outside of our control is doomed to failure and will disturb our tranquility. Essentially all of this book is elaborations and variations on this theme, specialized to some specific area of life like social media, anxiety, or grief and written in the style of a breezy memoir. If you're familiar with modern psychological treatment frameworks like cognitive behavioral therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy, this summary of stoicism may sound familiar. (Apparently this is not an accident; the predecessor to CBT used stoicism as a philosophical basis.) Stoicism, like those treatment approaches, tries to refocus your attention on the things that you can improve and de-emphasizes the things outside of your control. This is a lot of the appeal, at least to me (and I think to Delaney as well). Hearing that definition, you may have some questions. Why those virtues specifically? They sound good, but all virtues sound good almost by definition. Is there any measure of your success in following those virtues outside your subjective feeling of ataraxia? Does the focus on only things you can control lead to ignoring problems only mostly outside of your control, where your actions would matter but only to a small degree? Doesn't this whole philosophy sound a little self-centered? What do non-stoic virtue ethics look like, and why do they differ from stoicism? What is the consequentialist critique of stoicism? This is where the shortcomings of this book become clear: Delaney is not very interested in questions like this. There are sections on some of those topics, particularly the relationship between stoicism and social justice, but her treatment is highly unsatisfying. She raises the question, talks about her doubts about stoicism's applicability, and then says that, after further thought, she decided stoicism is entirely consistent with social justice and the stoics were right after all. There is a little bit more explanation than that, but not much. Stoicism can apparently never be wrong; it can only be incompletely understood. Self-help books often fall short here, and I suspect this may be what the audience wants. Part of the appeal of the self-help genre is artificial certainty. Becoming a better manager, starting a business, becoming more productive, or working out an entire life philosophy are not problems amenable to a highly approachable and undemanding book. We all know that at some level, but the seductive allure of the self-help genre is the promise of simplifying complex problems down to a few approachable bullet points. Here is a life philosophy in a neatly packaged form, and if you just think deeply about its core principles, you will find they can be applied to any situation and any doubts you were harboring will turn out to be incorrect. I am all too familiar with this pattern because it's also how fundamentalist Christianity works. The second time Delaney talked about her doubts about the applicability of stoicism and then claimed a few pages later that those doubts disappeared with additional thought and discussion, my radar went off. This book was sounding less like a thoughtful examination of one specific philosophy out of many and more like the soothing adoption of religious certainty by a convert. I was therefore entirely unsurprised when Delaney all but says outright in the epilogue that she's adopted stoicism as her religion and approaches it with the same dedicated practice that she used to bring to Catholicism. I think this is where a lot of self-help books end up, although most of them don't admit it. There's nothing wrong with this, to be clear. It sounds like she was looking for a non-theistic religion, found one that she liked, and is excited to tell other people about it. But it's a profound mismatch with what I was looking for in an introduction to stoicism. I wanted context, history, and a frank discussion of the problems with adopting philosophy to everyday issues. I also wanted some acknowledgment that it is highly unlikely that a few men who lived 2000 years ago in a wildly different social context, and with drastically limited information about cultures other than their own, figured out a foolproof recipe for how to approach life. The subsequent two millennia of philosophical debates prove that stoicism didn't end the argument, and that a lot of other philosophers thought that stoicism got a few things wrong. You would never know that from this book. What I wanted is outside the scope of this sort of undemanding self-help book, though, and this is the problem that I keep having with philosophy. The books I happen across are either nigh-incomprehensibly dense and academic, or they're simplified into catechism. This was the latter. That's probably more the fault of my reading selection than it is the fault of the book, but it was still annoying. What I will say for this book, and what I suspect may be the most useful property of self-help books in general, is that it prompts you to think about basic stoic principles without getting in the way of your thoughts. It's like background music for the brain: nothing Delaney wrote was very thorny or engaging, but she kept quietly and persistently repeating the basic stoic formula and turning my thoughts back to it. Some of those thoughts may have been useful? As a source of prompts for me to ponder, Reasons Not to Worry was therefore somewhat successful. The concept of not trying to control things outside of my control is simple but valid, and it probably didn't hurt me to spend a week thinking about it. "It kind of works as an undemanding meditation aid" is not a good enough reason for me to recommend this book, but maybe that's what someone else is looking for. Rating: 5 out of 10

Review: The Shepherd's Crown, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #41
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	2015
Printing:	2016
ISBN:	0-06-242998-1
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	276

The Shepherd's Crown is the 41st and final Discworld novel and the 5th and final Tiffany Aching novel. You should not start here. There is a pretty major character event in the second chapter of this book. I'm not going to say directly what it is, but you will likely be able to guess from the rest of the review. If you're particularly adverse to spoilers, you may want to skip reading this until you've read the book. Tiffany Aching is extremely busy. Witches are responsible for all the little tasks that fall between the cracks, and there are a lot of cracks. The better she gets at her job, the more of the job there seems to be.

"Well," said Tiffany, "there's too much to be done and not enough people to do it." The smile that the kelda gave her was a strange one. The little woman said, "Do ye let them try? Ye mustn't be afraid to ask for help. Pride is a good thing, my girl, but it will kill you in time."

And that's before an earth-shattering change in the world of witches, one that leaves Tiffany shuttling between Lancre and the Chalk trying to be too many things to too many people. Plus the kelda is worried some deeper trouble is brewing. And then Tiffany gets an exiled elven queen who has never understood the worth of other people dumped on her, and has to figure out what to do with her. The starting idea is great. I continue to be impressed with how well Pratchett handles Tiffany's coming-of-age story. Finding one's place in the world isn't one lesson or event; it's layers of them, with each new growth in responsibility uncovering new things to learn that are often quite different from the previous problems. Tiffany has worked through child problems, adolescent problems, and new adulthood problems. Now she's on a course towards burnout, which is exactly the kind of problem Tiffany would have given her personality. Even better, the writing at the start of The Shepherd's Crown is tight and controlled and sounds like Pratchett, which was a relief after the mess of Raising Steam. The contrast is so sharp that I found myself wondering if parts of this book had been written earlier, or if Pratchett found a new writing or editing method. The characters all sound like themselves, and although some of the turns of phrase are not quite as sharp as in earlier books, they're at least at the level of Snuff. Unfortunately, it doesn't last. There are some great moments and some good quotes, but the writing starts to slip at about the two-thirds point, the sentences began to meander, the characters start repeating the name of the person they're talking to, and the narration becomes increasingly strained. It felt like Pratchett knew the emotional tone he wanted to evoke but couldn't find a subtle way to express it, so the story and the characters start to bludgeon the reader with Grand Statements. It's never as bad as Raising Steam, but it doesn't slip smoothly off the page to rewrite your brain the way that Pratchett could at his best. What makes this worse is that the plot is not very interesting. I wanted to read a book about Tiffany understanding burnout, asking for help, and possibly also about mental load and how difficult delegation is. There is some movement in that direction: she takes on some apprentices, although we don't see as much of her interactions with them as I'd like, and there's an intriguing new male character who wants to be a witch. I wish Pratchett had been able to give Geoffrey his own book. He and his goat were the best part of the story, but it felt rushed and I think he would have had more impact if the reader got to see him develop his skills over time the way that we did with Tiffany. But, alas, all of that is side story to the main plot, which is about elves. As you may know from previous reviews, I do not get along with Pratchett's conception of elves. I find them boring and too obviously evil, and have since Lords and Ladies. Villains have never been one of Pratchett's strengths, and I think his elves are my least favorite. One of the goals of this book is to try to make them less one-note by having Tiffany try to teach one of them empathy, but I didn't find any of the queen's story arc convincing. If Pratchett had pulled those threads together with something more subtle, emotional, and subversive, I think it could have worked, but instead we got another battle royale, and Lords and Ladies did that better.

"Granny never said as she was better than others. She just got on with it and showed 'em and people worked it out for themselves."

And so we come to the end. I wish I could say that the quality held up through the whole series, and it nearly did, but alas it fell apart a bit at the end. Raising Steam I would skip entirely. The Shepherd's Crown is not that bad, but it's minor Pratchett that's worth reading mainly because it's the send-off (and there are a lot of reasons within the story to think Pratchett knew that when writing it). There are a few great lines, some catharsis, and a pretty solid ending for Tiffany, but it's probably not a book that I'll re-read. Content warning: major character death. Special thanks to Emmet Asher-Perrin, whose Tor.com/Reactor re-read of all of Discworld got me to pick the series up again and finally commit to reading all of it. I'm very glad I did. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2023
ISBN:	1-250-24410-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	116

Thornhedge is a fantasy novella by T. Kingfisher, the pen name that Ursula Vernon uses for her adult writing. It won the 2024 Hugo Award for best novella. No matter how much my brain wants to misspell the title, it is a story about a hedge, not a Neolithic earthwork.

The fairy was the greenish-tan color of mushroom stems and her skin bruised blue-black, like mushroom flesh. She had a broad, frog-like face and waterweed hair. She was neither beautiful nor made of malice, as many of the Fair Folk are said to be.

There is a princess asleep in a tower, surrounded by a wall of thorns. Toadling's job is to keep anyone from foolishly breaking in. At first, it was a constant struggle and all that she could manage, but with time, the flood of princes slowed to a trickle. A road was built and abandoned. People fled. There was a plague. With any luck, the tower was finally forgotten. Then a knight shows up. Not a very rich knight, nor a very successful knight. Just a polite and very persistent knight who wants to get into the tower that Toadling does not want him to get into. As you might have guessed, this is a Sleeping Beauty retelling. As you may have also guessed from the author, or from the cover text that says "not all curses should be broken," this version is a bit different. How and why it departs from the original is a surprise that slowly unfolds over the course of the story, in parallel to a delicate, cautious, and delightfully kind-hearted conversation between the knight and the fairy. If you have read a T. Kingfisher story before, particularly one of her fractured fairy tales, you know what to expect. Toadling is one of her typical well-meaning, earnest, slightly awkward protagonists who is just trying to do the right thing in a confusing world full of problems and dangers. She's constantly overwhelmed and yet she keeps going, because what else is there to do. Like a lot of Kingfisher's writing, it's a story about quiet courage from someone who doesn't consider herself courageous. One of the twists this time is that the knight is a character from a similar vein: doggedly unwilling to leave any problem alone, but equally determined to try to be kind. The two of them together make for a story with a gentle and rather melancholy tone. We do, eventually, learn the whole backstory of the tower, the wall of thorns, and Toadling. There is a god, a rather memorable one, who is frustratingly cryptic in the way that gods are. There are monsters who are more loving than most humans. There are humans who turn out to be surprisingly decent when it matters. And, like most of Kingfisher's writing, there is a constant awareness of how complicated the world is, how full it is of people who are just trying to get through each day, and how heavy of burdens people can shoulder when they don't see another way. This story pulled me right in. It is not horror, although there are a few odd bits like there always are in Kingfisher stories. Your largest risk as a reader is that it might make you cry if stories about earnest people doing their best in overwhelming situations hit you that way. My primary complaint is that there was nowhere near enough ending for me. After everything I learned about the characters, I wanted to spend some time with them outside of the bounds of the story. Kingfisher points the reader in a direction and then leaves the rest to your imagination, and I can see why she chose that story construction, but I wanted more catharsis than I got. That complaint aside, this is quintessential T. Kingfisher, and I am unsurprised that it won a Hugo. If you've read any of her other fractured fairy tales, or the 2023 Hugo winner for best novel, you know the sort of stories she tells, and you probably know whether you will like this. I am one of the people who like this. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Dark Horse, by Michelle Diener

Series:	Class 5 #1
Publisher:	Eclipse
Copyright:	June 2015
ISBN:	0-9924559-3-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	366

Dark Horse is a science fiction romance novel, the first of a five book series as of this writing. It is self-published, although it is sufficiently well-edited and packaged that I had to do some searching to confirm that. Rose was abducted by aliens. The Tecrans picked her up along with a selection of Earth animals, kept her in a cell in their starship, and experimented on her. As the book opens, she has managed to make her escape with the aid of an AI named Sazo who was also imprisoned on the Tecran ship. Sazo dealt with the Tecrans, dropped the ship in the middle of Grih territory, and then got Rose and most of the animals on shuttles to a nearby planet. Dav Jallan is the commander of the ship the Grih sent to investigate the unexplained appearance of a Class 5 Tecran warship in the middle of their territory. The Grih and the Tecran, along with three other species, are members of the United Council, which means in theory they're all at peace. With the Tecran, that theory is often strained. Dav is not going to turn down one of their highly-advanced Class 5 warships delivered to him on a silver platter. There is only the matter of the unexpected cargo, the first orange dots (indicating unknown life forms) that most of the Grih have ever seen. There is a romance. That romance did not work for me. I thought it was highly unprofessional on Dav's part and a bit too obviously constructed on the author's part. It also leans on the subgenre convention that aliens can be remarkably physically similar and sexually compatible, which always causes problems for my suspension of disbelief even though I know it's no less plausible than faster-than-light travel. Despite that, I had so much fun with this book! It was absolutely delightful and weirdly grabby in a way that caught me by surprise. I was skimming some parts of it to write this review and found myself re-reading multiple pages before I dragged myself back on task. I think the most charming part of this book is that the United Council has a law called the Sentient Beings Agreement that makes what the Tecran were doing extremely illegal, and the Grih and the other non-Tecran aliens take this very seriously and with a refreshing lack of cynicism. Rose has a typical human reaction to ending up in a place where she doesn't know the rules and isn't entirely an expected guest. She almost reflexively smoothes over miscommunications and tensions, trying to adapt to their expectations. And then, repeatedly, the Grih realize how much work she's doing to adapt to them, feel enraged at the Tecran and upset that they didn't understand or properly explain something, and find some way to make Rose feel more comfortable. It's surprisingly soothing and comforting to read. It occurred to me in several places that Dark Horse could be read as a wish-fulfillment fantasy of what life as a woman could be like if men took their fair share of the mental load. (This concept is usually applied to housework, but I think it generalizes to other social and communication contexts.) I suspect this was not an accident. There is a lot of wish fulfillment in this book. The Grih are very human-like but hunky, which is convenient for the romance subplot. They struggle to sing, value music exceptionally highly, and consider Rose's speaking voice beautifully musical. Her typical human habit of singing to herself is a source of immediate and almost overwhelming fascination. The supplies Rose takes from the Tecran ship when she flees just happen to be absurdly expensive scented shampoo and equally expensive luxury adaptable clothing. The world she lands on, and the Grih ship, are low-gravity compared to Earth, so Rose is unusually strong for her size. Grih military camouflage has no effect on her human vision. The book is set up to make Rose special. If that type of wish fulfillment is going to grate, wait on this book until you're more in the mood for it. But I like wish fulfillment books when they're done well. Part of why I like to read is to imagine a better world. And Rose isn't doted on; despite their hospitality, she's constantly underestimated by the Grih. Even with their deep belief in the Sentient Beings Agreement, they find it hard to believe that an unknown sentient, even an advanced sentient, is really their equal. Their concern at the start is somewhat patronizing, so watching Rose constantly surprise them delighted the part of my brain that likes both competence porn and deserved reversals, even though the competence here is often due to accidents of biology. It helps that Diener tells the story in alternating perspectives, so the reader first watches Rose do something practical and straightforward from her perspective and then gets to enjoy the profound surprise and chagrin of the aliens. There is a plot beneath this first contact story, and beyond the political problem of figuring out what to do with Rose and the Tecran. Sazo, Rose's AI friend, does not want the Grih to know he exists. He has a history that Rose does not know about and may not be entirely safe. As the political situation with the Tecran escalates, Sazo is pursuing goals of his own, and Rose has a firm opinion about where her loyalties should lie. The resolution is nothing ground-breaking as far as SF goes, but I thought it was satisfyingly tense and complex. Dark Horse leaves obvious room for a sequel, but it comes to a satisfying conclusion. The writing is serviceable, particularly once you get into the story. I would not call it great, and it's not going to win any literary awards, but it didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the story. This is not the sort of book that will make anyone's award list, but it is easily in the top five of books I had the most fun reading this year. Maybe save it for when you're looking for something light and wholesome and don't mind some rather obvious tropes, but if you're in the mood for imagining people who take laws seriously and sincerely try to help other people, I found this an utterly delightful way to pass the time. I immediately bought the sequel. Recommended. Followed by Dark Deeds. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs

Series:	Kindom Trilogy #1
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	October 2023
ISBN:	0-316-46342-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	430

These Burning Stars is a science fiction thriller with cyberpunk vibes. It is Bethany Jacobs's first novel and the first of an expected trilogy, and won the 2024 Philip K. Dick Award for the best SF paperback original published in the US. Generation starships brought humanity to the three star systems of the Treble, where they've built a new and thriving culture of billions. The Treble is ruled by the Kindom, a tripartite government structure built around the worship of six gods and the aristocratic power of the First Families. The Clerisy handle religion, the Secretaries run the bureaucracy, and the Cloaksaan enforce the decisions of the other branches. The Nightfoots are one of the First Families. They control sevite, the propellant required to move between the systems of the Treble now that the moon Jeve and the sole source of natural jevite has been destroyed. Esek Nightfoot is a cleric, theoretically following the rules of the Clerisy, but she has made a career of training cloaksaan. She is is mercurial, powerful, ruthless, ambitious, politically well-connected, and greatly feared. She is also obsessed with a person named Six: an orphan she first encountered at a training school who was too young to have a gender or a name but who was already one of the best fighters in the school. In the sort of manipulative challenge typical of Esek, she dangled the offer of a place as a student and challenged the child to learn enough to do something impressive. The subsequent twenty years of elusive taunts and mysterious gifts from the impossible-to-locate Six have driven Esek wild. Cleric Chono was beside Esek for much of that time. One of Six's classmates and another of Esek's rescues, Chono is the rare student who became a cleric rather than a cloaksaan. She is pious, cautious, and careful, the opposite of Esek's mercurial rage, but it's impossible to spend that much time around the woman and not be affected and manipulated by her. As this story opens, Chono is summoned by the First Cleric to join Esek on an assignment: recover a data coin that was stolen from a pirate raid on the Nightfoot compound. He refuses to tell them what data is on it, only saying that he believes it could be used to undermine public trust in the Nightfoot family. Jun is a hacker with considerably fewer connections to power or government and no desire to meet any of these people. She and her partner Liis make a dubiously legal living from smaller, quieter jobs. Buying a collection of stolen data coins for an archivist consortium is riskier than she prefers, but she's been tracking down rumors of this coin for months. The deal is worth a lot of money, enough to make a huge difference for her family. This is the second book I've read recently with strong cyberpunk vibes, although These Burning Stars mixes them with political thriller. This is a messy world with complicated political and religious systems, a lot of contentious history, and vast inequality. The story is told in two interleaved time sequences: the present-day fight over the data coin and the information that it contains, and a sequence of flashbacks telling the history of Esek's relationship with Six and Chono. Jun's story is the most cyberpunk and the one I found the most enjoyable to read, but Chono is a good viewpoint character for Esek's vicious energy and abusive charisma. Six is not a viewpoint character. For most of the book, they're present mostly in shadows, glimpses, and consequences, but they're the strongest character of the book. Both Esek and Six are larger than life, creatures of legend stuffed into mundane politics but too full of strong emotions, both good and bad, to play by any of the rules. Esek has the power base and access to the levers of government, but Six's quiet competence and mercilessly targeted morality may make them the more dangerous of the pair. I found the twisty political thriller part of this book engrossing and very difficult to put down, but it was also a bit too much drama for me in places. Jacobs has some surprises in store, one of which I did not expect at all, and they're set up beautifully and well-done within the story, but Esek and Six become an emotional star that the other characters orbit around and are in danger of getting pulled into. Chono is an accomplished and powerful character in her own right, but she's also an abuse victim, and while those parts are realistic, I didn't entirely enjoy reading them. There is quiet competence here alongside the drama, but I think I wanted the balance of emotion to tip a bit more towards the competence. There is one thing that Jacobs does with the end of the book that greatly impressed me. Unfortunately I can't even hint at it for fear of spoilers, but the ending is unsettling in a way that I found surprising and thought-provoking. I think what I can say is that this book respects the intelligence and skill of secondary characters in a way that I think is rare in a story with such overwhelming protagonists. I'm still thinking about that, and it's going to pull me right into the sequel. This is not going to be to everyone's taste. Esek is a viewpoint character and she can be very nasty. There's a lot of violence and abuse, including one rather graphic fight scene that I thought dragged on much longer than it needed to. But it's a satisfying, complex story with a true variety of characters and some real surprises. I'm glad I read it. Followed by On Vicious Worlds, not yet published as I write this. Content warnings: emotional and physical abuse, graphic violence, off-screen rape and sexual abuse of minors. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: The Book That Wouldn't Burn, by Mark Lawrence

Series:	Library Trilogy #1
Publisher:	Ace
Copyright:	2023
ISBN:	0-593-43793-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	561

The Book That Wouldn't Burn is apparently high fantasy, but of the crunchy sort that could easily instead be science fiction. It is the first of a trilogy. Livira is a young girl, named after a weed, who lives in a tiny settlement in the Dust. She is the sort of endlessly curious and irrepressible girl who can be more annoying than delightful to adults who are barely keeping everyone alive. Her settlement is not the sort of place that's large enough to have a name; only their well keeps them alive in the desert and the ever-present dust. There is a city somewhere relatively near, which Livira dreams of seeing, but people from the settlement don't go there. When someone is spotted on the horizon approaching the settlement, it's the first time Livira has ever seen a stranger. It's also not a good sign. There's only one reason for someone to seek them out in the Dust: to take. Livira and the other children are, in short order, prisoners of the humanoid dog-like sabbers, being dragged off to an unknown fate. Evar lives in the library and has for his entire life. Specifically, he lives in a square room two miles to a side, with a ceiling so high that it may as well be a stone sky. He lived there with his family before he was lost in the Mechanism. Years later, the Mechanism spit him out alongside four other similarly-lost kids, all from the same library in different times. None of them had apparently aged, but everyone else was dead. Now, years later, they live a strange and claustrophobic life with way too much social contact between way too few people. Evar's siblings, as he considers them, were each in the Mechanism with a book. During their years in the Mechanism they absorbed that book until it became their focus and to some extent their personality. His brothers are an assassin, a psychologist, and a historian. His sister, the last to enter the Mechanism and a refugee from the sabber attack that killed everyone else, is a warrior. Evar... well, presumably he had a book, since that's how the Mechanism works. But he can't remember anything about it except the feeling that there was a woman. Evar lives in a library in the sense that it's a room full of books, but those books are not on shelves. They're stacked in piles and massive columns, with no organizational system that any of them could discern. There are four doors, all of which are closed and apparently impenetrable. In front of one of them is a hundred yards of char and burned book remnants, but that door is just as impenetrable as the others. There is a pool in the center of the room, crops surrounding it, and two creatures they call the Soldier and the Assistant. That is the entirety of Evar's world. As you might guess from the title, this book is about a library. Evar's perspective of the library is quite odd and unexplained until well into the book, and Livira's discovery of the library and subsequent explorations are central to her story, so I'm going to avoid going into too many details about its exact nature. What I will say is that I have read a lot of fantasy novels that are based around a library, but I don't think I've ever read one that was this satisfying. I think the world of The Book That Wouldn't Burn is fantasy, in that there are fundamental aspects of this world that don't seem amenable to an explanation consistent with our laws of physics. It is, however, the type of fantasy with discoverable rules. Even better, it's the type of fantasy where discovering the rules is central to the story, for both the characters and the readers, and the rules are worth the effort. This is a world-building tour de force: one of the most engrossing and deeply satisfying slow revelations that I have read in a long time. This book is well over 500 pages, the plot never flags, new bits of understanding were still slotting into place in the last chapter, and there are lots of things I am desperately curious about that Lawrence left for the rest of the series. If you like puzzling out the history and rules of an invented world and you have anything close to my taste in characters and setting, you are going to love this book. (Also, there is at least one C.S. Lewis homage that I will not spoil but that I thought was beautifully done and delightfully elaborated, and I am fairly sure there is a conversation happening between this book and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series that I didn't quite untangle but that I am intrigued by.) I do need to offer a disclaimer: Livira is precisely the type of character I love reading about. She's stubborn, curious, courageous, persistent, egalitarian, insatiable, and extremely sharp. I have a particular soft spot for exactly this protagonist, so adjust the weight of my opinion accordingly. But Lawrence also makes excellent use of her as a spotlight to illuminate the world-building. More than anything else in the world, Livira wants to understand, and there is so much here to understand. There is an explanation for nearly everything in this book, and those explanations usually both make sense and prompt more questions. This is such a tricky balance for the writer to pull off! A lot of world-building of this sort fails either by having the explanations not live up to the mysteries or by tying everything together so neatly that the stakes of the world collapse into a puzzle box. Lawrence avoids both failures. This world made sense to me but remained sufficiently messy to feel like humans were living in it. I also thought the pacing and timing were impeccable: I figured things out at roughly the same pace as the characters, and several twists and turns caught me entirely by surprise. I do have one minor complaint and one caveat. The minor complaint is that I thought one critical aspect of the ending was a little bit too neat and closed. It was the one time in the book where I thought Lawrence simplified his plot structure rather than complicated it, and I didn't like the effect it had on the character dynamics. There is, thankfully, the promise of significant new complications in the next book. The caveat is a bit harder to put my finger on, but a comparison to Alaya Dawn Johnson's The Library of Broken Worlds might help. That book was also about a library, featured a protagonist thrown into the deep end of complex world-building, and put discovery of the history and rules at the center of the story. I found the rules structure of The Book That Wouldn't Burn more satisfyingly complicated and layered, in a way that made puzzle pieces fit together in my head in a thoroughly enjoyable way. But Johnson's book is about very large questions of identity, history, sacrifice, and pain, and it's full of murky ambiguity and emotions that are only approached via metaphor and symbolism. Lawrence's book is far more accessible, but the emotional themes are shallower and more straightforward. There is a satisfying emotional through-line, and there are some larger issues at stake, but it won't challenge your sense of morality and justice the way that The Library of Broken Worlds might. I think which of those books one finds better will depend on what mood you're in and what reading experience you're looking for. Personally, I was looking for a scrappy, indomitable character who would channel her anger into overcoming every obstacle in the way of thoroughly understanding her world, and that's exactly what I got. This was my most enjoyable reading experience of the year to date and the best book I've read since Some Desperate Glory. Fantastic stuff, highly recommended. Followed by The Book That Broke the World, and the ending is a bit of a cliffhanger so you may want to have that on hand. Be warned that the third book in the series won't be published until 2025. Rating: 9 out of 10

podlators contains the Perl modules and scripts used to convert Perl's documentation language, POD, to text and manual pages. This is another small bug fix release that is part of iterating on getting the new podlators incorproated into Perl core. The bug fixed in this release was another build system bug I introduced in recent refactorings, this time breaking the realclean target so that some generated scripts were not removed. Thanks to James E Keenan for the report. You can get the latest version from CPAN or from the podlators distribution page.

DocKnot is my static web site generator, with some additional features for managing software releases. This release fixes some bugs in the newly-added conversion of text to HTML that were due to my still-incomplete refactoring of that code. It still uses some global variables, and they were leaking between different documents and breaking the formatting. It also fixes consistency problems with how the style parameter in *.spin files was interpreted, and fixes some incorrect docknot update-spin behavior. You can get the latest version from CPAN or from the DocKnot distribution page.

This is a small bug-fix release to remove use of autodie from the build system for the module. podlators is included in Perl core, and at the point when it is built during the core build, the prerequisites of the autodie module are not yet met, so the module is not available. This release reverts to explicit error checking in all the files used by the build system. Thanks to James E Keenan for the report and the analysis. You can get the latest version from CPAN or the podlators distribution page.

Review: The Splinter in the Sky, by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

Publisher:	Saga Press
Copyright:	July 2023
ISBN:	1-6680-0849-1
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	372

The Splinter in the Sky is a stand-alone science fiction political thriller. It is Kemi Ashing-Giwa's first novel. Enitan is from Koriko, a vegetation-heavy moon colonized by the Vaalbaran empire. She lives in the Ijebu community with her sibling Xiang and has an on-again, off-again relationship with Ajana, the Vaalbaran-appointed governor. Xiang is studying to be an architect, which requires passing stringent entrance exams to be allowed to attend an ancillary imperial school intended for "primitives." Enitan works as a scribe and translator, one of the few Korikese allowed to use the sacred Orin language of Vaalbara. In her free time, she grows and processes tea. When Xiang mysteriously disappears while she's at work, Enitan goes to Ajana for help. Then Ajana dies, supposedly from suicide. The Vaalbaran government demands a local hostage while the death is investigated, someone who will be held as a diplomatic "guest" on the home world and executed if there is any local unrest. This hostage is supposed to be the child of the local headwoman, a concept that the Korikese do not have. Seeing a chance to search for Xiang, Enitan volunteers, heading into the heart of imperial power with nothing but desperate determination and a tea set. The empire doesn't stand a chance. Admittedly, a lot of the reason why the empire doesn't stand a chance is because the author is thoroughly on Enitan's side. Before she even arrives on Gondwana, Vaalbara's home world, Enitan is recruited as a spy by the other Gondwana power and Vaalbara's long-standing enemy. Her arrival in the Splinter, the floating arcology that serves as the center of Vaalbaran government, is followed by a startlingly meteoric rise in access. Some of this is explained by being a cultural curiosity for bored nobles, and some is explained by political factors Enitan is not yet aware of, but one can see the author's thumb resting on the scales. This was the sort of book that was great fun to read, but whose political implausibility provoked "wait, that didn't make sense" thoughts afterwards. I think one has to assume that the total population of Vaalbara is much less than first comes to mind when considering an interplanetary empire, which would help explain the odd lack of bureaucracy. Enitan is also living in, effectively, the palace complex, for reasonably well-explained political reasons, and that could grant her a surprising amount of access. But there are other things that are harder to explain away: the lack of surveillance, the relative lack of guards, and the odd political structure that's required for the plot to work. It's tricky to talk about this without spoilers, but the plot rests heavily on a conspiratorial view of how government power is wielded that I think strains plausibility. I'm not naive enough to think that the true power structure of a society matches the formal power structure, but I don't think they diverge as much as people think they do. It's one thing to say that the true power brokers of society can be largely unknown to the general population. In a repressive society with a weak media, that's believable. It's quite another matter for the people inside the palace to be in the dark about who is running what. I thought that was the biggest problem with this book. Its greatest feature is the characters, and particularly the character relationships. Enitan is an excellent protagonist: fascinating, sympathetic, determined, and daring in ways that make her success more believable. Early in the book, she forms an uneasy partnership that becomes the heart of the book, and I loved everything about that relationship. The politics of her situation might be a bit too simple, but the emotions were extremely well-done. This is a book about colonialism. Specifically, it's a book about cultural looting, appropriation, and racist superiority. The Vaalbarans consider Enitan barely better than an animal, and in her home they're merciless and repressive. Taken out of that context into their imperial capital, they see her as a harmless curiosity and novelty. Enitan exploits this in ways that are entirely believable. She is also driven to incandescent fury in ways that are entirely believable, and which she only rarely can allow herself to act on. Ashing-Giwa drives home the sheer uselessness of even the more sympathetic Vaalbarans more forthrightly than science fiction is usually willing to be. It's not a subtle point, but it is an accurate one. The first two thirds of this book had me thoroughly engrossed and unable to put it down. The last third unfortunately turns into a Pok mon hunt of antagonists, which I found less satisfying and somewhat less believable. I wish there had been more need for Enitan to build political alliances and go deeper into the social maneuverings of the first part of the book, rather than gaining some deus ex machina allies who trivially solve some otherwise-tricky plot problems. The setup is amazing; the resolution felt a bit like escaping a maze by blasting through the walls, which I don't think played to the strengths of the characters and relationships that Ashing-Giwa had constructed. The advantage of that approach is that we do get a satisfying resolution and a standalone novel. The central relationship of the book is unfortunately too much of a spoiler to talk about in a review, but I thought it was the best part of the story. This is a political thriller on the surface, but I think it's heart is an unexpected political alliance with a fascinatingly tricky balance of power. I was delighted that Ashing-Giwa never allows the tension in that relationship to collapse into one of the stock patterns it so easily could have become. The Splinter in the Sky reminded me a little of Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. It's not as assured or as adroitly balanced as that book, and the characters are not quite as memorable, but that's a very high bar. The political point is even sharper, and it has some of the same appeal. I had so much fun reading this book. You may need to suspend your disbelief about some of the politics, and I wish the conclusion had been a bit less brute-force, but this is great stuff. Recommended when you're in the mood for a character story in the trappings of a political thriller. Rating: 8 out of 10

podlators is the collection of Perl modules and front-end scripts that convert POD documentation to *roff manual pages or text, possibly with formatting intended for pagers. This release continues the simplifications that I've been doing in the last few releases and now uniformly escapes - characters and single quotes, disabling all special interpretation by *roff formatters and dropping the heuristics that were used in previous versions to try to choose between possible interpretations of those characters. I've come around to the position that POD simply is not semantically rich enough to provide sufficient information to successfully make a more nuanced conversion, and these days Unicode characters are available for authors who want to be more precise. This version also drops support for Perl versions prior to 5.12 and switches to semantic versioning for all modules. I've added a v prefix to the version number, since that is the convention for Perl module versions that use semantic versioning. This release also works around some changes to the man macros in groff 1.23.0 to force persistent ragged-right justification when formatted with nroff and fixes a variety of other bugs. You can get the latest release from CPAN or from the podlators distribution page.

Review: Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #40
Publisher:	Anchor Books
Copyright:	2013
Printing:	October 2014
ISBN:	0-8041-6920-9
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	365

Raising Steam is the 40th Discworld novel and the third Moist von Lipwig novel, following Making Money. This is not a good place to start reading the series. Dick Simnel is a tinkerer from a line of tinkerers. He has been obsessed with mastering the power of steam since the age of ten, when his father died in a steam accident. That pursuit took him deeper into mathematics and precision, calculations and experiments, until he built Iron Girder: Discworld's first steam-powered locomotive. His early funding came from some convenient family pirate treasure, but turning his prototype into something more will require significantly more resources. That is how he ends up in the office of Harry King, Ankh-Morpork's sanitation magnate. Simnel's steam locomotive has the potential to solve some obvious logistical problems, such as getting fish from the docks of Quirm to the streets of Ankh-Morpork before it stops being vaguely edible. That's not what makes railways catch fire, however. As soon as Iron Girder is huffing and puffing its way around King's compound, it becomes the most popular attraction in the city. People stand in line for hours to ride it over and over again for reasons that they cannot entirely explain. There is something wild and uncontrollable going on. Vetinari is not sure he likes wild and uncontrollable, but he knows the lap into which such problems can be dumped: Moist von Lipwig, who is already getting bored with being a figurehead for the city's banking system. The setup for Raising Steam reminds me more of Moving Pictures than the other Moist von Lipwig novels. Simnel himself is a relentlessly practical engineer, but the trains themselves have tapped some sort of primal magic. Unlike Moving Pictures, Pratchett doesn't provide an explicit fantasy explanation involving intruding powers from another world. It might have been a more interesting book if he had. Instead, this book expects the reader to believe there is something inherently appealing and fascinating about trains, without providing much logic or underlying justification. I think some readers will be willing to go along with this, and others (myself included) will be left wishing the story had more world-building and fewer exclamation points. That's not the real problem with this book, though. Sadly, its true downfall is that Pratchett's writing ability had almost completely collapsed by the time he wrote it. As mentioned in my review of Snuff, we're now well into the period where Pratchett was suffering the effects of early-onset Alzheimer's. In that book, his health issues mostly affected the dialogue near the end of the novel. In this book, published two years later, it's pervasive and much worse. Here's a typical passage from early in the book:

It is said that a soft answer turneth away wrath, but this assertion has a lot to do with hope and was now turning out to be patently inaccurate, since even a well-spoken and thoughtful soft answer could actually drive the wrong kind of person into a state of fury if wrath was what they had in mind, and that was the state the elderly dwarf was now enjoying.

One of the best things about Discworld is Pratchett's ability to drop unexpected bits of wisdom in a sentence or two, or twist a verbal knife in an unexpected and surprising direction. Raising Steam still shows flashes of that ability, but it's buried in run-on sentences, drowned in cliches and repetition, and often left behind as the containing sentence meanders off into the weeds and sputters to a confused halt. The idea is still there; the delivery, sadly, is not. This is the first Discworld novel that I found mentally taxing to read. Sentences are often so overpacked that they require real effort to untangle, and the untangled meaning rarely feels worth the effort. The individual voice of the characters is almost gone. Vetinari's monologues, rather than being a rare event with dangerous layers, are frequent, rambling, and indecisive, often sounding like an entirely different character than the Vetinari we know. The constant repetition of the name any given character is speaking to was impossible for me to ignore. And the momentum of the story feels wrong; rather than constructing the events of the story in a way that sweeps the reader along, it felt like Pratchett was constantly pushing, trying to convince the reader that trains were the most exciting thing to ever happen to Discworld. The bones of a good story are here, including further development of dwarf politics from The Fifth Elephant and Thud! and the further fallout of the events of Snuff. There are also glimmers of Pratchett's typically sharp observations and turns of phrase that could have been unearthed and polished. But at the very least this book needed way more editing and a lot of rewriting. I suspect it could have dropped thirty pages just by tightening the dialogue and removing some of the repetition. I'm afraid I did not enjoy this. I am a bit of a hard sell for the magic fascination of trains I love trains, but my model railroad days are behind me and I'm now more interested in them as part of urban transportation policy. Previous Discworld books on technology and social systems did more of the work of drawing the reader in, providing character hooks and additional complexity, and building a firmer foundation than "trains are awesome." The main problem, though, was the quality of the writing, particularly when compared to the previous novels with the same characters. I dragged myself through this book out of a sense of completionism and obligation, and was relieved when I finished it. This is the first Discworld novel that I don't recommend. I think the only reason to read it is if you want to have read all of Discworld. Otherwise, consider stopping with Snuff and letting it be the send-off for the Ankh-Morpork characters. Followed by The Shepherd's Crown, a Tiffany Aching story and the last Discworld novel. Rating: 3 out of 10

rra-c-util is my collection of utility and test functions that I keep synchronized between my packages. The big change in this release is that I've switched to semantic versions, which I plan to do for all of my packages, and I've started using scriv to manage a Markdown change log. We've been using scriv for a while at work, so I have finally gotten on board the change log fragment train rather than assuming linear commits. This release also raises the minimum Perl version for all of the Perl support code to 5.12 so that I can use semantic versions for all modules, and updates the perltidy configuration with lots of improvements from Julien LIE. There are also the normal variaty of bug fixes and more minor improvements. You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.

Review: Beyond Control, by Kit Rocha

Series:	Beyond #2
Publisher:	Kit Rocha
Copyright:	December 2013
ASIN:	B00GIA4GN8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	364

Beyond Control is science fiction erotica (dystopian erotic romance, per the marketing) and a direct sequel to Beyond Shame. These books shift protagonists with each volume and enough of the world background is explained that you could start here, but there are significant spoilers for the previous book. I read this book as part of the Beyond Series Bundle (Books 1-3), which is what the sidebar information is for. This is one of those reviews that I write because I'm stubborn about reviewing all the books I read, not because it's likely to be useful to anyone. There are also considerably more spoilers for the shape of the story than I normally include, so be warned. The Beyond series is erotica. Specifically, so far, consensual BDSM erotica with bisexuality but otherwise typical gender stereotypes. The authors (Kit Rocha is a pen name for Donna Herren and Bree Bridges) are women, so it's more female gaze than male gaze, but by erotica I don't mean romance with an above-average number of steamy scenes. I mean it felt like half the book by page count was descriptions of sex. This review is rather pointless because, one, I'm not going to review the sex that's the main point of the book, and two, I skimmed all the sex and read it for the story because I'm weird. Beyond Shame got me interested in these absurdly horny people and their post-apocalyptic survival struggles in the outskirts of a city run by a religious surveillance state, and I wanted to find out what happened next. Besides, this book promised to focus on my favorite character from the first novel, Lex, and I wanted to read more about her. Beyond Control uses a series pattern that I understand is common in romance but which is not often seen in SFF (my usual genre): each book focuses on a new couple adjacent to the previous couple, while the happily ever after of the previous couple plays out in the background. In this case, it also teases the protagonists of the next book. I can see why romance uses this structure: it's an excuse to provide satisfying interludes for the reader. In between Lex and Dallas's current relationship problems, one gets to enjoy how well everything worked out for Noelle and how much she's grown. In Beyond Shame, Lex was the sort-of partner of Dallas O'Kane, the leader of the street gang that is running Sector Four. (Picture a circle surrounding the rich-people-only city of Eden. That circle is divided into eight wedge-shaped sectors, which provide heavy industries, black-market pleasures, and slums for agricultural workers.) Dallas is an intensely possessive, personally charismatic semi-dictator who cultivates the image of a dangerous barbarian to everyone outside and most of the people inside Sector Four. Since he's supposed to be one of the good guys, this is more image than reality, but it's not entirely disconnected from reality. This book is about Lex and Dallas forming an actual relationship, instead of the fraught and complicated thing they had in the first book. I was hoping that this would involve Dallas becoming less of an asshole. It unfortunately does not, although some of what I attributed to malice may be adequately explained by stupidity. I'm not sure that's an improvement. Lex is great, just like she was in the first book. It's obvious by this point in the series that she does most of the emotional labor of keeping the gang running, and her support is central to Dallas's success. Like most of the people in this story, she has a nasty and abusive background that she's still dealing with in various ways. Dallas's possessiveness is intensely appealing to her, but she wants that possessiveness on different terms than Dallas may be willing to offer, or is even aware of. Lex was, I thought, exceptionally clear about what she wanted out of this relationship. Dallas thinks this is entirely about sex, and is, in general, dumber than a sack of hammers. That means fights. Also orgies, but, well, hopefully you knew what you were getting into if you picked up this book. I know, I know, it's erotica, that's the whole point, but these people have a truly absurd amount of sex. Eden puts birth control in the water supply, which is a neat way to simplify some of the in-story consequences of erotica. They must be putting aphrodisiacs in the water supply as well. There was a lot of sector politics in this book that I found way more interesting than it had any right to be. I really like most of these people, even Dallas when he manages to get his three brain cells connected for more than a few minutes. The events of the first book have a lot of significant fallout, Lex continues being a badass, the social dynamics between the women are very well-done (and pass the Bechdel test yet again even though this is mostly traditional-gender-role erotica), and if Dallas had managed to understand what he did wrong at a deeper-than-emotional level, I would have rather enjoyed the non-erotica story parts. Alas. I therefore wouldn't recommend this book even if I were willing to offer any recommendations about erotica (which I'm not). I was hoping it was going somewhere more rewarding than it did. But I still kind of want to read another one? I am weirdly fascinated with the lives of these people. The next book is about Six, who has the potential to turn into the sort of snarky, cynical character I love reading about. And it's not that hard to skim over the orgies. Maybe Dallas will get one additional brain cell per book? Followed by Beyond Pain. Rating: 5 out of 10

DocKnot is my static web site generator, with additional features for managing software releases and package documentation. This release switches to semantic versioning for the Perl modules, hence the v prefix to the version number. This appears to be the standard in the Perl world for indicating that the version follows the semantic versioning standard. That also required adding support to DocKnot for release tarballs whose version string starts with v. I plan to convert all of my Perl modules to semantic versioning in their next releases. The main change in this release is that it incorporates my old faq2html script that was previously used to convert text documents to HTML for publication. This code was imported into DocKnot and integrated with the rest of the package, so text documents can now be referenced by *.spin pointers rather than the (now-deprecated) *.faq files. The long delay in the release is because I was hoping to refactor the faq2html code to work as a proper module with no global state and to follow my current Perl coding guidelines before releasing a version of DocKnot containing it, but the refactoring is taking forever and support for v-prefixed versions was blocking other releases, so I'm releasing it in a less-than-ideal state and hoping to fix it later. There are also a few other bug fixes and improvements, the most notable of which is probably that the footer on generated web pages now points properly to the DocKnot distribution page rather than my old spin page. You can get the latest version from CPAN or from the DocKnot distribution page.

Review: Welcome to Boy.Net, by Lyda Morehouse

Series:	Earth's Shadow #1
Publisher:	Wizard's Tower Press
Copyright:	April 2024
ISBN:	1-913892-71-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	355

Welcome to Boy.Net is a science fiction novel with cyberpunk vibes, the first of a possible series. Earth is a largely abandoned wasteland. Humanity has survived in the rest of the solar system and spread from Earth's moon to the outer planets. Mars is the power in the inner system, obsessed with all things Earth and effectively run by the Earth Nations' Peacekeeping Force, the ENForcers. An ENForcer soldier is raised in a creche from an early age, implanted with cybernetic wetware and nanite enhancements, and extensively trained to be an elite fighting unit. As befits a proper military, every ENForcer is, of course, male. The ENForcers thought Lucia Del Toro was a good, obedient soldier. They also thought she was a man. They were wrong about those and many other things. After her role in an atrocity that named her the Scourge of New Shanghai, she went AWOL and stole her command ship. Now she and her partner/girlfriend Hawk, a computer hacker from Luna, make a living with bounty hunting jobs in the outer system. The ENForcers rarely cross the asteroid belt; the United Miners see to that. The appearance of an F-class ENForcer battle cruiser in Jupiter orbit is a very unpleasant surprise. Lucia and Hawk hope it has nothing to do with them. That hope is dashed when ENForcers turn up in the middle of their next job: a bounty to retrieve an AI eye. I first found Lyda Morehouse via her AngeLINK cyberpunk series, the last of which was published in 2011. Since then, she's been writing paranormal romance and urban fantasy as Tate Hallaway. This return to science fiction is an adventure with trickster hackers, throwback anime-based cowboy bars, tense confrontations with fascist thugs, and unexpected mutual aid, but its core is a cyberpunk look at the people who are unwilling or unable to follow the rules of social conformity. Gender conformity, specifically. Once you understand what this book is about, Welcome to Boy.Net is a great title, but I'm not sure it serves its purpose as a marketing tool. This is not the book that I would have expected from that title in isolation, and I'm a bit worried that people who would like it might pass it by. Inside the story, Boy.Net is the slang term for the cybernetic network that links all ENForcers. If this were the derogatory term used by people outside the ENForcers, I could see it, but it's what the ENForcers themselves call it. That left me with a few suspension of disbelief problems, since the sort of macho assholes who are this obsessed with male gender conformance usually consider "boys" to be derogatory and wouldn't call their military cybernetic network something that sounds that belittling, even as a joke. It would be named after some sort of Orwellian reference to freedom, or something related to violence, dominance, brutality, or some other "traditional male" virtue. But although this term didn't work for me as world-building, it's a beautiful touch thematically. What Morehouse is doing here is the sort of concretized metaphor that science fiction is so good at: an element of world-building that is both an analogy for something the reader is familiar with and is also a concrete piece of world background that follows believable rules and can be manipulated by the characters. Boy.Net is trying to reconnect to Lucia against her will. If it succeeds, it will treat the body modifications she's made as damage and try to reverse all of them, attempting to convert her back to the model of an ENForcer. But it is also a sharp metaphor for how gender roles are enforced in our world: a child assigned male is connected to a pervasive network of gender expectations and is programmed, shaped, and monitored to match the social role of a boy. Even if they reject those expectations, the gender role keeps trying to reconnect and convert them back. I really enjoyed Morehouse's handling of the gender dynamics. It's an important part of the plot, but it's not the only thing going on or the only thing the characters think about. Lucia is occasionally caught by surprise by well-described gender euphoria, but mostly gender is something other people keep trying to impose on her because they're obsessed with forcing social conformity. The rest of the book is a fun romp with a few memorable characters and a couple of great moments with unexpected allies. Hawk and Lucia have an imperfect but low drama relationship that features a great combination of insight and the occasional misunderstanding. It's the kind of believable human relationship that I don't see very much in science fiction, written with the comfortable assurance of an author with over a dozen books under her belt. Some of the supporting characters are also excellent, including a non-binary deaf hacker that I wish had been a bit more central to the story. This is not the greatest science fiction novel I've read, but it was entertaining throughout and kept me turning the pages. Recommended if you want some solar-system cyberpunk in your life. Welcome to Boy.Net reaches a conclusion of sorts, but there's an obvious hook for a sequel and a lot of room left for more stories. I hope enough people buy this book so that I can read it. Rating: 7 out of 10

Dear Debian community, Statement on Daniel Pocock The Debian project has successfully taken action to secure its trademarks and interests worldwide, as detailed in our press statement. I would like to personally thank everyone in the community who was involved in this process. I would have loved for you all to have spent your volunteer time on more fruitful things. Debian Boot team might need help I think I've identified the issue that finally motivated me to contact our teams: for a long time, I have had the impression that Debian is driven by several "one-person teams" (to varying extents of individual influence and susceptibility to burnout). As DPL, I see it as my task to find ways to address this issue and provide support. I received private responses from Debian Boot team members, which motivated me to kindly invite volunteers to some prominent and highly visible fields of work that you might find personally challenging. I recommend subscribing to the Debian Boot mailing list to see where you might be able to provide assistance. /usrmerge Helmut Grohne confirmed that the last remaining packages shipping aliased files inside the package set relevant to debootstrap were uploaded. Thanks a lot for Helmut and all contributors that helped to implement DEP17. Contacting more teams I'd like to repeat that I've registered a BoF for DebConf24 in Busan with the following description: This BoF is an attempt to gather as much as possible teams inside Debian to exchange experiences, discuss workflows inside teams, share their ways to attract newcomers etc. Each participant team should prepare a short description of their work and what team roles ( openings ) they have for new contributors. Even for delegated teams (membership is less fluid), it would be good to present the team, explain what it takes to be a team member, and what steps people usually go to end up being invited to participate. Some other teams can easily absorb contributions from salsa MRs, and at some point people get commit access. Anyway, the point is that we work on the idea that the pathway to become a team member becomes more clear from an outsider point-of-view. I'm lagging a bit behind my team contacting schedule and will not manage to contact every team before DebConf. As a (short) summary, I can draw some positive conclusions about my efforts to reach out to teams. I was able to identify some issues that were new to me and which I am now working on. Examples include limitations in Salsa and Salsa CI. I consider both essential parts of our infrastructure and will support both teams in enhancing their services. Some teams confirmed that they are basically using some common infrastructure (Salsa team space, mailing lists, IRC channels) but that the individual members of the team work on their own problems without sharing any common work. I have also not read about convincing strategies to attract newcomers to the team, as we have established, for instance, in the Debian Med team. DebConf attendance The amount of money needed to fly people to South Korea was higher than usual, so the DebConf bursary team had to make some difficult decisions about who could be reimbursed for travel expenses. I extended the budget for diversity and newcomers, which enabled us to invite some additional contributors. We hope that those who were not able to come this year can make it next year to Brest or to MiniDebConf Cambridge or Toulouse tag2upload On June 12, Sean Whitton requested comments on the debian-vote list regarding a General Resolution (GR) about tag2upload. The discussion began with technical details but unfortunately, as often happens in long threads, it drifted into abrasive language, prompting the community team to address the behavior of an opponent of the GR supporters. After 560 emails covering technical details, including a detailed security review by Russ Allbery, Sean finally proposed the GR on June 27, 2024 (two weeks after requesting comments). Firstly, I would like to thank the drivers of this GR and acknowledge the technical work behind it, including the security review. I am positively convinced that Debian can benefit from modernizing its infrastructure, particularly through stronger integration of Git into packaging workflows. Sam Hartman provided some historical context [1], [2], [3], [4], noting that this discussion originally took place five years ago with no results from several similarly lengthy threads. My favorite summary of the entire thread was given by Gregor Herrmann, which reflects the same gut feeling I have and highlights a structural problem within Debian that hinders technical changes. Addressing this issue is definitely a matter for the Debian Project Leader, and I will try to address it during my term. At the time of writing these bits, a proposal from ftpmaster, which is being continuously discussed, might lead to a solution. I was also asked to extend the GR discussion periods which I will do in separate mail. Talk: Debian GNU/Linux for Scientific Research I was invited to have a talk in the Systems-Facing Track of University of British Columbia (who is sponsoring rack space for several Debian servers). I admit it felt a bit strange to me after working more than 20 years for establishing Debian in scientific environments to be invited to such a talk "because I'm DPL". Kind regards Andreas.

Review: Snuff, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #39
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	October 2011
Printing:	January 2013
ISBN:	0-06-221886-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	470

Snuff is the 39th Discworld novel and the 8th (and last) Watch novel. This is not a good place to start reading. Sam Vines has been talked, cajoled, and coerced into taking a vacation. Since he is now the Duke of Ankh, he has a country estate that he's never visited. Lady Sybil is insistent on remedying this, as is Vetinari. Both of them may have ulterior motives. They may also be colluding. It does not take long for Vimes to realize that something is amiss in the countryside. It's not that the servants are uncomfortable with him talking to them, the senior servants are annoyed that he talks to the wrong servants, and the maids turn to face the wall at the sight of him. Those are just the strange customs of the aristocracy, for which he has little understanding and even less patience. There's something else going on. The nobility is wary, the town blacksmith is angry about something more than disliking the nobles, and the bartender doesn't want to get involved. Vimes smells something suspicious. When he's framed for a murder, the suspicions seem justified. It takes some time before the reader learns what the local nobility are squirming about, so I won't spoil it. What I will say is that Snuff is Pratchett hammering away at one of his favorite targets: prejudice, cruelty, and treating people like things. Vimes, with his uncompromising morality, is one of the first to realize the depth of the problem. It takes most of the rest longer to come around, even Sybil. It's both painful, and painfully accurate, to contemplate how often recognition of other people's worth only comes once they do something that you recognize as valuable. This is one of the better-plotted Discworld novels. Vimes starts out with nothing but suspicions and stubbornness, and manages to turn Snuff into a mystery novel through dogged persistence. The story is one continuous plot arc with the normal Pratchett color (Young Sam's obsession with types of poo, for example) but without extended digressions. It also has considerably better villains than most Pratchett novels: layers of foot soldiers and plotters, each of which have to be dealt with in a suitable way. Even the concluding action sequences worked for me, which is not always a given in Discworld. The problem, unfortunately, is that the writing is getting a bit wobbly. Pratchett died of early-onset Alzheimer's in 2015, four years after this book was first published, and this is the first novel where I can see some early effects. It mostly shows up in the dialogue: it's just a bit flabby and a bit repetitive, and the characters, particularly towards the end of the book, start repeating the name of the person they're talking to every other line. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it, and it was annoying enough to rob a bit of enjoyment from the end of the book. That aside, though, this was a solid Discworld novel. Vimes testing his moral certainty against the world and forcing it into a more ethical shape is always rewarding, and here he takes more risks, with better justification, than in most of the Watch novels. We also find out that Vimes has a legacy from the events of Thud!, which has interesting implications that I wish Pratchett had more time to explore. I think the best part of this book is how it models the process of social change through archetypes: the campaigner who knew the right choice early on, the person who formed their opinion the first time they saw injustice, the person who gets there through a more explicit moral code, the ones who have to be pushed by someone who was a bit faster, the ones who have to be convinced but then work to convince others, and of course the person who is willing to take on the unfair and far-too-heavy burden of being exceptional enough that they can be used as a tool to force other people to acknowledge them as a person. And, since this is Discworld, Vetinari is lurking in the scenery pulling strings, balancing threats, navigating politics, and giving Vimes just enough leeway to try to change the world without abusing his power. I love that the amount of leeway Vimes gets depends on how egregious the offense is, and Vetinari calibrates this quite carefully without ever saying so openly. Recommended, and as much as I don't want to see this series end, this is not a bad entry for the Watch novels to end on. Followed in publication order by Raising Steam. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Bitter Angels, by C.L. Anderson

Publisher:	Ballantine Books
Copyright:	2009
ISBN:	0-553-59217-3
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	438

Bitter Angels is a stand-alone science fiction novel. It won the Philip K. Dick award for best SF original paperback in 2010. C.L. Anderson is a pen name for Sarah Zettel. Terese was a Guardian, one of the agents of the Pax Solaris who find ways to keep the peace in troubled systems and high-stress situations with the help of an implanted Companion, an assistant AI. Forty years ago, on one of those missions, she was captured and her Companion was forcibly removed. She was rescued by her friend and mentor and retired afterwards, starting a new life and a new family, trying to leave the memories behind. Now, the woman who rescued her is dead. She was murdered on duty in the Erasmus system, a corporate hellhole that appears to be on the verge of exploding into a political hot spot. Bianca's last instructions asked for Terese to replace her. Terese's family is furious at her for even considering returning to the Guardians, but she can't say no. Duty, and Bianca's dying request, call too strongly. Amerand is Security on Dazzle, one of the Erasmus stations. He is one of the refugees from Oblivion, the station that the First Bloods who rule the system let die. He keeps his head above water and tries to protect his father and find his mother without doing anything that the ever-present Clerks might find concerning. Keeping an eye on newly-arriving Solaris saints is a typical assignment, since the First Bloods don't trust the meddling do-gooders. But something is not quite right, and a cryptic warning from his Clerk makes him even more suspicious. This is the second book by Sarah Zettel that I've read, and both of them have been tense, claustrophobic thrillers set in a world with harsh social inequality and little space for the characters to maneuver. In this case, the structure of her future universe reminded me a bit of Iain M. Banks's Culture, but with less advanced technology and only humans. The Pax Solaris has eliminated war within its borders and greatly extended lifespans. That peace is maintained by Guardians, who play a role similar to Special Circumstances but a bit more idealist and less lethal. They show up where there are problems and meddle, manipulating and pushing to try to defuse the problems before they reach the Pax Solaris. Like a Culture novel, nearly all of the action takes place outside the Pax Solaris in the Erasmus system. Erasmus is a corporate colony that has turned into a cross between a hereditary dictatorship and the Corporate Rim from Martha Wells's Murderbot series. Debt slavery is ubiquitous, economic inequality is inconceivably vast, and the Clerks are everywhere. Erasmus natives like Amerand have very little leeway and even fewer options. Survival is a matter of not drawing the attention of the wrong people. Terese and her fellow Guardians are appalled, but also keenly aware that destabilizing the local politics may make the situation even worse and get a lot of people killed. Bitter Angels is structured like a mystery: who killed Bianca, and what was her plan when she was killed? Unlike a lot of books of this type, the villains are not idiots and their plan is both satisfyingly complex and still depressingly relevant. I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that I have read recent news articles about people with very similar plans, albeit involving less science-fiction technology. Anderson starts with a tense situation and increases the pressure relentlessly, leaving the heroes one step behind the villains for almost the entire novel. It is not happy or optimistic reading at times, the book is quite dark but it certainly was engrossing. The one world-building quibble that I had is that the Erasmus system is portrayed partly as a hydraulic empire, and while this is arguably feasible given that spaceship travel is strictly controlled, it seemed like a weird choice given the prevalence of water on the nearby moons. Water smuggling plays a significant role in the plot, and I wasn't entirely convinced of the politics and logistics behind it. If this sort of thing bugs you, there are some pieces that may require suspension of disbelief. Bitter Angels is the sort of tense thriller where catastrophe is barely avoided and the cost of victory is too high, so you will want to be in the mood for that before you dive in. But if that's what you're looking for, I thought Anderson delivered a complex and satisfying story. Content warning: major character suicide. Rating: 7 out of 10