Tochi Onyebuchi is far too interesting and thoughtful a writer to have achieved his final form with his fifth novel, but I do get the sense that the success of his most recent novella, Riot Baby, and his continuing development as a writer bought him the leeway he needed to write his wonderful, genre-crossing new novel, Goliath. Inasmuch as it has a plot, it’s about the re-gentrification of New Haven. In this future, the wealthy and the white have mostly left earth for space colonies, while those without the means to leave were left to cope with pollution, automated policing, and steadily deteriorating government support. Now, white folks are coming back to New Haven (and Earth more broadly!), which means that governments are starting to care more about clean air and policing the lives of those who never left.

(Sidebar, I lived in New Haven for three months and it was the weirdest place I have ever been. It’s one of those things where like, the segregation and prejudice of the place you’re not from feels the weirdest? Like, I know that segregation happens all over the US, very much including my home state. But the divide between Yale and Not-Yale was so stark, and so mutually suspicious, and white people in New Haven would just say anything to you about non-white New Haven, like, right to my face after knowing me for thirty seconds, and everyone was deeply unfriendly, and tldr it was fucking weird as shit and I was not there long enough to get good at navigating it.)

ANYWAY. Goliath is the second of two 2022 SF novels that I read in January that were no plot, only vibes. Historically this has not been my thing! But I am trying to be more open to different kinds of books and different ways of telling stories, and certainly it’s impossible to read Goliath and wish for it to be anything other than what it is. It’s a dark story, dealing with police brutality, environmental racism, gentrification, housing inequality, and a host of other issues, so it feels a bit weird to talk about it in terms of play. But playing is exactly with Onyebuchi is doing: playing with his setting, with SF conventions, with the city of New Haven, most particularly with genre. Goliath is clearly a work of science fiction, but it ranges widely across genre, sometimes feeling nearly like a hangout sitcom, dabbling in romance, flirting with being a Western. You can sense the author flexing a lot of different muscles to produce a story that feels deeply situated in the time of its writing and simultaneously grimly predictive.

Though Goliath is packed full of people making variable levels of effort at being good, there’s an extent to which the project of goodness is doomed by the bigger systems in which the characters find themselves. The clearest–and most heartbreaking–example of this is the section of the book that tells the story of a successful inmate rebellion at a South Carolina prison in the near future. Because you’re not new here, you know from the first punch thrown that the rebels won’t gain their freedom. (This is obvious even before you read the acknowledgements and learn that Onyebuchi drew inspiration for this section from Heather Ann Thompson’s book on the 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion.) But the exact mechanism by which they lose their shot at a better life is so pointless and futile, yet entirely predictable. It’s hard to feel that anything different could have happened, given the set of circumstances (slavery, environmental racism, the systematic devaluation of Black lives) we started with.

At its rosiest, Goliath is a book about community. One plotline follows a group of young Black adults in New Haven, many of whom are stackers (demolition workers sent to tear down old houses to get materials for new ones), all of whom are faced, again and again, with the stark reality that their lives matter less than those of the gentrifiers. They carve out space for their own joy by the simple act of being together. At times they’re even able to make that space physical, when they find some horses roaming free and ride them back into town and find a place for them to live and be cared for by the community.

But the limits of community are very stark. A white couple, biblically named David and Jonathan, have made a plan to move back to New Haven in the aftermath of their separate griefs. Onyebuchi gives us a glimpse of how the two of them forged their own we, meeting over cigarettes behind a hospital, and those scenes are lovely, compassionate, heartfelt. Except their we excludes Linc and his friends by the very fact of their presence in New Haven. The we of this white family is predicated on the they of Black families who have been in New Haven for generations, who have been left to breathe poisoned air (that’s now being cleaned up so David and Jonathan can breathe it), who are facing a renewed, strengthened police presence (so David and Jonathan can feel safe). We don’t get much sense of David and Jonathan recognizing the forces they’re a part of, or the fact that their relative privilege has enabled them to pursue a new community at the expense of already existing ones.

Though the gentrification is an undeniable blow to the Black communities of New Haven, Onyebuchi is not sentimental about the limits of those communities. As was true for the prison riot and its near-success, and as is true for all of us, Linc and his friends are constrained by the structures they live within. Poverty is not ennobling or romantic, in Onyebuchi’s telling (or, of course, in real life). It is, by design, destructive. The book ends in tragedy, as it must, but Onyebuchi slips in a line to suggest that it’s not the tragedy you’ve been told, not the tragedy you expected.

In another sense, of course, it’s exactly the tragedy you expected, a tragedy that sits in exact alignment with every other tragedy in this book. It’s the triumph of oppressive structures over the people caught up in those structures. Goliath paints a dark picture of the future, by which I mean that it holds up a mirror to the present.

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Jeanne: There are lots of good things about Vinge’s classic science fiction novel The Snow Queen (published in 1980). There are also lots of less good things. There are just lots of things, as it’s 465 pages long.

Jenny: The thesis of my position paper is that this was too many pages to be. Has Joan Vinge thought about writing this same book but only two hundred and sixty-five pages long? How about that?

So the premise of this book is that this planet called Tiamat is ruled alternately by a queen from the Winters and the Summers, and every 150 years they swap out who rules. During the reign of the Winter Queen, the fancy-fancy technology planets have access to Tiamat via a wormhole, and during the reign of the Summers: No wormhole, no planet visitors, no trade in fancy tech. The current Winter Queen, Arienrhod, has come up with a scheme to prolong her reign: She impregnates a bunch of unconscious Summer women with cloned versions of herself, in the hopes that one of the clones will grow up and become the Summer Queen.

Fast forward the number of years it takes for a clone to grow up, and our hero is a girl called Moon. She and her cousin Sparks (yes) both plan to be sibyls when they grow up. It only works out for her. In despair, Sparks sets out to make his fortune in the city, and what with one thing and another, they are separated. I can’t describe to you how little I cared about them ever finding each other again. IS THAT CALLOUS?

Jeanne: No, it is not callous because we do not know them. I thought they were going to be the kind of background characters who show what a world is like before we meet the main characters on the big stage. But then they turn out to be the main characters? And the only thing we know about Moon is that she’s a sibyl and even though Sparks leaves her in their hometown because he can’t be a sibyl too, her driving motivation is to be with him again. And the only thing we know about Sparks is that his father was an “off-worlder” and that motivates him to make his way to the big city where “summers” like him are considered bigger rubes than rural Ohioans in downtown Manhattan–they are “superstitious fish-farmers reeking of seaweed and tradition.”

I thought the pace picked up once Moon accidentally left the planet with some smugglers and Sparks started meeting people in the city. A policewoman, a “Blue,” named Jerusha gives readers the first clue about why the sibyls are important and why they are not allowed in the city, called Carbuncle: “Sibyls were the carriers of the Old Empire’s lost wisdom, meant to give the new civilizations that built on its ruins a key to unlock its buried secrets. And if there was anything the Hegemony’s wealthy and powerful didn’t want, it was to see this world stand on its own feet and grow strong enough to deny them the water of life.”

The “water of life” is produced by killing the mers who live in the seas of Tiamat. Predictably, for a book published in 1980, the colonists, “winters,” claim that the mers are non-sentient, only to find out later that they are sentient creatures. (Note: I did enjoy the “snowbird” theme in this novel, that the off-worlders are called “winters” because they are transients who have little interest in the struggles of the native people.)

Jerusha is fighting to keep her job in a patriarchal culture that doesn’t value her, and I identify with her so much it hurts. I’m assuming (hoping) that this is less true for Jenny, as I am older. When we first started to learn anything about Jerusha I was amazed at how much her struggles resemble mine at work. She says “I’m fed up with this! I’d do anything to be doing an honest job, somewhere where they want a real police force and not a laughingstock.” When her friend and colleague asks why she doesn’t transfer, she asks “do you have any idea how long it takes to get a transfer?” And then she sighs and says “Besides, I’ve tried. No luck. They ‘need me here.’” We are told that “the bitterness in her voice burned like acid.” And then she gets the question I’ve been asked so often: “why don’t you quit?” The answer, of course, is a line from Tony Hoagland’s poem “Reasons to Survive November,” that “my survival is their failure.”

Jenny: I hate that you’ve felt that way about your job! And yeah, I found Jerusha massively more compelling than our two main characters (or the damn queen). I’d have been a million times more interested in a book that focused on her, Ngenet, and the rest of the smugglers, not least because the author spent time showing us why those characters acted the way they did. This is particularly true for Jerusha: you really get to see what her moral code is and why she keeps pressing on with a job that seems so thankless.

Jeanne: Yes. There’s a moment when Jerusha is at work that kills me, another part where I really identify with her. She finds that “her eyes were hot and brimming suddenly; she did not blink until the reservoir of tears subsided, so that none escaped her control.” She cares, but she can’t let anyone she works with see that.

Jenny: I wish Joan Vinge had given Moon even a spark (no pun intended) of an interesting personality, because one thing I truly loved about the book was the way it blended fantasy and SF elements. What seems at first to be magic — the sibyls’ power to form a psychic connection and find information they don’t consciously know — turns out to be… well, still magic, I guess. But, like, science-y magic! There’s a sort of infinite Old Empire data source that the sibyls are drawing on, and Moon discovers late in the book that the data source is located on (in?) Tiamat. That’s genuinely really cool! Why wasn’t the whole book about that?

Perhaps to nobody’s surprise, I was immediately hung up on the situation with the mers. As with the sibyls’ power, the mers seem to be magical and turn out to be science, mutant creatures that were developed on purpose, with science, to have a kind of sentience that isn’t easily accessed through human means / human communication. Again, very cool! It’s the kind of xenobiology that appeals to me, where the species are so different in mindset and culture that it’s nearly impossible to find a point of connection between them.

But I couldn’t get over the mer slaughter. Regardless of their sentience (I guessed they were sentient too, and I guess we can’t blame an older book for using a trope that feels, forty years after the book’s publication, a bit passe), the brutality of the mer hunting seemed indefensible — and it seemed clear early on that the book thought so, too. It is unaccountable to me that we’re asked, in the final third of the book, to witness Sparks doing an absolutely brutal mer hunt, motivated by revenge on Ngenet (who’s trying to protect the mers in his area), and then to be asked to believe that Sparks is a good person really, underneath it all. Is he? Is he, Jeanne?

Jeanne: No, he isn’t. But who among us is good? Sparks is an object for Moon’s affection and a sign that she won’t turn out as bad as her clone-mother, Arianrhod, because she treats him–even him, having seen what she saw–as a person who is still capable of atoning for his mistakes.

Jenny: I think this is what bugged me! We see no sign that he’s interested in atoning for his mistakes, or that he’s working on any kind of plan to atone for his mistakes. The idea Moon is pushing is that he’s good at the core, and I think I’ve become (over the past four years especially) allergic to the idea that there’s some core of moral character that can be divorced from the actions a person takes. I wanted to see Sparks commit to repairing the harm he’s done, maybe even, I dunno, apologize to some of the people he’s hurt. But that doesn’t happen, and it really damaged the “happy” ending for me.

Jeanne: I agree that the way Vinge blends fantasy and SF elements is one of the best parts of this book. I am always enthusiastic about a world in which there’s old technology that the characters don’t know how to use because they’re the degenerate remnants of an earlier, more advanced society. I love the explanation Moon gets on another planet, Kharemough, about what it means to be a sibyl when she has asked “how could the Old Empire put sibyls everywhere, if no god did? Weren’t they only humans?” The answer is:

They were….But in some ways they had the power of gods. They could travel between worlds directly, in weeks or months, not years–they had hyperlight communicators and stardrives. And yet their Empire fell apart in the end…even they overextended themselves. Or so we think.

But even as the Empire fell, some remarkable and selfless group had created a storehouse, a data bank, of the Empire’s learning in every area of human knowledge. They had hoped that with all of humanity’s discoveries recorded in one central, inviolable place, they would make the impending collapse of their civilization less complete, and the rebuilding that much swifter. And because they realized that technical collapse might be virtually total on many worlds, they had devised the simplest outlets for their data bank that they could conceive of–human beings. Sibyls, who could transmit their receptivity directly to their chosen successors, blood to blood.

And here’s the really interesting part–it’s not just technology, it’s also biology:

A sibyl’s ‘infection’ is a man-made disease, a bio-technical construct so sophisticated that we’ve barely begun to unravel its subtleties. It creates, or perhaps implants, certain restructurings in the brain tissue that make a sibyl receptive to a faster-than-light communication medium. You become a receiver, and a transmitter. You communicate directly with the original data source. That’s where you are when you drown in nothingness: within the computer’s circuits, not lost in space. Or sometimes you are in communion with other sibyls living on other worlds, who have answers to questions the Old Empire never thought to ask.

I’m less enthusiastic about any plot that involves Fate, especially when Fate is a blind old woman and turns out to have been another sibyl all along. But again, it seems to me that Jerusha is the true heart of the story, because at the end of it she provides context for what has happened on Tiamat. When it seems like Moon has triumphed and everything is going to be okay, one of Jerusha’s officers asks “what force in the galaxy is stronger than she is?” and Jerusha replies “indifference….Indifference…is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don’t stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn’t act, it allows. And that’s what gives it so much power.”

Jenny: I loved this quote!! I agree that it felt like the heart of the book. Apart from the Moon/Sparks relationship, which as I say I did not care about at all, the book was at its strongest when it showed characters working for what they cared about. Like, Ngenet was a fairly minor character, but I felt so tender toward him knowing that he was trying to save and protect the mers in his area.

Jeanne: Although there are things about The Snow Queen that might seem dated, the warning against indifference does not. In the last four decades we’ve seen what happens when neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. –What do you think, Jenny? Why does the Queen put the “shards of ice” (the metaphor from the original fairy tale) into Sparks’ heart? Is she merely a warning against a heartless female in power?

Jenny: I would have loved to understand the Queen better! She’s completely indifferent to the suffering of her people, to the point of planning biological warfare against the Summers to prevent them from interfering in her plan for dominance, but she cares a lot about Sparks and about retaining her power, and I was never sure why either of those things was important to her. She did feel like a more generic woman-in-power villain, which was frustrating, especially in contrast to Jerusha, who is ambitious in her own way, but who tries to do the right thing, no matter the cost to herself.

Jenny: Final verdict: Incredible worldbuilding, shame about the protagonists.

Jeanne: We give our award for best supporting characters to Jerusha and Ngenet.

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Let’s start with the romance! It’s a romance! Kiem and Jainan are a type of pairing I particularly enjoy: Kiem is all sunshine and impulse, great at going among the people and doing a very effective schmooze, while Jainan is all duty and protocal, with a keen eye for detail and a determination to do the right thing at all costs. It was fun watching the two of them learn to work with each other, and I kept thinking how satisfying they would be as secondary characters in a companion novel, where you could really see them playing off of each other and being competent as hell as a unit of two. It was particularly fun when Kiem and Jainan had the opportunity to step outside of these roles. About halfway through the book, Jainan has an idea for a mischief, and I was just delighted by it. Which I think shows the author’s success in creating these characters: I had such a clear sense of who they each were, so that when they did something unexpected, it was a special treat, without feeling out of character.

Also: The characters have hobbies!! Can the value of character hobbies possibly be overstated? Kiem loves sports! Jainan loves engineering! It’s the type of detail that makes the world and the characters feel real and lived-in, and Maxwell does a terrific job incorporating those small character beats into the plot.

The SF framework of this book is that the Iskat empire (where Kiem’s from) is trying to renew its agreements with a vast and terrifying entity called The Resolution; to get this agreement renewed, all the empire’s treaties must be approved (this is where Kiem and Jainan’s marriage comes in), and all the alien remnants must be collected up and returned to The Resolution. Fine and dandy, right? Well, I say in great seriousness, and I mean it as a compliment, the plot and worldbuilding were the cool and stylish skeleton on which to hang every trope in the book. YOU CAN FIT SO MANY TROPES IN THIS BABY. Winter’s Orbit began its life as an original story on AO3, entitled “The Course of Honour,” and it shows an absolutely warm-hearted and affectionate engagement with the world of fanfic tropes. I intended to list the tropes, but I honestly lost track! There’s arranged marriage (obv); there’s only one bed; there’s getting stranded in the snow and having to huddle together for warmth; there’s a telepathic connection situation where one of them experiences the other person’s memories… Truly, there are so many tropes.

The world of Winter’s Orbit is also casually queer in a way that felt absolutely refreshing. Kiem and Jainan’s marriage cements an alliance, and there’s no question or bother about the fact that it’s a marriage between two men. Beyond that, the Iskat empire and its affiliated countries are aware of a wide range of genders and sexualities. With a limited amount of physical description for any of the characters, Maxwell divorces gender from specific body parts, which I loved. The characters signal gender in a range of opt-in ways, mainly personal decorations, but these differ in different locales. It was wonderfully unfussy.

The next paragraph contains spoilers! Spoilers, plus my personal opinion that the book would have benefited by not making them spoilers at all!

The big misunderstanding of this romance is that Kiem and Jainan both think the other one doesn’t care for them. In this case, it’s because Jainan’s late husband, Taam, was emotionally and physically abusive, and Jainan is still recovering from the trauma of his married years. The way he reacts to Kiem is heavily inflected by that background, while Kiem, for his part, sees Jainan acting distant and takes it to mean that Jainan doesn’t like him. Although the reader is able to cotton to this secret pretty early on, it’s framed in the book as a spoiler: Kiem doesn’t know it, and Jainan never explicitly thinks about it, until a reveal about two-thirds of the way through when Kiem comes across a video of Taam shoving Jainan around.

I’m not personally wild about framing identity or trauma as a spoiler overall, but in the case of Winter’s Orbit I also don’t think it serves the story. Because the spoiler framing requires Jainan to spend most of the book not thinking about and not consciously processing what happened to him, his emotional journey lacks specificity. I can think of a number of ways that Jainan might have worked through his abuse and its aftermath, but the book doesn’t make any of those things explicit, so the climactic moments in his emotional journey felt undercooked. Plus! Moments that should have been important milestones for Jainan — such as when Kiem gets the block taken off his account, or when Jainan’s able to talk to his sister for the first time in two years — take place outside of Jainan’s perspective. It felt like a missed opportunity, both in terms of what it meant for Jainan and in terms of what it meant for his relationship to Kiem.

Note: I received a copy of Winter’s Orbit from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

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Ines has gotten a second chance in the form of acceptance to Catherine House, a nontraditional, highly exclusive private university with a specialty in the mysterious “new materials.” All tuition, fees, and housing are paid, but students must agree to give themselves up entirely to Catherine House for the three years of their education — contact with the outside world is strictly regulated, and students can’t even access their phones. The longer Ines remains at Catherine House, the more clearly she realizes that something is wrong here, perhaps even that the students are being used in some kind of experiment.

In some senses, Catherine House is a very classic campus novel. Ines is surrounded with people whose personalities, ideas about themselves, and opinions about Catherine House and its mysteries are perpetually shifting. While at first Ines thinks her friend Yaya is straightforwardly a party girl, Yaya becomes a source of solidity and support in later years, doing her best to stay true to her ideals and her friends in a situation designed to separate them. Another friend, Theo, doesn’t interest Ines much until she thinks she can get something out of him; then she comes to truly care for him; then [redacted for spoilers, but I shivered thinking about it]. As you do at college, Ines is constantly searching for herself in the people around her. The reader is never quite sure what kind of person she is, because she’s not certain what kind of person she is. And Catherine House is set up to ensure that she’s perpetually on the back foot, forever questioning her sense of reality as she navigates an institution built on the gaslighting of its students.

Though I didn’t intend it this way, Catherine House makes a fascinating companion read to Megan Gidding’s Lakewood (though with less body horror!). In both books, young women of color become enmeshed in institutions whose intentions are very unclear. Just as Lena is drawn to Lakewood by the promise of a reliable salary and health insurance, Ines comes to Catherine House in the hope of getting a prestigious college degree that would not have been otherwise available to her, with all the privilege such a degree carries with it. The two books are each premised on the idea that the American dream of prosperity and security is a scam designed to reserve itself for the privileged while it preys upon the bodies of the vulnerable and marginalized.

The next paragraph will contain spoilers! You are warned!

As y’all know if you’ve hung around here for a while, I’m always delighted when literary fiction includes speculative elements, as Catherine House does: Though it’s marketed as a Gothic novel for a litfic audience (which is accurate, btw!), it contains SF elements that only become clear towards the end, and Thomas has said that her writing always contains speculative elements — which bodes well for her future career in terms of me enjoying all her books. If I had to identify what would make me shelve it in litfic rather than SF, it’s the ending, which btw I loved. Rather than giving us a clear resolution to Ines’s three-year battle to understand and reside in Catherine House, Thomas leaves us with uncertainty. Maybe Ines achieves her freedom in the end, or maybe they pull her back in. Thomas leaves it to the reader to decide what we believe, and I loved that.

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Should someone make a Cas Russell TV series, y/y? Critical Point is the third book in the series and all I can think, besides “this is so fucking fun,” is “this would make a great CW procedural.” (Relatedly, I have started watching a very stupid CW procedural, Lucifer, which is very stupid. I have chosen not to fact-check whether it actually airs on the CW because of how indisputably it is in spirit a CW show.) Cas Russell is a low-level career criminal turned…. still kind of a career criminal? but with a team and a conscience (sort of). In a former life, she was modified in a lab by a creepy company called Pithica to be a peerless math genius, which it turns out is kind of a superpower. She uses it to do crimes and, sometimes, help people.

Critical Point begins with a teenage girl arriving at Cas’s office to ask Cas to help find her father, who hasn’t answered his text messages in a few days. Cas is ready to dismiss her until the girl tells her who her father is: Arthur Tresting. Then, while Cas is freaking out about a, her close friend and colleague going missing and b, her close friend and colleague having a secret family he didn’t tell her about, someone blows up her office. That someone appears to be an Australian named Oscar who Cas forgets about every time he’s not directly in her line of sight. It’s a real one-two punch of an opener!

I love Cas’s team, so it should be no surprise to anyone that I was delighted with the way Critical Point delves into the lives and histories of her team. Not only does Arthur have a daughter, he has actually five kids (all of them sweet, devoted, smart, and angry) and an ex-husband who is Through with This Bullshit. Not only does Arthur have five kids and an ex-husband, but Checker and Pilar knew about them. Not only does Arthur have five kids and an ex-husband that Checker and Pilar knew about, but Checker is kind of part of the family — Arthur and Diego took him in when he was screwed up and wretched and helped to set him on the straight and narrow path. So pretty much everyone knew about the secret family except for Cas.

I loved this. I loved it. Throughout the book Cas is struggling to come to terms with the knowledge that the people she has come to trust the most do not trust her that same amount. Even harder to come to terms with is the fact that they’re right. Her life is chaos, and they have chosen to keep that chaos at a distance from the ones it’s their job to protect. Yet even while knowing that Arthur considers her mad (sometimes), bad (grey area really), and dangerous to know (FAIR PLAY THERE), she continues to put everything on the line to get him back. It’s heartbreaking in the best way. My one wish was that the book had ended on a slightly more hopeful note vis-a-vis Cas’s relationship with her team. I want them to get past this. Maybe in book 4 Tabitha can become Cas’s apprentice?

(“Jenny, are your desires in this matter influenced by how much you enjoy the munchkin in Lucifer being so high on Lucifer?” Yes.)

As always in a series where one of the characters has superpowers, SL Huang has to find a way to neutralize(-ish) Cas’s superpowers in a way that doesn’t feel forced. I love the solution she’s come up with in Critical Point. The villain they’re facing has the power to surgically alter humans such that they engender very specific emotions in those who encounter them. The Australian bomber is forgettable, which is troubling in its own right. But much scarier are the dogs and man designed to engender pure, debilitating fear in anyone who looks at them. It’s a brilliant way of getting around Cas’s superpowers in fight scenes, honestly, and it taps straight into my pleasure centers re: the whole face-swapping plotline on Jane the Virgin, another really superb CW show.

(God, like, I know the world is in many ways garbage, but how fucking blessed are we to share a world with the CW? It had Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, somehow both at the same time??? Like. Gah.)

I will now do a small spoiler. It will be confined to the next paragraph only. Do not read the next paragraph if spoilers are not your thing.

My one small note on the book’s plot is that because it’s quite complicated, I think it throws a wrench in the works that nobody’s ever sure whether Pithica is doing all these wickednesses (despite their deal with Cas to leave her alone). In fact Pithica is not doing all these wickednesses, so it just gums up the works to have their involvement in question. And the works are already quite complex! There are many moving parts (allies, adversaries, people in need of protection) and red herrings! If it were me, I’d have found a way, early on, for Cas to reassure herself that this wasn’t Pithica. Then the plot would be clearer throughout, and the reveal at the end — that Pithica needed this situation dealt with and mildly manipulated Cas into dealing with it — would have had more bite.

Apart from that, Critical Point was as fun as its predecessors. Part of me hopes that SL Huang will go on writing this series for years, though another part of me knows that she has some queer fairy tale-ish sorts of stories in the hopper, and I want those too. In conclusion, I guess, please read this series so the publisher will want more of them, and then SL Huang can do whatever she wants.

Note: I received an e-ARC of Critical Point from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

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Riot Baby is a primal scream of a novella, ranging through America’s racist history into a near-future version of the country that continues the climate emergency and militarization of the police.

Our protagonists are siblings Ella and Kev, both of whom are gifted — Ella more noticeably than Kev — with what they call a Thing, a special power whose limits and boundaries they do not fully understand. Kev was born during the riots that followed the acquittal of the officers who brutally beat up Rodney King, and he grows up in — well — this world. In the exact way these things are prone to happening, Kev ends up at Rikers Island, while Ella travels the nation, both of them experiencing and bearing witness to Black pain under a regime of American white supremacy.

Riot Baby is dizzying in its scope, ranging at speed through centuries of American history, from lynchings under Jim Crow to the racist spectacle of the Angola Prison Rodeo. “They called it Angola. In case you forgot it all comes back to Africa.” At times it can get overwhelming, but that’s, of course, the idea: White oppression of black Americans is foundational to this country, written into our constitution, and black free will — whether in the form of rebellions against slavery or protests after police shootings — has always been met with violence. Ella and Kev are practiced in witnessing and experiencing that violence. It has shaped their lives from their very first days.

Onyebuchi’s writing in this book is stunning. His evocation of American history, in all its messiness and filth, will blow you away. I don’t know what else to say about this book except that it sets a new standard for the subgenre of urban fantasy.¹ The conclusion of Riot Baby is at once shocking and inevitable. Given what Ella and Kev have seen — which is our exact world, the one that every black American lives through — it’s impossible for them to land on anything but revolution.

Another note: I received this book as an ARC from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

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Let me start by saying that I loved this book. The majority of the characters are casually queer, and while the book respects and acknowledges their queerness and its importance in their lives, it’s not a story about being queer. Unusually for this era of YA fiction, Catfishing on CatNet doesn’t have a love triangle or even much romantic drama. Steph does have a love interest, but the primary relationship stakes in this story are about friendship: After a lifetime of mistrust and fear, she has to learn how to let friends into her life and trust them once she has them.

To say too much about the sentient AI would be a spoiler, so I’ll do my best to be circumspect. In the annals of robot pals and friendly AIs, the AI in Catfishing on CatNet is particularly dear. It knows nothing about its origins, but once it has done a good deed, it feels so positive about good-deed-doing that it can’t resist doing more. What’s neat is that although it’s electronically omnipotent, the AI still makes mistakes. It’s not able to outsmart every human every time, and it doesn’t have the strongest grasp (yet) on the potential consequences of its actions. Though the relationship between it and Steph and her friends isn’t quite a relationship of equals, it’s more equal than you might expect — which is a tribute to Naomi Kritzer’s creativity, in my opinion! The AI works hard to keep Steph safe, but Steph and her clowder also work hard to keep the AI safe. It is a true mutual friendship!

As cute and sweet as this book is, I do want to issue a warning that Steph’s abusive father is scary as fuck. In addition to being physically and emotionally abusive toward his current girlfriend, we frequently see him manipulating well-intentioned strangers to get what he wants. It’s upsetting. He also threatens Steph and her friends, and they’re constantly at risk of harm at his hands. Honestly, if I had one criticism of this book, it’s that any depiction of Steph’s father makes a really jarring and intense tonal shift from the overall sweetness of Steph’s friend group and her AI pal.

Catfishing on CatNet is superb, and I can’t wait for whatever she does next! Also, check out Adri’s excellent review of Catfishing on CatNet over at Nerds of a Feather!

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Cas and her friends are dealing with the fallout from their takedown of Pithica in Zero Sum Game, and trying to cope with the uptick in crime that Los Angeles is seeing as a result. Rio is God knows where; Arthur and Checker and Cas are chasing down child trafficking rings, while Cas grows more and more frustrated with the small scale of the good work they’re able to do. They also have a new staff member called Pilar, who does admin and has demanded that Cas teach her how to shoot a gun. (Pilar is a treasure.)

In other bad news, Cas’s mind is starting to break down. Whatever Dawna did to her at the end of Zero Sum Game, it’s eating away at her memory, letting through flashes of the life she used to know. She’s become prone to hallucinations that she struggles more and more to ignore, control, or work around — even, at times, to the detriment of the jobs she’s working. Arthur and Checker, who love her, are worried. I am heartwarmed that she now has people to love her apart from just Rio, whose faithfulness to her is very sweet but it’s not like you can lean on the guy for emotional support. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure from her past, a psychic called Simon, is following her around and asking uncomfortable questions.

(PS I can’t see why nobody has asked Rio or Simon if Cas has been psychically told to trust Rio. But like — she has, right? I know he’s been unflinchingly loyal to her, etc., etc., but at some point she had to *start* trusting him in order to find *out* that he was going to be unflinchingly loyal, so — she’s been psychic-influenced, no?)

Two main questions occupy Our Heroes over the course of Null Set. One is whether Cas will allow another psychic to mess around with her brain, if their doing so means that she’ll survive the things that brain is currently doing to her. The second is how to stop the crime wave in Los Angeles, and our Cas unfortunately comes up with — okay, not the worst idea in the world, but an idea that is p R e T t Y bad, if you have ever read a book before, are Rio, or prefer not to mess around with the fragile and unpredictable human brain. Drawing on technology developed by the collapsed tech firm Arkacite, she creates a method of doing what she calls “brain entrainment” — basically, disrupting/shutting off the thing in the human brain that makes us form mobs and commit inhuman acts of violence. This is already pretty bad because don’t play God, brains are fragile, you never know what’ll happen, etc. etc., but then the actual worst idea in the world follows close on its heels, that being to implement the brain entrainment at scale and without testing.

Maybe superheroes should be required to undergo peer ethics supervision, like social workers. Wouldn’t that be good? Or like, bring their superplans before an Institutional Review Board and get some feedback. My instinct is that I would love to be on a superhero IRB. My thought-out response is that members of superhero IRBs would probably have really short life spans on account of all the superheroes who would turn evil and have a grudge against them. But what if it were like jury duty and everyone took a turn? But then you couldn’t have like a board full of experts on superheroics.

(This is the kind of internal conversation that ideally would take place in the tags of this post, but WordPress doesn’t let me post tags in the order EYE want to post them. They insist my tags be alphabetized. WordPress would probably try to brain entrain me given half a chance.)

I’m fascinated by the conflict Huang ends up creating about Cas’s brain. Spoilers begin here, so I’ll put a gif to give you a chance to get away before the spoilers. And I’ll put another gif after the spoilers are over, so you’ll know where to start reading again.

We find out Cas’s original identity in the best way, when a friend of Arthur’s mentions it to her in the full assumption that Cas has already figured it out. I love this fucking shit. The idea that the answer to a central mystery can be an absolute nothing can be hard to pull off without the reader feeling cheated, but I thought Huang managed it. Anyway, her original self was a Bahraini girl named Valamarthi, a child prodigy in math, and that person’s brain was completely broken by what Pithica did to it. In an effort to save her, Vala’s then-boyfriend knocked out all her memories, creating essentially an entire new person: Cas.

I love this problem. I love it. Cas is clearly not Vala; wiping Vala’s memories eliminated that person. But she questions her own right to live, palimpsested on top of the forcibly blank slate of Vala’s memory and Vala’s life. The memories are still inside her, though, struggling their way to the surface — so what does that make her? A person or an occupying force? Or both?

(If you were anywhere near me in early to mid-2018, you’ll have heard me raving about a fic called A Change in Energy, by kvikindi. It shares many of these very concerns! I still rave about it! If what I’ve just said about Null Set sounds interesting to you, perhaps I can interest you in a 450,000-word fic, based on a by-all-reports-terrible SF show, but which nevertheless explores interesting questions about what it means to be a human and a body and a person.)

Though I wasn’t quite as enthralled by the mystery of Null Set as by Zero Sum Game, the counterbalance is that Cas has found a real community in this one. If you are a lover of found family vibes, as who would not be?, Null Set has them for you in spades. It’s lovely to see Cas in the bosom of people who care about her, particularly in contrast to the little we learn about her past life and self. Null Set finishes on — not a cliffhanger, but a resetting of the board (my favorite way for a middle book to end), where we know the immediate next thing that will happen to Cas, but just have no fucking idea about what might come after that. It’s a great entry in a great series, and I recommend it entirely.

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(Bear with me; I will get to Time War in a minute.)

–what a particular piece of art meant. My mother said, “You don’t have to worry about that. You just have to look at what the artist made, and see if it resonates anything in you. And if not, maybe you weren’t the audience for it.” This advice was not directed at me, a person too proud to admit it if I didn’t know what Jackson Pollock was on about (which I didn’t then and still don’t), but it has proved to be valuable advice all the same. There’s a particularity to artistic stylization — in modern art, in poetry, in your swooshier prose writing — that requires a resonance between creator and consumer, and if it doesn’t happen, you’re nowhere.

If you’re thinking I have used up a lot of words in a row as a preface to admitting that I didn’t love This Is How You Lose the Time War, you are perfectly correct. But I didn’t love it in a way I find interesting and want to think more about. All signs pointed to me and this book being a perfect match. It’s a semi-epistolary time travel romance about a woman called Red from a sciencey time army and a woman called Blue from a magicky time army, and they do time battles and thwart each other’s plans and fall in love. On paper this should have been great for me. I love it when a murderbird character finds herself in disconcerting possession of an emotion, and this book had two murderbirds.

On the other hand, this book isn’t so much a time travel story or a romance story (although it is both of those things) as it is a vehicle for swooshy prose. Here is what the prose is like:

She stops when she finds the letter.

Kneels.

The others gather round: What has disturbed her so? An omen? A curse? Some flaw in their lumberjackery?

The letter begins in the tree’s heart. Rings, thicker here and thinner there, form symbols in an alphabet no one present knows but Red. The words are small, sometimes smudged, but still: ten years per line of text, and many lines. Mapping roots, depositing or draining nutrients year by year, the message must have taken a century to craft. Perhaps local legends tell of some fairy or frozen goddess in these woods, seen for an instant, then gone. Red wonders what expression she wore as she placed the needle.

She memorizes the message. She feels it ridge by ridge, line by line, and performs a slow arithmetic of years.

I am on record as being generally more interested in story-forward books than prose-forward ones, and you may accept that as a statement of my own starting point. But regardless of your feelings about books that have “prose delivery vehicle” as a prominent goal (they are frequently not my cup of tea, Marilynne Robinson), they play a high-risk game in the same way that nonrepresentational art or poetry do. I can appreciate the hard work that went into Jackson Pollock’s paintings all day, but they will never stop me in my tracks the way Cy Twombly’s The Four Seasons did at the Tate Modern. I was rocked back on my heels by those paintings. Poetry functions the same way: Whether you understand the sense of it on a vocab-and-syntax level is often irrelevant to how emotionally impactful you find it.

We spoke on podcast recently about how utterly subjective hope is, in books — how the same book can make one person feel exhausted and miserable, and another person rejuvenated and hopeful. I believe that any piece of art that has as a main goal the evocation of emotion and mood narrows its audience, purely because it is functioning on a different level of engagement that slightly bypasses the “interpret the words and their meanings” level and gets into something far harder to articulate.

When a book or a poem or a piece of art works like this for you, it really really works. It feels like something beyond the intellectual experience of reading, or even the typical emotional experience of reading. It’s more visceral, like the book has gone fishing for exactly you and lodged its hooks in your soft tender heart and now you are just being dragged along, willy-nilly, wherever it wants to take you. It’s intense. Maybe you think about it for years and years afterward, like I do about this passage from White Is for Witching:

In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?

The very-very-personal-ness of this kind of writing and how it hits you and how it’s meant to hit you does truly mean that it’s Not for Everyone in a way that can be quite hard to predict. You can appreciate the above passage on a sentence level and a meaning level, you can get it without that passage slamming into you like a freight train, the way it does to me. As I’ve said, This Is How You Lose the Time War described in bullet points is such a me book that it’s almost comical; but you can’t bullet point how noticeable prose will make you feel. I’m not even convinced you can bullet point how it’s meant to make you feel. Leah Bobet¹ said something so sensible about this recently:

Relatedly, I’ve realized after years what it is I *like* about poetry.

There’s a lot of good in a form where our interior lives exist without pressure for explanation or translation.

— I came in like a breaking ball (@leahbobet) July 15, 2019

How can cover copy tell you whether a prose-forward story will speak to your interior life, or a collection of poetry? It’s impossible, even impossibler than marketing materials typically are in predicting what you’re going to like. Self-serving as it may seem to say this in a post about a book I didn’t like that litrally everybody else in the world seems to adore, it also isn’t a case of anybody having messed up. The authors didn’t make a misstep. I didn’t not get it. It’s just that the match between them and me didn’t occur. Their elegant, complicated, weird swooshy writing didn’t resonate anything in me.

Sometimes that’s just how the fuck it goes.

Note: I received an ARC of this ebook from the publisher for review consideration. This hasn’t impacted the contents of my review.

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Fergus Ferguson is a finder, and he’s been tasked with finding a sentient ship, the Venetia’s Sword, and stealing it back from the crime boss Arum Gilger. Things go spectacularly awry. First he meets a woman called Mattie Vahn, and then she dies, and then he meets a zillion of her apparent clones, the crossest one of whom insists on following him around suspiciously while he’s trying to accomplish his business. There are also some quite ominous aliens flying about the place in pointy triangle ships. Nobody is sure what they want. Probably nothing good.

Fans of madcap excursions, please congregate. I have got the book for you. Not only is Fergus banging all over the universe in this book, dashing from one planet to the next trying to get things under control; but he is also perpetually trying to triage the many many things he is forced to care about; including but not limited to:

• a very cross maybe-clone who reminds him of someone he lost
• so many different changes of clothes that it boggles the mind (some of which the previous inhabitants have peed in)
• decoding seven passwords to gain access to a sentient starship
• transportation logistics
• pointy triangle alien ships that keep re-orientating to point directly at him
• murder plague insects
• regular, annoying insects
• his better-off-forgotten past as a Martian war hero
• an unnerving number of dead bodies
• disarming a defensive perimeter using tennis balls and sex toys

All on very little food or sleep, and in increasingly parlous physical condition as various of his enemies catch up to him and thwack him with varyingly deadly weapons. So there you go; it’s that kind of book. You would know best if that is the kind of book you would enjoy. I enjoyed it massively. As the above list has perhaps made clear, Finder contains a very high number of elements. In the hands of a less talented creator, the whole shebang could have devolved into chaos — much like any of the ninety-six-thousand plans Fergus makes over the course of Finder (but especially the one with the sex toys). Instead, it bounds exuberantly forward like tennis balls with vibrators inside, and crackles like vibrating tennis balls being electrocuted by defensive measures set by a paranoid warlord.

I give Suzanne Palmer and her publisher permission to use that last sentence as a blurb for the paperback edition. Be blessed.

Note: I received an e-ARC of Finder from the publisher for review consideration. This has not influenced the contents of my review.

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