Chih, a cleric from the Singing Hills abbey, has come with their ?familiar? to Thriving Fortune, where they meet an elderly woman with stories to tell about the Empress of Salt and Fortune, who once lived in exile in Thriving Fortune. The elderly woman, Rabbit, offers Chih and their hoopoe, Almost Brilliant, a place to stay. As Chih looks through Rabbit’s home and finds relics of her past, Rabbit tells stories of her life as a servant to the Empress, in the years of the Empress’s exile.

This book slaps. One of the challenges of the novella length is to create a story that feels satisfying; another is to get the reader in on characters when we don’t have much time to spend learning what they’re about. Empress of Salt and Fortune delivers so resoundingly on both fronts. At first, when Rabbit is telling stories to Chih, you aren’t sure what the thrust of them is going to be — Chih says that they’re starting to understand long before you, the reader, start to understand. So it’s immensely satisfying to find that the throwaway details in Rabbit’s stories, the things you thought were there for scene-setting or local color, are absolutely central to what happened to Rabbit and her Empress.

She was a servant in the Empress’s household, not a person of importance, and the Empress herself was important only insofar as her marriage cemented an alliance. Once she had done her duty by bearing a son, there was no further need for her. When you reach this point in the book, you think you understand: Rabbit is telling history from the sidelines, as a marginal commoner in the household of marginal royalty. But the real project of the book is to tell the story of how marginalized people fought their way to the center. The Empress makes use of the tools that come to hand, and mostly those are people who are overlooked, ignored, and discounted.

One drunken evening, many years on, In-yo would say that the war was won by silenced and nameless women, and it would be hard to argue with her.

If you’re a fan of KJ Parker but wish his books weren’t so heartless, Empress of Salt and Fortune is your guy. It’s a novella that packs an emotional wallop, a story of political machinations that centers on servants and salt and games of chance, and easily one of my favorite books of 2020.

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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My favorite thing about Finna is that Nino Cipri could have easily let the jokey premise be the book. It’s pretend-IKEA! There are wormholes! That’s an excellent premise, and I’d have been there for it. Cipri sends Ava and Jules through a fun, imaginative series of worlds, though I’d argue that the worldbuilding for the regular-world side of things is even stronger. When the wormhole opens up, the manager at Ava and Jules’s branch of Not!IKEA — it’s called LitenVärld — puts on a training video about wormholes, and everybody goofs on it and hopes they won’t have to be the one to do anything about it.

“Are we getting overtime for this?” someone else asked.

Ava glanced up long enough to see Tricia shake her head. “Not unless you remain in the other worlds past eighty hours in a single pay period. But! I do have a couple of Pasta and Friends gift cards for the brave volunteers.”

I loled at this bit. Cipri perfectly captures the combination of annoyance and resignation that goes along with working a job like this. You know it sucks. Not having it would suck more. You’re willing to work the fucking job, that part’s whatever; but you’re constantly teetering right on the brink of willingness to go along with management that insists on pretending a fair transaction of work for wages is taking place and everything’s fun and fine. I loved that nobody’s unduly surprised about the sudden existence of wormholes at their shitty retail job. Ava and Jules and all the other employees are just like, yeah, well, this fuckin figures.

All to reiterate: I’d have been here for this book if it had just been its premise! But Cipri uses the short space of a novella beautifully to develop their characters. You’re in on the premise because it’s funny, but you’re in on the characters because they’re sad. Ava’s truly grieving the loss of her relationship, and the things that challenged her and Jules as a couple come back to challenge them again as a wormhole retrieval team. Cipri does a beautiful job of getting the reader in on Ava and Jules as a team without exactly suggesting that they would work as a couple. Neither is it suggested that they can or should work as a couple; Cipri’s thesis about them is that they could be something, given enough time to figure it out. It’s a lovely, hopeful way of thinking about relationships. Ava and Jules’s negotiation of who they are, who they’ve been to each other, and who they might be to each other in the future provides a marvelous emotional underpinning to this extremely fun, queer SF adventure.

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

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The subtitle for every KJ Parker novel, including this Tor novella The Last Witness might be, The Death of All Hope. Be warned of this before you go in. A lot of things will happen, you will experience feelings of suspense, and at the end, nobody you care about will get anything they want. Or if they do, they will find it is a cold and hollow victory.

What’s forgotten might as well never have existed. Think of that. If there are no witnesses, did it really ever happen?

You know, of course. Even after the last witness has died, you still remember what you did.

That’s why you need me.

If you cannot abide uncertainty in your reading, The Last Witness may not be your book. The plot is told in a nonlinear way, for one thing, leaping about from one era of the narrator’s life to the other with only a line break ornament for a warning. For another thing, the protagonist is wildly unreliable, in all the best ways. He leaves things out, sometimes. He is trying to mislead, sometimes. The memories he relates do not always belong to him. The memories he relates do not always include relevant details.

Per usual with KJ Parker, the story throws a lot of balls in the air, and keeps introducing new ones into the act. Halfway through, I was sure there were too many elements in play for the book to resolve them all in a satisfying way. But then, of course, KJ Parker pulled them all together in an inimitably KJ Parker kind of way, where some things that had seemed trivial became all-important, and some things that had seemed inescapable became utterly trivial.

(In other news, I am loving this new line of Tor novellas! Thanks, Tor! You’re doing great work! I shall read Sorcerer of the Wildeeps next!)

Some other reviews: Strange Horizons, Bookworm Blues, SF Bluestocking, The BiblioSanctum, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviews

And a question for you! Whenever I read KJ Parker, I am reminded of how much I love reading about the ins and outs of political machinations (Megan Whalen Turner is also very strong on this). Do you have any book recommendations along those lines, that really get into the (fictional or nonfictional) political trenches?

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