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Tag: Yoon Ha Lee

The Thirty-One Books of January

Because I am a person who derives energy and motivation from inventing goals and assigning them to myself as homework, January is a month in which I tend to be wildly energetic. Everyone else is lying in bed huddled up against the cold as they try to recover from the holiday season, while I charge around like the Energizer Bunny doing so many tasks it gives my mother a headache to hear about1 and being really, truly, genuinely annoying to my friends. But they have to deal with it because they know that the next time they want to make…

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Review: Phoenix Extravagant, Yoon Ha Lee

When Jebi signs up to take the examination for the Ministry of Art, they expect two things: a job, and for their sister Bongsunga to get really really mad at them. Which she does: The Razanei government oppresses Jebi and Bongsunga’s people, the Hwaguk, and the last thing Bongsunga wants is to see her sibling assimilating. She throws Jebi out, and the next thing they know, they’ve been forcibly recruited to paint the magical sigils that power the Razanei army’s automatons. Most particularly, Jebi has been tasked with finding out what went wrong with the dragon automaton Arazi, which went…

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Thank You, Yoon Ha Lee

2019 has been a no-good very-bad year, but the creativity and work of many brilliant people has gotten me through it. As this stupid thankless year draws to a close, I’m writing thank-you notes to some of the people who made things that brought me joy in a dark time. Dear Yoon Ha Lee, Thank you for the matchless gift of Kel Cheris and Shuos Jedao. They are the quintessential match-up of stern stoicism and absolute ferality, and I fucking live for their uneasy alliance/?friend?ship? (Would we call them friends? I cannot decide. Uneasy allies, anyway!) I often find it…

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Authors in Fandom: An Interview with Yoon Ha Lee

AO3 has won a Hugo, in light of which I felt it was time to revive my Authors in Fandom interview series, and I am very very thrilled to welcome Locus Award winner and multiple Hugo finalist Yoon Ha Lee! His book Ninefox Gambit daunted me a scootch before I read it, but I fell so intensely in love with it that I have never yet recovered. It’s about a dutiful space soldier who’s conscripted into sharing her mind with a long-dead military genius whose brain was put on ice after he inexplicably murdered his entire space battalion. Ninefox Gambit…

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Review: The Vela, Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon, and SL Huang

OOF. Tear my heart into tiny pieces, why don’t you, The Vela writing team? If you haven’t yet heard about Serial Box, my friends, you are missing a trick. They do serialized fiction — mostly SFF — with some of the most incredible writers working today. The Vela (out tomorrow!) brings together some of my truest new faves from the past few years: Yoon Ha Lee, who wrote Ninefox Gambit; Becky Chambers, who wrote The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet; Rivers Solomon, who wrote An Unkindness of Ghosts; and SL Huang, who wrote Zero Sum Game. Of course,…

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Review: Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee

The third Nicefox Gambit book is out — the series is actually called Machineries of Empire, but I like Nicefox Gambit too much to resist using it. So before I get into this book, Revenant Gun, here’s a quick, spoilery recap of the story in Nicefox and Raven Stratagem. A rebellious foot soldier has the ghost of a dead traitor general installed in her head. The hexarchate — the ruling powers — intend for the general, Jedao, and the soldier, Cheris, to win a particularly challenging battle for them — they’ve used Jedao’s ghost in the past this way, to…

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2017 Reading in Review

Well, 2017 was awful. And Trump’s still going to be president in 2018, so my hopes for the upcoming year are not that high. On the other hand, I’ve reached a sort of equilibrium with the family members who dumped me, so I won’t have to relitigate that whole mess in the upcoming year (said Jenny optimistically). And I’ve seen so much bravery and ferocity from people I know: Y’all stay inspiring me. With that said, I had a pretty terrific reading year in 2017. I encountered some new instant favorites, books I loved so much I shoved them at…

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Review: Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee

WHAT. A GREAT. BOOK. WHAT A GREAT BOOK. I confess that I delayed reading Ninefox Gambit, recent well-deserved winner of the Locus Award for First Novel, given that all the reviews I read of it said that it was SF as hell and explained absolutely nothing. And look: That was correct information. Several people explained to me in advance the whole deal with calendrical rot and what it all meant, and even so, I was at sea for the first AT LEAST forty pages, like to the point that I did not feel confident I had grasped the meaning of…

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