Sci-fi novella. The next entry in the Vorkosigan saga, which I am slowly working my way through. The series largely follows Miles Vorkosigan, scion of a powerful house on a planet with a deeply engrained, quite feudal, very hierarchical, and intensely militarist social order that is, in all of these respects, gradually becoming looser, more …
Fantasy novella. The premise is that when enslaved people who were pregnant were thrown or jumped overboard from slave ships and subsequently died, their foetuses did not die but came into the world transformed into beings of the sea. Over the years, some of these “wajinru” survived, found each other, and built a society. In …
Sci-fi contemporary novella. Sequel to Finna, featuring low-wage precarious retail employees of the same Ikea-esque big-box chain whose stores, because of the bizarre physics of their layout, sometimes connect with parallel worlds. This one begins, according to the author in the Acknowledgments section, from that one “otherwise inoffensive coworker that still somehow manages to earn …
Novella. Noir detective story mixed with eldritch horror. The book opens with a young boy trying to hire a PI who is more than he seems to kill his (the boy’s) stepdad. A very quick read. The kind of punchy, compelling writing you would want from both of its source genres and that you would …
Wuxia fantasy. Novella. Found family. A devoted nun of the order named in the book’s title, who is (for reasons revealed later) waiting tables in a village cafe, falls in with a gang of bandits, in the context of a country quietly seething in the grip of rebellion and civil war. Really, really good. Despite …
Novella. Our world but speculative – a bit science fictional, a bit fantastical, it’s not entirely clear, but our violent oppressive world to the core. Starts on the same day as the uprising ignited by the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King, and runs to the metaphorical twenty minutes into the future. …
Fantasy novella. A world reminiscent of imperial China. A cleric from a monastic order devoted to preserving history arrives, along with their talking bird-like companion with perfect recall, at what had been the late empress’ home while she was in internal exile many years before. They encounter an old woman who, as they catalogue the …
Sci-fi. A novella by the author of *The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet* (which I loved) and its sequels, though set in a different universe. The story of a small group of 22nd century astronauts on one of the early crewed voyages beyond the solar system. They travel in suspended animation over years …