Matthew's Journal

This is the last entry on the Hugo Award shortlist for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. I'm not sure it's really practicable to compare a 9-episode series with a single feature film, but there we are.

I like the concept behind Severance, but found the tonal shifts a bit jarring; and the series ends on a cliffhanger rather than a satisfactory resolution, all of which left me rather underwhelmed.

The premise is that technology has been developed that lets an employer "sever" the work and not-work memories of employees - at work the "innie" has no knowledge of what happens outside the office, and the "outie" likewise has no memory of what they do at work. Which, of course, leads to rumours about the sort of top-secret things that "severed" employees might be doing that must be kept secret. ( Spoilers )

A rather depressing set, this.

1. Rabbit Test, by Samantha Mills. An angry story, which feels very contemporary in its politics.
   
2. Zhurong on Mars, Regina Kanyu Wang. Based on a Chinese folk tale, but set on Mars; I'm not sure why "they" wouldn't have worked for Zhurong.
   
3. D.I.Y., John Wiswell. A rather bleak future, where IP is more important than drinking water.
   
4. Resurrection, Ren Qing, translated by Blake Stone-Banks. Another bleak story; a soldier is brought back to life, but to what end?
   
5. The White Cliff, by Lu Ban. Interesting reflections on palliative care, spoiled by a very bad translation.
   
6. On the Razor’s Edge, by Jiang Bo. A hazardous space mission, again let down by the translation.
   

My voting order for these:

1. We Built This City, Marie Vibbert. The value of important but menial work; join a union!
   
2. If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You, John Chu. A cute story, addressing some serious issues (race & racialised policing; coming out; the media).
   
3. A Dream of Electric Mothers, Wole Talabi. What would well-meaning advice be like if it came from all your ancestors?
   
4. The Difference Between Love and Time, Catherynne M. Valente. A lovely story, some witty moments, but I wasn't quite convinced.
   
5. Murder By Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness, S.L. Huang. A fair enough take on the ethics of "AI" systems, but I don't think the fictional parts added much to this.

I won't rank The Space-Time Painter, by Hai Ya, because it's not available in any language I understand.

I really enjoyed A Spindle Splintered (I ranked it first for the Novella Hugo last year), and hadn't realised this was a sequel to it until I started reading. So that was a nice surprise :)

Again, this is a feminist multi-verse based re-examination of a fairy tale, that also asks about who is and isn't the protagonist in the stories they find themselves in. It's also a reminder that being the friend of a hero sucks!

I don't know how many books like this Harrow can write whilst still keeping them fresh and interesting, but I thought this one works really well.

This is a detective story with occult elements, at least noir-adjacent. A magical detective discovers that a murder case is more sinister than it first appears, and that powerful occult players are at work. Plus it's 1940s Chicago, so they have to keep aspects of their private life hidden.

This is a pacy story with some well-drawn characters, and a nicely twisty plot. The ending works nicely unless you stop and think about it too much. ( major spoilers )

This is a story told in the second person - you are Torquell, a young man who is six foot tall. That's tall for a human, but much smaller than an ogre. And ogres are the Masters for whom humans must toil, as that is the natural order of things.

This is an excellent story, which deals with class, power, race, and the hero's journey. If it's bleak at times, there's plenty of humour, and the plot is carefully constructed and compelling. While I often complain that writers don't quite manage to stick the landing, I felt the ending here is very well done. Highly recommended.

I enjoyed this story, which is in turn about stories and how the stories you hear about a person are only ever partial, and how appearances (in person or in stories) can deceive. I read another Novella in this world a couple of years ago (but had forgotten that Chih and Almost Brilliant were featured there too); the fantastical elements this time have very little impact on the plot itself.

This is inspired by Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (WP describes it as a retelling thereof, which I think is not really fair), and it's a nicely constructed horror story with a suitably creepy atmosphere. There's a certain amount of body horror here, so if that's not your thing maybe give this a miss.

But I thought this was a good reworking of Poe's ideas, and the narrator is nicely drawn and pretty competent (avoiding some of the horror tropes of "no-one but an absolute idiot would be doing this, WTF you fool" that can be annoying). Recommended (providing you like horror stories!).

This is the 2022 book in the Wayward Children series; Cora (who has appeared in a couple of previous books) decides to leave Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children in favour of a different school that promises to rid children of traces of the other worlds they've travelled to.

This series has always leaned into the Rules that govern fairy stories, and often the cruelty and collateral damage that results; similarly the way that adults and children can be cruel to other children. I think McGuire really leans into that in this book - both in how Cora is treated for being fat, and in how the various educational institutions deal with that. The Whitehorn Institute is likewise used as a critique of boarding schools and how they manage behaviour.

If you like this series, then this is a reasonable addition; if you've not enjoyed previous ones then this won't change your mind.

This is the first Scalzi I've read. On this showing, I'm not inclined to read another (which is a surprise, because I know he's very popular). It feels like it ought to be a great premise for a book - a secret organisation, an alternate reality close to ours, giant monsters. But there's an awful lot of nothing much of note happening, the characters are all broadly the same wise-cracking smartarse, the plot developments such as they were were telegraphed a mile off (even I saw them nearly all coming), and I managed to come away with no real idea of what anything looked like. And this wasn't a Lovecraftian horrors that defy sanity and coherent description sort of thing, either: our narrator doesn't think it's interesting to note much other than that they're very big and very loud (and similarly doesn't bother describing anything else).

It's still quite fun - the villain is odiously hateable, there are a lot of one-liners since basically all the characters are that sort of person, and it's a great premise. There's just not enough material here to go with that premise.