1character: 1 Character, 1 Sentence, 50 Themes

Look at me, reading things in a timely fashion!

Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher was a very compelling, immersive read that I...don't know how I feel about? I enjoyed it a lot as I was reading it and I have all the respect in the world for the consciously and intentionally batshit choices Kingfisher made within it, but, well, it was batshit. Not my preferred kind of batshit, either, and not a kind that the first half of the novel led me to expect. I was there just vibing so hard with the stark desert atmosphere and building sense of supernatural horror, when suddenly, we learnt that the malevolent force of evil pursuing the heroine was ( SPOILERS ) and that the mysterious Catholic priest helping her was ( MORE SPOILERS ). I had been hoping for something very different, something more anchored in fear and dread and the oppressive vastness of the desert, and it all felt like a bit of a letdown.

On the other hand, I did really like the badass elderly lady character who took up as the heroine's snarky magical guardian (I have now read two T. Kingfisher novels, and both of them prominently featured a badass elderly lady character who took up as the heroine's magical guardian; is this a theme with her or a weird Two Nickels situation?) and I'm always going to cheer for any author who says "fuck it" to marketability and just follows their bliss. Get it, T. Kingfisher! ( SPOILER ) that ( SPOILER )!

Slow Gods by Claire North was...how do I put this? A worthwhile slog. I'm very glad I read it and would heartily recommend it to other space opera fans. But it took a full 50% of the book before I started enjoying it enough to want to sit down and read more than a few chapters at a time, and even then, it never reached the propulsive levels I always hope for in a work of this type. It's fundamentally a story of ideas, not of characters; of large-scale ethical conversations, not ordinary human emotions. I was never once tempted to DNF but it also lacked any element that would have helped me personally invest in the narrative.

Mawukana na-Vdnaze is born on one of the lower social rungs of a hypercapitalist dystopian society, in a setting where human civilisation has expanded throughout the galaxy but faster-than-light travel is too dangerous to be attempted without very good reason. Exceeding the speed of light requires entering arcspace, a dimension of darkness that sometimes swallows whole ships and invariably, within a few flights, destroys the mind of every pilot who navigates through it. Maw is conscripted as a pilot and dies on his first flight, along with everyone else on board. But he is brought back, an "imperfect copy of himself", a mostly human body in which the unknowable consciousness embodied in arcspace can dwell to sate its curiosity about the world. He doesn't age, can't be killed in a way that lasts, and - most crucially for the plot - can pilot through arcspace as often as he likes, sustaining no psychological damage and never losing any passengers or cargo to the dark. Thus he becomes a valuable chess piece for more sophisticated players to move around the board of a massive interplanetary cold war aggravated by equally massive environmental catastrophe.

Good sci-fi is always about something real, and this book is about so many things. It's about the climate crisis and the evils of unchecked capitalism, about western imperialism and the war in Ukraine, about gender and neurodiversity and seemingly every possible issue of personal identity. It balances these themes well, but that is still a LOT of themes, and without much in the way of a more concrete anchor. I think the main point of disconnect for me is that I didn't care even a tiny bit about the book's central relationship. I liked Maw a lot as a protagonist but didn't like his love interest and was unconvinced by their short yet supposedly life-changing fling, and without that buy-in, Maw's whole character arc just fell a tiny bit flat. I feel like I'm going to be picking pieces of the book's worldbuilding and philosophical ideas from between my teeth for ages, but on an emotional level it has already passed through me like water and left little behind. Very strange experience. But since I've ended up giving more space to critiques than praise - always easy to do - let me just say again that I'm very impressed with this book, think that overall it succeeds in its large scope, and am really glad I took the time to read it. Also, the tinges of cosmic horror are wonderfully creepy.