(August 25, 2023)
It’s been a while since it visited the library, so I’ve been rereading several novels. (I have added many more books to my library queue and requested several, so I’ll soon be back to new books.)
World War Z by Max Brooks was a fast reread; the various little tales are all quick, and when you start to encounter characters again in the second half of the book, there’s a warm burst of familiarity. A minor flaw is that the lack of continuous storyline meant that it didn’t embed in my mind, preventing it from being as useful when trying to sleep.
Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman was a fascinating flash back to the world of 25 years ago, where a story centered on an asexual aromantic lead character was played up as genuinely alien to standard galactic society. Tedla, blands, and the whole society of Gammadis are a fascinating look at where desires for service and gender interact – and don’t.
The Dispatcher by John Scalzi is a fun thought experiment, looking at a world where most murder victims pop back to life immediately after dying. It’s fleshed out to tackle some quick exploits – like integrating Dispatchers, basically licensed assassins, into high risk surgeries, or the adaptation of society to mercy killings basically as a “do over” for nasty accidents, etc. It feels like a long short story – one big concept well explored, rather than the complex storylines of most novels.
Vatta’s War is a five book series by Elizabeth Moon. We follow a few POV characters, but the anchor is Ky Vatta. The series kicks off with Trading in Danger, where Ky begins the story by getting kicked out of the academy for “helping” in a way that backfires with terrible publicity. She’s a great character, who is put through a lot of misery but comes through it surprisingly well. There are a number of parallels to Moon’s Deed of Paksenarrion books, but Ky manages to stand apart – in part because the universe is facing a different threat than Pak’s tale.