AUDITION, Kiwi social SFF-lite that sets a tendentious trap of prose

AUDITION
PIP ADAM
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

SHORTLISTED for the 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A genre-defying novel—part science fiction, part social realism—from one of the most powerful voices in New Zealand literature today.

A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.

Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves—experiences of imprisonment, violence and misrecognition, of disempowerment and underprivilege.

Pip Adam’s uncategorisable new novel, part science fiction, part social realism, asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room—about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Like Stand on Zanzibar a half-century ago, this story is making a point along multiple fronts of effort. Stylisically it's resolutely avant-garde, modernist, and uses that tradition of liberation from centuries old linear narrative convention to oppose itself as completely as possible. Oppose from what? That verb needs a subject!

It takes the opportunity to set oppositional positions to, well, modernity; the way the modern world steadily relentlessly inexorably shrinks the essential liberty, autonomy, self-determination of Humanity. This is a powerful theme to pursue. It leads into some dark meditations on confinement.

It is most evidently a story in support of the anticarceral abolitionism gaining ground among progressives. More quietly it enables, encourages, examination of the ways individuals accept labels and thus limitations, even when the labels aren't very good fits. It's not foregrounded the way opposition to the carceral state is. It's there for you to consider.

I enjoy novels that expect me to bring my own ideas and knowledge to bear on reading them. I enjoy being asked to hold a thought more than a page or two before the thought pays off, hooks into another thought to make a distinctive picture. It is a pleasure to be exercised and entertained and experience elucidation of a viewpoint while immersing oneself in lovely phrasemaking.

Alba searches around her body and there is not an ounce of homesickness. She misses nothing. She was born into the world and it was not happy to see her. This isn’t her home. She doesn’t want to take advantage or be any more of a burden than she already is here. They hadn’t asked her to come, she hadn’t asked to be there. It isn’t a welcome—it’s an extremely advanced form of attack and defence.

I think that, in its compactness and its rhythm, carries more than surface meaning. Alba's is a point of view I think many could and should attend to. Her sense of...wrongness...is it all external? Is it self-recognition without self-acceptance? Is Alba...are Drew and Stanley as well...forced to keep talking as the means of propelling their starbound prison moving away from Earth in order to get their pasts out of their heads? What does the taking up of physical space have to do with the implied relationship to psychic...emotional...space? All the way into eternal exile and utter Othering in order to get permission to be ecstatically oneself. A price paid without any kind or sort of reward is rare, if one becomes an other self in response to it. A different self, an intentional self, a truthful self.

The ending of this story offers that future of selfness to the giants. It's not found the way a lot of readers will be comfortable with. But if you can read about people told they are too much for this world being thrust out of that world by being squashed into sealed containers and hurled into lethal vacuum, you really should look at why this particular ending bothers you (if it does..I found it the most liberating part of the story).

Pip Adam is a writer who reckons with ideas in her fiction. It's not always clear to me that I'm on the same train of thought as she is. That is, for me as a reader, very interesting and gives a dynamism to the words I'm reading. I experience the need to consider, "did I read that sentence and change my view of the story I thought I was reading by Pip Adam's design or my own?" very involving.

It's a story I felt repaid my attention with well-honed ideas I'd had in duller forms before that. I'd wished, during the read, for...ornamentation...flourishes...a bit of zhuzhery. I can't say the directness of prose was unpleasant or uninvolving, so I can't call it a flaw. I can say that me, reader me, the id that devours Story, wanted it; so I can't offer a perfect five but I can't take much away from that height. It's a cruel place to land:

It’s a strange feeling to know that they will never have to explain this to any of their kind. They will never return. They had been sent to die. That’s clear now. Maybe they had been sent to take over this world, as some kind of front guard or maybe no one that sent them could imagine this. But they are lost to their own world now. They don’t belong where they have have come from and they don’t belong here. They are the only ones of their kind who will make it.

Pip Adam made it.

SIDDHARTH KARA'S PAGE: THE ZORG: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery; & COBALT RED: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

COBALT RED: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
SIDDHARTH KARA
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The revelatory New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award.

An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation―and the moral implications that affect us all.

Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt.

Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo―because we are all implicated.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Remember King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa? More than a quarter-century later, that story of exploitation and abuse of human beings from the vilest era of European colonialism had no effect on the world. Handwringing and smug self-assurance that we would never, it can't happen again, are herewith disproved. We did; it did.

And not many of "us" care, or act like we care, or say or do anything to indicate to our corporate masters that we disapprove. After reading this book, maybe a few will take some time to hunt up contact details for their pad/laptop/cellphone manufacturer and let them know...

...

...well, it's pretty much useless to finish that sentence. Siddharth Kara writes his fingers to the bone, he goes hot miserable places, and he comes and tells us the impassioned truth about how our "clean" energy devices depend on the slave labor of millions...so does every plateful of food you eat...and we go full Joker mode...

...and move on.

After reading Author Kara's interviewee who interrupts him to finish the sentence, "...you work in horrible conditions..." with

"No, we work in our graves."

And you and I sit here and stare at our cobalt-powered screens.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE ZORG: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
SIDDHARTH KARA
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

FINALIST for the 2026 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction! Winner announced 31 March 2026.

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

The Publisher Says: From Pulitzer finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Cobalt Red: A notorious slave ship incident that led to the abolition of slavery in the UK and sparked the US abolitionist movement

In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning “care”) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique.

After reaching Africa, the Zorg was captured by a privateer and came under British command. With a new captain and crew, the ship was crammed with 442 slaves and departed in 1781 for Jamaica. But a series of unpredictable weather events and mistakes in navigation left the ship drastically off course and running out of water. So a proposition was put forth: Save the crew and the most valuable of the slaves—by throwing dozens of people, starting with women and children, overboard.

What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history—sparking the abolitionist movement in both England and the young United States.

Siddharth Kara utilizes primary-source research, gripping storytelling, and painstaking investigation to uncover the Zorg’s journey, the lives and fates of the slaves on board, and the mysterious identity of the abolitionist who finally revealed the truth of what happened on the ship.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Whistleblowers are reviled by the greedy capitalists because they interfere with the satiation of the actually evil levels of greed that propel acts like these in the book.

There is a reason y'all's religions, one and all, condemn greed. Not that it ever has the tiniest effect on most "religious" people's behavior, nor the behavior of those who claim they work for the common good, nor really any other human being I've ever known. Yes, before some annoying twidgee says it, I include myself.

Like Cobalt Red (q.v.), Author Kara knows exactly what will give you nightmares, and deploys that thing in search of your conscience. It's history, not current events, I hear you echoing my bleat of self-justification. Back to Cobalt Red you should go.

The relief from guilt is the sheer outrageousness of the court case fought over this murderous event. It's something that I definitely see making a huge splash in the press of the day. It would be a Frontline documentary today. In any event, it is historical record, so there is no escaping the ugly truth:
We have known the facts of slavery for generations and done the bare minimum to end it, more to ameliorate our feelings of greed and guilt than because we see the enslaved as real people.

Sleep tight.

NOT YOUR RESCUE PROJECT: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice, a book to confront good but blind people with Reality

NOT YOUR RESCUE PROJECT: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice
CHANELLE GALLANT & ELENE LAM (foreword Harsha Walia; afterword Robyn Maynard)
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A landmark abolitionist primer on migration, sex work, policing, and the “anti-trafficking industry”—and a powerful argument about who is really leading the way toward justice: migrant sex workers themselves.

In this impassioned corrective to decades of misguided, carceral approaches to migration, sex work, and human trafficking, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing across North America and Europe. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to both human trafficking and the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy. Gallant and Lam illustrate how this movement is taking aim at the root causes of violence and abuse: the white supremacist securitization of borders, the criminalization of both migration and sex work, the patriarchial devaluation of women’s labor, and forced displacement due to climate disaster, war, and poverty—all fueled by racial capitalism.

An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration, sex work, and trafficking—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing. Throughout, Gallant and Lam place migrant sex workers at the center of struggles against border imperialism, carceral states, and capitalism—dispelling a range of poisonous myths and paving the way for deeper alliances across movements with the shared goal of dismantling and abolishing carceralism in all its forms.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Impassioned" is code for "making assertions of your self-evident correctness while bashing their benighted foolishness." This book is impassioned.

I agree with it.

White saviors never save anyone or anything but their own sense of superiority. See the multitudes of debunked "charities" and crowdfunding scams and the like over the decades. Capitalism needs scary monsters, or else how will it convince you to keep paying huge money to them so they'll keep you "safe." High-control systems need enemies to keep you afraid of what will happen if you dare not to believe them. The intersection of those things is usually called "fascism."

The voices of those opposed to the fascistic, moralistic response to the "problem" of women immigrating to the US are worth attending to. These voices belong to people with an established base in the migrant communities most affected by this spurious "moral panic." They do not deny that the trafficking of females of all ages for sexual abuse exists, only that this is the real focus of most of those claiming to want to combat it.

The authors are people who have spent decades on the ground, investing time and energy into *real* moral crusades in aid of the actual people impacted by the actual criminals. That group includes some...many...of those loudest in calling for carceral solutions to the "problem" of immigration.

I found their message much in line with my sense of how the situation really is. I don't necessarily think the hectoring tone of the read will make converts. Nor will the outrage in their words (honest and well-founded in their real-world experiences it may be and is) do more for those not sure what the fuss is about than a blander tone might have.

I think those who genuinely believe in personal autonomy and actual liberty will accept their strongly worded and rooted-in-experience message with slightly revolted by the facts surprise. I hope some few of y'all will be moved to action in your own communities by the read.

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS, first novel is an out-of-the-park home run

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS
NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH
Pantheon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.95* of five

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL!

FINALIST FOR THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD!

The Publisher Says: Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America's own.

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, or C.A.P.E., doesn't feel satirical. It feels nauseatingly predictive. This first novel, by the author of the excellent story collection Friday Black (my all-but five star review at the link), is a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in presented in less than a week's time.

The horrors of imprisonment aren't new. Neither is it news that African-Americans are disproportionately affected by those horrors. The horrible prevalence of carceral solutions to minor infractions started their rise with the ludicrous "War on Drugs" that was utterly ineffective at its stated goal, but gigantically successful at creating inmates for an increasingly corporatized and profit-driven prison system.

This novel's a shout of outrage, a howl of fury and grief, a klaxon of warning about this facet of the dehumanizing and victimizing of people of color by the racist system of "justice" in place in the US. It's equally effective as an anti-capitalist bellow of rage at the unchecked quest for profit above all other goals that is doing so much to actively destroy the planet's biosphere...that we all live in...with its greed.

We start our visit to a barely-fictionalized present-day US with a violent scene of battle brought to us by the CAPE (Criminal Action Penal Entertainment) program. Take a moment, please, to view this acronym. Look at the cultural tie-backs; the superhero comic-book culture polluting my screens for a decade now gets a brickbat right away, as does the Orwellian alphabet soup so prevalent in modern governmental bowls of gruel served to the needy (SNAP, WIC, AFDC and the like). This is Author Adjei-Brenyah's most well-honed talent: In Friday Black, he invented the slang term "shoelookers" for socially awkward teens unable or unwilling to meet their peers' or anyone else's gaze. This is a writer with an excellent ear serving a flensing-knife of an eye. Nothing in this read has any less sharp a perception or a usage case behind it. That is probably the most discomfiting thing about the novel: As I admired his wordsmithery, I realize the point of the red-hot blade he was forging was aimed squarely at me. Old white man, privileged and pampered by a system designed to coddle and comfort me. Well. That's me told.

So it is...and most of y'all, too. You won't necessarily like this part of your reading experience, if my own is any guide; I don't think it should, in your minds, present an excuse for you not to make the effort to read it. If the world has justice in its sharing-out of cultural kudos, this novel will win the National Book Award for Fiction in a few days' time. The reason I want it to is that it shouts the quiet part out loud in a cultural landscape of politely, passively sleepwalking into a new authoritarian era of unspeakable, horrifying intentions. The people trying to gain control of the world aren't troubling to hide their intentions, either, except to say blandly homogenized inoffensive acronymic things...or exactly what Author Adjei-Brenyah is warning us about so very effectively in Chain-Gang All-Stars.

If I'm honest, that is also a problem with the read. It is a warning. A story that, while I believe in its worldbuilding, is still meant to tell me something uncomfortable about my world. Historically, awards aren't always willing to put their celebratory wreaths on creative projects that poke people hard in their painful spots. I very much don't want that to be the case for Chain-Gang All-Stars, but it could easily lose the public lauding that the National Book Award for Fiction represents just based on what juries often refer to as "controversial ideas." I want all y'all to go get the book and engage with it on the intellectual level; the carrot to that perceived stick is a story that could easily be a superb action flick, unremittingly violent and all with genuinely elevated stakes...no one could ever fight for their literal life and have it be mellow. Reading the story on that level is exciting, as it is when you read the Reacher books that fly off the shelves. That's not my reading sweet spot. I look at it, frankly, as the cheese wrapped around the pill that you need to get down the dog's throat.

If I'm committed to that metaphor, I will say it's a bit like using Roquefort for the purpose. Rich, creamy, power-packed flavorsome stuff. Rare and expensive (in lost illusions). Hard to find the real, genuinely, ethically sourced stuff.

Here it is.

TransAtlantic, Colum McCann's polyphonic piece of Irish Abolitionism meets Aeronautical Achievement meets the End of the Troubles

TRANSATLANTIC
COLUM MCCANN
Random House
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.85* of five

The Publisher Says: National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann delivers his most ambitious and beautiful novel yet, tying together a series of narratives that span 150 years and two continents in an outstanding act of literary bravura.

In 1845 a black American slave lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine unfurling at his feet. In 1919, two brave young airmen emerge from the carnage of World War One to pilot the very first transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. And in 1998 an American senator criss-crosses the ocean in search of a lasting Irish peace. Bearing witness to these history-making moments of Frederick Douglass, John Alcock and "Teddy" Brown, and George Mitchell, and braiding the story together into one epic tale, are four generations of women from a matriarchal clan, beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan. In this story of dark and light, men and women, history and past, fiction and fact, National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann delivers a tour de force that is his most spectacular achievement to date.

My Review: This is an ambitious book indeed. McCann refines storytelling techniques he used in Let the Great World Spin, and layers in more complexity than he created in that National Book Award-winner. For that reason alone, I'd give him high marks.

But as a work of social commentary on Ireland, on its colonial past and its enraged present, the book comes alive. Without ever leaving his focus on the personal lives of people, he limns the results of the struggle of his homeland to be its ownself. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, is in Ireland to raise money for Abolition in the USA. Isn't that a nice cause for turn-about, with the IRA raising money in the USA for its militancy?

Webb took him out onto the verandah by the elbow and said: But Frederick, you cannot bite the hand that feeds.

The stars collandered the Wexford night. He knew Webb was right. There would always be an alignment. There were so many sides to every horizon. He could only choose one. No single mind could hold it all at once. Truth, justice, reality, contradiction. Misunderstandings could arise. He had one cause only. He must cleave to it.

He paced the verandah. A cold wind whipped off the water.

The water, the recurring use of the water, the wind off the water, being in the water, all of it the Atlantic, all of it marking transformation and immersion in the moment of transformation for each character...that's lovely.

The toughness and surivorhood of Ireland's women is a major part of the story. So is the deep-seated need of the Irish to Be Irish.

She stood at the window. It was her one hundred twenty-eighth day of watching men die. They came down the road in wagons pulled by horses. She had never seen such a bath of killing before. The wheels screeched. The line of wagons stretched down the path, into the trees. The trees themselves stretched off into the war.

She came down the stairs, through the open doors, into the wide heat...The men had exhausted their shouts. They were left with small whimperings, tiny gasps of pain...One soldier wore sergeant's stripes on his sleeve, and a gold harp stitched on his lapel. An Irishman. She had tended to so many of them.

So is the quixotic character of men, pushing boundaries that separate them (in their minds) from Glory. (The transAtlantic flight of the title...so very male in its pointless bravado, and in its gauntlet-flinging results of commonplace transAtlantic air travel.)

It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become a myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones.

That's plain old-fashioned beautiful phrase-making.

But in the end, the story large and small is about the strength of women to carry on. The struggles of men against the futility of their existence, a mere accident of evolution's need to stir the pot to keep the soup of life boiling merrily instead of burning irretrievably, are as ever and as always propped up, supported, allowed to exist, by women, evolution's one essential ingredient, carriers of whatever life the planet holds and makers of whatever future the men leave alone in their ceaseless tinkering.

The tap of his cane on the floor. The clank of the water pipes. She is wary of making too much of a fuss. Doesn't want to embarrass him, but he's certainly slowing up these weathers. What she dreads is a thump on the floor, or a falling against the banisters, or worse still a tumble down the stairs. She climbs the stairs before {he} emerges from the bathroom. A quick wrench of worry when there is no sound, but he emerges with a slightly bewildered look on his face. He has left a little shaving foam on the side of his chin, and his shirt is haphazardly buttoned.

...The ancient days of the Grand Opera House, the Hippodrome, the Curzon, the Albert Memorial Clock. The two of them out tripping the light fantastic. So young then. The smell of his tweeds. The Turkish tobacco he used to favor. The charity balls in Belfast, her gown rustling on the steps, {her husband} beside her, bow-tied, brilliantined, tipsy.

Worry for the present...nostalgia for the past...awareness of the short horizon of the future. She will bear it all. He will be borne to his bourn-side bier on the shoulders of this woman.

And the wonder of it is...it goes on.