FATHER'S DAY FAST ONES: Two new Adrian Tchaikovsky novels, SHROUD and BEE SPEAKER

BEE SPEAKER (Dogs of War #3)
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
Head of Zeus—an AdAstra Book (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the Arthur C. Clarke award winner, Adrian Tchaikovsky, comes the third instalment of the DOGS OF WAR science fiction series, a future where genetically engineered “Bioforms” have inherited not the Earth, but the Solar System.

The end of the world has been and gone.

There was no one great natural disaster, no all-consuming world war, no catastrophic pandemic. Only scores of storms, droughts, and selfish regional conflicts. Humanity was not granted a heroic end. Instead, it bled to death from a thousand cuts.

But where Earth fell apart, Mars pulled together. Engineered men and beasts, aided by Bees – an outlawed distributed intelligence—survived through co-operation, because there was simply no alternative.

Fast forward to today. A signal—'For the sake of what once was. We beg you. Help.'—reaches Mars.

How could they refuse? A consortium of Martian work crews gather the resources for a mission: a triumphal return to the blue-green world of their ancestors. And now here they are—three hundred million kilometres from home.

And it has all already gone horribly wrong.

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My Review: This one will require you to go to the bookstore. It is worth it. If Dad's already read the first two books, it's a no-brainer...of course he wants this one. If he is a fan of Author Adrian's work, getting all three is a slightly pricier alternative, but about 97% probability of being a huge hit.

If he hasn't read the first two novels, though, this is set in their medium-term future, and requires no knowledge not given in the narrative here to understand what's going on. I've read both previous books and didn't feel it was a huge advantage; more a mild fillip of some extra fun to be had.

Four Martians respond to the Old Homestead's pretty vague plea for help. The story has chapters the way a ham has calories...lots and lots and all distributed in tasty hunks of richly marbled language. There are multiple PoVs, nine in all. Each one is moving the story...about the way the kindest intentions get deeply enmeshed in very challenging realities of human fallibility...and oftentimes in ways that aren't supposed to be funny, but are.

If your Dad is like me, deeply suspicious of any kind of AGI that pretends to infallibility or omniscience, then this is a great series to hook him on. Nothing about Bees, the Martian distributed consciousness (AGI rebranded), long ago banished from the severely collapsing Earth, is infallible, though it is good-hearted. The crisis of climate collapse is one Bees can definitely help remediate, you'd think, that being part of Bees' memories; but centuries on Mars have overlaid a lot of unhelpful knowledge. The Martian bioforms are such a great idea, and you *know* I approve of intelligent dog-forms! Their terrestrial rescuees are the usual lot of mired-in-muck religious nuts, feudal static thinkers who need help but only want it to look like their idea of a perfect present, and passive whiners. Al the Martians are oddly indulgent IMO. I'd've kicked ass, banged heads...but these rescuers really seem to try to stay helpful.

Ultimately, I'd give this to Dad because the very human-Dadly thing of needing to Fix It, to Help and to Serve a Purpose, all get a strong run. I enjoyed the story, I didn't feel it was tacked onto the end of a duology (a critique I saw that I found particularly unfair...it's been two hundred years since Bear Head so of course things changed!), and the overarching critique of flawed, fallible humanity was challenging but not bleak.

A lot like being a Dad.

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

SHROUD
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
Orbit Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$19.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An utterly gripping story of alien encounter and survival from Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Children of Time.

They looked into the darkness and the darkness looked back . . .

New planets are fair game to asset strippers and interplanetary opportunists—and a commercial mission to a distant star system discovers a moon that is pitch black, but alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is anathema to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud.

Under no circumstances should a human end up on Shroud’s inhospitable surface. Except a catastrophic accident sees Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne doing just that. Forced to stage an emergency landing, in a small, barely adequate vehicle, they are unable to contact their ship and are running out of time. What follows is a gruelling journey across land, sea and air. During this time, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s dominant species. It also begins to understand them . . .

If they escape Shroud, they’ll face a crew only interested in profiteering from this extraordinary world. They’ll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all.

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My Review: A stand-alone story by a genre stalwart? Make the trip to the bookstore! A story where the aliens on a truly unnerving world are actually more humane than the humans' own bosses? Perfect for Dad on his special day, especially if he's not retired yet. Talk about living in hope....

Hope feels like a luxury to the women trying not to die on a moon whose every physical parameter seems purpose-built to kill them. (Of course it was—this is a novel.) These two women are put in a terrible place to determine if Shroud, the human name for their likely grave-place, has economic value to their corporation.

Author Adrian is not the biggest supporter of the capitalist world we live in. I knew I loved him for a reason.

As the constraints of Shroud bind their actions and options ever-tighther, their gynergy and their willingness to think outside the training and the constructs of their society coupled with Shroud's life form's desire to communicate with these utterly alien things meet and merge into true First Contact. One of my favorite plot devices, that.

I think it's clear I like Author Adrian's storytelling. I want to spoiler the hell out if why in this story's case more than in Bee Speaker's case. I'm really impressed this arachnid-fancyin' fantasy writer has bent his brain to the task of making Shroud make sense without showing too much of the gearshifting tech he used to get there. Author Adrian doesn't babble his techno, and doesn't imbibe a pint of handwavium before every chapter. I find the balance of fiction to science matches my preference in this story so perfectly you can't see the seam. Unless your Dad's a physicist by trade, I'm guessing he will quite probably enjoy this balance between story told and space-world built too.

I recommend it, and get one for yourself too. Borrowing Dad's might be tough to talk him into.

2024 NEBULA WINNER: SOMEONE YOU CAN BUILD A NEST IN, Literature's pipe organ with the "Strange" stop pulled all the way out

SOMEONE YOU CAN BUILD A NEST IN
JOHN WISWELL
DAW Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

WINNER of the 2024 Nebula Award!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Discover this creepy, charming monster-slaying fantasy romance—from the perspective of the monster—by Nebula Award-winning debut author John Wiswell

Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she's fallen in love.

Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth.

However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don’t think about love that way.

Shesheshen hates keeping her identity secret from Homily, but just as she’s about to confess, Homily reveals why she’s in the area: she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?

Eating her girlfriend isn’t an option. Shesheshen didn’t curse anyone, but to give herself and Homily a chance at happiness, she has to figure out why Homily’s twisted family thinks she did. As the hunt for the monster becomes increasingly deadly, Shesheshen must unearth the truth quickly, or soon both of their lives will be at risk.

And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with, rather than in, the love of her life.

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My Review: I really hoped that I'd find something that recalled for me the affect and effect of Mrs Caliban in this book.

Not so much.

This being the twenty-first century, I get it; that kind of quiet exploration of repressed rage and thwarted love is not the way this louder, more boisterous time copes with Life. Also, the author's an ace man. We aren't much for writing quiet women unless they are silenced by our power and privilege over them. (Look at the mind-numbing abundance of male-authored "thrillers" centering sex crimes against women sometime.) What this book does, then, is entirely unlike what I was prepared for.

This is a large pipe organ's keyboard. The stops, those round thingies, are the way the organist chooses the kind of sound...brash blaring trumpets, quiet soft woodwinds...the instrument will send into your ears. Author Wiswell pulled the "Strange" stop on his book's keyboard all the way out and then used the loud pedal.

The idea of this being reproducing in the same unspeakably horrifying way that wasps do is nightmarish enough for me. I absolutely abominate wasps. But then to be confronted with Shesheshen, the wasplike alien's, twisted psychology...finding its parasitic fatal-for-Homily (her intended victim) reproductive strategy LOVING!...and I thought, "that's me out!"

And then...

The reason I kept going, pushing past the extreme horripilation induced at the mere notion of this, this travesty on Love was the strength of my horror. If I am this repulsed and infuriated, the author is saying something loud and clear, and however much I don't *like* hearing it I should listen. I am honestly surprised to say I am glad that I did.

Female-presenting monsters are having A Moment, it seems...Alasdair Gray's Poor Things, a book I did not like but a film that was a note-perfect adaptation of it most recently....and Author Wiswell's more SFnal take on it surpasses that deeply strange story. In imaging an alien just trying to exist, as "Bella Baxter" does, as Frankenstein's monster does, but in such a revulsion-evoking way, Author Wiswell makes his readers stop and think: "where is my horror coming from?" Survival by consuming one's host is appalling! When one is the host, yes; but really, are we any different? We are using up the planet, we are complicit in the slave labor that provides us the benefits of food to eat, as well as the devices you're reading and I'm writing this on, and that offers the laborers nothing but early graves.

Some people who reviewed the book on Goodreads had some reservations about the nature of a man writing a love story between a woman and a female-presenting alien, when the love was not sapphic but asexual. To me, this felt like a feature, not a bug (!), because the point was asexuality. That was something I found moving, once I wrapped my head around it; the lovers are genuinely in love and they cannot deny or repress their feelings, nor are these feelings physiologically expressed through sex. If this is something you are unfamiliar with, I recommend reading the excellent Ace by Angela Chen. It was that book that, for the first time, presented me with information about the experience of asexuality, by an asexual person; it is extremely illuminating for someone not asexual.

The attentive have noticed my rating lacks a star despite my laudatory comments. This is not due to its sexual challenge to the allo overculture. It is due to the frankly peculiar pacing, too slow then zooming through character-building opportunities; it's due to the amount of body horror exceeding my personal limits; it's due to my very old-fashioned purseylipped response to the amount of lying Shesheshen does to Homily, that never causes any comment or evokes any sense of betrayal, nor causes Homily to require some assurance that she *can* trust Shesheshen.

Also I kept reading her name as "Hominy" and, considering she was being assessed as a meal by Shesheshen, it made me giggle most immaturely.

None of my minor crotchets should stop you from getting this deeply affecting and very peculiar story into your eyeholes. Soonest.

WEAVER will make a weaver of the reader in this post-apocalyptic tale

WEAVER
KELLY ANN JACOBSON
Livingston Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this Cloud Atlas-style speculative novel, humans are the alien invaders. The reader learns through many documents—police reports, legal depositions, speech transcripts, and diary entries—that a human company named HealthCorp has attempted to enslave two alien the Laffians stranded on a planet-wide ocean and the feline HoFe living on a bed of hofellium. Now, those same aliens have come to Earth in the hopes of using the planet to safely repopulate. The overriding question becomes whether these three groups can reconcile on Earth without killing each other first. . . .

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My Review: Definitely a message I endorse: anti-capitalist, anti-racist, greedshaming, selfish, tribalistic thoughts and actions disparaged and criticized in a post-apocalyptic novel that is very queer-inclusive. The author's previous two excursions into mostly YA storytelling but that are suitable for adults to enjoy too (ROBIN AND HER MISFITS, TINK AND WENDY) were favorites of mine earlier this year.

Author Jacobson's storytelling chops, in this book, are aptly held up against David Mitchell's famously fractured framework in Cloud Atlas and, while I wasn't a fan of that book, I felt this iteration of that multi-documentary style worked...and didn't work...in the same ways here. It makes the worldbulding, particularly important in a story with an alien species introduced to Earth, a bit spottier and harder to follow than is my personal sweet spot for reading.

What definitely works is Author Jacobson's certainty that all her queer-coded characters are central to the narrative of humanity's survival. It is by no means certain that humanity will survive, but we're giving it a good, solid go in our confict with the superior forces of an uncaring galactic horde. The story is moe than rich enough in detail to make the average teen reader use their pattern-spotting skills, keeping track of the many different threads of the story.

A terrific choice for the experienced SFF reader, the young queer or questioning reader will find themself in here too, and the grown person will enjoy this non-triumphalist, question-authority vibed tale of working for survival.
Highly recommended for the Booksgiving choice to unwrap and dive right into.

THE GLASSY, BURNING FLOOR OF HELL, Brian Evenson's latest collection of literary horror

THE GLASSY, BURNING FLOOR OF HELL: Stories
BRIAN EVENSON
Coffee House Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: "Here is how monstrous humans are."

A sentient, murderous prosthetic leg; shadowy creatures lurking behind a shimmering wall; brutal barrow men: of all the terrors that populate The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, perhaps the most alarming are the beings who decimated the habitable Earth: humans. In this new short story collection, Brian Evenson envisions a chilling future beyond the Anthropocene that forces excruciating decisions about survival and self-sacrifice in the face of toxic air and a natural world torn between revenge and regeneration. Combining psychological and ecological horror, each tale thrums with Evenson's award-winning literary craftsmanship, dark humor, and thrilling suspense.

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My Review: A collection from Brian Evenson, even one with some pieces that weren't quite as welcome to me as they ordinarily are (see below), will never not be greeted with warbles of delight from me. These tales are all from other homes, but they belong together. They're Family, much as a cult is.... Last Days, a pair of odd and deeply disturbing novellas linked by one hugely upsetting premise...and this premise is the *only* one I've ever encountered whereunder I am simply delighted to be called a "one"...made me think and shiver in 2014, and still does today. His short fiction tends to be very, very short (see my review of Windeye from 2013). This can render me almost mute, considering how very unreasonable the demands of reviewing collections, as opposed to anthologies of multiple writers, of short stories are. What's one meant to say? How to capture the gestalt of the collection? Is there a gestalt? If not, what the heck?! I get all verklempt and deeply verschmeckeled. But this is Brian Evenson. The peace is kept. These stories will take you, quickly, to places you're not at all sure you'd like to go.

I got a bit of a foretaste of the unease Author Evenson had in store for me when I kept thinking I should know that title, such a resonant phrase and so elegantly crafted! Is it a quote? A line from some famous poem by Milton, or permaybehaps Swinburne...turns out the author attributes it to Marguerite Young from Miss Mackintosh, My Darling! That monster hasn't been mined as thoroughly for titles as I'd've expected. I don't have any notion of where in the book it occurs, nor does he vouchsafe the information, but the sense of that exact phrase *belonging* somewhere has been answered and laid to rest. Unlike, it must be said, the science-fictional treatments of Otherness, the spooky treatments of cruelty and neglect, and the other many-sided polygons of storytelling he gets up to here. I agree that the planet's had it with us, and can even understand the more, um, arcane ways Author Evenson's come up with for it to shuffle us off. But they are as one expects from him: Unsettling, open-ended, and prettily told even when they aren't at all pretty.

With my usual éclat, I'll employ the Bryce Method of short impressions but no distinct individual ratings (no need; four fives, the rest but one four-and-a-halfs) for the stories so as to organize my thoughts and feelings, while hopefully allowing you to reach your own conclusions.

Leg is Hekla's, well, leg...only it isn't exactly a leg, and it's only hers until it doesn't want to be anymore. Then, well...you know who wrote it, you know what's likely to happen: Nothing you expect or predict. It's a quick, bitter hit of Evensonism.

In Dreams leads us to the sadly messed-about brain of a man whose very sense of himself is...flat, affectless. Much like, he muses, a psychopath's mind. But he has a familiar, a technological thing in his head, something that uses the parts of his brain that long-ago science said we, that is humanity, do not use...let us have it, they asked him, and he said yes.

That strange, almost fluttering sensation from deep within his mind, a sort of mental arrhythmia. It rose, it rose.

I could simulate dreams for you, it offered.

You've been listening in.

Of course I have, it said. I always am.

You always are, he acknowledged.


I could simulate them for you, it said again. They would be very well done. You wouldn't know the difference.

That was what frightened him, that perhaps he wouldn't know the difference.

I had a roommate when I was in the goofy garage who was schizophrenic. He was eerily like this character. Something else was in him, the C.I.A. was beaming imagery into his mind...it's a frightening thought, to be not-alone in your own head, and one that isn't obviously untrue sometimes....

Myling Kommer explains the unbearable burdens of family when Wrong is done to one of your own by one of your own. It is chilling and unfair; Jussi does not understand, can't possibly, the degree of hatred a child can feel for a selfish and terrible parent. Lucky boy, yet the future he inherits might not be quite so lucky.

Come Up for what, air? What good is air when you can't breathe? Breathing never got you anything good, never rewarded your life-long need to be seen or found to be important...but what do you do about it? You make sure you're never forgotten. Never. Even if it means making sure there isn't time to forget....

There was just a hole, a void where his wife had been. You couldn't feel anything about a void. All you could do was try desperately to keep it from swallowing you.

Good luck with that....

Palisade got built because someone, who remembers who, knew there was something that needed to be kept...in? out? hardly matters...and here you come, galumphing goofball that you are, head near empty and heart chock-full of nasty! Any wonder that the world around you gets angry? It's how angry that counts. One of the most persuasive arguments here for NetPriAppPeaDis to open up their vault and splash eight figures out on an all-Evenson anthology à la LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS.

Curator gives new meaning to the words "Mission Drift":

Here is how monstrous humans are, she felt the record should say. Humans are what they did to this world, their home. Here is why, once humans are extinct, they should never be brought back to life.

The Curator is absolutely correct. Wisdom comes at last, and too late.

To Breathe the Air is a master class in the beauty of launching the reader into a story in medias res. Simply superb science-fictional tale of two cities, and the horrors of Others being in control...exercising dominion over...those that do not consent and cannot benefit from it. Please, NetPriAppPeaDis, please make this an animated film!

The Barrow-Men makes you glad you don't live in Author Evenson's head. When Arnar claims an identity that isn't his, just to save himself, the barrow-men treat him to special, super-deluxe accommodations. Poor bastard.

The Shimmering Wall meditates on the power of love to make a person do what they believe they cannot and act as they swore they would not. It's also a bitter, angry denunciation of greed and selfishness and the disfiguring results of Institutional Superiority. And never once does it sound as strident as my reductive synopsis does.

Grauer in the Snow oh, how very much Grauer wishes he wasn't where he is! There but for the want of the presence of a ticket...he's quite sure his would've been punched; I wonder if anything in liminal space is ever for sure. Angels? An angel? If you like....

Justle makes a strong case for never pursuing family secrets! And Capgras syndrome? Maybe we don't really want to poke too deeply into it. No way to be sure there won't be a can of worms the size of Australia come poppin' up. Earth's revenge for our clever-clever uses and abuses, permaybehaps. Honestly, if this world's headed the way of Justle's Earth (assuming it is Earth), I'm not going to make book against this story coming to literal...life....

The Devil's Hand reminded me of an Aickman story, one about a weather house, that I read some time ago...the cruelty of the deprivations, the sheer indifference to bodily autonomy and integrity...just awful!

It was delicious.

Nameless Citizen or just "Nameless Person" in the end. No one lives through The End. The few clones of whatever is left aren't going to make it much past a few days apiece...by design? Or is this just another knock-on effect of the disaster that ends us?

Did I dream? I would say no—I never dream, at least not dreams I remember. I have not dreamt since the disaster changed me, as if the exchange for surviving the conflagration was to surrender my ability to dream.

Would that be a price you'd be willing to pay? Would there be a point to...continuing...if it cost you your dreams, your soul, along with your future?

The Coldness of His Eye reminds you, the reader, that no crime is perfect. Nothing on this Earth stays hidden forever...just hope that you're not interesting enough to be sought out for the wickedness you do without squaring it with the Universe. Because, rest assured, you will eventually pay the price, and the interest is a killer.

Daylight Come for the Eater of Darkness, the woman who can do what the men who think they need to know the future she might be able to tell them can't; so can it not actually come? The thing about power, true power, is that those who need it can never have enough and those who have it can never give enough.

Elo Havel is a take on that classic tale, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, crossed with The Lottery, told by a character from an Edwardian Saki story. Short, to the point, not a wasted syllable.

His Haunting left me wondering how, in the end, inheritance works...your father to you, then you (a childless gay man) to...? Props to Author Evenson for mundanely, unspectacularly, introducing a gay guy into his fiction.

Haver brings the brutality of the shrink Haver trying to confine artist Festus to one measly lifetime, one lousy timeline, and to trap them there with chemical cocktails. Can anyone believe this is a full and complete life? I'd say Festus has some ideas about it. Maybe some Other does, and uses Festus? One thing I'll say for Haver: he knows his fate's condign.

The Extrication makes Dr. Mengele seem like your kid's pediatrician!

A Bad Patch recalls the chest-burster scene in Alien all too vividly and revoltingly...and it's not just one...and you're Sigourney Weaver strapped to a Vogon Poetry Appreciation chair.

Hospice is the story that I like the least. Distasteful to me to spend any time with this, this incel or just plain asshole, whatever he's meant to be. Thank goodness it's a short-short.

The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell returns Hekla to us! Yes, Hekla from "Leg" and this is an earlier stage of her, um, partnership? with Leg. A trip to a yoga-ish retreat, where Hekla's just about the least valued and most ignored person there, arriving after everyone's asleep and helping herself to a room. Turns out it's the only room she can have...and the fat man (jarring note, making a villainous person fat) who's guru-ing this jamboree she doesn't want to be at is the Real Deal at Guruing. Only, and this is not particularly subtle, he's doing it out of greed. So, like, big not-cool points for fat-shaming and equating heaviness with greed.

This isn't enough to ruin the read for me, but YMMV of course.

PERSEPHONE STATION, seven-eighths perfect noir space opera, one-eighth perfect lesbian SF

PERSEPHONE STATION
STINA LEICHT
Saga Press
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Hugo award-nominated author Stina Leicht has created a take on space opera for fans of The Mandalorian and Cowboy Bebop in this high-stakes adventure.

Persephone Station, a seemingly backwater planet that has largely been ignored by the United Republic of Worlds becomes the focus for the Serrao-Orlov Corporation as the planet has a few secrets the corporation tenaciously wants to exploit.

Rosie—owner of Monk’s Bar, in the corporate town of West Brynner—caters to wannabe criminals and rich Earther tourists, of a sort, at the front bar. However, exactly two types of people drank at Monk’s back bar: members of a rather exclusive criminal class and those who sought to employ them.

Angel—ex-marine and head of a semi-organized band of beneficent criminals, wayward assassins, and washed up mercenaries with a penchant for doing the honorable thing—is asked to perform a job for Rosie. What this job reveals will affect Persephone and put Angel and her squad up against an army. Despite the odds, they are rearing for a fight with the Serrao-Orlov Corporation. For Angel, she knows that once honor is lost, there is no regaining it. That doesn’t mean she can’t damned well try.

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My Review: Okay...see...the trouble I've had with publishing this review has been the fact that there are two books here. One, the one you've seen advertised, is a noir space opera with a lesbian/non-binary cast. That book is *fabulous* and I get all verklempt and must retire to the fainting couch when I realize just exactly how hungry I've been for this exact combination of storyteller and story told for my sixty-plus years on this planet.

Then there's a different book, a truly terrifying anti-capitalist cli-fic tocsin rung in your damned scatty ear, demanding that you pay fucking attention to the simple, selfish way you're making your decisions because the planet's just about had it with you and me and the guy behind the tree. It's giving itself a fever to burn out the goddamned infection that's harming it.

As inhospitable as Brynner was, the rest of the planet was far worse, with storms ranging across thousands of miles of landmass and winds of 135 knots or more. The areas not regularly engulfed in severe weather were plagued with hostile life-forms.

I like both books, but telling you about one without mentioning the other...and I've seen plenty of reviews either miss this crucial pont or simply decide to belt up about it...despite the fact I fear you'll now think this is another eat-your-kale book with long-faced Prognostications spoken by Archetypes and ending in DOOM! or worse, ending in Savior-Rescue-Sunshine-Lollipops-and-Rainbows!

Author Leicht has labored mightily practicing her craft for more than ten years, been Hugo-nom'd, and is of finer stuff than that. What is here is a story that will pound your pulse and sweat your brow without rolling your eyes.

Now. What's so hard about that, you're wondering? A lot, let me assure you. Author Leicht is not unknown to me, and I am lucky if I hear from her should I say something she finds stupid or offensive about her work...which, I hasten to add, isn't untrue even of authors to whom I am as unknown as dark matter...so what to do? Mention the apparently-stealth aspects of the read and suddenly find myself unfriended, or go along with the herd?

Well, you're readin' it, so here's to hoping I don't screw stuff up too terribly.

My major grouse is simple. What's feminist about this read? Why, in 2021, should I find it in any way remarkable that a woman is a warrior, a leader, a badass? My mother left her husband, took three jobs, and supported me in 1960s Texas. I am not unacquainted with double-X badassery. Anyone who's witnessed a birth knows how warrior spirit comes to children from the women who bore them. So...lesbians? Is that it? I grew up with lesbian grandma-equivalents, a couple who were Together for most of the twentieth century. Lived together, stayed together, were quietly but obviously together...in the South!

A thumping good read, this book; but feminist? How?

That said, let's look at the world. Persephone Station barely enters into the story, but the planet is...fascinating, yes, but also maddening because *I*WANT*MORE* around how the central surprise about the way it works is accomplished and sustained. I want more about the Emissaries, and I want more about the unusual health effects of the Serrao-Orlov Corporation's primary target. Wouldn't the quality of immortality-tied-to-place rather make the whole thing less attractive? But the sheer joy of Angel realizing she's been played but knowing *why* in the same moment, and entering the conspiracy of silence willingly, can't be overstated. It is an frequently fallen into trap for authors to forget that readers invest in the main character's world-view. Not so Author Leicht. Angel's betrayed, yes; but this betrayal she goes along with and therefore I felt comfortable doing so, too.

And space opera dudes? Your worries about this being all talktalktalkfeelingsfeelings are unfounded. The action scenes are...wait for it...killer good. Angel's a disgraced member of a warrior clan who takes nothing about her strategy, her tactics, or her weaponry for granted. That means you can't, either. And that is a good thing in a space opera. The downside of that is that there isn't room for smexytimes. Of the two things, I can find smexytimes in about a trillion places and I can find lesbian-led SF in under a dozen.

My last observation is about the AI in this book...the Forbidden Being. A woman's body inhabited by a rogue AI, one that's developed sentience and emotional intelligence of a sort, is possibly the most SFnal thing in the book. We've gone beyond Robot, readers. The entry of this character into the book is a turning point. Our space opera finally has an alien. (The Emissaries are cool...they aren't terribly alien, they want what people want.) The way the AGI (as it's known in the book) inserts itself into human affairs often made me think of the paranoid QAnon people who believe in the Deep State hoo-hah...they should love this, I smirked to myself more than once...but in point of fact, it's not far-fetched at all. That was a moment for pausing and reflecting....

Whatever else I can say is a development of the theme "whyever is anyone surprised that women write good, solid SF that centers women as leaders and warriors and do it with panache", so here endeth the lesson. Go buy the book.