THE FIRSTS: A History of French Superheroes, fun and relevant and undemanding

THE FIRSTS: A History of French Superheroes
XABI MOLIA (tr. Alexander Hertich)
Dalkey Archive (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The ugly side of superheroes

What if you suddenly had superpowers? What would you do? How would your friends and family react? What would your obligations to society be?

The superheroes’ first missions—combating terrorists or rescuing disaster victims—are a boon to France. Yet while these actions bring the country pride, unity quickly starts to unravel. These superheroes, ultimately, are human. Paparazzi are everywhere. One has an affair with another’s wife. Another questions following the government’s imperialist agenda. Meanwhile the public carps on social media.

Molia takes our fascination with superheroes and adds a cutting portrayal of contemporary social mores to create an entertaining and disturbing work with deep dystopian underpinnings.

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

My Review: Remember the 1995 one-hit wonder "(What If God Was) One of Us?" It was a monster hit around the world. Its central question was one I think troubles people; it makes us all wonder why her and not me, why is there such an unfair randomness to divinity, what Greeks explained as someone being a demigod like Achilles or Herakles.

What we now call "superheroes."

In the labyrinth of the human soul, the superhero is tucked into a corner along the same stretch of hallway as the demigod. It's about wanting the anthropomorphic Divine to share more substance with us, not seeing the genuinely miraculous, divine acts of creation we interact with daily: my meds, the ones that keep my blood free of oversupplies of uric acid, the ones that keep mmy heart beating in normal rhythm, the computer I'm typing on, the phone you're reading this on, the software, the microchips...all designed by a human, all manufactured by human-designed machines...miracles surround us, the divine in us engendered them. But we use our miracles profligately. The computer and internet that give us access to the immense body of knowledge that's enabled wonders also gave us social media and streaming news.

I think of the first examples as Divine, the last as what we humans do when our reach exceeds our grasp...or demigods those superheroes come to life. Philosophical 3am maunderings aside, the novel The Firsts uses our overreach to explain our grasp to us. The ordinary people with superpowers are observed, as we all are, and reported on, scrutinized as celebrities are as part of their bargain for our attention. It's not the newest wrinkle in the communal brain, the soap operas that are comic books have pulled this idea out every so often. I'm not blaming or running down the book or its author, no idea is totally new or it would be ignored or rejected. Delivering dystopian stories can't really add a burden of novelty onto the already painful message of self-examination's fruits.

Science fiction's used the media-snippets (notably, prize-baitingly The Sheep Look Up, about fifty-five years old) and for centuries before that epistolary novels (Dracula for one) fake that same sense of immediacy and intimacy of perception, for generations. updating it for newly available tech underlines the basic reality of the human desire to share...willingly or not...our fellows' and our betters' deepest depths. As long as they're glowed up, glossy, and either unthreatening or in some way humiliating to them but never to us.

It's not fresh, then, the format of this story's delivery, and it obeys all these rules. It's French so its reactions to two superheroes' scandalous infidelity is more gleeful in tone than the US puritanical moralizing judgment, but really what we have here is not groundbreaking fiction or social observation or advancement in techniques of writing.

But it's a damn fun day or reading as people, ordinary people, grapple with the tweaked superpowers we all factually possess (you read that list-paragraph above, right?); if you go into this read expecting a good time that's not as demanding of your concentration and thinking as most stories from this publisher are, you can enjoy a well-told tale in a format not new or fresh but well-used in the story's service.

THE MULAI, consider the comps given by the publisher as gospel

THE MULAI
MUNIR HACHEMI (tr. Julia Sanches)
Coach House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Interstellar via Invisible Cities: spec-fic translated from Spanish imagines a utopian way of life on another planet.

Years after the climate wars on Earth, the Mulai have settled into their new home on an unnamed planet. Supplies stopped arriving from Earth many years ago, and the Mulai have found a way to live. But now the people of Earth want to know what happened to the settlers, so they send The Archaeologist.

He finds that they have become a different people: uncannily similar to us but with something radically Other about them. Their language has become more about change than stability, and the ways they eat, reproduce, bury their dead, and understand gender have all transformed into something almost unrecognizable. The Archaeologist feels like his trip is one extended misunderstanding.

With fragments from The Archaeologist’s notes and the stories of Flukeh and Faida, who map both their world and their language, The Mulai offers a glimpse of a world adjacent to ours – one that just may be a model for how to better our own.

From one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists and author of the celebrated Living Things, and translated by the award-winning Julia Sanches, comes a bold new Borgesian reimagining of what ‘civilization’ might look like.

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

My Review: “Only when we encounter the other can we truly see ourselves.”

This is the crux of this story's argument. It is spoken by The Archaeologist, Dr. Cordovero, in an unironic way as he executes the duties of a scholar to interpret the Mulai, a culture not his own. So, a colonizer's PoV...a man whose cultural matrix he's so embedded within that he can't see how it forms...distorts...his picture of Reality. This being a story about how a human culture simply...vanished...without making a ripple in water left behind, it made perfect sense this should be the case. The Archaeologist’s notes are his rigid way of trying to fix an understanding of the Mulai's lifeways into a clear explanation of power structures, kinship patterns, and language architecture.

None of these concepts apply.

Seen from The Archaeologist’s PoV, a Mulai library f/ex is not anything like a library. A bit like Samuel Beckett's splices from late in his life, these places are collecting points for unbound unconnected sheets that do not necessarily tell any kind of cohesive story...just as random pages torn willy-nilly then taped together did not form a deliberate Beckett story, though it was what Beckett intended. The Archaeologist is sure, with typical colonizer arrogance, that these distant cousins of Earth's humans have let him in, have answered his questions as he intended them to not as they intended to. Life lived in translation is always tough. Life lived in denial, blindness, in a fog of culture-bits one does not know is obscuring clear vision...harder still.

That this story about a life lived in (mis)translation is itself a translation is either a step too twee or a layer of hot fudge atop the whipped cream of sociological SF from an earlier literary era wrapping up a rich, dense custard of story. It's a novel that requires you-the-reader to think past the obvious, to dig your spoon under the rich topping of the SFnal setting, through the soothing sweetness of the story's meaning, into the heavy, velvety lushness of Author Hachemi's ideas about how culture, language, and art emulsify into this marvel of delightful idea-sharing.

What actually happens on the page is far less important to this reading experience than what happens inside you as you read it. Did you just read the glossy surface...did you just give the story your attention without turning it over and over as you read, after you finished...or is this a "too hard, turn on the TV" kind of experience? They're all in here.

It's a lot, but it's rewarding no matter where you end up.

KILLING BABY HITLER, time-travel/alt-hist fantasy of Changing History...derailed by the Butterfly Effect

KILLING BABY HITLER
MICHAEL TOMASKY
O/R Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the year 2141, the planet is ruled by billionaires, democracy is a relic, the environment is collapsing, and Illinois is home to thirty-foot alligators.

When a ragtag team of scientists discovers the secret to time travel, they set their sights on history’s most infamous villain: baby Adolf Hitler. The mission doesn’t go quite as planned.

Because rewriting history is never simple. Instead of preventing the rise of fascism, they trigger a bizarre new timeline in which Hitler grows up in America, editing one of the country’s most hateful newspapers, and history warps in strange and unsettling ways. What begins as a darkly funny scheme to fix the past spirals into a mind-bending journey across centuries, as the time travelers confront unintended consequences, shifting timelines, and a future that may be even worse than the one they left behind.

Part sci-fi thriller, part biting satire, Killing Baby Hitler is Michael Tomasky’s first work of fiction—a wildly original novel that skewers power, questions the logic of hindsight, and reminds us that the present may be the hardest time of all to change. Bold, provocative, and disturbingly plausible, it’s a time-travel tale like no other.

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

My Review: I like my silly sci-fi delivered with humor, so I'm your boy for this story's topic and style. I'm also a fan of time-travel (purest of fantasies) and alternate history (I dunno if we'll ever science our way into certainty that other timelines are real, but I think they can't NOT be), so bring your killing Hitler story unto mine eyes.

O/R is a leftist purveyor of tendentious reads mostly non-fiction; I approve of this, so seeing this novel become available I downloaded it immediately. I'm a fan of the wish-fulfillment inherent in stories of changing history, though the pop-culture "butterfly effect" is pretty inaccurate to the real subset of chaos theory. Doesn't mean I don't love to read about it. I was really hoping to love this read, too.

I enjoyed and liked it. I'd've loved it if it'd kept on with the initial tone. It's honest, abrasive, truthful about human nature; it's holding up our faults as people to us in this low-real life stakes fictional tale. It's always safe to look at existential crisis in the mirror of practical impossibility. To be able say humanity does not come off unscathed is pretty much my minimum standard for this kind of srory. Happy to say scathing is done. Pulling the punch at the end...well...I get it, I really do, and I can't tell you I thought the ending was incongruous, or tacked on to the story it was finishing off. It fit fine.

I wasn't expecting the tonal shift, so it popped me in the mouth for a minute. I don't think others who're less pessimistic, or permaybehaps don't see things through my Darkling eye. Without reservation a recommended read for summer in particular among the "if only" fantasists seeking to refashion the world. A well-paced story that makes its points without sacrificing the exuberant fun of reinvention, no matter how implausible.

Truths are told, honest self-appraisal encouraged, and a vote of confidence I don't entirely agree with is offered to send the entertainment reader away happy.

JULIE JOHNSON'S PAGE: The Reign of Remnants romantasy series

THE SEA SPINNER (Reign of Remnants #2)
JULIE JOHNSON
Ace Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25*of five

The Publisher Says: Blazing with reawakened magic, a young woman challenges the tides of fate in this highly anticipated installment of Julie Johnson’s romantasy series.

Everything changed for Rhya Fleetwood in the battle of Fyremas. Her grief is heavy, her rage volatile. Caeldera lies in ruins. Her friends are dead or wounded. And Pendefyre, their newly crowned king, is shutting her out. The Remnant of Fire needs all his focus for his kingdom, his people, and—perhaps more than anything—his insatiable need for revenge.

When a twist of fate leads Rhya to the last place she expected—the Water Court—the novice wind weaver is forced to confront the limitations of her untrained power as well as her increasingly complicated relationships. For enigmatic King Soren of Llŷr is as different from Penn as sparks are from the sea. The more insight he offers into the maegic that binds them together, the more confused Rhya feels—about her future as a Remnant, about her deepest desires, and about her role in the coming war.

Enemies circle close, ready to strike. And if Rhya isn’t careful, she’ll lose more than just her heart.

She’ll lose her life.

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

My Review: The geopolitical forces that clashed so inevitably and so violently in The Wind Weaver (review below) are recovering from the ugliness of battles fought but a war as yet unwon. Rhya's got more than just her powers to unleash, though, as she's got her love life to resolve as well as, oh y'know just the fate of the world, so no bigs and no pressure.

Penn continues to be bloody annoying, Soren continues to be my beau ideal of a boyfriend who could turn into a spouse of the most delectable rarity and scrummyness. Hey Rhya, if you want to continue to try that "but I can fix him" shtik with the yutz Penn, can I have Soren please and thank you?

Sadly for me, not only is Soren fictional but Rhya shows more than her usual (from last outing) romantic acuity while battening of Soren's Water Court vibe of collegiality, support, and genuine appreciation for her Wind magic. You go, girl! (Does he have a brother/uncle/cousin?)

The first third of the read was pretty pillar-to-post getting Rhya where she needed to be. I'm glad now that I have a sense that Author Julie Johnson is not going to give me anything all that fast-paced because it allows me to settle my expectations on the accepting it as it comes end of the spectrum.

I also understand now, having read these stories in close time-proximity that the ending of The Wind Weaver was very intentional. I'm ready to bump up my rating on this story despite its ending. That makes it sound like it's bad, but in point of fact it's merely evil-heated and cruel: It's a cliffhanger. Those really need to be outlawed. I should be able to start a class-action human-rights violation suit against Author Julie Johnson. I get it now...the endings are going to be like this in the whole series.

So where's book three, gorramit?! February 2027 is too long to wait!

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THE WIND WEAVER (Reign of Remnants #1)
JULIE JOHNSON
Ace Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Discover a world where magic isn’t learned. It’s survived. A gritty and intoxicating epic fantasy romance.

Rhya Fleetwood is a healer, an outcast, and like the realm itself—about to die. Or so she thought.

When the ruthless Commander Scythe plucks her from the vile clutches of her executioner there’s no time to feel relief. Her new captor wants Rhya for his own secret ends and they all lead back to the mysterious birthmark which brands her as a Remnant. One of four souls capable of calling forth inconceivable elemental power.

Rhya knows she must master the wind that whispers within her and make an escape. But as she is dragged across treacherous terrain with Scythe’s formidable band of soldiers, something keeps her at his side.

Inside her, a tempest roars—terror and desire. Soon, she knows she must choose.

Follow her magic, or her heart…

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

My Review: Strap in. This is a very long ride/read. I'm really not much of a romantasy reader because I want my romance between men and my maegickq absent or limited in its narrative use. Neither of those desiderata are delivered (or indeed promised) in this narrative. Still, it's a debut novel and a Sunday Times (UK) bestseller, so my curiosity was definitely piqued. Saying yes to the DRC didn't seem urgent so I did.

It's been a year since then, a second book (review above) has come out, and I'm quite surprised to report that I thoroughly enjoyed this read. Author Julie Johnson is not pushing any envelopes, nor was she touted by her publisher as doing so. I entered the reading experience hoping for a diverting low-steam, finding love and purpose at the same time, story trope-fest. I was expecting to need to skim past sex scenes disagreeable to my preferences.

Well...yeah...about that. Rhya has two possible love-matches. Penn's the main one, and goddesses below us is he tedious to read about. He's curiously unimaginitive for someone of his elevated station. Soren's more interesting because he's irreverent and funny with it, lightens Rhya's apparent bipolar-disorder moods, and generally feels like he's got main-character energy. In its most nuanced meaning. I'm happy enough to report there was pretty minimal scene skimming until we get to the topic of violence.

This story is violent.

Intentionally, carefully so; it still has a LOT of violent scenes that were almost...very, very nearly...gratuitously and salaciously, visceral pornographic gore. In a story intended as, marketed to appeal to, romantasy reading folk. These folk lean towards female identity. The violence is preponderently involving females. That felt like an odd choice, but it was not the only odd choice (see my opinion of Rhya's romantic options above): the pacing, or "how slow can you go" too.

I'm really, really drawn to the idea of being a Chosen One whose status is an ambivalent-leaning-bad one. I'm used to the social/societal trials and tribulations part of the Chosen Ones narrative but this world offers a story of the powers themselves being kind of awful and using them being a chore. (I'm a fan of KJ Charles's Simon Feximal for this reason.) A great deal more could've been done to explore this as opposed to the two skabillion words wasted on Rhya's experiences once she gets to the royal court.

In case my opinion on this authorial choice is not clear: I am not a fan of Rhya's tremendously long non-magical maladjustment to the court.

I hope you now understand my star rating above. It assorts oddly with my surprised pleasure with this debut romantasy that had few of my desiderata in that genre, has a very, very promising world to build out, and unusually powerful good fortune to find a paying audience in sizable numbers.

On to book two I now go with hope in my heart, and a (slightly strained) smile on my face!

WHERE THE AXE IS BURIED, Ray Nayler gets his Nostradamus on

WHERE THE AXE IS BURIED
RAY NAYLER
MCD x FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

FINALIST for the 2026 Locus Award for SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end.

In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world.

As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere.

Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches readers into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buriedcombines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom.

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

My Review: Political allegory is risky for authors to indulge themselves by creating. "The irony that haunts our entire history is that we humans have been the ones standing in the way of our own happiness the whole time" is a pithy truism. It's not much to hang a novel on.

Yet hang it does. The near-future techno-dystopia is all too real, all too probable, and dankly depressingly akin to the tech...bros...in charge of the most important functions of infrastructure's clear intentions. Why is "hacking" a crime? Because it interferes with the Aynholes' desires to install ransomware in all societal functions to exert supreme control over all humans. "The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me," is Ayn Rand's own deeply evil, greedy, and selfish distillation of the deeply evil, selfish, and destructive soi-disant "philosophy" entrenched in the tech industry, that reaches apotheosis in this story.

There are no good, humane systems in this novel, albeit they are uniformly very human-centered. Control of Humanity has always been at the center of all social and governmental systems throughout time. The eternal tension between the ideal of individual liberty and the safety of others has never, in my opinion can never, be anything more than temporarily balanced. It's the moment of imbalance, the time when the system built is not in equilibrium that makes this a novel not a short story. Looking into a dark and a deep void is courting vertigo. It's vertigo, a sense of the ground deciding it's not going to support one's weight any longer that defined this story to me.

Author Nayler blew past the discomfiting (to me) notion of AI government leaders into nightmare territory with the Federation president whose personality is digitized and downloaded time and time again into fresh bodies. An immortal being, like the Meths in Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, will not in any meaningful way be human. I don't even think the present-day model for this character is human. Well, genetically so but not humane or honorable in human terms. Be that as it may...this is a cautionary tale about ignoring mile-long freight trains barreling towards you. You will get flattened.

“What a world, Nikolai,” the president had said. “no old age, no sickness, and no death. Finally, we can have both our wisdom and our health.”

The president said we—but it was only he who could have those things. It was only he who could escape old age, sickness, and death.”

Like the immense benefits promised to thee and me in the rollout of "AI" there's a very, very low likelihood of anyone under billionaire status deriving more than the tiniest benefits, and as few of those as they can manage, from "AI". Assuming it's ever better than it is at this moment, where the divide is already stark, it will immiserate billions and make greedy oligarchs a scoche richer.

The essence of the story is:

“That was how it was. One day you had your own country. Next day you were a refugee. You were in a line, waiting to be someone again. To be legal again. Not to be nothing.

You could spend your whole life waiting.”

...and you will.

It's a bitter pill of a tale written by Author Naylor from a far greater pool of knowledge than mine on every story axis. It is not me, an old, bitter, angry socialist, shouting at the clouds the tech...bros...float atop. It is one of their own saying, "pay attention now before you pay a very steep price for lazy inattention."

It behooves us without his knowledge, or his storytelling nous, to listen up while we can.

A RUIN, GREAT AND FREE concludes the Convergence Saga with book 3

A RUIN, GREAT AND FREE (Convergence Saga #3)
CADWELL TURNBULL
Blackstone Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.99 hardcover, available now

One of Ancillary Review of Books' 2025 Notable Books!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From bestselling and award-winning author Cadwell Turnbull comes A Ruin, Great and Free, the stunning conclusion to the popular Convergence Saga.

It has been nearly two years since the anti-monster riots. The inhabitants of Moon have been very fortunate in the intervening months. Inside their hidden monster settlement, they’ve found peace, even as the world outside slips into increasing unrest. Monsters are being hunted everywhere, forced back into the shadows they once tried to escape from. Other secret settlements have offered a place to hide, but how long can this half-measure against fear and hatred last?

Over the course of three days, the inhabitants of Moon are tested. The Black Hand continues to search for them and the Cult of the Zsouvox wants to make Moon the last stand in their war against the Order of Asha. This is more than enough to reckon with, but the gods have also placed their sights on Moon—and they bring with them a conflict that may either save or unravel the universe itself.

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

My Review: Nothin' like uppin' the stakes in the last book in a series!

Not that anything was ever low-stakes here; but after becoming multiversal, adding heavy conflict among the gods afflicting the timelines, and starting from the baseline of shapeshifters being a real, oppressed minority, one can be forgiven for feeling...overwhelmed...in the toils of the complexification.

It's all big fun, though, if the previous volumes and their events are all on board one's mind. (My reviews might help you decide on whether this read will suit you.) As the storyverse has expanded, the stakes have multiplied and the worldbuilding has grown more ornamental than structural. It's to be expected; no one should start reading the series here because the world won't make enough sense to get the novice reader involved.

For the invested reader, Author Turnbull provides narrative guidance to put together the strands of this multiversal concluding chapter. It is complicated; it requires thought and rewards reflection; it does not hide its political stances. Since I am sympathetic to them I have no issue with that. This entire series needed to exist, to feed queer people the visibility of others without being Othered, to explore the world queerness as baseline identity, all are things that needed to be done. But the fight scene between the werebear and the dragon is the main reason Cadwell Turnbull *had* to start writing this series.

As much as I like Author Turnbull's politics, I read fantasy novels seldom...not the biggest fan of the genre, me...and when I do I want to have real fun, some thrills, and a background of worldbuilding that involves my brain in more than the ordinary tropey elves and suchlike. This series has delivered on each of those desires from giddy-up to whoa. The monsters are just plain folks, as is almost always the case when one gets to know the Othered; same desires, interests, needs, and the differences are vanishingly small when seen against the backdrop of greater familiarity. That makes their monsterness feel endearing to me. It becomes the urban-fantasy marker that does not turn off this less than eager fantasy reader.

I'm pretty sure anyone who reads my reviews can figure out why I approve of the queer representation herein.

A gory meditation on how much hatred costs, how misguided it is, and how gods, mages, multiversal Powers all have aims that barely touch our own so contact (let alone involvement) should be avoided. Grief and loss are the lot of all sentient beings; so spread kindness and acceptance, please.

It won't be in this series but I look forward to Cadwell Turnbull's next book.

VLADIMIR SOROKIN'S PAGE: Oprichnik's Russia duology

THE SUGAR KREMLIN (Oprichnik's Russia #2)
VLADIMIR SOROKIN (tr. Max Lawton)
Dalkey Archive Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 trade paper, preorder for fulfillment tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A puzzle of colorful, sardonic episodes that come together as a portrait of totalitarian society as a whole.

Sugar Kremlin follows the near-future universe of Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, crafting a set of 15 chapters that all return to the symbol of the The Sugar Kremlin. Thousands of these creations are being given away to citizens on the street, from lucky children to secret political dissidents, torture-obsessed civil servants, sex workers in a nearby bordello, and more.

As Sorokin moves from story to story, he draws the reader through the dark streets of life in Russia, creating a metaphysical encyclopedia of the Russian soul through a deceptively sweet sugary treat. Presenting a wide variety of genres and tones, Sugar Kremlin lays out a frightening vision of speculative mercilessness and quirky political horror.

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

My Review: Not a novel. A collection of fifteen stories set in the storyverse of Day of the Oprichnik but without overlapping or recurring characters. The structure here is centered around a literal "sugar Kremlin", a treat made of sugar in the shape of the Kremlin that's like an Advent calendar or a fruitcake or other holiday treat in ubiquity and celebratory affect.

That alone makes this unnerving, dystopian fantasia of a 2028 Russia unsettlingly like the Project 2025 US we're living in. The characters are constantly munching on, consuming, discussing the lusciousness of, this nutritionless pure sugar abomination.

On the nose much, Author Sorokin?

Expect the usual transgressive behaviors (I've been uneasily eyeing my hammer), the expected degradation and cruelty, the obligatory violent and vicious conduct. Sorokin is not going to coddle your imagination. The stakes here are too high. This duology (this one published in 2008 in Russian, 2025 in English, printed now that Dalkey Archive's under new ownership) is a trumpet blast, containing every dissonant and perverse note in Literature's instrumentation, to get the reader to see, really see, what is going on. It's been the brief of this press since its founding in 1984.

What made this a slightly-less-stellar read than Day of the Oprichnik for me was the episodic nature of stories...they don't really synergize to create a paralyzing terrified awareness of the overarching story's validity and possibly even applicability to 2025 US life. It's not what stories do, nor are they supposed to. What they've done as collected here is make the whole feel more melodramatic than dramatizing reality as a novel does. I was a bit thrown by a story titled "The Queue" because that's also an (unrelated) novel by Author Sorokin. It was brief but it threw me out of my flow state.

I am, then, one of those who are not au fait with Author Sorokin's contention that "The contemporary world is so complex and protean that it is no longer possible to describe it with linear prose and squeeze it into a traditional novel's structure." (From his interview with Joshua Cohen that forms the Introduction to the book.) I read a lot of linear novels; they do a creditable job of linear presentation of an inherently nonlinear world; I do not see that what I've just read has a notable advantage over, say, The Words That Remain (a linear-prose novel that presents complexity, pathos, cruelty, and love effectively). I readily stipulate that I'm possibly missing the point of his statement, or too dull of apprehension to get more than a dim gist of it.

Nonetheless, I experienced this read as a collection of well-made stories ready to épater les bourgeois as they...we...so badly need literature to do. Author Sorokin is ready, willing, and able to do this duty, with verve and panache, and scatology and violence.

It needs doing. It needs reading.

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

DAY OF THE OPRICHNIK (Oprichnik's Russia #1)
VLADIMIR SOROKIN (tr. Jamey Gambrell)
FSG
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Moscow, 2028. A cold, snowy morning.

Andrei Danilovich Komiaga is fast asleep. A scream, a moan, and a death rattle slowly pull him out of his drunken stupor—but wait, that’s just his ring tone. And so begins another day in the life of an oprichnik, one of the czar’s most trusted courtiers—and one of the country’s most feared men.

Welcome to the new New Russia, where futuristic technology and the draconian codes of Ivan the Terrible are in perfect synergy. Corporal punishment is back, as is a divine monarch, but these days everyone gets information from high-tech news bubbles, and the elite get high on hallucinogenic, genetically modified fish.

Over the course of one day, Andrei Komiaga will bear witness to—and participate in—brutal executions; extravagant parties; meetings with ballerinas, soothsayers, and even the czarina. He will rape and pillage, and he will be moved to tears by the sweetly sung songs of his homeland. He will consume an arsenal of drugs and denounce threats to his great nation’s morals. And he will fall in love—perhaps even with a number of his colleagues.

Vladimir Sorokin, the man described by Keith Gessen (in The New York Review of Books) as “[the] only real prose writer, and resident genius” of late-Soviet fiction, has imagined a near future both too disturbing to contemplate and too realistic to dismiss. But like all of his best work, Sorokin’s new novel explodes with invention and dark humor. A startling, relentless portrait of a troubled and troubling empire, Day of the Oprichnik is at once a richly imagined vision of the future and a razor-sharp diagnosis of a country in crisis.

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My Review: From the vantage point of late 2025, a post-Putin neo-medieval Russia in 2028 sounds...oddly optimistic...as well as wrong. From 2005's standpoint it probably seemed more likely; even though nothing in this book could be called hopeful, it was probably sounding good to Sorokin just not to have Little Vladdy Pu-Pu on the tsar's throne.

Predictions always miss something. Usually they're too optimistic, too hopeful, and weird to say that's the problem with this bleak prediction-fest. *waves at Little Vladdy Pu-Pu on his throne* I'm not entirely convinced the religious fervor of the Oprichnia, as revived from the days of Ivan the Terrible (an epithet with multiple valences in English, all of them applicable to the bearer then...and by extension now), is not active in 2025 let alone 2028.

With his characteristic OTT revulsion-inducing behaviors foregrounded, this book is automatically beyond the pale of all too many squeamish readers. I would say "try to get past it" but honestly...don't. One is meant to be revolted and put off by it, much as the 1972 John Waters shocker Pink Flamingos is not meant to titillate but shock and offend (fifty-plus years on, it still does). The world Author Sorokin posits is intended to be just as appalling and revolting, to disgust you and repel you! The entire reason to hold a dark mirror of satire up is to draw attention to the wrongness and cruelty of the world being posited. By no means is it accidental that so much of it is grimly familiar. The theocratic angle is the one not quite fully rolled out by our allegedly separate government. Just wait.

This edition was published in 2011, and it is only more relevant and more horripilating in 2025's world of ICEstapo and wholesale social upheaval caused and inflamed by the most powerful in our country.

YOSS'S PAGE: A PLANET FOR RENT, bitterly personal takedown of capitalist tourism, & RED DUST, same except it's law'n'order/security

RED DUST
YOSS (tr. David Frye)
Restless Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From beloved Cuban science fiction author Yoss comes a bitingly funny space-opera homage to Raymond Chandler, about a positronic robot detective on the hunt for some extra-dangerous extraterrestrial criminals.

On the intergalactic trading station William S. Burroughs, profit is king and aliens are the kingmakers. Earthlings have bowed to their superior power and weaponry, though the aliens—praying-mantis-like Grodos with pheromonal speech and gargantuan Collosaurs with a limited sense of humor—kindly allow them to do business through properly controlled channels.

That’s where our hero comes in, name of Raymond. As part of the android police force, this positronic robot detective navigates both worlds, human and alien, keeping order and evaporating wrongdoers. But nothing in his centuries of experience prepares him for Makrow 34, a fugitive Cetian perp with psi powers. Meaning he can alter the shape of the Gaussian bell curve of statistical probability—making it rain indoors, say, or causing a would-be captor to shoot himself in the face. Raymond will need all his training—and all his careful study of Chandler’s hardbitten cops—to meet his match.

As he did in his brilliantly funny and sharp science-fiction parables A Planet for Rent, Super Extra Grande, and Condomnauts, Yoss makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar in Red Dust, giving us an unforgettable half-human hero and a richly imagined universe where the bad guys are above the laws of physics.

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

My Review: Raymond (short for Raymond Chandler), a pozzie living on space station William S. Burroughs of the Galactic Trade Confederation, presses an already-imprisoned Gaussical into helping him catch a fellow Gaussical whose probability-bending is getting too greedy. Raymond believes like will call to like, and trusts he's Philip Marlowe not Miles Archer.

If none of that made sense, but you're still intrigued, sign up for this voyage of the Cuban-registered spaceship Yoss powered by much the same sense of absurdity that powered Douglas Adams to fame and fortune. Only he wrote it in Spanish. Lots of kinetic to-and-fro, lots of pseudo-hardboiled dialogue, innumerable odd lifeforms (the Gaussians, psionically gifted Cetian benders of probability, are my favorites but are not alone) pack the under-two-hundred pages set in the same fictional universe as A Planet for Rent (q.v.) very full.

Too full, most likely; and almost entirely male, so the misogyny Yoss is known for doesn't flare up. But don't think he's at a loss for slurs! Or any other colorful language, this man's right up there in the inventiveness standings. While I just said the short book's maybe a bit too packed, it's not filler...but it's also not moored onto a solid foundation unless you have read A Planet for Rent. They are not interconnected in plot or characters, but in background assumptions like Humanity's made up of wildly unpredictable, untrustworthy wild cards who need watching and controlling for their own good. (And their overlords' profit.) And our pozzie Raymond (positronic-brained android) is part of the machinery that keeps conflict between Humanity and the Xenoids to a dull roar. It's because of that the fascination with Raymond Chandler got hold of MSX-3482-GZ. We're all friends so let's use keynames, though. Sets the proper tone. As the events unfold we should be getting set up for the two Gaussians (you know, Gauss? numerical analysis, conformal mapping, all that stuff y'all already know too much about for me to go into it) confronting each other with one (reluctantly) representing Order and one not. And it never happens. Fifth star gone.

Rooted in Yoss's experiences of the 1990s collapse of socialist Cuba, his well-founded mistrust and anger at capitalism is loud and clear in the stories that precede this novella, where they reach a high shine. It's clear to me that the loud clanging of alarm bells in these two titles should have been heeded quite a while ago.

Best ten years ago; second-best, today.

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

A PLANET FOR RENT
YOSS (tr. David Frye)
Restless Books
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Out of the modern-day dystopia of Cuba comes an instant classic from the island’s most celebrated science fiction author: a raucous tale of a future in which a failing Earth is at the mercy of powerful capitalist alien colonizers.

In A Planet for Rent, Yoss critiques life under Castro in the ‘90s by drawing parallels with a possible Earth of the not-so-distant future. Wracked by economic and environmental problems, the desperate planet is rescued, for better or worse, by alien colonizers, who remake the planet as a tourist destination. Ruled over by a brutal interstellar bureaucracy, dispossessed humans seek better lives via the few routes available—working for the colonial police; eking out a living as black marketeers, drug dealers, or artists; prostituting themselves to exploitative extraterrestrial visitors—or they face the cold void of space in rickety illegal ships.

This inventive book marks the English-language debut of an astonishingly brave and imaginative Latin American voice.

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My Review: The Intergalactic League has been to Earth, has looked around, and has decided this shithole of a place is good for sex work and raw materials. The Planetary Tourism Authority licenses the visitors under some (largely notional not actual) rules, including the ready availability of Body Spares (humans to be...inhabited) for tourists who can't handle our atmosphere.

It's not terribly subtle; it is terribly biting. As satire often is.

Your tolerance for the howling outrage of a man who's seen his country get so desperate that it encouraged the "mulatta" women to become sex workers to balance the country's economic health on their bodies will determine your pleasure in the read.

Every facet of the capitalist colonization of "smaller" countries is brought into angry focus as the Xenoids, our spacefaring overlords, best us at sports we've never heard of, as they watch eagerly while a human performance artist uses his own, slow and painful, suicides (assisted by their superior technology to remain alive and reassemble afterwards) as artistic statements they can savor; most horribly, and pointedly, there is Buca, a Social (sex) worker, who's headed offworld with her Xenoid client to...nope. That one you need to read.

It is chilling to think immigrants to capitalist countries are sufficiently desperate to see what they know awaits them as preferable to what they're leaving.

And we, obliviously, heap more and worse atop them. It cannot last forever. Read about it from the other side, see at last why that's so.

THE CONFESSIONS: A Novel, a lens for Reality's more upsetting lumps

THE CONFESSIONS: A Novel
PAUL BRADLEY CARR
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A high-octane, high-concept thriller for fans of Blake Crouch, Harlan Coben, and Gillian Flynn from former Silicon Valley journalist turned bookstore owner Paul Bradley Carr.

Millions of letters arrive in the mail.
Murders are uncovered, affairs revealed, family secrets exposed.
These are the first Confessions.
This is our last chance.

LLIAM is the world’s most powerful supercomputer, built to make the toughest decisions for its users. Where to work, who to marry, and even who should live or die. But when LLIAM suddenly goes offline with no explanation, the world is thrust into chaos, paralyzed by indecision. Stocks plummet, stores are shuttered, planes sit grounded on runways as humanity scrambles to re-adapt to an uncertain, analog world.

Then the first letters arrive…on every continent, in every language, mysterious envelopes arrive in the mail, exposing people’s darkest secrets, and most shocking crimes. All beginning with the same chilling “We must confess.”

With millions of people suddenly made to confront their past transgressions, and society fast unraveling, CEO Kaitlan Goss must track down the only person who can help undo the resulting violent Maud Brookes, an ex-nun who taught LLIAM what it means to be human.

But when Maud receives a letter herself, revealing Kaitlan’s own unforgivable sin, the two women are forced into a deadly game of deceit as the world teeters on the brink.

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

My Review: I'm not 100% clear on the principle of LLIAM running things, then crashing, and as a consequence of crashing, all the ugly little secrets LLIAM knows being revealed, being presented as "confessions." How so? A confession is something one makes, offers, is corced into offering. This isn't what happens in this story. It comes from outside.

Okay, I've whined about it, and this explains my not-perfect rating.

The rest is all "go" and a wild-ass ride it is. What a weird idea and how fully I buy into the social chaos this event sows. It's a seriously unnerving idea that explores what we do not want to look at: The machine already knows literally everything about is. We're wrapped in a cocoon of denial about it, but one day the inevitable cocoon-rupture will occur. What will happen then?

By following several PoVs, Author Carr affords us the chance to form an overview of social and societal chaos as information reorders the attention economy. I think, if anything, he goes easy on us, but there's very good reason to pull back. It can feel over the top as it is; but there's a top to go over in storytelling, not in reality.

I am not always impressed with the turns of phrase in the story, and above I've expressed my main reservation; but what I hope you'll understand is these aren't pleasure-killers. This is a near-future tech thriller that is well-conceived to get and keep you hooked with its openness to examine the *reasons* this specific story could, and might, occur.

I agree with every one of the publisher's comps. The idea is one I can imagine Crouch or my insta-buy SF author, Adam Roberts...he wrote this in his novel Jack Glass, and it seems to me relevant to this story:

“Do you know where the past and the present intersect?" Jac asked him.

"Where?"

"In your mind, only. It's the only point. Otherwise, the past is further away than the furthest galaxy. We know it, intuitively, because we understand the irrevocability of past action, and sometimes that makes us sad." He looked into Gordius's face, trying to read his expression, but the fellow wouldn't make eye-contact with him. "But it ought not to make us sad. Another name for that irrevocable gap between past and present is—freedom.”

It's a fascinating story, proving again that no tool is not also a weapon. The use of the past as a weapon in the future is never a tired trope since it is the basis of all relationships.

This is the kind of read I seek out to keep my mind from hardening into only one solid shape.

LIGHTFALL, starting a fantasy series featuring interestingly different vampires

LIGHTFALL (The Everlands Trilogy #1)
ED CROCKER
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An epic fantasy of vampires, werewolves and sorcerers, Lightfall is the debut novel of Ed Crocker, for fans of Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire and Richard Swan’s The Justice of Kings.

No humans here. Just immortals: their politics, their feuds—and their long buried secrets.

For centuries, vampires freely roamed the land until the Grays came out of nowhere, wiping out half the population in a night. The survivors fled to the last vampire city of First Light, where the rules are simple. If you’re poor, you drink weak blood. If you’re nobility, you get the good stuff. And you can never, ever leave.

Palace maid Sam has had enough of these rules, and she’s definitely had enough of cleaning the bedpans of the lords who enforce them. When the son of the city’s ruler is murdered and she finds the only clue to his death, she seizes the chance to blackmail her way into a better class and better blood. She falls in with the Leeches, a group of rebel maids who rein in the worst of the Lords. Soon she’s in league with a sorcerer whose deductive skills make up for his lack of magic, a deadly werewolf assassin and a countess who knows a city’s worth of secrets.

There’s just one problem. What began as a murder investigation has uncovered a vast conspiracy by the ruling elite, and now Sam must find the truth before she becomes another victim. If she can avoid getting murdered, she might just live forever.

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

My Review: Vampires without humans to prey on. An entire culture with interesting status systems and hierarchies, with clandestine power networks, with careful proscrpitions against naked greed. I who hate vampire stories salute you, Author Crocker, for using the creaky, worn-out leather of the ill-fitting shoes in a new way.

What works best for me is the alternating first-person PoV narration. It really gives Author Crocker's chops at atmospheric detail presentation a showcase. I wasn't surprised that this meant the book's very dialogue-heavy as a result. The details are there, but spoken. I was probably able to ignore my general vampire weariness because it's used as a quite effective anti-capitalist metaphor, for which *chef's kiss* Author Crocker. I presume his lifelong Mancunian residence coupled with his heritage there has inflected this attitude. Works for me. Sam's plucky working-class girl attitude was also deployed well as a lens through which she sees the world of First Light. We are not trapped in the C-suite, or the scullery, by Author Crocker's use of this round-robin of PoVs.

It felt to me as though the choice of vampires as the baddies was fairly...predictable, and the use of immortality as a placeholder for generational wealth was the driver of the choice. It works; it's got the virtue of clarity and immediate familiarity, but does not add to the novelty of the western-fantasy tropes of ruling elite skulduggery due to greed. There are werewolves and sorcerers in the mix as well, used for violence and for their dark-academia stranglehold on knowledge. These are all expected in a fantasy story. It made the reason there are no humans left in this world a very oddly remote-feeling bit of lore, not a visceral development of plot.

Not that it necessarily needed to be. It's been a long time since there were humans in this storyverse. I mention it because it is part of my larger sense of mild dissatisfaction with the story as told. That skulduggery I mentioned is all wrapped in the same sense of characters discussing things, not things happening. While puzzle-solving, such as Sam's efforts to fix blame for Lord Azzuri's son Red's murder, are best handled this way, it can become less effective when it is the central narrative strategy. It requires the occasional "as you know, Bob," trap to be fallen into. Sometimes the passive voice is necessary, but it always feels to me like a stage magician's patter...too obviously hiding something.

These are my crotchets and concerns. I'm not the world's most voracious fantasy-novel consumer. I'm at best a dilettante, so I could easily be very out-of-step with the main currents in the genre. I'll say that I did NOT like Jay Kristoff's series, and I did like this book, and I'll read the next one. Why, you ask, when I've just been moaning about so much of it? Because its real-world resonances resonate with me, because it is a well-thought-through world so easy to invest in, because the political/intrigue/conspiracy bits are very much my jam at this moment in history. I'll single out the mapmaker of the book for some appreciative praise: Including the map was a good call, and the way it's presented is excellent. It's a story I feel speaks of and in our historical passage. Because, most importantly of all, I liked the experience of reading it even while I saw its imperfections.

A bit like meeting someone special you can see yourself falling in love with, just not this very minute.