30. "We are not alone."
Project Hail Mary, April new releases, a podcast appearance, and what I'm reading
Dear reader,
I’ve suppressed a strong urge to title this issue “Amaze Amaze Amaze” (if you know you know; if you don’t, well, I’m about to tell you in a bit so keep reading).
It’s no secret that I’m a nerd—if this is news to you, you must be either new here or I can clearly afford to display said nerdiness even more—and I love nothing more than learning about all sorts of things, especially new knowledge about something or someone I already know about. Earlier this month, I started reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in earnest, instead of random dips in and out like in the past. Before I even started the actual book, I read a very interesting fact in the publisher notes and wondered how I’d never come across it before: Hogarth Press, now a Penguin Random House imprint after quite a few homes along the way, was originally founded as an independent company in 1917 by none other than Virginia and her husband Leonard! It was named after their Richmond house, with the initial books being printed on a small hand press in their dining room.
How cool is that! I was inordinately excited about discovering this, and of course had to share 🤓. If something’s excited you this much recently, let me know below!
Unrelated but equally exciting is the news that Count d’Artagnan’s remains are believed to have been found under the floor of St Peter and Paul Church in Maastricht, more than 350 years after his death during the Siege of Maastricht! My fellow Three Musketeer fans, where are you? Here’s more information: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2rew2dgzzo. I’ve been wanting to revisit this book as an adult, so maybe the time’s sooner than later.
Critical Friends Episode 22: Romancing the Genre
A few weeks ago, Dan Hartland, the reviews editor at Strange Horizons, asked me whether I’d like to be on the next episode of their SFF criticism podcast. It was to be a discussion of romance and romantasy along with blogger and podcaster Jenny Hamilton (you can find her on Bluesky, at her blog Reading the End, and in various publications such as Booklist, Reactor, Lady Business, and others). I said yes, but was nervous since this was my first experience recording something like this, where it wasn’t just a chat about me and my work, or, you know, Arsenal and football! I needn’t have worried because both Dan and Jenny, the pros that they are (not to mention very lovely humans), almost immediately put me at ease. You’ll have to have a listen to decide how I did, but I certainly had fun! And it was great to be part of such a pertinent and necessary conversation.
It went live at the start of the week and you can listen to it in full here (there’s also a whole transcript, if you’re not big on podcasts). Let us know what you thought, and please share any insights or comments you might have to contribute to the discussion: https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/podcasts/critical-friends-episode-22-romancing-the-genre
New releases: April edition
I wanted to include these in the previous issue towards the end of March but it was already very long, so you some of my anticipated April releases 11 days into the month. As usual, all descriptions are excerpted from the publisher’s blurbs.
(Since I have already extensively talked about India Holton’s The Antiquarian’s Object of Desire in a previous issue, I’m not going to include that in the list below, but it is also an April release.)
Guilt by Keigo Higashino
Homicide Detective Godai of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department is assigned to investigate the death of a lawyer, Kensuke Shiraishi, whose body was found on a Central Tokyo riverbank. His investigations leads him to one Tatsuro Kuraki, who claims to have had limited contact with Shiraishi—but, surprising the investigators, Kuraki not only confesses to the lawyer’s murder, but another one from thirty years ago—for which another man was arrested and died in custody before trial. This brings unexpected resolution to two cases but there is one problem: to Detective Godai the confession rings false.
And Godai is not the only one who cannot accept Kuraki’s explanation of both murders and his professed motives. The confessed murderer’s son and the victim’s daughter both feel strongly that both the act and the motive claimed are untrue.
As Godai investigates further, he discovers that the relation between the murder of thirty years ago and the recent one is complex, raising multi-faceted questions of guilt and innocence.
Honey in the Wound by Jiyoung Han
A sister disappears and returns as a tiger. A mother’s voice compels the truth from any tongue. A granddaughter divines secrets in others’ dreams. These women are all of one lineage—a Korean family split across decades and borders by Japanese imperialism.
At this saga’s heart is Young-Ja, a girl who infuses food with her emotions. She revels in her gift for cooking, nourishing the people she loves with her cheerfulness. But her sunny childhood comes to an end in 1931 when Japanese soldiers crush her family’s defiance against the Empire. Young-Ja is cast adrift, her food turning increasingly bitter with grief. When a Korean rebel fighter notices her talents, however, she is whisked off to Manchuria to join a secretive sisterhood of beautiful teahouse spies. There, Young-Ja finds a new sense of belonging and starts using her abilities for the resistance. But the Imperial Army is not yet finished with her…
Decades later, Young-Ja lives alone in Seoul, withdrawn from the world until her Tokyo-born granddaughter Rinako bursts into her life with the ability to see into dreams. In cultivating a tentative bond, they confront the long-buried past in a stunning emotional climax.
Love & Other Monsters by Emily Franklin
In the bizarrely cold, scandalous summer of 1816, a group of famous young writers gathered at a mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Brilliant Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her fiery fiancé Percy Shelley, the famously promiscuous Lord Byron, and John Polidori, his sexually tormented personal physician all sheltered together during the storms of what would become known as The Year Without Summer. But they were not alone. Claire Clairmont, Mary’s impressionable, clever, and dangerously loyal step-sister joined them. That summer of desire, betrayal, and creative passion gave the world the works of Frankenstein, the modern vampire legend, and the mythic image of these Romantic literary giants.
When a global climate catastrophe wreaks havoc, Claire tries to separate from Mary and Percy Shelley, finding strength in her individuality. Yet Claire is also caught up in romance, fueled by Jane Austen’s novels, as she pursues Lord Byron whose celebrity status—and the paparazzi lurking nearby—threatens them all. As the connections between each member of the group grow more complex, Claire tries to find purpose in a world built by and created for men.
While those around her write what will become some of the most famous works in literature, Claire must ask herself just how far she will go for love. With dramatic weather threatening the food supply, Claire proves her worth by learning to forage for food, all the while documenting everything in her journal. As the summer progresses, passions rise and secrets refuse to stay hidden in Claire’s pages.
Love & Other Monsters offers a deep look into the loyalty of siblings, the commitment required to make meaningful art, the dangers of fame, and the creation of monsters—both those on the page and those who walk among us.
Claire Clairmont poured her love, life and razor-sharp wit into the pages of her now-missing journal, a document which everyone present had reason to destroy in order to protect themselves. Now Claire, all but forgotten in her famous sister’s shadow, will tell her story.
If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Cho-yeop
In If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, Korean science fiction superstar Kim Cho-yeop leads us to places we never thought we’d reach, imagining worlds galaxies away and unfamiliar lifeforms with near-dizzying humanity.
An elderly woman stranded in a defunct space station recounts her life story to a visitor as she waits for a vessel that may never arrive. A man comes across a company called Emotional Solids that sells emotions as material products—love as a piece of chocolate, sadness as a smooth stone, anger as a glass paperweight—and tries to understand why people would want to purchase any negative emotions. When an enigmatic artist reveals long-forgotten messages from beyond through her wildly original paintings portraying a planet from a time long before humanity formed, a team of researchers investigate if this planet truly existed and if so, how did this artist know of it? After a pregnant woman’s estranged mother dies suddenly, her avatar disappears from the library of lost souls where the digital minds of the deceased are stored—and the woman is forced, for the first time, to endeavor to understand her mother. In a future utopian society where gene selection has been made uniform and all those with imperfections are cast aside, one woman seeks the truth about the history of her isolated world. And when a young woman undertakes a never-before-accomplished journey through a wormhole, she must reckon with the legacy of her aunt, who vanished mysteriously days before she was meant to begin the same pilgrimage.
A River from the Sky by Ai Jiang (a follow-up to A Palace Near the Wind)
Fleeing from the Palace and crashing into the waters below its steep walls, Lufeng and her siblings reach Gear, with its huge deadly water wheels, where their sister Sangshu is waiting for them. In the chaos of the enormous waves, within moments they're snatched away and taken into rebel territory, where they learn more of the deadly experiments Zinc has wreaked upon the people.
Loyal to Copper now, Sangshu herself is a victim of Zinc's experiments. Desperate to find her family, she races through Gear to Engine, ruthless Zinc's industrial heartland, where she burns with a desire to fix her own mistakes and those of others and find a way to save her world.
This powerful, beautifully told novella explores the bonds of family, the pain of leaving all you have known behind, and the terrible price of our industrial future.
And now, a return to my “Amaze Amaze Amaze” comment at the start of today’s issue. If you’ve watched Project Hail Mary already, you’ll know all about it, and about Rocky and Dr. Ryland Grace. I finally watched it earlier this week and was reminded exactly why I love watching movies at the cinema on a big (in this case the IMAX) screen. It’s a feeling I’ve not had since the most recent Spiderverse movie and I didn’t realise I was missing it so. I decided not to read the book before, letting the story surprise (and, as it turns out, delight and move) me, and it’s a decision I stand by, because, having not even watched the trailer, I was able to go into the movie completely blind, and enjoy it on its own merit. Shoutout to my friend Lia for being the final convincing factor that I didn’t need to read the book to love the movie ❤️.
So, if you’ve not watched it yet, you must! Yes, even if you don’t consider yourself a “sci-fi kind of person”.
This is part-space-adventure, part-bromance, part-comedy, part-earnestly-heartfelt-feel-good-comfort-watch, part-cosmic-contemplation—though I did scoff at all the nations getting along as well as they did to tackle the existential threat in front of them, I’m not going to lie—and Ryan Gosling embraces a role meant for his exact skill set (I feel like we say this a lot; man has range, that’s what it is). This is also gorgeously shot, with a wonderful score to match. I’ve had the soundtrack on in the background of my work this week.
That said, I definitely want to get to the book at some point, but, having read fan opinions from all parts of the adaptation spectrum, I think I may choose to treat it as a separate entity.
I will also say that watching it while the crew of Artemis II were on their historic mission, and in the same week that they made a safe return, added to the whole experience, and my vibe and mood at the moment is very space-y. On the same day I went to the theatre, I also finished reading The Radiant Dark by Alexandra Oliva, which follows a family over half a century against the backdrop of first contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation. Bringing me to what I’ve been reading since we last met here.
What I’m reading
I’ve read three books so far this month and while one was a standout, the others had enough in them for me to enjoy.
This is book 11 of her Wayward Children series and one that I had been looking forward to because of the return of Nancy, whom I’d enjoyed getting to know in the very first book. The Halls of the Dead that Nancy calls her home are in danger, and her Lord and Lady can’t do anything to stop the malice, so she returns to her old school in our world and a quest is born. I’m going to be honest that I was left rather disappointed, though it was lovely to be reunited with other old favourites (minus one) along with Nancy. I’ve not read all the novellas yet (many of these can be read in any order, in any case), but I feel like the author’s running out of ideas here.
Next up was my ARC of Alexandra Oliva’s The Radiant Dark, my first experience with the author. The synopsis had caught my eye, which is why I’d requested it.
It is 1980 and Carol Girard is a new mother, her son Michael born weeks prematurely, and she doesn’t know she's already in the throes of severe postpartum depression. She lives with her husband Jake (who works in construction) in a small town in the Adirondack Mountains. Her younger sister lives in New York, her struggling alcoholic father is still local, and her mother died from cancer when Carol was in high school.
On the day her son was supposed to be born, Earth receives first contact from what will soon be dubbed Ross 128.
Set against the backdrop of this knowledge that we’re not alone, this is a multi-generational family story spanning half a century from 1980 to 1993, 1998, 2005, 2018, 2020, 2034, and an epilogue in 2138. A majority of the narrative centers Carol and, later, her daughter Ro, and the increasingly strained relationship between mother and daughter, but there is also quite a bit of Michael once the siblings are adults.
Humans looking up at the sky and wondering not just about what and how but also who have existed as long as we have. How does first contact impact civilisation, history, as well as culture, but also our daily lives, our relationships, hopes, and dreams? I appreciated it being used as a narrative device, along with the balance the author tries to maintain between the cosmic and the personal (a character aptly calls it “everyday mundanity under the umbrella of wonder”), something she manages more often than she can’t.
The inciting event affects and shapes each character in different ways and continues to reverberate throughout their lives and their choices, their traumas, and how they choose to deal with it all: Carol’s search for meaning, Michael’s need to find earthly grounding, Ro’s itch for the expansive that leads her to a world-changing interstellar career.
The pacing was slower, especially in the middle, and I felt the story dragged then, but on the whole there was a compelling texture to Oliva’s writing that made this hard to put down and easy to return to, even when reading it felt at times like saturation. The characters, even if often unlikeable and sometimes downright toxic, were well-etched. The ending felt lacking, but I don’t regret reading this, and it’s a lit fic/sci-fi blending that leans more towards the former that will appeal to many.
I started Ode to the Half-Broken simultaneously with The Radiant Dark, another ARC I’d requested because of the synopsis (though I must admit that while for the latter it was the title that first led me to clicking on it, for the former it was the gorgeous cover by…).
Wow, this book.
It starts off very slow and remains so for the first third. I nearly gave up, but I’m so glad I didn’t. For me the investment into the early parts of this story, its world building, and the first-person narrative voice of an old retired war mech, with a parallel set of third-person flashbacks, was worth the payoff in the following two-thirds. I feel like this is either something you’re going to vibe with or not. When I started reading this, I didn’t know what camp I’d fall into, but now I know!
A robot, unnamed when we first encounter them, lives an isolated existence in the grounds of the former New York Botanical Gardens. They have no interest in the outside world, nor what happened since they stepped away from the end of the world decades ago. But someone out there is intent in not only luring them out but finishing the job they were created for.
This was marketed as cozy and hopeful sci-fi, and while it is certainly, especially, the latter of the two adjectives, and you were sure that the protagonists would survive, the stakes were plentiful, the mystery reeled us in (even if I figured some revelations out before), and you weren’t sure what meaningful sacrifices were necessary for that promised survival. This was also the story of one robot’s reconciliation with all parts of themselves, of learning to live with past regrets and the grief that’s an inevitable part of any existence. An unexpected motley found family with their own emotional and personal arcs, is a delightful source of warmth, humour, and belonging for all members involved, and that includes us readers.
Once the story gained momentum, I couldn’t put it down but also didn’t want it to end. The more philosophical parts of the narrative intersected really well with the action—what does it mean to be sentient while being denied selfhood; discovering agency is but the first step towards a true sense of self, how does choosing a purpose of your own free will even look like; how can we, whether human, hybrid, or mecha, work to be whole in a world that itself is broken and fragmented; how can we mend the fractures and envision a better future, together?
Ode to the Half-Broken is a story I didn’t know I needed, yet it found me, and at the right time. Don’t you love when that happens?
From the archives
Some summer travel inspiration.
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Stay well and see you back here on April 26!
Anu
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