I really wanted to like this more. But then again, I really wanted it to do more. It's a classic setup for a Faustian cautionary tale about making bargains you shouldn't, but instead it's just a male-slanted Cyrano comedy with a gag ending (the only way I can explain is to write a book about it, which this book is).

There are so many more interesting plots that could start with "teenager allows a black-market AI to have an outpost in their head". The AI didn't even turn out to be evil, just amoral and imperfect. It was perfectly happy to tell its host how to kill it once it was no longer useful for helping him get with "target females".

It's not social science fiction, it's just a 1980s sex comedy with a light cyberspace overlay. Only I can't imagine William Gibson ever imagining anything so flimsy.

An interesting take on what Isaac Asimov called psychohistory—the idea that you could predict things in a rather general sense by using mathematics.

Although the narrator’s views of gender are knuckle-dragging, there’s an amusing anecdote:

“Transvestism by draft dodgers had at last resulted in a mass arrest in Chicago which was to have ended in a giant joint trial—only to have the deputy prosecutor show up in a pinafore and defy the judge to submit to an examination to determine the judge’s true sex. The judge suffered a stroke and died and the trial was postponed—postponed forever, in Breen’s opinion; he doubted that this particular blue law would ever again be enforced.”

Sure, it was intended to show how world-endingly topsy-turvy everything had become, but that was a funny story. The overall story, however, was rather bleak in the end.

Hope and doubt coexist in beautiful tension in Victories Greater Than Death. The universe provides bountiful reasons to doubt that things will turn out okay, especially for young marginalized people, and especially when there are powerful interstellar bad guys doing their thing. Despite those doubts, the people at the heart of this story keep coming back to hope: that we can do something about injustice, that people who want a loving relationship might actually build one, that we can make it through all this together. (And doubt plays an important role here, too: not only is it literally sacred to some people, it’s essential for interrogating baseless hate in one’s own head.)

Part of the joy of reading space opera is witnessing what Star Trek called “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”. Victories Greater Than Death not only has a diverse cast, but poses incisive questions about why infinitely diverse bodies are so often represented as humanoid. The universal translator gadget, EverySpeak, supplies the correct pronouns for everyone introducing themselves, with a few thoughtful and interesting exceptions. And the relationship dynamics of some species flip the script on human norms, with a member of a three-gendered species looking at two-person relationships the way humans once looked at one-gender relationships. The geneticist J. B. S. Haldane might as well have been speaking of Victories Greater Than Death when he supposed that “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” In other YA novels, the protagonist’s best friend being autistic-coded might be all the diversity you get, but here it could almost fade into the background of a grander panorama.

There are also delightfully familiar touches sprinkled throughout: a gag that reminded me of Angel; a trope I first saw in The Last Starfighter; and plenty of terms from the science fiction of yore. But the density of pop-culture references never exceeds 0.01 Clines (and they’re oblique enough that unfamiliar readers won’t notice), so they decorate the story without distracting from it.

Finally, I need to laud the author for having invented perhaps the most appalling bad-guy superpower I’ve ever seen. I won’t spoil it, but my gosh, the reveal took my breath away.

I am grateful to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for a free advance review copy.

Really cute! I put myself at a disadvantage because I haven't learned enough about Indian/Indian-American culture, but the author graciously bridged my knowledge gap. The techie culture also seems spot-on to me, and the story was charming and entertaining. It's only slightly more spicy than a teen novel by Judy Blume, but there's still enough to make a teen reader blush if a parent were looking over their shoulder.

A promising overview of the overlapping but distinct practices and aims of social work and librarianship, and a guide to several kinds of partnerships that might involve social workers (or student interns) in libraries, mostly public libraries.

What might work best for your environment is highly dependent on the individual aspects of your situation, of course, but this is an excellent primer for any professional who’s thinking about a project like this.