Every so often I need to dip into philosophy, mix in some math, and sprinkle on some science. Give me that interdisciplinary trip, please and thank you! Proof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty, by Adam Kucharski, seemed like just what Dr. Kara ordered for herself. Indeed, it’s illuminating enough, though it has a few flaws that prevented me from enjoying it more. I received an eARC from NetGalley and publisher Basic Books in exchange for a review.

Beginning with ancient mathematics, Proof is basically a subset of epistemology writ large, seeking to answer not “how do we know what we know?” but “how do we know what we know is what is?” But it doesn’t stop with math: Kucharski takes us from math to law, medicine, and society at large. This is what makes the book so fascinating and relevant, I think. Given the rise of misinformation or junk data, which Proof touches on, it’s more important now than ever to be able to evaluate what we should or should not believe—and to remember we can’t always trust our senses.

While there is plenty in this book I knew already, I also learned a lot. Kucharski has a great talent for diving deep into a subject and then only extracting the parts he wants to show the reader, like a diver who knows exactly how to pluck the best pearl or lobster and bring it up to the surface for onlookers. He doesn’t make you go down the rabbit hole with him, and that’s awesome. Proof is quite readable in that way despite its interdisciplinary nature.

Where it stumbles, in my opinion, is honestly the editing. As a copyeditor (mind you, that’s different from structural, or developmental, editing), I’m loath to criticize my own, but … Kucharski, my guy, someone needed to tell you no more often. Or maybe you needed to listen. See, Proof’s chapters are long. Like, I would hit a new chapter (and this is one of those rare eARCs that were actually formatted as ebooks rather than converted PDFs, woohoo, so my ereader detected chapters), and my ereader would be like, “This chapter will take twenty minutes to read,” and I was like, “Um, what?” because, look, I am no slouch in the speed department, so my ereader knows how fast I read. Sure enough, however … yeah, those chapters are long. Because Kucharski likes to digress, likes to ramble, likes to pack in as much as he can, and it seems like not a single person cared enough to stop him! Moreover, the chapters lack sProof: The Uncertain Science of Certaintytrong organizational structures, such as stories linked to individuals or any sense of narrative.

The result is a paradox of a book: the information is interesting, yet the writing is dull and ponderous. It’s a great example of why science and science communication are two different fields of study, and why being good at one doesn’t make you good at the other. Kucharski clearly knows his stuff, yet his storytelling skills aren’t a match, and it shows.

Proof is fascinating in its own way, and you would probably learn a lot if you picked up this book. But it’s not going to be one that sticks around for me.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., this book is not. I didn’t make this comparison—the book’s promo does, along with comps to Neil Gaiman (booooo, by the way), Douglas Adams, and Terry Pratchett. Indeed, when you see a book compared to so many heavy hitters, you should probably increase your skepticism rather than you hype. Acts of God is an inchoate mess of a novel, though I rather suspect Kanan Gill might welcome such an excoriating statement, and he or his publicists are welcome to blurb me on his next book. I received an eARC from NetGalley and publisher Blackstone in exchange for a review.

Acts of God follows two parallel, connected stories. In one universe, P. Manjunath is a private investigator on the trail of a globe-spanning mystery. However, it turns out his universe is just a simulation that exists within the universe of Dr. Krishna, who has been simulating Manjunath’s universe illegally. Krishna lives in an absurdist, almost Kafka-esque dystopia built on a principle of absolute transparency, which of course Krishna has violated. Both stories are narrated by a fourth-wall-breaking sentient wall tile.

Look, on the surface, I should love this. I love Vonnegut and Adams and Pratchett. I enjoy absurdist humour and metafictional commentary. The simulation hypothesis can occasionally be done well.

To Gill’s credit, as a work of science fiction, Acts of God is pretty good! There’s some trenchant commentary about AI, the meaning of life, culture, etc., buried deep within this trainwreck of a plot. The simulation hypothesis physics is explained fairly well. The whole society of nuclear winter refugees is interesting.

However, in his attempt to make this book into a weird kind of romp, Gill has done the literary equivalent of throwing a bunch of paint at a canvas and hoping the result is a masterpiece. Sometimes it is! Sometimes—most of the time—it’s just a mess. Pratchett’s secret lay in his deeply compassionate characterization: even the most minor characters, for him, were people who had these full, reified lives, even if we never saw them. Most of Gill’s characters barely have names—and that is fine, not every character has to be fully realized. But, you know, at least give us more backstory for people like P. Manjunath? Or his assistant?

Vonnegut wrote from a place of trauma—“Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time” is a great opening line, and it also signifies Slaughterhouse-Five’s abiding allegory for PTSD. I can see how Gill might be attempting to follow in these footsteps in Acts of God, where Krishna is grieving and processing the death of a colleague who was, in many ways, the closest thing he had to a friend. Yet the reader has very little to ground themselves in here, for the society Gill describes is so foreign it might as well be alien—and there is nothing, nobody around, not even the wall tile, who can really interpret for us the way, say, Arthur Dent can do in Hitchhiker’s Guide.

I want to bring one more author into the chat: Samuel R. Delany. Because he’s also great at writing weird science fiction and fantasy, and his stories are often set in societies far different from our own. Nevertheless, he grounds his characters in the real—it’s just the real for them—in a way that allows readers to grasp the fundamentals. (Except for Dhalgren, of course, because that’s just … pfft. James Joyce wishes.)

Anyway, if I’ve spent most of this review talking about other authors, it’s just because Acts of God didn’t leave enough of an impression for me to critique it very deeply. I don’t want to be harsh. Maybe my sense of humour has just contracted over the past decade. Maybe this is a hilarious book that have many doubled over with laughter! If so, that’s fantastic. But it absolutely did not work for me. Much respect to Gill for swinging big and writing a story that is very much his own, but in this reader’s humble opinion, he has a long way to go.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Hate to DNF an eARC (from NetGalley and publisher University of Chicago Press), but I just cannot with Battle of the Big Bang. It’s written like a fever dream of a science book, and on every page I was left asking, who is this book for?

Niayesh Afshordi is a cosmologist; Phil Halper is a science comms YouTuber. Together, they’ve teamed up to write a tour of cosmology. They trace the various theories of the origins of the universe, from steady-state to the different Big Bang theories out there. Then the book gets down to the fine details of what cosmologists are battling about today: inflation, spontaneous genesis from nothing, branes, etc. Some of it is stuff I had heard or read about before, though perhaps not in years. Some of it is brand new, and it’s a shame I didn’t finish the book, because I really was interested.

First, a small disclaimer: I was reading this on my Kindle, and it was converted from a PDF galley. Somehow the conversion wasn’t able to read any of the numerals present in the text, so all years and quantities were just … omitted (and quantities are kind of important in physics). Similarly, all ligatures with the letter “f” were gone. So … that made for an interesting read. Yet I persevered, for that is not the fault of the authors, and it’s not why I didn’t finish the book.

No, I DNFed this behemoth because I was a third of the way through the book and felt like I was spinning my wheels. Afshordi and Halper just have no sense of how to tell a story in prose—a complaint I recently levelled at Proof as well. Most popular science books, when they want to tell a story of a complex topic like cosmology, ground each chapter in a singular story, usually with a particular person as a main character. Afshordi and Halper seem to want to do this, but they can’t manage to find their narrative. Instead, they get bogged down in details and gossip and talking about multiple people at once—some of whom are still alive—such that Battle of the Big Bang feels like it’s inside baseball, meant for other physicists.

Similarly, this book is not for the faint of heart. The authors brag about there being no equations, but honestly, we need to dismantle that Hawking shibboleth already: please publish physics books with equations! I am fine with it. I am a mathematician. I get that this is a book from an academic press rather than a big publisher, so maybe it is meant for a more technical audience … in which case, though, why is this a book and not a peer-reviewed lit review paper?

That’s my main complaint. Battle of the Big Bang feels like it’s trying to be popular science when in reality it’s too technical and too much engrossed by insider gossip from the scientific community to be interesting or even comprehensible to lay readers. I now understand why most physicists don’t write popular science books.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Hmm, for some reason this review didn’t make it to StoryGraph. I reread this book in May 2025, but the review that follows is from 2018. My opinions remain largely the same, and I am giving myself a break on writing full reviews of rereads this year!

Original Review, 2018
Yes, um, hi, it’s been three years since I last read and reviewed a Laundry Files novel. It has been a long time since I bought a Charles Stross book. Don’t worry; I bought this book and the next one, so while I won’t be reading it right away, three years will not go by. I have a lot of catching up to do!

In The Apocalypse Codex, Bob Howard is back … and has to go to training courses because he is being groomed for middle management. Fortunately for our reader’s brains, we don’t have to sit through 300 pages of Bob networking with other British civil servants. Rather, Bob soon gets tapped by another Laundry higher-up to manage some “external assets”—a witch and her mercenary sidekick. They need to investigate an evangelical church that is a little too cult-like to be true—might the pastor actually be trying to summon a chthonic entity when he really means to resurrect Jesus? Of course he might. This is the Laundry Files.

TL;DR if you’ve read this series before and want to know how this one stacks up: it’s good. It’s really good. More mythology, new characters (Persephone and Johnny are cool; Lockhart is OK), new perspectives even, and an intense thriller plot. All the stuff you’ve come to expect, in spades.

This is also probably a great entry point into the series if you haven’t been following along and don’t feel like going back and reading the first three books. Bob brings you up to speed pretty quickly, and while there are obviously references (and spoilers for) earlier novels, this adventure really has Bob off on something quite new, and the ending sets him up for a kind of lateral move within the Laundry hierarchy that promises more interesting adventures going forward. As usual, Stross isn’t afraid to shake things up and move the overall arc of the series forward.

Getting into this particular book now: the first third kind of drags. It isn’t just the exposition to induct us into the world … it takes a while for Bob to get out into the field and do his thing and then for the shit to hit the fan. This is also the first time, if I recall correctly, that Bob narrates stuff in third person that he didn’t experience. That isn’t a big deal, but it is an interesting change. For the most part, I enjoyed Persephone and Johnny. They were competent ciphers of characters without being annoyingly smarmy or smug about it.

Surprisingly, my favourite aspect of the book was the antagonist. Without going deeply into spoilers, let’s just say that I really like the way Stross portrays Schiller’s faith. I think there are lots of interesting shades between con artists and true believers, and Stross sort of hits on the right balance to give us an antagonist who is clearly deluded and deceived yet strangely honest too.

I can’t help but notice some parallels between Bob and Schiller as well. Oh, not in the sense that I think Bob is going to start a cult aimed at waking the Sleeper in the Pyramid … but The Apocalypse Codex is ultimately about loyalty to those in your care. Schiller has a duty of care to his congregation, one that he egregiously violates in the name of his faith. Bob has a duty of care to his external assets—or at least feels like he does—and Stross uses multiple opportunities to hammer home his point that Bob’s loyalty is itself more of an asset than a liability.

I feel like, as Stross ramps us up towards CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN (when/if ever that arrives), he is having us think more critically about the structure of the Laundry. We learn more about its American counterpart, the so-called Black Chamber, here as well, and how it seems to be run by or at least associated with more supernatural creatures than the Laundry. Stross is laying a lot of groundwork that I have faith will pay off in later books.

Really, of course, if you’re coming to this book you’re probably coming for Stross’ effortless exposition and clever allusions. No one would accuse Stross of giving up an opportunity to infodump, and The Apocalypse Codex is not exception. It’s smart, and it knows it’s smart, in that annoying kind of way—but it’s also punchy, and a little bit sweet (especially the bits between Bob and Moe), so in my opinion, Stross can get away with it.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

The perfect trans YA novel does not exi—

 OK, it might be a stretch to call One of the Boys perfect. For one thing, there can be no One True Trans YA Novel because there is no One True Trans Experience, of course. What we need is a plethora of diverse experiences. But I have to say, considering I never played any sports in high school and know nothing about football and transitioned at thirty, somehow Victoria Zeller’s story of a trans girl in high school playing football hit me in a way I wasn’t expecting. Thanks to NetGalley and publisher Levine Querido for the eARC.

Grace Woodhouse has come out as trans over the summer before her senior year of high school. She thought that meant leaving football behind forever—but she was wrong. When her former teammates inveigle her into rejoining the team, Grace must discover if there is still room for her in this hypermasculine sport. At the same time, she’s navigating this whole “being a girl” thing while also processing a breakup and, oh yeah, she might be getting scouted for a college team? But no pressure.

Zeller’s writing just hits. Her style has a satisfying sufficiency to it, neither overly descriptive nor too sparse. And every so often, she says something that really resonated with me:

 

Chills down my spine as I read those words, which capture the complex emotions a lot of trans people feel no matter what age they transition. Living as your authentic self is its own kind of joy, and I am so immensely happy to have figured out who I am—yet that happiness will always be accompanied by the bittersweet wistfulness of wondering what I could have had if I had realized all of this sooner.

Now, I don’t know if Zeller’s writing will have the same power for cis readers. I can only speak to my experience of this book as a trans woman, of course. I hope it does. I hope cis people read this book and see our struggles, like when Grace’s ex dead names her accidentally in a conversation:

 

This is the perfect simile, and this moment is a perfect example of the grace (pun intended) we trans people are expected to display in the face of microaggressions like this. And this is an example where the microaggression was accidental—Grace and her ex are on good terms! Yet it happens, and even when you know there is no malice behind it, it’s painful.

 All of this happens against the larger backdrop of how Grace’s team, friends, and school handle her transition. One thing I really love? The unremarkable acceptance, for the most part, of Grace and her transness. In the current political climate, it’s tempting to succumb to the idea that everyone is openly hostile to trans people. The reality, which Zeller ably captures here, is that most people … don’t care. They will use your correct name and pronouns and accommodate you even if they don’t quite accept or (as is the case with some of Grace’s teammates, at least at first) don’t understand. The hardcore transphobes are loud and shitty, but they are a minority.

Indeed, although Grace’s transness obviously runs through every page of this book, it isn’t the main source of conflict. That comes from her relationships, as it should. Grace’s return to football, which consumes a lot of her time, strains her newfound female friendships that have been a source of strength and solace. Similarly, Grace’s ambivalence about pursuing a college football career, while connected to the celebrity conveyed by her status as a trans athlete, is ultimately about something much deeper: her relationship to the game.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to any readers that Zeller is writing this during a time of intense scrutiny of trans people (especially trans women) in sports. (I recently reviewed Fair Play, by Katie Barnes, if you want a primer.) One of the Boys sidesteps some of these issues by Grace playing in a sport that is, while nominally co-ed, effectively a boys sport. If Grace were instead joining Riley on the girls soccer team, that would be a different set of challenges. Nevertheless, she still faces undue scrutiny and notoriety. Yet it all comes down to feelings, or as Grace and her teammates call it, feelingsball.

Everything I know about football comes from my repeated viewings of Remember the Titans. That was a movie, which had swelling music by Trevor Rabin and lots of visual cues to convey tension and get the audience invested in the pivotal games. Zeller has to do that all with words … and, incredibly, she succeeds. I learned more about kicking than I ever knew. More importantly, I actually have a better understanding now of the kind of camaraderie and investment that young men put into football. This belies the stereotypical views I have held about football since long before I realized I wasn’t a man. Yes, Zeller’s depiction showcases the more toxic, overly macho aspects of the game too—but it goes deeper than that. She makes a strong case for why Grace would want to continue playing well into college.

This makes the ending even more poignant. I love the ending of One of the Boys—all of it. Everything, from Grace’s decision about college to her relationship status to some of the developments with minor characters. Zeller avoids trite, contrived resolutions in favour of decisions that make sense for her characters and also show promising maturity. Some of these resolutions are very happy, others feel bittersweet—thus perfectly capturing the tumultuous nature of this time in one’s life. High school graduation marks a time of transition (pun intended) for all of us. We all have to decide what parts of ourself to keep and what parts to leave behind.

This novel is not perfect. I wish we had seen more of Grace’s dad, for example, and how he was advocating for his daughter. The whole kerfuffle around the podcast and the resulting protest action, while very realistic, felt really compressed for time. Yet these are minor quibbles.

I want this book to be a movie so bad.

One of the Boys made me laugh and made me cry. Whether we’re talking sports stories, trans stories, or high school stories, by any measure this novel is excellent and one of the best I have read this year.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Nuclear war is … bad. That’s a premise on which most of us can agree. However, for the past eighty years, nuclear war has been possible and—at various times, including this past week as I write this review (looking at you, India and Pakistan)—more or less likely. In Six Minutes to Winter, Mark Lynas catalogues the potential scope and consequences of nuclear war—including the dreaded but much-misunderstood nuclear winter—and then makes a passionate plea for supporting the cause of nuclear disarmament. Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for the eARC in exchange for a review.

In the first chapters, Lynas basically games out what would happen if two countries attacked each other with nuclear missiles. He goes over the literal global implications, from the estimated death tolls around the world to the difficulty of avoiding retaliation if a system mistakes a malfunction for a real first strike. However, one important detail looms large in these chapters: the spectre of nuclear winter.

Lynas spends a lot of time on nuclear winter, and for good reason. Portrayed in numerous movies, TV https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7579022854shows, and books, this phenomenon has often been misunderstood or misexplained. To help his audience fully comprehend how devastating nuclear winter would be to human civilization and life as we know it, he takes us through a whistle-top tour of Earth’s biohistory. He covers previous mass extinctions and connects nuclear winter with climate change (which is really what it is a form of) to demonstrate that this is definitely something we do not want and could not, reasonably, expect to survive in any meaningful sense as a species of consequence.

From there, Lynas segues into showcasing more of the individual human toll of nuclear war. For this he leans on first- and secondhand interviews with survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He tells us their stories and emphasizes all the myriad ways nuclear strikes can not just kill people but cause lifelong and indeed intergenerational trauma.

Finally, the last part of the book becomes a manifesto: nuclear war must be prevented at all costs, and only we (Smokey the Bear says) can stop nuclear forest fires. Lynas is quite vehement in his rhetoric here, arguing that this is the overriding issue of the time and that nothing should be allowed to get in the way of a unified movement for disarmament. In that last, he’s taking shots at progressive moments that have become mired in infighting over things like terminology—Lynas blames both the woke and anti-woke crowds, seemingly equally, at derailing disarmament.

It took me quite a while to read Six Minutes to Winter—I actually started other books alongside it, something I tend to avoid. First, this is just a dismal subject, something Lynas acknowledges readily. No one wants to think about nuclear war because we all feel powerless to do something about it. Second, though, this book is dry. Like technical dry. Though Lynas gets pretty fired up towards the end—a welcome sight—the first two-thirds of the book are difficult to get through, not just because of the subject matter but also because of how it is presented.

I appreciate Lynas’s insistence that resistance is the most rational reaction to the prospect of nuclear war. I might even agree with it. Yet I don’t think he’s going to succeed in disarming the irrational part of us with that approach. In the same way that yelling at people to fight against oil companies because climate change is an existential threat isn’t going to motivate them, neither will talking about the rational need to reduce nuclear weapon stockpiles. I don’t pretend to have a solution (other than perhaps the very awful prospect of another nuclear bombing of civilians in our lifetime to shock people into activism—something I of course do not advocate for). But like, as much as I agree with Lynas and would happily sign a petition advocating for disarmament, I would be lying if I said he’s galvanized me into going to a protest or organizing a local anti-nuke chapter of my own. So if that is the bar for success, this book is a failure.

That’s harsh though. There is a lot to appreciate about Six Minutes to Winter. It is meticulously researched. It is interesting albeit depressing. I learned a lot from it that I didn’t already know, even having read books like the much-cited Command and Control by Eric Schlosser. Anyone who is interested in international politics, warfare, and weaponry would do well to read this book. I’m just not convinced it will change hearts as well as minds … and that is a shame.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

The Tetris movie was an unexpected delight when I had three months free of Apple TV+. I had never heard of it before, and I was so skeptical going into it—yet it was a surprisingly solid movie. Part biopic, part historical drama, it somehow managed to sensationalize and lionize the bringing of Tetris from Russia to other markets. So when I heard Henk Rogers had decided to tell the story in his own words, of course I had to check it out. Thanks to Di Angelo Publications and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for a review.

This book is very much an autobiography and memoir. Though his discovery and scuffle over Tetris is a large part of it, Rogers takes us all the way back to his parents’ childhood and follows his life all the way to the present day. If you are thinking you can get out of hearing about his time in high school or his daddy issues, you are sorely mistaken. However, when you pay that price of admission, you receive a very detailed look at Rogers’ involvement in Tetris. As he himself notes, this book is not an attempt to discredit the movie (which his daughter helped produce) but rather tell the most accurate version—according to him—of the story.

It’s very clear Rogers wrote this book himself (as opposed to hiring a ghostwriter) because the prose is short and choppy and almost impressively unappealing. I mean this unironically as a compliment: it is endearing how little rhetorical flair Rogers possesses. If you come to The Perfect Game expecting perfect prose, then you will be disappointed. Rogers provides clinical descriptions and often repeats himself or overexplains something (the book could have been better edited). Yet it … works? Like I read this book over the span of two nights. I was into it.

You should also be prepared for a background level of machismo and racism of the entrepreneurial variety. To be fair to Rogers, he seems like a good guy (more on that later). He gives his wife a lot of credit for helping him run Bullet Proof Software. But he also clearly has some fixed ideas (informed, it seems by his bio-dad’s abandonment and his relationship with his adoptive father, an incorrigible entrepreneur himself) about what it means to be a man in the world of business. Similarly, despite—or likely because of—living in Japan for decades and marrying a Japanese woman, Rogers’s description of Japanese culture and work ethic is pretty flat and stereotypical. None of it is (from my fairly limited perspective as a white woman) super problematic or a red flag but rather more of a “OK, boomer” kind of energy.

I’m willing to give Rogers a pass on the above, quite honestly, because he clearly cares about a lot more than video games. After he moves his family to Hawai‘i, he talks about setting up the Blue Planet Foundation and how deeply he cares about fighting climate change. He describes the concrete change his foundation’s activism has led to in the state. That’s pretty cool. Granted, one must always take an author’s self-aggrandizement with a grain of salt—but I looked up his Wikipedia article (because this is about the extent of serious research I care to do at the moment), and I couldn’t find much that might gainsay his claims in this book.

So in this way, Rogers truly endeared himself to me over the three-hundred-some pages of The Perfect Game. I love that he and Alexei are still friends to this day. I love how he is simultaneously modest, downplaying some of his hard work and giving a lot of credit to others, while also giving himself credit when he chooses, like the ideas he contributed that became standard in most Tetris. Rogers clearly has a well-developed philosophy of life that he is happy to share here, and once again, all I can say, with no small amount of bemusement: it works.

The Perfect Game is, as I have noted, far from a perfect book. Yet is is well worth an afternoon or two of comfort nonfiction reading. It’s a great balance of informative, reflective, and just kind of fun. I love learning about video game history, especially because I feel like I grew up in this really fascinating liminal time (the nineties) when video games were neither old nor new. Tetris is only slightly older than me, yet I never understood its significance until recently. Thanks to Henk Rogers, I understand it a lot more now!

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Time travel, like any subgenre of science fiction, shifts in response to the anxieties of our time (pun intended). These days, a lot of time travel focuses less on visiting the past or fixing one’s personal past and more on the existential anxieties we have about where humanity is going. Travelers, a Brad Wright series on Netflix, capitalized on this idea quite expertly. Hive, by D.L. Orton, reminds me a lot of Travelers. Except in this novel, there isn’t an entire program of time travellers being sent by a quantum Director. There’s just one man: Diego. I received an eARC of this book in exchange for a review.

Diego and Isabel live in a biodome—are, in fact, the last two humans alive, to their knowledge. The dome’s systems are failing, murderous microdrones hunt for any weakness, and Isabel is dying. They determine they can make one last attempt to jump back in time, and Diego goes, risking it all to pass a message to his past self—and give him and Isabel a chance at happiness they could never have in this timeline.

Hive is apparently connected, in a multiversal way, to Orton’s previous trilogy, Between Two Evils, and the fourth book of this series will be the fourth book of that series too. I admire this ambitious scope and love it when authors take big swings like this. I’m given to understand it’s OK I haven’t read the previous trilogy but want to note that up front here so readers know where I’m coming from.

When it comes to books that are both science fiction and thrillers, especially set in the near future, I’ve noticed that they often fall flat for me. Lifers or The Third Rule of Time Travel are recent examples of this phenomenon. Initially, I chalked this up to the thriller side of the equation—I just don’t really enjoy this genre! Yet now I am wondering if it’s more so the science fiction that lets me down? (Both of those books have significant issues with characterization, however, which Hive mostly manages to avoid.)

Like, as a thriller, Hive is fine. Orton has an excellent sense of plot and pacing, with some exciting action-oriented sequences. The stakes consistently increase, putting the protagonists in new levels of danger, right up until the end.

The science fiction parts of this book, honestly, feel like background noise. It’s a little like The Peripheral in that regard, with the time travel seeming more like an interesting footnote in a plot that is otherwise about politics and survival. Indeed, Orton and Gibson’s frameworks have a key similarity: in both cases, time travel is more about moving between parallel universes rather than altering one’s own past (thereby avoiding paradoxes). Whereas Gibson maintains that two-way communication is possible, Orton has elected for a far more elaborate, dramatic way of travelling via a space-time bridge.

But like … most of the ideas here feel very standard to me. Microdrones. Biodomes. The disasters Diego and Isabel have to avoid are fairly predictable, realistic worries about where our future could be going. There is very little on the science fiction side of the equation here that feels new or interesting to me—so if you are coming to this book hoping to be wowed by that aspect, you might be disappointed.

Also, a lot of the minor characters—especially the antagonists—are incredibly one-dimensional. Isabel’s ex is a great example, as is Agent Johnson, who is quite the stereotype of a busybody government official. Diego and Isabel, thankfully, are notable exceptions. Their romance is actually very touching, and you know I, as an aromantic person, don’t give out this compliment lightly! Getting to watch their romance rekindle through both of their eyes, and seeing how far it goes even as the world around them starts to fall apart, is really something.

The other part of the book I found disturbingly enticing was simply how realistic Orton’s depiction of the United States falling apart was. Comms crumble, and with them goes government services. Honestly, no notes.

Hive feels like a book I have read before. This is both a compliment and a critique. On the one hand, it is a solid work of science fiction and a compelling thriller. On the other hand, it didn’t feel like it broke new ground for me in any way. I think if you are a bigger fan of thrillers or second-chance romance, then you will probably love this book. As it is, I thought it was fun, and Orton definitely knows how to keep a reader engaged—but I am not sure how much of this will stick with me over time.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

What would you do to belong? And what would you do if you thought you didn’t belong, in fact that your attempts to belong had harmed the very people you love the most? The second Chronicles of Nerezia novella this year and the fifth overall in the series, Motes of Inspiration struck a chord in me unlike any of the entries since Awakenings. After several competent, entertaining, yet fairly straightforward entries in a row, I have to admit: I was starting to wonder where Claudie Arseneault was steering this story. I was getting a little complacent. That was my mistake.

I received an eARC of this book in exchange for a review. Spoilers for previous books in this series but none (even though it is killing me) for this one!

Our adventurers have made it to the other continent after all manner of drama with their ocean crossing. Now, they are about to enter the city of Virze. This is Rumi’s hometown, and he isn’t eager to be back. See, Rumi has his own secrets—and thankfully, Horace is quite good using eir lovable embo energy to pry those secrets out of tight-lipped tinkers. Rumi hurt some of the people closest to him, and for that reason, believes he is no longer welcome in Virze. What begins as a simple supply restock quickly turns into a reunion campaign on the part of the other adventurers. But then, just when it seems like everything wraps up for the better, tragedy strikes, and the story ends on the most significant cliffhanger this series has seen to date.

There’s just so much happening here! Let’s start with Rumi. He is, in many ways, the OG. Without Rumi and his wagon, there would be no travelling, no quest. Horace would be back in Trenaze, struggling with finding a clan. Learning Rumi’s backstory, and understanding as Horace does how Rumi and Horace have a kind of kinship in not feeling like they belong, was really fascinating. I share Keza’s indignation regarding how Rumi acted, and I love how Rumi leaves things at the end. Arseneault handles the anger Rumi’s friend feels with such deft attention to the complexities of platonic love. Forgiveness is something that can be certain yet gradual in its attainment, and I really appreciate how this book balances these two truths. I respect that we get hints at a future happiness that nevertheless will require work on Rumi’s part, work to repair a relationship strained not only by what he did but by what he didn’t do afterwards.

In the same way, revelations about the Wagon and even Aliyah also mark Motes of Inspiration as a seminal story in this series. We learn so much more here about the Wagon’s nature, with a new development that really helps the Wagon become the full-fledged character it has always deserved to be. Similarly, the nature of Aliyah’s relationship to the Fragments has been coming into focus for several books now—yet here we probably have the frankest, most honest discussion of it among the adventurers and from the Archivists.

It’s this latter group that excited me the most in Motes of Inspiration. When I cracked this book open and saw the epigraph from one of the archivists, my immediate reaction was, “These guys better do something interesting soon. Enough teasing.”

Welp.

It’s been a while since a book has truly stunned me with an ending like this one. We’ve had action before in Chronicles of Nerezia, but not like this. We’ve seen the stakes raise immensely before, but not like this. We’ve had characters laid low, characters in danger before—but not like this. Here we are, just past the halfway point of the series, and Arseneault has expertly delivered multiple twists that set the series up for its last four books in style.

If, like me, you have been reading this series since Book 1, then this book is the payoff. Wow. I am so ready for the next one.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Oh boy, I don’t know if this was the best time or worst time to read The Age of Insecurity. It was certainly A Time. Written just prior to Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States, Astra Taylor’s Massey Lectures for 2023 nevertheless capture the zeitgeist of the 2020s with uncomfortable clarity and, dare I say, prescience. This book is not a salve for our age, alas, but it might be a good treatment nonetheless.

Taylor’s lectures, organized as always into five chapters or nights of lecturing, focus as the title implies on the topic of insecurity. Specifically, she believes that insecurity is one of the primary tools capitalism uses to keep workers beholden to the powerful. So much of what drives our economy and our efforts is the fear of insecurity—a fear shared by the rich, Taylor points out, as well as the poor.

This book took me a while to read. In part that’s just because it is dense, well referenced, well argued. In part because I needed frequent breaks, for the topics Taylor covers are not easy. I am a fairly secure, middle class, privileged white woman here in Canada. I have a good union job, benefits, a pension. Yet Taylor describes my condition exactly in these pages. She seizes upon the fear I experience, along with the rest of the middle class: the fear of falling. The fear of our quality of life decreasing, of a reduction of station. The precarity we feel is the insecurity, she argues, that drives our fears of socialism, fears of helping people more marginalized than ourselves.

Taylor weaves an insightful and interesting history lesson throughout each chapter. From there, she actually gives prescriptions on what she thinks we can do. Always, her advice centres on organizing. The power of collective action. This, I think, is what makes this book so redeeming despite its fairly bleak outlook at the big picture: Taylor is not beaten down, and she isn’t suggesting we accept defeat.

I’m not sure who the audience for this book is. Maybe it’s me prepandemic? I think the past year or so have honestly woken a lot of people to the issues Taylor covers here, though I guess that the connective tissue of her exposition and history lessons helps too.

If I have a criticism, it’s simply that, like most of the Massey Lectures, this one opts for breadth over depth. Taylor touches on so many issues: Indigenous land defence and sovereignty, insurance and subprime loans, housing, food, etc. She does a great job showing us how everything is connected, yet at the same time, I suspect most people will need additional texts to truly grasp most of the issues she mentions here. The Age of Insecurity is an intriguing starting point yet far from an endpoint.

Not the greatest Massey Lecture I have ever read but certainly one of the most urgent, most topical entries. Well done.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.