A Psalm for the Wild-Built

by Becky Chambers

On a moon called Panga at some point in the distant future, there is peace and plenty. The people have set aside half of the world to remain in a state of wilderness, nobody is in charge, and everybody gets to do the work they find most fulfilling. Or not, if that’s their choice. And at some point centuries ago, all the robots decided they didn't care for servitude and they left. Nobody has seen one since.

Sibling Dex has decided that the work that will fulfil them is becoming a Tea Monk, so that’s what they set out to do. As Dex gets better and better at their new vocation, they find it less and less fulfilling, and they find themself more and more drawn to the wilderness. And one day, out at the very edges of human habitation, a robot appears. It approaches Sibling Dex with a simple question that’s going to be awfully hard to answer. The question is, “What do people need?”

In an odd way, Psalm for the Wild-Built reminds me of the Murderbot books. This universe is kind of the exact opposite of the Murderbot universe (which is a very good thing for its inhabitants). But both are about what personhood means and what it means to be viewed as a not-a-person. Both are short and sweet. And both will soften your jaded old heart just a little.

This is probably the gentlest, most hopeful story I’ve ever read. It’s deceptively simple, like a raku-ware teacup. It’s just a story about people from two societies that have diverged from each other but aren’t at odds about it, learning about each other.

If you know me well enough to be on my Christmas list, now you know what you’ll be getting this year. If not, what are you waiting for? It’s a super quick read and you won’t be sorry. Five stars.

The Invisible Life of Addie Larue

by V.E. Schwab

In 1714, in despair at being made to marry and spend the rest of her life in her tiny village in service to a man, Addie Larue makes a deal with… whom?... for more life. And is given just that. Given theoretically endless life, that will go on until she begs to have it taken away again. The catch? She can leave no impression of any kind on the world. Marks she makes vanish without a trace, items she breaks instantly mend themselves, and anybody she meets forgets her completely the moment she’s out of sight.

The only being on Earth who remembers her at all is Luc, the being with whom she made this bargain without understanding what it really entailed. He visits her every so often through the centuries. Each time he’s certain that the horrors she survives, the crushing loneliness she lives with every day, will drive her to beg him for release.

But she doesn’t. Sometimes it’s her ability to remain in awe of the world and all it contains that keeps her going. Sometimes it’s pure, deep-seated spite—she will suffer literally anything rather than let Luc win their battle of wills. And sometimes it’s the simple, biological will to survive.

And so she does. And then in 2014, in a bookshop, she meets a man who remembers her.

Without giving too much away, I can say that I assumed from the start that this was going to be a fairly simple be-careful-what-you-ask-for fable, with lush historical scenery. That would have been enough for me. But it’s not merely that. It’s the tale of the ultimate abusive relationship and a person’s resilience and ability to be true to herself in the face of it. And it’s a celebration of wonder and of what keeps a heart going, year after year after year.

The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

A haunted house story set in England in the years just after WWII, The Little Stranger’s creepiness comes not just from the decaying mansion and its inhabitants, living and otherwise, but also from the claustrophobically rigid habits of thought of its extremely unreliable narrator.

The house is Hundreds Hall, a grand Georgian mansion now left to rot in the hands of the Ayres family: a bitter, disabled war veteran; his plain, sturdy, self-effacing sister; and their doddering, once-elegant widowed mother. Our protagonist, Dr. Faraday, is a country doctor who has pulled himself up by his bootstraps from working-class roots. In a supremely British way he is very conscious of this, and very white, and very male.

Ms. Waters does a terrific job creating a window into the mind of a man who has no idea how blinkered he is, or how condescending. He’s such a man of his place and time, the book almost reads as if it had been written by a man of that period. This is, to me, what makes it interesting: the character study of Dr. Faraday.

In his mind, there’s a natural order to things that it would never occur to him to question. People of the lower classes and women of all classes either function properly and stay in their places, in which case he can safely disregard them; or they don’t, in which case he can chasten them or doctor them or send them off to the appropriate institution.

Meanwhile, the Ayres family is terribly isolated. The local folks see them as wealthy and powerful, which of course they once were at one point, and therefore too snobbish to rub elbows with the hoi polloi. But it has been decades since the estate could support itself and in fact its inhabitants are reduced to selling it off, bit by bit, just to keep food in the pantry and gasoline in the generator.

The Ayreses, being both proud of their heritage and ashamed of their current financial state, feel they have to keep to themselves. Until Dr. Faraday appears on the scene and slowly insinuates himself into the household. Around the same time, things at The Hundreds start going weirdly amiss, and naturally the good doctor won’t entertain any supernatural explanations. Hijinks ensue and the plot thickens, with the assistance of everybody’s God-given prejudices.

Verdict: read it if you love a good haunted house story, or if you enjoy a well-written period piece whose characters’ psychology is true to their time and place, or if you just want to read the book first so you can sneer at the movie. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

This book is shockingly good, and also not for the faint of heart. It’s sex, drugs, queerness, rough trade, postpunk, university town politics, womyn’s festivals, and magical realism, all mashed together and set in 1993. How could I resist? It’s like they wrote it just for me.

Paul is an artsy, opinionated, and super-louche queer boy. He tends bar at the only gay bar in a college town and lives perpetually on the bleeding edge of poverty and the AIDS epidemic. He trades on his good looks and alluring hauteur for sex, coffee, and whatever else he can get his greedy little hands on. He’s Desire personified, and he’s got a secret: he can change sex at will.

Literally: we’re not only talking gender here, we’re talking everything. His face, skin, build, primary and secondary sexual characteristics, everything. Think of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. (Yes, I’m using “he/him” pronouns; that’s what Paul uses throughout the book, even when he’s Polly.) In his resting state, he defaults to male. But whenever he feels like it (and whenever it feels safe) he can physically transform as much or as little as he likes, from vaguely femme right up through being a fully-fleshed-out female.

It takes some effort to stay that way, but it’s worth it. His constant, restless appetite—for food, drugs, sex, experiences of all kinds—takes him everywhere, and his ability to shapeshift means “everywhere” can include women’s spaces and straight boys’ beds. And lesbians’ beds, too: and then he falls in love with one, which means suddenly he needs to maintain his female form all the time. Except he can’t.

Hijinks ensue, taking him across the country and finally landing him in San Francisco. Along the way he goes through just about every sort of struggle and every height of pleasure available to a beautiful, impossible-to-categorize young queer in the 1990s. The writing is gorgeous, Paul is irresistible, and you’ll develop your next playlist as you read. Read this book.

Unprotected: A Memoir

by Billy Porter

Billy Porter first burst into my awareness at the same time he burst into the awareness of most people who aren’t especially into musical theater or gospel-tinged R&B: when he wore the now-famous tuxedo dress to the Oscars in 2019. But I don’t usually bother to watch the Oscars, and I don't care about haute couture. (Sorry not sorry.) So while I was delighted by his subversion of gendered clothing choices, he quickly faded from my awareness.

Then we all started sheltering in place and I discovered the first two seasons of Pose on Netflix and I fell in love with the show and with his character, the emcee Pray Tell.

The world of Pose is the world of the documentary Paris is Burning, which I watched with some interest in my Gender Studies class (then called Women’s Studies) back in the 20th century. It’s the underground ball culture of New York City in the 1980s, and this is not the place to try to explain or define it. If you’ve never heard of it, and if you love good storytelling, LGBTQ+ and/or New York City history, and really excellent representation, go watch Pose. You won’t regret it.

The character Pray Tell combines wit with glamor, a sharp mind with a sharper tongue, complete loyalty with a history (and present) of deep trauma, and more live-out-loud charisma than one person should have with incredible warmth. All of this, never mind the fact that he's easy on the eyes, makes Pray Tell fascinating to me. And Billy Porter inhabits that role like it was written for him. Which, as it turns out, it was. Suddenly Billy Porter became interesting to me, not just as a person on the front lines of the gender wars (and thank you very much for that, Mr. Porter: you’re fighting a truly good fight), but as the performer who brought that character to life.

Of course he didn’t spring into existence on that TV set like Venus rising from the foam. He’s almost exactly two months younger than I am, which makes his explosion into American pop culture in the late ‘teens remarkable. And indeed, he was something of a late bloomer as far as mainstream fame goes. But he had a long career before that, and a difficult life that both informed his career and his future roles and made his eventual success much, much more difficult than it should have been for a man of his talent and drive.

Billy Porter was born Black and gay—gay in a way that was obvious to everyone around him; there was no possibility of a closet for this kid—to an impoverished, disabled mom. His family and community were deeply religious, which meant he heard messages all his life that he was evil, worthless, and headed for an eternity in Hell. He was frequently and blatantly mistreated by members of this community and sometimes his own family, and his mother wasn’t in a position to defend him. And as if all of that weren’t enough, from a very young age he was abused by his stepfather, leaving him deeply traumatized.

Any one of those disadvantages would be enough to make many folks throw in the towel in terms of being some kind of major success in life. Billy wasn’t having any of that, though. What he had going for him was his mom’s unwavering love and support, his incredible vocal talent combined with a work ethic that never quit, his combination of stone-cold realism and determination, and an extremely hard-won sense of his own worth.

The narrative starts in the confusion and horrible anxiety of the early months of Covid, then dips back into his early childhood. It goes back and forth like that, as a series of chapters from his early life interspersed with episodes from his present moment. Getting to know the man he is now in parallel with learning how he got here really worked for me. So did his writing voice, shifting fluidly from formal to childlike to slangy and back again. This is a man with clear eyes, enormous talent, and a huge heart who knows how to put all of that down onto a page and make you care.

Go read this book. And if you like that sort of thing, get the audiobook; he performs it himself, and his gorgeous, inimitable voice makes his story come to vivid life.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

 

What if every time you made a choice in your life, no matter how big or small, you created a new universe? There’s a universe where you decided to say yes to the stranger who invited you for coffee, and one where you said no. There’s one where you decided to stick with your piano lessons instead of dropping them the minute you could. There’s one where you decided to stay at the party for just one more glass of wine, overslept the next morning, and missed your train… so you weren’t at work when your former coworker showed up with a gun. One where you chose kindness, one where you chose fame, one where you chose safety. And infinite variations of each of these.

What if, as your life was ending, you found yourself in a vast library where one thick volume contained every regret you'd ever experienced, big or small? And every other book—an infinity of books—represented an alternate life that you might have lived, if you'd made different choices? What if you got to try out each one of those lives, find out how things might have ended differently if every choice you'd ever regretted could be unmade? What if you could do it all over again… and again… and again, until you got it right?

Nora Seed finds herself in exactly that situation, after taking the pills that will end her life. She has so many regrets—a band she didn’t stick with, a dead-end job where she's just phoning it in, a brother who won’t talk to her. And now she’s got a chance to see what life she *should* have lived—and a chance to live it. All the chances she needs, to figure out what's actually important to her and what difference that knowledge might have made.

4.5 out of 5 stars—highly recommend.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

read by Michael Crouch

It’s 1985. Yale’s career as the development director for an art gallery has just begun, his friend Nico has just died of AIDS, and almost everyone he knows is terrified or in denial or both. Nico’s little sister, Fiona, has become the key to a coup that could make or break Yale’s reputation in the art world.

It’s 2015. Fiona is trying to find her daughter, who disappeared into a cult years ago; a random bit of footage has led her to Paris. She’s staying with an old friend, Richard Campo, a photographer who famously documented the ravages of the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the 1980s and 90s.

Days pass in Paris. Fiona is frustrated at the pace of the private investigator’s search for her daughter and heads out to seek her on her own. Meanwhile, Richard and his partner urge her to just enjoy the city while she’s there. She’s not so sure she’s ready for the sorts of enjoyment that are on offer, though. Romance, trips through her own past—that’s not where she’s at. She's in too much pain, too worried about her daughter.

Weeks pass in Chicago, and then months. Disaster looms over Yale’s entire community; some people flee, some descend into debauchery, and some get political and fight to be seen and heard. But for Yale, there’s nothing to do but soldier on, try to close the next deal, try not to feel too alone and scared as his friends get sick, one by one. Meanwhile, he’s getting to know the elderly benefactor whose art collection may or may not be a windfall for his gallery. And she seems to know more about him than he thought he was revealing.

This story winds a sinuous path back and forth, back and forth, between a past when nobody knew who would be struck down next and a today shaped by the loss of a generation of young men. We get to be there in that past with Yale. We see what it does to him, what it feels like on a daily basis to be subject to irrational hatred and constantly on the edge of existential terror, meanwhile going through all the normal growing pains of being a young man just getting started in the world. 

And we get to see, 30 years later, what carrying all that history, all the stories of all those extinguished lives, has done to Fiona, how it has scarred her—and, through her, scarred her daughter, who was only a baby during the worst of it.

I wasn’t there for the AIDS crisis in the same way Yale and Fiona were. Although I lived in San Francisco, or within an hour’s drive, during the 80s and 90s, and a relative I hadn’t seen in years died pretty early on, I was in middle school when things really hit the fan. So I was a little young to be very deeply affected, though of course I was aware of what was going on all around me.

I did work at a dry cleaning shop a few blocks from the Castro during the mid-90s, and I remember watching a lot of customers get sicker and sicker and eventually disappear. It was horrible, but they weren’t my community, my family, my friends. I knew I could become infected if I wasn’t careful, but I also knew I wasn’t at high risk. It wasn’t *personal* to me. It was just how things were. (I never believed I’d make it to age 30, but I didn’t think a virus would take me; I thought it would be that cowboy running the White House with his finger hovering a little too near The Button that would get us all in the end.)

The Great Believers makes AIDS personal. You will walk away from this book shaken. You’ll have some appreciation, if you didn’t before, of what a loss to us all was the loss of those young lives. What living in the middle of it was like—it was like a war, but one that you had to be ashamed of being the victim of, one that you kept to yourself as hard as you could if you wanted to have any chance of a happy life. What caring about and caring for so many young men who didn’t make it was like, what it was like to survive and try to build a life after losing literally everybody you cared about.

The book does this all unsentimentally, cleanly, without tear-jerking melodrama. It just lays the stories out, one beautifully-formed slab after another, each atop the last in ways that seem impossible because of the way the story goes back in time, and yet somehow perfect. 

Read this book. Once you start you won’t be able to walk away, and it will hurt, but that lost generation deserves to be mourned. You’ll be glad you didn’t turn away.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

read by Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller 

What if Michael Moorcock had decided one day to rewrite the Spy vs. Spy comics as an epistolary novel set in his Dancers at the End of Time universe, but aimed it at poets and at fans of The Hunger Games or maybe early Anne Rice? (Not that those are necessarily mutually contradictory.)

This book, like Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, gives the impression of being a triumph of style over substance—but only if you don’t know better. Style *is* substance, sometimes. And when it’s not, well, what’s wrong with having your substance conveyed by an absolute torrent of luscious prose, profusely elegant and full of biting wit? 

Nothing, I say. And there’s nothing wrong with a slim epistolary novel, surreal and crystalline-dense like a crazy fractal oil-spill diamond built up of fragrant slabs of impassioned ugly/beautiful imagery like slam poetry, whose setting is hard to grasp and flicks past like a universe-sized slideshow and whose characters know full well they are stereotypes.

So: our protagonists, Red and Blue. Each is a… well, not a soldier. More of an MI6 agent in a time of war. A time war. Each is fighting for the future they were born in—and, not coincidentally, for their own individual existence. Since of course if things had gone differently, neither of them would have been born in the first place. If things *do* go differently (and causing things retroactively to have gone differently in the other faction’s timeline is what Red and Blue are each hired to do), at least one of them will never have existed. Neither can live while the other survives.

Which is a problem. Because in the course of a playfully vicious cat-and-mouse exchange of letters between realities, engaged in at first purely because it made the game more fun, Red and Blue fall in love.

Yes yes yes. It all sounds very predictable except maybe where it’s just incomprehensible, and I won’t deny that it starts out that way. I enjoyed it from go, but saw it as frivolous, a guilty pleasure. But as time went on and more of the story rushed past me, with me just paddling along as best I could to keep up while all this improbable scenery whizzed by, I began to fall in love with it. Much, I think, as Red and Blue fall in love with each other: unwittingly, unexpectedly, ineluctably.

Here’s the exact passage where I fell in love with the book. Red, from the machine universe, had written to Blue, from the biotech universe, about how she enjoys eating, which is optional for people in her time. This taste sets her apart from her contemporaries, who find the whole idea of food not just unusual but actually revolting and even shocking. Blue replies:

“Absent from your mention of food—so sweet, so savory—was any mention of hunger. You spoke of the lack of need, yes. No lion in pursuit, no animalistic procreative desperation. And these lead to enjoyment, certainly.

“But hunger is a many-splendored thing. It needn’t be conceived only in limbic terms, in biology. Hunger, Red—to sate a hunger or to stoke it—to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth—is this a thing you (singly) know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it? Sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out?”

Right??? To desire a thing without needing it, with no skin in the game, is surely pleasant. It gives one a sense of safety in the enjoyment. But to actually hunger, to need, to want so deeply that it’s physical—that’s a knife’s edge, dangerous. And it’s on the threshold of that danger that you are truly alive, that new things can be born.

And, I mean. Such precision of language, unafraid of using the perfect word, the exact phrase to convey the meaning, even if it might be seen as trivial or highfalutin’ or a little odd or antiquated or (heaven help us) trite. Even if the reader might have to look up one or two of those words. Words are to prose what brushwork is to painting, and the fashion in prose at least since Hemingway has been to make that brushwork as invisible as possible so that the scenes and characters and plot shine through with as little distortion as possible. 

That’s begun to change, in spots at least, in the here and now. I mean, there have always been oddballs, cranks, and geniuses who wrote whatever they wanted however they wanted, gods bless them. What’s changing is that stylized and individualistic writing styles are more an accepted part of the everyday literary landscape than a couple of decades ago. This isn’t *always* a good thing in individual cases (*coughMichaelChaboncough*) (sorry-not-sorry if you’re a fan of Telegraph Avenue, which I desperately wanted to be), but it is definitely a good thing overall as it encourages creativity and diversifies what’s out there for us all to choose from.

El-Mohtar and Gladstone aren’t constantly that brilliant. I mean, who could be? To understand and convey so brilliantly the nature of desire, to depict in strobe-light flashes a conversation about desire and hunger between denizens of different realities who haven’t yet admitted to each other that their subject matter concerns them so deeply—to do all of that *constantly,* for 200 pages, is almost certainly impossible and would probably leave the reader bleeding and raw by the end, not in a good way.

No, the authors do it just often enough, and in intervals that decrease just enough as the narrative goes on, to make the reader remember that sometimes bleeding is a good thing. And to make you willing to bleed just a little more so that you can have just another chapter. Just one more.

Hungry yet?

Read this book.

Not convinced yet?

Here's another review.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

read by Cassandra Campbell

Beggars in Spain is Methuselah’s Children for the new millennium. 

If you don’t know what I mean by that, I forgive you. But also, I will have to ask you to bear with me while I try to explain myself. It’s a very specific reference, but also huge and dense with information that you kind of had to be there for (“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” anyone?). I’ll do my best, though. Here goes:

Methuselah’s Children is a Heinlein novel, one of his most sweeping and important. It is, of course, a massively ripping yarn. But moreover, it establishes two of the three major themes that characterize his body of work throughout his career and it sets the stage for his Future History stories. It tells us how the Howard Families got their start, and what effect that start, and the very existence of the Howards, had on the course of human history.

The short version: a wealthy man named Ira Howard has a genetic disorder that causes him to die of old age in his forties. Before he dies he decides, as his legacy, to increase human longevity. So he sets up a foundation that financially encourages folks with long-lived grandparents to have kids with each other. 

Within just a few generations, this scheme succeeds so wildly that the Howard Families, as they become known, live much longer than the folks around them. They start having to go on the lam, witness-protection-plan-style, because they don’t age like other folks and they don’t want to arouse envy or suspicion. They worry about the possibility of discrimination and even violence if ordinary people become aware of their advantages.

Eventually they do get outed, of course. And of course it turns out they were right to worry. Folks at large want to know what the “secret” to their longevity is and refuse to believe that there isn’t one, beyond good genes. The Howards race against time (and overreaching government) and manage a seat-of-their pants escape from Earth in a spaceship, and proceed to Have Adventures and Learn Lessons. 

A few years later they return to Earth—but due to Einsteinian time dilation, it’s been much longer than that back home. And the folks here, having been “cheated” of the “secret” to longevity, have had no recourse but to find it on their own—which they do, in the form of numerous therapies. 

Throw in a bunch of thinly-veiled (and sometimes buck nekkid) lectures on the benefits of eugenics and libertarianism, and you’ve got Methuselah’s Children in a nutshell.

Why is all of that so important? Well, to begin with, Heinlein wasn’t called “the dean of science fiction writers” for nothing. His writing career spanned five decades, during which he published 32 novels and 59 short stories in 16 collections (as well as numerous essays and a screenplay). His work has been adapted into numerous movies, TV series, and at least one board game, and his influence on other writers and on popular culture at large can’t be overstated. He invented the waldo, foresaw the Internet, coined the word “grok,” and gave comfort and encouragement to generations of free-love hippies and other sexual deviants.

And then there’s the Future History timeline. It’s just one of a sheaf of timelines in Heinlen’s World As Myth multiverse, but it’s the one nearly all of his early adult work is set in and, in my opinion, the vast majority of his most-important later work takes place there as well. (Sorry-not-sorry to any Heinlein scholars who disagree either about the timeline or the importance—and yes, there’s plenty of heartfelt and very vocal disagreement out there. That’s how important this guy’s work is.) 

Even outside of this timeline, Heinlein’s major themes of the excellence and longevity of humans being determined by eugenics and of the sacred importance of individual responsibility and the dignity of labor (slightly strange bedfellows when you think about it) are set up and thoroughly established here. The only major Heinleinian theme missing from this book is his rejection of contemporary sexual mores.

So then. We have a major work by a major author that lays out his major themes. How does it relate to Beggars in Spain, the book I’m actually reviewing here? Well:

Beggars begins in 2019 (which must have felt comfortably far in the future back in 1993 when it was written—or maybe 1991 or 1996, depending on how you count it) with a wealthy man strong-arming a geneticist into using a new and unproven genetic manipulation technique to give his as-yet-unconceived child the advantage of never having to sleep. He reasons that if his offspring doesn’t have to essentially waste 30% of its life being unconscious and therefore unproductive, that child will be able to accomplish 30% more than its peers. 

Why wouldn’t you buy that for your kid if you could, right? Lots of folks end up buying it for their kids. Thus begins the story of the Sleepless, a group of people who, in addition to the intended effect of never needing to sleep, also enjoy the side effects of an innately sunny disposition and—you guessed it—longevity. Plus whatever else their parents have paid to have them genetically predisposed toward, typically stuff like high intelligence and physical beauty. 

As these kids grow up, they become a group that is at once envied and reviled—discriminated against very openly, much like Jewish people in Europe in previous centuries, because they’re simultaneously seen as possessing unearned advantages and being not-quite-human. At the same time, the American economy is in a period of sunny prosperity, fueled by the invention of cold fusion technology called Y-energy by a man named Kenzo Yagai.  

Yagai is a fascinating figure, though we never spend any time with him in the book. His influence on the world isn’t limited to nearly-endless nearly-free energy and all that that implies. He’s also the founder and popularizer of a philosophy called Yagaiism, which emphasizes individual excellence and has its roots firmly in—you guessed it—libertarianism.

And so we have the two themes again, eugenics and (quasi-) libertarianism. But Kress doesn’t lecture us about them. Instead she explores them, in depth and with nuance. 

Through her characters’ eyes, we see the human effects of genetic manipulation combined with a philosophy that holds that the weak have no claim on the labor of the strong. We explore the meaning of community and the definition of humanity. We see all of this from the point of view of multiple sides and multiple generations. As a result, we ask ourselves interesting questions about them. Kress doesn’t shove the answers to these questions down our throats. But she gives us enough information to form some nuanced ideas, and start to ask questions of our own. Questions which apply to us here and now, in our current cultural, scientific, and political landscape.

Like the best literature, this is a book that can be read as lightly or deeply as you like. It can be enjoyed as an amusing walk through a plausible and interesting possible future, or an examination of what it does to a person to be “other than” or to be the one doing the “othering,” or the playing-out on a grand scale of a philosophical exercise. Whether you want to read for fun or to exercise your empathy or to sink your intellectual teeth into an intriguing idea, do read it.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

read by Kyle McCarley

Maia is the exiled, motherless, abused, and neglected youngest son of the emperor of the Elflands. He’s also a half-goblin in a society where stone-cold racism is the norm. When his father and all of his older brothers are killed in an airship crash, suddenly *he’s* the emperor—a job he has no training or desire for. 

But he does have the desire to make a good job of it. And he gradually learns he’s got the disposition for it; his childhood, miserable and deliberately neglectful as it was, prepared him for the imperial throne in some unexpected ways. Still, learning whom to trust and how best to navigate the bewildering and seemingly constant intrigues of a hostile court is far from easy. 

And then it turns out that the disaster that killed his father was no accident—and whoever is responsible for it is still out there somewhere. Or maybe somewhere in his own palace. Maia knows in his head, and soon learns in his gut, that an emperor can’t truly have friends; and his relations are either distant, dead, or have so many agendas, secret or otherwise, that it would take someone as idiotic as his former guardian always told him he was to trust them.

He can’t act alone, though. There’s only one of him, and he doesn’t know enough to be effective. And the potential consequences of failure to unearth the perpetrators of this plot won’t just affect him; thousands of his subjects could suffer if he makes a wrong move. He needs reliable advice and confederates, not honeyed words from sycophants. He’ll have to trust someone. But who?

This is a truly charming coming-of-age tale/political thriller/murder mystery set in a delightfully detailed and creditably believable world somewhere between elfpunk and steampunk (elfsteam? Punkpunk?). The cultures, political system, and details like court fashions are all three-dimensional and fascinating. We follow Maia's point of view closely throughout, to a degree that’s almost old school by today’s standards. 

Mostly this works beautifully, because Maia is such a good sort and a sympathetic character on multiple levels. His ignorance of court life is nearly as deep as our own ignorance of the world it’s set in, which makes him a good stand-in for the reader, and his awkwardness and occasional spitefulness are believable and save him from seeming too good to be true (or too good to be palatable, anyhow). 

The only drawback to this following-super-closely-over-Maia’s-shoulder business, and it’s the only real flaw I see in the writing, is that the scope of the story is much broader than our narrow view of it. Lots of things that one might like and expect to see happening, one only hears about afterward, which can feel a little anticlimactic at times.

But that’s a quibble. This is a really engrossing story that I couldn’t make myself stay away from for any length of time. Highly recommend.