September 17, 2026  ·  4 comments

The Everlasting.

Mousy academic and erstwhile war hero Owen Mallory uncovers a mythical manuscript about the folk hero Una the Everlasting, only to learn that the book is actually a time machine – and that he needs to go back in history to make sure that the real Una does what she’s supposed to do according to the myth. The two fall in love, however, which makes completing her legend a bit complicated, since it ends in her death. And so Owen goes back in time again, and again, egged on by the War Minister of his country, Dominion, to try to set the story straight, until he eventually discovers that someone else is writing their story, too.

Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting won the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year, quite handily according to the voting, and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, while acquiring what appears to be a dedicated fan base online for its sweeping romance, a love story that literally knows no bounds of time. The time-travel bits don’t add up here; you have to suspend your disbelief early and go with the flow, pun intended. That’s not a serious flaw when the time-travel aspect comes in service of a larger goal, and in The Everlasting, a story about power and loyalty and courage, that goal is evident. Where the story falls short, however, is in its two characters, and the weak chemistry between them that undermines much of the love story.

Una comes from the archetypal wild-child woman warrior, wielding a magical sword that apparently can’t be broken or destroyed, often living by her wits and her hunting prowess, feared by many of the peasants of her time but revered in hindsight by the Dominion of the present day. Dominion has just recently fought a bruising war that resembles our World War I in some ways, and Owen, still a coward, turned out to be a crack shot, dispatching enemy soldiers until he was nearly decapitated in a battle that became a massacre. He’s returned from that war dead-set on becoming a historian with a particular interest in Una’s legend, so finding and translating an original manuscript of her story, or any of the artifacts associated with her, would make his academic career. When the book arrives, of course he dives in, and he remains devoted to the task until he notices several details that make him question the nature of everything, from the righteousness of his cause to his own free will. Yet he’s much more of a Nick Jenkins here, observing, noticing, more involved in the action than Jenkins typically was but still on the outside of most of it, and as such ends up a blander character whose primary attribute is the cowardice that he tells us about – but seldom shows in these pages.

The world that Harrow has created may be the book’s real strength, as it’s recognizable and, other than the time travel, plausible, while allowing her to play around with setting and style. There are subtle shifts in the prose and tone between the more medieval settings of Una’s ‘true’ time and the contemporary vignettes of Owen’s childhood, the war, and the aftermath, along with an unsubtle warning about fascism and people who’ll destroy everything, even time itself, to gain power. (I’d also note that the identity of the villain here is as obvious as a sledgehammer to the forehead.)

The Everlasting is also an exploration of the gap between myth and reality, and the way that history, especially oral history, can change over time while also changing those who follow and hear it. Una’s legend turns out to be very far from the truth, and Owen, who grew up hearing some of the folk tales and believes he may have met Una under a yew tree when he was a child, has to grapple with the difference between the Una of the page and the one he’s traveling with, and whose mission he must protect to save Dominion. As he changes the story, however, the future changes as well, not quite in an A Sound of Thunder way, but enough to lay out an argument that past and future are intertwined in ways beyond the merely physical.

I read The Everlasting expecting to be sucked into the characters and their romance, but for the most part, I didn’t buy it. (There is one very well-written sex scene, however, especially shocking for a genre that produces some of the cringiest sex scenes put to paper.) I found the political and historical narrative much more compelling, which is enough for me to recommend the book, but also left me knowing I didn’t get what many readers seem to have gotten, and feeling like maybe I just missed something. Instead there’s some padding here and there on the duo’s repeated quests that was probably part of how Harrow tried to build their chemistry, and without that foundation, those parts dragged.

I’ve only read three of the six Hugo nominees this year, but I’d put this behind The Incandescent and ahead of Death of the Author. A Drop of Corruption is on my to-read shelf right now.

Next up: Tattoo by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

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September 8, 2026  ·  4 comments

Death of the Author.

Metafiction can be a powerful tool in the hands of the right author; At Swim-Two-Birds is one of my favorite novels of all time, using the technique to explore the relationship between an author and their creation, and to ask broader questions of free will and the meaning of life. More frequently, at least in my experience as a reader, it’s a gimmick that interrupts the narrative and results in one good story and one mediocre one, as in The Blind Assassin, which creates a work that ends up less satisfying than it would have been had the author just focused on a single work.

(I’m using the term “metafiction” here to refer to a fictional story within a novel, which is the definition I learned in college while we studied Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, one of the best examples of the genre I’ve ever read. Wikipedia defines it differently.)

Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, which made the shortlist for this year’s Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel, is more than just one novel; it’s trying to be at least two, the story of a disabled Black woman named Zelu who writes a best-selling sci-fi novel, and the novel itself, called Rusted Robots, with interviews interspersed throughout the book. The result is more like one and a half novels, each of them feeling about three-quarters full.

Zelu is Nigerian-American, raised in Chicago, one of six children to a couple of Igbo and Yoruba origins. When she was 11, she fell out of a tree while playing with friends, an accident that left her a paraplegic and made her the subject of pity and infantilization from her parents and siblings and of scorn and fear from relatives in Africa. She’s tried for years to write serious literature, barely making ends meet by working as an adjunct professor, but as the novel opens, she’s fired from that job and gets her umpteenth rejection letter from a publisher, forcing her to move back in with her parents. At this personal nadir, she begins writing a science-fiction novel about a post-human world populated by two types of artificial life, robots in human-shaped shells called Humes and bodiless AI programs called NoBodies. The novel is an immediate success, sparking a bidding war before it’s published and making Zelu rich.

The sudden media attention brings her into the sights of a scientist who has developed a form of intelligent prosthetic limbs called exos; Zelu decides to take the leap, regaining some mobility and independence while making herself world-famous as “that robot author.” Her family, however, doesn’t understand her writing, despises her choice to use the exos as a violation of God’s will, and wishes she’d stop smoking so much weed. As the novel keeps building, along with a film adaptation and expectations of sequels, Zelu struggles to adjust to the rapid shift from anonymity to celebrity, and grapples with an existential crisis of her own – much as the protagonist of her novel, the Hume named Ankara, has to do in the escalating conflicts of its post-apocalyptic world.

Rusted Robots is not a very good or convincing novel, and that undermines huge parts of the rest of Death of the Author. It’s written in a different voice from Okorafor’s usual writing, and the result sounds like a stilted attempt at YA literature. There’s some character development, and there’s a plot-shaped object there, but because it’s maybe the length of a short novella and written in a simpler style, it feels like she’s showing us the veneer of a novel rather than an actual one.

The constant interruptions to veer into Rusted Robots or those interview segments also end up detracting from Zelu’s story, which is the most interesting and the most fleshed-out by far. She’s a fascinating character, at least in part an author surrogate, evolving in some ways as her life changes rapidly, while still maintaining the fatalism that forms her main line of defense against her family and the world in general. Her choices can be irrational, which makes her maddening but also recognizable as a three-dimensional character who feels human. She deserves a better partner than Msizi, the South African entrepreneur whose AI-powered personal assistant app ends up a secondary distraction throughout the book.

Then there’s the ending, which is clever, maybe extremely clever, but also rather unsatisfying. Okorafor throws several matters into question with the resolution of both of the main plot points, and I’m not sure it’s internally consistent with what came before. I’ve seen this novel described as a Möbius strip; that doesn’t fit the structure, as it’s not Finnegan’s Wake, but the conclusion at least should force readers to re-evaluate some of what’s come before.

Death of the Author is very much a novel of ideas, which does mitigate some of the plot deficiencies. The main story sits on a foundation of Zelu’s identity as a disabled Black woman born to immigrant parents, with a large extended family in Nigeria, and as someone who perceives herself as an intellectual but ends up finding success writing a genre piece wildly different from her previous work. Zelu lives much of her life feeling like whatever she does is going to go wrong, which at least in some part is a function of the number of people expecting something of her, and the number of different faces she has to present to the world. (Okorafor hints at a religious divide, where Zelu is secular but retains some of the trappings of belief, such as thinking the universe is ready to smack her down if she gets too high.) Yet her ability to interrogate these influences on her life is limited. Her decisions are often impetuous, even if they’re right, and she doesn’t seem to have the introspection required to understand what’s pushing her in any direction.

The role of technology in society and individual lives, including AI, pervades both the novel proper and Rusted Root, while that inner novella’s story hinges on the power of storytelling and whether that is unique to humanity. Okorafor seems to be an AI believer, or at least a proponent, as there’s no hint in the novel of anything going awry from the technology, and its presence in the story is only positive. Zelu’s meteoric rise is possible because of technological progress, including her exos, and it opens up further opportunities for her later in the novel, one of which comes about in part due to the absence of real privacy caused by tech firms gathering endless information on us. Even I found myself skeptical of some of the pro-technology language in this book, as someone whose career also arose due to the changes in our world that technological progress has brought about.

Death of the Author is a lot of book, and offers plenty to discuss and debate, more than even the typical Hugo winner would. It’s an ambitious book, and a profound one. It’s also not entirely successful as a work of fiction, thanks to the shared narrative that results in neither Zelu nor her robots getting their due in the end. It’s a better work of literature than The Incandescent, also nominated for those same two awards, but nowhere near as enjoyable a read.

(Aside: I have read Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, about a year ago, and loved it.)

Next up: Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto, the second book in his Harlem trilogy.

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September 1, 2026  ·  4 comments

The Incandescent.

Stories set in magic school have become commonplace to the point of cliché; unless the author is willing to take the story in a new direction, like weaving parody into a genuine story (Lev Grossman’s The Magicians), the work is going to suffer from comparisons to the very popular books in the space, including those by she-who-must-not-be named. In The Incandescent, Emily Tesh takes a different tack by setting her novel at a magic school, in an alternate-world England where magic is just part of normal life, while making her protagonist one of the teachers, as well as making at least two more significant plot decisions that set this delightful book apart from its peers.

In The Incandescent, Saffy Walden is a senior teacher who works primarily with some of the oldest and most advanced students at Chetwood School, a day and boarding school outside of London where Walden herself was a student twenty years previously. One of her academic and practical specialties is dealing with higher-order demons – most magicians can handle the lower-order imps who love to occupy electronic devices like photocopiers or even wall clocks, but Walden is one of the few magicians in the world who can handle the most difficult, higher-order demons, which may turn out to be significant. And since Chetwood is full of young magicians learning to harness their powers, it attracts many demons trying to break through from their plane into ours, including a very powerful one nicknamed Old Faithful who has killed some students in the past. The threat of Old Faithful leads the school to bring in a Marshal, a sort of magical security agent, named Laura Kenning, who immediately rubs Walden the wrong way, so you can probably see where that’s going.

The story of The Incandescent has multiple peaks, so if you were wondering, say, if the whole novel was heading towards a denouement where Walden fights Old Faithful, you may be surprised when the demon shows up before the book’s midpoint. It’s misdirection by adventure, as every subplot is interesting and intense, but Tesh’s ultimate goal won’t be apparent until quite close to the novel’s end, when she finally reveals where all of this has been going.

Walden is a wonderful main character, and by the time the novel is through, Tesh has given us a huge amount of her life story as well as insight into many aspects of her character, particularly her somewhat low interest in romantic relationships. She’s not aro, but she’s indifferent enough that romance ends up a tangential part of the story rather than the core plot point. Her flaws are realistic and fit within her character while eventually playing a significant part in the development of the plot. The Marshal, Laura Kenning, and at least two of the four students who comprise Walden’s main class are also well-developed and have some sort of arc within the novel’s various subplots, while several side characters show up and get enough screen time to feel more than two-dimensional. (I was particularly fond of Todd, the groundskeeper/maintenance guy who has some untapped magical potential of his own; he needs his own story at some point.)

When the actual climax comes, the whole ground beneath the book shifts, and the final fifty-odd pages are a full-on sprint, thanks to two twists, one I saw coming and one I didn’t. It all makes sense in hindsight, and Tesh set it up perfectly. An author has to earn this kind of massive plot shift, and Tesh did so, while staying completely true to her characters.

The Incandescent was nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, which Alix Harrow won for The Everlasting, as well as this year’s Nebula Award for the same. This is the first of the six Hugo nominees I’ve read, and I’m currently in the middle of Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author. Tesh won previously for Some Desperate Glory, a sci-fi novel that was good but flawed, and this is a better work in almost every way, from plot to character development to playing with popular tropes. It’s also a more memorable novel. These characters and this wonderful setting will stay with me for some time, and while I don’t think it needs a sequel, I hope Tesh revisits this universe in some fashion.

Next up: I’m about a quarter of the way through Death of the Author, which feels like a very ambitious novel so far.

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August 25, 2026  ·  No comments yet

The Anniversary.

What if each unhappy family is, in practice, unhappy in fundamentally the same way? Can you reduce all familial unhappiness to a simple formula of cruelty, alienation, and poor boundaries?

Andrea Bajani presents us with one very unhappy family in The Anniversary, refusing to even name his characters, as the now-adult son of the family marks ten years since he last spoke to either of his parents. He retells their story and his in sparse but significant terms, painting the picture of a marriage marked by power, control, terror, and maybe even violence, but in a voice that allows the narrator to examine his own feelings through two lenses, how he felt at the time and how he feels now with the benefit of time and distance.

The narrator’s father is the obvious villain in the story, as he is cut from similar cloth to David Melrose in Edward St. Aubyn’s Melrose novels and Sam Pollit in Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, terrorizing first his wife and then his entire family with his outbursts, his vicious tongue, and later his delusions, like believing he’s capable of giving his enemies cancer through his mental powers. The narrator begins with his parents meeting, telling how his mother was actually the more educated one, heading to university when her husband-to-be dropped out of high school, dreaming of a job as a teacher while he had to take a sales job because it was all that was available to him. He compensated for this power imbalance by taking her down through his words, eventually pressuring her into abandoning her studies and her hopes of a career so she could be first his servile housewife and later a stay-at-home mother to the two children they would have in quick succession after marrying. The husband set a perimeter around his wife and tightened it slowly over time, limiting her contact with her own parents, then her friends, and eventually isolating her almost completely in their apartment until the children were nearly grown.

The narrator was a witness to much of this behavior, but did little to stop it or push back until he was much older, and even in early adulthood remained obsequious to his domineering father and cipher mother, still largely obeying his father’s wishes or orders well into his 30s. His slightly older sister, from whom he is also estranged, although less strictly so, couldn’t get out of that environment quickly enough; there’s much less on their relationship, but it is clear from the hints Bajani drops that it’s also quite complicated, with resentment in both directions, her willingness to protect him somewhat as a child turning into disdain for his obeisance to their father in adulthood.

Part of the spell that The Anniversary casts comes from Bajani’s use of small moments in conversation to stand in for the giant breakpoints you might expect given that the narrator tells us in the first chapter that he has cut ties with his parents. There is, in fact, one almost-certain story of physical abuse here, but it isn’t an impetus for anything – in fact, the perpetrator ends up forgiving the victim in a perversion of the normal order of things, further underscoring how skewed these internal relationships are. Every time there’s a large shift in any of those relationships, husband to wife, husband to son, or wife to son, it’s over something modest, maybe a sentence spoken, sometimes something not spoken. The final conversation between son and parents, after which the narrator decides to change his phone number (we’re in the pre-cellular era), feels so small, hinging on one thing his father says, but it sits on a mountain of decades of lived experience.

The Anniversary won the Strega Prize, Italy’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – winners include The Leopard, The Name of the Rose, and The Solitude of Prime Numbers – this year, and comes out in English tomorrow. (I received a review copy from the publisher.) Like many other recent winners, it’s quite short, only 135 pages, and punches well above its weight thanks to its economy of prose. Bajani has crafted a scenario that feels specific yet applicable to so many families, real or constructed, where power imbalances or insufficient boundaries fester over time, and nobody makes a real move to change them because so many people are just conditioned to accept family, whatever it may look like.

I was probably predisposed to like the novel anyway, given my affinity for Italian literature, but The Anniversary is superb. It’s incisive, thoughtful, and, despite its bleak subject, gripping right to the end.

Next up: Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent, one of the nominees for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel.

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July 27, 2026  ·  1 comment

Vigil.

George Saunders is one of the modern masters of the short story, and his one previous endeavor in the longer form of the novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is a masterpiece that earned him the Booker Prize in 2017. His second novel, the slight fable Vigil, is just as clever and whimsical and creative, and ultimately a huge disappointment.

Jill Blaine is a spirit, maybe an angel, although I don’t know the hierarchy well enough to say what sort, who is visiting the nearly dead fossil fuel executive KJ Boone on his deathbed and confronting him with the havoc he has wrought on the planet through his successful career in industry. She can do this by revisiting memories upon him, although he will get more of this from his daughter when she visits, as well as some other phantoms, including a never-named French inventor and two former corporate cronies who seem very much like the Marley & Marley of the story. There is no traditional arc of redemption here; Boone will die, and we’ll see how much he’s able to even accept complicity in the destruction of the planet, while Blaine herself has some accepting to do around her death at the hands of her husband’s nemesis.

I wanted to like Vigil, because I have liked everything I’ve read by Saunders, and in interviews he comes across as an earnest humanist and someone deeply in love with the craft of writing. This book ain’t it, to put it mildly. Lincoln had its heart at the center of the book, while Vigil has its heart on its sleeve and can’t stop showing it to you. The characters are not that interesting, even though Saunders makes a real effort to give Boone some depth, while creating some moral complexity by pointing out how much of modern life is possible because of the exploitation of the planet’s petroleum. There’s more gravity here in Boone’s life story, the kind of look back that’s a common trope in fiction from Citizen Kane to The Late George Apley, than there is in the attempt to get some sort of deathbed conversion from him, and that leaves the book feeling maudlin rather than meaningful. What exactly was the point of the exercise here? Are we to empathize with Boone, who had agency and used his resources to debase the planet and silence opposition, if he has a brief moment of clarity before dying? It’s a slice of life story, or perhaps a slice of death, but in the end leaves us no wiser than we were when we began. For a writer of Saunders’ talent and stature to push this wisp of a story into the world, and to do so as his second novel in the wake of a first one that remains one of the best novels of this century, is more confusing than anything that happens in the book itself.

Next up: Changing it up with Anthony Horowitz’ Close to Death.

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August 15, 2025  ·  1 comment

The Ministry of Time.

Kaliane Bradley entered the crowded field of time-travel fiction last year with her debut novel The Ministry of Time, earning a Hugo nomination for Best Novel and landing a coveted spot on Barack Obama’s best-of-2024 list. It’s a marvelous book that does this sort of fiction right: it’s very light on the time-travel parts, and spends extremely little time worrying about the mechanics or the paradoxes, instead jumping off time travel for a story that is by turns philosophical, psychological, and quite romantic.

The narrator of The Ministry of Time is a British-Cambodian woman, like Bradley, and has been working in various government agencies when she’s tabbed for a special project as a ‘bridge’ to one of six people that the British government has plucked from history and brought to the present. There is a single time-travel door, and while the government hasn’t mastered its use – far from it, as we learn – they went through history and found people who were otherwise about to die, usually in horrible ways, to ‘save’ them by way of making them guinea pigs in a massive experiment. The narrator’s charge is Commander Graham Gore, who was aboard the HMS Terror during the doomed Franklin Expedition in the Arctic waters north of and around what is now Nunavut, where the search for a Northwest Passage to Asia led to the death by exposure and starvation of over 100 men, along with no survivors. The Ministry extracted Gore, knowing he would die shortly anyway (so his removal would not affect the historical timeline), and put him in the narrator’s care, housing them together in a shared apartment once he’s released from several weeks of confinement and forced re-education so he and his fellow time travelers, some of whom came from the 1600s, would know what a car is or how money works.

There is a thriller here within The Ministry of Time – as you might imagine, the British Crown’s intentions here are hardly pure or altruistic – but the novel is a love story at its core, as the narrator and Graham develop feelings for each other from very early on, despite the gulf between them in times, cultures, and ethnic origins. (Race and racism are frequent fodder for dry humor in the book, especially as the various ‘expats’ from times past, all of whom are white, struggle to adjust to a multicultural society where a whole bunch of words are no longer suitable for common use.) The relationship comes across as natural, almost inevitable, including the required element where one gets furious at the other and appears to break things off, which here happens simultaneously with the big twist and leads to a slightly ambiguous but extremely satisfying conclusion.

Bradley also has a knack for creating supporting characters who manage to be three-dimensional and yet still useful in various ways, often for humor but occasionally for purposes of intrigue or suspense. The narrator’s own handler, Quentin, might be a conspiracy theorist, or he might know more than he lets on. Maggie, from the 1600s, turns out to be a saucy wench (channeling my inner Laurence Sterne here), and gets to explore her sexuality in a way that would never have been permitted in her time. Arthur was about to die during World War I, and has a harder time adjusting to the fact that he’s now in a time when his life and liberty won’t be at risk just because he’s gay. And Adela, the Ministry of Time’s Vice Secretary, starts out as a sort of comic relief taskmaster character, but plays an increasingly essential role in the plot as the story develops.

I said before reading The Ministry of Time that I thought it was going to win the Hugo, because it had so much hype and positive press behind it, and because the last ten nine authors to win the Hugo for Best Novel have all been women, with only one of the other six nominated works written by a woman author. Bradley’s work also includes significant explorations of race, sexual orientation, and culture, again all things the voters have tended to favor, over the sort of hard sci-fi that dominated the award’s first 40-odd years – with the winners then nearly always white men. (One exception is The Calculating Stars, the 2019 winner, one of the worst novels ever to take this award. The author was the President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association at the time.) Now that I’ve read it, I also think it’s going to win because it deserves it* – it would be an upper-half novel among all the winners, probably the best novel to win since N.K. Jemisin’s three straight wins, just edging out T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone. It’s sci-fi, but it’s literary sci-fi, one that uses a single speculative element to tell the sort of story an author couldn’t tell otherwise, and those are nearly always the best examples of the form.

*The other three nominees I’ve read, all of which were good: Service Model, A Sorceress Comes to Call, and The Tainted Cup.

Next up: Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, a classic of 20th century Italian literature.

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August 12, 2025  ·  5 comments

The Tainted Cup.

Nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup marries the classic detective story with high fantasy novels, with a story narrated by the detective’s assistant (think Archie Goodwin) because the detective can’t do the leg work (think Nero Wolfe), set on a world where civilization is constantly threatened by enormous aquatic creatures called leviathans that crash through the city walls and flood the town. It’s a slow build, but Bennett sticks – pun intended here – the landing, and by the end of the novel, both of the central characters have been so well developed that it felt like the middle of a longer series.

Din is the very young, very green assistant to an investigator named Ana, and finds himself at the scene of a very bizarre death: A military official with powerful connections, Blas, has been found disemboweled, killed by a mutant plant called dappleglass that essentially kills its host by sprouting a giant tree. The corpse is impaled upon the branches when Din arrives, and he finds that the wealthy family on whose estate the murder took place is away while their servants range from uncooperative to hostile. The murder turns out to be a small piece of a much larger conspiracy that runs all the way to the top, so to speak, as Blas was just one person killed in this manner and the body count will continue to rise over the course of the story.

In the world of The Tainted Cup, people – I’m assuming they are people, at least – can be augmented in various ways that enhance certain abilities at the cost of others, or perhaps of their health, sanity, or longevity. Din is one such augmented person, called a ‘sublime’; he’s an engraver who has the equivalent of an eidetic memory, ‘engraving’ everything in a scene into his mind through the use of specific chemical scents. Ana is an eccentric, not a sublime, but with superlative powers of deduction, choosing most of the time to remain blindfolded so that she can focus better on the problem at hand. She seldom leaves her lair, never visiting the crime scene, instead sending Din out to gather the information and report back using his engraving powers, making her a fantasy heir to Nero Wolfe in multiple ways. (If only she loved orchids.) Their relationship isn’t that interesting, at least not yet, as Din is so clearly the subordinate, and is often the straight man to Ana’s barbs and witticisms, although as the novel ends, multiple small events start to shift that balance of power to a more equal one and the door to a more Nero Wolfe/Archie Griffin sort of relationship opens.

Bennett has also built a fascinating world here, where humans are at the mercy of a larger species that threatens them, and the empire’s ability to maintain order and control of its people is at least in part predicated on their ability to protect them – or persuade them that the empire is their only protection. The investigation into the murder(s) exposes a complicated back story of multiple levels of corruption and a past catastrophe that killed scores and rendered an entire canton of the empire uninhabitable, a crime that ripples through their society to this day. It’s a complex supertext above the simple narrative of the detective story, and the latter allows Bennett to give the former so much detail and texture – the investigation propels the plot forward, and no one ever stays in one place, literally or figuratively, for very long.

The Tainted Cup is more detective story than mystery, however; I don’t think the reader is supposed to figure out whodunit, given that Ana figures out the culprits over a period of time, with one of the assassins identified with probably a third of the novel to go – except, of course, they’re an accomplice rather than the mastermind. I enjoy both genres, but the detective story depends much more on the strength of the detective character(s), while the mystery is usually driven more by how clever the plot is. Bennett has created two reasonably compelling characters already, with enough interplay in the last few chapters to start the development of their relationship and foreshadow a more interesting (platonic, to be clear) one in future novels. Ana could easily have fallen, or fall in the future, into cliché; she is odd, certainly, as Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes and Poirot are, but in different ways, and she’s a stronger detective character than Inspectors Alleyn or Montalbano, to name two other series I enjoy. Din shows more growth within this specific novel, as he’s young and naïve and wedded to formal traditions that Ana finds amusing or just silly. By the time we reach the conclusion, he’s learned substantial things about himself, and found his voice in a way that was almost as satisfying to read as the solution of the main mystery itself.

Next up: I just finished Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which I fully expect to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year. I think it’s the best one and I think it checks a lot of boxes.

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August 6, 2025  ·  3 comments

Service Model.

Andrei Tchaikovsky landed a pair of nominations for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, one of them for Service Model, a dark comedy set in a dystopian future and starring a robot valet who finds that he’s killed his master and no longer understands his purpose.

Charles is the valet, and when the novel opens, he finds his master in bed with his throat cut by his razor, and an investigation leads to the inevitable conclusion that Charles is the culprit. Charles takes himself to Diagnostics, although along the way he stops at some other manors, only to find that there aren’t any humans anywhere else, either. At Diagnostics, he realizes that the entire bureaucratic setup has been brought to a halt, with any robots who show up to wait in the unmoving line sent off for scrap, and The Wonk, who seems to be hanging out in Diagnostics but maybe not working there, tells him that he’s developed free will, so he should go ‘live’ outside of service. Charles, whom the Wonk dubs Uncharles, can’t quite grasp that, and spends most of the book on a quest for some human to serve, mostly with the Wonk at his (its) side.

Service Model combines elements of farce and picaresque novels to explore some fundamental questions that go beyond robots or so-called AI. Charles is searching for meaning when the meaning he believed in for his entire existence isn’t just erased, but completely defied, like someone who grows up in one religion and has a sudden experience or realization that the religion is false. Imagine an evangelical Christian turned atheist who can’t give up all of the trappings of the former belief system, and keeps looking for reasons to continue their previous way of life. Even in the face of undeniable evidence that his worldview is false – Charles and the Wonk meet a robot that calls itself God, who turns out to be neither omnipotent nor infallible – Charles can’t give up his programming.

Because Charles is a machine, not a human, Tchaikovsky – who says he was inspired by a scene in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe – pushes his quest to ridiculous extremes, like some sort of robotum ad absurdum. Charles’s source code says he must have a human to serve, even when there isn’t a suitable human, or any human, in sight. It reads as a commentary on the limitations of “AI,” even if it can supposedly rewrite its own code, and on our misplaced faith in these tools to think for us. Garbage in, garbage out. The solution Uncharles finds ultimately requires the intervention of a human.

Tchaikovsky uses peril quite liberally, almost to the point of parodying the picaresque genre, as Charles ends up in one ridiculous situation after another, often requiring the help of The Wonk or some other force, including just sheer luck, to get out of being shut down or decommissioned or otherwise ceasing to exist. It gets a little tiresome because when he’s on the verge of extinction with 250 pages left, you’re pretty sure he’s going to make it out all right, and there are a couple of situations Charles escapes just because he has to move to the next plot point. Most of those sections do work in spite of their absurdity, however, because Tchaikovsky has such a deft hand with black humor, and in Charles he has created one of the best unintentionally funny characters I’ve seen in a while. (I think Tchaikovsky might be the humorist-satirist that people say that Gary Shteyngart is.) You can just appreciate Service Model as a quixotic tale, where The Wonk is Charles’s Sancho Panza, but I think its great strength is what’s below the surface, with a deeply humanistic bent and a clear philosophy on the limitations and potential harms of technology.

Of the six Hugo nominees, I’ve read two in full, this one and T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call, and right now I’m almost through Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup. All are good enough to win; I think Kingfisher’s might be my favorite, but Service Model has a lot more to say, and if Hugo voters consider that aspect it’s probably the superior choice. That said, I have a copy of Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time on hold at the library, and I think that might be the actual favorite.

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July 29, 2025  ·  2 comments

Headshot.

I’ll start off the review with the conclusion: Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot, one of the three novels shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize this year by the nominating committee that the board passed over in favor of Percival Everett’s James, is just not very good. It’s probably the best of those three, but that is damning with faint praise. I’ve often suspected that the Pulitzer process was skewed by non-literary considerations, but never more so this year.

Headshot follows a series of eight relatively anonymous and uninteresting teenaged women competing in a boxing tournament held in an empty (maybe abandoned) warehouse in Reno, with modest prize money that hardly justifies the investment in time and pain required of its contestants. Bullwinkel uses the tournament as a gimmick to give personality sketches and life stories, backwards and forwards, for the various contestants, showing a broad range of archetypes but a surprising lack of insight into what makes any of these young women tick beyond some very general tropes (e.g., sibling rivalry). The plot is extremely beside the point; I don’t even remember who won the tournament.

Indeed, I barely remember anything about these characters, and I’m flabbergasted by all of the reviews specifically praising the characters as the novel’s strength. They’re not all the same, far from it, but they are all fairly boring. Most of them box because they have some kind of hole inside they’re trying to fill – broken families, bullying, dead-end lives – but the sheer number of characters means none of them gets the kind of page time they’d need for any depth, never mind actual development.

And some of those characters’ names are amateurish. Artemis Victor is one of the best of the eight boxers – she may have won the fictional tournament, I don’t know – but I’ll call Fowl on that one. Others just have weird character traits that don’t add to their definition, like the one woman who has memorized pi to 50 digits and uses it as a sort of mantra/coping strategy, like meditating, but appears to have no other interest in math or just school in general.

There’s a deep sadness throughout the scenes in the ring and around it, even though Bullwinkel’s descriptions of their later lives at least hint at richer futures to come – families, marriages, careers, lives longer than many people who get hit in the head this often end up with. (There’s no mention of concussions or CTE.) Those are the stories that mean something here, but the structure leaves them as afterthoughts because the focus is far more on what’s happening in the ring and in the girls’ heads as they prepare to fight or trade punches. That just leaves those flash-forwards feeling like throwaways, sops to lighten the mood of what is overall a rather depressing novel, because it’s easy to say “and then she had a good life” rather than exploring just what that meant and implying that this tournament, which loomed so large in the girls’ minds as it happened, turned out to be irrelevant in the grand scheme.

I don’t know what the committee was thinking here with the three choices, all written by women, none of which was even good enough for me to recommend. Everett’s James is one of the best novels written this century. Kelly Link’s The Book of Love was also eligible, and is better than any of the three shortlisted novels by a country mile. Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars was better. I’m sure there were other works of literary fiction more deserving than these three novels. The Board made the right call.

Next up: I’m slowly making my way through Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup, nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel.

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July 1, 2025  ·  2 comments

Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride.

Will Leitch’s Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is the heart-warming story of a police officer and divorced dad of an 11-year-old son who discovers he has terminal brain cancer and decides to die on the job so his son can get more cash in death benefits. It’s definitely the most enjoyable book you’ll read about dying of glioblastoma this year.

(Disclaimer: Will’s a friend – someone I’ve actually spent time with on multiple occasions – so there’s just no way I was going to be objective about this book. If I had disliked it, I just wouldn’t mention it at all, so bear in mind that this is one time you can actually accuse me of bias and be correct.)

Lloyd is a cop in Atlanta, the son of a decorated, hard-nosed, military-minded cop who was a sort of legend in the force himself until he died of a heart attack, possibly hastened by the case of a serial killer that he couldn’t solve. He learns at the very start of the book that his headaches are caused by an aggressive type of brain tumor called a glioblastoma that will kill him in a matter of months, and do so in ugly fashion as he starts to experience memory loss, extreme mood swings, and pain in his head he describes as “lightning bolts.” He doesn’t tell anyone at all about the diagnosis – not his son Bishop, his partner Anderson, his boss, his ex-wife, nobody but his doctor. He realizes that his life insurance policy isn’t going to do much for his son, paying for about a year of college if they’re lucky, and realizes that there are large payouts coming to any officer who dies in the line of duty, so he decides to find a way to do just that, only to learn that he’s a pretty good cop and not that good at the dying part.

Lloyd’s letters to his son, which he calls his ten edicts, are interspersed throughout the narrative and lend some gravity to the proceedings, which otherwise are quite jovial for a story about a guy with a time bomb in his brain and a gun at his hip. (To say nothing of his car, which is a weapon in its own right when Lloyd’s behind the wheel.) Those poignant interludes are an accurate reminder of every parent’s nightmare – that you won’t be there when your kid grows up to experience all of the big moments, to tell him how to change a tire or ask someone on a date, to answer the phone (or a text) when something’s wrong and they need their mom or their dad. The real genius of the book is that those moments aren’t sappy or maudlin, which they could so easily be. They read as honest and clear, probably clearer than any of us could really be if we sat down and thought too hard about what writing that kind of letters really meant, and as a result they hit some big emotional notes without dragging down what is otherwise a fast-paced novel with some great action sequences once Lloyd decides he has a literal death wish.

I would still rank Will’s first novel, How Lucky, as my favorite of the three, because I think its protagonist, Daniel, is such an incredible, compelling character, and I love the way the tension builds in that story. That’s not a knock on Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, as they’re different books with clearly different goals. There are even nods in this book to Will’s second book, The Time Has Come, that I won’t spoil, and a few other Easter eggs scattered here and there. I’d say Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is his most earnest book, but I feel like that word has morphed into a backhanded insult, like a pat on the head for a writer who’s mailed in the emotional stuff in most of their previous works. It’s very thoughtful, getting the details right in the important ways, and even in more trivial ways, like details of what an Atlanta cop’s daily routine might be like, that most readers wouldn’t even notice. (I only realized it after reading the acknowledgements.) It’s a novel with a big heart that earns your response through its honesty, with a strong main character and some levity to get you past the fact that the main character is staring death in the face from page one.

Next up: I actually finished Rita Bullwinkel’s gimmicky, Pulitzer-finalist novel Headshot last week and am reading Masashi Matsuie’s The Summer House.

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