16 Jun, 2023
Doing the WFC's Homework
Chloe Gong’s 2023 Last Violent Call is a collection of two novellas, both set in the world of her previous historical crime thriller duology, These Violent Delights.
Sensible criminals keep a low profile. They certainly don’t play investigator. In both of these stories, circumstances force criminals into unwonted behavior.
15 Jun, 2023
Miscellaneous Reviews
2020’s Mutant Pride is the first novel in SJ Whitby’s Cute Mutant superhero series.
Teen Dylan Tayler has always felt like a screw-up. Now it’s worse. Her pillow is talking to her. Other inanimate objects are waking up around her, suddenly becoming animate and chatty1. As this continues, Dylan (a long-time fan of X‑Men comics) is becoming increasingly sure that she’s a mutant and must have a superpower.
14 Jun, 2023
Translation
Usotoki Rhetoric Volume 1 is the first tankōbon in Ritsu Miyako’s historical mystery manga series. Usotoki Rhetoric was published in Bessatsu Hana to Yume from June 26, 2012 to March 26, 2018.
By the first year of the Showa era, Urabe Kanoko’s unique ability has secured for her a place in her hometown … as a pariah. Hoping to find a community where she might fit in, Kanako leaves her home for Tsukumoya, a town where nobody knows her, and she might hope to conceal her dreadful secret.
Kanako is a living lie detector. Utter a known-to-be-false statement in her hearing, and she will infallibly know it is a lie.
13 Jun, 2023
Special Requests
Ray Nayler’s 2022 The Mountain in the Sea is a stand-alone near-future tale of first contact.
In a triumph of human achievement, high ‑tech trawlers have scoured the oceans, transforming them from over-crowded seas full of thriving life to pristine deserts. As catches plummet, new ways are discovered and deployed to track down and catch the tiny remnant of a once-rich ecosystem.
While this is good news for consumers, it’s bad news for people like Eiko, kidnapped and enslaved on an automated fishing boat. Humans are slightly cheaper than new machinery.
It’s worse news for the entities living off Con Dao, for they are not human. This is a world in which humans are merely economic cogs while non-humans are simply food.
11 Jun, 2023
Because My Tears Are Delicious To You
1970’s Nine Princes in Amber is the first volume in Roger Zelazny’s five-part Corwin Cycle, which is part of the ten volume Chronicles of Amber.
Despite amnesia, “Carl Corey” has no problem understanding that he is being overmedicated or that if his minders have someone’s best interests at heart, it’s not his. The patient bullies his way out of the medical facility in which he has been immured, blackmailing the staff into providing him with funds and information.
Destination one: the home of Corey’s alleged sister Evelyn Flaumel. Since she has been footing the bills for his treatment, perhaps she can provide more information.
9 Jun, 2023
Doing the WFC's Homework
2022’s This Poison Heart is the first volume in Kalynn Bayron’s This Poison Heart series.
Teenage Briseis Greene struggles with unremarkable grades in school, familial money worries (the rent for her adopted parents’ flower store is being hiked), and her fear that she will be outed. She has a special talent: she can make plants grow. She’s still learning to control her gift and others might suspect that something odd is happening if plants were to thrive in unnatural profusion.
Distraction for such worries comes in the form of an unexpected inheritance.
8 Jun, 2023
Judith Merril’s The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy
1959’s SF: The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume (also published as SF:’59: The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy) is the fourth volume in Judith Merril’s The Year’s Best SF anthology series. It collects the best short fiction, essays and associated poetry from 1958.
7 Jun, 2023
Translation
Yōko Ogawa’s 2003 The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel is a stand-alone mainstream novel about … a housekeeper and a professor. The 2009 translation is by Stephen Snyder.
The housekeeper, a hard-working single mother, is used to Akebono Housekeeping Agency’s frequent reassignments. Her latest client has very particular needs, needs that previous domestic staff struggled to meet. Will the housekeeper be successful where others failed or will she be another anonymous face in a succession of housekeepers?
6 Jun, 2023
Miscellaneous Reviews
Philip Wylie’s 1972 The End of the Dream is a stand-alone ecological disaster novel.
The date (Old Calendar) was June 6, 2023, and the place, Faraway, New York, again in the Old Geography.
The 2020s are an age of hope. To reach that point, however, despair and calamity came first. This is why for every hundred people alive in 1970, only one still lives in 2023.
4 Jun, 2023
Because My Tears Are Delicious To You
John Sladek’s 1970 The Muller-Fokker Effect is a stand-alone satirical novel.
Bob Shairp is a technical writer reduced to editing computer-generated text. Bob is married to Marge. Together, they have a son named Spot, who is obsessed with military school. The Shairps are spied upon by National Arsenamid owner MacCormick Hines, a deranged oligarch who believes the Shairps to be characters in a drama staged for his entertainment.
Much to his wife Marge’s displeasure, National Arsenamid eliminates Bob’s job. The family’s financial security is salvaged when Bob is assigned the task of human research subject. What he experiences blows his mind.