Child Readers...Maybe Any Readers?...Of Science Fiction

This past September I came upon and flagged a 2015 Horn Book article, The Campaign for Shiny Futures by Farah Mendelsohn. I probably read it at the time it was published, because I was subscribing to Horn Book then, and I've been familiar with Mendelsohn's work for a long time. I believe we were once members of the same listserv, I may have heard her speak at a scifi/fantasy conference years ago, and I find her to be an incredibly logical and coherent thinker and writer.

In The Campaign for Shiny Futures she has fascinating things to say about child readers of science fiction, how science fiction for children has changed over the last half century, who is writing science fiction for children...I could go on.

One of the things she writes about is child readers' interest in ideas and information in science fiction, versus relationships. I am only a dabbler in reading and writing science fiction, but I wonder if this may be true of adult readers of science fiction, as well.

I was reminded of a science fiction discussion I attended at my local library years ago, back in the day when it actually sponsored literary events vs. gatherings regarding crafts and cooking. (Why, yes, I do have an ax to grind.) I don't recall what book we'd read, but I had not liked it at all. However, I was sitting in a circle with people who were leaning forward, on the edge of their seats, consumed with interest. What is going on here? I wondered.

What I realized was that those people were reading for content while I was reading for style. Did that make me just a little superficial? Or a lot?

For example, I like the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. In fact, I believe there's a new book out I'll be buying myself for Christmas. However, I can't tell you a whole lot about what's going on in those things, the technical information, or ideas. I am totally taken with Murderbot, itself. The same is probably true for any science fiction I read.  

This means, I think, that I should not be shopping for or advising any true science fiction reader of any age.

A Boy, A Girl, A Dog--What More Do You Want? Oh, Yeah, Robots

I stumbled upon Cog by Greg Van Eekhout on my first library visit in two years. It was the best book I brought home. 

It's a terrific middle grade outsider novel about a  boy, who isn't really a boy, but has many boy-like qualities. He's navigating the world, as real boys must do. He's at a bit of a disadvantage, because while he is capable of learning from experience (his name is short for "cognitive development") he has to do it in, perhaps we could say, a more literal way than your run-of-the-mill boys do. Because he is a robot. 

There is a cliched big-corporations-are-bad and bad-guy-corporate-employee thing going on here, but it's more palatable because of, you know, robots.

I know someone who's getting a copy of this for his birthday.

 

Can't These Two Nice Guys Find Happiness?

I usually find the Michael L. Printz and Alex Awards the most interesting of the annual ALA book awards. The Printz deals specifically with YA and  the Alex is a list of ten adult books with special interest for YA readers. It's not that I'm a fan of YA over books for younger readers. But I've found these older reader awards to be less predictable than those for the younger kids. The books selected are usually less instructive. There's a lot less of the small town children-mature-before-their time thing going on. 

This year I went looking for an Alex book to read, for one reason and another. I will admit,  Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell was the only one of this year's winners I could find in my library's e-book service. I had to put a hold on it, and by the time it arrived, I couldn't remember what it was about. The whole made-up-empires-on-made-up-planets-thing I noticed at this point didn't fill me with enthusiasm.

However, I most definitely understand how this book made a list of adult books with interest for YA readers, because YA Gail would have loved this thing. Adult Gail enjoyed it, too.  

Like A Historical Romance In Space

As a teenager, I was a big fan of historical romance. I continued reading it through college, primarily during exam weeks. Clearly some kind of relaxation/calming strategy. Winter's Orbit follows a classic historical romance pattern. A couple, often of unequal status, end up married, but because of a series of misunderstandings they don't understand they love each other/are meant to be together/are only moments from happiness.

This is not the Pride and Prejudice model of hate-at-first-sight and come-around-to-love-later seen in a great many contemporary romantic comedies. The situation I'm talking about involves characters who usually don't bear each other any ill will and have good intentions, but misunderstandings keep them apart emotionally.

At her website author Maxwell says that as a teenager she read science fiction and fantasy, "with her family’s Georgette Heyer collection always a reliable friend when the library books ran out." Heyer's historical romances were the reliable friend for many teenagers, and her influence is sprinkled all over Maxwell's novel.

In the world of Winter's Orbit, Prince Kiem and Count Jainan enter an arranged marriage to seal an agreement between their planets. Prince Kiem is a reformed playboy (a variation on the reformed reprobate often seen in romances), who now has a pseudo career as a Prince Harry-type, making appearances as a patron to various organizations. A charming guy, but not, at first glance, an intellectual heavyweight. Count Jainan is a very recent widower, a diplomat who had been half of another arranged marriage in support of his home world. A very serious guy who is carrying around a whole lot of  anxiety.

While dealing  with all the confusion regarding their mutual attraction, they end up up-to-their necks in a political mystery.

World Building Around Gender

Science fiction, like historical fiction, has a great deal to do with world building, and Winter's Orbit's is extremely interesting in relation to gender. There's not much in the way of gender issues in this empire. Evidently males and females may dress so similarly that they express their gender, should they want to, by wearing certain types of jewelry. Whether male, female, or nonbinary, the royal at the top of the heap is referred to as "emperor." There are no princesses, everyone carrying that status is a prince. There are no gay marriages or lesbian marriages or heterosexual marriages. No modifiers, only marriages. Spouses usually refer to themselves as "partners" rather than "husbands" or "wives," which gives the couples a definite level of equality. A male character is referred to as beautiful, without that word having the feminine connotations many readers would expect. Anyone could be beautiful here.There are no references to a female military person or academic having had to fight her way up because of sexism. Presumably no one in the Winter's Orbit world would know what that is. 

A Blast From The Past

I think a big part of the reason I enjoyed this book so much is that it took me back to a time when I read things similar to this regularly, a time when I just read to read, could stay up late doing it, and didn't have responsibilities beyond final exams. Compared to what came later in life, final exams were nothing at all. 

Time to return Winter's Orbit. There are three people waiting for it. I'm not at all surprised. 

A Book That Tears Up Some YA Cliches

Last Friday, October 1, I began a new writing group program with a Facebook group I've belonged to for a couple of years. We create a couple of temporal landmarks a year by setting aside a month for a specific writing project.  This month I'll be working on that mysterious YA mystery I keep talking about here. And today I'm posting about a mysterious YA book I recently read.

A number of books have covered people unaware of the world they're living in or unaware that they are being used for the entertainment of others  (notice how I'm not telling you much here?), but This is Not the Jess Show by Anna Carey does it particularly well. Even if you end up hearing some of what this book is about before reading it (it has been out since February), there's a genre-bending twist, and a bit of a surprise in the ending. 

A real ending, people. As I was getting closer and closer to the end of the book, my anxiety level was going up and up, because I was so sure this was going to be the first in a serial. What a delight to get to that last screen (I read an e-book) and get a satisfying resolution. I think there may be an opening for a sequel, but not in a serial, you've-got-to-read-another book sort of way. 

This Is Not The Jess Show starts out with a very traditional teen girl craving romance. She is a traditional teen girl with two best friends. She has a traditional family tragedy looming over her. I will be honest and say those are not my favorite things to read about. But then author Carey blows all of those out of the water. A really impressive job.

There's also some well done, subtle, commentary relating to technology and society going on here, a la Black Mirror. In fact, I believe there are some scenes similar to a Black Mirror episode. Which is not a complaint. Just saying, if you like Black Mirror, consider reading This Is Not The Jess Show. And if you like This Is Not The Jess Show, consider catching some episodes of Black Mirror.

I would also like to say that I think Carey makes the situation in her book believable with that genre twist I mentioned above. Well done. 

Here's a question you might be left with after reading this book: Why does our culture find death and grieving entertaining?

So Now The Publishing World Is Interested In Children's SciFi

Thirteen+ years ago, my blogging buddies and I bemoaned the fact that there was so little science fiction for children. Fantasy had control of children's publishing. Thirteen years ago, when I was shopping around a middle grade science fiction manuscript, I often saw children's agents who wouldn't represent science fiction.

Last month Book Riot had an entire column of middle grade science fiction. Well, thirteen years is a long time.

Replica--You Choose The Book's Structure

Replica by Lauren Oliver is one of those books I found on my Kindle--I bought it on sale, didn't read it right away, and didn't recall much about it when I finally began it. And I didn't understand the novelty of its structure. At the end of each chapter, I found instructions to follow a link to get to a chapter about another character. But only if I wanted to. I could choose to keep reading about the main character I started with, and then, presumably, read about the other character all at once. 

To more clearly explain this, here's the description from Oliver's website: "Replica is a “flip book” that contains two narratives in one. Turn the book one way and read Lyra’s story; turn the book over and upside down and read Gemma’s story. The stories can be read separately, one after the other, or in alternating chapters."

Point-of-View Switches

Though I'm always complaining about books with point-of-view switches, I chose to keep going back and forth between Lyra and Gemma's stories. Oddly enough, I thought that worked very well, especially when you consider that after reading a chapter from one character's point-of-view, I'd often read another chapter covering the same material, but from the other character's point-of-view. My complaint about point-of-view switches is that I feel they slow narrative drive. I didn't feel that was the case here, even though you'd think that covering the same material twice would do just that.

That Teen Girl-Boy Thing

 

Both Lyra and Gemma have romantic involvements. In fact, for one of them there is the possibility of a torn-between-two-lovers situation. Romance, romance everywhere is something, like point-of-view switches, that usually annoys me no end. Romance in books that are not actually romances usually strikes me as a gimmick, an awkward add-on, a distraction. Especially in thrillers or adventures where characters are in danger, the logic of dropping everything for a love scene is just lost on me.

 

In the case of Replica, though, the romance is less like romance and more like an attraction, a drive that the characters have no control over. That was particularly so in Lyra's case. A stage-of-life attraction to the opposite sex may be what's happening during adolescence. It makes more sense to me than sixteen-year-old romances.

 

 Are We Talking A Serial?

Replica leaves readers with the impression that there is more to come. And there is what's called a "companion novel," Ringer, that appears to involve the same characters after the events in Replica. But Replica has a satisfying ending. One phase of the story, at least, is ending. There isn't the feeling that this is a serial, that readers are left dangling and will have to buy another book to feel any kind of satisfaction.

 

I hate when that happens.

 

So Replica is both a good read and an interesting example of how a number of writing issues that I really dislike can be made to work.

 

How Does A Zombie Story Fit In With Black History Month?

Deathless Divide, the sequel to Dread Nation by Justina Ireland, is a work of alternative history dealing with the rise of the undead after the American Civil War. That's right. It's a zombie story. Why would I consider that an appropriate book to discuss in relation to Black History Month? Because in an Author's Note, Justina Ireland writes that she feels the one goal she is sure she accomplished with this book is putting "Black people back into history."

Ireland loves the western genre but says she felt that while Black people "lived throughout the West, they are rarely the heroes of any popular narratives." Given the author's goal, and the sense that Deathless Divide appears to have been as meticulously researched as a traditional historical novel, and the fact that, as with Dread Nation, Deathless Divide is about race and gender more than it's about zombies, I think it's a good title to bring to readers' attention this month.

The family member who recommended these books to me felt that the sequel wasn't as good as the original. I think Deathless Divide is as good as Dread Nation, but it is different structurally, which some fans of the first book may find disappointing. 

Dread Nation was told from the point of view of Jane McKeene, an outsider antihero type who is engaging the way outsider antiheroes often are. Deathless Divide is told from alternating points of view, moving between Jane and Katherine Deveraux, another excellent character from the first book. Like Jane, Katherine is a powerful young woman, but she manages her power behind a facade of traditional womanhood, while Jane is right out there. For me, alternating points of view often slow down narrative drive, and that may be an issue in the second book for some readers.

People who have read the first book are also probably going to want Jane and Katherine to get back together, which  takes a while. This is more of a journey book, with both Jane and Katherine on separate journeys to arrive at the same place.

I think you could argue that the author took an admirable risk structuring the second book so differently. I think it worked. I definitely felt I was reading a different book, while sequels and, particularly series, are often so similar to the original and each other that it's hard to pinpoint what happened in which book.

Not the case here. I think these will be memorable books. 

"Dread Nation" A Favorite Recent Read

A family member recommended Dread Nation by Justina Ireland to me. Within just a couple of weeks,
I saw the ebook edition on sale. At my house, that is what is known as a sign, a sign for me to purchase and read.

I'm always saying that I'm not that big a fan of zombie books, but I seem to have read a number of them.  I'm not attracted to the idea of walking dead, by any means, or horror. I'm attracted to zombie books that have a unique world for the zombies to exist within. That was the case with the Rot & Ruin books I read, as well as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Rot & Ruin was a zombie/contemporary western mash-up. P and P and Z was, of course, a zombie/Pride and Prejudice mash-up. Dread Nation is a zombie/alternative history mashup. It takes place in a post-American Civil War world in which the dead rose during/after the Battle of Gettysburg. 

I believe I once read that zombie stories are never about zombies. That's certainly the case with Dread Nation. This book deals with race and politics, with a twist on a southern belle/mean girl secondary character thrown in, just in case there's not enough to interest you. And like with Rot & Ruin, the zombies in Dread Nation are not necessarily the worst things our hero has to deal with. Some of the humans who exist in this zombie world are pretty grim. 

Fantastic main character who would have been a male a decade or so ago but most definitely is not. Even the ending is good, though the story is clearly set up for a sequel.

Seriously, I can't think of any negatives for this one.

Dec. 17 UPDATE Talk about a sign! (Which I was doing earlier in this post.) The eBook edition of Deathless Divide, the sequel to Dread Nation, is on sale! I just bought it! I just started reading a new book last night, so I can ditch that and read this instead!

Finally Read One Of My Christmas Books

Last year I asked for and received a copy of Company's Going by Arthur Yorinks with illustrations by David Small. It looks as if it was a 2001 publication that was rereleased in 2018. I finally read it a couple of weeks ago, because, you know, reading a picture book is so much effort.

I'm sorry to have missed Company's Going the first time it was published, because it's a sequel to Company's Coming, which also appears to have been rereleased in 2018. Company's Coming had a huge impact on my life, as I explained in a 2015 OC post. Basically, what happened was:

"The day after I read it to my sons, it inspired my short story, How Mom Saved the Planet, which was later published in Cricket Magazine. And another version of How Mom Saved the Planet became the first chapter of my first book, My Life Among the Aliens. I may not have had a writing career, if not for Company's Coming."

So, yes, big deal for Gail.  

Company's Going picks up with the same characters from Company's Coming, except now Moe and Shirley's alien guests are so taken with Shirley's cooking that they invite her to cater a wedding back on their home world. It's just as terrific as the first book.

Interesting point: My Life Among the Aliens also had a sequel, Club Earth. Both books were a series of stories about Will and Rob, whose mom's over-the-top healthy cooking attracts aliens. In their case, though, the aliens came to them. 

Another interesting point: Both the Company books are examples of picture books with no human characters and no animals characters filling in for humans. I don't see that a lot.

Both of what I call the Will and Rob books have human characters. And aliens, of course.

 

"Dragon Pearl" Wins Locus Award in YA category

The Locus Awards for 2020 were announced yesterday as part of a virtual weekend event. Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee won in the YA category.

The other nominees were:

• King of Scars, Leigh Bardugo
• The Wicked King, Holly Black
• Pet, Akwaeke Emezi
• Catfishing on CatNet, Naomi Kritzer
• Destroy All Monsters, Sam J. Miller
• Angel Mage, Garth Nix
• War Girls, Tochi Onyebuchi
• The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth, Philip Pullman
• Shadow Captain, Alastair Reynolds

Comfort Reading That Just Happens To Support A Goal

I remember early summer fondly. I had fewer family responsibilities than I'd had in years. The temps weren't terribly high. We didn't get any biking in, but managed a few short walks in town on weekends. Unfortunately, I had family members heading out on a lengthy trip at the end of June, and family members traveling is always a source of anxiety for me. Definitely damaged my bliss.

I treated that with a binge of Books Two through Four of the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. I could feel good about reading these books for two reasons.

• First, and most importantly, I love Murderbot
• Second, I have an adult scifi manuscript I've mentioned before that I'll be shopping around again some day, and I'm working on improving my recent reading background in this genre.

Now, I'm somewhat off-topic with these books, since they're adult, and I specialize in childlit here. But they first came to my attention last year when the first book in the series, All Systems Red, was an Alex Award winner. The Alex Award being for adult books with "special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18." So there's a connection.

These are marvelous first-person novellas told from the point-of-view of a Security Unit, an artificial life form with some human material thrown in. It's on a journey to discover how it came to murder some humans it was supposed to be protecting, as well as working on a corporate plot against a former employer. With all that on its plate, it still finds time to access the entertainment media it downloads. It finds a lot of time for that, actually.

Murderbot's quests are carried over amongst these books. But the series doesn't seem like an obvious serial. Each novella has its own storyline as well.

Murderbot is a great character, and these are great distractions when you have something you want to be distracted from.

Lodestar Award For Best Young Adult Science Fiction Or Fantasy Book Announced

The Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book was announced as part of the Hugo Award announcements at the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland. I believe I have an acquaintance at that convention. One I've actually met in the flesh for a moment and been in the same room with, unlike other people I am acquainted with in other ways.

According to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the Lodestar Awards are voted on by the same people who vote on the Hugos, but the Lodestar is not a Hugo. "The chief reason for this distinction is the principle that no single work should be eligible for multiple Hugo categories: Young Adult tales are not excluded from, and indeed have won, the Hugo for best novel and best novella." So now you know that. And it is interesting.

The 2019 finalists and the winner (in bold) are:

• Children of Blood and Bone, by Tomi Adeyemi (Henry Holt / Macmillan Children’s Books)
• The Belles, by Dhonielle Clayton (Freeform / Gollancz)
• The Cruel Prince, by Holly Black (Little, Brown / Hot Key Books)
• Dread Nation, by Justina Ireland (Balzer + Bray)
• The Invasion, by Peadar O’Guilin (David Fickling Books / Scholastic)
• Tess of the Road, by Rachel Hartman (Random House / Penguin Teen)

Tor.com lists all the finalists and winners.

Reading To Support Goals

At the end of January, I made an adjustment to this year's goals and objectives "Research and create notes for a happy apocalyptic story." I read Pandemic 1918 by Catharine Arnold and Pale Rider by Laura Spinney to research that story, but I'm also trying to read some general science fiction to ground myself in the genre I'm writing. (I also have an adult first contact story that I'm holding on to for a little while before I submit it again, so grounding myself in the genre would be good for that, too.) So late this winter/early this spring I read Lock In and Head On by John Scalzi. (I read his Redshirts a few years ago, and I believe we have his Agent to the Stars floating around the house somewhere.)

Lock In and Head On are police procedurals set in the near future, using the same main characters and same world. To be truthful, I found the science a little long in places and hard to follow, and there were a lot of secondary characters, particularly of the potential bad guy variety. I loved the main characters and their world, though, enjoyed the reads, and hope Scalzi does more Lock In books.

 

How Do Lock In and Head On Fit In To My Grand Scheme?

The Lock In books involve bringing science fiction elements into our world. This is my favorite kind of science fiction. I am not a big fan of stories about human elements entering science fiction worlds. When I write science fiction,which, granted, isn't that often, I bring science fiction to the here and, so far, the now. That's what I did with My Life Among the Aliens and Club Earth, which have the same main characters and world. They involve aliens coming into suburban children's world.

So I'm going to try to stick with that kind of science fiction reading for the immediate future.

Naomi Kritzer, Short Ficton

You will remember that reading is part of my goals and objectives this year. I'm sure I mentioned it here. Several times. An objective for the essay and short story goal involves reading a short story or essay every day. I've been hitting that one out of the park. I missed only one day when an elder was in the emergency room. And I wasn't one of the people who stayed there all afternoon. And evening. I definitely shirked that day.

My plan was to read randomly, which I pretty much have, though I did find myself doing an author study early on.

I discovered Naomi Kritzer on Facebook, believe it or not, when she very appropriately posted a link to one of her short stories in someone's comments. I loved it and took off.

Favorite Kritzer Stories

So Much Cooking was what got me started. This is an apocalyptic story written in the form of a food blog. So much to like.

Field Biology of the Wee Fairies. A fairy story for people like me who don't like them.


Waiting Out the End of the World in Patty's Place Cafe. An end of the world story? Or something else? 

Paradox. A time travel story that doesn't take itself too seriously. And it has a Travelers vibe.

Bits. This is the story everyone who has ever seen a story about human/alien romance has been waiting for.

What I like about Kritzer's writing is that she does scifi and fantasy stories and sets them in our real world. Or, in some cases, our nearly real world. That's my favorite kind of science fiction and fantasy. Which explains why I so rarely like fantasy. I don't find a lot of it set where I want it set.

YA Coming

This fall, Naomi Kritzer's YA novel, Catfishing on CatNet will be published by Tor/Forge. You can check out an excerpt at Den of Geek.

So Kritzer writes this neat short fiction AND she has a childlit connection. She's perfection for Original Content.

Environmental Book Club

Sometime in the past, I wondered here if environmental books couldn't work with environmental settings instead of environmental themes. I'm not certain what environmental themes are. "We must save the planet?" "Humanity is destroying the Earth?" "We must save the planet from us?" If so, they are themes that are often used in cliched and very preachy ways.

Books with environmental settings or, maybe, situations, can have nonenvironmental themes, giving a book more complexity and getting away from heavy-handed lessons and warnings. A good example of this is Kissing Frogs by Alisha Seviny, which is a romance set on a trip to work with endangered frogs. The theme here could be described as the rogue outsider finding love with an opposite, which does not have anything to do with the environment. The setting--the work with the endangered frogs--provides the environmental aspect to the story.

Another example is Blight by Alexandra Duncan, a traditional dystopian, post-apocalyptic story set within a world in which only a few types of food plants are viable, because of a...you guessed it...blight. Agribusiness is the bad guy here, as business often is the bad guy in post-apocalyptic worlds. There's not a lot of dwelling on what happened, what brought humanity to this state, though. AgriStar is the bad guy not because it caused the blight (Though it may have. I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember.), but because of what it's done since the blight. 

We've got a plot driven adventure here, including a journey story. We've got rebels. We've got evil junkers, a group of seriously bad guys who also appear in The Girl With All the Powers and The Boy on the Bridge. There are junker-like characters in the Rot & Ruin books. They may be a staple of post-apocalyptic stories.

My point is, this is the kind of narrative that could exist in many post-apocalyptic settings...a zombie apocalypse, an alien apocalypse...or in a religious dystopia. Blight is set in an environmental situation, but because it's more interested in its plot-driven adventure, it's far less environmentally cliched and heavy-handed than many books that might be described as environmental.

What I Found In The YA Department

A couple of months ago I found a book called The Girl With All the Powers by M.R. Carey in my local library's YA department. It's a post-zombie apocalypse story, which in my humble opinion is the only kind of apocalyptic story worth reading. It's a particularly good one. Girl With All the Powers is a stay up late into the night book.

Saturday morning, after waking up at 4:45 from a nightmare about fire, I finished reading The Boy on the Bridge, also by M.R. Carey. This is a prequel to Girl With All the Powers, and, though it repeats a lot of the Girl plot, it was a damn good read. Love Stephen. Love Foss. But, then, who doesn't love a woman with a gun?

But Why The YA Department?

It wasn't a YA book, though. Nor was The Girl With All the Powers. What were they doing in the YA department? Do the librarians here know something that I don't? That we have a big teen zombie reading population in this town?

Both books have an important young character in a pseudo mother/child relationship, but its hard to call them main characters. Well, maybe in The Girl With All the Powers. Not so much with The Boy on the Bridge. These books switch points of view frequently, and they're often about adult experience, at least, adult experience with zombies.

So, let's see...my point... Oh, yes. These books have a very important child character, but they aren't actually adult books with a child main character like, say, the Flavia de Luce books. I really don't see something here that will draw YA readers, specifically.

Well, except for the zombies, of course. But, then, who doesn't love a zombie?

Teens Reading Adult Books

I'm not saying YA's shouldn't read these books. They're terrific. And we live in a country where we can all follow our reading tastes, so teenagers are free to dip in the adult reading pool. Kids are supposed to like to read up, right? At some point, they're going to be reading adult books. In fact, I once read that part of a YA librarian's job is to lead teen readers to adult reading. In which case, seeding the new books section with adult books makes sense.

The only concern then would be adults missing out on these particular books because they're in the YA room.

A Terrific Alex Award Winner

Somehow I got onto a Tor.com newsletter a year or two ago, which provides me with some interesting info on books. Earlier this year, I learned on the newsletter about All Systems Red by Martha Wells, one of this year's Alex Award winners. I thought it sounded intriguing, and I was able to get the eBook for a very reasonable price. Cheap, really. You know me. Intriguing. Cheap. I bought that thing.

It is fantastic.

All Systems Red is the first in the Murderbot Diaries, Murderbot being the name an android gives itself, because...Well, isn't it obvious? Murderbot is a security android assigned to a group of scientists doing research on another planet. Its main interest is watching what we'd call soap operas it's downloaded. But when its people are endangered, it focuses on saving them.

I loved this book. As I was reading it, though, I wondered what made this one of the ten Alex winners, "book written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18." But by the time I finished, I got it. Murderbot is trying to understand why it is the way it is. And the humans in the story tend to treat it as a youth.

All Systems Red is a novella, one I purchased in print form for my niece to read during exams. I'm planning to get another copy for a family member short on time. There are three more novellas coming out this year.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Alternative History

That Inevitable Victorian Thing by E.K. Johnston is a quiet book in a very unique setting. Basically, it's a romance with your classic YA torn-between- two-lovers scenario. It begins with young upper class women (and, if I recall correctly, men) doing the debutante thing in the city of Toronto and then moves to an idyllic Canadian lake. The relationships are worked out without a lot of passion and drama. What raises the interest level here is the kinds of relationships we're talking about and the world the whole story is set in.

What we have here is a well-developed universe with computers...DNA issues...a superficially twenty-first century-type setting. But we also have a British Empire that the sun hasn't set on with a powerful queen, as well as a United States from which pirates set out to pillage Canadian/British ships on the Great Lakes. What's more, this is a particularly diverse world, in large part because the historic Queen Victoria from whom the present queen is descended married off her children to leaders all over the world, not just to European (and, of course, white) royalty. So the royal family is diverse and that makes it acceptable and normal for every other segment of society.

One of the many nice things about this book is that it doesn't preach or hit readers over the head with any Hey, look how we have characters from all over the world here! Look what we do with sexuality! Everything is just there, as if it's just totally run-of-the-mill life. Which, in a book, it should be.

A Regency/Spy/Fantasy Mash-up

Murder, Magic, and What We Wore by Kelly Jones is a gem, especially for readers who, like myself, spent many hours of their youth reading regency novels. Sixteen-year-old Annis Whitworth and her intellectual aunt have been left destitute by the sudden death of Annis's father. But Annis, whose big skill up to that point appears to have been advising her friends on how they should dress, is no classic damsel in distress, facing a sad future as a governess or companion. She discovers she has the ability to sew glamours into clothing, creating magical outfits in this world where glamours for this and that are a fact of life.

Oh, and also, she wants to follow her father into the spy business.

Regency novels often involve romance. This is more of an Austen-type social commentary with the strongest feminist tone I can recall ever seeing in a book of this type. There's even a #metoo type thing going on at one point. And, like That Inevitable Victorian Thing, there's no metaphorical neon sign here to make sure readers get it. This is merely the world of this book.

Okay, Well That's A Different Kind Of Apocalyptic Story

Landscape with Invisible Hand by M. T. Anderson is an apocalyptic story, which I didn't pick up on
from reading the flap content. But, then, I try to avoid apocalyptic tales, so I may not be able to spot one as easily as a fan would. This one has a really intriguing premise, though. Humans fall to the alien invaders because they destroy our economy. How cool is that?

Some interesting points:

• Adam, our main character, is an artist, and each chapter relates to a piece of art he's creating. In one chapter there's discussion of the artists of the Hudson River School and how their work is about atmosphere, clouds, mist, and moisture. Their work is "paintings of the air between things." I hope I remember that the next time I'm in a museum and stumble upon a Hudson School painting.
• Adam suffers from a bowel problem, a disease he picked up from drinking bad water in this dystopian world. Oddly enough, a character in The Lake Effect, another recent read,  also suffers from a bowel problem. Yes, this is a meaningless coincidence. Though in both books the situation is presented as the life problem it is, not as an opportunity for toilet humor. So it may not be meaningless after all.
• At various points, I felt that this book was a serious downer. Which, of course, is the case with books about post-apocalyptic worlds. But the ending is on the positive, light side, making it different in my experience of the genre.
• Landscape with Invisible Hand is short! That's how I want my apocalyptic novels.

Norton Award

I'm very late with reading about the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. Better late than never, however. Here is the short list with the winner highlighted.

• The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Kelly Barnhill (Algonquin Young Readers)
• The Star-Touched Queen, Roshani Chokshi (St. Martin’s)
• The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan UK; Abrams)
• Arabella of Mars, David D. Levine (Tor)
• Railhead, Philip Reeve (Oxford University Press; Switch)
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies, Lindsay Ribar (Kathy Dawson Books)
• The Evil Wizard Smallbone, Delia Sherman (Candlewick)

You can check out all the 2016 Nebula Award winners at Tor.com