Review by New York Times Review
ANN LECKIE'S LATEST Space romp, PROVENANCE (Orbit, $26), isn't really a space opera in the same way as the awardwinning Imperial Radch trilogy that made her famous. It might be tempting, therefore, to insist that comparisons are unfair. Yet they're also unavoidable - largely because, even though "Provenance" centers on non-Radchaai societies, it is effectively a sequel. Now that a treaty has been established between the empire and the enigmatic, violent, technologically superior Presger, countless planets breathe easier. But the peace will last only so long as the "civilized" races of the universe actually act civilized. This premise makes the book a perfect follow-up to the trilogy, because it is effectively a comedy of manners. The story focuses on Ingray Aughskold, a young woman adopted into a family of some importance on the planet Hwae. Ingray has a scheme to earn favor with her mother by breaking a notorious criminal out of prison - a scheme that, fortunately for her, does not go completely cockeyed. In the trilogy, there was a running subplot surrounding the diplomacy of tea, which served as a symbol of civilization (and colonization). Here, a similar purpose is served by Hwaean "vestiges," essentially fannish collectors' items. But at the end of the day, this is a saga of children struggling to meet the strict obligations of family and adulthood, which makes it a microcosmic mirror of what the Presger have demanded of humanity. It does get convoluted, however. "Provenance" feels clumsier than the Radch novels in many ways, possibly because there are fewer galaxy- or character-transforming moments to pull the reader along. As an example, Hwaean society's gender pronouns (his, hers, eirs and its) don't flow as well as the "universal her" of the earlier stories, though one gets used to them. Ingray and her companions aren't nearly so compelling as Breq and company, either. Still, the novel stands well as a sort of thematic coda to the Radch trilogy, and should please those who like tea with their space opera. The world is at war - unofficially for the moment, but it's only a matter of time before de facto conflicts erupt into full-fledged conflagration. And in the lush, complex realm of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda's monstress, volume TWO: THE BLOOD (Image Comics, paper, $16.99), the second in a series of graphic novels, that conflagration is increasingly likely to involve magical genocide by godlike eldritch abominations. This series is impossible to classify; genre elements mingle in mythical and gleefully subversive ways. The story's protagonist, Maika Halfwolf, is descended from an ancient immortal called the Queen of Wolves - quite literally an anthropomorphic wolf. Maika has only one arm, though sometimes she wears a magical clockwork prosthetic; hidden in the stump is a squiggly, many-eyed monstrosity that periodically pops out and eats people. Her companions include a talking cat and a child with a fox tail. Yet the obvious parallels with our own world give this wildly imaginative fantasy epic its greatest impact. The central conflict is between "arcanic" people like Maika and humans who have developed a means of extracting magical power from arcanic bodies - brutally, and fatally. This of course evokes the politicized bodies of our own society, more so because so many of the story's characters are visibly people of color. The war's proponents deploy propaganda with all the loathsome rhetoric of the white supremacist altright; the war's atrocities are Mengelean in scope and grotesquerie. That the true monsters here include the hatemongers, and not just the tentacled horrors running about, is never in question. Yet between Liu's lyricism and the utter breathtaking beauty of Takeda's art, it's tempting not to care about the story at all. It's a pleasant bonus, then, that Volume Two provides answers to some of the crucial questions driving this in medias res story, and some welcome character development for both Maika and her resident monster. New mysteries appear as well, so readers can look forward to the continuation of this macabre, masterly series. In a realm of myth, magic and burgeoning science, a set of twins is born to the ruler of the land. To tell their stories, J.Y. Yang has cleverly written a pair of twinned novellas, THE RED THREADS OF FORTUNE and THE BLACK TIDES OF HEAVEN (Tor.com, paper, $15.99 each). This is a tale of prophecy and family. Although their mother the Protector expects little of the twins, Mokoya develops the valuable ability to see - but never alter - the future. After she grows up and finds happiness with a family of her own, tragedy strikes, forcing her to rebuild herself as a scarred, hard-edged naga hunter. Meanwhile Akeha, the unwanted "spare" twin, eventually leaves to find his own fate, but he too is trapped by a prophecy that entangles his interests with those of rebels against the Protectorate. All of this takes place amid a gorgeous, outlandish backdrop : a pan-Asian technomagic world in which matter and energy may be manipulated by the Slack, a kind of invisible field of connective threads that controls gravity, electricity and more. Here part of the world has only half the gravity that it should, just because that's how magical lands work sometimes. Here adults impose their will on children in every way except the physical; when they come of age, children choose a gender identity and are then given medicines that shape their bodies to suit. Mokoya hunts nagas with the aid of a pack of trained velociraptors. She has a color-changing lizard arm. It's joyously wild stuff. These paired stories are being released simultaneously, and are clearly meant to be read together even though each stands alone. Each story follows one of the twins, though covering a different period in their lives; chronologically "Black Tides" precedes "Red Threads." Reading the later book first has no negative impact on the overall tale, however. Highly recommended. In Jeffrey Ford's THE TWILIGHT PARIAH (Tor.com, paper, $14.99), three college-aged friends while away a lazy summer in a small town. Eccentric Maggie gets the bright idea to conduct a pseudo-archeological dig on the outhouse of the Prewitt mansion, which has been abandoned for a century, and she persuades her aimless friends Russell and Henry to help out. Cue beer and lots of excrement jokes. But not long into the dig, they find a mystery: the skeleton of a child with horns on its skull, and ridges on its shoulder blades suggesting demonic wings. After this, things go about as well as can be expected. The three immediately start having "Did you see that?" moments. Mysterious, brutal murders begin to occur, and it quickly becomes clear that something - the Pariah, per local legend - is stalking the people of the town. This is in every way a traditionally shaped horror story of Things Best Left Undisturbed, and perhaps the only real tension lies in wondering if, or how, the three friends will survive. There are genuinely creepy moments, but most of them are predictable. One gets the sense that Ford knows this, however, and that scares aren't really the point. The deeper meaning is in the tale of three young people trapped in crumbling rural Middle America, with nothing but gallows humor and imagination to shape their lives. In quick but powerful brush strokes, Ford sketches Henry (the viewpoint character) as a young man watching his unemployed blue-collar father die slowly of despair. Maggie's restlessness draws in the reader most - she's the real protagonist - as it becomes painfully, horrifically clear that the murderous Pariah may be the only thing lending a sense of meaning to her life. Ford sticks the landing of this short, poignant and punchy book not by resolving the mystery, but by reminding the reader that there's nothing quite so horrific as having no future. N. K. JEMISIN won the Hugo Award for best novel in 2016, and again in 2017, for the first two parts of the Broken Earth trilogy, which concluded last month. Her column on Science fiction and fantasy appears six times a year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 10, 2017]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hugo- and Nebula-winner Leckie returns to the universe of her bestselling Imperial Radch trilogy with this standalone SF thriller styled as a space opera of manners. Ingray Aughskold is determined to outdo her conniving brother and impress their demanding mother enough to be named her heir, even if that means gambling everything Ingray has. She leaves her home planet to break a famous thief out of prison and get help in a scheme to blackmail her mother's primary political opponent. But when the person she retrieves denies being the person she wants, her rash plan starts to fall apart. Matters are made worse by the fanatical pursuit of the distressingly odd ambassador of the alien Geck. Though full of the charm and wit characterizing Leckie's other works, including delightful appearances by a Radch ambassador and tantalizing hints about the upcoming conclave, this novel nevertheless doesn't quite have the depth and richness Leckie fans might expect. It's primarily an optimistic coming-of-age story, and it stumbles on some false promises along the way. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In a bid finally to win the attention and approval of her politician mother, -Ingray arranges to smuggle Pahlad -Budrakim, heir to one of her mother's rivals, out of the prison planet known as Compassionate Removal. From the start, things don't go as planned. After a tense encounter with the alien Geck, Ingray manages to return her charge back home to Hwae, but the two are entangled in a murder investigation when a visiting diplomat from the Omkem people is killed in their company. While there are references to elements from Leckie's "Ancillary" books, the action focuses on Ingray, who wants her foster mother's love but fears her scheming brother will forever be the favorite. VERDICT Following up her magnificent "Ancillary" trilogy, Leckie wisely moves to a different area of the same universe, showing that she is still interested in nonbinary ideas of gender in this latest character-centered space opera from one of sf's brightest stars.-MM © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A woman seeking the approval of her foster mother takes a desperate gamble and finds herself in the middle of an interplanetary conspiracy.To help her foster mother, Netano, shame a political rival, Ingray Aughskold of the planet Hwae bribes a broker to smuggle the notorious Pahlad Budrakim out of prison, hoping that Pahlad will reveal the location of the valuable family antiques e stole. (Pahlad is a "neman," a gender using the pronouns e/eir/em.) This supposedly simple plan soon gets complicated thanks to Ingray's scheming foster brother, Danach, a neighboring planetary government that frames Pahlad for murder, an alien ambassador with a persistent interest in Ingray and her associates...and the fact that Pahlad never stole the antiques in the first place. Setting her new novel in the same universe as her previous books (Ancillary Mercy, 2015, etc.), Leckie again uses large-scale worldbuilding to tell a deeply personal storyin this case, to explore what binds children to their families. As always, she impels the reader to consider the power language, and specifically names, has to shape perception and reality. The title is meaningful in several senses. "Provenance" initially refers to vestiges, the antiques so highly valued on Hwae, many of which are probably fakes; but more importantly, it means the struggle to understand where people come from and how it made them what they are, how they will define themselves now, and what labels they will choose to bear going forward. In aid of that point, a deeper look into the relationship between Ingray and Netano might have strengthened the book, and so might evidence of Danach's much-discussed political abilityall we see from him are smugness and petulance, while Ingray demonstrates far more political adeptness. But since the novel is told from Ingray's perspective, which is that of a woman with poor self-esteem discovering her confidence and true worth, Danach may not have been all that brilliant to begin with. More intriguing cultures to explore, more characters to care about, more Leckie to love. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
