This weekend I finished two books, the first of which was The Seep by Chana Porter, which has been on my TBR for years. In this book, Earth has been peacefully invaded by a parasitic alien which goes about solving all of Earth's problems in exchange for insight on what being human is like.
If you're looking for a SFF book with heavy world-building, this is not it. Very little explanation is ever given about the Seep (the alien, not the book), how it works, how it got here, what its initial invasion was like. The practicalities of the Seep are not what this book is about; this book is about its protagonist, Trina, learning to live in a world where the Seep dominates everything, for better or worse.
The Seep itself could be an allegory for any number of things, but to me, it correlated strongly with modern technology, especially since the advent of AI, although the book was published in 2020, before AI hit the public market. The way Trina's misgivings about the Seep are brushed off as a sort of Ludditism, an old fogey being old (Trina is 50 for the better part of the book), the way even Trina acknowledges a lot of the good the Seep does but no one is willing to seriously discuss what's being lost, the way it has so quickly and totally seeped into every aspect of life on Earth so that those who choose to live without it are relegated to an isolated, ostracized community roundly mocked by everyone else.
However, while the book starts off with something to say about Trina feeling lost, about being unwilling to give everything up to the Seep, it peters out at the end without anything really to say about Trina's society (and by extension, our own). It floats around the idea that friction in our lives is good--various characters admit, under pressure, that they miss some of the more difficult aspects of life before the Seep, perhaps the sense that accomplishments meant more when you really had to work for them. Now everyone does whatever they want and it's easy, everything's easy. It hints that Trina, who is trans, has some resentment about how easily people are able to modify their bodies now with the Seep--friends walk around with angel wings, cat ears, change gender by day of the week--while Trina had to fight so hard to become who she is and feels that struggle is part of what made her who she is. It makes salient points that part of freedom is the freedom to chose wrong (the Seep is fixated on keeping humans from any unhealthy behaviors, and Trina longs for the days when she could have a drink without the overwhelming sense of alien disapproval, or the chance to grieve as she wishes to without someone trying to fix it for her). It implies that immortality takes some of the meaning out of life, because part of what makes our experiences meaningful is knowing that we only have so much time for them.
Yet the climax lacks a follow-through to these premises, in my view. When a book starts off with such strong opinions, I expect it to conclude with a solution, a criticism, a proposal...something. But here, Trina makes her speech to the Seep about why each person's individual experience shapes them and why we're all unique, but she also returns to the fold of the same community she left before, which, I think, substantially failed her in her grief for her lost wife, and partakes in the social rituals they had been demanding of her. Her end feelings on the Seep aren't even clear. She just sort of...goes on with life as she was doing before her wife's departure. Which would be perfectly fine if the story was only about grief, but this one felt like it was about a lot more than that.
I still think The Seep raises interesting, and very relevant in today's world, points, but I wish it did more with them in the end. However, the book is quite short, so I do still think it's worth the read.
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If you're looking for a SFF book with heavy world-building, this is not it. Very little explanation is ever given about the Seep (the alien, not the book), how it works, how it got here, what its initial invasion was like. The practicalities of the Seep are not what this book is about; this book is about its protagonist, Trina, learning to live in a world where the Seep dominates everything, for better or worse.
The Seep itself could be an allegory for any number of things, but to me, it correlated strongly with modern technology, especially since the advent of AI, although the book was published in 2020, before AI hit the public market. The way Trina's misgivings about the Seep are brushed off as a sort of Ludditism, an old fogey being old (Trina is 50 for the better part of the book), the way even Trina acknowledges a lot of the good the Seep does but no one is willing to seriously discuss what's being lost, the way it has so quickly and totally seeped into every aspect of life on Earth so that those who choose to live without it are relegated to an isolated, ostracized community roundly mocked by everyone else.
However, while the book starts off with something to say about Trina feeling lost, about being unwilling to give everything up to the Seep, it peters out at the end without anything really to say about Trina's society (and by extension, our own). It floats around the idea that friction in our lives is good--various characters admit, under pressure, that they miss some of the more difficult aspects of life before the Seep, perhaps the sense that accomplishments meant more when you really had to work for them. Now everyone does whatever they want and it's easy, everything's easy. It hints that Trina, who is trans, has some resentment about how easily people are able to modify their bodies now with the Seep--friends walk around with angel wings, cat ears, change gender by day of the week--while Trina had to fight so hard to become who she is and feels that struggle is part of what made her who she is. It makes salient points that part of freedom is the freedom to chose wrong (the Seep is fixated on keeping humans from any unhealthy behaviors, and Trina longs for the days when she could have a drink without the overwhelming sense of alien disapproval, or the chance to grieve as she wishes to without someone trying to fix it for her). It implies that immortality takes some of the meaning out of life, because part of what makes our experiences meaningful is knowing that we only have so much time for them.
Yet the climax lacks a follow-through to these premises, in my view. When a book starts off with such strong opinions, I expect it to conclude with a solution, a criticism, a proposal...something. But here, Trina makes her speech to the Seep about why each person's individual experience shapes them and why we're all unique, but she also returns to the fold of the same community she left before, which, I think, substantially failed her in her grief for her lost wife, and partakes in the social rituals they had been demanding of her. Her end feelings on the Seep aren't even clear. She just sort of...goes on with life as she was doing before her wife's departure. Which would be perfectly fine if the story was only about grief, but this one felt like it was about a lot more than that.
I still think The Seep raises interesting, and very relevant in today's world, points, but I wish it did more with them in the end. However, the book is quite short, so I do still think it's worth the read.
Today I finished The West Passage by Jared Pachacek. This is a fantasy novel about a massive palace that encompasses the entirety of the state where the protagonists live and is ruled over by the godlike and somewhat tyrannical Ladies. The ancient Beast, the enemy of the Ladies, is threatening to rise again, as it has done in the past, which leaves our protagonists, Pell and Kew, youths of the Grey Tower, to try to raise the alarm.
I’m usually a fan of stories that throw you right into things, but The West Passage did leave me turned around for a while. I struggled to conceptualize what was being explained, and it’s definitely a book that asks a lot of your powers of visual imagination regarding the palace.
However, I loved the general creativity of this book. I don’t think I’ve ever read a fantasy novel so firmly and intentionally grounded in the medieval. A lot of Western fantasy is generically medieval/pseudo-medieval (a la the Ren Faire), but The West Passage clearly took time to more securely set itself in this era. The technology is not always strictly medieval, as this is a fantasy world with all manner of fantastical beasts and tools, but the medieval setting is far more than window dressing here. To cap off the mood, the book is peppered with charming medieval-style illustrations at the start of each chapter and separating each “book” within the novel, showing our protagonists on their adventure.
On Monday's outbound commute I finished the audiobook for Even Though I Knew the End. This is a supernatural/fantasy noir romance and it does pack a lot of all three of those things into its brief 4-hour runtime.
This book relies heavily on stock film noir tropes—the veteran down-and-out private (paranormal) investigator (here a lesbian, Helen, our protagonist) who drinks too much and is haunted by past mistakes, a mysterious and sexy female client with a unique case, and "just one last" job before the PI plans to quit and retire with a beloved romantic partner. I didn't find them overused—and seeing them reworked to queer and female characters was fun—but other readers may find them too worn out even here.
Because the book is so short, it moves along at a very rapid pace. The whole thing takes place over the course of two days—the final two days before Helen's soul debt is called due and she finally has to pay the price of her warlock bargain. In this way, any rush felt appropriate, since it fit both the size of the novel and the context of Helen's urgency to get this last job done before she has to pay up.
The characters weren't super developed, but again—4-hour runtime. They're a little stock character-y, but not total cardboard cut-outs. It was disappointing for me to see Helen make the same mistake at the end of the book that she did prior to the start, as if she hadn't really learned anything, but since the novel ends promptly after that, the story never has to reckon much with it.
I was relieved that Edith, Helen's girlfriend, wasn't just the damsel in distress/goal object for Helen, which I was a bit worried about in the beginning. Edith has secrets and goals of her own.
Overall, the book was fine, and it entertained me well enough for a few days. Nothing extraordinary here, but nothing objectionable either. I will say I think keeping it short worked best for this book—I think drawing it out might have only weakened it. A fun little twist on a typical noir novel.
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fffriday The Plant Kitchen: 100 easy recipes for vegan beginners
Hardcover – January 14, 2020
by Ryland Peters & Small (Author)
We finished reading this cookbook today. It's not all that big, but some pages do have more than one recipe. The Introduction is just a couple paragraphs about plant-based eating. The chapters are Basic Recipes, Breakfast & Brunch, Light Bites & Snacks, Soups & Sides, Mid-Week Suppers, Feeding a Crowd, and Sweet Things. The Index seems to go primarily by main ingredients.
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Hardcover – January 14, 2020
by Ryland Peters & Small (Author)
We finished reading this cookbook today. It's not all that big, but some pages do have more than one recipe. The Introduction is just a couple paragraphs about plant-based eating. The chapters are Basic Recipes, Breakfast & Brunch, Light Bites & Snacks, Soups & Sides, Mid-Week Suppers, Feeding a Crowd, and Sweet Things. The Index seems to go primarily by main ingredients.
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Heroes' Feast: The Official D&D Cookbook
Hardcover – October 27, 2020
by Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, and Michael Witwer; recipes by Adam Ried
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Hardcover – October 27, 2020
by Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, and Michael Witwer; recipes by Adam Ried
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