Review

Hello my poor baby blog. As your grandparents once rustled through the attic storage and found lovingly bundled up love letters, so too will your generation revisit old blags and marvel at our once-treasured leavings.
I've spewed a lot of stupid garbage over the years, most of it right here.
George Orwell wrote a fantastic essay that I might have referenced once or twice before, about the various reasons anyone (himself included) bother to write at all. It came down to four very wide-reaching and frequently overlapping categories:
Political Purpose i.e. to transmit ideology
Historical Impulse to record and share
Aesthetic Enthusiasm writing for the fun and/or beauty of it
Sheer Egoism (and here I am going to directly quote him) "Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one."

I think we can all agree which camp this blog, and most blogs, and most of the pablum I've made for my own satisfaction falls under.
Not that that's necessarily a negative thing, it's just important to have a firm grasp of one's initial reason for doing anything.

I've never deleted anything I've put up here. I haven't even touched my Xanga, which extended further back all the way to ten years ago. Not because I'm not embarrassed - the opposite, in fact! - but because it would be a shame to erase such an earnest and genuine resource and time capsule.
I suppose people still have diaries, but the notion of an online diary that is intentionally made available to an audience of infinite hypothetical size would probably get you a few pennies in an early science fiction magazine.

I've sort of stopped writing here, as I changed beyond the sort of person who would derive anything from the thought of someone else reading something I wrote. Growing "up" implies a sort of linear and hierarchical path that only works until you reach maximum bone density. Does a 20 year old grow 'up' into 30? I'm definitely aging. I don't know if I'm maturing. I'm not convinced I've been growing anything lately.
But I have read some good books!

That was the impetus behind this, you see. There's a love of 'year in review' type valedictories, especially for years with as much garbage as this one. I've never been able to do one myself, due to a combination of an inability to remember events as anchored in specific timeframes and a general lack of enough yearly events to make a satisfying read. Also, a lot of the media I experience doesn't come from the year I experienced it in, which sort of defeats the purpose.

But I have read some good books.
Here are some of the ones I read this year, in no particular order.

The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell
The Sparrow is a story about the discovery of intelligent alien life and what happens when we make first contact. The fact that I can sum that up in a single sentence is as staggeringly remarkable as it is misleading and uninformative. The Sparrow is a story about humanity, and God, and family, and God, and discovery, and God. I learned a lot about the Jesuits, who as far as religious societies go are pretty alright. I have a negative view about proselytizing and missionaries in general, I think it's disingenuous to offer aid with the caveat of conversion. But I also understand it comes from compassion, and has fascinating history. As a book, The Sparrow is engaging, and is told well. As a science fiction novel, it is exceedingly successful - at creating a multifaceted alien society, at realistic space travel, at conveying a sense of otherworldly wonder. It is also very hard to get through at some points, from an emotional standpoint. If I felt qualified to dispense trigger warnings, this book would get a whole lot of them.

Children of God - Mary Doria Russell
Children of God is the sequel to The Sparrow, which I am unsure needed a sequel or not. You would think reading it would give me a better opinion, but I remain unsure. It's a direct and immediate sequel to the above story, so everything said so far applies. It is a perfect counterpart to the initial discovery/miracle themes of the first book in that it is focused much more on the aftermath/revolution. I would say it is required if you liked the first book. It has more flaws but also a much grander scope then the first. The conclusions are satisfyingly, unpleasantly true to life.

The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu
This book is also about the discovery of intelligent alien life and what happens. I did not plan this, but apparently that is the sort of book that gets Hugo nominations. This book is tremendously, immensely popular in its native China. It is the first in a trilogy, and despite an excellent, thorough, and helpfully annotated translation this book is fucking incomprehensible to my western-ass mind. It plot is fascinating but split into a million pieces. Things that I suspect are supposed to read like big reveals come across in the most unexpected places. Things I was fascinated by go unexplained, while boring minutiae get center stage. The final third of this book is bonkers bananas and I read the wikipedia summaries for the next two books and I STILL don't know what is going on. A very conflicting book.

The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
Addison is the penname of Sarah Monette, who apparently decided to publish in the same genre she works in normally under another name just to see if she could. Which is some baller shit, since it got showered in awards anyway. The Goblin Emperor is a fantasy story about a young man unfortunately becoming emperor and having to deal with it. I really infrequently go full on court-drama-intrigue in my book choice, but this story remained engaging and satisfying despite being 100% about elf politics. The book deals with race, shitty families, aristocracies, and what it means to rule. Also it keeps dropping these unexplained fantasy bombs that hint at this insanely detailed fleshed out elf and goblin populated steampunk ass world that aren't followed up on, which is my jam. I love it when authors are confident enough to not explain every fantasy aspect of their universes. This book was really good.

The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin
The Fifth Season is about a fantasy world where earthbending is real and the planet is inimical to life sometimes. It is also about loss, society, power structures, gender, and what happens when things fall apart. This book is one of the most well written and captivating stories I have read in a very long time, and if I was pressed would suggest this book above all others for 2017's capstone. The world is perfect in its creation and expression. The magic system is CHOICE. It is 100% emoji FIRE crying laughing face emoji. It is so good. Apparently it is the first book in a series and I am very glad of that fact. Several times while reading the book, I became acutely glad that this book that I was reading had been written, and was received with acclaim. I am glad that books like this are being written, because these are the sort of books that needed and need to be written and read by people growing up. Let this be the new face of science fiction and fantasy going forward, PLEASE.
Read this fucking book.

The Golem and the Jinni - Helene WreckerMy mom clued me into this book, and for that I thank her. The Golem and the Jinni is a book about a golem and a jinni and their lives in turn of the 19th century New York. That's it, that's the book. It is about the Old World and the New World and being human and not being human and trying to survive and maintain vital connections. The fantasy elements are super solid. Also, it's just straight up neat sometimes to read about life for these displaced peoples in this great big melting pot we call big-A-America.The characters are engaging and well defined and elicit compassion. A necessary trait in these trying times. Another book we should make sure the next generation has the opportunity to read if they choose. 

Embassytown - China Mieville
Mieville's Perdido Street Station is a book I hold in a special place for stories that are fascinating, alien, and are guaranteed to emotionally destroy me. On the rare occasion I recommend them to a friend it comes with a hefty warning that this book will fuck you up, and fuck your dreams up.
His other books are hit and miss, and his writing has a tendency to really crawl up its own asshole but if you're cognizant of it you can avoid getting sucked in.
I'm actually about halfway through Embassytown right now, but it's definitely got that characteristic Mieville flavor. Aliens, cities, using ancient words casually and like weapons, the deconstruction and deification of language, the vices of civilization, all wrapped up in incomprehensibly dense and chewy worldbuilding. I'm reserving judgement until I reach the end, but I felt I should include it in this list.

The last and largest book, or series of books, requires some explanation.
I was told to investigate an author, C. J. Cherryh, on the promise of wizardry and cool fantasy shit.
Due to a twist in fate that I haven't experienced since the early P2P era, the copy of the book I read was not in fact a book about sweet Slavic fantasy wizard shit.
It was about a space station and crisis and the fragmentation of humanity once we get out there in the dark.
Downbelow Station - C.J. Cherryh
Downbelow drops you off in a world that is already fully defined, and it's your job to figure shit out.
Downbelow is a book about a space station orbiting the first sentient alien world we find, and its handling of a sudden influx of refugees fleeing conflict halfway across the universe. The aliens are basically an afterthought to the somehow far more fascinating huge cast of characters trying to survive in this incredibly detailed, science fiction embedded super shitty environment. These grand sci-fi epics have a very specific flavor they carry, that is simultaneous appreciation and wonderment at the sheer SCOPE of the world this author has made. Shit like Dune and Foundation elicit a sense of something incomprehensibly vast and detailed, something you can't imagine a human being pulling out of their head. The fact that it's a compelling story is almost a delightful, unnecessary surprise to the creation of this world.

And indeed, Downbelow was simply the first gateway into Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe.
I read eleven books in this universe in the span of about a month and a half, in a disgusting display of gluttony for more radical space shit.
These are high class, early 80's science fiction novels about life on space stations, life on planets so far removed from old Earth that they're practically alien, life on planets where human and alien create something new, life on spaceships that fling themselves through rips in reality so violently that if you were conscious during the transition you'd lose your fucking mind.
Every single book is different and unique and adds something to the world, and they span a dizzying number of sub genres.
Cyteen is amazing and probably the best. Finity's End is actually the best, nevermind.
Forty Thouasnd in Gehenna is as bold an attempt as Asmiov's Foundation in terms of zipping wildly through generations of storylines at the turn of a chapter. Merchanter's Luck and Rimrunners are simultaneously light, action driven and full of heavy-ass shit, my dude.
The Alliance-Union universe is some of the best science fiction that I know of, man.



I read a bunch of other books this year, some by the same authors listed above, but as far as ones that carried enough weight to punch through me and onto this list, this is a satisfying amount.