fiction
Max Barry, Discordia:I think this is an expansion of a short story in which humanoid aliens start arriving on earth except they are terrible, want each other dead, and quickly start to encourage our humans to destroy it/ourselves, which we are all too eager to do. The aliens are different varieties of terrible-a white supremacist, an “equalist” who wants to kill most men, a libertarian capitalist exploiter, a religious fundamentalist who blows up an abortion clinic on the way to completing her mission of killing the libertarian capitalist, a guy who is really invested in the metric system (? Seemed like Barry was running out of homicidal/genocidal groups), etc. The POV character is Diego, who just happens to be at the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time and is carried through the various horrors constantly letting himself be convinced by whoever is in front of him. Not sure Barry really knew himself what he was trying to satirize.
Sarah Kuhn, Hollywood Heroine: There’s going to be a TV show based on Aveda and Evie’s adventures, but when the two go to LA to see it, there is weird white-guy bullshit going on (or is it also supernatural? Turns out to be hard to tell, at least for a while). As they investigate, Aveda/Annie has to figure out what role she’ll have in the new team dynamic and how to support her husband’s dreams now that she’s no longer the diva she was. It’s satisfying and found-family-all-the-way, though the big human villain is pretty obvious long before the characters twig to it.
Charles Stross, The Bloodline Feud: A Merchant Princes Omnibus: The Family Trade & The Hidden Family: Miriam is a journalist who’s just been fired for investigating the wrong tech bubble story. She discovers, in the belongings of her murdered birth mother, a mysterious locket that has the power to take her into another world, where the economics and culture are still basically medieval, and it turns out her family uses worldwalking to smuggle goods/get power. Because her talent is too valuable to the family, but also internal quarrels mean that there are people out to kill her no matter what, she decides that her best strategy is to use her knowledge of economics to change the business model from mercantilist to industrialist. It’s fun to see economics and patent law in fantasy, though Miriam is a bit of a nice white lady (pace her thoughts on the absence of police states in the modern US, which are period-appropriate for the character but probably not what Stross would say now).
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Sarah Kuhn, Hollywood Heroine: There’s going to be a TV show based on Aveda and Evie’s adventures, but when the two go to LA to see it, there is weird white-guy bullshit going on (or is it also supernatural? Turns out to be hard to tell, at least for a while). As they investigate, Aveda/Annie has to figure out what role she’ll have in the new team dynamic and how to support her husband’s dreams now that she’s no longer the diva she was. It’s satisfying and found-family-all-the-way, though the big human villain is pretty obvious long before the characters twig to it.
Charles Stross, The Bloodline Feud: A Merchant Princes Omnibus: The Family Trade & The Hidden Family: Miriam is a journalist who’s just been fired for investigating the wrong tech bubble story. She discovers, in the belongings of her murdered birth mother, a mysterious locket that has the power to take her into another world, where the economics and culture are still basically medieval, and it turns out her family uses worldwalking to smuggle goods/get power. Because her talent is too valuable to the family, but also internal quarrels mean that there are people out to kill her no matter what, she decides that her best strategy is to use her knowledge of economics to change the business model from mercantilist to industrialist. It’s fun to see economics and patent law in fantasy, though Miriam is a bit of a nice white lady (pace her thoughts on the absence of police states in the modern US, which are period-appropriate for the character but probably not what Stross would say now).
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.