Tangled Mind

“How can I stop doing something that I don’t even know I’m doing in the first place? It’s not like I’m sabotaging myself on purpose. The feelings are just there.” [p. 281]

M/M romantic fantasy. Leovander Loveage is brilliant at small magics, his cantrips and charms executed with musical accompaniment. Sadly, Leo's larger spells -- his Grandmagic -- never work out right. He's a student at the Fount, an institution where scrivers (like Leo) write the spells, and are paired with casters who execute them. Unfortunately, in their final year, Leo is not paired with his best friend Agnes but instead with his nemesis Sebastian Grimm( Read more... )

Now every debt is paid, every sin erased and I can begin anew, I who was once Odysseus and now am no one. [p. 145]

The conceit of this novel, or collection of short stories, is that the Oxyrhynchus Papyri contain 'forty-four concise variations on Odysseus’s story that omit stock epic formulae in favour of honing a single trope or image down to an extreme of clarity'. These are those variations, some more credible than others, which are effectively Odyssey AU^*. 

“Why are you doing all this?” If you tell him, he would get to die knowing it was all for a reason, that this has been a circle, closing. Which would be more than you ever got, that day in the snow. [p. 247]

Four young Blackfeet men once went hunting in winter on restricted ground, breaking an important tribal code. Ten years later, Ricky dies in a brawl outside a bar; Gabe is an alcoholic who seldom sees his daughter Denorah; Cass is planning to propose to his girlfriend Jo; and Lewis is married to a white woman. But Lewis starts to hallucinate a dead elk, and then his dog dies horribly.

“The age of exploration is long over, amira. Now it’s the age of globalization. And once everyone agrees something is one way, all the other ways it could have been disappear.” [loc. 958]

Nixie Song is sixteen years old and lives aboard her father's pirate ship, the Temptation. This is not your usual pirate scenario, though, for the Temptation can sail to any place or time, as long as Nixie's father Slate has a hand-drawn map to that place. And given the fantastical nature of some cartography, their voyages are not limited to the mundane. Nix's best friend, Kash (short for Kashmir) seems to have originated in an Arabian Nights-flavoured city, while the ship is illuminated by glowing fish from a mythical land named Scandia. 

...surely anyone could see that this new girl was . . . well, what? I wanted to say she was a liar, although I couldn’t think of any actual lies she’d told. It was more that she was somehow all lies, I thought: made of lies; one big lie. [loc. 1399]

The setting is June 1972, somewhere in the south of England. Deborah (who's looking back from the vantage point of her sixties) is one of a close-knit group of girls in their last year of primary school. Deborah is the clever one: come September, she'll be going to grammar school while all the rest of them go to the local comprehensive. She has a secret crush on Tutankhamun, a widowed Scottish mother given to gnomic pronouncements ('the way to make me strong, she thought, was to make me scared') and a love of swimming.

That’s the problem with the damned Empire these days . . . All these complacent bastards think the only thing that matters is which tiny beast is dancing in your blood, altering your brain, making you see and feel and think differently. The person an enhancement is paired with is just as important as what enhancement they get. And we get some say in what kind of person we are. We do not pop out of a mold. We change. We self-assemble. [p. 65]

I read and enthused about Robert Jackson Bennett's 'Divine Cities' trilogy, beginning with City of Stairs, though was a little disappointed by the trilogy's conclusion: that might be why I skipped the Founders trilogy (though I note I own the first volume). The Tainted Cup -- the first in yet another trilogy a new series (source), 'Shadows of the Leviathan' -- has been shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel of 2024, and was on offer, so I thought I'd give it a try.

In the Empire of Khanum, augmentations (temporary grafts, long-lasting suffusions) are used to shape living beings -- plants, animals and humans -- to imperial needs. Chief amongst those needs is the annual wet season, with its incursions of leviathans from the eastern ocean.( Read more... )

I find it harder and harder to put my finger on what exactly incenses me: whether it’s the knowledge that no matter how long I live in this place, some people will never believe I’m from here, or the fact that I am not and never will be from there. [loc. 236]

This caught my eye because I'm familiar with the big Canarian supermarket chain HiperDino -- who are, I'm sure, nothing like Supersaurio, the big Canarian supermarket chain for which Meryem, the narrator of Checking Out, works. The daughter of Moroccan immigrants, she's started as an intern: as the novel opens, she's working in Compliance and wondering if her boss Yolanda actually wants to send her home in tears three days a week. ( Read more... )

Mrs Burton of Avenue Cottage drank tea with the neighbours, joined in their complaints about the shortages and agreed that the war must soon be over... Colonel Kuczynski of the Red Army, meanwhile, was running the largest network of spies in Britain: her sex, motherhood, pregnancy and apparently humdrum domestic life together formed the perfect camouflage. Men simply did not believe a housewife making breakfast from powdered egg, packing her children off to school and then cycling into the countryside could possibly be capable of important espionage. [loc. 4269]

Another of MacIntyre's entertaining biographies of 20th century spies, this is the story of Ursula Kuczynski, a German Jew and communist who spied for the Soviet Union before and during WW2, and was instrumental in the USSR's acquisition of 'the science of atomic weaponry'.( Read more... )

What is unethical is ... a society where we’ve turned magic into a cage and love into an impossibility, such that murder is an easier resort than words... [loc. 4733]

A delightfully Gothic country house murder mystery set in a Regency-flavoured queer-normative England, with magic, automata, dark family secrets and a legal mechanism for severing one's family ties and owning oneself. 

Nicholas Monterris, our viewpoint character, is 'gay as a spoon' [do not expect historically-accurate slang here] and has seldom left the draughty and probably-haunted decay of Monterris Court. He's aghast to discover that his father, the Duke of Vale, has arranged a marriage between Nic and Lady Leaf Serral, daughter of a wealthy family.( Read more... )

Hephaestus’s marvels were envisioned by an ancient society not usually considered technologically advanced. Feats of biotechne were dreamed up by a culture that existed millennia before the advent of robots that win complex games, hold conversations, analyze massive mega-data, and infer human desires. But the big questions are as ancient as myth: Whose desires will AI robots reflect? From whom will they learn? [loc. 3576]

Intrigued by the mechanical marvels of The Hymn to Dionysus (which the author has said are based on the writings of Hero of Alexandria) I wanted to learn more about ancient machines. Gods and Robots is perhaps not the ideal book for this, but it was fascinating.( Read more... )