Tak! a cité Those Beyond the Wall par Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)
They call me Mr. Scales because I’m a snake.
— Those Beyond the Wall de Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)
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They call me Mr. Scales because I’m a snake.
— Those Beyond the Wall de Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)
I've had this one on my to-read list for ages - I'd better start it now if I'm going to finish in time to read Those Beyond the Wall for #SFFBookClub February
I read this book five years ago, and thought I'd refresh myself before the #SFFBookClub read of the sequel this month. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoyed this story and world. The writing has a brusque, hardboiled tone from the cynical point of view of a survivor, and it really works for this particular kind of book.
This is a multiverse travelling story, where there is technology that can send people between similar worlds, but only safely to ones where their "other selves" are not alive. Cara is somebody who has fought to survive her whole life and thus has few other selves alive, so she gets a job as a "traverser" to be sent to other worlds to collect information. Because it deals with worldwalking between closely related worlds rather than wildly different ones (like Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series), it gets the opportunity to explore the same …
I read this book five years ago, and thought I'd refresh myself before the #SFFBookClub read of the sequel this month. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoyed this story and world. The writing has a brusque, hardboiled tone from the cynical point of view of a survivor, and it really works for this particular kind of book.
This is a multiverse travelling story, where there is technology that can send people between similar worlds, but only safely to ones where their "other selves" are not alive. Cara is somebody who has fought to survive her whole life and thus has few other selves alive, so she gets a job as a "traverser" to be sent to other worlds to collect information. Because it deals with worldwalking between closely related worlds rather than wildly different ones (like Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series), it gets the opportunity to explore the same characters in different timelines where their lives had taken different paths.
The post-apocalyptic wasteland locale of this novel is split into the wealthy folks of Wiley City living behind a wall (literally and metaphorically the airquotes nice white people of this story), the religious Ruralites, and the survivors of Ashtown between them. Cara is constantly code switching and crossing borders, both locally and multiversally--she is pretending to be a Ruralite, is secretly from Ashtown, while she precariously lives in Wiley City (hoping to get citizenship). Thematically, I love how the book ends with doubling down on Cara's role as an intermediary between worlds.
The #SFFBookClub pick for February 2025
I added this to the SFFBookClub poll for the month of January because I super enjoyed it.
If you don't know about it, the SFFBookClub is our informal fediverse science fiction and fantasy book club. I figure that folks from bookwyrm probably might be more interested in reading and talking about books so I wanted to post this here as well. We vote, read a book together, and then discuss via the #SFFBookClub hashtag over the course of the month. Take a look if any of these books sound interesting to you and you want to read along with others.
See: weirder.earth/@picklish/113660284130610947 for January poll
See: sffbookclub.eatgod.org/ for more general details
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is a deeply dark yet eventually hopeful look at the continuation of current societal structures into space.
He spoke with an odd accent, intelligible but mushy, as if he held a small object in his mouth.
Ah, space danish
The woman woke to the crackling of her anklet and knew the boy had come upstairs. She leaned toward her clock: the numbers glowed 06:00. The stars outside the window were growing pale. She would not sleep again now.
my every single morning
The boy was taken upstairs without warning, unprotesting as he had been through all the changes in his seventeen years, the shifts from cell to cell each time he outgrew the bolt on his ankle and the Doctor came to exchange it for a larger one, an operation performed with a tool the Hold people called the Mallet, which jarred the whole leg and sometimes made the blood spray from the anklebone, and caused a sense of queasiness and superstitious awe in the boy, who would glimpse, for the instant during which the bolt and chain were removed, the shiny and alien-looking patch of underexposed skin on his leg which, according to the prophet, housed the seat of the soul.
That … is quite the #OpeningSentence
The #SFFBookClub pick for December 2024
The #SFFBookClub pick for October 2024
“Your mother is going to be a star,” said the man in the gray uniform.
— Counterweight de Djuna, Anton Hur
The #SFFBookClub selection for September 2024
The #SFFBookClub pick for August 2024
Avertissement sur le contenu plot discussion
This reads like a parable of the european takeover of the americas, except that the natives realized their mistake (just) in time this time around.
There wasn't much scifi or fantasy, except for the implied apocalypse that happened out of frame.
I was constantly frustrated with the characters for not being more proactive about stuff like: checking what happened with the power, being suspicious of Scott, following up on Scott after multiple red flags, etc. - but maybe I'm having unrealistic expectations about characters who don't know they're in a story.
I liked the strong themes of community and mutual support, even in the face of (imo realistic) uneven participation.
Overall a good read, I enjoyed it.