Posts Tagged: Books

I hadn’t read anything by Seanan McGuire before discovering Middlegame, but she’s an accomplished author who’s published a number of very well-received novels. Middlegame is McGuire’s latest novel, and it’s best described as urban science fantasy. It follows the lives of protagonists Roger and Dodger, two brilliant children who live on opposite sides of the country. Roger is a gifted linguist, and Dodger a brilliant mathematician. At around five years old, they discover that they can communicate telepathically.

Alix E. Harrow’s debut novel is a magical journey through fantastical worlds. January is the ward of the wealthy collector Cornelius Locke. She’s raised in Locke’s mansion, which is stuffed with rare treasures from every corner of this world (and others). January’s father is mostly absent; he’s usually off seeking new artifacts to add to Locke’s hoard. She never knew her mother.

I should have known Guy Gavriel Kay wouldn’t let me down. Kay’s books are often classified as fantasy, but I think they’re firmly historical fiction. I don’t have anything against fantasy—I grew up on J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, and I still love it—I just don’t think Kay’s books fit the description. Kay’s characters believe in mysticism, but I think that’s more a reflection of how people used to see the world than an effort to inject magic into the proceedings. Sword-and-sorcery novels these are not.

Like Douglas E. Richards’s Infinity Born, Darknet is a near-future science fiction thriller about the dangers of artificial intelligence. But Darknet is a much subtler, more carefully crafted, realistic, and enjoyable novel.

I didn’t like this book. It has some interesting and promising ideas, but none of them are well-executed. Ultimately it’s a book with boring characters about computer science and espionage that seems to be written by someone with little understanding of either computer science or espionage.

Ian McGuire’s novel The North Water is a story about whaling. That alone invites comparisons to Moby Dick, and, indeed, both are gritty, realistic tales about adventures on nineteenth century whalers. But the stories are very different. The North Water is told in the third person and the present tense (which, combined with the graphic descriptions of violence and gore, has prompted comparisons to Cormac McCarthy).