J.S. Fields

Author & Scientist

Review: The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

Genre: science fiction: space opera

Pairings: none

Queer Representation: nonbinary of many different flavors

Warnings: none

Review

The planet Gora is a desolate world with no real atmosphere, no water, no resources. Situated between two major jump points however, it has transformed over the years into a bustling commercial hub. Numerous species have made their homes there as well, most in the tourism industry.

With that much traffic and space infrastructure comes the inevitable malfunction. Spaceships are grounded, communications are cut from planet to space, and all travelers are stuck until the powers that be can fix things.

THE GALAXY AND THE GROUND WITHIN focuses on a group of diverse travelers stuck at the Five-Hop One-Stop bed and breakfast sort of establishment for the duration of the emergency. In Chambers’ fashion, the book doesn’t have an overarching plot and instead works more as an extended coffeeshop fanfic. Readers of Chambers’ previous books will be very familiar with this style of writing. Newcomers may bounce off hard while looking for some sort of established sci fi structure.

Structure is not what this book is about.

Instead, Chambers delivers intimate looks at a number of different alien species, giving the reader deep dives into culture, anatomy, politics, and love. The story focuses on three main aliens, the alien host, and the host’s adolescent child:

Roveg (a Quelin): an exiled video game designer with a warm personality and a heart of gold who will miss his child’s coming of age ceremony if the emergency goes on too long

Speaker: a methane breather without functional legs. One half of a twin set (her sister being named ‘Tracker.’) Speaker is an Akarak and while she has nowhere to be that is time sensitive, the emergency traps her away from her sister, without communication

Pei: a military cargo runner with a secret human love interest whom she will miss seeing if the emergency goes on too long. Pei, an Aeulon, featured in the first book THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET.

Ouloo (a Laru): is the owner of the Five-Hop One-Stop and deeply devoted to her child, as well as her guest’s comfort and needs.

Tupo: Ouloo’s adolescent child who has not yet decided xyr gender, and who is both deeply endearing and deeply awkward, as teenagers tend to be.

Awaiting him at the airlock entrance was a Laru–a large child, too young to have chosen a gender yet, comprised of angles that didn’t look comfortable and feet that didn’t match xyr body. Xyr fur looked halfway groomed, and was too long for xyr face. It hung listlessly over xyr large black eyes in a helpless manner that suggested it didn’t know why it was still growing but didn’t know what else to do.

Roveg and Tupo do have a number of fun exchanges, especially during Roveg’s visit to Typo’s natural history museum which is definitely not a geology museum.

And that’s…pretty much it. The characters spend the book slowly getting to know one another, gaining trust, and seeing each other’s ‘humanity.’ The strongest story line by far was Pei’s, who gets a lesson in agency and learns to exercise said agency by the end of the book. I was deeply engaged with all of her chapters.

Four tendays. Pei had four tendays to get this egg fathered. After that point, the window would close the egg would break down and be reabsorbed, and…that would be that. Opportunity lost. For most would-be mothers, there was only the one chance. This was Pei’s, apparently. She closed her eyes and pushed out what felt like every breath she’d ever taken.

Why now?

—

‘I trusted her. I liked her. I don’t always say that about doctors. But everything she proposed seemed safe and above board.’

‘But you didn’t do it.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I didn’t want to,’ Speaker said simply.

‘But why?’

‘Because I didn’t want to. And when it comes to a person’s body, that is all the reason there ever needs to be. Doesn’t matter if it’s a decision about a new pair of legs or how you like to trim your claws or–‘ she gave Pei a piercing look ‘–what to do about an egg. I didn’t want to. You don’t want to. That’s it.’

 

The other chapters, honestly, I frequently had to skim. The only other stand out character was Tupo, who did not really have a POV, but whose adolescent bumbling became deeply endearing.

Ouloo swung her long neck out into the room and saw that the sleeping alcove across from hers was empty. ‘Typo?’ she called. It wasn’t like her child to be awake this early. Every morning in recent memory had begun with a prepubescent war, each more tedious than the last. Ouloo felt a faint glimmer of hope arise, a fantastical fancy in which Tupo had gotten up on xyr own, started xyr chores, perhaps even cooked.

Ouloo nearly laughed at herself. There was no chance of that.

 

With even less plot than the previous WAFAIR installments, GALAXY is either a very weak ending, or a very Chambers’ ending, and I can’t decide which fits better. Fanfic readers will absolutely delight in the gentle, positive, hopeful atmosphere of the book. Those looking for the quintessential space opera space battles and intergalactic politics will want to skip this one.

Be the only human at the Five-Hop One-Stop by purchasing a copy here.

 

P.S. This is another book with cheese jokes

Review: Uncharted by Alli Temple

Genre: fantasy: pirates / lesbians on boats

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, nonbinary

Warnings: none

Review

Once upon a time Georgina (George), a minor noble, had a BFF in the form of a lower class little girl who liked to get up to all kinds of adventures. Then George’s father goes and dies and George is sent off to school. No longer bringing in money as a companion, her BFF is dressed up as a boy and sent out to sea to make money for her family.

Fast forward. The kingdom is in distress from taxation and other noble issues. Women are deeply repressed. George tries to help by acting as a low-level spy which everyone seems to know about and no one much cares. There are fancy dresses involved. Anyway. Her brother is kind of an ass and engages her to the eeeeevil prince because Money, and George must of course, say yes because, again, Money.

But lo! Danger is afoot! For the dreaded pirate Cinder roams the oceans and seems to really like attacking this little kingdom. On an outing with the prince, Cinder attacks near the dock and George is taken prisoner on her pirate ship, away from all her fancy dresses and parties and horrible marriage prospects.

Cinder is, of course, the old BFF (if you didn’t get that from the prologue, you don’t read enough lesbian pirate adventures) but is really bitter. And George is really naive. And the prince is really angry. He wants George back so he can publicly murder her and get a lot of sympathy from the people. Cinder wants George to realize how privileged she is. George just wants off the damn boat. Hijinks happen, cannons are fired, dresses are made and destroyed, and Cinder is everyone’s favorite saucy pirate captain trope. HEA and yes, the prince gets what he deserves.

 

This book was… you know when you go to the fair and you just really want funnel cake? It won’t keep you full but damn it you want it and it’s so damn delicious. This book is funnel cake. Will it stick with you long? Probably not. But it’s a known commodity of tropes and archetypes and it is indeed so damn good. George is a bit irritating at first but she has a reasonable character arc, and Cinder is everything I’d want from a lesbian pirate love interest. The prince is perfectly mustache-twirling evil, the side characters are diverse, and there’s a reasonable amount of backstabbing and criminal overlords. +10 for rollicking adventures on the high seas!

It does have a few drawbacks, like the setting. The Kingdom of Redmere is deeply patriarchal and homophobic, which I don’t generally like in my books since I have to live that every day. It kind of takes away from the ‘escapism’ of fiction. But it’s well done and it does make the ending that much more enjoyable. For a taste:

“It’s not true!” the man shouted from the back of the wagon. “I’ve done nothing wrong!”

“That’s what they all say,” a man near my right shoulder muttered to no one in particular. “I heard they actually found him in bed with another man, No shame. No deniability. Disgusting.” He spat on the ground.

~~

It wasn’t always like this. At least, that was what the old women who sat on stoops and old men who hunched over cups of strong tea would tell you. They’d say that, in their youth, Redmere had still been poor, but people had been free to dress as they pleased and earn a living any way they could, even if women had usually raised the children while men had made most of the money.

Then the king had come. He was a younger son, and he’d poisoned his brother to take the throne. He said the country needed change, a return to something he called “societal order.” Under his rule, laws were passed to define classes and the appropriate roles of men and women, and for a while, it worked. People felt they had a purpose. But the king over-reached, declaring war on neighboring kingdoms, costing Redmere in both gold and lives before he finally retreated to his palace.

But it’s also filled with Deep Lesbian Melodrama, such as lines like:

She put a hand on the wall as she reached the door that led to her bedchamber. Her whole body sagged.

“Sleep well, princess.”

Didn’t she know I hadn’t slept well since the day she’d left me?

And there is dress seduction which is one of my favorite fantasy tropes. If you can seduce a woman while you dress her, you get the A+ gold unicorn badge

Lou helped me dress. The neck and shoulders of the dress were covered in heavy gold embroidery and bright beads and stones that trailed down flowering sleeves. I lifted it, and the front floated away from the back. A line of ribbons dangled from the separate halves on each side.

“Let me do it for you,” she said.

I would be the first to admit I wasn’t very wordy. I’d spent the better part of my life trying not to be noticed in a very small country with little access to what lay beyond its borders.

But even I could tell I was being seduced while being dressed at the same time.

(it’s a great scene so I won’t spoil it for you)

UNCHARTED offers trope-filled lesfic pirate adventure along with fancy dresses and solid nonbinary rep. Whether you’re more of a swashbuckling pirate or a femme princess, you’ll find much to love. See if you can get yourself kidnapped by The Dread Pirate Cinder by buying the book here.

Review: Debris Dreams by David Colby

Genre: science fiction: military

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: trans*, cis lesbian, cis gay man, nonbinary

Warnings: use of the term ‘slated eyes’ to refer to people of Chinese descent, classifying binary trans as a separate gender (WTF???)

Review

It’s rare that I so deeply dislike a book that I know within four chapters that it is going in the trash, and not even in a book box. To be fair, we didn’t start out on a great foot. It’s YA and I generally do not care at all for YA. There’s always the odd exception, so I tend to plod through just in case.

This was a bad decision.

If you’re a fan of military sci fi, it definitely does have that, with all the mind-numbing battle scenes lacking any sort of solid character development (clearly I am also not a fan of military sci fi) that one would expect. The beginning is also decent, with our introduction to Drusilla Zhao, a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in the Hub, which is a sort of space station at the top of a really long elevator that connects Earth with space. It’s used almost exclusively by the Chinese-American Alliance to exploit the moon, which is sort of a future Australia colonized (and worked) by convicts et al.

The convicts get mad that all their hard work functionally saved the ecological crisis Earth was facing and, tired of being always put in harms way to benefit a planet they can’t go to, they blow up the giant elevator. Drusilla’s parents are killed (they’re engineers on it) and she and all the teens in group care are automatically conscripted into the military. This is especially hard on Drusilla, as her girlfriend lives on Earth as a civilian.

At this point we move into a sort of Starship Troopers sort of deal, without the comedy, and it’s battle after battle in the traditional trope of Drusilla eventually realizing she’s on the wrong side of the battle, etc. There isn’t much point to it, and no major stakes other than WAR! ZOMG! over and over, as we wait for inevitable turning point for our heroine.

The worldbuilding of the Chinese-American Alliance feels very Firefly to me, though with a bit more thought about the integration of the language (the frequent non-English words used appear to have been proofed by native speakers, so that’s decent). Still, language readers appeared to have missed this gem:

He was a young kid, younger than me, with the regular mixing of blonde curls and slanted eyes that marked most of the post-Slump generation.

For reference, the only people who routinely have slanted eyes, truly slanted eyes, are those with Down Syndrome. Other than that, slants to eyes occur across most populations, including European. *sigh*

But what had me yelling at the book over and over was its treatment of trans people as some sort of foreign gender:

Boys and girls and trans and unidentified around me groaned and rubbed at sore and bruised and tweaked muscles.

So instead of spending your day screwing your brains out with some of your best friends, writing letters to girlfriends or boyfriends or transfriends, or sitting in a corner sobbing until it hurts you get to much out the vats.

Trans men are men and trans women are women. They’re not some alien gender we don’t know what to do with. If you’re dating a trans woman, she’s your girlfriend. If you’re dating a trans man he’s your boyfriend. I’ve seen ‘xefriend’ used for the nonbinary equivalent (and quite like it) but ‘transfriend’ just smacks of othering, and really, really upset me.

There’s some nice neopronoun use and a mention of androgyne as a gender, so it’s clear the author was trying, and I get that. But this is what sensitivity readers are for. With the trans issues combined with the ‘slant eyes’ comment, I will not be providing buy links for this book. I do not recommend it, although I think with a few edits it could be a really nice YA military sci fi.

Review: Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

Genre: fantasy: superhero

Pairings: none

Queer Representation: nonbinary, bisexual woman (potentially pansexual), gay man, trans woman

Warnings: none

Review

Anna works behind the scenes as a villain tech–mostly in spreadsheets and data management. She’s low level and she likes it that way, though persistently getting short run jobs and ending at the temp agency every month is a touch grating.

During one of these no-name, low-level support gigs, Anna ends up as collateral damage when a superhero smashes her legs in simply for existing. Recovery is hard, she can’t work, and living with her best friend June is…less than perfect.

Depression sinks Anna into numbers. She likes numbers. They’ve always been her friend. Bored and in pain, Anna starts looking up how much superheros actually cost, in terms of broken buildings and broken people.

She posts her facts online.

People get interested.

Her big break (second, technically, if you count her legs) comes from Leviathan–a chitinous supervillain with a lot of money and a big, big dream. His grudge against Supercollider (the golden-haired Superman of this universe) is legendary. Anna, wanting to impress her new boss (and not lose her fancy new apartment), digs down deep, building up mass amounts of data on the world’s superheroes.

With Leviathan’s resources and her (super?) brain, they decide to rid the world of its monsters, one superhero at a time.

And Anna is really fucking good at her job.

~~

OMG THIS BOOK. It only crossed my radar because Seanan McGuire threw her arc at me and told me I needed to read it. It got lost in my ARC pile for months, then COVID hit and I finally started working my way through. WOW AM I GLAD I DID.

This is…not your standard superhero story. It’s not your standard villain story. It’s an amazing morally grey story about the costs of villainy and heroism, and how sometimes you just fucking want to eat a decent sandwich.

The book has a slow start, much like Anna’s life. It meanders. It false starts. It’s irritating enough to almost put down but Anna as a character is compelling and endearing, and, much like her best friend/roommate June, you sort of keep plodding on.

Then it hits you. BAM! Like Supercollider on a bender. All the emotional backstory and drudgey work pay off in this moment of triumph when Anna is hired by a Big Bad. And you’re so caught up in the thank god something is happening that you can directly empathize with Anna for not really caring that yes, Leviathan is evil and yes, her work is assisting that evil. Her life is moving, and it’s moving forward, and you know what? Fuck Supercollider anyway. Fuck him and his chiseled jaw and maybe fuck his longtime girlfriend (oh wait no, that’s a plotline for later in the book) for just tossing around humans like stale bagels. Anna earned this. Anna deserves this.

And just like that, you, dear reader, are also a villain.

It’s all action and emotions from there on out. Anna forms a nerd team of data specialists. Anna acquires data. Anna is really fucking good at her job. Superheroes start to fall, but in delicious, backhanded ways that are really more unraveling their lives and sense of selves than shooting them with a heat ray. It’s so good. And with each takedown, Anna slides a little bit deeper into Evil, and so do you.

This book is a 2020 must read, shitshow of a year or not. It’s filled with great lines:

I found myself hoping I wouldn’t see her back, that she’d get a good assignment and have a long lifespan (though I realized with a small pang that would mean I wouldn’t get to look at her well-muscled arms again.)

great tropes, great costumes, great emotion:

“My husband. He couldn’t deal with the career change,” he said, “He wanted to be respectable. He liked that. He liked waving me goodbye, waiting for me to come home.” His big hands were cupped around his glass. There was a noticeable callus on the ring finger of his left hand, where he must have worn a ring that was slightly too tight for his thick fingers.

“Why’d you put on a black cape?”

He bared his teeth. “The usual. Saw too many good men denied promotions or benefits. Too many honours given out to some powerful fuck’s idiot kid.”

and so much grey morality. It’s got some great sexual tension between Anna and Quantum Entanglement (I would LITERALLY MURDER someone to get a sequel where those two get together in a horizontal fashion), great boss/employee dynamics, and a best friend breakup narrative that will sear your soul.

HENCH comes out September 22, 2020, but just like…just go preorder it now. Join the forces of ‘we don’t really have the stomach for violence but the villains do have better dental’ by preordering here.

Review: Lucky 7 by Rae D Magdon

Genre: science fiction: dystopian

Pairings: f/f (could also be classed as f/nonbinary, the character in question hasn’t quite decided)

Queer Representation: cis bisexual, asexuality, trans, nonbinary

Warnings: none

Review

There’s nothing in the world as good as making a beautiful girl come.

Jacker Elena is on the run from AxysGen after the death of her crew during some ‘illegal’ activity.

Handler Sasha, an operative team leader, just lost her jacker and the rest of her crew in a botched operation. She can’t find a crew without a new jacker, and Elena needs a place to hide, STAT. AxysGen has a hit out on Sasha, too. If any of them are going to survive, they need to be deleted from AxysGen’s databases. And they can’t do that without a jacker. Or Sasha’s crew.

Elena and Sasha must work together to find Sasha’s crew and prevent AxysGen from finding Elena. The deeper they get into the the virtual world, however, the more layers of AxysGen peel away and the more Sasha’s past, including her ex-girlfriend, come back to haunt them.

LUCKY 7 is a fast paced dystopian sci-fi novel that starts with action on page one and does not let up. Unfortunately the action comes at the steep cost of stakes and character buy-in, and the first third of the book is entirely skimmable. The gems of attraction between Sasha and Elena are well done, but do little to progress the narrative forward. Elena’s character is poorly developed, as is her motivation, and Sasha’s ice queen attitude leaves her functionally emotionless.

The book takes a hard right turn at the one third point, with a steamy shower sex scene that breaks through our ice queen’s exterior and gives the reader some much needed emotional interplay. There’s consensual power play here, too, and it is hot as fuck. The book is worth buying for the sex scenes alone (there are three!).

But something in me wants to fight. To push back against her dominance, to show her I’m not just some warm body she can bruise because she hates me. I need her to fuck me, but she doesn’t get to unless I fuck her back.

~~

Somehow, I know I’ll never tire of bringing her over the edge. “Come for me,” I growl into the dip of her collarbone, close enough for her to feel my lips on her skin. “I want you to come for me.”

Halfway through the book changes POVs from Elena to Sasha, and it is at this point that the narrative takes off. Sasha’s POV is rich and complex, and the reader cannot help but be fascinated as she learns about her forgotten past, her relationship with her ex, Megan, and the secrets behind the ship’s AI. With an emotional hook, the storyline and plot pack a punch. The stakes raise, the crew becomes more three-dimensional. You care about Sasha. You root for Sasha. Sasha is the ideal unreliable narrator.

The A plot, of Elena running from the evil corporation, takes a quick backseat to the B plot of Sasha’s origins and the motivations of Megan. The B plot is by far the stronger of the two. Megan is the perfect villain–delightfully self absorbed with just enough humanity to make her relatable. The clone situation is excellent, the AI a delight, and Sasha, again, steals the show.

Another bonus: the representation in the book is phenomenal. Elena is Mexican (with brown skin), Sasha is black, and the richness of Elena’s background comes through in so many fantastic phrases and snippets of history. There is no white default in this book-white people are described via skin tone upon first introduction as much as the numerous people of color.

“If anyone tries to speak to you, let me do the talking,” Rami mutters from the corner of their mouth. “Just give them a white people smile.”

“The close-lipped ‘I acknowledged you, now please go away’ gringo smile?”

“Exactly.”

The trans rep, in particular, really struck a chord with me. One of the crew is trans, but it is the exploration of Sasha’s gender identity that was the most compelling. It is rare to see a true exploration of the nonbinary experience in queer fiction. So much is either a nonbinary person just being a person and having adventures, or being a side character. Sasha’s explanation of her gender, and Elena’s intuitive understanding, cemented their relationship as one of the best I’ve read in lesbian fiction. In a culture where the butch identity was long used as a dumping ground for both gender and gender identity, having one branch explored at length, and with deep sensitivity, was absolutely amazing.

I know from her smile that she’s joking, but my confidence falters. I know what Elena wants, but I’m not sure I’ll be ante to give it to her. I’ve got baggage around sex, around trust, around my body, and although I feel good in my skin tonight, I can’t guarantee she’ll get the results she wants, no matter how hard she tries.

~~

My face heats up. I’ve tried thinking about it that way sometimes, more often before I bought my first prosthetic. Once in a while, it works. Usually it doesn’t. There are aspects of womanhood I still connect and identify with, but my parents aren’t one of them. And even thought I know all too well that body parts don’t make a woman, being touched that way feels…vulnerable. In a good way, on some occasions, but more often in a not-good way.

~~

Once my hands are dry, I consider what to do about my swimsuit. The decision to pull down my trunks is an easy one, but my top is more difficult. It bares my midriff, but keeps my chest fairly flat. The look of hunger that takes over Elena’s face is enough to tempt me out of it. Her dark eyes have zeroed in as I pull it off, and her tongue leaves a glistening line on her lips as she wets them. I’m naked, but thanks to her admiration, I don’t feel overexposed.

~~

It’s a feeling of freedom, of knowing I can fly without the fear of falling. It has everything to do with the face that it’s Elena between my legs.

She’s memorized more of me in a few weeks than other people have bothered to learn in years, and I actually feel comfortable enough to teach her. It’s different. Powerful. A little scary. Bit it’s also all kinds of good, and I know I’d be a fool to give it up. I’m not even sure I can.

You can find your own curvy hacker in paperback here and ebook here. Consider supporting an independent bookstore by buying it here.

 

Double bonus: this scene

“You blew up the front door,” Rami yells back, taking the steps two at a time.

“Because I love you,” Cherry hollers. “Even though you left me in Brazil!”

“How do you run so fast in heels?” I gasp as I stagger down the front steps. I don’t know how Sasha finds all these magical bitches who can run ops in perfect makeup and designer shoes, but if I wasn’t terrified of dying, I’d be jealous.

 

And the best description of this particular flavor of bisexuality to date:

“Not my type, kid. I like pretty boys with long eyelashes and girls who look like they could step on my windpipe with their jackboot and make me thank them for it.”

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