J.S. Fields

Author & Scientist

Review: Alice Payne Rides by Kate Heartfield

This review is for the SECOND book in the series. To read the review for ALICE PAYNE ARRIVES, click here.

Genre: science fiction (historical/time travel)

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis bisexual

Warnings: none

Review

Have they successfully helped humanity and stopped people from using time travel, or has our daring group of heroines bungled things further? This sequel to ALICE PAYNE ARRIVES begins with another botched time travel job, this time accidentally bringing back Arthur of Brittany (yes, King Arthur) to the late 1700s…and smallpox along with him. Alice’s lover and inventor Jane has not had her vaccination, nor have many of the servants of Alice’s manor (now no longer in debt thanks to book one, YAY!).

They need a vaccine not available until the next century at the earliest. And, unbeknownst to the lot of them, Arthur’s abduction sends huge ripples in the time line, alerting Prudence’s boss to her whereabouts (she’s been in hiding since going rogue in book one).

And of course, since the group has not one but two time travel devices, our lovers end up trying to unravel the mystery of Alice’s deceased father and what plagued him in his later year’s dementia, while Prudence tries to sort out time. Alice and Jane get stuck in the USA during the revolution, their time device breaks via Prudence’s boss, Prudence’s beloved sister is erased from history, etc. IT’S A GIANT TIME FUCK but Alice and Jane still find time for heart-to-heart talks and some serious conversations about their relationship.

ALICE PAYNE RIDES is less coherent than its predecessor, but no less fun. It still has tons of time travel hijinks, steam-punk flavors, wacky inventors, and lady highway robbers. And the cover is more gorgeous than the first, which is a real feat. Like the first book, it also discusses mores around lesbianism at the time, but in a very tongue-in-cheek fashion:

Mr. Duncan makes a sound like a kettle about to boil. “I hope you pay little attention to the scurrilous libels in the London newspapers, Miss Payne. Certainly there are women who amuse themselves with Sapphic romances, but there is no true carnality in…playacting. It’s a physiological impossibility, you see. Isn’t it, Dr. Jenner?”

Join Alice, Jane, and Prudence in more time travel shenanigans here. Though as things never seem to work out all that well for them, maybe you’re better off discussing hedgehog reproduction with Dr. Jenner.

Review: Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield

This review is for the first book in the series. To read the review for ALICE PAYNE RIDES, click here (will post one week after this review).

Genre: science fiction (historical/time travel)

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis bisexual

Warnings: none

Review

The year: 1788. A mysterious highway bandit called ‘The Holy Ghost’ haunts a small section of road, attacking scoundrel men. The woman behind the mask is Alice Payne, indebted daughter to an aging father, desperate to pay of his debts, keep her childhood home, and the interest of inventor Jane, Alice’s ‘companion’ at Fleance Hall.

The year is also 1889, where Major Prudence Zuniga, a professional time traveler and meddler, is attempting to alter the course of human history by keeping Prince Rudolph alive. Of course, to Zuniga the year is also 2145, her year, in which two groups of time traveling bodies (the ‘Farmers’ and the ‘Guides) war to ‘fix’ humanity’s past and keep its future from combusting.

During a standard robbery of one asshole Earl of Ludderworth, who enjoys pressing his advantage on serving girls, a shimmer in the air catches the Earl and flings him into the future. Determined to not let the Holy Ghost be known as a murderer, Alice (with the help of Jane) tracks down the shimmer and finds herself in 2070…and also finds Major Prudence Zuniga. Having completely fouled up both the past and the future at this point, Zuniga takes the earl and Alice back to 1788, where Alice can be used as a pawn in the time wars. This all looks good from Alice’s end–Zuniga has promised her enough money to pay off her father’s debts (thereby ensuring she can live on at Fleance Hall with Jane for the rest of their days)–but time travel never seems to work the way one expects.

Zuniga’s continued meddling leads to a cascade of history changes, each worse than the last. In the end it is only an adventurous highwayman and her inventor-lover that can save Major Zuniga, and humanity’s future. Along the way the reader is treated to steam-punk like automatons, Victorian silliness, an endearing love affair, and a host of strong, three-dimensional women.

The book is short-only 168 pages in the print version, and a quick, engaging read. Keeping track of the various dates isn’t really necessary as the voice of the characters are each distinct. The pacing is excellent for a novella, though the worldbuilding is sparse (though, again, novella). The cover art is gorgeous and for that alone the book deserves a spot on your shelf–though I think most readers would be delighted to revisit Alice Payne on reread.

Readers familiar with the US political landscape of 2016 (and who can block out the horror of 2020) will enjoy the numerous jokes about Zuniga having to go to 2016 to fix history there:

“But 2016 is completely fucked,” she says, trying to keep her voice even. “You know that. Sir. We have to go back earlier.”

I have only two quibbles with this book. The first is that the inventor, Jane, gets very few chances to shine and she is by far, to me, the most interesting character. Brought to Fleance Hall by Alice’s father, Jane is the ward of Alice’s father’s cousin (follow that??), and also the builder of Alice’s accomplice automaton for the highway robberies. She is quick to put Alice in her place, rational, and endearing, and really deserved at least a few POV sections.

“Sometimes I think you see me as a great experiment, that you say things to get satisfaction from my shock. Little Jane, poor and plain, small bubbies and a big brain. That’s what the boys used to say, to shock me. You could try it, rather than declaring your intention to disappear into some other time and place and carry out some unknowable scheme at a stranger’s behest.”

The second is that I think I’d have preferred an novel almost entirely about Alice and her highwayman tendencies. Zuniga is a fun character and time travel is always awesome, but splitting between the two meant we didn’t really get to revel in how much fun it is to attack jerks on roads with your mechanical assistant built by your secret live-in girlfriend. I mean come on. Someone write this fan fiction, I’m begging you.

Grab an automaton and a cute girl and join Alice Payne on her adventure 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: Fall of the Imperium by William C. Tracy

Genre: science fantasy

Pairings: m/m/f

Queer Representation: bisexuality, pansexuality, nonbinary (multiple types, including third gender, agender, gender fluid)

Warnings: none

Review

In this final book in the Dissolution Cycle trilogy, Sam journeys to a new Nether facet to learn about his two unusual house colors, Enos attempts to recover from her time with her kidnappers, and Inas grows into his Aridori body (as well as a bunch of the old Speaker’s memories). The romance between the three apprentices heats up (there’s a cute little SFW sex scene in there), and Sam learns to draw strength from his friends to help manage (not cure!) his anxiety.

Of course, all is not well in the Nether. Elgynerdeen (giant millipede things that eat Nether crystal) keep dropping out of Drains all over the Imperium. They eat anything and anyone in their path, and seem to be hell bent on something in the Assembly Hall. We also have an ancient Aridori civil war resurfacing, Sam battling with the weird voice in his head (while trying to sort out the House of Time and the House of Matter), and yeah, a bunch of teenagers running around trying to keep the adults from dying.

Fans of the series will enjoy the tie-ins to all the various novellas. Mandamon makes several appearances, as do the Pixies, and mention is made of the new species above the Nether clouds that was learned about in JOURNEY TO THE TOP OF THE NETHER (the middle grade novella).

It’s a great wrap to the trilogy, with plenty of plot threads to keep the series well alive. Tracy has created an expansive universe with no end in sight to the potential worldbuilding, and it’s always fun to play around in the giant sandbox of music-based science fantasy. And as always, the nonbinary representation remains strong. My favorite passage from this book:

Now he looked closer, Inas didn’t think the pronoun encompassed multiple personalties as for the assassins or the Accretion. Instead it denoted someone who did not belong to a male or female gender. There had been a few in his family line who chose similar pronouns, though Aridori tended to separate themselves into binaries, perhaps because being born as two instances–two possibilities unfolding–predetermined them into dual categories.

You can join the Great Assembly of Species by buying the book here!

Review: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

Genre: science fiction: space opera / military sci fi mix

Pairings: f/f, f/m

Queer Representation: cis bisexual

Warnings: none

Review

~

I would like to tell you I knew what I was going to do, before that. But I had not seen the true measure of the destruction that the corporations were willing to wreak to consolidate their power.

I wanted to be brave. To be a hero. To carry out orders like a paladin would. I did those things even knowing what the outcome was going to be. I wanted so badly to be the good guy.

But it truly was not until that moment, after I had destroyed everything still good in this world, that I realized I wasn’t a hero…I was just another villain for the empire.

~

Who needs FTL drives when you can just become light? Humans have gone and destroyed Earth (of course) and a handful of mega corporations control the remaining population. Citizenship must be earned, so the poor remain poor unless they earn citizenship, usually through military service to their corporation. Early colonization of Mars went horribly wrong, and now the Martians have returned, and are threatening the tenuous corporate control of Earth.

Dietz is a fresh new recruit in the battle against Mars. Her ‘drops’ don’t take her to new places so much as new times, and she quickly finds herself seeing the war in different locations, with different squads, and across different parts of her own (somewhat fluid) timeline. The book focuses on her emotional journey of understanding, from complete devotion to her corporation (driven by extreme poverty and no other options), to discovering the truth of Mars, to taking control of her drops and movement in time, to saving humanity.

Out of all of Hurley’s books, THE LIGHT BRIGADE is probably the easiest to follow despite the time travel. With only one POV character (and first person!) the narrative is fairly easy to follow. Dietz is a surly character, but the political climate of the book closely mirrors the current situation in the real world, making it very easy to empathize with her views.

“They aren’t our people,” Andria said, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Most are paid protestors. We’re doing a job, just like they are. They were told to disperse or face force. They know what’s coming.”

“They aren’t even armed,” Omalas said.

“Some may be,” Andria said.

 

In Hurley fashion, Dietz has a primary interest in women, though she does hook up with a man as well during the course of the book (also in Hurley fashion, genders outside the binary are completely absent). She mostly moves through the book alone, watching most of her friends and colleagues die gruesome deaths from drop accidents, artillery, etc.

The strength of the book is really in Dietz’s journey to understanding the ‘sides’ of the war, and who is really fighting whom.

I wanted to punch him. Scream at him. Because in that moment I had no idea who “us” was.

“I’m here to fight the bad guys,” I said.

“Then you’re with us,” he said, and marched me to the cafeteria with the others.

 

And of course, there are some great one-liners:
“You know you’ll have to fight the aliens,” I said, before Frankie could get a word out, “not just fuck them.”

 

Muñoz perked up. “You have a girlfriend, Dietz?”

“Not anymore.”

“Does she know that?” Muñoz said.

 

THE LIGHT BRIGADE is pretty quintessential space opera/military sci fi. Much stronger on the political messaging than other Hurley books, this one is also a lot easier to follow. Good solid sci fi, though heavy handed enough in places that it likely won’t be a reread classic.

You can try your own drop and see if you can join the Light Brigade here.

 

 

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