J.S. Fields

Author & Scientist

Review: The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling

Genre: science fiction

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian (? could also be bi or pan, not stated explicitly)

Warnings: It’s 414 pages and I read it in one sitting because I was scared shitless. You were warned

Review

Gyre Pierce lives on a crapsack planet run by mining conglomerates. The only real resource are ‘minerals,’ which are buried deep in underground caves scattered across the planet’s surface.

Going into the caves is not an easy task, unfortunately. Alien creatures known as ‘Tunnelers’ kill Cavers at an alarming rate, making cave diving a dangerous–and lucrative–job.

Enter Gyre. Abandoned by her mother and desperate to find her, Gyre falsifies her credentials to take on a high pay and ultra high risk dive. If she survives, she can move to any planet of her choice immediately (and she’s going garden world all the way). If she dies, well, at least she isn’t living in a land of caves and mommy issues anymore.

Gyre expects a crew to assist her remotely, watching while she sleeps and monitoring her vitals in her high-tech Caver suit. What she gets is Em, the solo funder and solo tech operator of the expedition, taking way too many choices out of Gyre’s hands and leading her on a seemingly endless descent down into the bowels of the planet for a reason Em won’t say.

The credits, a chance to find her mother, drive Gyre to keep pressing on. But the Tunnelers are getting close and there are too many bodies in the subterranean caves for Gyre’s liking. And Em is irritating. Really irritating, and makes morally dubious choices, like injecting drugs into Gyre’s system without her consent and withholding information that could keep Gyre alive.

And there are the missing supplies.

The bodies.

The route changes.

And Em won’t let Gyre turn back, even if it means her death.

THE LUMINOUS DEAD is freaky as fuck. Let’s just get that out there. It’s a rich, traditional sci fi tale, with futuristic tech and an alien world built on the income inequity of our own. It’s worldbuilding is deep (pun intentional) and it’s only two speaking characters are richly built and distinct.

The suit tech is particularly well described:

The suit was her new skin, filled with sensors and support functions, dampening her heat and strengthening her already powerful muscles with an articulated exoskeleton designed to keep climbing as natural as possible. She wouldn’t even remove her helmet to eat or sleep. Her large intestine had been rerouted to collect waste for easy removal and a deeding tube had been implanted through her abdominal wall ten days ago. A port on the outside of her suit would connect to nutrition canisters. All liquid waste would be recycled by the suit. All solid waste would be compacted and cooled to ambient temperature, then either carried with her or stored in caches to be retrieved on her trip out.

Also there are bioluminescent fungi with hallucinogenic spores!

“It’s a fungus. Similar growths are all over this system, especially lower down. There are creatures that live in the water in the cavern and somethings they wash up and die,” Em replied. “Up here, sometimes insects fly in. And when the rains come, they wash in soil and everything that’s in the soil. This one’s been there for several months, though, so it’ll probably drain its host soon and die.”

The pacing and reveals are masterfully done. Readers will find themselves hooked from the very first page in the antagonism between Gyre and Em, Em’s mysterious goals, and Gyre’s fuck-all-I’m-going-to-beat-the-shit-out-of-this-cave attitude.

The descriptions are atmospheric, never too long winded, and always chilling. With very little actual antagonism, Starling builds fear and anticipation in the reader mirroring the adrenaline heights and crashes experienced by Gyre. The hallucination sequences are so artful one could easily questions their own sanity (and reading detail!).

The only weak point of the book (though minimal!) is the evolution of the relationship between Gyre and Em. The antagonism worked. The reliance definitely worked. The attraction seemed forced, at the end, and could have used another book to develop. Still, the characters both give solid reasons for staying together and after the weeks of cave diving and near death experiences, it makes sense for some bond to have formed. Readers looking for hot, steamy romance will want to look elsewhere. Readers looking for danger and enemies to lovers tropes will be right at home.

And it isn’t if there is no chemistry. Gyre notices Em right from the start, in fantastic language:

For a moment, Gyre couldn’t think. There Em was again, in full, living color, so different from the flat tones the reconstruction used to help her understand depth and material. It was surreal, mesmerizing to see another person, to see her. She searched Em’s face for any sign of incompetence, but instead, she only saw a focused, hyperaware woman. A beautiful woman, at that.

—

Gyre watched her for a moment, transfixed by the gentle curve of her cheek, the slight parting of her lips, before she realized her heart was fluttering in her chest. Her pulse was quickening, and she hated it. It wasn’t fair. Not only was she–stupidly–considering helping the other woman, even after everything that had passed between them, but Em was just her type. She was smart and driven and beautiful, and so unreachable that she could’ve been halfway across the galaxy.

 

You can get a fancy tech suit and go cave diving in paperback here and ebook here. Audio here.

Review: Compass Rose by Anna Burke

Genre: science fiction – dystopian, pirate, lesbians on boats

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian

Warnings: implicit racism in the narrative, racist language not refuted in-narrative or by authorial voice

Review

The year is 2513. The apocalypse came and flooded the Earth. Land is scarce, the navy rules, and most people live on boats, either as part of a naval force or as a pirate.

Rose is a member of the Archipelago fleet (a navy fleet). She’s a big rule follower, clearly likes in-charge women, and doesn’t mind the company of the ladies. When Admiral Comita sends her on a daring mission – to infiltrate the pirate ship Man-O-War, Rose has no option but to accept.

And oh, lesbians. This is the pirate ship of your dreams. It has a hot lesbian pirate captain. It has a ragtag crew. It has danger! Power play! Hot kissing scenes! Seeeeeecrets! Racism!

Damn it.

This could have been the perfect book. And it almost was. God, the chemistry between Rose and Miranda is hot. HOT. Their eventual sex scene will leave you unable to work for the rest of the day. You will. not. recover. There’s political intrigue and beautifully rendered worlds and three-dimensional characters. There are Lesbians. On. Boats. I mean, I literally don’t know what else to ask from a book, except maybe that it check its implicit and overt bias at the door.

So, let’s lay it out, incident by incident.

Our opening scene is Rose being assaulted by Maddox, a large, brown man.

I didn’t have to look far. Maddox’s large bulk towered over me, a bead of sweat dripping from his crooked nose to the floor….Maddox’s chiseled chest glistened in the light of the bioluminescence, the genetically modified algae that flowed through the light tubes of the ship casting blue shadows over his brown skin. I entertained myself with a fantasy of plunging several sharp objects into his over-developed pectorals, but kept my mouth shut.

Unsurprisingly, the skin tones of the white characters are seldom, if ever, noted (our MC is brown skinned as well, which is noted early in the book. Annie, a secondary character, is noted as having ‘dark’ skin. These are the only skin descriptors we get. I am left to assume all other characters were walking skeletons with some musculature, and no skin at all). This is known as white default. But more of an issue is the trope of large, black and brown men, especially very toned ones, being a threat. I could link about this ad nauseum, but here is a good place to start. This is another beautiful article.

So, we started the book off on the wrong foot. Sometimes things get better! Sometimes it’s just the one instance and the rest of the book is fine.

Sometimes it gets a lot worse.

On page 33 (print edition) we get our first racially-charged descriptors.

He had a flat face with a flatter nose, and his dark hair was slightly gray at the temple. The woman beside him was only slightly less intimidating, with biceps that were at least as thick as my thighs.

And I might have ignored it except we don’t get a name for said character right away, and by pg 35 we get:

“Are you a navigator or an engineer?” Flat Nose said with a sneer.

And it continues for several pages. Flat nose, of course, is a racial description for black people and some Asian people. Adding to the flat face makes this a clear Asian stereotype with very unfortunate implications. There are so many better ways to describe people of color that don’t involve radicalized, weaponized descriptors. Writing With Color is always a great reference, and great place to start.

And it’s just…so infuriating because this is otherwise such a monumentally great book! How can you not love a pirate captain who spouts lines like “I could take you any way I wanted you.” I mean, yes, please. Please.

Finally, we have our villain, Ching Shih.

Yup. Not even going to bother with a link on that one.

The fundamental difference between implicit bias and overt bias is that overt bias comes with intent while implicit does not. Not having intent, however, does not absolve someone of the damage caused from racism, whether implicit or overt. The coding, both implied and implicit, of all the major ‘problem’ characters (Maddox is brown, a stuffy, gruff guy is Asian, the biggest ‘villain’ of the piece is also Asian) is a bad trend. Yes, our MC is also brown but with the white default at play, we are still in a very white world, where most of the PoC are villain coded.

And that’s not okay.

So while this book could have easily been absolutely magnificent, and in many ways it was, that doesn’t mean we should overlook the bias, or not discuss it. PoC deserve to have representation in books, and they deserve that representation to be good representation, where they get to play the full spectrum of roles, from villain to hero and everything in between. The queer community has been active for years in discussing queer-coded villains and homophobia. As a community we owe it to our intersectional queer people, and the PoC community at large, to voice our concerns over other forms of bias, not just the ones that affect the white parts of our community.

You can purchase COMPASS ROSE and try to navigate the minefield of bias to get to the freaking amazing sex scene here.

 

 

Review: Velveteen vs. The Seasons by Seanan McGuire

This is a review for a third book in a series. To read the review for the first book, click here. For the second book, click here.

Genre: science fiction: superhero

Pairings: f/m, f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, trans woman, gender fluid person

Warnings: a hard scene where a jerk reporter pressures Princess on her assigned gender at birth. Handled very well, but may be hard to read for trans readers

Review

In VELVETEEN VS. THE MULTIVERSE, Vel strikes a deal with Santa and the other seasonal spirits in order to get a time do-over from her (more or less) successful attempt to overthrow the Super Patriots.

The deal, of course, came with a heavy cost. Vel must now spend time with all the seasons (except summer, which doesn’t have much interest in her) and allow them to attempt to woo her to their cause. If she declines all of them, she goes back to her reality. If she accepts one, she stays in that holiday, forever.

She had promised. She had taken the gifts that the holidays were willing to offer her. and she had always known that they weren’t free; she’d always known that she would have to pay for them, in the end.

Thus begins the final installment of the Velveteen books, where all of Vel’s chickens come home to roost and the reader gets a very, very deep look at the magical systems behind Santa Claus (winter), Halloween (autumn), and Persephone (spring). The end of the book wraps up the series nicely, with Vel making her choice and the reader getting to see how the ripples of that choice affect all the superheroes they have come to know and love.

What is most interesting about this book however, is how it looks at the rise of governmental legislation in the void of the Super Patriots Inc. While the seasons are intriguing and Vel’s trials entertaining and have the signature harshness of McGuire worlds, the social commentary on the grey areas inhabited by large corporations is the most critical piece to this book. While the Super Patriots, Inc., was responsible for a whole host of violations and moral failings, it did keep the government at large out of the legislation business when it came to superheroes.

She’d read most of the superhuman control legislation, the things proposed by frightened senators who wanted to protect their larger “normal” constituents; the somehow more terrifying things proposed by politicians who were virtually salivating at the idea of living weapons who carried no development cost, who would do as they were told and make “friendly fire” a thing of the past.

In that vacuum, the United States has taken up the legislation game. Readers get to watch the slow slide from what seems a ‘reasonable’ law to what is a clear grab of power and/or fear. The changing political climate over the three years Vel spends with the seasons adds an additional string of tension to the stories, pulls them together, and serves to further entrench Vel into our hearts.

This is not to say that Vel’s time in the seasonal lands isn’t engaging. Her first stop, Winter, is heartbreaking in the best and worst ways. In the previous two books we have seen Vel’s close attachment to Santa Claus, his role as a near father figure, the warmth she gets from her friends there and how she had used Winter as a tether during her time with the Super Patriots. Hence, returning to Winter not as a visitor but as a resident emotional destroys Vel and the reader at the same time–seeing the cruelness of Santa, of the other holiday spirits, of how they need Vel so they must use Vel, despite their fondness of her.

On a more uplifting note, everyone’s favorite lesbian couple does feature again in THE SEASONS, though not as prominently as in book two. But the friendship that grows between Vel, Princess, Jack(ie), Polychrome/Sparkle Bright (or whichever code name you prefer for her), and Victory Anna is everything one wants in found family, especially superhero found family.

The emotional conclusion to the Velveteen series is more than worth the cost of admission, even if you have to scour the internet to find copies to buy. Lucky for you, Vel visited from her Earth to let you know that you can buy the hardback here.

Review: Velveteen vs. The Multiverse by Seanan McGuire

This is a review for the second book in a series. To read the review for book one, VELVETEEN VS. THE JUNIOR SUPER PATRIOTS, click here. To read the review for book there, click here.

Genre: science fiction: superhero

Pairings: f/m, f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, trans woman

Warnings: none

Review

Velveteen is back! 

Settled now in Portland, Oregon, as the resident crime fighter, Velveteen almost has her life together. She has a cute superhero boyfriend, a new superhero friend, and a host of low-level villains to fight.

It all goes horribly awry, of course, when Vel wakes up in bed with Action Dude, her childhood crush. In bed. Married. And officially part of the Super Patriots, Inc.

Thus begins Vel’s journey through the multiverse. As with any good superhero story, long-hidden truths get revealed and Vel attempts to right old wrongs (she is a superhero, after all) and bring down the Super Patriots, Inc., once and for all.

Nothing comes without a cost, however. When one evil falls, another rises, and the destruction of the Super Patriots comes with an unimaginably high price tag.

VELVETEEN VS. THE MULTIVERSE is the strongest installment in the Velveteen trilogy. It is also the installment where we spend the most time with Sparkle Brite aka Polychrome, and see part of her romance with Victory Anna (a steampunk refugee from an Earth that never really existed, but who really has the hots for Yelena).

“Torrey’s very tea-oriented,” said Yelena, as she walked Vel toward the kitchen. “She’s from an alternate Victorian England that ceased to exist in a freak accident involving a time machine and a blackcurrant trifle. After spending a few years stranded in parallels without other people, she got very focused on the important things in life.”

Like tea,” said Vel.

“Tea, and shooting people who bother my girlfriend,” said Torrey, walking over with a tray.

It’s also the installment where we learn the full breadth of Vel’s powers and the extent to which the Super Patriots went to hide Vel’s potential from her. It’s a story with an amazing number of twists and turns, filled with robust characters, history, and so, so much comic book lore. Santa remains as concerningly creepy/loving as ever, Princess continues to enchant with her rodents that sew clothes and enchanted mirrors and be the best trans rep: “My name is Carrabelle Miller,” said Princess. “If you want to know what my parents called me, then you’re looking for Scott Miller. But that’s never been my name.”, Yelena’s character development turns her into my hands down favorite character, and Victory Anna is an absolute delight as an additional character who can turn anything into an explosive weapon. Anything.

There’s a final battle that feels satisfying, but opens more doors than it closes. There are promises made that hurt more than they heal, and tragic romances (no gays are harmed). Most questions are answered but in doing so, we lose the structure of our world. Was it worth the cost? We won’t find out until book three: VELVETEEN VS. THE SEASONS.

You can join Vel and her misfit superhero league in paperback here and on audiobook here. 

P.S. This is the volume where McGuire finally has Vel use My Little Ponies in battle. This is the book of my soul.

A herd of brightly-colored plastic horses came stampeding out of the alley, each carrying one or more toy soldiers on its back. Rainbow manes whipping in the wind, they circled the woman in black, and the soldiers opened fire.

Review: Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots by Seanan McGuire

Genre: science fiction: super hero

Pairings: m/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, trans woman

Warnings: you might explode from sheer reading joy

Review

At twelve, Velma Martinez manifested the ability to animate toys. Her parents, previously borderline negligent, sell Velma to the Super Patriots, Inc., to be trained as a super hero.

In Velma’s admittedly limited experience, “family fun” usually meant “Mama cries herself to sleep after Daddy passes out run, and Velma and the teddy bears clean the whole placed before morning.

The contract stipulates training until eighteen, at which point Velma (Velveteen) would get to chose to stay with the Super Patriots and become a fully fledged super hero, or return to a normal life.

No one ever leaves the Super Patriots, Inc.

Velma says good bye around nineteen, shucking decades of Marketing brainwashing and severing her few remaining friendships. She can’t hold down a job, however, or get into college, or do anything except hide her powers and hope the Super Patriots don’t find her.

Years later, an unfortunate encounter with some coffee worshipers in a small town force Velveteen to use her powers in public. The Super Patriots immediately try to bring Vel in, by dubbing her a super villain. Vel, of course, is having none of it, and with the help of a bunch of cast off toys, manages to make it across the border to Oregon.

Oregon doesn’t have a super hero extradition agreement and the governor hates the Super Patriots due to the untimely death of her super hero sister, who was sent on a deadly mission far too young. The governor grants Vel a superhero license so she can fight crime within Oregon’s borders, which also, conveniently, keeps her out of the Super Patriots hands.

The Super Patriots have plans, however, and will not give up until Vel is back under their control, one way or the other. They’ll use any thing or any one under their power to get to her, including her ex-best friend (Sparkle Bright) and ex-boyfriend (Action Dude). Vel has friends of her own, however, including a new boyfriend, holiday superheroes, and a mysterious new superhero who manipulates light.

A battle between good and evil lurks on the horizon. Will Vel and her friends be enough to stop Marketing? Will Vel ever get rid of her domino mask? Who is this mysterious new super hero??

VELVETEEN VS. THE JUNIOR SUPER PATRIOTS is both fun and serious, whimsical, joyful, and cruel. Working off the premise that super powers have always been among us and it is only a recent upswing in occurrence that has lead to a need for corporations and governmental control (all due to a large batch of irradiated maple syrup, apparently), McGuire shows us a world not dominated by epic battles between super heroes and super villains, but by kids in goofy spandex costumes and the corporation that would control them. It pairs bunny costumes, talking toys, lobster boys, and witty dialogue, with the brutal truth of marketing, child labor, and child exploitation.

 

“KICK THEIR ASSES!” shrieked Velveteen, who, after a long day of driving, detours, and idiots, was glad to finally have something to smash.

“DO YOU OPPOSE ME?!” demanded The Claw.

“Oh, David.” Velveteen sighed, and slapped her palms together over her head. “Grow up.”

And that’s when the bear-shaped bouncy castle kicked his ass.

 

In many ways it is fantasy. In even more ways it is not.

VELVETEEN carries all the classic super hero tropes–calling them out, naming them, integrating them–and then in a very McGuire fashion, turns them to her own use. The goofiness of super hero names (what will poll well with the public?). The reasons for the constant outfit changes (more opportunity to buy toys!). Why the goofy poses (learn to strike your best pose on your best side, for the constant media!).

Throughout all of it is Vel, former child superhero, now emancipated adult, who just can’t get her life together. A child star with no future, but an (adorable?) ability to bring ratty old teddy bears and such back to life. Vel is instantly relatable and instantly charming, and it is impossible to not get swept into a world that feels so similar to our own–almost certainly because McGuire stuck in just enough truth that every action sequence, ever emotion, every silly costume, resonates.

If you ever had a toy you wished would come alive and play with you, you need this book.

If you ever looked at a washed out child start and wondered what happened?, you need this book.

If you really love superheroes, you need this book.

To begin your training with the Super Patriots, Inc., you’re a bit SOL. These books were print only and a limited run. Book one is sold out but available online for free.

Click to read the reviews for books two and three.

 

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