J.S. Fields

Author & Scientist

Review: Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel by Jacqueline Koyanagi

Genre: science fiction – space opera

Pairings: f/f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian

Warnings: none

Rating: five stars

 

Review

All Alana has ever wanted is to be an engineer on a real live spaceship. A crippling, chronic illness for which she can barely afford medication, as well as her family’s poverty (and the general lack of ship engineer jobs), has kept her from achieving her dream. When the intoxicating Tangled Axon comes to her repair yard–dripping seduction like THE SHIP WHO SANG–Alana takes a chance and stows away, hoping that the crew won’t find her before they’re too far from her planet to make a return trip. But the crew have their own plans, including kidnapping/coercing Alana’s sister to save a dying crew member. Alana must find her place on the ship, save her sister and the crew she increasingly grows to love, all while trying to keep herself from succumbing to Mel’s Disease.

General

Noting how well the catch-line ‘lesbians in space’ sells books, I’m really surprised there aren’t more excellent lesbian space operas like this in the world. ASCENSION is evenly paced, and filled with wonder and action and all the right kinds of emotions. It’s the Star Wars we all wanted, but will never get because Hollywood would implode if someone suggested black women leads (and heaven forbid one of them be struggling with a chronic condition). The elements of magic blend seamlessly with the tech, the secondary characters are well developed, and it has multiple layers of relationships. It is the quintessential space opera, but with enough lesfic elements and shoot-em-up moments to keep any reader happy.

Relationships

There are a number of strong relationships in the book. Central to the story is Alana’s relationship with her sister, Nova (the ‘Jedi’ of the book), who is presented as a pretentious asshole with a fierce protective streak. The journey of the two sisters finding each other rang very true to sibling dynamics, and was immediately a hook for me. The second strong relationship was between Alana and Tev (the love interest), which was exactly the kind of slow burn I love in a book. The relationship develops slowly (but not so slow you want to throw the book into your window), and the eventual coming together of the characters is sweet but passionate. Tertiary relationships, between Alana and the other crew members, are engaging and do not in any way detract from the main two relationship plot threads. Every interaction pairing was intuitive and rewarding.

Parallels

Like any space opera, this one pulls from a number of familiar elements. Readers will find Tangled Axon reminiscent of THE SHIP WHO SANG, or, if you’re a younger reader, the ship from THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET. Star Wars parallels saturate the narrative, from the Jedi-like sister (seriously, we aren’t the fugitives you’re looking for. Look! I have a tail!) to the ‘just-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-law’ semi-fugitives, to the scruffy pilot. ASCENSION blends these elements into a comfortable, familiar yet exciting narrative with far more diversity and marginalized voices than the mainstream book/cinema has managed to ever produce (Black Panther aside, cause that was awesome).

Randoms

The engineer of the Tangled Axon is a wolf-man. Not a werewolf. A wolf-man. He has some type of wolf soul. I’m still sort of unclear on this but every time he was on page, I could only think about the ‘dinosaur souls in buff men’ book series by Nina Bangs. Full disclosure- they’re not gay at all but they’re…an experience. Yup.

 

Anyone in the mood for excellent space opera can find ASCENSION: A TANGLED AXON NOVEL here in ebook. The book is out of print (ARGH!), so if you want a paper copy, you’ll have to cough up $30 to get it used.

Review: Dalí by E. M. Hamill

Genre: science fiction (space opera)

Pairings: nonbinary/female, nonbinary/male

Queer Representation: gender fluid, third gender, trans masculine, trans feminine, agender

Warnings: violence against enbies (may be triggering for some)

Rating: five stars

 

Review

Dalí, a human, third gender changling, used to be a highly regarded diplomat. That all changed when their husband, wife, and unborn child were murdered. Adrift in suicidal thoughts, Dalí gets into one too many fights and stumbles across an interplanetary conspiracy to sell other third gender changelings to the highest bidder. Dalí agrees to help rescue their fellows, but the conspiracy is much deeper than they feared, and making it out alive isn’t exactly a high priority.

Plot

A very space opera-y space opera, Dalí gives a look at a pseudo-dystopian future in which being born nonbinary is common (that’s not the dystopian part, clearly), but factions from Earth would prefer to see people ‘go back’ to just male and female. Add in a mess of aliens and Dalí’s proclivities for sexual encounters and you get an intense book filled with intrigue, sex, betrayal, and a host of uncomfortable parallels to our modern society.

Although I found some of the scenes too brutal at times (I see and experience plenty of enby discrimination in day-to-day life, so I don’t always care for it in my books), the book was very well written and the pacing, especially in the second half, excellent. I was hooked after Dalí began to befriend a ‘pirate lord,’ and I got to see more of their personality come forward, instead of the (understandable) gut reactions we got in the first half of the book.

General

This book was recommended to me so many times that I waited to purchase a print copy, instead of getting an ARC from Ninestar (also my publisher). It was well worth the purchase and while I didn’t necessarily connect with Dalí on an enby level (we’re just different flavors of enby), the struggles they faced were all too real, and the conflicts, while set in space, were very 2018. It’s fantastic that stories like this are getting published, and that enby readers have more and more opportunities to see themselves in fiction. Much like with THE SEEDS OF DISSOLUTION, it was nice to see a variety enby types, from true gender fluid, to agender and third gender, to transmasculine and transfeminine. This representation, too, is key, in helping to educate readers that nonbinary doesn’t mean just one thing.

A solid, well-paced plot, strong writing, and a memorable main protagonist made this book a very satisfying read. Lovers of gritty books, such as TRANS LIBERTY RIOT BRIGADE, will find this book especially valuable, as will lovers of queer space opera.

You can buy Dalí in paperback here and ebook here.

 

Read the review for the sequel PEACEMAKER here.

Review: Safety Protocols for Human Holidays: A Holiday to Remember by Angel Martinez

Genre: sci fi (space opera)

Pairings: f/f (cis, although one is an alien)

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, alien lesbian

Warnings: none. This is adorable as hell

Rating: five stars

 

Review

is a Growlan security officer aboard a multi-species starship. When Human Jen starts exhibiting odd behavior, Raskli is sent to investigate (because she’s the only other lactation-capable mammal on board, which I love). Humor and romance ensues.

This short was adorable. Adorable. It’s been so long since I’ve had just a genuinely enjoyable read, too, that I think I enjoyed it all the more. It’s a fun holiday story with tons of heart. It’s well written, easy to read, and the romance is downright hot, despite the rather scientific words used and Raskli’s insistence on talking about fur instead of hair (which of course makes sense, culturally).

Don’t expect to get bogged down in any science or larger tension. No spaceship battles here, just solid happy romance and an adorkable crew ready to go to any lengths to make sure their human cheers up. Many winter holidays are represented, so it’s not just all about Christmas, either.

Additional bonus: glitter snakes

And I need not write any more, I think. You can by this delightful short in ebook only (*grumble grumble*) here.

Review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Genre: sci fi (space opera)

Pairings: f/f, m/AI (implied female), m/f, m/m (in-world, but not POV character)

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, trans, pansexual, gay, gender fluid, nonbinary

Notable other representations: implied autism representation

Warnings: none

 

 

Review

An eclectic crew aboard the galaxy’s ugliest ship (trope checkbox: ugly/dilapidated ship!) are given an extended mission to create a new ‘punch’ through space to an outlying world. Along the way we explore most every crew member in detail, people boink and find themselves, and only one person manages to die. Cultures are explored. Science is scienced. HEAs for almost everyone. Feels all around.

I have lost count of the number of people who recommended I read this book. Every Tweet request I put out for f/f space opera came back with this title, every FB post, every word-of-mouth query. So I feel pretty confident in say that people like this book. And I get it…sort of. I have mixed feelings.

Characters

To say this was a character-driven space opera would be an understatement. Characters were the plot LWtaSAP (forever after abbreviated as LW). Ninety percent of the tension in this book came from character self reflection and character interaction, not from external forces or plot driving. That was at once both refreshing and irritating, and in places this book read more like a cozy fan fiction than a novel, but on the other hand why don’t we have more books that are allowed to just exist like this? Why does space opera have to be explosions and death and war? Like, it’s opera, as in, soap opera. So really, when you think about it, LW is the quintessential soap opera in space, hence, space opera.

Plot

Not really. You sort of get the hint of one about halfway through, when the captain takes the long punch job to connect the mainly habited sections of space to a new outlier planet. The tension never really builds in this direction though, although we are treated to one pirate attack (with good tension) and one political upheaval (great tension), both of which are sadly quite short. The plot is the characters and the characters are the plot, and in this case, that means digging down into everyone’s past, exploring their secrets, and helping them find emotional resonance in whatever that means for them.

Of interest to me, of course, was the f/f pairing, which I thought was very well done. No explicit scenes at all, but enough tension that I was breathlessly flipping pages. I usually have a hard time getting into human/alien pairings, mostly because I’m (unabashedly) into breasts, but both female characters were so beautifully written and developed that the pairing seemed natural and obvious from the start. So too did the romance between Jenks and Lovey (the ship sentient AI). In no world did I ever think someone cuddling naked against a warm metal core would be erotic, but this book definitely proved me wrong (and I think we have THE SHIP WHO SANG to partially blame, for prepping me for this sexy moment decades in advance).

Science

Holy science, batman! Solid, solid science, from the tech to the ‘how do we explain space travel so that morons understand,’ to the little everyday household items, the science in this book was beautiful and well explained. Lovers of hard scifi will be at home, as will those who couldn’t care less about the hows and whys. The writing in this book is exemplary from start to finish, and makes even the most sciencey of technobabble understandable.

Quibbles

This is probably just personal taste, but the book, IMO, just wandered. I don’t mind a little wander, and I love a good drawn-out courtship, but I felt like the first hundred pages of this book were functionally unnecessary and seemed to just be filler. The book lacked in sort of standard structure, or a try-fail cycle, or even a strong narrative arc (an overall arc. Characters had great arcs). It just…didn’t seem to go anywhere, and we didn’t even get a through-line until halfway through the book. The story seemed more vouyeristic, like an episode of The Truman Show, Space Cadet Edition. We’re just…watching everyone’s everyday. We get to see all the little mechanics of the ship, and personal interactions, and minor stakes. We get extended meal times and shopping times and hugging times and it just… it dragged. But it didn’t drag in bad way, if that makes sense. Like, I wanted it to have more plot but I also didn’t mind what I was reading. This isn’t a book I’ll keep on my shelf, or that I’ll read again, but I don’t regret the experience, if that makes sense.

 

I think this book would be of interest, primarily, for those with a love of cozy, HEA fan fiction, true space science junkies, and anyone who has ever dreamed of ‘clean’ space opera without any mass death or military structures. It’s gay as hell, too, so if you just want a good time with some queer beings in space, this is also your book. It won a crazy number of awards, so it sounds like there are plenty of readers who have long awaited a space opera like this one!

You can buy LW in print here and ebook here.

Read the review for the second book in the series, A CLOSED AND COMMON ORBIT, here.

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