#sffbookclub

Bones & Runes was the #SFFBookClub January 2025 selection. It's a modern mythological quest of three friends trying to recover something stolen and grow as people and friends along the way. Overall it was a bit of a disappointment.

@eldang's thorough feelings after stopping reading sums up the majority of my thoughts. I'll try to get at a couple of other thoughts past that.

This book is attempting some interesting things by trying to mix together African, Irish, Hindu, and Greek mythology all at once. I can understand a story that is trying to stir together a variety of myths and methods of accessing the divine, but overall there's too many ingredients and everything is weaker for it.

Subjectively, I was disappointed by the writing. For a book that is so thoroughly rooted in South Africa and Durban in particular, I did not come away with much of a sense of place in most of the scenes. Part of this is that the characters are driven around by Ganesh from place to place in a way that makes it feel like the cast is teleporting between scenes.

But this isn't some seven stages of hell, Dante. These are African gods. The hero doesn't always survive. Forget heaven and hell. We've got no time for the devil here. Here, in this land, on this rock, we've got so many aspects of evil that one being doesn't suffice to hold its might; it's true strength. Maybe in your western worlds where everything is black and white, where you can afford one being to hurl your hatred at; one place that is good and one that is bad. This is Africa, baby. Here the good can be both bad and good at the same time.

I quoted this because this whole statement is repeated twice in the book almost word for word, but it feels all talk and no show. There is precious little ambiguity in this fantasy quest. There are a number of dangerous and neutral characters who deal in bargains or seem chaotically neutral, but the main players all seem fairly clear cut and shallow.

This novella is a story about memories, transformation, and love; it follows the demon Vitrine, whose best love is the city Azril that she writes about in a book kept in the glass cabinet of her heart. When angels raze the city to the ground, she curses one of them with a piece of herself, and gets to the work of rebuilding the city into what she remembers.

This is an interesting book to pair with Kalpa Imperial from the #SFFBookClub this month. The way Vitrine remembers the ghost of the old city interspersed with what the new city is becoming feels like it could be a chapter from Kalpa Imperial. Subjectively, there's sort of a similar lyrical style between the two as well.

I continue to love Nghi Vo's writing, and the way this book juxtaposes the fantastic with the literal rebuilding of a city brick by brick. However, the emotional crux is the relationship between the angel and the demon and this just wasn't my jam.

This book is the October/November #SFFBookClub book. It's a collection of stories about an empire that has fallen and been rebuilt multiple times, each focusing on a very different place and time, and each told with a narrated fable-like style. One stylistic choice that stands out immediately is that the sentence structure is quite long and there are often comically long lists of names or places or ideas or things or professions or or or... I found this to be overall a delight, personally.

This may be due to expectations that I had going into this, but the stories in this novel felt loose and disconnected. This is especially due to coming off collections of short stories like How High We Go in the Dark or even North Continent Ribbon, which interconnect the stories together with shared characters or worldbuilding. Kalpa Imperial had very few touchpoints between stories other than a loose thematic sense, and this created a storytale atmosphere where places and characters and words washed over me, unlistened.

Nothing was rooted in a time. Most stories were barely rooted in a place, and at best were set against "the south". Characters are referenced and never touched on again (or at best mentioned in passing elsewhere once). The storyteller narration references historical context that the in-universe listener would know to situate this story in, but to me the reader it felt like noise rather than worldbuilding, akin to opening the Silmarillion to a random page with no further context.

Theoretically, I can imagine placing any book on some hypothetical scale of narrative detail. (As a joke, let's say this is a scale with one end being the TV series Lost and the other end being a Brandon Sanderson wiki). I don't need all the details in a world spelled out, but there's a tipping point where there's enough detail where I believe that the author could fill in the blanks if needed. Well before that tipping point, it feels like authors are largely making everything up whimsically as they go. I think you can tell a set of disconnected stories where all the details are constructed out of whole cloth, but there needs to be some strong thematic through line to carry it, at least for me. This novel just doesn't quite have that.

To come back and treat this book for what it is rather than what I expected it to be, thematically I would try to pin this book down as about being about telling stories and taking the long view of history--that all places and empires and people change dramatically over time and can become something different. I think secondarily, it feels like it's a set of critiques and observations about empires and humanity; it's full of wry critiques of power, of nobles, and of human nature. I found the book amazingly quotable and quite funny in parts.

This is a hard book to recommend; even as I enjoyed it, its lack of coherence and whimsical storytale nature make it more a book that I enjoyed in passing than one that will stick with me.

Overall, this book didn't work for me. After finishing it, I found out that Counterweight was originally intended as a low budget scifi movie and it feels like it. The characters are thin, and there are almost more characters talked about off page than we see on page. The book emits its ideas in a smoke cloud of cyberpunk chaff without engaging deeply with any of their implications.

This is a cliché critique, but most of what didn't work for me was how much this book told instead of showed. There's an entire chapter midway through where the protagonist dumps the backstory of the old LK president's misdeeds that they've chosen not to share with the reader until that point. The book continually laments how AI will slowly run more of the world and humans won't be necessary, but we see little evidence (and directly very little of AI in general).

Here's some more blabs about AI in this book that I've left in a second comment for length.

#SFFBookClub