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I think the most interesting part for me is to analyze a little how this book positions AI compared to other books in the genre.

I don't know if this is just my own bias (and aversion to techbros), but there's something about this version of AI in this book that seems like it's meant to be an extension of LLM airquotes AI hype. It's something about the wording of "when AI began participating in creative tasks" that twigs that feeling for me. There's almost nothing here about sentience or consciousness. AI is both simultaneously a critical focus of the book while also relegated to the background.

We're told that AI has "worked magic on municipal planning and administration freeing the world of poverty" (citation needed). The book mentions one-off forensic evidence of "companies [that] were created by AI that emerged organically from global networks" but that's the last we hear of it. It also tells us that "no matter how we try to prevent it, corporations like LK are destined to become one giant AI" going further to say "we're all fated to disappear into the bowels of an AI behemoth" and this is arguably the conclusion of the book. But this is all talk.

The reader doesn't get to see any of this AI machination on page and so it's largely just an existential threat. How many AIs are there? Do they talk to each other? Even when characters are threatening to or partially merging with AI, we just hear about it, and don't learn what this means in the context of this world or for these characters. When the narrator interacts with AI, it's less about talking to a person and more like just using some tool: "external affairs AI lets me know where it thinks they're headed." That's the most detailed human computer interaction this book has to offer.

In thinking about this, here's a bunch of other books that came to mind that deal with these topics better:

Counterweight talks about the old president distributing their consciousness elsewhere, but what this means and its implications are barely touched upon, whereas that topic is a focal point for Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. The AIs in Counterweight are barely treated as tools and yet they are creating companies and merging with humans and exploring space in the epilogue, but there's no consideration of their sentience or consciousness or their rights in the same way that Ancillary Mercy does either.

Ursula Whitcher's North Continent Ribbon tells a much more nuanced story about the ways in which humans push back against machine intelligence and the messy line between human and machine responsibility.

There's a throwaway line of AI having its own sense of humor in picking music that humans don't understand, but Sue Burke's Dual Memory provides a much more nuanced and direct view of machine culture (as well more of a variety of what machine sentience and machine goals could look like).

I also think Charles Stross's Accelerando does a better job at describing the effects of powerful AIs that are so strange as to seem alien, and that have left no room for humanity.

Moon of the Crusted Snow is a story about a small, remote Anishinaabe community surviving through the beginning of an apocalypse. Power goes out, communication is down, and they turn inward to try to take care of their community, through leadership struggles, limited food, and the chaos of taking in strangers. I read this as a part of July's #SFFBookClub book.

I quite enjoyed the smaller focused story of survival here, where the outside world is at the margins. It centers a small Anishinaabe community, and about its dread and uncertainty and adaptation as everything starts to slowly unravel when winter sets in.

For me, the part that set the tone of the entire story was the conversation that Evan Whitesky has with the elder Aileen Jones, about halfway through the book. She says that there's no word for apocalypse in Ojibwe. But more than that, she says that their world already ended much earlier when they were forced out of their original land, and ended again when their children were stolen. That they've seen disaster over and over and have always been resilient and survived.

To me, that conversation feels directly juxtaposed with Evan's musing a few pages later about the phrase the moon of the crusted snow--he remembers teachers having a disagreement about whether that phrase referred to the month at the peak of winter or a month where it alternated between freezing and mild temperatures. In the context of Aileen's conversation, it feels like the title itself is about ambivalent ways of looking at disaster--one perception of it being the worst thing that's ever happened, and another saying that this is not the first time this has happened, and providing some future-looking hope for milder times.

Rebecca Thorne's Can't Spell Treason Without Tea is a cozy sapphic romance fantasy, explicitly in the vein of Travis Baldree's work. The book focuses on the (prexisting, and secret) relationship between a palace guard and a powerful mage. When the queen pushes too far, they treasonously abandon responsibility to set up a combination teashop/bookshop in a small town, like you do. It feels like there's larger stakes here than in similar books, but they're still personal and local ones. I'd also argue that these two are so competent in their own domains that any conflict feels much more about the potential emotional impact than a true worrisome threat.

I appreciated the amount of worldbuilding heft here. I am always a sucker for anything that opens with a fantasy map, and I felt like small bordertown Tawney was interestingly situated both geographically and politically. It's caught between three countries, and has two local governers who butt heads over who actually is in charge. It's just got the sense of place that I want out of a fantasy book. The book also has some magic system details that had more depth than I was expecting from this sort of book.

Overall, this was quite the cozy read, and it's definitely the kind of treat my brain needed right now. I'm looking forward to more novels in this series, as it felt like there were quite a few hooks for future complications. I laughed at the in-world explanation for why the biggest of these hooks lands itself in the "quite important but not at all urgent" category, which seems perfect for ongoing fantasy hijinks.