Author: Ada Hoffmann

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MONSTERS IN MY MIND: Story notes, part 26 and 27

26. The Parable of the Supervillain

At four in the morning with the baby biting me,
I watched you call the President of Australia
from his velvet bed
and feed him to the army ants.

This poem appeared in Apex Magazine, in March 2014. Its inspiration was a moment I had with a then-close friend who was visiting me. I had a meltdown triggered by something, and yelled in awful ways – I very rarely yell during meltdowns, I’m usually more inclined to just freeze up and cry, but this one was really bad. Afterwards I was full of shame. I’ve had people who always yelled that way when I was growing up, I know how damaging it is, and I felt like a monster because I couldn’t stop myself. And my friend just came to me where I was sitting there crying and wordlessly put her arms around me.

I don’t want this post to turn into some kind of weird, “and therefore it’s okay to yell at people” apologia. Obviously, it’s not okay to yell, and it is damaging, and I’ve been actively working on training myself into alternate strategies so that I don’t damage the people on whom I rely for support. But in the moment, I was overwhelmed with gratitude for my friend’s forgiveness, and I decided to write about that feeling.

Back when I was more conventionally religious, the Parable of the Prodigal Son was a story that had immense meaning for me. It still kind of does. And you don’t have to know me all that well to know that I appreciate fabulous villains. Once those two elements were in place, with the emotional core to back them up, the rest of it was easy.

27. The Company of Heaven

She couldn’t say why the angels frightened her. They swelled with too much light, but so did the sun, and she didn’t cower away from that. Maybe it was the way they said her name. Like another thing that knew her. Another that wouldn’t leave her alone.

“The Company of Heaven” is an older piece that never quite found a home before MONSTERS IN MY MIND. It’s named after a little-known work by Benjamin Britten, which I chanced to see performed live back in, oh, it must have been 2010 or even earlier. I was struck by this particular part of the text, a quote from John Ruskin, which is spoken aloud during the sixth movement:

…suppose that over Ludgate Hill the sky had indeed suddenly become blue instead of black; and that a flight of twelve angels, ‘covered with silver wings, and their feathers with gold,’ had alighted on the cornice of the railroad bridge, as the doves alight on the cornices of St. Mark’s at Venice; and had invited the eager men of business below, in the centre of a city confessedly the most prosperous in the world, to join them for five minutes in singing the first five verses of such a psalm as the 103rd – ‘Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all that is with me,’ (the opportunity now being given for the expression of their most hidden feelings) ‘all that is within me, bless his holy name, and forget not all His benefits.’ Do you not even thus, in mere suggestion, feel shocked at the thought, and as if my now reading the words were profane? And cannot you fancy that the sensation of the crowd at so violent and strange an interruption of traffic, might be somewhat akin to… the feeling attributed by Goethe to Mephistopheles at the song of the angels: ‘Discord I hear, and intolerable jingling?’

I knew immediately that I wanted to write about this scenario, about someone being directly confronted by Actual Angels – angels who didn’t appear to want anything of them, except that they consider joining in a song – and being completely unable to appreciate or accept the experience.

At first – being much more conventionally religious, back in 2010, than I am now – my view of what such a person would be like was very negative, and the story was going to be one of these unpleasant, self-critical, character study kinds of stories. But that version of the story never quite gelled, and I could never quite bring myself to write it down. Eventually I realized that Cassie, the story’s protagonist, needed to be much more sympathetic. She needed to have reasons for being uneasy around angels that parallelled my own – she is busy, yes, but she’s also queer and traumatized, acutely afraid of being called crazy, and suspicious that the social value systems that go along with believing in angels will also harm her in multiple ways. I needed to own those things as valid and relatable feelings, and write them accordingly. And I needed to give her, not a judgmental, downer ending, but a hopeful one.

So the story eventually happened that way, and was finished in 2012. It never sold, and I wonder if that’s due to the weird combination of both being queer and having heavy Christian overtones – who would buy that? I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t even buy that. It could also be that this is an earlier work, and maybe my craft just wasn’t quite there. But it’s a story I love, so I put it into MONSTERS IN MY MIND, and now you can read it, too.

By the way, all the words sung by the angels in this story are actual hymns, except for “Heaven is here, and the angels of heav’n,” which is from the Britten piece.

Song Pairing: Britten’s “The Company of Heaven” is difficult to track down in recorded form, but if you’d like to hear it for yourself, there appear to be several versions on YouTube.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

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A blog tour roundup!

I did a small blog tour for MONSTERS IN MY MIND in December and January, in which I was interviewed or guest blogged in various places. Now the blog tour is complete (I think), so here are all the links gathered up in one place for your perusal:

  • On A.M. Dellamonica’s Heroine Question blog, I talk about Julie Payette (now Canada’s Governor General) and what outer space meant to tiny!Ada.
  • On the Autonomous Press blog, I talk about what speculative fiction means to me and who inspires me.
  • On Elizabeth Bartmess’s blog, I talk about monsters, relationships, and reviewing.
  • On Jill Seidenstein’s Slow Bloom blog, I talk about identity, LARP, life skills, my literary ancestry, and the books I lend out most.
  • On A.C. Wise’s blog, I talk about titles and collection designs, and about poetry written by robots.
  • On Christina Vasilevski’s Books and Tea blog, I talk more about monsters, mother/daughter relationships, how I view technology, and what it means to exclude and be excluded.
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MONSTERS IN MY MIND: Story notes, part 24 and 25

24. Synchronicity

I dreamed of a woman made of glass, like this.

A poem that’s barely even speculative – I used to have an RPG/writing partner who could intuit some of my ideas almost this easily. It was my first sale to Through the Gate, in May 2013.

25. How My Best Friend Rania Crashed a Party and Saved the World

Rania snorted and shoved me. “That’s not a date with me. That’s a date with Suman Bachchan’s cheekbones.”

“Rania” is a YA that grew out of a very specific frustration of mine – polarized discussions about social media. Either millennials are using it to ruin the world and destroy everyone’s privacy, or it’s the wonderful wave of the future where everyone should always be connected and you didn’t need that privacy anyway. After walking out of yet another of these discussions, it struck me that neither side seemed to have much nuance – and that both sides seemed to be missing the ways that people actually adapt to social change, whether good, bad, or ambivalent.

So, I decided to write a not!dystopia. A world in which some Internet stuff had been taken to its logical conclusion, and was ridiculous and problematic in certain ways, and people adapted and went on with their lives – subverting what they could, when they needed to, but also using it to their advantage.

“Rania” is only barely science fiction, as it’s barely in the future. Almost all of it is completely doable with current technology, including the central conceit of an Infallible Cloud that sorts people’s personalities into categories. (Marketing companies already do this, just not publicly.) And the Kinect-like video game system, and the robot camel, etc. The only part I’m not sure you could currently do is some window dressing with holograms at a party, and even then, I’m not sure. The story came out in February 2014 in The Journal of Unlikely Cryptography, but a couple of years later, China announced that it would be using machine learning to give its citizens trustworthiness scores similar to a credit rating. So now this story is even less speculative than it was. 😛

Song Pairing: I struggled to pick a song for this one, but given the YA vibe and the focus on surveillance and privacy, I think I’m going to go with Miley Cyrus’s “Fly on the Wall”.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

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Autistic Book Party, Episode 42: Ninefox Gambit

(ETA: Yoon Ha Lee appears to have been misdiagnosed with autism, and has asked to be removed from Autistic Book Party.)

 

Today’s Book: “Ninefox Gambit” by Yoon Ha Lee.

The Plot: Disgraced Captain Kel Cheris is offered a chance to redeem herself by defeating a heretic fortress with the help of the undead General Shuos Jedao. Jedao is a genius who has never lost a battle – but he is also famous for a battle in which he intentionally massacred everyone on both sides. Cheris can’t trust him – but perhaps she can’t trust anyone else here, either.

Autistic Character(s): The author.

Yoon Ha Lee is one of my faves, and I was THRILLED when I found an offhand mention, in his public Dreamwidth journal, that he has an adult diagnosis of autism. (He has other mental health diagnoses, too.) It was such an offhand and ambivalent mention that I contacted him to ask if it was okay with him if I put him on the Autistic Book List. This was very scary since he is a famous author I had never spoken to before. He said yes; information in his public journal is public information. So here we are.

“Ninefox Gambit” is Lee’s debut novel, and is a Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Award nominee as well as the winner of the Locus Award for Best Novel.

There is no autism in this book. What we do have is an intricate and deeply imaginative dystopian military space opera that I am basically going to spend the rest of this post squeeing about.

The world of “Ninefox Gambit” is impressively weird. Both military strategy and the very structure of this world are based on math. The Hexarchate, an empire that most of the characters belong to, is dependent on what is called a calendrical system. Someone, at some point, calculated that, if society is run in a very specific way – not just the divisions of time and major holidays that the word “calendar” implies, but everything down to the people’s beliefs and social structures – then a new branch of physics opens up. If the Hexarchate keeps control and everything functions according to their calculations, then they are able to use “exotic” technology: weapons that produce powerful, surreal effects.  From a kaleidoscope bomb that instantly multiplies one side’s ships and personnel, to the infamous threshold winnower, which turns every door (and bodily orifice) into a source of deadly radiation.

This gives the Hexarchate a very material interest in hunting down “heretics” – those who observe the calendar differently. Too many heretics in an area can produce calendrical rot, in which exotic effects cease to function – or, worse, function differently.

As one might imagine for a society based on math, everything in the Hexarchate is highly formalized. One of the real joys of this book is the level of detail put into the Hexarchate’s cultural rituals and symbols. Multiple related sets of evocative symbols are used in different parts of the characters’ lives, from the banners and emblems announcing the presence of individual generals, to the system of signifiers which classify the personality of each soldier (Cheris is an Ashhawk Sheathed Wings, which means caution and stability), to the Tarot-like system of jeng-zai playing cards. An incredible level of geekery obviously went into the design of this world, and it’s wonderful.

But “Ninefox Gambit” succeeds as a novel because, amid all the wild detail, the book’s central drama is simple and human. Jedao, because of the way his current existence works, is uncomfortably close to Cheris at all times. Cheris is doing an incredibly stressful and difficult job. Although she is a mathematical genius herself, she can’t win this campaign without Jedao’s skill at strategy and trickery. But she has no idea where his true loyalties lie – or whether, and when, she herself is being tricked. At heart, this book is not only about a flashy calendrical system, but about trust, loyalty, sacrifice, and betrayal.

There are a few disability-related notes to make about “Ninefox Gambit,” both good and bad. Jedao is dyscalculic and suicidally depressed, both of which are depicted briskly and well. Being dyscalculic in a regime that runs on math is a significant disability. Jedao deals with it by relying on Cheris for his math, and asking her to display the results graphically, which she does – as she should – without comment or complaint.

On the other hand, this is also a book that throws around words like “crazy” and “sociopath” fairly liberally. I personally didn’t mind the use of “crazy”; I found it realistic for a bunch of characters in a repressive and dystopian society who have genuine concerns both about how their missions will affect their mental health, and about whether the people they’re working with are thinking in ways that are comprehensible and human. But readers who are more sensitive than I am to mental health slurs may take issue with it. As for “sociopath”, readers who object to the “sociopathic villain” trope will have a problem with Lee’s treatment of several minor characters. Thankfully, this isn’t at all the route that is taken with Jedao himself, whose motives turn out to be complex, interesting, and even a little sympathetic – though you’ll be guessing about them for nearly all of the book.

Overall, I just really like this book. It is a fave. It’s also proof that some of the most stunningly imaginative, major-award-nominated science fiction of our time is by autistic people. Haters to the left.

As a side note, I would never have realized that Yoon Ha Lee is on the spectrum if I hadn’t happened to look at his journal on that specific day. And now I’m wondering how many other famous authors are in that boat. Authors who are autistic, and who are happy to say so in public, but who also aren’t making a big deal out of it, so that if you weren’t already closely following that author, you’d never know.

My Autistic Book List is as comprehensive as I can make it, but I’m not omniscient. If a SFF author is autistic and they’re not on that list, it’s not because I’ve somehow judged them unworthy; it’s because I genuinely don’t know. Readers, if you see any other famous authors casually mentioning in public that they’re autistic, you’ll let me know, won’t you? I will be eager and delighted, more than delighted, to add them.

The Verdict: Recommended-2

Ethics Statement: The brief interaction that I describe at the beginning of this review is the only time I have ever interacted with Yoon Ha Lee. I read his book by picking up a copy that I already owned off of my bookshelf and re-reading it. All opinions expressed here are my own.

Many of my reviews are chosen by my Patreon backers. This one was not. Reviews chosen by my backers are still in the works. If these reviews are valuable to you, consider becoming a backer; for as little as $1, you can help choose the next autistic book.

For a list of past/future/possible Autistic Book Party books, click here.

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MONSTERS IN MY MIND: story notes, part 21 and 22

21. Lament for a Faithless Prince

For I know
your inner dark, and you know mine.

This poem came out in Goblin Fruit on Valentine’s Day, 2013, which was timing that caused my aunt to positively DREAD that I had written something TREACLY and COMMERCIALLY ROMANTIC and she would have to pretend to LIKE it. Then she read it and realized that she liked it, after all.

“Lament for a Faithless Prince” is a poem from the point of view of a sentient portal-fantasy world, I guess. I mean, it sounds a lot weirder than it’s supposed to be, when you put it that way. More to the point, it is a bitter, longing call to a grown man who used to visit the world, but who has no time for it anymore.

Obviously, this is not a metaphor for anything at all. Nope.

22. Ekyprotic Theory

A short poem written at a very different time to the previous one, but which makes a companion of sorts for it, as they both deal with romantic loss and longing. This one was published in Lakeside Circus in 2015.

Also, it uses brane cosmology as its governing metaphor, which, if you ask me, is freakin’ badass.

MONSTERS IN MY MIND is available for purchase on Amazon, Kobo, Indigo,  Barnes and Noble, and in Autonomous Press’s Shopify store.

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Autistic Book Party, Episode 41: Nantais

Cover of the book "Nantais" by Verity Reynolds. Contains a spaceship flying over a planet, and the word "Nantais" at the top.

Today’s Book: “Nantais”, by Verity Reynolds

The Plot: A ship’s crew are stranded after a computer virus infects their spaceship, and the more they try to find repairs for their ship and retrieve their missing comrades, the more complex the web of conspiracy around them seems to become.

Autistic Characters: Two crew members, named David and Hayek, and also, the author.

“Nantais” is a space opera in which all the usual fun space opera things come into play – cool aliens, interplanetary governments, space pirates, sentient ship’s computers, and so on. It contains some autistic humans, as well as some cool aliens that autistic readers will be able to relate to.

I don’t have much to say about the autistic humans, which is unusual for me. “Nantais” is being marketed in a way that makes a lot of noise about how the whole book is “very autistic” without ever mentioning the word “autism”, and how this is a radical authorial choice. I’m not sure I would describe either David or Hayek as “very autistic”. They both have autistic traits, but these traits are described in a very blink-and-you-miss-it way; in fact, I ended the book still unsure if Hayek was meant to be on the autism spectrum or not. Hayek is a fairly standard “go out of the spaceship and shoot guns” character, and the only autistic trait that I noticed from him is the use of a weighted vest.

There is nothing WRONG with having characters like this. Nor in refusing to other them or navel-gaze about their disability. In fact, a character like Hayek is nice to see since we don’t usually picture autistic people in that role. I’m just not convinced it’s an especially radical way of writing, with or without the word “autism”, especially since neither character seems to require the type of accommodations that necessitate societal change.

 

The aliens are good, though. “Nantais” is at its most interesting when Reynolds uses alien forms of communication to lightly upend common wisdom about communication in humans. Different species use different body language, including flapping and otherwise gesturing with the hands. Niralans appear to have no body language at all, and seem eerily emotionless to humans. But their nonverbal communication is actually some of the richest and most intense in the galaxy, for the few who have a sufficiently close physical connection to read it. Autistic readers and others whose emotions are misperceived by those around them will be delighted to spend time with the Niralan characters.

(As a side note, this might be another reason why I wasn’t super impressed with Hayek as an autistic character; he has an initial reaction to the main Niralan character’s lack of body language which more or less exactly mirrors the way NT ableists in real life respond to autistic people whose body language they can’t read. Not only did this make me subjectively annoyed with him, but it seemed like an odd and not-quite-realistic choice if he is meant to be autistic himself.)

Truth be told, I was a little underwhelmed with “Nantais” overall. The pacing is a little jumpy, and the way events progress doesn’t always feel coherent or satisfying. There is a cool subplot with a sentient ship’s computer that is trying to fight off its virus. The computer functions very differently from an Earth computer, in ways that are often interesting, but it irritated me that the term “computational linguistics” in this universe appears to mean something completely divorced from what it means in real life.

I think this is the most “meh” review I’ve ever written. There is nothing really wrong with the representation in “Nantais”; it didn’t click for me on a craft level, but there is nothing truly horrible about the book on that level, either. I did quite like the aliens, but the rest of it didn’t do a lot for me.

The Verdict: YMMV

Ethics Statement: Verity Reynolds and I have had quite a few business interactions; she beta read my still-unpublished novel and was a developmental/acquisitions editor for MONSTERS IN MY MIND. MONSTERS and NANTAIS were both published by the same press. I read her book because she emailed me a copy asking me for a blurb. I did, in fact, provide a blurb, which is an excerpt from this review. All opinions expressed either here or in the shortened blurb are my own.

This book was not chosen by my Patreon backers; I simply reviewed it because I decided that, having already read and blurbed it, a review would not be much extra labor. Reviews chosen by my backers are still in the works. If these reviews are valuable to you, consider becoming a backer; for as little as $1, you can help choose the next autistic book.

For a list of past/future/possible Autistic Book Party books, click here.

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Autistic Book Party, episode 40 and a half: Short Story Smorgasbord

Bogi Takács, “Trans Love Is” (Nerve Endings anthology, 2016; reprinted as a free Patreon reward)

[Autistic author] A poem about the author’s relationships and family. It’s speculative, in my view, because magic and magical folklore are mentioned, but the bulk of the poem is about the quirks, difficulties, and minutiae of a household of non-neurotypical trans people. The picture that emerges is chaotic but enthusiastically loving, and a welcome antidote to stereotypes about what autistic people’s relationships must looks like. Also it comes with a shorter poem, “A Song of Expanses”. [Recommended-1]

*

Andi C. Buchanan, “Syren Song” (Kaleidotrope, summer 2017)

[Autistic author] A story about a teenage runaway siren in space. It’s very brief, but nuanced, and manages to subvert a couple of tropes in its short space. [Recommended-2]

*

Rose Lemberg, “Domovoi” (Uncanny, July 2017)

[Autistic author] A spooky poem which, ironically, is also a complaint against people’s need for spooky stories. When kindness and domesticity are not enough to satisfy the domovoi’s housemates, it turns to other means. [Recommended-2]

*

S.B. Divya, “An Unexpected Boon” (Apex, November 2017)

Kalyani, one of the viewpoint characters in this story, has a both OCD and autistic symptoms – a common combination in real life. I like the plot in which Kalyani meets a magical beetle who helps her interpret emotions, and then develops even stranger abilities. But I wish that more of the story was from Kalyani’s point of view, rather than that of her ableist brother. The narrative clearly shows that her brother is wrong about her, but it still robs us of the opportunity to follow Kalyani as she has some of the most pivotal magical experiences, and to find out how she feels about them and what they meant to her. [YMMV]

*

A. Merc Rustad, “The House at the End of the Lane is Dreaming” (Lightspeed, December 2017)

[Autistic author] A powerful story about video games and free will, and the kinds of agency we do and don’t allow to the people we tell stories about. There’s a really interesting disability thread in here, even though nobody technically identifies as disabled. The protagonist, Alex, is consistently given choices in which they’re punished for trying to help their sister, but their sister is injured when they don’t try to help. The game then pushes them to abandon their injured sister to die. What the game’s writers see as a compelling tragedy is actually an ableist narrative, in which they try to force the protagonist to accept the necessity of sacrificing people who can’t keep up. It’s satisfying that Alex finds another way to survive in the end, and that they get their revenge against their writers – even though, in typical Rustad fashion, that revenge is quite vicious as well. [Recommended-2]

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Autistic Book Party, Episode 40: Mouse

Cover of the book "Mouse" by Richard Ford Burley

Today’s Book: “Mouse”, by Richard Ford Burley

The Plot: An autistic boy discovers he can talk to a ghost, is the reincarnation of Simon Magus (sort of), and needs to save the world.

Autistic Character(s): The title character.

This book is a fun urban fantasy with roots in medieval alchemy and ceremonial magic (not surprising, since Burley is a medievalist). It’s also a book with a pretty badass #ownvoices autistic protagonist from a somewhat under-represented part of the spectrum.

Mouse is a high school student who is “primarily non-verbal” – he can squeak out a word or two in an emergency, usually, if there’s no other option, but he prefers to communicate by writing notes. He is intensely sensitive and overwhelmed by the social information he sees in other people’s faces, which is why he never looks there. He’s taught in an integrated classroom with neurotypical classmates, but he isn’t especially talented at school; he mainly keeps his head down and tries to get through the day.

All these are great things to see in an autistic protagonist, and I liked seeing them. Unfortunately, the book kept making strange and inconsistent choices in how it portrayed them.

I feel really bad critiquing an #ownvoices author’s portrayal of autism, which makes this critique hard to write. It’s possible I’m missing something huge. But I’m just going to soldier on and show some examples of what I’m talking about.

In the beginning of the novel, Mouse is so painfully over-sensitive that he literally never looks at his classmates’ faces, recognizing them instead (in a cute touch) by their shoes. When he is pressed to look a classmate in the eye, the cascade of information there sends him straight into panic:

Ginnie crouches down in front of him. She lifts his bangs to look under and he can’t help it, he can’t close his eyes fast enough. He imagines it’s like being electrocuted; he sees it all in under a second, hears it like a building wall of static in his mind. He sees a dubious look on the surface of the most shining, blinding green eyes; he sees that she’s curious, interested; beyond that, she’s a little worried about breaking social taboos but a little excited by the prospect of it; he sees that she’s often a little bored and seeking a thrill but that she’s generally harmless to herself and others; that she’s the kind of person who smiles a lot but cries easily and that she desperately, desperately wishes life were simple enough to be solved with single, grand gestures rather than the day-in-day-out course corrections that constitute the waking world; and beneath it all he sees something more—an intricate reweaving of times and places, of ordinary days and extraordinary ones, the sadness of the mundane, and a crystalline, blinding hope she places in the new. And below even that he sees something bigger, darker, deeper—
Mouse recoils violently, nearly dropping what’s left of his lunch.

This is a bit of an exaggerated description, but it’s meant to be; it will later be revealed that Mouse is not just autistically sensitive but “a sensitive” in a magic sense. (As a side note, I know a lot of quite hyper-empathic autistic people. The part that I find unrealistic is not the amount of information, per se, but rather the fact that Mouse is able to process the information fast enough to consciously identify what all those different parts of it are before he recoils.)

Also, the description of Mouse’s shutdown immediately following this is just really good:

Even Mouse knows it was the wrong reaction. Everything’s gone quiet and they’re looking at him. The guitar has stopped. Mouse has his knees up to his nose and he can tell, even with his eyes closed tight, that they all have concerned looks. But he can’t move, can’t look. His stomach is a knot twisted to its snapping point, his heart is beating in his throat, he wants to throw up. Like a turtle curled up in its shell, he can’t risk extending his legs even to run away. He imagines for a moment the impossibility of ever moving again, of being frozen like this forever; but he doesn’t have to imagine, only remember the years of small rooms and soft voices, the gradual peeling open of a tulip flower cut too soon for the table.

As soon as the plot really gets going, though, Mouse seems to become less and less impaired for no discernible reason. We meet one magical character who is able to put up shields that make it more comfortable for Mouse to look at him; and we see Mouse practicing basic magical skills, like moving energy around to boil water. But we don’t see him practicing how to manage the onslaught of information that he sees when he looks at anything. Yet, the depictions of this onslaught of information, which were so effectively done at the beginning of the book, seem to just fade away as if the author forgot about them. First he’s no longer identifying anybody by their shoes. Then he is able, carefully, to look his love interest in the eye. Then all of a sudden we are reading scenes like this one:

The rest of the day passes in montage, and the following night, and the rest of the week. Sitting at his desk, exchanging glances with Bliss or Anna in the batcave, zoning out during dinner. He tosses and turns at night, wondering when the next attack will come.

Suddenly eye contact is a totally fine thing that we’re doing all the time, and I really do feel like I missed something.

We see some flash-forwards (this book has a couple of cool, timey-wimey twists) to an older Mouse in a dystopian world, who has somehow become calm and strong and commanding. He still doesn’t talk, but all the other impairments seem to have either gone away, or become un-noticed by the people around him. It’s hard to say, since nothing in those flash-forwards is actually from Mouse’s point of view.

We also have the problem that Mouse is a reincarnation of Simon Magus – or, not a reincarnation exactly, but a fragment of Magus’s consciousness that was passed forward in time. But the original Simon Magus wasn’t autistic, and has no problem talking. In emergencies, Mouse finds himself instinctively drawing on the original Simon Magus – which means he suddenly becomes a confident person who can conveniently talk and shout out verbal spell incantations at these emergency moments, including in the book’s climactic scene. This is a somewhat frustrating choice to me; I would much rather have seen Mouse figuring out ways to deal with magical emergencies without speaking.

Furthermore, since the original Simon Magus wasn’t autistic, Mouse is convinced that there must be a reason that he is autistic in his current life. Toward the end of the book, the reason is revealed:

Simon, that is, Simon Magus, he was a master strategist, he could see the way everything was going to go and planned ahead every time. But this time he couldn’t make the equations work—there wasn’t enough data. So he made Mouse to be the opposite of him—he can’t see, but he can feel. He can sense a pattern in the chaos and act right away. His intuition is exactly the opposite kind of knowledge to Simon’s.

Which, you know, sure – and I like the connection between autistic patterns thinking and magical intuition. Except I’m not sure how “he can act right away” jibes with his shutting down in the face of information earlier in the book. And the whole thing feels awfully close to two really problematic tropes – one being the person who seems to be disabled but it’s actually just magic, and the other being the autistic person whose character development consists of becoming less autistic as the story goes on.

This is all sort of nitpicky stuff; at the end of the day, we are still looking at an #ownvoices autistic hero who gets to be at the center of his own story, who has wonderful friends, family, and allies, and who saves the world. It’s well-written on a craft level, and it deals with its subject matter respectfully. If you’re not too bothered by the kinds of complaints I’m making here, and you’re up for a fun urban fantasy romp with medieval mages and mind-bending twists, then “Mouse” is for you. For me, it didn’t all quite work; but I’ll certainly be looking out for more from this author.

The Verdict: YMMV

Ethics Statement: I think I have vaguely interacted with Richard Ford Burley on Twitter once or twice, but that’s all. I read his book by reading an e-copy that the publisher emailed to me in hopes of a review. All opinions expressed here are my own.

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Faves from 2017, part 3: Stories and poems!

Here’s the part of my faves list that IS all award-eligible (as far as I know; I may have messed something up somewhere).

Hugo and Nebula nominations aren’t open yet, and by the time they are, I’ll have read even more stuff from 2017 thanks to other people’s rec lists and whatever else happens across my desk. But if I was nominating for all the awards tonight, here’s what I’d choose:

Novelettes

Short Stories

Honorable mentions:

Long Poetry

Honorable mention:

Short Poetry

Honorable mentions:

Other Categories

I don’t feel like I watch enough movies to vote for a Best Dramatic Presentation, but I adored The Last Jedi, and I thought Wonder Woman and Thor: Ragnarok were pretty frickin’ awesome, too. I’ve heard really good things about quite a few of 2017’s other movies. It’s going to be a tough category this year.

I’ll be tempted to nominate Charles Payseur for Best Fan Writer. I do not know how that guy eats or sleeps with the number of thoughtful and enthusiastic short fiction reviews he puts out. Bogi Takács is another tireless and intelligent reviewer who’s eligible in this category.

Uncanny and Strange Horizons have both put out huge amounts of really solid work this year, and I hope to see them both on the Best Semiprozine ballot.

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Faves from 2017, part 2: Novellas!

Like the previous faves post, this isn’t going to be limited to works published in 2017. Just ones that I read in 2017 and adored.

Andi C. Buchanan, “This Other World.” Full review here.

T. Kingfisher, “Summer in Orcus.” I love Ursula Vernon / T. Kingfisher’s short work, but hadn’t read a whole book of it before. This one was wonderful; she certainly didn’t seem to have trouble expanding her trademark wit, invention, and common-sense trope subversions to full length. When I realized just why this particular protagonist was the chosen one, I might have cried.

Rose Lemberg, “A Portrait of the Desert in Personages of Power.” Full review here.

Bogi Takács, “Iwunen Interstellar Investigations, Prologue Season: Glory as Birthright.” Full review here.

Isabel Yap, “Hurricane Heels.” I walked into this expecting a fluffy bit of Sailor Moon nostalgia, but to call it that would be to vastly underestimate what the author is up to. It’s written from a place of love for magical girl anime tropes, but it’s also a huge deconstruction of those tropes, as well as a celebration of fierce girls with fiercer friendships, and of surviving through trauma. Aiko is my favorite. I cried at this one, too.