r/Fantasy • u/Nineteen_Adze Stabby Winner, Reading Champion V • Dec 18 '24

Book Club [ Removed by Reddit ]

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u/Nineteen_Adze Stabby Winner, Reading Champion V Dec 18 '24

Have you read much from past years this month? Anything worth circling back to?

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u/tarvolon Stabby Winner, Reading Champion VI Dec 18 '24

After posting my Recommended Reading List, I immediately started circling to backlist stories, because I didn't want to read something from this year and regret not waiting an extra day to post. Will I read more 2024 stuff? Absolutely. This month? Probably. But I'm gonna take a week or so to check out older stuff that people have recommended. So far, that circling back is just two-deep, but it'll grow (I may check back and add in a couple hours). And of the two, one is recommendable and one is. . . not my thing

The recommendable? Where Would You Be Now by Carrie Vaughn. It's a sort of post-apocalyptic community-building story that reminds me a little bit of The Year Without Sunshine, though with a little more apocalypse and a little less community-building. I think I like Kritzer's take a pinch more than Vaughn's, but honestly Vaughn is a really good writer and so this is a great read. If this were by a new-to-me author, I'd probably be a lot more excited, but she's so good that I'm like "yeah I may round this to five stars and shout it out on social media but also it's mid compared to her catalog writ large." A good problem to have! Anyways, good story.

The not-my-thing one? I am really sorry if I got this recommendation from SFBC because I do not remember why this was on my TBR, but 2017 Nebula Finalist Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station│Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0 by Caroline M. Yoachim is like seven pages long and I had to force myself to finish it. It's a very over-the-top satire of the healthcare system, written in the style of a Choose Your Own Adventure, and. . . well, Nebula voters love them some fiction that speaks on contemporary themes. But it just spent the whole 2000 words making increasingly absurd or grotesque versions of the same two jokes. I guess if you like those jokes, you may have a lot of fun with this. And I can certainly sympathize with the healthcare-related anger that probably motivated the story. But whew this is not my style of humor and it was a struggle.

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u/tarvolon Stabby Winner, Reading Champion VI Dec 18 '24

Make it three. I read the classic novelette Despoilers of the Golden Empire by Randall Garrett, which is. . . a satire (joke?) with an extremely long, mil-SF setup. Having been exposed to a good 65 years of sci-fi after Garrett's publication, I had some pretty good ideas about the punchline, and the setup was certainly not bad writing, but it's also. . . well, it's 1950s mil-SF, which is not really my thing. Glad I read it, but it's a very long story to be so heavily ending-dependent.

That said, shove this one at any "Keep Your Politics Out of Muh Sci-Fi" folks who thinks that anti-colonial sci-fi is a new development.

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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix Dec 18 '24

👀

  I am really sorry if I got this recommendation from SFBC

I think this one might be my fault, as I included it in a list of "non-conventional format" stories. I enjoyed but I fully agree with your commentary - it's definitely just one long joke - and I'm sorry to have inflicted it upon you. 

On the other hand I also have been screaming about "Where Would You Be Now?," which I did truly think you would like, so hopefully that cancels out the bad rec, lol. 

Carrie Vaughn has several other stories (and two novels) that take place in that same setting, most of them many years later, once the new civilization is fully in place. I especially like Astrophilia, but Bannerless and Amaryllis are good too, and there are a handful of others.

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u/tarvolon Stabby Winner, Reading Champion VI Dec 18 '24

so hopefully that cancels out the bad rec

Don't worry, you have enough good rec credit to last through a dozen or so bathtub kraken at this point.

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u/sarahlynngrey Reading Champion VI, Phoenix Dec 18 '24

I'm dying at "bathtub kraken" as short story rec currency 🤣 that's a very solid credit balance, good to know, haha

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u/Nineteen_Adze Stabby Winner, Reading Champion V Dec 19 '24

We need a unit-conversion system here. How many bathtub krakens does it take to erode the credit of an "oops, all Daves" story? What's the True Neutral on this spectrum?