David Yoon

I loved Children of Time so much that I did something I rarely ever do and immediately picked up the second book of the trilogy to read. Sadly it couldn't keep up the frenetic momentum of the first book. Children of Ruin felt way slower and Tchaikovsky once again draws from his zoology background to poke at the challenges of interspecies communication — which frankly started to feel a bit “been there, done that.”

Nonetheless the alien collective revealed midway through the book vocalizing their mantra “We are going on an adventure” is easily one of the more terrifying species I've encountered on the page. I could have read an entire book (albeit through my fingers) about this consuming entity and my hats off to Tchaikovsky for penning some truly chilling moments of alien horror.

But sadly it too often got mired in its own plodding structure and I felt none of the stakes I should have with the other characters. Maybe I did myself no favours by reading this so quickly after the first. The themes echoed across the books and I couldn't help but find this the weaker of the two.

You've got Dr. Avrana Kern of the technologically advanced Old Empire, seeking to terraform planets and seed them with an evolutionary accelerating nano-virus. Her efforts are stymied by the escalating conflicts back home on Earth that manages to corrupt her mission, forcing her to upload her consciousness to an orbiting satellite where she grapples with her own sanity over the ensuing millennia. Meanwhile the nano-virus ends up infecting spiders, the planned primates completely destroyed on arrival. We follow the spider civilization through the millennia as they advance through their own dark ages, renaissance, and technological revolutions.

Meanwhile, thousands of years after the wars that devastated the Earth, a new era of human discovery sets out on cannibalized technology from the Old Empire. The Gilgamesh and its host of explorers, kept ageless in cryostasis, are out looking for new world to inhabit. Victims of their own infighting, living on a ship that is crumbling around them even as new generations are born and die on board, they're running out of time to find this habitable world.

The chapters flip back and forth between these two worlds. Even as centuries slip by the pace is breakneck as we head to the inevitable collision of civilizations. Along the way we explore the nature of godhood and religious fervour, interspecies communication that extends beyond the interpreting of sounds, the fight for male spider rights, world ending game theory, and how people are just the worst.

As the first book of a trilogy, Children of Time stands on its own as a fantastic, award-winning read with a wonderfully satisfying ending that is up there as one of my favourite sci-fi reads of all time.

This seems the perfect approachable entry as I attempt to further my exploration into modern philosophical thought. A more readable examination of the ever prevalent phenomena of assholes with a slight philosophical sheen. Sure, I'm still gripped by an adolescent glee when James tries parse the minute differences that separate assholes from mere ass-clowns, douchebags, and jerks, not to mention the more gendered bitch. But I appreciate the rigorous approach.

Things get even more interesting when he considers “asshole capitalism” and suddenly this book from 2012 feels eerily prescient. Kanye West is confidently placed in the Delusional Asshole category while Trump is categorized as a Narcissistic Asshole back when he was just crying over birtherism. You start to see assholes as a relentless force that wears down opponents. Entitled regardless of the larger social costs, assholes can start to break down the cooperation needed for systems to remain healthy - degrading them over time. Assholes win converts to assholedom looking to lunge and grasp at their own piece of the pie in the face of dwindling resources. One can see the dangerous appeal of the asshole, especially in our current attention economy.

Maybe this could have been tighter, reduced to a long-form Atlantic article — but I still enjoyed the ride and appreciated the accompanying Canadian documentary that was free to watch (at least on CBC)

And remember, if you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.

Maybe it doesn't have the same social clout as Sense and Sensibility or even Jane Eyre (which DuMaurier is clearly inspired by) but Rebecca still holds high esteem for many a bookish nerd. “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderly again...” is as recognized as “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” and “Call me Ishmael.” And that first chapter is as delicious a gothic introduction as one could possibly want.

Our protagonist is a child prone to wild day-dreaming discursions. Her flights of fanciful imaginings meander for pages at a time, more often than not imagining herself dull and plain, living in the long shadow of the beautiful and charming Rebecca. It is at once swooning then sinister.

At first I was sure this was a novel about the impermeability of memory. How we find the de Winters aging in a dull and listless present day which prompts our protagonist into the past to find some remembered colours, that she is willfully remembering herself the romanticizing child. Perhaps there is elements of that given how the story takes a third act turn that renders everyone in a dark, unflattering light.

Things do take a turn and it's delicious to see this play out amongst the characters in the story, but only at a bookish remove. Otherwise it's just a story of ridiculous rich people problems.

A more approachable work of modern philosophy, no doubt aided by the fact that German is Byung-Chul Han's second language which is subsequently translated into English. Not to say as a newbie reader of philosophy I haven't taken the absolute wrong message from this work.

Deep breath.

Our secular society has meant that time has lost its narrative structure. Time has been atomized. Each moment does not link with other moments and as a result we lack directional movement. We're whizzing from experience to experience - multitasking and trying to cram more and more into our lives. It's reduced us to “animal laborans” with an imperative to work. We should be stopping and lingering - seeking a contemplative life that rests in each moment.

Philosophers love explaining this and you respond with “Oh you mean Live, Love, Laugh?”

Like I said, new to this whole philosophy thing. But enjoyed it enough to pick up some more Han. Many of these ideas provide the foundation for his later work in The Burnout Society.

I loved Shining Girls and Broken Monsters warranted a rare 5 stars — but right off the bat something was off with Bridge. I found the writing plodding and perfunctory, swirling around yet another multiverse book.

After Bridge loses her neuroscientist mother Jo to brain cancer she finds herself, along with her long suffering, non-binary, Puerto Rican artist friend Dom, in her mother's house cleaning it out. Inside the freezer she finds a greyish-yellow cocoon like a spindle wrapped in elastic bands. Naturally she breaks off a piece and swallows it — remembering something about a dreamworm.

Turns out the dreamworm allows Bridge to jump into other worlds, to occupy the bodies of other versions of herself in the vast multiverse. A world-travelling influencer or a punk-rock mother and her abusive boyfriend — the same person made strange through different choices. Been there, done that, but I'm ready to be convinced by Beukes.

It's hard when the main character is just so unsympathetic. Her single-minded pursuit felt grating and selfish - certainly reflecting drug addiction and an unhealthy response to a fresh loss, but Bridge is just the worst. It's made ever more clear when paired with her long-suffering, voice of reason, helpful enabler Dom. And sure you can cite generational trauma as Jo Kittinger is also, the worst — which meant I never bought why Bridge would be so singularly obsessed with finding her.

Everyone is pared down to a singular obsessive impulse. Even amidst the blood spattered gore it felt monochromatic and dull as a result. Robots with singular purpose colliding in the multiverse with an ending I just didn't buy.

Tech-bro billionaire Cy Baxter has teamed up with the CIA to test a bleeding-edge, national surveillance program called FUSION. Cy is on the path to a 10-year, $100 billion dollar government contract if he can prove it out.

Enter 10 carefully selected civilians given the task to disappear and avoid capture for 30 days. Whoever can manage that will pocket $3 million dollars. No one suspects that a Boston librarian named Kaitlyn Day will somehow manage to avoid capture as the clock counts down.

Simple set-up with a hell of an execution. Short, snappy chapters and enough characters to bounce around and keep the momentum moving even as author McCarten dials up the stakes. This the perfect slump-busting, summer read. While I didn't love the third act turn and found the ending to be a little underwhelming - that's just post-read justifications. I devoured this thing in a few days, happy to suspend disbelief and be carried along for this wholly propulsive ride. Who doesn't love a badass librarian leaning on the real world connections she fosters at her job while she's recommending books to patrons? Makes up for the tantrum-having dick billionaire man-child that we get enough of in the real-world.

We find ourselves in a completely immersive steampunk Cairo at the turn of the century. Ever since al-Jahiz opened a hole between worlds, djinn now co-exist with people. Intricately realized, magic and technology mingle as the wider world rumbles to World War I.

The book opens with The Brotherhood of Al-Jahiz, consisting mostly of blue-blooded Englishmen, brutally burned, their clothes mostly untouched as if they had all spontaneously combusted. It seems to herald the return of the famed Al-Jahiz, and Agent Fatma el-Sha'awari from the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities is on the case. She is a sartorial dandy in colourful bespoke suits of forest green and magenta stripes perhaps paired with a fuchsia tie, bowler hat, and the always present cane. The perfect protagonist that guides us through the bustling city with its abundant share of interesting figures.

Author P. Djèlí Clark is revelling in this world, already having written several novellas based here, and he writes with sure-footed confidence even as he introduces us to the Clock of Worlds, possessed librarians, indifferent angels, magic texts, ifrits, ghuls, old gods and more. It's a whodunnit with earth shattering consequences. Even for someone who doesn't always enjoy fantasy, I found myself completely hooked.

Jeonga is our sartorially sharp and stylish, quick tongued, and fabulously wealthy protagonist. She's also 105, or at least was until she is struck dead by a Chicago bus. (Don't worry, this all happens in the first chapter.)

We flash back to find out what this centenarian from Seoul, South Korea is doing in the United States with her equally aged sisters. They are in-fighting, status-hungry, gossipy siblings that you often forget are even older than Joenga. All of them, like aged-up ajummas, are obsessed with appearances — so much so that even in death, Jeonga remains as a ghost to try and prevent what she considers an absolutely ill-fated engagement.

Han delivers an expansive family saga bringing us back to the Korean War and the histories entwined there, all the way into the present as members of the family carve out a life in their adopted country, and then adds another element to the story by bringing us into a richly imagined afterlife. But always with a light touch that keeps everything moving along with unexpected doses of humour throughout. (being a ghost is hard!) Also, it turns out your Korean elders will never stop meddling in your affairs even generations down the line. 아이참!

Can I just say I am here for messy Korean-American female protagonists. In Sea Change, Ro is going through it in this slightly skewed near future world. At 30 she's still mourning the loss of her father — who disappeared 15 years ago researching the Bering Vortex, the most polluted region of the world's ever warming ocean. Her boyfriend has left her — to join a privately funded mission to colonize Mars. And her best friend is moving on with her life, getting married and selling the one consoling constant in Ro's life — a giant mutant octopus that lives in a mall aquarium. When the kids say “it's complicated”, they're not kidding.

Ro is decidedly not dealing with any of it — instead she's hitting bars and driving home drunk, or holing up at home downing gin and Mountain Dew and obsessing over how everyone in her life leaves. She is flailing and failing and generally making a mess of things as she leaves her 20's behind. It's that struggle to keep moving forward despite the losses, to hope for more, and to invite a little grace into her life that I loved. I'll raise a sharktini to that any day.

It's a plotty thriller where a guerrilla eco-collective named Birnam Wood comes into contact with a moustache-twirling American billionaire with plans inside of plans. This in itself is interesting if not improbable. Our current spate of billionaires hardly seem capable of Lex Luthor levels of nefarious intent as they'd rather fly into space, dive into the depths, or square off in a cage match (or dick measuring contest for that matter)

I digress.

I found I could care less about the twists and turns the story took, even as the stakes kept getting raised. Even Catton feels disinterested in resolving anything and just ends the book. The collision of eco-idealism into rapacious greed is certainly interesting, but I'd rather read Catton exploring the inner lives of working stiffs surmounting their mundane day to day challenges.

Mira and Shelley are wrestling with what they are to each other as the co-founders of Birnam Wood. Shelley is tired of always feeling the bridesmaid, the ride-along, and is poking at the idea of leaving the collective and wrestling with how to break the news. Mira feels the tension and is trying to untangle her own motivations. I know it sounds navel gazing and tedious but I found it beautifully articulated. The scene where the Darvish's have company is a master class in all the unsaid things people navigate during a growing tedious, but familiar dinner with old friends. And I loved the juxtaposition of Tony Gallo's fiery, mansplaining, anti-capitalist screed levelled against Birnam Wood, contrasted against his almost giddy imaginings of uncovering a massive conspiracy.

These are just incredible character studies and Catton only falters with the billionaire Lemoine who is all action with little interiority. He is a shark, ever moving, ever planning — free from the plague of self-doubt or the need to examine his own motivations. He just there to move the plot along. As the story progresses, everyone is increasingly enmeshed in that swirl of action and there's less and less self-examination. The book is poorer for that lack.

Give me more of Catton perfectly encapsulating a nuanced and fully realized character with just the stray thoughts in their head. Hypnotizing.

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the two biggest stars on BattleGround. Peerless warriors on the field, tender lovers off it — they are at the white hot centre of a massive media empire. They're also prisoners who fight to the death to gain their own freedom while entertaining the masses.

We've seen countless variations on this theme onscreen, so all credit to Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah for keeping our interest. We expect the corporate branding on the prisoners clothes and body, we're hardly surprised by the 24/7 coverage on and off the field, we expect the ravenous crowds screaming for blood and developing para-social relationships with people they would otherwise cross the street to avoid. But Adjei-Brenyah can script a bloody spectacle that puts you in the seats of the spectators and suddenly you might find yourself just as caught up in the world, just as complicit as the rest of the rabid fans.

There's an interesting thread with a wife of a super-fan, initially sickened by the bloody display on the field and ethically opposed to everything about the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE) program that so captures her husband's interest. Initially a conscientious objector, we see her getting wrapped up in the drama that takes place off the field, invested in the relationship between Thurwar and Staxxx. Slowly she too comes around to the gladiatorial combat.

The activists protesting this barbaric spectacle are, perhaps aptly, a nuisance to the main story. Barely there, weakly gesturing at the inhumanity of the whole endeavour, backed up by the multiple footnotes that link the story to our world, to the current realities of America's carceral system. But their cries for justice and compassion are drowned out in the excited roar of the bloodthirsty crowds eager to see who will end up dead or “Low Freed” this time out.

The objections are clumsy and awkward and while appropriate, they kept jolting me out of the story and could hardly mount a credible defence against the pure momentum of the rest of the story. It felt off balance as a result.

Should a book about dolphins have trigger warnings? I was not prepared. The jacket copy would have you believe this is an ecological story of family, when really it's the story of a lone female out on her own that gets sex trafficked and meets a battle-scarred military veteran trying to shake his drug habit ...but with dolphins. There's clam bukkake, puffer three-ways, mystical mantas, trans fish, rampant drug use, random telepathy and rape. I'm not kidding. Even if you're ready to fully lean into this, I still found the whole thing disjointed and wildly uneven. There's a long section with a trans fish that feels like a completely different short story wedged into the text, and the overall narrative is hastily rushed off the stage like the author just realized she was late for dinner. Shortlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction it clearly resonates for many, it just was not for me. I'd give it less stars but I had way too much fun reviewing the book itself.

It's a collection of vibes that just worked. From the spot on feel of a Theranos miracle technology propelled by a singular cult of personality, to the gritty TV heroes that could never exist in our current environment but were nonetheless riveting to so many of us as kids. David Hasselhoff to Star Lord. And it's inescapable childhood grief that haunts as it bends the arc of your life. There's an improbably missing elevator, a questionable insta-family, and special milk that just didn't quite make sense but I was still down for the entire ride. This felt like a first season of prestige tv, all set up with oblique clues scattered throughout that hint at something larger. There's just so much meaty potential within the gaps of the story that kept snagging at my attention. Just one of those reads where you enjoy the experience without being able to exactly pinpoint the why.

It opens as a satirical update to Animal Farm at an Independence Day celebration where the animals are decked out in jackets, hats and scarves despite the intense heat. It's Richard Scarry's first political rally in the nation of Jidada (with a -da and another -da) It seems the perfect way into absurd populist leaders and their cabal of influencers and opportunists.

Tholukuthi that while it can be incredibly funny as the American President is referred to as the “Tweeting Baboon of the United States” while the new Jidadan leader is revealed to be attracted to his Siri virtual assistant, the story still opened up a history I was not aware of. Bulawayo is exploring Zimbabwe's 2017 coup d'état that removed then president Robert Mugabe, as former First Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa took the nation's reins. Here the leaders are shown as aging horses surrounding by a blood thirsty canine military, but their story intertwined with the nation responding on social media sounded eerily familiar.

Even with the remove of anthropomorphized animals, the recounting of the Gukurahundi genocide is absolutely chilling. And the story of the goat Destiny returning to her home nation was incredibly powerful. I appreciated this intimate insight into a part of the world I was previously blind to, and the strange political ascendancy of one Tuvius Delight Shasha.

It's a propulsive, airport-read thriller with an, if not totally unreliable, then blissfully unaware narrator spilling tea on the publishing industry. The satisfaction lies less with the unsympathetic protagonist blinded by capitalist ambition and fuelled by systemic entitlement and more with the deep bookish lore referenced throughout. For that small subset of us readers versed in the online book world, this is a collection of greatest hits and I suspect the conversation around the book itself will get wonderfully meta.

Come for the pearl clutching act of June Haywood passing off her successful and recently deceased friend's novel as her own. Stay for the sharp digs at the publishing machine playing coy with ethnic ambiguity, authors on the offensive over poor Goodreads reviews, inevitable misogyny and racial epithets, being cancelled, being embraced by the right after being cancelled, #ownvoices, yellowface and more. All from an author who hasn't reached 30, yet has a decade of hits under her belt and the receipts to show for it. The call is coming from inside the house and Kuang is no doubt writing from a wealth of personal experience.

So even if you've never shaken your fist at the Goodreads Choice Awards, taken a cringey group photo at BookCon, or gotten attacked by an author over your 4 star review, there's still lots to love — but your mileage may vary.

I've never read David Copperfield and I feel like I missed out on some of the inevitable book nerd glee recognizing character parallels between the two. Nonetheless, my stunning gap in the literary canon hardly prevented me from enjoying this modern day retelling set in Appalachia

Damon Fields, otherwise known as Demon Copperhead, is the singular voice carrying us through this tale from his en caul birth onto the gritty vinyl flooring of a Lee County, Virginia mobile home, to his pinballing through the foster care system, eventual opioid addiction and otherwise bleak, unyieldingly horrible time that can barely be considered a childhood.

It's one hell of a story told from the wry eye of Demon who is at turns funny, fiercely proud, and sharp. He knows what the world thinks of him and his ilk. How he's always been dismissed as a redneck, white trash, dumbass hillbilly. But he's here to tell you he's just a product of a system that has needed to denigrate him and his people in order to take advantage of them. To extract value from the land on the backs of its people, to bolster profits for big Pharma consequences be damned, to dismiss them all as entirely unimportant. Kingsolver's got a fierce agenda, but in the mouth of Demon it steps off its soapbox and avoids being preachy at the expense of story.

The travails Demon endures are breathtaking without devolving into maudlin trauma porn. In Kingsolver's hands Demon's life is one cliffhanger after another as she propels this Appalachian epic forward. It's a hell of a tale told well and worth telling.

Published in 1997, it still feels exactly like the middle-aged, affluent white guy hand-wringing story that comprises a good chunk of the classic Western canon. Hank Devereaux Jr is nearing 50 and as the interim chair of the West Central Pennsylvania State University he's facing funding cuts, potential layoffs, a mutinous department, a debt-ridden daughter, and the daily struggle to properly urinate. He's surrounded by bumbling, impotent men and nearly every woman is somehow an object of lust. Hank eventually finds himself choking an unlucky fowl by the neck on local television and threatens to kill a duck a day until his department receives funding. Which, along with some unresolved daddy issues, is the height of his turmoil. One that he can assuage with games of racquetball, or sitting on the quiet deck of his forested home with his ever patient and capable wife, considering his tenured position at the university. It sounds absolutely insufferable.

What can I say, I'm still charmed by the story. The expansive cast of characters is easy to laugh at but it's rarely done out of malice. Its slapstick set pieces are rendered with writerly flair that I can't help but admire. And the whole thing moves at a brisk pace throughout. Yes there are some clunkers that remind me it's a book of a past era, one that follows its own bookish logic to conclusion, but I'm in the hands of a polished storyteller with a sharp eye for character that's generated enough goodwill to carry me through.

It's a unique set up where we find Stephen Smith fresh out of prison and obsessed with uncovering the mystery of something that happened when he was still in high school. He starts recording his exploration and we are presented with a transcript of his thoughts as he starts peeling back the layers.

Is this the ravings of a deluded conspiracy nut seeing unlikely patterns everywhere or is Stephen onto something, uncovering ciphers, cracking codes and connecting the dots? As he reconnects with former classmates it seems like there might be something bigger happening just at the periphery of his understanding.

But it wasn't connecting with me. The further I got into the story the more convoluted the mystery became, it wasn't until the end that I realized I'd been reading it wrong all along but by then all my literary goodwill had been squandered. The problem certainly lies with me, but I was more relieved than satisfied when the book finally came round to its explanatory conclusion.

I just loved this chaotic mess of a book with its queer, goblin era protagonist. Greta is 45 and living in what she describes as the Fight Club house with comfy furniture. She's just an absolute wreck, a complete outsider in this trendy little hipster community where people were “better looking than average and dressed like boutique farmers.” Greta becomes a transcriptionist for the area's lone sex therapist — because of course. This leads to an aural obsession with one of the therapist's clients she names “Big Swiss” in her head.

When she meets “Big Swiss” in person, Greta finds out that Flavia (her real name) is a gynaecologist. Greta opens with “You must get this a lot, but would you mind taking a quick look at this thing on my labia?” Naturally she does not mention that she's been privy to Flavia's sexual therapy sessions. Did I mention Greta is just a huge chaos monkey? The two together make for the most unhinged lesbian relationship.

That chaos is hiding some serious trauma and this book comes with all the trigger warnings. While Big Swiss feels nothing but contempt for what she call “trauma people” and blithely ignores her past horrors, Greta is quietly writing long letters to hers.

This is going to be one of those novels that will do even better onscreen - this thing is made to be adapted and I can't wait to see what Jodie Comer does with the property.

Listen, the translation is kind of flat, the writing perfunctory, and the innumerable pages focusing on Luo Ji's waifu who literally gets fridged was so confusingly unnecessary.

But I like how Cixin Liu thinks. In a world where Trisolaran sophons can monitor all earthly communication, the United Nations Planetary Defence Council elects four Wallfacers who are given free rein and unlimited budget to carry out massive plans whose true intention must belie their surface appearance. It's a small wedge that humans seek to leverage as Trisolaran's thoughts are open to each other making deception an unknown concept. But the perfect, shut the front door, Wallfacer Luo Ji plan, is to cast a galactic spell on a distant planet and how it gets explained is exactly why I love Cixin Liu.

This is a modern day fairytale that sees biracial 12 year old Noah Gardener receive a letter with nothing inside but a single sheet of paper covered edge to edge in drawings of cats. It's addressed to Bird, a name he hasn't used in years. It's the first in a string of clues that will set him on the path to his mother who disappeared over 3 years ago. He'll be helped in no small part by a network of librarians as he navigates unfamiliar territory. Total bookish catnip.

His hero's journey is set in a near future where a nation reeling from an economic meltdown enacts something called PACT. Preserving American Culture and Traditions ensures God-fearing Americans are protected from subversive forces seeking to sow dissent and outrage. It can quickly remove children from harmful, unAmerican environments and “re-place” them with distant foster families. Turns out these “re-placements” tend to target People of Asian Origins (PAOs or Kung-PAOs as they are often referred - because of course) The thing is, this post-Crisis world is prey to rampant Sinophobia as China is blamed for manipulating markets, imposing tariffs and otherwise trying to bring a once powerful nation to its knees.

So another unevenly distributed dystopia set seconds into the future. A small minority vilified and targeted so that the rest of the nation can blithely go about their day to day. It happens all the time, but the beautiful thing about this book is how it shows that even within a long established, seemingly implacable system, the actions of a single individual can have impact.

Celeste Ng has been consistently good but this is easily my favorite of her books.

This is a fearless debut, defying all conventions. Written in the second person where the main characters remain unnamed, the prose follows its own looping rhythm, often repeating words across sentences. It is a celebration of black excellence as Nelson invokes Dizzee Rascal, Kendrick Lamar, Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, Zadie Smith, James Baldwin, Solange, Frank Ocean, Tribe Called Quest, and more. (Look for Caleb Azumah Nelson's Open Water Spotify playlist) This story, presented this way, would have never escaped the Iowa Writer's workshop.

It is a story on blackness and black masculinity that is vulnerable, emotional and remarkably chaste. It proclaims that you are more than the sum of your traumas but understands the consequences of being black. It is so intimate in its writing that I almost feel self-conscious, made a voyeur into a world I will never truly know, implicated by my own frame of reference and unconscious biases.

I loved this collection's ability to evoke a feeling; the sense of lost opportunity, the frisson of sexual danger, the questioning imbalance in the face of gaslighting, murderous ennui, and the impossibility of conjuring a specific flavour without a sense of taste. While many of the stories project into a technological future, several tackled appearance vs reality in our current social media age.

All of it just there, tucked inside a slightly skewed world that never overstays its welcome.

Mallory Viridian is a magnet for murder - humans tend to die around her. So in a post-first-contact world it seems a sentient space station, host to a remarkable array of alien lifeforms that are decidedly not human, might be a great place to hide out. And it is until she gets wind of an Earth shuttle on its way to the station - which arrives with predictably turbulent results.

Military intrigue, pharmaceutical weapons, estranged families, rock aliens, super smart wasp collectives, vigilante brides, ADHD military contractors, and a whole lot more. Like a whole lot - the story goes off in multiple directions, with flashbacks, overlapping plots, and countless side characters. Shooting for madcap sci-fi but ending up unnecessarily chaotic with a story that barely manages to resolve itself. Ability overwhelmed by ambition but enjoyed the attempt.