Apparently this is “a cozy sci-fi novella” about “a crew of abandoned food service bots that take over a ghost kitchen in late 22nd-century San FranciApparently this is “a cozy sci-fi novella” about “a crew of abandoned food service bots that take over a ghost kitchen in late 22nd-century San Francisco,” and I'm here for it!...more
NEW DAVID EDISON NEW DAVID EDISON NEW DAVID EDISON I AM SHRIEKING!!!
Review
HIGHLIGHTS ~the sky is broken ~the metal people broke it ~sci fi masquerading aNEW DAVID EDISON NEW DAVID EDISON NEW DAVID EDISON I AM SHRIEKING!!!
Review
HIGHLIGHTS ~the sky is broken ~the metal people broke it ~sci fi masquerading as fantasy ~I really wish this had been a different book
Sandymancer is one of those books where you watch the remaining page count get smaller and smaller, with a sinking certainty that there isn’t enough room left for everything that needs dealing with to get dealt with.
And that sinking feeling is completely correct.
As far as I can tell, everything about Sandymancer promised it was a standalone. It’s not. It’s the start of a series – or at least, it had better be, because Sandymancer is all set-up with no pay-off, and the book ends with almost every thread we started with still left hanging.
And the thing is, if it had been presented to me as the start of a series, I would have gone in with completely different expectations. My entire reading experience would have been very different. There are things that are huge no-nos for a standalone that are acceptable, or even great, in a series-opener…and because I thought this was a standalone, they landed wrong for me. Sandymancer didn’t leave me excited to see what happens next; it left me frustrated as hell with all my unanswered questions, and a pretty pathetic milk-sop of an ending.
To be honest, it worries me GREATLY that I can find no mention online of Sandymancer being a series, of there being a sequel planned. Because you know how there are books that could stand alone just fine, but also leave room for the author to come back and write a sequel if they want and are able to? Sandymancer is not that book. Sandymancer does not stand alone in any way, shape or form. It is incomplete.
I have not encountered this particular kind of set-up many times, but it’s familiar enough: a post-apocalyptic world that looks back on the civilisation before the Fall/Rending/insert-your-term-of-choice here as mythically perfect. When inhabitants of this world encounter workings of the ancients, they call them magic, but they’re not magic, just very advanced science. This is Caralee’s world, and it is dry and dusty and pretty dead, because eons before the Son of the Vine ruined it all.
And then Caralee meets the Son of the Vine. Who is still around – in a manner of speaking. And who, inscrutably, decides to try teaching Caralee rather than killing her with a wave of his hand, as he could absolutely do. She will accompany him on his mission to do…things.
Thus begins a good long trek across a fairly dead landscape, where we hear about various critters and monsters but don’t see them, encounter several Rather Alarming mysteries that do not get resolved, and endure a whole lot of telling-not-showing. Often literally, since the Son is given to lecturing.
There’s probably a name for stories that are basically just people travelling from point A to B to C – where the moving is the only real plot – and I don’t know what it is, but you can slap that label on Sandymancer. There are a few tiny sub-plots that delight – like the carpet, and the memory-songs, and I thought Caralee drawing everything she thinks into her miraculous-to-her notebook was quite sweet. But mostly, things are encountered, and then the characters move on, without anything really happening. The sky is broken! There are metal people! The world-sustaining Vine is dead! All of that is touched on, and then the narrative sort of…wanders off from the point. We don’t get to sink our teeth into any of the potentially Very Interesting bits, and it’s maddening.
The part of the book I adored, though, were those chapters written from the Son’s point of view, where he’s looking back on the world he knew and the events that led up to him doing what he did. Those were powerful, full of intrigue and emotion and magic (if you can make plants grow out of your head, dude, I’m calling it magic), with the hints of a truly glorious, strange, and wonderful world sketched in around the edges. I wanted more of that so bad. To the point where I pretty quickly came to resent the main story, because the main story was one I didn’t care about; I wanted the Son’s story, and specifically the world he grew up in. I think, for Sandymancer, keeping Caralee as the main character and making the Son’s chapters few and short was the right choice – but I wish we hadn’t had Sandymancer at all, but a different book entirely, one set in that past. That I would have been glued to.
Caralee…there’s a little bit of comedy – or something, comedy doesn’t seem like the right word, but I don’t know what else to call it – in how limited Caralee’s understanding of things like biology and physics are, at the very beginning of the book. But that effect – comedic, or charming, or whatever it is – runs out fast, and then it just becomes kind of tiring. I liked Caralee as a character a lot – I loved how determined she was, and how hungry for knowledge, and how few fucks she had to give for anyone trying to scare her or make her feel small. But the smallness of the story is made even smaller through her perspective on it, and not in an interesting Unreliable Narrator kind of way.
The Son was my favourite kind of villain, right up until he wasn’t. Seriously, the whole Thing of the ending was so pastel and perfect and Friendship Is Magic that I just Cannot, okay? I Cannot.
I will not.
Final point: I recognise that I am a prude, and I want my SFF to be pretty. I’m shallow like that. But what is the obsession with faeces here??? It’s one thing to replace ‘shit’ with ‘scat’ as a curseword; that’s fine, whatever. But it’s everywhere – as a curse, it feels like it’s every third word out of Caralee’s mouth, and hi, her laughing while the giant bugs who eat scat are ‘licking’ all over her face is disgusting. Way, WAY too much of that, did not need it, did not want it, do not care if you call me a prude for it. Just: nope. Stop. Why???
I adored Edison’s debut, The Waking Engine, and I will pounce on future works of his – but probably not any sequels to Sandymancer, if we do in fact get any. There were so many great individual bits and pieces here, but they were lost and overwhelmed by what I can only call the vagueness of the story. It fails as a standalone, and honestly, it doesn’t impress as a series-opener either.
Merged review:
NEW DAVID EDISON NEW DAVID EDISON NEW DAVID EDISON I AM SHRIEKING!!!
Review
HIGHLIGHTS ~the sky is broken ~the metal people broke it ~sci fi masquerading as fantasy ~I really wish this had been a different book
Sandymancer is one of those books where you watch the remaining page count get smaller and smaller, with a sinking certainty that there isn’t enough room left for everything that needs dealing with to get dealt with.
And that sinking feeling is completely correct.
As far as I can tell, everything about Sandymancer promised it was a standalone. It’s not. It’s the start of a series – or at least, it had better be, because Sandymancer is all set-up with no pay-off, and the book ends with almost every thread we started with still left hanging.
And the thing is, if it had been presented to me as the start of a series, I would have gone in with completely different expectations. My entire reading experience would have been very different. There are things that are huge no-nos for a standalone that are acceptable, or even great, in a series-opener…and because I thought this was a standalone, they landed wrong for me. Sandymancer didn’t leave me excited to see what happens next; it left me frustrated as hell with all my unanswered questions, and a pretty pathetic milk-sop of an ending.
To be honest, it worries me GREATLY that I can find no mention online of Sandymancer being a series, of there being a sequel planned. Because you know how there are books that could stand alone just fine, but also leave room for the author to come back and write a sequel if they want and are able to? Sandymancer is not that book. Sandymancer does not stand alone in any way, shape or form. It is incomplete.
I have not encountered this particular kind of set-up many times, but it’s familiar enough: a post-apocalyptic world that looks back on the civilisation before the Fall/Rending/insert-your-term-of-choice here as mythically perfect. When inhabitants of this world encounter workings of the ancients, they call them magic, but they’re not magic, just very advanced science. This is Caralee’s world, and it is dry and dusty and pretty dead, because eons before the Son of the Vine ruined it all.
And then Caralee meets the Son of the Vine. Who is still around – in a manner of speaking. And who, inscrutably, decides to try teaching Caralee rather than killing her with a wave of his hand, as he could absolutely do. She will accompany him on his mission to do…things.
Thus begins a good long trek across a fairly dead landscape, where we hear about various critters and monsters but don’t see them, encounter several Rather Alarming mysteries that do not get resolved, and endure a whole lot of telling-not-showing. Often literally, since the Son is given to lecturing.
There’s probably a name for stories that are basically just people travelling from point A to B to C – where the moving is the only real plot – and I don’t know what it is, but you can slap that label on Sandymancer. There are a few tiny sub-plots that delight – like the carpet, and the memory-songs, and I thought Caralee drawing everything she thinks into her miraculous-to-her notebook was quite sweet. But mostly, things are encountered, and then the characters move on, without anything really happening. The sky is broken! There are metal people! The world-sustaining Vine is dead! All of that is touched on, and then the narrative sort of…wanders off from the point. We don’t get to sink our teeth into any of the potentially Very Interesting bits, and it’s maddening.
The part of the book I adored, though, were those chapters written from the Son’s point of view, where he’s looking back on the world he knew and the events that led up to him doing what he did. Those were powerful, full of intrigue and emotion and magic (if you can make plants grow out of your head, dude, I’m calling it magic), with the hints of a truly glorious, strange, and wonderful world sketched in around the edges. I wanted more of that so bad. To the point where I pretty quickly came to resent the main story, because the main story was one I didn’t care about; I wanted the Son’s story, and specifically the world he grew up in. I think, for Sandymancer, keeping Caralee as the main character and making the Son’s chapters few and short was the right choice – but I wish we hadn’t had Sandymancer at all, but a different book entirely, one set in that past. That I would have been glued to.
Caralee…there’s a little bit of comedy – or something, comedy doesn’t seem like the right word, but I don’t know what else to call it – in how limited Caralee’s understanding of things like biology and physics are, at the very beginning of the book. But that effect – comedic, or charming, or whatever it is – runs out fast, and then it just becomes kind of tiring. I liked Caralee as a character a lot – I loved how determined she was, and how hungry for knowledge, and how few fucks she had to give for anyone trying to scare her or make her feel small. But the smallness of the story is made even smaller through her perspective on it, and not in an interesting Unreliable Narrator kind of way.
The Son was my favourite kind of villain, right up until he wasn’t. Seriously, the whole Thing of the ending was so pastel and perfect and Friendship Is Magic that I just Cannot, okay? I Cannot.
I will not.
Final point: I recognise that I am a prude, and I want my SFF to be pretty. I’m shallow like that. But what is the obsession with faeces here??? It’s one thing to replace ‘shit’ with ‘scat’ as a curseword; that’s fine, whatever. But it’s everywhere – as a curse, it feels like it’s every third word out of Caralee’s mouth, and hi, her laughing while the giant bugs who eat scat are ‘licking’ all over her face is disgusting. Way, WAY too much of that, did not need it, did not want it, do not care if you call me a prude for it. Just: nope. Stop. Why???
I adored Edison’s debut, The Waking Engine, and I will pounce on future works of his – but probably not any sequels to Sandymancer, if we do in fact get any. There were so many great individual bits and pieces here, but they were lost and overwhelmed by what I can only call the vagueness of the story. It fails as a standalone, and honestly, it doesn’t impress as a series-opener either....more
Well THAT was a freaking masterpiece. So worth waiting for!
Rtc!
I received this book for free from the author via BookSirens in exchange for an honest Well THAT was a freaking masterpiece. So worth waiting for!
Rtc!
I received this book for free from the author via BookSirens in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
HIGHLIGHTS ~finally, flying cars! ~fire powers are more socially acceptable than empathy ~sending flowers is a rich asshole move ~watches that keep secrets as well as time ~never underestimate a paranoid journalist
There are some books that need to be self-published, because traditional publishing just wouldn’t know what to do with them; Nora Sakavic’s All For the Game series, pretty much everything by Andrea K Höst, The Creature Court trilogy by Tansy Rayner Roberts – I could go on. (And on, and on.) Books that are boundary-pushing, that can’t be neatly pigeon-holed, that are so wildly original or subversive or strange – or all three! – that they terrify publicity and marketing teams.
Earthflown is the newest addition to that illustrious company.
That being said, it’s not exactly what it claims to be on the tin. A Potable Study of Love and Collusion implies a lot more focus on economic inequality and a (the?) water crisis than we actually got. Although Earthflown is ostensibly about the behind-doors-backstabbing of the Arden family working to keep their exclusive control of Britain’s potable water, that part of the story is very much in the backseat. I found it very hard to keep track of the politics involved and wasn’t always clear on who was voting for what – I think there were several parliamentary votes about the water issue? but maybe also some other stuff? – or really, what the stakes were for the Ardens: they currently produce and control CM15, which makes water potable, but there’s a push to move the country to a new water-cleansing technology, and sometimes they seemed to be trying to block that, while at others hinting that they wanted the contract for building and installing the new tech? All of which is tied up with the polite feud they have with another branch of the family tree? But most of that was all in the background, which made it difficult to be emotionally invested in (or keep track of).
But that doesn’t matter in the slightest, because where Earthflown shines is in its beautifully flawed, grey-shaded characters and their interactions with each other, the way their lives intersected and overlapped. The story circles around Javier – an Arden – and Ethan, who, in a world where superpowers exist, is a priceless healer; around them are Rina, Javier’s firebending twin who is toxic at best and abusive at worst; Vegas, Ethan’s best friend and roommate; Oliver, Vegas’ on-again, off-again boyfriend and intrepid gumshoe journalist; and far off to the sidelines, poor Nick, a detective constantly dragging Oliver out of trouble by the scruff of his neck and currently under the impression he and Ethan are in a relationship. This misapprehension is entirely Ethan’s fault, and one of several ways in which we’re made very clear on the fact that Ethan is not exactly a perfect person. He can, in fact, be a bit of a dick. Though he cares very much about Vegas – their dynamic is almost sibling-like – he’s not great at remembering to care about other people as people.
So it’s kind of ironic, and definitely hilarious, that he falls very hard for an empath, aka Javier, who has spent his life keeping his superpower a secret. His immediate family know, and one or two family friends, but in a world with a lot of paranoia over and prejudice towards empaths, you can’t really blame him for keeping it on the down-low.
The surprise is that he’s also a sweetheart, which feels a bit like a miracle given a) his family as a whole and b) the awful, and awfully normalised, way his twin treats him. Seriously, it’s enough to make your skin crawl.
Corinna had been looking forward to this murder for weeks – she wasn’t there for the last one.
ENOUGH SAID.
Wren’s storytelling is a perfect balance of emotion and action, the prose smooth and incredibly moreish; before you can blink, you’re sucked in, and it’s an absolutely delicious ride. I couldn’t put Earthflown down for the two days it took me to devour it whole; I’m stunned and delighted by how well Wren keeps things moving while simultaneously doling out a whole heap of Feels and giggles. This isn’t a light-hearted book, but prepare yourself for giggle-snorts nonetheless, because there’s a bright thread of comedic moments woven through the cli fi-thriller-noir thing Wren has going on.
*I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the c*I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.*
Welp, talk about a major disappointment. I was so excited for ‘Desi-dominant far-future anti-colonial foodie sci-fi’, but it was kind of like running smack into a wall. Face-first.
The worldbuilding…is a mess. Superficially, it’s very, very cool – humanity has spread throughout the galaxy, we’ve encountered aliens, and white people are DEFINITELY not in charge any more (about time). The centre of human civilisation – no longer Earth – is heavily socialist, extremely serious about protecting the environment, and populated by cities of constantly-shifting buildings. Massively intriguing!
But the ‘socialism’ is functionally indistinguishable from modern capitalism – supposedly no one owns property and the city assigns objects and possessions to whoever needs them, but there are people decked in jewels (who needs jewels???) and working in corporations that definitely don’t seem socialist in the slightest. Everyone on this planet – I kid you not – has one of nine names, which besides being objectively ridiculous and boring also makes it VERY hard to keep track of who’s who. And the cities of moving buildings are very cool, but how exactly people get around when maps etc are useless is hand-waved completely, and why are all the buildings in constant motion if they’re supposedly reacting to the needs of citizens? I don’t need my apartment to get bigger or smaller or change shape from minute to minute, only if something out of the ordinary happens. ??? Worst of all, Interstellar MegaChef is supposed to be two thousand years in the future, and, just – no. Not even a little. A few hundred years, maybe, but two thousand? I don’t think Lakshminarayan really thought about how much change occurs in two thousand years – look at how much the world has changed in just the last century! – because it’s definitely not reflected in the civilisation/s she’s created. You or I, fellow reader, could step onto planet Primus and get along just fine, if someone gave us a translator box – nothing about the culture is significantly different to the modern West at all.
Like… If you are going to write far-future fiction, can you PLEASE not do this? Far-future settings should be WEIRD. Or at least radically different to the world we know today. Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum does this incredibly well; Interstellar MegaChef really Does Not.
(And why, in two thousand years, is Earth still climate-destroyed? Did it get fixed but then wrecked again? We have the tech to terraform planets but not fix our own? What??? And if that’s the case, how is anyone still living on Earth at all?)
Plus, the aliens don’t feel like aliens. They read as humans in pretty costumes. That’s definitely a pet peeve of mine and I’m so sick of it. Don’t bring aliens into it unless they’re going to be alien, ffs! I get that inventing a new sapient species, one that doesn’t think like us because why would they, is very hard – that’s fine! Just don’t do it, then! No one said you had to!
Gah.
What’s going to be more important to most readers (I know most people aren’t as obsessed/nit-picky about worldbuilding as moi) is that none of the characters are very interesting – they’re all morally grey and unlikeable, but not in ways that make you intrigued – and this is really not a foodie book. The cooking competition is over almost before it starts; our chef character doesn’t even make it to the second episode, and there’s no lavish, delicious descriptions of the meals or food-prep at all. And despite the cheerful pink cover and too many people comping this book to the Great British Bake-Off, Interstellar MegaChef is really grim, actually – there are no fluffy, feel-good vibes here, which would be fine if this book had just been marketed more accurately instead of, you know, sending me in with completely wrong expectations.
When are publicity teams going to learn that that’s a fast way to make us hate a book? Sure, you made me buy it, but I’m going to tell all my friends and anyone who reads my blog that the marketing is a lie, so overall, I’m pretty sure this tactic is, in technical terms, fucking stupid actually.
The prose is very bland – some readers are going to enjoy it just fine, and I do think it’s very…accessibly written? But good luck figuring out how to picture…pretty much anything at all. There’s virtually no description – not even visuals, never mind things like taste and so on.
Is it anti-colonialist? Yep! Very, very heavy-handedly, I thought, but possibly it gets better with that later in the book. The first 20% was just embarrassing, honestly, like it needed to be SO obvious because what if readers didn’t get the message???
So yeah. This was a hard fail for me, but. If you go in KNOWING that it’s not a foodie book, nor a feel-good book – and if you don’t care about the worldbuilding – then I think it’s possible to enjoy this. (Lots of other early readers have!) But it’s an absolute NO THANK YOU from me....more
Is it fair to call a book boring because you thought it was going to be something it isn’t? Can I call this a bad book when I have a sneaking suspicioIs it fair to call a book boring because you thought it was going to be something it isn’t? Can I call this a bad book when I have a sneaking suspicion that I Just Don’t Get It?
I think I can.
As a science fiction novel, this is fucking terrible. It’s slow and dreary and the scifi elements are relegated to the background when they appear at all – and they often don’t; every ‘chapter’ is functionally a standalone short story, featuring different versions of the same character/s, and the majority of them contain no scifi stuff at all, nor do they explore or play with scifi themes and tropes. There are so many ways to play with gender and sexuality in SFF – The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum comes immediately to mind – and none of that is happening here. The blurb is phrased in such a way that I took it to mean we were going to be following one character moving through different universes, something in a similar vein to Nathan Tavares’ Fractured Infinity. That is not what this is! We, the reader, are taking peeks at different realities, at different versions of Raffi in different timelines, but they are all entirely separate; this isn’t a scifi adventure, it’s a collection of short stories about the same characters. Instead of a queer physicist hopping from world to world, we’re reading about professors who are unhappy in their academic success, kids who bow under to peer-pressure, women too cowardly to confess their true feelings to a partner; blah, blah, blah. It’s the kind of Lit Fic nonsense we mock Lit Fic for being, for crying out loud; if it were entertaining, I might even consider whether North intended this book as some kind of satire or spoof on that genre. But I think not: it takes itself too seriously, and is just so mind-numbingly boring, to be (successfully) doing something sneaky and clever.
As a literary fiction novel… Look, I’m not qualified to make that judgement. I hate Literary Fiction with a passion and think it’s all pretentious drivel by default. It is genuinely possible that I Just Don’t Get what North was doing here. But speaking as a nonbinary person, I didn’t see anything being said about gender or sexuality at all, never mind something smart or interesting being said, never mind it being done well or poorly. In some of the vignettes the main character was queer, or sapphic, or nonbinary, and in some they weren’t, or at least did not appear to be: being married to a man doesn’t make a woman straight, of course, but if that’s all I see in that particular vignette, I have nothing else to go on. Using she/her pronouns (as the MC does for at least the first half of the book) doesn’t make you a woman, for that matter – I use she/her pronouns, and am decidedly not a girl – but when a character uses she/her and spends her time obsessing over sandcastles and Shakespeare’s Ophelia, I have no evidence suggesting she’s not cis. It sucks that our society defaults to cishet, that I need evidence of obvious queerness to recognise a character as queer, but the fact is that I do. It’s not like that in real life – in real life, you can call yourself queer and I need no more evidence than that to consider you queer. But when we’re talking about a fictional character, I need to be shown, and in many of the chapters I read, I was not.
On the other hand, sometimes we did get that; in several chapters/universes Raffi is a woman attracted to women, or men and women; sometimes Raffi is nonbinary. But that in and of itself isn’t saying anything. So, not all versions of us across the multiverse will have the same sexuality and/or gender identity: I mean, le duh??? Is that the Big Deal that’s supposed to be blowing my mind? I took that as read long before I even heard of this book. Hells, I would argue that Orphan Black did a better job of showing how wildly different different versions of us could potentially be – including Tony, the trans clone we barely met, who I wish we’d seen more of – and that all took place in one universe!
Insert me banging my head against the desk here.
Push comes to shove, In Universe is a series of vignettes about a person who has depression of varying levels in a lot of the various versions of their life, a person who is not interesting and does nothing interesting, who is sometimes self-destructive in eye-rollingly obvious, even clichéd, ways. I skipped ahead to part 3 and that was no more promising than the first half of the book. It’s mundane and dull and banal, and yes all those words mean the same thing but I had to read dozens of boring versions of the same person’s boring life so you can deal with three synonyms.
Please let me go back to the sci fi that goes pew pew, thanks....more
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