Kate Elliott | Amanda Haimoto Rudd

While I’ve been busy with NaNoWriMo, it has come to my attention that November is also novella reading month: “Novellavember.” The wonderful and awesome bookseller, Kel, who is a bit Twitter-famous and can be found at the handle @panediting, has put a lot of work into promoting a bunch of novellas in the bookstore where she works, and sharing photos.

I do not currently have a bookstore, but I thought I could share some novella suggestions of my own. A few are ones I have mentioned on the blog before, and some are new.

So! Novellas to read for Novellavember:

Alix E. Harrow’s fractured fairy tale duology, A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended: these two novellas feature main character Zinnia Gray, a folklore major who is dying from a progressive disease, who comes to discover she is a variation on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale motif when she accidentally ends up in an alternate dimension with another Sleeping Beauty. In the second book, having survived the first incident, Zinnia begins trekking through fairy tales versions helping the characters fix their lives and save their happy endings until she is caught by the Evil Queen of one version of Snow White and must figure out how to save herself. Alix Harrow described these books as Into the SpiderVerse for fairy tale princesses, and that is a very accurate description. These books are an absolute delight, filled with sarcasm, sapphic women, and incisive commentary on the plight of women in fairy tales.

Lina Rather’s “nuns in space!” duology: Sisters of the Vast Black, and Sisters of the Forsaken Stars: I wrote a full review for the first novella in this duology back when it came out, which can be found here. These are slim, tightly-plotted, space operas in miniature, about nuns of the Order of Saint Rita, traveling around in their sentient spaceship saving lives and accidentally starting revolutions. These nuns are smart and complex, and their group includes a former war criminal, a lesbian engineer, and a lot of progressive liberals. The bits about the sentient spaceship are especially fascinating, and the political aspects are tense and horrifying. As a lapsed Catholic, whose patron saint is St. Rita, and loves space opera, these books were pretty much made for me. I adore them both!

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey: for something completely different, try this novella set in a dystopian America where technology has been outlawed or destroyed and society has reverted to a “wild west” style of living. To keep the isolated masses entertained and educated on government-controlled and highly censored reading materials, women librarians travel in horse-drawn carriages to various small towns in the west. Secretly-gay Esther stows away on such a carriage to escape her father when her lover is discovered and hanged. Once aboard, the other librarians train her, and reveal that they are not as “upright” and “government controlled” as the public might believe. This book was a joy! As one might guess, it is filled with gay and nonbinary women librarians who are secretly part of a rebellion against the oppressive government. And the righteous anger in every word is incendiary.

Servant Mage by Kate Elliott: This book is not really like Upright Women Wanted at all, but I think it has a similar tone/feel to it in that righteous anger drips from every word, and I love that about it. This novella is set in a world where magic exists, but in the years since an uprising destroyed the monarchist government, those who possess magic (once considered special and noble) are now taken from their families and made into slaves so that their magic may properly benefit all of society. Fellian is one such mage, however she is saved from her servitude by a group of monarchist rebels who need her magical abilities to help their cause. As Fellian works with this group, led by an exiled noble, she slowly realizes that the monarchists aren’t actually any better than the oppressive government they are fighting to overthrow. Kate Elliott is a master of the craft (see my review of her chonky space opera, Unconquerable Sun), and she proves to be as amazing in this short format as she is in her very expansive novels. The ending of this book is earned by every step of the narrative, and it is SO SATISFYING.

Trafik by Rikki Ducornet: Ok, this last one (for now) is a bit of a departure from the rest. It’s weird. If you don’t generally like more experimental literary fiction forms, you’re probably safe to skip this one. BUT if you are willing to go off the beaten path a bit, I highly recommend this one. For those not familiar with Rikki Ducornet, she is an avant-garde writer/poet, known for writing some very strange, dreamlike prose. One of her full novels, The Jade Cabinet, is a favorite of mine, and I’ve written a couple academic papers on it. Trafik is her most recent work (marketed as a novel, but as a teeny little book of about 120 pages, it’s definitely more in the novella category. It’s science fiction, of a sort, following a character named Quiver, a “mostly human” astronaut, and her neurotic robot Mic. When they accidentally destroy their cargo, they fear punishment from their employers and instead go rogue, making a run for the strange planet called Trafik. As I said, this is a WEIRD book, but it is weird in the best way possible – quirky, funny, hallucinatory. It functions as a nice, bite-sized introduction to Ducornet and her work.

Well, those should keep you busy for a bit at least! (And I just now noticed they are all women authors, so that’s fun). Time for me to dash back off to my Nano project (which is going pretty well for once… *knock on wood*). Catch you all later!

Book: Unconquerable Sun
Author: Kate Elliott
Release Date: 7 July 2020
Source: ARC received through employer
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I had meant to have this review up like two weeks ago, but life being life, things got in the way. So, my review for Unconquerable Sun comes out just in time for the official release. This book is available as of today! Read the review, and then go and buy it!

Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott (perhaps best known for her YA series Court of Fives), is a massive space opera played out on an epic intergalactic scale. In this intricately-plotted narrative, ambitious Princess Sun of the Chaonian Republic, heir to the throne of a great galactic empire, must fight to survive the ire of her temperamental mother, the secrets of her foreign consort father, and the political machinations of forces within the empire who wish to remove her as heir to the throne, all while in the midst of a long-standing war with a rival galactic empire.

The Chaonian Republic has long been at war with the Phene Empire for control of vast swaths of the galaxy, where FTL intergalactic travel is made possible by an ancient system of “Beacons” built by a long-dead civilization. Now, as the efforts of Princess Sun have given Chaonia a great victory in the war, and the Phene Empire readies for a massive counter-assault, Sun must deal with an attack from within her own ranks. Her mother, Queen-Marshal Eirene, is temperamental, volatile, suspicious, and under constant critique for choosing Sun’s father (a Royal of an enemy government) as one of her consorts, and therefore does not trust her own daughter. On top of that, someone among the Noble families is attempting to either kill or discredit Sun and the retinue of Companions she keeps by her side. Along the way, Sun allies herself with a diverse array of characters – including her secret lover, an unstable prisoner of war, a woman who may or may not be a spy, and the winner of a pop media Idol contest. Each of these allies, and many more besides, have secrets and goals and ambitions of their own. It is anyone’s guess who can be trusted, and who will betray the princess.

Kate Elliott is, of course, a highly respected writer of both adult and YA sci-fi/fantasy, and this novel may be her best yet. The world (or galaxy) building is detailed and immense. Because of this, the first fifty pages or so are dense and a bit difficult to push through. Elliott does not shy away from throwing a vast amount of information, terminology, slang, and names at the reader, and leaves it up to you to keep track of it all and connect the necessary dots. I personally have no problem with this kind of “throw them into the deep end and see if they can swim” kind of writing, but some might have difficulty with it. I promise, however, that the effort is rewarded by a intricate plot full of political intrigue and fast-paced space battles, which pulls much of its inspiration from the stories of Alexander the Great (indeed, one of the taglines for the marketing of the book is that it is a “genderbent Alexander the Great on an interstellar scale”).

In addition, many of the cultural details of the worlds and peoples in this novel are pulled from a variety of cultures such as ancient Greek and Roman, a few different Asian religions, and even a bit of the Romani — all mixed, combined, and riffed-off-of in unexpected ways. Perhaps my favorite aspect, however, is that the characters feature a diverse range of ethnicities, sexualities, and complex beliefs/motives. I think perhaps a good ⅔ of the characters are queer of some variety or another, and there are black, brown, and “Asian” people all over the place.

This novel is an unapologetic space opera (I saw someone calling it Space Fantasy, which I object to. Space Opera is its own genre and it’s not “fantasy” at all, even if some of the “science” is soft and unexplained). It is a grand adventure, political intrigue, and military scifi, wrapped in a space opera on an immense scale that rivals the works of James S.A. Corey, Kameron Hurley, and Lois Bujold McMaster.

I might be my favorite read of the year so far, and I absolutely cannot wait for the next one!

As I said at the beginning, this book was released today, so it is available everywhere books are sold! You can find it at any of these links (or at your local bookstore, of course – SHOP INDIE!):

Also! Author Kate Elliott will be in conversation with N.K. Jemisin about the book tonight at 7pm Pacific, through the efforts of Mysterious Galaxy Books. (I will, of course, be attending!)