chrisbiss's reviews
527 reviews

 Of all the books on the Ursula K Le Guin prize shortlist, this was the only one I wasn't able to easily source a copy of. All but one of the others are available as ebooks, and The Skin and its Girl - which has no digital edition in the UK - is readily available in bookshops. *Sift*, on the other hand, is very hard to get hold of here, and I went to great lengths to try and find a US-based store that would ship it to the UK without my needing to take out mortgage to make it happen. I'm glad that I went to the effort, though, because this is great.

The book arrived at my house today and I honestly wasn't expecting to read it so soon, especially as I'm still partway through last year's Booker Prize winner Prophet Song. But the physical book is a real thing of beauty and once I realised it's a novella and barely 100 pages long, I decided to sit down with it this afternoon.

Sift will inevitably be compared to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and it's an apt comparison in a lot of ways. Both deal with a pair of mostly-nameless characters travelling across a hostile, ravaged world in search of a new beginning. But where *The Road* is almost unrelentingly bleak, giving us only a glimmer of hope at the end that we fear might be snuffed out at any moment. Here the hope is more substantial, brought to us through the human connections that we cling to and nurture even through catastrophe.

Hattman's writing is spare and haunting, at times feeling like prose poetry. The story is painted in brief vignettes that slowly deliver us a fragmented mosaic of meaning to piece together. Though the subject matter is vastly different there's an ethereal, fragmented, dreamlike quality to the prose that reminded me in places of Jenny Offill's Weather. This is a really beautiful piece of work, and it's going to stick with me for a long time. 

My brain does this very weird thing where the more people tell me to do something, the less I want to do it. That extends to all parts of my life, and it also includes book and film recommendations. The more I hear about how good something is, no matter how laser-targeted at my tastes it may be, the less I want to know about it. *In Ascension* has been on my reading list since the beginning of the year, as I was aiming to read all of last year's Booker Prize Longlist, and I've been hearing nothing but good things about it for months. And the more I heard about it, the more it slipped down the list.

But the new Booker longlist is going to be announced in the next few days, and *In Ascension* just won the Arthur C Clarke Prize, so I figured I should probably get around to finally reading it. And I'm very glad I did.

If you reduce it purely to elements of plot, *In Ascension* isn't particularly original. As I was reading it I was drawing comparisons with *Annihilation* and *Pushing Ice*, and at the end I was struck by some similarities with *Interstellar*. But what makes this work where *Interstellar* failed, and what makes me love it rather than thinking that it's just derivative, is how beautifully MacInnes captures his people and how willing he is to take his time to immerse us in his world and to build to the ending.

The story of *In Ascension* takes place over years, and MacInnes is in absolutely no rush to get to where he's going. It definitely falls on the litfic end of the literary SF spectrum and that's especially apparent in the opening section. I know a few people who have bounced off this book in the first few chapters because they wanted SF and the first 20% of the novel is absolutely not SF. But I loved it, and it's critical to lend weight to the rest of the book.

All the way through the novel we're shown echoes of things that have come before. Leigh thinks at great length about the records of humanity sent out into space aboard *Voyager* and how we eventually lost contact with it; later, she sends her own records back and forth to her mother before losing contact. Early on we see Leigh join the crew of a deep ocean research vessel using unmanned craft to explore a newly discovered trench in the sea floor. We're told that unmanned craft are better suited for this purpose because people are soft and protecting them is too difficult, too expensive. Later, as Leigh and her new crew prepare to leave Earth, we learn that they chose a manned mission over unmanned ships because "Sentient flesh hitting the coordinates - that's why we were here, and why this wasn't a more elegant and streamlined uncrewed craft". And the second we're told this we remember the dread of the crushing ocean, the way the unmanned craft crumbled under the weight of the depths, and suddenly the whole mission seems that little bit more dangerous.

Speaking of that early section out in the depths of the Atlantic, I was particularly impressed with how real the whole expedition felt. One of my favourite books this year was Mensun Bound's 'The Ship Beneath The Ice;, which details the two expeditions to recover the wreck of Shackleton's *Endurance* from beneath the ice of Antarctica. Parts of that book are more viscerally terrifying than any horror novel I've ever read, and I learned much more about the challenges of deep sea salvage than I'd ever thought to consider. I have no idea if MacInnes has experience in this field or not, but the early sections dealing with the expedition into the depths of the Atlantic filled me with that same sense of claustrophobic dread as Bound's book. I'm not in any way a scientist and when I read SF I generally have no idea if the technology I'm reading about is even remotely accurate or possible, but knowing that the oceanic section was grounded in reality really sold me on the accuracy of everything else that follows in the book.

Frankly, I'm annoyed that I waited so long to read this. I fully understand how it ended up on the Booker longlist and though I've only read one of the other novels on the Clarke shortlist, I think this is very much deserving of all the accolades it's received. Definitely one of my favourites this year.

 A couple of years ago I got deep into Booktok, and I read a lot of “dark academia” novels that became popular on that platform. I realised quite quickly that I wasn’t really enjoying many of the books I was being recommended, and I also stopped using TikTok quite so much, and so I haven’t really engaged with that platform in a while. Right as I was disconnecting from those spaces R.F. Kuang’s Babel, or the Necessity of Violence was becoming popular and I sort of dismissed it as yet another BookTok trend that I wasn’t particularly interested in. Since then, though, people I know have told me that they think I’d enjoy it, and reading The Skin and Its Girl recently, which references the tower of Babel quite regularly, brought it back into the forefront of my mind. I figured it was time to finally sit down with it and see what all the fuss is about.

Babel opens with an author’s note titled “Author’s Note on Her Representations of Historical England, and of the University of Oxford in Particular”, in which Kuang speaks directly to people who would approach the book in bad faith or quibble about the ‘historical accuracy’ in this fantasy novel. It opens with the following passage:

Kuang follows this by talking about some of the changes she has made to the real Oxford in her presentation of it in the novel, as well as by citing several sources. She ends by telling us that if we “find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself that this is a work of fiction”.

My immediate reaction to this introduction was that it felt very strange and overly defensive in a sort of hostile way. As someone who’s spent many, many years dealing with Twitter users who think they know better than everyone around them about literally every topic, it read like it as written by someone who has also spent far too much time on social media and has been trained to account for bad faith reads every time they open their mouths. My longer-term reaction, somewhat perversely, was that going into the book with this assumption of bad faith actually made me want to read it more critically than I might otherwise have done. And that’s a shame, because largely I really enjoyed Babel and that experience was slightly marred by my sudden urge to check facts and to wonder whether this thing was accurate or not. I don’t think I would have had that experience had I not first read the author’s introduction, and I honestly wish I’d skipped it on my initial read.

My main complaint about Babel is that I don’t think it goes far enough. In the two years since it was published it’s garnered a lot of attention online from (mostly) white people who seem upset about the way it portrays the colonial attitudes of the British empire. Looking at the one-star reviews of this book on Goodreads is to look into a world where people are deeply, personally offended by white English people being the villains of a novel about the British empire and the beginnings of the Opium Wars. And yet when I actually read the book I found that it’s not particularly inflammatory at all. The white English people who serve as the villains aren’t portrayed particularly unfairly, and they’re not cartoon villains. If anything, the people who are portrayed cartoonishly or with simplistic motivations are the members of the Hermes Society who don’t seem to have any real understanding of how to make revolutionary action actually work.

Part of where I don’t think the book goes far enough is in its attitude to class, and one of the best examples of this is, I think, in how Kuang talks about food. Food is mentioned quite often in the novel, with characters regularly lamenting how bland and unseasoned British food is. Kuang writes:

This in itself is a very “American on Twitter” way of talking about British food, frankly, but it also betrays a lack of understanding - or at least a lack of interest - in the way this lack of seasoning is integrated into ideas of class. The fact of the matter is that when spices were still expensive and exclusive to the upper classes, the British did season their food. Once spices began to be more commonly available - a direct result of the colonialist extraction that’s at the heart of the novel - the British upper classes began to shun them as being common. This is when we begin to see the ‘theory of taste’ begin to emerge, in which the upper classes decided that things should ‘taste like themselves’ rather than being infused with spices. I had wondered if this was the sort of information that might show up in a footnote, since it feels directly relevant to the novel’s main thesis, but apparently not.

Something I’ve heard from many people about this novel is that it’s in conversation with Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is one of my favourite books. On the surface that appears to be true. It’s set at roughly the same time period (give or take twenty years), it’s an alternate history in which the British Empire reinforces their power with magic, and it contains footnotes. But that is honestly where the similarities end, and it’s also part of what makes me wish the book went a little further. Norrell is absolutely riddled with footnotes, you can barely turn the page without seeing a new one, and they’re all in-world. They all serve to further every single theme in the book, and do a lot of world-building that makes Clarke’s vision of a magically-enhanced Empire seem real.

In comparison Babel’s footnotes feel very thin on the ground. I wanted the book to be dense with references and supplementary material, but they don’t show up anywhere near as frequently as they could do. And when they do there’s a split between footnotes that talk about fictional in-universe matters, and footnotes that make reference to the actual truth of the matter. I’m not opposed to the latter, especially in a book that’s overtly concerned with social commentary - the footnotes in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars are breathtaking and stuck with me long after I’d forgotten the events of the book, for example. But many of Kuang’s footnotes simply serve to point out where the author is being particularly clever, or to drive home a point that was already very clear on the page. Many times when I read them I was reminded of the author’s introduction, and I couldn’t help coming away with the sense that many of the footnotes exist because Kuang doesn’t trust her readers. And that’s a shame.

Interestingly, rather than being in conversation with Norrell I often felt that Babel was more in conversation with - or had more in common with - the Harry Potter books, to the extent that some parts of the novel actually read like they could have come from fanfic. (This is not, to be clear, an inherently bad thing, and this isn’t a criticism. Very well-written fic exists and I have read a lot of it). When you set a novel in a pseudo-Victorian magical boarding school you will obviously always draw comparisons to the wizard books, but here the similarities go beyond the surface, from the broad to the specific. Our protagonist is an orphan plucked from a life of, if not poverty, then hardship, at the age of 11 to enter a world beyond his wildest imagination, where he’s told that magic exists and that he may one day learn how to use it. He spends his days at an expensive school where he never has to want for anything and never questions where his money comes from. Our protagonists steal food from the kitchens.

There are even elements that feel like references, like Robin living at number 4 Magpie Lane rather than number 4 Privet Drive, or a teacher being named Professor Felton (potentially named for Tom Felton, who played Potter fanfic authors’ perennial favourite bad boy, Draco Malfoy). At one point the protagonists plan to climb to the top of the tower to look at stars through the telescopes there, which a footnote tells us only exist because “In the mid-eighteenth century, Babel scholars were briefly seized by an astrology fad, and several state-of-the-art telescopes were ordered for the roof on behalf of scholars who thought they could derive useful match-pairs from the names of star signs. These efforts never yielded anything interesting, as astrology is fake, but the stargazing was pleasant”. Despite the footnote it seems to me that the telescopes on the top of the tower only exist because Kuang wanted to make reference to stargazing from the roof of the astronomy tower.

Once I’d made this Potter connection I started to see it everywhere. Parts of the writing felt like they could have been pulled from those books, like this passage that you could probably convince me came from Order Of The Phoenix:

I was even able to predict one of the large plot points in the later parts of the book almost perfectly because I drew a parallel between Letty’s father and Marietta Edgecombe’s mother. I’m aware that Kuang has talked about grappling with what to do with her Harry Potter memorabilia post-Rowling revealing herself to be a horrible person in an interview with Clarkesworld, so I don’t think I’m entirely misguided in thinking that some elements of Potter fandom may have made it into her work. (I, too, have had to go through a process of divorcing myself from those books, which meant a lot to me when I was younger).

One criticism I’ve seen repeated a lot is that all of the characters sound like they’ve stepped out of the 2020s with the exception of the white men, who all speak like they’re in the 1830s. I was looking for this as I read it, and honestly I disagree. The book does feel very modern and anachronistic, yes - at one point Letty shoots someone “a droll look” and says “Say more”, which is a very modern turn of phrase - but I don’t think that’s a flaw and I don’t think the white people in the novel sound any different to any other character. In fact Letty is, very much, one of the white people who turn out to be villains, yet here she’s speaking like she has a Twitter account.

This goes back to my earlier discussion of whether this is in conversation with Norrell or Harry Potter. Where Norrell is written in more time-appropriate language, Babel is very much a piece of modern commercial fiction. It’s written well, and Kuang has a very distinct voice, but despite being set in the 1830s this is not historical fiction - and that’s not just fine, I think it’s intentional and I think it’s something Kuang addresses in the text, albeit quite obliquely.

There’s a moment when the characters discuss the nature of translation, and Professor Playfair addresses the idea of fidelity of faithlessness in translation. We’re treated to this exchange:

After more discussion, we eventually come to the conclusion that “Either you situate the text in its time and place, or you bring it to where you are, here and now. You’re always giving something up”. In Babel, then, what we see is not an attempt to portray a realistic 1830s Oxford. Kuang tells us explicitly in her introduction that this isn’t the case. Instead what we’re seeing is 1830s Oxford and the politics of colonialism being brought to where we are, in order to make a point to modern readers.

I said at the start of this review that the defensiveness of the introduction led me to read the book more critically than I might otherwise have done, and I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t like it or don’t think it’s a worthwhile read. Frankly, I wouldn’t generally spend my time writing several thousand words about something I didn’t like. Many of the best books I’ve read this year have explored the experience of Middle- and Far-Eastern immigrants to the United States or the effects of colonialism on indigenous peoples - C Pam Zhang’s How Much Of These Hills Is Gold , Sarah Cypher’s The Skin And Its Girl , Tiffany Morris’ Green Fuse Burning - and I was really looking forward to reading something that turns that lens on my own culture and history. In saying that I wish the book had gone further, part of what I’m saying is that I went into Babel with a desire for the text to make me feel uncomfortable about my identity as a white British person, and I’m a little disappointed that it didn’t hit me harder. But with that aside, this was a joy to read. Kuang’s prose is strong and I felt immersed in her world.

The novel is definitely at its best in the front half as we get situated in Oxford and spend time with Robin and his friends as they study. The academic setting really shines and, as a former Potter fan who no longer reads those books, this felt very familiar and comforting in a lot of ways. The plot falters a little once the revolution begins, unfortunately, and I found the siege of the tower at the end of the book to be one of the weakest parts of the novel, but the nearly 600 pages rattled by at an unbelievable pace and I was left feeling very glad that I finally got around to reading this. 

 If this hadn't been on the Ignyte shortlist I doubt I would ever have heard of it, so chalk this up as a victory for fiction prizes. I also hadn't heard of Neon Hemlock Press before, and now I'm very interested to see what else they publish.

Urban fantasy is a hard sell for me. It's a genre I've tried and failed to get into, and the examples that I like are few and far between. Similarly, time travel stories often don't land for me. That meant that this one was facing an uphill battle.

That said, I really enjoyed it. The noir detective story at its heart is solid and I really loved the tone of the writing. The magic is cool and interesting and feels real in the world, and I liked the idea of this society of magic-users living alongside "normal" people (Sparrows, as they're referred to here) in spaces accessible only by turning reality on its side. It's not a new trope, but it's used well here.

Because it's a novella it rattles along at a blinding pace, and there were a couple of moments where I stumbled over who characters were meant to be and what their significance was, especially towards the end. But that's only a minor quibble, and the writing is strong enough that it didn't matter at all.

I'd really like to read more in this world. At its best it reminded me of Cassandra Khaw's *Persons Non Grata* series, which are some of my favourite weird urban fantasy novellas, and that's very high praise indeed. This is the third of the five novellas shortlisted for the Ignyte Awards that I've read, and right now I'd struggle to choose a winner between this and Green Fuse Burning. 

This is a novel about stories, and lies, which are both the same thing and not. It's about the ways in which families reinvent their own histories, and through doing so shape the identity of each subsequent generation. It's also about the ways in which your history can often sneak up on you at the most surprising of times, right when you think you've managed to reinvent yourself and leave it all behind.

As with many debut novels this suffers a little from a lack of restraint. There are lots of great ideas in here that on their own could be fantastic but when put together make this feel a little busy. The core story, Betty examining the stories her aunt has told over her life as she considers whether to leave America to be with her lover, is very strong, and it's the stories of Nuha's life that are my favourite parts of the novel. But the fact of Betty's impending decision is largely discarded after the opening chapters - in fact, by the time I reached the end of the book I'd completely forgotten that the reason she's revisiting her aunt's life is in order to aid with this decision. Instead she spends much of her time trying to contend with the complicated history of her Palestinian-American family, touching on ideas of what it means to be removed from your homeland without ever fully getting to grips with that.

Similarly, Betty has blue skin that flakes off when touched. It's later hinted that her younger brother may be partially made of stone, and another character who we hear fragmented stories about had hair made of fire. This vein of magic realism runs throughout the novel but never really had any meaning or purpose, and I spent a lot of time wondering what the payoff was going to be. As it turns out, there isn't one.

Still, despite being a little bloated this was a good read. Cypher writes well and the picture she builds of Nuha and her life is wonderful. It's a very ambitious debut novel and one that I'm glad I read, and I'll almost certainly be keeping an eye out for what Cypher does next.

The Singing Hills Cycle continues with book 5 in the series, and aside from a brief wobble with the third installment (*Into The Riverlands*) these books have consistently been my favourite reads of the past year. They also seem to get better with each new book, which is incredible. After finishing *Mammoths At The Gates* I didn't think there was any way for Vo to top it, and thought that I would have been happy for the series to end there. How wrong I was.

This book is like a magic trick, and it's hard to talk about exactly what's so great about it without spoiling things. Vo tricks us into believing things about the story that aren't true, in the same way that Chih is tricked. When things finally begin to become clear for Chih I also had a moment of clarity about what was going on. I found myself turning back to the first chapter to remember where the story had began, and it was in doing that that I realised there were fundamental truths about the story I was reading that had changed over the course of the telling of it, so subtly that I hadn't noticed.

The only weakness of this series for me so far has been in Vo's action scenes, and it seems that she's put some work in there. There are a couple of moments of violence in this installment but, unlike in the earlier books, the quality of the writing never falters for a second. Vo leans heavily into the dark and the gothic and there are moments of real horror here. Tonally this is as far removed from *The Empress of Salt and Fortune* as it's possible to get, and I continue to be amazed that Vo manages to play in so many different genre pools while still having these stories feel like a cohesive whole.

This is fantastic, and I can't wait to see what comes next.

This just wasn't for me, which is a shame because I was really looking forward to it. I struggled to separate the characters, who all had the same voice, and close to halfway through I realised that I was bored of reading very long sentences with no variation in rhythm or tone of the language. We spend a lot of time pondering the distant beauty of the globe as the station makes its endless loops but it all just becomes a little repetitive and flat for my tastes. I didn't get any sense that the next 100+ pages were going to be any different.

Maybe the slow, only fractionally-changing repetition is the point, but it wasn't for me. 

In the past 12 months I've attended the funerals of my father and my stepfather. I didn't know either man particularly well - my father because I chose not to speak to him for the past 18 years or so, and my stepfather because my mother remarried after I had already left home, and I didn't see either of them as often as I should. I've been to many funerals over the years, but those two were among the strangest, as I listened to stories I had never heard about men I probably should have known better.

Nghi Vo's Singing Hills Cycle is all about stories. What starts as a simple tale of a Cleric travelling the land and speaking to the people they encounter to learn its history (The Empress of Salt and Fortune) soon asks us to think about the ways in which the same stories can change dramatically depending on the teller (When The Tiger Came Down The Mountain) before reflecting on the fact that we can never really know everything there is to know about a person, and can never hear their whole story (Into The Riverlands). It's a story that unfolds slowly over the course of the books, always taking its time, never rushing to get to where it's going.

Where it's going is, it transpires, home. In *Mammoths At The Gates* we finally get to see the Singing Hills that we've heard of so many times but no nothing about. In all of our journeys with them, we've never really learned anything about who Chih is or where they came from. We've spectated as they learned new stories, or as they recounted the stories of others, but we've never heard their story - something I hadn't thought about until this book began, but which *Into The Riverlands* was pointing directly at.

Each of the books in the cycle takes a different approach to storytelling and how its frames the tale, and *Mammoths* is no different. For the first half of the novella we don't see Chih in pursuit of any new stories at all. Instead we follow them closely as they return home, as they chafe against the way the once familiar has become strange in their absence, as they contend with the fact that you can never leave anywhere in stasis. Life goes on for those you leave behind - and, in some cases, it comes to and end. Cleric Chih returns to find that their mentor is dead, and that death means that your past finally gets to catch up with you. Chih is caught between the traditions of the life the late Cleric Thien chose for themselves, and the traditions and demands of the family that they left behind to choose that life. And amidst all of this they have to find a way to manage their own grief and the grief of the one who knew Thien the best.

Vo's prose has always been fantastic, and it's at its most beautiful here. *Mammoths At The Gates* contains the strongest writing of the series to date, unmarred by the very few issues that I had with some of the earlier books (namely that I don't feel her action scenes work particularly well, which isn't a problem here). Chih, no longer allowed to hide behind the stories they've collected, finally steps into the spotlight as a character with depths of their own, and the emotional core that runs through all of these books is even more resonant now that we get to experience it first-hand rather than through someone's retelling. The final moments are the most moving of the whole series.

*Mammoths At The Gates* feels quite different to the other books in the Cycle, at least initially, but I think it's much stronger in every conceivable way - and I say this knowing that *The Empress of Salt and Fortune* was one of my favourite reads last year, and that yesterday I said *When The Tiger Came Down The Mountain* is one of my favourites this year. Where the others were books about stories, this is a book about grief - not just for the departed, but for your own past and the person you once were, the grief of coming home and finding it changed, grief for the futures that could have been but weren't - and it's beautiful. In some ways it feels like the first three books were just building up to this point, and that this is the book Vo has been leading us to all along. I know that there is another book in the series after this one, and I suspect that Vo has more in the pipeline, but if the Cycle were to end here this would be an incredible closing chapter for it. 

I liked this less than the first two, and that's largely because there's more action (Read: fighting) in it and I feel like Vo's writing isn't quite as strong in those scenes.

There's less of a focus here on the stories Chih collects. They're told in fragments, and we never get to hear a complete one. That's largely the point of the book, that we can never fully know a person, can never get all of their story. And while I understand it and see what Vo was aiming for - and I admire the choice to do something different again with this book - it doesn't quite land for me.

This is still very good, but it's lacking some of what made the first two books in the cycle so special.