#a history of what comes next

[literary-illuminati]

Book I picked up because I liked the author's panels at a con reassuringly not awful so far.

[ninja-muse]

I don't quite know how I feel about A History of What Comes Next yet but it was definitely the most interesting novel I've read this month. It's alternate history, but very gently so, about a family of women who work behind the scenes to spur on space travel, but it's also about their past, their family lore and secrets, and their potential future. It raises questions of ethics and morality, of what is and isn't humanity, and of risks and costs.

All this is stuff I usually enjoy and I did here too, but I also found it hard to connect to and truly engage with. The writing is largely dialogue and inner thoughts and very fast-paced, which is not what I'm used to in SF or what I was expecting, and it didn't have the depth of character I usually need to empathize properly with protagonists. For instance, I can totally understand and support the MC's biggest decisions and struggles, but I never quite liked her the way I've liked similar characters in other books.

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, this might be a lighter version of my usual problem with "ideas SF", where the author's more interested in exploring ideas than they are with emotional journeys or character arcs, because everyone felt flattened in a similar way to books I have genuine beef with. Or maybe it's that it's all a bit too neat, like even when the characters are at their lowest and most hopeless, they're still able to find a job or get someone's ear and continue their mission. Or maybe it's that the MC tells us her emotions more than letting us feel them. I don't know.

Anyway, the ideas! Neuvel's definitely done research on the space race and history more generally, and has woven it all nicely together with the alternate history bits. He's also done some strong work creating the family, through their lore and secrets and biology. I really liked that the stories they tell each other and the traumas they pass down change over the generations, either because of the telephone effect (A mishears B mishears C) or because, well, people are people. (Not sure I totally bought some of the stuff within this aspect of the novel, but that likely boils down to not personally getting the right amount of explanation to do so. Or, well, all the famous ancestors, even if that was cool.)

Will I be continuing with the trilogy? Probably. Now that I know what to expect, I'll be able to gauge better what mood I should be in for maximum enjoyment, and I do kind of want to see the MC continue to grow and fight for herself and eventually see space travel happen. I'd like to see Neuvel continue some of the themes and I'd like to see where he's going with the arc of the trilogy, all of that stuff. But I'm also not hooked enough to pick up the next book anytime soon.

[rhetoricandlogic]

A HISTORY OF WHAT COMES NEXT - Sylvain Neuvel

From the Take Them to the Stars series , Vol. 1by Sylvain Neuvel

RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2021

he first installment in Neuvel’s Take Them to the Stars trilogy is a historical science-fiction thriller set largely in World War II Europe that follows a mother and daughter whose mysterious family’s multigenerational mission is to save humankind.

Mia Freed and her mother, Sarah, are members of the Kibsu, an all-women society whose mysterious origins go back thousands of years to ancient Mesopotamia—and beyond. Generation after generation, the Kibsu consists of a mother-and-daughter team, and their objective never changes: “Take them to the stars, before Evil comes and kills them all.”

Pursued across the world by someone known as the Tracker, Mia and her mother must keep one step ahead of their mythical pursuer while also attempting the impossible—to somehow get aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, a pioneer in rocket technology, out of Nazi Germany before the Russians can get him and his knowledge. As Mia and Sarah struggle to achieve their lifelong task of getting humankind into space, Mia questions her very existence when she falls in love with a young woman who forces her to look at her life, and her suspected extraterrestrial heritage, from a different perspective. With the backdrop of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union adding tension and intrigue, Neuvel weaves a story that’s similar in tone to an X-Files episode, replete with arcane secrets, conspiracy theories, and the possibility of aliens living among us. The real power of this novel, however, lies in the adeptly developed character of Mia and her painful and revelatory journey of self-discovery. The abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion will leave some readers disappointed and others scratching their heads, but the second installment could easily set this saga, which is filled with virtually limitless narrative possibilities, back on track.

A flawed beginning to a potentially fascinating science-fiction series.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I'm not going back to Gusu with you.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[fantastic-nonsense]

the videos coming out of Syria right now are unbelievable. truly never thought I'd see the end of the Assad regime in my lifetime after 2016 happened and now I'm watching videos of people celebrating in the streets, statues being toppled, and dozens of refugees and political prisoners reuniting with their parents, spouses, children, and friends.

[qu4kerider]

STAR WARS: EPISODE III - REVENGE OF THE SITH & ARCANE S02E03

[puppet-purgatory]

so let me get this straight, watcher:

An unknown party is planting VHS tapes on your own set weekly, containing ad reads by:

a self-proclaimed professor

who mentions unfortunate encounters with horses

who has an 'estranged wife'

whose jacket is tan and tie and red

who is a 'gamer'

whose image flickered in like a hologram in an earlier ad read,

and you want us to just like, not think Something Smells Fishy. OK...

[vaguely-concerned]

I don't know what I love more, the fact that as rook you can make a statement in NO uncertain terms that you are NOT responsible one way or the other for the theological implications of the shit you're discovering in the 'regrets of the dread wolf' memories. not my jurisdiction. quite simply none of my business. not my chantry circus not my chantry monkeys. irrelevant to the matter at hand here we'll kill that god if we get to him he can get in line. or if the best thing about it is seeing the lone little 'lucanis approves' that pops up right after choosing it. corvid with a knife about to commit deicide keeping it real and sensibly, pragmatically, wilfully agnostic with me here in this magical lighthouse today

[shima-draws]

Grips my shirt and tears it apart so that all the buttons go flying and SCREAMS I love Law and Cora so much what the FUCK!!!!

[superm4ks]

Kit do you not rep Charles anymore 😭

Of course I do he’s prime I just need a break from his team and that fucking dog

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #66 – A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel

This was a book I bought entirely off the author being at a con I attended and being endearingly awkward in several panels including a long, rambling description of the weird bit of science that inspired it. So I went into this with no real expectations other than the hope it would be entertainingly off-kilter or different from the buzzy and award-nominated stuff I’ve been reading a lot of this year. Which it was! Something of a mess otherwise, sadly, but hardly the worst thing I’ve read recently.

The story follows the Kibsu, a lineage of human-appearing (probably) aliens notable for a) giving birth exclusively to identical clones of themselves, b) being lightly superhuman in both mental acuity and competence with violence, c) a hundred-generation-old family ethos to guide humanity to the stars before some mostly-forgotten doom consumes them all, and also to never have more than two of them (a mother-daughter pair) alive for long and d) the fact that there’s something hunting them across history, cutting a bloody swathe through the lives they leave behind.

The book is, specifically, about the point in history where that mission has suddenly become actually plausible – starting with WW2 and continuing into the early space race. With many significant digressions, the story follows a particular mother-daughter pair as they assist with Operation Paperclip and do everything can to start a Space Race, all while the Tracker hunting them closes in, and as they look around the world of the 1940s and ‘50s and wonder if the species is truly worth spending their and their descendents’ lives trying to save.

While, that’s the plot, anyway. This is one of those novels that gives the overwhelming impression of mostly being the vehicle for all the random trivia and anecdotes the author discovered researching for it and thought were cool (and the book was researched – there’s a ‘further reading’ chapter at the back). Hence the constant shifting in focus from the logistics of Operation Paperclip and the postwar anticommunist witch hunts in the USA to the biology of the Amazon Molly to the story of Olga of Kiev to the early study of atmospheric carbon levels to- you get the idea. Now personally I found this all quite charming, but I can’t say it does much for the pacing or coherence of the book as a novel. Narrativally the whole book is a little bit of a mess, and the digressions into exposition on the wild goose chases of the early soviet space program aren’t helping.

Formally and stylistically the whole book is refreshingly different than anything I’ve read recently. Incredibly close first person POV – essentially just running internal monologues, or I suppose real time diary entries? Different grammer for dialogue and punctuation than I’m really used to, too. There are a few cases where it’s played for tension or horror as you’re left guessing at whose head you’re in or waiting for enough clues to piece together what they’re actually doing. It works far less well for action scenes, though – unfortunate, since that’s what the book’s climax is.

There’s a current – incredibly over-represented among the sort of people who write science fiction novels but present to a lesser degree elsewhere as well – that considers space travel and extra-planetary colonization the ultimate goal of human civilization, the telos which all of history has been driving towards. (Nowadays they mostly seem to be one more subgroup of people nostalgic for the ‘60s, but they’re certainly still around). That current, more than anything else, is what the book seems to be in conversation with – the contrast between the beautiful sounding dream of ‘escaping to the stars’ and the mess of great power politics and intercontinental missiles and recruiting nazis that made up ost of the actual business of developing space travel. There’s several sequels, and I assume the theme’s developed in some more depth through them.

I’m not sure I’m actually going to get around to reading them anytime soon, though. This was refreshingly different and perfectly readable, but nothing about it really left me craving more. .

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2024: August Wrap-Up.

Hey, would you look at that, it's suddenly September! Rude and uncalled for. This month, I did a lot of knitting (two sets of gloves and two hats! gearing up for holiday season), and a LOT of writing (finished the first 16k draft of a scene, who???), and read uh. Some. I didn't finish a ton of books, but I did make it through what felt like a ton of pages.

Two-thirds of this month's reading were post-apocalyptic-community-oriented, on purpose, to feed into my current writing project, and that worked really well--either I'm very good at choosing books that match the vibe I need, or my ADHD brain is good at making connections, OR a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. Photos and/or reviews linked below:

GHOST STATION (pages-out stand-in book pictured above, because I checked it out from the library after canceling my paperback pre-order, which was a good call) - ★★ This was very bad. Bad science, stupid incompetent characters, JUST enough neat worldbuilding to make it FRUSTRATING that this missed so hard. I'm bummed because I wanted to read DEAD SILENCE by this author, too, but I don't trust her now :(

ALWAYS COMING HOME - ★★★★½ Loved this!! Dense and chewy, and it required a lot of patience, but it was very rewarding and I'm really glad I read it. My absolute favorite passage was about scrub oaks, but I posted a few other highlights and tagged them as "le guin posting," if you're interested! If you like Le Guin and/or utopias and better futures and/or huge books that push what it means to Be A Novel, check this out for sure.

ARCHANGELS OF FUNK - ★★★½ So. I didn't realize that this was attached to a few other novels she's already written. And I read it cold (oops). Goodreads informed me that it was Book #2 of Cinnamon Jones, and review-diving indicated that REDWOOD AND WILDFIRE is also implicated in its worldbuilding, but that didn't stop me because I can't read. I would like to revisit this one after I've read those other two, I think, but!: The community and vibes and Making Art At The End Of The World were all immaculate, and the character names made me feel vindicated in some of my own naming conventions (seriously: there's an Indigo in this, and a Game-Boy, and Hawk, I can't make this shit up).

Under the Cut: A Note About ~*★Stars★*~

Historically, I have been Very Bad™ about assigning things Star Ratings, because it's so Vibes Heavy for me and therefore Contingent Upon my Whims. I am refining this as I figure out my wrap up posts (epiphany of this month: I don't like that stars are Odd, because that makes three the midpoint and things are rarely so truly mid for me)(I have hacked my way around this with a ½). Here is, generally, how I conceptualize stars:

★ - This was Bad. I would actively recommend that you do NOT read this one, no redeeming qualities whatsoever, not worth the slog. Save Yourself, It's Too Late For Me. Book goes in the garbage (donate bin).

★★ - This was Not Good. I would not recommend it, but it wasn't a total waste or wash--something in here held my interest/kept my attention/sparked some joy. I will not be rereading this ever. Save Yourself (Or Join Me In Suffering, That Seems Like A Cool Bonding Activity).

★★★ - This was Good/Fine/Okay/Meh. I don't care about this enough to recommend it one way or another. Perfectly serviceable book, held my interest, I probably enjoyed myself (or at least didn't actively loathe the reading). I don't have especially strong feelings. You probably don't need to save yourself from this one--if it sounds like your jam, give it a shot! Just didn't resonate with me particularly powerfully. I probably won't reread this unless I'm after something in particular.

★★★½ - I liked this! I'll probably recommend it if I know it matches someone's vibes or specific requests, but I didn't commit to a star rating on Goodreads. More likely to reread, but not guaranteed.

★★★★ - I really enjoyed this!! I would recommend it (sometimes with caveats about content warnings or such--I tend to like weird fucked up funny shit, and I don't have many hard readerly NO's). Not a perfect book for me by any means, but Very Good. This is something I would reread! Join me!!

★★★★★ - I LOVED THE SHIT OUT OF THIS, IT REWIRED MY BRAIN, WILL RECOMMEND TO ANYONE AND EVERYONE AT THE SLIGHTEST PROVOCATION (content warning caveats still apply--see 4-star disclaimer). Excellent book, I'll reread it regularly, I'll buy copies for all my friends, I'll try to convince all of Booklr to read it, PLEASE join me!!

[puhpandas]

thinking about the parallels between tapenessa and beckory

[basingstokemercury]

Finally returning to Operation: Annihilate

Kid me was extremely freaked out by Kirk's brother dying and Spock being blinded and never touched it again

Coming back as an adult, yeah this is really dark. Not surprised ten-year-old me couldn't handle it, and that comes from someone who always loved angst and would delightedly replay episodes with fakeout deaths since at least age seven.

The aliens always made me think of D&D's cloakers for some reason.

[wildflowercryptid]

potentially batshit headcanon, but i think it'd be funny if these two were related somehow.

[goldkirk]

I DON'T HAVE TO LIE ANYMORE!