Author name: trishmatson

Educated as a physicist yet living as a journalist, Trish Matson is an award-winning writer and editor whose ever-expanding list of interests includes a lifelong love of SF/F, plus wordplay, libraries, games, music, dancing, audio drama, and podcasting. She’s listed as TrishEM on various fora, but you can find her most easily on Twitter.

Cover of Nonesuch, by Francis Spufford. A giant hand holds up a woman with a 1940s hairstyle, coat, skirt, and heels above a city skyline. The background is a blend of orange, pink, and yellow.
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Book Review: Nonesuch, by Francis Spufford

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I really liked Francis Spufford’s last book, Cahokia Jazz, as stated in my 2024 review, so I was very happy when my library app acquired his latest novel, Nonesuch. The protagonist, Iris, is fascinating, and it’s great fun to watch her machinations and verbal fencing; the setting, London during the so-called “Phoney War” and initial stages of World War II, has long held great interest for me; the book is full of lovely, lyrical descriptions, along with dread and occasional action scenes; and not only are there magic and time travel, but also, fights against fascists, and arguments that are sadly more relevant now than I would have believed possible 10 years ago. However, there’s a giant caveat: The comp that instantly leaps into my head after finishing it is Blackout, by Connie Willis. Not just because it’s set in World War II and there’s time travel involved; oh no: Nonesuch ends with the dreaded words, To be continued. If you hated the way that Blackout concluded with a cliffhanger, I need to warn you about this. Nobody warned me that this book was the first part of a duology — or maybe a series, but I really hope not, since the second book needs to go ahead and fix what went wrong at the end of Nonesuch, if that’s even possible. Please!

Cpver of Ignore All Previous Instructions, by Ada Hoffman, featuring a cartoonish rocket ship flying above Jupiter. The title lettering is tinted blue and orange, matching the predominant colors of the gas giant as pictured.
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Book Review: Ignore All Previous Instructions, by Ada Hoffman

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I’ve been a fan of Ada Hoffman since I ran across some of their stories on podcasts (I reviewed their collection Resurrections here) and read their trilogy that started with The Outside (reviewed here by Kate Sherrod). Some of those stories and especially The Outside trilogy dealt with artificial intelligence, but there the term referred to the older idea of supercomputers gaining intelligence (and sometimes ruling humanity). Hoffman’s new book, Ignore All Previous Instructions, out today, deals with generative AI (Large Language Models using predictive text) rather than true AI, but because one corporation has bought all the rights to all stories of the past, present, and future (at least for anyone who lives near Jupiter), it’s also about who gets to tell stories, what stories are allowed to be told, and what happens with some people whose lives don’t exactly fit into the greatest-common-denominator story framework. It’s a great book, with thoughtful explorations of ideas and what feels like great characterization of an autistic lesbian storyteller who thinks following the rules will keep herself and others safe, and her former best friend, a hacker who delights in breaking what he considers bad rules. It’s also an exciting adventure with heartbreak, passion, and piracy (stealing from the rich and/or evil to redistribute ill-gotten gains to the needy).

Cover of Platform Decay by Martha Wells, featuring a helmeted, spacesuited Murderbot floating next to a ladder in a zero-gravity service tunnel.
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Book Review: Platform Decay, by Martha Wells

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Platform Decay, which will be published on May 5, is the eighth book or novella in The Murderbot Diaries (there are a few short stories, too) by Martha Wells. It’s a fun extension of the series, but I strongly advise against coming in cold, without having read most of the series, or at least having watched the Apple TV show that’s based on it. The book starts in the middle of another infiltration mission, but we don’t find out the objective until halfway through the third chapter. So if you don’t already know a lot about Murderbot and its universe, you’ll be lost.

Cover of An Accident of Dragons, by Cheri Radke, featuring a silver-green dragon coiling around a dark-skinned man playing a stringed instrument.
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Book Review: An Accident of Dragons, by Cheri Radke

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The publisher’s description of Cheri Radke’s novel, An Accident of Dragons, makes it sound like a romp: “An unlikely lord finally meets a problem he can’t flirt his way out of in this adventurous and light-hearted queer cozy fantasy featuring pirates, dragons, kidnapping, tea, and other high-fantasy delights…” It mostly is, and it’s a lot of fun, but there are also touches of long-set sorrow and suppressed issues that ended up having to be faced. So rather than just being cotton candy, there’s some meat on the bones of this story. Tasty, tasty meat.

Cover of If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, by Kim Choyeop, featuring a moving starfield on a viewscren, with a person at the bottom, with a Mercator projection of the Earth on either side, with various symbols superimposed on the Asian and North American continents.
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Book Review: If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, by Kim Choyeop

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The publisher’s description on NetGalley of If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light says “From Korean science fiction author Kim Cho-yeop, a stunning and poignant collection of literary speculative fiction stories that explore the complexities of identity, love, death, and the search for life’s meaning, perfect for fans of Exhalation and The Paper Menagerie.” Unfortunately, as far as I’m concerned, the author (Kim Choyeop with no hyphen, as the book cover and https://library.ltikorea.or.kr/ transliterate her name, 김초엽) has a way to go before her works rise to the levels of Ted Chiang and Ken Liu, at least as far as they’re translated here by Anton Hur. However, some of the stories in this collection do include some interesting speculation, and engage this reader’s emotions.

Cover of The Killing Spell, by Shay Kauwe, featuring colorful strips of Hawaiian-print cloth swirling around a black center, with red lettering for the title and orange-yellow letters for the author's name.
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Book Review: The Killing Spell, by Shay Kauwe

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I greatly enjoyed The Killing Spell, the debut urban fantasy novel by Shay Kauwe. I’ll admit that the first chapter was a little challenging for me, because the protagonist, Kea Petrova, starts out feeling a bit overwhelmed by her family responsibilities as the young head of a household, with siblings and cousins to support, and a somewhat unreliable magical talent. She continues to be off balance and seemingly gets in over her head when a political activist is assassinated and she becomes responsible for figuring out the killing spell and tracking down the killer, but eventually she hits her stride and finds some allies. She learns that she is most powerful when she stops trying to do everything by herself and leans into her heritage and her people’s connections with nature.

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