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Book Review: The Everlasting by Alix Harrow

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The Everlasting is Alix Harrow’s novel weaving myth, legend, time travel, destiny, and yes, a love story.  Owen Mallory is an academic, a scholar in the country of Dominion. He has survived the last war and is now studying the national myth of his country. He is drawn, however, into doing much more than reading and writing about the myth. He winds up becoming part of that very myth cycle.¹ Una Everlasting IS that myth, the national myth of Dominion. Everyone knows her story, the Perfect Knight, who fought treachery, dragons, enemies within and without and found the Grail to heal a dying Queen.Everyone knows her story. But the ending of her story can change. Details in her story can change. Indeed the very fabric of her story can change. If someone plucks at the tapestry of her story long enough… Owen’s story, and Una’s story, is the story of Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting.

Cover of Rabbit Test and Other Stories, by Samantha Mills. The negative space in the letter A of Rabbit depicts a black rabbit with a red eye, and there's also a symbol in the middle of the letter I. "Test" is in red letters. All the text is against a black background.
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Book Review: Rabbit Test and Other Stories, by Samantha Mills

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“Rabbit Test” by Samantha Mills was a stunningly good science fiction/historical fiction story. Published in Uncanny in 2022, it was inspired by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe V. Wade, and looked at women desperately seeking reproductive knowledge and options throughout the centuries and into the future. It won the Nebula, Locus, and Theodore Sturgeon awards for Best Short Story; it also won the Hugo, but Mills rejected that after the awards shenanigans of 2023 came to light. That was basically what I knew Mills for before this collection. I’d heard that her Compton Crook-winning debut science fantasy novel, The Wings Upon Her Back, was also great, but somehow it never made it to the top of my TBR pile. Upon seeing that Mills has a collection of her short stories coming out soon, I eagerly signed up to read and review Rabbit Test and Other Stories. I discovered that she’s written some other really great stories that I’d already read or heard from online magazines, but I hadn’t realized she was the author. Seeing all these great stories together really reinforces what an excellent and versatile author Mills already is, and increases my excitement over her potential for future amazing stories and books.

Cover of The Faith of Beasts by James S.A. Corey, featuring spaceships using beam weapons in a battle.
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Book Review: The Faith of Beasts, by James S.A. Corey

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The Faith of Beasts (Book 2 of The Captives’ War), by James S.A. Corey, is an excellent sequel to The Mercy of Gods, which I reviewed very positively last year. It continues to develop the plots and themes introduced in the first book, while expanding the world- and universe-building in unexpected yet satisfactory and exciting ways. However, it definitely doesn’t stand on its own. I didn’t regret not having reread the first book, but I would have been lost if I’d skipped it entirely. (The more recent in-universe novella Livesuit provides additional perspective but doesn’t involve any characters from the novels, so it’s not essential.) Even if I’d started here with Book 2 and managed to follow the plot and keep the characters straight, I’d probably have perceived its characters very differently, primarily Daffyd Alkhor and the spy swarm.

Cover of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Ring of Fire, by David Mack, featuring (clockwise from left) Nurse Christine Chapel, First Officer Una Chin-Riley, Capt. Christopher Pike, Science Officer Spock, and Security Chief La'An Noonien-Singh, encircled by a yellow-orange ring of fire (the accretion disk around a black hole).
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Book Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: RING OF FIRE by David Mack

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The fourth novelization from the Strange New Worlds show of the Star Trek franchise, Ring of Fire takes place between the episodes “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” and “What is Starfleet?” from this past, third season. It’s the first novel from regular franchise writer David Mack to feature the cast of Strange New Worlds, but incorporates elements from throughout Star Trek canon as is typical for recent novels from the shared, expanded universe. As expected when writing this type of novel, Mack has limitations within the framework of what the show-runners are doing with specific character arcs in the cast. But Mack has also proven very successful at working within the boundaries of the sandbox to create compelling and entertaining stories that make optimal use of all the objects and details that sit inside that very large sandbox that is Star Trek. Ring of Fire continues that success. Fans who didn’t care for certain developments in the third season of the television show won’t be able to completely escape those here, but they will be able to enjoy the unique aspects of this particular story featuring the Pike-era USS Enterprise crew. Ring of Fire has a character-driven plot that focuses largely on an investigation by Security Chief La’An Noonien-Singh, but manages to give significant development to other characters, particularly Helmsman Erica Ortegas, who gets an opportunity to step up and shine as acting Number One. But the novel is equally plot driven as a mystery that involves espionage, sabotage, murder, and central speculative elements that make this more science fiction than a standard adventure that just happens to be set in space.

Cover of What We Are Seeking, by Cameron Reed, featuring a flower partially eclipsing a black crescent (moon?), against a lighter blue background.
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Book Review: What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed

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I was intrigued by Tor’s description of Cameron Reed’s upcoming novel, What We Are Seeking: “On the planet Scythia, plants give birth to insects and trees can drag you to your death. Artificial monsters stalk the desert, and alien basket-men have wandered into town.“John Maraintha has been abandoned here, light-years from the peaceful forests that he loves.” This mutability of the wildlife made me think the book was going to be kind of like Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Hugo-finalist novel Alien Clay, which I thought was great. I kind of glided over the promotional text’s part about “soaring novel of queer hope and transformation” (thinking that might be associated with the alien genetic mutability part, contributing to the metaphors), and I assumed that the protagonist being abandoned among “people in thrall to a barbaric custom called marriage” would be mildly amusing in a quirky way, like the protagonist in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos dreading having to meet female people on a space station, which turned out just fine. I also was ignorant of the author having won what is now the Otherwise Award in 1998, back when the award and she had different names, and when her gender was different, too. So, I started this story not only mostly unaware of some plot elements and themes, but actually wrong about some; however, I am happy to have had my expectations upheaved. This is a really interesting and engaging book, with some themes of survival in an alien environment, with alien translation and diplomacy and co-existence being important parts of the plot, but it’s also very much about human values and choices and cooperation, including guarding oneself and others against a proscriptive majority, with a side aspect of an ancestral online virtual “aiyi” culture that also occasionally enforces its opinions on others.

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