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it thought was dead are not deceased at all one sibling formerly known as pestilence who created one of the artificial nanotech based pandemics still plaguing humankind has been captured and imprisoned by derek litchfield who used to be milton s boss this litchfield is a pretty nasty character who tortured be s sibling and forced it to use the manufacturing facility run by post humanity free mechas to manufacture chips that will be used to enslave them and bring them under litchfield s control be s quest to find both its sibling and litchfield and stay out of the clutches of one general sawyer representing the last remaining dregs of the us government come to a climax in dr milton s ruined underground lab where be was created this book is a little bit on the cosy side in that the new society the mechas are creating is based on cooperation and helping one another and helping the humans they associate with in fact one important point that be makes in talking to sawyer who keeps trying to kill it is that sawyer basically represents the past and the free mechas the future and she is the one who needs to change since i left my santuary i have had occasion to spend a lot of time contemplating the nature of my own existence and purpose i say i have also had time to observe the world and all the people in it and how much has changed since the days when you and i were on opposite sides of a war we still are she sawyer says no conversation is going to change that i also i say have observed many things that have not changed that should have please do not take offense but you are one of them and if you are going to save your people you need to evolve because i cannot stop what is happening to your people and fight you at the same time on the contrary i need your help and you need mine these are not terminator style artificial intelligences for the most part in fact be s other surviving sibling ver has a planetwide network dedicated to rebuilding a more ecologically friendly civilization and cleaning and rewilding the planet this is an altogether delightful story with complex characters and thought provoking themes and a triumphant satisfying ending i loved it it s one of the best books i ve read this year view all my reviews posted by bonnie mcdaniel on 8 01 2026 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels book reviews books read in 2026 goodreads july 23 2026 review emily wilde s encyclopaedia of faeries emily wilde s encyclopaedia of faeries by heather fawcett my rating 4 of 5 stars i hadn t read any of this series before or even heard of it but i ended up really enjoying this book that s one of the best things about voting for the hugos you find gems you might have otherwise overlooked this is in much the same vein as marie brennan s memoirs of lady trent a victorian era woman of science fighting sexism and studying fantastic creatures in this case it is fantastic magical creatures the fae emily wilde is very much a female scientist of her era rational and mostly unemotional twice as much to be considered half as good she is dedicated to the scientific method even in the midst of crises which makes for some pretty funny scenes sometimes wendell i lunged forward trying to wrench the roots away from him they showed no interest whatsoever in me nor shadow who pounced and worried at them until they fell away but more rose to take their place why does it want you i cried why do you think you cold blooded lunatic of a woman he yelled clawing at the ground this was followed by a series of curses in what i assumed to be irish i stabbed at the roots with my pocketknife at the same moment though my mind was racing through stories texts journals can you not can you not say it he gave me one of his impossibly green glares we were nearing the base of the tree where a hollow like a mouth had yawned open black and writhing with roots like white worms no oh i breathed my pocketknife was having little effect but i kept up the stabbing nevertheless i believe i stabbed him once accidentally for i had gone back into my mind you can t reveal to me that you re folk it must have been part of the enchantment that exiled you from your world isn t that it i ve heard of that yes that account of the gallic changeling and isn t it a peripheral motif within the ulster cycle bryston s theory was that oh god he moaned she wants to discuss theory at a moment like this i am doomed aren t i the wendell mentioned here is emily s colleague wendell bambleby a vain insufferable professor at cambridge who we eventually discover is an exiled faerie king wendell follows emily to her research assignment in the far off country of ljosland and adventures and hijinks ensue wendell and emily have a combative relationship with much exasperation on emily s part and plenty of razor sharp dialogue flying back and forth of course it comes out that wendell is head over heels in love with emily in a typical understated british stiff upper lip way and an even more traumatized king of faerie way and later on in the story he asks her to marry him emily doesn t turn him down and at the end at the scientific conference where they are presenting their joint paper about the discoveries they made in ljosland she seems to be entertaining the idea in between emily discovers more about faerie and makes actual friends in hrafnsvik the village where she and wendell spend the winter she is a curmudgeon at the beginning of the story and a curmudgeon at the end but she is beginning to understand the value of reaching out to other people i really liked this it s told in a meticulous journal entry style with footnotes as befits a serious scientist i doubt i would have paid attention to this had i not been reading it for the awards but now that it s on my radar i m going to pick up all three volumes view all my reviews posted by bonnie mcdaniel on 7 23 2026 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels book reviews books read in 2026 goodreads july 19 2026 review coffeeshop in an alternate universe coffeeshop in an alternate universe by c b lee my rating 2 of 5 stars this is another entry in the so called cosy trend as in cosy young adult fantasy romance the spoiler is right there in the title the two protagonists brenda nguyen and katherine kat woo live in parallel universes linked by periodic fluctuating portals brenda s universe is ours kat s is our world more or less with an industrial revolution of magic instead of the internal combustion engine which also means for kat s world the existence of dragons pixies and other magical creatures and nearly non existent climate change although capitalism is as rapacious in her universe as ours now this could have been a very interesting scenario with some thoughtful examination of the contrasts between the two universes and an appreciation of the roads not taken in the magical one unfortunately the author doesn t choose that route instead settling for a meet cute frothy romance between brenda and kat and some pretty thin superficial worldbuilding which is obviously the direction she wanted to take and more power to her but in the end that makes this story happy and bubbling with kambayas and utterly forgettable i did finish it but i spent all of the back half longing for some grit in the gears and a villain less cartoonish than the portal crossing shannon mayfield the book didn t necessarily need to be grim but it did need a little more darkness than the author wanted to give it also the silly subplot about reducing a dragon to the size of a cat and conversely making brenda s friend erica s cat fancy the size of a minivan nearly threw me out of the story altogether because really any house cat suddenly enlarged to be as big as a sabertoothed tiger would not be sweet and cute but utterly terrifying look i have two cats myself and i love them but i know for a fact if my fifteen pound mocha grew as large as a fucking smilodon maybe 1 000 pounds i would run from him screaming not try to ride him that s pretty much the problem with the cosies i ve tried to read i think they re okay while i m turning the pages and the characters usually hold my interest and they vanish from my mind the instant i close the back cover i like stories that are thought provoking and layered and take some effort to tease out all the subtleties and facets those kinds of books stick with the reader long after they re finished this one unfortunately didn t view all my reviews posted by bonnie mcdaniel on 7 19 2026 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels book reviews books read in 2026 goodreads july 12 2026 review radiant star radiant star by ann leckie my rating 1 of 5 stars i normally love ann leckie s books but i could not get into this one part of that is that this is written in omniscient pov and i am not a fan of head hopping also despite being set in the imperial radch universe the worldbuilding felt thin finally i could not figure out what the heck the titular object macguffin the radiant star actually was which probably would have been answered further on but i didn t get that far i persevered for nearly a hundred pages but in the end i didn t care enough about any of these people to continue which is okay not every author s book is for every reader and i love the original imperial radch trilogy enough to make up for this view all my reviews posted by bonnie mcdaniel on 7 12 2026 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels book reviews books read in 2026 goodreads june 26 2026 review children of strife children of strife by adrian tchaikovsky my rating 5 of 5 stars this is the fourth book in the children of time series a far future saga of humans expanding into the stars leaving behind a dead earth and terraforming other planets these particular books as are most of the author s books are chunky both in the sense of sheer page counts and the weight of the ideas those pages hold this particular story boasts three timelines set centuries apart which nevertheless braid together neatly at the end it s also a somewhat bleak cautionary tale of what happens when a group of entitled megalomaniac sociopaths are set free to indulge all their selfish baser instincts at least until the climax when they run up against a stronger force with no fucks left to give which ends up restraining them for the good of everyone one almost wishes there was an alien mira on earth right now who could stop the techbros corporations and other conservative baddies currently wreaking havoc on our present timeline but i digress despite this being the latest book in the series this is more or less a stand alone story it helps to have read the other books but it is not necessary the author provides just enough background on the characters to bring the reader up to speed what this book does is expand on events only given a passing mention in the previous volumes the reader is caught up on all this at the beginning of the story in a nice precise three page summary that sets the scene for what is to follow there are a few returning characters in particular the sapient portiid spiders portia and fabian and the ai avrana kern but the main focus is on the said group of rich sociopaths who end up terraforming an alien earth like planet with their own brand of genetically engineered accelerated evolution ecosystems this becomes the planet marduk of the present day timeline with its endlessly mutating monsters and plant life that can exist in vacuum this planetary ecosystem which is manipulated into becoming an organic computer capable of holding the uploaded minds of its creators after they die takes over both the generation ark ship arrived from earth s past and the present day dissenter an exploration ship captained by the best of the new characters and the best character in the book as far as that goes the sapient mantis shrimp cato i must stop to tout cato in particular because he really should have been the hero of this entire book i realize the author was using multiple povs to tell his story and with the three separate timelines this was absolutely necessary but i still wish cato could have gotten far more page time than he did his character journey was fascinating the uplifted stomatopods in this universe are bad tempered belligerent pugnacious crustacean heavyweight fighters who would just as soon punch your head off as look as you as cato aptly demonstrates when he meets another of the main characters but as we discover more of cato s past and realize the genocide he was a part of he reaches a turning point where he has a chance to give in to his primal urge to battle and he backs down in many ways this is the most important plot point in the story what cato has learned because of what he did the feeling of failure and weakness burns through every segment of him only one sensation is worse how he d felt when the portiid ships had found him sitting alone in his ship after the orgy of glorious battle that had been the escalation coming to a realization of what they d all done the communal madness that had taken them so they d fought and fought seeking the searing inner reward of victory which the weaponry and the distance attenuated meaning instead of one defeated enemy they required ten a hundred a thousand chasing the hit the dream of warrior greatness until until seventy two survivors out of how many hundred thousand and only that many still living because by then they were so far spaced they couldn t find each other cato remembers he remembers that when they found him he would have fought them fought them and in that madness avoided facing up to what he d done lost himself to the delusion of martial triumph as with his own language though the portiid communications let their emotional state bleed through incredulity horror seeing himself through their many eyes his people were the best warriors the hardest hitters the stories they told themselves of their prowess to cover for the fact that all the knowledge all the tech all the interstellar travel was the province of other species so in that moment he understood the portiid rescue party saw things he d blinded himself to they saw the truth of what the stomatopods had done with the star system they d claimed turned it into a charnel house drifting with wrecks and corpses the old ways and the new technology a terrible combination he d seen himself as they saw him and realized he was a monster it s too bad some of the other characters in the book couldn t have similar epiphanies in particular the elon musk jeff bezos knockoff gerey hartmand the ego driven great man who sets all the genetically engineered horrors of marduk in motion but don t worry hartmand gets what s coming to him yes he does this book is dense and chewy both in story and theme there are characters who attain godh...
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