Octavia Butler wrote the Patternist books all out of chronological order (5-2-4-1-3), but I’m reading them as they take place. ★★★☆☆ Ethan of Athos Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga booklr bookblr books media log 2k18 media log There’s a lot worth exploring there that is only hinted at, and I didn’t find myself as interested once Ethan blasted off. The result is a solid fish-out-of-water story that offers the action-adventure thrills of the rest of this series, but I was sad to leave the distinct setting of Athos so soon. The denizens of Athos use medical technology to reproduce, and when their supplies of female genetic material need to be replenished, Ethan is sent off-planet for the first time in his life.

In lieu of our typical protagonists, this novel centers on the title character, a gay man from a world with an entirely male population.

It’s more of a spinoff, sharing the same general space opera setting but not focusing on the Vorkosigan family themselves for once. The first few Vorkosigan books haven’t really gripped me, so I decided to jump forward to this one (which was the third to be published, anyway – these books are all out of chronological order). ★★★☆☆ An Unkindness of Ghosts Rivers Solomon booklr bookblr books media log 2k18 media logĮthan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold ( Vorkosigan Saga #6) But again, other readers will likely enjoy the many good qualities that I have hopefully highlighted here. In the end I guess I would say that this is a well-written and distinctive piece of Afrofuturism that unfortunately lacks a lot of what I look for in a story. It never feels as though Solomon has neglected to think out any specific details, but I wish that more of them were known to their characters so that they could be shared with the rest of us. That is, although I believe wholeheartedly in what we see of life aboard the HSS Matilda through the perspective of its lower-class inhabitants, I’m frustrated by how much we don’t get to see at all.

That world is an interstellar spaceship housing an oppressive racial caste system, and the worldbuilding – the sense that a creator has fleshed out a believable, lived-in setting for their fiction – is of variable success.

No one in particular is proactively driving anything that happens over the course of the narrative, and it’s not always clear what the characters are aiming to do beyond simply survive the harshness of their world. With a dark-skinned intersex autistic heroine – and plenty of other diversity among the supporting cast – it’s a real triumph of representation, yet a bit of a disjointed reading experience on a plot level. This debut sci-fi novel from author Rivers Solomon is one of those books that many readers will justifiably love but that doesn’t quite hit the spot for me. An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

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