Epilogue – A month (I.G.A.S.S. Standard) later, on Ascend
Maria flopped on to xyr settee, drained from spending all day on a video call giving evidence in the trial of the former human governor of Aurox. For a week xe’d been giving depositions against the regime on Aurox and their crimes, including the harassment Maria and Sahrai had received from Josh Dalton, the senior security officer. It had upset xyr when evidence of the abuse of the bovids had been presented and the testimony of human prisoners forced to labour on Rocky Horror.
Although a geologist by trade, Suah had been on enough new planets to have picked up basic skills in cultural analysis. Observing the Auroxians had been a distraction from the horror of events since arriving on Aurox. She shuddered, remembering the day the research party had been attacked.
From sci-fi visionary and acclaimed author Annalee Newitz comes Automatic Noodle, a cosy near-future novella about a crew of abandoned food service bots opening their very own restaurant.
While San Francisco rebuilds from the chaos of war, a group of food service bots in an abandoned ghost kitchen take over their own delivery app account. They rebrand as a neighborhood lunch spot and start producing some of the tastiest hand-pulled noodles in the city. But there’s just one problem. Someone―or something―is review bombing the restaurant’s feedback page with fake “bad service” reports. Can the bots find the culprit before their ratings plummet and destroy everything they created?
My Review
It’s 2064. California has fought a war of Independence from the United States, and has freed robots above a certain level of intelligence. Well, not really free, they can’t own property, reproduce, or have bank accounts. Their licenses can be bought and sold, tying them to contracts and companies that can take them apart for scrap or sell them on saddled with debt. So not free at all.
Staybehind is an ex-military robot, free from contract and working wherever it wants. It happened to be working as manager of a terrible fast food franchise when it was shut down. Hands, the chef bot, Sweetie the front desk bot, and Cayenne, a former search and rescue octobot turned gastronome who likes to taste and smell food, slowly wake up after Staybehind is alerted to an emergency – their store is flooding. Once they work out what’s going on, the group make the decision to run the store for themselves, if they can find a way around the laws. Cayenne is on that.
Together with a human called Robles and an automatic minivan called Sloan, the robots go into business for themselves selling noodles. After a great review they get very busy, but then another review outs them as robots and starts review bombing the food delivery app everyone uses. While Staybehind searches for the culprit and discovers they have an artistic streak, Cayenne and Sweetie come up with other plans.
It’s a novella. I’ve read it in less than 3 hours this afternoon. I’d planned to go swimming but my lungs decided otherwise, so I’ve spent the afternoon on the sofa reading. I’m going back to bed as soon as I’ve written this because I’m sick once again!
I’ve read Annalee Newitz’s books in the past and enjoyed them; the author always seems to find the right tone for the subject and the right themes for the times. This is the case with Automatic Noodle too, with themes of found family, community resilience, and post-war rebuilding. The robots are stand-ins for the groups currently demonised by the right in the U.S. (and the U.K. honestly) – trans people, migrants, minority groups. There’s even a nod to the way African Americans were treated for the century between the end of the U.S. Civil War and the Civil Rights Act, in the way HEEI robots, and all robots, are treated.
The characters of Staybehind, Hands, Cayenne and Sweetie are all rounded, with backstories shared in vignettes. Reading them as they grow as people, and develop a community around them, facing their fears and the past, was sweet.
I think this is the sort of story we need right now. Things are going bad in the U.S., the U.K. government keeps pandering to the Right instead of telling them to go fuck themselves, and it’s scary for a lot of people. Me included. This novella is a story of hope – in community and community building, we can survive and thrive. I would read an expanded version of this novella or a sequel.
Format: 449 pages, Paperback Published: August 4, 2015 by Orbit ISBN: 9780316229296
Blurb
This is the way the world ends. Again.
Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze — the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization’s bedrock for a thousand years — collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman’s vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.
Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She’ll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.
My Review
This book and the other two in the series have been on my TBR pile for several years, but one of the GoodReads challenges for the summer had this book on the list and I decided that was as good a way to decide what next to read from my TBR Pile as any.
My TBR pile is disturbingly huge…
My currently reading piles is disturbingly huge…
Anyway.
I picked up The Fifth Season the other day to read in bed while I was feeling ill, managed 130 pages then fell asleep. I read the rest yesterday – 319 pages. I think I’m feeling better today but I can never tell until I test my lungs during a walk or swimming. I’ve managed to get a bit of reading done while I’ve been ill. Two more books off the TBR Pile and on to the shelves. Obviously, next late month I’ll be buying more books at World Fantasycon, so I should probably prepare more shelf space.
Back to the book. The narrative follows a character who goes by multiple names over her lifetime as she confronts first her status as an orogene – someone who can move the earth with her mind – in a world where people with orogeny are either murdered as children or sent to a training camp in the capital city of Yumenes, where they are abused slaves, trained to hate themselves and do as they’re told by Guardians.
We see the main character through the eyes of a narrator, who turns out to be a stone-eater called Hoa, who has been following the main character through her life, and from the 3rd person POV of the main character. It’s an interesting structure, and took me a while to adjust to. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed it, seeing the story from the outside eyes of Hoa and the internal narrative of the main character. Look, she can’t decide who she is, so I’m not going to use her name.
Each name is associated with a time in the main character’s life. She has the name her parents gave her as a child, Damaya, which she carries until she passes her first ‘ring test’ at the Fulcrum, and chooses another name. She calls herself Syenite. She carries that name through meeting her mentor-friend-partner-father of her first child, Alabaster, living on an island with pirates, and having a child, then the ending of that period. After that she spends ten years living with a husband in a small town and teaching children, with another name, Essen. This triple name situation gives her some difficulty with her identity by the end of the novel when people she knew at different point in her life also end up in the same place as she does.
The impetus for events is two-fold. Firstly, Essun finds her son dead and her daughter missing. Her husband is the culprit. Essun sets off to look for her husband and daughter to get revenge. Essun’s son is murdered because he is an orogene, a talent inherited from Essun. Nassun, Essun’s daughter is also an orogene. Essun has a lot to process and blames herself. She is a little mad, and her journey south, picking up first Hoa and then Tonkee, a scientist, on the way, helps her to regain some sense.
At the same time, Alabaster decided it’s time to destroy Yumenes, and the Fulcrum, the city and training centre that enslaves and abuses orogenes, and opens a giant rift from east to west on the Stillness. Alabaster is an incredibly powerful orogene, but under the control of the Fulcrum he has been abused and raped to produce children strong enough to be used in ‘nodes’. When he finds a safe place on the island of Moev, and a tripartite relationship with Syenite, and the deputy leader of the community, Innon (yay! Bi and gay rep), he starts to feel safe. They have a child, Coru, who is more powerful than Alabaster. Then the Fulcrum comes for them. Innon and the baby die in the battle, Alabaster is taken to safety by his stone-eater Antimony, and Syenite goes mad and disappears into the wilderness for 12 years. During this time Alabaster has been slowly devoured by Antimony and they’ve sought ways to destroy the people enslaving orogenes.
Damaya-Syenite-Essun and Alabaster have different motives for their actions, but the results are the same – the end of the system that has controlled the continent of The Stillness for thousands of years.
The planet is fascinating.
The continent that makes up The Stillness is two plates, the Maximal and the Minimal. There are plate boundaries that run through it and around it, but they use orogenes to dissipate earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Now, that’s not a sensible thing to do, in the long run. Continents move, that’s just how these things work; messing about with that would cause no end of trouble. Volcanic eruptions can destroy large numbers; they can, if big enough, block out the sun for years; but they also provide essential nutrients to the soil and recycle minerals and water through the system. Some of the most fertile soil is volcanic. Underwater volcanoes provide unique ecosystems and drive evolution. We didn’t think life could exist with photosynthesis until we discovered the chemosynthetic life of the deep ocean volcanic vents.
Earthquakes are terrifying. They trigger tsunamis and rock slides, they destroy homes and open fissures in the land. They also show that the rock recycling system of plate tectonics is working properly. When mountains are pushed up, or oceanic plates are subsumed beneath a continental plate, new land is made, old land is recycled, water is pulled into the crust and circulates through the system to come out in volcanoes.
Any planet that has a metal core – solid and liquid – and a liquid layer of rock will also have a magnetosphere, protecting the planet from cosmic radiation and solar flares. Life exists on earth because we have a living tectonic system. And a moon. It’s helpful to have a moon. The planet of The Stillness doesn’t have a moon, although Alabaster introduces the idea to Essun at the end of The Fifth Season, so at some point it must have had one.
The society in this novel is complex and well-developed. People think the earth hates life because humans caused damage thousands of years before and there was a massive eruption, and the first of the Fifth Seasons. Using orogenes to control the planet’s movements is supposed to protect life, but also makes people terrified of orogenes, who are so powerful that they can fight Father Earth. One aspect of the culture is disdain for the past that isn’t part of the Sanzed culture.
Former civilisations, ‘deadcivs’, are considered failures with nothing useful to provided the current civilization. This means archaeological remains are destroyed or covered up, pre-Sanzed knowledge is forgotten or corrupted to fit the ideological needs of the current civilization. They are an ossified civilisation, living by ancient lore written on stone tablets. Equally, scientists who don’t focus entirely on the earth and preparing for Fifth Seasons are considered to be practising pseudoscience – archaeologists and astronomers particularly. Contrasting the closeminded attitudes of most people are the independent community of Moev and later the community at Castrima, which is not only entirely different in attitude to orogenes but is also an artifact of a dead civilisation. The reader feels these contrasts through Syen-Essen’s confusion and fear.
This book was so good! Complex and beautifully written. I can see why it won a Hugo. I’ve already started reading book 2. If you haven’t read it yet, and enjoy sci-fi and fantasy, you need to read this book.
Format: 208 pages, Paperback Published: July 31, 2025 by Penguin ISBN: 9781804950647
A dying universe.
When the Home worlds finally achieved the technology to venture out into the stars, they found a graveyard of dead civilizations, a sea of lifeless gray planets and their ruins. What befell them is unknown. All Home knows is that they are the last civilization left in the universe, and whatever came for the others will come for them next.
A search for answers.
Scout is an Archivist tasked with scouring the dead worlds of the cosmos for their last gifts: interesting technology, cultural rituals—anything left behind that might be useful to the Home worlds and their survival. During an excavation on a lifeless planet, Scout unearths something unbelievable: a surviving message from an alien who witnessed the world-ending entity thousands of years ago.
A past unraveled.
Blyreena was once a friend, a soul mate, and a respected leader of her people, the Stelhari. At the end of her world, she was the last one left. She survived to give one last message, one final hope to the future: instructions on how to save the universe.
An adventure at the end of a trillion lifetimes.
With the fate of everything at stake, Scout must overcome the dangers of the Stelhari’s ruined civilization while following Blyreena’s leads to collect its artifacts. If Scout can’t deliver these ground-breaking discoveries back to the Archivists, Home might not only be the last civilization to exist, but the last to finally fall.
Alright, I’m back with more. It took less time than I thought.
Chapter 15, part 2
“Mrrh-wAa, what are you doing?” The new comer sounded desperate, “The Elders told you not to contact the aliens, Supai said it was dangerous!”
“Prrt-hai! Are you following me? They’re from igassss, like Supai. They’re looking for Supai!” Mrrh-wAa hurried their words out, “I told you it would be fine, you fussing will just worry the brood.”
“Yes, yes, the brood worries and the Elders were very specific; you are not to talk to the aliens.”
Expected publication July 15, 2025 by Flame Tree Press
ISBN 9781787589452
Rocky Mountain Fiction Writer member’s striking new book of time travel and biological science fiction is a thrilling ride.
Kezza, an aerialist in the Martian circus, can never return to Earth – but she can assassinate the man she blames for her grim life on the red planet. Her murderous plans take an unexpected turn, however, when she uncovers a sinister secret.
A thousand years into the future, Azad lives a safe but controlled life on the beautiful desert planet of Nabatea. His world is upended when he joins a crew of space-traveling historians seeking to learn the true reason that their ancestors left Mars
Separated by time and space, Kezza and Azad’s stories collide in the Martian desert.
They looked into darkness. The darkness looked back . . .
An utterly gripping story of survival and first contact on a hostile planet from Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Children of Time.
A commercial expedition to a distant star system discovers a pitch-black moon alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is deadly to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud.
Under no circumstances can a human survive Shroud’s inhospitable surface – but a catastrophic accident forces Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne to make an emergency landing in a barely adequate escape vehicle. Alone, and fighting for survival, the two women embark on a gruelling journey across land, sea and air in search of salvation.
But as they travel, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s unnerving alien species. It also begins to understand them. If they escape Shroud, they’ll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all . . .
Format: 123 pages, Paperback Published: November 24, 2022 by Gollancz ISBN: 9781399607797
Winner of the 1973 Hugo award for Best Novella, and nominated for many others, The Word for World is Forest is part of Le Guin’s ‘Hainish Cycle’. It explores a future history of Earth and pacifistic ideals in its depictions of violence, colonialism and resistance.
A world of peaceful aliens conquered by bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably altered. Forced into servitude, the Athsheans find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters.
Desperation causes the Athsheans to retaliate against their captors, abandoning their strictures against violence. In defending their lives, they endanger the very foundations of their society. Every blow against the invaders is a blow to the core of Athsheans’ culture.
And once the killing starts, there is no turning back.
My Review
This novella has been on my TBR pile for a while; my sleep pattern has been messed up by doing too much last week, so I slept most of yesterday, and as such I was awake half the night. Since I needed to keep myself entertained, I picked a book off my TBR pile. I read all 113 pages in one go, after reading the 2022 introduction by the series editor, and the author’s 1976 introduction. I found them both helpful in my reading of the novella, to understand the context. When LeGuin wrote this story, the U.S. was fighting an unjust war in Vietnam. She admits to being preachy in writing the story and not being subtle about her anger. LeGuin writes in her 1976 introduction that she tried to make the characters complex, except Davidson, who is a caricature of the evil invader. I think it’s important to remember the context and author’s own thoughts about the work when reading it.
This novella is part of the Hainish series. The context of the Hainish universe, with multiple humanoid species in the wider story-universe. The humans are part of a League with these other civilisations, but on the planet, Athshe, they are 27 light years from Earth and have only old orders to follow. On the planet, there is a humanoid species, the Athsheans, who are smaller, and furred. The Athsheans have a complex society and live partly in world-time and dream-time, with a multiphasic sleep pattern.
The humans are soldiers and loggers. They’re destroying the forest, which kills the land, as the continuous rain washes the soil away without the tree roots to hold it in place. After one of the soldiers, Davidson, rapes and murders one of the Athsheans, he’s attacked by her husband. Later, the husband leads an attack on the logging camp that Davidson runs, killing all of the humans and freeing the Athsheans. This man becomes a god among the Athsheans, the first to commit murder.
What follows is a war as the Athsheans demand promises from the humans that they’ll free the Athshean slaves, stay in their already deforested area, and stop destroying the forest. Davidson, a paranoid soldier, continues his war on the Athsheans, resulting in retaliatory attacks on the main human settlement and one of the logging camps.
It’s a short, punchy story, told from the perspective of multiple characters in eight chapters. I found it thought-provoking and painful to read at times. It’s probably not the book you should start with when reading LeGuin. You need more of the context of the Hainish series.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 