#REVIEW: Scion, by James Islington

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

For your edification: a brief review of a brief book.

James Islington is becoming one of those authors where I preface every mention of him with a disclaimer; he has written six books, I have bought seven of them, read roughly four and 1/4, and liked … two. Honestly, I only picked Scion up because, as a science fiction novella unrelated to any of his previous work, it promised to be different, and I figure that if I gave the guy a chance in a whole different genre and still wasn’t able to fully endorse his work, it would be okay to put him down.(*)

And … well, damn it, I would like to request to Islington that he stick to short-format science fiction for a while. He’s good at it. You can get away with a lot of shit in a standalone novella that you can’t get away with in a novel or especially a trilogy, and the kind of stuff you can get away with is exactly the kind of stuff that has historically bothered me about his work. You just need enough world building for everything to hang together, y’know? The book is 226 pages and I read it in about two and a half hours. There’s no time to explain everything! It’s no problem!

I am also a sucker for hazily futuristic worlds involving genetically and possibly mechanically augmented assassins(**), which seems like a very specific thing to be a sucker for but somehow isn’t. I like the main character’s voice, I like the overall tone of the book, I like that it’s gritty without being entirely nihilistic and twisty-turny without feeling like a puzzle box. I really enjoyed my time with this book, and in a way that was very different from the rest of Islington’s work. There are a lot of things, positive and negative, you can say about his work, but I think even his biggest fans would not describe either Licanius or Hierarchy as “fun.” This book is fun! It may not surprise you to learn that I like reading books I think are fun.

Now, that said: this is, again, a novella, and while I didn’t personally pay this much for it, the MSRP on the hardcover edition is thirty-two dollars, rather steep for a book that didn’t even last me three hours. I’m pretty sure I used cash back from my Amazon Prime card to buy this, or at least heavily subsidize it, and of course it was discounted already. But if you’re the type to want to buy this in a store that isn’t able to offer the kinds of discounts that Amazon does, maybe wait for paperback, if any such thing is coming. Or maybe not! Money’s not real, and I have a job mostly to support my book habit anyway.

(*) After buying Hierarchy 3, apparently called The Justice of One, of course. I may not read it! But I’m gonna buy it.

(**) Actual assassins, who start the book with an assassination. Lots of main character assassins don’t do nearly as much assassinating as you might expect them to.

In which I am a bad blogperson

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I’m tired, kinda crabby, and not feeling especially well, and at 8:00 I just finished my first meal of the day.

Not really thinking especially clearly, either. Y’all be good. I’ll see you tomorrow.

One left

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

I finished Towers of Midnight last night, which after a promising start to Sanderson’s concluding trilogy spent most of its length spinning its wheels. I’ve been doing a book a month pretty religiously since I started this, but I may go ahead and knock out A Memory of Light soon just to be finished. There’s a new John Gwynne book to get to first, though, and that’s much more important. I will almost certainly do a wrap-up post once I’m finished, but nobody wants to read that and you all know what it’s going to say by now.

One of my high school teachers passed away in the last few days at the ripe old age of 95, and while I’m not certain I’m going to write about her, I may attend the service on Monday and I’m a little twisted about it at the moment. I’d looked her up a few times over the past several years and just assumed that either there was no obituary to be found or it was eluding my Google-fu; no, turns out she was just nearly immortal, and I suspect she’d been running mostly on spite for the last couple of decades. I say that with deep affection, of course.

For now, though, the last week has been emotionally exhausting on a whole lot of levels, and I came home and immediately fell asleep in my chair for an hour or so, and I think the proper method of recovering from my week is to go hit a bunch of monsters with a giant fuck-off hammer. So I’m off to do that. I’ll see y’all tomorrow.

Can’t blog, reading

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

Bound and determined to finish the penultimate Wheel of Time book tonight. Less than 150 pages.

LOL

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

I cannot wait to vote for this man for President. Cannot. Wait.

Teachers are not really supposed to talk politics or endorse candidates in class, right? I get why that’s an expectation, although I don’t like it very much, and I think most teachers feel the same way, more or less. I have never confirmed how I have voted on any issue, although I have said things like “you have met me; your guess is probably correct” to kids before. But I will say that it was interesting to drag myself into work today, bleary-eyed and sticky in the weird way that one is after a night with little sleep, and notice just how many of the teachers in the building happened to be wearing blue. I was wearing a burgundy polo shirt, for no better reason than it was the first shirt I touched when I reached into my closet this morning, but I did make sure that all of the LED lights in my classroom were blue today. For some reason.

We were supposed to have state testing today, but it had to be cancelled at the last second because of some sort of tech issue that was either district-wide or originated at the state level, I’m not quite sure. But cancelling testing meant that everyone in the building had planned for very short class periods today and suddenly we all found ourselves with an extra 25 minutes in each class period to contend with. My car had a cylinder timing issue, and got towed to the mechanic yesterday, and after work I had to go pay for the repair, then take my rental back to the airport, then go back to the mechanic to actually pick my car up. So I didn’t get home until 6:30, which in Indiana in November is pitch fucking black. To say today was exhausting is to slightly understate things, I think.

All of that is prelude to say that last night was successful beyond my wildest dreams; I was somewhat willing to be optimistic about Texas, Maine and Michigan, but … Kansas? Mississippi??? And to be honest I’m not sure how the hell we lost Louisiana, because with all the vote that was still out in East Baton Rouge and New Orleans when I went to bed, that should have been plenty to take the win. Lauren Boebert is out. Virginia fucking Foxx is out. Kris Kobach is unemployed. Vivek Ramaswamy can slink back into the pile of semi organic goo he slithered out of. It was a good fucking night.

I don’t want to rain on my own parade, but I do think we all need to brace ourselves for an epic level of fuckery in the next two and a half months. There’s been surprisingly little yammering about the election being fixed so far, at least from what I’ve seen (and, of course, I’ve been at work all day) and it may be that we won so big that allegations of shenanigans simply can’t take hold. There’s going to be some bullshit, though. Probably a lot of bullshit. I hope the Democrats are ready for it.

And then, next January, I want these fuckers to hit the ground running, and I want this administration torn to shreds. No mercy, no quarter, and no pause. I want hearings, I want arrests, and I want fundamental fucking change. Some of these people are going to turn out to be Blue Dogs again, even if they aren’t calling themselves that (I’m looking your way, Josh Turek, and I’m very much prepared to not like you if you turn out to be another Fetterman,) but I have to feel like our majorities are big enough that we can absorb the occasional defection from a conservative Democrat from a red state. I mean, Christ, look at this:

I didn’t see anybody predicting an 83 seat majority. I sure as hell didn’t see anyone predicting what could be a 56 seat Senate, either. The first thing I want out of all of these people is a robust discussion about who leadership is going to be. I’m not as down on Hakeem Jeffries as a lot of people– the man has done a remarkable job holding his coalition in the House together over the last couple of years– but I am entirely willing to lose Chuck Schumer, and I don’t want to see either of them simply coronated.

I’m going to take a shower and go to bed early now. Regardless of whatever’s coming next, I feel a lot better about being an American right now than I did a couple of days ago.

Taking a deep breath

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

The last few times I’ve live-blogged election nights haven’t gone well, so look for me over on Bluesky tonight. I’ll be up until I can’t stand it any longer.

They’re just not that bright

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

Really freaking rough day at work today. The day started off with an emergency staff meeting. As you can probably imagine, an emergency staff meeting, this one called on literally three minutes’ notice, is never a good thing, and this one was worse than most, as we lost a student over the weekend. Apparently she had a massive seizure while in the tub. Halloween was her fourteenth birthday, and was also the day her parents decided to take her off life support.

She was not one of mine, and not a kid I knew, but the building was a mess as a result. We were given a statement we were asked to read to our second hour classes, and there were grief counselors in the building all day long.

And as much as I would like to blame that for my kids’ academic performance today, I really can’t do that, as once again a huge percentage of my students decided to pretend today that they had not only not attended a single second of any sort of 8th grade Math class, they had spent their entire lives living in a small, dark box and had never encountered the concept of numbers in general. Far, far more kids, unfortunately, than could be reasonably presumed to have known this girl. Plus it was also happening during first hour, before anyone knew what had happened.

I don’t know if non-educators can really understand the frustration of spending an entire month of class time talking about solving equations every single day, and then to wait a week and have a solid majority of your students act as if they have never encountered any such nonsense before. Or to ask an eighth grader what three plus nine is as part of explaining an admittedly somewhat tricky story problem and be greeted with a blank stare and three obvious guesses before you finally pry the answer to that first-grade math question out of them.

I still can’t figure out how it is fair that I get judged on the academic performance of people for whom being a moron is aspirational. “When am I going to use this?” indeed; you will never in your life use anything, and I wish I could get across to you how intensely depressing that all is.

Are there standardized tests later this week? Of course there are. They are never fucking dumber than right before something that is important to me, but not to them.

Monthly Reads: October 2026

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, ReadingLeave a comment

I read a lot of really good books this month, and A Court of Splintered Harmony is definitely the book I’ve talked about the most, but Book of the Month goes to Christopher Buehlman’s The Thrice-Bound Fool, which somehow I didn’t review. You should read it.