Category: Reviews

#REVIEW: Sublimation, by Isabel J. Kim

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In my review of Angel Down a couple of days ago, I talked about how I generally don’t like it very much when authors try to screw around with structure in novels. I was forced to eat my words with Angel Down’s unorthodox single-sentence structure, and now I’m about to review a book where a good half of it is written in second person.

Yes, second person. As in everything is “you did this” and “you did that,” like an old Choose Your Own Adventure book. And again, when I realized what I was looking at, I very nearly sighed and put the book down. And again, if I had done that, it would have been a huge mistake, as this is one of the more original science fiction books I’ve read … well, okay, since There Is No Antimemetics Division, which wasn’t even two weeks ago, but before that? It was a while.

Sublimation is more or less set in the real world, with only one real change to how the world works, but man, that one change is a doozy. Sometimes, when a person crosses a border, a person will leave a copy of themselves behind in the original country. Those people are entirely separate human beings, referred to as instances of the original person. Sometimes they adopt different names, sometimes they simply move on with their lives and keep their original names and identities. If instances physically touch each other, they recombine into one person, but keeping the memories and experiences of both people, who may theoretically have had many years to diverge from one another. Different cultures over human history have dealt with instantiation in different ways; sometimes it’s regarded as good luck, sometimes … not so much, but the book is clear that this has been with humanity forever. Odysseus comes up repeatedly; Adam and Eve left instances behind when they left Paradise, and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are referred to as instances of God.

This is, in case it’s not clear, one of those books that has Big Questions to ask, and if you are an immigrant this is going to hit you hard, and while instancing doesn’t necessarily happen based on major life decisions, I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to meet a version of myself who had turned left in places in my past where I chose to turn right. And, again, this is a huge thing– different countries treat citizenship of instances differently, especially since it happens when people are crossing borders anyway. And it’s not a situation where one person is the “original” and one is the instance– they are both instances, and there is no original person. There is technology that has recently been developed that does allow instances to touch each other, and when both of them are using it there’s a 95% success rate in preventing recombination when they touch. But up until recently, this was permanent if you didn’t have a way to get back to the person you instanced from.

The main characters are all instances; one a young woman named Soyoung/Rose whose mother took her to America when she was a child and she grew up there; “Rose” is the American version, and Soyoung remained in South Korea. The other is a friend of hers, Yujin/YJ, who moved to America for college. While Soyoung’s instantiation wasn’t intentional, Yujin actually hoped to split, and plans to recombine after both the South Korean and American sides of him have gotten their educations and their careers started. Soyoung and Rose haven’t talked in years. Yujin and YJ talk nearly every day. Soyoung’s mom instanced also, so there are versions of “mom” in both countries.

The story begins when Soyoung/Rose’s grandfather in South Korea dies, and Rose returns for the funeral, seeing her instance for the first time in nearly two decades. And Soyoung, who has gotten engaged in the meantime, forcibly integrates them without Rose’s permission. Meanwhile, YJ works for the company that makes the anti-reintegration technology, and it turns out they’re about to debut a new product that can re-split a pair after they have reintegrated, back into their separate instances, with their original memories intact. Yujin and Soyoung are old friends; Rose did not know YJ.

And … well, we’re off to the races, with corporate espionage, familial betrayal, generational guilt, emotional manipulation and a cat hilariously named Mr. Crouton all in the mix.

(Right, I forgot to mention it: when the subject of a chapter is an instance, the chapter is written in second person. When Soyoung and Rose integrate, the narration shifts to third person. It’s a good example of how playing with structure can work.)

I loved this book. I love the premise, the execution was great, and Isabel J. Kim is absolutely on my list of authors I’m going to continue to keep my eyes on in the future. This was a really remarkable piece of work. If you like smart books written by smart people you absolutely want to read this one.

Now, that said: two caveats, to close this out: first, this is getting seriously mixed reviews– it’s at 3.65 on Goodreads right now, which is normally not a great sign. Usually, that means that a book isn’t great; other times it can just mean it was written by a Black person or has a gay relationship in it. Now, I can see the second-person aspect causing some people to put it down immediately– again, I almost did– so that’s going to account for some of it, but I looked through some of the reviews and didn’t immediately feel like the people who weren’t big fans of the book were stupid, so maybe if you’re on the fence look at some other reviews and see what folks had to say.

Second, I do not understand the title. The physics definition of “sublimation” is something that moves from a solid state directly to a gas, much like “melt” means to move from a solid to a liquid. That does not seem to apply here at all. The psychological definition, and I’m pulling straight from Merriam-Webster here, is “to divert the expression of (an instinctual desire or impulse) from its unacceptable form to one that is considered more socially or culturally acceptable.” And that almost feels like it should fit, but … not really. If you’ve read this and you can explain the title, I’d love to hear it. I mean, Instance or Instantiation were both right there.

#REVIEW: Our Sister’s Keeper, by Jasmine Holmes

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I feel like I haven’t started a review with “Man, look at that awesome cover” in a while, but look at that awesome cover.

I had planned to review an entirely different book tonight, and I have a couple of movies to talk about as well, and I can already tell I’m going to have to review the book I’m reading now, and tomorrow and Saturday already have the traditional first-and-last-of-the-month book posts planned, so expect a flurry of review talk around here for the next few days. I picked this up last night specifically because I thought I could finish it by the end of the month; I was once again taken by surprise by an Aardvark book, basically not putting it down other than for sleep until I finished it, and at just over 300 pages, it’s a quick read.

Did you see Get Out? You should have. I don’t appear to have reviewed it here, but it’s a great movie.

Imagine that Get Out was a book.

(If it was a book, tell me, because I didn’t know that and I want to read it.)

Imagine that Get Out was more about feminism than racism.

Now imagine that Get Out was about feminism and set in a fictional Black free town in Mississippi in 1927, just a few years after the massacres that destroyed the Black communities in Rosewood, Florida and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And buckle the fuck in, because this one is a hell of a ride, with a fantastic twist toward the end– hell, a couple of them– and I don’t know what the hell is going on with July right now, because I’ve had too many DNFs and too many six-star reads for a single month. I’m not even gonna give you any details beyond the setting. Go in blind. Just trust me. And damn, somebody shove Jasmine Holmes a huge pile of money and make a movie out of this. Jordan Peele? You out there? This is your next project.

#REVIEW: Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

Every time I say this, I expect to get some pushback from someone, and I never do: World War I was a war that was fought for absolutely no reason at all, and every single person who died in it died for nothing. World War II is widely regarded as The Last Good War; its predecessor may have been the most wanton waste of human life I’m aware of. It was fought at a time where the technology to kill people far outstripped the technology to defend them, and every single thing about it was horrible.

Daniel Kraus, author of Whalefall, has written a book about World War I, where a group of American soldiers discover an angel dying in the mud in no-man’s-land between American and German positions. I read Whalefall when it came out in 2024, and I was surprised just now to discover that I five-starred it when I read it; my memories of it are not especially positive and I was expecting to discover I hadn’t liked it very much. I almost didn’t pick this book up, and then it won a Pulitzer, and FOMO kicked in, and to hell with it, it was cheap.

But I didn’t almost not buy it because I didn’t like Whalefall. I almost didn’t buy it because the book is structured as a single sentence, 304 pages long.

And the thing is, call me a philistine if you want, I’m generally not fond of people who try to fuck with structure too much in books. I like my narratives straightforward and my narrators reliable. I like dialogue to have quotation marks around it. I like all the text in a book pointed the same way. And I like sentences and paragraphs to be reasonable in length. I like a good long sentence once in a while, anyone who has read me for more than a few days knows that; 304 pages is Too Long.

So here’s the good news: if you have avoided this book because of the single-sentence thing, it’s absolutely a gimmick, and it’s almost unworthy of the book, to be honest. Here’s a randomly-chosen two-page spread:

You will note that there are, if not precisely paragraph breaks, certainly gaps between clauses that serve as such, and note the image break in the top left as well. The book also has chapters. Now, you’ll also notice that every paragraph starts with “and,” which you should expect to see a lot of, and all of those “paragraphs” end with commas, so technically this is all one sentence, or at least part of it.

But, c’mon. One of the reasons for paragraph and sentence breaks is to give the eye a place to rest, and the commas do that perfectly well. You will not notice, as you’re reading, that this book is one long sentence.

You will also notice that it never slows down, and it never lets up, but that’s more a function of the writing than the structure. Kraus could have sprinkled periods at reasonable places throughout this text without changing a single word and the character of the narrative itself would not have changed one whit. And, honestly, read those few paragraphs, and you’ll know whether you want to read this or not; follow that instinct.

I will say that I did really enjoy this book– it’s not on my 2026 shortlist, but if there’s going to be a book that sneaks onto my end-of-year list without having been on the shortlist, this will be it; it just depends on how well it sticks with me. It’s a better book than my recollection of Whalefall, certainly, and I suspect if I reread Whalefall tomorrow I would still think so. The sheer hopelessness of the WWI setting and the idea of saving a downed angel was a good enough high concept for a book to begin with, and the voice of the novel is perfectly matched to the setting and the characters. There’s also one other narrative trick in the last part of the book that I’m not going to spoil but which works very well; the book ends perfectly.

Well, sort of. You’ll see when you read it.

I have another Daniel Kraus book on my TBR shelf, one that just came out; he wrote a science fiction novel called The Sixth Nik, which means I’ll have read three of his books and they’ll have been from three wildly different genres. I know he’s got a ton of other books; Nik will determine whether I start seeking out his back catalogue or not.

Choose your own review

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Reading, Reviews2 Comments

I had a shingles shot yesterday, because I’m old now, and my doctor warned me that the shingles shot has a higher than average chance of kicking the ass of the person it’s administered to. I wouldn’t say the shot has kicked my ass, but I’m definitely not in the mood for anything today and more than a little dumber than usual. So I’m not writing a real post tonight, but I will tell you that I’ve finished two books and watched two movies in the last few days that, under other circumstances, I might review. If you’re especially interested in my opinion on any of these, let me know, and I’ll move it up in the queue.

(There’s no queue. But if anybody wants a review of any of these, you’ll get it.)

Three of these will be at least mostly positive. One, and you can probably guess which one, will very much not, and since you already know I hated it, I’ll just give you actual reasons.

#REVIEW: The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell

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This had better be the worst thing I read this year.

More on it later, possibly, but I have a terrible movie to watch before I talk about the terrible book. Needless to say, I have no idea who Michael Korda is, but I don’t believe he even read this fucking thing.

#REVIEW: The Death and Life of Malcolm X, by Peter Goldman

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This will be brief, as it’s been a stressful day; we had most of the rest of the work done on the bathroom (there are, sadly, still a couple of tasks to finish) and the guys were both an hour and a half late and then took much longer than they anticipated, which means I’ve spent the entire day waiting, and I’m currently chewing my arms off and climbing the walls at the same time.

The Standard Malcolm X Disclaimer: Malcolm is one of my favorite Americans; I nearly named my son after him (I had my wife talked into it and everything, and then we mutually decided to name him after his grandfather instead) and I have most of a shelf of books about him. “This book is about Malcolm X” means that I’m going to read it and unless it is tremendously poorly written, I’m going to enjoy it. It’s kinda baked in from the jump. And this book is certainly not poorly written.

Peter Goldman’s book was the first major biography of Malcolm X, coming out in 1973, with the edition I read dated 1979. I’m honestly surprised I’d never encountered it before, but I read The Afterlife of Malcolm X back in February and it got referenced enough times that I felt compelled as an amateur Malcolm scholar to pick it up.

And it’s a surprisingly solid biography, especially when one considers that it was written by a white guy in the early 1970s. Goldman appears to have had a good relationship with Malcolm and while the book isn’t as heavily footnoted as I might have liked, I didn’t encounter anything that smacked of shoddy historiography. He focuses heavily on the last year of Malcolm’s life, and then — and this is what made me decide to go ahead and write about it — also spends about a fifth of the book talking about the trial of the three men who were eventually convicted and sentenced for the assassination. Now, Afterlife covers that material as well, but that book is more interested in Malcolm as a cultural icon and I don’t think one book substitutes for another. The real interesting bit of the book is the 1979 addendum at the end, where Goldman says that he no longer believes two of the men convicted for the killing had anything to do with it.

I can’t really issue a blanket recommendation for this book, not because it’s bad but because it’s 2026 and there has been a ton written about Malcolm X in the years since he was killed. If you’re only going to read one book about him, you should read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book every single American should read anyway. If you want to read a biography, specifically, I’d recommend Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life Of Reinvention or Les and Tamara Payne’s The Dead are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X. If you already read those books and you haven’t read this one? Definitely give it a read.

#REVIEW: There Is No Antimemetics Division, by QNTM

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

I liked this book so much, I’m willing to forgive the author for wanting me to call him QNTM. I don’t know why, but I have a weird visceral reaction to authors using their Internet handles on their books. It’s made even weirder when you remember that “Luther Siler” is a pen name. I don’t know a single thing about QNTM other than that he wrote this book (and, I guess, that he’s a he, judging from his author picture) but if he’s going to keep writing books this good I’ll call him whatever the hell he wants.

This is one of the most original books I’ve ever read. I can imagine China Miéville writing something like it, which is not to say that Miéville has written anything like it yet. I’m not sure who or what else to compare it to. This is going to be a fairly short review, first because I don’t want to indulge in any spoilers, and second because beyond describing the premise, I’m really not sure how the hell to talk about this book. So I’m going to give you the basics, and I’m already telling you you need to read this if you’ve ever enjoyed science fiction that was smarter than you were, and that is going to have to be enough.

The main character of the book is Marie Quinn, who is in charge of the Antimemetics Division of something called the Unknown Organization. Her division is responsible for tracking, categorizing and occasionally keeping captive entities and objects that have the property of erasing themselves from memory. That’s what an antimeme is; it’s something that you view or interact with or occasionally get messily killed by and the very moment you’re not interacting with it you forget it exists. Some can erase specific kinds of memories (the book is generally not funny, but one entity that feeds on the very specific memory of knowing how to ride a bike has a fe pages dedicated to it) and some have the capability of also erasing notes, videos and recordings that reference their existence as well.

So, given that, and given that the potential threat these types of entities pose to civilization should be immediately clear, let me ask you two questions:

  1. How do you fight against these things, if you forget they exist the moment you turn away from them?
  2. How the hell do you write a book about fighting against something like that?

This is a short book; at under 300 pages it can be read in a day easily, and somehow, despite the complexity of the premise, it’s impressively clearly written. You would think this would be a mess to read, and in a lesser author’s hands, it would be; I certainly couldn’t have written this book. I almost read it twice in a row, and there’s a very good chance I’m going to read it again before the month is up. It’s an incredible achievement, both as a story and as a piece of craft. I know I’ve been super positive in my reviews lately (and I have read some amazing books in 2026) but once again I need to tell you that you absolutely have to read this one. Go grab it, right now, before you forget.

This was fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reviews2 Comments

It’s rare that I pick up a Lego set specifically because I want to build it, and not necessarily because I want it on display, but I took a look at the soccer ball set that hit stores in time for the World Cup and then a conveniently timed double points weekend rolled around and my money disappeared. Because look at the inside of this thing:

That looks a lot more complicated than it was, surprisingly enough, and it was tremendously satisfying to put together. Then there’s the bit that goes in the middle:

If you press that little tan piece sitting right in front of the green, the players jump up and down and the fireworks swing from side to side. Then the whole thing can close up, and honestly, the ball looks pretty cool closed up, too:

We aren’t going to do the math on how much this cost vs. how many hours it took to put together or anything like that, we’re just going to say it was a fun way to spend an evening and an afternoon, leave it at that, and … sigh, figure out somewhere to put it.

Book review coming tomorrow; I’m waiting for the high to die down a little bit.