The Dragon Republic, by R. F. Kuang

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is the sequel to The Poppy War, and in the shape of a classic second book of a trilogy, things get significantly worse here and do not get significantly better at the end.

Yes, from the state of things in The Poppy War. Yes, I remember how things were in that book. There is, it turns out, a lot darker to get.

And yet. And yet and yet and yet. Is this book a catalog of unremitting horrors. No. No, not unremitting. There is a lot of bleak here. There is a lot of darkness, a lot of betrayal, a lot of people fleeing from horrible situations in their world, in their politics, in their own hearts and minds, in their...theologies, I guess I would say, in a very concrete and immediate sense. This is a book that takes some of the worst situations in our own history and gives magical and divine weight to metaphors about them, and those are...not even necessarily the worst situations it describes. Some of the worst situations are very real ways humans have treated each other historically.

And yet.

Still not unremittingly bleak.

Still ways for humans to keep trying, to keep hoping, to keep reaching for a solution, for understanding, for some way for things to get better.

This is a second book.

Will book three be about the day the teddy bears have their picnic? I expect not, no. I expect there to be addiction and loss and turmoil, starvation and death and upheaval, fire and flood and betrayal. But I expect Rin to fight not just for the barest edges of survival but for something more in herself. I expect Rin to keep finding something more. And that's why I keep reading these books. And why I think you might want to also.

Beware, beware!

Today I have an essay about kindness and thought experiments out in Uncanny Magazine, Beware the Lifeboats. Go, read, enjoy!

Present Writers: Diane Duane

This is the latest in a recurring series! For more about the series, please read the original post on Marta Randall, or subsequent posts on Dorothy Heydt, Barbara Hambly, Jane Yolen, Suzy McKee Charnas, Sherwood Smith, Nisi Shawl, Pamela Dean,Gwyneth Jones , Caroline Stevermer, Patricia C. Wrede, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Nancy Kress.

I've been talking a lot about entropy in 2019, so I think it's inevitable that I would turn to the works of Diane Duane. Duane has written a gigantic and varied body of work--for adults and young people, original and media tie-ins, short and long, fantasy and science fiction of countless sub-genres, for prose and film, traditionally published and fan-funded, ranging over forty years. Name it and Duane has probably done it. She's worked alone and with others; she's written with Star Trek properties and Tom Clancy and even secretly been a John M. Ford character. (What, you thought Princess Deedee was purely an invention of Mike's?)

But in her longest and best-known series, the Young Wizards books, the antagonist is the Lone Power, which is Entropy. The Lone Power is the unraveler. And in a time when saving the whales was a cliche, Duane's characters stood with the whales to help them save themselves. What does Diane Duane's work mean to me. Friends, oh friends, this year, this horrible year, I am choking up trying to write this post about how lovely it is to have her here, still working side by side with us against the chaos of it all. Because we need this more than ever. We need the partnerships with other beings. We need to embrace other ways of thinking for what we all bring to the table. We need to keep turning over the assumption we made and letting it ramify. And that is what the Young Wizards books do and have always done, from the first time Nita and Kit went on errantry.

There are so many other things Duane's work has done--not always what it seems from the cover, she has some of the most oddly composed covers I have ever dealt with as a reader--but here and now, in the entropic vortex that is 2019, I find myself more appreciative than ever of the quiet, firm fierceness of these books, and of their author.