Asking the Wrong Questions

As the year approaches its end, I've ensconced myself in my reading nook to avoid thinking too hard about everything happening outside of it. This batch of reviews—once again, comprising mostly 2023 publications, including some of the most intriguing and anticipated books of the year—covers books read over the last few months.  Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis - Kevin, a sad-sack aspiring screenwriter turned professional film extra, is dismayed when his girlfriend of fourteen years, Amber, announces that she's joined a reality show competition for one of two spots on a mission to colonize Mars. A former gymnast and evangelical who is at loose ends in life—she has a master's degree in environmental science but her only employment options are with companies she considers unethical, and she and Kevin make a living growing quasi-legal marijuana, of which they partake liberally—Amber sees the show, and Mars, as a chance to not only find meaning, but to make a new world with...

My review of Shelley Parker-Chan's debut novel She Who Became the Sun —recently nominated for a Hugo award (the first time ever, apparently, for an Australian author), with Parker-Chan also appearing on the Astounding ballot—appears today at Strange Horizons . I enjoyed this novel a great deal, and particularly the way in which it combined a non-Western historical fantasy of the type we've seen so much of in the last decade or so with some really interesting ideas about gender. It's a story about how societies are weakened by rigid gender roles, and about how specific individuals, by queering those roles, can achieve power. Right at the beginning, then, Parker-Chan establishes that the rigid gender roles that govern the novel's society aren't simply a matter of one gender having more power and freedom than the other, but of separate spheres of knowledge—and that the men in the novel, by convincing themselves that women's knowledge is both useless and out of rea...