This review is based on a free copy received from the publisher.

World of Trouble is the third book in the Last Policeman trilogy, following The Last Policeman and Countdown City. We're now just two weeks away from the asteroid hitting the planet. Hank Palace's police department has long since been shut down, but he still can't help but search for justice, even though it's about to stop mattering permanently. This time, while searching for his sister and her band of radicals who believe they can save the world, he finds another young woman, her throat cut and near death.

The meaning and significance of life or the lack thereof has long been a theme of detective fiction, and this series has brought a SF twist to the subject with the imminent destruction of life as we know it. Hank has coded the towns he passes through according to how people are dealing with the end: red towns, where civilization has already been abandoned; green towns, which are keeping up the pretense of life as normal, and blue towns, which appear abandoned but aren't. But he still goes on, searching for his sister and for answers, even while there's no protecting anybody and the answers won't make a difference.

There are no surprises here, either in regards to the ending we've been promised since the first book or in the case of what happened with Hank's sister and the woman with her throat cut, which I saw coming long in advance. But the ending is exactly what this series needed all the same. This quietly philosophical series is perfect for fans of detective stories with a twist or apocalyptic settings.

Overall: A

World of Trouble will be available on July 15.

This review is based on an ARC received from the publisher.

Prototype is the second part of Archetype, which I reviewed here:

http://unreachableshelf.weebly.com/on-the-shelf/archetype-by-md-waters

Because I can't talk about it without talking about things from the first book, I will not hold back spoilers. Although spoiler is perhaps the wrong word. There are very few things that could make this book worse.

When I reviewed Archetype, I was having trouble deciding what I should think of it because I wasn't sure if I was unfairly comparing it to The Handmaid's Tale. Now, I'm even more concerned that I'm hating this book unfairly because it's the book it is and not the book I wanted to read. I am a librarian, and I believe in every book to its reader. But I'm not sure there's such a thing as a case in which a book can take place in a future in which women are property while completely avoiding the seriousness of that issue to focus solely on the romance and in which that book is OK.

I couldn't figure out if Archetype was aiming for The Handmaid's Tale or The Stepford Wives. Now I know. It's neither. It's a romance that uses the oppression of women as a plot device. Slavery was only a red herring. Or a MacGuffin, maybe, but I'd rather be thinking about Clue than thinking about this book. In these books, men own women as a justification for how Emma wound up in Declan's control at the beginning of Archetype. That having been accomplished, Waters completely fails to consider the possible impact on society. There's the occasional reference to corporal punishment in the Wife Training Centers, but she doesn't seem to have put any thought into how a woman's life is different after being bought. For example, there's this statement, of one of Declan's assets:

"'Who's name is it under? Travista's?'

'Mine,' I say. 'I never gave it any thought, but Declan once had me sign a bunch of paperwork. Financial in nature. He said he wanted to protect me if anything happened to him. He was making sure I was set up and would not have to remarry or work.'" [Emphasis mine.]

Think about that last bit there. Women are property in these books. Fertile women, at least. The legal status of infertile women is explored even less, aside from the fact that they aren't allowed to marry and have to work in specific women's-work type jobs. Having her own money or not isn't supposed to have any impact on whether or not Emma would have to remarry if Declan died. So long as she's fertile she's supposed to be forced to marry and reproduce, and not be allowed to work. Granted, Declan lied some in the first book. In retrospect, the more I think about it, the more he lied about really stupid things. He lied about how he met Emma and that she was bought for him. Not that it doesn't make sense that he might not want her to know that, except that that's how their society works, and since he doesn't plan to keep her isolated forever eventually she'll find out that's how their society works. Obviously he put this asset in her name to hide it, and maybe he's lying about the fact that there's a possibility she could have the option to avoid remarrying, or have the choice to work if she wanted to, in the event of his death. Apparently the property is legally in her name, which makes no sense because if women are an asset that can be bought and sold, how are they allowed to own things?

There's generally a really strange sense in spite of the fact that girls are forced into Wife Training Centers and then forced to marry and reproduce, or to not marry if they're infertile, that women still have just as much agency as they do now in every matter except whom/if they marry and reproduce. The fact that Dr. Travista is making women fertile through a process that involves cloning them has apparently gone public in between the books. This is being handled really strangely, too. It sounds like women are voluntarily signing up to be cloned. If this world has such a shortage of fertile women and if women are nothing more than a commodity, then why are the women the ones deciding to be cloned? Why isn't the government or whoever forces the young girls into the Wife Training Centers rounding up all the infertile women and forcing the procedure on them? (Apparently girls in some of the WTCs are being cloned, and this is apparently the only scandalous thing, but you'd think that a system based on forcing all fertile women into slavery because of a shortage of fertile women would go gather up ALL of the women given this opportunity.) There's also a reference to how a woman gave her daughter to a WTC and "stayed home to raise her son" in language that sounds like she had a choice in the matter. As if fertile women are allowed to do anything besides stay home and raise children in the world of this book.

And on multiple occasions, during love scenes, Emma tells Noah that she is "his." We're following characters in the resistance, and she calls herself "his" in the same way that people might in our contemporary U.S., in which legally two people enter into a partnership of equals. Calling herself "his" would mean something entirely different in a setting in which a man could buy a wife. By contrast I'm thinking of The Handmaid's Tale, how when the first laws keeping women from having their own bank accounts came into effect and the woman we know as Offred knows that her husband doesn't understand that it doesn't matter that he will take care of her, what matters is that she's not allowed to take care of herself. Meanwhile Emma lives in a world in which she literally belongs to her husband, not in an "I am my beloved's and he is mine" kind of way, but in a men can literally buy her kind of way, and yet she seems to be perfectly happy to belong to a man as long as it's the right man.

There are all other kinds of things that don't seem to be thought out. The plot thread about Emma wanting to find her parents seems underdeveloped, just an excuse to get her away from the resistance at the beginning of the book long enough for Noah and Sonya to start a relationship. It's mentioned in passing that Noah's father has been married five times because he sells each wife after he impregnates her a time or two. With such a shortage of fertile women, why would a man sell a wife who'd proven herself? Wouldn't he be afraid he couldn't purchase another one, or that the new one would turn out to be infertile after all? Does he wait until he knows he'll be able to buy a new wife before he sells the old one? Does he actually make a profit because the women he's had children with have been proven to be fertile? Is this encouraged for reasons of diversifying the gene pool, since there aren't enough women to go around for all the men, or is it just an old fashioned case of a rich guy who wants variety? And is he really rich and powerful that he can apparently always buy a new wife in spite of them being a rare commodity?

And at the end, the wife training centers are sold but still intact, as if that's supposed to make us happy. Because it's fine that women are being sold as long as they aren't cloning them and then killing the originals any more.

Look, I know that dystopias aren't really supposed to have happy endings. More often than not, they don't. The happiest ending of one of the classics I can think of off the top of my head is Fahrenheit 451, in which case it's clear that people are preserving lost literature waiting for the current regime to fall to its own wars. If this were a "He loved big brother" ending, that would be one thing. But this is supposed to be a living happily ever after ending.

This is obviously supposed to be a romance novel more than it's supposed to be social SF. I don't dislike it because it's a romance novel. I like romance novels but, like every other book, I expect them to commit to their characters and their setting, whether we're talking about historical, SF or fantasy, or a slightly quirkier version of the real contemporary world. If you don't want your romance hero and heroine to have to deal realistically with horrific dystopian things, then don't write a book with a horrific dystopian premise.

Overall: F

Prototype will be available July 24

This review is based on an advance reading copy received from the publisher.

Melanie is one of a group of children being raised on an army base in England after civilization has collapsed. Every morning, armed soldiers come to her room, strap her into a wheelchair, and roll her into class. Her favorite teacher is Miss Justineau. Sometimes she asks questions about what will happen when she grows up, but those seem to make Miss Justineau sad.

It's hard to say much more than that about this book without giving too much away. Melanie, Miss Justineau, and the rest of their small band are each wonderfully rendered, complex characters, including Dr. Caldwell. Although her interests are fundamentally opposed to Melanie's, her motivations are understandable and not entirely unsympathetic, no matter how heartlessly she goes about pursuing them. Although there is plenty of post-apocalyptic suspense, this is at heart a touching story of devotion and survival.

Overall: A+

The Girl with All the Gifts will be available on June 10.

This review is based on an advance reader copy received from the publisher.

Fifty some years in the future, Meena wakes up with mysterious snake bites and decides she needs to run. She sees the Trail, a series of connected cells meant to draw power from the sea, and decides to walk it from India to Ethiopia where she was born.

In an earlier time, we hear the story of a young girl named Mariama whose mother was trying to escape slavery before Mariama was forced to run on her own, relying on strangers.

Meena's journey across the Trail is transformative, sometimes hallucinatory, and sometime revelatory of the truths that she is running from. I kept thinking that to an extent it's the SF equivalent of Wild by Cheryl Strayed (Meena is also dealing with many different kinds of grief), and wishing it had been around to be our community's Big Read instead. I'm adding it to my list of possibilities for the book-club-in-a-bar one of my coworkers and I lead.

Overall: A

The Girl in the Road will be available May 20

The protagonist of Ancillary Justice, Breq, used to be a spaceship, or more precisely both the AI of the ship and the hive-mind of the corpse soldiers it carried. Now she only has one human body left, which she intends to use for vengeance. While she searches for a weapon that she'll need to carry out her plan, she rescues an old crew member, Seivarden.

Everybody seems to be focusing on the exclusive use of "she" in Breq's non-gendered society in this book. (As far as I can tell, there do appear to be two sexes. Members of other cultures use "he" to refer to some Radchaai, and a brief, vague discussion of reproduction suggests that Radchaai do it the same way as other cultures that do differentiate between genders. They just don't seem to find it linguistically or socially relevant.) I was surprised to find out how little that seemed to figure into the point, other than as a way generally to start stretching the reader's brain into funny directions. At first it bothered me that I wasn't sure how I was supposed to be picturing characters, but after a while I remembered that half the time when I read a book I keep realizing I'm picturing a character with different colored hair or a different height than what the author has explicitly told me, so visualizing characters wrongly is nothing new and I should just take my best guess and stop worrying about it.

So gender isn't as big a part of this story as I expected after I kept hearing it compared to The Left Hand of Darkness, possibly because unlike that book both of our protagonists have their roots in the same gender neutral culture, although their experiences have been very different. Mostly, this is a story about identity. Breq used to be very much not human-shaped, when she was a ship called The Justice of Toren and many squads of human-shaped corpse soldiers. Now, she has one human-shaped body, but the question remains of what she is and how it relates to what she was, and whether or not she is or was human. Secondary themes explore the imperial Roman style Radchaii culture, it's relationship to other human cultures and non-human aliens, and the class differences within it.

This isn't a hundred percent the book that I was expecting, but it was a fascinating and intriguing world. I'll be looking forward to the next ones.

Overall Grade: A

This review is based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.

In Black Moon, civilization has collapsed in the face of a worldwide insomnia epidemic. It follows a handful of people whose stories intersect here and there, most of whom are among the lucky few who can still sleep. I thought this sounded like an inventive new approach to the apocalypse, in the vein of the impending doom of The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters.

It took a few cases of the insomniacs attacking sleepers, though, before I realized what this book actually is. The first time it happened, I accepted it as the reaction of somebody who has completely lost self control, enraged with envy when she sees somebody who can still sleep when she can't. But then teenage sleeper Lila's insomniac parents test her: they pretend to sleep, and when she doesn't attack them, they know that she is still secretly sleeping. I can buy a worldwide insomnia epidemic destroying society, but it doesn't logically follow for me that the insomniacs, even unhinged, are guaranteed to attack people they see sleeping. I could accept that it happened sometimes, but if we were just talking about people who were beyond all self control, I would expect that although some might react with violence, some would be overwhelmed by despair and weep uncontrollably, some would be too catatonic for the sight to register, etc. That they all react the same way makes them seem less like humans dehumanized by duress than like creatures that are genuinely not human, or like people who are under some kind of external control. The realization that it's so guaranteed that an insomniac will attack a sleeping person that Lila's parents could use pretending to sleep as a test made me realize: this is a zombie novel.

Metaphorically, I mean. Nobody comes back from the dead. Insomnia isn't transmitted by biting. Nobody says the zed-word. But the utter mindlessness and predictability of the insomniacs after they hit the poor-syntax stage in effect makes the threat in this book approximately the same as that of a zombie story, except with less explicit gore and when the affected kill the unaffected, they don't eat their brains.

Maybe I find a mindless enemy too uninteresting, but the zombie stories that I like are the ones in which the threat comes from the unaffected humans. I like the ones where the apocalypse brings out the worst in people, like 28 Days Later or Zombie, Illinois. Or I like the ones in which sentient zombies narrate and are symbolic of various marginalized human groups, like Breathers or Zombie, Ohio. But in this insomnia epidemic, everything is strictly insomniac vs. sleeper. Most of the systems of civilization appear to have collapsed more or less by the time the book begins, although one character's storyline begins when the epidemic is just a rumor. If curfews were instituted or any civil liberties curtailed before everybody was just too delusional to keep the world running, we don't hear about it.

If I'm giving the impression that this is primarily a book about sleepers hiding from and fighting off attacks by insomniacs, I don't mean to. The main activity in all of the storylines is wandering, in search of refuge or loved ones while the men ponder their sexual and/or marital baggage.There are female point of view characters, but their thoughts seemed more focused on the basics of finding safety/finding loved ones, if possible. The men also search for and think about their loved ones, but those thoughts involve a lot more wallowing in uncertainty about their relationships or sexual prowess. I have read romance novels that spend less time discussing the state of somebody's penis. Erotic romance novels. If you are a fan of a certain kind of low key "literary" novel that is mostly about the protagonist worrying about his masculinity, then I have the apocalypse for you.

It is entirely possible that I'm just not the audience for this book. If I liked zombie stories in which the main threat was the zombies, or books that deal with male anxiety re: impotence/priapism/feeling distant from their wives, I'll allow that this book might be a wonderful new twist on my favorite thing. I also didn't care for The Road, which proves that my taste in the apocalypse might be far different from the public at large. I'd like to give this book to somebody who did like The Road to see if they like it more than I did. It certainly wasn't badly written, but going solely on my own opinion, this book is not nearly as original as the description made it appear.

Overall grade: C


Black Moon will be available March 4

This review is based on a free promotional copy received from the publisher.

Archetype is set in a world in which fertility rates have dropped so low that fertile women are treated as property and sold as wives. Teenage girls are raised in wife training centers and the ones judged capable of bearing children are sold at age eighteen. It's into this world that Emma reawakes after an alleged accident with no memory, but with a mysterious voice in her head and vague dreams of another life. Her husband is there when she wakes and clearly loves her, but there's another man in her dreams, and she knows that one of them must be the man she loves and the other is her bitter enemy. She doesn't know which is which.

I have mixed feelings about this book, possibly because it invites comparison with The Handmaid's Tale. (Waters acknowledges that a scene she remembers of the handmaids in training in the movie version was an influence on this book, but that she only recently read the book after having written Archetype.) If I try to forget every other dystopia I've read, this book satisfies. Emma's development as she recovers her memory also lets the reader slowly into the light about how her world works, and her love for the husband who takes care of her while she also remembers a life with another man is believable and well executed.

In comparison with other dystopias, and especially The Handmaid's Tale, however, it falls short on the social commentary scale. It may be because of Emma's abridged memory, but although we are told that wives are the property of their husbands and must be branded because they are at risk of being stolen, we are shown very little oppression. Other than a couple of brief mentions about how pregnancy is not a choice and how birth control and abortion are both illegal, the day to day lives of the women we see doesn't seem to involve many negative ramifications. There is, of course, a secret horror to be revealed, but it appears to be a reasonably unimportant part of the system as a whole. It doesn't give the sense that Emma's daily life would be restricted at all if she weren't a patient. It's clear that she could not hold a job, but she paints and sells her paintings. Is the money they bring hers? Could she conduct business on her own? Does she even care if she has any control over money of her own? Would she want to hold a job if she were allowed to do so? Are there rules about where she can or can't go without her husband? Presumably adultery is illegal since men who buy wives to reproduce will want to be sure the children are their own, but are there any other rules about interaction between wives and men not their husbands?

Although the reproduction oriented rules of society immediately made my mind go to The Handmaid's Tale, I'm not sure that Archetype is about reproductive choice, or at least about the threat of increased legal restrictions on women exercising that choice. If that's the story Waters is trying to tell, then this result would be equivalent to writing a story about slavery and only showing slaves who worked skilled trades and had the opportunity to earn money and buy their freedom. The system would still be abhorrent, but the story would stop short of depicting the full horrors possible under it. But maybe Archetype is actually a social satire in the vein of The Stepford Wives, only with the SF elements visible all the way through, less about a systematic threat to take away women's control over their own bodies and more about how women can  lose themselves to the interests of their husbands and their children, often while being complicit in it. If that's the case, then the fact that the premise is so close to The Handmaid's Tale is unfortunate in that it invites what can only be an extremely unfair comparison, but the story as it advances from there is much more effective.

I'm not sure I will really know how I feel about Archetype until after I read the second book, Prototype, which I have an ARC of but am going to try to read some books coming out sooner first to make sure I get to them before the release date. (Prototype is due out in July.) For now, the Overall Grade is B.

Archetype will be released on February 6.

I knew that this and Parable of the Sower were two books in what was supposed to become a trilogy but never did, but I couldn't remember which came first. So my husband and I were at The Strand book store on vacation, I couldn't leave without buying something, I'd been meaning to read more Octavia E. Butler, and this was the only one on the shelf. Therefore, I went ahead and bought it only to determine later that it was the second. However, it stands so well on its own that I'm a little worried that I'll be disappointed when I go back and read the first book.

Olamina is struggling to build a community and a new faith called Earthseed in a post cataclysmic California in which the government is in the process of being taken over by a fundamentalist denomination known as Christian America, education has become a luxury or something that must be arranged privately, and the poor routinely find themselves sold into slavery, and all of it is frighteningly believable. I can't comment on how possible it all seemed when it was first published, but thirteen years later it strikes me as one of the most prescient books that I've ever read. Earthseed teaches that God is Change, the only lasting truth, and that people can shape Change just as Change shapes them.

And yet, as dark as the book is, so full of violence and despair, it ends with hope. Olamina begins to find supporters at the end of the book's main timeline; in the farther-future timeline, in which her daughter pieces together bits of her mother's journal along with occasional additions from her father and her uncle in order to tell the story, we are told that Christian America is now just one denomination among many. Although Olamina's daughter explains from her experience that a CA family might believe that a woman who moves out of her parents' house before marrying is more or less a prostitute, there's no law that keeps her from doing so. She's not the property of her father until she becomes the property of her husband, and neither does a male guardian have to manage her finances or own/rent the place where she lives. In short, America did not go the way of The Handmaid's Tale. And if the chaos just sort of passing and normality returning might seem narratively strange, without the drama of massive resistance movements, it also seems quite natural in its way that the country would just reject the CA movement when it became clear they did not have the answers.

Butler said that she planned to write a third book about the Earthseed communities who colonize other planets. Although I wish that there was much more of her work to read and that she was still alive and writing more of it, I actually do not miss the opportunity to read that particular book, and it makes perfect sense to me that Butler turned her attention to writing Fledgling instead. We know that Olamina herself did not go to the stars. Her story is over, and over so perfectly that I'm afraid any more might detract from it.

Overall Grade: A+

This review is based on an advance copy provided by the publisher.

Some seven hundred years or more in the future, the human race has colonized the galaxy, but has divided itself into "colors," castes which determine everybody's job and place in society. Darrow is a Red, the lowest of the colors. Although some High Reds serve the other colors while working among them, he is a low Red, digging below the surface of Mars, unaware even that the planet is already habitable and that others are enjoying the fruits of his labor. Then his wife, Eo, is killed, and Darrow is recruited for a mission to infiltrate the Golds, the highest ranking color.

I had trouble getting a read on the audience for this book. Darrow is sixteen when it begins, but he has been married for several years, so his life experience makes him more of an adult than a teen, the same way that the heroines of fantasy novels with psuedomedieval settings are often teenagers by today's standards but functioning as adults in their world in a way that don't exactly make them YA books. I've seen it compared to The Hunger Games, for the obvious reason that both are dystopias featuring arena combat, but a Suvudu blog post from August 7th listed books of social science fiction to read while waiting for Red Rising that included all of the classic dystopias from 1984 through The Handmaid's Tale, and while I enjoyed most of those books as a teenager, nobody would say that any of them are YA books. On the other hand, while the book is brutal, much of it lacks the philosophical depth that I would expect from an adult book.

Darrow, having undergone a long and excruciatingly thoroughly described process to be able to pass for a Gold, makes it into The Institute, in which the students are drafted into twelve houses, each represented by an Olympian god, which fight until one has conquered all the others. It seemed to me that it took rather a long time for Darrow to come around to the conclusion that it would be more effective to win supporters and make alliances rather than attempting to gain power through brutality. There's also rather a lot of rape in the book, most of it as a weapon of war. Although Darrow eventually attains a position in which he can punish rapists within his House, it had been going on as an apparently normal part of the process at the Institute regularly before then, with one member of a faction of the house having to tell another (referring to the women captured by the leader of another faction) "what if they were our girls?" as if the fact that they are human isn't self evident reason that stopping a serial rapist shouldn't be the first order of business. There's also very little discussion of the Pinks, a color which seems to consist primarily of sex slaves. Adding in the fact that there are only two significant female characters in the book, one of whom dies well before we meet the other, and there is an awful lot of sexual subjugation of women and comparatively little evidence of women with power and agency of their own.

There is a reasonable adventure story here, but so far the psychology is lacking and it has a serious case of Smurfette syndrome. Red Rising will be released on Jan. 28, 2014.

Overall Grade: C

The Suvudu blog post referred to can be found here: http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2013/10/get-ready-for-the-dystopian-world-of-pierce-browns-red-rising.html