A pair of short SF books with central F/F
Feb. 21st, 2020 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hebethen posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
fffridayFebruary: it's been a hell of a month. But I did get to read a couple of F/F things so far! Both of these deal with the weight of expectation placed on a single person.
First, Rivers Solomon's The Deep. It's a novella set in a multi-medium shared universe (hence the co-credits), where an undersea merfolk civilization descended from the pregnant women thrown overboard from slave ships. The novella follows a neurodivergent historian from this civilization and what it means for her to bear that history alone, trying to walk the painful razor edge between remembrance and suffocation, peace and vacuity. The historian's growing love for a land woman is a significant (though not sole) part of what helps break her out of her cycle. There's some very interesting SFFnal worldbuilding amidst the allegory, and I also found the postmortem in the afterword illuminating.
Second, Lee Winter's Shattered, a short superhero romance novel with mild alt-history elements. Our POV character is a cynical tracker tasked with retrieving errant superheroes (powerful humanoid aliens who have sworn to protect Earth), and in the course of tracking down an elusive hero from the first generation, they strike sparks -- at first antagonistic, then, as they explore the conspiracy behind the superheroes, romantic. I found that the details sometimes clashed with the overall theme and messaging in distracting ways, and the editing seemed to reflect non-native English syntax at times, but I appreciated its take on one-night stands and "enemies to lovers to friends".
First, Rivers Solomon's The Deep. It's a novella set in a multi-medium shared universe (hence the co-credits), where an undersea merfolk civilization descended from the pregnant women thrown overboard from slave ships. The novella follows a neurodivergent historian from this civilization and what it means for her to bear that history alone, trying to walk the painful razor edge between remembrance and suffocation, peace and vacuity. The historian's growing love for a land woman is a significant (though not sole) part of what helps break her out of her cycle. There's some very interesting SFFnal worldbuilding amidst the allegory, and I also found the postmortem in the afterword illuminating.
Second, Lee Winter's Shattered, a short superhero romance novel with mild alt-history elements. Our POV character is a cynical tracker tasked with retrieving errant superheroes (powerful humanoid aliens who have sworn to protect Earth), and in the course of tracking down an elusive hero from the first generation, they strike sparks -- at first antagonistic, then, as they explore the conspiracy behind the superheroes, romantic. I found that the details sometimes clashed with the overall theme and messaging in distracting ways, and the editing seemed to reflect non-native English syntax at times, but I appreciated its take on one-night stands and "enemies to lovers to friends".
