FF Friday

(Novellae?) (It's still Friday somewhere, right?)

I recent(ish)ly read a couple of sci-fi novellas featuring f/f couples and enjoyed both, each for different reasons!


The first was Malka Older's The Mimicking of Known Successes, a murder mystery set on Jupiter, featuring an academic and a detective who had dated, then broken up, when they were younger. Being a book by Malka Older, there's of course a bit of thinking about systems and institutions and situations where there may not be a right answer (but there definitely are plenty of wrong ones).

The worldbuilding was, I thought, presented in a way which would not excessively put off either "jump right in"-style enthusiasts like myself nor those who prefer a more explicit style, and the dynamic between the two leads also struck a satisfying balance between conflict and comfort. I found it a fun read and hope there will be more about these two.


The second novella was Lee Mandelo's Feed Them Silence, a near-future hard sci-fi story featuring a married couple who are going through a really, really rough patch. Our POV character is a workaholic neurobiologist who's been neglecting her home life; her wife is an anthropologist who's sick of her shit and also feels that her current research -- putting a special implant inside a wolf's brain so that a human can "see" from the wolf's perspective -- is unethical and not an effective approach to conservation.

This was a difficult story to read -- the arguments were very real, our POV character often very wrong, the sense of impending doom with the wolf research project appropriately icy and foreboding. I found it well-crafted but very dark in a realistic way -- not grimdark or utterly hopeless, but very uncompromising. The well-written wolf POV sections only made it harder!