Book #84: Hullmetal Girls, by Emily Skrutskie

This book has everything I love in a space opera: deep faith, high stakes, endless questions about humanity, and a cast that shows the best (and less-best) of what we might become. Basically, humanity is on a fleet of star ships, looking for a habitable planet. Over the decades, the fleet has stratified into seven levels, and a group called the Fractionists thinks that the ships should go apart from each other in order to better their search odds.

On top of this are the Scela, humans who have volunteered their bodies for the fleet's police force. It's a procedure not everyone survives, as people are essentially grafted into a machine that they then co-exist with, but our MCs are both Scela, one by desperation (the pay is good), and one who just woke up in her new body with no recollection of how it came to be.

The world-building is really, really good. Skrutskie put so much thought into how the Scela work (there's a mental component as well as a physical one), and that extends to the fleet as well as to individual characters. The in-world words flow naturally, and it was a humanity I believed, basically. It's been a while since I've read a space book that felt this real. I enjoyed it immensely.

Hullmetal Girls comes out in July, but you can pre-order it. And I think you should.

Book #85 and Book #86: Scythe and Thunderhead, by Neal Schusterman

These books are a trip.

Basically: a future where humanity has achieved perfection, except that now we don't die, so Scythes kill people at random, and those deaths are always permanent. There's also an AI called The Thunderhead that controls pretty much everything, except separation between Scythe and State is, like, 100% solid.

Which naturally means that the plot of the series is 100% finding loopholes and exploiting them. Because that's how we roll.

I really liked the first book, Scythe, a lot. The world-building is tremendous here, and I love the idea of an AI that just, like, decides to be good because why would it be evil? Also, I love a good manufactured religion with multifaceted problems and moral debates, and the Scythe provides that in SPADES.

Book #2, THUNDERHEAD, was also really excellent, if not quite so much to my personal taste. The bad guys were too successful, basically, I could have done with them losing SOMETHING going into book three. That said, my personal dissatisfaction included, I am still REALLY REALLY REALLY in need of book three. Which won't come out until who knows when, because THUNDERHEAD doesn't even come out for a week.

(My money is on the third book being called ELEGY, btw. We'll see how it goes.)

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ANYWAY, that was 2017 in books. I am down significantly from last year, but I also didn't do NEARLY as much re-reading this year. Also, not listed are a few manuscripts I'll talk about when they are published. ;)

I debated whether or not I would just list books in my book journal going forward, instead of recording them here, but I think I'll give 2018 a shot, just to see how it goes. I didn't read anything I didn't like this year, which was nice, and something I'm looking to continue going forward.

In 2018, I would like to read more steadily. I have tended the past two years to not read at home, and then read 15 books in the week I go to The Woods. I'd like to level that off, if possible. Something something cutting down on screen time before bed, at least. ;)