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"The crew of the Rosebud are, currently, and by force of law, a balloon, a goth with a swagger stick, some sort of science aristocrat possibly, a ball of hands, and a swarm of insects."

This sentence got me to add this novella to my to-read pile. Nothing in the story is less weird than that, so buckle up!

There's a lot packed into this little story. Tiny spaceships, time travel, parallel universes, corporate overreach, and a fierce defense of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- even if the person pursuing their happiness happens to be trans.

It was a slow read for me, partly because it took my brain a while to process all the weirdness, and partly because I wanted to savor it. I've not read anything quite like it before, and I'm going to hold onto it and read it again. Maybe even soon.

If that sentence I quoted above has you intrigued, then by all means give it a go. I don't think you'd be disappointed.

I had a hard time rating this one. It's at its heart a pulp western, and I don't have much experience in that genre. The writing style was simple (lots of short declarative sentences) and in the third person, and that contrasts greatly with the more complex first person sci-fi I've read a lot of lately. It's probably not something I would have picked up, except for two things...

One, it's got a lot of steampunky alt-history elements to it. It's set in the late 1800s in the US Southwest (mostly), and it's nice to see steampunk stories that aren't set in Victorian England. Apart from an alien intelligence with mind control, it's a plausible alt-history. The alien influence affects why this history diverges from ours, but it does it through affecting people's motivations, not through introducing future tech. I liked that idea.

Second, it's largely set in a very specific area of the US Southwest I know very well, the central New Mexico Rio Grande valley. The author went to college in the same very small town I did and he used not just the town but specific canyons, buildings, and even courtyards that are still there and I have spent lots of time in. Near the beginning of the book, for example, there is an attempted witch trial on a courtyard behind a church surrounded by a low adobe wall. I spent many hours in that courtyard leaning against the adobe wall watching over recess at the little school attached to the church where I taught. There were references and word play and scenery that felt like he was writing just for me.

In the end, it was a fun romp with characters that grew and were nice to get to know. There are more books in the series, and I've already bought the next one. The writing style wasn't my current taste and would have earned the book three stars, but the personal connection I felt earned it five. I settled with four -- it was, as I said, a fun fast read and I'm glad I found it.

I figured going in I'd either love or hate this. The notion of being a disposable person with cloned versions of yourself waiting in tanks is familiar enough to me (such as the "troubleshooters", the player characters in the RPG Paranoia) that I've seen the possibilities for how surprisingly dull it can get.

Mickey7 did not fall into those traps. Through cleverly timed breaks for exposition and world building, mixed with just the right amount of gallows humor, I was never caught wishing the story would just move on already or felt the need to take breaks to escape the darkness.

In an interesting science fiction setting of humans trying to establish a beachhead colony on an inhospitable world, Mickey7 shows us how we can process trauma, how our past selves shape but do not define who we presently are. I see a movie is being made from it, and I fear it will lose a lot of what I love in the translation. I did pre-order the sequel book, though, and am looking forward to more of Mickey.

She is a fourth daughter of royalty with no hope of advancement in station, determined to invoke the promise of aid given to her ancestor generations ago by a powerful wizard when her mother refuses to engage a demon threatening the kingdom.

He is a long-lived exo-socialogist, sent to observe these people but not interfere. He broke that directive once before, many years ago, and now another of them has shown up at his outpost door...

I've never seen a story play with Clarke's Third Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") like this before. Each chapter alternates POV between the two main characters, so it is half science fiction and half fantasy. Sometimes the same events are told both ways. The story is interesting on its own, but told this way it also becomes a lesson on empathy and understanding.

It surprisingly also became a story about severe depression, persevering through grief and trauma, methods of self care, and how mental anguish can appear from the POV of both those suffering and those around them.

And that will always endear this story to me.