Kameron Hurley

It’s not often you come across gritty dystopian sci fi world with a strong female lead and well drawn lgb characters of this originality and uniqueness- it even has a very thinly veiled reference to the writings of Col Jeff Cooper, an influential though execrable personage (yeah, I’ve read a bunch of his stuff ) in firearms training circles. For all that it stumbles a bit here and there, I can’t withhold the 5 star rating because this book has interesting world building and science, show more large theological concepts (to wit, what happens when Abrahamic religious poison accompanies humanity’s expansion into the stars), unlikely friendships and improbable connections, and good old fashioned blood-slick floors, the smell of decay and shit, etc. There’s very little glamorization and almost no one and no “side” has entirely clean or entirely dirty hands. I will continue on with the series …immediately. show less

I literally want to scream about how much I loved this book.

It is so unapologetically GROSS and I love that so much...blood and fluids and ichor and gore and worlds made of bodies (or bodies made into worlds?) and everything is organic and moist and disgusting and I LOVE IT because it's never played for shock value but it just IS. This is the world inhabited by the characters and the grossness of it becomes integral to the story without consuming it and I love that.

IT IS ALSO ABOUT WOMEN show more ONLY WOMEN THERE ARE ONLY WOMEN.

And the women are allowed to be SO MANY THINGS they are allowed to be petty, spiteful, immensely cruel, violent, desperate, loving, loyal, determined, devoted, selfish, vicious...OFTEN AT THE SAME TIME like the characters are all so well rounded, so fleshed out (pun intended), so complex and so achingly human you find yourself rooting for them even when they're doing horrible things.

I loved Zan. I loved Zan's crew of misfits as they climb the levels of their world in all the grossness, all the muck and mire and gore, all the organic rotting splendor. I love how no one is reduced to a caricature, how none of the characters feel expendable. I love how the author doesn't commit violence against her characters for violence's sake; this book probably has more blood and guts than all the Song of Ice and Fire books combined yet you never feel like the author is exploiting her characters, torture porn-ing them just for the hell of it.

This was so good I'm sobbing and now I want to read everything else Hurley has ever written show less

“People keep saying I’m a bel dame, but I’m not. Haven’t been in over twenty years. I’m just a woman… And you lied to me.”

Rapture defies easy explanation. It reminds me of watching a woman give birth, or or revenge sex, or even–dare I say it–of my current musical obsession, Disturbed’s acoustical version of The Sound of Silence. There is something that is simultaneously brutal, messy, fundamental and life-affirming that cuts to the core.

After the events of [b:Infidel: Bel show more Dame Apocrypha|20502203|Infidel Bel Dame Apocrypha|Kameron Hurley|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1408934333s/20502203.jpg|16404567], Nyx has retired to the coast, hidden in a house with Anneke and her brood of children. It’s a life of sorts, although she still isn’t able to avoid an occasional death. One evening, a government official and familiar face comes calling with an offer to return to the bel dames, if she’ll only take this one last job. It is a premise familiar to anyone familiar with retired heroes, but this is Nasheenian, and every offer comes with an implied threat: Nyx knows the only route to safety–and not even a sure one at that–is a scorched-earth policy.

“Nyx went upstairs. Opened the bedroom door. There sat her lover, Radeyah, sketching the view of the sea from the balcony on a foolishly expensive slide that devoured each stroke. She was joyously lit up in that moment like a woman at peace with God.”

With her usual complex ambiguity, Nyx continues to deny sentiment and tenderness while committing unrelenting brutality to protect it. Hurley always does something amazing with character, and I found myself sympathizing with almost everyone at times. Three people from [b:God's War|26872958|God's War (Bel Dame Apocrypha #1)|Kameron Hurley|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1444100039s/26872958.jpg|14243275] (my review) return and are followed in three seemingly separate story lines, There’s an additional appearance by a nameless, deadly woman who brings in a scene of awkward foreshadowing. For most of the book, the three attempt to manage their own issues; Rhys, managing a hardscrabble existance; Inaya leading shifter revolution; and Nyx’s mission to retrieve a certain man. It takes most of the book before they are fully woven together.

“‘You don’t have to kill everyone.’ She enjoyed bickering for bickering’s sake, like a child. He was nearly twenty-one now, and her shrill, seventeen-year-old fury felt like something half-remembered from a lifetime ago.”

Interestingly, though the final (?) book in the trilogy, the world of Umayma continues to be developed, held up and angled so that we meet the Drucians, and see The Wall at the end of the desert (which reminded me too much of LeGuin) and lingering First Family/intergalactic politics. The politics didn’t feel as organically brought in, largely feeling unfinished. I don’t doubt that there is a coherent background conception as much as I mistrust that they are conveyed to the reader in a cohesive fashion. The politics this time are something else, and while they incite the mission, they play a massive role in the ending. It feels a bit uneven and rough.

It it an amazing story, but suffers at times from uneven pacing. That didn’t stop me from reading, however, and it won’t stop me from re-reading. Or from becoming a Patreon for Hurley’s work, because, wow: it wallows in all the messy, organic body fluids of humanity while struggling to keep an eye on God.

“They were the ones who’d done what she hadn’t, and what most living folks never would–they lost their limbs, their skins, their sanity to take a burst or a bullet for a friend, for a squad, to save a mission. Those were the ones she worried about most. The heroes. Heroes were unpredictable.“ show less

At first, this felt like a very generic military sf novel along the lines of Starship Troopers, which I'm sure was by design. I wasn't super into it. But then all of a sudden something happens and the novel becomes very intense and very interesting. I don't want to say what exactly, but perhaps I can tell you it becomes Starship Troopers crossed with Slaughterhouse-Five. From there on, I really enjoyed it, as Hurley unravels some of the tropes of military sf in service of perhaps didactic show more but strongly convincing message: it's the kind of story where you don't mind a message because the author constructs the characters and the world so that the message feels real and natural. I did struggle a little bit with the large cast of secondary characters, and unfortunately it's often important to know who they all are to follow some of the twists and turns of the plot. But across the course of the book I went from reading into small chunks to reading one hundred pages in one go. This is my first fiction by Hurley; I must seek out more. show less