“Children of Ruin” by Adrian Tchaikovsky was a long sequel to Children of Time. The first was enjoyable due to the accelerated social evolution of the spiders. This one has similar features: a genuine concern for social evolution (octopi, and a single cell slime mold that has an atomic level neural net and so can encode and replicate everything). It started off well, but by the middle Tchaikovsky was pulling the old “hey let’s check in where we left the spiders, and advance the plot a couple steps but not much” and then “let’s get back to the spiders who are having the same conversation they had before.” Desperately needed editing.
The three novellas that comprise Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter were the perfect read after the two longer pandemic novels (Severance and Station Eleven). They go back to Willa Cather subject matter: the hardscrabble ordinary lives of the mid-west and west in-between Americans of the 1870-1920 period. Incomes are rising rapidly and children increasingly are becoming well-educated and leaving the small farm towns. You can see plainly how the next generation is full of possibilities, but the probability of falling back are ever-present. Illness, “old mortality,” is everywhere. Nowhere more dramatic than 
If you are looking for a pandemic novel that explores precocious post-college five years in New York City (think how many novels there are that do that!) that culminate in pandemic, this is the one for you. Excellent writing, lots of flashback. For my taste rather a straightforward plot. And a few of the post-pandemic social “customs” and realities rang a bit implausible for me for some reason.
A challenging, brilliant novel to read during COVID19 pandemic. The opening chapter so uncanny in May 2020. Lots of technique and a good solid story. Maybe a few quibbles about consistency in some of the characters (Clark, for me, was just a bit too much of a foil.) I saw lots of nice echoes to Watchmen (obs the comic story in the story) and Blind Assassin. And you get the feeling a closer reading would deliver even more nice literary allusions, all wrapped in a close reading of Lear. Really, I have to say, unqualified recommendation.
I enjoy Ursula LeGuin-Doris Lessing-style “anthropologist science fiction” and 
I would definitely recommend 
Reading a few dozen pages every day of 
War Year by Joe Haldeman, published in 1972, is a tremendous short little novel loosely based, apparently, on Haldeman’s year in Vietnam. I got it from the library, and oddly it seems to have been classified in the Juvenile Literature section. It is far from juvenile, except that the main character is about 20, as so many other draftees were. The reality (boredom punctuated by horrific violence) of war is presented in 120 pages of clear, direct prose, with the blinders of a 20 year old from Oklahoma unvarnished. The treatment of minor African’-American and Vietnamese characters is truly a window into what was “acceptable discourse” in 1972 by the white majority. It is a novel that has to be run through to the end, without peeking. The end is really gut-wrenching. One page is all Haldeman needs. Here is a 
Reading some earlier novellas from the mid-1990s. Joe Haldeman’s “For White Hill” was a nice piece of “end of life” melancholy… when you are practically immortal but space is really big, it means there are still chances it will all be over, and how do you come to terms with that. A gathering of artists is the setting, and the story focuses on two of them.
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan is a nicely written adventure novel of ideas about how to understand the history of slavery, the human stain, through examining the lives of particular people involved in the peculiar institution. Some horrific descriptions, and then a nice tour through the mid 1800s…. A great novel for a young adult interested in history. A little bit of magical realism, but not much: the cover art actually suggests more than is there. Here is a nice 
