Sci-fi books where a queer woman has the ghost of an annoying dead guy in her head

*Misery is nonbinary (she/they) and who’s in her head is not dead or a guy but I’m counting it, okay

Romantic subplots in fantasy books with astronomical levels of tension✨

When you are held in the mouth of a god, sometimes the best you can do is let yourself be swallowed and call it a homecoming.

The Stars Undying (Empire Without End #1), by Emery Robin

THE STARS UNDYING // emery robin

Round 1

In the first year of the Thirty-Third Dynasty, when He came to the planet where I was born and made of it a wasteland for glory's sake, my ten-times-great-grandfather's king and lover, Alekso Undying, built on the ruins of the gods who had lived before Him Alectelo, the City of Endless Pearl, the Bride of Szayet, the Star of the Swordbelt Arm, the Ever-Living God's Empty Grave. He caught fever and filled that grave, ten months later.

-The Stars Undying, Emery Robin

Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick.

-The Shining, Stephen King

This is how I kill someone.

-The Female of the Species, Mindy McGinnis

Love me as I am and I will love you until the stars die.

4 stars

This was ultimately very good, and I'm a huge fan of Cleopatra and to have a fully fleshed out sci-fi world was very nice.

I know this book is written as telling a story, and I understand why, but I do think it in a way harms the enjoyment of this book. I felt a slight disconnect from the characters because we're never quite with them, we're not in the action with them, and we ultimately don't get to feel any of their emotions. Things are either told to us or happened, or it's meandering through time of the quiet spaces in between and the characters conversations of religion, divinity, AI, politics, etc.

I love Gracia and her unreliability as a narrator. I did enjoy her willingness to do anything. Even Ceirran was done well enough that you as a reader do like him. I see tons of people loving Anita and while I think she's interesting, I didn't particularly like her.

This book forces you to pay attention and there is so much politicking and state craft and world building and past history that it is hard to keep up with. So many named characters too and places and named sections of the star systems to keep up with. It also just throws you in. I also felt at times that while these characters would sometimes banter/politic/or whatever that sometimes I felt entirely lost to what the hell they meant or talking about.

I think the quicksilver pearls and the pearl of the Dead was super cool but ultimately not sure if I understand or got enough of it. It felt a bit dropped.

But it was cool to catch certain iconic moments in the book.

Ultimately, it was good and I enjoyed it. I'm interested enough to read the next book.

It's Big Week on Tumblr for the week of October 24, 2022.

This week, in our trends section: Taylor Swift, Doctor Who & Tumblr Top 5.

In the chat segment, Allegra chats with author Emery Robin about Emery's forthcoming debut novel The Stars Undying, a queer sci-fi retelling of Cleopatra's story. Topics include what fanworks need to exist once the book is out, favorite AU settings, and medieval literature.

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The Stars Undying by Emery Robin

Do you want to read about ancient Roman history, but in space? Do you want to read Julius Caesar/Cleopatra/Marc Antony but queer and in space?? Then this may be the book for you!

I really wasn’t expecting to love this book as much as I did. I know the basic outlines of the lives of these people, but that section of history isn’t something I’d say I’m well-versed in. However, I was totally sucked in! I think the world-building really sold it for me - I loved the cultures of the planets and how distinct they were even with the echoes of the real world present to help sell the retelling. I think for some people the strong focus on the world and the characters will make it rather slow in the middle, while they mostly just hang out and build up the politics and the world. On the other hand, I was perfectly happy to spend that extra time in the world, coming to care about the characters, especially with the rich and atmospheric prose. And yet if you know anything about Roman history the whole time everything is beautiful you know it will end, which makes it more poignant while it lasts, and I think helps to keep some tension as you build towards the end. To that point, the last 50 pages absolutely wrecked me, and I would absolutely devour the second book if it was out. A very surprise favorite at the start of the year!

(@logarithmicpanda​ I finally got around to putting up my review on this so you can see why I liked it - I’d love to hear if this sparks the reason it didn’t work as well for you!)

I'm a little over halfway through The Stars Undying by Emery Robin, and it's taking forever for me to finish. Not because it's a bad book, or a boring book, but because there's no urgency for me to read it. I already know roughly what's going to happen, because the broad outlines of the story were spoiled, oh, several thousand years ago.

It's not a book I read because I want to know what happens but because it's being retold in an interestingly vivid way. So I make tea, read a few chapters, think, "oh that was a lovely piece of worldbuilding," and then go back to folding laundry and listening to something like Seducing the Sorcerer (by Lee Welch, which was absolutely delightful and definitely the kind of book I like to gorge myself on in large hunks like a t rex on a triceratops carcass).

I'm starting to feel some pressure to finish it, because I don't like checking books out from the library without having something to return (equivalent exchange etc) and there's a held book waiting for me that I need to get in the next couple days, but I really don't want reading it to feel like a chore. I'd rather just keep nibbling luxuriously at it for the next week or so. Which is probably what I'll do, and my library book drawer by my bed will just have to deal with it.

ok I had mixed feelings initially but I'm getting really into The Stars Undying now. Emery Robin has a good ear for descriptive detail, and the character relationships are very compelling

Cruelty was never unforeseeable. It was only capricious.

-The Stars Undying, Emery Robin

The Stars Undying, Emery Robin

Even a planet knocked off its axis turns toward tomorrow. It has no choice.

The Stars Undying (Empire Without End #1), by Emery Robin

I was sent this from orbit and I CANNOT WAIT to get to it! I’ve heard nothing but good things

Title: The Stars Undying (Empire Without End #1) Author: Emery Robin Genre/s: science fiction Content/Trigger Warning/s: blood, gore, violence Summary (from publisher’s website): Princess Altagracia has lost everything. After a bloody civil war, her twin sister has claimed both the crown of their planet, Szayet, and the Pearl of its prophecy: a computer that contains the immortal soul of Szayet’s god. So when the interstellar Empire of Ceiao turns its conquering eye toward Szayet, Gracia sees an opportunity. To regain her planet, Gracia places herself in the hands of the empire and its dangerous commander, Matheus Ceirran. But winning over Matheus, to say nothing of his mercurial and compelling captain Anita, is no easy feat. And in trying to secure her planet’s sovereignty and future, Gracia will find herself torn between Matheus’s ambitions, Anita’s unpredictable desires, and the demands of the Pearl that whispers in her ear. For Szayet’s sake and her own, she will need to become more than a princess with a silver tongue. She will have to become a queen as history has never seen before. Buy Here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-stars-undying-emery-robin/18255504 Spoiler-Free Review: My interest in Cleopatra is generally peripheral to my interest in all things Ancient Egyptian - an interest that waned when I learned about more ancient queens like Hatshepsut. Still, Cleopatra (the VII, as there were other Cleopatras before her) is probably the most famous ancient Egyptian queen, especially when you’re talking about mainstream pop culture. Which means, of course, I had to check this book out, not least because it promised to be retelling of the story of Cleopatra, Caesar, and Antony but set against a space opera backdrop. And it certainly delivered on that part - but not quite in the way I hoped. See, I think this novel hews just a little TOO close to history for my liking. It TRIES to get away with it, but when your space Caesar is named “Ceirran” and your space Antony is named “Anita” or “Ana” (depends) and your space Cleopatra has the epithet “Patramata” and your space Octavian is Otávio, well-- You see what I mean? And it’s not just the names: it’s the worldbuilding too. Szayet does not sound like Egypt, but it sure is described as a kind of inverse Egypt where there is too much water instead of too little. Ceiao does not sound like Rome, but it certainly is described that way, with all the names switched out for Spanish- and Portuguese-esque sounding names and terms. Madinabia sounds adjacent to Britannia, and the description of the people there certainly aligns with the Britons the Romans encountered when Caesar (Ceirran?) went a-conquering. And all this before pointing out that, as a retelling, the beats of the plot very, VERY closely align with actual history. What this means is that it was easy to get pulled out of immersion while I was reading this novel, because there would be moments where I would recognize this character or that location and align it with the historical equivalent. I couldn’t really sink into this world the author was weaving (and it really is quite a fantastic world!) because I’d read about a character and suddenly think “Oh hey, this is Cicero” and I’d be pulled out of the story yet again. The recognition’s supposed to be part of the fun of reading these sorts of stories, but it’s fun only insofar as it lets me stay IN the world of the story and not constantly pulling me out of it. Makes me wonder if this wouldn’t have been better as a straight-up historical novel, but then maybe it wouldn’t have stood out from the herd of other historical novels set in the same time period and around the same characters? That being said, this story’s got its good qualities too. The prose is really very lovely, and really is what kept me reading to the end. There’s also a lot of clever worldbuilding going on in there too, despite it hewing too closely to actual history as I said earlier, and I rather wish the author had done something else with the ideas and not used them in this retelling. The themes are also intriguing: questions of power and empire are of course very prominent, but there are also questions around immortality and godhood that got brought up. All those themes were touched upon, but further exploration will have to come in the second book. So overall, this wasn’t an entirely bad read! I just think that it could’ve been better if it hadn’t stuck as close as it did to the source material, as it were. May get the second book when it comes out, just to see if this’ll end the way I think it will based on how the actual history went. Rating: two large pearls and one small pearl (two and a half stars)