I never do this, but lists. You’re getting lists this time:What I liked: • The subtlety. I’m not a jaded scifi reader, so all the scifi elements introduced were suitably familiar, but not too incomprehensible to me. • Prejudices. • The exploration of inequality in a relationship. Whether the inequality is constructed by rules parents teach their children or science that removes choice, it is real and there aren’t any easy answers. • The writing. • Akhmim. • The ending.What I didn’t like: • Multi...

McHugh has an amazing gift for immediacy in her writing. I think even folks that don't like scifi might enjoy this work, which is so character driven, that the scifi elements are simply part of the setting.At first, I thought seemed similar to so many dystopian romances, although much better written. But McHugh has so much more to say about society, status, position than these ya novels I have read. In the distance future in Morocco, Hariba, a young woman from the Nekropolis - the town of the de...

First-rate McHugh novel, which means it's among the best in the genre. I'm sorry she has fallen (largely) silent in recent years. The review to read is by Gerald Jonas, imo the best SF/F reviewer any major newspaper has ever had: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/bo...Excerpt: "Twenty-six-year-old Hariba lives in a Morocco that the author identifies in a brief note as ''entirely a fictional creation'' but ''based on the country of the same name.'' This country, like much of today's North Africa...

I. Hm. I don't know. This book is very much science fiction, very much not in the style of science fiction, and that's both its strength and weakness. The SF elements are used as constructs for the story, which is all about people. This is good, because I care more about people than I do about technology. This is bad, because I feel like some of those SF elements are not fully thought out (or at least not addressed in the text), because only the ones that have implications for the characters tha...

Maybe once I'll re-read this, I'll write a proper review. Let's just say I loved this a lot and I love Maureen F. McHugh's writing a lot and this punched me right in the heart and I didn't want it to end. I think I might like this novel of her best of the ones I've read so far and I've been thinking about it a lot the past month. I'm deeply envious of the way she creates characters and makes you really feel for them but in in elegant almost detached way.

What I got out of this book was, like other reviewers said, love isn't enough. Mainly not romantic love as shown between Hariba and Akhmim, but also familial as shown by how Hariba's family tried to help her, or friendship as shown by what happened to Hariba's best friend who also tried to help her. For Hariba and Akhmim's relationship, affection isn't enough in the face of power balances so unequal that attachment turns into dependency, consent and honesty is moot because there's too much press...

A bleak romance set in a future in which, as in our present, the actuality is so much less than the imagining. McHugh is expert at capturing contemporary compromise and longing and recasting our continuing sense of isolation and loneliness into a world that the genre has led readers to believe can only be one of, if not institutionalized hope, only temporary incompetence. Her worlds are real because they capture humanity's weaknesses, and rather than gloss over these failures, they come to defin...

This is going to be one of those works dearest to my heart - not because they are stimulating, nerve-challenging or fast enough to make my heart race. No, this is far from traditional SF - the plot is of no importance here, nor the characters - what matters is the world and how difficult it makes life for those who question its ways.What makes this novel stand out for me is its setting - it is so rare to see the future in a place that no one has bothered to look at, as if the future will not hav...

This was a good novel but not quite what I would call science fiction. There are several ‘sci-fi’ elements to it:Jessing: an illegal bio/programming method that bonds a person to another to ensure loyalty.Androids: Though they get called harni or chimeras.House computers and Simulations.I enjoyed this book; actually I read it right through overnight when I could not be bothered sleeping and that has to be a recomendation. The characters are well constructed and the setting is Morocco – which is

Well written, but author, what do you mean, the Morocco of this book is a place of your imagination? Major white person fail. Makes me shudder thinking of all the times in the book you inhabited Muslim women's POV and their concern over modesty, etc., when you know shit about it all.

Our main character, Hariba, used to live in a necropolis in her middle eastern city. This was the district where poor people lived- tombs are cheaper than housing. Hariba couldn't see a future for herself there and so sells herself as a slave, essentially, by being jessed. This procedure makes Hariba bond emotionally and involuntarily to the one who buys her bond. She can be sold again and rebonded if her owner desires. Hariba begins in a fairly wealthy household, but trouble comes along soon en...

This book made me super uncomfortable. A++

This book, set in a future Morocco, shows that, regardless of advances in technology, the basic human experience often changes very little. Her main character, the young Muslim woman Hariba, has voluntarily sold herself into servitude; her loyalty to her employers assured by chemical/biological means. However, when she falls in love with Akhmim, a lab-created biological "AI" who seems all too human, the two escape their employer/owners, risking jail or death...Regardless of the book's exotic tec...

Maureen Mchugh writes a very interesting sort of science fiction - a recognizably near-future earth filled with startling, amazing technology that has nothing to do with the plot drive of the novel at all. instead of speculating on what will be, she speculates on how an ordinary person will live their life in a world that just happens to have this tech. you want her to explore some of these post-post-modern marvels in depth; it can be frustrating at times to catch unexplained, matter-of-fact gli...

This is one of those books that I bought during a cheap bundle sale but never read. I have a few of those, just standing around on my bookshelf. On the back cover, it says Science Fiction. The authour is a Hugo winner. But the novel, though it is full of futuristic terms and props, is so basic. And beautiful. A woman gives up everything for love and then finds love, by itself, is not enough.

This is my fourth McHugh novel, and with all four of them, I have stalled out midway for a long time, coaxed myself back into reading them, and then plowed through the ending. I'm starting to think that it isn't just me, that she has issues with pacing and building narrative momentum. The concept, of a chemically indentured woman in an ultraconservative future version of Morocco who falls in love with an artificially made person, is intriguing. As ever, McHugh refuses easy resolutions and simple...

All I could think while reading this was that McHugh had a whole hell of a lot she wanted to say about fundamental Islam and / or Arabic society's treatment of women and I wished she would just come out and say it - but then I would remind myself that this was a fiction novel, and she was contentedly making whatever point she wanted to make. I guess. Having just read Infidel by Hirsi Ali made Nekropolis seem like weak criticism indeed, but then that's probably an unfair comparison.I was excited

This book could’ve been very disappointing. On the bottom of the cover a quote from Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer promises us “A literary novel in sci-fi clothing” and I can’t pretend I wasn’t sceptical when I read that but it was also what roped me in. It was probably too much to hope for Finnegans Wake with simulacra but the reviews I consulted promised a character-driven narrative that just happened to be set in a future Morocco sometime after 2144; we never do get to learn the precise date.At...

I just couldn’t get into this book. The first few chapters introduced an interesting near-future world and I was curious to see what the author would do with it. Well, she had her characters take an action that brought them out of that world so that she didn’t have to deal with the sci-fi aspects anymore. It was at that point that I realized I didn’t care about these characters. Disappointing, but glad I moved on to reading something else.

Nekropolis is the type of science fiction I love, that I strongly suspect many genre fans, perhaps most genre fans, will hate. It has a great setting, relatable characters (or intentionally unrelatable characters), it uses its science fiction elements to emphasize the themes and ideas the story presents, and it makes you think. So it’s great, right? The thing that might sink the book for many people is that all of these elements coalesce into a slice of life story, not a grand adventure, and the...