Nope, not for me. It opens with a really gripping premise that I was totally into. But that storyline then has to share time with another, and eventually is subsumed by it. Maybe I would have liked the other storyline better were it not for the bait and switch. The reveals at the end didn't help me tie these narratives together, which made them more frustrating than interesting. The language here is much more like Mechanique than Persona - lyric language, short sentences that are sort of non seq...

This was a somewhat creepy read. It's isolation in 120 pages. It's claustrophobic. It's paranoid. But most of all, it's awash with memories that steal away sanity on a run to Gliese.I did and did not like this. It was a bit dense and fragmented, which had me scrambling a bit for more information. I got a bit confused by the gender of Amadis Reyes and thought she was a he for most part. I also got confused right up until the part where it becomes clear she's the only one alive and there's a reall...

A haunting and harrowing exploration of loneliness, madness, family, and survival in deep space. Valentine excels at writing convincing characters -- especially ones that are deeply scarred in some way -- and then putting them in compelling, often intense situations. With Amadis Reyes she has created one of her best characters yet. Amadis is a loner, albeit a reluctant one; she's tough, but more fragile on the inside than she thinks; she has an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music but has n...

This was a haunting story, a kind of family narrative told in flashbacks during a rather tense and unconventional space voyage. I picked this up because I enjoyed Ms. Valentine's writing in "Eighty Miles An Hour All The Way to Paradise " from Robot Uprisings, and there are definite similarities - a kind of reluctant sentimentality, an indirect storytelling through flashbacks/ruminations, and an underlying premise that social connections are fundamental but fleeting.This was 76 pages on my ereade...

A melancholy, lovely and horrifying meditation on loneliness, family, and artificial intelligence, set to Thomas Tallis. Valentine has a beautiful mastery of language and character, and it's used to great advantage in this short piece. Amadis awakes in the spaceship she's crewing, with everyone else dead and five years to go before next landfall - and the ship's AI may or may not be plotting against her. It's also her only friend. The ruined world she's left behind is subtly conveyed in flashbac...

Extremely creepy novella set in the depths of space. Is Amadis crazy? Is the AI? Both? Plenty of shivers to go around...

An SF horror locked room scenario and a lovely character meditation. For a novella with a single character on a long distance spaceship, there's a remarkable amount of world-building. Good stuff.

I was EXPLICITLY WARNED not to finish this book at night. I did it anyway, for reasons known maybe to someone but for sure not to me. It's gorgeous and terrifying and it hurts from start to finish and I don't know why I do these things to myself, other than that in some ineffable way it feels right.A good book.

***WHO SUCKED ME IN***Tori Morrow on YouTube in their Science Fiction in One Sitting | 8 Short Recommendations video published on 25 aug. 2020Short stories I can read in one sitting but also science fiction that actually work in a short book?! How can I not get sucked in. Bit of a shame that I can't seem to get most of them in paperback. I actually like to buy novella's even though they are a bit pricey. I don't know I'm always a bit worried that if I don't buy them in physical form, they will s...

Dream Houses is a well written story about surviving in space. It has some great moments and I liked the parts about music a lot. The horror slowly creeps in and by the way how Amadis reacts to her surrounding I felt a deep connection with her. The characters and the language are the greatest strengths of the novella and kept me hooked until the end.I can't say that I fully understood what was going on and the inevitability of the events puzzled me. I wish the author had given Amadis the freedom...

On paper, this is just another one of those "woke up in space too early" tales.However, Genevieve makes it so much more than that. The horror, the flashbacks, the reality of it all makes it a story that gets to you, to your core, tugging at the most basic emotions and instincts.It is so beautifully constructed, I had to take breaks to breathe, because I just couldn't handle how it made me feel (in the best way possible).There's no doubt in my mind that I will read it again, just to understand it...

What's that saying "In space no one can hear you scream", If they could, It would be a really noisy place.Here is a quote from the author "DREAM HOUSES, my first-ever novella, was first offered as a standalone book at Capclave 2014. It’s about space, survival, motets, and deer.Or, more technically:It takes a certain type to crew a ship that drops you seven years at a time into the Deep. Kite-class cargo ships like Menkalinan get burned-out veterans, techs who've been warned off-planet, medics wh...

Thematically, this story had a lot in common with another book I read recently, Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes. A survivor wakes up aboard a spaceship after something terrible happened to the rest of the crew. In this case, however, Amadis is all alone, except for the creepy, unreliable AI (there was one of those in Six Wakes also). What follows is a psychic battle between Amadis and the ship's computer, which alternates between being cheerfully functional and ominously opaque, even threatening. Meanw...

My least favourite Valentine for sure - and I have now read all of her books! yay! - though still very interesting and of course beautifully written. Creepy, too. And weird.

Dream Houses is a separately published (something I have been reading a lot of recently) novella, and while it is comparatively short, Genieve Valentine manages to pack a lot into the small number of pages. The set-up is almost classical – Amadis (and I doubt the name is quite coincidental, in spite of the gender swap), our protagonist and first person narrator wakes up from cold sleep on board of the starship she is a crew member (or, more precisely, an auxiliary) to find out that everyone but

Most excellent, into the Hugo ballot it goes.

I had really high hopes for this novella; I've read the author's non-fiction work and enjoyed it greatly, hoping that would transfer to a similar like of her fiction; the premise is one of my ABSOLUTE favorite to read (or see): an interstellar traveler wakes up from cryogenic sleep to find that things have gone terribly, terribly awry. And to be absolutely fair, the reasons this story was not more enjoyable for me are entirely personal. I can look at it and recognize that it's well written while...

I'm completely in love with this book!Haunting, disquieting, beautiful.It has that creeping, paranoid ambiguity that I absolutely love in horror, along with a kind of heartbreaking sentimentality that grounds the story even as things get weirder and weirder out in space.

Dream Houses is a limited edition novella written and published for this year's Capclave, a SFF convention in Washington D.C. The story is about a woman who works as a grunt on a freighter run to a nearby star system, but wakes up early to find her crew dead and she faces a long voyage alone with only the ship's A.I for company. It's basically a tale about what happens to a person when they face madness from a long time alone. The story is well told, though it didn't feel like anything that I ha...

Today I finished reading Genevieve Valentine’s SF novella, Dream Houses. You may recall my mentioning that Ms. Valentine read from this work at Capclave ’14 a couple of weeks back. It’s a bit eerie reading a story someone wrote, and hearing the words in her voice … wowsers! A note: You can get Dream Houses in eBook format. Mine is an inscribed trade hardcover edition.I really liked this story. From the opening words straight through to the end, I was hooked – if it had been as long as this week’...