Countess and The Last Count of Monte Cristo

Countess by Suzan Palumbo (2024) 168 pages 

I listened to the audiobook on Hoopla narrated by Chante McCormick. The opening of the synopsis, "A queer, Caribbean, anti-colonial sci-fi novella, inspired by the Count of Monte Cristo" grabbed my attention right away. It keeps the basic ingredients of Dumas' story, but moves right along at a fast pace without so much flowery language or so many subplots and minor characters. The Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint Louverture is a major inspiration to Palumbo and Louverture is mentioned many times. In outer space, in the future, colonial powers remain problematic with people of color subjugated to labor for commodities that prop up the colonizers. Virika Sameroo follows a similar path to Dumas' character Dantes, but takes on a bigger fight against an Empire rather than simply seeking revenge against the individuals responsible for imprisoning her. I enjoyed this a bit more than the following graphic novel.

The Last Count of Monte Cristo by Ayize Jama-Everett with art by Tristan Roach (2023) 154 pages 

I'm fairly familiar with Dumas' story. I've listened to the novel and Tom Reiss' nonfiction The Black Count. This graphic novel holds very closely to Dumas' story. If memory serves, some of Dumas' phrases are incorporated in the script here. There is a large cast of characters including many characters who appear in disguise under aliases. Having the familiarity that I do with the story was very helpful for understanding the complicated plot. I imagine readers would be confused going into this with a blank slate. Focusing on African characters works well. The solar punk future with major climate change is only a veneer that does little to affect the core of the story. The future tech, really only the way characters are able to disguise themselves, is cool. The colors of the art are bold, but action and dialogue and foreground to background details are sometimes too much to take in. A little more focus could have helped.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

 A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, 160 pages.

(Opening Note: I love this cover)

This novella follows Sibling Dex, a devotee of the goddess of small comforts and tea monk who goes from village to village giving a listening ear, a place to rest, and a specially brewed cup of tea to anyone who needs it. However, Dex is feeling trapped and unhappy with their life, even as they believe they are doing good and worthwhile work. The same feeling that drove them from being a garden monk in the city to a tea monk in the first place.

On a whim they decide to go off the map into part of the 50% of the planet that is nature reserve, hoping to find crickets. What they find instead is Mosscap, a wild-built robot who was sent to be the first contact between robots and humans in centuries. They have been sent to check in on the world they left behind so long ago and ask the new question "what do people need?" 

The rest of the novella essentially sets out to explore that question. Strangely, this book and the last book I reviewed (Project Hail Mary, here) pretty much reversed my expectation of them. I expected Project Hail Mary to be interesting mostly for its world building and found instead that it was driven by emotionally rich explorations of personhood and interspecies contact. A Psalm for the Wild-Built which (with the presence of a tea monk as a concept) I expected to be carried by emotionally rich explorations of personhood and interspecies contact was instead primarily carried by the really phenomenal Solarpunk world building. The setting Chambers builds is extremely beautiful in a very hopeful way. It provides a really interesting meditation on the ways that people could live, if we all chose to, in a thousand little details. Definitely an interesting little book. If you want to here more about it, see Kara's post here.