10)Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad

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Several other people have read Minister Faust's The Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad for this community, so I need to figure out how to say something different from them.

Last month, I finished reading David Copperfield. That's the sort of gigantic book that dominates the way you look at reading for a long time afterward. My writing has taken on Dickensian undertones. And in trying to make sense of The Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad, I found myself returning again and again to David's fundamental question: Whether I am the hero of my own story.

That problem is Hamza Senesert's in a nutshell. Along with his fellow Coyote King Yehat, Hamza works a low-paying menial job and quests after fulfillment and entertainment. Faust makes it clear that the pair are far too good for the position they're in, but what the Coyote Kings lack is not success, but agency. Their movement through life is not in their own control, and they cannot figure out how to seize control. It's the problem of David earlier in David Copperfield, too.

The process of discovery involves strange pan-global magical traditions, which isn't exactly my cup of tea, but Faust makes the journey lots of fun. He gives you a variety of unique viewpoint characters and gives them each a powerful voice.

Hamza and Yehat are big SF nerds, with Hamza more a media guy, loving Star Trek and Babylon 5, while Yehat glories in the classic hard SF writers. But they're not just lone nerds. Other characters might have a quiet passion for 50s disaster movies, or even just a barely hidden disdain for the Star Wars movies they watched as children. But as things go crazy, everyone reaches into that store of knowledge for how to cope. It's an incredibly simple way to make an SF novel feel way more realistic. I've long wondered why more writers don't use it