As I said in FC Shultz’s Rose Weapon review, I’m often the sort of person who feels incessantly indebted to folks partly from my deep well of gratitude and partly from promises I’ve made, even if inadvertently. I tend to keep them, but I often take years. That includes a promise I made to LJ Cohen — a literary mother of mine — to read her debut Derelict a year or two after it came out. We’d met at Writer UnBoxed (specifically at the giveaway table and she’d given me a copy and encouraged me to go indie, advice I should have taken far, far earlier than 2020). Eventually, I’ll die and whatever promises I’ve made will die with me. But until that day, I’m quite content in being neither late nor early, but arriving precisely when I mean to. And thanks to sickness — and the momentum over my shame hill that finishing FC’s debut gave me — I also finished Derelict.

I read LJ Cohen’s Derelict in a couple days. I’m a slow reader, really and truly, mainly from my desire to savor, take notes in the margins, look up words I didn’t know — in LJ Cohen’s case, I didn’t know ampule and shunt (or at least didn’t know the proper name for either, though, upon looking them up, I’ve used both narcan and railroad switches). Got sick again — Norovirus this time — but also, I still wanted a non-Ovidian, non-epic, non-translation (Victorinus), good read.

After finishing FC’s little book, there sat Derelict by LJ Cohen.

Funny how these things can domino, if you face the thing you’ve dreaded facing from way way too much procrastination.

Didn’t see light this time, taunting me towards the spine. Did hear something like a tolle lege chime, atonal resolved to a major fourth, I think. Can’t tell for sure, but certainly something choral and Aaronical.

Stop that distant temple bell…

So I started, expecting as I tend to expect with colleagues and friends — with FC’s for certain — to be disappointed and have to pretend as if I never opened it. Or to couch my language in faint praise. Or to ask about her next one and neglect to mention anything about this one. Something like putting up a lightning rod in the middle of a lake before a stormfront: it’ll either flatten you and them and everything around or it’ll give you superpowers and call you into the third heaven.

But, as I said, you want — or at least I want — bluntness from friends. You have to emphasize it over and again. Cause you get it anyway, especially from those who don’t get you, much less your work. Double especially from folks who came to your work wanting the work of another.

For example:

I’m going to immediately say Lance’s book was bad. Very bad. The writing, the plot, the characters, the world building, all of it bad. … the whole thing was difficult to read, let alone understand. The writing was sloppy, to be fair, everything was very sloppy.

— Goodreads ★★ review

You get bluntness eventually down the road (however much it reads like snowballing), so pulling punches doesn’t help your friends.

And I know it wouldn’t help her.

Which is why I’m happy to say Derelict by LJ Cohen is the best science fiction novel I’ve read in years.

That’s partly because I’ve steered away from science fiction from too many disappointments, partly because I’ve read a decent number of bad ones, but I doubled checked my Goodreads: the last great “science fiction year” I had was 2019 — Old Man’s War + Canticle for Leibowitz. That was a great year.

I’ve since read the garbage entitled Stranger in a Strange Land. So yes, I’ve read “classics” since 2019 that were garbage and also other voices that I refused to post on Goodreads.

LJ Cohen’s Derelict surprised me. And look, I know I published her story in Of Gods and Globes I, but that doesn’t mean I have to like everything she every wrote. No writer in that series swings for the fences every time, not even Juliet. However, LJ’s story in the OGAG series makes me cry every time I read it, so maybe check it out?

So yes, I mean it — this novel surprised me. I know her work made shortlists for other things, but I want to highlight some really interesting things she’s doing:

• She managed to deal with coding in (1) knowing, (2) sophisticated, (3) non-in-house-talk, (4) creative ways. Specifically, she found ways to blend a mix of experienced domain knowledge, imagery, and parallels between code and other discipline I’ve never scene before. Honestly, had I known she’d appeal — whether directly or indirectly — to Boethius’s harmonic theorem, the math of music, the music of the spheres — I would have demanded a riff on that for the OF GODS AND GLOBES anthology because that’s precisely home base for that series.
• She managed to show, through that, how a musician could make a better coder than a brilliant hacker precisely for the same reason a musician can make a better metatheorist, metaphysician, and so forth.
• She gave us not merely an Ai, but a spaceship, with dementia. The only other time I’ve seen that is with Blaine the Train in The Dark Tower, and LJ — as ever — is far more subtle, interesting, and non-hokey when compared to King.
• She managed to show SERIOUS mental and physical trauma, its effects, deal with it seriously and emotionally, and yet have that management factor in meaningfully to the plot.
• It’s clear she has prolific medical experience herself. It’s clear her husband (I’m cheating here) is both a reader and a doctor. It’s clear she has significant nerd experience or folks to tap on myriad issues.
• I don’t want to ever go on a spaceship. I didn’t after Gravity and The Martian, but I really really don’t now.
• I think the Space Trilogy would have some objections to some of her metaphysics regarding consciousness (a la Hart), but that didn’t make those parts un-entertaining and not-fleshed-out for someone like me who disagreed.

I could go on and on. But the simple thing is this: read the book. I love this book. I really love this book as a first book (if that’s really the case, I think it is?)

And also, as I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t know that I’d classify it as Young Adult. Though it features four young adults running from their parents, technically. Of course in that case, I’d classify The Quartet as young adult. In fact, one might argue, it’s more young adult than this. As is every Bond film: certainly it takes adolescent levels of testosterone to write like that. Or the longing for such.

I think the only critique I have of this book is that the dispatch of the prime force of antagonism fell a bit flat for me in a deus ex machina sort of way (or rather machina eiecit hominem, to be precise). But it’s been long enough, she’s probably already acknowledged that.

Anyways, if you ever read this Momma LJ Cohen, I’m a nobody. Start there. And it took way, way too long. But for what its worth: thanks for the gift you gave me at the first UnCon. Sorry I took so long to open it.

If it makes you feel any better, it’ll probably take me thrice as long to open the last Christmas gift my father ever gave me: at least you’re still around for me to thank on that front. I dread gifts more than curses, in the end, for it means I cannot open them again. And in some cases, it’s the last one I’ll ever open. A book unread is as much of a treasure as one that stands permanently in your memory.

In this one instance, you have something in common with the currently unread classics on my shelf: you gave me both; a book long unread, a permanent memory. And for a book about memory, that’s quite a thing.

Gratefully, even still, after all this time—

LtmS