Author: Cheryl Morgan

Cheryl Morgan is the editor of Salon Futura and owner of its publisher, Wizard's Tower Press. She is also non-fiction editor for Clarkesworld Magazine. Cheryl has won three Hugo Awards: Best Fanzine in 2004 for Emerald City, Best Fan Writer in 2009 and Best Semiprozine for Clarkesworld in 2010. She is a director of San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions and of Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation. She lives near Bath in the UK.

Shadows of the Short Days

015, Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson, Book Review

Well, that was grim. I’d hesitate to describe this book at Grimdark because that suggests big mediaeval battles in which everyone dies. Lots of people do die in Shadows of the Short Days, but mainly because they are innocent bystanders. Besides, the book is absolutely not mediaeval fantasy; it is more like a steampunk political thriller.

Let’s start with some background. Shadows of the Short Days is book 1 of the Hrímland saga by Icelandic author, Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson. The book blurb says that it was translated by the author, so presumably it was published first in Icelandic, though there’s nothing to indicate that on the copyright page. The English is perfectly readable, but the text does include a lot of Icelandic (or possibly Old Norse) words, mostly proper nouns. The book begins with a primer on the language explaining how to pronounce letters such as þ and ð. If you are into language, the book is probably worth getting for this alone. If you are not, it will seem a very strange way to start a novel.

The island of Hrímland exists somewhere in the north of the Atlantean Ocean. Not long in the past it was occupied by the Kalmar Commonwealth (Denmark?), ostensibly to protect it during a major European war, but mainly because the island is vital to Kalmar’s naval domination of the northern oceans. Hrímland is now ruthlessly exploited by Kalmar, and its unique non-human races are horribly oppressed. So Shadows of the Short Days is a story of struggle against Fascism. Funny how that seems popular these days.

Unlike The Dark Crystal: The Age of Resistance, however, there is nothing cute about this book. In some ways it is like getting a view inside the minds of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Our heroine, Garún, is a bit like the Scarlet Witch. She’s committed to the cause, but largely unaware of how scary her powers are to ordinary humans. She’s a blendingur, meaning that she’s half-human, half-huldufólk (i.e. half-fae). As the book goes on, she becomes more and more committed to dangerous direct action, and also becomes more and more consumed by hatred.

That would make Sæmundur Magneto, except that he’s not actually the leader of the revolutionaries, and he’s much more like Victor von Doom. He’s smart, very smart, and most definitely the best sorcerer in Hrímland. His tutors at the Royal University of Reykjavík were far too timid, and they expelled him for engaging in forbidden practices, but he’ll show them. He’ll show them all!!!

Both Garún and Sæmundur use their powers to help the revolutionaries, but it doesn’t go well, for anyone. There are people in Reykjavík who are much smarter than idealistic young activists. Some of them are not remotely human.

Which brings me to one of the best parts of the book, the wonderful collection of brings drawn from Norse mythology. In addition to the huldufólk we have a couple of other non-human races. The marbendlar are an aquatic species who would utterly terrify poor Howard Lovecraft if he were to encounter them. Much more terrifying are the náskári, the raven folk. These three-legged winged beings are ferocious warriors who seem to live for fighting. Then there are the Seiðskratti, bird-masked sorcerers in the service of the authorities. For reasons I didn’t notice explained, they use non-binary pronouns. That seems entirely appropriate to me, because seiðr is women’s magic, and it is Óðinn’s use of seiðr that gives Loki an excuse to call the King of the Æsir effeminate in the Lokasenna.

Overall there is much of interest in this book, and I’m delighted to see an Icelandic author being published in English. There’s no way that a British or American writer could have produced something this heavily rooted in Norse mythology without living in the Nordic countries for decades and studying hard. Having said that, this isn’t a book that I can imagine people enjoying reading. It is relentlessly grim, and by the end there’s little likeable, or even redeemable, about either of the main characters.

Content note: this book contains a particularly cruel and gruesome murder of an innocent cat.

book cover
Title: Shadows of the Short Days
By: Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
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House of Whispers: Volume 1

015, Comic Review, Nalo Hopkinson

Now that Neil Gaiman is Very Hot Property, DC are keen to make as much of the IP he created as possible. There is a Sandman TV series coming, which Gaiman will have some role in, but he doesn’t have much time for writing comics. Therefore we have the Sandman Universe series of comics. They feature the setting and characters that Gaiman created, and he has some level of script control, but the writers are people he has hand-picked to carry on his legacy. I was delighted that one of the people he picked was Nalo Hopkinson.

House of Whispers, then, is Hopkinson’s Sandman stories, and Volume 1 is now available as a graphic novel. It is set initially in The Dreaming, but Dream himself is not there. Lucien is doing his best to manage things in his master’s absence, but something is going badly wrong and he’s not going to get any help from the likes of Cain & Abel.

Enter Hopkinson, and in her train a whole heap of West African mythology, filtered through her native Caribbean lens. The lead character is Erzulie Fréda, the Haitian goddess of love and beauty. As befits someone of her dazzling charm, she has three husbands. She also loves to dance, and to encourage her worshippers to follow in her flirtatious footsteps. She doesn’t particular care about gender as long as people are enjoying themselves. Chief among her worshippers is Alter Boi, whose gender is decidedly mixed.

We also have Uncle Monday, a Florida legend of an alligator god. He was once an escaped slave, but he encountered the alligator worship of the indigenous Seminoles and was able to transform himself into a giant gator.

Villainy, such as there is, is provided by Shakpana, the god of smallpox and other things that might be viral. He’s a smart boy. Having made his name in infectious diseases, he’s keen to make use of the modern world and infect people with other things as well. Whether he’s the main villain here, or if he’s only a pawn of whatever is attacking The Dreaming, is as yet unclear.

Finally we have some actual humans. Latoya, her girlfriend Maggie, and younger sisters, Lumi and Habibi, live in New Orleans. They are among the first victims of Shakpana’s mischief-making, and become key to the story.

Little is resolved by the end of Volume 1. The story is very much a slow burn. For me the main attraction of the book is discovering the many interesting mythological characters that Hopkinson clearly knows well but are a total mystery to clueless white girl here. I’m particularly intrigued by Erzulie because it appears that there’s a whole family of goddesses with the same first name but different second names. Some of them appear in the book.

I’m reminded of how Suyi Davies Okungbowa made use of variations in the Orisha between different ethnic groups in Nigeria for David Mogo: Godhunter. I note also that in ancient Mesopotamia there were different versions of the gods and goddesses worshipped in different cities. The idea of a unified pantheon like that which we were fed for Greek and Roman religion when we were kids seems very much a modern construct now.

The art is not really to my taste, but it is very Sandman so it will doubtless be OK with fans of the series. I’m happy to go with it.

Aside from the mythology, I’m here for the unabashed queerness of the cast. I particularly loved the scene in which the girls finally encounter Erzulie’s worshippers and little Habibi addresses Alter Boi as, “Mister Lady, Sir”. Kids are great. They understand.

book cover
Title: House of Whispers
By: Nalo Hopkinson
Publisher: DC Comics
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Menace from Farside

015, Book Review, Ian McDonald

I have been a big fan of Ian McDonald’s Luna series (or Dallas on the Moon, as it is often known). Therefore when I heard that there was novella available in the same setting I had to get hold of a copy. The Menace from Farside is set somewhat earlier that the dramatic events of the novels, but it is very much in the same vein.

The story revolves around the complexities of lunar polygamy. Part of the diplomatic structure of lunar society is the concept of a “ring marriage” where two parents raise children (some of whom may be adopted), but each parent also has a second partner and second home, and perhaps even second family. This is a means of making all of the great families of the Moon interconnected, and hopefully less likely to kill each other. As if Lady Luna herself wasn’t good enough at killing humans already.

Cariad Corcoran is a self-assured teenager who has ruled over her siblings for some time. However, a divorce and re-marriage in the ring has resulted in a new parent, and a new sibling. Sidibe Sisay is tall, fit, elegant, and older than Cariad, and therefore a clear threat to Cariad’s position. There is much teenage angst.

For reasons that never quite made sense to me, Cariad organises an expedition to the site of the original Apollo moon-landing so that the kids can take a selfie there to make a wedding gift for the new parental unit. But this, dear readers, is the Moon. No matter how well planned, such an expedition is fraught with danger. When it has to be planned in secret by a bunch of teenagers, well, you can guess. Teenage pranks on Earth can go badly wrong; teenage pranks on the Moon are almost always deadly.

That’s pretty much all there is to the book. It allows McDonald to do some more exploration of the interesting identities and customs that have grown up in lunar society. One of the kids is a neko; someone who identifies as a cat. It also allows for a certain amount of examination of the nostalgia around the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s famous footprint. It is a fun addition to the Luna series, and especially to the social themes that underlie that series.

book cover
Title: The Menace from Farside
By: Ian McDonald
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Titans : Season 2

015, TV Review

As you probably know, I am a sucker for superhero stories. However, I am mainly a Marvel reader. I know who the major DC characters are, but there are many others who are a complete mystery to me. I was therefore able to approach the Titans series on Netflix unencumbered with too much knowledge of how things “should” be. While the series made use of a whole bunch of standard Teen Titans characters, it also did its own thing. I was intrigued enough to watch it through, and was especially impressed by the final episode in which the demon, Trigon, who is the main villain of the season, gets inside Dick Grayson’s head and works out all of his frustrations about Batman.

Of course one of the reasons I loved Season 1 is that it featured Doom Patrol in a couple of episodes. I still don’t understand why Netflix won’t show that series in the UK. Its not as if Coagula is part of the TV team.

Season 2 starts with a big let-down in that the Trigon plot is resolved way too easily, and several members of the team then quit. It looks very much like a new creative team has come in and decided to junk everything that went before. Fortunately that is not quite the case. The team are eventually brought back together, primarily through the introduction of Deathstroke, a major villain from the old Teen Titans days back when Dick was still Robin.

Much of the storyline is about what it means to be a hero, and whether people who have done bad things in trying to do good are any better than those who just set out to be bad. That is, of course, classic superhero stuff. It is particularly an issue for the Titans. Raven, being the daughter of Trigon, is half-demon. The script team makes good use of the Deathstroke/Jehrico storyline to set up another angle. And they top that off by introducing Conner, a character who is a clone made from the DNA of Superman and Lex Luthor.

Mostly it works. The script hangs together fairly well, though Dick’s descent into self-pity seems a little overdone. There’s a more or less satisfying ending, as opposed to the massive cliff-hanger of Season 1. One really interesting feature is the introduction of Bruce Wayne as a recurring character. This is definitely Bruce, not Batman. For much of the series he’s a figment of Dick’s imagination, but he does turn up in person eventually. And he’s old. He’s still very sharp, but he’s actually old. I liked that.

If you are watching the series and were totally mystified by the whole Elko Diner thing, don’t worry, it really is not what it seemed. It hasn’t been explained yet, so I’m hoping we get a Season 3, but it is not totally daft. Kevin, who lives in Nevada these days, has been to Elko. He tells me that they do actually have a pretty good donut shop.

Quite why Conner has Krypto as a companion is a mystery to me. However, I have to say that Krypto is by far the best character in the series. Yes, he’s a dog. I’m a cat, I still think he’s great.

Something that’s a bit strange is that the TV series seems to keep shying away from the superhero thing. The characters are all known primarily by their ordinary names, and they often go into battle in their street clothes rather than in costume. Half the point of the costumes is that they are armour, so it all seems a bit silly to me.

If I have a complaint about the series, it is that the lighting is relentlessly dark. Much of the action is deliberately set at night to exaggerate this. I know the script is supposed to be Gloomy and Serious, but it would be nice to be able to see what’s going on.

Set against that is the fact that the team are headquartered in San Francisco. Am I homesick? You bet. Part of me is just waiting or them to pop across the road into the Ferry Building and go shopping for cheese and elk burgers.

Editorial – January 2020

015, Editorial

This issue is a little thinner than usual. That’s not because I have read fewer books, but because not all of them have been suitable for review. Two of the books I read in January have been books that I will be publishing later this year. Others have been history books, because February is LGBT History Month and I have a bunch of talks to give. What I have done is review a couple of TV series. And when putting the ‘zine together I realised that I have forgotten to write a review of Watchmen, so that will be in the next issue.

I will be on the road quite a bit in February, including a trip to Salzburg for an academic conference. Hopefully that will mean that I will get a lot of reading done. There’s a new William Gibson novel out, and I’ll be going to see him when his tour takes him to Bristol on Monday. There’s also a new Maria Turtschaninoff novel out, which I need to get read and reviewed before Swecon in March.

Issue #14

Issues

This is the December 2019 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


Cover: Cloud Island Castle

014, Art

Once again I have been scouring the internet for artwork that is tagged with permission to use with modification. There is plenty of stuff out there, of course, but it isn’t all good, and crucially much of it won’t work as a magazine (or book) cover. There needs to be space to add text, and an awful lot of the art you can find online doesn’t have that.

However, I have once again been fortunate to find something that does work. This is by Ponte Ryuurui. You can find the original post for the art here. As I once again had to crop quite a bit out of it, I’m posting the whole thing below.


Dead Astronauts

014, Book Review, Jeff VanderMeer

The new book from Jeff VanderMeer is set in the same universe as his novel, Borne.

I used two words very carefully there: “book” and “universe”.

In Borne one of the main characters, Rachel, discovers a courtyard in the city where three bodies are half-buried in the dirt. They look like astronauts as they are wearing all-encompassing white suits. Inside the suits are only skeletons.

Rachel soon realises that they are in fact wearing biohazard suits, which is entirely understandable given that the city in which Borne is set is overrun by escaped, experimental biotech. Borne himself is the most obvious example of that. But the label, “Dead Astronauts” stuck. VanderMeer talks about why in this interview from Weird Fiction Review (which is also where I found the magnificent art by Kayla Harren that I have included here).

It just came to me in a flash and then I had to decide if they were really astronauts and what people thinking they were astronauts meant in terms of the story — in a sense, people in the City thinking they’re astronauts is a kind of hope about the future or perhaps about the past. But I knew it was a potent image and had some symbolism and so I felt it deserved to enter the story further.

The book, Dead Astronauts, is the result of that exploration. Borne’s world, as I noted, is one of biotech run amok. In the past the city was run by The Company, a monopolistic organisation that employed and used pretty much everyone. But The Company died some time ago. All that is left are its labs, a few biotech geniuses, and the more successful of its creations. The Astronauts, in their role of symbols of hope, have taken it upon themselves to fight against The Company and put the world to rights.

They are not astronauts, of course. Except that one of them is. Grayson, a black woman, is the sole survivor of a doomed Moon colony who returned to Earth after all her colleagues had died. Grayson is also the only one of the Astronauts who is fully human.

Chen, though he was made to be human, is a thing created by The Company. He is perhaps a clone. Maybe there was once a human ur-Chen. But now there is perhaps what Victor Frankenstein would have created had he been able to make copies of Igor at will.

Moss is not human, and never has been. Moss is, well, moss. But Moss is able to take on bodily forms. For convenience that form is human. In this story that human is female, though we are told that has not always been the case. Moss is who Moss wants to be at the time.

These three, then, take it upon themselves to become crusaders against the evil that is The Company. But they are not just fighting here. One of Moss’s strange powers is the ability to link alternate realities. This is not the first time that the Astronauts have fought The Company. There is a multiverse out there, and the fight has taken the Astronauts to many worlds. In all their previous encounters with The Company, the Astronauts have lost.

Remember my opening remark with its carefully chosen words? I said that Dead Astronauts takes place in the same universe as Borne. Which means that somewhere in the city there is a courtyard where three dead astronauts are half-buried in the soil.

OK, so that’s a bit of a spoiler, but it is in the title of the book. The Astronauts are dead. They lost.

We find this out for certain about half way through the book, and from then on things get very weird. Which is why I described Dead Astronauts as a book rather than a novel. Obviously it is a novel — it says so on the cover — but it is a novel quite unlike anything that you, dear reader, might be used to. This is VanderMeer at his most experimental. Think back to City of Saints and Madmen, with its collection of short fiction and bizarre appendices. Some of the remaining sections of the book are more poetry than prose. Indeed, this is one of the few books where I really want to listen to the audiobook, to feel the text wash over me. Simply reading it seems somehow inadequate.

Much of the second half of the book is told from the point of view of the non-human inhabitants of the world. These tend to be company creations because they have sufficient cognitive ability to tell their stories, but they have not lost contact with their animal natures, nor with their less manufactured relatives.

The rest of the world is pretty angry with the humans. They have good cause.

I was a little confused for a while after finishing the book. What the heck was the point of all that, brilliantly evocative though it was? Thankfully this review by Alison Sperling in the LA Review of Books reminded me that science fiction is not about the future, it is about the Now.

We are living in a time of runaway climate change. If nothing changes, we may lose between 30% and 50% of all animal species to extinction by 2050. Some of us are still trying to fight The Company, but it is quite possible that we have already lost. Dead Astronauts is a book that faces that possibility head on and asks, “What the fuck were you thinking?”

There is no sane answer to that.

book cover
Title: Dead Astronauts
By: Jeff VanderMeer
Publisher: MCD
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Vei – Volume 1

Archive, Comic Review, Karl Johnsson, Sara B. Elfgren

I don’t often review graphic novels here, because I’m not sure I’m competent to do so. This one, however, is written by my Swedish friend, Sara B. Elfgren, and is gorgeously illustrated by Karl Johnsson. It is newly available in English translation, and comes with an enthusiastic blub from Mike Carey who knows far more about graphic novels than I do.

The story of Vei is based on Norse myth, but it is very much a new thing, not simply a re-telling of well-known tales. I’m not exactly surprised that the Swedes want to get in on the act, seeing as how Americans have taken their stories in a very wild direction.

Our tale begins with a young Viking chief called Eidyr taking his longship crew to Jotunheim where he intends to win fame and fortune. Close to shore the crew spot a body in the water. It is a young woman called Vei who claims to be part of a tribe of human-like people who serve the Jotun.

Very mild spoiler: the Vikings mostly don’t last very long. Only Dal, Prince Eidyr’s slave bodyguard, has enough wit and martial ability to survive Jotunheim. He’s also the only one smart enough to trust the local rather than want to kill her for superstitious reasons. Vei, it turns out, is a better warrior than any of them.

There is a reason for that, and a reason why she is found in the sea. This is a story about the Jotun, and their endless war against the Æsir. Vei and Dal are but pawns in that war. Odin, as you might expect, is a cunning, duplicitous bastard. The Jotun seem better people, but they are giants, and they are very much not human. (I’d say someone has been listening to my lecture from Graz, except that this must have been drawn long before last December.)

The portrayal of the Æsir is particularly interesting, especially given that the creators are Swedish. Thor looks more like Obelix than Chris Hemsworth, and Freyja isn’t the lithe beauty we have come to expect (though she does have her cat chariot). Then there is Loki, and Loki is everything we have come to expect: cunning, alluring, and very gender-fluid.

I’m really looking forward to volume 2, partly because I want to find out what Loki is up to, and partly because I want to see more of Princess Sól, the Jotun queen’s sulky teenage daughter, who is adding a much more personal dimension to an otherwise mythic tale.

book cover
Title: Vei: Volme 1
By: Sara B. Elfgren & Karl Johnsson
Publisher: Insight Editions
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Starless Sea

014, Book Review, Erin Morgenstern

Although I had the new Erin Morgenstern book before last issue, I elected not to try to read it in time. That’s partly because it is long so I wasn’t sure I’d get it finished. But also I didn’t want two books about doors and keys in the same issue. The Starless Sea and The Ten Thousand Doors of January both feature keys on the cover. Both feature heroes striving to keep doors to another world open while enemies try to close them forever. Thankfully there the similarities end.

When I reviewed The Night Circus my take-away was that Morgenstern was brilliant at description and atmosphere, but less good at character and plot. It has been seven years since her last book, and she has definitely learned a lot in the meantime. The atmosphere is still there, the characters are a lot more interesting (though some aren’t human which complicates matters), and there is a plot. More about that later, but first, seven years? Why?

I saw Morgenstern on her book tour which, thankfully, came through Bath. She talked a lot about process during the event. Some writers plot everything out beforehand. Some writers start the story and let the characters guide them. Morgenstern says that both methods sound much too organised for her. What she does is start writing scenes and wait until they coalesce into a story.

There is a pirate in the basement.

The results of this are not always easy for the reader, but if you have patience the end results are worth it. Morgenstern has been very open about the fact that she’s asking her readers to do a lot of work here, and she is. The line above is the opening line of the book. It begins a story about a pirate who is in prison awaiting execution, and a girl who comes to his rescue. There are many such stories scattered through the book. Their significance may not become clear for a hundred pages or more, but you get there in the end.

On page 268 we learn how one of the major characters deliberately bumped into a waitress, spilling a tray of drinks and thus saving the life of another major character whose order had been poisoned. That event is described, in a throwaway line and as an accident, on page 45. Morgenstern expects us to remember. You don’t have to pay attention as much as you do when reading Gene Wolfe, but you do need to stay sharp.

This has some effect on the pace of the book. With The Ten Thousand Doors of January we switch between viewpoints as Alix Harrow takes us through two stories that will meet up eventually. This is a classic technique. You keep reading because both stories have momentum. With The Starless Sea the main story is intercut with one-off tales, or chapters of a seemingly unrelated story that ends fairly quickly. You have to trust that it will all make sense eventually. And it does. By around halfway the plot gathers momentum and the switches are now between different viewpoint characters, just as we have come to expect. If you are finding the book slow, hang in there. It gets faster.

So there is a plot. Here it is. Zachary Ezra Rawlins — always Zarchary, never Zack — is the only son of a fortune teller, Madame Love Rawlins. As a boy he once saw a painting of a door on the wall of an alleyway. It looked just like the sort of door that would lead to a mysterious magical kingdom, but Zachary was a sensible boy and he did not try to open it. The next time he passed that way, the door had been painted over.

Years later, Zachary finds a mysterious book in his university library. It has no author listed, and when he tries to check it out the librarian can’t find it in the catalogue. He takes it back to his room to read, and in it he finds a story about a young boy who finds a mysterious painted door on an alley wall.

Being now the curious sort, Zachary investigates, and so he finally finds his way to The Starless Sea and its Harbor. But what he finds is far from the idyllic magical realm that the book, Sweet Sorrows, describes. There have been changes. The Starless Sea is a world of story, and stories never stay the same for long.

In the meantime there is the story of Zachary Ezra Smith to unfold. Will he manage to avoid the mysterious secret society that wants him dead? Will he manage to leave The Starless Sea and return to his friends and family? Will he be changed if he does?

Along the way, the two books this reminded me of most were The Magus by John Fowles and Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. It is not either of those things, but there are times when it very easily could have been.

Zachary’s tale is the story that most people will read, and it is a good story. It also has gay stuff in it, which will make a lot of you happy. But it is not all that there is to the book.

Reading a novel, he supposes, is like playing a game where all the choices have been made for you ahead of time by someone who is much better at this particular game.

That’s from page 16, and it sets out early on Morgenstern’s philosophy of fiction. It is the philosophy of the role-playing generation, of the fan-fic generation. Those who want stories to stay the same, to stick to canon, are closing off doors. Morgenstern wants to encourage us to keep them open.

This is not where our story ends, he writes. This is only where it changes.

book cover
Title: The Starless Sea
By: Erin Morgenstern
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Dragon Waiting

014, Book Review, John M Ford

Back in November, SF&F Twitter was all abuzz with the news that Beth Meacham of Tor had done a deal with the estate of the late John M Ford. Many of you could have been forgiven for saying, “who?”, and wondering why the likes of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Neil Gaiman and Roz Kaveney were so excited. Ford is most famous for a book called The Dragon Waiting, which won the World Fantasy Award in 1984. For historical context, that’s the year before Neuromancer won the Hugo. Someone born in that year would be in their mid-thirties now.

Ford died in 2006. Click through on the link above for the full story of how his literary estate became lost, and how it was recovered. It is a great story in itself, and also gives a real sense of how loved Ford was by his peers.

For additional context, the other novels on the World Fantasy short list that year included George Martin’s Armageddon Rag, Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, and RA McEvoy’s Tea With the Black Dragon (the only cross-over with the Hugo, which was won by David Brin’s Startide Rising). That’s excellent company to be in.

This is also long before Emerald City. I wasn’t reading a huge amount of SF&F in ’84, and was generally only up to date when Marc Gascoigne thrust a book in my face and told me to read it. So despite Roz keeping telling me that Ford was the best of us, I’d never actually read anything by him. But I did have a copy of The Dragon Waiting, so I thought I would give it a look over to see what all the fuss was about. And, of course, to see if the Suck Fairy had visited the poor book.

The opening chapters introduce us to three of our major characters. Hywel Peredur is a young Welsh boy who turns out to have a talent for magic and goes off to Byzantium to learn how to use it properly. Dimitrios Ducas is the son of a Byzantine nobleman who is murdered on the orders of the Emperor for that classic Roman crime of becoming too popular with his soldiers and the people he is governing. Cynthia Ricci is the daughter and heir of the best doctor in Florence. Her father’s patients include Lorenzo di Medici himself, but Vittorio Ricci has become a victim of the plotting of Duke Sforza of Milan.

So far, so conventional, perhaps. Good conventional. We have three characters brilliantly drawn in separate short stories, each one given an encounter that will be a defining feature of their lives. But not all is as it seems. After all, Hywel can actually do magic. The province that Dimi’s father governs for the Emperor of Byzantium is called Gaul. And Duke Sforza is a vampire.

What Ford gives us is a complex and strange alternate history. He has the depth of historical research that you might expect from Guy Gavriel Kay; the devious political scheming of Dorothy Dunnett; and the talent for weaving in historical characters that Kim Newman would later use to such great effect in Anno Dracula.

All of this is eventually put to use to tell the story of the latter part of the Wars of the Roses. Edward IV is on the throne. George, Duke of Clarence, has been politically stupid once too often. Richard of Gloucester is doing his best to serve his eldest brother by keeping the Scots at bay. Hywel, by now a well-known and trusted advisor of the Yorkists, is a friend to the mother of this brood, Cicely Neville. Dimi is now a soldier of fortune. As for Cynthia, a competent surgeon is always in great demand; as is our fourth major character, the artillery engineer, Gregory von Bayern. But the tides of history are flowing, driven, as always, by Byzantine scheming. If the previous sections of the book have told us anything, it is that the efforts of individuals to stand against those tides are generally futile, and often fatal.

One of the things that stood out to me about the book is how it is about propaganda. The Byzantine plot to put their man on the throne of England has two main thrusts. One is the assassination of key figures. The other is the spread of unfavourable stories about the Yorkists to turn the population against them. There’s also some very devious manipulation to create incidents that will give credence to those stories. Fake news is nothing new.

The Suck Fairy, I’m pleased to say, has given this book a very light touch. Cynthia, as one of the main characters, has a very important role to play and a great deal of agency. There is brief mention of a teenage gay relationship towards the end of the book, and this is taken as entirely natural and commonplace by the middle-aged knights discussing it. If I have one regret it is that the worship of Cybele is still important to the Byzantines and there is no mention of the Galli. There could easily have been trans people in the book, but there weren’t.

Oh, did I forget to mention that in the world of the book Christianity is still a minor cult among the many that were popular in Rome? Several of the knights, including Dimi, are proud devotees of Mithras, while Cynthia follows the path of Athena.

All in all, I was very impressed. The book is a little episodic because it has a lot of time to cover, but most readers will be OK with that. I found the description of the battle of Bosworth at the end a little hard to follow. However, these are minor complaints. From next year Tor will be producing new editions of some of Ford’s novels, starting with The Dragon Waiting. They might be old, but if they are all like this one then they are very well worth checking out.

“As Vortigern, king of the Britons, was sitting upon the bank of the drained pond, the two dragons, one of which was white, the other red, came forth, and approaching one another, began a terrible fight, and cast forth fire with their breath.” — from “The Prophecy of Merlin” in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain.

book cover
Title: The Dragon Waiting
By: John M Ford
Publisher: Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks
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Unravelling

Archive, Book Review, Karen Lord

There are some books that I can race through very quickly and write reviews of immediately. There are others where I have to think a lot while reading them and then let those thoughts marinate for a while before saying anything. Books by Karen Lord tend to be in the latter category.

Let’s do the easy bits first. Ostensibly Unravelling is a sequel to Redemption in Indigo. Paama does make a few brief appearances in it. But mainly this is a book about her sons: Yao and Ajit, or Chance and Trickster as they are sometimes known.

The book is also a murder mystery. It stars Miranda Ecouvo, a brilliant lawyer in a city somewhere. As the story opens, Miranda has just witnessed the end of a very high-profile case. She has finally seen the notorious serial killer, Walther Grey, put behind bars. But Miranda is not entirely convinced that the case is fully solved. She has a sneaking suspicion that Grey did not act alone. He just didn’t seem capable of committing those crimes by himself. And if he did have an accomplice, that person must be still at large.

Musing over these issues, Miranda steps into a road to cross it, and is run down by a bus.

Or is she? As far as Miranda is concerned, she was pulled out of the path of the bus by a young man who calls himself Chance. She immediately realises that he’s some sort of supernatural being, and together they begin to work on the case.

So what really happened to Miranda? Is she dead? Is she lying unconscious in a hospital bed and dreaming all of this? Or is she really still walking around and working? Oh, and was the accident, if it happened, actually an accident, or has someone decided that Miranda needs to be taken out?

One of the reasons that we don’t know is the way in which Chance and his brother set about helping Miranda solve her case. They can take her back in time to observe Grey’s victims. They can’t go everywhere in time, which suggests they are being opposed. But they can sometimes change things. Can you say, “time war”?

So what is this book? Well partly it is a fantasy novel featuring supernatural beings. We may remember that Redemption in Indigo was based, in part on Senegalese folk tales. And one character is called Trickster and sometimes takes the form of a spider. But one of the other supernatural beings in the story is the Archangel Uriel.

Partly the book is about class. Miranda and her colleagues are Freemen of the city. They own property there. They have rights. Grey’s victims were itinerant workers who have almost no rights. Investigating the case makes Miranda painfully aware of her privilege.

And partly this is a book about gender. People who get away with murder are often powerful men. Miranda’s boss, Khabir, is also a powerful man. He has access to communities within the city that are closed to her. But will he be prepared to risk his social position by exposing a member of his elite group?

By now you will hopefully have got the idea that Unravelling is a very complicated book, and one that will reward careful reading. I would expect nothing less from Karen.

For me, what I want to do most right now is sit down with Karen over a glass or two of rum and discuss the place of labyrinths in African & Caribbean mythology.

book cover
Title: Unravelling
By: Karen Lord
Publisher: Daw
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Storm of Locusts

014, Book Review, Rebecca Roanhorse

I very much enjoyed Trail of Lightning, the debut novel from Rebecca Roanhorse which, among other things, won her the Award Then Known as the Campbell. I therefore picked up the sequel as soon as I found a copy. The books are part of a series called The Sixth World. They feature a seriously kickass woman called Maggie Hoskie who lives in a Drowned World near future North America. Colorado, being considerably above sea level, has survived the flood, and so has the Navajo nation.

The books are loosely grounded in Navajo mythology and feature not just our dear friend Coyote, but a whole panoply of gods and supernatural beings. Maggie is their version of the human warrior who can challenge the gods. Thanks to the events of the first book, she even has a magic sword with which to do it, though she hasn’t figured out how to make it do magic yet.

Storm of Locusts follows on pretty much directly from Trail of Lightning (four weeks after, according to the back cover blurb). Maggie is still waiting to find out whether her boyfriend, Kai, has forgiven her for [redacted — spoilers]. She’s just had a run-in with a cult leader who calls himself The White Locust when a messenger arrives to tell her that Kai has been kidnapped. From there on the book is pretty much a non-stop adrenaline ride.

There’s a quote on the front cover from the New York Times review of Trail of Lightning. The reviewer asks for a TV series of the Sixth World books. I am tempted to concur, because it ought to be great watching. Unfortunately, people in Hollywood can barely be trusted with stories about African Americans. What they would do with a story about Navajo people is anyone guess. Probably make everyone white.

Consequently, those of you who would quite like a version of Fury Road, but set on Route 66 in the mid-west American desert rather than in Australia, are just going to have to settle for reading Storm of Locusts instead. I can assure you that there is a lot of blowing shit up, and most of it is done by women. The final confrontation is particularly cinematic — something I would expect from a James Bond film, not post-apocalypse urban fantasy.

Of course there has to be more to the book than just gun battles and explosions. There’s some nice tension between Maggie and her companions on the quest, and a fair amount of uncertainty over exactly what this White Locust guy is up to. Also there are locusts, lots of them, because you never get just one. An episode in a white-run community ruled over by a chap who calls himself Bishop gives Roanhorse the opportunity to flourish her feminist credentials and have a go at the capitalist nature of modern American Christianity.

By the end, however, it is clear that Storm of Locusts is a book about family: who belongs and who doesn’t. That’s a complicated thing, particularly in Native American communities where so much intermarriage with the colonisers has happened. I know a little bit about this, because Kevin’s family, on his mother’s side, is part Cherokee and part Arkansas Hillbilly. Kevin, having been raised as a white California boy, is careful not to intrude where he might not be wanted.

Now when it comes to family and weird folks there are basically two extremes: either you are family and they will defend you to the death no matter how weird you are, or your weirdness has brought shame upon them and you get ostracised. Most families, of course, fall somewhere in between. Way too many trans people get disowned by their families, and my experience has been far from a bed of roses, but Kevin’s family have been unfailingly loving and supportive. Also Kevin’s mother and sister both died this year. Which is why I was in floods of tears at the end of this book.

Fortunately for Kevin, I am not a raging ball of violence with a monster-killing magic sword. I don’t need quite that level of forgiveness. Maggie, of course, does. I’m not going to speculate on whether Roanhorse had any specific reasons for writing this book the way she did, but if she’s saying thank you to a family that has accepted her then I’m very happy for her, because I know what that feels like.

book cover
Title: Storm of Locusts
By: Rebecca Roanhorse
Publisher: Hodder
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The Poetic Edda

Archive, Book Review, Carolyne Larrington

This is not a new book. It was first published in 2014. It is, however, a gorgeous new edition which Oxford University Press have presumably issued to cash in on the current popularity of Norse myth.

While I am very familiar with the characters of Norse myth, and some of the stories, I am much less familiar with the source texts. Much of what we know come from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. This book, however, is a translation of The Poetic Edda, a collection of poems many of which are only known from a single source. The Codex Regius is a collection of poems first transcribed sometime in the 1270s, but obviously much older. Only a single copy of the whole collection exists, currently held safely in Reykjavik. By such slender threads are our knowledge of the stories of pre-literate cultures suspended.

The contents cover a wide range of Nordic/Germanic myth, from the creation of mankind to Ragnarok, and the story cycle later used by Wagner as the basis for his Ring Cycle. The stories have also provided much inspiration for writers such as Tolkien, Lewis, Alan Garner, and of course Stan Lee. Whoever wrote these stories down has a literary legacy that is perhaps even greater than that of Homer.

The translations are by Carolyne Larrington who is Professor of Mediaeval European Literature at Oxford. She knows her stuff, and has produced a very readable text. I’m therefore going to apologise in advance for zeroing in on some very specialist areas of translation which are the only ones where I have any expertise, and which Prof. Larrington might have tackled differently were she doing the translations today.

In reading through the poems I noticed the words “pervert” and “perverse” being used several times, generally with reference to Loki. These are clearly judgemental terms, and consequently I wondered what they meant within Norse culture, and how other translators had tackled them.

The first story I looked at was the “Thrymskvida”. In this story the Giant, Thrym has stolen Thor’s hammer and demands Freyja for his bride as the price of returning it. The gods trick Thrym by disguising Thor as Freyja and sending Loki with him to talk the foolish Giant into believing the masquerade.

In Prof. Larrington’s translation, after Heimdall (not Loki) has suggested the deception, Thor says:

“The Æsir will call me perverse,
If I let you tie a bridal headdress on me.”

In the original Norse the text (at least from this source) is:

“Mik munu æsir argan kalla,
ef ek bindask læt brúðar líni!”

The key word here is “argan”. It comes from a Norse word that, as far as I’m aware, means a man who may be effeminate and who has sex with other men. So Thor could be coming about as close as is possible in Old Norse to saying, “I can’t do that, people will think I’m gay.” Obviously the Vikings didn’t have the social concept of the homosexual (which is a 19th Century invention), but the meaning isn’t that far different.

The other poem I looked at is the “Lokasenna”, a poem in which Loki gets into a massive quarrel with the other gods. In this poem Thor regularly addresses Loki as “Þegi þú”, which Prof. Larrington has translated as “Perverse one” and the translator at voluspa.org renders as “Unmanly one”.

Þegi is a different word from the one I’m used to for indicating a queer man, but voluspa.org uses “unmanly” for “argan” as well, so presumably there are similar connotations.

Earlier in the poem, Odin and Loki trade insults. Both use the formulation, “ok hugða ek þat args aðal”. Odin is referring to a time that Loki spent as a woman, and gave birth to children. Loki counters by accusing Odin of practicing síða, a form of sorcery that is generally the exclusive preserve of women (and often translated as “witchcraft”).

Prof. Larrington uses the rather lengthy formulation, “And that I thought the hallmark of a pervert”. On voluspa.org the translation is, “Unmanly thy soul must seem”. In both cases the key word is “args” which is from the same root as “argan” above. Here “effeminate” seems to me a more natural translation.

There are two points I want to make here. Firstly I don’t think we really know whether the Vikings thought that being argr was perverted or not. Describing Loki as “perverse” seems entirely justified, but that probably isn’t the meaning of the English word that is being implied by “Þegi”.

The other is that issues of gender and sexuality are a key part of Norse myth and Loki in particular is a very queer character. All these people who claim that queer folk didn’t exist in the past are talking nonsense.

book cover
Title: The Poetic Edda
By: Carolyne Larrington
Publisher: Oxford University Press
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The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl

014, Book Review, Theodora Goss

I have great enjoyed the previous two volumes in Theodora Goss’s Athena Club series, and immediately pounced upon the new one, The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl, as soon as it became available. It follows directly on from European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman. Indeed, some of the Club’s members are still in Budapest when the book opens. The majority, however, have returned to Mary Jekyll’s London home, only to be told by their distraught housekeeper, Mrs. Poole, that Alice, the kitchen maid, has been abducted in the middle of the night by persons unknown.

While the first two books use elements from well-known stories — Jack the Ripper and Dracula — this one uses a much less popular work, Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of the Seven Stars. It is a story about archaeologists finding out that the magic of the ancient Egyptians is rather too much for them, and therefore it is the ancestor of all of those mummy movies. Goss cleverly ties this into the story of Ayesha, the immortal queen from H Rider Haggard’s She. I won’t say too much more about that because some of you may not have read European Travels yet.

What I will say is that neither Stoker nor Haggard were experts on Egyptian history. Of course we know a lot more about it now than when they were writing, but it is still a bit of a shame that Goss is tied into their fictional ancient Egypt and therefore can’t write about the real queendom of Meroë and the amazing Amanirenas who was Kandake there at exactly the time some of the events in Goss’s book take place.

On the other hand, the Temple of Isis at Philae is a very real and beautiful place. Bettany Hughes featured it in her most recent documentary series about Egypt. It had to be moved from its original location due to the construction of the Aswan Dam, but that was long after the events of Goss’s book, so we never get to find out what Ayesha thinks of that.

Talking of Ayesha, at one point she gets to explain the myth of Isis and Osiris to some of the modern-day characters. She says,

Isis searched for his body parts, keening with grief like a falcon. Her tears flooded the Nile, which is why the Nile floods to this day. When she had found all of the parts of his body, she assembled the pieces and brought Osiris back to life with herbs and spells.

Oh, Ayesha, you know what Isis did. Since when did you become such a prim, Victorian lady?

The Egyptian history connection makes the book pure candy for me, and of course part of the action has to happen in the British Museum. Also the main British characters from Stoker’s novel, Professor Trelawny and his daughter, Margaret, live in Cornwall. Kyllion Cove is a not a real place, but I suspect that Stoker got the idea from Mullion Cove on the Lizard Peninsula. Part of the action in Goss’s book takes place on Mount St. Michael, and I spent a fair amount of time during my childhood on Marazion beach so I know the location well. Goss is again limited by the fictional geography of Stoker’s Cornwall, but otherwise does a fine job.

Much more relevant to the majority of readers will be the fact that this book features the villainous Professor Moriarty (who very obviously would have survived Reichenbach Falls, just as Holmes did). He turns out to be even more unpleasant than Dr. Watson let on. Here he is giving a speech to a group of supporters he has gathered for his latest scheme.

Once we are in power, we will close our borders to the unwashed masses that pollute our cities. England for Englishmen! We will administer our empire with a firmer hand – no more rebellions, or at least not one that go unpunished. No more concessions to native populations who have no idea what is good for them. I assure you that in public policy, mercy is an overrated virtue.

I’m rather in two minds about this. On the one hand presenting Moriarty as a sort of Pound Shop Jacob Rees Mogg seems a terrible waste of one of the great villains of history. On the other, the Athena Club stories are all about gender-flipping Victorian literature, and because of this Goss is honour-bound to show that the female is far more deadly than the male.

Sadly it seems that this is the last book in the series, at least for now. I still want to read the story about Prince Rupert of Hentzau. I’m also very worried about Justine Frankenstein who has fallen under the influence of the mysterious Mr. Dorian Gray. However, if Goss wants a break so that she can write something different that’s fine by me. She is a very good writer, and I’d be very happy to buy whatever she comes up with next. In the meantime, here are a few things about the Athena Club stories that I love.

Obviously the whole League of Extraordinary Daughters of Villainous Gentlemen thing was an idea of genius. I wish I’d thought of it.

The books do capture the essence of the Victorian thriller rather well. Because I’ve read some of her other work, I know that Goss is an incredibly elegant and atmospheric writer. However, Catherine Moreau, the presumed author of the Athena Club Mysteries, has a particular style and Goss sticks to it throughout these books.

Finally, while I know that some readers have been irritated by the device of having the characters comment in the text on what Moreau is writing, I rather like it. It isn’t just comedy. It provides further opportunities for character development, and for foreshadowing future events. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of any other book that does this. Probably there is one, but if not I hereby propose that it be called The Goss Technique in parallel with the popular Dos Passos Technique of putting extracts from fictional news coverage into a story.

book cover
Title: The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl
By: Theodora Goss
Publisher: Saga Press
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Incarnations of Cats

014, Movie Review

I saw Cats in the theatre not long after it started. As I recall, Elaine Paige had moved on, but Brian Blessed and Bonnie Langford were still in it, as were most of the original cast. It was a fabulous experience. I know the soundtrack very well. So I was interested to see that there was going to be a movie, and not nearly as creeped out by the trailer as most people. Then the reviews started coming in, and it was clear that something had gone badly wrong. After all, this is a film of the longest-running musical in both London and New York. How could it tank so badly? As it happened, I had picked up the video of the stage show just before Christmas (HMV had it on sale), so I watched that, and then went to see the movie.

I’d like to start with something that Cats has done well. The original show contained a sequence based on the poem, “Growltiger’s Last Stand.” It is horribly racist, and that was obvious at the time. That sequence has since been cut from the stage show, and is not in the video. There is another sequence based on the poem, “The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles” which has a few racist lines in. That was kept for the video, but neither of those sequences is in the movie. So you see, folks, it is entirely possible to take problematic material from the past and update it so that it is no longer offensive. All you have to do is care enough to do it.

Reading some of the comment on social media, I came to the conclusion that many of the complaints were coming from people who had never seen the stage show, and consequently didn’t know what to expect. In many ways these comments mirror the controversy that surrounded the show when it first launched. The extras on the video disc have clips of respectable BBC culture critics (Michael Parkinson, Joan Bakewell and Barry Norman) all expressing shock and disbelief that grown men and women would be cavorting around the stage pretending to be cats. I mean, what next? Would people be pretending to be elves? Or little green men from Mars?

Cats was always going to be an exercise is suspension of disbelief. You had to want to see a show in which all of the characters are cats, and you had to believe in them. The stage show put a lot of effort into make-up and character behaviour to help with this.

The movie, I think relied too much on technical wizardry.

The body fur and the movement of the ears and tails is very good indeed, but I think that there are aspects that the cast either thought, or were told, that the CGI would take care of. The hands are a good example of that. In the stage show the cast work hard to hold their hands like cat paws. In the movie hands are human hands.

The mixture of human and feline isn’t necessarily bad. TS Eliot’s widow, Valerie, told Andrew Lloyd Webber that she’d turned down a request by Disney to make a cartoon of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats because she felt that they would make the characters look just like real cats. So the characters have to be a bit human. But there’s a very fine line between convincing and the uncanny valley. Faces are an obvious example. In the stage show the cast’s faces are heavily made up to look like cat faces. In the movie the characters have human faces on cat bodies. I have a feeling that someone in management said that the stars had to be recognisable.

The animals with human faces thing extended to the mice and cockroaches. In the stage show everyone other than a cat is played by a cat in costume. It is part of the show that they put on for Deuteronomy. The movie goes away from that and it doesn’t work well. Someone in the costume department had seen Ant Man & The Wasp and thought copying Hope Van Dyne’s outfit was a good idea.

But the thing that really creeped me out about the movie was the scale. The original stage show has a single set in a junk yard (this was apparently a deliberate pun – the cats live in a Waste Land). The bits of junk are sized appropriately for the cats, but as backdrops go it is fairly neutral. The movie has a whole range of different sets that are very much human settings. And because the characters spend much of their time walking like humans you get that “people in a giant’s castle” effect that takes away from the fact that you are supposed to be watching cats.

I can’t be certain about this, but I suspect that the movie’s VFX people didn’t put a lot of thought into the scaling. They just made the sets look bigger than the cats. But different sets were differently big and sometimes the same set was differently big in different shots. At least that’s how it seemed to me watching it.

And then there was the downright sloppy. There were times when the backgrounds looked very obviously painted.

Something else that has drawn comment is that come some of the cats wear fur coats. This has always been part of the stage show. I think it is intended to express parts of their personality. I’ve never really understood it, but it does seem to intrude more in the movie because of the quality of the cat-fur CGI. The more realistic-looking the cats are, the less you can give them ridiculous costumes.

Another issue may be to do with the cast being more distant. Cats was designed to be staged in the round, and the cast would run up and down the aisles during some of the more energetic numbers. If you were on the end of a row there was always the possibility of a cat coming to say hello. That made the audience part of the Jellice Ball gathering. You were one of them. That doesn’t work in the cinema because the cats are up there on the screen and you are down in the auditorium.

One of the things that shows a commenter hasn’t seen the stage show is the complaint that the cats in the movie are too sexy. Oh, you poor, innocent children. First up, they are cats, of course they are sexy. It is in their nature. And second, look at the characters. In the stage show Rum Tum Tugger is Cat Elvis. Jason Derulo has chosen to make him Cat James Brown instead, but the effect is the same and it is an entirely honourable substitution. The female cats all drool over him. On the extras for the video Gillian Frank, the choreographer, describes Victoria’s dance as, “a young female cat discovering her body after puberty.”

Then there’s McCavity’s song, which if you listen to it you will have to admit that it could easily be used in a strip club. Taylor Swift does a decent job of performing it, but if you take a look at the video you will get to see Rosemarie Ford (Bombalurina) and Aeva May (Demeter) strut their stuff properly, and I can assure you they are way more sexy that anything Ms. Swift manages. Oh, and there’s Grizzabella: she’s not out on the street because she “went with McCavity”; she’s a sex worker. Tottenham Court Road was a red light district when Eliot wrote those poems. The whole narrative of the show is the redemption of a “fallen woman”.

I’m not best placed to opine on the quality of the music, but I do want to make a few quick comments. The original stage show had to make do with a 16-piece orchestra because of the size of the theatre. For the video Lloyd Webber went for a full orchestra, with mixed results. One of the joys of Cats is that it is an eclectic mix of musical styles and dance styles. The full orchestra is magnificent on “Memory”, which is basically a song from a Puccini opera. It is much less good on some of the more traditional musical theatre numbers such as “Mr. Mistoffelees”. The movie seems to have taken a more middle ground, which was a relief.

There’s a new song in the movie, “Beautiful Ghosts”, to take account for Victoria’s enhanced role. It is not very good. Taylor Swift, whom the credits say voices it rather than Francesa Hayward who plays Victoria, does not help. Also a whole bunch of people who are actors or comedians rather than singers are allowed to sing their own songs. Again this does not help. Robbie Fairchild as Munkustrap does a decent job, but part of me wishes they had chosen someone with a deeper voice for that role, or had someone else sing it. He doesn’t sound like the day-to-day leader of the Jellicles. I know this is just me falling for social stereotypes about what alpha males should sound like.

On now to the plot and characters. It is, of course, a minor miracle that there is a plot at all. Lloyd Webber’s original idea was just to set the poems to music. There was no plot until Valerie Eliot showed him and Trevor Nunn an unpublished poem called “Grizzabella: the Glamour Cat”. Somehow they managed to stitch together something that vaguely made sense, and thankfully that’s all that musicals need to do. The audience is there for the songs and dancing, not the story. Hollywood, it seems, wanted something more.

I rather liked the idea of making more use of Victoria. In the stage show she’s basically there to find a use for a principal ballerina. The movie keeps that, but also uses her narrative as a young cat dumped by her humans to act as our introduction to the Jellicles and their customs. Any science fiction or fantasy writer will be familiar with the idea of the outsider character who acts as the eyes of the reader. So far so good, but…

In the stage show, McCavity briefly tries to kidnap Deuteronomy, but it is all over very quickly and McCavity’s evil is always understood as being directed towards humans (and most importantly towards police dogs), not towards his fellow cats. If he was evil towards cats, Eliot would have made him foreign, like Growltiger’s Siamese enemies. The movie turns him into some sort of pantomime villain. Idris Elba does his best, but it really doesn’t work, and it is hard to see how any cat with any brain, let alone the great McCavity, would ever think that it would.

I am, of course, delighted that Mistoffelees has been made more of a hero.

James Cordon and Rebel Wilson are absolute disasters. Neither of them makes any serious attempt to play a cat, except when doing it for laughs. They play themselves in cat suits. They do have comedy roles, but these are both characters, not bumbling buffoons. Jennyanydots is more like Joyce Grenfell than the character Wilson plays, while Bustopher Jones is a very proper gentleman, not a messy glutton. I got the impression that what we had here were two people who thought they were too big for the show.

In contrast Ian McKellen and Judi Dench do much better jobs, despite being much bigger names. I still prefer John Mills as Gus. I guess that, having played Magneto and Gandalf, Sir Ian wanted something more dramatic and heroic than an old chap with the palsy.

Dame Judi has been part of the Cats family from the start. She was originally down to play both Grizzabella and Jennyanydots, but she snapped an Achilles tendon in rehearsals and had to be replaced at the last minute. It is lovely that she finally has a place in the show. Of course this meant a gender flip for Deuteronomy. That took a bass voice out of the show which hasn’t properly been replaced, though McCavity doesn’t actually sing himself in the stage show. I suspect that is one reason why I had such an issue with Mukustrap’s voice.

Judi did make an off-hand comment about her therefore being a trans Deuteronomy, and of course the papers ran with that. I don’t think that she meant any harm by it. However, everyone has completely overlooked the actual trans character in the story. Sexing cats isn’t always easy, and that is why one of the magic tricks that Mr. Mistoffelees is known for is producing seven kittens, much to the surprise of his humans. So Mistoffelees is canonically a transmasculine cat, in addition to now being a hero and Victoria’s love interest. That is one cool cat.

It is possible that the movie also gender-flipped Griddlebone. She was originally Growltiger’s girlfriend, but she’s also mentioned in McCavity’s song and the movie has added a character with that name as one of McCavity’s goons. It isn’t clear what gender that cat is.

Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer are a hard act to pull off. The stage show had Bonnie Langford as Rumpleteazer, which will either please you or immediately set your teeth on edge. I’m in the latter camp. The video has some truly appalling cockney accents. (Jo Gibb, who plays Rumpleteazer, has a lovely Scottish accent, which I think she should have kept.) The movie, I think, comes closest to getting them right. They are very naughty, but they really don’t mean any harm.

I was pleased to see Growltiger had a place in the movie, because the much-feared pirate king of the Thames is a great character. Sadly the movie turned him into a bullying henchman for McCavity, which was a dreadful waste.

Jennifer Hudson did a fine job as Grizzabella. You can’t go far wrong with a voice like that. But the two stars of the show were the lead dancers. Francesca Hayward (Victoria) and Steven McRae (Skimbleshanks) are both Royal Ballet dancers. Victoria is the female lead and is in pretty much every scene. Hayward does a good job of acting in additional to showing off her ballet skills. McRae is also an expert tap dancer, and he puts this skill to good effect as Skimbleshanks, tap-dancing the sound of a train pulling away from a station and picking up speed. It is the one moment of absolute genius in the movie. I’d go to see it again just for that.

Of course I will see it again anyway. I love the musical, and the songs, and most of all it is a film about cats. I’m sorry that you humans are a bit perturbed about that, but how many movies do you have about apes compared to movies about us, hmm? I think it is about time we had our turn, praise be to Bastet. You can have Hollywood back soon, because after all that rushing around and excitement we will need to go sleep for several hours.

Interview – Kate Macdonald

014, Audio, Interviews

This is another interview that was previously broadcast on Cheryl’s Women’s Outlook show on Ujima Radio.

Kate Macdonald is the founder of Handheld Press, an innovative British small press specialising in recovering forgotten works by women writers. We reviewed their re-issue of Vonda McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting last issue.

In the interview Kate talks about why she set up Handheld, the work it does, and two of its more successful projects. The first is What Not by Rose Macaulay, a book that was a major influence on Brave New World. The story of how it came to be re-published includes a surprise contribution by John Clute. The other book is So Lucky by Nicola Griffith, which features a lead character with multiple sclerosis.


Luna: Moon Rising

Archive, Book Review, Ian McDonald

Reviewing the final book in a series is always a challenging task as you want to talk about how the author has concluded the story arcs, and yet somehow avoid giving too many spoilers for the previous books. I’m not going to try very hard here, because there are few excuses for not reading Ian McDonald. You should be up to date.

The Luna series has a very simple elevator pitch: it is Dallas on the Moon. In a relatively near future the Moon is busily being commercially exploited by five major families known as the Dragons. There are the Mackenzies from Australia who prospect for metals; the Vorontsovs from Russia who handle space transport; the Asamoahs from Ghana who handle life support and food for the colonists; the Suns from China who, appropriately, are into high tech including solar energy; and the Cortas from Brazil who mine helium. There is much corporate intrigue, and much family drama.

The Cortas, by the way, are the stars of the series. A while back now McDonald wrote a series of books set in non-Western cultures: India, Brazil and Turkey. Brazil is the culture that he seems to have fallen in love with. I can see why, even if they haven’t yet learned to play cricket.

While this is all perfect television fodder, and the series was optioned before the release of the first book by CBS, there is also much interest in sociology and politics. To start with the Moon is an entirely commercial society. Everything is regulated by contracts, and anyone can agree a contract of any kind. I’m sure this is in part a comment on some of Heinlein’s more Libertarian writings, though I want to read more of Farah Mendlesohn’s excellent book before commenting further on that. The important point here is that it gives an excuse for courtroom drama, which is why the brilliant, if self-centred, lawyer, Ariel Corta, is one of the stars of the series.

Luna society is innovative in other ways too. The people of the Moon don’t feel bound by existing Earthly customs and mores. They live how they want:

Alexia sees a dumpy, brown-skinned figure, short silver hair, robed and scarved in exquisite, fine-textured weaves that give nothing to fashion. Woman? Man? Alexia can’t tell. She doesn’t need to be able to tell; this is the moon. There seem to be as many genders and sexes and sexualities as there are citizens. And there are pronouns – or not, depending on personal taste – not just for those genders and sexes and sexualities, but also for non-human entities, and alternative human personalities. The Farsiders have a pronoun for speaking to and of machines. And then there are the Moon Wolves and their darkside and lightside aspects.

It is very much the beginning of a post-human future; the sort of thing that terrified conservatives on Twitter believe that trans people are attempting to foist upon them. (Which of course some of us might be.)

This, then, is the science-fictional side of the series, the speculation of how human society might develop. But in many ways it takes a back seat to the human dramas of family and politics. At the start of the first book the Five Dragons are ruled over by ageing patriarchs, and one matriarch, who have grown to hate each other. There have been attempts to weld lunar society together through cross-dynastic marriages, but these seem to end up either by seducing the incoming partner to the side of the family they are joining, in early divorce, or by becoming hostage-taking. Mostly their battles are fought through commerce and law, but violence is never far away. By the end of book two, everything has fallen apart.

The purpose of Luna: Moon Rising, inevitably, is to allow a new lunar society to grow from the ashes of the old. This has to allow the younger generation to put aside the enmities of the past and unite to face a greater, and fairly obvious, foe. Bad guys have to get their comeuppances, and there need to be a few happy endings. McDonald accomplishes all of this with expert ease. Much of it is, of course, entirely predictable, but by this time you are sufficiently invested in the characters to only want the outcomes that you can see. And even predictable outcomes are not won easily.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing this series on TV. It isn’t going to be another Expanse. McDonald is a good enough SF writer to make things seem mostly sensible, but that isn’t the point. The point is the people: their loves and rivalries; their obsession with fashion; and the jaw-dropping architectural vistas that they create thanks to the blessing of living in one sixth G. It will be visually stunning, it will be merrily multi-cultural, and no dudebro is going to be able to say that all those brown and queer folks shouldn’t be there because it isn’t “historically accurate”.

book cover
Title: Luna: Moon Rising
By: Ian McDonald
Publisher: Gollancz
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Alice Payne Rides

014, Book Review, Kate Heartfield

The second of Kate Heartfield’s Alice Payne novellas, Alice Payne Rides, is a full-on time war story. That is, it engages directly with the seeming impossibility of winning a time war when one side or the other can always go back in time to undo things. This may make the plot a little over-complicated for some readers, but you are all science fiction people so I’m sure the vast majority will be OK with it.

The main story thread is the ongoing antagonism between Prudence Zungia and her former commanding officer, General Almo. Alice, of course, is off doing something else entirely. She’s trying to find out what happened to her father in the war that caused him to come home not in his right mind. And because this was a two-book sale there’s the whole question of the inquisitive Captain Auden to deal with. Will he finally unmask Alice’s secret life as a notorious highwayman?

That’s basically it. Adventure story. Except that Heartfield isn’t the sort of writer to miss the opportunity to tell us something about history as well. In this particular case that something is Smallpox. It was a deadly disease in mediaeval times. It was a weapon of colonisation in the Americas. If you didn’t know all that, you will after reading this book. And you will be very grateful for vaccines, which is a very good thing for a book to be able to do to you.

book cover
Title: Alice Payne Rides
By: Kate Heartfield
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
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Embers of War / Fleet of Knives

Archive, Book Review, Gareth L Powell

I missed reviewing Gareth L Powell’s Embers of War when it came out, but now that I have read Fleet of Knives as well I figure I can do both together. Ideally, perhaps, I should do the whole trilogy, but that would mean a longer wait and Gareth wouldn’t thank me for that.

It was perhaps inevitable that, with the sad death of Iain M Banks, the publishing industry would be looking for a new King of Space Opera. Lots of people would love that crown. Gareth has made a pretty good pitch for it.

If you listen to Gareth talk about the series, one of the things he often says is that most space opera focuses on things like interstellar war, but he wanted to focus on what happens after the war is over. The aptly titled Embers of War therefore begins three years after the end of the Archipelago War. Two of the primary characters of our story are war veterans.

First up we have Captain Annelida Deal. She was the commander of the Conglomeration Navy forces at the battle of Pelapatarn, the engagement that ended the war. The Outwarders had perhaps felt themselves safe hiding deep within the vast forest of giant, sentient trees that covered the planet. Captain Deal’s superior officers thought differently, and they were not taking chances. If in doubt, nuke ‘em from orbit, it is the safest option. Even if it does mean obliterating an entire planetary ecosystem.

In the outrage that followed the atrocity, the Conglomeration government made Captain Deal a scapegoat. Fortunately space is a very large place and she has managed to disappear and re-invent herself. She hopes that she can stay that way.

The Trouble Dog was not involved in the destruction of Pelapatarn, though several of her pack mates were. As a Carnivore Class warship, she is one of the most deadly fighting machines that the Conglomeration is able to field. Naturally she is run by a top class AI. Following the war, Trouble Dog elected to resign from the Navy and sign up with the House of Reclamation, a galaxy-wide rescue and salvage company whose only mission is to save those in trouble. Her new captain, Sal Konstanz, is good hearted and brave, but not convinced that she is leadership material.

No space opera is complete without a certain amount of Gosh! Wow! factor. In Embers of War that is provided by The Gallery, a solar system that has been turned into an art installation by a long-lost civilisation. No one knows who built it, or why they decided to sculpt the planets into such beautiful and unusual shapes.

By the end of the first book, Sal and the Trouble Dog have discovered another relic of the builders of the Gallery. The Fleet of Knives is a vast fleet of marble-white, dagger-shaped warships run entirely by AIs. Much of the book named after them deals with the consequences of unleashing such a potent military force on the galaxy.

The other half of the story focuses on the attempts of Trouble Dog and her crew to rescue a foolish bunch of chancers who have tried to loot a very old alien starship that has been preserved as an historical relic. The aliens are not happy, but the whole episode also throws light on the reasons why the Fleet of Knives was built in the first place. What would anyone need a fleet of a million warships for, if all you wanted to do with your lives was to make art installations from planets? Along the way, Trouble Dog makes friends with Lucy’s Ghost, a ship that is run, not by an AI, but by the uploaded mind of a human girl whose body had been dying.

There’s a lot of talk about AIs in the series. It is useful to think of how the Culture Minds might see these ships. Trouble Dog they would probably view as on the level of a human child who had been enlisted as a soldier and was still trying to process the experience of going to war and killing people. The Fleet of Knives, on a similar scale, is a nest of very large fire ants.

The other thing that good space opera needs is interesting aliens. Gareth provides us with the Druff. The Druff have blue skin, six arms, and faces in the palm of each hand. They are natural engineers, able to fix anything, and have therefore made a niche for themselves on human-owned ships. Nod, the Trouble Dog’s engineer, is probably the most interesting character in the books.

The theme of the series, as should be fairly obvious, is the question of how to keep the peace in a dangerous galaxy. Most people, even most soldiers, don’t want war. But if danger is out there, who is to oppose it? And how much force is it acceptable to apply to do so? Trouble Dog and Captain Deal are probably far too damaged to provide answers. Sal Konstanz tries to provide the moral center of the story, but lacks the self-confidence and experience to do so. My guess is that in the end it will be down to Nod and the other Druff to fix things. After all, fixing things is what Druff do.

book cover
Title: Embers of War
By: Gareth L Powell
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
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book cover
Title: Fleet of Knives
By: Gareth L Powell
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Remnant

014, Book Review, Lania Knight

I met Lania Knight at a creative writing conference at Bath Spa University earlier this year. It turned out that we had a few interests in common, including feminist science fiction. Knight had a novel published in 2018 through an American small press. Life happening and the press in question not being a science fiction specialist have conspired to causing the book to fly under the radar, so I offered to take a look at it.

Remnant is a dystopia, which is pretty much par for the course for feminist SF, but it is unlike any I have read before. Yes, civilisation has collapsed, but a small part of it has survived thanks to a very wealthy scientific genius. She, now known only as Maitris, has created a small colony based around her biotech skills. Most of the inhabitants are clones of various types, each line created for specific purposes. Being the only technology that mankind has left, the clones are used for everything: managing the colony, doing the science, farming, security, food.

One clone line is special. Maitris has only one clone at a time. She is reared in seclusion (safe from assassins) on a small farm far from the city. The clone will know nothing of her world, save that she is destined one day to become its Queen. To the rest of the colony she is known as the Remnant.

Our story, fairly obviously, follows the current Remnant at the point at which she is brought to the city to become its ruler. But not everything is as she has been promised, including her role in it. Most importantly, entropy has set in. Vital chemicals are running low. Computers are getting old and becoming impossible to repair. The few crops that have survived have insufficient disease resistance. Issues with some of the clones cause them to go mad after a few years. (Oh well, they can always be eaten, but they are disruptive.)

We are looking, then, at a dying world. Some of the clones have enough sense and self-will to understand what is going on, and to plan for life after the colony. But can they trust each other? Is there really a safe world across the Border of the colony as some enterprising goat herds have claimed? And most importantly, will they be able to make new humans without cloning?

Guess who is the only female person in the colony known to be fertile?

It is a great set-up. I can also see how it might have been executed somewhat better. One of the issues with this sort of political fiction is that there’s a tendency for the characters and plot to fulfil a role. If Remnant had been written in the 1970s I’m sure we would all be saying how great it was. These days we find ourselves asking what an Anne Leckie or NK Jemisin might have done with the story.

Of course not everyone is going to produce Hugo-winning fiction to order. And Knight can write. Her debut novel, Three Cubic Feet, was a finalist in the Lammys a few years back (it is a gay YA book). My reservations about Remnant are that the book concentrates a little too much on the world and what must happen to it; and doesn’t give the rather interesting characters enough room to breathe. However, if you like feminist SF, you should definitely give this book a try. There’s a conversation out there, and Remnant deserves a place in it.

book cover
Title: Remnant
By: Lania Knight
Publisher: Burlesque Press
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
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The Taiga Syndrome

014, Book Review, Cristina Rivera Garza

It appears that this is a month for weirdly experimental fiction. If you thought that Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts was odd, well you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The Taiga Syndrome is a novella by Cristina Rivera Garza, hailed as one of Mexico’s greatest living writers (by Jonathan Lethem, no less, in the front cover blurb). It is translated into English by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana. I don’t envy them the task of maintaining the deeply surrealist feel of the prose in a new language. There are a couple of points where the text makes reference to rugby. I have no idea whether this is in the original, but it works. Translation is often an exercise in creativity.

The narrator of the book is a woman detective from an un-named country. She apparently has a reputation for taking on strange cases. Mostly she has failed to solve them. Recently she has been offered a private commission by a rich man whose wife has run off with a new lover. It was out of the blue, he says, completely unexpected. They have headed off around the world, but she keeps sending me postcards from wherever they end up. I’m sure that she wants to be found. I want you to bring her home.

Well, that was me paraphrasing the plot, not direct quotes, but you get the idea. The problem is the place where the missing lovers have gone. They were last heard from in the Taiga, the region of snow forest that circles the northern hemisphere of our planet. They are probably in Siberia, given the issues that our detective has with culture and language. She has to hire a translator, and that adds an additional layer of unreliability to the narrative.

The story is interlaced with references to Hansel & Gretel, and to Red Riding Hood, both stories of young people who get lost in the woods, for lost in the woods is exactly where the runaway lovers and the detective end up.

Once you are lost, nothing is quite what it seems. The normal rules of the world no longer apply. Time itself may seem to run differently. You will see things that you can’t quite believe. They will frighten you.

On the other hand, maybe being lost in the woods is exactly what some people want in their lives. Who can tell?

The Taiga Syndrome was published late this year in the UK, but there was a US edition last year and it won the Novella category in the Shirley Jackson Awards. I can see why, though I would class it as merely very weird, not horrific in any way. Don’t bother with it if you only want books that give you easy answers. But if you want, or need, to get lost in the woods this might be the very thing.

book cover
Title: The Taiga Syndrome
By: Cristina Rivera Garza
Publisher: And Other Stories
Purchase links:
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His Dark Materials – Season 1

014, TV Review

We are truly living in a golden age of science fiction and fantasy television. Good Omens was delightful. The Expanse continues to go from strength to strength. Watchmen is an unexpected surprise. And in addition we have Philip Pullman adapting His Dark Materials for the BBC.

It is a very long time since I read the books. Heck, I reviewed them in Emerald City. Checking back on what I said, I can see that I loved them. I have also read a huge quantity of books since then and consequently couldn’t remember much of the story. Therefore I have come to the TV series fairly raw. I’m certainly not going to comment on whether or not this is a faithful adaptation. I’m sure that people who know the books much better than I do are supplying that viewpoint.

I must admit that I was a little perturbed that there were only 8 episodes to cover three novels, but I see that this has only taken us half way. There will be a second, 8-episode series next year. This may finish the story, as the first season has included some elements of the second book, The Subtle Knife. Personally I like the fact that they have woven the start of Will’s story in with the narrative of The Golden Compass. I remember finding it quite jarring to start book two and find that it was all about Will, not Lyra.

One thing that I did notice is that the plot coincidences that troubled me when I first read the books still trouble me now. In The Golden Compass Lyra keeps getting into trouble, and each time this results in her being just where she needs to be in order to further the plotline. No one is perfect, not even Philip Pullman.

I was really pleased with the visual effects. The bears looked great, and the dæmons were mostly good too. It did seem that when there was a crowd scene that dæmons were often only visible for major characters, which I guess was a cost-saving ploy. I’m not going to complain too much if that allowed them to get the other effects right.

I liked the steampunk styling of Lyra’s world, though there were times when the Magisterium’s military reminded me slightly too much of SHIELD. Oxford was, well, Oxford. There are definite advantages to being the BBC and being able to just walk in and film in such a photogenic place.

As far as the cast goes, I thought that Ruth Wilson as Mrs Coulter and Lin-Manuel Miranda as Lee Scoresby were absolutely brilliant. James McAvoy does a decent job as Lord Asriel, but inevitably he always ends up looking like Charles Xavier making yet another dodgy decision. Ruta Gedmintas doesn’t look quite Finnish enough for Serafina Pekkala.

Overall I really enjoyed it. It took me two episodes to get sucked in, but after that I binged the rest. The next season will, I think, have a lot more challenges. They have done a good job of setting up the basic theological argument of the story, but there’s a real chance that everything might go off the rails once we get Metatron involved. I’m assuming that Pullman would not have agreed to do the series if they hadn’t promised to stay true to his vision, but how much of the theological argument will find its way into the rest of the story remains to be seen.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Archive, Book Review, Marlon James

“Truth eats lies just as the crocodile eats the moon”

Thus speaks Tracker, the Red Wolf, the principal viewpoint character and narrator of Marlon James’ new novel. He is in prison at the time, being interrogated by someone he refers to as an inquisitor. If that doesn’t ring alarm bells as to the accuracy of his narration, his behaviour during the book surely will. There is a lot of moon to be eaten.

Much has been written about how Black Leopard, Red Wolf will be an “African Game of Thrones”. It is true that it is a massive, sprawling, blood-drenched epic, but beyond that the comparison is by no means obvious. Martin’s series is a tale of the scions of great noble families vying for control of a kingdom. In James’ books the politics are still there, but the protagonists are for the most part less exalted figures.

Tracker himself is a country boy from a minor tribe. True he is twice-blessed: once with a nose of uncanny acuity, and once with a protective spell from a friendly witch. But in the political arena he is a nobody. The Leopard, well, he’s a leopard. He is not The Black Panther, King of Wakanda. He may be the King of the Jungle, for everyone knows that the lion can barely climb a tree, let alone get enough food to eat without his wives to go hunting for him, but the Leopard is still a cat. Occasionally he is a man, which makes speaking easier, but words are over-rated.

Once you see past the pyrotechnic prose, and the wonderfully unfamiliar African mythscapes, the rest of the central cast comes across like a Dungeons & Dragons party. In addition to Tracker and his shape-shifting friend, we have Sogolon the Moon Witch, Fumeli the archer, Sadogo the sorrowful giant, Mossi the swordsman, a very smart buffalo, and a few others who pop in and out of the narrative.

This is not a Fellowship, though James makes cheeky use of the word occasionally, because they mostly hate each other for various reasons. Sogolon is particularly caustic:

“Fellowship tear apart before it even come together in the valley. Three of you go off in the Darklands and one have to follow because you is man and man never listen.”

Our heroes, then, are on a quest because someone, not necessarily their immediate paymaster, has hired their services.

Oh, and yes, the characters do not speak Home Counties English. Why should they?

There is, then, a fairly standard fantasy narrative at the core of the book. There are people with power. They have plans. They need things done, and they hire a bunch of talented mercenaries to do the work. But there is so much more.

I was rather hoping for a grand historical narrative based firmly in actual African history. There are so many great options to choose from: Kush, Ghana, Songhai, Zimbabwe, Kongo, Benin and so on. James has chosen not to do this. Instead he has created an almost hallucinatory landscape that does have mighty cities, but is also populated with mythical creatures and borders on worlds clearly not our own.

We meet Asanbosam and Sasabonsam from Ashanti legends, and Ipundulu the Lightning Bird who is known to the Zulu and Xhosa. All of them are vampires of a sort, whereas the Omoluzu lurk upside down walking on roofs ready to snatch the unwary. We meet Chipfalambula the Living Island. We travel to the Darklands where time seems to run differently, and to the mighty tree city of Dolingo.

Nevertheless the story is clearly set in Africa. There is talk of the great Sand Sea. Mossi hails from the East where foolish, pale-skinned men think there is only one god. When I worked out what James meant by “glyphs” I kicked myself. As in Black Panther, it is an Africa made up of many traditions. Some of the creatures listed above are well known from myth. Some James appears to have altered to fit his needs, and some he may have made up. Words are taken from a variety of African languages. Customs are used too. Two of them will doubtless be contentious to some readers: slavery and homosexuality.

James is not shy about portraying slavery as existing. It was, after all, commonplace in Roman times, so why should it not be here? His story is set in a fantasy version of iron age Africa. The man who hires our heroes is a slaver. He is not a good man, but he is far from the worst we meet. This being a fantasy world it could, of course, have been made a world in which slavery did not exist. James did not make that choice. It isn’t my place to judge him, but I suspect that others will.

As to sex, Tracker is unashamedly Shoga, an effeminate man who prefers sex with other men. Or male cats who can become men. He is by no means the only man in the story to have such preferences. Indeed, his relationships with other men in the band are a major influence on the plot. While his behaviour is looked down upon by many, it is not unusual. Men fuck each other, a lot. This too has plenty of basis in reality, though there are those who will seek to deny it.

In addition to Shoga, which is a Swahili word, James mentions Mugawe, a tradition of men living as women found among the Bantu people of the Meru region of Kenya. He also mentions warriors called Uzundu who, like some Greeks, fought alongside their lovers. I can’t find a source for that, but then in an interview with Tochi Onyebuchi in Electric Literature he mentions that some African tribes have 15 genders. That fair blew my head off, and I can’t wait to find out more.

A final thing that will cause upset is that James loves poking fun at fantasy clichés. The most obvious example of this is that in so many fantasy books the wicked people practice something called “black magic”. James is having nothing of this. In his world the wickedest people are practitioners of something called “white science”. And why shouldn’t they be? It’s not like they have to base everything in their civilisation on Graeco-Roman ideas of purity. Fuck the physiognomists, there’s no reason why whiteness can’t be an indicator of evil. There will be tears before bedtime in Puppydom over this. I shall be much amused.

Of course the true indicator of evil is not blackness or whiteness, but hyenaness. Any leopard will tell you this.

I should note that while many of the possible parallels to Game of Thrones are missing, Black Leopard, Red Wolf can claim to be Grimdark (or should that be Grimpale?). Lots of people die, some of our heroes included. Some people die horribly. Tracker kills quite a lot of people. Pretty much everyone involved in politics is an awful person in some way, no matter how noble their cause might initially seem. The strangest of alliances may be struck out of necessity. Tracker begins the story in prison. We know there are no happy endings, in this volume at least.

Of course there will be more books. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is billed as the first book of the Dark Star Trilogy. But it is not a trilogy as we know it, Captain. According to a Guardian interview, the other two books will tell the same story from different viewpoints. That’s not entirely new. For example, Anne McCaffrey did something like it with some of her Pern stories. But in her case everyone was telling the same tale. That, James has made clear, will not apply to his books. All of his narrators will lie.

The crocodile who eats the moon is a myth. Perhaps what Tracker meant is that Truth is a myth too.

The next book will be told by Sogolon. You can be sure that she will have a thing or two to say about Tracker, and about men in general. I’m looking forward to it.

book cover
Title: Black Leopard, Red Wolf
By: Marlon James
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Editorial – December 2019

014, Editorial

Well, that’s 2019 out of the way. I’m not going to do a review of the year because I always do that for the lovely people at Aqueduct Press. You can read my 2019 post here.

I did manage to forget a couple of books in that, so profuse apologies to Karen Lord and Kate Heartfield. Hopefully having this ‘zine to refer back to will make me somewhat less sloppy next year.

What I have done instead is port across all of the reviews I have written this year to this site. You can find them all under the Archive menu.

I have also added a bunch of menu entries for various types of post, and a full index of book reviews by author. There’s a little bit of coding magic involved in that so hopefully it will stay up to date and useful.

That’s all I have to say for this year. I’ll see you all again in 2020.

Atlas Alone

Archive, Book Review, Emma Newman

All of Emma Newman’s previous books in the Planetfall series have been billed as being readable as stand-alones. The new book, Atlas Alone, may be the first to break that pattern. It is a direct sequel to After Atlas. If you are going to read it, it would be helpful to know who Carlos, Deanna and Travis are, and why they are on a starship heading after the Pathfinder. I’m going to assume that you folks know that. If you don’t, there will be spoilers.

So our heroes are safely aboard the Atlas II. Earth is a smoking ruin behind them. Most of the passengers are unaware of what happened after they left, but we know. We also know that some of the people in charge of the ship think that they have been part of the Rapture. Those sorts of people are unlikely to look kindly upon passengers who are not part of their cult. That includes our three escapees.

This book focuses on Dee. As regular Emma Newman readers will know, each of her books in the Planetfall series has a theme of mental illness. For Dee that means her unprocessed trauma from surviving London after social collapse when she was a child. It has made her self-reliant, ruthless and unable to trust others. Those characteristics happen to make her very good at immersive games – the book world technological version of LARPing, a hobby Emma is a very fond of. So when Dee is given an opportunity to play a game on an elite server available only to the upper echelons of Atlas II’s crew, she jumps at it.

As it turns out, our heroes are not the only people on Atlas II who know what happened to Earth. There is someone else as well, and he’s angry. He wants the guilty to be punished; and he wants Dee to help him. She’s unsure, but during the game she kills a non-player character, and when she emerges she discovers that a senior member of the crew has died. Somehow Dee’s mysterious contact has got her to kill on his behalf.

Pretty much all of this is in the back cover blurb, by the way.

From now on Dee is trapped. An investigation is launched. Carlos, having been a top detective back on Earth, is put in charge. Dee knows that she could be convicted of murder, but she also knows that her victim is one of the people responsible for the destruction of the Earth. Meanwhile her mysterious helper is busy trying to manipulate her into continuing to help him. He knows an awful lot about her; and is a master of psychological manipulation. Can Dee find out who he is, or help him kill the rest of the command crew, before Carlos catches her? And which should she do?

The book, then, is a psychological thriller with a badly traumatised woman as the viewpoint character. We live inside Dee’s head for the whole book; and get to feel her pain as she is ruthlessly manipulated. This is not a comfortable read, but it is a compelling one.

In happier times I would complain that the politics of Atlas Alone are simplistic and rather offensive to Americans. These days, however, we are facing what appears to be a hard-right Christian evangelist coup in the USA. I don’t suppose Emma will be the only person writing about this sort of thing. I still have reservations about the worldbuilding. I don’t believe that Europe would have been able to easily absorb the enormous number of American refugees who would want to flee the imposition of a theocratic government. But that’s not the point of the book. What we are interested in is the mental struggle that Dee is going through.

More than that I cannot say, because I absolutely do not want to spoil the ending of the book. I will be fascinated to see how other readers react to it. I also want the next book, NOW!

Yeah, it is gut-wrenching. I kind of trust Emma to do that these days. She’s very good.

But also the series has become very firmly plot-driven. The crew and passengers of the Atlas II have a number of serious issues to face. And at some point they will arrive at the colony established by the original Atlas mission. Aside from a handful of colonists stranded on Mars, these two groups are presumably the only humans left alive in the universe, so Emma doesn’t have much choice as to who and what to write about. Knowing Em, I’m sure she has it all plotted out, but it is going to be a challenge to pull off a satisfying ending.

book cover
Title: Atlas Alone
By: Emma Newman
Publisher: Gollancz
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This is How You Lose the Time War

Amal El-Mohtar, Archive, Book Review, Max Gladstone

Once upon a time…

Or maybe twice, thrice. Timelines buckle and bend back on themselves twisted in the multiple dimensions of Calabi-Yau space; some of them curved so tightly that they can fit in the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, others stretching to infinity through the whole breadth of the visible universe. Running through them all, like bright shafts of laser light, are two beams: one red, and the other blue.

This is Red. She is a cyborg, a constructed creature of The Agency. At the Commandant’s command she slices through timelines, cutting and re-sewing them as required. She is the stiletto and the needle, the finest tool that the Agency has to wield.

This is Blue. She is a grown thing, like all agents of Garden. She has roots everywhere, or perhaps we should say she is a vast mycelium connecting all time and space, patiently constraining and guiding its growth towards the outcomes that Garden desires. Of all of the things that Garden has grown, she is the finest, the most subtle and accomplished.

This is the War to End all Wars, because if one side wins it will control not just the present, but the past and the future as well. The winning side will be able to recreate the past so that the loser never even existed, and never will. The stakes could not be higher.

This, then, is a song of red and blue; of left and right; of good and evil (each side good in their own eyes). It is a song of ice and fire; an irresistible force against an immovable object.

Opposites attract, and all binaries are false. But these statements can only be true if they are allowed to be. Particles might collapse into waves, but how can they when they are controlled by agencies that seek to command time itself?

This is, perhaps, a dangerous message, especially in times like these when the news media are constantly telling us that we must be either with them or against them. But it is an important message nonetheless, and one that Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone should be congratulated for writing. It is an undeniable truth that soldiers on either side of a war often have far more in common with each other than they do with the people who sit safely at home and issue orders. This is a message that the world needs to hear.

In every strand of the timeline there is a play called Romeo & Juliet. In some it is written by Shakespeare, in others by Kit Marlowe or Francis Bacon, and in one memorable one by Francis Crawford of Lymond. In some it is a comedy, and in others a tragedy. Perhaps in one it is a love story with a happy ending.

That timeline might be a novella by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone called This is How You Lose the Time War. Or it might not. Time is flexible, and can be re-written. The book that I read might no longer even exist. Buy it now, while you still can.

P.S. There has to be a p.s.. The book is written largely as a series of letters between Red and Blue as they foil each other’s schemes and get to know one another. They have postscripts, and therefore so must we.

P.P.S. The book has already been optioned for TV. That would normally mean little, save that Amal and Max are already writing scripts. I was a little worried about what might happen to the protagonists in the hands of a Hollywood studio, but Amal assures me that the genders of the protagonists are not up for negotiation. In a post-Killing Eve world, lesbian relationships are apparently something that studio executives are less terrified of. Someone, somewhere, has executed a neat intervention in our timeline, changing it for the better.

book cover
Title: This is How You Lose the Time War
By: Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books
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The Ruin of Kings

Archive, Book Review, Jenn Lyons

Having a story told by one of the protagonists from his prison cell must be this year’s thing. Marlon James does it in Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Jenn Lyons does the same thing in The Ruin of Kings. Tracker, of course, is probably lying. It is what he does. We may have a better idea of the truth of the story when we hear the testimony of other members of his band. As for the prisoner in Lyons’ book, well…

Half of the story is told by Talon, a demonic mimic and eater of memories. Talon is the jailer, and she is able to describe events because she has eaten people who witnessed them. As for her prisoner, Kihrin, well, he is the Chosen One. Kihrin is the boy from the backstreets who discovers that he is secretly of royal birth. He is the boy about whom prophecies have been written. He is the Lawbreaker, the Thief of Souls, the boy who will one day wield the sword, Urthaeniel, known as Godslayer and the Ruin of Kings. Kihrin will one day destroy the world.

At least, that’s what the prophecies say.

It is a neat inversion of the traditional fantasy trope. As the strapline on the cover of my edition says, “What if you weren’t the Hero?”

There is a lot of hype around The Ruin of Kings. Tor describes it as, “The most anticipated fantasy debut of 2019.” They have a point.

I discovered this book when I saw Roz Kaveney tweet about how much she had enjoyed it. Roz is a very good judge of fantasy so I bought a copy. Within a few chapters I too was entranced.

There is a lot about The Ruin of Kings that is very traditional. It has kings and demons and prophecies. It has silly, Tolkienesque names. It has pirates and dragons and elf-like people and tentacled monsters. It has footnotes.

Wait, what? It has footnotes. The book is framed as a report by one Thurvishar D’Lorus to his Imperial ruler on the events of the past years, based mainly on magical recordings made by Talon while she and Kihrin were telling their stories. Thurvishar himself, as it turns out, was not an idle bystander in these proceedings. He’s not an idle bystander in the telling of the story either, because he has footnoted his report extensively. And he can be very sarcastic.

Let’s back up a little. Yes, there are dragons. But mainly there is a DRAGON. He’s known as The Old Man, and he’s the sort of dragon who makes Smaug seem like a winged gecko in comparison. The Old Man is to other dragons what Godzilla is to other iguanas. He’s what a dragon should be.

Did you notice that I mentioned “magical recordings”? That should tell you something. Yes, there is magic, but this is a sophisticated society we are talking about here. The magicians in The Ruin of Kings have thought about practical applications of their art. They can also be very clever in their use of spells.

There are some cunning magical artefacts as well. A major plot point revolves around something called The Stone of Shackles. If you are killed when wearing it, you are immediately reincarnated in the body of your murderer, who takes your place in the land of the dead. Because in this world souls do very much exist, and reincarnation is entirely possible. The Goddess of Death is real, and you can petition her.

One of the complications of this is that many of the characters in the story are not who they seem to be. It is bad enough that Talon can take on the shape of anyone she has eaten. Other people can also steal bodies, or be reincarnated in new ones, or in their old bodies but they have taken on new identities. There are times when The Ruin of Kings reads like a magical version of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon.

There are plots within plots. Gods are involved in some of the plots. There are long term issues involving gods who might once have been human, magicians who want to become gods, and a terrifying demon who is eating… well, no, that’s a bit of a spoiler. But really, the world is going to come to an end. This is less the Anthropocene and more the Mageropocene. (That should probably be Thaumaprocene, but fewer people would have understood it, I suspect.)

The Ruin of Kings is a long book. Some utterly terrible things happen in it. It flags slightly in the middle while Lyons is showing us what an absolutely awful excuse for a human being Darzin D’Mon is. Depravity gets boring after a while. But things soon pick up and once again, dear reader, you are forced to question everything you thought was true about the book.

This is a very impressive and assured debut. And it has footnotes. Comedy footnotes.

book cover
Title: The Ruin of Kings
By: Jenn Lyons
Publisher: Tor
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The Raven Tower

Ann Leckie, Archive, Book Review

OK, let’s get the awkward thing out of the way first. This is a fantasy novel written by a science fiction writer. That’s not to say it is a bad book. It is just that if you have certain expectations of a fantasy novel to do with it having a sense of the mysterious, the ethereal, the spiritual, then you will probably be disappointed. If instead you are happy to read a well-written book that speculates about the relationship between gods and men, you will be perfectly content with what Ann Leckie has to offer in The Raven Tower.

The book has two parallel strands: one about gods, and one about men. The former takes place over thousands of years, though it eventually focuses in on a prolonged war between two rival groups of gods and their worshippers. The latter takes place over a matter of days, many human generations after the war in the other strand has finished.

The gods are very real. They may be aliens. One of them, at least, arrives from space on a meteorite. They have powers, which they don’t entirely understand, that allow then to change the world by speaking it so. They can inhabit a variety of forms and, once humans arrive on the planet, they learn to communicate with them.

It turns out that the powers of the gods are fed by worship, particularly sacrifice. Doing things that affect the world drains those powers. It is a delicate balance for an ambitious god. You should never promise your worshippers more than you think you can get back from them, or you will find that you won’t be able to deliver and they will desert you.

The story focuses primarily on two gods. The main character is The Strength and Patience of the Hill, who takes the form of a very large stone. He’s not ambitious as far as gods go, but he is smart, stubborn, and very old. His friend, The Myriad, is the god who arrived on the meteorite. She takes the form of a swarm of mosquitoes (her original worshippers were reindeer herders), which naturally led me to distrust everything she said.

Humans have a different issue with godly powers. Having a god that you can communicate with effectively can be very useful. Gods can do amazing things for you. But gods do not always communicate clearly. Sometimes they don’t communicate at all. For an ambitious ruler, it can be much better to have a god who doesn’t do much, and whose utterances you, and only you, get to interpret.

The human story concerns the country of Iraden, ruled over by a god called The Raven and his human mouthpiece, The Lease. Ravens are long-lived birds, but they don’t live as long as humans. The deal is that while he is Lease, a human is protected by The Raven and speaks for the god; but when the current Instrument of the Raven, its mortal bird form, dies, then the Lease must give up his own life to the god and allow the new Instrument to bond with a new Lease.

As our story opens, Lord Mawat, the Heir to the Lease, is riding home to the capital city of Vastai. Word has reached him that the current Instrument is dying. He expects his father to follow suit, and that he will become the new Lease. However, when he arrives at Vastai, things are not as he expected.

The human story, then, is about how a corrupt and ambitious individual usurped the traditional process and installed himself as ruler. While the people might be upset about this, the rest of the political class are too wedded to the sanctity of the process to want to admit than it could be usurped. Besides, the new ruler might do some of them a good turn. He’s the man in power. It pays to suck up to him. Even if it turns out that he is in the pay of a foreign country.

I can’t imagine what real world events Leckie might be writing about here, can you?

Mawat, however, is not the hero of our story. That honor goes to his aide, Eolo, who is a trans man.

I am, I guess, expected to have an opinion on this. Especially as I have recently recorded a podcast for Breaking the Glass Slipper on the very subject of trans characters in science fiction and fantasy. Leckie, I think, has taken a fair but real-world approach to the issue. Like Claude in Kate Heartfield’s Armed in Her Fashion (which is an excellent book that I really should write about), Eolo is bound by the strictures of life in a mediaeval society. Mawat, when he is expecting to become Lease, offers to petition The Raven to transform Eolo’s body, but that’s very scary prospect that the young man never gets the chance to think through.

The consequence of this authorial choice is that there will be circumstances where Eolo’s secret (and he does keep it a secret) is in danger of being exposed. Mawat knows, and doesn’t care. He values Eolo for his bravery, loyalty and wisdom. Most other people don’t know, and might react badly if they did. This makes Eolo’s life dangerous, but Leckie never puts him in difficult situations for purposes of shock value, or voyeurism, or comedy. What she does do is make him the moral center of the story. Given the set-up of the book, I don’t think we can ask for more. Some people, I’m sure, would have preferred a different set-up.

The fact that Eolo is the smartest of a largely dumb bunch of humans is not lost on The Strength and Patience of the Hill. He narrates Eolo’s story as well as his own. That’s the common thread that will draw the two strands of the narrative together at the end. I’m not going to say anything about the end, except that I was very pleased with it.

I will be interested to see how The Raven Tower is received. I suspect that some readers of Leckie’s superb science fiction will be turned off by the fantasy setting. I also expect that some fantasy fans will complain that it doesn’t read like fantasy. It is certainly an interesting experiment, and one I enjoyed reading.

book cover
Title: The Raven Tower
By: Ann Leckie
Publisher: Orbit
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The Light Brigade

Archive, Book Review, Kameron Hurley

Time travel is very much the thing these days, it seems. I loved Ian McDonald’s Time Was, and I recently read a very different time-crossed love story in Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone’s This is How You Lose the Time War. I loved that one too. Kameron Hurley’s time travel story is a very different beast again, but also well worth reading.

Look, you know that if you want gritty, uncompromising military fantasy you should be reading Anna Smith-Spark, right? Well if you want gritty, uncompromising military SF you should be reading Kameron Hurley. The boys, sadly, can’t seem to hack it these days. They are probably too emotional.

The Light Brigade knows where it has come from. The Forever War is a type of time travel story, in that the soldiers come back from each tour of duty to find that decades have passed on Earth since they left, thanks to the relativistic effects of interplanetary travel. The Light Brigade, however, owes far more to Starship Troopers, even down to the cute reveal of the lead character’s first name towards the end.

Dietz, which is how our hero is known in the Corporate Corps, lives in a near future world in which Earth is dominated by six giant corporations: the Big Six, as they are known. The Moon and Mars have been colonised, but the Moon has suffered something of an accident and the Martians have gone full-on Communist and therefore Must Be Destroyed.

(“Communist” here meaning that they don’t want to work for the Big Six.)

Life under the Corporations is not great, especially if, like Dietz, you are not a citizen/employee. However, the Martians have just wiped out the entire city of São Paulo, including what remains of Dietz’s family. You can’t let that sort of thing stand. Someone has to join up and get revenge.

From here on it is very much Starship Troopers. Dietz and several others join up to fight back against Mars. They get Basic Training and Boot Camp. And then they are ready to be shipped out on their first mission. They are ready for their first drop.

But in The Light Brigade a drop means something very different. There is no jumping out of spacecraft. The Corporate Corps has developed a primitive form of the Star Trek transporter. Soldiers are dropped literally into the middle of the action. And sometimes, because the technology is a bit experimental, into the middle of walls. Occasionally too, some troopers arrive with their limbs in the wrong places. But the really weird thing is that some troopers end up somewhen else entirely.

Naturally no one is allowed to talk about this. Troopers who experience temporal dissociation are sent for psychiatric realignment, which mostly works because they are too confused by the experience to understand what has happened to them. Eventually, however, some of these time-traveling troopers manage to work it out. They also realise that they know far more about how the war will progress than their senior officers. In war, that sort of information is invaluable.

I should note that the cast of The Light Brigade is anything but white men. The platoon that Dietz is part of comes from Latin America. There are a lot of women in it. Dietz has sex with both men and women during the course of the story. None of this is terribly remarkable in the world of the book. The villain of the story is a blonde woman called Norberg who dresses in white. She’s a very obvious Ice Maiden who, in another world, might be fronting current affairs programs for Faux News.

There are also some fairly extensive political sections in the book. I think that Heinlein would have enjoyed engaging with the ideas being presented, even if he didn’t entirely agree with them.

All in all, this is a very impressive book which very much knows its history and wants to engage with it. I think that perhaps Dietz’s transformation from confused squaddie to someone who is able to turn the situation to their advantage happens a little quickly, but that’s a minor quibble. It won’t appeal to the sort of people who think that “freedom” means having bigger jackboots than everyone else, but the mere fact that it is written by a woman would have put them off so we don’t need to worry about what they think. Everyone else will, I think, be very pleased with this intelligent addition to the great conversation of science fiction.

book cover
Title: The Light Brigade
By: Kameron Hurley
Publisher: Angry Robot
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The Haunting of Tram Car 015

Archive, Book Review, P Djèlí Clark

P Djèlí Clark is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers. His The Black God’s Drums was one of the stand-out novellas of 2018. It is set in New Orleans and has airship pirates, plus nuns with guns and chemistry labs. I mean, nuns with guns is quite terrifying enough; give them chemistry labs too and there’s no telling what they might get up to.

Clark’s new novella, The Haunting of Tram Car 015, is the second story set in his steampunk Cairo universe. When the Sufi mystic, Al-Jahiz, found a way into the Kaf, the realm of the djinn, Egypt quickly became the world’s foremost technomagical society. The Egyptians’ abilities quickly outstripped those of the colonialist British, French, Germans and Italians, all of whom were swiftly sent packing. But nothing comes without a price. Cairenes have a new saying, “Thanks, Al-Jahiz”, that they wheel out whenever some feature of sharing their world with the djinn proves less than utopian. And there is a new organisation, the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, whose job it is to investigate magical crimes.

The series began with “A Dead Djinn in Cairo”, which was published on Tor.com. It introduces us to Fatma el-Sha’arawi, one of the few women agents in the Ministry and possibly its most flamboyant. Fatma has a preference for British men’s suits and carries an impressive black steel walking cane. Think Emma Peel and John Steed in one body. She’s not to be messed with.

The story also points out that the reintroduction of magic to society has resulted in an increased interest in traditional Egyptian religion. We meet the mysterious Siti, who has, “more of Sekhmet in her than most”.

The new novel uses that classic formula of police procedurals, the older, grumpy detective burdened with a young, naïve and over-educated partner. Agent Hamed Nasr was at the Academy with Fatma. His partner, Agent Onsi Youssef, read Literature at Oxford and knows as much about Shakespeare as he does about mediaeval Arabic manuscripts. He’s also a Copt, the ancient Christian sect that is common in Northeast Africa.

Hamed and Onsi are sent to Rameses Station, the main terminus of the busy djinn-powered aerial tram network that keeps Cairo moving. One of the trams has become infested with a malevolent spirit that has attacked passengers. Clearly it needs to be removed as quickly as possible, but the process turns out to be much more complicated than Hamed anticipated.

The story is told against the backdrop of tumultuous political events in Cairo. It is early in the 20th Century, and like other modern, developed countries Egypt has been gripped by Suffragette fever. The women of Cairo might mostly wear hijabs, but they want the vote just as badly as their bonnet-clad European sisters. They have adopted the woman pharaoh, Hatshepsut, as the symbol of their struggle. Hamed is not sure what to make of all the fuss, but Onsi thinks it is all very exciting.

The case is solved eventually, as it must be, but not without a certain amount of danger to the good citizens of Cairo, not to mention our heroic investigators. A haunted tram car is a dangerous thing. Thankfully they have the aid of Siti, who looks like being a regular feature of these stories. This is probably the point where I should note that Siti is from Nubia, a country that not only preserved Egyptian religion longer after the mother country had been overrun by Greeks and Romans, but also was ruled by some of the most badass warrior queens in human history. I’m pretty sure that Clark knows this.

Another neat element of worldbuilding in the stories is the presence of the Mahdist Revolutionary People’s Republic. That, of course, is a reference to Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah, the Nubian religious leader known as The Mahdi who, in our world, led a successful revolt against British rule in the Sudan in the later 19th Century. It was the only successful revolt by a colonised people in the history of the British Empire. In Clark’s world (can you tell I’ve been waiting to get that phrase in) Sudan is presumably also a technomagical society and therefore far more able to make its way in the world. Comrade Lenin and his friends, who are presumably still fighting a civil war, are probably looking on jealously.

As an extra bonus, the story introduced me to the tradition of Zār, an exorcism ritual common in Northeast Africa. I’m a little disappointed that there was no mention of the mangour, a musical instrument made of a leather belt sewn with goat hooves, but the image of the stuffy Hamed trying to play drums and being told, “You keep rhythm like an Englishman!” more than made up for it. Interestingly some sources claim that the Zār cult provided a haven for women and effeminate men in the rather misogynist and homophobic Sudanese state (that’s in our world, I have no idea what Clark’s Mahdists think about queer folks).

Clark’s Cairene stories combine the fun adventure typical of steampunk with a fascinating glimpse of a sophisticated Egyptian society. I should note that Clark himself is from Trinidad, not Egypt, but he knows far more about his setting than I do so I’m prepared to take it on faith that he’s doing a decent job. Now what I want is a novel. Someone commission one, please. Hello, Tor? Diana?

book cover
Title: The Haunting of Tram Car 015
By: P Djèlí Clark
Publisher: Tor.com
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The City in the Middle of the Night

Archive, Book Review, Charlie Jane Anders

You probably know by now that Charlie Jane Anders’ new novel, The City in the Middle of the Night, is set on a tidally locked planet. That is, the planet always presents the same side to its sun, just as our moon does to us, resulting in one side that it always day and another that is always night. Human settlers have to reside in the equatorial zone.

If you are expecting the book to contain a lot of science about such planets, you will be disappointed. I’m sure that Charlie Jane has done the research, but she hasn’t dumped it all into the book. It is not central to the story. Like me, you may have questions, though mine are more sociological and biological than to do with physics and geology. I’m wondering how, given how stupid and murderous the colonists seem to be, that they have survived this long. Surely they would have wiped each other out long ago.

I’m also wondering, as I always do in the case of planets inhabited by large numbers of Giant Murder Beasts, what the food chain looks like. There are other animals, because they get mentioned, but they don’t seem sufficient to sustain the large carnivores. The giant squid that live in the Sea of Murder must eat something when they can’t find a tasty tinned snack of stupid humans trying to cross the ice in armoured personnel carriers.

But, as I said, these things are not what the book is about. Firstly it is about the two main cities on the planet of January: Xiosphant and Argelo. The former is rigidly authoritarian and conservative, though probably Socialist in a way because all the means of production seems to be owned by the state. The latter is an “anything goes” sort of place, which means that you can do anything you want as long as you don’t upset one of the important families, who probably see themselves as the nobility but are actually little more than crime syndicates. It is this contrast in governmental styles that is most reminiscent of Le Guin. The Dispossessed does something similar.

Neither of these cities, by the way, are the titular location, because neither of them are in the middle of the night side of the planet. That’s a clue for you.

Our guides to these cities are two young student revolutionaries from Xiosphant. Bianca is upper class and oozes natural privilege that has the effect of charming everyone she meets. She is a Leader in waiting. Sophie is one of the few working class students at the university and is a revolutionary because why wouldn’t she be, and because the other students need a person from an oppressed minority to be fighting on behalf of, and to make the tea.

Bianca and Sophie are roommates. Sophie is in awe of Bianca. Bianca loves the fact that someone has faith in her and will follow her anywhere. And then, of course, something dreadful happens.

The political mixture is complicated by the presence of Mouth, the sole survivor of a hippy-like religious group, the Citizens, who chose to eschew city living and instead travel endlessly around the planet’s equator communing with nature, such as it is. The trouble is that nature is getting less and less friendly all the time and no one, not even the Citizens, knows why. Being out there, they were the first victims, but the cities’ days appear to be numbered too.

The question that The City in the Middle of the Night seems to be asking is: How can we hope to survive on a planet that is dying? Hint: murdering each other in a constant quest to retain a large share of dwindling resources is not the right answer. Only Sophie, armed with a good heart, a trusting nature, and a willingness to try anything, has any hope of finding a way forward.

Is there a lesson in there for Planet Earth? I rather suspect that there is. Unfortunately, just like the colonists on January, we are mostly much too busy trying to ensure that “people like us” survive, and “people not like us” don’t, to be able to see it.

book cover
Title: The City in the Middle of the Night
By: Charlie Jane Anders
Publisher: Titan
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Empress of Forever

Archive, Book Review, Max Gladstone

One of the things that is fashionable in the publishing industry these days is to have an “elevator pitch” for your book. This is just a couple of lines describing your idea that you can pitch in a matter of seconds, perhaps where a decision maker is in an elevator with you and can’t escape.

For Max Gladstone’s Empress of Forever the elevator pitch might have been: Flash Gordon, but Emperor Ming is a woman and Flash is a lesbian tech entrepreneur.

That, of course, is only the first layer. The book does feel very much like a Flash Gordon story at times, but there’s a lot more too it than that. I won’t dive into the depths as that would be spoilery, but here’s a few examples of the entertainment on offer.

Our hero is Vivian Liao, self-confident to a fault but utterly out of her depth having been stolen away from Earth and dropped in the middle of a galaxy-spanning conflict. All she has to rely upon is iron determination and a lifetime’s experience in people management.

Fortunately she has Hong, a warrior monk of the Mirrorfaith. Hong’s people worship the Empress, but he is a heretic, seeing in Vivian an opportunity to bring about change.

There is also Xiara, princess of a warrior clan on a backwards planet where the locals just happen to have been genetically engineered to be brilliant space pilots.

Most of all, however, there is Zanj, the Pirate Queen. Zanj is probably the only person in the galaxy that the Empress fears. She had led a revolt that was very nearly successful, but instead ended up imprisoned in a star, until Viv came along and freed her. Furred and tailed, with claws as sharp as her intellect, Zanj is the ally everyone needs, if only it were possible to trust her further than you could throw her. And let’s face it, anyone who tries to throw Zanj anywhere is likely to end up dead in very short order.

Zanj had her tricks, but Viv would never accuse her of subtlety. If she needed to hide in the shadows, she’d just snuff out the sun.

These, then, are some of the rag-tag group of misfits ranged against the Jade Empress, a woman so powerful she dreams of bending all of reality to her whim. Not to mention against the Pride, the spiky-death-metal robot race who are the mortal enemies of the Mirrorfaith. This is superhero-style space opera with a vengeance.

As befits the format, the book is shot through with pop culture references. One of my favorites is when Viv gets her eyes on the Mirrorfaith’s secret arsenal of super weapons:

Viv stepped through into an immense space, dimly lit by pulsing dots on the walls, no brighter than city stars. The Archivist followed her, and Qollak, and the door swung shut behind them with a thud. Viv’s night vision chiselled shapes out of the darkness: catwalks, shelves flanked by those stardots, and on the shelves all manner of boxes, baubles, weapons, machines, guns and crowns and shields and armor and, for some reason, a simple, blocky hammer.

This book is a heap of fun. It is also, as I noted earlier, much more complex than it seems at first sight. It is also decidedly queer, and a heartfelt plea for opposing factions to work together in the face of a seemingly all-powerful enemy.

Empress of Forever is about as far away from hard science fiction as it is possible to get and still be set in a far-future, technologically advanced civilisation. It is hugely entertaining. And yet in its own way it is a very serious book.

Of course, all of those people who have been clamouring for a return to fun science fiction adventures will hate it.

book cover
Title: Empress of Forever
By: Max Gladstone
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Ancestral Night

Archive, Book Review, Elizabeth Bear

Hmm, what have we here. Let’s see…

  • Far future civilisation – Check
  • Plucky human heroes – Check
  • Mysterious lost high-tech alien civilisation – Check
  • Big Dumb Object – Check
  • Space pirates – Check
  • Space dragons – Check
  • Cats in Spaaaaaaace! – Check
  • Sleek, deadly warships with silly names – Check
  • Scary alien cop – Check

Yep, this is space opera alright.

Elizabeth Bear has form, of course. Her Jacob’s Ladder series ranks as one of my favorite science fiction trilogies. I was expecting good things of Ancestral Night. I was not disappointed.

Our hero is Haimey Dz — I’m guessing Jamie Diaz with a bit of linguistic shift. She’s an engineer by trade. She and her colleagues run a salvage business, finding old, lost starships and bringing them in for recycling. Said colleagues are Connla, her pilot; Singer, her ship’s AI; and two cats, Bushyasta & Mephistopheles.

Salvage is the sort of business where you limp along from one job to the next, barely making enough to re-equip for the next voyage. You do it because it gets you away from the mass of humanity, and because you hope that one day you will get lucky and find something really valuable.

I can’t tell you much more than that without spoilers, but I do want to note that there are pirates. Because if you do find something valuable you can bet someone will want to take it off you. (That’s not a spoiler, you knew that was going to happen.) Pirates, in Bear’s future world, are brave and dashing and sexy. They are also Libertarian arseholes who have no responsibility to anyone other than themselves. They go by that famous maxim, “I should be free to do whatever I want, and I’ll kill anyone who tries to stop me.”

At one point during the book this leads to a long political debate between Haimey and the pirate leader about personal responsibility and freedom. It is all very Heinlein. Unfortunately for Haimey, she has a past. Because she accepted mental re-programming as part of a plea bargain, she can’t remember it. But that doesn’t mean that no one else knows what happened.

The book delivers pretty much what you would expect. Lots of mysterious alien stuff; political debate (including skewering certain people who I am very pleased to see skewered); high-stakes adventure; and cats. There will be some readers who find it overly sentimental, but there’s no reason why all of the characters in a book have to be horrible people. Some people will also go, “ewww, lesbians!” There’s no accounting for some people. Most folks, I suspect, will thoroughly enjoy it. I know I did.

It is worth noting that, while there is no reason why Bear should not write more adventures of Haimey in other books, this one works perfectly well on its own. Things are wrapped up nicely at the end. I say this because some sites are listing the book as “White Space #1” (White Space being Bear’s name for hyperspace), and some of you may be put off because you think the book will end on a cliffhanger. I should note also that the book is set in the same universe as the Jacob’s Ladder books, though presumably well after the events of that series.

There are also some very interesting bits of alien technology. This being space opera rather than hard science fiction, Bear does not have to explain exactly how they work. A fair amount of handwavium is involved. But there’s enough actual science there to make it all sound roughly believable. I particularly liked the idea that ships emerging from hyperspace have a bow wave of high energy particles that will destroy anything in their path. Which is either very useful or deeply embarrassing depending on who happens to be in your way.

Overall, a definite paws up on this one. It doesn’t do anything startlingly original, but it knows exactly what it is doing and it does it very well.

book cover
Title: Ancestral Night
By: Elizabeth Bear
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

A Memory Called Empire

Archive, Arkady Martine, Book Review

We seem to be particularly blessed with debut novels this year (2019). I was hugely impressed with The Ruin of Kings in epic fantasy. Now it is the turn of space opera and A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine.

Let’s start with the worldbuilding. Everyone has some idea of what an interstellar empire looks like, so creating one that will stand out takes a bit of doing. Martine’s academic expertise is in the Byzantine Empire, so she certainly knows how empires work. Teixcalaan, however, feels more Chinese to me. They have ideogrammatic writing, put great store by civil service exams, and have a cultural addiction to poetry. All of this makes life a little challenging for our heroine.

Mahit Dzmare is the new ambassador to Teixcalaan from a small, independent space station called Lsel. She has been summoned to Teixcalaan in a hurry, and on arriving she soon finds out that her predecessor has been murdered, though his death has been officially recorded as accidental. Apparently he got himself involved in palace intrigue. This is not a good start, and Mahit has a lot of catching up to do. Although she has been a keen student of Teixcalaani culture, living it is a very different matter from reading about it. There are translation issues to navigate. And of course the whole experience of living on a planet is new and strange to her.

One of the more quirky aspects of Teixcalaani culture is their naming system. Everyone’s name is a number followed by an object of some sort. Mahit’s liaison is called Two Seagrass, which may not mean anything much. However, the Emperor is called Six Direction, for the very obvious reason that his power extends in all six directions of 3D space. There’s a general called One Lightning who fancies himself a fascist dictator. Names can clearly be important.

The idea of a vast empire with an aging ruler is hardly new. We find it everywhere from Star Wars to Ancillary Justice. Martine therefore has to find a new angle, and she does a decent job. Without giving too much away, there is a potential succession issue. An empire with a succession crisis is a dangerous thing. There tends to be a lot of sabre-rattling. The daily news fills up with planted stories praising or denigrating powerful people. There is talk of war, for war is always good for taking people’s minds off domestic politics. Perhaps the empire should annex a few more regions of space, such as that one containing a few, largely defenceless, independent space stations.

All of this would be hard enough for Mahit, but she has trouble at home to deal with as well. The Ruling Council of Lsel does not appear to be entirely united at this dangerous time. Indeed, it looks like someone has sabotaged her mission before it even began.

How and why Mahit has been compromised is something I will have to leave you to find out. It revolves around another interesting science fiction trope that Martine has latched onto and made her own. It will get introduced fairly early on in the book, but the full import of what is going on may not become clear until much later.

There are no great space battles in this book, at least not in view of the characters. However, great space opera in books doesn’t need that spectacular vista to succeed. What it needs is a grand scale of events, a convoluted plot, and some fascinating characters. Martine delivers on all three.

If I have a reservation about the book it is that it seems to wrap up too neatly at the end. Martine makes it seem like that’s the end, that the book is a stand-alone. Which would be a shame because the threat of massive interstellar war that the book introduces has not gone away. Thankfully the publishers are not as coy. They insist that the book is the first volume of a trilogy. Huzzah! Bring on book 2!

book cover
Title: A Memory Called Empire
By: Arkady Martine
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

A Brightness Long Ago

Archive, Book Review, Guy Gavriel Kay

What can you say about a new Guy Gavriel Kay novel? You read it, it is brilliant, you decide once again that Kay is a genius. Plus ça change. If you are a Kay fan then you will love A Brightness Long Ago. If you have never read him before you should probably start with Tigana or The Lions of Al Rassan. If you don’t like what Kay does, the new book will not change your mind.

On then to the question that Kay fans will have about any new work: what real world history has inspired it? Well, the book is a prequel of sorts to Children of Earth and Sky. It is set in the Kay-world analogue of Renaissance Italy. We meet younger versions of some of the characters of the previous novel; in particular the healer, Jelena, whom Danica meets when she encounters the rebel leader, Iskander. It turns out that Jelena’s early life is far more exciting than simply being associated with a legendary warrior.

Other characters from Children are mentioned briefly in passing. We meet Duke Ricci, hear of Emperor Rudolfo, and discover that the odious Erigio Valeri learned macho posturing from his father. However, the book is not about any of these people, not even Jelena. It is, inevitably, about condottieri.

Switching back to our world, we should be aware of the rising power of the Medici of Florence. We should know of Francesco Sforza, the man who bought himself the Dukedom of Milan. But we should also know of Federico da Montefeltro, the one-eyed lord of Urbino, and Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, known as the Wolf of Rimini, two brilliant military commanders who were bitter enemies. None of these people are in Kay’s book, but people very like them are.

The beauty of Kay’s technique of running almost parallel to real world history is that he is free to add to and adapt the original timeline. Francesco Sforza did not have a beautiful and headstrong redhaired daughter. However, his granddaughter, Caterina, was seriously badass and doubtless fed into Kay’s creation of Adria Ripoli.

The central character of the story, however, is Guidanio Cerra, a smart and bookish young man from Seressa whose life intersects with that of the rich and famous in important ways. He acts as our guide and interpreter of local politics and society. He’s a thoroughly decent young man when we first meet him, and he manages to stay so through the novel, despite the various escapades he is involved in. That caused me to reflect on the nature of Kay’s work.

There are those, I am sure, who dismiss Kay’s work as sentimental. Certainly it can be at times, but it is not naively so. People die in Kay’s novels. They die because everyone has to eventually; and they die because they live in dangerous, violent times. Young Cerra kills two men early on in the novel. But Kay’s work is never going to be classed as Grimdark because it is also relentlessly hopeful. The expectation of a Grimdark novel is that everyone is awful, and that things will turn out bad in the end. In a Kay novel, the world is full of awful people, and things do often turn out bad. However, there are also good people in the world, and every so often they achieve small victories. A Kay novel never gives in to despair, which is one of the reasons why I love them so much.

After all, the real world is not irredeemably hopeless either. Sometimes, despite all of the oppression and nonsense social codes, people get to do amazing things, or be happy, or both.

“If I could write everything that happened, I would shock the world” – Caterina Sforza, Lady of Imola, Countess of Forlì.

Now there is a lady I would love to have met. Sadly I don’t have a time machine, but I have at least met Adria Ripoli, and I am very grateful for that.

book cover
Title: A Brightness Long Ago
By: Guy Gavriel Kay
Publisher: Hodder
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Night Circus

Archive, Book Review, Erin Morgenstern

There are plenty of people out there who absolutely love Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel, The Night Circus. There are others who think it is massively over-rated. I can see where both sets of people are coming from, and indeed I vacillated between the two views rather a lot when reading the book. How can a book have that sort of effect on people? Here’s a challenge for a reviewer.

The starting point has to be that the book is a really beautiful object. The Circus from which the book draws it’s name has a black and white color scheme. The book matches it, with a black and white cover (backed with sparkly silver stars) and dramatic black edging to the pages. Fans of the circus identify themselves to fellow obsessives by wearing all black, or all white, with a single flash of red, often a scarf. The book has a red bookmark, and red boards peeking out from under the black of the cover. A lot of care and attention has gone into the packaging of this object, and I feel very sorry for anyone who bought it as an ebook. Paper still has the edge when the publisher is prepared to go to such lengths to make a book look good.

Coupled with this attention to appearance, the book has some wonderfully evocative and atmospheric prose. I’m sure that there are many experienced authors out there who would love to be able to describe a scene the way Morgenstern can. Here’s an except from one of my favorite chapters. The viewpoint character, Bailey, is a visitor to the circus. He wandered into a tent promising stories and memories. A note at the entrance said, “Please enter cautiously and feel free to open what is closed.” Bailey finds the tent full of glass jars.

He recalls what the tag said about opening things, wondering what could possibly be inside all of these jars. Most of the clear glass ones look empty. As he reaches the opposite side of the table, he picks one at random, a small round ceramic jar, glazed in black with a high shine and a lid topped with a round curl of a handle. He pulls the lid off and looks inside. A small wisp of smoke escapes, but other than that it is empty. As he peers inside he smells the smoke of a roaring fire, and a hint of snow and roasting chestnuts. Curious, he inhales deeply. There is the aroma of mulled wine and sugared candy, peppermint and pipe smoke. The crisp pine scent of a fir tree. The wax of dripping candles. He can almost feel the snow, the excitement, and the anticipation, the sugary taste of a striped candy. It is dizzying and wonderful and disturbing. After a few moments, he replaces the lid and puts the jar carefully back on the table.

There’s a lot of material like that. Morgenstern is a very visual writer, and very concerned with the sensations her descriptions convey. I understand that she’s a painter as well as a writer.

There is so much that you want to love in this book, especially if you enjoy paragraphs like the one above. But a novel needs more. Specifically it needs plot and characters. Here’s the outline.

Two aged magicians, known as Mr. A.H.– and Prospero the Enchanter, are rivals and have been so for almost all their lives, possibly for centuries. Every so often they have a contest in which each trains up an apprentice, and these young people are pitted against each other in test of skill and endurance. This time Prospero has chosen his young daughter, Celia. Mr. A.H.– has chosen an orphan boy called Marco. The venue for the contest is a circus. Each young magician vies to produce more and more spectacular attractions, while continuing to fool the paying public, and most of the other performers, that this is all cunning artifice, not real magic. Celia and Marco fall in love, and complications ensue.

For about three quarters of the book that’s basically all there is. The plot moves at a snail’s pace as we are introduced to the various delights of the circus (all beautifully described) and a collection of mostly cardboard supporting characters. Eventually, in the final quarter, matters come to a head and suddenly you want to keep reading to find out what happens.

At this point I had decided that the book really needed to be a horror novel. Mr. A.H.–and Properso are a thoroughly inhuman pair (the latter someone literally for much of the book), mercilessly manipulating their young charges and casually murdering people who become a nuisance. The true nature of the contest is much more vicious than it is initially described. But the intensity of emotion never seems to ratchet up properly. Even when people die, it is all very understated. Eventually, of course, there has to be a happy ending. The book is really a love story.

The somewhat dreamlike nature of the narrative doesn’t help much either. The book is clearly stated to take place in the Edwardian era, but we don’t see much of real life. We see the circus, and we see a small group of impossibly rich, impossibly talented people who are its owners. Bailey and his briefly glimpsed family are just about the only real-world people in it.

(There is, by the way, one minor Willis-ism. Morgenstern appears to think that trains in the UK are boarded from ground level as they are in the US. But it is a very small niggle and the scene more or less works anyway.)

The main problem for me, however, was the characters. Most of them seem like cut-outs. They have little labels on them detailing their function in the plot. Some of them also have labels indicating feelings. But it never really seemed like they were people with actual objectives and feelings. It is a failing I find all too obvious in my own infrequent attempts at fiction. Maybe that’s why it stood out for me in this book. And it is a real shame because there are some good ideas there. Isobel and Tsukiko are both pivotal characters in the book, and more could have been done with them. Chandresh’s descent into drunken madness could have been much more poignant.

It is possible that Morgenstern is trying to replicate the extreme reserve required in upper class society during the Edwardian era, which would explain why people don’t seem to react the way they should. If so, I see what she was trying, but I still don’t think it works, at least not for most modern-day readers.

All of this may sound like I disliked the book. I didn’t. It took a long time to get into it, but I very nearly stayed up very late to finish it. I can see why so many people love the book. But, as I said at the start, I can also see why it has got a bunch of bad reviews as well. The best I can do is try to explain what the issues are so you can make an informed decision as to which camp you will fall into. For myself, I’m still not convinced it is a great book, but when Erin Morgenstern produces her next novel I will buy it. This one is her first. She shows tremendous talent and promise. Things can only get better from here.

book cover
Title: The Night Circus
By: Erin Morgenstern
Publisher: Vintage
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Signal to Noise

Archive, Book Review, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Every so often a publisher does something that completely surprises you. Here’s a case in point. Solaris do some great books. They publish Gareth L Powell’s Ack-Ack Macaque books, and Juliet E McKenna’s latest Einarinn series. But both of these are very clearly genre novels. I did not expect them to come up with something they might want to submit to mainstream literary prizes and not feel they were wasting their time.

More surprise: Signal to Noise is a novel from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whom I previously knew from Innsmouth Free Press. It is not particularly a horror novel, and certainly not Lovecraftian. It has a lot more in common with Graham Joyce in the way it connects magic with a carefully observed family saga; and with Tim Powers in the way that modern-day magic works. There’s a bit of Liz Hand in there as well, mainly because of the love of music that suffuses the narrative.

Basically it is a love story about two misfit teenagers. And it is set in Mexico City.

Back in 1988 Meche (Mercedes) and Sebastian were two poor, geeky kids against the world. He loved books, she loved music. Their only ally was chubby Daniella with her love of romantic soap operas and belief in the power of home-made cupcakes as a cure for all ills. There ought, by rights, to be a burgeoning romance here, except that the logic of the classroom dictates that both kids should aspire to something better.

Meche, therefore, is in love with the handsome Constantino, just like every other girl in her class. Sebastian is in love with the beautiful Isobel, who is of course Constantino’s girlfriend because no one else would be good enough for her, or for him.

None of this would have been too much of a problem, broken teenage hearts aside, if Meche hadn’t discovered a talent for magic, and involved her two friends in her quest to use it to better themselves, and gain revenge on their enemies.

Magic, of course, is done with popular music. And because the book is set in Mexico City that music is a fascinating mixture of songs that I know and love, and whose power I understand, cut with work by artists I have never heard of, probably because they don’t sing in English. Now I want to look them up.

In some ways the book reminded me a lot of Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon. The fantastical elements are nowhere near as exuberant, but the sense of reading something written by a person with a deep understanding of the setting, as opposed to an Anglophone tourist, is very much the same. Here’s an example.

She grabbed her jacket and walked two blocks away, to a narrow Chinese café. She asked for tea, but this being a Mexican-Chinese café, there was none.

Mexican Chinese restaurants don’t serve tea? Really? Then again, goodness only knows what Moreno-Garcia would make of a Mexican restaurant in rural Finland. Cultures blend in all sorts of odd ways.

Getting back to the plot, the scenes from 1988 are cut with a parallel storyline from 2009. Meche is now a successful, well-paid software engineer. She lives in Oslo, having traveled widely before that. Now she is back in Mexico City because her father has just died. Inevitably this brings back memories of Sebastian, and of the acrimonious nature of her parents’ relationship during her teenage years. As the story progresses, we learn more about what happened back then, both to her and to her parents. And we learn that power, magical power especially, never comes without a price.

I have to admit that Meche is not the most likeable character. She has a lot of growing to do via her reunion with friends and family. If you are the sort of person who needs to identify with the central character of a book you won’t like this one. Stroppy or no, however, Meche does have a neat line in banter. Here she is telling Sebastian about her life in Norway.

“What do you do in Oslo?”

“I’m a coding monkey. Didn’t I say that?”

If she had not told him, then she was sure her mother had.

“When you’re not coding?”

“I don’t know. I watch TV. I take care of Svend.”

“Is that your boyfriend?”

“It’s a very big fern. I have several ferns but I only baptized one because if you name more than one inanimate object you’re heading into crazy cat lady territory.”

Signal to Noise is a beautiful book. Had I not seen Gary Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan enthusing about it, I might never have read it, let alone been expecting something good. Thanks as ever, guys. I loved it. Hopefully other people will too.

book cover
Title: Signal to Noise
By: Silvia Moreno Garcia
Publisher: Solaris
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Issue #13

Issues

This is the November 2019 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: Space Station: This issue's cover is by Steve Bidmead, used under a Creative Common licence

  • Editorial – November 2019: We've made it to four issues. Hugo eligibility! Huzzah!

  • The Ten Thousand Doors of January: A review of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, the debut novel by Hugo-winning short story writer, Alix E Harrow.

  • The Future of Another Timeline: A review of Analee Newitz's novel, The Future of Another Timeline.

  • Infinite Detail: A review of Tim Maughan's debut novel, Infinite Detail.

  • The Rosewater Redemption: A review of the third and final part of Tade Thompson's Rosewater series, The Rosewater Redemption

  • The Deep: A review of the novella, The Deep, written by Rivers Solomon and based on the Hugo-finalist clipping song of the same name.

  • Interview – Rivers Solomon: An interview with Rivers Solomon, mainly about the book, The Deep.

  • The Exile Waiting: A review of Handheld Press's re-issue of Vonda McIntyre's debut novel, The Exile Waiting.

  • Interview – Kathryn Allan: An interview with Kathryn Allan from 2014. The main topic is Allan's work on themes of disability in science fiction.

  • What Can WSFS Do?: What exactly is the World Science Fiction Society, and why does it so often fail to respond to fannish controversies?

  • The Forbidden Stars: A review of the concluding volume of Tim Pratt's Books of the Axiom, The Forbidden Stars.

  • Silver in the Wood: A review of the novella, Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh

  • BristolCon 2019: Cheryl's report on the annual SF&F convention in Bristol.

Cover: Space Station

013, Art

Getting artwork for a fanzine cover can be a bit challenging. I’m very much aware that artists should be paid for their work, but fanzines typically don’t bring in any money, let alone enough to pay decent usage fees. Thankfully there are people out there who put good quality art up with Creative Commons licences. This one is by Steve Bidmead and you can find the original here.

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